by James Meek
‘I’m sorry, I’m a bit tipsy,’ she said. ‘I forgot what I was doing. I forgot it was about Dad.’ They were standing close together. Bec looked into her brother’s eyes. ‘Did you know O’Donabháin was reading his poetry in Wales recently?’
‘No.’
‘I went. I know how important it was to you that I forgive him. I know it means more to you than making your film.’ She hesitated. It seemed to her that Ritchie was greatly surprised at what she’d done. ‘So I went to see him, and I suppose I have forgiven him, in my way. We had a talk. Here. He wrote this on the title page of his book.’
She gave Ritchie the piece of paper and he read what O’Donabháin had written.
‘It’s for the best,’ said Bec.
‘Yes,’ said Ritchie with difficulty. He felt as if he were choking.
‘It’s all settled with him and there won’t be any film. It’s closure, as you said.’
Ritchie opened and shut his mouth a couple of times.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Bec, beginning to cry and putting her arms around him. ‘I don’t know why I brought this up in the middle of a party. I just saw you and thought about it. I don’t see you often enough.’
Ritchie went through the motions of returning the embrace and gazed over his sister’s shoulder at the dark window opposite and the stairs leading downwards.
‘Imagine you going to all that trouble to stop my film,’ he said. ‘To forgive him, I should say. That was so good of you. You really are quite a piece of woman. Well done! I’m feeling a bit the worse for wear, though, my dear. I must go.’
Ritchie went to a nasty bar nearby, drank three double whiskies in quick succession, left and hailed a cab. The driver was sceptical about driving seventy miles to Petersmere until Ritchie showed him a sheaf of red banknotes.
What Ritchie wanted more than anything was to kiss his sleeping children and to get into bed beside his wife. But Milena had taken Dan and Ruby to stay with Karin’s parents for the weekend. The taxi dropped Ritchie off at the gates and he walked up the drive. It was well after midnight and the lights were still on in the studio block. He heard music. He went to the window and looked in. Karin was on a stool, wearing headphones, working through a tricky chord sequence, and one of the boys from The What was cross-legged on the floor next to her, writing in a notebook. She looked up, smiled uncertainly as if somebody had said something to her that she thought was probably funny even though she couldn’t hear it, and took off her headphones. Ritchie saw her smiling mouth form the word ‘What?’ and somebody he couldn’t see must have repeated it because she laughed, and looked down at the boy and said something to him just as he was taking a swig of Dr Pepper. He laughed and held up the back of his wrist to his face so as not to make a mess.
Ritchie walked to the house. A faint ripple of bass and snare drum sounded behind him in the darkness as if fireworks were bursting far away and out of sight. A sadness greater than he had ever known quivered inside his ribs, terrifying in its weight and apparent permanence, and the thought of suicide returned to him not as a desire to end his life but as a counter-force to that sadness, as if, by going through the motions of ending his life, he might frighten the sadness, make it seem small and trivial. Yet once his intention to take steps was formed, he couldn’t help thinking What if? All the peaks and troughs around him would be flattened: his own sadness, Bec’s joy, Karin’s happiness. As for his children, what had his clever son said? ‘If you did so well without a father, why is it good for me to have one?’ And the sadness reached into him again, like a clawed hand groping through his body for a grip on his heart firm enough to drag him underground.
He went to the scullery, where he knew he’d stowed the old rope swing from the garden after it fell. He found it coiled in the back of a cupboard, slung it over his shoulder and took it upstairs. The lights in his study were indecently harsh and he switched them off except for one small desk lamp. He dropped the heavy coil of rope on the floorboards under the main roof beams and looked up.
For a moment he felt foolishly defeated by the mechanics of the problem before realising that he first had to tie one end of the rope to a fixed object at floor level. He lashed it to a radiator, then set to creating a noose at the other end. How do they make nooses in the films, he thought, with the rope twisted round the loop ten times? That’s not something they teach in the Scouts. He made a loop with a simple slip knot and tried to throw it over the roof beam. The rope was heavy, and his first attempts weren’t strong enough to top the beam. On the fifth try it went over and came down on the far side. For a moment he felt pride at a job well done. But the noose didn’t hang down far enough for him to be able to get his head inside it.
He fetched a small stepladder and by standing on it was able to pass the loop comfortably over his head and fit it snugly against his throat. The rough strands pressed against his Adam’s apple and he saw in horror that the length of rope was exactly right if he really had been intending to kill himself.
He passed his fingers quickly inside the noose to loosen it and pull it off his head, but the tightening of the slip knot had caused it to catch on an imperfection in the rope and it wouldn’t come free easily. Ritchie panicked and tugged hard at the sides of the noose with both hands. It loosened slightly and rose to just behind his ears but his violent tugging, and the effect on his balance of the alcohol still in his bloodstream, made him slip. He felt the stepladder sliding away from him and he scrabbled for a better foothold but instead he kicked the stepladder away, it toppled and hit the floor, and Ritchie was left dangling from the roof beam by his jaw. His metabolism responded to terror with power and instinct told him that his life depended on him putting all his strength into his hands, still stuck between the rope and his head, to overcome the slip knot and his own great weight and wrench the noose up over his chin and nose and let him fall to safety. Whimpering with fear and pain, thrashing his legs in space, straining every muscle in his upper body he pulled and pulled at the noose.
He saw quite clearly that his strength was about to run out, and he expended it all on one last effort. He cried out, the rope dragged savagely along his jaw, struck and passed the bump of his chin, hit his nose with such force that it seemed it would be torn off, and he fell onto the floor, where he lay for a long time, crying.
He got up, unfastened the rope from the radiator and coiled it neatly. He washed his face. There was no mirror in the study to examine himself. He couldn’t feel any damage, no cut flesh or bleeding, just a sharp stinging around his neck.
Still sniffing and wiping his nose he went to the fridge and took out a chocolate pudding. He ate a couple of puddings with a bottle of beer and went to the shelves where he kept his films. He found the DVD he’d ordered, but never watched, after his first meeting with Colum O’Donabháin. He took another pair of puddings and another bottle and sat down to watch Army in the Shadows. After half an hour he came to the scenes showing the Resistance’s execution of the traitor Dounat.
Ritchie watched Dounat in the car, realising what was about to happen to him, swallowing and wiping his thumb over his voluptuous mouth in fear.
The driver drew up on a bleak esplanade, alongside the high Mediterranean surf. Dounat’s former comrades Gerbier and Felix walked the traitor up a narrow alley, holding an arm each. Ritchie could feel the cold wind off the sea.
They entered a rented house. Inside was another young man, Claude LeMasque. In a bare shuttered room, LeMasque told Gerbier that he’d prepared everything for the interrogation. He smiled, rocked on his heels and massaged his left hand with his right ingratiatingly, as if he were talking about arrangements for a party: he’d prepared chairs, desk, paper.
But Gerbier said there would be no interrogation. ‘This is what it’s about,’ said Felix, taking out a pistol.
LeMasque said it was his first time. Gerbier swivelled round to face him and said with passion: ‘This is our first time too. Can’t you see?’
Ritchie swallowed
a gulp of beer. He felt such sympathy with these characters: with LeMasque – how could he stand by and watch Dounat, yes, a traitor, but a good-looking, well-dressed young man like himself, be killed? Yet there was Gerbier, who’d seemed so experienced, suddenly revealing that he, too, was writhing with horror inside at what had to be done!
They talked about how to kill the traitor. Felix asked whether they couldn’t just smash his head in and the traitor lifted up his hands as if to hold back a crushing weight rolling towards him. Gerbier ordered him gagged and Felix and LeMasque, brave LeMasque, stuffed a handkerchief in his mouth. The traitor began to whimper and they manhandled him face-down onto a mattress.
Gerbier said that they would have to strangle him, using a towel from the kitchen. LeMasque put his hands to his ears, unable to bear the sound of the traitor weeping through the gag. Gerbier told LeMasque that he’d asked for harder assignments, and now he was getting one.
How right they both were, thought Ritchie, a sweet sadness swelling in his chest, his eyes prickling. How tragic that this noble young man should have to take part in this terrible deed, and how right that Gerbier should remind him how necessary it was to be cruel sometimes, for the sake of justice, for the sake of order, so that good people and their families might live in peace! In ordinary times, this traitor wouldn’t need to die; but now he would have to be sacrificed for the good of others.
Felix drew the curtains over the shutters and switched on the light. LeMasque stood stiffly, looking down at the sobbing, gagged figure on the mattress. Gerbier planted a chair in the centre of the room. They hauled the traitor upright, sat him down on the chair, and Gerbier said: ‘I promise you won’t suffer.’ LeMasque held his arms and Gerbier held his legs, looking into his face – such courage, thought Ritchie – while Felix looped the towel around the traitor’s throat and tightened it by twisting a piece of wood. The traitor died with tears on his cheeks. His head lolled forward. LeMasque started crying. Gerbier stood at the window with his back to the room for a long time before leaving. ‘I could not imagine this was possible,’ said LeMasque. ‘Neither could I,’ said Gerbier.
Ritchie shut down the system and stared with eyes that no longer saw the things in front of them. Forgetting that O’Donabháin had used the film to strengthen his resolve before he killed his father, he was inspired by the nobility of men who did cruel but necessary things for the greater good.
I nearly died tonight, he thought. My wife was almost widowed and my children left fatherless, my company without a navigator. He barely remembered his affair with Nicole. He could hardly remember what she looked like, and that distant matter seemed unrelated to the business at hand, which was that an evil force had almost destroyed his family. And although technically Bec might not have done anything wrong – technically, scientifically, as if you could measure good by numbers, but that was how they thought! – Ritchie was amazed to realise, the more he thought about it, how close his sister was to the origins of the evil that had nearly ended his life and might yet tear his family apart.
It was Bec who’d provoked Val’s anger by breaking up with him so abruptly; it was Bec who’d released into the world, and to him, twenty years later, the information that two of his heroes thought he was a bad artist; it was Bec who’d stopped him making the film that might have rescued his reputation. You could virtually say, if you took the most extreme view, that Bec had almost killed her own brother. And there she was, in her world of beautiful people, reckoned to be the very best of women. She has no idea, he thought. She has no idea of the gap between how good she thinks she is and what she has actually done. And as if it had been lying there all along and he only had to find it and pick it up, Ritchie saw how fair it would be if the Moral Foundation showed the world that not everything she did was right.
Ritchie had no idea what secrets she might be hiding, and he wouldn’t go looking. But it seemed obvious to him now that there would be justice in it, rough justice, yes, like the summary justice of the brave men of the Resistance, but justice none the less, if he should happen to stumble across an awkward secret of Bec’s and quietly, in sorrow yet with dignity, pass it on to the MF. There would be a sort of kindness in it, it seemed to Ritchie; it was risky for his sister to live on in the mistaken belief that she was virtuous. By winging her reputation he would only be pulling her back into the mortal realm where it was safe for women who’d nearly killed their brothers to dwell.
56
It was around the change of seasons, when it was no longer a surprise to see a leaf fall but the days were still warm and the trees still green, that Bec and Alex’s unspoken pact to keep the house bare began to break down. If in the beginning they hadn’t been afraid to throw away each other’s ephemeral things or tidy up each other’s messes, that same confidence migrated into a contrary regime of being sure that whenever the other brought something into the house there had to be a good reason for it, and it would be aggression to complain. The unwritten rule against superfluous things turned out to have no weight; it was such that any act of enforcement would in itself be a violation.
Neither was conscious of the change when it took place and it was only later, as the evenings grew dark, that they became aware of its effect. Small piles of pieces of paper from the outside world, neither vital nor straightforward to discard, accumulated. Space was found on horizontal surfaces for gifts and photographs. A Tanzanian friend sent a statuette in dark wood for Bec’s thirty-fourth birthday, using an expensive international courier service for fear the regular post would let him down. They put it on a mantelpiece, and at once the space around it looked starved and empty. Family photographs appeared on either side. They had people to dinner; they bought more chairs. After coming back from a conference where she’d spent too much time in heels Bec said she wanted to lie on a sofa, and soon afterwards she and Alex were looking at photos in a catalogue, and soon after that, they were wandering through a store. She saw well-made things she liked, and a month later, the sofa arrived. That plump red piece of comfort acted as a portal, and almost of their own accord rugs began to appear, curtains – as winter approached, the house turned out to be draughty – unfurled along the edges of the windows, and nests of cables squirmed like eels out of sockets.
In late October goods arrived that Alex had put in storage when he left Maria. Most disappeared into the room he was using as a study, but a couple of paintings went onto the walls of the living room; the walls became conscious of their nakedness. A small round coffee table that Alex had grown up with found its way in. It was neither attractive nor ugly but it seemed to Bec that afterwards it became busy with objects and possessions that, though they were only things, diluted the people. A tiny part of her consciousness and Alex’s were diverted into the furnishings and away from themselves and each other. It seemed like a defeat, a retreat, and Bec wasn’t sure whether it was a retreat from a never-quite-articulated ideal of minimalism, or the first hints of preparations to defend against a future that might not, after all, be with children.
They were citizens of a domain relatively new to the world, a country much younger than America or Liberia but no longer completely fresh, the domain of sexual freedom. They hadn’t won it or been present at its birth; they’d been born into it. Neither had been married before, and were not formally married to each other now, but their inheritance was such that both had been in long, intimate experimental marriages before this one, each of which had, at the time, seemed to be, as this one was now, the actual, final version. These experimental marriages were called relationships, but they were marriages none the less, with the same assumptions of fidelity and assumptions of, if not permanence, durability, at least. From one experimental marriage to another, it was easy to misinterpret ‘different’ as ‘better’, but Alex, who had suffered in the past – and thus made his partners suffer – from familiarity blunting desire could see, when he compared past experimental marriages to this one, that as time went by his familiarity with Bec only intensif
ied his appetite for her. She felt this and it heightened her desire in return and within the secure borders of their ease and confidence anything was permitted. She drank him and he ate her and they licked each other off their fingers and she permitted violations, accepted moments of ruthlessness from him, that she had not taken from anyone else. When Alex was travelling away from her he would rip the sheets off the bed and disarray them round and between his legs before masturbating to better summon up the hours they spent together. At work, at four o’clock one afternoon, the idea of Alex came to Bec with such force that her cheeks burned and it was all she could do to lock the door and close the blinds before sitting down, opening her legs and putting her fingers between them. She called him and asked if there was any chance of him coming home early; and there was, and he did. Yet she was still not pregnant.
In the past Bec had imagined being pregnant and imagined having a baby. She’d never imagined the state of trying to get pregnant. In the beginning this and the delirium of sex and the confidence of love seemed braided together, indistinguishable. As the months passed, and Alex’s nonchalance became strained, the strands separated, and the intangibility of the barrier began to irritate her. She was used to working hard to overcome the obstacles she’d set for herself, and here the work was pleasure and there was no overcoming. It was like waiting to begin a journey without knowing whether there was a journey or where it would take her if it began.
The mind prioritises of its own accord, and although Bec tried to maintain the equilibrium between hoping to get pregnant and taking her research to the next stage, the having of a child would creep ahead. The diagrams and descriptions of the malaria parasites at work contrived to provoke her. The parasites bumped up against a human blood cell and stuck to it, then rolled, swivelled, butted their way inside and started splitting. It was a clever trick, as if a mouse could butt its way through the skin of an inflated party balloon and get inside without bursting it. In one person, a few thousand malaria merozoites could do it a few thousand times. Yet Alex’s millions of gametes couldn’t butt their heads into Bec’s even once. And Bec’s eggs were twenty times the size of a blood cell. The medical databases covered human reproductive science as thoroughly as parasitology; she only had to tweak the search terms to find more scientific papers about human conception than she could read in a dozen lifetimes, and she realised guiltily that over the weeks she had gained more mastery over the mysteries of the human reproductive cycle than the reproductive cycle of the parasites she was supposed to be studying.