Nicola Griffith - The Blue Place

“She woke up?” I went utterly still.

“Just for a minute. I’m sure.”

“I have to see her.” Before they prepped her and she ran away again into coma.

“I’ll go get coffee and be back in fifteen minutes.”

“If you see the doctor, send him to me.”

In ICU everything—the walls, floors, bed linen, even Julia’s bedspread—was white, against which crystal red and green lights blinked on and off, slowly, like lizards’ eyes. The air was full of the hiss and suck of oxygen, the peristaltic pulse of IV units squeezing god knows what into her veins, the hum of a dozen machines.

Julia’s hand in mine was mustard yellow, like her arm, like her face. I lifted it to my face. It smelled strange, of drugs and pain. The scent of one who has met that cheating Viking with the great ham hands. One who has played and lost.

“Your nails need trimming,” I told her.

Hiss, suck, blink.

“They must have grown a quarter of an inch in the last few days.” I sounded like a fool. “Julia, I want you to listen to me. You’re ill, but you mustn’t give up. I want you to start thinking about what you want to do when you get out of here. Have I told you about Whitby Abbey, on the Yorkshire coast? There’s a ruin there that dates from the twelfth century, very haunting, very gothic, but the first abbey there was founded in the seventh century by Hilda. There’s a power there. You wouldn’t think to look at it from the outside. But then you cross the track and walk over some turf, and…ah, Julia, it’s suddenly there before you, and it’s as though the breath of the earth drives up through the soles of your shoes and into your bones. I want to hold your hand, this hand, and watch your face when you step onto the turf at Whitby Abbey.”

Hiss, suck, blink.

“Or we could take a boat to the Lofoten Islands in late June when even at two in the morning the sea is silver, like ghost water, and you can read the newspaper without a light. Or if you’d rather go in autumn, we could make troll cream from whortleberries.”

I told her about crushing the berries, about whipping up egg whites, folding the one into the other; how it would feel in her mouth.

Hiss, suck, blink.

“But it might take a while before you can travel far, so before we sail to Lofoten, before you see Whitby, I’ll show you Northwoods Lake Court. As I promised.”

I had also promised I would keep her safe. I touched her cheek, very gently, with my fingertips. Dry now, but still soft. Her eyelids flickered.

“Fuck,” she whispered.

“Julia?” I touched her cheek again. “Julia?”

“Fuck. It hurts.”

“I’m here. I’m right here,” I said, squeezing her hand with both mine, then stroking her hair from her forehead.

Her eyes opened. The whites were pink, but her irises were brilliant as a clear evening sky. She blinked quickly, like a camera shutter. “I’m here,” I said again.

“I’m dying, aren’t I?” Her voice was light and dry, an insect running over a newspaper.

“You’ve had a liver transplant. It’s not going too well. They’re going to operate again this afternoon.”

“Promise me you…”

She shut her eyes.

“Julia?”

She tried to lift her hand. I lifted it for her, put it against my cheek. “When we met,” she whispered, “you were frozen inside. Empty. Now you’re not. Don’t go back. Even if I die. Stay in the world.”

I could not imagine a world without Julia. “You will not die.”

She opened her eyes. This time she didn’t blink. “My mother…she’s not always brave. I hate machines. Don’t let machines keep me alive. Don’t let them.”

“I won’t.”

“Stay in the world, Aud. Stay alive inside. Promise me. Stay alive.”

I whipped through the night as the ice crept through my veins. I stopped once at a strip mall, where I called Denneny’s office number, disconnecting as soon as he picked up. Then I filled my spare can with gas and bought some gloves. My mouth tasted of copper and blood.

At Cheshire Bridge Road I cruised the sex bars until I found the car I wanted, a dark, late-model Volvo with multiple airbags and antilock brakes. This time I parked in the lot of another bar and walked back. A quick thrust with a shim and I was inside.

I understand Denneny. He works late because he has nothing to go home to and when he looks inside himself, there is nobody there. I parked a block down the road from the precinct house, adjusted my headrest for maximum safety, and waited. I watched the stars. Tonight I didn’t recognize any of them; they were cold and alien. I thought of abbeys on headlands, of Norwegian islands in a sea breeze, of Northwoods Lake Court, where the air would be utterly still but for the creak of tree frogs and the endless patter of fountains. Then for a while I thought of nothing.

He emerged just after eleven p.m. I let his Lexus get a block ahead before I pulled out.

When we first met, he had lived in Candler Park. When he made captain he moved to Morningside, a neighbourhood where all the houses were built of dusty rose brick on winding little streets and fronted by velvety, floodlit lawns. No doubt he had thought he would soon be promoted up to commander and the giddy heights of the Prado mansions.

At an intersection I tightened my seat belt and turned my lights off before following him up a long, empty hill. He had been driving the same route for eight years and took it faster than was really safe in the dark. Half a mile from the top of the hill, the road would take a wide curving left, then a sudden right alongside one of those pretty rose-coloured walls. His speed picked up. Fifty, fifty-five, sixty.

He took the long left curve without slowing down, as I’d known he would. Time for me and the Viking to play one last round. I smiled, shifted, and punched the gas. The nose of the Volvo touched his right rear bumper just as he would have been thinking of feathering the brakes and threading the wheel through his hands to take the car to the right.

Brake lights flared and stained the night red. I eased my foot down a little more. Tires squealed, metal screeched. My heart was an anvil. The Lexus wobbled, then slewed, then seemed to straighten. I hummed to myself as I floored the gas and drove him into the wall at sixty miles an hour.

The noise was huge and seemed to last forever and then the night turned white as airbags bloomed and the cars bounced and my head walloped back into the head restraint. The wound along my shoulder pulled at the stitches. Nothing I hadn’t anticipated. I slashed the airbags and kicked my way out of the Volvo. The night smelled of honeysuckle and gas and hot rubber and seemed to turn very slowly.

His airbags had inflated, too, and like a good policeman he had been wearing his seat belt, but the impact had been a surprise, and he was still stunned. I pulled open his door, felt around his belt for his cuffs and gun. I shot the bag, then clipped his hands to the wheel.

“I never liked you, Denneny, but I trusted you. You had rules. What happened? Was it the death of your dreams or that of your wife? Nothing to work for, no one to go home to, nothing inside. Nothing except your rules. You should have clung to them, Denneny, they might have saved you.”

Metal ticked. Somewhere an owl screeched.

“You know why I’m here, don’t you?”

He turned his head slowly. Blood trickled from his left nostril. I pulled back the hammer.

“Don’t you.”

He closed his eyes and nodded.

“Good.” And I shot him in the abdomen.

The frame of the Volvo had buckled a little with the impact and it took me a moment to get the trunk open. My head hurt. When I got back with the gas can, he had started to go into shock.