There’s no big final scene with Mr Wolphram. He would never make his exit on a bridge. He just wants to drive away and see his aunt, spend two days imagining that none of this happened, though it will be all over the news – even his innocence is news, which is a kind of guilt – and work out how to get his life back. Work out which parts of his life even still exist, after this.
‘I’m not sure whether to thank you or not,’ says Wolphram. He’s smiling, or trying to. He’s tired, traumatised, eviscerated by what has happened to the life he had. But he can’t help himself: he’s courteous and he won’t let go of what keeps him civilised. Thirty years from when he taught me and four days from when we took him in, I realise it: he is someone who holds on in a big way to the little things – politeness, civility, consideration … the small change of civilised life. But there’s enough for everyone in the small change of civilised life.
‘You’ll let my solicitor know when they’re finished with my flat? I’d like to see in the New Year at home.’
Gary: ‘You’re not going back to that flat, those prod-nosed gossiping neighbours, are you? Not after what they’ve said about you! Go away for a bit, then come back and start suing people. Christ! You can probably sell your story to the papers at the same time as you’re suing them – how’s that? Postmodern or what?’
‘I’m not going anywhere … Gary,’ says Wolphram, speaking the name for the first time, slowly and emphatically and sounding as if he’s learning how to pronounce it. ‘I shall return to my home and drive my car and go back to my shops. Things will return to normal because I will return to normal. Also, I shan’t be selling my story.’
*
Lynne is waiting for us with the transcripts of her interviews with Ben and Chloe. That, at least, was a victory for Gary – allowing them to be classed as evidence, banning her from using them until we had finished with them. They’re on a memory stick, and she has even transcribed the first three hours. I skim through the pages. Phelps doesn’t need to be translated into redtop cliché, he already speaks it. They’re all about the ‘suspicious Mr Wolphram’, ‘the nosy neighbour’, how Zalie was ‘so vibrant and neighbourly and always ready with a greeting’. About how he and Chloe ‘sensed there was something not quite right with him’ but forbore to say anything because, ‘well, we didn’t want to be accused of prejudice’. About how ‘that could have been Chloe’ in those binbags. ‘I just wish I’d been able to stop it’ is where Lynne stopped typing. Maybe it’s when she answered our call; more likely it’s when she decided she had her headline.
Lynne is wearing the same mohair pullover and sits in the same seat.
‘Any of your tea/coffee/indistinguishable hot beverages for me today?’
We don’t answer, but she makes herself at home anyway. Takes my coffee from in front of me and I let her.
‘I must say, this story just gives and gives. How d’you like the sound of this: Veteran reporters thought they’d seen it all, but even they were conned by savage killer’s double life. That’s what’s coming out for the New Year. All while he was enjoying our hospitality. I was there in front of him, yours truly could have been the next binbag murder victim. I’ll probably do one of those personal witness life stories on it. Chloe is giving us a juicy serialised piece called Living with a Killer. This is pure gold. It’s not just the papers sold off kiosks, it’s the advertising feeding off the circulation hike. We’ve had to hire an extra ten salespeople over Christmas …’
Gary: ‘I once read a public health report about rat infestations in the takeaways on Golden Cross Road … found out rats have such a fast metabolism that they shit out the same meal they’re actually eating … that’s you that is. Aren’t you ashamed?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Okay, sometimes I am. That’s the short answer. You want the longer one?’
Gary says nothing.
‘I’ll take that as a yes. I don’t make things happen,’ says Mad Lynne, ‘I’m just the way they happen. I’m the form they take. That’s all. The online sewers full of angry bastards blood-sporting the latest wounded celeb or the latest broken nobody … the click-bait, the Have Your Says, the online comments, the slanted headlines, the innuendo … that’s all there anyway, Gary, there’s no more or less than there ever was, it’s just now we can see it.’
Gary is red-faced, pulsing with anger, bloaty with rage, but also with recognition. I think he’s going to kick the desk over, throw her tea in her face. A copy of her own newspaper is on the table, with her piece on the front page for the third day in a row. FREE! is the headline, nicely ambiguous: outrage at liberating a pervert, or relief at justice done at last. She has both bases covered, does Lynne.
Gary reaches for the paper and rolls it up tight and grips it.
I finish the gesture in my imagination: he leaps up, and as she gasps in surprise he drives the rolled-up Evening Post down her throat, hard and very fast, so it’s already past her voice box and halfway to her collarbone by the time we realise what he’s done, and it’s drilling through gristle, tearing her tonsils, ripping through the tissue of her trachea, choking her on her own words. Her face swells, the white foundation cracks with grey, her eyes bloody up with airlessness, her lips go violet as the blue of asphyxiation mixes with the Rectory Red shaded lipstick … She is swallowing her own headlines, suffocating on her lies …
… but only in my wandering mind. Gary still holds the Evening Post, but in a slackening grip. I’m fiddling with a pen, to hide my shaking hands, and my head is giddy with what it has just screened.
‘It’s okay,’ she says calmly (but later when I remember this, I also think that she is sad about it, too), ‘I know what you think of me. I don’t care. Anyway, it’s all over, isn’t it? Happily ever after. Scales of justice and all that: guilt in its proper place, innocence shining through in the end.’
Gary has nothing to say. I have had nothing to say for some time.
‘I have to go – got a Skype meeting with my new editor in a minute,’ she says. ‘One of the nationals. I can’t tell you which yet, but you’ll know when you buy tomorrow’s papers … He doesn’t like being kept waiting. He’s a man of few words, but his cheques are eloquent.’
Returnity
‘I’ve got a job for you,’ Vera says. She turns to Marieke and says: ‘There’s nothing, is there?’
Marieke shakes her head. She holds out the digital recorder. ‘Listen.’
‘I have. He’s given up.’
She shows us upstairs. I’ve never been up there, though Marieke has recorded every room and played me the recordings. She swore she heard things once, just a few weeks ago, and played me back a series of hums and whispers and room-static. She even parsed them for me, assured me they were the sounds of presence. ‘Coming closer, falling back, coming closer, falling back.’ Not today. Not for a while.
In their bedroom, Vera’s and Victor’s, are three open suitcases filled with his clothes. His smart shoes are in their original boxes, but his underclothes and slippers are in a binbag.
‘I think you know what I’d like you to do with these,’ she says.
I nod. ‘Will you want the suitcases back, Mrs Snow?’
‘No.’
Victor’s books, detective thrillers in large type, themselves bought from charity shops, are in a pile by his bedside table. I bag them up, too, putting a few aside for Gary.
As I load up the car, I notice that Vera has thrown Victor’s last crossword out, too, and it lies on top of the recycling by the door. I check to see if it has been completed and it has. She knows what I’m thinking and says: ‘It’s all right. I finished it myself.’
The Cancer Research shop on Coles Hill is still there, where we used to go, Danny and Neil Hall and I, for vintage clothes before the vintage shops arrived and made them expensive. It’s mostly pullovers now, rows of dead men’s cardigans, mushroom-coloured trousers, polyester shirts and low-end high-street suits. Coats: endless racks of coats. A riot of beige.
; Marieke browses the old cassette tapes and the records. Five for a pound. She chooses a few. She has no way of knowing this – no normal way – but I have bought her a record player for Christmas. As I carry the suitcases through the shop, I can see her drawing the records carefully out of their sleeves and checking for scratches. I watch her. She holds the edge of the rim against the flat of her hand, raises the record so the grooves catch the light. She has never played one or owned any, but already she handles them like an expert. Like Wolphram. Like the man used to in the old music shop. It’s instinct, or foreknowledge, or the leftovers of a previous life that hasn’t quite been wiped by a return to factory settings.
At the back of the shop there’s a little sorting room where a couple of old ladies not far off Victor’s age are pricing up their donations. I’m glad Vera isn’t here for that – there’s something so final about watching his clothes get swallowed up into the great sea of castoffs. The body goes back into the earth, the clothes back onto the market.
There are no ashes, but this is his scattering.
‘Maybe I didn’t believe enough to bring him back,’ Vera told us: ‘or maybe he didn’t.’
*
It’s when the parents say and they lived happily ever after that the child feels the anxiety. The child is right: what happens after the ever after? What happens in Returnity, after you’ve squeezed the day?
It’s all over, but in the way things are never really over: they just die as events and start new lives as consequences.
I’ll take Marieke back to mine and cook fish fingers under the grill and she will turn them after exactly five minutes of watching the clock. I’ll slice tomatoes she won’t eat and array them with futile precision around the plate. She’ll sit on the sofa with her legs sticking out over the edge. She’ll fall asleep around ten, and I’ll fall asleep an hour later. Sometimes less. Tonight, almost certainly less. I’ll doze. The night will take the day’s bones and sweat them into dream-stock, and at midnight the tiny click of the boiler thermostat will wake me without my even knowing I heard it. It could be anything, I think, a fox screeching, a beer can dropped by a passing drinker, a car changing gear – and I’ll scoop her up as she sleeps and take her to her bedroom. She is already in her pyjamas.
But first, while Sigrid is out with her office mates, we’ll go to the bridge and record. We’ll start at the buttresses where they’ve all started, and then edge out to its span where they’ve all stood: Danny and me and the poor kid they held over, Gary’s lost woman with the sun in her hair, Ben waiting for the credits to roll on the film of his capture.
And all the strangers: the ones whose bodies were found and the ones they never recovered; those who waved or called out and those who slid away quietly; those who changed their minds just in time and those who changed them too late; those who knew something beautiful as they hurtled to their deaths and said goodbye to the pain and the mistakes. Those whose lives looked better backwards, who lived happily for a few seconds with the years on rewind. Those who hit the water or the road, and those who hit the estuary silt; whose outlines – arms splayed, legs out, curled or balled up – briefly shone like a footprint on the beach before the water gluts it and the sand fills it and everything goes flat and traceless again.
They’ve all been here, pushed by the pain at their backs or pulled by the peace up ahead; there’s the lady with the big skirt who survived, and the ones no one knows, no one saw; there are the gulls and the ghosts, and there’s me at twelve, fifteen, twenty, thirty and forty, all my ages in one, looking down from the bridge and rinsing an adult’s eyes in the tears of a child.
This is what I’ll tell them, because it’s what I tell myself:
The estuary has everything I want and everything the ghosts want, because it is the opposite of Heraclitus and his river: it is water that hasn’t yet flowed and sand that hasn’t yet passed through the hourglass. Together they make a clay that hasn’t yet been fired.
There’s still time to change everything.
Also Available from Patrick McGuinness
The Last Hundred Days
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, a gripping debut novel set in the last dark days of a bloody regime.
Once the gleaming “Paris of the East,” Bucharest in 1989 is a world of corruption and paranoia, in thrall to a repressive regime. Old landmarks are falling, grocery shelves are empty, and informants are everywhere.
Into this state of crisis, a young British man arrives to take a university post he never interviewed for. He falls under the wing of Leo, a colleague and black market master, and under the spell of the sleek Celia, daughter of a party apparatchik. Yet he soon learns that in this society, loyalty is never absolute. As the regime’s authority falters, he finds himself uncomfortably, then dangerously, close to the eye of the storm.
Thrilling, satirical, revelatory, and studded with poetry, The Last Hundred Days captures the commonplace terror of Cold War Eastern Europe. McGuinness’s first novel is unforgettable.
“Observant, reflective, witty and precise … Combining the essayistic, the lyrical, the humorous and the aphoristic, sometimes within a single paragraph.” —The New York Times
“Sharply observant … Capture[s] the way corruption and tyranny warp behavior in any society.” —The Washington Post
“Superb … This is a novel that rages and flows by turns.” —Independent
“An ambitious work … The sardonic crispness and evocative power of the language distinguish it from the run of contemporary fiction.” —The Times Literary Supplement
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This electronic edition first published in 2019 in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape
First published in the United States 2019
Copyright © Patrick McGuinness, 2019
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-62040-151-4; eBook: 978-1-62040-152-1
Library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: McGuinness, Patrick, author.
Title: Throw me to the wolves / Patrick McGuinness.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018031888| ISBN 9781620401514 (hardback) | ISBN 9781620401521 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6113.C483 T48 2019 | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031888
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