Beneath the Earth (20 page)

But as it turned out, the baby
was
yours.

You struggled during the first year of his life though, as did Sarah. Neither of you seemed capable of making any real connection with the child and you resented how he tied you to your apartment when you would have preferred to be out with your friends. It was a difficult time. You never told Sarah this but you looked into what would happen if two people decided to offer their child for adoption. You knew you would never do it but somehow it relaxed you to know the options.

Eventually, however, you grew used to Billy and things began to get better. You realized one day that you loved him. And he seemed to love you too. To your surprise, you found yourself increasingly happy and your resentment at appearing so middle class and traditional wore off.

When he was four years old, you lost him in a shopping centre. You were holding his hand but then saw a friend from your college days and released him. It was a few minutes later before you realized that he was gone. You went wild, running around shouting his name. Security brought you to their offices, where the police were called. Before they arrived, Billy was delivered back to you. He'd been discovered sitting by a fountain eating an ice cream. He had no money and you questioned how he had bought it. The security cameras revealed a hooded figure, indistinguishable, taking Billy by the hand and leading him towards the front doors before apparently changing his mind and bringing him back, buying him an ice cream and whispering something into his ear before vanishing. When questioned, Billy said that the man had simply said sorry and told him to stay there exactly where he was until he saw a guard. It was a terrifying experience and one you never revealed to Sarah. You told your son that if he said anything about what had happened he would be in big trouble and so he never did. You're not proud of this behaviour.

When he was six, you began to grow concerned about your depth of feeling for him. You needed to be with Billy as much as possible and it bothered you how beautiful you found him. Not in a sexual way, there was nothing perverse attached to your love. But you found yourself staring at him frequently, his clean, clear skin, his deep-blue eyes, the sheer elegance of his trim little body, and all you could think was what a beautiful boy he was. You hated to think of him growing older, the fluff of teenage stubble sprouting on his chin, acne on his forehead, his body beginning to smell in the mornings. The notion of him touching himself in his bed, jerking off and disposing of the evidence, sleeping in his soiled sheets, depressed you. You wondered whether you needed professional help or whether it was normal for a father to love his son this deeply.

He stole money from Sarah's purse. You saw him doing it and he did it in such a skilled way that you knew it wasn't his first time. You didn't say anything.

From the age of five until the age of seven, either Sarah or you walked him to school every morning, holding his hand every step of the way. On the day of his murder, he'd only been walking without you for a few weeks. And even then he wasn't alone. He walked with a red-haired boy named George, his best friend, who lived three doors down from you. For the first week of their independence you drove behind at a safe distance to make sure they made it there safely. They were holding hands, which moved you enormously. After that, you decided to let go. You believed he would be fine.

Once, he discovered you watching pornography on your office computer. He was standing there while you flicked, bored, through a series of images on the screen. You were fully dressed, you weren't doing anything untoward, but as one sequence of pictures changed in favour of another you saw him reflected in the monitor, a ghostly presence, and jumped. You turned to him but he wasn't looking at you, he was staring at the screen with a bewildered expression on his face. You brought him back to bed and said nothing. You went downstairs and said
Fuck
about a hundred times. You felt terrible about it, although not enough to stop looking at pornography online.

When the police told you that he'd been murdered, you started laughing. They say that the mind reacts in bizarre ways to things that it cannot accept. They didn't flinch. Perhaps they'd seen this kind of thing before. Eventually you stopped and grew dizzy and they had to help you into a seat. You asked whether Sarah knew yet and they shook their heads. At that same moment, she turned her key in the front door and came into the living room.

A few minutes later she too knew that your son had been murdered.

You prefer to travel alone these days. For one thing, it makes it easier to have sex with strangers, something you have increasingly come to rely upon since Billy's murder. You're still relatively young, you're in good shape, you're reasonably good-looking. It's not difficult to find the right bar at the right time, to dress correctly, to sit in the right seat, to read a newspaper or work on one of your columns until the right girl comes in. The Internet will tell you everything you need to know about pick-up joints. You don't go over first but you do make eye contact and you hold it. Usually, if she's interested, she will too. And it becomes obvious what's going to happen. Maybe you'll buy her a drink, maybe you'll finish your column first, maybe you'll wait for her to make the approach. You never stay the night and you prefer not to bring someone back to your hotel. You're not particularly interested in conversation but if it's something that's important to her, then you're happy to go along with it.

The funny thing is, you don't particularly enjoy it. But it passes a couple of hours and makes you feel removed from a world that allowed you, however briefly, to feel part of a family.

You were never very promiscuous when you were younger but when you look towards the future, constant casual sex is all you see and the idea neither turns you on nor depresses you. Before you met Sarah you had slept with no more than half a dozen girls and one boy. The boy was a friend of yours in college. He was in love with you, or so he said. One night you decided to let him have what he wanted. You were young, nineteen, it didn't seem to matter much to you. Also, you were mildly interested to know how it would feel, to understand what another boy would do with you, to find out where his hands, his lips, his tongue might travel. The experience didn't move you very much and you didn't want to repeat it. The boy, who had promised that a single night together would satisfy the desire that threatened to overwhelm him, only grew more attached to you, and your friendship soon came to an end. He accused you of lying about yourself. He was wrong. You weren't lying about anything. You just weren't interested, that's all. You missed him afterwards though. You'd enjoyed his company. Still, you didn't regret it.

You went back to work soon after the funeral. There were cities on your calendar, one every month or so, and you saw no reason not to fulfil your commitments. You had to earn, after all. And you liked the idea of solitude. Previously, you saw your trips as distractions away from Sarah and Billy. You would arrive, see what you needed to see, meet who you needed to meet, write your column and then be on the first flight back home to your family. For European cities, you might need only a couple of days. For the Middle East, four or five. For further afield, a week. But since Billy's murder you have been to three different continents and seven different countries, and when you visited Rome, Copenhagen, Brno and Lisbon, places relatively close to home, you spent four or five days in each one when it would have been easy to leave quickly. Sarah didn't seem to mind. Perhaps she liked the solitude too. Perhaps she was fucking someone while you were away. In your bed. In Billy's bed. If she was, you didn't mind. You felt no claims over her body.

But it was her suggestion that she should accompany you to Amsterdam.

‘Why?' you asked her.

‘So we can be together.'

‘We're together all the time at home,' you said.

‘It would be good for us,' she told you.

‘I'll have to work. I won't be able to spend much time with you.'

‘You will if we don't arrive at the same time,' she said. ‘I'll give you a few days to get your work done and then I'll get a flight. I've never been to Amsterdam. You've told me all those stories about your time there. I'd like to see it for myself.'

It was true that you had often talked about your love of the city. The years you'd spent there had been important ones to you but somehow you had always resisted the idea of your coming here together; it was a place, a memory, that you wanted to keep for yourself. But she insisted. She said that if your relationship was to have any hope of surviving, you needed to spend more time together, to talk more, to be like you used to be. Many parents in these situations, she told you, break up within a year. Particularly when there are no other children to bind them together.

‘That's not what I want,' she told you. ‘Is it what you want?'

‘No,' you told her. ‘No, I don't think it's what I want.'

‘You don't think so?'

‘It's difficult,' you said quietly. ‘We're going through the same experience, we've suffered the same loss, and yet I find it hard to talk to you about it.'

She nodded. She felt the same way, you knew, which was comforting.

‘I don't know how two people can ever get over the murder of a child,' you said, preparing to give in and agree that she might come to Amsterdam. You were sitting in your kitchen at the time. She was drinking a glass of wine. Prior to this, she had seemed quite relaxed, quite calm. But when you said this, she picked up her glass and threw it at the wall, glass smashing everywhere, a stream of dark red smearing its way down the wall like blood.

‘For God's sake,' she screamed, standing up, scaring you with her fury. You leaned back, holding up your hands to defend yourself if necessary. ‘He wasn't murdered! Will you stop saying that he was murdered? No one murdered him! Will you stop saying that over and over and over and over?'

Then she left and it was very late when you heard her opening the door to her bedroom, the guest room, the room she slept in now. You still weren't sure what to call it. You were asleep in Billy's narrow bed, where you had been sleeping for months. Your own room was empty.

But he
was
murdered, that's the thing. That's where Sarah and you disagree.

You stand in a queue outside the Anne Frank House, shivering in the cold, the consequences of last night's drinking making themselves known behind your eyes. You've been here before, of course, but Sarah never has. She tells you that she read the novel when she was in school and then throws you an icy look when you point out that it isn't a novel. She stares up at the exterior of the building, the hooks extending from the gables, and runs her hands up and down her arms as she turns to look at a barge making its way along the canal. A moment later she gasps and looks at you in amazement.

‘That's him,' she says, pointing to a young man dragging a rope across the deck and dropping it in a corner before rotating his arms like windmills. Despite the freezing temperatures, he is only wearing a T-shirt on his upper body and is powerfully built. ‘I can't believe it!'

‘That's who?' you ask.

‘The boy. The …' She shakes her head but doesn't look away from the barge as it drifts further along out of sight. ‘It doesn't matter,' she says quietly before putting a hand to her mouth and stifling a laugh. ‘I can't believe it,' she repeats a moment later. Something like a groan escapes her mouth, a note of longing, perhaps. Or regret.

A party of schoolchildren are in front of you, a few years younger than Anne was when she and her family first took shelter in the annex. Twenty or so tourists are gathered behind you in groups of three or four. An American girl is chewing gum loudly, smacking it against her teeth as she talks rubbish with her friend, expressing outrage over some celebrity break-up. Their conversation is only marginally less annoying than the sound of her masticating. You turn around to stare at her and she stops in mid-flow, her mouth hanging open like some animal, the pink ball of gum attached to her lower teeth. She opens her eyes wide as if to say ‘What?' but you turn back and say nothing. The queue moves forward. You go in.

The tour is self-guided and Sarah and you move through the rooms slowly, quietly, reading the words inscribed on the walls, stopping only to examine some of the artefacts or watch the video displays. People whisper to each other beneath their breath, as if they are in church, and although there is no photography allowed, you notice more than one person taking pictures with their phones. You feel irritated by their wilful disregard for the rules. The same thing happened when you visited Auschwitz, tourists pointing their camcorders into every corner of the gas chambers to record the locations of despair, despite being instructed by the guides that this was strictly forbidden. What would they do with those images, you wondered? Why would they choose to watch them upon their return home?

You feel curiously unmoved by the exhibitions downstairs. Everything is too pristine, too carefully laid out to allow you to imagine the people who lived here seventy years ago and the anxiety they must have felt. Shelley Winters' Academy Award, a touch of Hollywood in an environment of tension, seems particularly incongruous. You hear the American girl laughing loudly, like a deranged donkey, but when you glance in her direction she is dragging her friend into a different room and whispering something in her ear.

You lose sight of Sarah momentarily, then find her, then lose her again. She ascends a staircase and you follow, separated only by two small boys from the school party who seem frightened to have been detached from their group. They're holding hands as they try to move faster but the staircase is narrow and they must wait for Sarah to make her way to the top, as she too must wait for whoever is before her and so on. They let out a gasp of relief when they reach the summit and rush to join their friends. You watch them and wonder for a moment whether George, red-haired George from three doors down, walks to school on his own now or whether he has made a new friend since Billy's murder.