by Glen Duncan
“I’ve no touched your wallet,” she says. “Honest to God I’ve no touched your wallet.”
“I believe you. It’s okay.” He keeps still and continues in the tone of gentle authority. “That’s it, easy onto the floor. Pointing away. Good. Okay.”
She straightens, staring at the gun—now with a twinge of loss, he thinks. Whatever else it’s power and she’s relinquishing it. A gun in your hand even for a few seconds denudes the mystery of killing. You see a new no-nonsense version of history.
“I’m just going to sit up,” he says. “That’s all. So I can talk to you. Everything’s okay. Do you want to sit down?”
“I’ve no robbed you,” she says. “Check your wallet if you don’t believe me. I’ve no touched your money.”
“I told you I believe you. Why do you want the gun?”
She doesn’t answer; not strategically, but because her incredible actions are just catching up with her.
“If you’re not going to sit down then promise me you’ll leave the gun alone.”
She puts the gun hand in her jacket pocket. The other hand’s gone reflexively to clutch the shoulder bag shut. “Don’t tell anyone,” she says.
“I won’t.”
“No but I mean really.”
“I really won’t tell anyone.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“Swear?”
“Look who would I tell? I’m not supposed to have a gun either.”
“I haven’t done anything, you know. I haven’t done anything wrong. You’ll no believe that.”
“I do believe it.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“No, I’m not.”
The flow of this exchange surprises them into silence. But that forces a worse intimacy.
“What do you want it for?” he says. She looks at the floor. He waits, then asks, “Protection?”
He can feel disappointment coming off her. Familiar disappointment: her ideas never work out. This is another stalled point from which she can fall back into herself, where it would be better to stay if it weren’t for things from the world rousing her impulses. This is what happens: she acts, gets ahead of herself, fucks it up. She’s been getting things wrong as long as she can remember.
“Well whatever,” he says. “I’m guessing it wasn’t for a bank job.”
Tiniest move of the head to acknowledge he’s trying to be nice about it. (But behind that the older wiser tireder version of herself saying aye but there’ll be a catch there’s always a catch. This older wiser tireder version is the thing her impulses get ahead of, then have to stand there over the mess they’ve made, waiting.)
“You a crim then, are you?” she says, looking up.
“What?”
“Only crims and coppers have guns.”
Crim is criminal. The difficulty wasn’t getting a firearm. The difficulty was getting one from someone you could trust. It had taken a three-day trawl through the pubs of South London. You got a beef wiv me? You lookin like you got a beef wiv me guy which for a ole man iz not a good plan y’get me?
“Neither,” he says. “Don’t you know in America everyone has guns? Look can I get a drink of water? I’m thirsty as hell.”
She’s not sure, looks down, takes her hand out of her pocket.
“I’m not going to do anything. You can stay right there next to it. I just need some water.”
She probably thinks he’s feigning (he imagines) hobbling on his stick to the cluttered sink with his tin cup, but he’s not. The shin and the knee he doesn’t want to look at because they’re on fire. Infection means you either ignore it and get septicemia or gangrene or you go to the hospital or you do it yourself. Sutures he doesn’t have. He needs antibiotics. He closes his eyes against the weight of all this practical shit. Plus her. It’s as if the croft’s filling with clutter. All at the behest of the fire like a little grinning god.
He drinks three tin-flavored cups. The clarity with which he feels the wounds in his legs says the rest of the confusion’s cleared.
“What’re you gonnie do about your legs?”
He fills the cup and goes back to the cot, by degrees sits down on its edge. “I don’t know. Get them looked at, I guess.” With a pop the fire spits out a tiny glowing shard. He catches himself sketching her past, sees her in a city, hours on the streets because she doesn’t want to go back to where she’s staying. He can’t help it, it’s in her face. The big leather jacket’s a friend to her, as is the shoulder bag. These are small forces at work on him, a feeling like injured flesh knitting but speeded up. He’s tempted to laugh. That I may not weep, he thinks, remembering one of Selina’s habitual quotes.
“Why’d you give me that fifty quid?” Fefty kwed.
“Thought you could use it.”
“You really loaded then?”
Now thirst’s out of the way there’s hunger. Can’t remember the last time he ate. Yesterday there were items: rice, a can of tuna. He wonders if they made it home with him. In any case there are soups and if he’s not mistaken a can of creamed chicken.
Wind pulls the croft’s flimsy front door shut, at which she jumps again, laughs once then stops as if the laugh was a mistake. “Put it this way,” Augustus says. “I’ve got more than enough money to last me the rest of my life.” He’s surprising himself, talking, all the while knowing it’s pointless, a reversion to habit. But at the same time he’s impressed—it’s as if there’s an orchestrating presence in the room to whom he’s conceding a point—by the unexpectedness of her and the gun, the vivid image of her wandering city streets confiding in her brotherly jacket. That sudden nearness to laughter just now was like one of those invisible road dips that catch you mid-sentence. Can’t recall the last time he laughed, either. Meanwhile the thought of creamed chicken’s going to work on him. His stomach yowls.
“Whatsisname took your coat off,” she says. “Passed it to me to hang up. He didn’t notice the gun.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Otherwise I’m out on my ear.”
“What’re you gonnie do?”
“About what?”
“You gonnie report me?”
“I already told you I won’t say anything. Stop worrying.”
The rain comes down harder, calypso on the assortment of bits outside.
“Sorry,” she says.
“What?”
“It’s still stealin. Still wrong.”
She looks at him and suddenly he knows he has to get her out of here, but when he opens his mouth to tell her suffers a feeling of prosaic lousiness because it’s sheeting down out there and manifestly she’s on foot. Another image of her, head down, hair plastered, shoulder bag clutched tightly.
“You can wait till the rain eases off,” he says. “But then I think you should go.”
Michael, who’d been nowhere near My Lai, came home on leave that Christmas and refused to meet Augustus. It was a wall between Augustus and Selina, who of course had to see him.
“What do you expect me to do?” she asked. “Boycott my own brother?”
Augustus sat very still on the floor of the apartment, rolling a joint. “I expect you to boycott your own racist brother, yes.”
She’d been kneeling opposite him. Now she sat back on her heels neatly with her hands flat on her thighs. She was wearing a plaid pinafore minidress, black turtleneck top and black woolen tights. This was the morning after a much worse argument the night before (from which he’d stormed out and gone back to his room at his mother’s and Cardillo’s) and he could see she’d made a special effort. In the apartment’s shaft of sun her feline face looked glamorous, which naturally made him angry all over again.
“You’re doing it,” she said, calmly. “You know you’re doing it.”
“Doing what?”
“Making this worse than it is. Making him sound like a Klansman, which you know he isn’t.”
“Yeah I forget this over
sensitivity I’ve developed.”
“We both know you’re comfortably bigger than this.”
Augustus lit the joint and inhaled deeply. Too early to smoke but fuck it. She’d had breakfast with her family at the Gramercy Park house and retained he thought the glister of renewed identity: healthy, wealthy, white, Their Daughter, His Sister. He imagined the family around the table of blinding linen and silver cutlery; if not Ruthie then some other white-gloved black maid (Yessum Mister Trent); Michael, who from photos Augustus knew had Selina’s blond hair and fine bones, though with his father’s sleepy brown eyes instead of Selina’s complex blue, possessed of a new quiet masculinity. Selina had felt it, Augustus could tell, thrummed guiltily from it. Turned out Michael was just the type to be made a man by the Marines. With some guys it worked: The brutality of training reduced them to an essence from which surprising strengths grew. Whatever you thought of war, soldiers in it became the bearers of the world’s strange tidings. Among which was the news from My Lai. America faced a tumorous question about itself from its own sons. Haeberle’s color photographs of the massacre had been splashed all over Life magazine. Eyewitness accounts said bayoneting of women and children, rapes, indiscriminate butchery and shooting. The Inspector General had turned the case over to the Criminal Investigation Division and the Secretary of Defense had said anyone involved in the killings would be prosecuted. So far only a Lieutenant, William Calley, had been charged. Selina said it was there in the house with them at home; Michael’s uniform, cleaned and pressed, hung on the back of his bedroom door like a sentient thing, a smirking intelligence. She made him hang it in the wardrobe out of sight. After her brother’s denunciation of Charlie Company—If that’s what they did then they need to face criminal prosecution—her father had declared the subject off-limits, the whole subject of the war, in fact, if Selina was in the house. Then stay out of the house, Augustus had said, along with many other dumb or ungenerous things. Selina just said, quietly: He’s my brother and I might never see him again. That’s the reality. That’s the personal reality I can’t get beyond. If that means I’m a moral failure in your eyes I’m sorry. I don’t have what it takes. Besides which neither do you. Your objection to me seeing Michael isn’t political, it’s personal in the most obvious way. It’s about him. You’re right, Augustus had said. He’s got the drop on me because he objects to all niggers. At least it’s a principle, at least it’s not just about me.
“Would it help if you fucked me?” Selina said. They’d been silent for a few moments, working out what was going on in each other. Now Augustus couldn’t meet her eye because yes of course that was among other things what he wanted. Perhaps not even among other things, perhaps only that, animal ownership of her. She knew and was prepared to act on the knowledge. It was what the prim parentally approved clothes were for, so she could give him, as well as the version of herself he already had, Mom and Dad’s Golden Girl. “Give me a hit of that,” she said, taking the joint from him. She took three quick pulls then handed it back. “I know you hate me right now,” she said. “It’s okay. I’m not crazy about you either. Come on.” She got up and went to the mattress, knelt down on it with her back to him. Businesslike, she pulled her tights and panties down, hiked her dress up and dropped onto all fours. Augustus watched, for a moment didn’t move and in that moment saw she was at the very edge of herself, conducting what might turn out to be a decisive experiment. He stubbed out the joint and shuffled on his knees to get behind her. Through everything else in his head the sight of her fully clothed but for her bare ass presented in contemptuous submission made him quickly hard, the thought of the cold weather out there and her supple softness kept warm by these clothes. “Go on,” she said.
Augustus didn’t let himself think, just went into her quickly. To his surprise she was wet, presumably because she’d been playing this out in her head in the silence. Worried he’d come before her he worked her clit with his fingers. The whole thing would be wrong if he came first, which she, after a moment’s resistance, seemed to concede. She could have three, four, five orgasms before she’d had enough. After her second she reached around and guided his cock to her asshole. They’d done this before but the challenge now was to dispense with all occlusion or denial. She lay on her side with him behind her, concentrated through the initial discomfort, then when he was fully in twisted and looked at him. This was new, her calmly and in full clarity accepting his hatred. It made him feel psychically smaller than her, exposed as if to a giant intelligence. She just stared and moved cooperatively against him, the slightest affirmatory lift of her eyebrows when he came, violently. He realized he was like Cardillo, went to a woman for the answer to the question of whether he was acceptable.
“Michael and I slept together the summer I was fifteen,” Selina said, when they lay together afterward. “We knew it was going to happen. You reach a point of inevitability. It went on all through the vacation. I wish I could tell you it felt momentously disgusting but it didn’t.”
“Was it your first time?” Augustus asked.
“Yes—Jesus what kind of child slut do you think I was?”
“Hey, you were the one told me you’d been diddling yourself since you were three.”
“Five—and that’s nothing for heaven’s sake, a little girl finding solace in her clitoris. Are you made of stone?”
Augustus could feel what a relief it was to her to have delivered the central dark fact and here he still was. He rubbed the top of his foot against the soft sole of hers. But they both knew the central dark fact alone wasn’t enough.
“I knew it was a mess,” Selina said. “But you have to understand I had to dig very deep to find the little fleck of wrongness. I don’t know that I ever really did find it. It’s like imagine you’re eating this huge delicious cake and someone tells you that somewhere in it there’s a spot of mold, that it’s started to go bad. You can’t taste it but you know it’s there. You find yourself chewing every mouthful forensically. That was an unpremeditated metaphor, by the way.”
Augustus pushed upward with his foot against her sole. He liked to feel the force communicated through the ankle, knee, femur, hip. He liked the feeling of lifting her weight slightly with just his foot. “I see it,” he said, though he wished he didn’t. Delicious cake, she’d said. And what was every mouthful other than the obvious?
“Eventually I couldn’t stand it,” Selina said. “I don’t want to lie to you. I never quite found the wrongness. It was just that compulsive searching for it began to feel claustrophobic. That and the secrecy, which of course is enriching to start with but becomes toxic. Also, Michael has this insistence, this will. He makes you feel nothing’s enough, even everything’s not enough. He could kill you and eat your remains and it wouldn’t be enough. I began to see it, the giantness of his demand. I began to feel something of how furious he was with everything. I think that’s why the army’s been good for him, weirdly. The fury’s gone into the discipline. Plus I think he’s been looking for something bigger than being in love with his sister.”
“There isn’t anything bigger than being in love with his sister,” Augustus said. Among many other things he was wondering if Michael had fucked her in the ass. Possibly this was what her look had been trying to tell him, that if he needed something of her Michael hadn’t had, it was this.
“Well, maybe killing and risking being killed,” Selina said. “I’m a tough act to follow but I imagine seeing your buddy step on a mine or cutting off a Vietcong’s head would do it.”
Which images cost her, Augustus knew. Once you force yourself into saying a difficult thing many other difficult things become sayable.
“Anyway,” she said, “I stopped it. For a while I thought he was going to kill me, or himself. You break up with someone you don’t have to see them. You break up with your brother he’s right there across the landing. I don’t want you to think this was me suddenly discovering it was wrong. It wasn’t. It was me understanding what a mes
s it was going to be if we didn’t stop. Michael made it easier by being ugly to me. It was a horrible time, wake up feeling sick, go to bed feeling sick, every day the same carnage to stare at. But we ground out the weeks and months and eventually a year had passed and it was time for him to go to Brown.”
They lay still and listened to someone down the hall taking a UPS delivery, then the delivery guy’s footsteps down the stairs, then the building’s main door opening and closing. It gave Augustus the feeling of precarious truancy. The world eventually nosed you out and started making demands.
“I don’t want you to have any illusions. I’ll never sleep with Michael again. That’s over for me. But it was a huge thing in my life and it’s probably sown the seeds of craziness. Also, I’m in love with you so much it hurts my heart. Also, I feel cursed and on borrowed time and full of lousy karma. Anyway that’s what you wanted to know so I’ve told you.”
What she wanted to know, he now understood, was whether it made a difference to him. It did: it made him want her more. Partly, stupidly, because he saw it as a project of heroic reclamation, an attempt to get her back to who she’d been before it happened, and partly because her survival of it proved her strength. Like her, he didn’t buy the Nietzschean line that whatever didn’t kill you made you stronger. Sometimes whatever didn’t kill you disfigured and debilitated you for the rest of your life instead of killing you. Mere survival was neither here nor there. It was the manner of survival, what you did with whatever it was that didn’t kill you. She’d taken her relationship with Michael as inoculation against human strangeness, made it the source of her compassion.
“I want to ask you something,” he said. They were lying side by side, not touching, his brown arm next to her white one. There was an aesthetic wrongness to the heating being on while there was so much sunlight in the apartment, further dissonance when he thought of how crisply cold it was outside. He wanted coffee and a chocolate doughnut.
“What?” she said.
He got up on one elbow to look at her. She kept her eyes closed. With her hands still and one knee very slightly bent she looked like someone tanning. For a moment he had a profound sense of her corporeality, felt a tenderness for her hair follicles, teeth, knees, arteries, her guts snugly hidden under all that beauty. He asked himself if he wanted her for the rest of his life, a question from which his mind ran forward some way, ten years, twenty, then flagged into an enticing desert darkness.