Breaker: Gravediggers MC

by Paula Cox

  Moira leaves the apartment. I gaze blankly down at the nursing book as Jude walks across the apartment and leans down into my field of vision.

  “Emily?” he asks.

  I try to speak, but I feel as though something vital has been wrenched from deep within me. I hate Patrick; he’s my brother. Patrick hits me; he’s my brother. Patrick ridicules me, insults me, resents me; he’s my brother. Patrick is an evil drug-dealing man; he’s my brother. It seems the latter always, no matter the circumstances, overrules the former. Brother is a trump card my emotions, my mind, my everything can’t help playing. And no matter how much I try and fight it, I can’t. When you’ve lived with something your entire life, it’s difficult to just let it go. I feel like a woman’s who’s lived her entire life with a glass eye, only to find that the eye has rolled out of my socket and disappeared. Maybe the glass eye was a nuisance, maybe it was a chore, perhaps it was annoying, but it’s been there forever and that’s all I register.

  “Emily?” he prompts.

  “I asked you to leave him alone,” I say. My voice sounds distant, disconnected from my body. It’s an out-of-body sensation I know well. It’s the same one that comes over me every time Patrick beats me.

  “What?” Jude flinches. “Are you serious right now?”

  “What do you mean, am I serious?” I look deep into his eyes. I feel rage bubbling over again. The presence of the rage provokes more rage. I don’t want to be angry with Jude. I want to be close to him, love him, and yet when I think about him laying into Patrick, the rage turns volcanic.

  “That’s not your blood,” I mutter.

  He takes a step back, regarding me with a perplexed expression. “No,” he says. Something in his face hardens. He’s not even sorry about it! “No, it’s not. But you shouldn’t even care, Emily.”

  “Well, I do!” I explode onto my feet, waving my hands at him. “I do care! Do you understand! I. Do. Care. I can’t help it, Jude. We talked about this. I said I wouldn’t go to work as long as you left Patrick alone! You completely ignored me! Do you even care about me, Jude? Or are you just using me for sex?” The words spill from my lips as though somebody else is talking. I don’t even think about what I’m saying. I just ride the wave of rage. “Well?” I bark, when he just stand there, blood-flecked features getting harder each moment. “Do you even give a shit about me? He’s my brother!”

  Jude paces up and down near the table, shaking his head, muttering under his breath. “After everything he’s done…so what if I did…after everything he’s done…so what if I did…”

  “Jude.” Voice shaky, threatening to blow up. “Jude, you’ve ruined my life.”

  Even I’m not sure what I mean by that. But then, it isn’t me speaking. It’s the scared little girl in the orphanage who, despite everything he’s done to her, sees Patrick as her only lifeline.

  “How the fuck would that even be the case?” he snaps. “Look at your eyes, Emily. How long until they heal? How long until you don’t look like a woman who’s been in a car accident? I can’t believe you’re defending him again.”

  “What if it was Moira, huh?” I chuck the question at him like a knife. “What if I came home one day covered in Moira’s blood? Wouldn’t you care? Wouldn’t you defend her?”

  “It’s not the same.” Jude stops pacing and turns his blood-ringed eyes to me. “Moira is a nurse. She spends her life helping people. Patrick is a fucking monster who spends his life hurting women.”

  Suddenly, unbidden tears sprout from my eyes. They slide down my cheeks, over the pitted bruises. My tear ducts don’t seem to see the irony in crying over the man who caused the black eyes; they just go right on ahead.

  “You’re . . . crying.” He speaks in a tone of complete disbelief. “Why are you crying? Even if I . . . He’s not a good man, Emily. I can’t have you defending him like this.”

  “You can’t have it?” I hate how my voice sounds, tear-choked and desperate. “It’s none of your business, Jude. It’s not up to you how I deal with my own brother . . . Oh my god, Patrick. Patrick is dead! My big brother is dead!” I sound hysterical. I pity the woman. I pity how under Patrick’s thumb she is. But then, when you’ve lived your life under somebody’s thumb, that thumb doesn’t dislodge without a fight. I try and think: This is good. Patrick was a bad man. But my mind just plays the brother card, halting that train of thought.

  Jude walks to the bathroom door. His boots leave bloody prints on the floor, on the rug I bought for him. It seems grotesque, my brother’s blood staining the rug, which after all is a sigil of my dedication to Jude. Suddenly, the dedication seems misplaced. I feel lost.

  “I’m going for a shower,” he says. “We’ll talk when I get out. There are some things I want to say. I’ll . . . I’ll explain everything after the shower.”

  He goes into the bathroom and locks the door behind him. Without giving myself time to think, I charge to the front door, pull on my sneakers, and walk out into the hallway. As I’m walking down the stairs, I misstep and trip. My arms flail and I manage to catch the banister, but the sensation of falling doesn’t stop, even when I’m in the street, even when I walk away from the apartment, marching blindly through the city. I’m still falling, reeling, spinning. Control has been wrenched from me. I feel as though I am lost at sea.

  I tell myself, time and time and time again, that Patrick is—was—a bad man, but bad man or not, he’s the only family I ever knew. He was the one constant in an otherwise hectic life. He was the man who—who what? Who beat you? Who hated you? Who made you feel small? I want to listen to this voice, part of me knows it’s talking sense, but a bigger part of me keeps imagining Patrick on his back, Jude’s boot stamping on his face. I hear Patrick screaming in agony, begging for mercy. Surely Jude must’ve paused, just once, and thought that Patrick is my brother. Surely he must’ve thought how this would’ve affected me.

  But, in the end, my first observation about Jude was right. He doesn’t care one tiny bit about how I feel. My desires mean nothing to him. In the end, all he cares about is himself, his own desires.

  I pause at the end of the street, wondering if I should turn back, but then my mind throws up another image, this time of Patrick cold and blue.

  I keep walking.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Emily

  I walk through the city in a state of profound shock. It’s like I can feel the spinning of the earth. Every time I walk by somebody, I expect them to stop me and ask if something is wrong. I feel as though I must look like a lonely, wandering woman. But people just brush by me and that suits me fine. I don’t want to talk to anybody. I don’t want to have to explain how I’m feeling to another person. They’d never understand; nobody would. How can I explain to another person that I’m distraught because my abusive brother is dead? But distraught is the right term for it.

  I walk for a long time through the sunlit streets, past honking cars and bustling businessmen and frantic parents dragging along even more frantic kids. I walk until my legs carry me, by accident, to Central Park. I don’t think. I just plunge into the park.

  I pass by a man and a woman holding hands. The woman has a wide smile on her face as she leans across and kisses the man behind the ear. The man turns, kisses her on the cheek. The love between them is almost physical, reaching across the park and nudging into me. I stop for a moment and imagine that I’m that woman, that life is carefree, that fear and pain and longing and regret and confusion are alien to me. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t completely put myself in that woman’s shoes. She’s one of the smiling, happy, loving women, the type I’ll never be.

  I reach into my pocket, meaning to take out my cellphone, but I forgot to bring it with me.

  I press on, deeper into the park, until I reach the pond. I go to a bench and throw myself down on it. My mind is filled with memories and not all of them are bad.

  Sometimes, Patrick was a good brother, and right now the good seems to massively outw
eigh the bad. It doesn’t help that I know it’s a skewed point of view. It doesn’t help in the least.

  I remember once, after we’d moved out of the orphanage and into our first apartment, I had recurring night terrors. I would dream that I was standing at the edge of a cliff, rooted in place as you often are in dreams, and behind me there was a huge, lumbering beast. Every night, the beast loped at me, slowly. I could hear every step, its breath as it got closer, its claws tearing up the earth. I looked down at the rocks, jagged and razor-sharp. Soon, I thought, the beast will push me over the edge and that’ll be the end. Despite the pain, I didn’t want to die. I always woke just as the beast smashed into me, sending me toppling over the cliff edge.

  I would scream and spasms would course through my body. I would pound the bed with my fists. I would claw at the sheets.

  I remember Patrick coming into the bedroom. I fell silent, a hand of terror gripping me. He’d hit me now, I thought, and no matter how many times he’d done it before, the pain never became less, just easier to accept. I shrank to the other side of the bed, arms at my face in a pathetic attempt to shield myself. But he didn’t hit me. He crawled onto the bed and wrapped his arms around me.

  “It’s okay,” he whispered, stroking my hair. Stroking my hair with hands that would, the next day, bruise my face. “You don’t have to be scared. I’ll never let anything happen to you.” Never mind that all the bad things that happened to me were his fault. “You’re safe.” A lie, because I was never safe with him. But in that moment, with the phantom of the lumbering beast in my mind, I didn’t care about the other things Patrick had done. All I cared about was how safe he made me feel. He kissed me on the forehead, tucked me into bed, and sat on the floor as I fell asleep.

  That’s what people on the outside never understand, I reflect as I watch the ducks drift across the water, leaving ripples in their paths. The ripples spread outward and create more ripples until the whole pond is shimmering in the sunlight. There is no such thing as just bad, or just good. There’s always an in between space. But nobody ever sees that. They think a devil must be a devil and an angel must be an angel. They never stop to consider that sometimes devils wear halos and angels sprout horns.

  And yet . . .

  I allow another part of myself, so far ignored, to pour its feelings into this potent brew.

  And yet now, I will never again have to fear him. I will never again have to shrink in terror as his huge, lumbering body comes at me. Because the truth is, Patrick was the monster in my dream. He was the monster and he was the protector. He’s dead. I never have to fear him again. I don’t have to be scared anymore. But he’s my brother. But he hit you. He’s dead. Be happy; he sad. Be strong; be a good sister. See him for what he really is; sometimes he was a good man.

  “Ah!” I snap, picking up a stray twig from the bench and throwing it into the water. I mutter under my breath: “Why can’t life just be simple for once?”

  “It rarely is.” The voice comes from behind me.

  I leap to my feet, spinning.

  The man doesn’t make a move toward me. He’s large and soft-looking, wearing an old-man overcoat which covers his knees. He’s short, squat. His face is squashed and he wears wire-framed glasses. A crescent of grey hair frames a bald spot on stop. His coat is pulled up around his neck, but there’s something under there, marking his skin.

  “It’s not polite to sneak up on people,” I say, voice breathy. The tears have stopped flowing now, though, so that’s something.

  “I didn’t mean to sneak up,” the man says, completely at ease. He reaches into his pocket and takes out a transparent bag of breadcrumbs. “I’m just here to feed the ducks. I couldn’t help but overhear.” He strolls to the edge of the pond, passing by me, and begins throwing breadcrumbs into the pond. The ducks gather around him at once.

  “Well, you did,” I say, backing away to the bench and sitting down again. Really, I should go away, but my legs are aching from so much walking and this old man doesn’t seem to even notice I’m here.

  For around ten minutes, I watch as he feeds the ducks. He takes a genuine pleasure in it, oohing and ahhing every time a new duck joins the fray. He even waves away some of the bigger ducks so that a duckling can get its share. When his bag his empty, he turns to me.

  In his other hand, he holds one final pile of crumbs. “Would you like to feed them?” he asks.

  “Uh, sure,” I reply, grateful for the distraction.

  I take the crumbs from him and toss them into the water. Together, this kind old man and I watch as the ducks polish off the last of the breadcrumbs.

  Then he faces me. “Are you okay?” he asks, gesturing at my eyes.

  “I tripped,” I say shortly.

  “Ah.” He nods knowingly. “I’ve known many women who tripped—”

  “I tripped.”

  He holds his hands up and wanders over to the bench. Without even thinking about it, I join him, dropping next to him. “I knew a girl once,” he says. “She was young, pretty, smart. Brilliant, really. She was eighteen years old and her father was a real nasty piece of work. Real nasty. The sort of man to kick a homeless person in the stomach whilst he’s sleeping. That’s not some random example. He really did that.” The old man sighs. “The girl had a boyfriend, but back then the boyfriend was too weak and pathetic to do anything about it.” He shrugs. “Long story short, the inevitable happened. The man beat the girl to death. By the time the boyfriend learned of it, it was too late. Not even killing the mean old bastard could do any good. He was half a man after that.”

  “You’re talking about yourself,” I’m not sure how I know, but it’s so obviously true that I don’t question the statement.

  The man smiles tightly. “Yes, I’m talking about myself.”

  “Is there a moral to this story, old man?”

  “No moral. There never are morals, not in life. Just decisions.”

  “Are you a philosopher?” I ask, genuinely curious. He talks like one.

  “No.” He laughs. “I’m just an old man with too much time on his hands.”

  There’s a pause, lengthening, ducks quacking and kids giggling and wind rustling the leaves overhead.

  “Was she scared?” I say. “The girl, I mean.”

  “Right up until the end,” the man murmurs, voice choking. “Right up until the goddamned end.”

  “I know fear like that,” I say. There’s something about this old man which allows me to open up, some disarming aspect. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never known a father.

  “You do?”

  I nod. “Too much about it, I think.”

  He spreads his hands. “I have all the time in the world. Why don’t we talk awhile?”

  I think: He’s a stranger. But I say: “Yeah, I think I’d like that.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Jude

  I shower quickly, realizing it’s cruel of me not to tell her the truth. But there’s something else, too, something which slides under my skin and spikes through my body. Rage. Cold, hard rage, the sort of rage which makes a man clench his fists until his knuckles strain to burst out of his skin.

  Why would she keep defending him? I ask myself as the blood runs down my body in rivulets and swirls down the plughole. He’s a monster. And the way she reacted . . . it was like he was the best brother who’d ever fucking lived! Why would she keep fighting for him after everything he’s done? Worst of all was the way she looked at me, like I’m the monster. Like I’m the man who should be ashamed of himself. Like I’m the beast. She went from loving to distant in the space of a couple of minutes and all for him. She chose his side. She defended him. It makes me goddamn sick.

  I get out of the shower and towel myself off. Blood is a tricky thing to clean, especially when you’re caked head to toe in the stuff, but I’m used to that by now. I’ve been dealing with it for most of my life. It gets under your fingernails, in your hair, sinks deep into your pores. You have to scrub it
off. I splash water in my face and then walk into the living room with the towel around my waist.

  I need to tell Emily the truth. I need to tell her I didn’t kill her brother. It may piss me the hell off, but I can’t have her hating me.

  I walk around the apartment. I expect her to be sitting on the couch, watching one of her documentaries or perhaps reading Moira’s nursing book. But the apartment is empty; it feels deserted. I go into the bedroom, but she isn’t there, either. Dammit. I return to the living room and pick up my cellphone, call Emily. There’s a vibration. Her phone is on the couch, humming against the cushions.