CHAPTER 10
Rian
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The tape across my knuckles had gone dark in the middle and the bag was still swinging when I quit. Sweat had already gone cold down my back. I opened my right hand and the split over the third knuckle came apart again, clean.
The chain up in the ceiling mount ticked twice more and then stopped. Nothing in this place makes any noise once you stop making it yourself. The other mark on that hand is older and it’s from the day she cut me with a card.
I’d been down there since before anybody in the house was up. Call that discipline if it makes anyone feel better about me. It’s a man on a Saturday with nowhere to put his hands.
She came in barefoot with a mug in each hand. The floor out in the corridor is wool over concrete and it eats the sound of everybody except her.
She looked at the bag first, and then at my hand. “You’ve been hitting that thing since before I got up and it hasn’t hit you back once.”
“It’s not supposed to hit back. That’s the whole point of the thing.”
“How long have you been down here?”
“Since about four.” I got the tape off my left hand with my teeth and dropped it. “The house is quiet at four.”
“That’s a long time to spend hitting a bag.”
“The hitting is the easy part of being awake.” I flexed the right hand open and shut and the split showed me what it thought of that. “You’re up early yourself.”
“I stopped sleeping properly around the same night you people did.” She held one of the mugs out and waited until I took it off her. “Drink that before it goes cold on you.”
It was made the way I take it. I’ve never told a living soul in this building how I take it, not the three men I’ve stood beside for years, and I drank it standing there with the tape hanging off one hand.
“You’re not going to ask me how I knew.”
“I’m not, and you wouldn’t give it up if I did.”
Her lip had healed. The bruise that had sat on the left side of her face since the night we took her out of that building was gone, and I hadn’t seen it go, and that bothered me more than it had any business doing.
She had both hands around her own mug. The nail on her right index finger was still torn from the stairwell and it kept catching on the ceramic, over and over.
Her hair was up on the one pin she uses and half of it had come down at the back.
She has freckles across her nose that never get outside this building.
She was looking at the cord around my neck. She’d been looking at it for days, and I’d let her.
“You’ve had that on since the night you took me.” She turned the mug a quarter turn and set it down without drinking out of it. “I haven’t seen you touch it. What is it?”
I gave her a different answer to the one she asked for, which is a thing I do when the true one is standing too close to my mouth.
“They needed somebody to look at Wesley Pike and say it was him, and I was the one standing in the room.”
She set her mug down on the bench. She didn’t fill the gap up with noise, which almost everybody does, and she did nothing with her face.
“Say that again, slowly.”
“He’d been in the water a while.” I wound the tape round my fist because my fingers wanted a job. “He didn’t look like the photograph on his own retainer.”
She stopped where she was, a clear pace short of me, and I counted the pace. “Who else in this house knows?”
“Nobody knows.” I got the tape off and put it in the bin. “There was a form and I signed along the bottom of it and I never brought it up these stairs.”
Her fingertips had gone white on the bench edge. “You’ve been carrying that around this house for days and letting me talk about the man like a file.”
“I didn’t know a way to hand it to you that would land right.”
“There’s no way.” She came up onto me, taking the inch instead of giving it. “You say it in a gym with a mug in your hand and it lands badly, and every other version of it lands badly too. The only part you ever got to choose was whether I heard it from you.”
I had nothing to put after that, so I went down the corridor, which is what I do. The comms room is the smallest room on seventy-one and Matty keeps it too warm. One fan, hot dust, a chair with the left arm gone pale where his hand sits.
The street cameras were up on the wall in a grid, and the weather in them was gray with the cloud sitting down on the tops of everything. No rain. Every surface wet regardless.
Sasha came up on the channel with her consonants gone flat, which is what happens to her when she’s been at her nails.
“Kestrel Six is holding on the outer ring at the Red Hook approach.” The fan turned its head away and came back. “He’s standing off a brick warehouse conversion on the water side, and the lease runs through a risk vendor registered in Zug.”
“Say the last part again.” I was off the wall and nearer the screen than I needed to be.
“I’ve taken the lease back three times and it comes out the same.”
“This morning we had a country. Now we have a building with a door on it.” I put my back against the wall by the rack, because that’s where I stand. “Tell Kane. Owen stays out on that ring.”
“He’s asked me twice already to walk the water side. I’ve told him twice that he can’t.”
Then Owen came over his own mic with the grin already sitting in it. “Copy that. I’m parked where the coffee is bad and the view is worse.”
“Hold your distance and don’t move for a plate number, not for any plate. That holds even if the same car goes past you twice.”
“Understood. I’ll sit here being bored at you until somebody sends me down a better idea.”
I held the transmit down after I’d stopped talking. “The boring version is the one where everybody comes home and eats something later.”
I wanted to be in that car. I wanted it in my hands and my back and the soles of my feet, and there’s not much else I’ve ever wanted that hard. I stayed on seventy-one because she was on seventy-one. I put myself here on purpose and there’s nobody else to hang it on.
Matty said a thing once about being late. It’s the only true thing he’s ever said out loud in front of me, and I haven’t asked him about it.
Her room smells of laundered cotton with the paper of her legal pads underneath it. Somebody other than her had put that bed into hospital corners, and she hasn’t touched a fold of it since. There’s a patch in the plaster by the wardrobe that nobody talks about.
She was sitting on the end of the bed with a pad on her knee and she didn’t look up when I filled the doorway.
“You didn’t answer me this morning.” She put the pen down flat. “I let you have that. I’m not letting you have it twice.”
I got the cord out from under my collar and let the steel sit where she could see it. “It was my mother’s.”
Fergus had been dead eleven years.
“There was a shelter at that stop with the back panel kicked out of it.” I stayed standing. “He was nineteen. I had a brother and his name was Fergus.”
She stayed where she was on the end of the bed. “You’re telling me this backwards.”
“I’m telling you this in the wrong order because there’s no right one.”
“What was he like?”
“Loud. He was loud in the way that makes strangers decide something about you.” My hands wanted the tape again and there was no tape. “He never worked out that he was doing it.”
“I was supposed to collect him at half nine and I got there at ten past. There were lads at that stop who had never met him before that night, and it didn’t take them long.”
I didn’t look at the patch in the plaster and I didn’t look at the door either, and I always look at the door. I looked at her the whole way through, and it was like carrying something heavy out over a drop.
She said it without inflection. “And you’ve been early to everything ever since.”
“I’ve been early to everything since, and not one minute of it has given me the ten back.”
“You’ve been paying that bill every day since with the interest on top of it.”
“Don’t make it into a thing with a shape.” My voice had gone down to nothing, which is the wrong way round for me. “It’s a bus stop and a clock and a man who was somewhere else.”
She put her hand on the back of my head. Nobody has done that to me since I was a boy. I had no idea what to do with my face, so I did nothing with it, and she left her hand there until I stopped needing her to.
Her left hand went into her pocket while she was deciding something. I watched her thumb work the torn corner of that card, and then it came out again.
She stood up off the bed and touched nothing on the way. “I want you to stop being careful with me for one afternoon, and I want to be able to end it with a word.”
“Say that back to me with the number in it.” I wanted it in the room out of her mouth before it was ever out of mine.
“Rule Seven.” She held my eyes the whole way through it, standing there with her arms down at her sides. “Any hour, to any of you, about anything at all, and everything stops and nobody asks me a single question afterwards.”
“That’s it and I’ll hold it to the letter. Tell me where the line is before I get anywhere near it.”
“Nothing on my face and nothing that shows above a collar. Everything else is yours. Don’t stop halfway through to check whether I meant it, because I meant it.”
She took the brass casing out and set it on the mattress by her right hand, near enough to take without reaching. It was warm off her palm.
“If my hand opens and that comes off the bed, you’re finished. You do not get to ask me why and you do not get to finish.”
“If that comes off the bed I stop with my hands still on you. I ask you nothing at all and we’re done for the day.”
I stood her up at the foot of the bed and took her clothes off her myself, one thing at a time, and I hurried none of it, not one button and not one strap. There’s a difference between slow and gentle. She found out what that difference is with the backs of her legs against the frame.
My mouth went on her throat under the jaw and worked down to where the bone comes out at the front of her shoulder.