The Museum of Doubt (11 page)

HM THE QUEEN: Thank you. The story of my discovery in a wicker basket among the reeds of the Pripyat Marshes, my upbringing by a collective farm director and his secretly
Banderovite wife, my teenage years in Brooklyn and the establishment of my descent from Ryurik of Kievan Rus are too well known to be retold here. In response to your second question, the documents mentioned in the Komsomolskaya Pravda article have been shown conclusively to be second-rate forgeries. There is no sex-change clinic in Yalta, and it is clearly absurd to suggest that anyone would attempt to change sex more than once. On gender, I reply as I always do: it is the privilege of a sovereign to strive to be loved without being desired, to be wedded to her people rather than a spouse to a single person. That said, anyone may desire me, if they dare.

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES: You don’t find me interesting enough any more, is that it? Is that why you never call when you’re in town.

HM THE QUEEN: Thank you. I do not accept comparisons with Imelda Marcos. It is not the quantity of shoes which matters, but the quality. I can assure you that in both respects I have left Mrs Marcos light-years behind. As for the economy, I hardly think that a proper subject for a queen to concern herself with. I can tell you that shortly before my departure I met with members of the government who assured me that they were increasing the production of money by all means at their disposal. I regularly go among the poor, dispensing small baskets of currency, but I am sure you understand my busy social schedule allows me to distribute money only to a limited percentage of the population. Alas, I cannot solve all my country’s problems singlehanded.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Just the person I need to settle this argument we’ve been having. Now I know Kiev is in Crimea, but where the heck is Siberia, is it Ukraine or Russia?

HM THE QUEEN: Thank you. No. I am not an ambassador
for my country. I am a hostage against my own reception. If America doesn’t love me, it’ll never see me again.

NBC: Are you OK?

HM THE QUEEN: Thank you. There is one man. His name is Mykola. I can’t tell you any more about him but if you want to write about love, write about him. Make it up. He does. Only make it up well. I know he’s there now, in the dark yard on Karla Marla, in the snow, thinking about me. Of course I wish he could have been with me when we sailed up to the lights of your island in the evening, with the crowd and the orchestra on the wharf and the helicopters squinting at us as we docked, but he chose to dine with a woman friend in the unheated hall of the Dnipro. He should have been with me in Kiev on my birthday, when we raced reindeer sleighs on the reservoir and roasted oxen on bonfires of old Soviet passports. He was here, watching
L’Age D’Or
in some arthouse fleapit. Does he care for me? I don’t know. I care for him. Perhaps he’s afraid of me. Perhaps he’s afraid of the scale of my style. I am difficult. I am beyond the limit. I am the Queen of Ukraine.

I drank and slept and dreamed I was a poisoned angel, with feet like a bird’s, standing on the edge of a crater looking down at an ocean of clouds boiling with bruise-coloured folds. I was poisoned by the thought that in one of the alternative moments the angels lived through, God had made a world other than the one we knew, our existence where the only tendency was towards an infinite complication in artefacts and deeds. I asked him, he was everywhere, but he didn’t pay attention, he wasn’t even aware of the nature of the question. I watched the lightning shooting upwards into the firmament from the clouds, and other angels darting like gnats around the flashes. I’d shoulder-charged the ends of time and broken through to the circularity of it, meeting myself each way, and still there was no trace of the world, no clue God had ever made it, only a memory planted inextractably, like the traces of poison, of a blue and white sphere of seas and mountains and beings. I pushed myself off the rock with the sound of claws scratching against it and dived towards the clouds. I wanted to be the first angel to commit suicide.

I woke up. I lay in bed petting my grief that something had been lost, something which could only be the world I suspected God of having made, in an alternative course the angels had been
forced to pass by without looking back. I felt as bad as if a woman I loved without her noticing had told me about another man. A better man.

Outside the window was the world I was mourning the loss of. The mountains were to the west side and the sea was to the east, the green fields to the north and the river to the south.

There were two things I admired Helmet for: wearing a fox fur hat in bed, and teaching his dog to fetch his newspaper from the shop. I thought the hat was a pose before I found out how cold it could be where he lived. He lived in an old fisherman’s cottage near the stony beach. I could see it from my window on the hill. With some people the hat would still be a pose, even if they were cold, but he wore it because it was what he had. It wasn’t like he’d killed the fox himself, either. As for the dog, there must have been a lot of training involved. And if I’d seen him doing the training, I would’ve thought he was a right wanker. But I hadn’t. That’s the secret. Never let anyone see you practising. One day I was round and the dog burst through a flap in the door, trotted in, bounded up on the bed and laid a neatly folded copy of the
Courier
on Helmet’s lap. And it was like with the hat. Helmet didn’t make an issue of it. He put on a pair of reading glasses and offered to split the paper with me. He turned to the death notices first, hoping to find the old fisherman’s name there.

He wanted the old fisherman to die and leave him the house. Helmet had been paying him ten pounds a week in rent for five years and they split the two-room effort down the middle but Helmet wanted more space for his records. Sometimes he left a few albums on the fisherman’s table by way of a hint but the fisherman would always find something in them that interfered with his sense of taboos and would throw them out the window, where they could carry a fair way if the wind was right. I once
came across an astounding LP wrapped up in the dried kelp and bladderwrack on the beach. The cover was shot but the vinyl was fine. I kept it. All items washed up on the beach are the property of the Queen. If she ever comes round to pick it up, she can have it.

The fisherman was in his late seventies but didn’t seem to be about to die. Helmet claimed he had no relatives but I told him there was no law that property passed to a tenant on the owner’s death. I said he’d have to be nice to him. Helmet didn’t say anything to that, he folded his arms across his chest and looked through the window at the sea.

He never even helped the old boy build his smoking shed. The fisherman had decided he would supplement his pension by making smokies on his back green like they did in Arbroath. He did build the shed, about the size of an outside toilet, but he never organised a proper fish supply and used to go to the fishmonger for packets of filleted haddock and fix them to racks with clothes pegs. Then he’d start faffing round with firelighters and bundles of firewood from the filling station. We came into the kitchenette once and found him trying to eat one of his smokies. It looked like a lung cancer autopsy. And Broughty Ferry wasn’t about fish. It was about gardening, retail and sheltered housing. The old fisherman was as popular with the neighbours as a naked aborigine walking onto the stage of Sidney Opera House during a performance of
Die Niebelungen
and asking the audience to leave so he could reestablish the site of the Kookaburra Dreaming.

My work as a seal counter left me with time on my hands. I was supposed to bike over to Tentsmuir every day at dawn and count heads but I found it easier, after a few hours’ research in the library, to work out a likely population curve and fabricate the figures on a daily basis. When I went down the Ferry I’d use the
people I passed to incorporate a random element. A young child meant fecundity among the seals. Two white-haired pensioners together meant a low death rate. A good-looking boy or girl meant a population explosion or a deadly epidemic. If I fell stricken in love on the street I intended to create billions of seals. I was waiting to be stricken. I was expecting it. If she wasn’t interested, I could always kill them later.

The morning after the dream Helmet called to see if I was coming over. He asked me to buy some pies on the way, and a couple of strawberry tarts. At the counter in Goodfellow & Steven the girl handed me the bags, I paid and left the shop. A gull sprang off the edge of the pavement, perfectly white, and stroked my jacket with the edge of its wing when it spun up towards the cloud. I stopped and looked in the bags. The baked goods nestled in unchanging twos. I went back inside.

I didn’t ask for these, I said.

The girl put her hands on the counter and stood on tiptoe, peering into the mouths of the bags.

I made them up for you, she said. Did you want something different?

It’s what I wanted but I didn’t ask for them.

The girl settled back on her heels with a squeak of shoeleather and a rustle of her smock and we looked at each other. These seconds would be the best of the day. The seals were to have a hard going of it later.

You come in here every morning and ask for exactly the same thing, she said. Two pies and two tarts.

I looked at her.

I was trying to save time, she said.

Everyone does that here. You can’t, though. It loses its value.

That was how I found out that Helmet never left the house.
He lived off a pie and a tart and tapwater six days a week. I was keeping him alive.

He came to the door bare-chested, wearing the grey leggings and the fur hat. We went through and lay side by side on the bed in his room. He’d been in it. He had a beautiful narrow chest, and a flat stomach, not by exercise, but by luck. He had tiny hard nipples sticking up like the backsides of buttons. I often felt like laying the flat of my hand on them, to see what it felt like, but I never did, not because I was afraid he’d think I was a poof, or’d scream or SAS my windpipe, but cause I was afraid of my bigoted future self giving me a good kicking for it ten years down the road.

I arranged the baked items between us on the bedcover and we lay on our sides on one elbow.

I dreamed about God last night, I said.

Did he tell you to kill a fisherman? said Helmet.

No.

Helmet hooded his eyes and tore off a piece of pie with his teeth. There was a thunder of jet engines over town as the fighters from over the river headed out to sea.

Helmet’s dog came in with the
Courier
and we divvied it up. The room had two windows, one looking on to the shore and the other into the back green. The old fisherman was to be seen pottering about so it was pointless for Helmet to be checking the deaths.

It’s pointless for you to be checking the deaths, I said. He’s out there. He’s alive.

Helmet levelled his heavy blackframed glasses at me over the top of the paper. If it says in here he’s died, he’s died. There’s nothing he can do about it.

Does it say he’s died?

Yes.

There were two things I admired Helmet for: the hat and the dog. It wasn’t much. Everything else about him was repulsive. I looked in the paper. Sure enough, there was the old boy’s name, George Brynie. Peacefully, on 10 October, and a poem. We think of you most every day/ But now that you are gone/There’s really not much else to say/ We must be moving on.

I got up and went to the back window. The door of the shed opened and the fisherman came out, coughing in waves of smoke. He caught my eye and raised his hand. I waved back. I looked at my watch. It was the tenth of the month.

If you can pay for a death notice, I said, how about paying me back for the food?

Helmet lifted his finger and held it still in the air for a second, his way of smiling, went over to a box on top of one of the shelves of records, took out a fifty pound note and gave it to me. I’d never seen one before, but that wasn’t going to stop me pocketing it.

I wonder how this death notice is going to be enacted, I said.

There’s a good sharp kitchen knife, said Helmet, taking off his glasses.

I looked into Helmet’s eyes. We were standing in the narrow space on opposite sides of the bed. He’d always been calm, certain and determined, but nothing had ever seemed to come of it. It’d never been possible to believe that the only goal towards which his self-conviction was taking him was finding more space for his records, even in the days when he’d still lived with his parents and he’d only had a few hundred. I tried to remember all the trivial things we’d talked about. They were trivial. And if I’d known they were trivial even then it meant I’d always known there was something not trivial which was not being spoken of. If the trivial things had been about money and entertainment, the thing not spoken of was a man’s life. Helmet was sober and
calculating now in his record-lined room which was more to him than the world he didn’t enter any more and so it was the man’s life, perhaps, that was trivial now. I feared for the fisherman. But I was wondering about the money too.

I opened my mouth to speak about the law and understood for Helmet it would be necessary to go deeper.

He hasn’t done you any harm, I said. You can’t do it.

I won’t get found out.

That’s not what I mean. I mean it’s wrong.

Why? Is this something to do with your dream?

It’s to do with thousands of years of human civilization.

I haven’t been around for thousands of years. I’m only 29. He’s lived long enough. He takes up too much space. He stinks of smoke and fish.

You’re exaggerating. He doesn’t get in your way. Killing him is too extreme.

You’re only saying that because you think I’ll get found out.

No! I’m not! I was trying to convince myself, and trying not to think about Helmet with a kitchen knife in his hand, coming up behind old Brynie in the kitchen while he was frying his supper that evening. It’s wrong, I said, it’s immoral, murder is wrong.

Why?

I looked out of the window at the sea. The edges of the waves slid up sharp and solid as the jags of a broken bottle. I tried to think of reasons for things we don’t usually seek reasons for because if we did we’d realise how badly we needed them at the same time as we realised how hard they were to find, as if you’d become addicted to a drug in your sleep and woken up to find it hadn’t been invented, as if you suspected a better world had been made and unmade behind your back before you’d had a chance to savour it.

He’s a human being like you, I said. What if everyone killed anyone who got in their way?

They won’t, said Helmet. Everyone’s afraid of getting caught. And the rest are afraid of having to clear up the mess.

Jesus, I said.

Is that your dream again? Is it religion, is that it?

No! You know I don’t believe in that. Listen, Helmet, you’re a human being, it’s what you are, you can’t help it, and it’s in your nature to be angry, but it’s also in your nature to be merciful and feel pity.

He doesn’t deserve any mercy.

But he hasn’t done anything wrong!

He has, he’s stopped me taking his room for my records.

The whole house belongs to him!

Exactly, said Helmet. That’s why I can’t go on like this.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. I felt as if the blood bank’d just tapped me for all I had.

When are you thinking of doing this? I said.

After tea, said Helmet.

All the blood came flooding back, with interest on the loan, and if the knife’d been there on the bed I would have filleted the boy on the spot. You’re fucking ill, you are, I said.

Easy, said Helmet.

You don’t see the seals killing each other.

I’m not a seal. They don’t collect records. I could see his brain working in the flexing of the flesh of his forehead.

And if they did, they’d have more room for them out there.

The phone rang. It was out in the hall. The fisherman answered it. He knocked and put his head round the door. Phone, he said flatly and disappeared. He was a small man, bony. Getting the point of the knife through his dungarees and sweater and through between the bones would be hard. The
worst moment would be halfway when Brynie was still alive but the blade was half in and it was too late to change your mind and say: God, sorry George, didn’t mean it. Especially if there’d been no row beforehand.

Forget it, Helmet, I said. They’ll catch you anyway.

Oh! he said, pointing at me as he went out. Like I said. And they won’t.

I picked up the
Courier
again and leafed through. I shivered. Someone had draped my chest in a soaked bedsheet. The text blurred on the white. Scientists shocked by latest seal numbers, said a headline on a single column story. The rest of it was punched through by canine teeth and smeared with dog saliva. The worst thing was his trust in me. No, the worst thing was that his trust might be justified. That I’d wait until he did it, because surely he wouldn’t, and afterwards it’d be done, and Brynie would be dead, and there’d be no bringing him back, so what would the point be in destroying Helmet, let his conscience be his executioner? Not that he had one. And where did you go to denounce your friend for planning to murder a stranger? The victim? The police? His mother?