Slave to Love

by Rebecca Campbell

  “This coffee tastes of fish,” said Andrew.

  Alice was still pale from seeing Leo. “It must hurt,” she said.

  “Well, it’s an affront to the taste buds, but I wouldn’t say—oh, you mean Leo. Yes. Hurt like fuck almighty. Pain’s a funny thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, when you’re in the middle of it, it’s all that you are. The way you live in your mouth when your teeth are bad. I remember as a kid I had a perforated eardrum, and for a week I had a pain so sickening, if someone had said, Look, here’s a tablet, take it and the pain will go because you’ll be dead, I’d have bitten their hand off to get it. And after the pain had gone—I mean minutes after, not just now, years after—there was nothing of it left, just the words I used to describe it. You see, you can’t have a memory of a pain, because a memory means calling something back, experiencing it again, and that would mean having the pain all over again. Sorry, I’m raving.”

  “It’s okay; hardly anyone’s staring.”

  Encouraged, Andrew went on. “It’s one of the reasons I’ve always been obsessed with phantom limbs: you know, when a fellow has his leg cut off, say in a sawmill, or blown off by a landmine, or—”

  “Yes, I get the picture.”

  “And afterward, when it’s been sewn up, they still feel the bit below the stump, still often feel the pain. Their toes might still hurt, even though they’re in a landfill in Newcastle, and the bloke’s in bed in Manchester.”

  “I’ve heard of it. Sounds horrid.”

  Andrew looked at her. He rearranged his features from frivolous to profound. Alice knew something was coming.

  “Emotional pain, anguish, is a bit like the phantom-limb thing. Because it exists as pure thought, unmediated by the body, you can summon it back, assuming it ever goes. Fully back, so it’s not the memory of a pain but the pain itself. The thing that hurt you is there like the ghost of the leg you lost. Sorry, is this coming out as comic? I don’t think it was meant to be.”

  “No. I know exactly what you mean.”

  The Dead Boy was her phantom limb, the thing there but not there, an imaginary cause of real pain. His meaning couldn’t have been more plain.

  “Do you think the fish here tastes of coffee? Maybe that’s why everyone looks so ill.”

  “The people with phantom limbs . . . does it go away after a while? Is there a way of making it go away?”

  Andrew looked at Alice, who was staring down into a plastic cup of gray hot chocolate, with a scum on the top the color of old chewing gum. The harsh strip lighting emphasized the light and dark in her face and made her look . . . vulnerable, was it? Yes, like a face peering out of an old photograph, a match girl or a Victorian child prostitute.

  Andrew couldn’t remember what happened to the ghost limbs, but he knew what he had to say. “You have to teach the mind that they’re not real. The more you look at the place where the leg isn’t, the more your mind comes to accept it. It learns that the body is different now, has a new shape. Stare long enough at the phantom, and it disappears.”

  Did he really believe that? Andrew wondered. It went against one of his most dearly held principles, that the best way to deal with a problem is to ignore it until it goes away. If that fails, you can always try running. He’d dubbed this option “Acapulco,” when he and his friend Marc Dibnah decided that they should flee there to escape the Biology mock A-level they were dreading. But it now seemed to him that Alice had some dragons to kill, and running away from a dragon was likely to lead to a burnt arse, at the very least.

  “Here they come,” said Alice, looking up.

  They drove back to the Docklands in high good spirits. Leo kept them amused with stories about the other patients, interspersed with withering attacks on the Merdemobile, which he had never before experienced in the flesh.

  “Smells like a fucking aardvark farted in here, died from the stench, and then slowly decayed down to a stew in the back. You should trade up to a chemical toilet. . . . And what is this fabric? It’s like the fuzz off a camel’s cunt.”

  More followed in the same vein. Andrew let his friend get away with it. He sensed that the stream of invective was the product both of the joy Leo felt on being alive and of the pent-up frustration of a week in hospital-issue pajamas. And then, he mused, if the Audubon sale went well, there was always the prospect of Crumlish’s old job, and the ten-thousand-pounds-a-year salary hike that went with it, and that would mean a new car, perhaps something snazzy like a 1987 Ford Fiesta . . . yeah, that’d shut them up, shut them up good.

  “You’re quiet, Alice,” said Odette.

  “Am I? Well, it seemed Leo was talking for the whole car.”

  But that wasn’t why Alice was quiet. She was quiet because she was thinking about her phantom limb.

  THE TWO WEEKS that followed were exciting ones for Andrew and, externally at least, dull ones for Alice, as she kept things ticking over on the non-Audubon side. The top management, from Parry Brooksbank up, kept popping down to see the Audubon team, which usually meant Clerihew and Ophelia, with Andrew kept on the periphery. Although externally dull, things were happening inside Alice. She’d known since the visit to the hospital canteen what she would do, but she had to wait until some preordained sequence of internal movement, an almost mechanical falling into place, had occurred. Lynden’s telephone call was only the last of these events, the final piece of the clockwork mechanism.

  She hadn’t spoken to him since the weekend, but she knew as soon as she heard the hesitation that it must be Lynden.

  “Alice, I . . . I had to talk to you.”

  “Edward. I thought I made it clear—” No, she thought, made it clear was too pompous, too unkind. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea, for either of us.”

  “Please. All I want is the chance to explain. If you’ll just listen . . . maybe you can understand. Maybe even forgive me. I can’t bear the thought of losing you without a struggle.”

  “You never had me.”

  Lynden abandoned the tone of pleading. “Don’t twist my words,” he said commandingly. But then, with an effort that Alice could feel, he controlled himself again. There now was desperation in his voice. “Look, I’m coming up for the sale next week. Let me see you alone for just a few minutes. You must let me: To know all is to forgive all.”

  “I’ve already forgiven you. No, I mean there’s nothing really to forgive. I don’t really care about you sleeping with Grace. I find it baffling, I admit, but not hurtful. Why should I?”

  “I don’t believe you. You do find it hurtful, that’s why you left, that’s why you won’t speak to me. And I know it hurts you because it hurts me. And the reason it hurts me is because . . . because I love you.”

  Alice froze. The telephone very nearly dropped from her hand. And then came a rush of ideas, images, impressions. She saw his savage face melting into something younger and softer. Her fury evaporated, replaced by sadness, by sympathy, by hope. A whole new life paraded before her: a life of elegance and ease, even excitement, in the great Cave of Ice. But then she saw Grace waiting in the shadows, shadows she made herself in that house without shadows.

  “But Edward . . . this isn’t the . . . time. What about Grace? Tell me about Grace.”

  “I must tell you face-to-face. Let me see you before the sale next week. Please. I . . . beg you.”

  Alice paused for a moment. The images in her mind still possessed her and continued to change. Lynden’s face softened yet more, became youthful, and altered in other more subtle ways. As she spoke, the transformation became complete.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’ll see you,” and the face of Lynden became wholly and completely the face of the Dead Boy.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Hand That Rocked the Cradle

  THIS TIME ALICE didn’t pause for a moment in front of the block of flats. It may have helped that it was bitterly cold, and the rain was taking on the dense quality of sleet. Alice didn’t po
ssess a single waterproof garment, and already the chill rain had soaked through her cheap overcoat and was working hard at the frayed cardigan within. It was with something close to relief that she plunged into the pissy stench of the stairwell (the lift wasn’t working) and wound her way up to the fourth floor. The walls of the stairway were gashed with red paint and crude murals: Phalluses reared at her like serpents; someone had laboriously etched we no where you live into the concrete with a fine blade. Alice came out into the murk and wet of day and walked carefully along the row of flats. A few had neatly painted doors and clean curtains; others were roughly boarded; some had great steel plates keeping out the unwanted. A dog barked desperately in one of the flats, but more, Alice thought, with a yearning to escape than a desire to kill.

  As she pressed the bell of number 427, she still didn’t know what she was going to say. But she did know that she wasn’t going to lie.

  She had telephoned the woman on Friday evening (“Don’t dare spend all night on that phone, young lady,” yelled Kitty, “there’s a call coming through to me from very far away, very far away indeed”), saying she wanted to talk about Matija. How strange the name had sounded in her own ears; she had only thought of him as the Dead Boy, never as Matija Abdic, the name on the slip of paper passed to her last spring by Odette. Usually the very name of the beloved takes on an enchantment, becomes filled with magical power. But no matter how hard she stared at the letters or spoke them aloud to herself, Alice couldn’t alchemize Matija; it was too harsh, too jagged. It could never truly be the name of the person she had seen. And so he would always be, to her, the Dead Boy. The woman she spoke to sounded reserved but not unfriendly. Did she think Alice was an ex-girlfriend? Some official? It was agreed, painlessly, that Alice should come to the flat at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon.

  She expected the door to be opened an inch, held by chains, by fear; perhaps then closed again in her face. Instead, after a startlingly short wait, it was thrown back and a thin, proud, fierce-looking woman of perhaps seventy years stood before her.

  “And you are Alice who phoned,” she said, not a question but a statement, made in heavily accented but otherwise clear English. Alice liked her immediately. She had not the refugee’s cowering fear but seemed indomitable. She could see only dimly the Dead Boy’s beauty in her severe features, but in this woman she knew his erect posture, his self-possession. “You are cold and wet. England, England, England: always cold and wet.” Leading Alice through the kitchen, she added, “You will see that my English is quite good, because in former times it was my subject I taught at school.”

  Ten minutes later they were sitting in the small living room, drinking tea. The woman sat as severely as she stood, with a china teacup perched on her knee. The furniture in the room was cheap, and Alice feared that she might drop through the bottom of the low, wide chair she occupied. But everything was clean and tidy, almost obsessively so. There were pictures everywhere: blurred snapshots of children on the beach; rigidly posed adults in Sunday best. And yes, there in the corner, a photograph of him: a boy of twelve or thirteen, his beauty then still embryonic. He stood, as thin as a wraith, in a pair of tiny, stripy swimming trunks. His black hair sat comically on his head, like a drunk’s hat. Alice found herself smiling but then had to look away before the tears came.

  “Tell me please, Alice—am I correct to remember Alice is your name?” said the woman. “Yes, yes. What is your interest in my grandson?”

  Grandson. Of course. This woman was far too old to be the Dead Boy’s mother. What could have happened to the mother?

  “I am so sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Abdic, but . . . I appreciate that this sounds strange, but I feel that I know your grandson very well.”

  “He did not have any friends. He was a lonely boy. He never mentioned any Alice to me. But I am an old lady and he might not have talked to me of these things.”

  “I should explain that I did not meet Matija. Or I mean that I met him only once. On the day that he . . . was killed.”

  “This is becoming a mystery.”

  Yes, a mystery. It had always been a mystery. Alice closed her eyes for a moment, summoning the nerve and resilience, as well as the words, to continue.

  “You’re going to think I’m mad, but I saw your grandson just a moment before the car hit him.” The moment came to her again, vivid in the tidy living room of the old woman. The whole seven seconds of their affair. The first look; the glance toward the approaching car, the return; the smile; the terrifying, comic explosion of arms and legs, almost as if some huge demon were trying to burst out from within his body; the thud, like a drum beating, that seemed to follow the impact by an age; the softer noise as the body, already a thing and not a human being, just so much fleshy rubbish, fell to earth behind the car. “And in that moment, he looked at me, and from that moment everything changed. I felt that we had exchanged something, that we had communicated in some way. I’m sorry, this is very inarticulate . . .”

  The woman smiled. “That is fine. The language of the heart is something different to the language in the mouth.” It sounded to Alice like a proverb translated. “And I know that my Matija had a special look. He learned it a long time ago, when he was too young to have seen the things that he had seen.”

  “Those must have been terrible times.”

  “There were bad times for us. His mother, you know, was killed. And his father. It was why he had only me, and I had only him. And doing what he did, at his age, could only make you special. Special in the eyes. But you did not finish what you were saying.”

  “Oh, yes.” Alice felt suddenly trivial and small. Compared to the horrors that her Dead Boy and this woman had lived through, her own experiences seemed insubstantial, weightless, banal. “Well,” she continued, trying to find a way to express herself that acknowledged the relative insignificance of what she had undergone and yet gave true weight to its impact on her, “since then, I’ve been . . . I can only say possessed by your grandson. I can’t . . . do anything . . . be anything. And it’s very hard. For me.”

  “And what is it you want from me?” The woman’s tone was neutral. There was no trace of wariness, but neither was there a sense that she was prepared to give Alice the magic word, the secret potion or spell that would set her free.

  “I thought that by knowing, by understanding, who he was, I might be able . . . to see clearly again.”

  “To see clearly again. How oddly you sometimes express yourself.” She paused and looked toward, but not through, the window. “But,” she said finally, “I can tell you the story of my Matija.”

  The story ran, at least to begin with, backward. Difficult times in London; trouble at school; a sensitive boy bullied. Neighbors who ignored them, or sneered, or banged on the door in the night and put vile things through the letterbox. And then back to the war and escaping after the killings.

  The woman’s tone was matter-of-fact, clear, objective. Her slight awkwardness suggested both that she had not told the story before and that she was keen to tell it and get it right. But when it came to the description of what had happened in their town, the things that had made Matija “special in the eyes,” her words took on an intensity and passion that could only come through pure feeling: rage, anguish, horror.

  But the woman’s words were not the words that Alice remembered. She did not, in fact, remember any words at all. What she remembered was images, some moving, some still, and to those she supplied her own commentary.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Dead Boy

  THE IDEA had come from Sarajevo. Its logic was pure, its psychology sound. Executed with courage, tenacity, and will, it would never fail. It was the simple perfection of the scheme that attracted: the way each step followed inevitably from the last, like a scientific proof. If only socialism had been as clear, as true, as sure.

  It came from Sarajevo, but it still lacked something. The Sarajevo system had begun with the men: the domesticated type out bu
ying bread, sausage, if there was any, or the morning newspaper, or a toy. But the women soon learned. And there would be children to look after. Recklessness in these circumstances was selfishness. One was just one, and usually none at all, as the men kept to the safe places. So they had switched to the women. What Slav—Orthodox, Catholic, or Muslim—would not go to his woman, lying writhing in the street, a bullet in her thigh or shoulder? “No, no!” they would cry, craning back across the cobbles, to the dim shapes crouching beyond. “Please don’t come, please don’t come.” But of course they would come, and one would become two. And naturally two—a refinement was also to avoid killing the husband with the first shot—was an even bigger draw than one. Which brother, son, uncle, or friend could leave two they loved dying out on the cobbles, blood working its way slowly, methodically, between the stones? And so two had a very good chance of becoming three. Perhaps then evening would come, and three would still be three.

  When the idea reached Mostar it was becoming a little stale. And the hate in Mostar, the hatred of Croat for Muslim and Muslim for Croat, craved piquancy just as much as the other hatreds to the west and north and east.

  The Mostar variation used, of course, a child. Begin with a child; take the mother; take the father. Always at least three, easy as shooting pigs in a yard. And the child would still be there, bleating like a lamb to draw more lions. Skill and care were needed with the child. An adult shot in the gut could live for three hours. Could, but only a fool would risk it. Thigh or shoulder, much safer. And no one runs away when they are shot in the thigh or the shoulder. You lie down and you cry like a baby and eventually you die from shock and blood loss. But a child shot in the thigh or the shoulder might die very quickly. Ten minutes. Not long enough. True, you might pick someone up making a dash just to see, but the percentages weren’t in it. What you wanted was a shot to the ankle. Asking a lot at a thousand yards. Asking too much, many said. Why are we making sparks—referring to the microsecond of brilliance when the bullet hit the cobble—said one wit, when we should be making widows? But it was an investment, said others. One makes two makes three makes four makes five. Capitalism! Remember, we’re capitalists now! Speculate to accumulate!