Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Alien X-Ray

“Oh, you want to tango tonight,” she said.

He gently avoided her clinging ways. “I guess you did a lot of that in Rio and Buenos Aires, Lima and Santiago when you were courting South American money for the IRA.”

He watched for a reaction on the word “Santiago.”

She backed away. “And what have you done to support a cause besides simper from a pulpit?”

“Nothing,” he said. “What made you fall in with the IRA at such a young age?”

“I escaped the Magdalene ‘school.’ None did, you know.”

“I do know. I’ve looked all that up.”

“So you can divine my entire life story from the Internet?”

He took his customary chair without turning his back on her, yet making the movement look natural, not defensive. He’d studied marital arts, but was finding the philosophy more helpful than the fighting part.

She tossed herself on the bed, reminding him that she’d made her political point on her back the world over and that she still struck him in some ways as a rebellious teenager. “How do you know how young I was?” she asked with a bit of a preen in her voice.

If Max was at his mid-thirties, his teenage “older woman” must be pushing forty, like Molina. Vamping it up might not get the instant results it once had. Besides, peace had made her cause moot.

“Max thought of you as an older woman.”

That had her sitting up, indignant. “Only six years!”

“Double that in the emotional age between you. And then there’s your vast sexual experience edge, no matter how wrongfully you came by it.”

“Max was an infant. A baby. He knew nothing of the world but being a privileged American and underage drinking and having fun and wanting to go far from home to seduce and screw his first girl.”

“That sure didn’t work out for him, thanks to you. He thinks the only reason you went off to the park with him was to have his cousin Sean killed in that IRA bombing. Divide and destroy.”

She shook her long black hair and wriggled to expose more leg in the front high-rise of the bipolar skirt. Nearing forty or not, she was a world-class beauty, born of abuse and compelled to think sexual power ran the world. “I thought we were here to talk about me. About how you’re Father Pureheart and want to save me.”

Her mockery held some pulse of hope she’d deny, Matt thought. Unfortunately, at the moment, Father Pureheart was not only no longer a “father,” but he had to figure out a nonsexual way to check out her back for cat-scar marks, as well.

“Tell me about it all,” Matt said.

“How much ‘all’ do you want?” She crossed her legs high up, legs in sheer black nylons visibly supported by a black garter belt. Matt was not susceptible, but he allowed her to see him glancing at her thighs, looking for marks. Nothing to see at this distance. The back would be the telling section.

“Tell me,” Matt said, hoping to overwhelm her, “about your mother and father, about your daughter. Then tell me about you and Max.”

“You don’t want much, do you?” She picked up the razor from the marble-topped bedside table. “One strike across the eyelid, and you’re blind.”

He couldn’t deter the chill of fear.

“My mother was a whore. Sounds Victorian music hall, doesn’t it?” She’d veered off the threat. Maybe she’d always craved an audience for her wrongs.

“So far,” Matt said, “I’m getting that she was unmarried and pregnant, like mine.”

“Don’t try to ‘identify’ with me.”

“How do you know she was a sex worker?”

“Because in the orphanage they called me a bastard child of a whore. Are you too holy to say the word ‘whore’?”

“No, but it’s a word meant to hurt, label, denigrate. And most often, it isn’t true.” Matt wanted to strip the shock value from her words, to depersonalize the dialogue.

He realized he was being as manipulative as she was, but maybe that was what it took to cut through thirty-some years of abuse, fury, and hatred.

He went on, “If your mother was put into a Magdalene school, she was an unpaid laundry worker, a virtual domestic slave. Those are labels I’ll accept.”

“With nuns and priests as the warders.”

Matt appeared to mull her words. “Yes. Warders is a good way to put it.”

His agreement aggravated her more than any diatribe would.

She grabbed the razor again and leaped to the floor. She flew at him, flying hair almost blinding her. Matt stood even faster, intercepted her right wrist, and pulled it down toward the floor. It was easy to push a foot out from under her, so she tumbled over onto her side.

She curled into a ball, the reflexive position revealing more about her early life than a hundred hours of “therapy” talk. He could hardly hear the low keening, but saw a trio of ruby red blots on the marble floor.

He bent over her. “Have you hurt yourself!”

“No! You did!”

The razor had fallen a few inches away. He grabbed it before she could. Her hand must have hit the floor with the open blade clutched in her palm. He shut it and closed the blood-dewed cutting edge out of her sight and put it in his pants pocket.

“Come on. We’ll clean that up.”

He was careful not to use her name. Anything that put her back into the dreadful past might push her into hysteria again.

Funny. Everyone took her for a stone-cold killer, including himself. That was only a pose. What she really was might be even more dangerous.

She let him lead her into the bathroom, to the marble sink with its 24-karat gold-clad faucets.

She hung over it, panting, as he ran cold water on her bloody hand and jerked tissues from a golden box to wrap her palm. King Midas must have had a frenzy in this bathroom.

Kathleen let herself sag against the sink stand, ironically accomplishing his dangerous and touchy mission for him. His supporting arm had pushed up the filmy top, exposing her spine and a lot of back.

White. Clear of scars. He almost let her slip in shock, and had to clamp her ebbing body close, her heavy hair against his chin and chest.

He realized this was supposed to be seductive, but his now ruefully regarded years of wrought-iron celibacy had made him seduce-proof.

“Here, a towel.” He grabbed an ornately embroidered finger towel and wrapped it around the cut hand. “Let’s get you back into the bedroom.” She’d take that move as a sign of victory.

He steered her out onto the bed, then peeled open the towel. It had absorbed some blood from the short cut, but the flow was already slowing.

He plumped the scratchy brocade pillows behind her and settled her back like an invalid.

Then he sat again in his usual chair against the wall.

It was hard to be seductive with a huge towel wrapped around one hand.

“You’re good at first aid,” she said, unaware of delivering her first compliment. “Did your stepfather hit you?”

Matt shrugged.

“Did he, did he? He must have!”

“Then why ask me?”

“I want to make you tell the truth.”

“You don’t have to make me. Yes, he yelled at me, cursed at me, and he hit me when I stood between him and my mother.”

“When was that.”

“Every time.”

She fell silent. No one had stood in front of her.

“Look,” Matt said. “I know Cliff Effinger was a piker in everything he ever said or did. He was even a failure at being abusive. I know now what I went through was minor compared to some.”

“And I’m that ‘some.’”

“No. You are the one. A one. The only one I’m talking to at this moment.”

“But you don’t want to be.”

“True.”

“You don’t want me to exist.”

Matt didn’t have to think before he spoke. “I don’t want anyone who’s been through what you have to exist, but the world won’t let that happen.”