‘A snooker table fell out of the sky,’ said Alex. ‘How is that something to do with me?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Bree. ‘I’ve barely heard of snooker. But it fell on a man who was trying to kill you. And it killed a man who was trying to protect you. He’s right in there somewhere -’ she pointed down through the double doors into the lit corridor beyond -’being zipped into a bag. That was my colleague. We were coming to try to help you.’
‘Were you?’
‘We didn’t want you dead. The other guy did. We were on your side. I am on your side.’
‘Nobody’s on my side,’ said Alex. ‘Not even my girlfriend.’
Girlfriend? Jeezus. Talk about self-absorbed. She let the pause ride, and picked a bit at her thumbnail.
‘Want to tell me what happened?’ she said afterwards. Bree didn’t care about the kid’s romantic problems – she had just seen two men die violently at very close quarters, and she wasn’t wanting to think very much about the likelihood that whatever killed them would kill her too. People who got close to this thing were dying.
‘No,’ said Alex. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
Once again, Bree’s mind did what it always did when traumatised: it sought refuge in the practical. Bree was thinking. She knew the police would have been called – the immediate assumption being that what had happened to Jones was a gunshot wound – and they were likely to have enough trouble with them as it was, explaining what these four people, some with guns, had been doing there in the first place.
The guard at the entrance to the emergency room was already casting the sort of glances their way that suggested he’d been briefed to prevent them walking out if they wanted to. Or was that paranoia? Red Queen would be able to calm this down. Perhaps.
‘It’s my girlfriend, see, Carey. She works here. She was a student where I go to university, in Cambridge. I’m studying for a PhD. You know about Cambridge?’
Bree let him ramble. She thought about the way Jones’s eye had looked when he was lying there in that vacant lot. Not the damaged eye – the other one. Stone grey in the iris. And that sudden sharp opening of the pupil as he came to grief.
‘Anyway, she went home. She’s American, from the West Coast. I came out to visit her and I had this idea that I… It sounds so stupid now, I know. But I thought she was it. She was… it’s hard for me to talk about this to a stranger, but…’
Came to grief. Why was it people said that?
‘I asked her to marry me. She didn’t want to, I don’t think. She sort of hesitated. No. Got to admit it. She turned me down flat. Just like that. I had a ring and everything. I came all the way here to see her.’
As if grief was there already, waiting for you. You don’t go away to it. You arrive. The boy burbled on.
‘Pretty funny. I was pretty upset at the time, but now – you know, you chalk it up to experience. It was about four hours ago, actually. I mean, I’m still pretty upset about it if truth be told. I wasn’t completely – you know, I did what you do. Went out and just left her. You can’t – you can’t recover from that, you know. But you live and learn, move on. Into every life a little rain must fall. It’s not the end of the world. It just feels -’ his voice quavered – ‘like the end of the world…’
What was Jones looking at? What was the last thing his eye saw of the world? Had he been looking at her when he died? She couldn’t remember.
Bree looked up and across the waiting area. A young black guy, lanky arms shining with sweat, was muttering and yipping. A girl in a hooded top sat with her hands folded in her lap, her lips moving silently. There was blood down one side of her face. A bulky man in a pale blue T-shirt, wedged into one of these chairs, had his right arm wound round and round with toilet roll. He was dozing, coughing out sporadic, apnoeic snores.
There was a noise. Through the door to the outside there came a man dressed in a white jumpsuit and a dark wig with extravagant sideburns holding a wad of bloodied tissue paper to his nose. He still had his sunglasses on.
Bree saw Alex look up, and something that might in another circumstance have been amusement passed across his face.
‘It’s not, honey. It’s not. Not the end of the world,’ said Bree, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. ‘Life goes on. You just feel sad for a bit. Maybe a long time. I had a husband. Marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’
‘Are you still with him?’
‘Had.’
‘What happened?’
‘He left. I wasn’t easy to be married to.’
‘Did you love him?’
‘Yes,’ said Bree, a flat matter of fact.
‘Still?’
‘No. Jolly Rancher?’
Alex frowned.
‘It’s a candy,’ Bree said. She pulled half of a stick of Jolly Ranchers from her pocket, the paper wrapper in a spiral tatter where she had been attacking them. Alex took one, unwrapped it, put it in his mouth. It clinked against his teeth like sticky glass, then started tasting of sour artificial apple. ‘My friend liked these.’
‘I’m sorry about your friend,’ Alex said. Talking was making him feel – not better, exactly. But it was like not looking down. In the back of his mind there was still this sinkhole, this gap, widening, between what he had thought his future was going to be, and what it was now.
With every passing moment, the gap got wider. It was irredeemable. Bridges crumbling and falling into the sea. Alex replayed Carey saying the one thing, the thing that was impossible: ‘Can we just forget this?’ It was done.
‘How does it get better?’ Alex said.
‘What?’ Bree had three Jolly Ranchers in her mouth and was unwrapping a fourth. The Ranchers didn’t seem to be imparting the jollity their name promised. It occurred to Alex that there was something about her – a look around her eyes? – that made him think he knew her. As if she were someone he saw often and paid little attention to, and then met in another context: like bumping into your old dinner lady in the supermarket a couple of years after you’ve left school.
‘Better,’ repeated Alex. ‘How long does it take?’
‘Long time,’ said Bree. ‘Wait. Waiting does it. Apparently.’
‘Look,’ Alex said. He dug a hand into his pocket, and half stood up, and out of his pocket he pulled a square box. ‘I even got a ring.’ He popped the box open.
Bree reached out. Her fingers were chubby, her nails bitten down. She took the ring and turned it round in her hands.
‘Pretty,’ she said. ‘The number eight. Swirly. Ah… I’m sorry, kid.’ She drew it a little closer to her eyes. ‘What’s that written in it there?’ She indicated some scratchy markings.
‘Hallmark, I think.’
‘No. Hallmark looks different. Longer. That’s just…’ Bree angled the ring in the harsh light of the waiting room. ‘ “AB” it says.’
Alex took the ring off her and looked at it more closely. It did – right up by where the band swooped into its figure-eight design. The letters had been worn almost to indecipherability by the warm friction of the finger that had once lived in the ring. Bree remembered something Red Queen had said.
‘What do those letters mean?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ he said truthfully. ‘I hadn’t noticed them. I bought the ring second-hand.’
‘Used?’
‘I bought it from an antique shop.’
Banacharski’s mother was called Ana. The letters they had intercepted had gone on and on about her. She had died.
‘You’re lying,’ said Bree.
The look Alex gave her – weariness mixed with fear – was enough to convince her that he was not. And if this was it – why show her? ‘Let me see it again,’ said Bree. She held it up to the light once more. On the leading edge, the metal seemed for an instant to have a diffracted blue light – a blur, as if it had slipped sideways in space.