Death & the City Book Two (43 page)

We park at the quieter end of the car-park, and get out.

"All right?" he greets me. He walks around the front of the car and gives me a kiss. "You sounded unhappy. What's up?"

"I'm not sure," I reply, reciprocating when he hugs me. "I feel as though I've been put in a spot I'm not qualified to deal with."

"In what way?" he asks, putting his arm around my shoulders as we head for the main entrance.

"I've been on two visits today, Harte and Dyer," I tell him. "Both following up after target practice. I don't deal with Aftercare, it's not my job. But usually, when they pull a surprise on me like that, I have something in my head I can quantify with it, like yesterday staking out the Scarecrow Dorothy girl, that was easy. A bit heavy-going, but I could identify what I was doing there, and why. Today - nothing. None of my experience gave me a role motivation or justification, if you know what I mean."

"No empathy?" Connor suggests.

"Yeah, it feels like that. I can see what's happened to them, but I don't have any emotional identification with it. Even when I'm the cause of it. Like I've completely dissociated from myself working in another job role, as if another person I've never met did it. And if I can't identify with the people and the situations, then I can't analyse it, which means I'm not getting feedback for head office. It's like I'm watching a soap opera, or a documentary about people I don't relate to."

"How do you feel about not being able to relate to the victims?"

"Like I'm not doing my job properly," I answer. "Something should be there putting reasoning and value on the results as I see them. But I'm getting nothing. Like a machine could do my job."

"Well, you could argue that the law is like a machine, which you're a part of anyway," he says. "Specifically, the law that says:
Financial motivation is not a legal argument to take a life
. Sandra was standing by to take out Jag Nut on a private contract still. It was moved up at short notice to take her out pre-emptively as soon as she had contact with Canem and his tropical disease collection, because rabies would have turned her into a red mist berserker, like the Animal Rights campaigners we're locking up at the minute all over the place."

"That bit I don't have a problem with," I agree. "When I take out a contract guy, I know why I'm doing it. But talking to families afterwards, where you would think sympathy and empathy are useful tools to carry, I haven't got anything in my brain that meets the requirements. I can read more into the back of a guy's head I'm about to put a hole in, than a whole group of family members dealing with the aftermath."

We go into the café, and I don't remember what Connor orders. The next thing I know, we're sitting at the window table with a cafetière of coffee, and he pushes a piece of Black Forest Gateau in front of me. I consider the possibility that James and Ash have been talking to him about my happily psychotic daydreams, and whether it's a test to see if I show signs of wanting to jump up and down on his car roof in my pyjamas.

"I'm guessing you haven't eaten today yet," he says, and is right. "I think you're just dealing with a lack of experience on your part. Which would mean lack of pattern matching. None of your personality disorders see yourself in the same situation."

"It's not just the situation, it's the whole family-couple-support-relationships thing," I say, shaking my head, and selecting sweetener sachets for my coffee. "They have this kind of closed-circuit network going on. When I was working on the Dorothy/Alice case yesterday, I could easily identify with a girl on her own, having no support system in place, keeping herself going with a fantasy world. But I don't understand symbiosis. I know it happens, I can interpret dysfunctional elements like co-dependency, but anything normal just leaves me blank. Like I'm forced to watch it while suspended over a gaping hole. I've got no commentary or personal structure supporting what I'm observing. Like watching an alien civilization."

"That's because so far, relationships to you ARE an alien civilization," he says steadily, stirring his own coffee. "You don't recognise subtext, or chemistry in couples that indicates sexual bonding, or the bonding two parents get from raising a new generation together. You just see mass Media propaganda ideals, and the reality leaves you cold. Like that stuff I got you to read in the car the other day, about commercial and sit-com couple dynamics. They're not reality, and the reason they're light entertainment - or in other contexts, drama - is because they're nothing like reality. But YOU don't have a reality to measure anything by. Hence you don't watch much of that sort on TV, and you don't socialize with people in normal relationships."

"Sums it up about right." I sip my coffee and look out of the window. Shoppers drift to and fro, coming and going from the store, in a never-ending stream of needs and consumerism. "I mean, when you see a couple out shopping together, or you notice a couple in the street, what do you see? What do you identify?"

"Depends," he shrugs. "They're all different."

"They're all the same to me," I remark. "I don't notice anything, I don't think anything, I don't interpret anything. Unless I have a bit of inside knowledge, or I know one or the other personally, nothing pops up in my head that I recognise or identify. I've never lived with anyone, or gone shopping with anyone, or had any sort of genuinely interactive life with anyone, so I don't have a picture in my head, or a feeling, or thought, or emotion, or memory of anything similar in reality. I don't recognise anything about the situation at all. I don't know what I'm missing to even miss it."

Connor nods and follows my gaze out of the window.

"I think you just need to not worry about it," he says at last. "You're not going to pick up a lifetime's worth of experience based on one date. Although there are guys who would boast about having that ability, in order to get women into bed quicker."

I realise that everything I've just said, could be interpreted by any normal self-respecting guy as a massive hint that some form of commitment was due. If women really do try that sort of transparent emotional blackmail, which I've overheard the V.I.P. girls and barmaids hatching plots about in the glass-wash room.

"I was just trying to illustrate how I can't relate to people living in the real world," I sigh, sticking my fork into a black cherry, and licking the cream off it absently.

"I was just trying to hint that I'm still getting another date with you on Sunday, before you jump on that plane," he says. "And please stop doing that to your cherry. You can eat any way you like when we're in private, okay?"

I catch his eye, startled, and he grins. One up to him, I guess. Just trying to conceive of all the other ways I might unknowingly be showing myself up in public keeps me quiet, for the remainder of the time it takes us to finish up.

"What time have you got to be back?" he asks eventually.

"Er - I have to pick up Junior, go home and make dinner, get ready for work and drive to Phantasia, so I have to fit all that in before my shift starts at nine."

"Need to get any shopping first?" he asks casually, tapping his teaspoon on a napkin idly. "Seeing as you're here, you could come round with me now and get it out of the way. Last time I saw you and her out shopping, you were only buying doughnuts."

"Yeah, she's a fussy eater," I joke. "I guess so. I think I'm out of pasta. And cat-food as well."

"I remember what's in your kitchen cupboards. I think you should probably write a list, because from that I know you don't keep one," he suggests, finds a pen in his inside pocket and pushes it towards me on top of a clean napkin, after first scrawling
SHOPPING LIST
at the top and underlining it. I give in, and write the first two items down, surprising myself how the action triggers proper recall of groceries currently lacking at home, including the shower gel and toothpaste I noticed this morning. After a couple of minutes I've reached the bottom of the napkin. Connor picks it up as I hand him the pen back, and gives it a summary glance.

"Okay," he nods, giving me the list back. "I reckon we can get both of our stuff in one big trolley. Let's go."

It's a strange feeling as I put the shopping away at home after picking up Junior, organising my storage better so that I have one upper and one lower storage cupboard just for food, and not hardware. Junior says if I give her the Jaffa Cakes, I won't have to find a space for them, so we negotiate a deal where she finds alternative accommodation for four of them on a plate, which is taken up to her room. Strange as in, I don't know what to make of the situation with Connor now. Every time I get back on track mentally, regarding keeping my distance, staying objective about it, and whatever his motives are, he just gets easier to get on with. More understanding, and more like he's making sense of everything, in a way I can't on my own.

I do find myself trying to discover empathy for the Hartes, by considering what Junior would feel like if I got the wrong end of a contract one day. But the thought of that, just makes me think it would be a good idea if I reminded head office that there was talk recently of drawing a line under it all, from my perspective. Quitting, in other words. I wonder if Sandra ever thought about the impact of her own lifestyle on her children, or the possible outcome. I have a brief echo image in my head of seeing her and Lenny, in V.I.P. getting drunk, after she left A&E having just been given heart tablets. No. Quite possibly she didn't.

And Terry evidently never took it into his head that his lifestyle choice, ignoring his former partners and their kids, could lead to the kind of outcome that would place his own next of kin on the operating end of a contract out on him, on his own doorstep.

It's a strangely selfish world at times, I think. Even in supposedly normal families. Finding my own identity crisis and personality disorders lacking an ability or mind to empathise with the functional, I think what mostly bothers me is that it reinforces my own dysfunctional make-up. I can't just wizard up a new personality out of my imagination to deal with it, all ready-equipped and fully-informed on relationships, and home support networking symbiosis. I can picture it in circuit boards, or computer highway terms - but not in people, not in communication - not in community.

I do, though, get a very tentative glimmer of explanation, hovering around my peripheral consciousness regarding my uncertainty towards Connor. If he's genuinely trying to reach me - psychologically and emotionally speaking, in terms of developing a relationship - the personality that a normal woman would already have responded to his efforts with, doesn't actually exist in me. I'm aware more than ever now, of the apparently increasingly yawning abyss between my personality disorders, and the grey areas I thought previously of as just fog. The bit of me that doesn't have the answers to anything out of my usual context. In the real world of attraction and courtship - without all the unproven rule books (unproven, in my case) - in normal relationship terms, technically that makes me an air-head.

Maybe that's just what he likes, I tell myself, and inadvertently smile. Knowing him, probably the last thing he'd be interested in, is a woman with a built-in pre-set program of how relationships progress. Or even worse, one with a plan.

As I tip the receipts out of the last of the shopping bags, before resigning them to the recycling, the paper napkin shopping list joins them on the worktop, with Connor's block capital heading standing out like a traffic STOP sign. It reminds me what he said, about women who keep a 'shopping list' up their sleeve, producing it whenever a man appears to be making the right conducive noises and moves that indicate he might be a good prospect to fulfil it. It's just a grocery list though, so in this case, I put it in the shredder along with the receipts. I don't need a souvenir of going shopping with him. It wasn't like it was planned, like a date. But it wasn't a bad experience either. I suppose I often forget to be grateful for the things I expect the worst of, which then turn out to be fine.

Recalling our first date, it does remind me that my shoes are still on the mantelpiece, and I have new Zombie heels in the car, along with my Vegas travel choice cheap Mary Janes. I decide to put them all away, like a normal person should. Not anthropomorphise them with any special powers or significance. Like a Hollywood hit-man's lucky one-shot underpants.

I drive to work after dropping Junior off, listening to
Daft Club
and
Alive 2007
on my MP-3 memory stick, plugged into the stereo. I don't mind the motorway commute so much at night. It's not a busy stretch, although out of a nearly 20-year habit I do keep an eye out for unmarked police speed traps, which comes of learning that any road in Florida with a school located on it had a 15mph limit - even if that road was ten miles long. I liked the American concept of conscience I picked up when staying over there as a kid. It was very religious, philosophically based in the insecurity of not having proof of an afterlife or what it might contain, so religious karma was more a part of society than anywhere else I've lived. Miss Haversham has some weird theory that reincarnation means you can come back as anyone you want, and claims she's lived so long because she hasn't decided yet whether to come back as Marilyn Monroe, Cleopatra, or Princess Diana, and how she would do things differently to them in each case.