a rational man

by J S Hollis

  “murder.” S caught the word among the students thronging through the halls. he opened W and cast it around trying to latch onto the conversation. but the shuffling in the corridor made it too difficult to focus. he took refuge in a toilet cubicle. in the peace, he found the conversation he had been looking for.

  “i know its terrible. but its the most exciting thing to have happened since i arrived.”

  “you really cant say that, theo.”

  “im just being honest. i bet if id flicked through W, id find you watching the coverage all evening.”

  “you wouldnt.”

  theo raised his left eyebrow so high it made his right eye twitch.

  “not all evening.”

  “the son of a murderer at our school.”

  “its not that exciting.”

  “why are you being such a pussy? cecil stanhope, nearly pm, just killed his wife, mother of his only child, for no reason.”

  “you watch the news too much.”

  “jealousy, madness, a conspiracy against W?”

  “my mum says commentators will say anything to get publicity.”

  “but why then, scott?”

  “that guy has just lost his mum.”

  “yes, its really terrible. tell me its inappropriate, sure, but dont pretend you dont wanna know more.”

  S closed W and left the toilets. he wanted to avoid the gossip. cecil would explain his reasons soon enough. in time, and all that.

  S arrived at his philosophy class and wondered whether he should go home. he didnt feel ready to think or speak and there was a risk that professor dutson would ask him a question.

  dutson was one of those teachers who wanted each member of the class to be equally involved. he was happy to call upon the most reserved pupils and then wait seemingly endless periods of time for an answer to dribble out. S would watch his classmates struggling with the desire to interrupt but they rarely did. the punishment for interruption was to take over the lesson.

  professor dutson got up from his seat and the class hushed.

  “ok, class. lets start in the complete abstract. what would you do if you were presented with two identical choices?”

  silence, eyes down and shifting to see if anyone would break.

  dutson looked around. “richie.” the class looked up. “what would you do if you were presented with two identical choices?”

  “make a choice.”

  “but how?”

  “doesnt matter.”

  “anyone else want to offer a solution?” dutson rubbed his shaven head. “ok, i thought that might be the response. watch this video and then well discuss further.”

  Ss eyescreens faded out and into a car. the car had stopped and the driver was shouting at the windscreen.

  “take me to the game. why wont you move?”

  “ive been programmed to take you the best route based on a number of factors including timing, scenery and efficiency. there are two routes available that are logically identical.”

  “the game is about to start so just choose a route,” the driver shouted.

  “but how do i pick one?”

  “go for whichever you prefer.”

  “but there is no logical way to decide.”

  the driver banged the front of the car and the classroom reappeared. dutson leaned back against the wall. “so lets start again,” he said. “how do you choose between identical options?”

  “but theyre not identical,” ariadne shouted out.

  “well come to that. but lets say you had two identical ways of reaching a destination, how would you choose between them?”

  “like if you fancy two identical twins, professor, and can only choose one of them?”

  the class laughed.

  “yes, i suppose so,” dutson said. “how would you make that decision?”

  “i guess you come up with some reason.”

  “and what does that say about logic?”

  “that its limited.”

  “perhaps.”

  S was trying to keep up. he knew the first irresolvable question would spin out into others and he wanted to remember the route so that he could pass the exam. understanding the process was beyond him. he would normally go into a lesson with questions and come out with answers. in philosophy it was the other way around. he felt like he was regressing. certainties became uncertain. a chair became “what is a chair?”. were questions preferable to answers even if those answers were misplaced? and what if there was no correct answer however long you pondered the question? what did that mean for why cecil killed clara? was there an answer? and if there was, were all answers equal? was cecil a jealous lover, a good man doing the right thing and a psychopath all at once? or was the answer a matter of taste and potentially subject to change over time?

  S had ignored the media but the headlines were unavoidable. in a week they had coalesced from question marks and circumspection into definitive statements. they were focusing on claras friendship with tom hutchings and cecils apparent jealousy.

  * * *

  jilted stanhope stalked wife before stabbing

  * * *

  grandma emma told him not to pay attention. “the media doesnt like a vacuum,” she said. “they need to explain why something happened.”

  S wondered whether it mattered if the media was right or wrong. a decision had been made. he raised his hand and dutson looked at it like it was a rare bird that might fly away if he made the slightest movement.

  “yes, sebastian.”

  “does this mean that i shouldnt try to make rational decisions?”

  the class laughed.

  “not quite,” dutson said.

  “but how else am i meant to make decisions?”

  “it depends on the nature of the decision.”

  perhaps it didnt matter. the question of cecils motive was pointless. clara would remain dead, cecil in prison and S parentless.

  “youre slouching,” Ss earaids reported. he stretched his back and sat up.

  entry 8

  the cab turned off the dual carriageway into a row of conical trees leading up to a drab circular building that was not quite a church.

  “is this it?” S asked his uncle carlo.

  “must be.”

  “why are they hiding it?”

  “would you want to live next door?”

  “i expected something else.”

  “like what?”

  “i dont know. something less …” – S screwed up his face – “administrative.” he turned his head upwards to see how the sky ran through the camouflaged tracks of the tree tops.

  they pulled up between the automatic door of the crematorium and a crowd of crowds. circles of people all bobbing and turning, separate but conjoined by clara. she had brought them together. a passing, pointless glue.

  and within moments of leaving the cab, a tall man put out his hand. S took it and was pulled into the mass. soon he was floating, turning “in time”, “in time” over in his head trying to make sense of it. was he really there? was his face just smushed up so close to a screen that he couldnt tell? if he had dared to look around, would the crematorium have smouldered away? to be replaced by what? smoke, nothing, his parents watery eyes?

  a woman hugged him. her hands embracing his bones. his hands merely notifying her back they were there.

  “you probably dont recognise me—“

  “youre gemma—“

  “youre sweet but anyone can read my name, sebastian. you havent seen me for a decade. i used to work at future fabrics with your dad.”

  “sorry.”

  “dont be silly. just wanted to say im sorry. i loved both of your parents.”

  “thanks.”

  “i dont know how i can ever forgive your dad though
.”

  S nodded and the woman was substituted for another woman, broader, with one dense copper lock that fell persistently in front of her face, but essentially the same. she spoke to him and he continued nodding like a worn out sewing machine. until he thought he was moving too much. did it seem sarcastic? he unkinked his back and stretched up, stiffening. the woman asked him something. he heard the words and recognised each of them. but they were disconnected gibberish. he nodded a couple of times. the sewing wouldnt start again. should he have let his body flap around in the blast of the womans chatter? S grabbed his mouth but a giggle seeped out.

  “are you ok?” the woman asked.

  “fine,” S said. over the womans shoulder he could see that the circles were beginning to disband and creep towards the crematorium entrance. “i think we better go in.”

  “oh, yes, of course. do let me know if you need anything.”

  S smiled and moved his head to confirm that he would. they both began to float towards the door with the wave.

  eugene and ariadne bobbed alongside him.

  “hi,” they said.

  “you didnt need to come.”

  “we wanted to come,” ariadne said. “we are your friends.”

  “and we get to skip school,” eugene added.

  ariadne poked him. “cant you take anything seriously?”

  “im trying to cheer him up.”

  “have you ever thought he might not want to be cheered up?”

  “who doesnt want to be cheered up?”

  “people who have a good reason to be sad. if he makes a joke, fine, but let him set the tone.”

  “if we let spec set the tone, we wouldnt say a word to each other.”

  “let us go for that then.”

  eugene raised his eyebrows but remained quiet. he followed ariadne and her black veil into the back row of seats.

  as S made his way to the front, he felt conspicuous. he looked around and saw hundreds of people standing, squashed into their rows. they reminded him of matches. what if they all went up in flames? hundreds of human candles, flickering for clara.

  “good morning, everyone,” an older woman with the round face of a young boy said, dousing the flames and gaining Ss attention. “i never knew clara stanhope and i regret that. speaking to her family and friends, watching her on W, has given me the opportunity to discover a woman i wish—“

  S locked his eyes on the box that rested in silence at the front of the room. he crawled over the wood looking for gaps, hoping not to find them. what if clara jumped out and saw the boy faced woman talking about her? wouldnt she wonder why her friends and family were the audience for someone she had never met?

  “now claras father, leo, will say a few words and he will be followed by her son sebastian.”

  leo rushed up to the front, pivoted off the pulpit and tried to inhale the room.

  “clara,” he exhaled, “my beautiful daughter, was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. thank god, if there is one, that we still have seb and a little bit of her lives on. otherwise i dont know what i would do.”

  leo managed to pump the words out like intermittent puffs of thick smoke, but S could hear his grandfathers throat scraping along an empty tank.

  “she was a far better daughter than i was a parent. i wont speak for donatella but i imagine she would say the same thing. when we broke up, clara was the only adult in the family. i remember her saying to me, ‘daddy, you know how you say you only want me to be happy? well, i only want you and mummy to be happy too. together or not.’ i nearly cried then. how had i created something so sweet and beautiful? i wished so hard that happiness could be a choice for her—”

  the shadow of the pulpit concealed leos face. S shifted to get a better view but leo was disappearing. death was weathering him.

  “she was always in search of the right way to live, a good way. she wanted to help others. i dont know where she got that from. not from me. one day, she must have been about seventeen, she came into my office and said she had something important to tell me. i thought she was going to say she was pregnant or something – she did party quite a bit in those days – but she asked if it was ok if she volunteered to help look after handicapped youths in camber sands over the summer.”

  S felt donatella shaking next to him and took her cold hand into his. he continued to look at leo, whose black skin had lost the contours of his face, clinging under the eyes, coming unstuck around his mouth, and turning a sherbet pink at the edges around his nose. S squeezed his own face with his free hand. it felt smooth and hard.

  “donatella has asked me to finish with some words from dante but the words for clara must never cease. i will ensure she is remembered until i am no longer here. with apologies for my italian accent: in te misericordia, in te pietate, in te magnificenza, in te s’aduna quantunque in creatura è di bontate. in you there is mercy, in you there is pity, in you there is magnificence, in you there is whatever goodness there ever was.”

  leo walked down to the front bench and hugged S. S felt leos cold cheek against his own. it felt alien, like fingers on a dead leg. when leo released him, S saw that the boy faced lady had returned to the front. this time S noticed that it was a crescent shaped scar on her cheek that had given it a sense of roundness.

  “we now have a recorded eulogy from claras son, sebastian,” she said. “you can watch it on your eyescreens or the visipaint at the front.”

  S saw himself appear on the screen and looked down. first at his nails, which were indistinguishable from the skin they were embedded in, even after he pushed back the cuticles. and then at his feet, which refused to sit flat on the floor. he rubbed the front of his right shoe against the bottom of his left and watched the scuff disappear. then he heard a voice, his voice, squeezing out from behind a virtual epiglottis.

  “for as far back as i can remember, mum wanted me to express myself. it was something of an obsession of hers. she believed that everyone had something to say, to do or to be, and i was no exception.

  “it started with drama classes. she was so proud when i got the role of neville in a school production of the philosophers stone. after i missed my line in my first scene, she said, ‘dont worry, it wasnt a very good line.’

  “then it was music – the clarinet – but it was clear that my heart wasnt in it when we found mould on the reed. there was football, which i liked, but my mind and feet had a communication problem.

  “my interests, to mums unspoken disappointment, turned out to be rather impassive. reading, watching films, chess. i suggested to mum that maybe my great expression was silence. she broke into that laugh of hers, you know where only one sound came out, and said ‘a fine choice’.

  “so here i am, expressing myself for you, mum.“

  with the slightest waggle of his finger, S searched back through the boy faced womans life for the moment she got the scar.

  “mum really cared about other people. the only time i can remember her having time off work was after she read a book about how poverty was inevitable. she was so furious she bought a hard copy and burnt it. she talked about working less to give others the opportunity. sure, she never did it. she did everything too fast to stop. i used to jog alongside her when we walked.”

  S knew he was close to it. the scar was raw meat. she was in hospital with her faced covered. she was being rushed in an ambulance. then the ambulance paused with the message “there is no earlier footage for this person.”

  “but whatever she achieved was never enough. she tried to tap into herself for more, to find something deeper. through meditation, yoga, whirling, dance, skydiving, canyoning, etcetera. dad and i lost track.

  “why? i guess she was convinced she could do more. remember utopia? mum was passionate about it – a game to make the world a better place. it never made it through trials. players were bored after half
an hour. they redeveloped it into death to utopia and mum said it was ‘a vast improvement’. there was always a positive spin with mum, even when she was heartbroken.”

  from the discussions in the hospital, S established that a glass lamp had fallen on the boy faced woman.

  “all this while dad ran for government and i was failing to express myself. i like to think that she ran life at double speed and all of us here are catching up.

  “so perhaps we should forgive dad. it doesnt matter why he did this. mum would forgive him. let us imagine her sitting us down and telling us ‘it will all get better. its a matter of perspective’. and i can say ‘i love you, mum’.”

  S felt his arm being squeezed. donatella leant into him and whispered, “that was lovely, sebastian. she would have been very proud of you.”

  S was delighted it was over. he cast his eyes up but his face hadnt disappeared from the visipaint. it seemed to be waiting for something. a hand pressed the crook in its nose and teeth bit dead skin off its pink lips. its green eyes darted and settled. it could fidget as much as it liked. was it fair that S was culpable for these shadows of his past? then the shadow walked off screen and S was left having to be himself.

  S pressed his index finger and thumb into his eyes, hoping he could squeeze a few tears out, while the audience watched the coffin vanish. his eyes remained like stones in the desert. S released them when the curtains fell and pop music began to fill the room.

  “sun is shining in the sky,” the audience sang, and the procession out of the crematorium commenced.

  the vision of claras body entering the furnace changed nothing. the movement of the casket behind the veil seemed routine. it was routine. the short movement happened many times each day. the undertakers couldnt make each occasion special. it was just part of the process. a box was burnt. claras death wouldnt end. at best it would fade, in time.