The Night Ferry (24 page)

“Politieagent! How did you find this place?” He spits toward Zala. “
She
led you here.”

“If you leave us alone I won’t say anything. You can walk out of here.”

Yanus finds this amusing. The point of his knife traces across my eyebrow.

“My partner knows I’m here. He’s coming. He’l bring others. If you leave now you can get away.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Looking for Samira.”

He speaks to Samira in Dutch. She begins gathering her things. A few clothes, the photograph of her family…

“Wait for me outside,” he tel s her.

“Zala.”

“Outside.”

“Zala,” she says again, more determined.

He waves the knife in her face. She doesn’t flinch. She is like a statue. Immovable. She’s not leaving without her friend.

The door suddenly blasts inward as if blown from its hinges. Ruiz fil s the frame. Sometimes I forget how big he can make himself.

Yanus barely flinches. He turns, knife first. Here is a fresh chal enge. The night holds such promise for him. Ruiz takes in the scene and settles on Yanus, matching his intensity.

But I can see the future. Yanus is going to take Ruiz apart. Kil him slowly. The knife is like an extension of him, a conductor’s baton directing an invisible orchestra. Listening to voices.

The DI has something in his hand. A half brick. It’s not enough. Yanus braces his legs apart and raises a hand, curling a finger to motion him onward.

Ruiz swings his fist, creating a disturbance in the air. Yanus feints to the left. The half brick comes down and misses. Yanus grins. “You’re too slow, old man.” The blade is alive. I scarcely see it move. A dark stain blossoms on Ruiz’s shirtsleeve, but he continues stepping forward, forcing Yanus to retreat.

“Can you walk, Alisha?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get up and get out.”

“Not without you, sir.”

“Please, for once in your life—”

“I’l kil you both,” says Yanus.

My hands are bound behind me. I can’t do anything. The acid sting of nausea rises in my throat. Samira goes ahead of me, stepping into the corridor. Zala fol ows, stil holding her cheek. Yanus yel s to her in Dutch, threateningly. He lunges at Ruiz who dodges the blade. I turn outside the door and run toward the stairs, waiting for the sound of a body fal ing.

On every landing I shoulder the locked doors, banging my head against them and yel ing for help. I want someone to untie my hands, to cal the police, to give me a weapon. Nobody answers. Nobody wants to know.

We reach the ground floor and the street, turning right and heading for the canal. Samira and Zala are ahead of me. What a strange trio we make hustling through the darkness. We reach the corner. I turn to Samira. “I have to help him.” She understands. “I want you to go straight to the police.” She shakes her head. “They’l send me back.”

I haven’t time to argue. “Then go to the nuns. Quickly. Zala knows the way.”

I can feel the adrenaline stil pumping through my body. Running now, aware of the void in my stomach, I sprint toward the house. There are people mil ing outside. They’re surrounding a figure slumped on the steps. Ruiz. Someone has given him a cigarette. He sucks it greedily, drawing in his cheeks and then exhaling slowly.

Relief flows through me like liquid beneath my skin. I don’t know whether to weep or laugh or do both. Blood soaks his shirt. A fist is pressed against his chest.

“I think maybe you should take me to a hospital,” he says, struggling to breathe.

Like a crazy woman, I begin yel ing at people to cal an ambulance. A teenager summons the courage to tel me there’s one coming.

“I had to get close,” Ruiz explains in a hoarse whisper. His brow and upper lip are dotted with beads of sweat. “I had to let him stab me. If he could reach me I could
reach him
.”

“Don’t talk. Just be stil .”

“I hope I kil ed the bastard.”

More people emerge from the flats. They want to come and see the bleeding man. Someone cuts away my cuffs and the plastic curls like orange peel at my feet.

Ruiz gazes at the night sky above the rooftops.

“My ex-wives have been wishing this on me for a long while,” he says.

“That’s not true. Miranda is stil in love with you.”

“How do you know?”

“I can see it. She flirts with you al the time.”

“She can’t help herself. She flirts with everyone. She does it to be nice.”

His breathing is labored. Blood gurgles in his lungs.

“Wanna hear a joke?” he says.

“Don’t talk. Sit quietly.”

“It’s an old one. I like the old ones. It’s about a bear. I like bears. Bears can be funny.”

He’s not going to stop.

“There’s this family of polar bears living in the Arctic in the middle of winter. The baby polar bear goes to his mother one day and says, ‘Mum? Am I real y a
polar bear
?’

“‘Of course you are, son,’ she says.

“And the cub replies, ‘Are you sure I’m not a panda bear or a black bear?’

“‘No, you’re definitely not. Now run outside and play in the snow.’

“But he’s stil confused so the baby polar bear goes looking for his father and finds him fishing at the ice hole. ‘Hey, Dad, am I a polar bear?’

“‘Wel , of course, son,’ he replies gruffly.

“‘Are you sure I don’t have any grizzly in me or maybe koala?’

“‘No, son, I can tel you now that you’re a hundred percent purebred polar bear, just like me and your mother. Why in the world do you ask?’

“‘Because I’m freezing my butt off out here!’”

The DI laughs and groans at the same time. I put my arms around his chest, trying to keep him warm. A mantra, unspoken, grows louder in my head: “Please don’t die. Please don’t die. Please don’t die.”

This is my fault. He shouldn’t be here. There’s so much blood.

5

Regret is such an odd emotion because it invariably comes a moment too late, when only our imagination can rewrite what has happened. My regrets are like pressed flowers in the pages of a diary. Brittle reminders of summers past; like the last summer before graduation, the one that wasn’t big enough to hold its own history.

It was supposed to be the last hurrah before I entered the “real world.” The London Metropolitan Police had sent me an acceptance letter. I was part of the next intake for the training col ege at Hendon. The class of 1998.

When I went to primary school I never imagined getting to secondary school. And at Oaklands I never imagined the freedom of university. Yet there I was, about to graduate, to grow up, to become a ful -fledged, paid-up adult with a tax file number and a student loan to repay. “Thank God we’l never be forty,” Cate joked.

I was working two jobs—answering phones at my brothers’ garage and working weekends on a market stal . The El iots invited me to Cornwal again. Cate’s mother had suffered her stroke by then and was confined to a wheelchair.

Barnaby stil had political ambitions but no safe seat had become available. He wasn’t made of the right stuff—not old school enough to please the die-hard Conservatives and not female, famous or ethnic enough to satisfy modernizers in the party.

I stil thought he was handsome. And he continued to flirt with me, finding reasons to lean against me or punch my arm or cal me his “Bol ywood beauty” or his “Indian princess.” On Sunday mornings the El iots went to church in the vil age, about a ten-minute walk away. I stayed in bed until after they’d gone.

I don’t know why Barnaby came back, what excuse he made to the others. I was in the shower. Music videos were turned up loud on the TV. The kettle had boiled. The clock ticked as if nothing had happened.

I didn’t hear him on the stairs. He just appeared. I held the towel against me but didn’t cry out. He ran his fingers slowly over my shoulder and along my arms. Perfect fingernails. I looked down. I could see his gray trousers and the tips of his polished shoes growing out from under his cuffs.

He kissed my throat. I had to throw my head back to make room for him. I looked up at the ceiling and he moved his lips lower to the space between my breasts. I held his head and pushed against him.

My hair was long back then, plaited in a French braid that reached down to the smal of my back. He held it in his fists, wrapping it around his knuckles like a rope. Whispering in my ear, sweet nothings that meant more, he pushed down on my shoulders, wanting me to kneel. Meanwhile, the TV blared and the clock ticked and the water in the kettle cooled.

I didn’t hear the door open downstairs or footsteps on the stairs. I don’t know why Cate came back. Some details don’t matter. She must have heard our voices and the other noises.

She must have known but she kept coming closer until she reached the door, drawn by the sounds.

In real estate location is everything. Barnaby was standing naked behind me. I was on al fours with my knees apart. Cate didn’t say a word. Having seen enough she stayed there watching more. She didn’t see me fighting or struggling. I
didn’t
fight or struggle.

This is the way I remember it. The way it happened. Al that was left was for Cate to tel me to leave and that she never wanted to see me again. And time enough for her to lie sobbing on her bed. A single bed away, I packed my bag, breathing in her grief and trying to swal ow something that I couldn’t spit out.

Barnaby drove me to the station in silence. The seagul s were crying, accusing me of betrayal. The rain had arrived, drowning summer.

It was a long journey back to London. I found Mama at her sewing machine, making a dress for my cousin’s wedding. For the first time in years I wanted to crawl onto her lap. Instead I sat next to her and put my head on her shoulder. Then I cried.

Later that night I stood in front of the bathroom mirror with Mama’s big dressmaking scissors and cut my hair for the first time. The blades carved through my tresses and sent them rocking to the tiles. I trimmed it as short as the scissors al owed, nicking my skin so that blood stained the blades and tufts of hair stood out from my skul like sprouts of wheat germ.

I can’t explain why. Somehow the act was pal iative. Mama was horrified. (She would have been less shocked if I’d sliced open my wrists.) I left messages for Cate and wrote her notes. I couldn’t visit her house without risking meeting her father—or worse, her mother. What if Ruth El iot knew? I caught the same buses and trains as Cate. I orchestrated chance meetings and sometimes I simply stalked her, but it made no difference. Being sorry wasn’t enough. She didn’t want to see me or talk to me.

Eventual y I stopped trying. I locked myself away for hours, coming out only to run and to eat. I ran a personal best a month later. I no longer wanted to catch up with the future—I was running away from the past. I threw myself into my police training, studying furiously. Fil ing notebooks. Blitzing exams.

My hair grew back. Mama calmed down. I used to daydream, in the years that fol owed, that Cate and I would find each other and somehow redeem the lost years. But a single image haunted me—Cate standing silently in the doorway, watching her father fuck her best friend to the rhythm of a ticking clock and a cooling kettle.

In al the years since, not a day has passed when I haven’t wanted to change what happened. Cate did not forgive me. She hated me with a hatred more fatal than indifference because it was the opposite of love.

After enough time had passed, I didn’t think about her every hour or every day. I sent her cards on her birthday and at Christmas. I heard about her engagement and saw the wedding photographs in a photographer’s window in Bethnal Green Road. She looked happy. Barnaby looked proud. Her bridesmaids (I knew al their names) wore the dresses she always said she wanted. I didn’t know Felix. I didn’t know where they’d met or how he’d proposed. What did she see in him? Was it love? I could never ask her.

They say time is a great healer and a lousy beautician, but it didn’t heal my wounds. It covered them over with layers of regret and awkwardness like pancake makeup. Wounds like mine don’t heal. The scars simply grow thicker and more permanent.

The curtains sway back and forth, breathing in and then out like lungs drawing restless air. Light spil s from around the edges. Another day.

I must have dozed off. I rarely sleep soundly anymore. Not like I did as a child when the world was stil a mystery. Now I snatch awake at the slightest noise or movement. The scars on my back are throbbing, tel ing me to stand and stretch.

Ruiz is lying on a bed in the dimness. Wires, fluids and machines have captured him. A mask delivers oxygen. Three hours ago surgeons inserted a tube in his chest and reinflated his right lung. They stitched his arm, commenting on his many scars.

My ear is wrapped in bandages and an ice pack has melted on my cheek. The swel ing has gone down but the bruising wil be ugly. At least I can let down my hair to hide the worst of it.

The doctors and nurses have been very kind. They wanted me to leave the DI’s room last night. I argued. I begged. Then I seem to remember lying down on the linoleum floor, chal enging them to carry me out. They let me stay.