Come to Harm

twenty-six

Tuesday, 19 November

Dr. Bryant read slowly, pulling on his nose. Keiko watched him, unsure whether she was tensed against discovery or tensed against a go-ahead, permission to do it, having to carry out her plan after all.

“These look competent,” he said. “Where did you get them?”

“They’re original,” said Keiko. “A friend helped me.”

“An English speaker?” he said, looking up, ready to find incompetence after all. Keiko nodded. He rolled his fingers together, dealing whatever had come of pulling his nose, and then started flicking the pages over again. “Strange fillers,” he said. “Rather dramatic.” Keiko waited for something more like a veto, but nothing came.

“I sometimes think,” she said at last, “that filler questions are so bland and boring, it’s too obvious what they are. These will be much better at distracting the subjects.” She felt sure he would argue with such a definite opinion. He wouldn’t be able not to.

“You could be right,” he said.

Keiko felt her shoulders slump down a little. “You don’t think the fillers are too offensive? Or anything,” she asked.

“Good luck offending the first years,” he said, pulling at his nose again.

“I’m not using the first years,” said Keiko. “I’m using the members of the association who’re sponsoring my accommodation.” She paused. “I’m experimenting on the people who’re funding me.”

“Well, let me know how it goes,” Bryant said. This time he wiped his fingers on the underside of his desk.

Keiko took the papers from him, holding them by the opposite corner from where he had leafed through them with his nose-pulling hand. She kept them clear of her body until she came to a litter bin, then dropped them in it and went to get Viola.

It had been a first dress-rehearsal for the end-of-term show, and Viola came out overexcited and still in lavish feline make-up, with her hair sprayed dark and sticky into a little cake on top of her head. On the bus, she tucked herself under Keiko’s arm and was drowsing before they slowed at the next stop.

“Your wee one’s knackered,” said a woman opposite with a comfortable smile, when Viola’s arm flopped out of her lap and swung loose as they rounded a corner. Keiko looked down at the elongated sweep of her closed eyelids, the black sheen of her sprayed hair, then smiled at the woman, tucked Vi’s arm back into her lap, and held her a little more tightly.

Fancy lay on the waxing table in the back room of Janette’s salon, waiting out the pain before young Yvonne applied the next strip to her leg.

“How about your bikini line, Fance?”

“Bog off and die,” said Fancy. “Who gets their bikini line waxed in November?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” said Yvonne. “Loads of people’ll get it done next month for parties.”

“Yeah, well I don’t get invited to that kind of party,” Fancy said. Craig McKendrick’s face popped into her head, but a surge of pain saw him off again. She breathed in a gasp so sharp that the cold air hurt her teeth.

“You’re so polite,” said Yvonne, blowing onto the red area. “The first and last time I did Mrs. McLuskie-when she was off on that golf exchange with all the other old trollops-guess what she said?”

“‘Dearie me, how painful’?”

“She said ‘Ayabastard.’ Dead loud. She’s never been back since.”

Etta McLuskie, sitting in her car in the darkest corner of the multi-storey, was using all the wiles that had deserted her on the waxing table that day.

“No one’s going to put two and two together and build a scaffold,” she said, speaking loud enough for her voice to carry through the open window of her car and into the open window of the car pulled up beside her. “Your… problem was years ago. I wasn’t the Painchton provost, you weren’t the minister. Everyone has remarried, moved house, retired, or all three. We have no connection and there’s no paper trail.”

“I hope you’re right,” the voice came back from the other car.

“We just need till the new year,” said Etta.

“And you’re sure it’s not going to leak? Painchton’s not what it was, I heard. Incomers, folk with no loyalty. Troublemakers.”

“But none of them know,” said Etta. “There’s only five of us, Painchton-born and -bred, who know what’s happening. Of course, there’s newcomers in the town-there’s a vegetarian numpty in the Cat’s Whiskers, for one-but we keep them where we want them. Outside.”

Pamela Shand was in the Cat’s Whiskers with the shutters down, busy pricing stock. Marking down sale stock, actually. Putting half-price stickers on her rack of vegetarian cookbooks, to be more precise than she felt like being. She had got them in when the horse meat scandal took off (which was how she put it to herself, although she was careful to say struck to others). But the stream of neighbours seeking advice on mung beans had never started, and the Pooles were busier than ever. She heard the bell clank again and again every morning as she stood in the queue at the post office. Just once she had asked Mrs. Watson:

“How can you? You’re surrounded by all that bounty and yet you eat the flesh of the dead?”

“The Flesh of The Dead?” said Mrs. Watson. “It sounds like a movie. Dina always loved a zombie, and she left her DVDs for me. Anyway, Malcolm gets all his meat from Malone’s, what he doesn’t prepare for himself.”

“And where do they get it?” said Pamela.

“Och, who cares?” said Mrs. Watson. “That boy could season a scabby rat and you’d not say no. Rosa Imperiolo tells me some of his special mixture-it’s a shame to put it in a curry.”

In his little study under the stairs, Kenny Imperiolo cocked his head and listened to the sounds of Rosa moving about the house, so familiar after all these years; the creak of a board in the smallest spare bedroom, a faint hiss, the clunk of plastic on metal, and then the creak again. She was ironing. Kenny screwed up his face trying to remember what the level had been in the plastic basket on top of the dryer that morning when he’d gone to the freezer to get his good fresh coffee beans. Surely it was piled high? Didn’t she always leave it until there was a mountain and then groan to herself as she carried it upstairs? She would be busy for hours, wouldn’t come anywhere near him. All the same, he moved a heavy box against the door of his little hidey-hole before he turned his computer on. There were no locks anywhere in this house, never had been-not even on the bathrooms, since that time Michael shut himself in in a tantrum when he was four and Kenny had put his foot through the garage roof climbing to the rescue. He pulled the door hard and the box didn’t budge. And anyway, Rosa never came checking up on him; it wasn’t her way. She was a good, trusting, loving wife who’d never done anything except make him proud to stand beside her, and she deserved no less than the same back from him. Kenny imagined those warm brown eyes of hers narrowed and hard, staring at him, asking him why. Then he shook the picture out of his head and started working.

Sandra Dessing followed Carmen and Melisande into the wood and put the little black bag with the integrated scoop away in her anorak pocket. She always carried it out for everyone to see while she was on the street, but she was damned if she was going to use one on the bark paths at £3.99 for ten. Ahead of her she could hear faint tuneless whistling and she pinched her cheeks and tucked her hair behind he ears. Iain Ballantyne came around the corner with Tig on his lead.

“Hello, hello,” he said. “I was just on my way home, but I’ll maybe turn back and have another wee stroll.”

“Why not?” said Mrs. Dessing. “Nice to see them having a good run and play together.”

“If you’re sure,” said Mr. Ballantyne, and something in his voice made Sandra look away from the dogs and glance at his face instead, right into his eyes.

“Why?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“We need to talk,” said Iain. “We really need to talk today.” He bent to unhook Tig’s lead from his collar and all three dogs, well used to one another by now, bounded into the trees with their owners following after.

As Keiko held Viola in the warmth of the swaying bus, as Fancy and Yvonne egged one another on in the fug of the salon, as Etta McLuskie stood her ground in the parked car, as Pamela Shand whacked the books with the pricing gun, as Kenny clicked and dragged and deleted, as Iain and Sandra’s dogs raced on into the darkest part of the woods-no one thought of the letters.

Some, reduced to ash with the rest of the clearings from the grate, were tipped into carriers, tied in binbags, burned again in the council incinerator, tipped out of the back of the truck eighteen miles away and scraped flat by men with masks and heavy gloves against the dust and grit they were spreading.

Some, in shreds, had rotted to compost with clippings and peelings, until the narrow lines of ink were gone. And in the spring when the bin was emptied and barrowed over to the border, there would be no sign in the crumbling brown that any paper was ever there.

Some had been pressed between pages never to be parted again, not even when the executors put the house on the open market and the eaves were emptied after the place was sold. That whole year’s worth of Woman’s Realm would be bound up with brown string and taken away by the clearance companies, sold on to the recyclers, and entered in the bill under sundry other items as “non-confidential printed paper: three bales.”

Some grew pulpy on their way downstream, heavy and sloughing apart, turning to grey paste in the water, one piece tangling itself in a length of plastic twine and floating for miles before the line snagged on a jutting rock and the balls of sodden paper were washed away.

Only a single letter remained, resting again where it had rested for years, behind the radiator, by the door, under the shelf, above the genkan now, as secret as ever-except that Keiko knew.

Murray knelt beside the Harley, waiting just the right amount of time for the WD-40 to loosen the nuts under the saddle but not long enough for it to drip down between the rear mudguard and the battery. Malcolm stood at his bench in the back room, boning and rolling, dividing his store of fat evenly amongst the joints, tying the skin snugly over the pink and white spirals and patting each one before he laid them into the tray for the morning. Mrs. Poole could hear the regular slap of his palm on the skin as he finished another one, but she barely registered such a familiar sound as she snapped her ledger shut and pulled the first bundle of banknotes towards her.