‘This worries me, Martha. You should have heard him, all these technical terms and a rationale as well. And this beating thing …’
‘Did you give it to him?’
‘No, Jesus!’
She grinned openly. ‘I know, I’m winding you up, you’re so easy. Listen, he’s a smart kid, everyone says so. And he’s probably sneaked a handful of CSI episodes or Criminal Minds – but that’s all, he’s a healthy and happy kid with an imagination he’s still trying on for size. Everything will be OK.’
‘Let’s talk to him together, this has me really spooked.’
She pivoted from the chair and kissed me on the cheek. Over her shoulder her computer screen was frozen; in the middle of a rolling landscape two tiny figures were arrested in their flight towards a dark forest.
‘Leave it to me,’ she said, ‘it might need a mother’s touch. But I’m telling you, I’m not going to be guilt-tripped on this. We’re good parents and he’s not the first kid to have a bed-wetting thing.’
‘Just do what you can, have a word.’ I nodded to the screen. ‘What game is it this time?’
She waved a narrow wrist.
‘Orcland. A centuries-long dispute between elves and orcs, border violations, rustling, water rights, mineral rights, it goes back to the dawn of time. I have to tip the balance of power towards the elves, upgrade their armour and ordnance. Market research has shown that elves’ approval rating has risen across all demographics. The gaming community has reacted badly to seeing them getting their arses kicked so easily. I have to even the odds a little for the new add-on.’
‘They’re still not going to win, the template is fixed.’
‘I know, I can only help them make a better fight of it. Well, fairer at least.’
‘What sort of job is that for a grown woman?’ I teased.
‘The type of job that pays the rent and puts food on the table.’
I sat on her chair and gazed at the screen. Two elves were streaking towards a great forest where they would find refuge and a cache of arms. Somewhere off-screen they were no doubt being pursued by a posse of murderous orcs. Tipping the balance of power, tilting the odds towards the elves; this is the type of thing Martha did.
‘Martha, how did we get to be this trivial, elves and subtitles? How did we ever get sidetracked into this shite?’
She shrugged, shook her head. ‘Don’t ask me. But you show me another job that comes up with food and rent at twenty hours a week and I’ll consider it. Till then I’ve got elves to arm.’ She giggled suddenly, put her hand on my shoulder. ‘John,’ she said, ‘don’t worry, his name is Jamie, not Damien.’
‘Not funny, Martha.’
‘Sorry, it was too juicy, I couldn’t sidestep it.’
Whatever way she broached the subject, she made no headway with Jamie. And whatever he said to her in reply left her in no doubt that this was something between men. No, there was no drawing him out on the subject – he’d talk it out with dad, he said. So I left him to it, hoping he might put the whole thing behind him, thinking that if he needed to talk about it badly enough he would bring the subject up in his own good time. And sure enough he did. We were sitting together on the couch after a double episode of The Simpsons.
‘You haven’t given my request any more thought?’
‘No, I can’t say I have, how about you?’
He squirmed round to face me, tucking his feet in under him.
‘Yes, I have it all figured out. Yesterday I killed a spider, I wrote it into my diary – that covers the cruelty to animals part. One beating now and I will have a complete profile, the homicidal triad, every box ticked off. Any investigation would have to be blind not to be able to track me down. But I need that beating. One beating registered with the childcare authorities and the job will be complete.’ He rolled up his sleeves, revealing his skinny upper arms. ‘You could confine your work to areas of soft tissue, my thighs and arms, places where the bruising will be obvious but not dangerous. But nothing around the head, you don’t want to risk a charge of attempted homicide.’
‘And how’s that going to make me look, a registered child beater?’
‘I’ll clear your name. I’ll say it was totally out of character, I pushed you to the end of your tether.’
‘You’re a serial killer, who’s going to believe you?’
‘I’m under oath, I won’t lie.’
‘And I thought there was something in those profiles about fire-starting.’
‘I could fix that easily enough.’
‘Don’t bother. And this profile thing, it’s an American template.’
‘So?’
‘It might not translate across the Atlantic.’
He shook his head sadly. ‘Dad, the world is of one mind. That’s the way it is.’
‘It doesn’t have to be like that. These things aren’t fixed.’
I put my arm round him and drew him into my side. There wasn’t a pick on him, his body a soft assemblage of angles, all elbows and shoulder blades. ‘How do you know these things, Jamie, where do you get these ideas from?’
‘How does anyone know anything? I just pick them up along the way, same as anyone; this is all common knowledge.’
‘It’s not common to me. Why don’t you turn yourself in now, before you do any damage?’
‘Who would believe an eight-year-old?’ He turned his face up to me. ‘Would it kill you?’
‘I’ll never know.’
He lowered his face. ‘I’m only for your good,’ he said, ‘you’ll thank me for this later on.’
I sat there long after he’d gone to bed, the TV on mute.
Someone told me that you know nothing of love till you have a child of your own. You know nothing of its unconditional demands nor the things you might do to protect it. And this is what I’ve been feeling these last few weeks, this is what spooks me. I’ve seen enough to know that wherever there is love there are opportunities for guilt. It has something to do with more laws and prohibitions, more opportunities for misdeeds and transgressions.
What spooks me now is that Jamie’s fear will become my fear, his terror my terror. I worry that one day it might spread from him, slip through his narrow boundaries and become mine. That old sense of weightlessness comes over me as I think these things; once more I am at a remove, standing at arm’s length from myself … And one night, at the end of my tether, the world really might be of one mind. And because I haven’t the courage to be scared, the courage to take up the full duty of love, I might find myself pitched into a place beyond marvelling that I could ever go this far. And because this is the age of reasoned hysterics and because I am haunted by his pale arms, I might find myself walking down the hall to his bedroom. And sitting on the side of his bed, lit by the light streaming in from the hall, I would run through my reasons once more, squaring my story against the day when I will stand up and tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And then, these things straight in my head at last, I will reach out to touch his shoulder, touch him gently, calling his name in a whisper that barely reaches into his sleep … ‘Jamie, wake up, Jamie, wake up, good boy …’
And that I can think these things and see them so clearly, that for a few moments I am so completely lost to myself …
You will not recognize him now.
Forget every memory you have of him, all those images in photo and newsprint that captured him in all his young promise as the coming man, the great white hope, when he strode onto the national stage. Forget the handsome face atop the long neck and the haughty carriage that lent him that irrefutable air of Providence. Forget also the declamatory style, that tone of airy certainty in which so many of us put our faith. Forget all these things and summon instead every cliché of decline and set them against the man who once topped six foot four inches and who drew the eye so easily in all those Cabinet photographs in which he loomed, head and shoulders above his colleagues. Gaze instead upon this terrible decline, the coda of a
cautionary tale wound on beyond its final pages.
This room is not what we would have expected. The walls are papered with old campaign posters, some curling at the bottom, some threatening to lift away at the corners and tear through the diagonals. All of them carry his photograph, and the earliest ones date back to his first campaign in the late seventies. Beneath these icons of his younger self he now sits in a wingback chair, looking out the window and down over the lawn to the seashore. At this moment his view is blocked by the woman standing with her back to him. She is broad-shouldered and planted solidly on the ground and we can infer from her flat shoes and her one-piece uniform that she is here in some official capacity – most likely representing one of the caring professions. Her name is Catherine and we know this from the name tag pinned on her right breast.
‘No one can tell me it was not beautiful,’ he says suddenly, swiping the air with a feeble hand. ‘No one.’
‘Yes,’ she says, turning from the window, ‘no one can tell you it was not beautiful.’
She reserves a special tone for him when he’s in this mood, a dull, placatory register that lies almost beneath hearing; it’s as if she needs him to lean close so she can be assured he is fully attentive.
‘Once more, Catherine, my first day in office …’
We notice now that he no longer speaks of himself in the third person. That regal idiom, which made him such a soft target for satirists and which too often occluded his real gifts, has given way to the full intimacy of the first person.
‘My first day, Catherine,’ he persists, ‘my first day.’
She turns from the window – there is nothing out there for her.
‘It was a glorious day,’ she begins, ‘the elements themselves deferred to the occasion; the sun recused itself from the sky. At any moment the clouds might have parted to give God a clearer view.’
‘They were affected, the elements?’
‘Yes, they were affected.’
She would welcome an interruption now, any sort of interruption. Someone with a questionnaire, for instance. She has heard they are out there, people with questionnaires traipsing the land on various need-to-know assignments. A few questions about her marital status, her number of dependents, her religious affiliation, if any … she would gladly answer a few of those queries right now. Anything would be better than this.
‘And how did I present myself on that first day?’
‘You wore a white suit.’
‘And that was unusual?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘What was the word?’
‘Transfigured.’
‘Yes! And there was no precedent for that?’
‘No, no one had ever seen the like.’
‘Ha!’ He clapped his hands smartly. ‘Of course not, I was always a step ahead. And what did I say, the clincher, who did I quote?’
‘You quoted Isaiah.’
‘Of course, the prophet.’ He sighs fondly at the memory and shakes his head. ‘I agonized over that, I won’t deny it. Would it be lost on them, would it go over their heads?’ He throws up his hands. ‘Of course it went over their heads. I scanned the editorials the following day and of course they missed it. But they remember it now.’ He falls silent, his chin dipping into his chest, one hand cupping the other. She has noticed this new habit lately – his left thumb in the palm of his right hand and this continual twisting action that threatens to torque it out at the root. She has noticed how it becomes particularly vengeful during these pauses in his story. On resumption he will stop, overcome with that irresistible brightening that always brings him back to himself. As if on cue …
‘And what did I say?’
‘You said that the Messiah would come out of the west.’
‘I did indeed. That’s exactly what I said. And did I lie?’
‘No, you were as good as your word.’
‘Yes.’
She turns to the window once more. But even with her back to him, she can sense his tongue flicking over his cracked lips, this anxious tic preparatory to the final push. She can anticipate him now but she prefers to let him have his say. One of his peevish fits is the last thing she needs at this moment.
‘And how did I do it, Catherine, how did I fulfil my mission?’
Not for the first time something mean in her wants to toy with him, something bitter in her wanting recompense for all the hours she has spent in this room with him. But she dare not risk it; there is something uncanny about him when he is in these moods.
‘Catherine!’
‘Yes?’
‘My mission.’
She turns and sees him looking expectantly at her. Lowering her eyes, she begins in a dull singsong.
‘You came to restore time and you did it by building roads and bridges and bypasses.’
‘Yes,’ he breathes, ‘roads and bridges and bypasses. And there was a formula?’
‘Yes. An average of three thousand cars a day with one point four occupants in every one … each vehicle spending seventeen minutes in traffic jams … multiply one by the other and divide by twenty-four and you get one thousand, one hundred and ninety hours … do the same sum with the alternate five-minute journey through the roundabout, take one from the other and you get eight hundred and forty hours.’
‘Eight hundred and forty hours,’ he intones solemnly, ‘restored to the living.’
‘Multiplied by the number of working days in a year and …’
‘Stop,’ he cries happily, ‘my head …’
He succumbs to a weak giggle and passes his hand across his face. After a moment he waves her on. ‘Cut to the chase, the sum total.’
‘According to the World Health Organization, at year’s end the sum total of thirty-five men’s lives.’
The figure leaves him stunned, as though he is hearing it for the first time and not, as is the case, rehearsing it for the umpteenth. His face tightens to a grimace of satisfaction.
‘This is what I did, thirty-five men per annum restored to the living. And over my lifetime?’
‘Multiply by …’
He silences her once more with a weak stamp of a slippered foot. For all his love of hearing this, he has only ever had a limited degree of patience. And it is always likely to give way to awe.
‘It beggars belief. That one man …’ He tails off, the sentence drooping in the bright air. ‘And if I did not raise the dead themselves, it was only a matter of time; sooner or later they would be elbowing their way up out of their graves.’
She turns back to the window. If past form is anything to go by, this is where he will lapse into silence, his anger and inspiration finally spent. Outside, the tide is at the low water mark, ready to turn at any moment. She readies herself, trying to attune her mind to this short interval when the sea is neither ebbing nor flowing. It is a game she plays with herself, something in her is comforted by this short period of stillness and balance.
‘Catherine.’
‘Yes?’
‘Did they not weep with gratitude?’
She turns once more. His eyes glisten. She remains silent. He does not flinch from her gaze.
‘This will soon be over and I will not be sorry,’ he says.
Now he shrugs himself up in the chair, squares his shoulders and plants both feet bluntly on the floor. Rallying himself, that’s what he’s doing. He wags a finger at her. ‘Someday soon I will be standing on the floor of heaven and I will be asked to account for myself. And this is what I will point to – thirty-five men per annum restored to their lives, my life’s work. No wonder my health is broken, no wonder my … and I will point to the electoral register and say, This is my mandate, this is my authority: thirty-three per cent of the total valid poll, each time returned with a bigger margin than the last; roundabouts and bypasses, bridges and dual carriageways … These are the things I did, Catherine, these are the things I will point to. And then I will say, Now show me your mandate, you prick … you etiolated cunt.’
Despite herself she is impressed; he has never pushed it this far before, never to this end. But in truth she is already bored. The day is gone when she would have found herself caught up in the story, drawn in by his enthusiasm and sometimes moved to embellish it with colour and detail all her own. It has been a while since such flights of fancy took hold of her. Now she stands looking out the window, down over the green lawn to where it ends on the jagged line of the seashore. She has a life of her own outside of this room, she must have, there is surely something out there waiting for her. But for the moment there is nothing but a vacant listlessness within her.
Even with her back turned to him she can sense the grinding effort it has taken him to push this far. His exhaustion fills the room like interference. She knows what it will cost him … the long night of fevered sleeplessness ahead, his bedding twisted into damp ropes.
Behind her, in his chair, he turns out the palms of his hands and looks imploringly at her back.
‘And they carried me shoulder-high, Catherine,’ he whispers hoarsely, ‘they carried me shoulder-high.’
Every time he enters a crime scene he experiences the moment as an absolute transition, as if he is crossing into a different realm. The crime scene is the frozen world; circumstances have run to their conclusion here and time has taken itself elsewhere.
The detective’s attention is drawn to the wound on her left temple. He studies the angle and depth of it and gazes up at the spray of blood that fans out across that part of the wall near where she must have stood. So telling are these details that he is already pre-empting the pathologist’s report: She was struck from behind with a blunt instrument; at the last moment she turned round, turned her head into the blow. On the other side of the corpse, the pathologist ducks out under the tape. Without a word of greeting, the detective calls to him.
‘Do we have a time of death?’
Forensic Songs Page 13