The Museum Of Doubt. James Meek
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interesting you talk about possession, said Arnold.
Christ, you’re the one who was doing the my daughter my daughter bit! I was working up an anger because I could see we were going to make it to the terminal and up the ramp no bother. She was old enough to be living by herself. It’s not like I was the first.
Arnold’s left hand came swinging off the wheel and I flinched. But he was just changing down from fifth to fourth.
What are you doing? I said. We swung off the dual carriageway onto the back road into Queensferry, the long way round to the terminal, narrower, slower, and with great opportunities for head-on collisions.
You’re such a bastard, Con, said Arnold, and you never bother to remind yourself of it.
I had a tight hold of the door-grip with one hand and my seatbelt with the other. We came up behind a Capri tanking along at 70 and Arnie took it on a blind bend just as something bright and screaming came round in the other direction. I closed my eyes, bent down and wrapped my arms around my head. There was a shrieking sound and horns, the Capri must have melted its brake pads to let us in, and we lived to fight another second.
Whatever it is I’ve done to upset you, Arnold, I’m sorry, I shouted.
No need to shout, said Arnold, frowning.
Slow down. There’s a bend – Jesus.
How d’you think it feels when you’re wife’s just died and they put you in jail for it and the daughter you raised for sixteen years stops seeing you ’cause she’s getting screwed by a man the same age as you are?
Not good. Bad. There’s a fffffff … there was no connection! She didn’t want to see you any more. Nothing to do with me. We were in love for a while, it was good for both of us, and then we drifted apart.
We were accelerating into absolute darkness on the wrong side of the road. There was nothing to overtake any more. Like the wrong side was smoother. I could see the orange glow of Queensferry ahead and a pale scimitar of headlights rising and falling through the trees before we got there, the car we were about to go head to head with, though we knew it, and they didn’t, they’d dip their headlights and slow down a little, voodoo steps to safety, they would never know. Apart from the apocryphal 30 seconds. He’d almost convinced me with that one.
There’s a car coming, I said.
It’s OK. We won’t hit it. You know, Con, 95 per cent of teenage girls who have relationships with men twice their age or more say love was never a factor.
I remembered reading that in Marie Claire when I was still seeing Jenny and worrying about it.
You’re talking shite, Arnold, I said. You’re starting to believe your own apocrypha. There aren’t any facts about love. Would you move to the right side of the fucking road?
It was over before I had time to wet myself, and when we’d swung round the bend into the blaring glaring squealing ton of glass and metal and flesh hurtling towards us, and there’d been no contact, I realised he’d done this before. Everyone else would swerve at the last moment, at exactly the same time as the other car, but he kept on on the wrong side, letting the other car swerve, so we missed.
Stop, I said. I’m sorry. You’re right and I’m wrong. I repent. Could you stop the car? I meant it. I would have stood in the Stoker’s Lounge all the way across with my lips pressed to his ringpiece just to be out in the open and not moving. It was 10.59 by his clock, we were just coming down the hill to Queensferry, and I knew he’d try to clear the High Street narrows and all the rest in 59 seconds.
You’re not making any sense, Con, said Arnie. You know better than I do what incidental risk’s all about, the danger that comes with getting where you want to go when you can’t wait. When you were screwing Jenny it was the hell with the crash, maybe you will, maybe you won’t. What’s the difference? You know you crashed. You do know, don’t you? You couldn’t stop yourself. You knew you might, and you did. You knew a kid would only be trouble for her and she didn’t want one.
I’m not with you. Just stop, eh. Stop. Stop.
I’m not intending to stop. It’s hard to stop when you’re almost there. You didn’t stop. And there are some accidents Pastor Samuel couldn’t help her with. He threw up his healing hands and said: If you don’t want his child, girl, cast it out.
STOP!
And she did cast it out. Six weeks gone. She really didn’t tell you, did she?
I pulled hard on the handbrake. We both went quiet for what seemed like a long time, watching the masts of the yachts fly past, it seems to me with our hands folded across our laps, but I suppose not. For a certain time, memory, the present and apocrypha became the same thing, a trinity, like the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. I remembered the car flying off the end of the pier before it actually happened, and I felt it skim three times across the waves like a stone as if it really did, though I knew I was feeling, with every bone and muscle, the apocryphal version of what truly took place, and the vague, imaginary sense of hitting the water once and going down was what was real.
Arnie had the sunroof open and was out of it before the top of the car sank below the water. He braced his legs on the roof and plunged his arms down for me through the flood that was beating me down into the seat and tied to pull me out, forgetting about the seatbelt. We went down into the black firth together, me struggling with the belt and gulping down a gallon of salt water before I shut my mouth, him clinging on to the edges of the sunroof with one hand and tugging on my jacket shoulder with the other. I got free just as a part of me I never knew I had started to try to rationalise the death experience into something negotiable but only making it worse. We were trying to kick off our shoes and jackets and our faces were in the air. We were treading water. The ferry was steaming out of harbour a few hundred yards away. It whistled. Arnold was swimming away from me towards the pier with strong breast strokes. I paddled my feet and coughed. I hate it when folk cry. It’s never good, and when it’s someone you thought you were fond of, like yourself, it’s a disaster. It was too late anyway. There was too much water all around. There was so much of it.
Adam on the floor opened the parcel without tearing the paper, labouring at the tape with the bitten-down pithy remnants of his fingernails to pick it off the gloss of the wrapping. Cate watched him from the settee, lying on her front, feet treading air. Soon they would need to start filling another drawer with old wrapping paper that never got reused. How could they? It was old. But they couldn’t throw it away.
A book had marbled board covers and a leather spine, with a spangled sheen on the edge of the thick, rough pages. The spine creaked when he opened it and clumps of pages fanned out with a sigh. He pressed it to his face and breathed in. It smelled of damp earth.
I know I said it was simple, but you won’t learn it by sniffing it, said Cate. If you could, all the cokeheads would have discovered perpetual motion by now.
Ellsta, he said, and leaned over to kiss her.
Ellsta! she said, wrinkling up her face.
El-lsta.
Closer but still way off. Ellsta!
He flipped through the pages. There were no pictures. There were desires and needs in other lives that had never even come within sight of their own, before electricity, when the servants had no artificial servants, and couldn’t fool themselves. Mayryng, would you adjust the bedspread? Yoshua, would you bring fresh coals? Mr Ocksyng, would you shoe the brown mare?
Brymdon anches ytr gastorst, he read out. Instead of laughing at his version of Ask that lamplighter to step over here she looked at him gravely and corrected his pronunciation.
Is there a section where the master seduces the serving wench? he said. Come thee hither, bonny lass, and rowp thy postillion?
Cate rested her