The Discourtesy of Death

by William Brodrick

  ‘And do you know something else? My uncle – actually he’s not my uncle, he’s my great uncle – he always says it’s magnificent. Marvellous. Awe-inspiring. And it isn’t. What do you think?’

  Anselm said it was rather dry.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Timothy, precisely. ‘It’s obvious. But my uncle can’t say it. Even though it is true, he can’t bring himself to tell my aunt that this thing she’s been bringing out of the oven for forty years is awful. And that he hates it. He’s made it something kind to say the opposite. Which is a bit odd, wouldn’t you say?’

  Anselm said he would. The boy was on the edge of his seat, his crumpled jeans with washed-out white patches on the knees. His white trainers were new, with the laces left untied and shoved down the insides, between the shoe and the sock. The sleeves of his brown woollen jumper had been pushed up to the elbows.

  ‘He doesn’t speak to his brother,’ said Timothy, clipping the words. ‘But my aunt speaks to his wife. Yet, they never speak together, all four of them. That’s weird, too.’

  Anselm agreed.

  ‘My grandparents don’t speak much to my father. And neither do my great aunt and great uncle. And from what I’ve heard, they didn’t talk much to my mother, either. So this is my family: my dad is sitting in a chair, sort of, and no one talks to him. And the people who aren’t talking to him aren’t talking to each other, except for my aunt and my grandma who only speak on the phone. Which is very weird.’

  Anselm nodded. And you have done your best to stop things getting worse. You’ve accepted a dreadful burden so as to keep your family from falling even further apart.

  ‘But the weirdest part of all this, is that they’re all talking to me.’ He started eating his great aunt’s cake hungrily. ‘Or they try to, but … the thing is … they don’t tell me the truth. It’s as though they thought it might bite them. Or me, I suppose. You see, my uncle Nigel – and I really like him – he seems to think he’s doing Aunt Helen a favour. As if her life was worth living because he says her cake is divine. Worse, I suppose … she thinks her life’s important because of the cake. Why not tell her it’s really bad? Why not say it’s dried out again because she’s always doing two things at once? Why not throw it in the bin and kick the oven? If my uncle did that just for once in his life instead of patting her on the head … well, maybe Aunt Helen would get a life. Get one for herself, not him. Do you know she’s got a degree in botany? And all she’s ever done is make herbal tea for my mother. She knows everything about plants, what you can eat and what you can’t. In the Middle Ages she’d have been a witch.’

  Anselm ate some of Helen’s cake. It was dry, lacking heart. He kept his eyes on Timothy who wasn’t expecting or wanting Anselm’s contribution … not just yet. This very clever boy was sick of listening. He wanted to be heard. But Anselm’s skin tingled with apprehension. He felt with uncomfortable certainty that Timothy was testing him. Playing with him, even. He was going somewhere with this voluntary narrative of family dysfunction. He was angry and curiously out of control. Seeming to enjoy himself while being unhappy. Anselm had seen this many times before, but in hardened criminals and usually the violent: they’d had too much to talk about. Too much to say. They’d been buried in unmanaged feeling. But he’d never seen it in a boy. But, then again, he’d never met a child who’d witnessed a murder.

  ‘Why doesn’t my grandfather tell his brother what went wrong in his life?’ asked the boy.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why doesn’t my grandfather try and sort things out with my father?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why doesn’t my grandmother give him a chance?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Anselm brought the angry assault to a close. ‘I really don’t know.’

  Timothy finished his cake, put the plate on the table and reached for his mug of tea. He slouched, involuntarily, looking at Anselm with that back of the classroom detachment. One of the bright lads who’d begun to see through everything around them and were giving cynicism a go. Only there was something advanced about this fourteen-year-old. He wasn’t acting to see what things felt like … he was already there, and he didn’t like what his eyes were telling him. He didn’t like the world very much or the people in it. They were all rather disappointing. Monks included. Even the one lost in the fog and claiming not to know.

  ‘I thought you’d be different,’ said Timothy, one foot pressing up and down, as if he were smashing a bass drum. ‘Just a little bit, but still different. And you’re not. There’s a lot of problems in my family and you know why.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  In truth, Anselm was being evasive. He knew about the shadow from Northern Ireland. He knew about Peter Henderson’s impact on the Goodwins. He knew about the suspicions harboured in this very house. But it wasn’t his place to bring these elements into the open … at least not yet.

  Timothy put a finger in his mouth to pick loose a hardened current or cherry. As if giving Anselm a second chance, he said:

  ‘Okay, why did my dad throw a brick at the boy in Manchester?’

  He looked at Anselm from suddenly tortured eyes – the anguish appearing as swiftly and dramatically as the sunlit smile. The vast distance between the two emotions, suffering and jubilation, had been crossed with the snap of a finger and thumb. The boy needed help. He’d just stepped over a vast, yawning hole of complex, knotted feeling as if it wasn’t there. All he had were these two intense reactions, one light, one dark. If he was to be balanced and healthy, he needed the immense grading in between. Otherwise he’d love without depth and hate without remission. He’d hurt himself and others, only he wouldn’t feel much … except exhilaration and despair. He’d seek simpler feelings through excess alcohol and senseless sex, telling himself that he was living life to the full; that this was rock ’n’ roll. He’d end up with cuts to his face – they always did. He’d end up crying without knowing why. Which – given his intelligence – he’d turn into some kind of existential symptom because life was absurd and then he’d go the route of many people who want radical answers but don’t always want to study the primary sources: he’d say that God was dead and Nietzsche and Sartre had said it all.

  Could things get any worse? The last words would go to the French and the Germans.

  Seeing Timothy’s sheer … impoverishment, the confusion and the bile, Anselm was simultaneously convinced that the true story behind the killing of Jennifer Henderson had to be told. That Peter Henderson’s desperate attempt to protect his son from the truth was profoundly misinformed. Something had to be done … something had to be done.

  ‘I said, why did my dad throw that brick?’ repeated Timothy. ‘You’re a detective. You’ve been asking lots of questions. You must have found something out by now.’

  After a moment Anselm said, ‘I’m sorry, Timothy, I wasn’t honest before. I do know why there are problems between your father and grandparents, and why there are problems between your grandparents and your aunt and uncle. But I don’t know for sure. I didn’t answer your questions because it’s not always appropriate to be brutally honest with people you’ve only known for ten minutes and when their aunt and uncle are due back in seconds. Sometimes telling the truth – and I can see that is what you like, want and admire – requires time. Planning. Cooperation from all the people involved. Your questions are too deep and important to be answered off the cuff – even honestly. I think you appreciate that, but I can see you’re sick of being messed around. In the present instance, however, I also think you know the answers to your own questions. You want to embarrass me, because you can’t embarrass them … because one of the strange things about being kept in the dark is that you get to like it after a while. It makes you powerful. Because you know far more than they could ever begin to guess. They feed you the party line and think they’ve got you on board whereas, in fact … you are watching them; knowi
ng what you know. And that is one good feeling among all the bad. Am I right?’

  Timothy seemed not to move. He was suspended between light and dark, happiness and misery and – Anselm sensed – doubt and certainty. Doubt about whether he should reply; certainty about what he’d say if he did. Finally, coming to his feet, he snatched the Sunday Times off the table. In almost the same action, he quickly rolled it up and then smacked it against an open palm, hovering between the coffee table and the chair as if he were trapped. There was no room to manoeuvre; he couldn’t pace back and forth; all he could do was shuffle on the spot.

  ‘These people who lie all the time,’ he blurted out. ‘They say he killed my mother. Not to me, of course, and probably not to each other. They’ve all got their reasons to blame him. So they say he’s a broken man. Did you know that?’

  Anselm made no admissions. He watched the boy’s erratic feet movements.

  ‘They tell me it’s grief but they think he feels guilty,’ said Timothy, whacking the Sunday Times against his hand. ‘Well, I know he’s unhappy and I know he’s got nothing to be guilty about.’

  Anselm looked at the white knuckles.

  ‘It’s why you’re here’ – Timothy slowed his arm motion as if the rolled newspaper were a piece of wood; he tapped his hand lightly, glaring at the Monk who’d Left it All for a Life of Crime – ‘it’s why you came to see my aunt and uncle. You’ve got a theory. Are you going to tell me what it is?’

  ‘No, Timothy, I am not,’ replied Anselm, very calmly. ‘Because I do not have a theory. I’ve had several and they’ve all turned out to be wrong.’ Imprudently, he added, ‘How about you? Do you have one?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m surprised.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, like I said, you don’t behave like someone who’s really in the dark or lost in the fog … you remind me of your father. You both know something you don’t want to talk about.’

  This was the moment of enquiry that should have been left to Nigel, but what could Anselm do? The Prior always said that the truth reveals itself in the concrete circumstances of our lives. You have to respond, as if to a voice. And this moment of opening mutual sincerity could not be slowed, postponed or avoided. It was happening. Timothy was sitting down. He’d thrown the newspaper on the floor. His voice, no longer splintering high and low with adolescence, became quiet and even.

  ‘They buy me books to make me laugh. They suggest I climb trees. Sky-dive. Would you believe that? Learn some tricks. They talk to me as if they were scared I might speak. And they’re right there, only they don’t know why they should be worried. They haven’t got a clue what I might say.’

  ‘Because they think you’re in the dark.’

  Timothy nodded, one arm massaging the muscle of the other, his nails leaving white scratch lines on his skin. ‘They tell me all these lies when I could tell them I know the truth. And I look at them all, one by one, and I keep thinking …’

  Anselm couldn’t help but frown slightly. Timothy was crouching forward, feet bobbing, hands rubbing his forearms.

  ‘Thinking about what, Timothy?’ asked Anselm, quietly.

  ‘About the night my mother died. I was there. I know it wasn’t cancer.’

  Anselm held his plate still as if a bird had landed on the rim.

  ‘I know she was killed,’ said Timothy.

  Anselm didn’t even nod.

  ‘It’s not what you think … it wasn’t one person, not really … it was a team thing.’

  A team. Anselm felt the blood slow in his veins.

  ‘Friends and family … you know, acting together.’

  Peter, Michael, Emma, Helen, Cooper, Ingleby? It simply wasn’t possible … unless this was some incredible attempt to share responsibility. To share the strain, equally. Had there been another, wider agreement … unknown to Jenny? Decided upon during the planning of her final party? They’d had a meeting; everyone had decided to bring something.

  ‘I know how it was done,’ said Timothy, seeing Anselm’s disbelief. ‘I was there …’

  37

  Michael took the call in his room at the Southcliff Guest House. He’d sat there waiting all day. Immobile, as if he’d been asleep; alert, as if he’d been waiting for Liam to knock on the door. At intervals he’d let his eyes scan the three photographs of Jenny: child, girl and woman. She was healthy in all of them. It was as though there’d been no fall. No illness. He was looking at the woman, the dancer, as he listened and spoke.

  ‘He’s back home,’ said Emma. ‘And he likes the book.’

  ‘Good. Did you make the fire?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s kerosene in the shed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He called Timothy?’

  ‘Told him everything’s going to change for the better. “For you and for me.” ’ Emma breathed so much tension into the receiver it almost burned Michael’s ear. ‘Bring Jenny with you.’

  ‘I will.’

  Michael put the phone down.

  It had been decided weeks back that Timothy wouldn’t go home immediately. That way his routine and schooling wouldn’t be disrupted and Peter would have time to settle down in Polstead. With Timothy away from home on the night of his father’s release, Michael was free to … do his stuff.

  So everything was now in place.

  After killing Peter, Michael would wrap the body in the tarpaulin, fold the edges over and fix them down with the stapler. He’d take the body to the Citroën using the wheelbarrow by the back door. He’d then set fire to the house with the kerosene … a wild act of vandalism, destroying all trace of Peter’s life and Jenny’s death. Nothing of their time together would remain. Within an hour, Michael would be on the lonely quay at Slaughden, hauling Peter onto Margot. After dumping him far out to sea, beyond the tug of the tide, Michael would drive to Harwich, cross to the Hoek as a Canadian, head north to Harlingen and come home as a Briton in a Volvo hatchback. He’d leave the gunman exiled on the continent, never to return to England. That whole other persona, the ruined FRU man who’d made the difficult decisions, would simply evaporate, like mist off a window. The police would come to Morning Light and find Peter’s second act of uncontrollable violence and self-destruction: the razing of his own home. But they wouldn’t find Peter. Peter, like the mist, will have simply disappeared, leaving behind words that now made sense: ‘Everything’s going to change for the better. For you and for me.’

  The room was completely silent.

  Michael found himself listening … listening to his own heartbeat.

  It pumped gently … soft-hard, soft-hard, soft-hard …

  How did I come to this? he thought, with a sudden last-minute gasp from his soul. And for one grisly moment, Michael thought he was going to hear a still, small voice. But he turned away, taking his mind to the last time he’d seen his daughter. She, too, had a voice … and it had been still and small …

  There was to be a party at Morning Light on Jenny’s birthday. It had been Peter’s idea. After a long, tense discussion, it had been decided that everyone was to bring something. So Michael made two lemon drizzle cakes: a small one for Jenny and a big one for everyone else. When Emma came home, they set off, arriving at Polstead just after Nigel and Helen.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Emma, lightly, pointing at a small paper bag in Helen’s hand.

  ‘Herb tea. My own. Jenny loves it.’

  Nobody else did. Her hands were trembling. Michael noticed that kind of thing.

  ‘And you?’ ventured Nigel, rocking on his heels, hands in his pockets.

  ‘Cake,’ said Michael, simply. ‘Lemon drizzle.’

  ‘Ah, that’s the business,’ enthused Nigel. ‘Lots of tang. But, if I’m honest, you can’t taste the sponge, can you?’

  He really had no idea. The distance between them was vast.

  ‘It’s the lemon that counts,’ replied Michael. ‘Jenny loves the lemon.’

  They all loo
ked at each other, frozen, except for Nigel, bobbing back and forth.

  ‘Well, let’s get going, then,’ sang Emma, smiling brightly. ‘We’re here for a party, aren’t we?’

  They all trooped inside, hale and hearty, greeting Peter woodenly, embracing Jenny warmly, and roughing up Timothy’s hair. Poor boy, he’d no idea either. Thankfully, Peter put on some music to fill the void.

  ‘Let me see her on my own for a moment,’ said Michael, with weak entreaty. ‘I’d just like to have a …’

  ‘You don’t have to explain yourself, darling,’ said Emma, bright and stiff. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

  Michael tiptoed into the sitting room. A wood fire rustled with contentment. The lights were low. He simply followed suit, coming quietly to the chair by the bed near the darkened window.

  ‘Happy birthday, darling,’ said Michael.

  Jenny was smiling, looking at her father with affection. A deep affection. The affection of travellers on the road.

  ‘I made this for you,’ he said, quietly.

  ‘Oh thanks, Dad.’

  ‘It’s the nearest I could get to a lemon drop.’

  She took the cake and bit it, wincing suddenly at the tang. ‘That’s what I call sharp.’

  Michael nodded. She loved the taste; always had done; ever since she was a child.

  ‘Don’t try and persuade me to go back to hospital,’ said Jenny in a forestalling voice. ‘I’ve had the last tests and now I’m home. I want to stay here, surrounded by what I know and those I love … I don’t want to be visited.’

  Michael nodded again, unhappily. Why wasn’t there a medicine? He’d pottered about the garden all afternoon handling plant food and fertiliser. Chemicals that kept plants alive. And he’d thought it awful: there’s nothing for Jenny.

  The fire murmured.

  ‘Dad,’ said Jenny, quietly, finishing the cake. ‘Will you call me Nimblefoot again?’

  ‘What?’ He reached for her hand, but Jenny didn’t need any of that understated support, those many gestures of understanding that had taken the place of words and tears. She almost seemed to push him away, but then took his hand, as if asserting herself.