The Girlfriend

by Sarah Naughton

  His face is white. A black line of blood runs from his hairline to the bridge of his nose, but he makes no move to wipe it away. His big, pale hands hang by his side.

  Then he speaks.

  It takes me a beat to make out the heavily accented words.

  “Will he be OK?”

  Slowly, my eyes never leaving his face, I get to my feet, clinging to the wall for support.

  “Abe. Will he live? Please tell me.”

  I manage to get my breath under enough control to be able to speak. “Didn’t you see what happened?”

  He tips his head back and closes his eyes. A single star is visible in the strip of night sky above us.

  “I wait for him here, at Stone’s. He never comes. I get back to the church, and all I see is blood. Only…blood.”

  His voice breaks.

  I wait. After a few moments, he lowers his head and crosses his arms over his chest as if he’s cold. “Will he be OK?”

  “No, Loran. He’s going to die.”

  He stares at me, his face a wax mask.

  “Hey! What the fuck’s going on?” The skinhead is standing at the entrance to the alley.

  “It’s all right,” I manage. “I’m fine.”

  I want to talk to Loran, to find out more about his relationship with my brother, but before I can stop him, he has spun away from me and stumbled into the darkness.

  The skinhead runs over and helps me up. He is about to race after Loran, but I manage to stop him, gabbling that I fell, that there was a misunderstanding, that it’s complicated. He doesn’t believe me but clearly decides it’s safer not to get involved in a domestic and contents himself with walking me to the bus stop.

  When the bus finally arrives, I barely have the strength to raise my foot to the step. My shoulders hurt where Loran gripped me, and I slump into the first seat I come to, letting my head loll against the shuddering window and wondering if I’m going to be sick.

  I thought he was going to kill me.

  I thought he had tried to kill Abe.

  It turns out he just loved him.

  33.

  Mira

  You lie with your back to me, and I am curled behind you, holding you. You have stopped crying, and we lie on the sofa in peaceful silence.

  I think about touching you. Perhaps making love will ease your pain. But your body is not my possession: I must wait until you want it.

  But our moment of intimacy is passing. I know you sense it too, because your body is gradually stiffening, and your breathing becomes lighter.

  “You must be hungry,” I murmur. “I will finish dinner.”

  You sit up to allow me to pass, but I can tell you are still heartsick. I sit beside you and take your hand. You look up at me, and I know you want to speak. You are ready to confide in me. I am glad. This terrible thing has brought us so much closer.

  I squeeze your rough hand and whisper to you in our language, “You are a good man, and I know you are suffering for what you did. But it’s OK. I am glad. It shows you love me.”

  A shadow passes across your face. “What?”

  “I know you pushed him.”

  “Who?”

  “Our neighbor. You pushed him down the stairwell.”

  You stare at me a moment, then snatch your hand back and shrink away from me. “What?”

  “You pushed him because you thought he wanted me.”

  You shake your head, your eyes wide with shock.

  “I saw you. It’s all right. I understand. It was the only way you knew how to express your love.”

  You jump to your feet. “What are you saying?”

  “Don’t worry. I will never tell. It will be our secret. It will bring us closer to—”

  You lunge at me, grasping me by the shoulders and shaking me. “Shut up!”

  “It’s all right. It’s all right.”

  “Can’t you understand? I could never have hurt him!”

  You are shaking me so hard, my head waggles. “Stop. You will hurt the baby!”

  “Fuck the baby!” you scream in English, loud enough for all the flats to hear. “The baby is a lie. It was not made with love! We are nothing to each other, Mira! Don’t you see? I married you because it would make it easier to get to the West, where people like me can live without fear. The baby will be nothing too. Hollow. An empty shell.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “I cannot do this anymore. I cannot do it to you or to me.”

  “Stop. Where are you going?”

  “Goodbye. I am sorry.”

  “No! No! Come back!”

  You are making for the door, but I fly after you, screaming. “You cannot leave me! I will not let you!”

  You have taken my looks and my spirit, and now you will abandon me. My child will be a bastard.

  I fling myself onto your back, my arms around your throat. If you want to leave, you will have to kill me first.

  34.

  Mags

  After I’ve watched the footage, I save it onto the iCloud and eject the disk.

  Then I just stare at the black screen. I can’t make sense of anything anymore.

  Abe was happy; he didn’t want to kill himself.

  Loran loved him; he couldn’t have hurt him.

  And yet Jody is lying.

  And Mira is lying.

  Why?

  Why?

  Once more, I stalk out of the flat and cross the landing to Jody’s.

  “Answer the door!” I hammer it with my fist. “You need to tell me what happened, Jody. Because I know you know a whole lot more about this than you’re letting on.”

  The flat is silent. The insolent spyhole stares out at me. I kick the door, making a sound like a gunshot, and I think I hear a whimper on the other side.

  “I know you’re there,” I hiss into the gap between the door and the frame. “You really don’t want to go up against me in court, Jody. You don’t stand a fucking chance.”

  After a few more growled threats, I head back to the flat and pour myself a drink, staring moodily down at the playground as I knock it back with grim determination, swiftly followed by two more.

  I’m dozing on the sofa when the buzzer sounds. It’s Jody’s social worker, Tabitha. I ignore it, but she won’t go away, and eventually, I buzz her in. Maybe she’s trying to get through to Jody too. Maybe with her social worker for backup, Jody will open up and speak to me.

  For a woman of her size, she’s very fit because within a minute, there’s a sharp rap on my door.

  “Can I come in?” she asks curtly when I open it. Her lips are tight, and her black eyes flash.

  I move to let her pass, and she marches up the hall, swinging her bag, and then turns on me.

  “You need to stop harassing my client.”

  “What?” I splutter.

  “Jody. You need to leave her alone. You’re making her ill.”

  “You are kidding me, right? The only person doing any harassing around here was her. I just want her to tell the truth about how Abe fell. To go to the police.”

  I walk past her to the kitchen and grab a beer from the fridge, smacking it open on the countertop, taking a chunk of particleboard with me.

  “The truth?” Tabitha laughs grimly. “When no one believes you, then it stops being truth and becomes slander. Last time, when she was raped—”

  “She wasn’t raped!” I cry, slamming the bottle down so that the froth surges up and over the counter. “That was made up, the same as everything else!”

  “When she was raped,” Tabitha goes on, “they threatened her with jail. And with all the things that would happen to her there. This is a girl who has been abused as far back as she can remember. What would you do under those circumstances, Miss Mackenzie? Would you agree that y
ou had lied or just been confused and go back to trying to live a quiet life where no one bothers you? Or would you put yourself through the horrors of a trial and all that that would rake up? Would you face those boys, with their upstanding families and admiring teachers, across the courtroom and hear yourself branded a liar and a fantasist and worse? The truth costs, Miss Mackenzie. And that cost is too much for people like Jody.”

  Her chest heaves.

  I am about to say that I don’t give a shit what happened before, this is about my brother, but she has turned away and is rifling through her bag. Hopefully, she’s getting her phone to call a cab. There’s no chance of her helping me winkle Jody out of her hiding place now.

  She straightens up and slams a blue document file folder on the table.

  “What’s that?”

  “Proof. People like you need that sort of thing, right? Have a look, and then please tell me how you can live with yourself, bullying that poor girl.”

  “She’s a woman,” I say. “Not a girl. She’s responsible for her actions.”

  But Tabitha isn’t listening. Swinging her bag over her shoulder, she turns and stalks out of the flat, and a moment later, I see her squat black shape hurrying across the waste ground.

  I stare at the file, swigging my beer, then I flip it open.

  Ten minutes later, I’m vomiting in the toilet. The mixture of beer and wine, alongside the medical reports and photographs contained in Tabitha’s file, were too much for my now daily hangover.

  Eventually, when the last of the bitter yellow bile is flushed away, I straighten up and wash my face, then I go back to the living room and tuck the papers back into the file.

  Jody’s haunted, seven-year-old eyes gaze at me from the last page.

  It was harrowing and pitiful reading, but it’s not the proof Tabitha claimed it to be. I can believe Jody experienced all that, and I’m sorry for it. But that doesn’t mean she’s not capable of crying rape. In fact, I’d say the opposite is true. That kind of trauma could fracture a personality completely. She might have believed she was raped, like she believed Abe loved her. I’d been coming around to agree with Derbyshire that Jody wasn’t physically capable of pushing Abe, but now I’m not so sure. Can psychosis give you unnatural strength?

  Flashes of the demon child from The Exorcist pass through my mind, and another wave of nausea washes over me.

  All I want is another drink but instead, I put two slices of freezer bread in the toaster and sit down at the table to plough through them, dry. I haven’t bothered to put the light on, and I’m glad I didn’t when I see that the gang’s back in the playground, their shadows darkening the bench, the roundabout. One is on a swing, the tip of his cigarette drawing a red line through the darkness. I suppose it would only have been four or five years ago since he was asking his mum for a push. What happened to him? To all of them?

  I think of another darkened window. Above the front door of our semidetached house in Scotland. I’m standing in the hall. My brother is close beside me. My mother’s head is silhouetted against the window. I’m looking up at her from a long way down, so I must be very young. I’m wearing my favorite orange coat with the blue stitching, and I am too hot. I wish my mother would let us go outside but she won’t. We are waiting. Waiting for my father who is sitting in front of the TV in the living room. Cold white TV ghosts loom and shrink across the threshold.

  It wasn’t dark when we put our coats on to go for a walk in the park, but my brother and I had been rolling a penny along the floorboards and had taken too long getting our shoes on, so my father decreed that if he had to wait for us, then we would wait for him.

  I don’t own a watch or know how to read a clock, but it feels as if we have been waiting hours. My brother is crying—silently, because otherwise my father will punish him, but I can hear his thick, wet breathing.

  I’m not crying. My five-year-old mind seethes with loathing.

  When the theme tune of his program comes on and he’s finally ready for what must now be a short stroll around the block, I refuse to move and am carried upstairs, thrashing and scratching, and hurled onto my bed hard enough for the center slats to splinter. My brother is taken out by my father to collect a fish-and-chip supper for the three of them. I’m given nothing to eat that night, and in an act of defiance, I refuse to eat for the whole of the next day. By evening, my mother is in tears, but my father asserts that I will eat when I’m hungry, and of course he is right. As I tuck gratefully into my mother’s macaroni and cheese, I despise him more than ever.

  This was some years before the Great Conversion, while my father was just your average domestic tyrant, rather than one with God’s stamp of approval. The Conversion (or breakdown as it was referred to in a doctor’s letter I steamed open) happened halfway up a mountain on a volunteer’s training exercise for the mountain rescue.

  He came down from that exercise convinced that Jesus had spoken to him from the sky.

  It’s not fashionable to be a Christian fundamentalist anymore. There’s something a bit quaint about arguing over the consistency, fleshly or otherwise, of the communion wafer when compared with the beheadings and immolations indulged in by other brands of religious lunacy. It’s almost comforting. But growing up tiptoeing around the hair trigger of my father’s rage was exhausting and terrifying.

  He had always been a bully, and after the Conversion, he had God to back him up. Our home was run like a prison camp. If we showed any form of dissent, we were locked in our rooms and starved until we begged forgiveness for dishonoring the Lord. Sometimes I think my father mixed up who was God and who was the self-employed roofer, but deluded as he was, he was clever enough to understand the concept of divide and conquer when it came to his children. When one of us was in disgrace, the other was treated like a prince or princess, so we learned to view one another as the enemy.

  Looking back, I was far worse than Abe. In fact, I was a monster. Like my father.

  There’s my proof, Tabitha. There’s my excuse.

  A scream shatters the silence.

  I jump up from the table and run to the door, bursting out onto the landing.

  “Jody!”

  But the screaming isn’t coming from Jody’s flat. Mira’s door is open. I run inside. The door at the end of the corridor is open, and I see on the floor, lit by that single harsh lightbulb, a wide smear of blood, as if a body has been dragged across the room.

  Has Loran lost his mind and killed his wife?

  A woman sobs.

  Mira.

  Was it her all along? Were the notes to deflect attention from her own guilt rather than Jody’s? Did she kill Abe because he was having an affair with her husband? And has she just killed her husband?

  The sob becomes a moan of pain.

  My thoughts fracture. I am losing their thread. Has Loran attacked her and then fled?

  I burst through the inner door. Mira is bending over the back of the sofa. For the first time, I am seeing her in normal clothes, without the abaya: a pair of cheap supermarket jeans and a flowery shirt I have seen for sale in the market in the main street. At first, I think the jeans are black, but then I notice that the cuffs are pale blue.

  They’re not black—they’re drenched in blood.

  She looks up at me, her face the color of marble.

  “The baby,” she says. “Help me.”

  _____________________

  The clubhouse smells of stale beer, and the floor is sticky with spillages. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust to the gloom because the two boys didn’t want to open the curtains and risk being seen. They had left the fire exit open the previous day for the express purpose of coming here to get drunk for free, and nobody had noticed.

  Felix’s friend is already behind the bar.

  “What’s your poison, Jody?”

  “Coke, please.”

&nb
sp; He gives a bark of laughter. “Vodka and Coke it is.”

  The boys play pool and drink steadily, pints of lager with Jack Daniel’s chasers. Every time the big one knocks one of these back, he gives a violent shudder accompanied by a loud grunt. He’s like an animal, she thinks, and as the afternoon wears away, he starts to smell.

  Felix does too. Sweat beads his forehead and upper lip despite the fact that the clubhouse is getting cooler as the sun goes down.

  The next round of drinks takes two of them to prepare, and for a moment, they stand with their backs to her, whispering.

  Felix brings hers over, another vodka and Coke, and something makes her glance into the glass. There’s just the slightly flat brown liquid and a slice of lemon from a glass jar behind the bar. She does what she did to the previous four drinks and pours sips of it into the pot of the ailing yucca plant when their attention has turned back to the pool table.

  “Let’s have a look at those scars, then,” the friend says when they’ve finished their game.

  She stares at him. “I…”

  “Come on, I’ll show you mine.”

  His hands go to his belt, and before she can say anything, he has dropped his trousers. He’s wearing tight white underpants that cling to the outline of his large penis, flopped over to one side. He hesitates a moment, his eyes on her face, then the corner of his mouth twists into a smile.

  “Nah, not there, darling,” he says. “My knee. Tore my cruciate ligament.”

  There’s a long scar running down from his lower left thigh, across the kneecap and down to his shin.

  “Oh,” she says vaguely. “That looks painful.”

  “Felix has got one too.”

  “I know.”

  “Oooooooooooooh!” he jeers, falsetto, and Felix pretends to smile.

  As the next game progresses, she catches them glancing up at her frequently, then the friend says, “How are you feeling?” His voice is thick with drink.

  “Fine, thanks.”

  “Fuck’s sake,” he slurs. “You some kind of bionic girl or what?”