Head Case

by Ross Armstrong

  I could ask my neighbour if they saw or heard anything last night, I think. Neighbours are good for that sort of thing.

  Then a memory comes back to me that has lain dormant for a while. Something from my first week, before Christmas, before any of this happened and my brain was a mundane place and so was the world outside it.

  I examine the memory. I pick it up.

  Then I put it down,

  shake it off,

  and leave.

  *

  Levine gives me a knowing smile when I come in. He doesn’t treat me like a thug or a terrorist. We aren’t that kind of threat. He sits me down and talks carefully about Bartu leading me astray. About a short, sharp slap on the wrists, ‘which he’ll learn from’. He talks about it being time for me to ‘go it alone’. It’s an opinion I don’t share.

  ‘You’re right. I’ve been so confused this last week or so. I’m sorry if I got in the way,’ I bumble out.

  ‘No, no,’ he says. ‘No, no. I’d call it encouraging exuberance. Nothing wrong with that. As such.’

  He talks with kid gloves gaffer-taped to his thin wrists. I wonder why.

  ‘By the way, Tom. There’s a man coming in to speak to you tomorrow morning. From the press, a local, but a lovely big piece. About you and us. Wondered if you could share a few good experiences. Obviously, be candid. Camaraderie of the team… the pleasure of serving the community… err… I don’t want to put words in your mouth.’

  Well, you do, you want to force them in, one hand squeezing my nose, the other penetrating between my lips and teeth. I’m good for Tottenham. I’m a gateway to good press and changing attitudes. Levine is not a bad man for craving any of this, like our nervy chief he’s just a little timid and benign and I have trouble respecting that.

  ‘Forgive me, sir…’ Levine sits up in his chair when I use the word ‘sir’. It’s not a method of address I usually bother with. ‘… but I just wanted to check something, sir.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you remember that car? The one that blew up?’

  ‘Yep, haven’t forgotten. We’ve had a hell of a couple of weeks,’ he says, wincing in mild pain.

  I picture the colour chartreuse, the taste of ink, the E flat sound.

  ‘We ever find out whose car that was? Where it came from?’

  ‘Ah yes. Well, we tried, but the plates were gone and it was burnt out. Turan escorted it over to the garage on Hale Road himself but they couldn’t enlighten us at all. So they’ll hold it for a while, then strip it and scrap it from there, in time.’

  It strikes me that he doesn’t mind me asking any of this. I’m not even a hassle anymore. Despite everything, maybe they don’t think I’m as much of a situation as I thought I was. Just an eccentric worth bearing for the positive benefits. No real possibility of infamy. Especially now I’m isolated.

  ‘Sure. Thanks, Levine. Thanks,’ I say.

  It was worth a shot. Just in case Turan’s story didn’t match. Or something had come back from the garage to Levine without Turan knowing. Or just in case the car hadn’t burnt out the glove, the glove that I now realise matched the scarf, the scarf that is sitting in the lab right now with three unidentified prints on it.

  It was his car, our man’s, I’m sure now. I remember seeing the matching glove before the car went up. Even though it was dark in there I saw the outline, then the pattern, and managed to store it somewhere in the back of my mind. It was only when I smelt the scarf at the Frasers, the one he must’ve given Tanya, that smelled of men’s aftershave when it’s true that they ‘haven’t had a man in the house for years’, that it all came back and the dislocated bone of thought popped into its socket.

  As the car went up and the pattern incinerated, it must’ve been hiding tiny pieces of secrets that could’ve helped. But it’s on the scrap heap now, or in as many fragments as the mirror I smashed last night.

  My shoulders dropped as I wandered into the debrief room and took a look at my pocket notebook entries for my first week. The uneventful one before Christmas, as I wondered where my life was headed and the snow fell for the first time. The week that only started bugging me this morning, as the vapour trail of a memory stormed across my brain and started to spark other neighbouring spectres.

  I pick up key words as my eyes scour the pages that fill my senses with days and the minutes within them…

  ‘Traffic’. I see my log of when I redirected cars along the main road.

  ‘ABC’. I picture giving Eli Minton the Acceptable Behaviour Contract.

  ‘Accident.’ I breathe in the outline of the day I saw dead bodies for the first time, in a smashed up car that brought back traces of a familial horror I’d tried to bury. The memory colours itself in rapidly with sharp and useful emotion. It’s not an exact science, the memory. It’s easily corruptible.

  While relied on in court as facts, memories are known to be more like negatives that get altered by your fingerprints every time you touch them. Their perfect sheen spoilt with new ideas and prejudices every time they are reflected upon. But while short term memory does work like this, like a tracing a sparkler might make against the night sky, scientists have recently found there is also a master copy stored in your long term memory bank. The true memory, indented onto your brain, never to be erased.

  I search my mind for the master copy, the one uncorrupted by the trails of things that have happened since, that jostle to blur the image.

  Then I read ‘Neighbour.’ And I recall the hint of the memory I’d been searching for all morning. Letters from a past version of me who didn’t know what he was looking for. I don’t so much read them as inhale them and relive the thoughts, my fingers pushing into the ink on the paper of my notebook…

  ‘…as I approached the house in question, the neighbour on the left side came out…when she saw me she hustled back inside quickly. She had a look of supreme fear about her… She didn’t want any trouble…and to her maybe I meant trouble…She gave me a funny feeling, her presence sparked a strange sensation close to déjà vu.’

  I hold this woman and her significance like a plastic figurine. I pick her up and place her against the façade of my skin-blanketed skull, pushing her to my mind:

  Her scent, leather, with taste notes of tangerine. Her touch, like an arch-backed Persian blue. I shake her at my ear, for whispers to fall out. She is marble coloured and a harbinger on a model plastic street. I hover over it like a flawed god. I will turn her sideways. And use her as a key. To the house she sits next door to.

  Where two other action figures, adorned like man and wife, sit.

  I feel the thoughts hit, one by one.

  I count them through.

  This is a thought.

  This is a thought.

  This is a thought.

  I feel them hit the bottom of the well, like copper coins thrown long ago, that only now strike against the depth and echo up to the listener.

  The woman figure in the house I had stood in during my first week, had been conditioned to stay deafeningly quiet. These figures are not bride and groom, plucked from an icing cake, but abuser and captive.

  Sarah Walker perhaps, not saying a word, as I, an emissary from her previous life, limply stood on her kitchen tiles, as she sat too scared to make say a word. Her brain’s creases washed out, the very thing that had allowed her to graduate to above ground. Taught that even if she was chased, or saw a member of the police, and particularly if a uniformed man happened to see a hint of recognition in her face, that she must be faithful to her keeper.

  After she had avoided my last attempt to get to her, and I was laid low by an oncoming vehicle, she may have collected herself and headed for the house. This plastic bride might have opened the door of her own accord, sat with her groom and not said word. While the girls kept below hid their heads and prayed like they never had outside of the confines of their school hall.

  I push the neighbour figure aside. Because my thoughts tell me she is merel
y a trigger. And if that’s true, then the chamber lies in the house next door.

  *

  My whole body is poised as I knock at the address from my notebook and the déjà vu hits hard as I wait for a response.

  Then a form, blurred by the effect of the front door glass, gets bigger and bigger until I hear the top bolt go, and then the bottom, and then the lock turns.

  My palms open instinctively. If this is her I will make a grab for her, one hand to her wrist and another to my radio to help me spirit her to safety. I mentally practise the move and motion. I prepare.

  The body in front of me fills the doorway too well. He is olive-skinned, stout, bald to the bone and has a full beard. I peruse my mental checklist and judge him to be the same man as before. I take in the size of him as I struggle for the right approach.

  I see the relevant thoughts shoot through him. His head moves from side to side a fraction, as if to say ‘Yes, what? Go on then!’ but he doesn’t say that. He doesn’t say a word. Obstinate in his belief that it’s not up to him to start the conversation. I’m the one that knocked.

  If I was to break this down to a micro level, I’d say it goes like this:

  3 eye saccades. The slightest move back. His lips quiver.

  5 more that size me up.

  4 saccades as his hand comes to hold the door handle on his side to assert his position. I’d call it a shadow move.

  2 saccades signal recognition of me, and his body primes itself.

  The stillness speaks and says ‘What’s this for?’ but my silence doesn’t offer him anything. It’s a sales technique I was taught and retaught in a series of dead end jobs. State your offer. Then silence. Every second they wait puts you in a more powerful position, but this time my only offer is me. Here I am. And he falters.

  4 saccades and a tightening of the jaw, a couple of muscles that lie on top of his cheekbones twitch.

  He’s threatened. He’s under attack. He starts to ready himself.

  Before he can, I push myself at him with all my weight, both hands at his chest, and knock him off balance.

  He’s a big man and it seems to take a while for him to reach the laminate floor below. This is because at this point my brain is in a heightened state, working hard to make more memories, which, in effect, makes time appear to slow down.

  It’s doing this because when your adrenaline is as high as mine is now your brain wants to remember exactly what you did that either saved you from, or caused the pain resulting from, the impending threat you’re headed towards.

  This makes each step towards her seem to take an age.

  They say people remember moments before and after serious injury as if the episode lasted a day rather than a matter of seconds. Maybe falling to your death would take a whole lifetime.

  She sits up in her chair, her back to me in the kitchen. I can’t see her face. She starts to turn, glacially, probably slow at normal speed, but at the pace I’m currently seeing things it’s like her reactions have been dulled to almost nothing.

  I hear him shout behind me. One step more. Then another.

  I dislodge a mirror from the hallway and it falls down fast behind me.

  Before it hits, I take another step closer, I see she wears a head shawl or veil. My mental encyclopaedia reminding me of a case in South London where a woman held captive for years was made to wear such a thing to hide her face, lest she was recognised when out on the street. I try to remember whether Sarah Walker had something like a veil at a resting position around her neck when I saw her.

  The mirror hits. I think she did, I think so, but some memories are negatives of negatives. I get another step closer, then another. I reach out my hand, I’m that close, but he’s behind me.

  I want to call out, like in my dream, to the girl in the forest or at the blackboard, but there’s no need. I’m right here now, I’ve come to save her. Her face was stuck somewhere inside my head, since before the bullet and everything else, and then it finally came loose.

  I picture the girls below the floorboards, hearing the moan of her captor and the smashing of the mirror that followed.

  Her hands come up. But why? To protect herself or show contrition?

  I hear his foot crunch on the mirror pieces behind me. I see the side of her face and my fingers touch her blonde hair.

  I see him in my peripheral vision. And all my muscles ready themselves. Instinctively. For what must come next. As her head turns. And her eyes saccade. To meet mine.

  I see no recognition in them. And I know there’s none in mine. My eyes flit around desperately as he enters the room. Looking for a clue to who this woman is, of a trace of Sarah Walker, or of anything. But nothing comes.

  I see a purple bruise around her right eye. I see her offer no expression and notice a cut on her lip, the space around which bloats and distorts her face a touch, like mine. But, I know deep within that this woman is not Sarah, nor is she connected to her, and this man pushing my left shoulder and asking me ‘What’s your game?’ has no connection to any of this either.

  It should be like turning on the lights to find yourself dancing alone in an empty basement room. My head pounds like a drum, or an alarm that I should interpret as a reprimand, from within and without, but I don’t quite feel like that. Because judging from her face and what brought me here the first time around, he is not a good man.

  I grab him by the flesh between his right shoulder and neck and raise my right fist. He ducks and cowers. Holds both hands in front of him and lets out a small noise. He’s afraid to be hit.

  I’m not afraid to be hit. And if she was the first time, then she’s come to understand the blows and pain. Their shape and reality. But her punisher’s neck sweats beneath my grip, his every cell screaming mercy.

  So I drop my hand and his head drops too. I wonder if she might leave after this. Or whether she’ll wait.

  ‘Just get out,’ he mutters.

  She transmits a thought to me which is difficult to express in words. Then I send my fist plunging hard into his stomach with as much force and effort as I have ever put into anything.

  He splutters, gasps, that desperate winded sound that you only really get from the bottom of the lungs. But he’ll live.

  I turn and make for the door. The shattered mirror pieces cracking and inserting themselves into my soles, as I drag my feet through the hallway.

  35

  ‘But, oh me, dang, me oh my,

  the way she took to it, brought water to my eye.’

  The first thought I have as I leave is ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have done that.’ I decide I’ll report it when I get back to the station. I won’t tell them about the punch, I’ll say I made a point of following up a previous domestic violence query, and that my second visit made me extremely suspicious, and furthermore I’d advise that this should be followed up by uniformed officers at their earliest convenience.

  If he hasn’t already made the call, this would be when the man of the house would mention my minor infraction. I resolve that what will be, will be. Best-case scenario, I think, could be joining Bartu for a firm wrist slapping on the naughty bench. It’s possible that’s what I wanted when I decided to punch him. A way off this escalator my brain has put my body on. I don’t know.

  The second thought I have is ‘What next?’ This is less easily resolved. Deprived of a clear head, a fully functional body and a method of transport, Bartu’s loss is big. It leaves me stranded in more ways than one. I arch my back, somewhat feline, against the cold.

  I observe my skin turn bone white at the wrist as I walk, but it isn’t just the elements that leave me vulnerable. My eyes tell me that around every corner, Jarwar could be waiting. My ears seem to crackle with white noise yearning for the shipping forecast. Every window I pass holds the distinct possibility of malignant strangers. And, far worse, with every second that ticks I feel the inevitability blossom, that soon a silhouette will loom then ripen as it draws closer. Maybe it’ll be the car that ran
me down. Or the hooded figure, who’ll get another chance to plunge a knife towards my chest. Or perhaps it’ll be a bullet travelling towards my skull at a rate of knots, which, this time, will make no mistake.

  At the height of these suffocation thoughts, my feet strengthen and I discover they are walking me towards the garage on Hale Road. Some say that the body makes most of the decisions for us anyway. That we give too much credence to so-called ‘consciousness’. You don’t think about the act of moving your legs one by one when you run. You just… run. Taking this to its extreme, you’d save yourself a lot of bother if you stopped believing in the myth of choices. Sure, there’s white or brown bread. Poached, fried, hard-boiled or scrambled. But other than that, don’t stress yourself out too much about choices. They find you.

  Garrett’s Motors do the lot. If you need a certain make or model they’ll find a way to get it to you for a certain price. They lose vehicles that need to be got rid of, too, possibly for good people and bad alike. Either way, they operate a pretty strict ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. They are also the best mechanics around and mostly make their money from repeat custom, rather than stiffing people on their MOT. It’s their mixture of knowledge and ingenuity that grant them the questionable privilege of being called on by the police with decent frequency.

  I’m sure I know the old shrink-wrapped, grey haired gent that comes to greet me in blue overalls, but luckily I think he sees as many faces as I do on any given day, and he isn’t too much better than me at recognising the old ones. But we’ve probably conversed a number of times that’s well into the double figures over the years. He probably sold me my first car.

  ‘What can I do you for?’ he says.

  ‘One of our boys brought a car in that’d been burnt on the inside. Wondered whether you’d sent it to scrap or if it was still here?’

  ‘Oh… yeah… yep. Come with me, you may be in luck,’ he shouts over his shoulder, leading the way.

  It seems stupid to tell him exactly what I’m after. I could say ‘I want to see whether there was anything left of a cotton glove, in a car I accidentally blew up, because its owner kidnapped three local girls and if I can get any physical evidence off it then it would probably still be hopeless but better than nothing, and I haven’t got anything else to go on, so here we are.’ Yep. Could say all that. Don’t.