Artifact

by Bowes, K T

  At the use of the words ‘get off’ Jayden flinched at the unintended connotation that flooded unbidden into her mind and shuddered visibly. She climbed down off her stool, avoiding Lorna’s gaze from her perch at the bar and was surprised when Barney leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. “Lovely to see you, Jayden.”

  He looked so fondly at her that she knew she had missed something major. She was completely out of her depth, as though in her counselling room she could cope with anything but out in the real world, surprises had the power to throw her hideously off course. Jayden smiled back up into his sincere face and hoped that she was giving off all the right signals. It wasn’t difficult. Barney was a genuinely lovely guy and hung with the twenty-somethings who lurked at the back of the church on a Sunday morning, listening to the ramblings of the Reverend McLean. Only now, it wouldn’t be his ramblings they sat and texted or worried through, but Eds...

  With an appeal for help at Raff’s happy face, Jayden bid Barney goodbye and headed for the ornate double doors, which still bore the betrayed monogram of O’Shea’s Bar, frosted onto the glass. Reluctantly, Raff followed her outside into the bitter cold January air. They had just begun walking when he stopped dead, a horrified look on his face. “Damn, I left my phone on the table. I won’t be a sec.”

  With that, he was gone, leaving Jayden stood alone in the darkened High Street. A few cars swooped by, hurrying to their destinations, headlights glinting and sparkling off the wet pavement. Jayden supported her cast in her right hand after pulling her coat tightly around her torso. It was too hard to pop the buttons through the holes in the dark one-handed, so she didn’t even bother.

  Raff was more than just a second and Jayden began to wonder if she should go back in and wait for him inside the doorway. Shifting herself back towards the wall, she didn’t see the dark shape on the ground behind her and almost fell, righting herself just in time as she saw the grey pavement coming up to meet her. The shape grunted as Jayden leapt away, untangling its dark mass to reveal two chunky legs and a stumpy body.

  The curate rose up from the ground, using the walls to climb up. He seemed confused and befuddled and Jayden felt momentarily sorry for him. He had been sick on the street and some of it ran down his black shirt in a creamy rivulet which stank of second-hand alcohol. He focussed his eyes, seeing the dark hair and pale face staring at him and reacted before Jayden could move away. His clumsy hand shot out without warning and he gripped the lapels of Jayden’s warm winter coat, hauling her towards him. She could feel the heat of his breath and scent the vomit as his vaporous fumes licked her face. She made the mistake of thinking initially that he wanted her to help him up, until he pushed his visage into hers and threatened her with a voice that hissed through his teeth like a snake. “So, she’s no better than the rest of us, is she?”

  Jayden’s brain worked overtime, trying to figure out who they were meant to be talking about, realising suddenly with a jolt that he was pointing his other wavering hand at her. “Little Miss Fantastic,” he continued with a sneer. “He thought you were marvellous.” Brian staggered momentarily, still gripping Jayden’s coat and almost pulling her down with him. He made his voice sound high and screechy, alarming in the quiet street as he did an impression of the Reverend McLean. “She’s so amazing that girl. She can talk to all the weirdoes and misfits in our congregation. Just send them all to her and she’ll train them out of it...”

  Saliva cascaded down his chin and spotted on the pavement as he lolled slightly on his unsteady feet but still didn’t release her. In desperation, Jayden let go of her cast, using her right hand to try and pry his fingers off her coat but he was locked on, as much to keep himself upright as to detain the frightened female. He leaned towards her precariously and Jayden thought that she might vomit herself. She fought to stop Brian’s florid face morphing into Wes’, working overtime to stay in the present moment and prevent herself being dragged backwards, to another time, another place, a whole other life.

  “Everyone loves you and all the time; you’re as much of a fake as I am,” Brian slavered. “Geez, I wish that mean old bastard was here to see it. Mind you, I could just tell the other one couldn’t I? Tell the bishop everything I know about the saintly counsellor. Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t. But you’ll be out on your ear, lady. I’m gonna make sure...”

  Brian lurched again, dragging Jayden to the left and causing her cast to jab into her side wickedly. The subsequent pain in her elbow joint produced the necessary impetus to galvanise her into changing her circumstances. With a well-remembered self-defence move, she turned her right-hand palm facing inwards, making the outer edge of it like a blade and chopped downwards against the cleric’s wrist joint. It wasn’t hard enough, nor was it completely in the right place and sent a jarring pain up her hand and into her shoulder, but it was enough to make him let go.

  It wasn’t completely necessary to do anything else as the man wobbled and his torso sank lower, folding over his legs like an envelope flap, but Jayden’s previous inactivity and sudden late start had put the self-defence process into motion. Using her right elbow, she turned slightly and jabbed it into the priest’s flaccid face, hearing the crack of bone on bone as it connected. He went down like a sack of potatoes falling over on itself, hitting the floor with a jolt. His head lay dangerously near Jayden’s foot and she lifted it, fully intending to stomp down on the skull beneath. He had ceased to be the idiotic, ungodly, lazy waste of space which the congregation barely tolerated, talking about him behind their hands. He had morphed into Wes fully, the gimlet eyes ravishing Lily’s innocent body even while his scarred hands ripped her skirt and tore her underwear away from her, without an ounce of regard for the teenager’s future. She felt the searing, humiliating sensations as keenly as if it had happened only yesterday and could taste powerlessness on her tongue. Jayden saw the cleric’s bald pate, its paleness reflecting the street lights and imagined the release that crushing it into the concrete would give her. It would be over. Finally. Her foot closed on the pale shape of Brian’s head.

  “Jayden! No! What the hell are you doing?” Raff’s voice penetrated her focussed brain with difficulty, sounding blurred and distorted through the hazy mist of her rage. He seized her shoulders in his hands as Murder flitted overhead. Jayden placed her foot carefully on the concrete, noting the satisfying click that her boot heel made on the flagstone.

  “He grabbed me,” she said, bile dripping off the end of her sentence as she pushed Raff’s restraining hand away from her bad arm. It ached. Her whole body ached each muscle, nerve and sinew reacting to the surge of adrenaline in her blood.

  “He what?” Raff’s voice went up at the end into a shriek that made Jayden’s ears feel sensitive and he stepped back towards the man prone on the ground. He was alive still, grunting and moving around on the concrete on his face. One of the bouncers appeared from the front doorway, seeing Raff holding onto Jayden’s wrist and the man on the ground.

  “Not you again!” he said with disgust, hauling the curate up by his arm. Another round face had appeared on the steps, looking disembodied in its black suit in the darkness. The first bouncer looked back towards him and commanded, “Get this dickhead a taxi will you. Not Collin’s or Yellow Cabs, they won’t take him anymore. Try that other one. And hurry up. I’m not bringing him back inside. Otherwise, we won’t get him out again. Someone needs to do something about this guy!”

  Raff put pressure on Jayden’s left arm above the cast, causing her to wince and move away from the scene. Then he gripped it hard and practically frog-marched her up the High Street. “Jayden...” he began but she reacted, pushing his hand off her arm and turning to face him.

  “You left me!” she shouted at him, the rage still bubbling under the surface, desperately seeking any crack or fissure from which to escape. “How could you?” Her eyes were dry, not a single tear visible as she stared coldly at him.

  “I was...I just...I was only a second...” he held out his ha
nds, palm upwards in supplication and it was then that Jayden saw the guilt in his eyes.

  “You weren’t getting your phone were you?” Betrayal lit up her face like a mask, appearing gold and yellowed in the headlights of the passing cars. Raff looked away.

  “Let’s go home,” he said.

  But Jayden backed away from him, feeling the edge of the kerb beneath the balls of her feet, her heels already out over the gutter. It felt precarious and dangerous as though she was drunk. Only she wasn’t. What am I?

  A strange and unfamiliar power coursed through her veins as she faced down the disloyal friend. It all fell into place with horrible clarity. “What were you doing?” Her teeth were gritted so tightly together that she could barely open them to speak. Raff bit his lip and struggled to answer her.

  “I was getting someone’s phone number,” he replied shamefaced. Then he took a step towards her. Big mistake.

  “You left me outside in the dark, alone, to be grabbed by a drunk so that you could get someone’s number?”

  Raff blanched at the cold, hard facts. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “It only seemed like a few seconds.”

  Jayden levered herself up onto the balls of her feet and set off marching towards him at a cracking pace. The neat right hook that Raff had spent hours teaching her in the gym landed precisely where it was supposed to, knocking him off balance with the unexpectedness of it. Jayden felt her mother’s eternity ring sink into the skin on the bridge of his nose as his mouth opened wide with shock. He staggered backwards like a boxer but didn’t fall, putting both hands up to his bleeding nose as his eyes began to water furiously. “Geez!” he exclaimed, leaning forwards to let the blood flow onto the ground and not onto his expensive imported suit jacket.

  When he looked up again, Jayden had gone, blending into the dark street as little more than shadows and blurred snapshots. Raff attempted to catch up to her, but the blood flowed more willingly with each heavy step and drove him back to his bent position over the pavement. By the time he had made his way up to the front door of her flat she was long gone, hopefully inside. Light from the second-floor window evidenced her safe arrival and Raff didn’t have the courage to knock, knowing that she would ignore him anyway.

  With incredibly sad footsteps he made his way home, breathing through his mouth all the way up Steep Hill, a journey encumbered by having to keep his hand underneath his nose. When he finally knocked on the front door of his own home, grateful for the capable presence of his brother framed in the light from the hallway, his jacket was spattered and ruined and his face a mess. Ed was in his pyjama bottoms and for once, Raff allowed him to be his big brother, taking care of his wounds and listening to him, long into the night.

  Chapter 23

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” Ed’s voice was calm and rational, catching Jayden as she turned to hang her coat in the closet. The view from her window was of the wall of the building next door and Jayden stared woodenly at it for a prolonged moment, before turning and holding her hand out towards the leather chairs in the seating area.

  “I would quite like to talk to you,” she said slowly, sounding guarded and closed. Ed paused, waiting politely. “I quit,” Jayden said with a tight little smile. “I realise that somehow the curate found out about my past and threatened to tell everyone. I don’t really need people’s sympathy and questions so I quit. I can leave today.”

  Ed looked at her oddly. “Can you just run that by me again?” he asked, sounding a little pleading.

  Jayden huffed slightly, as though speaking to someone of low intelligence and to whom she was trying to explain how to feed toilet roll onto a holder. “Has Brian been to see you?”

  Ed winced at the frost in her voice. “Yes.”

  “Good then,” she replied, standing up and going back over to the closet where she struggled to disentangle her coat from the hanger. “Then there’s no more to be said.”

  “Well there is actually,” Ed replied, standing up and moving towards her. His height was intimidating as he stared down at her. “Because he gave me this weird story about you being gay and then he quit.”

  Jayden’s mouth shot open in surprise, her eyes round and startled. “Gay? Me?”

  It was like being locked in a surreal episode of a soap opera. Realising that her arm was aching, Jayden gave up the battle with her coat and just stood there.

  “He also said you assaulted him, which my brother corroborated last night, although in his version the curate grabbed you first. After which, you assaulted my brother. So, if you wouldn’t mind just running the whole story by me from the beginning, I would be really grateful.”

  Jayden gaped like a fish. An ugly flapping fish; but didn’t move. Her brain ticked through the previous evening, trying to work out if she had been on the same night out as Raff and the cleric, or if she had actually been in some alternate universe unbeknown to her waking self.

  “Sit!” Ed ordered her authoritatively, snapping her out of her reverie. She walked shakily over to the chair adjacent to his and plonked herself into the leather. Ed watched her carefully. Leaning in, he took her right fingers gently in his large hand and rubbed the cold out of them, looking up into her eyes fondly. “Talk to me Jayd,” he said softly. “What on earth is going on?”

  “I’m not gay!” she blurted out, as though the whole idea was ludicrous. “That’s not what he was going to tell you at all. He was going to tell you my real name and what happened to me. I don’t know how he found out...maybe Nick came here and told him...he’s going to tell the bishop. I don’t want everyone to know. I need to just leave!”

  Ed pulled his chair round to face Jayden’s without letting go of her twisting fingers. Their knees were almost touching as he leaned in towards her. She could feel his warm breath on her nose and mouth, the scent of toothpaste seeming so fresh after the curate’s vomit-breath. Ed had cut himself shaving, a tell-tale speck of blood dotting his jawbone and Jayden had the overwhelming urge to launch herself into his chest, melt away inside his body and stay there forever, completely safe. She reached her hand up and touched his shirt front, resting her palm against his muscular chest, closing her eyes and grounding herself against his steady heartbeat. He moved his hand over hers and stroked her fingers again, a rhythmic, sensual touch that was hypnotic and helped her to believe that everything would be all right. “He got the wrong end of the stick. He assumed that because you were in a gay bar that you were gay.”

  “Gay bar.” The pennies dropped into the slot of the arcade game with amazing clarity, the girl at the bar, Barney’s surprise at meeting her there, Raff’s ease in the place and Lorna’s comment about Brian being there. She had said that he ‘shouldn’t’ be there. The curate was gay.

  “He killed Reverend McLean,” Jayden said with surety. “He left the pub and went back to church. When he returned he had blood on him.”

  Ed nodded. “I know. The police are with him now. It seems that Reverend McLean was somewhat homophobic and they had a very unpleasant conversation in which McLean told him that he would be finished as a curate. Brian went away, got drunk and came back to talk to him. It all got out of hand. He’s told me everything.”

  “But he was going to tell the bishop about me. He won’t approve of someone counselling when they clearly haven’t dealt with their own issues, so it doesn’t matter what you think, because you’re leaving anyway.”

  “We can deal with that,” Ed said patiently. “But I need to talk to you about something else. Ironically, your brother Nick has been here.”

  Jayden’s body reacted as though it had been attached to a live electric wire, jerking suddenly in her seat. Ed put his other hand reassuringly on her knee and refused to let her claim her right hand back from his chest. “It’s ok,” he soothed, “he came in a few days ago, just to sit for a while and we got talking. It took me a while to realise that it was you whom he was speaking about, but I figured it out quite by chance when he said that he had left a bunch of l
ilies at his sister’s door.” Ed kept the stroking motion going on Jayden’s stiff fingers. “He would like to see you, before he goes away. He came in again yesterday and we agreed that I would approach you about it. But your decision is final, Jayd. Whatever you want, I promise I will do. If you want to see him, I can be there with you, or get your supervisor, whatever you want. And if you don’t want to see him, that’s fine, I will tell him so.”

  Jayden took a huge gulp of air and accidentally swallowed it, feeling her gullet constrict in pain and the gurgling begin at the top of her stomach. She felt sick. “Did he tell you...everything?” she asked, getting eye contact with the dark man in front of her. Shame and Disgust had not had access to Jayden’s heart for a good few years but they floated near her face now, seeking to colour her pretty complexion and find a crack back into her psyche.

  “He did,” Ed admitted quietly, his blue eyes like pools of pain, “and it doesn’t change the way I feel about you at all. I’m sorry it happened, but I’m not able to stop myself loving you, even if I wanted to, which I don’t.”

  “Oh.” His reply had been unexpected and Jayden had only been ready for rejection and humiliation. With a screech of despair, Shame and Disgust clung to each other near the ceiling. “He’s been following me,” she said, her voice flat and toneless.

  “He’s been waiting for you to talk to him,” Ed said, sounding confused. “He pushed a letter through your letterbox a while ago asking to meet you. He said he would wait by the Stone Bow each night around five o’clock in case you decided to see him. The flowers were for your birthday.”

  Jayden smiled wanly. “Lily’s birthday.” She no longer celebrated it. “I didn’t get any letter.”

  “Ok, it’s irrelevant now. The thing is, Nick leaves in two days and is unlikely to come back to England. If you want to see him, I’m happy to facilitate it, but unfortunately, there isn’t much time.”