‘No, you can’t,’ she said, as if daring him to even try.
He had no idea what to do, or say. And they sat in silence for the longest time. Until finally she drew a long, quivering breath and wiped away the tear. She took a sip of whisky and cleared her throat, a determined effort to change the direction of their conversation.
‘So what about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Married?’
His eyes dropped to the glass he clutched in both hands. ‘Widowed,’ he said, and he felt her eyes on him in the dark.
There was another long silence before she said, quietly, ‘Do you want to tell me?’
He closed his eyes and thought that probably he didn’t. He had spent most of the last ten years trying to forget. Images burned into his retinas, scorched into his memory. Pain that had never left him in all that time. And yet, hadn’t Sita just bared her soul to him? The whisky speaking, for certain. But she had told him things she had quite possibly never revealed to anyone. Opened up her own little box of horrors to public view. How could he refuse to reveal his to her? A grown-up version of ‘you show me yours and I’ll show you mine’.
As if she could read his mind, she said, ‘It’s okay, you don’t have to.’
But he wanted to now. As if some invisible constraint had suddenly been removed. He needed to share it with her. Things he had never spoken about to anyone. And with the sense of his own death little more than a breath away, he felt the urge almost to shout it from the rooftops.
‘I was on the night shift,’ he said. Then looked up. ‘Why is it these things always seem to happen at night?’ He remembered it had been a warm, humid Glasgow night. He’d had a fish supper earlier, liberally sprinkled with salt and vinegar. And he still recalled the taste of it in his mouth when he threw it up just a few hours later. ‘I was a detective constable then. Working out of Pacific Quay. I got a message that the DS wanted to see me. I thought he was behaving kind of strange. Told me that he was taking me off shift. That I was needed at home. Said he didn’t have any further information. But I could tell that he did, and I knew that something awful must have happened.’
His recollection of it was painfully vivid. The frantic drive across the city. Turning into the road where he lived. The two police cars, and an ambulance, sitting outside his home. Neighbours standing at gates, gazing from windows, an intermittent blue cast on inquisitive faces.
‘I ran up the steps to the door. There was a cop in uniform barring the way. He raised a hand and asked where I thought I was going.’
He heard himself shouting. It’s my fucking house!
‘Someone was crying inside. My daughter. Just crying and crying. Throaty, like she had cried herself hoarse. Which she had.’
Sita sat perfectly still. ‘What age was she?’
‘She’d have been seventeen then. Just started at Glasgow Uni. Everyone was upstairs. A cop on the half landing, and a couple of ambulance men a few steps above him. Addie was sitting on the bed in our room, a policewoman with an arm around her. She was inconsolable. There was a medic. A woman. She was standing in the open door to the bathroom. I still remember her turning towards me, eyes wide with shock, face the colour of chalk. And she must have seen things in her time.’
He paused to draw breath. Closing his eyes and replaying it all in the dark.
When he opened them again, he said, ‘She advised me that it would be better to remain on the landing. Like there was a chance in hell I was going to stand out there. I glanced into the bedroom and Addie was staring back at me. The look on her face... I... I’ve seen it every night since, when I’m trying to sleep. The accusation in it. The naked hatred. I felt, right there and then, like my life was over, whatever it was that lay beyond the bathroom door. But still I had to look.’
He turned his head slowly towards the window, as if it might offer a reflective insight into the moment. Wet snow slapped the black pane and ran down it in slow rivulets, like tears.
‘I pushed past the medic and stepped into the bathroom. The overheadlight seemed unnaturally bright, reflecting back at me off every tiled surface. Like some overexposed film.’ He shook his head. ‘Of course, I realise now it was just my pupils that were so dilated with the shock.’ A series of short, rapid breaths tugged at his chest. ‘Mel was lying naked in the bath. Her eyes were shut, and there was this strange, sad smile on her lips. First time I’d seen her smiling in months.’ He turned away suddenly from the window, as if he could no longer bear the vision it was offering him. ‘The water was crimson with her blood. Marbled darker by it in places. The woman I’d loved since the first time I ever set eyes on her was dead.’
He turned now towards Sita.
‘Took her own life. It was Addie who found her. Came home from a night at the student union, and...’ He couldn’t bring himself to finish. ‘I’d give anything to be able to erase that moment from her life. It’s when she stopped being my little girl. It’s when she started hating me.’
Sita’s brows crinkled into a frown. ‘Why would she do that?’
‘Because she blamed me. Mel left a note, you see.’ He gave a sad little chuckle that nearly choked him. ‘She wasn’t the most... literate person in the world. Articulate in every way, except on paper. I suppose she’d been trying to explain why she’d done it. But they were her last confused thoughts, and they were all jumbled up, difficult to interpret.’ He shut his eyes again and shook his head. ‘She couldn’t take the deceit any more, she said, knowing that she no longer loved me. Even if I had been the love of her life. The affair had somehow destroyed all her feelings.’ He paused. ‘As if it was me who’d had the affair.’ He opened his eyes to gaze off into the darkness. ‘That’s what everyone thought. Including Addie.’ He turned his gaze towards Sita. ‘Blamed me for cheating on her mother. Driving her to suicide.’
‘But there was no affair?’
‘There was. Only, it wasn’t me who had it.’ He raised his glass to empty it and found that he already had. He leaned forward to grasp the bottle by the neck and refill the glass before raising it, trembling, to his lips. But the whisky seemed to have lost its malted flavour now. It tasted harsh and burned his mouth. ‘Though it didn’t look like that at the time. I was partnered with a female detective in those days. Jenny. We were colleagues, mates, but that was all. Jenny came to the funeral with me for moral support, and Addie thought she was my lover. How dare I bring my girlfriend to her mother’s funeral!’
He could still feel the sting of her slap, delivered with all the power of pure loathing when everyone had left the house after the wake. Words hurled at him in a fury, barely heard in the moment, and lost now in time. But the shrill tone of anger and accusation still lived with him in every moment of every day. As it would, he knew, till he died.
‘She packed all her stuff in a case and left that night to stay with a friend. I haven’t seen her or spoken to her since.’
Sita reached through the candlelight in the dark to place a hand over his and gently squeezed it.
He was overwhelmingly touched, feeling his eyes fill, and fought to prevent the tears from spilling. Big, macho Scottish men didn’t show their emotions, after all. He raised his glass to his mouth and emptied it in a single draught. And the sound of a glass smashing broke the soft, simmering silence of the hotel.
They were both startled by it. Sita half turned towards the barroom door. ‘What was that?’
Brodie blinked away his emotion. ‘Must have been Brannan. I’ll go and see.’ He was almost glad of the excuse to break the moment. He lifted a candle from the table and carried it to the door.