So He Takes the Dog. Jonathan Buckley

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СКАЧАТЬ seem happy, leaving the job aside for the moment. You and John. You seem very close. Not all couples are. Tell me if this is none of my business.’

      ‘Yes, we’re happy,’ Alice replied. ‘John?’

      ‘Happy. Confirmed.’

      ‘Good,’ said George, in full sagacious mode. Father of two teenaged girls, high-flying officer of the law, he drew a long breath and took a last sip of champagne before going on. ‘Look, it’s a terrific job, don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t do anything else. But the things that people are capable of doing to each other,’ he went on, directing a scowl at the floor. ‘I don’t think anything could surprise me any more. The madness that comes over people. The vicious idiocy. It’s unimaginable,’ he said, turning away, and he wandered off to find a fresh bottle.

      The words of this conversation are the gist of it, a reconstruction, not a copy, but those last three phrases were what was said by Detective Inspector Whittam, verbatim. He poured our drinks, chinked glasses. Smiling at the garden of his big new house, he said: ‘let me tell you about the day I lost my virginity.’

      For more than thirty years these two brothers had lived together, migrating from one pocket of slum accommodation to another in various east London locales before settling in a caravan in the breaker’s yard that they ran in Bethnal Green. In the evenings they drank together in a pub across the road from the yard. At six o’clock every evening they’d take their places at their table in the corner and there they would remain until eleven, downing pint after pint after pint, like drinking machines. You’d get a nod out of them, if you were lucky, and hardly a word passed between them. One night, though, they went home and had an argument, over a game of cards. Brother A brought the disagreement to a close by going to bed: his berth was at one end of the caravan and his sibling’s was at the other. While Brother A was asleep, Brother B came into his cubicle and struck him a few times – maybe twenty-five times – between the eyes, with a torque wrench. This done, Brother B closed the door and retired to bed, leaving the body of Brother A where it lay. Every evening, through September, October, November, December, Brother B went to the pub across the road. Silent as a bollard he sat next to the void that had been his brother’s place, and at night he went home to sleep in his bed, separated from the mouldering corpse by a few feet of space and a very thin wall. ‘Gone away,’ he replied, if anyone asked, and that was enough to satisfy anyone who could be bothered to enquire as to the whereabouts of the absent man. A few people noticed a smell hanging around the piles of car parts, a sewer smell that was emanating from the vicinity of the caravan, but hygiene had never been the brothers’ strong point and nobody was inclined to make an issue of it. So the remains of Brother A were left to dwindle undisturbed until Christmas Eve, when some unexplained mental event induced Brother B, as last orders were called, to mutter to the woman sitting at the next table, a woman who had never been in the pub before and just happened to be there because she was visiting her nephew and his new wife, ‘Get the police.’ Thinking they were in the presence of a psychiatric case, and a dangerous-looking psychiatric case at that, the woman edged away. ‘Get the police,’ he repeated, louder, and then he started shouting. ‘Get the fucking police. For fuck’s sake get the police.’ He burst into tears, but carried on drinking his pint until the police arrived.

      The detectives, young George Whittam among them, entered the caravan to find this thing that was halfway to being a mummy, dressed in brown pyjamas, lying on the foulest mattress in Western Europe. ‘It was really something special,’ George marvelled. ‘Most of him had drained away into the mattress, and there were so many dead flies, you could have filled a bath with them.’ We listened to his cautionary tale. He described the scene for us so vividly, with such relish: the stink when they opened the door; the brown mulch of a bed with the sticky rind of a corpse lying on it; the demented drunk man stamping on the heaps of flies as if it had been the insects that had killed his brother. We listened and we felt that we were almost there in the caravan with George Whittam, the young constable, as he stared at the bed and tried to stop the shake in his hand. But a case like the deranged brother must come along once in a decade, we told ourselves. There’s an element of bravado in the telling of the story too. ‘The man who looked on darkness and is not afraid,’ joked Alice afterwards, on our way home. And the brothers were from London, after all. London’s a different world. Life down here is more sedate. It’s not murder or GBH every day of the week. And the satisfactions of justice will outweigh whatever unpleasantness may lie in store. We can handle whatever happens. We love each other. We are happy.

      So the decision was made and the reaction to George Whittam’s warning was nothing more than a pause, a hesitancy that was soon overcome. But George was right. You can’t completely imagine it, and what it does to you is unimaginable – or, to be more precise, we didn’t imagine what it would do to us. When you deal with violence and its consequences every week, when every day you’re talking to people you know are lying to you, then perhaps it’s inevitable that you become a different person. In the beginning it’s a performance: you play the part of the hard man, the man with no illusions, the cynic. You learn quickly how it’s done. You observe and imitate, but at the outset there’s a difference between the role and the real person, between who you are being and who you are. Here’s a picture of a girl, can’t be older than eighteen, a prostitute, slashed so badly by her punter she was having to hold one side of her face in place when she crawled out of the park on her knees. ‘Poor kid,’ you say, and you pass the picture on without another word, but your eyes are prickling and you’re hoping that the bastard gets sentenced by a judge whose values come straight out of the rule book of Genghis Khan. A couple of years on there’s the blistered beetroot face of Evie Challoner, whose boyfriend has doused her with a kettleful of boiling water to make her ugly, so her ex-husband, who wants her back, won’t want her back any longer. At this you shake your head, and the weary shake of the head isn’t too far from representing what you feel, because the convulsion of pity isn’t there any more. ‘Christ,’ you mutter, and you get on with the work. In fact, you’re not so sure what you feel now. It’s as though you’ve spoken your character’s lines for so long that you’ve come to think like him, most of the time, and whenever you’re not thinking like him, when you get a pang, you wonder sometimes where it’s come from, if you’ve just slipped out of one character and into another one, the one you used to play all the time. And the home that Alice created and maintained, the pleasant and tranquil and orderly home environment, was intended to be something like a refuge for both of us. It was the place where life was restored to what was dependable and true, a place where the guises of working life were cast off, its contaminations rinsed away.

      By agreement we had a house rule: no shop talk in front of Luke. But from someone else he heard the story of the dead man on the beach, and one evening, on his way to bed, he stopped on the stairs and asked, ‘Why did someone kill that man?’ Sitting side by side on the top step, we talked about Henry for a while. ‘Why didn’t he have somewhere to live?’ he asked. ‘Who did it?’ He rested his chin on his knees, pondering his father’s less than entirely satisfactory answers, not frightened, it seemed, by the thought of the uncaught killer, but unhappy at the unfairness of homeless Henry’s death.

      It was half an hour or more before Alice came downstairs from Luke’s room. ‘He wanted me to stay,’ she said, taking food from the fridge. ‘It’s upset him.’ There was no sense that blame was being apportioned – there was never that, not until the day of judgement. Rather, it was as though we all had the misfortune to be living in a place with an unhealthy climate, or night-long noise outside. Over the meal there would have been some kind of conversation about Henry, a brief conversation, perhaps with a mention for Henry’s mysterious female companion, but there was nothing much to say about the case of Henry and by then it was understood that if nothing was offered, Alice would not enquire. Trusting her husband to do all that could be done, she would prepare the evening’s meal, watch the evening’s TV with him, and the following Sunday they would go to church together, where Alice would pray and think about Henry’s soul, in the belief or the hope that all will be well, that in the end – if not on this earth – the innocent will СКАЧАТЬ