Gilgamesh

by Jo Bannister

  I opened my mouth to warn her, but all that came out was a scream.

  Then from somewhere behind the horse, just audible over the clamour of his hooves, a single shot rang out. Sally straightened abruptly out of her crouch, surprise registering in her face in the moment before she fell.

  Unbalanced by the loss of his rider, freed from her hand and heels, the horse swung away from me and towards the coachhouse door where he pulled up, stamping and blowing, sweat lathering his coat.

  I eased forward the fraction necessary to take the hooks of the rake out of my skin, then less cautiously the extra inches that freed them from my shirt. I looked at the horse, but without his taskmaster he was no danger to me.

  I looked at Sally. The rifle bullet had passed clean through her shoulder and should not have imperilled her life; but the plough she had fallen on had broken her neck and she was already dead. No more rides for this Valkyrie.

  And I looked back up the straw yard towards the side of the house in time to see the back door close on the figure of the Colonel, beating his last retreat. I stood and waited. I knew what he was going to do. I knew why he had had the gun out and loaded at so fortuitous a moment. All he needed now was a few moments to reload.

  The second shot came just as the police car raced into the yard.

  Chapter Seven

  David understood it best of anybody.

  We finally had our meal together, the four of us: OK, so it was a Chinese take-away, in tinfoil boxes with plastic chopsticks, and we ate it on the verandah of Skipley General Hospital while the sun went down over Foxford Wood, but with David still mostly in a wheelchair and Harry trussed up like a Christmas turkey, we wouldn’t have got in anywhere more salubrious.

  We ate and drank rice wine, and watched the sunset, and eventually, inevitably, the conversation turned quietly onto Sally Fane and her burning desire, finally fulfilled, though not as she had intended, to stamp her name on the public consciousness. And it was not Harry, with his policeman’s experience of strained and savage people, or me, with my intuitive imagination, but David Aston who could make most sense of what had happened.

  “It’s hard for anyone outside to appreciate the pressures involved in professional sport—by which I mean all sport which is the athlete’s sole or major occupation. There are pressures in every business, I know, but sport is unique on a number of counts. Firstly, sportsmen are usually entering their highest level of competition when their emotional maturity is at its lowest ebb, in the late teens and early twenties. Those are bad years for taking sensible decisions. Then, too, to be in with a chance of making the big time, the kid with potential has to be spotted early and encouraged to focus all his energies on this one area of his life. It’s the only way to succeed, but it doesn’t make for a well-rounded human being.

  “By the time he’s twenty-one the typical athlete has eaten, breathed, and slept his sport day and daily for ten, even fifteen years. The only friends he has live the same way; the only authority he’s been taught to respect is his coach. Otherwise rules are for bending, records are for breaking, and the sheer physical limitations of his body are something he’s taught to push against as hard as he can. Winning is what counts: nobody gives a tinker’s how you play the game. And around twenty-one you’re probably winning at the highest level you’ll achieve. There are exceptions—eventing is one, though you don’t find many people still competing in middle age—but for the most part sport is a young person’s business. Old sportsmen never die; they just get beaten more and more soundly until they crawl off and start boring barmen. Age isn’t an accomplishment in sport; it’s a disaster.

  “By the time he’s twenty-five, sooner in some sports, he’s having to run faster than ever just to stay in the same place. Kids of seventeen are coming up and pushing him, and he knows damn well that anything he’s going to do in this world he’s been taught to consider the only important one has to be soon, because the longer it takes, the harder it’s going to be. If he isn’t close by now, he might as well go home. If he is close, he’s going to pull out every stop he can reach—mental, physical, emotional, and sometimes criminal—to get there. It’s his last chance to make all the work and all the hurting worthwhile.

  “That’s when it happens. The last inhibitions go, the ones that keep you alive and just about sane. Riders ride on when they know they’re injured. Boxers cover up conditions the Board of Control would lift their licences for. Track athletes start packing their own blood. The drugs bill goes up, and there are more on the menu: steroids for strength, bute for pain, uppers for performance, downers to relax. They get caught, but not all of them and not at once. The prize is worth the risk. For them there won’t always be another shot at it.

  “What I’m saying is that if sportsmen go crazy sometimes, it’s not all their own fault. You can’t take a kid of seven or eight and spend fifteen years telling him that what he does is the most important thing in the world, and telling him to swallow the pain and the exhaustion it costs him, and telling him he can be the greatest if he’ll only push himself to the limit, and then not deliver, and still have a mature, emotionally balanced young man capable of coping with that disappointment and moving on from it. It’s natural to admire excellence, but if you make a fetish of it—and whether you like it or not, it’s not only sportsmen but our society which does that—then you’re creating a religion that demands human sacrifices.“

  The rice wine went round again.

  Harry shrugged lopsidedly, since one shoulder still couldn’t move too far. All the same, he was looking much better. He was beginning to crumple again round the edges. The week he’d been in bed, white bedclothes stretched too taut and too smooth over his bulky frame, his face smooth and white to match, he’d hardly seemed the man I married at all. The breakthrough on the road to recovery came when the nurses let him feed himself, and reassuring blobs of tomato sauce and strawberry jam started appearing on his pyjamas. The first time I came through the door to be met by a large pink stain like a map of India, I knew we were out of the wood.

  He said, “Even if that’s all true, as it may well be, it isn’t relevant. OK, it’s another reason why someone might break the law. Add it to the list; there’s never a shortage of reasons. Every crime ever committed had a reason; most of them had several. What interests me is not what reason a criminal gives for his action, but why he lacks the inhibitors that stop the rest of us from responding to our problems with violence. No crime was ever committed for a reason that didn’t apply equally to a whole lot of other people who didn’t murder their grannies or rape the charlady in consequence.

  “Perhaps particularly as a policeman but also as a member of society—who has never, incidentally, shared the view of sportsmen that what they do is important—I don’t very much care why crimes are committed. No, not quite: I want to know if anybody’s hungry enough to steal food. That’s probably the only crime for which society is responsible. Is it society’s fault if a minority of people want to spend more money than they make, crave drugs or fast cars, can’t cope with the normal irritations of human relationships without resorting to violence? I don’t believe it is, and I don’t believe it can do anything but harm to suggest that people are not fundamentally responsible for their own actions.

  “All through our lives, all of us flirt briefly with unlawful responses to our dilemmas. We don’t turn that momentary contemplation into action for one of two reasons: we’re afraid of getting caught, or we accept that the thing is wrong. Sociologists would achieve more lasting good if they abandoned their research into the multifarious reasons for crime and worked at reinforcing that concept of wrong which they’ve spent the last twenty years trying to erase.

  “I suppose,” he added acerbically, as a side-swipe at me, “that’s too simple for the creative thinkers among us.”

  “Too simple,” I agreed, “or at least too simplistic. And anyway no help in resolving a situation. As long as you refuse to consider motivation, you can on
ly ever respond to a crime, not act to prevent it. You can fill the prisons that way and do wonders for your clear-up statistics, but you can’t prevent any of the human misery locked up in those figures.

  “Your problem is that you can’t discriminate between understanding a crime and condoning it. The fact that David can trace the chain of consequences that led to Sally’s actions doesn’t make him any more likely to repeat them than you are. But it does make him more likely to spot it in time if he ever sees it happening again, and maybe he could stop it, whereas the best you could do would be an early arrest. Two people died and two were seriously injured because of what took place in Sally’s mind. If someone had foreseen it, all that could have been prevented. Medicine isn’t the only field in which prevention is better than cure.”

  After another orbit by the wine Ellen, who had sat there almost in silence while we discussed the criminal as victim, as jail-bait, and as an intellectual conundrum, offered her view. She made no pretentions to great erudition, nor was she a religious woman. She was asked, by Harry in fact, for her opinion as a representative of the great mass of right-thinking people, not exactly an unbiased observer but someone without a direct involvement in sport, law enforcement, or crime, and she gave it.

  “What I don’t understand,” she said quietly, “is how we can have this discussion—we four people, in precisely these surroundings and circumstances—and we can consider what Sally did, and why, and how the responsibility breaks up; and we can talk about it at length without anybody saying the word ‘evil.’ We can debate the shooting of two unarmed men as an aberrant response to stress, or a criminal act facilitated by the failure of natural inhibitions, or a social problem to be defined, even if it can’t be resolved; and not one of you, not even you, Harry, is prepared to commit yourself to a judgement.

  “You want to know what the great mass of right-thinking people might say about this? In my opinion, they would say that what Sally did was wicked. Anything else is secondary to that. All that is necessary for evil to prosper is for good men to discuss psychology.”

  The wine was finished. So was the sunset. We turned a little on the verandah to watch the stars emerge twinkling from the deepening dark over Skipley.

  Harry said, “Then what about the Colonel? Was he a victim or a perpetrator?”

  I shook my head. “He saved my life, I’m not qualified to judge. I do know, for what it’s worth, that he considered himself culpable—not so much for the attack on you, David, of which he had no knowledge and no suspicions until we planted them, as for what she did to Harry and tried to do to me. That wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t sheltered her. That was why he was always going to kill himself as soon as she was gone, one way or another.”

  Harry gave a pensive sniff. “In that moment when he saw what was happening and turned his gun on her, I wonder what was going through his mind. That this was something he had to do to save you? That shooting Sally would save you, while shooting you wouldn’t save her? Or was it a punishment for what she’d done, not least to him, and saving you was only the acceptable face of vengeance?” He shrugged again, off-centre. “I don’t know. He was an honourable man, but he was a ruthless one too, in his way.”

  David cleared his throat very quietly; still all our eyes turned to him. He knew the answer to Harry’s question. Apart from the opening scene, he’d been present for none of the drama; yet we who had seen it through from curtain to curtain could only speculate, while David knew.

  “Breeding horses is a kind of sport too. Gilgamesh was the triumph of his skill, the horse he wanted to be remembered by. If he’d done nothing, Sally would have killed Gilgamesh as surely as she’d have killed Clio and herself. He couldn’t do anything to save Sally. So he saved the horse.”

  In the night sky the constellation of Pegasus began to climb.

  Copyright

  First published in 1989 by Piatkus

  This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

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  ISBN 978-1-4472-3644-3 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-3643-6 POD

  Copyright © Jo Bannister, 1989

  The right of Jo Bannister to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance

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