All That Follows

by Jim Crace

  It is tempting to remove the sun cap from her grasp and pull it on. Leonard likes to drive in it, especially to gigs and concerts. His much-repeated tease is that it helps him to concentrate, not only on the driving but also on the music he will play. He has never worn the cap onstage, of course. He knows it isn’t cool or hip. Francine has persuaded him of that. It isn’t blue. But afterward, when he is signing programs and booklets, he sometimes pulls it on, just for fun; its slogan, QUEUE HERE, seems pertinent and witty. He leaves it, though, in Francine’s grasp. He does not want to wake his wife just yet. He is not in a hurry to explain himself to her. He wants to settle himself and unravel his story first, sort out what he has dreamed from what occurred. Besides, the prospect of her waking up naturally only to find him sitting calmly at the wheel is an appealing one. He can play it very cool, he decides. He looks forward to her gasp of pleasure and relief, and then the shock when she sees his injuries.

  Leonard succeeds in driving out of Alderbeech through the busy Sunday traffic and almost reaching the motorway before Francine wakes briefly. She puts her hand on his thigh and says “Sweetheart” without even opening her eyes. When he squeezes her fingers, she says “Sweetheart” again, more flatly than before, her voice a little slurred.

  “You’re whacked,” he says. “Don’t wake, Frankie. I’ll tell you all about it when we’re home. You’ll be amazed.” But she does not respond to the bait. For the moment she would rather sleep than be amazed.

  “Who’s the dormouse now?” he asks out loud, for his own benefit. He is already a bit annoyed with her. It’s time she showed some evidence of anxiety. It’s time she saw the state of him, his damaged chin, his blistered, purple mouth, his torn and muddied clothes. “Wow,” she’ll say. “What happened to your face?” And he will reply, pianissimo and casually, “They beat me up, the police. Three guys. They turned their guns on me. They had me in their sights. I very nearly died. I spent the night in cells.” He wants to see her snap awake at what he says and stare wide-eyed at him. He wants to hear her mention pure valiance. Say it, say it, valiance.

  “I’ll tell you all about it when we’re home,” he says again, though mostly to himself. “Cooked breakfast, or will it be lunch, in bed? How’s that sound?” Francine appears to nod but does not make a sound. She rolls across the seat, drawing up her knees, and rests her head on his shoulder. They are that loving couple in a moving car that safety adverts warn against: Keep Your Distance from the Vehicle in Front; Keep Your Distance from Your Passengers. Her hair is unusually unkempt and springy on his cheek, he notices. Like it was when they first met. Her breath is spicy and familiar. It is not until he’s pulled up at the house and turned the Buzz’s engine off that Francine finally speaks. “Carry me upstairs,” she says, just as she did on Thursday evening, but this time there is no agenda other than her need to sleep a little more. Her eyes are open and she’s looking at his face, but she does not seem to notice how hurt he is. Perhaps he’s not as badly hurt as he would like.

  16

  LEONARD KNOWS, as soon as he chimes into the house, that there have been uninvited visitors during his absence and ones who have not made much effort to cover their tracks. The first abnormality is that their burglar alarm is not set. It was operating yesterday when he and Francine crept out through the back garden and their neighbor’s side gate to drive to the Emmersons’ house. It’s possible, he supposes, that in their ill-tempered hurry they forgot to turn it on, though that would be a first for him. He is neurotically careful about security. He daren’t risk the loss of his customized saxophone. That first cheap instrument stolen from him with punches in the pub car park many years ago still reverberates.

  At least Leonard does not have to key in the alarm code before struggling Francine up the stairs and into her bed. She is not light, small though she is, especially when sleeping or only pretending to sleep, as he suspects. She clearly wants to be treated like an exhausted toddler and returned to her own clean bedclothes where, knowing her, she will doze quite happily until midafternoon. Rest comes first, as ever. He cannot hold her like a toddler, though. The stairs are steep and narrow on the turn. He has to tuck his good shoulder into her waist and give her a fireman’s lift. His right shoulder tenses, but despite the pain, he manages to tumble her onto the mattress, pull off her shoes, and cover her with the duvet. It’s difficult to know if she has offered him a groan of thanks or is merely glad to be in her own bed at last. He considers joining her. He ought to sleep, but he can tell he will not sleep, not while it’s light outside.

  Their room is still in disarray. She wouldn’t let him tidy up before they set off on the drive down. But did they leave the desk lamp on? And were the curtains fully pulled open like that? Leonard has an idea that they weren’t. He looks down onto the patio as he snaps off the light and draws the curtains across again. He’s half expecting to see shattered window glass, some signs of burglary, his saxophone case abandoned on the lawn. There is no point in looking for evidence in their bedroom. All the drawers have already been pulled out and emptied onto the rugs, the chests and boxes have lost their lids, clothes are shaken from their hangers. A burglar would be hard-pushed to find any valuables. His spectacles are lost in here, Leonard remembers. But with the curtains now shut and Francine breathing evenly, he cannot and had better not hunt for them yet.

  The door to their room is a little lower than the others. It has a Tanzanian carving added on—a frieze of drums. Leonard hesitates, as he often does, directly under the lintel and stands on his tiptoes until he feels the touch of timber on his hair. He has not heard anything to alarm him, but in his current apprehensive mood, hearing nothing is disquieting in itself. Usually there is a distant radio or someone trimming hedges or the thrum of a reversing car. At least there should be birdcalls, shouldn’t there? This silence seems almost physical, a rippling of hinted sound, something present but unexpressed. What if he and Francine disturbed the burglar or the burglars when they returned, and one of them is still inside the house, holding his breath, holding his knife? Leonard looks for something to defend himself with, but in the half-light of the room can find only a heavy leather belt. He pulls it free from his discarded jeans, wraps the strap twice round his hand, and swings the buckled end in readiness. The floorboards creak as he steps out onto the landing.

  He climbs up the attic stairs toward Celandine’s room first. It’s almost comforting for old times’ sake to find it’s in a mess, though not as bad a mess as their own bedroom and not even as bad a mess as Celandine might have made herself when she was home. The police have been comparatively restrained. One or two bureau drawers are pulled out. The floor is littered only with a few saved magazines, a towel, some socks. The bed itself has been pulled back, a little overzealously, perhaps—looking for Lucy Katerina Emmerson, fast asleep, he supposes. There is a canvas bag of birthday presents and a few birthday cards hung up on a clothes hook, where Francine must have secreted them last week, which the police, showing some diplomacy, have left unopened. Most of the gifts are decorated playschool-style with Francine’s exuberant designs. The number 50 is prominent, of course.

  Leonard lifts the bag off its peg and tiptoes with it downstairs to the first-floor landing. Again he detects the glitter of no sound. He pushes open all the doors with his toe, one by one, and, still gripping the belt and the bag of gifts, peers inside: the guest room with Francine’s worktable; the bath and shower room; the lavatory; the little laundry room where they overwinter plants. He is most fearful of the door into the narrow side room under the eaves where he composes and practices when his wife is home and demanding quiet. He keeps his chord sheets and his music stand there, and all his instruments: two tenors, an alto that he hardly ever plays (“Too ripe”), Celandine’s school flute, the electronic keyboard with which he notates his tunes, and a one-note township saxophone made from beaten tuna cans. He waits on the landing for a moment, listening. There is sound at last, but only Francine breathing. He toes back the doo
r a little more and steps inside, quickly taking stock. More mess. But no one’s there. Nothing’s missing. Not even the treasured and valuable Mercury citation, or the Carnegie Excellence Medal, or the costly art deco bronze statuette The Trombonist that Francine bought for him as a wedding gift and that he keeps on the windowsill, where the light is flattering. Any self-respecting thief would help himself to that.

  Leonard is puzzled even more when he goes downstairs again and, still swinging the belt buckle, spots at once what he couldn’t see when he got home and Francine was in his arms: that the circulars and papers have been gathered up off the hall floor and tucked neatly into the deep wicker bowl where their post and keys are usually kept. That can’t have been his work. The newspapers were delivered only this morning. They won’t have picked themselves up off the mat. Nor, come to think of it, would burglars bother being so attentive as to tidy them away. That’d make no sense. It would be inefficient, even. Now he hurries into the kitchen, less nervously and a bit relieved because—of course, it’s obvious—he now can guess what must have happened, something more likely than a burglary. He pauses, though. He sniffs. That’s the unmistakable odor of tobacco. It cannot be the ghostly residue of Lucy’s roll-ups that Leonard washed off on Thursday evening at the sink. Tobacco lingers, certainly. It hangs around, keen to betray its user, always ready to offend. But it doesn’t linger that long. There can be no doubt, then, someone has been smoking in their house. Recently. Someone has been drinking coffee too. Stealing coffee. Three used mugs—crockery that neither he nor Francine likes—have been hurriedly rinsed and upended on the draining board. There’s gritty sugar spilled on the worktops. The fridge door has not been firmly closed. It’s spilling light and cold.

  Now Leonard is pretty certain what’s happened in their absence. Not a burglary but a bust. The raiding party has returned. Those policemen and the NADA man who spoiled his birthday and turned the house upside-down on Saturday have come back for a second visit. And not long ago, by the looks of it: it was after the newspaper deliveries, that’s for sure. Either they knew what he and Francine were up to all along (and that is worrying) or his phone call from Maven’s prompted it. They rang the bell and, getting no response, just let themselves in to snoop around, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and create more mess. They won’t have taken off their shoes, he’s sure of that. It does at least explain why nothing seems to be missing and there is no sign of forced entry. Locks and alarms are meat and drink to trained policemen. They probably set up some means of reentry during their first visit. They might have lifted a window latch or even taken an impression of the front-door key. They must have some device for identifying and unlocking alarm codes. Such chilly arrogance. They should know better, though, than to smoke in someone else’s home.

  Leonard is offended. He has suppressed his outrage over everything that occurred earlier this morning, before first light, following his final visit to the hostage street. It has not been clear till now what he should feel about it all, the dark disturbances of Alderbeech, or what to do. Now, attached to this uncomplicated principle, the integrity of private households, passive nicotine, all his buried resentment wants to be expressed. He puts down the canvas bag of gifts on the kitchen worktop and pats his pocket for his cell phone. He’ll call at once. He will demand an explanation and apologies. Some recompense, perhaps? First he’d better check the other downstairs rooms for further signs of impertinence and damage, before searching for the number stored on his cell from yesterday’s call to Agent Rollins. He doesn’t suppose that Rollins will be reachable on a Sunday, but that shouldn’t stop Leonard from leaving a firm message of complaint about this latest, odorous intrusion. He’s pretty sure that it is Rollins himself who broke in this time. What had he said, so icily, on the first visit? “Let’s leave it there, for the moment.” Leonard should have guessed. A second visit was implied. What were they looking for, what had they found?

  There is a fourth used mug and, astoundingly, a greasy plate smeared with sauce and crumbs on the carpet in front of the futon in the teleroom. The screen is switched on, although the sound is muted. “Make yourself at home. Do, please,” Leonard mutters peevishly to himself. This room shimmers even more loudly than anywhere else in the house with unexpressed noise. So that is all he’s sensed on the upstairs landing, the implied chatter of a silenced telescreen. Now he can relax. He can indulge his anger. He regrets that he hasn’t taken the phone number of the woman officer who apologized to him this morning. Someone ought to kick up a fuss among some top brass about this invasion. If the three officers who knocked him to the ground when he was trying to reach Maxie were suspended from duty, the men who broke into his house (in the absence of “the authorizing householder”) should expect at least the same. Their actions were literally unwarranted (he smiles at this; he’ll use the play on words in his complaint) and are proving to be, in many ways, more upsetting than the rugby tackles and the blows he endured in Alderbeech. He might have brought those on himself. At least in this case nobody can accuse him of being foolhardy. Or inconsiderate. He strikes the futon with the belt.

  It is that hair again that catches his attention. Maxie’s on the telescreen for an instant, and then almost at once it is replaced by advertisements. Leonard hunts for the console and finds it end-up on the mantel shelf, almost hidden by a vase of teasel heads and dried artichokes. He settles with it on the futon, in his usual place. It’s odd to realize that despite the drama of the past few days, he hasn’t even glimpsed a television or heard any broadcast news since seeing Lucy’s face on the concourse telescreen outside Maven’s store on Saturday. He’d better update himself before he phones, see what they’re saying about the ending of the siege. He shuffles through some channels and, as it is now almost exactly midday, is showered with a choice of news bulletins. Every one has Maxie. There’s no escaping him this morning, or the mug shots of the other two arrested “suspects,” all photographed in the NSF custody suite within hours of the freeing of the hostages. Leonard recognizes the decor, though that’s a generously inexact description of the cells’ stippled gray walls, the canvas investigation screen, and the strips of interrogation lamps. It is a shock for Leonard—and a bit of a lost opportunity—to learn too late that he was so close to Maxie during the early hours. Maybe, stretched out on their banquettes, they were separated only by the thickness of a wall. They could have shouted out. They could have talked.

  On Noonday on BBC National, Leonard’s preferred station, Maxie Lermon is on the left of the picture, his head pushed back against the investigation screen, his features coarsened by the flash of police and agency cameras. He needs a shave and looks exceptionally tired, more hollowed out and cornered than he seemed in the flesh before dawn. Even his hair is lifeless. But—other than some grazing to his face, which Leonard knows was caused by the tarmac in the hostage street—there is no sign of bruising or evidence of beatings. He is expressionless, bored even, as if he’s only posing for a passport photograph and has briefly put his features on hold. The face staring from the still-muted screen a meter from Leonard’s own face is too remote and stationary to truly care about. Nevertheless, Leonard freezes the image and copies it. He enters his Personal Briefcase, selects Menu, Archive, Album, Austin, and adds this latest image of Maxie and his two comrades to the file of photographs. Again he goes a little closer to the screen and peers at them—the sooner he retrieves his glasses, the better—looking for the romance in their faces, looking for the valiance. But the police photographers have done their duty, providing unheroic public images that present the hostage-takers as sullen, dull, defeated. People without feeling.

  Leonard sees it now. He cannot help but cry out in astonishment. The screen’s a mirror, suddenly. He’s looking at himself. A younger self—an old press photo taken on the evening of the Mercury. Then, almost before he has a chance to focus properly, a second image glides across, a close-up portrait not yet nine hours old. He reaches for the console and finds the volume b
utton but is too late to catch the commentary. So he jumps to EuroFox and then to Sky and Five and each time is greeted by the same dramatic still of himself, now with shared agency captions but no name as yet: “Prizewinning jazz musician arrested at hostage site” or “Saxman detained, questioned. Terrorist links.” It shows him in compacted profile, his left cheek pressed to the pavement, his shoulder pushed against the curb by a combat boot, the barrel of an automatic weapon pointing at his face, his beach cap trodden into the dirt but still the only touch of brightness—of summer, come to that—in the photograph. He is expressionless, but the image is flattering. As Francine says, he has no sag. His jaw and chin look less than fifty years of age, despite the almost two-day stubble and the blood.

  Leonard’s hand is trembling now. He drops the belt at last, flexing his aching fingers. It is astounding to discover that while he has not been watching the news, he has become the news, he has been living it. It’s too early to know if this is a pleasing or a costly development. A pounding heart can signify both things. He takes a copy of the still, pastes it in the open Austin file, next to the Gruber’s photograph. Then, on an impulse, he zooms in on himself in Texas, October 2006, and drags the expanded image across the screen until it sits next to the shot from Alderbeech. Now he can compare. What has become of him?