Excerpt: Flowers in the Window

Flowers In The Window

One

Think of something delicate. Something clichéd, silk, a spider’s web in the wind. Then think of something less clichéd - perhaps look at life itself and see how you feel and what you want to do with it all. These are the things to consider. Look at the parts of your life and see them as the petals attached to your stem. Then we can start talking. I’m not meant to be poetic. After all I’ve bumped off a few people in my lifetime (but don’t tell the cops that) and that’s meant to make me hard. I remember reading about gangsters when I was younger, hearing about the Kray Brothers and how they were good to their mum, as if that made them less monstrous. By the time I’d grown up a bit gangsters didn’t make any pretence of being nice. If they were nice to you you were supposed to be scared because it was the calm before the storm. If they were nice to you, it meant you weren’t going to have the opportunity to tell anyone about it because you’d be dead.

All us killers need a little signature thing - something to let the others know that we did it. It’s nothing to do with letting the police know - after all they hardly ever see half the bodies we knock off. But we try and leave a few out there to scare the others from trying the same racket. Take Johnny Blade for example. Now Johnny was a nice lad, even nice to his mum as far as I know. A bit old school. I’ll let you guess what his instrument of choice was. Well, he got a little too big for his boots and the Boss decided he had to go. It was one of my first jobs. After it was done, Bill said to me « John mate, you need a signature. » I thought about it for a while, but not too long as we had a dead bloke lying in front of us, and went to the car and got a rose from the bunch I’d bought for my wife. I bought her flowers every Friday and they were in the car already. So I took one and threw it on the body.

« How’s that? » I asked.

« Real class mate. Very poetic. » We wiped the gun off and left it there. If they did trace it, it’d only come back to itself. And all that crap about footprints was only a problem if you planned on keeping the pair of shoes you knocked some bloke off in. We didn’t plan on keeping anything.

A lot of these killings paid well, and that’s how I got involved. As far as I knew none of my family knew. It was a bit like moonlighting but unlikely to have the taxman coming after me. My day job was transporting jewellery from place to place so it was easy enough to explain the gun, and my paranoia. Nora, my wife, found it appealing, and that way that only people in love can. All those irritating little habits that when you’re in love you think they’re sweet and the second it’s over you ask yourself how you tolerated that for so many years. I watched my mother fall out of love with my dad over little things like the way he slurped his tea in the morning, and put the used teabag on the kitchen table and not throw it away. Her eye’d start twitching a little, as if sending out morse code saying will you put that bloody teabag in the bin you slob! But she never actually said anything while I was there, saving all the shouting for later. That was her big thing - not in front of the kids, as if we wouldn’t notice if they didn’t do these things in front of us, but of course we knew. When they finally announced the divorce me and my brothers had to act surprised, but none of us were.

Anyway, none of that has anything to do with my second job. I’m sure a shrink would say it was, but I don’t care about that. I’m just here to tell you some stories. Isn’t that what we’re all here for? Telling stories. We create them all the time - stories and lies, are there really any difference? The alibi I came up with for the police the one time they questioned me was total fantasy, which they knew, and I knew they knew, but they couldn’t prove it and they knew I knew that (Have I lost you yet?). So was that a lie or a story? Or a bit of both. I would’ve liked to have been a writer, but my dad always said that was what poofters did so I let it go and got into the diamond trade. Still pretty effeminate I supposed for his tastes, but it paid well so he never said a word, not even when I told him I had to get a manicure otherwise the jewellers would be upset. They don’t want some hard nut with nasty cuticles transporting their goods. They want my nails, my hands, my suit, my teeth to set off their product, mobile advertising if you like.

So why should you think of something delicate? I need you to do that for me, because I got caught, and now I’m locked up and there is nothing delicate. Even the fairies aren’t delicate as such. There’s beauty in delicacy and there’s no beauty in them. Just broken men who felt they didn’t have a choice.
I know you’ll want to know how I got caught, but that’s for later. I don’t feel like telling that story right now. I’m still trying to figure out the stories and the lies. All I want right now is something fragile - feel a breeze on my face, perhaps the foam of the sea running over my feet, the touch of my son’ hair when he was a baby. Any of those things but it’s a difficult situation. If you think of those things you’ll never make it through this. And if you don’t think of them you come out a brute. You could argue I’m a brute anyway. After all I’ve killed three people, but I’m not a brute. I don’t feel like one. I have a wife, kids, friends, and I love them all. But I found out I could get paid so much for a quick kill, and I was killing people who were complete wastes of space. But then perhaps who am I to judge. When the police see me they certainly don’t see a nice family man. Just some cold-blooded bastard who kills people for money. I guess both pictures are correct. And sitting here now, in this cell, with that smell that only prisons can have, of locked-up men, urine, feces, cheap paint and a blen of frustration and fear, all I want is to feel Nora’s hand in mine, rubbing her little finger with my thumb because she liked that, and thinking of nothing. So while I’m in here I think of nice things and when I leave my cell I have to turn on the hard bastard face. Hard bastard with bitten nails now.

The strange thing about all this was that I thought Nora would be in shock and she wasn’t. Women never fail to amaze me. I called her from the police station, as they’d picked me up at work. I got my phone call and called her. Who else would I call? And she sighed on the phone. A delicate sigh that almost made me start crying. A sigh of such immense disappointment, but with some kind of knowledge lurking behind it. When she came to see me, that first time she looked at me in the same way she looked at our kids when they touched the cooker and burned themselves after she’d told them a hundred times not to do it.
She came in and sat down, holding my hands across the table.
« I’m sorry. »
« What did you think? That they wouldn’t catch you? » she asked me.
I shrugged.
« What have they got you on? »
« Manslaughter. If I’m lucky. Their words not mine. » I tried smiling at her but felt like a fake. « Why aren’t you surprised? Aren’t you going to start shouting at me or something? » I asked.
« What difference would it make? » Her turn to shrug. « I never told you about my dad did I? »
I shook my head.
« He ran off, didn’t he? »
« No. Not exactly. Let’s just say he prepared me for you, before I even met you. Don’t they always say that women end up with men like their fathers? My mum warned me that you were like him, and I could see it too. But I didn’t care. Because I loved you. »
« And now? » I almost didn’t want to hear the answer.
« If I knew it was coming, and still fell for you, why would it stop now? » She sighed again. « Did we really need the money that badly? Was that what this was about? »
« I don’t know sweetheart. You know how you find yourself doing something, something horrible, but then it turns out that it was so much easier than you expected. »
« And that’s it? You can’t think of something better to say than that? »
I thought for a moment.
« No. Not really. »
« Thinking never really has been your strong point, » she smiled at me, taking the edge off her words. She looked at my hands in hers. She frowned. « You’ve started biting your nails? »
I nodded.
« Outside, a manicure gets me a job. In here it gets me other things. Filthy bloody habit too. I hate it. »
She laughed.
« Do what you have to do. »
« You’ll wait for me? » I asked.
She nodded, and then leant close so the cops couldn’t hear.
« I’ll do more than that, » she whispered, kissing my ear.