The Fat of Fed Beasts

by Guy Ware

  I have thought about this. I have anticipated this question, which was bound to come up sooner or later, and to which, from the Office’s point of view, it was always going to be hard to frame an answer that would not in some way make matters worse for me. When we were children, our mothers, first mine, then D’s, often told us that lying to hide or disguise an offence was usually worse than the offence itself, that it destroyed trust and eventually love between people: they had no time, they said, for the little white lie. Often they looked at our father when they said this and I always assumed that they were seeking his endorsement, or his approbation, or at least his collusion. Now I say, I was looking for the old man.

  D’uh. I know that. But you’re suspended. Theo’s getting Lopez in for the investigation.

  I can’t pretend that this isn’t a surprise that distracts me from the primary surprise that D knew I was looking for the old man not following up the dead woman or women. I say, Lopez?

  ’Fraid so.

  D does not look afraid.

  So the chances are, Sis, you’re toast.

  I’m sitting at the kitchen table opposite my brother and I say, Lopez only does major cases.

  Uh huh.

  Something occurs to me, some kind of a lifeline or rationalisation and it doesn’t seem altogether likely, but it is possible there could be more than one reason for Theo – whom I have every ground, including his own testimony, to assume both likes me and respects me professionally and who has been known in the past to allow me some limited latitude, procedure-wise – to get Lopez in to investigate my possible, or assumed, or alleged misconduct, and only one of those reasons is D’s evident assumption that, given Lopez’s reputation as a major hard-nose and total bloodhound when it comes to tracking down policy infringements, not to mention his intransigence in prosecuting such infringements as he uncovers, which he always does, Theo is throwing me to the lions because he might as well. It is also possible, albeit not highly probable and something of a high risk strategy on Theo’s part if he were really on my side in this matter, that he has asked for Lopez, despite the fact that this was not a case on the scale Lopez usually operates at, because if Lopez – given his reputation, etc. – found there was no case to answer then no one else would be able to quibble or accuse him – Theo – of letting me get away with something I shouldn’t have got away with, which, in the long run, when Theo is no longer around to look out for me, would be to my benefit. It is possible.

  I say, Unless . . .

  D looks up. He looks at me warily like he thinks I might be stringing him along and he doesn’t want to get caught out, but if I have thought of something he ought to have thought of himself he doesn’t want to miss out on it, either.

  What?

  Another, less palatable but probably more realistic possibility, is that Theo – who, for all his seniority and reputational capital and general kudos within the organisation is, after all, about to retire – is not the one dictating events here and that Riverside House has assigned Lopez to the case for reasons of their own, such as the need to find a replacement for Theo and the fact that Lopez, for all his fearsome reputation and unquestionable skills as an investigator is going to need some mainstream branch management experience on his CV if he is ever going to progress to the higher executive ranks. Which might be where Riverside House want him, and see him going in the long run.

  I say, Maybe Lopez isn’t coming for me at all, not really. Maybe he’s just coming to get the feel of the place before they drop him into Theo’s job?

  They can’t do that.

  But of course they can, and D knows this, so after a pause, more quietly and without the relish he might have displayed earlier, he says: You’re still going to get chewed up.

  I know this, so I say, But it won’t do you any good, D.

  In the circumstances D does not even bother to deny the obvious implication that he had hoped to profit by my downfall, even though he is my little brother, and he only got the job because I put in a word for him with Theo. He says, Shit. Lopez . . . You don’t really think . . . ?

  I don’t know, D. Perhaps you should ask Theo.

  He empties his can of lager and he says, Yeah, right.

  By the time Gary comes in with Matthew, D has pulled another couple of cans from the fridge and handed one of them to me, and I have popped it and drunk half the contents in a single, extended swallow, because, frankly, I need a drink and I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself, earlier. Gary looks at the cans and the still-full water glass I left by the sink and he says, I didn’t know it was a special Tuesday. What are we celebrating?

  I stand and swoop up Matthew and ask him about his day and if he has had fun at school, at the museum, and with Ivo, his friend, and this is so self-evidently special bonding time for the busy working mother and her son that Gary cannot interrupt. And D says, Hi, Matthew, and Matthew says, Hello, Uncle D, then D looks up at Gary and shrugs and says, It’s a work thing, and finishes his second can and Gary says he’d better get on with the dinner, then. And D, missing the point, or perhaps spotting the point but deliberately blundering right past it in a way that, for once, actually helps me, says: What is for dinner, Gary?

  Cous-cous salad.

  D groans audibly and Gary says, It’s been so hot today.

  He goes to the other end of the kitchen and fills the kettle and puts it on to boil; he weighs cous-cous into a bowl and measures olive oil in a jug. He bisects and squeezes several lemons. He slices a red onion and starts on the peppers before the kettle begins to whistle, which it does because, although it is electric and equipped with a simple bi-metallic strip to switch itself off when the water boils, Gary likes the faux-traditional design, which I knew he would when I bought it as a birthday present a couple of years ago. When he unwrapped it Gary did not, as D said he might have done, slap me and say he was going to the pub, and did not sulk, even, but was quite unreasonably pleased and kissed me and then immediately made a pot of some organic, flower-based infusion that smells like spinach that has been left at the back of the fridge too long.

  While Gary cooks, Matthew tells me about the museum, which has a walrus, a real one, and he dashes back up the stairs up to the hall to get his book bag and brings it down and pulls out his sketchbook with the badger/tapir/weasel pictures and another one he makes me guess what it is and I say, It is obviously a spider, a great big, hairy spider and although he does not say anything except, It’s a chimpanzee, I nonetheless see a moment’s disappointment in his eyes, a moment where he has rubbed up against the inadequacy of real people like his mother, which is a moment I wish I could have spared him and protected him from, but I know I can’t. It is gone as soon as I see it and Matthew is telling me how his friend Ivo put his hand in one of the fish tanks and had his fingers nibbled by a prawn but he – Matthew – didn’t want to, but I saw it all the same, the disappointment, or disillusion or whatever. I think about what I have done, how I have allowed the old man in the bank somehow to fill my mind, pushing everything aside so that I followed him, yesterday, out of the bank, followed him and not the gang, which a concerned citizen might just have done, the sort of person who helps the police with their enquiries and it is not a euphemism, and anyway I walked away from one or possibly two potential claims and followed a man who was still alive and of no interest to my employers. It is my job that pays for this, for this house, this food Gary buys and cooks, the wine and bread and heat and light and water, the clothes we wear, the museum trips and toys and music lessons and the Lego sets and birthday parties, and my employers do not want me, or pay me, to follow the quick, however brave or stupid or desperate or indifferent they might be in the face of death: my employers do not care, and neither should I. I can see now that I made an error yesterday, a monumental error, and that today I have compounded my misjudgement. I have found nothing that might help and anyway there was nothing to find: the old
man is of no concern to the Office and therefore of no concern to me. I look up from Matthew’s sketchbook and see Gary tearing mint leaves from their stalks, D finishing his lager, Matthew watching me, his eyes alive again. It was foolish to risk all of this, to risk the protection of my son, the comfort of my husband, and even that of D, who is a bit of a slob and pretends to be a brute, but isn’t really, and anyway is my brother, and I love him and I love them and it isn’t until Gary brings the salad and some loaves of bread he baked this morning and a pat of butter over to the kitchen table and goes back for the plates that anybody, even me, stops and says:

  Where’s Alex?

  Gary has warmed five plates because there are five of us, including Alex. He has laid places for five, as he always does, putting out five knives, five forks, five spoons and five glasses, but there are only four of us.

  D says, He was going to see Gina Spence.

  Gina? Why?

  Her son, apparently.

  Before I can think what that might mean, that it might mean a conversation I don’t want now, with Matthew here, I say, Denis?

  Abdullah. He converted, apparently.

  Gary says, Reverted.

  The point is, D says, cutting Gary off, whatever he was, he isn’t any more.

  I can see that Gary still hasn’t got it, it’s not his work, after all, and I can see that he’s about to say something more, about Islam, probably, something sensitive and theologically correct, but nonetheless missing the point entirely, the point being that Gina’s son is dead because why else would Alex be going there and I just hope that Gary doesn’t say anything that’s going to make D spell it out and then it’s too late because Gary opens his mouth and D holds his right fist up by his ear as if tugging on a rope and lets his head flop on one side and his tongue loll out and Gary says, Oh, and shuts up and turns back towards the cooker, though there’s nothing cooking, everything we’re going to eat is already on the table and Matthew is watching D with a smile on his face, and then he’s copying his uncle, his own small fist in the air his own head hanging loosely to one side and D does it again, and Matthew does it again and they both laugh and I say, Stop it! so loudly and so sharply that Matthew jumps and shrinks away and I notice that and know that I have failed to protect him, again. That I have made things worse. Shrinking is a metaphor, it is something people say, not what they actually do, but now the metaphor has come alive and I can understand and see why people say it because watching my son as I snap at D and, if I’m honest, at Matthew too, they were both doing it, it was a game they were both enjoying, and when I shouted I saw Matthew become actually physically smaller as well as more uncertain and concerned and I know that I have diminished him. I hug Matthew who is thin and bony and will be tall, like me, like his uncle, like his grandmother, but not his grandfather, when he grows up, and I think, Poor Gina. Poor, poor Gina.

  I say it’s not surprising Alex is late and we probably shouldn’t wait, he might be hours yet, whatever the procedures say, this wasn’t one for the procedures and D gives me a funny look and says he never thought he’d hear me say that and maybe breaking rules is getting to be a habit now I’ve done it once. I don’t want anyone to ask or D to say what this means because right now I can’t, I really can’t get into what has happened and what I have been doing, or not doing, all day, we need to eat the salad Gary’s made and get Matthew into bed with a story where nobody dies, a story about a chameleon, perhaps, and to keep pretending that the world is a safe place even though we all know that it isn’t. Even Matthew. So I am almost glad when D says that maybe Alex won’t get home at all tonight, that maybe he’s got lucky, and I can tell him to grow up. He says you never know: a distraught, lonely, single mother, a few glasses of something to take the pain away, a comforting arm around the shoulder . . .

  D? Grow up.

  I’m only saying. Grief does funny things to people.

  I say, How would you know? But of course he knows, and it is a stupid thing to say.

  D shrugs. I’m only saying.

  Gary sits down at last, and we eat, the four of us.

  9

  THIS MORNING IN the shower I get it. My bright idea. A fucking blinder, if I say so myself. I’m rubbing in conditioner when it comes. I’m in the shower stall, naked and in all my glory, but the water’s not on yet. A hairdresser told me once I had fine, fly-away hair. He was definitely a hairdresser, not a barber. I laughed. But afterwards I had to admit he had a point. He said I should rub conditioner in my dry hair every day. My bright idea is not so much an idea as a question, or a question that follows an idea. An insight.

  I can hear Rada out on the landing, knocking on the door, asking if it’s me in here. I suppose because she can’t hear water running, because, like I said, I’m still rubbing the conditioner in, and the water’s not running yet. Give me time. Give me time. World enough and time.

  Give me a lever and a place to stand. Who said that?

  Give me a horse. That was some olden-type fucker. My kingdom for a horse. We read it at school. Out loud, line-by-line. No one wanted to read the women’s parts.

  Give me a boy under seven and I’ll give you the man.

  Gimme shelter. Bottom rung of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, along with food and heat and sex and sleep and all that basic biological shit. Including shit.

  My point is, Rada’s got no business chasing me out of the bathroom this fine Wednesday morning because Rada’s got no business getting up at all and not spending the day in bed, sulking and crying and letting Gary rub pongy oils in her back or whatever it is he does, because Rada’s got no business. No job. No chance. Nada. Rada has nada. Nada Rada. I chant that to myself for a while, in my head, not aloud, I’m not that stupid. Nada Rada. Rada nada. It’s like one of those memory trick things I read about for remembering people’s names. Except she’s my sister and I don’t need to remember. Nada Rada.

  It didn’t stop her yesterday, though did it? Didn’t stop her getting up and eating that horse food she eats and getting on her bike and cycling off to work. Well, not to work, she’s got no work. To the bank to poke her nose in where it shouldn’t be. It’s pretty obvious that’s not what she told Gary. I reckon she’s kept Gary blissfully unaware of just what’s going on all through Monday night and yesterday. And, if she’s up this morning, trying to chase me out of the bathroom, then I can only suppose she’s planning to keep it up today as well. Which is a bit weird and I can see ending in tears. Boo-hoo. Not that I object to Gary having the wool pulled over his eyes – the dreary fucker has it coming – and I’m not above using my superior knowledge to twist Rada into knots of panic and embarrassment and shame and willingness to do pretty much anything her favourite brother wants. Her only brother, but still. I love my little sister, I really do. I mean, I’m happy she’s fucked up, of course, but that’s work. It’s different. So this isn’t any sort of moral qualm, but when I think about Rada and Gary, and Rada not letting Gary in on what’s going on and carrying on like nothing’s happened, I have to wonder just what exactly the point of that is?

  Which wasn’t it – my question. My killer question. But it kind of led me to it because it made me think – and this is it, this is the insight – that maybe sense isn’t the point after all. That what matters isn’t the what, it’s the why, if you follow my drift.

  So the question is: Why do people do the shit they do? When most of it makes no sense to anyone?

  And, more specifically: why did Wenlock pretend no one was killed, or even injured, in the robbery? And why did his deputy, Meersow, make it so easy for me to find out he was lying?

  Follow the what and you get all tangled up in other people’s stupidity – and, I don’t know, maybe I’ve just been unlucky, but the other people I’ve come across in my twenty-nine years all seem pretty stupid, one way or another. But maybe if you stop pitying them long enough to get inside, like kind of inhabit their stupidity th
en you’ll understand the stupid shit they do. And if you can do that, but still keep enough distance that the shit doesn’t seem to start making any kind of sense (because if it does, that’s it, you’re lost, because there is no fucking sense) – if you can be inside but still also outside at the same time, understand the shit, but still see that it’s shit – then, frankly, you’re the king, you’re the one-eyed man with a huge fuck-off telescope in the country of blind bastards, and they don’t stand a chance.

  By now Rada’s banging on the bathroom door and the conditioner’s like glue in my hair, so I turn on the shower and I think: Hold that thought. Come back to it at your leisure, Dmitry-boy, because that thought is going to make you a winner. I wash out the conditioner and I soap my chest and armpits and my crotch and I work up a real lather in the hair there and I think about giving myself a little squeeze, a tug, there, keep Rada waiting even longer while I do it. I think about the woman in the bank, about Rada waiting outside on the landing, but I don’t do it because I’m genuinely excited and I want to get going, because this idea’s actually bigger than sex.

  Down in the kitchen Gary’s poured out three bowls of horse food for himself and Rada and poor little Matt and is up to his armpits in a huge bowl of something floury that smells like a pub carpet. Same old, same old. I ruffle Matt’s hair and tell him to keep his chin up, this too shall pass, as his granddad used to say, this too shall pass. Matt smiles and Gary gives me kind of a funny look and Matt says, “Hi, Uncle D” and I say, “Hi, and what’s that you’re having?” Like I don’t know.

  Matt says, “It’s muesli.” Only he says it mooo-sli, like a cow might, if a cow wandered into the supermarket to do its shopping, and had to ask for its favourite items, because it was unfamiliar with the layout of the various sections, and like I always say it to him. Mooo-sli. Chin up, I say again and go to the freezer for one of those pop tarts you put in the toaster and two minutes later you get a small flat grenade of transfats and super-heated sugar that tastes of ICI and early death and burns the skin off the roof of your mouth. When he sees or senses what it is I’m doing, Gary can’t stop himself from actually tutting, the tip of his tongue up against the back of his teeth and pulling away with that wet, slappy disapproving sound, and there it is again, the power of my frankly blinding insight. As a culinary experience, eating pop tarts for breakfast is right up there with, say, chewing rats’ entrails or gargling hamster piss. There is nothing at all to recommend it except this moment of involuntary disgust that shows just how disappointed Gary will be if I actually eat the fucking thing, which of course I will for just this very reason. Now, I can see how, in Gary’s eyes, this is not just disgusting but literally incomprehensible. Why would a rational human being put himself through this horror when there are so many healthy and attractive and nutritious alternatives available? But that’s because Gary has never for one moment stopped to think why I might be doing it in any terms other than the (risible) nutritional benefits involved. He has never once stopped to think that I might eat pop tarts in his kitchen every morning precisely and entirely in order to piss him off. That in a world of abundance and boredom, where a man like me is not going to starve for lack of a few rolled oats, the look on Gary’s face and the wet slap of his tongue against his teeth might just be sustenance enough. Which is why Gary is Gary – one of the blind fuckers – and I, thank fuck, am not.