The Beautiful Dead

by Belinda Bauer

  She sucked in air and choked on it, and he lifted her with an arm that was already under her shoulders, and helped her to sit up.

  ‘Your nose is bleeding,’ he said.

  She nodded stupidly. She could see that now. Dripping down her cardigan and blotting on to the snow around her like black ink.

  He gave her a clean white old-man handkerchief and said, ‘Put your head back.’

  She did. That was better.

  ‘It might be broken,’ he said. ‘You should go to the hospital.’

  ‘I’m OK,’ she said, and looked around her, dazed.

  Her father was sitting on the step of the shed now, squeezing snow into ridged lumps of ice and dropping them. Not looking at her.

  ‘Can you get up?’

  Eve nodded, although she didn’t know whether she could or not, and allowed Mr Elias to help her – first to her knees and then to her feet. When she got there she was dizzy for a moment, and he steadied her.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s get you both inside,’ he said kindly.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said again.

  He took her to her house, not his, and Duncan followed meekly behind them, like a cow on a rope.

  Mr Elias locked the back door behind them and took out the key and put it on the table next to Eve.

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ he said.

  So English, thought Eve. As if tea will make everything better.

  But she was grateful that somebody else was in charge – even if it was Mr Elias.

  I’ll put my boobs on.

  Had he really said that?

  Probably not. Eve had known Mr Elias since she was five years old, and had never heard him say anything that was not achingly dull. And the way he had helped her up, and brushed snow off her hair, and steadied her when she swayed – he had touched her only with fatherly concern.

  She had been wrong about him being a dirty old man, and felt bad.

  She watched him fill the kettle. His eyes were red. He looked the way she felt. He must have a cold coming.

  ‘There’s no plug on this,’ he said, and held up the flex to show her the bare wires.

  Eve looked at her father. ‘Dad, where’s the plug for the kettle?’

  ‘I made it safe,’ said Duncan, then he wandered out of the kitchen, leaving a trail of ice-melt across the floor to the hallway. Drawn by the siren of the television, she guessed.

  She sighed and told Mr Elias, ‘He does that. He thinks he’s fixing things. But he just takes them apart.’

  ‘I’ll warm some milk on the stove,’ said Mr Elias seamlessly, and found a saucepan.

  Eve didn’t have the energy to stop him. She stared at her hands and the ruined handkerchief, both grubby with drying blood. Now that the shock of the blow was wearing off, she could feel the pain spreading through her face – her nose, her eyes, her cheeks. Everything there was starting to feel hot and tight.

  Mr Elias set down a mug of warm milk.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered, and took a sip. She hadn’t had hot milk for years and it was just the way her mother used to make it – with a little spoonful of brown sugar.

  Mr Elias sat down with his own mug.

  ‘I didn’t realize Duncan had got so bad,’ he said cautiously.

  Eve shrugged and opened her mouth to defend her father. To minimize the whole thing; to let Mr Elias know that she was coping just fine.

  But instead her mouth lost its shape and she said, ‘I wish he would just die.’

  The words said themselves.

  ‘I don’t mean that!’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure you don’t,’ said Mr Elias kindly. ‘It’s the shock.’

  ‘Yes,’ nodded Eve. ‘I’m just so … tired. It’s unrelenting, you know …?’ A plane passed mercifully overhead so she could stop talking. She couldn’t believe she’d said that. Couldn’t believe she’d even thought it. It was the shock. And no wonder. Her father had punched her in the face. Knocked her out cold. She didn’t know what she was saying.

  Thank God she hadn’t said it to anyone who mattered!

  She didn’t want to discuss it. Didn’t want to give it any more weight. Just wanted to move on and talk about something else.

  Anything else!

  Then she frowned, remembering.

  ‘Who’s Phoebe?’ she said.

  Mr Elias paused, then smiled and patted her hand, and asked if she’d like more milk.

  17

  9 December

  MY HEAD IS an apple!

  Eve woke with a start in the dark, suffocating, and with her face feeling as if it might split open down the bridge of her nose and spill hot fluffy stuffing, like an over-baked apple.

  She waited until her heart slowed to a safe rate, then rose groggily and with a sense of foreboding.

  Her father was still asleep. It would be nice to think he was tired from his foray into Mr Elias’s garden, and that he could be worn out by a good walk, like a beagle, but Eve knew the answer was more random: sometimes he slept, sometimes he didn’t.

  As she stood over his bed, the events of last night came back to her with surreal numbness.

  She could call Stuart, but what was the point? What would she say? Stu worked on the rigs, so a punch in the face was unlikely to ring any alarm bells with him. And even if it did, and brought him rushing back from Scotland, what could he do? Nothing. He would come, and see, and go again, and she would still be here, but with a new sense of resentment at the fresh abandonment to add to her other woes.

  So telling him was pointless.

  Telling anyone would be pointless. And embarrassing. She didn’t even want Joe knowing what had happened. It would all come out. It was a whole can of worms.

  Mr Elias knew, of course. He was not a stranger any more. Just another person to put on her Christmas list.

  Another bloody gift to buy …

  Her father turned over in bed and covered his ear with a cupped hand, like a child.

  I wish he would just die.

  Eve flushed and grimaced – then winced at the little jag of pain that punished her for her heartlessness.

  She was a bad person. A bad, bad person.

  She was ashamed.

  She went into the bathroom and examined her face. Her nose was twice its normal size across the bridge, and she had dark smudges starting under each eye. She sighed and brushed her teeth with great care, gripped by the weird feeling that at any moment her face might give way under its own weight and drop off into the basin.

  Ross was going to be furious.

  Mrs Solomon arrived at seven thirty.

  At seven thirty-two, Eve’s phone rang.

  It was Joe. From the way he said Hi, Eve knew it was bad news.

  ‘Guy Smith got the X-ray.’

  Guy’s report was no good, but it didn’t have to be. The X-ray was all anybody cared about – that shadowy skull, punctured by a bright-white blade, and two comedy eyeballs. It was TV gold, and watching it was like rubbernecking at the best kind of car crash, except that the wreck looked to Eve very much like her career, burning up on the hard shoulder.

  At morning conference, Ross Tobin yelled at her.

  She had been yelled at before – every reporter knew how to take a good bollocking on the chin. Usually Eve fought her corner with flair – accepting blame if it were due, while making a spirited defence of her own actions in order to remind the yeller that there were two sides to every story. She’d always been an expert at talking an angry boss down – even Ross Tobin – and, on occasion, had been known to talk a bollocking down to a boozy lunch, where he’d picked up the bill!

  But this time she just sat there and took it. Even though nobody could have been expected to get that X-ray, and Guy Smith wouldn’t have got it either, if he hadn’t slept with Janey in the coroner’s office – which was what Joe had heard from Ricky, and was an edge that was not available to her.

  So she had a defence. But she was too scared t
o launch it. Scared of making Ross even more angry. Scared of losing her job and not being able to pay Mrs Solomon. Scared of having to put her father in a care facility, and scared of keeping him at home. Scared of it going on for ever, and scared of it ending.

  Just as surely as her father had changed her life on sports day when she was seven years old, so Eve suddenly realized that he had changed it again – more slowly – over the past three years, making her a weaker, more fearful person just when she needed to be at her strongest.

  So she just sat there, silent and defenceless, until Ross finally ran out of steam and allocated jobs to everybody.

  Except her.

  Symbolically, it was damning.

  We don’t need you, it said, and everybody there knew it. They filed out without making eye contact with Eve.

  Ross snapped, ‘And what the fuck happened to your face? How am I supposed to put you on-screen looking like that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Well, Katie can take over,’ he said. ‘You’re on the desk until you look like a fucking human being again.’

  Eve walked back into a newsroom where everybody was apparently too frantically busy to notice her.

  Joe touched her arm. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said brightly, and sat down.

  ‘You sure?’ He perched on the corner of her desk.

  ‘Sure,’ she nodded. ‘Massive dick on legs, remember?’

  ‘I’m not talking about that.’

  She reddened. He meant her face, but she couldn’t tell him. She couldn’t say it even inside her own head: My dad punched me in the face. It was too awful.

  Instead she said, ‘Joe, we have to give him the Kevin Barr video!’

  Her words hung in the air between them like a rotting carcass.

  Joe didn’t look at her. He sat on the corner of her desk and fiddled with a bulldog clip. From his silence, she wondered if he’d been expecting this, and for a moment she hated him for not having more faith in her – however unjustified.

  She lifted her chin defiantly, waiting for an argument, wanting an argument. Wanting to be argued out of it and reassured that everything was going to be OK anyway …

  But still Joe said nothing. The air creaked under the weight of unspoken judgement.

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ she finally snapped.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re not on-screen and you’re not a woman,’ she said. ‘In twenty years’ time you’ll still be doing your job, but I’ll be lucky to have mine a year from now.’

  She hadn’t meant to sound so bitter, or to pit them as adversaries, but the way the words fell out of her mouth, it sounded like both those things.

  Eve should have just told him how much she needed this job. How she couldn’t take the risk of losing it – and why. But she was so scared of looking weak that it had come out all wrong. She wished she could start all over again and say it right, except that she didn’t know how.

  She looked at Joe, hoping that somehow he’d magically see through her clumsy words to the desperation that had spawned them.

  And he might have – if he’d looked at her at all.

  Instead he said, ‘OK,’ and stared into the middle distance for a moment.

  Then he got up and walked out of the newsroom.

  When she showed Ross the clip, he actually kissed her – wet and smoky on her cheek – and danced an awkward little jig, like a sailor puppet.

  ‘Fuck me!’ he kept yelling. ‘Fuck me! We got an in with a killer! He sent us a clip like on You’ve Been fucking Framed! Manna from heaven! The mountain comes to Mohammed! Eat my shit 24/7! Fuck me!’

  He used it, just as they’d known he would.

  It was a sensation. Just as they’d known it would be.

  Before it even went out, the tabloids got wind of what iWitness News had secured and were falling over themselves to buy the rights to the screenshots.

  Guy Smith’s X-ray was forgotten and consigned to the dustbin of history. It couldn’t compete with the clip of a murder victim apparently taken by his actual killer. Nobody gave a shit any more about the white knife and the comedy eyeballs. The world had moved onwards and upwards, and Eve was moving right along with it.

  Halfway through the lead story on the prime-time bulletin – against the creepy, flickering image of Kevin Barr – Ross Tobin turned to Eve and gave her a strained grin.

  ‘This is your lucky day,’ he told her.

  But it didn’t feel like it.

  She called Joe’s mobile three times, and it went to voicemail each time.

  She finally left a message, but he didn’t call her back.

  Eve made omelettes for supper. She would have made them Spanish, but Duncan Singer had taken all the knobs off the oven and put them somewhere she couldn’t discover and he couldn’t remember.

  ‘They’re somewhere safe,’ he kept saying. ‘Somewhere safe.’

  Then he wouldn’t eat his omelette – even after making a big fuss about having goat’s cheese instead of Cheddar.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ she asked him.

  ‘Everything,’ he said, and tipped his plate slowly vertical so that the omelette flopped on to the floor with an eggy slap.

  ‘Shit.’

  Eve scooped it off the tiles and into the bin. Some fell on her shoe.

  ‘Don’t swear,’ he said. ‘I don’t like it when you swear.’

  ‘Well, I don’t like it when you throw food on the floor,’ she snapped.

  ‘I’m not eating muck.’

  ‘Don’t eat anything then!’ she yelled at him.

  ‘I won’t!’ he yelled back. ‘See if I care!’

  Eve swabbed furiously at the floor with a dishcloth and wished they had a dog to take care of spillage. They’d had a dog when she was small. Arnie – a giant Airedale who’d taken up the whole of the sofa and driven them from the room with his farts.

  Maybe not a dog.

  She tossed the dishcloth in the bin after the omelette.

  Her father had days like this. Not often, but often enough now that she never had time to bounce back properly between them any more, never picked herself up so entirely that she could find them funny.

  ‘What do you want to eat then?’ she said angrily.

  ‘Peanut brittle.’

  She gave him granola and honey and he stabbed at it with a spoon with a sour look on his face.

  ‘See?’ she pointed out. ‘Nuts.’

  ‘You’re nuts,’ he said, ‘not me!’

  Her phone rang from her bag in the front room.

  She nearly didn’t answer it, because her father was so truculent that she didn’t want to leave him alone, even for a moment.

  Then she did answer it, because her father was so truculent that she wanted to leave him alone, if only for a moment.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello, Eve.’

  A man’s voice. Then silence. Already annoying.

  Eve went from zero to tetchy in two seconds flat.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m very busy.’

  There was a short laugh. ‘That’s very you, Eve.’

  Was it Guy? It didn’t sound like Guy …

  ‘Whatever,’ she snapped. ‘Tell me who this is or I’m hanging up.’

  Silence.

  She nearly hung up.

  ‘I sent you a video.’

  Eve stopped breathing. ‘What?’

  She’d heard him. She just needed time to adjust from daughter to reporter – and then to evaluate what he’d said.

  ‘What?’ she said again.

  ‘I’m so glad you showed it. It looked much better on TV. But then, everything does, doesn’t it?’

  His voice was smooth and cultured. Calm and confident.

  ‘It’s like a tree falling in the forest,’ he laughed. ‘If it’s not on TV, does it really happen?’

  ‘
W-w-where did you get the clip?’ Eve stammered – something she hadn’t done since she was a child. She’d grown out of it. She thought she’d grown out of it.

  ‘I made it,’ he said calmly.

  Eve went cold. Not chilly, but ice cold. As if all her blood had been sucked from her skin and rushed to her core, just to keep her heart and lungs going, while her brain was frozen.

  She was talking to a killer.

  Standing in her front room. With egg on her shoe.

  ‘W-w-what do you want?’ she whispered.

  ‘I want to show you something,’ he said. ‘Piccadilly Underground. Westbound. Tomorrow at six.’

  He hung up before she could say No.

  Or Yes.

  18

  10 December

  IT WAS A school day, but they weren’t at school.

  It had been Carla’s idea. Most things were.

  ‘We’ll bring clothes in our bags instead of books,’ she’d said. ‘Nobody will ever know.’

  Nobody will ever know was Carla’s go-to assertion. Nobody would ever know that they stuffed tissue in their bras; nobody would ever know that they drank vodka from her mum’s drinks cabinet and filled the bottle with water; nobody would ever know that they’d borrowed money from the electric meter.

  The assertion didn’t always bear close scrutiny after such events, but beforehand it was a persuasion almost impossible to resist.

  Zoey had been enthusiastic about Carla’s latest plan, Maddie less so. This, too, was the way they usually were. Maddie was the voice of reason – or, at least, as reasonable as a thirteen-year-old girl can be. Maddie had never been drunk; she’d never smoked and she’d never had sex, even though she was constantly assured that nobody would ever know if she did. She’d kissed a boy once – Jez Costa – and had been unimpressed. His lips had been too dry, and afterwards he’d wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, as if her lips had been too wet. So she wasn’t eager to try it again any time soon, regardless of Carla and Zoey’s nagging. They’d both kissed loads of boys. Tons of them. And got risky with some of them too. Carla said she was planning to have proper sex quite soon with Mattie Amir.

  ‘Isn’t that, like, illegal if you’re under sixteen?’ Maddie had asked her.