I Am Max Lamm (23 page)

And Lamm remembered something else. In bed an afternoon ago, after they finished yet before he had to leave, Kelly switched TV channels. They watched an Ultimate Fighting match on ESPN. An inelegant combination of boxing, kickboxing and wrestling, where greased thugs beat the shit out of each other for fourfigure sums and fifteen minutes of infamy. Usually the fights degenerate into one three-hundred-pound hulk spread-eagled atop his opponent, holding him down for the count.

‘
Ten, nine, eight, seven, six
. . .’

Circling like a toothless shark, the ref counts the numbers. A rippled greased fighter slams the other, pelvis first, into the floor.

Kelly cackled her drunken hyena laugh at the homoerotic theatricality of it all.

‘Look at these tough guys climbing all over each other! They love it! They should get a hotel room and fuck!’

She was puzzled that somebody – presumably her father – had paid to watch this fight on pay-per-view. Soon she’ll understand.

They sat on the lounge suite. Kelly massaging his right palm with the tip of her index finger. Concentric circles spiralling slowly, turning him on.

‘I’m in trouble with the law.’

She knows, you fool. You’re surely not the first fugitive she’s taken in
.

Lamm glanced at the coffee table. Malik Massawi’s obituary on page three of the
Telegraph
.

‘I need a passport.’

She withdrew her finger. You’ve entered a foreign land. The pathetic, penniless place she’s been taught to despise all her life.

‘Honestly, I don’t have a lot of money’

‘Your father does. I’ve got something he wants.’

She looked intrigued, hungry. Of course she’d dug around, but never got any dirt on her old man.

Kelly’s mobile started beeping. The alarm she set, in case they fell asleep naked, exhausted.

‘He’ll be back here soon.’

Lamm started to get up, yet paused. Another lapse of reason.
You shouldn’t have mentioned the money
. Lips close enough to touch hers, but he didn’t attempt a kiss. Merely felt Kelly’s breath, the shallow warm exculpations of a creature externally so perfect, inwardly flawed, maddeningly compelling. This girl born to
everything
, who resurrected herself through sadism, who scavenged him in the park like a hunk of carrion, who knows self-inflicted cruelty the way people know their favourite food. His tongue inches from hers, he whispered into her chaos, her being.

‘
Do you want to terrify your father?
’

The twitch of her smile told him what he needed to know.

The TV flashed onto the CNN news. Apart from an update on the London riots, the bulletin’s three minutes concerned the funeral of Pope John Paul II. Lamm and Kelly watched the mile-long procession of pilgrims entering the Vatican. Four million people had already visited the interred Polish pontiff, who succumbed to influenza and Parkinson’s disease as famously as the USSR crumbled into history’s compost heap.
That
, the CNN anchorman opined, was the Pope’s greatest triumph: the dissolution of the communist fairytale that had reduced Poland to scorched earth and empty supermarket shelves.

The funeral was the largest-ever gathering of world leaders and the most watched television event ever. The kings, queens, princes, presidents and prime ministers wore black and pretended to mourn. Gathered not because they especially cared for the grey corpse in white silk, but because their fellow lords of the motorcade – autocrat, theocrat, kleptocrat, democrat – were there too. Clinton the ageless smart-alec schoolboy, compulsively campaigning for his legacy, while Bush the Younger wore his simian scowl of resolve, deaf fortitude, dead certainty. A few feet away stood Chirac, affecting the hook-nosed de Gaullian profile of admonition, arrogance, antipathy that endeared him to his countrymen even before he and Old Europe’s other obstinate doorstop, Chancellor Schroeder of Germany, insisted on antiquated notions like prudence, forethought and the rest of the Saddam-appeasing hootenanny that drove Senator Richard Wesson nuts. Must be awkward; the American commander-in-chief sitting alongside those European nay-sayers who pooh-poohed the Iraqi adventure conceived by Reagan’s fossilized cheerleaders and a roomful of monkeys banging on typewriters in the Pentagon.

In another row, the Prince of Wales, who’d postponed his wedding for this funeral to end all funerals, sat stiff as an Oxford oak a few seats from Mugabe the anti-colonialist despot. Moshe Katsav, the president of Israel, hunched two seats away from President Khatami of Iran. Lamm recognized most of the dignitaries; he’d been reading the newspapers cover-to-cover for four days straight. This gathering of heads of state, announced the anchorman, eclipsed even the hallowed throng at Winston Churchill’s state funeral back in 1965.

‘That’s your father’s type of funeral.’

‘He’ll be buried at Arlington with a twenty-one-gun salute. It’s what he expects.’

‘That’s what he deserves? For starting this war and killing half a million Iraqis?’

‘You don’t get it.’ Kelly smiled half-mockingly at the fugitive. ‘It’s what
America
deserves. We have our kings and queens too.’

A familiar-sounding engine purred in the street. The US embassy limo.

‘Have you guessed his secret?’

Before Kelly could answer – her affirmation or the lie that she hadn’t – Lamm dropped the envelope onto the coffee table. It landed face up:
ATTENTION: SENATOR RICHARD WESSON
in black letters.

‘I need a hundred thousand dollars tomorrow. That’s nothing to him.’

They kissed. Lamm’s tongue grazing the soft rim of Kelly’s gums, the bevelled edge of her front incisors slightly chipped from when she used to jack open syringes with her teeth. He stood motionless, exhaling into her. Desire stirred, never long dormant, the thirst – for disorder, decrepitude, vengeance, chaos – that bound them together ever since he grabbed her disobedient dog in a neglected grove of Hyde Park.

‘Please talk to your father. I’ll call you tonight at ten.’

She doesn’t reply
,
like your ghosts
.

But look at her: she’s intrigued by the intersection of her revenge and your necessity
.

The wrecking ball is in that envelope. She’ll demolish him. Demolish the father who, through his professional neglect, passively tore her apart in a silent Georgetown mansion where every afternoon she’d stared in vain at his gun, waiting for somebody to tell her
not
to kill herself. The father who betrayed and banished her mother to Europe, who approved the cluster bombs that obliterated the legs of those Iraqi children appearing on the BBC news and in Kelly’s nightmares. The father who forced her into the National Guard to be reassembled, limb by limb, into what she hated. Into him.

The razor look she’s giving you. Too proud to ask what’s inside.

He glanced at the video screen by the door. The Minotaur was walking into the lobby. Lamm ran down the fire escape and escaped into Park Lane.

Hyde Park. The classic locale for demonstrations ever since the 1830s: the Chartists, the Reform League, the Suffragettes, the Vietnam War protests, the Stop the War Coalition. Commencing midday on Sunday 10 April 2005, another enormous rally was set for the park: the London Against Racism march. A communal demonstration of solidarity against the East End riots, organized by the British Muslim Forum, the National Union of Students and the Love Music Hate Racism alliance. Underneath the barbeque, Lamm awoke to the din of nearly twenty-three thousand protesters ten minutes away on the lawn.

Shouts, chants, horns, sirens and a voice that Lamm recognized, booming through the PA system half a mile away. In its gruff mix of East End slang and Urdu-accented English, the voice thundered in mourning, defiance, dissent.

‘
We will not accept violence against my son and other innocent Muslims! We will not accept this injustice! I call on Mr Blair to prosecute the racists responsible for my son’s death and the riot. I call on Mr Blair to stop his murderous war against Muslims in the Middle East!
’

The orator was Malik Massawi’s father, whose doggedly resilient voice was familiar to the culprit from radio bulletins. Overhead, the unnerving shudder of news helicopters, their cacophony pricking the hairs on Lamm’s skin. This was London’s biggest demonstration since the futile antiwar protest on a Saturday in February 2003. Face down in the blanket he’d pilfered from Kelly’s wardrobe, Lamm predicted the nearby scene: a vast assembly of British Muslims, of Christian, Hindu and secular protesters too, of firebrand students, curious local residents, police, journalists, TV crews. The crowds there to applaud the rhetoric, to enjoy the free rock concert, to admonish the prime minister who had taken British-Islamic relations to their lowest ebb since 9/11.

They’re protesting against you
.

Office workers, punks, Old Labourites, pensioners, radical students hoisting banners, Pakistani youths brandishing the teenage martyr’s head torn from the
Sun
’s front page and stuck on a square of cardboard. Pedestrians yelling their support or their opposition, or just there for the spectacle. On the lawn’s northern flank, a stage would soon feature Madness, the Libertines and Billy Bragg. Onstage, alongside George Galloway and the usual celebrities nodding like hungry pelicans, Malik Massawi’s father commandeered the fury of twenty-three thousand people. An impassioned performance from this short, moustached man from Kandahar, whose usual audience was the uninterested passenger in the back seat of his cab.

‘
Prime Minister, do not ignore us! The East End is burning for the first time in sixty years. London’s racist majority killed my son. London’s racist majority started the riot! And we, the Muslims of Britain, say enough is enough!
’

The tsunami of applause. Cheering of a conviction not often heard outside football stadiums and public executions.

From the growing crowd rumbled thunderous chants.

‘
The people
,
united
,
will never be defeated!
’

‘
No to racism! No to Blair! No to racism! No to Blair!
’

Following the concert, the protest would snake down Oxford Street. Already four hundred constables, some on horseback, others clad in helmets and body armour behind perspex shields, manned the pavement up to the junction of Tottenham Court Road. Most of the big Oxford Street stores were closed for the day. Some had boarded their windows with plywood.

Exhausted, excoriated Lamm! He sank into the blankets. The previous night’s sleeplessness, the stale air underground; it made a powerful sedative. Last night the restlessness wrought large in his dreams. He was floating; floating out of the barbeque, through the moist teary fronds of the weeping willow, above the silvery moonlit lawns and over London’s bejewelled midnight grid, faster, higher, higher, his body a jet until instantaneously he crossed the Atlantic. Hijacked by memory, he flew over New York, experiencing the scene that four years ago he had imagined daily: the steel sequoia forest of Manhattan, growing terrifyingly in the passenger windows as the two airliners commenced their suicide spirals. No destruction there for Lamm; he flew down, down, down between the towers, into the East River where he sank beneath the clear waves of his childhood holidays on Jan Juc beach. Deep in that frigid moat, Lamm felt his fingers through the warm sand of Bass Strait in summertime, searching for cockles, cuttlefish, tiny hermit crabs with pincers like his mother’s tweezers. Underwater, meet your ghosts: your grandfather, your mother, Mr Lewski, Rachel Samuels, Malik Massawi. Waiting, watching you in the aqueous endless ether of your memory, your nothingness, your wondering, your life.
Come back!
But the ghosts never say a word.

Again something was pulling Lamm out of the water. But not Scott Greer’s strong hands, the hands that accepted an award for bravery from the mayor of New York. These hands were sounds; the stark rattle of a truncheon bashing on the barbeque grate.

You’re drowning!

Lamm lurched up, trying to swim, hitting his head on the limestone wall.

More banging.

‘Constable, there’s a grate. Look!’

Not a metre away, the voice. Terrifyingly calm, relentless.

They’ve found you
.

No more than fifteen seconds between the commencement of the noise and Lamm grabbing the gun he had stolen from Kelly’s wardrobe, yet it seemed like a day at the edge of the abyss. The abyss of your bottomlessness, the
bottomlessness
of your bottomlessness, unmasked and fatal.

This is your Hitler’s bunker.

Lamm loaded the gun. Push it in and click; easy. No wonder that America’s geeks are murdering their classmates at junior high. Now raise the barrel and shoot yourself between the eyes. Or in the back of the neck, the way George kills Lennie in the dying pages of
Of Mice and Men
.

Mr Lewski! Your ghostly teacher who taught you Steinbeck, looking his students in the eyes, daring you to think! To criticize, to understand, to read a book
an-alytically
, as he would say. You never realized how you missed him. Now you’ll be together, wherever he is or isn’t.

The metal grate wrenched open. Sunlight spilt into the hole. They saw the fugitive’s feet.

‘There’s a man in there!’

Do it!

Now!

Lamm clicked the safety off. This
is
how George kills Lennie, in the split-second before the inevitable. The final moment before Curly and the ranch hands close in. Choose your defiant death, like the fearless Jews at Masada that your grandmother taught you about. They wouldn’t surrender to the Romans.

Do it!

Lamm saw his father in the checkout line at a supermarket in Caulfield, getting scolded by Schiff the plastic surgeon.

Your boy hates everything we love. The boy loves to hate
.

That’s what he loves. The hatred
.