For a moment I was truly there with them in the sunshine, in the real world rather than my own mind. Maybe things should have changed for me then, and I could have found something approaching a life. All that really stood in the way was my unwillingness to commit myself. Perhaps I could have learned how.
Two things intervened to stop it from being so, and the first of these was Fhee.
I was sitting in a bar in the Portal one evening when Angela was four, trawling for information on a sex-related homicide involving someone on 138. The night was young, and I was only slightly drunk, when I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned round to see someone who looked familiar.
The woman grinned, and I knew: It was an older version of Fhee. For a moment I was speechless, and then I forgot all about the questions I’d been asking the dopeheads at the bar.
I forgot about Henna, Angela, the present, everything. For three hours Fhee and I sat, knees and hands touching, competing with each other to remember times now ten years past; and while we spoke we knew they were gone, but it didn’t feel as if that made any difference. I felt as if years were being stripped away, as if acid was being poured down drains and pipes in my head which had been blocked for years.
At ten o’clock we bought a couple of bottles to go and took off in my car, driving randomly through the wilds until we came by chance upon Lake Ratcliffe. We parked the car by the shore and walked along the banks still talking nonstop, until we saw a small island and paddled to it through the freezing water. We explored the island, clambering clumsily over rocks in the dark, finding things to look at and enjoy and point out to each other as we had done many years ago.
When we’d worked all the way round we made our way up to the higher ground, and found a hollow, an enclave, a little way down from the top of the island shielded on two sides by the walls of rock. We sat and smoked and drank from our bottles of wine, talking of the people we’d known, the times we had seen, the way the moon glinted on the crests of the water.
And then we were lying, still talking, but with her head on my chest and my arm loosely around her. The inevitable came slowly and unexpectedly, and we watched it arrive, until our lips started to brush together and our hands moved less accidentally on each other’s arms, and faces, and bodies. Bewildered, as old friends, we made love then lay naked and warm, still friends. In a little while, with a calm and surprised enthusiasm, we made love again, still laughing and talking as we always did, and fell asleep wrapped together in the hollow.
We woke an hour later to find the first drops of rain falling on us out of a warm sky. The rain gathered and fell, and we lay in it, arms around each other, laughing and talking in low voices.
In the morning, we walked back across the water hand in hand, and we wrapped the night up in time and walked away from it. I saw Fhee in New Richmond a few more times after that, as a friend, but we never spoke of that night, except perhaps in silences sometimes, and in our loyalty to each other; and in the single rose I placed on her sealed coffin after her head was blown to mist by a mortar fired into a restaurant where she was eating lunch, in an attack on a local gang leader of whose existence she had been, and always would be, blissfully unaware.
In my own terms, a final statement on that night was made when I walked into a whorehouse on the 67th floor and placed three bullets in the head of the man who had ordered the attack on the restaurant. But perhaps there were later echoes in all the things I didn’t say to Henna, in the days I woke up not knowing where I was, in the fact that in the end not even Angela was enough to redeem my marriage or my life.
The second intervention was the Vinaldi case, which took up most of the last year I spent as a cop. I was a Lieutenant by then, and not doing what I was supposed to. It’s kind of a habit of mine. I resisted because I needed something to be right about, something in which I could feel blessed by a touchstone of morality and rectitude that was missing in every other part of my life.
Vinaldi was only an up-and-coming hood in those days, a long way from the godfather he became while I was on the Farm. His rise was inexplicably meteoric, I believed, unless a large proportion of the police were directly supporting him. I decided that I was going to reveal to everyone, to the whole city, exactly what was going on in New Richmond. By then I had come to distrust the city as much as I distrusted my own heart. Fhee had been dead for three years, and my marriage to Henna had petrified into politeness and warmth. Not so very bad, in other words, but not good enough for me. I could no longer remember what I’d thought I wanted, why I was unhappy with what I had. That’s when I knew I was really married.
The campaign against Vinaldi was a life-substitute, nothing more, and I pursued it with the zealotry of the damned.
In effect, I tried to set up a secret, secondary police force, operating covertly within the one which already existed. I recruited the few men I knew I could trust, Mal foremost among them. He was a Sergeant by then, primarily concerning himself with prostitute-related homicides in which there was bodily mutilation. He’d seen enough unpleasantness of that kind in The Gap not to be able to stand it in the real world, and was implacable in his pursuit of the guilty. He was also, once I turned him onto it, extremely good at finding out who in the force was helping Johnny Vinaldi make the transition from minor street thug to crime baron. The other men reported to Mal, and he reported to me. I didn’t report to anyone, in the department or anywhere else. I cleared enough homicides and kept the squad in sufficiently good order that no one poked their nose into what I was doing the rest of the time, especially as by then I was enough of a Rapt junkie for most of the brass to assume I was harmless.
I’d taken Rapt on and off since The Gap, but in the last years it got worse and worse as I tried to find something that would clear my head, something real enough to take me back in time. So much of Rapt’s attraction for me is the fear it engenders, and I found that I needed more and more of it to keep me sane. A life without fear is no life at all, and at the core of my life, in Henna, there was nothing to be afraid of.
The investigation created its own fears as it progressed, as it dawned on me that something very peculiar was going on. A small number of cops did turn out to be directly on the Vinaldi payroll, but nowhere near enough to account for his exorbitant success. As time went on, it became increasingly clear that his fan club must start near the very top of the NRPD, which I couldn’t understand. Things had gone on in the same old way in New Richmond for many, many years; I couldn’t work out what would make senior brass decide that it was worth throwing their lot in with one hood in particular.
Mai and I kept on digging, and kept getting closer to the truth, until that final week five years ago. By then, through pure intuition, I could tell the investigation was going to break. Normally my intuitions aren’t worth the paper I wipe them on, but this time I knew it was different. I could feel it like a continual vibration under my fingers, and I spent virtually the whole of that week in the office or on the street, barely seeing Henna and Angela.
On the last morning I left very early, but not too early for Angela, who came sprinting out of her bedroom as I was on my way to the door. She threw herself up at me and I caught her awkwardly, only then realizing how long it had been. Partly it was because I was away so much of the time, but it was also, I realized, because she was growing up and didn’t do it so often anymore. For a moment I was truly afraid. If I wasn’t careful I was going to miss the last of her childhood, and then what would I have left?