She carried on surfing, setting finally for a documentary about sharks, and went back to ironing her jeans. It had been a row she'd known was coming, ever since term had ended and she hadn't eagerly hopped aboard the first train home. Miriam, how could you choose to stay in that dingy bedsit rather than with your own parents in a comfortable house blah blah blah…?
She'd tried assuring her mother that she would be home in time for Christmas, but once the tears had started, it had been a lost cause. It wasn't like she didn't want to go home, but quite a few of the people on her course had decided to stay on for a bit and it was a laugh, just dossing about with them, going to the pub every night. She pulled on her jeans and moved hangers back and forth along the clothes rail, looking for a shirt. It was quiz night in the pub and she wanted to get there early, make sure she was on a team with that new bloke in the first year with the nose-stud and the green eyes… Jacqui was ready and waiting on the doorstep by the time her husband had got back from running her mother home. He leaned across and opened the passenger door as she came hurrying down the path. This was their routine. She pulled the door shut, placed her handbag in her lap and the car moved away, beginning their conversationless, ten minute journey to the tube station.
Mim turned off the television before the God Squad began in earnest. There was really nothing else to do on a Sunday night than sit in the pub. Fuck, she worked hard enough, why the hell not? She pulled her door shut, jogged down the stairs and stepped out into the cold. She heard the rumble of a diesel engine and looked up to see a bus coming round the corner. Swearing enough to make her mother faint, she started to run.
Jacqui and Mim lived miles apart. They did not know each other. They would never meet. They would finally come together as two names, the latest pair of names, one above the other in capital letters, on a large square of white, wipe-clean plastic. Two names.
One of them belonging to a dead woman.
Hendricks rang while he was feeding the cat, and Thorne quickly realised he hadn't been the only one having a shit Sunday. Mr. Handy In-The-Kitchen, who was actually called Brendan, had turned out to be Mr. Unreliable-In-Every-Other-Way.
'So where's the next piercing going then, Phil? On second thoughts, don't tell me…'
Hendricks laughed, but Thorne could hear how upset he was. 'Not in a million years, mate. I don't know… I wasn't clingy, I wasn't stand-offish, I really.., tried this time, Tom, you know?'
'Don't forget for a second that you're talking to completely the wrong person here, but for what it's worth, maybe you're trying too hard. That might be what you're doing wrong.'
Hendricks sighed, said nothing for a while, then: 'I know exactly what I'm doing wrong. Cutting up dead bodies, removing brains, and hearts and lungs…'
Thorne understood straight away. This was a conversation they'd had a couple of times before. 'Right. Another one didn't approve of the career choice?'
'Never said as much, but it was obvious. It's always difficult, but since the start of this year, it's like telling people I'm a terrorist or a murderer or something…'
At the start of the year, a scandal about the removal of body parts from dead children had discredited the business of organ harvesting in general and pathologists in particular. The hysteria had died down but damage had been done. Rates of organ donation had dropped dramatically. Transplant numbers were down. Pathologists had trouble making new friends.
'I tell people what I do, there's like this pause, you know?' Thorne did know, very well. Hendricks had started to ramble a little then, and Thorne could tell that he'd been Smoking. The dope was something they never talked about, but Thorne had often smelled it. He could all but smell it now, as Hendricks's voice on the phone dropped to a whisper. 'I wonder if… what I do, is something that I carry on me. D'you reckon?'
'Phil…'
'Not the stink, I know how to get rid of that… I mean, more like a shadow or summat. No… more like, when you're under UV light, like at a club, you know.., same as we use with Luminol… and you can see all the fluff and bits on your clothes, all that twinkly dandruff, glowing.., shining white? Maybe it's like that.., yeah. Little pieces of death starting to show up on me…'
Thorne cooked himself scrambled eggs, ate them at the tiny kitchen table. He thought about his father. Why, as the silly old bugger spiraled increasingly away into the distance, did Thorne feel so… buttoned up? Maybe he needed to do a bit of dope occasionally. Free up his thinking a little. Jan had smoked the odd joint, sometimes. Never in front of him, but he wouldn't really have cared if she had. It wasn't like he had any major objection to it; there was still far too much time and effort wasted in its criminalisation, but ultimately, it wasn't for him. He could always think of something better to spend his money on. Like beer and wine…
Suddenly, he could picture Jan and the lecturer she'd been screwing behind his back, skinning up, giggling, incense burning by the side of the bed. He opened a bottle of a different kind of drug and carried it through to the living room.
Abandoning the fruitless search for distraction on TV, Thorne sat for a while, considering what Hendricks had said. Remembering and thinking ahead. Thinking about bodies stabbed and bodies strangled. Thinking about a pair of cardboard coffins in the cargo hold of a plane bound for Amsterdam…
Were those who worked with death ever free of it?
He stood and walked across to the stereo. His fingers ran along the rows of CDs and lingered over a boxed set of Johnny Cash, before moving on. He'd treated himself to it the year before, a set of three CDs, each containing songs on one particular theme. God, Love and Murder. Much as he loved Johnny Cash, there was still one of them Thorne hadn't listened to.
Later, lying awake in bed, the lights turned out, the radio on, he couldn't get Hendricks's slurred monologue out of his head. It was dope-induced rubbish. It was paranoia, self-pity. It was cliche masquerading as philosophy.
It compelled him.
It had been over a year since his last relationship. No sign of another one. Was he too carrying a little of the stuff around with him? A handful of sparkling death, visible to those with an eye for it? He pictured his jacket lying across the back of the kitchen chair in the darkness. He closed his eyes and imagined them, luminescent, caught in a beam of moonlight coming through the kitchen window… A few tiny fragments, glittering at his collar and in the folds of the sleeves. Like malignant diamonds.
Karen, I didn't do it.
I wish I could tell you that it was because I refused. Because I stood up and said no to any more of it. I wish I could tell you that I was strong, that I decided not to go through with it.
The truth is, I tried to go through with it and I failed. Thank God. Thank God, I failed. Perhaps, a big enough part of me wanted to fail, wanted it to go wrong so badly that I made it happen. Perhaps I just chose the wrong girl. Or the right one. I sat in the pub and watched her, wanting to run, wanting to stay, counting each drink she had, listening to her laughing and feeling the thing heavy in my pocket. I sipped water and hummed along with the music and willed it all to be over quickly.
It was late when she finally left; they were virtually the last to leave the place and it was horribly perfect, Karen. They could have gone in the same direction, all of them heading home together and me needing to look again, to head into town and find a club, but she went her own way and I could do nothing but follow.
I don't often use bad language, Karen, but when I took out the gun, I was fucking terrified. It hung at the end of my arm like a dead thing and her mouth just opened so wide then, and I stood and watched her mouth and listened to her scream for a while. I don't know how long we stood therefore, but instead of doing it quickly, instead of firing, instead of doing it… the thing I was therefore, I just stared as she ran at me, and I bowed my head as she hit and hit. I backed away and I could see her bending down like she was picking something up. Then she came at me again and it started to really hurt and I know it sounds stupid but I almost laughed, because I suddenly realised that now, the sound of screaming was coming from me. I watched her running off towards the lights and shouting and I wiped away the blood that was running from my head on to my face. I put the gun back into my pocket and I left that place. It has to end now, Karen.
I wish I was brave enough to come to you, but you already know that I'm not. I think the poison inside me has eaten away every ounce of courage there might ever have been.
I need to find just a little more.
