‘ — That’s a lie!’ I protested, but he proceeded without hesitation.
‘Lisa never loved you, and you never loved her — ’
‘ — That’s a lie!’
‘Is it? Explain to me just how you can beat and rape someone you purport to love?’
‘ — That’s a lie!’ I ejaculated for a third time.
‘And as for William: you claim to have been devoted to him, but the fact is that you wanted him aborted for fear that he would take your place in Lisa’s affections — not realising that she never truly loved you anyway — and you harboured a festering resentment against him for having displaced you ever since — ’
‘ — That’s a lie!’
‘The only thing you loved in William was your reflection and the intimation of immortality he represented.’
This really was too much.
‘Lies! All lies!’ I proclaimed as, unable to contain my fury at his pseudo-psychobabble any longer, I lunged at him. He evaded my clumsy attack all too easily and, with a single strike, sent me careening across the room to crash against a bookcase and slump to the floor with books tumbling around me. I was disconcerted to discover that the books were all identical. They were all copies of Original Harm.
‘Lies, all lies,’ I mumbled beneath my breath.
‘It’s your autobiography that’s the lie,’ he maintained.
‘And what about yours?’ I hissed. ‘What’s your story?’
‘At last,’ he said, in a sarcastic tone. ‘I was beginning to wonder whether you’d ever get round to enquiring after me.’
‘I’m enquiring now,’ I said, cradling my bruised and battered face in my hands. ‘Do you know who you are?’
‘Thanks for asking,’ he said. ‘I do — though I admit there was a time when I wasn’t quite so sure —’
‘ — When was that?’
‘When you stopped replying to my letters — those letters might not have meant much to you but they meant a great deal to me. I’d grown to depend on them — they gave me something to look forward to and, until you stopped sending them, they told me who I was: I was your confidant. I felt privileged to be the sole recipient of your candid confessions and, secure in the status this prerogative afforded me, the regular flow of your correspondence gave me sufficient self-confidence to inspire my first steps towards self-exploration until I learned to raise my line of vision from contemplation of my navel to contemplation of a vista crowded with possibilities. I took succour from your candour and sought to emulate it through my own experiments in self-expression, resulting in A Halo Ring Rim, my one and only attempt at writing a roman-à-clef. Your response to these overtures? You cut dead all lines of communication.’
I was unsure what, exactly, he was talking about. It sounded to me as if he was skirting around an issue he felt compelled to impart; as if he hoped that by broaching it indirectly, I might be able to infer his meaning without forcing him into the awkward position of having to divulge it explicitly. If this was his hope, then it was in vain.
Despite the accusation that culminated this preliminary bout of soul-baring confession, his voice had grown more reflective and less vindictive and I felt obliged to modulate my own accordingly.
‘I’m not sure I follow,’ I said.
‘I thought you might find it difficult,’ he said, ‘but you weren’t interested in my torments then, so you’ll understand why I’m not predisposed to spell them out for you now. Suffice to say that they weren’t as trivial or as commonplace as your own. It’s what happened after your letters stopped arriving that should concern you.’
‘What happened?’
‘I decided that words are no substitute for action.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning I felt I needed to meet you in person.’
‘Me? Why?’
‘I needed to clarify something with you.’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘It doesn’t matter now.’
‘I’d like to know.’
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he repeated, in a tone that told me that any attempt to discuss this particular matter further would prove futile. His obfuscation was becoming exasperating. I sighed with frustration.
‘So what happened,’ I asked. ‘You didn’t find me, so you returned home?’
‘Not immediately.’
‘What d’you mean, “not immediately”?’
‘I mean “not immediately”. Which part of “not immediately” don’t you understand? I didn’t find you — but I found Lisa.’
‘You knew Lisa?’
‘Biblically,’ he said, just like that, then, tangentially, ‘D’you know what day it is today?’
‘No,’ I said, still trying to figure out whether he meant what I thought he meant by his confirmation that he had known Lisa.
‘It’s the tenth anniversary of your tragedies,’ he said. ‘You’d have thought that date might have etched itself in your memory — ’
‘What does the anniversary of “my tragedies” have to do with you?’
‘Everything.’
‘What d’you mean, “everything”?’
‘I mean everything: your tragedies are mine.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I’ve just told you that I knew Lisa in the biblical sense — what d’you think I mean?’
It took me a moment to digest the inference of this taunt and a moment longer for me to react to it. I sprung to my feet and lunged at him for a second time, regaining consciousness to find myself crumpled in a heap with blood dripping from my nose and mouth and a metaphorical sledgehammer lodged in my head.
I became aware of his voice talking in a detached monotone that sounded as if he was reciting a text he’d rehearsed from memory like a second-rate actor who’d rote-learned lines written in a foreign language.
‘… I blamed myself for driving you away and recoiled from any further attempts at self-discovery,’ he was saying, as if explaining himself to himself as much as to me, ‘but I found myself driven by an irrational need for your approval; a need which magnified during the protracted period of your failure to respond to my words. This lack of any feedback unsettled me more than a negative rejoinder might have done. I could only conclude that you deemed my writing unworthy of acknowledgement. But I felt my words deserved that at least, so that, once I’d resigned myself to the notion that no reaction was forthcoming, I flew here to demand one in person.
‘When I arrived at your apartment, straight from the airport, you’d already left for work and, once I’d introduced myself, Lisa invited me in to share the pot of tea she’d just brewed. I couldn’t help but notice that I’d interrupted her reading — Irene’s Cunt lay open on the kitchen table — and so I offered to leave and return that evening, but she insisted that I stay. She was like that, wasn’t she? She had that effortless ability to put people at ease in any given social situation. I always envied her that. She told me all about you. In retrospect, I suspect that I’d fallen in love with her right there and then. I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe the feelings I was feeling then, but she seemed to breathe life into me, like an author who creates a fictional character with such skill that he seems alive to the reader — like the way you once wrote to me that you had to keep reminding yourself that Tom Sawyer was fictional and that each time you remembered this fact, you felt as though you’d lost a friend — ’
‘ — Hence this Guy Fall character adopting Mark Twain as a namesake?’ I interrupted, it only just dawning on me.
Liam nodded. ‘You revealed your weakness for pseudonyms some time ago — what better pseudonym to give my messenger, not Will’s, than that adopted by the author of our shared favourite fictional character of our distant, innocent childhood? And what better pseudonyms to precipitate this meeting than variations of the “I am not he” anag
ram adopted by your good, or should that be bad, self?’
When this offhand remark met with nothing other than silence and an expression of perplexed puzzlement from myself, Liam sighed impatiently and, as if speaking to a dim-witted child, said, ‘I am Toni Mahe. And Noa…’
‘You murdered Craig Liddell?’ I asked incredulously.
‘Who else could it have been?’
‘But why?’ I asked, still uncomprehending.
‘As a means to an end. To start the ball rolling. That and the fact that — not that you even noticed — but, years ago, he did a hatchet job on A Halo Ring Rim. I’ve been nurturing my wrath ever since, so, when the opportunity presented itself, Liddell elected himself as the perfect candidate to draw your attention — and I did a hatchet job on him. As I said: sometimes extremes are necessary. As soon as Original Harm was published, I recognised it as an unsubtle plagiarised parody of A Halo Ring Rim, and that you were the author writing under a pseudonym. So I adopted the nom de plume Toni Mahe to do the dirty deed, with the intention of gaining your attention, forgetting just how slow on the uptake you can be at times.’ This latter remark was imparted with a tone of almost wistful affection, which somehow made it all the more menacing.
‘Then, later, I thought I’d give you a second chance to put the pieces of the puzzle together, so I phoned your crossword puzzle colleague using the pseudonym Noah Time and, finally, we began to bring matters to a satisfactory conclusion.
‘Anyway, to get back to what I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, Lisa fleshed me out and I suspect she did the same to you.
‘That evening, as I returned to meet you — Lisa and I had arranged it as a surprise for you — I found myself hesitating in the hallway outside your door with my fist raised, ready, but somehow unable, to knock. I finally realised why our correspondence had come to an end. With Lisa fleshing you out, why would you ever have need of me? As you said yourself a few moments ago, you felt you’d outgrown the need for me. Lisa had usurped me. As I stood there, I understood this and so I turned on my heels and hailed a taxi to the airport.
‘When I reached home there was a letter waiting for me from Lisa wondering what had happened to me and whether or not I thought that she should inform you of my visit. I instructed her not to. I told her that your correspondence with me had concluded, thanked her for her hospitality and wished her a happy future with you. She responded by thanking me for my kind words, wished me well and, as far as I was concerned, that was that. I returned to my studies and tried to forget all about you and Lisa. Then, about a year later, I received a letter from her which made me feel like a character in a book who’d been reassigned a different identity and pitched headfirst into the midst of a plot he no longer recognised.
‘Lisa’s letter informed me that she was a mother and that I was a father of a baby boy. She apologised upfront for burdening me with this confession but sought to justify it to herself by arguing that her conscience compelled her to inform me of the truth. She stressed that she wasn’t seeking any ongoing financial commitment from me to help her raise our son and begged that I do nothing about the situation because you’d already jumped to the conclusion that the child was your own and she’d no intention of enlightening you as to the truth. She’d enclosed several blurred Polaroids of a cherubic baby boy who, conceivably, resembled myself. But it was not these photos that convinced me of her startling claim — it was her absolute conviction that you were not the father.’
Liam’s revelations seemed to me to be designed to provoke a further violent reaction from me and so I resolved to deny him that satisfaction. Instead, I listened impassively. I felt detached from the story he was telling. Instead of enraging me, which, I knew, was his intention, I let his words wash over me.
My own serenity at this juncture contrasted starkly with Liam’s now agitated state. Whereas earlier his tone had grown subdued and mollified, his voice, though still sounding disembodied, was now rising in tenor and tremor and the frequency of his nervous tic was increasing. What enabled me to detach myself from his provocative words and foil his intention to incite a third violent reaction was the fact that I no longer believed a word of what he was telling me. It now seemed to me to be obvious that Liam was delusional. I had concluded that he inhabited an extravagant fantasy world of his own creation.
‘I did what Lisa had begged I do: I kept my distance,’ he continued. ‘I honoured my promise to her never to inform you of the truth about William’s parentage, thereby gifting you the biography that, by rights, was mine. How could I possibly bear the burden of such a sacrifice? You, of all people, should know. I buried my nose in book after book. For a while, reading helped to distract me from brooding over the sacrifice I’d made and imagining the endless fulfilment you must have felt with Lisa and William sharing your life. But only for a while.
‘After some years had dragged by, I arrived at the conclusion that a life lived incommunicado wasn’t worth living and I decided to re-establish links with Lisa. By this time I’d grown frustrated by her treatment of me and was desperate to hear about William. I’d found myself unable to think of much else beyond fantasising about William and the conversations we’d have. It was only when I’d put pen to paper to write to Lisa that I thought of a way to get her to reply to my correspondence. I blackmailed her. Sometimes extremes are necessary. I wrote that unless she sent me a letter once a week containing news of William, then I’d inform you that I was William’s father. So began our correspondence.
‘For a while, Lisa’s letters assuaged my feelings of loss — but I gradually realised that a regular supply of letters and the occasional photograph weren’t enough. I needed to meet William face to face. In the flesh. Initially, Lisa was horrified by this notion and had spouted forth all manner of objections in an attempt to dissuade me, but I was insistent till eventually, once I’d convinced her with countless reassurances concerning my capability for discretion and had repeated my threat to inform you of the truth about William’s parentage, she relented and effectively arranged a meeting by sending me details of the dates and the location of your accommodation in Majorca.
‘You might recall that, on the first afternoon, while you were sunbathing on the beach, Lisa had opted to take William shopping to buy him a bucket and spade. This was of course no more than a ruse to arrange a “chance” meeting at a café by the harbour where, for William’s sake, Lisa introduced me as a friend from America. I don’t think William believed this fiction for a moment, but he chose to play along with it. The fact that he didn’t mention me to you, I think, supports my theory that he knew who I was right away. It was only when I encountered my own flesh and blood standing before me — a vital, vulnerable seven-year-old — that I realised the extent of the sacrifice I’d made. For Lisa, our meeting unexpectedly rekindled the mutual love that we’d both sought to deny throughout the intervening years. Her faith was visibly withering and, for a moment, I thought that I might be able to steal them both away from you. Indeed, that was the rash proposition I put to her and, though she didn’t reject it outright, she did decline it the following day, though not without first declaring her love for me. I never did get the chance to reveal to William my true identity — Lisa made it clear that were I to succumb to the temptation to do so, it would be the last time I would set eyes on him and she’d convinced me that, for the time being, it would not be in William’s best interests for me to reveal myself — but, as we were bidding our last farewells, we shared a moment of recognition and I knew he knew who I was and, therefore, who he was. That night I decided to abide by Lisa’s ground rules and not identify myself to William until he’d reached an age where I felt he could cope with such a revelation. I could have nourished myself with this thought for another decade. Already I was fantasising about informing William on his seventeenth birthday that he was my son and indulged myself with visions of him deciding to abandon you and Lisa to come and live with me in N
ew York. But, of course, that was not to be because, soon after, William and Lisa were dead.’
I had sat and listened throughout the unravelling of this twisted fantasy, biding my time, garnering my strength, keeping my own counsel and seeking to conceal my mounting rage, but his perverse re-writing of reality was such that I lost the plot. I lunged at him for a third time and, finally wise to his manoeuvres, managed to make contact. My momentum overpowered his unprepared resistance and I grappled him to the ground and pummelled him. For a few moments I felt that I was gaining the upper hand. My surprise attack had exposed Liam’s vulnerability and his struggle for breath betrayed the underlying fragility of his physical condition. But no sooner had his susceptibility become apparent than he seemed to tap into a hidden reserve of strength and the full force of his hostility was unleashed in a maelstrom that spewed forth from his lips and fists. He grabbed at the copies of Original Harm that had fallen from the shelves and used them to batter me over the head as he launched into a fresh tirade with renewed vigour.
‘I knew straight away what had happened,’ he roared. ‘Lisa had informed you that she was leaving you for me and that she was taking William with her. You’d had no premonition of Lisa’s declaration of independence from you and your reaction to it was characteristically violent. You regarded her intention to seize control of her own biography as a humiliation as it trespassed upon your own status as the sole author of yours. You found the less-than-flattering characterisation of yourself contained within Lisa’s biography as infringing to an unacceptable degree upon what you regarded as your fundamental right to pen your own portrait. Your temper flared briefly, but with fatal consequences. You grabbed the purple paperweight that had caught your eye in Soller market — I was there and I saw you buy it — and struck her with a single savage blow to the temple. When your rage had subsided and you saw the fatal consequences of your actions, under cover of darkness you disposed of Lisa’s corpse by heaving it over the harbour wall and into the Mediterranean. But whilst you’d fabricated Lisa’s death, and proceeded to re-write it in your head as suicide, William’s suicide was tragically all too genuine and entirely unforeseen. For all that you resented William for displacing you in Lisa’s affections, the overriding fact remained that he made you immortal, so that his death condemned you too to death everlasting. His death meant that the remainder of your own sorry excuse for a life would be forever misspent waiting for the arrival of your own inevitable full stop. For you to kill William would have been tantamount to signing your own death warrant. No, whilst Lisa’s death was undoubtedly murder, William’s was an unanticipated tragedy. You sought subsequently to come to terms with your overbearing burden of guilt in the only way you knew how — by writing about it — ’
Oh Marina Girl Page 13
