The Man Who Built the World (21 page)

‘. . . watched as she became more like Gabrielle every day. Never as beautiful, never in a million years, but close, so close . . .’

Ian felt his fingers grip the edge of the table, his knuckles whitening.

‘So beautiful, so . . . glorious. So much like her mother that as Gabrielle’s memory began to fade, I could barely tell them apart –’

Ian came slowly to his feet.
He planted both hands on the table top and leaned forward toward Red, eyes sharp, piercing. ‘What are you telling me Red? What are you trying to say? I don’t like what you’re implying with this –’

Red looked up, shocked, broken from his monologue like a man snapped from a trance.
He appeared lost, as though barely aware he had been speaking at all.

‘Ian, I – I didn’t mean . . . I never touched Bethany until we became together, she was twenty – I –’
He looked into Ian’s eyes as if searching for the incriminations that waited there.

‘I trusted you my whole life, Red.
On the strength of our friendship I’ll believe you had no contact with my daughter until she became an adult like you and me. If you’re suggesting anything more, I swear I’ll . . .’ He trailed off, but his threat was far from hollow.

Red stood, hands coming up defensively.
Suddenly the huge hulking strength that had so terrified Matthew seemed nothing but a memory.

‘No, Ian, no.
Look at me. Could I have done something like that? She was a child, Ian. Bethany was a child! I loved her mother, and the image of her that your daughter became, but back then she was just a child!’

Ian forced himself to relax a little.
He took a deep breath, trying to diffuse his anger.

‘I think the last few months have taken their merits on us,’ Red said, eyes pleading.
‘The last two days have all but broken us. I think we need another drink.’

Ian nodded and gave his friend a wry smile.
‘Maybe something stronger.’

Red went to the cabinet and returned with two glasses of whiskey.
They jumped on the table when he put them down; his hands were shaking so much.

Ian watched him with a steady gaze.
‘I think you’d better explain what you meant by that,’ he said, downing half his drink. ‘
Exactly
what you meant.’

‘Ian, I –’

‘I know you’re my best friend, Red, but Bethany was my daughter. My flesh and blood.’ He stared at his friend, and for the first time, perhaps in his life, he wondered if he really knew the other man. Were they just strangers after all, or was it like Red told it, just the weight of the last few days hanging like a heavy thunder cloud over their heads, clouding their judgment and their reason?

Red rubbed his eyes, shook his head.
‘After Gabrielle . . .
died
, I guess I turned my love towards Bethany – but
not
as you think – I loved her like a daughter, as though she were my own. But as she grew up, as she became a woman, I don’t deny that my feelings changed, my
love
changed. I began to love her as a woman, and because of what she reminded me of, because she reminded me so much of Gabrielle,
your
Gabrielle –’

‘You loved my daughter because you wanted her mother?’

Red shrugged. ‘I guess so.’ His words seemed to echo across the room.

Ian sighed.
‘Gabrielle was mute when I first found her, if you remember?’

Red shook his head.
Ian smiled fondly, gazing down into the dark varnish of the tabletop, mind drifting back through the years. ‘All she did was smile and touch things, the flowers, the grass, even the bugs that crawled through the dirt. As though she’d never seen living things before.’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘For weeks she said nothing, just listened to my words with her head cocked as though everything I said was like sweet music. I began to despair of ever hearing her voice, but then one day she just began to talk. Just like that.’ Ian sighed. ‘For years I thought the same thing might happen to Bethany. Prayed for it, every day.’

‘But nothing.’

‘Not a single word.’ Ian expelled a sharp breath, and suddenly tensed. Red narrowed his eyes, noticing.

‘What?’

‘I think what happened to Gabrielle had something to do with speech. When she spoke it let the world in. It let
us
in, and it allowed her to experience everything that was corrupt in our lives, and it caused her to suffer because of it. Our lives and our world helped to taint her, to turn her bad. I think that’s why Bethany never spoke. She was afraid of the same thing happening.’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘Is it? Is it really? You saw what happened to Gabrielle.’

Red rubbed his eyes.
Ian took another drink.

‘
And I think somehow Gabrielle found a way to communicate this to Bethany.’

Red’s face turned hard.
‘What are you talking about?’

Ian looked at up at his friend.
Tears shone in his eyes. ‘Because one day I found out something about Bethany, found out something special. And I couldn’t handle it. It tore me apart, until I in turn . . . I
in turn
. . .’

‘Ian, what did you do
? Oh God,
what did you do?
’

Ian choked back tears.
His face had turned dark red, his eyes watery. ‘I found out how she communicated.’

‘
What?
’

He grimaced.
‘Bethany could communicate. She communicated all right. But only with herself.’ He shook his head violently, as though the memories jostling inside could scold his brain. ‘She wrote . . . she wrote a lot. In notebooks . . . in – in journals.’

‘What, like diaries?’

Ian nodded sadly. ‘I don’t know where she got the books from, or the pens. Maybe she stole them from one of the tutors I used to take her to. I don’t know. But I found them one day, while cleaning out her room when she was out in the garden. In a cavity under a loose floorboard. A whole stack of them, going right back to just after Gabrielle’s death.’

Re
d exhaled slowly. ‘Oh my good god.’

‘I never told you.
Never told anyone. Whenever she was outside or I’d taken her down to the village, I would sneak up into her room, and one by one I read through them all. Oh, Red, the things she wrote about! There was life in her all right, locked away behind the visage of a mute little girl.’

‘Like what?’

‘Things, just things. About the world, about us. But a lot about her mother. About Gabrielle.’

He stood up, went to the cabinet and refilled his glass.
‘I began to suffer nightmares, really bad ones, the images I got in my head staying even after I woke. I got sick, and it began to drive me mad. One night, you were away . . . I got drunk. I got drunk as hell. The next morning I could I barely remember what had happened.’

‘Yes?’

‘You see, they weren’t just memories of her mother. Bethany claimed to still see her, to see her mother watching her, wanting her back. God, they scared me. For a little girl, her writing was so damn
vivid.
But you know what? The worst thing was that I found myself believing them, that I actually
believed
she could still see Gabrielle, and I became jealous. Jealous of my own daughter because she could see her mother and I could not.’ He frowned and gritted his teeth to hold back tears. ‘Jealously. Ha! I could have done so much for her, knowing that she really did exist behind those blank eyes, that my little girl was actually in there. But I didn’t. You know what I did? You know what I did instead of helping my little girl?’

‘I don’t think I want to know.’

Ian ignored him and carried on. ‘After I’d put away a bottle of whiskey to wash away the pain, I went up into her room, and I took them. I took them all and I went downstairs and I burnt them, every last one. Put them in the grate. Whether she knew what I did with them I don’t know, but the smell of burning paper filled the house for days, and I felt so cruel and evil I wanted to kill myself right then. But I couldn’t, I had to stay, had to try and make it up for her. But that night, that night –’

Red said nothing, just watched Ian as he continued to talk, pouring out a confession that seemed to corrode him with its very bitterness.

‘I knew, afterwards, that there was no chance she would ever speak. At least not to me. By doing that I had dug a hole between us, one I’d never fill. You have no idea how bad that made me feel. That I’d alienated my own daughter
completely
, and it was all my fault. All my fault.’ He shook his head. ‘First I took away her mother. Then I drove her brother away. And then . . . and then –’ He downed the drink, coughed once, twice. ‘I took away her father. I destroyed all image of a man who loved her. Until you came along, Red, she had no one.’

‘That’s not true, Ian.
She must have known –’

‘You’re so wrong, Red.
So wrong. I ruined her life, just as I ruined her brother’s. Just in different ways. Just by being flawed. By not being good enough to cope, by not being good enough to handle what life put in front of me.’

Red looked like he wanted to say something but couldn’t.
For a few moments Ian let his despair drown him, drag him down into a place where Red couldn’t reach him. Where no one could reach him.

A couple of minutes passed.
They sat in silent contemplation, Ian with his head lowered, Red with his fingers rolling slowly around his whiskey glass.

The balance between them had shifted.
Red had stood on the brink, but had dragged himself back. It was Ian’s turn to linger there, on the verge of breakdown and self destruction. He thought back to all the things he had done wrong in his life, and wondered if anything was as bad as destroying his daughter’s voice. He didn’t think so.

But perhaps life had gifted Ian one last chan
ce to make amends. It had found him a drowning body screaming amongst the mire of his life, that only he and Red together had the strength to pull free.

Ian looked up.
Red was looking towards the window. Darkness had fallen outside; the outside light of the house cast a glow across the courtyard, pushing the night back from the window. Red looked back, and an unspoken agreement passed between them.

Time to go.

Red stood up. ‘Come on, Ian,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a visit to make. Whatever happened in the past has gone now. We’ve got something to do, now, here.’

Ian nodded.
He felt as weary as Atlas holding up the world. ‘Okay,’ he said, but his voice was hollow, his fight gone.

###

Bethany’s Diary,
June 20th, 1990

A funny thing happened today. Well, didn’t really happen, more something that was. Something I found.

I came out of my room, and lying on the floor outside of my door, was a notepad, not di
ssimilar to those I’d used for my diaries before. Some sort of apology from my dad perhaps, I think. I was touched, a little I guess, but the whole episode is still so fresh in my mind that I can’t begin to consider forgiveness, not just yet. Maybe in a few more days, perhaps weeks, even. I don’t think he really understands just what he’s taken away.

My memories were in those books.
My past, my memories of Mother. He threw my diaries in the fire, and might as well have thrown Mother in with them. It is just too much to contemplate right now.

I was young then, I didn’t understand much about anything.
I have memories of her face when I was really young, leaning over where I lay, eyes like pools of gold watching me. Mother. But since then, very little.

I don’t remember her getting sick, don’t remember how she died.
Not until she told me.

I think at first she was as scared as I was to speak, but once we both realised it would be okay, it got easier.
Those first words were the hardest, but once I got used to it, it wasn’t so hard. Not so hard at all, and we talked as if we’d never been apart.

9

Her face filled his vision from periphery to periphery, a blurred mess of grey cracks and crannies, claw marks and dried spots of blood.
Which, he realised from somewhere, wasn’t actually her face at all, but the wall against which he had slumped, the wall against which, many years ago, her scabbed and blistered fingers had scrabbled in a desperate attempt to escape from the bedroom that had become her prison.

No, he wasn’t looking at her, because Mother was sitting over on the bed.

He heard a whimpering sound emitting from a source within the room, filling it with a cold trickling presence like running water, which then evaporated to fill the air like a fine mist. It came from his own throat, tight and parched from sleep and drink, cracked like the walls.