Shooting in the Dark

a false dignity, makes them strut. Somehow the covering of the uniform envelops them in a self-importance that puffs up their chests and endows them with a bragging gait. Gives them ultimate authority, a moral superiority that is represented by their physical bearing and stature.
    Isabel was in that other place now. Out of it, away from the screaming reality. No one could touch her up there: her sister, her husband, not even Russell himself. She was free of the physical world.
    He shivered. The physical body had always seemed a kind of tyranny to him. It was so huge, so dense and material that it was difficult to imagine how the soul managed to live in it. When you took into account the bones and the blood and the lymph and the layers of muscle and fat, there were very few spaces left for anything else. Being a soul must be a squashed existence.
    Once, when he was a young man, Russell had come out with this argument in a pub and after closing time the three guys he’d been talking to had taken him round the back and kicked the shit out of him.
    Broke three ribs and left him permanently deaf in one ear.
    This was the chaos that politicians called society, civilization.
     

24
     
    She had never been in love. Being in love meant turning your back on the world, meant closing down all possibilities except one. Angeles could not envisage a time when she would want to make her world smaller, when she would willingly whittle away the storehouse of life’s possibilities. There had been men who had tried to insert themselves into her life, but none had penetrated further than the dark cave of her vagina.
    She was aware of him sitting beside her, his large hand covering one of hers. When she moved her thumb she could feel the stiff hairs on the sides of his fingers. The mattress was firm and the air was etherealized cleaning fluid and urine. An alarm was activated and hurrying feet moved to answer it. Some way off the whirring of a floor-polishing machine confirmed that she was not dead, that she had arrived in a hospital ward.
    When she spoke her throat ran with fire. The torn gossamer tissue of her vocal cords screamed in protest as hundreds of millions of incandescent cells reacted to the vibration of a single syllable.
    His grip tightened. ‘How’re you doing?’ he asked. That rich tone, concern enunciated in each word. And yet a maintained sense of irony and detachment was at work, lest the depth of his disquiet panic her.
    ‘What do I look like?’ she asked. Her voice was a whisper, a croak.
    ‘Bruised. Vulnerable.’
    ‘Tell me. I want to know.’
    ‘You look like shit,’ he said. ‘But you’ll mend.’
    She smiled. If she had to wake up in a hospital bed looking like shit, she couldn’t think of anyone she’d rather find holding her hand. ‘Shouldn’t you be out chasing whoever did it?’
    ‘I’m going in a minute,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see you were all right. And I think you should move into my place when you get out of here. We can’t protect you in your own house.’
    ‘I’d rather take the chance and be in my own place, Sam.’
    He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t a question. If you make me a list I’ll collect the things you need.’
    ‘What’s going on, Sam? He tried to kill me.’
    The detective shook his head. ‘We don’t know why. Not yet.’
    Her body juddered. She relived the attack again but compressed into a single instant. Her breeding had taught her to put a brave face on things and that is what she did, but inside she was trembling with fear. Since the death of her sister, no, even before that, her relationship with the world had altered. There was a malevolent force out there, someone was watching her, stalking her, waiting for a moment of vulnerability. She remembered calling to her neighbour’s Persian, Tilly, here Tilly, here girl, and all the while there was no Tilly there. Only a man, a silent presence, watching, waiting to strike.
    What kind of man was that? Someone who lived in the shadows, who moved in silence. Even while he was squeezing the life out of her he hadn’t spoken. Not one word. When she bit deep into the flesh of his thumb he didn’t wince.
    Angeles lived in a middle-class world, a world where words were the primary method of communication. She had never come across people who didn’t speak, who didn’t declare their intentions. Peasants, they say, don’t speak much, and nor do fishermen. But she was not being stalked by someone from another