The Sudden Dark

Seven

There were full clouds on Monday, dark, but it didn't rain. The day came hot. Pressure trapped itself under the spread of the atmosphere and laid still. I wasn't thinking about Wayne Markwell. I was thinking too much about him.

The building was a low and quiet office park on the outer blowout of town, and I arrived early because I had nothing else to do and sat silent in the waiting room. I thought of Kit and Frank. The lost boy and the dead man, and the strange connection laying between the two that had to do with a girl and some money. But I tried to brush them off my mind.

Melissa Cole took me into her office a little before our appointment time at two—'I'm glad to see you so early, Mr Hendricks,' she said, leading me in and opening the transparent curtains bright.

There were two slim armchairs; she took one and I took the indication for the other.

She was a solid woman, younger than I'd expected; well-groomed in a professional sense, carefully-dressed in mute colours, and with the cautious gaze of study in her slim eyes. No movement out of order, no glance where it shouldn't go. No attention other than where it was to be, so as to make no undue sense of provocation toward anything.

She smiled a little, clicking her pen ready and proning a notepad across her knees. 'Not a lot of policemen I see are so enthusiastic,' she said.

'I'm early,' I said blankly. 'Doesn't mean I'm enthusiastic.'

'Of course not.' She went on as if it were nothing. Maybe it wasn't.

Before she could say anything more, and as my fingernails were making nervous trails across the leg of my pants, I said, 'I don't know what it is I'm supposed to be here for...What kind of person I'm supposed to be, I mean. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to act that'll be the most proper.'

She didn't move. 'Are you frightened, Mr Hendricks?' she said.

'Of what?'

'Anything. A lot of people who are referred to me are apprehensive of opening up in sessions such as these. They find it difficult to be honest to people, much less to strangers.'

I almost laughed, but it didn't escape my throat. 'I'm not some kind of closed-off basket case. But—I mean, you hold my career in my hands, that's the thing. You stamp a form that says whether I'm fit to go back to the force, or that I'm a psychological danger to society. That would make anyone nervous. You see that, right? That's what I mean—How am I supposed to act that says to anyone that I'm a proper member of society? I don't bloody know.'

I released a quick breath and sat back, my spine feeling rigid. 

'I wouldn't know a proper member of society if I saw one anywhere,' I said. 'Being a cop does that to you.'

'I see.' The tip of her pen moved across the page, but I couldn't see what it said. She acted as if she wasn't aware of it at all. 'We'll start off light, then. How've you been feeling since the notice of your suspension?'

'Tense,' I said.

'How so?'

'I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing with my time. I never knew what time was supposed to mean with me.'

'Did you always fill it with work, then?'

I cleared my throat. 'No—maybe. I don't...I don't have some kind of pathological need, or anything, if that's what...'

'How long have you been on the force?'

I opened my mouth, then stopped myself. 'It doesn't say that on the file?'

She smiled. 'I want to hear you say it. I'm here to hear from you.'

I slumped in the chair. 'Just over twenty years now,' I said.

'And you've been a detective for...'

'Most of them. Too many. Can I smoke in here?'

'I'm afraid not.' Another note on the page. Traffic muffled outside the window; at the same time I felt its artificial sunlight, vacant heat. 

Cole put the pen down and leant forward.

'I know we've got more sessions to come, Mr Hendricks, and they'll be plenty of time for more serious discussion, but I should let you know that I'd like to ask you something now that might be a little difficult.'

'I thought you said we were starting off light,' I said, after a sound.

'I'd like to get it out of the way so it won't make you nervous about being brought up.'

'It's about the drinking, isn't it?'

'Has it always been a problem?'

'A problem? In that, has it always led to things like—'

'Let me rephrase: how long have you been drinking?'

'Long. I—I don't know. I drink. I work. I get angry. It's a shit job. I look at death all day. I drink.'

'So it's a coping mechanism.'

'That's your bloody phrase.'

'What would you call it?'

'I'd call it whatever it's meant to be called. I call it a coping mechanism, you put that down, I go from there: I stop drinking to cope, and I end up coping better. That's it, right? The correct answer?'

She wrote again, and said nothing other than a perfunctory rise in her lips that was halfway toward a smile, but not by much. She changed the subject again. 'You were married.'

'Long time ago.'

'And not anymore?'

'If you're angling to say that my drinking ended my marriage, then you're wrong.'

She smiled that off. 'I'm just trying to get a sense of your personal history. How long were you married for?'

'Look—it was a long time ago. I was young, still in the academy. We got married fast, we lived together, it got tense, we ended it. Mutually. That was it. We've been divorced longer than we were married; a couple of years together, fifteen years not.'

'And you're on good terms with your ex-wife?'

I paused again; stuttered, stopped, composed myself. I didn't like that I did, and I didn't like that she saw it. 

'Good terms like how?—I mean, it wasn't the drinking that ended my marriage, and it wasn't the anger, even though I could be a miserable fucker, just like anyone else. We were just two different people. She couldn't keep living with what I was, and what I'd bring home. She wanted kids, and I just couldn't do that. We called it off, and the second we did she met someone else and had his baby. I'm happy for her, alright?'

She wrote that down, and I slumped back again. Without thinking, and my voice a little vacant, I said, 'Have you got it, then?'

She looked up with a quick moment of thin surprise, the first time I noticed a movement in her face that wasn't completely measured. 'Got...?'

'What's wrong with me.'

She let out a small breath, soundless, and adjusted her glasses. The pen held light in her fingers. 'I can't tell you anything that's wrong with you, Mr Hendricks,' she said with a gentle calmness. 'We've still got another six weeks of sessions. After that, I'll present my report on your progress to the Internal Affairs committee and they'll make a determination about your suspension.' 

She paused and touched her glasses. Then she looked back up at me. 'But I'm glad you feel comfortable to open up to me already, Max—even if it may be in the form of aggression.'