by Ian McGuire
Morris, who had not stopped staring at Dirck, shook his head absent-mindedly. ‘Not much,’ he said.
Zoe nodded. They fell into a minute or two of reverential silence. The air carried faint scents of stool and sticking plaster, and beneath the TV chatter there was the low hum of complex, life-saving machinery. Dirck, she realised, looking closely at him for the first time, looked distinctly ill. He was pale as a root, and his face had the desolate, sunken quality of a beach at low-tide. Assuming he survived the initial ministrations of the NHS, he would be airlifted to the Netherlands for further treatment, she was sure of that. Afterwards the likelihood of him continuing his studies at Coketown were tiny. The path to Firenze Beach was proving to be rather more twisty and rugged than she had imagined. OK, there were still possibilities with Dirck – the cards, the flowers, the condoling and supportive emails – but with him gone from Coketown, what did she really have left? She looked up. Morris was sniffing. His eyes were damp and baggy; he looked like he had slept in his clothes. She had, she realised, Morris Gutman: Dirck’s clandestine and guilt-racked lover. Who would have thunk it? Morris, who an hour before she would have dismissed as mere academic boilerplate – lank, sexless and stained by failure – was now an object of interest, at least, if not a site of possibility. Zoe swallowed. She found such evidence of her own blindness strangely exciting – there were twists and crannies it seemed that even she had yet to explore. She stretched her arm around Morris’s hunched and fleece-wrapped shoulders.
‘Fancy a really bad cup of cocoa?’ she cooed.
Chapter 10
When Morris arrived home after making the anonymous phone call, E was, as he had imagined she would be, seated on the sofa with her legs tucked up, watching the news. She was surrounded by a chaos of bright plastic items. The violence of Molly’s playtime was clearly increasing.
‘Another train crash in toy town,’ E said. ‘Sorry, I just couldn’t be bothered to tidy.’
‘You’re not sick already, are you?’
‘Do I look sick?’
‘It was just a question.’
Morris went into the kitchen, opened the ice-choked fridge and retrieved a king-sized bottle of Brewmeister from the back. He went back into the living room. E looked at him.
‘Are you OK?’
Morris felt close to tears. The normality of his house was overwhelming him. Outside, the frigid darkness clashed and whirred like a frenzied death machine, but here inside was life, light, love, happiness. These were not empty platitudes as he had often feared. They were real: solid as the Artex ceiling, the combi-boiler, the dual-action microwave. Why had it taken the darkness and the blood to make him realise that? He looked at E. She smiled. Her face seemed like something that had slipped his mind but that now at the very last moment he had remembered. This life had been waiting on the tip of his tongue. Delayed, rolled over, but not lost, and it had taken Dirck van Camper – dead, dying, Dirck van Camper – to remind him of it.
He sat down on the tartan sofa. He took of sip of Brewmeister – he had never noticed the sour, ferric taste before or the ferocity of the carbonation. He squeezed E’s foot – hard, soft, curved, straight. It felt like a strange antique device whose purpose had long been forgotten.
‘We must change the way we live our lives,’ he said.
E looked at him again. ‘Are you announcing a mid-life crisis? Are you planning to buy a motorbike?’
‘Actually it’s Rilke, but there may be a continuum.’
‘There usually is.’
‘I was thinking of the baby – we need real nappies, a new high chair, names. We need books and catalogues; we need advice, confidential counselling, support. We have a myriad needs.’
‘But we’re second-timers.’
‘Exactly. We’ve never been that before, this is a first for us.’
They watched the beginning of North-West Tonight.
‘Do you like Magnus?’
‘No, absolutely not. Scandinavia is out. I exercise my veto on anything Nordic.’
E shuffled across the tartan sofa and leaned her head on Morris’s shoulder. She touched his knee. There was a weight to her which surprised him, which he hadn’t noticed before, as though she had become denser with age. He put his hand on her shoulder; it felt seasoned, smooth. What were they becoming? What were they growing into?
‘Molly was a compromise,’ she said.
‘She was. We found it hard to agree. Your parents suggested we try arbitration.’
‘Arbitration Gutman.’
‘That was the joke.’
‘What about Dirck?’
Morris stood up and circumnavigated the sofa twice before speaking. It felt like a rabbit punch, like a wedge of darkness had come through the curtains and whacked him on the back of the head. He needed to reorient, gather himself. Perhaps he should tell E what had happened. Perhaps he should explain. It was as though he had something inside him, some living creature he needed to expunge. If he let it loose in here, in his house, would it shrivel and die, or would it live, flourish, grow, like a hellish illegal pet they could neither kill nor give away? He swallowed. He couldn’t take the risk.
‘Dirck, berk, dork – he’d never survive junior school. It’s the nominal equivalent of “kick me”.’
‘It might be a girl – Dorca?’
‘Now you’re being facetious. Listen, I’m thinking of giving up my job, down-sizing.’
‘Is that feasible?’
‘I can’t bear it anymore. I’m throwing good money after bad.’
‘It rarely brings a smile to your face, I must admit.’
‘It’s been downhill since the Bangor incident. We both know it. There must be other avenues. Our needs are modest. I’ll go to the Job Centre.’
Morris was surprising himself. It was as though he were stepping into negative space, as though he had become suddenly and profoundly aware of everything that wasn’t his job, the university, his career, Dirck.
E snuggled up. Her face was the colour of cork. Her hair was tied with a spangly red elastic band. She smelt of mashed potato. He kissed her cheek. It felt at first vast and foreign, like kissing a wall or an official building. She shifted slightly and touched his hair. Morris felt like an animal – an ape or a cow. His consciousness was seeping down from his brain into his body. Thoughts were being back-engineered into sensations, impulses. They went upstairs. Their sex was like a reckless swimming – formless, amniotic, unchlorinated. Afterwards, E admitted that she was already craving parsley, that she could smell things at a distance. Morris had not slept unclothed for years, there were parts of his person he had forgotten about, allowed to lapse. He was fatter, in all honesty, than he had ever expected to be. There were lumps, nodules he had not been aware of before. As he fell asleep he thought lazily of gathering himself in, trawling for his pieces like an old Greek fisherman.
Sometime before dawn, the thought of Dirck van Camper distended, angry, haloed with black blood, wielding his water-damaged copy of The Phenomenology of Spirit, visited Morris. But it did not come alone – it was accompanied by unbidden memories of the Kant debacle, of his lunchtime humiliation, of Conrad Underseel and the Bangor calamity. What breathless anxieties these shades conjured up – what thoughts of bitter failure, of humiliation and wastage, of the urge, the need, to do better. Flummoxed and half asleep, he pledged himself, as if by rote, to work harder, to do more. Then he remembered that he had reversed over Dirck van Camper, that his chances on Friday were all but shot, that the police would already be making their enquiries. He had failed already, he had already lost. Clodding waves of anger and shame beat and bruised him. He would be exposed for what he was, stripped bare. He opened his eyes; the room was the colour of prunes. Sitting up he felt ashamed of his nakedness. He found a T-shirt and trousers. It was five-thirty. He went downstairs in a crushing vortex of gloom – Molly, E, the house were nowhere. How could he fail so badly when he had started off so well? He sat in the kitchen. It was bitte
rly cold, but he could not remember how to work the heating. He went to the cupboard and found a duffle coat that had belonged to his father. The room was dark; unwashed pans and plates gathered like storm clouds at its edges.
It had started well, he remembered. Six o’clock on an autumn afternoon in Rotherham, 1972; the visit from Miss Baxter, his form teacher. His father had assumed she was the pools lady. When Morris saw it was Miss Baxter he felt suddenly sick. Her presence on his doorstep terrified him. Two things which should never be connected had been. It was like a mix-and-match book – the Hipporaffe, the Pengotamus. She was wearing a green woollen coat with black zip-up boots, and she was carrying a handbag. After explaining who she was she smiled at Morris and assured him that he was not in any trouble; he turned purple and grunted. His parents became immediately and unnaturally cheerful: they made tea, found biscuits, bustled Miss Baxter into the lounge. Morris could hear his father asking questions, making conversation. For the seven-year-old Morris, this was the equivalent of graves giving up their dead, horses eating themselves. He sensed that something had gone terribly wrong. She stayed for half an hour. (His father dashed into the kitchen to retrieve a cut-glass ashtray, which Morris had never seen before, from the very top cupboard). There was the unprecedented smell of cigarette smoke. When she had gone, his parents came back in smiling and looking smug. They seemed possessed of a strange, secret knowledge. Miss Baxter had told them that Morris was unusually bright, that he should be encouraged to read more widely and that, if they liked, she would give him coaching once a week for the Rotherham Grammar School scholarship exam.
The exam was easy. Morris took the bus out every day – fifteen miles or so through council estates, past the municipal cemetery and sewage farm. He liked to sit downstairs, next to a window with his hood up and his face in a book. There were many dangers in attending Rotherham Grammar, the finest (the only) independent boys school in the Rother Valley. For pupils of other less selective institutions the isolated Grammar School boy was fair game. There was taunting, theft, assault and battery. Morris lost biology text books and shoes; he collected black eyes, dead legs and brutal Chinese burns. Summer was the worst. There was a special uniform: a purple and cream boating blazer with matching bow-tie. It dated from the Edwardian period; Morris’s mother got one cheap at the Easter bring-and-buy. On the twenty-nine circular it was suicidal. They wrote on him in felt-tip pen – poof, homo, bum boy – they extorted his dinner money and daubed him in Tipp-Ex. Adults turned a blind eye. Their children did CSEs. They voted Labour. Morris got what he deserved.
Once at school, through the Palladian iron gates, down the pebbled driveway, there were other, subtler risks to endure: his ignorance, for example, of holidays in France, his failure to own a bike, a cassette radio, a record player, his loathing of games. He talked like the dinner ladies; he wore nylon shirts. All these things marked him as vulnerable, open to abuse. His weakness was a temptation to others, an incitement; he drew violence to him – corporal punishment, kneeings, water bombs. He had no comeback, no recourse. He didn’t tell his parents – even at ten he knew it would only sadden and confuse them. All Morris had was his own cleverness. He hoarded it, he built it up like breastworks. He was small and bony, his father owned a hot-dog van, but he understood quadrilateral equations, he was the master of the irregular verb. It was his cleverness which saved him, as always. There were tricks he could perform: naming every UK number one, translating Plastic Bertrand – it was like being double jointed or having pubic hair. It was a thing. It earned him respect and safety. Playing rugby one freezing Wednesday afternoon, he accidentally poked Rory Chaplin, captain of the under-fourteens, in the eye. They were both trapped beneath a collapsed scrummage. Rory had a chest like Tom Selleck; he was already shaving. His fist, as big as a Melton pie, moved back, ready to punch his unlucky assailant. Morris awaited the sensation of flayed lip – the not unfamiliar taste of blood. Then Rory recognised who it was. It was that Morris Gutman, the Mekon, the one who knew the lyrics to every song on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. He stopped, rubbed his ox-like eye and blinked. His fist reversed itself and he shot off like a laser-guided bullock in search of the ball. It had only taken a second, half a glance, but Morris knew what he meant. He was immune.
They called him the Mekon, even the teachers (Meek for short). Dan Dare’s sworn enemy, all brain and no body. It was meant affectionately; he liked it, he took it on board. He was not the cleverest boy at Rotherham Grammar – that was Derek Spencer, whose father was a judge; there was also Lester Krauthammer, who had been born in Austria and was naturally trilingual – but Morris used his cleverness, he made it work for him.
‘You’ll make a fearsome bookie one day,’ Mr Callas his maths teacher had joked. That was what it was like. Even in his pomp there was a tinge of commonness, something vocational about Morris; he could never entirely shake it off. Derek and Lester went to Oxford, Morris went to Sheffield. He got three As at A Level but his Oxbridge interview was a catastrophe – high in his corduroy eyrie the don, who assumed Rotherham Grammar was somewhere in Cumbria, seemed unimpressed by Morris’s ability to memorise and skim. When Morris confessed his ignorance of eighteenth-century French poetry, he seemed faintly alarmed; when Morris admitted a fondness for the sea novels of Hammond Innes, he hastily relit his pipe to cover his amusement.
At Sheffield, he had had to retune his cleverness so as to appeal to women. This was not easy: there was an initial period of disorientation and rebuff. Women, he quickly realised, were not impressed by his ability to recall verbatim the albums of Jasper Carrott or to argue the toss on nuclear disarmament. They were unmoved (one or two seemed actually repulsed) by his narrative poem on the Falkands Conflict, which had won him prizes at Rotherham Grammar. He would need, he realised, new tactics, a whole new approach. The clothes – peg trousers, cavalry shirts, winkle pickers – were no problem. Likewise the hair, shaved at the back and sides, moussed vertical on top. It was the attitude he needed, the repartee. He set to work to transmute his cleverness into wit. It took him about a year. After that he began sleeping with women far above his station: women with double-barrelled names, women who studied Art History. They found him charming, quirky, Woody Allenish. They would never really go out with him, they would never invite him to their homes (which they returned to frequently), but he was tremendous fun, a terrific experience.
If there was a sadness in Morris at this time, it was prompted by his parents. He wanted them to be impressed by his achievements, but when they visited on the train they seemed bemused and at cross purposes. They thought his dissertation very nice, but they reserved their greatest enthusiasm for the spotlessness of the refectory toilets, the reliability of Morris’s new deep-fat fryer. He wanted something they could recognise – perhaps that was why he chose to do a Ph.D. (he would be a doctor!), perhaps (as E had asserted angrily more than once) that was why he had married. If so, his tactics were quite wrong. As his parents grew older they retreated, their vocabulary shrank and their willingness to acknowledge new experiences disappeared entirely. They wished Morris well, but it felt to all three of them like he was disappearing over the horizon.
The Bangor calamity followed his father’s death by three months. It was from those events that he dated his current woe.
‘I’m like a piece of wood,’ his father had said from his hospital bed. ‘A useless pork chop.’
The tumour was just above his left eye. When he first went in for radiation they marked him up with a black felt pen: little arrows and dots like a treasure map. When they brought him back from the hospital, he had lost the use of his remote control. He fell down in the toilet; he wept and asked for tripe and pictures of his granddad. It was hard to say whether he was becoming more himself or less. Morris felt he should do something, as if cancer was a problem he could solve. He had come to think of his brain as infinitely flexible, up to any challenge. While his mother responded with food – extraordinary puddings, jelly laced with protein powder
– Morris went on the Internet and yelled at the consultants. None of it worked. His father chewed and chewed but had forgotten how to swallow. Brown, masticated goo dribbled out of his mouth and back on to his barely-touched plate. As she scraped another Tesco ready-meal into the bin his mother shed silent tears of defeat. At the hospital, Morris explained carefully how his father’s life might still be saved; he mentioned the names of radical treatments, invasive possibilities. They offered him leaflets and freephone numbers, they suggested addresses he could write to, groups he might join. But Morris had never been a joiner.
As his father’s coffin disappeared behind the electric curtains of the crematorium, he felt the clay of his brain hardening in his head. Death was like a furnace: firing, fixing. When Underseel gave him the scholarship speech three months later, Morris had no elasticity left, no give. All he could think of was to lower his sights – Eccles not Banbury – and return to his work.
After that came marriage, then Molly, and through it all the interminable quest for employment, the endless interviews and self-promotion like a mirror image of celebrity. Perhaps he was fighting on too many fronts; perhaps he needed to rationalise. What was he talking about? He was already fucked. He had just made the biggest mistake of his life, bigger even than choosing to write his dissertation under the supervision of Underseel. He had left Dirck van Camper, stepson of Firenze Beach, for dead on the tarmac waste of the Dalton Street car park. Even if he was never caught, even if Dirck van Camper lived, how could he bear the knowledge of what he had done? Not just the reversing but the running away? He would break under the strain; he could already feel it inside him, taking him over like a virus, like an unlicensed drug.
When E came downstairs with Molly it was too late; Morris was consumed by the unspeakableness of his dilemma. All he could do was glare.
‘I had this dream about my mother,’ E said. She was heating Molly’s milk. Molly was playing with the fridge magnets. ‘We were bungee jumping, but she wanted me to stop because of the baby, she said it might fly out on its own. The bungee cords were sort of umbilical. What do you think it means?’