Acid Song (7 page)

Not that they were out of love. But it definitely wasn’t the same love. It was wrong of society not to have invented a separate word for it. Cowardly.

‘All done,’ Robyn beamed. ‘They said not to hurry. Well, Mum said not to hurry, Dad doted over Alicia. You know.’

She pecked him on the cheek.

‘What have you been doing? You’re all hot.’

‘Nothing. Just on the phone.’

‘Who to?’

‘A complete stranger who I never want to speak to again in my life.’

‘Oh, all right. How was the lecture today? I’ve got time for a shower right? When are we booked?’

‘Half seven, heaps of time. It was good, really good.’ He raised his voice as she walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower. ‘Fantastic actually. I’ll tell you all about it at dinner.’

‘GO AWAY … OH, sorry, Richard. Come in. I didn’t mean to … It’s been one of those days.’

‘What happened to your face?’

Richard looked at the dark swelling beneath his friend’s eye, not black but purple. The corner of the eye was a shocking red, fanning out to merely bloodshot nearer the iris. There was a scraping of dried blood beneath the nose, and his bottom lip was bloated, a dark jagged line marking the place where its surface had been ripped in two.

‘You want to see the other guy,’ William joked, but his eyes darted quickly from the contact. His right eyelid twitched, beating out an SOS. The bottle of whisky on his desk was open.

‘Have you had that seen to?’

‘It’s just scratches. Nothing’s broken.’

‘Who?’

‘Just kids. You know, caught up in the moment.’

‘Did you recognise any of them? You have reported this, of course.’

Amanda had rung to tip Richard off, and no doubt fish for a comment. But even when he was prepared, the sight was shocking. William Harding, twenty years a friend, who would never hurt anybody. Not knowingly. That distinction in the end was either everything or nothing. William’s office was bigger than Richard’s, and better ordered. Everything in its place, even now. Meticulous. Stubborn. Broken. They sat in silence. Whatever the way forward, it was obscured. As it had been for over a month. Ever since William first showed Richard the article.

‘Would you like a drink?’

‘It’s Elizabeth’s birthday. I’m meant to be home early, but I rang her before. She’ll understand.’

‘I sent her a card.’

‘You should come round later.’

‘You’re not going out?’

‘She prefers to stay in. And I have to work on my speech, you know, for tomorrow.’

Richard rolled his eyes, but William didn’t buy it. ‘Just vain enough’, was the way William described his friend’s love of the limelight. William by contrast really was happiest conducting his business on the pages of academic journals.

Richard knew what he had to do, but not how to do it. They sipped at their drinks, William unable to hide the pain as the liquid
seared his broken mouth. He put his glass back down on the desk and stared at this friend with his one good eye.

‘Just say it. Everybody else has. You want to. And you have every right to. Say it, and I promise I will listen. Then we can both get on with what we have to do.’

‘I respect you William.’

‘I know you do.’

‘Academically, I mean. I don’t want to dismiss what you’re saying.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘It’s not my area.’

‘It’s exactly your area.’

‘Not the analysis. Not without repeating the research myself… But look, if you say there’s something there, well there’s something there. I’m not disputing it.’

‘So what are you disputing?’

‘I didn’t come here to dispute.’

‘But …’

‘Maybe there’s no but.’

‘Of course there’s a but.’

There was, of course. There had to be. But …

‘What have you bought her?’

‘Who?’

‘Elizabeth.’

‘A necklace thing. It’s paua, but subtle I think. I hope. I mean shit, I have no idea. The kid in the shop told me it was subtle. She asked how old my wife was. She didn’t seem surprised when I told her. It’s good manners isn’t it, to look surprised? Our young people have no manners.’

‘I was thinking the same thing today,’ William smiled. The whisky was doing its work.

‘You’ve got to lay charges.’

‘I thought you’d come here to tell me to back off.’

‘I have.’

‘That’s not how you back off.’

‘It’s assault. Amanda’s got it on tape.’

‘Who’s Amanda?’

‘The documentary maker I told you about.’

‘It was her fault. She penned me in.’

‘She’s overenthusiastic.’

‘I’m over enthusiasts.’

‘It’s how people are. We have to make allowances.’

‘You’ve never believed that.’

‘Maybe I’ve just never voiced it.’

‘No.’ William shook his head.

Richard had first met William at a conference, although that simple summary cast more shadow than light. It was the conference that was meant to forge Richard’s international reputation. The single breakthrough that every academic secretly hopes will one day rescue them from the years of crawling forward one uncomfortable, unnoticed speculation at a time. Maybe it could have turned out that way, but for a single decision, and a single woman, or so she told him. Then again, he lied too. Ridiculous, foolish, predictable, and impossible to take back: a pebble thrown in the past, rippling out forever.

1984. The conference was one of the cross-disciplinary gatherings that were fashionable for a while.
Thinking about Thinking,
as he remembered it, in Manchester of all places.

Richard was to deliver an address on the evolution of culture, and more importantly was scheduled for a head-to-head debate with Stephen Watson. It was, within the limited world of the social sciences, an important meeting. He and Stephen hadn’t met since the fateful question time in Palmerston North, and within the mythology of The Institute the looming debate had taken on the
aura of a rematch between two prize fighters. Watson probably didn’t even remember their first meeting. His star had continued to shine brightly; he had become the darling of the talk show circuit, the reliable provider of twenty second McPinions across a variety of formats. In the strange style of populist academics, Watson’s interests were branching out into areas far beyond his specialist base, that he might more freely express his thoughts, unencumbered by any depth of knowledge.

Watson’s latest dalliance was in the field of ethics, where he was bravely proclaiming that the human moral code was biologically determined. The bout was scheduled for the last night of the conference, immediately before the dinner, and should have provided the grand finale.

Richard was sitting at the hotel bar, enjoying a quiet congratulatory drink after the minor success of a small group presentation, when she introduced herself. A cliché of course, the older man of established reputation drinking alone; the up and comer, the admirer, striking up a conversation. But then what isn’t cliché, Watson might have asked. She was ten years his junior, with bright engaging eyes and an accent like rolling gravel, a Scot from the north. He wasn’t sure of her name now. He’d never written it down, never save one time spoken of it, and now, when he thought of her, all that remained were the eyes, and the stupid fluttering of his stomach as he bought her a drink and listened to her earnest, insistent questioning. The burred voice reverberating deep inside his chest. He remembered thinking ‘Could I?’ and the shape the thought formed inside his head, too sharp to be ignored, too heavy to eject. Richard was no womaniser, he had never taken the time to learn the skills, yet here he was. Could I? He could. He did. They did. He was married then. He and Elizabeth were happy together; grateful, on their better days.

They spent three hours together in his hotel room. They talked and played and fucked like teenagers. Richard drowned in it, the
most ridiculously, childishly exciting late afternoon of his life. A truth he bravely resisted, every time he thought of it. Foolish, weak, embarrassing: these were the adjectives he came to rely upon, to keep the memory weighted down.

Coming out of the hotel room, freshly showered and still glowing, she of no name on his arm, Richard collided with Stephen Watson, returning to his room. Watson must have heard them giggling together, it was impossible to believe otherwise, and the look he gave Richard in the moment their eyes snagged was calculated to humiliate. Stephen Watson surely was the sort to reveal his secret, and to do so at the most excruciating moment. How could he resist? The next day Richard feigned food poisoning, and on the last night of the conference, when he should have been making his mark, he was holed up in a bar five blocks away, melting his shame in alcohol.

There he met William, a young academic just starting out, who had his own reasons for escaping the crowds. William didn’t ask him why he had missed the debate, and it was this discretion that first brought them close. Whisky cemented the friendship and Richard, feeling the need for absolution, and confident they would never meet again, shared his secret. Five years later William was posted to Victoria University and the two became solid friends.

‘So what do you think we’ll find at the bottom of this particular bottle?’ William asked, twenty years on.

‘Questions we can’t answer, promises we can’t rely upon.’

‘You’re meant to be cheering me up.’

‘I thought I was meant to be lecturing you.’

‘So lecture me.’

‘There has to be a way out of this,’ Richard told him.

‘I’m not apologising.’

‘I’m not saying you should.’

‘I’m not trying to make any particular point, you know that. I’m just following the data.’

‘That’s not true,’ Richard challenged.

‘It is.’

‘No, it’s partly true.’

‘So what’s the rest?’ William asked.

‘I tell my students objectivity is like a torch. While it may illuminate without prejudice, we still get to choose where to shine it.’

‘But I’m not a student.’

‘I’m sorry if I sound patronising. I do this when I’m out of my depth.’

‘I didn’t choose this question.’

‘You chose to publish.’

‘It’s what we do, Richard. We take what we find and we make it available. Unpalatable though it may be.’

‘I think that’s too heroic.’

‘I think that’s too cynical.’

‘We censor all the time,’ Richard insisted. ‘We do it to get funding, to get publication, recognition, job opportunities, love, whatever it is we’re hunting at the time. If we simply followed the data we’d be paralysed by choice.’

Richard looked at his friend who, ever since this thing had broken seemed to be shrinking, in the manner of a cancer patient. Richard hadn’t called in to talk through the intricacies of right and wrong. He was here to save his friend, that was all. He waited for William to say something, but the psychologist simply refilled their glasses and waited too.

‘Look, regardless of how you feel about your responsibilities towards the data, there have to be ways we can go about engaging with it. Ways we go about presenting it. I don’t know what I’m suggesting, I haven’t thought this through, I honestly didn’t intend to have this conversation. I wasn’t going to, I heard you’d been hurt, I just wanted to …’

‘You’ve started now.’

‘I have… You know how these things go. People are afraid. Not
of the data, but of what will happen with the data. And I don’t think they’re wrong.’

There, he’d said it: negated his way to disloyalty. William rose to the challenge. Despite being no public speaker, in a one-on-one confrontation William could be formidable. The professor was a master of the contemplative silence, never tempted to squeeze shape from a half-formed idea. He was most likely to respond to a question with one of his own, a method that in his hands was less Socratic than diversionary. Richard had seen many a colleague lose his footing in the scree of William’s arguments.

‘You don’t think they’re wrong?’ He said it slowly, as if considering this possibility for the first time.

‘What frightens you about people, more than anything?’ Richard asked.

‘You seriously think that can be answered in a sentence?’

‘I can answer it in a word. Tribalism. You and me. Us and them. Insider and outsider. Take me anywhere through time and space, point to any conflict, and at the heart of it I’ll show you an in-group first defining and then attacking an out-group. Before we can strike we must find a way to camouflage the most unpalatable of truths: that the closer you stand, the more valuable your life is to me. So Christian slaughters Muslim, white slaughters black, north– erner attacks southerner, Japan invades Korea, Kenya falls apart; and every time it’s the ability to paint the Other as different that makes the conflict plausible. And do I feel fear at the possibility that yet another badge of difference is to be made available to those who have no desire to properly examine it? Who wouldn’t?’

Even now, when his intention had been to lend support, Richard could not resist an argument. He took great pleasure in the way flapping edges of thought could so quickly be folded and tucked beneath the shape of the proposition in question. And he took a certain pride in it too.

The injured man waited, chewed silently on some segment of his swollen cheek, and fashioned a smile from amongst the wreckage.

‘Well me, I suppose, as you ask. You gave me a word, let me give you one in return. Ignorance.’

And again his friend paused, cheap but effective.

‘That conflict is based around identity is surely nothing more than a consequence of definition. Without readily identifiable sides, there is no conflict. You claim it is the availability of these badges, as you put it, that facilitate conflict, and here I disagree.

‘Finding difference will never be difficult; in the heat of conflict difference need not be substantive. An accent, a birthplace, a circumcision, which end you break your egg. Yes, go to any time, any place of conflict, and you will find, unsurprisingly, the conditions of conflict. But ask this. What are the conditions we find when conflict has been supressed? What of the powerful who do not take slaves, the men who do not rape women, the countries that do not declare war? I would suggest to you that the common thread is not the absence of identifiable difference, but the slow, miraculous progress of the great project of Enlightenment. Where ideas are not suppressed, where knowledge is not jealously guarded,
that
is where peace has a chance of taking hold. And so, when our every instinct is to hide a study away because its findings might be difficult, that’s when I feel fear, Richard.’

‘I’m not sure you’re wrong.’ Richard sipped at his whisky. ‘And I very much hope you’re not.’

‘But?’

‘But some of the most remarkable peace has been wrought from societies that see themselves as homogenous.’