The Accidental Recluse

by Tom McCulloch

  My stomach turned for an altogether different reason. I felt instantly sick. I remembered the evening I told Duke about Anna and I, the shouting from downstairs which I assumed was Duke on the telephone, confronting her with what we had done. Yet he hadn’t said a word.

  Thirteen

  ‘Mr Jackson, you’re so . . . ruthless.’

  ‘Tis a blue sunny morning after the Night of the Skull People. Frank Stone and I are sitting in the back of the Mercedes. He leans away from me slightly. I think he’s going for shocked respect.

  ‘I wish I’d gone now . . . A Man’s a Man, sure. But not if you’re working for him, huh, am I wrong? How much are you paying your people? I saw the TV, those were some seriously pissed hombres.’

  Stuck in the Mercedes with him, the presence of Stone is almost hypnotising. I drag my eyes away from the vampire fingers clutching the air as he speaks, the odd pouting ventriloquist mouth.

  ‘They’re not my people.’

  ‘Me thinks you doth protest too much.’

  ‘It’s not a protest.’

  ‘No. Last night. That was a protest.’

  ‘It wasn’t really much of a protest.’

  ‘There you go, protesting again!’

  ‘I mean, there weren’t that many people.’

  ‘Didn’t they start banging on the top of the car? Wow! Maybe they wanted to lift it up and carry you away like—’

  ‘Cannibals?’ I suggest.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Zombies?’

  ‘Vikings. There were Vikings round here, right? They were gonna carry you off like Vikings. Burn you on the beach.’

  ‘Vikings.’

  ‘Vikings.’

  ‘Dancing round the flames?’

  Stone grins. Teeth like neat rows of headstones. ‘Yes. That is exactly what I imagined.’ The smile vanishes and he leans forward, mock-serious. ‘Seriously though, what are you paying those people?’

  So we return to the start of the loop.

  ‘I’m just messing with you.’ I feel a hard squeeze on my arm and open my eyes to an apologetic smile. ‘It’s a long time you’ve been incommunicado. I get it. But you need to enjoy yourself. Go with it!’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

  Stone and I look up at Erin.

  I think we’ve both forgotten she’s in the car, sitting up front with Akira. Overnight, any guilty enjoyment about the bookshop demonstration has vanished. She’s caught up with the media coverage.

  She holds up her mobile to show us another headline. ‘Fear and Loathing for Breda Inc.’ Then an exaggerated shrug and grin. ‘What do you think, boys, are we fearful or all fucked up?’

  ‘Ha!’ Stone slaps his thigh and wags his finger. ‘Now that. That sounds like someone enjoying herself.’

  ‘Least we’ve got Renner flying in,’ she says.

  Brad Renner is the reason we’re in this Mercedes at 8am and heading for McIntyre’s Cave. The A-lister is in the air. Due at nine to visit crew and set. Then back to the Castle to work the press, pour stardust on last night’s debacle. ‘We’ll retake the narrative,’ she says.

  Just in time for tomorrow’s civic extravaganza, the re-awarding of the Freedom of Inveran to the Shinigami. I’m becoming quite fond of my title. Akira showed me the latest email this morning. I was at the bookshop. I saw you through the window of the car but you never saw me . . .

  Or some such.

  Erin has not mentioned it. She continues to protect me from an anxiety I don’t feel. I almost find myself telling her that I know who the emailer is. I still haven’t seen Lewis since I found out.

  The leading security car barely slows as it veers into the car park for McIntyre’s Cave, the security barrier lifted at the last second. Press and TV scatter as Akira sweeps in, the car following coming to a horizontal halt behind us, protecting us from the shouting throng on the other side.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ says Stone, cheerily.

  We get out. Erin and I ignore the shouted questions and head for the steps down to the cave. Stone goes over to the journalists. ‘It’s good to see so many of you here on . . . ’ the rest of his words lost as we descend into the mile-wide, undulating rush of soft-breaking surf on MacIntyre’s Bay. I remember these rare days of implausible peace, as if winter is catching its breath.

  Stone re-joins us at the cave entrance. As we enter the chamber, I witness a crushing defeat for his sociopathic cheeriness. The set has been trashed. Two of the three lighting rigs hang at odd angles, several stanchions buckled. Only the rig above the entrance still functions, throwing out that strange, mustardy light. Most of the uplighters around the stalagmites have been smashed.

  Erin wants to know why she wasn’t told.

  Frank wants to be alone. He ambles back and forward across the set then picks up his overturned director’s chair. I leave him and go back outside to the beach. In the distance, the tide is coming in. I remember the warning when we were kids: Be careful, it comes in faster than you can run.

  We tested it one day. Do you remember, Duke? There were a few of us, walking boldly out to meet the onrushing water. We didn’t get within thirty metres before someone bolted and then the rest of us.

  I walk for some distance across the wet sand before the sharp stab in my left side requests I stop. The waves here can be immense, a violence that seems unbelievable in today’s calmness, the surf low and lazy, the mercury water beyond almost flat. It looks so solid, as if I could walk on it, across to the isle of Erbay in the milky distance, Jesus in a long black coat, the onlookers on the beach lined up and staring. As indeed they are when I turn back to land.

  They’re looking not at me but a figure sitting on the sand. Frank Stone, I realise, as I come closer. I stop when I reach him. His eyes are closed and his hands clasped cross his lap. He is talking to himself in a low voice. May there be peace in the north and the Great Spirit protect me . . .

  I move on.

  I remember reading that Stone sleeps in an oxygen tent. He’s likely booked the cryogenic freezer too.

  ‘Another disaster,’ Erin explains when I reach the shore. ‘Renner’s PA just called. He’s not coming until his safety can be guaranteed. Asshole. The press will love this. Let’s have nothing else, ok? Let’s just . . . ’

  She gestures seawards with such helplessness. Instantly, I’m back at Wendlebury Manor, watching Erin playing by herself at the bottom of the long garden. Beside me on the patio Anna squeezes my arm, acknowledging our shared apprehension that this little girl will be forever alone.

  ‘Let’s go and visit her,’ I hear myself say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your mother.’

  ‘Really? You want to go now? For crying out loud.’

  ‘What else is there to do?’

  ‘Nice. Very nice. It’s not something you do when there’s nothing else to do. You go because you want to.’

  That remains the problem. I watch her stride away then look back at Stone, who is still sitting on the beach.

  * * *

  I am bone-cold.

  It is these incessant thoughts of graves. I shivered my way back up the steps to the car park. Then I shivered in silence as the motorcade swept back to the Castle and I was finally alone again. Even now, in the steam room that has been cleared for my personal use, I feel a tremor, though now more likely due to the DTs, weakening now as I drain the hip flask I have taken in with me.

  When I leave, there are a few peeved-looking guests in the changing room. I almost slip over on the tiles.

  ‘Sorry.’ I raise the flask. ‘I think I’m steamin’.’

  No laughs, not one. Gotta work on the delivery, Duke. I look at my wet footprints on the floor and imagine them carrying on, right out the door. I suppose I should get up and follow . . .

  Back in the suite I stand naked at the window, peering at my salmon-pink skin, wiping away the sweat caught in the sagging folds of my belly and breasts. Doubtless a long-range lens is pointing my way, a two-page s
pread awaiting, me on one side and Frank Stone’s beach prayer on the other.

  ‘Do you want to play?’ asks Akira.

  As I turn, I note with surprise that I am semi-erect. His eyes drop, the two of us now staring at the miracle and wondering about the malfunctioning libido that created it. A wholly different nuance has been given to Akira’s innocently asked question about the Go board he is carrying.

  ‘Give me a minute,’ I say.

  ‘You bet,’ he says, and can’t help breaking into a smile that becomes a laugh both his and my own.

  Go is a game I felt I had to learn when I moved to Japan. They have TV programmes showing live matches, an entertainment so compelling in its tedium that I have lost whole days to uncomprehending considerations of false eyes, snapbacks and atari combinations. Akira and I are terrible. Our game strategies reflect what our relationship has become, informality within convention.

  I watch him study the board in his usual fashion. Leaning forward on his elbows, palms together, fingers tapping his nose. He looks up at me very seriously, as if he is about to impart great knowledge.

  ‘I have a new strategy, Johnny.’

  I hold back my smile. ‘I’m intrigued.’

  He nods very slowly. ‘I do this.’ He picks up a white stone and holds it between thumb and forefinger. ‘And this.’ He closes his eyes. ‘And now.’ He places the stone down randomly on the board. He opens his eyes, looks down and then offers me an excited double thumbs up. ‘Success!’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I do.’

  Now I’m smiling widely. ‘How so?’

  ‘Because the strategy, dear Johnny, is no worse than any other. I am improving.’

  ‘You mean you’re not getting any worse.’

  He considers this for a moment and then nods, mock-serious once more. ‘That too I will take.’

  We are on the brink of a ferociously haphazard ko battle when there is a knock at the door. Akira shows Erin in and retreats to another room, my niece joining me at the low table in the lounge.

  She looks at the board. ‘I’ve never understood this game.’

  ‘You’re probably a genius without knowing it. It’s a game of territory, taking as much as you can.’

  ‘Hostile takeovers?’

  ‘Aren’t they the only kind?’

  She settles back in the seat and looks out the window. It is snowing again after the bright morning sun.

  ‘I’ve never known a place that has so much weather,’ she says.

  ‘Only one thing you need to know round here.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘No waterproof in the world will keep you dry.’ I pour myself another large one, courtesy of Mr J&B.

  ‘I want to apologise for earlier,’ she says quickly. ‘For not wanting to go to the cemetery. It was such a ridiculous morning and . . . it seemed like the wrong time. But when’s the right time?’

  ‘You should go when you want to, like you said.’

  ‘Then let’s go.’

  ‘What? You want to go now?’ I realise it is exactly what she said to me back at MacIntyre’s Bay.

  ‘You’re the one who wanted to.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Well, do you?’

  ‘I do, yes.’

  ‘Then I’ll see you downstairs in ten.’

  I stare down at the black-and-white stones on the Go board. I have seen your headstone, Duke, our father and our mother’s too, though not Anna’s. Still I have to visit you all. Still I hesitate.

  * * *

  When I was young there was no death. It was a time of much narrower confines, the most pressing concerns having enough money to buy The Dandy, or how long you could stay out on a school night.

  I had seen death, of course, my grandfather and grandmother laid out under white sheets. I had felt the solemnity of others and for those unsettling days before and after the funerals knew I was in the presence of something fundamental. Perhaps it was the suspicion that here was something likely to overwhelm me if I thought about it too much that led me to conclude that death was so bafflingly distant from the immediacy of my world that it wasn’t exactly real.

  The cemetery, likewise, where I stand now in the razoring scour of a sleet-heavy westerly. As a child, I didn’t pay it any attention. Only now and then, my eyes drawn upwards as I cycled home, did I think about the two occasions I watched my grandparents lowered into the ground.

  Later, when I was a teenager, I found out the cemetery was built on the site of a Viking graveyard. Frank Stone would be delighted to know this so I won’t tell him. I can all too easily imagine the scene he would somehow work into The Bruce. Fire against the sky as the ship is set alight, axes and swords and shouts of defiance all so much more appealing to my teenage imagination than these bleak rows of headstones, names gone from memory, lost to moss.

  ‘Jay!’

  Can you imagine if we didn’t cremate people, Duke? All those headlands from here to Cape Wrath filled with thousands and thousands of stones, we wouldn’t be able to move for old bones.

  ‘Can you remember where they are?’

  Erin is standing some distance away between two long rows of headstones, hands on her hips as she looks hopelessly around. I realise it is almost thirty years since she has been here.

  I remember where you lie, Duke.

  I helped with the cord that day as I could not help you with that other. I can still feel its surprising smoothness as we slid you under. I even wondered, appalled, if that was your final thought, the smoothness of the bathrobe cord around your neck as you scrabbled at the noose.

  I beckon Erin over. She follows me to the other side of the church, the Viking side. On the western edge, looking across the bay to the islands and the open sea, are the four graves. It is the first time I have seen Anna’s. The white marble has such depth. It holds my gaze like an enchantment.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ says Erin.

  I realise she too has not seen the stone. It was a year or so after the funeral that it was set in place, I think.

  ‘So peaceful up here.’

  Her eyes are tender. She seems almost happy, as if she could linger here for the rest of the afternoon. People are drawn to graveyards, even when they have no connection to the dead. I have walked Père Lachaise and Highgate, Kōyasan in the gathering gloom, hundreds of Jizo’s little red scarves glowing in the dark. As I look down on Anna’s grave, I glimpse a man on a bench away to the right. Does he know the dead or does he just sit? And if he just sits then why?

  ‘Are you going to tell me why you didn’t come to Mum’s funeral?’

  I smile ruefully as I reach forward and wipe dirt off the smooth face of the headstone. No escape here.

  ‘If I had stayed here I’d have turned into an old man who’s always talking about who’s just died. It’s what happens when you stay in one place. But I didn’t, so I only find out who’s dead long after. There must be so many I don’t know about. Maybe I should assume they’re all dead except me.’

  She’s chewing her lip when I turn to her. The vaguest of nods before her gaze moves out to sea.

  ‘I don’t know why,’ I say. ‘I just couldn’t. The thought of flying halfway round the world with her coffin in the hold.’

  ‘And me? I was thirteen. It was ok for me to fly around the world with her body in the hold? I needed you and you weren’t there.’

  I have wondered many times what Erin must have felt when Mrs Ishihara appeared at Haneda airport in my place to accompany her. Still, self-pity has never suited her. ‘When did you ever need me?’

  ‘Then. Maybe now? Can we just leave all this and just think about them? Nothing else, just think about them.’

  ‘I think about them all the time.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘And I do need you, you know?’

  She clasps my hand and puts her head on my shoulder. No small feat this; Erin is a foot taller and has to bend slightly at the knee to do so. Her body fee
ls tense, my own too, yet when I close my eyes, after a moment, I feel a relaxing in both of us. The spell of the white marble, perhaps.

  ‘So peaceful up here,’ she repeats.

  When I open my eyes the man on the bench has moved. He’s now about ten metres away, leaning against the cemetery wall. He produces a camera and starts taking pictures. Erin has also seen him, but her only reaction is to tuck her hair behind her ear, as if she wants to better show the photographer her profile. I start to move away but she grips me more tightly.

  ‘Let him take a few pictures, what does it matter.’

  I see now that the photo-op has been staged. It explains Erin’s change of mind about visiting the cemetery. I realise what she wants, something heart-warming to offset the recent media hostility. Uncle and niece together in tragedy.

  I suppose I should be outraged. Instead, I just feel a passing annoyance that Erin has wrong-footed me. She has wanted to come and visit her mother and her grief is genuine so what does it matter if she also makes a commodity out of it? It is no less authentic for being cheapened.

  We return, arm in arm, to the Mercedes. The quick-fading sunlight briefly swells, the sandstone of the old church deepening to umber, like an acknowledgement of my final farewell.

  Why was I so reluctant to visit Anna, Duke?

  As if there could be anything left to ambush me after so many years. As if the sight of a white marble headstone could have made any difference whatsoever. My essential feeling remains one of detachment, now tinged by a guilty disappointment that what I have never stopped carrying has been neither added to nor lessened by this visit. It was at least more bearable than it would have been back then, to stand jet-lagged and jittery in the undoubted rain, lowering her into a black pit beside you, Duke, as if, even in death, you had to have the last word.

  Akira eases the car across the gravel, picking up speed as we reach the road down to Inveran. Erin reaches across the back seat and takes my hand, her smile a convoluted mix of affection and apology.

  The visit to the cemetery, our shared grief and my silent complicity in the photo-op has created a conspiratorial warmth between us. In one moment, I decide to share my final commitment with her. In the next, I change my mind. The warmth fades. As we speed back to the hotel Erin tries to make conversation, giving up, yet leaving her hand on mine for surprisingly long.