Her mother nursed her like a grievance.
‘My little girl,’ she crooned over her.
Esme told her to stop. She was getting better. In some respects she felt better than she’d ever felt before. Her mother worried that that meant she was preparing to embrace the life of a permanent invalid. But then there was a secret corner of herself that was willing to embrace the life of a permanent nurse. Feed her daughter soup, kill her husband, put up the shutters, smell him rot and hope not to see daylight again.
Esme had never moved out of her parents’ house so she was back in her old room. Yet it felt as though she’d been away all her adult life and was revisiting the sanctum of her childhood for the first time in decades. It was the lying down that did that. Lying down and seeing words jerk about above her head. Can one ever return to bed for a long period and not be reminded of being a child? Even the books on her shelves and the magazines on the chest of drawers, bought just before she was run over, even her newest clothes, seemed to belong to a much younger her. Where had she been in the intervening years?
Her mother caught her weeping once. ‘Oh, my little girl,’ she cried.
‘Cut that out!’ Esme said. ‘I’m not in pain and I’m not sad. I’m just missing something.’
‘What?’
‘The last fifteen years of my life.’
‘You haven’t been here that long, darling.’
‘I know that. I just can’t think what I did with them before.’
In a few weeks she was able to lever herself up by her arms. It would be longer before she could walk, but there was no hurry. Physiotherapists visited her and were disappointed by her slow progress. ‘She’s regaining strength,’ they told her mother, ‘but she doesn’t seem to have the will to be up and about.’
She wasn’t worried about it herself. She still had a lot of thinking to do. Once she was out of the coma her thoughts did not fly at her. She missed that, as people from the country miss birdsong when they move to town. She had to call words to her now. She had to start at the beginning of an idea and puzzle it out. It was like following one end of a ball of thread, uncertain where it would lead her.
Her mother fretted. ‘Why are you so quiet?’
‘Thinking.’
‘You’ve had a lot of time to think.’
‘You can’t have too much.’
Can’t you? Her mother wasn’t sure.
But her father liked her like this. He took it for remorse. Any minute now he expected her to announce that the accident had killed off her lesbian tendencies.
‘What’s happening in the world?’ she asked one morning.
She had got herself over to the breakfast table to join her parents.
‘The usual,’ her mother said. ‘Births, marriages, funerals.’
‘What would you have instead?’ her husband asked her.
‘Something less horrible.’
‘We make our beds, we lie in them,’ Compton said.
Esme looked from her father to her mother, and back. How long had marriage been a horror to them both? From the first moment of their marrying, forty years before? Had they recoiled from each other even as they exchanged vows? She had never heard them speak lovingly of a time when they didn’t dislike each other intensely. So why had they married, and why hadn’t they parted? What was it that kept them together? The very magnetism of horror, was that it? The harmony that there is in hatred?
She suddenly saw them as a pair of evil planets, barren of life, spinning through space, in constant relation to each other but never colliding. Did a marriage obey the same unvarying law of physics as the solar system? And society too? Was this equipoise of antagonism essential?
But when the planets in disorder wander. . Who said that? Esme knew a crossword clue when she saw one. Disorder wander — prince among men, 6 letters.
Then she remembered the rest from sixth-form literature. But when the planets in evil mixture to disorder wander, what plagues and what portents . . what commotion in the winds. .
By these lights her parents had a successful marriage. They hadn’t wandered in disorder. They might not have known a moment’s happiness together, but at least the winds had stayed quiet.
Now apply this, she reasons, to that commotion whose abiding after-effects had been her study. A raging wind had been loosed, bearing plagues and portents, proof that the planets had wandered badly off their course. Some equipoise of hatred had been lost. You don’t kill the thing you love, but you don’t kill the thing you hate, either. You dance with the thing you hate to the music of the spheres. And all remains well — relatively speaking; of course relatively speaking, relative to massacre and annihilation — so long as the dance continues. The madness is to think you can dance alone, without a partner in mistrust. Had her mother left her father as she had so often threatened to, what would have become of either of them? She couldn’t imagine her mother without her father, so intrinsic to her character was her contempt for him. She existed to denounce him. But he, oh she could imagine him on the streets wielding a machete. WHAT HAPPENED happened, no ifs or buts about it, not because ten thousand men like her father had been abandoned by their wives — though that must have added to the savour of it for some — IT HAPPENED because they forgot, or more likely never fully understood, that those they were killing performed the same function as their wives. It was a catastrophe of literal-mindedness. You don’t kill the thing you hate just because you hate it.
As for why the hatred, Esme Nussbaum is not concerned to put her mind to that. Not now. Perhaps later when she has more strength. Should she slip back into a coma, she thinks, she’ll have the mental space for it.
She is just strong enough, however, to see this one thought through to the end: an essential ingredient of the harmony of disharmony was lost when men like her father went on the rampage. And now, still, all these decades later, they wander in uncomplemented disorder.
She is no longer employed by Ofnow. When Ofnow kills its employees it assumes them to be off the payroll. Her mother has been trying to get her a pension — an endeavour in which she has not been able to count on the support of her husband who understands Ofnow’s reasoning — but without success. She knows what their response will be if she pushes them too hard. They will prove her daughter is no longer on the payroll by killing her again.
Sometimes Esme forgets that she is no longer employed by Ofnow and finds herself preparing a new report to take into the office on Monday morning. It will argue that if the country is to enjoy any sort of harmony again, there must be restitution. Not a crude financial recompense to the descendants of those who vanished in the course of WHAT HAPPENED (there can be no talk of victims) — their whereabouts anyway, supposing some exist, are unknown. What she has in mind is making restitution to the descendants, or rather the idea of the descendants, of those who remained (there can of course be no talk of culprits either). Us, in other words, the living descendants of the living. Restitution in this sense: Giving us all back what we have lost.
There will be considerable relief in the office that she is not proposing financial recompense no matter that it cannot possibly be implemented. Blood money presupposes an offence and, since there hasn’t been one, blood money isn’t on the table. But they won’t know what in God’s name she means by giving us back what we have lost. What have we lost? Explain yourself, Miss Nussbaum. And she will. Gladly.