‘You can murder it, so you’ll take responsibility. You’ll eat it. You’ll know it’s dead and its goodness is inside you.’
‘I won’t eat it.’
‘You’ll sit here and I’ll sit here until you’ve eaten it.’ Minnie placed her drink hard on the table. The ice shuddered in protest.
They sat until her drink finished. He thought she would get up and refill it and that would have been his cue to leave, but she let the glass lie dry before her. She looked at him and blinked slowly. Time started to grow on them, like moss on the stones in the yard. Daniel looked at the cold chicken and vegetables on the plate and wondered if he could swallow them like pills.
‘What if I eat the vegetables, like?’
‘You’re a bright lad, so why do you ask that? You know I don’t care if you touch the vegetables, but I’ll have you eat every morsel of the bird that you killed. Those birds are my living, but that’s not why I’m angry. You know I eat the birds when it’s their time. I care for them and love them and yes, we do eat them, but they are killed in a proper way, not out of violence, not out of hate or anger. This one’s dead and we won’t waste it, but I want you to know it’s dead because of you, because of what you did. If it weren’t we would have its eggs tomorrow. I know that you’ve had a hard time, Danny, and any time you like you can talk to me about it. I know you’re angry and you’ve a right to be. I’ll do my best to help you, but I can’t have you killing my birds every time you feel bad.’
Daniel began to cry. He cried like a child smaller than he was, slumped in the chair and quietly humming his sadness over a wet lip. He put a hand over his eyes so that he didn’t have to look at her.
When he stopped crying, he opened his eyes and took breath after new clean breath. She was still before him with her empty glass and her steel-blue eyes fixed on him.
‘Calm down, that’s it. Get your breath back and eat it up.’
Defeated, Daniel sat up and began to cut the chicken. He cut a very small piece and set it on his fork. He let the meat touch his tongue and then took it into his mouth.
Guilt
13
Daniel looked at the clock and saw that it was nearly 3 a.m. A cool blue light filtered into the room. He couldn’t tell if it was the moon or the streetlamps below which caused the chill, austere glow. He had worked until ten, eaten at his desk and then gone to the Crown for a pint on his way home. Casual strips of desire whipped him, but the stress of the day had left him empty and he felt light as he turned and turned again in its wake.
In the near dark, he lay on his back with his hands behind his head. He thought about the years of anger towards Minnie that had folded into years of disregard. This had been his defence against her, he realised: anger and disregard. Now that she was dead his anger was still there, but set adrift. Half asleep, he watched it float and turn.
He had chosen to leave her all those years ago and now it was hard for him to grieve for her. To grieve he had to remember, and remembering was grief. In the half-dark he blinked as he remembered graduating and his first few years as a lawyer in London. All this had been without her. He had felt proud of his self-sufficiency. After he cut her off, he had paid his own way through university and then got a job at a firm in London, only three months after graduating. He had taken credit for this, but now, in the near dark, he was honest enough to wonder if he would have gone to university at all had it not been for Minnie.
He felt darkness circling around him and alighting on his chest, hooded, wicked, shining black like a raven. Daniel put a palm to his bare chest, as if to relieve the sting of the claws.
He had left her, yet her leaving still seemed the greater. As he turned and turned again he felt the death beyond the loss which he had created. Her death was heavier, dark, like a bird of prey against the night sky.
Ten past three.
With his mouth and eyes open, Daniel remembered killing the chicken. He remembered his child’s hands throttling the bird that she held dear. He sat up and swung his legs out of the bed. He sat there in the half-dark, his body curved over his knees. Because there was nothing else that would stop it, he pulled on his shorts, stepped into his trainers and went running.
Four o’clock when he checked his watch. The early autumn morning was warm and fresh against his face. He could smell the water from the fountain when he ran past it, and then the dewy leaves of the trees. The pounding of his feet on the path and the warming of his muscles energised him and he ran faster than he usually would, lengthening his stride and allowing his torso to drive him forward. Even at this pace, images came to him, causing him to lose concentration: he saw again her coffin; Minnie with her wellies on and her hands on her hips, cheeks reddened by the wind; Blitz bowing his head deferentially when she entered the room; the market stall stacked with fresh eggs; his childhood bedroom with the rosebud wallpaper.
He had been wild. Who else but Minnie would have taken on such a child? His social worker had warned him. Minnie had cared for him when no one else would.
Although he was already breathing hard, Daniel ran faster. He felt heat in his stomach muscles and his thighs. A stitch seared along his side and he slowed to accommodate it, but didn’t stop. He took longer, slower breaths as he had been taught, yet the stitch remained. In the darkness of the park, indigents shifted on cold benches, newspaper fluttering over their faces. His mind was torn between the pain in his side and the reluctant ache that came whenever he thought of Minnie. She had been the guilty one, but, accused at her funeral, he now considered his own part in her death. He had intended to hurt her, after all. He had been aware of punishing her. She had deserved it.
Deserved. Daniel staggered, then slowed to a walk. He was still a mile from home. The night acquiesced to a shameful, reluctant glow in the east. Daybreak. It seemed appropriate to Daniel; that the new day should be a small violence. The dark blue sky was beginning to bloody. He walked with his hands on his hips, breathing hard, sweat coursing between his shoulder blades. He wasn’t ready for the day. He was exhausted before it had even begun.
When he arrived back at the flat, he was sweating hard. He drank a pint of water and had a shower, staying under the jet for longer than usual, letting the water pour on to his face. He could feel the slow pulse in his veins from the exercise, and yet for once he did not feel calmed by it. All his life he had been running. He had run away from his mother’s home and her boyfriends. He had run away from foster homes, back to his mother; he had run away from Minnie, to university, to London. Now he still wanted to run – he still felt the need for it, an angry hunger in his muscles – but there was no longer any place to run to. And there was nothing left to run away from. His mother was dead, and now Minnie too; the one he had loved and the one who had loved him were both gone, and with it his love and his proof that he could be loved.
Dressing, he opened the box that she had left him and took out the photograph of Minnie and her family. Why had she left him this photo, he wondered? He understood the photographs of him and Minnie at the beach, the photos from the market stall or working on the farm. This photograph he had always been drawn to, but only because it depicted a youthful Minnie – a good mother and her perfect family. Perfect families had obsessed Daniel when he was a child. He used to watch them on buses and in parks, hungrily studying the interactions between parents and children, and between the parents themselves. He liked to see what he had missed out on as a child.