by Jo Mazelis
He had enough education and training in psychology to recognise the symptoms and causes and difficulties in his own psyche, yet seeing them, knowing them intimately, did not bring about a cure. His guilt was eternal, because he was the lucky one; the firstborn son who escaped the curse that befell the second child.
He poured another shot of whisky into his glass, didn’t add water this time, wanted to feel its burning golden sting. He shouldn’t have opened the Scotch. Single malt, aged for twenty years in oak casks. The good stuff.
He’d pretend the liquid had evaporated.
‘Mar,’ he’d plead when she scolded him, ‘it was only the angel’s share.’ She’d demand to know what that meant and he’d explain that it was the term used to describe the reduction in volume that occurred when whisky was aged.
She’d like that; the idea that something as prosaic as the manufacture of hard liquor could create such a poetic term to describe a merely physical side effect of the process. He smiled, imagining her smile.
He knew he should eat something, but worried it would lay heavily on his stomach. Just whisky. A little whisky to help him sleep.
He left the bottle on the counter, put the glass in the sink and ran cold water into it. He switched off the light, then did the same in the living room. He checked the front door meaning to lock it and discovered that the key was nowhere to be found. This meant that, theoretically, Aaron could go AWOL again, but Scott was too tired now to do anything about it except silently pray that Aaron had learnt his lesson and lightning doesn’t strike in the same place twice. Then, wearily, gratefully, he crept quietly up the stairs.
The door to Aaron’s room was closed. Usually it was left open a few inches or so, because at certain times Aaron would not open doors for himself – though he was quite capable of doing it – but would stand behind them rocking either from side to side or to and fro. On a couple of occasions, he had done this so violently that his head hammered a slow hollow rhythm on the wooden panel and a yellow-purple bruise spread across his forehead like a stigmata to show his suffering.
Scott opened the door a crack and saw, reflected in the dressing table mirror, the humped shape of Aaron under the white cloud of the duvet. His breathing was heavy and slow with deepest sleep. Faintly, Scott detected the acrid aroma of warm urine.
This, Scott thought, would be the last time. No more trips to France for Aaron. No more trips anywhere – not with him and Marilyn babysitting anyway. There were respite homes for people like him and after a day or two Aaron would get used to it. In this way their parents might also be eased toward the idea of permanent residential care for their youngest child – their lost boy, their borrowed angel.
There it was, that word again, angel. How his mother could conceive of Aaron as an angel of any sort was beyond him, but this is what she said, filtering reality, he supposed, through the Victorian sentimentality of the novels she read; Anne of Green Gables and Dickens and Willa Cather and Little Women and Gone With the Wind. Her favourite films were Inn of the Seventh Happiness, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and the one about the little deaf-mute girl, Helen Keller. She cried with all the predictability convention demanded of a woman of her age and generation. Especially when the children were saved and the dedicated teacher at last reached the lonely, silent, dark world the little girl existed in.
But no one had succeeded in reaching Aaron so far and he was not condemned by some rare syndrome or inherited disease to die young. He was healthy and robust, would before long add the muscle, strength and bulk of true manhood to his willowy frame and then what might happen?
Scott crossed the hall to the bathroom. The frosted glass there showed a limpid pinky grey light pressed against it, the sun edging upwards from the eastern horizon, illuminating the distant clouds before it peeped into view.
He splashed cold water on his face avoiding his reflection in the mirror, knowing too well how he would look – exhausted, in need of a shave, guilty.
He dried his hands, picked up Marilyn’s notebook from the top of the laundry basket and crossed to their bedroom where the door was (in a reverse of the usual state of affairs) half open. At the threshold he saw at once that the bed was empty, the covers as flat and smooth as becalmed sea. But not believing his eyes, he flicked the light switch on.
Where had she gone? He had felt her presence here, seen her in his mind’s eye minutes ago when he rehearsed laying her notebook on the bedside table. He stepped quickly forward and put the book in place as if that act would reset the real events that were happening into the assumed pattern. He looked around the room. The curtains hadn’t been drawn and the windows were all shut – nothing but the very worst winter weather or storms made Marilyn and he sleep without a healthy dose of fresh air.
There was a third room upstairs – the Clements’ bedroom which, over the years, out of respect for their privacy, Scott and Marilyn always locked on arrival, placing the key out of sight on the top of the door frame.
That’s where she was! Of course, it made sense, she would sleep in the master bedroom, because it was at the front of the house, because the extension phone was there.
He tried the door handle, turning it down then pushing with his shoulder. Locked. He drummed the pads of his fingers on the wood, called softly, ‘Mar? Mar! It’s me.’ Then rattled the handle to indicate his intent.
He tried a second time, increasing the volume of his voice, the weight and speed of his knock, the rattling of the handle.
He dropped to his haunches, put his eye to the keyhole and saw, outlined in tendrils of out of focus dust, the far wall of the room softly lit by weak pinkish light. No key in the lock.
Because.
Because Marilyn…
He tried to finish the end of that thought, even as he heaved himself upright again and stretching, groped with his fingertips along the dusty lintel. He found the key and flying in the face of logic, unlocked and opened the door. The Clements had a beautiful antique bed, carved and painted white, an elaborate armoire, a full length cheval glass, everything one would expect in a sophisticated and well-to-do French couple’s home. But it was overlaid with chaos; an untidy pile of Le Mondes on the bed, along with mail, box files, a plastic laundry basket filled with clothes and a guitar. Coats were heaped on a low upholstered chair, glossy magazines and paperbacks were stacked in three clumsy towers under the window, a laptop computer sat incongruously on a dressing table surrounded by a silver-backed hand mirror and matching hairbrush. Before leaving for their holiday they had collected all of the detritus of their lives and stored it haphazardly in the one room they knew their visitors never used.
Yet at that moment the room looked ransacked.
He fled, leaving the door open, the key still in the lock. He returned to Aaron’s room, creeping in on silent feet, circling the bed and studying the form on the bed, Aaron’s face slack on the pillow. No point waking him. No answers there, only another problem to be dealt with, Aaron wanting food, wanting the toilet, not wanting to be washed or shaved. And he’d pissed himself. Closer, the smell was stronger.
Scott ran downstairs again. Flicking on every light in the house, he looked in the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the cupboard under the stairs. Went out the front door where the hire car was still parked, peered inside its windows hopefully, hopelessly, for why would Marilyn be there?
Then back through the house, searching his memory for rooms he had forgotten existed, secret rooms that led from one to another in a maze, as in certain dreams he’d sometimes had, and wasn’t it said that in such dreams the house symbolised the mother?
Into the kitchen again, taking the key for the back door from its hook on the whatnot, fumbling to unlock it, then out to the garden. Night evaporating. Pale grey light, the grass sprinkled with dew, the greenhouse ghostly at the end of the garden. He might find Marilyn inside it, writing, making detailed notes about the delicate white hairs on a heart-shaped leaf, or the wiry tendrils a pea plant wraps around sti
cks, string, walls, other plants, itself. It would be no surprise to find her there amongst the tomatoes and chillies and cucumbers, sitting cross-legged on a square of cardboard on the floor, her eyes closed so that she could listen more acutely to every sound. The birdsong, the constant distant thrum or roar of something like a river, or traffic, the imperceptible creak of a root growing under the soil, the furious buzz of a drugged bumble bee blundering in the boudoir of a magnificent red poppy.
He studied the greenhouse carefully from where he’d paused near the house; the lawn seemed like a green sea he would struggle to pass. The window at the top had been opened to control the temperature, and the uppermost leaves of a huge tomato plant spilled out of it giving the impression that the plant had forced open the window in a bid to escape.
Deep down he knew Marilyn wouldn’t be there and that was why he lingered, postponing the moment when he ran out of places to search for her.
She had once said, and he had laughed, that it hurt her to write. Her expression told him she was in earnest.
‘Your hand?’ he said, stupidly.
‘No.’ Then she wouldn’t say more, because he had laughed and she took the comment about her hand as sarcasm.
He swayed for a moment on the edge of the path, then stepped onto the grass and crossed to the greenhouse where he peered in through its open door. She wasn’t there. Of course she wasn’t there.
She had left him, as he’d always known she would. Because he didn’t deserve her, because his heart was ice.
The Love Parade
Gerhardt Miller, feeling virtuous, left his lover in bed in order to walk the dog. How he had found himself in love with Henri, a provincial French schoolmaster, the owner of a toffee-coloured daschund called Proust, was still beyond him. They had met at the Love Parade in Berlin in 2004. Three years of this strange, wonderful, forbidden enchantment, always feeling that he should leave France, return to his birthplace of Cologne and the pretence of heterosexuality. Lonely, unsuccessful heterosexuality. He was a good-looking man. He knew that. Women fell for him. He dated, but nothing stuck.
Proust wriggled his rump with joy as he saw Gerhardt open the drawer where the dog lead was kept, and when Gerhardt bent to attach the lead to the collar he leapt up to lick his face, coating his cheek with fishy smelling slime.
Still holding the lead, with Proust eagerly following, claws clicking over the tiled floor, Gerhardt rinsed his face and dried it with paper towels. They went out through the back door, leaving it unlocked so that he would have no need for keys. Proust strained at the leash and Gerhardt released the catch that let the rein spool out to its full length, so that the dog trotted smartly along, long nose like the tip of an arrow, twenty paces ahead of him. Gerhardt had given up allowing the dog off the lead. Shouting ‘Proust! Proust!’ was embarrassing – even more so as the dog showed absolutely no sign that this was his name or that he even knew the handsome man with the black hair, five o’clock shadow and baggy green combat pants.
It was just getting light, must have been the first glimmer that woke him, either that or another of his bad dreams, those dreams where he was falling. The recurring nightmares he suffered since he was a child that had got worse after he watched the live coverage of the twin towers on 9/11, and even worse after he’d begun his relationship with Henri. Gerhardt knew why; guilt, fear, shame.
But he was in a buoyant mood as he walked down the tree-lined street, and he remained so even after Proust deposited a large glistening turd on the pavement. He had a plastic bag in his pocket and did not mind the ritual of picking up after the dog, did not mind apart from the warmth of it in his hands through the plastic. There was a bin beside a house nearby and Gerhardt quickly lifted the lid and threw the bag in.
He headed for the short cut, an upward-sloping lane with a few steps that led straight into the park. Usually he’d go through the park and out by its main entrance to the bakery for fresh bread then home again.
He was a good distance away from the turning into the lane when he saw Proust disappear. There was nothing unusual in that, but what was strange was the sudden tug on the leash as the dog pulled harder and the cord rubbed against the brick wall. Taken off guard before he knew it the plastic device that held the lead jumped out of his hand and skittered away along the pavement.
‘Proust!’ he yelled, then raced to try to catch the flailing lead and its clattering handle, which flew out of sight before he was even six feet away.
‘Ficken!’ he hissed and stopped running. He ran a hand through his hair, shook his head in frustration then continued on towards the lane. It sloped gently up, then there were four concrete steps. Proust was standing at the top of these steps and barked as soon as he saw Gerhardt.
‘Good boy,’ Gerhardt called and the dog gave another sharp yap. The dog did not wag his tail, but stood squarely on all four legs. The end of the lead with its rectangular box lay on the first step and the nylon cord was curled and draped elaborately over all of the steps, spelling out the journey of circles the dog must have made.
‘Good boy,’ Gerhardt said again and quickly stooped down to recapture the lead before the dog took off again. He pressed the button that caused the line to rewind, so that the dog would not be able to run out of sight again as easily. He had often thought that Proust could run into the road given such freedom.
‘He knows not to do that,’ Henri had said, laughing at Gerhardt’s utter ignorance when it came to animals.
Gerhardt had never been allowed pets as a child. His mother thought them dirty, his father, a quiet and profoundly good Lutheran pastor in a conservative town near the Swiss border, claimed to be allergic. Henri, on the other hand had grown up on a smallholding with dogs and geese and ducks and goats and cats.
The dog barked again. There was definitely something different about the sound and the way the animal was standing there waiting for him. Gerhardt wondered if the dog wasn’t finally going to go for him with his sharp little piranha teeth.
‘Good boy. Good boy,’ he said soothingly as he drew near and bent to stroke the dog’s bony silky head, its long back. He felt around the collar to check that the metal clasp was still attached. He always worried about losing the dog, about it becoming hurt in some way. Henri would not forgive him.
Then he saw her. He should have seen her straight away but he had been so focused on the dog that somehow he missed her. Or perhaps he had seen her but something in his mind had refused to transform the tangle of red hair, the pale battered flesh, the torn dress into a human form. He’d seen her in the corner of his vision down there by the side of the path, weeds growing up behind her, camouflaging her.
And it was only just getting light.
The dog gave another sharp yap, as if they were having a conversation and the animal was winning the point. ‘See?’ it seemed to be saying. ‘See, I told you, but you wouldn’t listen.’
She was lying so still. He could not bear to look at her.
Gerhardt moved back and down, pulling the lead hard. On the next step he stumbled a little but righted himself. He turned and hurried back to the street, the dog now running a little ahead of him again, straining at the short leash so that its breathing was rasping and laboured.
Once he was on the street, Gerhardt stopped and clapped one hand over his mouth – a theatrical gesture that was entirely natural and unplanned. He hadn’t brought his phone with him, just enough cash for the bread. He felt he should stay where he was, stop other people from going up the path, but how could he inform the authorities if he did that? There was no one else about on the street and on his way he’d seen hardly a soul. He could run home and call from there. Or find a payphone? Or go to the police station itself, which was not very far?
Proust was skittish, running around his legs, tugging at the lead, first one way then another. He couldn’t concentrate while the dog was doing that so on impulse he scooped him into his arms and was rewarded by a warning growl, an indignant wriggle and a nipped
finger. Roughly he half dropped, half threw the animal down. Another yelp – piqued this time, but the dog stood squarely on all four legs, trembling, but not hurt. Thank God.
He remembered there was a payphone less than ten minutes walk away, on the crossroads outside a closed-down garage. He hurried there, his mind racing, his stomach hollow. He found that his fingers were trembling badly as he fumbled with the coins, the receiver. He dialed the emergency number and kept worrying that his small change would run out before he had said all he had to say. In his agitation he had forgotten that such calls are free.
He was precise with the details he gave of the road, the lane, the position of the body, but when asked for his name he told them it didn’t matter; they said it did. He said his name was Jansson. They said they must have his full name. He might have said ‘Moomintroll Jansson,’ as that is where his imagination had flitted in this abrupt construction of a lie, but he remembered another name in the nick of time. ‘Mats Janssen,’ he said, inflecting it with the seesaw sound of a Scandinavian, knowing of course, that his accent would never pass as a Frenchman’s.
He had been reading Tove Jansson’s children’s books that summer, persuaded to do so by his older sister, Anna, for their brew of innocence and darkness she’d said, though he’d been unconvinced.
He spelled out the name. ‘M-A-T-S J-A-N-S-S-O-N’ and promised to go and stand by the entrance to the lane until the police and ambulance came. That done, he walked quickly away from the phone kiosk, leaving a pile of coins on the ledge there, silver coins like those abandoned by Judas.
When he got home, Henri was still asleep. He closed the back door quietly, undid Proust’s lead and returned it to its drawer, slipped his feet out of his sandals and put coffee on the stove, then sat on the edge of the settee frowning darkly. Proust retreated to his basket, turning in a circle many times before finally settling down with a sigh and closing his eyes to sleep.