I Was Dora Suarez by Derek Raymond Page B

help.’
    ‘I’ll have a go, too,’ said Ballard. He tapped his head: ‘From here.’ It was hard for him being a detective inspector and paralysed from the waist down. He said: ‘Keep in touch.’
    ‘I always do.’
    ‘Crap,’ said Ballard, ‘you just come running to Mum when you bruise your knee. Don’t worry, I’ll ring you at Poland Street the minute I hear something.’
    ‘Bye,’ I said. I let myself out.
    I came away from Frank’s place and by chance found a small public garden by the river; I found a bench under a weeping ash and sat with Dora’s book in my hand for a time, thinking about what I so far knew of her and her vanished life, that dark flower.
    Sitting there, I felt stabbed by the sadness which had descended on me in this case. I could tell Ballard had seen it in me just now; it was the first time I had felt so deeply over any case, and I didn’t know why.
    I opened her cheap ruled book again.
    Dora wrote in her short, angular hand:
    Until my illness forced me to think, I was neither intelligent nor stupid by nature but quite a passive girl. Of course I attracted men, I was young, and I enjoyed going out. Having fun stopped me thinking about the misery of my childhood. Betty’s calling.
    Later there was some writing to a school friend.
    Adele, don’t you remember the evenings when I used to pass your dress shop on our corner when coming back from school? Don’t you remember how you used to invite me in to the back of the shop for tea? Don’t you remember how you said to me: ‘Courage, girl’ – for she knew I had terrible problems at home; she was one of the few people I told. ‘Have you ever known love?’ I asked her once, ‘because I never have, not yet.’ ‘Only once,’ you said, turning away. I don’t know why, but that was the moment when I thought to myself: ‘Only rotten things will happen to me.’
    On another page:
    I have always needed people because I had no home. What I had for a home was four rooms solid with violence – my father beating up my mother, my mother fighting back with the frying pan, my mother lying on the floor, blood on the floor, never any money. I tell you, school was paradise, compared. My father was Spanish, my mother Jewish from Poland. They were both refugees.
    On another page she described how she had listened to a poet declaim his work in a crowded Soho pub one night when she was there with a man, which was why she had copied down from memory four lines of his that had struck her:
    Tell how his gas was lost
    His poor exhaust;
    Remember he was fat but ran the race,
    Was present in the war.
    She said how after his recital he had gone round the pub for a handout, and how she had given a pound.
    On the next page she had tried to draw Betty Carstairs dozing in her armchair, her head in its woollen hat lying back, her spectacles in her hand. She had written underneath it, ‘All my kisses, darling Betty, from your Dora.’
    (Christ, I was in that flat with them at Empire Gate now. Peace. Their broken telly with its screen glimmered in the darkness of the sitting room at the foot of the two beds. The two women were talking together softly, Suarez knowing that this was the last night of her life; she was going to take it. Betty had just gone to the bathroom; the electric fire glowed. And then
snap!
Suddenly all the lights went on. Dora looked up from the picture in the magazine, perhaps – and there he was, swinging his hand axe. Terror! And then the end.)
    Dora was beautifully dressed when she died. Besides her newly-washed hair, the frock she was wearing, the black high-heeled shoes we found near her feet which were curled up under her, everything she wore was brand-new. She was dressed for a special occasion. She was going out; as Dylan Thomas wrote, she was dressed to die.
    She certainly had wonderful black hair. I saw it now, recalling how clean it had smelled, the part of it that was not matted with blood, from the scent of apples in the