Rupert Thomson - Death of a Murderer

He turned out of the hospital. Wednesday morning. Curtains still drawn in many of the houses. Soon children would be sitting up in bed, knuckles in their eyes and tangled hair. Soon they would have to start preparing for school. He remembered the butterflies he’d had when he was young — that strange, sick feeling…The short days were the hardest: you got up in the dark and came home in the dark. The road curved gently downhill. He passed a pub, an empty car-park, a playground. Over one roundabout, and then another. It was on the faces of other drivers too. A rumpled quality, a puffiness. Not just the last vestiges of sleep, but a certain vulnerability; you could almost see them swallow, dry-throated, at the thought of what being awake involved.

He accelerated on to the A14, the town behind him now. Behind him, too, was the sugar factory, its thick, creamy smoke pouring upwards in his rear-view mirror. His eyes felt heavy. He wound the window down an inch or two, and cool air streamed into the car. Westbound, there was a tailback. East-bound, though, the road was clear except for a lorry with a Dutch numberplate.

Maybe we could go away…

Sue would have been thinking about the holiday they’d had shortly before she got pregnant with Emma. In Amsterdam, they had found themselves outside a coffee shop, and she had startled him by suggesting they should buy some dope. “But I’m a police officer,” he said. She laughed at him. “Billy,” she said, “it’s legal here.” Though full of misgivings, he handed her the money and watched as she disappeared through a black glass door. I’m buying drugs, he thought. Then he remembered what she had told him. It’s legal here. The words just didn’t ring true, somehow. But he had done worse things…

That afternoon they drove out to the coast and parked on a road that overlooked the sea. Susie produced a packet of cigarette papers, and Billy was surprised again, this time by her dexterity. Shutting the windows, they lit the joint. The car soon filled with smoke. It was a Sunday, and families kept walking past. People with small dogs and children.

“It doesn’t feel legal,” he said, sinking lower in his seat.

When they had finished the joint, they went for a walk along the beach. A cold wind tore in off the North Sea. Waves crashed against the sand like walls collapsing.

“It’s not working,” Billy shouted, and he could hear the relief in his voice.

As soon as they turned inland, though, he began to talk nonsense. Then he had a fit of the giggles, something that hadn’t happened for years. In a souvenir shop, he took eight bars of chocolate up to the cash-till, but just before paying he had a moment of doubt. Nudging Susie, he showed her what he was buying. “Do you think this’ll be enough?” he said.

Back in Amsterdam again, they decided to go to the cinema. They would be safer in the dark, they thought, where nobody could see them. They bought tickets to In the Name of the Father and sat in the front row.

After a while, Billy leaned over and whispered in her ear. “I don’t understand this film at all.”

“It hasn’t started yet,” she whispered back. “This is the adverts.”

When the pub blew up, Billy laughed. He couldn’t help it. The whole thing seemed so artificial, so exaggerated. Ludicrous, really.

“People died,” Susie told him earnestly. “In real life.”

Billy’s laughter became uncontrollable, and they were asked to leave.

They returned to their hotel and had showers, then Susie painted her toenails, which seemed to take hours. Later, they lay on the bed, watching TV. Once, as Susie leaned forwards, her bathrobe loosened and Billy saw the curve of a breast, the underside, heavy and soft.

Then, inexplicably, he fell asleep.

In the middle of the night he woke up with an erection. Susie was sleeping deeply, one arm abandoned on the outside of the covers. His penis felt harder than it had ever felt before, and it wouldn’t go down, no matter how long he waited. In the end, he decided to put it inside her. He didn’t know what else to do. She was facing away from him, which made it easy, and she was already wet, which made it easier still. It was almost as though she had been expecting him. He pushed into her gently, stealthily, and then stayed there, without moving. He could feel the muscles inside her contract around him, gripping him. Was she awake after all? If she was, she gave no other sign of it. He came without touching her, except in that one place. Just by thinking about her, imagining her — even though she was right next to him. He could feel the pulsing in his penis as the sperm pumped out, but his penis didn’t move at all. Still inside her, he fell asleep again.

The next morning she sat up in bed and looked at him. “Did you do it to me in the night?”

He nodded.

“Did I wake up?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

She lay back, her head resting on the pillow. “I don’t mind, you know. I don’t mind it if you do that.” She was staring at the ceiling. “What was it like?”

“It was amazing,” he said. “It was like our bodies weren’t there at all, only the parts of us that were touching. They were there all by themselves, and they were much bigger than normal, and it was dark all around them, as if they were in a cave…”

Susie’s head turned on the pillow, and she looked at him again. “I think you’re still stoned,” she said.

A brittle rattling began, and Billy glanced over his shoulder. On the back seat of the car were all the newspapers that he had bought at the weekend, their pages vibrating in the draught. He wound the window up a fraction, enough to stop the noise.

Amsterdam, though.

That was the first and last time he ever smoked dope, and he didn’t regret it either, not for a moment, but if they were to go back to Amsterdam in the near future, with Emma, it wouldn’t be like that. It would just be an extension of the life they were already living. What Sue had really been trying to say, he thought, wasn’t so much that she needed a holiday, or that she would like to return to a place where they had once been happy, but that she wanted to recover some spirit or quality that they appeared to have lost. Well, he wanted the same thing. It wouldn’t be easy, though. In fact, he wondered whether it could actually be done.

On a footbridge up ahead someone had written rural revolt in giant capitals. Labour had been in power for five years now, and all the excitement and the optimism had gone. All the shine too. They were always interfering, trying to tell people how to live their lives. Why couldn’t they deal with the things a government was supposed to deal with — health, education, transport — and leave the rest of it alone? Whoever was responsible for the graffiti had damaged public property, but Billy found himself approving.

He checked his rear-view mirror, then concentrated on the road in front of him. It was empty.

Then a lorry piled high with timber, which he overtook.

Then nothing.

As he came over a rise, not far from Stowmarket, Billy saw the lights of a petrol station below him and veered off the dual carriageway, braking hard. The cold air wasn’t enough: he needed a soft drink, something sugary to help him stay awake.

Parking outside the shop, he went in and picked up a bottle of Lucozade and a newspaper. He’d been hoping Keith would be behind the till — when Billy worked the late shift, he often dropped in and Keith would let him have a sandwich and a cup of coffee for nothing — but it was a man he’d never seen before, young and overweight, with floppy brown hair and a twist of gold wire dangling from his right ear.