The Killing Lessons (36 page)

He aimed a final kick at the old man’s head (felt, through his boot, the strange little detail of a bone cracking), watched his eyes close, then turned and mounted the porch steps to the cabin’s front door.

There was no one in the living room. The stove fire was going and the oil lamps were lit. The big shadows wobbled. There was a smell of fried food. The red North Face jacket that had been waiting for the door to show it to him. He tightened his grip on the pistol. He was getting used to using his left hand.

The two other rooms – one with only broken crates in it and the other a cramped bathroom – were empty.

He went back into the living room. Looked in the cupboards, behind the couch. Nothing. He returned to the empty room. A wooden door at the far end. She was out back. There was no other explanation. He could feel the seconds catching fire as they passed, the heat of time burning away. The relief he’d felt only moments ago was already starting to back up in his veins.

The door opened onto a short, roofed wooden porch and small wire-fenced yard beyond it, knee-deep in untouched snow. A solitary bare tree a few feet away, a rotten bird-house nailed to its trunk. Untouched snow.
No footprints
. But there was nowhere else she could be. For a crazy moment he convinced himself that she was hiding
in
the snow. He had a brief vision of himself digging in it with his hands. But she would have left tracks. How the fuck could there be no tracks? He started to get hot again. Fuck.
Fuck
.

The old man must’ve hidden her somewhere. Maybe there was a place he’d missed, a trapdoor in the floor, a crawl-space under the goddamned porch…

He ran back through the cabin to the front, grabbed the old man with his good hand and dragged him inside.

Nell almost stopped. There was a point – the point she’d known would come – when she didn’t believe she could do what needed to be done. She’d got her knees onto the handrail, holding the upright for balance. She’d got her hands in the pitched roof’s gutter. But in order to get her good foot onto the hanging basket bracket she had, for a moment at least, to let her bad one take some of her weight. That was what she didn’t believe she could do. She kept hearing Angelo saying, I’m pretty sure your ankle’s broken…’ The words ‘ankle’s broken’ had a feel of breakage themselves. She tried to imagine how bad the pain would be. There was a TV ad for Tylenol that featured a transparent CGI athlete, running, his skeleton and nerves visible, blue lightnings shooting up them to represent pain. She could feel preparatory lightnings in her teeth already. Advil was like Tylenol, she supposed. And though the strange, sleepy numbness had spread from her teeth through the rest of her, it was as if her ankle was telling her that wouldn’t be enough. Nowhere near enough.

Don’t think about it.

She pulled as hard as she could with her arms, and lifted her left leg.

Her mouth closed over the scream. She felt it in the bones of her skull. Her eyes closed. For a second or two she thought this was death. Everything disappeared except the pain. Total blackness. There was nothing but the pain.

Her left foot found the bracket. Slipped from it. Found it again.

Even with her weight transferred her ankle kept sending the lightnings. It kept sending the lightnings because it wanted her to know that she must never, ever do that again. It was a transgression for which the punishment had to be so extreme as to prevent her ever repeating the offence. She felt weight
less
, as if she were going to faint.

A long time seemed to pass in which there was nothing she could do but keep still, receiving the pain. Her right leg hung useless. Her ankle was heavy. She thought its own weight would tear it from her leg.

But she had her head and shoulders above the edge of the roof now. The snow in front of her was three or four feet deep. She would freeze to death. Josh had told her that the last thing you felt if you froze to death, your last sensation, was that you were blissfully warm. She could believe it. Her head was warm now. That wouldn’t be so bad.

The next manoeuvre was the same as when you had to haul yourself over the edge of a swimming pool.

Not the ankle, this time. The ribs.

She would do this one final thing, she thought, this one final horror to herself, and if the pain didn’t kill her, she would lie down in the snow and wait to feel warm for the last time.

Cold water crashed on Angelo’s face. He woke up, gasping. He was lying on his back by the stove, hands and feet bound with snap plastic restraints. The guy in the windbreaker stood over him holding the saucepan he’d used to drench him. He set it down on the stove and took a white-handled fish knife from the back of his jeans. The cabin door was closed and bolted now. Inexplicably, there were three or four shopping bags on the table. A pineapple was visible poking out of one of them. More bizarrely, the neck of a violin. In spite of himself Angelo thought of Christmas shopping, gifts waiting their wrapping.

‘Where is she?’ the guy said.

‘Who?’

Without warning and with astonishing precision the guy bent, yanked up Angelo’s left pant leg and drew the knife quickly over the exposed calf. Angelo screamed.

‘I can do that for hours.’ With his bandaged hand he picked up Nell’s red jacket. ‘Where is she?’

‘She’s gone,’ Angelo said. ‘She was here, but she’s gone.’

The guy dropped the jacket and cut Angelo’s calf a second time. Deeper.

Angelo screamed again. ‘Fuck, stop, please stop! I’m not lying. Listen to me. For God’s sake listen to me. She was here, three days ago, but she— No, don’t! Wait!’

He lifted Angelo’s sweater, knife poised. ‘Stop! Listen! She was—’

A sound froze both of them.

Unidentifiable. Some giant groan from above.

The two of them in shared suspense. Children interrupted in the middle of something they shouldn’t be doing.

Snow. Shifting. On the roof.

A chunk that sounded the
size
of the roof sheared off, slid, crashed behind the cabin.

A second absurd pause in which they shared the decoding.

Then the guy in the windbreaker looked down at Angelo. It was a moment of purity. Of knowledge. Sylvia was very close. Not speaking. Just radiating love like heat from a blast furnace.
It’s out of my hands
, Angelo thought, as the knife caught the light.
Wherever you are, my love, I’ll find you.

A slab of snow shifted beneath Nell, fell, crashed below. She knew she had to move. There was only one place to go. Up.

She could barely feel the pain. The pain was like a sound coming from a room many locked doors away. The wind raced over her face. A strand of her wet hair was in her mouth. She felt sleep like a weight on her. She pulled herself forwards up the roof’s incline on her elbows. Her body was very far away from her. She drifted free of it, watched herself from above. The sight looked familiar, as if she’d dreamed it long ago, or lived it in a life before this one. As if the sole purpose of this life was to lead her back to this scene, to bring her home to her beginning. The golden hare morphed next to her, then vanished.

‘Where are you going?’ the man’s voice said.

She turned her head. He was standing where she had stood, on the handrail, his forearms resting comfortably on the back porch roof, though the blizzard swirled around him. He looked like someone waiting patiently at a hotel reception desk.

She kept going. Her sweater had ridden up. Her bare belly was pressed against the snow. It didn’t seem odd that she couldn’t feel the cold. It seemed, in fact, like the most natural thing in the world. The apex of the roof was three feet away. But she knew when she reached it that would be the last of her strength gone. When she reached it, she thought, she would close her eyes and never open them again.

‘There’s nowhere for you to go,’ he called out to her. He sounded friendly, as if he were good-naturedly indulging her in what he knew was an amusing waste of time.

‘Well, I guess I’ll have to come up there,’ he said.

She couldn’t reach the apex. Her arms were finished. It irritated her, vaguely, that it was so close but still beyond her. It was like a minor job left annoyingly unfinished. In a last, half-hearted attempt, she bent her left leg under her and tried to push herself up onto her knee. It would be good at least to see over the top, to look out over the ravine and across into the woods, towards home.

She did get one glimpse over the summit, though in the chaos of snow there was nothing to see. She felt her hair streaming out behind her and her mother close by her side. She turned her head to smile at her, to tell her that she loved her.

Then something went out from under her. She fell.

She almost got past him. She came slithering down on her belly in a soft-roaring mass of sliding snow. If he’d missed she’d have had enough momentum to carry her off the edge of the porch and into the yard’s smooth white drift below.

But he didn’t miss.

The moment his fingers closed around her wrist was a perfection to him. He’d been waiting for it for such a long time.

You’re dying
, Angelo thought.
Here it is
.
Je vais chercher un grand peut-être
, as Rabelais had said.
I go in search of a big perhaps
. It comforted him, that his life contained such memories, so much of the best and loveliest that had been said, though now that it had come to it he knew that it didn’t count for much, that we knew nothing, even via our grandest intimations. Sylvia was gone. There was nothing of her with him now except an intuition. The kind of intuition you might have on entering a still, quiet room in which someone had left you their last words, in a note. It seemed right to him, that you were obliged to make the last part of the journey, the
very
last part, alone. He felt peaceful. He smiled.

But there was the child. It was a terrible counter-force, that she was still alive, that
her
life was about to end. It was a wretched connection, as yet unsevered, to the world he knew he must leave. The great physical temptation, a seduction in his veins, was to yield. He would be dead soon – minutes, seconds – so why not just let go, let be? His contract with the world was being – moment by racing moment – unwritten. What difference did it make whether the child lived or died? What difference did it make if the entire universe ceased when he drew his last breath? Why was it still his responsibility?

He smiled again. There was a new equation: All fear was, in the end, fear of death. Once you knew you were dying, there was nothing left to fear. It gave you the last great gift: infinite courage.

He sat up. It was the simplest thing in the world: he would use what little allowance he had left. It was hopeless. It was – he imagined God chuckling – ridiculous, but he would make it his last project to go on until he could go on no longer. He was fascinated by it himself. How much longer
could
he go on? It was a surreally titillating question.

His hands were tied. That would have to change. He laughed. His inner tone now was of a new no-nonsense but benign headmaster entering a hopeless school.
This won’t do, not having the use of your hands
.

He opened the stove door. There was the fire. There were the flames. Here were his tied hands. How long would it take? What was the melting temperature for tough plastic? At what point did first-degree burns become second-degree, then third?

He knew he couldn’t do it. And that he had to.

It was impossible. So he would do it, because there was nothing else, and because he had the strength to do it.

He would fail. The failure was already there. It filled his whole being. He wouldn’t be able to stand it. He had no time. He knew he couldn’t do it.

So he would do it.

He raised his hands. The flames shivered. The heat was already close to unbearable. The thought defeated his imagination.

It took the certainty of death, perhaps, to bring out the brain’s full talents. Because without the licking flames and the heat and the defeated imagination and the pain and the guarantee of failure and the levity and the infinite courage that was all but indifference, without any and all of these things, perhaps, he would never have remembered the axe.

He’d thought it would alarm Nell to see it when she woke up.

So he’d slid it under the stove.

It was going to be all right, Xander thought. He was exhausted. Carrying the girl in (she was unconscious by the time he’d grabbed her at the roof’s edge) had set his hand off again. His shoulders ached and his skin was heavy and damp. But it was going to be all right. He had her and he had the things he needed. He was fixing what needed to be fixed. After this, he would be back on track. He would go somewhere far away for a little while (he had a very clear vision of himself sitting alone on a warm beach in the evening sun) and get it clear in his head what he had to do next. He would recover his strength and find someone to fix his hand. Things had almost got away from him, but he’d gathered them back. He would deal with this, and then he would go to the warm beach and sleep for a long, peaceful time on the sand.

He entered the living room and stopped. The door was open and snow was blowing in.

He didn’t understand it. He couldn’t have been more than five minutes.

But the old man was gone.

It took an extraordinary effort of will for Angelo not to cut the ties on his hands first. But in the micro-time of these moments his brain had become a scrupulous high-speed realist:
You only have seconds. You can move without the use of your hands, but not without the use of your legs.
So he’d cut through the plastic binding his ankles then dragged himself and the axe to the door and out onto the front porch. The sciatica, seeing no reason why imminent death should stop it going about its business, didn’t let up. The same agony with every movement, with competition now from the fiery wounds and the swelling pain of his broken jaw. His mouth tasted strange to him, until he realised it was his own blood in there, welling repeatedly from where a tooth had been kicked out. (Where was the tooth? Had he swallowed it? Imagine if he wasn’t dying. He would have to go to Speigel, his dentist, who would be quietly amazed if not outright disbelieving of how he’d lost it.) Now he hunkered in the doorway of the freezing woodshed that adjoined the cabin with the blade wedged between his ankles and his bound wrists poised. The cold was astonishing. As was the warmth of the wound in his guts. It was a little pleasant satisfaction to him to have got this far. It tickled him, that the guy in the windbreaker would be exasperated to find him gone.