He has pulled her towards the bed, removed her sandals, her cotton summer dress and called her his mouse again, though only once. He pushes her onto her back. Consent has rough edges. Does a grieving woman grant it when she raises her buttocks so her panties are pulled free? I’d say no. She has rolled onto her side – the only initiative she takes. Meanwhile, I’m working on a plan, a gesture of last resort. My last shot.
He’s kneeling by her, probably naked. At such a time, what could be worse? He swiftly presents the answer: the high medical risk, at this stage of pregnancy, of the missionary position. With a muttered command – how he charms – he turns her on her back, parts her legs with an indifferent backhand swipe, and gets ready, so the mattress tells me, to lower his bulk onto mine.
My plan? Claude is tunnelling towards me and I must be quick. We’re swaying, creaking, under great pressure. A high-pitched electronic sound wails in my ears, my eyes bulge and smart. I need the use of my arms, my hands, but there’s so little room. I’ll say it fast: I’m going to kill myself. An infant death, a homicide in effect, due to my uncle’s reckless assault on a gravid woman well advanced in her third trimester. His arrest, trial, sentence, imprisonment. My father’s death half avenged. Half, because murderers don’t hang in gentle Britain. I’ll give Claude a proper lesson in the art of negative altruism. To take my life I’ll need the cord, three turns around my neck of the mortal coil. I hear from far off my mother’s sighs. The fiction of my father’s suicide will be the inspiration for my own attempt. Life imitating art. To be stillborn – a tranquil term purged of tragedy – has a simple allure. Now here’s the thudding against my skull. Claude is gaining speed, now at a gallop, hoarsely breathing. My world is shaking, but my noose is in place, both hands are gripping, I’m pulling down hard, back bent, with a bell-ringer’s devotion. How easy. A slippery tightening against the common carotid, vital channel beloved of slit-throats. I can do it. Harder! A sensation of giddy toppling, of sound becoming taste, touch becoming sound. A rising blackness, blacker than I’ve ever seen, and my mother murmuring her farewells.
But of course, to kill the brain is to kill the will to kill the brain. As soon as I start to fade, my fists go limp and life returns. Immediately, I hear signs of robust life – intimate sounds, as through the walls of a cheap hotel. Then louder, louder. It’s my mother. There she goes, launched on one of her perilous thrills.
But my own prison wall of death’s too high. I’ve fallen back, into the exercise yard of dumb existence.
Finally, Claude withdraws his revolting weight – I salute his crude brevity – and my space is restored, though I’ve pins and needles in my legs. Now I’m recovering, while Trudy lies back, limp with exhaustion and all the usual regrets.
*
It’s not the theme parks of Paradiso and Inferno that I dread most – the heavenly rides, the hellish crowds – and I could live with the insult of eternal oblivion. I don’t even mind not knowing which it will be. What I fear is missing out. Healthy desire or mere greed, I want my life first, my due, my infinitesimal slice of endless time and one reliable chance of a consciousness. I’m owed a handful of decades to try my luck on a freewheeling planet. That’s the ride for me – the Wall of Life. I want my go. I want to become. Put another way, there’s a book I want to read, not yet published, not yet written, though a start’s been made. I want to read to the end of My History of the Twenty-First Century. I want to be there, on the last page, in my early eighties, frail but sprightly, dancing a jig on the evening of December 31st, 2099.
It might end before that date and so it’s a thriller of sorts, violent, sensational, highly commercial. A compendium of dreams, with elements of horror. But it’s bound to be a love story too, and a heroic tale of brilliant invention. For a taste, look at the prequel, the hundred years before. A grim read, at least until halfway, but compelling. A few redeeming chapters on, say, Einstein and Stravinsky. In the new book, one of many unresolved plot lines is this: will its nine billion heroes scrape through without a nuclear exchange? Think of it as a contact sport. Line up the teams. India versus Pakistan, Iran versus Saudi Arabia, Israel versus Iran, USA versus China, Russia versus USA and Nato, North Korea versus the rest. To raise the chances of a score, add more teams: the non-state players will arrive.
How determined are our heroes to overheat their hearth? A cosy 1.6 degrees, the projection or hope of a sceptical few, will open up the tundra to mountains of wheat, Baltic beachside tavernas, lurid butterflies in the Northwest Territories. At the darker end of pessimism, a wind-torn four degrees allows for flood-and-drought calamity and all of turmoil’s dark political weather. More narrative tension in subplots of local interest: will the Middle East remain in frenzy, will it empty into Europe and alter it for good? Might Islam dip a feverish extremity in the cooling pond of reformation? Might Israel concede an inch or two of desert to those it displaced? Europa’s secular dreams of union may dissolve before the old hatreds, small-scale nationalism, financial disaster, discord. Or she might hold her course. I need to know. Will the USA decline quietly? Unlikely. Will China grow a conscience, will Russia? Will global finance and corporations? Then, bring on the seductive human constants: all of sex and art, wine and science, cathedrals, landscape, the higher pursuit of meaning. Finally, the private ocean of desires – mine, to be barefoot on a beach round an open fire, grilled fish, juice of lemons, music, the company of friends, someone, not Trudy, to love me. My birthright in a book.
So I’m ashamed of the attempt, relieved to have failed. Claude (now loudly humming in the echoing bathroom) must be reached by other means.
Barely fifteen minutes have passed since he undressed my mother. I sense we’re entering a new phase of the evening. Over the sound of running taps he calls out that he’s hungry. With the degrading episode behind her and her pulse settling, I believe my mother will be returning to her theme of innocence. To her, Claude’s talk of dinner will seem misplaced. Even callous. She sits up, pulls on her dress, finds her knickers in the bedclothes, steps into her sandals and goes to her dressing-table mirror. She begins to braid the hair that, untended, hangs in blonde curls her husband once celebrated in a poem. This gives her time to recover and to think. She’ll use the bathroom when Claude has left it. The idea of being near him repels her now.
Disgust restores to her a notion of purity and purpose. Hours ago she was in charge. She could be so again, as long as she resists another sickly, submissive swoon. She’s fine for now, she’s refreshed, sated, immune, but it waits for her, the little beastie could swell once more into a beast, distort her thoughts, drag her down – and she’ll be Claude’s. To take charge, however … I think of her musing as she tilts her lovely face before the mirror to twist another strand. To give orders as she did this morning in the kitchen, devise the next step, will be to own the offence. If only she could settle down to the blameless grief of the stricken widow.