Dead Men's s Boots

‘You didn’t think of going into the room?’ I asked.

Joseph shot me a bitter look. ‘I hear worse than that every day,’ he said. ‘Much worse. I-love-you-I-hate-you-I’ll-fuck-you. Everyone says that here. Or thinks it. I kept on walking. None of my business. All I do is empty the waste bins. There’s nightmares enough for anyone right there.

‘But then when we turned the key and looked into that room . . .’ He was staring at nothing now, and his face was set hard, the gloves dangling forgotten in his hand. ‘It wasn‹821tha217;t any kind of love that did that,’ he muttered.

‘Love can turn into a lot of things, but – there wasn’t a square inch of him that hadn’t been-’ He gave up on that sentence, shaking his head rapidly like a dog trying to get itself dry. ‘It takes a lot of hate to do that. To keep on hating someone after he’s already dead.’

Joseph discovered the gloves in his hand, put them on and wriggled his fingers into them one at a time with repetitive, robotic care. His eyes were hooded, his mouth twisted slightly as if in pain.

I got a glimpse of the truth then, about what had made him too sick to come into work. He was talking about a sickness of the soul.

‘Joseph,’ I said, although I wanted to stop now and get the hell out into the fresh air. ‘You didn’t see her? You never got a glimpse of her, going into the room or coming out?’ It was a question I’d already asked, but given his state of mind it was worth one more throw of the dice. Since he couldn’t get away from these memories, maybe if I kept hovering around the edges of them some kind of enlightenment, some kind of clue, would come to me.

‘I’ll know her if I see her,’ Joseph said, tapping his gloved finger against his right temple. ‘I dreamed about her that night. Dream about her most nights. My daddy had the sight, and I got it too, whether I want it or not.

‘She’s not a woman, though. Not a real woman. It sounds stupid, but I don’t care. I’ll say it anyway. She’s got a devil face. Long red hair.

Tall as a man, strong as a man. And a circle, here, over her eye, like a crater. Like a little bomb hit her and left a crater. Or like someone shot her and the bullet bounced off.’

The hairs rose on the nape of my neck as he talked. He was describing Myriam Kale: he’d even got the chickenpox scar. But the look on his face told me that carrying on with this line of questioning was going to lead to some ugly eruption that I probably couldn’t handle.