The Execution. Hugo Wilcken
drenched in summer colours. I stopped speaking for a moment and the two guys in suits glanced up at me almost for the first time. I said I thought the best thing would be to organise a press briefing as soon as possible, for tomorrow afternoon perhaps, with all three of them present. Maybe it would make the greatest impact if Jarawa’s cousin spoke …
One of the other guys let out a huge guffaw: ‘He doesn’t speak English! He hardly even speaks French!’
Jarawa’s cousin looked briefly to the other two men as they sniggered then turned back to the window. It was obvious that he knew he was being talked about but his face exuded a prisoner’s passivity. There was something of Christian’s hangdog look about him too. I remembered the interview with Jarawa I’d read in the library the other day, with that story about the mongol kid. It had stuck in the back of my mind for some reason. Did Jarawa’s cousin know this story as well? Did he too remember the child? I would have liked to ask him, if there was any way I could.
That evening the phone rang while I was reading Jessica a bedtime story. Marianne was in the garden so I got up to answer it, with Jessica pulling at my shirt. Before I even picked up the receiver though, somehow I knew it was Christian and I had this visceral desire not to talk to him. I just felt it wouldn’t be good for me.
He sounded pretty desperate, even more so than the other day when he left that message for me at work. I could hear pub sounds in the background and his speech was slurred. I can’t understand a word you’re saying, I said, just calm down and speak slowly. I have to see you tonight, he said, there’s something I have to tell you.
‘I don’t know. It’s not really practical right now. Maybe we can see each other later on in the week.’
‘Later on in the week? I have to see you tonight. I’m in London. I can come round and see you at home. You won’t have to move, I’ll come to your house.’
‘No, where are you? I’ll come and meet you.’
I didn’t want to see Christian but on the other hand he couldn’t come round here. For a start, I’d have to explain to Marianne about that day – the day I identified Susan Tedeschi’s body I mean. I never told her about it. I never told anybody, I don’t know why.
He gave me the name of a pub in Camden so I said I’d be there in an hour or so. I hung up and went back to Jessica’s room. She was sort of dozing, lying crosswise on the bed, so I straightened her out, tucked her in, switched on the lamp on the chest of drawers and turned out the main light. But she woke up and called out to me tearfully. I sat down on the bed and put her on my knee. ‘What’s up,’ I said, ‘is it that monster again?’
‘It’s not a monster. It’s a man, I told you before, the man with the mask … Look what he’s done to Teddy!’
She reached down and picked up the teddy bear off the floor, I had to hold her round the waist so she didn’t fall off my knee. She was getting all worked up.
‘See? See?’
The teddy bear’s head is stitched onto its body, and the stitching had come loose and undone in parts. The head crooked to one side in a slightly macabre way. ‘See? Look what he’s trying to do to me too!’ She proffered her neck to me. I examined it carefully. ‘A mark,’ she said, ‘a red mark. Can’t you see it?’
I couldn’t see it. Jessica was making it up. I put her back to bed and tucked her in: ‘If that’s all the man with the mask can do then I wouldn’t worry too much about him.’
I was hungry and I’d thought about taking Christian out to dinner, but as soon as I caught sight of him in the pub I realised there was no chance of that. His face had undergone a remarkable transformation since I’d last seen him. It looked sunken, wrecked, as if it were about to slide off his skull or something. He’d always seemed younger than his age and all of a sudden he looked older, much older. His eyes were drowned and glassy. He’d obviously been drinking for some time and he stared up at me in puzzlement: ‘You’re here!’
I bought a beer and when I got back to the table Christian had pulled himself together a little. He was grinning strangely and putting on a show of small-talk normality: ‘And how are things going on the Jarawa campaign?’
‘It’s moving along … had a strange meeting today … I’m seeing the ambassador tomorrow … some military guy. I’m amazed he agreed to meet me … Jo’s doing well – did you see her on Newsnight?’
‘No. I don’t watch too much TV these days.’
‘She’s doing a fantastic job.’
‘Great. Fantastic.’
I sipped at my beer and gazed around the pub. There wasn’t a single woman in it. It was one of those depressing places with dark wood, worn varnish and greasy green carpets that give off an odour of beer, cigarettes and urine – exactly the kind of place solitary men go to get drunk.
‘You weren’t at the funeral.’
‘No, I wasn’t. I’m sorry.’
‘No need to apologise. I’m no fan of graveyard scenes either.’ He laughed bleakly and stared at his pint glass. I wondered momentarily if he’d gone mad but didn’t say anything. His mind seemed to drift off: ‘You know when I was young, six or seven years old, we had a little house in the country and it was on the road to a graveyard … I’ll never forget the sight of those coffins being hauled along. It was like a scene from the Middle Ages …’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
There was a long pause while I tried to think of something to say, but I couldn’t. Christian seemed lost in his memories: ‘I remember that house in the country. I remember a forest behind it where I once found a hedgehog. I caught it and stuck it in a box. I didn’t really know what to do with it though so I just left it there, in the box under my bed – for weeks maybe – until Mum started complaining about the smell. So one evening I opened the lid. Inside was this horrible greenish brown slime. Just the slime and the spines. I can still remember the smell.’
A raucous laugh broke out from a table at the other side of the pub and several of the solitary drinkers standing at the bar glanced up from their drinks.
‘Listen Christian. For Christ’s sake. You’ve got to pull yourself together.’
Christian stared at me wildly: ‘Well I can’t just pull myself together. I can’t just pull myself together. Jesus!’
I forced myself to continue: ‘Look … you need help, you need to open yourself up to help, a doctor, a counsellor, whatever …’
He cut me off: ‘You don’t know the half of it. Not the half of it.’ He sat musing and playing with the beer mat. ‘I have no means of escape. I have to confront myself at every moment. My life is a mirror I’m not allowed to look away from. If I was an alcoholic I could drink my way through it. Drink my way to the other end. I forced myself to drink tonight because I knew I was meeting you but normally I can’t do it.’
I shook my head: ‘This is getting you absolutely nowhere. I’ll get a cab down to Paddington with you. I’ll put you on a train home.’
He didn’t seem to hear me though: ‘The worst is not what you think. The worst is not even that we loved each other. It was that Susan … Susan and me …’
‘Susan was being unfaithful to you.’
Christian looked up at me, genuinely surprised: ‘How did you know?’
‘I didn’t know. I guessed. Is that what you got me up here to tell me?’
‘No.’ We drank in silence for a while, then Christian started rambling on about his wife: ‘She met a guy, a younger guy, your age. It was absurd. I didn’t know at first, I didn’t have a clue. Anyway Susan got careless, or maybe she wanted me to find out … I heard her talking on the phone one day when she must have known I was there. Later