The Treatment (40 page)

“And you still love it?”

“Kissing pussy?”

He smiled. “The force.”

“Aye. I still love it. Every minute of it.”

“And you never feel you got in for the wrong reason?”

“No.” She forked rice cubes into her mouth and looked around the restaurant, chewing hard, focusing her eyes on a point somewhere above his head. “But, then, nothing happened to me like what happened to you when you were a wain.”

At that Caffery cleared his throat and sat back a little, looking down at his food. He knew Souness was waiting for him to pick up the baton. Suddenly he wasn't very hungry. “You know, don't you …” he looked up at her “… you know I only joined the force because I had some
fucked-up idea I was going to find Ew—” He paused.

“Find my brother.”

“Aye, it doesn't take a genius to see that.”

He sat forward. “But, Danni, I can't disentangle it. I get a case like Rory Peach and suddenly I'm ten years old again, fists up and wanting to take them all on—want to bare-knuckle fight.”

“So ye get angry from time to time. What of it?”

“What of it?” He pulled out his tobacco and quickly rolled a cigarette. “What of it? Well,” he said, holding a lighter to the cigarette, “well, one day it's going to go too far, I can see it. One day someone's going to push me and I'll do something I can't go back on.” He dragged on the cigarette and held the smoke in his lungs, head back, eyes closed. Then he let out the smoke and rested the cigarette in the ashtray. “It's all about perspective—that's what they'd call it, isn't it, perspective? Look at what I did at the hospital—look at the way I laid into you, trying to batter it into you that there's someone—”

“Ah, wait,” Souness said. “I know what you're going to say.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.” She dipped the meat in peanut sauce and ripped a piece off the skewer with her teeth. “Aye, and I've been thinking about it too. You think there's still someone out there? Another family.”

“Yes. I told you, I'm a dog with a bone.”

“ 'S OK, Jack,” she said, chewing hard. “I've spoken to the gov about it—I can give you two of the outside team. Do whatever you want with them—just bring them back with a smile on their faces. OK?”

He stared at her. “You're feeding me.”

“No. No, I'm not. I think ye might just have a point. Now instead of sitting there with your mouth open like an eejit, say thank you.”

He shook his head. “OK.” He nodded. “OK—thanks, Danni—thanks.”

“It's nothing. Now, put
that
out,” she jabbed the skewer at his cigarette, “and just get on with your food.
You look like a proper meal would kill you at the moment.”

He stubbed out the cigarette, and he pulled his plate toward him. But still he couldn't concentrate on the food. “What went on in that house, Danni?” he said after a while. “What the fuck went on in there?”

She used a fork to push the rest of the meat off the skewer into the sauce. “It's simple. Rory Peach got raped. By his father. It happens, you know.”

“Then what was going on in that family?”

“I don't know.” She forked some beef into her mouth and chewed. “I often wonder what it'd be like to rape. It's one of those things women wonder about—not to be raped, but to be the one who rapes. Not very PC for an old dyke, is it?” She took a swig of Singha and wiped her mouth. “I had a conversation once with this rapist, and you know what he said? He said—and I can remember every word, because it was then that I knew that whatever I did, however much I strapped my chest down and cut my hair, I'd never really understand what it feels like to be a guy—he said”—she sat forward and looked Jack in the eye—“he said: ‘It's like your heart is sticking out, it's like you're biting down so hard on leather that your jaw cracks, it's like the hard-on to end all hard-ons, it's like having your soul dragged out through your dick. ’ ” Souness sat back, stabbing her fork into the meat. “Pretty loony tunes, eh?” She stopped. Caffery had stood up. “Hey, where ye going?”

“Do you want another drink?”

“Yeah.” She was bewildered. “Yeah, go on then, another beer.” She put the food into her mouth and chewed slowly as she watched him go to the bar, wondering what she'd said. Something was definitely a bit tangled in Caf-fery—there was no doubt about it. Sometimes he had the eyes of a lion on a lead. When he got back with the drinks he was quiet.

“Jack—what is it? Come on, talk to me.”

“I think I'll call Rebecca.”

“Aye. Rebecca. How is she?”

“She's fine.”

“Good. Well, send her my love, then.” She leaned over and took his plate. “You're not wanting this are ye?”

“No—go ahead.”

She scraped what he hadn't eaten onto her plate and started to fork her way through it. The meal finished early and Caffery didn't need the extra money he'd got from the cashpoint.

On the phone Rebecca's voice was indistinct. “Jack— where am I—I mean, God,” she took a breath. “I'm sorry, I mean, where are
you
?”

“Are you all right?”

“I'm—I dunno—drunk, I think. I think I'm lost, Jack.”

“Where are you?”

“At the—y'know, at the gallery.”

“The same one I got you from before?”

“I think so.”

“I'm only over the road. Wait for me.”

The Satay Bar was only a hundred yards from the Air Gallery. He crossed the street and went inside, his tired eyes smarting in the smoke as he wove through the bar, past hanging aluminum panels, cast resin columns, tungsten pinpricks of light, not meeting the cool, otherworldly gazes of all the modern faces in the semidarkness. When he eventually found Rebecca, on the first floor, he stood for a moment and stared, as if he was seeing into another world.

A fully lit glass cabinet displayed models of pathology specimens in colored fluid. In front of it, on matching chairs, sat four girls with pale East European faces and geometric haircuts. They wore intent expressions and were leaning forward listening to the man who sat on the red plastic sofa opposite them. He was tall and strickenlooking in a black polo neck, and Caffery recognized him as a journalist from a late-night Channel 4 show.

“Like Michelangelo's blocked windows in the Medici library, these are vaginas that go nowhere,” he was saying, biting with precision on the ends of his words. “They invert the natural order of a phallocentric society; they create the organic, the
organ like
, where a male-obsessed perspective thinks there should be a space. They are
saying, “
Look!
Look at the tribalness,
look
at the
vagina
-ness—do not ignore it!”

Rebecca sat next to him as he talked about her work. She was folded into the crease of the sofa, dressed in a T-shirt and a dragonfly-blue skirt. Her chin was down on her chest, her hands were loosely wrapped around an open bottle of absinthe resting on her bare knees and, although no one seemed to have noticed, she was fast asleep.

“Becky.” Caffery put himself between the small audience and the sofa and held a hand out to her. “C'mon, Becky.”

The journalist stopped talking and turned to look at him: “Yes?” He pressed a hand on his chest and lowered his chin. “Did you want to ask something?”

Caffery bent down to see Rebecca's face. “Rebecca?” She didn't stir. She'd had her hair cut since he'd last seen her. It stood in wild tufts around her little smudged face. Two clumps of black eyeliner had collected in the corners of her eyes and she looked like nothing so much as a casualty at a teenagers' drinking party. A little drunken pixie. “Becky—come on.” He took her hand, peeling the fingers from the bottle, and she stirred a little.

“Uh?” She looked up and her eyes zigzagged across his face. “
Jack?
” Her breath was sour.

“Come on.” He took the bottle from her hands and put it on the table. “Let's go.” He draped her hand over his shoulder and bent down to put his arm round her waist.

“She going?” the journalist asked mildly.

“Yes.”

He shrugged and turned back to the women. “Now, Cornelius Kolig, for example, might take a different approach to the issue of sexual abuse.…”

The women uncrossed and crossed their legs with the absolute symmetry of a dance troupe and leaned forward, ignoring Rebecca, eyes fixed on the journalist, ready to suck up his words.

“You bunch of pricks,” Rebecca said suddenly, pushing herself away from Caffery. “Can't you see it's all bollocks?” She plucked the bottle of absinthe from the table and waved it around wildly. The liquid moved like melted
emeralds in the lights, sloshing out onto the floor, and the girls looked up in surprise. “It's all a
huge joke
—don't you get it? The joke is on
you
.” She stopped for a moment, swaying slightly as if she was surprised to find herself standing up. “You—” She took a step back and almost lost her balance, putting out her hand to steady herself.
“Oh
—” She stopped suddenly, breathing hard, looking helplessly around herself. “Jack?”

“Yeah, come on.”

“I want to go …” She slumped slightly and began to cry. “I want to go home.”

He managed to get her out of the club without attracting attention. Outside, when the night air hit her, she reacted slowly, raising dead-weight hands to rub her arm. She allowed him to bundle her into the passenger seat of the Jaguar and fasten the seat belt across her. “I want to go home.”

“I know.” He propped her up and pushed her hands inside the car, where they remained, on her lap, her head slumped against the window as he drove in silence through Dulwich, glancing at her from time to time, wondering how she had let herself become a sideshow like this. Rebecca had a long, vibrant survival streak in her—it was the first thing he'd noticed about her, the thing that most repelled and most attracted him. It was incredible to see her so demoted, so helpless, so needful. Her face in the car headlights was a little gray, her mouth bluish. They stopped at lights in Dulwich, outside a white weatherboarded villa—they could have been in a Pennsylvania Amish village, not South London—and he put out a hand to touch her head, to stroke the sturdy little tufts of hair. “Rebecca? How you doing?”

She opened her eyes and when she saw him she gave him a muzzy little smile. “Hi, Jack,” she murmured. “I love you.”

He smiled. “You all right?” Her mouth was a dusty purple shade. “You OK?”

“No.” She dropped her hands. She was shivering. “Not really.”

“What's the matter?” She fumbled for the door, her feet
rucking up the rubber mat on the floor. “Becky?” But before he could pull into the curb she stuck her head out the door and vomited onto the tarmac, her body shaking, tears coming up.

“Oh, Jesus, Becky.” Caffery rubbed her back with one hand, his eye on the traffic in the rearview, looking for a space to pull over. She was shuddering and crying, wiping her mouth with one hand and trying to close the door with the other. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry—”

“All right, just a moment, just a moment …”

The lights changed and he cut across traffic to pull the car onto the curb. She dropped back into her seat, sobbing, her hand to her mouth, mascara running down her cheeks. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen her cry.

“Come here, come here—” He tried to pull her to him but she pushed him away.

“No—don't touch me, I'm disgusting.”

“
Becky?
”

“I took some heroin—I took some smack.”

“Some
what
?”

“Some smack.”

“Oh, for God's sake.” He sighed, dropped back in the seat, raising his eyes to the ceiling. “When?”

“I don't know. I don't know—maybe a few hours ago.…”

“
Why?
”

“I …” She rolled her eyes to him and now he wondered why he hadn't recognized that glazed, smacked-up look before. “I wanted to try it.”

“Do you have to try
everything
? Every fucking thing?”

She wiped her mouth and didn't answer. The traffic was slowing down to see what was happening—to see if there was an argument. He leaned over and pulled her door closed so that the interior light didn't give the passersby a stage-lit show.

“Is this the first time?”

She nodded.

“OK.” He shoved the Jag into gear. “I'm not going to lecture you. Let's get you home.”

In Brockley he got her cleaned up and made her drink
tea. She sat like a child in bed wearing one of his shirts, her hands wrapped round the mug, a pale, numb look on her face.

“I'm getting a doctor.”

“No. I'm OK.” She stared into the bottom of the mug. “I feel better now. Will you …” she didn't look up at him “… will you come to bed?”

He stood in the doorway, his hands on the doorposts, and shook his head.

“No?”

“No.”

“I see.” She was silent for a while, as if moving this new resolve of his around in her head. Then suddenly she let go of the mug and put her face in her hands. The mug rolled off the bed and shattered on the wooden floor. “Oh,
Jack
,” she sobbed, “I'm
lost
—”

“OK, OK.” He sat on the bed and rubbed her back.

“
I'm lost
. I used to know where I was, but I just—I just
don't know anymore
.” She cried so hard she seemed to be crying for everything—for every small disappointment, for everything she had ever lost. Tears boiled down her cheeks.

“Becky …” he put his arms around her and kissed her head “… you can't go on like this.”

“I know.” Her shoulders were shaking and her neck had grown hot. She shook her head. “I know.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I don't know—I—” She rubbed her eyes and took deep breaths, trying to control herself.

“Rebecca?” He dipped his head to look at her face. “What are you going to do?”

She wiped the tears off her cheeks. Her breathing steadied.

“Well?”

“Uh.” She turned her head away. “I'm going to—I don't know, I'm going to tell the truth, I suppose.”

“OK.”

“No, I mean really
tell the truth
.” She raised her hands, then dropped them again. “Jack.”

“What?”

“I've been—I've been lying. A bit,” she stumbled. “No—not a bit, a lot. Jack. I've been lying to you—all the way along I've lied and now I'm so sorry and it's because I lied that we've got like this and it's all my fault and I'm—”