Paddy and Dub looked at him. He was very calm, as if he had been born for this moment.
“Callum,” said Paddy, “the man is not yet dead. What part of that don’t you get? He’s not dead, he’s alive.”
Callum sighed. “OK, call an ambulance then.”
She tutted, cutting him off, but Callum persisted. “If he lives will he kill you? Will he come back and get you and hurt Peter?”
“Maybe.” She thought about it. “Probably.”
“Grow up, then.”
“You should be in the fucking car,” said Dub, as if that helped anything.
Paddy covered her face with her hands. “God, I’m fucking starving. How could anybody get hungry at a time like this?”
“Adrenaline,” said Callum, calmly watching a bloody rivulet creep across the floor towards him. “You get a big whoosh of it and then it passes and makes you hungry.” He saw them looking at him curiously. “Anger management course. Prison.”
Paddy looked down at the crumpled heap on the floor. “Maybe he’ll bleed to death?”
Callum wrinkled his nose at her. “What if he doesn’t?”
Dub stood up and looked down at Callum. “The thing that really bothers me about this, I mean really fucking does my head in, is that you shouldn’t be here. Whatever happens, you shouldn’t be here, seeing this.”
“He’s right,” said Paddy, standing up, keeping her eyes on McBree’s wound, repulsed but afraid to take her eyes off him in case he leaped suddenly to his feet and came at her. “You should go back to the car.”
Callum got up, wiped the dust from his bum. “You’re trying to protect me but you’re too late.” He gestured down at the half-dead man. “This is what I understand. You two, you don’t understand this. You’re sitting watching him, hoping he’ll die, but we need to do something.”
He had a point but Paddy stepped between him and McBree’s body. “I need to do something.”
His eyes were imploring. “Let me do it. I know what I’m doing. You don’t.”
Paddy hesitated. “I want you to go back to the car with Dub. Most people, Callum, most of us come from a comfortable home, we grow up and then we see things like this. It’s going to be harder for you. You’ll have to do it backwards.”
“I’m not leaving you here, you don’t have a clue-”
“You WILL go to the car with Dub.” It was her warning-mother voice again. It had worked on the sports guys, it worked on Pete, but Callum had spent his whole life being shouted at. She could see him smiling a little, swithering. He suppressed a grin and dipped his eyes, glanced at Dub’s feet.
“I’ll go back to the car.”
IV
She lit a cigarette and looked down at McBree’s head. The wound had stopped bleeding, the pool of blood no longer slithering across the floor but still. She kept her eyes on his face as she skirted his feet, stepping towards his left arm. She should have felt for a pulse, seen if he was alive or dead, but she didn’t want to touch him, couldn’t bring herself to bend over him, afraid he’d sit up suddenly and grab her, pull her down, throttle her again.
She stood over him and thought about Callum’s unnatural calmness. He had been here before, stood in front of a person and made a decision to take their life. She imagined herself having to face this as a ten-year-old child. The man that made Callum kill the baby had been raping him. She imagined that threat hanging over her as she looked at McBree. She knew suddenly that if she’d been a frightened ten-year-old like Callum, she would have hurt the baby to save herself too.
Playing for time, she thought again of checking for a pulse but it didn’t matter whether he was still alive. She couldn’t exactly call an ambulance. She was waiting, she realized, for the decision to be made for her.
Outside, a lorry rumbled past on the road, birds began to call. The sun rose, the wind rustled the tops of the trees.
Quite suddenly she thought of her father lying in his hospital bed, the skin on his sunken face dry and thin as rice paper, clinging furiously to life.
She stepped forward to McBree, felt in his jacket pocket, fumbling past his cigarettes and a tissue to the car keys. Moving quickly, she picked up the spare sleeping bag, and skipped over to the petrol can. She lifted it carefully, trying not to get any on her hands or clothes, and gently spilled it on the floor around him, crouching as she worked her way around the body, circling it with the greasy fluid. The packet of coal left over from the barbecue was on the range and she stacked it under the table for kindling, throwing the firelighter bricks on top.
She stood and looked at the scene for anything out of place. The house was quiet; the calm morning filtered through the dirty windows, the smell of damp cut by the sharp tang of petrol. An animal hunger scratched at the lining of her stomach.
She stepped outside into the morning and lit a match, heart hammering in her chest as she reached into the kitchen. Her thumb left her index finger and the match dropped through space, flaming red and blue, spinning. She felt the muffled “whooph” pat her eardrum as the fire caught and a glittering carpet of flames rolled out across the bloody floor.
She was watching the firestarter bricks under the table burst into merry little lives of their own when a movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention: flames tickled around McBree’s left hand as the square fingers unfurled, graceful, flowering open to the ceiling, appealing for mercy.
Horrified, Paddy lurched forward to the door. She grabbed the handle and slammed it shut.
THIRTY-SIX. SON
It happened again. The pasta shards were clinging to each other, stuck in inseparable lumps that the sauce couldn’t infiltrate. Pete saw her disappointment and looked into the pot. “I like it like that.”
“It’s not supposed to be sticky though. I’ve done it wrong again.”
“No, but I like it like that.”
He was trying to make her feel better and it wasn’t his job.
“It’ll taste lovely anyway,” she said, sounding more cheerful than she felt, “because you made it.”
“Yeah.” He nodded, climbing down from the kitchen chair. “I’m good at that.”
Across the kitchen Mary Ann caught her eye and smiled at Pete’s casual confidence. She looked neat and small, never taking up any more space than she needed to. She still lived like a nun: still got up before clubbers went to bed to begin her morning round of prayers. The bedroom looked even more Spartan than it had when Dub slept in there. She laid her prayer books and rosaries out on a chair, owned three dresses and a jumper, some changes of underwear, but no make-up or favorite shampoos or books or records, none of the flummery of a normal life.
“Auntie Mary,” said Pete, sitting down next to her at the table, “you and me, we’ll grate the cheese.”
Paddy looked a warning over at him and he giggled. “I’m not to use the grater,” he explained, “in case I cut myself. You do it and I’ll order ye about.”
Mary Ann glanced at the clock. “Is it not a bit early?”
“Naw, go ahead,” said Paddy. “We’ll be eating any minute.”
As she spoke she heard the key in the door and Pete leaped to his feet, bolting out to the hallway, and then he froze, standing framed in the doorway, staring at the front door.
“Hiya,” he said absently.
“Hiya.” The voice was deep and shy compared to Pete’s.
“Right, wee man?” Dub appeared, scooping Pete up and swinging him about a bit, dropping him to his feet and giving a mock stagger at the weight of him. “This is your cousin Callum.”