Macbeth

‘No, Caithness. I can’t. You said you’d be satisfied with what you could have of my heart. But I can’t just give you a bit of that, Caithness. Then I would be cheating twice, both you and the mother of my children. And what you said about me not loving her any more isn’t true.’ He inhaled. ‘Because I’d forgotten. But then I remembered. That I love her and I always have. And I’ve been unfaithful to you with my own wife.’

He saw the words hit home. Saw the thin, false veneer of seduction melt into deep shock. Then tears sprang from her eyes, and she curled up, pulled up the sheet and covered herself.

‘Goodbye, Caithness. Hate me as I should be hated. I’m leaving now.’

At the front door Duff took the clothes and toiletries under his arm. The racket could stay. You don’t play tennis on a smallholding. He stood looking at the earrings and necklace. Heard Caithness’s pained sobs from the bedroom. It was expensive jewellery — it had cost him more than strictly speaking he could afford — but now, in his hand, it had no value. There was no one he could give it to anyway, except a pawnbroker. But could he bear the thought of this jewellery being worn by a stranger?

He hesitated. Looked at his watch. Then he put down the other things, took the jewellery and went back to the bedroom.

She stopped crying when she saw him. Her face was wet with tears, black with make-up. Her body shook with a last sob. One stocking had slipped down, also a shoulder strap.

‘Duff...’ she whispered.

‘Caithness,’ he said with a gulp. Sugar in his stomach, blood rushing in his head. The jewellery fell on the floor.

The sergeant grabbed the rifle from behind the bar and ran to the window; the rest of the club members were already on their way to the arms cupboard. Outside there was a lorry standing side on to the club house. The engine was running and the club gate was still hanging off its front bumper. As was Chang. The sergeant put the rifle to his shoulder as the tarpaulin over the back of the lorry dropped. And there were SWAT in their ugly black uniforms, their guns raised. But there was something even uglier on board, something which made the blood in the sergeant’s veins turn to ice. Three monsters. Two of them made of steel and on stands, with ammunition feeds, rotating barrels and cooling chambers. The third stood between them, a bald, lean, sinewy man the sergeant had never seen before but knew he had always known, had always been close to. And now this man raised his hand and shouted, ‘Loyalty, fraternity!’

The others responded: ‘Baptised in fire, united in blood!’

Then a single command: ‘Fire.’ Of course. Fire.

The sergeant got him in his sights and pulled the trigger. One shot. The last.

The raindrop fell from the sky, through the mist, towards the filthy port below. Heading for an attic window beneath which a couple were making love. The man was silent as his hips went up and down, slowly but with force. The woman beneath him clawed the sheet as, sobbing and impatient, she received him. The gramophone record had stopped playing its sweet melody some time ago, and the stylus kept bumping monotonously, like the man, against the record label with the command Love Me Tender. But the lovers didn’t appear to notice, didn’t appear to notice anything apart from the repetitive motion they were caught up in, didn’t even notice each other as they banged away, banging out demons, banging out reality, the world around them, this town, this day, for these few minutes, this brief hour. But the raindrop never reached the window pane above them. A cold gust from the north-west drew the drop east of the river that split the town lengthways and south of the disused railway line dividing the town diagonally. It fell on the factory district, past Estex’s extinguished chimneys and further east towards the fenced-in low timber building between the closed factories. There the drop ended its passage through the air and hit the shiny skull of a lean man, ran down his forehead, stopped for an instant in his short eyelashes, then fell like a tear down one cheek that had never known real tears.