The Killing Room

by Peter May

  Margaret bridled. “They’re not my guests,” she said. “You invited them. And, anyway, they seem to be having a pretty good time through there, drinking dad’s Scotch. They won’t want me spoiling their fun.”

  Her mother sighed theatrically. “I don’t know why you bother affecting the grieving daughter. You had no time for him when he was alive. Why start pretending now?”

  Margaret was stung, both by the unfairness and by the truth of her mother’s words. “I’m not pretending,” she said, fighting back the tears. She hated her mother to see any sign of weakness in her. “I loved my dad.” She hadn’t realised just how much until she had received the phone call in Beijing. “But don’t worry. I won’t cause any posthumous embarrassment at your funeral by pretending I ever felt anything about you.”

  She saw the colour rise on her mother’s cheeks and experienced an immediate stab of regret at her cruelty. Her mother had always had the knack of bringing out the worst in her. “In that case,” her mother said coldly, “perhaps you’d be better not going.” She turned back to the door.

  “You never loved me, did you?” The words were out before Margaret could stop them, and they halted her mother in her tracks. “That day my brother drowned. You wished it had been me and not him.” Her mother turned and flashed her a look. Things that had never been said, feelings long suppressed, were bubbling to the surface. “You spent your life wishing failure on me because I could never live up to the expectations you had of him. Your boy. Your darling.”

  Her mother’s jaw was trembling. Her eyes filling. But like her daughter, she would show no sign of weakness. “I didn’t have to wish failure on you, Margaret. You brought all the failure you could ever need on yourself. A failed marriage, a failed career. And now an affair with some . . . Chinaman.” She said the word as if it left a bad taste in her mouth. “And don’t talk to me about love. You don’t know the meaning of the word. You were always so self-contained. So cold. All those people you cut open. Just so much dead flesh to you. You never needed anything from anyone, did you? And never gave a thing of yourself.”

  Margaret’s eyes were burning. Her throat felt swollen. She wished she had never come home. Was it true? Was she really so cold, so ungiving? Her mother had always been squeamish about her decision to become a pathologist, but she had never realised just how much it disgusted her. The words hurt. She wanted to hurt back. “Maybe,” she said, “that’s because I took after you. You were always the Queen of Frost.” She paused. “And maybe that’s why dad had to go looking for his sexual pleasures on the Internet.” As soon as the words were out she regretted saying them. But there was no way to take them back, and she remembered the lines from one of her father’s favourite poems—The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, / Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit / Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, / Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

  All the colour that their argument had raised on her mother’s face drained out of it. The carefully controlled façade slipped, and she looked suddenly haggard and old. “What do you mean?” she asked quietly.

  Margaret found she couldn’t meet her eye. “Nothing, Mom. We’re just being stupid here. Trying to hurt one another, ’cos dad’s gone and left us and who else are we going to take it out on?”

  Her mother nodded towards the computer. Her voice had become very small. “He spent hours in here on that damned thing.” She looked at Margaret. “Your father and I hadn’t made love for years.” She became hesitant. “But I had no idea . . .”

  Margaret closed her eyes. There were things about your parents you’d rather you never knew.

  “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

  Margaret opened her eyes and saw a young man standing in the doorway. For a moment, in the semi-dark, she had no idea who he was. It was his voice which sparked off the memories of those pre-graduation years. “David?”

  “That’s me,” he grinned. “Thought I’d show my face. You know, for old time’s sake. But, hey, you know, if this is a bad moment . . .”

  “Of course not, David.” Margaret’s mother had immediately recovered herself, slipping back into the role of the bravely grieving widow. “But if you’ll excuse me, I really should be seeing to my guests. I’ll leave you two to get reacquainted. It must be quite some time.”

  David nodded. “Almost ten years.”

  “I’ll speak to you later, then.” The widow smiled and was gone, leaving Margaret and this ghost from her past standing in the silence of her dead father’s den.

  “Ten years?” Margaret said, for something to say. “You sound like you’ve been counting.”

  “Maybe I have.” He stepped into the room and she saw him a little more clearly. Sandy hair, thinning now, a lean good-looking face, strong jaw, well-defined lips. David Webber was tall and powerfully built. She remembered those arms holding her, his lips on her neck. And unaccountably she burst into tears. “Hey,” he said, and immediately he was there, those same arms drawing her to him, and she surrendered to the comfort of his warmth and strength and made no effort to stop the sobs that broke in her chest.

  For a long time he just held her and said nothing, until gradually the sobs began to subside. Then he drew the hair back from the streaky wetness of her face and smiled gently down at her. “What you need is to get out of here,” he said. “I’m going to take you to dinner tonight. And if I don’t have you laughing by the end of the evening, I’ll pick up the tab.”

  Which made her smile, in spite of everything. She remembered how she had always insisted they went Dutch, and how he had always made her laugh.

  IV

  Her life flashed before her eyes, like that moment people experience just before they believe they are going to die. All the familiar places she had haunted as a student, and then later during her residency at UIC Medical Centre. She had been more of a hermit during her time at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office.

  The cab took them along Armitage, lights blazing in the early evening dark. On Halsted they had passed familiar-looking restaurants, a bar where she had once spent an hour drinking with a boyfriend, waiting for a table in a nearby eatery. By the time it was ready they were too drunk to eat.

  Now she saw the used CD store where she used to browse when she was low on funds, only in those days they still sold vinyl, too. And the little speciality tea and coffee shop where she had got her favourite blend of roasted beans and Earl Grey tea by the pound. And all the chichi shops and boutiques where she would happily spend hours picking out what she would buy if only she could afford it.

  They passed under the El, and Margaret suddenly began to get a bad feeling. “Where are we eating?” she asked.

  David smiled knowingly. “I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.”

  But when the cab took a right into Sheffield and drew up outside Sai Café, she was. “Sushi! Jesus, David,” she said, trying to make light of it, “I just spent the last eighteen months eating Asian, I was kind of hoping you might take me somewhere different. Somewhere American, you know, even a burger joint.”

  “Oh.” He looked crestfallen. “You always liked sushi. I just thought . . .” His voice trailed off. He shrugged. “But, hey, doesn’t matter. We can always go somewhere else.”

  His disappointment was palpable. Margaret relented. “But you made a reservation, right?” It helped to make a reservation for Sai Café if you wanted to be sure of getting in.

  “Sure. But somebody else’ll be happy to get our table.”

  “No, it’s okay, let’s eat here.” She started to get out of the cab. She knew he wanted to bring her here because it was where they had eaten together as students, when they could afford it. Only, David could always afford it. It was Margaret who had trouble scraping her share together. She watched him pay the cab driver. No tip. Nothing had changed. “Listen,” she said when the cab pulled away, “don’t mind me. It’s just today, you know? I’m a bit cranky.”

  David guffawed. “Hey,
Mags, you always were.”

  She felt a little chill run through her. Mags is what Michael had called her. That was something David had obviously forgotten about Sai Café.

  The place was packed. People stood around the bar and sat drinking at tables in the window waiting for seats in the restaurant proper. Ahead and to the right, in the main eating area, customers perched on low stools along the sushi bar, chatting to Japanese chefs as they wielded sharp blades to carve up delicate pieces of raw fish. The girl at the lectern checked their reservation, and they followed her between crowded tables to one at the far wall. Candles flickered in the smoky atmosphere, and Margaret remembered that David, like Li, was a smoker. After all these months in China it didn’t bother her as much as it used to.

  Steaming hot towels were brought to the table, and they ordered miso soup and moriawase—mixed sashimi platters. David lit up as soon as they had placed their order. “So,” he said, “how long are you planning on staying?”

  “Don’t,” Margaret said. “You sound like my mother.”

  “Jesus, I hope not.” David laughed and gazed at her fondly. “You two never did get along, did you?”

  “Nope.”

  “I always reckoned you were more like your dad.”

  And Margaret remembered how David had never really known her. He had been attracted to her, physically, and that had been more important to him than anything else. She had thought he was good-looking, and the physical side of their relationship had always been rewarding—until she got pregnant. And then there had only been one course of action as far as he was concerned, and she had allowed herself to be talked into it. She had never forgiven herself. Or him. “You still in medicine?” He had made the youngest ever cardiac consultant at Chicago Hope.

  “Sure.” He laughed, although a little uneasily, she thought. “Still single, too.”

  Margaret hoped he had developed more subtlety in telling patients they were terminally ill. “I’m sure you had lots of girls after we split up.”

  “Lots.” He drew on his cigarette and blew a jet of smoke over her head. “But, then, you were a hard act to follow.”

  She grinned. “Oh, come on, David, it’s me you’re talking to. I never did fall for your bullshit.”

  He returned the grin ruefully. “No, and neither has anyone else.” He patted the top of his head. “And now I’m losing my hair I’m not such a catch any more. Women just pull out the hook and throw me back.”

  “Oh, sure. Like there aren’t a million women out there who wouldn’t die for a good-looking thirty-something cardiac consultant.”

  “Maybe I’ve just set myself too high standards. That’s what my mother thinks.”

  “She never thought too much of me.”

  “Yeah, but she never knew you like I did.”

  “Thank God.” She grinned and he grinned back. And then there was an awkward silence that neither of them knew how to fill.

  But they were rescued from their embarrassment by the arrival of the soup. The taste of it was familiar and comforting, pieces of wakame and tofu cubes in hot dashi stock thickened by red miso. They slurped in silence for minute or two.

  Then, “Good food, weird people,” David said.

  Margaret looked confused. “What?”

  “The Japanese.” He grinned stupidly. “Don’t think I’d much like to be practising over there. Neither would you.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know, they got this weird religion in Japan. Shinto. It’s peculiarly Japanese, but it’s kind of soaked up bits of Buddhism and other stuff as well. They’ve got a pretty strange view of the sanctity of the dead body. And, you know, they only got around to defining brain death as a legal condition a few years back.” He laughed. “Last time a doctor over there performed a heart transplant was in nineteen sixty-eight, and he got charged with murder.”

  Margaret said, “I can think of a few doctors who should be charged with that.” And she remembered her fear in the moments before she lost consciousness in the operating theatre, and then coming to and knowing that they had killed her child. She looked at David and wondered if he even remembered.

  “I read all about you when that business was in the news about the rice,” he said suddenly. “Jesus, Margaret, that was scary stuff.”

  She just nodded.

  “Nearly put me off sushi for life.”

  She managed a pale smile.

  He tried again. “You want to tell me about it?”

  She shook her head. “Nope.”

  “Okay.” He raised his hand. “Margaret says subject off limits.” He hesitated, then, “So what have you been doing in China all this time?”

  “Lecturing mostly. At the University of Public Security. It’s where they train their cops. Kind of like the Chinese equivalent of West Point.”

  “Does it pay well?”

  “Nope. The money’s lousy. But they give me an apartment I can just about swing a cat in, and as much rice as I can eat. So you can see why I was tempted to stay on.”

  He chuckled. “So why do you?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve got my reasons.”

  “Which you don’t want to share with me.”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Jeez, Mags,” he leaned across the table and put his hand over hers, “what the hell are you thinking? You had a great job here. You could have ended up Medical Examiner in a few years.”

  She said very quietly, “Don’t do that, David.”

  He withdrew his hand like he’d had an electric shock. “I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head. “I mean, don’t call me Mags. It’s what Michael called me.”

  “Oh, shit, I’m sorry, Margaret. I never thought . . .”

  “Doesn’t matter.” She wasn’t going to remind him that this is where she’d met Michael, that it was David who’d introduced them. A fact that had clearly not loomed large in his recollection, along with the termination of her pregnancy.

  “But, hey, you know, the question’s still relevant. I mean, why China? It’s a communist state for Christ’s sake.”

  “Oh, right.” Margaret felt her hackles rise. “And you want to turn it overnight into a democracy? Like Russia?”

  “Hey, come on, Margaret, I’m just saying . . .”

  “Saying what? That you want to see people dying in the streets of cold and hunger, watch organised crime take the money out of honest people’s pockets, see a breakdown of government, a descent into civil war?”

  “Of course not!” David was annoyed now. “I wouldn’t wish Russia on anyone, even the Russians. It’s this country, the USA, that sets the standard. People here have got rights.”

  “Yeah, the right to get shot because their democratically elected government isn’t strong enough to stand up to the vested interests of the gun lobby. The right to justice if they can afford to pay for a sharp lawyer.”

  David looked at her, uncomprehending. “Jeez, Margaret. What have they done to you over there?”

  “Nothing, David. Not a thing. I’ve just got a perspective now on the world that I never had before. I mean, what do you know about China? Have you ever been there?”

  “No, but—”

  “No, but what? That doesn’t make any difference? Is that what you were going to say?”

  “I was going to say,” David said levelly, “that I read the papers and I watch the news. I know all about their record on human rights, what they do to dissidents. Like the clampdown on that religious sect . . . what is it? . . . Falun Gong.”

  “Oh, right,” Margaret said. “Falun Gong. They’re the ones whose leader claims to be an alien . . . someone from outer space. That sounds like someone worth following.”

  “That’s not the point. The point is that people should be allowed to follow whatever religion they want.”

  “Like here.”

  “Like here.” He nodded, satisfied that he’d finally made his point.

  “Like the Branch Davidians?”

&nb
sp; “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Margaret!”

  But she wasn’t going to be deflected. “You remember the Branch Davidians, don’t you? They’re the ones the FBI massacred down at Waco. Women and children burned alive. I mean, I should know, I assisted on a fair number of the autopsies.”

  David breathed his irritation. “That’s not a fair comparison.”

  “That’s just the trouble.” Margaret slapped the table, and heads turned in their direction. “Comparisons never are. The Chinese have no history of democracy in five thousand years of civilisation. So how can you compare it to the United States? And whatever hell that society’s been through in the last hundred years, it is changing, David. Slowly but surely. And regardless of what people here might like to think, the man in the street doesn’t harbour dreams of democracy. He doesn’t even think about politics. He thinks about how much he earns, about putting a roof over his head, about feeding his family, educating his kids. And you know what? Right now he’s better off than he’s ever been at any time in history.”

  David looked at her in astonishment for several moments. Eventually he said, “I suppose there are lots of ways you can be brainwashed without even knowing it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about your . . . Chinaman.”

  It wasn’t just the word, or even the fact that he had used it at all, but the way he said it, that started alarm bells ringing in her head. It was a very accurate parody of her mother’s use of the derogatory term. “What do you know about my ‘Chinaman’?”

  But it wasn’t a question he was going to answer. He was intent on pressing home what he saw as his advantage. “That’s the real reason you never came back, isn’t it? The same reason you can sit there and bad-mouth your own country.”

  “I love my country,” Margaret said fiercely. “Whatever I think or feel about China won’t ever change that.” She paused to control herself. “But you didn’t answer my question.”

  “What question?” He had realised his gaffe now and was being evasive.

  “She told you, didn’t she?”