by Claire North
He looked up slowly from contemplation of his shovel hands, which flopped across the counter in weary hooks. His shoulders were broad, tapering to a triangle of muscle that ran up to the back of his neck. His head seemed tiny in comparison, black hair cut to a fuzz beneath his hat. He wore faded blue overalls and a shirt whose colour could no longer be guessed at. A large gap between his two front teeth made him seem a little younger than he was. His age showed only in his eyes, in the frown lines that had embedded themselves between his brows, and the crinkles that fanned out from the corners of his mouth.
“Sure. Why?” he grunted, neither accepting the glass nor pushing it away.
“I am followed by the shadow of a child who was murdered when I was in Africa,” I explained, angling my body against the bar so I could better watch the room. “As he comes near, I learn the truth of men’s hearts.” I held out my hand as he raised one burnt eyebrow, a bare quiver above the deep, goggle-ringed socket. “William Abbey. I should be a doctor, but I ended up a spy.”
Hideo, since coming to America, had made friends, fallen in love, fallen out of love, tried to find Jesus, failed, been paid a third of the wages of his white compatriots and seen the last of the Indians as they fled west across the plains. He had heard the sound of a hundred thousand buffalo running wild, before the men with guns came and blasted them into skin and blood for daring to roam; he had seen a comet strike the earth. Very little surprised him. I surprised him only a little bit.
“I prefer gin,” he said, picking up the proffered cup and downing it in one. “But if you’re buying, I’ll take the good stuff.”
That night we got phenomenally drunk.
“The ancient ways… the honour! The code! The… but actually, the price of fish, the price of fish was so important…”
We wandered, swaying on each other’s arms, into the Chinese quarter of the city, the shacks of six-stool bars and two-table parlours, music, laughter, women berating inebriated customers, inebriated customers declaring their undying love for life, drink, women, opium, and the smell of sizzling meat heavy on the air. There was one Japanese family he knew, just one, who had access to sake – sake! The taste of his homeland! He could never afford it, of course, but as I was buying…
“Would you ever consider being a spy?” I mumbled in a hazy, slightly nauseous fugue as the sun rose across the ocean below. “I mean… if someone asked. Not me. Not the British, we’re… but if the Americans, maybe? Or your own people?”
A dismissive wave of his hands, a clicking of fingers. “I like the railways now,” he exclaimed. “I have got used to them. I don’t want to go back to dealing with people, even my own people. Besides, they don’t want to hear the truth! You think the emperor wakes up every day and looks himself in the mirror and thinks, ‘What if I’m not the descendant of Amaterasu and I’m just making this up as I go along?’ You think the prime minister wants to hear that his ego has got in the way of a good decision, or that the people hate him, or the soldiers he sent to die did so for a stupid, old-fashioned idea? No one wants to know the truth! At least, not the true truth – not the truth of what everyone else thinks. They’re quite happy with the truths of their own hearts, the ones that tell them that they’re right, and that any doubts they might have about their own divinity are irrelevant and life is to be got on with regardless, thank you! You – you tell your people the truth?”
“When I have to.”
“And does it change anything? Does it make a difference?”
I didn’t answer.
“Of course not! Oh, maybe they’ll adjust a naval plan or move a platoon somewhere, but if you tell them something they don’t want to hear, they’ll just assume it’s because you’re unreliable. No one wants the truth. The truth means they’re not right. Being right is everything; it is freedom; it is suffering. Gin! Everyone wants gin! That’s the truth, I swear it.”
We had more gin, until finally I realised that walking into trees was a sign I might have had a touch too much, and we sat together in a contented, stinking haze until Hideo said, “I was raised to be Buddhist. And to worship the ancestors too, of course. We are very good at covering all the angles in Japan, and every decent Buddhist temple has a statue with a belly you can rub for fortune or lots of babies or luck with the harvest, and a fountain to purify your hands and mouth, and maybe a few demons or gods so you know it’s not just about sitting still and listening to birds, that there’s a divine intervention you can pay for with ready, honest cash. When I was young, I didn’t have much time for it, though I preferred temple to visiting the shrine, because at least the Buddhists had benches and didn’t shout so much. Then I came to America, and everyone keeps on talking about truth. The truth of Jesus, the truth of democracy, the truth of… all that. God. God is true. And I thought, that’s absurd. You can’t see God. You can’t touch God. There’s no proof that God exists; all you’ve got is a lot of things you don’t understand yet, and why would you say that some floating demon makes the things you can’t understand happens?
“We live in ignorance most of the time. We make up stories to find sense, to make the thunder the wrath of a dancing devil, to make the sunrise about our lives, a gift to us, rather than just the turning of the world that turns regardless of whether we live and die. We tell ourselves stories to put ourselves at the centre of everything, and invent knowledge to prove this, and truths to justify why we are important, and one day I thought… damn, maybe I am a great Buddhist after all! Because if I have learnt anything from my brother-in-law’s ghost, it’s that the world we see when we are trying to understand ourselves is nothing compared to the world we see when we simply let ourselves look. Truth… is imperceptible to human eyes, because we are so caught up in being ourselves that we are never simply here, seeing, here, being, here. We desire truth, the story that makes us right, I think, more than anything we have ever known. It is nonsense. It is noise. Let it go.”
At this, he let out a profound sigh, and turned his chin up to the growing light of day as if he might fly by its power. Then he rolled his head down to the ground, eyes closed, the breeze running across his crinkling, coal-cracked skin. Finally he twisted to one side and was profoundly sick in a fern.
Chapter 50
Say what you will for revolutionaries, they believe with great conviction. Since the shadow came upon me, I have been a magpie to the passions of other people, and Margot Halloran has always had a secret, blazing light.
After Vienna, we grew more reckless.
“I can’t believe you got me out, that was the most…” I babbled through drink and fumbling lips.
“Oh for goodness’ sake, you ridiculous man, of course I rescued you! When you didn’t show, I just knew, I knew, and I told them, I told them that if William Abbey died they would never get another secret from me.”
“You shot a man, Margot, you—”
“You have to live. William. William!” She caught my face in her fingers, held me tight, kissed me on the forehead, glowered into my eyes. “We have to live, you and I. We have to do the right thing by our shadows. Do you understand me?”
“Yes. I understand.”
In Milan we met at the opera, and eyed each other across our separate boxes throughout the tedious, dire event on stage, and carefully avoided each other’s gazes as we tramped out with the sore-backed audience after the performance and stumbled through chance into the same carriage as each other, where no sooner was the blind down than we were released from all decorum, freed for a few reckless hours from our duties and our curses to delight in simply being together, honest in our dishonesties, liberated from the masks that reasonable people wear.
“I want to burn it all,” I whispered, as we lay together in the hotel in Paris, watching the sun drag across the ceiling. “I want people to see the truth.”
Her shadow was near, and mine was not, so I don’t know what she meant when she kissed me on the cheek and murmured, “Funny man.”
In Istanbul, I thou
ght I saw Coman leaving the hotel where they stayed, pounding furiously across the road, and felt for a moment anxious and ashamed, but she took me by the hand and breathed, “Truth-speakers cannot love. The ones we love the most we have to push away.”
Then she kissed me, and I thought I understood everything, and had no idea what any of it could possibly mean.
Did I love her then? I love her, I don’t love her, I love her, I don’t love her. Even when Langa comes, I fumble at the words. Love is clean, it is a tangle, it is dazzling, it is self-deceit, I love her, I don’t love her, I love her, and all these things are true, it is true, I love her – but it would have destroyed everything had I ever said it out loud.
Langa makes my love poison, but even that is just an excuse.
In Istanbul she fed me information on the secret police who were hounding the nascent revolutionaries and nationalists seeking freedom from the sultan’s rule, and I gleefully passed it on to my masters, happy to enlist the British in destroying the enemies of my enemy.
In Singapore we huddled behind clouds of incense smoke as the mosquitoes gnawed at ankle and wrist, and she told me the secrets of pirates and smugglers, of great men who dealt in opium, silver and indentured workers for the American railways; and I betrayed British governors and their affairs, pox-ridden civil servants longing for a posting away from standing water, colonels and majors who prayed for a rebellion to put down, and the glory such a massacre might bring.
In Yokohama, we met beneath the red mori gate of a little shrine with paper streamers hanging from every post, and washed our hands and our mouths and stood silent together as the moon rose above grey curving roofs, and laughed at secrets shared and conspiracies hatched, and my shadow was never near, and hers sometimes was, and I thought I sensed it, and never asked.
In this way, she always knew my truth, and I never knew hers.
I was her agent, her lover and her confidant, and when she was finished with me, she went back to her husband, back to Coman and the revolutionaries, and I counted the minutes until we might meet again.
One winter’s night at the dawn of the twentieth century, I sat in Albert’s study, wet logs popping in the fire. Outside, London smoke had settled into choking, gas-smeared fog that blackened every inch of bare skin that waved through it. I stared into the bottom of my glass and found it empty. “Albert?” I mused at last. “Is there a cure?”
He let out a long breath before answering, considering all the amiable platitudes he might deploy again, and again, and again; the casual deflections and easy jokes that had been the baseline of his replies for so many years. Finally: “We’ve searched half the world.”
“But if you found a cure. If you knew there was a way to… to lift this. You’d tell me.”
“In an instant, my God! My God, William!”
He seemed genuinely hurt.
Was he?
I didn’t know. The sickness of not knowing, of having possibly overstepped the mark, of having doubted my friend, my not-friend, a man I betrayed, my friend – I didn’t know. I didn’t know how not to know. The trust built up between friends of shared action, of faith without proof of deed, of assumptions that when trouble came, so would help – this was meaningless to me. I had lived with only the truth for so long, with a definitive look into the hearts of men, and now to look at Albert, in whom I had chosen to trust, and to not know, horrified me.
I got to my feet, feeling suddenly dizzy, waved towards my glass in a half-hearted attempt to blame it on the alcohol.
“William?” Is that genuine concern? Is he my family? I would give it all to know. “Are you all right?”
“I have never met you when Langa is near,” I blurted. “I… I don’t know how not to know. I don’t know how to be… what people are any more. I don’t know… what people are when they aren’t stripped bare. You, the colonel, you put these people between you and me, all your agents, Mrs Parr, you make sure that I only ever know what they know, and they believe in you so much, I want to believe, I want to believe but I don’t know how not to know. I’m… sorry. I’m sorry. I can’t… I’m sorry, you don’t deserve my doubts. It’s not fair on you, you have never been anything other than… I’m sorry.”
For a moment I thought he would throw me out of the house, and that would have been fair. Instead, he put a hand on my shoulder, let out a little sigh, a breath I thought was more for himself, bringing his own, unknown temperament back under control, before guiding me back to a chair. “William,” he sighed again, “there is nothing you need apologise for. I know you are used to knowing… truth, and it must be challenging not knowing mine. We grow used to the rules we make for ourselves, however flawed. In truth, I am frightened of what you would see in me if your shadow was here. It is not just matters of state – if you were ever to fall into enemy hands, knowing what the colonel and I do – it would be a calamity. But it is also… I am a good man. I believe that. I doubt it every day. I believe I am intelligent, more than most. I sometimes cannot believe what a buffoon I am. I think the world is understandable, but my own thoughts are sometimes such a muddle that… Do you understand? I… have my truth. But it cannot be my reality. I don’t think anyone could live that way. All I can do is make the same promises to you and myself that other men do. If there is a cure for your condition, I swear that I will do everything I can to help you find it.”
For a little while, I believed him, and was grateful, and I never believed him, and I was full of rage, and these things were true too, and clouded my reality.
I run, and Langa follows.
I have met murderers who knew they were right when they did their deeds. Later, when asked, “Would you do it again?” they explain that they would not, because now they will hang, and they will tell their children never to follow in their path, and that they regret every action of their lives, but the truth in their hearts is that this story has no place in it for the ones they slaughtered. They were merely punctuation marks in their personal, quiet journey from cradle to the grave.
But then I met my sister, Anne, living happily in Mexico, long after Father was dead; and she believed in doing the best she could for her children, and loving her neighbours, and in a Christian heaven. She believed in heaven so much I could almost feel it, a divine light from a southern sky.
The man who ran into a burning building to save the child, because that’s what you do. It’s simply what you do. It is what needs to be done.
The lovers who fear nothing so much as the other being alone, or sad, or afraid, and find that they would compromise everything they ever thought they were, and face down every fear that has ever snarled from the darkest corners of nightmare, to keep the one they love safe and warm.
Children whose delight at the flight of birds is genuine and full of marvel.
A woman who found nothing so wonderful as the pleasure of the sea on her skin.
A man who swore his life to the service of his flock and would endure every insult under the sun, as long as it helped his tormentor find peace.
I have seen…
… so much love. Sometimes I forget that too. Sometimes, when I think about Albert, all I remember is the terror in the hearts of men. But then I remember: Albert loves his son. And his son loves the father. And there too is my vengeance.
I don’t know why the Nineteen took so long to destroy me. Perhaps they were ignorant; perhaps my treachery wasn’t worth their time. Whatever the reason, in the autumn of 1902, they struck.
Chapter 51
I should have recognised the trap, but it was carefully laid.
Queen Victoria was dead, and the second Boer War was coming to an end. The pictures of slaughtered Boer women and children, of the camps in the veld and the brutalities of the British had tainted the victory; but with so many powers rising to challenge the rule of the Empire, it was considered satisfactory to finally have settled the matter by military might, and reaffirmed Britain’s place on the world stage.
In Italy, a
dead king joined a murdered tsar, and all things, it seemed, were in a spin.
In the USA, the president was shot by the anarchist son of an immigrant. During his tenure, America booted the Spanish out of Cuba, acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii and the entire Philippines to boot. After his death, laws were passed permitting men to be arrested for their beliefs, and when the earthquake hit San Francisco the white potentates rubbed their hands together and wondered if finally, now, they could boot out the Chinese too and claim some prime real estate.
Meanwhile, miners were dying. At Rolling Hill, a hundred and twelve died when a methane gas mixture exploded. Eighty-four were immigrants, mainly from Eastern Europe. Those who didn’t die instantly in the blast were asphyxiated. After years of striking for higher pay and better working conditions, the United Mine Workers of America called a strike in Pennsylvania. Of the hundred thousand men who walked out, nearly all wanted the same thing. Money to feed their families. Wages to increase as the owners hiked the price of coal to the big cities who depended on it. Tunnels that didn’t collapse. Caverns that weren’t full of explosive pockets of gas, or the corpses of their brothers still floating in the flood. Money to pay for doctors’ visits when their coughing turned black. Recognition of their union.
These demands had worked before, in strikes across the Midwest. In Pennsylvania, the owners dug their heels in, and as the strike stretched from days into months and rumours grew of government intervention, the Nineteen diverted me from my usual trawl of admirals and senators to see what I might see.
And, of course, there was Margot.
Or rather, there was Coman. Standing on an overturned crate by the station door, he cried out against injustice, against the oppression of the people, against the brutality of Pinkerton’s and strike-breakers, against the rich who valued the life of a miner less than a mule, for whom it was cheaper to let ten men die in the pit than to build the pumps to allow them to breathe. He spoke of justice, of the history of a proud American state that had fought so hard for the right of the working men. He called out in Russian to his brothers from the East, in Polish to his good sisters and friends, in Italian to revolutionaries, and in the language of liberty to the black men paid not half the wages of the barefoot white.