The Pursuit of William Abbey Page 12

  Bed rest was easier to achieve than fresh air, and for three or four days I lay, half muttering the dreams of our next-door neighbours, of

  … lust, why doesn’t he understand, why can’t he see that she is also a sexual creature – he has his pleasures and then stops and she moans and groans beneath him and hopes that he will get the message, but it’s been six years now and the time passed five years and nine months ago to raise the question of his minimal prowess…

  … again and again the foreman points and laughs, again and again naked before all his peers who see at last that he is tiny, meaningless…

  Dreams of fire, bastard, bastard, bastard! Bastard how could you how could you how could you do it to me do it to me do it to me bastard want to punch punch punch but in my dreams my fist freezes in the air powerless powerless powerless bastard!

  Every night she dreams that he is dead, and she wakes weeping, and wonders if she is going mad.

  On the fourth day, I grabbed Mrs Parr by the arm, the truth a blather on my lips. “We have to leave Dublin.”

  “I hardly think—”

  “You don’t like your brother,” I growled. “You love him, dutifully, because you have to. You enjoy his company, some of the time. You respect what he achieves and are occasionally proud of him, and his odd flashes of humanity. But you don’t like him. In your heart, you know that he is not a good man, and lacks enough compassion to ever be bothered by that fact. He’s coming. Get me out of here!”

  That afternoon, four men carried me on a stretcher to the back of a cart, and hoped that I was insane and did not know of what I spoke. And the cart rattled us to the docks, and at the docks I was carried onto the steamer to Liverpool, and they put me in a cabin with a window that looked towards the departing shore, and I thought I saw the shadow of the boy who died by the boab tree following me through the crowd, one arm reaching up, as if he would hold my hand.

  Chapter 27

  So much of my life is spent in maps.

  The journey to Liverpool took a little under fourteen hours, and as we sailed, the need to babble the truth faded. One hundred and thirty-five miles in less than a day was enough speed to buy us time, and at Liverpool we were straight to the station, and onwards, to London. One hundred and eighty miles in four hours. At Langa’s unchanging speed across land or water, calculated from months of observations, that distance should buy us a little over a hundred hours before the truth returned to my tongue. Four days to heal; four days of silence.

  At Euston station, Parr asked if I wanted to go home.

  For a moment, I didn’t know what she meant. It didn’t occur to me that she could be asking about family; my family.

  “No,” I said, not sure why. “Not… right now.”

  She didn’t ask any questions.

  They put me in that same hotel off the Strand where I had first met the colonel. I think the housekeeper was a spy, but without the shadow close upon me, I couldn’t be sure, and that was wonderful.

  I lied about Margot.

  I couldn’t lie about all of it. Hutton was being blackmailed; that was unavoidable. I had chased a woman in yellow and received a split lip for my troubles. These things were a matter of mere observation.

  But sitting at the colonel’s desk, as he asked me who she was and what she did, I lied.

  “I didn’t catch her name. She is a blackmailer. I don’t know how she knew I was an agent. I don’t think she’s with the Fenians. Or the socialists. I don’t know how she got her information.”

  I lied for one who was like me, for the shadow and the bond I imagined that gave us. It was a foolish reason to make myself a traitor, but having committed to it, I could hardly change my mind.

  They interviewed me for two days before I began to dream my neighbours’ dreams again.

  Waking in the middle of the night, it occurred to me that this would be a good time to rock madly on the end of my bed.

  To howl.

  To march through the London streets looking for a fight.

  To get immensely drunk, find a brothel, visit old friends, write offensive letters to ancient, half-forgotten adversaries.

  Smash glass.

  Pray.

  Langa comes.

  He comes.

  He comes.

  I just lay there, wide awake, and understood that I was a prisoner in a gilded cage, and that my life would be spent running, and violating the hearts of men, and I did nothing until the morning came.

  Then they sent me on my way again.

  Chapter 28

  The British government were not the only ones with a truth-speaker.

  “They have orders to shoot me, of course,” mused Polina as we walked together through Budapest. “I know the truth of their hearts too.”

  Polina had worked for the Russians for nearly twenty years, ever since they’d torn her from her village by the banks of the Ob. We crossed paths in 1899 at a particularly tedious party held by an especially pompous minor lordling who had once married someone who was distantly related to a cousin of a king, and we were both working, and we knew the truth of each other’s hearts.

  She would not betray another of her kind, and saw in my eyes that neither would I, and smiled, and made her way over to me like a petal blown in the summer breeze, and shook my hand, and asked my name, and pretended to find my answers surprising.

  “This man is an English doctor,” she informed her escort, who trailed perpetually behind. “We shall now discuss irregular women’s bleeding.”

  This statement, made loudly enough for ladies nearby to blush crimson, brought us a little privacy. She looped her arm through mine, and the truths of each other’s hearts swept upon us both, and she seemed more amused than disappointed in whatever she saw in me, and whispered, “Say something medical. My keeper rubs himself in his private places with stinging nettles to keep away impure thoughts.”

  “Have you tried electrical stimulation to the genital region?” I intoned, voice carrying clear across the room as she turned me towards the door. “I also can recommend some innovative uses for salt.”

  We walked together between the white walls of Budapest, gas lamp and scratching violin, the Danube running high and children scuttling away into the alleys where the great men never went, and we were not disturbed.

  Polina walked with her shadow barely ten hours behind, and seemed to have no fear of it, words controlled carefully on her tongue, and noted the truth of my heart without regret, as I noted hers. She had been violated by a man in her village. The only way to redress the crime was for her to marry him, which she had done, and sobbed through the wedding, and sobbed in the night when he violated her again. Then the man’s father, proclaiming that clearly his son hadn’t done a good enough job in restraining his wife, joined in. In the end, her misery annoyed her husband and he tried to strangle her with his bare hands. She killed him with a sickle, and his mother, in rage, cursed her with the shadow that had followed her ever since. She had been fourteen years old. “If a woman cries,” she explained, watching as the horror of her truth rippled through my bones, “it is because the man has not hurt her enough to silence her.”

  As a spy for the Russians, she lived well enough. She had clean clothes, a good allowance, had travelled far and wide and was treated with a stand-offish respect. Her guards followed at a hundred yards’ remove, and had orders to kill her if she was ever in danger of capture. She told them that I was a foolish British doctor with interesting views on a woman’s bodily functions, and when I asked her, already knowing the answer, if she wanted to defect, she simply shrugged and smiled.

  “Your side will kill you too,” she tutted, “if they ever think you know too much. Cut our your brains first to see how you work; then kill you. I don’t know why, but I find it comforting to think I will be murdered by people who speak my own language. Of the two men who guard me, one already knows he does not have it in his heart to execute me, but he will look the other way if the order comes to Nikolai.
Looking the other way is the least he can do, for his duty.”

  “I’m no threat to anyone,” I replied. “I’m far too much of a coward.” Then, as always: “Is there a cure?”

  “I think so,” she concluded. “But it is in no one’s interest for us to know it, save the ones we love. And who would be foolish enough to be loved by us?”

  We shook hands, and in our hearts swore not to tell the other’s secrets, and saw the truth of that pledge in each other, and she vanished in 1905 during the failed Russian Revolution, and was never seen again.

  Chapter 29

  Spinning round the world.

  In America, a gangster buys the mayorship of a city not because it will give him anything he doesn’t already have, but because he wants it as a child wants an expensive new toy, so why the hell not?

  In Mexico, the general swears that he works day and night for the good of his country, and believes it. It is the truth of his heart – the work is killing him! That is why his family is paid so much and eats so well, because if he dies from overwork and neglect, he will be useless to Mexico. Then what will the peasants do without him?

  A Spanish nobleman sighs in the gardens of Madrid. “We used to be something,” he muses. “We used to be people of principle.”

  He has mortgaged his estates to three different lenders – one French, one British, one Italian – and lives in dread of the day they discover his duplicity. His wife complains that the other women laugh at her scuffed shoes; he doesn’t know what to say.

  In Ireland, a man is imprisoned for writing incendiary literature, and while in prison he is tortured, and when he leaves he kills a man, seeing no other way, and having no other dignity. That man’s son grows up to hate the idea that killed his father, and so he kills another whose child will one day grow up to kill, and all things considered, the constabulary’s policy of beating men bloody to clean up the blood is somewhat flawed.

  Socialism; communism; anarchism; nationalism. They are the new words of the day. Long before the death of an Austrian archduke plunged this continent into war, Spanish, Russian and Italian kings all met their end by violence and an American president was gunned down by an anarchist at a New York music hall.

  In Rome, I was sent to learn the truth of the revolutionaries who gathered in the shadow of the old Aurelian Walls. They huddled around fires and broke bread together and whispered of rebellion and freedom and justice and truth, and their bellies were empty and their deaths rang like the factory bell before their eyes, and among them was one man – barely more than a boy – who had made a bomb from stolen dynamite and tin cans filled with nails. He listened to the whispered talk of rebellion and liberty, resolved that day that he would kill the king, but must have seen me staring at him. He saw me, and though he had no shadow, he knew the truth of my heart as surely as I knew his. He knew I was a spy, who would tell all of his people’s secrets to my masters. And perhaps my masters would share some names with the Italians in exchange for favours of finance and signatures on pieces of paper, and some men would be arrested, and others killed; or perhaps they’d let them run riot, because it was of benefit to the British if Italy could not so easily sell its wares across the Alps. Either way, these men with their gutted lives would be sacrificed as pieces in our bigger game, just as they always had been, as they always would be.

  He saw this, and knew it, and ran away. He didn’t get very far. The dynamite he’d stolen was more than a year old, nitroglycerin weeping in thick little globules from the clay. He, being unable to read or write his own name, orphaned by hardship and accident, nothing more, was not well versed in the rules of explosives. In his haste to escape my gaze, he stumbled and tripped on a red stone protruding from the tufts of shadowy grass, and fell, and the shock of that was enough. The bomb, when it blew, killed no one of importance. Of the six people who died instantly – including him – one was a child, one a mother, two were fathers and two were men of uncertain origin, their faces too mangled to be identified, no one coming forward to claim them. I was not injured, being too far from the blast. My ears sang for a week and my hands shook; there was dirt and other people’s blood on my skin and in my hair. For a few minutes, I was a doctor again, tearing up coat and jacket to press into the wounds of those whose bleeding was heavy enough to merit attention, but slow enough that they were not already lost causes. I was astonished to discover that this was still within me; that the old profession still lingered in my heart, so focused and fixed on its objective that for a little while even the pain of my patients, amplified by Langa’s encroaching presence, was numbed behind the necessity of the task I performed.

  I worked for six hours, as the stretchers and carts came to carry off the wounded and the dead in dribs and drabs. It was dawn by the time I looked up, every part of me shredded to a rag, and saw the perfect image of the young man’s face, the would-be bomber with his unstable explosives, frescoed on the wall just behind where he’d fallen, plucked from his skull and pasted to stone at the moment of detonation, a ghoulish flaying. I sat beneath it for a while, shaking, until I realised that I was whispering the truth of men’s hearts, the muttered exclamations of this man’s infidelity, that woman’s true and burning love; the depth of her grief, her fury in the murder of the one she loved, a story she tells about herself, in which she, the living, is the true victim – not he, the dead. I put my hand over my mouth, and still the truth came, unstoppable, and somehow it didn’t occur to me to run. Running from that place seemed so entirely insignificant, so thoroughly pointless, that for a moment I thought, maybe even believed, that this time when Langa came he’d take mercy, and just kill me, not the ones I loved. If love was even in my heart any more.

  People turned away from me as I sank to my knees and tried to bury the sound of the truth in my chest, curling into the words, burying them. One man who had no fear, had refused to be afraid ever since the day he ran away; and a woman who believed herself kind in all things and had frequently beaten children for not respecting her compassion, and who was yet here, yet kind, bent over me and whispered that all would be well. But they spoke Italian, and I spoke English, and my garbled, babbling gratitude spat beneath the torrent of their spoken souls fell on deaf ears, and for that I was almost grateful.

  And there he was.

  Langa, coming towards me across the bloody field, caught against the grey light of rising day. A flock of pigeons burst and wheeled away from the cracked rooftop of the house behind him, as if startled by a pouncing cat. The insects wittering in the crooked trees fell silent, stayed silent, shuffled away into the nooks and cracks of the branches. The fat-bodied, gleaming flies that had gathered to feast on the blood buzzed and spun into the sky, gorged and eager to be gone. The tip of the sun peaked over the lip of an ancient wall built from a thousand years of different stones, monuments defaced and mortared back together again to make a kitchen, or a room for lovers to lounge in, and Langa came.

  He came, one hand raised towards me, a shuffle without movement, a shimmer in the air, reaching, inviting. I blurted the truths of all whom my eyes settled on, shrieked that once her uncle had touched her when she was young and told her it was fine, it was good, it was just a nice game they were playing, and now the sight of physical intimacy fascinated her, terrified her, she had no name for the torrent she experienced inside, there was no one to whom she could scream the thoughts that she did not know in her head, here he comes, here he comes, here comes my shadow…

  And I screamed the truth of the man who hated all Jews because he had lost his job, lost his money, lost his place, lost his family, lost his self-respect, and while he had never actually met a Jew or seen one as far as he knew, to be where he was without reason, to be merely a victim of life’s stormy currents, was an injustice, an indignity too great to bear, and so there must be, there must be someone to blame, there must be a reason, must be order, must be…

  “William!” Mrs Parr, overdressed and over-bustled for an Italian spring, running towar
ds me. “Dr Abbey!”

  And in her way, she loves me too. It is a maternal love, because she never had a son. Just a series of early miscarriages, and one girl, nearly fully formed, who kicked within her belly until the day she kicked no more, and was born dead, her eyes closed and perfect fingers curled across her chest, forming, Mrs Parr felt, the sign of the crucifix, the sign of the angels, it had to mean something, there must be something, there must be…

  The angle of her scamper towards me took her directly into Langa’s path. I howled a warning, but it was lost somewhere in the babble of souls pushing their way from between my lips. For a moment, woman and shadow were the same, Mrs Parr scurrying up behind Langa and then passing straight through him without slowing, oblivious to his presence, calling out my name. I gasped so deeply it hurt, then doubled forward again, wrapping my arms over my mouth, pushing my head against the wet grass.

  “William!”

  She caught me under the arm, pulled me to my feet. “You have to move! We have to go!”

  “She would have been called Caroline,” I whimpered. “You never told him that was her name, you never told him because he would never have understood…”

  “Can you see it? Can you see the shadow?”

  I nodded, pointed at Langa as he pointed at me, two poles steady in a spinning world. “There! He’s there!”

  “Run. Don’t stand there, man! Run!”

  Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to me to do this until she said it. She wanted me to live. So desperately, with all her heart, she wanted me to live, and in that moment, her desire was strong enough to fill the empty place where I imagine my desire should have been too. I grasped at her arm for support, and ran.

  On a star-spilling night in Rome, beneath the broken frescoes of past, lurid dreams, I knew the terrors that paralyse men in the trenches, felt the frozen, broken horror of all that was and all that had to be, and my skin began to pock and pucker with a sweeping purple rash, which I could not medically explain. You and I, Sister Ellis, have seen this before – and far, far worse. But we have both, I think, discharged men back to the fight in this condition, arguing that only by facing their terrors and conquering – or dying – will they be cured. This was the attitude of my masters then, as it is the attitude of our masters now, and many a man has died, shot between the eyes, gun at his side, because his mind could no longer bring his hand to grasp, lift and pull the trigger. This is also the truth that must be spoken: that men have gone to die simply because we did not have time to think of something better to do with them. We did not have time.