by David Thorne
13
GABE INHERITED HIS house from his parents several years ago, both of them having died within months of each other of two different forms of cancer, any fight his father was putting up against his rotting lungs vanishing when his wife lost her battle. Gabe’s father was, like me, a lawyer; but after that bland comparison all similarities end. He was a gentle and principled man who took the train every morning into Temple where he was the co-founder of a small set of chambers dedicated to defending the civil and human rights of the underprivileged and oppressed. He worked hard but his weekends were sacrosanct, dedicated to Gabe and his two sisters and, as Gabe and I became friends, to me too. He never attempted to play a fatherly role with me, but he did set a quiet example, which had a profound influence. He was slight and unimposing, a man of books and reasoned conversation. I often wonder where Gabe got his steel and adventure from. He must have had one hell of a grandfather.
Since his parents’ death, Gabe has done little to the house and in the dining room the walls are still covered with a history of Gabe’s life; as a baby, school photos, an action shot of both of us in a county final, then another of us in tennis whites holding up a trophy, each with a hand on a handle. Then Gabe in his first uniform, more Army shots, a group photo of him and his platoon sitting nonchalantly on a tank. That must have been taken in Desert Storm, before he was posted to Afghanistan. Seeing myself in those early shots only makes me realise how little I know of Gabe’s life after he left for the Army; I do not feature in any of the photographs after he puts on his uniform.
Gabe eventually answered the door after I had rung three times and started to check out the windows, looking for easy ways in. I had disturbed him from his physiotherapy; he answered the door flushed and sweating and seemed embarrassed for me to see him in that state. I do not think he noticed the relief in my face, just seeing him alive. Now from where I have cloistered myself in the dining room I hear the physiotherapist leave. Why am I hiding from my best friend? A barrier seems to have invisibly and mysteriously appeared between us and I am not sure how to address it. But I do not wish to politely ignore it; not with Gabe.
He walks in, still in his workout clothes. The back of his grey T-shirt is dark with sweat. ‘Coffee?’
I follow his lurching walk into the kitchen, although I cannot help but still think of it as his mother’s kitchen where she would allow me to sit for hours rather than go home, whether Gabe was there or not. My throat briefly swells and aches at the thought of her busy kindness. Gabe flaps a sleeping cat from the top of the Aga, which stretches resentfully before ambling off. I sit down, take a breath, try to find a voice that sounds natural.
‘How’ve you been?’
‘Yeah, not bad,’ Gabe says, his back to me. Doesn’t give me anything more. Silence. I try again.
‘Spoke to George today. He said something about…’ This is no good; why dance around it? ‘And the other night, with the police. I’m just worried, you know. That you might be losing the plot.’
Gabe’s back stiffens and I wonder if he will go on the attack. Then he relaxes and laughs gently. He turns around and his pale eyes are amused. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Yeah, you could say that. You could say that.’
He sees that I am not laughing and something like compassion appears on his face. He hobbles over and sits down awkwardly opposite me at the kitchen table. I am pinned by his fathomless eyes. He picks up a salt cellar, looks at it, puts it down. ‘Dan,’ he says. ‘What did you think would happen? Did you think I’d tough it out and come out the other side stronger? I’m not fighting a disease here. I’m facing the fact that I’m going to be a cripple for ever.’ He shakes his head. ‘I’m not going to win, Dan, because I’ve already lost.’
Of course my instinct is to reassure, refute, find the positive. But I know that he is right; he is far wiser than me and I can do nothing but nod. ‘Can’t blame me for worrying. It’s just, this, it isn’t you.’
Gabe smiles. ‘Yes it is. It’s just not who I was.’
‘That’s…’
‘I was a captain. On my way to becoming a major. I was heading for a place on the world stage, if I played my cards right, ten, fifteen years I’d be a brigadier. It’s what I joined the Army for. Now, Dan, I’m irrelevant. I will never have influence again, never save another man’s life, never shoot an enemy. Never.’
‘I thought you were angry with me.’
‘Why would I be?’ Gabe struggles up, walks to a cupboard, reaches down coffee, filters. ‘Look, yeah, okay, I’m angry. You’re here, you want me to make it easier for you, to tell you I’ll be okay, set your fucking mind at ease.’ He puts water into the machine, switches it on. ‘But I can’t. Maybe I’ll kill myself… I don’t think I will. But sometimes it gets so hard that it’s a possibility. My life is awful and it isn’t going to get better because my leg, Dan, isn’t going to fucking grow back.’
I do not know if Gabe is suffering from mental illness; I suspect that he is, that he is in the grip of a depression so profound and encircling that he has assumed it is his permanent reality. But perhaps this is just what I am telling myself; his argument has a ring of rationality about it. The loss of his leg has ruined his life and I am not about to patronise him with empty words about how he can turn it into a strength, how he cannot let it beat him. As he says, he’s not engaged in a battle; he has already lost. It is typical of Gabe to want to cope with the aftermath alone, in his own way. This self-sufficiency is what made him officer material, what allowed him to lead a Cavalry company into action. There is nothing I can do to help him.
We sit and drink our coffee and I tell Gabe about Halliday. He laughs when I tell him what I said to Halliday in the bar, a delighted and honest chuckle that sounds like the Gabe I grew up with. He has always been amused by tales of my wayward aggression; I think he is the only person I have ever met who is, maybe because he has always known that I will never turn it on him, and perhaps also because he is a man who is comfortable with brutality. I know that he loved war.
I do not mention my mother, it is too soon; if my search for her is a dead end then I would prefer to deal with the disappointment alone. We are not so different, he and I.
I say goodbye, swallow back the ‘If there’s anything I can do…’ We arrange a game of tennis and I leave, knowing that, if I thought the conversation we’ve just had was difficult, it will seem like nothing compared to what is coming next.
It is early afternoon when I arrive at my father’s house and I am apprehensive that he might already be drunk. It is hard to connect with him at the best of times, but when he has been drinking he is as unpredictable as a pit bull. I ring the bell but there is no answer so I walk around the side and open the gate to the garden.
He is working on his flowerbeds, his back to me, wearing a white singlet and shorts, and as he squats down I can see the massive muscles in his calves before they are covered by his thighs. He is dead heading his roses and he has not noticed me. I am ready to confront him and have my words chosen and ready. But as I approach him he hears me and turns, and as so often with my father he sucker punches me before I can get my words away.
‘Fuck you doing here? Dontchoo work for a living? Here, go get that bag of fertiliser for me.’
He turns back to his roses and I walk to the house, pick up the sack and lift it on to my shoulder. My father has been told what to do by more successful and powerful men his entire life. The resentment he has felt he has always taken out on me, by treating me as if I am an indentured servant rather than a son. I dump the sack next to him and he grunts, doesn’t say anything. It is hot and I sit down, watch my father work.
‘I spoke to Vincent Halliday earlier,’ I say after a minute has passed, tossing the statement into the bright summer’s day like an unsuspected grenade. My father stops, rigid. That’s done it.
‘Halliday,’ he eventually says through a cough. ‘Oh yeah?’
‘You know him?’
‘Me and him, we, yeah.
Yeah I know him.’
You and him don’t live on the same planet, I think. You are as insignificant to him as a starling. I don’t say anything, see how long it will take until my father sacrifices his pride to his curiosity and asks me to tell him more. I hear the distant rhythmic beat of a train going over points, the sound carrying over the stunned silence of the hot day. I do not have long to wait.
‘So what’s he want with you?’
‘Just a bit of business. Client confidentiality, couldn’t tell you more if I wanted.’ I am aware that I am being childish, withholding information to goad a man for no other reason than I can. I stop. It is not what I came for. ‘Anyway, he said something to me, wanted to ask you about it.’
‘Yeah?’
This is it. I feel as apprehensive as a boy about to ask his first girl out on a date. ‘He mentioned, said, that I was like my mother.’
My father doesn’t reply, busies himself with a rosebush. After he is satisfied with his work, he says, back still turned, ‘He did, did he?’
‘So he knew her?’
‘Well, I guess he must’ve fucking done. Or why would he say it?’ An edge has entered my father’s voice, never a good sign.
‘Yeah, well, go on then,’ I say, meeting his impatience with my own. ‘How did he know her?’
At last my father lays down his secateurs, turns and looks at me. A vicious sneer disfigures his face. ‘Fuck knows. Probably one of his bits on the side. I ever tell you she was a slag?’
‘I want to know more about her.’
My father doesn’t answer, just regards me with hostility. He is breathing heavily. He is having difficulty controlling himself.
‘What did she look like?’
Still no answer. There is a spade stuck into the earth next to him and he takes it in his hands. He is still looking at me. I can see his flanks moving, in, out, his breathing laboured from the emotions he is dealing with.
I can feel myself losing control. I cannot feel my legs. ‘What was she like? Funny? Pretty? What fucking colour was her hair?’
My father’s knuckles whiten underneath his tan. I know that things have now gone too far, that my questions and his silence must now lead to something, that we have reached a point of no return. I am throwing questions at him like I’m throwing stones at an angry bull.
‘Is she even alive?’
My father lifts the spade and hurls it at me, blade first like a two-handed javelin. I step aside and it misses me but there is no doubt that he meant to hit me with it, inflict serious damage. I feel the buzzing in my ears and experience the clouded vision that can overwhelm my reason and cause me to act with unthinking rage. He is an old man, I say to myself, he is a sick old man. I know that one more provocation will tip me over the edge into the freefall of violence; I have never before raised a hand against my father but all of a sudden the inevitability of this confrontation hits me. There is too much latent resentment, too much unspoken anger between us. It must come out.
‘I wanted to have you aborted,’ my father says. ‘Stupid bitch wouldn’t let me.’
He is an old man but he is still strong and as I step towards him he throws a punch that I try to avoid and it hits me on the shoulder, nearly turning me. I can feel the heft of his arm behind it; he is immensely solid. I grab his wrist and with all my strength I pull him towards me. He resists but I am too strong and, as I pull him off balance, I step past him and pull his arm with me, turn it up behind his back, wrapping my other arm around his throat and pulling his whole body close to mine so that my head is over his shoulder and my mouth is at his ear. I can smell his sweat and feel his breathing and it occurs to me that this is the most physically intimate I have ever been with him. I can feel his bulk and it surprises me that at his age he can still be so powerful. I want to say something irredeemably hurtful, obscene, whisper it gently so that he feels violated and it turns in his mind for months as he seeks sleep. Yet at the same time I realise that, powerful as he is, he is no longer a match for me and that I must let him go and walk away. I am not, like he is, a bully.
‘I will find out,’ I say. I take my hand from around his neck, let go of his wrist and walk away. My back feels as if it is covered with a faint electrical charge and I have to use all of my will not to turn around, see if my father is coming at me. I keep my eyes on the grass beneath me and have to admire its condition; my father has never let a ban on using hosepipes get in the way of a beautiful lawn. As I open the gate, I hesitate.
‘Cunt,’ says my father far behind me.
14
THAT NIGHT, THE police reconstructed the disappearance of Rosie O’Shaughnessy, to show her last movements on local television. A young woman, little more than a girl, played the part of Rosie and she was filmed drinking with friends in a local bar before receiving a text from her boyfriend and quickly drinking up and saying goodbye. From there she left the bar and walked along a busy street, crossed over, walked into a McDonald’s where her boyfriend was waiting. She was not in McDonald’s long before she left, followed by her boyfriend. He pulled her by the arm, tried to stop her, but she shook him off, yelled at him. She headed off up a side road, her boyfriend following her and shouting insults. That was the last time Rosie was seen alive by any witness, apart from her killer. She entered a park and walked into darkness.
The reconstruction attracted a crowd of bystanders, the same people who rush to throw flowers at the spot where someone they do not know has died. Rosie’s boyfriend had agreed to play himself in the reconstruction, a fact that I would imagine counted in his favour. However, one member of the public clearly did not share my view. As the filming ended, he ran at the boyfriend, assaulting him; the police were on the scene already but it took them several seconds to understand what was happening and come to the boyfriend’s aid, by which point he had been stabbed in the back seven times with a kitchen knife. The man who assaulted him was wrestled to the ground, handcuffed and led away through the watching crowd to the police car; along the way, people patted him on the back, told him, ‘Well done, mate, did the right thing, spot on.’ As the police car pulled away, several people applauded.
While the assailant was being charged with attempted murder and Rosie’s boyfriend was fighting for his life in hospital, I was trying to get to sleep, my mind drowsily flitting between two states: imagining what my mother might be like, and worrying about what might have happened to her. My father’s reaction had been extreme even by his standards; it felt as if there had been fear behind his aggression. But why? What was he afraid of, or trying to hide? No matter how many times I told myself that I was being overly dramatic, I could not help but think that perhaps my mother did not leave us; perhaps, like Rosie, she disappeared into a blackness she would never leave. Was my father capable of that, of murder? I did not have to consider for long; he was an angry and embittered man and I had no doubt that he hated women. With thoughts like these, I gradually drifted off; it was a warm night and I had left the window open in the hope of a breeze.
*
My dreams were punctuated by strange noises and filled with convoluted tales of being hunted by faceless enemies, the dreams of a man with a fever. I woke up around three and saw a black shape next to my bed, felt breath on my face. Not sure whether I was still dreaming, I did not feel any fear, instead simply grunted a disorientated ‘Yes?’ The shape retreated, turned and left and the sound of footsteps down my stairs brought me back to sudden clarity and I swung out of bed and on to my landing, finding a switch and throwing the light on to I think two people who were leaving through my front door. I followed and ran down the stairs through the open door into the night and saw two, maybe three figures running down the street. I ran out after them but as they turned the corner I knew that in bare feet I had no chance of catching them. As I realised this, I also realised that I was yelling enraged threats and vulgarities at their departing backs, sounding like an inebriated man in a pub brandishing a pool cue. Across the street a light came on
, a window opened; it was Ronald, a diffident man with three children and a pushy wife, who works in the City for, I believe, a major insurance firm. He peered out, skinny arms braced on the windowsill; he did not have his glasses and I imagined he had been ordered out of bed by his wife, outraged that scenes like this had the temerity to play out in her street.
‘Is everything okay?’ he half spoke, half hissed, nervously.
‘Go to bed, Ronald,’ I said, dismissing him. I was suddenly aware that I was in the middle of my street wearing only boxer shorts. The sight must have been frightening for anyone who did not know me, maybe frightening for anybody who did. With a suit on I can pass for a civilised man; half-naked I am a different proposition. But with Ronald it does not matter much, I lost his family’s good opinion long ago. Last summer, I was leaving my house when a man drove past my car, clipping the wing mirror and breaking it. He paused, considered, then drove on so I ran out and stood in front of his car, then walked to his door, pulled him out through the open window and pinned him with one hand to his bonnet as I went through his wallet with the other, pulling out notes. Ronald’s wife witnessed this and since then every time she has seen me she has shepherded her children close to her with one arm and quickened her walk. If I am honest, I can’t really blame her.
I got back in my house exhilarated at having caught men in my own home and at the thought that I could have inflicted damage on them, frustrated that they got away and intrigued by what they wanted. I put on a dressing gown and sat and watched rolling news for hours, making irrational connections between the different stories to reinforce my view that the world is essentially a dangerous and inhuman place with little to redeem it. Around six o’clock, I dozed off and woke up at nine, hot from the blazing sunlight pouring through my living-room window on to the sofa where I lay. I had sweated on to the leather and in my dressing gown must have looked like a wrestler fallen on hard times, sleeping off the previous evening’s shameful defeat on a borrowed couch. Not the finest night of my life.
