Talking to the Dead: A Novel

by Harry Bingham

  I sit down. The kitchen is the nicest room in my house. Not because I’ve done anything to make it nice, but because it’s reasonably clean and has big French doors out onto the garden. If it’s even a half-nice day outside, the kitchen feels bright and airy.

  “Help yourself. Tuck in. This is Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference smoked salmon, but I think they just charge you more and you can’t actually taste the difference. Or can you?”

  Penry seems a rather passive conversationalist, but he does come over to the table, yanks out a chair, and sits.

  “You are a fucking tit,” he says.

  “Oh, these are nicer toasted, aren’t they?” I busy myself toasting the bagels. “It is a murder investigation, you know. Janet and April Mancini. Stacey Edwards too now, as well.”

  He doesn’t react to Edwards’s name. I hadn’t expected him to, but it was worth a try.

  “I found her, actually. Climbed in through a window and there she was. Do you want to know how she died?” Penry doesn’t respond, so I tell him anyway, right down to the cable ties and duct tape. “Obviously no autopsy results yet, but she died the same way as Janet did. High as a kite. Airways blocked. Dr. Price, who did the autopsy work on the Mancinis, reckoned it could take just a minute or two. Finger and thumb. Just like that.”

  I drop a bagel on his plate and one on mine. I haven’t eaten since breakfast, so I’m genuinely hungry, and I tuck in straightaway. Penry must be hungry too, because he drops a bit of salmon onto the bagel and starts eating. He hasn’t pulled his chair closer to the table. He’s not eating with a plate, knife, or fork. And he’s not trying the cream cheese, which is a shame.

  “Did you call anyone?”

  “Yes. Everyone. I thought your mam was nice. She called me love and said ‘Bless you’ twice. I told her that she’d be getting a bunch of tulips tomorrow, so you might want to arrange that if poss.”

  Penry opens his mouth. Not to eat, but to say something. It’s not just a fucking-tit type comment either, because there’s a depth of calculation in his eyes. I silently urge him to say whatever it is that he’s contemplating, but he decides against it. He doesn’t even come up with another insult. He just slaps a chunk more salmon into a bagel and stands up. Ready to leave.

  I stand up too, to see him out. We’re standing in the space between the living room and the hall when Penry turns to me. Half of me thinks he’s going to say something useful. Half of me thinks he’s going to swear at me. But both halves are wrong. Nul points all round. With almost no warning or backlift, he hits me openhanded across the face. I’m stunned—literally and metaphorically—by the force of it. The blow knocks me across the hall, and I think I strike my head on the wall opposite. Whatever. By the time I’ve recovered my wits, I’m lying crumpled up on the floor at the foot of the stairs. Penry is towering over me.

  He’s two miles high and he’s going to kill me.

  I don’t say or do anything. I can’t. My vision is shot through with bolts of black and red. There’s blood inside my mouth. My skull feels as though it’s been detonated by professionals, then reassembled with sticky tape. I honestly didn’t know that one blow could do this. I’ve never lacked physical confidence, but I’ve also never been hit like this. It feels like a brick wall just reached out and whacked me. My skirt is thrown up above my knees, and I find my right hand tweaking it down. That is the limit of my resistance. Even my hand feels weak.

  This is what it is like. Total surrender. I never knew what that meant before. Never knew how total it could be.

  Penry towers over me for another few seconds, then turns on his heel and goes. Only when the front door closes—and not even then—do I attempt movement.

  I kick my legs out in front of me, and arrange myself so that I’m sitting on the bottom step. I review the damage. The right side of my face, where Penry struck me, is moving from numb and shocked to hurting and furious. I poke it gently with my fingertips. Everything is bruised, but neither cut nor broken. I think the blood inside my mouth comes from my cheek being slammed against my teeth. There’s also a cut on the other side of my head, where I hit the wall. My teeth feel loose, but I think that’s just shock. My neck feels painful everywhere, but I think that’s just the combined effect of shock and whiplash. There’s a taste in my mouth which I identify as vomit.

  I’m not angry with Penry. Hitting me seems like a fair enough response to my stealing his phone. He could have injured me far worse than he did. Part of my shock comes from seeing how unbelievably simple it was for him. I’m angry at my own feebleness. Why the fuck do we live in a world where women are at such a physical disadvantage to men? Why do my genes yield me five feet, two inches of height, when my sister Kay is five eight and Ant is rapidly heading the same way? Not that either of them would have stood a lot of chance with Penry. Abs, pecs, and body hair.

  I stand up.

  The experiment goes pretty well. My balance feels strange—like when you get out of a swimming pool after swimming for a long time—but everything works pretty much as it ought to. I go to the kitchen, spit some blood into the sink, and freshen my tea up with hot water.

  Do I call Lev?

  Do I call Dad?

  Do I call Jackson?

  Do I call Brydon?

  I don’t do any of those things. I pick my way upstairs, almost welcoming the headache which is beginning to crash in on me, because it’s a sign of normal function. In the bathroom mirror, the right side of my face looks puffy but otherwise amazingly ordinary given the way it feels. I can see the dazed look in my eyes, but only because I know it’s there anyway. The world still feels tilted and out of kilter.

  I run myself a hot bath and go crazy with the soothing bath salts. My neck hurts like hell.

  I can feel only three things. Numbness, pain, and fear. As the numbness starts to lessen, the other two things take its place.

  And downstairs, on my phone, I can hear the first texts coming in.

  The rest of that evening seems to go okay. After my bath—a long one—I chew up some more aspirin. I’m two over the limit, but I don’t care. The hammering in my head is now just a background thudding. Doping myself back into numbness.

  I lie down on my bed, intending to air-dry before dressing, but end up snoozing off for a couple of hours. Dreamless deep sleep. The kind I’ve been missing. I’m bone-tired, and those two hours feel like a gift.

  It’s half past seven when I eventually get up, and there’s a strange kind of summer evening normality in the air. A few lawn mowers are buzzing. Kids being ordered off their bikes in to dinner. A couple of fat blokes with white legs and unflattering shorts talking rubbish over a garden fence. A granny going home after a day with the family. If someone were making an infomercial about the delights of bourgeois living in Pentwyn, then they might well want to splice scenes like these into their piece. It’s not glitzy, but it’s real. Loving, in a low-key sort of way. Safe.

  Then I go downstairs. Down past the bottom step. Past the bit of wall where I cracked my head. Through the doorway where Penry drew his arm back to hit me. Into the living room, where he formulated his move and began to execute it.

  I feel sick. Physically sick. I actually have to rush through to the kitchen to hang over the sink, dry-retching to see if anything will come out. It doesn’t, but the feeling doesn’t go.

  Safe? The idea is ludicrous. Nothing to do with the real world. Penry walked in here, ate smoked salmon, then hit me. I let him in. Practically invited him round, but what on earth is there to stop anyone entering whenever they want? Yes. My door is locked—and as soon as I’m done dry-heaving over the kitchen sink, I check every door and window lock in the house. But the house itself seems flimsy. I’ve seen these damn things being built. Everyone has. A few low-density cement blocks. A bit of yellow fluff for insulation. A skin of bricks. That’s it. Someone could be through the wall with a few hard blows of a sledgehammer. And that’s the wall, for God’s sake. What the hell am I doing with windows? T
he window looking over my strip of lawn at the front, my stupid bit of paved parking area, is just an invitation to come on in. Hello, Mr. Burglar. You can’t get me. I’ve locked my doors. I’ve locked my windows. I’m like the three little piggies, pink, smug, chuckling to themselves at the big bad wolf outside. And then, good heavens above, the big bad wolf remembers that he might have flunked high school. He might not be able to read a book without moving his lips. But he doesn’t need to! There’s a window! One short, sharp tap, and it’s not a window anymore, it’s a please come in sign. Please come in, start spit-roasting those piggies, start slapping around that foolish little D.C. Griffiths. Do whatever the hell you want, because no one inside is going to be able to stop you. Beat her up. Fuck her. Cable-tie her hands together and put duct tape over her mouth. Experiment. Have fun. Help yourself.

  And that’s not all. It gets better. Because there’s not just one window in this house, there are loads of them. Every room has at least one. Take your pick of entry methods, because not a single room in this entire house is safe from assault.

  This is crazy thinking, I know, but it’s got me in its grip. I don’t know which room to be in. I get a sharp knife from the kitchen and a hammer that my dad gave me when I moved in. I draw every curtain tight shut and put lights on in every room. I put Lady Gaga on again, not because I want to listen to a single word of whatever she has to tell me about life but just to make a noise. I put the TV on too. There are people in this house, Mr. Wolf, and you don’t know how many, or how big, or how fierce.

  I’m shaking. I don’t think the shaking is visible on the outside, but the inside counts for more. A vibration that runs through me and that I can’t control or stop.

  Three times I almost call Lev, before holding back. What can he do anyway? He’s not a bodyguard. He can’t protect me from this.

  My head tells me that Penry is not a risk. And he’s not. I know that. Slapping me this afternoon was a tit-for-tat thing. In some awful pre-feminist way, according to some black-as-pitch medieval reckoning, I had that slap coming to me. I invited it. Literally. I’d wanted Penry to know I’d been in his house; wanted him to know that it was me who took his phone. I wanted to stir things up. See what happened if the pot was shaken. And so he hit me. I don’t blame him. He’s a thief and a self-destructive fool, but he’s not a killer. Not even close. He didn’t kick me when I was down.

  Yet what about the dark shapes that move out of sight behind Penry? Someone killed Janet Mancini. Someone dropped a sink on April Mancini. Someone taped Stacey Edwards’s mouth shut, tied her hands behind her back, then closed off her nose until she was dead. Stacey Edwards was killed, presumably, because she knew too much about the Mancini case and someone thought she was dangerously likely to talk about it. But if she was a threat, then isn’t D.C. Griffiths even more of one? You can’t take out a whole police inquiry, of course, but D.C. Griffiths has gone rogue. Only a bit, but just enough. She’s lifted a corner of carpet in a part of the room that her colleagues aren’t much interested in looking at. She hasn’t found much, but she’s still poking around. Who knows what she might find next?

  These thoughts aren’t comfortable. I take the path of least resistance. The inevitable one. The one I knew I’d end up taking.

  I call Dad. Ask him to come round and pick me up. He does a short double take, then says, “Right you are, love. I’m coming over.” I sit by the front door, holding my knife and my hammer, listening to Lady Gaga fight with the TV and trying to hear every squeak of noise from outside. My headache is terrible now. My jaw feels dislocated. Shudders run through me every twenty seconds or so. I can’t stop them. Nor am I able to turn my head, because turning my head would reveal the bottom of the stairs, and I half-expect to see myself still lying there in a crumpled heap, skirt above my knees. Unable to avert whatever is going to happen next.

  My one positive action is to call a twenty-four-hour flower delivery outfit and order up some tulips for Mrs. P. I send them, “with love from Brian.” Making peace. My voice is wooden, and when I hang up, there’s blood in my mouth again.

  My dad, bless his cotton socks, is here in under fifteen minutes. He’s not the sort to delay, my pa. Best thing about him. I hear his car despite the ongoing Gaga-TV warfare. Still clutching my knife and my hammer, I turn the TV off, then the music, then some lights. Dad knocks at the door. Because he is the way he is, a knock alone is never enough. “Fi girl, it’s your pa.” Shouted, not spoken. Everything with Dad is shouted, not spoken. Another good thing about him in the present context. I shove my hammer and knife away under a sofa cushion and go to let him in.

  Even then, my mind is untrustworthy. Scenarios play out in my head that couldn’t possibly exist. My dad being held at knifepoint. Made to shout “Fi girl” at my front door. Watched by men in black, who are holding my mother and two sisters in a four-by-four with black-tinted windows. All bollocks. Even so, it takes an effort of will to unlock the door and throw it open.

  Dad’s there. No knife. No gunmen. No four-by-four. Or at least, no four-by-four other than his own silver Range Rover.

  The normal crushing kiss. Pounding on into my house, because Dad is the ultimate mi casa es su casa man, but these things cut both ways.

  “Smoked salmon! And bagels, love. You do do things nice.” A big piece of salmon and bagel disappears into his gob. “Lawn okay, is it? Looks all right. Not growing quite so fast now. Course, a bit more sun and it’ll shoot up again.” He talks as much to himself as to me, and part of the su casa es mi casa deal is that he gets to inspect my lawn, roll my kitchen drawers in and out, and throw my fridge door wide open as though to inventory my food stocks. “Smashing,” he says at the conclusion of his inspection, which means nothing at all in his mouth, more a punctuation mark than anything.

  “Do you need your things, love? I’ll pop this up, shall I?” He swings the living room mirror up onto its hook, but not before scratching at the putty marks on the wall behind.

  It would be easy to see my dad as bossy and intrusive, but he’s not those things. There’s not that kind of edge to him. If I told him that I preferred the mirror just where it was, standing in front of the faux fireplace, slightly tilted so all you could see in it was your leg from the ankle to the knee, he’d just say, “Right you are, love,” and swing the mirror back down and try to make sure that he sat it back in the indentation it’s made in the carpet, not an inch out of its original position.

  I get my things—nightdress, toothbrush, change of clothes, a few other bits, my phone. I’m still shaking now, but the shakes have gone back inside. They’re internal, not external. In the bathroom, I put on some extra makeup. Blusher. Something on my eyes and lips. It doesn’t fool me, but it doesn’t have to.

  When I go down, Dad is in the hall, ready and waiting.

  “Your face okay, is it? It looks puffy.”

  He puts his hand to my chin. Not holding it exactly, more steadying it.

  “I went to the dentist yesterday. Had to have some injections. It felt fine at the time, but it’s all sore today.”

  He doesn’t immediately drop his hand. He squints as though he’s an antiques expert appraising some slightly unexpected find. And then he does. “Bloody dentists,” he says, and he’s off again. Turning off lights. Watching me lock up. Sweeping me over to his car. Telling me about the state of play at home. Ant and Kay both there, but Kay wanting an early night after a big party the night before. Mam’s already cooked and everyone’s already eaten, “but we’ve still got a lovely bit of beef left over from lunch, love, and I had your mam stick a potato in the oven for you. My favorite, that is. Just with a bit of butter and salt. Lovely!”

  A gift, that. To have as your favorite thing whatever it is you’re about to consume. Dad has a new favorite thing every day, often more.

  We Range Rover our way through quiet streets. His car is bigger, quieter, higher, plusher than mine. My fear is locked up in the house behind me. It can’t follow me here. It occurs to m
e that I’ve never been afraid of anything when I’m with my dad.

  We get home. Mam’s got two plates out. One for me, one for Dad. Meat and baked potatoes on both. And horseradish. And mustard. And a big blob of coleslaw. “Marvelous!” Dad’s amazed delight is genuine, even though it was inconceivable that Mam would have sorted out a plate of dinner for me and left him potatoless. We drink water.

  There’s an hour or two of family stuff. Ant likes it when the whole family is together, and enjoys just hanging around us all. There have been developments on the TV-in-bedroom front, but I can’t quite make out what they are because everyone is talking and I’ve got only two ears.

  Kay hangs around for a bit too. Badgering Dad to allow her half a glass of wine, which Mam disapproves of—“on Sunday!”—but which she gets anyway, hastily poured when Mam isn’t looking. Kay’s dressed casually, for her. Leggings. A black sequined tank top. Bare feet. A long silver necklace but no earrings. She looks gorgeous, as she always does. Long-limbed, silk-skinned, and photogenic. She likes being part of things too, though the teenager in her has to fight shy of looking too involved, so she sits sideways at the table and listens more than she talks, running her finger round the rim of her glass, making it sing.

  I love being part of things too. Families are strange affairs. Somehow Dad’s genes and Mam’s genes got sloshed together to create the overintellectual, fish-out-of-water oddity that is me, and yet we all get along together. We love each other. We belong. That’s been a rare feeling for me. The most precious one there is.

  Eventually, though, things break up. Ant to bed. Kay to her room. Mam to the living room for some TV before bed.

  “We’ll go through, shall we?”

  “Through” means to Dad’s lair. Not even in the house, but a separate studio room built on top of what used to be the pool house in the garden, a pool house that was once Dad’s most prized grand projet but that Mam persuaded him to abandon after an entire year went by with no one using it.