The Heart Broke In (10 page)

‘Are you publishing this?’ said Ritchie.

‘Look,’ said Val, pointing to a space just below the paper’s masthead. ‘There’s no date.’ He frowned at Ritchie. ‘I’m surprised to hear you ask that. You haven’t been arrested on child sex charges. Or have you? Did we miss a story?’

‘This is
in very bad taste
,’ said Ritchie.

‘I don’t understand
,’ said Val. ‘Is that what you want to say? You don’t understand why we’ve done this?’

‘I can think of a couple of reasons, both unacceptable.’

‘Go on.’ Val was still smiling and his voice was soft and pleasant.

‘One reason would be illegal.’

‘Oh, interesting. Let’s come back to that, shall we? And the other?’

‘A joke.’

‘A joke!’ Val nodded and looked to one side. He took a step back and turned to stare into Ritchie’s eyes.

Val raised his voice suddenly to a shout, almost a scream, so loud that Ritchie could hardly believe it came from a man’s mouth. ‘Do you have any idea what right and wrong is, Ritchie?’ Ritchie looked at him. ‘I asked you a fucking question, you weaselly cunt! Do you know the difference between right and wrong?’

Ritchie’s mouth dropped open of its own accord.

‘Of course I do,’ said Ritchie. ‘You don’t need to –’

‘Don’t you dare tell me what I need to do, you fucking cunting piece of dogshit. You fat cunt. You sad, talentless fuck. You know what you should be doing when you’re talking to me, cunt? You should be on your knees. Did you make her go down on you, you fucking exploitative abusive cunt? Did you make her go down on you with your great fucking belly hanging over her? What kind of fucking apology for a man has to get a child to suck him off?’

‘Wait a minute,’ croaked Ritchie, and the astonishing thing was that the loudness of Val’s voice, the terrible fixity of his eyes and the violence of his language were weakening him, literally weakening him, making his limbs feel weightless and his body shudder instead of tensing for defence. When the most astonishing and silly thing of all happened, and Val came up to him and whacked him hard across the jaw with the back of his hand, it didn’t seem astonishing or silly, and nor did it that Ritchie slumped onto the floor and stayed there, half lying, half sitting.

‘Ask yourself why I’ve got this power over you. Go on, ask yourself, you cunt,’ said Val, looking down at him. ‘How is it that I can hit you and you don’t fight back, apart from the fact you’re a nasty coward who bullies little girls into having sex with him? It’s because you’ve done
wrong
. Now you know the difference. I can see you feel sorry for yourself. You’re imagining other people feeling sorry for you too, aren’t you? Look at poor little Ritchie, getting a hiding from that
evil
tabloid editor. Look at him hounded and his privacy invaded. It was you, Ritchie. You did this.’ Val’s voice became softer. ‘When you don’t believe, when you don’t have faith in powers beyond this world to judge you, this is what happens. You don’t believe in God, so when you cheat, and lie, and bully little girls, there’s nobody to punish you. There’s just me.’ He tightened his tie and smoothed it down. ‘That’s right, get up. Be brave. That must have been a dreadful experience for you. Mr Oatman can get carried away.’

The sting in Ritchie’s jaw was clearing his mind. The sudden softness of Val’s speech, and a new gentleness in his eyes, was so welcome that he was grateful. He almost felt like crying. He filled with self-pity.

‘Why do you have to be such a sanctimonious cunt?’ he said.

Val laughed. ‘That’s the spirit. Come and sit down. I haven’t got much time but let’s have a chat about things.’ He crumpled the page in his hands, walked over to the table and emptied the bowl of fruit. Oranges and nectarines rumbled across the varnish and dropped onto the floor. ‘Let’s see how good the smoke detectors are,’ he said. He took a lighter out of his pocket, put the crumpled ball of paper in the bowl and set light to it. It
burned well and quickly, with a bright fierce flame. After a few seconds only black flakes were left in the bowl.

Val looked up at the ceiling. ‘No sprinklers. If there was a fire here, we’d all perish,’ he said brightly.

‘Are you going to run it?’ said Ritchie.

‘As I think I said, we can’t publish a story that isn’t true. You haven’t been arrested.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I’ve only got five minutes, Ritchie. Let’s imagine I know that you’ve been fucking some fifteen-year-old. Let’s imagine I run the story. You’re arrested, you’re put on trial, you’re publicly humiliated, you get put in the chokey, your marriage breaks up, you have to fight your wife for access to your children, you lose the mansion, the BBC repudiates you, you become TV poison; you’ve made your career on teenagers, but you’re not allowed near them any more, and nobody takes you seriously on grown-up TV; your film falls through because the man who killed your father is a good family man and doesn’t want to be interviewed by a child molester; and … well, I don’t know what happens after that, Ritchie. Were you going to say something?’

‘I’m not a child molester. Don’t you dare call me that.’

‘As I said, time is short. What happens after that, I suppose, is that you try to earn a living touring. But you were never that talented as a musician, isn’t that right? Karin was the songwriter, the one they came to see. Now let’s imagine another way. That I know you’ve been fucking a fifteen-year-old, and I don’t publish it, and I don’t tell the police. That’d be concealing a crime. We’d be breaking the law, Ritchie.’ He stopped and gazed at Ritchie as if he wished he weren’t there.

‘I’m wondering,’ said Ritchie, ‘what you know about any of the things that may or may not have happened.’

‘It’s good that you’re not sure,’ said Val. ‘I like that. This is where I feel I’m doing the right thing. Setting clear boundaries. Helping you identify the point where you’ll get in trouble. But you know what you’ve done, of course.’

‘You invited me here.’

‘These are hard times for newspapers,’ said Val. ‘We’re fighting to survive. We can’t afford to let a good story go when we have one. Unless we have another story to take its place.’

‘About what, for instance?’

‘About your sister.’

Ritchie’s fingertips squeezed the edge of the table. He couldn’t look at Val.

‘This is about you and Bec,’ he said.

‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘Leave her alone,’ said Ritchie. ‘She hasn’t done anything wrong. She’s never hurt anybody. She’s a good woman.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Val. ‘She was a prize bitch to me. Did she tell you we were engaged?’

‘No.’ The return of his power to lie made Ritchie feel stronger. ‘You can’t afford this kind of pettiness,’ he said.

‘It’s nice to hear you’re loyal,’ said Val. He leaned forward, folded his arms on the table and lowered his voice. ‘If Bec is as good as you say she is, she has nothing to worry about from either of us.’

‘Either of us?’ Ritchie wrinkled his face. ‘Are you –’

‘Stop!’ said Val sharply. ‘Stop.’ He smiled. ‘I’m not sure what you were going to say, of course, but I couldn’t do it, I don’t suppose, unless I knew something about you that you wanted
kept hidden from the public. Are you saying there is something?’

‘I’m not saying that.’

‘Good. That’s good. Well, I can’t be sure, but I expect that in the next year we’re going to be one good story short. Just one. So if we don’t get one, we’ll have to use one we’ve been keeping in reserve.’

‘And if you do get one, the reserve goes in the bin.’

‘I suppose it will. If we get one in the next twelve months.’

‘For God’s sake,’ said Ritchie.

‘Whose sake?’ said Val, cupping his ear.

‘For God’s sake, my
sister
! She’s my own flesh and blood!’ As he spoke the words, certain they were true, a sense of horror and shame shifted in him, like a chick about to hatch, squirming in its egg. ‘She’s not a celebrity. She’s not … newsworthy.’

‘Not yet,’ said Val.

‘For God’s sake!’

‘Bring me what you can, Ritchie. You’re not in a strong position.’ He got to his feet. ‘I looked up the names of your children. I was surprised to see that your daughter was called Ruby. I was sure your little girl’s name was Nicole.’

‘Do what you like,’ said Ritchie. ‘I’m not going to be your snitch and spy inside my own family.’

He went back to the studios and worked till seven, swamping the staff with excessive kindness and bursts of rage. They noticed that whatever anyone said to him, he didn’t listen. On the drive to Petersmere rain thickened the wind. He caressed his last words to Val like a gift he was bringing home.

The trees were roaring in a storm when Ritchie got out of the car. The lights were on in the house, bright and steady inside each strong white window frame. He’d forgotten his keys and as he sheltered in the doorway, waiting to be let in, a gust splashed his back with rain. Karin opened the door with Ruby in her pyjamas close behind, barefoot, naughtily staying up late, and he walked inside to warmth and the savour of supper. He picked Ruby up and carried her to the table, her soft wrists cool on his neck. Later, away from his wife and children for the shortest possible time, he sent Val a message.
Do nothing precipitate
, he wrote.

The word on Alex Comrie, the drummer in Ritchie’s first band, had been that he possessed some kind of genius, and not for drumming. But Alex kept good time and Ritchie wondered how he’d picked up a nice sense of rhythm on the drummer’s seat without getting the ability to dance as part of the package. On the dancefloor Alex squeezed his lanky body into a narrow tube, clamping his arms to his side and his legs together, and when he should have been moving his body to the music he only waggled his hands, bobbed his beak of a nose and waddled rapidly across the room like a penguin hurrying to the sea.

He came to London, to King’s College, aged seventeen, from a stern monoethnic comprehensive in Scotland where the teachers wore pleated black gowns and punished children for small misdemeanours by beating them on the hand with specially made leather belts. Alex’s mother Maureen, a middle-class English immigrant, wasn’t sure whether to be appalled by the savagery or pleased her sons were being exposed to a pain-based native initiation rite like the Satere Mawe of the Amazon, where, she read, boys had their manhood tested by gloves lined with stinging ants. But only the younger of her two children, Dougie, the more popular, was belted. Alex
longed to feel the bite of leather on his palm and the acceptance that came with it, but was too beloved of the teachers to earn the grace of cruelty. He was well enough liked, and had a peculiar intensity that attracted the shy, Gothic end of girlhood, but he sat out school dances, and never learned to kick a ball.

The band, Gorse, only lasted a few months. It was called Gauze but when Ritchie first met Karin, buying guitar strings on Charing Cross Road, she misheard him and told him how she loved the yellow flowers. From that moment Ritchie said it’d always been Gorse, and believed it. They gigged in pubs and student venues before Ritchie dropped out of university and formed The Lazygods with Karin. Alex, who of all the ex-Gorsies seemed to Ritchie the least like a musician, was the only one he kept in touch with.

Alex could handle the sticks as well as any multidextrous boy with tolerant parents, a room of his own and energy to burn who’d been given a drum kit on his twelfth birthday and watched
Top of the Pops
and
Whistle Test
. When he went to King’s to study molecular cell biology he’d taken the drums with him, wary of the role of gauche autist he was expected to act out by choosing science. Might his vocation, poking into the atomic codes of life, breaking people’s molecules and putting them back together again, make him unfit to live it? He saw his peers turning into blinkered fetishists of pinhole-narrow specialisations, and wondered if it would happen to him. He turned himself into the pulse of a rock band to show fate hadn’t put data points where his passions should be.

By day the monkey of curiosity on his back drove him to journals, equations and algorithms. He learned. He outpaced his coursemates and teachers. In his head the human cell
became a place whose workings he could wander through like a world. At night, with the band, he staked his claim to a rebel heart and a gypsy spirit, the attributes he supposed artists were born with. He punished the drums till the sweat ran down his back and his wrists ached.

At the dozen small gigs Gorse played, the crowd moshed to Alex’s falcon silhouette tyrannising the skins and cymbals at the back of the stage, his pinked mop of straight black hair bouncing off his forehead in 4/4 time, but he couldn’t lose himself in music as Ritchie did. It seemed he surrendered to the beat, that the life measured by the count of his heart and the life made by the music became, for the duration of a set, one and the same, but it wasn’t so. He couldn’t drown his intellect. He couldn’t just
be
. He doubted and feared like any eighteen-year-old, but examined his doubts and fears as if they belonged to someone he didn’t care about. The student haunts burned incandescent with
want
and
need
, and so did he, but in him
why
and
how
dropped through, cooling the embers of the pile.

He misunderstood. The divide in him wasn’t between scientist and artist but between focused and distracted. When he drew together all the scattered lights of his attention and turned them on a woman, she was gripped. Later she’d find how easily his mind strayed. Over the years successive girlfriends, walking and talking to Alex with his arm around them, felt their affection suddenly rendered equal in status to such momentary fascinations as the ubiquity of legless pigeons, the meaning of letters on drain covers, the social significance of corduroy or a change in car number-plate design. If the menage survived she would find how naturally, when it suited him, Alex stripped their togetherness down to the functional so as
to concentrate on the teetering arc of biomathematical bricks he was assembling in his head. He did his best work when a small part of his mind was engaged in a steady, practised physical activity, like cycling along a familiar route or snapping his fingers. Drumming never gave Alex the temporary personality of the unselfconscious artist he hoped for, but as an elaborate form of fidgeting, it helped him think.

Gorse lived on for a few weeks after Ritchie left. Study ate into Alex’s time and he gave up practising, then quit the band. Ritchie’s ascent to fame was steep. The two men would have lost touch if Ritchie hadn’t kept the connection going, and if Alex hadn’t met Bec.

Alex was twenty-five, his PhD freshly inked and rolled in a cardboard tube; Bec was seven years younger, just started at Cambridge. Ritchie introduced them casually, without a thought of attraction, assuming generic scientific babble would flow easily between them, like current through a joined-up cable. He forgot his sister wasn’t a schoolgirl any more. He could sense arousal in others yet was blind to the interest of men in his eighteen-year-old sister. His sense of her lagged several years behind the actual Bec. Unconsciously he thought of the fullness of her breasts and curve of her hips as if they were a kind of late childhood illness that had swollen around the fourteen-year-old girl and would eventually subside, returning her to fourteen again. He projected his lack of sexual interest in her freely over the rest of the male population.

Once, when she was seventeen, he’d seen her about to go out in a t-shirt and mentioned that Karin had bangles she could borrow and she’d seemed so uncomprehending that he babbled: ‘Nobody goes out with bare arms any more.’
The scars
on her wrist will make people nervous
, he thought. People would think she was a cutter and wonder if it ran in the family.

The bitter smell of her own skin burning, accompanied by an intense, clear and unambiguous pain, had eased Bec’s heart when she was a small girl, angry with her father for dying and for leaving her to pity the loneliness of his last hour. She twigged early that there might be something sarcastic about young skin: how pleasurable to spoil it! But the scars weren’t big or ragged when she started university, or as noticeable as they seemed to Ritchie. Bec hardly remembered they were there, more embarrassed by their neatness than by having made them.

Alex had been surprised to be invited to the launch party for The Lazygods’ second album,
Windfallen
. In seven years his mind refashioned the memory of the teenage Ritchie according to the star his friend became. Alex felt he should have noticed Ritchie’s talent at the beginning. He remembered Ritchie as confident, energetic and generous. If he also remembered his ordinary voice, crude guitar style and plodding way with songwriting he thought it was he, Alex, who must have been wrong, not the millions of people who’d bought
Fountain
. When Alex abandoned regular drumming to be a biomathematical traveller in the unmapped human cell, and Ritchie dropped out of university and got a recording deal, it seemed they’d moved into worlds whose spheres couldn’t intersect. No matter how many times Ritchie called him, contrived to mention him in interviews or invited him to mix with musicians at events like the launch, Alex expected it to end.

The party was in a new luxury hotel opposite Hyde Park. Alex walked into the lobby in a pair of jeans ripped at the knee,
Converse trainers, a t-shirt and a black suit jacket, the way he’d dressed as a teenage drummer and a style he reckoned drew the undergraduates’ eyes now he was Dr Comrie, cell biologist, junior researcher, with a desk of his own at King’s and students to teach. The t-shirt was a relic of Primal Scream merchandise, the black of the
Screamadelica
mask’s eyes faded to grey, the red to pink. The jacket was new. He’d been walking around campus for a few months with a badge on his lapel reading
Isn’t life RNA-ic?
but just before heading out he’d swapped it for the old badge from the days of Gorse, stating
I Am Nico
.

Hope lurched upright in him when the pretty girl on the door found his name on the list of invited guests and waved him into the bar of the Metropolitan, glittering with guests and booming with talk. His was one name in hundreds on a printout yet he felt recognised as belonging to the people of music. He’d thrown in his lot with the caste of cell biologists, and they wanted him, but he was disenchanted by his peers. If only, he thought with his heart jumping, the musicians could see the savage beauty of the sub-microscopic seas. If only they could understand their songs of love, death and sorrow weren’t debased by being embodied in adenosine triphosphatase.

His thumb and fingertips smeared the fog on a glass and he registered the surfaces in the room as if dumbly reading through the list of ingredients in a packet of breakfast cereal: fuzzed jaws, gelled curls, heel-stressed calves, dark glasses, tattooed calligraphy, bare shoulders, big rings. In the room he knew only Karin and Ritchie, who were talking to the guitarist-songwriter of a band that’d had hit after hit, the last number one a couple of months earlier; it’d taken the death of a
princess to knock them off the front pages. Alex went over to them, determined not to care what his famous friends’ famous friend thought of him, and Ritchie and Karin greeted him and introduced him to famous Noel.

‘Why are you always talking about how much you love the Beatles?’ was the first thing Alex said to Noel, with unintended aggression. ‘You’re asking to be judged according to how good someone else was.’

Noel’s shaggy eyebrows ratcheted up a micron.

‘Alex says what he thinks,’ said Ritchie.

Noel laughed. ‘What is it you do again?’ he said.

Alex’s mouth grew dry and he took gulps from the champagne glass, angry with himself for being familiar with a celebrity, for wanting to impress him, failing to impress him, not getting a hearing, bothering to come.

A man and a woman Alex didn’t know joined the group. Alex wasn’t introduced and found himself looking down at the floor. The feet of the six of them formed a circle that reminded him of the cell membrane. He watched the other ten feet creeping away from his, millimetre by millimetre, the circle opening to eject him, like a vesicle packed with waste molecules being popped from the phospholipid layer, and closing again with his feet outside. Shoulders were in front of his shoulders, blocking him out.

He stepped back, ruminating on the ballet of the proteins, forgetting he’d been angry. He wanted to sit and think. Close to a curving bench that ran along the far wall a young woman’s face caught his eye and he remembered the greedy hope he’d felt when he came into the bar. The woman inclined her rosy cheeks and mass of wavy black shoulder-length hair towards a man in a suit and tie. Alex resented not being the one who
was being listened to and smiled at and looked at with wide dark eyes. It seemed to Alex that the man, though better dressed, looked much like him, and she’d obviously just met him. He felt a punch of jealousy that he hadn’t seen her earlier.

Then Ritchie was next to him, saying: ‘Come and meet my sister. She’s a science type.’ He took Alex over to the woman he’d been looking at, introduced her as Bec, and steered the other man off.

Bec smiled at Alex, too, in a way that seemed trusting and for a moment, as if he’d stepped out onto the high ledge of a tall building and found the expected barrier between him and the view wasn’t there, he felt dizzy.

‘Brilliant,’ he said.

‘What’s brilliant?’ said Bec, tilting her head to one side.

‘I have a theory of conversation that when you meet someone you should say the first thing that comes into your head and open it up for discussion. If the other person doesn’t want to talk about it, it’s their problem.’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with a theory of conversation. So the first thing that came into your head was
brilliant
?’

‘The first thing that came into my head was, how could we quantify the things about us that tell people here we’re not rock stars? And then I had this insight that I should try getting the other person to say what
they’re
thinking. I thought it was a good idea and I couldn’t help saying so out loud.’

Bec considered this. ‘We might be stars,’ she said. ‘I used to be able to play Just Can’t Get Enough on the recorder.’

Alex took the message from her eyes on his that he couldn’t exhaust her attention.
She’s prepared to take anything seriously
, he thought, and demonstrated the attractiveness of his
personality by talking to her for half an hour without stopping. He summarised his career, bullet-pointed his family and shared his ideas about the evolution of multicelled organisms. It was going well, he felt; her raised eyebrows showed interest, the way she folded her arms signified concentration. She interrupted to ask if he knew where the drink was. Alex promised to get her a glass of wine and when he returned from the bar he couldn’t find her. It seemed she’d been called away.

In the days that followed he brooded over what he’d done to make her evade him and wondered how he could reach her. She was young, but he was only seven years older. He obtained her postal address from Ritchie, saying he’d promised to send her an article, and wrote her a five-page letter with a point by point dismissal of everything he remembered telling her. ‘As for my family,’ he concluded with what he considered a nicely humble flourish, ‘they are, of course, of no interest.’