A Line of Blood (35 page)

I sat back on my bunk, turned on the reading light. Bryce’s broken body against the bedroom door. I felt a queasy sense of foreboding.

‘Turn the page, Dad,’ said Max. He was watching me keenly from his bunk again now. I turned the page.

Another double-page spread. The scene was domestic: Bryce in the bath, listening to a radio on the side of the bathtub. Bryce was completely recognisable, and this time he was completely alive and completely at peace. There were no ropes, no animals; no lolling tongue or popping eye.

The bathroom was perfect in every detail: the pattern of the tiles on the wall, the moulded plastic scroll at the top of the tub, the expensively pretentious fittings, the monogrammed motifs on the towels. Bryce wore an expression of contentment and calm, as he washed his back using a long-handled brush. Soap suds dripped across his shoulders down the side of the tub and on to the floor. On the floor was an open bottle of red wine, and a glass was carefully positioned on a little protruding shelf halfway along the wall.

Another of Millicent’s paperbacks lay spine up on a bath rack above Bryce’s groin; on the rack there were also candles, and two bars of soap. Bryce looked tired but contented, fulfilled. He was smiling a jovial, unthreatening smile. Max had recorded the grown man reading in the bath, the glass of wine at the end of the working day.

‘It’s a good picture, Max,’ I said. ‘A very good picture.’

Maybe he had worked through his animus towards the neighbour. Maybe we were reaching the end of the drawings, the end of the process: the end of Max’s anger. I tried to hand the book back to him through the door. ‘Thanks for letting me see this, Max.’

The tiniest shake of the head. He was alert, his gaze sharp, all wakeful anticipation.

I turned the page and everything went cold.

The same patterns in the tiles, the same scrolling at the top of the bath, the same monogrammed towels. It was the same image, but changed. The body in the bath was the same, but changed. It was still Bryce, but the sinews in the neck and arms and thighs were taut, the torso rigid, suspended slightly above the water. The legs were kicking out, hard. The hands gripped the side of the bath. The wineglass had been knocked over, as had the bottle on the floor.

Max had drawn the neighbour at the moment of his death.

Still my son watched me. I could read nothing in his expression.

I turned back a page. Everything was the same size, in the same place, yet Max could not have traced one image on to the other; the paper was too thick for that. I compared the drawings for a while, flipping backwards and forwards between them. There was no doubt about it – they were designed to be seen together. A before-and-after pair, from a smile of contentment to a rictus of absolute, unendurable pain. Backwards and forwards, like a gruesome flick-book.

Seconds separated the two pictures, separated the living Bryce from the dying Bryce. Alive – dead – alive – dead. Wineglass up, wineglass down. Bottle up, bottle down. The emotion in the turn of the page, like a flash cut. Like television.

It was all there. The biting of the tongue. The kicking of the legs that must have cracked the fibreglass and plastic of the bathtub. The blood gathering at the nostril. All so much more dramatic thanks to the serenity of the scene before. Like television, calming things down before the climax. Then bang, dead. This wasn’t just a document, a record of what Max had experienced. This was cleverer, and more upsetting. Max wasn’t just sharing the facts of what he had experienced, he was sharing a cold bolt of adrenaline, the cruel horror of the neighbour’s death. These pictures were designed to be seen.
He wants us to understand what he felt.

Think, I thought.
Breathe.

The iron in the bath between Bryce’s legs: the electric iron that Bryce must have sat carefully on its end, so that it didn’t melt the plastic of the tub before he pulled it carefully in on top of himself. A cord ran out of the bath, and out to the edge of the image. There was no iron in the first image. It appeared as if from nowhere in the second.

‘Max,’ I said, ‘was it important for you to show me these pictures?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Dr Å says just because I draw bad things, it doesn’t make me bad. She says it’s like a process, or something.’

That word again.
Process.

‘Are the cartoons the way you felt about the neighbour?’ I said.

‘I suppose. It was horrible, Dad. Really, really horrible.’

‘And the other pictures, are they about the shock of finding the neighbour?’

‘I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t draw the boner.’ He sniffed loudly, twice. ‘Yeah, maybe. A bit.’

‘Then I’m glad you showed them to me.’ But really, who could be glad about something like this? And yet … And yet Millicent’s predication had not come true. The drawings might be gruesome, the feeling expressed might be terrifying, but Max was
working through
, and he was OK. He really seemed to be OK. He wasn’t falling. He wasn’t unravelling. This was a process.

Max was
moving on
.

Thank God, really. We were neither of us in any state to catch our son, to put him back on his feet, so thank God he wasn’t falling. Thank God, I thought, for Dr Å. And thank God for Millicent’s foresight. By predicting Max’s fall, she had prevented it.

I thought of Millicent then, wondered whether she was lying in her own narrow bed in her narrow police cell. Probably not. June’s colleagues would be politely depriving her of sleep, kindly bringing her coffee and sparkling water, and subtly, ever so gently – incremental question by incremental question – pushing her closer to the edge. The police are not what they once were, I thought. They have the measure of people like us now.

Millicent was alone at the police station. There would be no one to catch her if she fell.

What have we done?

I woke with a jolt from a dream I could not remember, breathing hard, frightened.

Frightened because I had remembered what the other thing was, that truth I had been pushing below the surface in the hope that it would drown, or dissolve, or merge with something else. Because it was not a good truth.

I realised that I had been deceiving myself. Because what I wanted wasn’t truth; what I wanted was to love Millicent with the intensity and the certainty that I once had. I was worried that that might no longer be possible. I was worried that the truth might be getting in the way.

For a moment in Norway I knew: it was there in front of me when she swam upwards and away from me; I knew that I would find her at the surface. That felt like truth, and for a moment that was all I wanted. The anticipation of her, the knowledge that love was waiting above me, real and vital, sunlight and air.

But we were home now. There were whole swathes of my wife’s life that were unknowable to me: her parents; baby Sarah; the neighbour: I knew next to nothing about what she felt about any of these. I could do nothing more than guess because Millicent didn’t give me much to go on. And all I knew was that the things that caused Millicent hurt, or stress, or humiliation, were the things that Millicent buried deep, engulfed in strata of silence and pain.

And so we gave each other ‘space’, and we got by; and isn’t that how marriages work? Give and take, they say. Respect for boundaries, they say. Intimacy without
enmeshment
.

But not now. Not any longer. Something was coming to an end. There was a truth coming to the surface now, and I didn’t think there was much I could do about it. Not any more.

I told Millicent that someone had replaced the fuse in Bryce’s iron with a steel bolt. She must have known that Bryce didn’t own an iron.

Yet she said nothing.

I read the letters that Millicent wrote to Bryce. They were both very short. The first said:

Well, you sure unscrolled me, Bryce. Can’t eat for thinking about that.

Unscroll me again.

Ever,

M

It spoke of a certain kind of sexual obsession, but there was no mention of love, and in that I took some comfort. No one who truly loves signs off with the word
Ever
. It’s a reflex, a platitude. It’s American for
Best wishes
. It’s
Cordially yours
.

Millicent’s second letter to Bryce was dated two weeks before his death:

Bryce,

I cannot help you, and I will not be party to this. I did not ask for it, and I do not seek it.

Leave me alone. Confess to what you have done.

‘Dad.’

I slid the letters under my pillow.

‘Go back to sleep, Max.’

‘What are you reading?’

‘Nothing.’

‘But I
saw
you.’

‘Go back to sleep.’

‘Are those Mum’s?’

‘No.’

‘They are. You’re reading the letters Mum went to get from the neighbour’s house.’

My mind raced. How could Max possibly know? Had he found the box? He could probably have reached it from the stepladder. He wasn’t much smaller than Millicent. I thought of his thin arms dragging the ladder up the stairs while Millicent and I were out. What did he know?

‘You might be right,’ I said at last, ‘I think Mum might have gone to get her letters from his house.’ Strange, then, that the police hadn’t found them first.

Max switched on his reading light. ‘Why did you lie, Dad?’

‘I wasn’t sure that was how they came to be there.’

‘You found them in that box in the attic.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I did.’

‘Did you read the other ones?’

‘They were sealed.’

‘So?’

‘What do you mean, Max?’

Max shrugged, rolled his eyes.

‘Max,’ I said, ‘Max, have you been reading your mother’s private correspondence?’

‘Obviously.’

‘How?’ I said.

‘Scissors and glue. It’s easy.’

‘You’ve been opening your mum’s letters?’

‘You would if you could.’

I was tired, and couldn’t find an answer that wasn’t going to make a hypocrite of me.

‘You should read the one she wrote to her dad,’ said Max. ‘Do you want to know what she said?’

‘No, Max. No, I don’t.’

‘She said, like, “Let me refresh your memory, Dad: Thaddeus took his own life. I was 3,000 miles away.”’ Max was running the words together, but the angry syntax was Millicent’s.

‘“Know too that for as long as you think his choice was my fault we shall remain estranged. Whatever you think I did, I did not do. Send no more checks. You will have realised by now that I get by without them. Sincerely, Millicent.”’

I could think of nothing to say.

‘Who was Thaddeus, Dad?’

‘Someone your mum was once close to.’

‘Who died?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did American Grandpa think Mum did it?’

‘I’m sure he didn’t think that, Max. Not really.’

‘Why didn’t she send the letter, then, Dad?’

I was still awake at five. Max was asleep, snoring quietly to himself. He had left his reading light on, and I had not turned it off for fear of waking him, though I had long since switched off my own. I slid the letters out from under the pillow. There was just enough light in the cabin to find my way down the ladder and locate my rucksack on the lower bunk. I opened the rucksack and slid the letters back into the zipped pocket, beside the card addressed to
Rosie
. I sat for a while, the rucksack between my legs, then slid my hand in again and drew out the card. I turned on the reading light in the lower bunk, and looked at the envelope, turning it over and over.

The address on the card was somewhere in Surrey, and although Millicent had not used a surname I was sure it was to the same Rose. The seal looked good, and for a moment I decided Max could not have opened it. But then I noticed a tiny triangular cut. The bottom right corner was missing. I compared the two edges. The right-hand edge was a little thicker than the left. I ran my finger along it. It was very slightly uneven.

By rubbing my thumb and forefinger across the seam I found I could loosen the glue at the side of the envelope. I started at the bottom near the tiny missing corner, and began to work my way up. The most effective thing seemed to be to keep my movements tiny, almost imperceptible. My finger hardly moved against my thumb. And yet. Tiny flakes of yellow-grey glue began to fall out through the gap and on to the pillow. After five minutes I had opened the seam halfway up. I tried very gently to draw it open by pulling it apart, but the glue was good, and I was worried that I might tear the paper.

When I had the side of the envelope fully open I carefully drew out the card inside.

It wasn’t a card of condolence. Not exactly. It was a work by Georges Braque, a print in yellow and blue of a bird in flight, simple and very beautiful. Inside Millicent had written:

Rosie,

Your brother is gone: a devastating loss, and one in which I feel implicated. Know, however, that I could never have foreseen the consequences of our affair.

Precisely because it was an
affair
, Rosie, and nothing more. I was unhappy, I made a bad choice, and for that I am truly sorry.

Please understand: what he wanted was impossible.

Please do not contact me. And
please
, leave my husband alone.

Ever,

M