Joe Victim: A Thriller

“Not that I know of. I don’t know why she had one, and I never asked her. I remember seeing it five years ago when she died. We had to go around to her house and go through her stuff. It still looked the same. I don’t know if she ever fired it.”


“Was your mum surprised to see it?”

“If she was, she didn’t say.”

“That night in her house, what did you do?”

“She told me to stand still, and that’s exactly what I did. I thought I was going to throw up again. I was sure if I moved, even if I blinked, she was going to shoot me. I’d seen enough movies to know exactly how it was going to happen. She’d pull the trigger then there’d be a whistling sound that lasted half a second, then I’d clutch my stomach with my fingers around the end of an arrow. I even held my breath in case that was enough of an incentive for her to shoot me.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened. Not right away. Neither of us said anything for about ten seconds or so, and then she said my name. I think it took her that long not to figure out it was me, but to figure out that it really could be me. I think she recognized me immediately, discarded it, went through a whole bunch of other possibilities looking for a better fit before coming back to me. When she got there she didn’t lower the crossbow.

“She said she was going to call the police. I asked her not to. She said it would be for my own good. I begged her not to. She said she was disappointed in me. Extremely disappointed. I’d heard that before, but didn’t tell her. She said it was going to crush my parents. I told her I was desperate for the money. Then I told her why, about the bullies and their threats and how paying them off was the only way I was going to be able to walk around school without having my pants pulled down around my ankles in front of everybody, or not getting pushed into walls and dog shit smudged into my hair. She nodded and seemed to understand, but kept the crossbow trained on me. She said everything I told her was awful, that school sounded tough, but no matter how tough it was that gave me no excuse for breaking into her house. I still had her money in my hand. It felt warm in there, it was crushed into a ball and my hand was sweating. Both hands were shaking a little, but hers were rock solid. It was like I was the fourth or fifth person she had caught that night.”

I was nervous about being shot, but given the choice, I was starting to think I’d prefer getting shot than having my parents find out. There was no way my aunt wouldn’t tell them. My mind was racing for ideas, for something I could bargain with. All I could think of was somehow getting my hands on that crossbow. My parents would know of my burglary attempt by morning. I didn’t know what would happen then, but it wouldn’t be good. I would be grounded, but that was no big deal. They would be disappointed in me, but that didn’t mean much either. They might call the police. That’s what I was afraid of. I’d rather have been shot than accept what the police would do to me. At sixteen years old, that’s the way my mind worked. So I was thinking about how I could get hold of the crossbow and how I could leave the house and my dead auntie and have nobody figure out it had been me.

“You felt guilty,” Ali-Ellen says.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. I felt bad, really bad.”

“Hmm,” she says, and notes something down, then looks back up at me. “Tell me, Joe, was it the fact you were stealing from your auntie that made you feel bad, or the fact you had been caught?”

It’s a good question. I had been breaking into people’s homes for the best part of a year and I thought I was above being caught. And caught by a woman more than three times my age. That meant even if I could get hold of the crossbow, I would probably get caught afterward.

“At both,” I say.

“Uh huh. Okay, what happened next?”

“My aunt asked me what my parents would say if she told them,” I say, and as the words come out I travel back in time again, back to that moment leading up to what I would later think of as the Big Bang. My aunt’s exact words were What would your parents say if I told them? She didn’t say when I tell them, but if I tell them.

They’ll hate me for it, I told my aunt. And maybe they’ll want to kick me out. I didn’t think they would, but I wanted my aunt to feel sorry for me.

They probably would, she said, and yet she still didn’t lower the crossbow. Are you armed, Joe? she asked.

No.

Have you ever been with a woman, Joe?

What?

A woman. Have you ever made love to a woman?

I’m only sixteen, I told her.

That doesn’t mean anything, she told me. Every TV show on these days has teenagers screwing. It’s what soap operas are becoming about. They’ve gone from adult story lines to children story lines, giving the children adult lives. Forty years ago they were about differences between people, struggling to run pubs and businesses; these days it’s all about fucking. Do you know how long your Uncle Neville has been dead?

Have you forgotten? I asked.

No. No, of course I haven’t forgotten. He’s been gone six years now.