A Year Less a Day (14 page)

“I still don't get it,” admits Wilson. “Unless she claims that her husband must have been in his room because Button had looked after him all day.”

“That woman is driving me nuts,” says Brougham. “If she's not snooping around the café, she's on the phone demanding to know what we're doing to help her friend. She's phoned at least six times today and she's been in twice.”

Trina has actually been in to see Ruth three times, and sent away twice, but now she is waiting in the interview room with a large plastic garbage bag.

“You've got a visitor if you can stop crying long enough to see her,” the matron tells Ruth. “She's brought you some clothes for your remand hearing.”

“Trina?” she queries hopefully.

“Dry your eyes and you'll find out.”

“Hi, Ruth. How are you doing?” asks Trina as Ruth crashes into her arms. “Not good, eh?”

“Sit down,” orders the matron, dragging the tearful woman off, and Ruth falls into a chair.

“Who's running the café today?” snivels Ruth.

“The Gestapo,” says Trina, recalling her adventure.

Ruth has a fearful look as she queries, “Not Jordan's mother?”

“No. But I got arrested. It was quite a lark. I was just trying to get some of your clothes ...”

“Getting arrested isn't a lark, Trina.”

“Yeah, but I hadn't done anything wrong.”

“Neither have I, Trina,” she cries. “Neither have I.”

“Look what I brought,” says Trina, anxious to change the subject, and she opens the bag like it's a birthday present. “I had to bring you some of my clothes,” she says, pulling out some snazzy pants. “They wouldn't let me have yours. But I expect these will fit you now. You're beginning to look like an Easter snowman. You should eat.”

“Eat, eat, eat,” spits Ruth. “Why does everyone tell me to eat? All my life people said, ‘Stop eating, fatso,' and now it's, ‘Eat, eat, eat.' How can I eat; how can I sleep or even think, knowing he's out there, cold and starving?”

“But you'll get sick if you don't eat, Ruth.”

Ruth isn't listening. “Trina,” she implores, looking for support in her friend's eyes. “Tell me honestly. You do believe that Jordan was there don't you?”

“Well ... I did think it strange that I never saw him.”

“Trina,” Ruth bawls. “Even you don't believe me.”

“Of course I do ... Though you did lie to me. If you'd told me he wasn't in his bedroom, I wouldn't have gone in.”

“He was there. I didn't lie ...” starts Ruth, then gives up.

Several minutes of awkward silence is punctuated by Ruth's constant sniffing, until Trina sneaks a peek at her watch. “I can stay another two minutes,” she says, and that gives her just enough time for an idea she's been working on.

“OK, Ruth. If Jordan really had cancer ...” she starts.

“He did, Trina. I know he did.”

“All right. I'm agreeing with you. I'm saying that if he did, and he was using a false name, what would happen when you killed him?”

“I didn't kill him,” whines Ruth. “Why won't anyone believe me?”

“Well, the police have got a lot of evidence.”

“But, I didn't.”

“I know ... Although the police are pretty sure that you did.”

“I did not.”

“OK. But let's just assume that you did for the moment. What happened to his alien?”

“What alien?”

“The one Jordan was pretending to be.”

“Do you mean his alias?”

“Whatever. All I'm suggesting is that if we wait and see who doesn't turn up for treatment in the next month or so, then we'll know who to look for.”

“A month,” cries Ruth, losing it again as Trina is escorted out. “I can't wait a month in here. I have to find him now.”

Ruth's ability to search for her husband, and her psyche, take a serious blow mid-afternoon when a crusty old battleaxe in a judge's gown yells, “Stop snivelling in my court you stupid woman,” and remands her in police custody for a further forty-eight hours.

The certainty that Jordan was alone and dying somewhere on the street, and the agony of her powerlessness to help him, had gripped Ruth's chest with an iron hand, and she had fainted in the prisoner's box. “Shove her head between her knees,” the judge
had ordered from the bench, and Ruth had quickly regained consciousness, though her mind had closed off to the outside world, and she had sunk into torpor.

Ruth had been led back to her cell like a zombie and, as the matron and guards watch her on the cell-block surveillance camera later that evening, there is growing concern about her catatonic state.

“The scrout hasn't moved in over an hour,” says one as he taps the screen. “Just stares at the door like she's trying to bore a hole in it.”

Ruth is frozen in a trance, bolt upright and motionless, keening with a high pitched whine as tears stream down her cheeks. She is determined to stay awake for a second night—and every night—until Jordan is found, and she cries constantly, catching the salty tears on her tongue and sniffing back the snot. But behind her immobile face is a sharp mind focussed on every aspect of Jordan's battle with ill health. She relives every one of his pain-filled expressions and every anxiety drawn word, counting the number of times he'd said, “What's the point in carrying on?” and the occasions he'd wished aloud that he had been struck by a truck and saved the benefit of a leisurely penitence. “It's like jumping off a cliff in slow motion,” he'd claimed one day, asking in a child-like tone, “Will the rocks hurt, Ruth?”

It is Jordan's pain more than her own that drives Ruth's incessant tears and, as the evening wears on, her constant bawling starts rattling nerves.

“Shut up. You're upsetting the other prisoners,” shouts one of the evening staff as she hands over her charges to the night crew. “She hasn't quit all evening,” the outgoing officer complains to Dawn and Jean as they sign in.

“Well I won't stand for it,” says Dawn grabbing the cell keys and shouting, “Jackson you shit-rat. Shut up now before I make you.”

“Oh great,” moans Jean as Ruth wails even louder, crying, “I haven't done anything. I haven't done anything.”

By midnight, Ruth is under attack from all sides as prisoners and officers alike try to sleep.

“Can't you shut her up?” yells one of the male guards from the adjacent block, and Dawn grabs the keys. “Right. That's enough Jackson.”

Dawn's first slap sends Ruth reeling to the floor, but the crying intensifies until hysteria sets in.

“Shut up; shut up; shut up!” screams Dawn, an inch from her face; but the howling won't stop, and Ruth is turning beet-red through the strain.

A couple of kicks go unnoticed in Ruth's agonized mind as she seeks a way out of purgatory, and a voice inside is begging,
please hit me, hurt me, wake me up and end this nightmare
.

They hit and they kick, but the nightmare doesn't end, and ten minutes later Ruth is still screaming as an uncaring doctor “tut-tuts” at the red contusions on her face. “Been knocking yourself about have you, dearie? I'm going to give you something to calm you down.”

Ruth's trembling hand takes hold of the doctor's wrist and she peers into his eyes with every ounce of will. “I don't want anything. My husband is out there dying in the rain, and they won't believe me.”

“Let go of my hand dear.”

“They're keeping me prisoner here.”

“I know ... Now be a good girl and let go.”

“Why are they doing this to me?” she screams into his face as her nails dig deep.

“Let go. You're hurting me,” he tries calmly.

Ruth snaps. “Why won't you believe me? Why won't you believe me? My husband is dying on the street.”

“Let go; please let go!”

“This is a set-up. You're in on it. His fucking moth-er's set me up.”

“Guard ... Help! Help!”

The shrill shriek of a panic alarm sends guards running, and a wall of uniforms pound down the corridor and crash through the door. Ruth sinks under the deluge as the terrified doctor is dragged away. “Leave her to us,” screams one of the guards, wound up from an evening of Ruth's wailing, and fists fly.

A few minutes later the doctor is brought back, armed with a hypodermic needle. Inspector Wilson has arrived and the yelling has stopped, but one of the male guards is hobbling around clutching his chin, moaning, “The f'kin bitch kicked me. The f'kin bitch kicked me.”

Ruth is still swamped in a sea of flesh, but she manages to get her teeth into the pudgy hand covering her mouth, and she shouts, “you should take up kick boxing—it's good for anger.” Then a fist lands straight in her face and she flops as the doctor jabs in the needle.

“This is very serious for you,” says Wilson as he helps ease the subdued woman from the floor a few minutes later.

“I don't fucking care. Why don't you listen? I haven't done anything.”

“You realize that you will also be charged with assaulting a doctor and two guards ...” starts Wilson, but Ruth is still snivelling.

“I don't care what you do to me. It doesn't matter anymore. All I tried to do was save his life.”

The lights had gone out for Ruth a few minutes after the loaded needle had been shot into her arm, and have stayed out all night. Morning dawns in darkness, as Ruth's swollen and pus-encrusted eyes refuse to open. Her sobs salt her wounds and sting her eyes until she bursts into another wail.

“Shut up, for fuck's sake, Jackson,” yells a warden, and Ruth tries, but fails.

“You don't want me to come in there, Jackson. Now shut the fuck up!”

At home, Ruth would have buried her head in the pillow, as she had most nights for the past three months, but here there is no pillow. Stripped to her underwear, “for her own protection,” she lies on a wooden bench with only a thin blanket for warmth and nothing for comfort, and continues bawling loudly.

Keys rattle and a chair's leg scrapes on a tiled floor. “This is your last warning, Jackson ...”

Holding her breath, Ruth cries as silently as she is able, while the morning matrons, inured to her suffering by years of experience, relax back and sit at the end of the corridor discussing her as if she is tabloid trash. Noreen, the mouthy one, is a flabby blond in her fifties who gets a kick out of the job, while her partner, Annie, just wants to put her kid through university.

“It says here that they haven't found her husband's body yet,” says Annie as she reads the article on the font page of the
Province.

Noreen pours herself a coffee. “No. And they haven't found the one whose throat she slit either. Then there's her mother.”

“I heard about that. Apparently she just vanished, and no one ever reported her missing.”

“There's a lot of that going on—makes you wonder about going out at night.”

“But she was only a kid.”

“Teenager—wouldn't be the first.”

Nothing has missed the rumour mill: Ruth's explorations into the underworld of pornography and drugs, even the suggestion that she was running a coven in Raven's back room.

“They found black candles and a black leather settee, one of the guys was saying,” says Noreen, dropping her voice. “Witchcraft, I bet. Human sacrifice in the suburbs. Did you hear what she did to the doctor?”

The way the night staff had portrayed the melee, Ruth had fought with demonic strength, and her nails had clawed so deeply into the doctor's wrist that she might even be a vampire.

“Bled like crazy,” one of the night matrons had said as she gave her the keys and handed over at six that morning. “She got her nails right into his vein.”

But Ruth won't be doing it again. When she finally
pries open her ballooning eyes she'll discover the root of the pain in her hands—all her nails have been trimmed to the quick.

“You try to bring your kids up right and there's shit-rats like that around,” moans Noreen as Inspector Wilson arrives.

“So, how is our client this morning?” asks Wilson, nodding to Ruth's cell.

Annie looks up. “Someone's going to throttle her if she doesn't shut up.”

“She's no fool; she's working on an insanity defence.” says Wilson.

“If she doesn't shut up soon, I'll plead insanity as well,” cracks Noreen. “You heard she attacked the doctor?”

Wilson nods. “One of the reasons I'm here.”

The sickly taste of blood and bile still cloys at the back of Ruth's throat and makes her retch as Annie gives her a poke. “Visitor,” she says. “Will you behave if we give you your clothes?”

Dressing takes Ruth an eternity, while Noreen and Annie stand over her and make a point of staring. Her new clothes are ripped and filthy from the fight, and the sting of her raw fingertips on fabric makes her whimper as she tries to do her buttons up, but no one helps. And all the while, the swelling over her right eye pulses like the discordant din of hip-hop and threatens to drive her insane.

“I've got some good news, Ruth,” says Wilson, with an edge to his voice, as she is blindly led, in handcuffs, into the interview room ten minutes later.

“What?” she snivels, though is barely able to speak through swollen lips.

“We've found your friend Tom.”

Ruth catches her breath and looks up. “He'll tell you ...”

“It's good news for us,” continues Wilson, talking over her. “Bad for you, I'm afraid. He denies any knowledge; says he never lent you any money.”

“What about his neck? I cut ...”

“Says he nicked himself shaving. He swears that you don't owe him a cent.”

Momentary relief turns to apprehension.
That's what he says now,
she thinks,
but he'll change his mind as soon as I get out.
“He got me into porn,” she whimpers.