The Swan Song of Doctor Malloy (31 page)

The crescent moon shape in the wall is comforting. It is smooth to the touch and welcomes the shape and contour of her finger. It holds it in place.

‘In Norse mythology, there are two swans that drink from the sacred Well of Urd in the realm of Asgard, home of the gods. According to the Prose Edda, the water of this well is so pure and holy that all things that touch it turn white, including the two swans and all others descended from them. In the Finnish epic Kalevala, a swan lives in the Tuoni River located in Tuonela, the underworld realm of the dead. According to the story, whoever killed a swan would perish as well.'

‘You never know how anything will be, until it happens to you,' thinks Caitlin, wandering through the lines and gullies of the rough plaster of the wall, her little finger nestled in her crescent moon, no interest in the pizza getting cold on the table. ‘You think you know how it will be, you imagine a response. Love, death, birth. War. Houses. And here. Chained to a bedstead. Another fragment. A deep depression sinking into this mattress, too tired of it all to change the radio station. Not anxious. Not wondering if they'll find me. Beginning to give in.'

Lottie and Trixie sit under the huge copper-beech tree overlooking the Ponds. On the boating lake below two small boys are pushing a toy yacht along the water's edge with a long willow branch. One almost topples in as the boat mutinies and sets sail for deeper seas. The boys scream out their anguish and a young man runs from a nearby bench to attempt a rescue.

‘I knew that was going to happen,' says Lottie, shielding her eyes from the sun.

‘So did I,' says her friend, as if they are two goddesses sitting in the clouds, watching the mortals playing out their merry dance beneath them.

Down the hill and to their right, through the lush foliage, they can just make out the blue diving board at the end of the jetty at the Men's Pond.

‘I remember when my dad first brought me here,' says Lottie. ‘My pet hamster had just died and we buried him by the roots of this tree.'

She points to a fork at the base of the thick tree trunk.

‘Just there I think. I felt so guilty. As if it was me that killed it. Because maybe I never loved it enough. That's how it felt, like it was all my fault.'

Trixie is setting the picnic things on a tartan rug. There is cheese and bread, fruit and water. She thinks for a minute, before passing Lottie a slice of cheese and a hunk of bread.

‘The way I see it,' she says, biting into a crisp green apple, ‘we can take life too seriously, if we're not careful. So that it becomes negative, stifling. Does nobody any good.'

A couple of cocker spaniels scurry by, circle the picnic blanket, and then head off down the hill at a gallop.

‘I know what you mean,' says Lottie. ‘It can turn on you and you freeze. Like it's all so much that you can't do anything.'

‘Or be good for anyone else.'

Lottie looks down at the two boys standing at the edge of the water, the yacht bobbing about merrily in the middle of the pond. Beside them the taller figure of their father looks helplessly on.

‘Let's not get like that, Trixie, you and me. Let's not get lost.'

‘No, not you and me, Lottie. We won't do it like that.'

Then they fall silent and set about buttering bread and cutting peaches into quarters. At the base of the copper-beech tree the roots twitch and spread their tendrils, seeking out water and nourishment from the dry red soil.

Caitlin stirs on her bed, roused from a shallow sleep. ‘What are these muffled words?' she thinks. Then she remembers the radio.

‘…
real name was Gregory Efimovich, the son of a carter. He was born in the Western Siberian hamlet of Pokrovskoe in 1872. Very much an ordinary child, but an extraordinary adult. As a young man he gained renown for his excesses and lecherous ways in the local inn. The nickname, to stick with him down the decades, meant “dissolute”….'

There is a crackling sound. The voices are distorted and the reception fades, as it has been doing from time to time. Some45thing to do with the weather, the muggy evenings, positive ions, the storm brewing from the west.

‘Adolf … strangler … ancient times … Ghengis Khan … Stalin and some may … suggest … Margaret Thatcher … ignominious company. But that might … loved by their mothers …'

The door opens and closes. Caitlin senses a presence. Eyebrows or no eyebrows?

‘…
Rasputin's first act of prophecy … only twelve, on his sick bed … fever after trying to save his own brother from drowning … astounded villagers … rightly accused Petr Androvich of stealing … horse of a poor carter …'

‘Do you want me to tune that thing for you?' says a voice.

This is a new voice. A man. Standing in the half-light, by the wall. ‘Who is this?' wonders Caitlin, ‘what does he want of me, asking his questions?'

‘Do you want me to tune the radio for you?' says the man again.

She deliberately doesn't move. He will see nothing but a bundle of blankets and the shape of a body. Legs. The rise and fall of hips. A shoulder, turned to the room. A wild shock of hair, unkempt, dull.

‘…
Khlysty … two-hundred-years old sect … believed those possessed by God were beyond the laws of both Church and State … reached God at the point of sexual orgasm.'

Silence, except the crackle from the radio.

‘I remember seeing a Samuel Beckett play once at the Abbey in Dublin,' says the man. ‘When I had time for such things. Before all this. The play opens. The narrator describes the room. From above. A pallet, he says it was called. That thing you're lying on. And that's all I remember of the description. There was a man waiting, listening to a radio. Pressed close to his ear. He held it the way a small child caresses a stuffed toy. He's listening out. Never says a word. Waiting for someone. Expectant. If he fancies he hears something he moves the radio from his ear. And he listens carefully for any new sound. Listening for the rumble of a wave perhaps, though he's miles from the sea.'

Caitlin opens her eyes. Wide. As if from a deep sleep. She recognizes this voice. Something about the ‘rumble of a wave' jolts her memory. She stares straight ahead.

There is the sound of footsteps on the floor. The man moves to the table. The scrape of the single chair. The sound of him sitting. He tunes the radio. She hears him listening.

‘Rasputin's wife bore him four children, one died in infancy. In those days he supported his family through farming. But all this changed when he received a vision from the Virgin Mary and a legion of angels. This experience convinced Rasputin that God had big plans for him. He began preaching and healing in his village. But Father Petr, the local orthodox priest, branded him the anti-Christ. Bored by the small-mindedness of village life, Rasputin spread his wings and travelled. He put into practice his belief in redemption through sin. He drank and fornicated his way across the country. In one infamous incident in Kazan, he fell out of a drinking hole, whipping a prostitute the length of the high street. None of this hindered his progress. Indeed, once ensconced in the protection of the Romanovs, he would seduce reluctant bedfellows with the admonition that sin must be accomplished, temptation yielded to, in order for us to repent. No one could ever accuse Rasputin of not practising what he preached, as his rape of a nun shortly after arriving in Saint Petersburg testifies.'

‘It's Gerard!' thinks Caitlin, without moving a muscle, without turning from where she lies. ‘The man who came to me in Brighton, with his talk of conspiracy and tidal waves.'

On the wall in front of her eyes she sees the rise and fall of the sea. A bank of black water the size of a house collecting on the horizon, drawing breath, then rumbling across the seas, blotting out the light. She strokes the side of her face, away from where she senses the man sits. If she speaks she fancies her face will crack, opening wounds never to heal.

‘…
of paedophilia. But the Tsar and Tsarina would hear nothing of it. This man might be called the Holy Devil, eat fish soup with his hands, never change his clothes nor wash his body, boast of his sexual exploits, but to the Romanovs he was a saviour, a gift from God. Where medicine had failed, Rasputin was able to halt the flow of blood from the body of their haemophiliac son Alexis.'

‘No one is only good, or only bad,' says Gerard. ‘Take this man on the radio. This monk. Do you know he was a pacifist who tried to dissuade the Tsar from entering Russia into the Great War? He was a peasant who knew peasants were sent to the front to die. That's why he wanted to keep Russia out of the war. To save the lives of innocent, guileless peasants. And Hitler, he risked his life in that same war to save a friend from being blown apart by a grenade.'

Gerard turns the volume down on the radio.

‘What is the saying about there being a bit of good in the worst of us and a bit of bad in the best of us? Think of the
Titanic.'

Caitlin stays still, giving nothing away. She sniffs. Gerard obviously takes this as a sign of interest. An acknowledgement of his presence, a primeval language.

‘Well, plenty of those lifeboats were empty enough,' he continues. ‘Some not even half full. They all saw the bodies in the water. Freezing, minutes away from death. Hands aloft, hoping against hope. Only one or two went back to save a few souls. Risking capsizing, maybe, but something told those people they had to do good. Could not live out their lives with the alternative.'

Caitlin carefully places her finger in the crescent cavity in the wall. She wants to scream out. She wants him to stop all this talking. She wants this man to tell her what he is here for. But she says nothing.

‘You must understand what I'm saying,' continues Gerard. ‘We all do things we are unhappy with. We all do things we would rather hide away. Keep locked in the past. Machiavelli got the balance right. When the ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de Medici his name was, asked him to outline the perfect structure for a stable State, Niccolo Machiavelli realized ruthlessness was necessary for the greater good. Kill your enemies to ensure lasting peace. A man advocating peace. And look at the press he got. But then we know all about that, Caitlin, don't we?'

Gerard runs his fingers through his thick black hair, takes a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and polishes his glasses.

‘That's really what I'm here to talk to you about,' says Gerard, still shining the lens of his spectacles. ‘Brighton, that is.'

Still she says nothing.

‘I think I'll turn on the light. Illuminate the matter.'

She hears his footsteps moving away.

‘Don't, please don't,' the sound of a woman's voice, outside her head, urgent. It shocks her. The sound of it. ‘I don't want the light on. Not now.'

She feels her face, runs the tips of her fingers across the patchwork of shiny, scaled, scabbed, raw skin of her face.

‘Please, I don't want to have the light on.'

She hears him standing, and then moving to sit down by the table.

‘Okay, if you say so,' he says, clearly glad to hear her speak. ‘How are you?'

A tear wells in her throat, but she swallows hard.

‘What do you think? How do you think I am? In this place.'

‘I have some things for you. Some cream, for your skin.'

She says nothing. Caitlin has no intention of thanking this man. Not any of them.

‘Nothing more's going to happen to you,' says Gerard. ‘I've come to let you know you'll be free soon. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has got what they wanted out of this. Even those two young Kerry boys have been released. There was not a scrap of evidence to pin on them.'

‘And Sammy, what about Sammy?' asks Caitlin, a tear rolling down the side of her face at the mention of his name.

‘I don't know anything about him,' replies Gerard, placing something on the table, his footsteps moving towards the door. ‘That was never part of my job. If I knew I would tell you. But I don't.'

Caitlin shifts her position slightly. Her hip is sore from the pressure. She thinks of Sammy. That last night in the bar with Liam and Michael. The look of anguish on his face as the men placed the hood over her head. And of Anthony, her brother. She knows he is being blackmailed in some way to save her. Otherwise why would she have been made to record all those messages to him?

The wall in front of her face is dark. She presses close against it, licks the crevice with the tip of her tongue. The bitter taste. The consistency is of porcelain, cold and smooth. A scar in the surface of the wall. Its skin penetrated, but now healed, sealed over. Clean.

‘Where is the cream?' she asks of the darkness.

‘It's on the table. In the bag,' replies Gerard.

‘Go away. Leave me alone.'

‘I've said all I need to say. You'll be away from here soon enough.'

She hears the turn of the lock, the opening of the door. A shaft of light from the corridor enters the room. She catches the fragment of a conversation. Gerard and another man. The door closes and is locked. She strains to hear the sound of receding footsteps.

She lies still for a while longer. She is past wondering who is dealing with who. Why Gerard should turn up here. Why she was accused of conspiracy with a man conspiring with everyone. None of this seems to matter to her. The thoughts and questions pass through her mind like sycamore seeds on the wind. Caitlin hauls herself up from the bed, places her bare, swollen feet awkwardly on the floor. She totters towards the table, her arms outstretched as if sleepwalking. A plastic bag sits next to the radio where Gerard has left it. She tips its contents onto the table. Some clementines, fennel toothpaste, a new toothbrush, conditioning shampoo, bath soap, chocolate. And a tube of cream, the same steroids she kept in her wash bag for twenty years, for emergencies.