She had a broad Glasgow accent nothing like my golden girl’s. She smelled of stale sweat; her cheeks were scarred with acne pits; on a corner of Bath Street she would have been in place any wintry Saturday night.
‘What gentleman? The gentleman you were performing with up— the stair?’
She dangled her disgusting udders at me, belching bad air and bewilderment.
‘You were seen. I was watching – and I wasn’t the only one. We were watching you earn your money.’
I hated her bovine corruption.
‘Ah didnae know.’ She was not resentful. She wanted to explain ‘He wis angry wi me. He had tae keep tellan me what to do. Every damnt thing, he said he’d to tell me. But ah’ve been hurt masel. One morning ah tried tae get oot o bed and ah was stuck. Ah had weeks o pain after that, doctors an jags an operations. Since then ah don’t know why people would want to be hurtit. Ah know ah wis wrang. Ah didnae mean tae make him angry. It just slipped out – ah tellt him – ah’ve been hurt masel. And that’s when he lost the rag. But, ken, it was just that ah’ve been hurt masel.’
In the upstairs corridor, the Hindu faithful still danced on the rim of the brass gong. I looked in the room where I had stopped being a virgin, but it was empty. I ran from one room into another and found Jackie Kennedy sitting on the bed. She stared at me in horror.
‘In the Name of God!’ she cried, like an Ulster cleric preaching of Hell, ‘where did you come from?’
‘Get up! We’ve got to get out of here. Get up!’ I reached out as if to pull her up from the bed. ‘Don’t you know the kind of place this is?’
‘Get away from me!’ She pushed at the air between us. ‘It’s you that shouldn’t be here. The young fellow didn’t say anything about you.’
‘Tell me when we’re out of here. I don’t—’
‘Listen to me!’ she cried. ‘He came to the house. Just a young fellow, well dressed and nicely spoken. Listen! It was him I came here with. Somebody has to listen! He said terrible things to me.’
She was wearing her best coat, brown cloth with some kind of fur at the collar that I had seen her put on to go visiting on a Sunday. I had a picture of one of Brond’s smooth young men talking quietly at her as she sat beside him in a car, very upright in her best coat for visiting. I wondered what smooth words he had found for telling her that in their eyes she was Kilpatrick’s whore and that her husband had killed him for it.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Please!’ and I held out my hand to her again.
‘Why didn’t he trust me?’ she asked, and I didn’t know whether she was talking of her lover or her husband.
‘Please, come!’ Stinging tears of frustration; I pitied her and I was afraid. ‘It’ll be all right if you come. I won’t let them hurt you.’
‘You’re only a boy,’ she said. ‘What could you do? I have to wait here. He’s going away tonight – out of the country. Oh, God, I’m so frightened.’ She swung her head from side to side. I had seen a fox caught in a trap doing that. ‘I feel he’s watching me.’
If the lie Kennedy had lived for so long was unimaginable to me, how strange a judgement she must feel he had passed on her. Yet this play-actor had killed for her.
‘I don’t know how he would come to know a place like this,’ Jackie said so quietly I had to strain to hear. ‘I won’t believe that he sleeps with that woman. I don’t know why they tell me such terrible things. She put me here and told me to wait.’
I sat beside her on the bed and put my arm around her shoulders.
‘Her name’s Maisie,’ I said. ‘An older woman with an Irish accent.’ And trying to help, ‘Maybe it’s just that he knew her a long time ago – in Ireland. She’ll be a friend.’
Jackie shook her head.
‘No. She was young. Just a girl. And very nicely spoken.’
My golden girl. I had lain with her on the bed in the next room. In an hotel room, I had sat on a bed – and they had yelled at me that a man had died in it – too suddenly for me to evade it, Kilpatrick’s poor dirtied corpse lolled out from under the sacks.
‘I’m so frightened,’ Jackie said. ‘I’m supposed to go away with him tonight.’
‘You don’t have to go anywhere with him. If we can just get out of here, I’ll look after you.’
I meant it. Sitting on the whore’s bed, I could have been in love with her. I touched her cheek with my lips and she did not move away.
Above her head, I saw the bed and squalid room reflected in the mirror, and her in my arms. I feel he’s watching me, she had said. Kennedy was watching us. Gently I put her away from me, and getting up went to the mirror, close against it – so close my own face blurred into eyes. The cold glass touched my skin.
‘Don’t be upset.’ In the mirror, she held out a hand to me. ‘There’s not anything you can do.’
A dark line drawn behind her on the bed turned into the stick I had been given by Brond. I had not brought it into that room. There was no time to warn her, perhaps there was no need, as the door came open. Like children, we stared at the shining weight of the gun in Kennedy’s hand.
‘Oh, you impossible bitch,’ he said. It was a voice full of love and rage and hopelessness.
‘I’ll go with you,’ she said. ‘There’s no need to hurt him.’
I went towards her. Even now I believe it was because I misunderstood which of us needed protecting.
‘You cowardly bastard!’ he shouted and I realised he could not fire because I was too close to her. I think he called me a coward again, but all my fear had left me. I picked up Brond’s unlucky stick and a turn shook free the blade.
He was coming towards me, trying, I suppose, to get some safe angle from which he could fire but Jackie kept turning with him. I even had time – I was in such control – to realise what Brond had brought about in giving me the stick; by death or guilt both Kennedy and myself were to be silenced. He knew my fatal temper and he had given me a weapon with which I could kill or get myself killed, but I would laugh in his face. He knew my temper but not the speed of my mind or the athlete’s strength in my body. I was young and nothing was impossible to me, and as Kennedy came forward I took him with the sword point on the wrist. He was to be disarmed and no great harm done. That was a thing impossibly exact, but I was mad with confidence and the gun fell out of his hand.
Brilliantly coloured blood came out of him in gusts as he tried to kill me with his hands. The heart, that tough muscle, becomes its own murderer when an artery is cut. Untended or if there were no natural defences, it would empty the body. He came at me and I did not understand what had happened. I even had a moment of terror that the blood was mine. I had nothing to defend myself for as he went for me a shock went up my arm and the stick was snatched out of my grasp. The bed took me behind the knees and I went back with him on top. He might have strangled me but it was my fortune that the nerve in his wrist had been cut so that the four fingers of his right hand would not close. I rolled and carried both of us off the end of the bed. As we landed I came down on him with all my weight and it seemed to stun him. With each heartbeat blood spurted from his outflung wrist. All I wanted was to save him. I knew that a tourniquet above the elbow might stop the blood but that the arm would at once begin to die. I did not lack knowledge. As he lay still, I pulled down the wadded sheet and pressed with all my strength on his wrist. The sheet soaked and I gathered more and pressed. The curtain of blood over my eyes put a drench of scarlet over walls, roof, bed, everywhere. The only bloodless thing in the room was his face, like a white parcel emptied and thrown aside. I thought I had saved him until I heard a whisper under the mingled thunder of our breath. On the white front of his shirt there was a small unremarkable shape like the lips of a child opening on a sigh.
At last I had to look up at Jackie. In the mirror of her eyes – not Jackie but Val, Michael Dart’s wife – I saw a man of blood on his knees beside a corpse.