into the crumbling plaster. He had seen the scissors in her hand. The fist around her neck tightened, squeezing the breath from her, making her tongue swell, lifting her off her feet.
Paddy swung her foot at his balls but missed, waved her free hand at his face and managed to knock his glasses off, but he didn’t flinch. He just pressed tighter and tighter until her eyes felt too big for her head, until her ears began to scream a high-pitched tone, and then he let her go.
Too stunned to go for the scissors, she stood, the very tip of her nose touching his, looking into his eyes wide with shock.
McBree dropped to his knees, bending forward, pressing his face into her groin like a man pleading for mercy. She raised her hands away from him, remembered her scissors, and fumbled to get them out of her coat pocket as McBree swayed first one way, then the next, and fell onto his side.
Callum Ogilvy was standing behind him, panting, holding a brick.
Behind him, framed in the kitchen doorway, furious and carrying a red petrol can, stood Dub. “I told you to wait in the fucking car!” he shouted.
III
Paddy, Dub and Callum sat close together along the wall, numbed, watching the man die. McBree’s right hand had landed on his chest but the left hand was thrown out to the side, palm open to the ceiling, like a singer reaching the crescendo. On the top of his head, facing the three of them, was a gash of bloody skin, a ragged split. Warm blood was still oozing lazily out of it, the puddle black in the dark of the kitchen, a slow-moving slick of ink that glistened silver as it split into tributaries on the uneven floor, making lakes of dips, looking for the sea.
The left hand was near to them, sitting in a diamond of the morning light coming through the window. Paddy could see a strip of soft white skin under his heavy wedding ring. His face looked strange without his glasses, naked, vulnerable. His eyes were smaller than she’d supposed, his lashes short and curled.
“We bury him in the garden,” said Callum.
Paddy was perturbed by his attitude. “He’s not dead.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” said Dub.
They sat in silence for a moment. Callum took a breath and spoke again. “We burn the place down with him in it. They come here and find the food and one sleeping bag. We leave a lighter near him and a packet of fags and they’ll think he was a jakey who was living rough and set fire to himself with a fag. The problem is the car out the front… We could drive it back, lose it in the city.”
Paddy and Dub looked at him. He was very calm, as if he had been born for this moment.
“Callum,” said Paddy, “the man is not yet dead. What part of that don’t you get? He’s not dead, he’s alive.”
Callum sighed. “OK, call an ambulance then.”
She tutted, cutting him off, but Callum persisted. “If he lives will he kill you? Will he come back and get you and hurt Peter?”
“Maybe.” She thought about it. “Probably.”
“Grow up, then.”
“You should be in the fucking car,” said Dub, as if that helped anything.
Paddy covered her face with her hands. “God, I’m fucking starving. How could anybody get hungry at a time like this?”
“Adrenaline,” said Callum, calmly watching a bloody rivulet creep across the floor towards him. “You get a big whoosh of it and then it passes and makes you hungry.” He saw them looking at him curiously. “Anger management course. Prison.”
Paddy looked down at the crumpled heap on the floor. “Maybe he’ll bleed to death?”
Callum wrinkled his nose at her. “What if he doesn’t?”
Dub stood up and looked down at Callum. “The thing that really bothers me about this, I mean really fucking does my head in, is that you shouldn’t be here. Whatever happens, you shouldn’t be here, seeing this.”
“He’s right,” said Paddy, standing up, keeping her eyes on McBree’s wound, repulsed but afraid to take her eyes off him in case he leaped suddenly to his feet and came at her. “You should go back to the car.”
Callum got up, wiped the dust from his bum. “You’re trying to protect me but you’re too late.” He gestured down at the half-dead man. “This is what I understand. You two, you don’t understand this. You’re sitting watching him, hoping he’ll die, but we need to do something.”
He had a point but Paddy stepped between him and McBree’s body. “I need to do something.”
His eyes were imploring. “Let me do it. I know what I’m doing. You don’t.”
Paddy hesitated. “I want you to go back to the car with Dub. Most people, Callum, most of us come from a comfortable home, we grow up and then we see things like this. It’s going to be harder for you. You’ll have to do it backwards.”
“I’m not leaving you here, you don’t have a clue-”
“You WILL go to the car with Dub.” It was her warning-mother voice again. It had worked on the sports guys, it worked on Pete, but Callum had spent his whole life being shouted at. She could see him smiling a little, swithering. He suppressed a grin and dipped his eyes, glanced at Dub’s feet.
“I’ll go back to the car.”
IV
She lit a cigarette and looked down at McBree’s head. The wound had stopped bleeding, the pool of blood no longer slithering across the floor but still. She kept her eyes on his face as she skirted his feet, stepping towards his left arm. She should have felt for a pulse, seen if he was alive or dead, but she didn’t want to touch him, couldn’t bring herself to bend over him, afraid he’d sit up suddenly and grab her, pull her down, throttle her again.
She stood over him and thought about Callum’s unnatural calmness. He had been here before, stood in front of a person and made a decision to take their life. She imagined herself having to face this as a ten-year-old child. The man that made Callum kill the baby had been raping him. She imagined that threat hanging over her as she looked at McBree. She knew suddenly that if she’d been a frightened ten-year-old like Callum, she would have hurt the baby to save herself too.
Playing for time, she thought again of checking for a pulse but it didn’t matter whether he was still alive. She couldn’t exactly call an ambulance. She was waiting, she realized, for the decision to be made for her.
Outside, a lorry rumbled past on the road, birds began to call. The sun rose, the wind rustled the tops of the trees.
Quite suddenly she thought of her father lying in his hospital bed, the skin on his sunken face dry and thin as rice paper, clinging furiously to life.
She stepped forward to McBree, felt in his jacket pocket, fumbling past his cigarettes and a tissue to the car keys. Moving quickly, she picked up the spare sleeping bag, and skipped over to the petrol can. She lifted it carefully, trying not to get any on her hands or clothes, and gently spilled it on the floor around him, crouching as she worked her way around the body, circling it with the greasy fluid. The packet of coal left over from the barbecue was on the range and she stacked it under the table for kindling, throwing the firelighter bricks on top.
She stood and looked at the scene for anything out of place. The house was quiet; the calm morning filtered through the dirty windows, the smell of damp cut by the sharp tang of petrol. An animal hunger scratched at the lining of her stomach.
She stepped outside into the morning and lit a match, heart hammering in her chest as she reached into the kitchen. Her thumb left her index finger and the match dropped through space, flaming red and blue, spinning. She
