by J G Alva
“I’m okay,” Andrea said, a little nervous with all the attention. Her eyes went around everyone. “Really. I am.”
“Nightmares,” Robin said, from behind Sutton. She stirred another cup. “But that’s to be expected.”
“I don’t mind them so much,” Andrea said.
“Come on, Andrea, they terrify you-“
“I know, I know,” she agreed. “They do. But…” She looked at Sutton. “When I wake up and realise that it is only a dream, then that’s the best possible moment.” She looked to Robin, to see if she understood.
Robin put a cup of tea in front of Sutton and smiled at her.
“The nightmare’s over,” Robin said, in confirmation.
“Yes.” She looked to Sutton again. “Thank you.” She started to weep. She clutched Sean’s hand. “All of you. Thank you so much for finding me.”
Sutton nodded, and then turned to look at Robin, who was staring with compassion at her sister.
But then her eyes moved to Sutton, and there seemed a moment where all things stopped, this happy moment, that all of them had hoped for but had not quite believed would happen. A return to innocence? No. That was fallacy; they could not go back. But of course that was not to say that the future could be not be better. Because it could. As a painter, Sutton understood too well that the dark makes the light so much brighter.
Robin said, “I have to talk to Sutton a minute, Andrea. Okay? There’s your tea. Do you want something to eat?”
“I’m fine,” Andrea said, after a moment, wiping at her tear stained face.
“You have to eat, Andrea,” Robin said, in a softly scornful tone.
“It’s fine,” Sean said. “I’ll make her eat something. You two talk.”
And then Sean gave Sutton a very deliberate look; its meaning eluded Sutton.
“Sutton,” Robin said, from behind him. “Can we talk in the Living Room?”
Sutton nodded and rose, and taking his cup of tea he followed behind Robin.
After the brightness of the kitchen, the Living Room seemed dark and somehow foreboding, even with the array of colourful pillows and scented candles dotted around the place.
Robin stopped in the centre of the room and turned to him, but she did not look at him; instead, she fixed her attention on the drink in her hands. She did not speak, and Sutton began to wonder if she ever would.
So to spare her the travail, he said, “you have a lot of books.”
“One of my great loves,” Robin explained. Happy, he thought, for the distraction. She was smiling, but like everything else about her he had come to know, it was restrained. “It was a toss up between whether I was going to study English Literature when I went to university, or Psychology. In the end, Psychology won out, but it was a close thing.”
“Did you make the right choice?” Sutton asked carefully. “For you, I mean.”
“I think so,” Robin said, her head to one side as she debated it. “Psychology – or more accurately Psychotherapy, which is what I eventually specialised in - is more proactive. I feel like I’m doing something. Do you know what I mean? Anyway, one feeds the other. Great fiction is always about characterisation.”
“You study real and fictional people,” Sutton said.
“Yes,” she said, delighted. “You could say that.”
This topic exhausted, silence returned. In some way Sutton was amused, but in another he sensed that what she had to say – what she could not begin – would not make either of them happy.
“What’s that under your arm?” She asked eventually.
“Oh.” He brought it up. “A present. For you.”
“For me?”
Robin took it and unwrapped it.
It was a framed picture.
“Of course,” she said, staring at it. “Robin Sails.” She looked at him, with some amusement playing at the corners of her eyes. “But to where?”
“Well. That’s up to you.”
The amusement left her face then.
“I have something for you too,” Robin said, reaching into a back pocket of her jeans. She produced a padded white envelope.
Sutton took it, fingered it, but did not open it.
“For what you did. You saved her. You did exactly what you said you’d do…despite my ungracious expectations. I’m glad I was wrong about you. You don’t know how grateful I am. How grateful I’ll always be.”
But Sutton was shaking his head.
“He was imploding. He was going to give himself up-“
“No,” Robin said, and she finally met his eyes then. “He would have killed her. I know it.”
They stared at each other, not quite friends, not quite lovers, and then Robin looked away.
“Do you still think I’m beautiful?” She asked, in an almost child-like voice.
“Yes,” he said, over something in his throat.
She nodded, but it was not with pleasure; it was almost as if it was something to be borne.
“The last three days have been so crazy,” she said, “I’ve hardly known myself. Like I couldn’t remember who I was. It was like a nightmare, like Andrea says.”
With a sinking feeling in his chest, Sutton said, “and now it’s over.”
She looked at him keenly.
“My world and your world are so completely different.”
“Robin-“
“What?”
Sutton sighed, but did not know how to continue.
“You like violence.”
“Robin-“
“You do. And danger. You pretend that you don’t, but you do. I saw you in that hairdressing salon, remember? I saw your face. And with Alden…”
Sutton did not know how to respond, was sure that any response would only convict him further. He had done only what was necessary to find Andrea. Couldn’t she see that?
Robin looked down at her cup again, traced its edge with one finger.
“I…I can’t make room for that in my life,” she said. “Everything I’ve done, everything I am, has been about undoing the trauma that violence causes.” She looked up at him, and it was as if she was searching his face for something. “There’s something in you…something wild. You remember we talked about the Death Drive, what the Greeks called Eros and Ethos? Alden had it…and you do too. So much of what you are is about embracing life…and yet so much of what you do risks everything you have. Sean told me about you jumping on to that digger’s arm. I mean, that was crazy. And you’ve told me that you hate water, and yet you went down into that moat…” She shook her head, as if she could not understand him. “I mean, you live next to a river-“
“I had to go down in that moat,” Sutton said, feeling angry. “If I hadn’t…”
But Robin was shaking her head.
“Sean was there. We could have sent the police down instead.” Robin sighed, staring at her cup. “I don’t know where it comes from, this…this urge. A psychological Russian Roulette. I’d be interested to find out, but not from the inside. From the inside…it would scare me.” Robin smiled then, but it was painful. “It feels like I’m punishing you for succeeding.”
“No,” Sutton said, shaking his head. He knew himself too well to deny what she was telling him, to deny the truth of it. Hadn’t he told her once that he was a man hungry for the truth? How then could he deny this truth…the flaw in him that she saw so clearly. A flaw suited for that world, but not for this gentler suburban one.
He could have pointed out that she would have liked that Sutton less, but it would have been an excuse. That was the real truth: that he wanted it, needed it; to always be on the edge, to be straggling that line where the darkness chased the sun, what the astrologers called the terminator…and that the dark he experienced made all the bright moments brighter.
And she did not want that.
“No,” Robin said, almost like an echo. “Maybe I’m punishing myself then.”
“You’re still finding reasons to push men away,” he said.
Robin looked up at him, and she seemed wounded, as if what he had said was unfair.
There was an awkward silence. On the street outside, a car rushed passed, and a dog went chasing after it. It was almost allegorical: that he, Sutton, was the dog, and it was his nature to chase things, even if it meant he was hurt in the process, even killed.
Robin said, “I wonder if, sometime in the future, when you’re done with slaying whatever dragon it is that haunts you, perhaps…I don’t know…if we bumped into each other in the street…maybe…”
Sutton smiled; it felt a little painful, but he managed it.
“I’ll buy you a tea,” he said.
Robin nodded, her eyes on his.
“I’d like that,” she said, with a small smile of her own.
*
Afterward, he returned to his flat.
He checked the white envelope and then placed it in a safe sunk into the floor beneath the slat flooring in the kitchen. The money should have felt earned; instead, it felt hollow, insubstantial, as if he had not won anything at all.
He then stood and went to the second bedroom, where he looked at the portrait he had done of her when she had slept in his bed.
He stared at it, feeling immeasurably sad, and then put it back amongst a stack of other similar portraits of women, dutifully, carefully, as if he were silencing the woman herself.
*
Almost six months after that visit, after the trial was over and Alden King was remanded to an institution for life, Sutton heard that he had requested that he visit him.
His doctors thought it would be good therapy, Sutton supposed. He wasn’t sure if it was curiosity that compelled him to go but he accepted the invitation. There were exhaustive security checks at Alden’s facility. It made Sutton feel a little better about things in general.
After he had been searched, and re-searched, and his ancestral lineage had been traced back to the beginnings of the Stone Age, Sutton was shown to a white room with two connecting doors in it. In the centre was a table bolted to the floor, and Sutton came in one door and sat in one chair at the table, which was also bolted to the floor. In moments the other door opened, and Alden King stepped through it, and sat in the opposite chair, which Sutton assumed was also bolted down.
Sutton studied him. He looked smaller somehow in the confines of this bland room. Shrunken. He looked awful. His face was a shocking mess of patchwork skin over a lumpy, slightly misshapen skull. Of course, Sutton had seen pictures of him in the paper during the trial, but the photographs had not done justice to the brutality Sutton had unleashed upon him. His nose hung crookedly to one side, and there was an unsightly hollow under his left eye. The eye itself was blind; a haemorrhage behind the optic nerve, so the doctors had said. His hair had now been shaved off completely, and the scars on his skull were like white lines of Tippex criss-crossing each other, one particularly deep scar running in a curve from the centre of his head to his left ear. It was hard to discern his expression amongst that jumble of mottled skin, but there was some emotion there, boiling under the surface.
“Well,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d come.”
He was amused, of all things.
“I was curious,” Sutton said blandly.
“Although I expect you only really came to have one question answered.”
His voice was how Sutton remembered it, soft, smooth, well spoken, like the voice of a hypnotist or therapist. It was insidious, like a well-oiled snake.
“Why did you ring the police?”
He smiled now, the twisted folds of skin peeling back to allow the movement, and shook his head.
“That’s not the question, but I’ll answer it. I had this vision in my mind, you see, of how things were going to be – after I called the local law enforcement, that is: the police pleading for the lives of my hostages, my hostages pleading for their lives, pleading mothers, brothers, fathers, their faces sparkling with tears, a cacophony of human misery...the negotiator with his bullhorn telling me to calm down...” Alden stopped suddenly, lost in his own world, and then returned to the real one. “Imagine how disappointed I was when I realised you were the only person on to me.”
Sutton shrugged.
“But now that the police know,” Alden said, leaning slightly towards him, “now everybody knows.”
Sutton shook his head, disappointed.
“You don’t understand,” Alden said, and paused. He cocked his head, as if deciding something. He smiled, but it was only the muscles of his mouth copying the things most humans do, without thought or effort…and he no longer looked even vaguely human. Physically, he had become the monster he was inside. “You got the girl, didn’t you. I bet you did. Guys like you always do. Look at you. All good looking people have that look, you know. Of slight distaste, of smug superiority. You are the insolent and the beautiful. You play your role. That’s what you’re best at. Well done. But there is something else I have to tell you. You may not know it, or perhaps you do know it but cannot bear the knowledge of it, but...you’re just like me, Sutton Mills. You see, I know about you. I looked you up. It wasn’t easy, you’re very good at keeping a low profile, but I found out enough to be able to figure you out. And do you know what I found? I found that you’re the other side of who I am, you’re me…just a little bit different. You like puzzles, don’t you? A question that must be answered. I set in motion a compulsion for people to answer that question. Because I wanted people to know me. This was all about me. Nothing had ever been about me before. It was liberating to know that people were interested in what I did…and what I was going to do next. You can’t imagine…” Alden shook his head with something like wonder, but then grinned. “Did you know, they’ve got me doing audio books for the blind? Talking books. And me, with only one eye!” He seemed at the same time both surprised and amused by this.
Alden raised his chained hands to his face and scratched the hollow under his left eye. He sighed. Even that was oily.
“I suppose it was The Play that drew them. But The Play was only an extension of me…so it was me that drew them after all, I suppose.”
Sutton frowned.
“The Play?”
Alden nodded.
“You know. The Play. It was a mechanism. It had the functionality of a well-oiled machine, as well as the beauty of Art. But just as the painter is impotent without an audience – as you well know – so I needed someone to be involved in what I was doing. To complete the circuit. Who could have known it would be you? It was a game, in the truest sense: there were rules, and we both stood to win or lose. It might seem to you like folly, perhaps of the darkest kind, but any game is frivolous until it is recognised by another; can Chess be considered as anything but ridiculous? What a waste of a person’s time, moving carved pieces pedantically across a chequerboard…From the outside it’s pure folly, but from the inside it’s so so different. There are tournaments, and there are masters. And we are masters, Sutton, you and I. Do you know why we do what we do? Do you know why we try to create, in whatever medium appeals to us?”
Sutton was not interested in this insane creature’s theories on Art, or on anything else for that matter.
But Alden did not wait for his answer.
“No? Well, I’ll tell you: artists parody life because they can’t live it. They feel disconnected. Don’t you?”
“No.”
Alden’s ruined face smiled, but the smile quickly died.
“Andrea, and Helen, and Sandra – sorry, Susan – they were a part of something. Do you understand? It was performance art, of the most profound kind. It was…it was incredible. I was alive. For the first time in my life, I was alive. They did that for me, all those girls. They gave me something. Their soul? I don’t know. So that I could begin to be. It was the Play, it was Art, it was everything.”
Sutton shook his head again, feeling slightly ill. He thought: here sits insanity.
Here sits something I could never become.
Alden held up his finger.
“I did give you a fair chance, however. A fair crack at the whip at getting her back. You can’t say that I didn’t. The tattoos tied them all together, told you where to look. I might just as well have drawn you a treasure map. And they were treasures…To be saved. Or to be buried.”
He smiled widely, amused at his own insane rhetoric.
“Did you work out the last tattoo?” Alden asked. “Did you know where I was going to leave Andrea?”
Sutton stared at him, trying to keep his expression neutral, trying not to give anything away. Because, God help him, he wanted to know.
Because it was a puzzle after all, and puzzles had to be solved.
Alden nodded, as if Sutton had asked a question.
“A cat heeding his master, who was a king. A ruler. The crown.”
Sutton stared at him, unable to untangle this seemingly random sentence.
“Cat heed rule,” Alden said. “Cat-heed-rule. Cathedral!”
He started laughing. Tears appeared in his eyes, and made their wayward progress down his face, travelling in odd lines across his scars.
Alden raised his shackled hands to his face, wiped at his tears.
“Of course, my name was in there from the first. Only a King wears a crown.”
Sutton saw it now. There had been a crown, of sorts, in almost all the tattoos.
Sutton asked, “why seven days? Why give us seven days to find them?”
Alden shrugged.
“It took God seven days to make the world. It took me seven days to undo it.”
Sutton shook his head and said, with acid, “it wasn’t a fair chance. You were just showing off. That’s all it was.”
Alden stuck his fat bottom lip out.
