‘Let’s be dear,’ he said. ‘You’re telling me that you raped this Spanish girl?’
‘Yes,’ said Clem. ‘Shouldn’t you be recording this?’
‘Louisa de Castro.’
‘That’s her name?’
Kelly nodded. ‘A nine-nine-nine call was made from a mobile phone at twenty-three fifty on the twenty-fifth of June. Her phone. A male reported that a woman had been assaulted. He gave an address on the Portobello Road but didn’t give his name. Do you know who made that call?’
‘No.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes.’
With the young constable on one side and Kelly on the other, they walked Clem across Reception and through a security door into the rear of the station. The female sergeant Clem had spoken to when he first arrived took him into custody. He emptied his pockets on to a table, signed a form, said again that he did not want a lawyer. Kelly left them. The sergeant and the constable took Clem down to a cell. It smelt strongly of bleach. He sat on the bed. The door was swung shut. He lay down. The man in the next cell was singing, a slurred lamenting that grew briefly raucous, then trailed off into silence. Clem wished they hadn’t taken away his cigarettes and lighter. He shut his eyes, opened them again, squinted at the light shining from behind its mesh of protective wire in the cell roof.
After three hours the door was unlocked. Kelly came in with the file in his hand. Clem stood up.
‘Louisa de Castro,’ said the detective, ‘has gone back to Spain.’ He consulted the file. ‘To a place called Burgos to be exact.’
Clem nodded. Burgos. For an instant, a whole and wholly imagined city appeared in front of him, with sombre churches and little squares in brilliant sunshine.
‘In July,’ said Kelly, ‘she was at a language school. The Charles Dickens Institute or some such bollocks. Anyway, one hot night having had a bit too much of the sangria she fights with boyfriend Carlos, and being from a more vocal and expressive culture than our own it all gets very over-excited. Following?’
‘Yes,’ said Clem.
‘There was no rape,’ said Kelly. ‘There was a very embarrassed Spanish teenager with an almighty hangover. But there was no rape.’ He paused. ‘Come here,’ he said.
Clem stepped forward. Kelly stood him with his back to the cell wall, then leaned an elbow by the side of his face. ‘You didn’t rape Louisa de Castro,’ he said quietly, ‘because nobody raped her. You’ve been winding me up, Clement. Sending me on the proverbial. Which means I now have to decide whether to charge you with wasting police time, though if I charge you I’m going to waste even more time and frankly I don’t have it to waste.’ He moved away from Clem and for fifteen or twenty seconds frowned at a comer of the cell roof.
‘Tears,’ he said, looking back at his prisoner. ‘Now who are those for? Not for Louisa de Castro. She doesn’t need them. For you? For me?’ He shook his head. ‘I understand you better than you think, Clement. You’re what I call a sins-of-the-world type. Obsessed with thoughts of moral chaos. Everyone guilty because everyone’s the same. All of us with the mark of Cain on our brows. Confessing gives you some relief. Am I right? Pricks the boil? Yeah. It might amaze you, Clement, but I’ve thought about it too. I see things here, you see. Real rapists, real murderers. People who do appalling and disgusting things to other people. And when I go home at night I sometimes wonder about the man in the shaving mirror, if he’s the same or different. Then I make the distinction. I sleep like a baby. I wake up and I go to work. I make myself useful. What is it you do for a living, Clement?’
‘I take pictures.’
‘A photographer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Any good?’
‘I have been.’
The detective nodded. ‘If I see you back here again it’s going to be unpleasant. You keep looking for trouble you’re going to find it. OK?’ He turned and left the cell. The female sergeant escorted Clem back up the stairs. She gave him the bag containing his possessions, told him he was being de-arrested and handed him a card with the telephone number of Social Services on it. He signed for his things and followed the sergeant through Reception to the door of the station. It was still snowing. He could see the flakes silhouetted against the finely serrated haloes of the street-lamps. He buttoned his coat, turned up the collar. There was almost no one outside on such a night. He passed the Underground station, the fly-over, the church. As he drew level with the metal house, the substance abusers’ old home, he stopped, suddenly unsure that he could go any further. He gripped the railings, then staggered up the little path and sat on the house-steps, his back to the steel door. After several attempts he managed to light a cigarette. The snow was heavier but softer, large flakes feathery against his cheeks. He sighed, shuddered. He began to cry again: warm, sticky, salty tears, running down the sides of his nose. He still could not have answered the detective’s question, could not have said who he was crying for. Himself, he thought; himself alone. He wiped his eyes, inhaled, to the roots of his lungs, the metallic coldness of the night air. Something seemed to shiver out of him. He was very sober, very awake. He tilted back his head and let the snow fall on his closed eyes, on to his lips, into his mouth. His mind, which in recent months he had exhausted uselessly, began to feel like a spreading room in which at last some light, a clean snow-light, was rising. He was not a criminal. He was not a saint. He could not take refuge any more in the purity of extreme positions. And though the meaning of the massacre at N— remained confounding, a shape rendered against a brilliant and unremitting light-field impossible to stare at, he thought he had reached a point where he might be able to work from some slight but useful faith in himself, some small, stubborn belief in the others.
He rubbed a little warmth into his fingers, then took from his wallet the three transparencies—Odette, the Bourgmestre, the classroom wall—pressing them gently into the snow between his boots as though on to the white page of an album. Within a minute they were covered; in another minute completely buried. He stood up, beating the snow from his coat. The morning papers would speak of a blizzard, a white-out: dawn would show the whole of London beautifully unlike itself. Clem, with his eyes narrowed against the darting flakes, turned out of the gate, a tall figure crossing the girdered railway bridge, crossing the canal, then turning at the cemetery wall and bending into the fiercer gusts of snow there, his footfall inaudible under the sweep of the wind, his footsteps, like a blood trail or the winding spoor of something hunted, slowly filling in behind him.
Author’s Note
The massacre at N— is based on a well-documented atrocity in Rwanada in 1994. This novel, however, is not about the Rwandan genocide and was never intended to be so. Readers wanting to remind themselves of what took place in Rwanda might like to look at Fergal Keane’s book Season of Blood or Philip Gourevitch’s equally powerful We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families.
The John Berryman poem Frank Silverman begins to quote to Clem in Toronto is from ‘Dream Song 1’. The lines Clem finds in Silverman’s article about the massacre are from ‘Dream Song 29’ by the same poet.
The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Villa Waldberta in Bavaria and of the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Tuscany where, in the course of consecutive summers, one stormy and one benign, much of this novel was written.
About the Author
ANDREW MILLER’s first novel, Ingenious Pain, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the International IMPAC Award. He was short-listed for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award for his novel Oxygen. He lives in Brighton, England.
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The Optimists Page 25