John Eider - Not a Very Nice Woman

‘Peter must have trusted you, to call you.’

‘No, he just knew I’d be the only one who could confirm it. He’d already abandoned me, like the rest of them. The women I expected nothing less from, but him, I always hoped he’d come around in time.’

‘He followed your career.’

‘Yes, he did,’ he brightened. ‘I was proud of that.’

‘Your mother. Did you know?’

‘No; and I didn’t plan it, if that’s what you’re getting at; by which I mean I know what I did, but only wanted to find her that night. I didn’t know what I’d do once I got there.’

‘It was dark, everyone was watching television.’

‘I watched from by the trees at first, at the windows of all the flats, knowing she was in there somewhere. The place looked deserted, only a few of the rooms were lit. I went around the back to the door and walked straight in, I couldn’t believe it was so easy.’

‘Perhaps they still trust people there?’ said Grey; but Mars didn’t spot the jibe, continuing,

‘She had her full name on her letterbox in the hall, otherwise I wouldn’t have found her. So I followed the numbers up… and…’

‘Yes?’

‘When I got there I couldn’t move.’

‘In the corridor?’

He nodded, ‘Frozen, terrified I was running on adrenalin. I know that feeling, you see, that fear. I learnt to recognise it in my training, to notice it, and acknowledge it and not pay any attention to it; but I couldn’t, I was frozen.’

‘Until?’

‘Until I heard other feet on the stairs; young feet, skipping feet, coming higher and higher up. The end of the corridor was wild, dark and full of plants, so I ran into them, pressed up against the back wall. And then I saw her.’

‘Stella?’

‘No, Esther, coming don’t the corridor, running toward me. I mean feet away from me.

‘She went to Stella’s room?’

‘No, she stopped still and then ran off.’

‘She saw you?’

‘No, no. I was invisible.’

But she sensed you, thought Grey. It came home to him then how Mars had robbed his own daughter of the chance to know, even to have an hour speaking on equal terms with, the grandmother she hadn’t before than evening known she had. Mars, his arms handcuffed behind him, lay prostrate, increasingly uncomfortably on his back on the lightly sloping roof; and Grey could understand why the young Constable had wanted violence done unto him; and why other officers, the bad ones you read about in the papers, might at this point — a doctor yet to attend, the man’s present injuries as yet unknown, with no one watching — have wanted to land a size-nine right into his midriff, again and again till his kidneys burst and his liver couldn’t cope with the injuries to his system.

But instead he only asked,

‘What then?’

‘I stepped out, back into the light. Her door was already open, and when I went in there she was, at the end of the table, like she was waiting for me,

‘”Patrick. Well, what a day it is for surprises.”’

‘You recognised each other?’

‘Yes. She was just the same, the same eyes, face, only her hair had gone grey. “I think you have a daughter,” she said. “She’s bright. You must be very proud of her.”’

‘The daughter you hadn’t seen for, how long?’

His face screwed itself up in unfacable pain, he turning it sideward, one way and then the other as if someone held a knife to it, before gasping for air like a landed fish. The sobs came quickly now, Grey imagining the inner-horror as he summarised,

‘The mother you thought abandoned you, who you thought didn’t love you, yet who was so glad to see you; the daughter you’d already cast away, had given up on; all the love you had missed out on, all you would miss out on. You snapped?’

He nodded,

‘She got up, came forward to greet me, and I…’

As if on cue the bright-coated medics burst onto the roof. In the end Grey hadn’t meant to hurt Mars, but he had more than ever by making him remember.

‘His breathing’s weak,’ said the lead medic, they unbuttoning his suit blazer. ‘His chest’s bleeding. Didn’t you check him?’

‘Hard when he’s pointing a shotgun at you.’

‘We need these cuffs off.’

‘No.’

The medic didn’t argue, instead shouting back down the ripped corridor, ‘We need a stretcher here. Stab wound, internal wounding.’

The big man didn’t seem diminished for his injuries, Grey still not imagining he could be badly hurt. For the medics’ presence he still had to ask Mars,

‘And Charlie Prove?’

‘Ah, him. Is that his name?’

‘You didn’t even know him?’

‘Oh, I knew him. I wouldn’t forget him. I had to go back you see, to the Cedars the next night: to relive it, to understand what had happened, what I’d done. I hid in the trees, watched the windows, watched them all go to bed; and then the alarm went up, lights were on, people moving around.’

‘One of the residents was taken ill.’

‘Well, what could I do? I slunk back, stayed hid, and then… and then there he was, dashing away down the road. I could see his pyjama legs beneath the coat. It was like he’d been gifted to me, feted to meet.

‘I went after him… and he only led us right to these wretched buildings my mother was always out at meetings campaigning about when she should have been home with me and dad, when I begged her to stay.

‘I don’t even know if he knew I was there. But then he stopped at the yard, turned around and… I’d bought the stick with me as a cover, for the Cedars, so I could rest on it while passing, looking like I needed it, like I was tired. I found I was gripping the stick so hard, and there was suddenly so much to ask him, to find out, but he just smiled at me like… like he wasn’t all there, and I knew there’d be no point, that I’d get nothing from him. And that tension, everything he did to my family, all the stuff from when I was a kid, it all came out and I had my stick in my hand and I just swung it. He tried to turn away and it came around at him to hit him on the back of the head. It… just kept going, the stick, went into his head, through his head, left a ridge in his skull.’

The medic, who had been diligent in his work, now cast his patient a look of horror before silently resuming his treatment.

Grey’s voice was white and dry as fired clay, ‘”From when I was a kid”?’

‘We went once to pick her up, after “one of her blasted meetings”, as dad would say, and she was getting into his car. She came over smiling when she saw us, bold as brass, saying how lovely it was we’d come to collect her, looking back to her fancy man, saying, “I won’t need that lift after all, my boys have come to pick me up.” I remember seeing him, and how my father looked at him; and I knew that night when my parents argued that it was him who dad was talking about.’

‘The night your mother left?’

‘I sat on the stairs listening — I used to when they argued. They didn’t know I was there. Dad called her “a whore and a harlot”, said she was out every night, and now he knew where. That she ought to be spending time with us. She was crying, trying to talk about the Council and her meetings, but he knew it was lies.’

‘How could you know? You were Seven.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Years later dad told me about it, but he hadn’t known I’d heard.’

‘Where’s that stretcher?’ called the medic. ‘You’ll have to ask him this later, it’s tiring him out,’ he said without conviction. But Mars went on regardless to his health,

‘And that’s what all came out when I struck him; and before I knew it he was down. What for, you ask? For loving my mother, for being loved by her, for having all those years with her living there so close to me, the son she’d walked out on. I hated him for splitting up my parents, for robbing me of my childhood, for leaving me with a father who could never trust a woman again.’