(2005) Rat Run (55 page)

The last night he had slept in the guest room, which was never used because no guests were invited to stay at their home. The Bear had driven the girls to school and they had gone, sullen and frightened, aware of but not understanding the crisis afflicting their parents. They would never challenge their father and neither had dared to ask why their mother was locked, a prisoner, in her bedroom.

He sat in the living room, his head and body statue still, the coat with the Harris tweed label clutched in his fists on his lap, and he waited for her aunt to come off the stairs and cross the hall, which he could see.

The Bear, who loved Alicia to the point of devotion, was in the garden and away from sight through the window. He raked leaves and perhaps wept - but it could not have been otherwise.

In the village, in the mountains where Timo

Rahman had been raised, she would have been beaten to death at his own hand, then buried in a shallow, unmarked grave, and would never again have been spoken of.

Her aunt passed the door. She did not stop to show her long arms and the skin on them wet from the bath, soiled with blood. She did not hold up the brush of steel bristles that had last been used by the Bear to scrape rust from an old bucket. She went by the door, but he had seen the blood and the brush.

He knew that his wife had met a man in the

summer-house of their garden - knew it because Ricky Capel would not have dared to lie to him and had denied the man was at the house because of him

- and knew that, for her betrayal of him, she was now cleaned.

He could hear each sound she made through the bedroom's locked door and down the stairs and across the hall and into the living room - and knew her body was now cleaned by a brush of steel bristles, the dirt scoured away so that the skin bled, It could not have been otherwise.

The man, Dean - or whatever he was supposed to call him - cleaned the gun.

Ricky said, 'I'm alive . . . Why am I alive? . . .

Because I lied. I lied to Timo Rahman. If I hadn't lied, I'd be dead. He'd have strangled me or broken my head open with a hammer, if I hadn't lied. For giving him the truth, he wouldn't have shot me because that would be too quick and he'd have wanted to hurt me.'

His body shook in spasms and he watched as each part of the weapon was laid out on a coat and meticulously wiped. He rambled.

'A man came after me where I live - I don't know who he is and I don't know what his problem is. A guy I do business with, his home was burned down with petrol. This man came to where I live and his coat stunk of petrol - the coat was distinctive, sort you see once and not again, but you don't forget it from the once . . . and I'm at Rahman's. All bloody hell breaks out, alarms and things, and there's a man legging it over the fence at the back of the garden, but his coat catches on the wire, and they'd have had him if he hadn't slipped off the coat. The coat came in the house, brought in by that bloody gorilla, and it was the same coat and it had the same stink, petrol. He asked me straight, Rahman, did I know the coat?

Basically, what he's asking me, was a man in his garden because of me? Simple question. I lied, said I didn't know nothing about it. I'd have been dead if I hadn't lied. I'm thinking now - the man whose coat was lost, Rahman'll believe he'd come to meet his wife. Poor cow, but not my problem. You look after yourself, in this world, first and second and third.'

The cold ached in every joint of his body but he had lost feeling in his feet however hard he rubbed them.

He did not hear his own voice.

'What's just amazing, he swallowed it. I hadn't the lie off my lips before I'd reckoned it out. Nobody lies to him, don't dare to. Get caught in a lie to him and he'd take a week to kill you. Sort of making a judgement, isn't it? Get killed in an hour or two for telling the truth . . . get killed in a week because you lied and got caught out - matter of judgement. I'm telling you because I like you, because I trust you.'

The weapon was reassembled. Ricky could not have stripped it, cleaned it, put back the parts.

'We get on that boat, get across the water, and we drop you off, then you're gone. It's like you never existed. My secret and your secret, carried to your grave and mine. I don't hear of you ever again and you don't ever meet up with me. What you do, I thought it was my concern, thought it mattered to me.

Isn't - doesn't. I'm telling you, honest, when I realized what you did then I told Rahman I wasn't taking you and he twisted my bloody arm, like it was right out the socket... Then he showed you the picture of that girl, bawled you out for what you done to her. Me, I don't have an opinion, not any more. You see, Dean, we're friends - I like you - friends with trust. That's good, us as friends.'

The weapon was loaded, cocked and laid down.

Hands slipped to Ricky's feet, peeled off the socks, squeezed the last moisture from them and started to massage his skin, the soles and the insteps, and he felt the first flicker of heat. There was wet at his eyes.

'Brilliant, Dean. That's just bloody brilliant.'

'What have I done? Something brutal. What are the consequences of it? Nothing. What am I saying, Malachy? I'm saying this bloody awful place has brought out the bitch in me.'

He lifted his arm, swung it, hooked it round her shoulder. In front of them was the beach and the surf and the horizon where the sea met the clouds.

'Don't think, Malachy, that anyone from my crowd will ever thank you. They don't do that. All except one, they're as awful as here is. I'm saying that you have to stand tall for yourself. Got me?'

She wriggled. She worked her body closer to his and he tightened his grip on her shoulder. Her hair was against his chin.

'It's what you deserve, to stand tall - whatever it was that happened. You get to a time when you've paid your dues, owe nobody anything.'

He felt the warmth of her.

'I want to be there and I want to see it - you standing tall, Malachy.'

The tide had turned to reveal the wide depth of the beach, and the gulls wheeled while searching for washed-up crabs and shells.

And they ate.

From the rucksack she had taken a tin of chicken in white sauce, another of rice, and one of peach slices in syrup. They passed the tins between them and scooped with their fingers at the meat, the rice and the peaches, licked the sauce and syrup off themselves.

Malachy felt the sand grains clog in his throat as he swallowed, and once she coughed hard and spat to clear her mouth. At the bottom of the bag, there was a small, collapsed burner and tablets in a sachet for lighting under it, and a rack the size of a palm for fastening over it, but the wind was too great and the rain too hard for them to try to heat the chicken or the rice - and the smell would have carried on the wind, with smoke that was a signature.

He made a rhythm for himself. With the binoculars he watched the skyline, where the white caps met the cloud, tracked the lenses over the dunes to the west and to the east, followed the flight of the ducks when they dived to feed, then back to the horizon, the roll of the waves and the clouds' chase. Each time he saw her, lingered on her, he thought she took longer to lick her fingers and nails, then her palm. Her face was pale and her lips; sand crusted her cheeks and settled on her glasses. All of her animation was in her tongue, working meat scraps, fruit, rice, sauce and syrup from her hand, licking and sucking. She sat with her shoulder pressed against his. When he lifted the binoculars, his elbow lurched against her arm. When he dropped them on their neck strap and reached to scoop from the tins, his elbow pressed against her chest and softness beneath the weatherproof coat, but he kept to the rhythm he had constructed and watched the sea, the beach and the dunes.

The tins were emptied.

She had her boots and the over-trousers inside the zipped-down sleeping-bag and he felt, through his elbow, the shiver of her body.

Through the lenses he saw the break of the waves far out and the spray leaping above the surf, but no darker shadow of a boat coming towards land. The gulls, in soft focus, were distorted, closer to him.

She shook in little convulsions. Malachy had reason to be there, huddled in soft sand and with bent grass stems around him, all that survived in the dunes. He had a purpose and she did not - should not have been there. Hunger took him back to the tin that had contained meat and sauce. For the last traces of it, his elbow against her chest, he pressed his forefinger, grimy and coated with sand, down into the tin and scraped its sides, his nail against the bottom. The skin caught the top edge, serrated with tiny teeth from the ripping out of the lid. Blood ran. No pain, but blood from a small wound spilled on to the can's base. She took his hand in hers, lifted it.

She gazed at him. Tiredness swelled the rims of her eyes at the limits of the frames of her spectacles, and hair, damp, limp, fell over them, but the eyes had brightness and light. Blood came from his cut and smeared her hand. Not looking away from him, not breaking her gaze, she slipped his finger between her lips and closed round it.

He felt her suck, swallow, and her tongue moved on the wound.

There was, at first, sweetness, gentleness - then the tongue brushed his finger with more force and the lips held it tighter.

She said, muffled, because her mouth held his finger and her tongue took the blood from it and closed the wound, 'I can't think of anything to talk about.'

The warmth from his finger ran in his hand.

'We could, if you wanted to, talk about the weather,'

she said. 'Is it going to rain much longer? I think it's getting brighter in the west, don't you? The wind's not dropping, is it? Do you want to talk about the weather?'

Her tongue licked his finger and she swallowed his blood.

'If you won't talk about the weather, you could talk about damn hypothermia - or you could do something about it.'

With her free hand she pulled down a little more of the bag's zipper, but she held his finger in her mouth, and she wriggled to the side. He slipped into the bag, pushed into it the old brogue shoes and felt them run against her legs, then against the bag's bottom stitching and heaved his weight against her.

She grimaced. 'I've never done it like this before -

get sand in me and I'll kill you.'

She reached behind him and dragged up as much of the zip as she could, and they were pressed together.

He felt the hardness of the pistol barrel gouge at his skin and the angles of the binoculars; he took his finger from her mouth and kissed her. He held her head, and her eyes did not close - as if the moment were too vital to go unseen - and his lips found hers and he tasted her breath and his own blood. He remembered what she had said to him, on a bench in a park of spring flowers:
Do it like you mean it... Don't
get any bloody ideas.
He had done as he was told. It had not entered his mind that she had kissed him, under the blossom and watched by the search party, from affection. She squirmed in the bag.

'God, aren't you going to help? Do I have to do it all?'

There were zips and eyelets, buttons, belts and hooks, and they writhed together to free themselves.

He did not think it was love . . . but need.

'I don't have one, don't suppose you do - not to worry, not that time of the month. I can feel that bloody sand.'

The need was bred on emptiness, Malachy recognized it. The void of his life and a corresponding chasm in hers. Each of them with an unspoken loneliness burdening them. He felt her skin, its coldness, had his hands under her waterproof coat, her sweater and blouse, and his fingers moved with wonderment, as if privilege was given him, and she caught the hand where the wound had been and forced it lower. Their loneliness made it desperate. He heard the zipper of the bag torn open as he came across her. They clung to each other, and she stroked him and he buried himself in her, and then the motion calmed. She moaned. She bucked under him. It was as he had never known it before. She cried out, piercing, as the gulls did over them and he felt the ecstasy of it . . . It was for need, hers and his, and they fell apart. She had said:
Do it
like you mean it.
He had, and he cradled her head. He thought it took them nowhere.

He crawled out of the bag. She swivelled on to her side and her back was to him. He did up the zips and buttons, reefed in his belt. He did not know of any future, only that emptiness must be filled. He lifted the binoculars, scanned and tracked.

'What can you see?'

He said, 'Only the waves and the clouds and the birds - but they'll come, I know i t . . . Thank you.'

'Crazy, isn't it? You being my friend, me not being your enemy. Mad, isn't it? If you saw me where you come from, whatever place it is, I'd be your enemy -

and if you'd just pitched up in Bevin Close I wouldn't be your friend. But we're here.'

The voice dripped in his ear.

'Your thing is killing people . . . What's mine? I'm not bloody proud -1 do heroin from Afghanistan, and cocaine from Venezuela . . . Dean, have you been in Afghanistan? Sorry, sorry, not for me to ask. Forget that. We're friends and we don't ask, don't need to know. I often wonder what Afghanistan's like. It comes on the TV but that shows you nothing, just ruins and old tanks and kids without shoes and women who cover themselves. I tell you, straight up, I've made big money out of Afghanistan, five times the money I make out of Venezuela. I'm not hating you because you kill people, and you're not judging me for what I do.'

The voice rambled, incoherent. He let him talk. He understood most of what Ricky Capel said, and he tolerated it. He took help where he could find it, and when the usefulness of the help was finished he discarded it. He had put the fool's socks against the skin of his crotch and let them dry out against his body warmth, and then he had peeled them on to the feet he had massaged, then put the shoes back on the idiot's feet, pulled the laces tight and knotted them for him. It was critical to him to have the imbecile's help.