by James Meek
‘Ritchie sent me that,’ said Bec.
‘This is him showing you he hasn’t done her any harm.’
‘He wants to show me he did her nothing but good, I think. She’s seventeen now. I looked her up. She looks older in the pictures, doesn’t she? It must be the make-up.’
‘Or the life. Or Ritchie taking away her childhood. This picture doesn’t tell you anything. There’s a reason it’s against the law to have sex with people younger than sixteen. We don’t know how fucked up she is. She might be an alcoholic. She might be on cocaine. She might be on Prozac.’
‘She might be. She might have been that without Ritchie. It might fuck her up more to have to testify against Ritchie in court.’
‘People like us are always rolling over,’ said Alex. ‘We never fight back.’
‘I don’t want to be people like us,’ said Bec. ‘I want to decide what’s right and wrong. I want to be able to do things that don’t make sense if you’re selfish like Ritchie.’
‘That’s weakness.’
‘Now you sound like the Old Testament.’ Tears formed in Bec’s eyes. She pressed her hands to her belly. ‘I did this for you. I never wanted a child before, and I want one now, because of you, and there’s still so much I have to do. And instead of us talking about how the three of us are going to get through this all you can think about is persuading me to take revenge on my brother. That’s not how I want to live.’
PART FOUR
73
One day the Moral Foundation collapsed. Its last act was to publish a complete list of sources for the dozens of exposés it had run in its short existence. Scores of people were revealed to have betrayed their friends and colleagues. Since Ritchie’s treachery had not resulted in a published story, his name wasn’t on the list. Midge’s was. When the people on the list contacted their lawyers, asking what had happened to their certificate of immunity, they got various answers. Some lawyers said that the certificates were cunningly worded; they guaranteed immunity from exposure of past misdeeds in return for the denunciation of others, but they didn’t guarantee immunity from exposure of the denunciations. Others reckoned their clients had a case. But when they began issuing writs against the Foundation, they found it had melted away. Its offices had been shut down a month earlier and its staff paid off. Its servers in Chile were paid up a year in advance, and no one seemed to know how the data could be accessed. Val disappeared, leaving his children in the care of the sister who had looked after them ever since Val had his breakdown and left the newspaper.
The question of what happened to Val became a perennial mystery. He became more mythic in his disappearance than he had been as the unseen genius of the MF. Each report and sighting was picked apart and rewoven into a set of stories, superficially different, that were in fact the same myth of the zealot doomed to be trapped within the shrinking walls of his own zealotry. He’d grown a beard, converted to Islam, learned Arabic and lived in a compound in Riyadh, where he kept four wives and consorted with Wahhabis. He’d grown a beard, converted to Greek Orthodoxy and lived in a cell on Mount Athos. He’d grown a beard, joined a strict Calvinist sect and lived on a croft in the Hebrides. He was a Mormon in Utah, a Jesuit in Manila, a rabbi in Jerusalem. As for his dovecot of orphaned consciences, the consciences, abandoned by their new keeper, presumably starved to death. Despite the social upheaval caused by the Moral Foundation’s last act, their original owners didn’t seem to want them back.
It seemed to Ritchie that the end of the MF marked a rejuvenation, a sharpening of senses that had been dull and pinched for too long. He would have felt pity for Midge had his former friend not lashed out at him so bitterly. ‘Typical of you to rat on somebody so lame they weren’t worth humiliating in public,’ Midge said.
Midge had no more idea than anyone that Ritchie had given his sister up to the moral authorities; the right reaction to the absence of Ritchie’s name on the MF’s valedictory traitor list, Ritchie felt, would have been to assume that Ritchie had never betrayed anyone, and Midge’s claim of general astonishment among mutual acquaintances that Ritchie hadn’t been fingered was surely wrong.
More than anything in those strange times he took pleasure in Ruby’s guitar lessons. He taught her to play Sisters of Mercy one day while Karin was off touring. They sat in Karin’s room at one corner of the house, with windows on two sides.
‘This is a lovely chord sequence,’ said Ritchie. ‘Shall we try it? D. That’s right. Brought me … D’s the mother chord, she’s mellow, she’s bright, steers clear of the low strings. You’ve got to love D. Now A … their comfort … A’s like D’s husband, absolutely straight, strong, reliable, holding it all together. Then we’ve got G … and later … G’s the son, the one they’ve been waiting for, he spans all six strings, he’s low and he’s high at the same time, G’s kind of magnificent. D, A, G – that’s all you need, you can change the world with those chords. And now what comes along? F sharp minor! … they brought me … it’s the difficult daughter, sad, complicated, in a different place altogether. That’s right, it’s a bar chord. Press all the strings down with that finger. I know, it’s hard. And then E … their song. E for end.’
‘Am I a difficult daughter?’ said Ruby.
‘Of course not,’ said Ritchie.
‘I’m not sad and complicated.’
‘I never said you were, darling.’
‘You said you were going to put me on television.’
‘I’m sorry, darling. It just didn’t work out. Sometimes entertainment’s like that.’
Big tears splashed onto Ruby’s guitar and her shoulders shook. She began to bawl. Ritchie put his guitar down and tried to take Ruby’s from her so he could clasp her in his arms but she clutched the soundbox and twisted away from him and went on crying.
‘You said you would put me on TV if I didn’t tell Mum about the phone and I didn’t tell her about the phone and you didn’t put me on TV.’
‘Oh darling,’ said Ritchie. ‘I do lots of nice things for you.’
‘I want to be on television,’ said Ruby, snivelling and letting Ritchie take the guitar away from her. He lifted her up and put her on his lap. She was getting big. He reached for a bunch of paper hankies and carefully wiped her nose.
‘I’m going to tell Mum about the phone,’ said Ruby.
‘OK,’ said Ritchie. ‘Let’s have a talk about this, shall we? Because Mummy’s not coming back till tomorrow.’
‘I’ll tell her then.’
‘Fine. So, let’s see where we are, shall we? You want me to put you on TV, and if I don’t, you’re going to tell Mummy about the phone.’
‘Yes.’
‘You know something about me that I don’t want Mummy to know and you’re using that to try to get what you want.’
Ruby thought about this for a moment and nodded.
‘You’re very clever,’ said Ritchie. ‘This is something grownups do. It’s called blackmail.’
‘Why’s it called blackmail?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Ritchie. ‘There’s email, and there’s Gmail. Why shouldn’t there be blackmail?’
‘They should call it Bmail!’ she said.
‘You really are a clever girl, aren’t you? Now the thing about blackmail is, it’s like F sharp minor. It’s tricky. Do you want to learn a bit about it?’
‘OK.’
‘Well, the first thing is that if you’re going to blackmail somebody, you have to make sure that you’re not going to hurt yourself even more than the person you’re blackmailing.’
‘What does that mean?’ said Ruby. She sounded a little bored.
‘Well, here’s an example,’ said Ritchie. ‘I haven’t kept my promise to you about putting you on television yet, so you want to tell Mummy about the phone. But if you tell Mummy about the phone, then Daddy will have to go away.’
‘Where?’
‘Just away. Far away.’
‘For how long?’
‘I don’t
know. For ever, perhaps. You don’t want that, do you?’
Ruby looked down and played with her fingers and began to cry again, silently this time.
‘You love Daddy, don’t you?’
Ruby nodded.
‘You don’t want to be on television so much that you want me to go away for ever, do you?’ Ruby shook her head.
‘Well, you’ll have to keep the phone thing secret. I know it’s unfair but that’s one of these things you have to learn in life. Blackmail doesn’t always work.’
‘Why’s the phone secret?’ said Ruby in a small voice.
‘The thing about families,’ said Ritchie, ‘is that no one has to know everything about everyone. You don’t know all the things I’ve said to Dan and he doesn’t know all the things I’ve talked about with you.’
‘Can I have some ice cream?’ said Ruby.
‘Of course, let’s get some,’ said Ritchie. He took his daughter’s hand and they went to the kitchen together. ‘It was the same with me and Auntie Bec and your grandfather,’ he said. ‘We had our secrets from each other. The daddy you see is like Dan’s daddy but there’s the dad only you see, your own special secret daddy, that nobody else knows about. And when you grow up and have children you won’t show all your children everything, either. Each of your children will have their own special secret mummy. That’s the way people are. Now, what have we got? Pistachio!’
74
Two years later Ritchie drove east out of London to a pub in a garrison town he visited every few months. The traffic was jammed on the A12, but Ritchie’s serenity was indestructible. He’d break out smiling at how well everything was going. He was living in the world’s greatest city again. It seemed to him that the BBC had done him a great favour by cancelling Teen Makeover far enough in advance for him to get his next project into planning and slim Rika Films down to a manageable core of half a dozen essential talents. The high of the last-season finale was still there for him to savour and nobody was smart enough to twig what a smash the new show was going to be. When he explained the format of Sing For Your Supper, everyone asked the same question: ‘How does the cooking tie in with the music?’ When it breaks through the upper range of its ratings target, he thought, you’ll work it out.
The first therapists Ritchie tried had expected him to do the work. They wanted him to interrogate himself, to compose the questions and answers while they sat back and rang up the bill. He was passed from hand to hand and in the end found a man he liked, not a mere therapist but a proper doctor, a psychiatrist, a down-to-earth Scot who wore a shirt, tie and cardigan under his tweed jacket and had gone to Ritchie’s school. The first time they met, Ritchie, who’d been trained by this time, began to talk about his father. The steady, patient gaze of the psychiatrist made him falter and stop.
‘Sorry, but you’re not prejudiced against drugs, are you?’ said the shrink. ‘Some of my patients think gabbing away about their problems is going to stop them being unhappy without them ever having to dip into the old chocolate box.’
Ritchie’s mouth wettened at the word ‘chocolate’. He watched the psychiatrist take a box out of a drawer. It was a box of chocolates, a cheap mass-produced brand, but when the psychiatrist lifted off the lid, there was only one chocolate in it. The other dimples in the black plastic tray held pills of different shapes and colours. The shrink took out a prescription pad, took off his jacket and pulled up his cuffs. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘do you feel bad here –’ he touched his forehead ‘– here –’ he patted his stomach ‘– or both?’
‘It’s everywhere inside,’ said Ritchie. ‘Not just at night. Even in the middle of the day I get these feelings of –’
‘Hup!’ interrupted the psychiatrist. ‘I try to steer clear of the whole area of “feelings of”. It takes up so much time and one never seems to get anywhere. I prefer to be more concrete. Let’s start with your tummy. Do you feel a sense of emptiness inside?’
‘Hollowness. Not filled in properly.’
‘Good. Is it an absent hollowness, or a gnawing hollowness, or a tingling hollowness?’
Half an hour later Ritchie left the psychiatrist’s office with a prescription in his pocket. What a modern marvel! Everything that was hollow was filled in, everything sharp was rounded, sleep was deep and worries were muffled, leaving his true self free to flourish.
More than the pills, more than moving back to London or gearing up for a new show, it was being able to share his life with a woman he loved that made Ritchie happy. ‘If I have one regret,’ Ritchie would say, ‘it’s that I couldn’t bring Karin and the kids with me.’
A few months after Val’s disappearance he found out about the old false rumour that he’d been having an affair with Lina Riggs. He was flattered and began to wish it had been true. And it became true, long after it had died, just when everyone, including himself, decided he really had become a loyal husband. It seemed to him that his love for Riggsy was both finer and more intense, more majestic and profound, than his teenage falling for Karin or his infatuations since then. He liked its simplicity. Riggsy was exceptional, and he loved her, and she loved him, and the fifteen-year age gap meant nothing.
Ritchie told friends he was a happy man, and their surprised reaction to this, he felt, reflected an increasing cynicism he had observed in society. Under questioning – and to Ritchie’s annoyance, some did question – he explained that yes, his one regret did unfold into a series of sub-regrets. He was sorry about the way it had ended. It had been his firm intention to tell Karin the moment he and Riggsy decided they were meant to be together, and the only reason he didn’t was that both of them were busy. Karin was away with her gigs half the time. Still, he would have told her, and it was terrible that she should have found out in the way she did. Ritchie had assumed that after the Moral Foundation debacle journalists would’ve acquired a sense of decency and a greater respect for privacy. He agreed that the closing of the gates of the big house, with him on the outside and – thanks to the firm of Sigurdsson, Godwinson and Weinberg – Dan and Ruby on the inside, had been difficult. He agreed that this was a considerable sub-regret of that one regret of his, and he supposed you could say the sub-regrets had sub-regrets. He agreed that it had been extremely – he faltered, held his happiness in front of him and sheltered behind it – the main thing was, he said, that he saw the kids once a week. They loved Riggsy, he said; they really got on. It was a beautiful thing to see. Everything had worked out for the best. Once, when he and Midge were still on speaking terms, he confided that he’d tried to get Ruby to stay with him instead of Karin. He’d found her answer sinister for a nine-year-old. Sinister; a horrible word to use about your own daughter, but what else could you call it when she said she’d rather stay with Karin because ‘it’d be better for my career’? Where did they pick up phrases like that? How did they learn to be so cruel?
Ritchie found a parking space in a steep, narrow street of terraced houses close to the pub. He dressed carefully for these evenings: black suit, white shirt buttoned to the top, no tie, black patent leather shoes, hair freshly cut with a little oil on it. With the same care, he dosed himself. He swallowed one of the big boys, the chestnut-coloured 150-milligram Effexors with the W on the side that looked as if they should be dropped from bombers, emptied a packet of Cadbury’s Chocolate Buttons down his throat, went into the pub and ordered a double whisky, which he swallowed in one. He bought another and waited at the bar. He was twice as likely to be recognised here, it seemed to him, since he was famous, and had been three times before, but none of the patrons gave any sign, presumably because they were too cool to. A couple was still playing darts on the pub’s raised level but next to them was an old man in checked shirt and fisherman’s waistcoat, bent over his equipment like a boatwright smoothing a keel. The place was filling up. There was a group of lesbians with a corporate look of short hair, khaki jacket and jeans, a set of cross-dressing men with pantomime-thick make-up and tired, fussy frocks, a short middle
-aged woman who for no clear reason was got up as some kind of member of the undead and a trio of girls with long curled hair, short tight dresses and high heels. A man Ritchie knew was called Tom, who had no job at the pub, or anywhere, but loved to work, who had a dried ketchup stain on his t-shirt and was three-quarters shaved, began rushing around, panting like a puppy and handing out scraps of paper. Ritchie greeted him by name and Tom grinned wider but didn’t seem to know who he was.
Ritchie wrote Robbie Williams – Angels on the piece of paper and gave it back to Tom. The background music went off and the karaoke began. One of the cross-dressers went first; he did a decent, husky version of Charlene’s I’ve Never Been To Me. The three girls went together and massacred a number by a TV-fabricated fivesome from the previous decade; Tom performed a superb rendition of a Roy Orbison standard; and the undead woman went up. Ritchie knew what she was going to sing after two notes of the intro. He wanted to leave, and he wanted to stay and listen. He stayed, and the undead woman’s version of Karin and The What’s hit You Lead Me On was stale and flat.
It’d never occurred to Ritchie that his unconditional love of music was a redeeming quality. A few weeks after their separation Karin’s voice was everywhere, singing that song. People who knew Ritchie couldn’t understand his eagerness to hear it over and over again, to explain to them how it worked musically, to declare that the boys from The What knew what they were doing, to demand acceptance of his claim that Karin was one of the great balladeers of her time. He loved the song, and he was glad that Karin had given him something new from that never-quite-attainable part of herself that he had always wanted to reach. And now a woman made up like a corpse was murdering it. Ritchie turned away from the performance and said to the girl behind the bar: ‘She doesn’t get it, does she?’