People in Season (9 page)

‘Under your supervision.’

‘It’s not a bad deal, is it?’ Her hip pushed into his, the trimmed tuff of pubic hair scratches his skin. ‘It’s your choice. Personally I think there’s a good way to go and a bad one. Why don’t we think of your new watch as a first step the right direction?’

He grins knowingly, eyelids drooped, and says, ‘I love you,’ by way of agreement.

‘I love you too,’ she replies.

It’s a handshake between them that seals the deal.

As Ava sits up to hug her knees, her gaze goes beyond the watches to a bottle of pills erect on the stand. She thought she left her painkillers in the pocket of her purse. Unsettled for some inexplicable reason, she begins to realise that they must belong to Alistair.

‘What do you have those for?’ she asks.

‘In case you get a headache,’ Alistair smirks.

Once again, it’s her turn to withhold affection. Ignoring the doctor’s hand running down her back, she fixates on the bed stand coldly. Alistair reaches over her and makes a show of putting on both watches. Displayed together on his wrist, he holds the arm level with her face.

‘I could wear the two of them. I’d be able to trade for a Ferrari and a pair of shoes.’

Ava has no idea what he’s talking about.

‘I don’t think you keep those pills for yourself or for me, Doctor Evans.’

‘Mm?’ he sounds suggestively.

‘I don’t,’ she confirms.

‘Maybe they’re not painkillers.’

‘Oh, shut up.’ She’s already tired of this nonsense, but when another minute passes the comment has made her itchy enough to ask. ‘What are they then? They look just like the bottle I carry in my purse.’

‘Maybe they’re poison and I like to keep them on me for the thrill of it. Death in a bottle. It’s a funny feeling, you know. Like having a loaded gun. Strangling people is so messy. I did it once. Spit everywhere. Piss too. Poison is much more elegant. Like the watch you got me, isn’t it?’

Ava puts a tick in her negative column of Alistair facts. He’d exhausted her with his untouched game when they met and now he’s at it again. The doctor showing up at her work unannounced and his incident with the taxi driver are both noticeably absent from her checklist. The uncomfortable feeling she gets is more from the idea that the games he plays amuse him exactly because they aren’t that. He’s displaying morbid facts as red herrings and relishing that he can do so without consequence. She knows because it’s exactly what she’d do. Everyone’s entitled to their perversions, so far as Ava’s concerned, just don’t rub them in her face. She pushes his floating arm away from her.

‘I think I like wearing two watches. What do you reckon?’

‘I’ll throw that gold one out the window next chance I get.’

Alistair barks his laugh, ‘And I’ll throw you out along with it.’

Palm pressed over the man’s lips, she feels him giggle madly against her fingers. When he stops, his hands tighten around her and she runs hers downwards, drawing white lines as she claws lightly on the flesh of his neck. In response, he leans forward and pins her to the mattress again. Now her eyes are an animals, lit up in the dark. All’s to be forgotten until there’s a knock on the apartment door.

Ava jumps at the sound, but Alistair leans heavier on her, pushing her legs apart with his knees. Frozen, like they’re caught in a searchlight, Ava’s first thought is of the taxi driver, standing in the corridor with a Gard at either shoulder prepared to arrest them for vandalism and assault. She’s already inventing ways to excuse herself from the matter and growing angrier at the driver for bringing it to this. What a petty man, she thinks, getting the police involved in something already finished. Her second thought is of the Agent Mullen, ready to have her scanned. But he wouldn’t arrive here, at this time, would he?

‘Awfully late,’ Alistair says. ‘Another man in your life?’

The knock is followed by a torrent of pounding. Feeling her wrists squeezed, Ava says, ‘Alistair, you’re hurting me.’

‘Tell me who it is.’

‘How should I know?’ Irritated, she tries distracting him with a question in the hopes that he’ll let go. ‘What time is it?’

His mouth peels open to reveal two rows of gleaming white teeth. ‘Three o’clock and three o’clock.’

With her chest heaving in the effort to get out from under him, he remains poised, passively observing her writhe.

Wary, she asks, ‘Are you going to let me answer it?’

Ava is powerless against the man. A struggle would only make him feel stronger. Riled now, she realises – Oh, here it is. In his possession she is a bag of organs, wrapped in a sweaty bundle on the operating table their bed has become. Beneath the nippled skin of her breasts, blood pulses through veins, stretching across a rib cage that expands and contracts at the inflation of the paired wet sacks that are her lungs. His eyes are a knife, running along her body, testing where best to take a slice. The light from outside is caught on Alistair’s lips and, as a bulge grows, Ava feels herself growing wet against him. Heedless of the razor edge she’s being dissected with, she’s ready to surrender to the arousal, but when the door pounds again, she’s reminded that they’re at a crossroads in their relationship and how she handles the situation will mark them for a long time after. In recognition of the critical impasse, she makes the decision to come out on top. He’s lying to himself if he believes his physical advantage can keep her in check. Calming herself, she invokes the words needed to remind the doctor that she’s more than the jabbering slab of teeth filled meat he’s considered spoiling on a whim.

‘Your hairline is receding.’

The sentence, spoken flatly, prompts a blink, and as the doctor attempts to grasp the comment, he’s brought back to the world of the living. When Ava feels his grip loosen she risks a command, ‘Let me answer the door, Alistair.’ It’s a steady voice that tells him she has more to give than he can take by force in a pitiful power trip. To begin with, he shows no comprehension of how their relationship is to be, but like a switch is flicked in his head, a lethargic grunt sounds from his throat and he rolls over and falls to land on his back. Bare skin painted with a silk robe, Ava glides around the bed, finding slippers, a bracelet, a hairpin, and like the night has been leading up to a practiced trick, from the knock on the door to her circuit round the room, her hand snaps up the pills to palm into her robe, ready for use in a later scene.

Night, the dull blanket draped over Ava’s apartment, mutes the room, it’s bare white walls now an ethereal blue. Ahead of her is god knows what. Behind, Alistair looms in the bedroom, ready to pounce. A strip of light splits the room’s curtain and scans her body as she skips by. Toward the pounding door she goes, meeting it’s pinhole of light with her own contracted pupil. A mass of straw hair is bunched atop a teetering head on the other side. Warped in the funnel of glass the face it sits over is lost. Ava knows who the unexpected visitor is by the time the latch is off the hook. As she swings the door open to confirm it, an obliterated version of her editor is revealed. The woman is absolutely hammered. Streaks of mascara tears stain her cheeks. She’s dressed in a crimson bandage dress, nude leopard heels, sparkly clutch, and a wide leather belt that’s strangling her waist and pushing her cleavage up to her chin. In college Ava and her friends had a name for this kind of woman: a clawless cougar. Too drunk and too old to even know what she’s doing. She’s sorry to see her like this, really, disappointed. Joanne Victoria, though tawdry on a quiet day, has been a giant that demands respect. Now here she is, just another withered divorcee out on the town desperate for a good ride. What has she been up to since that drink in the office? It’s clear this isn’t the first stop she’s made on her drunken odyssey and, given the wobble in her walk, it’s likely the last.

‘How did I get here?’ she stumbles past Ava.

‘Joanne,’ Ava greets her loudly so that Alistair will hear. ‘It’s late. We have work tomorrow. You can’t run a newsroom with a hangover.’

‘Ava, it’s all gone wrong, oh, we’re in big trouble.’ She jumps in fright as the lamp flicks on, then looks at it accusingly. ‘Don’t scare me like that.’

Falling from one wall to another, Joanne is on a course for the bedroom, no doubt hoping to find an empty bed where she can hibernate. Ava skips behind her and lightly directs her away from it, trying to find a place among the carefully selected furniture to set the bumbling editor. Choosing the two-seater couch she watches the woman collapse. With her face planted into the cushions, Joanne mumbles, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen.’

‘Joanne, it’s three in the morning.’ Pulling the cushion away from her, Ava checks it for make-up stains. ‘Do you even know what day it is?’

‘Judgement day,’ she cries a laugh.

Taking pause, Ava glides into the kitchen in search of something to sober her guest. The cabinets and fridge are bare. The best she can cobble together is a glass of juice. ‘You should be sleeping this off at home.’

‘Do you want to know something Ava? Everything that’s happening is because of that dribble of a man of Timothy Walsh, you know, him and his grubby hand on my waist. All of these bloody UPD reforms that are strangling us came about because I can’t stand a sleazebag. County councillors aren’t worth reporting on, my editor said. There’s not enough money for them to embezzle, is there? Go for the big fish.’

‘If you’re only here to reminisce...’

‘It’s much more than that,’ Joanne begs Ava. Something in her soul is hungry for compassion. ‘I can’t keep these things to myself. They’re rotting inside me. I just, I need you to listen.’

Ava nods, resigned to the fact that she doesn’t have any choice, except that her editor’s drunken attention has already shifted, ‘Where is the vase I made you?’

‘Joanne...’

The woman is fixated on a slot in the windowsill once occupied by a carefully crafted piece of pottery she created in her short but passionate affair with homemade gifts. She’d presented it to Ava as a house warming present shortly after her promotion to assistant editor. At the time, Ava had gushed over it and placed it in the cubby where it became a centre piece for the room. But when she noticed that Joanne had never returned for a visit, it made its way to a table in the hall, and shortly after that, suffered an accident in the swing of her handbag. That had solved that problem. Now Joanne has found the empty shelf. To avoid the question, Ava insists, ‘Get on with the story.’

‘Yes, the story,’ Joanne slurs. ‘I’d had this tip. This little tip. Walsh takes the envelope in the bar of the West County Hotel once a month from a local TD, a building contractor of some kind. They skim on materials and split the profits. An even split. Bribing him to look the other way. Is taking money to look away better than doing it yourself?’ She’s confusing herself, jumping to thoughts that are meant for later in the story. Finding her footing again she goes on, ‘Just like that anyway, he takes the envelope, they knock back a Guinness each and off they go like they’d never met.’

‘Who?’

‘I could feel the grease on his hands through my blouse, that smarmy bogger, and the stink of Major’s. I can’t stand the smell of them, you know that. And listen to what he said to me – Even if you caught my hand in the church basket, they wouldn’t have the guts to let you type it up.’

‘What are you talking about? You have to be more clear.’

‘Timothy, I told you. Timothy Walsh!’

‘Why Timothy Walsh? The first UPD? Why are you talking about that?’

‘I’m talking about how all of this,’ she waves her hands about the room and Ava follows their journey, expecting to gain some understanding from the gesture. ‘How all of this started.’

‘You’re agitated and confused. Drink this, calm down, and start again.’

Joanne takes the glass automatically and, not realising that she’s holding it now, forgets Ava’s advice altogether. The filter between her thoughts and mouth has been knocked completely out of order.

‘If you didn’t like the vase you could just say so,’ she mumbles from the corner of her lips. ‘I know I’m no artist. It gave the place some colour though.’

Ignoring her, Ava moans, ‘Why are you telling me about Timothy Walsh?’

‘Well, my editor was right you know. Even with a photo of the two circle jerking the newsdesk wasn’t going to let me anywhere near him. Too popular. On the high end of a seesaw and not ready to be knocked off. Timing is everything. Like that freak doctor. We have to know when to hit him. You said that, didn’t you?’

There’s a faint noise from the bedroom. Alistair has giggled. Neither of them notice. Joanne’s rant is at full steam. Ava, watching the glass in her hand, wrings the cushion in her fingers, half expecting the juice to topple and ruin the rug beneath them. As she reaches out to take it back, Joanne brings it to her lips and slurps at it greedily before making a baffled face. The woman was expecting alcohol.

‘He whispered it in my ear though, Ava. I couldn’t let it go.’

‘Where have you come from? You don’t normally drink on your own. Why are all dressed up like...?’

‘I don’t know where I came from,’ she hiccups. ‘I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t even know why I did it.’

‘Did what?’ Ava’s voice drops dramatically, aware now that something bad has happened. ‘What did you do, Joanne?’

Her editor’s mind though, is compelled to the distant past.

‘I wrote about it anyway. I got the newsdesk passwords, you don’t want to know how, and I changed them and I put it online. That’s where it all started. People don’t say it enough, but I know, I know when history looks back on it all that’s what they’re going to say. That article, that one line in it, that’s what changed the game. A single comment about him being sexually intimidating, a bully and a misogynist. If only I’d known. Trashy comments like that change the world. They’re worse than a badly worded press release,’ Joanne stops abruptly. Her finger, which had been swishing through the air is stuck in it now, her expression lifeless. Ava is inclined to check the woman for a pulse. Just as she’s about to say something, the editor jolts back to form with another hiccup. ‘Control the conversation, Ava, that’s why you’re one of my best, you know that. Don’t answer questions that lead to a talk you don’t want to have. Do you see what I’m saying? I couldn’t have known, could I?’

The juice jumps upward and splashes back down. Ava’s eyes dart to the rug, watchful for orphan drips. Annoyed, she tries reaching out for the glass again, but it’s away, up and around as Joanne uses it to draw her story.

‘Nobody cared about it, the article, it would have disappeared only for his bloody team wanted to nip it in the bud, discredit it in case it picked up any momentum. So they steered the conversation their way thinking that they were going into smooth waters. Ha! How could he let them do it? They made a point of attacking the sexual bully comment – Timothy Walsh is one of the most recognised family men in the county and will not let allegations like this affect the view his wife and daughters have of him – gave a long list of donations to charities for children and community work. Oh yeah, a real saint. They were right anyway, nobody cared about the bribes when sex got dragged into it. But they really should have asked what he gets up to in his spare time if they were going to fight for him.
They started the conversation and all of a sudden these people, these victims, started speaking out, saying he abused them. Children he was supposed to have been helping. A sixteen year old girl, fourteen, younger. My god he was a monster and people had voted him in to fix the lousy roads. Like even a good man could do that. And it all went back to my article. To his grubby hand on me in the bar! Remember The Children, Remember The Children! How could I forget the bloody children! Everything, Ava, these shoes,’  Joanne flings her heels off in disgust and one lands hard on the coffee table, making Ava cringe at the thought of a scratch. ‘These shoes and this necklace. I’m wearing the profits of all the misery.’

Joanne is infected with contagious hysteria. Ava though, seems unaffected.

‘We don’t just get to report good news Joanne. That’s the nature of the job. We all profit from it. What’s important is those people wouldn’t have gotten justice if it wasn’t for you.’

‘Oh yes, I know,’ Joanne concurs, but clearly takes the words in another way than they were meant. ‘One family speaks out and another and then that weasel Walsh is throwing allegations at other people, other councillors, TD’s, Gards, civil servants, a whole ring working inside every sector of our government. Paedophiles. It was like the church all over again. The rats escaped one sinking ship and infested the next. People didn’t want to believe it. If it was true then they were guilty for being blind to it, do you see that Ava?’

‘Oh shush,’ Ava hides a tired expression behind her slender fingers. She’s sure she hears a thump, but can’t imagine why Alistair would be moving about. She’s beyond caring though. She just wants the night to end. ‘You must be giving yourself a headache. Do you need a pill?’

‘I want to know where the damned vase I made you is gone.’

‘Oh my god!’ Incensed, Ava grabs her editor by the arm and tries pulling her out of the chair, ‘It’s in the bedroom Joanne. I moved it and I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. Do you want to see the damn thing? Come on.’

‘Oh never mind,’ the editor cries, ‘you have to let me say this.’

‘No, I don’t,’ she digs into the arm, but Joanne refuses to budge. ‘Let’s go see the vase. It’s right by my bed.’

‘Do you know dead people never shut up, sweetie?’

Letting go of the arm, Ava falls back into her seat. Elbows propped on knees, her face falls into the palms of her hands. Of all the reactions to a statement like this – confusion, shock, curiosity – Ava’s is something altogether different. She’s angry. Joanne has been assaulting her with a barrage of information so inconsequential it could best be labelled as white noise, and now she’s capping it off with something even more disgusting – the absurd. Her editor is trying to impart ideas that she doesn’t need. Like the ugly vase that had no place in her home, Ava’s neatly arranged world doesn’t have room for any of it.

‘They’re a storm,’ Joanne insists, trying to make her young colleague understand that the words are a revelation. ‘Every child that was ever molested and killed joined a black cloud on the horizon that couldn’t be ignored any longer. They were thunder,’ Joanne brings her elocution lessons to the fore, intoning dramatically, ‘A country’s dead and how they died are it’s identity. Our murdered rebels were getting outnumbered by molested children and these kids, they were demanding justice. We were guilty and they were the witnesses. People were rattled awake now, oh you can believe that, and once they got their head around what was happening they had to shift the blame.’

Ava is a statue now, vapid and abject, Joanne invisible to her as she waits for something relatable.

‘Untouched, Ava, the people who knew what was happening and did nothing. UPD, the lot of them. That was the name we came up with. Ignorance wasn’t the crime once that term came in to play, was it? You could imprison the rapists but what about the people turned a blind eye? A few politicians tried standing up to it but they were shouted down: Sure if you protest, then you must have something to hide, and besides, what rights should an untouched have if they don’t allow us any? Once a decade we’re galvanised into action and this had done it. Women – my god – women were letting children be abused. Mothers. What was it that minister said at her trial?’

‘Whelan,’ Ava remembers. Her make-up was terrible.

‘She said she could do more good if she stayed in power, and she wasn’t sure that she could retain it if she rocked the boat. The bitch was in charge of the hospitals and covering up rape scandals in the children’s wards, for god’s sake. Cops were in there. Doctors. Half of them molesting patients, the other half looking away. If that boat doesn’t need to be rocked, what does? For Christ sake when the charges were put against them all they tried turning it into an argument over which political party had molested the most!’ Joanne’s head falls to a side, too heavy for her limp neck to hold. ‘This damn electric scan, all because of a grubby hand on my waist, Ava.’