Стивен Бут - Blind to the Bones

Angie looked down at her coffee mug. She was still clutching it, though he had watched her tip back the last drops of coffee several minutes ago. Her fingers were tight and white at the joints. They moved restlessly against the smooth porcelain, tracing the slightly raised shapes of Homer and Marge. Backwards and forwards her fingers went, following the shapes, keeping themselves moving. Reluctantly, Cooper found he couldn’t hold on to his burst of irritation.

‘Have you spoken to Diane recently?’ he said.

Angie shook her head.

‘When? Not since you left Warley?’

‘No.’

‘But that was years and years ago.’

‘It’s fifteen years.’

Cooper restrained an exclamation. It was beyond his comprehension how sisters could be apart for fifteen years without getting in touch with each other. But stranger things happened in families.

‘I know Diane has been looking for you,’ he said. ‘In fact, she’s been looking for you very hard recently. She once told me it was the reason she’d come to Derbyshire, because she’d managed to track you down as far as Sheffield and this was as near as she could get.’

‘Yes, I know she’s been looking for me.’

Cooper began to get impatient again. ‘Well, if you know that , what’s the problem? You’ve found me, so I’m sure you could have found Diane a whole lot easier. What do you want me to do? Do you want me to talk to Diane for you? Maybe arrange a meeting? You want to do it gradually, is that what you’re worried about? I know it’s going to be a shock for both of you, after so long.’

Angie listened him out with a defiant stare. ‘No, you’ve got it all wrong,’ she said. ‘Completely wrong.’

‘What then?’

She leaned forward suddenly, thrusting her narrow face towards him, so that he couldn’t avoid the stare of her pale eyes or miss the tiny lines clustered around her temples, lines etched by years of pain.

‘I want you to explain to her that I never want to see her again,’ she said. ‘I want you to tell her to leave me alone.’

Cooper sat back, shocked by the vehemence that was suddenly in her voice. ‘You don’t mean that.’

‘Mean it?’ Now she put the mug down on the table, with a crack like the noise of an air rifle. ‘Believe me, I don’t want my little sister back in my life. And I’m damn sure she doesn’t really need me back in hers. But there’s no way I can try to tell her that myself. She’s so damn stupid and pig-headed that she wouldn’t believe me. I know from past experience that she only believes what she wants to hear, and I could never do any wrong as far as she was concerned. She never saw the real me, no matter how much I shoved it in her face.’

‘People change a lot in fifteen years,’ said Cooper quietly.

‘Do you think she’s changed? Or would you say she was still like that?’

He sat back. ‘Go on.’

‘But you could convince her, couldn’t you? Diane would believe you. They say you’re the man who believes in things like telling the truth. Is that right? Or are you going to be another one who just pisses me about?’

‘If Diane wants to make contact with you again, who am I to make a different decision for her?’

‘It’s not your decision, it’s mine. And I’m her big sister, so I know best.’ Angie sighed. ‘OK, what can I do? Will you listen if I tell you the whole story?’

Cooper hesitated. From the little Diane had said, he wasn’t sure it was anything he really wanted to hear. But what else was he going to be doing this evening?

‘Like you said, I’m a good listener.’

So Angie told him. It took fifteen to twenty minutes, with frequent pauses. But Cooper got the sense of the girl who had rebelled against her family situation, who had been desperate to escape from the nightmare she had got herself trapped in. Any escape route must have looked attractive to her then. But she had only been leaving one trap to enter another.

‘We were both taken into care by Social Services. I was eleven, and Diane was nine. They said my parents had been abusing me. Well, of course they had. My dad anyway, and my mum knew. No point trying to pretend it didn’t happen.’

‘And Diane, too?’ said Cooper.

Angie hesitated. ‘Has she said so?’

‘She says she can’t remember.’

‘Yeah, right.’ But then her tone changed. ‘Well, she was only a kid. Maybe she can’t. But you see why I know she won’t have changed now. The fear goes way back when.’

‘You were fostered together, weren’t you?’

‘Yeah. They kept moving us on to different places, though. So many different places that I can’t remember them. It was because of me that we didn’t stay anywhere long. I was big trouble wherever we went. But Di thought the sun shone, and she screamed the roof down at the idea of being split up from me. In the end, I couldn’t stick it any longer. I left our last foster home when I was sixteen, and never went back. I haven’t seen Diane since. And it’s much better that way, believe me.’

‘I know you were already using heroin,’ said Cooper.

‘So she told you all about that, too? She must really think a lot of you, Ben.’

‘I think it just slipped out.’

Angie raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh, yeah? My little sister doesn’t let things slip out, unless it’s for a reason.’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Well, you’re right. The thing is, I was stealing stuff from the house to pay for it. Stealing from our foster parents. That’s why there was so much trouble. They just couldn’t deal with it, with the idea that this was the way I showed my gratitude. So I had all this shit flying around my head all the time until I thought I was going to be sick on their Axminster carpet, and all I could think about was the next hit. You know, as long as you get your daily fix, you don’t care about anyone. You’ll use anybody, steal or rob, just for a hit. They always say it’s the needle that some people get addicted to, not the drug. They call it needle fever. So it was better for me to leave — better for Di, too. I couldn’t stand the thought that she would follow the same route.’

Angie was staring at the ceiling again, rather than look at Cooper. As he had expected, tears began to form in the corners of her eyes as she spoke. She made no attempt to wipe them away, and they streaked her face as they trickled across her cheekbones.

‘So it’s not quite true that you didn’t care about anyone,’ said Cooper.

Angie flushed. ‘Don’t try to trap me. I’m telling it like it was. You need to know that, no matter how strong you are, heroin is stronger. I’ve done cold turkey many times, and they’ve had me on a detox programme. Do you know how long you have to wait for help from the Drugs Service? Up to twenty-eight weeks for an appointment. Six months. Do you know what can happen to you in that time? Do you know how easy it is to die? It doesn’t take six months. I went through hell doing all that, but I always went back to the drugs. No matter how strong you are, heroin is stronger in the end. It’s always there in your brain, and it just calls you and calls you. I know Diane would try to make me stop, but I couldn’t deal with that. Neither of us could deal with that.’

Cooper was silent. Despite the deception and the performance he was watching now, the feeling was creeping over him that Angie Fry was essentially telling him the truth. He wasn’t entirely convinced, but there was sufficient doubt in his mind.

‘I’m still not sure that I shouldn’t phone Diane right now and tell her you’re here,’ he said.

‘They told me you were Di’s friend. If you care anything about her, you won’t let this happen to her. You won’t let me happen to her.’