Throw Me to the Wolves

by Patrick McGuinness

  There’s a pause, then a silence, where Gary tries – tries and fails – to line up something lapidary to finish with.

  It’s Christmas, and Christmas is a violent time. It’s not the violence of police thrillers or TV detectives. No Poirots or Marples here. No need. It’s the dun, blunt violence of ordinariness. It isn’t shiny and it isn’t complicated – either to fathom its motives or to find its culprits. No one’s going to be calling in Columbo anytime soon. It’s simply there, a seepage of everyday darkness that pools and fattens and brims, and then one day it overflows.

  It’s our underlife, that’s all: and sometimes it just pushes over the edge and pulls us down with it. The thin blue line they call us. I think we’re more like a meniscus: we gather the overspill for a moment, halt it as it swells and curves against the air; it trembles, stretches, crosses over, and then drops.

  It’s dropping now. It’s dropped.

  Two domestics, an arson, a couple of break-ins. A Pound Shop ramraid. Even the thieves pitch their fantasies low these days, their ambitions tailored to an austerity idea of loot. Black Friday riots in supermarkets. Flat-screen-hysteria, white-goods-stampedes. Technology bringing us back to animalhood by another route.

  Against it all, under the police work, under the courts, the unseen plumbing of the system, is violence against women. Especially at Christmas. It’s the pulse, the beat you hear like bass from some car or basement you’ll never locate. Or that’s gone or moved by the time you get there. Wife, daughter, girlfriend, the repeat beating, the ‘one-off’ that keeps happening, the twenty years of one-offs, the mind-hammering cruelty of the words; women with burned-out nerves and minds like blown circuits, scared, punch-softened until their flesh is tender as veal. Gary and I see it so much we think this is another one. It isn’t.

  When the call comes I’m putting a line through five boxes on the calendar. That’s my holiday up ahead. As I close in on it, I always get nervous. All it takes is one case, one crime out of the ordinary, and it’s gone – deferred they call it – to some shimmering horizon point in the future I’ll never reach. I know already that I won’t reach it now. If anyone can tell from the ringtone what a call is about, I can. This one tells me that everything will change.

  No need for a siren, they said. We know what that means: the siren screams time, screams that there is time. But we are quick nonetheless, Gary and I. He drives. I look out at the shop fronts as they slide past, the expensive school on the hill, the old zoo they closed years ago but where I still think I catch the barking of the seals, the smell of their fish. Then the bridge towards the brownfield outskirts with their stalled cranes, the half-built credit-fuelled flats now credit-crunch-frozen. The designer shops that decline into Pound Shops. Then what Gary calls Brexit-land. ‘Like New York,’ he says, ‘it’s not just a place, it’s a state of mind.’ He laughs a dry, yellow little laugh, then sings ‘Brexit Land my only home’ to the tune of the Soft Cell song ‘Bedsitter’. I don’t know how he knows the song or when he heard it, because he’d have been a baby when it came out. Unlike me – I bought the single, though I had nothing to play it on. Even then I was late – when I bought it second-hand and it already had someone else’s name on the sleeve, someone else’s scratches on the vinyl.

  You hear it now sometimes, on those reruns of Top of the Pops from the 1980s, or those variety shows with the presenters filleted out because they’re disgraced or dead or in jail. ‘The show with no presenters,’ my niece calls it – she knows there was something there once, in between the songs, the acts; the glitz and the showbiz and the jokes. She just doesn’t know what. But Marieke has an ear for what’s gone. That’s why she loves the zoo so much, the empty, haunted zoo. The animals ghost-calling behind the boarded-up enclosures. That’s why she likes visiting Mrs Snow, too. All that goneness. ‘Silence isn’t silent,’ she says, ‘it’s a hum: listen …’

  Then there’s some greenery, before the commuter-belt unspools and we reach a place the satnav calls ‘Unnamed road’. We know we’re there, because there’s an ambulance, a patrol car and two unmarked Fords. Everything is slack, unurgent. It all smacks of the too late. Someone I can’t see is smoking and the smell comes in ragged little wafts across a surprisingly large distance. Plastic bags are twisted and thorn-snagged in the blackberry bushes. The blackberries have hung unpicked for months: first they’re hard as buttons, then soft, and now they’re the colour of spider thread, dried-out and shrunk and fat with mould. The kind of people who come here don’t pick fruit.

  We walk but we don’t rush, because for now we’re caught between the moment when what happened happened and the moment it becomes a fact. I can feel all those events massing there, just on the other side of the discovery we’re about to make, and I want to spin this short walk out, hold it all off. It helps me think, I tell myself: you can’t live between tenses for long, make the most of it.

  Then this:

  Two officers are taking a statement from a woman with a dog on a tightrope-taut leash. Its nose points down the lane; whatever it found, it wants another look, another go at it.

  ‘Why’s it always dog-walkers who find them?’ asks Gary. ‘It’s such a fucking cliché.’ I don’t answer. ‘At least it’s not doggers.’ He walks round the car and opens my door. It’s not deferential, or to do with rank. It’s just that I’m not wholly there. ‘Doggers don’t do mornings.’ Gary urinates against the car before we head down. ‘Don’t want to contaminate the scene, do we?’ he says. I can smell the coffee off his piss and it’s not even breakfast time yet.

  I know this road. I can’t name it, but I know it.

  We dispense with the statement for now. In good time, I think. In due time, I mean, because there’ll be nothing good about time now: the only advantage of being too late is that you can choose the order you take things in. At least we have that. It’s the consolation of the defeated. We’ll get to her and her dog soon, then the press will. Most likely Lynne Forester will get to her before the others. Mad Lynne, Gary calls her. If it’s who I think it is out there, who we fear it is, out there beyond the trees. There’s no such thing as too late for Lynne.

  Most finds like this are the same: dog off leash; dog bolts off on its own; one scent among the thousands reels it into the undergrowth; dog refuses to come back when called; owner finds dog nosing through … what?

  Let’s see.

  I hang back, but I know the way.

  It’s a damp, off-cold early dusk in late December, and the arc lights are on. They’re visible up ahead, plus a luminous white tent and some white-clad figures. Camera-flashes, police ribbon. ‘Santa’s Grotto,’ says Gary, and I know I should laugh, just to keep things rolling. Also, it’s better than his usual jokes, so I smile and catch him looking sideways to check. Smiling is better – it makes him think I’m stifling a laugh. My forced-out smile looks to him like a laugh-held-back. I think it’s enough to see us through the next few hours. The conviviality-tank replenished. We’ll need it.

  He’s suspicious of me, a ponderous fast-stream university blow-in. I’m suspicious of him, a borderline-racist throwback from central casting: a fat, uncomplicated sexist who sweats processed chicken-water and smells of gravy. If he was a pub, they’d be marketing him to hipsters and tourists as defiantly retro, or possibly vintage, though definitely not gastro-. But to each other, we’re both from central casting. It’s just that he’s from a seventies police show, the kind where they smoke and hit suspects, drink on the job, scorn paperwork and call women ‘birds’. Gary likes all that stuff. It’s his idiom. Learned behaviour they’d call it, and because he’s younger than me he’s only ever seen it on TV. I call it Gary’s learned self, from the observation post of my own learned self.

  ‘She’s been more than killed,’ someone says. ‘She’s more than dead.’

  The corpse-side factuality, yes, but no banter. There’s something about this one. I can tell from the flatness, the sadness-undertow. We all know.

  Someone is be
nt over a body. I can only see the feet, but it is a she: one leg straight, the other up, kicked back and frozen in a delicate dance move. Charleston. Dead chorus girl, dredged from some thirties musical, a body from a river. Never the same river twice, I think, unsure why, and then I whisper it: never the same river twice. More and more I talk my thoughts as I think them. A decent lip-reader would know my mind.

  The river, the real one, is not far. The floods have slowed, but the water stays fast and violent down here, and the rubbly riverbed makes it foam and spit. It sounds like motorway traffic. The M25 frothing at its banks.

  ‘I’m not confirming anything yet, and I’m not using any names, but you can start now on the basis that it’s her.’

  I know this. I learned it at uni: it’s hard to recognise someone when they’re dead. In the early days of morgue photography, they displayed photographs of the latest corpses outside and people walked by as if they were window-shopping or going to the races. Some morgues let people in to see the bodies. Whole families went out in their Sunday best to browse the dead. It was like Tinder for corpses; swipe, swipe, hold, swipe, add to favourites, block, DM … But many of the relatives couldn’t recognise their loved ones as dead. It had nothing to do with the state of the body. It was just the goneness of life that made it look other than it was. How to explain it beyond that?

  My first case – a hit-and-run – the father stood by the body and looked carefully. We’d asked him to come in and identify it. He shook his head and claimed it wasn’t his son. We knew it was but had to go through the protocols of believing him, apologising, pretending we were going back to the list of missing persons we had culled him from in the first place. He rang back later and admitted it was him, said that admitting it was like flicking a switch, his off-switch. He couldn’t do it. ‘The button between making it real and keeping it unreal,’ he said. That’s where ghosts live: not in a place, not in spooky houses and graveyards. They live in the time it takes for the outside fact of their death to become an inside fact in us. This is why we free them, not just ourselves, by admitting they’ve gone.

  But who knows what the dead will do once they’re free? Where they will go?

  No one says anything. One of the constables scribbles something in a notebook, but it’s just to keep his hands occupied and his eyes away.

  She’s twisted strangely and garbed … I write – garbed? I feel stupid using that word, scratch it out, replace it with – attempts have been made to hide her in refuse sacks. I scratch that out, too, and put in binbags. I don’t know why I go through this protocol of euphemism and officialese; it’s just myself I’m talking to, myself I’m writing for.

  Garbed? For God’s sake …

  Later, I’ll think that what I was doing was trying to lay her out on a bed of words, as softly as possible, because I already knew what would happen to her when the papers got hold of it. ‘Like a broken doll in a binbag!’ wrote Lynne Forester later. Mad Lynne hadn’t seen her, hadn’t even seen the photos at the time, but that’s what she wrote for the whole country to read. She wasn’t going to mess her readers around with words like garbed.

  ‘I’ve been here before,’ I tell them. Below me, to the side, Gary is already squatting, and I see his head jerk upwards. He has understood what I mean, though the others haven’t. Gary is intuitive; he notices feelings and the changing tones of people’s moods. This doesn’t fit with his self-image, so we all conspire not to see it.

  Still, I should have told him first.

  ‘We’ve all been here before,’ says the pathologist without looking up, without turning around. ‘Each death different, each death the same.’

  ‘No, I mean here. This place. I’ve been here before.’

  Then the rest of them look up. I’ll explain later.

  *

  It’s strange how we think of haunting as a people-thing: something fundamentally sociable, however unnerving or scary. The haunters are still versions of us, they’ve just gone over to the other side. Ghosts are domesticated creatures, like dogs and cats, because we have invented them (maybe they think the same of us) to replicate our actions, which they repeat (repetition is important to the ghost-life: like pets and children they need routine) slowly but often with surprising exactness. They are spectral replays of our matches, won or lost, and we impute to them something of ourselves we do not like to see: an inability to move on, a hunger for return. We’re the ones haunting them. All they want is permission to leave.

  That’s why you can’t haunt somewhere you’ve never been, not properly at least, and though there have been ghosts who erred into other stories, other hauntings not their own, the effect there is comical, of actors stumbling into the wrong play.

  As a child I found ghosts disappointing for these very reasons: how constructed they were, how made up they are of all they’ve left behind – how made up they were of us. It was our lack of ambition for ghosts that disappointed me; as if, with all we knew about the unknown, we couldn’t imagine something better for them than repositories of our unfinished business. I’d have liked them to pull away a little more, to peel off from us, but no: they were hemmed in by their patterns, which were our patterns. A lost opportunity, I thought; for us in our imaginations and for them in their imagined reality.

  This is because haunting is just another way of belonging. For some of us, it’s the only way.

  My ghosts are places. This is one of them: an intermediate scrubland, a satnav-anonymised interzone between some school playing fields and a brown river banked by mud and fringed with plastic bags, paint pots and bike wheels. The Kent Downs are a few miles away, an ‘area of outstanding natural beauty’, England at its greenest and cleanest. These places are their shitty cousins, their shadow aspect. Some defunct white goods still shine in the undergrowth, and just beyond them the river gargles what looks like a fridge door. Nearby and further up, hidden by the trees so serried that even leafless they block the view, is the bridge.

  There’s something about fly-tipping sites; their slow, sad, furtive accumulation of debris from our daily life. First, a piece of edge-land is inaugurated, modestly with just an old TV, or perhaps grandly with a six-foot fridge-freezer; and then, like iron filings to a magnet, the rest of the stuff arrives. People know, they’re drawn to it; after dark, wrapped in shame, headlights off, they slide here in their cars and vans and dump their crap. It’s a no-place – who cares? But by the end, it’s like some sort of showroom, a Walmart of the jungle, a futuristic shopping centre where the future’s been and gone. It doesn’t decay, biodegrade, compost or erode. The earth refuses it all: the fridge gases, the battery acid, the MDF, the swingers’ leatherette sofa and the stained mattress speared with rusting coils.

  It’s a no-place, yes. But it’s no place to die; no place to be found dead in.

  As for me, I live in the present; it’s where I eat and drink, sleep and wake, draw my salary and take my niece to the park or to the shops. But my home is the past. Most people take day trips there – an hour or a minute’s musing, an old photograph here, an old song or smell there, then it’s back into life as we think we live it: forwards.

  That’s because most people are tourists of memory. I moved there, and whenever I visit the here and now I feel like an expat, as bemused by the old country’s sameness as I am by all the changes that have happened while I’ve been away.

  Big Pasts, Small Pasts

  I don’t know who it was who said the past is another country, but, studying the school photographs, the 1980s certainly look like another planet.

  Gary has brought thirty years of Mr Wolphram’s pictures and we’re sifting them. He’s not sure why yet and nor am I, but, as the saying goes (or doesn’t, not yet anyway, since Gary just made it up), Everything’s evidence until it’s not. It’s like the innocent until proved guilty rule, but in reverse – after all, he says, ‘People have more rights than things, right? Right?’

  ‘Right,’ I answer with a lack of confidence he catches and, by
now, probably shares: because Mr Wolphram has no rights. It’s going to be open season on him: his sexuality, if he has one, his bachelorhood, his education – especially that. Even before he’s been charged they’ve dredged up old pictures – class photographs, something from the premiere of a play he directed, his graduation photo (stark, backgroundless, him with a gown and scroll), him playing a guitar in his short-lived Oxford student band, Horspath Driftway, and even, God knows how, a couple of holiday snaps of him as a child. Thin cold legs and lumpy kneecaps that look like knots in rope.

  Alone.

  No toys.

  No parents either, Gary points out. No brothers or sisters.

  In the first picture, he’s withdrawn, looking for somewhere to hide his eyes. It’s classic childhood self-erasure: hoping that by seeing nothing he will not himself be seen. He’s alone, averted not just in gaze but in body; averted in self. In the other, as if to compensate, he looks straight out at us. It’s the same look you see in the consumptive sons of aristocrats in old pictures: that doomed, remote yearning that looks like arrogance and sometimes maybe is. Or in the deep foal-eyes of the Romanov children as the bullets wait for them, snug in the chambers of Bolshevik rifles. Somewhere down the telegram line, ticking away along the minutes that haven’t yet come, waits the order to pose them for a family photograph, then gun them down and quicklime their dainty, soap-white corpses. That’s the sort of face I mean: pale and papery as a moon dissolving in daylight.

  ‘All that’s missing is a sailor suit and a governess,’ observes Gary.

  We read photographs from left to right, like sentences; like words. But on either side of the frame it’s time we see, not space. Before and after, flanking that paper monument to the dead now.

  He’s … what? Nine? Ten? That would date the pictures to the late fifties. Black and white, of course, but that variety of black and white that suggests there was never any colour in the first place. England in the fifties black and white is a shade which deserves its own place on the colour chart of grey, somewhere between soiled-headrest-cover grey and the grey of a pigeon’s underwing. ‘When did they invent colour?’ asked my niece one day. The adults laughed, but we knew what she was asking.