Page 14 of Famous Last Words

14

Cam

Cam is waiting on a verge by the side of the road, with two police officers as her keepers. She goes someplace else. All she can think about, see and hear is Luke, on slow, in her mind. A montage plays out for her as her eyes glaze and she listens to the silence of what might be his own denouement. Luke at a publishing prize ceremony with her last summer, a man who doesn’t care for literary fiction but likes an outing, saying to her, ‘I don’t even know which book this is!’ Luke mainlining Quality Streets last Christmas with her, not moving for hours, turning to her and saying he might just wet himself rather than get up, he was so comfortable. Luke in the labour ward, wet-eyed and quiet and gazing at Polly.

Maybe her mind already knew it was going to happen, and immersed her in these memories, because she hears them while she stands on the roadside in the warm summer air.

The gunshots that everyone has always known would come.

Two gunshots and two echoes, and Luke pops clean from her mind.

She waits for a moment in the quiet calm, the same way you know you will feel pain right after you injure yourself but it takes several seconds to come. This time, she almost thinks that it won’t.

But, of course, it does. And here it is, a wave of awful closure, of fear. The question of whether he was the shooter or the victim. She thinks she’s going to collapse.

Neither of the police reacts at all. Cam’s legs are trembling with adrenaline, jiggling uncontrollably. Gunshots. Gunshots.

‘What was that?’ she asks needlessly, a hand to her mouth. Her jaw is quivering and she begins to chatter her teeth against her fingertips.

‘We’ll let you know as soon as we know anything,’ one of the officers replies.

One of their radios crackles but no words are said.

Cam stares at the lit-up warehouse, at the drone and helicopter above it, at the hundreds of police around it. But wait. What’s that …?

As she watches, it becomes clearer. There’s something happening on the roof.

She squints, trying to look, but knowing that if she makes it obvious the police may move her.

The roof is so far away, so high up, they look like moving figurines, but they are yet more police in riot gear, running, shouting, perhaps searching. Against her own moral code, Cam hopes that they’re searching for her husband, and that he got away, that he wasn’t shot. Against all the things she now knows. That he left this morning, leaving only a shitty, cryptic note. That he went to that warehouse. That he did all this.