The Last Word

Twenty-four

Everything good in art came from seeing a new thing and saying it, Harry said to himself. So when it came to the book, what mattered most was that he liked it. And despite the fact the world seemed be exploding in his face, with everything suddenly shifting and moving in ways he couldn’t comprehend, Harry knew that to write he needed time and regularity. He worked all day and, at the end of each afternoon, had taken to running in the woods, illuminating his way, when it got gloomy under the heavy trees, with the light of a miner’s helmet Julia had found in a market.

By the late evening, Harry was glad to get out of the house. He’d meet Julia at the top of the track. Smiling, she’d rush out from the woods, jump into his car, and they’d go for a drink — she knew all the local high spots. She liked it if, after, he accompanied her to her bedroom. Increasingly under siege from her mother and the agitated suitors, she would ask him to read to her, or to play her guitar while she sang.

Having issued a severe warning, Rob had gone, flinging his rags into his suitcase and taking off like a Romantic poet, striding through forests and across fields, through streams, across car parks and into pubs. He seemed to believe he would gain knowledge of the countryside if made to suffer by it. To celebrate Rob’s departure, Harry thought he’d take Julia out for an Indian. ‘What do you say to that?’

She had to say she was pleased about the on-the-way children. She knew her place, shut her mouth and accepted what she was offered. Her family had always been on the wrong side, too. She was, however, slightly bemused by the dinner. Why pay for something when you could have a tuna sandwich and Coke at home? The last time she and Harry had gone out ‘formally’, they’d taken an E each and gone bowling at a floodlit centre called the Hollywood Bowl, just out of town, where there was a mega-cinema, drive-thru McDonald’s and KFC. The evening had been fluorescent, glittering, like a cartoon.

But drugs were fatuous, he found, as he got older. This time they would talk — about what, he had no idea. Why would he worry? If love is loquacity, in bed they liked to discuss her body and its vicissitudes, as well as her weight and hair colour; and, he had to admit, he learned more about present-day England from her than he did from anyone else. In bed, while he thought about the book, she would ask questions, not wanting to waste the resource she had beside her.

‘Friendly Harry,’ she would say, ‘how many prime ministers have there been since the war? And who was the best? Which is the most interesting newspaper and why? What do you think of Canary Wharf? Will you take me there? Who was Muhammad Ali? Why are men unfaithful to their wives? Will you dump me?’

What tormented her now, she told him, was that he was like a circus which came to town for a while, and then went away. ‘When you and Alice go, I’m scared of being left behind. Mum’s getting worse. More men come to the house. I’m always in her way. She says I put people off loving her.’

But Julia loved Harry, and there was something she wanted to give him, a special treat to remember in exchange for the kindness he had shown her. And, as she said, ‘It isn’t every day your lover’s girlfriend gets pregnant.’

And so, that evening, when they walked into the Indian restaurant where Mamoon had had his party, a girl stepped out from behind a screen. Julia had arranged for a friend to join them. Prettier than Julia, like her she wore eye shadow, lip gloss and platform shoes, as if they were going out to meet footballers. ‘This is Lucy,’ she said, as the girl went to kiss him. ‘We both congratulate you.’

Lucy gave them each some MDMA, and took them to a club where an obese woman vomited over the floor. Julia suggested they go somewhere else — not Julia’s, as her brother could be there, no doubt tattooing himself on the forehead with a penknife; and not Lucy’s, because of her child. The girls were keen for him to take them to a hotel in town. They bought alcohol and cocaine, closed the curtains, turned off their phones and didn’t emerge until the next afternoon.

However, some time in the late morning, while the girls slept on either side of him, Harry, who didn’t sleep at all, recalled something Mamoon had said with regard to Marion. ‘The truth is, everything we really desire is either forbidden, immoral or unhealthy, and, if you’re lucky, all three at once.’

‘What follows from that, sir?’

‘Don’t forsake your desire, even if you’re punished. Take the punishment gracefully, as a tribute, and never complain.’

In the afternoon, he and Lucy stood outside the hotel, waiting for Julia, who had misplaced her bra in the room. Lucy kissed him; he held her tight.

‘Three’s always a party,’ she said.

‘You are irresistible, Lucy,’ he said. ‘Last night was so much fun I can only contemplate an eternity of regret and self-recrimination.’

‘For not having a laugh more often?’

He fumbled in his pockets. ‘Here. Perhaps the closing of the abattoir ruined your life too.’

He gave her almost £100 and she handed it back, saying, ‘You’ll need it to buy clothes for the babies. Your partner, Alice, she’s having two, isn’t she?’

‘Yes. Twins.’

‘When did you find out?’

‘At the scan the other day, the nurse said, “There’s your baby — oh, and there’s another one. Looks like you’ve got two there.”’

‘You’ll cope,’ she said, putting her phone number in his phone. ‘You’re a joker, and you’re never happier than when you’re with a woman. It’s like you want to suck us right up. Didn’t your mother have twins?’

Usually he said as little as he could get away with. Like his father, he wanted to be a listener: it seemed safer. But the drugs had undone his tongue and condemned him to the truth, at last. When Julia came out and joined them, he found himself telling them that his older brothers were identical twins, and his mother had been a paranoid psychotic. Distracted by voices, she had gone to the river and drowned herself.

‘“Fear death by water,” the Tarot says. She haunts me, and I think of her floating, like Ophelia.’

‘How bloody awful,’ said Julia, kissing him.

‘It’s the easiest death — you can be gone in thirty seconds if you keep your mouth open.’ He added, ‘What is the desire for death the desire for? Wasn’t my mother always going in that direction? We three boys, who would have maddened a stone, were lucky to have her for as long as we did. I’d say she was too obedient.’

‘To what?’

‘I guess to one fascist voice speaking in her head. Far from being too mad, as some people said, she was too orthodox.’

Lucy banged Harry on the arm. ‘Julia told me you’re weird.’

‘If I’ve been granted a flicker of madness, I’ll be sure to take care of it.’

‘She said at breakfast you were making a list of people with a parent who killed themselves.’

‘And of those who are drawn to suicides. All Hitler’s women — I think there were seven — killed themselves. It is a very particular sort of death to live with. The worst thing that could happen has already happened. I’ve been wondering what sort of psychology it makes.’ He said that if you have a parent who kills themself, you never lose the fear that everything you most loved could be taken from you. ‘This morning, as you beauties slept, it occurred to me that I should attempt a small book about suiciders and those who love them. I’ll talk to Dad about my mother, meet her friends and the writers she was supposedly fond of. Be her biographer.’

When Harry’s car rolled up at the house, Julia’s brother Scott came out into the front yard and stood there, looking at Harry sitting in his car, the two girls silent and watchful.

Julia whispered, ‘He’s protective, but he knows what you mean to me.’

Harry lowered the window. ‘Good afternoon.’

‘All well?’ said the brother.

He made a gesture at the girls and they scuttled inside the house. Scott stood in front of the car. Harry went to seal the window once more, but couldn’t manage it.

‘You have a good one?’ Scott asked again, without raising his voice, but unable to resist a little gob on the ground.

‘Yes, thanks,’ said Harry. He thought he might reverse away fast, but wondered if that might seem impolite. The two of them looked at one another until at last the brother stood aside.