The Casualties

by Nick Holdstock

  Sam’s naïveté had mixed results when it came to Trudy. Whilst it would be an exaggeration to say he was in love with her, if he hadn’t felt some form of affection he wouldn’t have tried to get her a passport. It was also his way of proving that he was different from her other clients. In his defence, it must be said that he was no less susceptible to the confusing effects of an orgasm.

  The kindest assessment of Sam and Trudy’s “relationship” would be that he was her best client (or the one she disliked least). All she had to do was talk. He didn’t touch her or ask her to touch him. Sometimes he didn’t even masturbate. This allowed him to think there was something special about their time together. The money was just for the sake of appearances; if one day he forgot to pay, he thought she would probably say nothing. It might, however, be awkward for her, and that was why he kept paying.

  But Sam’s real mistake was his insistence that Trudy stop seeing Mr. Asham as a client. When she said she’d think about it, he actually believed her. The only explanation is his belief in their “special relationship.” Which is not to say he was entirely convinced. He would not have worked so hard to get her a passport if he thought she’d make a quick decision. He phoned government departments, and spent hours searching online. He started conversations about immigration with many people, including his volunteers, during which he asked, in throwaway fashion, if they knew anyone who could get a passport for a friend of his.

  All this is to his credit; there is no doubt that Trudy wanted to leave. He was also right to say what she already knew: that Fahad Asham was a dangerous man who enjoyed hurting women. Sam’s error was to assume that her subsequent silence on that matter—throughout the winter of 2016 and the following spring—was due to her having made the right decision. He thought she’d followed his advice because they were close.

  This situation was complicated by the fact that Mr. Asham had stopped visiting Trudy. But after four months he thought it safe to resume his visits. He paid double the usual rate and never hurt her face.

  * * *

  CAN ANYTHING BE said in Sam’s defence?

  If one considers the short life of Samuel Clark, in particular the period from his eighteenth birthday to his twenty-ninth, there are certainly positives. There is no question about his commitment to raising money for the charity. In its first year the shop made sixty thousand pounds; in its second, seventy thousand pounds; for its final year, the projected takings were just below one hundred thousand pounds. It is reasonable to assume this money helped protect a number of children who would otherwise have been harmed. The other group that benefited were the volunteers. For most, it was somewhere they could come and feel valued. For people like Spooky, it was a safe place where they could start to reconstruct themselves. They could sit behind the till and take money and put books in bags. They could clean and tidy shelves, alphabetize the fiction, cull books from too-full sections, build towards the realisation that they were OK.

  Sam’s other good deed was letting Alasdair live with him. This required considerable patience and self-control. During Alasdair’s first few months in the flat he acted as if Sam weren’t there. He had conversations with himself that began as a series of muttered phrases then quickly turned into shouting. Most of these ended with him yelling, “WHAT?” or “I DON’T KNOW.” He also left blood in the sink after cleaning his teeth. Whenever Sam asked him not to do this, Alasdair smirked and said, “You don’t like blood, do you?”

  He had no respect for the few objects Sam possessed. Within the first few weeks Alasdair ripped two cushions and broke three plates, all the glasses and mugs, the bathroom mirror, two light bulbs, and one of the windows in the lounge. He often smashed things with a hammer then left the debris on the floor. The flat was his storeroom and personal junkyard. Sam had to wear shoes in the house; he took them off only to get into bed or the shower. As Sam lost his possessions, he gained many new ones. He’d come home to find a lawnmower in the kitchen, a child’s bicycle in the hall.

  Alasdair also threw out one of the few objects that had any sentimental value for Sam, a small jade crocodile he had been given by his grandfather. The crocodile was on Sam’s bedside table in a big glass ashtray, along with a few stones he’d taken from the river because he liked the veins of quartz in them. One morning, when Sam was at work, Alasdair went into his room in search of a glass to urinate into. In some respects, he had good reason to do so, as there was only one left in the flat (and it wasn’t really a glass, but an old jar), and Sam had taken to hiding it. When Alasdair couldn’t find it—Sam had taken it to work with him—he considered the ashtray, but only briefly, because its capacity was too small. Alasdair did not know why Sam had the thing at all. Neither of them smoked. He took the ashtray and put it in the box of broken plates and glasses that Sam had been asking him to get rid of for weeks. After that, he carefully filled a bottle with his piss.

  When Sam came home and found the ashtray and its crocodile gone, he calmly went into the kitchen. He was used to Alasdair moving objects around—not just small ones, but all the furniture. Alasdair thought the flat had irritable feng shui.

  “Where did you put the ashtray?”

  Alasdair was putting handfuls of what looked like grass into boiling water. “Which one?” he asked without turning.

  “The one by my bed.”

  “You don’t smoke,” said Alasdair, sounding pleased.

  “That’s right. But where is it?”

  “I put it in the box with the plates.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Outside.”

  Sam went and looked. There was no box. It was the day rubbish was collected.

  He went back into the kitchen. Alasdair was pouring a yellow liquid from a plastic bottle into the saucepan. He was whistling. Sam was not angry, but nonetheless wanted to say something. Surely Alasdair needed to know that he had upset Sam. He had thrown away something precious. Now all he had left of his grandfather was the tin chest in the lounge.

  But all he said was, “What are you making?”

  “Soup.”

  Later, after they had eaten, Sam wondered why he wasn’t bothered. All he felt was calm. He would experience this feeling many times in the weeks that followed. Though Alasdair continued to dispose of objects in the house—he threw out Sam’s parents’ bed because it was too soft; the kettle because they could boil water in saucepans—it didn’t seem to matter. It pleased him to watch the slow destruction of his parents’ home. He was no longer afraid they might return; now he wanted them to come back and see the state of the place. Their possessions gone, the rooms littered with junk, the sweet ammonia smell of Alasdair’s urine.

  Having a place to live definitely helped Alasdair. One evening after dinner they were sitting quietly in the lounge. Alasdair was looking at the photo album; Sam was reading a crime novel in which the members of an aristocratic family were being fed to circus animals.

  “This woman,” said Alasdair, “is not my mother.” He tapped her face with his nail. Then he turned the page.

  Sam waited for Alasdair to continue, but he seemed engrossed in the album. He returned to his novel and read two chapters, the second of which ended with someone hearing the roar of a lion. He yawned, closed his eyes, reopened them, and saw the photo album coming toward him. This was the photo he saw.

  Alasdair’s long fingernail tapped the boy on the left’s face, moved right to his father, then tapped along the line.

  “This is not my family,” he said. He sounded sad, but only for a moment. Then he closed the book and handed it to Sam.

  “Take it back. Sell it tomorrow. If you don’t, I will.”

  “Thanks,” said Sam, and Alasdair nodded. Sam felt he should say more, but he didn’t know what. He returned to his novel and read about an aunt being chloroformed.

  “You are not an object,” said Alasdair.

  “I hope not,” said Sam, and laughed. Alasdair did not.

  “Just because they threw you
away doesn’t mean you’re a thing. You weren’t something they owned.”

  “I know,” he said without thinking. He felt uncomfortable.

  “They were wrong, but they don’t know that. No,” he said, then shook his head. “They won’t be coming back.”

  “They might,” said Sam, his heart beating faster.

  “Why? So they can own you?” Alasdair made a noise in his throat. “You should hope they are dead.”

  “No,” said Sam, who had fantasised about it. Prayed it was not true.

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s wrong. I don’t wish them well, and I don’t want them to be happy, and I hope they’re living a shitty life in some air-conditioned condo with ex-pats who moan about the beer. But just because I can’t forgive them doesn’t mean they deserve to die.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just told you.”

  “No, you didn’t. You said that isn’t what you want. Not why they don’t deserve to die.”

  “Because no one does. Or only people like Hitler or Stalin.”

  “Why them and not your parents?”

  Sam shook his head. “You’re fucking crazy. It’s obvious.”

  This accusation did not bother Alasdair. He knew it wasn’t true. He tilted his head. “Not to me.”

  Sam sighed. “Because they killed millions of people. Because even putting them in a cage for the rest of their lives doesn’t seem like enough.”

  “What about your parents? Would that be enough?”

  “No! They didn’t kill millions of people. They didn’t kill anyone. They didn’t kick me or hit me or put cigarettes out on my legs. They just left me without saying goodbye or we’re sorry or even that shit parents tell their kids when they’re getting divorced about how it isn’t their fault and Mummy and Daddy still love them very much. It was a horrible thing, and I guess it’s fucked me up, and I don’t think I’ll ever understand why they did it. But it’s not the same thing as killing millions, or even one person. Lots of people are total fuckers who only hurt and destroy other people, but that doesn’t mean they should be killed. What my parents did was horrible, and just because they could have done worse, doesn’t make it less so. They just—”

  He stopped, because Alasdair didn’t seem to be listening. He was concentrating on an old piece of rope he was twisting around his fingers. Sam felt stupid, then angry that Alasdair had brought up the subject then gotten bored. He stood up and went into his room and closed the door very hard. At that moment, if you had said to him that he was right about his parents, he would have told you to fuck off. But what was true of them was perhaps also true for him. Just because someone makes a stupid, naïve, catastrophic mistake, one that they cannot forget, not even after sixty years, this does not mean we must condemn them completely. I have heard too much talk about people getting what they deserved. About karma and so forth. To my mind, this is the kind of thinking we should now be done with. We can admit the faults of the dead without saying they deserved to die.

  14. June

  DURING THAT PENULTIMATE MONTH CAITLIN stopped coming into the bookshop. It had taken her a long time, and it had been painful, but she had finally given up. Any interaction was a risk; the last thing she wanted was hope.

  She would have been surprised (and maybe pleased) to know how much her behaviour upset Sam. After all, he was not in love with her, and—though it may seem cruel to say so—they were not really friends. What upset him was the fact that she was leaving. He felt the same when his volunteers left. Though this was usually cause for celebration—it meant they had found permanent employment, true love, a level of self-esteem that made them realise their time was too precious to be spent sitting behind a cash register—it always bothered him. It suggested that his world was not as stable as he thought. This, perhaps, is another reason he stayed in Comely Bank. It was like one of those little lakes a river sometimes leaves behind. A place to meet the same fish all the time.

  Sam was especially sensitive because four of his volunteers had left that month. Clive and Penny were the first to go. They announced that with the help of Jesus they had beaten their addictions and in gratitude were going to work with street kids in Bolivia. Next was Mehmet, who clasped Sam’s hand and said he was going to open an ice cream shop in Ürümqi. As for Boring Lesley, she had found a job at the airport. But although Sam would miss them, they were easily replaced. There was no shortage of people in Comely Bank whose lives had hit bottom. Only a week later there were three new volunteers: Abena (who had just converted from Buddhism, her ninth religion, to Islam), Paige (who was on probation), and Douglas (who had had surgery then chemotherapy for his cancer and whose prognosis was good).

  But Caitlin meant more to Sam than his volunteers did. One does not have to reciprocate love in order to enjoy it. No wonder he found the loss of Caitlin’s attention distressing. If someone stops loving you, or seeming to love you, it casts a shadow backwards. Treasured Memories lose colour, light, and become Things That Happened. Perhaps she had not enjoyed talking about books or the oddities of their volunteers. Perhaps he had bored her.

  Sam started having dreams in which he was continually late. Usually these involved him running to catch a bus because he had gotten the time of departure wrong. When he woke his heart was racing and his chest felt tight; sometimes he had to drink whisky to calm down. The worst part was that he couldn’t disagree with what Caitlin was doing. Anything except ignoring him was basically self-harm.

  Sam dealt with the loss of Caitlin’s attention in a way Mrs. Maclean would have understood. He lent Lonnie fifty pounds. He allowed Lucifer to separate Crime from Fiction. On Sunday afternoons he started going to Mrs. Maclean’s house, even though this involved two hours of halting conversation with the three elderly ladies she invited from church. Some days he went to the toilet three times during his visit, just to get away from the talk of bunions and floral arrangements. It was during one of these escapes that he happened to look in a room whose door was usually closed. Inside he could see a writing bureau and a long shelf full of boxes. On that day he went no further; the next week he took as many letters as he could hide in his pockets.

  He also tried to be a better housemate to Alasdair. It took three hours to find soybean paste, ginger-marinated tofu, organic spinach, organic flat parsley, wild garlic, freshwater mussels, buckwheat noodles, rice wine, single cream, and saffron. He marinated the mussels for six hours. The sauce took another two. When Alasdair came in he sniffed the air suspiciously, then looked in the pot.

  “What’s in that?”

  Sam told him, then could not help adding, “It tastes pretty amazing.”

  Alasdair picked up a wooden spoon. He dragged it through the thick sauce, then brought it to his mouth. He sniffed.

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “It’s no good.”

  “Why?”

  “You can’t put these together.”

  “Come on. Just taste it.”

  Alasdair put his finger in the sauce, then licked it.

  “So?”

  “It’s very good.”

  “I told you.”

  “Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is—” he said, and paused, as if he was only then picking a reason. “The point is they don’t work together. The wheat upsets the mussels. The spinach blocks the cream. Just because it tastes great doesn’t mean it’s good for you. You’ll get more nutrition from rice crackers.”

  Which is what he ate for dinner.

  That same week Sam brought the laptop and image scanner from the bookshop and set them up by the old chest. When Alasdair came in, Sam made no attempt to explain the piles of photos, notebooks, and paper scraps on the floor. Even if Alasdair wasn’t interested, it was a job long overdue. A small fire, a minor flood, and they would all be lost.

  It wasn’t an unpleasant task. He got to remember (or try to remember) when and how he’d found each item. For the first two years he hadn’t bothered t
o record this information, which meant that some items were even more of a mystery than when he’d first seen them. I doubt anyone will ever know why the boy on the left looks so scared.

  Sam didn’t dwell on any picture. He preferred to lose himself in the repetition of the task. Nowadays we only need to hold something up to our screens for a second; back then it could take thirty seconds to scan an item. It was boring, but soothing.

  Sam was about to scan a photo he’d found in a book called The Price of Glory, in May 2011, when he realised Alasdair was standing over him.

  “I don’t know them,” he said.

  “I didn’t say you did.” Sam turned over the photo. “The women’s names are Val and Cynthia; it doesn’t say what his is. It’s from 1961.”

  Sam put it down and picked up another. “You probably don’t know them either.”

  “That’s right,” said Alasdair. “They’re not my family.” He squatted and turned over several more photos, then stood and went to the chest.

  “You should give these back.”

  “I didn’t take them.”

  Alasdair thought for a moment. “Maybe you are not a thief. But they belong to someone who didn’t mean to give them away.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in people owning things.”

  “These are not things.” He sat down and started looking through the piles. Sam scanned a few more pictures, then yawned. He stood and stretched.

  “I’m going to bed. Do you want to take over?”

  “All right. Just pass me that cup.”

  It was half-full of yellow liquid. At least it wasn’t warm.

  That night Sam woke several times and heard the whirr of the scanner. How many people were in that trunk? At least several thousand. More than the number of living people he knew in Comely Bank. Even that small amount, perhaps three hundred, was overwhelming when he considered all the things they’d said and done, what people thought about them. It was a lot of information, most of which would vanish when they died—except that which persisted through their children and friends, and then, after they were gone, through letters, photos, or videos posted on the Internet. For a moment, as Sam lay in the dark, he saw himself in a playground holding the hand of a child with curly yellow hair and a nose like his. He protested, and the child vanished.