by Black, Paula
She was lying about knowing my brother, or holding back what she knew. Had Daniel got caught up in that scene? Was that what Gracie was trying to tell me, without telling me anything?
The thought of my brother putting himself up on that stage, even selling himself to the highest bidder, opened old wounds inside of me, but we’d been dragged up on London’s mean streets. I was no innocent. I’d fought against the low expectations life, and our strung-out mother, had set for us. Daniel had never been that strong.
And the big, scary Ukrainian? First the peace sign on his arm the same as on Daniel’s neck, and now that damn tattoo. It couldn’t be coincidence. I needed to get closer to him. Close enough to get more than an angry warning from him, close enough to talk. Either he knew something, or he was potentially in danger himself.
A thought struck me and I set the noodles aside.
I hadn’t come away empty-handed.
I still had the first photo of Lazarenko’s back, though the focus was off. Shame the creepy Friar made me delete the best one. I blew it up on my laptop for a clearer look, and cast my eyes over the tattoo centred on Konstantyn’s back. In the centre of the serpent was a triangle with a line through it and a dot. There was writing too, high on his shoulders, that I hadn’t noticed when he’d been on stage. I couldn’t read the Cyrillic script, but the image of the snake creature with the symbol at its centre was instantly recognisable. Though I hadn’t seen that serpent in a long time, there was no mistaking the resemblance to the one I remembered from my childhood.
I toed off my heels and pulled the dress over my head, dumping the silk at the end of the couch, and dragging the laptop onto my knees. Googling ‘snake eating itself’ threw up a Wiki page for the ouroborus, an ancient symbol representing the eternal cycle of death and rebirth. I searched triangular symbols too, and Google coughed up a bunch of images eerily similar, but none exactly like the one at the centre of the snake.
Twitching with nervous energy, I was on the brink of discovering something significant. But what? How was a bunch of ancient symbols going to help me?
I blew out a breath and chewed my lip, knowing what my next move needed to be. It was the last place I wanted to go, but I would have to bite the bullet and pay a visit to the other bearer of that iconic snake image: my mother.
Not wanting to even contemplate the possibility she’d been involved in her own son’s death, I focussed on the letters on Konstantyn’s back instead, tracing the Cyrillic symbols onto a paper napkin from my take-out order. I found a Ukrainian keyboard online and ran the phrase through a translator. ‘Faithful unto death’ was the translation that flashed up, and I couldn’t help feeling pleased with myself for figuring it out. Not that it helped.
What had I expected it to say? I killed Daniel Raines? Sighing a frustrated groan, I scrubbed a hand through my hair, messing the loose waves even more, and pushed the laptop closed as I stood. I was too tired to figure it out.
Crawling into bed, I wondered what I was getting myself into. Whatever, it was worth it, to get justice for my brother. With my thoughts whirring, I expected a restless sleep, but no. Either my mind was a cruel tormentor or the kindest ever, because, in spite of myself, I dreamt of Lazarenko’s body.
The following morning, I pulled a heavy, cable-knit sweater dress over my dance gear. To get my boss, Peter, off my case, I’d taken to force-feeding myself and hiding under baggy clothes. I stuffed another butter croissant into my face, and to ease its passage, I visualised myself shoving the pastry down Peter’s throat until he choked. I washed it down with the dregs of tepid coffee from my mug, wincing at the bitter aftertaste. Over time I was regaining my modest curves, and today the baggy sweater was to fend against the icy turn in the weather, not my eagle-eyed boss.
Shouldering my work hold-all, I turned to leave, and ripped October’s page from the calendar on my refrigerator door as I passed.
A new month, and the rent was overdue on this pokey flat I still refused to call home. I’d held onto the two-bed for longer than I could afford it, refusing to acknowledge Daniel wasn’t coming home. Giving up the apartment we’d shared felt like giving up on him.
Eventually though, without our dual income, I’d had to let our old place go. It’d always been out of my league anyway. London rents were astronomical, even for people who made a decent living, which I didn’t, but Daniel’s music video gigs had paid-off unbelievably well.
Now, on my own, I was struggling to keep up with the rent, and subscriptions to my dance classes had dwindled. I knew why. It was because the clients sensed me going through the motions. It was your passion that kept them coming back, week after week, and I couldn’t deny I’d lost that.
You felt passion dancing with Konstantyn Lazarenko.
He’s dangerous.
That dream you had about him last night… you were doing more than dancing.
That was nothing, just a dream, a hangover from visiting that sex club.
If you get through the auditions with him, your money worries will be taken care of.
You shut up. We’re not having this conversation, I told myself.
I slammed the front door, locked up the basement flat and took off towards the underground station at a fast clip.
This time of the morning, the commuters were pouring from the foggy residential streets, headed silently, purposefully in the same direction, never making eye contact, never exchanging smiles. They reminded me of zombies, lurching towards their dreary jobs in the city. As kids, Daniel and I used to play a game, greeting every grim pedestrian we passed with a cheery hello, just to see if we could get a reaction. Now, I’d become one of them. I’d moved house, but I hadn’t moved on. Four months, and the pain of his absence still clung to me. Life went on around my grief. The clocks didn’t stop, the neighbours’ dogs still barked, and the bills kept on coming, while I continued to wake in a sweat from the nightmare of Daniel’s body in the morgue. It was always the same: the pristine white sheet pulled up under his battered face, and the sick irony of that peace sign branded on his neck. They hadn’t let me pull down the sheet to look at the rest of him, but the pathology reports had painted a graphic, bloody picture. In my dreams I saw it all.
Last night had been different, though. I’d still woken in a lather, but for once it hadn’t been Daniel’s body making me sweat. I suppose I should’ve been thankful to the Ukrainian for that small mercy.
You’re an idiot, creaming yourself over a killer. He’s got your mother’s tattoo on his back, and that can only mean one thing: bad bloody news.
Everything my mother touched turned to ash, inside of a crack pipe. Was Konstantyn involved in drugs too?
That would be a deal-breaker.
You have to have a deal before you can break it.
Lost in thought, the station snuck up on me. The line split two ways. I could get into work early and sweat out my sexual frustrations in the gym. Or I could go the way I’d planned all along: to the Old London Secure Forensic Psychiatric Unit, where a meeting with my mother was sure to put a dampener on my pathetic fantasies.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I studied the broken veins on the security guard’s face as he went through my purse.
“First visit?” he asked.
“Yeah.” My eyes roamed the cluttered cabin while I adjusted my ponytail and shifted my weight on my feet.
“Don’t worry, it’s not like they show it in the movies.” He gave me a gap-toothed smile.
“What, no shaved heads, padded cells or lobotomy scars?”
His laugh was as rough as his East-End accent. “Exactly. I’m going to have to hold onto this, my darling,” he said, waving my phone in his sausage fingers.
“You’re confiscating my iPhone?”
“No recording or internet enabled devices. Standard rules for visiting the forensic unit. You can have it back on your way out.”
I nodded. What choice did I have?
He gripped my purse in both hands and slid
it back across the table.
“Thanks,” I said curtly, closing the catch and hitching the strap over my shoulder. I’d hoped to get a photo of my mother’s tattoo, to compare it with Konstantyn’s, and to show her the photo I had of his, but that wasn’t going to happen.
“You’ll need this,” he said, handing me a laminated card on a red lanyard.
I eyed it curiously.
“Your security pass,” he said, “so they let you back out.”
“Got it,” I said, nodding and slipping the cord around my neck.
“You’ll want the Laburnum unit. Follow the path under the trees and it’s the single storey red-brick on your left. Ring the buzzer and John will let you in.”
Laburnum was a poison, wasn’t it? Bet they reserve the dodgily named wards for the murderers, I thought, letting my feet carry me where my mind didn’t care to follow. Crushing the fallen laburnum seeds beneath my shoes, I took consolation in knowing that much as I dreaded this visit, my mother would hate it more. She’d been crystal clear about wanting no contact whatsoever with her one remaining child.
An over-chatty male staff nurse led me to her closed door. “The psychiatrist increased her medication, and we’re just now beginning to explore her past traumas in therapy. She refuses to discuss her time in the cult though, so it’s great to finally meet a family member.”
I stopped dead. “I’m sorry. Did you say the cult?”
“Her escape. The reason she immigrated to England. Oh –” Seeing the confusion in my eyes, his cheeks reddened. “I assumed you knew.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. My mother wasn’t just a closed book. When it came to me and Daniel, she’d always kept her secrets chained, padlocked, encased in ice and sunk deeper than the Titanic. She’d never mentioned anything about a cult, only that she’d run from my abusive father before I was born.
“Anyway. Your mother’s being kept in isolation now,” the nurse said.
“Why?”
The colour in his cheeks deepened to a sickly purple. “Since the outburst at the funeral.”
“She’d just buried her only son,” I said, searching his eyes for compassion. I wasn’t even sure why I felt a need to justify what my mother had done. I’d been livid, and relieved when the police escort restrained her and took her away. All the same, I knew what it was to lose your closest family. If I’d had the excuse of insanity, maybe I’d have torn apart that serene chapel with its stink of incense and flowers and death. Part of me envied her the outburst.
“She threatened to tear that man’s throat out with her teeth,” the nurse said.
I had no answer to that. When it came to murder, my mother had history. She’d shown exactly what those teeth of hers were capable of.
“Is he planning to press charges?”
The nurse shook his head.
“Well that’s something. May I go in?”
He nodded. “You’ll be on CCTV the whole time, and I’ll be right outside the door. This is a panic button,” he said, pressing a small round device into my palm. “If you feel uncomfortable or threatened, just press it and we’ll be right there.”
“Thank you. I’ll be fine,” I said, attempting to reassure myself as much as him.
The room was bland, in a way only institutions can be: beige walls, plastic chair, boring patterned bedspread, a wilted plant on the sill of the barred window. The woman who birthed me sat on the bed with her bony knees drawn up to her chest and straggly wisps of hair framing a once-beautiful face. It was as though an artist had sketched shadows all over the childhood memory of my mother. She ignored me, until she realised I wasn’t the regular kind of visitor. Then she showed her fangs.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” she spat, “I told you not to come.” She shouted towards the closed door, “I said no visitors, you incompetent sons of bitches. Get her away from me!”
“Yep, and I’m thrilled to be here too, mom.” I dragged the chair over and sat on the hard seat.
She pursed wrinkled lips. “Did you bring me cigarettes?” Her voice was deep and dry as a husk. In her heyday, she’d sounded sexy, like Lauren Bacall. She’d been angular and alluring, mysterious even, with her distance and stiffly given affection. Now, raw-boned and ravaged by drugs, everything about her seemed withered and hollow.
“No cigarettes, sorry. They’re not allowed anymore.”
“Not allowed?” She sneered, baring nicotine stained teeth. “You always were such a goody two shoes.”
“Must be inherited from my father, so.” I ground my teeth, determined not to let her get to me.
“We do not speak of that monster,” she snapped. “No cigarettes? Those bastards. They treat me like a criminal.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “You killed a man.”
“Not a man. A demon,” she said, plucking lint from the fabric of her leggings.
Demons and devils. That was what had earned her an insanity verdict and landed her indefinitely in the forensic psychiatry unit. And clearly the increased medication dosage wasn’t having the desired effect. She was making no more sense than she had on the day of her arrest.
“I came to ask you something. It’s about Daniel.”
“Oh Lord, my baby boy,” she said in that gravelled voice, rocking on the bed. “They put a demon inside me. He was my punishment.”
Anger swelled, as always, when she launched into this crap. “The only demons inside you are your addictions, mother. Your demons are heroin, and alcohol. Daniel wasn’t a devil. He was gay. Get over it.” It was bad enough having a psychotic mother, but the homophobia was a step too far. “You made a show of us at the funeral, calling that poor man an abomination of nature.”
“You know nothing!” my mother shouted. She stared knives at me, her once full lips puckered up by age and years of relentless chain-smoking.
I hated that the little girl I’d once been cringed from her mother’s rejection. I was stronger than that. “I didn’t come to make small talk, mother.” I leaned forward and tugged up the sleeve of her left arm, revealing a flash of blank ink. “I saw this tattoo, exactly the same, on a man who works at the studio where Daniel auditioned for that music video. Tell me what it means.”
“That’s no business of yours,” she said, yanking her sleeve back into place. “You stay out of it. Stay away.”
“How can I, when Daniel’s killers are walking the streets?”
She’d had the ink as long as I could remember, though she’d always taken great care to hide it, wearing long sleeves, even in the heat of summer. I had memories though, early ones, before she gave us up to care, of the three of us sharing a bath. I’d seen it then, and it was the kind of image that stuck in a child’s memory: the circular dragon eating its own tail had been like something out of a fantasy story.
“Is it a drugs thing?” I asked. “I need to know. Did you have Daniel buying drugs for you?”
Her spittle sprayed my cheek, but I wiped it away.
“What then? Is it this cult? The people you ran from, before I was born?”
That sparked her attention, and hawk-like eyes narrowed on me. “Who spoke to you of that?”
“Your psychiatrist mentioned it. I guess they pulled your immigration records to help with your insanity plea.”
“They had no right.” She growled, her face contorted with anger.
“I want the truth, mother. You never gave us anything.”
“I gave you everything,” she said hoarsely. “When it happens to you, then you’ll understand.”
“I will never be like you. I’d die first.”
“You think it’s that easy?” she sneered. “You should be grateful I got you away from them.”
“Away from whom?”
“Your fathers. Perhaps you’re right. I should have aborted you, or taken my own life when you were in my belly.”
Damn, but the woman used razor blades for words.
“But you didn’t,” I said tightly, “you gave
birth to us, and all we ever wanted was your love. Yet you did everything in your power to push us away. You owe us this much. You owe it to Daniel to help me.”
She reached out, squeezing my hand until the knuckles hurt, and she had tears in her voice when she spoke. “I am trying to help you, child. You stay away from them, you hear me? You see the Devil’s mark, and you run, far, far away.” Her nails cut into my skin, marking me with bloody crescents, and I could see the whites of her eyes as her speech became more pressured. “You shouldn’t be here. The demons have eyes everywhere. They found me, and you’re not safe.”
She was right. Coming here had been a huge mistake. The woman was delusional, and about to break every bone in my hand.
I squeezed the button, and true to the nurse’s word, the room was suddenly swarming with staff and security.
“Are you okay, Miss?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” I said, covering up my bleeding hand. “She’s just… I think my being here upset her. I should go.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Crap, I was running so late. First, my boss held me back for another bollocking about falling class-numbers. Then the Tube had been overcrowded with rush-hour commuters, and a self-righteous prick of a stockbroker in a pinstripe suit elbowed me out of the train. Seemed like it was meet an asshole day.
I stumbled into the studio, breathless after a rapid change of clothes, my shoes squeaking loudly on the polished floor just as the clock struck seven. The entire class turned to look at me, and I felt like Cinderella, caught on the hop after the stroke of midnight. I smiled awkwardly, taking position beside Gracie. Weird, she seemed surprised to see me. Raider shot me a look that said I was there by the skin of my teeth. Good, at least I was there.
