Throw Me to the Wolves

by Patrick McGuinness

  Sigrid is still at work, so I fetch Marieke from the ‘Activity Club’ she goes to in the mornings. She loves the police station, loves the glass walls, the endless screens, the litter of papers and the corridors of interview rooms. Usually, she sits and reads by the front desk, where we have left board games with missing pieces and toys with missing limbs or wheels. There’s a Christmas tree with empty boxes wrapped as presents.

  ‘What would you like to do?’ I ask her. She is surprised to see me, because I wasn’t supposed to fetch her today.

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I’m not needed in work today. Maybe not tomorrow either,’ I reply.

  ‘What have you done?’ What’s the point in hiding things from her?

  ‘I forgot to tell my chief that I knew the man we’ve caught who might have killed someone. I knew him a long time ago, when I was a child – he was my teacher – and they think it’ll stop me doing my job properly.’

  ‘It’s because you still know him,’ she says.

  ‘Where shall we go?’ I ask her.

  ‘Mrs Snow’s,’ she replies, excitedly. As we drive, she asks, as she always does: ‘You remember how we met her?’

  Even though Marieke was there, she likes hearing the story. She loves the telling, and then she loves the retelling. She loves the sameness, and then she loves the variation on the sameness.

  ‘How could I forget?’

  As we drive, I tell her, and she chips in with details or corrects me when I exaggerate or misremember. I exaggerate and misremember deliberately because she likes it.

  We met Vera shopping for basics.

  We were passing a supermarket, Marieke and I, when I saw two police officers running – beat bobbies from my station whom I didn’t know or couldn’t remember. They overtook us and swerved inside.

  We followed them in. I assumed the classic shoplifting scenario. I was expecting a ragged tracksuited waif pinned against a wall by a couple of guards or some local have-a-go-heroes, a sad haul of cans in his pockets. They nick the cheap stuff. It’s only in films that thieves aim high, that they’re allowed to dream. Still, you never know how these things pan out, where they finish up: you chase one shoplifter down the street, catch him, and he’ll hand back what he stole with a sigh, or sometimes even a laugh; you chase another and he’ll turn and stab you in the face. Some of them bite, because their mouth is all they have left to defend themselves: their spit, their germs, the threat of their saliva: hepatitis, TB, HIV. When you’re sick or desperate or racked with disease or drugs, your mouth is your last weapon. I keep an eye on the hands, yes, but it’s the mouth I watch.

  There was a commotion at the tills. People were shouting, a few angry men, tabloid-faced and scarlet with headlines about migrants or scroungers or benefit cheats – randy for offence and glad to find it here, at the end of a supermarket conveyor belt, in the shape of an old lady unable to pay for her shopping.

  ‘If you got no cash, don’t go to the shops!’

  ‘Ever heard of a food bank, you crazy old cow?’

  ‘Should be in a home, you demented old biddy!’

  Vera sat on a chair, her hands resting on the tartan shopper trolley she had brought with her. She was trying to be impassive, but you could tell she was toughing it out. She was all the tougher for not being immune to the abuse, as she sat there trembling and biting her lip, but not giving in to the tears or the urge to run away.

  Each insult made Vera blink. Stacked up before her was her modest shopping. Bread, tea, some tins of meat, a short-sell reduced-price cut of roasting beef, and a few vegetables. A bottle of the supermarket’s own-brand sherry and – a nod to luxury – a plump, top-of-the-range fruit cake. People hate the poor buying luxuries. If they’re not eating out of bins and watching the wallpaper instead of TV, they’re the underserving, ungrateful poor. So: no cake.

  ‘What exactly is the problem?’ asked the WPC, stooping to speak loudly and slowly, her mouth aimed at Vera’s ear via an imagined ear trumpet.

  Vera answered so everyone could hear: ‘I can’t pay for my shopping.’

  ‘You’ve come to a shop but you can’t pay for it?’ asks the WPC.

  ‘No – she can’t bloody pay for them!’ shouts someone from the back of the queue, ‘and we’re all waiting for her to bugger off so we can get on with our shopping.’

  ‘She does this every week,’ explains the girl at the till in the sari. She is kind but embarrassed, because this has happened on her shift. Again. ‘Every time she comes we all dread being the ones at the till. She always takes out her purse and shows us it’s empty and puts it down here. Like now.’ She lifts up Vera’s purse and opens it up. There’s a bus pass and a library card but nothing else, not even small change, in its gusset. ‘It’s like an act,’ she adds, ‘but she isn’t acting – she really doesn’t have the money.’

  ‘We’ve given her loads of chances but she keeps doing it,’ the store manager appeals, ‘this is the first time we’ve called the police … it’s just getting too much. Customers are complaining – look around – it wastes massive amounts of time … and in the end someone gets charged for it. Customers, that’s who.’

  The WPC puts her hand on Vera’s shoulder, as if she might make a run for it. The police constables are sweating embarrassment. It’s hardly a high-octane action callout. But it is a situation.

  ‘Why on earth do you go to a shop when you can’t pay for what you’re taking?’ asks the WPC. It is the question we’re all asking, because this old lady is no thief, no renegade, no shoplifting miscreant. Vera doesn’t answer immediately, but instead looks around her. When she feels people are listening she replies:

  ‘I just don’t have the money. I’m a widow and I’m on a state pension. I’ve used it all to pay for the central heating and the rent and there isn’t enough left in my account to buy food …’

  ‘Surely there are places you can get assistance …’ the WPC tells her.

  She means food banks and charities, but doesn’t want to say the words food banks and charities. Everyone is listening now. The shop is quiet. This is like street theatre, and for a moment I think maybe that’s just what it is, that someone is recording it for TV or some psychological experiment … Some people saw the police and started to film it on their phones, but they’ve stopped bothering now that there’s no violence in prospect.

  ‘There are places, yes, but I’m afraid that isn’t the point, is it?’

  ‘Oh yeah? Then what is the point?’ asks someone at the back – a young man behind me, loudly enough to be heard across the shop. If this were a TV show, he’d be in on it, because he has fed Vera her big line.

  She rises on tiptoe and speaks to the crowd: ‘The point is that if people like me don’t keep going to the shops, people like you will forget that we exist.’

  Everyone is silent. The WPC has let go of Vera’s shoulder.

  ‘That’s why I’m here – to remind you that we exist even if we don’t have money to buy things. We are not going to stay indoors or in shelters and soup kitchens and get forgotten. We’re not going to hide so you don’t have to see us.’

  Now Vera falters, because she hasn’t planned to say anything beyond this, but she has called such attention to her that people expect more.

  But the faltering makes her words even more effective. The new rhetoric is to have no rhetoric, to run dry of words in exactly the place you are expected to soar away with them.

  Vera sits down. She has finished.

  I may be old, poor and alone, she means, and my wants may have been winnowed until they are aligned with the most basic of my needs, but I won’t disappear between the cracks, hide in my house or go to food banks just so you don’t have to look at me. There are thousands of us, hundreds of thousands, and we’re not rats and we’re not going underground.

  Marieke recorded it all, but likes to hear it again. That way, the story breathes differently around its facts. I told the constables I’d deal with Vera, take her
home, sort out any legal comeback from her supermarket sweep.

  Now look at us: in her house sharing tea and biscuits with her, Joey the budgie and Victor’s ghost. It was a coincidence that I happened to be walking past that supermarket at that time and on that day. I say coincidence, but coincidence is just a word we give to the contraction of the world around us, the tightening circles of its happenings.

  I met Vera because – plainly – I was meant to.

  As I made small talk with Vera that first day, Marieke wandered through the rooms recording, trying to see if Victor was there. She hoped to catch one or two of his breaths maybe, a few oddments of words he’d left behind. She concluded that he was ‘mostly in the living room’. Vera agreed.

  Now I’m a regular visitor, and Marieke often joins me, though Sigrid disapproves and Gary says it’s crazy. But why not? Marieke likes biscuits and she likes hauntings.

  So here we are now, the three of us, and something that is no longer quite an absence.

  Marieke has disappeared upstairs to take a few soundings from the rooms to see if Victor has ‘spread out’. She tells Vera that she can hear ‘the back of his voice’. Vera is pleased. ‘Me, too,’ she says.

  But today she wants to help me with the case.

  ‘This sounds rather cynical of me, Inspector, I hope you don’t mind,’ she begins falteringly, ‘but if your schoolteacher turns out to be the sort of man who does things to young boys like they’re implying, then the chances are he’s not the sort of man who does things to grown women.’ She looks across to her husband’s armchair for assent, and she must get it because she goes on, more confidently now, ‘but what do I know? Anyone can do anything in the right circumstances – isn’t that what they teach you at police college or whatever it’s called?’

  ‘I didn’t need police college to teach me that, Mrs Snow, but, yes, I know what you mean.’

  She is right, mostly: sexual behaviour is usually about specialism, but violence is the great all-rounder. But I didn’t come here to discuss Wolphram and Zalie with her, so I shift the topic: ‘Is there anything I can do for you while I’m here?’ I have taken to doing odd jobs like unclogging the conservatory guttering and changing fuses – the sort of thing Victor used to do and which he can do again once he’s … what? Recovered? A little less dead?

  I’ve stopped trying to challenge her reality; it’s easier to give in, and where necessary to share it with her. Anyway, I can’t pretend I’m not fascinated by it.

  ‘Thank you, you’re very kind. But we’re fine, aren’t we?’ She looks across at the armchair, then smiles at me.

  We finish our tea in silence. Mr Snow’s tea stays there untouched, cooling on the side table by the Tru-Flame wall-mounted fire. Beside it is his last crossword. The last biro line in the top left row of boxes is longer than I remember it and maybe – or maybe I’m willing myself to see it – is beginning to resemble the start of a word, the spine of a letter: L? P? Capital E? The rest of the crossword, the section with the clues, has been cut off. There are words starting to show, not yet legible but feeling their way through from the other side of the paper. It is like cloudy water in which you can make out shapes under the surface, but can’t tell whether it’s the shapes clouding the water with their turbulence, or the turbulence making you think there are shapes.

  As for the words that are there, I try to read them for meaning but can’t. We always think the other side has something big to say, though there’s no reason to. It’s not up to the dead to be meaningful. If anything, it must be a relief for them not to have to be. Still, I scrutinise the letters, and find them bland and impermeable as the lino on Vera’s kitchen floor: ‘Ticket’, ‘Bristle’, ‘Des-Res’.

  She is willing him back, prising open the tiniest crack in the darkness to let him through.

  I think he’s returning, little by little.

  Or that he’s dead, that she’s gone mad, and that I’ve joined her there.

  European Cinema

  One afternoon Mr Wolphram decides to spend the double English class on a film. It’s a long Scandinavian film about a brother and a sister whose father dies and whose mother marries a grim-faced, authoritarian clergyman. That’s about all the boys understand, and there are subtitles which put them off even more. To start with. Mr Wolphram tells them, chillingly, that it lasts for five hours (‘three hundred and twelve minutes’ is how he puts it), and he slides the first cassette into the video player he has wheeled in, half-hearse, half-cinema, from the staff common room.

  The boys at the back are whistling and smacking each other around the head. They can’t decide whether no work and ninety minutes in the dark, ninety minutes of farting and squirting and bas-reliefing dicks into the desks, is better than having a class where there’s at least a break, and the lights are on, and you know where you stand: in the midst of a familiar boredom. They’re easily bored, but more to the point they never expect to be interested. The best they can hope for when they get up in the morning and go to school is a change of boredom, a selection of different varieties of the stuff: science-boredom, test-tube-boredom, word-boredom, numbers-boredom, Jesus-boredom, toga-and-senate-boredom, Kings-and Queens-boredom. That’s the curriculum, so a film, a Scando film, too, where there might be tits and some humping, is promising.

  The film, to begin with, is not. Even without knowing it lasts five hours, you can feel it giving off the five-hour-film vibe. Every moment is doubled, tripled, seen from every angle. It is as if an expanding Time-foam had been injected into every join of the camerawork, the story, the action, the words. It is a poor start to Mr Wolphram’s European cinema afternoon, and no one knows why he chose it. The boys are fighting in the back, a few go out to the toilet and stay for too long; a couple of them might cram in a wank. Some of them giggle and laugh and throw stuff around. Mr Wolphram has gone out. He probably can’t face watching a film he loves mocked. But, then, why did he show it? Even Ander and Danny, who feel that they and boys like them have a responsibility to appreciate it and set an example, find it hard.

  There are good students among them: Dave Sweeting at the front, who does everything well but indistinguishably, without preference. There’s Neil Hall, a kind of semi-Goth who pierced his own ear with a compass using a deodorant anaesthetic, so that for three months now his ear has had a crust of burgundy-coloured blood crystals green-streaked with pus around the septic hole. Gwil Isaac, who likes film and has film posters all over the small part of wall that is his in the dormitory. Rich Nicholson, the class poet. Even they are restless. ‘So far, just one arse – a bloke’s – and no tits,’ someone says from the back. There is a scene, some way in, where a man farts out three candles through his elaborate underwear, those slightly stained, grey-washed long johns they wear in films and in cold countries from the past.

  Then, quietly, like a takeover, a slow, rippling coup, they stop talking, start watching, frown to catch the subtitles, even try to hear the language without them. Ander and Danny notice it first: they’re paying attention, but so is everyone else. The film’s slowness is punctuated by something else, something hard and dark, sharp pieces of joy and sharp pieces of misery. The helplessness of the children when their father dies, stuck in the cold God-filled yet empty world their stepfather makes around himself, is something desperate and compelling. What really catches Ander about the film is the echoes: the place is so big, the floors wooden, the walls reverberating. The world has been arranged to make you feel tiny. Like here, Ander thinks, like all around me. The echoes in the film are like the echoes in the school, too. They make you feel abandoned, and yet watched; listened to; unable to move without dislodging both your own noise and its echoey ghost.

  Mr Wolphram comes in at the end of the double session and presses ‘Pause’. The tape whirrs to a held stop. He tells them that anyone who wishes to can come in the next afternoon, Saturday, and watch the rest – that he’ll be here and put it on for them.

  Saturdays are precious. It’s free t
ime, going-into-town time, buying-booze-from-the-newsagents-far-from-school time. The idea that anyone would willingly give up their afternoon in the city to come and watch this Scandinavian time-glacier melt across a screen for another three and a half hours is crazy. And in a classroom, too. ‘Yeah, right – see you there,’ says Jonny Kebab uneasily. No one endorses his comment; they just leave lingeringly, stickily, hovering by the video machine, by Mr Wolphram who stands there watching them, nodding them out one by one. ‘Yeah, right!’ Jonny repeats, looking for assent and not getting it.

  And yet, the next day, there they are: not just Ander and Danny, Neil, Rich and Sweeting, a few of the others from the middle rows, but a good number of the boys who only yesterday had been farting and laughing and dismissing the whole thing as a long, tedious joke. They file in, quietly, a little ashamed at being, for once, studious and engaged. Some have brought sweets or crisps. Even Jonny Kebab is there, with a pint of sherry disguised in an orange juice carton. He has plastic cups with him, too, so he can sell his booze like a cinema usher. Mr Wolphram comes in and if he is surprised to see so many of them he doesn’t show it. Out of a class of eighteen, thirteen are there, for a Scandinavian film with subtitles that they don’t even have to watch, that has nothing to do with their English classes, let alone any exams, and that will swallow their Saturday afternoon.

  But they have come, and now they stay. Ander sees it getting dark outside, the afternoon ebbing, but he doesn’t care. None of them care. They’re engrossed, they half understand, they’re drawn to the cold ice of rebellion in the boy, who is scolded and beaten and locked up but stays defiant and sweats revolt. He sees through the adults, sees through their God, sees through the palace of cold glass the adults have built inside themselves to honour Him.

  When Ander hears the boy, Alexander Ekdahl, say, ‘If there’s a God he’s a shit and piss god and I’d like to kick him in the arse’, he feels weak with excitement. Light.

  It’s like he’s evaporating.