The Leto Bundle

by Marina Warner

  When Kim tried to block the man’s path and pull Simi out of his grip, the man pushed him aside with a blow to his shoulder. So Kim ran instead to the gates and bolted them, and was standing in between them, ready to bar the man’s way, whether he made for the Boys’ or the Girls’ as his exit.

  ‘Let go of that child immediately.’ Kate Daiges, small and ferocious in authority, confronted Simi’s abductor. ‘Or I’ll call the police.’

  ‘He’s coming home with me, and he knows what for.’ The man’s eyes were funny, said the head afterwards, blank with dot pupils, and when his cap fell off, which happened later, during the struggle with Kim, his head had been shaved in a checked pattern that made him look mangy. Sally was behind Kate Daiges, screaming.

  Kate Daiges squared up to him. ‘You’re not taking Simi anywhere not until you’ve told me what you think you’re doing. This is a primary school, and until you explain who you are and give me an account of your business here, and your relation to this child, I consider you are trespassing.’ She was very controlled, though her heart was jack-hammering inside her. It was the start of the scholastic year, she would explain later, so she didn’t know much yet about the family; she only remembered her interview with the parents because the man was there and had a job. He was a telecommunications engineer, who’d moved into the estate recently from somewhere up north. They were anxious for their youngest child, who they said was shy, and they’d clearly dressed carefully for the meeting with his future head teacher.

  The man said to her, ‘His brother knows what my business is.’

  Then Sally saw his right arm move, and the hunter’s knife, with a thick curved blade. He was holding it to the boy’s head, under his chin.

  ‘Get out of the way.’

  ‘Don’t hurt him!’ cried Kate Daiges. She paused, spoke quietly, slowly. ‘Please give me that, now.’ They were all at the Girls’ gate in a tangle; they were determined to stop him, although they realised, afterwards, as everyone kept telling them, that it would have been best to call the police and then let them deal with the matter; they shouldn’t have intervened; none of them should have played the hero, not Kate, not Kim. But as it was, in that struggle to prevent Simi’s capture, Kim tackled his assailant, seizing him by the arm wielding the knife, and throwing his own weight back on his heels. There wasn’t any way of grabbing the boy, everybody agreed later, and so Kim must have thought, they worked it out, that he could pull the knife away from the boy’s neck and force the man to drop him. But Kim’s slight build met the bigger man’s bulk as he lunged to get past them with his quarry and out into the street to his car – that green souped-up saloon that was later found abandoned after his getaway – and in the collision, the hunter’s knife twisted. It entered Kim’s lower abdomen, the doctors reported, at an acute angle and plunged in up to the hilt, slicing a mortal wound into his liver.

  Simi hit the ground, and so at first, when his abductor had sprinted off, leaving him behind, with blood spurting from his nose, and his eyes and mouth round Os of terror, the head and the others paid attention to the fallen boy and to the kids who were clustered around by now, some of them crying and shrieking and wetting themselves and some of them giggling. It was essential to bring order to the situation; when the police arrived, in their bawling cars with their yammering lights, the children grew demented with excitement, and in all this commotion, Kim was slumped on all fours head down like a deaf-and-dumb animal trying to graze the tarmac. The head was issuing instructions to end the break and get the children calmly back in the classrooms, Sally was opening the First Aid box she’d fetched and was staunching Simi’s nosebleed; when the paramedics arrived, one of them spotted Kim, who was trying to get up. But getting up from all fours and standing up straight was proving far harder than he expected.

  At first there was no pain; the blade slipped through so sharply that Kim only gasped at the impact. But in the ambulance they gave him a shot of something because the agony was coming on. There were so many questions he wanted to put, about the new boy Simi and Simi’s family, and why what happened happened; there were several urgent messages he wanted to send about it so that they – Hetty and Gramercy – should both hear the news from him, not from anyone else; there was the pressing business of the Bundle and the celebrations and the HSWU – what would happen to it all without his hand on the mouse, at the cursor? But Kim was alone in the screaming vehicle except for the paramedics, who were applying things to him, dangling bladders with cords inserted into his arm, and a diver’s mask to his face, and he found his tongue was too swollen in his mouth to speak. The middle part of his vision was fiery black, the edges flaring sulphurous; he’d like to lift the big blot in the centre like a flap or a door and look behind it, for something lay buried under similar noise and darkness, something that pointed another kind of blade into his gut. But the memory of what was once lost to him and never found – if that’s what it was – was spooling free, falling off the edges of his mind, into that crammed, vital, populous ether all around, where fibre optics trembled and swayed like sea anemones as they strained to capture the floating knowledge of what was to be, what was to come: the phantom shapes were gliding into the future, and their slipstream was lifting him away.

  7

  ‘History Starts With Us’

  Hortense was bicycling home from the Museum as she did in fine weather, and she didn’t notice the headlines of the evening paper; she only bought it when she travelled home by tube in the winter. Daniel met her at the front door; his fall semester had not started and he had not yet left Enoch. He put a hand on her arm and sat her down; he had heard the news on the radio. He was upset for her, he knew it would be a terrible shock and a blow, and he made her a cup of tea and held her arm. Because she seemed composed enough to be left alone, he went out to buy the evening paper, and then they watched the television news together, and again later, and the following morning.

  He said, sympathetically, ‘It’s the sort of thing that happens where I teach. Not here, you’d never expect it over here.’

  ‘Maybe such things are catching,’ said Hetty. She was grateful to Daniel that she could grieve without him asking questions.

  During the immediate aftermath of the murder at Cantelowes Primary, the evil of the abductor and murderer concentrated an outraged public’s attention. The fizzing, potassium-carbon mix of children’s sanctuary, laddish predator and cold-blooded killer, broad daylight, hunting knife, baseball cap, souped-up car, blaring music, excited explosions of fury: against television (violence of), government employment policies (young men with nothing to do), pop culture influences (violence of), video nasties, video games and couch potatoes (young men with nothing to do), weapon licensing laws (young men with nothing else to do), feminism and single mothers (young men with nothing to do and no one to fuck) and pop music of every kind, but especially techno dance bands (young men doing something wrong, and taking drugs with it).

  Because so many witnessed the incident and before, and were certain they could pick him out at two hundred yards in any identity parade, because he was caught full face by the CCTV camera over the Girls’ gate, because he’d dropped his baseball cap in the struggle and there was follicle fluff caught in the rim from which the laboratories could construct his DNA profile, because his fingerprints were all over the virulent green saloon, which was unmistakably seen here, there, until it was found abandoned the following week in a side street to the south of the city, police and detectives issued numerous confident bulletins that soon, the killer would be traced. But his motive continued to elude enquiries, and he himself to escape pursuit.

  Hetty rang Gramercy from the Museum the next day; she desperately needed to speak to someone with whom she didn’t have to pretend mere professional acquaintance with Kim. Now that Kim was dead, they were able to talk of him, together, when before they had handled each other carefully on his score. Now Gramercy would ask Hetty, ‘And did you go to bed with him?’ and Hetty would say, �
��No,’ looking back at her, to which Gramercy responded, ‘No, no, it wasn’t like that.’ Neither woman believed the other, though both were relieved. The question hovered; it was a connection between them, for they had shared a longing for something Kim had brought to them.

  They talked about the reasons, or rather the non-reasons for his death.

  ‘This journo thinks it’s all due to racist feuds, that makes sense, doesn’t it?’ cried Gramercy. For the man in the puffer jacket was presumed to have arisen from the city’s eastern marshes, like a chemical whiff out of estuarian contaminated mud. They followed the possibilities:

  Did that reference to ‘his brother’ reveal a local vendetta about respect and disrespect?

  Was this brother sleeping with the killer’s sister? With his mother? With his wife?

  Investigations yielded no clues: Simi’s brother was fifteen, it turned out. ‘That boy – he’s like a St Bernard puppy, all gangling limbs and huge feet he doesn’t know where to put . . .’

  ‘Not exactly a heart-throb, is he?’ said Hetty, agreeing with Gramercy, for Simi’s ‘brother’ simply didn’t fit the picture of a precocious, super-cool, testosterone-enriched teenage gangsta who might go around dishonouring estuarian menfolk by giving their women a good time.

  ‘His parents are the kind who want him to do his homework,’ added Gramercy. ‘That’s what this paper says, and he even has extra music lessons at weekends with one of the ten thousand fucking lottery-funded brass bands.’

  ‘You never can tell, I suppose,’ said Hetty, ‘but it makes no sense.’

  So, was it an underworld rite of passage? A male dare, an initiation test to show how hard the killer was, how he had a right to be One of Us? It seemed such extreme risk-taking, to march out in front of everyone and try and kidnap a child just like that.

  Or was it some drug baron’s bungled foray into protection racketeering in Cantelowes?

  Or was he a paedophile who’d conceived a passion for the child?

  Or was it a mistake? Not just Kim’s death, but Simi’s attempted abduction as well? Some writers thought so. Was Simi the right target at all? The little boy couldn’t say how he knew the man. Or even that he knew him. The interviews with the child were conducted carefully, as he was in a profound state of shock, and barely able to speak. ‘I saw him coming for me, like I’s ’fraid of always,’ was all he could give them to go on. But raiders from a dozen cult video films could instil such a fear –

  That it was Kim McQuy, the founder of HSWU, who’d died didn’t focus media interest in the way the two women expected; or at least not to begin with, and then not for what seemed a long time. Splutters of indignation erupted at first at a schoolteacher’s tragic murder, but HSWU was cursorily mentioned, as if Kim’s activism almost marred the picture of his fortuitous martyrdom, as if it was inappropriate that the victim should have been a campaigner well known to the police. And nobody seemed to notice, Hetty pointed out, that Kim was a young man too, who warranted rather more attention than his killer and his killer’s kind. ‘You’d think they’d pay attention to the fact that here we have a hard-working, public-minded, completely vocational young man who’s probably around the same age as this thug they’re spending all their time on drivelling on about, and they don’t seem to have an idea in their head how to write about him. About Kim. They just paint this mimsy picture of him, a boring goodie slaughtered by the oh so much more fascinating forces of darkness.’

  But Gramercy decided the muteness around Kim’s campaign was part of the conspiracy; that he’d been the victim of a skilful and deliberate plot to put him out of the way. ‘He was assassinated, Hetty. I see it all now: someone didn’t want him around stirring up trouble with his ideas about the new mongrelised non-native state. It could be many people, many different interests behind it. Take a look at those websites urging on hatreds against anyone who speaks up for . . . Listen to this one I found last night: “This is the site you need if you want to publish names and addresses and photographs of the scum that’s polluting our streets, our countryside, our homes . . .” Then it goes on, you won’t believe this: “Send a trophy – an ear, a hand, any part of the enemy you deal with – to this Box Number and we’ll send you a reward.”

  ‘It figures, Hetty, doesn’t it? The creator of a message that disrupts the fucking fixed, bigoted, complacent status quo is suddenly knifed in broad daylight. Yeah, Kim had made enemies and they were all the right enemies to have. And they’re not going to have their way.’

  Kim’s death could not be left to do nothing, that was her furious resolve at the loss of him. His death was going to mean something, because he meant something; she would fling herself, with all the force of her media clout and her contacts, with the seduction of her frayed, urgent, hoarse whispering and keenings, into making him live on.

  August Farrell, the poet, sent a letter to every member of the workshop in cultural identities, including Gramercy; she rang him back straightaway.

  ‘It’s not good,’ he said. ‘The barrier of silence, the lack of explanation.’ Then Rob Chowdury called her; Sanjit May had called him.

  Hetty said, ‘Conspiracy theories – don’t go that way.’ But she was staunchly behind the new resolve not to let Kim’s murder pass unnoticed and unavenged.

  ‘Even if it was a fucking mistake,’ Gramercy hissed at Hetty down the telephone from Fellmoor, ‘there’s got to be a pattern, a meaning. We’re going to find it, we’re going to make it come out.’

  August added, ‘Let’s make a noise, come on, let’s do it. Let’s see some justice done. I’m angry now. I didn’t much like Kim when he was alive – too squeaky clean for me. But this is . . . this is horrible.’ He was writing to Noakes, he added. Through HSWU’s website, they could muster an e-campaign. Some stories start with a death, not to be cynical about it. Nations sometimes start with a death. Many world religions start with a death. But some deaths inaugurate nothing, they only blot out the brightness of hope, of possibility. That’s the usual outcome.

  At first this seemed to be the case with Kim: that alive, he had captured attention from many quarters, for a moment here and there. But dead, he’d joined the superfluity of those whose lives mean next to nothing.

  ‘I wonder,’ Hetty replied, when Gramercy reported the conversations she was having with Rob, with August; even Sanjit, his rancid take withal, was coming on side. Shareen Ghopil telephoned; she too was indignant, upset, wanted to lend her support: could she become a patron of HSWU? ‘We’ve got to transform this tragedy: it’s foul, it’s cruel, but maybe, like mud where the lotus grows, it can bear fruit.’ She paused. ‘I should say rather, like the plane tree, which grows so well in the brickdust and clay here.’

  And Hetty thought of the cults of fallen heroes, of dying gods in their mothers’ laps, of the founding blood of martyrs: the brutal logic of sacrifice. Would the plot never stop repeating? Would it ever be possible to start again, as Kim had wanted, and delete the old files of history? ‘It is ghastly,’ she said, quietly, ‘and I wish with all my heart that it weren’t so. But Kim is dead, and maybe that makes it his story now.’

  There were further delays to the installation of the Leto Bundle in its new setting, but HSWU’s campaign that the Museum make a very strong statement when the new plans were published won support, to Hetty’s surprise, from many of her colleagues, keepers of various collections that had been considered exotic in the past, but were the natural patrimony of groups now rooted in the country. Kim’s legacy helped resist the calls to repatriate such treasures to their homelands; there were now larger numbers of some communities in Albion than there were in the territories their ancestors had inhabited far away and long ago.

  Hortense was preparing two publications: the booklet, which she was writing, was to appear to coincide with the planned procession of school kids from all over the inner city. Cantelowes Primary was to lead it (after Kim’s death, Kate Daiges quickly became a powerful voice in the movement for his recogniti
on). This booklet would be included in a school pack filled with supporting materials, with maps, reproductions of manuscript from the mummy bands, a make-your-own-papyrus kit and various study sheets about the historical background: ‘Goods & Services’, ‘Power & Authority’, ‘Pleasures and Penalties’ and so forth. The annotated catalogue, edited by Hortense, with articles by several other scholars, was planned for the following year. It would be followed, if one of the big remunerative foundations gave a grant, by full facsimiles and translations of the contents of Skipwith. This was a long-term project, but the signs were hopeful.

  Gramercy released her anthem, written for Kim, ‘History Starts With Us’, as a single the Christmas after he died. The song’s melody was folksy, with a simple sequence of a repeated phrase that rose to a plangent diminished seventh that made it sound half-ecstatic, half-elegiac – Gramercy was surprised at herself, and worried that it was schmaltzy and commercial, especially when it started selling like no other recording she’d made since her first hit when was nineteen years old. She began working furiously, and an extended version soon followed on a full CD of the same name, with a twenty-four-track backing including wooden flutes and rain-sticks, a tabla solo from a guest musician and other syncretic touches. It won her a nomination on the shortlist for the most prestigious prize in contemporary music, rock and classical.

  The forty-five-minute documentary programme about the Leto Bundle was cancelled by the television channel that had promised an arts slot the day of the unveiling, but Taffy did not at all lose heart. ‘This issue’s building. I can feel it. It’s not going to go away now, and we can do better. This is good for us. We’ll switch from the dead art & archaeology slot to prime time. We’re no longer culture, we’re news.’ The material would be re-edited to tell the powerful story of Kim’s tragic short life and high ambitions, as part of the news channel’s hard-hitting investigation into the capital’s lawlessness, the authorities’ loss of grip, and the turbulent undercurrents of hostility that were claiming more and more innocent lives. Kim McQuy, Cantelowes schoolteacher, knifed in the playground by a thug: he was the symbol now. His fate packed so much more value than a sheaf of old manuscripts and a few scattered objects.