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Jody shuffled into the lounge in his dressing gown and found Beth seated on the edge of the armchair. “You watched it?”
Beth nodded once but didn’t look up. She heard Jody unscrew the cap from a bottle and discard it before the sound of liquid pouring into glasses. “It’s nearly...it is morning.”
“Not officially morning until seven.” He handed her a filled glass.
She took it and sipped. She hated bourbon but the taste brought her back to the room. She watched Jody drop into the armchair opposite and balance the second glass on his paunch.
“You had to, sooner or later.” He said stolidly and examined his generous measure.
“Sorry if I woke you.”
He shook his head dismissively.
They drank slowly and didn’t speak. Beth emptied hers before Jody. She wasn’t a liquor drinker. Always drank it too quickly. She could feel her insides shrivelling against it but reached for the bottle on the coffee table. She wanted the warmth again.
Her mother and father didn’t drink, and it was their teenage infractions that had united her and Jody as they’d grown up. They’d both been subjected to their tag-team lectures. Being partial to the occasional spliff was their most heinous crime, but only Beth had ever been caught. When the French investigating officer, Sauveterre, made insinuations about her and Luc’s substance intake prior to the accident, which were entirely untrue, her parents had deftly distanced themselves, fearing the procedure would throw up her criminal record.
It had happened thirteen years ago and she’d mistrusted law enforcement officers ever since. She’d been spot-checked outside Brixton Academy when she was eighteen and had a large amount of cannabis resin found about her person – way too much for it to be for personal use.
Ironically, she really had been holding it for someone. Granted, someone who had promised her a fraction of it for concealing it while he dealt. It had never been clear if John Dukes was really her boyfriend. All these years later and she still didn’t know. John had said she had too honest a face to be searched. He’d been right, until then. The female police officer had seemed just as surprised after frisking Beth.
Bottom line, Beth was charged with possession and got a criminal record. It wasn’t the beginning of her parents’ disappointment in her – her first tattoo had seen to that – but it had made things nice and official.
It was why she hadn’t told them about her ordeal at the station. The police hadn’t thrown her in a cell, but they’d deliberately put her in a holding room with a homeless man strung out on something much harder than she’d been busted with. She’d never forgotten him. He’d looked like a walking, jaundiced corpse and had initially ignored her while his constant scratching had intensified and he’d clawed the skin on his neck raw.
His hallucinations prompted the beggar to plead with, and then attempt to assault Beth. The desk officer had taken great glee in letting things play out before he’d eventually intervened. It was the first time she’d experienced their indiscriminate mishandling of civilians. It had shaken her up badly, but she hadn’t let her parents see just how much when they’d picked her up from the station.
She started smoking the odd joint again with Luc, and they both did it for nostalgia’s sake. If she was honest, it had never done much for her. Red wine was always a more reliable way of loosening up. Blow only seemed like something illicit to repel the sensation of being too safe.
Another thirteen years of life later, half of that spent working on the periphery of the criminal justice system, and she was still wary of the police and their methods. When they’d questioned her after the collision, she’d assured them she didn’t do drugs anymore. If they’d tested her at the crash site, they would probably have found small traces of it from their nights relaxing in front of the wood burner. But she hadn’t been smoking or drinking prior to the car journey to the restaurant. The police said there was no way of knowing for sure because she hadn’t been breathalysed at the scene.
“You going to watch the rest?” Jody refilled his glass.
Beth shrugged her shoulders. Did she need to see them? She knew she’d have to. There was so much activity within that small frame. Would she glimpse something in the others? Perhaps the man from the camper? The police said they’d examined all the recordings and not found anyone outside of the roadside witnesses who’d made statements.
She wondered which one of them was “bloodlegend”. They’d uploaded a YouTube clip and called it “nut job crash bitch goes postal”. The banal description of her trauma was obscene. Why were these creeps allowed to get away with posting stuff like this? But she knew she was trying to misdirect herself from her aggression at the crash site.
She’d erupted when she should have been with Luc. She’d assaulted strangers instead of comforting him. Would he have even known she were there if she’d stayed with him? But despite the antipathy she felt towards the ghouls, Beth realised her behaviour disgusted her more than the people who had recorded them.
She found her glass empty again and looked up at Jody. He was scanning the rack of Blu-rays as if looking for something. This had to be difficult for him, her invading his life when he hadn’t seen her for so long.
“I promise I’ll be out of here as soon as I can.”
Jody suddenly looked at her accusingly through his bushy red eyebrows. “And I promise you’re welcome to take as long as you fucking need.” He seemed genuinely affronted.
Now it was Beth’s turn to look elsewhere. Her gaze rested on the bottle, but she resisted the urge to pour from it again. It was already making her feel desensitised. “Thanks.”
“I’m eating. You eating?” Jody was on his feet.
“No... I’m fine.”
“I’ll make you some breakfast and you can reheat it later.”
Jody left the room and walked across the landing to the kitchen.
Beth was left looking through the bay window to the smoked panes of the newly built but vacant office block opposite. She’d spent hours watching the automated window-cleaning cradle going up and down all day. It seemed to epitomise her new existence – fruitless robotic routine maintaining emptiness.
She listened to the scrape as Jody aggressively tugged the ice-clad drawers of the freezer, and it reminded her of the snoring she’d been lying awake listening to. She was so grateful to be here, though. Momentarily, it was a neutral place. There was nothing here to remind her of the life she’d lost. There were no pictures of her or Luc on the walls as there were at her parents.
She wondered if there had been and Jody had removed them, or if her life really had no impact on her brother’s for the years she’d been married. Whichever was the case, she knew she’d have to leave her detached sanctuary soon, and watching the clips had been her first step. The more she exposed herself to what was familiar, the more chance she had of remembering what had happened to her. But what did she have left now?
The bourbon suddenly tasted poisonous in her mouth, and she made her way quickly to the bathroom. She ran the tap but only stared as the water weakly coiled down the plughole. It was how she felt, as if everything that had made her Beth Jordan was slowly trickling away. She had few remnants of the life she’d previously owned. Only the family that Beth had a tenuous connection to were left. Luc was gone and someone else now occupied the familiar Edgeware home they’d previously inhabited. It felt like they’d never happened.
Now she wanted to go to the new house and rifle through the boxes. Find the DVD of their wedding and the discs of digital photos to prove it had actually been genuine.
What had her last words been to Luc? She wondered if any more of the evening would ever come back to her. Would it suddenly present itself weeks, months or years from now?
She was sure they’d spoken civilly to each other after they’d made love and before they’d driven to the restaurant. Prior to that they’d had a diplomatic version of their regular argument. Both of them still opposed but politely trying to accommodate the other’s perspective. But Luc had remained implacable.
Luc didn’t want children. It wasn’t that it was too soon. They were both in their early thirties. It wasn’t that he wasn’t ready or didn’t want the responsibility. Luc didn’t ever want children. Beth had known why, right from the early days, but she’d always figured he might change his mind.
He’d always been honest, told her he’d understand if she wanted to find somebody else who would. They’d been in their early twenties then and it had felt like a negotiable ultimatum that would be altered by time and circumstance.
As years passed and their closeness deepened, however, she realised that had only been her perception of it. Luc had given her the option to leave. Had he really meant it, or had he known she would never walk away from him? The resentment had built and surfaced when she’d least expected it.
But they hadn’t rowed that evening. She hadn’t wanted to ruin the last night of their trip. They would have had enough to face when they returned for the move, and piling on any more stress was the last thing either of them needed. They’d got out of bed and dressed for dinner. He’d watched her in the mirror, then he was whispering “sorry” through blood.
Had their conversation been on his mind as she’d driven him for the last time?
