He looked at me and I thought I saw in his eyes how the depth of the wish was measured by its hopelessness.
‘We came out of the pub that night,’ he said. ‘Thrown out of the last one at time-up. It was pissing with rain. Coming down in sheets. I think in our euphoria we were almost offended that the weather wouldn’t match our mood. We doorway-hopped for a spell. We reaffirmed what we were going to achieve. Like a pact. We addressed the weather like King Lear. Telling it to behave itself. We didn’t want the feeling we had made among us to stop. We were busking an end to the night that would match the grandeur we felt in it. Then, from some final doorway, somebody saw a car. I don’t know who saw it first. All I remember is there we were talking about it. It was an old A40, pretty beat-up. It was parked across the street. There were no lights in the buildings around us.’
They decided to steal the car.
‘It was a group decision, I suppose. I remember that my own clever contribution was to say, “Property is theft. Let’s thieve it back.” The idea was just to drive it close to the flat and leave it there. No harm done. Even if they traced us to the flat, we’d be off by tomorrow. It was just a joy-ride.’
Breaking in was easy. Dave Lyons connected the wires. They drove off. As he reached that point in his story, Michael Preston held his hand up, forestalling my question.
‘We were all driving,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask me to define it more closely than that. We were one group mood. The way it can get sometimes. All of us broke into the car. So all of us drove it. We accepted that among us afterwards. I still accept it. I know Scott did. Maybe one pair of hands on the wheel. But four intentions. There’s no reneguing from that.’
He stared into my scepticism and didn’t flinch. I saw the strength that had enabled him to live for so long with something he hated to live with. Wounds sometimes heal into hard places.
‘I was there,’ he said. ‘I remember the shared madness. I think they call it hubris. That wasn’t just a car to us. It was an ego-machine. That wasn’t just a road. It was our road, where we were going, what we would become. We were all shouting instructions. Naming destinations. “Take us to our leader.” “Next stop: the meaning of the world.” “Drop me off at the next planet.” “Self-fulfilment here we come.” That kinda nonsense. The car was fogged with our lunacy. The rain hammering down outside didn’t hear us. And then it happened. Jesus, I don’t know where he came from. It seemed to me he reared up out of nowhere. He might as well have been born full grown in the headlights. It was as if he came out of the impact, not the other way around. He was a brief shape in the air. Like Icarus. Only difference is we were the arrogant bastards. It was him that took the fall. The car stopped. That’s the loudest rain I’ve ever heard. Or ever want to hear. It was like living under a waterfall. One you know is never going to stop. You’re going to live the rest of your life with the sound of it in your ears.’
He lifted the dagger that was his paper-knife and his face was so clenched and dark he might have been contemplating using it on himself. He sat still for a moment as if he was still listening to the rain. He looked at me.
‘That was your man in the green coat,’ he said. ‘Except that it wasn’t green. It was brown, as I remember it. But then maybe that was just the rain. He was lying mainly on the pavement. He was the stillest thing I’d ever seen. He was balding. Not a face you’d notice normally. One of those that make up the numbers. An extra in a thousand pub-scenes. Could’ve been anybody. He was lying with a terrifying awkwardness. That’s been the shape of a lot of my nightmares. Sandy Blake examined him. He wasn’t dead. But he said that he was getting there. And no way would he live. We had found the man in the street all right. And it looked as if we had killed him.’
I have dreamed many times that I have murdered someone. Those are the most frightening dreams I have ever had. The terror, I think, comes from the sense of irrevocability. I am in a place from which it is impossible to go back. I have become someone I never wanted to be and I must be that person forever. Waking up with the sweats, I have experienced a feeling of immeasurable relief. I tried to imagine never wakening up.
‘The only blood,’ he said, ‘was coming from under his head, where it had hit the road. We tried to argue with Sandy. But he said he was losing his heartbeat. We were shouting in whispers to each other. And the rain was drowning out everything. Terror, people talk of it loosely. That was terror. Imagine your life frozen in one long, long accidental moment. You have to move to unfreeze it. And you’re too terrified to move. Because there are only two ways you can go. And both of them are badder than you ever imagined anything could be. You can take him in and he’ll be dead already. And you’ll be just drunken bastards who have killed a man with a car. Your lives are over before they properly got started. Or you can leave him there. And maybe nobody will ever know except yourselves. But the rest of your life is based on leaving an innocent man to lie dying in the rain. Nice choice we had made for ourselves. You fancy it?’
I didn’t say anything. His bitter smile was just a scar across his face.
‘We made our choice,’ he said. ‘Or panic made it for us. The longer we stood, the more chance we would be found. And have no choice. Scott was crying. We more or less had to wrestle him into the car. We drove away. We left the man there. We left him there. We left him there. He’s there still, I think, for all of us. Except poor Scott. He’s erased that image at last. We abandoned the car somewhere and went back to the flat.’
He sat very still, staring straight ahead. His voice took on a dead quality, as if he were repeating a text he had learned painfully by heart.
‘University,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if you went there. I thought I had graduated earlier, that summer. But it was that night in the rain I really graduated. I found out who I was. And that I didn’t like who I was. And that I never could. I mean, I had loved all that grappling with great minds. The moral questions. Then suddenly, in one night, the issues were real. We were living the questions. Seminars? Did we have a seminar that night. We talked into the light, though I don’t know that we ever found it. Scott still wanted to go back. That we should give ourselves up. I felt like that myself. Dave and Sandy were against it. I couldn’t see how I could live with this. I still don’t see how I have. But I have. It was Dave who finally persuaded me that there was nothing else we could do but live with it. He said we had all acquired certain abilities. The most valid respect we could pay to the man we had killed was to fulfil those abilities. Anything else was anti-life. If we gave ourselves up, we were destroying ourselves for a moral convention. For what good could it do? It wouldn’t bring back a dead man. It would simply waste our lives, bury such abilities as we had. A terrible, irreversible thing had happened. We could either sacrifice ourselves to no purpose. Or we could find the strength to live with it and fulfil our lives as best we could. I came to accept that. We were three against one. But we needed four. Scott couldn’t implicate himself without implicating all of us. His conscience wasn’t his own. It was all or none. That’s when he wrecked his paintings and tore up his books. We let him do it. Because I think we knew what it meant. That he had given up on his self-belief. And would have to find out how to live without it. Which was what we needed.’
There was a knock at the door and Bev, his wife, looked in. As he saw her, the softness that suffused his face was striking. It was not an act of concealment, so that she wouldn’t know the dark things he had been saying. It was a spontaneous admission of love.
‘You two old wives,’ she said. ‘I’ve made some coffee.’
She brought in a tray with coffee and biscuits.
‘I hope this one’s not boring you,’ she said to me.
‘Never that,’ I said.
As she put down the tray, his hand rested briefly on her hip. It was an instinctive expression of affection.