by James Meek
‘I was jealous of Pat getting off with Lucy,’ said Kellas.
‘You’re on surer ground with that but still way off,’ said M’Gurgan, reaching inside the fridge and taking out a two-thirds full bottle of white wine. He set down three glasses and filled them as he talked. Sophie watched him. ‘What’re you doing? He’s still the honoured guest, is he?’
‘Every year, Adam, you’ve brought some woman of all-surpassing, God-help-me gorgeousness to our door—’ said M’Gurgan.
‘Have I?’
‘—and you see me, for one time in my life, attracting the interest of a girl—’
‘You cunt,’ said Sophie. Kellas had not heard her swear like this before.
‘—I don’t see it stirring the waters of your jealousy like that.’ M’Gurgan began rummaging in the fridge.
‘You should be a fuck of a lot angrier with him,’ said Sophie. ‘You’re not putting out cheese?’
‘What was it, then?’ said Kellas, grabbing a glass of wine and taking a gulp.
‘Sophie,’ said M’Gurgan, nodding at his wife but continuing to look at Kellas. He sat down so as to sit opposite to, and equidistant from, both of them, and took a glass. He cut himself a piece of cheese. ‘You still fancy her.’ He drank and gobbled the cheese. ‘You never got over it.’
‘Jesus,’ said Sophie, putting her hands down flat on the table and knocking her forehead on them, ‘you don’t—’
‘Listen,’ said Kellas, raising his voice to interrupt Sophie. She widened her eyes and mouth and looked at him, a sarcastic mime of surprise.
‘Listen,’ said Kellas again. ‘I didn’t come here to apologise. I am sorry, and I wish I’d never written that letter, but it’s true what you say, my sorry’s no use to you. I came to say, Sophie, that I’ve known Pat since we were boys, and I’m sure in my heart that whatever he did with that one girl that one night, the only woman he loves, and will always love, is you.’ He finished, glad that he had said it without pausing or backtracking or digressing. Sophie’s expression had gone from fake to real surprise. Kellas turned to M’Gurgan for the required affirmation. Bastian had shown him how it was possible to invent new para-religious rituals and the advantage was that, like real believers, unbelievers did not have to believe in the truth behind the words; they simply had to believe in the words.
M’Gurgan lifted his glass, looked into it, swirled what was left, swallowed it, put it down on the table hard and leaned back in his chair. Kellas began to sweat. Several days earlier he had expanded for M’Gurgan and Sophie the parameters for the amount of destruction one man might wreak in a domestic setting. Yet how could M’Gurgan let go the chance for exculpation Kellas had offered him? On Tuesday morning, walking through the snow towards Chincoteague, Kellas had imagined his letter destroying this family, and he had thought that, by imagining it, an incantation was cast preventing the realisation of the exact thing he had imagined.
‘“Sure in your heart”,’ said M’Gurgan. ‘Are you able to make your heart work like that? I’ve always found mine to be an inaccurate instrument.’ He thumped his chest with his fist. ‘You’re lucky to have a reliable heart. It’s all mine can do to keep beating. As for measuring love, I’d be better with a pair of callipers, or a ruler, or a set of scales. I’m going to need a second opinion, I’m afraid. Get me a brain scan or an x-ray, stick a colonoscope up my arse, purge me and give me a barium meal.’ He poured himself more wine. ‘Biopsy me. Swab me. Sample me. Transplant your heart into me and I’ll give you mine. But you’ll need to watch out ’cause my heart’s a liar. It’s a poet’s heart and poets are liars. You know the Egyptians used to pray to their hearts before they died, because they didn’t trust them not to lie to the gods about them. “O heart,” they used to say. “Do not betray me.”’
He was going to go on, but Kellas interrupted him and Sophie started to speak over him and Kellas yielded.
‘I don’t know how the two of you ever became friends,’ she said. ‘You both like the sound of your own voice too much.’ She spoke to Kellas. ‘You don’t listen to what he says because you’re too busy worrying about what you’re going to say next.’ To M’Gurgan: ‘And you switch Adam on and have him going quietly like a radio in the background until it’s time for you to talk again. I’ve seen it. And now I’ve heard you both saying the other one wants me, when the fact is neither of you does. Adam’s not interested in me, Pat. He hates me for not being the sixteen-year-old girl he never had the bottle to speak to—’
‘That’s not true,’ said Kellas.
‘—and he’s jealous of you because he knows all his imaginary women are going to turn into plain, ordinary women like me, and he believes you’ve found some poet’s alchemy for loving me for ever for my beautiful inner self. That’s why he wrote his nasty letter. See, he doesn’t say that’s not true. Well, Adam, he hasn’t. You see, if he loved me,’ she put one elbow on the table and leaned towards Kellas, ‘he wouldn’t have put his cock inside a girl not much older than his daughters while I was in the same house. Would he?’
‘All this talk about love is making me nauseous,’ said M’Gurgan, getting up. ‘Have we got any bread?’
‘There’s some Ryvita in the breadbin,’ said Sophie.
Kellas had an urge to leave, to run away. It was not his house. M’Gurgan put the crispbread down on the table on a plate with more cheese and started opening another bottle of wine. Sophie took a piece of Ryvita, broke it in half, broke a corner off one half and put it in her mouth.
‘I wonder if she got anything out of it,’ she said. ‘Your cute Lucy. You’re not a great lover.’
‘Have I got worse?’ said M’Gurgan, laughing his atrocity laugh again.
‘More perfunctory, I’d say.’
‘For God’s sake, after twelve years, I know what your clitoris tastes like.’
‘You know what bacon tastes like too and that doesn’t stop you stuffing it down your fat neck.’
‘I should go,’ said Kellas, getting up.
M’Gurgan reached out a hand, pushed him back into his seat, and addressed Sophie. ‘Do you want me to leave you? Because I don’t want to.’
‘You wouldn’t survive,’ said Sophie. ‘I remember the state you were in when I found you. There were creatures living in your bed sores.’
‘You didn’t answer the question.’
‘I don’t want you cocking around!’
‘Do you want me to admire you? I admire you. Do you want me to praise you? I praise you. Do you want to travel with me? I want to travel with you. Do you want to share my bed? I want to share your bed. Do you want to share my life? I want to share your life. Does that not add up to enough for you?’
‘You never put me in your book.’
‘It finishes before you found me.’
‘I don’t want to be who you both think I am!’ shouted Sophie. Her face coloured. ‘How do you think it feels for a woman when a poet starts getting pragmatic with her? I don’t want to be who I am. I don’t want to be so real. I want to be, for one moment, the woman he imagined I was.’ She stabbed her thumb in Kellas’s direction.
They heard the front door opening and Angela came into the kitchen in her school uniform. Everyone stood up and Kellas had time to glimpse the anxiety on her face before Sophie squeezed her in a tight hug. After her release Angela was attentively kissed by Kellas and her father.
‘Holy Moly,’ said Angela. ‘You’ll never let me go on holiday by myself if you’re all over me like that when you’ve only been away a few days.’
‘Where’s your sister?’ said Sophie.
‘No idea. What was all the shouting?’ She was examining the faces, the glasses, the stances. The three adults sat down and said it was nothing and urged Angela to join them.
Angela’s eyes narrowed. ‘You two have been having a row, and he’s involved somehow.’ Nodding Kellas’s way. ‘Sitting around boozing in the middle of the afternoon and blaming each other for something.’ She shook her head. �
��Nobody’s innocent here. You’re all guilty ’cause you’re old.’
Angela went upstairs. Kellas, Sophie and M’Gurgan each knew that the first impulse of necessary denial was not ‘I’m not guilty’ but ‘I’m not old’, and the consciousness of this stunned them. A sense of solidarity flew through them.
‘I never said this before,’ said Kellas to Sophie, ‘but I always thought it was strange that you went looking for me and then for Pat in the same year.’
‘Shows you which one she preferred,’ muttered M’Gurgan.
‘I sometimes wondered if finding him wasn’t why you came to me. I gave you his address,’ said Kellas. He helped himself to more wine and a biscuit and some cheese.
‘If what you’re saying is that I was as much an idealistic fool as you were, you’re right,’ said Sophie. ‘You’re wise now you’ve come back from America, are you? What was that about? The woman you met in Afghanistan?’
‘Astrid.’
Sophie asked him how it had gone.
‘It turned out that she had a baby. It turned out that she has a drink problem. And it turns out that I was ready to walk away from her as soon as I found out.’
M’Gurgan and Sophie laughed, then apologised, and looked contrite.
‘Did you?’ said Sophie.
‘No,’ said Kellas. ‘I didn’t.’
‘That doesn’t sound like you.’
‘We’re going to meet again. But it won’t be for a drink.’
Fergus came in with a boy his age and size. They were carrying shopping bags. Fergus greeted his parents and said: ‘Is it OK if me and Jack make dinner?’
‘I don’t know if you’re helping me as much as you might think by de-skilling me now,’ said Sophie. ‘Have you got enough for everyone? There’ll be…seven of us, I suppose.’
‘Aye,’ said Fergus. ‘Turkey escalopes en croute with a cranberry jus.’
‘Call that a meal?’ said M’Gurgan. ‘Hey, Jack, easy with that.’ Fergus’s friend had pulled an eight-inch stainless steel blade out from inside his blazer.
‘It’s my chef’s knife,’ he said. ‘I got it for my birthday. It’s a Sabatier.’
The three adults watched in silence while the boys tied white aprons around each other and set to work, swaggering and at ease with their tools, like young butchers.
‘Take your tie off, Fergus,’ said Sophie.
‘I spoke to Liam yesterday,’ said M’Gurgan. ‘He called. He thought you might be in touch.’ He glanced at Sophie and turned back to Kellas. ‘You haven’t spoken to him since you got back? He’s going to cash that cheque. You did a lot of damage. But the thing with Tara was a false alarm. I’d say Liam’s forgiven you. More than forgiven. He thinks you did a brave thing. He said to tell you that he understood what you were trying to do.’
‘The fucking bastard.’
‘Adam, the boys.’
‘People like Liam aren’t exposed to sincere passions very often,’ said M’Gurgan. ‘Particularly from a nice middle class fellow like yourself. He’s…honoured. He’s really happy that you’ve made him feel like one of the victims. He said: “At first I was angry, and then I realised my anger was the same as the anger experienced by an Afghan or an Iraqi whose house was bombed for no reason, and I understood what Adam was trying to tell me.” He’s going to write a piece about it.’
‘What a fuck he is. Who does he think he is, understanding me? If I go back and burn his house down, kill him and rape his wife and daughter, will he understand that?’
‘Adam! Stop that!’
‘Yeah,’ said M’Gurgan. ‘About Margot. That’s not such jolly news. She is not going to forgive you. She’s sure about that. She doesn’t want to see you again. The way she looks at it is that war never gave you a commission to act in its name in her house. She said you were a fraud.’
‘She used that word?’
‘She said that you had no right or cause to try to pass yourself off as one of war’s destroying angels. She said it was a kind of blasphemy.’
‘Did she really say that? Blasphemy?’
‘She was very harsh, Adam. Do you want me to go on?’ Kellas nodded. ‘She said that when somebody drops a bomb, it doesn’t make any difference whether they’re doing it to destroy your home, or to show you what it’s like to have your home destroyed. All there is is the bomb.’
‘If she thinks that was destruction…’
‘I’m only telling you what she said. She said you’d been infected. You’d caught something, maybe in the wars, maybe earlier. And whatever it is, this infection, according to Margot, the symptom is this great longing for silence. Which is strange for someone who puts words together for a living. But somehow, she said, you got infected with this loathing for dissent and persuasion. You can’t bear it that people have to use these clumsy instruments to open each other up. Somewhere along the line, Margot reckons, maybe when you were writing one of your passionate despatches about how terrible it all was, you fell in love with it, the destruction, because of the silence that comes afterwards. It seemed to you that force is truth, because it’s final and afterwards there’s only silence.’
‘You recorded Margot’s speech, did you, and memorised it?’
‘You didn’t have to hear it.’
Kellas looked towards Sophie. The boys were making a purposeful clatter with knives and bowls and chopping boards. ‘Were you there when Margot was saying this?’ he asked.
Sophie leaned towards him and lowered her voice so that Fergus and Jack couldn’t hear. ‘I remember the first time you sent me a poem. I saw you the next day and I couldn’t understand why you would write that, work so hard to write such passionate lines, and then still not speak to me. Now I understand, of course, that it wasn’t about me.’
‘Not right at all,’ croaked Kellas. His mouth had dried out and he rinsed it with wine. They were all a little tipsy now. He noticed that Jack and Fergus had provided themselves with glasses from which they occasionally refreshed themselves as they prepared the food.
‘To finish what I was saying,’ said M’Gurgan, ‘Margot wanted to tell you that she does have the negatives for the photographs you smashed, but the prints themselves, which you destroyed, were unique. Apparently that’s the way it is in fine art photography. She made those prints herself and she can’t reproduce the same conditions twice.’
‘Did she mention the Sistine Chapel?’
‘She compared it to something closer to home. She said to imagine if she deleted the file where you’d saved one of your books. How would you feel, she said, if she did that and then told you not to worry because you still had the story and the characters in your head, and you could just write it out again? She’s bigger than I knew in that world. Those prints were worth ten thousand pounds each, and she wants you to pay her that money. A bite out of your big advance.’
Kellas grinned and shook his head. ‘Something beautiful happened,’ he said. ‘France and America came together to save Europe and America from going to war.’ He told Sophie and M’Gurgan about Karpaty Knox, and his intentions for Arabic and Iraq. He added a new embellishment that had just occurred to him. He would sell his flat in London, pay off his debts, and buy a couple of flats in Baghdad immediately after the invasion, when prices were low and foreign currency was in demand. His friends listened. As Kellas came to the end of what he had to say, he felt the pain in his belly of having done an irredeemable wrong. The thought of not being forgiven till death by a woman he liked began to ache, and it would linger.
Jack appeared at Kellas’s shoulder with a plate of bruschetti, which he placed on the table with an eerie casualness, as if the M’Gurgans’ kitchen was a hectic gastropub where he served dozens of such platters through crowds each night.
‘Thanks,’ said Kellas.
‘They grow up fast,’ said M’Gurgan, helping himself to a piece.
‘Dad, you owe Jack twenty pounds for the groceries,’ said Fergus.
‘How?’ said M’Gurgan sharp
ly, getting up. ‘I left you and your sisters with sixty quid.’
‘Angela took twenty.’
‘What for? Keep your eye on that onion while you’re cutting it.’
‘I don’t know.’
M’Gurgan stalked off and yelling commenced on the stairs. Sophie stood up and moved to the chair next to Kellas’s and put her face close to his, speaking quietly, almost in a whisper.
‘Any other time I’d be concerned about you going to Iraq,’ she said. ‘I don’t care now. I’ve got troubles of my own. This could be it. I could leave him. I should. I love the kids but I don’t want to be kept prisoner by them. Our single friends come here and they sit in the kitchen, like you, and they watch it all as if it’s a zoo. And I’m not sure which side of the bars I’m on.’
‘I have too much freedom for any animal,’ said Kellas. ‘I hope you don’t split up.’
‘You have to say that, of course,’ said Sophie. ‘If it happens, you’ll visit him, and you won’t visit me.’
‘It’s not just about my conscience. I really do hope you stay together.’
‘I don’t want your hope. I need something more concrete. I don’t want to sit here like some sailor’s sweetheart while he’s roaring around the world with a hot book and a mid-life libido. What can you tell me? Was this a one-off? Has he been shagging around for years?’
The truth was that Kellas didn’t know. He suspected that M’Gurgan had been and would continue to do so. He looked Sophie in the eye. ‘No,’ he said. She looked away. She wanted to believe him.
‘Maybe we’ll talk it out,’ said Sophie.
‘How long would that take?’
‘About forty more years, I think.’
‘Is that what it is? Is it time, then?’ said Kellas. A pulse of excitement beat in him. ‘Is that the language I need to be learning? Not Arabic?’
‘Time’s hard to learn. It takes so long,’ said Sophie. She smiled without rancour for the first time that evening. ‘This Iraq venture of yours. It is about money, isn’t it? It’s not some kind of bullshit atonement exercise?’
‘I hope you’ll all come out to visit me in Baghdad once I’m settled there,’ said Kellas. ‘Maybe next autumn, when it’s cooler, or the spring of ’04. I might be able to get a place with a pool. I don’t know if they still have houses with colonnades and courtyards. I’d like that. With a fountain in the middle. Shade is everything. Good shade, running water, and a good library. And patience. Don’t look at me like that! Don’t think I couldn’t learn Arabic and patience together. Don’t think I couldn’t give Baghdad forty years.’
