by Paul Hoffman
It took him a few more seconds and then he began to laugh. ‘My God, what a monster. Out . . . out . . . outrageous. Impossible. Unfair. Unjust. In . . .’
He looked at her but she was crying, the tears spilling down her face without her making any effort to stop them. He took her hand and neither of them said anything. Within ten minutes they had both fallen asleep.
An hour later he gasped aloud. ‘What?’ he called out. ‘What?’ Afraid, distressed, he waved his hands weakly in front of him as if to push someone away. She was instantly awake. ‘It’s all right . . . It’s all right . . . Sshh . . . Sshh . . . calm down.’
Breathing heavily he seemed not to know where he was. Then he looked at her, as if surprised to see her there, and was immeasurably relieved. ‘Oh . . . Alice . . . Oh . . . It was a dream.’
‘It’s all right now,’ she said, taking his hand, ‘it was a dream. It’s all right . . . just a dream.’
In his anxiety he had moved upright but unable to keep this position he fell back against the pillows breathing heavily. ‘Terrible . . .’
‘It was only a dream. Sshh.’
‘Write it down.’
‘What?’
‘Write it . . . write it down.’
It was the first time since he had become seriously ill that she had seen him truly afraid.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Write it for me.’
‘It was a dream . . . just a dream.’
‘Please.’
She switched on the twenty-watt table lamp. It hurt her eyes, thin though the light was. He did not react. She picked up the writing-pad and the pencil and looked at him. His eyes filled with dread as he stared into the distance and she felt a surge of overwhelming pity. ‘Let me get you something.’
He shook his head. ‘There is a man . . . in his late fifties. He is overweight and cheerful and he’s wearing a cardigan and slippers. He is coming out of his front garden. It’s a bungalow and there are many others. It’s a long street . . . many houses all of them neat . . . cared for. But at the end of the road there is a large waterfall . . . big . . . very wide.’
‘You’re going too fast.’
He did not slow down or look at her. ‘He must go down the side of the waterfall to fetch his daughter’s husband who is missing. They think he’s dead. He sets out and he has a rifle over his shoulder. He’s at the side of the waterfall. It’s very noisy and there’s a rope and he has to use it to climb down because there’s no path. Hand over hand he uses the rope to climb down the side of the waterfall and it’s very easy for him and he’s feeling a sense of adventure . . . but as soon as he reaches the bottom and he puts one foot on the ground it vanishes and he feels very uneasy. The waterfall is now huge . . . incredibly . . . noisy. This is a crater of some kind and it’s like . . . It’s Africa . . . it’s South Africa or somewhere. And he looks up, and around the rim of the crater are all these bungalows, and they have lights on and the curtains drawn and it’s night up there but it’s day in the crater. But he can’t get back the way he came because he can’t pull himself up and the only way out is to go on a long trek to the other side of the crater. It’s open at the other side but it’s a long way. His spirits are shaken and he thinks of his duty . . . to find his daughter’s husband . . . his body. So now he walks hunting style around the front of the waterfall, which is somehow far away but . . . close as well . . . and he goes around the other side. There it is . . . in the pool . . . the body of the young man.’
He paused for a moment, afraid.
‘All around the pool are black cats . . . ordinary cats but bigger. They don’t look at him . . . they don’t seem bothered but he knows they’re very dangerous. They lick their paws and don’t seem interested and wash. He takes his gun off his shoulder and a black cat standing on a rock in the pool slowly, casually, slips into the water and goes over to the young man’s body and takes it up on to a rock where it folds him over one paw like it was holding him in its arms. It has killed the son-in-law and keeps the body in the pool, guarding it from rescue. The dead man’s hair is black and very wet and thick and it’s thick over his forehead where the water has slicked it down.’
He groaned softly.
‘And he looks down at his gun but when he looks up the cat isn’t holding the young man any more, he’s holding a woman.’ He stopped and his eyes were staring. He looked at his wife. ‘It was my mother and – she’s alive. Her arms are swollen and she’s looking at me and she’s calling out to me to help her. “Don’t let me die here . . . please don’t let Mummy die.” Then the man aims his gun. Then it’s as if I’m looking down the barrel like a telescope pointing at the cat . . . then the cat looks backwards and forwards between my terrified mother in his arms and the hunter . . . and the hunter is confident because he’s got the cat in his sights. And I am confident as well because it’s covered. I’m going to save her. The cat looks back and forth making itself angrier and angrier looking at the hunter and my mother’s face. Then the cat . . . its face becomes a sort of a blur and it has lips and its mouth makes a kind of O shape . . . and his mouth moves and changes shape in a rage. The man shoots . . . and he misses . . . again . . . he misses . . . and again . . . and he misses and the cat turns and starts towards us and I see it coming down the barrel . . . it won’t stop. He keeps coming and it leaps and the man jumps back and takes his eye from the sight and seeing the cat with his own eyes . . . not through the sight . . . he shoots from the hip as he falls back. The cat falls down dead.’
George stopped and looked at Alice.
‘Shhh,’ she said, ‘it’s all right.’
‘The man is terrified . . . but he rushes through the water to my mother. She’s floating on her face and he quickly turns her round. But it’s not my mother any more, it’s the man’s son-in-law. He stares down at the body, confused and so sad, and I feel as if . . . as if I have failed my mother that I didn’t . . . I don’t know how I felt . . . bad, terribly bad.’ He closed his eyes as if he were about to faint.
‘Be quiet now,’ she said softly. ‘It’s all right.’ But he began talking again so softly that she had to bend her head to hear him.
‘He has to take the body with him and he is so sad, so melancholy. The pool is shallow now and covered in an immense scaffolding . . . rusty . . . everywhere and there’s a kind of roof so it’s dark and dripping. He’s got to drag the body through it all, climbing over the pipes and pulling the body behind him turning over in the water . . . and though he’s dead he’s . . . alive a little bit very deep inside and he knows . . . he’s been very frightened in the pool all this time . . . so cold and wet and alone . . . dead but not dead. The man drags him behind him and it’s slow and hard . . . and with each step it gets darker and colder and now he feels a terrible loss . . . terrible, which he never felt for the young man before when it was just a duty he owed somebody else. But he’s afraid because he can see outside in the light beyond the scaffolding there are the cats and they’re gathering and looking to see him. And then he knows and the body knows too . . . that he can’t take him back. But he keeps pulling him to the edge of the pool and out of the scaffolding and into the shallows at the edge and he’s next to the rope which he climbed down . . . but he can’t get back up and he can’t take the body of his son-in-law with him. He has to leave him behind in the land of the dead even though he isn’t completely dead . . . moving and rolling under the water . . . bobbing and rolling. He has to leave him. There are others waiting on the shore – white hunters and black hunters – but he can’t make out their faces. They are shouting at him to come . . . They can lead him up a steep path nearby, covered in plants and trees but they won’t wait . . . there’s no time . . . he must come now. Terrible is the way he feels. He has to leave the son-in-law behind. He can barely walk because his grief and his loss are terrible. He comes out of the water and the hunters take him away.’
She did not know what to say to him.
‘It was only a dre
am,’ she said at last.
He closed his eyes, exhausted.
‘I’ll get you a glass of water.’ She took the jug from the bedside table and went downstairs.
In the kitchen she emptied and refilled the pitcher and quickly returned to the bedroom. He was asleep.
Over the next two days he deteriorated quickly. He had reached the point where he started to look wasted. His skin was losing all colour. The doctor’s visits increased from twice a day to four times. It was his habit on leaving to give her a brief summary of George’s condition as she saw him out, but at the end of the second day after the dream he asked her to sit down. She took him into the living room.
‘Is he talking?’
‘Hardly at all . . . very little for two days.’
‘His sight’s going.’
‘Yes.’
‘It will be quite gradual. He’ll probably go in his sleep. He won’t be in pain.’
‘Really?’ she said desperately. ‘I couldn’t bear it if he was.’
He was touched: she had not shown much reaction before beyond the merely dutiful. But it was clear now that he had been mistaken. How easy it was, he thought, to misunderstand people.
‘If there’s anything, you can call me at any time . . . night or day,’ he said.
She smiled, grateful and relieved, then followed him out into the hall and said goodbye.
For an hour she sat in the green recliner, watching him. She felt an extraordinary weariness, as if something heavy were pressing down on her, irresistible, anaesthetic. When she opened her eyes it was more like regaining consciousness than waking. Her chest ached in a strange way, and her throat. She looked at her watch. She had been asleep for four hours. Alarmed, she looked over at George but even before she had half risen from the chair she could hear his breathing, slow, heavy and with a slight sigh on every inward breath.
She stayed with him, mostly silent, sometimes reassuring him, always holding his hand, leaving only twice in the next fourteen hours, both times jamming open the bedroom and the bathroom door. All through the night she did not eat or drink or rest. All through the night, through dawn, he did not move; there was only the regular breathing, the sigh on the down breath and the blinking of his eyes. Then at ten past six his head moved slowly, and with an immense act of will he turned towards the door as if listening for the sound of someone on the stairs who should not be in the house. It held his attention for a full minute. Then he called to her. His voice was faint and indistinct, slurred by weakness, it sounded like a warning. She started to talk to him and, for a moment, he saw her but then, exhausted, his head shifted back onto the centre of the pillow. He opened his eyes and looked at her.
‘I don’t feel well,’ he said weakly. ‘In fact . . . I think I’m going to die.’ He closed his eyes and a faint groan escaped his lips. She froze in horror and pity. Suddenly he opened his eyes and again looked to the door, calling out as if warning of the approach of an intruder.
‘Hello?’
The pain in her chest surged, unbearable, filling every fibre in the muscles of her chest and neck and cheeks. She squeezed his hand and began to talk to him. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’m here. Don’t be afraid. It’s all right. You’re not alone.’
He gave no sign of having heard her or that he knew she was there. He had opened his eyes again and appeared to be focused somewhere far away.
In the distance there was a loud noise, a bang like a truncated clap of thunder. Although she heard it, she was too distracted for it to register.
There was no sound inside the house. It was still, and it seemed to her that the stillness would go on for many hours more. Then suddenly it was as if something powerful stirred in the room. Something huge was leaving, an entire world passing away.
‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘I’m here. I’m with you. I’m here.’
Between her first sentence and her last his hand went cold and his eyes emptied. And then he sighed.
Alice sat back as if astonished, staring at him. After a short while she began to whisper: ‘Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend his spirit. Give him eternal rest and let thy perpetual light shine on him, for you are . . .’
A terrible constriction in her throat began to choke her and she could not go on. She stayed like this for ten minutes then gave a loud cry, a terrible bark of grief.
In a small flat in Finchley, Geoff Healey is listening to the summary of the morning news as he packs up before returning to his wife. The most important story is that the Bank of England has announced that interest rates are going up. Then the newsreader, light-hearted and a little condescending in the way of such signings off, announces that engineers working to prevent the imminent collapse of the Leaning Tower of Pisa have succeeded in moving the tower back by six millimetres to the position it held twenty-five years ago. Of John Barton there is no mention. As Geoffrey Healey finishes his preparations for a return to life, for that is how it feels to him, he listens to the weather. The forecast is snow.
The prediction is correct. The men and women of weather have got it right. In the centre of Harrow-on-the-Hill a single snowflake is falling. Formed high up in the clouds as the result of many complex variations of temperature and humidity it gently falls, with its lattices and puckered layers and its fragmented symmetries, onto the lips of a young woman. Her lips are blue; but not because of the cold. She is the source of the noise heard but not noted by Alice Winnicott a few minutes before. The young woman with blue lips is lying in the road. Her spine is shattered and she has no legs. For the moment she is still alive, but it will not be long before her mouth stops gaping like that of a fish drowning on a river bank, and the cold stealing through her stomach will reach her chest and cause her heart to stop. Twenty yards away a red double-decker bus, an old-fashioned Routemaster, lies on one side of the pavement, shattered and skeletonised by the bomb she had been carrying at her feet and which she had been intending to use to kill George Winnicott. The explosive death of the former Head of the Anti-Terrorist Squad was to have been a dissenting reminder that not everyone agreed that even for the gangster the story must change, that coercion now required a female wing. They would not see the future also had to be female for intimidation as for everything else; that even terror has its feminine side; that words must point the gun in politics; that the inquisition of the baseball bat or bomb should only now and then be used as an enforcer to the despotism of the gentle hint. (They haven’t gone away, you know.) A persuasiveness that’s rooted in the occasional, spectacular and yet deniable atrocity is the way ahead for wickedness. No one claims responsibility any more. But even reactionary killers are driven to adapt and they had tried to put the future to the service of the past through the young woman dying slowly on the streets of Harrow. Afready she had killed, a husband and his wife who’d been passing as a lorry that she’d parked in Newgate Street had blown apart. But she was made uneasy by these deaths; it was too hard to like yourself with blood like this upon your hands. Had she lived, she, too, might have outgrown dynamite and murder and become an entirely novel kind of nuisance: one who needed to feel good about themselves, one of many new kinds coming to afflict us in a new millennium where the nuisance will lie down with the psychopath, and the pest will lie down with the thug; as long as it is remembered that we get our word for pest from the notion of plague, rivers of blood, the death of the firstborn.
At the Fraud Secretariat people are arriving to start the day, ignorant of the death of their helmsman and that with this death their days are numbered. Already with Alice Winnicott’s terrible howl they are beginning the vanishing: into the Department of This or the Office of That. For some of them its drift into oblivion will bring opportunity; for others, blight. For now, many and watchful, they begin the daily task of sorting the ins and outs and ups and downs: What is the story of this lie? Who made the decision? Why did they make it? Should they have acted as they did? Who did what to whom and for how long and for how much and what was their
state of mind? What has been stolen? Who was it stolen from? Who was the thief? Each one must make some progress through this mournful day: ponder, rule, decide to prosecute, baulk the submission to dismiss, fearing the appeal and the release, hoping for the confirmation of the prison sentence and the ruinous fine.
Waiting for his final resting-place, the narrow valley for his bones now dry and disconnected, the ache in George’s back is fifty minutes gone. At close of business all his former workers’ heads will throb and all of them will stretch and ease the muscles of their backs commemorating him. The spine designed to take them on all fours through life on horse’s hoof or reptile’s claw will groan in protest at this unnatural pretence, its upright deviance. Our leaning tower, our Babel of backbones ending in a little tail that still exists between our hips, is always threatening the collapse, the slip, the slow degeneration; straining at something it was never meant to do. We were not made to sit all day to make a bob or two. But economics doesn’t give a toss for our biology. At the end of the working day our backs will always ache, we will always be sore. At half past five the workers will unite in harmony and fellowship and celebrate the common ownership of tender joints. They are confederate now, united, made one flesh in honouring their spinal destiny, raising themselves to toast their former boss:
Be upstanding.
Acknowledgements
I have had the benefit of reading numerous books and articles, but too many to mention all of them. Some have been essential to various sections of this book. I am deeply indebted to Stephen Fay’s account of the workings of the Bank of England, Portrait Of An Old Lady. The dialogue in The Dark Figure often relies on interviews or comments made by historical characters quoted in his excellent analysis. I am also indebted to two of Michael Levi’s impressively readable books on fraud: Regulating Fraud and his Royal Commission report, The Investigation, Prosecution, and Trial of Serious Fraud. Richard Sennet’s The Corrosion of Character distilled some useful thoughts on the life of the consultant. I am particularly grateful to Blay Whitby, Lecturer in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex, who commented so thoughtfully on the material about artificial intelligence in the novel. Louis Bris’s comments on the fox and the hedgehog are partly stolen from an essay by Isaiah Berlin and another by Keats. The extract of ‘For the Fallen’ by Laurence Binyon on page 275 is by permission of The Society of Authors, on behalf of the Laurence Binyon Estate.