Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

(Someone was calling up from downstairs, a woman was calling, but I hardly heard her.)

Christopher was shouting, hoarse with rage. ‘I’ll fucking kill you! Both of you! You bloody — awful — lying — bitch —’

I looked at him; it might be enough; he must see the truth written in my eyes; it’s me, Alexandra. I know you love me. Christopher, please. I never stopped loving you — We’d moved, both of us, Benjamin and I, across to the window, as if we could escape, as if we could have flown like Superman four floors down to where the world was normal — Benjamin put his hand on my arm, perhaps to protect me, perhaps to restrain me –

Somebody else came through the door. I didn’t see who. There was a shattering explosion, the sound of everything coming to an end. Another and another. I was crouched on the floor, an animal was moaning, Christopher had me by the hair, Benjamin lay half on top of me, dead, blood pouring out of a hole by his ear.

Christopher was making strange horrible noises, my arm was crimson with someone’s blood, my blood, God oh God I’m bleeding, blood was welling from a wound in my side, but Christopher was still hurting me, dragging my head from side to side, and I realised what he was trying to do, he was trying to pull me out from under Benjy’s body, I made to help him, Benjy’s head fell back, his eyes rolled upwards, he was dead, dead, oh I didn’t want to die myself, Chris pulled again and then let go, I lurched forward, staggered on to my feet, lost my balance and fell sideways so my forehead butted the bloody mess where Benjy’s ear and cheek had been. There was silence, briefly, except for Chris’s panting and my small sobbing breaths of incredulous terror, this couldn’t have happened, he couldn’t be serious, Christopher could never have hurt me…

It must have been a minute at least before I saw there was another body. Prostrate on the floorboards by the door. Thin, sexless, in shapeless grey. She must have been poor, I realise that now, Consuela Harbert must have been poor — with her kind smile and her six kids and her part-time job in a two-bit doss-house.

Benjamin and Christopher and I were alive, sprayed with blood but superficially wounded. Consuela Harbert was stone dead, hit through the head by a ricochet off the steel window we had been so fond of, Consuela Harbert who had liked us both and had taken the foolishly courageous course of following Christopher upstairs.

(In court he had to explain it all. He had bluffed her into giving him our room number, pretending he was Benjamin’s brother bringing an urgent message from home. She must have suddenly sensed his rage. She was ordinary, but extraordinarily brave.)

Consuela Harbert. We killed someone. I didn’t dare go over to her. I no longer knew what was happening.

Outside the window, the sirens grew louder. Perhaps for us. Perhaps they would save us, Christopher and me, from all this horror. The police would come and whisk us away…

I remembered. No, they were coming for him. Christopher was a murderer.

We heard them running upstairs. The last hotel in New York with stairs. Chris faced the door, gun still in his hands. I wanted to put my arms around him, I wanted to touch him, hold him — Christopher, not Benjamin; but when I tried to raise my hands only one of them moved, I felt suddenly weak, I sat on the ground, it pulled me down, the splintery floor with its thin stained carpets, I bled on the wood, I bled on the carpet, I sat in a faint as the drama ended, as the policemen shouted from outside on the landing, as Christopher threw his weapon out with a noise that made me clutch my heart, and suddenly an army of men rushed in and bundled Chris out, arms twisted up behind him.

Everything happened in another world. He was an old man, silver-haired, in tears, and small compared to the giants who held him, tooled to the gills with guns and truncheons. He looked back at me. I stared at him. Consuela Harbert lay where she had fallen; a police officer was massaging her heart, hissing ‘Jesus, Jesus, come on, lady…’

I knew already it was no good. What had I done, what had I done?

I was mad as a hatter for two or three months. I blamed myself entirely; I sat in a darkened room and wept. Benjamin was far from dead; he had a deep but not dangerous wound by his ear where the bullet had sliced past his head. My upper arm had been pierced by mistake — at least Chris claimed it was by mistake in his confession, and I believe him.

Isaac slipped into a coma the very next day. Whatever had happened, he still had to be visited. Benjamin couldn’t leave hospital, Chris was in prison. I went alone.

They had managed to do something about his breathing, but his eyes had the same unfocused look. I wasn’t sure he knew me, but he did. ‘Blink if you know me,’ I said. He did; he wanted to hold my hand; how could it be the same hand after all that had happened since yesterday? His eyes signalled at my wounded arm, which happened to be nearest to his own freckled claw, but I gave him the other, un-painful one and began to babble nervously, stupidly, I started to tell him a torrent of lies lest he spotted the bulge underneath my blouse where the bandage pressed into my flesh; I had been in a road accident, Benjamin too, we had been mowed down by a drunken driver as we walked away from visiting Isaac, so Benjamin couldn’t visit today, I was sure he would try and be back tomorrow, I thought drunken drivers should go to prison, I thought they should treat them like murderers… as if he knew or cared about all this shit.

And as I skidded on down a long slope of rubbish I watched Isaac leave; it was as simple as that; consciousness was there, and then it was gone, and I had an absolute intuition that it would not come back again.

Sometimes I know I am a worthless person. On the day I die I shall still remember how my lies were the last thing Isaac ever heard. He was trying to get clear, to be free of us all, and I poured out garbage on top of him. And when soon after that I became confused, and they had to take me and sedate me, I think I was still talking about that last morning, though of course nobody could understand. ‘If only I’d shut up, and just said I loved him…’ They thought I was talking about Chris, or Benjamin.

If only I’d shut up, and just said I loved him.

I went to the funeral, doped to the eyeballs. I felt I was mourning the whole of my life. The ghosts were there, through a cold sea-mist, staring out from the other end of the church where Isaac was buried. Christopher’s back, I saw Christopher’s back, sandwiched between the policemen’s vast ones; it made me shiver with a fierce emotion, love, hatred, pity, guilt? Then the spasm died and the world returned to its general state of frozen grey.

Out of that greyness, Susy stared. She was up at the front, level with Christopher. His escort of gigantic policemen entirely occupied the right-hand pew, so Susy sat alone in the left-hand one. Her eyes tracked me down as I entered; she stared at me; she wanted me to see her; she wanted me to see the message she gave; she didn’t realise that I was frozen.

The message was that she hated me. The message was that it was all my fault. I had killed her brother and imprisoned her father. Her pale green eyes burned out of the grey.

The terrible millennium. For most of the summer I was not at home. I stopped seeing Benjamin for a bit. I gave evidence to the police; they looked at me appraisingly, hostilely, staring at the bags underneath my eyes, their faces saying What do you do? What tricks do you turn to make them fight over you? And the other message I read everywhere: You dirty bitch, it was all your fault.