Tana French - Broken Harbour

She had quieted. Behind the fine gold haze of hair, her face was still, turned inwards. Her voice was steady. I was the one who was afraid.

Jenny said, “Everything looked so weird. It felt like the light kept getting brighter, till it turned into searchlights everywhere; or like there had been something wrong with my eyes for months, some kind of haze blurring them up, and all of a sudden it was gone and I could see again. Everything looked so shiny and so sharp it hurt, and it was all so beautiful -just ordinary stuff like the fridge and the toaster and the table, they looked like they were made out of light, floating, like they were angel things that would blow you to atoms if you touched them. And then I started floating too, I was floating up off the ground, and I knew I had to do something fast, before I just drifted away through the window, and the kids and Pat were left there to get eaten up alive. I said, ‘Pat, we have to get out now’-at least I think I did, I’m not sure. He didn’t hear me, either way. He didn’t notice when I got up, didn’t even notice I was leaving-he was whispering something to that hole, I couldn’t hear what… Going up the stairs took forever because my feet weren’t touching the ground, I couldn’t move forward, I kept hanging there trying to go up in slow motion. I knew I should be scared that I wasn’t going to get there in time, but I wasn’t; I didn’t feel anything at all, just numb and sad. So sad.”

The thin bloodied thread of her voice, winding through the dark of that night to its monstrous heart. The tears had stopped; this place was far beyond tears. “I gave them kisses, Emma and Jack. I said to them, ‘It’s OK. It’s OK. Mummy loves you so much. I’m coming. Wait for me; I’ll be there as soon as I can.’”

Maybe I should have made her say it. I couldn’t open my mouth. The humming was a fretsaw whining at my skull; if I moved, breathed, I would split into a thousand pieces. My mind was flailing for something else, anything. Dina. Quigley. Richie, white-faced.

“Pat was still on the kitchen floor. The knife was right there beside him. I picked it up and he turned around and I stuck it into his chest. He stood up and he went, ‘What…?’ He was staring at his chest and he looked so amazed, like he couldn’t work out what had happened, he just couldn’t understand. I said, ‘Pat we have to go,’ and I did it again and then he grabbed me, my wrists, and we were fighting, all over the kitchen-he was trying not to hurt me, just hold me, but he was so much stronger and I was so scared he would get the knife away-I was kicking him, I was screaming, ‘Pat hurry we have to hurry…’ He was going, ‘Jenny Jenny Jenny’-he looked like Pat again, he was looking at me properly and it was terrible, why couldn’t he have looked at me like that before?”

O’Kelly. Geri. My father. I slid my eyes out of focus till Jenny was just a blur of white and gold. Her voice in my ears stayed mercilessly clear, that fine thread pulling me onwards, slicing deep.

“There was blood all over. It felt like he was getting weaker, but so was I-I was so tired … I went, ‘Please, Pat, please stop, we have to go find the kids, we can’t leave them alone there,’ and he just froze, stopped still in the middle of the floor and stared at me. I could hear us both breathing, these big ugly gasping noises. Pat said-his voice, Jesus, the sound in his voice-he went, ‘Oh, God. What did you do?’

“His hands had gone all loose on my wrists. I got away and I hit him with the knife again. He didn’t even notice. He started to head for the kitchen door, and then he fell over. He just fell. He was trying to crawl for a second, but he stopped.”

Jenny’s eyes shut for a second. So did mine. The one thing I had been hoping for Pat, the one thing that had been left to hope, was that he had never known about the children.

Jenny said, “I sat down beside him and I stuck the knife in my chest and then in my stomach, but it didn’t work -my hands were all, they were all slippy and I was shaking so hard and I wasn’t strong enough! I was crying and I tried my face and my throat and everywhere, but it was no good: my arms were like jelly. I couldn’t even sit up any more, I was lying on the floor, but I was still there . I… Oh, God.” The shudder galvanized her whole body. “I thought I was going to get stuck there. I thought the neighbors would have heard us fighting and called the cops, and an ambulance was going to come and… I’ve never been so frightened. Never. Never.”

She was rigid, staring into the folds and valleys of that worn blanket, seeing things. She said, “I prayed. I knew I didn’t have any right to, but I did anyway. I thought maybe God would strike me dead for it, but that was what I was praying for anyway. I prayed to the Virgin Mary; I thought maybe she might understand. I said the Hail Mary-I couldn’t remember half the words, it was so long since I’d said it, but I said the bits I could remember. I said Please , over and over. Please. ”

I said, “And that’s when Conor arrived.”

Jenny’s head came up and she stared at me, confused, as if she had forgotten I was there. After a moment she shook her head. “No. Conor didn’t do anything. I haven’t seen Conor for, since, for years-”

“Mrs. Spain, we can prove he was in the house that night. We can prove that some of your wounds weren’t self-inflicted. That puts at least part of the attack on Conor. Right now, he’s going down for three murders and one attempted. If you want to get him out of trouble, the best thing you can do for him is tell me exactly what happened.”

I couldn’t get any force into my voice. It felt like a struggle underwater, slowed, weary; both of us were too drained to remember why we were fighting each other, but we kept going because there was nothing else. I asked, “How long did it take him to get there?”

Jenny was more exhausted than I was. Her fight ran out first. After a moment her eyes drifted away again, and she said, “I don’t know. It felt like ages.”

Out of the sleeping bag, down the scaffolding, over the wall, up the garden and turn the key in the back door: a minute, maybe two, tops. Conor must have been drowsing, wrapped snug and warm in his sleeping bag and in the certainty of the Spains’ lives sailing onwards below him, in their shining little boat. Maybe the fighting had woken him: Jenny’s muffled screams, Pat’s shouts, the faint bangs of overturning furniture. I wondered what he had seen when he leaned to the windowsill, yawning and rubbing his eyes; how long it had taken him to understand what was happening, and to realize that he was real enough to smash through the wall of glass that had held him away from his best friends for so long.

Jenny said, “He must have come in through the back door; I felt the wind on me when it opened. It smelled like the sea. He picked me up off the floor, my head, he pulled me into his lap. He was making this sound, like whining or moaning, like a dog that’s got hit by a car. At first I didn’t even recognize him-he’d got so thin and so white, and he looked so terrible; his face was all the wrong shapes, he didn’t even look like a human being. I thought he was something else-like an angel maybe, because I’d prayed so hard, or something awful that had come up out of the sea. Then he said, ‘Oh Jesus, oh Jenny, oh Jesus, what happened?’ And his voice was the same as always. The same as when we were kids.”

She made a vague motion towards her stomach. “He was pulling at me, here, at my pajamas-I guess he was trying to see… There was blood all over him but I couldn’t understand why, when I didn’t hurt anywhere. I went, ‘Conor, help me, you have to help me.’ At first he didn’t understand, he went, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, I’ll get an ambulance,’ and he was trying to go for the phone, but I screamed. I grabbed hold of him and I screamed, ‘No!’ till he stopped.”