Laidlaw

25

‘You might’ve rented a place with a more private entrance,’ he said.

It was a bad joke but there were no good jokes here. The deadness of his own remark was like a tuning-fork for Harry. Here anything but silence would be discord.

Tommy was standing against the wall. He needed a shave and his clothes were grimy with the dust. His eyes, raw with sleeplessness, looked as if they had a horizon of two inches. Already he seemed as derelict as the building. He had been crouched at the wall as Harry came in and had risen when the door opened. Fear had given him focus for a second. But that dispersed instantly and left him looking eerily past Harry, having forgotten why he stood.

Harry thought he understood why Tommy had no reaction to him. What had entered wasn’t Harry Rayburn. It was the non-appearance of whatever monster of fear Tommy was making in his head. And therefore it was irrelevant, because that obsession could admit nothing but itself.

‘I brought some more stuff. Have you eaten anything?’

Tommy nodded vaguely. But the food Harry had brought for him yesterday seemed hardly to have diminished. A roll lay on the floor, one bite taken from it. It was unfilled, just dry dough.

‘Tommy,’ Harry said. ‘Let me get you out of here tonight. Will you?’

Tommy wasn’t looking at him.

‘Please.’

He moved along the wall until he was in the corner at the back of the room. It was a kind of answer.

‘The police have been to see me.’

Tommy’s attention flickered towards him and moved away again. His stillness took the place of questions. He was waiting to hear what more there was.

‘They don’t know anything yet but they’re looking. They’ll find you if you stay. You’ll have to get out of here, Tommy. Out of the city.’

Tommy stayed completely still. Watching him, Harry ran out of words. His eyes went out of focus and he saw only Tommy, distending hugely, relentlessly in front of him. He was aware of traffic noises, someone shouting, and Tommy, utterly alone in the middle of it all. He couldn’t speak.

‘There’s nowhere to go from here.’

It was said quietly — by the way. It had the gentle sound of an absolute certainty, something that needed no force to maintain itself. For Harry, having been taught despair as the necessary result of what he was, it was a familiar sound, so familiar that it came to him not as an expression of what Tommy had done but of what he had been made to believe he was. The route didn’t matter so much to Harry because he knew the destination was predetermined. Tommy was where so many people wanted homosexuals to be, trapped in a ghetto of self-loathing.

He had seen it happen often enough before to people he cared about. They opposed the presumption of others with the reality of themselves until the pressure became too much for them. They lost the necessary tension of their natures and became caricatures of themselves, capable of nothing except offering their arses to the world, like animals whose only recourse is placation.

He despised that. He had been taught despair but he had learned defiance. Out of its tension he had earned his own sense of himself. He wasn’t a poof, taking his identity from a failure to be something else. He wasn’t gay, publicly pretending to a uniformity that had no meaning in private. He was a homosexual, like everybody else one of a kind.

It was the hardest thing to be and, looking at Tommy, the difficulty of it hurt him again, enlarging his love for Tommy. He saw a nature that was driven by demands incompatible with the reality it inhabited. He remembered how good bed had been together, so good that it had frightened Tommy by offering him definition. Finding himself becoming one thing, he had rushed to try to prove himself another. Harry thought he understood the pressures that had made him make the attempt. They were a kind of absolution, as far as he was concerned. A lot of people had been present at that murder. Why should one person answer for it?

Tommy was speaking now — odd, unrelated statements. ‘Thomasina. That’s what they used to call me.’ ‘My uncle took me for a drink once.’ ‘But I embarrassed him. Just by being me.’ ‘I always felt I needed to prove people wrong.’ ‘I remember playing with a boy once and I got excited without knowing why. The way he looked at my face. It was like having a birthmark you hadn’t noticed yourself.’ ‘They were right.’ ‘There’s nowhere for me to go, Harry.’

The disconnection puzzled Harry until he noticed a couple of discarded sheets of paper on the floor and decided that Tommy was giving him some pieces of the past he had been trying to make sense of by writing them down. He had been looking for understanding of what had happened, and every moment of his own suffering he had unearthed had only added to his despair. Beside the enormity of what he had done, they were so trivial. They constituted no case for the defence. But then, it seemed to Harry, nobody’s experience ever did until it was informed by the compassion of another person.

‘Yes there is, Tommy,’ Harry said. ‘There are places you can go, all right. I’m making arrangements. All I want is that you let me get you out of here. I’ve been in touch with a friend. He’s going to help. We’ll get you out of here. You’ll be all right.’

Tommy shook his head. But Harry had succeeded in reconvincing himself. The helplessness of Tommy intensified his love for him. It would happen. Whatever had been done, they had earned some right to be with each other.

The bleak, empty room they stood in was for Harry a kind of natural precipitation of their experience. It was their portion of the noise and busyness that was going on around them. In this moment there hardened in him the admission of a knowledge he had been a long time acquiring. He knew the viciousness of public virtue, how it subsists through the invention of its opposite. He made a simple rule for himself: unjust suffering eventually writes a blank cheque for the sufferer. They would collect theirs.

‘You’re getting out, Tommy,’ he said. ‘You’re going to get out. And later I’m going to join you. We’ll live somewhere else. Together. You’ll be all right. And that’s the truth.’

He didn’t feel it as a vague lover’s promise. The nature of his experience precluded that. He knew the danger of the police getting hold of them. He knew the risk of trying to use Matt Mason. But he also knew precisely where his own strength was. It lay in his rejection of everybody else, in the loneliness they had taught him.

He wondered at his own ability to bury a dead girl in indifference, and every other scruple with her. But then he had been well taught.

‘You’ll be all right,’ he said again.

Tommy waited.