Whatever You Love (24 page)

‘I grew up in village…’ he tells me, then pauses, as if trying to gather his strength. ‘My father is boss at the local place, you know, the cucumbers in vinegar, they put in jars. I have many brothers. My uncles, they are farmers. My mother clever woman, she teaches how to dance. Life very good for us, very good. Big house. Then, when war comes, many leave but we all move to city but we come back. There is no food in city. The soldiers, not rebels, how is it?’ He looks at me.

‘Militia?’ I suggest, coolly, ‘Militiamen?’

‘Yes, this is it, militia, they come and take brothers, and their children, the sons. They take all away. Two other brothers away fighting. They kill the men and boys with rifles but my mother, she is stabbed.’

He is expressionless as he tells me this, even makes a small stabbing gesture with his hand, as if he is telling an anecdote. I stay very still, opposite him, watching.

‘My wife and children leave before the war. I do not know of them, I think my wife has other husband. The only left from my brothers is nephew. He is baby. He is not killed. He is left in forest, next to the dead ones. I find him, in the night, and that is how I see brothers’ bodies. I go into the forest at night, even though I do not know if they have gone away yet. I went to find brothers and their sons. I look for many hours. Then I hear the baby crying and follow, the sound, the crying very weak. Baby is lying on the ground still wrapped in his cloths. It is youngest brother was baby’s father. He is lying on ground next to the baby. There is moon, by then, the sky, things in…’ he is searching for the word clouds. I do not help him. ‘They move, the things, so I see. My brother,’ he points at his face, ‘he has no eyes.’

At this point, he stops and looks at me. His gaze is large and watery but still expressionless. His voice has the same even tone throughout, even when he gets to the bit about the eyes. When he gestures with his fingers at his own eyes it is not for emphasis, simply to make sure I understand. How opaque we are made by our faces, I think. I look at his – heavy-set, pale and jowly, and realise that because it is almost motionless, because his lips hardly move as he speaks, many would assume that he is able to distance himself from the tale he is telling me. Before Betty was taken away from me, I might have assumed the same. Before my daughter was lost to me, I might have attributed his apparent stillness and control to a lack of feeling but now I know, to my cost, that appearing unfeeling is the price we sometimes pay for being able to speak at all. Mr A’s words are careful and in their plain, hesitant way, articulate, but behind the words, I hear all sorts of things. I have been given that insight.

‘I pick up baby and carry it back to village. The schoolmaster comes to my house when day comes and says they are still in the area and that if I stay, they come and shoot me and the baby. The women are all gone by then, no children, they all go on buses. There is no one to be for the baby except me. I go to the schoolmaster’s house and his wife gives me bottle with water, and, and, and… sugar, sugar in it, for baby, and tells me we go now, go, go. They are very scared. First I want to leave baby there but they say no and then as I am walking down road I think no, is better this way. I have baby and baby has me, uncle. Is good this way. It takes two days to get to town. There are other towns but I thought they might be there. At first the baby cries all the time, then he sleeps, then he sleeps too muchI think. I think the baby will die. There is a farmer, my uncle knew, on the town. I go to the house, the farmer is gone but the wife is there. She is twins and she feeds baby, you know, like a mother. I think this saves life, otherwise, no good. She is good woman, very scared but good, so, we go to city…’

He slows to a halt, mid-sentence, and although he has given no indication of it I know that, quite suddenly, he is exhausted by his story. Neither of us speaks for a long time, as if we have to let his story rest between us, pause for breath. A memory of a school history lesson comes to my mind: a male teacher – we called him DtheR, I don’t know why – was telling us about life in medieval England. He was talking about child mortality, about the Black Death, starvation, how any parent knew when they had a child that that child – or any other family member for that matter – could be snatched away at any moment. I remember I interrupted him and I remember what I said. I put my hand up and said, ‘But, Mr Rogers…’ That was his name, Rogers. ‘Do you really think people were more unhappy then than they are now?’ I meant it as a philosophical question but Mr Rogers exploded, ‘Well, Laura yes I do. Yes, I think if you’re starving and your third child has just died and another toe has just dropped off because of your leprosy, yup, I think you’d be pretty unhappy.’ It was a disproportionate response. I could tell by the way the rest of the class rolled their eyes that I had them on my side. ‘But,’ I trilled, all wide-eyed, Little Miss Intellectual, ‘Don’t you think that happiness is relative to expectation?’ I can still recall Mr Roger’s sigh, his look of despair. Oh Mr Rogers, if only you could see me now.

We sit there, Mr A and I, at my kitchen table. His shoulders are bowed, as if they sit heavily on his body. He makes a brief attempt to start again. ‘We come here, after the war, it finishes… there is a lot of… it was my brother-in-law, the work. The nephew, he was a boy by then. School. Work.’ He finishes.

There is another long silence between us and I realise that Mr A has come to an end – not that his story is complete, it will never be complete, but that he has simply come to the end of his ability to speak. I have read enough Upton Centre reports to know the rest myself. And so, the chain of responsibility for my daughter’s death that begins with Aleksander Ahmetaj – it goes back through the nephew, through the person who left a traffic cone on a pavement, through the unknown children at St Michael’s who bullied the nephew for having a strange name and a strange accent, then further still, way back, ending with a militiaman who spared a boy baby after he had carved out his father’s eyes. If I am looking for someone to blame, for where blame begins, should I find the militiaman who left a baby to cry in a forest? Why stop there? Who, or what, imbued that man with the small streak of mercy that stopped him killing a baby when he had already done so much worse?

For most of the time he has been speaking, Ahmetaj has been staring at the kitchen table or into his whisky glass, but now he lifts his head and looks at me. His eyes are hard eyes and the expression in them unfathomable but something in them gives me a glimpse of him as a younger man. I imagine him twenty years ago, before the belly grew on him, when his broad shoulders and large hands were proportionate with a young, strong frame. I imagine him in a vest, a farm worker or factory hand, confident, from a family that is well-respected in his village. He probably made a good marriage – I wonder what went wrong there. I would guess that his childhood and youth were probably, in many respects, a good deal happier than mine. I picture him in a suit, dancing on his wedding day, and all at once it comes to me, an obscene desire to fuck him. Something of the shock of this thought must show on my face for he is staring at me. I want to do the most inappropriate thing I can think of doing and I don’t even know why – I want to fuck this man, right here on my kitchen table, hard and hurting. I want to obliterate everything else that has happened to us and everything between us and everything else that has gone on elsewhere, that has nothing to do with us.

It is a ridiculous thought. It flares and dies in an instant. I stand up. I am standing in front of him. I look down at him. He looks up, his gaze large and confused. I turn and walk to the kitchen door, then look back. He rises awkwardly from his chair.

I lead the way upstairs, to the main bedroom, the one I have not slept in since Betty went away. I am heading for the marital bed, the bed I shared with David. I go into the room without turning on the light, sit down on the bed and remove my shoes, then my socks. He stands in the doorway, staring at my bare feet, as if trying to face the implications of them, the knowledge of what I intend. He looks at my face and I stare back aggressively. I feel as powerful as I felt when I dangled the boy over the cliff edge. He sits down on the bed next to me and bends to unlace his shoes but I turn and push him back, so he is lying on his back, then straddle him. As I pull his shirt up, out of his trousers, his large belly, white and hairy, moves, there is motion in it; I avert my gaze and my fingers move quickly, so I will not lose my nerve. I pull his leather belt undone, unbutton his trousers, unzip his flies. He is wearing cheap white underwear, soft underpants like the sort I buy my son. His dick is straining in them. I take a guess that he has not had sex in a long time. I kneel up and remove my jeans and knickers swiftly, then extract his penis from his white underpants and, without further ado or even looking at him, straddle him again, guiding him in.

I have not had sex for a long time either – there has been nobody for me since David. David. I close my eyes and think of David. I liked to straddle David in this position sometimes, me on top, holding his arms above his head in a parody of domination that made us both smile, wordlessly. Sometimes, he pushed my arms behind my back and held my wrists together and we laughed and bickered about who was in charge as we fucked – and then the moment, that moment, when the physical intensity of it would loosen his grasp and I would sink down on to his chest and he would push his hands in my hair and we would kiss long and deep and say each other’s name and sometimes cry, and I think, as I fuck Ahmetaj with my eyes closed, of how it stayed that good with David right up until the end and how it bewildered me. David. My thoughts of David combine with the friction of my body against Ahmetaj’s body, the slip and slide of skin, and my flesh remembers something. It remembers the easy and profound intimacy of sex with the man I loved, and I don’t come exactly but I feel something, some basic response of muscle and blood. I sink down on Ahmetaj’s chest, become still, and, not knowing what to do, he lifts his hands and lays them gently on my back.

As soon as his hands touch me, I pull away. He slides out of me. I hate the fact that I have let myself feel anything, which was not what I intended; I meant to have the advantage over him. Swiftly, so that I will not have time to think about it, I move down on him. He has lost his erection. His penis is small and pale and flaccid. He is not circumcised. As I go down on him, I smell hair and sweat and fat and know I must work quickly. I take him in my mouth and it feels sad and soft, like cod’s roe. He raises his pelvis slightly in shock at the sensation, gives a small cry, goes from flaccid to orgasm so quickly that he seems to bypass the erect stage altogether. My mouth fills and I gag and swallow quickly, then pull away and get off the bed.

I leave the bedroom without looking at him, go to the bathroom, spit into the sink. I am naked from the waist down but still wearing the rest of my clothing. I pee, then brush my teeth. While I brush them, I look at myself in the bathroom mirror and feel detached enough to note that that is the first time I have fucked someone I haven’t liked – how I had never understood before that it was possible, even easy, to do it for reasons that had little or nothing to do with the person you were doing it with, and how it feels as not-good afterwards as I always suspected but that a cold, hard part of me is able to detach myself enough to feel interested that I have tried the experiment. This is how men fuck, sometimes, I think, out of bitterness and need and a lust for control – all sorts of things that have so little to do with desire.

When I return to the darkened bedroom, he is asleep on his back, his mouth open, making a gentle snorting noise, short and intermittent, on each intake of breath. I pick up my knickers and jeans from where they lie discarded on the floor. I take them into the bathroom where I sit on the bidet and wash myself, front and back. I dry myself roughly with the hand towel and pull on my knickers and jeans.

I go downstairs, straight into the kitchen, where I pour myself a shot of whisky, down it in one. I pour myself another and, this time, raise the glass to myself.
Cheers, girl, bottoms up!
Today you have discovered what you are, and are not, capable of
. I down it, then rush immediately to the sink, on the point of vomiting, but instead I gag and spit. The whisky stays down, a hot lump inside me, hard as a ball bearing.
My mouth corrupts
me. I do not know myself. I am good
. No, I think,
my mouth
convicts me
, that’s it:
convicts
, not
corrupts
. Raising myself from the sink and wiping my mouth on a teacloth I think there, it’s done, I’ve done it, and I can’t ever take it back. When I had that meal with David, I felt triumphant at the thought that I had something I couldn’t tell him about, my scheming to find Ahmetaj. Now I know that was nothing. Now I have something that he must never know as long as we live. I’ve fucked the man who killed our daughter and given myself a suit of armour against David – and with that realisation comes the knowledge that that was the whole point, to do something that David could never understand or forgive, to have something to hide from him and hold against him, and I know now that this is how it will always be, that anything I ever do with another man will be a coded message to David.

After a few minutes, I hear Ahmetaj coming down the stairs. His look as he comes into the kitchen is that of a bewildered boy. He does not understand the rules of what we are doing, knows only that I am in charge. He comes over to me and, clumsily, attempts to put his arms around me but I push him away. I know he is desperate to leave now, as desperate as I am to see him go, but we are not quite finished yet. I nod at the kitchen table and he sits again. I sit down opposite him and refill both our glasses.

As I put down the bottle, I say, ‘You said, you want to pay.’

He looks at me, confused. Hasn’t he just paid, in a way he cannot comprehend? But no, he hasn’t. That was just an extra, that mutually humiliating fuck. That was about David, not Betty.