by James Meek
He asked Rose what she thought. She spoke with sureness for a young girl. Alex realised that she was giving her parents back their own words, shortened and summarised.
‘What about you, Alex?’ said Matthew.
Alex, who hadn’t read the Bible since he was a child, had skimmed through the first chapters of Judges while the others were talking. He could see no relationship between what Lettie and Matthew described and the words on the page; in the text he read, the Israelites and their deity were a sado-masochistic old couple only kept from divorce by their shared love of killing.
‘God and the Jews seem to hate each other,’ said Alex.
‘It’s not to be taken literally,’ said Matthew. ‘It’s about submission to God’s law.’
‘There’s a lot of gangster stuff in it, though, Dad,’ said Rose. ‘When Ehud stabs the fat king in the stomach and Jael hammers a nail into Sisera’s head.’
‘That’s not what it’s about,’ said Matthew.
‘You wouldn’t let me read it when I was younger cause of the language.’ She was looking from face to face, lifting her chin defensively against an attack that hadn’t happened. ‘Why not just tell us how to behave, like other books do?’
Matthew and Lettie folded their arms at the same moment. With a heavy turn of her head Lettie looked at her husband.
‘What other books?’ he said.
‘Never mind,’ said Rose, jumping up and saying ‘May I be excused?’ as she went through the door.
‘It’s the school,’ said Lettie. ‘It’s too multicultural. She spends too much time with them.’ She turned to Alex. ‘If you and Maria had children, you’d know how hard it is.’
Matthew put his hand around her wrist and she tugged at his hold, not so much trying to break free as to show defiance; he was holding her wrist quite tightly. ‘You have to guide them. You have to show them the difference between right and wrong. You need some equipment. I know you think all this,’ she lifted the bible, ‘is very silly, but how do you explain life without it?’
‘There are no explanations,’ said Alex. ‘There are no answers, and there’s no meaning. There’s just life.’
Lettie laughed. ‘Is that what you’d say to your children if they came at you with their questions? That there’s no meaning, no answers? I’ll bet Maria doesn’t see it that way.’
‘Maria and I aren’t together any more,’ said Alex. ‘We broke up.’
Lettie looked at him in astonishment, tinged with horror, as if he had brought something unwholesome into her house that couldn’t be cleansed.
‘It didn’t work out,’ said Alex. ‘It was amicable.’
‘But you were together for so long,’ said Lettie.
Alex shrugged and couldn’t stop a smile creeping onto his face, which increased Lettie’s horror.
‘He found somebody else,’ muttered Matthew.
‘You had an affair?’ said Lettie.
‘No!’ said Alex, no longer smiling. Lettie had never cared for Maria as far as he could remember. ‘No, it was her idea.’
Lettie looked at him incredulously. ‘It was Maria’s idea that you should fall in love with somebody else? Why would she want that?’
‘Lettie,’ said Matthew. Alex was blushing furiously and his heart was pounding.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Lettie. ‘It’s what happens, I know, but it seems so casual.’ She spoke as if she’d forgotten she was speaking her thoughts out loud. He wanted to defend himself but he couldn’t tell them how ashamed he’d felt to walk away from Maria when he’d already smiled about it to their faces. Phrases like It’s one of those things and It happens all the time came into his head and he knew that for some reason in his cousin’s house they’d fall crippled from his lips.
Lettie got up, one hand on her belly, one hand on the back of the chair, taking care not to let the chair legs scrape against the wooden floor. ‘So you and this new girlfriend’ll be taking over Harry’s house,’ she said to Alex. ‘Or maybe you’ll find a way to sell it.’ She turned her back to put a half-eaten loaf away and spoke words Alex didn’t catch except the last, which were ‘… two million’.
‘Don’t speak that way,’ said Matthew to Lettie as if he were rebuking a child. ‘He can’t do that.’ He looked at Alex. ‘You don’t know what we’re talking about, do you? Did you ever wonder what was going to happen to my father’s house when he dies?’
‘You’ll inherit it, I suppose.’
‘He’s made a will leaving it to the institute. He got a lawyer to draft a covenant so that the only thing the institute can do with it is let the director live there for free. You, in other words. As things stand you’ll have possession of my father’s house when he’s gone.’ Matthew turned to Lettie. ‘He does look surprised.’ He said to Alex: ‘I would rather you didn’t let Dad know that you know. He told me he wanted to make a stand.’
‘You saw him?’
‘I hadn’t seen him since he got the diagnosis four months ago, so I went to London. He wouldn’t let me into the house. We stood and talked on the doorstep. He said, “The old intellectuals in London are dying and the young ones can’t afford to live here.”’
‘I’ll move out,’ said Alex.
‘There’s no need.’
‘I’ll move out as soon as I get back. And you’ll be seeing him again and looking after him. He’ll change his mind.’
‘It’s unfair,’ said Lettie. ‘You don’t have a family.’
‘Lettie,’ said Matthew.
Shaking her head, Lettie said she was going to bed. Matthew rose, apologised to Alex, said goodnight and followed his wife out.
Alex was only alone in the kitchen for a moment before Rose came back and began to fill the dishwasher. He offered to help.
‘It’s all right,’ said Rose, smiling as if it was ridiculous that he could do anything with the chores except get in the way. Alex stayed where he was and watched her work. Where did she get the grace? he wondered. Did she pick it up from Lettie?
‘What’s the point of living, then?’ said Rose, slotting plates into the rack. She turned round and folded her arms. ‘You said there are no explanations, no answers and no meaning.’
‘You were listening outside the door.’
‘So, what’s the point?’
‘Living doesn’t have a point,’ said Alex. ‘And yet we’re living.’
‘That’s not very clever.’
Alex stood up and began flapping his arms up and down. Rose shook her head and laughed at him and Alex said: ‘The first thing you feel when you’re born is time. Time, you see?’ He looked around and blinked as if he could feel time on his face like the wind, as if he could smell it. ‘Everyone around you is moving through time and changing. That’s the journey you’re born into. You’re born on the wing. Flying through time, on a great migration.’ As he talked he trotted around the kitchen table, flapping his arms heavily as if he were a weary bird. ‘And then, still travelling, you give birth yourself.’ Still flying around the table he used one wing to make an extravagant natal gesture.
‘I hope there’s somebody there to catch the egg,’ said Rose.
‘Come on! Follow me! Come on!’ Rose sighed and shook her head and with her hands in her pockets began to trudge round the table after her uncle. ‘Take your wings out of your pockets!’ said Alex. ‘Fly! And when your child looks back at you and asks: “Where did we start this journey?” you remember that you asked that question, too, and never got an answer. You never found out where you were going. But when you die, you’d rather still be flying. And the others around you, your children and your friends, the great flock, they’re still flying on.’
‘If you have children.’
‘Your bluntness is a great cauteriser.’
‘I don’t know what that means.’ Rose was annoyed. ‘Being clever’s not everything, you know. People are never clever enough to work out right and wrong for themselves. They need to be told by a higher power.’
‘I
s that what your parents think?’
‘Yeah, but they’re not strict enough,’ said Rose. ‘I’ve got this friend, he’s a Muslim, and he was saying how every thousand years there’s got to be a new religion, because the old one gets soft and bends the rules. So there was the Jews, and they got soft and there was the Christians, and they got soft and now there’s Muslims.’ Her eyes were shining. ‘Don’t tell Mum and Dad I said that.’
Later, in Chris’s room, Alex called Bec, although he knew it was long past midnight in Tanzania. He knew she wouldn’t answer, but was disappointed when she didn’t. He wanted to tell her what had happened, how when he thought of her he couldn’t stop smiling, and how he’d forgotten that it’d look as if he didn’t care about Maria, when it wasn’t like that at all; and about Harry’s spiteful legacy. He wanted an audience that would turn his shame into goodness. The phone rang out and every few rings there was a click as if Bec was picking up but it was only some kind of interference in the cosmos. The joy of anticipatory love Alex had felt was destroyed and he doubted everything. What a prick he’d been to smirk about Maria; what a fool he’d been to say that he’d found someone when Bec had made no promises and they hadn’t so much as held hands. He began to think over the lines in the messages she’d sent him, lines he’d read so many times and found so tender, and find alternative, cooler interpretations of each phrase she’d written. The thought that he could fly to Dar es Salaam and fly back two weeks later with Bec as nothing but a friend ran freezing through his body.
He bumped his head against the lampshade as he was undressing. He switched off the light, laid his head on the springy pillow and listened to the window rattle and the prickle of raindrops against the glass. Why, he thought, did Matthew admire his medical work, when he was delaying the entry of souls into heaven by keeping people alive? Why did the believers love the healers who brought them back from the brink of everlasting light? Harry was dying without the hope of paradise, but Alex knew that when Matthew came to face old age and the illnesses that would kill him he would cling to life no less tenaciously than his father.
38
There was something that sickened Ritchie about Bec’s principles. Was she really so good? If she was so kind, why had she gone through so many men in her life? She’d barely broken up with Val before she’d moved on to Alex. Long ago she’d confessed her part in the terror that their father had delivered to his bedroom on the night before he left on his last tour. The evil yellow eye of that cruel bird, the sweep of its wings and the hellish shadows they cast on the wall, the dagger of its beak! The scream seemed to come from within the bird’s skull, even if the sound came from his own throat.
It occurred to Ritchie for the first time that if he chose to dig up dirt on his sister, he would find something. She already came to him with her problems. Of course I would never do that, he thought.
He began to resent the way his sister, comfortable in her malaria-healing saintliness, would never know how loyal he had been to her, and the terrible punishment that he faced from her ex-lover as the reward for this loyalty. It was unjust that he, Ritchie, should suffer like this, when it was Bec who had made Val angry by saying she would marry him and then changing her mind. She would never appreciate the sacrifice her brother was making in order to protect her from the consequences of her own selfishness. This was the woman who presented herself as a superior guardian of their father’s memory, when she wanted to let the world forget him, and he wanted the world to remember!
Let it be that way, then, thought Ritchie. If he had to be the one to understand it was nobler to make peace with O’Donabháin, so be it. If he had to make the secret sacrifice of not betraying his sister, well and good. Let God be his witness: he did the right thing. And if he was to be a martyr, why not make it harder for himself? Why not help Val dismantle another obstacle to Bec’s exposure in a national newspaper, her lack of fame? When Ritchie realised Alex and Bec might be falling in love, just when Alex’s research was giving him a tinge of celebrity, his instinct had been to keep his sister and his friend apart, to keep Bec safe in her obscurity. But he, Ritchie, was going to be a martyr for his sister, so there was no need for that. He’d help her and Alex to be together. He’d encourage them. He’d sing at their wedding if they liked. If Bec was neither too good nor too obscure to be the subject of national scandal, all that stood between her and disgrace would be her martyr-brother, who would hide his goodness, who went unappreciated, the secret philanthropist, the doer of good deeds for the perpetually ungrateful. He wouldn’t betray her, not because he couldn’t, but because he chose not to.
Ritchie wasn’t resigned to exposure, arrest, disgrace and divorce, but he was afraid to seek help from the lawyers and showbusiness intermediaries who might make his problems go away. He looked for an alternative sacrifice, an enemy with a secret whom he could stitch up. He knew Lazz did coke backstage during Teen Makeover rehearsals, when vulnerable young people were only a few yards away, but Lazz wasn’t an enemy. For all his coldness, Lazz was a star, Ritchie’s star, and Ritchie couldn’t bear to break the star’s exquisite points.
The last hope he was left with was the film about his father’s killer. Ritchie sensed that there was a cryptic accountancy of darkness, that the public was prepared to tolerate a certain amount of balancing and rounding up between different columns where sin and suffering were concerned. A distinguished film director, for example, might be able to take figures from the ‘suffering’ column – parents taken to Auschwitz, wife murdered – and transfer them over to the ‘sin’ column – committed statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old girl. This was acceptable because, in some mysterious way, the figures all seemed to represent the same general quality of darkness, a more palatable and universal medium than wickedness, stoicism, evil or self-restraint. In sum, there was no darkness received and darkness expended: there was only darkness. Ritchie believed his interview with his father’s killer would cast a kind of balancing darkness over him that would make his indiscretions with Nicole more fitting and forgivable in the eyes of society, and that this held whether society was touched by the film, or appalled.
None of this would keep his family together if the story broke, and this weighed heavily on Ritchie’s heart, and kept him reaching for the bottle.
39
When Alex returned from Lancashire he went to the institute, used his passcode to access the freezers in the basement and took out a bag of his uncle’s genetically modified cells. He took a cab back to Citron Square and went up to Harry’s room, taking the stairs three steps at a time. Judith, the agency nurse who now attended his uncle, followed behind with an IV stand. She pushed Gerasim out and left him whimpering on the other side of the door.
Harry lay on his bed with a ramp of pillows raising his head and shoulders halfway upright. He wore a black waistcoat and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was freshly shaved. The scent he’d rubbed into his chin was an aromatic squawk in the gamy bachelor reek of the overheated room, a deep smell of old books and decades-worn wool and painstaking ablutions. On the wall above Harry’s head was a faded reproduction of The Boyhood of Raleigh that had hung in his parents’ house in Derby when he was a child.
Alex’s boots clomped on the white-painted floorboards and made them creak. He dropped an orange Sainsbury’s bag on Harry’s lap. The thin plastic made a crinkling sound as its wrinkles relaxed. Harry looked inside the bag and took out a litre plasma sachet filled with clear liquid. He turned it over in his hands. It was cold to the touch and had his name written on in his own handwriting from fifteen years ago.
‘Sainsbury’s,’ he said. ‘Son of a gun. My genetically modified self should be a Waitrose product.’
Alex hooked the bag on the IV stand. On the table by Harry’s bed a wind-up travel clock in a clamshell case of cloth-covered tin ticked fussily, the alarm hand set to seven-thirty. Next to the clock was a horn comb with one broken tooth and a photograph in a silver frame of Harry and his brother,
Alex’s father, as boys on Filey beach, with bleached hair and little nipples and teeth white against their summer-darkened skin, eyes squinting at the sun. As Harry’s condition worsened the cluster of objects had seemed to creep closer to him.
Alex and Judith washed their hands, put on rubber gloves and set up the infusion kit. Judith spiked the line into the salt solution, closed the clamps, connected the bag of cells, arranged the bags and lines on the stand and fed salt solution into the drip chamber. Alex sat on the bed, ripped open a sterile catheter bag and lifted Harry’s hand. He swabbed a spot and Judith stuck the catheter in. She fed the line into the catheter tube and flushed it with the solution. Alex got up, opened the clamp in the line from the cell bag and adjusted the flow. The bag began to empty into Harry.
How strange it would be, Harry thought, if something happened; if his muscles filled out, his skin turned pink and taut, his voice strengthened, his cancer shrank, his innards cleared and glistened and he could eat, talk, run, sing and laugh, eat meat and smoke tobacco.
‘You think I’m a fool,’ he said. ‘You know it won’t do me any good.’
‘Who knows what good it did you last time?’ said Alex. ‘Who knows what diseases you didn’t get?’