‘I killed my wife by drinking too much and driving without due care. That reason enough?’
‘Definitely.’ He nodded in a satisfied way, like the man who comes down the ladder to tell you that you need a whole new roof. ‘How long ago was this?’
‘A little over six months.’
‘What actually happened?’
‘Another car hit us on the passenger side. It was at night, raining, very dark. I never saw that car until it hit us. The driver just backed up and took off, I didn’t get his number. Or hers, if it was a woman.’
‘Could it have been the other driver’s fault?’
‘When the paramedics breathalysed me I was well over the limit and I couldn’t walk in a straight line. Maybe the other guy was in the same kind of shape, I don’t know. If I’d been sober I’d have approached that intersection more cautiously. The police thought it was worth a one-year ban but that doesn’t matter because I won’t be driving any more.’
‘Your wife died instantly?’
‘Yes.’ His question made me see Jennifer as she looked after it happened, her face turned towards me, her eyes closed, her mouth open. Why did he need to know how long it took her to die?
‘And now you see her face as she died and you’re haunted by it?’ he continued.
‘Yes.’ I considered planting my fist in his face; if he lowered his head I’d probably break my hand.
‘And you wake up in the morning hating yourself?’
‘I go to bed hating myself and I get up hating myself, and I hate myself in between, OK?’
‘But it was an accident, right?’
‘It was an accident but I made it happen.’
‘How did you make it happen?’
‘I told you: by drinking too much.’
‘Did you know that you were going to be driving?’
‘Yes.’
‘So then why did you drink too much?’
‘Lots of people do.’
‘That’s not a good enough answer. Did you know that drinking would impair your judgement and your reflexes when driving?’
‘Sometimes I drive better when I’m a little over the limit.’
‘That’s what I mean by impaired judgement. Let me put it another way: if you were driving when you had too much to drink, was it really an accident?’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘There aren’t really that many accidents, are there? If you do Thing A that makes Thing B happen, there’s no reason to be surprised, is there?’
‘Are you saying that I wanted to kill my wife?’
‘I’m saying we need to look at what came before the accident.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like how were things between you and your wife.’
‘Is this how you get your jollies or what?’
‘This is how we find out what makes things happen.’
‘Right. Well, Doc, I think your time is up. Bye bye.’ I got up and walked out. Looking back on it later I understood that I didn’t really want to know all there was to know about the accident. After a while I got used to my guilt.
Nonetheless I was hoping, with time, to get her death off my back, but it was behind me whichever way I turned. At first I’d been like a parent to it but gradually it became the parent and I the child. When would I grow up and move out of its house? I rubbed my bat tattoo and remembered with embarrassment that I had done it in the expectation that my life was going to change. So far the only change was that I felt more confused than before.
More and more I found myself at the Church of St John’s in the North End Road. That smooth fibreglass Jesus had begun to pull me; the idea of someone’s dying for our sins was much in my mind. What a lot of big and little sins there were to die for! How could one man handle all of them? But of course that was his thing, that was what made him special. I wished it were a system I could believe in.
It was a damp and foggy November morning with a chill in the air. The fog made everything more personal, as if it were taking me aside to tell me a secret. I was leaning on the church railings and looking at Christ when the John Smith drinker who’d asked me what I wanted from Jesus appeared. I wondered what my answer would be if he asked the same thing again.
‘Getting any messages?’ he said.
‘Not so far. The last time we spoke you quoted Psalm 137.’
‘I remember.’
‘You said there was a lot of Babylon around here but what Zion do you remember? If you don’t mind my asking.’
He shook his head. ‘Right now that remembered Zion is all I’ve got and it isn’t something I show around. Haven’t you got one of your own?’
Again the smells of oil and metal, cigarette smoke and Jack Daniel’s came to me with my father at his work-bench under the light of the green-shaded bulb. Is that my Zion? I thought. Is that all there is? Nothing since my boyhood? I tried to see Jennifer’s face and couldn’t. The John Smith man was watching me with his head cocked to one side. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ve got one. My name’s Roswell Clark. What’s yours?’
‘Abraham Selby.’ We shook hands. ‘Zion is what you think there’s no end of when you have it, then all of a sudden it’s gone and there wasn’t really that much of it.’
‘Can I quote you?’
‘Any time. Now I need to think about what I just said. I’ll see you.’ He went back to the low-budget drinking community and found himself a place to sit on the low wall around the trees. He couldn’t be too badly off, I reflected, if he found it worthwhile to think about what he said.
I stood there silent in Babylon while the fog kept me private. There was in the damp chill a smell of freshness and change. The Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor came into my head and of course it brought with it the gorilla and the woman I’d made for Adelbert Delarue. I moved my mind away a little and let images without words come to me. I saw my hand making sketches but I couldn’t see what the sketches were. I saw the tools on my workbench; I saw the sheds at Moss & Co, the measured forests of timber, the baulks of lime. I heard the whispering silence.
16 Sarah Varley
That hand would not let go of me. That a remnant of a masterfully carved crucifixion should be among the rubbish in that box was unsettling; this fractional representation of real suffering had some importance and it laid on me the responsibility to do the right thing by it. How many miles and how many years had it travelled to get to me?
There’s a fair amount of ignorance among market traders; most of us know a little and a few of us know a lot but Dermot and Vernon at the Jubilee Market were the only ones who I thought might have a clue as to the provenance of this fragment. Dermot thought it was Italian; Vernon thought it was German; both of them guessed seventeenth century or earlier.
Sometimes I have little premonitions: I expect to see someone and they appear. Roswell Clark was a woodcarver and I thought he might turn up and shed some light on the crucified wooden hand. About half-past ten suddenly there he was. ‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Hi.’ He looked haggard and preoccupied.
‘How’s it going?’
He shrugged. ‘Hard to say.’
‘Anything wrong? Bad news of some kind?’
‘Oh, no, nothing like that. Nothing especially wrong and no news of any kind.’ He looked as if he hoped there’d be no more questions. ‘How’ve you been?’ he said.
‘Much the same. I’ve got a recent acquisition I’d like to show you.’ I took the hand out of the box under my table and held it out to him. He stepped back, folded his right forearm over his stomach, leant his left elbow on the back of his right hand, and rubbed his chin thoughtfully with his left hand while regarding me suspiciously.