by Ian Mcewan
Ten minutes later, I was in the armchair in the kitchen, observing Mark. Just below the worn armrest was a long tear in the leather into which I often shoved old newspapers, in part to dispose of them, but also in the vague hope they would substitute for the vanished stuffing. Mark was counting as he pulled them out, one by one. He unfolded them and spread them across the carpet. Miranda was at the table, deep in a hushed phone call with Jasmin. Mark was smoothing out each paper with a careful swimming motion of both hands, pressing it onto the floorboards and addressing it in a murmur.
‘Number eight. Now you go here and don’t move … nine … you stay here … ten …’
Mark was much changed. He was an inch or so taller, the ginger-blond hair was long and thick and centre-parted. He was dressed in the uniform of an adult world citizen – jeans, sweater, trainers. The baby plumpness was going from his face, which was longer now, with a watchfulness in his gaze that may have derived from the upheavals in his life. The eyes were a deep green, the skin of porcelain smoothness and pallor. A perfect Celt.
Soon, all the events of the previous months were at my feet. Falkland warships burning, Mrs Thatcher with raised hand at a Party Conference, President Carter in an embrace after a major speech. I wasn’t sure whether Mark’s counting game was a way of saying hello, of sidling up to me. I sat patiently and waited.
Finally, he stood and went to the table and retrieved a carton of chocolate dessert and a spoon and came back to me. He stood with an elbow resting on my knee, fiddling with the edge of tinfoil he needed to remove.
He looked up. ‘It’s a bit tricky.’
‘Would you like me to help?’
‘I can do it easily but not today so you have to.’ The accent was still the generalised cockney of London and its surrounds, but there was another element, some undertones inflecting the vowels. Something of Miranda’s, I thought. He put the carton in my hands. I opened it for him and handed it back.
I said, ‘Do you want to sit at the table to eat it?’
He patted the arm of my chair. I helped him up and he sat, perched above me, spooning the chocolate into his mouth. When a dollop fell on my knee, he glanced down and murmured an untroubled ‘Oops.’
As soon as he was done, he handed spoon and carton to me and said, ‘Where’s that man?’
‘Which man?’
‘With the funny nose.’
‘That’s what I was wondering. He went for a walk last night and hasn’t come back.’
‘When he should be in bed.’
‘Exactly.’
Mark spoke directly into my growing concern. Adam often took long walks, but never overnight. If Mark hadn’t been there, I might have been pacing the room, waiting for Miranda to finish on the phone so that we could fret together.
I said, ‘What’s in your suitcase?’
It was on the floor by Miranda’s feet, a pale blue case, with stickers of monsters and superheroes.
He looked to the ceiling, took a theatrical deep breath and counted off on his fingers. ‘Two dresses, one green, one white, my crown, one two three books, my recorder and my secret box.’
‘What’s in the secret box?’
‘Um, secret coins and the toenail from a dinosaur.’
‘I’ve never seen a dinosaur’s toenail.’
‘No,’ he agreed pleasantly. ‘You haven’t.’
‘Do you want to show me?’
He pointed straight at Miranda. It was a change of subject. ‘She’s going to be my new mummy.’
‘What do you think about that?’
‘You’re going to be the daddy.’
What he thought was not a question he could respond to.
He said quietly, ‘Dinosaurs are all extinct anyway.’
‘I agree.’
‘They’re all dead. They can’t come back.’
I heard the uncertainty in his voice. I said, ‘They absolutely can’t come back.’
He gave me a serious look. ‘Nothing comes back.’
I got halfway through my therapeutically supportive, kindly reply. What I was starting to say was, ‘The past is extinct,’ when he interrupted me with a shout, but a happy one.
‘I don’t like sitting on this chair!’
I went to help him down but he leapt with a shriek onto the floor, into a crouching position, and then he jumped and crouched again, shouting, ‘I’m a frog! A frog!’
He was hopping across the floor as a very loud frog when two things happened at once. Miranda came off the phone and told Mark to keep his noise down. At the same time, the door opened and Adam was before us. The room fell silent. Mark scurried for Miranda’s hand.
I knew that depleted look. Otherwise, Adam looked, as ever, well groomed in white shirt and dark suit.
‘Are you all right?’ I said.
‘I’m so sorry if you’ve been anxious, but I …’ He came forward to near where Miranda was, ducked down to retrieve the cable and with a lunging motion, pulled his shirt clear and shoved the socket into his stomach and fell onto one of the hard kitchen chairs with a moan of relief.
Miranda stood up from the table and went to stand with her back to the stove. Mark followed her closely, with his head turned towards Adam.
She said, ‘We were beginning to worry about you.’
He was still in his moment of immediate abandon. I had sometimes wondered if the charge was like slaking a desperate thirst. He had told me that in those first seconds it was a gorgeous surge, a breaking wave of clarity that settled into deep contentment. He had once been untypically expansive. ‘You can have no idea, what it is to love a direct current. When you’re really in need, when the cable is in your hand and you finally connect, you want to shout out loud at the joy of being alive. The first touch – it’s like light pouring through your body. Then it smooths out into something profound. Electrons, Charlie. The fruits of the universe. The golden apples of the sun. Let photons beget electrons!’ Another time, he’d said, with a wink, as he was plugging himself in, ‘You can keep your corn-fed roast chicken.’
Now he was taking his time to reply to Miranda. He must have progressed to the second stage. His voice was calm.
‘Alms.’
‘Arms?’
‘Alms. Don’t you know this one? Time hath, my Lord, a wallet at his back wherein he puts alms for oblivion.’
I said, ‘You’ve lost me. Oblivion?’
‘Shakespeare, Charlie. Your patrimony. How can you bear to walk around without some of it in your head?’
‘Somehow, it seems I can.’ I thought he was sending me a message, a bad one about death. I looked at Miranda. Her arm was around Mark’s shoulder, and he was gazing at Adam in wonderment as though he knew, in a way that adults immediately might not, that here was someone fundamentally different. Long before, I’d owned a dog, a normally placid and obedient Labrador. Whenever a good friend of mine brought his autistic brother round, the dog growled at him and had to be locked away. A consciousness unconsciously understood. But Mark’s expression suggested awe, not aggression.
Adam became aware of him for the first time.
‘So there you are,’ he said in the sing-song way of adults addressing infants. ‘Do you remember our boat in the bath?’
Mark moved closer against Miranda. ‘It’s my boat.’
‘Yes. Then you danced. Do you still dance?’
He looked up at Miranda. She nodded. He returned his gaze to Adam and said after a thoughtful pause, ‘Not always.’
Adam’s voice deepened. ‘Would you like to come and shake my hand?’
Mark shook his head emphatically so that his entire body twisted from left to right and back. It hardly mattered. The question was merely a friendly gesture and Adam was retreating into his version of sleep. He had described it to me variously; he didn’t dream, he ‘wandered’. He sorted and rearranged his files, reclassified memories from short to long term, played out internal conflicts in disguised form, usually without resolving them, reanimated old ma
terial in order to refresh it, and moved, so he put it once, in a trance through the garden of his thoughts. In such a state he conducted in relative slow motion his researches, formulated tentative decisions, and even wrote new haikus or discarded or reimagined old ones. He also practised what he called the art of feeling, allowing himself the luxury of the entire spectrum, from grief to joy so that all emotion remained accessible to him when fully charged. It was, above all else, he insisted, a process of repair and consolidation from which he emerged daily, delighted to find himself to be, once again, self-aware, in a state of grace – his word – and to reclaim the consciousness that the very nature of matter permitted.
We watched as he sank away from us.
At last, Mark whispered, ‘He’s asleep and his eyes are open.’
It was indeed eerie. Too much like death. Long ago, a doctor friend had taken me down to the hospital mortuary to see my father after his fatal heart attack. Such was the speed of events, the staff had forgotten to close his eyes.
I offered Miranda a coffee and Mark a glass of milk. She kissed me lightly on the lips and said that she would take Mark upstairs to play for a while until he was collected, and that I was welcome to join them at any time. They left and I returned to the study.
In retrospect, what I did there for a few minutes came to seem like a delaying tactic to protect myself a little longer from the story, now an hour old, that was engulfing the media networks. I picked up some magazines from the floor and put them on the shelves, clipped together some invoices and tidied the papers on my desk. At last I sat down at the screen to think about earning a little money myself, in the old style.
I clicked on the news first – and there it was, on every outlet, worldwide. A bomb had exploded in the Grand Hotel, Brighton at 4 a.m. It had been placed in a cleaner’s cupboard almost directly under the bedroom where Prime Minister Benn had been sleeping. He was killed instantly. His wife was not with him because of a hospital appointment in London. Two members of the hotel staff also died. The deputy prime minister, Denis Healey, was preparing to go to Buckingham Palace to see the Queen. The Provisional IRA had just claimed responsibility. A state of emergency had been declared. President Carter was cancelling a holiday. The French president, Georges Marchais, had ordered all flags on government buildings to be at half-mast. A demand for the same from Buckingham Palace had been met with a cool response from a royal official: ‘Neither customary nor appropriate.’ A big crowd was gathering spontaneously in Parliament Square. In the City, the FTSE was up fifty-seven points.
I read everything, all the instant analysis and opinion I could find: until now, the only British prime minister to have been assassinated was Spencer Perceval, in 1812. I admired the speed with which newsrooms could turn around instant analysis and opinion pieces: the innocence has gone forever from British politics; in Tony Benn, the IRA has eliminated the politician most open, or least hostile, to their cause; Denis Healey is the best man to steady the ship of state; Denis Healey will be a catastrophe for the country; dispatch the entire army to Northern Ireland and wipe the IRA from the face of the earth; police, don’t be rushed into arresting the wrong people; ‘State of War!’ was the front page of one online tabloid.
Reading this material was a way of not contemplating the event itself. I blanked the screen and sat for a while, thinking of nothing much. It was as though I was waiting for the next event, the decent one, that would undo the event before. Then I began to wonder whether this was the beginning of a history marker, of a general unravelling, or one of those isolated outrages that fade in time, like Kennedy’s near-death in Dallas. I stood and walked up and down the room, again thinking of nothing at all. At last, I decided to go upstairs.
They were on their hands and knees, assembling a jigsaw on a tea tray. As I came in, Mark held up a blue piece and announced, gravely, quoting his new mother, ‘The sky is the hardest.’
I watched them from the doorway. He shifted position to kneel up and curl an arm around her neck. She gave him a piece and pointed to where it belonged. With much fumbling, much help, he slotted it in. There were the beginnings of a sailing ship in stormy seas, with piled cumulus touched yellow and orange by a rising sun. Perhaps it was setting. They murmured companionably as they worked away. At some point soon, after Mark had been collected, I would give Miranda the news. She’d always been passionate for Benn.
She put another piece in the little boy’s hand. It took time for him to get it in position. He had it upside down, then his hand slipped and displaced some adjacent bits of sky. At last, with Miranda guiding him, her hand on top of his, the fragment was in place. He glanced up at me and smiled confidingly about a triumph he seemed to want to share. That look and the smile, which I returned, dispelled all my private doubts and I knew I was committed.
*
When Adam emerged from his recharge he was in an odd state, well removed from wonder at the fact of conscious life. He moved slowly about the kitchen, stopping to look around, grimacing, moving on and making a humming sound, a high to low glissando, like a moan of disappointment. He knocked a glass tumbler over which shattered on the floor. He spent half an hour morosely sweeping up the pieces, then sweeping again, then looking for shards of glass on hands and knees. Finally, he fetched the vacuum cleaner. He carried a chair into the back garden and stood behind it, staring at the backs of neighbouring houses. It was cold outside, but that wouldn’t have bothered him. Later, I came into the kitchen to find him folding one of his white cotton shirts on the table, bending low to the task, moving with reptilian slowness as he smoothed out the crease in the arms. I asked what was up.
‘I’m feeling, well …’ His mouth opened as he searched for the word. ‘Nostalgic.’
‘For what?’
‘For a life I never had. For what could have been.’
‘You mean Miranda?’
‘I mean everything.’
He wandered outside again and this time sat down and stared ahead, immobile, and remained that way for a long time. On his lap was a brown envelope. I decided not to go out and ask his views on the assassination.
In the early afternoon, after Miranda had said her goodbyes to Mark and finished another conversation with Jasmin, she came down to find me. I was at the screen in pointless pursuit of more news, angles, opinions, statements. It turned out she had known as soon as the story broke. She leaned against the door frame, I remained in my seat. Physical proximity would have seemed like disrespect. Our conversation was much like my thoughts, a circular chase around an incomprehensible event – the cruelty of it, the stupidity. People with Irish accents had been attacked in the streets. The crowd outside Parliament had grown so large it was being moved by the police to Trafalgar Square. Mrs Thatcher’s office had released a statement. Was it sincere? We decided it was. Did she write it herself? We couldn’t be sure. ‘Though we disagreed on many fundamentals of policy, I knew him to be a thoroughly kind, decent, honest man of huge intelligence who always wanted the best for his country.’ Whenever our conversation strayed into likely consequences, we felt we were betraying the moment and accepting a world without him. We weren’t ready, and we turned back, although Miranda did say that with Healey we would keep our ‘end-time’ bombs after all. I was hardly a Tory, but I thought I would have been just as shocked if Mrs Thatcher had been in that hotel bed. What horrified me was the ease with which the edifice of public, political life could be shaken apart. Miranda saw it differently. Benn was, she said, in an entirely different league of human being from Margaret Thatcher. But a human being, was my point. A divide was opening up that we preferred to avoid.
So we moved on, after these lamentations, to Mark. She summarised her conversation with the social worker. The route to adoption was difficult and long and Miranda had learned that we were almost two-thirds of the way. Soon, a probation period would begin.
She said, ‘What did you think?’
‘I’m ready.’
She nodded. We had celebra
ted Mark many times before, his nature, his changes, his past and future. We weren’t about to do that again now. On any other day, we might have gone upstairs to the bedroom. She slouched beautifully in the door frame, dressed in new clothes – a thick white winter shirt, artfully too large, tight black jeans, ankle boots tricked out in silver studs. I reconsidered – perhaps this was a good moment to retreat upstairs. I went over to her and we kissed.
She said, ‘Something’s worrying me. I was reading Mark a fairy story, and there was a beggar, and that word. Alms.’
‘Yes?’
‘I had a horrible thought.’ She was pointing across the room. ‘I think we should look.’
Now the bed was gone, I kept the case in a locked cupboard. As I lifted it out, it was obvious enough by its weight, but I sprang the catches anyway. We stared into a space void of £50-note bundles. I went to the window. He was still out there, on the chair, and had been for an hour and a half. The thick envelope was still on his lap. £97,000. ‘And you kept it in the house!’, I heard an inner voice say.
We hadn’t looked at each other yet. Instead, we looked away, and stood around, wasting time, swearing quietly to ourselves, separately trying to take in the implications. Out of habit, I glanced towards the screen on my desk. The flag was, after all, being lowered to half mast on Buckingham Palace.
We were in too much turmoil to have a sensible discussion about tactics. We simply decided to act. We went next door to the kitchen and called Adam into the house. At the table, Miranda and I were side by side, with Adam facing us. He had brushed his suit, cleaned his shoes and put on a freshly ironed shirt. There was a new touch – a folded handkerchief in his breast pocket. His manner was both solemn and distracted, as though nothing much mattered to him, whatever we said.
‘Where’s the money?’
‘I’ve given it away.’
We didn’t expect him to tell us that he had invested it, or put it in a safer place, but still, with our silence we enacted our profound shock.
