Where the Rain Gets In (15 page)

“Fine,” said Katie, “whatever you say,
but I’m driving to the airport and returning this car. I’m not going to leave any
loose ends for them to trace me back to Mike.”

“You’re a fucking ruthless bitch, aren’t
you?” said Bruno. “Now you have your money, you just dump Mike and never see
him again – is that it?”

“Don’t start, Bruno; you know that was
what we agreed. If you didn’t like the plan, you shouldn’t have agreed to
come.”

“Like I had a choice,” said Bruno. He
readjusted the mirror and Katie reached up to correct her rear-view vision.
Bruno touched her cheek with his fingertips.

“When are we stopping?” he asked.

“We’re not stopping,” said Katie. “I
told you – we’re almost there.”

“I mean when are we stopping to have
sex?”

“You’re joking, aren’t you?” said Katie,
but already she was scared.

“You promised,” said Bruno. “It was part
of the plan – you can’t go back on it now.”

“Yes,” said Katie, “but that was before
you stabbed yourself with a fork and nearly gouged your eye out. Besides, we’ve
passed by where I was thinking of stopping. We’re almost in Phoenix now;
there’s nowhere here suitable to pull over.”

“We could do it in the car,” said Bruno.
“Switch to Cruise Control – why aren’t you using Cruise Control anyway if
you’re going to stick to the one speed? Come on Katie, let’s fuck.”

Katie drove on. She could see where the
sky was bright from the lights of Phoenix, but they were still some distance
away. If she just drove on there was very little Bruno could do. But then he
reached over and put his hand on her thigh and she froze. She felt as though
the blood in her head was blocking her ears and her eyes too, somehow; she was
blind with anger. She was unable to speak; she couldn’t even tell Bruno to take
away his hand. No one had ever touched Katie there and now this, this . . .
thing that she didn’t even understand how it was a part of her life – this
thing was touching her. Bruno moved his hand up and around Katie’s thigh and
she thought she was going to be sick. She was conscious of the car travelling
at speed, and of the lines on the road moving across the car, and the rougher sound
and feel of the gravel as the car veered off the road.

“Whoa!” laughed Bruno, and he let go of
Katie’s thigh to grab the wheel. “Slow down,” he said, and tried to keep the
car from leaving the highway completely.

Katie was aware of Bruno laughing, but
wasn’t aware of what he was saying.

Bruno tried to lift Katie’s foot off the
pedal with his left hand and guide the wheel with his right hand. Each time he
looked down at her feet, he lost any sense of direction for the car. “Fucking
brake, can’t you?” he laughed, and tried to push down the brake pedal with his
hand.

Katie let go of the wheel and looked
down at the top of Bruno’s head. She reached over to the dashboard and picked
up the metal model of the MGM Grand. She brought it down heavily on the back of
Bruno’s neck. It made a dull thump it was so heavy. Bruno slumped forward and
down. The car shook over the rougher terrain and leaned at such an acute angle
that it was in danger of tipping over. Still holding the model, Katie grabbed
hold of the wheel again and guided the car on to level ground. She couldn’t get
her feet to the brake pedal because Bruno’s head and upper body were between
her legs, but the car gradually slowed down. Twice Katie had to turn sharply to
avoid huge boulders that appeared in the bright headlights, and then flashed on
by. The freakishly large cacti reared up like cartoon jokes – like silent
observers – before disappearing again into the desert night. When the car came
to a stop, Katie switched off the engine and turned off the lights. She closed
her eyes and waited.

It was the weight of the model in her
hand that brought Katie around. She replaced it on the dashboard. She let her
eyes become accustomed to the darkness; she could have switched on the
headlights again, but they only illuminated the immediate direction in which
they were pointing and made the rest of the night seem doubly dark. This way
she could at least get a feel for where she was, without attracting the
attention of the traffic she saw passing by on the highway. Katie reached down
and felt the back of Bruno’s head, expecting it to be a sticky mess, but it was
nothing but still – still and heavy. She pulled at Bruno’s hair but couldn’t
get his body out from around her feet. She managed to free her own legs and stepped
out the car on to the rough ground of open desert. Once she was standing, Katie
could reach in and grab Bruno properly by the shoulders. She lifted him first
on to her own seat and then pushed him upright back into the passenger seat.
She rested and listened for Bruno’s breathing, and tried to think what best to
do.

She could drive back to the highway, but
she couldn’t ask for help – there’d be too many questions. Or drive on to
Phoenix, and decide what to do once she reached the airport? There’d be more
questions in Phoenix, and delays, and Katie’s fate would depend on Bruno
pulling through. She could empty him out the car and dump him here in the
desert – she didn’t care if he lived or died; he was nothing to her now. Katie
didn’t really know how hard she’d hit him. She knew she had to feel for a pulse
to be sure, but she didn’t want to know what the lack of a pulse would tell
her.

  She walked around the car and
opened the passenger door. She pulled Bruno from the car to the ground – much
harder than she thought because his feet got jammed between the seat and the
doorframe. She grabbed him under the arms and pulled him away from the car
towards a large boulder shape she could make out behind her. She dropped him by
the boulder and stood upright to get her bearings. From the lights of the
occasional passing car and truck, Katie figured out that the highway curved
gradually around her present position. She pulled Bruno round to the blind side
of the boulder and rolled him in tight beneath an overhang. She peered into the
darkness behind her and could sense nothing but open desert, but of course,
morning might come and there’d be a huge diner there or anything. The huge sky
was full of stars, but they gave off little or no light to help Katie see into
the night.

She reached into Bruno’s pockets,
looking for his ticket and passport, but she found nothing – perhaps they were
still in his bag, or in the glove compartment of the car? Katie came back from
around the boulder and for a second she panicked as she thought she’d lost her
sight of the car but then she made it out over to her right. She walked over
and reached into the glove compartment – nothing there. She walked back to the
boot of the car and went through Bruno’s bag – nothing. What had he done with them?
Sold them, or swapped them for drugs?

Katie stood by the car thinking. So long
as there was no identification on Bruno, there was nothing to tie him to her.
She wanted to be safe in Manchester before any connection was made between
them. She could easily dispose of his bags when she came to a suitable spot –
hell, she could throw them out in the desert and no one would care. His
passport was a different matter but whatever he’d done with it, Katie would be
long gone before anyone came looking. She was conscious of the time – if she
stayed here much longer she’d be cutting it fine for her flight. She slammed
down the boot of the car and walked around to the driver’s door. She saw the
model of the MGM Grand still on the dashboard and reached across to grab it.
She walked back to the far side of the boulder, stumbling twice on the smaller
rocks and stones beneath her feet. She heard Bruno move on the desert floor.

“Fucking hell, Katie,” he said, “what
did you do?”

Katie leant in to where Bruno was lying
beneath the boulder. She swung the model high above her and crashed it down on
to Bruno’s head.

“You don’t ever touch me there,” she
said. “Do you hear me?” She swung and hit him again. “Never!”

Bruno’s leg twitched for a second and
then he was still, but Katie hit him again. She hit him again and again and
again.

Part 3

M
argaret Maguire lay in bed and listened
and waited for the sound of the front door to be closed. Once she knew she was alone
in the house, she pushed herself up into a sitting position and picked up the
cup of tea her husband Mike had made before leaving. It was six-thirty in the
morning.

“I’ll be home between eight and nine
this evening,” said Mike.

“Will you have eaten?” She spoke without
opening her eyes, sleepily, and into her pillow.

“I’ll eat on the plane.”

“Will that be enough for you?”

“Possibly not,” said Mike, “but I’ll
grab something else if I need to when I get home – don’t wait for me.”

“I’ll see,” said Margaret. “How I feel
at the time, I mean.” Her alternative was to eat alone. “Have a good day.”

It was too early for her to be drinking
tea but Mike liked to bring her a drink in the morning, regardless of the time
he was leaving. She took a sip and wrapped her hands around the cup, enjoying
the heat through her fingers. She wondered what Mike might be doing. She knew
he was going to Dublin but he hadn’t told Margaret why, only saying that he was
following up on a business idea. How many times had she heard that? She’d given
up trying to pin him down when it came to business ideas. Mike explained that
if he talked about it too soon it might never come off; you had to let the idea
grow, to test it privately before opening it up to public scrutiny. By public,
he meant Margaret. She didn’t mind so long as he provided for her and the
family, and he’d certainly always done that. She knew Mike was a restless soul
when it came to business; once he’d achieved something, he had to move on and
find another challenge.

Like Woody Allen’s shark, she thought,
and smiled. Or was that a cat? And that was relationships, not business –
anyway, it was too early for details like that.

When the children were little, Margaret
had worried and felt vulnerable; she didn’t want to be married to a chancer.
She was as dependent on Mike as her young dependent children were on her,
living in a city in a foreign country – whatever some might claim – away from
her family and friends in Belfast. But things had gradually changed; the
children grew, Manchester became her home and she knew now that, if needs be,
she could manage on her own.

Margaret had recently taken again to
playing a game that once had terrified her – the ‘what if Mike leaves
tomorrow?’ game. It was a game she increasingly felt she could win, even if she
upped the odds a little each time. What if she lost the house? What if it
happened before she finished the training on her counselling course? It was a
test to see how far as a woman she’d come from that Belfast girl. And now, of
course, she knew that Mike would always be able to discover new ways of making
money; it wasn’t this that should have worried her at all.

So what if this was the last cup of tea
Mike ever brought her? What if this morning was Margaret’s last chance to see
him, and she didn’t even open her eyes to say goodbye? She couldn’t blame Mike
if he decided never to come back.

What if there was something more than
business in Dublin for Mike?

What exactly were the secrets he’d been
keeping from her all these years?

Well, Margaret had her secrets now too.

Was that what this was all about –
because she didn’t know what Mike got up to, she had to get up to something
herself?

Margaret closed her eyes again – the day
wasn’t five minutes old and already the guilt was back, at her. She took a deep
breath and took another sip of tea.

And what good had her own secrets done
for her? She had less of an idea than ever what Mike might do with his days,
and a greater reason than ever before to fear she might not be the centre of his
world. She’d had to tell him anyway, tell him what she’d done, because she
couldn’t stand the weight of her secret any longer. Mike asked her who it was.

“Don’t you want to know why?” she asked.
“Isn’t why more important than who?”

“Oh right,” said Mike, “so there’s a
league table, is there – a correct order in which I should be asking these
things? You have rules for that as well now, do you?”

“What do you mean ‘rules for that as
well’? What else do I have rules for?”

“Just tell me who it is, will you?”

“It’s not important,” said Margaret.
“It’s more important you know why.”

“But it obviously is important to me,”
said Mike.

Margaret sat there in silence.

“Jesus Christ, all right then – why?”
said Mike.

But in the end Margaret didn’t tell him who
or why. The reasons she used to justify to herself what she’d done sounded
feeble when she saw the effect her words had on Mike. That he was never around?
That even when Mike was home he never seemed fully there? That she’d felt
redundant, useless now the kids were grown up? That she’d always feared he
didn’t love her, that he loved someone else?

So she got in the first blow, just to
protect herself.

Margaret could see Mike was devastated.
She didn’t expect him to be overjoyed, but she was surprised at the extent of
his upset. Part of her thought he had it coming – he’d forgotten what she meant
to him, forgotten what she could do to him if she put her mind to it.

“Are you saying you’ve never been with
another woman?” she shouted at Mike. Her aggressiveness came from her disgust
at herself.

“Not since I’ve been with you,” he said.

“You haven’t been with another woman in
over twenty years?”

“No!” said Mike. “Why – is this
something you do all the time? Or just something you think I do all the time?”

“But you’re always away,” said Margaret.
“You have plenty of opportunity.”

“And because I have the opportunity, it
means I must take the opportunity?”

“I don’t believe you’ve never looked at
another woman,” said Margaret.

“Of course I’ve looked at other women,
and I’ve thought about it too – I’ve just never done anything about it.”

“Well you’re a saint then,” said
Margaret, “or a liar.”

And so it went on, around and around,
round after round, Margaret trying to justify what she’d done by something Mike
had not.

“You just weren’t there,” she said one
day.

“What do you mean?” asked Mike. “Of
course I wasn’t there, otherwise you wouldn’t have done it. But where was I?
Out earning money for you and our kids and our home, that’s where. That’s what
I thought my role was – to provide. You certainly made that plain enough when
we first got married. Where’s the money coming from Mike? What’s going to
happen to the business Mike? Why do you have to change what you’re doing Mike?
Jesus Christ! No one told me I had to stay at home all day so my wife could
feel secure, and wouldn’t feel the need to go and fuck some other bloke. No one
told me that was the deal.”

“I don’t mean you weren’t there
physically,” said Margaret. “You were too distant, I wouldn’t know where your
mind would be half the time – oh, I don’t know, I don’t know why I did it,
okay?”

Over and over it went through Margaret’s
head. She put the half-drunk cup of tea down on the bedside table and lay back
in the bed. She couldn’t start every day in this way, couldn’t go through each
day beating herself up like this. What she had done she had done, but this
guilt was killing her. She turned on to her side and pulled the bedclothes over
her head. She was a tiny figure in the huge bed, a tiny figure in a huge bed in
a huge room; a beautiful room in a beautiful house; a family home with only
Margaret inside.

They moved here soon after Jack was
born, Margaret heavily pregnant with their second child – another boy, who they
called Mike. They took the large front bedroom for themselves and decided the
size of the room demanded a statement of a bed, a big heavy wooden bed that
people could be born in and people could die in. And mothers could lie with
their children in, as Margaret had and yes, that was the happiest time of her life.
She finally felt safe and secure, in her huge bed with her children around her,
her husband out at work, earning the money to pay for their beautiful home.

So when had it stopped being enough?
When had Margaret started wanting more? When did she first notice the void?
Where had it come from and what had been there to fill it before? She was
happy; it was tough enough at first but she was happy. Once the kids were all
at school, though, she knew she had to find something new. She was a young
woman still – she’d only been an adult for as long as she’d been a child.
Margaret could simplify her life since school into four easy decisions:
nursing, marrying Mike, moving to Manchester and having the children. She
didn’t regret any of them. But she was still only just turned thirty – what the
hell would she do next?

Margaret had returned to nursing,
encouraged by Mike and supported by Jack and Mike junior, who loved her in her
uniform (as did Mike senior, but that was a different story – would it work for
him now, she wondered?). It wasn’t the sudden exposure to the workplace that
had changed Margaret. She knew her way around the ward and she fitted right in;
she was too good a nurse not to. There was no great awakening of her
consciousness, no sudden dissatisfaction with her lot in life. In fact, it had
very little to do with her at all and much more to do with Mike – who the hell
was this person, and why had he chosen to be with her? They’d been married for
over ten years before Margaret began to realise that she didn’t really know
Mike at all.

And now another ten years have gone by,
thought Margaret.

Their house backed on to Longford Park,
one of a terrace of large properties with long gardens that reached all the way
to the perimeter of the park. Margaret listened to the early morning sound of
birds singing, about the only time of day when they weren’t drowned out by the
sound of traffic. She still couldn’t recognise the individual songs of
particular birds. As a child she’d asked her mother to teach her, but her
mother didn’t know and Belfast wasn’t the place to listen to birdsong on a
regular basis. Margaret had wanted to know for when she had children of her own
but – just like her mother before her – it was unlikely now that she’d ever
learn. Not that the children ever asked her, but it would have been nice to be
able to tell them.

The house had served its purpose as
their family home but what was to become of it now, Margaret didn’t know. Jack
was settled in Leeds, if you could call working in a pub settled. And while
Mike junior might occasionally turn up for a few days at a time, you wouldn’t
want to base your life around it; he’d inherited his father’s restlessness and
was currently working as a boat painter down in Cornwall. This was not a house
then for a woman to be alone in; Margaret may not have known what happened to
the years as her children were growing up, but she was well aware of what was
going on now. She snuggled deeper down into the bed, trying not to listen to
the silence of the large empty house. Her children were gone, her husband was
gone; she was alone.

They were so right to leave Belfast when
they did. Margaret was surprised when Mike considered staying for a while once
he’d finished his degree in Manchester – although Mike’s Belfast was always
very different to Margaret’s. He seemed to need a few months to decide what to
do next and spent it with his parents up in Hollywood, detached from reality as
Margaret saw it. She didn’t understand why he hadn’t taken the job with the
investment bank that had sponsored him through college, but she presumed he
must have his reasons. She didn’t mind waiting but that was because she knew
she was on her way out of there regardless. Belfast, post hunger strikes, was a
nasty little town and getting worse. She was leaving with or without Mike.
There was nothing to be done with the place but to walk away.

English people were so funny when she
first met them – they couldn’t conceive of living in a place like Belfast, or
what it must do to your head.

“It must make you very hard,” was the
phrase they used, but Margaret thought that if anything it was the leaving of
Belfast that had made her so – hard in the sense that she prevented her
emotions from getting the better of her. What could you do, how could you
reason through what they’d allowed to happen? And why were those deaths any
worse than any others? The only thing to do was to shut down your mind.

That autumn Mike suggested they get
married and go to live in Manchester. Margaret agreed. She loved him and she
believed that he loved her – he’d just taken his time to realise it – and there
was no way she was staying in the North after marrying Mike. Her own family
were reasonable enough, but Margaret knew what she was doing; she knew she’d
rarely see them again. They didn’t shun her; it was just that everybody
understood the choice she was taking. This was her way out and this was the
price she would pay.