Anarchy

by James Treadwell

She found hotels around the castle, all either expensive-looking or closed. She wheeled on at random. A petrol station at a nondescript roundabout ambushed her with a horribly vivid memory: she’d been there before. She’d stopped there to get a snack and a bottle of water more than once, on family excursions to the amusement park outside the town. If it had been December the ambush would have wounded her badly, but by now she’d been assaulted by pitiless memories and associations so often that they no longer had the power to stop her in her tracks. All right, Mum, but can we get a Magnum on the way home? She’d have said no. Her own voice was never in the memories—she was nothing to herself anymore—but nevertheless she was sure her answer would have been no. It seemed like all she’d ever said was no. No you can’t, don’t do that, no you’re wrong, no there isn’t, no I can’t see anything.

  She found a chain hotel out toward the motorway. The boy asked her to pay up front. “Sorry about that,” he said. “It’s just the way things are going.” She gave him cash, without protest. The room was so barren and bleak, she didn’t dare look at it. She left all the lights off, fumbling around in the near dark to unplug the phone from the wall.

  • • •

  The silent calls had started not long after she’d been released from the hospital.

  “Hello?”

  No response. Nothing, not even a hiss. She hung up, shivering, feeling weepy. She was shivery and weepy all the time in those days.

  The second one was just a few hours later.

  “Hello?”

  Her husband was just coming home. She saw him through the window, loafing down the street with his homecoming gait, as if checking out each house in the cul-de-sac to see which was going to make him the best offer of dinner and bed. She hung up quickly and said nothing about it. She said nothing to him about anything, as far as was possible. They’d already had every fight there was to have, exchanged every mutually predictable barrage of detestation and blame, but it still felt as if the tiniest misplaced word or the most briefly unguarded tone of voice might trigger the whole thing again and leave her blown about by a tempest of hatred so furious she’d be wrecked by it.

  The third time was two days later. Those first few times the calls only came when she was alone in the house.

  “Hello?”

  That afternoon was when she’d managed to get up the stairs for the first time, to the first floor where her son’s room was. She hadn’t been in his room since December, before her wild drive and the crash. Despite her pleading and her threats her husband had “tidied up,” as she’d known he would. Some things were moved. Some were even gone. While she’d been lying broken-legged and drugged into oblivion he’d come in here and touched things, thrown things away. She was still weeping on the boy’s bed when the phone rang and wouldn’t stop ringing.

  “Hello?”

  Then and there she understood what the silence was about. She curled up, nestling the handset close to her mouth.

  “Gav?” she whispered.

  She was certain the silence was listening. It felt like a nothing that was somehow there, a presence at the other end of the line.

  “Gav, love. I’m here. It’s me.” She was suddenly terrified that he’d hang up on her. “Please don’t go,” she said. Like the gust of roaring air that preceded an onrushing train, she felt pain coming, fast. “Please forgive me.” Even saying that much was too much. She started crying again, the kind of crying that was like being garroted. She didn’t stop until long after she’d dropped the handset to the carpet.

  The next time, a couple of days later, she begged him to talk to her. “Anything at all. Just one word. Please, Gavin. Please.” But he was determined to punish her. The silence was the worst possible reminder of his absence. I’m not here, it said, continuously. It was the same as the message he’d left. She’d played that message tens of thousands of times until it had stopped sounding like her boy speaking at all, until it was like the inscription on a gravestone. (Nigel had erased the message while she was in the hospital. It was only making things worse, he said, you know it was.) “I deserve it,” she told the silent caller. “I know you’re doing this to hurt me. It’s all right, love. I don’t mind. I just want to know if you’re okay. Can’t you just say that, and nothing else? Once? Please?”

  The occasion that cured her of these agonizingly hopeless conversations with her missing boy was when one of the calls came in the evening, for the first time.

  She couldn’t get to the phone as fast as he could, of course. It took her twenty seconds just to get out of a chair and into her crutches.

  “Stokes.” Her husband always answered the phone with this curt bark, a dog woofing his territory. Gets the other bugger on the back foot, as he put it.

  “Who’s there?

  “Hello?

  “Bloody nonsense.”

  She gripped her hands together. If it turned out the silence would speak to him when it hadn’t spoken to her, she knew she’d kill herself that very night. But he tossed the phone down with an irritated shrug. “No one there.”

  After a few more days of silent calls he complained to the phone company, and then the police. Equally useless, he said. “Nothing we can do?” More like, “Can’t be arsed.” One evening he began shouting at the silence. He went red when he shouted, like someone in a cartoon. “I don’t know who you are or what you want or why you think this is funny, but when I find you I’m going to— Okay. I’ve got your number and I know where you’re calling from, so you’d better start watching yourself, because I’m going to teach you a fucking lesson, I’ll—”

  “Stop it!” she screamed at him, banging both fists on the table, spilling coffee. “Stop it! Don’t talk to him like—”

  He flung the handset at the sofa. “You stop it!” He was red up to his bald patch. “When will you . . . just . . . stop . . . being . . .”

  They stared at each other, balancing on the very edge, again.

  “Ah,” he said, in something nearer his usual register. “I get it now.”

  He took an invisible step back from the invisible precipice. He fetched the phone, carefully replaced it in its base, then sat on the sofa, rubbing his face.

  “There’s no reason to think it’s him,” he said. “Think about it.”

  She started crying. She’d have given almost anything to master that reflex, to stop herself bursting into tears all the time like a particularly hateful, spoiled four-year-old girl, but it had become as automatic as sneezing.

  He sighed noisily, to show how much of a burden her unhappiness was to him. “It’s just some crank,” he said. “Or a glitch. Probably a glitch. There’s stuff like that going around. I don’t think there’s anyone there at all, it doesn’t sound like someone not talking. It’s probably a problem with the line. Just rings for no reason. I’ll get BT to send someone round.”

  She mopped up the coffee spill with her napkin, still crying.

  “It’s not him,” he said. “When he’s ready to get back in touch he will. You know that. I know that.”

  She managed to gather enough breath to speak. “You don’t know anything,” she said.

  “Here we go again.” She wasn’t looking at him, but she could hear his eyes rolling.

  “You’ve been in his room. You’ve thrown things out.”

  “What the hell are you doing going upstairs?”

  “You wouldn’t tell me if he rang.” It was her worst fear. “Would you. You’d do anything to stop him coming back.”

  “Iz. Listen to me. You cannot haul yourself up and down those stairs. You’ll break your neck.”

  “I want to break my neck.”

  “Oh, God help us.”

  “I do. I want to.”

  “Let me know when this bit’s over.” He went to the kitchen. She heard unscrewing, clinking, pouring. She was shaking, staring at the invisible clif
f, willing herself to go over it and fall and shatter. She felt as though she was falling all the time, but she never hit the bottom. Time went on. The awful evening continued, like all the other awful evenings. He came back in holding a drink, leaning in the doorway, looking patient, sensible, long-suffering.

  “I understand you don’t want to hear it,” he said. He was the voice of reason. “But this is what happened. Your sister spilled the beans, he flipped out, they buggered off together. You can tell me all you like that I don’t know and I wasn’t there and this and that and the next, but I’m sorry, Iz, it doesn’t change the simple fact. She had the brilliant idea that Gavin of all people was ready to hear that particular piece of news, and surprise surprise and knock me down with a bloody feather, he didn’t take it too well. And it’s just filthy bad luck that it happened to coincide with that, with that hoax about the bird and all that, which we both know is exactly, is exactly”—he had to speak louder and more firmly to keep going over the noise she was making—“the kind of thing that Gwen loves, and it’s even worse luck that every spotty leftie moron in the country chose the same moment to descend on Gwen and all the other morons and—”

  She staggered out of the chair, reaching for a crutch to hit him with, missed, fell over, and knocked herself out.

  The calls continued, day and night. Thanks to what he called “pulling strings,” a policeman eventually came, resulting in a conversation that if anything went worse than the one that evening. By steps that were gradual and somehow inevitable, it progressed from the topic of nuisance calls and harassment to the whole sorry history of her efforts to locate her son and sister, including the official warning from the Devon and Cornwall police after she’d threatened them with legal action and personal violence, and culminating with her mad wild drive southwestward into the worst winter anyone had ever known and her humiliatingly predictable accident on an icy road on the flank of Dartmoor. The officer, very junior, very young, visibly terrified by the presence of a madwoman, strained so hard to be professional that it made her shame even worse, as though with every sentence it became more obvious that she belonged to a different category of person from him, the category it was his job to keep an eye on and (if necessary) lock up: the wrong’uns, the irredeemable. When he began to explain—forced calm, stumbling over words—the protocol for missing persons, as if she hadn’t heard it a thousand times before, as if she hadn’t spent whole days being fobbed off with believed to be in the company of an adult relative and not treated as a criminal investigation until evidence arises to suggest otherwise and exceptional burden of cases at present and please try not to alarm yourself, Mrs. Stokes and his message indicated that he intends to make contact in future so our advice is to wait, however difficult that may be, then she could no longer contain herself, and she metamorphosed into the harpy of grief and rage her husband found so deeply, deeply embarrassing. There was, of course, nothing the police could do about the calls, strings or no strings. Try British Telecom, the officer suggested as he fled.

  She stopped thinking it was her boy calling. Harassment, creeping malice, prolonged cruelty—that wasn’t him. When he wanted to make her feel bad, his weapons had always been indifference or contempt. Go away. Just leave me alone. The blank teenager stare. He’d always hated the telephone anyway. He wouldn’t have done this to her. He wasn’t nasty.

  She spent countless hours thinking about that. She searched her memory, looking for something to explain the, in retrospect, completely baffling imbalance between his lack of nastiness and how nasty they’d been to him. The more she searched, the more astonished at herself she became. Was she uniquely evil? she wondered. How could someone as evil as she have got on in the world all those years, got a degree and a worthy job and a marriage and a house? Why hadn’t she been blasted by divine judgment, or done away with by the first paladin of decency who’d happened to pass by? Or were all parents like that, without knowing it? She remembered lots of time spent agonizing about whether she was a bad mother. How could it not have been obvious straightaway how pointlessly vile she’d been? No wonder he’d run away with Gwen. Kind, sweet, silly Gwen. She’d run away from herself if she could. She’d run away from herself that very instant, if it wasn’t for the fact that her tibia was cracked.

  One evening, after her husband had picked up the phone and woofed and listened for a second and hung up, she said:

  “Maybe it’s Miss Grey.”

  He went quiet in a different way from the usual. Nineteen years of marriage, and here was something a little bit new, a behavior she couldn’t interpret immediately. Perhaps, she thought, he’s going to hit me. She’d felt it coming for a long time, like living with an incurable disease. He turned the page of his newspaper instead, deliberately, neatly.

  “Good an explanation as any.”

  “She might be missing him too.”

  “Iz.” He tipped the paper down. “I want to help you get through this. I really do. I want us to help each other through this. He’s my son too, actually. I’m not having the best time either, actually.” He looked at her with intense, heroic sympathy, the look of a martyr. “I honestly think the only way we’re going to manage is if we try . . . if we stay . . .”

  “Sane?” she offered, after a pause.

  “Focused.” Ah, the vocabulary of the sports pages. He always fell back on it when he was trying for sincerity, or otherwise varying from his normal emotional range. Dislodged from his established territory of sarcasm or hectoring, his only lexical handholds were the clichés mouthed by the few people he envied (because they were good at what he wanted to be good at and as rich as he wanted to be). “If we”—he meant you—“can just try and focus on what we. Actually. Know. The facts. It’s hard, I realize.”

  “He might have been telling the truth.”

  Her husband pursed his lips and angled the paper up again, shaking its corners.

  “Don’t you ever think it was odd?” This was another point she’d reflected on increasingly often. “I mean, he could see we hated it, and God knows it didn’t make him happy either, so why . . . why did he carry on? If he was just making it all up?”

  The front page, now raised to her eye, had a big picture of the young pilgrim woman who’d been on TV and who spoke so powerfully. Hair everywhere, a scarf that looked like it was knitted by her dotty grandmother, big untrendy glasses not concealing the passion in her eyes. Ruth, her name was: from a Christian commune, they said, though she wasn’t preaching any orthodoxy now. Spotty leftie moron. The headline read: self-appointed prophet turns sights on money.

  “Well,” the voice behind the newspaper said, “next time she rings you can discuss it with her yourself.”

  She actually tried to, but she couldn’t. Guilt choked her. She couldn’t say the words again, Miss Grey, not even when she was all alone in the house except for the cavernous silence at her ear. Her lips closed to make the m and stayed shut as if glued. She was thinking of the months, the years, she’d spent devising strategies to prevent those two words being spoken in her house: talks with her husband that went on till midnight, talks in coffee shops with the two or three other mothers she trusted with the information that her son was delusional, talks with doctors, counselors, a vicar. (A vicar!) When she was five she’d fantasized about waking up one morning to discover that she was actually a fairy. That was what it was like trying to persuade herself it might be Miss Grey on the other end of the line.

  Whatever world her boy had lived in—a world where birds appeared in your bedroom and a knight in black armor carrying a spear trudged beside the car park on Wimbledon Common and people with the heads of animals waded through the river and an invisible old woman was your best friend—it was too late for her to pretend she lived there too. She tormented herself at night with thoughts of how simple it would have been. Gwen managed it, after all, apparently quite happily, with no harm to herself or anyone around her. Would it have be
en so bad? Where had it come from, this default assumption that thinking and talking like her younger sister would have made life ridiculous or impossible? Gwen seemed to get on well enough down there in the country doing whatever it was she did. Gwen hadn’t ended up married to a person she didn’t like, doing a job that ate so much of her energy that except on weekends and holidays, the part of each day she enjoyed most was going to sleep. If she’d only been a little bit more like her sister, her boy would never have run away. But it was too late now.

  Or so she’d thought.

  The first appointment British Telecom could give them was almost three weeks away. Hopeless at the moment, they said. Problems in the supply chain, they said. Huge numbers of reported faults, unexpected staff shortages. Her husband raged and tried to pull more strings. They popped out and dangled limp in his hands. The calls continued, one every day or two. She got rid of the crutches and began to walk. To her eyes the outside world had a tinge of strangeness. Nothing felt quite real. The supermarket delivery van stopped coming. The company’s software had caught the Plague. They had a name now, those mysterious inexplicable hiccups which manifested themselves in things that weren’t supposed to be unpredictable: the Plague, capital P. Over prepackaged dinners he talked about how things were getting serious now, as if their lives before had been a kind of joke; this was oddly like the kinds of things the spotty leftie morons were saying, though she didn’t bother pointing that out to him. Getting serious now. It sounded about right to her. Now we’ve lost our child, now the thing I love most in the world has been torn away, now at last we get serious. Now we can stop arsing around. Now we get the message. But was it welcome? And who was it from?

  • • •

  On 9 February the phone engineer rang the doorbell. It was Thursday, and as far as she knew he wasn’t due until the following Tuesday, but she was nowhere near caring about such details. He stood in the doorway as if he owned the place, smiled all the time (although it was a kind of inward Mona Lisa smile with no warmth in it), and kept his eyes on her. He smelled faintly of something almost like pipe smoke, something heady, burnt, bittersweet. His face was Middle Eastern but his voice was all England, bizarrely so, as though he was in fact a classical actor moonlighting for BT between jobs. She showed him where the phone line came into the house and he told her to undress. The whole process had a weird quality of fatefulness. Some script had been written and she had no choice but to stick to it. She wondered afterward whether she’d in fact just been raped. No other way of describing it seemed appropriate, and yet there’d been no sense of violence, no aura of fear and shame. It had just . . . happened. She was turned so she didn’t see anything. There was a nova of pleasure quite terrifying in its intensity, almost as if it wasn’t her pleasure at all, as if she was merely hosting it. Then there was an aftermath of kneeling down on her own, staring at the floor, and then he might have said something about the fault being fixed.