The Family Arsenal

by Paul Theroux

  ‘What’s all the noise?’ She saw Mayo. ‘Oh, you’re back.’

  ‘Hello, love,’ said Mayo. ‘You all right?’

  Brodie nodded and broke into another yawn, her mouth wide open; her teeth were small and unstained. ‘Okay,’ she said pushing her hair back. ‘I just heard the racket and I was wondering.’

  ‘Get a load of her,’ said Hood. Brodie wore her purple tee-shirt. There was a wrinkle of sleep – a pink welt – on her cheek, and another across the tattoo on her arm.

  ‘I was getting the most fantastic flashes,’ she said. She moved towards the painting. ‘Hey.’ She unrolled it on the table, still yawning, keeping the canvas spread with her hands and touching it, seeming to study it with her slow fingers, like a learner at braille, tracing the loops of the collar, the contours of the man’s dark clothes. At this angle, Hood saw a gleam in it he had not noticed before, a softer light falling across the figure’s hand, relaxing it and answering the light on the face, dignifying the skin with a gentle sallowness. And he saw a tension of concern that was almost a smile on the mouth and the beginnings of motion in the legs – one knee canted left as if starting a dance-step. The clothes were not the stiff material he had seen earlier, but the level pelt of blue velvet with bluer folds crushed into it. Around his neck was a silver chain with square links and depending from it the medallion of a dead animal: a fox. Brodie smoothed the paint with her fingers, helping Hood see, and still touching it, still identifying its deft features, she said, ‘Anything on telly?’

  He wanted to reply – to mock – but he was gagged. He was angry with himself, for the girl’s dismissal, that pale child’s blindness parodied his own reaction. Anything on telly! She had bettered him and with this new glimpse of the painting he felt reproached.

  ‘Have you had anything to eat?’ asked Mayo.

  Brodie said no and let the painting roll itself on its own stiffness. She yawned again. ‘I’ll have a cup of tea.’

  ‘You’ll have to do better than that, my girl. Look at yourself – you’re getting skinny. Have some scrambled eggs at least.’

  ‘I’m not hungry –’

  ‘You’ll do as I say –’

  Hood listened: mother and daughter, scolding and whining. Watching them bark and circle each other nagged all his desire away; their careless noise drove off his lust and killed his affection and left him with annoyance. Brodie brushed an eggshell to the floor; Mayo picked it up; and that simple action – the girl blundering, the woman righting it – caused in Hood an unreasonable anger. He wanted to shout. Instead, he moved Mayo aside and finished making the meal himself, saying, ‘Tell her to set the table.’

  Brodie insisted on eating with the television on. Hood said, ‘One of these days I’m going to put an axe through that thing.’

  Brodie pointed. ‘He’s on Dad’s Army.’

  ‘Eat,’ said Mayo.

  ‘Aw.’ Brodie picked up her fork and went on smiling at the television programme. It was a comedy, a pair of mimics quacking.

  – Do you play an instrument?

  – I pick my nose.

  – That’s a start. Speaking of noses, what would you do if your nose went on strike?

  – Picket!

  ‘Murf’s missing it,’ said Brodie.

  ‘Who taught you to cook?’ said Mayo.

  ‘If you don’t like it don’t eat it,’ said Hood.

  ‘Stop fighting,’ said Brodie. She put down her fork and picked up a banana from the basket of fruit. She peeled it, took it in her mouth and champed at the television.

  ‘See her eat that banana, honey? A symbol she hates her father. Remember that.’ Hood rose, went into the kitchen and came back with the painting. He held it against the wall, where Brodie’s Magic Roundabout poster was tacked. He said, ‘How about putting it here?’

  Mayo was clearing away the plates, Brodie still watching television; neither one made a comment, but when Hood began prising the tacks from the Magic Roundabout poster, Brodie said, ‘Don’t do that’

  ‘I need the tacks.’

  ‘Don’t take it down. It’s mine. There’s more drawing-pins upstairs.’

  ‘Then pick your ass up and get them.’

  ‘No.’ Brodie glowered at the television.

  ‘Stop it, you two,’ Mayo called from the kitchen.

  Hood threw the poster aside and put up the self-portrait, securing its top edge with a row of tacks. Its lower edge lifted and curled like a scroll. Hood stepped back. The man seemed to have moved slightly from the window and his gaze was no longer tense but mildly relieved, starting to smile. Hood had the impression that the wide-brimmed hat the man held in his hand had, earlier in the evening, been covering that fine hair. The peevishness, the anxiety, was gone from his face: Hood saw contentment in the dark eyes and light starting at the edges of the room where there had been shadow and old varnish.

  He said, ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s poxy,’ said Brodie. ‘I like mine better’ – the poster was on her lap – ‘but I’ll put it in my room where you can’t touch it.’

  ‘I’ll do the same with this,’ he said.

  Mayo drifted in saying, ‘I’ve done the dishes – thanks for the help.’ She looked at the self-portrait. ‘Incredible,’ she said. ‘It works beautifully in this room. Too bad we have to keep it upstairs.’

  ‘Look at her leer,’ said Hood.

  Images jumped on the screen, a newsroom, an aged face: the late news. Brodie said, ‘Rubbish.’ There were shots of the seaside: ‘Record crowds –’ Hood sat between Brodie and Mayo on the sofa, his long legs extended, his hands clasped across his stomach. The drone of news made them remember – the unpaid electric bill, the broken door – and Hood listened, fascinated by how trivial their murmurs were, those low neutral voices on the old companionable sofa, in front of the crackling television. They stared at the television to ignore it, and it struck him as comic, their arrival at such simple topics, trading the bland family assumptions about the light bill, the missing bathplug, the burnt pan, the smashed bowl. ‘We’ll have to do some shopping.’ It related them; domesticity obliged them more than crime, and Hood almost laughed. The bomber went on murmuring to the thief: family matters – and he, the murderer, agreed to make cocoa.

  ‘Nothing about the picture,’ said Hood when the news ended. ‘Looks like you’re out of the running, Mother.’

  ‘We’ll send them another inch.’ said Mayo. She stretched, flattening her small breasts against her shirt. ‘I’m going to bed.’

  Hood followed her to the top of the house, three flights. She paused on the last landing to kick off her shoes, and when she did Hood lifted her and kissed her. She stared at him with a wife’s detachment, considered his eyes, and moved past him. In bed Hood threw his arm around her and said, ‘Honey?’

  ‘I’m whacked,’ she said. ‘Not tonight.’

  He spoke to the ceiling: ‘I had a ruck today.’

  Mayo turned to him. ‘Who was it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘You fool.’ She settled against her pillow, and he waited for her to say more. But she only sighed.

  ‘I snuffed him,’ he said. She said nothing: her sigh was sleep.

  The house was purring an hour later when, wakeful, restless, Hood descended the stairs. He had not slept, but he knew how. He tore a pinch from his plug of opium and rolled a pill in his fingers: that was all the weight he needed to take him fathoms down through the world to Guatemala, to the Perfume River and beyond to the slowest rehearsal of damp sexual knots, the watery orbit of triumphant love. He swallowed the pill with a glass of water and the buzz in his ears changed to a new frequency, a low drawl that tugged and burred at the back of his eyes. The room was dark, but the painting had a light of its own, the white narrow face of that laughing man who stood, Hood saw for the first time, with one hand on the silver knob of a sheathed dagger. And the window he had seen as motionless with summer was alive with excited shapes, fat baffl
ed men with buckets, bawling children, a rearing horse, a flock of fleeing chickens, riot. Rogier heard, but his back was to confusion, and on that face Hood saw his own alert eyes.

  Part Two

  6

  Often, seeing a workman propped by a smoking ditch in the road, Hood dressed the man in ermine, envisioned a pronged crown where his tattered cap was and made that shovel a sceptre to lean his chin on. He gave them the benefit of his belief: the rag-and-bone man a stallion, the postman impressive robes. The regal face was puffed and florid; the labourer’s lank hair and heavy jaw only made the imagining more vivid. They might look broken, but they never lost that look of watchful cunning he had seen in powerful men –the pot-bellied general in his bird-bill cap supervising the shelling of empty hills. Hood convinced himself that the shouting hag in Deptford with her handcart of whelks and cockles and her sign Live Eels could be transformed into a braying baroness. It was a swift flight of the mind, and he rarely saw a pack of slender children that could not be possible inheritors: the urchins changed by the eye into princelings.

  The slim woman he saw in velvet, a high-collared cape and buckled shoes, with pearls at her throat and a jewelled pistol crammed into her sash. She was agile, with blue eyes and a sly suggestion of toughness on her mouth. She had a boy’s bounce and black hair that was straight and bright and caught the sun like metal. She glided in the heat, always away from him. But that, like the oaf in ermine, was mostly fanciful: he did not know her, he had only timed her movements, as she left the house in striped slacks and a yellow blouse and low slippers. She rarely smiled, but that was half her beauty; the rest was motion: the silver bracelets that rode on her arm and visibly jangled, and the sideways swish of her trouser cuffs and when she shook her hair the sight of her ear-rings; large hoops that jumped against her cheek, and all the light she brought forward on her skin that made him think she could not cast a shadow. She aroused him the moment he saw her, the housewife in Deptford with the large child, and he wondered if perhaps she was ordinarily pretty and he committed to enhancing her. He did pity her, and he felt saddest when her mood was bright and she chased the boy and made him laugh, because she was alone and did not yet know she was a widow.

  She went out in the mornings with the boy, whose round head was screwed tight to his shoulders: he looked unrelated to her, his size was wrong, no feature matched. She stopped, carrying a string bag. If it was sunny after lunch she spent the afternoon in a corner of the park on Brookmill Road –the child flopped in the sandpit and she regarded him vaguely, keeping her distance, plucking at the pages of a book. Then, on the Thursday, the police arrived at her house, braking hard, and took her and the child away. An hour later she returned and her posture was so changed they might have taken her away to beat her. She seemed to crouch with grief, her black hair over her eyes, and she held tightly to the child as if, surprised by danger, she was performing a hopeless rescue and moving towards more danger. Her spirit had been arrested; she was weakened; and when she turned to speak to the policeman at the wheel her gaze saw nothing. She entered her house stooping.

  Hood watched from a bench on the corner. He chucked the paper away. She knew.

  On the following days, apart from one morning – the funeral, he guessed – she continued her routine, the morning shopping, the afternoon at the park, varying it once with a trip to the laundry. Her slimness had become angular, she had grown thin in a matter of days, with a stiff sorrow in her shoulders and a frailty that took the ease out of her walk and made her movements arthritic. Once she looked directly at him with hollow deep-set eyes, and Hood knew she was not sleeping. There was something stunned about her, not saddened but shocked. It was different from grief now; it was as if she had awakened in a foreign country and was listening for a familiar voice. He understood her displacement. Then she wore sunglasses, which emphasized the smallness of her head and gave her the hunched foreshortened look of an insect. She stayed close to the child, holding his hand, though he pulled hard on her arm. She was subdued, but the child was livelier than ever and bigger with infantile glee.

  In the house on Albacore Crescent Hood was awakened by the sound of typing, Mayo – always purposeful when she got up – pecking away in the next room. This went on for several minutes. Then she came into the bedroom and said, ‘I have to go to Kilburn. Tell Brodie there’s another envelope inside this one. She’s to take it to the West End and open it and post the one inside – without leaving prints on it.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell her yourself?’

  ‘She’s asleep – I looked. Explain it when she’s wide awake or she’ll forget. And you might remind her that her prints are on file at Scotland Yard, so she’d better be careful. Got it?’

  Hood took the envelope and rolled over to hide his face from the London sunlight which in mid-summer dawned as early as it had in Vietnam, dazzling the curtains and heating the dust in the room before he got out of bed. That same heat was mingled with the smells of carpets and varnish, the sound of flies. He said ‘Got it,’ into the pillow and heard her go.

  It was simple enough, but everything was simple as long as you stayed anonymous: the man who had been told everything was safe because he was dead. The charade with the notes meant nothing; the painting had nothing to do with him. He was glad to have it in the house – it was graceful and indefinite. It warmed him like the sun’s curious hum and startled him each new time he saw it; but he did not feel responsible for it, only lucky that it was on the wall, a patch of order where he could rest his eye. It was a window, nothing more, accessible and well placed, but not his. Mayo always called it ‘My Rogier’; he called it ‘Death Eating a Cracker’.

  The ransom notes: in them he saw all of Mayo’s futile diligence. He had sent an inch of the canvas himself and laughed when it was pounced upon by an art critic who saw in the theft and this ripping a terrible crime, as if he had posted the man a bloody finger or a victim’s nose. Then he had watched Mayo follow up with her ransom notes and a list of her demands; he was interested but detached, as the canvas strip, now verified as authentic, was sent an inch at a time. To The Times: Mayo said they had a knowledgeable art critic on the staff – even on the run, in hiding, she did not forget her snobbery. In the week Hood had followed the widow’s movements three notes had been sent, with a crusted fragment and a codeword in a plain buff envelope. They were mailed in different parts of the city, at Clerkenwell, Earls Court, Shepherd’s Bush, anonymous places, densely populated. But though the demands had grown insistent – she was promising to destroy the self-portrait – the response had become muted, and indeed there had been no recovery. ‘What if they ignore it?’ Hood had asked, and Mayo replied, ‘They wouldn’t dare.’ But it was a hollow certainty, since Hood guessed that she had placed a higher value on the painting than anyone else – higher perhaps than the person she’d stolen it from. And so the spate of notes: this was the fifth.

  She had, almost from the moment they had met at Ward’s, kept Hood at the edge. They were lovers before they were conspirators, but she had another life, other friends, and though her casual allusions to them gave them the large-seemingness of the very obscure, this prevented him from knowing her well. Her secrecy made their friendship incomplete. She was over-anxious to reassure him, and so he imagined that her urgencies – sexual, political: she turned one into the other – could not but be adulterous. She used his affection like a pledge of purpose, and making love to her was only another aspect of this commitment: comrades became lovers, lovers conspirators and promises whispered to her in bed she repeated later as evidence of political involvement. ‘You told me,’ she once said to Hood, ‘that you’d never met anyone like me.’ He said, ‘Yes, in the sack.’ Their very intimacy excluded him; he was so close to her she could say, ‘All in good time,’ and keep him in the dark. Patience was the lover’s obligation. It would have been easier, he would have known more, if he had never been her lover, and while he mocked her secrecy she replied by criticizing his impatie
nce. He sometimes wondered, like the cuckold, if he was being humoured, all the gentle foolery of occasional sex a cover for her betrayal.

  He had been given one specific task. He saw it as trifling, she said it was important. ‘The Provos don’t change people,’ she said. ‘We have chemists, teachers, drivers – they’re all good at their jobs. The only difference is now they work for us. If a carpenter joins and says he wants to be a hit-man, we tell him to get lost. We’ve got enough of those. We want skills.’ So Hood, the consul, was ordered to prepare an American passport for the Provos. He had the necessary equipment, a stock of passport blanks he had stolen when he ran from Hué, with unrecorded and so untraceable numbers; the stamp, the official seal. He had been given a small photograph of the person – the prospective traveller – a bespectacled man with an old-fashioned hairstyle, almost certainly a disguise. He had glued in the picture, forged the passport, stamped and sealed it and given it to Mayo to deliver. ‘They like it,’ she said. And later: ‘They might have some more for you to do.’ But he wasn’t contacted again. He had brought the passport blanks to London almost as an after thought; he had only believed in his anger. He was told he could be valuable, he did not know if he was trusted; and though Mayo said, ‘They’re going to contact you,’ she said it in that remote wifely way and it did nothing to lessen his impatience. The passport business was the work of a morning, but he knew he had done nothing until he had killed Weech, and he wanted to do more.

  ‘Deal the cards,’ he heard Murf saying.

  ‘What else?’ said Brodie. ‘Was that all?’

  ‘Naw, the silly bitch put treacle on it and let everyone lick it off. She was stoned. Anyway, what about you? What’s the sexiest thing you ever done?’

  Hood listened. He heard a giggle.

  ‘I wore five belts.’