The Heart Broke In

by James Meek

  They shot him in dusty hills, kneeling by clumps of tough, gnarled bushes, and he looked into the camera and said that the plants were more than ten thousand years old, that they had been growing in this place when Britain had only just been released from the ice age, when humans were learning how to farm. He said it five times before he got it right. He tripped over his words and put the emphasis in the wrong places. He didn’t like the script. It was too respectful towards the mean patch of scrub that had lived so long without learning how to die. Speaking into the camera he composed a different set of lines in his head. Look at this gnarled, bitter old survivor. It doesn’t have the dignity to step aside and let green shoots take its place. It can’t bear to be replaced. It won’t let go.

  The love of knowledge in the scientists he interviewed had been spoiled by their quest to lengthen human life. Each had experienced a moment of fame for one discovery, then been sought out ever since by visitors asking the same questions about the same discovery, and even while they grew bitter because their new work was being ignored in favour of the old, their desire to recapture their earlier glory had driven them to travel further down the same dead-end road towards immortality; and that journey had made their own ageing, their own failing powers, so much harder to bear. As the days in California went by Alex thought about Harry, how ungraciously he’d treated Matthew, and how his desire to be literally immortal had poisoned the alternative immortalities he might have claimed in the lives of those he left behind.

  After two weeks, as the trip neared its end, he was longing to be home. He wished he’d taken Bec’s first advice and not left the institute to make the film. He wanted to show her that he’d stay with her until the end, whether he could father children or not. He would marry her if she liked. When they spoke on Skype he was preoccupied with this and didn’t notice how quiet she was and how she did all she could to get him to talk and tell her about his time there while telling him as little as possible about herself.

  She told him that Dougie had left without giving a reason. Alex told her that it was time for his brother to move on and he saw her smile quickly on the screen. He asked if she was relieved, too, and she nodded and said she was.

  Alex’s flight got in to Gatwick in the middle of a workday morning and there were people Bec had promised to meet so it wasn’t until six in the evening that she got home. Alex had been there since the early afternoon. He’d slept for an hour, washed and fidgeted about the house nervously, checking the time every few minutes, changing his shirt twice, eager and anxious, going over what he wanted to say.

  Bec had been deciding whether to tell Alex what she’d done. She’d already sent Dougie a message, which he hadn’t replied to, saying that she was going to tell him. But as she opened the front door of the house and called Alex’s name she still hadn’t made up her mind. She was beginning to get used to the mental barrier that stood between knowing she should tell him and actually speaking the words out loud. The barrier between knowing the right thing to do and doing it became a shelter for her to crouch behind.

  She heard Alex coming downstairs and hesitated, feeling she should have taken more care about how she looked. She rubbed her hands together – they were a little damp – and not knowing what else to do ran them down over her blouse and skirt. When Alex appeared she moved her hands away from her body and rubbed the fingertips against her palms. She smiled, and in her acutely self-conscious state it seemed to her like a guilty smile. He was bound to ask, she thought. He was tanned. It made him attractive.

  Bec wasn’t as Alex remembered. Her colour was high and he felt he could hear her heart beating. He’d just travelled here from the far side of the world, and she’d walked in off the street, and yet he felt as if he’d been nowhere and she’d come from far away, from a place he’d never been to where she would, if he wasn’t bold, go again without him. She looked as if she’d been breathing different air and been under another sun. If it was possible for her to run away from him and surrender to him abjectly with the same gesture, he thought, she would do it. Panic swept through him and he thought that all along she’d been on a journey past him to a greater destiny and that he hadn’t risen to her. In the wake of fear came a thick hormonal cloud of aggressive lust and as it drove him towards her the only thing resembling a thought in his head was that to hold and keep Bec was more to him than life or death.

  For a moment she followed the path of greeting and tried to kiss him. She meant to speak. Their lips touched and Alex grasped the hem of her narrow skirt with both hands and pulled it up round her waist and she drew her head back and looked in his eyes. She unbuckled his belt as his fingers found her.

  Lying on the floor of the hall, when they began to feel the cold on their bare skin, Alex said: ‘We could get married.’

  ‘What about children?’ said Bec.

  ‘I’m going to be less proud about it. I’m going to be less selfish. I’m not going to care if they don’t have my genes. Why are you crying?’

  ‘You can’t just change your mind like that.’

  ‘It’s a good thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Bec felt his unhappiness swell. He said: ‘You don’t want to get married.’

  Bec pressed her face into the dark of his chest. ‘Of course I do,’ she said.

  Fourteen days later Bec went back to the chemist. This time there was a single word in the window of the tester. PREGNANT, it said.

  64

  It was mid-morning. Alex had left the house to do voiceovers and Bec was by herself in the kitchen, looking at the items on the table next to her hand: a pen with the logo of a drugs company down the side, a block of Post-it notes with the corners fluffed up and a pregnancy testing kit. In a way, nothing had changed. There were still two possible futures, one with children, one without. But the appearance of a word on a pregnancy tester spoiled one future. Childlessness was something she’d probably have to go out and get if she wanted it now. It wasn’t that motherhood had instantaneously become more desirable; childlessness had become less. And yet she felt pleased, as if, in this, the relative and the absolute were one and the same.

  She left the house and walked to Angel station. The doctor, she thought, clothes, space, work, belly, diet, feed the beast. She imagined telling Alex that she was pregnant, letting him be happy, and telling him that the child might be his brother’s. She imagined telling him that she’d slept with Dougie first, letting him react – and how would he take it? Would he run away? She would chase him.

  Or she would keep it a secret. That was easy to imagine. Nobody would find out; how could they? Years would pass and the secret would be overgrown and covered by new events. The child would grow, and it would be a Comrie-Shepherd child.

  Bec passed through the station entrance and caught sight of herself in the CCTV monitor over the ticket barriers. How ordinary and anonymous I look, she thought. Like pictures on the news, like the last pictures of someone before something terrible happens to them, before they’re murdered or raped. She didn’t look, she felt, like a mother; but how was a mother supposed to look?

  A long time seemed to have passed since Dougie lay on top of her, and the pregnancy gave her confidence. It belonged to her in a way it could never belong to the father. It was easier for her now to talk to Ritchie. She called him and asked if he could see her. He answered on the second ring and sounded pleased to hear from her. She told him that she needed his advice about something important and he told her that he could see her that morning, if she would come to the studio.

  65

  No one outside Ritchie’s household knew that he’d almost hung himself. He wore scarves and polo necks in public and was mocked for it in paparazzi picture spreads. Karin told him she’d found him lying asleep on the floor of his study, surrounded by beer bottles and empty cartons of chocolate pudding, with a noose on the floor and a rope burn scarlet round his neck. In the weeks that followed he told her so many truths about his deep fears
that the truths he didn’t mention – that he’d exchanged his celebrity, his time, his attention and about thirty thousand pounds’ worth of gifts for flattery and sex from a fifteen-year-old girl, and that this information was about to be made public – didn’t seem to him to be great omissions.

  He told Karin that Bowie and Bono were right; he was a poor singer. He’d been a fool to imagine he could be treated as an equal by artists like them. Karin was the talented one. Everyone said so. It had always been his destiny to end up running a show that championed mediocrity. Bec’s high moral principles had destroyed his last chance to do something great by stopping him making the O’Donabháin film. When he was away Ruby and Dan didn’t miss him as they would have missed a better man. He’d always been surrounded by more extraordinary people; his brave father, his brilliant friend Alex, his wife Karin, who wrote wise, tender songs with the clever boys from The What, and, most extraordinary of all, Bec. How could he compete with his sister? No wonder she’d been their father’s favourite. She was kind, clever, hard-working, good, humble and beautiful. She didn’t cheat or lie. Everybody loved her. Why wouldn’t they? She’d found a cure for malaria. She deserved her wonderful life, the fame, the beautiful house, the ideal boyfriend, the glorious future. She deserved success in a way that Ritchie, coarse, fat, trashy old Ritchie never would.

  Karin didn’t let him down. She picked up Ritchie’s broken hopes, carefully, one by one, like toys he’d thrown to the ground and smashed, and gave them back to him mended and wrapped, transformed into building blocks of confidence. He was a wonderful father, she said. He was a creator and an artist with a great love of music. Without him, she said, there would have been no band and no songs. Was David Bowie so perfect – was Bono? Wasn’t it possible they’d been jealous of a rival? Couldn’t it be that for Bowie it was a compliment to compare someone to a dog howling? Wasn’t Hound Dog Taylor one of Ritchie’s favourites? She mentioned the musicians who’d praised Ritchie behind his back and he was glad to hear her recite those names again. And did he suppose, she said, that the millions of people who watched Teen Makeover every week were stupid, were ignorant? Some of them were, no doubt, but wasn’t that the wonderful thing about popularity, that among the vast mass there were bound to be some of the best people in the world, who loved the show for its special magic? Life was hard. Life was full of pain, Karin said – and here Ritchie could tell she was making a great effort of logic – imagine, she said, if there was no malaria, and people in Africa lived as long as Europeans, and had the same amount of time and money? Wouldn’t they be just as bored and depressed as Europeans were, and need popular talent shows to fill the emptiness in their lives?

  Ritchie nodded and said he supposed they would, but Karin’s reasoning didn’t entirely satisfy him, and without noticing how often he was doing it he began to say out loud, whenever he felt low and in response to the softest of cues, how base he was compared to his sister. A mood of fatalism crept over him.

  66

  The Rika Films studio was in far east London, where it shaded into Essex, where the city’s builders and fixers and deliverers lived in estuary light, where dense layers of mean-windowed, low-ceilinged homes rose between roads, canals and railway lines. It was a world of pylons and bridges and cranes, of container trucks barrelling to and from the eastern ports, of drive-ins and lock-ups and lay-bys. Bec’s taxi dropped her at the security booth at the entrance to the studio car park and Ritchie came out to meet her in a black sheepskin coat, flapping open over his belly.

  ‘Let’s go to the caff for a change,’ he said. He looked exhausted and an extra pouch seemed to have been added to the bags under his eyes. He was no fatter, but there was a slackness to him, as if his weight had somehow hollowed from within. Smiling was an effort for him today, Bec thought, and it seemed to her that his face bore traces of an attempt to apply make-up. I take my troubles to him and get none back, she thought.

  The café was around the corner in a remnant row of shops, set in red brick like old teeth in gums; a boarded-up chippy, a place offering Export Services, a fatal-looking pub and Wilson’s Refreshments, the name hung in fat scarlet plastic letters fixed to a wooden strip painted yellow. The other buildings around were newer. Like the outer shell of Ritchie’s studio they were not really buildings, more giant sheds that could be struck like tents when their owners moved on.

  In Wilson’s they sat at a trestle table and a Polish girl with a ponytail and an apron took their order.

  ‘The chocolate’s good here,’ said Ritchie.

  ‘I’ll just have a tea, thanks,’ said Bec.

  ‘A tea, a hot chocolate and a bacon roll,’ said Ritchie to the waitress. Most of the men in the café wore hi-viz waistcoats and steel-toecapped boots. There was English shouting and Slav murmuring.

  ‘It’s busy,’ said Bec.

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Is everything all right with you? You look tired.’

  Ritchie grinned. ‘People have been saying that to me all my life. It’s just the way I look. Sleepy old Ritchie. I’m a coper. Whatever they throw at me I’ll catch it.’

  He was jiggling his knee up and down, a new tic that distracted Bec. ‘Tell me what’s on your mind.’

  ‘Your crazy sister has excelled herself this time,’ she said. ‘I’ve done something extreme and I’m not sure what to do. Why are you looking at me like that? I haven’t told you what it is yet.’

  ‘Like what? Sorry. You know how I worry about you.’ The jiggling of his knee was faster. He was unaware that he was doing it. Some slithering worm seemed to coil and uncoil in his belly. He was filled with terror and hope and had an urge to shriek Don’t tell me! at his sister. As Bec told him what she’d done with Dougie, and that she was pregnant, he stopped jiggling and a great peace spread through him.

  ‘I would never have thought such a thing was possible,’ he said gently, full of tenderness and pity towards his sister. How terribly she has fucked up, he thought. A violent indignation rose in him towards her for pushing him to act as he would rather not. He jiggled his knee again.

  ‘Whatever you do,’ said Ritchie, ‘don’t tell Alex.’

  ‘But what if it comes out later?’

  ‘Just don’t tell him,’ said Ritchie. He lifted the cocoa to his mouth to hide the impulse that came on him to let rip with a snorting guffaw. His hand shook slightly and this fact had an almost unbearable pathos for him. His eyes filmed with tears. His heart was beating very fast. He wanted to get out in the open air. Bec wouldn’t let him go.

  ‘You think I should just bury it? Let it become one of those family secrets?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Ritchie. ‘Alex was desperate for a child and now he’ll have one. Congratulations.’ As he spoke these words he became powerfully conscious of his own good sense. He smiled warmly at Bec and she smiled back. He’s not wearing make-up, she thought. The daylight made him look rough.

  For the rest of the day, and on into the evening at home, Ritchie was distracted. When he should have been listening to someone else, or carrying out a task, he found he was looking at an object, or a texture, a knot in the varnished wood of the kitchen table, fascinated by its detail, as if he were high.

  ‘Why are you staring at the bread?’ asked Dan. Ritchie was wondering how many holes the slice of bread in front of him had; how they’d got there; whether there was more air than solid matter in the slice; what it would look like if he could be shrunk to microscopic size and clambered over the bread’s surface. Did the holes have holes?

  He stood up. ‘There’s something I forgot to do in the study,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ Karin looked at him in surprise. He climbed the stairs. It was hard for him to believe that the wooden steps always made so much noise, that their creaks always sounded as loudly in the silence of the upper floors of the house, or that the stairs always took as long to climb. He went into his study, which was, he knew, exactly as he’d left it; yet it seemed to him he
was entering a space that he’d prepared specially for this moment. There was a high-pitched singing in his ears and the skin over his cheekbones prickled unpleasantly. He felt it was not him who went over to the desk but his limbs and trunk, moving of their own accord, and that his consciousness was observing it. It seemed that the arms of his will were folded while his physical fingers flipped through a notebook.

  He began thinking It’s done now, it’s out of my hands, there’s no way to make it un-done. And yet he still had not done it.

  He called the Moral Foundation, and heard a digital voice message.

  ‘If you have a code,’ the voice said, ‘please enter it now.’

  67

  Next morning, in the lobby of the building where Bec had her new office, she saw her happiness reflected in the faces of the man and woman security guards, sitting behind their counter like a couple in uniform.

  ‘Hello, love,’ said the woman guard.

  Bec’s assistant had taken the day off. Bec was too energised to sit down and she walked around her office, trailing her fingertips along the wall. The room had seemed too big and too low-ceilinged when she got it and yet now the most ordinary objects, the yucca plant in the corner, the photograph of her father and mother with her and Ritchie, the year planner busy with marks and stickers, taped slightly squint to the wall, seemed to express an equal amount of an obscure quality, the sense of a world gone right.