Both projects proved beyond him.
Very soon it became clear that he could be trusted with nothing. The spacious kitchen, where Xan spent most of his suddenly limitless free time (he was keen to reassert his culinary skills), became a psycho’s laboratory of molten frying-pans, blackened pots and blazing skillets; the waste-disposer would be chewing its way through one of his dropped tablespoons while the microwave juddered and seethed. Things slid through his fingers – spillages, sickening breakages. The toaster scorched him, the coffee-grinder finesprayed him. Even the fridge stood revealed as his foe.
Elsewhere he left traces of himself around the house, like messages sent from one animal to another. A sock, a vest, a pair of underpants, on the stairs, in the sitting-room – but also his wastes, his emanations. Whenever she went near it the bathtub always seemed to contain two feet of cold swill bearing a greenish mantle; there were flannels, scraps of tissue paper, wadded with mucus and earwax, and little middens of scurf and nail-clippings, leavings, peelings. Most signally, of course, no amount of asking could persuade him to flush the toilet: as you opened the front door you felt you were entering some coop in rustic Dorset, or the Zoo, or a men’s room from the Third World. Now, at night, his armpits gave off a smell of meat.
They were at the table, with the teamugs and the newspapers. If asked to describe the atmosphere, Russia would have called it pseudo-normal. Then he said,
‘Chicks like salad.’
‘What?’
‘Chicks like salad. That’s a real difference between the sexes. Chicks like salad.’
‘You eat salad.’
‘Yeah but I don’t like salad. No man likes salad. Chicks like salad. And I can prove it.’
She waited. ‘How?’
‘Chicks eat salad when they’re stoned. A bloke would want his chocolate bar or his sugar sandwich. Not some bullshit tomato. A chick’ll eat salad in the morning. From the fridge. Only a chick would do that. That’s how sick chicks are. Christ, is that the phone?’
‘It’s the fridge.’
‘The fridge?’
‘It’s new. Haven’t you noticed? It makes a noise if you leave the door open. You left the door open.’
‘Fuck off!’ he called out to it. ‘I wonder. Am I the first man on earth to tell his fridge to fuck off?’
It came again: a vicious chirrup.
‘Oi you. Fuck off out of it!’
‘Instead of telling it to fuck off, why don’t you go and shut it?’
‘You shut it. And I mean your mouth and all.’
‘Don’t talk to me like that.’
‘Why not? Are you getting your period or something. Okay, I’ll make allowances. Red Rag is running in the two-thirty. You’ve got the painters in.’
The words came out this way: ‘Please try and remember yourself,’ said Russia.
After a moment his head and his shoulders dropped and he said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m trying to do … I am trying. You can’t imagine how hard I’m trying. You don’t know this thing. I can tell you. It’s a real cunt.’
The doorbell buzzed. Russia swung the fridge door shut on her way to the stairs.
My room, Xan thought … Outside is cold, but my room is warm, but my fridge is cold …
When Russia came back she saw that her husband was doing two things at once. Such multitasking was now rare. Doing one thing at once was difficult enough. Still, there he sat on the sofa, where he slept and wept.
Meanwhile, the little girls handed down their judgements.
Both had at first seemed astonished but on the whole delighted to see him. Billie, in the front hall on the first day, had smiled so wide that he feared her face might break: the corners of her mouth almost disappeared into her hair. He didn’t encounter Sophie until first thing the next morning: she was what he saw when he opened his eyes. Whereas Billie, in the same situation, would have inserted herself between her parents like the crossbar of a capital h (H for home, perhaps – but with the further suggestion of a thwarting wedge), Sophie kept to the side of her mother (with whom, again resonantly, she was making the beast with no backs). Sophie too smiled. And when he opened his eyes twenty minutes later she was still smiling, and he knew it was the same smile, held good as he slept. Sophie’s smile lacked the unsustainable emphasis of Billie’s. It was faithful, grateful, and above all proprietorial; she had written him off, and now he was home. He reached out and felt her arm. The warmth this event had created, his return, came back at him through her blue-veined wrist.
Billie changed slowly. She consented to be picked up and hugged, but after a couple of seconds she would wriggle for release with disconcerting vigour. Later on, when he crouched to receive her, she twirled away and then looked up at him through splayed fingers. And when he prevailed upon her to settle down to a book (come, read: the sky is falling!), and he bent down and kissed the parting of her hair, she would jerk back and rub her head and say, ‘Oh Dad‘— as if Dad was nothing more than the name he went by. She sidled up to him and asked in an embarrassed whisper if he had brought her a present; when he offered to bathe her she declined – but said he could watch. She had begun to treat him, he realised, like a moderately intriguing family friend. Billie was of that breed of little girl who, in certain lights, resembles a twenty-five-year-old emerging (with considerable advantage) from her second divorce. This formed, knowing, worldly face was the one she turned on him now. Seventh or eighth in line, he was the louche and ponderous suitor whom, against her better judgement, no doubt, she had decided to keep on file.
Sophie changed suddenly. Sophie turned, in an instant.
It was his third day home. Some logistical entanglement had forced Russia to leave him alone in the house with the baby: a configuration never repeated. Sophie was supposedly down for the night (it was about seven o’clock), and he hadn’t thought much of it when he heard the cries from her room. She had now been on the planet for almost a year. These cries of hers were confident, almost businesslike (she knew the score). He had heard her in far greater confusion and disarray. Why was it so hard for them, sometimes, to go from one state to another? What were they separating themselves from, with such bitter difficulty? In sleep, it seemed, they lost their hold on love and life; and when they woke, sometimes, they couldn’t shake off this dream of freefall.
He went in and decribbed her and took her back out into the light. She saw his face – and all the dogs of London must have snapped to attention. A scream is a blunt instrument; this was more like a whistle, piercingly focused, and focused on him … She twisted away, quietening, stiffening. Then by degrees she tracked back, infusing her lungs with short hot gasps of suspense: perhaps – obedient to the intensity of Sophie’s wish – her father would now be transformed into Russia or Imaculada. On finding that this hadn’t happened, she reestablished herself on the outer limit of distress. Then it went on getting gradually worse.
There came a crucial interval, in the garden under the apple tree. He had somehow juggled and manhandled her down the stairs, half the time on his rump, and drawing himself along on the lifeline of the banister, with the baby wedged in his knitted armpits. They gained the kitchen; he tried all he knew, and nothing worked. So he pushed his way out of the back door – and the cooler air, and the pale-blue evening above, seemed to reposition her. After a while she was able to meet his gaze. Her eyes: to contemplate them was like floating in a pond or a slow-moving river. Competing currents and temperatures subtly coursed; one of these undertows looked like trust, and he tried to swim towards it; but it was soon lost, sluiced out, in other undertows. Then he abandoned his pleading whispers and just held her to him as he groaned and shuddered. It was like the last days of Pearl: twins joined at the chest and now under the knife, in inseparable pain. Nearly an hour later Russia returned with the fetched Billie. Within ten minutes Sophie was asleep, piteously but resignedly clutching her duck.
Thereafter he would sometimes look into Sophie’s eyes, in search of that pul
se of trust. He couldn’t find it. And she cried, now, the moment he entered the room. At supper, when the baby was with them, her seat like a pair of medieval underpants bolted to the table, Xan ate with one hand in a fixed salute, shielding his face from her sight.
And Russia?
‘You’ll remember this in pain, boy.’ Well, he remembered that. ‘You went and named him!’ Named who?
He remembered the Dickheads, the dead duck upside down in the green canal. The sunset, like a firefighting operation. The paparazzo sparrow (‘Is that your “bird”?’). ‘Why’d you do it, son? You went and named him!’ Named who?
Xan had read in the books, in the literature of head injury, that an experience needs time to become a memory. Not long – maybe a second or two. And the blow had come so quickly, so hard upon. The significant name didn’t have time to become a memory. And perhaps (the books suggested) that memory-pause was a cerebral reflex – of self-protection. The brain didn’t want to remember the blow.
But he wanted to remember it. In epileptic longhand, with his pen shooting off, accelerating off in all directions, he retraced the steps of that October evening, saying come on, come on with an East End cadence (said in this way, come on rhymes with German; in the East End it was normally reserved for watching fights). Sometimes he could get as far back as the smell of the assailant’s breath, the assailant’s hormones, wrapped round his neck like a scarf. But no further. It was like an investigation into the very early universe, that infinitesimal fragment of time which was obscured by the violence of the initial conditions. You couldn’t quite reach the Big Bang – no matter what you did.
At his desk he also worked on his diary, as instructed. Record everything, they told him. And he recorded everything:
Woke at ten. Rose at eleven. Cold water on face. Went downstairs (lost balance twice). Baby there – cried. Ate cereal. Made tea, scalding hand. Had shit. Searched long time for address book. Phoned agent. Sat at desk. Wrote this.
He’d been in a state of combat-readiness, when he went down. And his body remembered that. But now he was a cripple: a cripple who was spoiling for war.
Outside was for healthy people, and he didn’t go there. Even his visits to the mailbox at the end of the front garden (a distance of fifteen feet) took him to the brink of a chaotic immensity. It made his face flicker.
Outside was the thing which is called world.
‘Do you mind if I use a tape recorder? You didn’t last time, as I remember. Rory said you wanted to give this a definite emphasis.’
‘Yeah well we’ll come to that. But – yes. I mean to send a message.’
‘Okay … When did you first realise that your father …?’
‘Was a villain. When I was little my mother used to tell me he was in the army. He’d go away for a year and Mum’d say he’s in – I don’t know – Vietnam. “But we’re not in Vietnam, Mum.” “Well your dad is, that’s all I know.” And then there were all these brown letters from Broadmoor and Strangeways, and he’d come back as pale as a polyp, so I had my doubts. And around then, see, the villains found a new toy: publicity. They all started doing what I’m doing now. Giving interviews.’
Xan had said much of this before – in interviews. And the sentences, even the paragraphs, were still there. But now something else was trying to ail his speech.
‘Villains? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.’
‘No, it don’t, and they all paid for it. They thought it was a great new way of winding up the oppo – you know, sticking it to the Old Bill. But you can’t have it both ways. You don’t want to be riling up a bloke who’s getting good overtime. So I’d read him in the news, mouthing off about how they couldn’t do him for this or that caper, and then he’d go away for another stretch. Where is it this time, Mum. Mozambique? Anyhow, you don’t pick your dad, do you. Or your childhood.’
‘Were you part of all that, growing up?’
‘I was me mother’s boy, and she was crooked too, but dead against the violence. I was a scrapper, mind. Don’t ask me why but I loved a fight. I’d go into pubs outside the borough. The sort of places where the carpet sucked the shoes off your feet. You ordered a pint, drank it in one, and put the glass upside down on the bar. That meant: I’ll have it with any man here. Someone went and put me in hospital for three months, just before my dad went away for the nine. Mum went absolutely spare. What with my sister already running wild. I went direct from Princess Beatrice to this fucking barracks of a boarding-school in Littlehampton on the south coast. Basically a crammer for posh dropouts. A couple of years of that and then Lit and Drama at Sussex. I changed. I was a hippie. But I could still fight. And a hippie who could fight was something to be.’
‘At university you were quite a ladies’ man …’
‘Every bloke was quite a ladies’ man in them … in those days. In those days, for a while, girls went to bed with you even when they didn’t want to. Peer-group pressure, that is. If I was above average, it was because I could offer them … pacifism from a uh, from a position of strength. I was covered in beads and flower scarves, but when some fucking great rocker come stamping up I’d say, “I smell grease.” Or go over to a gang of skinheads and call them a load of little fascist cunts. If you can fight, you don’t have to fight. And you don’t have to cower. And girls like that, whatever they say. Uh, look, mate – I’m fading. Sorry. It’s, it’s my condition.’
‘If you like I can … Are you sure? Last question, then. Could you say something about your father and the attempted murder.’
‘Okay. My sister Leda, rest her soul, she got roughed up by her husband. And me dad’s done him. Give him a fucking good hiding. Said he’d gladly do ten years for him and that’s what he got. And I’ll tell you something else and all. The bloke who put me in hospital for the three months: it was him. Mick Meo. For why? I’ve gone into the yard, and there he is, having this fight to the death with some other mad prick. I dragged him off and he done me. Three months. One week later he’s done me brother-in-law, who never walked again, and gone away for his nine. Then he’s gone and done the Governor at Gartree and got hisself topped by the screws in the Strong Cell …
‘No. Wait, wait … See, I split from the villain world, but things stay with you. One is complete contempt for the police. In America the police, they’re working-class heroes. Here they’re working-class dogs. They’re scabs and traitors. They take the rich man’s shilling to guard his gear in the property war. There’s talk about honour among thieves. That’s all bollocks. But there’s rules. Now, whoever did me in October or had me done – I get the feeling they think I’ve been telling tales to the Old Bill. And that is something I would never do. When the police uh, questioned me about the attack I said I remembered nothing. And they can come round here again and I’ll tell them I remember nothing. It ain’t true, but that’s what I’ll tell them. They can stick red-hot pokers up me arse, and that’s what I’ll tell them. Understand? Me, I’m the nicest bloke in the world. You know, in the car. Come on, darling. No – after you. But if someone … Now I spit in the eyes of whoever did me or had me done. I tell him: you got business with me, then you fucking come down … you come down …’
Even in sleep his face held its distortion.
Then there was the kind of whispering behind half-shut doors that gets done around the sick and the unpredictable and the violent.
Pearl, when her ex-husband called, was dependably merciless.
‘Would you like to talk to a boy? I’ll find one in a minute. But first, Xan, I want to ask about your care-giver. I mean the – where is it? —“the non-head-injured party in your relationship”. She’ll be in mourning, Xan, for the person you once were. That’s quite natural. It says here you both have to “let go” of the “old” Xan Meo – the one who could get about the place and earn a living. He’s gone, Xan! And listen: don’t be afraid to cry. It says here you should talk about all the good old times and get the old photos out and have a good old blub.’
Xan wasn’t gone. He had to believe that he wasn’t gone. Reality was like a weak dream, in early morning. You sense the weakness of the dream-authority and in velvet revolution you rise up, you rise up; you try to take control of the nonsensical narrative – to guide it towards pleasure, or away from fear. The dream was weak, but so was the dreamer. And another wave would come and he would go under.
‘Mm,’ said Billie, ‘yummy water.’
Using both hands she placed the empty glass on the kitchen table and then drifted from the room.
‘Yummy water?’ said Xan. ‘Well, a man condemned to die finds water delicious. Air delicious. Maybe it works the other way round.’
With the broadsheet on her lap Russia watched him. They both knew that talking made Xan manic, now. They had of course discussed it. And it made him manic.
‘I can’t believe you said all this. It was your intention, was it, to sound like an animal.’
‘It’s the dialect of the tribe. It will be understood.’
‘By whom?’
‘By the party concerned. Do I swear a lot?’
‘Generally, or in the interview? … No. “Little fascist bastards”. “Mad prick”. No.’
‘And how’s me … how’s my English?’
‘Your English?’ She shrugged and said, ‘It parses.’
‘Thought I could feel my English going. Bloke must have cleaned it up. Tea’, he added, ‘is bullshit. I want coffee. You’re on your second cup of Colombian and I’m still on the bullshit. What’s for dinner?’
‘Fish.’
‘Seafood is bullshit. I want meat.’
‘You can’t have meat. You can’t have coffee. Not yet.’
‘What have I got to look forward to? This evening, before my meal, I’ll drink a couple of glasses of near-beer. And if beer is bullshit, which it is, what’s near-beer? It’s not even bullshit. It’s bullshit bullshit. And then what? A plate of bullshit. And yummy water.’