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Extended Work
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| PAST CARING | |
| By russ11 | |
| 05 March 2008 | |
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Have revamped this from a previous story. Hope you can provide some feedback. Thanks for reading.Is this too long perhaps?  PAST CARING “…….. so there it is then,” he said with about as much concentration as a blind man at a peep show. I looked at him. I knew him. After all the hours and tests, I was beginning to make my own diagnosis – I didn’t like him. He was supposed to be helping and yet it seemed a charade. He had a white coat and I didn’t. Not that white was my colour but another coat would have doubled my wardrobe. “Whatdayamean, ‘so there it is then’. You can’t just say ‘You’re a mad fucker but you’re going to die, so there it is then’. What happened to bedside manner, approaching the bad news obliquely, breaking it to him gently, dealing with stuff in a touchy feely warm way rather than…you know…just blurting it out in onner.” He looked at his watch. He was no more interested in the time than he was interested in me. It was just another message, just the same as his words and just as far from just as you could get. And the message? … indifference, disinterest, professional disdain. His manicured hands played the papers on his desk, a tune of status and impatience, its silent eloquence loud in my ears. The only papers I had were the ones served on me before I came here, before the madness out there became the madness in here, before…well ‘before’ is where it all kicked off so I’d better get it down and soon because whatever I might think about his manner he was right about one thing, I was dying. ≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈ It read ‘Please close the door, up the stairs to the surgery’. I went up, slowly. The tooth stabbed sharply, distracting from the half-glassed surgery door and its still faced reflection, I paused to look. Middle aged, with a face beginning to hold its creases between laughs and hair of various colours, some grey, some dark, and some natural. I tried a grin and got one back. You see, smile and the whole world…… wonders what the hell you’re up to. I raised an eyebrow at the guy to no different effect and then gave him my grimmest look, pushed my hand out and in an instant he’d swung wordlessly to one side. “He’s running late, be with you presently”, came fromthe top of the receptionist’s head. I tried a smile on her but the bloke on the door had been more friendly. “Just go in and sit down.” I was still asking her where when she grunted and waved my way. She was warming to me, I could tell, ‘cos she was using all her fingers. I turned around and followed her direction, leaving her behind, alone. So to speak. I eased into the waiting room. Usual set up, walls, ceiling, floor, carpet, air. I was in pain but at least I hadn’t lost my keen sense of observation. Nothing special except the one person there wasn’t waiting. Pen posed over the crossword on her lap, filling in clues and time is how I was supposed to see her. Small things, you say, but they’d kept me alive before. So I kept looking. “I’m afraid we’ve got a wait on our hands,” she was saying friendly words. I grunted. I could be a charmer when I wanted. Right then what I wanted was nothing to remind me, nothing even close to what I used to do, and absolutely nothing like this threat. Because that’s what she was, a threat. Attractive perhaps, chatty for sure, but no less a threat. “But perhaps I’ll be able to get this finished,” nodding her head down to the newspaper, its neat crip folds pristine except for one edge. She’d crumpled it, holding on too tight. “Any luck.” Two words more than I felt like saying and only one of fifty questions broiling me. This reeked of Service meddling. Why now downstream a decade or so? Here in the most obvious of places? So on, so forth. I smiled, inside and out. How ironic. I was standing, still. Hands loose fists by my hips, legs flexed on the balls of my feet. Palm heel to her nose flicking her head back and knife- shaped hand strike to the throat is how I would have finished it. Lifeless before she toppled to the floor, DOA, endex for her, for the Service and whatever mission she was on and, yeah, for me too. Too public, too many witnesses. Ironic too, their Jujitsu training, my hands, her death but I wanted the truth first. So for now, we were just playing - me, her, and the Service. “Some,” she said following my chatty lead, meandering her hand to put fourteen down and the rest out of sight. Not quick enough. She wasn’t good at all. ‘Some’, she’d said but that had been a lie. The grid was fully empty, not a one completed. It might have helped if she’d had the top off the pen. Yeah, right, in every sense clueless. She was different, not like the other patients. Neither was I because I was ex. Ex Service, ex stereotype, and ex pretty much everything. Here free dentistry was the one perk I had after twenty years’ duty. And, how could I forget, a pittance of a pension that kept me in a lifestyle I had to get accustomed to. It was where the best and the rest of London’s MI5 got their dental quota. They had a look and a silence about them that bespoke their profession. Or could be they just had the personality of a paperclip. It made sense, I could see that. One surgery was secure – easier to vet one staff, easier to sweep one building, and easier to get only one answer when you wanted stuff not taught in Dentistry School. But she was talking. People here didn’t, especially to me. They knew. Yet, she was and she was being sociable. Sociable in what she said, how she held herself and in the diamond stare of her green white eyes. It had been somewhere between too long and not long enough since I’d been looked at like that. For a moment thoughts of Margaret tried to wrangle me down, to brand me, to seer me with the past. Eyes flickered and I looked again at the Crossword Queen. Slim, brunette, natural faced without eyebrows plucked into some Geisha arch. She was half my age but I was beginning to forget it and my caution. The way she talked was…easing. It jarred my resistance, discomforting and resonating a tsunami of feelings. “Not good at them myself but could be,” I said throwing my thumb over my shoulder towards reception like I was hitching there,” she’ll give you a hand if you can get a word in edgeways.” “Her, Janice, you mean. She’s OK really. We go back a long way. She’s alright once you get to know her. Used to help me with my homework, heart of gold.” Well, at least, I knew she wasn’t allergic to clichés. She stood to get up to my level. What she’d dropped I didn’t know exactly straight off but we both grabbed for it… same time, same idea, bad move. Laurel and Hardy in colour 80 years on, she faltered, I fumbled, and she almost kneed me where it really hurts a man. But I’d turned at the last instant throwing in a deflect. “I’m sorry,” said as she retrieved her pen. “Don’t worry, I’m still a baritone,” at last placing her accent and wishing I hadn’t. It was Margaret’s. Fifteen years since she’d died and I’d begun to, just a little each day. Not my fault I’d told myself but I’d known I was lying and so had the judge. “Did I hurt you?” Only with the memories, but she meant the knee thing so I mouthed some words I wasn’t thinking. “No, but I don’t think it’s going to take the place of shaking hand,” I said sticking out my hand and recovering my balance several ways. We traded names, shakes, and something else that barely registered before the silence crept up to full volume. “What do you do?”, I asked. Wasn’t really interested, was on auto chat and would be until the past faded and my eyes started looking out, rather than inwards. The receptionist interrupted, Mr Pearlywhites had an emergency and could we come back three hours later. “Actually I just live round the corner,” she said. Same accent again. I wasn’t really listening. “Well….” She wanted an answer so I told her. Said she had to powder her nose so I went ahead, pausing on the stairs as the past overrode. Don’t know for how long I was stood there but, as I glanced at the surgery door, I saw her outline square in the glass. She was talking low and fast into her sleeve, hand to her ear making the connection. Maybe she was just practising her ventriloquism and, yeah, maybe “Same again” were the last words of Socrates. Reached the bottom just as she sway-hipped along the stairs towards me. I looked out the door and up at the Bradford weather. Dull, grey, and miserable is what I saw - and the weather wasn’t too good either. The door slammed. We’d stepped out. I kept her slightly in front looking for any tells we weren’t on our own. Difficult. Outside in the cold, last week of December, the tarmac was full of pinched-faced buyers hurrying to pray and display at the altar of commercialmas. Me, I was an unbeliever and it was cold so my money and my hands were in my pockets. I needed an exit or a way to neutralize her, it, or them. I knew that already. She was about 20 something but the way she walked, made me …something niggled. Echoes stuttered, blinked into being and December Bradford faded out….. Five years in I was still obsessed – the Service, the whole Service, and nothing but the Service. I was the saviour of Capitalism, the nemesis of Communism, and Captain A-fucking-merica all rolled together with a regional accent my superiors affected not to notice. My career was going to be as stellar as my undoubted, by me at least, abilities could make it. Margaret was none of these things. Early thirties, voluptuous in a way that made men feel themselves whatever their mood. Blonde hair a meld of shades like honeyed toast cut long at the back running shorter to the front, bouffant mid parting, arcing outwards along her cheeks to ride the line of a squarish jaw. We met. It was raw, anmimalistic. A simple gut releasing passion limited only by time and opportunity. But she’d wanted more. More? From me, a self-obsessed ambition-laden Yorkshire lad climbing the Service ladder as fast as his short vowels would allow? Didn’t want the distraction of responsibility’, ‘a moment’s hesitation could cost lives’ and a lot of other word-worn stuff is what I told her, is how I lost her. What I should have said was that I was too in love with myself. Short, sharp, intense…and painful is what Margaret had been, then. She had herself posted out, away. In a desultory way over a decade or so I heard bits here and there. Deep cover in Moscow, promotion, attachment to Quantico, more or less standard stuff. Fourteen years later and God, coincidence, and the master personnel posting plot got us into the same mission. Nothing spectacular or world shattering - a tawdry tag and surv of some low level Russkie – home, Embassy, home, Embassy, so forth. Just a little mistress on the side and some not so jake meetings out of office hours for variety. Standard stuff. But all that time had changed little for us except now we were splicing love and honesty into the mix of lust and passion. And this time I wanted to change our lives. So did Margaret, but faster, like we had just one chance. Margaret, so she told me, had wanted peace and quite something else besides danger, deniability, and a tiny government pension. With Margaret in tow, I’d looked at my life and it hadn’t smiled back. I wanted more than memories I thought I had but couldn’t quite recall and we, well, we wanted the clichéd stuff. You know the drill, net curtains without binos, neighbours we didn’t need to lie to, old age,. For our families to meet, so forth, the whole lot, the list of things we were going to make time for but never did. So we’d decided it’d be our last mission, then we’d be married. It was, but we weren’t. I’d been thrown clear, alive but paralysed from the waist down. It was the noise, the try-as-you-can-in-every-dream-to-forget-but-never-can noise, of her screaming that brought me to, groggy, in agony and fuddled by the explosive translation from car to concrete. She was trapped, entwined with the dashboard. She screamed she didn’t want to die and then, as the flames from the fuel tank reached, how she didn’t want to live. I’d yanked it loose from my belt and got off a full mag from the Browning. The hammer clicked empty and she stopped screaming, living, and dying. I’d stood trial. By then I’d got my legs back. But mercy killing was no defence. I’d left the Service, their choice not mine…. Ten years on and I’d been out on licence a time or so and now her this horlicks, this nonsense from the past. Twenty-something was talking. She’d had to say it twice before I made it back to the present. She said it a third time, throwing the words and a smile my way as she reached into her coat. It was the smile more than her hand out of sight, I think. Incongruous, menacing. “Oh darling, are you alright?” I said. I threw in a knife hand and she dropped. Fighting like crazy, knowing as she must, that a knife hand meant a kill strike, she powered back at me with all her…At least, that’s how it played in my head for a moment as the blow went in but she’d gone limp with the force of it, the carotid haemorrhaging under the skin. Just a minute or so now, is all she had.Casting round for any back-up, I saw she was on her own so I max’d the smokescreen with a re-run of ‘Oh darling, are you alright’ hoping any passing interest kept on passing. “Why…” the word barely making it past her bloodless lips. I knew the answer to that but not the other questions. Like how they’d got ready for me at the dentist’s, what they wanted and why, after all this time, the Service was interested in me. I told her. “Not the Service…..” she was taking deniability to extremes. I cuffed her, looking for truth and getting blood. “Just a secretary…work there…”, that coppery metallic ozone of blood drifted up from her mouth. “....heard about ….” she was coughing now as her lungs began to wheeze. “ …Margaret….and you…had to find out……accessed your files….” That was the magic word. I pulled her face to mine, anger ripping the words rough and raw from my throat. “What do you know about Margaret?” What I heard was the last of it as she died and her hand slipped out from beneath the coat. In that hand were just her doorkeys. “Excuse me sir, is the young lady alright?” There were three of them, of course, like buses, except alive, in uniform, in sight, and interested enough in me to already be reaching for their truncheons. It was amateur hour, alright. I could have excised them all but then that’d be four innocent deaths. Because that was exactly what she’d been. As I recalled her words, I understood her accent and what niggled about the walk too and why the Service had had nothing to do with any of this. “Margaret,” she’d said,” was my mother”. I laughed. I think this didn’t help. The nearest copper said some words I didn’t want to catch as the adrenalin dumped out, my blood sugar dropped, and the action aftermath slugged me towards cold and sluggish. I fingerpalmed a flurry of hair from her face and snapped the blue jewelled flashing from her ear. Nothing sinister, nothing Socratic, just bluetooth tech was what she’d been talking to. “You’re coming with us. You’re not obliged to say anything…”, so the mantra went, a dreary, distant, disconnected droning murmur as grief took its dull spoon to my insides. Excavating for something to extract and extinguish. All these years on and a policeman’s words hadn’t changed much. Déjà vu-lnerable, alright. I’d killed her mother out of compassion, cold and compelling, and now by mistake I’d…Her daughter? Jesus, Joseph, and Merry Hell, that couldn’t be. I’d misheard, surely. I wasn’t saying anything and they were used to that but I wasn’t moving and they weren’t having that. Their hands held me as one of the three spoke into his lapel and we listened to the crackled reply. By mistake? As defences went, it seemed to lack something like, you know, all hope, any chance of success, and almost anything else other than certain failure. As I waited and got cold inside too, my thoughts hazed into the trial and the cross-examination to come: ‘I’m going to ask you some questions about your evidence to this court today. You say…” He paused here looking down at his notes and over his glasses at the jury, then me. ‘You say you killed her by mistake,’ reaching to his left shoulder and redressing his black gown back in its place with a flex, quick and abrupt, as if that’s how this idea of mistake should be disposed of. ‘Yes,’ I’d learnt the first time not to be wordy. ‘You made the mistake because you say you felt threatened…?' ‘Yes.’ ‘…and vulnerable?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘…and gripped by – I’m just checking for the words you used – ah yes, here it is. And gripped by an adrenalin soaked fear rooted in the past, that’s what you said? Is that right?’ ‘Yes.’‘And that would be after..’ He looked down again, at his notes. I knew, he knew, he didn’t need to look at anything he’d written.‘…I want to be sure I’ve got your, erm, story straight,’ he pronounced it like ‘story’ had another syllable just in case any Neanderthals in the jury weren’t getting the message. ‘Ah yes. And that would be after she’d used her Bluetooth to take a call at the dentist’s?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘After she’d kindly invited you to her flat?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And after you’d accepted?’ ‘Yes.’ At least I wasn’t going to have any trouble learning my lines. ‘Anyway, back to my point. It was after she’d used her Bluetooth, after she’d invited you to her flat, and after – isn’t this also right – she’d reached for her door keys not fifteen feet from her door, that you struck?’ ‘Yes.’‘So what was it that made you feel the most vulnerable, threatened, and fearful, the bluetooth call, the kind invitation, or the removal of the door keys, eh?’ ‘You’re twisting my words.’ ‘Well, the jury will take whatever time they need to decide that. And then you used a single Jujitsu blow to the neck known as a knife hand?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Tell me, is it also correct that there are 177 other forms of Jujitsu hand strikes that are not fatal?’ ‘Yes.’ (turning to the Judge)’I rest my case, my Lord. I have no more questions for this mad, guilty fucker.’ Well, that’s how it ran in my thoughts as they cuffed me and waited for the car. Station, custody sergeant, interview, and a murder charge is what followed. Regina- -v- GEOFFREY ARNOLD FULTON You, Geoffrey Arnold Fulton, are hereby charged that on the 22nd day of December 2007 at Bradford you did unlawfully kill Elizabeth Margaret Olganovich intending to kill, or cause to grievous bodily harm to, her. And a cell with a busy peephole, white easy clean tiles and a rubber bound mattress that could draw sweat from a corpse atop a raised built-into-the-wall stone block of a bed. There was also an unflushable, floor fixed stained stainless steel lav with a smell strong enough to armwrestle. The peephole shuttered back and forth, blinking different eyes with the same curiosity. You couldn’t blame them but I did, it made the minutes go away. Not many murderers out on licence come back. I’d returned on a second murder charge, I was worth a peep. I got a free legal aid defence lawyer who turned out to be worth what I paid for him. Plead guilty, he said. Didn’t like my story, didn’t like my chances, and only liked me until the flick of his wristwatch showed my legal aid had run out. Legal aid? I’d have been better off with Lucozade. As for the Service, well, I was duping myself if I thought it would be anything but the same this time. But, fantastically, it was. The first time, with Margaret’s death, they hadn’t helped. Not with the trial, not with the money, nor with anything that might microscopically have made a difference. They’d dropped me faster than a juggler with a porcupine. Didn’t want to know, no info, no character reference, know nothing. And this time? It was worse. Same drill but with great big fuck-you knobs on. This time they ‘D noticed’ my file, Margaret’s file, anything about the Dentist’s, and the personnel file for the ‘daughter’. National Security, they said. The courts agreed. My lawyer said they would. Good work, Rumpole. National Security, I can tell you, is an anagram of ‘a saintly neurotic’ so I discovered but it didn’t bother anybody except me and the time I had to pass. I didn’t think it was important and nobody asked me ‘cept to fill in the forms and do whatever was required to go quietly. But I wasn’t doing it. So I told my story, saw the shrinks, read their reports, and learnt the jargon. You couldn’t blame them but I did. I was getting good at it. But it was just a distraction, the blame stuff. With the D notices in effect I couldn’t prove anything. Like what the girl wanted from me, how she could be Margaret’s daughter -Olganovich for God’s sake - or even why I’d reacted so fiercely. The trial was held in the Old Bailey, in camera, and in a rush. I had my say and it went as I’d imagined, I was shredded in the cross-examination. Christ, the jury actually looked sorry for me. They didn’t find me guilty, but don’t kid yourself it was good news. I was not guilty by reason of insanity. I was going to an asylum pro tem. That’s fancy legalese ‘for a very long time till we decide you won’t do anything bad again’. I’ve been writing everyday here. It’s what I do the most now. Now that I’ve been told that me, the doornail, and the dodo have something in common. Three – six months maxside – is what he’d said. His coat had been white, his humanity nicely manicured for display to those –unlike me – who mattered but you didn’t have to be Mother Theresa to read test results aright. So I’m here writing and waiting for the rest of my life. I use the bendy pencils provided that can write but not kill. We weren’t all killers but there’s always a first time or, should that be, a second time? It helped, this writing, a way to understand, to grieve. I sit with my three sheets of paper for company. Three sheets, not a threat, you see. Because we had some of them here too, some who loved flames, fire, and smoke. Sat in the Community Room I had a table to myself and quiet apart from the occasional question. Theirs, not mine – why are the lights always on, where are my clothes, yada yada. The staff called it the Con-mutiny room. It was a joke, the first time, almost. I wrote resting on top of their A4 ‘Guide to Broadmoor Mental Health (Severe Personality Disorder Wing) Services Establishment. Catchy title, eh, only £5-99 plus p&p or free with lifetime membership to nut city if you complete the following phrase in not more than ten words “I was sent here because…” (Judges’ decision final, no correspondence will be replied to etc, so on). Stained, torn, and a lot of other things other than well read. Except by me. They’d been jokers, the guys who lobbed it together. Or civil servants. Or both. The first page got right to the heart of it, how it had been built by Sir Joshua Jebb, full of quotes and raptures. I had read it. This is the style of it: ‘…such praise as ‘Typical of its period, the small, irregular bricks had a redness that belied their centuries of age. The house had majesty. It exacted examination. Its buttressed façade was pockmarked with mullioned windows. They sat snugly beneath a roof steeply pitched and studded with octagonal chimneys hungering tall for the wind. At each end battlemented towers loomed, as if leaning in to ward the place. Lunging from this imposing front was a castellated portico. It enticed the eye inwards towards the central courtyard, where its stone paved embrace restrained a luscious green of tightly shawn grass.’ Just what homo insanius was looking for, wouldn’t you say, the architectural history of the mad house. Just what I needed. Locked up spending too much time in my head, by myself till the only person I wanted to be with was myself, the only person I knew was me and the only person I hated was me. But they had drugs for that, drugs for anything, doled out by the staff. But what they dished out the most, alongside the chemical cuffs, was resentment. You couldn’t condemn them, not having to work like this you couldn’t, not safely anyway. Steve was my carer. That was a job description, not an emotional state. He was better than the rest, he didn’t hurt. He had tried but I’d mentioned my convictions and he changed the subject. Tables turned, endex. He was wary now and just as careless. I tongued my pills out of sight and out of mind. Bricks and bars as boundaries I had to accept but not a thorazine truss nor any other reality intake inhibitors. So I ditched the chems. Some others did too. It was difficult to be sure, who was or wasn’t mindnapped. On a good day – yeah, right – I could get two or three hours pencilling in. Occasionally what was left of the Brady bunch now Ian had moved on or some of the rest would intervene with their chatter or the milling. If you could call it milling. Random, back and forth, directionless and anythingelseless you care to mention. They were trapped in the bagatelle corridors of the place. All that separated tomorrow from yesterday was a day like their today padded with the usual, organised inactivities. It was too much, sometimes, and I would spread my arms wide corralling them away to the windows. Didn’t open, wouldn’t open, against house policy to be open but they would spend hours confirming that. All this flittered through my mind as the pencil paused. “Visitors,” Steve said jerking his thumb, half gesture, and the rest not a choice. I dressed up in the cuffs and leg shackles he offered and we went for a stroll, slowly. Out of the room through two tall doors of wood and power down a cream walled corridor with a green dado stripe till we got there. It was like a dog’s dinner, this interview room. Everything was bolted down; table, window, grill, chair – only one, only one visitor a time for Cat A’s like me – and what have you. I sat, leaned forward and Steve took up the slack, looping the metal links into the D-ring impaled in the floor. Secure, sure; comfortable, no but that and me weren’t priorities. Steve left, returning with it in his outstretched hands, like he was holding his breath, like he didn’t want to show it was a struggle. In this place small things meant big differences and he put it down very carefully, eyes gleaning the distance between me and it. Making sure of arm’s reach. It was another chair. I watched it, like it was a prize. In just three months already, an extra chair was a change from the norm. That hurt, churned my stomach, and dumped fear into the system. “Enjoying your stay, are we.” I didn’t know him from the moment he swung through the door but I heard more than I saw. He had an accent. It was the kind his kind called enunciation. ‘Steady on’, ‘Bad show’, ‘Oh I say’, ‘Good stuff’, ‘Ever so’, was what I was expecting to hear. Probably wouldn’t but it would all have a smugness that was triumphant and forgiving if your vowels weren’t quite the thing, don’t you know. Over the years inside and out people had become less to me. I had stopped noticing but in this interview room I needed the old me back full force – because whatever else he was, he was MI5. I could almost smell it on him, see it right down to the black, briefcase and gold embossed Dieu et Mon Droit. So I switched on, tuned in and stood by, sort of. I watched him from the door. He held himself like he loved himself – probably last thing at night just before he went to sleep. A lack of judgment, if you asked me. He was fat. It was hot enough for him to be carrying his jacket from a suit that hadn’t been made for anyone but him. Round his midriff was a life-preserver of fat which his short legs propelled before him, towards the table and me. Small, quiet, stumpy steps. “Don’t mind me if I don’t get up,” I murmured observantly. With my future well and truly behind me, I was fishing for reaction, purpose, info, anything to edge me an advantage. His lips sneered my way. He sat, eyes flickering up and behind me. There, high up, a tannoy and a camera perched witchingly but silent – man’s ingenuity to man. It wouldn’t save him, to me he was already way past his deadtime. His arse oozed, around the edge of the chair he’d inflicted himself on. Somewhere behind his pelican throat was an Adams apple that must have worked overtime as he shovelled down his daily load. Gourmand, not gourmet, the thought came. Something to horrify him with, ever so. She was his assistant. Another triumph of humour for personnel and posting – she was a willowy Little to his Buntersque Large. Jacket on the chair, briefcase to the floor, he glanced up and gave me a look at his eyes cranking them down over my hospital-issue fatigues and forty pounds of body jewellery – leisurely, in charge, superior, confidant. I eyed his face and let him see in mine how I wanted to look – anxious, curious, and anything but how I truly felt; venomous, violent, the hate leaking out from under an anger that needed a place to go. Two murder trials, ten+ years of my life, absolutely nothing and now this. I felt echoes of the Dentist’s screening but tried to keep them behind my face. “Maybe, someone’s been looking out for you after all,” said as he bent down and extracted a green folder as daintily as he could. And that wasn’t much. His were the hands of fat man. White, flabbly, pudgy, the fingers seeping out of his hand with the skin taut at the knuckles as if the fat there had somehow got trapped at each joint, unable to escape. He was sweating along the hairline, a dark boundary between his puttied skin and jet black hair. Too stark, too contrasting, smacked of dye and looked like Lego Man. His forefinger knuckled the wet away and made to flick it aside. But she caught his eye and he desisted. It was only a tiny moment but it meant something. He smoothed his slick hair back into its forehead lair as I gave her a gaze. What she was, first off, was more difficult. Dressed to depress in a dull, mustard cardigan, she seemed distanced. She pulled its yellowness close, elbows compressing it against her angular frame. Age or premature osteo, it was hard to know, but her hands were old. Gnarled knuckles, shiny and white, like enlarged islands in a sea of roast chicken skin. She was a woman of contrasts. The blouse, welding-arc bright, beneath was cut deep with more cleave than age. But the bouffant hair, measured with tight calculated curls, was lifeless, still. She looked lacquered by life, as brittle as her hair, guarded almost. Yet from the waist down she was long muscled legs paraded in sheer something denier dropping a long way out of a short, black skirt. And a steno. She had a stengrapher’s notebook, like she was a mere functionary. When she’d sat, she’d dropped her pad. Bent down, her skirt rode up where her stockings and my mind were getting started. A flash of something white and lacy slid into eyeline. It didn’t look like anything her mother had given her. I’d noticed, of course, I’d noticed. By the time I’d stopped noticing and glanced up she’d been watching me, appraising. It was something else wrong, another conflict with the ditsy stenographer image. “Looking after me,” I said looking into myself and out the window. Clouds shuttered the sky grey. Timid rain caressed the glass, slaking pathways through the grime. It had been a sticky tarmac summer. “Looking after me,” my attention leaking back into my eyes,” I killed Margaret, the woman I loved, been abandoned by the Service, done a decade inside, got out on licence, killed again, been found guilty but mad, put in this house of bedlam and I’ve only got three months till I get pine-box parole…and you think someone’s looking after me.” In truth the doc had said three, chances of up to six, months but I was becoming a pessimist, for some reason. Pessimism had become the norm, I’d tried to kick the habit but it had been more the other way round. I felt the anger blossom, a heat beyond temperature. Still playing a part, the part they expected: shallow, angst ridden, resentful but the anger was real. It was mine and I intended to enjoy it without sharing, without restriction. What else was still mine? “Have more respect,” her words and then lots of others, rapid lips spitting cross-armed talk. A flat, uninflected invective expelled from her mouth, gums and teeth on show, like she was trying to bite every syllable. She got up, her skirt high – definitely not a present from her mother. She made the distance between us short till she was behind me. Her grip was power and ice and around my neck, yanking it back using the restraints to work against. “I thought…we…,” I struggled, my throat tight against her skin, her fingers clamping my nostrils shut. “I thought we…were doing….the Contessa and the Chauffeur this week.” He laughed, a nasal whinny, but she must have heard it before because she kept at it. I felt the fear to the most, that cold cobra uncoiling and shunting down from my head to my belly, setting my lungs off fast and shallow and my palms leaky. She’d stopped but not the fear. You see, there was a camera and this was the twenty-first century when accountability wasn’t just a theory but a problem. Yet they were doing this on CCTV? Anything they’d needed to sort out had already been done long before she’d begun to fingerprint my neck. I could expect more of it. She wriggled the mini down out of sight and imagination on the way back to her pad and chair. He looked at her and I shrugged an indifference I didn’t feel. She smiled, with all her teeth, like it was his permission. Permission to ask the questions, get the info they – I mean, she – wanted. As my lungs quietened I said “So what happened to the softly, softly approach.” She looked about to get up again but I kept on anyway, I wanted to provoke them, inveigle some gobbet of leverage out of the pair. “You know the sort of thing. Small talk, little words, auto chat and, if that didn’t work, the formalities like ‘You can be obliged to say anything but if you don’t, we will harm your defence by writing down in evidence anything we decide to make up and rely on in court’.” They ignored that and he got on with the script. “Now, now, ol’ fella, play the game. This file here….” but I cut across him. “Play the…Why should I, why don’t I just knee you in the balls and Bob’s your Auntie. Three months are all…” Well, forty pounds of chains and a concreted D-ring was probably the answer to that but it was her turn to shut me up, just words this time. “Shut up, let him talk.” “And as for that,” he added,” the three months…we can change that too.” Now he was taunting me, I thought, but he was talking. His face tall and his words empty, as if repeated by rote. What it distilled down to was this. The twenty first century hadn’t just bought myriad CCTV but also defectors, crowds of them all touting after different deals, offering titbits and morsels, sometimes to the Service, sometimes not. All for analysis and assessment eventually, friends became enemies, alliance turned to enmity, so forth, what have you. And along the line, I’d become a threat. He didn’t explain and I didn’t get to ask straight up. So I had been slotted for extinction. I didn’t have bad teeth, just a bad dentist, an evil bastard prepared to fleece my pocket for incidentals and inject things the BDA wouldn’t approve of. Things like mercury and polonium and the like, just enough to induce renal, pulmonary and most other kinds of failure you could list. And the med reports had done just that, made a list - cause: unknown; diagnosis: general systemic necrosis; prognosis: terminal. Rage and incredulity vortexed my thoughts. But me, a threat? Hate, anger and the rest of my night-time companions could wait because just for the moment this was a lifeline. What he’d said wasn’t a confession, we were trading. What I had they wanted, I didn’t know, yet. But I had a role to fill so I abused him, his parents, his sexual practices, and made a couple of suggestions only a pervert and an acrobat could complete. And then I got on with it. “Me, a threat, how?” One word is what he said, more shocking than any of the Sweeney Dentist Todd crap. What he said was, ‘Margaret.’ “All this defector folderol, mateybob, gets to the files ultimately, like this one,” tapping the green one and half inches on the table. “I don’t like to tell you this but,” he smirked just to make sure I knew fine well that he was lying, that he couldn’t wait to enjoy his moment centre stage. She smiled too, the two of them were having an epidemic. “…but, you see, Margaret was – how can I put it – one of theirs.” I wanted to launch myself at him and the rat-trap lips that zippered his chin together but it was a no go. For saying it, not because I believed it. Yeah, right, Margaret was a double, Lee Harvey Oswald was innocent and Eve got it right in the Garden with “Go on, Adam, He’ll never notice.” I wasn’t having it so I kept listening and he kept going. “Didn’t you ever wonder about that RPG the night she died. Oh, I’m sorry, the night you killed her.” He was smiling again. I wanted to kill him just the way that rocket propelled grenade had done her, with flames and pain till I’d done the only thing I could. It was one of the very few bits of intel my lawyers had been able to prise out of MI5 - RPG fragments consistent with the stuff routinely shipped into Belfast via Libya courtesy of our Russkie friends. But, getting my legs back and getting over Margaret, had been a handful before the trial. And in the years that followed I’d never got close to working out how the Irish had made the plates on the car, why there was no claim of responsibility, none of it. “It’s what you told my lawyers,” I said. “Not me, old man, I was in out-of-area ops sweating it in the Far East in the 80s. But, yes, that is what they told your lawyers at the time. No idea why, looking at the files now we didn’t have a clue. Looks like they just wanted to shut you up.” Front and back thoughts were flummoxing around my head, arcing back and forth – Margaret, traitor, murder, IRA, ‘shut me up’. I let that go and waited. “Tell him the rest,” she said adding a little more to cam her words into something not so commanding, “ you asked me to remind you to tell him the rest.” “Perhaps, you shouldn’t chide yourself about what you did, chummy, you probably won’t when you know the details,” savouring the moment. Memory wreckage flared behind my eyes for a second until I wrangled my head back in. “They were wrong, as it turned out, but her bosses – the Russians who turned her – thought we had come to have some doubts about Margaret. You know, after Burgess, Maclean et al, we’d been pretty shaken up but, as for Margaret, we were just like you, mateypal – blissfully ignorant.” “So they analysed it and came to the same conclusion back then that we did a few days ago, but for different reasons, of course – the threat to Margaret, to their plans, to it all was you. You knew her best, worked with her most, had to be you was their take on it. You know the drill.” Now I knew I was in the right place because this was madness upon madness, the impossible upon the inconceivable. He went on and I took the pain out of my ears to listen. “She sensed something, some change in them, so it was Margaret that suggested the solution, so we know now,” tapping the green file again. “Just what the fuck is that,” I said. “Her file, Margaret’s file, all down here in black and white, stuff old and new, ever so new. Not only did they think we doubted her but they were beginning to doubt her themselves. Kill two birds etc was the plan they came up with,” he ended on a smirk as he elongated the moment. He started up again. “When they knew how much she loved you, what greater show of loyalty could there be…so she gave you up. It was you that should have been killed. Her idea, her plan, her salvation. What went wrong, how they came to hit you both…..” I didn’t hear the rest of it as the vomit cascaded out of my mouth. He fletched backwards and checked his shoes for flecks. He said some more but my tears deafened me and leached out of me what little was left. All those years of nights like weeks, awake inside my head, endless re-runs with always the same ending… and then a thought. “Hold off, wait on. You said they knew about Margaret and me.” “Yes.” No grin, no gloating, no superiority. Just one word. He was slipping. She slinked to a corner and sluiced sand from the fire bucket. It rippled over my more solid contribution to the dialogue and she sat back. Not even a look. “Then it must be wrong, has to be, first principles stuff in the School of Stepford Spies,” I’d been there, they’d been there. I wasn’t telling them anything they didn’t know. I was catching them out in this filthy sham. “First rule, never tell them anything they can use as leverage against you. She would never have told them about us, never…” It was my turn to grin, probably not as sardonically as I’d have liked, but the specks of heave on my face didn’t help. “She didn’t,” looking ever smugger, “ now this will surprise you.” “Remember, after your fling, she got posted out, Moscow undercover.” “Yes, yes, I know all this. Must be when she got turned.” No chance, even now I wasn’t having it but if I was still playing the game, still looking for some advantage, I had to act convinced of something. “Indeed, where two things happened. Where she told them about you. Just a mistake, just a thoughtless little personal thing. And the other thing was that she gave birth.” He laughed. I could feel it back again, like she was going to need that fire bucket again. “Yes, ol’ man, she had a baby born on the,” he paused stretching the syllables and his vocal chords out as he flicked to the top page beneath the green cover,” the 24th March 1984. I can see you doing the maths. Let me save you the trouble, its yours alright. That’s how they came to know, put your name on the birth certificate.” And now I was sick and kept going till the poisonously yellow bile was all that trickled out of my mouth. She did the fire bucket thing. I’d killed my own daughter. Sleeving the crud from the corner of my mouth I found words that only burned twice as much as my throat. “Why, why not come back, how did she…” It was her talking now. Smoothing the denier on her leg, disdainful, a drudge, something to be got over with, something to shut my questions and my feelings down. “It’s guesswork but it makes sense. In the 80s any pregnant agent got the heave-ho, a liability the Service wouldn’t bear. You’d shafted her and I can see she wouldn’t want to return, fat use to anybody and canned to civvy street.” I wanted to say I hadn’t known, hadn’t an idea but she pressed on past the pregnancy. “Best guess is she approached them, did the deal and maybe thought she could cross them when she got back. She probably could have. But it went tits-up. They kept the kid as security, a good behaviour curio. Oh, I don’t doubt she loved you but when the hard choices were on her, she made a target out of you and she and her child survived. Well, except for the idiots with the RPG. Still can’t sort that out, unless they changed their minds. Never know.” Her grey eyes were like tube trains down a tunnel, far away, her words more and more sparse. What she was thinking I didn’t know but it didn’t have much to do with what she was saying. And then it began to attack me, all this. Cold, I was cold and in pain. He was holding my head up and she was slapping me conscious. Not Harley Street but it did the job. It had been too much and I’d blanked it, my mind falling through the back of my head for a few seconds She wiped her slapping hand on the latest hospital fashion I was sporting, sat back, and gestured at him minimally. But I saw. He carried on. “And now we need to debrief you, need you compos mentis. We want to trade. Your live and your freedom,” eliciting a brown envelope from the papers on the table, “here’s your marching orders.” Possibly ‘illiciting’ might have been a better word ‘cos this didn’t sound so legal to me. “Debrief me about what?” “The last mission, the surveillance tag job, remember?” I did, just. But that Russkie had been low level. OK, so he had a mistress and a dodgy meeting or two with the Yanks that wouldn’t have kept him on his bosses’ Christmas card list, but so what. In the 90s everybody was talking to everybody, glasnost, musseltof, suchlike. Margaret had thrown it all into the final report, file closed, endex. “Yes,” I said, not sure how much I did but prepared to ramp it up to perfect recall if it got me out of here. “Well, we need it, that info. Got to be in vogue suddenly. “But its ten, twelve years ago, and it was all in Margaret’s report.” He ignored that. His glance at her she returned with a nod. “Not seen, not here, could be she sent it elsewhere. Do you remember the tag’s name?” “No, no, never had it, some grainy photos for the ID and a pseudo…, ‘Cerberus’, I think.” “His name was, is, Putin. Get the picture.” I did and a lot of other things too I could have done without, like hope. When at last the thing that rips you up, hope, eventually goes, when hope goes you can live without it, without all the goals and disappointments it spawns. But now it had returned and fear was its sidekick. All the way to the admin block I went over it looking for the poo trap, trying to fit the past into this twisted template and that bastard green file. Whatever was in that brown envelope was Merlin-stuff because in no more that thirty minutes I was out, out the front door across beige brown pebbles of welcome and status into the black leather smell of a Service issue BMW fulling flat out for the M3. I held my eyes still and fixed like I wasn’t listening or concentrating but their words were few. She drove, with quick judged movements taking the car where she wanted. No fuss, no flourish, no cut away poncy driving glove on the stick hand, just her mind, her will, and the machine. My attention slithered to the horizon and a sky knitted by con trails inbound to Heathrow and, beneath, a busy spec choppering above the traffic, back and forth, motorway sitreps for the homeward bound. It did, but I didn’t, care about the traffic. The beat of the wipers snared me back and I blinked back in, just a shower come and gone. “I need to pee,” imperious tones in her throat. “There’s a service station…” he began but she cut him shut. “Can’t wait, I’ll take this exit.” Wrong. Very wrong. You believe what you want when push comes to shove. I’d wanted to believe, to believe I was free, going to live, so on, all the bits. Except this little exchange of words was wrong. Not because she’d dashed the subordinate steno role, just a bit of flim flam so she could watch my reactions. Knew that, accepted that, not a problem with that but this was all wrong. Remember that feeling, in the house through the front door, hand to the light switch and that endless moment in the dark when you know, know for sure, know without understanding that someone else is there in your house waiting and then the light goes on and its bullshit. But for you, for then, it was real. For me, for then, it was real – the absolute overpowering but I-don’t-know-how-feeling that they’d been lying flat out, the both of them, about nearly everything I couldn’t catch them out on. And that covered a lot of ground. I was battered inside, didn’t really want to know, wanted to feel warm and cosy and safe. So what if they hadn’t been straight, so what if they’d done more flat out lying than Tutankhamen? I was out, wasn’t I, in a beamer so forth. But it didn’t work because that survival thing inside my head crawled to the controls as we sidled out of sight into a copse past the slip road. The road went on, cars zipped by in a noise, the distant chopper all normal as hell but this charade wasn’t. “Stretch my legs,” I said getting out the back. She nodded to Lard Laddo to be my shadow and got herself out. After a couple of paces she looked round at us. I was checking distances, cover, what have you. I was going to have it away on my toes, die running, these bastards….Her words scythed through to me. “Yes, well,” she hemmed pointedly as she hitched up her skirt and stooped as if to squat. Paused in indignation at our ungentlemanly conduct, she reached beneath her skirt. He turned aside, my cue too but I wasn’t having it. His hand inside his jacket, casual, deadly. Tensed, I got ready. I was arsed if I wasn’t going to look. Her arm, all sinew and length, flashed out from under the mini as if saluting us and he died. The back of his head came off and thumped against the bonnet like a coconut at a shy. And now she was pointing it at me – just like the knickers, something her mother never gave her. A .22 palm sized pistol, a girly gun from a girly place. I needed to talk. “Ah, so this week is actually the Chauffeuse and the Dead Spy.” “Spies,” she said eyeing his fat form and then me, flexing out a leer that came and went like a shark in the night. “Not sure I’m getting this.” “You don’t have to and never would have but for that stupid Olganovich bitch,” that was no way to talk about my daughter but I didn’t mention it. This was going somewhere but only she knew. For me the longer it went on the longer I lived, might be a chance, an opening, something or other. She closed the gap until we made a three – me, her, and the dead blubber. “And him,” nodding my head down at him and the pool of blood red and questing out beneath. “Just as stupid but necessary. Margaret’s file was in lock down after that fracas in Bradford,” she meant when I’d killed my own daughter but my thoughts skittered away from that like dogs off the leash. “I needed a second signature, secure file release’s a two signature job so I told him what I needed him to hear. Hook, line and plonker.” Not quite Hallmark standard, but it was an epitaph of sorts. “So, it was all a cock and bullshit story, what he said…Margaret, the kid…?”. I was getting my hopes and my gorge up. “None of it, not even the Putin name. All the actual factual. My idea, my plan, the top brass loved it. Not that any of it would have been used directly, a hint here…” She trailed off, seeing me breaking, confused, pained. “But why…why this,” flicking my hand down to the ground. “The file, Margaret’s file, not very long now and they’ll be dissecting it. Can’t have that. I was her handler and mentor, name’s all over it.” Every agent had one, part boss, part supervisor, part observer, confessor, friend…it was a life-time thing till you left or died. Half leash, half reins, supervi |