Beneath the Earth

by John Boyne

  You went back to work soon after the funeral. There were cities on your calendar, one every month or so, and you saw no reason not to fulfil your commitments. You had to earn, after all. And you liked the idea of solitude. Previously, you saw your trips as distractions away from Sarah and Billy. You would arrive, see what you needed to see, meet who you needed to meet, write your column and then be on the first flight back home to your family. For European cities, you might need only a couple of days. For the Middle East, four or five. For further afield, a week. But since Billy’s murder you have been to three different continents and seven different countries, and when you visited Rome, Copenhagen, Brno and Lisbon, places relatively close to home, you spent four or five days in each one when it would have been easy to leave quickly. Sarah didn’t seem to mind. Perhaps she liked the solitude too. Perhaps she was fucking someone while you were away. In your bed. In Billy’s bed. If she was, you didn’t mind. You felt no claims over her body.

  But it was her suggestion that she should accompany you to Amsterdam.

  ‘Why?’ you asked her.

  ‘So we can be together.’

  ‘We’re together all the time at home,’ you said.

  ‘It would be good for us,’ she told you.

  ‘I’ll have to work. I won’t be able to spend much time with you.’

  ‘You will if we don’t arrive at the same time,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you a few days to get your work done and then I’ll get a flight. I’ve never been to Amsterdam. You’ve told me all those stories about your time there. I’d like to see it for myself.’

  It was true that you had often talked about your love of the city. The years you’d spent there had been important ones to you but somehow you had always resisted the idea of your coming here together; it was a place, a memory, that you wanted to keep for yourself. But she insisted. She said that if your relationship was to have any hope of surviving, you needed to spend more time together, to talk more, to be like you used to be. Many parents in these situations, she told you, break up within a year. Particularly when there are no other children to bind them together.

  ‘That’s not what I want,’ she told you. ‘Is it what you want?’

  ‘No,’ you told her. ‘No, I don’t think it’s what I want.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘It’s difficult,’ you said quietly. ‘We’re going through the same experience, we’ve suffered the same loss, and yet I find it hard to talk to you about it.’

  She nodded. She felt the same way, you knew, which was comforting.

  ‘I don’t know how two people can ever get over the murder of a child,’ you said, preparing to give in and agree that she might come to Amsterdam. You were sitting in your kitchen at the time. She was drinking a glass of wine. Prior to this, she had seemed quite relaxed, quite calm. But when you said this, she picked up her glass and threw it at the wall, glass smashing everywhere, a stream of dark red smearing its way down the wall like blood.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ she screamed, standing up, scaring you with her fury. You leaned back, holding up your hands to defend yourself if necessary. ‘He wasn’t murdered! Will you stop saying that he was murdered? No one murdered him! Will you stop saying that over and over and over and over?’

  Then she left and it was very late when you heard her opening the door to her bedroom, the guest room, the room she slept in now. You still weren’t sure what to call it. You were asleep in Billy’s narrow bed, where you had been sleeping for months. Your own room was empty.

  But he was murdered, that’s the thing. That’s where Sarah and you disagree.

  You stand in a queue outside the Anne Frank House, shivering in the cold, the consequences of last night’s drinking making themselves known behind your eyes. You’ve been here before, of course, but Sarah never has. She tells you that she read the novel when she was in school and then throws you an icy look when you point out that it isn’t a novel. She stares up at the exterior of the building, the hooks extending from the gables, and runs her hands up and down her arms as she turns to look at a barge making its way along the canal. A moment later she gasps and looks at you in amazement.

  ‘That’s him,’ she says, pointing to a young man dragging a rope across the deck and dropping it in a corner before rotating his arms like windmills. Despite the freezing temperatures, he is only wearing a T-shirt on his upper body and is powerfully built. ‘I can’t believe it!’

  ‘That’s who?’ you ask.

  ‘The boy. The …’ She shakes her head but doesn’t look away from the barge as it drifts further along out of sight. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says quietly before putting a hand to her mouth and stifling a laugh. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she repeats a moment later. Something like a groan escapes her mouth, a note of longing, perhaps. Or regret.

  A party of schoolchildren are in front of you, a few years younger than Anne was when she and her family first took shelter in the annex. Twenty or so tourists are gathered behind you in groups of three or four. An American girl is chewing gum loudly, smacking it against her teeth as she talks rubbish with her friend, expressing outrage over some celebrity break-up. Their conversation is only marginally less annoying than the sound of her masticating. You turn around to stare at her and she stops in mid-flow, her mouth hanging open like some animal, the pink ball of gum attached to her lower teeth. She opens her eyes wide as if to say ‘What?’ but you turn back and say nothing. The queue moves forward. You go in.

  The tour is self-guided and Sarah and you move through the rooms slowly, quietly, reading the words inscribed on the walls, stopping only to examine some of the artefacts or watch the video displays. People whisper to each other beneath their breath, as if they are in church, and although there is no photography allowed, you notice more than one person taking pictures with their phones. You feel irritated by their wilful disregard for the rules. The same thing happened when you visited Auschwitz, tourists pointing their camcorders into every corner of the gas chambers to record the locations of despair, despite being instructed by the guides that this was strictly forbidden. What would they do with those images, you wondered? Why would they choose to watch them upon their return home?

  You feel curiously unmoved by the exhibitions downstairs. Everything is too pristine, too carefully laid out to allow you to imagine the people who lived here seventy years ago and the anxiety they must have felt. Shelley Winters’ Academy Award, a touch of Hollywood in an environment of tension, seems particularly incongruous. You hear the American girl laughing loudly, like a deranged donkey, but when you glance in her direction she is dragging her friend into a different room and whispering something in her ear.

  You lose sight of Sarah momentarily, then find her, then lose her again. She ascends a staircase and you follow, separated only by two small boys from the school party who seem frightened to have been detached from their group. They’re holding hands as they try to move faster but the staircase is narrow and they must wait for Sarah to make her way to the top, as she too must wait for whoever is before her and so on. They let out a gasp of relief when they reach the summit and rush to join their friends. You watch them and wonder for a moment whether George, red-haired George from three doors down, walks to school on his own now or whether he has made a new friend since Billy’s murder.

  At the top of the house you find yourself more engaged with history. You wander through the room that once belonged to Anne, the walls decorated with pictures of film stars and the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret-Rose. You imagine her taping these pictures to the wall and wondering what life must be like in Windsor Castle. You assume that the Queen has visited this building at some point in her life, perhaps more than once, and wonder what passed through her mind when she discovered her own likeness there. Did she question why she had been allowed to live a long and productive life while Anne, three years her junior, did not survive her teenage years? Did she wonder which of their names would endure over the centu
ries ahead? You find the ordinary things almost unbearably moving – a sink, a toilet, the bookcase that hides the entrance to the annex where the Franks and their friends were hidden before their capture. Finally you emerge into a long room where pages from the diary, the original diary, are on display hidden beneath glass cases. The children march by, barely glancing in, but you lean forward to examine the handwriting – it’s neat and refined – and imagine the young girl faithfully recording her thoughts and longings. You notice Sarah standing next to a tall man with a Van Dyck beard; he is showing her something in a book that he holds and she’s looking at it closely before she nods and smiles at him. He says something in reply before moving on and a group of you gather before a television screen and watch as an elderly woman recounts how she knew the Franks, how Anne was once a friend of hers. She tells a story of how she brought food to the family and kept their secret. She wonders who it was who betrayed them. To this day, she still doesn’t know. Her face bears an expression of incredulity that someone close to her, perhaps, committed the awful act and you wonder whether she has spent her entire life with friendship and love undermined by suspicion. You look around and think of the children – Anne, her sister Margot, Peter van Pels – confined together within these walls for two years, fearing their discovery, and a crescendo of emotion builds inside you as you consider their fate. An elderly couple with a distinctive Jewish aspect hold each other tightly and the woman removes a fine lace handkerchief from her handbag and dabs at her tears. She does it so elegantly that you are moved by this too. You can tell that she was once very beautiful and then realize that she still is. The lady on the screen is replaced by a documentary – crowds on the streets of Amsterdam, members of the Wehrmacht marching along the canals while young, handsome soldiers wave towards the camera. You watch images of Anne and her family pass by, hear of how Otto saved the diary after their capture, learn of the fate that awaited them at Auschwitz.

  And then a phone goes off.

  There is an audible sigh from several quarters of the room and a few heads turn, including yours. The ring tone is deafening, an irritating song designed to make people laugh, and it only gets louder as the phone is fished out of someone’s pocket. It’s the American girl. The one with the chewing gum. You stare at her, willing her to silence the phone, but no, she answers it. She speaks into it. She declares in a loud voice that she is in someone called Anne Frank’s house, that the guidebook said they should see it, but it’s like a total waste of time. She says that she’s hungry. She says that she’s still hungover. She asks whether someone called James has said anything about what happened last night.

  The elderly Jewish gentleman walks over and taps her on the shoulder. She turns to him, outraged at the interruption.

  ‘Please,’ he says quietly, smiling a little to show that he means her no harm. ‘Your phone.’

  ‘I’m on a call,’ she snaps, looking at him as if she cannot believe his audacity at speaking to her.

  ‘Please,’ he repeats, his smile fading. ‘You should not do this. Think of where you are.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘Will you please stop talking to me?’

  She waves him away as if he’s unworthy of her attention before returning to her conversation. He turns and walks back to his wife slowly, colour in his cheeks now, unable to meet her eyes.

  ‘So disrespectful,’ says his wife, shaking her head.

  You stride over and take the phone out of the girl’s hands in a quick gesture, no force needed. You have it in your grip before she can even realize what’s going on. And then you make your way to the window, which is slightly open to let in the air, and throw it out. You would love to fling it into the canal in front of you, it would be a far more dramatic gesture, but there is not enough space in the gap for you to be able to do that. Instead it falls four floors to the ground below, where you imagine you can hear it smash into a hundred pieces. Your first thought is that you hope it didn’t hit anyone.

  The only sound in the room as you turn around is the voice of the lady on the television screen, telling her story once again. She is on a loop, recounting her memories over and over, day after day, year after year without end. Everyone is looking at you. Most of them are smiling. Some look anxious. Sarah is watching the American girl, who now lets out a roar of anger as she advances upon you.

  ‘What the fuck?’ she cries. ‘I’m an American citizen!’

  She pulls an arm back as if to strike you – you think she means to push you through the window – but before she can succeed, your hand has become a fist and you lash out to punch her in the face, striking her directly on the nose. She’s knocked off her feet as a fountain of blood springs from her nostrils and she stumbles to the floor clumsily. The room gasps, the schoolchildren scatter, your former allies look at you in horror and things go blurry for you as you find yourself smothered by three or four bodies that have piled on top of you. It seems the girl has friends. Male friends. Also Americans and utterly outraged at this assault upon their blessed nation. You see Sarah disappear down the staircase as they begin their assault and your body tenses as you make no move to resist their punches.

  Your first thought was that she must have been drunk. But it was late afternoon, school had only just let out for the day, and who is already intoxicated at three o’clock in the afternoon? She claimed that she hadn’t seen him, that he’d stepped out on to the road without looking left or right, but the forensic team quickly established that this was impossible. Her car was halfway on to the pavement, after all, and he was beneath it, his lower torso crushed beneath her suspension.

  You asked many questions of the doctors afterwards and they were loath to give you answers, claiming that most of it would be too upsetting for you to hear. However, you insisted. They told you that it was very unlikely that Billy would have felt anything; the car had crashed into him before he would have known what was happening. And when he was under there, in those last few minutes while he was still alive, he would have been too deeply in shock for his body to have processed the concept of pain.

  An old man held his hand as he died. He was walking home from a DIY shop with a packet of light bulbs and had seen the entire thing. He was an important witness. He sat on the pavement with your son’s hand in his own and told him that he wouldn’t have to do any homework that evening, that everyone would understand if he took a night off. He told you afterwards that Billy said ‘Daddy’ over and over and that although he could not move his head, his eyes were darting left and right in search of you.

  George, red-haired George, miraculously escaped injury. He’d been walking closest to the wall and the car just grazed him, lifting him off his feet and sending him crashing to the ground. As the old man held Billy’s hand, as your son died, George made his way to a nearby bench and sat there weeping. No one comforted him, apparently, as they were all too concerned for Billy. This has always bothered you. You worry about George. You worry about the effect that this experience will have on him in later life.

  When the ambulance arrived, blood was seeping from Billy’s mouth and he was gasping for air. His eyes locked on the old man’s face and you were told afterwards that his grip was very tight, tighter than one would expect from a seven-year-old boy, but then it gradually loosened and went slack as his breathing slowed down and his short life came to an end. The paramedics laid a blanket over him and attended to the driver of the car.

  She was a few years younger than you, in her late twenties, but already had three children, the youngest of whom, a baby, was in a car seat in the back. When she murdered your son, she was talking on her mobile phone, chatting with a friend about an arrangement they had made for drinks and dinner the following night – a Friday – and they were coordinating their outfits. Her friend, when questioned, remembered a great deal about the conversation and, although Sarah said it was irrelevant, you asked the police liaison officer to find out where the two women were planning on going the next night and what decis
ions had been made regarding their outfits. The officer shook her head and said that there was no reason for you to know any of that.

  The woman tried to blame Billy at first but the murder took place in a part of the city where, by chance, a closed-circuit television system was situated and it recorded her laughing on the phone, her head thrown back in glee at the moment she sped around the corner and lost control of her vehicle. Presented with the evidence she was advised by her own representatives to plead guilty to the charge of manslaughter and reckless driving, advice that she took and which led her towards a brief prison spell and a lengthy driving ban. None of which really mattered to you very much.

  And so you have a loathing of mobile phones. Of communication. Of anyone being able to contact you. If you want to see someone, or if they need to see you, there are other ways to get in touch.

  Sarah has decided to leave tomorrow; you have to stay for several more days while the authorities decide whether or not to press charges against you. They’ve received information regarding your state of mind and apparently this will be taken into account. You are to stand before a judge early next week but have been told that you will most likely be discharged with a warning. There may be issues about your entering Holland again but you will take these as they come. And the American girl will, no doubt, pursue you through the courts for years to come, demanding millions in compensation. You already know that you would rather put a bullet in your head than a cent in her bank account.

  The crowds in Dam Square are quite large for this time of year but then today is Friday and the tourists might be getting an early start on the weekend. You and Sarah agree to go for a walk together and stroll side by side but not hand in hand.

  Sarah asks whether you think you would have ended up together if she hadn’t become pregnant and you tell her the truth. That ‘ended up’ may be a bit previous. She turns to look at you and there is something approaching pity in her eyes.