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Half an hour’s walk and a little water cleared us of the crime… Reaching the car I looked back in the direction of the fire. I thought I could detect a glow in the distance, and I heard a siren wail. I turned to Clem and said, “Do me the biggest favour: tell me that that was the last on the list.”
Clem took the list out of her pocket and regarded it in the orange glow of the streetlights and said, “Just the one entry left, and that can wait.” Disappointment washed over me; I had hoped that it was all over.
Clem leaned against the car and lit a cigarette, sheltering the tiny flame until the light caught. The warmth was strange but not inexplicable: the city’s integral heat informed all about it, and since dawn the weather had been unsettled and unexpected, with winds leaping up from every corner. She’d ensured that the place was empty - she wasn’t psychopathic, and neither was I - and everything had gone well enough. The fire brigade was already hard at work: I could hear the distant scream of the siren. Clem was clever about, possibly an inheritance from her more legal days when army funded her destructions. There had been no bomb this time - obviously - but Clem had made sure that a bomb threat had been phoned through in good time; had made sure that the pattern of the message left was close enough to that of the contemporary terrorists to make any suggestion of a hoax fade out. Besides, there were so many people with a grudge to work: how would they ever find out us? Then wind changed direction and Clem’s cigarette died. I grinned at the sigh she gave before beginning to light another. She inhaled ruthlessly before reaching into her pocket for her mobile. A short text message and everything was done. Clem looked at me and said, “Want a smoke?”
The question might have sounded ironic in those circumstances, and I hardly ever did (it wasn’t a habit I cared for, and I was glad that Clem never lit up in the office or the car, constantly looking out for sheltered spaces that would keep her and her cigarette safe) but just then I felt I needed something, and 3am was no time to be drinking. So I nodded, and she passed the box over to me. “Light?” she asked, and we both looked - as one - toward the blaze and grinned ruefully. Clem flicked her lighter and I cupped my hands around the tiny flame, drew the smoke into my system and gave out that little sigh that isn’t so dissimilar to one of the sounds in sex, when someone reaches inside you.
So I was burning buildings and smoking, too, but neither bothered me so badly. When I began working for Pandora I knew that not all of my job description would encompass legal actions. I inhaled again and looked at Clem, whose strangely relaxed manner was wholly at odds with most of her behaviour. If I had had to describe her to anyone, I would have said that she was like plate tectonics: nothing you could at first register, then an imperceptible slide and suddenly you’re standing on another country. Tall, strong, handsome rather than any other adjective, and utterly loyal to Pandora.
Clem did most of the planning, but I did sometimes wonder if we’d ever get caught. So far as I knew there was nothing overt to link us to any of the fires, and Clem was an immensely skilled arsonist. It was as well that they hadn’t visited that many places in the city or London would long since have been reduced to cinders. Clem stubbed out her cigarette, put it into her ember bag and reached out for my own, which was almost down to the filter. The tidiness was an integral part of her; I’d never seen her anything but orderly, except after Liz died. I think that after Liz died something came apart in Clem. But it was the rest of us, those who’d known Liz so much less, who fell apart at the service. Even Pandora came, though she fucked off after the service. I looked down at myself and realised that I was wearing the same coat I’d had on that day - long, black, and with deep pockets and a velvet collar that you could stand up against the cold. A nice coat; a smart coat. I looked down at my feet, but I wasn’t wearing graveside shoes. For some reason that came as a relief to me.
The wind suddenly howled at us, bursting down Oxford Street and catching up all the fallen leaves, sending them blasting at us, like tiny demons bent on destruction. They struck the windscreen and for a moment neither of us could see the road ahead. I stared back over my shoulder and saw those same leaf demons spinning across road and pavement, seemingly intent on their own brand of destruction. Another flight struck the car and Clem jammed on the brakes; for a moment there was nothing all around us but weaving, darting leaves, striking the windscreen and bouncing off the paintwork.
And as suddenly as it had begun, the storm was over and the road was clear again. Clem, her pallor accentuated by the inhuman orange night, reached into her pocket and drew out her cigarettes. I saw that her hands were shaking, so I took one out and lit it for her. I passed it over and pressed the window button, so that in a moment the car was full of the smell of autumn. “Just don’t ask me to smoke it for you.”
Clem regained her composure and we moved on. Surreptitiously I watched her, as I had often done. Scare over, she drove steadily and well. I could never get over the dichotomy: on the one hand this was the solid, mostly monosyllabic, unimaginative part of our partnership, now driving easily through the muted London streets, her gaze sensibly fixed on the road, humming a tune under her breath. And on the other hand, this was the talented arsonist, who’d just set yet another fire. Over the years of our working relationship I’d come for feel for Clem a kind of awed respect, an admiration, but never in all that time had I ever fancied her. All through the last weeks I’d watched her work as Pandora’s lieutenant through the process of the memory list, diligent and quiet.
Then I asked her the question I’d often wanted to ask, although I didn’t know how she’d respond to me. “Clem? You always do exactly what Pandora wants of you. I wondered… Has she ever asked you to kill anyone?”
The silence that followed the question was almost tangible. A long silence that ended as Clem sighed hard and said, “Casey? If you really want to know, I’ll tell you. But once you know, everything changes. Once you know, you can never stop knowing.”
The simple gravity with which she spoke chilled my blood. “Forget it,” I said. “Stupid question.” And we drove in silence the rest of the way to the little terraced house I had in Queen’s Park, close to the Bakerloo Line and the Portobello Road. Clem said nothing as I opened the door and got out of the car. It had been the strangest night.
But then, it had been a pretty strange year, albeit one that was now drawing toward a close. Liz’s funeral had been in In January and Clem had been different since then. In a sense we were both in mourning, her for Liz, me for Sean. But Sean was still alive, just… unassailable, unreachable. And I was never going to understand.
I had known from a day early in my employment that my employer was… different. Eccentric. I came into the company not long before Jez went out of it, so to speak. I’d known about Jez, the young woman who’d cheated on Pandora. Pandora did not forgive. I’d seen Jez when she was still in favour, and then again when she was not. She’d seemed nice enough, attractive, intelligent, and I could see why Pandora fancied her. Someone should have warned Jez that cheating on Pandora was not a healthy proposition.
Clem had been on Pandora’s staff for ten years, and I had been there for just over five, and I guessed that between us we knew more about Pandora than any of her business partners or her lovers ever had. There had been a stream of women in Pandora’s life, and I never knew a relationship of hers that ended well. To be wholly honest, it didn’t strike me as odd that Clem and I had been doing what we’d been doing. Hell, hadn’t there been times when I would have liked to erase the past, not to be reminded, day after day, of someone now gone. So long as no-one got hurt I didn’t care if we cleared a broad swathe through the city. Nor did it strike me as in any way strange that we never discussed what we were doing: we had our remit, a list to work through, and that was enough.
It had been just after Sean went back to America, on an ordinary day in mid October, that Pandora had given Clem the list. Clem left Pandora’s office, the paper in one hand. She had sat down slowly and carefully on her side of the double desk that marked out our centre of operations. Actually, that wasn’t quite true; in a sense our centre of operations was out on the little balcony, adjacent to the private kitchenette, where Clem kept her espresso machine.
It was hideously late or painfully early, but I was too wound up to sleep. After I’d showered away any smell of burning I thought back to April, when I was sitting in the restaurant Clem had just reduced to ashes, at a table by the window with Sean. I tried but couldn’t remember what I’d chosen to eat that night: Sean and I had been too consumed with the delight of seeing one another again to think hard about anything else. I wrapped more tightly round me the towelling robe that had looked nice in the shop but which failed to measure up to satisfaction in the steady light of day. I sat there on one side of the coffee table, a nice, restored pine affair that I’d rescued and sanded down myself, and looked at the sofa opposite, where Sean had sat not so very long ago, before we said goodbye for the last time, and she went back to America.
Jez had been a different matter: she’d cheated on Pandora but Pandora was about to forgive her when Jez disappeared. I still wondered about that, remembering Pandora, Clem and I on the boat that day, Clem leafing through not a Dear John letter but a dissertation, which was all of Jez that we ever found. Pandora hadn‘t had anyone for a while after that, but then she’d rediscovered her old hungers and life had gone on as normal, until Sean. I hadn’t known much about Jez, but I knew all about Sean.
When Sean and I had met for dinner, it had been our first meeting in almost six years, and the two of us both so anxious to share our experiences that we kept talking over one other. Jabbering madly into one another’s face, perilously happy and drinking too much wine. I had never expected to see Pandora out of the office, and was so firmly ensconced on Planet Sean that when my boss’s pleasant contralto broke through the frantic exchange it took me a moment to regain the present and respond accordingly. Recovered, I’d done the polite thing and introduced Sean to my boss. Then Pandora went on her way and we continued with our news fest.
The day after our reunion I woke up feeling like death. Indeed, waking early and dry-mouthed and dizzy I might have welcomed death. Then I gave up, and mixed the repellent hangover cure that I’d discovered at college. Shuddering even through just thinking about it, I crawled into the kitchen, poured out a glass of tomato juice and added a raw egg to the mix. I added a generous helping of black pepper, took a deep breath and drank it down. There was a horrible sensation of slippage, and unavoidable retching, but I hung on, and I hung in and fairly soon was feeling almost human again.
I might have looked dead but I wasn’t late to work. At a little past eleven I went outside for a breath of air while Clem made coffee (she was addicted to espressos) for us both. My mobile vibrated in my pocket. Clem, with a mug in either hand, noticed as much and grinned. She handed me my poison and lit up, while I put the mobile to my ear. Judging by the pitch of her voice Sean wasn’t feeling any better than I, but her voice was still clear as crystal and had bite. She said, “You sound as bad as I feel, and you sound like shit.”
“Thanks.” I took a mouthful of coffee and hoped I could retain it.
“Look, I know they don’t like you getting calls at work but I needed to talk to you. That woman we met last night, your boss…”
“Pandora. Yeah?” A hint of humanity was easing into my veins, carried by the caffeine. I grinned at Clem to thank her as she went back inside.
“Did she ask you for my address?”
“Your address? Why would she have wanted your address?”
“Flowers, Casey.”
“Flowers? Pandora sent you…”
“Flowers. Lots and lots of flowers. Seriously. This place looks like the Chelsea fucking Flower Show. How did she know where I was staying? How the fuck did she get my address?”
Then the oddness of the conversation struck me. “Pandora sent you flowers?” The words fell clumsily out of my mouth.
Sean laughed at me. “Thanks for joining the party. Yes. Flowers. A fucking great rainbow of them.”
Fool that I was, I missed my cue. “Anything apart from the flowers?”
“Such as? Diamonds? Pearls? A small yacht to play with in the bath? None of those. But…”
“But what?”
“But there’s an invitation to dinner tucked into one of the bouquets.”
“Dinner?”
“Yes. Dinner. I wondered… What do you think? She’s your boss after all, should I go?”
“Do you want to?”
“Casey, she’s filled my room with flowers and she’s invited me to dinner at 43. 43 for chrissakes. Talk about fucking exclusive… Listen to this: she said on the invite, ‘just dinner’. Well, I can paraphrase like the best of them; you know her better than I do: will she expect me to fall into bed with her?”
“Hell, no, I don’t think you have any problems with ego, Sean.”
“Oh, fuck you.” But I could hear her smiling over the phone. “But come on. You know her. What is this? Just dinner?”
“Uh, from past experience I should say yes, just dinner.” But what did I know? How did I know? There’s ample evidence that I can screw up as well as the best of them. Once I’d mis-programmed my iPod and had ended up with the Corrs when I’d anticipated Alice Cooper. Don’t get me wrong, I like both. But that day I’d wanted explosive rock, not pop music. “I really don’t know. If it bothers you, don’t go.”
I could feel Sean’s amused uncertainty through the phone. Difficult not to react favourably to flowers and the offer of dinner. Of course, Becky, another college flatmate, who’d embraced Feminism with a capital F, would have dismissed flowers and invitation as nothing more than pejorative sexist exploitation. She might also have said that we must be fucked in the head if we would allow that to influence us. Where are our peers when we need them most?
“Hell. Ah, fuck it. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go, just out of curiosity.”
“Let me know what happens.”
“Voyeur.”
“Takes one to know one.” She was still laughing as she broke the connection. I stood there with my mobile clutched hard in my hand. A few minutes more and I went back to work.
There had never been anything physical between Sean and I. We’d been flat-mates at college and we’d stayed friends in the decade that followed. While Becky went off to the wilds, brown rice and love of good women, and I went into the city, Sean went. I hadn’t even known that she was gay until the graduation party. How dumb is dumb? She’d known about me but she’d never let on. I was busy coming to terms, all that stuff, but Sean was way ahead of me. In retrospect I can see that I fancied her, but how could we have made it as a couple with her knowing all my faults? She’d lived with me, after all.
The night of that potential first date I got home stupidly tired, and found I couldn’t settle to anything. I showered to wash off the stickiness of the underground, then I settled down on the sofa with a book. I read the same chapter three times and still failed to take in the slightest nuance of the plot. Realising that it was going to be a good night for insomnia I threw caution to the winds, knocked back a sleeping tablet with a shot of vodka and went to bed.
All my dreams that night - which seemed endless - were in some way sexual. I would half-wake from one only to slide effortlessly into the next. In every dream there was a concrete plot complete with a host of supporting parts. In episode I found myself in bed with Sean. We’d made love, or were about to, when she said: “Your boss just phoned. She wants you back in the office.” And I left her, knowing full-well that the moment I was out of the bed, Pandora would be taking my place.
The pill and the booze did their work. I don’t know how long Sean had been waiting for me at the door, one finger jammed against the buzzer. I staggered down the stairs and let her in, still dressed as I was.
She looked me up and down. “Shit. I woke you. Sorry.”
“Of course you didn’t.” The lie made her smile. She knew about my sleeping problems. “I’ve been up for ages.”
“You’re such a hopeless fucking liar, Case.”
I put up my hands. “Don’t shoot. I’ll come quietly.”
“Can I make us some coffee?”
“You can do anything in the world you want to, if you’ll give me time to grab a shower and a little humanity.”
She grinned at me. “Run away and shower, druggie.”
“Thanks a whole lot.”
The water beat down on me. I stumbled out and towelled myself dry, then wrapped up in my dressing gown and followed the smell of coffee. Sean had set out a tray on the coffee table before the sofa. She said, “I like your home.”
“Thanks. Me too.”
“You must be… How the fuck do you afford this place?”
“I get a good salary.” Just don’t ask me for a job description. “And I did inherit my gran’s place. That paid the deposit and then some.”
“Of course. I forgot about your gran. Sorry. Fucking inconsiderate bitch. Mind like a sieve.” She was clearly wired, though it took me a while to see that. She sat down only to get up again, and it struck me then that she was pretty dressed up for a Saturday morning.
Insight struck then. I said, “You haven‘t been home yet.” She blushed. Hell, I blushed. I felt something shift inside me, something that hurt. “You stayed the night with Pandora?”
“Not exactly. Sort of. I guess. Not like that. We didn’t have sex, I mean, if you’re wondering. We didn’t leave the restaurant until late, and then she took me to this incredible club.” The Radcliffe. Of course. I knew all about the Radcliffe. In another few months’ time I’d help Clem burn it to the ground. “Before I knew it, it was dawn. We drove through the city, watched the sun come up.”
“Sounds very romantic.” The inanity of my response didn’t touch her and I was glad of it.
“When I met her the other night with you, she seemed a bit cold, but up close she seems really nice.”
“I’m glad you had such a good time.” My play list was fucked anew. I had the Corrs gently harmonizing when what I really wanted was Alice Cooper screaming inside my head. Or Faith No More and something unsubtle. Sean played with her coffee cup, unable to settle. At last I said, “And you’re next seeing her…?”
“Later in the week.” I was surprised: Pandora tended to follow up her first full-frontal assault with a body-blow. “To be honest, she did say something about tonight, and dinner, but I felt I needed a little time. She… She does tend to overwhelm, doesn’t she?”
A not uncommon feature in a boss. For the first time I understood that I was jealous. And sad. Seeing Sean again had been a revelation, but if I’d been going to tell her how I felt about her it was now too late.
“Maybe she’ll get by your defences. And then charm her way to your heart.”
The months went by. Most of the time I worked solely with Clem doing things I wouldn’t discuss without a solicitor present, while Sean and Pandora continued dating. In all that time Sean and I never once discussed the affair. It was a tacit agreement that remained in place until one day in August.
“I don’t think I can go on like this.” Sean was back at my flat. She’d been pacing nervously, wall to window, window to wall. She looked at me, appealing. “I thought it might have worked.. I really did think it might. But I was wrong. It’s all wrong. You can see that, can’t you?”
If I’d been a bookie I couldn’t have been in a better position to give her odds, and I still didn’t know how to go about it. The best I could do was, “It’s not a mutual thing, then? I got the impression that you were pretty happy. Pandora certainly seems happy.”
“A month or two back I thought I’d never been so happy. But things change. I’m due to fly back to America early next month, you know.”
“I thought you’d cancelled your flight.”
“I nearly did. I so nearly did. And then I decided to leave it. I thought it was worth losing money over, if it kept things at least open. Last month I thought I was going to waste it, but now I’m glad I left it stand.” She went to the window and looked out over the little back yard I called a garden. “I used to think that autumn started in September, but I was wrong. July’s the last proper summer month. Halfway through August and the nights are already getting longer. It seems so sad.” Then she looked at me and shook her head, embarrassed, not smiling. “I’m sorry. I must sound a little nuts.”
She stopped pacing and shook herself free of thought. In another week’s time, when she’d called on me in the early hours of a Sunday, she seemed too exhausted to pace any more.
It was about 2am when she reached the house, but she’d texted me first. All the same, I was only half awake when she reached my door. She almost fell into the hallway. Her hair was ruffled and her clothes were crumpled. It was only later that I realised she’d just come from Pandora’s bed. That night she didn’t bother with coffee, just rifled through my cupboards until she found the bottle of Wild Turkey that I saved for emergencies. I’d left her just long enough to grab a couple of shot glasses, and when I got back to the living room she was sitting in the centre of the second sofa, her shoulders slumped.
By the time we’d emptied the bottle - me in drinking in silent empathy - we were both close to collapse. That night she slept with me - just slept - in a tee-shirt of mine and a pair of sweat pants. At some point in the night (I couldn’t sleep, my thoughts were marching) she turned and rolled into my arms. I felt her tears against my skin. Her arms went round me, too hard, and I held her as gently as I could, until I finally fell asleep somewhere near dawn, my head spinning. Every time I began to drift, another Corrs’ song began to play within the anguished inside of my mind.
She never told me what happened that night to make her exchange - however temporarily - Pandora’s posh apartment for my tiny terrace. The next morning we shared a very late and very quiet breakfast. I wanted to say something or ask something, but it was clear she didn‘t want to talk. But she stayed all day with me, picking up book after book and then putting them down again, while I did my usual Sunday things: ironed some shirts, re-organised the fridge, wrote out a shopping. That evening we walked down the main road to the cinema and watched a forgettable film. Then we bought a pizza and took it home. I offered her another night’s accommodation but she thanked me and said she had things she needed to do.
And then it was Monday, and Pandora was… fucking unbelievable.
Even Clem looked wary, and by midday I was merrily working on my CV, wondering how to describe my current employment without actually saying anything. When Clem appeared, silently, beside me, I nearly took off. “Jesus!” I said, leaving a good two inches’ worth of space between me and the seat of my chair. “Please don’t do that.”
“Sorry.” Clem hardly ever spoke, and her voice, when it did come, was as unexpected as ever, low-pitched and almost shy. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Forget it. It’s me. Funny day.”
“She’s not happy.” Clem gestured toward the door of Pandora’s office. It had been almost an hour since we’d heard the marble vase break as it struck the wall. Before then it had seemed as if everything Pandora could throw and break, she’d thrown and broken. Even the tall marble vase that stood just inside her room now lay in pieces.
“What’s wrong with her?”
Clem looked at me a little oddly, then said, “Sean walked out on her. Didn’t you know?”
“I knew things weren’t good is all.” When Sean had left me she’d still been undecided about what to do. Evidently she’d since decided.
“Not good at all, it seems.”
Clem said nothing for a moment, then she glanced toward the office. “It’ll blow over. Eventually.”
It didn’t. Sean used her ticket after all, and went back to America in October. She never told me what took place that night between her and Pandora, and I never pressed her on the subject. For the last days of her time we saw a lot of one another, and she never once referred to the affair. I admit, I was curious, but I simply wasn’t going to ask. And I was never going to know.
The night before Sean went back to America she stayed with me, and we did end up in bed together, all her cases waiting in the hall for the dawn taxi. That night all the jogging pants and tee-shirts in the world weren’t going to come between us. But when the taxi came she kissed me and left with hardly a word
October drifted on and Pandora’s mood got darker and darker until the day she called Clem into her office, and gave her the list. She couldn’t bear to be reminded of all the places she’d been with Sean, so she had us take erase them. Two weeks after Sean left, Clem and I took up our new role as arsonists.
Two days after the penultimate fire the office atmosphere felt much easier. Clem said to me at the end of the day: “Pandora wants us to check up on the boat. I thought we’d leave early tomorrow morning. I’ll pick you up if you like. It’ll make a change, at least.”
Wow. The boat. It’d been ages since we’d been out there. I knew that Pandora had never gotten rid of it - why should she? it had been little more than a means to an end - and the idea of getting away from the city, from looking at the empty armchair had an amazing amount of appeal. I grinned at her and said, “What time do you want me?”
“Call it five? Can you do five?” I grinned again: I wasn’t always late. And then I nodded.
So we drove up, taking the long haul in turns. When I drove Clem climbed into the back and slept like someone stunned. I took care with the driving, making no sudden stops or starts that would scare her out of a sleep so deep it looked almost like death. I shook myself: I kept thinking about death. Kept thinking about Clem going off to visit Liz’s grave with a bunch of lilies so scented they made me dizzy.
I liked the way the country looked out there, but I knew it wasn’t the place for me. The colours were still stunning, even so late in the year; the bracken had gone from flame to rust and the heather was following suit. We had a night on the way and it was late the next afternoon, with the light beginning to fade, when we hauled out the dingy and set off for the boat. I’d forgotten how strong the current could be, and I was grateful for the outboard motor, which still sounded toned and strong. But by the time we’d reached the boat, the light was almost gone. It wasn’t going to be easy, getting back. I said, “Wouldn’t it have been easier to wait until morning?”
“You know what Pandora’s like,” said Clem. “Let’s just get it over with.”
We boarded the boat without too much difficulty - all those hours in the gym finally paying off - and I got the lights going. The boat itself felt cold and damp and unloved. “I can’t imagine that Pandora’s going to want to spend much time out here.”
“Pandora isn’t ever coming out here,” said Clem. She looked me full face and there I saw an expression there both impatient and sad. “That’s not why we’re here. You’re not always all that bright, are you, Casey? Have you still not figured it out?”
“What’s to figure? Why would - ” I broke off and looked at Clem, who had reached into her pocket and produced a gun. I’d seen it before, when we’d taken Jez, but I’d never thought to see it again. She held it firmly in one hand, the muzzle pointed straight at me, and said,
“This is the list Pandora gave me. You might as well see it.”
I took the paper from her fingers. Pandora’s list of Sean-related places, all of which we’d carefully erased. Sean-related places. But not just places.
Oh,god.
There was Pandora’s capable, bland script. There Clem’s additions: neat ticks beside all entries but one. I stared at the last two entries and then at Clem. She shrugged her shoulders, embarrassed. I thought of the private cab that had called to take Sean to the airport and I felt sick.
Clem reached into her pocket and pulled out her cigarettes. “Want one? It can hardly hurt you now.” She had to give me a light, too: my hands were shaking.
The gun in her hand looked dull and too real. I was trying to get my head around the shift in circumstances but I couldn’t think straight. Lassitude or fear was creeping through my bones, and I was suddenly so tired I thought I might die of it. “What are you going to do? Leave me here to freeze, or shoot me now?”
“She said that you could choose. I can leave you here tonight, or I can… It’s up to you, Casey.” Now there was no compassion in her eyes, and I realised that though I’d never thought of Clem as being anything other than a friend, I didn’t know her at all. We hadn’t been friends. We’d gone drinking together but we’d never shared that stupid, likeable drunken companionship. She had always kept her distance, and now I understood why. Clem was Pandora’s woman to the end.
I’ve pleaded things in my life. I’ve been in love and I’ve been thrown over and I can remember how hopeless things seemed to me then. I can remember crying myself to sleep. I can remember - though it shames me to do so - once going down on my knees and begging. I suppose that at least I can claim to have felt something in my life. I’ve experienced wild intensity and passion. Neither had done me any good.
No. Pleading was out.
I turned away, and walked across the deck and looked at the sky. Out to the west there appeared a shifting veil of colours, mostly green and pink, shimmering across the sky. I watched the veil shivered in the wind and transfer itself further out across the darkness. “Aurora Borealis,” I said, dully. “The Northern Lights.” I put my hands on the rail and felt how cold that was. I pulled up the collar of my coat to cut out the chill that was spreading through the deck and up into me.
“I’ve never thought to see them,” said Clem. A pause and then she added: “Liz would have loved this.”
“I’ve only ever seen them on TV,” I said. And then the sadness washed over me and through me. I thought about Sean: I wondered where her body lay.
“I don’t want to die by inches, ” I said. I heard the snick of a gloved finger pulling back that ugly little gun’s safety catch. Above me the shimmering green was being eclipsed by the pink, the whole of it flapping like a sheet in the wind, and that wind was cold. All I think to do was say: “Now.” Not much of a farewell speech, but it was all I had.