Enduring Love (26 page)

I shrugged a kind of yes. There was dither in these faces. They wanted the money and they wanted absolution. These coke dealers, these property crooks impoverished by negative equity and their dim beliefs, were making a stab at being moral, and they wanted me to help them out. I was beginning to feel better. So I was the bad person. Suddenly I was set free. I took the wad and tossed it on the table. What was the point of bargaining?

I said, “Why don’t you count it?”

No one moved at first. Then there was a flash, and Steve’s hand got there just ahead of Xan’s. Daisy stared hard. It looked serious. Perhaps they were living on toast and porridge.

Steve counted the notes in bank-clerk style, at high speed, and when he was done he put them in his pocket and said to me, “Right. So now you can fuck off, Joe!”

To keep face, I included myself in the nervous laughter.

Then I noticed that Xan wasn’t laughing. He sat waiting, his arms folded, his snarl giving nothing away. In his right forearm, a muscle—it was one I didn’t have myself—twitched rhythmically to an unseen movement of his hand. When the laughter died he spoke up, but not in the voice that had made the case for holism. It was
pitched higher and it was husky, and his tongue clicked drily against the roof of his mouth. He was still, but I could see the turmoil beneath the skin, in the pulse at the base of his throat. That was when my own blood began to run a little harder. Xan said, “Steve, put the money back on the table and get the gun.”

Steve was getting to his feet, holding Xan’s stare all the while. “Fine,” he said quietly, and began to cross the room.

Xan was out of his chair. “That money isn’t going in the tin box.”

Without turning, Steve replied with equal certainty, “I’m owed,” and continued on his way.

The nearest object to Xan was his empty porridge bowl. He seized it between thumb and forefinger and skimmed it hard, frisbee fashion, with left hand extended and splayed for balance. It missed Steve’s neck by an inch and shattered on the door frame.

“No!” Daisy shouted. There was something of the weary impatient mother in this call. Then she walked out of the room without a word. We saw her retreating back and her hair swinging about her waist. She was gone and we heard her footsteps on the stairs. Johnny looked at me. I knew what he was thinking. Now the responsibility for the fight was all ours. In fact, it was all mine, for Johnny had sat down to roll himself a cigarette and was shaking his head and sighing at his trembling fingers.

Steve had turned and was coming back to the kitchen table. Xan went toward him and took him by his shirtfront and tried to push him against the wall. “Don’t start this,” he said breathily. “Put it on the table.” But Steve was not so easy to push. His body was tight and hard, and he looked cruel. The two men leaned into each other in the center of the room. Their biggest effort, it seemed, was to breathe. They were so close, there hovered between their faces a gestalt candlestick.

Steve said quickly, “The household owes me, you both owe me. Now get your fucking hand off.” But he did not wait for compliance. His left hand flew to Xan’s throat and gripped. Xan swung back his free arm in a wide arc, then whiplashed his open hand against Steve’s face. The crack of the blow sounded like a burst balloon, and the force of it thrust the men apart. For an instant they froze, then they charged and went into a clinch. The four-legged beast swayed and edged sideways across the kitchen floor back toward the table. Johnny and I heard only bottled grunts. Heads down, eyes closed, lips stretched across their teeth, they groped and clambered and wound over and under each other like lovers.

Something had to give. Xan got his hand under Steve’s chin and began to force back his head. No neck muscles could be a match for that hideous impacted arm, but still, it was a mighty trembling effort, because Steve had hooked a thumb into Xan’s nostril and was groping for his eyes and Xan, forced to lean away, was at full stretch. Steve’s head was going back, and Xan’s next move was to slip a headlock on him, right arm around Steve’s neck, left hand pulling on his own wrist to tighten the squeeze. I started toward them. Steve was going slowly to his knees. He was moaning and his hands were flailing, then beating weakly against Xan’s legs.

I tapped Xan’s face with the back of my hand and crouched down to speak in his ear. “You’re going to kill him. Is that what you want?”

“Keep out of this. It’s been coming a long time.”

I tried pulling on his ear to get him to turn and look at me. “If he dies, you’ll be inside for the rest of your life.”

“Small fucking price!”

“Johnny,” I shouted, “you’ve got to help!”

I saw Daisy come back in the room. She held a shoebox in two hands, and her expression was of weariness. Her downturned mouth asked us to see what she had had to put up with—the men in her life
struggling for the mechanical advantage, for the leverage that would permit one to break the other’s neck.

“Take it,” she was whispering. “Take it, take it!”

I got to my feet and took the box from Daisy. It was heavy, and I needed two hands to support the flimsy cardboard. Steve moaned again, and I looked at Johnny. He made a pleading look and jerked his head toward the door.

“That’s right,” Daisy said firmly. “Better go.”

The exhaustion in her manner made me wonder if this were not some kind of domestic ritual, or an overrehearsed prelude to a complicated sexual alliance. On the other hand, I thought we ought to be saving Steve’s life.

Johnny pulled on my sleeve. I went with him a couple of paces across the room. He muttered into my ear, “If something happens, I don’t want to be a witness.”

I saw what he meant, so we nodded at Daisy, and with one last glance at Steve’s head in the trembling vise of Xan’s forearm, we hurried along the dark hallway to the front door.

As soon as we were in the car, Johnny pulled out a joint and lit it. It was the last drug I would have wanted just then. Far better to stop for a Scotch somewhere and calm down. I started the car and drove hard back up the drive.

“It’s funny, you know,” Johnny said through the smoke. “I’ve been there other times and we’ve had these really interesting discussions.”

I swung out onto the road and was about to reply when the phone rang. I had left it plugged into the cigarette lighter.

It was Parry. “Joe, is that you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m at your place, sitting here with Clarissa. I’m putting her on, okay? Are you there? Joe? Are you there?”

I had
the impression of having passed out for a second or two. The roar in my ears, I realized, was the car’s engine. We were doing almost sixty and I had forgotten to change gears. I shifted from second to fourth and dropped my speed.

“I’m here,” I said.

“Listen carefully, now,” Parry said. “Here she is.”

“Joe?” I knew immediately she was frightened. Her voice was pitched high. She was trying to keep control.

“Clarissa. Are you all right?”

“You have to come straight back. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t talk to the police.” The monotone was to let me know that the words weren’t hers.

“I’m in Surrey,” I said. “It’s going to take me a couple of hours.”

I heard her repeat this to Parry, but I didn’t catch what he told her.

“Just come straight back,” she said.

“Tell me what’s happening there. Are you okay?”

She was like a speaking clock. “Come straight here. Don’t bring anyone. He’ll be watching out the window.”

“I’ll do exactly as he says, don’t worry.” Then I added, “I love you.”

I heard the phone changing hands. “You got all that? You won’t let me down now, will you?”

“Listen, Parry,” I said. “I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll be there in two hours. I won’t talk to anyone. But don’t hurt her. Please don’t hurt her.”

“It’s all down to you, Joe,” he said, and the line went dead.

Johnny was looking at me. “Trouble at home,” he murmured sympathetically.

I opened my window and took some lungfuls of fresh air. We were passing the pub and entering the woods. I turned off the road down a track and followed it for about a mile until it ran out into a small clearing by a ruined house. There were signs of renovation work—a cement mixer, a pile of scaffolding and bricks—but no one was around. I switched off the engine and reached for the shoebox on the back seat. “Let’s take a look at that wherewithal.”

I lifted the lid and we peered in. I had never fired a handgun before, or even seen one, but the object that lay partially concealed within the folds of a torn-up old white shirt looked familiar enough from the movies. Only the feel of it was a surprise. It was lighter than I expected, and drier, warmer to the touch. Oily, cold, and heavy was what I had imagined. Nor, as I lifted it up and aimed it through the windscreen, did it radiate the mystique of deadly potential. It was just another of those inert devices you unwrap at home after shopping—mobile phone, VCR, microwave—and wonder how difficult it’s going to be to bring it to life. The absence of a sixty-page instruction manual seemed like a head start. I turned the gun over, looking for a
way in. Johnny put his hand in the shirt cloth and pulled out a compact box of red cardboard, which he picked open.

“It’s a ten-shot,” he said, and took the weapon from me, slipped a catch at the base of the stock, and slid the magazine home. With a yellow forefinger he pointed out the safety lever. “Push it right forward till it clicks.” He looked along the sights. “It’s a nice one. Steve was just bullshitting. It’s a Browning nine-millimeter. I like this polyamide grip. Better than walnut, really.”

We got out of the car and Johnny gave me back the gun.

“I didn’t think you’d know about this stuff,” I said. We were walking behind the roofless house, into the woods.

“I was into guns for a while,” he said dreamily. “It was the way the business was going then. When I was in the States, I went on a course in Tennessee. Cougar Ranch. I think some of the people there might have been Nazis. I’m not sure. But anyway, they kept on about their two tactical rules. Number one, always win, and number two, always cheat.”

At another time I might have been drawn to elaborate the evolutionary perspective, drawn from game theory, that for any social animal, always cheating was a sure route to extinction. But now I felt sick. My legs were weak, and my bowels had gone watery. It was a constant and conscious effort as I walked on the crackling dry leaves beneath the beeches to keep my anal sphincter tight. I knew I shouldn’t be wasting time. I should be racing toward London. But I had to be certain I knew what to do with the gun. “This’ll do right here,” I said. If I had walked another step, I might have crapped in my pants.

“Use both hands,” Johnny said. “It’s quite a kick if you’re not used to it. Set your feet apart and distribute your weight evenly. Breathe out slowly as you squeeze the trigger.” I was doing all this
when the gun went off and reared upward in my hands. We walked to the beech tree and took some moments to find the entry hole. The bullet was barely visible, sunk two inches into the smooth bark. As we walked back to the car, Johnny said, “A tree’s one thing, but it’s a big deal when you point a gun at someone. Basically, you’re giving them permission to kill you.”

I left him waiting in the front seat while I took some paper and went back into the trees and used my heel to scrape a shallow trench. While I crouched there with my pants around my ankles, I tried to soothe myself by parting the crackly old leaves and scooping up a handful of soil. Some people find their long perspectives in the stars and galaxies; I prefer the earthbound scale of the biological. I brought my palm close to my face and peered. In the rich black crumbly mulch I saw two black ants, a springtail, and a dark red wormlike creature with a score of pale brown legs. These were the rumbling giants of this lower world, for not far below the threshold of visibility was the seething world of the roundworms, the scavengers and the predators who fed on them; and even these were giants relative to the inhabitants of the microscopic realm, the parasitic fungi and the bacteria—perhaps ten million of them in this handful of soil. The blind compulsion of these organisms to consume and excrete made possible the richness of the soil and therefore the plants, the trees, and the creatures that lived among them, whose number had once included ourselves. What I thought might calm me was the reminder that for all our concerns, we were still part of this natural dependency, for the animals that we ate grazed the plants which, like our vegetables and fruits, were nourished by the soil formed by these organisms. But even as I squatted to enrich the forest floor, I could not believe in the primary significance of these grand cycles. Just beyond the oxygen-exhaling trees stood my poison-exuding vehicle, inside which was my gun, and thirty-five miles down teeming roads was the enormous city
on whose northern side was my apartment, where a madman was waiting, a de Clerambault, my de Clerambault, and my threatened loved one. What, in this description, was necessary to the carbon cycle, or the fixing of nitrogen? We were no longer in the great chain. It was our own complexity that had expelled us from the Garden. We were in a mess of our own unmaking. I stood and buckled my belt and then, with the diligence of a household cat, kicked the soil back into my trench.

Wrapped as I was in my own affairs, I was amazed to find Johnny asleep again. I woke him and explained that I was going to have to drive home fast. If he wanted, I could drop him near a railway station. He said he didn’t mind. “But listen, Joe. If you get into a collision and the cops are involved, the Browning’s nothing to do with me, okay?” I patted the right-hand pocket of my jacket and started the engine.

With the headlights full on, I raced up the single-track road and made no compromises with the oncoming traffic. Drivers reversed in front of me and scowled from the passing places. Once we were on the motorway, Johnny lit up his third of the day. I kept to a steady one hundred and fifteen, all the while watching the rearview mirror for patrol cars. I tried phoning the apartment but got no reply. I thought about calling the police. Fine—if I could find someone to dispatch an elite squad to rappel in on Parry and overpower him before he could do harm. What I’d get, though, if I was lucky enough to reach their level with a phone call, would be Linley or Wallace, or some other weary bureaucrat.