The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime, Volume 8

No Thanks, Please Declan Burke

Heads turned, half-curious, then full-faced in horror. A man started towards her, one hand out as if reaching to catch a low driven ball, but she walked on, turning up off the river under the arch at Christchurch and on down Patrick Street.

A condom in the gutter with a used teabag inside. A Labrador puppy cocking a leg at its reflection in a puddle. Italian names on car tyres. Each new thing reminded her why she was looking in these places for the first time. Not to avoid the shame she would see mirrored in their eyes or the degradation she might glimpse in some angled shop window. It simply hurt too much to roll her right eye up against the bruising. So she kept her head down and her shoulders hunched, arms loosely folded to cradle her ribs.

Now her feet began to hurt. At first the pain was a sharp pinching where the stiff leather folded across the knuckles of her small toes but soon it became a chafing and melted down in a raw burn. She realized the blisters had burst but she did not stop. She thought that if she stopped walking she would fall down and die. This was who she was now: a woman who might die if she ever stopped walking.

She tried to remember her name.

He rattled the paper in folding it, then slammed the pen down. This was his quiet time, mid-afternoon, a time for the crossword, a smoke. He crossed the apartment in two strides and jammed a forefinger against the red button.

“Yes?”

But all he heard was the intercom hiss and a low, rasping breathing. “Look,” he said. “If I have to go down there...” Then he heard the faint, choked-off sob.

“Janey?” His stomach churned. “Janey? Is that you?”

The sob broke.

He didn’t open the door wide enough and slammed his shoulder on the frame on the way through.

He ministered to her cuts and bruises using paper tissues and Dettol. But it was awkward, leaning in from so far away. She would flinch back even before he touched her.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Janey. I just want to—”

“I know,” she whispered.

She had bawled at first, raw and honking until the whiskeys seeped through. Then she had whimpered, shoulders shaking with rage and fear and the tremors of a pure adrenaline charge. Now she seemed blank and dry, like old cardboard. “I just,” she said, “I...”

He waited for her to finish but she only winced and hunched forward, arms folded below her chest.

“Janey, I really think we should get you to ER. Those ribs should be—”

“It’s too late now.” She nodded at the empty glass. “It’s the first thing they’ll ask, was I drinking.”

“But I gave you the whiskey, to calm you down. I’ll be your—”

“Jay? James?”

“What?”

“Can you run me a bath? Can you do that for me? A warm bath?”

“But shouldn’t you wait until after you get...?”

But she was rocking herself, features flinty and set against the world at an impossible angle. He put the paper tissues on the arm of the chair and left the room.

When she said, “I’ll need you to help me get undressed,” he could almost taste the loathing that coated her tongue.

“Of course,” he said. “Whatever. Janey, just ask. Anything you want.”

She nodded, staring at a fixed point between the coffee table and who she used to be.

“You can stay here, no worries,” he went on. “He won’t get in here.” He ground his teeth. “He can fucking try, but he’ll be leaving backwards, in three fucking body bags.”

She made a sucking sound, ran her tongue between her teeth and her split upper lip. “Jay? Did you leave the bath running?”

“Fuck.”

He mopped the floor with dirty towels, poured in a handful of fizzy salts. Called her from the bathroom door and watched her lurch down the hallway like an ageing monster. She turned her back to him and he eased her T-shirt up over her shoulders, unhooked her bra, slid her denims over her hips and down past her knees. He experienced the frisson he had been dreading but when it was past he was unable to say if it had been the expected sexual rush or a profound reaction to engaging with the most vulnerable intimacy he had ever known.

The abrasion on her back ran from one shoulder blade almost to her kidneys. It looked as if he had attacked her with a wire-wool scrub. He quivered, felt his jaws lock in place.

“I’ll be right next door, Janey,” he said, retreating. “If there’s anything, just shout.”

“It hurts when I talk.”

He closed the door as gently as he knew how and backed away down the hall wondering what his next move should be. The grating of the key was a kick in the gut.

He slipped out to the small Spar on Patrick Street. A pizza, garlic bread, a bottle of vodka, a carton of orange juice, some Panadol. At the checkout a stout middle-aged woman leaned across the counter to the young bottle-blonde till-jockey. He edged closer until they could no longer ignore him. The older woman turned and drew herself up.

“Can we help you?” she asked. Dry pink powder grouted the corners of her mouth.

“My friend was beaten up,” he said, nodding at the armful of groceries. “She’s a woman,” he explained. “Her husband beat her up.”

Their eyes glazed over, tiny pools freezing fast.

“She’s taking a bath,” he added, as if that might help them thaw.

“You left her alone?” the bottle-blonde said.

“She locked the door.”

“You shouldn’t have left her alone,” the stout woman said. “God love her.” Her hand was a hummingbird as she blessed herself, bringing her forehead down to meet the fingers, the wicker carrier-bag heavy on her elbow. “How bad?” she said.

“I’m going to kill him.”

The stout woman stood back to allow him to put the armful of groceries on the counter. “Now hush,” she said. “That’s no way to talk.”

“How?” the bottle-blonde said, waving the pizza at the side of the till until she heard the beep of barcode recognition. He stared at her. “How are you going to kill him?” she said, picking up the orange juice.

“Now, Tricia,” the stout woman said.

“I’m going to eat his fucking throat out,” he said.

The bottle-blonde bagged his groceries and put out her hand. “Don’t just say it,” she said. She rang up the transaction, returned his change. “I don’t believe you,” she said.

She ate steadily, without interest or appetite, and he despised himself for having to look away from the loose gaping of the bathrobe. She took two more painkillers and sipped her vodka-orange and stared vacantly at the TV.

“Are you sure you don’t want to ring the cops?” he said.

She nodded.

“And you definitely don’t want to go to the hospital.”

She nodded again, weary.

“Are you going to stay here tonight?”

“No.” The word deader than stone.

“You’re going back?”

She nodded.

“Jesus, Janey...” Her eyes flickered away from the screen and came to rest on his. “If he’s done it once he’ll do it again. Go back now and you’re telling him it’s OK. You’re giving him the right, Janey.”

“Don’t you think that’s a bit simplistic?”

“What’s so complicated about being kicked in the head?”

She waited. “This is about me,” she said quietly.

“It’s you I’m trying to help.”

Her eyes flickered back to the screen.

“At least let me ring Caroline,” he said. “What’s her number?”

“She’s minding the girls,” she said. She drained her vodka-orange and stood up slowly.

“At least they weren’t around to see it,” he said, and just like that, as if she had suddenly seen it through her daughters’ eyes, a thin orangey vomit spewed.

“At least,” he said, re-hooking her bra, “let me come in with you. Just so he knows you’re not alone.”

“So he knows there’s someone like him, just ready to go.”

“Fuck sakes, Janey...”

“You can come in,” she said. “If you can admit that you need to come in for you, then you can come in.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’m only doing it for me. So my conscience is clear. Happy?”

“No,” she said. She walked to the car barefoot.

He drove up past the canal, out through Donnybrook, taking the N11 all the way to Foxrock. He vaguely remembered the estate from the house-warming party. When they pulled in to the kerb she stared into the setting sun, face immobile below the sunglasses he’d given her.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said.

“See the icebergs?” she said.

“What?”

She nodded, and he turned to look. Light wisps of orange-tinged cirrus hung suspended above the sun. And it was true: three small, hard, glittering clouds had the appearance of icebergs floating in a patch of light blue sky. “How would that happen?” she said. “What are they?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

She couldn’t reach up far enough to open the front door and so she handed him the key. They walked through the downstairs, then checked upstairs, but he wasn’t home. She didn’t want him to wait.

“Not here,” he said. “But I’m going to wait down the road. And when he comes home, I’m coming back in. Someone needs to tell him what’s what.”

“And what’s that?” she said. They were standing in the hall, the front door ajar.

“This isn’t about you,” he said. “It’s about him.”

“It’s about you,” she said.

“He has to learn. I’m only going to warn him.”

She bit her lip and looked down. “It wasn’t Sean,” she whispered.

He frowned. “Then who?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were jumped?”

“Jay,” she pleaded, “trust me.”

But he was adamant, insisting. She backed away into the corner behind the door and when he took a step towards her the words tumbled out as if they might fend him off. Job. Lost. Mortgage. Sean. Friend. Company.

“No fooling around, though,” she said. She sounded dull, a sleepwalker. “That was the deal. Just company. For the races at Leopardstown. Just drinks and company.”

And all he could think to say was, “You walked all the way in from fucking Leopardstown?”

“There was another girl,” she said. “In the room. I think she was Thai.” She reached up and removed the sunglasses, holding them out for him to take. Her right eye was closed behind a blackening bruise spreading from forehead to cheek. “They preferred her.”

He swallowed dry. “Where is she now?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“What room, though?”

“I don’t fucking know,” she whispered.

He didn’t believe her.

He drove to the far side of the green in the middle of the estate and reversed the car so that he was looking directly at the house. He opened the boot, found the wheel-brace, sat in the car again and lit a cigarette, huddling back in the seat to watch the house over the rim of the steering wheel.

Sean arrived walking, maybe an hour or so later. Smaller than James remembered, stick-thin even beneath the overcoat. He trudged to the driveway and stood outside looking up at the house with his hands buried deep in the pockets. Then his shoulders seemed to fall forward and he trudged up the driveway. He reached with the key, reconsidered, and rang the doorbell instead. He rang three times before the door opened but when it did he stepped inside straight away.

Now Jay got out of the car and jogged across the green, sidling up the side of the driveway out of sight of the living room window. He gained the porch and stood with his back to the wall, half-crouched, the wheel-brace held rigid behind his thigh. Then he punched the doorbell with his forefinger and left it there, jammed down.

They didn’t answer. Four times he pressed the doorbell, half-crouched against the wall, looking out at the quiet estate. Wondering if he could be seen from behind the lowered blinds that faced their house. He pounded on the door but no one came.

He looked out across the estate to where the sun was sinking behind the horizon. The icebergs were gone. The porch lights hummed, flickered, winked on. On the far side of the green his car seemed impossibly distant.

He wondered how long was reasonable to stay before walking away.