I didn’t know that any of this was true until he started crying harder, and then I knew that it was all true. Suddenly, it didn’t feel too sunny for this anymore; something went out inside me. Some light. I cut him again, digging the stanley knife over his cheekbone, pressing down so hard that the muscles in my forearm bunched and my teeth gritted.
‘You fucking killed her.’
‘I didn’t! I didn’t! I swear to God! Jesus, ahhhh!’
The train leaving the station now: rolling out backwards. It was out of my hands.
‘You met her and you killed her.’
Easier to just sit back now, as I carved his face apart.
‘I didn’t kill her,’ he sobbed. ‘Please stop hurting me!’
I let go of his hair, throwing his head back in disgust, and stepped away from him. Then, I went to the top of the bank and checked the woods again. In the distance, I heard Charlie calling my name. She was a long way away by the sound of it. If she’d been closer, I might have left it there.
Who am I kidding?
Back with Kareem, by the side of the stream. In the sun. With the breeze making the grass in the field shiver, and the trees above us nodding thoughtfully.
‘What happened?’ I said.
‘I don’t know what happened.’ He was knuckling blood and spit off his chin. His cheek was bright red and looked utterly destroyed.
‘Jesus. Oh, Jesus.’ He looked up at me desperately. ‘Marley took her. I owed Marley some money, and he fucking took her. That’s all I know.’
I made to grab him again, and he flinched away.
‘You
He shook his head.
‘Not like that. I didn’t have any say in it. We were just talking about things.’
‘About what?’
‘About rape. About why I wanted to do the things I did. Why I like that stuff. We were just talking, I swear. We weren’t doing anything!’
I pictured this man in a room with Amy. Just talking. Either side of a table, elbows resting there. Cups of coffee between them. Just shooting the breeze.
‘What happened?’
‘I owed this guyMarley. He’s like this big underworld guy in Thiene, and I owed him money. I’d been gambling, and taking shit from him on loan, and I didn’t want my wife to know. He was gonna tell her. Gonna beat me and tell her everything. Maybe beat her too.’
‘So you gave him my girlfriend?’
White rage: I took hold of his hair again, ready to put the knife through his face a
‘NO! He just took her, man. I didn’t have any say in it, I swear. He had a couple of other guys with him – real big guys – and they just took her out by the hair. I tried to stop them, but-’
I attempted to picture him trying to stop them, but the image wouldn’t come. I couldn’t see it somehow. All I saw was Amy being taken away by her hair, and I knew exactly what had happened. Kareem had paid his debt by giving Amy to this man, Marley. Before I even knew what I was doing, I’d punched Kareem in the stomach so hard that the knife flew out of my hand and landed on the bank. All the air went out of him in a whoosh, and then I was dragging him up by the hair, pulling him towards the beck, then kicking his legs out from under him, and down he went, face first, into the water. He couldn’t help sucking it in. Blood spilled away downstream in little tendrils.
And I held him there. Looking out over the field, and then glancing back at the bank behind me. Charlie was calling me: still quite a way away. Maybe if she was closer I would have stopped: I could keep thinking like that. My mind was calm now. The panic would come afterwards, I was sure, but for now there was only silence, as I carried out this unreal thing that it had been telling me not to all along while at the same time knowing I was always going to.
He fought for a minute or so, but I was stronger than he was. And that’s what life’s about, isn’t it? You fuck up, you fight with all your might, and then you die anyway.
I met Charlie halfway back through the woods. We saw each other from quite a way off and she waited for me as I walked towards her, head bowed. I scratched my nose, looked up at her and shrugged as I reached the place she was standing.
‘He got away.’
‘Too bad.’ She noticed my clothes. ‘Jesus – you’re soaking.’
I looked down at my leg and my arms.
‘Yeah. I took a tumble into the beck. My hand’s pretty sore.’ I looked at it, pretending that it hurt or appeared injured in some way. ‘He took off over the field, and I figured I was done in.’
‘Thanks for trying.’
She smiled at me, but looked a little shaken.
‘You really beat the shit out of him,’ I said, trying to make light of the situation. But my face just wouldn’t smile. Every time I tried, it just slipped away.
She said, ‘I think he had it coming.’
And then she shivered. ‘The adrenalin’s kicking in, though. I’m a wreck. Think I hurt my hand on him, too.’
‘Let me have a look.’
Suddenly, I was this world expert on injured hands. I took up her small fist and examined it. Already, between her first two knuckles, the skin was darkening. It happened to me a lot when I went bare-fist on the Scream, and I figured she’d be okay.
‘You’ll live,’ I said, letting go of her hand.
She rubbed it.
‘Well – bit of excitement, anyway. Think we should report it?’
‘I doubt it.’ I looked behind me. ‘He’s long gone.’
‘Probably think twice before he does that again, anyway.’
‘I would think so.’ I smiled at her, but it faded again. ‘Where did you learn to do that stuff?’
She struck a stance.
‘Second-dan gojo-ryu,’ she said. ‘I’ve been training since I was eight.’
‘Jesus.’
She relaxed. ‘You still want to go for that drink?’
‘I think I really need it.’
‘Okay, then. Let’s go.’
So we walked back up to the path and together followed it all the way to the ring road. In better circumstances, it might have reminded me of walking with Amy. I don’t know how I would have felt then, but it hardly even registered now. I was like a zombie, grunting in the right places to everything Charlie said. I’d left the thinking part of me back down by Lacey Beck, and it was still kneeling there now, squatting beside Kareem’s corpse and keening like a frightened, abandoned child as the water washed over him.
CHAPTER SIX
When forensic experts want to recreate a murder victim’s face from the skull, they stick little plasticine pegs at key points on the bone structure – at the right height for the ethnic origin and gender of the skull, which is determined by size, shape, and so on – and then they join those points up with strips and fill in the spaces in- between. My relationship with Amy was as complicated and intricate as a human face, but you could begin to see the shape of it in the same way: by picking out key points and then filling in the missing details later.
Year 0: We meet.
