Shooting in the Dark

by Baker, John

  ‘Isabel was still. She wasn’t crying any more. I didn’t touch her. I held tightly to the ladder and waited until they got us back to dry land.

  ‘They bundled us both into an ambulance and took us to the hospital. Isabel had nearly drowned, of course, and they were worried she’d die. And we were both in shock. At the end of the day Isabel rallied around better than me and we were allowed to go home together after a few days.’

  She looked over her shoulder as if she could see. ‘And that’s it,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been on ice since without having some kind of panic attack. Isabel and me, we didn’t talk about it much, but she was the same. Ice skating was never a possibility; I’d rather go hang-gliding.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘Any clues in there? You think it’ll help us find out why a psychologist wants to kill me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sam said. ‘He could decide to talk. They usually do. If he doesn’t, you might have to reconcile yourself to not knowing the answer.’

  ‘I can live with that if I have to,’ she said. ‘The search for certainty is a kind of mental cowardice, an avoidance of reality.’

  Sam whistled through his teeth. ‘I like you a little more each day,’ he said. ‘But reality is when two or more people are pretending the same thing.’

  ‘Like us,’ she said, reaching for his face.

  ‘Could be.’ He slipped down on to the rug beside her and they fumbled with each other’s clothing.

  ‘Shhhhh,’ she said. ‘We’ve got lots of time.’

  Sam closed his eyes and kept them shut, even up the score a little. They made love quietly in the empty house, as though someone was listening.

  49

  Felt like it was the end of another case to JD. It’d been good to be close to Marie again, for as long as it lasted. One of the things that had finished it for them, put the final nail in the coffin, so to speak, was when she found and read his journal. Specifically when she read what he’d written about her.

  Everyone was in JD’s journal. Sam Turner, Geordie and Janet, Marie and Celia. All of JD’s friends and neighbours and acquaintances. No one escaped. He watched them because character was his stock-in-trade. He stole bits of them, a mannerism from Sam, a phrase from Celia, the peculiar stoop of the man who cut his hair, and he combined them within the confines of a novel. JD laughed when people sneered at fiction, said they preferred biography or documentary, wanted to deal with the real world rather than something from a writer’s imagination. Picasso had said it more than once: ‘Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.’

  Guilt? Should he feel guilt for getting his friends and neighbours down on paper? For watching them, for spying, for being an observer of human nature? JD didn’t think so. The supreme watcher was not the writer but the reader. It was the reader who greedily gobbled up the end product. The reader who looked into the souls of all the characters in the book, and who, ultimately, tried to discern the movement of the mind of the writer.

  He didn’t store people away in a computer. His object was to discover, to retain and enhance the humanity of his stolen characters. He didn’t reduce them to data. His stock-in-trade was art, language. He didn’t digitize people, wasn’t concerned with the jargon of cyberspace.

  He’d tried all of those arguments on Marie, but she didn’t like any of them.

  50

  What would’ve happened if he hadn’t told Ralph to get out of the house? If he hadn’t delivered his brother’s things to the hospital? Geordie had asked himself these questions over and over again, and he knew the answers. Ralph would still be alive, that’s what would have happened.

  Ralph would still be alive because Geordie or Janet or someone would have arrived at the hospital to bring him home. He wouldn’t’ve been left there to hobble across town on his own. Injured, after being beaten up, unable to defend himself.

  It was as if everything had conspired to set Ralph up for the chop. The psychiatrist, whatever he was, the fucking murderer must’ve thought it was his birthday when he saw Ralph on his own.

  OK, so Ralph was no angel. Geordie knew that, just like everybody else. He was a chancer, but that didn’t mean he was gonna be a chancer all his life. Their mother had been a chancer and so had Geordie for most of his life. Their mother had taken her chance and run off with the landlord, somebody with money. She’d had the chance to change her life and she’d grabbed at it with both hands, took it by the throat.

  Geordie had seen his own chance the day Sam Turner came up to him in that shop doorway and offered him a job, and Geordie had done the same as their mother. He’d taken the chance and everything that’d happened since that day had led to his present position as a husband and a father. It’d meant he had a group of friends he could rely on.

  And the same thing could’ve happened to Ralph. If Ralph could’ve seen that Geordie and Janet and Sam were willing to be there for him. If he could have understood that they weren’t just there to be taken, then he’d’ve had a chance too.

  But instead of those things happening he’d gone and got himself killed. Inside his head Geordie called his brother a stupid bastard. He wanted to go down the morgue and get hold of the body and shake it. Everything could’ve come up roses if Ralph’d only opened his eyes for a few minutes, let himself see that the whole world didn’t have to be painted the colours of Hell.

  He remembered Ralph when he was a young boy, when they were both living together with their mother in a Sunderland sham. Ralph had been the breadwinner then, the one member of the family who gave a degree of hope to the others. He’d always been a big lad, forever hungry, and Geordie loved it when he strolled into the house, a grin on his face and somebody’s television set or stereo equipment under his arm.

  There were other times, too, that Geordie’s memory threw up. When he couldn’t sleep at night for bad dreams or when he woke up with his sheets soaked in pee. Their mother’s bedroom was off limits because there’d usually be some guy in there with her, and Geordie would go over to Ralph’s bed and shake him awake.

  ‘Not again, bro,’ he would say. ‘You’re gonna have to grow up soon.’ But he would help Geordie out of his stinking pyjamas and dry him off with a towel. Then they’d cuddle up together in Ralph’s bed. ‘You piss yourself in here and I’ll fucking kill you,’ Ralph would say. But Geordie never did. There was no reason to do it when you were cuddled up with someone else.

  All of his memories were confined to that house in Sunderland. Four rooms and an outside bog, and it was the size of a mansion in his mind. Every other house he’d known was nothing compared to the one in Jeddy Road. It was true, the house you were born in was the most interesting house in the world.

  Janet was worried about him. She tried not to show it, smothered her feelings in a brash display of efficiency. She dressed Echo in half the time it normally took and she had the evening meal on the table an hour before they were going to sit down. Geordie told her he needed to sit and think, that he would be all right in a few days, but she wasn’t convinced. Her face was drawn and there was a shrill note in her voice.

  Celia came and sat with him for a while. Before she left she said, ‘Geordie, it’s all right to sit here the rest of the day, but tomorrow you should do something else.’

  He nodded, grunted agreement.

  She said, ‘It is an extreme evil to depart from the company of the living before you die.’

  Shakespeare maybe. One of her literary heroes. Geordie didn’t think he’d departed from the company of the living. He was still there. Maybe he’d become a little more shadowy, but he hadn’t gone anywhere.

  JD quoted Ezra Pound. ‘For most people,’ he said, ‘life slips by like a field mouse not shaking the grass.’

  T feel like shit,’ Geordie told him.

  ‘A guy feeling like shit,’ JD said. ‘That’s a condition that has changed the world more than once. Not always for the better.’

  Geordie had tried to read Ezra Pound once, all t
hose Cantos things, but he didn’t have the right kind of brain. Celia had told him that Pound ended up in Venice in the early seventies, a madman feeding the city’s stray cats.

  Marie arrived only half an hour after JD had left, which would piss JD off if he found out. If he’d known Marie was coming, he’d have hung on and left with her and tried to make her fall in love with him.

  ‘What’s happening inside your head?’ she asked.

  ‘I dunno. It’s like a whirlpool.’

  ‘It’s important to pin it down,’ she told him. ‘What we can name and understand we can begin to heal.’

  ‘I wanna remember my brother,’ Geordie said. ‘I wanna remember him when he was good.’

  Marie smiled. ‘You’re half-way home,’ she said.

  Sam came late at night. ‘I saw the light,’ he said. Janet and Echo were upstairs, sleeping. He fussed with Barney for a while. ‘You want me to take Barney for a run?’ Geordie shrugged.

  ‘You and me, Barney,’ Sam said.

  They returned an hour later. ‘Dead of night,’ Sam said, ‘and not one fuckin’ killer on the streets.’

  They sat together through the small hours. Sam didn’t speak again and Geordie let his mind tumble around inside his head. It was good to have Sam there; even better that he was quiet. When dawn cracked Sam got to his feet, did a stretch almost as good as one of Barney’s. ‘Got things to do,’ he said. ‘People to see. I’ll catch you later.’ Geordie nodded.

  Sam stood by the door for a couple of seconds. Then he took a step back into the room. He said, ‘It’s all right to look back, but you mustn’t stare.’

  51

  Silence frightens people. The age in which we live is so ear-shatteringly noisy that when they are faced by muteness they become uneasy, as if part of their anatomy has been removed.

  I am their silence.

  The Trappists renounce speech as a mark of religious observance, preferring to commune in silence with the order of the universe. Traditionally we mark the death of someone special with a period of silence. And death itself, of course, is not renowned for kicking up a fuss.

  When all is quiet, folk seem to think that a storm is brewing.

  I have only spoken three words since they came for me. There was a remote possibility that they would have given me bail if I had spoken more, denied the charges they levelled against me. But I deny nothing; and neither do I admit that they are right. They are small people, the police, the prison authorities. They have no right to judge me.

  Neither do they have the ability, the qualifications to judge acts of a higher nature. Their minds are ideally suited to the everyday, the domestic, the functioning of the PTA and the Highway Code.

  They do not understand consequences, that one thing inevitably leads to another. They can never understand that, that one act becomes another.

  Kant is Sade. That is what I told them. I ran the words into each other so it came out as three syllables: Kantisade. They brought in a senior police officer and asked me to repeat it. He shook his head and left the room. One of the brighter ones decided it was a foreign language and they brought in someone from the linguistics department of the university. He went away to confer with his colleagues. Kantisade.

  I have heard nothing from Miriam. They asked me about her, wanted to know if she was involved. I didn’t answer. In my own mind I blamed her at first, for taking the bike. But it was my own fault. I shouldn’t have kept it. She was late for work and thought it would be all right to use it.

  They threatened me repeatedly and one of them took a swing at me in the cells. I didn’t flinch. Took another full-bodied punch in the eye and stood there feeling it puff up as the blood raced towards the damaged tissue. I am not afraid of them. They are little men. They cannot touch me. In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant said:

  Suppose that someone says his lust is irresistible when the desired object and opportunity are present. Ask him whether he would not control his passions if, in front of the house where he has this opportunity, a gallows were erected on which he would be hanged immediately after gratifying his lust. We do not have to guess very long what his answer may be.

  This is seen as Kant externalizing the voice of conscience. But what he failed to take into account is the emergence of individuals who can only fully commit themselves to a night of passion and find joy there if they are threatened by some form of ‘gallows’. I am not the only man and Miriam is not the only woman who needs to violate society’s prohibitions in order to achieve sexual fulfilment.

  Donatien Alphonse François Sade, known as the Marquis de Sade, showed us how, but it was Kant himself who set the ball rolling. In his definition of marriage, Kant describes it as ‘the contract between two adults of the opposite sex about the mutual use of each other’s sexual organs’.

  An interesting phrase, is it not? And one that has been pored over for many hours in the universities of the Western world. Interesting because if we didn’t know already that it was written by Kant, we might be persuaded that Sade penned it.

  Kant is Sade because the two of them together allowed us, no, demanded, that we reduce the sexual partner to an object, and not only an object but a partial object. Sexual pleasure and gratification is dispensed via a bodily organ, not by a whole human person. Kant said so, and Sade said so. And Kant is Sade.

  Together they are our heritage.

  The temperature today is well below zero. The windows are encrusted with ice crystals. In the garden hoarfrost is nipping the leaves of the plants and a deep ground frost has turned the grass verges as white as an old man’s beard. Even the pebbles on the drive are clinging together for warmth.

  The inmates and the screws are suffering. They button up tightly. One of the inmates is called Jack the Shepherd because he is a pimp. This morning I watched him blow his nail. Later he handed me a sliver of glass. A simple tool which will allow me access to the fair blind maiden at the heart of my story.

  52

  She came down the stairs with a small suitcase. Sam had already put her other bags in the boot of the Montego. He’d given up trying to convince her to stay. What was the point? A woman wants to stay, she’ll stay. He didn’t want to listen to all the bullshit about how she had a life, a job, commitments. Who wants to hear that stuff?

  Oh, sure, he was glad about her having a life. Whaddaya think, he wants to put her in a cage, a museum, suffocate her with love? No, just leave it as it is. Her with her job and her commitments, walking out of the house as an independent being. Going back to big business and blind politics and designer clothes.

  And his injured hand was playing up again. Numb this morning, no feeling in it. The hand standing in for the whole man.

  ‘It’s been good, Sam.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  ‘Really. I’ve enjoyed being here.’

  I’m not about to argue. ‘Sure.’ And there’s that smile on his face, designed to win Oscars.

  Dressed for the weather: a three-button mohair coat with the collar up and underneath she’s wearing a tube of a dress in blue silk that creates illusions about the length of her neck. There’s a fur hat at one end and opaque tights at the other, sensible shoes.

  She’s standing close enough now and he has a quick whiff, trying to decide how much of it is her and how much the perfume. It’s like trying to separate the toast from the marmalade once you’ve chewed them up. They go so well together you wouldn’t do it if you could. ‘We’re going to keep in touch, aren’t we?’

  ‘Try and keep me away,’ Sam said, hitting the right note, pacing it like a virtuoso. Competing with rich friends, middle-class sentiments, middle-of-the-road-mystical politics. He’d had a couple of stabs at it when he was young. Now it felt like a strain. Except it was her. And there was no doubt about it: he needed a woman. He took her bag and led her out to the car.

  He unloaded at the other end but didn’t stay. He put the bags and cases inside her bedroom door, to the left, along the wall, so she wo
uldn’t trip over them. He headed off for a new case, just routine, but it needed organizing.

  She held out her arms and their lips brushed against each other’s cheek. ‘I’ll catch you later,’ he said, backing away, not looking at her in case he saw what he’d done.

  The Montego took him to JD’s house without thinking about it. He rang the bell four times and was half-way down the path, leaving, when JD answered.

  ‘I’m disturbing you,’ Sam said.

  ‘Too true. I’m trying to write a book here.’

  ‘I’ll come back later.’

  ‘No, come in, it’s not great literature.’

  They sat and looked at each other. JD was wearing a ragged hand-knitted jumper that came down to his knees. ‘You came to see me,’ he said. ‘So it’s your turn to talk.’

  ‘I just took Angeles home,’ Sam said. ‘So I thought I’d call in.’

  ‘Angeles lives on the other side of town. You can’t use that line. You weren’t in the neighbourhood.’

  ‘I was feeling low, my hand’s playing up and I wanted to talk to somebody who hates the middle classes more than I do.’

  ‘You’re not going soon, then?’

  ‘Going?’

  ‘Leaving me alone to write my novel.’

  ‘If you want, I’ll go,’ Sam said.

  ‘It was a joke. Anyway I’m writing a chapter with deep emotional connotations. Lost love and betrayal. I need inspiration.’

  ‘What d’you think about a grown woman who calls her parents Mummy and Daddy?’

  JD laughed. ‘Yeah. It puts you off. This Angeles?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Signifies emotional immaturity.’

  ‘Or could it be a cultural thing? Like that’s the way they do it in their social group?’

  JD scratched his head. ‘Yeah. Could also be that the group itself is emotionally immature. Might be genetic. For example, there are certain crimes the middle class can’t understand, like rage, say, or the way some people just love fighting, or they go straight for the jugular, can’t wait to get in there and mix it. The middle classes think these things are inexplicable, or they’re mental disorders, or the result of drugs. They can’t understand that some people have violent personalities. They’re blind to it. You can explain it to them, show them examples, but they still don’t understand. D’you like her a lot?’