The Tyrant's Novel (8 page)

Don't worry, he said. Get your breath. Everyone understands, Jimmy and Sarah's mother understand. You're lucky in your in-laws.

I didn't have any in-laws anymore. Andrew assured me we could go back to the car from here without risking any contacts. No one expected more of me.

Since nothing much had been demanded of me for some days, I forgot about my laptop and about drowning it, and spent the rest of the day and early evening in the Kennedys' screening room—it wasn't large, but it was curtained and had one of those huge television screens generally seen only in the international hotels in town. I watched famous soccer games, war and murder movies. I sneered at love stories, laughed bitterly at everything—every depicted human concern and demise. Andrew sat next to me for a good part of the time, drinking whiskey, and Grace brought tea and food.

As, towards midnight on the day of the burial, we watched a rerun of the last World Cup final between Brazil and Italy, Andrew filled me in on the details of the last time we failed to make the World Cup. The Others from across the straits had beaten us 3–2 with a penalty kick and, almost instantly afterwards, a goal, after we had been ahead 2–1 with five minutes to go. When our team arrived back at the airport in town, they and their officials were collected instantly by the Overguard, even before they had claimed their baggage, and driven in a bus from the tarmac to the Winter Hill Palace. Bemused wives, girlfriends, and children, gathered to console the heroes, still waited at the airport, expecting them to emerge from Customs, even as they were ushered into Great Uncle's presence. According to Andrew's story, Great Uncle sat behind a polished table with the Minister for Sport, one of his dumber stepbrothers, Albert Jenkins. He reproached the team and its management, particularly eyeing off Red Campbell, his remote kinsman, and Tony Barker, the unpopular team manager, known for a certain close-lipped arrogance. They all felt humiliated, one of the team's young defenders told Andrew later. It was a terrible thing for any man, simply in terms of his self-regard, to be despised and chastised by his head of state. They also felt a professional weight, knowing they would need to play with unchallengeable brilliance for the next four years if they wished to contest another World Cup. One would have thought they were adequately punished by now, said Andrew.

But then Great Uncle called in Sonny, sometimes known in our polity as Football Sonny because of his passion for the sport—though he could also have been called Cocaine Sonny or Bimbo Sonny. If Great Uncle had been unhinged by power, having once been a halfway normal though rather thuggish social democrat, according to all available evidence Sonny had been quite crazy from childhood. His father's fierce tribal nature had been restrained by powerlessness, his childhood governed by want and lust for literacy. Sonny had experienced none of these constraints. Though Great Uncle was rarely photographed unless he wore a holstered pistol, and in some pictures held in his hands his legendary old AK-47 from the days of the revolutions (two of them), Sonny seemed to carry an arsenal, and was seldom photographed without a joyously caressed M16. When he came into the team's presence that night, Sonny looked grim, but they knew him from many a locker room visit he'd made, and expected nothing more than angry words.

Instead, the young man came from behind his father's desk and shot Red Campbell through the head. Then Tony Barker, who had stood firm, either defiant or stunned, was similarly shot. Some of the players had blood and gobbets of cerebral matter on their clothing. Members of the Overguard came and removed the bodies, Sonny had a quiet word with his father and then went off to a party, and the rest of the team was ushered to their bus again and driven back to the airport. They had instructions to tell Mrs. Barker and Mrs. Campbell that their husbands had been delayed at Ankara, and a story was published in the
Gazette
that the manager and the captain had been arrested by the Others in Straits City for crimes against underage girls. Other team members soon enough told the bereaved families the truth, but by mutual consent the story quickly died. The widows received a sumptuous pension, and lest recruitment of young players stop, the Minister for Sport was authorized to tell the national side, on an informal basis, that they had nothing to fear, that the Campbell-Barker case had been a special one.

The national side had never looked back, making the quarterfinals six years ago, and being beaten in the semis at the last World Cup. Semis were good enough for national credit. After all, Great Uncle didn't want absolute victories. He wanted only a showing of honor. One way or another, said Andrew with an acid laugh, it couldn't be denied that the cement of the national team was fortified with the blood of Campbell and Barker.

Later still in the night, Grace brought in the sleeping tablets she had had made up. She laid them on the table beside a glass of liquor I had nearly finished. Then she took both my hands in hers. Alan, she said, I'm not going to treat you like a child. But you have to promise you'll use these tablets purely to help you to sleep. God knows you need it. Do you promise me that? Andrew and I can't afford to lose you.

Of course I gave my promise. I had spaces of time ahead of me in which to act. I had the leisure of choosing the moment.

Don't forget, she told me, you have a book to publish. You can dedicate it to Sarah, and through it she will live.

I nodded. It would be a miserable enough gesture, my book momentarily in the world. That was why I had decided to give it to her pitiful, violated shell. But for Grace's sake, I drunkenly decided that yes, it would be a bad thing, or more accurately uncivil, to make an end of things here, in the Kennedy household. Like most potential suicides, I thought upon my exit purely in terms of causing minimum inconvenience. I did not believe that anyone would be too aggrieved. I had typically ceased to believe in the mystery of human affection.

I could not impose on the Kennedys too long. Nor did I want to become their child, though I had a sense that they were willing, from the kindest motives, to transform me into a damaged son.

After I had watched a few more of Andrew's videos, and received and absorbed some more of his diverting Great Uncle tales, I intended to go up north to Scarpdale, where an old friend, a doctor, had a state medical post. I could stay with him in what I thought of as that city of crystalline air, beneath mountains of blue snow, on avenues as straight as my intentions. I was coming, Sarah, to where you were, to the nothing you enhanced. Was delay fatal to the would-be suicide? I did not believe so.

When I went home to pack, I waited till eight at night and took my laptop out across Republic Bridge, and without hindrance from the Overalls or anyone else, dropped it into those deep, ancestrally owned waters which had carried three thousand years of culture down to the sea and would have no trouble destroying the cyber ghost of my novel.

I caught a plane up to Scarpdale, and the city did not seem as pristine or well planned as it had been in my imagination. (Why not abandon an earth whose cities let a man down?) My friend and I drank too much together in the thin air. But he had a very pleasant government villa to do it in, and was occasionally visited by a brown-eyed woman friend, the young widow of an officer killed in an ambush by one of the tribal liberation fronts in the mountains far beyond the city. She possessed a wistful expectation that she and my friend would marry, but he told me when we were drinking together that he did not choose to acquire a ready-bred family. It was not the widow who frightened him—it was her boy and girl, with the memory of the brave father in their eyes.

Oh how we drank! I came to the conclusion my friend was a sot—as was I, but that didn't count, since I had abandoned all expectations of health. He was good at disguising his daily intake of alcohol. He told me that in Scarpdale a great deal of alcoholism prevailed amongst bureaucrats and officers. The ski run reserved purely for military officers and officials went underused. Scarpdale was one of those places bad for morale, a town in which people felt exiled unless they were natives of the region, as indeed Great Uncle had been when young. One took a mere three days to examine comprehensively Scarpdale's fourteenth-century temples. Then the chill of being remotely posted on a flank of mountains began to enter the bones.

When we were deep in drink one night, he suggested we visit a brothel. If he thought the idea would appall me, it didn't, and there was enough nihilism and drift in me to go along, as disgraceful as such an idea was. I was so far gone with vodka that I spotted little connection between any intimacy I had ever shared with Sarah and what I might be expected to do with a stranger on a whorehouse's linen. My friend joyously called ahead and ordered two women—for sharing, it seemed, in the same room. He wanted to welcome me back to the commerce of flesh, and treat my grief with orgiastic therapy. A more serious, less childlike man than he would have laughed at the idea. This, in fact, helped make it a matter of indifference to me whether I went with prostitutes or not. Later, with a clear head, I could see he had probably planned the night, rather than falling into it by impulse, but had then eased me along to the right point of stupefaction.

But it was I who went.

Somehow, in spite of his drunkenness, he drove us to a house near the old university. We were politely received by a stylish woman who called my friend
Doctor
and summoned our girls to come and meet us in the drawing room. I can't even recall their faces except for the fact that they were particularly handsome northern, semitribal women, and I assumed they had been deliberately recruited from their villages by some whoremonger. They led us, one each, by our hands to a spacious room towards the back of the house.

I somehow found myself sitting naked on a bed, caressed from behind by a wild-eyed peasant girl, her legs slotted around mine, her pelvis grinding against my spine in simulated urgency. I watched my friend the doctor—mind you, an expert in communicable diseases—drop to his knees before the fairer, less raw, more formal of the two young women and begin mouthing her in a manner which seemed to bring her unfeigned pleasure. Her groans so dominated the room that the second mountain girl and I gave up our own unenergetic rites and simply gazed at the event on the other side of the room. No question but that I had displayed the normal, half-interested animal reactions when caressed, but the extra dimension of eroticism orgiasts were supposed to lend each other by their parallel acts had been replaced by bemusement. For my friend's feral appetite was somehow horrifying. Not that such usage exceeded my atlas of erotic possibilities. Nor was it the matter of hygiene alone, either, the fact that this same woman my friend was devouring had probably accommodated many officers, technicians, and departmental employees. The reaction in me combined all elements: remotely felt lust, nausea, revulsion, a sense of futility. The girl herself broke the obscene spell by withdrawing herself a little from my friend and twisting his ear, saying, Gentle, gentle, Doctor. There's time!

But that was it. He had behaved like a man in a panic, a man who believed there was no time left. My friend, I decided, would in the end destroy himself, consumed by his own hunger. A peculiar insight, you'd agree, for a man who, as I did, intended imminent suicide in a day or week or two. I saw dreadful weariness now enter the face of the doctor's prostitute and a line appear just below her jaw, the beginning of a jowl. She was disappointed at herself for believing, however briefly, in my friend's goodwill, his apparent democracy of lust, which had now turned totalitarian, his teeth biting tissue.

When I saw this, I got up, ran into the bathroom, and vomited across the floor. This brought to an end the tolerance the women had so far extended to us. As I raised my face, I could read in my friend's irritable and flushed countenance that it was the end of his tolerance for me too. I must now either end my life at altitude, in Scarpdale, or return to the city to do it.

On my last night before flying back to the city, my doctor friend, as if embarrassed by our recent mutual adventure and by what I had seen of him the previous evening, muttered some excuses about a dinner invitation he had and how bitterly he regretted we could not spend my last night in the town over a shared meal. I found it easy to tell him to keep his appointment, and if I had hurried to the curtains to see him make his way to his garden gate I am sure I would have seen a man with lightened step. No doubt he was off to visit the widow, who did not understand the sort of fellow she was interested in marrying.

I was drunk by a little after seven o'clock. The hollow air of the city seemed somehow to leave room for much liquor. I watched a video of
To Kill a Mockingbird,
which was like enjoyable science fiction to me. The film was not dubbed, and the skill of the screenplay was continuously betrayed by the banality and literalism of the subtitles. I had become so crazily and alcoholically affronted at the damage done not only to the original English but to the translation into my own language that by the time the trial scene began I stopped the tape and called Andrew Kennedy. I told him, with all the miscued fury of too much grief and too much liquor, my brain seeming to creak with malign heat, that I was watching a taped version of
To Kill a Mockingbird,
as broadcast by his National Network, no less. Under your ultimate responsibility, I said. And the subtitling's utter shit. Who does these things for you?

He was of course taken aback by the lack of greeting and, in my view, wasted time asking how I was. But I wouldn't be swayed from the point. Who does your subtitles? I insisted.

Half the English department at the university, he confessed. And then, Ellen Cassidy at Haddow and Sons.

I scoffed at this. These aren't creative people, I told him. You have to employ creative people. Movies aren't comic strips, you know. For the viewer, the shit of the subtitles leaks into the very texture of the film.

I'm sure you're right, Alan, he conceded. But we have to take what we can get.