Page 47 of The Likeness

  He shook water droplets off the glass and pulled out his handkerchief again, to dry it. “Part of the debtor mentality is a constant, frantically suppressed undercurrent of terror. We have one of the highest debt-to-income ratios in the world, and apparently most of us are two paychecks from the street. Those in power—governments, employers—exploit this, to great effect. Frightened people are obedient—not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally. If your employer tells you to work overtime, and you know that refusing could jeopardize everything you have, then not only do you work the overtime, but you convince yourself that you’re doing it voluntarily, out of loyalty to the company; because the alternative is to acknowledge that you are living in terror. Before you know it, you’ve persuaded yourself that you have a profound emotional attachment to some vast multinational corporation: you’ve indentured not just your working hours, but your entire thought process. The only people who are capable of either unfettered action or unfettered thought are those who—either because they’re heroically brave, or because they’re insane, or because they know themselves to be safe—are free from fear.”

  He poured himself three fingers of whiskey. “I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a hero,” he said, “and I don’t consider myself to be insane. I don’t think any of the others are either of those things. And yet I wanted us all to have that chance at freedom.” He put the bottle down and glanced across at me. “You asked me what I wanted. I spent a lot of time asking myself the same thing. By a year or two ago, I had come to the conclusion that I truly wanted only two things in this world: the company of my friends, and the opportunity for unfettered thought.”

  The words sent a slim knife of something like homesickness straight through me. “It doesn’t seem like very much to ask,” I said.

  “Oh, but it was,” Daniel said, and took a swallow of his drink. There was a rough edge to his voice. “It was a lot to ask. It followed, you see, that what we needed was safety—permanent safety. Which brings us back to your last question. My parents left investments that provide me with a small income—ample in the 1980s, now hardly enough for that bedsit. Rafe’s trust fund gives him roughly the same amount. Justin’s allowance will end as soon as he finishes his PhD; so will Abby’s student grants, and Lexie’s would have too. How many jobs do you think are available, in Dublin, for people who want only to study literature and to be together? In a few months, we would have been in precisely the same situation as the vast majority in this country: caught between poverty and slavery, two paychecks from the street, in thrall to the whims of landlords and employers. Perennially afraid.”

  He looked out through the ivy, up the grass to the patio, tilting his wrist slowly so that the whiskey slid circles round the glass. “All we needed,” he said, “was a home.”

  “That’s enough safety?” I asked. “A house?”

  “Well, of course,” he said, a little surprised. “Psychologically, the difference it makes is almost inexpressible. Once you own your home, free and clear, what is there left for anyone—landlords, employers, banks—to threaten you with? What hold does anyone have over you? One can do without practically anything else, if necessary. We would always be able to scrape together enough money for food, between us, and there is no other material fear as primal or as paralyzing as the thought of losing one’s home. With that fear eliminated, we would be free. I’m not saying that owning a house makes life into some kind of blissful paradise; simply that it makes the difference between freedom and enslavement.”

  He must have read the look on my face. “We’re in Ireland, for heaven’s sake,” he said, with a touch of impatience. “If you know any history at all, what could possibly be clearer? The one crucial thing the British did was to claim the land as their own, to turn the Irish from owners into tenants. Once that was done, then everything else followed naturally: confiscation of crops, abuse of tenants, eviction, emigration, famine, the whole litany of wretchedness and serfdom, all inflicted casually and unstoppably because the dispossessed had no solid ground on which to stand and fight. I’m sure my own family was as guilty as any. There may well be an element of poetic justice in the fact that I found myself looking at the other side of the coin. But I didn’t feel the need simply to accept it as my just deserts.”

  “I rent,” I said. “I’m probably two paychecks from the street. It doesn’t bother me.”

  Daniel nodded, unsurprised. “Possibly you’re braver than I am,” he said. “Or possibly—forgive me—you simply haven’t decided what you want from life yet; you haven’t found anything that you truly want to hold onto. That changes everything, you know. Students and very young people can rent with no damage to their intellectual freedom, because it puts them under no threat: they have nothing, yet, to lose. Have you noticed how easily the very young die? They make the best martyrs for any cause, the best soldiers, the best suicides. It’s because they’re held here so lightly: they haven’t yet accumulated loves and responsibilities and commitments and all the things that tie us securely to this world. They can let go of it as easily and simply as lifting a finger. But as you get older, you begin to find things that are worth holding onto, forever. All of a sudden you’re playing for keeps, as children say, and it changes the very fabric of you.”

  The adrenaline, or the strange trembling light through the ivy, or the spirals of Daniel’s mind, or just the sheer bizarreness of the situation, was making me feel as if I actually had been drinking. I thought of Lexie speeding through the night in poor Chad’s stolen car, of Sam’s face wearing that look of terrible patience, of the squad room in evening light with some other team’s paperwork scattered across our desks; of my flat, empty and silent, dust starting to build up on the bookshelves and the standby light on the CD player glowing green in the darkness. I like my flat a lot, but it hit me that in all these weeks I hadn’t missed it for a second, and that felt somehow horribly, horribly sad.

  “I would venture to guess,” Daniel said, “that you still have that first freedom—that you haven’t yet found anything or anyone that you want for keeps.”

  Steady gray eyes and the hypnotic gold shimmer of the whiskey, sound of water, leaf shadows swaying like a darker wreath on his dark hair. “I used to have a partner,” I said, “at work. Nobody you’ve met; he’s not working this case. We were like you guys: we matched. People talked about us the way you do about twins, like we were one person—‘That’s MaddoxandRyan’s case, get MaddoxandRyan to do it . . .’ If anyone had asked me, I’d have said this was it: the two of us, for the rest of our careers, we’d retire on the same day so neither of us would ever have to work with anyone else and the squad would give us one gold watch between us. I didn’t think about any of that at the time, mind. I just took it for granted. I couldn’t imagine anything else.”

  I had never said this to anyone. Sam and I had never mentioned Rob, not once since he was transferred out, and when people asked how he was doing I gave them my sweetest smile and my best vague answers. Daniel and I were strangers and we were on opposite sides, under the civilized chitchat we were fighting each other tooth and nail and both of us knew it, but I said it to him. Now I think that should have been my first warning.

  Daniel nodded. “But that was in another country,” he said, “and besides, that wench is dead.”

  “That about sums it up,” I said, “yeah.” He was looking at me with something in his eyes that went beyond kindness, beyond compassion: understanding. I think in that moment I loved him. If I could have dropped the whole case and stayed, I would have done it then.

  “I see,” Daniel said. He held out the glass to me. I started to shake my head automatically, but then I changed my mind and took it: what the hell. The whiskey was rich and smooth and it burned trails of light right down to my fingertips.

  “Then you understand the difference it made to me,” he said, “meeting the others. The world transformed itself around me: the stakes shot up, colors were so beautiful they hurt, life became almost unimaginably sweet and almost unimaginably frightening. It’s so fragile, you know; things are so easily brok
en. I suppose this may be what it’s like to fall in love, or to have a child, and to know that this could be taken from you at any moment. We were racing at breakneck speed towards the day when everything we had would be at the mercy of a merciless world, and every second was so beautiful and so precarious, it took my breath away.”

  He held out his hand for the glass and took a sip. “And then,” he said, raising a palm towards the house, “this came along.”

  “Like a miracle,” I said. I wasn’t being snide; I meant it. For a second I felt the old wood of the banister under my palm, warm and sinuous as a muscle, as a living thing.

  Daniel nodded. “Improbably,” he said, “I believe in miracles, in the possibility of the impossible. Certainly the house has always felt like a miracle to me, materializing just at the moment when we needed it most. I saw straight away, the second my uncle’s lawyer rang me with the news, what this could mean to us. The others had doubts, plenty of them; we argued for months. Lexie was—I suppose there’s a kind of tragic irony in this—the only one who seemed perfectly happy with the idea. Abby was the hardest to convince—in spite of the fact that she was the one who most craved a home, or perhaps because of it, I don’t know—but even she came round at last. I suppose, in the end, it came down to the fact that, if you are absolutely sure of something, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll eventually persuade people who aren’t sure one way or the other. And I was sure. I’ve never been more sure of anything.”

  “Is that why you made the others co-owners?”

  Daniel glanced sharply across at me, but I kept my face blandly interested and after a moment he went back to looking out through the ivy. “Well, not to win them over, or anything like that, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “Hardly. It was absolutely essential to what I had in mind. It wasn’t the house itself I wanted—much as I love it. It was security, for all of us; a safe haven. If I had been the sole owner, then the crude truth of it is that I would have been the others’ landlord, and they would have had no more safety than before. They would have been dependent on my whims, always waiting for me to decide to move or get married or sell up. This way it was all of our home, forever.”

  He lifted a hand and hooked the curtain of ivy aside. The stone of the house was rosy amber in the sunset light, glowing and sweet; the windows blazed like the inside was on fire. “It seemed like such a beautiful idea,” he said. “Almost unthinkably so. The day we moved in, we cleaned the fireplace and washed up in freezing water and lit a fire, and sat in front of it drinking cold lumpy cocoa and trying to make toast—the cooker didn’t work, the water heater didn’t work, there were only two functioning lightbulbs in the whole house. Justin was wearing his entire wardrobe and complaining that we were all going to die of pneumonia or mold inhalation or both, and Rafe and Lexie were teasing him by claiming they’d heard rats in the attic; Abby threatened to make the pair of them sleep up there if they didn’t behave. I kept burning the toast or dropping it into the fire, and we all found that ridiculously funny; we laughed until we could barely breathe. I’ve never been so happy in my life.”

  His gray eyes were calm, but the note in his voice, like a deep bell tolling, hurt me somewhere under my breastbone. I had known for weeks that Daniel was unhappy, but that was the moment when I understood that, whatever had happened with Lexie, it had broken his heart. He had staked everything on this one shining idea, and he had lost. No matter what anyone says, a part of me believes that, on that day under the ivy, I should have seen everything that was coming, the pattern unrolling in front of me clean and quick and relentless, and I should have known how to stop it.

  “What went wrong?” I asked quietly.

  “The idea was flawed, of course,” he said irritably. “Innately and fatally flawed. It depended on two of the human race’s greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. Both of which are all well and good in literature, but the purest fantasy outside the covers of a book. Our story should have stopped that night with the cold cocoa, the night we moved in: and they all lived happily ever after, the end. Inconveniently, however, real life demanded that we keep on living.”

  He finished his drink in one long swallow and grimaced. “This is foul. I wish we had ice.”

  I waited while he poured himself another one, gave it a look of faint distaste and set it down on the bench. “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  Daniel inclined his head. “You talked about paying for what you want,” I said. “How did you have to pay for this house? It looks to me like you got exactly what you wanted, for free.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Do you think so? You’ve been living here for several weeks now. Surely you have a fair idea of the price involved.”

  I did, of course I did, but I wanted to hear it from him. “No pasts,” I said. “For a start.”

  “No pasts,” Daniel repeated, almost to himself. After a moment he shrugged. “That was part of it, certainly—this needed to be a fresh start for all of us, together—but it was the easy part. As you’ve probably gathered, none of us has the kind of past that one would want to retain in any case. The main difficulties there have been practical ones, really, rather than psychological: getting Rafe’s father to stop ringing up and abusing him, Justin’s father to stop accusing him of joining a cult and threatening to call the police, Abby’s mother to stop showing up outside the library high as a kite on whatever it is she takes. But these were small problems, comparatively; technical difficulties that would have sorted themselves out, given time. The real price . . .”

  He moved one finger absently around the rim of the glass, watching the gold of the whiskey bloom and dim as his shadow passed across it. “I suppose some people might call it a state of suspended animation,” he said, at last. “Although I would consider that a highly simplistic definition. Marriage and children, for example, were no longer possibilities for any of us. The odds of finding an outsider who would be able to fit into what is, frankly, an unusual setup, even if he or she should want to, were negligible. And, although I won’t deny that there have been elements of intimacy among us, for any two of us to enter into a serious romance would almost definitely have damaged our balance beyond repair.”

  “Elements of intimacy?” I asked. Lexie’s baby—“Between who?”

  “Well, really,” Daniel said, with a touch of impatience, “I don’t think that’s the issue. The point is that, in order to make this house our shared home, we had to forfeit the possibility of many things that other people consider to be essential goals. We had to forfeit everything that Rafe’s father would call the real world.”

  Maybe it was the whiskey, on a hangover and a half-empty stomach. Strange things spun in my mind, sprayed showers of light like prisms. I thought of ancient stories: battered travelers stumbling out of the storm into glowing banquet halls, losing hold of their old lives at the first taste of bread or honey wine; of that first night, the four of them smiling at me across the laden table and the lifted wineglasses and the curls of ivy, smooth-skinned and beautiful, with candlelight in their eyes. I remembered the second before Daniel and I kissed, how the five of us had risen up in front of me breathtaking and eternal as ghosts, hanging sweet and gauzy over the drifts of grass; and that danger drum, somewhere behind my ears.

  “This isn’t as sinister as it sounds, you know,” he added, catching something in my expression. “Regardless of what the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can’t have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it’s a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that’s worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.”

  “And you did,” I said. I felt like the stone bench was rocking underneath me, swaying with the ivy in a slow dizzying rhythm. “You went consenting.”

  “I did, yes,” Daniel said. “I understood all of the implications, very clearly. I had thought it all out before I ever embarked on this, and I had decided it was a price well worth paying—I doubt I would ever have wanted children
in any case, and I’ve never placed much stock in the concept of one perfect soul mate. I assumed the others had done the same: weighed up the stakes and found the sacrifice worth making.” He brought the glass to his lips and took a sip. “That,” he said, “was my first mistake.”

  He was so calm. I didn’t even hear it at the time, it wasn’t until much later, when I went over the conversation in my head looking for clues, that I caught it: was, would have. Daniel used the past tense, all the way through. He understood that it was over, whether anyone else had noticed or not. He sat there under the ivy with a glass in his hand, serene as the Buddha, watching as the bow of his ship tilted and slid under the waves.

  “They hadn’t thought it through?” I asked. My mind was still sliding, weightless, everything was smooth as glass and I couldn’t get a grip. For a second I wondered crazily if the whiskey had been drugged, but Daniel had had a lot more than me and he seemed fine—“Or they changed their minds?”

  Daniel rubbed the bridge of his nose with finger and thumb. “Really,” he said, a little wearily, “when I think about it, I made an astounding number of mistakes along the way. The hypothermia story, for instance: I should never have fallen for that. Initially, in fact, I didn’t. I know very little about medicine, but when your colleague—Detective Mackey—told me that story, I didn’t believe a word of it. I assumed he was hoping we’d be more likely to talk if we thought that it was a matter of assault, rather than murder, and that Lexie might at any minute tell him everything. All that week, I took it for granted that he was bluffing. But then . . .” He lifted his head and looked at me, blinking, as if he had almost forgotten I was there. “But then, you see,” he said, “you arrived.”