“About ten or fifteen minutes after you’d gone. I was still crying and…”
“
“It wasn’t just you. They’d been phoning all weekend, wanting to speak to Johnny.”
“Who had?”
“The papers. Your mates.” She was talking to the floor.
“And you told Foster about me?”
“I didn’t tell him your name.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Just that some fucking journalist had been round asking about Jeanette.” Paula Garland looked up, staring at my right hand.
“Tell me about him,” I said, my dead hand waking again.
“Who?”
The pain was growing, throbbing. “Donald Foster.”
Paula Garland, beautiful blonde hair tied back, said, “What about him?”
“Everything.”
Paula Garland swallowed. “He’s rich and he likes Johnny.”
“And?”
Paula Garland, her eyes blinking fast, whispered, “And he was very kind to us when Jeanette went missing.”
My mouth dry, my hand on fire, staring at the piece of red cotton thread, I said, “And?”
“And he’s a bastard if you cross him.”
I held up my white right hand. “You think he’d do something like this?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“No I don’t know, because I don’t know why he’d do it.”
“Because of what I know.”
“What do you mean, what you know?”
“Because I know everything’s connected and he’s the link.”
“Link to what? What are you talking about?” Paula Garland was scratching at her forearms.
“Donald Foster knows you and Johnny, and Clare Kemplay’s body was found on one of his building sites in Wakefield.”
“That’s it?”
“He’s the link between Jeanette and Clare.”
Paula Garland was white and shaking, tearing at the skin on her arms. “You think Donald Foster killed that little girl and took my Jeanette from me?”
“I’m not saying, that, but he knows.”
“Knows what?”
I was on my feet, my bandages flailing, shouting, “There’s a man out there and he’s taking and raping and murdering little girls and he’ll take and rape and murder again and nobody is going to stop him because nobody really fucking cares.”
“I care.”
“I know you care, but they don’t. They just care about their little lies and their money.”
Paula Garland flew from the chair, kissing my mouth, kissing my eyes, kissing my ears, holding me tight, saying over and over, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
My left hand clutched at the bones in her spine, my right hand dangling numb, pawing at her skirt, the piece of red cotton thread catching on my bandage.
“Not here,” said Paula and gently picked up my white right hand, leading me up the steep, steep stairs.
There were three doors at the top of the stairs, two closed and a bathroom door ajar. Two tacked on plastic door plates:
We fell through the
“You care and you believe. You don’t know how much that means to me. It’s been so long since someone cared.”
We were on the bed, the light from the landing making warm shadows of the wardrobe and the dressing table.
“You know how many times I still wake up and think, I must make Jeanette’s breakfast, I must wake her up?”
I was on top, kissing back, the sound of shoes hitting the bedroom floor.
“I just want to be able to sleep and wake up like everybody else.”
She sat up and took off her yellow and green and brown striped cardigan. I tried to lean on my right hand, pulling at the little flower buttons of her blouse with my left.
“It used to be so important to me, you know, that nobody ever forgot her, that nobody ever spoke about her like she was dead or in the past.”
My left hand was pulling down the zip of her skirt, her own hand on my fly.
“We weren’t happy, you know, Geoff and me. But after we had Jeanette, it was like it was all worth it.”
My mouth tasted of salt water, her tears and words a hard and ceaseless rain.
“Even then though, even when she was just a baby, I’d lie awake at night and wonder what I’d do if anything happened to her, seeing her dead; lying awake, seeing her dead.”
She was squeezing my cock too tight, my hand inside her knickers.
“Usually hit by a car or a lorry, just lying there in the street in her little red coat.”
I was kissing her tits, moving across her stomach, running from her words and her kisses, down to her cunt.
“And sometimes I’d see her strangled, raped and murdered, and I’d run to her room and I’d wake her up and I’d hug her and hug her and hug her.”
She was running her fingers through my hair, picking scabs loose, my blood beneath her nails.
“And then when she never came home, everything I’d imagined, all those terrible things, it had all come true.”
My hand was burning, her voice white noise.
“It had all come true.”
Me, cock hard and fast inside her dead room.
Her, cries and whispers in the dark.
“We bury our dead alive, don’t we?”
I was pulling at her nipple.
“Under stones, under grass.”
Biting at the lobe of her ear.
“We hear them everyday.”
Sucking her lower lip.
“They talk to us.”
Squeezing her hip bones.
“They’re asking us why, why, why?”
Me, faster and faster.
“I hear her everyday.”
Faster.
“Asking me why?”
Faster.
“Why?”
