Jolt

by Bernard Beckett

  ‘I should be going, get back to the family,’ she explained. ‘It’s been good seeing you all though. A bit of time out, you know. Marko, come here. I am so pleased…’ She hugged me again.

  ‘I’ll ring you eh?’ I said.

  ‘That’d be good. You should come round. I’m not back at school yet.’

  She smiled, gave the others a little wave, and left.

  ‘Shit, that must be so hard,’ Rebecca said. ‘Wish there was something we could do.’

  So did I.

  So it’s been a big two days. Then there was last night, making it even bigger.

  I’ve had nightmares before, or bad dreams I thought were nightmares. I remember times when I was little, running into Mum and Dad, asking if I could sleep with them. Last night wasn’t like that. Last night wasn’t the sort of nightmare you can fix by sitting up and turning on the lights. It’s stupid but I’m even scared to write it down, as if putting it on paper means it will still be here, in the room with me. It feels stupid because of all the real things I’ve seen, things I’ve already written down. But night-mares are worse somehow. They do things to your mind when your mind can’t defend itself.

  I dreamed I woke up and I was here in my room. The walls were darker, stained wood took the place of wallpaper, and they rose up high so I couldn’t see the ceiling, but I was still here. It was still my room. Looking up I felt as if I was at the bottom of something, as if I had fallen. There was no door but I hardly noticed that, as if I didn’t expect there to be. It was this room and I was in this bed and something had woken me up.

  A sound. I sat up and listened. It was at the window, not tapping or knocking but a gentle, irregular bumping sound. I got up and the feeling of the cold floor on my feet was real enough to penetrate the dream so I woke a second time. Still, I needed to check the window, to be sure, before I went back to sleep.

  I pulled back the curtain and the blackness beyond the glass was unfamiliar, too thick to be the city by night. A bubble formed against the pane and rose up. Water. It was water. I followed the bubble and saw the Doctor there, floating. Not moving but not lifeless either, his face glowing white, his eyes looking past me, into the room, filled with longing. There was no acknowledgement, no recognition, he just hung there, and when the current moved him he came forward. His face bumped into the glass and his bloated features squashed against it, as if he was made of rubber.

  I wanted to run but there was nowhere to go. I tried to pull the curtains closed, to hide his face, but the curtains were gone. I was stuck there, staring at him. Then the look in his eyes changed, from longing to panic, and I saw the fingers on one hand curl slowly, as if it took his every effort to move them, so that he was pointing at my feet.

  I looked down to see they were already covered in water, and the water was so dark it was as if I was dissolving in it. At the place where the water touched the wall the wall was dissolving too. Soon I would be with him, floating on the outside, unable to break in.

  I screamed. I opened my mouth and filled my lungs and bellowed, aware I was still dreaming and desperate to wake myself. But there was no sound. The water kept coming until I was floating too and that was the most frightening part of all, the feeling of nothing. No weight, no strength, no movement. It was like no other dream I’ve ever had, it did not progress and it did not end. I was stuck there, suspended for a time that lasted forever. Sometimes I would bump against the Doctor, sometimes into one of the many windows that now surrounded me.

  When I woke up this morning I was exhausted. I never want another night like that. Can he be doing this to me, from where he is, trapped and dying? I know that’s not possible but I also know how easy it is to know things that are wrong. Now I can’t even leave this bed, because I don’t know where to go. I don’t know what to do next.

  I have to tell someone. I have to be rid of part of this. Maybe Lisa. She said it herself last night. She said I should call round.

  21

  APRIL 27 I’d got Lisa’s address off Jonathon the night before. Her phone number too, but I didn’t ring. I didn’t want to hear ‘now’s not a good time’. I couldn’t stay in the house any longer. I knew the street, up in Karori, not that far from us. I took my bike.

  It was a big house, dark brick and new-looking, with a smooth twisting driveway and a black iron gate pulled open. Not the sort of place where you’d expect much could go wrong. I leaned my bike against a bush and then changed my mind, wheeling it to the side of the double garage. I rang the doorbell. I waited. It was good to be out of the house but I felt nervous being there.

  ‘Yes, hello?’ It had to be her mother. Young, with big eyes. Good-looking. Sad.

  ‘Hello. Ah, I’m Marko. I’ve just come round to see Lisa, if that’s all right.’

  ‘Marko? Oh yes, of course. Marko. I was so glad, I mean we were all so glad, to hear you were safe.’

  ‘Yeah, um, sorry to hear about Matthew.’ My good luck and her bad luck stared at each other for a moment. ‘Um, is Lisa in?’

  ‘Oh, no, look you’ve just missed her. She’s gone up to the cemetery.’

  ‘Makara?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think she’d mind if I went there?’

  ‘She’ll tell you if she does.’ She saw my bike. ‘Be careful going out. They’ve had to change the road, down through the farm on the right. It’s very bumpy. There are signs of course. A lot of people are using it now.’

  I counted twenty cars in the carpark. To the left on a freshly mown hill was the earthquake section, rows of new dirt marked out by small, in-the-meantime undertakers’ plaques, all the same. A woman walked past me with flowers. She smiled at my lost expression, as if to show she understood. Some people were sitting, others stood, looking like the statues they have in older cemeteries. Others fretted, trying to find ways of stopping their flowers from blowing onto the wrong graves. I couldn’t see Lisa. I thought of looking for his name, Matthew Harding, eleven, but it didn’t seem right to walk through all that sadness like a tourist. It didn’t feel right standing there staring either. I was going to leave. I felt fear turning to panic again, tightening my skull. I tried to relax, let the attack pass, but it was lodged there. I needed to see Lisa so badly I almost screamed out her name. Then I heard her, somewhere behind me.

  ‘Marko!’

  There was a steeper bank, just before the grass gave way to gorse, overlooking the graves. She was sitting there, sheltering from the wind. I walked over, stopping myself from running, and sat down. I realised I was smiling.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

  ‘Looking for you. Your mum said this was where you were. You don’t mind do you?’

  ‘No, of course not. It’s good to see you. Mum doesn’t like coming here much, not yet. Dad neither. Liz’s gone back to Auckland. It’s good to have some company.’

  She moved closer, right up against me, and rested her head on my shoulder. It could have been the bush again. I felt my panic retreating.

  ‘Awful isn’t it?’ she said, looking out at the carefully measured plots.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Too much dirt. I mean, you know what it is, right, you know it’s a grave, so it shouldn’t matter, but it’s just too obvious like that. I can’t wait until the grass grows. I was thinking of getting some seeds. Do you think they’d be allowed?’

  ‘Probably just blow onto the next one.’

  ‘Like the flowers.’ She smiled. ‘I think I’d want to be buried down that end, where the wind blows. You get a lot of flowers down there.’

  ‘Where is he? Matthew. Where’s he buried?’

  ‘Second row, three in from this side. Sounds like a school photo doesn’t it?’

  ‘Are you all right? I mean, you know…’

  ‘Yeah, I guess. I mean, no, not really. I don’t know. I don’t even know what all right is, most of the time. I feel like shit, but only when I’m awake, you know. That’s how I want to feel though. I don’t want to fee
l okay. I don’t want it to be like nothing’s happened. Mum wants us all to see a grief counsellor but I’m not sure about that. It would be like letting a stranger in. How about you? We didn’t talk so much last night. Sorry. How are you? Are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah, I am,’ I lied. I knew it was the time to tell it, but I was afraid to start. They weren’t the sort of words you could ever take back. ‘Well sort of. There’s something I need to tell you. No one knows this. No one can know. You have to promise. You have to say you’ll never tell.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Promise, please.’

  ‘What’s it about?’ she asked.

  ‘Up in the bush. The guy who killed Ms Jenkins. It’s good news really. You’ll be pleased. But you can’t tell. You have to promise.’

  She looked me in the eye.

  ‘Yeah, I guess.’ She didn’t even sound that interested. She sounded tired. ‘I promise I won’t tell.’

  I started slowly, unsure of my footing, expecting her to interrupt. She didn’t though, and I kept going. Soon I was lost in the telling of it, while relatives came and went and the wind blew and flowers were scattered about. I told her about tripping over, about fighting free, and seeing his face. I told her about the hospital, the drugs he gave me, Margaret who I should have trusted, Andrew who fooled me, this book where it’s all written down. It came out in a rush and with the words came the feelings. Suddenly it all seemed so much clearer again. I was the victim. I was angry. I was right. I had won; for me, for Ms Jenkins’s family, for Lisa and the others. After everything that had happened, the words were surrounding me, wrapping me in their blanket. The weight was lifted. It would be all right now. I wanted to take Lisa in my arms, thank her for sitting there and listening, letting it all come out. Almost as much as I wanted her to turn towards me and tell me how amazing I was, for doing what I had done. There are so many different kinds of stupid, and that was mine.

  ‘You’re just so lucky to still be alive,’ she finally said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And it was the day before yesterday, when you left him?’ she checked. Her face was screwed up, like she was having trouble taking it in.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So he’ll still be alive.’

  ‘Not for long,’ I said, not seeing where she was headed. There was a pause. Then she said it, quiet and determined, and the whole world moved beneath me one more time.

  ‘You know what you have to do, don’t you Marko?’

  No way. I shook my head. She was there too. She saw the body. She’d been attacked, right alongside me in the night. She could have been killed just as easily. She couldn’t think it. It wasn’t possible. I wanted to get on my bike and pedal away, before I had to hear her say the words.

  ‘You’ve got to let him go.’

  ‘Why?’ I heard myself say. I was shaking and my mouth was dry. She was shaking too. It wasn’t fair, that we should have to do this. We weren’t that old.

  ‘Look out there,’ she told me. ‘Isn’t it obvious? The world doesn’t need any help dealing out its shit, Marko. It’s doing just fine without us.’

  ‘I can’t go to the police. I’d end up in jail.’

  ‘You have to let him go,’ she repeated.

  ‘But he killed her.’

  I felt her go suddenly still beside me, and heard her swallow. I turned and saw a tear on her cheek. A gust of wind spread it across her face and it was gone.

  ‘Do you know what it was like at Matthew’s funeral?’ she said, and I wasn’t sure if she was changing the topic. I wasn’t sure of anything. ‘Have you ever seen an eleven-year-old buried? They waited six days. Waited for me to be found, and I was so tired when I got there, it all felt so hurried. I was in shock for most of it and when I try to think of it now it’s just a blur. There were so many funerals. Our undertaker was doing five that day, so everything had to be done to a schedule. When we came out of the church there was another group waiting to come in, trying not to look at us. And inside it was so packed, there were so many people there. I felt as if the air was crushing me. He was only eleven and there were so many people.

  ‘You see, at an eleven-year-old’s funeral you can’t just pretend, you can’t find any sense in it. So you go up there one by one and you talk about the good times, even though the good times are all over. You say, “at least there was this, at least there is something we can cling to”. And do you know what they mostly remembered about him?’

  She looked straight at me, like she expected an answer, but I’d never even met him.

  ‘The little things, shit that happens every day, that you don’t even think about. Some time he made somebody laugh, or did something kind that he didn’t have to do. It’s not so much is it? Not much to come to at the end of it all. But it’s everything too. That’s what I ended up thinking anyway, sitting there. Somehow we can still do good things and somehow that still matters.’

  Then she stopped, like there was nothing else that needed saying. Like then I would have to understand. But it wasn’t my brother. I wasn’t there, same as she wasn’t in the hospital. It wasn’t so easy to see past the Doctor’s face. I shook my head again and again, until it felt like things were coming loose inside.

  ‘I can’t Lisa. He wanted to kill me. He killed her. I’m not letting him go.’

  ‘Then fuck you!’ she hissed at me, and before I could say anything she was standing, then storming off down to his grave, second row, three in from the right hand side. I didn’t move, just sat there and watched her sink down on the dirt and even in the wind I could hear her crying.

  She stayed there ten minutes, maybe longer. I tried to think things while she was gone, I tried to feel things, I tried to understand. But my mind wouldn’t switch on. I was blank, numb. I was useless. When she came back she didn’t sit down. She stood in front of me, legs set wide like she was getting ready to take another blow.

  ‘You’re pissing me off Marko, because I know that I’m right and I can’t find a way of saying it. I can’t make you understand. Just listen to this okay? I don’t know why he tried to kill us, or why he killed Ms Jenkins. I don’t know about him at all. I just know it’s happened. But that’s finished. It’s not about him any more. It has to stop somewhere. Can you just not think about him at all? Can you think about you instead?

  ‘See, you’re not like him. Not yet. But if you leave him there you’re a killer too, maybe even worse than him. Forever. Look around you. That’s what you will have contributed to. Another hole in the ground for a family to stand over, feeling useless. That’s not right. That can never be right. You do that and you’ve walked away from the only things that can ever matter, and I don’t think you can ever walk back. If you can’t change your mind now then he’s still winning, because it’s still not over, and it won’t be over until you’re dead too. You’ll be stuck on the outside and I don’t care how right it feels right now, one day you’ll get the way it is, the way I can see it now, and then Marko it’s going to be too late. Oh shit, Marko, you have to get this. You just have to.’

  She stopped and stared me down. Her eyes were thick with tears and understanding.

  ‘So you want him to get away with it?’ I asked.

  ‘No, it’s too late for him. I want you to get away with it.’

  My head was full of noise, old thoughts rearranging themselves, looking for a place to settle. I looked at her, her prickly short hair, her determined face, harder than anybody I knew, harder even than Rebecca, and I started to get it. Late, but maybe not too late.

  ‘So how do I do it?’

  She didn’t answer. She just threw herself at me and pinned me against the bank. She squeezed me tightly, almost as tightly and as desperately as I squeezed her.

  Doctor Found

  Doctor Chris Shaw, who has been missing for two days, was today found alive in the building site of Palmerston North’s new surgical wing. Carl Stopper, an electrician called in to check on faulty wiring, discovered the doct
or tied and bound in a locked room. Police say his attackers, who stole money and may have been trying to get access to drugs, are both Caucasian men in their late twenties or early thirties. It is possible they were living rough in the site which closed after the bankruptcy of H.J. Pickard construction. The doctor was kept in the hospital over-night for observation and is expected to make a full recovery.