Candy

  It was there.

  I knew it was there.

  I nodded my head.

  Candy said nothing. She removed her finger from my lips, leaned forward and kissed me, then turned around and headed for the door. I watched in silence as she slipped the knife inside her coat and pulled the armchair away from the door. I watched her pause for a moment, muttering quietly to herself, and then I watched in wonder as she unlocked the door, flung it open, and ran out into the clearing.

  I really didn’t know what she was doing then, and there was something of me that didn’t care, either. She was doing what she was doing. It had nothing to do with me. I was out of it now.

  I suppose I wanted to care, but the truth is, at that moment, I was out of it. Physically, emotionally, mentally… I didn’t have anything left. I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know what Candy was. I didn’t care about Mike…

  I couldn’t reason.

  I couldn’t act.

  I couldn’t connect with anything.

  I didn’t lock the front door and I didn’t call the police, I just stayed at the window and watched. Everything seemed unnaturally clear: the moon hanging high over the trees, its flattened light shining down on the clearing like a spotlight flooding the stage; the blanket of mist hugging the ground; the curtained backdrop of wooded darkness; and, in the midst of it all, Candy running toward Iggy…

  And the pistol in Iggy’s hand.

  And Gina.

  And the rest of Iggy’s crew.

  They were all out of the car now. The two from the back had moved off to one side, taking Gina with them. One of them was holding her, while the other one—the one I’d seen earlier—held a gun to her head. I couldn’t tell if the driver was armed, as he was standing behind the open car door. Iggy was about five paces in front of him…ten meters or so from the cottage. His arm was raised, his pistol pointing at Candy.

  It didn’t seem to bother her. She just kept running toward him, calling out to him, calling his name…

  “Iggy!” she sobbed loudly. “Thank God you’re here. Help me, Iggy…please… you gotta help me…”

  She was crying…

  Why was she crying?

  I watched her run up to him. I watched his eyes, watching her. They never blinked. His gun never wavered.

  “Where’ve you been?” Candy gasped, stopping in front of him. “What took you so long? Christ, I’ve been waiting—”

  “What you doing?” Iggy growled.

  “I missed you so much—”

  “You ran out on me.”

  “No, I didn’t…He made me…I didn’t want to—”

  “You shamed me, bitch. You put me down and left me.”

  “No,” she wept, moving toward him—cowering, begging, fawning. “No…please…I didn’t mean anything. Joe made me do it…he forced me. I didn’t want to hurt you. Why would I hurt you? I need you, Iggy…please…I need you…”

  He still had his pistol raised, but as Candy inched toward him, lowering herself like a wounded dog, he didn’t do anything to stop her. He didn’t hit her as she crept tearfully under his outstretched arm and buried her face in his chest. He didn’t move as she put her arms around him. He didn’t do anything. He didn’t need to; he had what he wanted.

  “I’m dying, Ig,” I heard her say, rubbing her hands all over him. “I really need—”

  “Shut up,” he told her, turning his eyes and the barrel of the gun toward me. “Who’s in the house?”

  “I just need a little—”

  His eyes didn’t move as his free hand whipped down and cracked into the side of her head. She flinched but didn’t let go of him.

  “Who’s in the house?” he repeated.

  “Just the kid,” she said dismissively. “He’s on his own.” She rubbed her head and looked up at him. “Please, Iggy…I really need a hit. Have you got any stuff?” Her hands started moving over his shirt. “Please…? I’m dying…”

  “Does it hurt?” he asked coldly.

  “Yeah…”

  “Good. Now get in the car. I’ll deal with you later.” He took his eyes off her and waved the gun at me. “I got business to attend to—I got smiles to cut.”

  “You like a smile?” Candy said quietly.

  It was the voice I remembered from the station—sweet and clear, like a shining jewel in the gutter—only colder. A lot colder. She breathed ice, the words of a ghost, and—for a timeless moment—everything froze. Iggy’s eyes, the mist, the night…

  Candy’s devil…

  Iggy’s heart…

  The two of them stilled in the moonlight.

  And then her hand swung up in a silvered arc and she buried the knife in his throat.

  epilogue

  I told the police afterward that I didn’t remember anything after Candy had left the cottage. From the moment she flung open the door and ran out into the clearing to the moment the local police turned up…my mind was a blank. I couldn’t remember a single thing. I’m not sure if they believed me or not—and I didn’t really care. I told them everything else. I answered their questions—what, when, who, where, how, why—over and over again. It wasn’t difficult. They asked me what happened; I told them what happened. They asked me again; I told them again…

  Why not?

  There wasn’t any point in lying. If they didn’t get the truth from me, they’d get it from someone else. Gina would tell them. Mike would tell them. Forensics would tell them.

  So I answered their questions. I cooperated with them. I gave them what they wanted: details, names, addresses, descriptions…my cell phone, my shoes, my fingerprints, my DNA…

  I gave them a statement.

  Why not?

  None of it meant anything.

  Even if I was lying about how much I remembered…

  Which I wasn’t.

  Not entirely.

  Even now, I’m not sure what happened to me when Candy stuck the knife in Iggy’s throat. I know she did it…The memory’s there. I can see myself standing at the open window…the moon hanging high over the trees…I can feel the hush of violence, sucking the air from my lungs…I can see the silent flash of the blade…slicing through the dark…

  But then something happens inside my head. Something shuts down, some unknown part of me, and my senses aren’t mine anymore.

  Time stops.

  Iggy doesn’t move a muscle. He doesn’t fall, he doesn’t flinch, he doesn’t make a sound. He just stands there in the deadening silence, with the knife embedded deep in his throat…and his vacant eyes fixed on mine…and the gun still gripped in his hand…and something inside me is thinking distantly of stone black giants and deathless souls and nightmare beasts that refuse to die…

  But then it happens: Iggy breaks.

  A crack appears in his death-mask face…a faint look of surprise, the child in his eyes, a momentary shiver of fear…and at last he’s human. Ready to die. His eyes glaze over, his giant frame shudders, and he slumps to his knees in the mist.

  Time starts again.

  I have no feelings. I’m just hoping to God he’s human enough to die.

  I have no attachment to what I can see—Candy stooping down and ripping the gun from Iggy’s dead hand. Movement at the car—the driver behind the open door. Candy straightening up and leveling the pistol at him. The driver’s frozen face, the half-raised gun in his hand…the flash of flame, the dull crack, the muffled thud…

  I know that Candy’s shot him, but it doesn’t mean a thing. I’m just watching him go down, bleeding from the chest…and then I’m watching Candy as she lowers the gun and turns her attention to the other two men…the two from the back of the car…the two with Gina.

  One of them still has a gun to her head.

  Candy doesn’t care.

  “It’s over,” she tells them, her voice a dream. “There’s nothing left.”

  The two men look at each other.

  Candy starts walking toward
them, holding the gun at her side. “The police are on their way,” she says. “If you leave now, you might just make it. If you shoot the girl, you’re dead. If you try taking her with you, you’re dead.” She stops in front of them. “What’s it to be?”

  Moments pass, silent and dark…and then Gina is sitting alone on the ground and the two men are backing away toward the car. Candy is watching them all the way. I’m watching them, too. They’re helping the wounded driver into the back of the car…they’re shutting the doors…they’re getting in the car and starting it up and reversing around the clearing…and now I’m watching Candy again as she watches them driving away…up the lane…through the woods…the glow of the taillights reddening the mist…and she doesn’t stop watching until the lane is dark and there’s nothing left to see.

  Another moment passes…and now Candy is done. With a silent sigh, she sinks to the ground and sits in deadness beside Gina. They look at each other for a second, then they both close their eyes and bow their heads to the moon.

  That’s what I have inside me, and that’s where it’s staying. I suppose I could have tried explaining it all to the police, and maybe I should have, but I didn’t know how.

  How do you explain that what’s in your mind isn’t yours?

  Or why you didn’t do anything?

  How do you explain that even when you did do something, the only memories you have are the secondhand memories of someone else…of a slow-motion boy with tears in his eyes, helping two girls into a cottage? How do you explain that you can feel the coldness of their skin on his hands, that you can feel his eyes shutting out the corpse on the ground, seeing stone black mountains in the mist? That you can feel his time passing…his sensed little things…hot drinks, blankets, movement, faces…Mike on his feet, smiling at Gina through the blood…Mike and Candy…Mike and the boy…Candy’s ghost…Mike outside…Mike on the phone…

  Sirens and lights and squealing wheels…

  The midnight police, taking everybody away…

  How do you explain all that?

  A lot happened in the next few months, most of which I don’t want to talk about. It was nothing—just stuff: Dad stuff, me stuff, more police stuff…there was even a bit of Mum stuff for a while, but that didn’t last very long. Nothing lasted very long. The days just passed, as they do—days, weeks, endless months—and gradually things started settling down.

  Gina slowly got better. The doctors kept her in the hospital for a couple of days, but the drugs that Iggy had sedated her with hadn’t done any lasting damage. Once they’d been flushed from her system and she’d had time to rest, she was physically as good as new. Emotionally, though…well, that was something else.

  We talked a lot.

  We held each other a lot.

  We sat with each other and cried.

  And when I wasn’t there, she always had Mike. Out of all of us, I think he was the least affected by everything. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe he was just better at hiding his feelings, but it seemed to me that—apart from the stitches in his head—he was barely scarred at all. He just dusted himself down and got on with things.

  I wish I could say the same about myself.

  I did my best—or perhaps I didn’t…but I did what I could to accept things as they were. It was impossible, though. Without Candy, nothing seemed to have any meaning. I just wanted to see her, that’s all…or at least find out what was happening to her. But no one would tell me anything. All the police would say was that she’d been arrested and charged and released on bail and that I wasn’t allowed to see her as I’d probably be called as a witness at her trial.

  Dad was even less forthcoming. Even if he had known where Candy was—which I’m not sure he did—he’d never have told me. He hated her. Despised her. He wouldn’t so much as mention her name. As far as he was concerned, everything that happened was down to her. It was all her fault—she’d seduced me, she’d put Gina’s life at risk, she’d messed up his family…and he refused to listen when I tried to tell him otherwise.

  I didn’t really blame him.

  He was wrong, of course…and bigoted and blind and stupid—but I couldn’t hold that against him. Not for long, anyway. Not after everything I’d put him through. He was my dad…

  And that was that.

  So, in the end, I turned to Mike for help. I didn’t want to go behind Dad’s back, but by then I hadn’t seen Candy for nearly four months…and I knew I couldn’t stand it anymore. I was living in a void. Living and dying inside my head. Thinking about her, picturing her, trying to remember what she was like…

  That was all the world I had.

  And it wasn’t enough.

  I needed to see her…I had to see her.

  I’m not sure how Mike managed it—and I’m not sure he wanted to—but a couple of weeks later I was sitting at a garden table, in the shade of a high brick wall, waiting anxiously for Candy to appear. It was a Sunday, the first week in July, about two o’clock in the afternoon. The sky was bright with the electric blue haze of a perfect summer’s day. Birds were singing. Small flies were swarming in the air, pulsing in the sunlight, and away at the end of the garden, through an open window in a tan brick building, I could hear the comforting sounds of someone at work in a kitchen—rattling pots and pans, hissing urns, low voices…

  The window was barred.

  I looked around the garden. It was a small square of lawned grass, surrounded by an old brick wall. There wasn’t much to look at. A few more tables and chairs, some flowering shrubs, a couple of trees…

  No people.

  Just me.

  I looked over at the building again. It was exactly the same as all the other buildings in the complex—a single-story structure with a gray slate roof and a dark blue door. There were six buildings in all—I’d seen the entire complex when I’d arrived: six brick bungalows, a couple of acres of mesh-fenced fields, a driveway, a courtyard, a parking lot at the front…

  Just outside the entrance, a discreet wooden sign with small gold lettering said: THE MELVILLE-DEAN RESIDENT ADOLESCENT UNIT.

  “I’m not sure what kind of place it is,” Mike had told me. “Gina would probably know, but I don’t want her getting involved in this. As far as I can tell, Candy’s been there since she was released on bail.”

  And that was about all I knew. I didn’t know what a Resident Adolescent Unit was. I didn’t know why she was here. I didn’t know what went on behind those walls…behind those metal bars…

  I was looking at them now, recalling another time…crouching in the bushes, watching the white house…the black-barred windows. I remembered again how I’d found myself curiously drawn to the bars…how I couldn’t stop staring at them…studying them…concentrating on their regularity…the black lines, the width of the gaps, the background whiteness of the curtains…and how, after a while, the lines had begun forming themselves into a perfectly focused grid, black on white, black on white, black on white…and I’d started having really weird thoughts…imagining my chaos distilling itself into clearly defined elements, each embedded in its own neatly outlined rectangle…one, two, three, four, five, six…six perfect rectangles…and how, inside the rectangles, there were symbols…elements…nameless shapes of things I didn’t understand—shadows, shades, abstractions, forms—flickering colors on a pure white background…

  None of it meant anything to me.

  Then or now.

  It was just there.

  But now the blue door was opening—and now was now—and a woman was leading Candy out of the building…

  And everything else was nothing.

  The woman with Candy was carrying a slim black briefcase. She had short mousy hair and an angular face, and I think she was wearing some kind of trouser suit…but I can’t really remember. I barely looked at her.

  I only had eyes for Candy.

  It took me a while to see her at first. For a moment or two, all I could see was how plain she looked—plain blue jeans, plain bla
ck sweatshirt, no makeup, no jewelry…no lipstick, no mascara, no bracelets, no leather. No life, no spark, no smile. She wasn’t Candy anymore. She was someone else, someone who used to be Candy…

  But then I looked closer, looking for the stuff that really matters, and instead of not seeing what I expected to see, I saw what was actually there. And that was Candy. It was Candy all over—her face, her lips, her cheeks, her eyes, the shape of her body…her pale white skin…the gleam of her chestnut hair…

  Nothing had changed.

  She still looked stunning.

  As the woman led her across the garden, I could feel all the familiar stirrings inside me—the beat of my heart, the race of my blood, the rush of adrenaline tingling my skin…

  Nothing had changed.

  I watched them getting closer. I could hear their footsteps on the sun-baked grass. Candy was walking with her head bowed down and her eyes fixed firmly to the ground. The woman was staying close to her, guiding her along with a careful hand on her back.

  The air was thick…

  They were a few steps away from the table…

  I couldn’t breathe…

  They stopped in front of me.

  I looked up at Candy. She didn’t look back.

  “Kevin Williams?” the woman said.

  I didn’t reply.

  “Are you Kevin Williams?” she asked again.

  “Uh…yeah,” I mumbled, still looking at Candy.

  “Are you all right?” the woman asked me.

  “Sorry,” I said, turning to her. “Yes…yes, Kevin Williams…I’m fine.”

  She held out her hand. “Louise Hammett,” she said. “I’m the Senior House Officer.” I stood up and shook her hand. She said, “Dr. Davies has already had a word with you, I believe?”

  “Yeah, I saw him on the way in.”

  “Good.” She glanced at Candy, got no response, then looked back at me. “Well, I’ll leave you to it, then. I’ll be just over there if you need anything.” She indicated a table on the other side of the garden. “OK?”