The bathroom door opened. Her hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail and she kept her robe tightly closed as she returned to her side of the bed. For a while they lay there in silence. Although Cass’s eyes ached with tiredness, the clock was only just ticking round to half-past nine. It was too early to sleep, and too late to get up again. The awkwardness that was the only child of their strange marriage embraced Cass and he felt tension knot in his shoulders. His breathing sounded irregular in his chest, and he could barely hear hers.
‘Why did you do it, Cass?’
He rubbed his tired eyes and then rested his arm across them. He didn’t need to ask what she meant. It was the same question, always. It was the only question. It was the cause of the rot in their marriage, hidden deep. It was like a corpse dumped and left to bloat on a riverbed, but it was there all the same.
‘I don’t want to talk about it, Kate.’ He tried not to let a long sigh escape with his words, but he failed.
‘I do.’
The mattress creaked. In the darkness behind his closed, covered eyes, he thought perhaps she’d sat up.
‘Well, I don’t. It’s been a shit day in the middle of a shit week.’
‘You never want to talk about it.’
Her tone had hardened and his skin prickled. Great. Just what they needed. A post-sex argument. Echoes of colour swirled behind his closed lids and he thought he saw the outline of wide, dark eyes in them. He opened his own before those from the memory could take shape completely. She was right. He never did want to talk about it.
‘Just not tonight, Kate. Okay?’
‘It’s never any night.’ The words were hot and angry. ‘I need to understand it.’
‘Kate, you know there’s nothing more I can say.’ He stared at the ceiling. ‘And I don’t see why you need to discuss it tonight. Just let it go.’
‘If only we could.’ She rolled onto her back, mirroring his position. The invisible divide down the middle of the bed had never felt more pronounced to Cass, as if the mattress itself were straining to tear itself in two and make the break definite.
‘I’ve had to live with it too, you know. All these years,’ she said, ‘the looks at parties. The whispers among the other wives. The way they left me out of everything as if I was
tainted
by what you’d done.’ She swallowed hard. ‘I stood by you, Cass, when they said it was over for you. That even if you kept your job, you’d never be promoted. And then even after . . . after
the thing
that happened with us . . . I stood by you.’
You didn’t really have anywhere else to go
. He bit the retort back. This was an old argument that refused to die and there was nothing new to throw at each other in the ring, primarily because he rarely joined in. He wasn’t going to make matters worse by starting now.
‘But I did get promoted. And now the wives would speak to you, if you’d let them. Although God only knows why you’d want to hang around with the tennis club brigade.’
She let out a derisive snort. ‘You should be a DCI by now. They were only forced to promote you this far because you’re so bloody good at your job.’ She made it sound like an insult, and the words stung like one. ‘You might as well live at the station, and for what? You think they don’t still all talk about it? Talk about you?’ She barely paused for breath. ‘I hate the way they look down on us. And I hate that you don’t care.’
She’d run out of steam. Cass sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. He didn’t turn to look at her; he knew her face pinched tight when she was angry, her delicate features pulling in on themselves and making her look mean and bitter. He didn’t need to see that.
‘That’s not
living with it
, Kate. That’s just living with the consequences of it. It’s a different thing entirely.’ He searched in the gloom for his underwear and pulled it on. ‘Trust me.’
‘Why can’t you just tell me why you did it? Why can’t you just tell me that?’
He tugged his jeans on and a sweatshirt. ‘I’m going for a drive.’
She stared at him and her shoulders slumped forward. He’d seen Macintyre do just that movement on the grainy film of the boys’ shooting. The fight had gone out of her. The argument was over, for today at least.
He left her sitting silently in the gloom, but when he reached the bedroom door he turned. She looked tiny and fragile on the vast bed, and he thought for a moment that her eyes were shining with the hint of tears. He hadn’t seen her cry for a long time.
‘I’m sorry, Kate,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you, because I can’t remember. You know that. I don’t
know
why I did it, and that’s all there is to it. Some days I don’t know what were my reasons and what were those they told me to say, or what I thought I should say. It’s all a mixed-up mess in my head. It was a long time ago. I was a different man.’
And I really don’t want to think about it
.
Downstairs, the lights were still on, and the brightness felt almost judgemental as Cass passed by. He picked up his car keys and Artie Mullins’ envelope. He shook out the bunches of notes that would be dished out to the team on Friday night in the car park at the back of The Swan on Kilburn High Road. He rummaged through until finally he saw a small folded wrap of shiny paper probably cut from some trashy porn magazine. Inside it would be a gram of cocaine, maybe two.
Right at that moment he was grateful to Artie for his occasional gifts. He didn’t have a habit, but he’d be lying if he said he didn’t have an occasional hobby. He listened for sounds of movement from upstairs before quickly chopping a line on the back of the envelope. The house remained silent.
He pulled a note from its batch and rolled it before quickly snorting the white powder up through his right nostril. By the time he’d replaced the note and resealed the envelope, his front tooth was going numb and the powder was trickling pleasantly down the back of his throat, dispelling his tiredness as it powered its way into his system. Cass smiled. It was strong stuff, cleanly cut.
He looked upwards, seeing through the bland plaster-work to the memory of the tiny figure on the bed upstairs. Would she ask him to stay? He lingered for a moment, almost willing her to scream at him, but Kate stayed silent. The door clicked shut behind him. As the buzz reached his head, he found it easier not to care.
‘You’ve got to look up, Charlie.’
It’s raining and they’re standing under the awning of the betting shop. Birmingham unravels around them in a network of littered streets that darken under the constant muddy downpour from the steel-grey sky. The chips are hot in their paper wrapping and the older man grabs a handful and his lips smack together as he eats them. This afternoon is all about learning to make the most of simple pleasures, and despite the dirty water that’s blown into their shelter on the wind and soaked the bottom of his jeans, Cass feels happy. He likes this man. He can’t help it. He smiles.
Brian Freeman grins back, the expression making a Picasso portrait of his face. Brian ‘the brain’ Freeman had had his nose broken four times by the time he was seventeen. His jaw is slightly misaligned on the left side, shattered during a fight with three Chelsea football fans, back in the day when he was a young man and football hooliganism was how a respectable bloke spent his weekends. Brian had once said that the fighting gave blokes
purpose
, whatever that was. A grin cracking his wrecked face, he’d said there was nothing like the buzz of kicking a few heads in on a Saturday afternoon to get you ready for a night on the town. He is fond of the memories, even the painful ones, the simple pleasures to be had in the thrill of a kick-in.
The Chelsea fans, two trainee bus drivers and a train engineer, left Brian and his mashed-up face for dead. It wasn’t a clever move, not finishing the job. Brian and his brothers, George and Bill, tracked them down. They didn’t kill them, but gave them such a beating that the train engineer would forever after struggle with words of more than two syllables. One of the bus drivers spent two months in hospital not only drinking through a straw but pissing through one too. The last anyone heard of the third one, he wasn’t leaving his wheelchair in a hurry. No one ever saw them at a game again.
Brian Freeman gave up fighting not long after that. Not because he didn’t like it - he fucking loved it (he grins whenever he says this too - wide, like an excited child) - but because he discovered he had other talents. He’d left the fighting to Bill and George because he’d realised, he told ‘Charlie’ while tapping the side of his weatherbeaten head, that he had what most of the muscle didn’t. He could think. He had the smarts.
‘You’ve got to look up, Charlie.’
Cass is so absorbed in the hot chips, the chill in his toes and the sheer freedom of the afternoon, that for a moment he’s almost forgotten he is ‘Charlie’. This is strange, because most of the time he finds it hard to remember he’s Cass. A bus stops in front of them and Cass sees his face reflected in a filthy window. He wonders if that’s his face or Charlie’s, but then sees his eyes. The eyes are the same. His eyes, whoever he is.
‘Oi, you muppet! I’m talking to you.’
Brian nudges him, and he turns. The old man repeats himself. ‘You’ve got to look up, Charlie. Wherever you are, make time to look up.’ He points a thick finger, and Cass follows it above the top of the bus. He swallows his chips.
‘You see, Charlie? How about that, then?’
Even through the grey rain, the skyline is extraordinary. From where he is standing Cass can see the glass elegance that is the new Regency Tower, standing like a shard of diamond amidst the grit of the sixties and seventies buildings surrounding it. His eyes move up to the peak, one hundred and twenty feet above the ground. There’s no grime on it; the steel and stylish green glass somehow maintain their shine, despite the lack of sunshine, or perhaps in defiance.
‘Don’t just look at the obvious, mate. Look around it.’ Brian’s voice has dropped into gruff softness, the tone reserved for a favoured grandson. Cass smiles and thinks that if Santa had a brother who hadn’t lived up to family expectations, then maybe he’d have a voice like Brian Freeman’s: cruel and kind, rolled into one.
He does as he’s told. As his eyes narrow and focus he takes in the curves and shapes, finally starting to appreciate each unique building. He spies a clock embedded high up in the face of what he will later learn is a Georgian building. His smile breaks into a small hiccough of surprised laughter. The clock is too far up the wall to serve any useful purpose, apart from anyone happening to look out of the opposite building at the same level. Whichever long-dead man designed that feature had placed it there purely for his own pleasure: a secret thing, only for those who bothered to look up.
His eyes drift. Gargoyles that have been completely invisible during the year he’s spent in Birmingham suddenly reveal themselves, rising proud from their arches. Even from so far away Cass thinks he can see tiny details like grimaces and wrinkles on their monster brows.
He stands like that for several minutes, drinking it all in.
‘You see, Charlie,’ Brian smiles, still chewing on the cooling chips, ‘simple pleasures can be had in just looking up.’
‘You’re not wrong,’ Cass agrees. His London accent is thicker than it is naturally, because Charlie is supposed to be the nephew of Andy Sutton, a player in one of the north London firms. Sutton is legendary across the country, but he is also on the police payroll. The kiddie porn charge is dropped, and Cass is suddenly Sutton’s newly invented nephew Charlie. Everyone’s happy.
Cass has been using this accent so long he wonders if he’ll ever find his own accent again. ‘It’s fucking amazing,’ he says.
‘When things seem like shite around you, just look up. It’ll give you a whole new perspective.’ The old man takes his own advice. On that dank autumn afternoon Cass thinks Brian Freeman looks every one of his sixty-three years. The humour fades from of his eyes as he looks around him. The skin of his neck doesn’t tighten when he lifts his chin but hangs like a wattle. The lines carved around his eyes deepen as he frowns. ‘Sometimes you’ve got to look at things from all the angles, you know?’
Cass nods. He’s twenty-five years old. He’s clever, but the man beside him is like a dinosaur of knowledge and experience. He has existed in times Cass can only imagine, and has done things Cass has read in files that are endless in their documentation of crime and violence, but that sometimes he can’t reconcile with the person he has come to know. He likes Brian Freeman. He can understand how he came to this life.
It’s all a mess, of course. Even back then, when his own skin is smooth and his consciousness is merely an empty space in his head, he knows that.
‘To get the clearer picture,’ Brian continues.
Cass nods again.
‘And aside from that’ - Brian screws up the rest of the chips inside the paper and tosses it into the pavement bin - ‘buildings are fucking beautiful.’ He sniffs. ‘Here endeth the lesson. Now, come on. Let’s go to the pub and investigate some other simple pleasures.’
He laughs, loud and gruff, and Cass laughs with him. They laugh like men that rule the world but the world just hasn’t figured it out yet. As he climbs into the waiting taxi, a fat roll of notes stiff in his pocket and without a care in the world, Cass almost believes he is Charlie, and there is no Kate waiting for him patiently in London, who doesn’t know the things he’s doing - and enjoying - in the name of his job. His heart heavy for a moment, he looks at Brian beside him and wonders where the dividing lines are. He’s not sure he can see them any more.
‘Home, James,’ Freeman says to the cabbie, and then laughs at his own poor imitation of a posh accent.
Cass peers out of the window. The world blurs, and mixed in with the streets of Birmingham he sees London’s streets. He frowns. His head hurts. The rain outside is changing colour. It’s not grey any more. It’s thick red. Something warm hits his hand and he looks down, confused. The crimson stands out against his pale skin. Another drop joins it and he feels its heaviness as it thuds into the back of his hand. His nose is running. He turns to Freeman and tries to say - have I got a nose bleed? - but the words stop in his throat as Freeman’s eyes widen, his mouth falling open in horror.