“No,” Mr. Titwhistle says, “they are not.”
“They are. And you know it.” He sounds like a child in his own ears, and something in him rages, but he wants to be rescued. He wants the Queen or the BBC to reach down and make it all stop. Rodney Titwhistle is neither, but he’s as close as can be had.
“They are not. And it is very wrong to suggest that they are. It is counterproductive. Worse, it gives assistance to the enemy.”
“What enemy?”
“Any enemy. All enemies.”
“So they’re torturing me to keep everyone safe.”
“They are not torturing you, Mr. Spork. That is against the law. I could not use them if they were to subject you to any sort of degrading treatment. However, I do use them. I know them to be lawful. I have asked exacting questions. I have received assurances. Therefore you are either making this up, or you are deluded. If you are making this up, I should warn you that manipulative falsehood is now considered a technique of Lawfare. You understand what that means? Warfare using the legal code, thus Lawfare. There are penalties for illegitimate Lawfare.”
“They won’t even tell me what they want. I want to tell them, you see. Only I have no idea.”
Rodney Titwhistle sighs. “They want the calibration drum for the Apprehension Engine, Mr. Spork. A small item. A thing no bigger than your hand. The Book, as it transpires, will turn the machine on but not off. We must have the drum. There is some suggestion that you possess it. Or that your grandfather did. You would do well to consider carefully before denying anything.”
“I don’t know. I want… I want my lawyer! Get me Mercer. I have rights. You know I do.”
“No, you do not. Not here. Not in this room, or this building. Here you are a patient. You are suspected of an act of terrorism so gross, so destructive, that it is the definition of madness. Patients have no rights. And I told you before, sir: there are penalties for Lawfare.”
Mr. Titwhistle leaves in a huff, and it turns out that there are, indeed, penalties. But Joe knows there are penalties for everything now, and they touch him less and less.
He lets himself go away for a while.
“This task. These words. Are against nature. They are against everything. Fathers should not bury their sons.” Daniel Spork, pendulum-straight, choking like a gritty caseclock.
“Not in war, not in peace. I have seen both.” He stops, and works his right shoulder, his neck. He contains a furnace of sorrow, and he is burning through. “My son was not a good man. By the measure of our country’s law. He was a transgressor. He. Could not be made to see. I tried, but I was alone, and I cannot. I am not. Good with words. Or people, even. I understand machines. So. He was a bad man. He stole. He robbed. He broke things and fired guns and he encouraged others to do the same. He tried to sell drugs. He went to prison. My son was bad. I mourn my bad son.” Defiance flares in him.
“But he was not. He was not bad. He was not. He loved. He loved his son. He loved his wife. He wanted above all to love his mother. My Frankie. His Frankie, that he barely knew. I believe he loved even me. Even though I failed him. Every day, I failed. I am so sorry that I could not. I could not.” Daniel stops again. Whatever, exactly, he could not, Joshua Joseph will never learn, because his grandfather must gather himself and go around it, or he will not recapture himself, will fail this one last time, and that is something Daniel Spork will not permit. The spring must unwind all the way.
“He was not bad. He was not. He was intemperate. Angry. Lawless. Not dishonest. Although sometimes the truth could not—like many of us, could not—could not keep up with him.
“And in this last thing, he is revealed. That he knew he was. He knew. He was not long. That he was. Dying. He got out of prison. To see his son and say ‘goodbye.’ He did not tell me he was coming. I could kill him.”
And this, impossibly, makes them laugh, not bitterly, but wholeheartedly. Yes. Mathew Spork, in going to his grave, is as infuriating as he ever was, and as stupidly, stubbornly heroic about it.
“So grieve. Please. Today, let it out. For me. Scream. Weep. Drink too much and be unwise. Be like him. Let go. Because I cannot. I do not know how.
“Fathers should not bury their sons.”
Outside, they lower the coffin into the ground. For some reason, the hole is decked out in AstroTurf. Joshua Joseph had imagined the soil would be loamy and soft, and that he would be able to scatter it, but London is built on clay, and so instead he hefts a great mustard-coloured clod into the hole and it makes a muffled, hollow thudding as it lands. He worries he may have chipped the varnish, and then feels stupid, because no one will ever know, or reproach him if they did.
The burial goes on and on.
Until, nearly an hour later and the box buried safe and sound, Joshua Joseph stands with his grandfather looking out across a little road. For five minutes they have stood thus, the old man boiling with whatever self-reproaches he has not voiced, and the boy seeking by instinct the one person equally responsible for Mathew Spork in life and death. Together, they watch—but do not watch—a red double-decker bus, the first of two, draw up to the stop across the street. After a moment, it pulls away again, revealing a single figure in mourner’s black, gaunt and straight against the newsagent’s window.
Joshua Joseph has a brief impression of grey hair cut in a severe bob, a scrawny neck like a silver birch tree, and two knobbled, arthritic hands clutching at a pair of severe black trousers. Very slowly, very deliberately, she raises the left in a gesture of greeting, and Joshua Joseph can see, even at this distance, that she has been crying. By her shudders, he deduces that she is crying still. He wonders dimly whom she mourns, and if she comes here every day, or every week, or if there is another funeral following on the heels of this one, and then his dawning realisation finds voice in his grandfather’s appalled, desperate shout, as the old man lurches forward, one hand outflung as if reaching from an icy sea for one last chance at the lifeboat’s ladder.
“Frankie!” he shrieks, “Frankie, Frankie, please!” as he flings himself, heedless of his gammy knees and his spindly ankles, towards the East Gate. “Frankie! My Frankie!”
And she responds. She does. Her face lights up at this unlooked-for, unimagined blessing; that even now, even in this cruellest moment, his love remains. The waving hand extends towards him as if blown by a breeze. And then, sharply, the open door slams shut. She is not yet done. She is not ready. She snatches back her hand and begins to turn away, and the second bus draws a temporary curtain between them. Daniel struggles with the catch on the gate, his grandson torn along in his wake, as desperate—almost—as the old man himself. The gate swings open—but when the bus moves off again, Joshua Joseph knows already what he will see. Sure enough, the bus stop is empty.
Daniel stares without understanding, and then whips around to follow with his eyes the departing double-decker, and sees—they both see—that narrow figure clasping tight to the silver pole at the back. Her face is turned away from them even as her body and her heart refuse to complete entirely the abandonment, and she remains rooted to the running board, standing full square as if she will embrace them both even as the bus carries her away and turns a corner, and she is gone.
They find Joe’s resistance—his unresistant resistance—curious and frustrating. They shut him in his little white room and a moment later the box seems to detach from the building and hurl him around, up, down, around. It occurs to him, as he hangs suspended, watching one side of the box retreat and knowing that the other must be rushing up behind him, that if he is moving at fifteen miles an hour—not unlikely—and the box at fifteen as well in an opposing direction, then he will strike with a total force of thirty miles an hour and quite possibly die.