by Stephen May
There’s something I have to say, despite everything.
I run to the street. She’s already a hundred yards away and she’s actually broken into an awkward half-jog. I call after her: ‘Thank you, Mary. For what you’ve done with Scarlett. Thank you.’ I’m not even sure she hears. And if she does, I hope she doesn’t think it’s sarcasm, because I really am grateful. Whatever happens, Scarlett has been happy with Mary. She’s made real progress. Mary brought us all hope, and that’s a great gift. I’m still grateful for that, even now. The second-best kind of love is still a good kind of love.
On my own now I feel sick, literally sick, with dread. There’s a sour taste in my mouth and my stomach spasms painfully. I want to scream and shout and break things. I want to rage and howl and strangle someone. But I also feel so tired, I could sleep for ever. And I want to somehow relieve the volcanic pressure in my head. But there’s nothing to be done except wait for a new note and that might not be for hours or days.
And where the fuck is Sarah?
In the end it’s the money that’s done all this and I get the notion that if I do some immediate good with the money, then maybe some good will flow back my way. So I go into the downstairs toilet, the place where just a few weeks ago I had discovered Russell stiff and cold and gone. I go in there and pick up one of the Private Eyes stacked in a pile next to the pan and go through to Russell’s office with it.
I flip the lid on Russell’s iThing and there, under the tubercular gaze of those pre-Raphaelite girls, I start shoving wads of electronic tenners into electronic begging bowls.
You know Private Eye, right? It’s this magazine that attempts to keep the ruling class in line with satirical jokes and, also, by revealing the stuff they’d rather keep hidden. It has some very good political cartoons. At the back it has a classified section, one column of which is called EYE NEED. It’s where people beg basically. They stick in one line about their particular misfortune and also put their bank details in the hope that people will be moved to donate. Does it work? I guess that sometimes it must because people wouldn’t do it, but it seems unlikely.
Anyway, this copy of Private Eye is three months old so the philosophy student who wants to do a PhD, the newly divorced mum who wants to keep her kids at private school, the wine merchant about to go bankrupt because of late payments from his suppliers, the guy who wants to buy some land and build a straw-bale house, the Surrey roofer who needs to buy a kidney, all of these are going to find ridiculously pleasant surprises in their bank accounts. Surely they’ve given up all hope by now?
Of course it might be too late for the roofer.
I also send money to all the charities advertising through the mag, so Save The Children, WaterAid, Oxfam, Help The Aged, Shelter, they all get a million. And Scope, the cerebral palsy people, they get five million on the grounds that they help people like Scarlett.
Right from the start of this whole thing we’d talked about which charities we’d support, but hadn’t actually quite got around to doing it. I’d bought new suits and new hair, Sarah had bought new frocks, but we’d not actually done much concrete good with the money. Though I have given money to Russell’s daughter. But I should give more, it is all her money after all. So I transfer a million across to her. And then another million.
Giving all this cash away has taken a while and has kept the sickness at bay just a little – at least I’m doing something – and I come off the bank site and sit back and stretch. My neck clicks uncomfortably. I glance at all the short cuts on the screen and click on one more or less at random, which is how I find out something that any other time would be kind of fucking hilarious.
Forty-two
CATHERINE
After the kid announces that she doesn’t want to go home, she starts screaming. Catherine has heard this kind of desperate noise from children before, several times. She’s heard it in Mostar, in Fallujah, in Helmand, in Sierra Leone. And the children screaming then had something to bloody well scream about. This kid is being rescued. Catherine is this kid’s Queen bloody Arthur. Her Galahad.
Catherine can’t allow this racket. Not here. Not now. She can’t. It isn’t just the fact that the noise might bring the neighbours round, or have staff and customers from the shop downstairs investigating. It isn’t just the fact that someone might phone the police. All of these scenarios could be dealt with. It’s more that it threatens her sanity. It’s doing her head in. Catherine feels her whole body begin to go rigid. She clenches her teeth. She wants to throw that child out the window.
There is lots of advice for dealing with major tantrums out there on the net. Top tips include holding the child really tightly; making eye contact while you say – calmly but firmly – ‘I’m here, I won’t let you hurt yourself.’ Some experts advise a time-out strategy. This means you put your child somewhere safe but boring, like a playpen, and let them rage for a while on their own.
Some people think that a silly song or a tickling game will change a kid’s mood sufficiently that they forget about screaming and yelling.
These days very few recommend a sharp slap on the leg and almost none suggest telling the kid that you have a gun and you will use it if you have to. But then Catherine has never wanted kids and has always thought that ninety per cent of them seem to be horribly spoilt. Take her sister’s kids, for example, with their incessant demands for stuff. Demands that are always met too. In the end.
No wonder the Western world is so messed up. Little children are not democrats. Discussion, debate, reasoned argument – all of these are wasted on them. Might is right, however, and the ankle-biters, they get that. Violence, blackmail, extortion and bribery. Kids understand how all of that works more or less from birth. Kids are born terrorists.
It’s one reason Catherine wants to write children’s books. She wants to show a world that children will recognise rather than this baffling make-believe adult place where things can be talked through and resolved with love and magic. That’s all horseshit and children aren’t fooled by it. They know the world is a war of all against all and that you use every weapon you have. Being cute, that’s just another tool kids have, and when that doesn’t work, they try something else. You can’t blame them – it’s nature – but that doesn’t mean you give in to them.
Keeping a steady bead on Jesus she crosses over to where the brat is now thrashing around on the sofa barking and yelling. She looks like a thirsty seal stranded on dry land. A seal having an eppy.
With her right hand keeping the gun on Jesus, she wallops Scarlett hard on the back of her thigh with her left. The noise stops. See, Catherine thinks, see. You just need to have clear boundaries.
The screaming stops for about five seconds. If that. And then starts up again louder than before.
And that’s when Catherine says that she will use the gun if she has to and, to be fair, she does say it calmly and firmly just as they recommend on Mumsnet. And she does get eye contact. The screaming stops again. The child looks back at her just as calmly. And then slowly, deliberately, purposefully, the kid opens her mouth, fills her lungs and lets rip twice as loud, the child’s hot, fierce eyes never leaving Catherine’s. Catherine feels panicked. Trapped, What to do now?
Across the room, the Latino closes his eyes. He swallows and shows his palms to Catherine as if to say kids eh, what can you do?
And then he takes a step forward.
Catherine hates have-a-go heroes, they fuck it up for everyone. Her finger tightens on the trigger.
Latino stops.
‘The baby?’ he says, and so Catherine understands that he is offering to comfort the child, and so she nods and lets him cross the room where he sits on the sofa and murmurs and croons and babbles and strokes the kid’s hair and whispers in Spanish. Catherine thinks she’ll give him one minute. And that is almost exactly how long it takes before the kid is snuffling rather than wailing.
‘Be good now, you hear?’ says Jesus in English and the kid hugs him and then
stands unsteadily on thin, crooked baby foal legs. Very solemnly he takes off his necklace and places it around the kid’s neck. She giggles and limps over to Catherine and holds out both arms.
Catherine has to admit that as teary, snot-streaked faces go, this is quite a bearable one. Or maybe that is relief at the cessation of that excruciating shrieking. She squats down and scoops the kid up. One arm is tight around her neck. The other one squashed against her chest. She is warm and she smells soapy. She weighs almost nothing.
Catherine tells the Latino to go to the bathroom and to stay there for five minutes. ‘Use the time to call your girlfriend,’ she says. ‘Remember – lethal force. Anything happens to her, it’s your bad.’
He goes meekly enough. ‘Nice work with the brat though.’ Catherine says this to his retreating back.
‘Fuck you,’ he says, without looking round. He sounds tired. He sounds like the weariest man on the planet.
Forty-three
POLLY
She is standing with her mother, with the package in her hand, listening to Daniel’s breathing. It sounds like water on stones, like the tide coming in fast on a shingle beach.
‘Mervyn will be here soon,’ her mother says, and squeezes her arm. ‘I’ll make some tea.’
Polly looks at Daniel, and wonders. She wonders if he can still hear anything, hear his own breathing maybe. You know, with hearing being the last thing to go and everything. She wonders if he knows he might be dying.
He’s 77 she thinks, he’s had a good life, an interesting life. He’s lived in India. He’s made things, big things that have lasted and that have improved lives. The world is a better place than it was when he came into it, and that’s all you can hope for really.
And he might still wake up of course. He might suddenly sit up, announce that he fancies a fry-up, or that he wants to go to the beach, or up in a hot-air balloon. Or that he’s going to sort out the garden, or paint the kitchen, or write a song. You don’t ever really know with Daniel.
Still, this feels like the end coming. And she thinks Daniel knew it was on its way.
Last night he’d asked her what she would do if she knew the end of the world was tomorrow. And got a bit cross when she replied that there were probably lots of people she should say sorry to.
‘Why?’ he’d said. ‘What’s the point of that?’ And he had explained that it was actually pretty damn rude of her, because if it was the last day on Earth did she really think people would want to have any of their final precious minutes wasted listening to her apologies?
And she’d felt like she’d been tricked somehow and was annoyed at herself. And she’d asked him what he would do and he’d obviously been giving it a lot of thought because he had the whole day planned.
He would get up early before the dawn so that he could see the last sunrise come up and hear the last dawn chorus. He would watch the birds at the feeder for a while.
And then he would have a bucks fizz like it was Christmas Day, or a wedding breakfast. Then he would have toast made from home-made bread with home-made bramble jelly.
And while he ate his breakfast he would listen to Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio For Strings’, the 2001 performance with Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Orchestra. And then he’d go for a long walk somewhere he’d never been before, maybe even get lost.
‘What if the weather is bad?’
‘No such thing as bad weather,’ said Daniel. ‘There is only inappropriate clothing.’
Polly wasn’t so sure about that.
‘Anyway, ‘ said Daniel, ‘I shall want some rain, if that’s what you mean.’
In Daniel’s perfect final day it would just so happen that as he was growing tired from his walk, he would stumble across a lovely little pub that is, somehow, still serving and he’d sit near a fire, drinking and thinking – maybe doing the crossword – listening to the rain as it hammered down outside.
‘A place can only be truly cosy if it’s wild outside,’ he said.
And then the pub would fill up and there’d be good conversation and songs and stories, and then somehow there’d just be him and the landlady with her twinkling black gypsy eyes and an easy smile. And she’d ask him if he has anyone to be with on this last night and he’d say no and she’d say that she was also alone. And so there would be a moment of silence and thought and after this she would smile and say, ‘No sad stories, not tonight.’
And she would get a bottle of the finest Islay malt, the kind that costs hundreds of pounds a glass, and she’d pour them a generous measure, and they’d go upstairs to a room that smelled faintly of oranges and they would undress each other by candlight.
Polly stopped him there. She couldn’t hear any more.
‘Maybe I could say sorry to everyone by text. That wouldn’t take up so much of everyone’s precious time,’ she said.
And Daniel had laughed and asked if he was making her uncomfortable, and she said no and then she laughed as well. And she’d admitted then that, yes, of course he was making her uncomfortable. And that’s when he’d told her that he was going to stop taking his pills.
‘What? All of them?’
‘All nineteen of them, yes.’
‘What will happen?’
‘Well, I hope I’ll feel better. I hope I’ll have more energy. I hope I won’t be quite as dozy. And then I hope that one morning quite soon I’ll drop down dead. Possibly while mowing the lawn, or maybe while listening to music or watching a film. Or maybe I just won’t wake up. That would be the dream scenario.’
And now it looks like he might have got his dream ending, even if it’s come rushing up a bit quicker than they’d imagined.
Looking at the rise and fall of his chest beneath the covers she wants to tell the daft old bugger that his fantasy last day is way too easy. What about the children? The babies? What about the pregnant women? What about all the people who have just got started. Easy for him to imagine it all lovely with candles and posh whisky and conversation and crosswords. She can’t help thinking of all the people who would be in bits. She could just hear all the angry tears. All the shouting.
She goes to the kitchen and has a cup of tea with her mum. Her mum who is pointedly not asking what the package is. Who doesn’t even ask about the package when Polly is taking the ice cream out to make room for it in the freezer.
‘That’ll melt,’ she says.
‘Oh well, there’s not much left anyway. Maybe I’ll have some now.’
‘Ice cream in the morning?’
Yes, why not ice cream in the morning? Let’s go crazy. Let’s imagine it really is our last day on Earth. And actually, Polly can easily imagine her mum using her last day trying to use everything up, to make sure there was no waste. Spending her last hours making a casserole out of leftovers for a dinner no one would ever eat. How sad is that?
Polly goes to her room and lies on her bed and watches Cash In The Attic and Wife Swap and wonders where they find these people prepared to humiliate themselves on national TV. But she’s glad these shows are on now. Much easier to let your mind wander with the telly on.
If you can imagine it then someone somewhere has actually done it, that’s what he’d said to her once. When? When she was speculating about killing Irina, probably fantasising about cutting her up and using her to thicken the lunchtime soup. But if it’s true that a thing imagined is a thing that has been done somewhere or other, then it means someone somewhere has really spent their last day on earth using up leftovers, even when they knew it was the final act of their life. Someone has made radish pancakes or something because that was what was left in the fridge.
And it also means that a lady somewhere has actually gone into the bedroom of a dying old man and put her hand around him – around his thing – and has massaged him gently till he’s hard – or hard enough anyway – and then that lady has straddled him, guided him into her and moved up and down on him until he’s come. And that lady has gone on to have his baby, so that his fantastic
genes carry on. Maybe the old guy’s only son is dead and this lady, whoever she is, maybe she thinks that’s a shame, what with him being so clever and so talented and such an interesting old man and everything. And still quite handsome even though he’s 77 and ill.
Someone, somewhere, hasn’t just thought about this. Someone, somewhere, has done it.
There’s a knock at the door. She jumps. It’s like someone has been reading her thoughts and is so disgusted that they’ve come to stop her thinking any more of them. And it’s not her mum’s knock, her mum doesn’t knock. This is a man’s knock. A confident man’s knock.
The door opens and she sees Mervyn’s face. He looks serious.
‘Came as soon as I could. Got a lift most of the way. Cabbie who’d seen me on Newsnight. Wouldn’t take a fare.’ A pause, then, ‘I’ve had a look at Daniel. I think he’s had a big stroke. If he really won’t go to hospital then it’s probably just a case of waiting now. And keeping him comfortable.’
Polly is suddenly really glad he’s here.
‘Come in, Mervyn. Come and talk to me. And close the door.’
She can always eBay the package.
Forty-four
SARAH
A homeless guy. Nothing remarkable about him. Another motionless kid in the stained pupa of his sleeping bag, lying by an ATM on California Street. Next to him is a takeaway coffee mug. Starbucks. Trente-sized, though it looks like someone has actually bitten a lump out of the rim, there are jagged edges that are definitely suggestive of teeth marks. Nevertheless it’s half full of nickels and dimes. And Sarah bends down and stuffs in her own five-dollar bill. There’s no acknowledgement. The sleeping bag doesn’t stir. If the body inside was dead, how long before anyone noticed? And how long after that before someone removed the corpse? The money would definitely go first.
