Significance

by Jo Mazelis

‘Are you arresting me? Are you arresting me, sir? Please, I need to know. I need to…’

  The metal door swung shut, silencing Joseph. Noise like a rung bell. Or like a crowbar hitting an oil drum. He sat on the wooden bench and put his head in his hands.

  That was a bad game they played once, Abrahim and James had persuaded a smaller boy to climb inside an empty oil drum they’d found. They were both smiling at the kid and so he smiled too. The kid was wary at first, but those smiles must have convinced him that these were friends. Joseph thought they might pick the barrel up and run around with it giving the boy a ride as if he was in a plane or rocket ship. The three of them lifted the barrel and rocked it to and fro. Joseph looked down into the small boy’s face to see excitement only faintly tinged with fear.

  After a time Abrahim began to push more violently while the other two tried to resist. They battled back and forth for some time, the small boy inside hardly aware of the struggle between good and evil being fought on his behalf. Then Abrahim gave one last half-hearted shove and let go. James and Joseph managed somehow to keep the barrel from falling and resumed their gentle rocking. Abrahim walked a few paces away then spat on the dry earth leaving a gobbet of foamy spit that shone momentarily in the hard sun.

  The oil drum wasn’t all that heavy, but still with the other child inside it was heavy enough and hurt their hands as they struggled to continue the game. The first excitement had quickly passed. It was dull for them, dull for the boy too. James lowered his side of the barrel and wiped his hands on his shorts; dirt and crumbs of orange rust left multiple finger marks like the outstretched wings of a bird on the white cloth.

  The kid struggled to climb out. Joseph watched him for a few seconds, then the boy lifted his arms up, his face full of trusting expectation. Not much older than the kid himself this was new to Joseph. To be looked up to as if he were an adult. To be needed. He was about to reach in and grab the boy’s arms when Abrahim came running at them, a short metal pole upraised, a battle cry on his lips.

  Automatically Joseph leapt back and barely breaking his stride, Abrahim struck the oil drum a ringing blow. He ran on past then slowed and tossed the pole over a fence. James ran to catch up with him and the two walked off, not looking back once either to beckon Joseph or see what had become of the kid inside the barrel.

  Not that banging on the oil drum could hurt the kid. Or could it? Joseph didn’t know. No sound had come from inside it since the reverberations had died away. No sound. No movement. No sign of the kid’s hands grasping the lip to haul himself out. Joseph couldn’t see inside but he didn’t take a single step closer. He just stood there wishing it all away. Wishing he had turned around when Abrahim and James fell into step beside him. Wishing he’d stayed in the yard under the shade of the big tree reading a schoolbook. Wishing to unravel the day.

  Was the kid okay? What if that was a way of killing a small boy? Putting him in a metal drum then banging on it. Could it stop his heart? Frighten him to death? Make his head explode?

  He didn’t know. He was only eight. The kid was about five. Why didn’t the kid scream or cry?

  Abrahim was a very big boy, he was almost eleven. James was nine. When Joseph looked he could still see the figures of the two boys shimmering and receding in the distance. So far away that it seemed astonishing that they had ever been there at all.

  The oil barrel was as dumb and lifeless as it had been when they’d found it lying on its side with the weeds half covering it. Joseph circled it at a distance until he reached the path that led back to the town. Once on the path he began to walk as fast as he could. Faster and faster until at last he broke irresistibly into a run.

  Never knew what happened to the kid. Always fretted and wondered. Eventually the fear fell away and logic told him that nothing (besides being scared out of his wits and a ringing in his ears) had happened to the younger boy. It was a small town, he’d have heard.

  Certain sounds however … certain sounds had always haunted him. Metal striking metal. Long awaited retribution. Innocence was no defence. Not then, not now.

  He shivered, uncertain of his fate.

  A Man of Constant Sorrows

  Thom put the phone down. He’d come dangerously close to weeping as he spoke to Lucy’s father. He’d felt the distantly familiar, hot pricking sensation in his eyes and he’d pinched his nose at its thinnest part just below his brows to stop it. He was not a man given to weeping, nor indeed was Lucy’s father, but the angry bafflement, the fraught worry in her father’s voice combined with the unmistakable sounds of Lucy’s mother sobbing uncontrollably in the background had almost started Thom off.

  All his anger about Lucy, all those assumptions about her running off with another man, had entirely flown. Now he was left with only worry and guilt.

  How many times had he said over the phone to Lucy’s father: ‘I don’t know where she is. I didn’t know about her breakdown. She didn’t say.’ Or, in a variation on that theme, ‘If I’d known, if she’d told me…’

  That was precisely what was so unfathomable, that Lucy hadn’t (or had she?) told Thom about her previous breakdown. Not the whole truth about it anyway. The odd quips she made about Art College being enough to drive anyone loopy made any suggestion about her mental instability seem safely consigned to the past.

  He stared at the red light of the answer machine trying to remember something about ‘the eye of the little God’. What was it? A line from a poem by Kipling or a story by Wilkie Collins. Something spewed out of the old prejudice of Empire, the fascination and fear of ‘uncivilised’ peoples.

  This particular little god (or was it a demon) with its one glowing red eye held him in its thrall for a few minutes more as he sat absorbing the conversation with Lucy’s father.

  ‘We must inform the police,’ her father had said with certainty, then in an aside to Lucy’s mother he’d added, ‘Alright hen, don’t take on so. The lassie’ll be fine, we just need to find her, eh?’

  Then he’d ordered Thom to stay in the flat until they arrived.

  ‘But you’re in Scotland! You can’t surely…’

  ‘Seven or eight hours on the motorway, we’ll be there by suppertime, son.’

  ‘But…’

  Thom had meant to say he had an appointment at three and essays to mark, but that was irrelevant now. Everything in his life was irrelevant now, or at it least withered into so much banality.

  And there he was. In Lucy’s flat, somehow consumed by her, absorbed into the body of her life by her absence. Standing in for her, listening to her phone messages, waiting for her parents to arrive, checking her mail, being moved by her mother’s tears, eating her food.

  ‘The eye of the little god.’

  Maybe it was a line from a film, whatever it was, you were probably not meant to stare at it in case it drove you crazy, hypnotised you.

  Thom stood up abruptly and checked the time. He felt trapped in the stillness of the flat. All he had to do was wait in these empty haunted rooms while Lucy’s parents hurried down the motorway from Scotland. Was it easier for them to be moving towards some specific destination? Or easier for him? To do nothing but wait.

  And (he comforted himself to some degree with this thought) who knew, Lucy might breeze in at any moment, perhaps after her parents had arrived, and say, quite understandably, ‘What the hell are you all doing here in my flat?’

  And there would be absolutely nothing wrong with her. She’d be good old perfectly sane but slightly scatterbrained Lucy. And Thom would suddenly look like a lunatic. Breaking into her flat and scaring the bejesus out of her poor old parents. Terrifying them into coming hundreds of miles when her dad was a nervous driver and had lumbago and sciatica, and her mum, scarlet-cheeked with hypertension, did nothing but weep the whole way.

  Thom went into Lucy’s kitchen and began to search for something to drink; something stronger than black coffee or water, but there was nothing, only three empty bottles of red wine lined up in a row
next to her tall chrome rubbish bin from Ikea. Thom picked up each bottle and checked it against the light, but all had been thoroughly drained and nothing was left.

  He drifted from room to room, there was nothing particularly strange anywhere, nothing to suggest that the person who lived here had suffered a breakdown or entered some terrible manic phase.

  He kept picturing Lucy’s parents; for some reason he saw them driving down the M1 in a tiny rattling Morris Minor surrounded on all sides by huge articulated trucks. He also pictured them arriving at the flat, their questions and looks accusatory, their worries about Lucy far more acute than his had been, and the worry would be contagious.

  He could not face them alone, he suddenly realised. He could not and would not. He picked up the phone, called the college and asked to speak to Mitra Vali in the fashion department.

  Her tone when she finally picked up turned frosty as soon as she understood who it was, but she said she might be able to come after a departmental meeting at two. Yeah, sure – like she’d help him. He heard that loud and clear.

  Thom put the phone down and avoided its evil red eye. He walked down the hall to Lucy’s bedroom at the far end of the flat. He had a strange sensation that the walls were closing in around him; the light flickering in time with his heart. He closed the blinds then drew the heavy grey wool curtains shut and lay down on his usual side of the bed. He turned so that he was facing Lucy’s side and tried to visualise her face on the pillow next to his. But there was nothing there in the half light, nothing but space and darkness.

  He closed his eyes and tucked his hands between his thighs. He felt his penis harden against his wrists. He tried to summon Lucy through his memories of how she had always felt next to him in the darkness. They knew each other’s bodies, knew how to touch and when and where. They were beyond awkwardness and fumbling, and apart from those times when they had quarrelled or Lucy was in either a grey sulk of depression or a belligerent rage, their lovemaking was both easy and violently passionate, intimate and somehow deliciously dirty too.

  It crossed his mind that he could masturbate. What did the massage parlours in the city call it – tension relief? Would it relieve him of this growing burden of fear though? Temporarily maybe, but afterwards he’d be drained and ashamed and nothing would be any different.

  He dismissed the thought and willed himself to think about Lucy’s parents again; their creased faces, her mother’s round belly and snub, almost piggy nose. Her father’s wild eyebrows that met in the middle giving him a permanently angry look. He was also round-bellied and wore high-waisted casual slacks that sat just above the swell of his stomach thus emphasising it and reminding Thom of John Tenniel’s drawings of Tweedledum and Tweedledee from Alice in Wonderland.

  He pictured the motorway again, this time Lucy’s parents were in a bone-rattling, pale-blue Volkswagen Beetle. Coaches, lorries and fully loaded car transporters surrounded them on all sides. Fast cars and motor bikes wove in and out. Lucy’s father would cruise inexorably down the middle lane at barely forty-five miles an hour, his knuckles white on the wheel, his face, with its bristling monobrow, frozen in a grimace of intent.

  They might crash and be killed, but as in some disaster movie, it wouldn’t only be them, would it? Thom added a diesel tanker to this nightmare, a busload of happy children.

  All because of him.

  His erection had gone and despite the visions he’d conjured of tangled metal and sheets of flame he somehow managed to fall asleep.

  Close Quarters

  The interview began innocently enough. Full name, date of birth, date of arrival in France, full name of wife, his brother’s details. (Scott had duly reported this information about his brother just as if everything about Aaron were normal and Scott almost pictured it through their eyes; the two brothers and one of their wives on holiday, the shared driving duties, the laughs over drinks, the tennis games, the camaraderie, the winks exchanged when Aaron began chatting up some young woman, the guidance and encouragement Scott would give Aaron about his college work – everything in short that he should have had with a brother, but was cheated of.)

  ‘And how long have you rented the house for?’

  ‘Two weeks. The owner is my cousin, Monsieur Louis Clements and his wife, Madame Kristell Clements, they’re in Thailand.’

  ‘I see, and you say you were angry because you had a flight home booked and the incident was delaying you?’

  ‘Yes, but I should explain…’

  ‘You had the house for fourteen days…’

  ‘Ahm, fifteen actually, because…’

  ‘But you had been there only six. Why were you suddenly leaving, may I ask?’

  ‘Well,’ Scott said. He realised suddenly that if he were to tell the truth, then the incident with Aaron might open up a whole other mess of trouble. On the other hand, the truth was the truth, and it was not as if Aaron had hurt anyone other than himself. But there was the matter of his and Marilyn’s failure to take care of a vulnerable adult. He had no idea of French law in this regard. Why the hell hadn’t they researched it? How could they have been so stupid as to bring Aaron to another country without a full understanding of its laws?

  He grew aware that he had been sitting there for far too long thinking about his answer and that this in itself was suspect.

  ‘My wife wasn’t happy,’ he said suddenly, surprising even himself with his lie.

  ‘She wasn’t happy?’ the woman detective raised a quizzical eyebrow, as if to suggest that mere unhappiness was a sorry reason for abandoning a long holiday in la belle France.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Scott stuttered. ‘My er … my French is not so good. Excuse me. I meant she wasn’t well.’ And now he remembered Marilyn being sick a couple of times, of her complaining of heartburn and refusing any wine.

  ‘So she was ill.’

  ‘Yes. Ah, nothing serious, but…’

  ‘And it was she who was going to drive to the airport?’

  ‘Yes, we take it in turns. She likes to drive.’

  ‘Even when she was so unwell that you felt it necessary to cut short your holiday?’

  Scott nodded. His mouth felt tacky and dry. He wished he had said yes to the Coke.

  ‘And did you enjoy your holiday before your wife became ill?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course. We love France.’

  The policewoman smiled indulgently and nodded, then read some papers in front of her. She picked one page up and indicated a particular paragraph for the attention of the man beside her who had not yet spoken. He nodded.

  The woman once more took up the conversation on the pleasant topic of holidaying in France.

  ‘So you managed to get out and about to dine and drink and enjoy all there is in our little town?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course. Except that my wife has, well, because she didn’t feel so great, and because she is a writer, she has preferred quiet evenings at home.’

  ‘Oh, your wife is a writer?’

  ‘Yes, a poet really and ah…’ Scott ran out of steam here, he had no idea why he’d mentioned that Marilyn wrote – did he think this would mark them out as a family with a particular sort of sensibility, a grace or gravitas that allowed or explained any odd behaviour in the eyes of the law.

  Jesus, he should have just stuck to the truth. Who could not be sympathetic to Aaron’s plight, to their essential charity and love in bringing him here, even if they had for one unfortunate moment failed him?

  ‘So you all stay in the house? Eat at home? What a pity! You might as well have stayed in…’ the woman looked at her notes, ‘…Ottawa.’

  ‘Well, yes, but, we hadn’t planned it this way. We didn’t know that my wife would…’

  ‘…be unhappy?’

  ‘Unwell. Though, of course, she was unhappy that she was unwell.’

  ‘So you nursed her?’

  ‘Nursed her? No, she wasn’t that unwell.’

  ‘But she was unhappy.’

 
‘Yes, but…’

  Suddenly out of this tangle of words, the insistent litany of ‘unhappy’ and ‘unwell’, the older man at last spoke. His voice was deep and slightly husky, but there was intelligence and warmth in his delivery. It was the voice of a man you could trust and also respect.

  Scott looked at him, noticing for the first time that although his hair was very dark, almost raven black; his eyes were blue-grey, like wet slate in a certain light.

  ‘So, did you stay in last night, for example?’

  Scott remembered the nightmare of the day before, losing, then finding Aaron, the blood, the worry, then sedating him – not because he’d particularly seemed to need it – by the time they’d cleaned and bandaged his wounds Aaron was moderately calm, but because they’d needed it. He and Marilyn were exhausted, but not only that, they’d needed some kind of comfort, some reassurance about who they were as a couple and that was why, quite naturally (though it could be viewed otherwise) they had made love. Last night then, Scott knew exactly where he had been.

  ‘Yes, we stayed in.’

  The policeman shrugged and made the corners of his mouth quirk downwards in a seemingly typical Gallic dismissal of these foreigners’ bizarre choice of lifestyle – non-smoking, non-drinking, non-meat eating, desexualized ‘good’ living which was no life at all.

  ‘And the night before?’

  ‘I went out,’ Scott said, glad to show he wasn’t quite the wife-nursing freak he was being painted as. ‘Marilyn stayed in with my brother; there was a film on TV. Woody Allen, I think she said.’

  ‘Ah, ha ha ha, Woody Allen, yes – who would not stay in to watch a Woody Allen film?’

  Stumped by this remark, Scott merely shook his head and attempted a weak smile as if to show that here, finally, in Woody Allen they had found some common ground.

  ‘So you went out?’

  ‘Yes, just for a couple of beers, just, you know, to enjoy the evening air.’

  ‘And to escape your unhappy wife?’

  There it was again, the unhappy, unwell business which he thoroughly regretted bringing up. He shook his head, dismissing the question.