Resolution

Chapter 43

She was shaking so much she could hardly see. needles of broken glass were stuck in her arm, each puncture demanding attention, each an urgent distraction. Michael groaned behind her and she spun, startled, almost dropping the knife. It was so much sharper than she had thought it would be, so much sharper than a normal knife.

She was terrified. She could hear her own breathing, in her ear, like a stranger's breath. It wasn't dignified, not a happy exit. She was afraid of herself. All her elaborate justifications had dissolved in the visceral reality.

Down at the burn, before the road, she washed her hands and cried at what she had done, rubbing her arms with the dirty water, working the glass deeper under the skin, the sharp pain reminding her that she wasn't dead. She took her squelching, bloody boots off and walked home barefoot, like a pilgrim, taking dark back roads. She left the boots a mile away, under a mattress on some waste-ground. As she walked towards home she felt sure that the tangy metal taste of panic would stay in her mouth forever.

When she climbed the stairs to her house she wanted to bang on Jim Maliano's door and apologize for what she had been thinking about him, give him a gift of something, take the packet of biscuits he had brought her from holiday and be gracious.

Following Doyle's instructions, she phoned Kilty the minute she got in the door and casually invited her over. Leslie was sitting at the kitchen table, watching her in the hall, staring at her bleeding arm. When Maureen had said a cheery "Cheerio" and hung up on Kilty, Leslie called to her, "Mauri?" She looked frightened. "Liam phoned for you. I told him you were asleep, like ye said."

Maureen fell forward until her face hit the wall. She stood there, sobbing, terrified and disgusted, rubbing her forehead against the plaster.

Leslie took her into the bathroom and washed her face, then pulled her bloody T-shirt over her head and took off her sodden bra, made her drop her shorts and her bloody knickers. She took a poly-bag from the kitchen and wrapped the clothes in it, tying the neck of the bag tight as Maureen sat trembling on the side of the bath. She looked down at her wee bony body and saw that his blood was all over her, splattered on her calves, stuck in the wide pores on her thighs, smeared on her breast. Her forearms were covered in cuts, bits of glass glinting in the wounds like Mark Doyle's lens. The pain was all that was keeping her conscious.

Moving with what seemed like supernatural speed, Leslie stood her in the bath and washed her down with cold water from the showerhead. She brought some fresh clothes from the bedroom and got Maureen to hold on to her shoulder as she stepped her into the pants and shorts. She put the bra on wrong, pinching the skin on Maureen's left tit with the elastic, and pulled a fresh T-shirt on over it. She was tweezing the broken glass out of her arm before Maureen spoke. "Leslie," she whispered, "I've done something…"

Leslie nodded at her arm, frowning hard. "Were you careful?"

Maureen thought about it. She couldn't focus at all. She thought she'd been careful but she didn't know, she couldn't know. She shrugged, making Leslie lose hold of a long sliver near her wrist. Frustrated, Leslie slapped her hand reflexively and Maureen jumped. Leslie looked at her and Maureen realized she was crying too. "You better've been," Leslie said, her voice terrifyingly shrill, her nose glowing red. "You better not… Fuck."

Leslie sniffed hard and went back to the tweezers. Salt tears dripped onto the cuts on Maureen's arms. Leslie cleared her throat. "Mauri, I'm pregnant," she said calmly, "and I'm keeping it, and I'm gonnae need you to bring it up with me." She started crying again. "I can't do it myself, Mauri. I don't know the first fucking thing about weans."

Maureen was stunned. "Ye can slap me again if ye like," she said.

By the time Kilty arrived Leslie had taped toilet paper over Maureen's cuts and dressed her in a long-sleeved top. They were both stunned, and pretended they'd taken a Valium each to calm them down for tomorrow.

"You shouldn't drink on top of Valium," said Kilty, staring at Maureen's full tumbler.

"No," said Leslie, "it's all right. Ye can drink on top of these ones."

"Well, why aren't you drinking, then? You must have finished your antibiotics by now."

Maureen looked at her glass and wondered, for a moment, whether she'd done it to fan the fires of her self-pity, so she could keep on drinking. She interrupted Kilty's speculating to tell her she'd seen her dad in hospital but not to tell anyone because the family didn't want her to see him. She described the way he spoke, that he said he was a nurse and thought she was a doctor.

"That sounds like a wet brain," said Kilty, pestering a cigarette, creating banks of smoke. "That would explain the confabulation."

"The what?" said Maureen.

"Making things up, I'm a doctor, all that stuff. Bits of their brain gets burnt out and they make things up to try and make sense of what they see."

The skin on Maureen's forearms was burning. She had to concentrate hard to sit still and not rub the wounds or press the tissue.

"A girl in the detox unit's dad had it," said Kilty. "I used to take her up to visit him in hospital. One week he'd claim to be a sailor, one week he was a nurse, but he was always pretty cheery. Couldn't remember anything he'd done in his life. His family hated him-they were like these pent-up balls of fucking fury because he'd kicked the shit out of them and ruined their lives, but he couldn't remember it. So, there was this nice wee guy sitting in a bed smiling, and the family used to gather round him like angry vultures. I swear the mother used to hurt him when no one was looking."

"Can ye get better from it?" said Leslie.

"Oh, guessing, I'd say the recovery rates are low. Most people die from it, I think. I heard something about vitamin B injections but I can't remember what it is."

Maureen looked at her tumbler of whiskey suspiciously. "How do you get a wet brain?"

"Well, if ye drink heavily for years and don't eat. It's heaven for alkies, really, if you think about it. They drink to forget and then, one day, they finally do forget."

Maureen nodded, ignoring the itching and trying not to touch her arms.

"So," said Kilty carefully, "are you ready for tomorrow?"

"Yeah," said Maureen. "Let's not talk about tomorrow just yet. Tell us about Josh."

Kilty wasn't sure about him. He was nice and doing defense work because he thought it mattered, but he was a lawyer and she had a horrible image of herself wearing pearls and drinking chardonnay. She didn't think it would work, really, but he was a nice guy and quite funny.

Maureen half listened, watching Leslie's face for visual clues about how to react. She kept thinking she was back in the dusty kitchen, watching the fat man running for a Twix, the sour smell of Michael as she caught him under the arms when he stumbled, the crunching underfoot, down by the burn. She understood the urge to drop away from life, walk into a police station and make a confession, to have the confusion and the terror over, to tell someone else, in detail, what had happened. But as she stood over the body she'd made a pact with herself: that her penance for this would be that as long as she lived, she would never tell anyone what she had done. And Sheila was right: it would always be the most important thing that had ever happened to her.

They lay on their beds in the darkness and gradually Leslie's and Kilty's breathing deepened. Maureen lay awake, eyes open wide, staring at the ceiling. Headlights from occasional cars going up the steep hill rolled along the ceiling. Drunk people passed in the street, shouting or laughing, or staggered home alone. In the city below, sirens wailed and police cars rushed to avert crimes. Ambulances followed them or ventured out on their own.

She looked at her watch. It was ten to four and the sun was smearing the sky blue, waking the birds. Her arms were itchy, the tape tugging at small hairs. She sat up and lit a cigarette, pulling her knees up to her chin and clasping them tightly. If she didn't die from this, if the police didn't catch her, she was going to get away from here. She was going to sell up and go to St. Petersburg and spend a month in the Hermitage, filling her eyes and her head with beautiful things, and never waste a calm hour, never spoil a good meal with worry. The cigarette burned her tongue, stripping it and making her mouth taste of metal tape again. She was getting pain spots in her lungs and couldn't laugh without coughing anymore. She would go to St. Petersburg and stop smoking and see beautiful things. If she had her time over again she'd stop drinking. In the impossible future she'd strive to be happy.