The Heart Broke In

by James Meek

  The cemetery was in Dorset. The last time he visited had been with Karin and the children. He remembered Karin swooping on Ruby at the graveside, lifting her up and carrying her off to a line of trees at a run so the infant wouldn’t pee on hallowed ground. He remembered watching his daughter’s little bare legs swinging from side to side as Karin ran away from him and Dan, thinking that if his daughter was being stolen it would look like this, and feeling foolish (he’d called himself an agnostic then) because his father’s name on the gravestone and the presence of a box with his father’s bones underneath it made him feel that his father was watching him. As he remembered, he remembered more. Karin and he had fought in front of the children, exchanged bitter words, so bitter that Dan had walked away, not wanting to hear, and in Karin’s snatching up of Ruby, besides bodily necessity, there had been a kind of taking away, an anger against him; and he’d been there by the gravestone, alone with his dead father, looking at his son stumbling off in tears in one direction, his wife and daughter running into the distance in the other, and had felt alone, cut off in a fragment of the present while the future fled from him and the past went dark.

  There was a car in the parking bay in front of the churchyard when Ritchie arrived. The ground rose in a gradual slope from the road towards the church at the far side and when Ritchie passed through the lich-gate, beyond the screen of yew trees, he could see the graves paraded in ragged tiers, but couldn’t see Bec. He wasn’t getting a signal on his phone. He walked up the gravel path towards the church, remembering how hot it had been on the day of the funeral. There were sweat patches under the armpits of the Marines carrying the coffin. He’d watched Bec’s pale, serious, wondering face and felt a need to protect her and his mother. He held her hand, even though he thought the Marines would reckon it weak and sentimental, and she’d looked at him in surprise. Yes, he thought, you never imagined I’d do that, did you. His poor little sister! Not so much older then than Ruby now.

  Bec stood in the shadows in the church porch, shivering. She watched Ritchie’s big silver car pull in next to her little red rental, heard the slam of the door and saw Ritchie lumber through the gate in a heavy black coat and red scarf.

  Ritchie couldn’t see her. She watched him leave the path and walk slowly across the grass to their father’s grave, turning his head from side to side. He stopped in front of the tombstone, squatted down and took his right hand out of his pocket to stroke the white marble tablet and run his fingertips across the heads of the flowers Bec had left there. He looked over his shoulder, stood up and took a step towards the church. Bec came out and he stopped and she walked towards him. She kept her hands in her pockets.

  He reached out to hold her shoulder and moved to kiss her and she stepped back. An unfamiliar hardness in Bec’s eyes made Ritchie hesitate to ask about the undamaged memorial stone.

  ‘I can’t see anything wrong with it,’ he said. He gestured back at the grave and pressed his hands together. He tried to speak cheerfully. It came to Bec as a frightened smile and she wondered if some instinct was prepping him to beg for mercy even before he knew what she was going to say.

  ‘Do you remember who’s buried there?’ she said.

  Perhaps, Ritchie thought, she’s had a nervous breakdown? He asked her if she was all right.

  ‘You didn’t answer the question,’ said Bec.

  ‘You’re being silly,’ said Ritchie, trying to touch her again. She twisted away but kept her eyes on him.

  He said wearily: ‘Dad’s buried there.’

  Just before Bec spoke, it seemed to her that she had an array of words to use against her brother that were both cruel and just. The moment she opened her mouth, she was reaching blindly for anything. She said: ‘You have no honour.’

  She thought she’d found a weak word to attack him, an obscure, old-fashioned word. In twenty-first-century England honour was not in play. But the four words darkened Ritchie’s vision and pressed a fistful of cold needles into his heart. The words of the poem by their father’s executioner came to him and he understood them. The clapper jings the sky.

  ‘Tell me what you mean,’ he said. The coldness of his voice and eyes reminded Bec of Val’s transformation on the night they had broken up.

  ‘You betrayed me to Val,’ said Bec.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Ritchie.

  ‘You told the Moral Foundation that I slept with Alex’s brother.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Ritchie slowly, exaggeratedly enunciating his words and pointing his finger at Bec, ‘I did not denounce you to the Moral Foundation. I’d never, ever do that to my own sister, it’s outrageous to suggest I would, and I want to know who slandered me by telling you so.’

  ‘How can you lie to my face?’ said Bec. ‘Were you born a liar, or did you become one?’

  ‘What gives you the right to talk to me like that? Didn’t you hear what I just said? I did not snitch on you. Why do you have to be such a sanctimonious, patronising bitch?’

  Bec took a step back, as if she’d been struck.

  ‘Well?’ said Ritchie, trying to hide his surprise that he’d called his sister a bitch and wondering how it could be erased from the record. ‘Who’s been telling these lies about me?’

  ‘You never called me that before,’ said Bec. She pointed at the gravestone behind Ritchie and he followed her finger. ‘I can see Dad’s name, right there, while you call me that.’

  ‘I won’t have you spreading this slander.’

  ‘Please stop,’ said Bec, resting her aching forehead on her hand. The tears trickled between her fingers. ‘I know you’re lying. I know what you did.’ She looked up at him. ‘I heard you. I heard every word. Val played me the tape. I heard you dial the number, and key in the code, and tell Val that I slept with Dougie, and tell Val that you didn’t have any pictures. I heard you telling Val that he’d tortured you. I heard you crying.’

  Ritchie stared at his sister till her outline burned and jumped. ‘Val,’ he whispered. How he would love to kill him! He saw how he would hurt Val if he were in front of him now, how he would grab his ears and yank his face down onto his uprushing knee, breaking his nose, then hook his fingers into his eyes and fling him across the graveyard before charging down on the blinded, whimpering demon to kick, kick, kick his soft body with his boots, breaking through bone, tearing flesh and organs, making blood gush.

  Hands were pulling his coat. Why couldn’t they let him kick, kick, kick?

  ‘That’s someone else’s grave,’ Bec was saying. ‘You’re going to kick it over.’

  Ritchie collapsed onto the ground. His right foot hurt. He sat on the grass and pulled up his knees. He had kicked a hole in the toe of his right boot, kicking some dead fucker’s gravestone. He started unlacing the boot.

  ‘He tortured me,’ he said, without looking up. ‘He’s evil.’

  ‘What do you mean, he tortured you?’ said Bec. ‘How? Why didn’t you tell him that I slept with Dougie to get pregnant?’

  ‘Have you told other people?’ said Ritchie.

  ‘Alex and Dougie, so far.’

  ‘Not Mum?’

  ‘Not Mum, yet.’

  Ritchie pulled off his damaged boot and bloody sock and regarded his mangled big toe. A fresh dose of rage swilled into him and he beat his fists on the grass, clenched his teeth together and growled like a dog.

  ‘Why did you betray me?’ said Bec. ‘What do you mean, he tortured you? Did he tie you to a chair and hit you? Was he going to kill you?’

  ‘Worse,’ said Ritchie.

  ‘Worse than having to choose between giving up an informer and being killed?’

  ‘Dad’s got nothing to do with this. That was a war.’

  ‘All life’s a war if you make it one.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘You’re such a coward.’

  ‘I nearly died!’ shouted Ritchie. ‘I hung myself. I only just managed to get my head out of the noose. It was you
r fault. You made me feel worthless. You made me feel that I wasn’t a good man.’

  Bec squatted down close to Ritchie and said softly: ‘Maybe you’re not a good man. Maybe you’re a bad man. Have you considered that?’

  ‘I am a good man!’ said Ritchie. ‘I’m a good man, I’m a family man, I love my wife, I love my children, and I’m not letting you or Val or any police or lawyers tear us apart.’ He stared at Bec. A brilliant idea came to him. I’m always brilliant under pressure, he thought. ‘This is what he wants!’ he said. ‘What we’re doing now, this is what Val wants. It’s his revenge, on you, for what you did to him. He wants to destroy you and me and everyone around us. He wants us to fight and break up and hate each other. He’s evil, pure evil.’

  ‘This isn’t about Val,’ said Bec. ‘It’s about you. You haven’t told me. Why did you betray me? Your sister? And Alex, your friend?’

  ‘I didn’t betray him. You did. You slept with his brother. I didn’t make you do that. I had nothing to do with it. If you hadn’t slept with him none of this would have happened.’

  ‘Why did you betray me?’

  ‘I’m a good man,’ said Ritchie. ‘Look, I think my toe is broken.’

  ‘I’ll have to ask Karin,’ said Bec, getting up and striding off down the hill. Ritchie tried to go after her, telling her to wait. Atrocious pain shot up his leg from his foot and he fell over. ‘You can’t tell Karin,’ he shouted. He clutched his leg and screwed up his eyes against the pain, which had spread to his side when he fell.

  An idea came to him. Relief bloomed and he realised he was strong and safe.

  Bec came back. He could see her legs, dimly. He couldn’t bear to raise his eyes any further.

  ‘You can’t tell Karin,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because then she’d leave me and take the children with her, and I’d lose the show, and maybe …’ he winced. ‘I think now I’ve cracked a rib as well.’

  ‘Maybe what?’

  ‘Go to prison.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘You know how the Moral Foundation works. They get people to stitch each other up by trading in secrets.’

  ‘What have you done?’

  ‘You know that in Thailand, the age of consent is fifteen?’

  The expression of pleading and cunning on Ritchie’s face, the hope in his eyes recognisable as hope but hope choked in the grasping fist of a bully who wouldn’t let it go, almost made Bec retch. ‘What have you done?’ she whispered.

  ‘You had sex when you were fourteen.’

  ‘Not with a forty-year-old married man!’

  I must be dignified, thought Ritchie. He said: ‘Since you insist, I’ll tell you. There was a girl who appeared on the show, pretty and clever but not very musical. She wasn’t quite sixteen, but she was extremely mature for her age, and a very experienced flirt. I knew it was wrong but she was persistent. It was stupid of me to give her my phone number. She wouldn’t stop calling. She took advantage of me.’

  ‘She took advantage of you?’ said Bec.

  ‘Yes. Repeatedly. Of course I ended it, but by that time …’

  ‘She was a child.’

  ‘She was no child. I wasn’t the first.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You just dropped her?’

  ‘She went off with a footballer.’

  ‘So she left you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Were you in love with her?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘So what you wanted was to have sex with a fifteen-year-old girl.’

  ‘You don’t understand. It’s not that simple. It’s not like that.’

  ‘So Val found out, and blackmailed you.’

  ‘He was clever. He made it seem like it wasn’t blackmail.’

  ‘You betrayed me to save yourself.’

  ‘Bec, Bec!’ Ritchie reached out to grab his sister’s legs and she stepped back. The movement caused him to yelp with pain. ‘I do love you but there are priorities in love. I love Karin and my children first.’

  ‘So you sleep with under-age girls and lie to your wife about it.’

  ‘Are you so much better? You talk about how good Dad was, but when I try to forgive the man who killed him, you stop me.’

  ‘I didn’t stop you forgiving him. I stopped you boasting in public about it.’

  ‘You put your own children ahead of Alex’s brother when you slept with him and you don’t even have any.’

  ‘What does Karin think about what you’ve done?’

  ‘She doesn’t know.’

  ‘She doesn’t know anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m going to tell her.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘She needs to know what kind of man you really are.’

  ‘If you tell her about the girl, and about me telling the Moral Foundation about you, she’ll leave me. We’ll get divorced, the house will be sold and your niece and nephew’s parents will live apart.’

  Bec marvelled at the earnestness with which he spoke.

  ‘If you tell Karin, it’ll get out, and I’ll be charged and tried and go to prison. Teen Makeover will be cancelled and the company will go bankrupt. If you want revenge, that’s it.’

  ‘That’s not revenge. It’s justice.’

  ‘You can have your justice. You can have a cruel, terrible justice that destroys families and livelihoods if you want. But that’s not the Bec I know.’

  ‘I think your family should be broken up. Karin and Dan and Ruby would be better off without you if you’re going to lie and cheat behind their backs.’

  ‘You don’t mean that. I don’t do that any more. That was the last time.’

  ‘How can I believe anything you say?’

  Good point, thought Ritchie. He said quickly: ‘I know you think I’ve not behaved as a brother should.’

  ‘Do you think you have?’

  ‘You think I’m nasty and worthless. Doesn’t that make me exactly like the scumbag Dad was protecting when they killed him? Dad didn’t betray that worthless man, even when they tortured him. I’m asking you to do the same. Don’t betray me. And I know that because you’re a good person, a better person than me, because you love Dad, you won’t tell Karin, or Mum, or anyone.’

  Bec folded her arms and looked down at the grass, awed by the vast, alien moral landscape Ritchie had taken her to the edge of. ‘You did me wrong, and I’m going to suffer for it, and you’re not?’ she said. She frowned. ‘It seems unfair.’

  She was sad and tired, and the world was a heavy burden. To walk, she felt, to lift her feet, even to breathe, would be to struggle against the power of gravity and the crushing weight of the sky in an existence that was designed to do nothing but press people like olives till the last drop of joy was squeezed out of them.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What’s the point? Why are we alive if we treat each other as badly as you treated me? What does love mean if my own brother betrays me? We should be better than this.’

  ‘We are!’ said Ritchie eagerly. ‘You’re better. You can rise above it. You’ll never get a better chance to show me how people aren’t just out for ourselves. I’m giving you the chance to show how real human goodness is by forgiving me.’

  He felt a sharp sting on the side of his cheek. Bec had slapped him.

  ‘Why does everyone feel they have the right to hit me?’ he roared.

  Bec, who’d struck Ritchie instinctively in the way she’d try to make broken machinery work by striking it with the flat of her hand, said: ‘If I keep quiet you’ll never be punished.’

  ‘Don’t you think this proof of how morally superior you are will make me suffer for the rest of my life?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I know you better than you know me. You won’t tell anyone. You can’t help yourself
. You’re too kind.’

  ‘You’re contemptible,’ said Bec. ‘I put so much trust in you, for all my life.’

  ‘If you had children of your own, you’d understand,’ said Ritchie.

  ‘I will,’ said Bec. She began walking off down the hill.

  ‘Wait,’ said Ritchie, raising his voice as his sister moved further away. ‘I can’t walk.’

  Bec didn’t turn round or slow down. Ritchie began to crawl after her on his hands and knees. Using one of the gravestones he propped himself upright.

  ‘Which one’s the father?’ he shouted.

  ‘I don’t know!’ His sister’s voice rose from the road. She was getting into her car. ‘Both!’

  71

  Alex was at home in the evening when Bec got back. They reported on their brothers. Alex had bought some cooked chicken and made a salad and they ate quietly together. Bec was surprised at how easily the conversation slid away at a tangent from the things they needed to talk about and how cheerfully they spoke of the steps to childbirth, maternity leave and whether it was time for Alex to write a book. They were gentle and patient with each other. There were none of the usual interruptions from her or driftings-off from him. And yet when they were filling the dishwasher together he touched her wrist with the side of his hand and said ‘Sorry’, and blushed, as if they were strangers.

  They were afraid of the night. They feared what the Moral Foundation would say next day and they feared the bedroom, the renegotiation of the terms of intimacy.

  After supper Alex went to his study and Bec tried to watch a film. She felt alone. In the past she would have called Ritchie. She didn’t want to talk to her friends, let alone her mother, until she knew what the MF would say.

  Pressed into the corner of the sofa, staring at the blur of faces on the screen and mashing the soundtrack into white noise, Bec could think of nothing except Alex in the kitchen the previous day, shrinking away from her onto the floor. He was wrong, she thought: she hadn’t wanted him to be angry with her and he shouldn’t have been. She did what she did for him. She took the pain on herself, for his sake, yet his greatest concern wasn’t about her, or about their family; it was about himself, and whether he was fit to be a member of the human race. What was it about the Comries? She thought of Alex’s father, looking out of his attic window and seeing his wife and Harry together and blacking out the skylight instead of going outside and breaking them up. Dougie, too, was filled with a selfish self-loathing, and couldn’t be trusted, but he wouldn’t have left her alone like this, hidden himself in a study or an attic.