Читать книгу Soul Murder - Daniel Blake - Страница 20

Flames leapt high and jagged around the burgers on the grill.

Crammed into a sweltering kitchen, wearing a ridiculous polyester uniform with her hair in a net as though she’d just been caught by a trawler, Jesslyn’s anger mashed in tight oblongs.

The interview had been bad enough. Kevin the manager had proved as snotty as he was spotty, sneering at her throughout it all with a contempt he didn’t even bother to disguise. Why did she want this job? Why had she left her previous employment? Did she have references? Had she ever worked in the fast-food industry before?

And on, and on, and on, when they both knew this was a minimum-wage job that almost literally a monkey could do, and here was Kevin treating it as though he were personally responsible for choosing the next UN Secretary-General.

She even had to work some Sundays, her religious convictions be damned. Not because Kevin had forced her to – she could have claimed her constitutional right to freedom of religion and threatened him with a lawsuit if he’d even tried – but because she’d done Sunday shifts at Muncy so she could preach in the chapel there. Her suddenly spending every Sunday at home would arouse suspicion in a moron, and Mark was certainly not that.

But even if she did find a way to tell him about Mara, she thought, he wouldn’t understand, not really. Prison was one of those things you could never explain. If you knew what it was like, you didn’t need to be told. If you didn’t know, mere words weren’t enough.

Prison was a pressure cooker, a place of white heat where life had a suffocating intensity. Friendships, still less love affairs, weren’t casual, to be picked up and put down whenever one felt like it; they were life-rafts of survival in a place that tried to crush the soul, raging torrents of defiance and pride in being human.

Within prison walls, the rules changed. What went on inside stayed inside. That was why Jesslyn was so careful to keep her two worlds apart. Mark had some of his colleagues over to dinner or Sunday lunch at their condo from time to time; she never did. Mark brought documents home, discussed work problems with her, gave her tidbits of department gossip; she never did any of that either. If he thought it weird, he’d long since accepted it as just the way she was.

And with Mara, who’d been such a bright shining Technicolor light in the pallors of endless institutional gray…well, Jesslyn had been honored, frankly, that Mara, beautiful, radiant, poised, fragrant Mara who somehow kept her poise and fragrance in those conditions, had chosen her when she could have had pretty much anyone.

And then she’d gone. Gone in stages, each of them more painful than the last.

First, Mara had called time on their relationship.

One day, just like that, out of the blue, Mara had said she didn’t want to go on with it. Jesslyn had been standing six feet away, yet she’d honestly thought Mara had hit her, such was the physical shock. She’d rushed to the restroom and brought up her breakfast. Food poisoning, she’d said, before going home. They wouldn’t see her cry on the prison floor; not then, not ever. Crying was weakness, and weakness was death.

In the weeks that followed, Jesslyn had begged, pleaded, reasoned, shouted and threatened, all to no avail. Sometimes she sought Mara out; sometimes she tried to avoid her. Each time she saw her, it felt as though someone had opened up a wound and started scraping salt into it.

Second, Mara had been released; back into the outworld.

If seeing her had been a torment, Jesslyn quickly realized that not seeing her was a hundred times worse. Even after their split, Mara had been the center of Jesslyn’s universe, the point around which she orientated herself and her days.

Now all Jesslyn had was the whisper of Mara’s name in corridor gossip, and the few of Mara’s keepsakes she’d managed to hold on to, inhaling their scent as though it were the breath of life.

Third, Mara had officially complained about Jesslyn’s conduct.

Briefly, surgingly, Jesslyn had hoped Mara had brought the complaints as some warped way of trying to keep Jesslyn in her life. But she could only fool herself for so long and, as the process had ground forwards, Jesslyn had let her feelings curdle towards hatred, if only in hope that it would harden into a carapace around her heart.

She’d always thought of Mara as the innocent victim of an egregious miscarriage of justice. Now, she’d forced herself to damn her as the devil incarnate, vile and evil murderess, fit only for an eternity in hell.

And finally, obviously, when Muncy had given Jesslyn her marching orders.

Jesslyn stared into the flames.

Stripe for stripe, burning for burning.

Was it fair, what had happened to her? Was it fair that murderers, rapists and pedophiles were walking the streets while she was here, frying burgers made of meat she wouldn’t give to a dog? Was it fair that she’d given twenty years of her life to trying to make the world a better place, and in return had been given half an hour to pack up and go?

It wasn’t just Mara she’d grown to hate, of course. It was everyone who worked the system for their own ends, and then blamed that very system whenever they didn’t have the courage to take responsibility themselves. It was lawyers who made people terrified of using common sense; it was media executives who broadcast whatever got them ratings, no matter the harm to those involved; it was judges who gave light sentences; it was doctors who kept alive people any decent society would have executed. It was all these parasites, and more.

Jesslyn sought solace where she always did, in the Book; Ecclesiastes 3: 3–8.

‘A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.’