“You haven’t given my request any more thought?”
“No, I can’t say I have, how about you?”
He squirmed round to face me, tucking his feet in under him.
“Yes, I have it all figured out. Yesterday I killed a frog, I wrote it into my diary—that covers the cruelty to animals part. One beating now and I will have a complete profile, every box ticked off. Any investigation would have to be blind not to be able to track me down. But I need that beating. One beating registered with the childcare authorities and the job will be complete.” He rolled up his sleeves revealing his skinny upper arms. “You could confine your work to areas of soft tissue, my thighs and arms, places where the bruising will be obvious but not dangerous. But nothing around the head, I’d like to keep my wits around me.”
“And how’s that going to make me look, a registered child beater?”
“I’ll clear your name. I’ll say it was totally out of character, I pushed you to the end of your tether.”
“You’re a serial killer, who’s going to believe you?”
“I’m under oath, I won’t lie.”
“This profile thing, that’s an American template.”
“So?”
“I’m saying that it may not translate across the Atlantic.”
He shook his head sadly. “Dad, the world is of one mind. That’s the way it is.”
“No, it doesn’t have to be like that. These things aren’t fixed.”
I put my arm round him and drew him into my side. There wasn’t a pick on him, the bones in his shoulders dug into my ribs. “How do you know these things Jamie, where do you get these ideas from?”
“How does anyone know anything? I just pick them up along the way, same as anyone. This is all common knowledge.”
“It’s not common to me. Why don’t you turn yourself in now, before you do any damage?”
“Who would believe an eight year old?” He turned his face up to me. “Would it kill you?”
“I’ll never know.”
He lowered his face. “It’s only for your good,” he said, “you’ll thank me for this later on.”
I sat there long after he’d gone to bed, the TV on mute.
Someone told me once that you know nothing of love till you have a child of your own. You know nothing of its unconditional demands nor the lengths you will go to protect it. And this is what I’ve been feeling these last few weeks, this is what spooks me. I’ve seen enough to know that wherever there is love there are opportunities for guilt also. It has something to do with more laws and prohibitions, more opportunities for transgression and omission.
What spooks me now is that his fear will become my fear, his terror my terror. One day it might spread from him, slip through his narrow boundaries and become mine. And, as ever, being in two minds, that old sense of weightlessness comes over me when I think these things; once more I am at a remove from myself… One night, at the end of your tether, the world really might be of one mind. And because you haven’t the courage to be scared, the courage to take up the full duty of love, you find yourself pitched into a place beyond marvelling that you could be pushed this far. And because this is the age of reasoned hysterics and because you are haunted by his pale arms, you find yourself walking down the hall to his bedroom, to where he is tucked up fast in his dreams. And sitting on the side of his bed, lit by the light streaming in from the hall, you run through your reasons once more, squaring your story against the day when you will stand up and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And then, these things straight in your mind at last, you reach out to touch his shoulder, touch him gently, calling his name in a whisper that barely reaches into his sleep… “Jamie,” you call, “wake up Jamie, wake up, good boy…”
And that you could even think these things, that for these moments you are in two minds and so divided from the better part of yourself leaves you with this question—to whom or where do you turn to now?
Americans
[ICELAND]
GYRÐIR ELÍASSON
The Music Shop
I visited a most unusual music shop the other day. Actually, it wasn’t “day”; it was night and I was sound asleep during my visit. Yet in my dream I was wide-awake and walking down Vesturgata on a sunny spring evening. The air was perfectly still and all the gardens were a fresh new green. I walked almost to the end of the road, then turned off, only to find myself in a small side street. Not only had I never been down there before, as far as I knew, but I hadn’t even been aware it existed.
There was a tall, blue building ahead with a flat roof and a shop on the ground floor. The sign over the door said aladdin’s music store. I couldn’t quite see what Aladdin had to do with music but it had been so long since I’d read the story that I didn’t give it another thought.
I’m constitutionally incapable of walking past a music shop without taking a look inside, and this time was no exception, so I climbed the low flight of steps and went in. A jangling at the door announced my entrance and a young girl emerged from a back room and said good evening.
“I just wanted to take a look at your music.”
“Go right ahead,” she replied. She had a lovely voice; dark hair, dark eyes.
“You’re open late,” I said.
“We’re always open.”
I walked over to the racks of CDs. For its size, the shop boasted an extraordinarily wide selection. I flicked quickly through the racks. Beethoven’s Eleventh Symphony: I was pretty sure he’d never composed it, yet here it was, in a very fine German edition. It was the same with Satie’s Military March for 203 Pianofortes: I knew this piece had never been performed. When Satie died, three hundred and fifty-four dirty shirts were discovered behind his piano—perhaps because he’d sweated so much when composing this work.
I moved over to the Blues section and before long found a CD by Mississippi John Hurt that got me excited; he was playing the electric guitar and singing songs by Neil Young. The evening sun shone in through the large window at the front of the shop and there was a bluish radiance inside, though no lights were on. The girl was still standing by the counter, gazing absentmindedly into the evening light.
“I’d like to listen to this one.”
“Of course.”
She went round the back and re-emerged with a machine that I took at first for some kind of vacuum cleaner. It reminded me rather of one of the old cylindrical Hoovers; silver like them, with a long, gray, concertinaed windpipe.
She put the CD in the machine and handed me a pair of headphones: “You’re welcome to go outside in the sunshine and listen there. Just drag the windpipe with you and carry the machine in your hand.”
I thanked her and opened the door, with the machine in one hand and the earphones on my head. The door closed gently on the windpipe, which stretched across the threshold as I went out.
I met no resistance when I pulled on the windpipe; it yielded every time. The weather was so glorious that I decided to walk a little farther, down to the corner at the western end of the street, where I could sit on a bench bathed in evening sunshine. I listened, blown away by the sound of Mississippi John performing songs by Neil Young, although I knew perfectly well that he had never played those songs, and that Neil Young had probably never even composed them—at least not to my knowledge.
Shortly afterward another customer came out of the shop bearing the same kind of machine as me. He dragged the windpipe after him like a fireman wielding his hose and for a moment I was afraid he was going to extinguish the blazing sun.