by James Meek
Ritchie waited till he had his pudding bowl of rhubarb fool in front of him to tell them what he wanted to do and ask for their blessing. Four months ago he’d written to Colum O’Donabháin, executioner of Greg Shepherd, his and Bec’s father, Stephanie’s husband. He wanted to make a documentary about the killing, and film interviews with him. O’Donabháin was a few years out of jail, living in Dublin, and wrote back saying he had no objection. As the leader of a faction of a faction of Marxist Republicans, O’Donabháin caught Captain Shepherd on his way to meet a traitor in their ranks, beat the Englishman up to make him identify the traitor, and when he wouldn’t tell them, shot him dead. Bec was nine; Ritchie fifteen.
He watched his sister. The glisten of her eyes and the colour in her cheeks made him feel sluggish and earthbound. She’s pretending to be interested, he thought.
‘O’Donabháin’s an old man now,’ he said. ‘He spent a long time in prison. He lives in a council house with his mother and writes poetry. I never got over what happened to Dad and making a film about meeting O’Donabháin would be a chance for us to get closure and for him to atone to the family.’ He beat the air with his fist as he had that morning, persuading The What to play music badly. ‘I don’t want to do this without your support. Tell me what you think.’ He saw his mother, who’d been rocking back and forward, head bent, hands clasped, look up at Bec, who started to open her mouth. ‘You first, Mum,’ said Ritchie.
‘Oh,’ said Stephanie, who’d wanted to hear what Bec thought before committing herself. Her daughter had such strong convictions that there were right and wrong things to do that Stephanie could yield to her. She was surprised to hear Ritchie say he’d never got over Greg’s death. As she remembered, it was only true in the sense that the death of his father turned him from a sullen, rebellious tyke into a precociously warm, generous man who looked after his family. It’d been Bec, surely, who hadn’t been able to bear the loss, burning lines into her wrist with the edge of a hot spoon, screaming at everyone, disappearing into the coomb for hours in the rain.
Stephanie couldn’t see any harm in Ritchie making his film. She’d lost a second husband to heart disease since the first. She didn’t so much miss Greg as resent the sense of unfairness his departure had left her with. Twenty-five years had passed; a new generation had grown up. Long before Greg was killed she’d imagined him dying, and he’d been away so much, off smiling to his life of guns and sleeping rough, that he’d already died a little in advance.
‘As long as I don’t have to meet the murderer,’ she said. ‘As long as I don’t have to watch the film. I don’t see …’ she looked at Bec again ‘… why I should mind. What do you think?’ she asked her daughter.
‘Maybe Dad would be writing poetry now, if he were alive,’ said Bec. ‘I don’t understand what closure means. What gets closed when you do this? If this man wants to atone to the family, he should atone to the family, not to millions of strangers on TV. That’s not atonement. It’s entertainment.’
‘It’s not entertainment,’ said Ritchie patiently, ‘it’s cathartic.’
‘It’s a show, isn’t it? It’s doing whatever you have that’s intimate and private and turning it into a show. It’s wrong. Go and see him, talk to him, be his friend, take his confession, whatever, I don’t care, but you mustn’t make a film about it.’
‘You didn’t ask us when you named your infection after Dad.’
‘It’s not an infection,’ said Bec. ‘Haemoproteus gregi is a benign parasite.’
‘They’re not going to thank you in Africa if you cure malaria and all the kids are wearing bottle-bottom glasses and bumping into trees.’
Stephanie laughed and put her hand over her mouth.
‘If you do this,’ said Bec, ‘it’s as if the most important thing Dad did in his life was to die.’
15
At home after work the next day, dressing to meet Val, Bec put on some of the light casual clothes she was taking to Africa: a long cheesecloth skirt, a black spaghetti-strap top, a light black blouse and black sandals. Before leaving she opened the freezer compartment of the fridge, took out the envelope with the ring and put it in her bag.
The plane trees near the restaurant were full of starlings and their song was louder than the traffic in the warm evening air. Bec waited in the street, delaying the moment when she would have to step out of the light. She squinted up at the apricot-coloured sky and listened to the rub and squeak of the flock turn all the crooked spaces of the street’s mismatched façade into instruments, its rusting gutters and cracked pediments and the dark chinks between bricks. She took a deep breath and walked down a flight of stairs into a windowless, air-conditioned basement.
Val was late. Bec sat on a high stool at the bar, rolling up and smoothing out the white tissue mat her glass of wine had been served on. Her heart beat hard. The bar top was made of heavy black stone, flecked with mica, cold to the touch, and the walls were black. Tiny lights illuminated red-painted recesses. Young waiters, all in black, with lacquered hair and patent leather shoes, placed a bowl of wasabi-flavoured snacks in front of her and opened for her the tall card carrying a short menu in an expanse of space. Bec wanted Val to get there quickly but when he touched her shoulder and greeted her it was too soon.
Short, dark and slim, with grey eyes that bulged slightly, Val looked as if he might be a bullfighter in middle years. He was still and alert, wary, handsome, rationing his passions, careful what he ate, jealous of his time, straight-backed. Bec told him he looked nice and when she spoke the words her mouth went dry and the blood rushed in and out of her face as if she’d been caught tipping poison in his drink.
Val glanced down at Bec’s cheesecloth skirt and sandals, at the bra strap under the strap of her top. ‘Didn’t you have time to go home and change?’ he said.
He sat on the stool next to hers and saw her naked left hand.
‘Where’s the ring?’ he said.
Bec reached into her bag, took out the envelope and gave it to Val. It was a plain white office envelope, the kind they sell in stationery shops in packets of fifty. It was crumpled at the edges and damp where ice from the freezer had melted on the paper. Val took it, opened the flap, looked inside, stuck out his lower lip, closed the envelope, folded it in two and tucked it in his inside jacket pocket. He leaned one elbow on the bar and linked the fingers of his hands together. His shoulders quivered. He couldn’t meet Bec’s eyes.
‘I’ve behaved badly,’ said Bec. ‘I’m sorry.’
Val looked up and swallowed. For a moment, he seemed unsure of himself. It became him.
‘When I met you, there were so many people around you wanting your attention, and all the same you seemed lonely,’ said Bec. ‘They looked up to you, or they were jealous of you, or they were afraid of you, and you were still lonely. You were carrying a loss, and I admired how you tried to hide it. You were …’ She groped for a word to describe a man hollowed out by grief who doesn’t become addicted to it, or to the pity of others, and who remains loyal to life. ‘… dignified,’ she said.
‘Go on,’ said Val. Bec could see his uncertainty skinning over. She remembered how he liked to talk about his young teenage children. He found more about them to say than was worth telling, as if fending off the temptation to impress her with anecdotes about famous people he knew. She realised Val had been prepping her for a life of shared responsibility all along; a life of cohabitation with the quiet, evasive kids, for whom Val’s determination not to spoil them had been, with its intermittent blasts of overwhelming attention, a kind of spoiling. He’d assumed from the start that they were moving towards marriage, and the children, perhaps, had assumed the same thing, which was why they were so quiet and evasive.
Her eyes slipped to the knot of Val’s tie. She’d taken pleasure in moving his ties to one side, unfastening the second button of his shirt and sliding her hand over his chest. The memory seemed like a story she’d been told rather than something she’d done.
>
It was as if just by staring at her and keeping perfectly still he was forcing her mouth shut and making it hard for her to breathe. The knowledge that death had broken into Val’s house and slowly killed his wife, and that he hadn’t crumbled and had guarded his children, had made her interested in him and given her a feeling of kinship. It didn’t seem to her that she’d dealt well with death when it came early to her family. His grief had hooked her and his assumption of power had turned her on. It satisfied a need for abasement. Several months earlier, when she’d kneeled in front of him in a half-lit room and taken him in her mouth, she felt power, mercy and humiliation running through her and mixing in a single delicious stream.
A waitress came over to tell them that their table was ready.
‘We won’t be needing it,’ said Val. ‘I’ll have a bottle of mineral water, still, no ice, no lemon.’ He turned to Bec. She saw herself reflected in his face: a cold, hard, trivial woman.
‘It was wrong of you to take my wife’s ring if you didn’t want to marry me,’ said Val.
‘It was wrong,’ said Bec gratefully. ‘I should have said no. I was a coward. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. I didn’t think.’
Val pinched the creases of his trousers and pulled them straight. ‘Do you remember telling me about your father?’ he said. ‘Do you remember telling me how he died when he could have stayed alive by betraying some shit, and how his children had to try harder than most people to do the right thing? Here.’ He gave Bec a napkin and she wiped the tears from her face. ‘I’m making this too easy for you by letting you hate me.’ He got up, seemed about to walk away, sat down again and pulled his chair closer to Bec.
‘You’ve been saying “yes” to everything I asked for six months,’ he said. ‘You’ve met somebody else and you don’t have the guts to admit it.’
‘I haven’t met anybody. I said yes before because you asked me and I liked making you happy. I said yes to marriage because I panicked when you brought out your ring with all the weight of it.’
‘You pitied me.’
‘You make pity sound like a punch in the face.’
‘That would have been better,’ said Val.
‘Yes, I see that,’ said Bec. ‘You never talked about love. I liked it that you weren’t throwing that word around the way people do. But perhaps because you didn’t tell me you loved me, it made me think it was all right that I didn’t love you.’
A change came over Val’s face. The muscles of his face tightened, his eyes seemed to harden and his mouth twisted into an expression of hatred.
‘You really are a modern Englishwoman, aren’t you?’ he said in a harsh, alien voice. ‘An atheist prattling about love, a hedonist bragging about her good works among the poor, an arrogant intellectual who thinks science has all the answers and who knows nothing about the lives of ordinary, decent, hard-working people. You move from party to party, from man to man, without a thought for family, loyalty, commitment. How many men have you been with? Twenty? Fifty? How many still to come? One day you’ll wake up dry and alone and wonder why your house is so quiet, why there aren’t any children in it.’ He gulped water and the glass hiding his mouth emphasised his bulging eyes and the rage that had taken possession of him.
The shock of his words pushed Bec’s spirits into a crouch, as if she were suddenly fighting for her life, and amid the roar of blood and the battering of her heart her mind was clear. ‘You could have asked me to marry you before you put your hand between my legs,’ she said. ‘You could have asked me to marry you before you kissed me. You talk as if there are rules I should be living by but if there are, you don’t know them any better than I do. I wish there was some kind of moral foundation I could stand on or try to blow up if I didn’t like it but there isn’t one.’
Val’s eyes softened and he relaxed, as if a demon that had possessed him had left his body, taking with it all consciousness of what it had just made its host say. ‘There can be, darling,’ he said. ‘Be my wife, be the mother to my children, and you can stand on that moral foundation: tradition, common law and the ten commandments.’
Bec was already getting up before he finished speaking. ‘I’m not the one,’ she said. She put out her hand for him to shake. He didn’t move. She said: ‘Goodbye. I’m sorry I made such a bad mistake.’
16
A month later Val invited Ritchie to lunch in his office. In the lift going up Ritchie regretted not having brought someone with him. He stuck the clip-on visitor badge in the pocket of his jacket. You chose your team according to who you were up against, he thought. Sometimes it was better to be alone; you projected trust and confidence. But there were times when you wanted a sidekick. What they did wasn’t important. Sometimes, when he was on his way to meet a cunning man he didn’t like, and he wasn’t sure what they were going to talk about, Ritchie wanted another body on his side of the table, just for the extra mass.
The lift doors opened and a woman was there to meet him. She smiled and he followed her sprightly march along the corridor. Their footsteps made no sound in the thick carpet of this, the executive floor. The building was a steel, concrete and glass tower from the 1980s but on this level the walls were panelled with old oak and hung with paintings of – who? Past editors? As long as it wasn’t about trying to get Bec to change her mind, thought Ritchie, it would go well; there was always advantage to be gained.
‘Here you are,’ said his guide, opening one of a set of double doors.
Ritchie went in and the door closed behind him. Most of the room was taken up by a long, narrow walnut table, polished to a deep lustre. Val sat at the far end, talking on a mobile. Two places had been set for a meal there, with bottles of water, glasses, a bowl of fruit and a basket of bread rolls. As Ritchie walked towards him Val stood up, lifting the chair back with his free hand, and began to end the call, signalling a welcome to Ritchie by widening his eyes. The long walls of the room were panelled with the same dark oak as the corridor. Instead of paintings of editors there were framed pages from the newspaper. The room’s short walls, incongruously, were windows – clear glass from floor to ceiling, framed with anodised metal. Through the glass at Val’s end of the table Ritchie could see Tower Bridge, the choppy broth of the Thames and the grey and yellow clouds driven low over London by the gusting September wind.
Val put the phone away, shook Ritchie’s hand and said that he hoped he didn’t mind if the two of them had lunch in the boardroom. Val seemed in such a good mood, more chatty and funny than Ritchie had seen him, and seemed so interested in the O’Donabháin film, that Ritchie relaxed. Val was tactful and open about his sister. He said early on, tucking in his chin while he looked at Ritchie, as if there was something he was having trouble swallowing, that Ritchie probably knew he and Bec had broken up; and Ritchie said yes, his sister had emailed him from Tanzania, and he was sorry. Val said he hoped Bec was doing well in Africa, that she was a remarkable woman, and that whatever had happened between the two of them, he wasn’t going to let it spoil his lunch with Ritchie Shepherd.
A young man in a white tunic and apron came in with a trolley and carved a chicken for them and a waitress offered wine. They were left alone. Val bent his head over his plate and cut a small slice of chicken breast in half with a sawing motion that Ritchie found finicky.
‘Is this going to be the last season of your show?’ Val asked, looking up and putting the chicken in his mouth.
Ritchie felt a hollowing, but laughed. ‘I haven’t checked my messages in the last sixty seconds,’ he said. ‘The ratings don’t lie. They’d be insane to cancel.’
Val nodded, finished chewing and took a drink of water. Ritchie put his knife and fork down, leaned back in his chair and watched him.
‘I haven’t heard anything,’ said Val. ‘I’m sure you have your enemies. Don’t you?’
‘I have a strategy,’ said Ritchie, taking up his cutlery again and setting to work folding a leaf of crispy chicken skin onto the tines of his fo
rk. ‘Don’t give anyone a reason to hate you.’
‘Enemies inside the BBC, I mean. Those who might think making a market in setting children against each other wasn’t a good use of the licence fee.’
‘That’s not really what Teen Makeover’s about,’ said Ritchie cheerfully. ‘Is that what you think?’
‘You’re way ahead of them,’ said Val. ‘This film project of yours is a bold thing. Perhaps it’s the start of a new career. You’ve done that before. Changed course. Kept them guessing. And made it work, which is more than can be said for most.’
What does he want? thought Ritchie, enjoying the praise. He’d only abandoned The Lazygods after three albums flopped in a row, but he remembered it differently. It seemed to him that he’d put music aside when his creativity pulled him in another direction, when producers and critics were still urging him to keep recording.
‘Your father was the kind of genuine British hero we should be celebrating more often,’ said Val.
‘It’s about honouring his memory,’ said Ritchie, wondering if the girl was coming back with pudding.
‘Honour. That’s exactly the word. Just because the guy he refused to give up seems to have been a nasty shit doesn’t change that. He was loyal. Didn’t crack.’
‘Yes,’ said Ritchie, frowning out of respect for his father’s suffering. ‘It’s going to be hard for me to look O’Donabháin in the eyes, knowing what he did, but—’
‘Is he a Catholic?’ said Val.
‘Who? O’Donabháin?’ Ritchie grappled with the strangeness of the question. ‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’
‘One of these socialist Catholics, I suppose,’ said Val, smiling.
