Benighted (11 page)

“Or are you worried about the planet?”

“Hell no.” I laugh. “I just don’t have a car. Yes, thanks, a lift would be great.”

Getting past reception without being caught leaving before quitting time turns into a little adventure. We pull it off by having Kelsey talk to the girl on the desk—not Josie, some new rookie we haven’t settled yet—while I sneak by, my attention apparently on some papers in my hand. We get the elevator to ourselves and grin at each other in silence, then walk through the downstairs lobby with the guiltless stride of people who have other matters on their minds.

“If there’s anything I’ve learned in an ill-spent life,” I remark as I settle into the seat of his car, “it’s that the best way to avoid getting caught is to look like you’re doing it on purpose.” His car is an old green hatchback, I notice with the critical eye of a woman who can’t afford her own vehicle; it’s clean, except for having muddy wheels. Something knocks my feet as he starts the engine, and I pick it up: a large rubber ball. “What’s this?”

“What’s what?” he says, his eyes on the road.

“This ball.”

“It’s a ball. I use it when I’m visiting very young kids sometimes.”

“Mm. Do you have anatomically correct dolls in the backseat?”

He takes his eyes off the road and looks at me.

I cover my mouth. “Sorry. I don’t know where that came from.”

He looks at me a moment longer, then his mouth twitches and he laughs. “No big deal. At least you said it.”

“Oh, I’m kind of thinking it would have been better if I’d
not
said it.”

“I don’t know. I reckon you’re better at coming out with things.”

“In the five minutes you’ve known me,” I risk saying. “And I don’t know where you got that idea.”

He grins to himself and looks at the road. Being pleased by my odd remarks is something he has no business doing, but I’m still too relieved to care. There’s another silence, less tense than the ones in my office. We’re driving past Abbot’s Park, one of my favorites in the daytime. The road around it is a little raised, and the outer circle is ringed with trees. The park turns under my eye as we follow the curve of the road around it.

“Can I ask?” he says.

I take my eyes off the bare, clean branches. “Ask?’

“Your friend. You said it was your fault.”

As I lean my head back against the seat, it comes to me that I haven’t really explained it to anyone. I’ve written reports and justified myself here and there; putting it into words is something else.

“It was, I guess. He’s my trainee. We were out on a—patrol—”

“You may as well say dogcatch. I know that’s what you say.” He doesn’t look at me. His voice is expressionless.

I frown. “It’s no worse a word than bareback.”

He glances at me. “No, you’re right. But that’s not a word I say.”

“Oh.” I push my hair off my face. I should answer this, only I can’t think of anything to say, so I carry on. “Well, he’d messed up before, so I told him we had to go by the book. And that meant that when we ran into a group of bad lunes, he wasn’t carrying his tranquilizer gun, because we’re not supposed to use them except in a real crisis. So”—I speak quietly—“they attacked him, and he didn’t have his gun out. And they mauled him.”

There’s a moment of quiet before he replies, only the noise of the engine. “Is that what you were drowning out when I met you that night in the bar?” he says.

I close my eyes, trying not to feel disappointed. I had no reason to expect him to say something comforting. “That was it. Mostly.”

“You shouldn’t feel guilty.” This isn’t said in a consoling tone, it’s said deadpan.

I make a very quiet noise, turn to stare out of the window. We’re past Abbot’s Park.

“You shouldn’t.” His tone is flat, yet for some reason it doesn’t match the drabness of the streets. “Of course it was your fault. Nobody could go through life doing what you do and make no mistakes. Look at that scar on your arm.”

“I—” I make a gesture, push against the air. “Maybe I should walk.”

“I’m not trying to insult you. Please calm down.” He actually says please, like he was asking for something. I keep my head turned away, fighting what he’s just said.

He talked about my arm. He remembers the scar there. Oh, God. Ten years, ten years of long sleeves and keeping my arm to my side if I wear a pretty dress, one misjudged moment when I was a girl of eighteen and now I have a great worm dug into my flesh that’ll never go away. That’s what he remembers about me.

He doesn’t even sound too upset. “Lola, I don’t mean you’re to blame, all I was saying was that your job’s dangerous. If you hunt lunes, people are going to get hurt. It’s not your fault if it happens sometimes. You were just—”

He trails off and his mouth chews itself.

“—within the margin of error,” I finish for him softly.

“Yeah.”

I hang my head. I’m sulking like a child; that must be what it looks like from the outside. It’s just too hard to pull myself together.

“But he’s going to be all right,” Paul Kelsey says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, he is.”

“Are you all right? Look, I didn’t mean to offend you.” He taps the steering wheel, making an ironic mouth. “I just think aloud sometimes.” He shrugs. “Ask anyone.”

“You think aloud? In your job?”

“Well, no. Off duty.”

“So you’re—off duty?” I say the phrase carefully. It’s what he said about coming on to me in the bar. It weighs in my mouth, heavy with potential and danger.

He turns his head, looks at me. I can’t read his face, I don’t know his face, there’s nothing I know about him. I have to find some way of reading his face—

The car swerves, jolting me out of my panic. Some careless driver cut across him—he’s only just seen it.

I look away. The moment’s past; we’re safe again. “Didn’t know I’d be dicing with death when I accepted this lift,” I tell him. It’s an easy thing to say.

He shrugs. “What can I say? I’m just a bad driver. No help for it.” He steadies the car. “Look, I didn’t mean to offend you, what I said about—”

“Kelsey,” I say. “Spade. Hole. Digging. Stop.”

He smiles. The truth is, it’s a few minutes since he said it, and once the shock’s worn off, I feel almost good about it. It’s a change from struggling against all the well-meant lies about how it wasn’t my fault. It’s almost peaceful. Like the buzz in your mouth after the first burn of a spice wears off.

This does not, however, prepare me for the fact that when we get to St. Veronica’s, he doesn’t drop me off in the parking lot but escorts me all the way inside. We’re halfway down the corridor and he’s still there, shoes squeaking on the shiny linoleum. I keep almost asking him why he’s following me, and then not doing it.

“I’m here to see Sean Martin,” I tell the receptionist. “Can you tell me what ward he’s on?”

“Visiting doesn’t start for another half hour,” she says, without looking up from her computer. Kelsey looks around, looking for somewhere to sit, I think, and I undergo a brief conflict. I could sit down with him, or I could get in to see Marty. It won’t be hard to force my way in. The thought makes me lose strength, because he’ll see me for what I am, a non, I’ll turn from a person to a frozen-skinned freak in front of his eyes. It’s a bad idea. So I decide to do it, already angry with him for judging me.

“This is a business matter,” I say hard enough to drag her eyes off the screen, and put my DORLA card in front of her face.

She looks at the card, and then at me. Her smoothly powdered face unsettles, shows itself. If she were luning, she’d be pacing the cage, baring her teeth and worrying the bars. “I’ll phone you through,” she mutters.

This is the hospital Leo was born in. The two of us pass the labor ward, and indeed, I see the man who delivered him, the elegant Dr. Parkinson, sauntering down the corridor. He looks even sleeker without his green paper hat.

“Dr. Parkinson,” I hail him.

“Good morning, Ms….” He looks at me, trying to place me.

“Galley, May Galley. You delivered my nephew last month.”

“Ah yes.” He looks genuinely pleased. “Have you named him yet?”

“Leo.”

“A good name, that. I had an uncle called Leo.” His smile is impressive. Strong teeth, well-kept skin, assurance. He looks like my father, like my father’s friends. The relaxed, nourished look, the look of people who don’t worry about paying their rent, people who walk down the streets and watch other people defer to them. Or hate them for what they have. It’s still regard of a sort.

It’s a look I never had. A year ago, before that stupid ruinous night, before Leo’s conception and her husband’s desertion, Becca used to look like that. Looking at the man who delivered my nephew somehow brings home to me how the gloss has faded from Becca’s skin.

“He’s a bonny boy,” I say.

“Excellent,” says Parkinson, looking at his watch.

I make the excuse to keep walking before he can do it.

“That man doesn’t appreciate my nephew,” I whisper to Kelsey. For some reason I don’t try to fathom, this is only half a joke.

“May?” says Kelsey.

“Yes?” I respond automatically.

“I thought you said your name was Lola.”

“Oh…” I shrug. “May’s my middle name. My family call me May.”

“How come?”

“Just do. It says Lola May on my birth certificate. They called me Lola at the creches.” I say the word “creches” almost without a flinch.

“Creches?”

For a social worker, he’s not very well informed. “DORLA creches.”

“Oh.” He nods to himself. I tense, waiting for him to go awkward, sympathetic, but instead he just takes it on board. I guess he hasn’t heard the stories. Or else he’s seen worse.

“You know, for a social worker, you’re not very well informed.”

“For a lawyer, you’re not very diplomatic,” he bats back at me.

“I’m not a lawyer, I haven’t the training.”

“Fair enough.”

Being rude to him doesn’t seem to get a rise, and for a moment I have the urge to be ruder. Probably I’m curious, or I just want someone to take things out on. Then we get to Marty’s floor. I clutch my hands together as we reach the ward door.

There are rows of beds in here, all with curtains hanging around them, off-cuts of some cheap printed fabric on metal frames. I can feel the thinness of the mattresses from where I’m standing. Falling back a little, I hang closer to Paul Kelsey. To my annoyance, and also unsettlement, I feel his hand on my arm in a brief touch. “It’s okay,” he mouths at me.

I scowl at him, clear my throat. “Thank you, Mr. Kelsey,” I say in as stern a voice as I can produce.

“I’ll wait,” he says.

I see the bed, Marty’s bed. Kelsey sits himself down a little distance from it, and I unclasp my hands, and walk toward it to pull back the curtain.

There he lies. Marty turns his head at the scrape of curtain ring on rail, and his eyes widen a bit at the sight of me, surprised. I look at him. I can’t get my face to move. Bandages, a drip, hospital sheets. They’ve trussed his throat, buried it under white cloth. They’ve pinned a bag of water to his arm, and laid him flat on an ironed white bed with salt water going drop by drop into the pale fragile flesh inside his elbow.

I stand and watch this, and I have to reconcile it with the expressions on Marty’s face. He isn’t looking at the end of the world, there are no burning cities or toppled towers in what he sees. He looks so ordinary. A little look of surprise to see me, and then his face crinkles up in a smile. It’s a young smile, rather gauche, not quite relaxed and full of hope that life may yet turn out well.

The boy is actually pleased to see me.

“Marty,” I say.

I’m not prepared for his voice. “Hi Lola,” it says, and it’s hoarse, scoured, as if someone took a tool and scraped and scraped it dry. They said he could talk again; the doctors said he had his voice back. They lied. This isn’t his voice.

“How are you?” Marty says.

Marty thinks I’m a grown-up. I have no business showing him a weak face.

“Well enough, kiddo,” I say. “Good to see you sitting up again.”

He smiles back. I wish I’d brought flowers. “Doctor says my voice come back fine.” He chokes on the C of come, swallowing the previous word.

“How are you bearing up, kid?” I say. I say
bearing up
rather than
how are you.
Bearing up is what he’s going to have to do.

Marty shrugs. “Okay.” His face is pale; his eyes don’t quite meet mine when he says this.

“Managing okay? I mean, apart from the injuries and the nightmares?”

He gives me a startled, caught-out look.

“We all have nightmares, Marty.” I lay my hand on his foot. It’s as close as I can get to gentleness.

Marty bites his lip. If he had his voice I think he’d say something. There’s nothing he can say, though, not really. What they did to his throat is keeping him from filling the air with polite chit-chat.

“This is just what happens,” I say into the silence. “You learn to live with it.”

He plucks at the blanket.

“I know,” I say, “the last thing you want is some patronizing woman telling you your life’s going to be no good.”

Marty makes a whispering sound, noncommittal.

I draw hospital air into my lungs. “I’m sorry about what happened,” I say. “It was mostly my fault.”

“S’okay,” Marty croaks. “Mine too.”

“Well,” I grip his foot, “you’d have been better armed if you hadn’t listened to me. Except you didn’t have much choice in that either.”

“Nor did you,” Marty says. He speaks quietly. He could just be being friendly, or it could be he’s already resigning himself. With so few words, it’s hard to know.

I breathe in again. “We’ve got one of the prowlers who did it,” I say. “Not the other ones. We’re checking hospitals for people coming in with a silver-bullet injury, the one you shot in the leg, but nothing yet.”

Marty doesn’t say anything. It’s quiet as a moon night in here.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Your throat will heal up, and you’ll be okay. You’ll just have a few scars. Maybe you can grow a beard.”

Marty feels his face. He has such a sweet smile.