Rook & Tooth and Claw (26 page)

“
I have to stay here
,” she hissed at him. “
Don’t you get it? I have to stay here
!”

“All right!” he told her, lifting both hands in instant surrender. “If you want to stay here, then stay here. That’s fine by me.”

Catherine continued to stare at him as he retreated along the aisle. He picked up his chair and sat down at his desk, giving her one last, long look of concern. She was still in shock, no doubt about it, but he didn’t want to distress her more than she was distressed already, and he didn’t want to disrupt the tutorial. He would have a quiet word with her later, when she was on her own.

He went back to his conundrum.
2 Friends? Who
? What he didn’t see was the drop of blood that suddenly appeared between Catherine’s tightly-pressed lips and quickly slid down her chin. It dripped onto her notepad and made a red splattery mark.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Then she lifted her head again and continued to stare at the ceiling, her eyes still expressionless, as if she were listening to a long message that came from a long, long time ago, and far, far away.

He was leaving college at four o’clock that afternoon when he saw Catherine waiting beside the parking-lot, clutching her books close to her chest, her head bowed and her long hair blowing in the warm afternoon wind. He walked up to her and said, “Waiting for your brothers?”

She nodded. This time she wouldn’t even look at him.

“Come on, Catherine, you’ve had a hell of a rough time,” he told her. “You don’t have to come back to college until you feel like it. Maybe you should talk to your doctor. Or better still, you could have a word with the college counsellor. Did you ever talk to Naomi? I know she looks a little – well,
eccentric,
what with those glasses and that hedge of a hairdo, but she’s a terrific listener. She’s a real sane person too. Not one of these whackoes who’s going to tell you that you’re suffering from sublimated guilt or something.”

Catherine raised her head. Her eyes were streaming with tears, so that some of the strands of her hair stuck wetly to her cheeks. “What if I
am
guilty?”

“Guilty of what? Guilty of being the last person to see Martin alive?”

“He wanted to stay with me. He wanted to sleep with me. But I said no.”

“So what are trying to tell me? If you’d let him sleep with you, he wouldn’t have gone back to the beach, and he wouldn’t be dead?”

“I didn’t know what to do. If I’d let him sleep with me, and Paul and Grey Cloud had found out—”

“Catherine, you’re a big girl now. You’re way past the age of consent. If you wanted to sleep with Martin, then there’s nothing that Paul and Grey Cloud could have done about it.”

She shook her head. She really was exceptionally pretty, especially with her hair floating across her face and her eyes glistening.

Jim said, “You can’t let your brothers rule your life. All right, I know they’re family. I know they think that have your best interests at heart, not to mention the racial purity of the Navajo. But look at me. I’m part German and part Scottish and part Hungarian. You may be Navajo, but first and foremost you’re Catherine, your own person. Only
you
can decide what’s best for you.”

“That’s not the point. If Paul and Grey Cloud had found out that Martin and I were sleeping together, they would have beaten up on him, I know it. Every time I’ve gotten friendly with anyone, they’ve frightened him or chased him away. Martin was the first boy who wouldn’t let them push him around. If it had ever gotten really serious between us – I don’t know. It all scares me. It scares me so much. That’s why I didn’t let Martin into the house.”

Jim said, “You weren’t to know what was going to happen to him. How could you? You were doing your best to protect him.”

She lifted her head, her mouth tightened with grief. Jim said, “Here,” and took a travel pack of Kleenex out of his coat pocket. He pulled one out and dabbed her eyes for her. It had been a long time since he had dabbed a woman’s eyes.

“I killed him,” she said, her voice choked with grief. “I should never have dated him. I should never have fallen in love with him.”

“Come on, Catherine. You didn’t kill him. It was bad luck, that’s all. Everybody knows that the beach can be risky at night.”

He dabbed her eyes again, and it was at this moment that he heard the throbbing of a tweaked-up V8 engine, and her brothers’ black Firebird rolled into the parking-lot and stopped close beside them. Paul and Grey Cloud climbed out in their black jeans and their sunglasses, came over to Catherine and stood either side of her.

“Well, well, the Cheeryble Brothers,” said Jim, referring to the irrepressibly optimistic characters in
Nicholas Nickleby.

“The what?” asked Grey Cloud, taking off his sunglasses.

“Forget it. I don’t expect you to know anything about Dickens.”

“Dickens? They sound like hotels for people like you,” Grey Cloud retorted.

“Well, well, a sense of humour,” said Jim.

Paul came up close to him. “Catherine is coming here for the education, man. She’s not coming here to look for a date. She’s not here to look for any kind of counselling, either. And most of all she’s not here for some kind of indoctrination into the white man’s way.”

“What she chooses to make of her time here is up to her, wouldn’t you say?”

“No, I wouldn’t say. And if I were you, I’d stick to teaching English and stay out of the rest of her life, OK?”

“Otherwise what?”

“Otherwise you remember what happened to your college football captain.”

“That’s a threat,” said Jim.

Grey Cloud shook his head. “That isn’t a threat any more than what we said to Martin Amato was a threat. That’s just another prediction.”

Jim took Susan out that evening to St Mark’s, on Windward Avenue, for a steak dinner and an evening of live blues. He liked St Mark’s because it was a friendly, jostling, casual place and dinner didn’t usually cost more than $30 a head, so long as he didn’t drink too much Stag’s Leap chardonnay. They sat at a cramped corner table and tried to hold a conversation while King Jerry and the
Screamers gave a deafening rendition of
The House of the Rising Sun.

Afterward, Jim drove Susan home. They sat outside her house in Jim’s Rebel SST with the engine quietly burbling.

“Thanks for coming out,” he told her. “I needed something like that to get my mind off Martin.”

“That’s OK. I enjoyed it.”

He touched her shoulder. “Listen,” he said, “you know what you said earlier, about boats bumping?”

She looked at him with her head slightly tilted to one side and he knew what her answer was going to be. Girls who want to bump will immediately give you a kiss: they won’t look sympathetic.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that – I don’t know, Jim. Our relationship doesn’t seem to be going anyplace.”

“Where do you want it to go? Paris? Rome? Van Nuys?”

She smiled and shook her head. “It’s not a question of where I want it to go. It should have a dynamic all of its own. But all we seem to be doing together is nothing very much.”

Jim propped his arm on the back of his seat, and faced her directly. “So what are you saying to me? That you want to stop doing nothing very much, and do something else instead? I’m only a college teacher, Susan. My only dynamic is to turn semi-literate kids into people who can express themselves.”

Susan said, “Yes. I know. And I’ve always admired you for what you do. But the truth is, Jim—” She paused, and then she said, “The truth is that I’ve forgotten why I fell in love with you.”

He felt a cold snail-like sensation in his stomach. It made him feel like a teenager all over again. “Is it
important that you remember
why
?” he asked her. “I mean, so long as you do?”

“That’s the thing about it, Jim. I don’t. Not any more.”

“The other day, you said you almost did.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about that; and I don’t think I’m being fair on you. Almost just isn’t enough, is it?”

“Almost is better than nothing.”

“Jim … I don’t want to hurt you, that’s all.”

“You’re right. Better to face up to it. We don’t want to live out a lie, do we?”

“No,” she said, lowering her eyes.

“Come on, we can still pass in the corridor and say ‘hi’ to each other. We can still watch college football games together. We can still chit-chat over cups of poisonous coffee at faculty get-togethers.”

“Jim—” she said, and took hold of his hand.

He took a deep breath. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll live.”

Although it suddenly occurred to him that if he didn’t find the
2 Friends
within the next twenty-four hours, he would almost certainly die.

He knew that something was wrong as soon as he reached the top of the steps and started to walk along the balcony that led to his apartment. His front door was ajar, and there were hundreds of soft, crumbly fragments tumbling out of it, like snowflakes, except that they couldn’t be snowflakes, with the late-evening temperature still well over 60 degrees.

He approached his front door cautiously, tightly rolling up the copy of
Esquire
that he was carrying so that he could use like a club. He listened, but he couldn’t hear anything except for the occasional surge of studio laughter coming from Myrlin’s television in the next door
apartment, and the swooshing of traffic. Somebody was playing a guitar somewhere, and somebody else was whooping with laughter.

He reached the door and the snowflakes blew around his shoes. It was only then that he realized that they were tiny fragments of multicoloured plastic foam. He bent down and picked one up and squashed it between his fingers. It looked as if a pillow had been ripped open and emptied all over his floor.

“Pusscat?” he called, in a low, hoarse voice. He waited, but there was no response. He tried whistling, but there was still no reply. It was a damned nuisance, having a cat that refused to answer to her own name. She had suddenly stopped, about eighteen months ago, and Jim had even taken her to the vet to find out if she were deaf. The vet said, “Just cussedness, that’s all.”

Jim stretched out his hand and eased the front door open wide. It must have been kicked open, because the lock housing had been splintered right out the doorframe. Inside, it was almost totally dark, and he stood for a long time wondering if he dared to go in. There had been a spate of drug-connected robberies along this stretch of Electric Avenue in the past few weeks, and two innocent householders had been shot, one of them fatally.

“If you’re in there, you’d better come out!” he called. “The cops are coming and I’m armed!”

Still there was no response. Jim reached around the door and felt for the light-switch. He took a deep breath, and switched it on.

At first he couldn’t understand what he was looking at. Then – as he took one step into his apartment, and then another – he realised that the whole place had been torn apart, as if by a gang of enraged baboons. The snowflakes had come from his couch, which had been comprehensively gutted, right down to the springs. Polyurethane
foam was scattered everywhere, ankle-deep in places. Pictures had been pulled from the walls and smashed. His television lay on one side, the screen cracked and two of the legs wrenched off. His CD collection had been pillaged, his books thrown everywhere, his venetian blinds reduced to collapsed concertinas.

It was the same in the kitchen. The refrigerator door had been pulled right off, and food strewn everywhere. A large jar of tomato-juice had been emptied across the floor like blood.

Most chilling of all, though, were the scratch-marks across the kitchen cabinets. The light oak doors had been viciously gouged by something which must have resembled a huge claw. Even the formica work-surface had been scratched – over an inch deep in places.

Jim picked up a broken picture-frame containing a photograph of his cousin Laura, with whom, when he was younger, he had fallen hopelessly in love. The glass was smashed and a claw had torn away half of Laura’s face. He looked at it for a moment, and then let it drop back onto the floor. It was as if his entire life had been ripped to shreds – as if everything he had ever thought or felt or worked for had never counted for anything, and this was fate’s way of showing him so.

There was worse to come. He went into the bedroom and his bed-covers had been sliced into shreds, his pillows burst apart. In the bathroom, the mirrors had all been smashed into kaleidoscopes and the washbasin pulled free from the wall – although, thankfully, the pipes hadn’t been fractured.

He was just about to close the bathroom door when he noticed a reflection in the shattered mirror of his medicine cabinet. A dark reflection, on the other side of the door. At first he thought that it was just his robe, which he usually hung up there. Then he realised
it was something more. His robe seemed to have a thick fur collar.

With a terrible feeling of dread, he looked around at the back of the door. His robe was there, yes. But it didn’t have a fur collar. The feline formerly known as Tibbles had been hung on the same hook, right through her wide-open mouth, up through her palate and into her brain. Her eyes were wide open and glassy, and her teeth were bared in an agonized snarl.

Jim bent over the bathtub and up came half-chewed steak and string potatoes and broccoli, as well as an acid gush of bile and chardonnay.

After a few minutes of choking and gasping, he wiped his mouth on a towel and made his way back to the living-room, treading on broken glass and CDs and books. He found the telephone behind the sofa, and by some miracle it was still working. He took Lieutenant Harris’s card out of his coat pocket and dialed his personal number.

He was still waiting to be put through when a figure appeared in the doorway. It was Miss Neagle, in a gauzy pink nightdress, with a ruffled collar.

“My God, Jim, what happened here? You look like you’ve just had your own personal earthquake.”

Jim said, “Not far from it, Valerie. You know what you said about this dark thing coming to get me – this old, dark bristling thing? Well, it’s almost caught up with me, believe me. If I hadn’t have gone out tonight—”