A Line of Blood

by McPherson, Ben

  Max came into the kitchen. ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘why don’t you like Mr Ashani?’

  ‘I do like Mr Ashani, Max.’

  ‘So why don’t you care that he’s dead?’

  ‘He isn’t.’

  ‘He didn’t flush his toilet this morning. He always flushes it after breakfast.’

  I laughed. ‘Mr Ashani isn’t dead, Max. Maybe he just hasn’t been to the toilet yet.’

  But Max was serious. ‘He is.’

  ‘He isn’t.’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘He can’t be.’

  ‘Have you heard him in his house today, Dad?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about yesterday?’

  ‘I wasn’t really here yesterday.’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Max, I know you’ve had a terrible shock with the death of the neighbour. But Mr Ashani isn’t dead.’

  Max went out of the kitchen into the front room. I glanced at Millicent; Millicent looked down at her food.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  I heard the front door open, could hear traffic from the street.

  ‘What?’

  ‘So maybe you could not jump right in and tell him he’s wrong, when we don’t know if he’s wrong.’ She cut a strip of steak.

  ‘Oh, come on. Of course he isn’t dead.’

  Through the wall I could hear Max ring Mr Ashani’s doorbell. Percussive, old, like a school bell. You could feel the vibration through the wall. Millicent chewed thoughtfully at her steak. I could hear people walking past in the street.

  Millicent took a slug of wine. I heard Max ring the doorbell again. No other sound from the house next door.

  ‘The man has a life,’ I said. ‘He’s out.’

  ‘Maybe so.’

  ‘You think Max is right?’

  ‘I just don’t think he’s necessarily wrong. It has been kind of quiet here.’

  The bell was still ringing through the wall. Max must be leaning against the bell push now. Millicent was staring at me.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘All right.’

  I got up and went to find Max. He was standing in the street, leaning against Mr Ashani’s brass bell push.

  ‘I’m sorry, Max.’

  ‘It’s OK.’ He took his weight off the bell push; the ringing stopped. ‘Do you think he could be dead, though?’

  ‘I’m sure he’s fine.’

  ‘Do you want to ring?’

  ‘If he’s in, he heard you, Max.’

  Max got down on his knees, lifted the brass flap on the letterbox and looked through into Mr Ashani’s front room. Then he put his lips to the gap and shouted, ‘Mr Ashani!’

  I had forgotten how piercing Max’s shout could be. ‘Max,’ I said, ‘don’t.’ I looked up and down the street.

  ‘OK. Can you wait here, Dad?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Please, Dad?’

  ‘All right.’

  He went inside our house and up the stairs. The heat of the day lay heavy on the street even now: the sunlight dirty yellow, the air thick with car noise and pollen. In an hour the sun would be down, but the oppressive heat would remain.

  Max came back downstairs with something in his hand. A thin blue shaft, ridged, slightly curved. He knelt on the mat, and pushed it through Mr Ashani’s letterbox.

  ‘What’s that, Max?’

  Max held the handle between his thumb and his forefinger, seemed to be adjusting the angle slightly, staring straight along it. He pushed back from the door and stood up.

  ‘He is, Dad.’

  ‘Is what?’

  ‘Dead. Look.’

  He handed the instrument to me. I recognised the handle of one of Max’s old toothbrushes. He had cut off the bristles, and it looked as if he had used heat to angle the head upwards, then glued a small piece of mirrored glass to the head.

  ‘Clever,’ I said. ‘How did you do this?’

  ‘I used a candle to melt it.’

  ‘Max,’ I said, reflexively. ‘You know you aren’t supposed …’

  ‘Yeah, Dad. I know. But look.’

  I knelt down on the mat, pushed the toothbrush handle through the letterbox, tried to look down the shaft at the reflection in the glass.

  I saw nothing. It was dark in Mr Ashani’s house, and the bristles around the letterbox obscured my view. I looked up at Max.

  ‘You’re not doing it right, Dad. You have to turn it so you’re looking downwards.’

  I looked back in again, tried to remember how Max had held the brush. I took the handle in my thumb and forefinger, leaned my other fingers against the bristles inside the letterbox to push them out of the way, and closed my left eye. Slowly, very slowly, I rotated the handle until the mirror was angled towards the floor.

  All I could see in the mirrored glass was a fraction of a whole; it was hard to form a recognisable image from the tiny pieces I could see. Then I found it. There, glistening dully, a small greyish ovoid around a smaller, darker grey circle.

  It was an eye. It could only be an eye. And yet it was far too wide open, like an eye drawn by the hand of a small child.

  It was as much as I could do to steady my hand. I tilted the mirrored head to where the other eye should have been, and found nothing. I tilted the mirror back, found the first eye again, and realised that its shape had confused me. It looked far too symmetrical to be real; the tiny muscles around it must be drawn tight in all directions. The slope near the temple was so steep that it matched the slope by the nose. I tilted the mirror in the other direction and this time I found the other eye. I stared at the eyes for the longest time, tilting the mirror from one to the other. They were looking straight up at me. Too open. Too alert.

  I could make out details in the shadows now. I tilted the handle, followed the contours of the man, dark skin against the dark lacquered floorboards. Now that I had the eyes I knew where to look for his other features, turning the handle in tiny increments.

  ‘Max,’ I said. ‘Find Mum. Get her to call an ambulance.’ How long had he been there?

  ‘But Dad, he’s dead.’

  ‘Call an ambulance, Max.’

  My first kick achieved nothing. My foot stopped dead against the hardwood door. I felt the pain in my thigh, then felt it wind me like a blow to the groin. The door barely shook in its frame. I took a step back, breathing heavily. There were two locks, and I had kicked at the bottom of the door. Stupid, really, to think that would work.

  This time I aimed directly between the locks, kicked out with the sole of my foot. The pain was bearable; I was ready for it. The door, however, did not move. I was getting nowhere. I didn’t have the strength.

  I went inside our house and fetched a claw hammer from the drawer in the kitchen.

  I knocked out first the lower lock, then the upper. The door swung back against the security chain, and I leaned into it until the chain broke from its mount. The door caught again, but I forced myself through the gap, then realised that I had pushed the door hard against Mr Ashani, forcing his wrist backwards. His arm was bent out of shape. His eyes stared upwards.

  I knelt down beside him, straightened out his arm. His hand was warm, but it was hot in his front room. Still, there was no smell. Didn’t death have a smell?

  ‘Mr Ashani,’ I said. ‘Mr Ashani?’

  The sharp pleats in Mr Ashani’s cream trousers looked absurd now, drooping across themselves. His stomach flopped across his fly. I put a hand on his chest, but could feel no movement.

  Please, let him live.

  As I was wondering how to take the pulse in his neck he blinked.

  ‘Mr Ashani?’

  I leaned forwards, pressed my nose against his. Nothing. No discernible breath. His skin was perfectly smooth, his eyes stared upwards at nothing, too wide, too awake.

  I waited with him for the ambulance. People walking past in the street looked in, saw me sitting with Mr Ashani’s head in my lap, and walked on. No one c
alled out to me through the door. Perhaps I seemed to have the situation under control.

  Twice more I thought I saw Mr Ashani blink. I talked, hoping my words might reach him. ‘Help is coming, Mr Ashani. Emmanuel … Emmanuel, help is on its way.’ Not once did he stir.

  The ambulance crew found a pulse. They raised Mr Ashani on to a stretcher, sought out veins in his arms and legs, attached him to a clear bag of saline solution. Max was with me now, watching in fascination as the paramedics injected Mr Ashani twice in his upper thigh. Adrenaline, I guessed. Or was that something they injected into the heart?

  I knew nothing about his next-of-kin, so I gave them my name and telephone number. A policewoman I didn’t recognise asked me what had happened. ‘It’s my son,’ I said. ‘He knew something was wrong.’

  Max stood, legs planted wide, at once proud and shy, shading his eyes in the sunlight.

  ‘And I rang 999. By myself.’

  ‘I think you may just have saved your neighbour’s life, son,’ said the policewoman.

  ‘But what if he dies? Could he still die?’

  ‘You did the right thing, son.’

  I let Max do most of the explaining, watched as he weighed his words before speaking – slow, measured, and very adult: ‘I became concerned when I realised … Mr Ashani’s normal routine … My father and I felt …’

  Later when he asked for money for a cheeseburger I said yes. ‘And chips, Dad? Can I have chips?’

  ‘Anything you like, Max.’

  ‘Anything? Really?’

  ‘You saved Mr Ashani’s life, Max.’

  ‘But you don’t know that yet. He could still die. And I’ve already had a hamburger.’

  ‘Max,’ I said, ‘go and buy yourself a burger.’

  It was a relief to have something I could tell my mother over the phone: a heroic narrative, with Max at its centre; a narrative that made sense of our being here in London, so far from where she was. ‘He saved the man’s life, Mum.’ A story she could share with friends over bridge: her husband’s bravery, passed down the male line to her grandson. Family pride.

  ‘Alex, get up.’

  Morning light. Curtains open. Millicent at the end of the bed, fully dressed. ‘Get up. Now.’

  She threw underpants, a t-shirt and a pair of trousers on to the bed.

  I dressed, peed, threw water on to my face. What is this?

  Downstairs in the kitchen the lights were on. Millicent handed me a cup of coffee. ‘Sit down.’

  ‘What’s going on, Millicent? Where’s Max?’

  ‘School,’ she said. ‘Here.’

  She pushed something across the table top at me. A flat enamelled yellow tin. Gold Block Virginia tobacco.

  ‘I mean, I guess I pretty much think that our son has a right to privacy, and that I’m a bad mother for searching in his school bag, only I didn’t search it. I made him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and put it in a brown paper bag with a note telling him I was a proud mom and that he was my boy-hero. Kind of intentionally hokey but also true, right? Because I thought maybe it would embarrass him, but in a good way. Only inside his lunchbox was this.’

  I picked up the tin and turned it over in my hands. The enamel was pocked, the metal beneath rusted.

  I opened the tin. A pair of pliers with pointed jaws. A small disgorger for removing fish hooks from fish gullets. Some flattened-out pieces of sheet lead. A steel penknife with a four-inch spike.

  ‘Are you serious?’ I said. ‘These are fishing tools. Where’s the problem, Millicent?’

  ‘The problem is underneath.’

  I lifted the tin at one end so that the tools shifted to the other side. There, underneath, was the edge of a photograph, all faded greens and blues.

  There was an intensity to Millicent’s eyes that I hadn’t seen in years. ‘Take out the picture, Alex.’

  I drew it out by the edge.

  The first thing I saw was the smiling faces. The next was the khaki: two men in short-sleeved shirts, short trousers, grey socks, black boots. They were standing in a clearing in the jungle, white-skinned against the dense foliage. The men looked healthy and relaxed, proud even, displaying their trophy for the camera, smiling broadly. Both were making victory signs with one hand; their other hand held their victim aloft by the ankles.

  The third man’s skin was darker than theirs. His clothes were torn and bloodied, his eyes forced almost shut by the bloating and the bruising on his face.

  ‘Oh. Oh, God. What?’

  Millicent’s eyes bored into mine. ‘That’s Korea, right?’

  I looked at the victim. His features were so distorted that it was impossible to guess at his ethnicity.

  ‘It could be,’ I said. ‘It’s hard to tell.’

  ‘No, Alex, it is Korea. You didn’t look closely enough.’

  And then I saw it. Something about the hair, and the jawline. The white man on the right of the frame was my father. I looked up at Millicent. She nodded.

  ‘Did you ever see this picture before?’ she said.

  So young he was; so fresh of face. I had never seen the picture before. I shook my head.

  ‘Alex, did you know?’

  ‘I suppose I knew it was a possibility.’

  ‘But you didn’t ask?’

  ‘No. You don’t ask, do you?’

  ‘You don’t ask? Really?’

  ‘That could be anyone’s father, Millicent. It was war. It could be your father.’

  ‘Actually, no. My father burned his draft card. Pretty much the only good decision he ever made. So no, one thing this could not be is my father.’

  I held the picture up again. How happy he looked, smiling out at the comrade-in-arms who had taken the picture. I wondered if he had shown it to my mother, passed it around during dinners with close friends, whether he had intended that Max should see it. He had certainly never shown it to me.

  ‘New question,’ said Millicent.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I should have checked the fishing bag before I gave it to Max.’

  ‘OK, well, we agree on that. On Friday he took it to school and showed it to a boy called Ravion Stamp. Apparently they got in a fight.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘No, but you could have known. Why would you not check? What’s the message here? Like, the men in your family solve problems by violence?’

  ‘Don’t reduce my father to this, Millicent. This …’ I picked up the photograph ‘… is not who my father is.’

  ‘Alex,’ she said, ‘I get that this is hard for you. But you have to protect Max from shit like this.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I could no longer tell where grief for my father began and ended; there were no clean lines around the fear that the police would charge me, nor around the gut-wrenching shock of the discovery of the neighbour’s body, nor the fear that Mr Ashani too would die.

  ‘The hard bit,’ I said at last, ‘has been trying to do it all without you.’

  ‘You could let me in a little,’ she said. ‘We could work on things together.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘you have such clarity. You’re better at this stuff than me.’

  ‘We are better when we work together at things, Alex. You wouldn’t screw up like this. And I wouldn’t …’

  ‘… seek solace in the arms of other men?’

  A wounded look on Millicent’s face. I was sorry as soon as I’d spoken the thought.

  ‘I didn’t mean that. Please.’

  ‘OK, Alex. Sure. But can we at least try to work together?’

  I looked at the picture of my father, smiling out at his unseen comrades-in-arms.

  ‘OK, Millicent,’ I said, ‘because I do know you’re right.’

  Sitting in the cinema with my father: the helicopters and the flame throwers, the screams of the animals and the children.

  It was my father’s reaction that frightened me most. He sat rigid in his seat, as if to attention, and shook me o
ff when my hand sought the comfort of his. The explosions lit up his face, and I could see that he was crying. I sat silently, trying for his sake to be brave.

  That was the only time I saw my father cry. When we came home he sat rigid again in his comfortable chair, smoked pipe after pipe.

  I should not have asked my father if he was all right. He took off his belt and made me lift up my shirt. Then he struck me eight times across the back with the leather end. I counted each blow. The beating left welts upon my skin but it did not last long, and I did not cry out.

  I remember thinking how odd it was that my father had used the belt he had worn as a soldier. He confused me even more as he was putting it into his drawer afterwards; he apologised for what he had done, and told me I was a good boy. He asked me to forgive him, and said he would understand if I felt I had to tell my mother.

  I never cried in front of my father. I never told my mother about the beatings, although she must have known.

  I was eleven when the beatings stopped. Max’s age.

  For a week I worked like a dog. My boss was prepared – grudgingly – to forgive me for allowing my work to slip (he knew that Dee liked me), and I needed his forgiveness. ‘These are people we can not disappoint,’ he said. ‘Do not disappoint them.’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. I needed his money.

  My day began at seven and ended at two. I saw Max and Millicent over breakfast and over supper. The rest of the time I spent at the production office, dutifully ringing my mother on the walk to the station. In my lunch breaks I briefed the assistant producer, leaving her to set up the American shoot and make arrangements with Dee.

  On the Monday Mr Sharpe rang. He wanted to speak to me about Max. I asked him to ring Millicent. She was better at these things, I said, and I had work to do. On Wednesday my American visa arrived, and on Thursday I handed to the edit producer my log of the footage I had seen so far, along with notes for what to do with the remaining twenty hours, which she promised to view over the weekend. If I was stressed or agitated I did not notice.

  On Thursday evening I left a long message on Dee’s answering machine; I told her I was sorry I’d been busy, but that I had a programme to finish, and that she could call me tomorrow at home.