Why We Die (19 page)

To the window; back again. It was Katrina who was unspilling secrets; Helen Coe who was agitated and unhappy.

‘Why did you stay?’ she asked suddenly.

‘I suppose you’d have left.’

‘After I’d nailed his balls to the ironing board.’

Katrina laughed: a short sharp shock that startled both of them.

‘I’m not joking, dear. You stay with them, you give them licence to do it again.’

‘Is this a new phenomenon to you?’

‘What, he beats me because he loves me? Of course not.’

‘Because you seem to have trouble comprehending it.’

‘Maybe that’s because you’re an intelligent woman. Too intelligent to fall for that bullshit.’

‘You think it’s an IQ issue?’

‘Maybe, maybe not. But I’d put a man’s lights out before I let him hit me twice.’

Katrina said, ‘Your point being?’

And up the stairs and into the room came Jonno. ‘Food’s on the table,’ he said. Neither woman replied. ‘Yeah, well,’ he added, and went back the way he came.

Once his footsteps had disappeared downstairs, the only sound in the room was the humming of the bored dictaphone.

‘I suppose,’ Helen said after a while, ‘he didn’t exactly get away with it, did he?’

Another squall of wind, and the outside world turned to water.

Chapter Seven

i

The rain, already hard, redoubled its efforts, and for five minutes bounced off pavements, windows, rooftops, like the trailer for an environmental-damage movie. From the shelter of a shop awning Helen Coe waited until it eased, thinking of this as London weather as opposed to any other kind, which made her wonder if she’d been here too long. It was still steadily raining, though less torrentially, when she moved on.

Her flat was three bus stops from the
Chronicle
house and boasted a canal view, though you’d have needed a periscope. At the corner shop she picked up milk, bread, teabags and washing-up liquid, wishing she’d sent Jonno out for them earlier. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Jonno; more that she regarded it a duty to make his apprenticeship unpleasant. To do otherwise would be to waste her experience. These thoughts carried her the last hundred yards; where, flimsy white plastic bag in one hand, she pawed free her keys with the other, and let herself into the building. She lived on the first floor, and had small excuse for using the lift. A small excuse, though, was all she needed. Somebody she didn’t recognize stepped out as she stepped in, and for the time it took the machinery to deliver her to her landing, she endured the masculine smell he’d left behind: aftershave and hair gel, on its way to being swamped by pubs and smoke.

In her kitchen, she unpacked her purchases; transferred the milk to the fridge, left the rest on the table. The kitchen wasn’t large, and unput-away groceries made it seem smaller very quickly. Helen coped with this by not minding. She poured a medium-enormous gin and tonic, then moved into her sitting room, draped her raincoat over a chair and sank into the sofa. The day’s newspapers lay stacked beside her. Ignoring them, she turned the radio on, and caught the end of a report about an increase in the congestion charge, followed by a brief uninformative item about the discovery of a woman’s body somewhere in the West Country. Interesting set of priorities, she reflected, turning it off again. The same stories were always happening: only their endings altered. Unknown women were murdered, and their bodies dumped in the West Country. Others fought back . . . Helen liked the idea that Katrina Blake be recognized for what she was: a victim who’d switched roles. She even liked the way Katrina seemed determined not to cooperate, as if she felt soiled by what had happened to her. Baxter Dunstan might have deserved what he’d got, but once you took pleasure in that, you were no better than the bastards of Al Qaeda or Abu Ghraib.

She took a large swallow of her G&T, then got up and rifled her raincoat pockets. From one, she took out her dictaphone, and ejected a tape. On this, she’d recorded the afternoon session with Katrina.
I
’
d put a man
’
s lights out
before I let him hit me twice
, she had said, and wondered now if that were true. Scaring a man: Helen could manage that – look at Jonno. But there was a crucial difference operating here; the difference between men who hit women and men who didn’t. Statistics dictated that Helen had met more than a few of the former, but all had pretended to be the latter in her presence. And what would she have done if any had dropped the pretence? By its nature, it wasn’t an offence that took place in public. It had the dropped shutters of a relationship shielding it; it happened behind the carefully constructed doors of intimacy.
Is this a new phenomenon to you? Because you seem to have
trouble comprehending it
. No; she’d known it happened. But knowing something and experiencing it were galaxies apart, and in hoping she’d react in a certain way, she was echoing the thoughts of a generation of men who’d never know what stripes they’d have shown, had they been called upon to march to war.

Ultimately, though, you dealt with what happened to you. Anything that didn’t, you filed under Pending, and forgot about.

This first cassette, she put on the table next to her glass. Then she foraged in another pocket, and found a second.

She inserted it into the recorder, pressed rewind, finished her drink, and poured another. Then dimmed the light, and crossed to the window. Rain pattered the glass, while traffic splashed about on the road below. Because, like everywhere else, the parking here was criminal, an illegal amount of it was taking place on the pavement opposite. Helen didn’t run a car. When she needed to be somewhere, she used a minicab. When she was in a hurry, she rang ahead and explained she’d be late.

Yawning, letting the curtain drop, she went back to her seat.

Another slug of G&T, and she took her glasses off; let her surroundings dim to a cozy fuzz. The room felt warm and private; detached from the world of men. Odd thoughts to be having when she was about to violate the privacy of others, but that was pretty much her job description. She pressed play. After a moment, the recorder broadcast the noise of somebody bending to pick a folded newspaper from the floor, and collecting what had been lying beneath it.
It seems the guardian of the free press forgot
something
. What the voice was referring to was the recorder now broadcasting its words. This felt a little postmodern.
Wouldn
’
t want her to waste her batteries
.

She wondered if he’d really been so naïve as to believe the room wasn’t wired for sound; then found other things to think about as the tape unpacked its meaning.

Dusk had fallen, and the lights in the houses across the canal made everything look warm, comfortable and well fed. In the van, however, all was a grumbly mess. Trent would have killed for a drink, and Arkle was in that high-pitched state he reached when he went too long without sleep. This involved talking too much and tapping his fingers on available surfaces.

Earlier, Trent had done as Arkle wanted; had crossed Whatever Street – the road with the park on one side, behind big black railings – and had rung Helen Coe’s bell, then waited, like, eighteen months for someone to answer it. Helen Coe, who arrived on sticks, had turned out to be old, really old: a granny – very nearly a mummy – and definitely not the Coe they were after. But a kneejerk response to old ladiness kept him hovering on her doorstep anyway, mouth flapping as he unwrapped seven plausible reasons for bothering her, none of them remotely intelligible once they’d been scrambled by his damaged mouth, then processed by her malfunctioning ears. In the end, when she’d looked ready to pass from bewildered to downright terrified, he’d turned and walked back to the van; had got in and been driven away.

Arkle said, ‘Course, that would only really work if we had two vehicles.’

By the clock on the dash, it was an actual eleven minutes before Trent worked out what he was on about.

But now here they were; the third of the unknown quantities. There were lights on but the building was divided into flats, so that wasn’t a clue as such; more an unnecessary confusion. Rain drummed on the van’s roof. A man walked past, with slow enough steps that he might have been a policeman, or possibly a drug dealer. Or both: you heard stories. But he walked on by.

Arkle stopped tapping, and examined his knuckles instead. ‘If you had to eat one of your own fingers, which would you choose?’

Trent tried to think of something to say – anything. But all that happened was that rain kept falling; while over the road, the same lights stayed on in the same windows.

Being in the van when it rained was like sitting in a tin can being shot at.

Arkle said, ‘Where are we, anyway?’

Trent showed him on the map.

Arkle said, ‘Where are we, anyway?’

‘Back there,’ Trent said, pointing, ‘is the Angel Islington.’

‘That one of the blue ones?’

Now a woman walked past with a small, black, snuffly dog. Arkle mimed aiming his crossbow at it; fired an invisible bolt through the windscreen. He was remembering the apple, and how he’d hit it on the bounce: a reaction shot God would have been proud of. He’d raised the subject with Trent a few times (sixteen). He raised it again now.

Trent said, ‘Wish I’d been there,’ feeling like he had been.

Arkle said, ‘What’s that?’

Another dogwalker, thought Trent. Another office worker arriving home; another cleaner heading out to scrub offices. But he looked anyway, because Arkle expected a response when he voiced a thought, and Arkle didn’t mean someone else was coming down the road; he meant someone was standing by a window.

Second floor. She was framed by background light, and had mad grey hair and thick glasses; wore a tatty green cardigan which bunched into tufts around the shoulders. Even as Trent watched he saw her yawn, and remembered not believing it the first time.

‘That’s her,’ he said.

Arkle looked at him, waiting for the follow-up.

But all Trent said was ‘It’s her’ again, and the pair sat watching Helen Coe drop the curtain, while rain hammered the roof as if what it really wanted to do was pound their heads.

I remember a cold morning. I remember a hailstorm last April.
It was late in the year, but there aren
’
t any rules, are there? He
’
d
just washed the car when this hailstorm left little powdery marks
all over it. He hit me that day. He said it was for something I
’
d
done, but it was because he
’
d had to wash the car twice
.

This voice, this tape, this recording Helen had made – it barely sounded like dialogue. It was simply a given; a situation trying to make itself understood. It included the odd question, the odd prompt, but the policeman might as well not have been there. This was Katrina, talking to herself. Or talking to an empty room, rather, which just happened to contain a policeman.

He never used to care where he hit me. When you read about
men . . . When you hear about men who hit women, hit their
wives, they
’
re careful to do it so no one
’
ll know. You see women
in supermarkets with smiles and nice haircuts, who can
’
t reach
the top shelf because their ribs are taped up. But he
’
d slap me in
the face. I had black eyes. He loosed a tooth once. I
’
d tell people
I walked into doors. Some of them even believed me. And you
know what? Even the ones who didn
’
t, they never asked. Never
said anything. You see, if it happens to you, it
’
s bad. But if it
keeps happening, it
’
s your fault.

This woman, downstairs. The journalist. She wouldn
’
t let it
happen to her. You only have to look at her to know that. Or at
least . . . You only have to look to know she believes that. And
belief is not something you can argue with. What people perceive
about themselves, they assume is hard-won knowledge. Who
knows them better than they do? It
’
s hard to accept that things
don
’
t always work like that, that you
’
re not always the person
you think you are. Something happens, and it takes part of you
away. And then you
’
re frightened in case it happens again. And
when it does, you
’
re more frightened, because you
’
re not sure
how much of you is left.

All this stuff, I allowed it to happen, so what does that make
me? A coward? And why didn
’
t I tell somebody, instead of lying
about these stupid injuries I kept sprouting, covering them up
with paint and powder? I think about it now
–
non-stop
–
and
I wonder if what I really wanted was for somebody to
fi
nd out
without me having to tell them. For somebody to know there was
no door I kept walking into. Maybe what I was hoping for was
a knight on a silver steed. Not to carry me away. But to slay the
dragon.

He didn
’
t come, of course. And because there was no door,
I couldn
’
t walk through it. So I stayed and it kept on happening.
Because I let it happen, yes. Because I was ashamed enough to let
it keep happening. As if it were my fault. But then, that
’
s what
we
’
re told, isn
’
t it? We
’
re told that women in that position think
it
’
s their own fault. So when we
’
re in that position, we think it
’
s
our own fault
.

Helen stood and turned the machine off. The room felt smaller, its walls bearing in. She went and poured another drink. For a couple of days, she’d been talking to Katrina – asking the usual questions; the ones where you hoped a story would eventually appear, even if you had to change the words to help it come. But these words flowed without Helen’s intervention, and now she understood that Katrina would have been better off talking to anyone but her. Even this policeman whose name nobody could remember. Because every time Katrina looked at Helen, what she saw was somebody who’d insisted
I
’
d have nailed his balls to the
ironing board . . . I
’
d put a man
’
s lights out before I let him hit
me twice
.

She emptied her glass standing by the sink; in a kitchen in which no man had ever hit her. What did she know, really? When had she decided she was the judge? She didn’t notice pouring another drink, or drifting back into the other room, but that’s what she did; and sank into the sofa again, and turned the recorder on.

You
’
re going to ask about the police now, aren
’
t you? About
why I didn
’
t go to the police. Do you mind if I make a very
particular observation here? Don
’
t make me fucking laugh.
There. Let
’
s move on
.