The Mule

by David Quantick

  Carrie looked at me with, I thought, actual compassion.

  ‘Don’t die for a book,’ she said. ‘Especially not this one.’

  ‘I know what I’m doing,’ I said. ‘Although I agree this book isn’t worth dying for.’

  ‘Nothing will be gained by you doing this,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘Please give it to me.’

  ‘Or me,’ suggested Frant, as if casually.

  ‘I’m not giving it to anyone,’ I said. ‘Except the police. When all this is done, I’ve no doubt you can all argue your case in court. Or settle between yourselves. I really don’t mind.’

  ‘Put it back!’ said Frant, lunging ineffectually at me. I stepped back nearer to the door.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ said Madame Ferber.

  ‘He wants the money,’ Frant said.

  ‘I don’t want the money,’ I said.

  ‘Then you have nothing to gain from this,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘Your action makes no sense. You fail to benefit financially. You certainly fail to benefit romantically as I doubt that my daughter is in love with you.’

  ‘You can’t know that,’ I said, and wished I hadn’t.

  ‘Trust me,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘Unless you are a drug dealer or a very rich man, she might sleep with you but she cannot love you. I feel partly responsible for that, I suppose.’

  I tried not to look at Carrie, but failed. I was almost relieved to see that she was trying just as hard not to look at me.

  ‘And you fail to benefit the majority,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘In fact, you harm the majority. Whatever my dispute with him, it will be resolved in my favour—’

  Frant snorted like a pony.

  ‘And when it is resolved, I think I might publish the Von Fremdenplatz documents under my own name, creating not just wealth for myself but also pleasure for hundreds of thousands of people.’

  ‘You bitch!’ shouted Frant.

  Camilla waved the gun at him and he subsided.

  ‘By taking the books with you now,’ Madame Ferber said to me, ‘you at best delay that moment. Your action is therefore meaningless as both a selfish act and as a humanitarian one.’

  “I thought the books were a student prank you wanted to suppress,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she said. ‘Besides, all my children matter to me, no matter how weak their father is.’

  ‘Not all of them,’ I said and motioned for Carrie to get to her feet. ‘Please don’t try to follow us,’ I said, taking her hand.

  ‘No!’ said Carrie sharply. ‘What are you doing?’

  I pulled her towards the door, holding the bag in front of me.

  ‘Give me my bag!’ shouted Frant. Before anyone could move, he grabbed the gun from Camilla. Carrie was standing right in front of me. I pushed her away, and he fired. There was a sudden dull thump in my chest. I looked down at it as I fell. The bag in front of my chest had a hole in it. The hole was smoking. I slipped my hand into the bag as I hit the ground and two books spun out, the Alice and a Von Fremdenplatz.

  ‘How about that,’ I grunted. ‘Saved by books.’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Frant.

  I looked down. The books hadn’t been touched by the bullet, which had gone straight into me.

  ‘You could have avoided all this,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘You didn’t have to do this. Now you’re dead, like most idiots.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘I’m the Mule, I don’t give up.’

  I thought I heard sirens. Then I heard nothing.

  PART THREE

  Translation is a form of close reading, an act of criticism, not creation, and the need for new interpretation becomes apparent when new ideas arise with the passage of time.

  Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a coma, but it’s very odd and not at all as I would have imagined. For a start, you are at once in the world and out of the world. I would say that sometimes you are in one and sometimes the other, but that would mean that time was something you experience in that state. At various junctures I found myself listening to the conversation of doctors and nurses and hearing snatches of news stories about arrests and shootings, but also being in different places entirely.

  One minute – although there were no ‘minutes’, just events overlaid on each other – I was completely present in the room, eavesdropping on a somehow familiar voice talking to a nurse and it was real in every way except I couldn’t see or move, and the next, or rather the same, or possibly the preceding, moment, I would be back in the room above the bar in Paris, unable to move as Frant fired, not at me but at the girl. Then I would feel a thermometer’s thinness in my mouth, or a hand on my skin, but at the same time I would be in another bar with a martini, watching a girl cry as she looked at photographs of herself.

  And once I was drifting into sleep in a small overheated room when suddenly I was in a city.

  *

  The city was full of sunlight. But it was cool despite the sunshine, and a breeze ran through its wide streets. I was in a large square, surrounded by tall, evenly spaced buildings. There were people about, but I could only see them out of the corner of my eye, and they seemed vague and stretched, like the figures in an architect’s drawings. A fountain played nearby, and in front of me there was an abstract sculpture on a small area of grass.

  I had never been in this city before, but I thought I knew it. Perhaps I had seen photographs and drawings. I felt thirsty, and got off the bench where I had been sitting to walk over to a small kiosk selling hot drinks and cans of soda. I was about to buy a cup of tea when I realised there was another customer there already.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I didn’t see you there. Please finish your order.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said the other man. ‘Let’s order together. Two teas, please,’ he said to the vendor.

  He turned to me and smiled. It was my father.

  * * *

  We sat down on a bench. My father looked exactly as he had done the last time I had seen him. He was even wearing the same aftershave.

  ‘The weather was like this on your birthday,’ he said.

  I knew which birthday he meant. I was quite small then.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.’

  ‘You were crazy about the Wild West. You wanted to be a cowboy,’ said my father, smiling. ‘You were always playing with little plastic cowboys. I kept finding tiny guns everywhere.’

  ‘I had a cap pistol,’ I said, remembering. ‘But I never had any caps.’

  ‘That birthday we gave you the cowboy outfit,’ said my father.

  ‘I don’t remember that,’ I said. I was puzzled. A cowboy outfit would have been a big deal to me when I was a small boy. I would have been very excited. I would have worn it every day and there would be photographs of me in my cowboy outfit, waving my cap gun.

  ‘You didn’t want it,’ my father said. ‘We were so surprised. There was a hat, and a waistcoat, and a pair of cowboy trousers.’

  ‘I can’t believe I didn’t want it,’ I said.

  ‘It was because of the trousers,’ said my father.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Were they too big?’

  ‘Not that,’ said my father, smiling again. ‘They fitted fine. It was the pictures.’

  I was very confused now. ‘What pictures?’ I said.

  ‘The trousers had pictures on them. Like drawings,’ said my father. ‘Pictures of cowboys. And that’s what you didn’t like.’

  I understood now. ‘I wanted to be a proper cowboy,’ I said. ‘And a proper cowboy wouldn’t have pictures on his trousers. Especially not pictures of cowboys. It wouldn’t make any sense. It was just wrong.’

  ‘That’s what it was?’ said my father. ‘We never could figure out why you didn’t like the pictures. We thought maybe you were frightened of them.’

  ‘I’m sorry I made you go,’ I said.

>   He got up from the bench. ‘Finished your tea?’ he said, and took my cardboard cup from me. He dropped both cups in a bin.

  ‘You didn’t make me go,’ said my father. ‘I did.’

  * * *

  I woke up. I was in the hospital. There was a woman sitting beside my bed, reading a magazine.

  ‘Hello, Mother,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, hello, dear,’ she said.

  I tried to sit up.

  ‘Be careful,’ she said. ‘You’ve been lying down for several days, let the nurse help you up.’

  ‘I had a very odd dream,’ I said.

  ‘Please don’t tell me about it,’ she said. ‘I can’t stand other people’s dreams. Would you like some water? There were apples but I think they’ve gone off.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, and was surprised to discover that I was fine. I felt my chest. There was a bandage.

  ‘Don’t play with your dressing,’ my mother said. ‘You were very lucky, they said. The bullet hit a bone and went off sideways.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Where am I, anyway? Is this a prison hospital?’

  ‘No. What a silly question,’ said my mother. ‘This is the same hospital you came to see me in. Isn’t it funny? You came to see me and now I’ve come to see you. I can’t stay long, I’ve left Duke at home and he’s not at all continent.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s good of you to come.’

  ‘Every day for a month,’ said my mother.

  I tried again to sit up.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ my mother said. ‘There are stitches and I’m not going to put them back in.’

  She stood up. ‘I’ve got to be going,’ she said, and leaned over to kiss me. ‘Anyway, you’re only allowed one visitor at a time.’

  She left, and I wondered what she meant. Then the door opened and Carrie came in.

  * * *

  I have read that in these circumstances it’s common either to be struck dumb or to act in completely the opposite manner and just allow a stream of queries to fall from your lips. I seemed to have opted for the latter, if the word ‘query’ means a lot of single words beginning with ‘wh’. ‘What?’ I said. ‘When – why – how?’ (‘How’ doesn’t begin with ‘wh’ but what the hell, this isn’t a test.)

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘We were in that room, and I was – I left you. With them. I don’t—’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Carrie. ‘I’m going to do something my mother and father could never do. I’m going to tell you a story.’

  And this is the story she told.

  * * *

  A long time ago in a not very good university (she began) there were two bright kids. One of them was called Anna and one of them was called Alan. They didn’t have a lot in common other than the fact that nobody liked them. Anna would sit in the library reading books on her own and Alan would take his dinner in the refectory alone and nobody bothered them or asked them how they were doing.

  One day, so I’m guessing, they bumped trays in the refectory or she dropped her library book and he picked it up or they were stuck together in a hot study period and one of them asked the other if they’d like an ice cream. One of those things, or maybe not, I don’t know. But somehow Alan and Anna met and they started – not dating, because they weren’t the dating kind. But they had stuff in common. Alan liked reading all kinds of weird books, fantasy novels and fairy tales and anything set in a made-up place. If it had its own language and its own swirly alphabet, then so much the better. If he’d had any friends, Alan would have been fighting war games with armies of elves and whatnot, but he didn’t, so he just read these books.

  Anna liked reading too, but she was more high-faluting. She favoured the great writers – Goethe, Schiller, Henry James, Joseph Conrad – she had her own list of authors to be admired. She liked anyone with a heavy touch and a dour outlook, so much so that she would scribble down not just their own words of wisdom but a few of her own, which were terribly derivative but that didn’t bother her. Anna was looking for the tone, for the voice.

  One night as they were sitting in Alan’s awful student bedroom, Alan called Anna’s attention to a short story he was reading. It was about an encyclopedia from another world that somehow took over our own world. Alan was all fired up about this, because the encyclopedia was not just made up, but it was in a different language and it was an enigma. Normally Anna got annoyed when Alan read stuff out to her, because it was all about gnomes and pixies, but something about this story got to her. Maybe it was because it was an encyclopedia and that made it more serious.

  Over the next few weeks, Alan and Anna just couldn’t let go of this idea, and one day as they sat over herbal tea looking at their fellow students – some of them smoking dope, some of them horsing around and quite a few just looking dim – Alan, or maybe Anna, proposed their idea for a great hoax. A real encyclopedia from another world. Or maybe this world. There would be no way of telling. It would be in a new language, and it would describe, in words and pictures, a place nobody had seen. Only, because it was in this new language, it would be a mystery. A complete enigma.

  Alan worked on the language, and Anna used her time in the library to source the most obscure photographs and images. Their first efforts were feeble; the new language looked like mushy Esperanto, while the pages of the ‘encyclopedia’ resembled a cheap punk fanzine. But – and this is what made them different to other pranksters – they didn’t give up. Anna found printers and typesetters and spent her inheritance (she had a pretty nice inheritance) on better quality paper. Alan worked hard too, and as a test of his skills translated Alice Through the Looking-Glass into his invented language. Anna had two copies of this book printed to see if her printers were up to the job.

  After that, there was no stopping them. They began to leave copies of their mysterious book in university libraries all over the place. They produced perfect forgeries and they made academics into fools as the ‘experts’ fought over interpretations of their work. They had succeeded in their great task.

  Unfortunately, the stresses of producing this epic, for which there never could be any financial reward, were too much for Alan and Anna’s relationship, and they fell out. Alan saw the documents as his way to wealth and fame while Anna, who had nearly completed her first novel, had different plans. They quarrelled bitterly, and Alan left. Anna completed her first novel, and discovered that she was pregnant.

  * * *

  It was getting dark outside. Carrie turned on the bedside light and sat down.

  ‘So my mother raised me, and never spoke about my father,’ Carrie said. ‘I used to ask all the time of course, but she just told me to shut up and got on with writing another damn book. Then one day she called me in and showed me a picture of a monkey in a hat. It turns out the monkey was my dad. Then she told me the whole story about the Von Fremdenplatz and I said they were both crazy and I didn’t want to hear any more. She said fine and so we never talked about it again. Case closed.’

  Carrie paused. ‘Except I tracked the old monkey down, and I found he was working in some college facility,’ she said. ‘I wanted to see him so I got a job there, right under his nose. And then guess what I found?’

  ‘The translated Alice,’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ said Carry. ‘The second Alice, that they put into a library.’

  ‘I thought it vanished,’ I said.

  ‘My mother took it,’ she replied. ‘As insurance against the future. She loved him then but she didn’t trust him.’

  ‘Your family…’ I began.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I stamped it so it looked like it was from the facility and then I was all, oh, Mr Frant, look what I found. He went crazy trying to look bored but I could tell it had got him going.’

  ‘He had no idea there were any copies of the Alice at large,’ I said. ‘So I’m guessing that gave him an idea. If he could use the Alice to get some gullible sucker interested in the Von Fremdenplatz, he could get the same suc
ker to take him to Paris …’

  I could feel my eyes widening with realisation. ‘And if that sucker happened to be one of the few people who knew Madame Ferber’s address, Frant could engineer it so they’d be on the run from the police and just have to hook up with the one person who never wanted to see Frant again.’

  ‘Almost,’ said Carrie. ‘You see, when my father revealed his grand plan to me, I could see the holes in it from space. What if you didn’t fall for it? What if you refused to take him to Paris? It was a stupid plan. It lacked the human element. Me.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Why would you go along with Frant? You didn’t even—’ I stopped. ‘You told her,’ I said. ‘You went back to Madame Ferber and you told her what had happened between you and Frant.’

  ‘I was hoping she would be pleased,’ said Carrie. ‘I thought if she knew I’d been talking to my father, maybe, I don’t know, we could be the three of us again.’

  I couldn’t imagine a worse family unit but I said nothing about that. Or the fact that I had been used. In fact, ‘used’ wasn’t a strong enough word for it. The entire family had taken turns at pulling my strings. First Frant, inventing the whole horrible plan. Then Carrie, adding herself as a human lure. And finally, making sure it all worked and nobody went off the agreed track …

  My head was reeling. ‘And that’s why your mother is Henry J.’

  ‘I used to call her Henry James when I was a kid,’ said Carrie. ‘Because she wrote like she was constipated and she wanted so badly to be a great author. It used to drive her crazy.’

  ‘All that stuff in the notebook about Henry J offering you a bright new future,’ I said. ‘Because you thought she was encouraging you to make friends with your father. Then you realised she wasn’t all she was cracked up to be.’

  ‘She wanted to get Frant to come to her, play his dumb hand, and make sure he didn’t bother her again. She used me,’ said Carrie.