Читать книгу The Museum Of Doubt - James Meek - Страница 5

When I see Arnold I remember the woman who could walk. I think about Jenny too of course, not that she looked anything like her dad. I haven’t seen her for a long time now. That was why I stopped the woman who could walk, to find out when the healing would be over and Jenny would come out. I didn’t go inside. I had nothing that needed healing then. Nothing that you would stand up and say you believed in Jesus for, or that you’d know if you’d been healed of. Praise the Lord! I can love the ones I didn’t love before, and stop loving the ones that didn’t love me! Hallelulia! I walked up to the hall entrance slowly, early, and I was reading the curved red letters on freshpasted white paper about Pastor Samuel’s Ark of Salvation when the woman who could walk walked out. I knew she could walk because she told me. She was big and mobile in skirt and sweater and her hands stuck in the pockets of her open raincoat which was flying behind her in the warm wind over the car park, her face was white and her mouth slightly open and she was staring straight ahead. She had a crutch tucked under her right arm. I had to catch her by the elbow to stop her.

Excuse me, d’you know how much longer it’s going on? I said.

She stopped, one foot lifted, balanced by my hand resting on her elbow – it was a soft, round elbow – and looked at me long enough to say: I can walk! before she walked, then ran, to her car and drove away. It was a straight slip road to the M8, a busy enough evening with no roadworks, and as far as I could understand from the paper next morning it happened within a couple of minutes of her merging with the flow that the juggernaut swung easily through the barriers and hit her car head on, with a combined speed of 150 miles per hour. I suppose Pastor Samuel might have said Well, I healed her, so the least she could’ve done was to have stayed to the end of the meeting. Now she walks, nay drives, with the Lord.

I was concerned for myself. I kept her back for half a second and the juggernaut hit her. In half a second a truck moving at 70 miles an hour travels its own length twice – that’s what Arnold told me when I shared this with him, a free sample. From her side she could have avoided the truck by being more polite. We were both in the wrong. I suffered by not knowing I’d have to wait quarter of an hour for Jenny to come out. The woman who could walk suffered by being conscious for at least 30 seconds of the sensation of the destruction of her body by an oncoming lorry (spontaneous Arnoldism.) Usually when I think about the woman who walked the thought is: I didn’t summon up the juggernaut, did I. You don’t guess the instant when northbound and southbound collide, like a single bolt of lightning. Only when I see Arnold I think about how maybe everything is equalled out in the end, not in a good way, and how easy it is to summon up an irresistible opposing force, after all.

What Siobhan said this one time, and the tenner pointing at my empty tumbler was sharp and fresh as a new razor, was even more ominous than Arnold lurking round the pub as he was: Same one again? she said. Not Same again? but Same one again?

Ah, better not, last ferry and all. I looked down into the glass and dodgemed the sleek humps of ice around the bottom. The unnecessary One hung in the air.

Go on, said Siobhan. You sold a house today, didn’t you? Take a cab.

I sell a house most days. I sold one yesterday.

It was a big one, you said.

It was a big one. I felt like rewarding myself with a third g & t. But the taxis skin you for a ferry trip and it’s no better picking up a second one on the other side.

I can’t drive after three, I said.

Take a cab. Two gin and tonics please, she said. She’d seen the weakness in my face and got the order out the way so we could argue about it over a drink.

I don’t want to take a cab, I said, looking over at Arnold sitting by himself at the table by the cigarette machine. He was working, he had the yellow pad out in front of him. He turned and smiled at me. I looked at Siobhan.

It’s not the money, I said. I don’t like being screwed. I’ve got to take the car across. I’ve got a season ticket.

Well drive then, she said, holding the two glasses out in front of her.

But I can’t if I have a third drink, I said. I took one of the glasses from her.

Don’t drink it, she said.

I won’t, I said, and took a mouthful of the stuff and swallowed it down.

You’re so weak, she said, smiling and touching her earring.

You make it sound as if that’s good.

Oh, I love weak men.

So how do I get home?

I’ll give you a lift back.

I was very happy. It was easy to make me happy. Maybe I’d have four drinks and all in Siobhan’s company, and a free ride all the way to Kirkcaldy on the big white ship. There’d be time for one on the moon deck bar on the way over and we could sit there studying the constellations, talking. I was grinning too much too close into Siobhan’s heroic delighted face and turned again to Arnold. We smiled at each other and waved. I raised my glass to him. He raised his. It looked like water.

Great, I said to Siobhan. In the rush of it I almost said I love you, not meaning it like that, but instead said: Why did you say Same one again?

Confusion sluiced darkly into her face.

You said Same one again instead of Same again.

Did I?

Yes.

She looked into the middle distance, frowning, quiet for a while. So what? she said eventually.

I took a deep drink and went under, groping for something good.

We’re like sister and brother, you and me, I said.

She looked at me without saying anything for a few seconds, then put her drink in my free hand. Arnold’ll give you a lift, she said, and walked out the door.

I finished my gin, sat on a bar stool and started in on hers, raising the side without lipstick to my mouth, turning it to the side with lipstick. It tasted pretty much the same. I was watching Arnold. He was scribbling away with a pencil. The bar was full but the only person I knew was Arnold, sober as an ayatollah and his car parked outside.

Once there was a group of merchants who returned to the borders of the empire after months spent crossing the great wilderness. Everyone wanted to know what it had been like. Och, it was all right, the merchants said. Hot deserts of course, cold mountains, wet jungle – still, we made it.

Folk listened to them politely, clapped them on the back and drifted back to their affairs. Some time later another group of merchants arrived. The locals gathered round – what was it like? Incredible, the merchants answered. Absolutely unbelievable. It was so hot that the beaks of the vultures would soften and fuse together and they would die of starvation if they were careless enough to close them. It was so cold that we had to breathe on each other’s eyes every five minutes to stop our eyeballs freezing solid. It was so wet that a cup held out would fill with rain faster than a man could drink it.

A huge crowd gathered round the second group of merchants, stood them drinks for a year, offered them their daughters in marriage and secured them pensions for life.

Arnold was making a good living on the discovery that folk hungered after apocryphal facts like drinkers hunger after salty snacks. He had a name. The editors would ring him up: Death Valley, Arn, they’d say, give me ten by six. And he’d sit around and write: In Death Valley in August, you can toss an ice cube in the air and it will have melted before you can catch it. Nine more like that. Or: Dead composers this week mate, say a dozen. And he’d write: If the Italian composer Vivaldi was alive, he would be the richest man on the planet, earning an estimated £1 million a minute from royalties on the use of The Four Seasons on telephone switchboards. The secret lay in the utter lack of research and confidence that anyone who could be bothered to challenge his published facts would be rejected as a nitpicking wanker. Besides, whenever one of his jobs appeared, it was so quickly plagiarised that it immediately took on the veracity of gospel – more so, in fact, since every second of every day somewhere in the world an average of 6.5 people challenges the authenticity of the New Testament (6.5 – what Arnold calls the precision principle in successful apocrypha) whereas no-one, not even the Vatican, had ever taken the trouble to complain about Arnold’s assertion that, for liturgical reasons, the Pope never flies in aircraft that can land on water.

He never said but I reckon it was something about the six months he did for dangerous driving that got him on the apocrypha thing. He’d been terrified of getting beaten up or abused or whatever in jail and tried to keep in with the authorities on both sides by writing pornographic stories to order. And maybe after a while the sex fantasies began to fray and it began to show that there was a hunger for something else, tiny legends of a world outside, and he began to slip them in: that it wasn’t just the smooth slender bodies twining over the sheet which got the screws and lifers going but the insistence in parenthesis that the ancient Egyptians had abandoned goat-hair duvets for duck-down ones when they discovered the aphrodisiac qualities of the now extinct Nilotic eider.

Almost everyone had been amazed he got sent down, he was so middle class, even the advocate was embarrassed, he hurried away afterwards and didn’t speak to anyone. I wasn’t surprised, though. Arnold was a dangerous driver. He’s a dangerous driver now. Whatever they did to him in prison, it didn’t change his overtaking habits. It was a gamble on a blind summit and he lost, collided with a car full of students from England. He killed two of them. Arnold went into an airbag but his wife in the passenger seat didn’t have one. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. Perhaps she’d been as unhappy as that. I don’t know. Anyway she went through the windscreen head-first. Straight away you imagine it happening in slow motion but it doesn’t, of course, you don’t see it like that any more than you see the flight of a shell from a gun. There’s a loud noise and in an instant, like a badly edited film, it jumps, it’s all arranged across the road, perfectly, peacefully, the broken cars, the glass, the bodies and the wheels spinning slowly.

Arnold was 36, same as me. His wife died about the time my divorce came through. Since the trial he’d seen even less of Jenny than I had. She didn’t think he’d killed her deliberately, no-one did. Before the accident Jenny said she liked the way he drove. Afterwards she didn’t hate her father: nothing so passionate. She went off him. She’d just started at art college and got a flat and never went round to see him any more, in jail or out. When they paroled him I expected him to take to drink, I don’t know why. He went teetotal and as soon as he got his licence back he was driving worse than before. That’s to say he was a good driver, very skillful, but always found a way to drive that was out beyond the edges of his skill and relied on luck to fill the space between.

I’d left my watch at home. The clock above the bar said 10.25 and the last boat was at 11. Someone told me that the landlord always set the clock ten minutes fast, so that left a good three quarters of an hour to get to Queensferry. You couldn’t rely on Arnold to use that time well, though. Of course everyone ran the risk that they might die on their way home from the pub. A loose slate might fall on their heads, or they might have a heart attack, get stabbed. What else could happen? There could be an earthquake. A predator could escape from the zoo. A predator could escape from his mates. But the chances were infinitessimal. It wasn’t something you thought about: Better watch on my way home from the pub in case I get killed. Driving with Arnold it was. Even if the chances of death doubled at the third decimal place, you wouldn’t put money on it, there was only one life. To have four gin and tonics and then go out the door thinking and now, perhaps, the afterlife, now, even before morning.

Arnold was coming over. Need a lift? he said.

No thanks.

He nodded at the door. I don’t think Siobhan’s coming back. Did you say something?

Yes.

Arnold jiggled his car keys. Last boat at 11, he said.

I’ll get a cab.

Come on.

No really Arnie, it’s great of you, I appreciate it, but I’m fine, I’m doing all right, taxis are good, they’re cheap, they’re reliable, they’re fast. Fast enough, I mean. Not too – yeah, fast enough. Don’t want to have you going out of your way.

He looked hurt. He fidgeted with his keys and looked around. He did seem astoundingly calm and sober for an Edinburgh pub on a Friday night. Con, he said, I don’t understand you. We’ve been drinking in this place for the past two years and we both know where we go at closing time. It’s not like we’re strangers. What is the deal with these taxis? D’you not get embarrassed when you’re getting out of the cab on the quayside and you see me driving up the ramp? D’you think I avoid the moon deck bar on a Friday night cause I like the Stoker’s Lounge better?

I had wondered about that. My face went the colour of the carpet in the Stoker’s Lounge. It’d been stupid to think he hadn’t noticed me trying to avoid him on the boat all this time.

I’m sorry, Arnie, I said. I don’t like the way you drive.

I hadn’t meant to say that. Anyway, he was alive, was he not?

I know, said Arnold. But I’m more careful now.

No you’re not. I’ve seen the way you go down the Queensferry Road.

That’s just the way it looks. That is me being careful. I don’t hit anything. I never hit anything. I make sure now. I’ve made sure ever since that time. It’s a science, it’s dynamics. Anyway, there’s plenty of time, there’s no need to hurry.

The clock said 10.35, i.e. 10.25, so he was right, there was plenty of time. And even though I’d seen him shoot past and slot his car at 60 through a space you wouldn’t try to park in, I’d never actually driven with him.

If you’re so worried about the taxi, said Arnold, you can give me a fiver if you like. He grinned.

A fiver? To Queensferry? I could get to Inverness on a fiver. And still have money left over for a deep-fried Brie supper and a chilled Vimto.

Make it ten then.

We went out to the car. We hadn’t got there before he’d hit me with some new apocrypha which might’ve made me change my mind if I hadn’t been thinking along the same lines, so much that I was hardly aware he’d said it.

The dice you’d need to roll to reflect the chances of your being involved in a car accident on any one trip, he said, would have so many faces that without a powerful microscope it would be indistinguishable from a perfect sphere.

What was that? I said, fastening the seatbelt. He repeated it while he started the car.

Bet you didn’t sell that to News International, I said.

No. I just thought of that one. It’s not for sale.

Private apocrypha, eh.

He didn’t say anything. That didn’t bother me because I was looking at the digital clock on his dashboard. We were out on the road and moving. Arnold was driving at just under the speed limit in built-up areas. Cars were passing us. The clock said 10.35.

Your clock’s wrong, I said.

I know, he said.

Right.

They were going to change the name to Kingsferry, said Arnold. In honour of the king who died falling off the cliff, you know, trying to catch the boat late at night.

That’s not such a good one, Arnie. Don’t think you’d get far with that.

It’s true! I’m off work now. No apocrypha in my free time. It’s true.

Why would they call it Kingsferry? They didn’t start calling Dallas Dead Presidentville after Kennedy got shot there.

Because that’s what it’s about. It’s not about folk crossing the river.

It is as far as I’m concerned. They could call them South Ferry Ferry and North Ferry Ferry and that’d make sense to me.

No, Con, said Arnold, turning to look at me, and even though we were still trundling along at 30, I wanted him to turn back and keep his eyes on the road. He looked worried for me, as if I was about to go out alone into the world without the things I needed to know to survive. If it was about folk crossing the river there’d be a bridge. A Forth road bridge. They could easily build one. It’d be open round the clock and no-one would ever have to be racing to get the last boat again.

We’re not racing, though, ’cause we’ve got plenty of time.

OK, but folk do. And they’re supposed to be all into public safety. I tell you what it is, it’s put there deliberately. It’s a deliberate exception. Because they know you can’t resist it. You want it. You want a place in the country where you can be provoked into taking a risk without going out and looking for it too hard.

No you don’t.

You do Con. You know you do. There just aren’t enough real risks on the go, and you don’t want to go rock climbing or bungee jumping or kayaking, cause you’re getting on, and it’s too much trouble, and they take all the risk out of it anyway, it’s like a fairground ride, and you don’t want to go out looking for a fight, and violence in the pictures is just a wank … so you sit in the pub and you wait until you’re about to miss the ferry.

Don’t talk this way, Arnie, it’s not good.

It’s not that you want to die. You want to live. More than anything, you want to live, you want to have even just the next five minutes of your life, never mind seeing the sun come up again. Only there’s something that comes in between wanting one and wanting the other, it’s like a separation, you start believing two different things at the same time, that if you die, it’d be the end, and that you can die without actually dying. That you can watch it. That you can do it again. That it’d be interesting. You really believe that. It’s strange. I don’t understand it. D’you understand it?

A horn opened up behind us and headlights flared through the rear windscreen. The car behind pulled out sharply and overtook with a roar of contempt. Our speed had dropped to 25. So far the only way we were going to die tonight was getting spannered by a fellow motorist. I wanted to talk about going faster. I wanted to talk about what happened to Arnold’s wife. I didn’t want to upset him.

I’m not into the risk, I said. I was really wanting to get a lift with Siobhan and sit with her in the moon deck bar in the big white ship and go home.

Arnold didn’t say anything. I hadn’t thought it was possible to drive any slower in high gear but it seemed we were slipping back to about bicycle pace. I remembered he’d been after Siobhan just after he’d got out, and I remembered he’d been sitting down there in the yeasty fug of the Stoker’s Lounge for two years while we’d been up there watching the lights of passing ships through the rain on the glass roof and the moon wax and wane over the flint-coloured water of the firth.

We passed the Kwik-Fit garage. I turned round to check the time on the digital clock they had.

Arnie, I said. Let’s talk about time.

Despite his mastery of the laws of space and time, said Arnold, Albert Einstein never owned a watch and relied on friends to tell him what year it was.

When we left the pub it was 10.25 by the clock, I said, which was ten minutes fast, so it was 10.15. Your clock said 10.35, but you agreed that was wrong.

Stonehenge tells the time more accurately than the most sophisticated atomic clock.

The Kwik-Fit clock we’ve just passed says 10.50.

The landlord of the Faulkner Arms always sets his clock 10 minutes fast to make sure none of his customers misses the last boat to Fife.

Christ, was it you told me that?

I didn’t think you’d believe that one, said Arnold. He’s a landlord, isn’t he? His clock’s slow. So’s mine.

I looked around. Accurate timekeeping by: Kwik-Fit. Arnold’s car had central locking, controlled from the driver’s seat. Traffic was shooting past. I had the impression we were standing still. But we must have been going at least as fast as a strong freestyle swimmer. Ten minutes to cover seven miles. Not at this rate. Siobhan would be on board already. She was great but it upset her that all I wanted to do was talk to her and loiter in her presence for as long as she happened to be around. She wanted love, or sex, or both, I wasn’t sure, which made it strange she’d put up with me for so long. One time we did come across Arnold on the big white ship, just when Siobhan was crying over something I’d said. There are people who treat crying as like sighing or yawning but I hate it, it’s a catastrophe. Once when I was wee there was a primary school trip to the city reservoir and we were walking along the foot of the dam wall and I saw some drops of water dribbling down the concrete by my head and I screamed to the teacher that the dam was about to burst. Everyone laughed and the teacher, who never missed an opportunity for a bit of child-battering, gave me a thump on the back of the head. I was relieved. I really had thought the dam was going to burst. What got me wasn’t so much the thought of all of us and Mrs Swynton getting swept away by a wall of water but the chest-hollowing innocence of the first little driblets, the inadequacy of the warning they were of the thousands of tons of dark, cold, merciless water pressing against the concrete. They did warn you, but they told you nothing of how deep and overwhelming their source was. I hadn’t cried since I was a boy. That was something I could have asked Pastor Samuel about.

Arnold had tried to comfort her. It’d been terrible. She kept coming up against not liking him as much as she felt she should and he kept coming up against the fucking apocrypha every time something more than inane pleasantries were called for. He hadn’t been like that before. When I heard him telling her, instead of not to pay any attention to the crap I’d said, that 60 per cent of single women in their thirties were in stable relationships by the time they were forty, the thought of him scribbling away about fantasy women in his cell, struggling to meet some deadline for fear he’d get his head kicked in, and getting infected with the spores of instant harmless wee fictions for instant meaningless wee rewards, almost set me going without the pastor’s help.

We were quiet up to the city boundary, him crawling along, leaning back in the seat, one hand on the wheel, ignoring the cars overtaking us, staring ahead, placid and blinking, and me trying to work out how to open the door, the effect on the fabric of the jacket of rolling and skidding for a few yards, the effect on the fabric of me, the result of grabbing the handbrake and pulling it sharply upwards, calculations of time, distance and speed, and what about going by Kincardine, a place of great and famous beauty by night.

The moment the dual carriageway came in sight Arnold stamped on the accelerator and we were away. We had five minutes to get to the terminal. Once we were up to 90, I started to think we’d make it. By the time the needle shook on 110, I was thinking we wouldn’t.

We’ll just fly across, then, I said.

Arnold didn’t say anything. We came up behind a Mercedes dawdling along in the fast lane at 80 or so. With two sharp movements of the wheel, we slid into the slow lane and back again in front of the Merc, missing a rusting hatchback by the thickness of paintwork.

Don’t do this, Arnie, I said. It’s not important. Slow down. We’ll get there.

I thought you liked it, said Arnold. Just to see what happens.

I never did anything to give you that idea.

You fucked my daughter without wearing a condom, said Arnold.

People get older suddenly. It builds up and comes breaking through. One instant the age you’ve been for years, the next, the age you’ll be for years to come. A dream one night, a drink, a cloud crossing the sun, a word, a thought, and you lurch backward into the next age like a drunk going over the balcony. I felt as if I’d been seized by eight relentless hands and had clingfilm pressed down over my face and body and I couldn’t fight it, it was becoming part of me and that was me for the rest of my life with this extra, unwanted, itching skin.

As things stood the rest of my life was being measured out in red cat’s eyes beaded along the A90, and the vision of the long cat of after dark expired at the water’s edge, if not sooner. Arnold, I said, Arnie, wait, OK. Whatever you think, let’s talk. Let’s take time to talk. We’ll go down the waterfront and get a carryout and sit up all night and talk it over. All weekend if you want. I can’t talk when you’re driving like this. It’s putting the wind up me.

Arnold laughed. Putting the wind up you! he said. Good. Scientists say thirty per cent of the human brain is set aside exclusively to react to fear.

Bollocks, I said. Sixty.

The laugh went out of Arnold’s face. He was leaning forward, his chin almost over the wheel, staring ahead. I don’t know I want you to talk, he said.

Come on Arnie. She was 17, she knew what she was doing.

She was 16.

OK, she was 16 at the beginning, but she was very self-possessed.

It’s interesting you talk about possession, said Arnold.

Christ, you’re the one who was doing the my daughter my daughter bit! I was working up an anger because I could see we were going to make it to the terminal and up the ramp no bother. She was old enough to be living by herself. It’s not like I was the first.

Arnold’s left hand came swinging off the wheel and I flinched. But he was just changing down from fifth to fourth.

What are you doing? I said. We swung off the dual carriageway onto the back road into Queensferry, the long way round to the terminal, narrower, slower, and with great opportunities for head-on collisions.

You’re such a bastard, Con, said Arnold, and you never bother to remind yourself of it.

I had a tight hold of the door-grip with one hand and my seatbelt with the other. We came up behind a Capri tanking along at 70 and Arnie took it on a blind bend just as something bright and screaming came round in the other direction. I closed my eyes, bent down and wrapped my arms around my head. There was a shrieking sound and horns, the Capri must have melted its brake pads to let us in, and we lived to fight another second.

Whatever it is I’ve done to upset you, Arnold, I’m sorry, I shouted.

No need to shout, said Arnold, frowning.

Slow down. There’s a bend – Jesus.

How d’you think it feels when you’re wife’s just died and they put you in jail for it and the daughter you raised for sixteen years stops seeing you ’cause she’s getting screwed by a man the same age as you are?

Not good. Bad. There’s a fffffff … there was no connection! She didn’t want to see you any more. Nothing to do with me. We were in love for a while, it was good for both of us, and then we drifted apart.

We were accelerating into absolute darkness on the wrong side of the road. There was nothing to overtake any more. Like the wrong side was smoother. I could see the orange glow of Queensferry ahead and a pale scimitar of headlights rising and falling through the trees before we got there, the car we were about to go head to head with, though we knew it, and they didn’t, they’d dip their headlights and slow down a little, voodoo steps to safety, they would never know. Apart from the apocryphal 30 seconds. He’d almost convinced me with that one.

There’s a car coming, I said.

It’s OK. We won’t hit it. You know, Con, 95 per cent of teenage girls who have relationships with men twice their age or more say love was never a factor.

I remembered reading that in Marie Claire when I was still seeing Jenny and worrying about it.

You’re talking shite, Arnold, I said. You’re starting to believe your own apocrypha. There aren’t any facts about love. Would you move to the right side of the fucking road?

It was over before I had time to wet myself, and when we’d swung round the bend into the blaring glaring squealing ton of glass and metal and flesh hurtling towards us, and there’d been no contact, I realised he’d done this before. Everyone else would swerve at the last moment, at exactly the same time as the other car, but he kept on on the wrong side, letting the other car swerve, so we missed.

Stop, I said. I’m sorry. You’re right and I’m wrong. I repent. Could you stop the car? I meant it. I would have stood in the Stoker’s Lounge all the way across with my lips pressed to his ringpiece just to be out in the open and not moving. It was 10.59 by his clock, we were just coming down the hill to Queensferry, and I knew he’d try to clear the High Street narrows and all the rest in 59 seconds.

You’re not making any sense, Con, said Arnie. You know better than I do what incidental risk’s all about, the danger that comes with getting where you want to go when you can’t wait. When you were screwing Jenny it was the hell with the crash, maybe you will, maybe you won’t. What’s the difference? You know you crashed. You do know, don’t you? You couldn’t stop yourself. You knew you might, and you did. You knew a kid would only be trouble for her and she didn’t want one.

I’m not with you. Just stop, eh. Stop. Stop.

I’m not intending to stop. It’s hard to stop when you’re almost there. You didn’t stop. And there are some accidents Pastor Samuel couldn’t help her with. He threw up his healing hands and said: If you don’t want his child, girl, cast it out.

STOP!

And she did cast it out. Six weeks gone. She really didn’t tell you, did she?

I pulled hard on the handbrake. We both went quiet for what seemed like a long time, watching the masts of the yachts fly past, it seems to me with our hands folded across our laps, but I suppose not. For a certain time, memory, the present and apocrypha became the same thing, a trinity, like the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. I remembered the car flying off the end of the pier before it actually happened, and I felt it skim three times across the waves like a stone as if it really did, though I knew I was feeling, with every bone and muscle, the apocryphal version of what truly took place, and the vague, imaginary sense of hitting the water once and going down was what was real.

Arnie had the sunroof open and was out of it before the top of the car sank below the water. He braced his legs on the roof and plunged his arms down for me through the flood that was beating me down into the seat and tied to pull me out, forgetting about the seatbelt. We went down into the black firth together, me struggling with the belt and gulping down a gallon of salt water before I shut my mouth, him clinging on to the edges of the sunroof with one hand and tugging on my jacket shoulder with the other. I got free just as a part of me I never knew I had started to try to rationalise the death experience into something negotiable but only making it worse. We were trying to kick off our shoes and jackets and our faces were in the air. We were treading water. The ferry was steaming out of harbour a few hundred yards away. It whistled. Arnold was swimming away from me towards the pier with strong breast strokes. I paddled my feet and coughed. I hate it when folk cry. It’s never good, and when it’s someone you thought you were fond of, like yourself, it’s a disaster. It was too late anyway. There was too much water all around. There was so much of it.