‘Dr Å said lots of murderers are a bit mad, but that doesn’t make them insane. She says they should still go to prison.’
‘Max,’ said Millicent, ‘Max, my sweet, sweet child, it’s not because you’re insane, or because you’re bad. You made a wrong choice because you were behaving like a much bigger person.’
‘But that’s what grandiose
means
, Mum.’
‘I know that, Max, honey,’ she said. ‘My sweet little child.’
But I saw how she shivered, even as she tenderly held him to her breast.
At two, Max went into the living room to watch cartoons. Ten minutes later I found him asleep on the sofa, face down. The cat had stretched herself out along Max’s spine. She raised her head and chirruped softly at me. Then she blinked twice and rested her head in the nape of Max’s neck.
I went back into the kitchen. ‘Millicent,’ I said, ‘are you sure that we can protect Max?’
‘It’s our job,’ she said simply. ‘We’re his parents.’
‘Those kids who killed Jamie Bulger were the same age as Max, weren’t they? They weren’t protected by their parents,’ I said. ‘I mean, having parents didn’t stop them from going to prison. They were tried as adults.’
‘That was an experimental killing of a child. This is not at all the same thing. In the absence of better evidence, it’s a suicide. We can protect Max.’
I picked up a cigarette from Max’s packet, rolled it exploratively between forefinger and thumb. Fine threads of tobacco dropped from the tip. I looked over at the gas cooker. I would lower my head to light it in the flame, suck the smoke greedily down, stand up dizzy with the thrill of nicotine in my yearning veins.
Old friend.
I looked back down at the cigarette. ‘How many of these do you think he has?’
‘I don’t know. All of them, I guess. We lost a
lot
of cigarettes.’
I held the cigarette out to her. ‘You want it?’
‘More than you would know.’ She pushed it gently away. I put it back in the packet. Then I got up and went out into the garden, faced the wall on the opposite side from Bryce’s house, and threw it as hard as I could. It spun high. Three gardens at least, I reckoned, before I lost sight of it. Five, maybe.
Voices from Mr Ashani’s garden.
‘Sir, please remain calm.’
‘I am perfectly calm, young lady, but what you are suggesting is an outrage.’
‘I suggested nothing, Mr Ashani.’
‘You know perfectly well that you are drawing an inference.’
The voices were raised, but sounded distant. Perhaps they weren’t in the garden after all. I pulled myself up and looked over the wall. Mr Ashani’s garden was empty of people, but his kitchen window was open.
‘It’s no more than an informal conversation at this stage, sir.’
‘And yet you wish to search my house? You call this informal?’
‘If you would like me to formalise the situation, sir, that can be arranged.’
I dropped back down into my own garden. Shortly afterwards I heard Mr Ashani’s window slam shut.
The kitchen was dark after the searing summer light outside. I closed the door carefully behind me. ‘Alex,’ said Millicent, ‘what’s up?’
I walked through to the front room, pushed the curtain aside. There he was, being led to a marked police car. Mr Ashani must have seen me open the curtain, because he stopped.
He turned towards me. His eyes met mine.
He looked utterly humiliated.
Millicent was standing by the door to the garden, heavily backlit, waiting for me. ‘Is Max telling the truth?’ I said. ‘Were you going to leave me?’
She walked past me and out of the room.
House, marriage and children.
So small, in my case, and so imperfect. A tiny house, a marriage that didn’t look much like a marriage, and one single child. Still my only real achievement, though, because my television career was probably gone.
She was going to leave you.
I heard Millicent’s feet on the stairs. She hadn’t taken off her shoes. I thought about the rot in the floorboards, now spreading from the bathroom to the bedroom, of the window frames that barely fitted, of the pathological mess of the life we lived: God, but the
neglect
of it. The house was tidy now, but give it a week. Coming in through the front door, the neglect would be the first thing that hit you.
House, marriage and child.
She was going to leave you.
Had we neglected each other as we’d neglected the house? I didn’t think so, but how do you
know
? Only the very naive believe that love is all you need; but the other stuff, the boundaries and the fights, the sex and the food? Hadn’t we been good at that?
Perhaps Millicent had truly loved the neighbour. Perhaps she had seen in him a man who would not neglect her as I had done. Perhaps his tidy little house represented something else to her: a cleaner, better version of what a marriage could be.
Millicent returned. She was carrying the letter from Bryce.
‘I know that you loved him,’ I said. The fight was gone from me now. ‘Max knew too. That’s why he was so afraid.’
‘Oh, Alex.’
‘Didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘for a time I did.’ She nodded sadly to herself.
‘And you didn’t want me to know.’
‘And now you know,’ she said.
‘Were you going to leave me?’
She handed Bryce’s letter to me. ‘You forgot this,’ she said. ‘You forgot that I told him no.’
‘So it’s husband before lover,’ I read to myself, ‘duty before passion, routine before LIFE.’
‘Poor guy,’ I said. ‘He never guessed what was coming.’
‘I see the envy in his words,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see it then, but I see it now.’
‘He envied me?’
‘Yes, Alex, he really did.’
‘He thought I had it all?’
She nodded.
‘Do I?’ I said.
‘Alex, that is not a question I can answer for you.’
It was then that someone knocked at the front door.
I went through to the front room. Max was lying on his side now, the cat cradled in his arms.
Another knock. Max stirred slightly, but did not wake.
I looked through the eyehole. There was something familiar about the man standing on our front step, but his shape was so distorted by the lens of the eyehole, and my thoughts so disordered, that I could not at first discern who it was.
Breathe.
‘Ms Weitzman?’ He had seen the movement at the eyehole. ‘Ms Weitzman, it’s the police.’
I considered for a moment. I didn’t have to let him in, I thought.
The policeman knocked a third time. ‘Mr Mercer?’
I opened the door. The policeman who had interviewed Millicent in the garden. June’s boss. He looked past me into the front room.
‘Alex, is your wife at home?’
I considered this for a moment. On balance, I decided, Millicent wasn’t. Not for the police. Not right now.
‘Not really,’ I said.
I stepped out past him on to the street and pulled the door closed behind me. The lock clicked into place. I folded my arms across my chest.
Where’s the warrant, porco?
‘My son,’ I said, as if that explained it. We stood looking at each other for a moment. He was as smart as I was dishevelled, pinstriped in the afternoon daze. I wondered what sort of house he lived in.
He produced a small envelope from his inside jacket pocket. Windowed. Addressed to Millicent.
‘Well, this is weird,’ I said.
‘How so, Mr Mercer?’
‘My day’s been all about little envelopes today. I’ll give this to Millicent.’
He handed me a business card, then wished me goodbye.
‘Who was that?’ said Millicent, as I walked back into the kitchen.
‘The officer who interviewed you. The man.’
‘You really never got his name? Jeez. What did he want?’
‘Derek. His name’s Derek. I really don’t know what he wanted. Polite as ever, mind. He didn’t offer me counselling this time. But he did give me this.’ I handed her the envelope.
‘Huh,’ said Millicent.
‘They’re interviewing Mr Ashani. I think they implied they thought he had done it.’
‘Wow,’ she said, ‘that’s kind of desperate.’
I sucked at my nail. ‘If they’re going to accuse Mr Ashani, do you think one of us should do the noble thing?’
‘What in the world are you talking about?’
‘We can’t let him go down for our crime.’
‘He won’t.’
‘He had motive, and he had opportunity. He had his own keys, for God’s sake. And an iron.’
‘And he didn’t do it.’ Millicent was staring at me, slowly shaking her head.
‘Millicent, I think maybe I need to confess to the murder of Bryce so that some sort of justice could be done.’
‘No, Alex.’
‘If Max can’t take the consequences, I can. We
did
this to him.’
‘Again, no. What is it with you? No one is going to jail.’
‘But someone should, and Max mustn’t, and Mr Ashani can’t take the fall for that.’
‘They’ll interview him under caution. He’ll be out in hours.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘I’m sure of that.’
Millicent held the corners of the envelope between the thumb and middle finger of her right hand. She tipped it experimentally one way, then the next. ‘Alex, did the police ever ask you about the tape adhesive on the breaker switch?’
‘No.’
‘That’s a little curious, right? If they think it’s a homicide? And they are kind of clutching at straws if they’re accusing Mr Ashani.’ She was shaking the envelope gently.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Alex, it’s a suicide. That’s what we have to think. That’s what we have to teach Max to think. That’s what the police are going to have to think, once they’re through accusing the neighbours. Don’t go screwing with a version of the truth that works. For everyone. Look.’
‘Oh.’ Dulled a little by the opacity of the paper in the envelope’s window was a clean metal edge. White gold and sapphires. My grandmother’s bracelet.
‘I think they closed our file.’
‘He didn’t tell me that.’
‘Yeah, Alex, I think he just did.’ She opened the envelope with great care and slid the bracelet out into her left hand. Then she dropped it into my right hand. ‘Look.’
I cupped the bracelet in both hands. ‘If I hadn’t been so angry, none of this would have happened.’
‘Alex, you
have
to get real. No one is going to prison. We are not
that
family, and you are not
that
man.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You sweet, confused fuck.’ She laughed. ‘I mean,
you
? In prison? That just isn’t going to work, for you, or for us. Like you wouldn’t go to pieces. Get serious, Alex. I can’t do this alone, and Max can’t do it without a father.’
‘Maybe not.’
Then she became very formal. ‘Alex, there is something I would like for you to do for me.’ She raised her right arm, and I opened the tiny gold catch, slipped the bracelet on to her wrist.
Millicent’s eyes were shining. I laughed.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Stupid, right?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not stupid at all.’ The catch slid into place.
MW.
Millicent Weitzman.
My wife.
We spent two hours constructing the big lie. Mostly it was Millicent who spoke, and mostly I agreed. The lie had one major flaw. If Max ever confessed to someone outside the family he was finished; and then we, as a family, would be finished too. The truth was our enemy now; the truth would not set us free.
Max could not now reach adulthood as the untroubled soul we wanted him to be. ‘That train left,’ Millicent said matter-of-factly, and of course she was right. We would never now be the classic
good-enough
parents you read about in books. We would neurotically police his friends and, when the time came, his girlfriends. There would be no more shrinks, no one to whom Max could unburden himself: from now on he had only us. But the alternative was so much worse.
Millicent burned Max’s book. She had dried the sink thoroughly with an old pair of pants from the laundry basket, and crushed the pages into balls, making a loose pyramid on the bottom. Then she lit the pyramid at the four corners with a lighter that Max had hidden on top of a high cupboard.
I passed her the five pages that Max had cut from the book; she made balls of them and added them to the fire in the sink. Tiny angry fires reflected back at me from Millicent’s dark irises; highlights in her hair burned red. There was a strange calm about her now. She knew what she had to do. When there was nothing left but brittle balls of ash she turned on the tap and we watched them collapse and fleck into the steel sink, carried by the water in tiny flakes out of our house and out of our lives.
Only then did she let me take her in my arms. Only then did she cry for what was lost.
The rest of the day ran with delicate precision. Millicent rang Arla at four and told her we would meet her in town at six. We had woken Max and explained to him what was going to happen to him, and what he had to do and to say. He listened to what we told him; he did not ask a single question.
Millicent embraced Arla when we met. Then she held out to Arla the letter she had written her when she arrived in Rhode Island.
‘Half a lifetime away,’ she said. ‘Here.’
Arla took the letter, and tried to apologise to Millicent. It was all good, Millicent said. There was nothing to discuss and no more apologies needed.
We drank overpriced beer at a Chinese restaurant with worn carpets and spectacular food. Arla half-filled Max’s tea cup with beer, and Max sipped delicately at it throughout the meal. I remember looking around, and thinking how happy we all looked, how like a family.
Soon I shall be gone.
Bryce had been planning to move – that was the worst of it. If Max had not acted, his mother’s seducer would have melted from our lives. Millicent’s decision had been made and so too had Bryce’s. Max, I thought, why couldn’t you just wait?
Still, it was good to have a plan.
Arla was gone. Her flight left Heathrow at ten; she had woken Max at six to say goodbye; she had not woken Millicent and me.