Cold Hands (25 page)

Or this, from an essay by George Orwell. I wrote the
quotation out in one of the yellow legal pads I keep on my desk in the study.

Orwell wrote this in Allied Occupied Europe in 1945, after witnessing the cruelties perpetrated on captured Nazi soldiers. And, despite my own experience, I think Orwell is, on the whole, right. Most people, given the chance to abuse or torment someone who had once done the same to them, would turn away. In most of us the half-life of hatred is short.

But not in everyone.

Some people can keep it alive in the breast for many years. And even then most of these people, if they were offered the opportunity to avenge their wrong, to pluck the eyeball or the tooth that they are due, most of them would still turn and walk away.

But not all of them. A few will reach into their bag and start taking things out. They’ll pour the ether onto the gauze and walk straight towards you. They’ll scrape the knife along the gun barrel as they come looking for you in the dark. And when you call out for help, for your mother or for your God, they will not hear you. They’ll smile and keep on coming.

I remember the day over twenty years ago that Mr Cardew gave me the
Complete Shakespeare
, the day I got the three
Highers (ABB) that satisfied my conditional offer from Lampeter. I had been Donnie for over a year then and neither of us slipped very often. William was gone. We’d talked of practical things, about what I could expect at university, about the halfway house I’d live in for a few months over the remainder of the summer, to acclimatise before term began and I took up a place in the halls of residence. He’d be visiting me. ‘Don’t go getting drunk out of your mind at any of these freshers’ parties now,’ he’d said, smiling, as he extended his hand. We shook, there in that sad room where so much had happened in the last seven years, where Wilfred Owen’s rifles had stuttered, where Birnham Wood had walked to Dunsinane, where Ted Hughes’s Jaguar had prowled. He left the book on the table and I read the inscription after he’d gone.
‘Now make yourself proud.’

But I couldn’t, not without telling the truth. The truth he never knew. Without saying ‘I did it. It was me.’ I’ve only ever said it aloud to one person, but she was the person who’d needed to hear it the most. A kind of peace, then.

Down the hall I can hear Cora clattering pots in the kitchen. I can smell an aromatic stew. Soon enough it will be six o’clock and I can fix myself a drink. (In the immediate aftermath I found myself drinking during the day. I pushed it back, slowly, gradually, to 6 p.m. I smiled with recognition when I read an interview with J. G. Ballard, who said he started drinking all day to cope in the aftermath of his wife’s death, to cope with raising several children on his own. Ballard too finally pushed it back to a six o’clock start. ‘Was that hard?’ the interviewer asked him. ‘Hard?’ Ballard said. ‘It was like Stalingrad.’)

I look up from my book as, through the open windows,
I hear the squawk of brakes, then the hiss of hydraulics and the flap-bang of the concertina doors opening, then the chatter of children. I get up from my desk, wincing, using my hands to push myself up, and head through the cool, airy house to greet my son.