“Please, I-Please.”
“All right, Erma. I can have the BBC here in time for the wake-up news.”
“Just him.”
An hour later. “Do stop sniveling, Erma. You lived through it once, didn’t you? What’s the harm in talking about it? They can’t try you again. Now come on, dear, answer the question.”
“Yes. The little boy-Brian Doyle-he was quite brave, really. Kept saying he had to take care of his mum, because she was divorced now, and asking us to let him go. He was only eight, and quite small. He even offered to fight us if we’d untie him. When Sean was getting the masking tape out of the cupboard, I went up to him, and I whispered to him to let the boy go, but he…”
“There you go again, Erma. Now I’ve got to shut the machine off again while you get hold of yourself.”
She was alone now. At least, the reporter woman was gone. Just before eleven, she had scooped up her notes and her tape recorder, and the photos of the dead children she had brought from the photo archives, and she’d gone away, promising to return in a few days, to “put the finishing touches on the interview.” The dates and places, and forensic details, she could get from other sources, she’d said.
The reporter had gone, and the room was empty, but Miss Emily Kay wasn’t alone anymore. Now Erma Bradley had got in as well.
She knew, though, that no other journalists would come. This one, Jackie, would keep her secret well enough, but only to ensure the exclusivity of her own book. Other than that, Miss Emily Kay would be allowed to enjoy her freedom in the shabby little room overlooking the moors. But it wasn’t a pleasant retreat any longer, now that she wasn’t alone. Erma had brought the ghosts back with her.
Somehow the events of twenty-five years ago had become more real when she told them than when she lived them. It had been so confused back then. Sean drank a lot, and he liked her to keep him company in that. And it happened so quickly that first time, and then there was no turning back. But she never let herself think about it. It was Sean’s doing, she would tell herself, and then that part of her mind would close right down, and she would turn her attention to something else. At the trial, she had thought about the hatred that she could almost touch, flaring at her from nearly everyone in the courtroom. She couldn’t think then, for if she broke down, they would win. They never put her on the stand. She answered no questions, except to say, when a microphone was thrust in her face, “I didn’t do it.” And then later in prison there were adjustments to make, and bad times with the other inmates to be faced. She didn’t need a lot of sentiment dragging her down as well. I didn’t do it came to have a truth for her: it meant, I am no longer the somebody who did that. I am small, and thin, and well-spoken. The ugly, ungainly monster is gone.
But now she had testified. Her own voice had conjured up the images of Sarah Allen calling out for her mother, and of Brian Doyle, offering to sell his bike to ransom himself, for his mum’s sake. The hatchet-faced blonde, who had told them to shut up, who had held them down… she was here. And she was going to live here, too, with the sounds of weeping, and the screams. And every tread on the stair would be Sean, bringing home another little lad for a wee visit.
“I didn’t do it,” she whispered. And it had come to have another meaning. I didn’t do it. Stop Sean Hardie from hurting them. Go to the police. Apologize to the parents during the years in prison. Kill myself from the shame of it. “I didn’t do it,” she whispered again. But I should have.
Ernie Sleaford was more deferential to her now. When he heard about the new book, and the size of her advance, he realized that she was a player, and he began to treat her with a new respect. He had even offered her a raise, in case she was thinking of quitting. But she wasn’t going to quit. She quite enjoyed her work. Besides, it was so amusing now to see him stand up for her when she came into his grubby little office.
“We’ll need a picture of you for the front page, love,” he said in his most civil tones. “Would you mind if Denny took your picture, or is there one you’d rather use?”
Jackie shrugged. “Let him take one. I just had my hair done. So I make the front page as well?”
“Oh, yes. We’re devoting the whole page to Erma Bradley’s suicide, and we want a sidebar of your piece: ‘I Was the Last to See the Monster Alive.’ It will make a nice contrast. Your picture beside pudding-faced Erma.”
“I thought she looked all right for forty-seven. Didn’t the picture I got turn out all right?”
Ernie looked shocked. “We’re not using that one, Jackie. We want to remember her the way she was. A vicious ugly beastie in contrast to a pure young thing like yourself. Sort of a moral statement, like.”
HAPPINESS IS A DEAD POET
THE FIRST THING Rose Hanelon did at the Unicoi Writers’ Conference was to commandeer the reservation clerk’s typewriter and change her name tag from GUEST AUTHOR to NOBODY IN PARTICULAR.
It wouldn’t work for long, of course. By the end of the welcoming reception, the conference organizers would have introduced her to enough novices for word to get around, and she would spend the rest of the conference listening to plot summaries of romance novels (surely superfluous, since romance novels had only one plot), dodging poets carrying yellow legal pads, and trying to look sympathetic while housewives explained why they were only on chapter one after four years.
You had to go, though, she told herself, as she took the green-tagged room key and trudged off in search of an elevator. Agents and editors often turned up at these conferences, apparently under the delusion that a weekend’s confinement in a motel outside the state of New York constituted travel. These people could be useful. She always waited until two days into the conference to talk business with them, because by then they had been so steeped in novice-babble that she seemed brilliant by comparison.
Rose did not get the opportunity to feel brilliant as often as she thought she deserved, which was perhaps another reason to attend these regional conferences. Being hailed as a literary lion by Writer’s Market junkies compensated for the well-bred scorn she endured more or less regularly from the college English department, to which she did not belong. She and several of its faculty members sniped at each other with less than good-natured derision over their respective literary efforts.
The opinion in Bartleby Hall was that Rose was not worthy of serious consideration as a writer, because she wrote “accessible” fiction. That is, she used the past tense, quotation marks, and plots in her books, rather than venturing into their literary realm: experimental fiction of the sort published by the “little” magazines. These tiny subsidized (sometimes mimeographed) journals paid nothing, and were read chiefly by those planning to submit manuscripts, but they counted for much in prestige and tenure.
Rose didn’t have to worry about tenure. She was the college director of public relations (the English gang pronounced her job title as if it were something she did with no clothes on). For her part, Rose professed not to want a job teaching semicolons to future stockbrokers, and she often said that the English department would give a job to a Melville scholar any day, but that they would never have hired Herman Melville. Still, the steady trickle of disdain ate away at her ego, and she often threatened to write a “serious and pretentious novel” just to prove that she could. So far, though, time had not permitted her such an indulgence. The time that she could steal away from her job, her dog, and her laundry was spent producing carefully plotted mystery novels featuring a female deputy sheriff. Her works had not made her a household name, but they covered her car payments and inspired an occasional fan letter, which was better than nothing. Certainly better than writing derivative drivel for years and then not getting tenure.