Seven Types of Ambiguity

by Elliot Perlman

  “Fuck you, Simon.”

  “Well, look what happened when you found out that I had wasted my time trying to examine Swinburne through the eyes of Empson. You make a smart-ass remark suggesting that it’s futile because there’s no money attached to it.”

  “I didn’t say anything about money!”

  “It was implied and unambiguous.”

  “Well, we can’t all be fucking poets, can we? Maybe Anna can come and start shopping for you? Maybe she can cook for you or would she just pay someone to take care of you? Oh, that would be me, wouldn’t it? She could pay me to clean up the place while the two of you get off on Swinburne or Empson or whoever the hell.”

  And if it was not already over, if we had not yet spun out of our orbit and into some new nightmare, I took a breath and made it certain. With hindsight, I see that now.

  “You know, he told me he thinks there’s someone else. She’s going away to some conference or convention or something,” I told Simon.

  “Oh, he’s crazy, paranoid. He’s really crazy. You’re both crazy. People go away to conventions all the time. Even teachers do these days, or used to. He’s just trying to assuage his guilt, or maybe it turns him on talking about it with you.”

  “Simon, will you relax. So what if she’s going away with someone? It’s his problem, not yours.”

  “This is just part of the shit he spins you, Angel. You can’t believe it?”

  I had wanted not to cry but the tears rolled down the side of my face one after the other, too fast to dry. I was angry. I was hurt. And now I keep trying to convince myself that I did not send him to prison with these few words, that my sentence was not his sentence, and therefore not my sentence either.

  I regretted it before I had said it but I said it anyway, like a fool determined to take everyone down, “He said he’d leave her if she were seeing someone else.”

  The next time I saw Simon it was done. He had taken the little boy, and there he was. A sweet little boy whose mother I knew too well from photographs and whose father I knew even better. I looked at the little boy and felt ashamed for all of us—for me, for Simon, for Joe, and even for Anna, whom I had never met. Children can do that to you. They can make you ashamed of yourself. I don’t know why. Perhaps by so effortlessly reminding you of yourself when you were still innocent, they force you to confront all the mistakes you’ve made since.

  I was shocked to find him there, and when Simon whispered to me, “That’s him, this is Sam,” it took me a moment to connect the sleeping schoolboy in the living room with Joe Geraghty’s son. It is still one of those realizations that keeps hitting me the way the death of someone close to you does; you go to sleep exhausted by what has happened and wake up the next morning to have it happen all over again. Nobody was actually dead, but I felt a sense of that deepest loss for which there is no preparation. Simon had taken their son from school and in doing this he had robbed me of the wisest, sanest man I had ever known. He had been grooming me for life, but he had stopped before he had taught me how to protect him from himself. No longer could Alex and I pretend not to hear the alarm bells he was sounding. Perhaps that was his motivation. It makes as much sense as any other explanation.

  Even though Simon was calm and the little boy was sleeping, and even though I knew Simon was not going to touch him at all, the whole scene made me feel sick. I didn’t know what to do at first so I played along with what he’d done for a while, trying to hide my horror. In the freezer I found a box of Popsicles in Walt Disney shapes which Simon must have bought the day before. He’d planned the kidnapping. It was not a spur-of-the-moment idea. It had crystallized in his mind when I told him that Joe had said he would leave her if she was seeing someone else.

  When exactly did it occur to me that if Joe left Anna then Simon might leave me? I really don’t know. I just remember being appalled at what he had done and how crazy it was. I knew he was not going to hurt Sam but, other than Alex, nobody else would know that. The sooner Sam was returned to his parents the easier things would be for Simon, and for everybody. I decided to call the police and tell them where Sam was.

  During one of my now-frequent and unpredictable visits to the toilet, I called the police in a frightened whisper on my cell. Then I made some hot chocolate for us and a glass of chocolate milk for Sam. Simon and I were like two young kids playing dress-up, pretending to be parents. He was Sam’s parent and I was his. He was calm and I was nervous. I knew that soon he would know what I had done. I knew that everything had changed.

  The police would be arriving any minute, and it seemed like my last chance to tell him again that what he had done was insane. It wouldn’t change anything, but I had to tell him. And it was my last chance to thank him for, as Alex had called it, the golden age that would be ending for me at any moment. I had to tell him that too. My words tumbled out manically, compulsively. With everything that has happened to him since that day I am certain that he doesn’t remember what I, or he, said, not the way I do.

  But for me it holds the significance of last words spat out hurriedly without much breath or premeditation, rapid-fire words filling up the seconds before an execution, before our execution. If he does remember what I said, it clearly means nothing to him.

  “I want you to know . . .” What did I want him to know? “I love you, Simon. I know everything you’ve said. I know I am . . . forewarned, as you say, but please know it—remember it, no matter what—I love you even though . . . I know you’re crazy. You’re the softest man I’ve ever met. Too soft. He’s smarter than you,” I said, pointing to Sam, still sleeping.

  “He may well prove to be smarter than me. He’s already a lot wiser.”

  “They’re going to find him here. You know they will. They’ll figure it out,” I said.

  “They’ll find him happy and safe if they do, with a chocolate moustache.”

  “What do you mean if? They will find him; it’s just a question of how soon. They’ll both be frantic. It’s not going to take them long.”

  “However little time it takes them to get here, it will have been long enough to have saved him. I did it for him.”

  “You did it for him? Simon, are you completely mad? What are you talking about? What does kidnapping a little boy from school do for the boy other than scare him out of his wits?”

  “Listen to me, Angel,” he said deliberately. “This will stop his mother having an affair.”

  “My poor Simon,” I said to him and to myself. “You’re even crazier than I thought.”

  I got up and went over to him on the floor. He held me in his arms, and we looked at Anna’s son gently breathing half into the pillow.

  “When will they find him? They won’t be that fast,” he said in a low voice. “ ‘The emotions are not skilled workers.’ ”

  I repeated the line to myself after a moment’s thought. Was I supposed to know that one? “Is it Eliot?” I asked. He shook his head. They were coming for him. They were on their way. “Dylan Thomas? No. Yeats, isn’t it?” Just keep him talking.

  “No,” he answered, running his fingers through my hair for the last time.

  “Who wrote that the emotions are not skilled workers?” I put my head in his lap. Maybe I’d given the wrong address. Maybe they wouldn’t come.

  “That’s a story in itself, Angel. It is a beautiful line, isn’t it? Attributed to a man who never said it, by two men who wrote it and then pretended they were a third man who never existed.”

  “Wait just a minute. Start again. Tell me slowly. Tell me a story.” I closed my eyes and repeated softly, “ ‘The emotions are not skilled workers.’ ”

  I wanted him to tell me a story to get me to stop living the one about the out-of-work schoolteacher who drank too much, thought too much, and felt too much for his own good.

  They kicked the door in, kicked it clean off its hinges. We were in the other room but it sounded like a grenade, a short sharp shock to restore order. Empson started barking, and the bo
y started crying for the first time.

  13. When I was a child I had a night-light. It was a small cube of soft orange light that just plugged into the wall at floor level. I don’t remember it being given to me. It was always just there. Then one day, without warning or explanation, my father took it away. I remember lying in bed that night going through the events of the day trying to work out what I must have done to have had it taken from me. When nothing came to me, I extended the search beyond that day back to the previous day and then to other days. The further back I went, the hazier the days became and the less I could remember. All I knew was that the light had gone and that everything was black when I woke up at night. And that I had somehow caused it.

  There were two police cars. Simon and I went with two male officers who put us into the back of one of them, while Sam was taken by a female officer into the other. We were the perfect suspects, caught red-handed, cooperative, only speaking when spoken to. I sat next to him in the back wondering whether he had already worked out that I was the one who had tipped off the police, that it was because of me that they had homed in on the sleeping boy in his cluttered apartment so quickly. It was not going to take him long to figure it out, but I wasn’t going to tell him because the instant he realized it was me was the instant the night-light would be snatched from the wall and everything would be black.

  When the police treated us the same way despite the fact that I was the one who had called them, I found myself going along for the ride. Relieved to be able to cling a little longer to the fiction that Simon and I were in this together, I sat beside him in the backseat squeezing his hand and staring out of my window or looking straight ahead, past the policemen sitting in the front seat, at what was coming toward us. Only occasionally did I steal a glance at him through the corner of my eye and wonder which squeeze of his hand would be the last I would be allowed. The police radio kept cutting in and out. Externally, he was remarkably calm. It was only at the station when they shepherded us in opposite directions to different interview rooms that I looked back at him and I saw in his eyes that he knew. I heard the door close behind him.

  One of the uniformed policemen who had come for us accompanied me into the room and asked me to sit down. He said that a detective from the Criminal Investigation Bureau would like to ask me a few questions. The detective would be in shortly. He looked me up and down when he thought I wasn’t looking, but since it was a small room without windows and there were only two of us in it, he found it difficult not to stare at me. The seriousness of the offense and the formality of the situation were no match for his male curiosity.

  “What’s a nice girl like you doing mixed up in all this?” he asked, but before I had a chance to say anything, the door opened and a plainclothes detective came in, shook my hand, and sat down opposite me. He started arranging some paper he had on a clipboard, telling the uniformed man that he would wait alone with me for another detective to join him. The uniformed man left the room without making eye contact with me. The detective, a broad man with eyes too small for his face, seemed to look at me furtively.

  “Could I have your full name, please?” the detective asked me matter-of-factly as the door snapped shut behind him. He did not seem to know that I was the one who had called them. He had a flat, pasty face, blank and bovine. I had seen men like that before, standing naked in front of me in the middle of a working day when they were supposed to be doing whatever it was they did for a living. These were the ones who wanted you to kneel and open your mouth while they remained standing. I won’t do that for any amount of money. Kelly told me about a man who had become a regular of hers. At his very first session with her he had her kneel down while he remained standing. He coiled his fingers through her hair at the back of her neck and then, pushing down on the back of her head, he had her deep-throat him so deeply, so suddenly, that she vomited. It turned out that he was expecting this. He had done it before. It was what he had wanted to happen. He wanted it every week, and she complied and charged more for it. Even when we were busy, all too busy to know what day it was, passing each other only briefly in the waiting room, everyone knew when this particular regular of Kelly’s was due. She would be seen hastily gulping down a half bottle of liquid yogurt. It was easy to bring up. The face of this detective made me think of it. I don’t know why. I don’t think I would be able to pick out any of Kelly’s regulars in a line-up. But something about this detective’s face made me think of the way she would look at the clock on the wall and take her yogurt. His face had the consistency of congealed milk.

  Another detective came into the room, nodded at me as he sat down beside the milk-faced detective, and introduced himself. They sat opposite me, and I stuck out my hand to shake hands with the second detective, which seemed to amuse both of them. The second detective spoke.

  “So . . . Angela. What’s your connection to Simon Heywood?”

  “He’s my boyfriend.”

  The second detective looked sideways at his milk-faced colleague.

  “Your boyfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  The second detective gestured to the other one that he wanted to see him outside the room.

  “Would you mind waiting here, Angela,” he told me, and the two of them got up and left.

  When they came back only a couple of minutes later the second detective, whose name I would come to remember as Threlfall, started asking questions before they had even sat down.

  “So, Angela, you say you’re the one who called this in?”

  “I don’t say I’m the one. I am the one.”

  “And Simon Heywood—you told us Simon Heywood is your boyfriend,” the milk-faced one said.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  Again the two of them looked at each other in code. The milk-faced one pushed his chair out away from the table.

  “And the little boy . . . ?”

  “His name is Sam.”

  “Do you say that he’s your son?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Is he your boyfriend’s son?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “No, not really. No, I don’t.”

  “But you do know him a bit?”

  “No. I mean . . . I’ve heard about him.”

  “Who have you heard about him from?”

  “Simon and—”

  “And who?”

  “Simon.”

  “You said ‘Simon and.’ ”

  “Yeah, and thinking about it I realized that it was really only Simon who had talked about him.”

  “Who else could’ve talked to you about him?”

  “I don’t know. Everyone you know these days is always talking about their little kids and how cute they are or how smart they are. Well, they do to women, anyway. After a while you forget which cute story belongs to which friend’s kid.”

  “But you said he’s not Simon’s son.”

  “No, he’s not Simon’s son.”

  “Who is he, Angela?”

  “He’s a little boy. He’s the son of an old friend of Simon’s.”

  “What’s the name of that friend?”

  “Anna. Anna Geraghty.”

  “Is she your friend too?”

  “No.”

  “You seem pretty sure about that.”

  “Well, I know who my friends are.”

  “Is she your enemy, Angela?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! I’ve never met the woman. She’s an old friend of Simon’s. I don’t know her.”

  “Does Simon talk a lot about Sam?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Does he want children of his own?”

  “Maybe in the future. We haven’t really talked about it. You should ask him that. Do I have to stay here?”

  “What does Simon say about Sam when he talks about him?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing really.”

  “What do you remember Simon saying about him?”

&nbs
p; “I don’t remember him saying much at all.”

  “But you said he has talked about him. What has he said?”

  “I really don’t remember. He’s a clever little boy . . . I don’t know . . . once he fell in a pool.”

  “What happened?”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “What did Simon say happened?”

  “I don’t know. He fell in a pool with his school clothes on. Simon had to . . . they had to pull him out and resuscitate him or something.”

  “Did Simon resuscitate him?”

  “I don’t know. I told you. I wasn’t there.”

  “Was Simon there?”

  “I don’t know. Can I go?”

  “Why did you call the police and tell them where Sam was?”

  “I thought his parents might be worried about him.”

  “Why should they worry about him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was there anything they should worry about?”

  “No.”

  “Were you worried about him?”

  “No.”

  “Were you worried Simon was going to do something to him?”

  “No. Simon loves children. He wouldn’t harm anyone.”

  “In what way does Simon love children?”

  “Oh no. This is too weird. He wasn’t going to hurt him at all.”