Shooting in the Dark

marriage. God, I wouldn’t have had Quintin Reeves in the house, let alone marry the man.’
    Celia let her talk. She found cups and saucers, a carton of milk in the fridge. She poured the tea and took it over to the table, pulled out a stool for herself.
    ‘Mummy had another child,’ Angeles said quietly. Between me and Isabel. A boy called Simon, but he only stayed for three days.’ She pushed her hands down between her thighs and looked up at the ceiling. Her eyes were running with tears but she didn’t make a sound. Celia watched the river of salt-water course along her cheeks and down her neck. After several minutes Angeles spoke again.
    ‘I wonder how it would have been different if he’d lived.
    If he’d been there to stand between us. Isabel and I were almost the same person. I knew her so well that there were times I couldn’t tell where she ended and I began.’
    Celia reached out and took her hand.
    ‘You know what they say when someone dies?’ Angeles was shaking her head from side to side as she spoke. ‘When someone dies the soul can get stuck for some reason. It goes into limbo and can’t travel on to wherever it’s supposed to go. That’s because it can’t leave the earth behind. It still has business here.’
    The tears came again, then. Angeles gave herself over to them, made no attempt to dam them up with words.
    ‘Isabel is like that,’ she continued eventually. ‘Stuck in limbo. Because there’s a part of her that’s me and part of me that’s her, and the one can’t go on without the other.’ She began to shake. The sounds that came from her lips were dragged up from way below the belt. Celia got to her feet, afraid that Angeles would fall off the stool. She went to her and took Angeles’ head and pressed it to her breast and gently rocked her back and forth, letting her own body absorb the violent spasms that threatened to turn the younger woman inside out.
    ‘There,’ she said. ‘There, m’dear. Let it come.’ There were no words of wisdom within her. The rocking and the rhythmical way she used her voice was the most she could bring. Angeles would have to work her way through her own pain, face up to her own demons.
    It was another one of the amazing things about life. That we seemed to arrive here with no experience at all and had to learn to cope with everything that the world threw at us. Angeles Falco would manage. She didn’t quite believe it just now. But she’d come out the other end, with scars, of course, but also with a lust for life.
     

13
     
    Miriam said I’m as crazy as a two-bob watch.
    It was a joke.
    She said it three days ago, and it keeps coming back to me.
    This was because I said that people who worked for money were a waste of time and in contravention of God’s dream for us.
    Miriam: ‘Why would I work for anything else? I spend eight hours a day in that place and I hate every minute of it. If there was no money involved, I wouldn’t go in.’
    In a conflict situation like this Miriam is defensive, she takes on an aggrieved tone, and when she’s finished speaking, or between sentences, while she’s thinking about what to say next, she grinds her front teeth. She doesn’t look at me, either. She hangs her head. In the midst of her arrogance and pride there is humility.
    I wear a voice-activated cassette recorder. The microphone is tiny and clips behind the lapel of my jacket and the cassette recorder itself sits snugly in my shirt pocket. It is a sensitive machine. As I listen to it now I can hear Miriam’s teeth grinding together.
    ‘I’m not against people making a living,’ I told her. ‘It’s when it goes beyond that that the devil gets involved. When money-grubbing becomes a way of life. We’ve got Politicians lining their pockets, chiefs of industry and commerce cheating and lying and cooking the books.
    Churchmen who know what is going on, but remain silent, refuse to bear witness, because they benefit from the proceeds.
    ‘This is the kind of society we live in. Everything is valued in terms of money. People, technical or social achievement, and works of art, they all have a price. And people are blinded by money. Once it gets in their eyes they can’t see anything else. We’re led to believe that the best films are the ones with the biggest budgets, the best books the ones that have earned the largest advance. Most people, if they meet a millionaire, they don’t ask where his millions came from, they just admire