Sing Like You Know the Words (24 page)

-He doesn’t remember me
David.

It was true, but now that he
spoke, the voice was familiar.

-It can’t be. Abbas?

-Hello my friend. It’s not your
fault I have changed so much. Everyone calls me Albert these days.
It was easier in certain circumstances and the name has stuck.

David laughed, and said that he
had to speak with some of the other company but he would catch them
later. For once Matthew did not resent being the spare social
appendage for the evening.

-You too have a lot of catching
up to do, David said.

But the next day, thinking it
over, Matthew realised that Abbas, or Albert as he now was, had
said very little about himself or what he had been doing; only that
he travelled a lot. It had been fascinating to talk with him at
length, and in a way he was just like before: always wanting to
talk about the world of the mind, forever analysing the world
around him. Only now he spoke about serious things with great
levity. At times Matthew was not even sure that he was not being
quietly made fun of. Yes, they had spoken about politics, about
travel, and about the world in general, but about Albert himself;
who he was these days and what had made him so; he had said
nothing.

Over the next weeks they saw a
lot of Albert. In the years he’d been away, he seemed to have read
and seen everything. On general principles, Matthew decided he must
be some kind of fraud. He made pronouncements about the world in
general that sounded as if they came from books, without any
apparent self-consciousness. No one had such a range of knowledge;
or if they did, they would not express it so freely as Albert was
in the habit of doing. And why the reticence about himself? No-one
even knew where he was living.

But Albert was good company and
more interesting than the self- important businessmen who Matthew
normally found himself stranded with at David´s. In his old
fashioned way he was as charming as David himself. So here was
another problem for Matthew to brood on: why did he sometimes find
himself downright irritated by the man? Perhaps it was no more than
his own weak character that gave in to petty jealousy. First David
and now Abbas, or whatever he wants to call himself, he thought.
I´m becoming a bitter and resentful person; blaming the world for
my own failings. There´s no reason for me to be suspicious of
either of them.

***

In one way at least, the
transformation of skinny, serious Abbas into fat, funny Albert, was
like that of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. Although
Albert´s speech sounded pompous, he took nothing seriously,
including himself. His conversation fluttered around every subject.
He seemed to know everything and have an original opinion on it
all, but he had also discovered the knack of ending a monologue
before it became tedious.

He took a particular delight in
talking to Matthew, for no good reason that Matthew could see.
Perhaps he was amused by Matthew´s clumsy, earnest manner; his
inability to make polite conversation or to keep his mouth shut
when silence was the best option. Neither had a regular partner and
both spent much of their free time at David´s house. David referred
to them more than once as his resident professors, as if he were a
renaissance prince and they his tame savants.

They all spent nights together
in the downstairs room at the back of the house that David liked to
call his snug. It was the shabbiest room in the house, too small
and poorly lit to be of much use, but all the social evenings
seemed to gravitate there in the end. A small bar was set up
against the back wall, with an impressive selection of spirits on
the shelves behind. As students, none of them had drunk spirits,
but now David took pride in offering a range of single malts as
well as a selection of obscure liquors and mixers. There was a
small glass fronted refrigerator for the beer.

So far as Patricia was
concerned, the furniture in the snug was the stuff of nightmares:
David described it as comfortably ruined: mis-matched leathers and
outmoded cloths shiny with wear, but cosy enough. The place was a
male refuge from the prim chic of the rest of the house, and
Patricia respected it as such, claiming that this was cheaper and
safer than allowing David a shed in which to develop home
improvement skills.

Somehow Matthew and Albert were
pitted against one another, verbally sparring all the time. Albert
said Matthew was the only journalist he knew who had no curiosity
about the world around him. Matthew replied that his job was not to
investigate things but provide words that were a comforting
backdrop to everyday lives, a reassurance that everything was as
his readers believed it to be. As he said the words he thought
about Ralph telling him the same thing and how he’d felt when he
first heard it. Matthew joked about the old Abbas he had known.

-You´ve changed so much. You
used to be far too busy with important things like politics and
economics and I don´t know what other –ics. You didn´t have time
for trivialities like literature, and yet now you seem quite the
authority.

-It´s true I used to imagine
that the world was governed by logical principles if you could only
understand them. I even thought I might be destined to play some
small part in the great play. When one becomes disabused of such
illusions, the consolations of literature become a comfort.

-You don´t believe in reason
now?

-I´m afraid not. You know how
the human brain developed: by adding new parts to the old. In the
front part here we have grown fantastic abilities to do and think,
but the further back you go, towards the spine, is where our
motivations sit: the primitive lizard brain that has hardly changed
at all. And so we live in chaos, driven on by urges we don´t
understand and hardly control.

-It sounds like a frightening
world.

-But I came to see it as
inevitable. If we evolved so far as to be fully logical, we´d have
no reason to do anything. We´d only sit in our rooms and we waste
away.

Sometimes it seemed that Albert
practically lived at the house for long periods: then he would
disappear suddenly. When he came back he might pick up the thread
of a conversation that he´d been having with Matthew three weeks
earlier, without any explanation. He seemed to work on a different
time scale to the rest of them.

One night there were four of
them in the snug: Albert, David and Matthew, and some woman whose
name Matthew did not remember, though he half suspected that she
was hanging on because she was interested in him. She was very
drunk. They all were; even David could not have been sober, though
he gave no sign of intoxication. Matthew supposed that Patricia was
somewhere in the house, probably working on a legal brief.

David insisted on serving more
good whisky, though none of them needed or even wanted it. The
woman asked for some water. Matthew decided that she was probably
going to be sick in a short time and resolved to keep well away
from her. Albert was saying something about eastern systems of
belief compared to western thought. It was one of those meandering
conversations that take their own course; so that the end seems to
bear no relation to the beginning, unless perhaps the end and the
beginning are in the same place.

He was talking about being able
to accept the truth of different propositions even if they were
contradictory. Albert claimed that western thought lost more than
it gained by insisting on their being only one version of the
truth. He said that approach was too literal minded. David
commented that it was useful to have a single consistent world view
if, for example, you wanted to build a bridge or send a rocket into
space.

Albert was speaking with the
exaggerated dignity of the truly inebriated. He claimed that the
world itself was contradictory and inconsistent. To understand it
you must be able to maintain beliefs on different levels. Being
comfortable with ambiguity, he called it. He was playing to his
audience as usual, carried away by the sound of his own words: You
could see that David was enjoying himself too. Matthew thought that
most of what Albert was saying sounded impressive enough, without
actually meaning anything. Now David interrupted.

-I´m not against mysticism, I´ve
had mystical experiences myself. The effect has been formative. I
remember once, I must have been about thirteen, and we were on a
family holiday in Lakeland. My mother had just died and I was
pretty upset and confused. She was very young. Anyway, everyone was
off on one of my father’s route marches across three counties, and
I refused to go. I was sulking I suppose. But later on in the day I
went out walking on my own in the hills and the bad weather came
in, and I became lost. I was up there for hours; no proper
clothing, and suffering from hypothermia and exhaustion. I even
started hallucinating I think. The point is I survived, even though
I had no right to. You see I’d done every stupid thing, and
everything that could go wrong did, and by all logic I should have
died, but I didn’t. And you know, ever since that, I’ve had the
feeling that it wasn’t me getting myself through the situation, but
that I was saved. And I came to think that if I was saved, it must
have been for a purpose.

-He tells a different version of
that story every few weeks, said Matthew, who had become quite
tired of hearing it. Just be grateful you heard the short one.

-But the point of the story,
David insisted, is that it’s true; it expresses a truth.

Matthew did not say anything. He
only wondered whether, in David’s mind, being true and expressing a
truth meant the same thing.

***

Rodney had warned Patricia about
Smith before their meeting. He went so far as to say that she might
not thank him for instructing her in this case. That was stupid.
Rodney was the defence solicitor and Patricia would be defence
counsel in a murder trial – it was the chance she had been waiting
for. Hardly surprising if the defendant was not a charming person.
The sort of lawyer who worried about that would have no place at
the criminal bar.

According to Rodney, his client
had insisted on having a female brief speak for him.

-Maybe he thinks he’ll be able
to bully me into running some stupid argument he’s dreamed up.
We’ll see about that.

Rodney smiled. He thought of
himself as something of an uncle figure for Patricia, but he knew
from the specific enquiry he had made of her clerk that she had not
dealt with a case like this before. She was bright enough, but
talking as if she knew it all fooled neither of them.

-Smith is a nasty piece of work
even by the standard of your average violent criminal, he warned
her. Most murderers are not like proper crims. They just do the one
crime, usually at home, and maybe it’s due to bad luck or bad
character or both. Often they deny guilt only because they can’t
face up to it, even in their own heads. With that type you might
think, if they let him go, probably no chance he’d do it again. Not
that I’m saying that’s what should happen. Anyway, with Smith, you
don’t have that impression.

-Well, he’s not most murderers
is he? He’s an alleged offender who is our client, and I believe
he’s saying he is not guilty. So it’s our job to get him acquitted
if we can.

Rodney only snorted at this.

They were at the prison.
Naturally Smith was remanded in custody. Every time Patricia went
there, she had the thought that for a first time inmate, the place
must be enough to make them doubt there own innocence and maybe
everything else they thought they knew. Perhaps that was the point
of it: the combination of Victorian Gothic in the architecture and
Stalinist utilitarianism in the rooms and corridors, like this one
with its bare walls, sparse plastic and formica tables and chairs
that seemed too small for the room; tube metal framed with the
metal discreetly chained to the floor. Something miserable and
hopeless had been rubbed into the furniture by successive
generations of offenders. It wouldn’t drive you crazy so much as
make you think you may as well just give up the struggle against
fate.

Whilst they waited for the
guards to bring the prisoner, Patricia went over in her mind what
she knew about the case. Simple enough. Husband comes home from
work, argues with wife, stabs wife, wife dies. Families shouldn’t
argue around kitchen cutlery. Husband makes feeble attempt to
conceal body and flees. Daughter finds wife dead when she comes
home from school. Husband arrested.

Soon, Smith arrived in person:
an ugly, scrawny man with an overlong neck and thinning black hair
that might have been dyed. Patricia had the impression that his
eyes were very cold, too calm, and flickering about the room all
the time as if looking for something he could use. She told herself
the appearance meant nothing. He’s taken a life; don’t fall into
the trap of thinking there is particular significance in his face
just because of that fact. But still, a jury are not going to like
him. She tried to imagine what he might have looked like to the
victim, when they were first married: she couldn’t do it.

Smith walked up to them and sat
down at the free chair, ignoring their polite standing up by way of
greeting. Still he had not met the gaze of either of them. He sat
facing slightly away from Patricia; then he inclined his head and
grinned at her in a cockeyed way. Perhaps that is an acceptable
greeting in his circle, she thought. Don’t be too quick to judge:
sometimes nervousness comes over as aggression.

Smith turned to Rodney for a
moment.

-Pretty enough, he said. How’s
it going Mr Jackson? Did you get my smokes?

-There you go Oscar, call me
Rodney, his solicitor replied.