Chapter 39
As Neil Henderson walked through the door of the flat he shared with Angela Mickle he gazed over the high bridge of his nose with vacant, shifting eyes. He seemed to have lost something, perhaps his sense of himself; or perhaps it was he who was lost. Angela rose from the mattress, stood before him, but he gazed through her as though she were glass. He stood splay-legged with his head tilted to the side. For a moment he was motionless, slightly groggy looking where he stood, and then a faint gleam entered his eyes. He registered her now, knew she was there. He jerked his head, his eyes front, and then he brought his feet together and shifted his weight to the right one. His demeanour altered too; it was as if Angela’s presence stirred thoughts in him; he eyed her cautiously for a moment and then he took a step forward.
‘Hello Ange,’ he said.
‘What is it, Hendy?’ Her voice was shaky, seemed to carry a loose rattle that started somewhere in her chest and worked its way up her windpipe to her throat. ‘W-what happened?’
He moved slowly, his broad shoulders easing forward and backward in harmony as each step sounded softly on the bare boards of the flat. His eyes narrowed now, took on a predatory glare as he started towards Angela. ‘I saw your wee friend.’
‘Crawley? You saw Crawley?’ The timbre of her voice changed, grew higher.
‘Aye, that’s right.’ Henderson watched Angela start to retreat from him; he smiled, a sly smile that slid up the side of his face and settled there like a scar.
‘What did he say? W-will he come back?’
‘Questions, questions…’
Angela put her hands out behind her as she backed up to the wall of the living room. Her thin frame looked insignificant against the broad expanse of plaster. She eased herself up to it and lifted her shoulder blades; the slow movement seemed to shrink her even more. ‘What happened, Hendy?… I need to know.’
Henderson swayed in the doorway for a moment, he removed his hands from his trouser pockets and then entered the living room. He stared for a second at the dim bulb as it burned in the centre of the ceiling, then he reached for the switch to extinguish it. When his gaze returned to Angela her skin was the pale grey of prison walls. He sneered at her, registered her sour look and then he felt an unfathomable connection to her eyes. It was as if thoughts passed visibly between them, as if they were communicating without words, conveying more than language ever could.
‘Hendy…’
The room felt cramped to him after the broad streets of Edinburgh with the wash of rain and the blow of wind. He felt closed in, not just within the confines of the room, but in his mind. He felt trapped there, with Angela. A succession of grim thoughts played tag inside his head. When he spoke, his voice was a coarse whispering rasp, ‘He said you’d had words, Ange.’
Her mouth clamped shut, she turned her head to the side as if looking for an exit route. Her eyes closed tight and then reopened quickly as she flicked her head back to the front, towards Henderson.
‘He said, he wasn’t afraid of anything I had to say now.’ His teeth gritted, ‘Do you know why, Ange?’
She shook her head; her mouth remained tightly closed. Her fingertips worried at the seam of her dress as she looked at him with wide, staring eyes.
Henderson drank in Angela’s fear, he bunched a fist, brought it before his face and bit into his knuckles. His eyes closed with the action, then reopened as he withdrew the knuckles from his mouth. ‘You put him off, Ange.’ His voice was louder now, firmer. ‘He thinks he’s safe because you fucked everything up.’
‘No.’
‘Yes… You ruined everything. All my hard work, wasted. What am I supposed to do now, Ange?’ He leaned forward, placed his bunched fist under her chin, lifted her head back until it touched the hard wall. ‘How am I supposed to get that beast bastard to pay up now, Ange?… You tell me that, eh…’
Angela tried to turn away from him, to push past his extended arm but he lowered his reach, splayed his fingers against the wall and blocked her path. She retreated, tried to manoeuvre herself in the other direction but Henderson stepped to the side and stood square-shouldered before her. ‘Where do you think you’re going, Ange?’
‘Let me go…’
‘Go… Go where? To Crawley? You going to go and see him and try and make it right?’ Henderson drew in more of her fear. He wanted to see her scared, he knew she was the cause of his troubles and it lit a fuse inside him. He felt his stomach muscles tighten as he reached out and clutched her by the hair. Angela screamed out. He grabbed her throat and held her against the wall; he smothered her mouth with his free hand and watched as she struggled in his grip. She was nothing, trash. That’s all she was. She had been useful to him once but she had outlived that usefulness a long time ago. ‘You had to fuck it up, didn’t you?… Just had to fucking ruin it. He was going to pay out, you knew that, and all you had to do was keep your trap shut, but you couldn’t could you?’
She struggled harder, seemed to sense the anger that was burning inside of Henderson. He pressed his hand deeper into her face but her mouth seemed to widen to accommodate his palm and then she jerked forward and he felt the bite of her teeth on the fleshy underside of his hand.
‘Ah, you fucking bitch!’ He recoiled, turning his hand under his arm and folding himself over. The pain shot through him, he took his hand out, saw blood.
Angela ran from him towards the kitchen, her bare feet slapping on the boards as she went.
Henderson heard her opening the kitchen drawers, rattling cutlery. He straightened himself, looked down at the hand Angela had bitten. The palm throbbed, the thin flesh was torn and blood ran in a narrow trail towards his fingers. He could see her teeth marks, little puncture wounds that sat white above the skin. He shook out the sting of the wound, cursed, and ran after her. As he entered the kitchen Angela stood before him with her arms outstretched, her hands clutching at the haft of a large knife. She seemed unsteady on her feet but her jaw had set firm, signalling her resolve. She swiped the air before her with the knife.
‘Are you off your fucking head?’ said Henderson.
‘You just fucking leave me alone!’ her voice screeched.
Henderson edged forward, smiling. He kicked out at the upturned drawer on the floor and closed in on her, ‘I’m warning you, bitch, that knife comes anywhere near to connecting with me — even fucking close — and I’ll use it to gut you.’
Angela screamed, ‘Fuck off! Leave me!’
‘Oh, I’ll leave you… As I fucking found you.’ He lunged forward to grab her arm, knock the knife away; Angela withdrew; lunging out with the blade in a sweeping arc she caught Henderson across the face and chest. He yelled out as the knife fell to the floor.
Angela ran to the corner of the room and cowered there.
Henderson shouted out, ‘Look what you’ve done!’ He touched the blood spilling from his cheek and jaw, pressed the tear in his shirt fold. His chest tightened, the pain from the wound was intense but the rage beneath it felt as if someone had reached in and grabbed his heart, squeezed tight. ‘You fucking bitch!’
He bent over and kicked the knife across the kitchen floor. As he did so, Angela stood against the wall with her eyes wide and her lips quivering. She pushed herself flat against the bare plaster and screamed out. ‘Help!’
‘You fucking bitch!’ said Henderson again. His brain itched; he felt queasy, the whole situation had the unreality of dreams. He took steps towards her but his legs didn’t feel like his own, the sound of his footfalls was amplified, seemed to echo off the walls. ‘You fucking bitch!.. You fucking bitch!’ The words were a siren wailing in his head as his fingertips burned with a slow friction around her neck. He held her, pressed hard to the wall, for as long as it took the life to drain from her face. The eyes bulged out, then her mouth drooped open and her head lolled to the side, settled on her shoulder. He released his grip and watched Angela fall to the ground in a tangle of thin limbs. Her wide eyes protruded from within her grey-pink face as she lay on the floor.
‘You fucking stupid bitch!’ he said. ‘Couldn’t leave well alone, could you?’
He stood over her, watching the motionless body she had once inhabited. He ran an open hand through his hair, gripped the crown and turned his face into the crook of his elbow. ‘You had to fucking ruin it… Just had
