I said
Well what about Szegeti?
And he said
That charlatan?
Mother Theresa? I said.
That nun?
Jaime Jaramillo?
He said Jaramillo was all right. He said
But I haven’t seen it. What I’ve seen is
He said
You go into these situations as a journalist and you keep thinking you should stop reporting and just help. You have to be professional. You tell yourself you’re helping by letting people know what’s happening.
Well, they know what’s happening but it doesn’t do any good. You try to get some people out before it’s too late and you run into a blank wall of officialdom, and nothing does any good. And then it’s not just that you’ve seen stupid thugs with another language and a foreign uniform commit atrocities, but someone pretty much like yourself say I’m sorry there’s nothing I can do. If you’re lucky the person says Well, I’ll write to the Minister.
He said
I don’t want to go on. If I’ve got 50 years ahead of seeing the eye and the leg and the girl and the rest and the best I can hope for is someone promising to write to the Minister I’d be better off if I were out of it now.
I know it will cause a lot of people a lot of pain. Can I go on for 50 years so they can go comfortably on saying I’ve adjusted?
People tell me, you can’t let them win. You made it this far. If you kill yourself they’ve won. But it’s insane. Who the fuck is they? How the fuck does it defeat them if I wake up howling every night?
He said
Maybe reporting does a little good. But does it do enough good to justify living this way? There are plenty of others who’d be glad of my job and could do it well.
I said
Well just as long as you stay off paracetamol.
He said
What?
I said
You should never try to kill yourself with paracetamol. It’s a horrible way to die. People think you just pass out, but actually you don’t lose consciousness, you think nothing’s happened but then a day later your organs shut down. It destroys the liver. Sometimes people change their minds, but it’s too late. I’m not saying you would change your mind; but almost anything is better than dying of paracetamol poisoning.
He laughed.
Where did you pick all that up? he said. He laughed again.
I said
My mother told me.
I said
A guillotine is very quick and pretty painless, though they say the head can be conscious for a minute or so before the blood supply to the brain is drained off. I made a miniature one when I was five with my Meccano set. I think it would be pretty easy to make a big one. Of course, it would be a bit gruesome for the person who found the body. You could call the police if you didn’t want to upset a family member. There’s no way they could reach you in time to stop you.
He laughed. I’ll bear that in mind, he said. Do you know any other good ways?
I’ve heard that drowning is pleasant at the end, I said. A friend of my mother’s was rescued when she was going down for the third time. She said it hurt at first, when her lungs filled with water, but then it was drowsy and lovely. It hurt when they pulled her out and forced the air back into her lungs. That might not be too bad. You could jump off a Channel ferry at night, or maybe it would be nicer to jump off an outboard motor in the Aegean and drown in blue. There might be a few problems for your family if the body wasn’t found, but I expect it would be all right if you left a note.
Yes, he said. He was smiling. That would probably be all right. I’m going to have a drink. What do you want? A Coke?
Thank you, I said.
I followed him downstairs to the kitchen.
You seem to know a lot about it, he said.
I’m better on mechanics than pharmaceuticals, I said. I can make a noose. You want to break the neck rather than suffocate, if possible; apparently that’s quite difficult to achieve with a sheet. My mother thought I should know how in case I was ever put in prison and tortured—I’m terribly sorry.
That’s all right, he said. He drank a lot of the drink. She’s probably right. It’s not a bad thing to know—if you’ve use of your hands. I was tied up the whole time, so it wouldn’t have helped.
Except when you played chess, I said.
No, I was tied up then too. He made my moves for me. Sometimes he’d deliberately move a piece to the wrong square and pretend not to understand if I objected. You wouldn’t have thought I’d have cared, with everything else, but it made me absolutely furious. I’d refuse to play, and he’d beat me. Or he’d beat me if he lost. He didn’t beat me if he beat me.
He said
He was kind of split up. He’d be quite friendly when he brought out the board, and he’d smile. That would last for a few moves and then sometimes he’d start to cheat, and sometimes he’d lose his temper and hit me with the gun, and sometimes. The friendliness was the horrible part, because he’d be hurt, genuinely hurt, when I wasn’t pleased to see him or took offence because he’d beat the shit out of me the day before. And now that I’m back that’s all I see. That horrible friendliness everywhere. All these people who simply don’t realise, it just doesn’t occur to them that
He said
That’s what I mean about the ordinariness. That’s why it’s not enough. It’s not enough to stand up to what’s there, but people go on smiling pleasantly
My wife smiles and I see that horrible friendliness on her face. My children disgust me. They’re delightful, extroverted, confident. They know what they want, and that’s what interests them, and it disgusts me. They allowed me two weeks to be a bit strange, and then they all came to me separately.
My wife said she knew what I’d been through but this was hard on the children. My daughter came to see me and said it was hard on Mum, I didn’t know what they’d been through. My son said it was hard on his Mum and sister.
So then I think, this is bloody ridiculous. It’s unfair. They’re perfectly OK. It’s not their fault. What do you want? Do you want them to be shell-shocked and dreaming of horrors? You want them to be safe from all that. You want all the rest to get away to be ordinary. And I think, we’ve got so much. Let’s celebrate life. We’ve got each other, we’re so bloody lucky. And I throw my arms around them with tears in my eyes and I say, Let’s go along the canal and feed the swans. I’m thinking, we can walk straight out of the house, there’s no one to stop us, and we can walk by the canal because there are no land mines and no one’s shelling us, let’s not waste this. And they all look absolutely appalled because it’s such a totally wet thing to do, but they come to humour me, and of course it’s awful.
He said
When you’ve seen things, or things have been done to you, this badness gets inside you and comes back with you, and then people who’ve never been near a war, people who’ve never struck an animal never mind tortured anyone—people who are completely innocent—get hurt too. The torture comes out as disgust, and it comes out in that gush of sentimentality that chokes them. I see that but I can’t kill the badness, it just sits inside like a poison toad.
He said
Is it really doing them any good to keep the toad alive? Or even if it is can I go through a lifetime of it?
I said
It would obviously be better to die before rather than after years of suffering; no one would condemn an innocent man to a life sentence to make someone else happy; the question is whether it is really the case that nothing will blot out these memories and that nothing could be good enough to make it worth undergoing them. If that’s the question you can’t seriously expect me to know the answer.