A Line of Blood (29 page)

For a moment I actually wondered if he had done it. I found myself anxiously staring at the pleats in his trousers. He clearly made regular use of an iron, and he had reasons, financial and moral, to dislike his tenant. But the thought was absurd, and I put it from my mind.

‘Why are you telling me this, Emmanuel?’

‘Who else can I tell, Alex, sir? I have no one.’ A change came upon him. The muscles in his face sagged and his shoulders dropped; he looked diminished, beaten: a seventy-seven-year-old man who lived alone and worried about the future. I reached across and put a hand on his arm. He nodded, patted it with his free hand.

‘You are lucky you have your beautiful wife. What is it that you have forgiven her for?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘She did nothing wrong.’

‘And yet you have forgiven her?’

‘Yes.’

When he showed me to the door a little later I realised he had not once mentioned God.

I went home and made calls.

My mother was finding it hard to sleep. Edinburgh was unseasonably hot and the flat was like an oven. She was all right, she said; she was getting by. She had a fan in the bedroom, but it wasn’t much use. I sensed that she did not want the call to end. But neither of us is good at smalltalk, so we spoke instead about forgiveness. My mother believed forgiveness brought relief to the person who had been wronged, more than to the wrongdoer. She wanted to speak about forgiveness as part of God’s plan for mankind. I did not.

Neither of us spoke about my father, though he hovered at the edges of our conversation like a shadow. You’re wrong, I thought, Mum. He craved your forgiveness; he never dared ask because he thought himself unforgivable.

I called my boss and apologised for calling him a cunt. I had, I explained, been under the influence of morphine at the time. I did not think he was a cunt, and deeply regretted the offence I had caused him. I did not expect him to give me my job back. It had been reasonable of him to sack me.

‘There’s something we can agree on,’ he said, and hung up.

I rang Dee. She rejected my call, so I left her a short message apologising for my lack of engagement and explaining that my family had been under a lot of pressure, that someone close to us had died, and that I deeply regretted that she and I were no longer working together.

Half an hour later Dee’s agent rang to tell me that Dee accepted my apology. She wished me well. There were no hard feelings.

Relief flooded my body; I was shocked to discover that Dee’s words could mean so much. It’s not as if we were friends.

‘Dad,’ said Max later, as we sat on his bed, ‘Dad, what did Mr Ashani tell you about Mum?’

‘Nothing, Max. That’s not what we talked about.’

‘You didn’t ask him about her?’

‘No.’

‘So what happened in Norway then?’

‘We stopped smoking. I think you’d like it there.’

‘That’s not what I meant. What did she
say
to you in Norway?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You said you were going away to talk about what happened. But now you’re all loving again. Why didn’t you say you know the neighbour
did
her?’

‘It wasn’t like that. Mum knows I know about her affair.’

‘It’s like
you
keep forgetting, though.’

‘People make mistakes, Max.’

‘You can’t just let her get away with it.’ There were angry tears in Max’s eyes now. ‘You can’t just
forgive
her.’

‘Actually, I can.’

‘Why?’

‘Because bad things happen when you don’t forgive people.’

‘You think she wouldn’t have hit you with the bottle if you forgave her?’

‘Nevertheless, Max, I have forgiven her.’ I could feel a pricking in my own eyes. I swallowed hard, put thumb and forefinger to my forehead, and breathed deeply.

‘What do you want, Max? Do you want us to split up? Because the consequences if I don’t forgive her are … you know, it would be bleak.’

‘You don’t have to split up. But you shouldn’t just …’ said Max. ‘I mean, look.’

He reached into his trouser pocket, then held out to me a cheap black notebook. The cover was worn and striated. I looked down at it but didn’t take it.

‘It’s about what happened when the neighbour did Mum.’

‘A diary?’ Max nodded and pressed it into my palm. ‘Max, listen to me. Your mother made a mistake. It’s over, and I am going to forgive her. You need to understand that. I am not looking for new reasons to be angry with her. If you want me to read your diary, those are my terms.’

‘OK,’ he said, after thinking for a while. ‘I still think you should read it.’

We sat on his bed, not speaking. Max picked up a comic book. The defiance in him belonged to someone much older. ‘OK, boy-man,’ I said. ‘I will read your diary.’

‘Don’t talk to me like that.’ The slightness of that body – too small, too angular, too breakable. I ruffled his hair. He pushed me off, suppressed a smile, became serious again.

‘Max, you’re eleven,’ I said.

‘I know.’

‘For your age, you’re the most grown-up person I know.’

‘I know, Dad.’ Another suppressed smile. ‘So are you.’

‘Cheeky wee bastard,’ I said.

‘Same to you.’

At eleven I left Millicent and Arla talking downstairs. I brushed my teeth, undressed, and lay on top of the bed.

Inside the scuffed covers of Max’s diary the pages were yellowed, uneven; something seemed to have spilled and dried, fading and separating the black ink into diffuse blues and reds. I looked again at the covers and the spine. The coarse fibres were unevenly spread, stained: watermarked.

I saw now that the whole book had been wet. Max must have dried it, then prised the pages apart; he seemed to have gone over the faded text with a fresh pen. There were pencil drawings too which had smudged a little where the pages had rubbed against each other in his trouser pocket.

The smudging and the rewriting gave Max’s book a childish, incomplete feel. I half-closed my eyes, and the water damage and the smudges faded away. The diary became much more workmanlike: evenly spaced text, small images placed where the eye naturally fell.

A shift in the shadows on the far wall. I opened my eyes. The door was open, and Millicent was standing there watching me.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Max’s diary,’ I said.

‘That isn’t how you read a diary.’

‘I was looking at the composition.’

‘An excellent avoidance strategy.’

‘Avoidance?’

‘Yeah, that way you get to not engage with it. Do you think maybe you’ll read it and decide that you don’t forgive me for what I did?’

‘Max doesn’t want me to forgive you.’

‘Think you
can
read it and still forgive me?’

‘Obviously. Yes.’

‘So I was thinking I would come to bed now. But I guess Arla is planning to be up for a while. I could go downstairs again.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Lie here.’

‘You sure?’

‘I’ve forgiven you, Millicent. That’s the spirit in which I’m going to read it.’

She took off her shoes and lay on her back. ‘Alex,’ she said, ‘you’re in the process of forgiving me, which is not the same thing.’

After a time she closed her eyes. I watched her, beautiful in her white cotton shirt and black fitted skirt. I caressed her hair with my hand.
Mine
, I thought:
I really need you to be mine
.

When I was certain Millicent was asleep I began to read. Max’s diary began on the evening Bryce had seduced Millicent. Max had known instantly. He had heard her take off her shoes and lay them gently on the landing, had seen her shadow cross the gap beneath his door; he had felt as much as heard the boards as they shifted beneath her. Some permanent change in the chemical structure of the house, I thought: old bonds broken, new bonds forged.

Max had crept to the bathroom. From beneath the open window he had heard his faithless mother emerge from the kitchen into the garden, heard her feet tracking low across the uncut grass. He had heard the love seat creak as she jumped easily up on to the wall. He had heard her footfalls on the other side as she landed and walked on, there to open bottles and crack bone with next-door neighbour Bryce.

The acuity of Max’s hearing was a torment all its own. He had heard the flick and snap of cigarette lighter, the chink of coffee pot on china cup, the mangling of daisies under foot and under thigh.

He had not looked out of the window; once his mother was in the neighbour’s garden she was hidden by the trained foliage of the hated neighbour’s verdant bower. But he had heard the neighbour’s terms of endearment: ‘sweetest’, ‘loveliest’, ‘darlingest’: they sickened him; they made him want to drench Bryce’s front room in angry shards of glass, to throw a chair through his perfect little bay window, to knock out his perfect white teeth.

Then came the sex. From his room at the front of the house Max would hear the insistent rhythm of Bryce’s lust, could feel, almost, the scrape of bed leg on ancient board. He would slink from his room unheard, senses raging. Crouched in our bathroom he discerned his mother and her seducer, their voices, their every whisper and moan.

It was summer. His mother had left the windows open: of course Max heard the sex.

According to Max, Bryce had
intercoursed
Millicent eleven times. He had recorded it all using the words he had learned from the books we had given him; he had counted the number of
orgasms
(for some reason he had underlined the word each time it appeared), and the number of
strokes
that had led to each
orgasm
; he had written down the words that Bryce had shouted as he had got there. Five Oh Gods, two Oh Jesuses, three Fucks and one Christ.

If Millicent had achieved orgasm, her son had not recorded the fact. I looked across at her but felt no anger now. Instead I felt a strange kind of fear. What was this knowledge doing to our son?

Max had been awake and had documented each occasion in words that betrayed no emotion. I supposed it made it easier. But against each record of sex he had drawn an illustration of a man. In each drawing the man was dressed in a polo shirt but naked from the waist down, with little round glasses and a tiny childlike penis. It was Bryce. It could only be Bryce.

The drawings were dated. Max had scratched the day, month and year on to the neighbour’s flaccid penis. The first showed only Bryce, frontally, shouting ‘Oh God’, his eyes represented by crosses behind the lenses of his glasses. The next drawing showed him shouting ‘Fuck!’ with a giant noose around his neck. The third showed Bryce walking over a cliff, cartoon-like, the noose around his neck suspended from an unseen point in the sky. Then came Bryce in a forest, the noose slung around a high branch, as he shouted ‘Oh Jesus’.

This was cartoon violence, no more. What eleven-year-old boy wouldn’t want to see his mother’s seducer punished? Be a devoted son, turn sex into death:
process
your rage. Here in this book Max could be anyone he wanted and what he wanted to be was this: Max the vengeful deity, tormenting the man who had cuckolded his father and defiled his mother. Really, who could blame him? No child should be exposed to that.

The scenarios became more elaborate: Bryce suspended from a crane on a construction site; Bryce on a buffalo with a rope tied to a giraffe; Bryce jumping from a burning building, the rope tied to a window ledge. ‘Oh Jesus!’ ejaculated Cartoon Bryce, ‘Oh fuck!’, ‘Oh Christ!’

My poor, poor son. Max could not have known that Bryce would take his own life. You wish him dead, you draw it in cartoon form, over and over, and presto, the neighbour is gone. A parody of magical thinking. Who wouldn’t be crippled by that guilt? The thing you most desire, but the last thing you actually want: the reality of death so much worse than the fantasy. And yet my son still seemed surprisingly sane. Angry, but sane.

I looked up at Millicent, watched for a while as her chest rose and fell, thought how strange it was that we were together after all this, that we’d found a way back to each other in the midst of so much betrayal. I wondered why I felt so little anger now. Perhaps, I thought, we are evolving. We had begun repairing our marriage: perhaps we could repair Max too.

I turned the page.

I had to turn the book on its side. This was a completely different kind of drawing, using the full width of the double page, still childlike, but far more detailed than the cartoons: Bryce in a bedroom with a noose over the door handle, his crumpled body slumped beside the door, dead, no speech bubble, a book splayed open on the floor beside him, spine up. Max had used colour this time, reddening the cheeks and the lolling tongue.

Bryce was completely naked, and completely, believably dead. I thought of how Bryce had looked on the evening we’d found him in the bath. That was the Bryce in the picture. I could feel the blood pulsing in my ears now, slow but loud, a strange rushing sound.

Another description of sex followed, two minutes and forty-seven seconds of Bryce
intercoursing
Millicent, one hundred and fifty-seven strokes, at the end of which Bryce had shouted ‘Ah, yes!’ Very loudly, according to Max.

I could hear the blood pumping in my ears. The book on the floor – it was one of Millicent’s. Max hadn’t completed the title, but the words ‘for Cynics’ were very clear, and you could just make out the faint shape of Millicent’s first name on the cover.
Millicent for Cynics.
A message, I thought. My clever, angry son: old beyond his years.

‘What is it, Alex?’ said Millicent.

‘Sleep, Millicent,’ I said.
Breathe
, I thought.

‘You’re so restless. What is it?’

‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Sleep.’

Millicent propped herself up on an elbow. ‘You think I’ve been asleep? Are you out of your mind?’ She reached for the notebook. ‘You are so crazy-tense, Alex.’

‘He probably doesn’t want me to give you this.’

Millicent looked at me, paused for a moment, then took the notebook.