Nicola Griffith - The Blue Place

The lamp was warming her sleek, French-twisted hair, and through the brown bitter smell of coffee I caught a quick scent of her shampoo, light and sunshiny and sharp, the way cloudberries on the fjord smell when the sun comes out after a quick summer rain, and I saw her clearly. An innocent who believed herself a cynic, one too innocent even to understand that the timing of that incendiary device had been carefully planned; that she had to have been as much the target as Lusk or the painting. Someone had tried to kill this woman who had read my record and asked for my help, and if she blundered around making noise, they would try again. So I surprised myself, and said yes.

While I read through my transcribed statement, Denneny, immaculate in white linen short sleeves, leaned back in his chair on the other side of the desk and polished his spectacles.

“There is no ‘e’ in lightning.”

He ignored me. The spectacles had left deep indentations on either side of his nose and he had to bring the lenses very close to check for blemishes. His expression was utterly focused, as pure and concentrated as that of a boy studying the dissected body of his first goldfish.

I signed and dated the statement. “You should really pay for better-educated clerks.”

He slid the spectacles back on and his face was a man’s again. He picked up the statement, looked at my signature, and put it on the top of a pile on his left.

“Your new rookies were particularly raw this time.”

“I hope you didn’t hurt anyone,” he said, more distracted than concerned.

“You should take a session yourself.”

“I’ve spent too much time lately sitting behind a desk—”

The lack was more in his soul than his body.

“—besides which they wouldn’t listen to a captain. They’d say, ‘Yessir!’ but their eyes would glaze and they wouldn’t really hear a word I said.” Just as he wasn’t hearing a word I said, not really.

I stood. “If any of them don’t measure up, I’ll let you know.”

“Yes.” He made an effort. “I appreciate this, Torvingen. The department can’t afford to pay warm bodies to spend time in the hospital instead of patrolling the streets.”

His rookies had once been more than entries in a ledger, cogs in his cost-effectiveness machine. I tried to remember the last time I had seen him shout or laugh. I failed. Twenty years in the police force had killed everything, bit by bit: his ambition, then his passion, then his wife.

I don’t like being surprised, especially by my own behaviour, and I had no idea why I had taken Julia Lyons-Bennet’s card and agreed to be at her office tomorrow morning at eight-thirty. When a machine acts oddly, it’s easy enough to take it apart and look for the fault. If it’s a computer, say, which freezes while you’re online trying to read e-mail, you just shrug and hit the reset button.

My preferred reset button is adrenalin.

Revolution is not the hippest women’s dance club in Atlanta, but it’s the biggest, a huge building in Ansley Mall. When I slid the Saab into a parking slot, the place was already filling with the vehicles so loved by Southern dykes with money: apple-green Samurais, blood-red Jettas, peach Cabriolets, dignified gold Camrys, two silver Isuzu Troopers. It was only ten o’clock and the air was still soft and sooty with rush-hour fumes. Dogwood blossoms lay underfoot, and the parking lot smelt of rubber and asphalt and perfume: an exciting, urban scent. I made sure I was wearing my open, friendly face.

On Tuesdays, there is no cover. I slipped in unnoticed and got a Corona from the bar. There were already about two hundred people in the club: half on the dance floor, the rest drinking and talking. Two of the three pool tables were occupied. The third had money lying on the side. I put down my own quarters, looked around a little, and took a pull of my yellow beer. Lovely cold bite.

“Toss for the break,” said a clear-skinned, long-haired woman who looked as though she were just off the farm.

I smiled. “Sure.”

We exchanged names—she was Cathy—and played the first round amiably. I let her win.

“Another?”

“Why not?” I got another beer, too.

This time I won, and there were more women in the club. It got warmer. I got another beer.

Cathy left and was replaced by Ellie. I didn’t much care. I was waiting, enjoying the beer, taking the pulse of the audience because there is always an audience. Of the women at the small tables surrounding the pool area, some were talking, drinking and watching, but some were just drinking and watching.

When Ellie was replaced by Jodie and I realized the club was nearly full, I decided it was time. I smiled at Jodie, tucked my hair behind my ears—to show my jaw and the small muscles in my neck—and opened myself to the audience. As I racked the balls I held the last one in my palm, the way you cradle the weight of a breast when your lover moves over you and your breath is searing in and out, in and out. As I leaned over the cue I let the yellow light hanging low over the table slide over the hollows in my wrist, up the long smooth muscle of my bare arms and lose itself in the dip and shadowed curve of collarbone and breasts. As I drew the cue—the long beautifully polished warm strong cue—back over the sensitive webbing between thumb and index finger, I enjoyed the sensation, and let my face show it, and then I thrust with my hips with my arm with my cue into the ball, through it, and the pretty-coloured triangle exploded into a dozen rolling pieces. I threw back my head and laughed as the balls dropped in the pockets: one, two, three. Around the table with the cue now, picking up the chalk—stroke it rub it over the tip, the rounded, velvet tip, cherish it, make sure that not a millimeter is ignored—laying my left breast plump against the felt and stroking that cue back and forth, back and forth, calculating, measuring, waiting as my breathing quickened and the moment trembled then thrusting again, and round the table and again, and again and again and again until the felt was all green and clean and I straightened, nipples hard against the silk of my waistcoat, and smiled a slow, satiated smile. And then she smiled back at me from a table and stood and stepped forward like a young deer leaving the shelter of the trees.

I ordered us a beer each. She was Mindy, up from Birmingham for two days, interviewing with Coca-Cola for a job in their budgeting department. She was staying in a nice hotel downtown but didn’t know anyone and was I here on my own? Oh yes, I said, and touched her lightly on the wrist, and now I had her scent, light and flowery but not innocent, and she brushed against me with her hip, her just-a-bit-old-fashioned-from-Alabama-jean-clad hip, and she lifted her chin a little and blinked and I kissed her.

“Such pale, pale eyes,” she said.

And we had another beer and played more pool and drank more beer and danced, and at one o’clock I took her back to the hotel and took off her clothes and, to the sound of a late-breaking thunderstorm, took my time. I kissed her, and stroked the soft planes of flank and thigh, teased with fingertip and breath and gaze, and when she was shuddering like a kite on a long line, when she began to whip and plunge, when she begged me, I turned her and steadied her and let her loose.

It was always the same. They flew and I flew, but to different places.

Later, she stroked my cheek drowsily. “Your eyes are different in this light. No colour at all. Like cement.”

The Bedouin definition of day is when the light is strong enough to tell the difference between a black hair and a white hair. There are no colours in the dark.

Eventually she slept. I listened to the rain and contemplated the relaxed face, smooth and fine and very young. No doubt she thought herself worldly, sophisticated, but what would she think if she knew she was sleeping next to a woman who had killed for the first time when she was just eighteen? What did she know of that blank look that always touched their eyes before they spat blood or tried to rattle out one last breath?