‘Hey, Dad, am I a polar bear?’
“‘Well, of course, son,’ he replies gruffly.
“‘Are you sure I don’t have any grizzly in me or maybe koala?’
“‘No, son, I can tell you now that you’re a hundred percent purebred polar bear, just like me and your mother. Why in the world do you ask?’
“‘Because I’m freezing my butt off out here!’”
The DI laughs and groans at the same time. I put my arms around his chest, trying to keep him warm. A mantra, unspoken, grows louder in my head: “Please don’t die. Please don’t die. Please don’t die.”
This is my fault. He shouldn’t be here. There’s so much blood.
5
Regret is such an odd emotion because it invariably comes a moment too late, when only our imagination can rewrite what has happened. My regrets are like pressed flowers in the pages of a diary. Brittle reminders of summers past; like the last summer before graduation, the one that wasn’t big enough to hold its own history.
It was supposed to be the last hurrah before I entered the “real world.” The London Metropolitan Police had sent me an acceptance letter. I was part of the next intake for the training college at Hendon. The class of 1998.
When I went to primary school I never imagined getting to secondary school. And at Oaklands I never imagined the freedom of university. Yet there I was, about to graduate, to grow up, to become a full-fledged, paid- up adult with a tax file number and a student loan to repay. “Thank God we’ll never be forty,” Cate joked.
I was working two jobs—answering phones at my brothers’ garage and working weekends on a market stall. The Elliots invited me to Cornwall again. Cate’s mother had suffered her stroke by then and was confined to a wheelchair.
Barnaby still had political ambitions but no safe seat had become available. He wasn’t made of the right stuff—not old school enough to please the die-hard Conservatives and not female, famous or ethnic enough to satisfy modernizers in the party.
I still thought he was handsome. And he continued to flirt with me, finding reasons to lean against me or punch my arm or call me his “Bollywood beauty” or his “Indian princess.”
On Sunday mornings the Elliots went to church in the village, about a ten-minute walk away. I stayed in bed until after they’d gone.
I don’t know why Barnaby came back, what excuse he made to the others. I was in the shower. Music videos were turned up loud on the TV. The kettle had boiled. The clock ticked as if nothing had happened.
I didn’t hear him on the stairs. He just appeared. I held the towel against me but didn’t cry out. He ran his fingers slowly over my shoulder and along my arms. Perfect fingernails. I looked down. I could see his gray trousers and the tips of his polished shoes growing out from under his cuffs.
He kissed my throat. I had to throw my head back to make room for him. I looked up at the ceiling and he moved his lips lower to the space between my breasts. I held his head and pushed against him.
My hair was long back then, plaited in a French braid that reached down to the small of my back. He held it in his fists, wrapping it around his knuckles like a rope. Whispering in my ear, sweet nothings that meant more, he pushed down on my shoulders, wanting me to kneel. Meanwhile, the TV blared and the clock ticked and the water in the kettle cooled.
I didn’t hear the door open downstairs or footsteps on the stairs. I don’t know why Cate came back. Some details don’t matter. She must have heard our voices and the other noises. She must have known but she kept coming closer until she reached the door, drawn by the sounds.
In real estate location is everything. Barnaby was standing naked behind me. I was on all fours with my knees apart. Cate didn’t say a word. Having seen enough she stayed there watching more. She didn’t see me fighting or struggling. I
This is the way I remember it. The way it happened. All that was left was for Cate to tell me to leave and that she never wanted to see me again. And time enough for her to lie sobbing on her bed. A single bed away, I packed my bag, breathing in her grief and trying to swallow something that I couldn’t spit out.
Barnaby drove me to the station in silence. The seagulls were crying, accusing me of betrayal. The rain had arrived, drowning summer.
It was a long journey back to London. I found Mama at her sewing machine, making a dress for my cousin’s wedding. For the first time in years I wanted to crawl onto her lap. Instead I sat next to her and put my head on her shoulder. Then I cried.
Later that night I stood in front of the bathroom mirror with Mama’s big dressmaking scissors and cut my hair for the first time. The blades carved through my tresses and sent them rocking to the tiles. I trimmed it as short as the scissors allowed, nicking my skin so that blood stained the blades and tufts of hair stood out from my skull like sprouts of wheat germ.
I can’t explain why. Somehow the act was palliative. Mama was horrified. (She would have been less shocked if I’d sliced open my wrists.)
I left messages for Cate and wrote her notes. I couldn’t visit her house without risking meeting her father—or worse, her mother. What if Ruth Elliot knew? I caught the same buses and trains as Cate. I orchestrated chance meetings and sometimes I simply stalked her, but it made no difference. Being sorry wasn’t enough. She didn’t want to see me or talk to me.
Eventually I stopped trying. I locked myself away for hours, coming out only to run and to eat. I ran a personal best a month later. I no longer wanted to catch up with the future—I was running away from the past. I threw myself into my police training, studying furiously. Filling notebooks. Blitzing exams.
My hair grew back. Mama calmed down. I used to daydream, in the years that followed, that Cate and I would find each other and somehow redeem the lost years. But a single image haunted me—Cate standing silently in the doorway, watching her father fuck her best friend to the rhythm of a ticking clock and a cooling kettle.
In all the years since, not a day has passed when I haven’t wanted to change what happened. Cate did not forgive me. She hated me with a hatred more fatal than indifference because it was the opposite of love.
After enough time had passed, I didn’t think about her every hour or every day. I sent her cards on her birthday and at Christmas. I heard about her engagement and saw the wedding photographs in a photographer’s window in Bethnal Green Road. She looked happy. Barnaby looked proud. Her bridesmaids (I knew all their names) wore the dresses she always said she wanted. I didn’t know Felix. I didn’t know where they’d met or how he’d proposed. What did she see in him? Was it love? I could never ask her.
They say time is a great healer and a lousy beautician, but it didn’t heal my wounds. It covered them over with layers of regret and awkwardness like pancake makeup. Wounds like mine don’t heal. The scars simply grow thicker and more permanent.
The curtains sway back and forth, breathing in and then out like lungs drawing restless air. Light spills from around the edges. Another day.
I must have dozed off. I rarely sleep soundly anymore. Not like I did as a child when the world was still a mystery. Now I snatch awake at the slightest noise or movement. The scars on my back are throbbing, telling me to stand and stretch.
Ruiz is lying on a bed in the dimness. Wires, fluids and machines have captured him. A mask delivers oxygen. Three hours ago surgeons inserted a tube in his chest and reinflated his right lung. They stitched his arm, commenting on his many scars.
My ear is wrapped in bandages and an ice pack has melted on my cheek. The swelling has gone down but the bruising will be ugly. At least I can let down my hair to hide the worst of it.
The doctors and nurses have been very kind. They wanted me to leave the DI’s room last night. I argued. I begged. Then I seem to remember lying down on the linoleum floor, challenging them to carry me out. They let me stay.
I feel numb. Shell-shocked. This is my fault. I close my eyes to the darkness and listen to him breathing. Someone has delivered a tray with a glass of orange juice under a frilled paper lid. There are biscuits. I’m not
