Benighted (30 page)

TWENTY-SEVEN

W
hen Hugo calls me into his office, he does something I’ve never seen before: he takes his phone off the hook. “Lola, sit down.” There are creases under his eyes, the flesh under them loosened as if someone had been pulling it about.

“Hugo. What can I do for you?” I sit in the chair facing him. It’s a wide, sturdy thing, big enough to accommodate a man his size. The back of it rises around me, giving me the feeling of leaning against a wall.

Hugo steeples his thick fingers for a moment and studies me. “I have to ask you,” he says, speaking slowly as if each word was heavy, “whether you’ve had any contact with our free-ranger detainees.”

Am I in trouble for speaking to them? “I—took the food cart down to them once. Why?”

“When you were down there,” Hugo unlocks his fingers and lays his hands on the desk, “did you have much conversation with them?”

“Mostly with Lewis Albin. He wanted me to plead their cause.”

“Mm.” Hugo inclines his head. “And what did you say?”

Everything that happens down there is recorded. I’m not sure why he’s pretending he doesn’t already know. “That they’d get a lawyer when they were assigned one.”

He sits up. “It may be that you get assigned to them,” he says. The change of tone surprises me a little. “Richard Ellaway is your client already, and it’s likely they’ll all be tried together. Would that be acceptable to you?”

I look down at my hands, trying to think of what to say. This is a high-profile case. Never mind the city, everyone in the country is going to hear of this. People will take sides. Nons will want to see the free-rangers swing. Lycos will be divided, caste loyalty will war with the knowledge that they’re killers. And I’m going to lose this case. I can’t get them off, and I don’t want to. It may show me as a good lawyer with a doomed cause, a poor lawyer who isn’t trying to win, a show-trial accessory in DORLA’s latest purge. This is a long way from defending moon-loitering alcoholics.

“I—go where I’m sent,” I say. “You know my experience, it’s your call if you think I’m up to it. If I’m assigned, I’ll do it.”

Hugo regards me for a moment longer.

“Is it likely that they’ll get assigned a legal adviser soon?” I say to fill the silence.

“Not immediately,” he says. “Although if you wanted to start acting as one unofficially, I’m sure you’d be allowed a certain amount of leeway.”

“Why?” Hugo is not the man I normally ask such questions. I’ve known him a long time, and over those years I’ve got used to his expressionless face, his neutral comments. Asking him about my position with other people is an uncertain business.

“Well,” he says as he sits back, “it seems you already know them. You’ve had contact with them a couple of times, at least, which is more than most people here. And you arrested them yourself. It gives you a certain prestige. Besides, they did ask for you; it’s possible they’ll be more communicative with you than with a stranger. Albin has asked several people if you’ll represent them.”

“Why would he?” I really want to know.

Hugo’s heavy face remains impassive. “I think he likes you.”

I look past him, out of the window at the gray, rain-smeared sky. I have no response to that.

“In any case,” Hugo says, “we’ve arrested another one.”

“What?” I sit up in the huge chair. “When?”

“This morning.”

“How—how?” This is startling news, this is crucial.

“He’s been leaving messages on the answering machines of three of them, Albin, Sanderson, and Stein. This morning, he went round to knock on Albin’s door, then Sanderson’s. He was quite agitated by the second house, banging on the door and shouting up at the windows. That’s where the surveillance team arrested him.”

I’m leaning forward, ravenous for information. “Is there evidence that he’s a free-ranger himself—I mean, not just a family friend wondering where they’d gotten to?”

“Oh, they recognized him down in the cells,” Hugo says. “No discussion of the murders, of course, but the free-ranging, they talked about that straightaway. He’s one of them, no doubt about it.”

“Jesus.”

“In any case, they’ve been asking to see you again,” he tells me. “They’re becoming quite a nuisance. It would be a favor to all of us if you’d go down and see them.”

“Of—of course,” I say. “I’ll go now.” I stand up, ready to head downstairs.

“Lola,” Hugo says.

“Yes?” It isn’t courtesy to just run out.

“You’ll have to use your own discretion in this. But any information you can give us is valuable, whether you represent them or not.”

“Okay,” I say, barely listening. He nods at me, and I gather myself up and go.

It’s quiet on the stairs. My shoes are low-heeled and rubber-soled—I gave up high heels when Seligmann got loose and took out this old pair, scuffed and cheap and easy to run in, and they make almost no sound as I walk down the steps. There’s a tube flashing overhead, and the steps are concrete, dingy. The change in light stings my eyes as I go through the door into the white-tiled corridor, and I stop for a moment, blinking, shielding my face.

“Is that you, Ms. Galley?” Albin’s voice sounds from the end of the row. “Please come in.”

There’s a dark-haired man in the cell beside Carla’s, standing with his hands pressed against the partition. I don’t make much noise as I walk but he turns at my step and comes up to the bars, reaches through them with a bruised hand, saying, “Lola, thank God, you’ve got to help us.”

I stand frozen on my feet, just beyond his extended hand.

“Lola, angel, I’m so glad to see you, they’re accusing us of murder, these agents arrested me and they said I’d killed someone called Nate Jensen, do you know who that is?”

There are bruises on his face, one of his lips has a little cut, just at the edge where it splits over the canine if you punch the cheek. My heart beats, echoing through my chest.

“Lola, for God’s sake, say something.”

“She isn’t going to help us, Paul,” says Sarah. “I told you, it’s not going to happen.”

“Lola, please.”

My mouth fills with ice and I can’t speak.

“Lola, what’s happening? Is there some place we can talk alone?” Paul’s hand comes back through the bars, holds on to them with a light grip. I’ve seen his hand curved that way around my wrist. “Listen, I—I guess this is a shock to you, I mean—I know I should have told you about—oh God—” He turns around in the cell, a full circle. Pacing the bars. “Lola, I’ll beg if you want me to, but you’ve got to believe me, I never heard of Nate Jensen before today. Please, don’t just—don’t give me that face, just—please, say something.”

My legs shake. I take a step back to keep from falling.

The other prisoners are at the back of their cages, far away from us, watching.

“Lola,” Paul says as I turn around. “Lola!” I keep a grip on the bundle of papers in my arms; one foot follows another and I hardly sway at all, my eyes filled with white. It isn’t until I get out into the stairwell that I start to run. I stagger up it for a few paces before I slip and fall, a step digs into my shin, and I sit wordless. It’s cold and filthy here, I can’t stay here, but there’s nowhere else left in the world I can go.

TWENTY-EIGHT

I
t doesn’t take very long before everyone knows. This is DORLA, after all.

No one speaks to me very much. Hugo asks me where I’ll stay now, and I can think of nothing to say. I can’t go home. I can’t go back to Paul’s place. Sitting penned in my chair, I think this, and even to think his name twists a blade inside me. Bride’s gone away. Becca won’t take me.

My eyes are crusted and ache as if I’d spent too long in the light. I look at Hugo out of them. “I don’t know,” I say. The voice isn’t mine, and I can’t feel my limbs. “Maybe I could fuck Ally Gregory for somewhere to sleep.”

Saying this is the end of me. Hugo’s face barely changes, it just—settles, goes still like sand settling underwater. I didn’t know I was going to say it, and once I’ve said it, all the doors open and everything comes rushing in. I can’t keep my memories separate anymore. The look Hugo gives me is one I’ve seen before, one I’ve given people myself. It’s the way people look at twitchers. My body lies limp in his chair, and gives up. My eye jumps, and my hands start to shake. I look down at them through the haze, watch them jump and crawl in my lap like dying frogs, and I can’t make them stop. What I feel, above everything else, above the memories and the pain and the din inside me, is a sense of sick inevitability, like a fallen sinner who finds, when the last day comes, that she was right all along. She always knew she’d end up in hell.

The first night I’m given an empty cell to sleep in, one of the longer-stay places that has a sink and a mattress. I have blankets, more of them than the prisoners have, and I’m wrapped in my coat, and still I shiver as drafts blow through the bars. The bars bang against me when I turn over, they loom above my head when I open my eyes. My vision is striped with them, in the half-dark they waver and shift, focus and unfocus, and when I cover my eyes the image of the bars still swims in front of them.

Within half an hour, the whisper goes from cage to cage. There’s a DORLA agent sleeping in the cells, there’s a bareback down here. When I first hear the hisses, I think it’s my imagination, that I’m hearing the sound of the bars. Then I start to make out the words.

Hey skin…Skin girl…

I can handle this. I’ve had this all my life. I turn over and pull the blankets over my ears, but still I hear it.

You’re gonna die down here…

They can’t reach me. They can’t touch me here in this cage.

Let us see your soft pretty hands, skin…Who’s the bareback whore…

Something touches me on the arm, and I fly up, my body vibrating like a plucked string, scrabbling at the place I was touched. Looking around me, wild in the dark, I can see that the cells around me are empty. I look down. A cigarette pack. A lucky shot. I pick it up, open it to see if someone hated me enough to throw their cigarettes away, but it’s packed full of dirty tissues. I close the pack, don’t look at what they’re soiled with.

We can get to you, skin…I’ll be first, skin…You’ll scream for it…

They see me as I drag my mattress to the middle of the floor, as far away as possible. I know they can see me.

You won’t get away…Frigid bitch, let’s see you lie down…

Names I’ve heard before. Bareback girls are sluts. Bareback women are frigid. Bareback flesh needs a good workout because they never fur up, they like it rough. Bareback children fuck their brothers and sisters. This is what they say, this and other things. The whispers scuttle from cell to cell like rats. They tell me what they’re going to do to me. They tell me what I am.

I bang on the door, try to sound the alarm, but that happens a lot down here. Nobody comes.

The memory of Paul’s skin possesses me moment to moment, and I can’t predict when it will come. When I look in the bathroom mirror, though, I don’t think he’d recognize my face. There are no smiles now, no concessions, my eyes don’t close. It’s a face that I recognize, the hollow sockets, the damaged teeth, all the ugliness that I spent a lifetime trying to hide, that I knew in the end I would never escape.

I take blankets, fold one into a pillow, layer others into a mattress, push my desk back, lock my office door. This is where I sleep now. Chairs tower over me. In the middle of the night I dream of Paul and wake up longing for him. The pillow I’ve folded is hard, rigid fabric, an uncomfortable place to smother my sobs, and my hands grasp the institutional blankets and remain empty. I could sculpt him from clay, the line of his neck, the soft veins along his arms, his waist, his jaw, alone in this dark room I could make a statue of him and it would be right, anyone would see it and know, yes, that’s him.

It can’t even be called weakness, it hurts so much. Things don’t annoy me anymore; nothing hurts my feelings. I look at the world through the same red shadow, and the pain comes and goes according to its own tides, and the world seems barely real.

That isn’t so, though. It’s the reality of this that hurts most. I can’t make it stop. It isn’t an argument to be conjured out of existence by an apology, it isn’t a state of wounded feelings that can be cajoled away. My lover is down in the cells with his fellow killers. There’s a lock on the door. I struggle with it, fight it, cry to the world to change. It doesn’t happen. It can’t.

One day I walk out of the office, through the streets. People jostle me. I don’t step out of their way. I walk and walk, find I’ve gotten as far as St. Veronica’s and turn to go inside. I sit in the accident and emergency department for two hours, watch the crooked limbs, the choking children, the man who staggers in clutching his chest. A nurse passes me and stops, asks if I’ve checked in at reception.

I look up at her, and I can’t feel my face. “No,” I say, “I’m not sick.” As I stand up, I brush my hand against her arm, feel the smooth nontexture of her uniform. The sensation of the fabric stays in my memory for hours.

Nobody sends work my way. My hands shake, my skin prickles. Everything about me is raw, as if I’d lain with a lover made of sandpaper. I can’t stop thinking about skin cells. Once after Paul left my apartment, I lay down on the bed, pressed my cheek against the pillow, thinking what I’d learned in forensic classes when I was thirteen, that a little dust from your skin remains on what you touch. I loved the thought, that Paul was still on my pillow. Now I can’t tell if there are any skin cells of his left on me. I don’t stop taking showers, telling myself that if I can keep my hair clean it means I can survive, but there must be a vestige of him somewhere around my office, from the days when I still lived in his apartment and he’d kiss me good-bye and send me to work with traces of him still on my face and clothes. If my coat brushed against something, if I touched a shelf with the same fingers that touched him, there must be something of him left. I neither scrub the office nor refuse to dust it; I go on as I have always done, not trying to keep or purge whatever remnants of Paul may be scattered. To do that would mean knowing which I preferred to do. Instead, I live inside my own scraped, scarred skin; I drag from place to place trailing blood like a snail, and people start to step aside when I pass them in the corridor, they start to avoid my eyes.

I can’t stop dreaming of Paul at night, and I wake up crying because even in dreams, I can’t find an answer that will make any of this go away.