by Dan Rhodes
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In Room Ten, Count Your Blessings, a tall, thin boy of nineteen was huddling behind a large display board, listening as echoing voices, some sombre and some emotional, spoke of the sadness of a skeleton. He wished they would stop, and go away.
When the museum first opened, Room Ten had been called Worse Things Happen at Sea. Designed to help visitors put their problems into perspective, it had told various tales of human misfortune. Along with the accounts of sinking ships was a series of photographs of a village lost to a mudslide, only its skewed rooftops visible above the new ground level, then there had been a short video presentation about a city decimated by a cloud of toxic gas, and an interactive timeline of global pandemics. Pavarotti’s wife had been pleased with this room, but as time went by she started to worry that it might not lift everybody’s spirits in the way she had intended, that some people might think it just a little on the negative side. After many sleepless nights she had decided to dismantle it and approach the same territory from a more positive angle, one that was in no way open to misinterpretation. This room being one of the smaller spaces the required upheaval would not be too great, so the old man had allowed this plan to go ahead.
The room was now lined with cork panels, and on a table in the middle were felt pens of different colours, and a pile of blank rectangular cards. On a large display board was an invitation, in several languages, for each visitor to write something good about their life and pin it on the wall so others could be reminded of the good things in their own lives. Pavarotti’s wife had gone first, with her card that said I have four wonderful daughters, and Hulda had been next, pinning up The trials of my middle-to-late childhood are over now. A lot of visitors had joined in, and there were notes that read I treasure the love of my family; I can see; Ice skating is my passion, and I often find opportunities to enjoy it; I have many valued friends; and the single word Horses. Earlier in the day the boy had read these cards, and many more, and found them all to be smug, or hectoring. I have food, clothes and shelter; I have fantastic legs; I am in relatively good health; My uncle is fun; My apartment has a lovely view of parkland in one direction, and rooftops in the other. These were other people’s blessings, and each one was a kick in his face. Everything that ought to have been good about his life, that should have brought him joy or satisfaction, had been suffocated by the emptiness that would not let him go, and the words on these cards meant nothing to him. He was sick of counting what were supposed to be his blessings.
Some of the cards had been written in languages he didn’t know, and he was glad to have been spared from reading them. The old man, though, was able to understand most of these cards, and as he passed the room on his rounds he had noticed that some had not been written in the spirit in which Pavarotti’s wife had intended. One, in Bulgarian, said Hairy spunk bubble; another, in Spanish, I am blessed with a big, hard cock; and another, in Welsh, Alun caught VD off his sister. The old man had left them there, not because he wished to support this subversion of the room’s intentions, that was a matter of indifference to him, but because taking them down would have been an unnecessary effort.
The voices moved to the lobby, and at last the goodbyes came to an end, and were followed by the sound of footsteps going upstairs. The light in his room went off, the footsteps went away, and then, at last, there was quiet. He got out from his hiding place, stood up and stretched his long legs, which had gone to sleep.
For a few days letters on the subject will be written to newspapers. Professionals in the field will offer level-headed perspectives on what had gone on, and there will be emotional and articulate outpourings from people who had lost sons or daughters, siblings or parents, and who were struggling to make sense of what had happened. They will all offer their own ideas about preventing such tragedies, and each one will be heartfelt, each one different, and each somehow the same.
Along with these, a small amount of letters, written by people with no professed connection to the subject matter, will declare the reported upturn of young men ending up this way to be a direct result of the decline of the French Foreign Legion. Historically, they will say, it had been there as a refuge for the desperate and the lost, giving structure to lives that would otherwise have collapsed, but modernisation had rendered it pointless, its decline having become fatal the moment it was announced that in the spirit of equal opportunities women must be allowed to enlist. They will acknowledge that this ruling had yet to be tested, and for the time being the Foreign Legion remained all male, but the damage had already been done. Such men would no longer be inclined to join up, knowing that at any moment a button could be pressed in Brussels and this edict would be implemented. A charabanc would arrive at the barracks, bringing the first batch of new recruits. The men would be bombarded with reminders of what they had been trying to escape as the garrison filled with pretty girls topping up their tans, tying each other’s hair in elaborate plaits, fanning themselves with fashion magazines and doodling love hearts on scented paper. A glimpse of dainty fingers, or a gentle chime of laughter tinkling through the desert heat would, in an instant, render their escape pointless.
Had these incandescent correspondents seen the boy in the museum they would have been obliged to admit that their theory did not apply to him. His limbs were skinny and flaccid, eel-like as he moved awkwardly around the room: women or no women, army life would never have been an option for him. He would have been laughed out of the recruiting office.
The boy’s heart raced. He walked around the table, then out into the corridor and through the other rooms, reaching out and running his fingers along the exhibits as he went: dioramas, dummies, latex models of Gadarene swine. He knew that touching exhibits in museums was forbidden, but he didn’t care. He found himself excited by the possibility that an alarm would go off, that his next step might trigger it. He waved his arms around, wondering if there was a sensor. Nothing happened. Everything was still again, and quiet. He knew there was somebody else in the building; he had heard them walk upstairs. They could appear at any moment, and the thought made his heart beat faster still. He kept on going, from room to room.
He pressed the light button on his watch, and was surprised by how much time had passed. He had been expecting everything to be over by now, and he supposed he should get on with it. But first he would walk around just a little more. He went into Room Seven, and there before him, its whiteness making it seem luminous in the darkness, was the skeleton they had all been talking about. He stared at it. Then he reached out with both hands, and gently held the skull, and looked into the holes where its eyes had been.
Every once in a while an independent foundation with deep pockets will fund a team of scientific researchers. To give credence to their findings, the scientists they choose will often be Swedish. The instant the money hits the Swedes’ bank accounts, instead of vanishing into their laboratory they head straight for the Mediterranean, where they spend their days sunbathing, snorkelling and racing jet skis up and down the coast, dark glasses wrapped around their tanned faces as their fair hair flutters behind them. In the evenings they go out dancing, or stay in and mix extravagant cocktails, throwing their heads back in laughter as they drink them in hot tubs on the roofs of their rented villas. At no point do they spend so much as a moment on research. After a year or two, when the money is running low, they contact the foundation and tell them their study is nearing its end. With heavy hearts they return to Stockholm and, having waited a few weeks for their tans to fade, they hire a conference room and don slightly ill-fitting business wear. The press is summoned, and the scientists sit in a row as their announcement is made.
‘We have discovered,’ their spokesperson will say, ‘over the course of our research, that, in the night-time, the average person will, in their life, eat . . .’ Here they leave a pause, building the suspense. ‘. . . one thousand, nine hundred and seventy-seven spiders.’ They would have reached this number by deciding, over calamari and lager the nig
ht before leaving for home, that an average of somewhere around one a fortnight sounded about right. With their findings presented, they bid the press farewell, and the item is sent on newswires around the world.
Because only the very brave or the very foolish would ever dare to challenge a Swedish scientist, it is reported as an incontrovertible fact. The sponsors of the independent foundation, usually a manufacturer of mouthwash, will be happy with the outcome of their scientific patronage, knowing that for some time to come people will be a little more inclined to take care with their oral hygiene. Having booked a global advertising campaign to coincide with the announcement, they sit back and watch their sales rise by a small but significant percentage.
Had these scientists done their research, and had they chosen to observe the old man, they would have noticed an unexpected pattern, one which, because they were scientists, they would have discounted as a coincidence. They would not have seen any connection between what was happening in the rooms below, and the spiders that crawled into the old man’s mouth.
The old man had noticed this pattern, and having seen an elbow protruding from behind the display board in Room Ten as he had made his way upstairs, he had an idea that a spider would be near.
When he woke in the night, though, it was not the spider’s touch that stirred him, but the slam of the fire exit door, and a whoop of what sounded like joy. The old man closed his eyes and began to go back to sleep. This happened from time to time: somebody would change their mind.
He was relieved that he would not have to wake up early for the second day in a row.
The spider scuttled back to where it had come from. The old man’s breathing slowed, and the rattle returned. In and out, in and out. It all sounded the same.
PART THREE
I
The first people to be identified will be those who had been reported missing, and whose trails had ended in the city with a final phone call, postmark or cash withdrawal. A photograph from the doctor’s collection will be matched with one already in the police files, and for a few days name after name will be released to the press. And then things will slow down.
Having looked forward to months of frenzied coverage, news editors will be disappointed as the story, thwarted on several fronts, stalls much sooner than they had hoped. Early on they will be disheartened by the balanced reactions of the families – instead of the emotional outbursts they had anticipated, their statements will be simple and quiet. Where they had hoped to find condemnation they will find resignation. What anger there is, at the doctor and at those who have gone, will be kept inside. Sometimes there will be an expression of relief at finally knowing what had become of a son or a daughter, a mother or a father, or a few words of self-reproach from somebody who feels they could have done more to help, and there will be sincere, though fruitless, attempts to convey the emptiness left by the knowledge that somebody who ought to have been there, and whose return had been longed for, has gone for ever. There will even be words of pity for the doctor, and sadness for him having turned out this way. In news terms, none of this will propel the story forwards.
The next difficulty for the editors will be its scale, or rather its lack of scale. The early front page cries of One Hundred Dead in House of Horrors? will turn out to have been optimistic. Finding that the shards of bone and scraps of clothing correspond with the evidence in the doctor’s extensive diaries and painstakingly filed photograph albums, the police will announce the official tally to be a little over a quarter of that. The initial glee at adding a new name to the list of notorious German cannibals will soon fade, leaving them unsure in which direction they should take the story. While it was clear to everybody that the old man and the doctor ought to have behaved differently, there was no reason to believe that in their final moments these people had been victims of anybody but themselves. The faces that look out of the pages of the newspapers had belonged to people who had made their own choices.
And then the stories behind the faces will begin to emerge, tangling things further still. Most will be heartbreaking: the young woman who had seemed so happy with her life and had given no sign of even the slightest turmoil in her mind; the man who had been unable to recover from the loss of his wife; the woman who had been suffering from an agonising and incurable illness. But then there will be the sex attacker, the fraudster, the serial bigamist and others who make it seem as if the old man and the doctor had provided a useful service to help rid the world of unsavoury characters.
As announcements from the investigation become fewer and farther between, the editors will be glad of the opportunity to relegate the story to the inside pages. With no serial killer to vilify and no trial to look forward to it will soon fade away, returning only occasionally, in ever-decreasing column inches, whenever a batch of evidence slots together and a new identification is announced.
Months into the investigation such an item will appear. Most people will pay it very little attention, but around the world, in cities where the streets are lined with rails and cables, from Changchun to Helsinki, from Sofia to San Francisco, a thousand lonely boys will be unable to look away. They will read the words over and over again, and stare at the accompanying picture until it is locked in their memory.
She is slightly out of focus, as if her image had been cropped from the back row of a group photograph, and her dark eyes are looking away to the side. Her hair, brown and straight, falls a little past her shoulders, and her lips are parted, revealing slightly crooked teeth. They had never been to her city, but even so the thousand boys feel they have seen her before, at night in an almost-empty tramcar, and as they stare at the photograph it is as if they can hear the soft whirr and clunk of wheels on rails, and the glide of a pole against an overhead power line.
In every language in which it is reported the article will be just a few sentences long, a repetition or slight reworking of the information released by the police. Her name had been Élodie Laroche, she had lived in Lyon, and she was thought to have been nineteen or twenty years old at the time of her disappearance. Her childhood had seen her drift from one foster home to the next, and in her mid teens she had left school without qualifications, after which it was thought that she had started living with men, moving from job to job and from one short relationship to the next.
She had not been reported missing, and had it not been for a dogged landlord’s pursuit of a missed rent payment the connection might never have been made. The police had released this information and the photograph, the only recent one they could find, in the hope that they would be able to track down a relative, somebody to whom they could pass on what little of hers they had recovered – a scarf, a copper bracelet and not quite enough bone fragments to fill a shoebox.
The thousand boys cannot understand why nobody had wanted her. They close their eyes, and in their minds they have conversations with her lovers, these Jean-Pierres and Fabrices, Azizes and Jean-Lucs, who recall her fondly enough, saying things like, She was slim, and I like that, but when asked why they had let her go, they shrug. She was a bit strange, I suppose. A bit quiet.
Did you love her? the boys ask.
The men almost laugh, and shake their heads. No, they say, it was only ever a casual thing.
The boys picture the final scenes of these brief affairs: the man telling Élodie that he needs some time alone, and Élodie silently packing her belongings into a single case and walking through the streets, getting on the first tram she sees and riding up and down the line, wondering what she will do this time, where she will go. It gets so late that the tram stops running, and she has no choice but to get off. Once again she finds herself unpacking her case in a small room near a terminus, and finding a job in a café or a cheap hotel, where she will meet somebody who, for a while, will let her into his life.
The thousand boys are overcome by an urge to track these men down and put them in headlocks until they explain why they had not taken better care of her, but as they rise to their
feet they realise that these Jean-Pierres and Fabrices, Azizes and Jean-Lucs are not to blame: the fault lies instead with boys just like them, boys who would have sat across from her in almost-empty tramcars late at night. Mute and inept, they would have listed reason after reason why they couldn’t approach her:
She probably has a boyfriend.
I don’t think that spot has quite gone away.
I shouldn’t have eaten onions earlier.
My hair looks fluffy today.
She wouldn’t like me anyway.
As they carried on adding items to this list they would reach their stop and go away, and they would never see her again. They had let her drift into the arms and beds of men too stupid to realise what they had.
The thousand boys close their eyes again, and other details from her life appear before them – the unknown father, the alcoholic mother, the siblings she had never met, the disappointment in the eyes of the foster parents as they wished they hadn’t been assigned such a withdrawn child, and the girls who had made her every schoolday a misery. They will see how easily somebody just like them could have reached out to her, and made things better, but they had let the opportunity pass. They feel the weight of responsibility, but at the same time they feel something they had never felt before. They feel ready.
They put the newspaper away and return to their lives, knowing it won’t be long before they fall in love with a sad-eyed girl in a tramcar, and that this time they will not just sit there making excuses to themselves. The next day they see her, and when she looks up and their eyes meet, they smile.
Instead of returning this smile, the girl turns her head in a way that makes it clear the attention had not been welcome. They wait for the familiar burn of humiliation, but it doesn’t come. Instead they realise their judgement had been clouded by impatience; the girl’s sadness had been nowhere near as deep as Élodie’s, and was probably no more than the mild and transient melancholy that follows a dull day at work. They wait for the next pair of unhappy eyes, and if necessary the next, and sooner or later it happens.
