Читать книгу Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - H. Mel Malton - Страница 28

Were all trying to harness faith,

the sun you gotta worship

to be warmed by.

—Shepherd’s Pie

After I dropped Morrison off at the police station, I headed home. The Kelso’s experience had left me feeling a bit queasy, partly from the bad draft, partly from Becker’s coldness, but mostly from Candy and the beer bottle. On top of the murders, it was just too much. I had read about stuff like that from time to time, but I’d always figured it was the result of some fiction-writer’s diseased imagination—something to say “eeew, gross” about and then turn the page. There would be no page-turning for Candy, though, and thinking about her and how she got to where she was, doing what she was doing, made me feel rotten. And helpless. What could I do when even the police said there’s no point in trying?

I entertained a fantasy about going to Kelso’s the next morning, finding the stripper and having a good heart-to-heart with her, then helping her to a new life feeding goats, eating healthy foods and living in George’s house. Fat chance. She’d just tell me to piss off and mind my own business, which would be about what I deserved. The bucolic life I’m so fond of touting as the answer to everything isn’t the answer at all for most people. Candy and other people like her, would probably choose beer bottles and bikers over goat poop any day.

When I got back to George’s place, his town car, an elderly Toyota, was gone, so I figured he was at Susan’s again. Poe was half-asleep on his shelf and croaked rudely at me. I left a note for George on his kitchen table telling him I’d fed the cats, which I proceeded to do. At least, I put food in their bowl, which usually brought them running, but there was no sign of them. Then I went down to the barn to check on the goats before going home.

They were all settled in for the night and I found the cats curled up in a ridiculously photogenic bundle with the new kids, all warm and toasty next to Erma Bombeck.

“From sleaze to saccharine in one fell swoop,” I said, but the sight did actually make me feel a bit better. Erma bleated at me and I bleated back, then turned out the light.

I smoked a little dope when I got home, but didn’t have the heart to work on the puppet. A friend of mine had died, I’d been stupid about a man (again) and rather than fill me with creative energy, as a toke usually did, it just made me more depressed. What was the point, anyway? The puppet would get sold at the Artists’ Consignment Depot, I’d take the money and live on it for a while, and then have to make another one, and so on. What big hairy difference did it make to the world? Goats got born, goats died, but at least they made milk. People got born. Sometimes they got beaten up by people they loved, sometimes they danced on tables and did unspeakable things with beer bottles to entertain other people, but they all died too, sooner or later. There just didn’t seem a point to anything.

I thought about praying, but I’ve never been able to scrape even a tiny hint of belief together about a supreme being. God has always seemed to me to be a huge, powerful mess of wishful thinking. I knew this because the only time I ever thought about it was when I needed comforting, and the comfort never, ever materialized, no matter how hard I prayed.

My dead parents had been serious Catholics, and my early years were steeped in religion, but even though I was outwardly as devout as I was expected to be, I had secretly been sure that nobody was listening.

They were killed in an automobile accident on their way to visit me at summer camp. It was parents’ night and I was the master of ceremonies. When they didn’t show up, I still went onstage. I did my bit, fuelled by an incredible anger. There would be excuses later, of course. A religious meeting or something they had forgotten about—too important to miss. It had happened before. It never occurred to me that something might have happened to them. Children assume the worst, and for me, the worst wasn’t death, it was indifference.

The news came during the juice and cookies party afterwards. The camp chaplain, a boisterous, overly friendly man called Father Bob, deftly cut me out like a slice of cake from the group of parents I was being praised by. He annoyed me, and I was rude to him, the way a big-headed ten-year-old who’s been told she’s hot stuff tends to be.

“I need to talk to you, dear,” he said.

“What? Can’t it wait? I’m busy.” The words ring in my head still. It’s one of those bad moments in life that grow more horrific with age and will not fade no matter how hard one tries to forget. The adults who had been praising my performance went suddenly silent, shocked at my behaviour. The sweetness turned in my mouth, as if I’d bitten into a chocolate and found it full of dust. Father Bob drew me away gently and told me my parents were dead. It was like a punishment. If I hadn’t been rude, my parents would be okay.

After that, I went to live with my Aunt Susan in Laingford. Susan was, and still is, an agnostic. She was beside me at the funeral mass (which was incredibly long), and later she told me that, although she was perfectly willing to discuss God and religion if I wanted to, she would not be accompanying me to church again. That suited me just fine. After the initial numbness had worn off, I had experimented with prayer, probing my customary lack of faith like a sore tooth, and found that nothing had changed. There was still nobody listening, and nobody left to insist that there was.

But early training stays with you. In times of trouble, I still find myself probing that empty place in my brain where Christians promise divine comfort is.

Sometimes I feel like an Icarus lost in a flock of twentieth century frequent flyers. They all buy their tickets and whizz off to the tropics while I’m still stuck on the ground gluing chicken feathers to my arms.

That search for meaning continues, of course, and up until the day I found Francy hanging in the kitchen, I was content to putter along believing implicitly in the goodness of humankind, the healing power of the earth and my own efforts to leave as small an ecological footprint as possible. That had been enough.

However, after two murders awfully close to home, and after seeing Candy onstage at Kelso’s, it struck me that composting, making herbal tea and living the simple life of a craftsperson was absolutely pathetic.

I sat at my worktable and cried. Lug-nut plunked his head in my lap in that endearing way dogs have of trying to help, and I thought about what to do. Become a social worker? Start counselling battered women? Go to cop college and become a caped avenger with a gun? Start a farming co-op for exstrippers? Write a self-help book for New-Age artists with step-by-step instructions for changing the world? Hang myself? Or, dammit, find out who killed John and Francy and erase them from the planet?

My parents were killed by a drunk driver. I wanted to kill him back, for the longest time. Then I met him when he got out of jail. I was fourteen, and he got in touch with Susan and said he wanted to see me. She said it was entirely up to me. I said okay, because I’d never seen him and I wanted a face to go with my hatred.

We met in Susan’s front room, both sitting on the edges of our chairs, fragile as porcelain. He was thin and pale, like a root vegetable, and he wept when he saw me, the tears seeping out the corners of his eyes and dripping off his unlovely chin. He wanted to give me money. (I didn’t take it. Now, I would. Then, I couldn’t.) His hands were damp and they trembled. He smelled of fear and sweat. He had little white yuckies in the corners of his mouth. He made me feel sick, but I stopped hating him. He didn’t seem to be worth the trouble. Then he asked me to forgive him.

I used to think forgiveness was a big mystery, something you could only understand if you had been touched by God, which I hadn’t. The real Christians I know (as opposed to the bogus ones) speak of it with a kind of wonder. Forgiveness is tangled up in reams of theological wool, though. God forgives everyone everything because of his divinity, and those who believe in him look for forgiveness; they need it, beg for it, even. What’s more, they seem to get it. Non-Christians (at least this one) sometimes shy away from the concept because of all the trappings. But after meeting the man who schmucked my parents to a bloody pulp because he was driving pie-eyed, I discovered that forgiveness is actually a piece of cake. You just do it. You say “Okay, I forgive you,” and then you forget it. That’s what I did.

So, finding John’s killer, and Francy’s (if it was the same person, which was likely) and killing them back, was out. I suppose I used up all the revenge-juice in my body the last time, and there was none left. Finding the killer and forgiving him or her was an idea that stopped my tears and prompted me to light up another joint.

First of all, why should I forgive them? I mean, why me? Francy and John weren’t mine. Francy was my friend, that’s true, but I didn’t own her the way I had, in a sense, owned my parents.

If someone breaks a teacup, which is yours, you can say “Oh, that’s okay. It doesn’t matter,” and it doesn’t any more. But that’s a teacup, not a person. Forgiving that man for killing my parents was something I gave him because he needed it, and so did I. I owned my anger, he owned his remorse. Together, we gave them up, or gave them away, which was good.

I certainly had anger about John’s and Francy’s deaths, for different reasons. John didn’t deserve to die, although he was a shithead and a wife-beater, and he deserved something, but not murder. My anger about John’s death came under that big, amorphous heading “wrong”, the kind of thing that saints and superheroes fight against. Francy’s murder came under the “wrong” heading too, but I was madder about hers because it was wronger. She deserved no bad thing. She deserved better. The killer had stolen her life from her (wrong), her friendship and company from me (personal wrong) and the killer was getting away with it (extremely wrong.) Why did I want to find the killer, then? To punish them? Nope. To stop them from doing it again? Maybe. To find out if there was any remorse, so I could mix it with my anger and come up with a magical recipe for forgiveness? That was pretty close, although I felt uncomfortable with the missionary zeal of it. “Admit that you have sinned and ask forgiveness.” Yuck.

And what, I asked myself, would I do if I found the killer and discovered that they had no remorse whatsoever? What then? I would be left with my anger and nowhere to put it. I think that’s where revenge comes in. “Oh yeah? Well, I’ll make you sorry.”

What if the killer not only lacked remorse, but still had an unhealthy desire to keep on doing the “wrong” thing? To me, maybe. Then my anger would be gone, certainly, as well as my ecological footprint. I would become the best composter a human being can be. I would be dead.

At this point, I had worked it out. I couldn’t just go back to making puppets and drinking herbal tea as if nothing had happened. I would have to find the killer, danger or not, before he killed someone else, like me. As for starting a co-op for ex-strippers, well, maybe in my next life.