The Heart Broke In (32 page)

‘I don’t think I’d be very good at that,’ said Jane. ‘I’d say something out of turn and somebody would report me. Isn’t that how it works in police-state countries? It’s not all torture and buying people off, as far as I understand. Don’t they catch
most of the dissidents out by blackmailing the cheaters and druggies and embezzlers to betray their friends? I suppose that’s what’s interesting about the Moral Foundation. It rewards people who inform on their friends. That doesn’t seem very moral, does it? Ritchie, I wouldn’t have guessed you were such a good listener.’

Ritchie told them that he had to leave.

Early one morning, without telling anyone, Bec went to a literary festival in Cardiff, shaking with nerves. A few miles west of Bristol she dry-heaved into the stinking pan of the train’s toilets. O’Donabháin’s session was one of the earliest, at eleven a.m. on a weekday.
He’s a harmless old murderer poet these days
was what Wales reckoned, by the look of it; his session was three lines lost in the middle of the festival programme, part of a strand called Voices Redeemed. Other redeemed voices were a white South African apartheid-era cop, a reformed heroin dealer with an inside account of the trade and a perjurer MP who’d found Jesus in prison. They’d been given afternoon and evening sessions. O’Donabháin seemed to have been marked down.

The walk from the station to the festival campus in warm wind and strong sunshine lifted Bec’s spirits. When she entered the artificial brightness of the conference centre, her soles squeaking on the expanse of corporate carpet, her gorge rose again and her heart hammered. She stood in a toilet cubicle, arms locked against the edge of the cistern, head hanging, drool spilling from her lower lip. She’d chosen a blue jumper, jeans and trainers and left her face alone. She wished now she’d pancaked on a mask of make-up, found haughty shoes
and an elegant suit and jewellery, made herself forbidding. At five past eleven she walked across the lobby to the door with the taped sheet of paper reading
11 am – Colum O’Donabháin
.

The room was smaller than she expected, with a dozen or so rows of about ten folding chairs, divided down the middle by an aisle. Half the seats were occupied. At the far end of the room two men wearing clip-on mikes sat behind a table; a tall one in his fifties with tufts of white hair behind his ears and round, thick-framed glasses, turning his head from side to side like a lawn sprinkler, and an older man, bulky and uncomfortable, eyes downcast.

O’Donabháin had aged since his poet’s picture was taken. The collar of his white shirt was crumpled.
He is only a man
, thought Bec, and took a seat in the back row near the door. It was as if the one she’d dreaded meeting was still to appear. Yet this was him. Instead of the necessary visceral connection between the man at the table and the man who’d executed her father, time had confused the trail. He’d got away.

‘Shall we get started?’ said the man with glasses. O’Donabháin looked at him as if surprised to find he wasn’t alone and began riffling through the pages of his book with his thumb.

‘I’m Dale Luthbridge,’ said O’Donabháin’s interlocutor, ‘and it’s my great pleasure to introduce to you the poet Colum O’Donabháin, who’s visiting Wales for the first time, I think? Colum will be reading today from his new collection
Back Road
, which was awarded the McGarragle Prize for the best book of poetry by a former prisoner living in Ireland.’

‘Mine was the only one that qualified,’ said O’Donabháin.

The audience laughed and Bec got up and left the room. They’d laughed with him; there’d been a feeling of warmth.

There was a table in the lobby covered in a white cloth and
small piles of O’Donabháin’s slim volumes. Bec picked up a copy of
Back Road
and began to walk away when the girl minding the stock called her back and told her there was £9.95 to pay.

‘For this? Does some of it go to the poet?’

‘About a pound, I suppose,’ said the girl. ‘I don’t know. It’s poetry. There’s not much money in it.’

Bec paid. The cover had an etching of a country road winding over hills, between hedgerows. She looked closely at the hedgerows. There were no people in them. Her damp fingertips left faint marks on the porous cream-coloured paper. The fact that she had heard O’Donabháin’s voice struck her as horrifying. She hesitated at the door to the room. There was a burst of clapping and she grabbed the handle, slipped in and went back to her seat as O’Donabháin began to read his poems.

Again he seemed to Bec too bland and quiet to be the man who’d tortured and killed her father. He read out his verses quietly and monotonously, hunched over his book, speaking into the table. He lyricised birds of various kinds, driftwood, a non-specific regret. He read a comedy poem about being the only one in a group who couldn’t speak Gaelic. The audience laughed along. Bec’s cheeks burned.

The time came for questions. A woman in her fifties with cropped white hair, a purple vest and earrings three inches wide asked O’Donabháin why he hadn’t read the poem ‘The Riddle of One Small Soldier’.

‘I wondered about that,’ said Luthbridge to O’Donabháin. ‘It’s different in style to your other work.’

‘Yeah, it’s an old-fashioned English style,’ said O’Donabháin. ‘Pastiche, almost. There was a time when I started listening to a lot of the old English folk songs about recruiters, about the press gangs. Why do I not read it? Cause I don’t much
like it, that’s why. It’s got that word “anthropomorphise” in it. That’s quite a mouthful for an old man who never went to uni. Five syllables. I bought the car and it wouldn’t fit in the garage.’

Again they laugh!
thought Bec.
They’re so cosy with him!

A tall man in a blue blazer, red trousers and a yellow shirt, with a cravat tucked in under his florid chops, stood up and said in a loud drawl, ‘I’d like to know what a convicted murderer and torturer’ – he seemed to enjoy saying the word
torturer
, as if he were taking the first bite of a hot, crispy treat – ‘is doing on the British mainland after his savage treatment of an honourable British officer.’ There were intakes of breath and a cry of ‘Read the programme!’ The man looked round and raised his voice. ‘Your presence is an insult to the family of Captain Shepherd, to whom you have never apologised for your cowardly and monstrous behaviour.’

O’Donabháin said: ‘The question was, what am I doing here? It’s a question I’ve asked myself every day, wherever I am. People make a lot of assumptions about crime and punishment. They think they always come in that order. They don’t, that’s all I have to say.’

After the session O’Donabháin left the room with Luthbridge and sat behind the book table in the lobby. Bec watched while he signed books for four people. The man in red trousers left. Bec went to the table and held out the book to O’Donabháin as he was swigging from a bottle of water. He put the bottle down, wiped his mouth with his sleeve and opened the book at the title page. He held his pen over it and cocked his head enquiringly.

‘Make it out to Bec Shepherd,’ said Bec.

O’Donabháin had bent to the job before she gave her name
and she could see the bald spot on the top of his head. It hung there over the book for some seconds. The pen didn’t move. O’Donabháin looked up slowly and stared at her. He seemed anxious. It made the idea of the killer in him emerge to Bec and she dug in to hold her ground and keep her voice steady.

‘Do you know who I am?’ she said.

O’Donabháin nodded. Now he didn’t look so much anxious as curious.

‘I have some things to say to you,’ she said. ‘Come outside with me.’

She led him out of the lobby, down the stairs and out into the daylight. She walked ahead and didn’t look back, confident, for some reason, that he was behind her. Near the conference centre was a square edged on two sides by steps where festival-goers and summer school students ate sandwiches and skateboarders did tricks. Bec sat on the steps and O’Donabháin lowered himself with difficulty onto a place a few feet away. He had her copy of his book in one hand and the water bottle in the other.

‘My brother thinks I should forgive you, and I’ve been thinking about it,’ said Bec. ‘It seems very important to him, and I’d like to do what he wants, because I feel bad about not letting him make his film with you. It’s just that I’m not sure what forgiving you means. It’s not as if you’ve asked me to forgive you.’

O’Donabháin shook his head, not taking his eyes off her.

‘And I’m not going to tell you that it was all right, what you did. That it was understandable. The only reason I can sit here is that what you did was so cruel I can’t bring myself to imagine it.’ Unconsciously she scratched the scars on her wrist and O’Donabháin looked away.

‘Forgiveness is different for me and Ritchie,’ said Bec. ‘He thought about you a lot. I think for him forgiveness means not wanting any more revenge. I never thought about you after the trial, only when he brought it up. For me forgiveness means thinking about you at all. It means accepting that you were punished and there’s no need to punish you any more. Is that any use to you?’

O’Donabháin nodded.

‘I don’t want your remorse,’ said Bec. ‘I don’t want your atonement. I want you to know that your being free doesn’t bother me. Is that forgiveness? If so, you can have it.’

O’Donabháin shrugged.

‘Say something, then,’ said Bec, suddenly irritated by his silence.

‘I’ll take that,’ he said.

‘Read me that poem of yours,’ said Bec. ‘The one you wouldn’t read before.’

‘That’s not a good idea.’

‘Read it.’

O’Donabháin took a swig from the bottle, found the place in the book and began to read.

‘That’s the title,’ he said.

‘Go on.’

O’Donabháin cleared his throat and read:

When he’d finished Bec said: ‘Sign the book.’ Colum wrote
For Rebecca Shepherd, I will make no film. For Ritchie Shepherd, your sister forgives me. Colum O’Donabháin
.

Bec took his bottle and drank from it and gave it back. She tore the dedication page out of the book and put the book in his hand.

‘I don’t want your poems,’ she said.

He took the book. As he got up, turned and walked away the disappointment on his face sank into her and she realised that she’d hurt him more than she’d intended, or known was in her power.

A spectre materialised in Ritchie’s mind, a long-bodied crook-kneed ghoul without a face who would one day walk through his gates and through the locked door of his house as if they had no substance, drag him from his sleeping wife’s side and throw him down in the road outside his property, then stand guard, preventing him ever returning to claim what was his, his home, his woman and his children. He began to spend less time in London. He tried to be back before Ruby went to bed. Twice after term started he surprised Karin and Milena by taking the children to school. He saturated them with attention and gifts. He worried that they were bored by him, and in Dan’s polite closing of the door against him with the excuse of homework, in Ruby’s flitting suddenly from him to his mother, Ritchie rediscovered, at the age of forty-one, the same heartache over the quick, bright, fickle attention of children he’d felt when he was a child himself.

He began teaching Ruby to play the guitar. At times she would show a precocious ambition and an eerie grasp of the vocabulary of the trade. ‘I only want to do acoustic gigs,’ she said once. Or she would lose interest and shout that she didn’t want to play.

Ritchie’s heart rose when he watched his daughter’s fingers
stretch to span the fretboard and hold down the tense nylon strings, with her head nodding and her hair waving over the sound box. Sometimes she would make a small mistake and look at him and smile in comradeship; her eyes would look into his with an understanding that was timeless, as if all the ages that she would be were in her already, waiting to unfold, child, friend, fellow-adventurer, lover, mother, grandmother. Ritchie wished that the instant could be eternal, but he never knew when it was coming, and when it did, his pride and possessiveness would shine out of him too hungrily, and the comfort of that sure, timeless bond would vanish.

Bec and Alex threw a housewarming party. Ritchie thought he could get away with not going, but Alex badgered him with emails and a phone call and he said he’d come with Karin. Two days before the party Karin told him she couldn’t go. The What were coming to work with her in the studio for a week. She couldn’t leave. Ritchie had thought the band too good and too disrespectful to him to appear on
Makeover
, and to encourage them not to make trouble about it Ritchie had put Karin in touch. She’d seen them play in a small venue in Portsmouth, liked their sound and liked that they treated her as a national treasure. Ritchie asked if it wasn’t going to be bad for her image to work with a bunch of fifteen-year-olds and Karin said that they were sixteen now.

‘They’re bringing tents,’ she said. ‘There’s a shower in the studio block. I knew you wouldn’t want them in the house.’

‘They mustn’t take drugs,’ said Ritchie.

He reached the party at nine. The windows were lit and the door stood open. A girl in a short black dress and a skinny man with a moustache and sideburns were smoking and
drinking wine on the steps. They ignored Ritchie when he went between them and into the house.

There were so many people inside, and Bec and Alex had arranged lamps so cleverly, in corners, in fireplaces, lighting ceilings, casting overlapping pools on the floor, that Ritchie didn’t notice at first how little furniture there was, or how naked the walls were. On one floor there was dancing; on another, cushions and paper screens and gentler music; in the kitchen, clever-looking men and women were arguing intensely in different groups, and Ritchie felt he was observing the proceedings of a chic parliament. The guests were better-dressed than he’d expected, with more wit and elegance in their clothes than he’d thought off-duty scientists could show. It hadn’t occurred to him that Bec and Alex might have friends who weren’t scientists. The wine was superb; they must have spent a fortune on it, he thought. In each room, the first impression that came to Ritchie, before he began picking out individuals, was of a mass of people who were sure of themselves, thoughtful and open. He’d never been in a group quite like it, and the jealousy that was so quick to rise in him surged up. The luck of it, he thought, for Bec and Alex to fall into this town house and find themselves running a salon, without trying! While he’d ended up a family man out in the sticks! How did it happen? He was the rich one. He was the celebrity. Who were these people? Who was the extremely pretty young girl, and why was she wearing a Muslim headscarf, when she was plainly white? Who was the big sunburned chap with the shoulder-length fair hair and the uncanny eyes?

He saw Alex and Bec from the far side of the room, standing next to each other as if they’d just married, Alex with his arm around Bec’s waist. They were laughing with somebody; they
looked full of an endless joy. Bec wore a low-cut halter-neck dress, and the light glinted on a silver necklace and silver chains in her ears that swung as she moved her head. Alex had on a plain white shirt and it seemed to Ritchie that the room inclined towards them, like photographers behind the ropes at the red carpet.

A woman beside him asked if he’d like a refill. She was holding a bottle in her hand and Ritchie’s glass was empty. She poured him a full measure. She seemed tipsy.

‘I’m driving,’ said Ritchie.

‘So am I,’ said the woman, laughed and touched his forearm. ‘God, doesn’t she look gorgeous? I hate her.’

‘Who?’

‘Bec,’ said the woman, staring across the room with her eyes narrowed. She turned back to Ritchie and smiled. ‘I love her. We used to be best friends at school. You know, BFF. It never is for ever, is it? We were out of touch for a long time.’

Ritchie looked at the woman, wondering if he’d met her. He liked to be unrecognised and then to reveal his true identity.

‘Did you ever spend the holidays with her?’ he said.

‘No,’ said the woman. ‘Oh well, we went to London for the weekend once. Her brother was a pop star. He was in a band called The Lazygods. I don’t know if you remember them.’

‘Vaguely.’

‘We went to see them at the Hammersmith Palais. They were OK. I mean the woman was good, but her brother was a bit …’ She looked round, touched Ritchie’s arm and leaned forward. ‘It was quite funny. She made me promise never to tell anyone but it was such a long time ago. She had a
backstage pass, and she went looking for her brother, and she walked into this dressing room, and there was David Bowie and Bono! They’d been on as well, it was some kind of benefit gig. And she heard one of them, I think it was Bowie, say: “That Ritchie Shepherd, he sings like a dog trying to get back inside the house.” And Bono laughed.’

Ritchie looked back towards Bec. She saw him and waved and he walked towards her stiffly, blood roaring in his ears. Alex clapped him on the shoulder and Bec kissed him on both cheeks. He smelled her perfume and heard her asking if he was OK.

‘You look preoccupied,’ she said.

‘Enjoying myself,’ said Ritchie. ‘Great party.’

‘Wait here,’ said Bec. ‘I’ve got a surprise for you.’

‘We’re keeping an eye on each other,’ said Alex to Ritchie, watching Bec go. ‘Drunk host syndrome, never good.’

How did it happen that my geeky old drummer is familiar with me about my sister?
thought Ritchie.
I am in some other being’s new world of punishment now
.

‘Do you ever watch science documentaries?’ asked Alex. ‘They asked me to front one.’

‘Why wouldn’t they?’ said Ritchie, unable to make the effort to part his teeth.

Bec returned with a piece of paper in her hand. She asked Ritchie to come with her and took him to the landing outside.

‘I’m sorry, I’m a bit tipsy,’ she said. ‘I forgot what I was doing. I forgot it was about Dad.’ They were standing close together. Bec looked into her brother’s eyes. ‘Did you know O’Donabháin was reading his poetry in Wales recently?’

‘No.’

‘I went. I know how important it was to you that I forgive
him. I know it means more to you than making your film.’ She hesitated. It seemed to her that Ritchie was greatly surprised at what she’d done. ‘So I went to see him, and I suppose I have forgiven him, in my way. We had a talk. Here. He wrote this on the title page of his book.’

She gave Ritchie the piece of paper and he read what O’Donabháin had written.

‘It’s for the best,’ said Bec.

‘Yes,’ said Ritchie with difficulty. He felt as if he were choking.

‘It’s all settled with him and there won’t be any film. It’s closure, as you said.’

Ritchie opened and shut his mouth a couple of times.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Bec, beginning to cry and putting her arms around him. ‘I don’t know why I brought this up in the middle of a party. I just saw you and thought about it. I don’t see you often enough.’

Ritchie went through the motions of returning the embrace and gazed over his sister’s shoulder at the dark window opposite and the stairs leading downwards.

‘Imagine you going to all that trouble to stop my film,’ he said. ‘To forgive him, I should say. That was so
good
of you. You really are quite a piece of woman. Well done! I’m feeling a bit the worse for wear, though, my dear. I must go.’

Ritchie went to a nasty bar nearby, drank three double whiskies in quick succession, left and hailed a cab. The driver was sceptical about driving seventy miles to Petersmere until Ritchie showed him a sheaf of red banknotes.

What Ritchie wanted more than anything was to kiss his sleeping children and to get into bed beside his wife. But Milena had taken Dan and Ruby to stay with Karin’s parents
for the weekend. The taxi dropped Ritchie off at the gates and he walked up the drive. It was well after midnight and the lights were still on in the studio block. He heard music. He went to the window and looked in. Karin was on a stool, wearing headphones, working through a tricky chord sequence, and one of the boys from The What was cross-legged on the floor next to her, writing in a notebook. She looked up, smiled uncertainly as if somebody had said something to her that she thought was probably funny even though she couldn’t hear it, and took off her headphones. Ritchie saw her smiling mouth form the word ‘What?’ and somebody he couldn’t see must have repeated it because she laughed, and looked down at the boy and said something to him just as he was taking a swig of Dr Pepper. He laughed and held up the back of his wrist to his face so as not to make a mess.

Ritchie walked to the house. A faint ripple of bass and snare drum sounded behind him in the darkness as if fireworks were bursting far away and out of sight. A sadness greater than he had ever known quivered inside his ribs, terrifying in its weight and apparent permanence, and the thought of suicide returned to him not as a desire to end his life but as a counter-force to that sadness, as if, by going through the motions of ending his life, he might frighten the sadness, make it seem small and trivial. Yet once his intention to take steps was formed, he couldn’t help thinking
What if?
All the peaks and troughs around him would be flattened: his own sadness, Bec’s joy, Karin’s happiness. As for his children, what had his clever son said? ‘If you did so well without a father, why is it good for me to have one?’ And the sadness reached into him again, like a clawed hand groping through his body for a grip on his heart firm enough to drag him underground.

He went to the scullery, where he knew he’d stowed the old rope swing from the garden after it fell. He found it coiled in the back of a cupboard, slung it over his shoulder and took it upstairs. The lights in his study were indecently harsh and he switched them off except for one small desk lamp. He dropped the heavy coil of rope on the floorboards under the main roof beams and looked up.

For a moment he felt foolishly defeated by the mechanics of the problem before realising that he first had to tie one end of the rope to a fixed object at floor level. He lashed it to a radiator, then set to creating a noose at the other end.
How do they make nooses in the films
, he thought,
with the rope twisted round the loop ten times? That’s not something they teach in the Scouts
. He made a loop with a simple slip knot and tried to throw it over the roof beam. The rope was heavy, and his first attempts weren’t strong enough to top the beam. On the fifth try it went over and came down on the far side. For a moment he felt pride at a job well done. But the noose didn’t hang down far enough for him to be able to get his head inside it.

He fetched a small stepladder and by standing on it was able to pass the loop comfortably over his head and fit it snugly against his throat. The rough strands pressed against his Adam’s apple and he saw in horror that the length of rope was exactly right if he really had been intending to kill himself.

He passed his fingers quickly inside the noose to loosen it and pull it off his head, but the tightening of the slip knot had caused it to catch on an imperfection in the rope and it wouldn’t come free easily. Ritchie panicked and tugged hard at the sides of the noose with both hands. It loosened slightly and rose to just behind his ears but his violent tugging, and
the effect on his balance of the alcohol still in his bloodstream, made him slip. He felt the stepladder sliding away from him and he scrabbled for a better foothold but instead he kicked the stepladder away, it toppled and hit the floor, and Ritchie was left dangling from the roof beam by his jaw. His metabolism responded to terror with power and instinct told him that his life depended on him putting all his strength into his hands, still stuck between the rope and his head, to overcome the slip knot and his own great weight and wrench the noose up over his chin and nose and let him fall to safety. Whimpering with fear and pain, thrashing his legs in space, straining every muscle in his upper body he pulled and pulled at the noose.

He saw quite clearly that his strength was about to run out, and he expended it all on one last effort. He cried out, the rope dragged savagely along his jaw, struck and passed the bump of his chin, hit his nose with such force that it seemed it would be torn off, and he fell onto the floor, where he lay for a long time, crying.

He got up, unfastened the rope from the radiator and coiled it neatly. He washed his face. There was no mirror in the study to examine himself. He couldn’t feel any damage, no cut flesh or bleeding, just a sharp stinging around his neck.