by Neil Cross
He remembered the stories his father had told him – that hawthorn marked an entrance to the underworld. It was associated with the fairy-folk; not the glittering Tinkerbells of their century, but the dead, the demons, the demoted angels and lost gods of another. So it seemed fitting to lay these things here.
Kenny balled up the socks and stuffed them into Jonathan’s Rockport shoes. He placed the shoes neatly on top of the shirt. Next to the shoes, he lay out Jonathan’s wallet and mobile phone.
He walked along a few steps, then squatted to scoop up a handful of earth and dead leaves. He scattered it like ashes across the shirt, shoes, wallet and phone.
Then he reviewed this arrangement. These prosaic items, their presence amplified by strange context.
He thought of Oisin, kidnapped and trapped in the land of fairies. Then returning unharmed to learn that three centuries had passed. Crouching to touch the English soil. Becoming old in the blink of an eye.
Placed in the lee of the hedge, Jonathan’s belongings might easily have been missed by casual trampers for many weeks. Kenny was satisfied.
He removed the yellow gloves and stuck them in his rucksack, zipped it up and headed back the way he’d come.
He walked for a mile.
Then, in weak sunlight – a few yards from a pathway that would lead him back into suburban Bath – he called the local police. This was the single number he’d programmed into the new phone’s memory.
He gave them a false name and contact details. He said, ‘I was taking the dog to do his business. He went sniffing in the bushes. He sniffed out something a bit odd. I thought you’d want to know about it.’
He described the shoes, the shirt, the phone. ‘I peeked in the wallet, saw the name Jonathan Reese on a credit card, thought it rang a bell.’
He agreed to wait where he was, so he could point out the exact location of these objects to the police officers who even now were rushing in his direction.
Instead, he turned off the mobile and deleted the single speed-dial number from the SIM card. Then he removed the SIM card from the phone and, on the way back to the Combi, dropped it down a drain.
He polished the carcass of the phone on the hem of his T-shirt, inside and out, smearing beyond use any fingerprints he might have left. He dropped the phone in a bin at an unattended bus-stop.
Just before he reached the Combi a single police car passed him. He felt neither fear nor shame.
Back home, Kenny let himself in, running the kitchen tap until the water ran deep-underground cold. He slaked his summer thirst until his belly stretched, ripe as a berry, beneath his T-shirt.
Then he looked in on Jonathan, lifting the pillowcase from his head and peeling back the gag.
Jonathan’s eyes were purple; his skin was damp and cheesy. He didn’t seem to know that Kenny was in the room.
Kenny replaced the pillowcase over Jonathan’s head. He locked the last bedroom door.
Later, when it was dark, he returned with the portable radio, to let Jonathan hear the news.
Bath police say they are ‘very concerned’ for the safety of missing Bath man Jonathan Reese, the search for whom took an apparently tragic turn today when items believed to be linked to him were found near the Kennet and Avon Canal. Sources close to the police say this might indicate a possible suicide . . .
Kenny waited until full awareness settled behind Jonathan’s eyes, then turned off the radio.
Into the silence, he said: ‘Nobody’s looking for you. They’re looking for your body in the Feeder canal and the River Avon. Your girlfriend and your parents are sitting down, right now, arranging a memorial service. Nobody knows you’re here. You’re all alone.’
He sat with his back to the wall. ‘Just tell me what I need to know. Tell me what happened to Callie Barton. Just say it and go home.’
‘There’s nothing to tell.’
‘I’m dying, Jonathan. I haven’t got long left. If it happens, if I go first, you’re going to die in that chair. You’ll die of dehydration. That’s quicker than starving. But first, it’ll drive you mad.’
There was silence in the darkness, just breathing. Kenny was glad he couldn’t really see him, tied to a chair, weary and famished and hurt.
In the defeated silence, Jonathan said: ‘Did you want to fuck her? Is that what this is about?’
‘No.’
‘Because I fucked her. I fucked her all the time. She couldn’t say no. Not to me. I made her come like a train. I made her beg for it.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Why? You don’t want to hear this? I thought you wanted to know all about her. All her secrets.’
‘Not that.’
‘It wasn’t anything special about me. She loved sex. She couldn’t get enough.’
‘Shut up.’
‘She’d fuck anything. Black, white, tall, short, fat, thin. She’d fuck strangers on trains. In pub toilets.’
‘Shut up!’
‘She’d fuck taxi drivers for the fare home. So are you the only man she ever met who didn’t get to fuck her?’
Kenny punched him in the face.
Jonathan’s nose bled in rivulets. Through it shone Jonathan’s teeth. He was grinning, saying: ‘That’s it! That’s it!’
Kenny punched him again. Jonathan was still grinning. His eyes were jammed tight and he was sobbing, too. He was saying: ‘Go on! Go on!’
Nursing his sore hand, Kenny stepped back. He placed the sole of his foot on Jonathan’s sternum and kicked over the kitchen chair.
Jonathan’s head struck the uncarpeted floor. It made a very loud, hollow noise.
Jonathan wasn’t smiling now.
Kenny wanted to stamp down on his defiant face, to shatter Jonathan’s leering jaw with the heel of his shoe.
But he knew it was what Jonathan wanted, too. He was scared of dying alone in this room, of going mad with thirst. He wanted Kenny to kill him.
Kenny took a breath, counted down from ten, counted down from ten again. Then he squatted and, keeping his back straight, hauled the kitchen chair upright.
The exertion tore open the wound to his side, the injury that didn’t seem to heal.
Kenny looked at Jonathan and said, ‘I’m going to have to start cutting off your fingers.’
36
Pat didn’t read the newspapers because she found the stories just kept repeating: young men committed futile, degenerate crimes; their victims were other young men, children, the old. It just went wheeling on, careening down the hill, nobody able to catch it and stop it.
She didn’t understand how this could be news to anyone.
She did watch the early evening news on TV, but mostly for the weather.
Tonight she was doing a Sudoku and only half-watching a police media briefing – flashing cameras, local journalists in dodgy suits.
The police chief sat there, facing the cameras. Behind him were posted enlarged snapshots of a moderately handsome young man whose age (late thirties, early forties) marked him out either as the killer of a close family member or the victim of some terrible, random crime.
The TV murmured on. Pat’s eyes were on the screen but her attention was elsewhere – until someone said the name Jonathan Reese and her mind snapped into place.
She brushed off a cat, leaned forward and turned up the volume.
The police chief was reminding the assembled news crews that, some days ago, a man called Jonathan Reese had disappeared. He’d walked out of his house one night and never come home. And now they’d found his shirt and wallet and shoes by the canal.
Pat knew that such irrational neatness was often taken to be a good indicator of a suicide’s disordered frame of mind.
But Pat also knew who Jonathan Reese was. How could she forget?
Cutting away from the briefing, addressing the cameras from the streets of Bath, a perky television reporter disclosed that Mr Reese was rumoured to have been under considerable stress at the time of his disappearance. Apparently
, the economic downturn had impacted his business, whatever that meant. So had the atrocious summer weather.
Back in the studio, the newsreader sat before a jagged graphic representing the fall in local house prices.
But Pat didn’t hang around to see how much less her caravan was likely to be worth than this time last year. She was already looking for her car keys.
The door to Mary’s house was opened by a hairy man in cut-off jeans and a Battlestar Galactica T-shirt.
Pat said, ‘You must be Stever.’
‘That’s me,’ said Stever and grinned through his beard, showing good white teeth.
Pat glowered at him. She couldn’t help it.
Stever said, ‘Come on in’ and she followed him through to the living room, still bright in the evening sun despite the gathering cloud and the occasional shiver of rain.
Stever withdrew to what he called his Man’s Room, pausing only to explain at tormenting length that he didn’t mean the bathroom, he wasn’t going for a wee or anything. Apparently the Man’s Room was the little box room where he kept his DVD box-sets, his gaming computer, his DVDs and his comics.
He left, presumably too nervous to think about asking Pat if she’d like a glass of water. Pat was alone in the living room for a while, looking at her reflection in the blank TV screen.
Then Mary entered, barefoot in old jeans and a white vest top. When she bent to sit, Pat caught sight of a pale, freckled little breast, and felt a puzzling compassion.
Mary said, ‘So what is it?’
Pat could see Mary’s reflection in the TV screen. There they sat, the two of them.
Pat said, ‘Did Kenny ever mention a girl to you?’
‘I don’t know. What girl? When?’
‘Callie? Caroline, maybe.’
Mary gave the question a polite few seconds. ‘No. Why?’
‘Did he talk about the past? Before he met you?’
‘Kenny? God, no. He always thought stuff like that was . . . ungallant. When we were together, he denied he ever looked at other women.’
‘They all say that, love.’
‘Don’t they just. But the thing is – with Kenny, I believed him. We’d be at the beach. Or at the park in summer or something. And I’d make a game of it; I’d try to catch him out. All blokes ogle girls, don’t they? Stever does it all the time. It’s natural. Over the years, it’s got so, I know his type—’ She mimed a pair of meaty breasts and a sulky, pouty mouth.
‘You don’t mind?’
‘If they looked at him twice, he’d run a mile. He’d have to ask me what to do. It’s sad really.’
Pat grinned at that.
Mary said, ‘Why? Has Kenny fallen for someone?’
‘I don’t think it’s that. But you know him better than me. Do you think he’s - changed, at all?’
‘Changed how?’
‘Just changed.’
‘Well, yeah. He’s unhappy. He’s wired – like he’s on speed. He’s got a look in his eye I’ve never seen before. Do you know what I mean? Like he’s in the middle of something important.’
Pat knew the look: a secretive, raptorial glint.
Mary said, ‘Has something happened I don’t know about?’
‘Is that the feeling you get?’
‘Kind of, yeah.’
‘Me, too.’
‘So what is it? What’s going on?’
Pat looked her in the eye. Mary had confirmed what she needed to know. But Pat had nothing to give her in return, no hard information. Just a feeling.
‘I don’t know, sweetheart.’
She took Mary’s hand in hers and squeezed. ‘The thing to do is love what you’ve got, not what you once had. Because one day the good stuff’s all gone. And all you’ve got is the crumbs of the days that are left.’ She squeezed once, for emphasis, then let go.
Then she heaved herself off the sofa, using her arms. She said goodbye to Mary and walked away from that Victorian terrace with a strangely determined gait, leading with her jaw, heading towards her little car.
Mary stood at the window, watching. She wondered where Pat was going and what she was going to do when she got there.
The first thing Mary did was go and see the kids. They were asleep. She was filled with a tenderness so acute it bordered on grief.
Then she went to the Man’s Room. A yellow radiation warning sign was pinned to the door, and drawings by the kids – Wallace and Gromit, Happy Feet, a pony with a machine gun.
Stever was playing World of Warcraft on a gaming computer for which he’d paid what another man might have spent on a pretty decent second-hand car. Stever still owned the Jurassic Corolla that had been fifteen years old when Mary met him. All these years later, no power on earth could prevent it from smelling a bit like spoiled milk.
Mary sat in his lap and kissed him. She ran her fingers through his coarse mane, in need of a comb; she nibbled his sweet little earlobes, she gave his balls a gentle squeeze.
He said, ‘Is it Christmas?’
‘Pat told me to do it.’
‘Pat told you to come upstairs, interrupt my game and squeeze my nuts?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘I liked her,’ Stever said, ‘the minute I saw her. Have her round any time you want.’
Mary said, ‘Perhaps it’s time to turn the computer off.’
Stever put down the mouse.
37
Kenny was in the studio with his portraits of Jonathan – a series of impatient sketches, smudged with jaundiced ochre, charcoal, dabs of scarlet. Laid out in a sequence, they formed a map of his degradation from frightened human being to something leaner, injured, more brutish.
Jonathan would never be released from the last bedroom while these sketches existed. They gave Kenny power.
He was interrupted by the sound of a car in the drive. It wasn’t Mary this time – he knew the sound of her engine like he knew the rhythm of her footsteps.
He ran to the window and saw Pat’s Peugeot bumping along the rutted drive.
Kenny scooted back to the studio, vaulting furniture. He gathered the sketches of Jonathan and slipped them into a plastic portfolio, which he zipped and leaned against the studio wall. Then he ran to the last bedroom, where Jonathan sat strapped and bound to the kitchen chair.
His head hung lifeless and it seemed to Kenny that he might actually be dead. All he felt was relief.
But then Jonathan opened his eyes. His face was crusted with dried blood and a week’s growth of beard.
At the sound of Pat’s car door slamming in the driveway Jonathan grinned with white barbaric teeth and shrieked: ‘Help!’
Kenny couldn’t move.
He glanced over his shoulder.
The doorbell rang twice.
Jonathan shouted, ‘I’m in here!’
Kenny closed the last bedroom door and picked up the roll of duct tape that still lay in the corner by the window. His fingers scrabbled to find an edge.
‘Please!’ Jonathan shouted, ‘I’m in here!’
Kenny’s fingernails found an edge. Fumbled. Lost it. Found it.
The doorbell rang again.
‘My name is Jonathan Reese!’
Kenny’s nails snagged the edge of the tape. He ripped off a long strip, raced over, grabbed Jonathan’s face in a pincer grip.
‘I am Jonathan Reese!’
He squeezed Jonathan’s jaw until his lips pursed in a wet burlesque kiss.
Jonathan snarled, clamping down on Kenny’s fingers with his teeth.
The bell rang again. Then Pat began to pound on the door; an impatient, copper’s knock.
Kenny contorted himself, working hard not to shout in pain, twisting the hand, trying to free it. Jonathan bit down harder.
Kenny jabbed a finger into Jonathan’s eye.
Jonathan opened his mouth to cry out, and Kenny snatched back his hand. He grabbed Jonathan under the jaw and applied the duct tape, not gently.
Jonathan tried to shout thr
ough the tape. He drummed his feet on the bare floorboards. Kenny shoved him, hard: the chair toppled, fell over.
Jonathan lay dazed on his back. Kenny stamped on his belly.
Jonathan tried to take a breath. Couldn’t. He lay there wheezing, blood bubbling at his lips.
Kenny hurried through to the hallway, locking the door. ‘Coming!’
He grabbed a piece of kitchen towel, wrapped it round his bleeding hand, opened the front door.
Pat looked at Kenny, then nodded at his hand: ‘What happened?’
He clasped the hand under his armpit. ‘Caught it in the door.’
She walked in.
Kenny said, ‘Go through to the studio. Make yourself at home. Let me clean this up.’
The studio was as far from the last bedroom as it was possible to get without leaving the cottage. As Pat waddled through, Kenny hurried to the bathroom, locked the door behind him and opened the medicine cabinet. He found a few plasters in a box.
He picked blood-sopping paper fragments from the bite wounds to the middle fingers of one hand; tattered half moons, oozing blood and plasma, clearly showing the impression of Jonathan Reese’s teeth.
He ran cold water over the cuts then, using his teeth and one hurried hand, applied a plaster to each of the gashes.
As he did so, he caught sight of his reflection in the medicine cabinet and shut down for a moment, staring.
Usually, when Kenny looked in a mirror, he knew himself. But he no longer recognized this man. His hair was sticking up. He was unshaven and pale. His wrinkles had deepened. His eyes had gone wrong. It was as if someone else was looking out through them. He thought of a face burning in a forest.
He blinked, slow as a lizard basking on a rock, and looked away. He unlocked the bathroom door and walked out to join Pat in the studio.
Night rain was falling on the glass ceiling and Pat was looking at the painting of Michelle. Kenny stood at her shoulder.
She said, ‘And who’s this?’
‘Client. You sound a bit tetchy.’
‘By “client” you mean your client’s crumpet.’
