Ghostwriting (8 page)

“That’s right.”

“Do you by any chance know the name of this cult, Mr Madison?”

“According Caroline’s notes,” Madison said, “it is called the Kurti sect.”

This had an immediate and surprising effect on the private investigator. Begum leaned forward and said, “Mr Madison, I can but express my condolences. You are an innocent player in this situation, a naive visitor to the city, as was your wife before you. I can but express my commiserations and furnish you with one piece of advice: leave Calcutta now.”

“But my wife—”

“Mr Madison...” this with a weight of weary compassion. “There is no hope for your wife. She is past all earthly help. Let her go, live with her memory, for this is all that remains.”

Only with difficulty did Madison find the words, “What has happened to her?”

“She has fallen foul of wicked men, Mr Madison. Are you aware of a drug known as chola?”

Madison shook his head, wanting to tell the detective that no, of course he wasn’t. “Tell me about it,” he said with trepidation.

“Some claim that he drug is an... an empathy-enhancer. It allows the subject to better appreciate, some might even say
read
, the emotions of others. It is especially effective in producing a certain empathy to pain.”

“To pain...?” Madison began, his voice catching.

“I know little of the sect,” the detective said, “and I prefer to keep it that way. But I have heard that the sect uses chola to share the mental agony of their victims.”

“Then Caroline...?”

“I’m so sorry, Mr Madison.”

Madison closed his eyes, sat in the silent darkness for a minute, trying to come to terms with what Begum had told him. At last he looked up. The investigator was as impassive as ever.

“Can’t something be done?” Madison said. “The sect rooted out, abolished?”

“But secrecy is their by-word, my friend. No one knows where they base themselves. There can be no contact to be had with the Kurti sect, or rather only the terrible contact of the damned.”

“If I were to hire you...?”

The investigator shook his head. “There are some commissions that even I would not dare to take. Since Independence, many strange cults have come into being, and the Kurti sect is one of the worst.”

Madison could not recall taking his leave of Begum, or making his way back through the thronged streets to his hotel. That period – an hour, maybe more – was a blur of disorientation and inner anguish, a visual kaleidoscope of jeering, taunting faces, startling sounds and strange sights. His mind was full of the nightmare of what Caroline might have suffered at the hands of the cultists.

Then suddenly, and to his overwhelming relief, he was standing outside his hotel, the building a sanctuary from the surrounding chaos. He hurried to his room and ordered whisky from room service. He read through Caroline’s notes again, then took a picture of her from the bedside table and stared at her smiling face.

He sat beside the window, bottle in hand, and considered what to do next. He should go to the police, of course, present the facts to the official representatives of the law... but he surmised that he would gain little satisfaction from that quarter.

Then he recalled what Begun had told him about the Kurti sect: that no one knew where they based themselves... But had not McAllister mentioned that he had taken Caroline to a certain Taipusan ceremony?

He was startled by a ringing sound from the corner of the room. He looked up, noticed the bottle in his hand. It was half empty. How long had he been drinking? The ringing continued.

He staggered across the room and snatched up the receiver. A smooth voice said, “Mr Madison?”

“Speaking”

The voice almost purred, mocking. “Mr Madison, this is Mr Krishnan.”

“Yes...”

“I understand that you have been looking for your wife, Mr Madison.”

His heart leapt. “Who are you?”

Krishnan purred, “Would you care to learn the whereabouts of your wife, Mr Madison?”

He felt suddenly dizzy. “You know?”

He could almost see the smile on the Indian’s smug face as Krishnan replied, “Oh, I know...”

“What the hell have you done to her?” Madison cried.

“If you really wish to find out, then come with me, Mr Madison,” the smooth voice coaxed.

“Where are you?”

“Leave the hotel immediately. We will pick you up.”

“Wait!”

The line went dead.

Madison smashed the receiver down and sat staring at the opposite wall.
 

He had no option, of course, but to place his fate in the hands of the faceless Krishnan, even though he suspected that in doing so he would be endangering his own safety.

Choking on a sob, he hurried from the room.

~

The street outside the hotel was busy with pedestrians. Hardly had Madison set foot on the sidewalk than a tall figure in a dark suit and sun-glasses took his arm and unceremoniously steered him towards a waiting car. As soon as he was in the back seat the car drove off, swerving through the traffic at speed.

“What have you done to my wife?” Madison asked.

“An old Hindu saying, Mr Madison – in certain situations, silence is wisdom.”

Madison lay his head back, trying not to dwell on what Begum had told him about the Kurti sect.

The drive through the teeming city seemed interminable. An hour passed, perhaps longer. Long after Madison thought they should by now have left the city and entered the countryside, dim slums passed by on either side, and surging crowds filled the streets. He wondered if they were driving him around in circles, so that he might find it impossible to return to where they were taking him.

At last the car rolled to a stop and the engine cut. The silence was blessed, until the lesser noise from the city intruded.

“Where are we?”

He felt a hand on his arm, helping him from the car.

He climbed out, stretching his legs with relief. The thought that soon he might find Caroline, or perhaps what had happened to her...

“Come!” Krishnan took his upper arm and hurried him away from the car.

They passed down a narrow alley between two buildings, all the while Krishnan gripping his upper-arm.
 

Madison stepped between drifts of rubbish and scurrying rats. The area stank, and Madison gagged, almost retching on the miasma of rotting vegetation and faeces.

Then he heard the cry from up ahead and stopped. Krishnan urged him on. “Come. Do not fear. This way.”

The cries continued. They seemed to come from the mouths of children, high-pitched screams of entreaty, ululating in the night’s fetid heat.

Perhaps twenty yards ahead he made out a lighted window in the wall of the building to his right, and it was from here that the screams seemed to be issuing.

He slowed his pace, despite Krishnan’s prompting. The screams grew louder as they approached the lighted rectangle. The window was open, he saw, revealing a small, white-tiled room.

As they passed, his abductor hurrying him along, Madison turned and stared, and then wished that he had spared himself the sight of what was taking place within the room.

He cried out. The image, brief as it was, would live with him for ever.

Panic clutched at him. “What have you done to my wife?” Madison cried.

Krishnan walked on, ignoring him.

They came to a door in the wall, and Krishnan ushered him through into a tiled corridor of what might have been a hospital building.

“What...?” Madison began. “What in God’s name where they doing to...?”

Krishnan gestured along the corridor, towards the room where Madison had witnessed the torture.

He stumbled, resisting. Krishnan, showing aggression for the first time, took him roughly by the shoulders and pushed him down the corridor.

“Mr Madison, you are not in England now. This is India, and we are an impoverished country. How do you suppose children are to earn a living, if they have no trade, no skill, and are illiterate? Begging is their only option.”

“But... such butchery!” was all Madison could say.

He could still hear the screams, though deadened now by intervening brickwork.

They came at last not to the room, as he had feared they might, but to an outside courtyard strung with a garland of electric bulbs that dazzled him after the dimness within the building.

He stumbled outside and Krishnan released him.

He stood, peering feebly into the dazzle.

Across the courtyard he made out some kind of seat, or rather throne. A cloaked figure was seated upon it, with a dozen Indian men crouched on either side in attitudes of obeisance.

What was extraordinary about the seated figure was the headpiece that sat upon its shoulders – a great, blood-red mask, all flaring eye-brows, staring eyes, and a mouth set in a fearsome, grinning rictus.
 

Krishnan murmured into his ear, “The Chosen One, the exalted disciple who, this month, is the favoured one of Kurti. With Chola,” he went on, “the Chosen One can better appreciate...” He fell silent then, but gestured towards the old hospital ward where amateur surgeons were mutilating the city’s street children.

Madison moaned out loud and staggered. Krishnan caught him, eased him upright.

He gathered himself, looked across the courtyard the masked figure, and suddenly knew that his search was drawing to a close. He understood, then, that Caroline had not become a victim of the Kurti sect...

He stepped forward. “Caroline?” he said.

The throned figure raised its hands, reached for the mask and slowly lifted it from its head.

Madison took a breath in surprise and stared at the revealed figure.

McAllister sat upon the throne, watching Madison with rheumy eyes. He seemed even frailer, more decrepit, than he had at their first meeting. “I must apologise for my earlier dissimulation,” McAllister said. “I had to make certain that you were acting alone, and not in league with the authorities. We of the sect must... practise certain safeguards, you understand. India is a tolerant country, but some people in positions of power might find our predilections somewhat...
outré
, you might say.”

McAllister stood up then, swaying, and Madison looked into his eyes and saw the light of madness there.

“Caroline?”

Then the old man said, “Come, Mr Madison. Your wife is awaiting you.”

And it was all Madison could do to stumble forward and follow the madman from the courtyard.

~

They passed down another corridor and stopped before a door.

McAllister said, “Mr Madison, last month your wife was the Chosen One—”

“You mean, she experienced...
that
?” he said, gesturing feebly towards what lay beyond the courtyard.

“And more,” McAllister said. “And the experience changed her...”

Before Madison could question him, McAllister opened the door and gestured him into a tiny room.

A thin figure lay upon a narrow camp-bed, a single sheet covering her emaciated form.

Madison moved into the room.
 

Caroline turned her head on a sweat-stained pillow, and stared at him with hollow eyes.

She reached out, and Madison hurried to her, knelt and took her hand. He heard the sound of a door closing behind him, and turned his head. McAllister had retreated from the room.

Caroline said, in a voice barely a croak, “Charles...”

He cried, “Why, Caroline?”

She replied, “I wanted to...” It was barely a murmur, and he had to bend his head in order to make her out. “I wanted...”

“What?” said.

“To suffer what they were suffering,” she cried.

He wept, then reached forward and embraced her. “I’m taking you home, Caroline,” he said, and eased her from the bed. She stood, skeletal and weak, and he walked her from the room, slowly, along the corridor and out into the courtyard. Not knowing whether they might be stopped, he continued across the courtyard watched by a dozen Indian faces. Mercifully, the cries of the tortured children had ceased.

They emerged from the building to find Krishnan and McAllister awaiting them in the courtyard. Without a word, and to Madison’s relief and – God forgive him – gratitude, they led him and Caroline down the alley to the waiting taxi.

“You are letting us go?” Madison asked.

McAllister smiled. “Our cult is a movable feast, Mr Madison. Go now, and do not return.”

In silence they watched as he eased Caroline into the car. He climbed in beside her, gripping her frail hand. The driver started the engine. As they pulled away, Madison turned and looked through the window.

McAllister raised a hand, and then turned back and disappeared into the darkness of the alley.

~

As the liner pulled away from the dock, Madison stood by the rail and watched the city recede. He looked ahead to his arrival in England, to the new life that awaited him there with Caroline. It would not be easy, he told himself as he made his way below-decks to their cabin. He thought of what Caroline had experienced, and tried to clear his head of the sight he had witnessed in the tiled room.

He slipped into his cabin quietly, so as not to wake Caroline. She was sleeping fitfully, tortured by nightmares Madison could not begin to imagine.

He sat by her bed, took her hand in his, and kept vigil long into the night as the liner steamed away from India.

The Memory of Joy

There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief
– Aeschylus

The last glimpse I had of my daughter was when I left the house and crossed to the car. Ella was dancing around on the lawn, playing with her dog. She was wearing knee-length dungarees and a red tee-shirt, and her spontaneous, five year-old laughter filled the air with joy.

She looked up and smiled at me.

I treasure that last smile.

I climbed in behind the wheel and sat for a while, going over what I had to get from the artist’s supply shop in Oxford. I should have set off immediately. The future would have been very different, then.

But I hesitated, ordering my errant memory.

I turned the key, started the engine.

In the brief minute I delayed before setting off, Ella must have moved from the lawn.

I never saw her.

I backed the car down the gravelled driveway.

I felt the slight resistance, conducted through the bodywork of the car; then I felt the gentle crunch, a faint popping detonation, and it came to me that I had run over one of Ella’s plastic toys, her tricycle or doll.

I swore and opened the car door.

In retrospect I realise that that action was the last my old self would make – the old self of blithe contentment, of innocence. Nothing would be the same again.

I glanced back along the length of the car. At the very second I beheld my daughter’s outstretched legs – without really comprehending the evidence of my eyes – I heard my wife scream.

Laura was standing at the front door. She had watched Ella run from the lawn, dart behind the car. Our daughter had knelt, then got down on her belly to examine something that caught her childish interest, a ladybird, perhaps.

Laura had seen all this through the lounge window. She had stood transfixed, paralysed, knowing what was about to happen – granted, as it were, a foresight of the tragic inevitability of events played out before her – and had been unable to do a thing about it.

Laura’s scream brought home the truth that my eyes had refused to acknowledge.

Framed in the doorway, between the beauty of hanging baskets, abundant crimson phlox and trailing fuchsia, she raised her hands to her face and wailed.

Munch.
The Scream
. Pure Horror.

I moved from the car. I caught my wife. We dropped to our knees, holding each other. We crawled across the gravel, towards the car, towards Ella, and we lay on the ground, still clinging to each other, and without looking upon the remains of our daughter we reached out as one and grasped her sun-tanned, dungaree’d leg.

That was how the neighbour found us later – I have no idea how much later – and called for an ambulance.

~

Laura spent the next three days in the local hospital, out of it on a powerful cocktail of tranquillisers. I refused the balm of barbiturates. Conscious, the horror was bad enough. I did not want to leave myself prey to whatever demons might haunt me in the twilight world of delirious semi-consciousness.

I spent the next few nights with a friend in the village. My brother came down from Yorkshire, the lineaments of his face pulled into unfamiliar lines of grief, and I experienced a gnawing guilt for all the pain I’d caused.

I found myself giving thanks, then, that my mother had passed away the year before. Ella’s death would have destroyed her.

Laura’s parents had died years ago, before we married. They too were spared the pain, and I the guilt of burdening them with pain.

I visited Laura every day, spending hours beside her bed. For the first two days she was unconscious. On the third, I arrived to find her sitting up, staring at the opposite wall.

Staring...

My transit across her line of sight brought not a flicker of response. I sat on the bed and gripped her hand. Nothing. She looked ten years older, drained, grey, her eyes haunted and empty.

I found myself unable to speak. Words were beyond me – crude, rude things wholly inadequate to the task of communicating my complex thoughts and feelings.

At last I mouthed platitudes. How much I loved her. How much I was sorry.

I told her that Dan, my brother, had suggested we sell the house. I told her that I was putting it on the market and looking around for something else.

Nothing, not a flicker of response. I was concerned for Laura, of course – but I would be lying if I denied that I was concerned also as to her reaction. Would her pain and recriminations target me?

Later, sitting in the darkness of my studio at the bottom of the garden, it came to me that, loath though I was to be the butt of my wife’s accusations, a part of me would welcome the blame, for only when we shoulder the burden of responsibility can we be granted absolution.

~

On the third day in hospital, Laura attempted to take her life.

She climbed from bed, swung a chair at the window, and slashed at her left wrist with a dagger-shaped shard of glass.

A nurse heard the crash and arrived in time to prevent her bleeding to death.

By the time I was informed, she had already been transferred to the psychiatric unit.

That night, at home, I stared at the delayed transmission of humankind’s first ever landing on another planet. I watched the silver-suited explorers venture out across the red sands of Mars, but for all the emotion the sight evoked in me they might have been cartoon figures in the latest Disney feature film.

~

The department at Laura’s college gave her indefinite compassionate leave.

I sold the house quickly, at a loss, and bought a small place in a village closer to Oxford. Dan and a neighbour helped me move, and while I was visiting Laura they went through Ella’s room, removing all her belongings and clothes. I told Dan what I wanted keeping of Ella’s effects – a few items of clothing, a teddy bear, some drawings – and they stored them in a sealed box which I placed in the attic of the new house, for the day when I would be strong enough to open it and use the contents as mnemonics, a part of the healing process.

I began painting again. I finished the commissions I had neglected – banged them out on auto-pilot with little regard as to their quality – and then started a series of paintings for myself.

They were dark, of course, and introspective, freighted with guilt and regret, containing self-referential symbols and icons known only to myself. They were not for general consumption. I might not even show Laura them. They were for the cowering, grief-stricken, guilt-ridden coward deep within me. They were a catharsis.

Ella came to me in dreams. Her face drifted into my vision, ethereal, ghost-like, and always she was wearing an accusing stare. Always, too, she asked me, “Why did you kill me, daddy?”

I would awake screaming, terribly alone in the empty bed.

~

Laura began slowly to emerge from her suicidal fugue. Heavily sedated, she responded to my visits. She talked to me. I told her about the new house, the garden, the studio – a converted stable at the bottom of the garden.

We never discussed Ella, or the accident. That would have been too painful.

Two months after my daughter’s death, Laura was discharged. I drove her home in the second-hand Rover I had bought three weeks ago. She was quiet all the way, seemingly sedate. She was still on medication.

I showed her around the house, my studio, with my latest canvasses turned to the wall.

I left the bedroom until last. On the dresser I had placed a single photograph of Ella, smiling, filling the room with light and life.

Her glance took them in, quickly, but she made no comment.

Over dinner that evening, with a glass of French red wine, she told me that she was going back to work next week. I smiled, encouraged, buoyed by this evidence of her positivism and by half a bottle of merlot.

Only later, after a long silence, did she say, “Do you know what’s the worst thing, Ed?”

Something plummeted within me. I shook my head.

She said, simply, “The future.”

I let the silence stretch. At last I responded, “The future?”

“The future that’s been denied us,” she said calmly, and I wanted to cry out, tell her to stop.

She went on, relentless, “So much of our thoughts of the future were predicated by the fact of Ella. It was
all
about Ella. I planned ahead, imagining her at eight, at ten, at eighteen. I had a whole imaginary life charted, with you and me and her...” She was crying now, tears rolling down her cheeks. She shook her head. Her fingers tightened on her glass. She finished bitterly, “And now all that’s gone, gone.”

“Stop!”

She looked up at me. “You did the same?”

“Of course.” What parent didn’t? I had been battling against the absence of future certainties myself, over the weeks since the accident. We invest so much time in the paradoxical, imponderable fact of our children’s futures that, when those futures are so cruelly torn away, we are left doubly bereft: consigned to a present filled with vast absence, to a future deficient of hope.

Laura flung her glass, contents and all, against the wall, then stood quickly, evading my attempt to stop her, pull her to me. She screamed, a wail I can hear to this day, and sobbing threw herself after the glass, battering herself against the walls in the corner of the room, back and forth, berserk, until I pulled her to me in a grip less compassionate than vicious with fear.

And held her, and rocked her, mouthing that I was sorry, sorry. What else could I say?

~

She returned to work, lecturing in Seventeenth Century English literature. I lost myself in my own work, spending long hours in the studio, absorbed. Laura talked about counselling, but I declined: I had my own form of therapy. She was seeing someone linked to her college, she told me, but I refrained from asking how it might be helping her.

She was still on sedation. She was not the Laura I had known and loved, the pre-accident Laura. She moved through life as if walking on cut glass, delicately, wincing from time to time. These were her good periods, when she somehow managed to hold her grief in check.

At other times, when she thought she could give full reign to her anguish without hurting me, I would come in from the studio to find her weeping, or wailing inconsolably.

My guilt was compounded by my inadequacy to say or do anything that might ease her pain.

Then, while I was painting one afternoon, she came in from work early, unannounced, and confronted me in the studio.

I had had no time to remove the canvas from the easel – though she was so intent on unburdening herself that she only winced at what she saw in the painting, before saying, “Ed, we can’t go on like this.”

For a terrible second I thought that she was suggesting separation.

She went on, “We’ve got to see someone.”

“I thought you were.”

“A grief counsellor, for all the good it’s done.” She shook her head. “There’s someone at college. He approached me the other day. He thinks he can help. Both of us.”

“I don’t need the help of psychiatrists. I can handle this myself.”

She heard out my anger, staring at me with her calm blue eyes. “He’s not a psychiatrist. He works in the neuroscience department – he’s the chairman of a private IT company.”

“Neuroscience? What are you suggesting? Lobotomy?”

My anger didn’t faze her. She had a wonderful way of tolerating my idiocies. She said, “It’s hard to explain, and I’m not sure I can do it full justice. I suggest we go and see him. Together.”

I stared at her.

“Please, Ed. It might help.”

I hesitated. “I don’t want to share my pain with strangers!”

Her gaze was even. “You don’t even want to share your pain with me,” she said, gesturing to the dark images on the canvas behind me. “You don’t even want to share your guilt with me.”

She reached out, and I came into her arms, and said that yes, yes of course we should seek help.

That night I lay awake, thinking of Ella, of all the joy she gave us, and it came to me that there was no pain so great.

~

I’d met Laura ten years earlier, at an exhibition of my early work at her college. I was in my early thirties at the time, and trailing a string of failed relationships in my wake. I had no intention of getting seriously involved with anyone, not even a slim, beautiful, golden-haired woman in her late twenties, and then Laura walked up to me, wine glass in hand, and said how much she liked my paintings.

I overcame my initial inferiority complex: Laura Markham was a high-flying intellectual with a well-received book behind her, a dozen conference papers and a string of articles in learned academic journals – and I had left school at sixteen to paint.

Then I discovered that, despite her intimidating knowledge of Derrida and Lacan and post-colonial theory, she was an intimidated woman, unsure of her own worth, in need of love and affection. We were married a year later.

Would it be sexist and demeaning to say that, in my view, the birth of our daughter fulfilled Laura in a way that her profession never had? Perhaps not – for Ella fulfilled a need in me that even my painting had never managed.

~

Memories...

A host of pleasant memories sluiced through me as I accompanied Laura through the gates of her college, across the quadrangle, and into the maze of ancient corridors to the study of Professor James Enright.

He was surprisingly young. I put him at no older than forty. Tall, refined, very public-school – I imagined a cloistered life spent in academia, cosseted through a degree, a doctorate, post-doc fellowship, then a junior lectureship, followed by a series of promotions culminating in his present eminent position: Chair of Neuroscience, Oxford.

Perhaps the uneducated yob in me resented the idea that this effete scholar, with little knowledge of the outside world, thought he might be able to ease our pain.

Perhaps I should have been suitably grateful.

He sat behind his desk, somehow managing to appear tall even when seated, steepled his fingers and declaimed.

His voice was a plummy distillate of E.M. Forster and Betjeman. I told myself that he could no more help his accent than I could my Devonian burr – but he did sound patronising and elitist.