Nicola Griffith - Always

“I woke you,” I said. “Before. Earlier.” The smell had unmoored me. “It’s late. I’m sorry.”

She sat at the other end of the sofa, and tucked her legs up again. Her toes poked out beneath the robe. Small, like her hands. I imagined them soft between my palms.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

She nodded tiredly. “I don’t need this. The police already kept me for hours. Did I have a grudge? Why? And when they got past that, it was, Did I know who did have a grudge? Did I know against whom? Did I know why? Had I seen any strangers on the set?”

“What did you say?”

“That you were the most suspicious character I’d seen all day.” She glanced at her wrist, realized it was naked. She got up again and tucked my blanket in around my shoulder. “Sorry. But it’s true. Besides, you know the police won’t come after you. Lift your hand.” She tucked my arm in. “Whoever you are, you’re off limits. To the reporters, too. My face was splashed all over the papers—and Sîan Branwell’s, of course. You? Nowhere to be found. But me, all anyone will think of now when they see the name Film Food is poison.” Her voice sounded distant, almost dispassionate. “The mad poisoner of Seattle. I worked so hard.”

I didn’t say, Don’t blame me. I didn’t say, It’s not my fault. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t her fault, either, but people were still blaming her. She had still lost her reputation. “Did you? See any strangers on the set?”

It seemed an effort for her to come back from her bleak internal landscape. “No.”

“Then I’ll get it all back. Your reputation.”

“Why would you care?” she said wearily.

Because your feet are turning blotchy red with the cold and I don’t want to think about why I want to warm them with my hands, why I want to make you tea, bring it to you, right here, and stroke that heavy hair— which gleams like soft metal that’s been cut with a knife—back from your cheek and tell you not to worry about the stain on your white coat, not to worry about anything.

“I’ll find them.”

She nodded, but she wasn’t really listening. She was too tired to care.

I carefully folded back the blanket and levered myself to my feet. The least I could do was let her get back to bed. “I’ll wait outside.”

She also stood, but this time with a slight smile. “No, you won’t.”

“I won’t?” I said, stupid in the face of my own horrible, insidious tenderness.

“No. Because I hear your ride.”

All I could hear was the uneven lumping of my heart. I concentrated. Outside, a car door thunked and a diesel engine rattled as the cab pulled away. She opened the door before he could knock.

He looked at me, then her. No one spoke. Then she stood to one side. “Can you walk?” Dornan said to me, and I nodded. “Keys?” I touched my jacket pocket, nodded again, and stepped forward. My knees held. “Tomorrow?” he said to Kick, who also nodded. She looked ill and tired and walking once again in her bleak world.

“I’ll find them,” I said.

Dornan walked by me down wooden steps, then concrete. I didn’t hear her shut the door behind us, but I couldn’t afford to split my concentration to turn and see if she was watching. I leaned both hands on the car roof while he opened the passenger door. He stood close while I eased myself into the seat, made sure my fingers were out of the way before he slammed the door. Then I looked. Kick’s door was closed.

Dornan fussed with the seat and seat belt and then the mirrors, the way people who rarely drive do.

“Do you know the way?”

“Mostly. I think.” He started the engine, released the brake, and we rolled down the street. There was absolutely nothing on the road, but at the traffic circle he checked his mirror twice, indicated, and drove counterclockwise all the way around to the left before turning.

We reached the interstate without incident.

“What happened?” he said.

I shrugged tiredly. I didn’t really know. He nodded as though I’d answered, and drove some more.

"Sîan Branwell,” I said.

He spared me a quick sideways glance.

“The name of the star of Feral: Sîan Branwell.”

“Yes. I found out yesterday.”

That wasn’t the only name he’d found out. “Why did she tell you her name and not me?”

“Maybe because I asked her nicely.”

And then the freeway was passing beneath what looked like the hanging gardens of Babylon. I blinked and tried to refocus, but the vision remained, and it was real: a park built over the interstate. It wasn’t hard to imagine the city overtaken by forest, fifty years after the apocalypse. For a moment I thought I smelled the rank breath of an unseen predator, big and lithe, pacing the car, hidden by trees.

THIS WEEK THERE WAS STILL LIGHT IN THE SKY WHEN I PARKED, AND UNDER THEgreasy hydrocarbon fumes of drive-time traffic, a hint of life scented. Twigs were swollen at their tips.

The white board was gone, but magazines were stacked under the pegboard. I tried to imagine how this space was used when I wasn’t here. Some kind of low-rent group-counseling space? A beggars-can’t-be-choosers law clinic? Sandra was absent. I wondered if she would come back. No matter. My guess was she already knew the most important things I would be teaching today.

We would begin, though, with action. Make them all feel big and strong. “The larynx,” I said. “To fracture it, you use the edge of your hand, like this.” I showed them how to make a knife-hand. “The tension is in the fingers, the thumb is bent. It’s easier and faster to strike outwards, palm down. Practice with both hands. If your attacker is on his back, you can come straight down, like a hatchet. If he’s on his stomach, you’d be better off with an axe kick to the spine.”

They spent a minute or two slashing the air, then I ran them through a few attacks on the prone bag. After that I hung the bag back on its frame, and we did some side strikes.

“The knife-hand will work very well, though obviously you’d have more reach with a pipe, even a length of hose. No,” I said, as Nina opened her mouth, “not panty hose. Garden hose.” Suze punched Nina on the upper arm and grinned. “Any other household objects that might work?”

“Wrench,” Suze said.

“Hammer,” said Katherine, after a moment’s thought.

Objects from Man World. “What about the kitchen?” They looked blank. “Anything fairly flat to get under the chin.” Silence. “A cake slicer,” I suggested. “A spatula. Even a dinner plate, if you hold it in both hands and jab forwards.”

“A dustpan?” Kim said.

“A skillet. Swing it.”

“Good, Tonya. What else?” Another pause. “Anything can be a weapon if you think about it that way.”

Therese folded her arms. “The Joy of Cooking ? ”

“A little unwieldy if you’re going for the larynx, but it would work well against the back of the neck or side of the head, or even slammed down on a hand. One of those thin hardcovers would work, though, just like a plate.”

“Man,” Pauletta said. “You sit around all day thinking up this shit?”

“More than fifty percent of attacks on women happen in the home. It makes sense to have weapons close by. Imagine your house not only as a refuge but as a garden of weaponry.” I might as well have been talking Farsi. “So think. What else? What’s in the kitchen, apart from recipe books and cooking utensils?”

They just couldn’t seem to make the connection between the kitchen and violence. The one who would have understood that bad things happen more often in sunny breakfast nooks than in midnight alleys wasn’t here.