Page 64 of Beyond Repair
Goodie’s voice cut through her thoughts. ‘He deserved what he got,’ she said. Her tone, as always, was controlled, but Katie could just about detect the undercurrent of fury threading through her words. She shrugged, but still couldn’t find the strength to lift her head.
‘Listen to me.’ Goodie’s voice was nearer now. Katie looked up in surprise to see her crouching in front of her. It was truly freaky how silently the woman could move. ‘I promise he deserved everything that happened to him. The world is a better place with him disappearing off the face of it.’
Katie nodded slowly, but the fact that she had been the cause of Daniel ‘disappearing off the face of the world’ was making her feel more than a little sick.
‘He didn’t just buy and sell drugs; he bought and soldpeople,Katie. And now he’s gone.’
Katie nodded a little more firmly this time.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Okay … thank you.’ Goodie waved her hand in a dismissive gesture and stood from her crouch to go and sit back down on the sofa.
‘It was fun for me,’ she said with a small smile, and Katie’s eyebrows shot up at Goodie’s idea of ‘fun’. ‘And now some very useful people owe me a very big favour, so I’m happy.’
‘I don’t want to know anything about that either, do I?’ Katie asked, and Goodie nodded, her smile growing wider.
‘Now tell me; why were you crying?’
Katie frowned; she was quite sure Goodie was not the sort of female who invited emotional exchanges very often. ‘I’m fine.’
‘You are not fine,’ Goodie told her.
‘Um …’
‘Sam is not fine either. You are the one that needs to go to him, Katie.’
‘Goodie … I don’t think –’
‘Do you know that when you fear for your life, when you’re isolated from the outside world for enough time with someone, all your barriers come down? You reveal things you would never dream of letting slip normally. Sam is the only person alive who knows my background.’ Goodie paused to catch Katie’s eye. ‘And I am the only one who really knows his.’
‘Okay,’ Katie said slowly, still not sure where Goodie was going with this.
‘Let me tell you a story,’ Goodie said, settling back into the cushions but not dropping eye contact with Katie for a second. ‘There was a beautiful boy and he loved his mother, but his earliest memory was of her lying on the carpet of their living room, sobbing for hours whilst he watched, hungry from a corner. From the age of four he rode an emotional roller-coaster with a woman who was either laughing uncontrollably or in the depths of despair. Sometimes he would eat painstakingly prepared home-cooked meals; sometimes he would have to raid the freezer for frozen peas for his supper whilst his mother cried herself to sleep.
‘He learnt to shut down his own emotions; he learnt to be hard. Then one day his mother didn’t arrive to pick him up from school. He wasn’t surprised, this often happened. Hewassurprised when it was his father who eventually showed up. His mother was gone; she had driven her car off the road straight into a tree. So the boy went to live with his father, a man that, thanks to his mother, he barely knew.
‘His stepmother was kind but painfully shy herself. She tried to draw out the ten-year-old little boy but could never quite manage it. That was until she had a baby, a little girl. Have you ever noticed how sometimes people who have difficulty relating to adults respond differently with young children and animals?’
Goodie’s hand dropped to Salem as she spoke, absently stroking his back.
‘That little girl brought the broken boy out of himself. She lightened him; she saved him; so that when he was ready to move to senior school he made friends, real friends, and one in particular. These boys were inseparable. They shared a dream of careers in the military and they made that dream happen. They met another boy (well, nearly a man by then) in their training and the three of them were successful. All three made it into the Special Forces.
‘They went all over the world; they were some of the best operatives out there. That was why when an assignment came up that the government had to get right and only the best were selected, the friends found themselves deployed together for the first time. The mission was covert. They were working with both American forces and –’ Goodie smiled a small smile ‘– some more … freelance types.’
‘You were there,’ Katie said, a statement not a question, which went unacknowledged by Goodie.
‘There was a cartel. It was out of control. Too many drugs pumping through from it. Too much destruction in its wake. The governments decided to do something, but something that was below the radar … unofficial. It went very bad.’
Katie felt the blood drain out of her face. ‘What happened?’
Goodie stared at her for a beat as if to assess whether Katie genuinely wanted to know. Her eyes hardened and she made her decision.
*****
Katie retched into the toilet one last time, expelling the last of what she’d eaten that day and thanking her lucky stars that she hadn’t gone for the prawn rolls.
‘Are you still alive?’ she heard Goodie ask through the door as she pulled back to sit on the cold tiles. She braced herself, told herself to stop being such a big girl’s blouse and pushed up from the floor. After she’d washed out her mouth and flushed the toilet she moved to the door, resting her head against it for a moment before she could bear to wrench it open.
Goodie was standing on the other side with Salem next to her, her face impassive and seemingly indifferent to the fact that she had just overheard Katie being spectacularly and repeatedly sick. Katie took a deep breath, the details of Goodie’s harrowing account still twisting in her mind.
