Sin (Wattys Winner)

Chapter 05

"Pardon?"

I was shocked at the abrupt change of mood. A second ago we were laughing and now laughter had fled screaming into the night. The forest had darkened and the trees had closed in making me feel suddenly claustrophobic. I almost waited for feral eyes to open like slashes in the darkness. None did, so thankfully my dream hadn't travelled that far on the express train into Nightmare Station.

Joy seemed unaware of the sudden suffocation. She wasn't looking at me, instead picking some invisible piece of cotton or dirt from her trouser leg. Whatever was there was stuck fast and she stayed intent on it as she spoke.

"The boy. He crashed and there's a better than good chance that he wouldn't have if you hadn't been there, but you couldn't help him. He was lost anyway."

My heart was suddenly squeezed by an invisible hand that had reached inside my chest and taken a hold, long, cracked and yellowing nails digging in. I couldn't speak.

"He killed that poor girl. He would have done it again. He would. More than once. It wouldn't have stopped him and it wouldn't have slowed him down. He would have begun to look for it. The rush. The danger. The badness of it. He would have become addicted. He was rotting from the inside out and you did him a favour. You did those little girls he isn't going to mow down a favour. Hey, you did the world a favour."

Joy's voice wavered, a ripple in the velvet. I could only stare at her, the hand around my heart squeezing rhythmically. What was she doing? Justifying murder? That's what it was! Manslaughter at the very least because I couldn't help it. But what if I could? What if there was some sick core inside me, rotting like she said the boy was? What if I meant for him to die?

What if I wanted it to happen? I knew. I knew what he had done. Eight years old. That's all she was. But I didn't feel anger or pity for him. I felt nothing. So what if that nothing was concealing my pleasure, or my desire? If I'd reached out to his car with whatever twisted thought or idea crawled beneath the nothing and made it swerve, and made it crash...?

What then?

Maybe this was hell and I had ended up in that furnace and I had been char-broiled and I was dead. And Joy. Maybe she believed in Heaven and Hell. And maybe, because of that, we were part of each other's damnation. She was doomed to try and make me feel better - something that, on a grander scale had bled her to a husk - and I was doomed to listen. Her Purgatory was a much more focused and personal version of the life that had led her, or pushed her, here. Mine was to relive my own, the tales retold in my sister's vain attempts to justify and reconcile and appease.

And I hadn't even brought a picnic.

I mentally gripped the metaphorical hand around my heart, wresting its grip and flinging it away. What if, what if, what if. What if Willy Wonka had made flour instead of every kind of chocolate? Charlie Bucket would never have been the hero he was and Violet Sludgemonkey, or whatever her name was, would probably be a redcoat at Butlins by now. What if Man really had landed on the moon, or men in black really did protect us from illegal Aliens and the scum of the universe? What if, in space, someone can hear you scream? What if curry night at the Trawl pub, Toothill, was on a Wednesday instead of a Thursday? Would the world come crashing down around our ears like a Paris Hilton CD?

No. I doubted it. So why worry about it. Or, at least, why dwell on it. Blank it out. Smother it in Nothing. No pain, no brain. Or something like that.

Of course that wasn't how it worked. It didn't work much at all, really, but...

Hey ho, daddyo, away we go.

It didn't matter if Joy was right or not. If I'd saved half a dozen or more children from being hit-and-run victims at the cost of one stupid, stupid boy's life, it didn't matter. It did matter, but it didn't. Not really. It was what it was. Life and death. Heaven and Hell. Black and white.