Sophie changed suddenly. Sophie turned, in an instant.
It was his third day home. Some logistical entanglement had forced Russia to leave him alone in the house with the baby: a configuration never repeated. Sophie was supposedly down for the night (it was about seven o’clock), and he hadn’t thought much of it when he heard the cries from her room. She had now been on the planet for almost a year. These cries of hers were confident, almost businesslike (she knew the score). He had heard her in far greater confusion and disarray. Why was it so hard for them, sometimes, to go from one state to another? What were they separating themselves from, with such bitter difficulty? In sleep, it seemed, they lost their hold on love and life; and when they woke, sometimes, they couldn’t shake off this dream of freefall.
He went in and decribbed her and took her back out into the light. She saw his face — and all the dogs of London must have snapped to attention. A scream is a blunt instrument; this was more like a whistle, piercingly focused, and focused on him … She twisted away, quietening, stiffening. Then by degrees she tracked back, infusing her lungs with short hot gasps of suspense: perhaps — obedient to the intensity of Sophie’s wish — her father would now be transformed into Russia or Imaculada. On finding that this hadn’t happened, she reestablished herself on the outer limit of distress. Then it went on getting gradually worse.
There came a crucial interval, in the garden under the apple tree. He had somehow juggled and manhandled her down the stairs, half the time on his rump, and drawing himself along on the lifeline of the banister, with the baby wedged in his knitted armpits. They gained the kitchen; he tried all he knew, and nothing worked. So he pushed his way out of the back door — and the cooler air, and the pale-blue evening above, seemed to reposition her. After a while she was able to meet his gaze. Her eyes: to contemplate them was like floating in a pond or a slow-moving river. Competing currents and temperatures subtly coursed; one of these undertows looked like trust, and he tried to swim towards it; but it was soon lost, sluiced out, in other undertows. Then he abandoned his pleading whispers and just held her to him as he groaned and shuddered. It was like the last days of Pearclass="underline" twins joined at the chest and now under the knife, in inseparable pain. Nearly an hour later Russia returned with the fetched Billie. Within ten minutes Sophie was asleep, piteously but resignedly clutching her duck.
Thereafter he would sometimes look into Sophie’s eyes, in search of that pulse of trust. He couldn’t find it. And she cried, now, the moment he entered the room. At supper, when the baby was with them, her seat like a pair of medieval underpants bolted to the table, Xan ate with one hand in a fixed salute, shielding his face from her sight.
And Russia?
‘You’ll remember this in pain, boy.’ Well, he remembered that. ‘You went and named him!’ Named who?
He remembered the Dickheads, the dead duck upside down in the green canal. The sunset, like a firefighting operation. The paparazzo sparrow (‘Is that your “bird”?’). ‘Why’d you do it, son? You went and named him!’ Named who?
Xan had read in the books, in the literature of head injury, that an experience needs time to become a memory. Not long — maybe a second or two. And the blow had come so quickly, so hard upon. The significant name didn’t have time to become a memory. And perhaps (the books suggested) that memory-pause was a cerebral reflex — of self-protection. The brain didn’t want to remember the blow.
But he wanted to remember it. In epileptic longhand, with his pen shooting off, accelerating off in all directions, he retraced the steps of that October evening, saying come on, come on with an East End cadence (said in this way, come on rhymes with German; in the East End it was normally reserved for watching fights). Sometimes he could get as far back as the smell of the assailant’s breath, the assailant’s hormones, wrapped round his neck like a scarf. But no further. It was like an investigation into the very early universe, that infinitesimal fragment of time which was obscured by the violence of the initial conditions. You couldn’t quite reach the Big Bang — no matter what you did.
At his desk he also worked on his diary, as instructed. Record everything, they told him. And he recorded everything:
Woke at ten. Rose at eleven. Cold water on face. Went downstairs (lost balance twice). Baby there — cried. Ate cereal. Made tea, scalding hand. Had shit. Searched long time for address book. Phoned agent. Sat at desk. Wrote this.
He’d been in a state of combat-readiness, when he went down. And his body remembered that. But now he was a cripple: a cripple who was spoiling for war.
Outside was for healthy people, and he didn’t go there. Even his visits to the mailbox at the end of the front garden (a distance of fifteen feet) took him to the brink of a chaotic immensity. It made his face flicker.
Outside was the thing which is called world.
‘Do you mind if I use a tape recorder? You didn’t last time, as I remember. Rory said you wanted to give this a definite emphasis.’
‘Yeah well we’ll come to that. But — yes. I mean to send a message.’
‘Okay … When did you first realise that your father …?’
‘Was a villain. When I was little my mother used to tell me he was in the army. He’d go away for a year and Mum’d say he’s in — I don’t know — Vietnam. “But we’re not in Vietnam, Mum.” “Well your dad is, that’s all I know.” And then there were all these brown letters from Broadmoor and Strangeways, and he’d come back as pale as a polyp, so I had my doubts. And around then, see, the villains found a new toy: publicity. They all started doing what I’m doing now. Giving interviews.’
Xan had said much of this before — in interviews. And the sentences, even the paragraphs, were still there. But now something else was trying to ail his speech.
‘Villains? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.’
‘No, it don’t, and they all paid for it. They thought it was a great new way of winding up the oppo — you know, sticking it to the Old Bill. But you can’t have it both ways. You don’t want to be riling up a bloke who’s getting good overtime. So I’d read him in the news, mouthing off about how they couldn’t do him for this or that caper, and then he’d go away for another stretch. Where is it this time, Mum. Mozambique? Anyhow, you don’t pick your dad, do you. Or your childhood.’
‘Were you part of all that, growing up?’
‘I was me mother’s boy, and she was crooked too, but dead against the violence. I was a scrapper, mind. Don’t ask me why but I loved a fight. I’d go into pubs outside the borough. The sort of places where the carpet sucked the shoes off your feet. You ordered a pint, drank it in one, and put the glass upside down on the bar. That meant: I’ll have it with any man here. Someone went and put me in hospital for three months, just before my dad went away for the nine. Mum went absolutely spare. What with my sister already running wild. I went direct from Princess Beatrice to this fucking barracks of a boarding-school in Littlehampton on the south coast. Basically a crammer for posh dropouts. A couple of years of that and then Lit and Drama at Sussex. I changed. I was a hippie. But I could still fight. And a hippie who could fight was something to be.’
‘At university you were quite a ladies’ man …’
‘Every bloke was quite a ladies’ man in them … in those days. In those days, for a while, girls went to bed with you even when they didn’t want to. Peer-group pressure, that is. If I was above average, it was because I could offer them … pacifism from a uh, from a position of strength. I was covered in beads and flower scarves, but when some fucking great rocker come stamping up I’d say, “I smell grease.” Or go over to a gang of skinheads and call them a load of little fascist cunts. If you can fight, you don’t have to fight. And you don’t have to cower. And girls like that, whatever they say. Uh, look, mate — I’m fading. Sorry. It’s, it’s my condition.’