What She Knew

by Gilly MacMillan

  Be careful what you assume, is what I’d say to that. Be very careful. I should know. I was married to a doctor once.

  I’m also interested to know how uncomfortable you feel now. Whether you’re regretting our agreement. Remember the roles we allocated each other? Me: Ancient Mariner and Narrator. You: Wedding Guest and Patient Listener. Do you wish you could shuffle away yet? Refill your glass perhaps? Now that my grip is loosening whose side are you on? Mine, or theirs? How long will you stay with the underdog, given that she’s so beaten now, so unattractive? Displaying here and there signs of mental instability.

  If I were to make a final bid to keep your attention I suppose I would say that if it troubles you to hear these things from me, to witness my descent, then perhaps you can take heart from the fact that it pains me very, very deeply to confess them.

  When, finally, the darkness outside my studio began to dissolve that morning, I pulled my chair away from the computer, tore my horrified eyes from the screen. With ice-cold fingers I pulled my dressing gown around me and I watched the grainy night contours of my garden morph slowly into a strangely lit morning where the rising sun tinted the pendulous clouds so that they were not entirely black, but colored instead with bruised fleshy tones, burnished in places. It was the kind of light that nobody would mistake for hope.

  Back in the kitchen, it felt as though I was meeting my possessions after an absence. I boiled the kettle, and realized that I hadn’t done that myself for days, because Nicky had done everything. Almost out of curiosity I opened the fridge, having no idea what was in it, and found cooked meals, in labeled containers, prepared by Nicky before she left, and half a pint of fresh milk.

  At the kitchen table, warming slowly as the heating in the house cranked up around me with its familiar clicks and clonks, I began to look at Ben’s schoolbooks.

  There were five of them. There wasn’t a great deal of work in each one as it was so early in the school year, but I started to work through them: math, literacy, spellings, a history project, and a news book.

  The first page of the news book made me smile.

  Ben had drawn a picture of a huge bed, which filled the entire page. In it was a small stick figure. Underneath it he had written: “I spent the hole weekend in bed.” There was a comment beside it in red ink: “Are you sure that’s all you did, Ben? I expect you did something else. The drawing of the bed is nice.”

  It even made me smile, because it was nonsense, and I thought simply: this is the world I want to be in, the imaginative, funny world that’s my son.

  I knew then, with perfect clarity, that if Ben didn’t survive this, then neither could I.

  JIM

  Five of us turned up: me and four men in full gear. Black clothing, bulletproof jackets, caps that hide your eyes, and shoes with soles that were thick enough to do damage. All my men were armed. All of us wore earpieces, to keep in radio contact. I was leading.

  It was 05:00 hours. It was dark. Early morning hush was settled over the neighborhood like a blanket.

  We parked quietly around the corner, killing the car engine quickly, and when we got out we didn’t talk, communicating with gestures only. Three of us stayed at the end of the driveway, in the shadows and out of sight, and we waited there silently while I sent two around the side of the property.

  We didn’t want anybody slipping out of the back.

  Streetlights revealed that the bungalow was in bad condition, in contrast to the neighboring properties, which were immaculate, their front gardens displaying neatly trimmed lawns, and tended borders containing closely clipped shrubs like shiny suburban trophies.

  The flower beds in our bungalow’s garden were overgrown, and the lawn was muddy and unkempt, but the metal gate at the side of the house had shiny black paint on it and its latch didn’t squeak when my two DCs opened it and sidled through it.

  My guess was that its decline was recent.

  There was a single garage to the side of the bungalow; its door was shut but in good shape, and the driveway had been expensively relaid at some point recently. There was no crunchy gravel to give us away. There was also no vehicle in the driveway, no curtains drawn at the front, and no lights on in the house, and I hoped to God the place wasn’t empty.

  On my signal, two of the men approached the front door and stood on either side of it, tucked in, so that they weren’t visible through the frosted glass in the door, not until they were ready to be.

  There was a security light above them, but it didn’t come on. They had a battering ram with them, a black metal cylinder, so that they could break down the door if necessary.

  They didn’t look at me. They were focused on the door, waiting to hear my voice in their earpieces. “Go,” I whispered into my radio. I knew the command would transmit loud and clear, and they didn’t hesitate. They rang the bell, hammered on the door, shouted through the letter flap: “Police, let us in. Police!”

  The noise ripped through the predawn stillness.

  By the time a light came on in the hallway of the bungalow the other properties around us were lit up like Christmas trees and we were about to bash the door in.

  A woman opened it, just an inch or two at first, suspicious eyes peering through. She looked as though she’d been asleep. She wore tracksuit bottoms, plastic clogs, and a nurse’s tabard. My men pushed past her. I followed.

  “Where is he?” I said.

  She pointed toward the end of the hall opposite. One of my men was already down there; the others had gone into the front rooms. I ran down the hall, but even before I’d traveled those few paces I knew it had gone wrong when my man said, “In here, boss,” and his voice sagged. He stood in the doorway just ahead of me and his body language had relaxed, adrenaline gone. There was no threat.

  As I pushed past him, he said, “He’s not going anywhere.”

  In the middle of the room was a hospital bed. In the bed lay a man, his eyes wide balls of fear. He was underneath a white sheet that he’d pulled up to his neck with fingers that scrunched the material tight. A hospital band was visible on his wrist. The only clue to his relative youth was his brown hair. His face hung from his bones and his skin was gray apart from high red spots on his cheekbones, from fever, or morphine. He was hooked up to a pump. An oxygen mask was attached to his face, the elastic digging into his cheeks, and a bag of dark orange urine hung from the side of the bed.

  Beside the bed was an armchair, and a table, with books on it, along with a laptop computer, a remote control for the TV that sat on the chest of drawers in a corner, and a cardboard tray for collecting vomit. Beside the door was a wheelchair.

  The nurse was beside me now. “He’s dying,” she said. She had tribal scars on her face, two rough, raised lines on each cheek, and eyes that told me that she’d seen death before.

  I turned to my man. “Search the garage,” I said, but I already knew that there’d be no sign of Ben Finch.

  RACHEL

  Zhang phoned me midmorning. She’d just parked on my street, she said, and, no, they hadn’t found Ben but could I let her in? She wanted to speak to me.

  I listened at the front door for her footsteps, reluctant to open it until I knew she was there. A peek from my bedroom window had told me that overnight the numbers of journalists had dwindled to just two or three, but I didn’t want to give them a photo opportunity.

  When I heard her footsteps, and I heard the journalists call out to her, I began to undo the latch, but the expected ring on the bell didn’t come. Instead I heard her curse. I opened the door a crack.

  My doorstep was awash with milk. It covered the front door and dripped down onto the doormat at my feet. It pooled onto the short front path and it was littered with broken plastic. A pair of two-pint bottles, my twice-weekly delivery from the milkman: full fat for Ben and his growing bones, semiskimmed for me. Smashed to pieces.

  I pictured hands throwing them, feet kicking them, the impact, the explosion of white liquid, the dirty, messy a
ftermath, and I knew I was meant to understand it as a rebuke, that it labeled me as a woman with a filthy doorstep: such an old-fashioned taint that marks you out as the worst, sluttish kind of woman. I read it as snide vigilante justice, the domestic equivalent of a white feather through the door.

  You can see how my mind was rampaging, now that I was cornered, and alone.

  “Rachel, go back in,” Zhang snapped. “I’ll deal with this. You go in.”

  I did as I was told. She borrowed a mop and a plastic bag to gather the debris, and when she came in after cleaning up I said, “Do you think somebody did it on purpose?”

  “I can’t say that for sure. It might have been an accident.”

  “You know it wasn’t.”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “Did they see who did it?” I gestured toward the journalists.

  “They say they didn’t. They say it was like that when they arrived this morning.”

  “They’re liars.”

  “Rachel, it’s nothing. It could have been an accident. Don’t let it get under your skin.”

  But it was too late for that.

  We went down to my studio, taking the dog. I couldn’t bear to be near the front door, with its smeary residue of vandalized milk that shamed and frightened me.

  In the studio I put the heater on this time, embarrassed in front of Zhang to indulge in the predawn masochism that had compelled me to sit in the cold while I looked online.

  Zhang told me about the letter then, and about the dawn raid that had turned up a dying hoaxer.

  “He was a broken person,” she said. “His child died during surgery, when Mr. Finch was operating.”

  “Was it John’s fault?”

  “No. It was a very risky operation. The father had been informed of that, and the child would have died without it. John wasn’t at fault. Nobody was.”

  “Was it a boy or a girl, the child?”

  “I don’t know. Apparently the death drove the father mad. He’d been bringing the child up alone anyway because the mother had died. Also to cancer. He wrote a series of letters to the hospital threatening legal action, but he had no case against them, so it was hopeless. And now he has terminal cancer himself. The whole family, wiped out by that disease.”

  “How did he know about Ben?”

  “He saw it on the telly, recognized John, and he thought it was a chance to get back at him. That’s all it was, a spiteful act. I’m sorry. We’re not back at square one though. We’ve got other avenues to pursue.”

  Her words were reassuring in themselves, but I could see that it cost her an effort to arrange her features into an expression of optimism.

  As she stood up to leave, my photographs caught her eye.

  On the wall above my desk was a collage of pictures I’d taken over the years, and almost without exception they were portraits of Ben. They were my best work.

  They were mostly in black and white, and mostly taken on old-fashioned film and developed and printed by me, in a darkroom I’d rigged up in the garage of our family home. John had been happy to hand the garage space over to me. He wasn’t a DIY man.

  My camera of choice had been a Leica M20, given to me by Ruth and Nicholas. I processed the films myself, and spent hours poring over the negatives, deciding which ones to print.

  The printing process was a joy: the murky red light in which images of Ben emerged from the chemical soup, a kind of alchemy, painting with light, bringing something from nothing. It was a wobbly, unreliable, unpredictable process, yet it yielded images of such beauty and power, and I never tired of it.

  The photographs I took weren’t the brightly lit studio prints that are ubiquitous now, where families are pictured against glaring white backgrounds, mouths agape, dental work on show, in poses they’ve never before adopted. Artifice, all of it.

  I preferred to work with light and form, with what was there already. I started with the idea that I would be lucky to capture just a scrap of the beauty of my child.

  Once, when Ben was about five years old, I came downstairs very early one summer morning to find a dawn light so softly crystalline that it seemed to have an ethereal presence of its own.

  I roused Ben gently and before he was fully awake I asked him to sit at the breakfast table. It had been a hot night and he wore just pajama shorts. He sat and gazed at the camera with a frankness that was perfect. In the finished photograph, it’s as if you can see into his soul. His hair is messy, his skin has the texture of velvet, and the contours of his slender arms are perfect. There are no harsh lines in the picture. Blacks fade into grays and into whites, and shadows draw the features of his face and torso. They describe sleepiness and innocence and promise and truth. Only deep in Ben’s eyes is there a glint of something that is of its moment. It’s a flash of light, a white pearl, and although nobody else could tell, I know that the pearl is the reflection of the window, and of me, taking the photograph.

  It’s the best photograph I’ve ever taken, and probably the best I ever will take.

  Zhang stared at that photograph for a very long time. She held her coffee and stood in front of it and in time steam stopped curling above her hands. Then she looked at the others too, the various manifestations of Ben, of Ben as he was to me.

  He was a toddler examining something on a summer lawn, with a lightly furrowed brow just visible under a sun hat; he was a close-up of two chubby baby feet and a study of hands with tiny, fragile fingernails and knuckles that had newborn wrinkles but not yet any solidity; he was his profile, the softness of the skin on his temples, the crisp curls of his eyelashes just visible behind; he was a distant silhouette jumping a rock pool on a spectacular cliff-edged winter beach.

  There were so many and Zhang studied each one. Occasionally her radio made a sharp noise, a crackle or static or a voice. She ignored it.

  “These are just beautiful,” she said.

  I was lost in the pictures myself when she said it, and her sincerity was unexpected, and felt unfiltered.

  “You’re the first person outside the family to see them,” I said.

  ‘Truly? I’m honored. I really am.”

  Her voice caught. She had to take a moment to compose herself.

  “I tried to learn photography when I was younger,” she said. “My dad bought me a camera, an old-fashioned one. It was a film camera. I was fifteen years old. He set me a project. He told me to go out and take photographs. He drove me to a place called Old Airport Road, in Singapore, where I grew up, because he was in the army, you see. Anyway, on Old Airport Road there’s an old-fashioned food court, so you know what I mean, lots of stalls selling street food of every different kind, a photographer’s dream really. My dad told me to take photographs of the food. I had to ask permission from the stallholders and my dad sat and watched while I spent ages preparing my shots and looking at the different angles and shapes, and after two hours I’d taken my twenty-four photographs. We dropped the film off to be developed and I couldn’t wait to go and collect it the next day, I was so excited. I had one of those ideas you have when you’re young, you know: I’m going to take one roll of film and be a famous photographer. I was that excited. But when I went back the next day and the girl in the shop gave me my packet of photographs, I pulled them out, and every single one of them was black.”

  It was the most I’d ever heard her talk. “What happened?” I asked.

  “Well, I looked at my dad, I had the same question on my lips, and he said, ‘That will teach you not to leave the lens cap on.’ I was so angry with him for not telling me.”

  “Did he know? While you were taking the photos?”

  “He did. That’s what he’s like though. He believes you should learn things yourself, do things the hard way.” She smiled wanly. “It worked. I never did it again.”

  “That’s what I was trying to do for Ben,” I said. She kept her eyes on the photographs. “In the woods, when I let him run ahead. Because I thought that being independ
ent would let him feel life, be enchanted by it, not fear it, or feel that he has to follow a set of rules to get through it. Because it’s tough.”

  She said nothing. She turned away for a moment and the silence was awkward. When she turned back her eyes were red and she put a hand on my arm, and said, “I’m so sorry, Rachel. I really am.”

  Once Zhang had gone I went back into the house, driven by the need to be near the landline in case of news. The silence was hard to bear, and I tried to console and calm myself by looking at Ben’s books again. I revisited the page where he’d drawn himself spending the whole day in bed, before I turned over to see what he’d written next.

  The following page was startlingly colorful by comparison. Greenery filled every corner: trees and plants in strong confident lines, and a dog that was obviously meant to be Skittle. Short straight lines slanted across the page, over the other images, as if somebody had spilled blue sprinkles across it.

  “On Sunday Mummy and Skittle and me walked in the woods,” he’d written. “It was raining all the time.”

  I turned another page. The next week’s drawing was very similar. Ben had written: “We walked in the woods agen on Sunday. I found a very big stick and brung it home.”

  There was a comment in red ink: “Your walks sound lovely, Ben. Excellent drawing.”

  Another page. A different drawing: a picture of a bowling ball, a crowd of children. “I went to Jack’s bolling party and Sam B won,” he’d written.

  Red ink: “Brilliant!”

  Another page: trees and foliage again, a swing hanging from a branch, a child beside it, wearing red. Ben was a good artist for his age; the images were clear.