‘It’s over ten years!’ Mere protested, watching my face.
‘Yes. But I was a kid. And I grew up feeling like an orphan and a refugee. Or a competent cripple—competent because no one ever noticed. As for my anger, I’m not just angry about my own life, I’m angry when I see all my friends’ dissatisfaction, and the way they keep blaming it on themselves, wanting to be thinner, to get better grades, a better job, more money—all vying for favours from a greedy, wasteful world. Of course I’m angry—outrage is a sane response to a lot of what goes on.’
‘All that extrapolated out of Mum and Dad leaving you?’
‘Yeah. I have fewer illusions than you. I’ve never been able to mistake society for a mother. My mother left me. How was I supposed to trust any subsequent assurances that I’d have a place, and be cared for?’
‘The world isn’t that bad.’
I watched her, thinking. ‘Sure. We all come here, merely alive, curious, trusting. We learn to speak, switch on the TV, go to school—and are invaded by demons, diseases and ghosts.’
She said, ‘I suppose you think you’re universalising your problem. But your problem is not being able to forgive your parents’ human failings. Period.’
‘They’ve never done anything to deserve being forgiven.’
‘They’ve suffered.’
‘Good.’
‘I suppose you believe in revenge, too?’
—powerless against that which has been done, the will is an angry spectator of all things past. The will cannot will backwards; that it cannot break time and time’s desires—that is the will’s most lonely affliction. It is sullenly wrathful that time does not run backwards. ‘That which was’ is the stone it cannot roll away—
I stood among the macrocarpas just above our vehicles, watching Wrathall walk away up the road carrying Jill’s crowbar.
I followed him, waiting at each corner for him to vanish around the next. He trudged on, head lowered and arms held clear of his sides, like High Noon’s gunman hero; the only light about his body a strip of pale skin at the back of his neck, and his large fists.
At the slip there were no warning lights, no MOW vehicles and rescue services. The waste of clay glistened around the smudged shape of Wrathall’s car.
He clambered down to it, sinking at every step like a man struggling through fresh snow. On reaching it he first wedged the crowbar under the hood of the boot then, thinking better of it, clambered around to the half-buried driver’s door. Several blows with the end of the crowbar shattered the window, though it was well braced with mud. Wrathall removed his car keys and returned to the boot. Then he stood for nearly a minute, unmoving, the keys dangling in his hand.
I jumped over the rim of the slip and slunk down towards him, placing my feet across the ridges of the clay and sinking in only a few inches at each step. Before I reached him he finally stirred to unlock the boot, then lifted the hood slowly.
I heard the sound of water splattering on plastic. Wrathall paused another moment, wiping his wet hands superfluously back and forth across the sides of Basil’s wet jacket, then he reached inside and took out a spade. He laid it down on the ground at his feet, stooped under the hood and lifted out a limp bundle swathed in black polythene.
It had to be a body.
Holding the bundle cradled in both arms he tried to bend down to pick up the spade, hooking his fingers through the handle, but it slipped and fell onto the clay. Then he heaved the body over one shoulder and picked up the spade with his free arm, straightening, his head over at an angle and shoulder raised to balance its burden. He really needed his other arm to steady the corpse if he intended carrying it anywhere over that slick, broken slope.
‘I’ll take the spade for you.’
Wrathall spun about and stared at me through a curtain of the twisted strands of his dripping hair. The rain continued to tap on the black plastic, drumming fingertips pointing out what it held.
‘What do you want?’ he got out through gritted teeth.
‘I was offering to aid and abet you—I asked you if I could carry the spade.’
Hostile, confused, he glared at me, his eyes oily dark, his skin smooth and as lustrous as the near-liquid wax at the top of a lit candle.
As my attention contracted, from the many things preoccupying me to the one thing before me, Wrathall’s countenance emerged—from the night, from the moment, from his irrelevance and strangeness to me—into my life; savage, keen and unforgettable. I realised he was enraged because he couldn’t make sense of the situation. What worried him most was not that he’d been discovered trying to dispose of a corpse, but that he couldn’t understand why I was offering to help him.
The offer didn’t make any sense. When I saw what he produced from the boot of his car I should have turned around and run back to the house to tell the others. Without a doubt this was the stupidest thing I had ever done. As bizarre, thoughtless and self-forgetting as Peter Pan standing on the rock in Mermaid’s Lagoon saying, as the tide encroached, ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure!’
Yet, in a way, I had known what to expect. It was as though I’d willed what I imagined to be true to run quietly on into the truth; two people and a corpse in half-a-mile of black, rainy wilderness, in a world in which bloody secrets could be kept, a limitless world, without law—my world. I felt invulnerable, amused and happy. I began to say, ‘I asked if—’ when Wrathall dropped the body, and lunged at me.
He knocked me to the ground, landing with a knee across my legs and an arm pressing into my throat. The clay was soft; I sank into it and water welled up around my neck and shoulders.
When I caught my breath and my vision cleared, I looked up at his head and shoulders above me, silhouetted against the clouds. Cold drops of water from his hair dribbled on my face. A stone was jabbing into my left shoulder. When I tried to move in order to relieve the pain, Wrathall applied more pressure to my throat.
I grabbed the arm choking me. My fingers didn’t meet around his wrist; with his fist clenched the tendons and muscles in his forearm were as hard as wood. I saw clearly a vision of him dragging my body down over the jumbled clay by the ankles, towards the bush. I thought of police, newspapers, and courts of law. I thought of my grandmother, of Meredith, and of my father, who must always belong to me—of my friends and flatmates, who were expecting me to arrive at the bach we’d rented for the Easter break.
There were flashes in the sky—I was sinking in the mud. It gnawed at my body as if it wanted to suck the flesh from my bones.
Tucking my chin under his arm, I released my grip and relaxed completely. Unresisted, his arm drove my head back into the mud, so that water entered my ears. My windpipe was sealed—
—then the pressure slackened, the ringing red fog dissipated. I breathed out and in and out. Then very slowly I lifted my hands, placed one between his arm and my throat, the other into the curl of his now opened, downturned hand. My touch slid across his palm, into the crevasses between his fingers; linking my fingers with his I pushed his arm back and sat up.
Wrathall moved away from me, squatted back on his heels, and withdrawing his hand from mine he hid both his hands behind him. Then he moaned softly, like a big dog when it is sleeping and you poke it with your toe.
As with each passing moment I became more aware of his violence and immense physical power, I became more at ease. He made me feel safe. In extremes of danger I have often felt safe—in storms, among mean, uncivilised people, with strong emotions—mesmerised, absorbed, engaged, safe. I reached out and touched his neck with my knuckles just under his ear, and said, ‘I’ll help you,’ hoarsely.
He studied my face. ‘If you insist.’ He didn’t move, but continued to stare at me. Then he smiled faintly. ‘You’re a mess.’
My throat was aching. I rasped, ‘You’ve got good nerves, Wrathall.’
‘And you’ve got clay in your hair.’
‘It’ll come out in the rain.’
‘All com
e out in the wash, eh?’
‘You’re a bit crazy.’
‘Not really.’ He smiled again, that little—and I now noticed—sad and apologetic smile.
His gaze was unnerving. I wanted to direct it away from me. I said, ‘We’d better bury this body.’
He regarded the black-wrapped shape. ‘I was wondering whether I should do anything to make it harder to identify. I don’t think I could ever be very efficient at getting rid of the evidence. I nearly decided to just leave it.’
‘It?’ I said.
He didn’t respond.
‘Leave it and get caught?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. But then I realised that I just couldn’t bear everyone talking about me.’
I stood, picking up the spade. ‘Come on, let’s find a good place.’
We struggled and slithered to the edge of the wet morass. He had more difficulty than I did. Already a very heavy man, the extra weight he bore caused him to sink to his knees at every step, and lift his feet free with loud sucking sounds. It was just as well we were both wearing boots—shoes would have been pulled from our feet.
At the end of the slip he stopped and tried to knock some of the mud off his legs by striking his heels on the ground.
‘I’m cold. We’d better hurry,’ I said.
He took Basil’s torch out of his parka pocket and handed it to me. ‘If we go straight downhill we won’t get lost.’
‘Where do you think they’ll cut the new road?’
‘Above the old one, hopefully.’ He pushed me ahead of him down the slope.
The bush was noisy with rain striking leaves and the ticking sounds of seepage. I had to keep turning around to give him light by which he could see to free himself, or his bundle, from the branches that caught at them. We moved slowly through the thick undergrowth, over fallen logs and bare roots. Thin rivulets of silt ran into the bush for perhaps forty metres below the slip.
I picked the place: a terrace covered only in ferns. ‘If we can dig out a few of these with their roots intact then maybe we can cover over the ground again.’
He threw the body down and knelt to untie the rope holding the polythene in place. ‘It won’t last as long if it’s not wrapped in plastic. I’m going to take off its clothes and—’ He looked up at me, and didn’t finish the sentence. The knots yielded to his tugging. He unravelled the ropes and plastic.
‘I knew it wasn’t a woman,’ I said.
The body was dressed in light blue denim, jeans and shirt. The clothes were dry and looked comfortable; it seemed a shame when drops from the foliage and Wrathall’s hair dappled the fabric with dark blue stains. He had deep red hair—alive—like the coat of a ginger cat I once saw lying killed on the roadside; glowing, meteoric, a fallen star still hot from the skies.
I muttered, ‘Redheads ought to be protected by law.’
Wrathall stood up and said softly, ‘We’re all protected by law.’ He took the torch and spade from me. ‘You go back now.’
‘OK. But listen. This is what happened. You came down the hill to the camper, then found the keys had dropped from your pocket, so you slowly retraced your steps to the house, on the off-chance of finding them. They were lying in the grass near the topside of the tunnel. After you’d fetched the crowbar you trudged along the road to look for the warning lights. You’re sorry you took so long.’
‘How did I get so dirty?’
‘There’s plenty of water to rinse the clay out, Wrathall.’
‘This might take longer than your excuse covers me for.’
‘They’re hardly going to think you’re burying a body. Just get on with it. You’d better hurry up, he’ll be harder to undress when his clothes are wet.’
‘Later you are going to tell me how you knew. I had forgotten all about this till you mentioned burying bodies.’
I couldn’t make any sense of this remark. I stared at him, but he had begun to pull off the corpse’s shoes, so I left him and scrambled back up the hill. When had I mentioned burying bodies? If he was going to have crazy ideas I preferred him not to have them about me.
Breathless, I reached the road. The rain had diminished to a fine drizzle. Thick, puffy fingers of mist were reaching up from the valley. All the clouds seemed lit from within.
Three years before, sitting on the balustrade of the terrace at the house in Mazatlan, I listened to Maxine Baird, a friend of Gareth’s second wife, saying, ‘My trouble is that I can never believe that I only get one take. When things get rough I always feel like I’m in a self-directed movie, and that if I do a bad take, I can always make another. Someone gets hurt and I think, “Hell, that isn’t the best I can do, can’t I have another shot at that?”,’ laughing and peering thoughtfully at the last half inch of tequila in her glass. And when Gareth glanced at me I bristled, swearing that no one would ever get a another take out of me.
Take Two: I see Wrathall haul a body out of the boot of his car, pelt back up the hill, and climb through the window, yelling, ‘You are not going to believe this, but Simon Wrathall is disposing of a corpse!’
Nietzsche called it ‘the spirit of revenge’, that hatred of not being able to reverse the clocks and alter actions. But sadly life isn’t a series of takes, and we aren’t able to do over those things we do badly, or that make no sense.
Basil
Jill had said: my ghosts.
My gaolers, my jurors, and the sound of rain on water coming to crouch in my ears at any moment, unbidden, whispering—
I recognised Kelfie because I remembered Russell: someone who could make things happen by suggesting they might. I recalled Russell’s habit of speaking for me, convincingly, and his playing me close, or at a distance, like a kite on a string. It was as though my ghost had appeared wearing a different body. Kelfie reminded me of Russell; when he spoke there was that same suggestion that—perhaps—some meaning in what he said was exclusive to me, and that only I could understand him. And he’d glance at me before speaking, his look not communicating anything, just noting my presence, like that of a critic in the front row of a full theatre.
Kelfie was like Russell, and Russell had frightened me. But why was I afraid of him? Was it his weakness or his absolutism that scared me? Or was it that, even alive, Russell had haunted me?
He was a set snare.
We were all on our own ground, our prep school dormitory, catching up with one another after the holidays, putting away books and comics, tacking up new posters in the carefully mapped-out personal spaces on the walls behind our beds.
The windows were open, the sound of a motor mower, the smell of freshly cut grass and blue petrol fumes drifting in.
My friend Ian was inspecting my new camera while I was idly making resolutions about not sitting next to him in science, and not even trying to tell anyone about the Vanishing House, and writing my parents (vets in a small town in Saskatchewan) a decent letter once a week.
Then Neil Roop came in with Russell, a tall, lightly freckled boy with fine brown hair, who carried himself with the constrained grace of an adolescent body trying to accommodate a growth spurt and still remain poised.
Neil brought Russell over, introduced us all—we said ‘hi’ and kept on unpacking. Russell started to put his stuff away, then went over to one of the windows and leaned out. He put one knee on the sill, and asked over his shoulder, ‘Can you get out any of these?’ Added, ‘Basil?’
I looked at him, and he changed before my eyes. His face had a kind of blankness that even small babies’ faces never have, that I had seen before only in the face of one ten-year-old in a crowd of intellectually handicapped children who came to watch a choir I was in. Yet even as I registered his lack of expression something happened within him that changed his face. As if an unknown element filling his body became suddenly denser and heavier.
Russell was unable to laugh at himself, and hated making missteps. If, despite his caution, someone managed to show him up, he always looked as though he would like to kill th
at person—like Dewalle, the math teacher who called him ‘grandiose’. That was what he was: David’s Napoleon—with hair streaming and sword upraised—Crossing the Alps; grandiose like all imaginative adolescents trying prematurely to impose a ‘meaning’ on everyday existence.
Once we sat among the pepper trees on the steep bank above the swimming pool. It was early autumn, the pool had been closed for two weeks and was already no longer bright, inviting summer blue, but brownish-green. Russell picked up a pebble and cast it over the fence and into the pool. He was thinking—his thoughts quietly rising in an ascending spiral of excitement—his eyes feverish, and the skin around his mouth pale, as mine tends to go just before I throw up.
‘My brother shot himself, you know.’
‘Jesus! How awful—’ I was thrown into confusion by this sudden revelation, and by his casual tone.
Confusion wasn’t the reaction he intended me to have. ‘No, it wasn’t awful. He had style. He stole a crucible from his school, melted down a silver star sign his girlfriend had given him and made a silver bullet, put it in Dad’s .22 and shot himself. He didn’t die straight off, but bled to death through a little hole in his head. You see, the bullet was so hard that its nose didn’t flatten at all and, relatively speaking, it didn’t do much damage—’ He picked up a handful of earth, tossed it as though weighing it, then threw it into the pool, making a volley of small splashes. ‘Paul had style,’ he concluded.
I sat in stupefied silence for a while, then asked, ‘Did he think he was a werewolf?’
Russell favoured me with a look of contempt. ‘Don’t be so stupid, Basil.’
I tried again: ‘He must have been pretty determined, to go to all that trouble—like that guy they were talking about on the News who made holes in his own head with a power drill.’