He had agreed, acquiesced, bent, given in, and betrayed his mother.
She was a whore.
The words had left his lips; his tongue scarred by their passage through his mouth, his teeth should have broken with such an utterance. He nodded agreement, blasphemers, closed his eyes and his retinas burned with an image of her, weeping at the foot of his cross, so he slowly opened them again. He saw clearly now, it wasn't his mother he was delivering like Christ to the Romans, it was himself.
The doctors had told him that he would feel a heaviness around his heart, inside his left lung. The two ribs broken there, jagged beneath his left arm. He felt the outline of a thin grinding pain with every inhale. Every exhale. But it was the wet and dark weight inside, beside the cage of bone that worried him.
"Broken ribs," he mused.
His rib bones had been battered before and never had he felt pain like this despondency.
On the street he watched a black motorcycle, black clad rider cocky as death, dart through the traffic and with a great inheaving of breath, he felt the sickled curve of a steel blade slide into the space between his ribs and his heart and he grimaced.
He had been queued inside a Boots. Packet of cigarettes and lighter fluid on his mental checklist. Boxed holiday cards were being clearanced in a bin beside the checkstand and he glanced down. At first he didn't realize what it was he was looking at, he only felt as though he would have to put out a hand to steady himself, but then he saw what it was and he reached down to pick it up. A box of cards with a blonde Madonna swathed in dark blue holding the blonde child against the contour of her throat, staring out over the head of the babe, into the shadows, not seeing the unseeable future, not knowing the unknowable destiny.
He himself looked up and away from the image, out the glass doors fronting the chemist, out into the grey streets of early January. Wishing his future was unknowable, unseeable, but seeing it clear and knowing it intimately.
He paid for the smokes and bought the box of cards and forgot the butane.
He inquired and requested and the Vory tattooist appeared one night, insubstantial as smoke, as solid as the sharp pain he brought with him. Nikolai ushered him into the walk-up, handed him the Christmas card Madonna with her child, and pulled his damp t-shirt over his head. They were seated at the kitchen table.
The tattooist raised one eyebrow. "You know this means...?"
"Yes." He cut him off with one word and a curt nod. He turned away, raising his left arm, elbow crooked over his head, and indicated the space beneath the hair of his armpit, the place over his ribs that protected his heart.
It burned reminiscent of the game of chicken, a lit cigarette held against the flesh.
He nodded hisappreciation when it was over, tossing banknotes onto the table.
She was hidden beneath his arm. "Prison for life." He said this without feeling, running two fingertips over the gauze bandageand the tattooist nodded, watching him beneath heavy brows, packing away the gun and inks, tossing the latex gloves into a paper bag opened on the countertop, scooping the money up and folding it into a money clip he fished out of his trouser pocket.
A 5 star hotel in Edinburgh. His mind had seized on this. He would take her there. Exiled from their own futures, banished from the possibilities of what might have been.
He had told his Scotland Yard commissioner with no hesitation, do not waste these stars. Do not waste this, the door has opened. He had no way of knowing that day, those words, that cigarette, a covert hospital balcony meeting, that the next night would reveal to him that the opened door led, like Virgil leading Dante, down. The next night he knew and he heard the door clanging shut, forever forever, behind him. A new kind of prison cell.
It was July now. Seven long months had passed since that time. London was unbearable. At turns too hot, then too humid, clammy, uncomfortable. He lay awake for hours in his single bed, the sun rising early, the sheer curtains in his room, a filter between him and the world. Something inside him still hurt with every breath he took.
He booked the hotel from his cellular, outside a smoky club on a Tuesday night, standing on the kerb, smoking and sad. He hadn't known he was actually sad until he disconnected the call and felt hope, a bloodied, pocketedwrap itself around his heart.
He walked briskly up to the brightly-painted front door, pressed the thick envelope, the letter, the train tickets, through the mail slot, heard it hit the tiled foyer floor, and turned away.
He waited for her, in Scotland. Smoking. He could not have said one way or the other if he believed she would come. He only knew he iwanted/i. He wanted her to come to him. He wanted to love her.
The only one he had ever betrayed was himself.