by Tim Pears
Lewis reached James first. James slowed, Lewis held him, began to urge him away from the cottage, towards the house. James was slippery with sweat: for the moment, though, he let himself be led, while gazing towards the commotion dumbly, waiting for clarification. Then Lewis sensed the first reluctance in James’ body.
‘Come on, Jay,’ he said, ‘come with me.’
‘What’s happening?’ James asked.
‘I’ll tell you inside,’ Lewis said. He exerted greater pull, one arm around James’ shoulders, a hand on James’ wrist. They were nearing the front door now: only twenty yards to go, Lewis judged. As long as James didn’t bolt. Someone help me, he silently implored.
‘What’s happened?’ James asked. ‘Let me see.’
‘You don’t want to see,’ Lewis said.
He felt James tense, but Zoe appeared. Thank God, thought Lewis. She distracted James enough, coming the other side of him from Lewis, to get him through the door and then into the drawing-room.
‘Zoe, what’s happened?’ James asked, a bewildered boy sinking into a sofa. Someone brought mineral water: James had forgotten his thirst, he didn’t feel it; he drank the water in one draught.
Suddenly James shouted: ‘Fucking tell me!’ He was trembling. Lewis, behind him, put a jacket round his shoulders.
‘I’m going to tell you now,’ Zoe said. ‘I promise.’
A man entered the room, exchanged looks with Zoe, came to James.
‘I’m going to tell you now what’s happened,’ Zoe repeated as James let himself be injected with what he knew to be a tranquillizer. He was burning, quaking, to know what had happened, and he wanted to put it off for ever, he wanted time to stop, to start rewinding, slowly, back into the precious past.
There was a bustle in the hall. Simon and Alice met from different directions, framed in the drawing-room doorway. The people in the room turned and watched.
‘We can’t find Mina,’ said Alice.
‘Has Nat said anything?’ Simon asked.
‘She’s still in shock, they’ve taken her to hospital.’
‘Damn it,’ said Simon. ‘Oh, damn it, Alice.’ He looked like he might be about to collapse, but then took a deep breath and said: ‘She must be in the grounds. Come on.’ They vanished. This cameo had frozen the group on and by the sofa, which now came back to life.
‘Let’s help find her,’ said James, getting up before anyone could stop him.
‘No, sweetheart,’ said Zoe, grasping his hand. ‘Sit down. Let me tell you.’
‘No,’ he said, pulling loose. ‘Give me details later.’
‘You’ll be asleep in a few moments,’ said the doctor.
‘Let’s use them, then,’ James replied. He marched out of the room, towards the kitchen, down a side corridor, and up the back stairs. No one followed: he’d lost them with the decisiveness of his actions. He reached his old darkroom and tried the door: it was locked, and he knew that could only be done from the inside. Without hesitation James put his shoulder to the door, which burst easily open, small screws of the catch splintering out of the door frame.
James closed the door behind him. The room was infrared. Adamina was sitting wedged in a corner under the bench, with her knees held up tight to her chest. She didn’t seem to have heard or seen him. James sank to his knees; he had to anyway, he realized, he was so drowsy. He pulled himself over the floor. Adamina didn’t look at him but squeezed herself tighter, shuttering herself more firmly in.
‘I’m here now,’ James slurred. ‘Let’s just stay here a while, shall we?’ he managed, rolling on to his back a couple of feet from Adamina. His heavy eyelids closed themselves and he reached his hand towards her, letting his arm flop beside her leg before losing consciousness.
Chapter 12
MAP OF THE HUMAN HEART
IT WAS MIDDAY when Alice opened the darkroom door and found them: James laid out on his back and Adamina still crouched in the corner, holding his unconscious hand. She made no response until Alice tried to lift her up and then she clenched tight, like a limpet, to the wall and held fast to James’ hand, although she made no sound. The doctor came and gave Adamina a tranquillizer, and when she too had lost consciousness they were separated and carried to adjoining bedrooms on the same floor.
Adamina had seen her father blow his brains out, and then she’d followed after Natalie into Laura’s room and seen her mother’s slaughtered body, beside which Natalie had broken down; and Adamina had turned and run without a sound.
Adamina would not speak, would refuse to say a word to anyone, through the weeks and months to come. That first day she woke in the evening, looked around her, ignored Alice, speaking soothing words, and struggled out of bed. She walked out of the room, turned left, and tried the next room: it was empty. She tried the next – empty, too.
‘What are you looking for, dear? This is your Aunt Alice, Adamina, I’m here.’
Adamina reached the end of the corridor and then returned past Alice as if she was invisible. When she reached the room on the other side of hers she heard the sound of a man groaning behind the closed door, and she let herself in. James sat on the side of a bed, breathless, being comforted by Zoe. Adamina walked over and climbed onto the bed behind James, where he had slept, and leaned against his heaving back.
James alternated between a zombie-like state, in which he sat inanimate, and a furious, guilt-ridden grief. Zoe stayed close to him and was there to listen to his raving monologues, as he grappled with the awful puzzle of Laura’s death, an apocalyptic riddle he turned over and over. Why had Robert done it? Was he mad always? Why had I woken, and gone for a run? Was Robert watching, waiting for me to leave? Or had he intended to kill me? Or us both? I went for a run and I’m alive. If I’d been there, could I have saved her?
James tried to contain the rawest eruptions of his grief until Adamina was asleep or absent. He stayed in the same room all the time, with the curtains drawn; Adamina slipped out from time to time.
‘Let her go,’ James told Zoe. ‘She’ll come back.’
Adamina wandered like a sleepwalker in search of someone in her dreams. She wandered through the house, in the garden, to the cottage, oblivious to those who crossed her path. Sometimes she stopped and sat and waited, patiently, for her mother to be returned to her. Back in the room with James, she knelt between the drawn curtains and the window – just the back of her kneeling legs visible in the dim room – looking out for her.
At night they slept together. Adamina cried only in her sleep, waking James with the dampness of her tears.
The family cleaved tight to itself. Zoe stayed in the house. Harry hired men to keep at bay the press and television crews. Natalie came home; she stayed in her room with Lucy, mostly. She’d saved Adamina’s life but wouldn’t admit it: only that she’d failed Laura. Natalie had seen so many women battered, had protected one or two of them when drunken spouses found the refuge, but she’d been unable to protect her friend, and sank into a despair as much of guilt as of loss.
Charles was broken. As if in imitation of Adamina, the youngest, the old man seemed to lose all inclination to speak, and sat around in a stupor. Alice took care of her children with efficiency and vigour, doing things the au pair usually did, then crumpling into tears without warning.
Only Simon was capable of taking care of both practicalities and emotions. He liaised with police, priest and doctor, answered door and telephone, but also provided broad shoulders for others to lean on.
James stayed in the house until the funeral. There were two funerals, of course, but only Simon accompanied Charles to Robert’s. How to grieve for a son, a brother, who’d wrought such carnage?
Laura’s funeral was private, almost secretive. James had been persuaded not to look at Laura’s body, her face blown half away, beyond the restorative powers of the undertakers. Her coffin was buried in the churchyard.
The priest, knowing of James’ and Laura’s agnosticism, tempered the Christian hope of the
burial service. Of what was left James took in every word: they fumed in his head, neat as pure alcohol, alternately consoling and enraging.
‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery,’ the priest read out at the graveside. ‘He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.’
Yes, a shadow, that’s all we are, James thought. Adamina held his hand tight the whole time. A shadow, my love, and I will follow. I will flee after you.
‘In the midst of life we are in death,’ the priest read. ‘Of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased?’
Her sins, what fucking sins? James’ brain boiled. O Lord, you gruesome bastard, displeased, are you, you cunt-fucker God? Are you happy now to have your sinner home?
‘Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.’
Simon stood on James’ other side. He held his arm, and held him up from falling when he felt James’ knees giving way.
‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.’
As they threw handfuls of soil onto the lid of the coffin the priest continued: ‘For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear sister here departed: we therefore commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust …’
Afterwards they returned to the house – just the family and Garfield and Pauline, Lewis, Gloria and the priest – for a solemn, awkward wake made bearable only by Harry and Alice letting loose their children. The three youngest, insensitive to the pain of death, demanded to be dealt with normally, and so lifted the clammy weight of the occasion. Adamina, though, stuck fast to James, utterly aloof from them, silent and self-enclosed; the six-year-old child seemed as if she’d aged a hundred years.
And then at a certain point James, coming back from the lavatory, overheard Alice and Zoe in the kitchen.
‘We can look after her,’ Alice was saying. ‘What difference will one more make?’
‘You’re probably right,’ Zoe said. ‘If you’re sure. Are you sure?’
‘We’ve got a ready-made family for her, she knows us all. With a bit of luck she’ll just mesh in.’
James stormed into the kitchen. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ he demanded. ‘How dare you discuss Mina like this?’
Alice paled.
‘Easy,’ Zoe said, putting her hand on Alice’s arm.
‘I’m her stepfather,’ James exclaimed. ‘I’m her guardian, in case you hadn’t worked it out. I’m going to look after her. We’re going to look after each other.’
‘We’re thinking of her,’ Alice said faintly. ‘Of what we can offer her.’
‘Fuck off, Alice,’ James said. He was already on his way back to the drawing-room.
‘Let’s go,’ he said to Adamina, and she followed him. They went over to the cottage, where James blundered like a wounded bear, filling suitcases with Adamina’s clothes.
‘We’ll come back for things we’ve forgotten,’ he told her. He telephoned for a taxi, and they went to meet it through the side gate in the wall.
Over at the house the others sat and stood around, limp and useless, like marionettes waiting for a puppet master to pull their strings.
‘Let him rage,’ said Zoe, finally. ‘He needs to.’
‘She needs help,’ said Alice.
‘She needs more than that,’ said Natalie. Lucy stroked her back.
‘Look, I’ll go and visit,’ said Zoe. ‘I’ll see how they are, and I’ll keep you all posted, all right?’
‘I’m here, if there’s anything you need, you know that,’ said the priest, his eyes addressing Simon. ‘I’ll call on James anyway, in a few days.’
‘I can arrange a social worker,’ said Gloria. ‘And I know one of the child psychiatrists, who’s really good. I mean unofficially. However. OK?’ She gave Zoe her home and work numbers.
Lewis sipped lukewarm tea. Each time he returned cup to saucer they rattled. Garfield, standing by him, put an arm on his shoulder. Charles sat quietly in an armchair in the corner.
When Zoe left, Harry caught up with her by her car. ‘Money is not a problem,’ he confided, slipping a wad of notes into her hand. ‘James should know that. I’ll leave it to you.’
Back in his flat, James made up a bed for Adamina on the sofa in the sitting-room. She spent the evening at the window, looking down at the busy street. James sat beside her, his back against the wall, drinking from a bottle of whisky. When it was empty she was asleep on his lap. He carried her, staggering, over to the sofa, then stumbled through to his bed.
James was woken in the middle of the night by thuds and scrapes, and gasps of exertion. Adamina had pushed and heaved the sofa as far as the doorway. James smiled drunkenly: she looked like a removals man struggling with a giant’s furniture.
‘Life is not a fairy tale,’ he slurred. He wanted to help her but was told by himself it was futile to try. He fell back on the pillow.
In the morning Adamina was asleep on the sofa wedged in the doorway. James climbed over it and went to the bathroom. The hangover squeezing his head felt like appropriate pain; he relished it, even as he drank copiously from the tap and splashed water against his benumbed face.
In the kitchen James threw out bread, milk, fruit that had gone stale or mouldy over those previous days. He heated up baked beans for Adamina, had black coffee and apples himself.
After breakfast Adamina wrote a note: ‘Will we look for her today?’
‘Yes, we’ll do that,’ James agreed. ‘We’ll look for her.’
* * *
And so they set out, walking through the town, looking for Laura. James walked in front, Adamina a shadow tucked into his footsteps. Occasionally he felt her hand in his and they walked side by side, and when she grew tired, in the afternoon, she tugged his arm and he lifted her up and carried her, on his back or shoulders.
‘You can see better up there,’ James said. ‘That’s your lookout position.’
They walked the streets James had walked before, with his camera, carving rectangular images from all that passed before his eyes. This was very different: they were searching for someone. James knew they wouldn’t find her. He wasn’t sure whether Adamina knew that too, but it was her game and it was a serious one, and he would play it as well as he could. They returned to the flat around six, tired and hungry, to find the fridge and cupboards full of food: Zoe had let herself in with the key James had given her. He gave momentary thanks, and then took for granted the fact that he wouldn’t have to concern himself with obtaining food. Except, he realized, that Zoe maybe didn’t know about Adamina’s limited tastes. He was looking through the provisions for baked beans, Mars bars and Coca-Cola when Adamina opened the fridge and helped herself to milk and cheese, and then – while James observed, amazed – a tomato, banana and peach from the fruit-and-vegetable rack: from that moment on she relinquished her exclusive childhood diet and ate whatever she was given.
They wandered the town each day, wherever the whim of their footsteps led them. The weather remained warm during those first days, allowing them to ease themselves into their endeavour. James bought a street map and traced their movements: each evening upon their return Adamina laid the map out on the table in the sitting-room and filled in the roads and lanes and avenues they’d freshly trod, with a red felt-tip pen, the map like a maze in a children’s puzzle book.
James moved the sofa into the bedroom, and after they’d bathed and eaten Adamina soon slept. James remained in the sitting-room, drinking, whisky both loosening and anaesthetizing his mind into a strange kind of mourning, pathetic a
nd inconclusive. ‘What am I going to do?’ he murmured. ‘Why did you leave me? What do you expect me to do? I’m cracking up but I can’t. Damn it, you must have known this might happen. Why didn’t you prepare me? What kind of a mother were you, what kind of a lover, to leave me like this? What am I doing?’ He drank until he couldn’t hear or understand his own monologue, the words scrambling in his head and mouth, but he kept drinking till the bottle was empty; then he crawled to bed and instant, dreamless sleep.
They found their pace soon. It took an hour or two to reach the furthest parts of the town and often that’s what they did, and covered the streets in that area for the day. Occasionally Adamina would see a woman in the distance and, pulling James’ hand, run towards her: he responded eagerly, feigning hope, never prefiguring their imminent disappointment. If on his shoulders, when she spotted someone, Adamina pointed him in her direction and urged him faster like a jockey, and he stumbled towards the stranger until the resemblance faded. It seemed to them as if all over town were scattered women in disguise, Laura’s more or less authentic doubles, or reflections, planted in their path.
Weekends, James decided, would be less strenuous, and they spent them in the town centre, making a bench their base. Sometimes a wino shared it, sometimes an elderly shopper, resting limbs and carrier bags, waiting for a bus. Adamina wrote on a card: ‘were looking for my mummy have you seen her’ and showed it to them, until she sensed James’ disapproval and stopped.
‘You know, I lost my voice too,’ James told her. ‘I was older than you. I didn’t lose it completely; I whispered. It’s fine, you don’t have to say anything.’
Sometimes Adamina darted off into the crowd after a passer-by alone, but she always returned to the bench, as James knew she would.
James decided not to acknowledge anyone he knew. There were many who did recognize him, the Camera Man, but, if so, then they also knew what had happened – it had been in the papers, on TV, a scandalous local tragedy – and so avoided his eyes as he did theirs. A few were braver, kinder, stronger and pushed through the barrier around the bereaved. James hated it when they did. His grocer neighbour, Mr Khan, who’d come to the wedding reception, stepped outside with a tray of vegetables as James and Adamina returned one evening. He put the tray down.