Mr. Flood's Last Resort(53)

At first Renata was calm. She walked forwards into the living room like they told her to. Adjusting her headscarf, raising her eyebrows, she asked them what it was they wanted in a light, even voice.

They ignored her and said things to each other that she didn’t quite catch. They spat out the big gobs of spit that they worked up in their throats. One lit up a cigarette and one glanced at the television. Then they went to work. One stayed in the living room with her, the others spread out. Renata could hear them crashing about in the other rooms.

*

HE PULLED the novels off the bookcase, flicking through each of them with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, as if he were looking for a good read. He tipped out her drawers and riffled through her papers. Renata had stood motionless.

He glanced up and asked her what she was looking at. Faggot.

He walked over to her. What was he, seventeen or eighteen? With the whey-pale look of the badly fed, the underfed, the fed full of crap. A thin, bland face, with spots around the mouth. His trousers were slung low, halfway down his arse with his underpants showing. Renata fought the urge to laugh. She fought the urge to tell him to pull his bloody trousers up.

He walked up to her, close to her, and in his too-high, whining, strung-out voice asked her what she was fucking looking at. Nonce. It was a ducking, edging kind of walk; he could be a crab scuttling sideways, his arms out as a counterbalance. As if he was walking through an earthquake— Crashes in the other room: as loud as colliding tectonic plates, slamming, shattering, rending noises, then pauses and exclamations.

He told her to walk to the mirror. She didn’t understand. He pointed. She moved, numb, dulled. She didn’t think to refuse.

Take it off.

She didn’t understand.

He pointed to her headscarf. Take it off.

She had reached up and he had watched her. She fumbled with the knot. He put his cigarette in his mouth.

Here, Faggot, he murmured.

He ripped it off her head.

Time slowed and stopped.

Together they looked in the mirror, him standing over her shoulder. She saw her face through his eyes. Sad old clown.

She was surprised by how naked her head was, how obscene, with its skin puckered, scaly even, and the little wisps of gray hair above the ears. He stood smoking, on his face an expression of disgusted fascination.

What is fucking wrong with you, man?

He swore emphatically, stepped back, and swung his crowbar. Not at her but at the gemstones in the cabinet, aiming for the moon.

*

WE STAY in the bathroom, the only room they did not destroy. I bring two chairs in from the kitchen, shaking splinters of glass from them. Then I close the door against the carnage.

I can call the police, Renata agrees grudgingly, but only when she’s decent. I clean her face very gently, with baby lotion and cotton balls from the bathroom cabinet. Sometimes she grabs my hand and holds it against her. Sometimes she just sobs for long furious moments on my shoulder. I find her shower cap and carefully pull it down about her head and she nods and breathes out. In her bedroom I find spilt boxes of makeup. I gather what I need along with a handheld mirror and take them into the bathroom.

Renata sits quietly in her shower cap and kimono, with her face clean and blank: small, pale, and genderless.

I hold the mirror in front of her but her hands shake too much to use tubes and wands, applicators and brushes.

“Do your worst, darling,” she says with a stiff little smile.

*

SHE LOOKS for the longest time in the mirror. She is not herself but it is enough for her to face the world. My version of Renata’s face is softer, smudged in places, so that she looks a little baffled.

When the police officer arrives I find Renata a headscarf to replace her shower cap. When Lillian arrives we find paper cups and make coffee.

Renata sits at the kitchen table with her hands folded on her lap and I sit next to her. The officer, a tall heavyset girl with a ponytail, sits opposite. She calls Renata madam and asks if she has been a victim of hate crime before.

Renata glances over at the sink. Lillian has her back to us but I can see that she has stopped what she is doing; in her stilled hand she holds the broken crockery she’s pulled from the dish drain.

“Yes,” says Renata.

“Recently?”

“Ten years ago.”

The officer writes in her pad. “So no connection to today’s incident?”

“No.” Renata reaches for my hand.

The officer looks at her. “Was there a conviction?”

Renata half turns to me and I squeeze her hand.

“No.”

“And that was . . .”

Renata’s voice is suave and careless, as if she’s extending an invitation to a top-drawer party. “Indecent assault, darling, behind Waterloo Station.”

“I’m really sorry,” says the police officer, who looks like she really is.

Lillian puts the crockery in the dustbin, dries her hands on a tea towel, and walks out of the room.

*

THE POLICE officer has gone and Lillian is sweeping broken glass into a black bag in the living room, picking out the rock samples as she goes. The string cockerels are not salvageable, but no one liked them anyway. Jesus Christ has been found in the bedroom with his face against the wall, still exuding calm and perfect radiance. Like Johnny Cash, he has been restored to his rightful place in the hallway.