Acid Song

by Bernard Beckett

  ‘Of course there’s a but.’

  There was, of course. There had to be. But …

  ‘What have you bought her?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Elizabeth.’

  ‘A necklace thing. It’s paua, but subtle I think. I hope. I mean shit, I have no idea. The kid in the shop told me it was subtle. She asked how old my wife was. She didn’t seem surprised when I told her. It’s good manners isn’t it, to look surprised? Our young people have no manners.’

  ‘I was thinking the same thing today,’ William smiled. The whisky was doing its work.

  ‘You’ve got to lay charges.’

  ‘I thought you’d come here to tell me to back off.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘That’s not how you back off.’

  ‘It’s assault. Amanda’s got it on tape.’

  ‘Who’s Amanda?’

  ‘The documentary maker I told you about.’

  ‘It was her fault. She penned me in.’

  ‘She’s overenthusiastic.’

  ‘I’m over enthusiasts.’

  ‘It’s how people are. We have to make allowances.’

  ‘You’ve never believed that.’

  ‘Maybe I’ve just never voiced it.’

  ‘No.’ William shook his head.

  Richard had first met William at a conference, although that simple summary cast more shadow than light. It was the conference that was meant to forge Richard’s international reputation. The single breakthrough that every academic secretly hopes will one day rescue them from the years of crawling forward one uncomfortable, unnoticed speculation at a time. Maybe it could have turned out that way, but for a single decision, and a single woman, or so she told him. Then again, he lied too. Ridiculous, foolish, predictable, and impossible to take back: a pebble thrown in the past, rippling out forever.

  1984. The conference was one of the cross-disciplinary gatherings that were fashionable for a while. Thinking about Thinking, as he remembered it, in Manchester of all places.

  Richard was to deliver an address on the evolution of culture, and more importantly was scheduled for a head-to-head debate with Stephen Watson. It was, within the limited world of the social sciences, an important meeting. He and Stephen hadn’t met since the fateful question time in Palmerston North, and within the mythology of The Institute the looming debate had taken on the aura of a rematch between two prize fighters. Watson probably didn’t even remember their first meeting. His star had continued to shine brightly; he had become the darling of the talk show circuit, the reliable provider of twenty second McPinions across a variety of formats. In the strange style of populist academics, Watson’s interests were branching out into areas far beyond his specialist base, that he might more freely express his thoughts, unencumbered by any depth of knowledge.

  Watson’s latest dalliance was in the field of ethics, where he was bravely proclaiming that the human moral code was biologically determined. The bout was scheduled for the last night of the conference, immediately before the dinner, and should have provided the grand finale.

  Richard was sitting at the hotel bar, enjoying a quiet congratulatory drink after the minor success of a small group presentation, when she introduced herself. A cliché of course, the older man of established reputation drinking alone; the up and comer, the admirer, striking up a conversation. But then what isn’t cliché, Watson might have asked. She was ten years his junior, with bright engaging eyes and an accent like rolling gravel, a Scot from the north. He wasn’t sure of her name now. He’d never written it down, never save one time spoken of it, and now, when he thought of her, all that remained were the eyes, and the stupid fluttering of his stomach as he bought her a drink and listened to her earnest, insistent questioning. The burred voice reverberating deep inside his chest. He remembered thinking ‘Could I?’ and the shape the thought formed inside his head, too sharp to be ignored, too heavy to eject. Richard was no womaniser, he had never taken the time to learn the skills, yet here he was. Could I? He could. He did. They did. He was married then. He and Elizabeth were happy together; grateful, on their better days.

  They spent three hours together in his hotel room. They talked and played and fucked like teenagers. Richard drowned in it, the most ridiculously, childishly exciting late afternoon of his life. A truth he bravely resisted, every time he thought of it. Foolish, weak, embarrassing: these were the adjectives he came to rely upon, to keep the memory weighted down.

  Coming out of the hotel room, freshly showered and still glowing, she of no name on his arm, Richard collided with Stephen Watson, returning to his room. Watson must have heard them giggling together, it was impossible to believe otherwise, and the look he gave Richard in the moment their eyes snagged was calculated to humiliate. Stephen Watson surely was the sort to reveal his secret, and to do so at the most excruciating moment. How could he resist? The next day Richard feigned food poisoning, and on the last night of the conference, when he should have been making his mark, he was holed up in a bar five blocks away, melting his shame in alcohol.

  There he met William, a young academic just starting out, who had his own reasons for escaping the crowds. William didn’t ask him why he had missed the debate, and it was this discretion that first brought them close. Whisky cemented the friendship and Richard, feeling the need for absolution, and confident they would never meet again, shared his secret. Five years later William was posted to Victoria University and the two became solid friends.

  ‘So what do you think we’ll find at the bottom of this particular bottle?’ William asked, twenty years on.

  ‘Questions we can’t answer, promises we can’t rely upon.’

  ‘You’re meant to be cheering me up.’

  ‘I thought I was meant to be lecturing you.’

  ‘So lecture me.’

  ‘There has to be a way out of this,’ Richard told him.

  ‘I’m not apologising.’

  ‘I’m not saying you should.’

  ‘I’m not trying to make any particular point, you know that. I’m just following the data.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Richard challenged.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘No, it’s partly true.’

  ‘So what’s the rest?’ William asked.

  ‘I tell my students objectivity is like a torch. While it may illuminate without prejudice, we still get to choose where to shine it.’

  ‘But I’m not a student.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I sound patronising. I do this when I’m out of my depth.’

  ‘I didn’t choose this question.’

  ‘You chose to publish.’

  ‘It’s what we do, Richard. We take what we find and we make it available. Unpalatable though it may be.’

  ‘I think that’s too heroic.’

  ‘I think that’s too cynical.’

  ‘We censor all the time,’ Richard insisted. ‘We do it to get funding, to get publication, recognition, job opportunities, love, whatever it is we’re hunting at the time. If we simply followed the data we’d be paralysed by choice.’

  Richard looked at his friend who, ever since this thing had broken seemed to be shrinking, in the manner of a cancer patient. Richard hadn’t called in to talk through the intricacies of right and wrong. He was here to save his friend, that was all. He waited for William to say something, but the psychologist simply refilled their glasses and waited too.

  ‘Look, regardless of how you feel about your responsibilities towards the data, there have to be ways we can go about engaging with it. Ways we go about presenting it. I don’t know what I’m suggesting, I haven’t thought this through, I honestly didn’t intend to have this conversation. I wasn’t going to, I heard you’d been hurt, I just wanted to …’

  ‘You’ve started now.’

  ‘I have… You know how these things go. People are afraid. Not of the data, but of what will happen with the data. And I don’t think they’re wrong.’

  There, he
’d said it: negated his way to disloyalty. William rose to the challenge. Despite being no public speaker, in a one-on-one confrontation William could be formidable. The professor was a master of the contemplative silence, never tempted to squeeze shape from a half-formed idea. He was most likely to respond to a question with one of his own, a method that in his hands was less Socratic than diversionary. Richard had seen many a colleague lose his footing in the scree of William’s arguments.

  ‘You don’t think they’re wrong?’ He said it slowly, as if considering this possibility for the first time.

  ‘What frightens you about people, more than anything?’ Richard asked.

  ‘You seriously think that can be answered in a sentence?’

  ‘I can answer it in a word. Tribalism. You and me. Us and them. Insider and outsider. Take me anywhere through time and space, point to any conflict, and at the heart of it I’ll show you an in-group first defining and then attacking an out-group. Before we can strike we must find a way to camouflage the most unpalatable of truths: that the closer you stand, the more valuable your life is to me. So Christian slaughters Muslim, white slaughters black, north– erner attacks southerner, Japan invades Korea, Kenya falls apart; and every time it’s the ability to paint the Other as different that makes the conflict plausible. And do I feel fear at the possibility that yet another badge of difference is to be made available to those who have no desire to properly examine it? Who wouldn’t?’

  Even now, when his intention had been to lend support, Richard could not resist an argument. He took great pleasure in the way flapping edges of thought could so quickly be folded and tucked beneath the shape of the proposition in question. And he took a certain pride in it too.

  The injured man waited, chewed silently on some segment of his swollen cheek, and fashioned a smile from amongst the wreckage.

  ‘Well me, I suppose, as you ask. You gave me a word, let me give you one in return. Ignorance.’

  And again his friend paused, cheap but effective.

  ‘That conflict is based around identity is surely nothing more than a consequence of definition. Without readily identifiable sides, there is no conflict. You claim it is the availability of these badges, as you put it, that facilitate conflict, and here I disagree.

  ‘Finding difference will never be difficult; in the heat of conflict difference need not be substantive. An accent, a birthplace, a circumcision, which end you break your egg. Yes, go to any time, any place of conflict, and you will find, unsurprisingly, the conditions of conflict. But ask this. What are the conditions we find when conflict has been supressed? What of the powerful who do not take slaves, the men who do not rape women, the countries that do not declare war? I would suggest to you that the common thread is not the absence of identifiable difference, but the slow, miraculous progress of the great project of Enlightenment. Where ideas are not suppressed, where knowledge is not jealously guarded, that is where peace has a chance of taking hold. And so, when our every instinct is to hide a study away because its findings might be difficult, that’s when I feel fear, Richard.’

  ‘I’m not sure you’re wrong.’ Richard sipped at his whisky. ‘And I very much hope you’re not.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But some of the most remarkable peace has been wrought from societies that see themselves as homogenous.’

  William raised an eyebrow in acknowledgement. He too took a taste from his glass, a signal of a truce of sorts.

  ‘If you’re right, and people’s fears are unfounded, isn’t there still a way of easing them? Can’t you, I don’t know, suggest a joint study? How about offering to make your work available to your critics, to work with them in designing the next phase of the study? You don’t have to make any public statements. You don’t have to recant. They’ll say enough by themselves. You know, “we are suspicious of the data as it is currently being interpreted, and are working with Professor Harding to design a study which we hope will show how these anomalies have been generated.”’

  ‘They’re not anomalies.’

  ‘They might be. You said so yourself.’

  ‘It’s possible yes, but it’s not likely. You’re suggesting we spend the next ten years wasting time and money following up on the least likely of the available explanations. That’s the same as burying the data.’

  ‘No it’s not. It’s out there now. It’s available to anybody who wants to look at it.’

  ‘But nobody will. That’s the point, don’t you see? We’re all too frightened.’

  ‘Maybe with good reason.’

  ‘I never thought I’d hear you say we should be frightened of the truth.’

  ‘I don’t even use the word truth.’

  ‘Very fucking convenient.’

  It was like this between them sometimes. It could turn personal without warning. Richard had never experienced it with any other of his colleagues. With them a vigorous disagreement was a sign of respect. With William it was more like being married.

  ‘Some people are saying you’ve changed, William.’

  ‘Why are using my name, Richard? Don’t you know that’s patronising?’

  ‘You did it before.’

  ‘I meant to be patronising.’

  ‘You’re avoiding the question.’

  ‘I didn’t hear a question.’

  ‘People are worried. That’s all.’

  ‘Of course I’ve fucking changed. How can that not change you? What am I meant to do, just get on with it?’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘You’ve never mentioned it before.’

  ‘I, it’s your business. I assumed, if you wanted to … You know where I am.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Again they both waited, holding their breath, as if not certain that silence could be trusted to take proper hold. But it did, finding its place between the sipping.

  It went unmentioned. A Friday afternoon two years before. Richard was home with Elizabeth when they got the call. William’s car had gone off the road on the way back home to Eastbourne. The setting sun had blinded him as he came around the corner; he’d tried to brake suddenly, hit the accelerator.

  It was the most beautiful road in the city, the last place the sun visited, lighting up the houses that hid amongst the steep dark bush, making green the water that licked at the road. The car barely sank past its roof, but that was all it took. William went down five times, trying to free his wife. On the sixth attempt he blacked out, and bystanders dragged him to the shore. He’d changed. And it would not be mentioned.

  ‘Are you saying,’ William asked, bringing his fingers together below his nose, his thinking pose. The knuckles on his left hand were scraped raw from the concrete. ‘Are you saying that people can’t handle this information? Is that, in the end, your thesis?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think you are.’

  ‘I’m saying …’ Richard thought carefully. What was he saying? He was slipping. ‘I’m saying that with information of this nature, it’s never neutral. It can’t be presented neutrally. We have a responsibility, when it comes to how we choose to present it.’

  ‘A responsibility to whom?’

  ‘To ourselves, primarily.’

  ‘That’s pompous.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘You know the problem with liberals, Richard? Their education compromises them. In the end, to be a true liberal, you have to trust your fellow man, and the educated never do.’

  ‘Did you see Wilson’s speech today?’

  ‘I heard a little on the news.’

  ‘He’s polling at eight per cent. That’s why I don’t trust people.’

  ‘What about the other ninety-two per cent? Don’t they deserve some credit?’

  ‘It always starts somewhere. One Nation, what does that even mean?’

  ‘It’s a party for those who have trouble counting.’

  ‘He talked about the “Asian Problem”. Did you hear
that? Last night a group of skinheads put a Chinese student in hospital. He’s in a coma. It’s touch and go.’

  ‘You can’t make me part of that.’

  ‘I don’t have to. There’s already a link to your study on the National Front website…’

  ‘If we stopped to think how every new discovery might be interpreted, where would we be?’

  ‘I’m worried about you.’

  ‘Snap.’

  ‘Then walk away.’

  ‘That would be giving in.’

  ‘So give in.’

  ‘You driving?’

  ‘I’ll leave the car here and get the boat across.’ Richard held his glass out for refilling.

  ‘Thanks for coming.’

  ‘No, of course. I had to. Which is not to say …’

  ‘I can’t deny what I know.’

  ‘Galileo did. What difference did that make, in the end?’

  ‘He died miserable.’

  ‘Dying’s a miserable business. Anyway, he was miserable when he was alive.’

  ‘Have you even looked at the numbers?’

  ‘Briefly.’

  ‘And …’

  ‘And I’d rather I hadn’t,’ Richard admitted.

  ‘You ever scared you’ve grown too comfortable?’

  ‘That’s a stupid thing to be afraid of.’

  But Richard was lying. And every time he repeated it, the less convincing it felt.

  THE RESTAURANT WAS too warm, and throughout the room carefully dressed couples regretted their choice of costume. It was that sort of place: quiet and expensive, with an imperfect temperature. A room where the commonplace of the wealthy and the special occasion of the middle class could mingle uncomfortably.

  Luke studied Robyn, who studied her menu. Behind her, two of the dining dead sat in silence, sealed over by the already said. Luke looked again at Robyn, and for a way back into their conversation. A conversation that parenting and careers, lost sleep and ‘worries for the future,’ had cut short. Almost mid-sentence, it felt. If only he could remember that sentence. Finish it. Unlock their lives.

  ‘You weren’t thinking of staying for dessert as well were you?’ Robyn asked. Not a question but a reminder; of a dozen conversations like it. Fifteen dollars for ice-cream. We can buy ice-cream, perfectly good ice-cream, for a tenth of the price. We’ll eat it on the couch, in front of the heater, once Alicia is in bed. Hokey pokey from a plastic tub, with the television on, and the thousand needles of jobs undone for company.