Читать книгу The Execution - Hugo Wilcken - Страница 9

I was in my car, on the way to a meeting in a Park Lane hotel. As I rounded Marble Arch the traffic slowly ground to a halt. It was hot; I wound down the window and gazed out at the arch. The air shimmered with the heat rising off the cars, like trees trembling in the breeze. I was thinking about that last time I’d been caught up at this same spot, a week ago, with Christian beside me – silent and stiff as he stared ahead in some kind of trance. I recalled reading somewhere that Marble Arch was where people used to be hanged, back in the seventeenth or eighteenth century.

A hotel porter showed me to a top-floor suite with sweeping views over Hyde Park. Three black guys were sitting around a conference table. Two of them were dressed in identical black suits, as if they’d just come back from a funeral. They were members of Renouveau National, Jarawa’s party. They fled the country at the time of Jarawa’s arrest. Now they’re on a tour of world capitals, to drum up support. The third, a gaunt-looking man, was in an ill-fitting jacket without a tie. A white woman was there as well. She was on her feet, talking animatedly and gesticulating, then she abruptly fell silent as I was shown in. A couple of mobile phones lay ostentatiously on the table; beside them was a shiny brochure. I recognised the name on the cover: it was a company Jamie had been looking into, in relation to the African arms trade. One of the Renouveau National guys waved his hand and without looking up said: ‘Later, later. I told you not to disturb us.’

The porter showed me into a side room just off the suite. I could still hear the white woman speaking, with occasional interjections from one of the African guys, but it was hard to make out the words. After a while I gave up trying. Scattered over the floor of the room I was in were piles of new clothes and shopping bags from Knightsbridge boutiques. As I stared at an expensive-looking suit hanging up behind the door, a dream I’d had the night before came back to me. It was about Jarawa. He was at my door in his three-piece suit, pleading with me to pardon him and let him go. I explained that it wasn’t me who’d sentenced him but he wouldn’t believe me. A horrible sense of guilt had begun to take hold as it dawned on me that perhaps he was right …

A door opened. There was the sound of laughter. The woman was saying: ‘Well you know, we’ll talk about this again,’ then I could hear the soft ping of the lift doors. I got up and walked through to the main suite. The two guys in suits were in a huddle, talking in low voices. The other man sat apart, staring blankly out the window. There was something about his long face but what it was didn’t click at first, not until we’d finished with the introductions. The man had remained wordless as he shook my hand but his eyes had that same uncomfortable ferocity as his cousin’s.

I quickly ran through the campaign presentation. It started with what Jamie termed ‘our coup’ – the agreement with the other human rights agencies to co-ordinate efforts under my supervision. I’d already given this same presentation to a group of Labour MPs that morning and a feeling of disengagement invaded me as I mechanically repeated the words. I talked about our media strategy before moving on to lobbying, intelligence then finally Jarawa’s appeal.

I noticed that no one was really paying any attention to me. One guy sat fiddling with his mobile phone and looking at his watch while the other flicked through the brochure the woman had left. Jarawa’s cousin still sat apart, not looking at me, not looking at the others, just staring out over a Hyde Park already drenched in summer colours. I stopped speaking for a moment and the two guys in suits glanced up at me almost for the first time. I said I thought the best thing would be to organise a press briefing as soon as possible, for tomorrow afternoon perhaps, with all three of them present. Maybe it would make the greatest impact if Jarawa’s cousin spoke …

One of the other guys let out a huge guffaw: ‘He doesn’t speak English! He hardly even speaks French!’

Jarawa’s cousin looked briefly to the other two men as they sniggered then turned back to the window. It was obvious that he knew he was being talked about but his face exuded a prisoner’s passivity. There was something of Christian’s hangdog look about him too. I remembered the interview with Jarawa I’d read in the library the other day, with that story about the mongol kid. It had stuck in the back of my mind for some reason. Did Jarawa’s cousin know this story as well? Did he too remember the child? I would have liked to ask him, if there was any way I could.

That evening the phone rang while I was reading Jessica a bedtime story. Marianne was in the garden so I got up to answer it, with Jessica pulling at my shirt. Before I even picked up the receiver though, somehow I knew it was Christian and I had this visceral desire not to talk to him. I just felt it wouldn’t be good for me.

He sounded pretty desperate, even more so than the other day when he left that message for me at work. I could hear pub sounds in the background and his speech was slurred. I can’t understand a word you’re saying, I said, just calm down and speak slowly. I have to see you tonight, he said, there’s something I have to tell you.

‘I don’t know. It’s not really practical right now. Maybe we can see each other later on in the week.’

‘Later on in the week? I have to see you tonight. I’m in London. I can come round and see you at home. You won’t have to move, I’ll come to your house.’

‘No, where are you? I’ll come and meet you.’

I didn’t want to see Christian but on the other hand he couldn’t come round here. For a start, I’d have to explain to Marianne about that day – the day I identified Susan Tedeschi’s body I mean. I never told her about it. I never told anybody, I don’t know why.

He gave me the name of a pub in Camden so I said I’d be there in an hour or so. I hung up and went back to Jessica’s room. She was sort of dozing, lying crosswise on the bed, so I straightened her out, tucked her in, switched on the lamp on the chest of drawers and turned out the main light. But she woke up and called out to me tearfully. I sat down on the bed and put her on my knee. ‘What’s up,’ I said, ‘is it that monster again?’

‘It’s not a monster. It’s a man, I told you before, the man with the mask … Look what he’s done to Teddy!’

She reached down and picked up the teddy bear off the floor, I had to hold her round the waist so she didn’t fall off my knee. She was getting all worked up.

‘See? See?’

The teddy bear’s head is stitched onto its body, and the stitching had come loose and undone in parts. The head crooked to one side in a slightly macabre way. ‘See? Look what he’s trying to do to me too!’ She proffered her neck to me. I examined it carefully. ‘A mark,’ she said, ‘a red mark. Can’t you see it?’

I couldn’t see it. Jessica was making it up. I put her back to bed and tucked her in: ‘If that’s all the man with the mask can do then I wouldn’t worry too much about him.’

I was hungry and I’d thought about taking Christian out to dinner, but as soon as I caught sight of him in the pub I realised there was no chance of that. His face had undergone a remarkable transformation since I’d last seen him. It looked sunken, wrecked, as if it were about to slide off his skull or something. He’d always seemed younger than his age and all of a sudden he looked older, much older. His eyes were drowned and glassy. He’d obviously been drinking for some time and he stared up at me in puzzlement: ‘You’re here!’

I bought a beer and when I got back to the table Christian had pulled himself together a little. He was grinning strangely and putting on a show of small-talk normality: ‘And how are things going on the Jarawa campaign?’

‘It’s moving along … had a strange meeting today … I’m seeing the ambassador tomorrow … some military guy. I’m amazed he agreed to meet me … Jo’s doing well – did you see her on Newsnight?’

‘No. I don’t watch too much TV these days.’

‘She’s doing a fantastic job.’

‘Great. Fantastic.’

I sipped at my beer and gazed around the pub. There wasn’t a single woman in it. It was one of those depressing places with dark wood, worn varnish and greasy green carpets that give off an odour of beer, cigarettes and urine – exactly the kind of place solitary men go to get drunk.

‘You weren’t at the funeral.’

‘No, I wasn’t. I’m sorry.’

‘No need to apologise. I’m no fan of graveyard scenes either.’ He laughed bleakly and stared at his pint glass. I wondered momentarily if he’d gone mad but didn’t say anything. His mind seemed to drift off: ‘You know when I was young, six or seven years old, we had a little house in the country and it was on the road to a graveyard … I’ll never forget the sight of those coffins being hauled along. It was like a scene from the Middle Ages …’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

There was a long pause while I tried to think of something to say, but I couldn’t. Christian seemed lost in his memories: ‘I remember that house in the country. I remember a forest behind it where I once found a hedgehog. I caught it and stuck it in a box. I didn’t really know what to do with it though so I just left it there, in the box under my bed – for weeks maybe – until Mum started complaining about the smell. So one evening I opened the lid. Inside was this horrible greenish brown slime. Just the slime and the spines. I can still remember the smell.’

A raucous laugh broke out from a table at the other side of the pub and several of the solitary drinkers standing at the bar glanced up from their drinks.

‘Listen Christian. For Christ’s sake. You’ve got to pull yourself together.’

Christian stared at me wildly: ‘Well I can’t just pull myself together. I can’t just pull myself together. Jesus!’

I forced myself to continue: ‘Look … you need help, you need to open yourself up to help, a doctor, a counsellor, whatever …’

He cut me off: ‘You don’t know the half of it. Not the half of it.’ He sat musing and playing with the beer mat. ‘I have no means of escape. I have to confront myself at every moment. My life is a mirror I’m not allowed to look away from. If I was an alcoholic I could drink my way through it. Drink my way to the other end. I forced myself to drink tonight because I knew I was meeting you but normally I can’t do it.’

I shook my head: ‘This is getting you absolutely nowhere. I’ll get a cab down to Paddington with you. I’ll put you on a train home.’

He didn’t seem to hear me though: ‘The worst is not what you think. The worst is not even that we loved each other. It was that Susan … Susan and me …’

‘Susan was being unfaithful to you.’

Christian looked up at me, genuinely surprised: ‘How did you know?’

‘I didn’t know. I guessed. Is that what you got me up here to tell me?’

‘No.’ We drank in silence for a while, then Christian started rambling on about his wife: ‘She met a guy, a younger guy, your age. It was absurd. I didn’t know at first, I didn’t have a clue. Anyway Susan got careless, or maybe she wanted me to find out … I heard her talking on the phone one day when she must have known I was there. Later I looked through her things and found a letter, just lying there, not hidden or anything. I couldn’t believe it. So I confronted her with the letter and she admitted it. I still couldn’t believe it. She said she loved me but that things had got stale. She needed to get this out of her system and all that crap. She didn’t want to leave me, not at that point anyway. I should’ve left her there and then but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the strength.

‘Life went on. The only difference was that I knew everything now, I knew that when she wasn’t home with me she was fucking this other guy. In a way it made it much easier for Susan, everything being out in the open like that. She didn’t have to hide anything any more, she didn’t have to go through the hassle of secret rendezvous. She could even sleep over at this guy’s place now, when before she had to come home every night.

‘I should’ve left her as soon as I found out. If I’d left her then, she’d have come banging at my door. She’d have come back to me eventually and I could have made my choice. She wasn’t in love with this other guy. She thought she wanted me but when I didn’t dump her, when she saw what I was willing to put up with, she knew I was weak. Then near the end, I could see I’d lost her. Not because of the other guy, but I’d lost her anyway. She became dismissive of me. She’d grown stronger. I couldn’t contemplate her leaving me though. I couldn’t contemplate her being alive and not being with me …’

Christian was speaking in a low, robotic voice. I shook my head again: ‘I don’t want to hear any more. I don’t want to know these personal things.’ He stopped, looked quizzically up at me, then continued talking. I interrupted: ‘I said I didn’t want to hear. I don’t want to hear it!’ I was almost shouting. I was upset, I don’t know why. Christian just stared at me in amazement and there was an uneasy minute or two of silence.

Eventually I said: ‘Look, I’m sorry. I’d like to help out but I honestly can’t see what I can do.’

‘You do know what you can do.’ His stare was unnervingly direct: ‘You’re scared of me. Why are you scared of me?’

‘I’m not scared of you, for Christ’s sake.’ I looked away in irritation. ‘I’ll get a cab with you to the station.’

‘There aren’t any more trains tonight. They’re doing work on the line. The last one went at nine.’

‘To the coach station then.’

Christian put his hand to his chin and kind of slumped in his chair. In the intensity of the encounter I’d forgotten how drunk he actually was. Suddenly, whatever menace he might have posed to me seemed to vanish, to disappear so completely that I wondered just what it was that had upset me in the first place.

Outside, the drizzle had cleared and the wet city glistened in the street light. Christian seemed to have developed a stoop since I’d last seen him, or perhaps it was the drink. He kept up a wandering monologue as we walked down Camden High Street: ‘There’d been a chance maybe … we’d shared a bed but I couldn’t … I hadn’t …’

I’d changed my mind about the coach station. I remembered a hotel nearby. I’d once spent a night there with a Brazilian woman I’d met in a Soho bar, years ago. In the morning she’d packed her bags and I’d driven her to Heathrow to catch her plane to São Paulo. I could still remember her face and the nakedness of her smile, so different from an Englishwoman’s smile.

The reception area was grimly functional and deserted, except for an unshaven Indian-looking guy behind the desk, watching football on a tiny black-and-white television. I got out my wallet but Christian waved his hand: ‘Don’t be absurd.’ He went through his pockets and fished out a ten-pound note: ‘What the hell have I done with my Visa?’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

I paid for the room and gave Christian some money for breakfast and to get home with in the morning. Then just as I was about to leave, he seemed to sober up a bit and suddenly came over all apologetic. He said he was really sorry for doing this to me, that he felt humiliated. It’s all right, I said, ring me when you’ve sorted things out a bit.

‘Yes, I’ll ring you. I need to talk to you. I’ll send you a cheque.’ Then when I’d already left and was on the footpath he appeared at the hotel window and shouted out again: ‘I’ll ring you! I’ll ring you!’

People were spilling out of pubs, talking loudly about where they were going next or how they were getting home. In a way I felt bad about leaving Christian in a hotel, but then on the other hand I was also relieved to be rid of him. I remembered that I hadn’t eaten yet and I was still hungry: it was getting on though, and I wondered whether restaurant kitchens would still be open. Then I had another idea. Charlotte lived just around the corner.

I found the art deco block Charlotte’s flat is in and pressed her button on the intercom: the door buzzed open before I had time to say who I was. I could see her peering down at me as I climbed the stairs, sizing me up like a club bouncer: ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ She’d messily pulled a jumper over her underwear and a television blared in the background.

Charlotte let me in then disappeared into the bedroom. I poured some wine and helped myself to the cold pasta salad on the dinner table. As I ate, my mind drifted back to the meeting I’d had with the people from Renouveau National. I remembered one of the men smiling at me and saying: ‘Well you know, politics in our country is a dangerous business.’ I’d replied: ‘But what’s at issue is not the death of one man … not one man, do you see?’ It was only now that I realised I’d unconsciously used Christian’s words, from the day his wife had died.

Charlotte was talking to someone on the phone in the bedroom but I could only catch snippets of what she was saying: ‘… no, really, I’m tired tonight … I wouldn’t be any fun … yeah I’ll see you tomorrow night … you too.’ She threw open the bedroom door. She’d put on some make-up and a pretty pink shirt with a flower pattern: ‘It’s good to see you and everything but don’t ever just turn up here again unannounced. OK?’

We had some wine and a late supper and chatted idly. After a while we started kissing across the table, then we lay down on the sofa and continued talking, laughing, kissing, joking around. At the same time I was kind of playing with the buttons of her shirt, undoing them slowly, waiting for the conversation to dissolve.

We’d been talking about our jobs and at one point Charlotte said: ‘What’s your real ambition in life? What’s the one thing you want to do before you die?’

‘I’m aiming for immortality.’

‘No seriously, what’s your ambition? What do you want to do with your life?’

I stopped messing about for a moment and sat up. ‘I don’t know … an international posting … the UN, maybe Paris, maybe UNESCO … I want to move on, move up, pretty soon.’

‘So does everyone. What I mean is, isn’t there something that engrosses you, something you must achieve?’

‘I don’t have that kind of ambition.’ I thought again. ‘There are things … there’s the campaign I told you about …’

‘You mean the guy they’re going to execute?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So it’s your job after all. That’s your real interest, your job.’

‘No. I couldn’t give a damn about my job.’

We were silent for a moment. Somehow the atmosphere had changed.

Eventually I said: ‘I had this strange encounter just now,’ and then I found myself telling Charlotte about meeting up with Christian.

When I finished, Charlotte lit a cigarette and said: ‘Let me get this straight. A friend rings you up. He wants to talk to you about his wife’s death, presumably he wants a bit of emotional support. So you end up dumping him in a hotel round the corner?’

‘He’s not a friend. He’s just a colleague.’

‘So what? He’s a human being, isn’t he?’

‘I didn’t want the sordid details. I didn’t want to know about his wife screwing some other guy.’

‘Why not? Too close to home?’

I didn’t say anything for a while. Charlotte stared at me defiantly.

I said: ‘Why are you seeing me? What’s in it for you?’

‘Why am I fucking you, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does it matter? I like the way you look. I like your face. I like your body.’

‘That’s all there is to it? I’m some kind of sex object?’

‘Why not?’

She looked at me with amusement as she did up the buttons I’d undone on her shirt. I got up off the couch.

‘I’ve got to go. Thanks for dinner. Shall I give you a call sometime during the week?’

‘Why not?’

I kissed her on the forehead and she said: ‘Give my regards to Marianne.’ I could hear her switching the TV back on as I walked down the stairs to the main entrance.

I got a cab home. It was Monday night and apart from a few other cabs there was hardly any traffic on the streets. London looked shabby and beautiful in its enormous emptiness, like a vast illuminated scrubland. I thought about Charlotte then I thought about Christian and his dead hedgehog. A childhood memory returned to me of a summer in the country. My cousin Peter had constructed a crossbow and we’d gone to the nearby woods and killed a rabbit – I can still recall its jerky, struggling death. I hadn’t thought about my childhood for a long time. I had the sensation it was something that had in fact happened to someone else, and not to me at all.

The bedroom door was shut but the light was still on. I didn’t go in immediately, though. Instead I went to the little room we use as an office, on the other side of the house. We’ve got a filing cabinet in there, for documents to do with the house, tax returns, birth certificates, that kind of stuff. There are also files full of Marianne’s personal stuff, although I’d never looked at them before. That’s what I wanted to look at now. Seeing Christian had given me stupid ideas.

Everything was arranged tidily: a file for old letters, a file for exhibition programmes, a file for this, a file for that. There were essays she’d written as a student in that typically rounded French handwriting. There were notebooks too, clearly labelled 1998, 1999, 2000, etc. They looked like diaries. I’d never known she’d kept a diary, never seen one about the house. I flicked through the one for last year. Some of the entries were in French, some in English, some a mix of the two. I read a few at random. Mostly they were about her work: ‘Big canvas. Thought I might move on to love but no it seems I’m stuck with this fear.’ There were notes about Jessica’s development: ‘Her linguistic skills different in French and English. English vocabulary wider but grasp of grammatical structure not as good as in French.’ I skimmed through to find any mention of me but in vain. I noticed that she’d marked every third or fourth entry with an asterisk. I wondered what that meant.