Or assume the worst, the deed is done — my father’s last kidney cells are sheared by a crystal of poison. He’s thrown up his lungs and heart into his lap. Agony then coma then death. How about revenge? My avatar shrugs and reaches for his coat, murmuring on his way out that honour killing has no place in the modern polis. Let him speak for himself.
‘Seizing the law into your own hands — it’s old hat, reserved for elderly feuding Albanians and subsections of tribal Islam. Revenge is dead. Hobbes was right, my young friend. The state must have a monopoly of violence, a common power to keep us all in awe.’
‘Then, kind avatar, phone Leviathan now, call the police, make them investigate.’
‘What exactly? Claude and Trudy’s black humour?’
Constable: ‘And this glycol on the table, madam?’
‘A plumber suggested it, officer, to keep our ancient radiators unfrozen in winter.’
‘Then, dear future best self, get yourself to Shoreditch, warn my father, tell him everything you know.’
‘The woman he loves and reveres planning to murder him? How did I come by such information? Was I party to pillow talk, was I under the bed?’
Thus the ideal form of powerful, competent being. What then are my chances, a blind, dumb invert, an almost-child, still living at home, secured by apron strings of arterial and venous blood to the would-be murderess?
But shush! The conspirators are talking.
‘It’s no bad thing,’ says Claude, ‘that he’s keen to move back here. Put up a show of resistance, then let him come.’
‘Oh yes,’ she says, cold and satirical. ‘And make him a welcome smoothie.’
‘I didn’t say that. But.’
But I think he almost did.
They pause for thought. My mother reaches for her wine. Her epiglottis stickily rises and falls as she drinks, and the fluid sluices down through her natural alleys, passing — as so much does — near the soles of my feet, curving inwards, heading my way. How can I dislike her?
She sets down her glass and says, ‘We can’t have him dying here.’
She speaks so easily of his death.
‘You’re right. Shoreditch is better. You could visit him.’
‘And take round a bottle of vintage antifreeze for old times’ sake!’
‘You take a picnic. Smoked salmon, coleslaw, chocolate fingers. And … the business.’
‘Haaargh!’ Hard to render the sound of my mother’s explosive scepticism. ‘I dump him, throw him out of his house, take a lover. Then bring him a picnic!’
Even I appreciate my uncle’s umbrage at ‘take a lover’ — as in, one of nameless many, of many yet to come. And it’s the ‘take’, it’s the ‘a’. Poor fellow. He’s only trying to help. He’s sitting across from a beautiful young woman with golden braids, in bikini top and cut-offs in a sweltering kitchen, and she’s a swollen, gorgeous fruit, a prize he can’t bear to lose.
‘No,’ he says with great care. The affront to his self-regard has pitched his voice higher. ‘It’s a reconciliation. You’re making amends. Asking him back. Getting together. Peace offering sort of thing, moment to celebrate, spread out the tablecloth. Get happy!’
Her silence is his reward. She’s thinking. As am I. Same old question. Just how stupid is Claude really?
Encouraged, he adds, ‘Fruit salad’s an option.’
There’s poetry in his blandness, a form of nihilism enlivening the commonplace. Or, conversely, the ordinary disarming the vilest notion. Only he could top this, and he does after a thoughtful five seconds.
‘Ice cream being out of the question.’
Plain sense. Worth saying. Who would or could make ice cream out of antifreeze?
Trudy sighs. She says in a whisper, ‘You know, Claude, I loved him once.’
Is he seeing her as I imagine her? The green gaze is glazing over and, yet again, an early tear is smoothly traversing her cheekbone. Her skin is damply pink, fine hairs have sprung free of her braids and are backlit into brilliant filaments by the ceiling lights.
‘We were too young when we met. I mean, we met too soon. On an athletic track. He was throwing the javelin for his club and broke some local record. It made my knees go weak to watch him, the way he ran with that spear. Like a Greek god. A week later he took me to Dubrovnik. We didn’t even have a balcony. They say it’s a beautiful city.’
I hear the uneasy creak of a kitchen chair. Claude sees the room-service trays piled outside the door, the cloying bedroom’s disordered sheets, the nineteen-year-old near-naked at a painted plywood dressing table, her perfect back, a wash-thinned hotel towel across her lap — a parting nod at decency. John Cairncross is jealously excluded, primly out of shot, but huge, and naked too.
Careless of her lover’s silence, Trudy hurries on a rising note, before her tightening throat can silence her. ‘Trying for a baby all those years. Then just as, just as …’
Just as! Worthless adverbial trinket! By the time she tired of my father and his poetry, I was too well lodged to be unhoused. She cries now for John as she did for Hector the cat. Perhaps my mother’s nature won’t stretch to a second killing.
‘Erm,’ Claude says at last, offering his crumb. ‘Spilt milk and all.’
Milk, repellent to the blood-fed unborn, especially after wine, but my future all the same.
He waits patiently to present his idea of a picnic. It can’t help, to hear his rival wept for. Or perhaps it concentrates the mind. He drums his fingers lightly on the table, one of the things he does. When standing he rattles his house keys in his trouser pocket, or unproductively clears his throat. These empty gestures, devoid of self-awareness, are sinister. There’s a whiff of sulphur about Claude. But for the moment we’re as one, for I’m waiting too, troubled by a sickly fascination to know his scheme, as one might the ending of a play. He can hardly expound while she’s weeping.
A minute later she blows her nose and says in a croaky voice, ‘Anyway, I hate him now.’
‘He made you very unhappy.’
She nods and blows her nose again. Now we listen while he presents his verbal brochure. His delivery is that of the doorstep evangelist helping her towards a better life. Essential, he tells us, that my mother and I make at least one visit to Shoreditch before the last, fatal call. Hopeless to conceal from forensics that she was ever there. Helpful to establish that she and John were on terms again.
This, he says, must look like suicide, like Cairncross made a cocktail for himself to improve the poison’s taste. Therefore, on her final visit she’ll leave behind the original empty bottles of glycol and shop-bought smoothie. These vessels must show no trace of her fingerprints. She’ll need to wax her fingertips. He has just the stuff. Bloody good too. Before she leaves John’s flat, she’ll put the picnic remains inside the fridge. Any containers or wrapping must also be free of her prints. It should seem as though he ate alone. As beneficiary of his will, she’ll be investigated, a conspiracy suspected. So all traces of Claude, in bedroom and bathroom especially, must be eradicated, cleaned to extinction, every last hair and flake of skin. And, I sense her thinking, every no-longer thrashing tail, every stilled head of every last sperm. That may take some time.
Claude continues. No concealing the phone calls she has made to him. The phone company will have a record.
‘But remember. I’m just a friend.’
It costs him to say these last words, especially when my mother repeats them as in a catechism. Words, as I’m beginning to appreciate, can make things true.
‘You’re just my friend.’
‘Yes. Called round from time to time. For a chat. Brother-in-law. Helping you out. Nothing more.’