Shooting in the Dark

by Baker, John

  Propaganda is not a new concept; the brokers of power have practised it for hundreds of years. Historically, every time a new ruling elite comes to the fore, they bring with them hordes of propagandists, ‘educators’ and media types practised in the dissemination of selective information.

  The other thing that we professionals know is a very simple fact. When something horrible happens in childhood, the child does not suppress it. He or she usually remembers every detail. The lives of these people are marked by a desire and a wish to forget those details, but, try as they might, they will have to live with them for ever.

  Whenever I meet someone who claims that a therapist has helped ‘awaken’ them to a memory of childhood sexual abuse, I find myself looking around for a therapist who is passionately, no, hysterically, concerned with an agenda that has nothing at all to do with the client.

  If I had been given another minute, if the woman with the pram had not come to the door, the blind woman’s life would be over. My mission would be completed and I would now be settling down to a normal life divided between my work and Miriam. A pleasant dream.

  I had to ask myself if the arrival of the woman with the pram at that particular moment was a sign. This is a fair question. There are legends as old as time itself which recognize the intervention of fate at the moment of execution. The neck of a hanged man is not broken. The soldiers drag him back to the scaffold, but at the second attempt the trapdoor does not open. The crowd become restless, their eyes cast towards heaven. They have been transported to the realm of magic. A moment before they thirsted for blood, but now they feel that the creator is focused upon the same scene, and that He wants this condemned man to live. If there is a third hitch in the hanging, the man will be pardoned.

  It does not necessarily mean that the man is innocent of the crime for which he has been condemned, only that God has another purpose in mind for him. The man may be released and go on to provide comfort and succour for the poor and disadvantaged. Or he may be released only to face degradation and suffering, a fate worse than death.

  In the case at hand the blind woman’s life was saved, I believe, not by fate, but by an accident. The woman with the pram was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t know what brought her to the door at that particular moment, when I already had the victim by the throat. This is something we can never know. We can speculate, say, that the child woke earlier than usual, that the mother, stressed by her responsibilities, left the confines of her home and walked, by chance, to the blind woman’s house.

  Why didn’t she walk in the opposite direction, find herself knocking at someone else’s door? Are we to believe that some divine finger pointed her towards the house of the blind woman? That the same heavenly presence dictated the speed at which she travelled, timing her arrival at the precise moment when I was squeezing the last breath of life from Angeles Falco?

  This would not be a scientific conclusion. All the evidence points to an act of chance. Should the same thing happen again, however, the data would have to be reexamined. And, certainly, if my third attempt at retribution were frustrated, I would have to take a long look at the arguments that have brought me to this pass.

  In the meantime I shall remain steadfast. I am not in doubt. I know what I have to do.

  Crucifixion was not designed for Jesus Christ. People tend to forget this. Crucifixion was designed for rogues and robbers and murderers. It was one of the methods used to rid the world of those who no longer deserved to live.

  I walked through her ward in the hospital today. Visiting hour. The other patients had their loved ones around them, but she was alone. As I drew level with her bed I slowed to get a good look at her and she stirred in expectation, raised herself up on an elbow. I touched the rail at the end of her bed, just tapped it as I went past. Her face, which a moment before had been full of expectation, turned into a study in fear. In the time it takes to snap my fingers her features became a parody of the mother in Picasso’s Guernica.

  Looking back at her as I left the ward, I realized that I could torture her for ever. In many ways that would be a better solution for me. There would be enjoyment in it. Perhaps it would be possible to reduce her to a shaking wreck? To undermine her totally, so that she becomes the agent of her own death.

  But no, I want her life. She owes me that much.

  The scratches on my face were not as bad as I feared. They are healing nicely. The thumb will take a little longer. There is no doubt that the woman intended to bite it off. I have had a tetanus injection and, for the sake of my neighbours, invented a dog. I have been in the wars, but I shall come through.

  Miriam wanted me to suffer for being unfaithful to her. It is strange to be thought unfaithful, because I would never dream of betraying her. But it is better this way; I cannot tell her the truth. She read about the punishment in a national newspaper. She bought a small cellophane packet of hardened steel nails from B&Q and handed them to me. She led me over to my work bench, which I keep in an alcove of the kitchen. She took the packet of nails from me and placed them on the bench. Then she took a hammer out of the tool box and placed it next to the nails.

  I looked at her enquiringly and she nodded. She didn’t smile.

  ‘Is this it?’ I asked.

  She went into the bedroom and returned with a packet of tampons and a reel of surgical tape. I tried to imagine what was going to happen. ‘Will it be bad?’ I asked, but she wasn’t going to say anything.

  She undid my belt and let my trousers fall around my ankles and she tugged at my underpants until they were around my knees. I felt ridiculous standing there in a T-shirt, but humiliation is an essential ingredient in a meaningful relationship.

  She asked me to open my mouth wide and then pushed one of the tampons inside. I now know the meaning of the word ‘absorbent’.

  ‘Now close it,’ she said. ‘Tight.’

  I brought my lips together and Miriam took the reel of surgical tape, tore a strip off and placed it over my mouth. The beginnings of an erection stirred between my legs.

  Miriam took hold of my penis and placed it on the work bench. It didn’t lie exactly where she wanted it, so she tugged at it, making me shuffle forward a few inches. I could feel one of the cross beams of the bench against my shins.

  I watched carefully while she opened the packet of nails and shook them out on to the wooden surface. I wanted to scream but the tampon had absorbed all the saliva I’d produced. She selected six of the nails and placed three on each side of my member.

  When she picked up the hammer and began joining me to the bench I closed my eyes.

  I went to the café this morning and Miriam’s boss was there, his maroon Jag parked outside. He’s younger than I expected, probably still in his twenties, but with a small tummy that would seem more suitable on a middle-aged man. He has nice manners and nice clothes and he smiles when he speaks to the girls, and the clever ones smile back at him, their faces lighting up as if by some internal illumination. He is in no way a hunk, his body is spidery and his face is close to a skull, with almost no soft tissue, the skin pulled tightly over sharp features.

  His manners and his clothes act as a mask to hide other attributes - like his brains - which are singularly lacking. But Miriam was smiling brightly along with the other girls. People are impressed by power, and within the confines of that café all the power resides in the man with the Jag.

  In the midst of all this I caught Miriam’s eye and she saw that I had seen what was going on. She looked away for a moment and then came back and locked on to me again. She gave me a look that no one else on the planet would be able to interpret. It was a look that said, OK, so I’m using my sexuality to impress my boss. Why not? He’s the man who pays my wages. He can make my life better or worse. He’s powerful. But underneath the look there was another statement: You’ve caught me. I’m going to be punished. Later, after work, I’ll submit myself to you. I’ll take whatever you mete out. Because you’re powerful t
oo.

  And I looked back at her. I didn’t move my lips or my eyes. I didn’t nod or make any external signs. But I could see by her reaction that she understood every nuance of our silent dialogue.

  She wiped down my table and said, ‘What can I get you, sir?’

  ‘The all-day breakfast.’

  She scribbled on her pad, touched her chin with the end of the pencil and walked over to the kitchen. A few minutes later she delivered the breakfast, together with a knife and fork wrapped in a paper napkin. ‘Can I get you anything to drink?’

  I shook my head.

  I was aware of her on the periphery of my vision, flitting from table to table, delivering toast and chips and beans and fried tomatoes to the other customers.

  When I’d finished my breakfast I counted out the right amount of change, added a twenty-pence piece, and left the café.

  I keep my eye on Miriam, just as I keep my eye on the blind woman. I am the watchman. I am a reliable witness. I can testify to the crimes and misdemeanours of those I watch, just as I can confirm their righteous acts.

  And I am a witness, also, to the power of faith. Throughout my conscious life, faith, and faith alone, has kept me fixed to the path of my destiny. I have seen where I must go, and nothing has stood in my way. In our time commitment is not a fashionable virtue. As a culture we are committed only to throw-away ephemera and momentary desires. And because of that our lives lead inexorably to depression, to insanity, and to death.

  I know one thing for sure. My faith will lead me elsewhere. It will lead me away from this vale of sorrow. I shall be reunited with the greatest love of all.

  The man from Neighbourhood Watch is supposed to check the garages and doors around midnight. Last night I saw him enter someone’s house. He turned the door handle and hesitated before pushing it open. He looked around, made sure no one was watching, then went through and closed the door behind him. The woman who lives in that house is divorced. The kids on the street call her Sexy Sadie. She hooks scarlet underwear to her washing line, like bait.

  These characters form the landscape of my life. I watch them because we can never be sure that the people we meet are real. People begin life with a genetic potential, a temperament, and an environment (including their parents) which is going to somehow modify their behaviour. As they grow, their genetic inheritance usually comes into the foreground, and by the time they have come through the chaos of their teens, they are more or less formed. They have become whatever it is that they were supposed to become.

  But most of them are not satisfied. They look around and find the world populated by people more interesting than themselves. They see intelligent people, or beautiful people, they see people who are strong, or wilful, or talented. And the response is to begin a process of reinventing themselves. They dream up an exotic past, stories of lost fortunes or family tragedies, historical links to the great and the good.

  Binjamin Wilkomirski, the author of the book Fragments, describes his experiences as a three-year-old who was separated from his family in Riga and taken to the concentration camp at Majdanek. In the camp he witnessed and survived a series of harrowing ordeals, and ended up, after the war, in a Swiss orphanage. He was taken from the orphanage by a Swiss couple who showed no understanding of his experience, and who forced him to suppress all of his earlier memories.

  Fragments is an interesting book. It has won awards and its child’s-eye-view narrative has ensured an important place on the Holocaust circuit for its author.

  But in the late nineties it was alleged that Wilkomirski is not from Latvia. He was never near a Polish death camp. He is not even Jewish. Instead he was born Bruno Grosjean in 1941 in Biel; in 1945 he was adopted by a wealthy Swiss couple from Zurich, who, when they died in 1986, left him a large inheritance.

  Why is it so fascinating that someone should decide to invent a new identity for himself? Was Bruno Grosjean’s real life so totally devoid of meaning that he could do nothing but dump it?

  We don’t know the answer, because Bruno Grosjean, in spite of the body of evidence against him, still maintains that he is Binjamin Wilkomirski.

  In my profession and in the medical profession this phenomenon is well known. There is even a name for it. When delusions surface in physical symptoms, the condition is called Munchausen’s syndrome. And patients with Munchausen’s syndrome are so convinced and so convincing that they will repeatedly seek out and endure surgery for medical conditions that do not exist.

  Some of us do not have the space or the time in our lives for delusions of any kind. We are different. Fate or circumstances has given us the lonely role of modifying the behaviour of others. In my case I have to bring the life of at least one more person to an end.

  27

  There was a knocking sound coming from the engine of the Montego, like the little guy who lived in there had certain knowledge of an impending disaster and wanted to get out. Sam thought about dropping the car off at the garage and collecting Angeles in a taxi. But the single tenner in his wallet convinced him he had to coax the car along for a few more miles.

  Rosie, one of his old flames, had told him that machinery was always surrounded by invisible elemental beings, like imps and goblins, who weren’t very bright. If you looked after the machine, made sure it was oiled and in good condition, then these little guys were happy to play about among themselves. But if you neglected the thing, let it get rusty and corroded, they were likely to start messing around. They’d trickle rust into the petrol tank, guide the tyres towards slivers of glass on the road, and they’d alter the fuel ratios until internal combustion failed completely. Any mischief they could cause, they’d go for it.

  Come to think of it, that banging from under the bonnet could easily be those guys dismantling the car while it was travelling along the road. A pixie wrecking crew out of their skulls on exhaust fumes.

  Rosie got religion really bad in the end. Seemed to spend the whole day on her knees. She lived on clichés and meditations and moved away to a New Age commune. Sam tried to think about Rosie but he couldn’t remember her face or why they were attracted. He couldn’t recall the sound of her voice. Just the weird things she said.

  Angeles was sitting on her bed in a side ward on the top floor of the District Hospital. She wore stone-washed jeans with a navy fitted jacket, and a charcoal-grey blouse. She was pale, her features drawn, as if someone had her skin in a tourniquet at the back of her head. ‘Sam,’ she said as he entered the room, a smile animating her face.

  ‘You ready to get out of this place?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’ She was on her feet now. She handed him a sheaf of paperwork. ‘Discharge papers. I still have to see one of the nurses. Then we can go.’

  Sam collected her suitcase and stood close to her so she could take his arm. His hand was swathed in bandages but she didn’t seem to notice. He walked her out of the room and along the corridor to the nurses’ station. As they approached, a small nurse with her hair highlighted in different shades of maroon detached herself from the table. ‘Ms Falco,’ she said, ‘here’s your medication.’ She held out a small paper bag, then remembered that Angeles couldn’t see it. ‘I’ll give it to your friend, here.’

  Sam had Angeles in one hand and her suitcase in the other. He grinned at the nurse and held the suitcase wide so she could slip the tablets into his jacket pocket.

  ‘Any goodies in there?’ Sam asked. ‘If I should need a new way of looking at the world.’

  The nurse shook her head. She didn’t say anything. She’d heard it all before.

  Sam got Angeles installed in the passenger seat of the Montego and walked around to the driver’s door. She seemed to be having some trouble with the seat belt. He waited, not wanting to seem over-solicitous. There’s something wrong with the woman’s sight; she’s not a cripple. If she needs help, she’ll ask for it.

  ‘This’s broken,’ she said.

  ‘It’s just awkward,’ Sam said. ‘I could show you?�
�

  ‘It’s broken,’ Angeles said. ‘I could show you.’

  He turned in his seat and pulled the belt around her. There was that hospital smell, and then the scent of the woman muffled behind it. He slotted the male connector into the female receptor and listened for the click.

  Angeles pulled on the belt to show him that the connection didn’t hold.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s supposed to click.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s broken,’ she told him. ‘It’s never going to click again.’

  He made the connection once more, held it with both hands so she couldn’t pull it apart. She ran her fingers lightly over his hands and smiled. ‘Are you going to drive like that?’ she asked. ‘You want me to take the steering wheel?’

  ‘There’s something wrong with the engine, as well,’ Sam told her. ‘Kind of knocking noise. The thing’s falling apart.’

  ‘It’s nice to know I’ve hired a company that isn’t overcapitalized.’

  Sam looked across at her. She’d put on a poker face to make things as difficult as possible. All those old sexist notions started invading his consciousness. You listen to Celia and Marie and Janet and you take it all on board and change the way your mind works, alter your whole genetic make-up, then a woman like this comes along. ‘Temporary problem,’ he said. ‘The old bucket’ll last long enough to get you home.’

  ‘You’ll have to look out for a new one,’ she said. She said it like someone who had a bank account. Sam counted to ten.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘When I start the engine you’ll hear the knocking sound. When I pull away from the kerb it’ll feel like she’s listing over to the left. These are not things to worry about. The other thing is, the safety belt, as you mentioned, is in fact broken, so you’re not strapped in. But you don’t have to worry about that either, because I’m gonna drive real careful.’