Always (29 page)

“Scrambled eggs.”

“Other eggs?”

“Any eggs. Especially boiled. And milk smells terrible. I’ve been drinking my tea without.”

“Butter?”

“Not good.”

“In what way?”

“Sulfur and smoke.”

“Fish?”

“Some are fine. Some aren’t.”

“But fruit is good.”

“Yes. Not all vegetables.”

She was nodding again. A wisp of hair slid gracefully from its clip. “Like broccoli.”

“Yes. How did you know that?”

She brushed aside the question, briskly, impersonally, like a doctor.
This isn’t about me, it’s about you.
“I have some ideas about what might taste good. Though, hmmm, is it the taste or the smell?” She was talking mostly to herself.

“Everything would taste better if I could find whoever did this and bang their head on the wall.”

She laughed. “That sounds like you mean it.”

I shrugged. “It’s what I do.”

“I thought you owned things.”

“That, too.”

The stripes in her trousers flared and stretched from waist to hip, ran in muscled lines down her thighs. Someone brushed by me. I turned, glad of the distraction. Peg and Joel, carrying milkshakes, laughing for a change. Behind them was Bri, the bony-faced teenager, and his friend, with greasy paper sacks. His brother was dying, and he could still eat.

“Fast food,” Kick said, misinterpreting my look. “No one even drinks my coffee anymore.”

“Then why do you stay?”

“Because I’m stubborn. They won’t be willing to eat fast food forever. And the minute they change their mind, I’ll be ready.”

“All right. How about now?”

She looked me up and down, raised her eyebrows. I nodded. “Okay, then.” She took off the fan, dropped it on the counter, and busied herself with the urn. “It’ll take a minute to make fresh.”

“No cream.”

“No cream.”

People were flowing back in. Cool air eddied from the door and the ceiling. Once she had the coffee on, she got a can of soda from the fridge. Instead of popping it open, she ran it across her forehead and the inside of her wrists.

I laid my hand on hers. “Not the wrist.” Her hand was so small. “Lots of nerves in the wrist and the side of the neck. If you put something cold there for long enough, those nerves will send a message to the rest of the body saying, Hey, it’s cold out here, and all the peripheral blood vessels will close to preserve heat. Those blood vessels are what dissipate heat. So if they close, you won’t cool down. Here.” She let me take the can. I ran it slowly down the outside of her arms, smearing condensation over her smooth skin. I took her hands, one by one, rubbed the can over the backs then palms, tilted her chin, followed the curve and hollow of her face, slid the can to the back of her neck.

She looked up at me. “It was good, what you did with that rent-a-cop. Just leading him out without fuss. Maybe you just act nicer when you wear a dress.” I didn’t say anything. “You said last week that you wanted my help.”

“Yes.”

“Let’s trade. I talk to you, I get you as my food guinea pig.”

“All right.”

“Then come to my house for dinner. Supper. Nine o’clock. You know where it is.”

“Yes.” I brought the can back to her cheek. Moisture from the can trickled down her neck, as far as her collarbones, which rose and fell, rose and fell. I wondered if the water would still be cool or whether it would have warmed running down her skin. “If you really want to stay cool, you should wet your hair. The heat generated by your head will dry it, and the evaporation will cool you down.”

“What are you doing?”

We turned. Dornan. Holding a red-cardboard-bound script.

Kick stepped away and took the can from me in one smooth move. “She’s telling me to go soak my head, in the nicest possible way.” She put the soda back in the fridge, got herself a bottle of water.

“You should use the fan I got you.” Kick pretended not to hear him.

“Is that the script?” I said.

“What? Oh, yes. Here.” He held it out. “You should read it.”

The air conditioner fell silent.

I hefted the script in one hand. Nine o’clock. “I’m going back to the hotel,” I said to him. “I’ll give you a ride.”

“Oh, I think I’ll stay awhile,” he said. “But thanks.”

OUTSIDE, IT WAS STILL OVER SEVENTY DEGREES. INSIDE, THE BASEMENT AIR-
CONDITIONING unit set in the wall rattled like a garbage disposal with a spoon stuck in it. I turned it off. It would get hot. Tough.

I handed out the five polystyrene weapons and lined the women up opposite their unarmed partners.

“A lot of us are scared when we face an edged weapon—a big knife, a broken bottle, a razor. If and when that ever happens to you, the first thing you do is breathe, the way we learnt two weeks ago. Do it now.” They did. In. Out. “Now that you’re sure you won’t pass out, the next step is to demystify the weapon. Look at the weapon—Tonya’s bottle, Kim’s bread knife, Sandra’s razor, Suze’s ice pick, Jennifer’s KA-BAR—and ask yourself: Why is your attacker carrying a weapon in the first place? To boost their confidence? To instill fear in you, his victim? To hide behind it in some way? Then you ask yourself what the potential power of the weapon is. How sharp at the tip? Is it edged? How long is it? What kind of damage can it do? So, for example, an ice pick isn’t very long, and it’s not much use for slashing or bludgeoning, but it’s great for stabbing.”

Suze gave Kim a superior look.

“And Kim’s bread knife,” I said to her, “while it might not be very sharp, nor have a stabbing point, can be used, with sufficient force, to take your nose, or your head, right off.”

They nodded, but they had no notion of the sheets—the rivers, the lakes—of blood, or how much muscle it took to saw through flesh and then bone.

They were waiting for me to continue. I forced myself back into their southern lady shoes.

Suze’s ice pick was traditionally a tool of men, or sexually predatory women in the movies. A bread knife was a tool of the home and hearth, something they handled every day, or that their mothers, at least, had. Not hard to guess which these women found more frightening.

“Next you have to ask yourself how expert the attacker is likely to be with the weapon. We’ve already seen how difficult many of them can be to wield. Bear in mind that very few people are experts with things like razors or bread knives or ice picks. Remember that a weapon has no power of its own. It depends entirely on its user.” And the magic the victim invests in it.

“What’s the point of all this thinking?” Pauletta said.

“Assessment. You can’t know what to do in any situation until you’ve assessed it. Keep your eye on the weapon and remember: It’s just a tool. Not magic.”

None of them looked as though she believed me.

“Once you’re breathing, we go on to other questions: What does your attacker want? Will you be in more or less danger in a few minutes? Pick your moment to act. When you do act, begin with a distraction.”

“Wait,” Pauletta said. “Can we go back to the part about—”

“I’ll take questions later. An attacker with a weapon will be concentrating on that weapon. It will be a kind of talisman, a psychological crutch. The armed attacker’s focus will be very narrow indeed.”

“I’m getting lost here,” Pauletta said.

“Sandra, give Pauletta your razor. Pauletta, come and stand here. Threaten me with the razor. Sandra, where were you, as the attacker?”

“Getting my oil changed.”

“And what did you want from Pauletta?”

“To make her weep,” Sandra said matter-of-factly.
Weep.
Very biblical. Very melodramatic.
I’m special,
her tone implied.
My life is worse than anyone here can possibly imagine. Except you, of course.
But I was tired of her nonsense.

“All right,” I said to Pauletta, who was staring at Sandra. “We’re in a garage. Pauletta, you’re going to try and make me weep.”

“I don’t . . . Okay.” She waved the polystyrene self-consciously. “Kneel down, bitch. Kneel right here.”

“Okay,” I said, putting my hands up in the universal “Hey, whatever you say” gesture. “Just tell me what you want.”

“I’m gonna make you cry.” Her hand went to an imaginary zipper. Always the same. Too many movies. “Get on your knees.”

“Right,” I said, pretending to be about to go down on one knee, and then started to retch.

“Eeeuw!”
Pauletta said, and stepped back.

“There. That’s a distraction. Other distractions could include picking your nose . . .”

“Gross!”

“. . . drooling, shouting, acting like a crazy person. The point is to break your attacker’s vision of the event. Don’t let him orchestrate. Don’t, ever, buy into his world.” They weren’t getting it. “In this instance, as soon as my attacker gestured towards his fly, it was clear he wanted close personal contact. He was having some kind of power and sex fantasy. Vomit has probably never figured in them. Vomit is visceral: wet and hot and stinking. Nothing like the vision he’s been constructing for months, years, decades. The point of vomiting or picking your nose is to break his vision of you. You are not a victim. Don’t act like one.”

Jennifer looked as though she wanted to cry. Tonya seemed confused. “Which part don’t you understand?”

“Me, I don’t understand why you’re so pissy today,” Nina said.

“Pauletta wanted to ask a question earlier and you just steamrollered over her.”

“Yeah,” Pauletta said.

It was true. I didn’t want to be here, in the closed basement. I wanted to be outside, bare feet in the grass, breathing fresh air. But I had agreed to teach these women. No one else would. “I apologize. Pauletta, what was your question?”

“I was wondering, when you said you have to know what they want and pick your moment to act. What did you mean? How do we know what he wants?”

“Yeah,” Nina said. “You said no one is a mind-reader.”

“That’s right. No one is a mind-reader. You don’t have to be. With an attacker with a weapon, you most probably won’t even have to ask. Just listen.”

They were nodding even before I could explain, taking my word for it. I said, “Most attackers who arm themselves do it because they’re nervous. If they’re nervous, they’re very likely to be verbal. They’ll be talking from the first second they threaten you: ‘Give me your purse, lady, give me your purse, put the fucking purse on the ground,’ and so on. That’s the simple situation; if someone says that, nine times out of ten the best thing to do is to give them the purse and they’ll go away. But you can’t always trust what someone is saying. For example, if your attacker is saying, ‘Don’t scream, don’t say a word, I’m not going to hurt you, keep quiet and I won’t hurt you,’ you might not want to believe them, because, generally, if someone is saying something over and over again, it’s for a reason. It means they’re thinking about it.”

“Even if they’re saying the opposite thing?” Kim sounded more puzzled than skeptical.

“Yes. You’ll be able to tell the difference.”

“How?”

“You will know. You’ll feel it.” The body always knows. “Feeling it, knowing it, is the easy part. The hard part is trusting that knowledge and acting on it.”

“I don’t understand,” Therese said.

“It’s women’s intuition,” Katherine said.

Suze snorted.

“Women’s intuition makes it sound like magic, and it’s not. In reality such knowledge, a visceral understanding of a situation—you could even say empathy itself—is based on a biological system. Your mirror neurons.”

They looked perfectly blank.

“Tonya, you and Suze and Christie, go get me three of those chairs, and, Pauletta and Nina, bring the bench. Chairs here, bench here, as though these are stools by a bar. Sandra, bring me my satchel, please, then sit opposite me. Therese, you sit there, you’re drinking quietly, idly watching me and Sandra talking while we drink.” I rummaged in the satchel, found a big flat-ended Magic Marker, and set it on the bench so that it stood up. “Imagine Sandra and I have shot glasses and this”—I gestured at the marker—“is a bottle of whiskey. We’re just drinking and talking. Everyone is relaxed. We’re talking quietly. Therese can’t hear a thing we’re saying.” I leaned confidentially towards Sandra, and she adopted a matching pose. “I pick up the bottle, like so, to pour. Then suddenly I stiffen, and start to hold the bottle differently.” When I changed my grip Sandra swayed slightly: a sudden, instinctual urge to move backwards, out of harm’s way, negated by her conscious mind. “What’s going on? Therese?”

“I don’t know.”

“Trust your first instinct.”

“Looks like you’re about to slam that bottle across his, her face.”

“Anyone disagree?”

None of them was ready to commit, either way, though it was clear from their body language—tilted heads, hands clasped in the small of the back—that they knew what Therese knew, they just didn’t understand how they knew and they weren’t ready to say so.

“Therese is exactly right. I was getting a better grip, getting ready to break this bottle on Sandra’s face. You all knew that, instinctively.” Sandra in particular, but she had also learnt from long experience not to fight back because she was never going to make her defiance permanent, never going to run away and get to safety, and in the long run, the more she resisted, the worse her beating would be. “You saw the way I changed grip, and the act of watching me do that triggered a cascade of signals in your inferior parietal cortex.”

And I’d thought they’d looked blank before.

“You’ve probably all seen the way children imitate things to understand them. They’ll pretend to roll out a pie crust right along with you, they make noises and pretend to change gears as you drive. This happens in your brain, too. When we see someone pick up a bottle, a whole set of nerve fibers, called mirror neurons, pretend to be picking up the bottle, too. Whether you’re actually picking up the bottle or just watching someone do it, those neurons fire in the same pattern. Your body understands intimately how it feels. So when I shift grip, your brain shifts grip, too. And these mirror neurons are hooked into your limbic system, to the part of your brain that handles emotions. So your brain knows what it means when I’m turning the bottle like that. You know, deep down, in that intuitive part of you, what’s going on, in a way that your conscious mind probably doesn’t.”