by James Meek
Ritchie was leaning forward, his hands squeezing the edge of the sofa cushion.
‘We weren’t ready, the three of us. We weren’t ready on any level. None of us had ever interrogated anyone before. None of us had met anyone like your father before. Where would a bunch of Taigs ever sit at the same table as an English toff who’d been to private school and Cambridge?’
‘Oxford,’ said Ritchie. His mouth was dry.
O’Donabháin took a deep breath. ‘What I’m saying is, if we hadn’t abducted him, we wouldn’t have met him socially.’
‘Do you have nightmares about it?’ said Ritchie.
‘No. That wasn’t the answer you were looking for, was it?’ O’Donabháin folded his arms and looked up at the ceiling, then leaned towards Ritchie, speaking quietly again.
‘Before we took him, when I knew what we were going to do, a guy lent me this film on cassette. It was a French film about the Resistance – Army in the Shadows, do you know it? There’s a scene in it where these Resistance fellows, one of them’s grassed the others up, so they take him to this house, and they have to get rid of him. But none of them has ever done anything like it before. They end up discussing it in front of the man they’re about to top off, and he’s got to sit there and listen.’ O’Donabháin gripped the ends of the armrests of the chair and shook his head. Was he teary? Ritchie couldn’t tell.
‘It was twenty-five years ago,’ O’Donabháin said. ‘The man I was then, he’s a stranger to me.’
His eyes were dry, Ritchie saw, but the thought that they might not have been showed Ritchie the possibility again of something in Colum O’Donabháin that he could reach out to and hold. If the man had wept, Ritchie thought, I would have gone over to him and put a hand on his shoulder.
‘Did you read the poem?’ said Colum.
‘Yes,’ said Ritchie.
‘What did you think?’
‘Interesting.’
Colum shook his head. ‘You can carry out an action,’ he said, ‘a bad action, and know you’ve done it, but nobody else knows, it’s private. And the thing about being exposed isn’t just that everyone knows what you’ve done. It’s that you don’t really know what you’ve done until you know that everyone else knows. When I went into that newsagent, I knew that two days before, I’d beaten a man up and done him in. But it was only when I saw the headlines in the papers that I knew what I’d really done.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Ritchie.
‘Do you?’ said Colum, looking at Ritchie in surprise.
Ritchie blushed and licked his lips. ‘I’d like to make this film,’ he said slowly. ‘I can’t offer you any money, of course.’ He understood what he’d seen in Colum. ‘I can offer you forgiveness.’
‘Do you think I want that?’ said Colum.
‘Yes,’ said Ritchie. The more the word ‘forgiveness’ settled in his mind, the more it eased him.
‘D’you think you have it in your power to forgive me?’
‘If not me, who?’
‘Your father can’t,’ said Colum. ‘That leaves God.’ He cocked his head and looked down at the carpet. ‘What a brave foolish man your father was. He never asked us not to kill him, and you know,’ he looked up at Ritchie, and again Ritchie had the uncomfortable feeling that Colum and his father had been intimates ‘— if he’d just given us the name we wanted, we might have let him go. He never saw our faces.’
‘Would you be prepared to talk to me like this on camera?’ said Ritchie.
‘We were talking about forgiveness,’ said Colum.
‘That’s what I can offer you.’
‘Ah but it shouldn’t be a bargain, should it? Would you not forgive me unless I was in your film?’
Forgiving Colum in any circumstances seemed like cool water Ritchie could drink in a dry place. ‘I do,’ he said, and saying it gave a sense of contentment that amazed him. He stood up, walked over to Colum and held out his hand. ‘I forgive you,’ he said. ‘I forgive you, Colum.’
Colum didn’t get up, but put his hand in Ritchie’s. Ritchie squeezed it and shook. I am doing this, he thought. This is real. I am forgiving my father’s killer. I am doing a good thing. I am holding the hand that killed my father.
Colum let go and Ritchie sat on the arm of the sofa closest to him. ‘The film would be about an hour and a half long,’ he said. ‘You and me talking; you being interviewed; me being interviewed; archive footage. We’d have to restage this first meeting.’
‘What about your mother?’ said Colum.
‘What about her?’
‘What about your sister?’
‘What about her?’
‘We didn’t take anything except his weapon,’ said Colum. ‘Your father’s. We didn’t take his wallet or what was in it. We had a look inside. There was a picture of the four of you, the family. I was surprised to find it there, with him being undercover. It wouldn’t be right to do this without your father’s wife and daughter.’
‘Maybe they aren’t ready yet.’
‘I don’t mind waiting.’
‘Maybe they’ll never forgive you.’
‘Then there won’t be a film.’
Ritchie lifted his thumbnail and bit it.
‘What was the last thing he said?’ he asked.
‘He said, when he knew it was coming, he said: “Tell them I wasn’t frightened in the end.”’
‘And then you shot him?’ Tears suddenly oozed out of Ritchie’s eyes.
‘Yes.’
‘What did you say before you shot him?’
‘I didn’t say anything. I just pressed the gun into the side of his head and shot him.’
43
Late in the afternoon, in the porch outside the kitchen of Bec’s villa, Batini chopped onions and aubergines for the evening meal. She’d mopped the floors, changed the bedding and handed over the dirty sheets to the laundry truck, and then she’d sharpened the knives. From the front yard round the corner she heard a dog whimper as it yawned and the clang of the door set in the main gate of the compound. She recognised her sister’s footsteps shuffling across the yard and Zuri came round the corner and greeted her.
‘Go on cooking,’ said Zuri in Swahili, waving at Batini when the greetings were over. ‘I’ll make us some tea. I couldn’t call, I’ve no credit. What are you making?’
‘Curry.’
‘Where’d you learn that?’
‘The old housekeeper.’
‘Do they like that, then?’
‘One of them is Pakistani from England.’ She shrugged. ‘The English English like it too.’
Zuri wrinkled her nose and sat down with a sudden exhalation of exhaustion on a stool at the corner of the table. She wobbled the table from side to side contemptuously and pinned it in place with her powerful elbow.
‘You should get your husband to fix that,’ she said. ‘Where is he?’
‘Looking for work. The Chinese opened a factory.’
‘Do you have any of those biscuits? Why can’t he get a job here? Drive one of their cars?’
‘He doesn’t know how. They need a driver, too. They’ve got anyone driving cars, even her.’ She put the kettle on and threw the chopped vegetables in a wide shallow pan.
Zuri took a paper twist of pumpkin seeds out of the plastic bag she was carrying and began to eat them, spitting out the husks. ‘I thought she was blind,’ she said.
‘Not all the time,’ said Batini uncertainly.
‘Doesn’t she have a man these days?’
‘Alex,’ said Batini. She laughed. ‘He’s just visiting.’ She turned away from stir-frying. ‘He keeps trying to help me with the washing up.’ She covered her mouth with her apron and doubled up laughing. Zuri increased her seed-processing rate.
‘He has a huge nose like a beak,’ said Batini.
‘Don’t let the food burn.’
Batini went back to frying. ‘I hear them. They’re in the room above me.’
‘Heh.’ Zuri was kn
owing. ‘And she’s thirty-three, and no husband, and no children? And I suppose he’s got no wife and no children either? How old is he?’
‘Older. Forty at least.’
Zuri shook her head. ‘What’s wrong with them? Is it something about the climate there?’
Batini switched off the gas, folded her arms and stood over Zuri. ‘I like Bec,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t need to have children. Why should she? She has a house of her own and a big salary. I’d like to live like that. Why not?’ She put her hand on her belly and gestured with the other. ‘I say to my husband “Where’s the condom?” and he says “You want me to wear one of them, you get the condom,” and I say “You’re the man, you wear it so you get it, you get your own underpants and your own t-shirts and you wear them, why should I choose your condoms?” Of course he never has any.’
Zuri inclined her head to one side and lifted her eyes to the sky until Batini stopped talking and relit the burners.
‘Well, you’re pregnant now,’ Zuri said with satisfaction, and after a moment, while Batini scraped angrily at the bottom of the pan, said: ‘You’re very nice about her when her vaccine doesn’t seem to work.’
‘She never said it would protect completely,’ said Batini. There was a sharp hiss from the pan as tears splashed into the hot oil. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and sniffed. ‘I don’t want to think about Huru now.’
A crash of metal against metal and breaking glass came from the street outside. There were shouts and screams and the continuous blare of a horn. Batini and Zuri ran to the gate and saw that one of the vaccine project’s big white Toyotas had smashed head-on into the wall of a neighbouring villa. Bec was still gripping the wheel. She was saying ‘Sorry, sorry,’ over and over. Two doctors were trying to open the back doors to get out and in the seat next to Bec, Alex was slumped forward, forehead on the dashboard.
44
The failure of Bec’s vision was sudden, extreme and shortlived. Her eyesight was good when she was slowing down to drive into the compound; completely gone just before the car hit the wall; and almost back to normal a few seconds later, when she turned to the passenger seat to see Alex not moving, blood creeping busily across the thundercloud-coloured plastic. There isn’t much blood, thought Bec. Then she thought: I’ve killed him. She put her hand on his shoulder.
‘Is he dead?’ she said. Haji had already got out of the back and was peering at the side of Alex’s head when Bec shouted that they had to help him. She had both hands on his shoulder, feeling that she must carry out some action, push, pull, support. She had the wild thought that the warmth of her touch might bring him back to life and at the same time a strange remote voice inside her was saying So, Bec, you’re responsible for the death of Alex; nothing but remorse from here on in.
She felt him sigh and shift and he said, distinctly, ‘Ow.’
‘Oh thank God,’ said Bec.
‘Careful, young man,’ said Haji, who to Bec’s astonishment didn’t seem surprised that her lover had come back from the dead. Alex lifted his head off the sticky dashboard. Bec’s first impression was that his face was destroyed, and the horror of this made her calm and she pulled wet wipes from a dispenser and began to clean his face and saw that it wasn’t as bad as it looked. Haji held her wrist and said she should wait and asked Alex how he was feeling.
‘How are you feeling?’ said Bec, as if she’d said it first. A crowd had formed around the car; it was the most thrilling entertainment the younger children had seen.
‘That gregi,’ said Alex groggily, leaning back. ‘It finds its way to stick it to you.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ said Bec.
Haji fixed him up in the kitchen with three stitches. Batini, Zuri and Bec watched Haji run the needle and thread through the skin of Alex’s forehead and cover the wound with gauze, lint and tape. When it was finished and the doctor stepped back and Alex grinned at Bec, one eyebrow crinkling the edge of the tape, she stopped biting her lip.
‘Sorry,’ she croaked, feeling small in the shadow of the enormity of her selfishness.
‘I should’ve worn the seatbelt,’ said Alex.
‘I could have killed you,’ said Bec.
Her attachment to her internal colony of haemoproteus had never seemed so sentimental. It seemed childish, the indulgence of a woman who’d gorged on freedom. It occurred to her for how harsh her father would have been towards anyone who put the group in danger in order to commemorate one who’d fallen.
That night she shook the bottle of anti-parasitics in Alex’s face and told him she was going to start taking them. But she didn’t start that night, and she didn’t start the next day, when Alex flew home. She intended to, but didn’t, all through the winding up of the trial, and when she moved back to London at the beginning of February, and Alex began to live with her in her flat, the seal on the bottle was still not broken.
Only two weeks passed between Alex leaving Tanzania and Bec moving back to London, but it seemed a desert to Alex, who missed her badly and had been deprived of his usual refuge of sub-microscopic flânerie by his new job and the conclusion of his chronase complex work. He shuttled between the dreary Byzantium of the Belford Institute, where, he discovered, the leader of one faction had reorganised his research group into an attack team tasked solely with discrediting the work of his American rivals, and Citron Square, where Harry was fading peevishly away, complaining of neglect and demanding to be left in peace.
It left time for Alex to brood and to build the epic thoughts that put him and Bec and the child they would have in the same narrative as the billion-year past and future of life and earth. Pedalling at high speed and singing across London, making his Belford colleagues suck air through their teeth with his teaspoon drum breaks on the rims of coffee mugs, he would be weaving visions together, the vision of a small, specific mittened hand, his daughter’s, held in his at the zoo, while he explained each animal’s strong and weak points to her, and the vision of a limitless cloud of human beings floating towards an eternally setting sun, like dandelion seeds carried on the wind, as if the two visions were the same picture.
Since moving from Imperial College to the Belford Alex had been struck by the fecundity of scientists who seemed less in tune with the rhythm of life than him, awkward, inarticulate, lumpy, unfit, plodding; men and women whom he felt should be less likely to be favoured by nature the bouncer than he was, yet who had children, two, three, five, who belonged. Perhaps, he thought, it wasn’t given to him to belong, and when he died, his chronase clock would stop forever. But he had been given another chance with Bec to prove that this was not the case.
Alex saw that there were obstacles. He saw that Bec, who took contraceptive pills, might not want to have children; that they might not conceive; that she might feel it was too soon. He was wary. He remembered difficult conversations with Maria. He didn’t know how to bring it up.
In February, a few weeks after Bec returned to London and Alex moved in with her, they took Harry to Scotland for the seventieth birthday of his brother Lewis, Alex’s father. On the eve of their flight north Alex came home from the institute to find Bec on the floor of the living room next to a large box marked with the Apple logo. She sat cross-legged on the laminate surface in black leggings and a Norwegian jumper, trying to fix together two sheets of candy-striped wrapping paper. Through the French windows behind her the last blue light before darkness showed the rusted barbecue and rotted hammock in the backyard.
Two days earlier they’d bought Lewis an antique globe as a birthday present. Alex got down on his knees beside Bec and twisted his head to read the specs of the laptop the box apparently contained. ‘That’s quite a stocking filler for my old dad,’ he said.
Bec lifted the box, slid the doubled paper under it, wrapped it round and began fixing it with tape. ‘It’s for Batini,’ she said. ‘She sent a message asking me to get her a laptop. She’s going to do a course. They have fast Internet in Dar now.’
/> Alex held the folds of gift wrap in place at the ends of the box while Bec taped them down. She began unrolling a length of brown paper.
‘Haji’s in town,’ she said. ‘He’s coming round later to pick it up. He’ll take it back with him. Hand me the scissors.’
Alex tucked the handles of the scissors gently in Bec’s palm. ‘That’s a lot of Mac for a small lap,’ he said.
Bec stopped what she was doing and looked him in the eyes. ‘Yeah, there’s guilt,’ she said. ‘Her son died when she wasn’t there to help. The boy’s grandmother carried him ten miles over the hills in the middle of the night to get to the clinic but he was already gone when they got there. We vaccinated him and I told Batini it was a good thing, when it only made him half-immune. We keep telling people they have to go on covering their children at night and treating their nets, but if some group of big-shot international medics comes in with a vaccine and gives it to their kids they think, “Oh, they’re protected now, I can save a few shillings on the permethrin.” Wouldn’t you?’
She faced Alex and bit her thumbnail. ‘Since then she’s married the brother of her dead husband and she’s already pregnant by him. I spend six years and tens of thousands of pounds of other people’s money getting a doctorate in parasitology, I trek around Papua New Guinea and find an unknown species, I persuade dozens of people to spend millions of pounds and years of their lives making a malaria vaccine and in the end I can’t save Batini’s boy. And in a few months’ time, without an ounce of science, she has a baby. It’s the oldest medicine there is. Lose a child, make a new one. Try to beat the malaria parasite at its own game. It reproduces, you reproduce back.’
