Daniel Blake - Soul Murder

Within prison walls, the rules changed. What went on inside stayed inside. That was why Jesslyn was so careful to keep her two worlds apart. Mark had some of his colleagues over to dinner or Sunday lunch at their condo from time to time; she never did. Mark brought documents home, discussed work problems with her, gave her tidbits of department gossip; she never did any of that either. If he thought it weird, he’d long since accepted it as just the way she was.

And with Mara, who’d been such a bright shining Technicolor light in the pallors of endless institutional gray…well, Jesslyn had been honored, frankly, that Mara, beautiful, radiant, poised, fragrant Mara who somehow kept her poise and fragrance in those conditions, had chosen her when she could have had pretty much anyone.

And then she’d gone. Gone in stages, each of them more painful than the last.

First, Mara had called time on their relationship.

One day, just like that, out of the blue, Mara had said she didn’t want to go on with it. Jesslyn had been standing six feet away, yet she’d honestly thought Mara had hit her, such was the physical shock. She’d rushed to the restroom and brought up her breakfast. Food poisoning, she’d said, before going home. They wouldn’t see her cry on the prison floor; not then, not ever. Crying was weakness, and weakness was death.

In the weeks that followed, Jesslyn had begged, pleaded, reasoned, shouted and threatened, all to no avail. Sometimes she sought Mara out; sometimes she tried to avoid her. Each time she saw her, it felt as though someone had opened up a wound and started scraping salt into it.

Second, Mara had been released; back into the outworld.

If seeing her had been a torment, Jesslyn quickly realized that not seeing her was a hundred times worse. Even after their split, Mara had been the center of Jesslyn’s universe, the point around which she orientated herself and her days.

Now all Jesslyn had was the whisper of Mara’s name in corridor gossip, and the few of Mara’s keepsakes she’d managed to hold on to, inhaling their scent as though it were the breath of life.

Third, Mara had officially complained about Jesslyn’s conduct.

Briefly, surgingly, Jesslyn had hoped Mara had brought the complaints as some warped way of trying to keep Jesslyn in her life. But she could only fool herself for so long and, as the process had ground forwards, Jesslyn had let her feelings curdle towards hatred, if only in hope that it would harden into a carapace around her heart.

She’d always thought of Mara as the innocent victim of an egregious miscarriage of justice. Now, she’d forced herself to damn her as the devil incarnate, vile and evil murderess, fit only for an eternity in hell.

And finally, obviously, when Muncy had given Jesslyn her marching orders.

Jesslyn stared into the flames.

Stripe for stripe, burning for burning.

Was it fair, what had happened to her? Was it fair that murderers, rapists and pedophiles were walking the streets while she was here, frying burgers made of meat she wouldn’t give to a dog? Was it fair that she’d given twenty years of her life to trying to make the world a better place, and in return had been given half an hour to pack up and go?

It wasn’t just Mara she’d grown to hate, of course. It was everyone who worked the system for their own ends, and then blamed that very system whenever they didn’t have the courage to take responsibility themselves. It was lawyers who made people terrified of using common sense; it was media executives who broadcast whatever got them ratings, no matter the harm to those involved; it was judges who gave light sentences; it was doctors who kept alive people any decent society would have executed. It was all these parasites, and more.

Jesslyn sought solace where she always did, in the Book; Ecclesiastes 3: 3–8.

‘A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.’

Patrese’s sisters had gone to dinner with Bishop Kohler. Patrese had turned down the invitation. There were probably ways of spending Saturday night which he’d find even less appealing than listening to Kohler mouth platitudes by way of trying to offer spiritual succor, but he couldn’t think of any off the top of his head.

Instead, he stood on the balcony of his apartment and looked down over the city.

He lived in a block called The Mountvue on Mount Washington, the hill on the city’s south side which rises so giddily that only cable cars can make the ascent. He paid $1,200 a month for the place, at least a third of which was surely for the vista over the city skyline, which would have made postcard sellers kill their grandmas.

Dusk was his favorite time; the moment when the city was held suspended in all its contradictions; halfway between day and night, sanity and madness, picturesque and squalid.

The heart of downtown was called the Golden Triangle, sandwiched between the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers and tapering to the point where the two met and joined the Ohio. On crisp fall evenings like this it did indeed seem golden, the sunlight making the thrusting skyscrapers glow as though in belief that the day to come would hold more than the day just passed.

There was the medieval castle of PPG Place, all battlements and crenellations; there the four interlocking silver octagons of the Oxford Center; there the tallest of them all, the USX Tower, a behemoth of exposed steel columns and curtain walls; there the Grant Building flashing P-I-T-T-SB-U-R-G-H in Morse code over and again; and there the blue light on top of the Gulf Building which signified that the temperature was falling.

Patrese loved this city. Always had, always would.

He loved the way Pittsburgh held high the best of American values: hard work, unpretentiousness, renewal. Time was, in the heyday of the steel industry, when it had been virtually uninhabitable: palls of smoke so thick that streetlights had burned all day; desk jockeys who’d left their offices for an hour’s lunch downtown and returned to find their white shirts stained black; rivers so choked with chemicals that they had burned for days on end.

One writer had called Pittsburgh ‘hell with the lid taken off’. He hadn’t found much dissent.

But by the early 1980s the steel industry had shut down, and now hillsides above the mill sites had grown lush and green again. Pittsburgh was a riot of hills and valleys, slopes, hollows, streams, gulches too. It spilled out cockeyed across the landscape’s folds, taking its cues from the terrain.

It was therefore a city of neighborhoods, little worlds of their own separated by earth or water and rejoined by bridges. Pittsburgh had more bridges than Venice, something of which the tourist board was inordinately proud; that, and the fact that the ’Burgh had been voted America’s Most Livable City.

That kind of shit was always double-edged, Patrese thought. The surest way to stop it being Most Livable was to attract all the people who came here because it was Most Livable.

There was a sudden explosion of light from below as the sun reached just the right angle to fizz off one of the plate-glass corners on PPG Place. Patrese didn’t know whether the architect had designed it so, but he caught his breath every time he saw it happen.