The Museum of Doubt (22 page)

You’d best all come and get your dinner, said Mary.

They went through to the dining room and ate smoked salmon. Mary cleared the plates away and brought out a casserole and the police came. Gordon went to the door. It was two constables, a man and a woman. He invited them through to the lounge.

We were just having dinner, he said.

Your wife called us, said the man constable.

You must know my brother Bruce, said Gordon. Bruce Stanefield. He’s CID.

It’s all under investigation, said the woman constable. We can’t say anything just now. I’m sure he’ll be back at work soon enough.

He’s on full pay while he’s suspended, said Gordon.

I never knew him personally, said the man.

I wondered whether maybe the lads were getting together some kind of support fund for his family while he’s suspended, said Gordon. I’d like to contribute. He pulled a folded 50-pound note out of his pocket and held it in the air between the three of them. Nobody said anything for a bit.

Kind of support fund, said Gordon again.

We’re from the uniform branch, said the man. You should
go to plain clothes directly. He glanced at the woman. Right Wendy?

Aye. You’re best going to them, Mr Stanefield. See we’re not supposed to carry messages from the general public. I know the DI’s your brother and that but there’s all sorts of rules about us taking money, eh Lindsay.

Fair enough then, said Gordon, putting the note away. Was it my son you were wanting to see? It was his car got its tyres slashed.

Aye. Aye, said Lindsay. Only we got another call from your neighbours up the road, the Willmans, saying your son beat up their kids. They came home with their faces all bruised. And the kids say it was you that slashed the tyres.

It’s awful cold out tonight. I’m not a young man. I’m a pensioner. Where’s the motive, eh, son? Where’s my motive?

You understand we had to ask, Mr Stanefield, said Wendy.

You know the things kids’ll say.

Och yes but we had to ask, said Lindsay.

That’s OK, said Gordon. I went out to check my son’s car was OK and I saw these two shadowy figures slashing the tyres and I went back inside.

Could you give us a description?

No. They were like I said shadowy. But I remember there was this strong smell of burning leaves.

You don’t think your son’d mind popping down to the station with us for a chat?

It’s not the best time but what can you do? I’ll go and fetch him.

He’s never been known to be violent, has he? Aggressive?

Kenneth? Our Kenneth? Aggressive? The boy couldn’t punch his way out of a meringue cake.

Right.

That’s maybe why he carries a knife in his pocket. Self-defence, I suppose.

A hunting knife?

No, nothing like that. One of those DIY tools, what’s it called, a Henley knife. I mean when you’ve had a bit to drink like he has tonight you can lower your guard maybe and then you need some extra protection, right.

The constables stood up and put their hats on. If you’d just fetch him, said Lindsay.

Gordon went back to the dinner table. They want you to nip down the station with them, he said to Kenneth.

You what? I just about got fucking killed back there.

Language, Kenneth, said Mary.

I can’t help it, Mum, you know that, when I feel strongly about something. I haven’t even started on the casserole. They should be out chasing the psychopaths that slashed my tyres.

They’ll be wanting a statement, I suppose, said Mary. You remember how your uncle Bruce used to operate.

Christ if Uncle Bruce had anything to do with it I’d need a crash helmet before I went down there.

That’s no way to speak about your uncle. He’s twice the brains his brother has and it’s not his fault about the alkie.

Can I go with him? said Julie.

Best not, said Gordon. They’ll bring him back soon enough.

I’m not budging, said Kenneth.

Don’t worry, we’ll look after Julie, said Gordon. You’d both best spend the night here, you can have the spare room.

Maybe they could interview you here, said Mary.

I’m not going anywhere, said Kenneth. He started cutting up a piece of meat on his plate.

They’d think you were hiding something if you didn’t go, said Gordon. That’s what I’d think.

It’s really delicious this, Mum, said Kenneth.

Might affect your insurance, said Gordon.

OKAY! shouted Kenneth, throwing his knife and fork on the floor. OKAY! I’LL GO, RIGHT? Keep your bloody shirts on. He stomped out. They followed him. The police were waiting in the hall. Their blue lights flashed through the glass in the door.

Mr Stanefield? said Lindsay.

OK, I’m coming, I’m coming, said Kenneth. This’d better not take long.

Gordon caught Wendy’s eye and made a gesture. It’ll be all right, he said. That shouting was completely out of character. He didn’t think, the wee brat’d never been able to hold his drink. God if his brother’d been on duty he’d have been on the phone, out with the balaclavas and teach his nephew the difference between a boy and a man and not to poach his elders’ and betters’ women.

You’ll bring him back, won’t you? said Julie to Wendy.

Of course, said Wendy. It’s all routine. They went out to the police car and drove away.

I’ll get a taxi home, said Julie.

You will not, said Gordon. You’ll stay here with us till Kenneth gets back. We can’t have you sitting at home on your own worrying about him.

I should have gone with him.

Gordon’s right, love, said Mary, looking at Gordon and narrowing her eyes. Come on and we’ll have some Bailey’s and coffee. We’ve got some Amaretto if you want.

Gordon yawned and stretched. I’m off to bed, he said.

At ten o’clock? said Mary.

It’s been a long day.

You didn’t get up till half nine this morning.

I’ve been to work.

You haven’t been to work. You haven’t got any work. You’re retired. Never mind him, Julie, let’s go through and get a drink.

Night night, said Gordon.

Night, said Julie, looking over her shoulder at him and smiling. Gordon went upstairs to the room where he’d left the drill, picked a spot at eye level and began drilling a hole in the wall. The work went well. In a minute he’d penetrated the first layer of plaster. He got stuck in a bit of timber. Christ why did they not just make walls with holes in so folk could watch each other? They did it with doors. He moved a few inches and started on another hole. This was the one. Straight through.

What the hell are you doing to my walls? said Mary.

Oh fucking shite Smithie, can you no leave me alone even for a minute? said Gordon, stopping the drilling, leaving the bit stuck in the plaster.

I’m not Smithie. I’m Mary, your wife. Smithie’s dead. D’you not remember? He stuck a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head off. Mary came over and took the drill out of the wall.

These lovers, eh, said Gordon, putting his hands in his pockets and looking at her, puckering his lips. How’d she crept up on him like that? Jungle training she had. Moving without the snap of a twig. She’d been practising. While he’d been out on the golf course she’d been practising moving silently round the house. It wasn’t fair.

You won’t get a glimpse of Julie’s knickers that way, said Mary, leaning against the doorframe and toying with the drill. It’s all fitted wardrobes on the other side.

Gordon sat down on the chair at Kenneth’s old desk. There was still that Iron Maiden poster hung up over it. The boy’d
never had a poster of a lassie hung up there and he got a Julie. The injustice of it was so terrible Gordon felt like greeting.

These lovers, eh, he said, turning to Mary. How old it is.

Gordon woke up. There’d been a dream with a white and mint-fresh-green plastic cover for a domestic appliance with an insect stuck in a crevice inside which he’d been trying to get out with the end of a spoon handle. That’d gone on too long. Mary was up and moving about. It was barely light. Gordon just opened his eyes so’s he’d be able to see but they’d still look shut. Mary was lying on the floor on her back, holding her knees in her hands and pulling them down towards her. She pulled and grunted with the effort and rocked back and forth for a second and let the knees go. She did it again. She could have put a tracksuit on. The thighs on her.

Give us a break, eh, said Gordon.

It’s my back, said Mary. I can’t sleep, I have to do my exercises.

What’s the time?

Half seven.

Jesus.

I’ve told you, it’s bloody sore. You’ve never had back problems.

I have so.

There’s no justice. You haven’t got piles or heart disease or arthritis and you’re the biggest bastard I know.

I get headaches.

Aye, you know what that is? That’s your brain stotting against your skull, trying to escape.

I was dreaming.

Oh aye. What about?

Plastic.

Mary pulled her knees tightly down towards her chest and grunted through clenched teeth.

There’s been no word from Kenneth, she said.

Eh?

Kenneth, your son Kenneth.

There was something good in this, a prize, something that came before the plastic. What was it? Gordon turned over and put his arm out onto the quilt.

He should’ve called. They’re allowed a phone call.

Who? Gordon had something hell of a good coming to him but what form it was there was no remembering. He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes with his fingertips.

Kenneth. That’s nine hours he’s been down there now. Julie’ll be worried sick.

Gordon swung out of the quilt, stood up and made a run for the door. When he got there Mary was already leaning against it with her arms folded.

She’ll be wanting her breakfast, said Gordon.

You can’t even open a yoghurt carton.

I can.

Aye, I’ve seen you. With your teeth. From the bottom. Why can’t you leave her alone? She’s not for you. You won’t get in to see her, she’s locked in. Get dressed and come down.

Where’s the key?

Mary shook her head, put on an acrylic dressing gown with pictures of pagodas on it and went out of the room. Gordon put
on blue jeans and a cream polo shirt and a light blue Lacoste cardigan and went to the door of Julie’s room. He turned the doorhandle and pushed. It was locked. He knocked.

Julie! he said.

Hello, said Julie from far away, like she was half under the covers still, like he’d woken her.

Can I get you something?

No, I’ll come down.

Kenneth’s on the phone.

Right, she said, I’ll take it here. Sure enough there was a phone in the room, the planning of it was meticulous from beginning to end. He was in the hands of a master. What was the use. He started off downstairs, hearing her pick the phone up and say hello and hello and put it down and call out to him that they must have been cut off, she’d come down. He shook his head and laughed and kicked the skirting board with the toe of his slipper as he came round into the hall.

In the kitchen Mary was putting orange halves onto a machine which was making them into juice.

Can I have a shot? said Gordon.

Your paper’s on the table. What d’you want to eat?

Kippers. Gordon sat down and picked up the paper.

Kippers. Mary laughed. I’ll make you some bacon and eggs.

Julie’s greeting and screaming upstairs cause you locked her in. Where’s the key?

Screaming is she, said Mary, clenching her teeth as she pressed the fruit onto the growling spindle.

Give us the key, eh, I’ll go up and let her out.

D’you want juice?

No. Gordon found the obituaries column in the paper. He grinned. Hey Smithie, he said, mind that old cunt used to teach us Latin?

Mary turned round with a gouged-out half-orange in her hand. Looking at Gordon she took hold of the lapel of her dressing gown, put the orange down, reached in and took out her left breast. The broad puckered brown nipple stared at Gordon.

I’m not Smithie, Gordon, Mary said. He was a man. He didn’t have any of these. D’you see that? D’you understand what I’m saying?

I’d forgotten you had them on you, said Gordon.

I know you did, said Mary, tucking her breast in and going back to the oranges. You forget too much. People who’ve forgotten a good sight less than you are bouncing round the Royal Ed. And I won’t have you using words like cunt in my kitchen either.

How––

And you don’t speak a word of Latin.

I do: Friends, Romans, countrymen. Listen if Smithie had a shotgun how come he never gave me a shot?

Julie came in. Has Kenneth not called back? she said.

How did you get out? said Gordon.

Out of what? said Julie.

Your door was locked.

I’m sorry. It’s a habit from hotels. I always lock the door. I can’t sleep otherwise.

Might have been a fire, said Gordon. Here, come and sit down. He grabbed a chair and pulled it close to him, patting the seat. Julie glanced at Mary and took another chair at the far corner of the table. Mary put a glass of orange juice and a toast rack in front of her.

Julie, I should have said, borrow some of my clothes, said Mary. You don’t want to be wearing that nice dress two days running.

She does, said Gordon.

Shut up, said Mary. Just go up to our room, my clothes are in the units on the left, and help yourself. Pair of jeans probably for a Sunday.

Thanks Mrs Stanefield.

Mary.

I’ll go and help, said Gordon, getting up and lunging forward. Mary pulled a knife from a mahogany block on the sideboard and flung it at the floor. It landed upright in the parquet tiles just in front of Gordon’s foot and quivered there, the blade imbedded half an inch into the wood. The three of them looked down at it.

Slipped out of my hand, I’m sorry, said Mary. Away you go upstairs, Julie. Gordon stood and watched his wife while she came over, tugged the knife out and put it back in its place. She’d been practising. Well then, if that was the way of it, two could play at that game. Once he found out what game it was he’d be onto them like he used to be. But did she have to take those legs away? They were so long and smooth. One wee stroke was all he’d been after. He sat down and opened the paper.

Need to go up the garden centre again, he said.

What for?

What not for!

How about Kenneth?

Ah, he’ll not want to come.

He’s at the police station still. D’you not think they should have let him out by now? I’ll take the car and go round there with Julie.

I’ll take her.

Mary didn’t say anything. She broke eggs into the frying pan. After a while she said: I’ll put any money on those refugees for the ones slashed Kenneth’s tyres.

Gordon was reading the livestock prices. What a bargain a sheep was! So much cheaper to buy a whole one at the auctions than get it in penny packets at the superstore. They knew how to screw the punters right enough. Maybe there was some angle in there for a middleman with a bit of capital.

Andrew said he’d see they never got permission to put them there, said Mary. And then look. Outvoted on the committee. We’ll all be murdered in our beds. What’s his name that Shiltie calls himself a Christian minister and he fills our church hall with foreigners. If folk want to be refugees they can do it in their own country. We never got German refugees coming over here during the war.

She put bacon rashers into the pan and they sprayed out fat loudly. Gordon looked up.

You’d be better buying a whole one, he said.

A whole what, said Mary. Here’s your coffee.

Julie came in and sat down. She was wearing a pair of Mary’s jeans and one of her black handknitted jumpers that looked liked it’d been caught on the barbed wire trying to get away. Gordon glanced at her and looked back to the paper. The jeans and the jumper were baggy on her. It wasn’t the same Julie as it’d been with the legs and the dress and the breasts and the lips and the arse on her. It was a different lassie. It was a skinny girl with her hair out of place not knowing where she was or what she wanted. How could Smithie take that Julie with the legs away without her being dead and without there being two of them, it was like there was only one of them at the heart of it all but they’d gone off on different roads, the Julie of the black dress on one by herself without Gordon, to a place he couldn’t go, and the Julie of the baggy jeans with Gordon and Mary, getting older and more vulnerable to attack with every passing day. It was awful quiet in the kitchen, why was that? He coughed.

See eh, see they’re wasting our money on the river, he said, flicking a story in the paper with his fingernail. Literally throwing it down the river. Stopping folk dumping stuff in it.

Is there a river here? said Julie.

It’s the only thing that keeps this part of town clean. Imagine if you couldn’t dump stuff there, eh Smithie, eh – Mary. All the dead dogs and cats and the old prams and mattresses and household appliances piling up in folk’s gardens. And now they’re looking to put up signs against it with our money. Literally throwing it down the river.

It’s not easy to clean a river once it’s polluted, said Julie. We had one in our town. The council spent tons of money on it and it’s really pure now. It’s great. It’s amazing, you can catch salmon.

Never. Really? said Mary.

Yeah, it’s true. The man who caught it got fined because he didn’t have a licence to fish there but the magistrate said it was a bonus for the community.

Gordon put an old fridge in our river.

I never, said Gordon.

I was with you, said Mary. You heaved it off the bridge at one o’clock in the morning.

You’re imagining things. I wouldn’t have done that. It’s good to have a river that’s pure.

He’s havering, Julie, said Mary. He doesn’t know what purity is.

I do so. I do so know what purity is.

What is it then?

Purity, it’s when all the germs are killed.

Mary took Julie to the police station in the car and told Gordon to wait till they got back. After they’d gone Gordon went upstairs and into the guest room. Julie had made the bed.
Gordon pulled back the covers, pressed his face into the sheets and inhaled. It smelled the same as their own sheets when they’d been washed. He looked around for the black dress. He couldn’t find it. He went downstairs and found the washing machine already working. He knelt down and looked at the dress slapping against the glass as the drum churned it round. How small it was with the water on it. He put the palm of his hand on the warm door and felt the humming and sloshing of the water. It was incredible. All that time Smithie had a shotgun and not once had he given Gordon a shot. What had he killed himself for? Who was he living with if it wasn’t Smithie anyway? Ah, the woman Mary. Left-footer by the sound of it. And now the jungle warfare. He didn’t much fancy the idea of sticking a gun barrel in your mouth. The metallic taste of it on your tongue. Or were you supposed to put your tongue inside it? What if you threw up before it went off, eh, from the fear. Ach Smithie. He was a good pal till that boy came on the scene, the wee fucker. And he’d seemed a nice enough lad, like those Willman sprogs. Eager to please. They betrayed you in the end.

Gordon put on his waxed jacket and a tartan scarf and a cap and went out. Kenneth’s car still sat deflated at the kerb. Gordon grinned. He ran the toe of his shoe round the rim of the exhaust pipe. Better not, eh. Too dirty and a hell of a lot bigger calibre. He turned and headed up towards the river.

At the stone bridge he leaned over the rails and looked down at the black and yellow scum-flecked torrent slipping through the rocks and branches and household appliances. Looked like a washing machine down there. Money you could save putting the machine in the river and just putting the clothes in and leaving the doors open. He heard a sound behind him and looked round. A boy about Kenneth’s age was trying to climb over the rails.

Hey! shouted Gordon. There’s salmon in that river! He ran
across the road and grabbed the boy’s black leather jacket just when the balance of his weight was tipping over the edge. The boy didn’t resist, he sat there on his arse with his legs dangling over the edge, like a mealbag, swinging whichever way Gordon pulled him. He had half a mind just to push the lad off anyway to see what would come of it but letting the river fill up with suicides wasn’t going to impress Julie of the legs if she ever came back, especially suicides that hadn’t washed, like this one by the look of him.

Fuck off, said the boy, like Kenneth, the pansy.

None of that cheek. Get back on the pavement, said Gordon. That river’s designated for purification and it’s good so you keep out of it.

The boy laughed like a brightly-plumaged bird of the rainforest and fell backwards off the railings onto the pavement. Gordon let him fall and the boy lay there cackling. He had a plastic carrier bag containing something square and heavy fastened to his neck with a piece of clothesline and some elaborate knots. He stopped laughing and looked at Gordon seriously.

I’m very clean, he said. I have a shower every morning and every evening and sometimes in the middle of the day if I’m at home. I change my underwear every day. It’s important to be clean if you’re going to show that the white race is superior. He narrowed his eyes.

Get up, said Gordon.

Think I’m ashamed? – ’cause I amn’t, said the boy, getting up. He loosened the cords round his throat, took off the rope and opened the carrier bag. There were leaflets inside. He took one out and handed it to Gordon. Here, he said. Support the master race! He laughed.

Gordon looked at the leaflet. It was a single piece of paper folded in half. On the front was a Xeroxed sketch of a boy lying
on the ground stripped to the waist with something like blood pouring from him and a group of men standing round grinning. One of the men had a turban on. At the top in big letters it said ENOUGH! WE MUST DEFEND OUR PEOPLE! On the other side there were several columns of small dense print and a picture of a row of young lads wearing dark shirts and swastika armbands and holding knives above their heads.