She took a cutoff to the High Street and walked down to the Pizza Pie Palace, a badly Americanized restaurant destined for insolvency from the first. The walls were varnished red brick, hung with chipped tin adverts for cigarettes and gasoline. Two battered papier-mâché cacti stood on either side of the door. The bonnet of a Cadillac had been unwisely attached to the wall just above the till, at forehead level. She could see Leslie sitting at a table at the back of the room, still wearing her battered biker's leathers, with two enormous cocktails in front of her and a cigarette in her hand. Her short dark hair was kept perpetually dirty by her crash helmet and stuck out in all directions. Her nose was flat and broad, her eyes were large and deep brown, verging on black, her teeth were big and regular. The overall effect was mad and sexy. She pushed one of the cocktail glasses toward Maureen as she walked over to the table.
"Aloha." She grinned.
A shiny-faced young waiter came over to the table and interrupted Leslie's pizza order to tell her he thought her leathers were sexy. Leslie blew a column of smoke at him. "Get us a fucking waitress," she said, and watched as he walked away.
"Leslie," said Maureen, "you shouldn't speak to people like that. He doesn't know what he's done to offend you."
"Fuck him, he can work it out for himself. And if he can't, well, he'll be offended and that makes two of us."
"It's rude. He doesn't know what he's done."
"You are correct, Mauri," she said, "but I think that the important lesson for our young friend to learn is that I'm a rude woman and he should stay the fuck out of my face."
A bouncy young waitress came over to the table. Leslie ordered a large crispy pizza for the two of them to share with anchovies, mushrooms and black olives. Maureen ordered a carafe of their cheapest red wine.
Unlike Liz, Leslie was great to talk to. Whatever had happened she unconditionally took her pal's side, happily bad-mouthed the opposition and then never mentioned it again, but she hated Douglas and she was pleased now that Maureen said she wanted to finish it. "He's an arse." She fished a cherry out of her glass with her fingers. "That was abuse. You were a minute out of hospital when he nipped you."
"He didn't nip me," said Maureen. "I nipped him."
"Doesn't matter. Getting involved with a patient is abuse."
"But I wasn't his patient, though," said Maureen, instantly defensive. "I was Angus's patient."
"He met you at the clinic, didn't he?"
"Yeah," Maureen conceded uncomfortably.
"And it's a clinic for victims of sexual abuse?"
"Yeah."
"And he worked there and knew you were a patient?"
"Yeah, but-"
"Then it's abuse," said Leslie, and, lifting the cocktail, drank it far too quickly.
"Oh, I dunno, Leslie, everything can't be abuse, you know? I mean, I wanted it. I was as much part of it as he was."
"Yeah," she said adamantly. "Everything can't be abuse but that was. Do you think he could have guessed that your consent was compromised by being four months out of a psychiatric hospital?"
"I dunno."
"Maureen, four months out of the laughing academy, come on, even a prick like Douglas knows it's not right. He's with someone else, he asks you to keep it a secret, he's got a lot of power over you. It's abusive."
"He didn't ask me to keep it a secret, actually," said Maureen, blushing with annoyance.
"Did he take you home to meet his mum?" Leslie smiled softly. "What's your damage about this guy, Mauri? He's got access to your fucking psychiatric record, how equal can that be?"
The waitress brought the carafe of wine and poured it for them as if it was nice. She lifted the empty cocktail glasses. Maureen couldn't think of anything to say. She nursed her cigarette to mask her discomfort, rolling the tip on the floor of the glass ashtray. Leslie was right. Douglas was a sad old wanker.
The carafe was half-empty by the time the giant pizza arrived. They ate it with their fingers, catching up with the news and gossip. The funding to the domestic violence shelter where Leslie worked had been cut and it might have to shut in a month. She was conducting a campaign to have the funding reinstated and was getting the rubber ear everywhere. "God, it's depressing," she said. "We got so desperate we even sent a mail shot to the papers telling them that eighty percent of battered women are turned away as it is, and not one of them phoned us. No one seems to give a shit."
"Can't you ask the women to speak to the papers? I bet they'd cover a human interest story."
Leslie drained a glass of wine and thought about it. "That's a hideous idea," she said flatly. "We can't ask these women to prostitute their experience for our sake. They've been used all their lives and most of them are still being hunted down by their own personal psychopath."
"Auch, right enough." Maureen sat forward. "I can't help thinking that we never win the abortion debate at a media level because the antiabortionists coach women to cry on telly and use photographs of dead babies and we always use statistics. We should use emotive narratives and arguments."
Leslie grinned. It must be very cheap wine, her teeth were stained dark red. Maureen supposed hers must be too.
"Frothy emotionalism," said Leslie. "Best way to engage the ignorant."
"Precisely. You should do that."
"I'm sick of trying to win arguments," said Leslie quietly. "I don't understand why we don't all just band together and attack. Doris Lessing says that men are frightened of women because they think women'll laugh at them and women are frightened of men because they think men'll kill them. We should all turn rabid and scare the living shit out of them – let them see what it feels like."
"But what justification would there be for adopting violent tactics?"
"Negotiations," said Leslie, adopting a Belfast accent, "have irretrievably broken down."
"I don't accept that," said Maureen. "I think what you mean is you've lost patience."
It was unfair of Maureen to say that: Leslie worked in the shelter with women who had been systematically beaten and raped by their partners. In Leslie's world men rape children, they kick women in the tits and teeth and shove bottles up their backsides', they steal their money and leave them for dead and then feel wronged when they leave. If anyone could justifiably lose patience Leslie could.
Leslie thought about it for a minute. She looked despairingly at her glass and struggled with some thought. Her face collapsed with exhaustion. "Fuck it," she said. "Let's get really pissed."
And they did.
Maureen's head was fuzzy with red wine. She put on her softest T-shirt straight from the wash to make herself feel coddled and went to bed. She took more than the prescribed dose of an over-the-counter liquid sleeping draft and fell asleep with her eye makeup half-off and her leg hanging out of the bed.
Chapter 2
Douglas was tied into the blue kitchen chair with several strands of rope. His throat had been cut clean across, right back to the vertebrae, his head was sitting off center from his neck. Splashes and spurts of his blood were drying all over the carpet. One long red splatter extended four feet diagonally from the chair, slashing across the arm of the settee and nearly hitting the skirting board on the far wall.
She couldn't seem to move. She was very hot. She had been scuttling back down the hall from the toilet when the blood-drenched cagoul lying just inside the living-room door caught her eye. A trail of bloody footprints led to Douglas, tied to the chair in the dead center of the room. The footprints were small and regular, like a dance-step diagram.
She didn't remember sliding down the wall into a fetal crouch. She must have been there for a while because her backside was numb. She couldn't see him now, just the cagoul and two of the footprints, but the sweet heavy smell of blood hung like a fog in the warm hall. The yellow plastic cagoul was drenched in blood.