The forecast promised sunshine and heat. Sunshine and heat aren’t the best weather conditions for being an avenging angel. She steps out of the house and into the unexpected cold.
She sets off, packing an unobtrusive piece in her fluffy black bag. The unexpected cold makes her nose run, her eyes water. Her stomach gripes, protesting against emptiness. Emptiness was all that figured now. Emptiness and vengeance.
8.30. She has overslept. She is late.
She’s wearing her pink coat as a disguise. People always remember the coat. Never her.
She makes the train just in time, rushing on, feeling warmer now. In spite of the queues of people waiting to board, the train is quiet.
Half term. Kids off school. Parents off work. Seats available on the train. She sits down and puts her mp3 player on. I Loves Ya, Porgy.
A girl with hair dyed as black as her own sits down opposite her. All the empty seats on this train, and someone has to sit opposite her. The girl is skinny. Her jeans are baggy, rolled up. She has a pair of shell toes on, loosely laced. Her lipstick is a dark plum. All in all the outfit is saying nu-goth. A sk8r grl, punk, nu-metal, gothic beauty with all of life ahead of her.
Underneath her pink coat, she’s wearing her plum top, her Edwardian choker, her black skirt. All that is missing is the plum lipstick, or she would be an old goth, confronting the nu on a train rattling through Levenshulme, Longsight and Ardwick Junction.
The B of the Bang. That first moment of an explosion that was expanding to contract; that had brought them all to this point and would take them back again. Quantum physics. An ever expanding universe of infinity that yet would reach its brick wall and have to reverse thrust through its own history, back to where the B first started.
She wonders how many times they have been through all this before. Is that where déjà vu comes from? Because we are all constantly racing backwards and forwards from first expansive explosion, to ultimate contracting implosion, like a shuttle in a loom, always weaving the same pattern over and over, back and forth. The coloured threads of individual lives, thought to be unique, thought to be the sole demarcation of each soul on the planet; and actually, the same old same old. There is nothing new under the sun.
She wonders how many times she has sat on this train, in this moment, carrying a gun to a destiny, not knowing the outcome, not knowing the consequences, but always doing it, and then travelling back to see it reverse so that, unknowing, she could do it again, and again, and again.
The train pulls in at Piccadilly. She has watched the morning sun shining on the streets of this city, and she has felt her heart swell with love for the place. The train pulls in at platform 14, and she knows that she doesn’t need to get off and change to a tram. This platform means onward travel.
Nobody is above the law. Nobody. She knows this, and yet, she has chosen today to take the law into her own hands. She has chosen the cliché of that act of independence. She has gone behind, beneath, beyond the law many times, but always for someone else. Always for the wadge of cash wrapped in brown paper. Always for the means that would secure some other end.
Until a different end happened, and all the money in the world would be unable to buy her out of this one. All that money she had earned, had stashed and stowed and stockpiled, so that they would be free, so that she could leave, go away with him, start again, somewhere new, somewhere anonymous. There was no point now.
An avenging angel in a pink coat.
The train stops at Deansgate. It will go no further, and she doesn’t need it to. She stands up, walks back through the carriage to the door, and out across the platform and down the stairs. The ticket man tries to stop her; she doesn’t have a ticket; he can’t stop her though, she will not let it happen.
She forces past him, and it is only a fare so he lets her go, doesn’t bother to chase after, to grab hold of her sleeve, to try to detain her.
He will remember her pink coat later, but not her face. Her face is thankfully average and will not be remembered.
She is out on the street and she crosses the road when the green man says that she may. She walks along Deansgate towards town, towards Spinningfields, and
She stops at a door. She pushes against it and goes inside the building.
The woman on reception tries to stop her, tries to ask if she has an appointment. He is a busy man. He will only see those he wants to see.
Today she will make him see someone he has to see, and then she will make him see everything, in slow motion, freefalling before his very eyes.
She is up the stairs and outside his office. She doesn’t knock, she just goes in. He looks up, startled, from what he is doing. Sitting at his desk, papers on the surface before him, he looks up to see what intruder this is; what person has dared to enter his office uninvited, unsolicited, unappointed.
He sees it is her, and he smiles; a smile of genuine warmth and some small surprise.
He stands to greet her. He makes to move around the desk so that he can hug her. A long-time-no-see kind of hug. Uninvited, unsolicited, undesired.
She counts the seconds as though they are heartbeats, and maybe they are. Maybe her heart rate has slowed now to 60 beats a minute. She counts; it takes ten beats. He has rounded the corner of his desk and stands in front of her as the bullet leaves the gun, squeezed out by her finger on the trigger. The bullet leaves the gun and enters his body, and his body crumples. His face widens into shock. His eyes look into hers, asking why.
She turns heel. A kitten heel. A neat kitten heel at the end of a long plum suede boot. Attention to detail. The gun had a silencer on it. There was just the slightest sound. Nothing to rouse a response from adjacent offices. The receptionist didn’t leave her position at the front desk. Nobody was on the stairs to see her come in, nobody was there to see her leave.
Just the receptionist, and all she will remember is the pink coat and the dark hair and the receding back of a young woman who had rushed in to see Mr Wainfleet at a little before 9.30 that morning. She will tell this to the police, and they will issue a statement about the pink coat.
People will remember the coat, but they will not remember her.
It isn’t a perfect crime, but it is a beginning. Vengeance for another death. The life of her brother in exchange for the life of her love; the love of her life. Her life, her love, her brother gone. And nothing now but to leave the coat behind, to slip the coat off and run from this life, to a bridge, or a train track, or another means to end this all.
A pink coat, lying on the ground, halfway between Knot Mill and Victoria.
Attention to detail. It always matters in the end.
© J R Hargreaves June 2006
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