But I’d thought it through before this, and I was pretty sure that it would be okay. No – strike that. I was just plain sure.
‘You want to go for a drink tomorrow?’ I asked. It came out a bit too quickly, as well, but I figured she’d take that as my reluctance to ask her for help. Male pride. Whatever. ‘I mean, I’d like that. It’d be nice. We could talk.’
‘Sure.’ She sounded pleased. ‘Where would you like to go?’
‘Um.’ I pretended to think about it. ‘What about the Bridge? You know – the one on the ring road?’
Charlie lived on the other side of Swaine Woods. A patch of houses just across from Lacey Beck, in fact.
I closed my eyes; forced myself to carry on with the conversation.
It
‘Sounds good,’ she said. ‘It’s nice in there.’
‘Yes. It is.’
‘So, what time?’
‘About half-past four?’ I suggested. ‘How about that?’
‘Still sounds good.’
‘Well okay, then. It’s… well, it’s not a date.’
‘No.’
I’d meant it as a joke, but realised – as she replied – that I’d said entirely the wrong thing. That used to happen with Amy all the time, before she disappeared. We’d both be happy, having a lovely conversation and the sun would be out, and then one wrong word from me would turn the whole day on its head. Make the sky go dark; make us both not know where to look, or what to say. It was good to know that I hadn’t lost the knack.
‘Okay,’ I said softly. ‘Well, I’ll see you there.’
‘Yeah. Thanks for ringing.’
‘Take care,’ I said, and pressed [CANCEL] on the call.
The kitchen was suddenly very quiet. The enormity of what I’d just done was hanging in the air; I could just make out the shape of it, and saw enough to know that it was wrong.
The year before, when I was still hung up on material things and the idea of being part of something that mattered, I would have stood and agonised about my actions. I would have fought with my conscience over it. But that was all past now. I’d learnt the best way to deal with these things. A two sentence thought which was hard to face but seemed increasingly easy to take to heart.
And what I’d found was: that thought is like a box. That’s how I imagined it, anyway: a black box up in the loft. Whenever you’re facing anything you want to save until later, or don’t really want to face at all, you open the box and drop whatever it is inside. And so that’s what I did. I put my conflicting emotions about what I’d done that evening in the black box, allowed the lid to seal itself, and forgot all about them.
And then I went upstairs to exercise.
My punchbag was the shape of a man’s upper torso, minus the arms: a strange, jet-black sculpture, resting on a strong, metallic pivot in the same way that a work of art might rest on a plinth in a museum. There, however, the similarity ended. It had square indentations for eyes and mouth, a rough block of a nose, and not so much a neck as a curve from non-existent ears to rounded shoulders. From certain angles it looked angry; from others, the expression seemed more pained. When I’d first bought it, Amy had referred to it as The Scream.
While I talked to Kareem earlier, I’d also been downloading a six-minute dance track from Liberty, and I put it on now, looping the play function and knocking the volume up to three below maximum. One less sense to worry about while I trained. In fact, it was so loud that, when I started work on the bag, I couldn’t even hear the punches land. I like my music that loud; I like to feel the cobwebs being blown out of my head.
My routine was pretty standard. One hundred jabs with each arm. One hundred jab-crosses, leading with each arm. By that point, my shoulders would be trembling. One hundred hooks, alternating body and head shots, generally at random. And then a combination: jab, jab, hook; jab, jab, cross. Whatever, really. I’d throw in a few kicks for good measure, but only when I could get away with it realistically, and maybe even add in elbows, knees and – rarely – a headbutt or two. Twenty minutes later, I’d be warmed up – ready for the main event.
I warmed up hard that night – so hard, in fact, that I was dripping with sweat and almost unable to throw a punch by the time I’d finished. I didn’t know whether it was the correct way to train or not, only that it was the way I’d found worked best for me. Start at the bottom, feeling as drained as possible, and then try to make it through the workout. If I was in a real fight, fresh and full of energy, then all well and good, but if I was caught on my last legs, I wanted a precedent to work from of how it might feel.
This time, I was cut off before I could even begin.
Maybe the banging at the door had been going on for some time. I don’t know: I only recognised it when I went over to the computer to change the track. I wanted something heavier: more industrial. Instead, in the silence, I got a hammering fist on the front door downstairs. I threw a towel over my shoulder and went to answer it.
It was raining outside, and there were two guys in black raincoats waiting on my doorstep, hunched against the cold. The first one showed me his badge and said:
‘Inspector Wilkinson.’
But I didn’t need that to know he was a cop. The i-Mart logo was all over the left breast of the raincoat. I watched a few droplets of water fall off the edge of his hat, heading down past a slightly pained face.
‘We’re looking for Jason Klein,’ he said.
‘That’s me.’
‘We’d like you to come down to the station,’ he told me. And then eyed my upper body. ‘Preferably with some clothes on.’
‘What’s it about?’
He looked at me. Rain was slashing down on the road behind them, but closer to it sounded more intimate. It was tapping on their hats.
‘We’ve found a girl’s body,’ Wilkinson told me. ‘We need to speak to you.’
CHAPTER TWO
It was a McDonald’s moon that night: two great big, golden arches staring down at me from the black sky, with stars twinkling beside and around. I’ve always hated that one the most: a big M – M for Moon – as though we’re all so stupid that we need everything labelling for us. The Nike tick annoys me, too.
No, fuck it – my favourite was old-fashioned plain. The night I’d met Amy it had been that way: three-quarters waxing, which was still slim enough to be free from advertising. Not exactly the stuff that poetry’s made of, I grant you – a kind of half-fat and unremarkable moon – but you need to take what free space you can get these days, and so that’s what I’ll take.
Wilkinson wouldn’t tell me any more information than he’d told me at the house. They’d found a girl’s body, and they wanted to speak to me. But what else could it be? I couldn’t think of anything. My body rocked with the motion of the car. I was aching slightly from the force of the exercise, but my mind felt very calm and passive.
The police car headed quickly through drenched streets. There were a few people around, black as the shadows between the buildings, and the pavements looked so dark it was as though it was raining oil and not water. I supposed that it could have been. Clouds, sponsored by Esso. Bright lights turned to blurs through the front window, before the screeching wipers smeared away the rain; water pattered on the roof, like pins dropping. We tail-ended a pair of bright red lights for half a block, and then headed onto the freeway. The city dropped away to the side, and the driver sped up a little.
