Murderous by David Hickson (best ereader for comics .txt) 📕

Robyn drew on the cigarette again. I had not missed the change of tone. She was no longer talking about the ten-year-old survivor of a brutal farm killing.

“There was nothing innocent about the man who did that to you,” I said. “Nothing innocent, kind, or normal.”

Robyn turned to me and her face reflected the glowing end of her cigarette as she drew another breath.

“He wants forgiveness,” she said, and threw her cigarette down the ramp to the sea where it gave a desperate hiss and expired. “He wants to be forgiven for having survived. That’s what nobody understands. Everyone feels sorry for the survivors, they say all the comforting things, but they just don’t get it. All he wants is to be forgiven.”

“Is that what you want from me?” I asked.

Robyn turned her dark eyes onto me. “No, Ben, I don’t want your forgiveness.”

We sat in silence for a minute.

“I doubt he is that little boy,” she said after the silence. “He doesn’t seem all that damaged to me.”

“And you would know,” I said. “It takes one to know one.”

Robyn’s eyes held their gaze. You don’t say something like that to the survivor of a trauma like hers. But she allowed me to get away with it. I was making progress.

Nineteen

Chandler dropped thirty seconds ahead of me. That was the minimum separation we dared go for. We didn’t want to get tangled up in each other’s chutes on the way down, and we weren’t going to be able to see each other. We’d not be collapsing our sliders, so the flapping would be audible, but we weren’t strapping on the glow tubes to provide the ground staff of Riaan “BB” Breytenbach’s game farm with a neon light show. BB’s ground staff were a part of the private army that he deployed to his gold mines and they were encouraged to overcome the temptation to squeeze the triggers of their Vektor R5 sub-machine guns on the mines by squeezing them here on the training ground of the Breytenbach farm. Neon-coloured, glowing tubes strapped to people dropping from the sky would be just the kind of target their instructors would approve of.

The other reason for the thirty-second gap was that it had been some years since I had last stepped through the open door of an aeroplane at sixteen thousand feet. Chandler had insisted on fastidiously triple checking every detail of my rig with me the day before to make sure time had not eroded my training, and he hadn’t seemed entirely convinced after I’d forgotten the names of some important cords. I’d told him it was a joke, and he’d flattened his mouth to show me how funny he thought my joke was. But the gap was thirty seconds.

The air struck me like an old friend playing rough and took my breath away as it always had. I was that misguided teenager again, doing everything because it was an escape. Seizing every challenge because it offered a way out of an unsatisfactory life. On every one of the hundreds of jumps I’d done since the first one at the training centre in Hertfordshire, I’d relived those first few seconds. The instinctive panic as I leapt into the void, the loss of breath, the momentary disorientation. The sense that this was finally the end, that this would be the last one. Before the icy air found its way back into my lungs, the moment of suspension – the ‘sharpening’ our Israeli instructor had called it. That point at which sense returns and brings with it, for those who have the ‘problem with thoughts of the bigger things in life and death’, a realisation that it is not all over after all. The instructor’s eyes always found me at this point of the briefing, perhaps because I’d never laughed at what my peers assumed was a dry joke of his. I’d thought of the stories I had heard of his family who were killed in the suicide bombing in the Mahane Yehuda Market of Jerusalem. His wife and two daughters who had been shopping to prepare for his return from a training camp. But then he looked away from me and reminded us that even for those who do not ‘have a problem with such thoughts’, the sharpening was the point at which you gained control of your fall, turned your body, regained your bearings.

I held the glowing altimeter close and confirmed that I was only now passing fifteen thousand feet. I started my count out loud to keep my focus. I needed the sixty seconds of free fall to position myself correctly, then I’d pull the chute at the last moment to avoid spending too long with my canopy visible from the main buildings. We were dropping into a lower section of the bush below a ridge, but there would be a minute or two in which someone with good sight or a pair of binoculars might make out the shape of our translucent canopies as the sky brightened.

The sun had not climbed above the horizon yet, but the eastern sky was blushing and already I could distinguish the darker patches of trees beneath me. To drop into an unlit zone in pitch dark would have been suicidal, and looking down now I wondered whether Chandler had misjudged it. It didn’t look as if there was enough light yet. Strapped beside the altimeter was my GPS watch. The five pinpricks that were the solar-powered beacons we had installed around the flattest patch of bush we had found were off to the side, showing I was overshooting. I needed to account for the wind: I didn’t want it behind me, pushing me beyond the zone and into the thorn trees. I pressed down with my right arm onto the blast of air I was riding and pressed my legs down. The five pinpricks started to turn slowly.

Another glance at the altimeter told me I was