I searched the apartment, shouting Will’s name. There was no response. The policeman waited at the doorway, fidgeting with the rim of his helmet until I stopped and looked at him. He had something in his hand that he was offering me. It was a letter. I was afraid to read it. Instead, I searched the empty rooms one last time. It was then, and only then, that I discovered Will’s last, undelivered, letter to you (the letter it is my fervent hope to finally deliver to you in person on Will’s behalf in the very near future) being used as a bookmark in his copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and pocketed it, furtively, to be pored over as soon as I was alone. Eventually, resigned to Will’s absence, I approached the policeman, terrified that the letter he held would confirm my worst fear.
‘We found this with the crucifix,’ he said, handing me the letter.
This is what I read:
Dear Dad,
I’ve gone to be with Mum. I was missing her too much. I’ll miss you too, but I know you’ll come and see us soon. Hope you won’t miss us too much. We’ll be having fun in heaven playing with God and his angels. Bye!
Love, Will xxx
chapter nine
an envelope without an address
‘Why do you sit there, looking like an envelope without an address?’
Yanked from the familiar comfort of my morbid ruminations to find myself sitting hunched up on a bench beneath the flagpole in Queen’s Park, I turned, startled, to assess the stranger who had materialised beside me, invading my body space despite the availability of an identical empty bench nearby. He was a sallow-skinned, callow youth with black-rimmed sunken eyes weary and worn by a burden seemingly too great for his tender years to bear.
‘Sorry?’ I stalled.
‘Mark Twain,’ he said. ‘I never knew what he meant, until I saw you just now.’
I didn’t know how to respond to this, so I didn’t.
‘Nice sunrise,’ he commented. I looked to see it seep up the sky from the horizon like watercolour paint and nodded.
‘Mark Twain,’ he said. I turned to see him extend a hand for me to shake. I shook it and mumbled my own name.
‘I’m a namesake,’ he added.
Then, at the conclusion of a protracted hesitation, during which I received the distinct impression that he was weighing up what my reaction might be if he were to take a leap of faith and make me a proposal which lay beyond the parameters of what might be considered appropriate pleasantries between two strangers, he bade me farewell, hesitated, once more, though thankfully not for as long as before, and, when I echoed his farewell, departed.
I was left pondering his hesitation. I waited till he’d disappeared over the brow of the hill and then set off in the opposite direction, speculating about his identity. When I passed through the park gates, for the first time in a long time I remembered Lisa’s last words to me. They’d struck me as odd at the time, as if she’d been reciting a quotation — and it was only now that I felt certain that she had been, and whom it belonged to.
‘There is in life only one moment and in eternity only one,’ she’d said, in response to what, I no longer recall.
I may well have remembered what she’d said, but I remained mystified by what she’d meant by it. What intrigued me, though, was the thought that there might be a connection between Lisa’s Mark Twain quotation and my encounter with his namesake. I wondered whether his hesitation could be explained by the fact that he’d been on the verge of divulging something about Lisa. Or was that fanciful speculation? After all, it implied that our meeting had been arranged by him, and it was not often that I was to be found sitting on a bench beneath the flagpole at Queen’s Park at the break of dawn ... so how could he have arranged to meet me there — unless he’d been spying on me? Could he have been behind the sense I had of being watched the previous day? I considered this possibility before deciding that it was more likely that our encounter was a simple case of coincidence. After all, Mark Twain quotations are not exactly obscure. I knew a few myself: ‘Truth is good manners; manners are a fiction,’ for example.
Still, the more I thought about our conversation, the odder it seemed and I considered returning to search for the namesake to confirm that our encounter could be put down to chance rather than design, but realised that he could be anywhere by now, so, instead, I proceeded on my way home, my thoughts already returning to the familiar haunting ground from which they’d been so rudely interrupted by the namesake’s untimely intrusion.
chapter ten
suicide note
The irrepressible optimism of the ‘Bye!’ in Will’s suicide note nailed me to the crucifix of my lie; the lie to myself as much as my lie to him.
I sought some evil past deed I’d committed to explain why I’d been singled out for such divine retribution, a search which contradicted the conviction of my atheism, but conviction had long since been replaced by a maggoty mass of contradiction.
As I continually replay the reshot version of my internal scene of our last morning, my monologue has undergone a radical revision so that, when Will wakes and asks me where his mum is, instead of seducing him with beautiful lies spawned from a cowardly attempt at shielding him from the terrible truth, I grasp the thistle and tell him the truth, relate the facts as I know them to be and answer his questions with unflinching honesty. Of course, revision is easy in the safety cushion of retrospective introspection where, with the benefit of hindsight, I know that, instead of shielding Will from the truth, my lies had been accepted as truth, with the result that, rather than recoil from the truth, he’d embraced the lie. With the benefit of hindsight I suspect that I’d underestimated his inherent resilience and capacity for coping with bereavement. I truly believe that the terrible truth would not have proved fatal, as the seductive lie had shown itself to be.
Beneath my own grief lay a stratum of mortification at the improbability of losing my partner and my son within twenty-four hours. As a plot twist in a work of fiction it would have been rejected outright as implausible melodrama but, unfortunately for me, reality had no truck with such literary considerations, concerning itself solely with fate; and fate, whether literary critics liked it or not, had an insatiable appetite for sensation and tragedy; an appetite which my paper stood as daily testament.
‘Bye!’ Will had written.
‘Your son’s handwriting — yes?’ asked the policeman, indicating the letter. I nodded. ‘He could swim?’ he asked, mimicking the breaststroke.
‘Yes,’ I confirmed, ‘but he was only seven.’
The policeman nodded and fidgeted with his helmet, a habit I recognised. He asked me to accompany him. I thought he was leading me back to the morgue but, instead, he took me to the police station where, in a cramped, windowless room, a uniformless and perfect English-speaking colleague joined him to probe me thoroughly, though not without sensitivity, about the last known movements of Lisa and Will, recording my replies with a paper and pen and a tape machine, occasionally prompting me to speak louder ‘for the benefit of the tape’, a phrase whose familiarity, through overhearing its frequent recurrence in a popular thrice-weekly ITV police series which Lisa watched religiously, made me feel as though I was acting out a part in one of its episodes, just as I’d felt I’d been acting out a scene when I’d visited the mortuary no more than twenty-four hours earlier.
I don’t know whether he was a literary critic in his spare time, but evidently the uniformless policeman shared that profession’s disdain for credibility-straining coincidence.
At the conclusion of this protracted question and answer session I was told that the note, complete with child-sized fingerprints, and the crucifix had been hung on a nail on a post at the end of the pier. I learned that Will’s body had not yet been found but that, given the letter, they would continue to search the sea for him.
chapter eleven
forgery
On my retur
n home, there was a letter addressed to Will amongst the scattered pile of junk mail and bills littering the hall. It wasn’t till I saw his name on the envelope that I finally gave up hope of him ever being found alive. I held the envelope up to examine its postmark and realised that Will would never read the letter inside it. For a few moments I mulled over the morality of reading it myself then succumbed to temptation and tore it open. It was from you.
It was written with a red felt tip pen in an intimate style brimming with zest. Its summery air of undiluted idealism and implicit faith in the omnipresence of good, devoid of any inkling of evil, made me despair of my own long-lost innocence. You wrote of a family holiday travelling through the Rockies in a burnt-orange Volkswagen camper van with your mum and dad and your little brother. You gave a detailed account of an action-packed fortnight, written in an unaffected style that conveyed the adventure of your holiday. Your anecdotes at the expense of your parents made me laugh aloud. Your protectiveness towards your brother, though never explicitly stated, shone through each line and made me cry — pathetic, perhaps, and damning evidence of a cloying sentimentality, maybe, but a welcome, albeit belated, release, for it shames me to confess that I’d been unable to produce so much as a single tear throughout the unfolding double-tragedy of Lisa and Will.
I wondered what response to the letter, if any, would be considered appropriate. I cowered from the obligation of informing you about Will’s tragedy. Your innocence seemed far too precious for me to slaughter with the truth. Seeking a way to avoid having to tell you about Will, an ingenious solution occurred to me: I would write to you, but I would assume Will’s identity.
Morbidly excited by this devious scheme of deception (born from cowardice rather than altruism, however much I sought to convince myself that the reverse was true) I rushed to where Will hid his stockpile of your correspondence and passed many, too many, hours poring over it to trace the trajectory of his relationship with you. I soon became absorbed with these letters. I found that they helped me cope with the trauma of my double-tragedy. The insight they gave me into Will’s thoughts, as perceived by way of your replies to them, accentuated my loss; an accentuation that I masochistically relished because my loss had come to define me and the more keenly I felt it, the more readily I could accept that part of me was still alive.
I became obsessed with the idea of being able to read the letters Will had sent you. Aside from the solitary final artefact, I possessed only one side of the story and so could only fantasise about the other, where Will’s thoughts, written in his own fair hand, lay waiting to be discovered in a corresponding stockpile of letters, no doubt tucked out of sight in a corner of your bedroom thousands of miles away in Vancouver Island.
The absence of these letters gnawed at my insides a little more each day. I dreamed about the insights into Will they contained until the importance I attached to them grew to the extent that I began to equate their return to the return of Will himself; a metaphorical resurrection maybe, but the only reason I could think of to postpone my appointment with Will and Lisa.
The lack of any letters from Lisa, and the lack of any prospect of finding any letters from Lisa, made her death final to me. She was dead and gone and, though it grieved me so, her absence was irrevocable. But the fact that Will had never been found, and the thought that one day I might be able to read his correspondence, kept him alive in my imagination. His words had outlived him. They still existed, somewhere; and maybe, somewhere, so did he.
It was some time before I dared attempt to compose a reply to you. When I finally did, I tried to imagine I was Will’s age. As well as the one, vital letter of Will’s to you I had in my possession, I was helped in this regard by reference to the bundles of letters my own pen-pal, Liam, had written to me and so it was that I set sail on a voyage of rediscovery of my own long-forgotten youth.
I was struck by the innocence and naivety I encountered there and wondered whether the tone employed by Will would be similar to that employed by Liam, a notion that only made my hunger to read for myself his correspondence to you more acute. Once innocence had been lost, could it be rediscovered? Could the lessons of experience be unlearned? What a fabulous notion, for, if there was one thing that rereading the letters Liam had written to me as a seven-year-old had shown me, it was that, rather than leading me towards happiness, the knowledge that came with experience had led me astray.
If the recapture of innocence was to be possible, I suspected that the process would at least be as laborious as that entailed in the gaining of experience. In order to short circuit that protracted process, I resigned myself to the challenge of faking innocence for the purpose of assuming Will’s identity for writing to you. I emptied Will’s shelves of school jotters and concentrated on copying his handwriting and prose style.
Finally, after many monotonous evenings devoted to hours of rigorous practice, the day arrived when I felt I was ready to attempt a passable imitation and, after countless botched drafts, a few days later I posted a brief reply to you, which, though it had taken an immense time and effort to compose, contrived to appear spontaneous.
The ensuing weeks dragged by and were endured agonising over whether you would accept my forgery as an original or see through my attempted fraud. A fortnight after I posted the letter, I adopted the habit of waiting for the postman to deliver the post before departing for work, my dread and anticipation compounding each successive morning until, finally, one rain-soaked Wednesday, a reply arrived and, with trembling hands, I tore open the damp envelope to find, with a disproportionate sense of relief, that you had fallen for my fraud.
My next letter only took half as long to compose as the first and the one after that half as long again until my confidence had scaled such heights that the spontaneity of the letters, at least, was genuine. And, though it had never been my intention to prolong this deception, I soon became addicted to the regular receipt of your correspondence. I revelled in my adopted identity, which afforded me the opportunity to imagine what kind of life Will might have lived whilst giving me a second chance to live my own. The correspondence let me escape from my double-tragedy into an irresistible world of rosy optimism. And the longer it continued, the harder it became to bring it to a conclusion. Each time I promised myself that I would sign off, a letter would arrive from you of such innocent intimacy that I realised that the cruelty or brevity necessary to kill it off lay beyond me.
After a long time I felt able to return to work on Original Harm, which I’d neglected, though virtually all my previous motivations for writing it had been rendered redundant. I decided to proceed with it primarily for Will, to atone him, and for myself, to postpone my celestial reunion with Will and Lisa. The routine of editing the paper’s letters page during the day, writing Original Harm in the evening and corresponding with you preoccupied me and kept me alive. Original Harm was an extended love letter to my partner and son, its joint dedicatees. Perhaps that partly explained why I was so sensitive to criticism of it and leapt to its defence when I found it to be the subject of a savage attack by Niamh Toe in the pages of my own paper. I wasn’t defending myself. I was defending the cherished memory of my beloveds, which I felt had been desecrated.
Remembering that review reminded me of the blackmailer’s letter. I popped into a twenty-four-hour garage to pick up a copy of the paper to see if the story had made the front page. It had. The story was illustrated with a photograph of the actual letter. Examining it anew, I was once again struck by the notion that there was something familiar about the handwriting.
part three
thai omen
chapter twelve
the front page (1)
At the foot of a front page dominated by an in-depth eyewitness account of a running riot in George Square — caused by the unforeseen invasion by a militant mob of peace protesters of a peaceful protest by pro-war campaigners calling for the government to send ground troops into ce
ntral Europe as part of a UN peacekeeping force; a clash which resulted in a fatal stabbing (of a twenty-one-year-old, five months pregnant district council receptionist unfortunate enough to have been passing through the square on her lunch break when the riot had erupted around her) and eleven people admitted to hospital with a variety of injuries ranging from concussion to broken limbs to surface cuts and contusions — the following unattributed story appeared:
KIDNAP DEATH THREAT
We have received an anonymous letter from a kidnapper threatening to kill a hostage if we do not publish it in full on the front page of today’s paper.
The hostage is named in the letter (shown opposite) as Mr Ian Thome, who recently wrote to us in defence of a novel against a critical review, which itself appeared earlier in the week.
The kidnapper warns that ‘intolerance will not be tolerated’ and that he will slit Mr Thome’s throat unless we print his letter and promise ‘never again to publish such a misguided defence of pernicious propaganda’.
Mr Thome’s letter had been written in response to a review of Original Harm, a first novel by Tom Haine. The reviewer, Niamh Toe, criticised it for what she regarded as the wrong-footed stance it took on its central theme of abortion.
Mystery surrounds the identity of the kidnapper. The letter is not thought to have originated from any of the known extremist pro-life organisations and none has accepted responsibility for it. Rather, it is thought that the kidnapper is most likely to be a lone fanatic bearing a personal grudge against Mr Thome.
The letter proceeds to direct a death threat at our editor if he should fail to comply with its demands and includes a reference to Mr Craig Liddell, a book reviewer, found murdered in a city centre hotel room earlier this year.
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