IVORY
Steve Merrifield
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Steve Merrifield
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for Granddad
my first reader
IVORY
Steve Merrifield
Awakening
Prologue
Phillip Mayhew surveyed London’s buildings as they stretched out from beneath the crane cab into the grey haze of smog on the horizon. The site was at the heart of Camden where three high-rise blocks of flats had been demolished. The neglected and dated buildings had been cleared to make way for a smaller affordable housing development. He thought it a shame they would be low-rise and lose the arresting view that North London had to offer over the basin of the city and its landmarks; the skinny finger of the post office tower, the glittering glass gherkin and the group of skyscrapers around the obelisk of the Canada One building at Canary Wharf.
The crane’s cab creaked in protest against a gust of wind that leaned heavily against it. The sway became a lurch as the wind’s strength built and it was several minutes before he felt the crane shift back into its centre as the current of air weakened. The floating-like motion didn’t concern him since he had spent fifteen years working with cranes in his time in the building trade. As a labouring lad if there had been a crane on-site he would ask to go up it and if a foreman actually refused him he would sneak up anyway. That kind of mischief had got him suspended from sites for a few days, but he had taken his punishment of lost earnings like a man, and would then commit the same crime again if he had wanted to.
The days of being a labourer were far behind him now, but he still couldn’t shake his love of being in the cab of a crane. As an architect he had even less reason to be up there than his crane stowaway days, but it was well known by those around him in his office that whenever he visited a site where one of his company’s designs were being built, he had the quirk of giving a foreman a laugh or a coronary by asking to go up a crane. No one had any reason to suspect that today his motive for his visit was different.
Although his body lacked the energy of his youth and the climb had exhausted him, the experience had lost none of its appeal. It was a combination of things that drew him to the crane cabs, the view obviously – it didn’t matter what area the site was in, the height always made for an awe inspiring panorama. The constant listing drift of the crane was how he imagined it would be as a bird suspended in a thermal updraft. There was also the sense of power through being in control of a giant arm that would reach down and lift heavy things from the ground and move them effortlessly around the site, like Zeus in the Clash of the Titans film moving people around like pawns. He laughed as he remembered fantasies he had as a lad of plucking miserable foremen up from the ground and depositing them high up on builds on exposed girders.
However, what had drawn him to the crane today was the solitude the cab gave him and the much needed sense of escaping the mess that he had made of his life. At that moment in that place – his cherished place – he experienced a comfort and a peace that he imagined faith would give to those that had it. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and produced a dog-eared photograph of his wife Brenda and their three boys. He rubbed the corners, trying to smooth it out, but the creases were too deep. He couldn’t fix it. Like the family in the picture – he couldn’t fix what he had done.
The love he felt for the family in his hands sharpened his guilt into wicked barbs in his chest. He and his wife had planned their life well. In the early years they hadn’t allowed their love for each other to distract them from their university courses, and they had made it through four years of living in different parts of the country while they studied. They then threw themselves into their respective jobs and getting themselves noticed by their employers. Once the money had been good enough they got married and bought a house and allowed themselves the luxury of a family, with the knowledge that they could give their children the good start in life they had both lacked themselves.
Over the thirty-five years they had known each other, Brenda had gained some weight to her face and her skin had lined in the delicate areas around her eyes and mouth, but she was still attractive and was all he had needed to fulfil his fantasies. He had the love of his wife, and his fantastic boys and he was a success in his job. That was supposed to be enough.
It had been enough. Until he had seen the girl.
He had never considered straying before – it was against his moral code. Yet he had. She was unusual in appearance but strangely attractive. Considering the probable thirty year age gap she would never have looked at him twice if she hadn’t been a prostitute. Going to a prostitute was something else that he would never have considered, yet he had been to her many times now.
He had felt shame every time. It was an awful feeling. A feeling that he had wanted to cut out of him if he could, along with his sin, but his shame hadn’t been potent enough to stop him paying for her again and again. The cancer of guilt had grown with every visit. He had no idea of the going rate for such services, but knew she was expensive. Even if she had cost less he had seen her every other day for months on end and he would still be facing the same financial crisis.
He had tried to stop himself, but she was beautiful. Even after the first month had destroyed his personal savings, he hadn’t been able to stop himself squandering the family savings, money that had been reserved for his boy’s education, their deposits on property and cars, and the nest egg for Brenda and himself in retirement. All gone on sex with a prostitute. Brenda was due an annual statement any time and his betrayal would be uncovered.
He stifled a sob. He hated himself. Yet that wasn’t enough to stop him meeting the girl. He would make up for it. He would replace all the blood money he had wasted and his family would never know what he had used the savings for. He might even retain the love and respect of his wife and boys. He looked at the cityscape of north London. It was a powerful panorama that imbued him with inner strength. He felt more than the weak man he had become. He felt free. Like a bird. Like a Giant. Like a God. Like the young man that had craved this view throughout his dreams and achievement of love, family and success.
Clutching the photograph of his family he stepped out of the cab and plummeted. The air rushed over his body, pulling at his clothes like a thousand snatching hands. After this industrial accident the insurance pay-out would cover all his debts. He did it for Brenda, the girl who had lived next door to him as a child. The girl he had courted, the woman he had married. Did it for the babies he had cradled, the young men he had raised. He did it for his family. He crammed his mind with their faces and scenes from their life together like his own imagined heaven. They would be the last thing in his mind as he died. It would secure his link to them in the afterlife. Christmases, births, birthdays, picnics, day trips.
A face filled his mind. It was a pale phantom of a face with blackness for eyes. The girl. The thoughts of his family scattered. He slammed against the concrete below and burst open. The last thing in his mind and heart was not his family, but his guilt.
Part One
“Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible.
God and Devil are fighting there,
and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
Fedor Dostoevsky
Chapter One
Dark bloated clouds swathed the night sky in a low crawling ceiling, haemorrhaging their substance over London, turning the dark grey streets into stretches of black glassy marble infused and splashed with the reflected lights and neon signs. Martin Roberts’ Volvo estate hit a puddle with the impact of a hydroplane touching down, sending fans of silvery water into the air like wings. The lights of the streets were distorted by the vertical veins of rain and the watery pearls that twitched across the glass away from the direction of the car.
The outside world was a blur in Martin’s peripheral senses, swept away by the trudging march of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A that strained the speakers of his music system, blocking out the sound of rain rattling onto the roof and the hiss of the tires thrashing the puddles. The music’s steady climb to its crescendo imitated the rage that was building from the red lights and busy junctions that seemed to conspire against Martin’s need to get home and end his evening. The track came to its quiet close but instead of another pounding classic taking its place it was replaced by bouncy notes and saccharine voices – the Tweenies. One of the boys CD’s had been left in the CD changer. Ditched by the powerful classic tracks his mood suddenly had nowhere to go, and he had been so enjoying his rage. Feeling passion instead of the constant mire of his underlying melancholy and frustration was a refreshing change.
There was a clear stretch on the Charing Cross road, the Tweenies would have to stay for the moment, he gripped the wheel and aimed his car at the night-time streets, and the Tweenies sang as he floored the accelerator and charged to gain some ground on his trek across the city. He had been forced to take an indirect route home due to the major water pipe and sewer restoration and replacement project taking place at various points across the city. The road works had forced drivers into unfamiliar territory, causing them to hesitate and change their minds and directions, snarling the roads with traffic even at this late hour. He slowed as he approached a Queue of glaring red eyed brake lights. He had gained a couple of hundred metres. Hardly worth breaking the speed limit. Guilt soured his gut before being diluted within his stagnant reservoir of other unpleasant feelings. The journey and the nightmare driving conditions were the crown on a shitty day.
Martin stabbed a finger at the CD player and switched to the next classical CD and his red mood soared with Wagner’s Valkyries. The point when the evening had become a write-off with his hopes strangled and his pride smothered, had been when the little wanker Richard Hadleigh won the award for best piece at the University Departmental Achievement Ceremony. The ‘UDAC’s’ as they were called on the campus, were the universities equivalent of the Oscar’s. The judges had said that Hadleigh’s work ‘Conveyed the artists struggle with repressed emotions and hidden desires’. It was a piece that had symbolised his ‘coming out’ in his second year at university.
Everyone knew Hadleigh was a raving woofter. It wasn’t a secret, it wasn’t even something many people batted an eyelid at these days. It was almost fashionable. The amount of lads that he had seen hanging from Hadleigh or locked to his face over the last three years didn’t seem much of a ‘struggle’.
The car’s burst of speed was halted as he reached Oxford Street and even though the lights were in his favour, he was forced to inch himself across the streets traffic. This award meant that Hadleigh had won the Universities art prize two years running, which was a rare event that had only been achieved by Martin himself. Martin’s second win had been in Hadleigh’s first year at the university, after which they had met and forged a relationship of mutual admiration; Martin for Hadleigh’s developing talent and passion and Hadleigh for Martin’s generous teaching of his own honed skills. Their needs had been mutually met within the role of student and teacher. It had come just when Martin had first sensed his creativity being stifled from a long tenure as lecturer, and Hadleigh’s passion had been infectious. Their shared bond through canvas acrylics and oil had been broken when Hadleigh defected to sculpture. A sudden and mysterious coup that had left Martin without a protégé.
A route-master bus lurched out in front of him, belligerently ignorant of Martin’s existence and right of way, causing him to suddenly punch his brakes, leaving him with his heart in his throat from the narrowly avoided collision. Scantily clad girls hung out of the rear door, one of them waved a bottle of champagne at him. A hen-night hiring. That meant the bus that was now ahead of him on Tottenham Court Road would be a fixture in his view and an obstacle until their paths diverged.
Martin was an artist. A painter. A traditional artist. He didn’t understand sculpture – especially metal work. He could become one with the paint and command it with a subtlety or a passion most canvases were not fortunate enough to be graced with. In the past he had created portraits with a photographic realism that had captured life and emotion, and landscapes swept in bold strokes that emphasised their drama. Sculpture could compliment its subject and be both beautiful and inspiring of emotion, but its tangible reality in the three-dimensional world had a brutality and force that Martin struggled with. Hadleigh’s work in metal sheeting and salvaged machine parts was not what Martin considered being sculpture, it heralded from a school of art that Martin could not reconcile himself with: where a stack of bricks or some frozen animal halved and suspended in formaldehyde could be regarded as art. It was the Emperor’s new clothes of the art world.
The lights were out at Euston Road and he pushed the nose of his car hesitantly forward trying to measure the approaching gaps in traffic to see if he could risk pulling out onto the road. The sudden loss of the flattering draw on Martin’s knowledge and Martin’s talent being the focus for another’s inspiration, and the sense that his opinion and approval were needed to validate Hadleigh’s success, had caused the smouldering embers of Martin’s creativity to cool, and his talent had gone into remission. He found himself in a state of impotence. He had tried his best to resurrect his muse, working all year in his loft studio, mixing subtle hues and vibrantly skilful strokes to create life like some gothic necromancer. Yet what he had created had been a Frankentein’s bastardisation of his previous works. An imitation of his past glory that wasn’t strong enough to sustain a soul of its own. He could, and would, blame Hadleigh but it was a demise that had only been delayed by his brief work with his student. Martin was losing his art. For that reason, Martin hadn’t deserved to win the award.
Martin slammed his foot on the accelerator and lurched into a gap on a spray of surf. He held his breath as the headlights of the Mini Cooper he had cut across filled the car and blazed angrily in his rear view mirror. When there was no shunt from a collision he puffed out a breath he hadn’t realised he had been holding. He needed to calm down, although he was definitely not going to put the Tweenies back on to help him.
He was a son, a head of department, a teacher, a husband and a father, and each of these roles conspired against him with their own conflicting demands and responsibilities and drained his creativity. With the lack of his art, he was increasingly believing that he was an intellectual hypocrite in his role as art lecturer and head of the art department since he was teaching to create from the soul and from the passion within when his own were so diminished he barely had enough to sustain him his wife and his children. As hard as he found it difficult to accept he found that his family were equally as unsatisfying to him. His life was not how he had expected his life to be, although if he were asked to imagine the details of what he had wanted his life to be like he wouldn’t have been able to answer, all he had ever wanted was his art and to be a master of it. He often struggled to understand how this life had even come about.
At the corner of the British Library the traffic lights amber winked out and a red light burned in its place. He cursed and slammed his foot on the brake. The stream of traffic on the Euston Road tauntingly left him behind. Life, which for Martin was family and love, was meant to influence his art, and his job was meant to fund his life. Stripped back to basics they were relationships of necessity; symbiotic. Yet his family and his job were also distractions that drained his resources, creatively and financially, and without his art they seemed without function.
A green light allowed him to resume his journey, but the resentment generated from his reflection caused him to lose patience with the main roads, his thick fingers, whitened by their grip, yanked the wheel to one side and turned the car sharply off the Euston Road and into a side road. He hadn’t travelled these roads for some time and he was sure their layout may have changed since the St Pancras developments but he hoped to weave through the streets more as the crow might fly rather than the intended express of the main roads. He took road after road and was as uncertain of the direction he was taking on these back roads as he was in life generally. At the age of forty-three he expected to be settled and taking life in comfortable strides, not stumbling and looking back unsure what had tripped him.
The car continued its journey into a residential area and on a whim he pulled into a narrow street. Most of its streetlights were out and the shadowy houses crowded in on him. Some had the odd light on behind curtains, but most of them were dark. The occupants asleep or judging by the houses rundown condition the houses were abandoned. The light from his headlights hollowed the road out of the night and the constant fall of rain was a dizzying glitter in the beams. Suddenly his lights pulled something stark white from the dark road ahead like a ghost suddenly made manifest. There was a sharp noise, the sound of a thousand voices screaming out before being cut short by the crunch of metal and splintering glass. Martin lost sight of the road as he was thrown forward from braking and yanked back in place by the tension of his seat belt. The white shape had gone and the light from his headlights had returned to picking raindrops out of the dark before the now stationary car.
Martin found an uncomfortable rigidness in his leg and relaxed his foot from pressing the brake-peddle to the floor. He still held the wheel, but the anger that had crushed his fingers to it had gone. His hands fell trembling into his lap and he sank back into the seat. With a faltering hand he clicked the stereo off and thanked fuck that the kids hadn’t been in the car.
He didn’t know what had happened. A man in an alley-way parallel to the car seemed caught mid motion, poised in a pose of running, before he turned on his heels and disappeared into the alley. Without the stereo the only sounds were the idle of the engine, the squeak of his windscreen wipers swiping mechanically back and forth shunting the rain from his vision, and the drum of a thousand fingers on his roof and buckled bonnet as the rain rattled down.
The bonnet was crumpled. He had hit something, yet there was no car, no motorbike, there was nothing before him that could have caused the collision. A bollard? One of those wrought iron posts made to look like a cannon. That would easily have caused the damage, but it wouldn’t have been in the middle of the road.
His heartbeat was drumming to the tempo of the falling rain, each quivering beat launched an unbearable shiver of anxiety through his nerves. He remembered that his headlights had caught something. The bonnet was buckled. He had hit some-thing. The bonnet was buckled.
The rain drummed.
The wipers swayed.
His heart pounded.
He remembered the blur in his headlights.
It had hands that had risen up in defence. It had had a white face.
He had hit some-one.
The perceptions of headlights, the rain, the wipers, the tick of the cooling engine, the tremble of his hands, the echo of his heart all clambered around his head, then scattered away from a pale hand that reached up from before the car and slammed onto the bonnet.
The slender feminine hand spread palm-flat, the fingers working and probing to gain some purchase. His tongue trembled in his slack mouth. His heart’s uncertain beat in his throat. The hand tensed, as if bracing against dragging its body upright and back to its feet, then slid on the slick surface and abruptly disappeared back over the edge out of sight.
Chapter Two
The light from his headlights reflected from the narrow corridor of parked cars and picked out the overbearing walls of the canyon of houses that reached up into the night around him. The shifting silver grain of the rain gave the world beyond the windscreen the quality of a scratchy black and white film playing out. The dark shape of a man ran and stopped in the mouth of an alley in the terrace, but Martin was distracted from registering his details by the girl that fled from that direction. The girl darted into the road so suddenly that by the time Martin had turned his head to catch sight of her again she was framed in his headlights. It was strange that he could see it so clearly in his memory, yet hadn’t had time to realise what had happened when it had actually occurred. He had hit the girl at forty-miles an hour in a thirty-zone with a hulking Volvo estate.
The tyres had gripped at the road and surfed the rain wash before biting the tarmac in a screeching slide that had joined another sound. A choral sound of infantile voices wailed then abruptly ceased as his bonnet crumpled with a cacophonous crunch and the car slammed to a halt. The howl had been unnatural, but then all the noises that played back to him from that moment frightened him with their intensity and their unexpectedness.
Martin sat in his car for what seemed like an eternity. The man that had been in the alley, who in Martin’s memory had been part of the same body of movement as the girl, was gone and had not returned. A weight suddenly lifted from him and all the detail of his world came flooding back around him as the cloying treacle movement of shock time dissipated into the vividness and urgency of real time. Martin prayed it hadn’t taken him the length of time it seemed to have taken for him to react. He wanted to think that if someone’s life hung in the balance, after the shock and the consideration of driving off, he would make every second of that time count.
He popped his seatbelt, flung his door open and hauled his considerable weight out of the seat. After the stuffiness of the car the rain was like needles of ice on his face and neck and soaked his white dress shirt to his sweat clammy body with the shock of a cold compress. He rounded the broad front of the vehicle and crouched at his victim’s side with a sickening nausea in his belly. The girl was sprawled before the car on the gritty tarmac that had been washed into a textured glass by the fall of rain. He whined a noise that he had never heard himself make and swore at the world.
Her pose looked painfully uncomfortable. Her arms and legs had been thrown into unnatural disarray from the impact. The front of the car stood poised over her fragile form, the bumper buckled in, the bonnet curled up like a lip snarled to bare the ragged teeth of its shattered radiator grille. The car was just a foot away from being parked on top of her body. The headlights poured over her dispassionately with their glaring white eyes, lighting her white skin and clothes into an overexposed whiteness.
She was luminous in the light except for the dark marks where she had been dirtied from her rag-doll roll along the road, and the blood that was lit into brilliant scarlet against the white of her flesh. It was like blood on snow. Martin dialled for an ambulance on his mobile phone and crouched between her and the lights to shield her from their glare. In the shade of his bulk the colour of her blood lost its vividness, yet her hair and skin maintained its unnatural whiteness.
Her eyelids twitched the smallest of movements.
Speaking on the phone, panting against his fear, he reached out a hand that trembled with shock and the bitter cold of being soaked on a November evening, and shielded her face from the rain. It could easily have been the fall of the rain drops that had given the impression of her eyelids moving, but he preyed to a God he didn’t believe in that they had moved by themselves. That she was indeed still alive. That he hadn’t killed her.
Her eyes flicked open with the suddenness of a trap being sprung.
He fell onto his rear in shock but was instantly sobered by the soaking chill of the ground. He repeated himself on the phone to the operator after a cry had made his last statement unintelligible and he returned to his haunches. The movement of her eyelids had startled him but it was the sight of her eyes that had toppled him.
The rain had driven the lids shut again and he questioned what he had seen. Giving a shaken approximation of his location to the robotic sounding operator he knelt forward, not caring that the slurry of rain water on the road was soaking him. He shielded her eyes again and they reopened.
Her eyes were as black as jet and made more striking by the white eyelids that framed them. There was no coloured iris, no white of sclera, seemingly just yawning ciliary muscles leaving only pupils with the draw of black holes contained behind each lid.
Ivory had been taken to the University College Hospital, a modern glass building opposite the gothic orange brick Victorian façade of St Pancras. Having two boys, it was a place that Martin was familiar with. He sat with his head in his hands and stared down into the glassy black surface of a cup of coffee. He had bought it from the A&E department’s vending machine, but it was too hot to hold let alone drink. He had bought a Mars bar too, more for comfort than for hunger, but he hadn’t eaten it. It was in his pocket, he didn’t want to be seen satiating his needs in these circumstances. He wanted to get out of there and escape, he thought of King’s Cross with its Platform 9¾ with the baggage trolley half-way through a wall on it’s way to the train to Hogwart’s. Finley had made him take him there countless times in the hope of spotting one of his favourite characters. Martin liked the idea of having a magical escape route, and not just tonight.
The polystyrene cup sat on the scuffed linoleum floor at his feet, staring back up at him with its well of black like one of the girl’s eyes. Those fully black eyes. What did it mean? Had she been on drugs? He had heard one of the nurse’s whisper ‘brain damage’. There was no way of knowing for sure at the moment.
The ambulance staff had found a medical bracelet on her wrist. Beneath a black caduceus symbol and engraved statement that declared that it was the patient’s wish not to receive any medical examination or treatment whatsoever. There was a phone number that was to be called in case of emergency, and this had been done. Although this had made it difficult for the hospital staff to determine the extent of her injuries, the attending doctor had ruled that the patient’s wishes were to be respected and she would not receive an x-ray or even a stitch. Besides a nasty gash to her head, which had looked to Martin as if it really could do with a stitch, and some other grazes and bruises she had seemingly escaped serious injury. She was apparently responsive to a certain degree, with shakes and nods of her head to questions and suggested examinations and treatments. That had to rule out brain damage. Could her eyes really be like that naturally?
She was now sleeping off the shock within a curtained cubicle ahead of him, although the nurses were convinced that she was feigning sleep. The staff had found that the pockets of her three-quarter length white Mackintosh coat had contained a supply of condoms and a fat roll of money. There had been a business card printed with the word ‘EBONY’ with a mobile phone number beneath it. Martin had heard a nurse say the number on the card matched the one on the medical bracelet, and in response a nurse had mouthed, ‘Pimp?’ It struck Martin as strange that a pimp would take such responsibility for her care. Perhaps she was an illegal immigrant and her pimp wanted to ensure that she didn’t get caught or escape him through an accident such as this.
He struggled to accept that she was a prostitute. Curiously it didn’t alter her allure. Her startlingly white hair and skin and her contrasting black eyes were strangely engaging. He wondered whether it was the peculiarity of her appearance that attracted the porters, nurses and doctors to her side on what appeared to be a busy night for the A&E department.
Martin’s police questioning was already out of the way. He was relieved he hadn’t been drinking. He didn’t understand why the police had kept asking about a second vehicle, and was unsure exactly how many points he would gain on his license, or whether the police were going to charge him for dangerous driving. When the girl had recovered they would take her statement to see if her version of events corroborated with Martin’s explanation that she had run out in front of the car. If their stories didn’t match then the police would investigate the scene to determine his speed.
The girl had yet to speak. When the discomfort or pain from the nurses handling of her overcame the resistance of her pretend sleep she would shake or nod her head to questions. One of the nurses surmised that she was foreign and couldn’t speak English, and that fitted with Martin’s assumption that she was an illegal sex worker, maybe trafficked. He had half-watched a Panorama documentary on it whilst painting. Another nurse had suggested that to keep silent against the pain she must be experiencing from her injuries she had to be a mute. If that were the case then he didn’t understand what had caused the sharp ululation that had seemed to be formed from more than one voice when he had run her down. He had never imagined that tyres on tarmac could make such a human scream; one full of terror and defiance, as if the world cried out in grief and outrage at her being struck down.
The girl was clearly still in her teens, but the taboo freshness of her youth was saved from being a vulgar guilty attraction by her classical beauty, for with her eyes closed she had the poised majesty of any sculpted Greek or Roman face that he had studied in the British museum. He was unsure whether it was her young age, her abhorrent job, her current situation, the innocence that seemed to cling to her, or a combination of all these that drew upon his sympathy. He took it as a point against society that it had turned perfection into a whore, and corrupted such a rarity as beauty into something that could be bought and used to satisfy ones needs. He found some consolation in the fact that those that used her would do so within some guilty dirty secret that could only sully their experience, and they could ‘have’ her but never own her. He caught his own naivety; her pimp owned her.
The painfully skinny and scruffy young male nurse that Martin had relayed the incident to before the police had arrived, studied him with a look of curiosity and disbelief. He stalked over to Martin, a scarecrow in a tunic.
“I think you’re all finished here.”
Martin stood and rubbed his closely cropped ginger beard as he considered what he was going to ask from the nurse, knowing that he was going to push his luck. “If you don’t mind, I would like to see her.”
There was the briefest twitch of the man’s long but sparse eye brows. “I don’t think that’s appropriate, do you?” He suddenly wore a fixed smile. “You have shown your concern by staying around. I am sure it’s been noted.”
In the fantasy world that he only dared to play out in his head he punched the cynical nurse to the floor. “Seriously, I just want to see that she’s okay.”
“So would we, but considering she would only let us clean her up a little, even we don’t know how she is. And once her next of kin collects her I doubt we will be seeing her for a follow up exam.”
That idea made him want to see her even more. Martin sighed. “I just want to apologise to her. She deserves that at least. I want to let her know that I care that this has happened and that I didn’t just leave her.” The nurse gave an exaggerated nod, Martin was sure the nurse wanted to accompany the gesture with a roll of his eyes as he readied himself to reject Martin’s request. “Look if you’re worried I might put pressure on her to corroborate my story or that I might bribe her in some way then stand in the cubicle with me. I am not ashamed of someone seeing my guilt. If I did want to bribe her or intimidate her then I could sneak back later. Hospitals aren’t known for their security, you know.” Martin huffed a half-laugh, trying to make himself sound reasonable. “Besides it looks like she earns more in a night than I earn in a week. I don’t think that what I could offer her would sway her when she can probably quite rightly sue my arse off.” He hadn’t thought of that until he had said it and hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
The nurse did roll his eyes now as he motioned Martin towards the cubicle, as if Martin was going to give him cause for regret. The nurse made a triangular parting in the curtain and poked a thumb over his shoulder. “In you go then.”
Martin jogged the few paces to the curtain, but was stopped by the nurse holding up a cautioning hand. “You’re good at making a reasoned point but you might want to remember that she might forgive you in there, but I sincerely doubt her ‘next of kin’ will. Personally I would not hang around for him to arrive.”
Martin’s guts chilled and loosened and a sense of urgency overtook him. He stepped hastily beyond the curtain, he would have to make this quick – he didn’t relish the idea of that encounter.
He was confronted with his victim.
The bare strip lighting lit her flesh, less than his car headlights had, but her skin and hair still held a strikingly brilliant luminescence. Her eyes were closed. Martin approached the bed with a quietened step and measured pace. He realised there was a reverence in his step that he hadn’t felt since the days when he had followed his father up to the altar in church. He had abandoned his father’s catholic faith in his teens mainly because he was an atheist but also because it hurt his father. The powerful architecture of ‘God’s’ houses of stone and coloured glass, and the magical ritual thrall of the Eucharist had always created awe within him, and he felt that same awe now. He threw a conscious look at the nurse who stood watch over him, but found that the nurse’s attention had been drawn in on the sleeping girl.
Martin rested his hands on the raised chrome cot sides in the same way his father had done with the brass rail around the Holy Mother to support him as he dipped down to one knee and genuflected, it was ridiculous that the moment seemed to conjure the memory of such a gesture. He struggled with a need to laugh at the connections his mind was making, especially now he had no God, but all thought of laughter was banished as he realised the blue and purple bruising on one side of her face and a puckered crimson break in her skin that ran across half her forehead above one eye. Martin stole himself against the realisation that he could have been staring at a corpse – and it would have been his fault. He clenched his hands against a tremor of guilt, which quickly became a start as her gently rested eyes flicked open. Then there was fear as her obsidian eyes stared into him.
Faced with the precipice of the deep fall into her eyes, memories were conjured of how he had felt as a child when his father had told him that God was not only watching over him but could see into him, and all his sins were made bare. Martin felt shame before those black eyes, but it wasn’t the child’s guilt for touching himself and thinking about Lilly Mcgreggor round the corner or Mrs Jenkins tight fitting blouse, as an adult it was shame for driving angry and for not seeing the poor girl in time.
“I’m sorry…” his voice quavered. “I didn’t see you…”
Her black raven stare fluttered as she blinked several times in close succession as his words seem to bring her around to some level of consciousness. Her head turned a little towards him and her pale lips blushed with the faintest hint of pink, seemingly delicate like petals, parted into a thin fragile smile. He was so surprised that she might smile at him the gesture had an intimate quality. Curiously she did seem genuinely warmed by the apology and pleased to see him. Then he remembered the man in the alley. Perhaps he had saved her from something worse than a car accident tonight. The man had seemed to be chasing her.
This unexpected reaction to Martin’s presence appeared to cause the nurse to shift uncomfortably from one foot to the other. He didn’t understand the discomfort the young man seemed to experience from this smile being aimed at Martin. Surely the gesture exonerated him in some small way. Something blossomed in his stomach in response to that smile. Something he didn’t recognise. It was warm and light, yet dense like candy floss.
The curtain was swept aside and Martin and the nurse both spun guiltily on their heels.
A large black man filled the opening that had been made. A large winter coat covered his broad barrel of a chest and dropped to just below his knee, giving him the impression of an immovable and imposing monolith. The oversized thick lapels were fastened close to his neck making his round head appear like a boulder balanced on his shoulders. His face was chiselled with a hard scowl of brooding determination. Jet dark curls of wiry hair clung neatly to his head like moss with a rich weave of greys and silvers. His eyes squinted closed. He brandished a long piece of intricately carved wood before him. It was too long and thick to be a cane and too short to be a staff. He held it in a commanding grip that angled the wood down to the floor without allowing it to come into contact with it. He held a worn and antiquated black leather Gladstone bag in the other hand.
Martin swallowed against the constriction of his throat and was thankful that the nurse broke the silence, as he was sure he wouldn’t find his own voice. The young nurse’s objection to the man’s presence started strong, having seemingly been startled by the large man himself, but it began to trail off as the nurse realised who the man was.
The black man’s face darkened, creasing around his words and gathering shadows under the harsh lighting as he spoke. His voice was deep, arrestingly commanding and well articulated, and he possessed a curiously haunting undulating dialect that Martin considered to be a mix of French and German. “I am fully aware this is a private area, and yes; I am looking for someone, but it appears that my search is now o-ver.” The authority the man possessed was chilling.
The nurse and Martin looked to the girl, whose smile was suddenly more definite and flickered with life. Not the greeting Martin was expecting her to have for her pimp. He experienced a twinge of jealousy that was both unexpected and uncomfortable in its clarity and its inappropriateness.
A tight smile briefly softened the black man’s features in response to her smile, several gold teeth winked among his yellowing originals. “She is my ward,” the man announced precisely. The smile dissolved and his fierceness returned. He pressed the point of his staff onto the floor and rested both hands on its flat head, posturing behind the claim. “I have come to take her home.” His shuttered eyes flickered and flashed the whites of his eyes as if there was a building power within his head that culminated in his eyes snapping fully open. Martin found the force of the man’s statement emboldened by two blank white eyes staring into him.
Martin had returned to his vigil outside the cubicle. The coffee in his trembling hands had cooled but was too bitter to be enjoyable. The Mars bar in his pocket had become more appealing, and he wanted nothing more than to cram it in his mouth and devour it, but he didn’t know if the black man would want to talk to him again. The man had asked to be alone with the girl, the girl who now had a name, ‘Ivory’.
Martin could see why he called her that, but it couldn’t be her real name. It had to be her ‘street’ name – if there was such a thing. The blind black man called himself ‘Ebony’: ‘Ebony and Ivory’… Martin strangled a laugh at the absurdity of it. It wasn’t that funny but he needed a reason to laugh tonight. He knew the humour that ached to be free was relief that the girl wasn’t hideously maimed and disfigured, disabled or dead, and that she didn’t seem full of hatred for him – although he was sure he had misread the smile she had sent him. He was also relieved that Ebony had restrained any ire and not revealed any intention to knife him or shoot him, that neither the girl nor the pimp were interested in the nurse’s insistence that they contact the police regarding Ivory’s statement about the accident. When the nurse had looked at Martin after this exchange there had been a look of disappointment on his face. Little shit.
The curtain around Ivory’s bed snapped open and the man called Ebony stood facing Martin but stared through him with blinkered slits of white while talking to a nurse Martin hadn’t noticed entering that area. “I have looked after the girl for all her existence.”
At first Martin thought he was making the statement to him and he had stumbled over how to reply until Ebony’s voice whip cracked the air again, the peaks of his voice cut as precisely as a scalpel blade while the lows were as soft and gentle as silk. “I believe I am capable of deciding whether or not she is fit to travel.” He stalked forward, with his staff held before him like some totem of power or status. The girl emerged from his silhouette like a sun reborn from an eclipse. She was standing and walking with apparent ease, and this startled Martin. Surely she would need to stay overnight?
The girl snaked an arm through Ebony’s and despite being blind, he lead the way with a determined step, his long coat swept out from his body and gave the appearance that he was gliding. Martin was arrested by her black glossy eyes that were fixed upon Martin as she walked with Ebony in his direction. In seconds her route took her past and beyond him to the doors. She turned her head a fraction, the slightest of movements, and her petal lips blossomed once more for him. A ‘thank you’?
Then she was gone.
That was it.
Gone.
Strangely he felt bereft. As if her leaving had dragged his insides after her. That was it. The encounter was over. He found himself sitting, weakened by the moment being over, the experience passed. The night had been an exhausting rollercoaster for his emotions, with the exhilarating climb of his anger followed by the plummeting despair of fear and guilt from the accident, and then that strange warm feeling inside him that he normally only found after a cup of tea and a pastry or a chocolate bar. There was also the discomfort and dissatisfaction that her absence created within him.
Chapter Three
The car had been undriveable and Martin had arranged for it to be towed away, Jenny couldn’t have left the kids to come and collect him in their Ford Focus estate, so he made his way back home to Finsbury Park by cab. He pressed the money into the driver’s hand and left him to keep the little change that would be left from the fare. He stood before the dark edifice of his home. It had been a stressful place to be lately, they had a busy life as it was with the kids and their little friends needing ferrying about to and thro after school and at weekends but Peter his father-in-law had had a heart attack three weeks ago and they had been driving to the hospital in Suffolk every other night so that Jenny could be with him and her mother. Thankfully he had recovered well and was home now and the normal chaos and demands of family life had returned. He couldn’t wait to get in and close the door on the night.
He dead locked the door and planted his keys home on the flat top of the stairs newel post. The hall was dark except for a strip of light that filtered through the part open door to the back room. He could tell by the volume of light that it was coming from the standard lamp, and that Jenny would be in her armchair beneath it with a book in her lap that she wasn’t really reading for the worry. He had text her that he had hit someone with the car and she had wanted him to call her, but he didn’t want to have to deal with her angst on top of his own and he sent her updates by text. He would have to recall all the events to her now. The thought of having to revisit it all depressed him. He just wanted to have a drink and something to eat and go to bed. He decided that he wouldn’t tell her that the girl he had hit was a prostitute, or about her strange appearance.
He pushed the door open and peered in to the room. Jenny was sitting in her chair under the standard lamp, leaning out from her chair like a cat alerted to a noise and poised to spring to life, her book closed in her hand with a finger hooked into the pages to keep her place.
“It is you. I thought one of the boys had come down again.”
“Hi.” Martin said gently. He tried a reassuring smile but he wasn’t sure how it looked from the outside.
She dumped the book on the side table and jumped up to him and threw her arms around him. He did the same back although he didn’t feel the need to. A hug wasn’t going to change what had happened, and it was getting between him and a desperately needed cup of tea and a sugar fix.
“I was so worried,” she said into his chest.
“I told you not to. I’m fine. And as far as I know the girl is okay too.”
“You were so lucky.”
He really, really, didn’t need to be told that. He had been saying it to himself enough, and it always led into thinking about how badly it could have turned out and how close he had come to killing someone that the guilt was tangible. “I know.” He shifted his hands to her face and moved her away from his body for a kiss. She looked pale and drawn with worry. It made her look old. He kissed her then ran his hands down to the tops of her arms. He had successfully broken the hug and held her away from him. “Even if I had been driving under the speed limit instead of on it I still would have hit her. She just ran out of nowhere.”
“Awful.”
It was more awful that he had been speeding but he couldn’t face Jenny’s ire at his stupidity on top of his own self-criticism. “Yup. It was pretty much the finale of the evening. Oh, and I’m pretty sure the car is a write-off.” He moved around her, back into the hall and then into the kitchen. He went straight to the kettle, offered to make Jenny a drink that she turned down, and went about making himself a tea. He nodded to a cluster of coloured sheets and a crudely fashioned trophy on the breakfast table. “What’s all that?”
Jenny scrunched her eyes and shook her head as if trying to shrug an annoying fly from her nose. “Oh, it was Oscar and Finn, they made you a few things to cheer you up after not winning.” She held up two coloured sheets of paper painted with even more colours. “They are your very own UDAC certificates congratulating you on how amazing you are, and your very own prize-winning cup.” She pointed at the trophy made from things he recognised from the recycling bin. “I would advise looking and not touching though.” She flashed her hands to show palms and fingers as gold as the trophy. “Not sure whether the paint they used is going to dry or not.”
He felt a suitable tug on his heart strings at the cuteness of the gesture but nothing could console him from losing. “That’s really nice.” He blew on his tea.
“Well, how are you?”
He rummaged through the breadbin. He knew that she was now asking about the UDAC’s. He was angry that the accident had stolen the focus from the awards night, but felt guilty for thinking feeling that way. It was hard to demand people acknowledge his pain when he had traumatized someone else by nearly killing them, but losing tonight was like proving a point that he had been trying to make for some time. For six months he had been struggling to paint with any conviction of talent and he had told everyone around him that he was failing, that his work was rubbish, and that he wouldn’t get a UDAC this year. Maybe tonight would finally convince all those that had smothered him with platitudes. Tonight he was a failure. “Shattered.” It was the only answer he could manage but it summed up how he felt physically and emotionally after months of preparing to lose. He plucked a yum yum from a packet and took a hearty bite and chased it with a sup of tea. It felt hot sweet and doughy in his mouth. Comforting.
Jenny closed on him and placed her hands on his belly. “I’m really sorry it didn’t work out.”
“Not as sorry as I am.”
“I was gutted when you text me the news. I just wanted to be with you.”
He felt a bruise of guilt for not letting her go. “I know.” Maybe he should have let her come tonight. He wouldn’t have been driving in one of his rages then.
“Did you speak to Richard?”
Martin took another bite and sip and shook his head. Thankfully Hadleigh had been surrounded by congratulators after winning. Martin had caught his eye when he was sure he couldn’t get away from the crowd and gave him a nod of recognition and a gesture of applause that saved Martin from actually having to talk to him.
“Did he deserve to win?”
It was a strange question for Jenny to ask and a difficult one to answer. He didn’t like sculpture in metal, but the piece entitled ‘square peg’ had an aesthetic to it. It was a large sphere of oxidised iron with one hemisphere being ripped open from within by an emerging cube of polished steel mesh. Within this cube was a white plastic sphere that lit up every three minutes, starting with a soft orange glow that built into a brighter more vivid colour. It’s brightness distracted the eye from the mesh case it sat within and lit up the inside of the large sphere that it emerged from, revealing that the sphere’s interior surface was lined with rusted bolts, nails, hooks, razors and barbed wire.
Martin pulled out the small business card that described the piece. He had arranged that every piece on show by the art department had cards printed for people to take and deliberate over as they looked the item over. “ ‘It is about ‘coming out’ as different in a world that can be cruel to non-conformists, and how if given time the ‘square peg’ can be seen as something else; something acceptable.’ I know I hate sculpture but the piece did actually say what is printed on that card. It was good. It was personal, it spoke to the people that viewed it, and it made a comment on society that the individual could relate to, it evoked sympathy and empathy. Everything that my work did not.” During her own private viewing Jenny had carefully and sensitively suggested that Martin’s entry had lacked these points. She stared at the darkness outside the kitchen window as he fed them back to her.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. You’re an art critic. I value an honest educated opinion over the desperate clichéd positivity of fawning apologist friends.” He popped the last of the yum yum in his mouth.
“This is really getting to you isn’t it?”
She had lived with him for the last six months, he didn’t need to answer.
“Honey, you have a good job, you’re a dad with kids that love you, you have a nice home, and you’re married to a wife that loves you to bits.” She bopped her pelvis against his, except his stomach stopped it a foot short of his groin and was a reminder of how out of shape he now was. He regretted the Mars bar he had scoffed in the cab and the yum yum he had just eaten.
She kissed him again. “You’re a good kisser.” She ran her fingers through his waves of hair and traced them down his neck, causing him to flinch as they tickled their way down to his shoulder and then his collar bone. “You’re a good lov-er,” she said huskily in a mock-sexy voice.
“Not now. For Christ’s sake.” Of all times. Not now. Feeling like a loser
“When is a good time?” She snapped.
She stood before him with her chestnut hair hanging untidily about her face where it had slipped out of her crude ponytail, and any suggestion of shape or form to her body was smothered by the old baggy and tatty jumper that served as her housecoat when she slouched over the ironing, cleaned the toilet or did the cooking. She had hardly put much effort into a seduction attempt. A quick fuck wasn’t going to make everything better. He didn’t want to have to switch off his feelings to meet her needs.
“Clearly not when I have fucked up twice in one night!”
One of the boys called down with a whiny voice and Martin swore at himself for shouting and waking him.
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