Oh Marina Girl Read online

  ‘Given the reference to Craig Liddell, I don’t see how we can afford not to,’ mumbled White Whiskers.

  ‘That being so,’ proceeded Kerr, irritated by this interruption, ‘so far as I can see, we’re faced with two options: either we meet the demands as set out in the letter, thereby forfeiting the very foundation on which this paper was founded — the right of free speech — and laying ourselves open to future copycat threats in the hope that we save the life of the hostage; or, alternatively, we refuse point-blank to meet the demands as set out in the letter and, instead, contact the police — a course of action which would uphold our principles and safeguard us against any future copycat threats, but might have a fatal consequence for the hostage.’

  ‘Which option do you propose?’ enquired White Whiskers. Kerr stalled and surveyed the room, seeking clues to help him gauge the mood of the board. They remained inscrutable. On impulse I decided to try and bail him out.

  ‘There might be a third way,’ I suggested. The glower Kerr bestowed on me showed that he was entirely unappreciative of my intervention (it reminded me why some of his staff, emboldened by a dram or two after hours in the Space Bar would, on occasion, substitute his Christian name for its Spanish equivalent ‘Juan’ — behind his back, of course. Indeed ‘Juan’ had become Kerr’s unofficial nickname — the juvenile humour behind it only making sense to those who knew his surname). It was a glower reproduced by the board of directors, all of whom appeared outraged that I should have the impertinence to speak without having first been spoken to.

  ‘And what would that be?’ enquired White Whiskers, cupping his hand to his ear. I cleared my throat and spoke louder than I normally would.

  ‘To run the letter on the front page, unedited as demanded, but to surround it with editorial condemning it outright and defending the right of free speech. It seems to me that, whilst the letter is an outright threat, it also presents us with an opportunity — ’

  ‘How so?’ interrupted Findlay.

  ‘It presents us with an opportunity to exploit an exclusive (no one else knows about the letter) from the inside — ’

  ‘ — I could run the story on our morning news bulletin,’ proposed an unidentified board member, as if it was his idea.

  ‘I could use it on our evening news programme,’ suggested another.

  ‘We could get our investigative team onto it,’ added Findlay. ‘Find out exactly what prompted this letter; start a search for the kidnapper — it’s obviously the same guy who murdered Liddell.’

  ‘Can you do all that for tomorrow’s edition?’ enquired White Whiskers. Findlay assured him that he could, before looking towards Kerr for confirmation. ‘Good. Let’s get to it, gentlemen.’

  As the room began to empty, Whiskers indicated to Findlay to remain seated. Only once they were alone did he turn to him and, in a confidential tone, instruct him to make contact with ‘our friend, the Chief Constable’ on the QT to put him in the picture and seek his advice about how best to proceed without alerting the kidnapper to the fact that they’d made contact.

  ‘And while you’re at it, make contact with that private eye working on the Liddell murder investigation. What’s her name again?’

  ‘Pardos,’ said Findlay.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Whiskers. ‘But don’t, for God’s sake, let her know that we’ve tipped off the Chief Constable and, more importantly, don’t let him know about her.’

  Once I’d finished editing the letters and passed them to the sub-editor to lay out, I left the small matter of the front page to the reporters and slipped out into the evening drizzle where, instead of heading for the bus stop, which was my usual routine, I returned to the Mitchell.

  As I suspected, Niamh Toe, or whatever her real name was, was nowhere to be found. Even if she was a bona fide librarian — and I had my doubts — then the chances were that her shift had finished. Nevertheless, I decided to enquire about her whereabouts on the off chance that someone could enlighten me.

  Needless to say, the surly librarian on duty had never heard of a Niamh Toe nor knew of any staff member fitting her description.

  part two

  atone him

  chapter eight

  flesh out

  That night, as I teetered on the brink of sleep, I plunged into an abyss and was jolted fully awake by an involuntary jerk.

  The first time this had happened to me was on holiday in Majorca years ago; the first night I’d gone to bed without Lisa to wrap myself around. I remember I’d got up and stumbled through to Will’s room to snuggle in to him instead. The second time, the following night, I once again stumbled through to Will’s room, only to be confronted by an empty bed. When the plunge into the abyss became a nightly occurrence, the doctor prescribed a course of sedatives, but an instinctive need to plumb the depths of suffering left me immune to the temptation to dull its intensity, and I took to wandering the streets instead.

  The other night, because the plunge had reprised itself, I decided to resurrect the early hours street walk.

  At night, city streets, lit by starburst orange-haloed lampposts, are deserted.

  Late-night wandering can foster doodles of wondering which, occasionally, help put pressing concerns into perspective; stripping layers of trivia from long-forgotten fundamental truths. On such occasions, blind to my surroundings, submerged in reveries of halcyon days with Lisa and Will, I’d emerge to find myself in unfamiliar districts and it would take an angst-ridden hour or longer to discover the reassurance of a familiar vicinity from which I could thread my way home; or else I’d emerge to find myself haunting a nondescript place around which the passage of time had woven an intricate pattern of poignancy; a particular bus stop or former friend’s flat or a favourite pub. I remember once emerging before my primary school, unable to drag myself from the gates, gazing through the railings into the small, square concrete playground, hearing the raucous joy of kids playing echoing around the empty yard with a loud and limitless energy for life fuelled by a concrete optimism without trace of the faintest hairline fracture of self-doubt.

  The other night, fear swamped by reflection, I entered Queen’s Park, an oasis of darkness in the lamppost-lit cityscape, acknowledging a frisson of danger, alert and surveying the shadowy surroundings. I hesitated to ponder the duck pond: the sleeping swans, beaks tucked tightly beneath wings; the drowned upturned shopping trolley adorned with strands of ASDA carrier bags billowing in the breeze; the oily, stagnant water choking on rusted and crushed cans of Tennent’s lager, spawny condoms and cigarette stubs; the moon-glinted, shattered-glass-spangled tarmac rimming the pool spattered with blobs of bird shit from the flocks of pigeons and seagulls that scavenged the bread crusts brought for the ducks by Sunday-afternoon parents doting on runny-nosed, ruddy-cheeked, mini Michelin-man toddlers.

  I passed by the locked, vandalised amphitheatre and wandered up a steep path, noticing a broad tree-lined avenue slope down to grand, gilded gates and out on to Victoria Road, which forged straight on into the heart of the city and beyond to the horizon where, on a clear day, you could see the snow-peaked Campsies.

  I proceeded to the flagpole at the summit where, perched on a bench buffeted by the wind, I surveyed the city that circled below me.

  I was reminiscing about an evening in Majorca’s Port de Soller with Lisa when, in a post-coital bliss, we lounged, still naked, on the veranda of our rented villa toking a joint and sipping sangria, listening to Jobim, inhaling the fragrance from the rampant bougainvillaea amongst the cluster of cypress trees.

  We’d hired a moped that morning and snaked our way up over the winding mountain road to Deia, where we bumped down a dirt track to the cove and found a small café, signalled by a cluster of faded, striped sun umbrellas, perched on the edge of a promontory overlooking the bay. We slaked our thirst with Cokes and Sprites and San Miguels. We donned shades, balmed lips, dipped i
nto sandy paperbacks, massaged each other with coconut-scented sun cream and dived into the crests of waves to bathe our burning bodies in the sun-kissed sea.

  I had interrupted the post-coital reverie to pen postcards, a signal for Lisa to retreat behind the pages of her book. Lisa was an avid reader. She devoured books and they consumed her. I understand now that I was jealous of her books: jealous because they satisfied a need I couldn’t; jealous of their ability to enrapture her; jealous of the time she devoted to them; jealous because they stole her away from me.

  ‘Is a life spent reading worth living?’ I’d once asked.

  She’d shrugged and, only half-joking, said, ‘Two things make life worth living: sex and books.’

  That night she fucked me while finishing off George Bataille’s Story of the Eye.

  Lisa always read but she never wrote. She never sent postcards or birthday cards or Valentine cards or letters. I always sent them to her and she always thanked me for them. It took me longer than it should have to learn not to comment on her lack of reciprocation.

  The first letter she wrote me was the last letter she wrote me.

  She said that she never sent postcards because she felt incapable of compressing a week or more of novel experiences into a sentence or two. She said that she never sent a birthday card because the passage of time, being beyond control, wasn’t an achievement and so wasn’t a cause for celebration. She said that she never sent Valentine cards because the words inside them bore no relation to how she felt and, anyway, she didn’t know how she felt. And if she did, she couldn’t write it. And if she could, she wouldn’t. She said that she never sent letters because she didn’t believe that anyone could express themselves accurately through writing. She argued that words are spoken and then remembered or forgotten, depending on memory, which edits what it considers to be important, whilst time distorts the importance of written words by eroding the context within which they were written.

  She never said, ‘I love you’, but I know that she did.

  ‘I can tell you that I love you without opening my mouth,’ she said. ‘Words aren’t necessary. You get the message. Language lets us down. It’s hard enough trying to articulate things without trying to write about them. Words can’t express how I feel. I’m lost for words. I’m speechless. You can’t write in clichés but everyone talks in clichés. Actions speak louder than words,’ she said, pushing my head down between her legs.

  But I loved writing and receiving letters. I’d exchanged letters on a monthly basis with a pen-pal called Liam who lived in Brooklyn, New York, (I’d made contact with him through an international reading club — in the days when I devoured books as avidly as Lisa does now), from when I was old enough to write and post them on my own until shortly after I met Lisa, who found this a constant source of amusement.

  ‘Whatever do you find to write about?’ she’d ridicule and I’d embark on a stumbling self-conscious self-analysis of my motivations, trying to explain that how, on reflection, I could see that I used Liam as a confidant because the distance somehow made it easier to express all the things that mattered, all the things that you withheld from everyone else for fear of reprisals — only to stop mid-sentence when I noticed her smirk.

  ‘What things?’ she goaded.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I shrugged. ‘Things. I don’t remember.’ Utterly humiliated by Lisa’s mocking, I vowed there and then to bring my long-standing epistolary friendship with Liam to an abrupt conclusion.

  ‘Did you ever meet?’ she asked and, annoyed by her tone, I changed the subject.

  I sent her birthday cards and Valentine cards every year. When she became a mother, I sent her Mother’s Day cards. When she fell ill, I sent her Get Well Soon cards. One year, aggrieved at yet again not receiving a birthday card from her, despite the dropping of heavy hints, I decided not to send her one. She sulked the entire evening, refusing to confess the cause of her foul temper, but I knew. I knew too to let it be. An unspoken rule of our relationship, drawn up in its infancy, was that she was permitted to ridicule me, as freely and as frequently as she saw fit, but on no account was I ever allowed to taunt her.

  She lay there on the inflatable blue-bottomed dinghy out on the veranda, her head propped up against the bow; her face hidden behind the pages of her book, gobbling a peach, its juice dribbling down her chin; her crossed ankles resting on the stern; her crucifix nestling in the valley of her breasts, glinting in the sunshine; her straw-coloured hair which, when I twirled it around my index finger, looked like string... and I inhaled her. She smelled of summer.

  I was stirred from my reverie by a shiver. Turning up the collar of my jacket, I dug my hands deeper into its pockets, surveying the cityscape once more, noticing the steeples piercing the dawn sky, like a cluster of cold, concrete cypress trees.

  ‘Do you approve of abortion?’ she’d asked. Just like that. I remember it distinctly. She caught me unawares. We were planting herbs in the back green under the low grey clouds of an oppressive Sunday afternoon. She didn’t stop what she was doing, digging pockets in the earth with a trowel into which she buried the roots of mint and parsley and sage, or look to gauge my reaction.

  ‘I think it’s every woman’s right,’ I said. I was about to enquire why she’d asked when she snorted and shook her head. I waited for her to confirm my suspicions. I waited for an opportunity to burst into celebration at the miracle of creation. I waited while she pressed rosemary into the earth. I waited.

  Then, aware of the scent of thyme on my hands, I said, ‘But I don’t want you to have an abortion,’ and wandered in to the kitchen to wash it away.

  I cut to the baby crying in his cot in the dead of night. Lisa was sound asleep. I dragged myself out of bed to feed him. Stumbling in the dark, I lifted him and, finding that he was wet, washed, dried, talcummed and changed him. Then I heated up his formula milk in the microwave (Lisa had persevered with breast feeding for seven raw and cracked days before dispatching me to Boots with precise instructions to procure the correct formula, brand and quantity of artificial milk) and, sitting in the splintered cane rocking chair, bought from an auction a few months earlier specifically for this purpose, rocked and hummed Hush a Bye Baby and fed him and dozed, being intermittently woken by cars driving along the wet road and over the loose drain at the T-junction — the two syllable metallic ca-clunk as the front, then the rear, passenger-side wheels drove over the slack metal lid. I can hear it even now. Ca-clunk.

  Awakening again, I listened to the wind howling and, as I cradled my newborn son in my arms and watched Lisa sleeping, her mouth slack, her breathing heavy, realised I was adrift and alone.

  Lisa had grown weary. Too tired to rise in the morning. Too tired to stay awake in the evening. She’d fallen into the habit of slumping in front of the television, swamped by lethargy, with Will (we’d baptised the baby William after Lisa’s dad; the dad who’d abandoned her mum and herself before she was old enough to remember him) wreaking havoc around her. I had assumed her fatigue to be a temporary reaction to the strains of labour and the stresses of motherhood, but the languorous days soon became weeks before stretching out into months and, eventually, years.

  When she became too tired to read and too tired to fuck I knew something, somewhere had gone awry.

  At weekends I’d leave her to watch her television in peace and quiet and take Will to the park to play. It was me who taught him how to walk. It was me who taught him how to wipe his bottom and flush the toilet and wash his hands. It was me who taught him how to use a knife and fork. It was me who taught him how to swim. It was me who taught him how to ride his bike, to fly a kite and to tie his shoelaces. It was me whom he read his homework to and it was me who helped him hone his handwriting. This was probably my proudest achievement. His calligraphy was an aesthetic delight: his O’s were perfectly round; his I’s tall and straight; his S’s satisfyingly symmetrical — I could go on th
rough the whole alphabet.

  If she had had the patience or the perseverance or the energy, Lisa would have taught him her faith.

  Between the opposite banks of faith and faithlessness our relationship coursed like a polluted river whose toxic undercurrents neither dared probe. Having grown to accept that the banks could not be bridged, we agreed to keep our own counsel with regard to our fundamental disparity so that, whilst her faith and my faithlessness remained an implicit understanding, it was in both our interests not to strain the sturdiness of that understanding by forcing it into a position whereby it was made explicit — until Will arrived and I insisted on resisting Lisa’s persistent attempts at infantile indoctrination.

  Whilst I despised her faith, I knew too that Will owed his life to it. Without it, she’d have had an abortion, whatever my thoughts on the matter might have been. This realisation was an important impetus behind Original Harm.

  More specifically, Original Harm had been prompted by a news item on the murder of a doctor en route to witness the birth of his son. Because the doctor had performed a number of terminations, a pro-life group had claimed responsibility for his death.

  Since I’d become a father, I’d become increasingly sensitive to news of murders and atrocities and tragedies, particularly where children were concerned. I found that I would rather switch off the television or turn the page than be exposed to this reality. The frequency and horror of such incidents seemed to me to demand urgent investigation. I fancied that, by detailed consideration of the murder of the doctor, I might be able to expose some common factors underlying such atrocities that could perhaps help me understand what motivates their perpetrators.

  That was one reason why I started writing, but perhaps a more fundamental reason was selfishness. Writing fulfilled a need to do something more productive with my time than while it away in passive consumption like Lisa. Part of me despised Lisa for what she was doing to herself. I couldn’t understand it. That she didn’t love herself any more seemed obvious. That she didn’t love me any more I could learn to live with. But that she didn’t love Will was incomprehensible. Yet what other conclusion could I reach when she would rather watch an episode of EastEnders than read him a story in bed?