Nutshell (4 page)

The body cannot lie, but the mind is another country, for when my mother speaks at last, her tone is smooth, nicely in control. “I agree.”

Claude comes closer, speaks softly, almost at a whisper. “But. What do you think?”

They kiss and she starts to tremble. I feel his arms move round her waist. They kiss again with soundless tongues.

She says, “Scary.”

And responding to a private joke he replies, “Hairy.”

But they fail to laugh. I feel Claude push his groin into hers. That they should be aroused at such a time! How little I know. She finds his zip, tugs downwards, caresses, while his index finger curls under her cut-offs. I feel its recurrent pressure on my forehead. Might we go to bed? But no, thank God, he pursues his question.

“Decide.”

“I'm frightened.”

“But remember. Six months ahead. In my house, seven million in the bank. And we've placed the baby somewhere. But. What's it to. Erm. Be?”

His own practical question calms him, allows him to withdraw his finger. But her pulse, which had begun to settle, leaps at his question. Not sex but danger. Her blood beats through me in thuds like distant artillery fire and I can feel her struggling with a choice. I'm an organ in her body, not separate from her thoughts. I'm party to what she's about to do. When it comes at last, her decision, her whispered command, her single treacherous utterance, appears to issue from my own untried mouth. As they kiss again she says it into her lover's mouth. Baby's first word.

“Poison.”

How solipsism becomes the unborn. While barefoot Trudy sleeps off our five glasses on the sitting-room couch and our dirty house rolls eastwards into thick night, I dwell as much on my uncle's
placed
as my mother's
poison
. Like a DJ hunched over his turntable, I scratchily sample the line.
And…we've placed the baby somewhere
. With repetition, the words are rubbed clean as truth and my intended future shines clear.
Placed
is but the lying cognate of
dumped
. As
the baby
is of
me
. S
omewhere
is a liar too. Ruthless mother! This will be an undoing, my fall, for only in fairy tales are unwanted babies orphaned upwards. The Duchess of Cambridge will not be taking me on. My solo flight of self-pity settles me somewhere on the thirteenth floor of the brutal tower block my mother says she sometimes gazes on sadly from an upper bedroom window. She gazes and thinks, So close, yet remote as the Vale of Swat. Fancy living there.

Quite so. Raised bookless on computer toys, sugar, fat and smacks to the head. Swat indeed. No bedtime stories to nourish my toddler brain's plasticity. The curiosity-free mindscape of the modern English peasantry. What then of maggot farming in Utah? Poor me, poor buzz-cut, barrel-chested three-year-old boy in camouflage trousers, lost in a haze of TV noise and secondary smoke. His adoptive mother's tattooed and swollen ankles totter past, followed by her labile boyfriend's pungent dog. Beloved father, rescue me from this Vale of Despond. Take me down with you. Let me be poisoned at your side rather than
placed somewhere
.

Typical third-term self-indulgence. All I know of the English poor has come to me by way of TV and reviews of novelistic mockery. I know nothing. But my reasonable suspicion is that poverty is deprivation on all levels. No harpsichord lessons on the thirteenth floor. If hypocrisy's the only price, I'll buy the bourgeois life and consider it cheap. And more, I'll hoard grain, be rich, have a coat of arms. NON SANZ DROICT, and mine is to a mother's love and is absolute. To her schemes of abandonment I deny consent. I won't be exiled, but she will be. I'll bind her with this slimy rope, press-gang her on my birthday with one groggy, newborn stare, one lonesome seagull wail to harpoon her heart. Then, indentured by strong-armed love to become my constant nurse, her freedom but a retreating homeland shore, Trudy will be mine, not Claude's, as able to dump me as tear her breasts from her rib cage and toss them overboard. I can be ruthless too.

And so I went on, drunkenly, I suppose, expansive and irrelevant, until she woke with several groans and fumbled for her sandals under the couch. Together we descend, limping, to the humid kitchen, where, in the semi-darkness that might almost hide the squalor, she bends to drink at length from the cold-water tap. Still in her beachwear. She turns on the lights. No sign of Claude, no note. We go to the fridge and hopefully she looks in. I see—I imagine I see on an untested retina—her pale, indecisive arm hovering in the cold light. I love her beautiful arm. On a lower shelf something once living, now purulent, appears to stir in its paper bag, drawing from her a reverential gasp, forcing her to close the door. So we cross the room to the dry-goods cupboard and there she finds a bag of salted nuts. Shortly, I hear her dial her lover.

“Are you still at home?”

I can't hear him for her crunching.

“Well,” she says, after listening. “Bring it here. We need to talk.”

From the gentle way she sets down the phone I assume he's on his way. Bad enough. But I'm having my very first headache, right around the forehead, a gaudy bandanna, a carefree pain dancing to her pulse. If she'd share it with me, she might reach for an analgesic. By rights, the pain is hers. But she's braving the fridge again and has found high in the door, on a Perspex shelf, a nine-inch wedge of historic parmesan as old as evil, as hard as adamantine. If she can break into it with her teeth, we'll suffer together, after the nuts, a second incoming salt tide rolling through the estuary inlets, thickening our blood to brackish ooze. Water, she should drink more water. My hands drift upwards to find my temples. Monstrous injustice, to have such pain before my life's begun.

I've heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness. To avoid serious damage a simple creature needs to evolve the whips and goads of a subjective loop, of a felt experience. Not just a red warning light in the head—who's there to see it?—but a sting, an ache, a throb that
hurts
. Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self. And if that works, why not feeling disgust for shit, fearing the cliff edge and strangers, remembering insults and favours, liking sex and food? God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.

So what's the use of a headache, a heartache? What am I being warned against, or told to do? Don't let your incestuous uncle and mother poison your father. Don't waste your precious days idle and inverted. Get born and act!

She sets herself down on a kitchen chair with a hung-over groan, the elective malady's melody. There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact: remorse, or more drinking and then remorse. She's chosen the first, but it's early yet. The cheese is on the table, already forgotten. Claude is returning from where my mother will live, a millionairess shot of me. He'll cross London by cab because he's never learned to drive.

I try to see her as she is, as she must be, the gravidly ripe twenty-eight-year-old, youngly slumped (I insist on the adverb) across the table, blonde and braided like a Saxon warrior, beautiful beyond realism's reach, slender but for me, near naked, sunnily pink on the upper arms, finding space on the kitchen table for her elbows among the yolk-glazed plates of a month ago, the toast and sugar crumbs that houseflies daily vomit on, the reeking cartons and coated spoons, the fluids dried to scabs on junk-mail envelopes. I try to see her and love her as I must, then imagine her burdens: the villain she's taken for a lover, the saint she's leaving behind, the deed she's spoken for, the darling child she'll abandon to strangers. Still love her? If not, then you never did. But I did, I did. I do.

She remembers the cheese and reaches for the nearest tool and makes a decent stab. A piece snaps off and it's in her mouth, a dry rock to suck on while she considers her state. Some minutes pass. Not good, I think, her state, though our blood won't thicken after all, because the salt she's eating she'll need for her eyes, her cheeks. It pierces the child, to hear the mother cry. She's confronting the unanswerable world she's made, of all that she's consented to, her new duties, which I need to list again—kill John Cairncross, sell his birthright, share the money, dump the kid. It should be me who weeps. But the unborn are po-faced stoics, submerged Buddhas, expressionless. We accept, as our lesser kith the wailing babies don't, that tears are in the nature of things.
Sunt lacrimae rerum
. Infantile wailing entirely misses the point. Waiting is the thing. And thinking!

She's recovered by the time we hear her lover in the hall, cursing as he disturbs the garbage with the outsized brogues she likes him to wear. (He has his own key. It's my father who has to ring the bell.) Claude descends to the basement kitchen. The rustling sound is a plastic bag containing groceries or tools of death or both.

He notices at once her altered condition and says, “You've been crying.”

Not solicitude so much as a point of fact, or order. She shrugs and looks away. He takes from his bag a bottle, sets it down heavily where she can see the label.

“A 2010 Cuvée Les Caillottes Sancerre Jean-Max Roger. Remember? His father died in a plane crash.”

He speaks of the death of fathers.

“If it's cold and white I'll like it.”

She's forgotten. The restaurant where the waiter was slow to light the candle. She loved it then, and I loved it even more. Now, the withdrawn cork, the chink of glasses—I hope they're clean—and Claude is pouring. I can't say no.

“Cheers!” Her tone has quickly softened.

A top-up, then he says, “Tell me what it was.”

When she starts to speak her throat constricts. “I was thinking of our cat. I was fifteen. His name was Hector, a sweet old thing, the family's darling, two years older than me. Black, with white socks and bib. I came home from school one day in a filthy mood. He was on the kitchen table where he wasn't supposed to be. Looking for food. I gave him a whack that knocked him flying. His old bones landed with a crunch. After that he went missing for days. We put posters on trees and lamp posts. Then someone found him lying by a wall on a heap of leaves where he'd crept away to die. Poor, poor Hector, stiff as bone. I never said, I never dared, but I know it was me who killed him.”

Not her wicked undertaking then, not lost innocence, not the child she'll give away. She begins to cry again, harder than before.

“His time was almost up,” Claude says. “You can't know it was you.”

Sobbing now. “It was, it was. It was me! Oh God!”

I know, I know. Where did I hear it?—
He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers
. But let's be generous. A young woman, gut and breasts swollen to breaking, God-mandated pain looming, milk and shit to follow and sleepless trek through a newfound land of unenchanting duties, where brutal love will steal her life—and the ghost of an old cat softly stalks her in its socks, demanding revenge for its own stolen life.

Even so. The woman who's coldly scheming to…in tears over…Let's not spell it out.

“Cats can be a bloody nuisance,” Claude says with an air of helpfulness. “Sharpening their claws on the furniture. But.”

He has nothing antithetical to add. We wait until she's cried herself dry. Then, time for a refill. Why not? A couple of slugs, a neutralising pause, then he rustles in his bag again, and a different vintage is in his hands. A gentler sound as he sets it down. The bottle is plastic.

This time Trudy reads the label but not aloud. “In summer?”

“Antifreeze contains ethylene glycol, rather good stuff. I treated a neighbour's dog with it once, oversized Alsatian, drove me mad, barking night and day. Anyway. No colour, no smell, pleasant taste, rather sweet, just the thing in a smoothie. Erm. Wrecks the kidneys, excruciating pain. Tiny sharp crystals slice the cells apart. He'll stagger and slur like a drunk, but no smell of alcohol. Nausea, vomiting, hyperventilation, seizures, heart attack, coma, kidney failure. Curtains. Takes a while, as long as someone doesn't mess things up with treatment.”

“Leaves a trace?”

“Everything leaves a trace. You have to consider the advantages. Easy to get hold of, even in summer. Carpet cleaner does the job but doesn't taste as nice. A joy to administer. Goes down a treat. We just need to disassociate you from the moment when it does.”

“Me? What about you?”

“Don't you worry. I'll be disassociated.”

That wasn't what my mother meant, but she lets it pass.

Trudy and I are getting drunk again and feeling better, while Claude, starting later with greater body mass, has ground to cover. She and I share two glasses of the Sancerre, he drinks the rest, then returns to his plastic bag for a burgundy. The grey plastic bottle of glycol stands next to the empty, sentinel to our revels. Or memento mori. After a piercing white, a Pinot Noir is a mother's soothing hand. Oh, to be alive while such a grape exists! A blossom, a bouquet of peace and reason. No one seems to want to read aloud the label so I'm forced to make a guess, and hazard an Échezeaux Grand Cru. Put Claude's penis or, less stressful, a gun to my head to name the domaine, I would blurt out la Romanée-Conti, for the spicy cassis and black cherry alone. The hint of violets and fine tannins suggests that lazy, clement summer of 2005, untainted by heatwaves, though a teasing, next-room aroma of mocha, as well as more proximal black-skinned banana, summon Jean Grivot's domaine in 2009. But I'll never know. As the brooding ensemble of flavours, formed at civilisation's summit, makes its way to me, through me, I find myself, in the midst of horror, in reflective mood.

I begin to suspect that my helplessness is not transient. Grant me all the agency the human frame can bear, retrieve my young panther-self of sculpted muscle and long cold stare, direct him to the most extreme measure—killing his uncle to save his father. Put a weapon in his hand, a tyre wrench, a frozen leg of lamb, have him stand behind his uncle's chair, where he can see the antifreeze and be hotly incited. Ask yourself, could he—could I—do it, smash that hairy knob of bone and spill its grey contents across the squalor of the table? Then murder his mother as sole witness, dispose of two bodies in a basement kitchen, a task only achieved in dreams? And later, clean up that kitchen—another impossible task? Add the prospect of prison, of crazed boredom and the hell of other people, and not the best people. Your even stronger cellmate wants daytime TV all day for thirty years. Care to disoblige him? Then watch him fill a yellowed pillowcase with rocks and slowly turn his gaze your way, towards your own knob of bone.

Or assume the worst, the deed is done—my father's last kidney cells are sheared by a crystal of poison. He's thrown up his lungs and heart into his lap. Agony then coma then death. How about revenge? My avatar shrugs and reaches for his coat, murmuring on his way out that honour killing has no place in the modern polis. Let him speak for himself.

“Seizing the law into your own hands—it's old hat, reserved for elderly feuding Albanians and subsections of tribal Islam. Revenge is dead. Hobbes was right, my young friend. The state must have a monopoly of violence, a common power to keep us all in awe.”

“Then, kind avatar, phone Leviathan now, call the police, make them investigate.”

“What exactly? Claude and Trudy's black humour?”

Constable: “And this glycol on the table, madam?”

“A plumber suggested it, Officer, to keep our ancient radiators unfrozen in winter.”

“Then, dear future best self, get yourself to Shoreditch, warn my father, tell him everything you know.”

“The woman he loves and reveres planning to murder him? How did I come by such information? Was I party to pillow talk, was I under the bed?”

Thus the ideal form of powerful, competent being. What then are my chances, a blind, dumb invert, an almost-child, still living at home, secured by apron strings of arterial and venous blood to the would-be murderess?

But shush! The conspirators are talking.

“It's no bad thing,” says Claude, “that he's keen to move back here. Put up a show of resistance, then let him come.”

“Oh yes,” she says, cold and satirical. “And make him a welcome smoothie.”

“I didn't say that. But.”

But I think he almost did.

They pause for thought. My mother reaches for her wine. Her epiglottis stickily rises and falls as she drinks, and the fluid sluices down through her natural alleys, passing—as so much does—near the soles of my feet, curving inwards, heading my way. How can I dislike her?

She sets down her glass and says, “We can't have him dying here.”

She speaks so easily of his death.

“You're right. Shoreditch is better. You could visit him.”

“And take round a bottle of vintage antifreeze for old times' sake!”

“You take a picnic. Smoked salmon, coleslaw, chocolate fingers. And…the business.”

“Haaargh!” Hard to render the sound of my mother's explosive scepticism. “I dump him, throw him out of his house, take a lover. Then bring him a picnic!”

Even I appreciate my uncle's umbrage at “take a lover”—as in, one of nameless many, of many yet to come. And it's the “take,” it's the “a.” Poor fellow. He's only trying to help. He's sitting across from a beautiful young woman with golden braids, in bikini top and cut-offs in a sweltering kitchen, and she's a swollen, gorgeous fruit, a prize he can't bear to lose.

“No,” he says with great care. The affront to his self-regard has pitched his voice higher. “It's a reconciliation. You're making
amends
. Asking him back. Getting together. Peace offering sort of thing, moment to celebrate, spread out the tablecloth. Get happy!”

Her silence is his reward. She's thinking. As am I. Same old question. Just how stupid is Claude really?

Encouraged, he adds, “Fruit salad's an option.”

There's poetry in his blandness, a form of nihilism enlivening the commonplace. Or, conversely, the ordinary disarming the vilest notion. Only he could top this, and he does after a thoughtful five seconds.

“Ice cream being out of the question.”

Plain sense. Worth saying. Who would or could make ice cream out of antifreeze?

Trudy sighs. She says in a whisper, “You know, Claude, I loved him once.”

Is he seeing her as I imagine her? The green gaze is glazing over and, yet again, an early tear is smoothly traversing her cheekbone. Her skin is damply pink, fine hairs have sprung free of her braids and are backlit into brilliant filaments by the ceiling lights.

“We were too young when we met. I mean, we met too soon. On an athletic track. He was throwing the javelin for his club and broke some local record. It made my knees go weak to watch him, the way he ran with that spear. Like a Greek god. A week later he took me to Dubrovnik. We didn't even have a balcony. They say it's a beautiful city.”

I hear the uneasy creak of a kitchen chair. Claude sees the room-service trays piled outside the door, the cloying bedroom's disordered sheets, the nineteen-year-old near-naked at a painted plywood dressing table, her perfect back, a wash-thinned hotel towel across her lap—a parting nod at decency. John Cairncross is jealously excluded, primly out of shot, but huge, and naked too.

Careless of her lover's silence, Trudy hurries on a rising note, before her tightening throat can silence her. “Trying for a baby all those years. Then just as, just as…”

Just as! Worthless adverbial trinket! By the time she tired of my father and his poetry, I was too well lodged to be unhoused. She cries now for John as she did for Hector the cat. Perhaps my mother's nature won't stretch to a second killing.

“Erm,” Claude says at last, offering his crumb. “Spilt milk and all.”

Milk, repellent to the blood-fed unborn, especially after wine, but my future all the same.

He waits patiently to present his idea of a picnic. It can't help, to hear his rival wept for. Or perhaps it concentrates the mind. He drums his fingers lightly on the table, one of the things he does. When standing he rattles his house keys in his trouser pocket, or unproductively clears his throat. These empty gestures, devoid of self-awareness, are sinister. There's a whiff of sulphur about Claude. But for the moment we're as one, for I'm waiting too, troubled by a sickly fascination to know his scheme, as one might the ending of a play. He can hardly expound while she's weeping.

A minute later she blows her nose and says in a croaky voice, “Anyway, I hate him now.”

“He made you very unhappy.”

She nods and blows her nose again. Now we listen while he presents his verbal brochure. His delivery is that of the doorstep evangelist helping her towards a better life. Essential, he tells us, that my mother and I make at least one visit to Shoreditch before the last, fatal call. Hopeless to conceal from forensics that she was ever there. Helpful to establish that she and John were on terms again.

This, he says, must look like suicide, like Cairncross made a cocktail for himself to improve the poison's taste. Therefore, on her final visit she'll leave behind the original empty bottles of glycol and shop-bought smoothie. These vessels must show no trace of her fingerprints. She'll need to wax her fingertips. He has just the stuff. Bloody good too. Before she leaves John's flat, she'll put the picnic remains inside the fridge. Any containers or wrapping must also be free of her prints. It should seem as though he ate alone. As beneficiary of his will, she'll be investigated, a conspiracy suspected. So all traces of Claude, in bedroom and bathroom especially, must be eradicated, cleaned to extinction, every last hair and flake of skin. And, I sense her thinking, every no-longer thrashing tail, every stilled head of every last sperm. That may take some time.

Claude continues. No concealing the phone calls she has made to him. The phone company will have a record.

“But remember. I'm just a friend.”

It costs him to say these last words, especially when my mother repeats them as in a catechism. Words, as I'm beginning to appreciate, can make things true.

“You're just my friend.”

“Yes. Called round from time to time. For a chat. Brother-in-law. Helping you out. Nothing more.”

His account has been neutrally rendered, as though he daily murders brothers, husbands for a living, an honest high-street butcher by trade whose bloody apron mixes in the family wash with the sheets and towels.

Trudy starts to say, “But listen—” when Claude cuts her off with a sudden remembered thought.

“Did you see? A house in our street, same side, same size, same condition? On the market for
eight
million!”

My mother absorbs this in silence. It's the “our” she's taking in.

There it is. We've made another million by not killing my father sooner. How true it is: we make our own luck. But. (As Claude would say.) I don't know much yet about murder. Still, his scheme is more baker than butcher. Half-baked. The absence of prints on the glycol bottle will be suspicious. When my father starts to feel ill, what stops him calling the emergency services? They'll pump his stomach. He'll be fine. Then what?

“I don't care about house prices,” Trudy says. “That's for later. The bigger question is this. Where's your risk, what's your exposure here when you're wanting a share of the money? If something goes wrong and I go down, where will you be once I've scrubbed you out of my bedroom?”

I'm surprised by her bluntness. And then I experience not quite joy, but its expectation, a cool uncoiling in my gut. A falling out among villains, the already useless plot ruined, my father saved.

“Trudy, I'll be with you at every step.”

“You'll be safe at home. Alibis in place. Perfect deniability.”

She's been thinking about this. Thinking without my knowing. She's a tigress.

Claude says. “The thing is—”

“What I want,” my mother says with a vehemence that hardens the walls around me, “is you tied into this, and I mean totally. If I fail, you fail. If I—”

The doorbell rings once, twice, three times, and we freeze. No one, in my experience, has ever come to the front door so late. Claude's plan is so hopeless it's failed already, for here are the police. No one else rings a bell with such dogged insistence. The kitchen was bugged long ago, they've heard it all. Trudy will have her way—we'll all go down together.
Babies Behind Bars
was a too-long radio documentary I listened to one afternoon. Convicted murderers in the States, nursing mothers, were allowed to raise their infants in their cells. This was presented as an enlightened development. But I remember thinking, These babies have done nothing wrong. Set them free! Ah well. Only in America.

“I'll go.”

He gets up and crosses the room to the video entryphone on the wall by the kitchen door. He peers at the screen.

“It's your husband,” he says dully.

“Jesus.” My mother pauses to think. “No use pretending I'm not here. You better hide somewhere. In the laundry room. He never—”

“There's someone with him. A woman. A young woman. Rather pretty, I'd say.”

Another silence. The bell rings again. Longer.

My mother's voice is even, though strained. “In that case, go and let them in. But Claude, darling. Kindly put that glycol bottle away.”