by Ian Mcewan
Above all, there swells in him a peculiarly modern emotion—the motorist's rectitude, spot-welding a passion for justice to the thrill of hatred, in the service of which various worn phrases tumble through his thoughts, revitalised, cleansed of cliché: just pulled out, no signal, stupid bastard, didn't even look, what's his mirror for, fucking bastard. The only person in the world he hates is sitting in the car behind, and Henry is going to have to talk to him, confront him, exchange insurance details with him—all this when he could be playing squash. He feels he's been left behind. And he seems to see it: receding obliviously down a side street is the other, most likely version of himself, like a vanishing rich uncle, introspective and happy, motoring carefree through his Saturday, leaving him alone and wretched, in his new, improbable, inescapable fate. This is real. Telling himself it is so betrays how little he believes it yet. He picks his racket off the car floor and puts it back on top of the Journal. His right hand is on the door catch. But he doesn't move yet. He's looking in the mirror. There are reasons to be cautious.
There are, as he expected, three heads in the car behind. He knows he's subject to unexamined assumptions, and he tries to examine them now. As far as he's aware, lap-dancing is a lawful pursuit. But if he'd seen the three men hurrying, even furtively, from the Wellcome Trust or the British Library he might already have stepped from his car. That they were running makes it possible they'll be even more irritated than him by delay. The car is a series-five BMW, a vehicle he associates for no good reason with criminality, drug-dealing. And there are three men, not one. The shortest is in the front passenger's seat, and the door on that side is opening as he watches, followed immediately by the driver's, and then the rear offside door. Perowne, who does not intend to be trapped into talking from a sitting position, gets out of his car. The half-minute's pause has given the situation a game-like quality in which calculations have already been made. The three men have their own reasons for holding back and discussing their next move. It's important, Perowne thinks as he goes round to the front of his car, to remember that he's in the right, and that he's angry. He also has to be careful. But these contradictory notions aren't helpful, and he decides he'll be better off feeling his way into the confrontation, rather than troubling himself with ground rules. His impulse then is to ignore the men, walk away from them, round the front of the Mercedes to get a view of the damaged side. But even as he stands, with hands on hips, in a pose of proprietorial outrage, he keeps the men, now advancing as a group, on the edge of vision.
At a glance, there seems to be no damage at all. The wing mirror is intact, there are no dents in the panels; amazingly, the metallic silver paintwork is clean. He leans forward to catch the light at a different angle. With fingers splayed, he runs a hand lightly over the bodywork, as if he really knew what he's about. There is nothing. Not a blemish. In immediate, tactical terms, this seems to leave him at a disadvantage. He has nothing to show for his anger. If there's any damage at all, it is out of sight, between the front wheels.
The men have stopped to look at something in the road. The short fellow in the black suit touches with the tip of his shoe the BMW's shorn-off wing mirror, turning it over the way one might a dead animal. One of the others, a tall young man with the long mournful face of a horse, picks it up, cradling it in both hands. They stare down at it together and then, at a remark from the short man, they turn their faces towards Perowne simultaneously, with abrupt curiosity, like deer disturbed in a forest. For the first time, it occurs to him that he might be in some kind of danger. Officially closed off at both ends, the street is completely deserted. Behind the men, on the Tottenham Court Road, a broken file of protesters is making its way south to join the main body. Perowne glances over his shoulder. There, behind him on Gower Street, the march proper has begun. Thousands packed in a single dense column are making for Piccadilly, their banners angled forwards heroically, as in a revolutionary poster. From their faces, hands and clothes they emanate the rich colour, almost like warmth, peculiar to compacted humanity. For dramatic effect, they're walking in silence to the funereal beat of marching drums.
The three men resume their approach. As before, the short man—five foot five or six perhaps—is out in front. His gait is distinctive, with a little jazzy twist and dip of his trunk, as though he's punting along a gentle stretch of river. The punter from the Spearmint Rhino. Perhaps he's listening to his personal stereo. Some people go nowhere, even into disputes, without a soundtrack. The other two have the manner of subordinates, sidekicks. They're wearing trainers, tracksuits and hooded tops—the currency of the street, so general as to be no style at all. Theo sometimes dresses this way in order, so he says, not to make decisions about how he looks. The horse-faced fellow is still holding the wing mirror in two hands, presumably to make a point. The unrelenting throb of drums is not helpful to the situation, and the fact that so many people are close by, unaware of him, makes Henry feel all the more isolated. It's best to go on looking busy. He drops down closer by the car, noting a squashed Coke can under his front tyre. There is, he sees now, with both relief and irritation, an irregular patch on the rear door where the sheen is diminished, as though rubbed with a fine emery cloth. Surely the contact point, confined to a two-foot patch. How right he was, swerving away before he hit the brake. He feels steadier now, straightening up to face the men as they stop in front of him.
Unlike some of his colleagues—the surgical psychopaths—Henry doesn't actually relish personal confrontation. He isn't the machete-wielding type. But clinical experience is, among all else, an abrasive, toughening process, bound to wear away at his sensitivities. Patients, juniors, the recently bereaved, management of course—inevitably in two decades, the moments have come around when he's been required to fight his corner, or explain, or placate in the face of a furious emotional upsurge. There's usually a lot at stake—for colleagues, questions of hierarchy and professional pride or wasted hospital resources, for patients a loss of function, for their relatives, a suddenly dead spouse or child—weightier affairs than a scratched car. Especially when they involve patients, these moments have a purity and innocence about them; everything is stripped down to the essentials of being—memory, vision, the ability to recognise faces, chronic pain, motor function, even a sense of self. What lie in the background, glowing faintly, are the issues of medical science, the wonders it performs, the faith it inspires, and against that, its slowly diminishing but still vast ignorance of the brain, and the mind, and the relation between the two. Regularly penetrating the skull with some modest success is a relatively recent adventure. There's bound to be disappointment sometimes, and when it comes, the showdown with the relatives in his office, no one needs to calculate how to behave or what to say, no one feels watched. It pours out.
Among Perowne's acquaintance are those medics who deal not with the brain, but only with the mind, with the diseases of consciousness; these colleagues embrace a tradition, a set of prejudices only rarely voiced nowadays, that the neurosurgeons are blundering, arrogant fools with blunt instruments, bone-setters let loose upon the most complex object in the known universe. When an operation fails, the patient or the relatives tend to come round to this view. But too late. What is said then is tragic and sincere. However appalling these heartfelt engagements, however much he knows himself to be maligned by a patient's poor or self-serving recollection of how the risks have been outlined, whatever his certainty that he's performed in the theatre as well as current knowledge and techniques allow, Perowne comes away not only chastened—he has manifestly failed to lower expectations—but obscurely purified: he's had a fundamental human exchange, as elemental in its way as love.
But here on University Street it's impossible not to feel that play-acting is about to begin. Dressed as a scarecrow, in mangy fleece, his sweater with its row of holes, his paint-stained trousers supported by a knotted cord, he stands by his powerful machine. He is cast in a role, and there's no way out. This, as people like to say,
is urban drama. A century of movies and half a century of television have rendered the matter insincere. It is pure artifice. Here are the cars, and here are the owners. Here are the guys, the strangers, whose self-respect is on the line. Someone is going to have to impose his will and win, and the other is going to give way. Popular culture has worn this matter smooth with reiteration, this ancient genetic patrimony that also oils the machinations of bullfrogs and cockerels and stags. And despite the varied and casual dress code, there are rules as elaborate as the politesse of the Versailles court that no set of genes can express. For a start, it is not permitted as they stand there to acknowledge the self-consciousness of the event, or its overbearing irony: from just up the street, they can hear the tramping and tribal drums of the peace mongers. Furthermore, nothing can be predicted, but everything, as soon as it happens, will seem to fit.
“Cigarette?”
Exactly so. This is how it's bound to start.
In an old-fashioned gesture, the other driver offers the pack with a snap of the wrist, arranging the untipped cigarettes like organ pipes. The gripped hand extending towards Perowne is large, given the man's height, and papery pale, with black hair coiled on the back, and extending to the distal interphalangeal joints. The persistent tremor also draws Perowne's professional attention. Perhaps there's reassurance to be had in the unsteadiness of the grip.
“I won't, thanks.”
He lights one for himself and blows the smoke past Henry who is already one point down—not man enough to smoke, or more essentially, to offer gifts. It's important not to be passive. It has to be his move. He puts out his own hand.
“Henry Perowne.”
“Baxter.”
“Mr. Baxter?”
“Baxter.”
Baxter's hand is large, Henry's fractionally larger, but neither man attempts a show of strength. Their handshake is light and brief. Baxter is one of those smokers whose pores exude a perfume, an oily essence of his habit. Garlic affects certain people the same way. Possibly the kidneys are implicated. He's a fidgety, small-faced young man with thick eyebrows and dark brown hair razored close to the skull. The mouth is set bulbously, with the smoothly shaved shadow of a strong beard adding to the effect of a muzzle. The general simian air is compounded by sloping shoulders, and the built-up trapezoids suggest time in the gym, compensating for his height perhaps. The sixties-style suit—tight cut, high lapels, flat-fronted trousers worn from the hip—is taking some strain around the jacket's single fastened button. There's also tightness in the fabric round the biceps. He half-turns and dips away from Perowne, then bobs back. He gives an impression of fretful impatience, of destructive energy waiting to be released. He may be about to lash out. Perowne is familiar with some of the current literature on violence. It's not always a pathology; self-interested social organisms find it rational to be violent sometimes. Among the game theorists and radical criminologists, the stock of Thomas Hobbes keeps on rising. Holding the unruly, the thugs, in check is the famous “common power” to keep all men in awe—a governing body, an arm of the state, freely granted a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. But drug dealers and pimps, among others who live beyond the law, are not inclined to dial nine-nine-nine for Leviathan; they settle their quarrels in their own way.
Perowne, almost a foot taller than Baxter, considers that if it comes to a scrap he'll be wise to protect his testicles. But it's a ridiculous thought; he hasn't been in a hand-to-hand fight since he was eight. Three against one. He simply won't let it happen.
As soon as they've shaken hands, Baxter says, “I expect you're all ready to tell me how sincerely sorry you are.” He looks back, past the Mercedes to his own car, parked at a diagonal across the road. Behind it is an irregular line, three feet from the ground, scraped along the sides of half a dozen parked cars by the BMW's door handle. The appearance on the street now of just one outraged owner will be enough to set off a cascade of insurance claims. Henry, knowing a good deal about paperwork, can already sense the prolonged trauma of it. Far better to be one of many victims than the original sinner.
He says, “I am indeed sorry that you pulled out without looking.”
He surprises himself. This fussy, faintly archaic “indeed” is not generally part of his lexicon. Deploying it entails decisions; he isn't going to pretend to the language of the street. He's standing on professional dignity.
Baxter lays his left hand on his right, as though to calm it. He says patiently, “I didn't need to be looking, did I? The Tottenham Court Road's closed. You aren't supposed to be there.”
Perowne says, “The rules of the road aren't suspended. Anyway, a policeman waved me across.”
“Police man?” Baxter dividing and leaning on the construction makes it sound childish. He turns to his friends. “You seen a police man?” And then back to Perowne, with mocking politeness, “This is Nark, and this is Nigel.”
Until now, the two have stood off to one side, just behind Baxter, listening without expression. Nigel is the horse-faced man. His companion may be a police informer, or addicted to narcotics or, given his comatose look, presenting with narcolepsy.
“No policemen round here,” Nigel explains. “They all busy with the marching scum.”
Perowne pretends to ignore both men. His business is with Baxter. “This is the moment we swap insurance details.” All three chuckle at this, but he continues, “If we can't agree on what happened, we'll phone the police.” He looks at his watch. Jay Strauss will be on court, warming up the ball. It's not too late to settle the matter and get on his way. Baxter hasn't reacted to the mention of a phone call. Instead, he takes the wing mirror from Nigel and displays it to Perowne. The spiderweb fissures in the glass show the sky in mosaics of white and ragged blue which shimmer with the agitation in Baxter's hand. His tone is genial.
“Fortunately for you, I got a mate does bodywork, on the cheap. But he does a nice job. Seven fifty I reckon he'd sort me out.”
Nark rouses himself. “There's a cashpoint on the corner.”
And Nigel, as though pleasantly surprised by the idea, says, “Yeah. We could walk down there with you.”
These two have shifted their position so they're almost, but not quite, flanking Henry. Baxter meanwhile steps back. The manoeuvrings are clumsily deliberate, like an ill-rehearsed children's ballet. Perowne's attention, his professional regard, settles once again on Baxter's right hand. It isn't simply a tremor, it's a fidgety restlessness implicating practically every muscle. Speculating about it soothes him, even as he feels the shoulders of both men pressing lightly through his fleece. Perversely, he no longer believes himself to be in any great danger. It's hard to take the trio seriously; the cash idea has a boyish, make-believe quality. Everything said seems like a quotation from something they've all seen a dozen times before and half-forgotten.
At the sound of a trumpet expertly played, the four men turn to watch the march. It's a series of intricate staccato runs which end on a high tapering note. It might be a passage from a Bach cantata, because Henry immediately imagines a soprano and a sweetly melancholic air, and in the background, a supportive cello squarely sawing away. On Gower Street the concept of a reproachful funereal march no longer holds. It was difficult to sustain with thousands in a column stretching over hundreds of yards. Now the chants and clapping rise and fall in volume as different sections of the crowd move past the junction with University Street. Baxter's fixed regard is on it as it passes, his features faintly distorted, strained by pity. A textbook phrase comes to Henry in much the same way as the cantata melody—a modest rise in his adrenaline level is making him unusually associative. Or the pressures of the past week won't release him from the habits, the intellectual game of diagnosis. The phrase is, a false sense of superiority. Yes, it can be down to a slight alteration in character, preceding the first tremors, somewhat short of, a little less disabling than, those other neurological conditions—grandiosity, delusions of grandeur. But he may be mis-rememberin
g. Neurology is not his field. As Baxter stares at the marchers, he makes tiny movements with his head, little nods and shakes. Watching him unobserved for a few seconds, Perowne suddenly understands—Baxter is unable to initiate or make saccades, those flickering changes of eye position from one fixation to another. To scan the crowd, he is having to move his head.
As though in confirmation, he turns his whole body towards Perowne and says genially, “Horrible rabble. Sponging off the country they hate.”
Perowne thinks he understands enough about Baxter to know he should get clear. Shrugging off Nigel and Nark at his side, he turns towards his car. “I'm not giving you cash,” he says dismissively. “I'm giving you my details. If you don't want to give me yours, that's fine. Your registration number will do. I'll be on my way.” He then adds, barely truthfully, “I'm late for an important meeting.”
But most of this sentence is obliterated by a single sound, a shout of rage.
Even as he turns back towards Baxter in surprise, and even as he sees, or senses, what's coming towards him at such speed, there remains in a portion of his thoughts a droning, pedestrian diagnostician who notes poor self-control, emotional lability, explosive temper, suggestive of reduced levels of GABA among the appropriate binding sites on striatal neurons. There is much in human affairs that can be accounted for at the level of the complex molecule. Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction? In her second year at Oxford, dazzled by some handsome fool of a teacher, Daisy tried to convince her father that madness was a social construct, a wheeze by means of which the rich—he may have got this wrong—squeezed the poor. Father and daughter engaged in one of their energetic arguments which ended with Henry, in a rhetorical coup, offering her a tour of a closed psychiatric wing. Resolutely, she accepted, and then the matter was forgotten.
