Pinprick (3 page)

July 2006

As the tune got into the first verse Shane noticed that everyone in the bank was looking at him. As he looked down, he realised his mobile phone was ringing. It was the song he’d assigned to his sister’s calls. He was assigning way too much importance to these things lately; everything reminded him of something else.

Damn these infernal things!
he cursed inwardly, willing it to stop ringing. On one hand he daren’t move, on the other, he didn’t want to have a direct conversation with the gunman who was now staring at him with dark eyes.

“Erm,” Shane began, as he tried to hide the slight tremor of fear in his voice, “Would you like me to put it on vibrate?”

Of all the stupid things to say.

The gunman shouted at Shane in whatever his native language was, before he remembered he was speaking to an Englishman.

“Turn the phone off!”

Shane reached slowly in to his trousers pocket and pulled out his phone. The shiny phone slipped through his sweaty palm and instead of pressing the ‘off’ button, he pressed ‘answer’. The phone landed on the floor and the whole room went silent as they heard his sister’s voice from the phone.

“Hello?” she called.

The gunman grabbed the two cloth bags of notes that the young cashier had filled for him and pointed the gun at Shane.

“Get up you! Bring the phone!”

Shane nervously got to his feet and reluctantly approached him with the phone held out.

The gun man snatched the phone from him.

“Don’t br–” Shane faltered as he eyed the gun.

The man ended the call with Catherine, turned the phone over in his hand and handed it back.

“Switch it off.”

Surprised he hadn’t smashed it or stolen it Shane did as he was told.

The gunman prodded the gun in his lower back.

“Hey!”

“Move or shoot,” He pointed at his chest and then at Shane.

Shane got the message and stepped forward, the phone still clutched in his hand. They left the bank. When they got outside the heat hit them with blinding sunlight. Squinting, Shane risked a glance at his watch. He was already fifteen minutes late for his reservation at ‘La Rana Azul’.

Half way across the road the gunman suddenly let go of him and ran full pelt through the traffic. Shane was taken aback by his sudden freedom; he stopped dead in the middle of the lane and had to dash to avoid being hit by a van.

He breathed a sigh of relief that was taken away, almost instantly, by an almighty crash. He turned towards the source of the noise and was sickened to see the bloodied body of the gunman sticking out of a car’s rear-view window. A bus had ploughed in to the back of the car and had crumpled the boot. The gunman’s lifeless eyes stared out of the interior of the car; the two bags of money lay open amidst a pool of blood that was growing rapidly. The notes blew gently in the summer breeze. Screams rent the air amid the sound of car horns and the smell of fresh blood perfumed the air. Shane rolled his eyes.

“Well, wasn’t that a waste of time?” he muttered, as he walked in the opposite direction.

Chapter Two

July 1986

Shane groaned. When he opened his eyes the lights blinded him. His vision was blurred but after a few minutes it cleared. Painfully, he moved his head to the side to look at the room he was in. It was white with two green chairs and hospital machinery either side of him.

There was no one else in the room with him. He felt so weak and when he moved everything was slow and painful. His left leg was in plaster and so was his left arm. Grazes and cuts scarred his right arm. A dull throbbing sensation in his head made him feel nauseous. He put his good arm up to his head and felt that it was bandaged; his fingers touched an area that was so sore that it made him yelp in pain. Bile rose in his throat and he leaned over the side of the bed and was violently sick. The torrent of vomit burned his dry throat as it spattered over the linoleum floor. From the corner of his eye, he saw a nurse run in and call for some assistance. She helped Shane get comfortable and gave him a bowl in case he needed to vomit again. When he spoke his voice was croaky with a dry rasp.

A little while later, his mother came in with a police officer. The police officer asked him if he remembered what happened…

July 2006

Shane arrived at ‘La Rana Azul’ twenty-five minutes late and drenched in sweat. He spotted his dinner guest immediately across the virtually empty restaurant. He smiled briefly at the woman and sat down. A waiter quickly approached him and asked if he would like something to drink. With a flourish of his hand, Shane pointed to a bottle on the wine list and concentrated on his guest. A woman three years his senior, she had dark, greying hair that was scraped back into a ponytail. She barely nodded a greeting. Shane thought she looked tired and sad, like she hadn’t slept for a few weeks.

“How are you Catherine?” Shane asked trying his best to appear to be warm. “I’m sorry I’m late; there was a hold up in the bank.”

Catherine wrung her hands and slowly looked up at him. She had known him longer than any other man in her life but he was a total stranger to her. Who was this man wearing a business suit worth more than two months of her wages?

“Hello Shane, it’s nice to see you,” She did her best to smile, to show her pristine white teeth and more importantly, to not give away the anguish beneath. Taking in his expensive suit, she hugged her arms to herself for fear that he may look patronisingly at her ‘best clothes’. She did not want to be in a restaurant this expensive, let alone one that served Spanish food.

He knew she was lying about it being nice to see him. There was no love lost between him and his sister. She represented everything he hated about country folk; their ignorance and bitterness towards the outside world, their intolerance and inability to accept new and different things and their refusal to travel outside their own county, but he knew that where Catherine was concerned there was more to it than that. The locals disliked all the things he stood for as the local country lad who made a name for himself and deserted his village for better things, but Catherine’s resentment ran deeper than that. She was jealous of his achievements and power, which gave him a way to help others. She looked down on his exciting exploits because he was leading the kind of life she had been so unfortunate to lose.

“How have John and the girls taken it?” he asked as the waiter poured some wine from the bottle in to his glass.

“Water only for me please,” Catherine addressed the waiter as she placed a delicate hand over her glass. She turned to Shane, “Who’s ‘John’ Shane?”

Shane put a hand over his face and sighed heavily. There is no John, John’s gone. Johnny’s dead.

“I’m sorry Catherine, I meant Jack. How’s Jack?”

She snorted with an ounce of triumph.

“He’s fine, you know the summer’s only just started picking up so the crops aren’t as good as we hoped for but we are getting by okay…” She paused and ran a fingertip round the rim of her glass, lost in thought for a few seconds, “I miss her–”

Her voice cracked. She looked away resolutely and wrapped her arms back around herself.

“How did it happen?”

“The doctor said it was a stroke, she was sleeping at the time.”

“She died peacefully then.”

“I suppose.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Well, she was getting on.”

“Yeah, I guess” Shane sipped his wine and quickly did the maths in his head, “She was sixty eight right?”

“Seventy one,” Catherine disagreed.

“How are the funeral arrangements?”

“Hard. We spent all of yesterday afternoon at the bank.”

“I never thought of that,” For a moment Shane thought she was going to snap at him for not being there.

“Is there anything I can do…” he hesitated, feeling awkward, “To help out, I mean?”

“I don’t know – there are the flowers to arrange.”

“Don’t worry. Where’s the shop? I’ll take a cheque over.”

She pursed her lips. He didn’t really know what the problem was. If there was something he could do to take the pressure of off her, shouldn’t he do it?

“Sure,” She looked up at him with a hard look in her eyes. “Anyway, enough of that,” she cleared her throat, “how’s work? Is it still to do with the housing projects and running around the House of Lords?”

“Yes it is, and it’s dull too; apart from the travelling of course.”

Catherine’s eyes sparkled at him once more.

“Ah yes, the travelling. I must admit to being quite touched by the postcards we receive from all the different exotic locations, Dubai, Rome and even Sydney. And it’s nice for Angela and Jennifer to read the trials and tribulations of their famous uncle, the politician, I must say.”

Shane smiled. At least his postcards surprised her. It was his way of showing he hadn’t totally forgotten them. Maybe he was a bit confused with her husband’s name, but the postcards still proved he cared.

“Yeah, the kids really look forward to receiving them and hearing about what you’ve been up to, even though I’m not sure they understand exactly what it is you do,” Catherine sipped her water and giggled gently, “and they get really excited when Mrs Davis, the lady who lives down the road, brings the cards round. She tells them the basic gist of what you’ve actually written,” Catherine raised an eyebrow at Shane.

The realisation of what she had said hit home and Shane sighed yet again.

“I’m sorry, what can I say? I’m a shit uncle; I forget your husband’s name and the number of your house. The house I once lived in. I’m sorry okay?”

Catherine smiled politely at the waiter who arrived at the table to take their order. She lowered her eyes to the menu and pointed at the ‘Aceitunas Mixtas’. Shane snatched a brief glimpse at the menu before saying, “Filetes de lubina con arroz de gambas” with ease.

They sat in silence for a few moments avoiding one another’s gaze. Shane felt uncomfortable; the closer he got back to his home town, the more the memories came flooding back. His tinnitus, something he had had since his car crash, was playing up; almost as though it knew he had returned to the place it happened. But that, Shane told himself, was ridiculous.

The whistling had been inside his head for so long now that it had become a part of him. Usually, in order to hear it, he would have to sit in total silence and concentrate hard. Now he could hear it despite the talking diners and the clink of glass and china. It made his head throb.

He watched as his sister drummed her fingers on the table in a repetitive pattern.

God my head hurts
, he thought as he watched her three fingers tapping up and down individually, in the same rhythm; the same annoying little habit that she had always had, ‘tap tap tap, tap tap tap,’ over and over again, ‘tap tap tap…

July 1986

‘…Tap tap tap, tap tap tap.’

Catherine’s chipped, hot-pink lacquered fingernails rapped on the arm of the chair. She sat with her legs curled up under her by the side of his hospital bed. The hand that was not doing its perpetual tapping was holding a thick creased paperback book. Her thin legs hung over the arm of the chair, her knees poking through her scuffed jeans, her red hair hung in ringlets over her face.

A big round clock ticked ominously, its sound the only noise in the quiet room. Shane’s mother sat in a chair to his left. Every now and then she shot him a concerned look. Shane sat propped up by pillows as he looked at the door. They had been sat in silence for the last twenty minutes.

Shane’s mother eyed the clock and occasionally shot a concerned glance at her son. They were waiting for the results of his scan.

He had been in hospital for two weeks and had started to make a speedy recovery. The only thing that concerned the doctors was the ‘whistling’ sensation that Shane said he was experiencing. The doctors had done routine tests, asked him thousands of questions and finally given him a brain scan. They said that the results would be due at three o’clock that afternoon and it was now five past. Every time they heard footsteps approaching the room they bristled, expecting a doctor to stride in and deliver bad news, but then the footsteps faded and the family relaxed.

Shane noticed that Catherine’s tapping had reached a crescendo and that she had been on the same page of her novel for the past half an hour.

An icy trickle of sweat dripped down Shane’s back as he saw the silver handle of the door swing down.

A short stocky Asian doctor came into the room, a paper file clutched in one hand. He nodded a general greeting to everyone.

“Afternoon Shane. How are you feeling?”

Shane just wanted to get the niceties over and done with. His mother’s face had taken on a morose expression. Clearly she expected something terrible; an undiscovered tumour perhaps? Catherine stared at him from over her book, fear in her blue eyes.

“Well then,” said the doctor with a smile, “Let’s get to business shall we…” as he opened the paper file and scanned the documents within. Shane wondered if he’d only just sensed the tension in the room.

“The results of your test show…”

July 2006

They sat at the table eating their meals, neither of them really caring for the expensive cuisine that had been prepared for them. The conversation had dried up almost entirely.

Shane thought about how much his sister had changed; he’d been away for too long and had become detached from the girl he once loved. He couldn’t rebuild what they once had. He just needed to focus on the reason for his visit and just get away as soon as he could. He searched his mind for some safe topic of conversation.

“So has Brantham changed much?” Shane asked already knowing the answer. Places like that never changed, they always had the same people, the inbreds, the bored teenaged yobs and the coven of busybodies.

Catherine speared an olive with her fork and smiled up at Shane.

“Oh well, there have been a lot of changes since you were last there. A lot of Hammond’s farmland was sold off a few years back to a retail developer who thought the village could do with a little more,” she tried to think of the appropriate phrase, “livening up. There’s a branch of Booksellers, a pharmacy, a baker’s and even a wine bar! As if the general store and post office isn’t enough.”

Shane was slightly amused and surprised; he could picture the rows of wrinkly-lipped old villagers queuing up with pitchforks griping about having their countryside dug up.

“Oh come now, at least it gives some of the kids somewhere to work that’s clean.”

Catherine tutted and rolled her eyes.

“Yes I suppose,” she said, “but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of hard labour. It makes people stronger–”

“Physically maybe…” Shane interrupted.

Catherine chose to ignore him.

“Although it just means that the people on the new housing development at the bottom of the village have something to do at the weekends when they’re not tearing up the roads in their big 4x4’s that don’t even see a speck of dirt. The wine bar keeps them out of the local pubs; they can flash their cards at the pretty waitresses there instead of the barmen and maids that have been working all their lives behind the bar!”

Shane was shocked at Catherine’s outburst; he sipped at his wine and was silent for a few seconds before he spoke.

“So I take it the locals don’t like the new housing development?”

“Well it’s easy to resent the people living there isn’t it? They buy the expensive houses that were built especially for them, commute to London everyday whilst their bored housewives try to fit in with the rest of us; barging into our coffee mornings and classes with their designer clothes and solarium complexions. They have no real interest in the village; it’s just somewhere quaint to live.”

Shane could see just how set in her ways his sister was. What had happened? He wished to god he could have taken her with him. He remembered what she had been like when she left school. She had been his inspiration.