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| Point Blank | |
| By Bondvillain2k | ||||||||||||||
| 07 April 2007 | ||||||||||||||
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I wrote this a while ago and fiddled around with it the other day. It is not, admittedly, the shortest of reads. Hope you like it! It took me a while to realise that the vicar had finished his part and gone. He had another appointment to dispatch some other unlucky sod before lunch. It was the coo of pigeon that drew my attention away from the hole in the ground, from the rectangular brown box and from the dirt dropped on top of it. The sun was hot and sweat was dripping down my collar, but I’d felt cold all day. The idyllic strands of white, fluffy cloud drifting across the blue sky pissed me off. The last time I went to a funeral it had been a black, stormy day, which entirely suited my grief. The sun was too chirpy, too much like a perverted celebration. There wasn’t even a breeze to ruffle my hair slightly as I tried to stare moodily into the middle distance. I was pretty certain that I was going to be the only one to turn up, especially as I’d convinced the vicar to publish an alternate name in the local funeral listings, but it was still a disappointment to have the pick of the sixty seats. I think he was all too willing – he didn’t want the press attention on himself and his church. I looked around at the empty chapel and sighed. She’d told me that she didn’t have any friends (she preferred to keep to herself) and that her parents had ceased communicating a long time ago. I was surprised, but quietly pleased that she’d seemingly picked me out to have regular chats with. After the vicar had gone, I pulled an envelope out of my pocket and sat near the hole that contained Rachel. I apologised if she thought I was invading her privacy, but I had to see her exam results. I remembered the afternoon she waved me away because I was interrupting her revision, even though I told her I had something important to say. She was determined to finish her degree, her second degree. If I ever wanted to find her, odds were that she’d be at her desk or reading her way through the library. If I could get away with it, I’d watch her from a distance - she’d suck in her bottom lip when she was concentrating, bite her thumbnail when she was listening, and punch concrete walls when she was raging. I wanted to be watching her twisting her hair as she followed the words on a page, but the coffin lid and a shotgun wielding nutter stopped that. My hands were shaking on her behalf as I opened the envelope and pulled out the folded piece of paper inside. She’d done four exams, and they were all good marks. I dropped it into the hole next to her. I leaned against her tombstone and remembered the first time I met her. She wasn’t what I was expecting. I thought she’d be shorter, stockier, less elegant I suppose. She was polite, chatty, made jokes. She’d flash me a shy smile whenever she laughed, seemingly embarrassed that she was sharing a joke with a superior, but it didn’t stop us from talking for almost an hour. I think Rachel was the first woman in met in that place who didn’t swear excessively, didn’t threaten me with violence if I ever messed her about, and actually asked a few questions about my own life and interests. A young couple walked past with a bunch of flowers, towards an already well-laden grave. The florist near my house was closed on a Sunday, and not wanting to insult her memory with a tatty bunch of petrol station specials, I’d turned up empty-handed. She went missing a few days before she was killed. The police were out with helicopters and dogs, checking local suicide spots in case she’d jumped. I watched my phone, waiting for it to ring but it was like staring at a pot on the hob. I was willing them to bring her back so we could talk about old films and bemoan our surroundings. She was happy the last time I saw her: we joked about the state of the paintwork and the bars on the windows. She didn’t leave a note and amazingly no-one had seen her – she had a way of slinking into the background if you didn’t pay attention. She’d used that particular skill to sneak up on me and scare the living daylights out of me, entirely for fun. She said she’d always found my white-eyed surprise hilarious. When the phone eventually rang, it was to tell me that the police had ‘found’ Rachel, outside a supermarket in the city. She’d been pronounced dead at the scene because a woman had shot her in the head, one of those guns you use for clay pigeons. Naturally, it was all over the papers. Pictures of forensics at the scene, photos of the killer at some group she attended, a few pictures of Rachel from when she was still at school. They raked over the past, dragging up ex-colleagues and psychiatrists to hand over a sound bite that would be used ad infinitum for a modest fee. Old friends were ‘shocked’ that such a thing could have happened, they’d never have imagined it, she was such a lovely lady. Scene of crime officers were picking bits of Rachel’s skull up ten metres from the place where her body had fallen, underneath old plastic bags and empty crisp packets. The woman gets sentenced today, but I know she’ll be out in a few years because the papers have painted her as some bloody saint that had been pushed over the edge by the sudden death of her husband. I don’t remember what I did after I got the phone call. I didn’t go to the scene, I think I just watched a television screen with a falsely concerned presenter emoting about ‘this terrible, devastating tragedy’, then drunk enough vodka to wipe me out for the weekend. I stretched my legs out in front of me, tipped my head back and was suddenly reminded of the time I’d seen Rachel doing exactly the same thing in one of the gardens. She basked in the sun like a pedigree cat, her long body even slimmer as she extended herself on the grass. It stuck in my mind as she seemed to be enjoying the sun, but she was wearing jeans and a long sleeved turtleneck. Her sweater had risen up above her belt, and I could see a significant slice of skin. She caught me looking, and for a moment I thought I’d lost my job until she slowly crossed her legs, which brought her jeans down lower and revealed even more toned flesh. Eventually, we got chatting about the headlines on the newspaper that lay across my lap, and all the time she kept her eyes locked onto mine, challenging me to look down if I dare. I was pleasantly surprised to find her so articulate about current events and politics, and then ashamed for thinking that way. I felt worse when she went for a meeting with her lawyer and I couldn’t help but watch as she stretched luxuriantly, then slinked away into the distance. I felt the same guilt whenever I walked past the gym to see her practicing her martial arts. She was so elegant, moving quickly, powerfully, in control. She prowled around wolfishly, her fists striking with the speed of a snake biting. I always sucked my stomach in and continued on my way before she saw me, though I don’t think my visits went unnoticed. I should probably have been intimidated by the way Rachel kicked those pads, in a way that caused her colleague to stumble backwards each time. Instead I found myself asking her more and more about it, learning the philosophy behind it and debating whether or not to start a class myself. I never did and probably never will, considering all the good that it did her. A more thorough search of her room, after her death, uncovered the note that she had left for me. It simply said that she wanted to get away to talk to somebody. I read it over a number of times, trying to analyse the handwriting to see if it was written a hurry, wondering if the single ‘x’ at the end meant anything. Then I screwed it up and threw it behind the television. I was angry at her, angry for choosing someone else, someone else I didn’t have a name or face for, and most likely never will. The police couldn’t uncover who she was supposedly going to meet, and if I didn’t know, it was unlikely that anybody else was going to. I spent that evening recalling our conversations about her childhood, her parents, her schooling, every detail she’d given me about her life leading up to her eighteenth birthday. One day, after I’d known her for about a year, she got attacked by one of the other prisoners. I went down to see her, to get her to the doctor but she wouldn’t go. I took her an ice bag and some antiseptic cream, but she refused me again saying that she would be fine. She dabbed gently at her nose with a tissue that was already spotted with crimson and studied the royal purple bruise forming around her eye in the mirror. When she sat down, she held her side and moaned loudly – with that she relented and asked me to check that none of her ribs were broken. As I slid my hand around her waist, she wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled me close, whispering to me that it had happened because the others thought I was giving her preferential treatment. Knowing that if anyone caught us now we’d both have our heads kicked in, I pulled away and told her I couldn’t feel anything broken. Before I could leave, she pulled her top off and asked me to look carefully. I saw the scars on her arms, her legs, her back, her breasts. There were bite marks on her shoulder, long slash marks down her spine, tramlines across her wrists. She told me she’d been raped, a few days after her eighteenth birthday. I helped Rachel to get a therapist after that. She said the talking helped, and always went through the sessions with me, but she needed sleeping pills for weeks afterwards. Gradually, I learned what happened to her. They stabbed her in the back first, which brought her to her knees in the street and let her be dragged inside a flat she’d never seen. She had a thick white seam running along her bicep, where the knife had gone too deep when it was cutting her clothes off. The teeth marks served as a reminder of the animal who bit her and rutted her as his accomplice held her down. Her slashed spine was the turn of the friend who liked snuff films. I felt terrible because we always talked in my office about her sessions, so I always wished I could invite her out, somewhere nice, so she could cry on my shoulder on an inviting sofa, or on the top of a grassy green hill with no-one around for miles. As it was, we sat in the sterile hospital green surroundings of my office, constantly reminded of my superiority. I shifted my position so I could read her tombstone. As there were no friends or relatives willing to do the job, all the arrangements were up to me. Everything took so long because I didn’t have much idea what she wanted done. I remember us laughing about how she wanted to be buried at sea because she thought she was too much of a heathen to qualify for holy ground, and at the same time she could have been reunited with the goldfish she’d had when she was eight years old. In the end, I asked for a few lines of W.H. Auden on her grave, because although I’d tried to read the type of poetry she was into I never really understood it apart from the Auden. I read it over and over, hoping it was a fitting final testament, but I knew that most passers-by would probably sneer with contempt if they recognised the name. I knew about Rachel before I met her because she was better known as a murderer than a rape victim. The newspapers leapt on the fact that there were pictures of the scene, pictures so grotesque they made one of the jury members faint and another vomit on the spot. The papers were even more excited that it had been caused by a teenage girl who was only just old enough to buy alcohol. Rachel told me she had been thrust against a wall, within arm’s length of the ceremonial samurai sword. It wasn’t meant for attack purposes, but she was delirious enough with pain and fear that her panicked swipes and lunges found the jugular of one of her attackers. He died straight away, but she remembered the gurgling sound that went on long after he’d breathed his last. The second one lived, and lived to tell a nauseous jury that Rachel wanted it that way, but only to draw them in so that she could slaughter them like cattle. She was given a life sentence because everybody believed him, the young man from Oxford with the Queen’s English and the good job in accounting. Eight years later she arrived in my prison, with a gang of capital punishment supporters following her every move. One of them had sent me the pictures the jury had seen, soon after Rachel had been attacked by one of the girls. I was worried one of them had told someone outside the prison what had been going on, and for several weeks I watched carefully to make sure I wasn’t being followed home. I didn’t get rid of the pictures straight away. After I thought the images had become less vivid in my mind, I studied the man who died. His eyes stood out from his blood-spattered face, bright white wild orbs. His mouth was open in the manner of a silent scream, but his black tongue, caked in dried blood, lolled out towards one cheek and gave him the look of a dopey, demented carnival mask. The picture must have imprinted on my mind much more than I thought, however, as I dreamt again about the candlelight dinner, except that time it was with the dead man, telling me in a grotesque gurgle that Rachel was coming to get me. He then reached across with a crimson hand and took the pips from my shoulders, feeding them to an enormous grey dog. I shredded the pictures the next day. I sat at my desk one morning with the picture of Rachel’s killer in front of me, thinking about how one murder had simply lead to another, and how the pathetic cycle would continue until there was no-one left, or until someone was clever enough to not get caught. I saw women like her everyday, and I thought I could find some way of sympathising with all of them. I was immune to the media, especially this time. Suddenly widowed or not, this woman had no right to be walking the corridors of a building full of vulnerable girls. Drug users, thieves and prostitutes they might be, but the ones I’ve come across have an uncanny knack of seeing through a situation. I was worried after Rachel was beaten; I felt more eyes on my back than usual. Thankfully, the vagaries of prison life afforded me an opportunity to give her a reasonable dressing down in front of the others. A dispute over the validity of a ball potted during a game of pool had overspilled into a cue-threatening-orifice argument. I knew she hadn’t started, but it had to be done for the sake of my job. She kept her distance for a week or two, and just as we started talking properly again, she escaped. I read the tombstone one last time, and got to my feet. I started to walk away, but had to turn around. I kissed it once, then began the long, sticky walk in the midday sun back to my house, all the time thinking about what it would have been like to have been raped, stitched back together by doctors, then arrested as soon as I’d woken up. Rachel told me she still wondered if the incident with the police was an anaesthesia-induced dream, or maybe she had actually already died and this was the underworld. She called me Virgil for a while after that. To amuse her I put up a piece of paper saying ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’ whenever she was due to come up to my office. The piece of paper is in a box, alongside a book of Auden’s poetry, on its way to the other side of the country where I’m due to start my new job in the next week. It’ll be a new challenge, top dog at a new prison with new responsibilities and new inmates. Responsibility for one inmate in particular, actually, as she’s just been jailed for a point blank shotgun murder.
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