Emma is listening intently from her booster seat. How much does she understand?
‘I don’t think we should talk about this now.’
Charlie won’t let it go. ‘You’re treating me like a child.’
‘Maybe because you’re acting like one. You’ve been arrested. God knows what your mother will say.’
‘Don’t tell her!’
‘It’s too late. She called me.’
Charlie groans. ‘Now she’ll get all sad and she’ll spend days looking at me like she’s a seal pup about to be hit with a club.’
‘She’s not that bad.’
‘Yes she is. She’s sad enough already.’
Is she sad?
Julianne is standing in the doorway of the cottage as I park the car. She opens her arms for Emma, who runs up the path. Charlie takes longer to retrieve her bag and open the car door.
‘We still need to talk about this.’
‘Whatever.’
I hate that word - ‘whatever’. She’s telling me I don’t understand. I’ll never understand. I’m too old. I’m too stupid. I have no taste in clothes or music or friends. I don’t own the right language to talk to her. I don’t dread the same things or dream the same dreams.
I’m caught in that in-between place, unsure whether I can be a father or a friend to Charlie, knowing I can’t be both.
Right now she is like a separate nation state seeking independence, wanting her own government, laws and budget. Whenever I try to avoid conflict, choosing diplomacy instead of hostility, she masses her troops at the border, accusing me of spying or sabotaging her life.
She walks up the path and steps around Julianne, going straight upstairs to her room.
Julianne calls out to me. ‘Did she say why?’
‘Sienna.’
‘We’ll talk about it later.’
The door closes and I sit on the low brick wall across the lane, beneath the overhanging branches. Gazing at the cottage, I can sometimes make out silhouettes behind the curtains. Right now Julianne is getting Emma ready for bed. Next will come the brushing of teeth, the reading of bedtime stories, a kiss, a hug, a thirsty summons, and one final hug before the light is turned down.
I know the script. I know the stage directions. I no longer have a walk-on part.
8
It’s six thirty-five. Still dark outside. Sometimes I wake like this, aware of a sound where no sound belongs. The terrace is old and full of inexplicable creaks and groans, as if complaining of being neglected. Footsteps in the attic. Branches scratching against glass.
I used to sleep like a bear, but not any more. Now I lie awake taking an inventory of my tics and twitches, mapping my body to see what territory I have surrendered to Mr Parkinson since yesterday.
My left leg and arm are twitching. Using my right hand, I pick up a small white pill and take a sip of water, raising my head from the pillow to swallow. The blue pill comes next.
After twenty minutes I take another inventory. The twitches have gone and Mr Parkinson has been kept at bay for another few hours. Never vanquished. Till death us do part.
At seven o’clock I turn on the radio. The news in scolding tones:
Scuffles broke out yesterday outside the trial of three men accused of firebombing a boarding house and killing a family of five asylum seekers. Riot police were called to quell the fighting between anti-racism protesters and supporters of the accused, who have links to the British National Party.
Police have promised extra security when the trial resumes this morning at Bristol Crown Court.
The second bulletin:
A decorated former detective has been brutally murdered in his home in a village outside of Bath. DCI Ray Hegarty, who spent twenty years with Bristol CID, bled to death in his daughter’s bedroom.
Forensic experts spent yesterday at the eighteenth-century farmhouse, where they took bedding and carpets, while detectives interviewed neighbours and family members. Investigators are waiting to talk to the victim’s teenage daughter who is under police guard in hospital.
The weather forecast: patchy cloud with a chance of showers. Maximum: 12 °C.
Gunsmoke can hear me coming down the stairs. He sleeps outside in the laundry, an arrangement he resents because the cat sits on the windowsill almost goading him.
‘A short walk today,’ I tell him.
I have work to do - a lecture at the university. Today my psychology students will learn why people follow orders and act contrary to their consciences. Think of the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, black prisons and Guantanamo Bay . . .
I make mental notes as I walk across Haydon Field. I shall tell them about Stanley Milgram, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University, who in 1963 conducted one of the most famous experiments of them all. He organised a group of volunteers to play the roles of teachers and students and then set up an ‘electric shock’ machine. The students had to memorise a pair of words and were ‘punished’ for any wrong answer with a shock from the machine.
There were thirty levers, each corresponding to fifteen volts. With each mistake, the next lever was pulled, delivering even more pain. If a teacher hesitated they were told, ‘The experiment requires that you go on.’
The machine was a fake, of course, but the teacher volunteers didn’t know that. Each time they pulled a new lever a soundtrack broadcast painful groans, turning to screams at higher voltages. Finally there was silence.
Sixty-five per cent of participants pulled levers corresponding to the maximum 450 volts, clearly marked ‘DANGER: LETHAL’.
Milgram interviewed the volunteers afterwards, asking them why, and was told they were just following orders. Does that sound familiar? It’s the same excuse offered down the ages. The man in the white coat or the military uniform is seen as a legitimate authority figure. Someone to be believed. Someone to be obeyed.
Gunsmoke is lying in a shallow watercourse at the edge of the river where silt has formed a beach. He drinks, pants and drinks some more. Crossing the bridge, I walk up Mill Hill. The Labrador catches up, dripping water from his chin. His pink tongue swings from side to side.
As I near the terrace, I see a young woman sitting in a wheelchair. Dressed in jeans and a sweater, her dark hair is pulled back from her face into a tight ponytail.
‘Mr O’Loughlin?’
‘Yes.’
She raises her hand to shield her eyes from the glare, but the morning sun isn’t that strong.
‘I’m Zoe Hegarty.’
She looks older than nineteen, with her mother’s eyes and build.
‘Do you want to come inside?’
Zoe glances up and down the street. Shakes her head. ‘I get a bit funny about being alone with men. No offence.’
‘None taken.’
She rolls her chair to face away from the sun, resting the wheels against the low brick wall. Fumbling for a cigarette, she lights it apologetically. ‘Can’t smoke around Mum. She doesn’t like it.’ Turning her head, she exhales slowly.
‘I heard about Liam’s hearing. They’re not going to release him.’
‘Not this time.’
‘But he can try again?’
‘In a year.’
Zoe nods. I wait for something more. Her hand shakes. She raises the filter to her lips.
‘Sienna didn’t kill Daddy.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘You can tell the police.’
‘Why don’t you tell them?’
‘I have. I don’t think they’re listening.’
A car passes. She looks at it through a veil of tiredness.
‘Tell me about your father.’
She takes a deep breath. ‘It was tough being his daughter.’