Margaret, his wife, stood at the French windows and said something to him. He let go of the girl’s hand. His wife came out into the garden. They talked briefly. He stared at the ground. He went into the house. Margaret took the girl’s hand and followed him in.
‘Hello, hello,’ Brian Harkness said in a whisper.
Even from this distance, Margaret Mason walked like a carnival of womanhood.
‘Bloody activate,’ Edek said. ‘Bloody activate.’
He rolled down his rear-seat window and balanced his leather-cased receiver on the sill. He pulled out the aerial. He checked the connection to the tape-recorder on the seat, which he had insisted on telling us was a Nagra. (‘State of the bloody art, don’t worry about it.’)
‘Is this going to work, Edek?’ I said.
‘Is up to her now, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘There’s no more I can do from here. She’s got a mike in her brassiere. Connected up to a first-class transmitter. Taped to the outside of her thigh. That was hard work. Jeez, the things you have to do for your art. I even picked her wardrobe. Now it’s in the lap of the gods. Or the breast of the goddess, maybe.’
He was doing mysterious things with some of the knobs on his machine.
‘I hope she hasn’t interfered with the bloody wiring,’ he said.
The garden was empty. The building looked charming and beautiful, a picture in an estate agent’s window. Then there was a sudden crackling and the house was haunted by a dark voice.
‘In here. Your timing could’ve been better.’
Rendered metallic by the recording equipment, Matt Mason’s voice was low and harsh. Abstracted from gesture or facial expression or social context, it emerged without concealment, just itself. It cut into the silence of the car like a serrated knife.
‘So, Melanie. To what do we owe the pleasure?’
There was a pause. Melanie’s voice, when it came, seemed barely there. It impressed itself on the surface of the silence as delicately as fingerprints, seeming almost to fade as it happened. It made you listen intently.
‘Matt, I’m sorry to be bothering you.’
‘So why are you?’
‘Matt, you know what’s happened.’
‘Do I? What’s that?’
‘Meece is dead.’
‘Uh-huh? Siddown, Melanie.’
The material of her dress rustled through the microphone as she sat. The length of the silence made me wonder if we had lost them. I looked round at Edek. From his position at the open window, he winked.
‘So that’s the news, is it?’ Matt Mason said. ‘You came to tell me that?’
‘I was livin’ with Meece.’
‘I know that. Come on, Melanie. Do you think Ah just arrived on the bus yesterday?’
‘I miss him, Matt. I miss him so much.’
‘What is it you miss? Your supplier? Is it money you want, Melanie?’
‘No. No. I’m tryin’ to come off it.’
‘Is that right?’
‘What happened, Matt? I can’t understand it.’
‘You don’t have to. Let other people do that. Now if you need money, Ah’ll give ye some money. If you don’t, that’s up to you. Either way, you’ll have to leave. We’re havin’ a party here. You’re not exactly addin’ to the atmosphere.’
I was hoping I hadn’t underprepared. I had simply suggested that Melanie should go to Matt Mason and ask about Meece Rooney, and possibly Dan Scoular. I had chosen not to rehearse her because I was afraid she would give herself away if she tried to follow a script. She wasn’t exactly in shape for handling complicated instructions. Now I wasn’t sure she could improvise a response to such a summary dismissal. I leaned into her silence.
‘I can’t leave, Matt,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘I can’t.’
‘Ah don’t think you heard me. You are leaving.’
‘No, Matt. No.’
‘Come on! Get — ’
The tape-recorder fed us a confusion of noise — rasping sounds, what could have been a chair falling, strange poppings.
‘For Nagra read aggro,’ Edek said.
‘To hell with this,’ Brian said.
He put his hand on the ignition. I gripped his wrist. Brian stared at me.
‘He’s givin’ her a doin’,’ he said.
‘Behave,’ I said quietly. ‘This is a war. It’s not a skirmish. We’d do Melanie a lotta favours breakin’ cover now. The cell door’s open. Sh. Let’s see if he walks in.’
We waited. I could hear Eddie Foley breathing directly behind me. The first clear sound that came back to us was of Melanie crying. Brian’s look judged me hard.
‘Come on, Melanie,’ I said. ‘If just one person turns up and defies their fear, we’ve got a chance.’
I was watching the house. Three children, two girls and a boy, had come out into the garden. They were playing what looked like an improvised game of tig, a way of touching one another, of learning one another without admitting that’s what they were doing. Receding and approaching, running away and hoping to be caught, they were a beautiful innocence, human relationships at play. Behind them, the house seemed to me menacing, an adult corruption that was already threatening to thwart their lives. They did not know the inheritance the house was giving them, what lay at its heart, the continuing conflict between violence and hurt.
I stared at the sunny garden, the red tiled roof, the white walls, the shining windows. This was where we were, all right — a place where violence dressed nice, injustice wore legal robes, venom smiled sweetly, unnecessary suffering was ignored and hypocrisy was honoured. I thought of many of the people I had met this week. They lived here, too. And like polite house-guests, they wouldn’t break the rules. Their continued residency depended on that conformity. To break the rules was to put yourself at hazard.
I realised that nobody I had met had been quite prepared to do that. They might have whispered the odd secret to me but they wouldn’t stand up and risk themselves to challenge the lies of others. If we were to expose the truth of Matt Mason’s life, Melanie was our last chance.
It was a strange thought. Here was a woman who had more reason than any of us for running and hiding. Life had battered her remorselessly. She had been used by men. She had been on drugs. She was hanging on to what remained of her sense of herself by her fingernails. Who could blame her if she had decided her only allegiance was to herself? It would take a lot of courage to do otherwise.
We were still waiting. When Matt Mason spoke, I understood that his long silence had been to give her time to compose herself.
‘Okay? You ready now?’
There was another silence.
‘No.’
I could have cheered. That one word was defencelessness refusing to be intimidated.
‘Get up and get out of here.’
‘No. I need to understand what happened to Meece. I feel as if my life’s over.’
‘Not yet it’s not. But that can be arranged.’
On the wildness of that remark I heard the conversation swing in the direction we needed it to go. The weird experience of a helpless woman defying him had made Matt Mason careless. This didn’t happen and, since it didn’t happen, his reactions lost their judgment.
‘I need to know about Meece,’ Melanie said.
‘You know about Meece. Everybody knew about Meece. He was a piece of shit. You know what he was up to. You were in it with him. Ye’re lucky ye didn’t join him. Thank me for that.’
Brian looked at me and raised his eyebrows. Eddie Foley sighed behind me. The children were still playing in the garden.
‘Meece? I’ll tell you about Meece. What were ye doin’ with him, anyway? You used to have a bit of class. Remember Dan Scoular? The love of your life? That was a man at least. Remember what I did for you? I brought you to my house. Ah let ye meet real people. Look at ye now. Listen. You want to mourn for somebody, mourn for Dan Scoular. He’s dead, too.’