Nutshell

by Ian Mcewan

  Footsteps on the stairs. Trudy and Claude look up, startled. Has the inspector found a way into the house? Has a burglar chosen the worst of all nights? This is a slow, heavy descent. They see black leather shoes, then a belted waist, a shirt stained with vomit, then a terrible expression, both blank and purposeful. My father wears the clothes he died in. His face is bloodless, the already rotting lips are greenish-black, the eyes tiny and penetrating. Now he stands at the foot of the stairs, taller than we remember him. He’s come from the mortuary to find us and knows exactly what he wants. I’m shaking because my mother is. There’s no shimmer, nothing ghostly. It’s not an hallucination. This is my corporeal father, John Cairncross, exactly as he is. My mother’s moan of fear acts as an enticement, for he’s walking towards us.

  “John,” Claude says warily, on a rising note, as if he could wake this figure into proper non-existence. “John, it’s us.”

  This seems well understood. He stands close before us, exuding a sweet miasma of glycol and maggot-friendly flesh. It’s my mother he stares at with small, hard, black eyes made of imperishable stone. His disgusting lips move but he makes no sound. The tongue is blacker than the lips. Fixing his gaze on her all the while, he stretches out an arm. His fleshless hand fastens on my uncle’s throat. My mother can’t even scream. Still, the illiquid eyes remain on her. This is for her, his gift. The remorseless, one-handed grip tightens. Claude drops to his knees, his eyes are bulging, his hands beat and pull uselessly at his brother’s arm. Only a distant squeaking, the piteous sound of a mouse, tells us that he’s still alive. Then he isn’t. My father, who hasn’t glanced at him once, lets him drop, and now draws his wife to him, enfolds her in arms that are thin and strong, like steel rods. He pulls her face towards his and kisses her long and hard with icy, putrefying lips. Terror and disgust and shame overwhelm her. The moment will torment her until she dies. Indifferently, he releases her, and walks back the way he came. Even as he climbs the stairs he begins to fade.

  Well, I was asked. I asked myself. And that’s what I wanted. A childish Halloween fantasy. How else to commission a spirit revenge in a secular age? The Gothic has been reasonably banished, the witches have fled the heath, and materialism, so troubling to the soul, is all I have left. A voice on the radio once told me that when we fully understand what matter is we’ll feel better. I doubt that. I’ll never get what I want.

  *

  I emerge from reveries to find us in the bedroom. I’ve no memory of the ascent. The hollow sound of the wardrobe door, a clank of coat hangers, a suitcase lifted onto the bed, and another, then a brisk snap of locks opening. They should have packed in readiness. The inspector might even come tonight. Are they calling this a plan? I hear curses and muttering.

  “Where is it? I had it here. In my hand!”

  They criss-cross the bedroom, open drawers, move in and out of the bathroom. Trudy drops a glass that shatters on the floor. She hardly cares. For some reason, the radio is on. Claude sits with his laptop and mumbles, “Train’s at nine. Taxi’s on its way.”

  I’d prefer Paris to Brussels. Better onward connections. Trudy, still in the bathroom, mutters to herself, “Dollars…euros.”

  Everything they say, even the sounds they make, have an air of valediction, like a sadly resolving chord, a sung farewell. This is the end; we aren’t coming back. The house, my grandfather’s house I should have grown up in, is about to fade. I won’t remember it. I’d like to summon a list of countries without extradition treaties. Most are uncomfortable, unruly, hot. I’ve heard that Beijing is a pleasant spot for runaways. A thriving village of English-speaking villains buried deep in the populated vastness of a world city. A fine place to end up.

  “Sleeping pills, painkillers,” Claude calls out.

  His voice, its tone, prompts me. Time to decide. He’s closing up the cases, fastening leather straps. So quick. They must have been half-packed already. These are old-fashioned two-wheeled items, not four. Claude lifts them to the floor.

  Trudy says, “Which?”

  I think she’s holding up two scarves. Claude grunts his choice. This is only a pretence of normality. When they board the train, when they cross the border, their guilt will declare itself. They only have an hour and they should hurry. Trudy says there’s a coat she wants and can’t find. Claude insists she won’t need it.

  “It’s lightweight,” she says. “The white one.”

  “You’ll stand out in a crowd. On CCTV.”

  But she finds it anyway, just as Big Ben strikes eight and the news comes on. They don’t pause to listen. There are still last things to gather up. In Nigeria, children burned alive in front of their parents by keepers of the flame. In North Korea, a rocket is launched. Worldwide, rising sea levels run ahead of predictions. But none of these is first. That’s reserved for a new catastrophe. A combination, poverty and war, with climate change held in reserve, driving millions from their homes, an ancient epic in new form, vast movements of people, like engorged rivers in spring, Danubes, Rhines and Rhones of angry or desolate or hopeful people, crammed at borders against the razor-wire gates, drowning in thousands to share in the fortunes of the West. If, as the new cliché goes, this is biblical, the seas are not parting for them, not the Aegean, not the English Channel. Old Europa tosses in her dreams, she pitches between pity and fear, between helping and repelling. Emotional and kind this week, scaly-hearted and so reasonable the next, she wants to help but she doesn’t want to share or lose what she has.

  And always, there are problems closer at hand. As radios and TVs everywhere drone on, people continue about their business. A couple has finished packing for a journey. The cases are closed, but there’s a picture of her mother that the young woman wants to bring. The heavy carved frame is too large to pack. Without the right tool the photograph can’t be removed, and the tool, a special kind of key, is in the basement, deep in a drawer. A taxi waits outside. The train leaves in fifty-five minutes, the station is a good way off, there may be queues for security and passport control. The man carries a suitcase out to the landing and returns, a little out of breath. He should have made use of the wheels.

  “We absolutely have to go.”

  “I’ve got to have this picture.”

  “Carry it under your arm.”

  But she has a handbag, her white coat, a suitcase to tow, and me to carry.

  With a moan, Claude lifts the second suitcase to carry it out. By this unneeded effort he’s making a point about urgency.

  “It won’t take you a minute. It’s in a front corner of the left-hand drawer.”

  He returns. “Trudy. We’re leaving. Now.”

  The exchange has grown from terse to bitter.

  “You carry it for me.”

  “Out of the question.”

  “Claude. It’s my mother.”

  “I don’t care. We’re leaving.”

  But they’re not. After all my turns and revisions, misinterpretations, lapses of insight, attempts at self-annihilation, and sorrow in passivity, I’ve come to a decision. Enough. My amniotic sac is the translucent silk purse, fine and strong, that contains me. It also holds the fluid that protects me from the world and its bad dreams. No longer. Time to join in. To end the endings. Time to begin. It’s not easy to free my right arm lodged tight against my chest, or gain movement in my wrist. But now it’s done. A forefinger is my own special tool to remove my mother from the frame. Two weeks early and fingernails so long. I make my first attempt at an incision. My nails are soft and, however fine, the fabric is tough. Evolution knows its business. I feel for the indent my finger made. There’s a crease, well defined, and that’s where I try again, and again, until the fifth attempt, when I feel the faintest rendering, and on the sixth, the tiniest rupture. Into this tear I succeed in working the tip of my nail, my finger, then two fingers, three, four, and at last my balled fist punches through and there follows behind it a great outpouring, the cataract at the beginning of life. My watery protection has
vanished.

  Now I’ll never know how the business of the photograph or the nine o’clock train would have been resolved. Claude is outside the room at the head of the stairs. He’ll have a case in each hand, ready to descend.

  My mother calls out with what sounds like a disappointed moan. “Oh Claude.”

  “What now?”

  “My waters. Breaking!”

  “We’ll deal with it later. On the train.”

  He must believe it’s a ploy, a continuation of the argument, a repellent form of womanly trouble that he’s too frantic to consider.

  I’m shrugging off the caul, my first experience of undressing. I’m clumsy. Three dimensions seem three too many. I foresee the material world will be a challenge. My discarded shroud remains twisted round my knees. No matter. I’ve new business below my head. I don’t know how I know what to do. It’s a mystery. There’s some knowledge we simply arrive with. In my case, there’s this, and a smattering of poetic scansion. No blank slate after all. I bring that same hand to my cheek, and slide farther along the muscular wall of the uterus to reach down and find the cervix. It’s a tight squeeze against the back of my head. It’s there, at the opening to the world, that I delicately palpate with puny fingers and immediately, as if some spell has been uttered, the great power of my mother is provoked, the walls around me ripple then tremble and close in on me. It’s an earthquake, it’s a giant stirring in her cave. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, I’m horrified then crushed by the strength that’s unleashed. I should have waited my turn. Only a fool would mess with such force. From far away I hear my mother call out. It could be a shout for help or a scream of triumph or pain. And then I feel it on the top of my head, my crown—one centimetre dilated! No turning back.

  Trudy has crawled onto the bed. Claude is somewhere near the door. She’s panting, excited, and very afraid.

  “It’s started. It’s so quick! Get an ambulance.”

  He says nothing for a moment, then he asks simply, “Where’s my passport?”

  The failure is mine. I underestimated him. The point in arriving early was to ruin Claude. I knew he was trouble. But I thought he loved my mother and would stay with her. I’m beginning to understand her fortitude. Over the bright jingling sound of coins against mascara case as he rummages through her handbag, she says, “I hid it. Downstairs. Just in case this happened.”

  He considers. He’s dealt in property, he owned a skyscraper in Cardiff and knows about a deal. “Tell me where it is and I’ll call you an ambulance. Then I’ll go.”

  Her voice is cautious. Closely observing her own state, waiting for, wanting and dreading the next wave. “No. If I’m going down so are you.”

  “Fine. No ambulance.”

  “I’ll call them myself. As soon—”

  As soon as the second contraction, stronger than the first, has passed. Again, her involuntary shout, and the whole body clenching as Claude crosses the room to the bed, to the locker at its side, to disconnect the phone, while I’m violently compressed, and lifted, sucked down and backwards an inch or two from my resting place. An iron band around my head is tightening. Our three fates are being crushed in one maw.

  As the wave recedes, Claude, like a border official, says dully, “Passport?”

  She shakes her head, waits to get her breath. They hold each other in a form of equilibrium.

  She recovers and says in a level voice, “Then you’ll have to be the midwife.”

  “Not my baby.”

  “It’s never the midwife’s baby.”

  She’s frightened, but she can terrify him with instructions.

  “When it comes out it’ll be facedown. You’ll pick it up, both hands, very gently, supporting the head, and place it on me. Still facedown, between my breasts. Near my heartbeat. Don’t worry about the cord. It’ll stop beating on its own and the baby will start to breathe. You’ll put a couple of towels over it to keep it warm. Then we wait.”

  “Wait? Christ. For what?”

  “For the placenta to be born.”

  If he flinched or retched, I don’t know. His calculation might still be that we could get this over with and catch a later train.

  I listen closely, intent on learning what to do. Duck under a towel. Breathe. Don’t say a word. But it! Surely, pink or blue!

  “So go and get a pile of towels. It’ll be messy. Scrub your hands with the nailbrush and lots of soap.”

  So far out of his depth, so far from a friendly shore, a man without his papers who should be on the run. He turns to go and do what he’s told.

  So it continues, wave on wave, shouts and wails, and pleas for the agony to cease. Unmerciful progress, relentless ejection. The cord unreels behind me as I make my slow way forward. Forward and out. Pitiless forces of nature intend to flatten me. I travel a section where I know a portion of my uncle has passed too often the other way. I’m not troubled. What was in his day a vagina is now proudly a birth canal, my Panama, and I’m greater than he was, a stately ship of genes, dignified by unhurried progress, freighted with my cargo of ancient information. No casual cock can compete. For a stretch, I’m deaf, blind and dumb, it hurts everywhere. But it pains my screaming mother more as she renders the sacrifice all mothers make for their big-headed, loud-mouthed infants.

  A slithering moment of waxy, creaking emergence, and here I am, set naked on the kingdom. Like stout Cortez (I remember a poem my father once recited), I’m amazed. I’m looking down, with what wonder and surmise, at the napped surface of a blue bath towel. Blue. I’ve always known, verbally at least, I’ve always been able to infer what’s blue—sea, sky, lapis lazuli, gentians—mere abstractions. Now I have it at last, I own it, and it possesses me. More gorgeous than I dared believe. That’s just a beginning, at the indigo end of the spectrum.

  My faithful cord, the lifeline that failed to kill me, suddenly dies its allotted death. I’m breathing. Delicious. My advice to newborns: don’t cry, look around, taste the air. I’m in London. The air is good. Sounds are crisp, brilliant with the treble turned up. The lambent towel beaming its colour summons the Goharshad mosque in Iran that made my father cry at dawn. My mother stirs and causes my head to turn. I have a glimpse of Claude. Smaller than I cast him, with narrow shoulders and a foxy look. No mistaking an expression of disgust. Evening sunlight through a plane tree throws a stirring pattern on the ceiling. Ah, the joy of straightening my legs, of noting from the alarm clock on the bedside table that they’ll never make their train. But I don’t have long to savour the moment. My pliant rib cage is clamped by the squeamish hands of a killer and I’m placed on the snowy-soft welcoming belly of another.

  Her heartbeat is distant, muffled, but familiar, like an old chorus not heard in half a lifetime. The music’s marking is andante, a delicate footfall leading me to the true open gate. I can’t deny the dread I feel. But I’m dead beat, a shipwrecked sailor on a lucky beach. I’m falling, even as the ocean licks around my ankles.

  *

  Trudy and I must have dozed. I don’t know how many minutes have passed until we hear the doorbell. How clear it sounds. Claude is still here, still hoping for his passport. He may have been downstairs to hunt. Now he goes towards the videophone. He glances at the screen and turns away. There can be no surprises.

  “Four of them,” he says, more to himself.

  We contemplate this. It’s over. It’s not a good end. It was never going to be.

  My mother moves me so we can exchange a long look. The moment I’ve waited for. My father was right, it is a lovely face. The hair darker than I thought, the eyes a paler green, the cheeks still flushed with recent effort, the nose indeed a tiny thing. I think I see the entire world in this face. Beautiful. Loving. Murderous. I hear Claude cross the room with resigned tread to go downstairs. No ready phrase. Even in this moment of repose, during this long, greedy stare into my mother’s eyes, I’m thinking about the taxi waiting outside. A waste. Time to send it away. And I’m thinking about our prison cell—
I hope it’s not too small—and beyond its heavy door, worn steps ascending: first sorrow, then justice, then meaning. The rest is chaos.

  A Note About the Author

  Ian McEwan is the bestselling author of sixteen books, including the novels The Children Act; Sweet Tooth; Solar, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; On Chesil Beach; Saturday; Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award; The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, both short-listed for the Booker Prize; Amsterdam, winner of the Booker Prize; and The Child in Time, winner of the Whitbread Award; as well as the story collections First Love, Last Rites, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and In Between the Sheets.

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