TRUDY AND I are getting drunk again and feeling better, while Claude, starting later with greater body mass, has ground to cover. She and I share two glasses of the Sancerre, he drinks the rest, then returns to his plastic bag for a burgundy. The grey plastic bottle of glycol stands next to the empty, sentinel to our revels. Or memento mori. After a piercing white, a Pinot Noir is a mother’s soothing hand. Oh, to be alive while such a grape exists! A blossom, a bouquet of peace and reason. No one seems to want to read aloud the label so I’m forced to make a guess, and hazard an échézeaux Grand Cru. Put Claude’s penis or, less stressful, a gun to my head to name the domaine, I would blurt out la Romanée-Conti, for the spicy cassis and black cherry alone. The hint of violets and fine tannins suggest that lazy, clement summer of 2005, untainted by heatwaves, though a teasing, next-room aroma of mocha, as well as more proximal black-skinned banana, summon Jean Grivot’s domaine in 2009. But I’ll never know. As the brooding ensemble of flavours, formed at civilisation’s summit, makes its way to me, through me, I find myself, in the midst of horror, in reflective mood.
I begin to suspect that my helplessness is not transient. Grant me all the agency the human frame can bear, retrieve my young panther-self of sculpted muscle and long cold stare, direct him to the most extreme measure – killing his uncle to save his father. Put a weapon in his hand, a tyre wrench, a frozen leg of lamb, have him stand behind his uncle’s chair, where he can see the antifreeze and be hotly incited. Ask yourself, could he – could I – do it, smash that hairy knob of bone and spill its grey contents across the squalor of the table? Then murder his mother as sole witness, dispose of two bodies in a basement kitchen, a task only achieved in dreams? And later, clean up that kitchen – another impossible task? Add the prospect of prison, of crazed boredom and the hell of other people, and not the best people. Your even stronger cellmate wants daytime TV all day for thirty years. Care to disoblige him? Then watch him fill a yellowed pillowcase with rocks and slowly turn his gaze your way, towards your own knob of bone.
Or assume the worst, the deed is done – my father’s last kidney cells are sheared by a crystal of poison. He’s thrown up his lungs and heart into his lap. Agony then coma then death. How about revenge? My avatar shrugs and reaches for his coat, murmuring on his way out that honour killing has no place in the modern polis. Let him speak for himself.
‘Seizing the law into your own hands – it’s old hat, reserved for elderly feuding Albanians and subsections of tribal Islam. Revenge is dead. Hobbes was right, my young friend. The state must have a monopoly of violence, a common power to keep us all in awe.’
‘Then, kind avatar, phone Leviathan now, call the police, make them investigate.’
‘What exactly? Claude and Trudy’s black humour?’
Constable: ‘And this glycol on the table, madam?’
‘A plumber suggested it, officer, to keep our ancient radiators unfrozen in winter.’
‘Then, dear future best self, get yourself to Shoreditch, warn my father, tell him everything you know.’
‘The woman he loves and reveres planning to murder him? How did I come by such information? Was I party to pillow talk, was I under the bed?’
Thus the ideal form of powerful, competent being. What then are my chances, a blind, dumb invert, an almost-child, still living at home, secured by apron strings of arterial and venous blood to the would-be murderess?
But shush! The conspirators are talking.
‘It’s no bad thing,’ says Claude, ‘that he’s keen to move back here. Put up a show of resistance, then let him come.’
‘Oh yes,’ she says, cold and satirical. ‘And make him a welcome smoothie.’
‘I didn’t say that. But.’
But I think he almost did.
They pause for thought. My mother reaches for her wine. Her epiglottis stickily rises and falls as she drinks, and the fluid sluices down through her natural alleys, passing – as so much does – near the soles of my feet, curving inwards, heading my way. How can I dislike her?
She sets down her glass and says, ‘We can’t have him dying here.’
She speaks so easily of his death.
‘You’re right. Shoreditch is better. You could visit him.’
‘And take round a bottle of vintage antifreeze for old times’ sake!’
‘You take a picnic. Smoked salmon, coleslaw, chocolate fingers. And … the business.’
‘Haaargh!’ Hard to render the sound of my mother’s explosive scepticism. ‘I dump him, throw him out of his house, take a lover. Then bring him a picnic!’
Even I appreciate my uncle’s umbrage at ‘take a lover’ – as in, one of nameless many, of many yet to come. And it’s the ‘take’, it’s the ‘a’. Poor fellow. He’s only trying to help. He’s sitting across from a beautiful young woman with golden braids, in bikini top and cut-offs in a sweltering kitchen, and she’s a swollen, gorgeous fruit, a prize he can’t bear to lose.
‘No,’ he says with great care. The affront to his self-regard has pitched his voice higher. ‘It’s a reconciliation. You’re making amends. Asking him back. Getting together. Peace offering sort of thing, moment to celebrate, spread out the tablecloth. Get happy!’
Her silence is his reward. She’s thinking. As am I. Same old question. Just how stupid is Claude really?
Encouraged, he adds, ‘Fruit salad’s an option.’
There’s poetry in his blandness, a form of nihilism enlivening the commonplace. Or, conversely, the ordinary disarming the vilest notion. Only he could top this, and he does after a thoughtful five seconds.
‘Ice cream being out of the question.’
Plain sense. Worth saying. Who would or could make ice cream out of antifreeze?
Trudy sighs. She says in a whisper, ‘You know, Claude, I loved him once.’
Is he seeing her as I imagine her? The green gaze is glazing over and, yet again, an early tear is smoothly traversing her cheekbone. Her skin is damply pink, fine hairs have sprung free of her braids and are backlit into brilliant filaments by the ceiling lights.
‘We were too young when we met. I mean, we met too soon. On an athletic track. He was throwing the javelin for his club and broke some local record. It made my knees go weak to watch him, the way he ran with that spear. Like a Greek god. A week later he took me to Dubrovnik. We didn’t even have a balcony. They say it’s a beautiful city.’
I hear the uneasy creak of a kitchen chair. Claude sees the room-service trays piled outside the door, the cloying bedroom’s disordered sheets, the nineteen-year-old near-naked at a painted plywood dressing table, her perfect back, a wash-thinned hotel towel across her lap – a parting nod at decency. John Cairncross is jealously excluded, primly out of shot, but huge, and naked too.
Careless of her lover’s silence, Trudy hurries on a rising note, before her tightening throat can silence her. ‘Trying for a baby all those years. Then just as, just as …’
Just as! Worthless adverbial trinket! By the time she tired of my father and his poetry, I was too well lodged to be unhoused. She cries now for John as she did for Hector the cat. Perhaps my mother’s nature won’t stretch to a second killing.
‘Erm,’ Claude says at last, offering his crumb. ‘Spilt milk and all.’
Milk, repellent to the blood-fed unborn, especially after wine, but my future all the same.