51

Shocked, angered, bewildered, Eddie walked into the sunlight in Broomhill Drive. I didn’t see it coming, he thought. I didn’t even get a sniff of it. He’d been preoccupied in a number of ways, sure, but just the same he felt he should have sensed something. He’d had a breakdown of his peripheral vision, of instinct. No, it was more, it underlined the distance between his world and his sister’s, how far apart they’d been forced to grow. He stopped walking and thought of her as she stood on the staircase wrapped in what must have been one of Caskie’s bathrobes, and the quiet way she’d uttered his name. A whisper. He didn’t remember turning and marching out of the house, nor if she’d called after him. He had to get out, that was all he recollected, leaving her on the stairs, the big fan turning and Caskie’s expressionless face in the hallway.

His throat was dry, and he had pain at the back of his eyes. He stopped at a traffic signal. He heard Joyce call his name and he turned, saw her half-walk, half-run, towards him. She wore a tan lightweight silk shirt that hadn’t been tucked very well inside the waist of her dark brown slacks, and the strap of one shoe was undone, causing her foot to slip in and out, and the heel of the shoe to cluck against the pavement with each step she took. She looked as if she’d been glued together hastily and the parts were already coming undone.

She caught his arm and said, ‘Eddie, I’m sorry.’

‘It’s your life, Joyce. I figured you might have better taste, that’s all.’

‘Fuck you,’ she said, and her small face was pinched and pale and sharp. ‘I’m trying to apologize for not telling you about this before, but if this is your attitude I’m wasting my time.’

‘He’s a shit,’ Eddie said. ‘Big-time.’

‘You don’t know him, Eddie.’

‘I know enough. He lies. He manipulates. Where he should have a heart he’s got a fucking icebox.’ He fell silent, because the next sentence that came into his mind was one he wanted to withhold, to spare her, to leave her with something. Choke on it, Eddie. Tamp it down.

‘You need to see it from his angle,’ she said. ‘He’s been through a lot. His wife was ill for a long time.’

‘And you were his solace, huh? You were his comfort.’

‘Christ, you have a way of making things seem downright cheap.’

‘Talk to your boyfriend. He knows about cheap.’

He turned away but she tightened her hold on his arm and swung him round to face her. ‘I know how it might look to you. But he needed me. She was dying, and he hadn’t loved her in years. Even so, he stayed with her until the end, Eddie. He went through her pain with her. He nursed her. He dispensed her medication. He bathed and fed her. He sat up with her for hours at a time, watching her pain. He’s caring and he’s good-hearted and maybe that eludes you, Eddie, because you don’t know him –’

‘Okay, the guy’s a saint, a real sweetheart,’ Eddie said. ‘But he had you on the side to ease his burden, so that must have helped.’

She swung a fist suddenly. Eddie didn’t see it coming. It stung his ear and he heard a whining sound in his head. He caught her hand and held it against his chest.

‘Don’t make me hate you,’ she said.

‘Did Jackie know about you and your Romeo?’

‘You can be so fucking childish, Eddie.’

‘Did he know?’

‘No.’

‘Couldn’t tell him? Ashamed to confess?’

‘What was the point in telling him?’

‘You were sparing his feelings?’

‘Yeh, that’s it. He and Chris were on different sides of the fence, Eddie.’

‘Bullshit. When you come right down to it, they were on the same side of the fence. They were both crooked.’

‘I don’t believe that, Eddie.’

He touched the side of her face as softly as he could. He had to tell her now. He didn’t have an escape route. ‘Listen to me. Caskie knew Jackie was going to be murdered before it happened. Caskie, whose bed you’ve just come from, was involved in the mechanics of the killing – in conjunction with a man called Roddy Haggs.’

She put her hands on her hips and stepped back a pace. ‘What kind of fucking person are you? How can you possibly say something like that, Eddie? How can you stoop so damned low? You really know how to get down into the gutter and come up with some pretty vile stuff, don’t you? Why in God’s name would Chris want my father killed? You want to hurt me because I lied to you, I omitted the truth, fine, I apologize, I am sorry to the bottom of my heart, but there’s no bloody need for you to make up all this shite and throw it in my face, is there? We don’t need this between us, Eddie. It’s a wedge, and I don’t want it.’

She doesn’t want to believe, he thought. Who could blame her?

‘I tried to kill off the relationship, I really did,’ she said. ‘When I married Haskell I thought, this is a way out of a bad situation. But I couldn’t get Chris out of my mind. The whole Haskell thing was doomed. I didn’t want him. I wanted Chris. I’m not getting any younger, Eddie, and love is a substance that is bloody hard to find. What do you know? You’ve got Claire and a kid.’

Love, Eddie thought. Love was a thing you wanted so desperately you didn’t always see things clearly. It was more than a life raft that kept you afloat in solitary waters, or the sound of another human voice in an apartment or the ruffle of somebody turning the pages of a newspaper while you read the magazine section on a Sunday afternoon. Love was a commitment of the heart, not a salve against solitary confinement. I’m not getting any younger, Eddie. ‘How long has it been …’ He left the question hanging.

‘How long has it been going on?’ she said.

He looked away. Butterflies flapped out of a hedge and flew close to his face, startling him. Forget I ever asked, Joyce.

‘Buckle your seatbelt, Eddie,’ she said. ‘The first time was a few months before my thirteenth birthday.’ She delivered this statement in a flat way, as if it were something she was reading from a prepared health bulletin. The patient is comfortable and is off the critical list. We don’t expect any further complications.

Dear Christ. He didn’t know what to say. Stunned. He’d assumed the affair was of more recent vintage – maybe the last six or seven years, on and off again. Now she was telling him something else, and he couldn’t take it in. He couldn’t find room for it. Couldn’t get his mind round it.

‘He’d always been so kind to me, Eddie, it just seemed that what we did was natural,’ she said.

‘Twelve,’ he said.

‘Almost thirteen.’

‘What’s the difference?’ He thought, Twelve is only a word. Let it go. But no, he couldn’t, twelve was a child, a kid, an innocent. Caskie had committed a crime.

‘You consented to it,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Even if you gave your consent, it’s still –’

‘I know what you’re going to say, and I know what you’re thinking,’ she said. ‘How could he do it with a girl that young? He must be some kind of perve, a monster. Look at me, Eddie. Don’t turn away. I wanted him to do it. It was all I had to give him in return because he’d been good to me. Here, my body, it’s all yours, take it, I want you to have it –’

‘I don’t need to hear this,’ Eddie said.

‘But I damn well need to tell you. He was twenty-nine and married, and I was almost thirteen, and after that first time it became a regular occurrence. We’d meet, he’d find some place to take me, a hotel out of the city, he’d book us into different rooms just in case … So it went on.’

‘And on, and on.’

‘We tried to break it off a few times over the years.’

But true love conquers all, Eddie thought. It can vanquish any enemy. He couldn’t picture Joyce, twelve years of age, spreading her legs for Caskie in a hotel room, Caskie entering her, man into child: did he speak of love, did he talk of a future? She’d fall for it. She was a kid, and optimistic. Yeah, she’d go for it. Eyes closed, a supplicant before her own future, she’d dream her romantic dreams even as Caskie thrust himself inside her and grunted, and the years rolled away and still he remained married, and her hopes diminished to the extent that she met and married Haskell just to escape – what? Her own disappointment? Some sense of shame? Twelve years of age, he thought. Jesus Christ. He felt unsettled, queasy. It wasn’t his thing, schoolgirls and their little skirts and their blazers and their gymslips, their smoothly innocent faces and tiny breasts. For some guys, sure, it was a big twisted kick, they sat in the half-light of their computer screens and scoured the Internet for images to incite them, the Web pimped for them – but he’d never understood that kind of lust. He’d perceived it as sickness. He’d seen too many runaway schoolgirls raped by middle-aged men, sodomized and forced to participate in orgies and drugged and God knows what else. He’d seen them dumped inside derelict buildings or on abandoned railroad lines, alive, half-alive.

Joyce said, ‘We couldn’t stay away from each other, Eddie. It was a kind of insanity. It’s always been like that.’

‘It’s an insanity, granted,’ he said.

‘Oh, you don’t have to sound so damn smug. Who are you to judge?’

‘I wasn’t judging.’

‘You prick. You can’t help yourself.’

‘Okay. I’m judging. I have a moral view. It’s instinctive. I can’t help it. Who else knows about you and your boyfriend?’

‘Nobody.’

He placed his hands on his sister’s shoulders and, lowering his head, looked directly into her eyes. What did he see in there? A tiny hint of sorrow because she’d kept her secret and the effort made her lonesome, or a touch of relief that she’d finally told somebody? He wasn’t sure.

Twelve, he thought. 12. Two times six. Three times four. Work the figures any way you like, it still came out twelve.

He said, ‘I think somebody knew.’

‘I’m positive they didn’t, Eddie.’

‘Here’s an educated guess. Roddy Haggs.’

She shook her head. ‘No, not –’

‘He found out. He had the knowledge. So he had the power. Do whatever I ask you to do, Chris old pal, or I’ll blow the whistle and it’s going to be heard all over the land. High-level cop fucks underage girl. Field day in the tabloids. They have a name for this crime, Chris. So cooperate with me, Inspector, or you’re going to hell on a fast bus … It makes sense, Joyce.’

‘We were careful, Eddie. Very careful.’

‘You thought you were.’

‘I know we were.’

‘Secrets are the hardest things to keep. You’re seen on the street by chance, or you’re noticed stepping into a taxi or catching a train, or maybe in the parking lot of some rustic hotel you think is remote and nobody knows you, but it’s a small world …’ He dropped his hands from her shoulders. ‘Do you really love him?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not sure what love is. When I was twelve I would have died for him. I thought he was damn adorable. He could’ve asked me to jump off a bridge and I would’ve done it without hesitation. When I was twenty I wanted to live with him, the whole domestic bit. Cook, clean, have kids by him. By the time I was thirty I realized I’d become accustomed to sex with him. There was still this spark, this passion. Now … now I think it’s a pleasant habit, Eddie, one I can’t imagine living without. Is that what love is in the end? A habit? I have an addictive personality anyway, for God’s sake …’

‘I hope to Christ you don’t love him, Joyce. I think he’s got all kinds of problems coming down on him sooner or later. I don’t want to see you hurt. I don’t want you drawn into something that can only end unpleasantly.’

‘I don’t believe he had any involvement in Dad’s death,’ she said. ‘I’ll never believe that. Not in a hundred years. No way.’

‘In a hundred years we’ll all be history,’ Eddie said. ‘And none of this will matter a damn.’

‘You can’t live your life from that perspective, Eddie.’

‘When stuff gets unbearable, you can try.’

She suddenly wept then, pressing her fingertips against her eyebrows, inclining her face. He watched tears roll down her cheeks and he reached out and held her and he thought of the little girl with the ribbon in her hair who played Chopsticks on the piano with flamboyant movements of her hands, like a melodramatic concert pianist, and Jackie would say, ‘Good Christ, girl, is there nothing else you can learn to play?’

Jackie’s voice echoed in his head.

He was filled with a deep yearning to go home, and leave Joyce to the misadventures of her heart, and forget Jackie Mallon. What do you owe him anyway? Whatever illicit activity he was involved in was a link in a chain of lies and violence. You didn’t do business with a killer like Gurk without making a statement about yourself: okay, so you didn’t pull a trigger and kill somebody, Jackie, but you were prepared to associate with a man who was a shooter, so what did that make you? If you knew what Gurk was capable of, you were an accessory. And if you didn’t know, then greed had made you blind. And if you were trying to recover any decency with your phone calls to Queens, and your regrets about how you’d driven a stake through the soul of the family, and how love had to be restored, goddammit, you let it all slip through your fingers, didn’t you, Dad?

And yet he couldn’t resist the thought: Jackie wasn’t responsible for his associates, was he? You went into business with someone, and he turned out bad, it happened all the time to people … Screw it, Eddie, even now you’re looking for an avenue leading towards forgiveness. Even after all that has happened, you still come back to the hope that you can find a cleft of light in your heart and a way to rescue Jackie from damnation. Why can’t you just despise him, and let it go like that? You’re a kid again, and he’s telling you how he’ll take you to Balloch and hire a boat and go fishing, except that day never came, but you’re still fucking waiting for it, aren’t you, Eddie, even when it’s impossible …

The sun began its very slow summery descent. He listened to his sister crying, and he had the impression that the city all around him was built on foundations of deception and greed.