After the Darkness

by Brown, Honey

  We were doomed. Old Trudy, the real Trudy, the one who wore floral dresses and giggled at the seriousness of school assemblies, was in the room, watching in horror, in disbelief at how unhinged things had become.

  Finn’s stomach folded and creased over the waistband of his jeans. Bruce put one knee on Finn’s shoulder and reefed Finn’s head around to the side. Finn was stiff, yet compliant. There were many ways to try to get free, but he wasn’t trying any of them now. His eyes were screwed up and he was sucking in air through his teeth. Then he opened his eyes and looked at me. His pupils dilated, and contracted again, focusing on me. I don’t know what he saw. I felt confused, drained and shattered. The topknot in my hair had slipped. Long blonde wisps had escaped. My feet ached in my narrow boots.

  ‘Let him up, Bruce. Let him explain.’ The phone had been knocked onto the floor. It was still recording. As a way to get through to my husband I picked it up and sat it back on the chest. ‘Let him tell you.’

  Bruce hauled Finn to his feet, and as he did he put to him forcefully, ‘You know Guy Grant!’

  ‘Yeah,’ Finn challenged, slurring, almost revelling in the confrontation. ‘Whatever you wanna hear.’

  ‘No! He doesn’t know him!’

  It was all too clear how complete the confusion was about to become.

  ‘Why did you go near my daughter?’ Bruce bellowed in Finn’s face.

  ‘He doesn’t know Guy Grant!’

  ‘I’ll fucking kill you!’ Bruce screamed.

  The intensity of Bruce’s fury seemed to register then. The cocky sneer dropped from Finn’s face. He broke free from Bruce’s hold and lunged for the bedroom door. He managed to get it open and ran into the hallway. Bruce caught him at the front door. He hauled him away from the doorknob.

  ‘He doesn’t know Guy Grant!’

  They wrestled in the hallway a moment. Finn’s T-shirt came off during this struggle. It fell onto the doormat. Finn pushed past Bruce into the living area. As he ran he saw the knife. Bruce had laid it down alongside the skirting outside Finn’s bedroom door. I saw the moment when Finn’s fear became something else, as mine had done when I’d looked up to see the furnace cowling above my head. Now he sprinted. There were three exits he could choose from – the living area sliding door, the laundry door, or out through the garage. He chose the sliding door. He jumped over the coffee table, tripped over cushions, and was able to reach the handle before Bruce pulled him back. Finn’s fingers slipped on the smooth plastic as he was wrenched away. Bruce took hold of Finn by the waistband of his jeans and threw him sideways into the couch. Finn landed safely in the cushions.

  ‘Don’t move!’ Bruce demanded.

  Finn climbed over the back of the couch, falling onto the narrow floor space between the couch and wall. He shot out and made a dash for escape route number two – the laundry. I moved to stop him.

  ‘No,’ Bruce said, ‘stay back, you’ll get hurt!’

  The laundry door had a deadlock. If it weren’t for this, Finn would have made it into the backyard. But before Finn could get the door open, Bruce overpowered him. Their bodies knocked and bumped. I stopped in the doorway and turned on the light. Bruce pushed Finn’s head into the laundry trough beside the back door. The steel in the basin twanged and the thin base buckled. Bruce turned on the cold-water tap. The water poured over Finn’s head and splashed on the tiled floor.

  As I rushed forward, I slipped and came down hard on my right knee. I suppressed how much it hurt. I got straight back up, but was immobilised as pain gripped me. I bent over, clutching at my knee.

  Bruce leaned in and used his body weight to control Finn, who began kicking against the cupboard below the sink, gripping the basin sides with both hands and levering back with all his might. The basin had one of those plugs that live in the plughole. Finn’s forehead must have pushed the plug down into its sealed position. The sink began to fill.

  Touching my husband’s back I could feel he was completely closed off from me. Men don’t appreciate their physical strength, compared to that of a woman. It’s why they forget to lock up a house at night, and women never forget. Bruce didn’t feel twice as strong as me; he felt ten times the strength. There was no way I could stop him. I pulled at his shoulders, to no avail. Pleaded with him to stop. I knew he sensed on some level that I was there, because he moved, so that I couldn’t reach the tap to turn it off.

  Finn looked to draw on those reserves of strength stored away for times like these, superhuman strength; he was able to straighten in Bruce’s hold. He began screaming, hollering, at the top of his lungs. The doof doof music was still playing next door. No one could hear him. Bruce regained control and pushed Finn’s head back under the tap. He held it there with both hands. Bruce’s feet slipped, but he was wearing boots, and had the benefit of tread. Finn’s bare feet slid about without any chance of gripping.

  People could drown in a small amount of water. When our children were young, Bruce and I had been vigilant. We’d upturned buckets and put the cats’ drinking bowls up high, we’d covered the drums of grey water collected for the garden. Our kids weren’t going to drown in an inch or two of water, not on our watch. Some new parents were paranoid about accidental choking, others lost sleep over cot death, or an unexpected fall, but Bruce and I had fretted about shallow drowning. The bottom of the sink filled. Finn gurgled and spluttered. The tap water was flowing over his head, even when he turned his head he couldn’t take a proper breath.

  Torture didn’t work as a way of extracting information from a person. I’d read that somewhere, or seen it on TV. Finn would be shutting off, losing all sense of what to say or do. Pretty soon he would say or do anything to make Bruce stop. Torture could bring about compliance, but not honesty. Bruce had been tortured to the point of compliance. I knew that now. Reuben must have held Bruce underwater in the other room Bruce had spoken of; that was why his clothes had been wet. Sadists used torture in the manner it should be used, to placate. Shackling Bruce had been easier after that, touching him had been easier. I only needed to look at my husband’s actions to know what had been done to him.

  Bruce was no sadist, though. He let Finn up. Finn gasped, open-mouthed, water streaming down his face. I backed away, shaking. I was dumbstruck, shocked by how deep and wide the hurt was, concerned for my husband, wanting to comfort him, even though it was Finn in need of assistance. Bruce leaned on the washing machine, taking in deep breaths, drying his hands on the sides of his pants. The two men were in a time-out as they recovered. Water dripped. Finn coughed and breathed. My husband frowned in thought. Only now was he able to look back and see what he had done. He was becoming aware of the uneasy truth. His boots were wet. His pants were soaked. He looked down at his body. I sensed his growing distress at his own actions.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said.

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  Finn slid down to sit on the wet floor, his back against the door. Beneath his freckles, his face was the colour of uncooked dough. Water dripped from his hair. His legs were stretched out in front of him, in a pose that struck me as both defeated and defiant. It was how Bruce had sat in his manacles.

  ‘Get out now, you fucking psycho,’ Finn said to Bruce.

  ‘How do you know Guy Grant?’

  ‘Get out of my house!’

  ‘You’ll tell me why you approached my daughter!’

  ‘Please just answer that,’ I said. ‘Finn, why did you talk to Summer at the restaurant?’

  ‘I was being nice! I saw her name on the list of students, and I was being fucking nice!’

  ‘Hey,’ Bruce barked.

  ‘Fuck you! You tried to drown me!’

  ‘No, he didn’t.’

  ‘He did!’

  ‘Do you know Guy Grant, or not?’

  I saw Finn’s eyes moving past me to fix on the open laundry door.

  ‘The hotel guy, ’ I explained. ‘He’s involved with someone who attacked us.’ Finn’s expression didn’t change. ‘W
ould you testify to the police that you saw him in town? We can go to the police now.’ I looked at the wet clothes, Finn’s battered face. ‘Or once you get dry. That’s why we came here, to ask if you can testify to seeing him and confirm he was in town.’

  Finn pushed some wet hair from his eyes. His tongue moved and probed inside his mouth. I could see he didn’t like looking at Bruce, or looking in Bruce’s direction. ‘The desk girls told me he was there.’

  ‘Will you testify you saw him?’

  After a second of thinking, Finn answered, ‘No. Just get out of my house.’

  ‘Too bad,’ Bruce said, ‘you’re going to whether you like it or not. Trudy, get my phone. We’re ringing the police. You assaulted my wife today. You prey on upset women, you took a schoolgirl away from her school group, and I don’t trust you as far as I could kick you.’

  ‘You tried to kill me!’ Finn bared his teeth and tapped a finger on an incisor, indicating a chipped tooth. ‘You broke into my house, beat me up and tried to drown me – you’re a fucking psycho.’

  ‘Assault someone’s wife and approach their kids and you’d want to expect something. I don’t think the cops will be too surprised that I hit you. We’re calling them.’

  Finn suddenly began getting to his feet. Once standing, he sniffed and jammed a thumb up under his nostril, rubbed hard. ‘I’ll testify if we go there. Only if we go there, though. I don’t want the cops and some fucking circus here.’

  We waited in the kitchen while he went to the bedroom for a jumper. We walked ahead of him when he appeared again. He was carrying a pair of socks. His feet remained bare. The light in the garage was bright. It bounced off the windscreens of both cars.

  At first I thought it was this harsh light that made Finn look so different. He was almost unrecognisable as the pleasant redhead who had tapped lightly on my office door. Bruce, keen to go, was standing between the two cars. Finn carried his shoes to the driver’s side door of his Jag. My eyes followed him. He reached behind his back and pushed at something beneath his jumper, as though tucking a shirt into the band of his jeans. It didn’t look to me, though, like he was wearing a shirt.

  I said quietly to Bruce, ‘Be careful.’

  ‘I’m following you there,’ Finn said.

  ‘Get in the car,’ Bruce said to me.

  ‘I think he’s got a weapon …’

  Our whispered conversation had Finn glancing across. From the relative safety of the far side of his car he said, ‘You know what? I don’t need this bullshit. Just get in your car and fuck off. Go home and tell your husband, Trudy, how you led me on. It takes two to play the fucking game. The man at the hotel is no one. Say what you want to the cops – I’ve done nothing wrong. You wanna charge me with something? You go for it. My parents will bury you. If I were you I’d plan on selling every one of your houses if you want to match the legal team they’ll set onto you.’

  ‘Is there a reason you don’t seem keen for the police to come here?’ Bruce said.

  ‘Shut up,’ Finn sneered at him. ‘You’ve got some balls. You should be happy I just want you to piss off.’

  Bruce was silent.

  ‘Not screaming at me now?’ Finn said. ‘Come round here now and try to hit me.’ The thing jammed down the back of Finn’s jeans was feeding this bravado. ‘What’s stopping you?’

  ‘Did you follow Sue Murdoch out of the office today?’ Bruce said.

  Finn laughed. ‘Um … whatever.’

  ‘Are you paid to be here?’

  ‘Yeah, okay, I sure am.’ Finn put his shoes on the Jag’s roof, leaned his body against the closed driver’s side door, reclining against it, as though getting comfortable. ‘You must think you’re pretty important. Even if you were attacked, what makes you think anyone would give a shit?’

  This effort to appear relaxed was an act, though. Finn was very pale. One eye squinted shut as he looked to deal with a flash of pain. The garage lights seemed suddenly too bright for him. He shied from them.

  I said, under my breath, ‘Maybe he wants whatever he’s carrying out of the house in case the police come. Let’s just go.’

  ‘Tell you what …’ Finn took the shoes off the car roof. ‘You two stay here and do whatever mental thing you reckon.’ He reached for the door handle of his car. ‘And next time you hear from me it’ll be through …’

  His last word was slurred. A blood vessel had burst in his eye. Any remaining colour dropped from his face and blood oozed from his nostril. It followed the line of his upper lip. He swayed. The shoes he was holding dropped onto the dusty concrete.

  ‘Bruce, he’s going to faint!’

  Finn was upright and speaking one second, the next he was dead-eyed and falling back. His head hit the concrete with a sickening smack. It was as though the concrete accepted Finn’s skull and Finn’s skull accepted the concrete. We ran around to him. Bruce lifted Finn’s upper body from off the floor. There was a patch of blood where Finn had landed, but as I looked at his anaemic face, I had a feeling that the bleeding was happening inside, contained within Finn’s skull; it had started before he’d fainted.

  Bruce took his hand out from beneath Finn. My husband was holding a small pistol. It didn’t look real. I’d never seen a handgun out of a holster, up close. Weren’t they bigger, blacker and shinier than that? Bruce opened his hand, taking the tips of his fingers away from the chequered timber inlay in the grip, leaving the weapon resting on his palm. He tilted his hand and let the weapon slide onto the floor.

  ‘Call an ambulance,’ he said.

  I ran to our car. Finn began to twitch and convulse on the floor. I heard his body jerking and his bare heels rubbing against the concrete.

  ‘Hurry!’

  It took me a few seconds to find my phone. I had a text. It was from Sue Murdoch. Just got your message. Had my phone off. Hope everything is ok?

  Finn grew still. The garage was suddenly much colder and starker.

  ‘No, no,’ Bruce began to say, ‘no …’

  I ran back to my husband.

  He was holding Finn, gripping him tight as though to squeeze the life back in, but life had slipped out, through my husband’s fingers. It had seeped out through the cracks we’d made. There’d been no stopping it.

  22

  The first thing I did was put the knife back in the kitchen. I rubbed the handle with a tea towel after sliding the blade into the knife block. Then I kept the tea towel with me and wiped over the computer keyboard, and around the edges of the screen. I wiped down the kitchen bench, the drawer handles, everywhere I thought Bruce had touched. The wad of notes was on the floor where Bruce had dragged it with the toe of his boot. I put the money in the bedroom bedside drawer. I went out into the hallway and picked up Finn’s T-shirt, folded it, and put it away with his other T-shirts.

  Bruce’s phone was still recording. The battery was down to three per cent. I turned the phone off, put it in my pocket. I cleaned up in the laundry, using a towel from the dirty laundry basket to dry the floor.

  Returning to the garage, I found Bruce kneeling beside Finn’s body. He had eased Finn down onto the floor, placed him carefully, arranging his arms to lie either side, close in to his torso, and had turned Finn’s hands so that they were facing down. Bruce looked at his own hands, his knuckles, and clenched his fists and opened his hands slowly, as though hoping this might disperse the redness. He looked at the side of Finn’s neck, where he had squeezed him.

  ‘Is it bruised?’

  ‘It’s red.’

  We looked at the handgun on the floor.

  ‘You touched it.’

  ‘We’ll wipe it down.’

  ‘They’ll be able to tell it’s been wiped down.’

  ‘I’ll say I touched it.’

  ‘It won’t be registered. That was probably why he wanted it out of the house. We should perhaps … get rid of it.’

  ‘Our coming here can be explained,’ Bruce said.

  ‘What if the recording on Sue
’s phone isn’t clear? We haven’t heard it. It might prove nothing. Or what if the police can’t retrieve it? None of this will make sense if there’s no proof of our attack.’

  ‘He fainted.’

  ‘I think he had a seizure, before he fainted. You realise, it’s going to look like you came around here thinking I’d had an affair? Robert told you today about Finn. This happened the same day you found out your wife might be cheating.’

  ‘There were so many coincidences linking him to Guy Grant …’

  ‘I’m not sure there were.’

  ‘We thought he was involved.’

  ‘It’s going to sound like we’re crazy.’

  ‘Not if the recording proves our attack.’

  ‘It makes it even worse that Finn had a past with married women.’ I touched my forehead, rubbed at the magnitude: it was collecting in my brow. ‘This is breaking and entering, and assault, and if he haemorrhaged as a result of one of your hits, with all those calls and emails to me …’

  ‘He had a gun. He still might be involved.’ Bruce stayed kneeling by the body. ‘If we could just know Sue’s recording was real. Guy Grant has been here in town. Won’t there be security camera footage of him at the hotel?’

  ‘I’m not sure it was him now.’