The Book of Evidence (20 page)

face floating behind the glass, blear-eyed, unshaven, the very picture of a fugitive. The car slid away smoothly and passed along the harbour road and turned a corner and was gone. I did not stir. I wanted to stay like this, with my forehead against the glass and the summer day all out there before me. H o w quaint it all seemed, the white-tipped sea, and the white and pink houses, and the blurred headland in the distance, quaint and happy, like a little toy world laid out in a shop window. I closed my eyes, and again that fragment of memory swam up out of the depths — the doorway, and the darkened room, and the sense of something imminent — but this time it seemed to be not my own past I was remembering.

The silence was swelling like a tumour at my back.

Hurriedly I fetched my plate with the fried egg and greying rashers from the kitchen, taking the stairs three at a time, and came back and opened the window and clambered on to the narrow, wrought-iroo balcony outside. A strong, warm wind was blowing, it startled me, and left me breathless for a moment. I picked up the pieces of food and flung them into the air, and watched the gulls swooping after the rich tidbits, crying harshly in surprise and greed. From behind the headland a white ship glided soundlessly into view, shimmering in the haze. When the food was gone I threw the plate away too, I don't know why, skimmed it like a discus out over the road and the harbour wall. It slid into the water with hardly a splash.

There were strings of lukewarm fat between my fingers and egg-yolk under my nails. I climbed back into the room and wiped my hands on the bedclothes, my heart pounding in excitement and disgust. I did not know what I was doing, or what I would do next. I did not know myself. 1 had become a stranger, unpredictable and dangerous.

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I explored the house. I had never been here before. It was a great, gaunt, s h a d o w y place with dark drapes and big b r o w n furniture and bald spots in the carpets. It was not exactly dirty, but there was a sense of staleness, of things left standing for too long in the same spot, and the air had. a grey, dull feel to it, as if a vital essence in it had been used up long ago. There was a smell of must and stewed tea and old newspapers, and, everywhere, a flattish, faintly sweet something which I took to be the afterglow of M a m m y French. I suppose there will be g u f f a w s if I say I am a fastidious man, but it's true. 1

was already in s o m e distress before I started poking a m o n g Char!ie*s things, and I feared what I might find.

His sad little secrets were no nastier than mine, or anyone else's, yet when here and there I turned over a stone and they c a m e scuttling out, I shivered, and was ashamed for him and for myself. I steeled myself, though, and persevered, and was rewarded in the end. There was a rolltop desk in his b e d r o o m , which took me ten minutes of hard w o r k with a kitchen knife to unlock, squatting on my heels and sweating beads of pure alcohol. Inside I found s o m e banknotes and a plastic wallet of credit cards. There were letters, too — f r o m my mother, of all people, written thirty, forty years before. I did not read them, I don't k n o w w h y , but put them back reverently, along with the credit cards, and even the cash, and locked the desk again. As I was g o i n g out I exchanged a shamefaced little grin with my reflection in the w a r d r o b e mirror. That G e r m a n , what's his name, was right: m o n e y is abstract happiness.

T h e b a t h r o o m was on the first-floor return, a sort of w o o d e n lean-to with a gas geyser and a gigantic, claw-footed bath. I crouched over the hand-basin and scraped o f f t w o days" g r o w t h of stubble with Charlie's soap-142
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encrusted razor. I had thought of growing a beard, for disguise, but 1 had lost enough of myself already, I did not want my face to disappear as well. The shaving-glass had a concave, silvery surface in which my magnified features —

a broad, pitted j a w , one black nose-hole with hairs, a single, rolling eyeball — bobbed and swayed alarmingly, like things looming in the window of a bathysphere. When I had finished I got into the tub and lay with my eyes shut while the water cascaded down on me from the geyser. It was good, at once a solace and a scalding chastisement, if the gas had not eventually gone out I might have stayed there all day, lost to myself and everything else in that roaring, tombal darkness. When I opened my eyes tiny stars were whizzing and popping in front of me. I padded, dripping, into Charlie's room, and spent a long time deciding what to wear. In the end I chose a dark-blue silk shirt and a somewhat louche, flowered bow-tie to go with it. Black socks, of course — silk again: Charlie is not one to stint himself — and a pair of dark trousers, baggy but well cut, of a style which was antique enough to have come back into fashion. For the present I would do without underwear: even a killer on the run has his principles, and mine precluded getting into another man's drawers. My own clothes — how odd they looked, thrown on the bedroom floor, as if waiting to be outlined in chalk — I gathered in a bundle, and with my face averted carried them to the kitchen and stuffed them into a plastic garbage bag. Then I washed and dried the breakfast things, and was standing in the middle of the floor with a soiled tea-towel in my hand when the image of her bloodied face shot up in front of me like something in a fairground stall, and I had to sit down, winded and shaking. For I kept forgetting, you see, forgetting all about it, for quite long periods. I suppose my mind needed respite, in order to 143
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cope. Wearily I looked about the big dank kitchen. I wondered if Charlie would
notice
there was a plate missing. Why did I throw it into the sea, why did I do that? It was not yet noon. T i m e opened its black maw in my face. I went into one of the front rooms — net curtains, vast dimng-table, a stuffed owl under glass — and stood at the window looking out at the sea. All that blue out there was daunting. I paced the floor, stopped, stood listening, my heart in my mouth. What did I expect to hear? There was nothing, only the distant noise of other lives, a tiny ticking and plinking, like the noise of an engine cooling down. I remembered days like this in my childhood, strange, empty days when I would wander softly about the silent house and seem to myself a kind of ghost, hardly there at all, a memory, a shadow of some more solid version of myself living, oh, living marvellously, elsewhere.

I must stop. I'm sick of myself, all this.

Time. The days.

Go on, g o on.

Disgust, now, that is something I know about. Let me say a word or two about disgust. Here I sit, naked under my prison garb, wads of pallid flesh trussed and bagged like badly packaged meat. I get up and walk around on my hind legs, a belted animal, shedding an invisible snow of scurf everywhere I move. Mites live on me, they lap my sweat, stick their snouts into my pores and gobble up the glop they find there. Then the split skin, the cracks, the crevices. Hair: just think of hair. And this is only the surface. Imagine what is going on inside, the purple pump shuddering and squelching, lungs fluttering, and, down in the dark, the glue factory at its ceaseless work. Animate 144
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My wife came to see me today. This is not unusual, she comes every week. As a remand prisoner 1 have the right to unrestricted visiting, but I have not told her this, and if she knows it she has said nothing. We prefer it this way.

Even at its most uneventful the Thursday visiting hour is a bizarre, not to say uncanny ritual. It is conducted in a large, square, lofty r o o m with small windows set high up under the ceiling. A partition of plywood and glass, an ugly contraption, separates us from our loved ones, with w h o m we converse as best we can by way of a disinfected plastic grille. This state of virtual quarantine is a recent imposition. It is meant to keep out drugs, we're told, but I think it is really a way of keeping
in
those interesting viruses which lately we have begun to incubate in here.

The room has a touch of the aquarium about it, with that wall of greenish glass, and the tall light drifting down from above, and the voices that come to us out of the plastic lattices as if bubbled through water. We inmates sit with shoulders hunched, leaning grimly on folded arms, wan, bloated, vague-eyed, like unhoused crustaceans crouching at the bottom of a tank. O u r visitors exist in a different element from ours, they seem more sharply defined than we, more intensely present in their world. Sometimes we catch a look in their eyes, a mixture of curiosity and compassion, and faint repugnance, too, which strikes us to the heart. They must feel the force of our longing, must hear it, almost, the mermen's song, a high needle-note of pure w o e buzzing in the glass that separates us from them.

Their concern for our plight is not a comfort, but distresses 145
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us, rather. This is the teoderest time of our week, we desire tranquillity, decorum, muted voices. We are constantly on edge, worried that someone's wife or girlfriend out there will m a k e a scene, j u m p up and shout, pound her fists on the partition, weep. When such a thing does happen it is awful, just awful, and afterwards the one that it happened to is an object of sympathy and awe amongst us, as if he had suffered a bereavement.

No fear of Daphne making a scene. She maintains an admirable poise at all times. T o d a y , for instance, when she told me about the child, she spoke quietly, looking away f r o m me with her usual air of faint abstraction. I confess I was annoyed at her, I couldn't hide it. She should have told me she was having him tested, instead of just presenting me with the diagnosis out of the blue like this.

She gave me a quizzical look, tilting her head to one side and almost smiling. Are you surprised? she said. I turned my face away crossly and did not answer. Of course I was not surprised. I knew there was something w r o n g with him, I always knew — I told her so, long before she was ready to admit it. F r o m the start there was the way he m o v e d , warily, quaking, on his scrawny little legs, as if trying not to drop s o m e large, unmanageable thing that had been d u m p e d into his arms, looking up at us in bewilderment and supplication, like a creature looking up out of a hole in the ground. Wlhtere did you take him, I said, what hospital, what did they say exactly? She shrugged. T h e y were very nice, she said, very sympathetic.

T h e doctor talked to her for a long time. It is a very rare condition, somebody's syndrome, I have forgotten the name already, s o m e damn Swiss or S w e d e — what does it matter. He will never speak properly. He'll never do anything properly, it seems. There is something w r o n g with his brain, something is missing, some vital bit. She 146
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explained it all to m e , repeating w h a t the doctor told her, but I w a s only half-listening. A sort of weariness had c o m e o v e r m e , a sort of lethargy. V a n is his n a m e , have I m e n t i o n e d that? V a n . He's seven. 'When I get out he will p r o b a b l y be, w h a t , thirty-something? Jesus, almost as old as I am n o w . A big child, that's what the country people will call him, not w i t h o u t fondness, at C o o l g r a n g e . A b i g child.

I will not, I will not w e e p . If I start n o w I'll never stop.

In the afternoon I b r o k e into Charlie's desk again, and t o o k s o m e cash and ventured out to the newsagent's on the harbour. W h a t a strange, hot thrill of excitement I felt, stepping into the shop, my s t o m a c h w o b b l e d , and I seemed to be treading slowly t h r o u g h s o m e thick, resistant m e d i u m . I think a part of me h o p e d — no, expected — that s o m e h o w I w o u l d be saved, that as in a fairy-tale everything w o u l d be magically reversed, that the w i c k e d witch w o u l d disappear, that the spell w o u l d be lifted, that the m a i d w o u l d w a k e f r o m her enchanted sleep. A n d w h e n I picked up the papers it seemed for a m o m e n t as if s o m e m a g i c had indeed been w o r k e d , f o r at first I could see nothing in t h e m except m o r e stuff a b o u t the b o m b i n g and its aftermath. I b o u g h t three m o r n i n g s , and an early-evening edition, n o t i n g (is this only hindsight?) the hard l o o k that the p i m p l e d girl behind the counter g a v e m e .

T h e n I hurried back to the house, my heart g o i n g at a gallop, as if it w e r e s o m e choice erotica I w a s clutching under my a r m . Indoors again, I left the papers on the kitchen-table and ran to the b a t h r o o m , w h e r e in my agitation I m a n a g e d to pee on my foot. After a lengthy, 147

feverish search I f o u n d a quarter-full bottle of gin and took a g o o d slug f r o m the neck. I tried to find something else to do, but it w a s no g o o d , and with leaden steps I returned to the kitchen and sat d o w n slowly at the table and spread out the papers in front of me. T h e r e it was, a few paragraphs in one of the mornings,, squeezed under a p h o t o g r a p h of a bandaged survivor of the b o m b i n g sitting up in a hospital bed. In the evening edition there was a bigger story, with a p h o t o g r a p h of the b o y s I had seen playing in the hotel grounds. It was they w h o had found her. T h e r e was a p h o t o g r a p h of her, too, gazing out solemn-eyed f r o m a blurred b a c k g r o u n d , it must have been lifted f r o m a g r o u p shot of a w e d d i n g , or a dance, she was wearing a long, ugly dress with an elaborate collar, and was clutching something, flowers, perhaps, in her hands. Her n a m e was Josephine Bell. T h e r e was m o r e inside, a file picture of Behrens and a view of Whitewater House, and an article on the Behrens collection, littered with mis-spellings and garbled dates. A reporter had been sent d o w n the country to talk to M r s JBrigid Bell, the mother. She was a w i d o w .