(no subject)

[toujours_nigel]

For my WiP class I have to write a story about a secret and/or a crime. So I dallied a long time, and then I gave up and chose one of my old favourites, about whom I once attempted to co-write a novel. Anyway.

Rock forth rock back, the hands on your arms clenching, pushing, fixing themselves in your flesh—there will be red marks on your skin, as though someone not you grabbed hold. You have tracked mud on the clean floor, and it is still flaking off the soles of your shabby sandals—‘Change your shoes, Alex, they’re disgusting.’—you can see where you have stepped, from the drying mud on the floor, mingling in a corner with the drying blood.

 

There is only a little blood, a very little, drying dark red and flaking from the wall where she had struck her head in falling. Not a killing wound, nothing more than a scrape. You would have been laughing, a little panic-stricken, had that been all—she hadn’t looked weak enough to faint at the sight of blood, to need smelling salts. But then you don’t know any women like that, don’t know whether any women like that exist. But then you don’t know many women, and the one you know best is your mother, and you can hear her voice in your head—a voice imagined, one of very few you have ever needed to imagine—berating you for giving in, for crawling into a corner at the first sign of all being less than perfect of working yourself into a fever, for not picking up the phone.

 

And you do, still shaking, fingers jamming hard against the lining of your pocket, almost dropping the phone. She picks up, and you hate yourself for sagging in relief-joy-horror at the sound of her voice. “You didn’t get lost again, did you?”

 

“No,” you say, and breathe to the sound of her breaths echoing down an imagined wire—you prefer the solidity of a landline, though now, lost-awash-at sea, you desire anything that will keep you landlocked. “Mrs. Banerjee.” You wait again, trying to force words up your unwilling throat and from behind locked teeth.

 

“What about her?” she asks, already the voice sharp with fear-worry-protectiveness, “Alexander?”

 

“I killed her,” you keen, eyes skidding over and returning—always returning, like they say sharks do to blood—to the woman lying on the floor, so undignified in death you can imagine it hurts her, somewhere deep inside, where life has ceased to flicker, saree pallu spread in a fan, white hair red-stained, one arm still-outstretched in a parody of the handshake you’d pulled loose from when her eyes rolled up in her head and her knees ceased to hold her up. “I killed her,” you say again, then, explaining it half to her, half to yourself. “I killed her and she’s dead.”

 

There is a breath’s pause and then she speaks, voice unwavering. “Have you called an ambulance?”

 

“I don’t know the number,” you say, stupid with shock—why isn’t she advising you to run?

 

“The neighbours will,” she says, as though this is matter-of-fact, humdrum, daily, nothing-to-see-here. Mother, why have you forsaken me?

 

“I killed her,” you say, hand shaking so hard that you have to bring your other up to hold the phone steady to your ear. This hand it was, that she shook. A death-dealing hand. “How can you ask me to… how…Mother.”

 

“You did not,” she says, and you draw a rattling breath, and hope you suck courage in, and her voice cuts across yours and stifles it. “You did not shoot, stab or strangle her. She is old, she died. Stop panicking.”

 

“I did,” you say, though you are already pushing to your feet, walking in your muddy footsteps back to the woman you have made a corpse. “I shook her hand, and she died. I heard her die, I heard her thoughts slowing…” wonder-horror-fear, and then her eyes turning up, and why can’t I see, why can’t I feel, what’s happening, what did that boy, what, oh.

 

“Sikander,” she soothes, “go call the neighbours in. It’ll be fine, just do this. Do as I say.” And then there’s a long low beep and dead air.

 

You look down at the body, at the blood mingling with the mud you tracked all over her clean floor, at the first fly landing, inquisitive, on her nose. You make no move to brush it away, but turn and walk—right foot, left, right, left, forward, march—to the door and out into the weak afternoon sun, gilding your hair, and the fur of the cat sleeping on the wall opposite you.

This is the first section of the story.