The Museum of Doubt

by James Meek

  How should I be calm?

  You see me coming into the bakery every morning, don’t you?

  That’s what they do! They keep telling you! It could be someone you know!

  Wait, I said. I screened my lap with the menu, slid the knife out and laid it on the table.

  D’you have to go back right now? I said.

  No. What is it you do?

  I’m a seal counter. I count seals.

  The girl picked a splinter of once-frozen cheese off the mini-pizza and nipped it with her teeth. Her nails were pink. So how many are there? she said.

  Enough.

  How many seals is enough?

  I don’t know. How many people is enough?

  Four, said the girl seriously, looking at me and twiddling another bit of cheese between her pink nails. A strand of hair swung in and hooked her lips. She flicked it back behind her ear and put the splinter on her tongue.

  A waitress came. I ordered a steak and a pot of tea.

  There’s one! said the girl, pointing over my shoulder. I looked round. What? I said.

  You missed it, said the girl. There was a seal coming out the charity shop with a drip-dry brown nylon top. She grinned and looked pleased with herself.

  The waitress came back and tried to lay down a steak knife at my place. I lifted Helmet’s blade. It’s OK, I’ve got one, I said. The waitress opened her mouth, closed it and walked away.

  The girl was angry with me for not being good about her joke. She rested her chin on her hand and looked out the window. I asked her what her name was. She didn’t pay any attention.

  Listen, I said. I have this friend. He wears a fox fur hat in bed and taught his dog to fetch the newspaper for him. He’s been indoors for too long. He says he’s going to kill a man tonight. His landlord. It was going to be with this knife. But there are other knives in the house. His landlord’s a fisherman, and they always have a lot of knives about the place. Now I’m wondering how we became friends. I can’t remember how it was an hour ago, before he told me about what he was going to do, whether I thought better of him, or if I always knew he was going to show me one day he didn’t care about other human beings. I can’t remember.

  It’s Liz, said the girl.

  Wait.

  You haven’t told me yours.

  Wait. Suppose your friend is about to kill someone. What do you do? This is what I’m most afraid of, that I go to see him later and there’s no fisherman. No blood, no weapon, no clothes, no possessions. And I say to Helmet: what happened to the fisherman? And he says what fisherman? You’re remembering something that you dreamed as if it really happened. And I say: but Helmet, I remember. And he says: a memory of a man doesn’t make the man exist. D’you see what I’m saying?

  He sounds like a right wee bastard, this Helmet.

  He’s not wee.

  I know the dog. I’ve seen it coming out of the newsagent with two copies of the Courier.

  Two, I said.

  I thought it was weird there were two. I followed it once and I saw it going into the house with both papers.

  Christ, I always thought the fisherman hated the dog, I said. The trouble with Helmet is he’s a psychopath, but he’s too thick to be good at it.

  I got up. Liz raised her head and her hair fell back, and she looked at me and blinked. Sometimes it’s only when the looker blinks you realise how hard they’re looking at you and how deep back the heart of the look lies. And that’s in Visocchi’s, over a half-eaten mini-pizza, a stainless steel teapot and a ten-inch kitchen knife. The seals were thickening. I took out five pounds and left it on the table.

  I have to go, I said. That’s for the steak. You have it.

  Are you going to count seals? said Liz.

  Later, I said. I go across to Tentsmuir. But there’s others out on the sandbanks, closer to Monifieth. I was going to walk out there this evening. You could come.

  OK, she said.

  I made for Helmet’s place. I left the knife on the table where I’d put it. I was trying to think how much I cared about Helmet. Not much. Hardly more than the money he’d cost me that day. Maybe I’d cared more before lunch. Liz was millions of seals, billions, just the way her hair bobbed against her bare neck, and those tiny golden shaved hairs, on the curve at the back.

  At the cottage there was no answer when I knocked. The door wasn’t locked. I went in. The house stank of smoked bacon. The dog ran up and started doing figures of eight round my ankles. I went through to the back green and saw the fisherman sitting on a chair outside his smoking shed, reading the Courier. He had reading glasses like Helmet’s. Smoke wisped out from the edges of the shed door, held shut with a wooden twist latch. I stood in front of the fisherman for a while. He took no notice. A gull screamed on the glide over the shore, as if in ecstasy, or on Ecstasy, after all, they must get dropped in the gutter sometimes. The smell was rich.

  Where’s Helmet? I said.

  The fisherman said nothing. He didn’t look up. Only his eyes moved, scanning text.

  Where’s Helmet? Where’s Ian?

  Eh? said the fisherman.

  I was expected to remember the tosser’s surname as well. Ian Colwell. Your tenant. I’m looking for him.

  No tenant here, said the fisherman. I live on my own. Me and the dog.

  You had a tenant. I was here this morning. I borrowed a knife from you.

  I don’t remember. Have you got it with you?

  No. Where’s Helmet?

  Are you wanting to do business, son, ’cause I’m busy.

  I heard you were branching out from smoked fish into smoked pig. I was thinking of making an order. D’you mind if I look in the shed?

  I’m not taking orders, said the fisherman, lifting his eyes from the paper for the first time. It’s all still at the experimental stage. I’m getting a grant from Brussels. I need to expand. There’s not enough room here. He took off his glasses and tapped the inside pages of the paper. It’s a communist paper, the Courier, he said. They’re against private enterprise. They’ve been running a campaign against me. They’re hand in glove with the council, you see, against the business. If they can’t get you on planning permission, they get you on the fucking Clean Air Act.

  I’m not saying I want to look in the shed, I said.

  I’m not saying I’m going to let you, son.

  Maybe someone walked in there by mistake and got locked in.

  The fisherman folded the paper and put it down on the flagstones beside his chair. He took a tin out of his shirt pocket and started rolling a cigarette. He really did like smoke.

  You can see the latch is on the outside, he said. If anyone’s in there, it means I locked them in, right? D’you think like there might be a market for smoked folk? He laughed and lit the cigarette. With yellow skin like haddock! He laughed. See that commie rag? They ran a death notice of me this morning. It’s part of the campaign against me. I wasn’t too chuffed when I saw the death but then I thought hang about, if they all think I’m dead and I’m alive, there’s bound to be some poor bugger who’s died and nobody knows.

  Why?

  You think they can put a death notice in the paper and there’s no death? I signed up once on a deep sea trawler, split-new, superb, radar, sonar, stabilisers, it was like a space shuttle. A million and a half it cost. There were a dozen partners and it was named after the skipper’s daughter. The Tamsin L. We were set for the first trip and the girl goes and gets herself kidnapped in Kashmir. Kashmir, aye. She was hiking there and they took her, the rebels. And nothing was heard for six or eight months. And we went to sea all the same. And the skipper too. We had two good trips. Listening to the radio, keeping in touch, but thousands of miles from shore nonetheless. I was on a fixed rate, the partners were on a percentage. I was doing all right and they were making an absolute mint. So we were back on shore and the news came in that the girl had been killed. They’d found her body with some others in the mountains with a message saying why they’d done it.<
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  Why?

  I can’t remember, said the fisherman, shaking his head and waving his hand. They wanted to be free.

  Free from what?

  Free from having to kill people. They wanted the place to themselves. Anyway so the skipper had to fly out there, poor bastard, and identify the body. He was all set to go and he went to his partners and said look you’re due to sail the morn, go anyway, go by yourselves, this is hard enough on me, why should you lose out. And they didn’t say anything, they looked away, looked at the ground, they couldn’t look him in the eye. They refused to sail. Eventually he realised it was the name: they’d never set foot in the boat as long as it was called the Tamsin L. So he said OK, we’ll recommission her, she’ll be another boat. But not till I get back. Till then you can just sit on shore and drink your savings. And he flew off to Kashmir.

  Only when he got there, who should he see waiting at the airport to meet him but the fucking lassie, his daughter! The local polis had screwed up and it wasn’t her who’d been killed, they hadn’t killed anyone, I can’t mind now if she was ever even kidnapped or if she maybe just hiked around the Himalayas with them for a few months. So it was a big happy ending and they rode off on the 747 back to bonnie Scotland, five pages in the Daily Record, TV interviews and everything. And when the partying and the drinking’s all done the skipper rounds up the crew and says right lads, we’ve got some ground to make up here. And it’s the same routine again with the eyes, you know, they can’t look him in the face. They still won’t go. And he tries to tell them she wasn’t killed, no-one died, it was a mistake, no need to change the name, everything was back to the way it was before, like they’d dreamed it all. It was no good. None of them could explain it, or maybe they could’ve, but nobody tried, they knew they couldn’t go on the boat any more. He couldn’t persuade them. There’d never even been a funeral, but as far as they were concerned they’d lived through the death of Tamsin L, and that was it.

  Is it true? I said. The fisherman shrugged and went back to his paper. I walked to the shed and unlatched the door. The hot salty smoke smothered me and I took a few paces back, intoxicated and coughing, eyes stinging. When it cleared I saw the dark space empty except for half a dozen rashers of supermarket streaky bacon pegged to the racks.

  I turned and walked back into the house. Brynie didn’t try to stop me. I opened the door to Helmet’s room. Helmet wasn’t there. The bed was made and the records were gone and without them there was no sign Helmet had ever been there. I looked out the window at the fisherman. He was sitting where I’d left him, reading, though he’d closed the door of the smoking shed. I left the house and went home.

  I rang Helmet’s number a couple of times in the afternoon and hung up without saying anything when the fisherman answered. I couldn’t sit down or eat. I made a pot of tea and watched it get cold. I stood at windows with my palms on the glass, breathing on it, drawing crosses, hearts and smiley faces with the tip of my finger. I watched Gray Street through the binoculars, not knowing if I was looking for Helmet or Liz. I couldn’t remember when I’d last seen Helmet in the open air. The pedestrians looked anxious and placid until two of them would start laughing for no clear reason. The sun was on its way down. I should have done something about Helmet. It was making me feel bad that I hadn’t. It was only so bad as to be strong spice for the feeling good about meeting Liz later. And the planet’d spin like a tennis ball and get kicked off the wall of sleep four or five times and lose its energy and which of them’d be first to fade? I didn’t know. But the thought of not breakfasting with the fur hat worried me less than the thought of not having a reason to go to the baker’s in the morning.

  I went down the road at six with the binoculars round my neck and a seal sheet in my pocket and saw Liz in a print dress sitting on the bench near the lifeboat shed, looking out across the river. The sky was still light from the afterglow of the sun but pricked with a blinding white Venus it looked a darker blue than it really was. Liz looked up and smiled and turned back to the river. I sat down next to her. Her hands were on her lap and she was playing with her fingers.

  It’s too dark to count seals, she said.

  I know, I said. D’you not want to go for a walk?

  No, it’s OK, she said. I thought maybe you had special equipment for seeing in the dark.

  I don’t. Just these, I said, holding out the binoculars. She took them and focused on Tayport. She watched the cars scudding along the coast road for a bit. Then she stood up and tried to look at the dark light-speckled humps of Dundee upriver.

  The lights keep skidding, she said. It’s hard to keep still.

  Here, put them on my shoulder, I said. She came round behind where I was sitting on the bench and put the binoculars on my shoulder, leaning her body against my back.

  There’s a plane landing at the airstrip, she said. I could feel her breasts press into my back and her heart beating as she tracked the plane in. She moved away and handed the binoculars back.

  We began walking along the top of the sea wall. It was easier than I expected to ignore what was coming in on the tide as long as she hadn’t noticed it. She said there’d been something on TV about the seals: too many old ones, not enough pups being born, they couldn’t understand it. I told her how I made up the results.

  Is that not really bad? she said.

  If they knew the truth, it’d be worse. The real seals are having millions of kids, and most of them don’t survive to be old, and the old tough ones get to be that way because they survived and know how to beat the young ones back until their teeth fall out and they’re too weak to fight and feed themselves any more and they go away and die. I’ve been counting people instead of seals and it’s the other way round. Too many old ones and not enough pups. And the pups start to think they’re the tough ones. Time runs backwards and the young ones try to teach the old ones, try to share their wisdom, and if they don’t listen, or they get too cocky, or they get in their way, they go out and fight. The scientists are looking at my figures and they can’t believe the young seals are so special and the old ones are so common. They should start counting their own.

  What are those? said Liz, stopping and putting her hand on my shoulder. She’d noticed. She pointed at the flat waves lapping the stones, pushing a zig-zag graph of sodden album covers up the beach.

  I put my hand on top of her hand. It was cool and soft. I love you, I said. She turned round to look at me.

  What? she said.

  I leaned forward and kissed her and found her mouth slightly open. Hers was the tongue to enter, buzz on mine and slip out. We separated. I heard the sound of marine engines on the river, cars and the hiss of the city as if my ears had just been unblocked. She looked at me like a nurse who’d had to jab a bucketfull of adrenalin into a cardiac arrest case and was interested to see what was going to happen next.

  You’re going too fast for me, she said.

  Yeah?

  That only happened because of me getting interested in those LPs being washed up on the beach, didn’t it?

  No, I said. It was because of that, but it was also bringing forward something I was going to do anyway.

  Fuck you, said Liz. I’ll go away and come back later, would that be more convenient?

  No, but don’t let’s talk about those albums. I did want to change the subject but would I have thought of saying I love you if I didn’t? It would have taken longer otherwise. Did I not sound as if I meant it?

  Liz began moving on and I walked beside her. She didn’t look at me to begin with. She said: Maybe you sounded like a man who finds it easier to change the names of things than do something about them. Like you’re afraid someone you know’s been murdered, and because there happens to be a girl next to you, the easiest thing is to cross out I fear it and write in I love you. But it’s fear all the same, not love.

  It’s not like that, I said, and went quiet, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, because she was almost right.
But we were walking on, leaving the records behind. We passed the harbour and approached the floodlit castle. It was a clear night. It would have been good to have lain with Liz on the beach, watching the stars and all the cosmic furniture. The floodlights and the streetlights were too bright. Through the fog of lights only the very brightest planets stood out. Years back the energy makers had gone on strike and there’d been power cuts across the district. We’d been grateful those nights, when we’d hung our heads back with our mouths open and tried to cover the whole speckled glory with our narrow eyes, and the powdered field behind the constellations had seemed to drift and not drift, move and not move. Then the lights of the ground came on again. The energy makers had dared to strike then. They didn’t know Thatcher was coming. I was as angry with them for a moment as with Helmet for not accepting that she’d ever been. It was easy enough to confuse the past with the future. I did it all the time. Liz was right. My mind was as weak as Helmet’s, it was filled with storms that had no names or directions, colours that could never be remembered, events with faces and dialogue that shifted with mood and age.

  Is that a seal down there? said Liz. We were on the beach, walking on the dry sand firthward of the dunes, the tide half-out. She pointed to a blubbery tube rolling from side to side in the surf. We stopped.

  I don’t know, I said.

  I’m going to look, she said.

  Don’t.

  You said you came out to count seals.

  I told you about that.

  You could get one real one at least.

  What if it isn’t a seal?

  Liz frowned and looked down at the sand. We go to the police, she said.

  I squatted down like a bird and watched Liz step away alone through the ragged graph of jetsam onto the smooth, wet, yielding sand of the recoiling waters. The first horn of a crescent moon had risen over Tentsmuir, sheening the lower beach, and Liz’s feet sank neat black inches into the sand, haloed with squeezed dry grains like charlatan snaps of ectoplasm. She reached the body, bent down, skipped away to avoid an incoming wave, pushed her hair back, turned to me, pointed at the carcass and called: ‘One!’