by Adam Thorpe
And a slave to love is all I have ever been.
YOU NEVER
Those who knew Stuart were aware of a past murky with acts not altogether run-of-the-mill. He had returned home from his time in Africa (where, it was supposed, he had been a mercenary) to find his mother dying and his sister in pod by a man she would not identify. The mother had died, the sister had settled in the far north of Scotland with her child and an oil rig worker who was not the father, and Stuart had inherited the house.
The house stood back from the leafy road, pebble-dashed and modest, behind a low screen of spindly Lawsons, and gradually sprouted accoutrements that pointed to days spent fiddling with electronics in the spare bedroom. No one visited Stuart and he rarely stayed elsewhere; yet on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays he was always to be found in the bar of the nearby Cap and Bells, treating the immediate world as if it was his bosom, his lifelong companion, his mess-hut.
Those regulars who drank alongside him – he was generous with his wallet – liked him, but only within the confines of the setting. He had a damaged mouth; that is to say, something vicious had left a badly stitched scar that ran from the corner of his mouth to his ear, giving his face a lopsided look.
At regular intervals – at least once a week, when he was more in his cups than other nights – he would tell the stranger next to him at the bar that he had ‘killed a hotsy-totsy in cold blood’.
No amount of probing would reveal any more information beyond the fact that, as Stuart had apparently been a mercenary, such things were bound to happen and that it had happened in a far-off country. John, the barman, ventured a theory (in Stuart’s absence) that Stuart had shot an unarmed ‘native’ in somewhere like South Africa, thus confirming for most of those present the essential harmlessness of the act Stuart had long ago committed. No one could find out what ‘hotsy-totsy’ meant, because it was Stuart’s invention and he wouldn’t say anything more.
‘It’s what it means,’ he would say, and sink into silence.
After his evening in the pub, Stuart would walk fairly steadily home and boil up some packet soup – Knorr’s, generally tomato – to which he conceded a knob of butter. With the natter of the bar circling in his head behind his deep-set eyes, he’d finish the soup and wash up. All of these actions – the walking home, the boiling-up, the spooning to his damaged mouth of the soup, the scouring with the all-but-bald brush his mother must have bought way back in the fifties – were performed with a slow and satisfied rhythm. There was an air of triumph to it. The whole had been conceived and successfully executed. Then he would don his headphones and ride the airwaves, homing in on the ships or the jet aircraft or the local firemen dealing with something nasty like a road accident, before turning in.
He’d had women, he’d had a lot of women in Africa, a lot of bibis for baksheesh – but not what he would think of as an affair, let alone a steady woman. This bothered him only when he watched some sentimental series on the box. He’d got no plans to set up with anyone; nor even, at sixty-one, to indulge in games. His vigorous twenty-five years as a paid fighting man struck him as price enough for peace; he enjoyed the sunshine through the windows of the sitting room (not cleaned in his mother’s absence), and would succumb to the touch of its gold on his face and sit for hours as impassive as a Buddha, much as a cat does on the arm of an easy chair, feeling no guilt about it. He seldom even walked, as the countryside around the town did not attract him, flat and bald as it seemed after the forest and the mountains and the bright red earth.
Preferring to entice the world in, he worked long hours on constructing short-wave radios of various types. He erected a huge metal mast in his garden, kept in place with wires and cables, as well as other antennae perched like skeletal birds on the roof. He communicated with other hams now and again, even in good old-fashioned Morse, but was more the listening sort. Aside from the firemen, whose morbid jokes he found amusing, he was particularly attracted to military planes, which posed a challenge he could rise to, unscrambling their coded intercourse or simply keeping them tracked.
The local airbase was close enough to walk to – he had no car – and he hovered regularly in a concealed part of the perimeter fence with a portable scanning device that enabled him to home in on the cockpits. He had his old groundsheet from Africa days to keep the damp off: speckled with mosquitoes, its thick green canvas reassured him. His magic carpet, he called it.
He considered bringing along a member of the East Anglian ham radio club to which he belonged. The members were mostly much younger than he was, young enough to have been his offspring, and he hesitated for some time before asking Rob, a pleasant enough youth of about seventeen or eighteen with fur instead of a moustache, if he would consider a trip that Saturday to the airbase.
Rob was enticed by the illicit air around the enterprise, and agreed with enthusiasm. Thus it was that the two, armed with cheese rolls and a couple of Alinco scanners (Rob’s being the more powerful and expensive, surprisingly), crept up between the firs to a point where the high electrified wire gave a view of the runway but was not covered by a CCTV camera: the observers were happily concealed in shade. Stuart unrolled his groundsheet and the two sat on it like happy infants on a mat. Rob didn’t know it, but the groundsheet’s smell was of the thick green Congo air gone bad.
They had an excellent time with the apparatus, eavesdropping on some very dirty banter between pilots (delivered in a US drawl Rob was reasonably skilled in imitating), and falling upon their rolls in high spirits. As they sat on the canvas, feeling the soft lumpiness of fir needles underneath, and chattily shared what was mostly technical data, Stuart noticed that Rob’s chin had a ‘button’ in it, similar to his own. He indulged in the fantasy that Rob was his son, receiving in the process a recognition of loss, of what he had lost by certain actions and decisions, that was almost equivalent to a physical blow. He continued the conversation haltingly, all but overwhelmed by the thought of the days that still lay in front of him, shorn of satisfaction or triumph.
The American jets roared close over their heads, crushing him further, but he took hold of himself by concentrating on what Rob was now telling him.
‘They sent me the US version and the cellular frequency was blocked. So I sent it back and then a UK-friendly version came back without the SMA rubber-ducky earphone and the memory-skip was faulty, so I sent that back with a rude letter and they sent me this DJ-X2000 instead, so I wasn’t complaining then, was I?’
‘UK version?’
‘Of course. And I didn’t know whether it was a mistake or them feeling a bit manky about their customer relations!’
Rob laughed so the button in his chin disappeared, and Stuart smiled in his lopsided way. Rob talked older than he looked, he thought.
‘It’s got a 2000-channel memory,’ the teenager said, with his mouth full of chocolate bar. ‘And an audio descrambler.’
Stuart pulled a face, showing admiration rather than the envy he felt. His model – the model Rob had originally ordered – had only 700 memory channels and could not decode scrambled signals. Rob was telling him how his ultimate dream was to be the one to locate a missing plane with his mobile RDF equipment, picking up the ELT signal, but for that you needed a few wild mountains and East Anglia was not exactly the place for wild mountains! He paused in his natter to pour some tea from his thermos and offered Stuart a cup. Chilled by the easterly wind, Stuart accepted: he had dropped his thermos on the kitchen floor the day before and the interior bulb had shattered. As the steaming tea was being poured, Stuart’s hand jerked and his forefinger was splashed. His yelp was drowned in the roar of the jet fighter landing beyond the perimeter fence, and Rob apologised.
Stuart told the lad not to worry, it was his own fault, and he did not even blow on the scalded knuckle. He brought the cup to his damaged mouth and blew on the tea instead. Rob asked him if he was sure he was alright and Stuart said yes, he was fine.
Then he said, with a little snort: ‘My trigger-finge
r.’
‘Bang bang,’ laughed Rob.
‘I killed a hotsy-totsy with it. In cold blood.’
Rob nodded as if unconcerned. ‘Hotsy-totsy?’
‘An enemy soldier. My word.’
‘What enemy was that, then? In the war, was it?’
‘A war, Rob. Got what it deserved, it has. My trigger-finger.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t think that. War is war. That lot are going over to drop bombs on A-rabs,’ said Rob, pointing to the fat planes in the hazy distance beyond the hangars.
‘They don’t need to talk like that,’ said Stuart. ‘Always watched my tongue, I did. Personally. You’ve got to keep it respectable.’
Rob asked him again if he was alright, and Stuart nodded, noisily sucking at his tea.
‘Butterflies,’ he said, after a moment, his mouth trailing steam. ‘Thousands and thousands of butterflies.’
It was not even as if Rob was the kind of son he would have liked – the boy was thin and pustular and had a voice right up in the nose – but it was very pleasant sharing a passion with him and how much more pleasant would that sharing have been if he had also shared his blood, sprung him from his loins. The young man had not heard the comment about the butterflies, he was already donning his headphones because a plane with an unusual profile had appeared, at some distance, to the left of the main hangar. Stuart watched him locating the correct frequency, shifting the rubber-duck antenna and straining to pick up whatever the crew were saying. Rob’s face was all a-twitch with concentration, his pursed mouth like a girl’s ready to have lipstick applied to it; Stuart imagined this face as the flesh of his flesh, the result of a carnal union between himself and his imaginary wife, who would be big-buttocked and well-endowed in the top storey and extremely blonde. Was such a union carnal, or did carnal only apply to an illicit or an improper embrace? At any rate, he was filled with affection for young Rob, at that moment, and his eyes welled with tears because the soldier he had killed was not a man but a brat of eleven or twelve, wielding a rusty panga and drugged to the eyeballs.
It was the shots that had raised the butterflies. When he tasted the Congo, as he was now doing, the taste was of blood mingled with the rust of the panga’s blade. He had been squatting down in the forest, answering the call of Nature, taking care the ants weren’t having a snack of his behind and that his SMG was to hand. The razor-sharp panga had come out of nowhere and slit Stuart’s cheek to the teeth at one blow, knocking two of his molars clean out. His scream had raised the butterflies in the forest clearing. Or maybe it was the shots, immediately after. The kid was running off and dropped as if he’d tripped, butterflies all round the space where he had just been. Blood welled about Stuart’s teeth and mingled with the sweat collected in his collar-bone. The top of the brat’s head was blown off and the brains were spilled out like pink cauliflower, but he still looked peaceful, lying there with his mouth open, as kids do when they’re asleep.
‘A few years back,’ Rob was saying, ‘I had my two-meter radio on 145.550 MHz and picked up the Mir Space Station chatting away as it went over. The Mir bloody Space Station, all in Russian. You could hear every word, but fat lot of use that was. Now I can’t even find this one and it’s about two feet away. What do you reckon on the frequency?’
Stuart had hidden his face in his hands because he could not for the life of him control himself. His shoulders shuddered and he made tiny whining noises, like a poor signal. Rob turned round and stared, open-mouthed. He removed his headphones as if to see better, so that they sat either side of his neck and made it look even thinner. Over Stuart’s muffled whines the headphones sounded like silly girls tittering.
The following week, in the pub, the talk was of why no one had thought to check on Stuart when he hadn’t turned up either on Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday. John said he’d been run off his feet, Tony Wilson had had no idea that Stuart hadn’t been in on Tuesday and he himself wasn’t around on Thursday, if they recalled, and Geoff Eastley reckoned it wasn’t their business anyway.
‘Post-traumatic stress syndrome,’ said Tony Wilson, who was a systems manager and read the broadsheets. ‘Now we’ll never know.’
‘Never know what?’
‘Whom he killed in cold blood. His hotsy-totsy or whatever.’
‘Darkie, wasn’t it?’ said Geoff Eastley, a Tesco supervisor who liked to stir things up. ‘Out in Bongo-Bongo Land.’
‘I thought you’d personally employed that deaf Jamaican girl?’ said Tony, touching the cream on his Adnams and sucking his finger. ‘You bragged about it enough.’
‘So?’
‘I wonder what it’s like being dead?’ said John.
‘Cold,’ said Tony.
‘Cold blood,’ laughed Ron Crashaw, who had just come in after a few days’ repping in Scotland and was rubbing his hands as if it was winter outside.
‘That’s an unfortunate joke, Ron,’ said John.
‘Stuart’s done himself in,’ said Geoff Eastley.
‘Has he now? Cripes. How?’
‘It’s in the Daily Excess,’ said Tony, unfolding the Daily Express at the right page. ‘Picture of Stuart looking a bit more handsome. Read all about it.’
‘You never,’ said Ron.
There was the picture of Stuart, blurred and very youthful, togged up in military wear. The article was entitled DOG OF WAR MYSTERY DEATH IS SUICIDE, CONFIRMS CORONER.
‘Well well,’ said Ron, shaking his head as he read it. ‘You never. It all goes on when I’m away. Pills, was it?’
‘Slit his wrists,’ said Geoff Eastley. ‘The fire boys found him in the sitting room in a pool of blood. Read it to the end.’
‘Like a Greek tragedy,’ said Tony.
‘And now we’ll never know,’ said Ron.
‘Know what?’
‘Who exactly he did in. Did he ever say anything to you, John?’
‘Nope,’ said the barman, waiting for Ron’s Guinness to settle. ‘He just went on about having butterflies or something.’
WANDERLUST
His wife and children no longer even asked him when he might be coming back. He left without warning and he returned without warning. The essence of freedom is selfishness.
He would be standing by some strand in, say, faraway Sweden, gazing out at the bright scintillant water of the Baltic, and he would deliberately think of his family, allowing feelings of love and loss to well up inside him. He would have to sit and weep. It was a selfishness that gave him atrocious pain; consciously setting instinct against itself, nature against nature. One day it would spark into revelation, he knew.
He slept in barns and building sites and woods. He began to lament the passing of the horses. No one wept for them. Occasionally he would slash the side of a car with his knife.
Dogs were no substitute for the hundreds of thousands of horses. He hated dogs.
The great forests of France were infinitely welcoming, as were the barren heights of Romania. He avoided others on the road, as weathered and ragged as himself, with their tragic tales of lost families, their spite and drunkenness.
The fact is, he loved his wife and children more than he could say.
Sometimes he would formulate his journey thus, repeating it like a charm as he walked on his blistered soles, mapless, not knowing where he was heading for: Selflessness lies the other side of the selfish impulse, as bones lie the other side of flesh; I am stripping my own flesh to find my bone.
If this did not satisfy him, then he would think of himself as a small boy, with a small boy’s innocence. Living on his wits, yet bewildered. He would talk to trees, feeling his words absorbed by every leaf as his hands rested upon the bark; or plunge deliberately into the coldest of rivers, the shock seeming to pain his very lungs and turn them into frosty wings. As he lay on the grass, naked, in some lonely region whose name was probably unknown to him, memories of his wife and children and the ache of his loneliness combined in exultation like sacred music rising in some cathedra
l of stone and glass to the furthest point of the firmament, and he would cry out in near ecstasy and sorrow, almost fulfilled for good, almost ready to die upon such a moment, upon such a cry.
Europe turned around him as a wheel turns round its hub – he appreciated this. How many were the wheels that turned invisibly around the myriad other souls that made up the world? How did they mesh unfailingly like some great complicated machinery, turning beside or within or above each other in the populated areas? How did they not snag and grind?
Death came and removed a wheel with careful fingers, or sometimes many wheels at once, whole handfuls of wheels – but the space was quickly restored, filled again with the turning cog-like encrustations that passed for an individual life.
When he returned home, each time he would feel the teeth of his wheel snag on the wheels of his family – his children most of all, since their demands were on his soul, his capacity for love and affection. He brought them strange presents found on his travels – quite ordinary objects that spoke to him of a stage on his journey, fielding their disappointment in something as banal as a worn toothbrush or an empty tin of shoe polish with tales it engendered, glimpses of the life he had led for those months away. The great house and grounds would look smaller – but his children, grown inches taller since he had last seen them, pointed to something achieved, for they were all still alive and thriving on the simple gruel of time. Only his wife looked worn, though he presumed she must have indulged in lovers; he did not allow himself to care.
His notes accumulated: he had a tiny study at the top of the old tower, where he would spend most of his waking hours resurrecting his travels. Imagine, he wrote, a pilgrimage without a centre, without a destination; which route must one take? The choice is endless, infinite – I proceed only where my feet take me, this way, that way, to the left or to the right. He enjoyed writing, but it was not a craving like the other thing, the actual movement of his feet on the ground, the passing of trees and houses, the unknown itinerary of food and movement and drink and sleep. And he would again leave his family waving and weeping on the familiar driveway – seeing his mother in her furs standing there in the guise of his wife, a hooded car around him instead of the open air, school’s loathsomeness beckoning to him instead of the endless road, the hills, the heights. Then he would know that his selfishness was good, was a possible key to understanding when everything else had broken in the lock.