Slights (18 page)

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Authors: Kaaron Warren

Tags: #Fiction, #Psychological, #Horror, #misery, #Dark, #Fantasy, #disturbed, #Serial Killer, #sick, #slights, #Memoir

BOOK: Slights
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  Dougie made some sandwiches with bread he went out and bought and we swapped sandwiches, half and half.
  "So, have you thought about what you're going to do? Are you still keen to be a detective?"
  That was the only time I felt guilty about selling drugs. I decided I'd stop; Peter gave me enough money to live on.
  "I sort of lost interest," I said. "It seemed to have no purpose to it, because you didn't catch the guy who killed Dad, so what's the point?"
  He scratched his ear. It was a habit I had tried to form myself; I thought it looked very sophisticated.
  "Didn't your Mother ever tell you?" he said.
  "Tell me what? She didn't ever tell me anything."
  "Can we go for a drink? You still drink, don't you?"
  "Aren't you on duty?"
  "I'm not working at all," he said.
  I felt strange, drinking in the pub with this man. Saddened. If Dad was alive, we might be doing this; sitting about, talking, friends.
  I never got to be friends with my father.
  He drank whisky. I drank beer. He smiled at that. "You never were into pretences," he said.
  "You're a bit old fashioned. Everyone drinks beer, now. It doesn't mean we fuck like rabbits any more." I threw back the beer and ordered another.
  He laughed, a man's laugh, unselfconscious, hearty.
  "So, what have you found out?" I said.
  He bought another drink before he answered.
  "I know you were always interested in what we were working on, even as a kid."
  "I loved it."
  "Well, I don't think we told you about this one. It was pretty gruesome, and your Mum would have killed us for giving you nightmares."
  "Mum was always squeamish," I said. I swallowed too much beer; my eyes watered.
  "I'm so sorry that your Mum died," he said.
  "I'm not crying." I ordered us another beer, and got some nuts and chips. I suddenly felt very hungry.
  "It's okay to."
  "I never cry."
  "Yes, I remember that. Your Dad used to tell us stories about you, your stoic little face, determined. He always said you were tougher than him."
  "He was pretty tough."
  "He acted that way. He loved your mum, though, and you two."
  I thought he said "You, too."
  "What about Peter?"
  "Yeah, you two, you both." And there I was, thinking I was the favourite.
  "Everyone loved Mum," I said.
  "Yes. I know I did. Did you know that?"
  "I guessed."
  We drank our drinks in silence. I thought about the people in the pub and what I'd eat for tea; he sighed repeatedly. Was he thinking about Mum?
  "So what have you found out?" I said again.
  "It's a bit of a long story. The gruesome murder I was talking about – your Dad and I were investigating it when he died. Two bodies were found on the roof of an office building. They had been there for months; people hardly ever went up there. They were impossible to identify; the birds had been at it. A man and a teenage boy. Handcuffed together. It was one of those sad cases; you see a young body and you think, someone misses that child. Someone's looking for him. But nobody was. Alex and I hadn't gotten very far. We kept hitting walls, not finding any answers. And then we got that break you wait for. Someone remembered seeing the man and the boy in the building. We had a witness."
  "So did the man kill the boy?"
  He shook his head. "From what forensics told us, the boy was long dead. That creep had walked around with a dead kid handcuffed to him. Then someone had strangled the creep. I gotta tell you, we didn't look so hard for the killer once we figured that out. Best clue we had was one glass cufflink." Slightly chipped, I thought. Like the one I have at home in my pile of garden treasures.
  "Did you figure out who they were?" I said.
  "The man's name was Joel Bennet, we knew that much. He was a bloody banker, plenty of money, everybody loved him, one of those kinda guys. The witness remembered another man, under hypnosis, and we were going to be drawing up a picture of him. But then…well, this is when it gets really weird. The witness died in the shoot-out where your Dad saved my life. They died together."
  I said, "You don't need to be delicate with me. I'm not like Peter, big wimp. But I was too young at the time to be told anything. All I heard were whispers."
  He shuddered. It was dark in the pub, silver furniture giving only a dull reflection of the low light. Office workers appeared, strained, alone, nervous, or loud, in groups.
  I watched them, their simple lives, clear pasts. I was nervous of my next sentence; I had thought it a hundred times, even practised saying it, but it still scared me.
  "What is it, Stevie? Your lips are moving but nothing's coming out."
  "It's just I always wondered why he died like that. Why he took the bullet. Cos from what I can tell, you were fine, covered. I don't know. Maybe I'm confused."
  He smiled, shook his head. "You're good. I'll give you that. Is it only laziness holding you back?" He pinched my hand to let me know he was joking.
  We watched a small crowd, one pretty woman, five men. It was so easy for her; all she had to do was laugh. Whenever I try that I'm so boring, people can't keep their eyes open.
  He bought us more drinks. I sipped my beer; its bitterness didn't refresh me. I wanted his answer.
  I stared at him. He wouldn't look at me; concentrated on tearing a coaster into snow.
  "Come on," I said.
  "I wondered, too," he said.
  "Come on," I said.
  "Because he wouldn't have done that. He was a good cop, good at seeing into the future, seeing what would happen. It was like he wanted that bullet."
  "Did you tell Mum this?" I said. My ears were buzzing; shock or rage, I wasn't sure.
  "That's when she said, fuck off, don't come back."
  "My mum said fuck off?"
  We both laughed, hysterical little giggles which drew stares.
  "I wish I'd known that before she died. I would have liked to know she was capable of saying fuck."
  We laughed again, stupid laughter without mirth. Then he shook his head. "I can't tell you how much I regretted speaking. You know? I lost your mother. And you, too, Stevie. I've missed you."
  I looked at him and it struck me he wasn't that much older than me. He would've been twenty when Dad died. I glanced around the bar and wondered if people thought we were together.
  "Did anyone else say anything about it? How weird it was?"
  He shook his head. "No one else went beyond the hero thing. They couldn't get past that."
  Now I had a new, bad question. I couldn't ask it, though, wouldn't. Didn't want to know the answer. Didn't want to know why my Dad had hated me so much he wanted to die to get away from me. Dougie Page cleared his throat; he was about to ask me the difficult question.
  I gabbled before he could speak, oooh, work, ooh, the garden, ooh, my car, no, not my car, ooh, the wealthy, ooh, the state of the police.
  "Hmmm," he said." You're right. Spot on, love," he said, until I thought I'd lulled him.
  "So, can you tell me about it, Stevie? About your mum's accident. We never heard. Never got the details."
  "Why would you want the details of something like that?" I drank another beer.
  "You know, not the details. I mean what happened. How did it happen?"
  "There was an accident. That's what happened," I said, and he sucked his head back like a turtle avoiding a hailstorm. Ducking, weaving.
  "Fair enough. Don't blame you. Don't blame you."
  Who believes anything which has to be said twice?
  I tried to tell him about the digging and the bones. I wanted his help.
  "That's your business, Stephanie. Keep yourself to yourself. Don't unbury the past," blah blah blah, hours of it, cliché after shut up cliché.
  When we finally left, I was empty. Finished. I didn't want to think about what he'd told me about my father. The implications of it. I didn't want to be alone with the thinking and the memories, I didn't want to dig, I wanted to be gone before the smell of the night blooming jasmine took me and made me feel as if life was worth living.
  I'm always well stocked. Always. I went to the toilet and had a shower. I wanted to be clean. Then I got my stack of pills, all different colours, and I lay on the bed. Mum's bed, it used to be. Mum's and Dad's. Mine now.

For a while I didn't think I would make it to the dark room. My body resisted. It was like I had a hook through my back, and someone kept tugging, tugging, pulling me backwards away from my destination. Finally chemicals took over, and as I sank away from consciousness, into the smell of mothballs and the sound of clicking, I could hear them murmuring, waiting for me, and my stomach filled with shit, I could feel it like a ball in there, but Dougie found me; pushed open the front door then sought me out in my bedroom. He confessed he thought I was waiting for him; my knees had fallen apart, my mouth was open, my arms flung wide. Then he realised I wasn't breathing normally. He saw the empty bottle of pills. He panicked. He saved me, when I didn't need it.

  The counsellor came to see me in hospital, so I knew things were pretty dicey. She never got off her arse, didn't even open the door for you when you came in for a session. She said, "Steve, maybe it's time you thought about others. I think you need to do something unselfish, something that will make a difference in the lives of others."
  The nurse checking my chart looked up. "She should try being a nurse. That'd stop her feeling sorry for herself. The things you see make you feel lucky to be alive."
  "What sort of things?" I said.
  The nurse shook her head. "I couldn't begin to tell you. Little kiddies dying, terrible injuries. You soon realise you're damn lucky to be on this earth in one piece."
  The counsellor agreed. "We'll look into it for you. Okay? Some study will do you good."
  "How much study?"
  "An enrolled nurse needs a year," the nurse said. "You could start with that."
  It was an interesting thought.
  Access to the dying. The chance to look into their eyes.
  It was worth thinking about.
  Peter looked at me distrustfully when I told him the plan.
  "I'm hurt," I said. "You want to do good but you won't let me do good."
  "You're right. You should give it a go," he said.
  Auntie Jessie surprised me by telling me it was a terrible idea. "For someone like you," she said.
  "What do you mean, someone like me? A woman?"
  "Someone with your interest in death," she said. "These people need help, not your curiosity."
  I was offended, truly offended. "I'm not doing it for me, Jessie. It's a sacrifice. It's less money than anywhere else, and it stinks, and you're dealing with sad people the whole time. How can that be for my benefit?"
  I knew what she meant, though. I remembered looking into the faces of the dying, when I was in hospital. I remembered the feeling it gave me, the sense of fulfilment.
  "I'm doing it anyway," I said.
  Sometimes, Auntie Jessie would talk to me about the most gruesome, exciting crimes, or tell me about her latest favourite book, and I couldn't understand her lack of animation.
  Auntie Jessie had more books than anyone I've ever seen. She kept most of them in boxes and wouldn't let anyone read them. She said people didn't treat books with respect. It seemed odd she would keep so many books when she had a whole library to play with. I stayed with her quite often as a child, to give Mum a night off and me a treat. Mum never seemed to need a break from Peter.
  Jessie had wonderful books about forensics, detectives, murder. When I visited, I curled up in her huge armchair, a pile of books waist high on the floor beside me; I worked my way through.
  The books inspired me. I found the sections Auntie Jessie found inspiring, read them, underlined them again, in pen this time, red or purple, whatever I had. She had a quote by Agathon in one of the books, and I wondered if Stalin had read it too.
Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics. Book V1, 2
"It is to be noted that nothing that is past is an object of choice; for e.g. no one chooses to have sacked Troy; for no one
deliberates
about the past, but about what is future and capable of being otherwise, while what is past is not capable of not having taken place; hence Agathon is right in saying:
  'For this alone is lacking even to God,
  To make undone things that have once
  been done…'"
Agathon quote, 1 Fr. 5, Nauck

It gave me an idea for a story, and I wrote it for a class assignment. The only time I ever got an "A" at school. Mrs Nicholson said, "Refreshing and charming." I loved that. I never got words like that again. It was called "The Sacking of Troy".

The Sacking of Troy
by S. Searle
There are great things afoot in the workings of mankind. Only one man can save the day and it is always a strong man, a good man, a man who shows up on time to work and does not take sickies. A man who has only one girlfriend at a time and does not keep three women waiting while he performs nebulous duties. This man is always honest. This man does not steal food from his employer.
  This man is not Troy.
  Troy got his job at Woolworths because his big brother worked there for years and was now head manager of the cigarette booth. Brad had an attendance record which was being noticed in high circles, and he never blew his nose on his sleeve. He was popular because he was going places and there was always a chance he would give out free cigarettes when the floor manager took her tea break.
  Brad looked good in his short red coat. He had a smile which was quite believable and a laugh which didn't shock anybody.
  There was no reason to think his little brother Troy would be any different.
  Brad knew, but he was under the control of his mother, who insisted Troy be given a chance. She could not see Troy in the light everyone else saw him in, because he was charming and he gave her kisses still, although he was fifteen.
  The Starting of Troy caused a stir of anticipation. The customers were no cause for gossip – only the ones who liked to catch the cashiers out in errors. They received slow, painstaking service. The best gossip to be had was about each other.
  Troy arrived with sunglasses on, greasy hair, sandshoes. Brad received a word of warning; had he not drilled the dress-code into his brother?
  Troy wore scuffed school shoes the next day and declared that his ignorance of the difference between a Naval orange and a Valencia would remain just that.
  He began to feel besieged the next day when he did not properly pack a customer's bags, and he lashed out. Brad was called to speak with him.
  "Troy, you must be careful. The people here are very unforgiving. They don't like temper or any other emotion. Perhaps if you were in Paris things would be different, because the French are a passionate race. But you are here, where we are dispassionate, and you must abide by the laws, however unfair or invasive you find them."
  On his next shift, Troy was discovered having sex with Diana, who had gone out the back for a cigarette and been surprised.
  "What can I say? He's built like a horse. I could hardly resist."
  With that, Troy was sacked.
THE END

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