They asked him about our sex life.
’Would you say you and your wife had a good physical relationship?’ asked the policeman.
Let it be recorded. ‘Off and on, satisfactory. I mean, fine,’ said Mr Connors. ‘Sometimes good, sometimes not so good. Like most people. We’ve been married ten years, you know.’
‘Was she ever maybe a bit too much for you? Too demanding?’
‘I wouldn’t have said that was a problem.’
He was trying to guess what I might have answered, and hoping our two stories would agree. That’s the charade the police force on you, with their insistence that it’s up to you whether you answer or not. With their tissue-paper sympathy and their watchful eyes.
‘D’you ever stray, I mean, have you ever had an affair?’
‘No.’
‘What about your wife?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘She was your first girlfriend, wasn’t she? You’ve never looked at another woman?’
‘Looked? I don’t know about looked. I’m happy with the relationship we have—’
They have investigated our lives. They have found amongst our books and videos adult movies, arthouse movies that they construe as pornographic. They have invented a sour, twilight existence for the woman who stays at home although her son is seven years old, and the man who works at home except when he goes on mysterious trips away. The man who finds the adult workplace and his adult wife too demanding. Everything looks bad in their light.
‘Don’t you see what they’re doing?’ I yelled at him. ‘They’re setting you up as some kind of pervert, and you can’t stop them. Damned if you answer, damned if you don’t.’
‘They won’t find any evidence,’ said my husband, shrugging, ‘will they?’
We looked at each other for a long, long moment, until I could see nothing but the mushroom cloud, boiling and silently thundering up into the sky. What can happen? What does it matter? It doesn’t matter if they call Eric a pervert, it doesn’t matter if I scream in the Post Office. Nothing can be worse than this.
Destroyer of Worlds.
‘I’m going to follow him,’ I said, ‘I want to know everything. I don’t care how bad it is.’
* * * *
Nothing hurts. You could saw my leg off, I’d feel nothing. Being ‘hounded by journalists’ is not a torture, being interviewed by the police is not a torture, making appeals on the TV is not a torture. Don’t pity the families in these cases, pursued by the greedy, prurient media. We feel nothing. I’ve felt more outrage over an unwanted piece of junk mail, long ago, than over a tabloid reporter on the doorstep, or the sting of a camera flash in my eyes. I couldn’t care less. I walk out. I go and stand in the street. I lean against the wall of the bus shelter, waiting.
I see a boy in a black quilted jacket and black trousers coming out of the Post Office. I know why nobody saw him, he is totally anonymous. There is no sign of the baby’s body I loved, no sign of the sweetness of his smile. When he was five he once confided in meI keep getting stiffies...Where on earth had he picked up that expression? In the classroom, obviously, other children have older brothers. Had he any idea what he was saying? I don’t think so. Once, I lost him for ten minutes in our public library. When I found him he said he’d gone to the toilet for a wee. He’d gone into the Gents alone because he thought he couldn’t go in the Ladies without me. Very proud, very independent. There was a man in there, he said. Who looked at me, and I was scared. The Gents at the Public Library is unsafe for little boys. Thinking like this is a disgrace, but what is to be done? My blood ran cold. I said, don’t go there again.
But I can’t keep on going in the Ladies, he said. Not all my life. So what will I do?
I’m following my ghost down the street. There must be someone with him, taking him away, but I only see my child. He’s walking aimlessly, oh how I love to see him when he doesn’t know I’m watching. To see him look into a shop window, to see him bend down over a piece of litter, studying it, hope springing eternal, has he won a million pounds? He walks on, carrying this old crisp packet, his companion: little boys need to have something to hold. A stone, a ball, a pencil, an elastic band; a boiled sweet furred in pocket-grime. Of course I won’t tell him but of course I know...this affection for the object is easy to read. I am not repelled. When he gets older I will remember these days and I will understand a young man’s obsession with his favourite toy, his faithful companion, his treasure. Having a son will explain the whole sex to me, at long last.
The boy on the street stops and half turns: a stilled frame, quivering. He’s looking back, seems to look at me with an expression of intense malignity, eyes narrowed, inhuman rage—
He has read my thoughts.
He will never be a young man. He is dead.
I saw him again at the railway bridge. He was up there, crossing the line. I still could not see who was with him. I was in the car park, all the suburban commuters’ cars in rows. Everyone has their place, I imagine. Eric doesn’t like to drive, he walks when he comes to take the train. The boy on the bridge looked back at me, with incredible hatred.
I followed him, we climbed over the fence and into the wasteground beside the line. Brambles, unkempt winter grass, weedy sycamores, naked straggling buddleia thickets with dead flower spikes. Rusting cans, rotted litter, slugs and snails, blackened ballast, the view from a train window. A path like a grey snail’s trail, a little boys’ path. Is it true that he came this way, or is the ghost lying to me?
Who brought him here? What happened?
There’s a hut by the track, the roof of tar paper, the slatted walls obliterated by crusted grime. It’s a den, a hideout, it’s somewhere things can happen out of sight. My path is heading towards it. No ghost now...but then suddenly there he is. I don’t understand what I see, then I realise he’s naked. A flash of pitiful white arms and legs, a face blank oval, and in the quivering frozen frame he’s running, brambles whipping his little ribs, rusty cans bruising his bare feet, I can’t hear him but I know he’s crying, terrified and shamed. He’s running and running, crying for help, but there’s someone catching him—
How do you kill a little boy? By accident, is my best hope. You want him to stop screaming, you’re afraid someone will come. You took him to a lonely place but it had to be somewhere nearby and now it isn’t lonely enough. Big adult hands, squeezing the child’s throat, or throwing him down, and his fragile temple crashing against stone. Something like that, in a moment. He was fighting for his life and he didn’t know he was going to lose until he’d lost. He didn’t die helpless, he didn’t die smothered, pinned, held down, knowing the whole world had betrayed him—
I found myself crouched by the snail path, fists in my pockets, head bent, dizzy and nauseous. The vision had gone, but I was seeing in my mind’s eye my baby’s skin darkly marked, printed with the pattern of that black jacket, clear as frost flowers. I’ll tell the police, I thought. They won’t believe me, but they’ll come here and search. They’ll leave no stone unturned. I listened to the distant hum of traffic, and looked at my watch. The ghost had led me where I wanted to be led. I knew that, really. I stood up and went on down to the track.
I was beside the railway line, walking up and down, looking at my watch, shivering, oh God, how long between these suburban trains, when Eric arrived. I saw him coming, I didn’t try to get away. ‘Come home,’ he said. ‘Hazel, come on home.’
‘How do people kill themselves? I don’t know how to do it. But I’ll find a way.’
He nodded, and took my arm. I didn’t resist. He ought to say please don’t leave me or all we’ve got left is each other, or someday we’ll make a new life. But ideas like those don’t come. There is nothing left, no human need, regret, affection nor pity. Destroyer of Worlds.
‘You know how I felt about Fery,’ I said.
‘I know,’ said my husband, leading me away. He has never reproached me, he has never said it was your fault, you lost
him. How could you. Ideas like that don’t come either. Not yet.
‘I loved him too much.’
‘Yes. You loved him too much.’
What a cruel thing to say.
* * * *
I have committed a grave crime. I have given birth to a child, and made him my whole world, in a society where children are not safe, where little boys can be taken from the street and never seen again. Now there’s another turn of the screw, they are taking away from me my last memories. They are saying he was already lost, before I ever went out to the shops that morning. They are saying he never walked beside me, he never peeped at the greetings cards in the Post Office with that furtive, tender attention which I remember so clearly. No, they destroy that world. He was lost already, he was long gone. Where did I lose him, and when?
In Delauney’s Park the mothers-with-children, and occasional fathers-with-children, are in possession until school is over. They talk to each other, they play with their toddlers, they nurse their babies. They sit like cows in the grass, silently ruminating over the weariness of broken nights. Then the schoolchildren appear, first from the nursery then from the primary school classrooms. They yell, they run around, they play with dolls or footballs, they pose and swagger and compare the prices of their trainers; they are cruel to each other. But the light changes and the shadows grow. The mothers-with-buggies all go home, except maybe for one lost soul, smoking a cigarette, naked ankles, skirt too short, her baby grizzling vaguely.
When the light has changed the park has a different clientele. Bloodstained needles, used condoms, teenagers and derelicts: all of them no more than decayed and broken-down kids themselves, that’s why the after-dusk playground is their home. They sell illegal drugs, and they bandy words with the schoolchildren, the bold, inquisitive ones who have lingered. Fery was one of those. Always ready to run, he promised me, at the first sign of trouble. Did he stay out too late one evening and I didn’t notice? Did he fail to come home, and my husband was so wrapped up in his work he didn’t know? Eric tells me they are going to search the park again, because of something I said or something someone remembered. The police will walk through the shrubberies in a line, working like a single machine, picking up every scrap of detritus. They will reach into the dark by that bend in the path, where the laurel bushes make their permanent shade, and they’ll find ... I don’t know what. Maybe they’ll find out why it has always felt bad. If a ghost can exist after death then why not before? My son and I used to be sure that spot was haunted.
I won’t watch the search. I think I’ll stay here, in his bedroom, with the soft toys that he’ll never consign to oblivion, the pictures of cartoon animals, the battered childish things that he would have abandoned. I’m lying on his bed, where we used to cuddle together, bedtime, storytime, I’m saying now I have to go and he’s saying, no, stay, stay with me not with Daddy; just for once. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, soft arms holding onto me. He’s only a baby. I don’t have to be in the park, this is the foul place, the place that dogs wouldn’t pass. This is where I lost him. This is where he destroyed all the worlds.
Gwyneth Jones lives in Brighton. A writer of science fiction and fantasy for adults and teenagers (under the name ‘Ann Halam’), she was co-winner of the 1991 James Tiptree Award, for science fiction exploring gender roles. Her young adult novel The Fear Man won the Dracula Society’s Children of the Night award in 1996, while the same year her fairy tale collectionSeven Tales and a Fable was awarded two World Fantasy Awards. Recent publications includeDeconstructing the Starships, a collection of essays and criticism on SF published by The University of Liverpool Press, and a futuristic thriller for teenagers entitledThe N.I.M.R.O.D. Conspiracy from Orion Children’s Books. As the author explains, ‘ “Destroyer of Worlds” was inspired by a newspaper report I read several years ago, about a little boy killed in the same way, or one of the ways, suggested in this story. I had a child of the same age, and the details stuck in my mind as a parent’s worst nightmare.’
<
* * * *
The Geezers
PETER STRAUB
‘Clyde was a hell of a shock,’ Ray Constantine said to Gus Trayham, the man on the next bike.
‘Shock to us all,’ Gus said. ‘You weren’t shocked, you wouldn’t be breathing.’
‘I mean, besides that,’ Ray said. ‘The whole thing reminds me of Paolo. It brings it all back.’ Nine years earlier, Paolo Constantine, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, had died of a drug overdose. Ray’s wife, Fabiana, whom he had met during his Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, had eventually packed up everything she chose to salvage from their marriage of twenty-five years and returned to Italy.
‘Don’t you think it brought Linc back to me? All that misery when he went upstate? Linc passed three years ago, this April.’
‘I remember,’ Ray said. Neither he nor the other three men who met every weekday to exercise in Dodge Gymnasium at Columbia University and lunch together afterwards had known Lincoln Trayham. Gus’s elder brother, but it was an article of faith with them that although Linc may have done some bad things and made some bad choices, as Gus put it, he had been falsely convicted of second-degree murder and railroaded into a life sentence.
For a time, they continued pedalling furiously, though perhaps a touch less so than the three teenage sylphs beside them. One of the sylphs wore a Philips Exeter T-shirt and Spandex shorts and, Ray noted, had not once lifted her stunning little face from a hypnotic perusal of the book propped on the console before her, Killer Diller by Grant Upward, a onetime friend or semi-friend who by dint of writing the same book over and over had entirely eclipsed Ray’s own, less frequent fictions. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have come today,’ he said.
‘Do us good,’ Gus said. ‘Sweat out some pain before we talk to the Man.’
Dismounting more gracefully than Ray, Gus strode past the sylphs and ejected a panting, long-haired beanpole from the bicep curl machine by the simple mechanism of standing before him, lowering his head, and glowering. After the boy muttered an apology and slipped away, Gus adjusted the weights from 50 to 120 pounds, positioned his upper arms on the pad, settled into the seat, wrapped his fists around the handles and began smoothly raising and lowering the stack of weights. Gus Trayham’s father had coached football and swimming at Fisk, and despite the distinguished appearance given him by the bald head, grizzled white beard, and spreading waistline he had assumed as he approached sixty, Gus was the strongest and most athletic of the four friends.
Ray walked over to the lat pull machine located next to the stationary rower, where blond, still nearly boyish Tommy Whittle was going through his reps while answering the bemused smile of a dark-haired girl moving towards the water fountain. Tommy’s acting career was recovering from the layoff imposed by a three-year-old mugging that had put him in the hospital for a month, but people who had watched a good deal of television during the late eighties and early-to-mid nineties often imagined him to be an acquaintance whose name they had temporarily misplaced. Tommy referred to this sense of baffled recognition on the part of strangers as his ‘infamy’. Now he watched Ray lower the seat of the lat pull and said, ‘How do you think they’ll handle it? One on one, or all at the same time?’
‘One on one,’ Ray said. ‘That captain - what’s his name?’
‘Brannigan,’ Tommy said. ‘Like the John Wayne movie.’
‘What John Wayne movie?’
‘Brannigan,’ Tommy said. ‘He played a Chicago cop who goes to London to bring back a suspect. Mid-seventies. Not bad, not bad at all. But I’m a freak for the Duke.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Ray said. He set the pin for 175 pounds and straightened up to grasp the long bar attached to the weights.
‘One on one, huh?’
Ray let the bar ascend, carrying his arms with it. ‘Brannigan is going to park us in a room somewhere and call us out individually. We’ll tell him whatever we know. Are you
nervous, Tommy?’
‘Sure I am. Clyde, that was a hell of a blow. Will you take a look at Leo? There’s a guy who is reallyupset?
Ray agreed with Tommy Whittle’s assessment. Leo Gozzi was executing half-hearted abdominal crunches with long pauses between each one. His olive face had a grey tinge and purple bags drooped beneath his eyes. After Leo’s report of dubious financial practices on the part of his employer, a computer company, had been leaked to the press, first his job, then his marriage had disappeared, and he had moved twenty blocks north into an apartment on West 107th Street, only a block from Clyde Pepper’s two rooms on West End Avenue. It was Leo who had introduced Clyde into their group.
When Ray finished his reps, he moved across the aisle and slid into the back press, the machine next to Leo’s. He had adjusted the weights and begun to push backwards before Leo glanced over his shoulder.
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