The Heart Broke In

by James Meek

  ‘I’ve already got one,’ said Dan.

  Ritchie remembered the child-sized electric guitar Dan never played and the drum kit he didn’t touch.

  ‘Why did you want Daddy’s guitar, Danny love?’ said Ritchie. ‘What’s wrong with yours?’

  Dan turned his face further away and sniffed and Ritchie saw tears on his cheeks. Ritchie didn’t understand. He laid his hand on Dan’s shoulder and asked him what the matter was.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Dan. ‘You don’t care. You don’t care about me and Ruby.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ said Ritchie. ‘Don’t you know how important it is to me to be a good father to you? Have you any idea what it was like for me growing up without …’

  ‘I know,’ said Dan.

  ‘You just made an augmented fourth there. I knoooow. La laaaaa.’

  Dan was sitting up, watching him and listening without crying or smiling, a half-familiar expression of slyness on his face. Perhaps that’s who he really is, perhaps he is the school bully, the boss of the playground, the one the other children fear, Ritchie thought with sudden hope.

  ‘If you made so much money without a father,’ said Dan, ‘why is it better for me to have one?’

  ‘What a terrible thing to say!’ said Ritchie slowly, trying to decide how he felt about it. Different paths forked out from what his son had just told him, and he could follow any fork, and still be Ritchie. On one path, he yelled at his son that he was a heartless, ungrateful little brat. On another, he said nothing, stared coldly at Dan, turned round, walked back to the house – ignoring any appeals for forgiveness – and shunned his family for the rest of the day. The third fork would see him shaking his head, laughing softly, running his hand through Dan’s thick fair hair and telling him he was a clever chap.

  This was the way he chose. He reached out his hand for the top of his son’s head, but at that moment Karin called Dan’s name from the far side of the orchard. Dan got up so quickly that Ritchie’s hand brushed his ear instead. Dan glanced at his father, confused by the awkward touch, and a little frightened, as if he thought he’d accidentally avoided a blow, not a caress.

  ‘Shall we go on the swing?’ said Ritchie.

  ‘Mum’s calling me,’ said Dan. ‘I’m too old for the swing.’

  Ruby came galloping towards them, laughing, and Ritchie caught her under her arms and lifted her up, holding her high so that her head blocked out the sun. He weighed her precious squirming density. Chaotic strands of hair fell over her face and Ritchie savoured the wholeness of her attention. ‘Shall we go on the swing?’ he said, and she nodded, and without looking at Dan Ritchie put Ruby down, took her hand and walked with her to where the rope swing hung from the branch of an old chestnut tree.

  He pushed Ruby on the swing and decided he would have a shot. Ruby told him he couldn’t, he was too fat, and while he told her not to be rude, he wondered whether it would take his weight. He sat down carefully on the length of wood and heard the branch creak. Dan and Karin were coming towards them. He shoved off with his heels, let go of the ground and swung to and fro. The creaking of the branch became louder. It wasn’t so much the fear of the branch breaking as his sense that the tree was in pain that made him stop and step off the swing when Dan and Karin came up.

  The moment his feet were safely on the turf, as if some goblin up in the branches had slipped the knot, the swing tumbled onto the grass and the rope fell on top of it with an angry slap. Ruby yelped and the others drew in breath and began to laugh. Ritchie caught Karin’s eye and smiled. It seemed to him that this chance moment of small fear had snapped the family neatly together. He almost heard the click.

  4

  In the bathroom Ritchie took off his filthy t-shirt and shorts and showered. He washed, conditioned and dried his hair and fixed it with oil. He shaved, applied moisturiser and scented lotion from a bottle marked après-rasage, plucked wild hairs from his nostrils, ears and eyebrows, cleaned his teeth, flossed and rinsed his mouth with Listerine and spent half an hour choosing a shirt.

  Karin had already caught him cheating twice, once just before the children were born, and once just after. ‘If you do it again,’ she told him, ‘I’ll divorce you, see you don’t get custody, and take you for every penny.’

  The idea of being stripped of what he had was frightening, but it was hard for him to imagine. The moment of being exposed seemed worse than the consequences. He’d discovered that he felt no shame about cheating on Karin until she found out. It was the great discovery of his adult life, greater than the discovery that he was a good businessman, or that he was making more money than contemporaries who were more talented musicians. His conscience only troubled him when somebody pointed out that he had one, and that it was bound to trouble him. As long as this didn’t happen, he was a man doing his best to be good to two women who had nothing in common and never needed to meet. He loved his wife; he would never leave her. Apart from Ruby and Dan, Karin’s happiness was more important to him than anything. That was why he would do whatever he could to protect her from the knowledge that he was having sex with someone else.

  Ritchie took the clothes and went to dress in the room where Karin kept her wardrobe. It had better mirrors, and it was closer to the main staircase. If Karin came looking for a row, and the door was left open, it would force her to keep her voice down to prevent the children hearing. The disadvantage was that he had to be in the room with the big photograph of young Karin covering the whole of one wall. It had been taken when she was nineteen and he was twenty-one and the band’s hit had charted in London, New York and Tokyo. One night that year in North Shields, from the window of a limousine stopped at red, Ritchie had watched a chain of girls marching arm-in-arm down the centre of a wet street, singing his and Karin’s song, their coats open and the wind driving the rain onto their faces and low-cut frocks till their cheeks and throats shone.

  In the photograph Karin was on a park bench at night. She was wearing short boots, a white chiffon scarf and a white bra and knickers. She sprawled on the bench with her elbows hooked on the back and her forearms hanging down, a cigarette in one hand, her legs open. A half-empty litre of vodka stood on the bench beside her. Her skin was bone-white in the flash although the resolution was so good that it was possible to make out the goose pimples and fine hairs on her limbs. Those were the days she was filling her body with poisons, not, as the newspapers said, because she hated herself, but because she loved herself, and her body’s resistance to all those poisons was the exact measure of how indestructibly young and beautiful she felt she was.

  The illusion of spontaneity was spoiled by the lacquered golden waves of Karin’s hair and the artful black outline of her eyes, but Ritchie knew it wasn’t an illusion. He’d been there in the park for the shoot. Karin had pulled off her dress and left it lying on the frosty leaves on the edge of the park road because she wanted to. The stylist had raised her hand to stop her and realised it was pointless. Ritchie knew that the missing half of vodka had gone into Karin. Halfway through she swigged from the bottle, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and as the make-up girl was moving in to rescue her face, let her head loll down into her chest, coughed, laughed, said ‘I’m taking this off,’ stood up and unzipped the dress. Ritchie saw then that his future wife was wilder than he was.

  It seemed to Ritchie now that his wife had deceived him. She’d allowed him to think that no matter how bad he was she was bound to be worse. He’d designed his future as the straight one to her wild woman of rock-ness. But while he was jerking his hips to the crowd and spitting lyrics into a mike, wondering about rates of return on offshore deposits, it turned out she was thinking about children; she was thinking about it even as she gouged lumps out of the air with a hard pick on the guitar strings, singing in deadly harmony with him and making the speaker stacks tremble. Ritchie hadn’t changed; she had. Years ago the virtue began to peep out from behind her hellraising disguise, and in a short time, Ritchie found h
imself watching helplessly as his wife’s moral platform rose from the depths, shot past his own, and continued rising until she stood high above him. She didn’t so much give up coke, cocktails, sleeping with boys and girls she liked and cigarettes as kick them off easily, like loose old shoes. ‘Let’s move to the country,’ she said, and they bought a house in Hampshire. She stood by him, beautiful, talented, funny, loving, his alone, the mother of his children, and he was dismayed.

  Karin came into the room and smiled at him in a way that Ritchie took to mean ‘Let’s not talk, shall we?’ She opened one of the wardrobes and began to leaf through her old dresses. The hangers clicked on the clothes rail and Ritchie felt the wordlessness inflating until it pressed against the sides of the room. Karin took a short dress sewn with cobalt-blue sequins and another covered in black beads and threw them on the bed. She hauled out a cardboard box, dug in it and emptied it on the floor. Dyed feathers, sequinned gloves and hats of metallicised raffia slid out and spilled across the varnished floorboards. She knelt down and hunted among her old treasures.

  ‘Are you going out?’ said Ritchie. Karin shook her head without looking up. She unwound a fake jade necklace from a gold plastic tiara set with blue plastic stones and tossed the tiara onto the bed.

  ‘I promised to find dressing-up clothes for Ruby. Her friend Deni’s coming for a play date,’ she said. ‘I have to make supper for them. I might have time to make a few calls afterwards before Deni’s mother comes to pick her up and I have to listen to her troubles. Once that’s done Dan and Ruby’ll need putting to bed and reading to sleep. I don’t think I’ll be going out.’

  It came into Ritchie’s mind, as it always did when his wife reminded him how her life was given over to Dan and Ruby, to ask Karin why she needed to spend so much time looking after the children when they paid Milena to do it. He didn’t ask the question any more, because he couldn’t argue with Karin’s answer, that she cared too much about Dan and Ruby to want them to be brought up by somebody else. When Karin said this, Ritchie believed it; why not? He loved them too. But even as he was thinking Yes, of course, because she loves them, a parallel thought came to him: that it was part of Karin’s long game of superiority and reproach. It was ingenious. She made herself look like the better parent, while depriving him of his great strength in the family, his generosity, his power to see his family’s needs and wants and open his wallet to satisfy them. In the beginning, these two ideas of Karin – as a loving mother, and as a devious partner – floated in Ritchie’s head together, with the first having more substance. But the idea of Karin as a loving mother was so obvious and simple that it was not very interesting, whereas the idea of devious Karin was contentious and intriguing and called for Ritchie’s intelligence to be brought to bear. So he left the idea of the loving mother Karin alone, and kept turning the idea of the devious Karin over, examining and testing it, until it seemed a natural part of his thinking. He took comfort from the notion of a cunning, calculating Karin. To Ritchie it signified that her wild old self wasn’t lost.

  Karin put the rest of the props and finery back in the box and stowed it in the wardrobe. Ritchie’s eyes flicked to the arrogant smile of young Karin spread across the wall. The Karin of twenty years later followed his eyes. She twisted her head and neck round and up and looked at the flat expanse of her immortal Then.

  ‘She gets less like me every day,’ she said.

  ‘Do you mind that?’ said Ritchie.

  ‘You do.’ Karin pinched the back of her hand and let it go. A ridge lingered for a moment before it smoothed itself. ‘It’s only skin,’ she said. ‘It’s not a deviation from the essential me. If there was an afterlife I wouldn’t want to hang out with the twenty-year-old you, I’m afraid.’

  ‘It didn’t seem like the real you then, either.’ Ritchie went over to the wall and stroked the little pouch between young Karin’s thighs with his index finger. He hadn’t been able to help imagining a fantastical secret in there that he couldn’t reach, no matter how he touched.

  ‘Even then you had a porn mind. You can be so cold,’ said Karin.

  ‘What is it? What’s the matter? I don’t understand.’

  ‘You never do.’

  ‘Everybody in this family says I don’t understand, but nobody in this family knows how to explain anything. Like Dan today. What does he need to take my guitar for when we already bought him one?’

  ‘Because it’s your guitar. He doesn’t want a guitar of his own, he wants your guitar. He wants to be on the show. He wants to be part of that world. The kids at school are always saying to him, if it’s your Dad’s show, why doesn’t he put you on it?’

  ‘He hasn’t asked for a long time,’ said Ritchie.

  ‘You told him he was too young.’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘And told him what the word “nepotism” meant.’

  ‘Well!’

  ‘And kept telling him how your dad wasn’t around to help you.’

  ‘Why is it so uninteresting for Dan to have a grandfather who was murdered? If I had a grandfather who was murdered I’d think it was cool. I’d go on about it all the time.’

  ‘You do go on about it all the time. And your father wasn’t murdered. He was executed. It was a war. He was a soldier.’

  ‘If that was a war,’ said Ritchie, ‘everything’s a war.’

  Two hours later, when he was leaving for London, Karin asked why work so often cut into his weekend. ‘You’re not fucking some girl, I hope?’ she said.

  Ritchie smiled. ‘You know if I don’t sit in on these Sunday night meetings nobody cracks the whip. There’s no girl,’ he said. ‘I promised not to do that any more, and I won’t. You have to trust me.’

  It bothered Ritchie that people lied to protect themselves. He only lied to protect his family. He loved the way a handful of false words could insulate his wife, his children and his peaceful, prosperous future with them in this house from the things he did in London with Nicole.

  ‘I can hardly see you any more,’ said Karin.

  ‘You see me all the time,’ said Ritchie. He knew that she had meant something different but he hoped that deliberately misunderstanding her would prevent her telling him what it was. He smiled timidly and his face took on a yearning look.

  ‘Be careful,’ said Karin. ‘If I find out you’ve been lying, the lawyers will be all over this place like …’ the left corner of her mouth turned up in a way that was dear to Ritchie ‘… Vikings in a monastery.’

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ said Ritchie. ‘I’m not cheating on you.’ Delicate, he thought, economical: fewer than a hundred false words in the day, and he kept his family safe.

  5

  For his liaisons with Nicole, Ritchie had bought a flat in a cul-de-sac in Limehouse, on the fifth floor of a new block. He found a parking space nearby and when he pressed the lock button on the fob and the car lights flashed out it struck him as coarse, like an invitation to passers-by to join him for dirty games upstairs. But there never were passers-by. At night, windows were lit, and there were signs of habitation. Once he saw a cactus on a windowsill where there hadn’t been a cactus the previous week. But he hadn’t seen another human being on foot since the estate agent who showed it to him.

  He’d told Karin he needed a crash pad for late working nights and early starts. It’d cost him. Yet the ceilings of the flats were low, the rooms cramped and the windows small. A metal grille jutted out a few inches from the largest window. The estate agent called it a Juliet balcony. It looked like bars designed to defend the block against the mob.

  He’d been grinding coffee beans and making espressos on a stove-top coffee maker in the flat for months, but the smell refused to take, and the place still stank of newness when he opened the door. He saw Nicole’s bare foot and ankle, with its gold chain, disappear around the corner at the end of the hall. She liked to play when he arrived. She would scurry through the flat like a kitten, her feet pattering fast, then going
quiet. He’d hear her singing, or the faint jingle of her bangles. Sometimes he walked through the motion of a chase, would find her on the bed or in the kitchen, leaning on the counter with her hands behind her back, one bare knee raised to his hand, looking into his eyes while he pushed her skirt up.

  He stood in the hall, listening to Nicole banging doors and drawers. The TV was on, quietly, though he recognised the show from the bleating vowels of the Irish host, cutting through the audience laughter.

  I should end it now, thought Ritchie. The alien quality of her presence inside his property thrilled, scared and irritated him as it had in the first place. He remembered the moment when his mind swung from the thought that he couldn’t have her to the thought that she was his to have.

  Nicole’s eyes reminded Ritchie of a scholarship boy at his school called Barney Parks. Ritchie and Jules and Randeep couldn’t let Barney Parks go past when they saw him in a hand-me-down blazer God knows how many sizes too big. Kudos to Barney Parks for getting into a school his parents couldn’t afford but he had to be shown what it meant to look ridiculous in public. The teachers gave their lessons and the boys gave theirs. They stopped him and Ritchie and Randeep held him while Jules got behind him, lifted up his blazer and began pushing his own arms into the sleeves to show that there was room in there for two boys. The trouble with doing that sort of thing was, if the victim didn’t laugh it off, it made Ritchie feel bad, and he was sure he was good, so it couldn’t be his fault; it seemed to him that world was full of selfish victims who deserved a little bullying in order to teach them to take their punishment more gracefully.

  Barney Parks didn’t laugh it off. Barney Parks struggled. He was wiry, and Ritchie had to grip tightly. The defiance in Barney Parks’ steady, dark eyes, wet with tears held back, made the blood in Ritchie surge and his face burn. It wasn’t really defiance. Barney Parks wanted them to do this to him. Barney Parks never spoke, just locked his eyes on Ritchie’s; his gaze declared that he wanted to be attacked, because the more urgently they wrestled him, the stronger they would see he was; that they could make him bend, and twist, even cry out in the end, but that there was a core of resistance and self in him they were seeking without knowing it, and he would never let them get there. This would make them keep coming back, and this was what Barney Parks wanted. Ritchie had begun breathing heavily, let go of Barney Parks, drawn back his right fist, punched Barney Parks in the face and run away. Ritchie was twelve. Barney Parks would have been nine. With Nicole, Ritchie felt the same fake struggle, the same fake defiance, but he didn’t have to punch her. He knew what to do, and how to look at her.