Days Like Today (26 page)

He was afraid that his muscles were going to go into spasm or to lock without warning but he couldn’t turn the other way because there wasn’t room.
Don’t do something sudden out of desperation,
he thought.
Just keep going.

He couldn’t believe that he was going to make it to the
top. He would have lost hope if he hadn’t remembered that there were other people counting on him. Trying to remain calm, he forced himself to go on. For a while it seemed to him that he was gaining and losing, only to stay in the same place. Then he made some progress. The idea of stopping, and of looking down, began to pull at him. He wanted to look back even though he knew that that would be the end. He kept on.

As he reached for the top, he lunged ahead and up, getting his hand, his good arm and a leg over the edge of the stone shelf. He rolled forward, pressing himself to the security of free ground. Behind him another section of rock slipped downward and fell with a crash to the quarry floor.

This time he looked back, to see if the others were all right. They were both standing where he’d told them to. Maria was clapping her hands. He waved.

Everything was clear and dreamlike in the moonlight. He moved with a steady pace. If he hadn’t felt strange, he would have liked to run. Anyone who saw him would have thought there was nothing wrong, but he knew that something peculiar was happening to him. Being knocked out, and then landing in the quarry, might have shaken up his head. Maybe he had a concussion. He’d have to worry about that later.

He had a strong sense of the unreality of everything he looked at. He was also uncannily aware of being protected. Later he’d imagine that there had been a giant hand above him. At the moment it was simply a presence.

This time, he thought, he wouldn’t make the mistake of charging through the front door and on into the back room, if that was still where they were. If his wife had sent the children away for the afternoon, they’d be at home again now. And the man might have moved on; with the opportunities of a job like his, he probably had several women in the district. Or maybe not. Perhaps his wife’s pregnancy was a sign that the man was committed to her.

As he neared the house he inspected all the overgrown fences, the broken-down walls, the disused paths. He was looking for the car. He had to wait until he was closer.

The car was parked outside the house. It had been positioned at the back, so that no passerby would be tempted to steal it, but it was right next to the door, to save its owner time and to keep him from getting wet if it rained.

He crept along the side of the house to the tool shed, pulled the loose plank away and reached in under the shelf where he kept an extra knife. It was still there, in its sheath. The ax was in its place, too, up under the slope of the shed roof over the woodpile. He stuck the knife down his boot and carried the ax in his hand.

Which part of the house would they be in? Not in the back room this time; the children would be in that bed. And not where the old woman’s bed had stood; he could see the mattress sagging against one of the trees. They’d be upstairs, in his own bed.

He got in through a window, climbed the stairs stealthily, tiptoed beyond the other room where the children would be sleeping, and stopped outside the bedroom. He tried the
door. It moved forward under his hand; they hadn’t turned the key because they’d thought that he was safely disposed of.

He could hear them inside, breathing in sleep.

He pushed the door wide, snapped on the light with his elbow, stepped forward and swung the ax down on the back of the man’s head. Then he pulled out the knife. The sight of the woman – her face partly covered by a white mask – brought him to a halt. He didn’t know who she was. For an instant he wondered if he’d gone out of his mind, or if he’d entered the wrong house by mistake and just imagined all the rooms to be familiar in the half-dark and moonlight. Had a strange couple been invited over for the night?

She made a sound and opened her eyes. He realized that what she was wearing was a large bandage. He must have broken her nose when he’d hit her earlier in the evening.

He dropped the knife on the bed, pulled her by the hair and got her neck into the crook of his arm. He picked up the knife again. She hadn’t even had time to scream. ‘Where’s the hook?’ he demanded. She tried to speak. He released his grip slightly.

She said, ‘It wasn’t my idea. I didn’t want to –’

‘Where is it?’ he repeated. ‘Quick. Or I’ll take one of your eyes out.’ He pushed the knife forward at her.

‘It’s gone.’

‘Where?’

‘I threw it out. He said to.’

‘Where?’

‘In the garbage.’

‘Outside?’

‘No. Still in the bag. Under the sink.’

He said that they’d go there together and not to make any noise. She wanted to talk. He tightened his grip, pulled her out of the bed and forced her to walk in front of him. As he dragged her from under the covers he saw her eyes go to the man and the ax. She began to moan. He told her to shut up. She started to cry. ‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘If you wake the kids, I’ll kill you.’

‘I won’t do anything,’ she whispered. She breathed fast, choking. He loosened his hold on her.

‘I didn’t want anything to happen to you,’ she said. ‘I did it for the food and cigarettes. I –’

‘Move,’ he hissed, shoving her forward.

When they arrived in the kitchen, he made her point out the bag that contained the hook. With the knife still in his hand he lifted the bag out of the pail and dumped it into the sink. ‘Find it,’ he told her.

That was the moment where he almost relented: when, pressing her forward and still gripping her neck in his arm, he saw her hands shake uncontrollably as they searched through the eggshells and the rotten ends of cabbage leaves. He felt such pity at the sight that he almost let her go. The next instant, she had the hook and she was trying to twist around, to reach up and stick it into his face, at the same time kicking backward at him. The trembling had been caused by hope, not fear.

He lifted her off her feet, threw the knife away and brought his hand forward to press more tightly into her neck. He
squeezed as hard as he could until her body relaxed and – as far as he could tell – her breathing stopped, but she could be pretending. He waited. And afterwards, to make sure, he chopped the back of her neck with the side of his hand. He wasn’t going to leave anyone half-dead.
No prisoners, no survivors, no ghosts
: that was what his friends used to say.

He moved her to a chair and ran some water over the hook, cleaned it with the towel by the sink and screwed it back into its socket.

From then on, he worked as if he had actually planned everything, knowing how much time he could save by doing which thing first. He went through the neatly folded clothes that had been placed on the bedroom chair. He found car keys, identification, a notebook and jewelry. He removed a watch, a heavy gold bracelet and neck chain, a large gold ring with an eagle stamped on it. He put the keys in his pocket. The shoes and knife were under the side of the bed.

He retrieved the ax from the body, wiped it on the man’s trousers, looked at the shoes to determine whether or not they’d fit anyone he knew, and decided to sell them. He threw them – with the knife, the papers and notebook and jewelry – into the man’s shirt, tied the arms to make a bundle and stuck it under the bed. Then he wrapped the trousers around the man’s head and carried him out to the car. On the way back to the front of the house, he collected a hammer, saw, screwdriver, nails, screws and bolts and a lamp. He left them all on the front seat and returned to the house for two of the ropes and the ax, which he’d stood in a corner.

He pulled the nightdress off his wife, looked it over for bloodstains and dropped it into the laundry pile. He carried her outside and slung her into the back seat of the car, on top of the man. The ax and ropes went into the front with the rest of the tools. He wanted to stop but he didn’t dare. As soon as the wish for sleep crossed his mind, he knew how close he was to complete exhaustion.

He looked around the kitchen to see if he’d forgotten anything that should be hidden or cleaned. His eye fell on the man’s coat – an extremely beautiful and expensive-looking leather coat hanging on the back of the door. In an inside pocket there was a pistol. How had that gone unnoticed by the children?

He went through the other pockets quickly, pulling out an unused handkerchief, an open pack of cigarettes, a wad of money, a spare magazine for the gun, a map and an address book. He himself would never have gone to another room and left such treasures unguarded. A couple of empty bottles and two glasses on the table might have explained such carelessness. They’d been drunk. After what they’d been through earlier in the evening, they’d undoubtedly taken to the bottle, starting as they bandaged his wife’s nose, continuing during the struggle to drag him and the old woman into the car and then pausing while they had to deal with the return of the children to the house. Perhaps they’d made the kids drunk too, to be sure that there would be no interruption, and no awakenings when they were away from the house. They’d both go, of course; each to see that the other did what should be done.

He kept the pistol on him. The rest of the things he put under the bed upstairs, except for the coat, which he took out to the car. He threw it over the two in the back seat. It was too dangerous to keep, no matter how much it was worth. To sell the car – and the shoes and jewelry – would be easy A dead man’s coat was another matter.

He released the brake and pushed the car away from the house. He didn’t think a short distance would be much use in disguising the noise of the engine starting up, but after having made so many mistakes earlier, he didn’t want to ruin everything now. He was already so tired that he was forgetting things: he was behind the wheel, the car moving, when he remembered that he’d meant to bring the two women another blanket and his wife’s coat.

He drove to the quarry without seeing anyone and, he hoped, without being seen.

Before anything else, he heaved the two bodies over the side. He tore the bandage from his wife’s face and threw the sticky ball of gauze and adhesive into the bushes before he let her drop down. The man went after that, with the trousers still knotted around his head.

He leaned over the edge. ‘Are you down there?’ he called softly.

Maria’s voice came back: ‘Is that you?’

‘I’ve got a car and some ropes. The ladder’s got to be a last resort. You’re going to have to do most of the work.’

*

They washed, changed their clothes and sat down to a
meal. The children were sleeping so soundly that he was sure his guess was right: they’d been given something to keep them quiet. In the morning he’d give them another kind of sedative: he’d tell them a story. This time the fiction would be about their mother and a strange, bad man and – unlike the tales of kings and princesses – no one would ask to hear it a second time.

Maria had a story, too. She said right at the beginning – that first night – that she was going to tell him all the information he’d ever want to know about her; he’d never have to question her again and he shouldn’t try to interrupt, otherwise she wouldn’t be able to get through to the end. In the half-dark before dawn she spoke in a hoarse whisper so hurried that he couldn’t have stopped her anyway.

She was at school when the town she lived in had been caught in a daylight attack. Her first thought was to find her sister. Her sister was in one of the upper grades composed entirely of girls because the boys had been taken into combat.

She’d fled from her classroom only to encounter soldiers raising their guns at her. Grenades came through the windows. One of her friends, standing next to her, was shot in the face and fell to the floor without making a sound, the back of her head blown out against the wall. There was panic in all the corridors. Soon everyone was screaming and pushing. She ran into the gymnasium, where she climbed up an exercise rope that hung from one of the beams, then pulled the rope up after her and hid in the rafters. When the rest of the school took refuge in the gym,
followed by the soldiers, she was perfectly placed to see the massacre that followed and, after she turned her head away, to hear it. That was what she said she kept remembering – not anything she’d seen, but what she’d heard: all the different sounds of fear and pain and the laughter: the sound of men laughing at suffering. Her position wasn’t so safe a few hours later when the retreating troops set fire to the building. And when she got out alive – even without injury – and reached home, all her mother had had to say to her was, ‘Where’s your sister?’ Much later, at the height of an argument about Maria’s racketeer boyfriend, her mother had shouted, ‘If only you’d been the one to die and not your sister. Why couldn’t it have been you?’ That was the reason, Maria said, why she’d left home.

He still thought that once they’d concocted a good story, he should have gone straight to the house where the two children lived: to install Anna there, drive the parents back to the quarry and throw them in. When the girl and boy woke in the morning, Anna could have told them that the fairies had come to take the parents away and that they’d left her in their place. But Anna had said no and anyway, by the time they’d managed to get her to the top of the rock face, all three of them were at the end of their strength.

He’d wanted to go after Maria’s lover, too – the man who had seduced her, taken her out on wild sprees with his black-market friends, indirectly caused her family to disown her and – undoubtedly – had been planning to turn her into a whore: he’d driven her out to the quarry at night; she knew what it was but he’d told her that the place represented
a part of their country’s history that no one was ever going to record, so she ought to see it. It shouldn’t upset her: the people down there deserved to be there; they had all transgressed in some way. Maria had found herself having to live up to her reputation – based on her looks – for being tempestuous as well as sensual. She’d said: sure, she wasn’t scared. He’d parked the car near the edge, pulled her out, made her look over and had asked her if she could see the rats. And then he’d said: what the hell had she wanted to go and get herself pregnant for? What use was she going to be to him now, and anyway didn’t she know he was married? Of course he had a wife; everybody did. You got married the first time so she’d say yes and all the other times afterwards, you just promised it. Why didn’t she know that? Everybody else knew. And now he’d had all the trouble of breaking her in without getting his money’s worth because she was just a dumb farm girl after all.