The Ashes of an Oak (4 page)

Frank thought about how clean the back of the TV had been, how clean the windows were. The carpet may have been worn, but it too was spotless. Mrs Dybek was a lady of habit. He drummed his fingers against the sink. ‘See if Milt’s still in the building would you? Get him to take the plate and glass away. He might find something on them.’

Steve walked away at a pace to catch Milt.

‘Shit!’ said Frank.

He’d just made a fool of himself. A while ago he’d have seen that but, there he was, ready to walk out and close the door, until Steve turned up. Maybe it was time to go.

He walked back into the living room.

The man in the sharp, dark grey suit stared through the window at him.

Frank jumped back and lost his balance and fell back over the arm of the chair. ‘Holy shit!’

He picked himself up, but by the time he was back on his feet, the man had gone. He leapt to the window and looked out. There was no one. He pulled out his gun, bent through the gap, stepped onto the platform and took off down the steps two at a time. ‘Hold it!’ he shouted. ‘Police officer!’ – like that ever stopped anybody from running, he thought.

He reached the lowest level and stopped. There was no one. Not a sound. No footsteps, no heavy breathing, no one in the alley.

He put the gun away and leaned against the railing. His breath stuttered from him as if he’d just run a marathon. He bent double and spat.

‘What the hell?’ he said. ‘What the hell?’

Chapter 4

Frank turned the key, stepped into his house and shut out the world. He leaned against the door, listened to the silence and endured it, forced his ears and his mind to accept that this was in fact a part of the norm.

He dropped his keys into an ashtray on a hallway table, caught himself in a mirror, growled and went into the living room.

‘Hey,’ he said.

Mary pulled her eyes away from her book and smiled. ‘Hey to you too.’

‘What are you reading?’ Mary held the book up for Frank to see. ‘
Babbit
? Does that say
Babbit
?’ He read the rest of the cover. ‘
Sinclair Lewis
. Which one is his first name?’

He went over to a cabinet and poured himself a whisky. He downed half of it instantly and topped it up.

‘How was your day?’ asked Mary.

‘Tell me about yours first.’

‘That doesn’t bode well.’

‘I need sunshine, not rain.’ Frank sat down in a chair, kicked off his shoes and sighed.

Mary turned the corner of the page down and closed the book. ‘I taught some kids English. Some of them liked it, many didn’t. One of them peed in the bin. I don’t know why he did that and neither does he. He just thought it would be funny at the time.’

‘I can sort of see that,’ said Frank. Mary narrowed her eyes. ‘It’s a boy thing, lady. You wouldn’t understand. You girls have such a narrow vision.’

‘I hope you feel the same when you arrest him for peeing in public when he’s twenty.’

‘Anything on the promotion?’

Mary shook her head. ‘No. Not yet.’ She got up, took his empty glass away and refilled it. ‘Your turn to spill the beans, mister.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Hey. What are the rules of this house? You come in from work, get it out of your system and that way we don’t let it suck the goodness from us like some psychic tapeworm.’

She went back to her chair and sat down with her feet curled beneath her. She was five years his junior and those five years showed. She hadn’t managed to get that patina of pale weariness and inertia that he saw in himself; the mask of the city that defined him as much as his soul. Her smile still lit her up and when she put her long blond hair into a pony tail, as she had now, she could have been ten years younger. She had a good figure compared to most women her age and still managed to see the positive in most things.

‘I’m thinking of retiring,’ said Frank.

The reply came without hesitation. ‘Good.’

Frank turned to her. His blue eyes examined her every twitch for lies. ‘Really?’

‘Really. You’ve given that place your all for thirty years. It’s time you got something back.’

‘Yeah. You’re right.’

Mary waited. She knew Frank better than she knew herself. There was more to come. She could tell by the way his head was inclined, the way he watched the reflection of the lights break up in his crystal glass and turn the whisky that smoky gold, the way the corner of his mouth twitched as if he was trying to form the words. In a moment, he would open his mouth to speak, then change his mind and close his lips like a trap catching the words before they escaped. Then he would say what he wanted, because once those words had taken that crazy ride from his brain to his mouth, she knew he couldn’t stand the feel of them dancing on his tongue, just itching to get out.

‘You remember Mrs Dybek?’

‘No. Remind me.’

‘She used to come into the precinct three or four times a week with all these tales…’

Mary remembered Mrs Dybek, the short, round Polish lady who lived alone in an apartment since her husband died fifteen years ago, who came in with stories of aliens and ghosts and complaints that the garbage men sang too loudly on pick up day. She let Frank tell her again because he needed to. It was all a part of the process.

‘…and she died today.’

Frank took a drink and lit a cigarette.

‘What happened?’ asked Mary.

‘She took a dive from the fourth floor. Came to an abrupt halt on the first.’

‘Suicide?’

‘I don’t think so. It doesn’t figure that way.’

‘Someone murdered her?’

Frank pursed his lips. ‘I think so, yes.’

‘Poor old dear.’

‘That’s what I thought. There’s this lady, does no harm to anyone but come out with the odd bit of cuckoo and now she’s dead. It’s not right.’

‘What makes her different from all the others, Frank?’

Frank shot her an angry glance. What the hell kind of question was that? ‘You mean, what made her different from the dead junkies and whores and dealers and thieves and the rapists and the robbers and all the other shit we scrape off the sidewalk?’

Mary’s expression didn’t change. ‘Yeah. Them and the thousands of other Mrs Dybeks that you’ve known. They’re all innocent at some time, Frank. Every one of them. The guy who held up the pharmacy the other week, for example. He wasn’t born with a gun in his hand, same way Mrs Dybek wasn’t born to fall from her landing.’ She went over and sat on his lap and looked into his eyes. ‘So what makes her different, Frank?’

Frank rubbed a hand across tired eyes. She always did this, she always drowned him in whisky then broke him down. She was the queen of marital interrogation.

‘The difference is me,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s like I woke up a different person this morning. I’m smelling things I never smelled before and noticing things I never saw. Faces, wounds, people.’ He finished his drink and put the glass down. ‘You know, Steve picked up on something today that even two weeks ago I would’ve seen. I notice all these other things and I miss that.’

Mary put her head on his shoulder and wrapped an arm around him. ‘Well, maybe there’s a part of you that’s saying you want to retire. Maybe this is your subconscious talking, you know? Freud says that we’re like icebergs and that all this hidden stuff, our deep, true feelings, hides under the water and we only acknowledge a tiny part of ourselves. It’s like we drown the bits that hurt us. But they have to come out somehow, Frank. They have to.’

Frank rubbed a hand over her hair and kissed her forehead. ‘Geez, teacher, how comes you're so clever and I’m so dumb?’ he mocked gently.

‘Why, that’s why I’s a teacher and you’s just a dummy cop. Cause I’s so smart.’

They laughed. The crisis, for the moment, was over.

‘You think it’s a good idea, then? This retirement thing?’ asked Frank.

‘If you can handle it, sure.’

‘I thought maybe we could move upstate. Some quiet town with a lake for fishing and woods for walking…’

‘And a school where you go out into the yard and ring a brass bell to call the children in to class and where you can tell them a story that they think might just be true because they haven’t seen it all already.’

‘What do you say?’

‘I say let’s do it. You want some food?’

Frank put his head back and closed his eyes. ‘No, he said. ‘Let’s just stay like this forever.’

She kissed his cheek. ‘I’d love to Frank, but you’re a bony old bastard and I’m hungry.’

‘Okay.’ As Mary got up, Frank held her wrist. ‘Say, you’re a teacher. You know anything about a poem which goes something like…’ He closed his eyes again as he recalled the words. ‘”The ashes of an oak in the chimney…”, stuff like that?’

‘Yeah. It’s by a fella called John Donne. English guy. Why?’

‘Oh, Milt was reciting it this afternoon while were looking round the Dybek place.’

Mary sat down on the arm of the chair. ‘”It comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes. The ashes of an oak in the chimney are no epitaph of that oak, to tell me how high or large that was”,’ she recited.

Frank was impressed. ‘Wow. Teacher! You know some things. What does it mean?’

‘It means that when death comes, we are all the same. It means that the residue of us, that which we leave behind, doesn’t tell the whole tale.’ She kissed him on the forehead. ‘Will that do you?’

‘I guess so. Kind of sad, don’t you think?’

Mary smiled thinly. ‘Spaghetti or potatoes?’

Frank looked at the clock. The thick luminous hands smiled at him. Ten to two.

He’d slept; the whisky had seen to that.

Then at one on the dot, his eyes had snapped open.

Next to him, Mary snored lightly.

Frank slipped out of bed, grabbed his smokes and went to the window. Mary turned over. Her breaths became deep and long, weighted by the pleasure of unconsciousness.

Outside, people were walking and talking loudly, happily. Cars went smoothly by. The heat from their engines melded with the warm night air and sent a ripple before them as if they were melting the world. Their tyres crackled upon the gritty road like popping corn. It seemed as if they had no passengers. They were just empty automatons grazing his lifeline, to disappear among the street lamps and porch lights into the oppressive distance of a glimmering summer night. At the end of their journey, they would reveal their secrets and eject the hearts that beat within them, to either carry out their evil deeds or reach a dull conclusion to their aimless day. Each car held a secret. Each journey held a story. Each story had an end. He hoped with all his heart that he wouldn’t be there at journey’s end. It never ended well when he became involved.

He lit a cigarette and sat on the windowsill and allowed the cooler night air to tingle upon his naked skin. He could feel sweat trickle between the hairs of his legs and down the back of his neck. He could feel it kiss the air and begin to dissolve in its desire to be taken up into the clouds, to be born again as rain or the condensation upon the windows of a lovers’ car.

What was all this? What was all this light and all this dark? What were these Will-O’–the-Wisps that ghosted through his life and then disappeared by dint of simply turning a bend or ending their burned-out days? Is that what he could smell, even now, in the middle of the night, in the burning oil of car exhausts and the thick perfume of sweat and Chanel? Was that the passing of these sprites? The remnants of their souls? Were those distant shimmering lights of town no more than stars? Memories of seconds passed?

Where did that leave him? Was he just a transient odour under someone’s nose, a brief light on their horizon? And what of Mrs Dybek? There one moment, gone the next. Her void was already filled. Her landlord would have found someone to rent the apartment. Her place in the queue at the supermarket was already occupied. Another had been born to breathe the air she left behind. She had left no scar upon this earth to signify the fight.

If there was no afterlife, if there was no God, if she didn’t see her husband again, what had been the point? To eat, shit, fuck and sleep? Was that it? If there was no Heaven or Hell - if, for certain, there was no Heaven and no Hell - then where were the rules? If the object was simply to live as long and as well as possible then, fuck it, tomorrow he would take his gun and start enjoying life. If the world suddenly found out that there was no such thing as sin, what hell would be let loose upon it? Was he really the keeper of the flame? Or was it God? He was pretty damned sure that it wasn’t human decency. You take away that thin veneer of bible-belt respectability and all you’re left with is an ape – and apes kill. The whole law stemmed from those Ten Commandments. They were either the word of God or the meanderings of a madman. If someone found out that they weren’t real, there really would be hell to pay.

Midnight thoughts. Midnight blues. He would wake up in the morning and, if he remembered this shit, he would feel shame for the childish helplessness that he had allowed to thrive as he sat naked at the window of his apartment in Queens.

He took a last drag of the cigarette and flicked it into the night. He followed it as it fell like a waning firework to the ground.

It landed at the feet of the man in the sharp, dark grey suit.