Nothing Sacred (4 page)

But recently, in the sporadic times that I had seen him, I had noticed a change in him; an air of purpose, a contained stillness he used to wear like an aura when he came home on leave, still in uniform, fresh from Bosnia or Iraq or Sierra Leone. I had not asked him what he had going on, did not consider it my business. Yet I could not help but worry, and I hoped that whatever he was now involved in, it was not destructive. Turning trained killers loose in society without job or role after decades of fighting could have, I knew, dangerous consequences. I promised myself that I would visit him, check on him, do it soon.

Although we were in April, it was cold outside; we seemed locked in an eternal winter, spring attempting an entrance and then quickly retreating as if the flat frozen land was not ready, the low sullen skies unwilling to open up and let the blue in. Still, Maria, like any good Essex girl, did not wear a coat; she might have been a respectable primary school teacher but when she was going out, she was doing it right. She was wearing a short skirt, heels and a top that was, I suspected, created with clubbers in the Balearics in mind; her long dark hair was down, curling over her shoulders, and she looked fantastic.

‘Not cold?'

‘Idiot. Course I am. Can you walk faster?'

Maria had booked at a Mexican restaurant around the corner from my home, its authenticity only slightly marred by the fact that it was staffed almost exclusively by Eastern Europeans. But it was close and the food was good, the atmosphere friendly, and besides, I was out with Maria. I did not greatly care about anything else.

‘So, what's going on?' said Maria as we sat, a waiter pushing in her chair, Maria thanking him with a smile that I was willing to bet had made his night.

‘Going on?' I picked up a menu. ‘Nothing much.'

‘Something's up. Work?'

‘No.'

Maria pushed my menu down, looked at me sternly. ‘You lie. Come on, Daniel. You can talk to me. It's kind of the point of this, you know? Of us.'

Us
. The matter-of-fact way she used the word, as if it was natural that we were together rather than it being some lucky accident of fate I would never have believed had I not been sitting here, right now, opposite her. I could not accustom myself to it: us, we, a couple.

But perhaps she was right, it would help to talk through it with her; perhaps that was the point. So I told her about Vick, about what she had said to me in my office. Watching Maria's face as I told the story was a lesson in the powers of empathy, her expression changing from intrigue to shock to horrified pity as Vick's children were taken away from her. After I had finished, she sighed, shook her head.

‘What she must be going through.'

‘Yeah.'

‘Sounds… I don't know what it sounds like. Gives me the creeps. Her, alone in that house.'

‘Never seen anyone so desperate.'

‘With all that happened. Things moving around, the way she woke up outside. Then the kids. What next?'

I had not thought of it like that, put down my glass. ‘How d'you mean?'

‘Well, like it's escalating, isn't it? Getting worse.'

‘You think?'

Maria took a long sip of wine, thought about what I had told her, her eyes unfocused as she put herself in the place of Vick, tried to feel what she must be feeling. She shook herself out of it.

‘What are you going to do?'

‘Don't know. Speak to social services. Apply pressure.' I shrugged. ‘Christ knows.'

The truth was, I did not know where to begin with Vick's story, did not have the first idea what horror had violated her life. I was not superstitious but what was happening to her sounded like it had more in common with the supernatural realm than the legal.

For a respectable primary school teacher, Maria could put away a lot of tequila; after we had left the restaurant, she insisted that we did not call it a night, that we went on to a bar. She pointed one out across the dark street,
Karma
glowing in purple neon. We were arm in arm and she tugged me along.

‘Not that one.'

‘Too classy?'

‘Really, Maria, not that one.'

‘Oh.' She heard my tone, looked at me suspiciously, put on a deep voice. ‘Got a beef?'

‘Something like that. Let's try somewhere else.'

‘Really?'

‘Really.'

The bar was owned by a local gangster called Vincent Halliday, a man who I had not seen or spoken to for months but with whom I had a history. To walk into his place would be a crazy provocation. There was no way I was going through those doors, not tonight. Aggravations, resentments, old scores; it sometimes seemed to me that my Essex home was built on these, as much as on hastily concreted marshland.

‘Okay, I won't ask. Let's try that… what's it called? The new place.'

I must have looked unwilling, because Maria gave me another tug. ‘Come on. What's the worst that can happen?'

I was coming back from the men's, where four or five kids of school-leaving age had been crammed into a cubicle, giggling over their first lines of coke, swearing and snorting. The bar was dark, and the music was loud and there was an atmosphere of dormant aggression; the clientele was too young and too drunk and still had too much to prove, and I was too old to be in a place like this. Maria was at the bar and a man, no more than twenty-four or -five with a white t-shirt, fake tan and whitened teeth, was talking to her, laughing and leaning in too close to her ear as he shared whatever he imagined passed for wit. Maria noticed me as I approached, rolled her eyes at me, pulled away from him.

‘It's all right, Daniel, this gentleman was just leaving,' she said.

The man might have been young but he was taller than me. He looked me up and down, apparently unimpressed by what he saw.

‘This yours, is it?' he said to Maria. I could only assume he was talking about me. He did not smile; clearly he saved his good humour for the ladies.

‘So go on then,' I said. ‘Leave.'

He had gym muscles under his t-shirt, his triceps unnaturally pronounced. Behind him I noticed two other men taking an interest: his friends, back-up, one of who had the neck, shoulders and acne of a serial steroid user.

‘Think she prefers me,' the man said, putting an arm around Maria's shoulders. He was drunk and I suspect more besides, but this was too much, way too much. Before I could do anything, though, Maria shook his arm off, turned to him.

‘Don't make me call your mother,' she said with nothing but contempt in her voice. She turned to me, said firmly, ‘We're going, Daniel.'

‘Jog on then,' said the man, making a show of dismissing us. He turned back to his friends, muttered, ‘Slag anyway.'

Maria walked away but I did not follow, not immediately. My upbringing and, I had come to accept, my innate character made me incapable of ignoring such a disgraceful insult; I could not, like Maria, excuse the man's casual disdain. I stood there and he must have felt my presence because he turned back around, said, ‘What?'

I put my left hand around his throat, worked my thumb into the space behind his jaw, underneath his ear. His eyes widened in shock at my strength. He put both hands on my forearm to push my hand away and for the first time realised my mass, what he had got himself involved with. It was almost as if I was squeezing the man out of the boy, his eyes looking around for help, for somebody to stop what the nasty man was doing. But his friends suddenly did not want to know. I looked over and they would not meet my eye, the steroid user peering intently at the ice cubes in what remained of his drink, prodding them carefully.

I did not say anything, did not need to. It was not often that I was grateful for the face I was born with, hard and forbidding as it was, but in situations like these it could be a useful deterrent. I saw pain and regret and fear in his eyes, and sensed tears weren't far behind. There, I thought. See what happens?

I let go and the man took a shaky breath and looked down at the floor, tried to pretend he wasn't there. I turned to leave and saw Maria watching me from three metres away, on the edge of a semicircle that had been created by people backing away from what was going on at the bar, from what I might have done. I'd thought that she had left, had not meant her to see this. I shrugged, hands out, palms up: what could I do? She did not react, just turned around and headed for the door. But I had seen her face and the look on it had been anger, and something else which was more like disgust.

*

Any given Friday night saw any number of couples walking along streets in my neighbourhood, one walking fast, the other trying to keep up, hands busy, explaining, apologising. Tonight, I was the one doing the explaining; Maria was not having any of it.

‘You hear what he called you?' I said.

‘
He started it
,' said Maria, contemptuously.

‘Well,' I said, an attempt to sound moral, ‘he did.'

‘You were old enough to be his father.'

‘So? He thought you were old enough to be his girlfriend.'

‘
Danny
.' She stopped, turned; she was infuriated. ‘Jesus.'

‘What?'

She looked at my face, examined it as if searching for something, some imperfection. ‘Do I need to be scared of you?'

‘Of me?' I was surprised, shocked. ‘No, Maria. No. I'll always protect you.'

‘Not exactly what I asked,' said Maria, frowning.

‘Listen,' I said, but I did not know what to say next, struggled to think of the right words, wondered how I had got things so wrong. Seeing my confusion seemed to touch something in Maria because her tight face relaxed, something gave in her eyes.

‘Don't hit people for me, Daniel,' she said. ‘I'm a big girl.'

‘Okay. All right.' I could not go as far as to say sorry. I wasn't, not really. Regardless of what Maria said, he'd had it coming. ‘Anyway, I didn't hit him. Just…' What had I done? I shrugged. ‘Squeezed a bit.'

‘Squeezed,' said Maria sceptically, but her anger had gone and despite herself she smiled at my half-hearted justification, then laughed at what I suspected was my hapless expression, a warm, generous despairing chuckle.

Cars hissed past us, a chill drizzly rain sparking coldly through headlights. Maria shook her head at me then leaned over and kissed my cheek, took my hand and turned and led me, gently but with a purpose that I dared not question, back from where we had come, through the dark and the drunks and the dramas, back to the quiet street where I lived.

4

NEXT MORNING I
woke up to find Maria gone and panicked for some seconds, imagining that she had left me, that what she had seen last night had caused her to change her mind about us. But then I heard her clattering about in the kitchen and soon after her feet on the stairs. She appeared in the doorway with a cup of coffee for me, wincing at her headache, blaming me, us, the world.

I arrived at my office to find a message from Vick on my answering machine, asking for any progress. She sounded, if anything, more desperate than she had when she visited my office. I wondered if she had had any sleep in the last few days. There was also a message from the social worker in charge of Vick's case who said her name was Ms Armstrong, giving me a time to visit; clearly social workers started their days earlier than lawyers.

Looking about my office I realised that I did not have a great deal else to do: no pressing cases, nobody to chase, no clients to report back to. Just a meeting with a social worker about a case I did not want and could not influence. Force of habit had brought me in to work; I ought to have stayed in bed.

*

Ms Armstrong was middle-aged and white but had her hair piled on top of her head African style, wrapped in a brightly coloured cloth. She was enormous and wore a blue velvety dress that draped over her large breasts nearly to the ground, giving her the shape of a massive bell. Yet despite her bulk she had a brisk energy. She gave my hand a couple of tugs without smiling before turning with a curt ‘Follow me', out of the reception and along a linoleum-squared corridor. I had to hurry to keep up with her.

‘Thank you for seeing me,' I said to her back, a statement she did not bother to reply to. There were large windows along the corridor and through them I could see a large play area, like a children's nursery, but the children in it ranged in age from two or three to early teens. Some were playing, some writing and drawing at tables, some watching a television attached to one of the walls, which was showing a cartoon I did not recognise. The walls in the play area were painted red and purple and pink, but despite the gaiety of the walls, the children did not seem happy, going through their activities in a desultory way as if through duty rather than pleasure. I wondered if Vick's children, Ollie and Gwynn, were in there; wondered if they had any idea what was happening to them.

We turned a corner, leaving the children behind, and Ms Armstrong opened a door, showed me into a small office. There was a desk, a chair and shelves along one wall with books and box files on them, a window at the end. With both of us in the small room there was little space to manoeuvre and I had to press myself against the shelves to let Ms Armstrong pass me to get to her desk.