Kiss Me Quick (33 page)

‘Stop!’ screamed Bobbie.

Pierce snapped out of his storytelling reverie.

‘You didn’t
kill
the baby?’

‘Yes, and I’ve regretted it ever since,’ said Pierce, his head
drooping
in shame, full of repentance for the past. Racked with guilt, he had never been able to forgive himself for what he did that night. And now he was confronted with the consequences.

Bobbie tried to block out the unfathomable horror of the Herodian atrocity. Her mind desperately scrambling around for hope, found some solace in those words he’d uttered:
regretted it ever since
. A chink in his insanity perhaps? Some degree of
humanity
creeping in … and some hope for herself?

Pierce raised his bowed head, and lowered his heavy brow so his features sank into a satanic V. Then he said, ‘Yes, I didn’t kill the baby.’

Bobbie was at first confused. Then she remembered the old wartime song,
Yes! We have no bananas, yes we have no bananas today.
Bobbie felt both blasts of that double negative, as hope disappeared and insanity returned.

‘And I’ve regretted not killing the baby ever since,’ snarled Pierce, shaking his head as if in disgust, while he continued the story …

‘I missed.’

‘Missed?’

‘
Missed
.’

A numbness spread around her body like a ghost. She didn’t want to know any more, but she had to keep going – had to keep Pierce talking and keep herself alive. ‘What happened?’ she asked in almost a whisper.

Pierce gave a burdensome shrug. ‘Madness? Weakness?
Superstition
mainly. In fact, you could say that superstition was my weakness, and my madness. I’ve been prey to it all my life. It stems from my wrestling days. You’ll find that most professional
performers
and sportsmen are superstitious. And having Red Indian blood in me probably didn’t help, them being a superstitious lot and no mistake. Not walking under ladders, or hats on the bed, or black cats crossing your path, that sort of thing. So, you see, I couldn’t stab the little mite again any more than I could walk under a ladder or put a hat on a bed. So I said to myself, I said, Henry, if it’s still alive, then maybe it was meant to live.’

Bobbie wrapped her arms tightly around herself, as if an Arctic chill suddenly pervaded the room. She began rocking slightly on the lip of the sofa, as she pieced it together, sensed where this story was heading. She looked down at her dress, the turquoise silk dress. Her mother’s dress. Pierce leaned in and brushed his hand over her breast, and over the brooch. She didn’t flinch.

‘Take off the brooch, my dear.’

‘No,’ she said, her mind now a montage of memories, piecing together the times she had spent with Jack. Him asking about her past, her mother and father … the mother and father she never knew … the mother and father
he
had killed.

‘Take it off!’

Bobbie, trance-like, turned the brooch over and slid the long, thick fastening pin from its catch, then withdrew the pin through the material till the brooch was off. Revealing the repaired gash where the knife had entered. Scarcely an inch long, but
undeniably
there.

Pierce smiled in recognition of the slashed dress as the memories rolled back for him, too. ‘The minute I saw that dress, I knew it was you. I remember your mother. Never forget a face, and a real beauty she was. And you, my dear, are your mother’s girl. Same face – the image of her. Got a touch of your father about you, but you’re a spit of your mother. A beauty.’ A snide, knowing smile spread across his face. ‘Easy to see why Jack would fall for you.’

Tears forced their way through her closed eyes and fell freely on to the silk dress and soaked into it like big spots. Her parents, the young couple, now became vibrant to Bobbie, almost alive to her as her imagination joined up the dots. She wondered what might have happened to incur Jack’s wrath. Her father might have owed Jack some money and couldn’t pay it back. But would Jack
really
kill him over that? She didn’t know, because Jack was a black mystery to her now. Maybe her father had said something out of turn, something to cause Jack offence. Bobbie at once recoiled from the thought, a wave of repulsion moving over her. Was she making excuses for Jack, her lover? If Pierce was to be believed, he had slaughtered a whole family: father, mother and, for all he knew, their baby daughter. As inconceivably evil as it seemed, and as undeniably mad as Pierce was, she unquestioningly believed it. Deep down, she knew it was true. She
did
believe that Jack Regent, the man she’d lain with, had butchered her own parents …

‘You want to know what happened next?’ Pierce asked,
disrupting
her thoughts.

She didn’t want to know, but she did want to live. So she nodded.

‘I wrapped you up in that dress and drove you out of Brighton that night. It was dawn when I found the church where I left you on the steps.’ Pierce gave a throaty chuckle. ‘Christmas Day, I should have left you in a barn, to keep up the nativity theme. So, you could say, my dear, I saved your life.’

Her eyes still closed, the heavy sobs has subsided into sharp little intakes of breath, and her hands still clasped the brooch. ‘You should have killed me.’

Pierce gave a slow, harmonious nod of accord, then gripped the arms of the throne and hauled himself to his feet. He stretched himself to his full height and bulk, and issued a plangent sigh that marked the end of the conversation and his confession, and signalled that the bloodletting would commence. He moved slowly towards her, carving knife in hand.

His words echoed in Bobbie’s mind:
If it was still alive, then maybe it was meant to live.
She wanted to live.

‘You bastard!’ she yelled. ‘Jack Regent killed my mother and father, and you … you want me to be grateful?’

At these words, Henry Pierce stopped in his tracks and stood stock-still. His mouth twitched, a smile teetering across his dry old lips, then it transformed itself into a fully fledged grin. And then he laughed. He laughed loud and he laughed hard, till he was doubled up in his mirth. Eventually, after he’d exhausted it, he stilled himself. He calmed his breath that was still wheezy from laughter. He felt this moment needed silence, because he felt a weight of responsibility for what he was about to do. It felt good to him, he felt like God, not only having her life in his hands, her future, but also her past. He was about to tear it all away from her and leave her with nothing. Henry Pierce had killed before … but not like this. Not from the inside out. This solemn moment needed time, more time than they had, but still …

He drew closer to her.

Bobbie, her head bowed, gripped the brooch in her hand, squeezing it tight. The end of the thick pin had sunk into the base of her thumb, boring into the flesh, the tendon, the muscle, towards the bone. The warm blood coursing down her fingers felt good to the touch. She wanted to feel more of it.

Pierce bent down to meet her gaze, his neck seemingly
extending
out of the grimy collar of his shirt; an unnatural and dangerous position for him to be in, like a giraffe grazing in the long grass. But this was the real moment he had been waiting for: to study the wretched creature he’d caught and trapped under glass, as he delivered the denouement, the final part of her destruction.

And then he could finally kill her. Everything inside out.

‘My dear, you don’t know the half of it.
The half
—’

‘
The half of it!
’

The all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing Henry Pierce was now stopped, unsure and blind. The brooch pin sank into his eye. The good eye. The seeing eye.

Bobbie had heard enough of what emerged from Pierce’s mouth, enough to last her a lifetime. She was ready. Coiled ready on the mouth-shaped sofa, she sprang. Her only warning was those hissed words,
‘The half of it!
’

At that, Pierce took his first backwards step. He’d seen
something
in her eyes, something fresh, something new. An expression that sent a jolt of uncertainty through his powerful body. And, in that backward step, and in a flash, she leapt up and was straddled around him. Her left arm was around the back of his head, grabbing a hank of his inky-black hair. In her bloodied right hand, the brooch was buried within her fist, its long pin sticking out from between her fore and middle fingers, a deadly protrusion like the sting on the scorpion’s tail. And, with her legs wrapped around his waist, she jabbed the pin straight into his eye, moving her balled fist around and around, digging deeper, as it shredded the jellied lens.

Pierce gave a scream, surprisingly high and shrill for the brutish bulk of his body. But it soon faded as he worked on ridding
himself
of the lacerating limpet that had attached itself to him with such speed and surprise, and was now destroying his only good eye. The unfavoured eye that paled in comparison with the
scary-looking
eye. The eye that he’d never shown too much interest in went up in his esteem now that he realized he was losing it.

But it was too late. The work was done.

His arms flailed and flapped about, like some dreadful old albatross trying to take flight, as she gripped him tightly. They were thrashing around the room, engaged in a ghastly dance, clattering into furniture, smashing ornaments, knocking into
gilt-framed
mirrors and taking paintings off the walls. But Pierce had played the blind man for so long now that he was well rehearsed in the role, enough to get his bearings. Somehow he felt as if he still had his good eye and, working on the memory of sight, that’s what led him towards the doorway. He regained his balance, and charged for the door.

Bobbie, her eyes still closed, still hanging on, trying to push the entire brooch into his bloody eye socket, felt a first crushing blow as her back slammed into the heavy black bureau that stood blocking the doorway. She let out a scream of pain.

Pierce, alerted to the doorway by her knife-like scream directly into his ear, shuddered helplessly in pain and rage. He didn’t want her attacking any more of his senses, and he knew he would be desperately needing his ears. Realizing that he’d run into the bureau, from hearing her pain, he stepped backwards, then charged at it again. Another scream, and the sound of cracking just in front of him, either bone or wood.

Then release, her grip was gone. She was off him.

Bobbie was now on the floor, crawling away from him. Pierce, blood coursing down his face, still wanted to finish the job he’d started. He gripped the black bureau, braced himself and, with a loin-stretching groan, heaved it up over his head. Henry ‘Redskin’ Pierce, like his grandfather before him, the supposed Sioux warrior, used his tracking senses. He listened. He sniffed the air around him, hoping to pick up her scent: Chanel No. 5. He was now doing all the things he pretended to do when he was
pretending
to be blind. The irony wasn’t lost on him – but it still wasn’t
fucking
funny.

His head tilted downwards. The bad eye and the new
really
bad eye were superfluously directed towards Bobbie, sprawled in a crawling position on the floor. She looked up at Pierce and, seeing she was about to be crushed by what seemed like a monolith, carefully, silently, took off her shoe and tossed it about five feet across the room. Hearing the noise, Pierce turned his attention in that direction; shifted his stance and, with a belting grunt, hurled the black block of wood in the direction of the fallen shoe. The bureau, brittle and old, exploded on to the parquet floor. Then Pierce stood in silence, listening for the last sounds of the crushed and dying girl.

And heard …
nothing
.

Pierce stared out into this new-found blackness.
Was this it
? he asked himself. His shoulders collapsed; it had all gone wrong. This would never have happened to Jack. For him, the girl would be dead by now. Maybe he now wanted to cry? But this was not the time for experiments. Pierce stood there wondering if anything else came after the blackness. Wondering if this was all a bad joke and the lights would come back on again. He didn’t know what to do next.

Then he realized it was over. The lights weren’t coming on again – and this was it. That black garb he’d dressed himself in all these years, even during the most inappropriately sunny of days, was never coming off now. There was no respite from the
darkness
that had once defined him. The dress rehearsal for the old performer playing the blind man was over – this was opening night for the rest of his life. He was at one with the part now. And in a soft, sad, almost involuntary voice, he said ‘Goodbye’ to the girl.

Gripping the ornate banister, operating on falls, rolls, bumps, twisted ankles and gravity, he bruisingly made his way down the unforgiving marble stairs. With arms outstretched in front of him, like Frankenstein’s sad old monster, he stumbled out into the street, groping his way into the night and into the middle of the road. He lifted his head to the sky and let the rain beat down on his face to wash the blood away and cleanse his brand-new eye. The fantastic new jewel he wore glistened in the rain and moonlight. The light from the moon and the street lamps playing on the silver and the cut-glass stones. The brooch was now firmly implanted in his eye socket. The dead diamanté eye was as much a part of him now as the dead marble eye. Neither of them pretty, but both fitting.

‘SPIDER!’

… Spider had been instructed to park on the opposite side of the crescent, and that’s exactly where he was, in Pierce’s car, a black 59 Cadillac sedan Deville with red interior. Spider liked tooling around in Pierce’s Caddy – typical of Pierce to have a yank tank. Fuck-off fins, fuck-off V8 engine and fuck-off white wall tyres. Nice and conspicuous, a real eye-catcher, it was the only Cadillac in Brighton now. A local car dealer had owned one, too, different colour, white interior. Pierce had the car stolen, then compacted. The other Cadillac, now about the size of a television set, was then dumped on to the car dealer’s front lawn; along with a warning not to be such a flash cunt. The town wasn’t big enough for two of them: Cadillacs that is, not flash cunts. The town was full of flash cunts. And Spider was one of them.