Peace Talks

by Tim Finch

  I had made myself watch videos before. Online. On the dark web, I think they call it. I may be wrong. This was no doubt an unhealthy thing to do; fixated and morbid. As ever, Caroline tried to give nothing away when I described how I had sought out these films, how I felt I had to see and in some sense experience what had happened to you: to immerse myself in the horror and gore. She tried, but I could see it in her eyes and in the moue on her lips: the obvious disgust and revulsion. An entirely natural reaction. I wasn’t still watching these videos by this stage, I told her. A look of some relief. But stopping hadn’t helped. Or rather, I still had the thoughts and in some ways the thoughts were worse.

  Today they came, as they often do, in the early hours, a twist – those thoughts come too – on Larkin’s ‘Aubade’. The poem was a favourite of yours. ‘Most things may never happen: this one will’. You were so afraid of death. You had been since you were a little girl, I remember you telling me. It was why you didn’t like to be ‘caught without people or drink’. Or work. I was awake, not at four, but not far off, and I was remembering all this, and that you could annoy people – notably me – by repeatedly quoting lines from the poem – ‘That vast moth-eaten musical brocade’ – and then, suddenly, I wasn’t thinking about ‘Aubade’, I was thinking about your decapitation.

  Imagine being able to say these words? Sometimes I try to imagine it – and can’t. Yes, my wife was beheaded. Yes, she had her head cut off. This is where the whole swish, gone, pouf! thing comes in: because it still doesn’t seem real. Like something out of The Arabian Nights was how I put it – though, come to think of it, this is playing Hadj-Dixon’s game too. Orientalism: that deadly trap.

  What must it have felt like? (‘Don’t go there,’ a voice insists.) What did you know, sense, experience? (‘Go there,’ comes the response.) I hate to think; I want to know. What?

  Almost nothing, was what they told me at the hospital. Death would have been almost instantaneous. But even leaving aside those perfidious ‘almosts’, this still leaves the instant. Light. Switch. Dark. If I can put it this way. In the instant of the switch there was something. In the instant you knew, you felt, you experienced something.

  What?

  Searing pain. Appalling realisation. Catastrophic shock. Some cocktail. These attempts to capture it don’t come close, of course. Indeed, their function, it seems, is to distance me from the moment. From you. From whatever it was like, given that searing pain etc., etc. doesn’t even begin to describe it.

  At around this point, I generally find that I am dwelling on the sword. As you can imagine, it was much discussed at the time. (Just as I forced myself to watch videos, so I didn’t spare myself the online chatter.) It was a broadsword or a longsword of some sort, or perhaps not, to summarise threads that went scrolling on forever and then some. (Did these people – in Kaohsiung and Belo Horizonte and Tampere – not realise I was watching and listening in? Did they perhaps get off on the remote possibility?) It was certainly very heavy, this sword. A policewoman tried to lift it and couldn’t. (This was captured and put on Instagram and something like 100,000 people pointed out that the policewoman failed to follow the most basic crime-scene protocols. ‘She dropped a clanger,’ one wag observed.) And sometime later, this was widely reported, a forensics officer nearly severed a finger as he swabbed the blade for what exactly? Blood, flesh, bone, tissue, marrow. It was your neck all right. Your body was lying just there and your head right next to it. But apart. Which went to show that the sword was ‘lethally sharp’, one reporter observed. Well, duh, another 100,000 or so people commented (or liked, loved, smiley- or sad-faced): it cut a woman’s head clean off.

  It was suggested, quite tenderly, such is the intimacy of social media, that you – and I – should almost be grateful for the super-sharpness of the blade. And likewise, for Hadj-Dixon’s superhuman strength, agility, athleticism, balletic grace, hand–eye coordination, nerve, single-mindedness, ruthlessness. And his army training, when that became apparent. Few others could have wielded this immense sword with such force and accuracy as to cut off your head with a single swipe. In the hands of someone less superhuman, it could have all been horribly messy. Hideously gruesome. A sawing or hacking through flesh and muscle and windpipe and spine, as sometimes happens if the blade is blunt or the executioner inept. Not to mention other injuries – hands, arms being hacked off – as the victim tries to shield themself. As it was, the volume of blood was shocking. Witnesses reported seeing it pumping out of the neck of the victim. Great pools of it on the pavement. The mopping-up exercise was something to see, apparently.

  So, thankful for small mercies, then. And smiley-face to the people who acknowledged that this was all they were saying, others having pointed out their insensitivity, thereby virtue signalling insensitively. Give it a rest, will you. Why are you even RIPing Anna Dupont or sending her husband your thoughts and prayers? You don’t know these people. They are complete strangers. Let them be.

  Hello, I’m here! This – weirdly – is how I was cop- ing.

  Do you remember that trip to the Musées des Beaux-Arts? Of course, we went many times subsequently, but I am thinking of that first time. I remember you wanting to show me Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Bruegel – or perhaps not; by Bruegel, I mean – though who cares. You were always impatient about these disputes over attribution. It was the poem by Auden that drew you to the picture and the gallery, which a friend of a friend pointed out that evening was actually called the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts. ‘Yes, and not forgetting the de Belgique.’ Pedants, that was another thing.

  Anyway, I remember us both sitting in front of David’s The Death of Marat, which is in a nearby room to the Icarus. Where we discussed, inevitably, the legend of Charlotte Corday’s execution by the guillotine. That look of indignation on her face after one of the executioner’s assistants picked her severed head out of the basket and slapped it. Camus among many others had put the notion about. You were rather fond of the story. ‘Well, I should think she would be …’

  Not true. This is why I am telling you all this: it is not true. That is to say scientists agree that a severed head does not remain conscious for anything up to several seconds after decapitation. Your head couldn’t have looked up from the pavement at your neck spurting blood. You couldn’t have had the thought – the one that appals the most – that your head had just been cut off. That your head – lying, how?: on its side, I presume, somewhat cockeyed – was now you, the conscious entity, devastatingly bereft. That in seconds you would be dead. The great dread.

  So you – your head – couldn’t have looked up and seen Hadj-Dixon, standing over you, wielding the bloody sword. ‘You! Oh, Ali!’ Much speculation online on that front, as you can imagine. You taking it up the arse. Sucking his cock. Must have been. And then you chucked him, so he cut your head off. Bitch had it coming. These towelheads don’t do women’s lib. Respect for that at least.

  ‘Please,’ Charlotte said gently, reaching forward to put her hand on top of mine. Others said it too. They also said – though Caroline (it is Caroline not Charlotte) didn’t: ‘Please, Edvard, stop doing this to yourself. It doesn’t help.’ Caroline didn’t say it, because she could see it did. Help. The thoughts came and I had to go there. As deep down as I could stand. To the most agonising depths, until I could stand it no longer and had to surface. In this consulting room or wherever.

  That was the only time, as far as I can recall, we – you and I, not Caroline and I – ever discussed decapitation. And here’s the thing: I remember that afternoon very fondly. We discussed decapitation in the way two young people do when they are sitting together in front of David’s The Death of Marat, never imagining that one day …

  ‘You were how old at the time?’

  I remember I looked up. Such a direct question.

  ‘Our late twenties, I suppose. Anna had a friend working at the European Commission and we went over for a weekend. Strangely for a diplomat, even quite
a young one, I had never been to Brussels before. We went on to Ghent, I remember. Though we had been to Ghent before.’

  There must have been something about the look on my face. Caroline smiled.

  ‘You don’t know Ghent?’ I said.

  She didn’t.

  ‘We used to love Ghent.’

  This is what happens. Even without the expert navigation of Caroline, I am washed into gentler waters. I reached out for that box of tissues on the low table. This became a feature of the sessions. I took a moment.

  We had once discussed Lockerbie, I said, picking up. For a moment, the name didn’t register with Caroline. Then, yes, Lockerbie. Maybe we had watched a documentary about it. It wasn’t at the time of the disaster. That happened one Christmas, or close to. We were in New Zealand that year, I remember: staying with friends in Auckland. Our discussion took place sometime afterwards, presumably on a significant anniversary. What we discussed was what it might be like to be on the Pan Am plane, just after it was blown apart, not – unfortunately, in the circumstances – having been killed by the blast, but still belted up in your seat, fully conscious, or coming in and out of consciousness, and hurtling towards the ground, with – how long? – a couple of minutes, perhaps? – to contemplate inevitable death.

  ‘Well, it is hardly a contemplative experience, I would imagine.’ I can hear you saying that in exactly those words. God forgive us, that made us laugh. The whole conversation was, oddly, quite light-hearted and jokey. We went on to speculate as to whether two or three seats or a whole row might have fallen through the air together, intact. With all the occupants holding hands together. And singing. Singing ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’.

  More seriously suddenly. Would you want to be with someone else at such a time? More specifically, would we have wanted to be together? A variation on the Phil and Babs question. We didn’t say so, but I think both of us felt the same way: no. Better to face the end alone.

  Understandably, I had lost Caroline by this point. Phil and Babs? More generally, she must have been thinking what a couple of crazies we two were. Though doubtless you get to see all sorts in your line of work. Crazies by definition.

  I went on to explain the Phil and Babs story. She listened intently and made no judgement. And then I mentioned that I had been reading this book in which the author imagines being offered a different Faustian bargain. Either: have the years you had together and your wife dies young of cancer. (What had happened in reality.) Or: forgo those years (go back in time; you both take different paths in life) and your wife (now not your wife) lives into old age. The author chose, if I remember rightly, the first of these two, I need hardly add.

  But what am I thinking? I have mixed things up somehow. The story of Phil and Babs had not come to me when I was seeing Caroline. Philemon and Baucis, yes, of course; but Phil and Babs, that was only the other day. And this other book? I am not sure about that either. I have read it and thought about it, but was that more recently too? It also makes me doubt whether I am right about Lockerbie. It makes me wonder how reliable any of the above has been.

  I should mention that the thoughts this morning – now back in the present – have precipitated something of a crisis. If it can be called a crisis to find oneself sitting on a bench outside the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square at five in the morning. And I should qualify that ‘find myself’, implying as it does that, as if by black magic, I had just appeared here – or that I cannot account for my movements or motives, either wholly or in part.

  In fact, I can. I couldn’t sleep. No change there. Then the thoughts came, as they can. And I needed, I felt, to get up, to get out, to do something to stop them going around and around in my head. A walk, I thought. Blow the hour! Blow the cold!

  And if it was madness at all, it was a controlled sort of madness. My sort of madness, in other words. Not so mad, then, as to neglect to put a coat on over my pyjamas and to put on shoes, and indeed socks, the latter before the former. And, at the last minute, to tie a scarf around my neck and to remember gloves.

  But still, I must have looked somewhat odd, as I exited the lifts at this early hour, fully dressed but not quite, and with no luggage. No nothing. No early flight or train to catch. No taxi booked. ‘Sir?’ the night porter on the hotel desk enquired of me. Sleepwalking? If I was, there was – I thundered through – no stopping me. He left it. He sees a lot of nocturnal comings and goings, no doubt.

  I was out of there anyway. Out on Northumberland Avenue. Then what? Well, I walked. A full five hundred yards. I can see the hotel I am staying in from where I am sitting. I got this far and thought, what am I doing? This is madness. So I sat down. On this bench in Trafalgar Square. Deriving from Taraf al-Ghar (Cape of the Cave) or from Taraf al-Gharb (Cape of the West). Who on earth told me that? In my coat, and shoes and socks, and pyjamas. Not much of a crisis, then, if crisis at all. I am in a city I know well, where I have lived off and on for many years, and in a part of the city I know well too. I must have walked across Trafalgar Square thousands of times. And I am just minutes from the warmth and luxury of my hotel. I have – I have checked – my key card with me. No wallet, no keys, no phone. But I can get back into my room without any fuss or bother. Yet for all that, I am struck by how alien the atmosphere is out here. Something about the hour, the light, the cold, the circumstances.

  One thing that has surprised me is the large number of other people who are out and about at this hour. Though the fact that I am surprised only goes to show how pampered and privileged – and middle-aged – I have become. Clubbers and night owls are heading home or, for that matter, still going strong. The night is still young. For the still young.

  And then there are all the early-shifters – the cleaners and porters and baristas. The shadows of the shadow economy. Looking shell-shocked and shattered, the tearing from sleep streaked across their blurred features. You hated early starts, those hideous jingly/jangly ringtones on smartphones positioned just out of reach of the outstretched arm.

  Suffice to say, I am not attracting any attention amid all this human traffic. A duo of policemen, bulked out with holsters and pouches and cuffs and sprays and batons and tasers and torches and bodycams and phones and radios, walked towards me a few moments ago, looked at me, nodded and walked on. Perhaps they clocked my pyjama trousers, but so what? I think perhaps when I left the hotel, in some distress, I imagined I might end up in a police station or A & E or a secure unit.

  That was the extent of my madness right there. Yet after this five-minute walk, if that, I sat down here. I am repeating myself. And I was as I am now. Calm, lucid, rational. Normal. As in, I feel like I generally do. In no sense do I feel out of control. Not now. Sometimes I have these dark thoughts about how my wife was killed and I lose it for a bit. But that’s understandable, surely?

  Entirely. Caroline is back. As a device. She exists, of course. I assume she does. I would have heard if she had died. Anyway, I haven’t made her up. But now she is only in my head – remembered, falsely remembered, misrepresented, represented faithfully, summoned as and when. I rather think she would approve of my making use of her in this way.

  A tramp approaches. Let me rephrase that: a homeless person approaches. He doesn’t have matted hair and a ratty beard and a raddled face. He’s not wearing a torn and soiled overcoat or pushing a shopping trolley filled with stuffed plastic bags containing God knows what. That ‘street look’ went out with Thatcher. Indeed, perhaps he is not homeless at all. Though it is hardly likely that he is a night-time rambler, is it? And on closer inspection, the sensible clothes – weatherproof jacket, ski gloves, jeans and strong trainers; the sort of decent clobber dispensed at night shelters these days – are tired and worn and crumpled and grubby. He has probably come from the underpass into Charing Cross station. Stretching his legs before breakfast at St Martin-in-the-Fields. Or come from further afield. Maybe he has been walking all night.

  For a moment I imagine us sharing a ciga
rette or passing back and forth a can of something. He would have to have been the one to offer. I haven’t either on me, of course. Just that key card. (One more check.) Indeed, it has been years since I’ve had a packet of cigarettes about my person (nice phrase, that). And for all that I drink too much, I haven’t resorted to downing lagers or cider in the street. I don’t believe I ever have. Perhaps as a student?

  Why I imagined us – the homeless man and me – communing in this way I now can’t imagine. (The moment has passed.) What bond is there between us? None. Unlike the policemen, this man didn’t look in my direction or nod. He just walked past me. He is passing the Canadian High Commission now. Perhaps he is teetotal and doesn’t smoke? Presumably some homeless people are? What prompted this, I now realise, is that I could murder a cigarette, not having smoked one for literally decades, or had cravings for one for nearly as long.

  But the craving has passed. The crisis never was, I now feel. It would suit the moment if I could say that the first light of dawn was appearing in the sky. It isn’t. It is still dark, still night. Larkin stretched the definition of aubade in naming the poem. Or rather, was being bitterly ironic in using it. They don’t start serving breakfast until six, but I am already looking forward to my full English.

  Can it really only be six hours since I was having dinner with Josephine?

  MY SUITE

  I loved our house. I loved that it was unremarkable, that we could have afforded somewhere bigger, grander, in a better part of the city. The care and indeed the money we lavished on the house was excusable because of its essential modesty. We were allowed to show it off, to be open, even gushing, about our love for it, in the way an owner can be over an old mongrel but not a pedigree dog, or a parent over a willing child, but not an obvious prodigy.