The Museum of Doubt (4 page)

You didn’t have to call it a museum, said Jack. You must have been wanting people to come. You don’t doubt you need visitors, do you?

No, said Adela, shaking her head. Her eyes were deep and bright and looking into his, where she was falling from altitude towards an unlit continent, self-eclipsed, falling and knowing nothing of the forest canopy about to catch her, only certain it was warm and filled with prey.

D’you know what I need?

Maybe I do. I don’t know what I need but I know what I feel like.

Jack reached out an index finger and placed it between her
lips. Adela opened her mouth a little and stroked the finger moist in a pout. A message of salt travelled into her and the answer was raw hunger. She closed her eyes, the moon rose and she was high with longing to wound a creature. She opened and closed her jaws and pressed her teeth into the finger, wanting to meet bone, wanting the knuckle to break. She felt blood run down her chin and the hunger stopped. She opened her eyes and saw Jack’s head hung back, his finger unharmed and unmarked. There was no blood.

Oh, your finger, she said. She took it in one warm fist and squeezed it, kissed the tip. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I wanted to bite your finger off but I didn’t want to hurt you.

Jack raised his head. You didn’t hurt me any more than I wanted to be hurt, he said. Stand up.

Adela got up and Jack unfastened her jeans and took them down. He touched her vagina with his lips and looked up at her. I’d like to fuck you with my tongue, he said.

Yeah, go ahead, said Adela.

When they were tired they lay overlapped on the sofa facing each other, boy-thigh girl-thigh boy-thigh girl-thigh, elbows propping them up at either end.

I’m in sails, said Jack. With an ‘i’.

What is it you sell? said Adela.

I sell as much as anyone can ever get.

And how much does that cost?

It doesn’t cost anything. It’s just Life.

I don’t get it.

Life. Guaranteed to last a lifetime. All you can eat, all you can drink and all you can wear before you die.

But you’d get that anyway.

Would you? You haven’t.

I haven’t got life? Do I not seem alive to you? You thought I was alive enough when you cried my name a minute ago.

Jack looked away. His body slackened and tensed and his face closed, as if he was preparing to reshoulder an intolerable load after a moment’s rest. He said: You are alive. You’ll die one day like all the rest but you never got what they call a life. That’s what they’ve got, life. But you’ll live till you die. It’s not the same. You’re alive.

Adela shook her head. D’you want something to eat?

Jack shook his head. You can’t spare it.

There’s soup. You’ll have to have some.

Only if you let me pay.

Don’t be stupid.

Here, said Jack. He reached into his jacket and took out a small box. He held it out to Adela. This survived. Take it. For the soup.

Adela looked at the box for a while. OK, she said. She got up, put on her jeans and sweater, took the box and walked towards the kitchen.

Adela, said Jack. What was that last ornament you got rid of when you left your old place?

A gull. A grey and white porcelain gull with a yellow beak.

Some time later Adela went to call Jack through for the soup. He was gone. She looked in the morning for his tracks in the snow, but they had been covered up by the freshly fallen.

She opened the box and took out a grey and white porcelain gull with a yellow beak. She went up behind the house to the tall rocks, laid the gull on a flat place, took a heavy stone and pounded it to powder. By evening the weather turned and rainclouds crossed the ridge. Rain fell and washed the powdered porcelain off the rock, where it mixed with the melting snow and was carried away to the river on the floor of the glen.

When I see Arnold I remember the woman who could walk. I think about Jenny too of course, not that she looked anything like her dad. I haven’t seen her for a long time now. That was why I stopped the woman who could walk, to find out when the healing would be over and Jenny would come out. I didn’t go inside. I had nothing that needed healing then. Nothing that you would stand up and say you believed in Jesus for, or that you’d know if you’d been healed of. Praise the Lord! I can love the ones I didn’t love before, and stop loving the ones that didn’t love me! Hallelulia! I walked up to the hall entrance slowly, early, and I was reading the curved red letters on freshpasted white paper about Pastor Samuel’s Ark of Salvation when the woman who could walk walked out. I knew she could walk because she told me. She was big and mobile in skirt and sweater and her hands stuck in the pockets of her open raincoat which was flying behind her in the warm wind over the car park, her face was white and her mouth slightly open and she was staring straight ahead. She had a crutch tucked under her right arm. I had to catch her by the elbow to stop her.

Excuse me, d’you know how much longer it’s going on? I said.

She stopped, one foot lifted, balanced by my hand resting on her elbow – it was a soft, round elbow – and looked at me long enough to say: I can walk! before she walked, then ran, to her car and drove away. It was a straight slip road to the M8, a busy enough evening with no roadworks, and as far as I could understand from the paper next morning it happened within a couple of minutes of her merging with the flow that the juggernaut swung easily through the barriers and hit her car head on, with a combined speed of 150 miles per hour. I suppose Pastor Samuel might have said Well, I healed her, so the least she could’ve done was to have stayed to the end of the meeting. Now she walks, nay drives, with the Lord.

I was concerned for myself. I kept her back for half a second and the juggernaut hit her. In half a second a truck moving at 70 miles an hour travels its own length twice – that’s what Arnold told me when I shared this with him, a free sample. From her side she could have avoided the truck by being more polite. We were both in the wrong. I suffered by not knowing I’d have to wait quarter of an hour for Jenny to come out. The woman who could walk suffered by being conscious for at least 30 seconds of the sensation of the destruction of her body by an oncoming lorry (spontaneous Arnoldism.) Usually when I think about the woman who walked the thought is: I didn’t summon up the juggernaut, did I. You don’t guess the instant when northbound and southbound collide, like a single bolt of lightning. Only when I see Arnold I think about how maybe everything is equalled out in the end, not in a good way, and how easy it is to summon up an irresistible opposing force, after all.

What Siobhan said this one time, and the tenner pointing at my empty tumbler was sharp and fresh as a new razor, was even more ominous than Arnold lurking round the pub as he
was: Same one again? she said. Not Same again? but Same one again?

Ah, better not, last ferry and all. I looked down into the glass and dodgemed the sleek humps of ice around the bottom. The unnecessary One hung in the air.

Go on, said Siobhan. You sold a house today, didn’t you? Take a cab.

I sell a house most days. I sold one yesterday.

It was a big one, you said.

It was a big one. I felt like rewarding myself with a third g & t. But the taxis skin you for a ferry trip and it’s no better picking up a second one on the other side.

I can’t drive after three, I said.

Take a cab. Two gin and tonics please, she said. She’d seen the weakness in my face and got the order out the way so we could argue about it over a drink.

I don’t want to take a cab, I said, looking over at Arnold sitting by himself at the table by the cigarette machine. He was working, he had the yellow pad out in front of him. He turned and smiled at me. I looked at Siobhan.

It’s not the money, I said. I don’t like being screwed. I’ve got to take the car across. I’ve got a season ticket.

Well drive then, she said, holding the two glasses out in front of her.

But I can’t if I have a third drink, I said. I took one of the glasses from her.

Don’t drink it, she said.

I won’t, I said, and took a mouthful of the stuff and swallowed it down.

You’re so weak, she said, smiling and touching her earring.

You make it sound as if that’s good.

Oh, I love weak men.

So how do I get home?

I’ll give you a lift back.

I was very happy. It was easy to make me happy. Maybe I’d have four drinks and all in Siobhan’s company, and a free ride all the way to Kirkcaldy on the big white ship. There’d be time for one on the moon deck bar on the way over and we could sit there studying the constellations, talking. I was grinning too much too close into Siobhan’s heroic delighted face and turned again to Arnold. We smiled at each other and waved. I raised my glass to him. He raised his. It looked like water.

Great, I said to Siobhan. In the rush of it I almost said I love you, not meaning it like that, but instead said: Why did you say Same one again?

Confusion sluiced darkly into her face.

You said Same one again instead of Same again.

Did I?

Yes.

She looked into the middle distance, frowning, quiet for a while. So what? she said eventually.

I took a deep drink and went under, groping for something good.

We’re like sister and brother, you and me, I said.

She looked at me without saying anything for a few seconds, then put her drink in my free hand. Arnold’ll give you a lift, she said, and walked out the door.

I finished my gin, sat on a bar stool and started in on hers, raising the side without lipstick to my mouth, turning it to the side with lipstick. It tasted pretty much the same. I was watching Arnold. He was scribbling away with a pencil. The bar was full but the only person I knew was Arnold, sober as an ayatollah and his car parked outside.

Once there was a group of merchants who returned to the
borders of the empire after months spent crossing the great wilderness. Everyone wanted to know what it had been like. Och, it was all right, the merchants said. Hot deserts of course, cold mountains, wet jungle – still, we made it.

Folk listened to them politely, clapped them on the back and drifted back to their affairs. Some time later another group of merchants arrived. The locals gathered round – what was it like? Incredible, the merchants answered. Absolutely unbelievable. It was so hot that the beaks of the vultures would soften and fuse together and they would die of starvation if they were careless enough to close them. It was so cold that we had to breathe on each other’s eyes every five minutes to stop our eyeballs freezing solid. It was so wet that a cup held out would fill with rain faster than a man could drink it.

A huge crowd gathered round the second group of merchants, stood them drinks for a year, offered them their daughters in marriage and secured them pensions for life.

Arnold was making a good living on the discovery that folk hungered after apocryphal facts like drinkers hunger after salty snacks. He had a name. The editors would ring him up: Death Valley, Arn, they’d say, give me ten by six. And he’d sit around and write: In Death Valley in August, you can toss an ice cube in the air and it will have melted before you can catch it. Nine more like that. Or: Dead composers this week mate, say a dozen. And he’d write: If the Italian composer Vivaldi was alive, he would be the richest man on the planet, earning an estimated £1 million a minute from royalties on the use of
The Four Seasons
on telephone switchboards. The secret lay in the utter lack of research and confidence that anyone who could be bothered to challenge his published facts would be rejected as a nitpicking wanker. Besides, whenever one of his jobs appeared, it was so quickly plagiarised that it immediately took on the veracity of
gospel – more so, in fact, since every second of every day somewhere in the world an average of 6.5 people challenges the authenticity of the New Testament (6.5 – what Arnold calls the precision principle in successful apocrypha) whereas no-one, not even the Vatican, had ever taken the trouble to complain about Arnold’s assertion that, for liturgical reasons, the Pope never flies in aircraft that can land on water.

He never said but I reckon it was something about the six months he did for dangerous driving that got him on the apocrypha thing. He’d been terrified of getting beaten up or abused or whatever in jail and tried to keep in with the authorities on both sides by writing pornographic stories to order. And maybe after a while the sex fantasies began to fray and it began to show that there was a hunger for something else, tiny legends of a world outside, and he began to slip them in: that it wasn’t just the smooth slender bodies twining over the sheet which got the screws and lifers going but the insistence in parenthesis that the ancient Egyptians had abandoned goat-hair duvets for duck-down ones when they discovered the aphrodisiac qualities of the now extinct Nilotic eider.

Almost everyone had been amazed he got sent down, he was so middle class, even the advocate was embarrassed, he hurried away afterwards and didn’t speak to anyone. I wasn’t surprised, though. Arnold was a dangerous driver. He’s a dangerous driver now. Whatever they did to him in prison, it didn’t change his overtaking habits. It was a gamble on a blind summit and he lost, collided with a car full of students from England. He killed two of them. Arnold went into an airbag but his wife in the passenger seat didn’t have one. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. Perhaps she’d been as unhappy as that. I don’t know. Anyway she went through the windscreen head-first. Straight away you imagine it happening in slow motion but it doesn’t, of course,
you don’t see it like that any more than you see the flight of a shell from a gun. There’s a loud noise and in an instant, like a badly edited film, it jumps, it’s all arranged across the road, perfectly, peacefully, the broken cars, the glass, the bodies and the wheels spinning slowly.

Arnold was 36, same as me. His wife died about the time my divorce came through. Since the trial he’d seen even less of Jenny than I had. She didn’t think he’d killed her deliberately, no-one did. Before the accident Jenny said she liked the way he drove. Afterwards she didn’t hate her father: nothing so passionate. She went off him. She’d just started at art college and got a flat and never went round to see him any more, in jail or out. When they paroled him I expected him to take to drink, I don’t know why. He went teetotal and as soon as he got his licence back he was driving worse than before. That’s to say he was a good driver, very skillful, but always found a way to drive that was out beyond the edges of his skill and relied on luck to fill the space between.

I’d left my watch at home. The clock above the bar said 10.25 and the last boat was at 11. Someone told me that the landlord always set the clock ten minutes fast, so that left a good three quarters of an hour to get to Queensferry. You couldn’t rely on Arnold to use that time well, though. Of course everyone ran the risk that they might die on their way home from the pub. A loose slate might fall on their heads, or they might have a heart attack, get stabbed. What else could happen? There could be an earthquake. A predator could escape from the zoo. A predator could escape from his mates. But the chances were infinitessimal. It wasn’t something you thought about: Better watch on my way home from the pub in case I get killed. Driving with Arnold it was. Even if the chances of death doubled at the third decimal place, you wouldn’t put money on it, there was only one life.
To have four gin and tonics and then go out the door thinking and now, perhaps, the afterlife, now, even before morning.

Arnold was coming over. Need a lift? he said.

No thanks.

He nodded at the door. I don’t think Siobhan’s coming back. Did you say something?

Yes.

Arnold jiggled his car keys. Last boat at 11, he said.

I’ll get a cab.

Come on.

No really Arnie, it’s great of you, I appreciate it, but I’m fine, I’m doing all right, taxis are good, they’re cheap, they’re reliable, they’re fast. Fast enough, I mean. Not too – yeah, fast enough. Don’t want to have you going out of your way.

He looked hurt. He fidgeted with his keys and looked around. He did seem astoundingly calm and sober for an Edinburgh pub on a Friday night. Con, he said, I don’t understand you. We’ve been drinking in this place for the past two years and we both know where we go at closing time. It’s not like we’re strangers. What is the deal with these taxis? D’you not get embarrassed when you’re getting out of the cab on the quayside and you see me driving up the ramp? D’you think I avoid the moon deck bar on a Friday night cause I like the Stoker’s Lounge better?

I had wondered about that. My face went the colour of the carpet in the Stoker’s Lounge. It’d been stupid to think he hadn’t noticed me trying to avoid him on the boat all this time.

I’m sorry, Arnie, I said. I don’t like the way you drive.

I hadn’t meant to say that. Anyway, he was alive, was he not?

I know, said Arnold. But I’m more careful now.

No you’re not. I’ve seen the way you go down the Queensferry Road.

That’s just the way it looks. That is me being careful. I don’t hit anything. I never hit anything. I make sure now. I’ve made sure ever since that time. It’s a science, it’s dynamics. Anyway, there’s plenty of time, there’s no need to hurry.

The clock said 10.35, i.e. 10.25, so he was right, there was plenty of time. And even though I’d seen him shoot past and slot his car at 60 through a space you wouldn’t try to park in, I’d never actually driven with him.

If you’re so worried about the taxi, said Arnold, you can give me a fiver if you like. He grinned.

A fiver? To Queensferry? I could get to Inverness on a fiver. And still have money left over for a deep-fried Brie supper and a chilled Vimto.

Make it ten then.

We went out to the car. We hadn’t got there before he’d hit me with some new apocrypha which might’ve made me change my mind if I hadn’t been thinking along the same lines, so much that I was hardly aware he’d said it.