I am home, and I fucking hate it. I was so angry when I was sent to Africa years ago like it was the worst punishment in the world. I was wrong. Being back here is.
I crawl onto the dirty damp smelling bed, fuck everything smells manky and wet in here. I try to sleep or at least pass the hours until day light when I can go outside and pretend to live just a little bit. I have to be patient for now, something I am not very good at, I will need a distraction.
When I wake up it is still raining, I hate rain. The cold wet drops pelt against my only window drowning the little light it actually lets in. I down a glass of scotch for breakfast so I can try face another day in my own personal hell. I take a taxi to the cemetery so I can visit my Ma and Cassie, before my presence is required. We plan to bury Pop later today, I should feel sad or cry or something but I feel nothing at all and I think that is worse.
When you google my home town the first thing that comes up is cemetery it is that big and that old. I walk through the quiet wet grounds rain sloshing at my feet until I find my Ma’s grave. I stand at her grave and I talk to her for a long time. I tell her about Rowan and my life in South Africa. I leave out my love life or lack thereof, I don’t want her to jump out and kill me, I don’t think my Ma would approve of the way I treat the ladies. As I walk through the quiet grounds towards Cassie’s grave I listen to the sound of the falling rain on my umbrella and try ignore the cold. My feet are soaked and my clothes are plastered to my body, I would give anything for the warmth of the South African summer right now. I stop before I reach Cassie’s grave because I can see her little sister Shannon cleaning her grave and laying some pretty flowers on her headstone. The red of her hair and her bright yellow umbrella stand out in this grey place, I want to go closer and see her face but I cannot bring myself to do it. She looked just like Cassie growing up and I don’t think I could see her up close without feeling my heart crack in my chest. I loved her sister, perhaps the only woman I ever loved and she loved Rowan. It is like seeing a fucking ghost. There is no mistaking that it is her even from here I can see the red hair and slight build that make her the mirror image of her older sister.
I wait under an old tree for her to finish talking to her sister and walk away before I trudge down the hill to where Cassie rests. I see Shannon turn around and stare at me for a minute, but she keeps walking away until she turns her head and I can’t see her yellow umbrella through this God awful rain anymore. I don’t talk to Cassie I just stand there and let my heart feel all the things I should feel for my dead Pops but only ever felt for her.
I don’t bother leaving since it’s only an hour before my Pop’s service I walk through the grounds to the cathedral on the other side and sit near the front. There are flowers everywhere and a huge portrait of my father. I wonder about God as I sit there, my Pop went to mass every single Sunday and he prayed and he believed yet he was one of the most evil men on earth. I cannot understand how God would let a man like him in church. A man like me doesn’t even belong in here; I always wait for lightning bolt when I am in church. I wonder if God exists or if the church is just another criminal organization in this shitty world where bad things are rewarded more than good?
My half-brothers and sisters fill the rows in front of me with their wives, husbands and children, followed by our cousins, aunts and uncles. Neil gives me the side eye because I know I look rough as fuck. I am wearing a suit, it’s all I ever wear but my hair is wilder than most days my beard is two weeks old, I didn’t shower and I had scotch for breakfast. They are all married, I am the only one who is living a single life, yet another disappointing thing about me, I never found a good Irish woman, hell any woman to marry. I am married to my fucking job that way I cannot get hurt.
I turn around to see the church filling behind me, my father was a well-known man and a respected criminal. I see the yellow umbrella in the doorway and my eyes won’t turn away as Shannon walks inside. It’s like looking back in time right at Cassie all over again; I turn my head forward and try to concentrate on saying good bye to the world’s worst father.
We stand in the rain for what seems like an eternity while Pop’s casket is lowered into the wet ground. In the end when we die this is what awaits a cold wet hole in the ground. I swallow a lump in my throat at how lonely my life is. I know it is time to try and fit into this family. I need to try and make this home. I need them all to believe I want a part of this family if I am to pull this off.
The day ends with drinking and smoking and dancing and singing at our local pub. I let the scotch soothe this new ache in my soul and join in the celebration even if I never loved him he was my father.
I am home and I have to stay. Just for now, I need to fit into this world these criminals are different than the cold hard gangsters of the Cape flats these are not animals they are well adjusted members of society. A society that I plan to fuck up completely.
ROWAN
“I sleep with the wolves in my head and wake up in my own blood. We love the things that kill us.”
~Christopher Poindexter
Callum cut all ties with us three months ago after they buried his Pop; he believed it safer for us if no one knows about Lauri and me. Our baby would be viewed as a rather powerful figure in the criminal world given not who we are but who our fathers were. A thought that never crossed my mind until he mentioned it, I have changed our security and made things safer for us here. As long as we are this far from Ireland we should be safe there is almost no one who knows who or where we are. There are so many things that change with having a family, I can understand the weight that Mick carried with him all those years, why he ran and hid here to start with. He didn’t have a wife, a mother for Lauri it was all on him and right now I feel like I can’t do this even with an amazing beautiful strong woman by my side. I have a new found respect for the man who moulded so much of my life. I miss Callum though; I miss the friend I could tell anything too.
Lauri is a little over six months into her pregnancy, so far it hasn’t been bad, by that I mean she hasn’t changed into and axe murderer and killed me just yet but she still might. She has changed into something darker. Her moods are all over the place and her nightmares have never been as bad as they are now. She won’t discuss them with her doctor, me or anyone for that matter she seems to just pretend she doesn’t wake the dead with her screams every night. She goes from happy to crying to a raging monster that I don’t recognize within minutes I don’t know how to read her at all anymore. I feel her slipping away from me every day like she is pulling back and the more I try to drag her out she digs her heals in. I have tried talking to her, showing her that she is loved I have even yelled at her, as ashamed as I am to admit that it was the only time I felt a glimmer of hope that she might snap out of this crazy that seems to have overtaken her mind. Amya says it can happen and that it may just be combination of the hormones and the years of abuse that have her in a bad place but I cannot help but wonder if I might just wake up one day and find her gone. She is ripping my heart out and I am not sure I can survive this much longer.
We have a check-up with her doctor this morning, I missed the last one so I intend on going with and will try bringing up this erratic behaviour if I can without being killed. She found out the sex of the baby last time but won’t tell me she said I can see for myself today. I have to be honest it’s killing me, I am torn between wanting to know and not wanting to know. If it has a sex it becomes real a person with a gender and in all likelihood a name and I am not ready for real just yet, I don’t know how to be ready for real.
In my mind a son means a legacy, a boy who will become a man like me. I know he may not want to but he will have to in order to live in this fucked up world. A girl means I will need to protect her and keep her safe from men like me, but at the same time I know I need to make her as much like me as I can to protect her from ending up where Lauri did. We have discussed it at length; our child will know wh
o I am and what I do. They will know exactly what being part of our family means. I need to try and explain this better I sound like a crazy man, after our wedding, after Lauri told me in no uncertain terms to go out and kill someone, later during our “honeymoon” week she asked me something else. Something that ripped the breath from my lungs and both crushed and filled my heart. What she wanted shocked me to the point where I couldn’t form words or even coherent thoughts. I don’t know why I am surprised, I should have known it was in her somewhere, I never thought it would set her all the way free but she asked me to teach her, to let her into my world. Lauri wants to be a murderer, she wants the darkness in her life to be her own and not the darkness that Renzo has created with his torture. I could tell it was a deep inner struggle that she had fought with before coming to me. She did not come to this decision lightly and I have a weakness you see; I cannot say no to that woman, I knew committing murder would change her. I knew it, but I let her do it anyway. Maybe that’s where this crazy behaviour has come from? I have spent some time teaching her about what I do, different things she wanted to know. I took her to watch me kill a few times before she wouldn’t wait any longer. Then I took her with me to a job, her job. A simple pick up, kill and dispose of job for a local business man who was having trouble with his daughter’s bad taste in men. As usual I didn’t want to know details, but I got them anyway. The young punk thought he could rape a pretty girl and get away with it, this Africa after all, but she told her daddy who hired me. Stupid little shit. Given her feelings about rape I decided that this was the time to let her do this if she wanted to. We worked on the whole job together from start to end she wanted to know how I worked, so I showed her my whole world. I have watched a new part of her come alive as we worked on this, the anticipation of tonight has made her eyes dance with a new desire a dark twinkle that I haven’t seen in them before.
We collected the idiot from the airport posing as his car service, once in the car and out of the city I restrained him with cable ties and duct tape he was too big to let Lauri try restrain him. After he was bound and gagged on the back seat her nerves were so evident I could feel them and I gave her more than one chance to stop this, to forget about it, to save the piece of her soul I knew would be lost forever when she did this. She refused every time, even when I begged. I don’t know who I was trying to save, her or me, I didn’t want to see her become a monster I loved her light. She was determined that she needed to do this for herself. It hit me hard that no matter how she was raised, this need that runs in my veins runs in hers too, she was born into this life just like me. I feel like a concrete block is resting on my chest, I know this will be the best and worst thing all at once. The outside air is cool as we find a parking spot in the acres of fruit farms in the Hex River valley a long way from the city, there is a light mist settled over the whole place making it eerie. The night is dark and void of city lights, only the headlights of my car light the area where we park, a dusty spot between the fruit trees. I have been here before and know that we are out of sight and hearing range. My stunning wife, with her slight baby bump is leaning against the car while I heave the useless sack of rapist shit out of the car and onto the hard dusty ground. He is squealing like a stuck pig behind the duct tape gag. He knows that this doesn’t end well for him, you see anyone living here knows that if you get tied up and dragged to a field in the middle of the night you will be dead before morning. Lauri has her hands around a knife she is staring at the shiny blade, she didn’t want to shoot him, she wanted to use a knife I didn’t argue with her, she needs to do this and do it her way. I know that. I can see her colourful skin peeking out from the edges of her shirt sleeves, her feet are rooted to the ground and she twists the knife in her hand over and over again.
I move to stand right in front of her, trapping her between my arms so I can look into her eyes, when I do I can see it. I see the look I feel when I am about to kill, I smile and kiss her softly on the corner of her mouth before I step out of her way. I have to let her have this because that look just told me that this is who she is too. We are the same on the inside, light and dark… Grey. Nothing is black or white, Lauri and I exist in the grey where taking a life is perfectly normal and not getting caught is the norm. What a beautiful monster she is, as she moves her fluid body towards her victim she comes alive. It is not something I can see, but something I feel radiating from her.
Lauri stands in front of the boy; I won’t call him a man because men don’t rape women. She lifts his chin to look in her eyes and talks calmly to him. Her fingers are digging into his chin firmly so he cannot break from her gaze. She rips the tape off his mouth so she can hear him begging her for his life. “You raped a young woman; you took something that she didn’t want to give you. Now it’s very simple I am going to take something you don’t want to give me… Your life.” Her words are clear and strong and meant with every dark demon in her, as she plunges her knife into his chest and through his lung just like I showed her. His screams disappear into the night air for no one to hear, before they become nothing more than a gargle. Her next strike is lower on his abdomen connecting his liver. I stand back and watch this magic unfolding, I thought I had brought her to life more than a year ago, I was wrong. I have just now in this moment seen her come alive. She stabs him one last time in the neck and holds his hair so she can see it; she wants to see the life leave his eyes. She is a flawless assassin, not one ounce of remorse bleeds from her; no she is proud of her work. She stands a little straighter, her shoulders square and her chin up, she is the most ravishing monster I have ever seen and she is my wife. I am fucking lucky.
Lauri lets him go when she knows he is dead his limp body slumps down onto the ground with a heavy thud and she walks back to me, her clothes and face are spattered with blood and she never looked so sexy in all the time I have known her. She doesn’t wipe it off just comes to stand right in front of me. She looks into my eyes and they are dancing with something new. Something I recognize because it’s a feeling I know. “Now I know what I was born to do Rowan. Thank you.” It comes out a whisper before she kisses me hard against the car. Holy fucking shit I love my wife. That’s the only words I can actually form right now as I clean up the scene and remove all signs of us being here. We leave his body there, no one will find him in a hurry and when they do they won’t care a shit anyway. Lauri waits in the car, still covered in blood and dirt, she stares out the window at the stars that cannot be seen this clearly in the city and I know that some things will never be the same but I also know that she was born to do this just as much as I was. We had sex like we never have before that night, in my car with a dead body outside and it was un-fucking-believable. I was like she was giving me all of her at long last. Her body was free and it moved and moulded to mine like never before.
I drove us home and Lauri fell asleep in the seat beside me.
Now, I don’t know what’s going on with her, she shut down a little after that but asked me that if I had to kill a rapist or anyone that had abused a woman that I allow her to help me with the job. My wife wants to be my partner in all things. She really does love all of me and I love all of her, even this crazy pregnant monster that is in her place right now. I just worry about her pulling away from me I cannot put a word to it exactly but she is slipping away a little every day and I do believe she is doing it on purpose as if she wants me to be ready to live without her. I will not, I cannot, I know what love is now and I know I need it just the same as I need the bad things that make me, well me. I need my murderous wife more than I need air to breathe.
LAURI
“You know what aches all that you are? Having so much inside you and not having the slightest clue of how to pour it out.”
~Christopher Poindexter
By now you know I am a monster. Here is what you don’t know yet is that I loved it, every fucking second of it. There is nothing like the feeling of power it gave me. After eight years of being stri
pped of any power, any control I finally had ultimate control over this one thing. He may not know it but Rowan set me free that night in the Hex River, between the trees and under the clearest sky ever, I found myself all of me and when I was done I gave it to him. I made mad passionate completely free love to my husband in his car next to the man I murdered minutes before. I have never felt that way before; my body was completely in synch with his, our monsters lined up perfectly. He made me come so hard that my body couldn’t recover I fell asleep in the car next to him.
I went to Robin the very next day and had him ink a number one into my blank heart, that window into my soul would be covered by the sins I have paid for in advance. He was not happy. Firstly it’s like a cardinal sin to tattoo a pregnant lady and he knew exactly what that one meant. He kept his anger silent but I could see it on his face and in his eyes the way he moved was strained and uncomfortable. It was something I needed to do and I think he somehow understood that need deep down. “I know who you are Lauri.” Was all he said to me, like it was alright that this is what I had decided to do. I was meant for this, my father had been so wrong to keep me away.
I have also found out that we are having a baby girl; I didn’t tell Rowan I want him to choose to know the sex of the baby. There has been a letter from Renzo every week since then. The same note on the same paper every single time. I take them to Robin to keep he is still the only one who knows. After Callum cut all contact with us all Rowan went a little security crazy so I feel safe for now, but the feeling that things are afoot that I cannot control grows every single day. When the hairs stand on end and your skin prickles with the fear of what might happen. I feel myself becoming irrational and unstable yet I cannot control it no matter how hard I try. I know it’s the hormones combined with all the other variables in my life that are pushing me over the edge. I feel this intense need to retreat into my own mind and hide there. I have been here before, I lived here for a long time, and it’s not a pretty place. I just cannot snap out of it no matter how I try.
Colour My Ugly Page 27
