The Killing Lessons (6 page)

Xander King – who had not always been Xander King, and was reminded of that fact when things like this happened – couldn’t believe it. What kind of country place didn’t have a milk jug? He’d been through every cupboard in the kitchen. Just a plain fucking milk jug! Or even a gravy jug. Preferably brown. What they called earthenware. It didn’t matter what they called it. There wasn’t one. If there was one he could put this mistake – which was Paulie’s fault – right. This mistake could be… not corrected, exactly, but… brought into line. How far
out
of line this was was a terrible irritation, to him, like roaches scurrying under his skin. Mama Jean flickered and bloomed on his peripheral vision, smiling at the mess he’d made. It was Paulie’s
fault
, goddammit. Let me do one.
I
want to do one. And Xander had said OK. What was he thinking? If Paulie
had
done it it wouldn’t be his problem. But of course, useless shit that Paulie was, when the time came he, Xander, had had to take charge, because Paulie chickened out. Which made the whole thing his. Which meant there should have been a jug.

‘I should go in there,’ Paulie said. He was sitting on the floor in the kitchen gripping his injured knee. His face was wet with sweat. Xander – who, in desperation, was standing on one of the worktops and running his hands along the top of the wall cupboards, just in case for some reason there was a jug up there, maybe chipped or with a missing handle, that they hadn’t used for years – ignored him.

‘Xander?’ Paulie said.

Still no response.

‘Hey. I’m saying—’

‘Shut up,’ Xander said. Then, after a pause, ‘You hear the way I’m saying that?’

Paulie radiated silence. But after a few moments said, ‘That’s not right.’

Xander got a splinter in his palm. The small pain made his scalp hot. He got down off the worktop. There was no jug. This couldn’t be put right. The bit of ease he’d got from what he’d done to the cunt in the living room was all gone. All the knots were as tight as ever. He was trying not to dwell on how all this had cheated him. But it was as if the whole day were laughing at him.

‘Go get the RV,’ he said.

‘It’s not right.’

‘Go get the RV. I’ve said that twice. Do you want me to say it a third time?’

Paulie looked away. Xander examined the splinter. Now he was going to have to look for tweezers. The roaches darted under his skin.

‘I can’t fucking
walk
,’ Paulie said.

‘It’s not far,’ Xander said. ‘You’ll do fine.’

Paulie didn’t move. Then, quietly, he said, ‘When we’ve got her inside, then.’

Xander was wondering if he shouldn’t just do Paulie right here and now. But this whole thing was enough of a mess already. And he was bone tired.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘When we get her in there.’

Paulie struggled to his feet, wincing.

No point telling him yet that she wasn’t going in the RV, Xander thought. No point telling him that this couldn’t – since there was no milk jug – be fixed. No point telling him that they were leaving her and her son where they were and driving away. No point telling him until he’d fetched the vehicle. No point telling him much of anything any more, because soon he’d be dead.

Nell didn’t know if she was awake or dreaming, alive or dead. Nothing was certain. Something dragged her through the snow. When she was small Josh had terrorised her with talk of the Abominable Snowman. A monster – Nell had pictured a huge creature covered in long white hair with eyes like ragged black holes and a mouth filled with blood – who loomed up, suddenly, in the midst of a blizzard and just…
took
you. (Nell had had mixed feelings. To her it seemed the sort of creature so ugly and alone you could feel sorry for it – if only it weren’t
taking
you. To its cave. To lift you in its pure white hands and bite your head off and crunch your skull between its teeth.) Something dragged her through the snow and she thought:
Oh, it’s the monster.
It was a light thought. It came and went, not bothering her much. Many things came and went, snapshots that flashed in and out of complete blackness. Snow falling out of a dark sky. An old-fashioned iron stove like a dwarf with a pot belly. Someone’s hands touching her face. An old man crawling towards her on all fours, his face twisted. She hadn’t gone to heaven after all. But it didn’t feel like hell. Or she was having a fever. Her mother would be somewhere near: Poor Nellie, you’re burning up. Josh whispering: Is she going to be OK? Abominable Snowman got confused with Abdominal Cramps. Her mother had had those.

Hands undressed her.

This was in the complete blackness.

Vague shame when she felt her jeans being unzipped.

She tried to come out of the blackness to make sure it was her mom but the blackness wouldn’t let her. It was a soft weight, like warm dark water.

The hands – no, it wasn’t her mother; the smell and touch were wrong – pulled her panties down over her legs and there was the sound of wood popping in a fire. Maybe the Devil undressed you when you arrived in hell? In a picture of hell Josh had shown her all the people were naked, stuck on skewers or big wheels or being stabbed and burned by little demons with pitchforks. The weird thing was all the naked people looked unconcerned, as if they weren’t even aware of what was happening to them. She was only mildly concerned herself. The hands undressing her were a sort of annoying distraction, stopping her from falling properly asleep. She was very tired, and the warm blackness promised deep, restful sleep. She tried to speak:
Hey, stop that. Leave me alone
. But her mouth made no sound. The words went around under the skin of her face instead of out into the world.

She came back again and saw the same old man, still on his hands and knees, still with his face twisted (by crying, she thought; there were tears), crawling away from her on a wooden floor she didn’t recognise.

Then the warm dark water closed over her head. Her last thought was that she didn’t want to dream. Because the last dream she’d had had been a nightmare, in which her mother had been lying at the bottom of the stairs in a pool of her own blood, telling her to run.

Irony, thought Angelo Greer, waking in breathtaking pain from a dream of an earthquake to discover he’d passed out on the cabin’s mouldy floor, was immortal. Or if not immortal, then a guaranteed last survivor. When the world ended, the final vestige of the human presence on earth would be a whiff – like the odour of spent gunpowder after a firework – of irony.

The two and a half years since his wife Sylvia’s death had been an incrementally expanding demonstration of the fallacy of grief. The fallacy of grief was that it passed. The fallacy of grief was that when someone you loved died, you suffered, you went to the underworld, you found the measure of yourself in the small hours’ darkness, and eventually (because the commitment to life overrode all else) you found that the measure of yourself was enough. Slowly, you raised your head. You began to look about you. You saw that the world – via cloud formations and product labels – was reinsinuating itself. You understood that the world was still enough. You understood that the will to live was a thing of benign slyness. You began to
get over it
. You were changed – enlarged and deepened by your loss – but you accepted the renewed contract. You knew you were going on. You discovered that this thing had not, as it had threatened to, killed you.

That was the fallacy, and he was the living proof.

He’d stopped writing, of course. Of course, because a novelist had to be amorally in love with life, all of life, even death – and he was not. Not any more. He’d believed it was art’s job to imaginatively accommodate the world, to find room for everything. But after Sylvia’s death he had room only for her absence and his own stubborn presence.

They had been married for thirty years when the diagnosis arrived: grade 4 astrocytoma. Inoperable. Radio- and chemotherapies until she’d said: Enough. She died in the late afternoon in their bed at the apartment on Twenty-third Street. Angelo had been lying with her, spoons fashion, in the bed’s oblong of sunlight, his arm wrapped around her. He’d fallen asleep for perhaps twenty minutes and when he woke up she was gone. Eyes closed, facing away from him. Facing away from him. Towards elsewhere. Towards wherever the dead went. Which was maybe nowhere. She’d been fifty-six years old. A year younger than him.

Since then his orientation had gone.
Things fall apart
, as the poem said. He couldn’t think. He had no view of himself. He found himself doing various things: lying on the floor staring at the ceiling; fucking a twenty-four-year-old Latina prostitute; walking the width of Manhattan in concussive heat, heavy with his own sweat. He was aware of the people in his life (he had no living family, but there were friends, there were professionals) at first tiptoeing around him, then willing him to pull himself together, then getting annoyed, then gradually conceding that perhaps he’d lost his mind. A very remote part of himself knew how it must seem to them: his life ought to have furnished him with the resources to survive losing his wife. He was a successful literary writer. He had won awards. His work had been translated into twenty-five languages. He had long lunches with editors in restaurants of winking glass and fat white napkins. He went on international tours. But they didn’t know, the friends, the professionals, that the thing at the centre was Sylvia. They didn’t know that what made it bearable was that she didn’t take him seriously. They didn’t know that the only time he was peacefully himself was when he was with her. They didn’t know it had been the kind of love the world thought it had outgrown.

And without her the paltry dimensions of everything else had been revealed with a violent molecular vividness. He could connect nothing with nothing. As another poem said.

He had come to the cabin with no clear purpose but with the vague intuition that he might never leave it. That was as far as the thinking had gone. The place had belonged to his father. Unused for more than two decades. Angelo had been there as a child. Somewhere in the midst of his grief he’d found himself remembering it. The ravine like a Halloween pumpkin grin. The dense evergreens. There was something in the land he wanted. He didn’t know what. He got in the car and drove west from New York for two days. Snow fell, eventually, which soothed him, somewhere at the edge of himself. He picked up supplies in Ellinson. He didn’t know what he was doing but there was a quietness and solidity to the place that was a kind of spartan endorsement.

Six days had passed. He had brought no books to read. Reading had gone the way of writing. Reading and writing were proof that you were still interested in the world, still intrigued, still
bothered
.
Instead he watched the snow. He lay on the couch. He let himself be reduced to simple actions. He chopped a stack of wood. He ate tinned food. He kept the fire in the stove going. His mind operated with a sleepy skeleton crew.

Then, last night, irony had arrived. In the shape of something as medically unspectacular as sciatica.

Sciatica! He’d been introduced to the condition four years ago. Had one operation to trim the herniated disc in his spine that was pressing on the nerve (L5 compromising S1, as he came to know them), done his Pilates exercises with a kind of numb fascination, accepted the slight limp and the use of a cane and led a physically pain-free life since then.

Until last night, when, without preamble or warning, the sciatica had come back.

He’d forgotten what it was like. He’d forgotten what excruciating and completely debilitating pain was like. Before passing out he’d spent two hours on all fours on the floor, comprehensively incapable of moving. The pain had made him cry. He hadn’t cried for months. Grief had given up on tears. Grief had worn out their mechanism and moved on to other things. The universe had granted him one random mercy: he’d hit the deck within reach of a bottle of single malt, a gift from his publisher, with whom he’d had a pointless lunch more than a year ago, back in the days when people were still expecting him to get over things. The whisky – a twenty-five-year-old Macallan – had been on the passenger seat of Angelo’s car ever since, and he’d added it to the box of unthought-out supplies he’d brought from Ellinson when he’d arrived. In the absence of pills (the thought for
physical
pain had long since stopped being part of his scheme of things) the Scotch had presented itself as the only pain relief available, and he’d drunk the better part of the bottle. Now, therefore, on top of the screaming crisis in his legs, he had a brain-bashing hangover. He needed water. He was dying of thirst.

The wood-stove’s fire had gone out, but there was a little radiant heat still left in its iron. His feet hadn’t, quite, frozen, but the rest of him was shivering, ludicrously. (Sylvia would have taken care of him had she been here, but not without humour. Once, having suffered a sudden onset of diarrhoea at a friend’s book launch and raced home in a cab, he’d shat his pants before he’d quite made it to the bathroom. Sylvia, in a black evening dress and globular gold necklace, had stood in the bathroom doorway, quoting from his press reviews: ‘… unflinching honesty and a richly ambiguous imagination…’ ‘… one of our finest writers…’ ‘… while lesser novelists are satisfied with cute entertainments, Greer is still going after the big stuff…’ while he’d flailed on the floor trying to divest himself of his soiled clothes, the two of them laughing like children. They had seen each other at their best and worst. It was a continuum. There was nothing of either of them love hadn’t found room for.)

The question was: could he make it to the sink? He had to move. He had to have water. No matter what the pain said. And after that, somehow, he was going to have to make it to the car. To a phone. To a doctor. Which the pain was already telling him would be impossible. The pain was already telling him it would be a miracle if he made it to the sink.

It nearly killed him. He had to crawl and pull himself up by the edge of the stove. The nerves in his right leg shrieked. He took as much of his weight on his arms as he could and stuck his parched mouth under the faucet’s icy stream (spring water, allegedly, it tasted fresh and stony) feeling goodness ease back into his cells with every gulp. He couldn’t tell how long he drank. It seemed like hours.

But he still couldn’t walk more than three steps, even doubled over, even with the cane. On his hands and knees, working in increments that jammed his teeth together and brought tears back to his eyes, he loaded the wood-stove and got a fire going. It was another half-hour before he managed to struggle into his thermal jacket and hat, in the stubborn hope that by the time he got them on, he’d be able to walk.

Which he could not.

It was a joke. The car was on the other side of the bridge across the ravine, and the bridge was a ten-minute walk away even for an able-bodied person. But the only other pain relief available was the last fifth of Scotch, and with the best will in the world he knew that in his current state he wouldn’t keep a mouthful down. He wondered if he could knock himself out
manually
. Whack his chin on the edge of the stove. Wallop his own head with a skillet. It was a measure of how much pain he was in that the comedy of the idea was lost on him. All he could think was that he’d fuck it up and break his jaw and knock his teeth out. Sylvia, of course, would have laughed. It had brought the spirit of her very close to him, this absurd predicament. He could sense her smiling at the contrast, his soul’s drama reduced by his body to farce. She appreciated it. Irony had been her element.

He decided to crawl to the door and look outside to see how deep the snow was.

And though, when he’d got the door open, he saw what he saw straight away, it took his understanding a moment to catch up with what his brain had already unpacked.

He was looking at the body of a little girl.