by Simon Wroe
The old man pronounced it an excellent idea. This, combined with the news of The Fat Man’s incapacitation, the canceled debt, lifted his mood no end. Was it the thought of a reunion with wife or bookie that cheered him more? Still, it was an improvement. He gabbled about what he should wear for the trip home, how this time meant change. He’d turned over a new leaf, he said, he was no longer the useless human being he once was. He’d changed. Oh, and there was one more thing. Could I pay for his train ticket? He’d spent the last of his money on a present for my mother. A small collector’s edition of model sports cars.
“Your mother is crazy for these,” he kept saying excitedly, though I seemed to recall it was he who loved sports cars, not her. Anyway, I didn’t mention it. The second, less honorable part of my thinking was that if I got him out of London he wouldn’t have the money or inclination to come back. An act of disposal as much as mediation.
From the train, beyond the carriage’s lime green furnishings and the surly trolley steward, a great and ancient city could be glimpsed, as gray as the sky above it, carved from the same solemn temperament. And behind those stone façades: stories, flesh, difference. The land under this bridge, I once read, had belonged to German merchants for centuries, a self-governing Teutonic enclave deep in the heart of Albion. Of course my father was not interested. You could tell him nothing about London. He began arguing with the steward about the price of the Kit Kats, and I was obliged to produce my wallet once more. My father seemed to expect nothing less. As he reminded me between bites, I still owed him fifty pounds from the bet about Harmony. I told him the book on that one was still open. He nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “Some women will take anything.”
Ordinarily I might have read this for a dig, as was my father’s custom. But I don’t think this was his intention.
“Your mother keeps taking me back,” he continued. “Christ knows I don’t deserve it. A very kind woman. She deserved so much more.”
Was this another reference to me? The fallout from Sam’s death. The son I could never be. But all that felt so faint and far away from us now, passing over the river, the sunlight flickering about us through the girders. I would like to think I had grown up. There was no reason why I could not have a civil exchange with my father about my mother.
“She is kind,” I agreed.
My father nodded happily.
“Yes,” he said, turning his head to look out the window. “It’s time I went home.” He breathed in deeply through his nose and sighed.
“Smell that,” he said.
I sniffed the carriage air. It smelled like a train to me.
“Doesn’t the world smell great when you don’t have air freshener being sprayed through the keyhole every five minutes?” he said.
We both laughed, and it struck me, a little spike of sadness in the middle of our laughter, that we had not shared a joke in a long time. It had taken an arrest, a reunion and frequent dispensation of funds, but perhaps it had been worth it, for this.
Around us the city grew slowly out, greens sneaking in among the grays, increasing their share, popping up behind station platforms, between industrial parks. Banks of ivy sprawled over concrete. Buddleias sprouted impossibly from the brickwork. Then we were in the still, patchwork fields and the city’s populous streets and sad shadows and One-Eyed Bruces were just a dream, another version of life I had read in one of my books, and I was coming home again.
Was this right? Home? At the door my mother threw her arms around me.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming up?” she scolded fondly, kissing me on both cheeks. I had forgotten that note of carbolic and old age she carried from the care home. Was that a little more silver in her hair, a little less rose in her skin? Still a handsome woman though, by any standards.
“I was arrested,” I told her by way of hello. “I’ve only just got out.”
Her eyes goggled a bit at that, which pleased me.
“My poor dear!” she cried, then slightly warily, with that voice she reserved for my father, “What happened?”
“An accident, Mum. It’s okay. I’ll tell you all about it.”
She ushered me in, aflutter with big, sweeping sentiments. They stopped short, however, of the other figure on the doorstep.
“Catherine,” he said. His arms came up a little at his sides, an old muscle memory of embrace, then fell quickly when she made no effort to respond. She looked neither surprised nor angry to see him. He nodded toward the front garden. “Daffodils have come up nice.”
She let him in without a word. In the sitting room the old sporting trophies had been cleared away, otherwise the place was pretty much as I had left it, as it had always been. That’s what I mean about my parents—not much changes. My father must have sensed this unchallenged admittance was not the same as an official pardon, for he was wise enough not to sit on the sofa where he had spent so much of the last fifteen years. He chose instead a straight-backed chair near the television that made him the center of attention. He knew an apology was required and molded himself into an appropriate shape—clasped hands, penitent stoop—to deliver it. Unfortunately, that was not what came out of him.
“I see you moved my trophies,” he said. Then, seeing the look my mother shot him, he added, “Which is fine.”
“How’s London, dear?” my mother asked me.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“It’s horrible,” said my father. Whether it was the sight of my mother again, his hatred of the capital, the disappearance of his trophies or simply the effect of sitting upright, he appeared quite moved in his response.
“Are you all right for money?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
“No,” said my father.
“I’ve missed you, love,” she said to me.
“I’ve missed you too,” my father blurted out.
“Dad”—I turned to him—“do you have something you want to say to Mum?”
“Yes,” he said. “I messed up. . . .”
This was true so far as it went. No one could deny that. My mother listened as he outlined his personal disgraces, her face flickering between the hatchet and the muse. He had gambled, he had strayed. Oh, he had been so terribly weak. Here he looked at me. Was that a wink? Was he lying about being untrue? Did he hope, by talking of infidelity, to remind my mother that he was a man of blood and passion? Perhaps this was their bond: somewhere between love and hate, closer to the latter but reminded, by these unsavory proxies, of the former.
He had blamed himself for losing Sam, he went on, and he had blamed that loss for so much. He had hogged the burden of grief. He knew that wasn’t fair or right, because we had loved Sam too, my mother and I. That guilt had also fallen on us and we had not given in. I studied a detail on one of the cushions and did not meet his eyes. My father said he could see his mistake now, and he could change. It was a touching speech, which struck all the right chords. And though my mother’s bitterness was every bit as corrosive as my father’s in its own way, I thought I saw her expression softening as my father talked, the deep marionette lines around her mouth dissolving, the blue-gray eyes taking in new light. In that moment I was filled with hope for my family. As people we had a lot to learn, yet there was some acceptance of that.
But always with my father there were doubts. His record for sincerity was poor. Country cunning lingered in those sharp features. His eyes, small and bright against his spider-veined cheeks, knew many versions of the human condition. Like the mirror in my mother’s room that split the viewer into a thousand different types of self, my father possessed kaleidoscopic properties: he could be many things at once. He was the husband begging forgiveness, who had come bearing gifts. He was the con man spinning his spiel, with some toy cars he’d bought for himself. He was the penitent traveler. He was the man who stole apples from the homeless.
He was the poor dupe who always got the blame. He was the only one who had been near that silver swan above the till. He was the chicken and the fox. He was the thief next to Christ who was saved. He was the thief who was left to rot.
I left the two of them to talk in the living room and wandered around the house awhile. The same pictureless walls. The same tatty show home furnishings. The same damp, unlived-in smell of the house rotting quietly when we turned our backs. The glass on the front door was frosted, not striated as I had remembered. The place was still cold. Behind an old tumble dryer in the garage I found a child’s bicycle covered in rust and cobwebs, its tires flat and jaded. Sam’s bike. I remembered how big that bike had looked to me when we tore through the backwaters together. So shiny, so grown up. I had dreamed of one day possessing it. Now I did not even want to touch it.
Up the stairs, past the window that overlooked the rest of the cul-de-sac, I paused outside his room but did not enter. Not yet. I was still not quite ready. Instead I carried on toward my parents’ room. My mother’s hinged mirror stood in the corner. I pulled the wing mirrors around me and I was back in the endless hall of my childhood, a kaleidoscope of all my many selves, multiplying and dividing according to the angles of the glass. I was the wooden child with books for friends. I was the weak brother, straggling and creeping. I was the brother who survived. Hate. Love. We learn these words so early; we read them in our mothers’ laps. But little boys grow up. Experience outstrips us, and we live with the mistakes we have made. The face at the center of the kaleidoscope was leaner and older now. A man’s face looking back at me: a chef’s.
—
Excerpt from Ramilov’s letters, no. 2: What is done cannot be undone.
Back on the landing I looked again toward Sam’s room. The door was closed. I had not entered since the moment I found him. Now I reached for the handle. Now I stepped inside . . . There were the posters of the shows we used to watch, the teenage footballers long since retired. There were the scrapbooks he had kept and the boots he had run in and the football shirt hanging proudly over the back of his chair, torn where he had snuck under the golf course fence one time to retrieve our ball, restitched by our mother in nearly matching thread. There was the bed where he had rested before . . . Christ, could I not even say it? Before he died. Before the hemophilia took Sam, with a little help.
In fact, hemophilia was shorthand for what Sam had really had: thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura. A different cause amounting to the same curse. His platelets would not clot. The blood was faulty and had to be replaced. But when the doctors took his blood they seemed to take a part of his character too: he became sluggish and overshadowed, adult. In the months following our encounter with the wasps Sam’s movements grew stilted. Like his father on the tee, his hips were not in kilter. Back to the doctors he went, and they found blood in his joints, making him limp. He had never stopped bleeding. They said his blood must be changed again.
I remembered one day around this time, on the way to town, my mother suddenly pulling the car into a foreign lot. It was just the two of us. My brother was at home, resting up on doctor’s orders. My father, preempting medical opinion, was doing the same. Outside it was pouring with rain, and the glum afternoon light had made the windows reflective. We sat there awhile, the wipers still slapping, as I watched my mother’s strong features in the windshield wrestling with the idea. Back and forth, back and forth. Then they made a decision.
We stumbled through the downpour, hand in hand, into church. The metaphors are all there if you want them: deluge and shelter, the passing out of darkness and into light; though if I recall correctly it was pretty gloomy inside that church, more of a passing from one kind of darkness into another. A few figures sat facing the front, regarding the stigmata of the painted wooden Christ, meeting the gaze of those gaping wounds. It was the first time I had ever been inside a church. Of course I’d heard claims of god’s powers, the magic tricks and resurrection stories, but I’d never been inside his house. Looking around it, I was a little disappointed. There didn’t seem to be much to do.
“Stay here,” said my mother. She put me in a pew at the back and went off toward the priest. They talked together in low tones. Concerned, he held his robe of deep tropical green away from the bank of candles. Shadows of a tree reached through the stained glass behind.
“Is it a fatal disease?” I heard him say.
On the walls about him, scenes from the crucifixion.
Jesus is stripped of his garments.
Jesus falls the third time.
“But you must let us know when and we shall pray for him,” said the priest.
Only then did I realize how sick Sam was. So sick, in fact, that my mother and the priest were going to talk to god about it. But something about the way the priest said it rankled me—so casual, as if talking to a higher power were the same as brushing your teeth or cleaning your room. It stripped a lot of magic from the enterprise. I was furious with the priest for that. Here was my mother, ashen with worry, begging him for a miracle, and this scoundrel was waving her implorations away—“Sure, sure!”—as if it were nothing. I’m not sure what my mother thought about it. She’s had a lot of practice obscuring these things.
The prayers did not work. Sam walked ever slower. After the second transfusion the footpaths and backwaters were out of the question. His bike bloomed with rust. Again they changed his blood, but Sam was weak from all the secret wars beneath his skin. Bed was the only sure thing. Piles of blankets, and the unnatural sight of my father attending. Cold palms, sour sheets, windows closed to keep the heat, color fading from the cheeks. Too frail to wipe away the nosebleeds. Stay rested, your loving brother will bring you bowls of soup.
That was my only task. The single thing I was asked to do for Sam. And yet I failed, even in that. I could not understand why my brother would not pull himself together. I felt so ashamed that he had let himself be overcome, that he had allowed this thing to become bigger than him. The boy in front of me was a toothless impersonation of my brother. An insult to the idea of him. This was why I did what I did. Not because I was jealous of him, though he was the better son. No, it was done out of love. I was very young, I know, young and stupid, but I know this much. When I brought him up those bowls of soup I left them on his bedside table a little too far away from him—because I wanted him to get better. Reach for it yourself, that bowl was saying. Have a little strength. If you want it, take it. And if you do, then I’ll know you’ve been hamming up this illness all along. I’ll take it as a sign that you’re all right.
One day in high summer I came back into Sam’s room to fetch the bowl and found the bed empty. For a second I actually wondered if my plan had worked; if he had thrown back the sheets and returned to health. Then I saw the leg sticking out from behind the bed. The angle of it all wrong. I rushed forward, suddenly terrified. Sam lay on the floor between the bed and the bedside table in a heap of thin limbs. His face was turned toward the carpet. A nimbus of blood already framed it, creeping gently outward. I pulled him toward me and held his head in my hands and saw the dark torrent pouring from his nose, the wasps’ nest again but worse, much worse. Around his mouth there was blood also. On the bedside table the bowl of soup sat untouched, still that little bit too far away, just as I had left it. Had he tried to reach for it? How else could he have fallen? Had I done this to him?
“What happened?” I cried. “What happened?”
I was desperate to know, mostly desperate to be exonerated. But whatever Sam knew he wasn’t saying. He was breathing weakly, his eyes opening and closing, trying to choose what to focus on. I grabbed him under the arms and tried to hoist him up into the bed again as his limbs spooled unhelpfully beneath him. His sick body was slight enough that I could lift it, but his limbs were like cooked spaghetti, pulling the center of gravity with them. And all the while the blood kept running and running, pouring out of him, covering us b
oth. In the end I wrestled him back into bed. I pulled the sheet back over him and dragged the soup bowl nearer in case anyone thought to notice. Then I called desperately for my parents.
My father was the first in. We watched together as the life ran from my brother. We stuffed his nose with tissue and wiped the blood from his mouth. My mother phoned the hospital. We did our best to save him, but he was too frail, too frail to stop his own blood leaving him. We could only watch. That hot summer day Sam died. My mother kept asking how he had fallen. She was repeating it like a mantra. My father said it didn’t matter. He saw me standing on the fringes of our tragedy, so quiet and pale, and said we must not blame ourselves. He opened the windows in Sam’s room, but there was no breeze to relieve us, only heat.
—
Excerpt from Ramilov’s letters, no. 3: There are only three ways out of the Kanun’s cycle of revenge.
The targeted man can spend the rest of his life in his house, where it is forbidden to murder him. Or he can retreat to a windowless “tower of refuge,” where he will climb a ladder to the first floor and then pull it up behind him, and where food and drink will be left outside for as long as he stays. Finally, the avenger can refuse to avenge. He will be served coffee with a bullet in his cup wherever he goes, as a reminder of his cowardice and a sign of his disgrace.
—
Excerpt from Ramilov’s letters, no. 4: Mating shortens life.
When I returned to work after the stabbing and the visit home, Harmony came straight up and hugged me, knocking the breath clean out of me. She was so relieved I was all right. The same girl who once pushed my bleeding form aside because I was blocking the mustard, now relieved I was all right. This was an improvement, no question. A worldly betterment not to be ignored.