by Ian Mcewan
The thump of rapid footsteps, and he shouts her name again. Then, his heavy breathing in the bathroom.
“I cut my foot on a stupid piece of glass.”
“There’s blood all through the bedroom. I thought…” He doesn’t tell us that he hoped for my demise. Instead he says, “Let me do it. Shouldn’t we clean it first?”
“Stick it on.”
“Hold still.” Now his turn to grunt and gasp. And then, “Have you been drinking?”
“Fuck off. Stick it on.”
At last it’s done and he helps her to her feet. Together we sway.
“Christ! How much did you have?”
“Just a glass.”
She rests again on the bathtub’s rim.
He steps away, into the bedroom, and returns a minute later. “We’ll never get that blood off the carpet.”
“Try rubbing it with something.”
“I’m telling you, it won’t come out. Look. Here’s a spot. Try it yourself.”
I’ve rarely heard Claude so forthright. Not since “We can.”
My mother too hears the difference and says, “What happened?”
Now there’s a whine of complaint in his voice.
“He took the money, didn’t thank me for it. And get this. He’s given his notice on the Shoreditch place. He’s moving back in here. He says you need him, however much you say you don’t.”
The bathroom echoes die away. But for their breathing, there’s silence while they consider. My guess is they’re looking at each other, into each other, a long, eloquent stare.
“There it is,” he says at last, in his familiar, empty way. He waits, then adds, “So?”
At this my mother’s heart begins a steady acceleration. Not just faster, but louder, like the hollow knocking sound of faulty plumbing. Something is also happening in her gut. Her bowels are loosening, with a squeaky stretching sound, and higher up, somewhere above my feet, juices race down winding tubes to unknown destinations. Her diaphragm heaves. I’m pressing my ear more tightly to the wall. Against this crescendo, it would be too easy to miss a vital fact.
The body cannot lie, but the mind is another country, for when my mother speaks at last, her tone is smooth, nicely in control. “I agree.”
Claude comes closer, speaks softly, almost at a whisper. “But. What do you think?”
They kiss and she starts to tremble. I feel his arms move round her waist. They kiss again with soundless tongues.
She says, “Scary.”
And responding to a private joke he replies, “Hairy.”
But they fail to laugh. I feel Claude push his groin into hers. That they should be aroused at such a time! How little I know. She finds his zip, tugs downwards, caresses, while his index finger curls under her cut-offs. I feel its recurrent pressure on my forehead. Might we go to bed? But no, thank God, he pursues his question.
“Decide.”
“I’m frightened.”
“But remember. Six months ahead. In my house, seven million in the bank. And we’ve placed the baby somewhere. But. What’s it to. Erm. Be?”
His own practical question calms him, allows him to withdraw his finger. But her pulse, which had begun to settle, leaps at his question. Not sex but danger. Her blood beats through me in thuds like distant artillery fire and I can feel her struggling with a choice. I’m an organ in her body, not separate from her thoughts. I’m party to what she’s about to do. When it comes at last, her decision, her whispered command, her single treacherous utterance, appears to issue from my own untried mouth. As they kiss again she says it into her lover’s mouth. Baby’s first word.
“Poison.”
FIVE
How solipsism becomes the unborn. While barefoot Trudy sleeps off our five glasses on the sitting-room couch and our dirty house rolls eastwards into thick night, I dwell as much on my uncle’s placed as my mother’s poison. Like a DJ hunched over his turntable, I scratchily sample the line. And…we’ve placed the baby somewhere. With repetition, the words are rubbed clean as truth and my intended future shines clear. Placed is but the lying cognate of dumped. As the baby is of me. Somewhere is a liar too. Ruthless mother! This will be an undoing, my fall, for only in fairy tales are unwanted babies orphaned upwards. The Duchess of Cambridge will not be taking me on. My solo flight of self-pity settles me somewhere on the thirteenth floor of the brutal tower block my mother says she sometimes gazes on sadly from an upper bedroom window. She gazes and thinks, So close, yet remote as the Vale of Swat. Fancy living there.
Quite so. Raised bookless on computer toys, sugar, fat and smacks to the head. Swat indeed. No bedtime stories to nourish my toddler brain’s plasticity. The curiosity-free mindscape of the modern English peasantry. What then of maggot farming in Utah? Poor me, poor buzz-cut, barrel-chested three-year-old boy in camouflage trousers, lost in a haze of TV noise and secondary smoke. His adoptive mother’s tattooed and swollen ankles totter past, followed by her labile boyfriend’s pungent dog. Beloved father, rescue me from this Vale of Despond. Take me down with you. Let me be poisoned at your side rather than placed somewhere.
Typical third-term self-indulgence. All I know of the English poor has come to me by way of TV and reviews of novelistic mockery. I know nothing. But my reasonable suspicion is that poverty is deprivation on all levels. No harpsichord lessons on the thirteenth floor. If hypocrisy’s the only price, I’ll buy the bourgeois life and consider it cheap. And more, I’ll hoard grain, be rich, have a coat of arms. NON SANZ DROICT, and mine is to a mother’s love and is absolute. To her schemes of abandonment I deny consent. I won’t be exiled, but she will be. I’ll bind her with this slimy rope, press-gang her on my birthday with one groggy, newborn stare, one lonesome seagull wail to harpoon her heart. Then, indentured by strong-armed love to become my constant nurse, her freedom but a retreating homeland shore, Trudy will be mine, not Claude’s, as able to dump me as tear her breasts from her rib cage and toss them overboard. I can be ruthless too.
*
And so I went on, drunkenly, I suppose, expansive and irrelevant, until she woke with several groans and fumbled for her sandals under the couch. Together we descend, limping, to the humid kitchen, where, in the semi-darkness that might almost hide the squalor, she bends to drink at length from the cold-water tap. Still in her beachwear. She turns on the lights. No sign of Claude, no note. We go to the fridge and hopefully she looks in. I see—I imagine I see on an untested retina—her pale, indecisive arm hovering in the cold light. I love her beautiful arm. On a lower shelf something once living, now purulent, appears to stir in its paper bag, drawing from her a reverential gasp, forcing her to close the door. So we cross the room to the dry-goods cupboard and there she finds a bag of salted nuts. Shortly, I hear her dial her lover.
“Are you still at home?”
I can’t hear him for her crunching.
“Well,” she says, after listening. “Bring it here. We need to talk.”
From the gentle way she sets down the phone I assume he’s on his way. Bad enough. But I’m having my very first headache, right around the forehead, a gaudy bandanna, a carefree pain dancing to her pulse. If she’d share it with me, she might reach for an analgesic. By rights, the pain is hers. But she’s braving the fridge again and has found high in the door, on a Perspex shelf, a nine-inch wedge of historic parmesan as old as evil, as hard as adamantine. If she can break into it with her teeth, we’ll suffer together, after the nuts, a second incoming salt tide rolling through the estuary inlets, thickening our blood to brackish ooze. Water, she should drink more water. My hands drift upwards to find my temples. Monstrous injustice, to have such pain before my life’s begun.
I’ve heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness. To avoid serious damage a simple creature needs to evolve the whips and goads of a subjective loop, of a felt experience. Not just a red warning light in the head—who’s there to see it?—but a sting, an ache, a throb that hurts. Adversity forced awareness on us, and
it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self. And if that works, why not feeling disgust for shit, fearing the cliff edge and strangers, remembering insults and favours, liking sex and food? God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.
So what’s the use of a headache, a heartache? What am I being warned against, or told to do? Don’t let your incestuous uncle and mother poison your father. Don’t waste your precious days idle and inverted. Get born and act!
She sets herself down on a kitchen chair with a hung-over groan, the elective malady’s melody. There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact: remorse, or more drinking and then remorse. She’s chosen the first, but it’s early yet. The cheese is on the table, already forgotten. Claude is returning from where my mother will live, a millionairess shot of me. He’ll cross London by cab because he’s never learned to drive.
I try to see her as she is, as she must be, the gravidly ripe twenty-eight-year-old, youngly slumped (I insist on the adverb) across the table, blonde and braided like a Saxon warrior, beautiful beyond realism’s reach, slender but for me, near naked, sunnily pink on the upper arms, finding space on the kitchen table for her elbows among the yolk-glazed plates of a month ago, the toast and sugar crumbs that houseflies daily vomit on, the reeking cartons and coated spoons, the fluids dried to scabs on junk-mail envelopes. I try to see her and love her as I must, then imagine her burdens: the villain she’s taken for a lover, the saint she’s leaving behind, the deed she’s spoken for, the darling child she’ll abandon to strangers. Still love her? If not, then you never did. But I did, I did. I do.
She remembers the cheese and reaches for the nearest tool and makes a decent stab. A piece snaps off and it’s in her mouth, a dry rock to suck on while she considers her state. Some minutes pass. Not good, I think, her state, though our blood won’t thicken after all, because the salt she’s eating she’ll need for her eyes, her cheeks. It pierces the child, to hear the mother cry. She’s confronting the unanswerable world she’s made, of all that she’s consented to, her new duties, which I need to list again—kill John Cairncross, sell his birthright, share the money, dump the kid. It should be me who weeps. But the unborn are po-faced stoics, submerged Buddhas, expressionless. We accept, as our lesser kith the wailing babies don’t, that tears are in the nature of things. Sunt lacrimae rerum. Infantile wailing entirely misses the point. Waiting is the thing. And thinking!
She’s recovered by the time we hear her lover in the hall, cursing as he disturbs the garbage with the outsized brogues she likes him to wear. (He has his own key. It’s my father who has to ring the bell.) Claude descends to the basement kitchen. The rustling sound is a plastic bag containing groceries or tools of death or both.
He notices at once her altered condition and says, “You’ve been crying.”
Not solicitude so much as a point of fact, or order. She shrugs and looks away. He takes from his bag a bottle, sets it down heavily where she can see the label.
“A 2010 Cuvée Les Caillottes Sancerre Jean-Max Roger. Remember? His father died in a plane crash.”
He speaks of the death of fathers.
“If it’s cold and white I’ll like it.”
She’s forgotten. The restaurant where the waiter was slow to light the candle. She loved it then, and I loved it even more. Now, the withdrawn cork, the chink of glasses—I hope they’re clean—and Claude is pouring. I can’t say no.
“Cheers!” Her tone has quickly softened.
A top-up, then he says, “Tell me what it was.”
When she starts to speak her throat constricts. “I was thinking of our cat. I was fifteen. His name was Hector, a sweet old thing, the family’s darling, two years older than me. Black, with white socks and bib. I came home from school one day in a filthy mood. He was on the kitchen table where he wasn’t supposed to be. Looking for food. I gave him a whack that knocked him flying. His old bones landed with a crunch. After that he went missing for days. We put posters on trees and lamp posts. Then someone found him lying by a wall on a heap of leaves where he’d crept away to die. Poor, poor Hector, stiff as bone. I never said, I never dared, but I know it was me who killed him.”
Not her wicked undertaking then, not lost innocence, not the child she’ll give away. She begins to cry again, harder than before.
“His time was almost up,” Claude says. “You can’t know it was you.”
Sobbing now. “It was, it was. It was me! Oh God!”
I know, I know. Where did I hear it?—He kills his mother but he can’t wear grey trousers. But let’s be generous. A young woman, gut and breasts swollen to breaking, God-mandated pain looming, milk and shit to follow and sleepless trek through a newfound land of unenchanting duties, where brutal love will steal her life—and the ghost of an old cat softly stalks her in its socks, demanding revenge for its own stolen life.
Even so. The woman who’s coldly scheming to…in tears over…Let’s not spell it out.
“Cats can be a bloody nuisance,” Claude says with an air of helpfulness. “Sharpening their claws on the furniture. But.”
He has nothing antithetical to add. We wait until she’s cried herself dry. Then, time for a refill. Why not? A couple of slugs, a neutralising pause, then he rustles in his bag again, and a different vintage is in his hands. A gentler sound as he sets it down. The bottle is plastic.
This time Trudy reads the label but not aloud. “In summer?”
“Antifreeze contains ethylene glycol, rather good stuff. I treated a neighbour’s dog with it once, oversized Alsatian, drove me mad, barking night and day. Anyway. No colour, no smell, pleasant taste, rather sweet, just the thing in a smoothie. Erm. Wrecks the kidneys, excruciating pain. Tiny sharp crystals slice the cells apart. He’ll stagger and slur like a drunk, but no smell of alcohol. Nausea, vomiting, hyperventilation, seizures, heart attack, coma, kidney failure. Curtains. Takes a while, as long as someone doesn’t mess things up with treatment.”
“Leaves a trace?”
“Everything leaves a trace. You have to consider the advantages. Easy to get hold of, even in summer. Carpet cleaner does the job but doesn’t taste as nice. A joy to administer. Goes down a treat. We just need to disassociate you from the moment when it does.”
“Me? What about you?”
“Don’t you worry. I’ll be disassociated.”
That wasn’t what my mother meant, but she lets it pass.
SIX
Trudy and I are getting drunk again and feeling better, while Claude, starting later with greater body mass, has ground to cover. She and I share two glasses of the Sancerre, he drinks the rest, then returns to his plastic bag for a burgundy. The grey plastic bottle of glycol stands next to the empty, sentinel to our revels. Or memento mori. After a piercing white, a Pinot Noir is a mother’s soothing hand. Oh, to be alive while such a grape exists! A blossom, a bouquet of peace and reason. No one seems to want to read aloud the label so I’m forced to make a guess, and hazard an Échezeaux Grand Cru. Put Claude’s penis or, less stressful, a gun to my head to name the domaine, I would blurt out la Romanée-Conti, for the spicy cassis and black cherry alone. The hint of violets and fine tannins suggests that lazy, clement summer of 2005, untainted by heatwaves, though a teasing, next-room aroma of mocha, as well as more proximal black-skinned banana, summon Jean Grivot’s domaine in 2009. But I’ll never know. As the brooding ensemble of flavours, formed at civilisation’s summit, makes its way to me, through me, I find myself, in the midst of horror, in reflective mood.
I begin to suspect that my helplessness is not transient. Grant me all the agency the human frame can bear, retrieve my young panther-self of sculpted muscle and long cold stare, direct him to the most extreme measure—killing his uncle to save his father. Put a weapon in his hand, a tyre wrench, a frozen leg of lamb, have him stand behind his uncle’s chair, where he can see
the antifreeze and be hotly incited. Ask yourself, could he—could I—do it, smash that hairy knob of bone and spill its grey contents across the squalor of the table? Then murder his mother as sole witness, dispose of two bodies in a basement kitchen, a task only achieved in dreams? And later, clean up that kitchen—another impossible task? Add the prospect of prison, of crazed boredom and the hell of other people, and not the best people. Your even stronger cellmate wants daytime TV all day for thirty years. Care to disoblige him? Then watch him fill a yellowed pillowcase with rocks and slowly turn his gaze your way, towards your own knob of bone.
Or assume the worst, the deed is done—my father’s last kidney cells are sheared by a crystal of poison. He’s thrown up his lungs and heart into his lap. Agony then coma then death. How about revenge? My avatar shrugs and reaches for his coat, murmuring on his way out that honour killing has no place in the modern polis. Let him speak for himself.
“Seizing the law into your own hands—it’s old hat, reserved for elderly feuding Albanians and subsections of tribal Islam. Revenge is dead. Hobbes was right, my young friend. The state must have a monopoly of violence, a common power to keep us all in awe.”
“Then, kind avatar, phone Leviathan now, call the police, make them investigate.”
“What exactly? Claude and Trudy’s black humour?”
Constable: “And this glycol on the table, madam?”
“A plumber suggested it, Officer, to keep our ancient radiators unfrozen in winter.”
“Then, dear future best self, get yourself to Shoreditch, warn my father, tell him everything you know.”
“The woman he loves and reveres planning to murder him? How did I come by such information? Was I party to pillow talk, was I under the bed?”
Thus the ideal form of powerful, competent being. What then are my chances, a blind, dumb invert, an almost-child, still living at home, secured by apron strings of arterial and venous blood to the would-be murderess?
But shush! The conspirators are talking.
