Nutshell (9 page)

And yet. And yet. And yet she violently wants him. Whenever he calls her his mouse, a curlicue of thrill, a cold contraction lodges in her perineum, an icy hook that tugs her downwards onto a narrow ledge and reminds her of the chasms she's swooned into before, the Walls of Death she's survived too often. His mouse! What humiliation. In the palm of his hand. Pet. Powerless. Fearful. Contemptible. Disposable. Oh to be his mouse! When she knows it's madness. So hard to resist. Can she fight it?

Is she a woman or a mouse?

A silence I can't read follows Claude's mockery. He may regret his sarcasm or resent being diverted from his breezy upland of elation. She may be resentful too, or wanting to resume as his mouse. I'm weighing these possibilities as he moves away from her. He sits on the end of the disordered bed, tapping on his phone. She remains at the window, her back to the room, facing her portion of London, its diminishing evening traffic, scattered birdsong, lozenges of summer cloud and chaos of roofs.

When at last she speaks her tone is sulky and flat. “I'm not selling this house just so you can get rich.”

His reply is immediate. It's the same needling voice of derision. “No, no. We'll be rich together. Or, if you like, poor in separate prisons.”

It's nicely put as a threat. Can she believe him, that he'd take them both down? Negative altruism. Cutting off your nose to spite another's face. What should be her response? I have time to think because she's yet to reply. A little shocked at this implied blackmail, I should say. Logically, she should suggest the same. In theory, they have equal power over each other. Leave this house. Never come back.
Or I'll bring the police down on us both
. But even I know that love doesn't steer by logic, nor is power distributed evenly. Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well as longings. They're not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they'll tell outrageous lies or make irrational sacrifice. But they rarely ask themselves what they need or want. Memories are poor for past failures. Childhoods shine through adult skin, helpfully or not. So do the laws of inheritance that bind a personality. The lovers don't know there's no free will. I haven't heard enough radio drama to know more than that, though pop songs have taught me that they don't feel in December what they felt in May, and that to have a womb may be incomprehensible to those who don't and that the reverse is also true.

Trudy turns to face the room. Her small, faraway voice chills me. “I'm frightened.”

She already sees how their plans have gone wrong, despite signs of early success. She's shivering. Asserting her innocence isn't viable after all. The prospect of a fight with Claude has shown her how lonely her independence could be. His taste for sarcasm is new to her, it scares her, disorients her. And she wants him, even though his voice, his touch and his kisses are corrupted by what they've done. My father's death won't be confined, it's cut loose from its mortuary slab or stainless-steel drawer and drifted in the evening air, across the North Circular, over those same north London roofs. It's in the room now, in her hair, on her hands, and on Claude's face—an illuminated mask that gapes without expression at the phone in his hand.

“Listen to this,” he says in a Sunday-breakfast sort of way. “From a local paper. Tomorrow's. Body of a man seen by hard shoulder of M1 between junctions et cetera and et cetera. Twelve hundred calls from passing motorists to emergency services et cetera. Man pronounced dead on arrival at hospital, confirms police spokeswoman et cetera. Not yet named…And here's the thing. ‘Police are not treating the death as a criminal matter at this stage.' ”

“At this stage,” she murmurs. Then her voice picks up. “But you don't understand what I'm trying to—”

“Which is?”

“He's dead.
Dead
! It's so…And…” Now she's starting to cry. “And it hurts.”

Claude is merely reasonable. “What I understand is you wanted him dead and now—”

“Oh John!” she cries.

“So we'll stick our courage to the screwing whatever. And get on with—”

“We've…done a…terrible thing,” she says, oblivious to the break she's making with innocence.

“Ordinary people wouldn't have the guts to do what we've done. So, here's another one.
Luton Herald and Post.
‘Yesterday morning—' ”

“Don't! Please don't.”

“All right, all right. Same stuff anyway.”

Now she's indignant. “They write ‘dead man' and it's nothing to them. Just words. Typing. They've no idea what it means.”

“But they're right. I happen to know this. Around the world a hundred and five people die every minute. Not far off two a second. Just to give you some perspective.”

Two seconds' pause as she takes this in. Then she begins to laugh, an unwanted, mirthless laugh that turns to sobbing, through which she manages to say at last, “I hate you.”

He's come close, his hand is on her arm, he murmurs into her ear. “Hate? Don't get me excited all over again.”

But she has. Through his kisses and her tears she says, “Please. No. Claude.”

She doesn't turn or push him away. His fingers are below my head, moving slowly.

“Oh no,” she whispers, moving closer to him. “Oh no.”

Grief and sex? I can only theorise. Defences weak, soft tissues gone softer, emotional resilience yielding to childish trust in salty abandonment. I hope never to find out.

He has pulled her towards the bed, removed her sandals, her cotton summer dress and called her his mouse again, though only once. He pushes her onto her back. Consent has rough edges. Does a grieving woman grant it when she raises her buttocks so her panties are pulled free? I'd say no. She has rolled onto her side—the only initiative she takes. Meanwhile, I'm working on a plan, a gesture of last resort. My last shot.

He's kneeling by her, probably naked. At such a time, what could be worse? He swiftly presents the answer: the high medical risk, at this stage of pregnancy, of the missionary position. With a muttered command—how he charms—he turns her on her back, parts her legs with an indifferent backhand swipe, and gets ready, so the mattress tells me, to lower his bulk onto mine.

My plan? Claude is tunnelling towards me and I must be quick. We're swaying, creaking, under great pressure. A high-pitched electronic sound wails in my ears, my eyes bulge and smart. I need the use of my arms, my hands, but there's so little room. I'll say it fast: I'm going to kill myself. An infant death, a homicide in effect, due to my uncle's reckless assault on a gravid woman well advanced in her third trimester. His arrest, trial, sentence, imprisonment. My father's death half avenged. Half, because murderers don't hang in gentle Britain. I'll give Claude a proper lesson in the art of negative altruism. To take my life I'll need the cord, three turns around my neck of the mortal coil. I hear from far off my mother's sighs. The fiction of my father's suicide will be the inspiration for my own attempt. Life imitating art. To be stillborn—a tranquil term purged of tragedy—has a simple allure. Now here's the thudding against my skull. Claude is gaining speed, now at a gallop, hoarsely breathing. My world is shaking, but my noose is in place, both hands are gripping, I'm pulling down hard, back bent, with a bell-ringer's devotion. How easy. A slippery tightening against the common carotid, vital channel beloved of slit-throats. I can do it. Harder! A sensation of giddy toppling, of sound becoming taste, touch becoming sound. A rising blackness, blacker than I've ever seen, and my mother murmuring her farewells.

But of course, to kill the brain is to kill the will to kill the brain. As soon as I start to fade, my fists go limp and life returns. Immediately, I hear signs of robust life—intimate sounds, as through the walls of a cheap hotel. Then louder, louder. It's my mother. There she goes, launched on one of her perilous thrills.

But my own prison wall of death's too high. I've fallen back, into the exercise yard of dumb existence.

Finally, Claude withdraws his revolting weight—I salute his crude brevity—and my space is restored, though I've pins and needles in my legs. Now I'm recovering, while Trudy lies back, limp with exhaustion and all the usual regrets.

It's not the theme parks of Paradiso and Inferno that I dread most—the heavenly rides, the hellish crowds—and I could live with the insult of eternal oblivion. I don't even mind not knowing which it will be. What I fear is missing out. Healthy desire or mere greed, I want my life first, my due, my infinitesimal slice of endless time and one reliable chance of a consciousness. I'm owed a handful of decades to try my luck on a freewheeling planet. That's the ride for me—the Wall of Life. I want my
go
. I want to
become
. Put another way, there's a book I want to read, not yet published, not yet written, though a start's been made. I want to read to the end of
My History of the Twenty-First Century
. I want to be there, on the last page, in my early eighties, frail but sprightly, dancing a jig on the evening of December 31, 2099.

It might end before that date and so it's a thriller of sorts, violent, sensational, highly commercial. A compendium of dreams, with elements of horror. But it's bound to be a love story too, and a heroic tale of brilliant invention. For a taste, look at the prequel, the hundred years before. A grim read, at least until halfway, but compelling. A few redeeming chapters on, say, Einstein and Stravinsky. In the new book, one of many unresolved plot lines is this: will its nine billion heroes scrape through without a nuclear exchange? Think of it as a contact sport. Line up the teams. India versus Pakistan, Iran versus Saudi Arabia, Israel versus Iran, USA versus China, Russia versus USA and NATO, North Korea versus the rest. To raise the chances of a score, add more teams: the non-state players will arrive.

How determined are our heroes to overheat their hearth? A cosy 1.6 degrees, the projection or hope of a sceptical few, will open up the tundra to mountains of wheat, Baltic beachside tavernas, lurid butterflies in the Northwest Territories. At the darker end of pessimism, a wind-torn four degrees allows for flood-and-drought calamity and all of turmoil's dark political weather. More narrative tension in subplots of local interest: Will the Middle East remain in frenzy, will it empty into Europe and alter it for good? Might Islam dip a feverish extremity in the cooling pond of reformation? Might Israel concede an inch or two of desert to those it displaced? Europa's secular dreams of union may dissolve before the old hatreds, small-scale nationalism, financial disaster, discord. Or she might hold her course. I need to know. Will the USA decline quietly? Unlikely. Will China grow a conscience, will Russia? Will global finance and corporations? Then, bring on the seductive human constants: all of sex and art, wine and science, cathedrals, landscape, the higher pursuit of meaning. Finally, the private ocean of desires—mine, to be barefoot on a beach round an open fire, grilled fish, juice of lemons, music, the company of friends, someone, not Trudy, to love me. My birthright in a book.

So I'm ashamed of the attempt, relieved to have failed. Claude (now loudly humming in the echoing bathroom) must be reached by other means.

Barely fifteen minutes have passed since he undressed my mother. I sense we're entering a new phase of the evening. Over the sound of running taps he calls out that he's hungry. With the degrading episode behind her and her pulse settling, I believe my mother will be returning to her theme of innocence. To her, Claude's talk of dinner will seem misplaced. Even callous. She sits up, pulls on her dress, finds her knickers in the bedclothes, steps into her sandals and goes to her dressing-table mirror. She begins to braid the hair that, untended, hangs in blonde curls her husband once celebrated in a poem. This gives her time to recover and to think. She'll use the bathroom when Claude has left it. The idea of being near him repels her now.

Disgust restores to her a notion of purity and purpose. Hours ago she was in charge. She could be so again, as long as she resists another sickly, submissive swoon. She's fine for now, she's refreshed, sated, immune, but it waits for her, the little beastie could swell once more into a beast, distort her thoughts, drag her down—and she'll be Claude's. To take charge, however…I think of her musing as she tilts her lovely face before the mirror to twist another strand. To give orders as she did this morning in the kitchen, devise the next step, will be to own the offence. If only she could settle down to the blameless grief of the stricken widow.

For now, there are practical tasks. All tainted utensils, plastic cups, the blender itself to be disposed of far from home. The kitchen to be scoured of traces. Only the coffee cups to remain in place on the table, unwashed. These dull chores will keep the horror at a distance for an hour. Perhaps this is why she puts a reassuring hand on the knoll that contains me, near the small of my back. A gesture of loving hope for our future. How could she think of giving me away? She'll need me. I'll brighten the penumbra of innocence and pathos she'll want around her. Mother and child—a great religion has spun its best stories around this potent symbol. Sitting on her knee, pointing skywards, I'll render her immune to prosecution. On the other hand—how I hate that phrase—no preparations have been made for my arrival, no clothes, no furniture, no compulsive nest-making. I've never knowingly been in a shop with my mother. The loving future is a fantasy.

Claude emerges from the bathroom and goes towards the phone. Food is on his mind, an Indian takeaway, so he murmurs. She steps round him and sets about her own ablutions. When we emerge he's still on the phone. He's abandoned Indian for Danish—open sandwiches, pickled herring, baked meats. He's over-ordering, a natural impulse after a murder. By the time he's finished, Trudy is ready, braided, washed, clean underwear, new frock, shoes in place of sandals, a dab of scent. She's taking charge.

“There's an old canvas bag in the cupboard under the stairs.”

“I'm eating first. I'm starved.”

“Go now. They could be back at any time.”

“I'll do this my way.”

“You'll do as you're—”

Was she really going to say “told”? What a distance she's travelled, treating him like a child, when just now she was his pet. He might have ignored her. There might have been a row. But what he's doing now is picking up the phone. It's not the Danish people confirming his order, it's not even the same phone. My mother has gone to stand behind him to look. It's not the landline, but the video entryphone. They're staring at the screen, in wonder. The voice comes through, distorted, bereft of lower registers, a thin, penetrating plea.