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Drown My Books Page 11

by Penny Freedman


  Andrew Gray, my former husband, is quite distinguished in the human rights field these days. When he was married to me, he was no more than a wannabe, really, but in the past fifteen years he has done some quite flashy things – cases at The Hague and everything. And, if I ask him, he will do this for me, I am sure, because he will want to impress me. It frustrates him, you see, that I, who know him so well, am the one person who doubts his motives and fails to be impressed by him.

  So, last night, my way was clear. I intended to ring him first thing in the morning, put the case to him and give Dora the good news that Farid was in expert hands. This was, I knew, the right thing to do. It is now ten-thirty, however, and I have not picked up the phone. This morning, I see things differently. This morning, I am a worse person than I was yesterday. This morning, my fifteen-year grudge against Andrew has me in its thrall and I am motivated by self-centred pride. This morning, I cannot bear to give Andrew the satisfaction of riding to the rescue and meriting my admiration. This morning, I move to plan B.

  What I tell myself is that Farid is not, actually, in imminent danger. Of course, he would like to get out of the IRC, and I would like to get him out, but a better approach presents itself. I will find out who killed Kelly Field, I will present Paula with the evidence and Farid will have to be released. Then, I tell myself, then I will contact Andrew and ask him to help Farid with his asylum application: a nice, low-level job, nothing dramatic. I shall be quite happy with that. I hope you understand that I’m not proud of any of this and what it says about me. The only thing I can say in mitigation is that this course of action does present dangers for me: Paula Powell has threatened me with the full majesty of the law if I interfere in this case, so I am taking a risk. I’m not all bad, you see.

  I can’t start thinking about my plan until Freda goes home. Her mother will be picking her up later this morning, but in the meantime I am fully occupied, first with pancakes for breakfast, then with tracking down her belongings, scattered liberally about the house, and then with the issue of a present to take home to her little brother. This last demand came as a blow, since it looked as though I would be forced to make the trek into Dungate to find something suitable. I feel guilty about minding the inconvenience of the village shop’s being closed – it’s like minding the inconvenience of being in a tailback on the motorway because of a fatal accident – but I am beginning to think that we may have to organise a community shop as well as a community library. How very Archers.

  Without much hope of success, I suggest that we make some chocolate crispies for Nico, but Freda has a better idea; she will draw him a picture of the sea, she says. And so we wrap ourselves up and go and stand by the sea wall to study the scene. Freda has insisted on bringing her sketchbook and her new pastel crayons with her, to draw the picture in situ, but the wind blows the paper about, the fine mist smudges the pastels and she can’t draw with her gloves on, so she declares that she will draw it from my mind and we go back inside.

  My offers of creative criticism are rejected so I occupy myself with trawling the house for Freda’s abandoned paraphernalia. I find her pyjama bottoms and a hair scrunchie in Caliban’s basket, where he has made a sort of nest of them and is lying in it with a distinctly sheepish expression on his face. I look into his eyes, trying to fathom his motivation. Is he jealous of Freda because she owns things? Does he love her and want the smell of her close to him? Would he take my clothes to bed with him if I left them lying around on the floor? I have no idea. Dogs ought to be simpler to fathom than people, but Caliban is a complete mystery to me. A friend of mine, who studied philosophy at university, wrote an answer in her Finals paper to the question, If I think my cat is a person, what kind of mistake am I making? Really, we should all study philosophy, I think, because we all ought to consider these things.

  When Freda calls me to show her finished work, I am as bewildered by her as I have been by Caliban. She has done a rather good, slightly post-impressionist picture of sand, sea and sky but the sea and sky are in vibrant shades of blue and the gold of the sand is echoed in the large golden sun that presides over all. This, then, is what comes from Freda’s mind – not the picture she has been seeing for the past three days – a bleak study in relentless, dirty greys and browns – but the schema of the seaside, the picture-postcard, half-a-dozen-days-a-year-if-you’re-lucky model of the English seaside that remains lodged in our heads and refuses to be dislodged by any amount of empirical evidence to undermine it. The notion of the schema is one I like. It explains a lot about the way we experience everything from books and paintings to war and motherhood. Before I share with you my thoughts on schemata, I’m afraid I have to go on a brief diversion about plurals, though; in my former life I taught linguistics, you see, and these obsessions die hard. If this bores you, feel free to skip the next paragraph.

  Schema is a Greek word, and though I have come across references to schemas, really the plural should be formed in the Greek way – schemata. It’s the same pattern as stigmata – one scar is a stigma, many scars are stigmata. A lot of these Greek (and Latin) plurals are regarded as optional these days, but I like them. Whatever happened to syllabi, for example? When I started my teaching career, that was the plural of syllabus; now they’re syllabuses, making me think of a party of double-deckers in a frisky mood. That’s all right, though. Language changes; English has always adapted foreign words and anglicised them. They become so English that an ‘s’ ending for the plural is completely natural. The problem, though, with losing sight of these plurals is that if a word doesn’t have an ‘s’ on the end, some of us don’t recognise that it’s plural at all. Take panini, for example (the Italian sandwiches). They are plural already. They don’t need an ‘s’ on the end. Will someone tell the catering trade this? If you want to know whether an ‘Italian’ deli is really Italian, see whether they put ‘s’ on their panini. One sandwich is a panino, by the way. But it is the Latin plural ‘a’ ending that is the greatest casualty. We seem to get on all right with data (one item of information is a datum, several are data). Data feel plural – there are clearly lots of facts – so we say The data suggest/demonstrate/support and so on. So why can’t we deal with media? Aren’t media obviously plural, too? TV is a medium, radio is a medium, the press is a medium; together they form the media. And yet I hear all sorts of people say, the media is. What do they mean? What do they imagine this singular media is? I am mystified. In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that even Shakespeare could get these things wrong. Latin and Greek he could cope with but he came unstuck with Hebrew. Prospero, in the Tempest, tells Miranda that when she was an infant she was a cherubim, but we all know that the cherubim and seraphim are plural, don’t we? She was just a cherub. Though, thinking about it, I wonder if Will knew this quite well but went with cherubim anyway because it fitted the iambic pentameter so well. Pedantry can’t always win out.

  Well, now I’ve got that off my chest, back to the schema. I’m talking to you about this not just vis-à-vis Freda’s picture, but because I think it has relevance to murder inquiries and it may help me with my current project. Schema is a term from cognitive psychology. A schema is a mental structure, a preconceived idea. A stereotype, if you like. Together, our schemata form a framework for our understanding of the world and we fit new ideas into this framework. What psychologists have found is that people are more likely to notice things that fit into a pre-existing schema, and confronted with a contradiction to a schema they will be likely to reinterpret it as an exception or distort it to fit. Schemata are remarkably tenacious: we depend on them for making sense of our experiences and we resist evidence that challenges them. Thus, in Freda’s mental world, the sun’s taking a winter break and leaving the beach to the wind and the rain has done nothing to shift her seaside schema. Her yellow sun even has a smiley face. Well, good for her, I suppose.

  I’ve been thinking a lot about our schema for asylum seekers an
d refugees because I think this is one that has actually changed quite radically. You can’t know, of course, what other people’s schemata are like exactly, and I suppose my earliest asylum-seeker schema was influenced by The Railway Children. Do you remember the Russian who collapses on the railway station and is rescued by the children and their mother, who talks with him in French? Add this to Karl Marx and other bearded émigrés working in the British Museum Reading Room, and that’s a schema I still have tucked away. Other schemata have nudged it out of the way, though, as the ripples from one conflict after another have washed the persecuted and homeless onto our less and less welcoming shores. I remember the Ugandan Asians, thrown out by Idi Amin: I remember the solemn-eyed, tongue-tied brown children who started arriving at my primary school. They would gather in a huddle in the playground, talking unintelligibly to each other, while we ignored them, swirling and yelling around them in our raucous London way, and then, at some point, when we weren’t noticing, they stopped being separate and became part of the general mayhem. Successful integration, you would have to call it, but those solemn, bewildered faces form another asylum schema for me.

  Then, our twenty-first-century schemata are different again. I’m not sure how conscious I was of choosing my metaphor when I said that the ripples from global conflicts were washing refugees up on our shores, but watery images dominate our discourse about asylum seekers these days: they come in waves, they threaten to swamp us, we fear being overwhelmed. And then there is the literal wateriness, the horror of men, women and children set afloat in leaky boats by the traffickers and dragged ashore half-drowned if they are very lucky. So we sit in our living rooms and watch all this on television and the schemata jostle with each other in our overheated brains because while fear has started to dominate, fostered by the relentless rhetoric of the right-wing papers and the craven politicians who trail in their wake, fear that we shall drown under the waves of would-be immigrants rolling onto our shores, at the same time, we haven’t – yet – altogether lost our humanity, so another schema battles for space – the schema presented by the beleaguered Italians, pulling their fellow humans out of the sea week after week and offering them, once they are on land, what I – faith-free though I am – can only call Christian kindness. It’s a schema we like, don’t we? We would like to think that we would do the same. If it weren’t for the numbers.

  Ah, the numbers. It is the numbers that dehumanise, wouldn’t you say? They both take away our humanity and – with alarming ease – they make us see desperate people as less that human. Which takes me to my third schema: the hideous makeshift camps – the jungles – in Calais, in which destitute refugees eke out an existence somehow and from which, night after night, young men – and women – even pregnant ones – desperate to the point of insanity, try to get onto lorries coming through the tunnel to us. The metaphors here are not watery ones, they are about infestation: the men swarm out of the camps, they crawl into lorries or cling on to their outsides. What can we do about such infestation except, like good householders, repel it with any means available to us? How can we be so foolish as to attract it with the lure of a weekly pittance to live on – surely the equivalent of putting out dollops of jam to invite an army of ants into your kitchen? With this schema, there comes no counter-schema like that offered by the benevolent Italians. The French people seem untroubled by the inhumanity of the Calais jungles, by the beatings and harassment by the police. Why aren’t they out on the streets protesting at this blot on a civilised country? They take to the streets at the drop of a hat, the French – they regard it as a god-given right. Why are they silent about this?

  Well, there we are. None of this is new to you, I know. I don’t pretend that my analysis is clever or original – or even right, necessarily – but I thought the language aspect might be enlightening. And I have one more thing to say which just might make a difference to our asylum-seeker schemata: just 2 per cent of the world’s asylum seekers are in the UK. People seek asylum, very largely, in a neighbouring country and since our neighbours are blessed with the same security and stability as we are, we are really not a target source of refuge, whatever anyone may tell us about the magnetic draw of the princely £36.95 a week we provide to those seeking asylum here.

  Enough. I must peel potatoes and make sausages and mash for us all for lunch. Freda has ordered this as it is Nico’s favourite, and I am touched by her affection for her little brother. It shows a nice nature, I think.

  Ellie and Nico arrive in good time and I call Freda in from the garden, where she has been talking to Sam and Joe through a hole in the fence. We eat lunch early. I have a lot to think about and would like to despatch them fairly smartly but it would not do to let this show, so I offer second helpings, I dish up apple crumble and ice cream for pudding and I encourage Freda to discourse on the delights of her seaside break. She does this pretty well, though children have a gift for lighting on the small and insignificant, with hardly a passing nod to the main events. Come to think of it, quite a lot of adults do that, too; there is no legislating for what will grab the imagination. So Freda talks about pancakes, the creaky floorboard in her bedroom, Ariel’s refusal to sleep on her bed and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. ‘And Granny’s not a witch,’ she adds sadly, ‘even she’s got a broomstick.’ Then she brightens. ‘But Sam and Joe’s mummy has gone away,’ she says, and opens her arms with a dramatic flounce. ‘Simply vanished!’

  I am taken by surprise. What makes Freda think that Alice has vanished? Her departure was a bit sudden, it’s true, and Simon was a bit cagey about it, but I didn’t think Freda had noticed anything odd. She was talking to the boys earlier, though; maybe they said something about Alice vanishing. I look at Ellie. ‘A row,’ I mouth silently, but Freda has no inhibitions.

  ‘They shouted,’ she says, ‘her and Sam’s dad, and now they don’t know where she is.’ She picks up her spoon and returns to her pudding. ’Joe was crying,’ she says through a mouthful of crumble.

  Ellie seems inclined to linger by the woodburner and it takes a couple of prompts by me about getting home before dark to get them on their way. Once they are gone, I make myself a cup of tea and sit down with a notepad. Freda has alarmed me about Alice. If Simon can’t tell the boys where Alice is, that is worrying. Alice is devoted to her boys; what could possibly make her go out of contact completely? Even if she wants to punish Simon, why wouldn’t she ring and reassure the boys? But the Alice issue I am putting on the back burner for the moment. I have only so much brain space and I have more urgent obligations.

  Kelly Field, I write at the top of the page. Murdered Feb 13th 2014. And underneath that I write, Means, Motive, Opportunity. Means is simple: Kelly was pushed off the sea wall and then had her head bashed on the pebbles. This last detail was revealed to me unguardedly by Paula Powell; it is not in the public domain. It tells me that whoever pushed her really wanted her to die, was prepared to take the risk of going down onto the beach (not so much of a risk, really, since the weather was vile and it was still semi-dark) and was angry or ruthless enough to kill at close quarters. My amateur sleuthing experience tells me that it would be misguided to rule out a female perpetrator just because a lot of physical force was involved, so the means hardly helps in narrowing the field of suspects.

  Which takes us on to motive. Paula, of course, thinks she has found her motive, but any reader of crime novels knows that the person who says You’ll be sorry for this never turns out to be the killer. So, setting aside Farid, who else? Well, I still have my suspicions of Matt and those big hands of his. I’m not sure what his relationship with Kelly was like but there was something quite aggressive about both of them that time I saw them together. I don’t remember exactly what was said, but I do remember that she yelled at him that he fucking better come round tomorrow, and that when I commented that he was a nice lad (what made me say that?) she said, That’s all you know. Hardly love’s young dream, were they?


  However, the main clue to motive, I still believe, is the book. And not just the book but the page it was open at, with the Medusa poem highlighted. The female monster who turns men to stone – who unmans them, you might say. Are we talking about someone who suffered sexual humiliation by Kelly? Or just someone who resents women in general and whatever female assertiveness he feels our book group stands for? In either case, it has to be someone with connections to the book group and we went through the husbands and boyfriends the other night and sort of ruled them all out. However, it is worth giving them another thought. I write down:

  Matt O’Dowd (Kelly)

  Don Dering (Lorna)

  Peter Harper (Lesley)

  Simon Gates (Alice)

  And then, because I am determined to be scrupulously impartial, I add:

  Farid Khalil (Dora)

  I start with the first four names, though. Matt is already a suspect in my mind, and I remember how he looked at Kelly’s copy of The World’s Wife and called it one of those women-getting-their-own-back books. I put an asterisk against his name. Then there is Don Dering. I must be dispassionate here and not discount him just because I’m fond of Lorna and I couldn’t bear it to be him. However, I have met him a few times and if he is a secret woman-hater then he hides it very well. He gives every impression of being both fond and proud of Lorna, and she has the serene composure of a woman who has a good man at home. And if we’re thinking of a particular grudge against Kelly, I really can’t put him and Kelly into the same mental frame. He is a rather good-looking man of the fair, unobtrusive kind, with a Scottish accent modified by years of life in the South so that it just gives a gently ironic edge to his remarks. He has two passions (besides Lorna, I assume) and these are his job as an ecologist, trying to protect the local wildlife from the effects of cliff erosion, and playing the cello. So, you see, he is a gentle, serious, cultured man and, even taking into account the unpredictability of sexual attraction, I can’t see how he could have been drawn to Kelly, who was neither good-looking nor serious nor cultured. I may be deceiving myself here, but I’m not giving him anything more than a question mark. Peter Harper, Lesley’s husband, really can be ruled out. The fact that he was ‘away’ when Kelly was killed, can’t, of course, be taken on trust: if the killing was premeditated, then that could have been a blind. However, his gammy leg really does rule him out, I think. I don’t altogether accept Lesley’s defence that he wouldn’t have been able to climb through people’s windows to steal their library books, because there are other, more cunning ways of doing it, I imagine, but the picture of him jumping out to push Kelly over the wall and then hobbling down the slippery steps with his stick, lowering himself painfully onto the pebbles to finish her off and then starting the long, effortful ascent seems just crazy. If he had wanted to kill her, wouldn’t he have chosen a more convenient way?

 

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