‘Sure.’
‘That nothing can be forgiven.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Agreed.’
‘No amends. No forgiveness.’
‘Agreed, agreed. But you can’t stop the grass growing, Clem.’
‘I’ve no idea what that means.’
‘It means the grass is growing over their bones. It will grow over ours one day.’
‘You suggest we forget about it?’
‘Of course not! That’s not humanly possible. But we should be ready to move on.’
Clem bit back his reply. For a moment, neither wished to catch the other’s eye. Silverman rubbed at his wedding band. The London flight was called again. Clem picked up his bag. Silverman walked to the barrier with him. They embraced. Silverman was crying.
‘This is how I am now,’ he said. ‘All sentiment.’
‘There’s no shame in it.’
‘The boy asked for you last night,’ said Silverman, brushing a tear from his cheek. ‘He must have a future too, don’t you think?’
Clem agreed. A gap opened between them. Silverman reached across it with the envelope. ‘Maybe you can do something with this. It’s beyond my powers.’ Clem took the envelope; Silverman smiled and quickly retreated, waving his newspaper. ‘You get my vote, Clem Glass!’ he called. ‘Better times for us all, eh?’
It was the same crew Clem had flown out with from Heathrow. He recognised the blonde stewardess as she stood by the door greeting and directing. He couldn’t tell if she remembered him: though still discernibly new to her work she had learned the indiscriminate smile of a professional, her face lighting up like a torch bulb, one or two seconds, as each passenger shuffled past her.
His seat was at the front of Economy (or what did they call it now? Main Cabin? Family Traveller? World Explorer?), an aisle seat behind the central bulkhead where the film screen was showing reassuring pre-flight images of birds roosting at twilight. Of the other seats in his row only one was occupied, a man who, in short order, had put in the earpieces of his Walkman, put on his complimentary eye mask, and drawn his blanket up to his chin.
They took off, hurtling gently into the lighter sky above the clouds. Announcements were made, a trolley service began. When Clem had a drink he took down his bag from the overhead locker, put it on the empty seat beside him, and unzipped it. Silverman’s brown envelope was on top. Clem regarded it for a moment (unwelcome gift!), then reached below for the word-search book whose gloss cover showed a woman holding a pencil to the corner of her mouth in some strange, coquettish mime of rumination. Each puzzle in the book set the same basic problem: how to find a list of words sunk within a block of letters. The words could run in any direction. The trick, it seemed, was to apprehend a word as a pattern, then try to recognise it against a background where it was minimally differentiated. More doggedly, you could take the first three letters of the word and work systematically across the grid, though this approach was made harder by the anticipation of the puzzle-makers who often set letters together as a decoy, thus Clem found the ELE of ELECTRON running down, diagonally and backwards, before uncovering the word itself. There was an extra challenge to the puzzles that employed longer or less familiar words. He completed a puzzle called Things to Do at Home—KNITTING, YOGA, BRIDGE—in ten minutes, but made only slow progress with Varieties of Clematis. One on this list, HELSINGBORG, he searched for fruitlessly. The solutions were given in the back pages but he went on, scanning the grid with the nib of his biro until it became, quite suddenly, beyond bearing. He told himself they had certainly left the word out, while at the same time knowing perfectly well they could not have done and that he was simply too blind to see what was there in front of him. The pain above his eye was significantly worse. He pressed around it with the tip of his thumb, a kind of acupressure, until his eye watered and the letters in the grid blurred to the point of being unreadable. He shut the book, brushed it from his lap. He stood up. Both of the toilets at the front of his section were engaged. He went through the curtains into ‘Executive’ Class. If anyone stopped him he would tell them he was about to vomit, which, from the heat rising into his head, he thought perhaps he was. The only air-crew in his way was the young stewardess, and she was occupied with one of the passengers, leaning in front of him, listening to something she evidently didn’t want to listen to, her face attempting an expression of quiet authority. Coming closer, Clem saw that the man talking to her was the one in the white linen jacket he and Silverman had seen in the bar before the flight. On his tray were already four empty mini-bottles, Remy Martins, and from his tone as Clem passed he seemed at the point of deciding whether to go on flirting with the stewardess, or to start becoming very angry with her. (‘Oh, rules!’ Clem heard him say, as though he were a man for whom rules were both made and broken.)
In the toilet, Clem hung his head over the steel basin. When he realised he wasn’t going to throw up he wiped his brow with water and dabbed it dry with a paper serviette. He examined his eye: shut it, opened it, blinked. There was nothing to see. Even the redness he had noticed at the Trillium Inn—or imagined he had noticed—was gone. The face in the mirror, a face for which he now felt only a very minor sense of ownership, regarded him with a curious intensity, a look of excitement he neither understood nor trusted.
He emptied his bladder, washed his hands, and folded open the cubicle door. The stewardess was still leaning beside the man’s chair though her posture now was more defensive. He heard her say, ‘Sir...’ two or three times, then saw her hold up her hand, palm out. The man reached up, snatched at her, caught her arm below the shoulder, dragged her down, then thrust her backwards. In her effort to escape him she snagged her feet, one behind the other, lost her balance and fell, heavily, striking her head on the moulding of an unoccupied seat in a way that looked both comical and painful. The man began to stand, already, from his expression, appalled at having done so much so easily. With his eyes fixed on the stewardess he did not notice Clem step forwards. The blow—a noise like the snap of a leather belt—caught him high on the cheek. He grunted, sat back, said, ‘Oh!’ in a mild voice, and turned up his gaze just as Clem’s second punch, a downward slanting right, connected with the wetness at the side of his mouth. By the fourth punch he was bleeding freely, black drops falling on to the lapels of his jacket. He raised his hands, defending himself, or a gesture of surrender perhaps, but Clem, braced by the seat, thrashed at him, flurry-punching until he was seized from the back and dragged clear. Some discreet alarm was sounding. Cabin crew arrived from all parts of the plane. The blonde, helped to her feet, sobbed against a colleague’s blouse. Orders were issued, counter-orders. Someone said they should fetch the restraints; someone else said the captain was coming.
Across the aisle, a woman, some ten years older than the stewardess—a tall, shapely woman in an expensively tailored night-blue suit—got out of her seat, inclined her head to Clem in grim salute, and began to clap. A second woman, a few seats further back, stood and joined her, then, more grudgingly, a half-dozen of the men. The steward who had wrapped his arms around Clem’s chest loosened his grip. Clem looked down at the beaten man and smiled at him. The man’s blue eyes were wild with shame. He tried to speak (Violar, estoy violada!), a thread of blood between his yellow teeth. Then he turned in the seat and hid from them.
At Heathrow, the Transport Police were waiting by the gate. They escorted Clem to an interview room, took a statement and held him for four hours. At first they were hostile; then the view developed that he had simply defended a member of the airline staff. As Clem was taken from one room to another he saw in the corridor the woman who had applauded him. The man in the white linen jacket was called Paulus, and in the end, it seemed, nobody cared much about a man like Paulus. By three p.m. Clem was back at his flat. His knuckles were so swollen he could scarcely move his fingers. In the kitchen he used a bag of frozen peas as a cold-pack. When the swelling had reduced he made phone-calls—o
ne to a friend in London, one to Scotland, one (a number he had not called in years) to a house in Somerset. Afterwards, he sat on his front steps. The air was full of the dust of high summer. On the pavement the paint had worn to a faintly orange, faintly purple shadow. He wondered what he should feel about the man he had hit, about Paulus, but when he thought of him, the frightened face turning away, he felt a glee he was too tired to despise in himself. He lit a cigarette, gripping it between ruddy fingers. It was only when he leaned to tap out the butt on the stone between his feet that he realised his headache was entirely gone.
13
He left his bed while the Grove was still lit by its orange lamps. In the kitchen he cleaned out the Bialetti, then filled it with water and fresh coffee. From the kitchen window he could see a scatter of lights in a scatter of buildings. A car passed, then, two or three minutes later, another. The city was at low ebb, as hushed now as it could ever be with so many restless millions packed in for miles in all directions. An hour notorious for ghosts, rummaging foxes, suicides, false clarities. While he waited for the water to boil he calculated the time in Toronto. Eleven, eleven thirty. Silverman would be making his preparations, Defoe or his uncle buttoning his uniform, the Moldovans (if that was what they were) and the Guatemalans keeping their vigil, their practice of an almost infinite patience. And on the island? Was his father asleep, or was he taking his turn in the little chapel, ‘the heart of the house’? Old knees, old thighs, old neck bent in prayer. What did he hear above the sea sounds and the settling of his bones? A mail train on the mainland? The dub, dub, dub of a trawler’s engine? It was harder to conjure up the night at Ithaca, those concentrations of distress that shaped the darkness there, everyone pressed against his particular confusion, someone whimpering in a dream, the night staff gossiping in the corridors...
He poured the coffee into a mug, sugared it, and carried it through to the living room. For a minute he stood there, stalled, irresolute, then crossed to the bookshelf, reached to the top of it, and lifted down a black mock-leather file the size of an attaché case. He took it to his desk and sat in front of it a long time. It was here that he kept the negatives and transparencies from the spring, hundreds of them in acetate pockets, many of them—the negatives—processed in the bathroom at the Bellville Hotel where, stripped to his underwear, he had laboured like an automaton, the films dangling in long bronze curls from a clothes-line above the bath, some curious resource of shock or professionalism allowing him to go on with it.
He had not opened the file since his return—he had not dared—but now he took the light-box from under his desk, plugged it in, shook out frames and strips of film, and scattered them across the lit surface. His Schneider eyeglass was in a velvet pouch in the desk drawer. He polished the lens on the hem of his T-shirt, then ordered the film into rows, leaned, and went from one to the next, from the innocuous to those he could scarcely believe he had had the stomach, the effrontery, to take at all.
What prompted him to look again? Why this morning? Did he fear the wearing thin of his faith in human iniquity? That his disgust was being undermined by petty kindnesses, the rounding-off of memory? Or was it the persistent rankling of Silverman’s challenge to him the night they drove to the station—Do you really know what we saw? The question then had seemed outrageous, easily answered. He had the evidence in Ektachrome and on rolls of Tri X 400. He could touch it, handle it; he owned it. But knowing what it meant—wasn’t that the sense of Silverman’s question? Not what it was, but what it meant? He roused himself and pressed his eye more keenly to the glass, yet the more he looked the less it seemed the pictures had to tell him, as though, stared at too long, too needily, they shaped themselves into terrible puzzles, the truths they held retracting into tiny points of light, their eloquence suddenly ambiguous, contentious, refutable.
He switched off the light-box, thrust the film anyhow back into the file, zipped the file shut. The day had dawned. Cars passed the house every few seconds; the street-lamps were barely brighter than the air around them. To quieten himself, these waves of agitation, the troubling half-glimpses of the weeks ahead, he pulled one of Clare’s books from the shelf (Delacroix and the Economics of Excitement), settled into the room’s solitary armchair, one leg crooked over the armrest, and read a dozen cool well-written pages from the middle of the book. Delacroix in Paris, Delacroix and Chopin, music and painting, the civilisers. As he read he thought he heard his sister’s voice and, growing drowsy, the book slipping from his lap, saw her in the doorway of his box-room bedroom in Bristol telling him it was time to put the light out, time to sleep, that tomorrow was a school day. When she was in the mood she would sometimes come and sit with him for a few minutes, solicitous, serious, a little distracted, as though trying to keep track of all the things she had to do before she went to bed or turned eighteen. Then the light was off, the darkness bloomed, and he was left to swallow his grief until sleep came with dreams that ushered him through empty rooms or left him, house-trapped, listening to a voice from the garden, a calling to be let in that could not be heeded...
He was woken by the noise of sirens. A pair of fire engines lumbered past, dementedly. His leg was insensate. He rubbed it hard, wincing as the life flowed back, then hobbled into the kitchen to eat. The fridge contained a carton of UHT milk, the peas he had used to cool his knuckles, a nub of salami hard enough to break his teeth on. He opened a can of tuna and ate the meat from the tin, his chin shiny with oil. When he had finished, he shaved, dressed, and packed a suitcase (this endless packing and unpacking!). It was eight fifty. He had arranged with Toby Rose to pick up the car at ten. He went back to the living room to collect his cigarettes from the desk, but as he reached for them he saw that three leaves of film had, in his haste to hide them all away, floated to the back of the light-box. He hesitated, considered for a moment sweeping them into the bin by his feet, but sharply curious to see which of the images chance had selected (he was drawn increasingly to every manner of portent) he pressed them on to the surface of the box, flicked the switch, and picked up the eyeglass.
The first—vivid enough to make him flinch—was Sylvestre Ruzindana, a shot Clem had taken of a photograph that he and Silverman had found at the Bourgmestre’s house when they had driven out there in the hope of confronting him. They had arrived too late: an intense disappointment, though hardly a surprise. The house, a two-storey concrete building on the edge of the commune where most of the murdered once lived, had already been abandoned, broken into, ransacked. The photograph lay under shattered glass on the floor of the office, a portrait, semi-official, of a solidly-built, neatly bearded man in his mid-fifties. A relaxed and confident figure looking at the camera through black-rimmed spectacles, one hand on his hip, the other reaching back to rest on the bright roof of the saloon car behind him. A man on the way up. A man with connections, heft. Someone accustomed to issuing orders and to seeing them swiftly obeyed. Silverman had taken the original print, intending to give it to whomever seemed most serious about hunting the man down.
The next picture showed a classroom in one of the outbuildings beside the church. The legs of upturned desks. A map of the world. The edge of a blackboard with chalk marks from the last lesson. The whitewashed wall at the end of the room was sprayed and thickly smeared with blood. The dead were not in view, though in places their bodies had been stacked three or four deep. He had no recollection of taking the picture, of the moment when he must have looked at the wall and thought, I’ll take that.
The third was Odette Semugeshi. She was dressed in a blue cotton pinafore and plastic sandals, and stood at the end of her bed at the Red Cross hospital. Ten years old, bandaged, graceful as a blade of grass. The daughter of murdered parents, the friend of murdered children. She returned the camera’s stare with a gaze of the quietest imaginable outrage.
These three images Clem put into his wallet, a compartment with a steel popper, a pouch meant for a bus pass or a library ticket. He would not look at them
again—he did not want to weaken them with looking—but he would carry them with him as others carried photographs of a wife, a house, a beloved animal. He would let them tell him who he was (for who was he?) and what he believed (for what did he believe?). In the end, perhaps, they would excuse him or, if not, they would be the excuse that he offered.
14
It took several minutes of ringing the bell to bring Toby Rose to the window. He dropped the keys down; Clem let himself into the building, went up a flight of bare steps—it was an undistinguished ex-council property two hundred yards from Wandsworth Common—and opened the door to the flat. Rose was in the narrow passageway dressed in a pair of boxer shorts, his large face blurred from heavy sleep. He held up his hands. ‘Sorry, mate. Forgot the whole fucking deal.’ Clem put his case down and followed him into the living room. The room, in darkness, was pungent with the smell of the previous night’s partying. Rose tugged the curtains open. Over the coffee-table, the sofa, the carpet, the mantelpiece, the top of the television, was a litter of glasses and CD covers, newspapers, Rizla papers, contact sheets, ashtrays. On the floor by his feet Clem noticed a heat-discoloured spoon and the length of strapping that Rose used to swell a vein in his arm, a mild heroin habit that did not seem to have affected his work and which, perhaps, made it possible.
‘Long time no see,’ said Rose.
‘No great change here,’ said Clem.
Rose collected a pair of empty wine glasses and went to the kitchen to make tea. Clem followed him out, going along the passageway to the toilet at the end. On his way back to the living room he passed the bedroom door. It had been shut before but now was open. There was a girl in the bed, drowsy but awake, naked from the waist up, her hands on the pillow beside her head, the sheets ruffled around her hip-bones like a surf. She smiled unguardedly (a nymph in the sea off Lemnos spied upon by some idiot goatherd on the beach). Clem smiled back and walked on, made dumb for a moment by this intrusion of the lovely, then rueful and half amused that a five-second view of a nude in a sunlit room could make everything, all weighty preoccupation, into so many bubbles of soap. To be alone with a girl like that for an hour! To close the door and run his tongue to the pit of her belly! To breathe her in! He was ready for that, felt, with a little flare of impatience, that he had earned it. Hadn’t he?
The Optimists Page 9
