Benighted (21 page)

“Are you okay?” I open my eyes. Paul’s face is a shadow above me, his hand on my shoulder.

“What?” I’ve fallen back into my body with a shock, my arms and legs in the bed are not where I thought they’d be.

“You were whimpering in your sleep.”

“Whimpering.” I touch my face, my fingers cautious.

“Yes, you were making funny noises. Not the usual piano music. I thought you might be having a nightmare.”

“I was dreaming.” I take hold of his arm. I’m not sleepy anymore. “Paul, what’s it like to lune?”

He rubs his face. “I thought we’d done that one.”

“You said atavistic. I can hardly spell atavistic. I want to know.” I try to grin. “If you tell me something, I’ll make up some convincing stories of everything pornographic I did in the creches.” His forehead wrinkles and he looks at me, steady blue eyes, and I look down. “Bad joke. I just—I don’t know. You seemed okay with it. People do it. And I can’t ask my sister, she’d just clam up and get all tense that I’m dwelling on our differences.”

“Will you introduce me to her sometime?” He tugs a lock of my hair, rolls me on top of him.

I let him. “She doesn’t know I’m seeing you.”

He lets go, half sits up, lies down again before he dislodges me. “What? Why not?”

“I—” I hold on to him. “Becca doesn’t get my life. She’d like to be able to pin it down. If I told her about you, I’d have to—to have a formula. I’d have to give her a definition, and then come back and act it out.”

His chest raises me like a wave as he sighs. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Anyway, her husband left her pregnant with what could have been his son. He went to another country. He wouldn’t even come back for a blood test.”

“That’s pretty sorry.”

“I don’t think she wants to hear about men right now.”

“So I can’t meet her?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Lola?” Paul picks up my head so I have to look at him. “Just how many people have you told about us?”

“I—a couple.”

“Who?”

“My best friend, Bride?” I say this with a slight plea in my voice like a homework excuse.

“That would be the woman on the phone? Who you had to tell because she heard me answer the phone in the middle of the night.”

“My friend Ally.”

“Who’s she?”

“He. He’s—he’s just someone at work.”

“Who else?”

I squirm my head free and sit up, hugging my knees. “That’s kind of it.”

“Er—Lola?” Paul’s almost scowling, but his voice is restrained. “That’s not very many.”

“Well, have you told everyone?”

“Yes!”

“Oh.”

“Lola, is this a relationship or an affair?” The question blindsides me. I drop my head to see his hands fidgeting on the covers.

“What do you mean?” I almost whisper.

“I mean, why the secrecy?” He looks at me, and for a moment his face is tense, still. Then it creases up, and his head tilts on one side. “Are you keeping quiet to make me more easily disposable?”

“God, no.” I want to put my arms around him, but he’s mad at me and I can’t. I take hold of his knee and hold tight. “It’s not a secret, you’re not a secret. I just—it’s been going so well. I—God, Paul, you’re the best thing that’s happened to me in years, maybe ever.” This isn’t me talking, I don’t talk this way, but I make myself carry on. “I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want to jinx it. That’s all it was. I didn’t know any of this was going to happen, and when it started, I just—I didn’t want to admit to myself how much I hoped you’d stick around. I didn’t want to admit how disappointed I’d be if you didn’t. That’s all it was. I wanted to keep you.”

Paul looks at me. His hands on the blankets loosen.

I push my hair out of my face, tell myself that my hand can’t be shaking. “And that’s the speech,” I say. “Honest-to-God, cut-out my-heart-and-show-it-to-you truth. Don’t go looking for another one.”

“Oh.” I hear Paul let out a breath, and then he reaches over and hugs me to him. My back is stretched in this position, but I don’t ever want to move. “That’s all right then, isn’t it.” We both laugh a little, and I crawl closer, hold on.

“I wish you wouldn’t worry,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Did you think this was an affair?” With my face buried in his neck, he can’t see me, I can ask him things.

“No. I hoped not.”

“Not even when I asked you home right away?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to say no.” He laughs, his fingers trace the outlines of my spine.

“My mother would have told me you wouldn’t respect me.”

“Glad you didn’t take her advice.” He shifts position without letting go. “Honestly? At the time I thought, well, this ended up in bed sooner than I expected, but I wasn’t going to object. I’d kept thinking about you ever since we met. When we got to go out, I thought I’d have to spend weeks trying to seduce you.” He rocks my head to and fro. “You saved me a lot of cold showers.”

“I read in the papers that cold showers were supposed to stimulate the hormones.” This is easy; nothing can come of me saying this.

“Yeah, maybe that’s true.”

I tighten my grip. “You’ve got to appreciate me saying nice things,” I say into his shoulder. “I don’t do it very often.”

“When you do, you do it properly.” Paul strokes my neck, inhales the smell of my hair. “I’m going to write that down and frame it.”

“Don’t you dare. My reputation would never recover.”

We sit for a while without speaking.

“Can I ask you something?” I say.

“What?”

“I was dreaming about luning.”

He disengages his head from my shoulder and looks at me, smoothing the hair back from my face.

“I dreamed I was this guy we collared last night. He was running away from us. Not running away. Just running, and we were behind him. I tranquilized him. But in the dream, the darts never hit me.”

“Was that good or bad?”

“I don’t know.” I close my eyes as we lie down. “What about my dream?”

He sighs. “It’s—it’s hard to talk about. It’s hard to describe not having words.”

“Is it cold? I dreamed I was warm. Too much hair for the cold to get in.”

“Oh.” He laughs. “No, it can be cold. Cold gets in between the hairs.” His fingers creep through my own hair, touch my scalp. “It can get right up against your skin. But you feel everything. It’s harder to think of cold as bad. It’s just another thing you’re feeling.”

“Is it nice to run? Like in a dream, when you don’t get tired.”

“You don’t expect to. I mean, there’s never a moment when you say, hey, look at me go! It doesn’t work like that.”

“Sounds like you remember some of it,” I say. “Most people don’t.”

“You remember bits of it if you think about it when you wake up,” he says, toying with my fingers. “But don’t quote me on that. I don’t want to end up messing with legal precedents.”

“I dreamt I was looking at the moon. I was following it like a moth. It looked golden.”

He laughs. “No, it’s not golden. You don’t exactly see in color. Not in the same way.”

“Black and white?”

“No. Not like a black-and-white movie. You don’t look and see it’s different. I mean, when you look at the world now, you see what you expect to see, these are the colors that exist. And the same when you’re luning, only the color range is different. It isn’t exactly colors, not the ones you see, but you understand what you’re seeing. As far as you understand anything in that state.”

“Oh.” My voice trails away, sinks. “And following the moon?”

“No, you don’t do that either.” His hand cups the back of my head, his palm wider than my neck. “Everything else is before you. Why would you follow the moon?”

I close my eyes, bury my face against his chest. So I was mistaken. Everything I dreamed was wrong.

Five days later, Nate is dead.

EIGHTEEN

T
his is what happened.

Even a boy wouldn’t walk through the parks alone after dark, not after he’s hunted in them. He was cutting past one of them, walking around the perimeter, heading for whatever he does when he’s home. They think someone followed him from inside the Park. Sanctus Park, where the trees grow all around the edges and you can hide. It was along Nate’s nightly route.

They think someone knew he’d be there.

Nate walked a long way before he died. A hundred, two hundred yards, not knowing he was being followed. He didn’t know this was the end of his life. If nobody warned him, he couldn’t have known that he should have loved those last hundred yards, that they weren’t just an obstacle to getting to where he planned, that the sounds of his feet on the pavement and the wind in the branches were all he was ever going to have.

Some people take out handkerchiefs as we sit gathered in the lobby, someone from above standing up to make the sad announcement. Bride’s beside me, and I don’t look at her. I stare into my tea, milkless, sugarless, the color of old leather. I don’t cry. Perhaps there’s somebody here who knows whether Nate would have loved the street where a bullet hit him in the head and spilled all his ability to love across the unswept cobbles, but I don’t know who to ask.

“Are you okay?” There’s a hand on my shoulder, Ally’s. I twitch, brush it away. “He worked with you, didn’t he?”

I stare up at Ally. “I hardly knew him.” My lips are cold as I speak.

The announcer only gives us a minute to take in the news before calling on people to report. Names are read out. Bride Reilly. Gus Greenham. Lola Galley.

When I go inside and meet the people there, I see Hugo is among them. Others I know by sight, or by name.

Alice Townsend. High on the committees, wears heavy, sharp-framed glasses that prove she’s a handsome woman and can get away with wearing them, chignon hair, posture, thirty years in Personnel. We still call it that. There was a time when some optimists thought we should keep up with the times and change the name of Personnel to Human Resources. It didn’t happen. None of us could face the remarks of prisoners about whether we’re really human. Ms. Townsend was one of the people who declared there was no point changing.

Amit Aggarwal. High in security. I’ve heard it said that there’s little that happens in the cells that he doesn’t know about. Fifty years old, and he never forgets a name, a face, an event. Often he’s present where it’s not strictly his concern, at the invitation of his superiors. They know they can ask him years later what happened, and he’ll know. He’s slight, skinny, he doesn’t have a cop’s face. There’s something strung-together like a manikin about him, like you could pick him up easily. No one would speak harshly to him, even if you didn’t know he’d remember it for the next twenty years; just the way he looks somehow stops you. He looks fragile, unless you remember who he is.

William Jones. I look at him. William Jones is at the top, so high he doesn’t even have a department. He meets government ministers. He interprets policy. He’s a sign something terrible is going to happen, because why would he bother speaking to a legal adviser who’ll never make her mark and earns her living defending derelicts and junkies? He sits there, beside my boss, his clasped hands resting on the tabletop. Doubtless he was a handsome man in his youth, and even now, despite the scar that runs across his forehead, his is a striking face, regular features lit with a spark of intelligence, a quizzical twist about the eyes that’s always there. It must come from when he was young, because I haven’t seen him make jokes. Something about him suggests a light that’s gone out. His eyes on me are utterly serious.

“Hello, Lola,” says Hugo.

“Here I am.” My voice is hoarse, it doesn’t stand up to things. I clear my throat. “What’s all this about?”

Ms. Townsend leans forward. “I know you will have heard about Nathan Jensen’s death. You were at the meeting, weren’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, I was.”

“We feel we should warn you…” Ms. Townsend sighs, leans forward. Her tone is not unkind. “You should consider the possibility that you’re at risk yourself.”

“At risk.” There’s nothing I can do with my face.

“We think it’s likely that Nathan’s death is connected with the Seligmann case.”

“Nate.” I can’t feel my hands. “Nobody called him Nathan.”

“Nate.” Ms. Townsend glances at the others.

“Is that what you’re telling everyone? Everyone you called in? That’s why, isn’t it. You think he’ll come after people who interrogated him.” My words run together too fast, but I can’t slow them down.

“It seems likely.” It’s William Jones who’s speaking. He speaks gently, but there’s an underlying note of professionalism in his tone, as if he were speaking to a member of the public. As if he’s spoken that way so much he can’t stop the habit.

I swallow. “Is—I heard a rumor Nate was training to guard military lock-ups. There’s no chance this is some military conspiracy, is there?”

Alice Townsend’s look of pity seals my mouth shut. “It’s true he expressed an interest, but he was too early on in his training to have gotten to that stage yet. I’m sorry, Ms. Galley. It’s Darryl Seligmann you need to be worried about.”

“Oh.” She’s very, very sure.

William Jones leans forward. “Seligmann refused to cooperate with any psychiatric examinations, and there’s very little we know about him, but he bore all the marks of a man who would keep a grudge. Is there anything you can tell us, based on your experience of questioning him?”

“I only did it once.” This won’t save me.

“It was you who captured him.” Amit Aggarwal speaks from the corner of the room without raising his voice.

“Oh, yes,” I hear myself say. “I’ve no doubt I’ll stick in his mind.” The words make me laugh, and I grab hold of my sleeves, drag breath into my lungs, stop myself. Holding on to my arms, I can feel I’m rocking a little. I can’t do this here. “In—in the interrogation, he was hostile. He said funny things.”

“What did he say?” Hugo leans forward. He’s outranked by everyone here, but I’m his.

“He called us soulless.” It’s the only thing I can remember, the only word I can hold on to. I sit before four powerful people and my legs are numb and I can’t remember how to cry, and it’s how I feel. Soulless.

“Soulless?” Jones leans forward. “That’s curious.”

“It’s new to me,” Aggarwal says softly.

“Is that all?” Hugo’s face is expressionless as ever, and it’s a hiatus in this empty white room.

“I—I don’t remember. He threw some words around, said some things, you—you hit like a girl…I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“All right.” Ms. Townsend raises her hand. “We don’t have to do this now. Tell me, Ms. Galley—Lola—what do you think you’ll do?”

“Do?” There’s chalk dust on my eyelids, I can’t see straight.

“Well, we’re talking to the people who’ve had contact with him. For the moment, we’re considering him dangerous.” She speaks calmly, she’s the woman from Personnel—breaking this to me is her job. Her voice and her face won’t mesh in my mind, the images are coming from different places. “Now, most of the people who interrogated him don’t feel themselves to be in too much danger.”

“Why?” My voice is pitched like a child’s. I shouldn’t have come in today. I should have stayed at home. I should be sick, I want a migraine like Paul’s, something to hold on to.

Jones looks at me; there’s awareness in his face, with a faded overlay of sadness. “He was blindfolded.”

“Blindfolded.” They blindfolded him before they interrogated him. They must have known in advance. They must have gone down to his cell already resolved to do things to him he’d never forgive.

“There are few faces he’ll recognize. I’m afraid yours is one of them.”

“Bride. What’s Bride doing?” Bride will have a joke, a saying, a way of making this ordinary.

Ms. Townsend speaks again. “Bride Reilly has requested a temporary transfer to another city. We’ve agreed.”

“Transfer? She can’t transfer. Her husband’s sick, he’s not supposed to have any excitement. He can’t just move, he’s sick.”

“Lola.” Hugo’s voice stops my words as they fall from my mouth, tumble and scatter on the floor like pebbles.

“On a positive note, Lola,” Ms. Townsend continues with a businesslike sigh, her voice still at a soft pitch, “you’ll be pleased to hear that because of what’s happened, we’ve discussed the case of you and Sean Martin a few days earlier than expected, and decided that you should not be disciplined. We thought you’d like to know that before you make any decisions about what to do.”

“But you were going to straw me. I was supposed to be strawed.” The meeting was three days from now. In two days I was going to prepare myself, wash my hair, get some speeches ready in my defense. They can’t just be making a decision now, when I’m not even wearing my good suit.

“Your record is good, and it’s kept on being good after that event. And I think we can all agree that the circumstances were—well, worse than you could expect. It’s good news, Lola.” She keeps saying my name. “I hope you’re pleased.”

“Pleased.”

“But, now you have to decide what to do.” She shuffles some papers. The others watch me. I want Hugo to speak to me, but he’s just looking at me, and I have to shake out of myself the urge to reach for his hand. “Most people have taken temporary transfers. Do you think that’s something you’d like to do?”

“Transfers.” I can’t go away. I don’t know anyone in another city. Becca lives here, Leo, Paul. Who could I talk to? “I—I don’t think I could afford a move, to rent somewhere else, I mean, I don’t have much money saved or anything, I—I don’t know…” They can’t mean I’m not safe here. I’m never safe here. Never, and things happen, I lose blood and pieces of flesh and—how would I move?

“Well, you just take some time to think about it. We could deal with accommodation somehow if that’s a problem. The alternative is staying. You can carry on working here; I won’t say we don’t need the staff. If that’s what you decide, I’d suggest certain precautions, maybe staying with a friend or family rather than living at your own address.”

“My address.”

“Yes, it would be quite easy to trace you. Somewhere else might be safer.”

So I can’t go home. My hideout is discovered. I’m locked out of my kitchen and I’ll have to eat somewhere else, my little blue bedroom is forbidden me and how am I going to sleep in another bed? The pillows will be the wrong thickness, the sheets won’t be the texture I know. I can’t sleep.

“You’ll need to give us a contact number, but don’t tell us the address. You should be as discreet as possible. Assuming this works for you. Do you have family you can go to?”

“My sister.” My voice isn’t certain, it’s stunned. Would Becca even take me in?

“Though if you wish to be extra cautious, someone less easy to trace. A friend, perhaps? Do you have a boyfriend?”

No one knows about Paul. When I’m with him, no one knows where I am. Can I really go to him and expect him to take on a commitment, a fugitive, risk his life and have to see me every minute he’s at home?

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t do this.”

“It’s all right,” Hugo says. His tone is as flat as ever, but he leans forward a little, putting his bulky shoulders between her and me. “I think we’ve finished here. And you don’t need to decide now.”

There’s quiet as the others look at him, and then Jones puts down the papers he was holding. “All right,” he says. “That should be enough.”

I rise before they tell me to go, stumble and hit my hip on the chair as I stand. They sit in their seats, balanced in them, held up. My limbs half remember how to walk, it feels queer and wrong but I move forward. I don’t look over my shoulder as I go out of the door.

When Becca lets me in, she has Leo on her hip. He’s holding his head up now, eyes round as marbles, the brown irises huge in his face. He makes a noise of pleasure to see me and flaps his arm, and something in me breaks.

“Look, it’s Auntie May,” Becca says, and hands him over to me. I take hold of him, wrap my arms around his small body, hold his head against mine. He’s warm and smooth in my arms, scented with powder, but still he’s too little to hide behind.

“Come in, May, I was just making some tea,” Becca says, wiping her hands on her trousers. This doesn’t make sense, Becca never wiped her hands on her trousers or her eyes on her sleeve; she scolded me for doing it. Where’s my sister?

“You seem—okay,” I say, my hand around Leo’s head for support. Fine hairs cling to my palm, and his scalp is soft and hot. My fingers stray over the empty patch on his skull, the great gulf where nothing but a layer of skin covers his brain, and I lift him up, hold him steady.

Becca sighs, not sadly but calm, as if she’d just woken from a deep sleep. “I feel fine. Lionel hasn’t called, before you ask. Nothing’s happened. We’ve just had a nice day, Leo and I. We went out to the park for a walk, it’s a beautiful day for the time of year.”

“You took him for a walk?”

“Yes.” She pours tea.

“Which park?”

“Well, Queens. It’s nearest.”

“I—I took him to different ones.”

“Well, I’m not as energetic as you.” Becca sits cross-legged on the sofa and smiles. Her feet are bare.

“I could have taken him out.”

“Well, you haven’t been taking him out these last couple of weeks, May.” She cocks her head at me, admonishing.

“I—things have happened.” She’s taking him to the parks. What am I going to do?

“Oh, Mom came to visit the other day,” Becca says, picking up some of Leo’s clothes from beside the sofa and folding them.

“Why are you folding those?” I say. I sound confused. “They’re so small already.”

“Hmp.” Becca nods at me with a critical grin. “Well, you were never the one for domestic tasks.”

“I can be domestic.” I can. If she’d seen me cleaning my plates, painting my walls, sweeping my floor, she’d know I’m not the scruffy little kid she grew up alongside. Once I had my own place, I learned what it meant, and I got old enough to do chores. I help Paul keep his place tidy. She doesn’t know it, but if I’m in the house, I help. I’m not a burden.