One of Us (20 page)

“Anna,” he said, in a thick, bubbling voice. “Help me. I’m really hurt. I think my nose is broken and I’ve lost a tooth. For Christ’s sake, do something, it really hurts. You’ve got to help me, Anna, you’re a doctor, I need you.”

I walked over to him. “Medical student,” I said. And then I kicked him, very hard, in the balls. It was good, and I wanted to do it again. But I did not. I just left.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The car was sitting outside, Corgan in the front passenger seat, Fat Paul driving. The back door was already open. I got in, and had not even closed the door before Paul drove away, fast. He did not look at me, not even once. Corgan sat in the passenger seat, looking too big for such a car. He did not speak. I looked out of the window and tried to become sober, and said nothing.

I was taken to a building that had once been something to do with industry and making things but now was made into apartments that were full of empty space. Paul stopped in a small area in front of the building that was taken up by expensive cars watched over by a camera on the wall. Corgan got out. “Move,” he said.

I got out of the car and Paul drove away without looking back. Corgan keyed some numbers into the panel beside the door, and the door clicked open.

“Up to my flat. Move.”

I did not like this, not one bit. “This is your flat, where you live? Why am I going there with you? I don’t think I want to—”

“What you want doesn’t matter,” he said. He pulled me in by my arm, and the door shut behind me. I had no choice. When did I ever have any choice? All this was mapped out, start to finish. I felt like an actor in someone else’s play. We went up three floors in a silent lift, and then along a corridor with a carpet that silenced our footsteps as if we were not even there. I looked straight ahead as we walked, but I could feel the weight of his stare upon my skin. Then we arrived at a door, and he paused for a moment. “You be good in here, no pissing about. Nicky’s one of my own, and this is personal.” Then he opened the door, and pushed me in.

Nicky stood there. He stared at me for a moment, and took a long breath, as if he had just come up from deep under water. “Thanks Sam,” he said to Corgan. “Thanks.” He did not speak to me.

“No problems, Nicky. How is she?”

“I don’t know,” the man said, “I’m shitting bricks, mate. If anything happens, and she gets to hear...”

“Time to earn your keep, Anna.” Corgan put his hand in the small of my back, and I walked forward down the corridor so that it did not stay there.

The room was dimly lit with the kind of expensive lights that made it look like a trendy bar, and a flat television on the wall the size of a window. There was a leather couch along one wall, with a big glass coffee table in front of it. A shapeless bundle under a blanket lay on the couch. An air freshener had been sprayed recently, but the room still smelt of alcohol and strawberries and vomit.

I walked over to the couch, knelt down beside it, and pulled the blanket back. A girl lay underneath, very young. She had fashionable clothes on that were too old for a girl her age, and her hair was matted with vomit. She was not conscious.

“How much has she drunk?” I asked. “Do you know?”

“I dunno,” Nicky said. “I dunno. Alcopops most likely, from the smell, but I don’t know how many bottles she’s had.”

“Drugs?”

“What? No. Well—no. I don’t think so. I don’t think so. God, I hope not.”

“You must take her to the hospital,” I said, checking the girl to see if she had any head injuries.

“I can’t,” he said. “You’re the doctor. You see to her.”

“She is best at the hospital,” I said. “She needs to be monitored, watched. If she gets worse, she needs—Corgan, take her to the hospital.”

Corgan came out of the shadows of the room, a shark swimming up from the depths. He passed by me, stared at me with dead eyes, and said, “Anna, I don’t pay you to tell me what to do, so be a good girl and do as you’re told. Nicky, I’ve got to make a call.” He walked out of the room.

Nicky looked at me.

“I will do what I can for her,” I said. I had no choice. They were not going to take her to the hospital. And if anything happened to her, it would be my fault, not theirs. “She is so young, she can not be older than fifteen.” The contempt was clear in my voice.

“She’s fourteen,” Nicky said in a quiet voice.

“I will do what I can for her,” I said again. “But you stay away from me while I do it. And you stay away from her. What kind of man is with a fourteen year old girl and lets her get like this? No kind of man. I will look after her, but you stay away from me.”

He lifted his hands, not to strike me but more as if he was pleading. Then he sat down heavily on the chair.

“She’s my daughter,” he said. “This isn’t business. She’s my daughter. She told me she was staying with friends, sleeping over. One of them rang me, and I found her like this, in the park. I rang Sam and he said to bring her here, that he would fetch you, that you’d be able to look after her. I thought she was with friends, safe. I’m not a bad father. I’m not. I thought she was safe, but you can’t watch them all the time, can you?”

The girl stirred, moaned in a little voice and then said something about being cold. Her body shook and she gave out a sour, sad belch. Then she went back to her sleep. I checked her mouth, made sure she had not brought up any vomit, listened to her breathing for a minute or two. Then I covered her back up with the blanket.

“This is all I can do,” I said. “Her breathing is normal, and she seems responsive. If she has drunk too much, she could have her stomach pumped. But if this was hospital, and I was a doctor, I would not be doing that right now, just watching her, observing. But this is not a hospital, and I am not a doctor, just a student, and I tell you again, it is your daughter, you should take her to the hospital. If there is nothing wrong here, and she is just your daughter, I can not see why you do not do this.”

Nicky put his head in his hands, and rubbed at his face as if he wanted to get rid of something from it. Then he sat back in the chair, swore to himself, and shook his head.

“Course I want her to be cared for properly. I want the best for her, always. Whatever you think of what I do, I’m her dad, and I would give anything for her.”

“Then take her to the hospital.”

He looked up at me, held my gaze. “If I do, my ex will find out. And if she does, then that’s it, I won’t see Danielle again. She’ll use this to have her solicitor on to me quicker than flies onto shit. I’ll lose my access. And I can’t have that. Not ever.”

Now I understood. I checked the girl again. “You do not think she will tell her mother herself?”

“What, about this?” He laughed, but there was not much joy in it. “She knows better than that. Not only would she end up never being able to stay with me, but her mum would kill her. She’d never be allowed out with her mates again.”

“I am surprised,” I said after a while. “I would have thought that doing what you do, you would not have this problem. That you could...apply pressure. Scare the mother. Make her see things your way with a few threats. It would be easy, I think, for a man who does what you do.”

He looked at me for a moment, then looked back at his daughter. I thought about what it would do to this girl when she realised the truth about the man she loved and called daddy, when she realised what it was he did, and what put food on her table. I thought about the guilt that she would feel. And the more I thought about it, the more angry I became, because I knew what her future was. I knew only too well. People like him poisoned lives. But be calm, Anna, I thought. Hate him from within, but keep your mouth shut.

“And does she know?” I said. I kept my voice calm, like I was making conversation about the weather. I was never very good at keeping my mouth shut.

He frowned. “Does who know, what?”

“Your daughter. Does she know what you do?”

Nicky stared at me, rasped his fingers over the stubble on his chin. “Piss off,” he said in the end.

“Or does she think you work in a proper job, like the normal people do? When it’s her birthday, do you think she knows where the money to buy her presents comes from? What you do to get it? Her party dresses, does she know what they are bought with? She will, one day, if she does not now. And when she finds this out, you know that she will hate you, don’t you? She will despise you, and she will hate you, and you will make her hate herself.”

He sprang up from his chair, and moved towards me with his fist raised. I braced myself to be hit and wondered whether he ever lifted his hand like that towards his daughter. I was sure that he would have done to his ex-wife.

“Nicky,” a voice said from the doorway, very quietly, without any kind of threat or order at all, but it was enough to make the man drop his hand. “Go take a walk.”

Nicky stared at me for a moment, the desire to hurt me clear in his eyes. He lifted his hand, jabbed his finger close in to my face. I blinked, but tried very hard not to move my head back at all.

“You look after my daughter, and if anything happens to her, I’ll push your fucking face into a deep fat fryer.”

He held his finger in my face for a moment longer, then turned and walked out of the room past Corgan, who leant against the door frame, his hands in his pockets.

“I think you upset him,” Corgan said.

I shrugged and gave all of my attention to the girl. Nicky was a danger of one kind, obvious and immediate like an angry dog. Corgan was another kind, and one that scared me far more. He was like a part of nature, like a volcano, and the danger was deep down where you could not see it. He walked over to me and stood very close.

“You’re a one, aren’t you Anna? Come across all quiet, but underneath you’re all claws and teeth. I should have kept a closer eye on you.”

I could smell his aftershave, feel him there next to me, big like a building, something that cannot be moved. The girl shuddered in her sleep. I stroked her hair. Corgan stood there, just watching me. My skin crawled and itched under his stare, like it was giving me sunburn.

“Your friend,” he said in the end. “The one who was fucking Elena.”

“He was not,” I said.

“Not what I hear,” Corgan said.

“He was not.”

Corgan moved a little closer. If I turned my head to the side, my cheek would have brushed his crotch. “Whether he was, or wasn’t, he was trying to fuck me. She was trying to fuck me. You know anything about that, Anna? Were you trying to fuck me too?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” I said. “I don’t know and I don’t care, I am just here for the girl, this, this is what I do for you, this is what you make me do. So I am doing it, and you are getting in my way.”

“It’s just that from what I hear of him, and what I knew of Elena, I’m thinking are they smart enough?” It was as if I had not said anything at all. “Smart enough, those two, and with enough balls to have a go at something that’s mine? Maybe. Maybe. But I keep wondering whether someone smarter was pulling their strings. What do you think, Anna?”

“I don’t,” I said. “I do not think. I am just here for the girl. I am just trying to live my life, in this world. I do not think. It’s bad for you.”

“Mmmm,” Corgan said. I felt him move, and my throat went very dry. He bent down next to me, and put two fingers on my cheek. He gently moved my head around so I was looking at him.

“I will find him, Anna.” He spoke very quietly, as if he were talking to a child. “And when I do, he will talk to me. You understand that? He will tell me everything before I’m done with him. And if I find out anything...”

I put my hand on the girl’s head. She twitched, the way a cat does when it is dreaming. Her skin was clammy to the touch. She had dribbled a little into the cushion. I took a tissue from my pocket, and gently wiped her chin.

“I have to make sure this girl is all right,” I said, not looking up at Corgan. “I cannot leave her. She is the only innocent one here.”

“So, what are you guilty of, Anna?” Corgan said. “Is this a confession? Tell me.” I could feel his breath on my face.

“I am guilty of working for you. That is all. But that is enough.”

Corgan laughed, held my face for a moment more, and then he let go and walked away and shut the door and left me on my own with the girl and the ticking of the clock. I wondered if she would ever talk to her father about the things she probably knew already. It was never easy.

The argument with my father began with something stupid, like these things always do. I was going away for the weekend with friends from medical school, to a quiet cottage by a lake for noisy drinking by the fire. I told my father, weeks beforehand. But when I mentioned it closer to the time, he frowned and said, “I promised your aunt we would visit.”

“So we visit next weekend.”

“I told her this weekend. You go with your friends another weekend. She is old Anna, we do not visit enough, and I am not going to break a promise.”

“But I had said to you, I told you I was going away, and you said OK. It was weeks ago, everything is arranged.” I sounded like a twelve year old.

My father shook his head. “You never told me you were going away.”

“I did,” I said. “I remember. I told you. You’re just pretending you don’t remember because you know now that you forgot but you won’t admit it.”

“No,” he shrugged. “You’ve got it wrong.”

“I have not,” I said.

“Well, maybe yes, maybe no, whatever, I am busy, Anna, and I have told you my decision.”

“No maybe yes, maybe no, I am right, and you are lying.”

My father stopped, as suddenly as if I had slapped him. If I had, only one cheek would be red. But now, both were.

“Remember who I am,” he said slowly. “I am your father, and you do not call me a liar. You do not call me a liar in my own house.”

“And are you not?”

“If you have something to say, Anna, say it now. I do not have the time to play games. And I will not be called a liar in my own house.”

He stared at me. I stared at him.

He waited.

I opened my mouth, but I could not make any words come out so I just stood there with it open, looking like a fish. My father crooked an eyebrow.

“Well?” he said.

I cleared my throat. Took a breath.

The door banged, and Aleksey breezed in. “Sis, taking a break from cutting up dead people? Dad, I wanted to borrow...” He looked from one of us to the other. “You two having a fight? I need to put a coat on, it’s that cold in here.”