Absolution (45 page)

He covered his eyes with his left hand and his mouth with the right. It was no longer apparent to Clare what she should do or how she should behave, if it would be wrong to cross the room and hold her son, or if that was the very thing he wanted. They sat
in silence for ten minutes and then he removed his hands from his face and looked at her. As he was about to speak the intercom at the front gate buzzed.

‘If this is my neighbour I shall phone the police to charge him with harassment. Yes?’ Clare barked, pushing the intercom button as the screen flickered into an image of the driveway. ‘Oh God what do you want?’

‘Mrs Wald? It’s Donald Thacker again.’

‘I can see that.’

‘I know that something is wrong there. I know you’re being held hostage. If your attackers can hear me, then they should know that I have a gun and that I’ve phoned the police. The police are on their way and everything is going to be fine.’

‘Mr Thacker, you have made a fool of yourself. There is no one here but my son.’

The little black-and-white image of Donald Thacker looked stunned, and then Clare could hear the police sirens and the different pitch of her own security company’s sirens. It took a further half hour to sort out the confusion. Clare consented to the police and security company undertaking a search of the house to be certain there were no intruders hiding in wait until the authorities had left. The police were not amused and warned Mr Thacker he could be charged with wasting police time.

‘Truly, I thought there was something amiss,’ he said, blustering the night with his hands. ‘I thought I was being a good neighbour and a good citizen.’

Thacker looked so pitiful and frightened that Clare asked the police not to charge him and finally everyone left except Thacker himself.

‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘but your lights are almost never on at night, and I thought you were alone.’

‘Thank you for your concern,’ Clare said, shaking his hand as cordially as she could. ‘We must go to bed now. My son has an early morning.’

Clare clicked Thacker in and out of her gate and went back inside to find Mark almost in the same position as before the interruption.

‘Will you forgive me?’ he asked.

‘For Laura? Oh, Mark, no. I cannot do that. It is not for me to forgive or to judge. You did what you felt you had to do. If you wish forgiveness, you must ask Laura for forgiveness. I am not Laura,’ she said, realizing that she was angrier with her son than she had ever been before. Not only was Clare the wrong person from whom to ask forgiveness, she also lacked the capacity to forgive what Mark had done.

‘But Laura is dead.’

‘Even still,’ she cried, trying to make her face immobile where it convulsed into spasm. ‘That shouldn’t prevent us from asking Laura to forgive our failures against her.’

‘And if she had asked you for money?’

‘She did not ask me. But yes, if she had asked me, I would have given it. I wouldn’t have thought twice, just as I would give it if you asked. But my relationship with each of you is – was – different from your relationship with each other. I cannot say that you did the wrong thing. You believed you were doing what you had to do at the time. You regret it now. You wish my forgiveness, but from my perspective there is nothing to forgive. I don’t hold you accountable for Laura’s actions, for what she did, and what became of her, whatever that might have been. She was only accountable to herself. I could have been a different kind of mother to her, and that might have changed everything. We cannot say that one moment or series of moments determined what Laura became. She was an adult. She made her own decisions. I think we dishonour her by assuming we could have changed her mind so easily.’

It was not yet light the next morning and there was already breaking news of another commuter bus being fired on by masked gunmen. Six passengers were reported dead, dozens
injured. Nurses striking over a pay deal were barricading hospital entrances so that patients and ambulances and even the doctors themselves could not enter. Hospital workers were toyi-toying in operating theatres, dancing in protest around anaesthetized patients. Injured people were dying on the pavements outside. A woman gave birth in a car park. Abandoned by ward nurses, mental patients rioted for food. The military had been called in to restore order and provide emergency medical assistance, but they were also threatening to strike. Meanwhile, the Health Minister had been indicted for siphoning millions into an offshore account. Clare turned off the television, went to shower and dress, and had the coffee made by the time Mark emerged from his bedroom.

‘I’ve been called back home, Mother. I’m afraid I have to leave this morning.’

‘I would say it has been nice to see you but I fear it hasn’t been nice for you. It hasn’t been entirely nice for me, but that’s not what I mean. I am glad you came and I hope you will come to stay again soon. I shall promise not to burden you with further confessions. It is clear that the only answer to my problem is one I must find myself. Short of the dead granting me forgiveness, I have little hope of absolution, and thus of being freed from these memories.’

‘There’s one thing I don’t think I understand,’ Mark said, sweeping his tie over his shoulder as he sat down to his coffee. ‘The wig. Do you truly believe that Uncle Stephan’s relatives are the ones who broke into the old house?’

‘If not his relatives then his friends or associates, or even people hired by them.’

‘But what does it mean, if that’s what actually happened?’

‘I took it as a warning – that they knew the role I had played, and they knew that justice had not been done, so far as my involvement was concerned. Perhaps it was not their plan. After all, Marie and her little handgun interrupted them. Perhaps they had other spoils in mind than symbolic ones.’

‘Or they were nothing more than ordinary thieves who were interrupted and took the first thing to hand as they fled the house.’

‘But then why return the wig to the monument? Your version does not make sense if you think about its return – it requires that they would have been knowledgeable thieves, thieves with a sense of remorse about what they had taken, who returned it to a place where I
might
find it, but not to the house itself.’

‘You’d moved out. And it’s possible that they
did
know who you were and were only targeting someone they thought might have money. Not all thieves are idiots. I’ve met my share of knowledgeable ones … and remorseful ones, too.’

Clare shook her head and moved around the kitchen, putting bread in the toaster, refilling her son’s coffee cup.

‘It’s not completely impossible, what you say, but I prefer my version. It was a symbolic act – perhaps not the act the robbers intended. Possibly they intended nothing symbolic at all, but something brutal: a reckoning of the flesh. We will not know. I think I no longer fear them. There is little to fear from the living but pain, and pain is, in the end, transitory. I could survive pain, or if not survive it then transcend it.’

Together they ate breakfast in silence. When they were finished, Mark pulled his belongings together, put his suitcase at the door, and the two of them moved through the house without speaking. There was no one else to mediate them, no employee to give them occasion to speak about something other than themselves. Clare finally stopped herself from searching out new reasons to be absent or preoccupied and stood waiting at the door while Mark moved between the guest room and the bathroom and the kitchen and the back porch. It was as though he were delaying departure but could not tell her he wished to stay longer.

When it was almost nine and he had only half an hour to get to the airport he put his arms on Clare’s shoulders and leaned close to kiss her once on each cheek. She inhaled him and caught the scent that he would never realize was the smell of his mother and
father in equal parts, a hybrid of the two: a fecund spiciness on one hand, a formal, feathery mustiness on the other. Clare put her arms around his back and brought him close and said, though she hoped it was unnecessary, ‘You know everything there is to know about me. I have no more secrets. Everything will be archived. It will not be yours, but it will be yours to read. I trust you not to contest my wishes or my final actions.’

‘You speak as though you were about to die.’

‘Most nights now I feel I am already with the dead.’

He looked at her and put his forehead against hers. It was a thing he had not done since he was a small boy, staring her down at closest range. They held each other’s gaze for a moment and then he broke away.

‘Before I go I have a request,’ he said, taking her hands in his.

‘Anything I’m able to do, you know that I shall.’

‘I beg of you, please, not to put any of this in one of your books. What we’ve said to each other is just for you and me. It’s not for other people to read. I don’t want anyone reading it, in whatever way you might try to disguise it. Don’t make up a character that did something similar to what I did to Laura, not even remotely like it. Don’t record my confession to you in your diaries or journals for people to read once you’re dead. Don’t take my story or my words. These are my words.’

‘I understand entirely,’ Clare said, opening the door.

It was time for him to go.

Clare

I wake in this hotel in the middle of a night that is never quite night, the old green streetlights flickering outside my window, students shouting below on the street, crying out in ecstasy and relief and yearning, and even here you come to me, Laura, at the foot of my bed, waking this old woman who might as well be dead, my hair grown iron-strong and stringy, eyes dropping into the sinkholes of my skull. You fondle my feet and tickle my toes, the cold burn of your spirit raising welts on my soles. What must I do to make you leave me alone?

I take myself back to that day, to the porch and the men and the boy before me. What sign did you give that I should know Sam’s importance? I remember chiefly my terror of the men. It was obvious to me, thinking back on it, that they could not have been strangers you met on the road. They could only be your associates. I knew you would never have consigned your notebooks to people you were not certain you could trust. And I knew the type: the frozen eyes, the determined watchfulness, alert and jackal-wary, lion-fierce. I knew they came with news of you, and if not with news then in search of you – that was my fear, what they might do to find you, the measures they might take to extract information from me, alone in the house, interrupted and surprised and caught with my guard down. They would take what they wanted, take me as well, to find you. Now I know these fears were unfounded, or if not baseless then perhaps exaggerated, heightened beyond reason.

But not only that, I feared those men might not be what they claimed to be, that it was all a ruse to get themselves inside, to take what was not theirs, that they were no friends of yours. I
feared petty criminals, robbers, and invaders. I feared violation. I feared my sister’s adopted family, feared that these men had come to visit revenge upon me for the crime I committed in my own younger days. At least that fear was not misplaced, I have to believe, only premature. They would come later, with greater stealth and silent menace.

I wish you could have appreciated how alike we were.

Understand that you were the braver. I always knew this was so.

Your colleagues, from whom I had nothing to fear, presented you to me in text and image, in the form of notebooks and your final letter, and the photographs they had taken, as if to prove their intimacy with you, and you with the boy. I imagined you had slept with the men, perhaps all three of you together, crammed into tight beds, flung out across the floor, rolling round campfires in the bush. A mother will imagine this despite herself, the complications of her children’s lives, the constellations of their bodies, fear for their safety and their hearts and the wounds they will bear. I feared you had not been a willing partner, but could only choose to succumb to them, to be a trapdoor in the night into which they crawled, battering you open but leaving you half-intact, frame splintered and hinges sprung, but recognizable for all that. I feared what they could do to me, these associates of yours who might batter in the night. At first I believed I could smell you on the notebooks, feel your sweat and secretions through the bindings, taste your breath in the odours that came off the men. When they left I pressed your letter to my nose and searched for you there.

After presenting your texts, the only thing that now remains of you, they pushed the boy forward, assuming he was mine, and in that movement of two small feet it all became more complicated. Logic said I had no responsibility. No one could make him mine but you, and you were there only on the page, elusive and indirect. You did not tell me to take him, and if you did not tell me, there
was no way for me to know your wishes. I needed you to say, ‘Take this child, Mother, and keep him close.’ I needed direction. I waited for command.

I know that waiting is a form of cowardice.

Understand that I did not know, did not allow myself to know. I was too scared and too selfish to know what to do, and to make myself see what should have been obvious, to piece together the picture you presented, in the smell of connection that remained on those pages.

I can only ask you to forgive me. I have asked you countless times and will ask you again. Tell me what I must do, the penance I must offer. Show me how to make you go away.

In the weeks and months after you left the
Record
, smaller units of time that stretched to larger ones until years passed, our infrequent meetings became ever more rare. And when you did condescend to visit us at the old house on Canigou Avenue, you almost never spoke to me. I would find you in the garden with your father, and as I approached, a tray of drinks in hand, you would fall silent. After such meetings I would ask William what you said, and he always replied, ‘Next to nothing. I did all the talking, asking questions, imploring her to be careful. She didn’t ask for money but I gave her some anyway. You don’t mind?’