J (9 page)

They were elderly parents – that explained something. Elderly in years in his father’s case, elderly in spirit in his mother’s. And this made them especially solicitous to him, watching and remorseful, as though they needed to make it up to him for being the age they were, or the age they felt they were. At the end of his life his father had admitted to a mistake. ‘We would have done better by you had we let you be more like the rest of them,’ he said. ‘We wanted to preserve you but we went about it the wrong way. May God forgive me.’

His mother had died a month earlier. She had been dying almost as long as he’d known her, so her exit was expected, though the means of it was not. In circumstances that could not be explained she had suffered multiple burns while taking a short walk only yards from the cottage. As she didn’t smoke she had no use for matches. The day was not hot. There was no naked flame in the vicinity. Either someone had set fire to her – in which event she would surely, since she remained conscious, have pointed a finger of blame – or she had combusted spontaneously – and what counted against that theory was that her torso was not burned, only her extremities. She lay quietly on her bed for three days without complaining and seemingly not in pain. Her final words were ‘At last.’

But his father died – aged eighty though looking older – in a slow burn of ineffective rage. On the faces of some old men the flesh sags from lack of expressive exercise, the feeling man behind the skin having no more use for it; but on his father’s it grew tighter with approaching death as though the skull beneath could not control its grimaces. On his last night he asked Kevern to dig out an ancient music system he kept hidden under the stairs in a box marked Private Property and got him to play the blind soul singer Ray Charles singing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ over and over. He shook his fists while it was playing, though Kevern couldn’t tell whether at him, at Ray Charles, or at the cruel irony of things. ‘What a
oke,’ his father said. ‘What a
oke that is.’

He had to unclench his father’s fingers when the bitter light finally went out of him.

He let the music go on playing.

Kevern had always known about the box marked Private Property. Its futility saddened him. Would the words Private Property deter burglars? Or were they meant to deter him and his mother? What he hadn’t known was how many more boxes marked Private Property – some of them cardboard and easy to get into, others made of metal and fitted with locks, but all of them numbered – his father had secreted under his bed, on the top of the wardrobe, in the attic, in his workshop. Hoarding was proscribed by universal consent – no law, you just knew you shouldn’t do it – but he didn’t think this could be called hoarding exactly. Hoarding, surely, was random and disorganised, the outward manifestation of a disordered personality. His father’s boxes hinted at a careful, systematic, if overly secretive mind. But he’d read that people who kept things, whether they ordered them or they didn’t, were afraid above all of loss – the fear of losing their things standing in for their fear of losing something else: love, happiness, their lives. Well he didn’t need proof that his father was a frightened man. The only question was what he had all along been so frightened of.

Kevern knew the answer to that while maintaining that he didn’t. You can know and not know. Kevern didn’t know and knew. There were books in the redacted section of Bethesda Art Academy library with pages torn from them. Kevern sat in what appeared to Rozenwyn Feigenblat, the academy librarian, to be a concentration of profound vacancy, reading the pages that were no longer there.

One of his father’s boxes was marked for his attention. Another was marked for his attention only in the event of his considering fatherhood. What he was meant to do with all the others he had no idea. Hoard them, he supposed.

Going through the papers and letters in the box marked for his attention, Kevern discovered a shocking truth about his parents. They were first cousins. That fact wasn’t documented or brazenly trumpeted, but it was evident to anyone capable of reading between the lines, and Kevern lived between the lines. He couldn’t have failed to gather, from his mother’s and father’s misery and from remarks they let drop over the years, that they didn’t belong down here, that they lived in Port Reuben not out of choice, because they loved the sea or sought a simple way of life, but under duress; but he had never understood the nature of that duress, who or what had brought them and why they stayed. Now he knew. Down here no one would care about their incest (as Kevern considered it to be) even had they got wind of it. Cousins? So bleeding what! We are all one big happy family here. We don’t care, my lovelies, if youz is brother and sister.

Kevern didn’t miss out on wondering about that too. Was it worse than the letters intimated? Was ‘cousins’ a euphemism?

Such easy-goingness as Port Reuben and the surrounding villages exercised in the matter of consanguinity was not shared by the rest of the country. Blood needed to be thinned not thickened if there was to be none of that dense, overpopulated insalubriousness that had been the cause of discord. The county was allowed to make an exception of itself only because the authorities didn’t take it seriously. A cordon sanitaire could easily be drawn across the neck of the county, cutting it off from the rest of the country; and the existence of an imaginary version of that line – beyond which few aphids (as tourists and even visitors on business were contemptuously known) had ever wanted to stray – already prevented any serious cross-pollution. It was in the overheated towns and cities, where people talked as well as bred too much, that cousins needed to be kept apart. And it hadn’t escaped the attention of Ofnow that in acknowledging and encouraging nationality-based group aptitude – popular entertainment and athletics in this corner, plumbing in that – it ran the risk of allowing steam to build up in the enclaves once again. But that didn’t apply to Bethesda. The Bethesdans could mate with their own animals as far as the authorities were concerned.

In this, as in so many other matters, Kevern Cohen was not able to be as insouciant as his neighbours. Learning that his parents had been first cousins – if not closer – shook him profoundly. It had nothing to do with legalities: he didn’t know whether they’d done wrong in the eyes of the law or not. But their hiding away suggested that they felt they had. And to him it was an animal wrongness: first cousins! – it was too hot, like rutting. They’d run away to breed, and he was the thing they’d bred. Engendered in the steaming straw of their cow-house. Inbred.

He wondered if it explained the oddity of his nature. Was that the reason he had never married and had children of his own? Was he possessed of some genetic knowledge that would ensure his contaminated line would die out?

They’d always been too much of another time for him to feel close to them in the way other sons were close to their parents, so he found it difficult to attribute sins of the flesh to them. What they’d done they’d done. What he couldn’t forgive them for was not taking their secret to the grave. Why had they left incriminating documents behind? Shouldn’t they have kept him in the dark about what they’d done, as they’d kept him in the dark about almost everything else in their past – where they’d come from, what sort of family theirs was, who they
were
? There were few other papers for him to sort through. Most of the evidential story of their life, other than a number of nondescript notebooks and scrawled-over writing pads he kept for no other reason than that they had kept them, and a locked box which Kevern gave his oath he would open only when it looked likely that he would be a father himself – not before, and certainly not after – had been scrupulously destroyed. So he had to assume that they had deliberately not burned or shredded the handful of letters they had written to each other that proved how closely they were related. But to what end? Did they suppose they were helping him to live a better life? Or were the letters left where he could easily find them in order to give him a reason not to go on living at all? Was it their gift of death to him, like a single silver bullet or a suicide pill?

So much for their delicacy! They had brought him up unable to utter the most commonplace of oaths, a man of refined feeling, a fist of prickles as spiny as a hedgehog, and all along he’d been abnormally sired, a monstrosity, a freak. No wonder he couldn’t tell anyone else to kiss his arse or eat shit. He had eaten shit himself.

He made a further unwelcome discovery going through his parents’ papers. It wasn’t they who had run to this extremity of the country to escape scandal. They had grown up here. Again he was having to read between the lines, but it seemed it was
their
parents, at least on his mother’s side, who had bolted. Why that was he couldn’t tell. Were they cousins too?

So what, by the infernal laws of genetic mathematics, did that make him? A monstrosity, four or even sixteen times over?

It was Ailinn’s adoptive mother’s opinion that Ailinn had been abused when she was a little girl. Nothing else quite accounted for her bouts of morose absentness.

Ailinn shook her head. ‘I’d remember it, Mother,’ she said.

It didn’t come naturally to her to call her mother-who-wasn’t ‘Mother’. And she could see that her mother-who-wasn’t didn’t care for it either. But she tried. They both did.

‘You say you’d remember it, but that depends how old you were when it happened.’

‘Believe me, it didn’t happen.’

‘I believe you that you don’t remember, but there’s a mechanism in the human heart that helps us to forget.’

‘Then mightn’t that be because we’re meant to forget,’ Ailinn replied, ‘because it doesn’t matter?’

‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’

Was it? Ailinn didn’t think so. What you don’t remember might as well not have happened. Remember everything and you have no future. Unless what you remember is mostly pleasant, and it didn’t occur to Ailinn to imagine memory as pleasant.

Her own memory went back a long way. She heard the distant reverberations, like echoes trapped in a steel coffin. She just didn’t know what it was she was remembering.

‘So at the end of your life,’ her mother went on, ‘when you have little or no memory left . . .’

‘That’s right, you might as well not have lived it.’

‘God help you for saying such a thing. I hope for your sake you won’t be feeling that way when you’re old.’

Ailinn laughed. ‘It could be a blessing,’ she said.

But even she knew her cynicism was bravado. Deep within her was a hunger for life to start, to aim herself towards a time when she would not regret having lived. She would outpace memory if she could.

They were at home, drinking tea and dunking biscuits at a scrubbed pine table, looking out over a ploughed field. A crow with a crazed orange eye was hopping with malign purpose from rut to rut. What sort of memory did he have, Ailinn wondered. How many thousands of crows past had it taken to teach him what he knew? And of them, of any of them – what knowledge did he have? Of his own past, even – just yesterday, for example – how much did he know?

Ailinn was nineteen. She had lived in this house how many years now . . .? Twelve, thirteen? It should no longer, whatever the exact computation, have felt foreign to her. But its dry formality: the teapot with its woolly hat, the floral china tea set, the biscuits carefully arranged on the plate, three ginger, three chocolate digestive, the silver tongs for the sugar cubes, the perfectly ploughed field which, by screwing up one eye, she could move from the horizontal to the vertical plane, as though its parallel furrows were a ladder to the heavens, even her weary-eyed, unsmiling adoptive mother who had never quite become her mother proper – all this was to her the setting for some other nineteen-year-old’s life. As for where hers was, that she didn’t yet know.

She was artistic. A further reason to think she’d been abused. She drew in pastels: the rising field, the scrubbed table, her would-be mother (not her would-be father who found her skills uncanny and disconcerting), the demoniacal crows – great luminous, visionary canvases which her teachers admired for their ethereal, other-worldly atmosphere, though one of them feared her work was a little too reminiscent of Kokoschka’s dreamscapes. ‘Where do you go to in your head, Ailinn?’ he asked her.