Nutshell (13 page)

“Any violence?”

“No.”

“Threats?”

“No.”

“None from you.”

“No.”

“What about his depression? What can you tell me?”

It's kindly said and must be a trap. But Trudy doesn't pause. Too distraught to coin new lies, too persuaded of her truth, she falls back on all she said before, in the same unlikely language. Constant mental pain…lashed out at those he loved…wrenched the poems from his soul. A vivid image comes to me of a parade of exhausted soldiers with ruined plumage. A sepia memory of a podcast, the Napoleonic Wars in many episodes. Back when my mother and I were at ease. Oh, that Boney had stayed within his borders, I remember thinking, and gone on writing good laws for France.

Claude joins in. “His own worst enemy.”

The altered acoustic tells me that the chief inspector has turned to look directly at him. “Any other enemies, apart from himself?”

The tone is unassuming. At best, the form of the question's lighthearted, at worst, fertile with sinister intent.

“I wouldn't know. We were never close.”

“Tell me,” she says, her voice now warmer. “About your childhood together. That is, if you want to.”

He does. “I was younger by three years. He was good at everything. Sports, studying, girls. He thought I was an insignificant scab. When I grew up I did the only thing he couldn't. Make money.”

“Property.”

“That sort of thing.”

The chief inspector turns back to Trudy. “Is this house for sale?”

“Certainly not.”

“I'd heard it was.”

Trudy doesn't respond. Her first good move in several minutes.

I'm wondering if the chief inspector is in uniform. She must be. Her peaked hat will be by her elbow on the table, like a giant beak. I see her as free of mammalian sympathies, narrow-faced, thin-lipped, tight-buttoned. Surely her head nods pigeon-like when she walks. The sergeant thinks she's a stickler. Bound for promotion out of his league. She'll fly. Either she's decided for John Cairncross's suicide or she has reason to believe that a late third-term gravid is good cover for a crime. Everything the chief inspector says, the least remark, is open to interpretation. The only power we have is to project. She may, like Claude, be clever or stupid or both at once. We just don't know. Our ignorance is her perfect hand. My guess is that she suspects little, knows nothing. That her superiors are watching. That she must be delicate because this conversation is irregular and could compromise due process. That she'll choose what's appropriate over what's true. That her career is her egg and she'll sit on it, warm it, and wait.

But I've been wrong before.

What next? Clare Allison wishes to look around. A bad idea. But to withdraw permission now, when, for all we know, things are going badly, will make them worse. The sergeant goes first up the wooden stairs, followed by Claude, the chief inspector, then my mother and me. On the ground floor the chief inspector says that if we wouldn't mind, she'd like to go to the top and “work down.” Trudy doesn't care to climb more stairs. The others continue up while we go into the sitting room to sit and think.

I dispatch my light-footed thoughts ahead of them, first to the library. Plaster dust, a smell of death, but relative order. The floor above, bedroom and bathroom, chaos of an intimate kind, the bed itself a tangle of lust and broken sleep, the floor strewn or piled with Trudy's discarded clothes, the bathroom likewise with lidless pots, unguents, and dirty underwear. I wonder what disorder tells suspicious eyes. It can't be morally neutral. A contempt for things, for order, cleanliness, must lie on a spectrum with scorn for laws, values, for life itself. What is a criminal but a disordered spirit? However, excessive order in a bedroom might be suspicious too. The chief inspector, bright-eyed as a robin, will take it in at a glance and come away. But below the level of conscious thought, disgust might bend her judgement.

There are rooms above the second floor but I've never been so far. I bring my thoughts to ground and, like a dutiful child, attend to my mother's state. Her heart rate has settled. She seems almost calm. Perhaps fatalistic. Her engorged bladder presses against my head. But she can't be troubled to move. She's making her calculations, thinking perhaps of their plan. But she should ask herself where her interests lie. Disassociate from Claude. Land him in it somehow. No point in both doing time. Then she and I could languish here. She won't want to give me away when she's alone in a big house. In which case I promise to forgive her. Or deal with her later.

But there's no time for schemes. I hear them coming back down. They pass by the open sitting-room door on their way to the front entrance. The chief inspector surely can't leave without a respectful goodbye to the bereaved wife. In fact Claude has opened the front door and is showing Allison where his brother was parked, how the car failed to start at first, how, despite the row, they had waved when the engine turned and the car reversed into the road. A lesson in truth-telling.

Then Claude and the police are before us.

“Trudy—may I call you Trudy? Such a terrible time and you've been so helpful. So hospitable. I can't—” The chief inspector breaks off, her attention distracted. “Were these your husband's?”

She's looking at the cardboard boxes my father carried in and left under the bay window. My mother gets to her feet. If there's to be trouble she'd better use her height. And width.

“He was moving back in. Leaving Shoreditch.”

“May I see?”

“Just books. But go ahead.”

There's a gasp from the sergeant as he goes down on his knees to open the boxes. I'd say the chief inspector is squatting on her haunches, not a robin now, but a giant duck. It's wrong of me to dislike her. She's the rule of law and I count myself already in the court of Hobbes. The state must have its monopoly of violence. But the chief inspector's manner irritates me, the way she riffles through my father's possessions, his favourite books, while seeming to talk to herself, knowing we've no choice but to listen.

“Beats me. Very, very sad…right on the slip road…”

Of course, this is a performance, a prelude. And sure enough. She stands. I think she's looking at Trudy. Perhaps at me.

“But the real mystery is this. Not a single print on that glycol bottle. Nothing on the cup. Just heard from forensics. Not a trace. So strange.”

“Ah!” says Claude, but Trudy cuts across him. I should warn her. She mustn't be too eager. Her explanation comes out too fast. “Gloves. Skin complaint. He was so ashamed of his hands.”

“Ah, the gloves!” the chief inspector exclaims. “You're right. Clean forgot!” She's unfolding a sheet of paper. “These?”

My mother steps forward to look. It must be a printout of a photograph. “Yes.”

“Didn't have another pair?”

“Not like these. I used to tell him he didn't need them. No one really minded.”

“Wore them all the time?”

“No. But a lot, especially when he was feeling down.”

The chief inspector is leaving and that's a relief. We're all following her out into the hall.

“Here's a funny thing. Forensics again. Phoned through this morning and it went right out of my mind. Should have told you. So much else going on. Cuts to front-line services. Local crime wave. Anyway. Forefinger and thumb of the right glove. You'd never guess. A nest of tiny spiders. Scores of them. And Trudy, you'll be pleased to know this—babies all doing well. Crawling already!”

The front door is opened, probably by the sergeant. The chief inspector steps outside. As she walks away her voice recedes and merges with the sound of passing traffic. “Can't for the life of me remember the Latin name. Long time since a hand was in that glove.”

The sergeant lays a hand on my mother's arm and speaks at last, saying softly in parting, “Back tomorrow morning. Clear up a last few things.”

At last the moment is on us. There are decisions to take, urgent, irreversible, self-damning. But first, Trudy needs two minutes of solitude. We hurry down to the basement, to the facility the humorous Scots call the cludgie. There, as the pressure on my skull is relieved and my mother squats some seconds longer than is necessary, sighing to herself, my thoughts clarify. Or take a new direction. I thought the murderers should escape, for the sake of my liberty. This may be too narrow a view, too self-interested. There are other considerations. Hatred of my uncle may exceed love for my mother. Punishing him may be nobler than saving her. But it might be possible to achieve both.

These concerns remain with me as we return to the kitchen. It appears that after the police left, Claude discovered that he needed a Scotch. Hearing it poured from the bottle as we enter, a seductive sound, Trudy finds she needs one too. A big one. With tap water, half and half. Silently, my uncle complies. Silently, they stand facing each other by the sink. Not the moment for toasts. They're contemplating each other's errors, or even their own. Or deciding what to do. This is the emergency they dreaded and planned for. They knock back their measures and without speaking settle for another. Our lives are about to change. Chief Inspector Allison looms above us, a capricious, smiling god. We won't know, until it's too late, why she didn't make the arrests just then, why she's left us alone. Rolling up the case, waiting for the DNA on the hat, moving on? Mother and uncle must consider that any choice they make now could be just the one she has in mind for them, and she's waiting. Just as possible, this, their mysterious plan, won't have occurred to her and they could be one step ahead. One good reason to act boldly. Instead, for now, they prefer a drink. Perhaps whatever they do obliges Clare Allison, including an interlude with a single malt. But no, their only chance is to make the radical choice—and now.

Trudy raises an arm to forestall a third. Claude is more steadfast. He's in strict pursuit of mental clarity. We listen to him pour—he's having it neat, and long—then we listen to him swallow hard, that familiar sound. They might be wondering how they can avoid a row just when they need a common purpose. From far away comes the sound of a siren, an ambulance, merely, but it speaks to their fears. The latticework of the state lies invisibly across the city. Hard to escape it. It's a prompt, for at last there's speech, a useful statement of the obvious.

“This is bad.” My mother's voice is croaky and low.

“Where are the passports?”

“I've got them. And the cash?”

“In my case.”

But they don't move and the asymmetry of the exchange—Trudy's evasive reply—doesn't provoke my uncle. He's well into his third as Trudy's first reaches me. Hardly sensual, but it speaks or sinks to the occasion, to a sense of an ending with no beginning in sight. I conjure an old military road through a cold glen, a whiff of wet stone and peat, the sound of steel and patient trudging on loose rock, and the weight of bitter injustice. So far from the south-facing slopes, the dusty bloom on swelling purple clusters framing receding hills and their overlapping shades of ever paler indigo. I'd rather be there. But I'm conceding—the Scotch, my first, sets something free. A harsh liberation—the open gate leads to struggle and fear of what the mind might devise. It's happening now to me. I'm asked, I'm asking myself, what it is that I most want now. Anything I want. Realism not a limiting factor. Cut the ropes, set the mind free. I can answer without thinking—I'm going through the open gate.

Footsteps on the stairs. Trudy and Claude look up, startled. Has the inspector found a way into the house? Has a burglar chosen the worst of all nights? This is a slow, heavy descent. They see black leather shoes, then a belted waist, a shirt stained with vomit, then a terrible expression, both blank and purposeful. My father wears the clothes he died in. His face is bloodless, the already rotting lips are greenish-black, the eyes tiny and penetrating. Now he stands at the foot of the stairs, taller than we remember him. He's come from the mortuary to find us and knows exactly what he wants. I'm shaking because my mother is. There's no shimmer, nothing ghostly. It's not an hallucination. This is my corporeal father, John Cairncross, exactly as he is. My mother's moan of fear acts as an enticement, for he's walking towards us.

“John,” Claude says warily, on a rising note, as if he could wake this figure into proper non-existence. “John, it's us.”

This seems well understood. He stands close before us, exuding a sweet miasma of glycol and maggot-friendly flesh. It's my mother he stares at with small, hard, black eyes made of imperishable stone. His disgusting lips move but he makes no sound. The tongue is blacker than the lips. Fixing his gaze on her all the while, he stretches out an arm. His fleshless hand fastens on my uncle's throat. My mother can't even scream. Still, the illiquid eyes remain on her. This is for her, his gift. The remorseless, one-handed grip tightens. Claude drops to his knees, his eyes are bulging, his hands beat and pull uselessly at his brother's arm. Only a distant squeaking, the piteous sound of a mouse, tells us that he's still alive. Then he isn't. My father, who hasn't glanced at him once, lets him drop, and now draws his wife to him, enfolds her in arms that are thin and strong, like steel rods. He pulls her face towards his and kisses her long and hard with icy, putrefying lips. Terror and disgust and shame overwhelm her. The moment will torment her until she dies. Indifferently, he releases her, and walks back the way he came. Even as he climbs the stairs he begins to fade.

Well, I was asked. I asked myself. And that's what I wanted. A childish Halloween fantasy. How else to commission a spirit revenge in a secular age? The Gothic has been reasonably banished, the witches have fled the heath, and materialism, so troubling to the soul, is all I have left. A voice on the radio once told me that when we fully understand what matter is we'll feel better. I doubt that. I'll never get what I want.

I emerge from reveries to find us in the bedroom. I've no memory of the ascent. The hollow sound of the wardrobe door, a clank of coat hangers, a suitcase lifted onto the bed, and another, then a brisk snap of locks opening. They should have packed in readiness. The inspector might even come tonight. Are they calling this a plan? I hear curses and muttering.

“Where is it? I had it here. In my hand!”

They criss-cross the bedroom, open drawers, move in and out of the bathroom. Trudy drops a glass that shatters on the floor. She hardly cares. For some reason, the radio is on. Claude sits with his laptop and mumbles, “Train's at nine. Taxi's on its way.”

I'd prefer Paris to Brussels. Better onward connections. Trudy, still in the bathroom, mutters to herself, “Dollars…euros.”

Everything they say, even the sounds they make, have an air of valediction, like a sadly resolving chord, a sung farewell. This is the end; we aren't coming back. The house, my grandfather's house I should have grown up in, is about to fade. I won't remember it. I'd like to summon a list of countries without extradition treaties. Most are uncomfortable, unruly, hot. I've heard that Beijing is a pleasant spot for runaways. A thriving village of English-speaking villains buried deep in the populated vastness of a world city. A fine place to end up.

“Sleeping pills, painkillers,” Claude calls out.

His voice, its tone, prompts me. Time to decide. He's closing up the cases, fastening leather straps. So quick. They must have been half-packed already. These are old-fashioned two-wheeled items, not four. Claude lifts them to the floor.

Trudy says, “Which?”

I think she's holding up two scarves. Claude grunts his choice. This is only a pretence of normality. When they board the train, when they cross the border, their guilt will declare itself. They only have an hour and they should hurry. Trudy says there's a coat she wants and can't find. Claude insists she won't need it.

“It's lightweight,” she says. “The white one.”

“You'll stand out in a crowd. On CCTV.”

But she finds it anyway, just as Big Ben strikes eight and the news comes on. They don't pause to listen. There are still last things to gather up. In Nigeria, children burned alive in front of their parents by keepers of the flame. In North Korea, a rocket is launched. Worldwide, rising sea levels run ahead of predictions. But none of these is first. That's reserved for a new catastrophe. A combination, poverty and war, with climate change held in reserve, driving millions from their homes, an ancient epic in new form, vast movements of people, like engorged rivers in spring, Danubes, Rhines and Rhones of angry or desolate or hopeful people, crammed at borders against the razor-wire gates, drowning in thousands to share in the fortunes of the West. If, as the new cliché goes, this is biblical, the seas are not parting for them, not the Aegean, not the English Channel. Old Europa tosses in her dreams, she pitches between pity and fear, between helping and repelling. Emotional and kind this week, scaly-hearted and so reasonable the next, she wants to help but she doesn't want to share or lose what she has.

And always, there are problems closer at hand. As radios and TVs everywhere drone on, people continue about their business. A couple has finished packing for a journey. The cases are closed, but there's a picture of her mother that the young woman wants to bring. The heavy carved frame is too large to pack. Without the right tool the photograph can't be removed, and the tool, a special kind of key, is in the basement, deep in a drawer. A taxi waits outside. The train leaves in fifty-five minutes, the station is a good way off, there may be queues for security and passport control. The man carries a suitcase out to the landing and returns, a little out of breath. He should have made use of the wheels.

“We absolutely have to go.”

“I've got to have this picture.”

“Carry it under your arm.”

But she has a handbag, her white coat, a suitcase to tow, and me to carry.

With a moan, Claude lifts the second suitcase to carry it out. By this unneeded effort he's making a point about urgency.

“It won't take you a minute. It's in a front corner of the left-hand drawer.”

He returns. “Trudy. We're leaving. Now.”

The exchange has grown from terse to bitter.

“You carry it for me.”

“Out of the question.”

“Claude. It's my mother.”

“I don't care. We're leaving.”

But they're not. After all my turns and revisions, misinterpretations, lapses of insight, attempts at self-annihilation, and sorrow in passivity, I've come to a decision. Enough. My amniotic sac is the translucent silk purse, fine and strong, that contains me. It also holds the fluid that protects me from the world and its bad dreams. No longer. Time to join in. To end the endings. Time to begin. It's not easy to free my right arm lodged tight against my chest, or gain movement in my wrist. But now it's done. A forefinger is my own special tool to remove
my
mother from the frame. Two weeks early and fingernails so long. I make my first attempt at an incision. My nails are soft and, however fine, the fabric is tough. Evolution knows its business. I feel for the indent my finger made. There's a crease, well defined, and that's where I try again, and again, until the fifth attempt, when I feel the faintest rendering, and on the sixth, the tiniest rupture. Into this tear I succeed in working the tip of my nail, my finger, then two fingers, three, four, and at last my balled fist punches through and there follows behind it a great outpouring, the cataract at the beginning of life. My watery protection has vanished.

Now I'll never know how the business of the photograph or the nine o'clock train would have been resolved. Claude is outside the room at the head of the stairs. He'll have a case in each hand, ready to descend.

My mother calls out with what sounds like a disappointed moan. “Oh Claude.”

“What now?”

“My waters. Breaking!”

“We'll deal with it later. On the train.”

He must believe it's a ploy, a continuation of the argument, a repellent form of womanly trouble that he's too frantic to consider.

I'm shrugging off the caul, my first experience of undressing. I'm clumsy. Three dimensions seem three too many. I foresee the material world will be a challenge. My discarded shroud remains twisted round my knees. No matter. I've new business below my head. I don't know how I know what to do. It's a mystery. There's some knowledge we simply arrive with. In my case, there's this, and a smattering of poetic scansion. No blank slate after all. I bring that same hand to my cheek, and slide farther along the muscular wall of the uterus to reach down and find the cervix. It's a tight squeeze against the back of my head. It's there, at the opening to the world, that I delicately palpate with puny fingers and immediately, as if some spell has been uttered, the great power of my mother is provoked, the walls around me ripple then tremble and close in on me. It's an earthquake, it's a giant stirring in her cave. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, I'm horrified then crushed by the strength that's unleashed. I should have waited my turn. Only a fool would mess with such force. From far away I hear my mother call out. It could be a shout for help or a scream of triumph or pain. And then I feel it on the top of my head, my crown—one centimetre dilated! No turning back.

Trudy has crawled onto the bed. Claude is somewhere near the door. She's panting, excited, and very afraid.

“It's started. It's so quick! Get an ambulance.”

He says nothing for a moment, then he asks simply, “Where's my passport?”

The failure is mine. I underestimated him. The point in arriving early was to ruin Claude. I knew he was trouble. But I thought he loved my mother and would stay with her. I'm beginning to understand her fortitude. Over the bright jingling sound of coins against mascara case as he rummages through her handbag, she says, “I hid it. Downstairs. Just in case this happened.”