by Adam Roberts
Eventually, under the continued pressure interrogation, Arsinée just crumpled, and nothing more could be got out of her except tears. What game had Leah been playing? I don’t know. Which show did you watch, in your cot? I can’t remember. What time precisely did you last see Leah, before you went through? I’m not sure, I don’t know, not precisely. They stuck a tab on her wrist, and this showed Arsinée to have consumed perhaps half a glass of wine that evening. This revelation increased the flood of tears prodigiously. ‘It’s true! It’s true! I’m a terrible person!’ She had, she sobbingly confessed, sometimes carried away the leftovers from her employers’ discarded bottles, and drunk them in secret, in private, when the kids were abed, never very much, never enough to make her lose control, but just a taste. Beautiful wine, and the lovely confusion it made in the thoughts. This was exactly the sort of thing she had never had the chance to experience before Mr and Mrs took her on. And then more tears. It was amazing, in fact, that she was able to weep as copiously as she did without simply drying up like a raisin. Tears, tears, tears.
It was gruelling, extracting this testimony from the sobbing girl; and at the end Captain Afkhami smiled and patted her on the shoulder, before saying ‘And now I must arrest you.’ For George this was yet another mentally indigestible twist in the evening’s events. Marie had more presence of mind. ‘But who is to care for Ezra?’ she said, the baby still asleep on her shoulder.
The lady captain faced her. If the thought occurred to her you are the child’s mother, and must care for him, then she at least had the good sense not to say it aloud. Instead she said: ‘What arrangements did you have in place should your carer fall sick?’
‘Arsinée fall sick?’ Marie said. ‘The very idea.’
Once again, the captain had the look of a woman choosing not to say aloud something she was thinking. She said: ‘One of the hotel’s employees might be assigned, on a temporary basis. Perhaps from the crèche?’
‘Why must you arrest Arsinée?’ pressed Marie.
‘It is our experience that when a kidnap has been, uh,’ said Captain Afkhami, straightening herself, ‘performed. That when a kidnap has, has occurred, an insider is often involved.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Marie, although the iron certainty had gone from her voice. She looked at Arsinée. The girl had hidden her face completely in her hands.
‘Sometimes servants are bribed, or otherwise seduced by the kidnappers. We cannot be sure.’
And so, without another word from the girl, a uniformed security pesar led her out of the room and away. The shock of the arrest stemmed her sobs; or else she had simply run out of steam as far as crying was concerned. ‘Did you see the way she stopped crying when they arrested her?’ said Marie.
‘I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything,’ said George.
‘No? She cried and cried, and as soon as they clapped her in irons she stopped.’
‘You have had a hard piece of news,’ said Captain Afkhami, waving her one remaining security pesar to the door and nodding her head sagely to the two Westerners. ‘I shall leave you tonight, and, with your permission, meet with you again in the morning.’
And that was that. The hotel sent a bleary-eyed teenage girl up to look after Ezra, but it took Marie a very long time to surrender the baby. She handed him across, but took instant exception to the way the kid was holding him – ‘Have you never held one before? No, support his head’ – snatching him back. Although he had slept through everything else that had happened that evening, this pass-the-parcel finally woke him up. He hid his eyes in a tangle of fleshy creases, opened his mouth and cried with the immense volume of which babies are capable. This howling took the form of a drawn-out iambic pattern, short inbreath, long yell, short inbreath long yell, and each syllable darkened and reddened the colour of his little scrumpled face. Marie tried jabbing a pacifier in the mouth, and snapped at the girl to make up some milk, and when that didn’t work, she walked him very briskly round and round the room. And when that didn’t work, she ordered George to call for a doctor, since the baby was clearly ill. Finally, in a state of expressive, tearful misery herself (and you know Marie! – she’s not one for tears, she never cries), she handed the baby back to the teenager, who with a little judicious cooing, and cuddling, and the application of the milk-teat, got him to stop crying. Marie, looking more drained than George had ever seen her before, went through and lay down.
At the end of this prolonged interlude, George’s nerves were scraped raw. On some pretext he slipped out of the room and made his way to the Deluge Bar. There he found Ergaste drinking brandy out of what looked like a one-legged fishbowl. Peter was there too, fiddling with his own ears, drinking from a regular glass some liquor so bright green it looked radioactive.
‘Dear fellow,’ said Ergaste. ‘The rumours! You wouldn’t credit them.’
George filled the two of them in. A waiter brought him a glass of Hyderabad Red wine. The servant was a silent fellow with a young, grave face and hands so much larger than was proportionate to his slender frame that George, for a moment, thought he was wearing some kind of prosthetic giant-hands, like a Freak showman or comedy performer.
‘Good grief,’ said Peter, when George had finished.
‘Fuck my nostril,’ said Ergaste, with less refinement but with more force. ‘Ransom, I suppose?’
‘Apparently not,’ said George, and sighed. He sighed loudly, and lifted his glass. ‘Security people say not,’ said George, fitting his snout into the wine glass, and tipping it until the wine overran his lower lip.
‘Not?’ boomed Ergaste.
‘But if not ransom,’ asked Peter, ‘then for what?’
‘They didn’t say,’ said George. ‘They didn’t tell me. They didn’t say.’
‘It must be money, it boils down to money, always, with these people,’ said Ergaste. ‘I’m not a racist, indeed not. I don’t mean these people racially, you comprehend.’
‘Of course not,’ said George, vaguely.
‘Hhh!’ sniffed Peter, in perfect agreement, or perhaps in pointed disagreement.
‘I’m as free from race-hate as the snow itself,’ insisted Ergaste.
‘Of course you are, I believe in you,’ said George, uncertain as to what he might be committing himself.
‘By these people I don’t mean Iranians, or Turks, or Armenians, or Kurds, or Arabs, or Parsee, or fucking Russians, or moon-men, or, or,’ he lifted the glass balloon of his cognac slowly before him, as if acting a dumb-show lift-off to orbit. ‘Or any racial category. I mean poor. I mean the poor.’
‘The poor,’ repeated George, tentatively, as if the concept were being introduced into his consciousness for the first time in his life.
‘It’s the poor,’ said Ergaste, banging his glass back down on the table between them. ‘We’re an island of Enough in an ocean of Poverty. I mean, here, on this mountain, this Ararat. But I mean – you know. In life, generally. And the poor, you mark my words, young George, the poor only ever want one thing. Money.’ The cognac had made him unusually talkative.
‘Assuming it is poverty, behind this?’ put in Peter. He patted George’s arm, companionably. ‘Maybe it’s political? Maybe it’s a news-grab? Either way it ought to be possible to get the little lady back. Which is to say, it will be possible. Of course it will. And it goes without saying,’ he added (whilst Ergaste nodded his massy nose, and grunted ‘goes without saying’), ‘that anything we can do to help, we will do. Anything at all.’
George stared with, in the first instance, frank noncomprehension at this offer of assistance. He ought to have been able to process the conventional companionship on offer. It should have been a supportive and readily graspable thing: manly society at a time of crisis, friendship. But for some reason, looking into Peter’s moist eye, George felt a blurting urge to burst into tears. It was on the end of his tongue to say: I fucked your wife this afternoon. Naturally he didn’t say this. But there was something painfully absurd in the man’s
ignorance – about George, and about his own wife – that gave an oppressively poignant quality to his ingenuousness.
It was out of the question to cry.
George turned away to hide the new reflecting brightness of his eyeballs, and looked through the bar’s main window at the floodlit snow field outside. Some brave souls were larking about in the night-time. At the wall, a few feet behind their table, the screen was on. What was on? Some show about dancing, a twinkling blur of colours. Most of the wall was taken up with a huge mirror, crusted about its rim with a light-brown crimped and scalloped frame, like a pizza’s edge. The mirror itself, lit from within, reflected the narrow bar, its oval tables, its almost exclusively male clientele.
A moth, very hostile when faced with the sight of moth-ish rivalry, repeatedly and vehemently headbutted its own reflection in the bright glass. The moth made a noise like a rag pennant fluttering in the wind.
‘I’m in hell,’ said George, not loudly; but as the thought occurred to him – as a sudden realization, a novel insight into his new condition of existence.
The others either did not hear or chose to ignore him.
‘Wine,’ boomed Ergaste. ‘Did I ever tell you I’m a Roman Catholic? Oldest religion in the world! Wine is part of our worship – did you know that? We drink wine to worship our God.’
‘Wine,’ said George. ‘Wine.’ It was night. And after night comes day, or more night, depending on the particular time-frame you choose to apply to your perspective.
7
The morning started with a Clear, to purge George of an irksome, leaden headache. He wore shades in the shower, and omitted breakfast. Marie, who had woken repeatedly in the night and who had angrily rejected his suggestion that she take a Doze, was now lying on her front like a corpse. Out of a vague sense of duty, rather than because he had any pressing reason, he went down to Leah’s old room and found the teenager – Rana, she was called – feeding Ezra, and tickling his tender, dark-brown cranial fuzz with her free hand. He had no instructions to pass on to her, and nothing to say, so he left her and walked along the hotel corridors for a while with no particular destination in mind. Portraits came to life as he passed them, offering purchases that could be immediately delivered anywhere in the world, and freezing into lifelessness behind him as he passed.
Leah was gone.
Mid-morning he had a very unsatisfactory meeting with Captain Afkhami. There had been no progress, she said, despite unceasing efforts by her people. She promised she would arrange a flitter to take them to Doğubayazit, later that day, to liaise with the local law enforcement. They have opened a wiki on the case, she said. But there were certain administrative trivialities to be cleared up prior to that journey. She unrolled a screen and typed some phrases into it. He and his wife were married, despite the disparity of surnames? Yes, hardly unusual, in this day and age. But it is difficult for our database to process! It keeps throwing up flags. It does not like it. Denoone is not a Jewish name? What did that have to do with anything? Nothing. Of course, nothing. But her name was down in the hotel database as both Marie and Miriam, and the House AI disliked this duplication very much. Very much. The House AI liked one person to have one name. Inflexible, perhaps, but who amongst us does not understand the preference for clarity? So: was it Miriam Marie, or Marie Miriam? George started to explain that the one was an affectionate idiom for the other, when the complete pointlessness of the interaction popped up in his head like a diary reminder. He got to his feet without saying another word, and went out of the little office. He faced Afkhami the whole way out, walking backwards to the door. ‘Mr Denoone,’ said the captain, passionlessly, as he went. ‘It is important that our data records do not contain apparent contradictions. It is important for legal reasons.’
Out.
He walked on the terrace. The various hilarities and goofinesses of people larking in the snow seemed as alien as The Pirate Moon of Co-RoT 9. It occurred to George, with some force, that human enjoyment was a fragile skin drawn over a great depth of potential misery. A layer of moonlight slicking the surface of the ocean silver. More than that, there was more. For the moonlight’s beauty was a lie, for no amount of shine changed the fact that the waters extended straight down black as oil for kilometres and kilometres into crushing, airless, oblivious depths.
A ramjet passed over the sky – impossibly high, no bigger than a rice-grain, yet drawing after it, like a monarch’s weighty cloak and train, the aftermath of its profound bass-tone roar. A scratch and scuff in the blue. A tower in the sky, a needle, a triangle.
He went back to his room. Marie was awake now, sitting on the bed. She was holding a mug of coffee: her left hand underneath the base and her right hand cupping its flank. Rana was playing with Ezra on the floor beside her. When George came through the door, his wife looked at him with eyes like loaded guns.
‘I’ve had another meeting with the captain,’ he said.
Marie considered this. ‘Her English isn’t very good,’ she said.
‘You think so? I’d say she was pretty fluent.’
‘No,’ said Marie, with enormous vehemence. ‘Her.’
George looked at Rana with a sort of helpless vagueness.
‘I can’t get her to understand,’ repeated Marie.
‘Understand?’
‘That she must come back to the States with me.’
‘Must she?’ said George.
Marie’s shellac-hard gaze. Her lower jaw moved incrementally forward. ‘Of course she must.’ These four English monosyllables did not literally include the phrase ‘you moron’, and yet Marie conveyed the extra sentiment.
‘Madam, Sir, I may not,’ said Rana, in a mild, fluty voice. Ezra threw out a giggle-gurgle that had the neat little rhythm of a drum-fill.
‘I’m sure we can find somebody native in NY,’ George offered.
‘I am going back to the States,’ said Marie. ‘You, George – stay here until they find Leah. And when they find her, I want you to bring her back with you when you have her, and we have her back again.’
George’s eyelids flickered, down-up, down-up. He experienced these sorts of lid fibrillations from time to time. Presumably it was related to stress. Brightness flickered in his head, like a fan spinning in front of the light.
What could he say?
He said: ‘Yes.’
‘You understand that I cannot stay in this place,’ said Marie.
‘Place,’ said George.
‘You understand that one of us has to stay. And you understand that it won’t be me.’
George thought about saying but actually I don’t understand that. The problem, though, wasn’t at the level of comprehension. What was the problem? I suppose the problem was habit. A relationship may become habituated to the dynamic of one party being more decisive and the other less – to one individual taking predominant control and the other cheerfully acquiescing. In such circumstances, whilst the play may be a sustaining and refreshing aspect of life, the intrusion of reality upon the playacting will be all the more unsettling. In other words, George’s lack of understanding did not have to do with the content of his wife’s communication so much as with the tectonic grumble of the ground shunting beneath his stance. He had always been the one comfortable with the fiction that she was in charge. Evidence that circumstances had overwhelmed her – evidence, in other words, of her very overwhelmability – constituted a sort of anti-Copernican revolution. For the rich, few things are as disabling as uncertainty.
‘And I can’t get her to understand and she needs to understand.’
‘It is unpossible,’ said Rana, speaking to the carpet.
‘What is it that she must understand?’ asked George.
‘That she is to come back to the States with me.’
‘Oh,’ said George, ingenuously. ‘We’ll easily find somebody native in NY. We can use the agency Dench recommended.’
The quality of Marie’s silence quietened him. She sat there, cross-legg
ed on the bed, holding her mug of coffee in front of her. She raised it up like a chalice and tipped it over. The oval of blackness in its mouth elongated and broke over the lip. One, two, three seconds of micturating sound-effect. Then Marie swung the mug (still half-full) to the side to fall to the carpet.
George and Rana were looking intently at her now. Even Ezra seemed to sense that something significant was happening. He stopped on all fours, mid-crawl, and looked up to his mother.
‘Are you suggesting,’ said Marie, in a level voice, ‘that I tend Ezra myself, the whole journey, from here to home?’
Silence. Mossy-edged, flanked by dark green shadows. Sunlight on the pond. A single fin slicing the water like a paper-knife.
Silence.
George opened his mouth to speak without knowing what he was going to say. And indeed, when the words came, they came from somewhere other than his conscious mind. Possibly from somewhere quite other than him, at all. ‘Nothing about your life is you must, my love,’ he said. ‘Nobody can say that.’
She eyed him. She was, presumably, trying to determine whether he was being sarcastic or not. But, then again; wasn’t this a simple statement of the truth of things? Wasn’t this a nutshell definition of what it means to be rich? She kept her eyeline on him, and said nothing, and nodded, once.
‘I will, I will,’ said George. His eye was momentarily snagged by the view through the window. The view was of unscarred ground. Bleached sheets; the snowfreeze. White.
Silence was never far away. Silence was always there. It falls, as snow falls, and covers us all. George summoned his willpower and put a footprint in it.
‘I’ll call the agency,’ he said, pulling out his Fwn. As he did so he felt something shift in his breast, like a tide hauling itself over and round. Some grand, hidden, gravitational reorientation of the world focused on his heart. ‘Better, better than that, I’ll call the agency we got what’s-her-name from. You remember, the Ecuadorian girl. I’ll call them, and I – will – have them fly a new carer over here—’ as he typed the search into the Fwn-screen with his thumb, laboriously, one character at a time. ‘It’s an hour and a half to Tabriz. She can be here early afternoon, and—’ and the more he spoke, the more a momentum gathered in his speaking, ‘—of course assuming she passes muster, assuming you like her, my dear, you, she and Ez can be on an evening flight back home before the sun sets.’ And in the spurious assertion of action, the logic of connection between this human being and this other human being altered. Marriage is a very old manuscript, and there are always gaps in the text. Two people may choose to be linked when what there is between them is something; and that something may be practical or sexual or habitual, a shared sense of humour, a shared disinclination to holiday alone. Whateffer. Whatehva. Choice is intoxicating enough at the best of times, and it fair makes the head spin when it tangles with such a linkage. But more potent than something is nothing, for that dissolves choice as salt dissolves a slug. And this is what George now understood, or rather (at any rate) what he now had some inkling of. Their marriage had once been a voluntary contract, but now they were joined by something much stronger than the will of either of them. Prison is a perdition, and perdition means something lost. That he and Marie, having previously been lightly connected by various somethings, were now, abruptly, terrifyingly welded much more solidly together by an absence, the nothing where their daughter had been.