The dark confides, p.11
The Dark Confides, page 11
‘Yeah. I mentioned all this to Milich.’
She nodded but said nothing, meaning: go on.
‘He went on about split-brain surgery and bicameral minds and some other shit. Things I’d never heard of. Severing the cerebral hemispheres. Something about the corpus callosum and the optic chiasm. He said I was abulic, whatever that means. I mean, what the fuck? Was that supposed to help me?’
‘Okay.’ She wrote, ‘So you grow up and meet who’ll become your wife.’
‘I met her in sixth form.’
She smiled. ‘Childhood sweethearts.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘You loved her?’
‘Yeah, of course I love her. Loved her.’
‘Then why the undercover work?’
‘What do you mean? It was my job.’
‘Well, you’ve escaped your childhood, your old family life, and met someone you love. Why vanish into another life? Why risk what you have? Where you afraid to settle down?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Settling down isn’t the same as giving up.’
‘Then why does it feel that way?’
She had no answer.
‘Maybe I met her too young. I was still living at home the first few years of seeing her, so I suppose she reminded me of that time.’
‘Isn’t that a bit unfair on her?’
‘Very unfair. I gave her up for the force. I gave everything up for the force.’
‘But becoming someone else was preferable to being you?’
‘People always talk about starting again—a new job, a new house, a new haircut—but this, this is something else altogether. I’m talking about a new name, a new persona, a new set of beliefs, an entire new set of people in your life. The first time someone calls you by your new name, and they have no idea that you’re only a matter of months old, it’s like nothing you’ve ever felt. It’s beyond belief. There’s this … this great falling away, like you’re shedding the skin of your old reality. Like a spider. I mean, yeah it’s scary and stressful, very fucking stressful, but on the flip side it’s … it’s astonishing. You feel weightless. It’s beyond conception. It’s like you’re someone else’s clone stepping off the production line, polished and refined and without history. It’s reincarnation.’
‘Wow.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Especially if you’ve always been running from yourself.’
‘Especially that.’
‘Like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly.’ She glinted at him with a wry smile.
‘God, not that again.’
‘You’re the one who mentioned spiders.’
‘Spiders aren’t insects.’
‘Whatever.’
They laughed.
‘What did your dad do?’
He tensed up. ‘He was a cokehead and fucking coward. A woman-hating bully. Always taking it out on my mum and my sister.’
‘He was violent?’
‘Yeah. Always raging.’
‘What about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Did he ever hit you?’
He shrugged. ‘Yeah.’
‘Were you afraid of him?’
‘Of course I was afraid of him.’
‘Did he work?’
‘He was a taxi driver.’
‘What does he do now?’
‘Nothing. He’s sick.’
‘What about your mum?’
‘I wish I could go back as the man I am now and break his fucking jaw.’
‘Okay. And what about your mum? What did she do?’
‘A few things. Dinner lady, supermarket checkout, a cleaner.’
‘And now?’
‘She died a few years back.’
‘Do you mind me asking how?’
‘A stroke. Well, three strokes. The second one paralysed her. Hemiplegia.’
‘What’s that?’
‘She was paralysed down one side of her body.’ He looked at a scab on his knuckles, picked at it. ‘I was frozen cold for five days when she died. Cold to the touch. I had a sore throat for a year.’
‘Were you close?’
‘I think so. A little bit. But he stood between us all so I don’t think anyone of us really got as close we might have.’
‘Do you miss her?’
He thought about this, kept picking until the scab bled. ‘No. I don’t think I do. I don’t think I miss her. We all just reminded each other of him. We were just each other’s scars, walking reminders of the wounds. She tried to get closer to me when she was sick but I think I’d outgrown her by then. It might have been more appreciated if she’d done it when I was a kid. I mean, I get why she didn’t, or couldn’t, but still.’
‘Can a child outgrow its mother?’
‘I think I was just sick of all the pain they brought me, which is a selfish thing to say, I know, but that’s how I feel. I tried with her for so long and never got much back because of how walled in she was with his violence and how closed off from everyone she was, so in the end I think I just stopped trying or caring. Probably both. I put everything I had left in me into the force and my marriage.’
‘What do you mean, everything you had left?’
‘I mean, whatever was left inside me after childhood that was still any good, the part of me that still cared about people, I channelled it into the force and into my marriage.’
She mimicked his movements. Something she probably thought he didn’t notice yet ingratiated her. It irritated him.
‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘I think that shows a really constructive approach to dealing with a bad situation. How about your sister? How has she dealt with it?’
His sister was younger than him by four years. She’d had problems with alcoholism and was ‘morbidly promiscuous’. That was the term her psychiatrist had used, morbidly promiscuous. She gave birth to a daughter when she was fifteen and gave her up for adoption after five months. She tried to commit suicide at seventeen, eighteen and twenty, the last time by stepping in front of a truck. She suffered a depressed skull fracture and was buried alive in a coma for three weeks. She now lived with her girlfriend in Dublin. He hadn’t seen her in four years, not since their mother’s funeral when she’d shown up with a shaved head, the scars of the suicide-attempt weaving palely through the stubble. He remembered their mother’s sister at the wake saying, ‘She’s in a better place now,’ and his sister looking their aunt in the eye and saying, with a confidence he’d never seen in her before, ‘You never came near her in her life, but here you are in her death. You fucking vulture.’
‘She’s okay.’ He looked at his watch and blew out a breath. He had a splitting headache.
‘Would you like some water?’ she said.
‘How about a whisky?’
‘Is that what you feel like now, a whisky?’
‘It was just a joke.’
It wasn’t.
‘Okay.’ She read through his files, wrote something, read some more. ‘You’ve recently been deployed again.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And got divorced.’
‘It never rains but it pours.’
‘How have you been coping in general, day-to-day?’
‘It’s all right there on your lap.’
She crossed something out, wrote something else.
‘Can we talk about regrets?’
‘Regrets?’
‘I like to know my patients’ biggest regrets.’
‘Why? Isn’t that a bit ghoulish?’
‘Only when you know what a person regrets can you know who they are.’
‘You believe that?’
‘I do.’
‘What do you regret?’
She smiled and looked down and then looked back up, into his eyes.
‘This isn’t about me.’
‘Tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.’
She laughed and crossed her legs.
‘I’m serious,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t work like that.’
‘Then from here on, I’m a closed book.’
She was still smiling but the smile was slowly fading, a distant look glazing her eyes.
‘Okay.’ She cleared her throat, repositioned herself. ‘I regret having an abortion when I was in university.’
The air in the room chilled.
‘Have you had kids since?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Well, you’ve got plenty of time. You’re what, twenty-five, twenty-six?’
‘We’re the same age.’
‘You’re thirty-three?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Really? You don’t look it. Well, it still stands. You’ve got plenty of time.’
‘Now I can’t have children.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry.’
‘Me too.’
‘I shouldn’t have said anything.’
‘It is what it is.’ Her thick, dark eyebrows arched above her glasses. ‘Well, what say you?’
He rubbed the outside of his thigh and said, looking the other way, ‘I wish I’d stayed with her and had her baby. I wish I’d been there for her. For both of them.’
‘You mean your wife?’
He looked at the shut blinds, trying to visualise time as a place, moments to which he could physically travel. He wondered where he would go first.
‘Sean, are you talking about your wife?’
The blinds were always shut when he arrived. She never forgot. In two years she’d never forgot.
‘Sean?’
If time were a place he knew exactly where he’d travel to.
Rydell was parked off-road and out of sight behind the snow-dusted dunes of an extensive coastal road that ran parallel to the Irish Sea just outside Southport. Grassed dunes and foliage so high and dense land and sea either side of the narrow two-lane road lay occluded. Bleak and desolate. Sleet pulled in across the road from a stateless wind coming in off the sea. He looked at his watch and then pulled up his hood and got out of the car.
He opened the boot and took out a long narrow box made of aircraft aluminium and shut the boot and walked along the edge of the road in the sand and the snow carrying the box by its handle, looking both ways for traffic. He lay down the box on the road’s edge and removed the metal case that enclosed the spike assembly. He pulled the safety pin and switched on the power, rotated the pressure valve to the open position, ensuring the self-contained tank of pressurised air connected to the double-acting pneumatic actuator was charged to one hundred fifty psi. He scooped up a handful of snow and dusted the box and then rose, visually marking out a signpost approximately a hundred feet away. Then he went back to his car and sat in the driver seat.
And he waited. Holding on to the key fob remote control. Night lowered down in layers of blue. The occasional vehicle drove by, headlights on. He looked at his watch. When five minutes remained on a countdown timer, he got out of the car and squatted beside the rear wheel where he had a view of the box and the road north. The high whine of a motorcycle. He looked at his watch. Out by three minutes. The headlight of a bike hove into view.
The biker cop was travelling fast considering the ice and the snow and the striations of blued darkness laying over it all. Rydell estimated about seventy miles per hour. He watched the signpost. The cop approached thrusting south. The moment he passed the signpost, Rydell pressed the button on the fob and with a pneumatic hiss, a pantographic spike strip deployed from the box, and in a single second the spikes had extended sixteen feet across both lanes of the road.
The cop didn’t see a thing. He rode into the hollow steel spikes without coming off the accelerator. Both tyres blew out and the handlebars turned in, the bike kicking out from under him, and he somersaulted over the windscreen. He came tumbling across the road, past the hidden Corvette where Rydell hunkered, and skidded off into the cushioning dunes before finally coming to rest. Rydell pressed the fob again and in the spikes retracted. He remotely opened the boot, lifted the cop from behind by his armpits and hauled him rearward to his car - the cop’s boot heels dragging across the road gouging out a narrow rutted track in the snow. He groaned and tried to kick out a leg but he wasn’t any real trouble. Rydell got him into the blockaded boot space, folding him up and bending his broken joints to get him to fit.
He went back to the road and retrieved the spike box, refitted the cover and hauled it by its handle. He tucked the box into the boot alongside the writhing cop and slammed down the lid. Back on the road, he stood the bike up, engine still ticking, and ran it forward into the sand. It was difficult to manoeuvre in. He hid the bike behind a high sandhill among chest-high marram grass, switched off its engine and kicked snow over it. In his car, he dialled a number and held the phone to his ear. The call was immediately answered. He said, ‘Anton. Rydell. Get ready to get happy.’
On the top floor of the derelict block of council flats somewhere in the south of the city, Anton sat slumped on the armless sofa, legs wide apart, hands either side of him, palms upward. He gazed into nothing, dead still, the silence about him filled with a mindless droning from the generator. From the room next door, what once was some unfortunate’s bedroom, he heard movement, things being dragged about, arranged. His phone beside him on the sofa lit up and began to ring and vibrate. He picked it up and looked at the caller ID. Wren. He set it back down. It rang on. He picked it up and answered.
‘Were you asleep?’ she said.
‘I still am.’
‘I was thinking about your dream, the fish, what it could mean.’
‘It means nothing. It means I think too much about the wrong things.’
‘I’ve been reading about it and I think it means you think that you’re swimming too deep, that you can’t see the surface any more, the light’s fading. You’re using the fish to try to reconnect, to come alive, to feel something. Or it could be about Mum.’
‘You done?’
‘I’m trying to help.’
‘Maybe you should step away from her side, Wren. You might not want to be the creature she uses to feel her pain.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘We’re monsters. We do monstrous things. We deserve all the hurt we get, but we have money so we’ll never feel a thing. We use people to feel pain for us. I’d feed my closest friends to the baddest wolves just to climb another rung. What would you do?’
‘I wouldn’t do that.’
‘Then what would Wren do to climb another rung?’
‘Anton, what have you done?’
‘What I should have done long ago. But I think the more interesting question here is what have you done?’
Footstep and shuffling somewhere below, ascending the stairs, out of synch, accompanied by a goading voice resounding through the hollowed out floors.
‘Anton. Tell me—’
‘You need to get out, Wren. That’s all you need to do. Now.’
He hung up.
The door opened and the biker cop came staggering in on crumpling knees. One of his lower leg bones tenting up against his leather trousers. He was wearing his helmet and gripping his throat, hi-vis jacket in rags about his leather jacket. Behind him strode Rydell looking pleased with himself. He was holding out a long animal catchpole, braided steel lanyard looped tight around the cop’s neck. Anton grinned and sat up.
‘You should never remove a biker’s helmet after an accident,’ Rydell said. ‘That’s what we’re told, right?’
He walked the cop in circles around the room as if training a defiant dog to do as it’s told. The cop shook his head and pulled at the pole, and when he fell to his knees, Rydell jerked the pole and the cop could do nothing but find his feet and lumber on, limping and grunting. Round and round they went. Anton circled the opposite way, taking in the sight.
‘You sure it’s him?’
‘It’s him.’
‘No one saw you on the road or coming in here?’
‘Wouldn’t be here if they had.’
‘This is good. This is good.’
Anton rapped his knuckles against the cop’s visor and the cop recoiled and tried to lash out, but he was too slow and Anton easily avoided the wayward fists.
‘Where did you get the rabies pole? In fact, I don’t want to know. You’re horribly adept with it.’
‘Got to give him credit too. He’s well trained and used to being handled. Let me show you. You keep your hands at a distance apart on the pole like this. See? You never drag or yank the animal like this.’ Rydell dragged violently on the pole and the cop went to his knees and made an odd sneezing sound inside the helmet. ‘And you especially don’t try to lift the animal like this.’ He stood behind the genuflecting cop, lowered the back end of the pole and began to lift at the loop end. The cop panicked and clawed at his throat.
‘Okay, okay, enough,’ Anton said. ‘Let’s get on with this.’
Within the hour, the biker cop was chained naked to a steel embalming table in the soundproofed room next door. The table tilted on a slight incline and edged with a drainage trough and sinkhole at the lowest end for fluids. Plastic sheets had been taped to the windows and nailed to the floor. The dire trinity Anton had hired moved about with malign purpose. Red coveralls and pointed black executioner hoods veiling their faces from the small camcorder Anton had fixed to the tripod. Two halogen floodlights illumed the diabolic scene. Anton and Rydell stood in the dark behind the camcorder, watching as the three men moved thoughtfully about the chained-down cop, scalpels, secateurs and hammers dripping in their fists. Police a rare treat for the trinity. Two of the cop’s toes had been snipped off and his right knee and shinbone, already damaged in the bike crash, hammered in. His left hand sawed off, the spurting stump cauterised with an electrically heated cauter. He was revived with smelling salts whenever he blacked out. During the profane bloodletting on that hollow steel altar, the cop moaned and shrieked but didn’t say a word, neither in supplication nor in condemnation. Trauma and blood loss had desiccated him and his flesh had tautened and paled blue-yellow with strange white spots. He looked like some strained demon mannequin come alive with wires and galvanism. One of hell’s own sawbones took from a large foam-lined aluminium case a terrifying and ungainly contraption of chromium steel. It looked like a huge pair of vernier calipers.
