by Neil Jordan
37
I arrived back to a home that was apparently normal. The mist still hung about, heightening the fairy-tale fantasy of the place. The carved gargoyles on the wooden gate opened obediently and the garden looked just like a garden should, in its umbrella of soft moisture. Jenny was being prepared for bed and Sarah kissed me briskly on my entrance, the way a busy wife would. I made my apologies for being late and took our daughter from her arms, to perform the bedtime rituals.
Come on then, I murmured, I’ll read you that story.
Not the Johnny McGory one, please, she said.
Will I begin it?
No, she said. Read me a proper one.
I looked back at Sarah as I turned into the bathroom and hoped to be graced with at least the pretence of a smile. But she looked at me mournfully, and simply appeared lost.
The story in her book was about a giant who didn’t want to frighten people but couldn’t help doing so, such were the stereotypical clichés attached to giants. People demanded all of the tropes of ogredom from him, and fully expected to run and scream, and willingly did so, but this poor giant had a heart of soft toffee and all he really wanted to do was hug people and be friendly.
I read it dutifully and as I read I began to long for the pitiless morality of the traditional fairy tale, where evil was evil and was never explained, and good was good, as it always had been. But Jenny seemed to love this witless post-modern spin, and had half-closed her eyes before the story ended. So I was kissing her cheek and turning off the light, when she murmured something that stopped me dead in my tracks, the way an old Brothers Grimm fairy tale would have done.
I have a new friend, she said.
So, I said, you have three of them now?
Four, she said. Rebecca, Jessica, Melanie and Petra.
Petra? I echoed. And it felt like an echo. The name, and my voice.
Yes, she said. Petra. And she plays the thing.
What thing?
The cello thing.
A little girl could never play a thing as big as that.
And I was saying anything to take my mind off the chill that seemed to have descended on the room.
Well, she’s not always little. Sometimes she’s big.
So there’s little Petra and big Petra.
Yes. And little Petra has blonde hair and plays the violin like me. And when she’s big she plays the other thing. The cello.
Go to sleep, honey. Don’t think about such things.
Such things, she murmured. But I have to think about them. Because she’s going to teach me.
Teach you what?
The suites.
What suites?
The cello suites. By that man that Mummy likes.
You mean Bach?
Yes, that’s his name. Bach.
And she closed her eyes fully, and seemed instantly to be asleep.
She related it all with the simple directness of a child relating a fairy tale. And maybe it was a fairy tale that we had both blundered into. We had been walking, the two of us, and wandered into a Ruritanian wood. And as I walked back from her bedroom to the kitchen and an encounter that I now dreaded, was it my imagination or did the shadows seem blacker, the contrasts between them and the reddish lamplight etched in ink?
Sarah was sitting, pouring water on to a green-tea sachet.
Do you want one? she asked.
Please, I said. And she used the time it took for the kettle to boil again to relish the silence.
Should we divorce? she asked me.
Is that the only option? I replied. And it was hardly a question. It was a statement that hung in the air, like invisible smoke.
Well, she said. We both seem to have made a mess of things.
And is it the kind of mess that ends in divorce?
It is the conventional option, she told me. Isn’t that what one does?
One, I thought. I could never think of her as one.
You would never survive it, I said, stupidly.
You mean life without you? I had a life without you once. It was at least coherent.
I thought of the razor wire and the burning tyres and the dull crumping sound of another car bomb and wondered what was coherent about that. But she had been always oddly composed, and I suppose, coherent, in that burning world.
And this isn’t?
No, she said. This has become an incoherent mess.
Maybe life, I murmured, is an incoherent mess.
Do you love this woman? she asked.
There was no answer to that question. But I gave the only one that had a hope of being understood.
She’s dead, I said.
Oh God, she said. Please. What have you got us into?
She killed herself. She jumped from one of those bridges.
Oh Jonathan.
And with one of those sudden reversals that reminded me why I loved her, she clutched at my hand.
Oh God, she said, as if she knew something I didn’t. I really don’t want this.
Neither do I, I said.
So, I suppose you have to tell me.
I left a note. After we had that – conversation – about the Visa bill and the bracelet.
Was that a conversation?
It was more like a monologue.
What did the note say?
This is hard, Sarah.
I don’t mean the actual words.
It said I wouldn’t see her again. And I needed the bracelet back.
She went quiet for a moment. And I could hear the precipitation, dripping from the eaves outside.
You thought so much of me?
Of us, I told her.
She turned her back to me. And all I could look at was that curve where her neck met her shoulder, outlined in yellow by the lamp behind.
Do I need to know the rest? she asked.
I can’t explain it, I said.
Could you try?
And I realised, as I was speaking, what a mutable thing truth was. She killed herself, I told her, she climbed above the parapet of the bridge up to the stone foot of the statue and jumped. Her body was pulled from the river and remains on a refrigerated tray in the morgue in the twelfth district, awaiting identification.
Because of what you wrote?
How could I know?
I don’t know. How can one know anything?
And she was right, of course. How could I be certain I was here, talking to the woman who was still my wife?
There was a man she was upset about. A cellist, in the opera.
A cellist, in the opera.
She put her cup down on the metal tray above the sink and turned and came towards me. She put her arms around me, but I could sense the stiffness, the reluctance in her limbs.
Do I need to know more, Jonathan?
I hope not, I said.
Because I’m going to bed now. I’m shaking on the inside.
Not on the outside?
You know Sarah never shakes on the outside.
And she didn’t. That was her coherence. She was always calm, searching through the rubble with her elasticated gloves, no matter what the chaos was outside.
I should ask you to sleep in the other room. But I don’t know how to. And I don’t know why I don’t.
That’s all right, I said.
No, it’s not all right. maybe it will never be all right.
And she turned away from me and walked towards the bedroom.
Every word I had told her was the truth, yet every word was a lie. How could that be? I wondered, like a child, trying to understand the rules of logic. Had I left out the essentials for my own convenience, to retain some final value in her estimation, or because I couldn’t understand them myself? It was the truth: I had met her, allowed her to take the bracelet, written her a note and found out that she had died. And yet it was the most profound untruth I could have spoken.
I saw a whisky bottle sitting among the cartons of cereal above the fridge. I poured myself a glass, broke
out some ice and sat by the hard wood of the kitchen table, savouring the burning taste of it. It would be good, I thought, to drink it down, to reach that place where the inside impinged on the outside and nothing needed to be certain any more. Drunkenness. I remembered the state, but whenever I had allowed myself to get there it had been out of an excess of excitement, abandon, happiness even. I had never got drunk deliberately, to blur the lines that should have been separate because one couldn’t understand them any more. And I wasn’t about to now. I was a rational being, I told myself, I dealt in puzzles that had solutions and sometimes they ended in death, but death was death, that final and unreachable place beyond where thinking lay, where all of the puzzles ended. And it provided – what was that word Istvan used, so beloved of the television serials? Closure. A corpse provided its own full stop.
So I finished the glass and walked quietly into the bedroom we shared. She seemed to be asleep, or maybe she lay curled in the posture of hope, hope that sleep might yet arrive. I laid my clothes on the floor beneath my side and crept beneath the sheets, with as little disturbance as possible.
The whisky must have done its job because I fell immediately asleep. And was it the whisky that woke me two or three hours later, or the wind, opening those French windows? I could not be sure. But I woke, anyway, quite suddenly and the curtains were blowing in the soft breeze from outside and it was still raining on the lawns and she was in the room.
I wake up, she was saying, and I don’t know where I am, and my hair is wet and I don’t know why and then I remember what you said and I know that you have left me. And I feel dead again and there is mud in my mouth and I can’t talk. And I remember then that you have a wife and a daughter and that it is impossible and blah blah blah all those things, but I am back on the bridge waiting for you and there is something living inside me, a little one that I could maybe teach some day, all of the things you taught me, the way to make the instrument sing, the way to play not just the notes but the spirit of the notes. And there is something left, you see, even though it’s over like you say and I’m left in this dead place, there is something left that will get us back to where we were and where everything is alive again.
She was talking to someone else, not to me. And maybe that was the last part of the puzzle. She had always been talking to someone else and not to me. And I felt grief-stricken suddenly, for reasons I knew I would never understand. I had to be jealous now, about what a woman who was dead felt for a man I had never known. And Sarah shifted in the bed beside me and asked, still half-asleep, what was that breeze that was blowing, had someone opened the windows, and I kissed the back of her head and said the wind must have opened them and I turned, and she was gone, there was just the curtains blowing and soft rain still falling, mercifully, outside.
I got out of the bed and padded quietly over the bare floorboards across the space she had occupied and looked through the French windows at the dripping linden trees. It was still humid and hot outside, with that fine mist everywhere and the soft drops falling from every leaf and branch. I could never have been certain she had even been here, I thought, and then I heard the sound that told me that she had.
It was a cello, playing quietly but confidently, from a room inside, the first prelude of the first suite, and by now I knew it so well that it seemed natural, even right, that it was coming from somewhere in the house we lived in.
You’ve left the CD on, haven’t you? Sarah asked.
And I lied again.
Yes, I said. I’m sorry.
And the fact that I was sorry was the truth.
Well, turn it off, please. I need to sleep.
And I moved to the bedroom door to turn off what I didn’t know how to turn off when suddenly it stopped. And Jenny was standing in the doorway in those pyjamas she wore with the imprints of small elephants.
She was playing, she said, still delightfully sleepy but strangely matter-of-fact.
I told her not to play the thing when everyone’s asleep.
What thing? I asked, and I wondered why I was asking when I already knew.
The thing. That rhymes with yellow.
Cello? said Sarah.
Yes, Jenny said. The cello.
Who plays the cello? Sarah asked. Her voice had reduced itself to a whisper.
My new friend, Jenny said.
And what’s your new friend’s name?
Don’t, I whispered to Sarah.
Daddy knows her name. Petra.
I reached out to touch Sarah’s hand. But she drew hers away, as if stung by a wasp.
Mummy will take you to bed now, love, she said, as softly as she could.
Please, Jenny said, and stretched out her arms as Sarah walked towards her.
And Mummy will sleep with you tonight, in case you get frightened.
Why would I be frightened?
The plain way she asked this question was frightening enough.
38
We both drove her to school the next day, in Sarah’s car.
You will tell me, Sarah said as Jenny walked towards the monumental steps with her coloured schoolbag bobbing on her shoulder, what is going on and if it doesn’t make sense, I’ll book the next flight home.
I don’t know what’s going on, I said.
You never lied to me before, she said.
And I’m not lying now.
You took our daughter to meet that girl.
I didn’t.
How else would she know her name?
She has imaginary friends, I said. Could you explain that?
This is different, Jonathan, she said. There’s something in our house, in our family that wasn’t there before.
Like those cufflinks, I said, and immediately regretted it.
Fuck you, she said, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Maybe the next time we talk should be with that therapist. And maybe you should walk from here.
* * *
I did, and it was a relief to walk. I walked through the crumbling suburbs beyond the grand boulevards to the for-lorn end of the river where it ran off into those small canals. I called Istvan on the way and he picked me up by an empty skatepark and drove me to the morgue, where the body of Petra was lying in the small room that she couldn’t leave
The parents, if they were hers, were already waiting underneath the old glassy sign. Istvan wrote in the book and we descended again, with the pretty lab assistant with the rubber gloves, in the industrial lift down to the chilling depths where the refrigerators hummed
The mother wept quietly when she saw the row of metal handles and the father wiped his eyes when the tray was pulled out. That is the way grief happens, I remember thinking, quietly and without much fuss.
Petra, the mother whispered, when the body was revealed. It was unchanged and looked like it always would be. The small fringe of hoarfrost round the eyelids.
Ask her how can she be sure, I said to Istvan and he repeated the question.
Mladez, she said, or something like it. She walked forwards and pulled the sad frozen dress to reveal the knee. There was a birthmark there, and I wondered how I had never noticed it before.
Unde, she said.
Dove, said Istvan. Dove, they used to call it.
I could distinguish something like the blur of wings and a tiny birdlike body. For some reason I felt the tears now, flowing down my face. And for some reason I was embarrassed and I turned away.
The lab assistant snapped her gloves softly. Out of discomfort, I supposed. We were all of us, suddenly, uninvited guests at a funeral.
We should give them some . . . how do you say?
Space? I said to Istvan.
Yes, he said, almost proudly. For moment of closure.
Outside, we stood by the discoloured strips of industrial plastic that covered the ambulance bay.
Will there be an autopsy now?
Only if they request it.
He took off his jacket and folded it with two meaty hands. I saw the sweat marks undernea
th the armpits and had to remind myself that it was hot.
What about bill? he asked.
Don’t bill them, I said.
We have many expenses. Phone, petrol, time.
Put them all against me, I said.
For what reason? he asked. They are clients, like any other.
For reasons of closure, I told him.
And I realised I needed whatever that inadequate word meant, desperately. I needed the credits to roll and the commercials to begin.
Her parents walked out, blinking in the bright summer air, like two bewildered penguins. They stood then on the cracked cement path and moved from one patch of weed to the other and I realised that, like most of the lost souls I had seen wandering here, they weren’t sure where to go.
How did they get here? I asked Istvan.
By train, I suppose. And then by foot.
Will you give them a lift?
What about you?
I can walk, I told him.
So I watched him walk over to them. I saw rather than heard the conversation, the nodding, the bowing, the clutching of hands, and after he had helped them into the back and the car had sputtered off, I saw the lab assistant emerging through the strips of plastic to smoke a cigarette.
She gestured the packet towards me, mutely, in her plastic-covered hand and I took one, for lack of something else to do.
Is sad, she said.
Yes, I nodded.
But we never know the story. We don’t need to know the story. We deal with cadaver, organ, cause of death. Is bad to know the story.
Is it?
Yes, she said. Better to stay uninvolved.
Can I see her again? I asked.
The corpse?
She smiled bitterly and blew smoke out of her delicious mouth.
You knew her?
I shook my head. And it was true; how could I have known her?
I was hired to find her.
Like policeman? she questioned. Detective?
She walked me back through the strips of plastic into the empty ambulance bay and down a set of grey stairs. She snapped her gloves once more and smiled at me before she pulled open the great steel doors.
