‘Well,’ she says, after listening. ‘Bring it here. We need to talk.’
From the gentle way she sets down the phone I assume he’s on his way. Bad enough. But I’m having my very first headache, right around the forehead, a gaudy bandanna, a carefree pain dancing to her pulse. If she’d share it with me, she might reach for an analgesic. By rights, the pain is hers. But she’s braving the fridge again and has found high in the door, on a Perspex shelf, a nine-inch wedge of historic parmesan as old as evil, as hard as adamantine. If she can break into it with her teeth, we’ll suffer together, after the nuts, a second incoming salt tide rolling through the estuary inlets, thickening our blood to brackish ooze. Water, she should drink more water. My hands drift upwards to find my temples. Monstrous injustice, to have such pain before my life’s begun.
I’ve heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness. To avoid serious damage a simple creature needs to evolve the whips and goads of a subjective loop, of a felt experience. Not just a red warning light in the head – who’s there to see it? – but a sting, an ache, a throb that hurts. Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self. And if that works, why not feeling disgust for shit, fearing the cliff edge and strangers, remembering insults and favours, liking sex and food? God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.
So what’s the use of a headache, a heartache? What am I being warned against, or told to do? Don’t let your incestuous uncle and mother poison your father. Don’t waste your precious days idle and inverted. Get born and act!
She sets herself down on a kitchen chair with a hung-over groan, the elective malady’s melody. There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact: remorse, or more drinking and then remorse. She’s chosen the first, but it’s early yet. The cheese is on the table, already forgotten. Claude is returning from where my mother will live, a millionairess shot of me. He’ll cross London by cab because he’s never learned to drive.
I try to see her as she is, as she must be, the gravidly ripe twenty-eight-year-old, youngly slumped (I insist on the adverb) across the table, blonde and braided like a Saxon warrior, beautiful beyond realism’s reach, slender but for me, near naked, sunnily pink on the upper arms, finding space on the kitchen table for her elbows among the yolk-glazed plates of a month ago, the toast and sugar crumbs that houseflies daily vomit on, the reeking cartons and coated spoons, the fluids dried to scabs on junk-mail envelopes. I try to see her and love her as I must, then imagine her burdens: the villain she’s taken for a lover, the saint she’s leaving behind, the deed she’s spoken for, the darling child she’ll abandon to strangers. Still love her? If not, then you never did. But I did, I did. I do.
She remembers the cheese and reaches for the nearest tool and makes a decent stab. A piece snaps off and it’s in her mouth, a dry rock to suck on while she considers her state. Some minutes pass. Not good, I think, her state, though our blood won’t thicken after all, because the salt she’s eating she’ll need for her eyes, her cheeks. It pierces the child, to hear the mother cry. She’s confronting the unanswerable world she’s made, of all that she’s consented to, her new duties, which I need to list again – kill John Cairncross, sell his birthright, share the money, dump the kid. It should be me who weeps. But the unborn are po-faced stoics, submerged Buddhas, expressionless. We accept, as our lesser kith the wailing babies don’t, that tears are in the nature of things. Sunt lacrimae rerum. Infantile wailing entirely misses the point. Waiting is the thing. And thinking!
She’s recovered by the time we hear her lover in the hall, cursing as he disturbs the garbage with the outsized brogues she likes him to wear. (He has his own key. It’s my father who has to ring the bell.) Claude descends to the basement kitchen. The rustling sound is a plastic bag containing groceries or tools of death or both.
He notices at once her altered condition and says, ‘You’ve been crying.’
Not solicitude so much as a point of fact, or order. She shrugs and looks away. He takes from his bag a bottle, sets it down heavily where she can see the label.
‘A 2010 Cuvée le Charnay Menetou-Salon Jean-Max Roger. Remember? His father died in a plane crash.’
He speaks of the death of fathers.
‘If it’s cold and white I’ll like it.’
She’s forgotten. The restaurant where the waiter was slow to light the candle. She loved it then, and I loved it even more. Now, the withdrawn cork, the chink of glasses – I hope they’re clean – and Claude is pouring. I can’t say no.
‘Cheers!’ Her tone has quickly softened.
A top-up, then he says, ‘Tell me what it was.’
When she starts to speak her throat constricts. ‘I was thinking of our cat. I was fifteen. His name was Hector, a sweet old thing, the family’s darling, two years older than me. Black, with white socks and bib. I came home from school one day in a filthy mood. He was on the kitchen table where he wasn’t supposed to be. Looking for food. I gave him a whack that knocked him flying. His old bones landed with a crunch. After that he went missing for days. We put posters on trees and lamp posts. Then someone found him lying by a wall on a heap of leaves where he’d crept away to die. Poor, poor Hector, stiff as bone. I never said, I never dared, but I know it was me who killed him.’
Not her wicked undertaking then, not lost innocence, not the child she’ll give away. She begins to cry again, harder than before.
‘His time was almost up,’ Claude says. ‘You can’t know it was you.’
Sobbing now. ‘It was, it was. It was me! Oh God!’
I know, I know. Where did I hear it? – He kills his mother but he can’t wear grey trousers. But let’s be generous. A young woman, gut and breasts swollen to breaking, God-mandated pain looming, milk and shit to follow and sleepless trek through a new-found land of unenchanting duties, where brutal love will steal her life – and the ghost of an old cat softly stalks her in its socks, demanding revenge for its own stolen life.
Even so. The woman who’s coldly scheming to … in tears over … Let’s not spell it out.
‘Cats can be a bloody nuisance,’ Claude says with an air of helpfulness. ‘Sharpening their claws on the furniture. But.’
He has nothing antithetical to add. We wait until she’s cried herself dry. Then, time for a refill. Why not? A couple of slugs, a neutralising pause, then he rustles in his bag again, and a different vintage is in his hands. A gentler sound as he sets it down. The bottle is plastic.
This time Trudy reads the label but not aloud. ‘In summer?’
‘Antifreeze contains ethylene glycol, rather good stuff. I treated a neighbour’s dog with it once, oversized Alsatian, drove me mad, barking night and day. Anyway. No colour, no smell, pleasant taste, rather sweet, just the thing in a smoothie. Erm. Wrecks the kidneys, excruciating pain. Tiny sharp crystals slice the cells apart. He’ll stagger and slur like a drunk, but no smell of alcohol. Nausea, vomiting, hyperventilation, seizures, heart attack, coma, kidney failure. Curtains. Takes a while, as long as someone doesn’t mess things up with treatment.’
‘Leaves a trace?’
‘Everything leaves a trace. You have to consider the advantages. Easy to get hold of, even in summer. Carpet cleaner does the job but doesn’t taste as nice. A joy to administer. Goes down a treat. We just need to disassociate you from the moment when it does.’
‘Me? What about you?’
‘Don’t you worry. I’ll be disassociated.’
That wasn’t what my mother meant, but she lets it pass.
SIX