by Glen Duncan
‘Sheer chance I came in when I did,’ Rhubotham said, quietly. ‘Happens like that sometimes. He wasn’t planning to use the gun, I suppose, for the noise.’ His voice quivered. He stepped a few paces away, bent double, vomited. Kate looked down at Kalia’s face, the wide, tough cheekbones, the too-many teeth that his lips always struggled to cover. His mouth was open, the tip of his tongue visible, as if tasting the dust. His half-closed eyelids showed two crescents of white. Are you waiting for your God to help you, miss?
‘I’ll have to stay here,’ Rhubotham said. ‘Crime scene. You go up to the Institute, tell them I sent you and you’re to use the telephone to call—’
‘Get someone else to go,’ Kate said.
It threw up a sheet of silence between them. She ought to be feeling something, she knew. She felt nothing. She thought of reaching down and closing Kalia’s mouth, started the move towards doing it, but stalled, straightened. Rhubotham came nearer, smelling of sick. When he stood alongside her it was as if Kalia was their sleeping child, forcing a shared intimacy on them. Rhubotham, sensing it, spun on his heel and hurried back indoors. Kate stood for a few moments. Dogfighting flies scribbled in the space around the body. Her natural weight had re-established itself but the last veil of her childhood had gone. She turned and went back into the house.
Rhubotham was out from, issuing instructions to Mr Knight. Cyril lay as he had been left, bandaged, head on cushion. He was shivering, face yellowish pale and wet. Standing over him, she realized he hadn’t acknowledged her presence since she’d come in. Even now, with her shadow crossing his chest, he couldn’t look at her. Rhubotham came back inside. Opened his mouth to speak, but something about the girl standing over her uncle like that stopped him. It was Kate who spoke.
‘You will never lay another finger on me,’ she said. ‘If you do, I’ll kill you myself.’
Cyril said nothing, but wetly shivered. Rhubotham, who had found his cap, put it on, slowly, as if with new reverence for the smallest acts. He moved aside to let Kate pass. She went through the door and out into the street, where a murmuring crowd had gathered at the gate. The murmurs ceased when she appeared. In silence and the day’s bleaching light Kate took her bike, wheeled it past them, mounted, and rode slowly away down the hill.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
witnesses
(Bolton, 2004 & 1971–1972)
In the small hours, woken by another things-speeded-up dream that left me with sweat cooling in the digital clock’s salving green light, I get up and prowl.
I’m back in Bolton, a week after my night with Janet Marsh. Today was my mum’s seventy-seventh birthday, and Melissa, Maude and I have made the Herculean effort and convened (at Maude’s) to celebrate. Carl makes only one trip a year from Arizona, a product less of economy than of the stingy American holiday allowance, and he’s already been this summer for the parental wedding anniversary. (Our claim, mine, Maude’s and Melissa’s, has always been that Carl is our mother’s favourite. Of late I’ve revised. He’s not the favourite, I told the girls. It’s just that he’s not demonstrative. Mum needs a lot of affection. Hugs, kisses, all that. He withholds. Not like us, Melissa said. We’re cheap. We’re like affection whores. This is true. Actually, I told them, I don’t think it’s a bad thing. This pining for Carl keeps her involved, leaves her motherhood unfinished. She’s better than she’d be without it.) Spouses, partners, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, none of them is here. As they get older Mater and Pater want the whittled-down family. The grandchildren were fascinating when they first came along, introduced my parents to another version of love, but they’ve grown up and become remote. There are too many of them. They’re out there with the internet and video phones, having kids of their own and changing towns and countries every ten minutes. When they’re all present it takes the old man for ever just to address someone, all the false starts, Ben I mean Mike I mean Carl Rick Owen–bleddy hell. He only wants a refill. I’ve told him to just sit there and hold his glass up and keep bellowing Whisky until someone supplies it.
The frail nobility of houses at night: the little islands of LCD light; the timid sentience of coat-stands; the well-earned relaxing tonk of a cooling radiator. Garp, I recall, got a kick out of watching his kids sleep. I’ve got a similar penchant, not for kids, since there aren’t any, but for my family. The role comes naturally, insomniac or dream-spooked guardian in the dead nocturnal spaces; it gives me a profound feeling of sadness and well-being, as if my vigilance hangs above them like an imperfectly protective veil. There they lie, lumps of darkness in the room’s dark. I exhale, quietly, feeling the last vestiges of the nightmare evaporate. These are the moments, alone, keeping watch, when my muscles and bones ease into their right alignments. I know what Vince would say: And you don’t think this is a sign there’s something wrong with you? You’re like a sort of perverted addict, he told me, the last time we had the routine conversation, a grown man addicted to his family. It’s really awful. What about your life, for fuck’s sake? I couldn’t answer him. I wanted to. I wanted to say: They had gold bars and bloodstones and machetes and murder plans and God and India and Destiny. I’ve got a teaching job and a broken heart. What fucking life?
It’s been a good day. The perennial Monroe offspring project to get Mater tipsy (getting her drunk, or as she would say blotto, is out of the question) today met with success; she sank three–yes, three–Harvey’s Bristol Creams and entered the state of mild word-muddling inebriation from which we, the degenerates, derive disproportionately devilish pleasure. Cheeks flushed, eyes moist, she said: I feel a bit giddy. That’s the point, Ma. That’s what it’s for. Oh, no, I don’t like it–trying to blink herself sober, giggling, hiccupping, for God’s sake. She had to go to bed early, but came downstairs a couple of hours later, ostensibly to get a drink of water, really because the gathered family is irresistible for her. She has a way of doing this, gravitating in her nightie back to the bit of the household still awake and poking her head round the door, frowning and rubbing her arms and somehow conceding that this is where the fun is still going on and that she’s a sucker for it. She’ll stand in the doorway for an hour, or perch on the arm of a chair, knees together, keeping up the appearance of being just about to go back to bed. ‘What are y’all watching?’ she asked. We were watching Channel Five’s Cosmetic Surgery Live, of which Pasha, Melissa and Maude are appalled fans. The programme included a feature on anal bleaching. (It’s quite something even to someone of my generation that you can be watching a terrestrial commercial channel at eleven-thirty at night and hear: ‘Coming up after the break: anal bleaching’, along with a teaser shot of a young, attractive Latina down on all fours with her dark Levis and white knickers round her ankles.) And sure enough, after the break here was the young Latina, having her anus, well, bleached. ‘I juss like to feel, ju know, that everything’s nice an neat back there.’ She was being interviewed in situ. ‘A lada dorker-skinned ladies now are lightening up in the anal area.’ This was the bleach-pasting ‘doctor’, American, naturally, female, mid-forties, humourless, piping up adenoidally from behind her client’s upraised arse. It wasn’t that it wasn’t funny to her (any profession soon bleeds its funny stuff of funniness); it was that it had never been funny to her. Pasha was sitting forward in his chair, glasses on forehead, squinting as if in poor light, trying to get his head round the concept. Melissa and Maude were delightedly agog (that’s the way for unpoliticized women; yet it goes in, adds to the weight of depression, the dully intuited mass of torture men coerce them into inflicting on themselves). ‘Look at this, Ma,’ Maude said. ‘It’s women who have their anuses bleached.’ My mum stood there holding her elbows and trying to unpack what she’d heard, then said, after a crinkle-faced moment, ‘Dear God,’ which sent us into hysterics. And if that wasn’t enough, she asked in genuine puzzlement: ‘Who’s going to be looking back there?’
On Maude’s shag-piled landing I stand and smile, thinking of this. My mum’s sexual naivety
and that shy nightied way she has of coming back to where the kids are still up will, when they’re gone, leave a terrible gap in my world, a unique loss.
Barefoot I creep into my parents’ room. A palpable aura of body heat cocoons them. Pater sleeps (marking time in sonorous snores) as he’s always slept in England, with the sheet wrapped bedouin-style round his head against Night Chills, to which he refers in an undertone, as if they’re malevolent spirits who might be listening. My mother sleeps on her side facing away from him, knees tucked up, a slight frown on her shut face. Her last set of dentures has given her a very slight underbite none of us is happy about. She’s not happy about it herself, but we’ve all stupidly nagged her about it as if it’s her fault, as if she’s betrayed us by suddenly changing her face in her late seventies. ‘Anyway,’ she told us this morning, ‘I’ve made an appointment to have these teeth replaced, you’ll all be glad to know.’ It made us realize how lousily we’d handled it. We’re such bullies, in our mild angry loving ways.
It hurts my heart to see Mater and Pater like this deep in their dreams (dead to the world, as the pitiless idiom goes), especially her; the fragilely held balance of her seventy-seven years forces me to remember the gaps between her children’s world and hers, all the ways modernity (us, the kids, with our deranged lovers and boozing and disappointment and gadgets and boredom and ambivalence and secrets) has left her behind. I try to imagine her–as The Cheechee Papers insists I must–as the orphaned child, the near-destroyed adolescent, the dreamily (I’m tempted to say somnambulistically) plotting murderess. Hard to believe it’s the same person. More than half a century ago those hands (phthisic now, the skin worn to transluscence by the years of feeding us, clothing us, picking up after us, First Aiding and caressing us) that lie as if in unconscious prayer together by her cheek, lifted the machete abandoned by Kalia and felt the heft of its promise, the implicit potential, the one great liberating trajectory it offered. What was the plan if not to smash Cyril’s head in with it? But would you really have done it, Ma? I’ve asked her God knows how many times. She shrugs, then thinks, then says, Yes. Definitely. He disgusted me. I would have killed him. It’s lucky I met your father when I did. Is this the same woman, girl, child? Can the identity really have survived? This is the question like the buckled heat of a furnace The Cheechee Papers forces me to face. Again I remember the look of her, delightedly frowning, arms wrapped round herself, rejoining us in the living room earlier. The little self-allowed indulgence: ‘What are y’all watching?’ How can it be the same person? But the facts insist. Katherine Lyle, now Katherine Monroe. Dearie. Ma. Mater. Mum. You write what you want, Sweetheart. None of that can touch me now.
Melissa and Maude sleep with their doors wide open, Maudy, who’s inherited Pasha’s intolerance of the cold, with the duvet pulled right up under her chin, her long dark hair spread coronally on the pilow; Melissa (years with Ted on the icily draughted farm) with the duvet half off, one arm bent up as if she’s just been relieved of a badminton racket. Whether I like it or not it’s a pleasure to see them without their men. (Ted’s never in any hurry to join these gatherings, from which we can’t help making him feel excluded; neither is Maude’s man, Greg. We’re insufferable together, we know, liking each other; it’s best if we’re left to get on with it.) I have to remind myself that my sisters are women now, Melissa a grandmother, for Christ’s sake. Maude’s daughter, Elspeth, has just moved in with her boyfriend. They used to be the Girls. Their bodies have filled out certain schedules: grown breasts, assimilated the monthly bleed, fucked and been impregnated by men, carried and given birth and milk to children, worked, walked, ached, suffered divorce, drunkenness, ’flu and fad diets, soaked up sun and poisons, begun to slacken, to wrap and put away certain small treasures. Love’s been. Left. Sent its less fierce relatives along later. Life’s tiringly manageable. Matters of the heart that might have killed them haven’t; now there are only the matters of the body to worry about. Their offspring still draw them into the future, but without the blind ferocity there once was. They’re starting to see that the main shape of their lives, the bulk of the relevant information, is already in. Only the death of one of their children could really open the book again, and even that (though I know they’d never admit it), since the kids are adults now and God more or less dead, wouldn’t start the apocalypse it once would have. By the Nietzschean law they’ve survived too much to be destroyed. They’re starting to see, without, most days, minding, that they’ve only got one mystery (the big firework saved till last) left.
The stair carpet receives my tiptoed descent with, I decide, a sort of terrified collusion, recognizes me, the small-hours prowler, the family voyeur, the communer with the mute souls of domestic appliances. I pause in the hall, abristle with selfhood, privacy, certainty of my own eventual death. I tell myself there are all sorts of things I might do: make a cup of tea; play a game or two of patience; start Maude’s abandoned copy of The Sea, The Sea; step out into the moist, conifered back garden for a sensuous shiver; but I and the tense hall know that’s all smoke.
From my rucksack by the telephone table (there’s a nonworking grandfather clock here that makes me think of Tom’s Midnight Garden) I unpack the envelope files I’ve brought with me. All three of them. I’d intended to bring only The Cheechee Papers and Skinner, but found after I’d packed them that leaving the Scarlet file behind felt wrong. I’ve started working–the writing, The Book–on the computer at home (which when I open the desktop still confronts me with a folder marked ‘Sheer Pleasure/Millicent Nash’) but the attachment to the physical files now is superstitious. Besides, a great deal of what’s in them is without backup or copies. What if there was a fire in the flat? Scarlet’s photos. I tell myself, settling on Maude’s lounge floor, that I must make duplicates of everything.
I sift, unproductively, circularly, through The Cheechee Papers. ‘The gods and goddesses of romance make their inaugural demands,’ one sheet begins, but the sentence isn’t finished. The material, I tell myself for the thousandth time, is difficult. Progress is bound to be slow. I’m cursed with memory: I remember everything. That’s the problem.
No point in opening the Skinner. Tomorrow morning, if I can get him alone, I’ll tell Pasha I’ve found him.
The cat-flap squeaks and thinly slaps and Maude’s cat, Fergus, comes in with a tinkle, smelling of damp lawns, the night. I would like him to curl up in my lap, but he doesn’t. Instead sniffs me, goes once abstractedly round the room’s perimeter, then stops, comes alert, listens. In a moment, he’s gone, tink tink tink tink. That’s the appeal of animals, why we can watch them for hours: they can’t choose, it’s all call and response. They have fear, but not anxiety.
I switch the television on, mute it and channel surf until I find late-night boxing, Great Fights of the ’70s, Ali vs Frazier in Manila, which, at the retirement flat on the other side of town, the Mater and Pater VCR will be whirring into life to record. I remember the fight. The big contests were festival events in the Brewer Street household, like Easter or Christmas, brought the distant glitter of America into our living room. (I always knew Pasha’s analysis of Ali’s superior boxing was incontrovertible, but secretly I was with my mum in the Frazier camp, took Ali’s bullying bigheadedness at face value. Frazier looked like a nice guy, but with his style, that monotonous, loose, forward-stepping chug–like a drunk trying to lean on a bar that kept moving away from him–and all but folded arms as defence, you knew Ali’d get him sooner or later.) What always frustrated me as a child was that you could never get a clear view of the half-naked girls who came on to parade the round number-cards in the intervals. Maddeningly, the camera stayed on the gasping boxers getting sponged and barked at; every round you thought someone would get wise and shift the shot a few degrees left or right, so that instead of a torturous glimpse–one long leg, a nude armpit, a sliver of spangle-pants’d buttock–you’d get the whole glorious sight. But they never did. Further maddeningly, you sometimes got a
pulled-back shot of the ring just as the girl was clambering awkwardly out. There was, it seemed, a minder whose job it was to part the ropes and give her a hand down. It infuriated me that these men never seemed particularly interested in the girls, did their rope-parting all the time looking past them, at the slumped fighters in their corners. These girls struggling to negotiate the ropes and the step down in their high heels hurt my childhood heart with their suddenly revealed humanness; I loved them, wanted to marry them. How could the minders be so oblivious? Even the crowd’s between-rounds wolf-whistles sounded token, bored, impatient for the action to begin again. It was American boredom, a collective satiation that added in spite of myself another layer of sinister glamour to who my mum and dad called the Yanks. You could see that for the crowd there was a fine line between being bored by the girls and hating them. (When we grow up, I said to Scarlet, countless times, we’ll go to America.) It’s different nowadays. The broadcasters have wised up. Now you do get the camera shift between rounds; the blonde with the porn body and Sunday Sport crop-top and high heels and deadened smile. The world changes, the old order passes away. And that’s just my meagre quartet of decades. At St Aloysius Pasha read science fiction tales about people going in rockets to the moon. Science fiction.
The papers in the Scarlet file are held together with a bulldog clip. It’s with a familiar feeling of shirking my duty that I prise it open and slide them out.
She came to live with us at the Brewer Street house (when she and I were going on six years old) because her mother, Dinah, was mad.
‘Aren’t you going to give Owen a kiss?’ Dinah said to Scarlet, as if to prove the issue. Scarlet stood holding on to a leg of our dining table. At the mention of a kiss she twisted herself round it in embarrassment disguised as abstraction. (I see it now as a foreshadow of the move that would come later round a pole in stilettos and her underwear. Can we trust the way a grown man remembers the behaviour of a little girl? When the grown man is me and the little girl Scarlet, yes. I remember everything.) ‘Come on, silly,’ Dinah said. ‘Don’t be shy.’