‘Me?’ he had once told Russia. ‘I wouldn’t hurt a fly.’ This had perhaps been true, for a while. It was certainly true no longer. Now he spent at least an hour a day, with swat and spraycan, trying to hurt them, trying to kill them: flies. Wasps he left alone if the children were elsewhere; bees he respectfully spared; and spiders — fly-eaters — were his familiars, his enemies’ enemies. Flies he hunted down: the fatter and hairier they were, the worse he needed to see them dead. Some seemed armoured: they looked like the attack aircraft of the twenty-second century. And when they rubbed their wrists together the way they did: was it in anticipation of it, or was it in satisfaction with the vengeance they had already exacted, the vengeance of ugliness? The ugliness spoke to him. When they rubbed their wrists together, they seemed to be sharpening their knives.
Such substantial creatures could not be dispatched with the brute physics of the swat; the disgust of it would travel up through your hand and along your arm and into your gorge. ‘So Potent You’ll Watch Them Drop’, said the blurb on his spraycan. And he did watch. For a few seconds they buzzed about their business, as if the fatal blast was something they would at once shrug off. Then it was all over them, like age: every possible affliction. The wings sharply shrivelled; the taut rods of their legs became as crinkly as pubic hair. They were little old men — but not dying as we do. In the hospitals, even in the execution chambers, in the last rooms, human beings didn’t hammer themselves against the windowpanes or the mirrors and then plop to the floor, enragedly buzzing, and spinning on their spines.
What were they doing here anyway, so late in the year? What atmospheric betrayal sustained them? They were living carrion — dead already, already dead.
At St George’s Avenue there had been few visitors since the night of the accident. Three or four broad-shouldered, blue-chinned men in shiny suits came to sit with Xan for an hour or so; he kept asking them if he had ‘upset’ someone, if someone had a ‘problem’ with him that he didn’t know about; the broad shoulders shrugged, the blue chins gravely shook. They stopped coming. He had actor friends, director friends, producer friends; such people (and Xan partly understood this, because he was partly one of them) cannot bring themselves to contemplate failure or distress or humiliation. His writer friends might have taken a different attitude, but he didn’t have any; so the writers stayed away too. The crowd he used to play guitar with: they came, and kept coming, for a while. And the boys kept coming.
On the Tuesday of the third week Russia conducted an experiment. With not yet entirely humourless resignation she had read, in the books, that ‘head-injured people often find it easier to relate to the elderly, who also cannot keep up the fast pace that the peers of a head-injured person expect.’ All right, she thought: but what’s in it for the elderly? Then, seated at her desk, with her head held still in her hands, Russia took her lower lip between her teeth, and alighted on the Richardsons: late seventies, and good old sports. She had a long chat with Margot on the telephone; and Margot was amenable, stressing her immunity to all extremes of boredom, embarrassment and alarm. It went ahead.
The four of them were in the upstairs sitting-room, the Meos, the Richardsons. Earlier, in nighties, their hair thickly coiled from the bath, Billie and Sophie had been presented, to considerable acclaim. Russia attended, now and then, to the drinks tray (a lone bottle of Chardonnay, plus all Xan’s near-beers, his sodas, his juices and squashes and quashes), while the man himself sat facing their guests, his expression especially leonine that evening, his mouth curved downwards at the edges, grand, sleepy, all-tolerant. Margot Richardson, better known as Margot Drexler, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at UCL, was talking about the world situation with particular reference to Kashmir.
‘It is incumbent upon the West’, she said in her seminar style, ‘to establish a cold-war culture in the subcontinent. Starting with the hotline. Plus arms-limitation talks, test-ban treaties, crisis-management channels, and the rest of the wherewithal. We waged such a war for forty years. We know how you do it. They don’t. But then there’s religion. In Gujarat some peanut-wallah refuses to say “Hail Ram” and the next thing you know there’s two thousand dead. On one side of the border there’s Hindu Nationalism, and on the other there’s Islam. Think of it: nuclear jihad.’
‘Pakistan’, said Xan Meo, ‘is bullshit.’
‘… The clinical term for it is perseveration,’ explained Russia, after a pause. ‘You don’t mind my saying this, do you, honey? When you have an accident like Xan’s you can get hooked on certain words or ideas. We seem to have drawn “bullshit”.’ Yes, she thought: ‘bullshit’, and its not very numerous synonyms. ‘There’s also a touch of Witzelsucht, or inappropriate humour. My, how they love that word “inappropriate”. It’ll pass.’
‘But Pakistan is bullshit. India is India but Pakistan is plain bullshit. They just cobbled it together on the map. “Pakistan” is a uh, an abbreviation. It could be Kapistan. Or Akpistan. Total bullshit.’
Margot said quickly, ‘Xan’s right in a way. “Pakistan” is an acronym. And if they lost Kashmir, they’d lose the k. It would have to be … Apistan.’
‘Anyway it’s Krapistan as it is. What I don’t get about Partition is this. What I don’t get about Pakistan is this. You take one country and turn it into two countries that are bound to go to war. And this was … two years after Hiroshima. Which is just round the corner. Geographically. Now you don’t have to be … what’s he called? Cosanostra …’
‘Nostradamus.’
‘Nostradamus …’
While Xan continued, Russia’s eyes settled on Lewis Richardson. As was the case with many husbands of distinguished women, his project was the radiation of quietly relentless approval. The creases of his face, when Margot spoke, gave tiny flinches of encouragement and affection and pride. Russia was reminded that Xan had had something of that in him, once upon a time: silent but expressive approbation, directed at her. Silent respect — and it was gone.
‘On the uh, woman question,’ he was saying, ‘they’ve gone backwards. In the north, guess what the punishment is if you get raped. You get raped. You know, kid,’ he said to Russia, ‘the books are wrong. It’s not old people that make me relaxed. It’s young people. Like the boys. Because they don’t know who they are either.’
Russia blew her bangs off her brow and said, ‘What a day I’ve had — beginning at five, when Sophie woke up for good. Then Billie went to school for around five minutes, and then I had both of them till two. Then three hours of teaching. And I still haven’t touched my Munich lecture. I guess I’ll work on it tonight until Sophie wakes up again.’
‘Ah,’ said Xan authoritatively. ‘There goes my fuck.’
Into the silence that followed he said, ‘So when’s the comet due then?’
‘I hate space,’ said Russia evenly.
Xan said, ‘The comet is the come of heaven.’
But maybe come here to unmake us.
Meanwhile, in the master bedroom … On the night of Xan’s return from hospital Russia had been more or less pleasantly surprised when, with the dull glow of the linoleum still on him, he had clambered up on top of her. Afterwards, she praised him and calmed him, and there were avowals. She thought: what could be more — natural? The next night it happened again, and the next. And the next morning, and the next. Having subsided, he lay there trembling like an engine. Russia thought about this engine. It would be that of a large vehicle, stationary but locked in a high gear, and the stick would be flailing and juddering in its attempt not to stall.