by Jonathan Lee
She had many identities, some betraying the same gender mistake I made. Wally in the Sun. Whaley in the Mirror. The Daily Mail called her Willy and in The Times she was Wilma the Whale and/or the Prince or Princess of Whales. The Sun got bored of Wally and rechristened her Celebrity Big Blubber for a TV tie-in. The barge swept her away to Margate, a place called Shivering Sands.
Do you know what I miss? I miss the hidden energies you get in air-conditioned air. The electrical currents of whispered secrets. Friday flirtations at departmental functions. The way you could meet your best friend’s girlfriend and steal from her a glance or smile, no more, just enough to feel alive. There was no intention to harm. Eye contact over crisp cold wine. The pout of a mouth as smoke’s blown out. You would shore up such moments against your weekend, keeping them charged in your mind until the tranquil melancholy of Sunday evening, when the dishwasher had finished its cycle, and the unread newspapers nagged, and shirts hung creased in the withering light. Monday’s alarm always had a panicked, risky ring that Tuesday’s could only echo. I’d wake to the faint scent of Christine’s clammy-sweet skin as she stretched to hit Snooze. We would spend ten minutes huddled and quiet, feeling our way back into the world. And after brushing fuzzed teeth, eating dry toast, journeying underground with millions of other Londoners, our office seemed luminous and fecund. Every phone call after nine could bring a glamorous case, or a pay raise, or the offer of some fantastic new role we’d never known was there. It didn’t matter that the phone calls never did bring these things. The possibility kept us content.
Shivering Sands. The Internet says that as night fell on the barge the medics monitored her breathing for signs of stress. I imagine this whole circus of survival taking place in space, somehow, on some faraway planet, but it was Margate, just Margate, England. It must have been quite something, though, don’t you think, to see the dreamy sway of torch beams crisscrossing in the dark, catching patches of water, sky, or the whale’s scarred skin? They had the barge floodlights on low. Just enough glow for the helicopters overhead to keep the live feed going. She was at eight breaths a minute. Eight breaths a minute seemed encouraging. She’d been taking oxygen at that rate in the river. Barge travel did not disagree with her, or rather was only as disagreeable as the river itself – narrow, noisy, shallow.
Sometimes something happens which seems to rewrite the rules of what is thinkable. It was like that on the search through Wimbledon the previous summer, me and Christine and forty-odd officers and locals in streets and fields, our flashlights finding insects and dust, all of us silent in a long shining line, our sense of purpose dwindling with each baby step we took. And I felt an odd distant grief, didn’t I, wandering through the night, a sorrow shaded with relief that the affair had stayed secret, and only later could I think myself into the marrow of that small boy’s bones.
Just before 7 p.m. the breathing went to eight, ten, twelve breaths a minute. The veterinary pathologist on board the barge produced a bottle of Large Animal Immobilon. Fourteen, sixteen, eighteen. Euthanasia seemed the kindest way. Twenty. Twenty-two. With this strong delicate creature convulsing he loaded the syringe, tried to navigate the wounds on the underbelly – the rub of the riverbed, the bruise of passing boats, the gashes in the grey flesh that looked (did they?) like a split in the Great British sky. Finally the needle pierced her thick skin. Dehydration, muscle damage, failing kidneys. The autopsy showed a wet plastic bag in her stomach, along with algae and a single potato. Sea-glimpsed things, swallowed half hopeful from the river’s floor. The twistedly perfect details that stay lodged in your soul. Long after the lights have gone off, long after the live feed has stopped.
I bet you like it, don’t you, me talking about souls the way you used to talk about souls, you putting hope in my mouth? Does it make you smile that at this point I want to believe, to believe that the boredom and betrayals of those years, the sex and con calls and aimless dogshit days, had some sort of form and coherence?
The charity shop has done well out of my shattered marriage. Christine decided she didn’t want most of her old stuff, preferred to start afresh with Tiny Tony O. Tiny Tony! What a humiliating choice! I went round there, to his nasty little maisonette, shouting a bit, boozed up, aiming the occasional fist at his already-injured nose. And when things calmed down, and I asked her to come back, asked her in as many different voices as I could muster, all she said was ‘Take my things to the charity shop’. I started to explain about my trainee – I’m sure now, almost sure, it’s the trainee she knows about; not Joy, not the others, just that meaningless fling with Jess – and she stood there without a blink or a tear. It took an age for her to speak again, and when the words came I barely heard them over my own heartbeat. ‘I wanted you to love me,’ she whispered. ‘I wanted you to love me.’
There was a squat freckled man behind the counter. If he was a toadstool you’d avoid him. Avoid him as a man, too, as a rule. And it took some time to untangle Christine’s things from mine, to get them organised, but now it’s done, almost done, it’s as if she was never here, and it makes me a little sick to think it is that simple, that the sky changes one day, a cloud spreads itself out, and someone you love in your own imperfect way disappears into the grey. They disappear, but your failures stay. They remain undiminished. You squirm and plead with yourself but the same base shadow remains, a dark limbless thing, the shape of the things you’ve done, the shape – you eventually realise – of you, you are the monster, you do not see it at first but then you do, that this shadow trailing behind is yours, no outlined horns or extra eyes, no brutal despicable fangs, just you, pinstriped and pleading, wishing you could be better. I was a monster but I loved her and sometimes I tried to be better.
It didn’t make the televised news until later, but we saw it that night, Christine and I, a thin column of text huddled between Eriksson’s Football Corruption Claims and an ad for a high-impact bra, and we knew. Remains of Child Found in Thames. We read all the pages about the whale, about how a team from the National History Museum travelled to Gravesend to bag up her bones, and then the pieces about how the divers helping in the rescue bid had found old boots, drowned cats, passports, remote controls, condoms, relics of sex and death and truth and television, and then we read that spindly story and we knew, the way you know something without thought, like when you’re sorry or sad.
The police said the remains would have been washed out with only two further turns of the tide. They said there were signs of recent struggle. So his body, such as it was, had not been waiting in the water since summer. After Wimbledon, Ben went somewhere with someone. I do not know who, or why, though I think about it every day. He was killed, and bagged, and dropped in the Thames. And you come to realise, don’t you, that the facts just show you gaps. Even the scientific details, the most miraculous facts, the way everything a person eats bears the trace of the soil in which it was grown or reared, the way you can look in someone’s bones and find the hint of a strawberry seed, can compare soil samples around the world until you’re sure the fruit came from some unceasingly still place far from car horns and headlights that supplies fruit to the world’s greatest tennis tournament. Even hearing this, finding out what science can do, feeling the immensity of design, something humbling shaping the century, even in the midst of this grim epiphany you sense the facts just show you gaps. And once they’ve finished with the bones and have given up on catching the killer the family can burn them up, of course, the bones and other remains, and scatter the ashes on the Heath. Ash being blown every which way, mixing with air. A kind of closure, I suppose.
I rearrange the DVDs on the shelves, ordering them by Director or UK release date, and make myself a sandwich. I listen for the soft suck of the fridge door closing, as if Christine is there to close it. I consider a trip to the shops. There’s always more action lists to make: phone parents, take out bins, pay water bill. I wander around London, watching planes circling the city, sain
tly sun-streaked things hoping to land, and increasingly where there are passenger jets I see nearby the malevolent gleam of a green-grey Chinook, a great urban insect made to keep the sky safe.
Today is my birthday. I bought a new suit on Upper Street and caught a film at the Screen on the Green. Afterwards I went walking through supermarket aisles but struggled in my search for the intended purchase, taking the wrong routes, peering through cracks in arousing packaging. And then straight ahead, in Poultry no less, I saw Joy. Still in the wheelchair, one leg in plaster, thumbing the buttons of a phone. Not a BlackBerry, she no longer works in the City, just a clumsy antique thing. So pale, so thin, but laughing. I heard the musical laugh, the one that filled the hours we stole together, and I looked up, saw it really was her. She was with Annie, her sister. Annie’s body was arranged in a boxer’s crouch and she was shuffling through cellophane trays of chicken breasts, sniffing them in a way that would make old Dennis proud. And there was a child there too, a pretty little girl with a deep stare, keen to carry the basket. With resolve Joy’s sister turned the wheelchair in my direction – the wheels didn’t seem to be moving, but I suppose they must have been – and I hurried away. I bought my knife from a different shop. For some jobs you need a brand-new thing, don’t you? Wrapped and clean. Without history.
I’ve tried to call Christine, write to her, send gifts to her parents. I’ve done everything I possibly could. We can do what we can but there are things which flee or get lost or are just beyond our reach. I’ve decided some people are beyond our reach, Doctor Odd, blown too far by the years to hear us calling. We try to call out but the air gathers up our voice and there’s no way we can reach them, not there, in that place, there’s nothing we can do. There is only in the end the calling, the fact someone was trying to call, and I do not think anyone will call for me. I hear nothing but the shushing of the taps and the staticky cackle of the TV but the DVDs are all nicely arranged and the planes are still sinking into London and I spot the odd Chinook. I have not got all the way through my action list but the weatherman with his deeply flawed face says summer is coming. In summer Mum’s defective light bulbs will be less of an issue. And it’s not my birthday – I lied, I’m sorry – but I hope this gets to you, I hope you can read it despite the smudged full stops and shaky lines, because you seemed the best person to send my note to, the one most likely to understand. Everyone else has vanished. They have vanished, they have gone missing, and it seems I have waited until this moment to love them fully – waited until the moment they are no longer in my life. And when I climb into the bath with the knife, fully clothed in a fine new suit, this letter written, my brogues getting heavy, I’ll try not to think of whatever awaits, whatever darkness, whatever nuance of night. I’ll try to focus on the early-evening light slanting through the bathroom window, flirting with the surface of the water, and the colour it will catch when the blood blooms from my veins. I’ll try to focus on that, in a determined manner, for as long as I can hold my breath
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to everyone who gave me encouragement and advice as this book took shape. Skilled counsellors on whom I’ve relied include Clare Alexander, Jason Arthur, Anna Stein, Stephanie Sweeney, Emma Finnigan, Laurie Ip Fung Chun, Sally Riley, Suzanne Dean, Ed Caruana, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Jennie Rooney, Ben Johnson, Robert and Elizabeth Lee, Peter and Pat Norman, and Amy. Thank you to all at William Heinemann, and thank you to all at Aitken Alexander Associates.
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