“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.
I stopped in Streatham High Street to give Johnny his money and drop him off. He leaned in the open passenger door to say goodbye. “When you’ve finished with the gun, don’t keep it or sell it. Chuck it in the river.”
“Thanks for everything, Johnny.”
“I’m worried for you, Joe, but I’m glad I’m getting out.”
The midafternoon traffic in central London was surprisingly light, and I reached my road an hour and a half after the phone call. I turned off before the apartment building and parked behind it. Round the back, where the dustbins were kept, was a locked fire escape for which only the residents had the key. I let myself through and went up quietly onto the roof. I hadn’t been out here since the morning after Logan’s accident, after Parry’s first phone call. There was a stain on the table from my breakfast coffee. It was bright up here, and to see through the skylight I had to get down on my knees and cup my hands over the glass. My view was across the hallway and into a portion of the kitchen. I could see Clarissa’s bag, but nothing else.
The second skylight gave me a reverse sight line along the hall, into the sitting room. Fortunately, the door was wide open. Clarissa was sitting on the sofa, facing in my direction, though I could not make out the express
ion on her face. Parry was seated directly in front of her on a wooden kitchen chair. His back was to me, and I guessed he was doing the talking. He was thirty feet away at most, and I indulged a daydream of taking a shot at him right then, even though he was too close to Clarissa and I didn’t trust my aim, or understand enough about guns to know how the glass of the skylight might deflect the bullet from its course.
This fantasy had little to do with the actual gun, which was beginning to weigh in my pocket. I went back to the car and parked round the front and sounded the horn as I got out. Parry came to the window and stood partly concealed by the curtain. He looked down and we exchanged a glance, inverting our usual perspective. As I went up the stairs, I felt for the gun and located the safety catch and practiced releasing it. I rang the doorbell and let myself in. I could hear my heart under my shirt, and the pressure of my pulse made my field of vision throb. When I called out Clarissa’s name, my thickened tongue glued itself between the c and the l.
“We’re in here,” she replied, and then she added on a rising pitch of caution, “Joe—” and was cut off by a shushing sound from Parry. I went slowly toward the sitting room and stopped in the doorway. My dread was of provoking sudden action. He had moved the kitchen chair to one side and was sitting on the sofa, with Clarissa close by him on his left. We looked at each other, and she closed her eyes for half a second, which I took to mean it was bad, he was bad, watch out. He looked young and gawky with his hair cut. His hands were shaking.
Since I had appeared before them there had been complete silence. To fill it I said, “I preferred the ponytail.”
He glanced away to his right, to the invisible presence on his shoulder, before meeting my eye. “You know why I’m here.”
“Well …” I said, and took a couple of paces into the room.
His voice cracked on a higher note. “Don’t come any closer. I’ve told Clarissa not to move.”
I was looking at his clothes, wondering about the weapon. He had to have one. He hadn’t come to kill me with his bare hands. He could easily have borrowed or bought from the men he had hired. There was no obvious bulge in the beige cotton jacket he was wearing, though its cut was loose and it was hard to tell. An edge of something black, a comb perhaps, protruded from his top pocket. He wore tight-fitting jeans over gray leather boots, so whatever he had was in the jacket. He sat right up against Clarissa, with his left leg touching her right, almost squashing her into the arm of the sofa. She was perfectly still, her hands palm downward on her knees, her body radiating disgust and terror at his touch. Her head was turned a little toward him, ready for whatever he might do. She was still, but ripples of muscle and tendon at the base of her neck suggested that she was coiled, ready to spring away.
“Now you’ve got me here,” I said, “you don’t need Clarissa.”
“I need you both,” he said quickly. The tremor in his hands was so bad he clasped them. Sweat was beading on his forehead, and I thought I could smell the sweet grassy tang. Whatever he had in mind was about to happen. Even so, now that he was right in front of me, the idea of pointing a gun at him seemed ludicrous. And I wanted to sit down, I was suddenly so tired. I wanted to lie somewhere and rest. I felt let down by the adrenaline that was meant to bestow alertness. I couldn’t help myself yawning, and he must have thought I was being very cool.
“You forced your way in here,” I said.
“I love you, Joe,” he said simply, “and it’s wrecked my life.” He glanced at Clarissa as though acknowledging a repetition. “I didn’t want any of it—you knew that, didn’t you? But you wouldn’t leave me alone, and I thought there must be a point to it. You had to be leading me on for a reason. You were called to God and you were fighting it and you seemed to be asking me to help you …” He paused, looking across his shoulder for his next thought. I suffered no failure of attention, but my anxiety about his closeness to Clarissa continued to grow. Why wouldn’t he let her move? I remembered a moment during my visit to the Logans when I had grasped what it might mean to lose her. Should I be doing something now? I also remembered Johnny’s warning. As soon as I took out the gun, I would be giving Parry permission to kill. Perhaps the danger could be dissipated in talk. My one certainty was that I should not contradict him.
Clarissa’s voice was very quiet and small. She was taking a risk, trying to reason with him. “I’m sure Joe didn’t mean you any harm.”
The sweat was fairly rolling off Parry now. There was something he was about to do. He forced a laugh. “That’s debatable!”
“He was actually very frightened of you, you know, standing outside the house, and all the letters. He didn’t know anything about you, then suddenly there you were …”
Parry tossed his head from side to side. It was an involuntary spasm, an intensification of his nervous sideways glance, and I had the feeling we were catching a glimpse of the core of his condition; he had to block out the facts that didn’t fit. He said, “You don’t understand. Neither of you do, but you especially.” He turned toward her.
I put my right hand in my jacket pocket and felt for the safety catch, but I was fumbling too hard and couldn’t find it.
“You’ve no idea what this has been about. How could you? But I haven’t come here to talk about it. It’s all in the past. It’s not worth discussing, is it, Joe? We’re finished, aren’t we? All of us.” He trailed a finger through the sweat along the line of his eyebrows and sighed loudly. We waited. When he raised his head, he was looking at me. “I’m not going to go on about it. That’s not why I’m here. I’ve come to ask you something. I think you know what it is.”
“Perhaps I do,” I lied.
He took a deep breath. We were coming to it. “Forgiveness?” He said on a rising interrogative note. “Please forgive me, Joe, for what I did yesterday, for what I tried to do.”
I was so surprised I could not speak immediately. I took my hand out of my pocket and said, “You tried to kill me.” I wanted to hear him say it. I wanted Clarissa to hear.
“I planned it, I paid for it. If you wouldn’t return my love, I thought I’d rather have you dead. It was insanity, Joe. I want you to forgive me.”
I was going to ask him again to let Clarissa move away when he turned toward her, thrust his hand in his top pocket, and pulled out a short-bladed knife, which he drew through the air in a wide semicircular motion. I had no time to move. She raised both hands to her throat, but he wasn’t aiming for that. He brought the tapering point of the blade right up under his own earlobe and held it there. The hand on the knife was shaking, and pressing hard. He turned right round to show her, and then he showed me.
He pleaded in a kind of rising wail, an unbearable sound. “You’ve never given me a thing. Please let me have this. I’m going to do it anyway. Let me have this one thing from you. Forgiveness, Joe. If you forgive me, God will too.”
Surprise was making me stupid, and relief was confusing my responses. It was so extraordinary, such a reverse, that he was not about to attack Clarissa or me that the fact he was about to slit his throat in front of us presented itself with numbing slowness. I managed to say, “Drop the knife and we’ll talk.”
He shook his head and seemed to press harder. A plumb line of blood ran down from the knife’s tip.
Clarissa too seemed paralyzed. Then she was stretching a hand toward his wrist, as though she might bring him back with the touch of a finger.
“Now,” he said. “Please, Joe. Now.”
“How can I forgive you when you’re mad?”
I aimed at his right side, away from Clarissa. In the enclosed space the explosion seemed to wipe out all other senses, and the room flashed like a blank screen. Next I saw the knife on the floor and Parry slumped back with his hand to his shattered elbow, his face white and his mouth open in shock.
In a world in which logic was the engine of feeling, this should have been the moment when Clarissa stood, when we moved toward each other and folded into each other’s arms
with kisses and tears and conciliatory murmurs and words of forgiveness and love. We should have been able to turn our backs on Parry, whose thoughts must have shrunk to a brilliant point of pain, to his ruined ulna and radial (six months later I came across a chip of bone under the sofa); we should have been able to leave him behind, and when the police and ambulance men had carried him away, when we had talked and caressed and emptied the teapot twice over, we might have retreated to our bedroom to lie face to face and allow ourselves to be carried back to the pure familiar space. Then we could have set about rebuilding our lives, right there.
But such logic would have been inhuman. There were immediate and background reasons why the climax of the afternoon could not have been in this particular happiness. The narrative compression of storytelling, especially in the movies, beguiles us with happy endings into forgetting that sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It’s the great deadener. Those moments of joyful release from terror are not so easily had. Within the past twenty-four hours Clarissa and I had witnessed a bungled murder and an attempted suicide. Clarissa had spent the afternoon under the threat of Parry’s knife. When she had spoken to me on the phone, he had held the blade against her cheek. For my part, aside from the stress, the accumulation of horrible certainties borne out by events brought no immediate comfort in vindication. Instead I felt cramped by a flat and narrow sense of grievance. It was a passionless anger, all the harder to bear or express because I intuited that being right in this case was also to be contaminated by the truth.
Besides, there isn’t ever only one system of logic. For example, the police, as always, saw things differently. Whatever they might have had in store for Parry, they were quite clear in their minds, when they came to the flat twenty minutes after the shooting, about their business with me. Possession of an illicit firearm and malicious wounding with intent. Parry went his way on a stretcher while a police constable and a sergeant formally, and even a little apologetically, arrested me. An exception was made to the usual procedure where guns were involved, and I was permitted to walk downstairs unhandcuffed. On our way we passed the police photographer and forensic specialist going up. A routine, I was assured, in case one of us changed his story. My third visit to a police station in twenty-four hours, the third in my life. More random clustering. Clarissa was asked to come too, as a witness. Inspector Linley was off duty, but my file was brought out and read and I was treated pleasantly enough. All the same, I was held in custody overnight in a cell next door to a bawling drunk, and the following morning, after a long interview, I was bailed to return in six weeks. As it turned out, following a letter from Linley to the director of public prosecution, no charges were ever brought against me.