‘What to do with me?’ She laughed. ‘What to do. Indeed, indeed, the big question.’
He shook his head. ‘There was a body,’ he said. ‘We know that.’
‘These cats,’ she said, ‘you really have got to stop pretending they don’t live here. Give up. This is a cat palace.’
‘That wasn’t him,’ he said, ‘the body.’
‘Too short.’
He laughed though none of it was funny. His eyes creased. ‘How many more up there, you reckon?’
‘God knows. The earth teems.’
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I’m not having this.’
She blanked and looked down. ‘So that’s it anyway,’ she said, ‘it’s all up. Now I’ve told you.’
‘Yes.’
She said nothing but looked at him as if waiting for him to say something, but he couldn’t get his thoughts in order and the room was too hot, and he was beginning to think he’d pushed a bit too far with the booze, even for him.
She said nothing.
‘You—’
‘I’ve told you,’ she said, ‘I’m not telling you again.’
‘The thing,’ he said, ‘the file.’
‘The diamond file.’
He shook his head. ‘Never heard of a diamond file before.’
‘No reason to,’ she said. ‘You’d never need one.’
‘So,’ he said, pulling sense back around him like a blanket round his shoulders, ‘so’ – someone like that, he thought, you’d never know what was real and what wasn’t – ‘so let’s just say, let’s say’ – he flipped a cigarette out of the packet – ‘let’s just say…’
She looked harmless. The witch in his garden. She’d been scary, but he hadn’t been afraid of her now for a long time. He pitied the mess of her. Made him feel like a normal person.
‘Let’s say,’ he said, ‘for the sake of argument—’
‘I’ve told you the truth,’ she said.
They sat a while.
‘So what now?’ he said.
She looked at him. ‘Can I have one of your cigarettes?’
He opened the pack, took one out, tossed it. She caught it deftly and put it in her mouth, and when he tossed his lighter she caught that too. ‘Thanks.’ Her hands shook visibly.
‘Stop trembling,’ he said roughly.
‘Can’t.’
‘Try!’ Sternly. If she went to pieces, he hadn’t a clue how to deal with it. Slug from the bottle, meaningless, just another little smear of courage, another little trick on the mind, let it go, let it happen, nothing can be stopped anyway, not when it’s gone this far.
‘So what now?’ he said again.
‘I don’t want these to start working,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘It’s like, looking at this cat now—’
But she was muddling words – so she just looked at him because she didn’t know how to say, and he was looking back and she thought, it’s these I’ll miss when the meds kick in, these moments when you catch something from another person but you don’t know what it is but it’s more than real and too much to take, when you see yourself rippling away under someone’s eyelids, when a cat’s paw comes into focus, a complication you see in someone’s eye stops you in your tracks. These I’ll miss. But not to feel! Oh God, let me not feel!
‘Stop this,’ he said, horrified.
Because she’d started to cry and it was embarrassing. She stood up. ‘I did it,’ she said, ‘I really did.’
‘Stop this!’
The fire blazed on her face.
‘Sit down,’ he said, standing and pulling her arm.
She was all over the place, electrified. She drew in smoke as if it was life-giving air. ‘I know I’m evil. I want him down from there.’ She jerked away from him and started for the back door, trailing the old rug from her ridiculous hovel behind her. ‘Everyone will know,’ she said, ‘everyone will know. ’
‘Wait!’
She turned.
‘Where are you going?’
‘You gave me two pills,’ she said. ‘God knows what they were. I’m wide awake.’
‘It’s half past twelve.’
She gathered the rug into a roll and put it under her arm. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘everything’s under control.’
‘The fuck it is.’
He followed her to the door. The moon was high and bright, nearly full.
‘Look at the stars,’ she said, then pushed him back lightly and walked out into the yard.
‘What you doing?’
But she ignored him and walked away round the side of the house. He went to the corner and called after her, ‘You cause so much trouble for people. You think you can just do what you want.’
He saw the dark shape of her for a few moments against the light coming out of the side door window, then she was swallowed up in the night. For a while he heard the sound of her footsteps, then not even that. He walked back to the house, slammed the door, went back to the fire and chucked on another log.
‘Idiot!’
He sat down, grabbed the bottle, threw back his head. ‘I can’t stand all this,’ he muttered. ‘None of it’s even true.’ Let her. Do what she wants. He’d had all he could take. He sat for half an hour gazing into the fire. He thought about going out and getting in the car, drunk as he was, and driving down the lane to see if she was OK. Nah. Much too drunk to drive. Ridiculous. Fuck her and her madness. She’d be somewhere along the steep track leading up to the Wights. God, he was tired. None of it was his problem. Nothing of this would change, his house, his garden, the cats, his grandma’s old car, the back step with the gouge where his mother had hit it with an axe. That was a terrible thing. That old pickaxe, still around somewhere. No use for it. In the shed somewhere. The way she swung it, right up over her head and whack! He’d screamed. Four or five. It was like it was coming down out of
