Still Waters (Charlie Resnick #9)(41)
“I thought she was great,” enthused Jane. “Really, really good.”
“She was all right,” said Mollie, who had heard it all before and was wondering if she would bother going back after the break.
Jane had decided to go to the session on fashion, and since Hannah had done all of the reading for the fiction seminar, she would go there. Arriving slightly late, Hannah found herself sitting next to Sister Teresa, who had positioned herself midway along the back row, and immediately behind the young woman with the shaven head.
The group leader, a journalist and published writer herself, kicked things off with some observations about writer and reader, killer and victim, male and female, the weapon and the wound. She referred to an article on slasher movies which talked about the Final Girl, the one woman strong and resourceful enough to defeat the serial attacker, rather than becoming his victim. “The same,” she said, “in books. Books by men. Think about The Silence of the Lambs. But here, in these books we’ve been reading by women, this doesn’t happen. There is no escape.”
She paused and looked out at her audience.
“Now is this because these women writers are more bloodthirsty than their male counterparts, want to scare us, chill us more? Or are they simply being more realistic, more serious, more concerned with the truth? If we become, as some of the female characters in these novels do, fascinated by violence, especially by a combination of violence and sexuality, then there is a price to pay. If you stick us—as someone, as far as we know not a woman, once famously said—do we not bleed?”
She sat down to the sound of coughing, furious scribbling, and some generous applause.
The questions were not all as productive as they might have been; as was often the case, too many people were concerned to state their given positions instead of opening out the discussion. But Sister Teresa asked a quiet, well-formed question about the absence of any wider spiritual morality within which to contain a more individual, sexual one, to which the shaven-haired young woman, who turned out to have a soft, Southern Irish accent, responded by comparing the sexual wounds received by women, the often ritual nature of their bleeding, with the Christian tradition of the piercing of the body of Christ.
At the end of the hour, Hannah’s own question, about women asserting their right to explore the nature of their own fascination with violence and domination, remained unasked.
Time for tea, a quick cigarette or two for some, a degree of female bonding, and then back in for the main feature. Teresa barely had time to catch up with Sister Marguerite, her face aglow from good strong argument; for Hannah, a few moments in which to observe Jane’s continuing elation that the project on which she had worked so hard was proving such a success.
As she was slipping back in through the front doors, Hannah passed Mollie Hansen, slipping out.
“Not staying for the film, then?”
Mollie shook her head. “I’ve seen it already.”
“And?”
Mollie smiled her oddly invigorating smile. “It’s bollocks. If you want an informed opinion.” And, sports bag slung over her shoulder, hurried off to her workout in the gym.
Some hundred and thirty-nine minutes later, stumbling somewhat numbed out into daylight, Hannah wondered if Mollie might not have been right. For all those around her who spoke with admiration of the director’s control of the big action sequences, or Ralph Fiennes’ beauty, there were others who were appalled by the inclusion of a lengthy rape sequence, shot almost entirely from the point of view of the male aggressor.
“Talk about ending the day where you started off,” said one of the group, hollering her exasperation. “You expect that kind of thing from someone like Hitchcock, but this is a woman, for f*ck’s sake!”
“Well, I’m sorry,” said another. “But I loved it. Every minute.”
Sister Teresa had remained in the cinema some sixty seconds into the scene in question before leaving.
Hannah looked around for Jane, to give her a final hug of congratulation, but failed to pick her out in the crowd that was milling around the service area in the Café Bar. Tired, stimulated, Hannah headed along Goose Gate in the opposite direction to that taken by Lynn Kellogg the night before. She would phone Jane later.
When she rang Jane’s number at twenty-five past seven, Alex answered abruptly that she hadn’t yet arrived home; at half past nine, there was no answer, and Hannah left a brief message on the machine. It was past one in the morning, Hannah alone in her bed and not quite able to sleep, when Alex phoned her: Jane had still not returned, nor been in touch; he had seen nothing of her, neither hide nor hair.
Twenty-three
Narrow, 1960s modern, the blip of gray-bricked houses presented their backs to the tightly curved sweep of road and the fenced circle of grass on which a rough-coated pony improbably grazed. Trees hung green across broad pavements in need of some repair, and in the gardens of neighboring, older properties, shrubs sat fat and prosperous on swathes of lawn. Sunday morning, less than fifteen minutes brisk walk from the center of the city, still too early for the milkman or the paper boy or the first church bell. The background hum of traffic vied with the sweet, intermittent racket of birds.
The interior of the Peterson house was less parsimonious than its exterior suggested, the rooms surprisingly broad and light, a central stairway opening onto glass. Save for a grandfather clock, clumsy and tall in the space opposite the front door, the furnishings were quite contemporary, blacks and whites and grays in wood and chrome. The walls were cream, a roughish matte finish at one with those places where the exposed brick had been allowed to show through. Paintings hung sparingly, vivid abstracts whose colors seemed to move.