Simon Beckett - Owning Jacob - SA

He made an effort not to drift off again.

“What?” he asked. His voice sounded far away.

“I said are you going to dance?”

Ben shook his head. It felt heavy, unattached. “You go.” She said something else, but he couldn’t hear what. She stood up. Ben found himself looking at her stomach, pinkly suntanned and sweetly curved. When she turned and began to push through the crowd jammed up to the table, the waistband of her jeans moved away from her back, exposing a further inch of knuckled spine below the imprint it had left of itself.

She vanished into the wall of bodies. Ben felt he had strands of tar pulling at him. Every movement had to fight their resistance, but every now and again they would snap and his limbs would move in uncoordinated lunges. He knocked over an empty beer bottle as he raised his arm, and two more as he tried to grab it. They chinked but the noise was lost in the larger cacophony. He was suddenly thirsty. There was beer left in some of the bottles on the table but the thought of it nauseated him. He picked up a glass that had liquefying ice cubes in the bottom and tipped them into his mouth. Then he drank the dregs of lukewarm ice-melt from the other glasses on the table. It made him more thirsty than ever.

He looked above the people bunched in front of him. The ceiling over the dance-floor was mirrored. He could see heads and shoulders suspended upside down, rhythmically bobbing and heaving, outflung hands waving like seaweed in the erratic blue and red lights. He felt sick.

Zoe came back. He had no idea how long she’d been gone.

Her hair was plastered to her forehead and her arms and torso were flushed and shiny with sweat. Her breasts rose and fell after the exertion. The halter top was dark in patches, sticking to her. She carried two glasses. She grinned as she gave one to Ben. He was aware that he had already had too much to drink but the glass was cold and had ice cubes in it.

He emptied it while he was still wondering if it was a good idea.

Then they were somehow outside and it was quiet and cool. Ben had a buzzing in his ears. His arm was around Zoe’s shoulders and he felt hers around him. They were in a taxi and she was leaning against him. Her skin was burning hot and slick. The thought circled that he was going to fuck her. Somewhere miles away in his head was a protest but it was too distant to bother with. His hand stroked her bare back under the flimsy top. Her mouth was covering his. Her tongue and teeth seemed huge, covering him. The hard pebble of her nipple pressed into his palm through a thin layer of fabric.

Cold air hit him as he climbed out of the cab. He looked up at the sky. There was a faint lightening towards the horizon.

The stars wheeled above him. He stepped backwards to keep his balance, swaying as she unlocked a door. For a moment of clarity he saw Zoe again, the girl he worked with. Then he was going into an unlit hallway. A door creaked open and he was in a bedroom. She was pressed against him, cooling skin and hot, wet mouth. His hands were down the back of her jeans, inside her pants. His shirt was open. Her hands were on his chest, his stomach. The buzzing in his ears grew louder. It went away and he was looking down from a dizzying height at the top of a dark head. He felt a chill on his naked skin, but no sensation other than that. He didn’t know where he was. The head wasn’t Sarah’s. He felt panic, and then it came back to him in a rush that she was dead, that he was at Zoe s, and he stumbled away from her.

“I’ve got to go.” His voice sounded thick and unfamiliar.

He began pulling on his clothes.

“What’s wrong?” He didn’t answer, not knowing, not able to speak anyway.

He began to dress, and the buzzing returned with the motion.

He overbalanced and almost fell. His trousers were on now, and his shirt, and he was searching for his shoes. Zoe was a shadow kneeling on the floor, watching him. She didn’t say a word as he went out but he knew without looking that she was crying.

On the street he began walking without any idea of where he was or where he was going. He wanted only to get away, to put distance between him and the memory of what had happened. The sky was lighter now, the stars beginning to pale. A police car slowed. Two white faces watched him.

He shivered without feeling the cold and walked past them.

Unfamiliar streets stretched out ahead and behind. He took them at random until he came to a main road. The sodium lamps on the pavement had winked out before he flagged down a taxi.

Jessica’s trial was held three weeks after Jacob’s final handover to the Kales. It fanned fresh interest in the case, and as Ben walked into the court building on the day he had been called as a prosecution witness he was treated to a media phalanx barring his way.

“Mr Murray, are you relieved not to be standing trial yourself?” one woman demanded, walking backwards to keep pace with him. She held out a microphone like a baton, as if she expected Ben to take it and run with the question. He brushed past without even giving her the benefit of a ‘no comment’. When he was inside the court and safely out of camera shot he stopped and leaned against a corridor wall until he felt less like punching it, and the spasm that had gripped his stomach had passed.

He had tried not to think about what the trial would be like. But even reminding himself that his first contact day with Jacob was soon afterwards didn’t make the prospect any more palatable. He had done his best to move his life back to some sort of normal footing, or at least as normal as it could be now that two-thirds of it had been cut away. The only way he could think of to do that was to throw himself into his work. Ironically, he had never been so busy. The tame events that had wrecked his private life had brought a boom to his professional one. When the phone calls first started coming in he had thought it was a sign of support from editors and designers he’d known for years. That had been before he saw how his name had suddenly acquired a cachet that had nothing to do with his photography. One magazine editor had run a series of fashion shots that Ben had done months earlier completely out of context, hanging the piece entirely on his new notoriety. He had phoned her in the blazing heat of discovery and told her graphically what he thought, the result being one source of work he could cross off his Christmas card list.

There were plenty of others to replace it. Once his initial indignation had died down, he stifled the self-destructive voice that urged him to tell them all to fuck off and accepted everything he could. It was all work, and anything that kept him occupied at the studio and away from the hollow bricks and mortar he’d once thought of as home was welcome.

He contented himself instead with raising his fees.

It meant he could pay Zoe more, which helped ease the guilt he felt after their night out together. He’d woken on the Saturday with a sense of curdling shame and a full-body hangover. He’d folded himself over the toilet and vomited until only dry heaves were left and the sweet stink of it blocked his nose. Even then he’d had to wait until the throbbing in his head had eased enough for him to pull himself feebly to his feet. Rinsing his mouth and splashing cold water on his face and neck made him feel cleaner but no better. He’d braced his arms on the washbasin and studied the palsied wreck of his reflection in the mirror. His face was pouchy and colourless, except for his lips, which were an unnatural red. There were lines under his eyes he’d never noticed before.

He’d felt racked with self-hate as he’d looked at himself. His thirty-third birthday had been the month before. Christ had changed the world and been crucified by that age. Ben didn’t give much for his chances of founding a religion, but the way things were going he felt that crucifixion wasn’t out of the question.