The Sleepless (40 page)

‘Fire is our friend,’ he kept repeating, with his eyes focused on Mr Hillary’s face, fifteen feet away, somewhere in the kitchen wall. ‘Fire is our friend.’ 

The flesh of his fingers swelled and blistered. His entire sleeve was alight now, so that his arm was a column of fire. The distinctive stenches of burning hair and burning wool and burning flesh combined to form a rancid, unbreathable fog, and even Bryan began to cough. Joseph took hold of his arm and began to push him quickly towards the door. 

Ralph didn’t see them –
couldn’t
have seen them, because he was still immersed in a deep hypnotic trance. The trance affected Ralph’s nervous system in the same way that multiple sclerosis had affected his father: it made him impervious to pain. He was burning but he didn’t feel it, and he knew that fire was his friend. 

Verna performed a frenzied dance, an extraordinary arched-back double-hopping dance, and at last broke free. She staggered and fell sideways, away from the oven, her head blackened and smoking, blinded, her nose burned away, her lips smoking and raw. She tried to get up but she couldn’t, and she lay on the kitchen floor completely rigid, with only a spasm in her right hand to indicate that she was still alive. 

Ralph knew that he was standing too close to the fire. He was far too hot. His left hand felt as if it were blistering, and he lifted it up to make sure that it wasn’t scorched. 

As he did so, his whole world was engulfed in flame. He screamed, and woke up, and suddenly felt the pain of his burning arm. 

What had been strangely enticing – the beach, the night, and ‘Mr Hillary’s’ fire – suddenly became a hell on earth. 

His arm – his whole fucking arm was alight. He tried to beat at it, but all he could do was burn the fingers of his other hand. Every beat seemed to do nothing more than fan the flames. What had they told him, in survival lessons? Drop to the ground, roll, smother the fire the best way you can. 

He snatched a towel from the hook beside the oven, and wrapped it around his arm. He could see that his hand was gruesomely burned away ... a five-fingered pattern of bone and blackened ashes. The pain was more than he could bear, and he staggered stiff-legged around the kitchen in a state of shock, his arm still smoking, trying to find some way to come to terms with the most overwhelming agony that he had ever experienced. He had crushed his fingers in a car door once. He had burned his arm, when he was trying to light a reluctant barbecue with gasoline. He had lost a fingernail in a fight with a violent crack dealer. Pain, all pain. But nothing compared to this. He wouldn’t have believed that it was possible for a human being to suffer such pain without dying. 

But he wasn’t dead. He was still alive. And he didn’t even realize that he was roaring out loud. 

He heard weeping. He heard furious knocking. Then he heard gunshots, and a splintering sound. He heard somebody arguing, wildly arguing, at the top of his voice. The next thing he knew, Patrice Latomba appeared in the kitchen doorway, panting, sweaty, wearing nothing but a grease-stained vest, and jeans. 

Patrice looked down at Verna, lying on her back on the floor, her face still smouldering, her body convulsing in pain, her heels juddering against the kitchen floor. Then he turned back to Ralph. His eyes were white and wild. 

‘What went down here, man?’ 

Ralph could do nothing but grin at him, sickly. His pain was misting his eyes with scarlet, and he was right on the point of collapse. 

‘
What the fuck went down here, man? Where are those guys? Where are those guys?’
 

‘I – don’t know – they’re –’ Ralph began. Then, in an anguished howl, ‘I didn’t mean to burn her! I don’t know why! I didn’t mean to burn her, for Christ’s sake!’ 

Patrice waved smoke away from his face. Suddenly, he looked very serious. ‘
You
burned her?’ he asked. His voice had that terrible coldness of severe shock – a voice that left a taste of oil and metal on the roof of Ralph’s mouth. 

‘I didn’t mean to burn her.’ 

Patrice raised his automatic, stiff-wristed, and fired once. The .45 bullet hit Ralph right on the bridge of his nose, and sprayed his brains all over the kitchen curtains. A flower-basket pattern of beige and bloody red instantly appeared on the window, stencilled at a velocity of 860 feet per second. 

Even before Ralph had toppled to the floor, Patrice swivelled around to Verna and shot her in the head, too, one shot, straight into the smoking gristle of her face. 

Bertrand appeared in the doorway, and looked around in awe. ‘You killed them both, man. What about the law?’ 

Patrice’s eyes were filled with tears. ‘No more law, man. No more fucking law. Not on Seaver Street. No more law.’ 

Bertrand looked down at Verna, and whispered, ‘Mary Mother of God,’ and crossed himself. 

Patrice pushed him out of the kitchen and across the hall. ‘No more religion, man and no more law. No more nothing. This is war, man. This is war! You see one pig inside of a mile of here – you see one white face – you see a Jew, or an Arab, or a goddamned Algonquin Indian – you blow them away! You blow them away, man! With my specific permission! Because
I’m
the law! And what they did here today, that gives me the right!’ 

Bertrand hefted a nickel-plated .45 automatic out of his red fringed jacket, and fired it into the ceiling. Plaster showered down, and Bertrand brushed off his shoulders, and screamed out, ‘Christmas! Christmas come early!’ 

Michael was sitting in his study when there was a quiet little knock at the door and Patsy came in. It was mid-afternoon now – they had all lunched well, on chicken pot-pie, and Victor had taken Jason out onto the beach so that they could fly Jason’s new battle kite. 

The sunlight brightened and faded, brightened and faded, as clouds passed swiftly over the shoreline. Michael could just see Victor and Jason in the distance, and the red-and-yellow kite whirling and dipping as they tried to get it to fly. The wind was too turbulent today, too much downdraught. 

Patsy came up behind him and massaged his shoulder muscles. She said, ‘You’re tense! You haven’t been tense like this for months.’ 

‘It’s the job, that’s all. Just as soon as we’re done with it, and I’ve collected my pay cheque, it’ll be back to barnacle-zappers, I promise you.’ 

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe it suits you, a little stress.’ 

He swung his chair around, and took hold of her, and sat her on his lap, and kissed her. Her hair was tied back in a yellow silk scarf, and she was wearing a short cotton dress, yellow as sunflowers, yellow as paint, yellow as I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! Her lips tasted of pink lipstick and freshly-sprayed-on perfume. Her large bead bracelet clattered. 

When they had finished kissing they looked each other in the eye, searchingly, unembarrassed. 

‘You’ve changed,’ she told him, with considerable certainty. 

‘Changed? I don’t think so.’ 

‘No ... I can feel it, you’ve changed. You’re – what can I call it? –
deeper.
’ 

‘Deeper? And up until now, I was shallow? You make me sound like a swimming-pool.’ 

She flicked the tip of his nose with her finger. ‘I didn’t mean that. I mean that you seem much more sure of yourself – much more confident. I get the feeling that – all of a sudden – you know exactly where you’re going.’ 

He glanced across at the tattered copy of
Mushing
on
the floor beside the couch, and he knew that Patsy was right. He
did
know where he was going, for the first time in nearly a year, and it wasn’t the magnetic pole with a team of huskies and four cases of Labatt’s. 

Ever since Rocky Woods, he had gradually let slip all of his responsibilities as an insurance investigator, and as a husband, too – or even a man. He had tried to pretend that he was capable of being somebody completely different – not just different, but somebody
luckier.
He should have known that he was never lucky, in the sense that he never got anything for nothing. He had never won a competition or a lottery, he had never even made a profit on a slot-machine. 

Even at work, his most inspired investigation had never won him a raise, or even a modest promotion. Take the Hunt case, for example, three and a half years ago. He had discovered that a wealthy Lynnfield wife had been dead
before
her car had been torched, with her inside it, because there were no smoke inhalation marks around the nose and mouth. Not even the fire department investigators had noticed it. He had saved Plymouth Insurance $1.35 million and won himself a complimentary pat on the back from Joe Garboden, and a thankful memo from Edgar Bedford, and that was all. 

But Patsy was right. The John O’Brien investigation had made him deeper. It had made him realize that he was not just an observer, not just a poker-about in the smoking ruins of other people’s lives, but an individual who was capable of changing the way things were, starting with the way
he
was, himself. 

Some of this new-found confidence had come from the hypnotic trances he had experienced ... the beach and the lighthouse and the bony white-faced man. He had the strongest feeling that the man in his trances was real, and that he was the kind of man who could shape the course of history. He was sure that the lighthouse, too, was invested with some momentous significance. The lighthouse may be real or it may be symbolic. But Michael was determined now to find out
why
it was so significant, and who the man was – and because of his determination, he was beginning to feel stronger. 

He
could shape the course of history, too. 

Patsy kissed his forehead and ruffled his hair. ‘So what’s this all about?’ she wanted to know. ‘Who
were
those young men who were hanging out across the street?’ 

He kissed her back. ‘Oh ... they were nobody.’ 

‘They must have been
somebody.
’ 

Michael swivelled his chair back around again, so that they were both facing his desk. It was strewn with the blown-up black-and-white photographs that Joe had hidden in his magazine. They must have been enlarged to the very limit, because they were grainy and blurred and some of them could have been entered for ‘What Is It?’ contests in the
National Enquirer.
 

‘What are these?’ asked Patsy. 

‘You recognize any of them?’ 

She picked up one of the photographs and frowned at it closely. ‘I don’t know ... where were they taken?’ 

She was looking at a picture of a fence, shaded by trees. There were several people standing in front of the fence – a woman in a spotted dress, a man in a suit and a sports coat, another woman in a short-sleeved dress, carrying a handbag, another man in a checkered shirt. Behind the fence, however, eight or nine other people were standing, their faces more difficult to distinguish because of the mottled shadow of the trees. On the far right there were three pale-faced young men, all wearing black snapbrim hats, the kind of hats that were popular in the 1960s. All three of them wore dark glasses. 

‘Well?’ asked Michael, coaxing her. 

She peered very close, until her turned-up nose was almost touching the surface of the photograph. Then she looked up at him and he could see the little grey flecks in her cornflower-blue irises, and the fine, fine hairs of her eyebrows. ‘It’s them, isn’t it?’ she asked. 

‘I don’t know. That’s what I’m asking you.’ 

‘It
is
them,’ she said, nodding her head. ‘At least, those two are. The one on the right and the one next to him, the one in the middle. I don’t recognize the one on the left.’ 

‘Are you sure about that?’ 

She peered at the photograph again, and then nodded. 

‘I’m sure. I’m sure. I’m
positive.
Look at his ears. I mean, he’s not exactly Mr Spock, but almost. It’s not so much that I recognize them individually, but the two of them together ... ‘ 

Michael kissed her ear, curled her fine blonde hair around his finger. ‘I wanted to mush to the pole,’ he told her. ‘I wanted to leave you and Jason, and fly to northern Greenland, and then sledge the rest of the way. I think I was half-hoping that I’d die of hypothermia. It’s supposed to be peaceful, dying of hypothermia ... especially with all those loyal huskies licking your face as you go to meet the Great Popsicle-Maker in the Sky.’ 

‘What
you
wanted, honey-pie, was not to think about reality. And don’t try to make a joke of it. You suffered, after Rocky Woods, and don’t try to pretend that you didn’t, because I suffered right along with you.’ 

‘I know,’ said Michael, squeezing her hand. ‘But
this
is reality.’ He tapped the photograph. ‘Those were the men who were waiting around outside; and those were the men who followed Joe when he drove away from here. I mean – I want to have these photographs enhanced on Plymouth’s computer, but I’m ninety-nine per cent convinced of it.’