Where the Rain Gets In (9 page)

“What does that mean?”

“It means that there’s money to be had,
if only you’re prepared to take it.”

“I still don’t understand,” said Katie.
“Where are they giving money away?”

“The banks, for one,” said Mike. “They
were only too keen to open an account when I started college, so I opened
several.”

“Under your own name?”

“Some, but not all.”

“How many accounts did you open?”

“Quite a few,” said Mike. “About thirty,
I think.”

“Thirty?” said Katie. “But what’s the
point – you can only take out what money you put in, surely?”

“Not necessarily – the banks are so slow
in clearing funds, half the time they don’t know what you might have in the
bank. I create such a convoluted trail of accounts, I can disappear with their
money before they figure out what’s happening.”

“But it all leads back to you, doesn’t
it?” asked Katie.

“No,” said Mike. “I keep my own accounts
completely separate. Most of the others are bogus business accounts.”

“Now that is fraud,” said Katie. “They
can put you in jail for that, or throw you out of college – Mike!”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t be
going anywhere near those accounts again.”

“So what now?” asked Katie. “What mad,
illegal scheme are you dreaming up now?”

“Not illegal,” said Mike. “I earn a fair
bit at the casino, but nothing too spectacular; and I have a broker buying and
selling shares on my behalf. Together, they make a lot of money; certainly more
than I need to support myself through college.”

“A broker?” asked Katie.

“Yes.”

“From your Belfast firm?”

“No,” said Mike. “I don’t want them to
know about it. I have someone based in London.”

“And he advises you on what to buy and
sell?”

“Occasionally, but it’s mostly my own
decisions.”

“So what – you study the Financial Times
each day, or something?”

“Yes,” said Mike, “I do, but a lot of it
is just common sense.”

“Mike!” said Katie.

“What?”

“There’s nothing common sense about it!
You’re studying for a law degree, for Christ’s sake.”

“So? I’m doing okay on the course; maybe
not up to your standards, but I’ll pass the end of year exams.”

“But what if you get caught?”

“Caught at what?” asked Mike. “I told
you, I’ve stopped with the banks thing, though they’re so stupid it’s tempting
to rip them off all over again.”

“Promise me you won’t,” said Katie.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want you to lose
everything, and I don’t want to lose you.”

Mike looked up at Katie.

“I mean,” she said, quickly, “I don’t
want you to be kicked off the course.”

Mike took a moment to reply.

“They won’t kick me off the course,” he
said. “I’m not going anywhere; unlike Bruno – I think he’s had his final
warning.”

 “Really? Do you think so?” asked
Katie. “Won’t they wait until after the exams? At least give him until the end
of the year?”

Mike shook his head.

“No,” he said. “From what I heard this
morning; I think Bruno’s gone.”

Bruno was gone, in more than one sense
of the word. Katie couldn’t understand how he ever hoped to hold down his place
on the course; couldn’t see why he even applied to study law in the first
place. He was obviously very intelligent, but was in a permanent state of
self-destruct. Katie felt uneasy in his company, particularly when they were
alone. He’d never actually done anything to upset her, but she could sense the
potential for him to do so. Part of it was sex: Bruno fancied Katie and showed
it. Everyone else – Eugene, for example – was either embarrassed by Katie’s
good looks, or presumed she was with Mike and therefore off-limits.

Katie recognised that Bruno’s self-harm
was much more public than her own; she didn’t know if it was any the worse for
that or any better.

Katie never understood why Mike gave
Bruno so much of his time. Mike was under no obligation to explain his every
action to Katie, but it was unlike him to do anything that wasn’t in his own
interest. If the crowd of them were out together – at the casino, say – it was
obvious to Katie that Bruno acted as a form of protection; otherwise, they were
just a bunch of nerds let loose on the town. But Bruno was also such a wind-up
merchant that he could never resist having a dig at the likes of Eugene and
Rory. Bruno wasn’t always happy to be seen out with them, and they would
certainly have been happier without him.

But Bruno was also there for Mike’s own
personal protection. Mike was always just one step away from being in a scrape
with some dealer in the casino and Bruno’s presence was an unnerving deterrent
to anyone starting trouble. The pit bosses – the floor managers – weren’t quite
so in awe. It was their job to watch out for the likes of Mike and forcibly
eject them from the casino. All Bruno could do then was to provide a barrier
while Mike got out with his winnings; it could get pretty intimidating when
they asked you to please accompany them to some back room. It got really ugly
once after they’d repeatedly been playing a Chinese casino in town – Bruno was
no match for twenty or so baseball bats and they all ran out as fast as they
could, winnings or no winnings. Bruno often caused more trouble than he
prevented; he was forever being guided out of a club or a casino, with Mike
pleading for him to please just walk away.

If Katie thought they would be seeing less
of Bruno once he was thrown off the course, she was wrong. Nothing much seemed
to change. Katie suspected that Mike felt sorry for Bruno – as she suspected he
had her when they first met – and that this was what bound the three of them
together. Was this the basis of Mike’s friendship with Bruno and Katie – a
sympathy bordering on pity? Mike denied it, but the impression remained.

At the end of the first year, Mike
persuaded Katie to hold a party in her flat and, despite her reservations about
her privacy, she agreed.

“It’ll be fine,” said Mike. “Everybody
will be so drunk or high, they won’t be looking in your drawers and things.”

“Great,” said Katie, “so they’ll be
throwing up in my bathroom?”

“If they make it that far,” said Mike,
and smile. “I promise you we’ll all help tidy up, and who else has a place like
yours? It’s ideal for a party.”

Katie felt as protective of her flat as
she did of the White Horse – this was her space and she wanted it to remain so.
But she understood what Mike was doing. He was right: Katie’s flat was the
ideal place for a going away party, but this had more to do with Katie
loosening up and not being so uptight amongst their friends. She’d never looked
at her things through the eyes of other people before; even Mike was a rare
enough visitor to her flat, and only once got past the front door.

“I need to use your loo,” he said, after
he’d walked Katie home one night.

“Well, you can’t,” she said.

“What do you mean, I can’t? I have to.”

Katie stood in the doorway and looked at
Mike. Their friendship demanded that she let him in. She was scared that he
might see something he shouldn’t, some incriminating evidence she may have left
lying around in the bathroom. It was decision time again: let Mike in, or
retreat back into her own private world. She stepped back, and allowed him
through.

“I didn’t snoop around,” Mike said, when
he came back down. “I just concentrated on my aim.”

The party raised the same issues for
Katie, only on a larger scale; but at least she had time to prepare for it.

“It’ll be fine,” repeated Mike. “You’ll
be fine. Everybody hides their stuff before a party. Clear away as many things
as you can and by the time we arrive in from the pub, we won’t notice a thing.”
He seemed to be saying that it was normal for Katie to have her secrets, that
he understood her need for privacy and it was fine – but then, he didn’t know
her secrets, did he?

“You’re not all meeting in the White
Horse?” she asked.

“Where else would we go?” said Mike.
“Come on, Katie, I’ll talk to the bar staff; they won’t mind a crowd of
students in for one night.”

“No,” said Katie, “but I might.”

“But these are our friends,” said Mike.

Katie thought of what Mike said as she
got the flat and herself ready for the party. It helped her avoid repeating the
disaster of their first night out together. It was normal to strip the flat
bare of anything that could be damaged; it was normal to hide any personal
stuff she didn’t want to be seen – this is what people did when they held a
party in their home. But it was inside her head that Katie feared the most;
there was nothing normal about what went on there.

Why did Mike push it so? Why did he keep
putting her in a position where she had to confront what she did to herself?
She thought she knew, but she didn’t understand – how could anyone in his right
mind fall for her? He couldn’t possibly know – could he?

When the moment came – that look in the
mirror before she dressed – Katie tried to slow it down. She wanted to freeze
that precise moment – now, is it now? She wanted to know the exact second. She
wanted to know what made her reach for the bathroom cabinet. Was it fear of
what the evening might bring? She thought of the girls in
The Great Gatsby
– girls who knew that an evening would soon be over, that a party would always
end, that none of it really mattered at all.

Katie thought of Mike. She didn’t want
him to know what she did to herself; she didn’t want him to see the cuts on her
thighs. Well, it was too late for that; her scars would never heal.

It’s not as though he’ll ever see you
naked, she thought. Not tonight – and not ever?

Katie didn’t want to keep doing this to
herself. She didn’t want to live her life in this way. She wanted to use her
intelligence to beat this thing.

She looked in the mirror, but her
reflection laughed at her.

In the end it was the thought of the
bloody mess that slowed the moment down.

If you do this now, she thought, if you
lose it now, then you have to clean up the blood. You have to wash yourself and
clean the floor; you have to check for splashes, and you’ll be crying so you
won’t be able to see.

It would add an hour on to getting
ready, and Katie would be late for the pub; there was every chance that people
might start arriving at Katie’s flat.

Katie looked down at her thighs.

Don’t look down there! You know what’s
down there – nothing’s changed there. Are you going to do this, or what? Is
this the moment?

Katie reached for the door to the
bathroom cabinet. She looked hard at her reflection in the mirror and felt for
the packet of razor blades. She unwrapped the blade and held it between her
thumb and forefinger. She lowered her arm so that her hand lay flat against her
right thigh. She pressed the cold metal surface of the blade against her skin.

“This is the moment,” she said, and she
moved the edge of the blade across her skin. The blood trickled over her
fingers. This was too good a feeling for Katie ever to stop; this was her sex.
It hurt, but she hadn’t lost control.

When Katie arrived at the White Horse,
she was relieved to see that Bruno wasn’t there. The last thing she wanted was
Bruno starting trouble, completely off his head on some drug or other. Not that
Katie was a saint when it came to drugs, and Bruno kept her supplied with
whatever she might need, but Bruno took everything to excess. Katie couldn’t
keep track of what he was on, and he could turn a harmless occasion into an
unpleasant scene within seconds of arriving.

This happened a few weeks before the
party, when Katie was at the gym in town. Bruno turned up, and Katie saw
immediately what a volatile state he was in. He was always worse when Mike
wasn’t around; or rather, he was always in the same state, and only Mike had
the ability to talk him around. Bruno began by muttering something to the
rhythm of his weight machine; each time he brought his arms together, he
repeated this one phrase. At first, the noise of the gym obscured what Bruno
was saying, but he grew louder and louder with each rep. Katie hoped the
exercise would act as a distraction for Bruno, but she could see he was getting
worse.

“I wanna fucka nigga,” he said. “I wanna
fucka nigga.”

Katie heard what it was that Bruno was
chanting. She stopped her tread machine and grabbed her towel. Bruno’s chant
became a shout, and Katie ran into the changing room. She sat and listened to
the disturbance outside in the gym – Bruno’s shouts of protest, and the scuffle
as the other members threw him out. They didn’t even wait to call security.

Why would Bruno do such a thing? Or say
such a thing? Katie found at later the same day that Bruno had been thrown off
the course, but this didn’t even begin to justify or excuse his behaviour. She
knew that somehow she was mixed up with all the things in Bruno’s head, but if
Bruno was sweet on Katie, he had a strange way of showing it. Unlike Mike,
Katie felt no pity for Bruno at times like this – only disgust.