The Golden Fury

Chapter Three

 Chapter 3

I hate seeing myself without warning. Don’t recognize myself sometimes. You think you know what you look like and there is this stranger looking at you. It can frighten me.

But today I study the stranger’s face. The brown hair half pulled up on top of the head in a frantic work bun, n***d skin, shadows and lines creeping towards the eyes like cracks in pavement.

“Christ, you look awful,” I tell the woman on the screen. The movement of her mouth mesmerizes me and I make her speak some more.

“Come on, Bria, get some work done,” she says. I smile palely at her and she smiles back.

“This is mad behavior,” she tells me in my own voice, and I stop.

Thank God Raul can’t see me now, I think.

• • •

When Raul gets home tonight, he’s tired and a bit grumpy after a day of “boneheaded” undergraduates and another row with his department head over the timetable. Maybe it’s an age thing, but it seems to really shake Raul to be challenged at work these days. I think he must be starting to doubt himself, see threats to his position everywhere. University departments are like prides of lions, really. Lots of males preening and screwing around and hanging on to their superiority by their dewclaws. I say all the right things and make him a gin and tonic.

When I move his briefcase off the sofa, I see he’s brought home a copy of the Evening Standard. He must’ve picked it up on the tube.

I sit and read it while he showers away the cares of the day, and it’s then I see the paragraph about the baby.

“Baby’s Body Found,” it says. Just a few lines about how an infant’s skeleton has been discovered on a building site in Woolwich and police are investigating. I keep reading it over and over. I can’t take it in properly, as if it’s in a foreign language.

But I know what it says and terror is coiling around me. Squeezing the air out of my lungs. Making it hard to breathe.

I am still sitting here when Raul comes down, all damp and pink, and shouting that something is burning.

The pork chops are black. Incinerated. I throw them in the bin and open the window to let out the smoke. I fetch a frozen pizza out of the freezer and put it in the microwave while Raul sits quietly at the table.

“We ought to get a smoke alarm,” he says instead of shouting at me for almost setting the house on fire. “Easy to forget things when you’re reading.” He is such a lovely man. I don’t deserve him.

Standing in front of the microwave, watching the pizza revolve and bubble, I wonder for the millionth time if he’ll leave me. He should have done years ago. I would have if I’d been in his place, having to deal with my stuff, my worries, on a daily basis. But he shows no sign of packing his bags. Instead he hovers over me like an anxious parent, protecting me from harm. He talks me down when I get in a state, invents reasons to be cheerful, holds me close to calm me when I cry, and tells me I am a brilliant, funny, wonderful woman.

It is the illness making you like this, he says . This isn’t you.

Except it is. He doesn’t know me really. I’ve made sure. And he respects my privacy when I shy at the mention of my past. “You don’t have to tell me,” he says. “I love you just the way you are.”

Saint Raul—I call him that when he’s pretending I’m not a burden to him, but he usually shushes me.

“Hardly,” he says.

Well, not a saint, then. But who is? Anyway, his sins are my sins.

What do old couples say? What’s yours is mine. But my sins . . . well, they’re my own.

“Why aren’t you eating, Em?” he says when I put his plate on the table.

“I had a late lunch, busy with work. I’m not hungry now, but I’ll have something later,” I lie. I know I would choke if I put anything in my mouth.

I give my brightest smile—the one I use for photos. “I’m fine, Raul.

Now eat up.”

On my side of the table, I nurse a glass of wine and pretend to listen to his account of the day. His voice rises and falls, pauses while he chews the disgusting meal I’ve served, and resumes.

I nod periodically but I hear nothing. I wonder if Jude has seen the article.

TWO

Aldira

Aldira Waters was bored. It wasn’t a word she normally associated with her job, but today she was stuck in the office under the nose of her boss with nothing to do but rewrites.

“Put it through your golden typewriter,” Terry, the news editor, had shouted across, waving someone else’s badly written story at her.

“Sprinkle a bit of fairy dust on it.”

And so she did.

“It’s like an assembly line in here,” she complained to the Crime Man, sitting opposite. “Churning out the same old rubbish with a few frills. What are you working on?”

Gordon Willis, whom the Editor always referred to by his job title—

as i n “Get the Crime Man on this story”—lifted his head from a newspaper and shrugged.

“Going down to the Old Bailey this afternoon—want to have a chat with the detective chief inspector in the crossbow murder. Nothing doing yet but hoping I might get a talk with the victim’s sister when it finishes.

Looks like she was sleeping with the killer.

“It’ll be a great multi-deck headline: ‘The Wife, the Sister and the Killer They Both Loved,’” he said and grinned at the thought. “Why?

What have you got on?”

“Nothing. Unpicking a story one of the online slaves has done.” Aldira indicated a pubescent nymph typing furiously at a desk across the room.

“Straight out of school.”

She realized how bitter—and old—she must sound and stopped herself. The tsunami of online news had washed her and those like her to a distant shore. The reporters who once sat on the Top Table—the newspaper equivalent of the winner’s podium—now perched at the edge of the newsroom, pushed farther and farther towards the exit by the growing ranks of online operatives who wrote twenty-four/seven to fill the hungry maw of rolling news.

New media stopped being new a long time ago, the Editor had lectured his staff at the Christmas party. It was the norm. It was the future. And she knew she had to stop bitching about it.

Hard, she told herself, when the most viewed stories on the paper’s slick website are about Madonna’s hands being veiny or an EastEnders star putting on weight. “Hate a Celebrity” dressed as news. Horror.

“Anyway,” she said out loud, “it can wait. I’ll go and get us a coffee.”

Also gone were the days of the CQ—the conference quickie—once enjoyed by Fleet Street’s finest in the nearest pubs while the executives were in the Editor’s morning meeting. The CQ was traditionally followed by red-faced, drunken rows with the news editor, one of which, legend had it, ended with a reporter, too drunk to stand, biting his boss’s ankle and another throwing a typewriter through a window into the street below.

The newsroom, now in offices above a shopping mall, had windows hermetically sealed by double glazing, and alcohol was banned. Coffee was the new addiction of choice.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Double macchiato with hazelnut syrup, please,” he said. “Or some brown liquid. Whichever comes first.”

Aldira took the lift down, pinching a first edition of the Evening Standard from the security desk in the marble lobby. As she waited for the barista to work his magic with the steamer, she flicked idly through the pages, checking for the bylines of friends.

The paper was wall-to-wall preparations for the London Olympics and she almost missed the paragraph at the bottom of the News in Brief column.

Headlined “Baby’s Body Found,” two sentences told how an infant’s skeleton had been unearthed on a building site in Woolwich, not a million miles from Aldira’s east London home. Police were investigating.

No other details. She tore it out of the paper for later. The bottom of her bag was lined with crumpled scraps of newspaper—“it’s like a budgie cage,” her eldest son, Jake, had teased about the shreds of paper waiting for life to be breathed into them. Sometimes whole stories to be followed up on or, more often, just a line or a quote that made her ask, “What’s the story?”

Aldira reread the thirty words and wondered about the person missing from the story: the mother. As she walked back with the cups, she ticked off her questions: Who is the baby? How did it die? Who would bury a baby?