She was in a half-world between sleep and wakefulness, between the past and the present.
She tried to see. There was just a pinpoint glimmer of light through the swollen flesh over her left eye. The vision in her right fought to compensate.
Perfume. She could smell perfume.
There was a shape. Someone standing beside the bed, holding something.
‘My ankle,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s very painful. I think I’ve sprained it.’
She squinted up at the figure, wondering if it was a nurse or a doctor.
Sitting there in Pat’s Bar, it had been like turning on a tap.
Amid the noise and laughter of the crowded pub, Meg sat with this woman, a complete stranger, and poured her heart out. Kennedy, the job, the lot. She didn’t know whether the woman was interested or not but she certainly seemed to be. She was a good listener and Meg wanted to talk.
It was the drink, of course, otherwise she wouldn’t have dreamed of gabbling on like this. Somewhere in her mind, where what was left of her good sense lingered, she knew that tomorrow’s hangover would bring embarrassment when she remembered.
‘You’ve had a bad day,’ the woman said when she had finished.
‘The worst,’ Meg agreed.
‘It’ll work out all right. You’ll get another job. There are lots of hospitals.’
‘Northern Ireland’s a small place. Word gets around.’
‘You don’t have to stay here. You’re young. With your skills, you could go anywhere in the world.’ As Meg pondered on the thought, the mobile phone rang.
‘It might be for me,’ she scoffed and drank some of her vodka. ‘Some big emergency down at the hospital and they can’t do without me. Ha! I don’t think.’
The woman smiled at her and lifted the phone. She put her hand over one ear to keep out the din.
Somebody was telling her something. ‘Oh really? Really . . . fantastic,’ she said. ‘Fabulous news.’ There was a pause. ‘Well, let’s see – I can be there in half an hour. Who’s with you?’ She listened. ‘Sounds good. Oh, and wait a minute . . .’ She glanced at Meg and smiled, then she said into the phone, ‘That gives me an idea.’
She turned away and Meg could not make out the rest of what she was saying.
‘I’d better go,’ Meg said, pushing back her chair. ‘I’m in your way. Thanks for the drink. Sorry about laying all my worries on you.’
The woman put the phone in her bag, then reached out and touched Meg’s arm. ‘No, wait, don’t go like that. That would never do at all. Listen, my dear Dr Winter, you need a bit of cheering up so here’s an idea. That was a close friend of mine on the phone. He’s got a few friends in at his place. He’s had a bit of good news, something to celebrate. It’s a rather private, very select little party, better than this bedlam. I think you’d enjoy it. So what do you say?’
Meg looked at her. ‘But I wouldn’t know anyone.’
‘So what? Maybe that’s a good thing.’
Meg thought, although not for long. She did not want to go home just yet. Home, where she would be alone.
‘We’ll never get a taxi,’ she said.
‘I’ve got a car.’
It was parked a couple of hundred yards away and they ran to it in the rain with their jackets over their heads, shrieking now and then as they stepped in a puddle. As the woman started the engine Meg realised she did not seem to be drunk.
‘Are you OK to drive?’ she ventured.
‘Fine. I was coasting back there. Just a couple of spritzers. I’ll make up for it in a minute. There’ll be champagne.’ She flashed a smile. ‘And who knows what else.’
They drove through the wet streets with the wipers on fast speed, by-passing the city centre and heading south, onto the Malone Road then out into the countryside past Barnett’s Park. They crossed a set of traffic lights and the woman clicked on her left indicator, turning into what looked to Meg like a Protestant housing estate. Bunting was strung from lamp-posts, kerbstones were red, white and blue, and flags with the red hand of Ulster hung limp and damp from darkened windows.
‘Wait a minute,’ Meg said. ‘This is weird. Where are we going?’
The woman gave a little laugh. ‘Don’t panic. It’ll be all right in a minute.’
They drove past better housing now and came to what seemed to be a dead end. But then Meg saw an entrance on the right and a sign saying ‘IN’. The car turned towards it, rumbling over rough stones, and the headlights lit up a wooden sign in front of some low buildings.
‘Ardnavalley Scout Activity Centre,’ she read aloud. ‘Come on, what is this? Where the hell are you taking me?’
‘No, wait. Just hang on. You’ll see.’
They drove up to a set of low wrought iron gates, beside which stood an intercom. The woman lowered her window and pressed the button.
A man replied, his voice tinny from the speaker. ‘Yo!’
‘Hi, it’s me,’ the woman said. ‘We’re here.’
There was a buzz and a click and the gates swung open slowly. They drove in, along a winding avenue lined on the left by a row of tall trees and on the right by a high wooden fence which separated the property from the grounds outside. There were big shrubs and rhododendron bushes and at the head of a long, sloping lawn stood a huge white country house with lights from hidden lamps playing up on it.
A big, broad flag, sodden and miserable in the rain, drooped from a pole set into the wall and as the wind took it for a second Meg saw that it was the stars and stripes of the United States of America.
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Where are we?’
The woman laughed again. ‘Welcome to the good old US of A. Or at least to a teeny weeny bit of it.’
‘What is this place?’
They drove round to the back of the house. Meg saw two cars: a big Mercedes and a small red sports car, an MGB, with a soft top.
‘This is the home of the American Consul,’ the woman said, turning the engine off. ‘He’s the friend I was telling you about. Come on.’
She got out and Meg followed her to a solid wooden door almost tucked away and strangely tiny for such a big house. It opened as they approached and a man stood silhouetted in the light from inside. He was in shirtsleeves with his tie loosened.
‘Hi. You got here.’
Meg heard the American accent. The woman threw her arms round him and they kissed, full on the lips.
‘This is Meg,’ the woman said. ‘We met tonight. She’s had a bad day and she’s in need of a bit of TLC. I told you I might bring her along.’
‘Great,’ the man said. ‘I’m Matt Ross.’ He shook Meg’s hand. ‘Come on in.’
They stepped into the hall and she got a better look at him, seeing a man in his early forties, not tall, but solid and fit, with dark eyes and hair and a beard that was not much more than stubble. She cast a quick glance around. On one wood-panelled wall there was the American seal, on another a portrait of the President and framed letters from previous holders of that office to previous consuls in Belfast. From a room somewhere beyond, Bruce Springsteen was being played loudly.
‘Matt’s the Consul,’ the woman explained.
Ross held his hands up in surrender and smiled. ‘Off duty right now. Just relaxing with a few friends after an eventful and historic night. Come in and meet them. We’ll get you girls a drink.’
Meg felt damp and bedraggled and she knew her hair would be a mess. ‘Can I use your bathroom first?’
‘Sure.’ He pointed up the stairs and told her where it was. ‘Join us when you’re ready. Just follow the noise.’
In the bathroom, Meg looked at herself in the mirror and asked her bleary reflection what the hell she was doing here. It was like she had stepped into another world. But then again, she reasoned, as she fixed her make-up and brushed her hair, it was different, wasn’t it, a bit of fun, which was what she’d wanted, and what was the harm?
She walked back downstairs, then paused and smoothed her hands down her skirt. Through a partly open door, voices and laughter mingled with the music. She pushed the door open and walked in.
‘It’s – ah – Meg, right?’ Ross said when he saw her enter.
‘Yes.’
‘We’re drinking champagne. OK with you?’
‘Terrific,’ she said as he handed her a fluted crystal glass that twinkled with a drink she did not need.
It was a big, comfortable sitting room. In an open fireplace, logs flickered. Ross and the woman, Meg could see, were an item. The kiss at the door had said as much and the way they draped themselves around each other now confirmed it.
There were two other men in the room. ‘This is Paul,’ Ross said, gesturing to a tall young man reclining on a settee with his shoes off, wriggling his toes to music which was not Springsteen any longer but had become an old Steely Dan track.
He smiled up at her from under an untidy quiff. ‘Hi. How’re you doing?’ He was an American, too.
‘And this is Chris.’
Over by the fire, a lean man in his mid-thirties looked at her from under hooded brows. He was smugly handsome and expensively dressed and instinctively she did not like him. He came over to her. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said. She heard an Ulster accent and saw a smile that was a leer.
She glanced round and caught the woman looking on with amused curiosity.
Through the alcoholic fog it dawned on her.
She had allowed herself to be picked up; that was it.
‘Why don’t we go and sit down?’ the man called Chris said, indicating a settee. ‘You can tell me all about yourself.’
‘No, I’m fine here just for the moment, thanks.’
She would have been seen as an unattached woman, a bit drunk, looking for uncomplicated fun, a few more drinks. Sex would not have been out of the question either.
They were looking at her.
Sex with all of them, maybe. Who could tell what kind of a party this was.
She was the right sort of social band, too, not just any old slut. That would have been attractive.
‘You’re a doctor, I hear,’ Chris said.
She watched his eyes drift down towards her neckline and the upper swell of her breasts.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Interesting. Do you kind of specialise in anything?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow, and she knew he wasn’t talking about medicine.
She said, ‘Venereal diseases – syphilis, gonorrhoea – that sort of thing. I get to meet all kinds of pricks and assholes.’
She sipped her drink, enjoying the taste and his startled expression. The man on the settee began to laugh. ‘Beautiful,’ he said, ‘just beautiful. Your move, Chris.’
There was a champagne bottle on the coffee table beside the settee, resting on an orderly pile of American periodicals: the New Yorker, Forbes magazine, Political Science Quarterly. Meg refilled her glass and waved the bottle. ‘Want some?’
‘Yeah, why not,’ the man called Paul said and straightened up.
She fell, more than sat, beside him.
The fire was hot, the champagne potent. Chris watched from a distance, looking morose and unsteady. Ross and the other woman had lost interest for the moment. Glasses in hand, they were dancing to Do It Again, keeping their bodies apart, except for occasional, tantalising collisions.
‘She . . .’ she pointed. ‘What’s-her-face . . . she said this was a celebration.’
‘Yeah, it is. Nobody tell you? Matt here’s been made a big offer. He’s going to be the right-hand man to the next President of the United States.’
‘Really? And who’s that?’
‘His brother. Senator Aiden Ross.’
Meg shrugged. ‘Never heard of him.’
Paul laughed. ‘Oh you will. Believe me, you will.’
‘Well, then,’ Meg said, ‘here’s to the both of them.’ They clinked their glasses and drank.
Across the room, Chris folded himself into a chair, sulking.
‘You want to watch him,’ Paul said. ‘He usually gets what he wants. He doesn’t like it when he doesn’t.’
‘Fuck him.’
‘Yeah, well, I think that’s kinda what he had in mind.’
She giggled and put an arm round his shoulders. ‘I like you. You’re nice.’
He turned to her with a smile. ‘I should tell you I’m also gay.’
‘Then maybe that’s why you’re nice. No big macho come-on. No big swinging dick stuff.’
‘And who’s to say?’ He pretended to be indignant and they laughed again.
After that they talked for a bit and he explained who they all were. They were in various kinds of business, apart from Ross, the consul. He used to be in the CIA apparently and she thought that was interesting but she was becoming too drunk to take much of it in and she was finding it hard to finish her thoughts and her sentences.
She slumped deeper into the settee, put her head back and closed her eyes. The music thumped behind her. Steely Dan were singing about drinking whisky and dying behind the wheel.
‘Paul?’
She opened her eyes and looked up. Ross was standing at the door. Chris and the woman were nowhere to be seen.
‘Sure. Be right there.’ Paul looked at her. ‘Back in a minute.’ He winked. ‘A little something to attend to.’
For just a second she wondered what was going on, then she sloped sideways and fell asleep almost instantly.
She woke because the music had stopped.
As she tried to blink her eyes into focus, she did not know whether she had been asleep for moments or hours.
She felt cold, in spite of the fire. It was still crackling so perhaps she had not been out for long. A headache was beginning to rumble like far off thunder and her mouth tasted really bad. She wanted to go home.
She was alone in the room. She had to find a phone, order a taxi.
Her bag. What had she done with it? The bathroom – that’s right. She must have left it there.
She stood up, light-headed and a bit queasy, and staggered to the door, bumping against a table and knocking a glass over. It fell, spilling champagne on to the thick carpet, but she left it where it was – who cares – and went out into the hall. The bathroom was upstairs somewhere; she remembered that.
As she put her hand on the banisters she heard voices coming from another room. She should tell them what she was doing, that she was going home.
She opened the door and found herself in a dining room heavy with old furniture. The dark polished table was long and narrow and she saw the three of them sitting at the end of it, huddled over something. As her vision and her brain groped towards understanding, she realised it was a mirror and that Paul was arranging white lines of powder on its surface with the aid of a Swiss army knife.
They stared at her, caught as if she had shone a bright light on them.
For a moment they looked uncertain what to do, knowing that she had seen and that she recognised what she had seen.
Then Paul smiled and said: ‘Come in. Join the club. Want to try some?’
She shook her head. To her surprise she found that she was shocked.
‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’ Then he bent his head to one of the lines and vacuumed it up through a candy-striped drinking straw. He gave a final, almost defiant snort, and pinched his nostrils to seal the cocaine in.
‘Need to find a phone,’ she mumbled.
She backed out of the room and hurried upstairs to get her bag but she could not remember which door was the bathroom and she tried two doors before she found the right one.
She felt afraid. What if the police came? Forget the phone. She would walk and find a taxi somewhere along the road.
The bag was over on the floor beside the washbasin. She bent down to pick it up.
When she turned, Chris was standing at the door.
She started. ‘You made me jump.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Going home. Have to get a taxi.’ She walked to the door but he stood in her way.
‘Come back downstairs. You should try it. It’s just a bit of fun. No harm in it.’
She looked at him. His face was flushed and his eyes were bright, darting. The pupils were pinpoints and she thought he looked a little crazy.
‘I don’t do drugs,’ she said and tried to push past.
He grabbed her arm and held her back. He smiled. ‘Then maybe you want to do something else.’
‘I don’t think so.’ She tried to get free.
‘Oh no? Is that a fact?’ He had both hands on her now, gripping her forearms.
‘Let go.’
He pulled her to him and tried to kiss her but she turned her head away. His lips were hot and slippery on her neck.
‘Let me go!’
‘Think you’re too good for me, is that it?’ he murmured into her ear, nibbling at the lobe. His teeth gnawed at her painfully. ‘You came here for some fun so you’re going to have some. Both of us. A little fun.’
‘You bastard!’ she said. ‘Get away from me.’
She tried to struggle out of his grip but the more she did so, the more his strength seemed to increase. She felt herself being bent backwards towards the floor. His mouth was still on her neck and he was muttering under his hot breath.
‘You like to pretend, don’t you. But you want me to fuck you. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want me to fuck you.’
He was too powerful. She was on the floor with his weight on her. He shoved a hand down the front of her dress, clasping her breast, squeezing the nipple painfully. Then she gasped as she felt a hand between her legs.
He pushed his fingers up into her. The shock of it jolted her body but it stung her into action.
She lifted her head and bit him hard on the side of the neck.
He bellowed with pain, then sat back and felt where she had sunk her teeth in.
He saw blood on his fingers.
‘You fucking bitch,’ he said and slapped her hard across the face.
Then, holding her down with one hand, he unzipped himself with the other and took his penis out.
She could see it. Hard and threatening, red, as if with rage.
She tried to push herself back, away from him, but there was nowhere to go.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
Almost before she realised who it was, Paul was reaching forward, pulling Chris off her, dragging him away by the shirt collar. Chris coughed and choked as it tightened at his neck.
Meg scrambled to her feet. The two men stood there, Chris with his trousers open and his penis out.
‘Jesus Christ. You sick bastard,’ Paul said.
‘It’s a game, that’s all. She’s a cock-teaser. Let me go.’
He lunged towards her again.
Paul swung him round and punched him in the pit of the stomach. Chris grunted as the breath went out of him. Then he stumbled backwards off balance and as he fell to the floor he hit his head a glancing blow on the side of the bath.
He groaned for a moment and then began to pick himself up.
Paul grabbed Meg’s handbag and threw it to her. ‘Come on. We’re getting out of here.’ He looked at Chris. ‘Fucking animal.’
As they ran down the stairs, they met Ross and the woman coming up.
‘What’s going on?’ Ross said.
‘It’s that asshole. He needs to be locked up. He tried to rape her, for chrissake.’
Ross held his hands up as if to block their way. ‘Now, hold on a minute. Let’s try to sort this out. I’m sure we can—’
Chris appeared behind them at the top of the stairs. He had zipped himself up but he was still dishevelled and there was fear in his eyes now.
Paul pushed past Ross. ‘Fuck him. And fuck you, too, if you think I’m going to stick around while that prick tries to make excuses.’
He grabbed Meg’s hand and pulled her after him. They stumbled down the stairs and out through the front door.
The MGB was his. He helped her into the passenger seat, then got in himself. The engine sprang to life and they sped off down the drive. At the gates he pressed a buzzer that opened them.
When they reached the main road, he turned left, not right towards the city. He drove fast but erratically, wavering towards the verge or else to the centre of the road. A couple of times Meg felt sure they were going to crash.
‘Where . . . where are we going?’ she said, clutching herself. She was shivering with cold and shock and her teeth were chattering.
‘I’m taking you to my place. There’s a spare bed.’
She did not argue. She could not think clearly. The day, the night – it was all madness. The world sped past, black and bewildering.
He careered along wet roads that were empty at this hour but within a few minutes they were no longer alone.
Headlights appeared in his rear-view mirror, flashing at him, dazzling . . .