The Museum Of Doubt. James Meek
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do Con. You know you do. There just aren’t enough real risks on the go, and you don’t want to go rock climbing or bungee jumping or kayaking, cause you’re getting on, and it’s too much trouble, and they take all the risk out of it anyway, it’s like a fairground ride, and you don’t want to go out looking for a fight, and violence in the pictures is just a wank … so you sit in the pub and you wait until you’re about to miss the ferry.
Don’t talk this way, Arnie, it’s not good.
It’s not that you want to die. You want to live. More than anything, you want to live, you want to have even just the next five minutes of your life, never mind seeing the sun come up again. Only there’s something that comes in between wanting one and wanting the other, it’s like a separation, you start believing two different things at the same time, that if you die, it’d be the end, and that you can die without actually dying. That you can watch it. That you can do it again. That it’d be interesting. You really believe that. It’s strange. I don’t understand it. D’you understand it?
A horn opened up behind us and headlights flared through the rear windscreen. The car behind pulled out sharply and overtook with a roar of contempt. Our speed had dropped to 25. So far the only way we were going to die tonight was getting spannered by a fellow motorist. I wanted to talk about going faster. I wanted to talk about what happened to Arnold’s wife. I didn’t want to upset him.
I’m not into the risk, I said. I was really wanting to get a lift with Siobhan and sit with her in the moon deck bar in the big white ship and go home.
Arnold didn’t say anything. I hadn’t thought it was possible to drive any slower in high gear but it seemed we were slipping back to about bicycle pace. I remembered he’d been after Siobhan just after he’d got out, and I remembered he’d been sitting down there in the yeasty fug of the Stoker’s Lounge for two years while we’d been up there watching the lights of passing ships through the rain on the glass roof and the moon wax and wane over the flint-coloured water of the firth.
We passed the Kwik-Fit garage. I turned round to check the time on the digital clock they had.
Arnie, I said. Let’s talk about time.
Despite his mastery of the laws of space and time, said Arnold, Albert Einstein never owned a watch and relied on friends to tell him what year it was.
When we left the pub it was 10.25 by the clock, I said, which was ten minutes fast, so it was 10.15. Your clock said 10.35, but you agreed that was wrong.
Stonehenge tells the time more accurately than the most sophisticated atomic clock.
The Kwik-Fit clock we’ve just passed says 10.50.
The landlord of the Faulkner Arms always sets his clock 10 minutes fast to make sure none of his customers misses the last boat to Fife.
Christ, was it you told me that?
I didn’t think you’d believe that one, said Arnold. He’s a landlord, isn’t he? His clock’s slow. So’s mine.
I looked around. Accurate timekeeping by: Kwik-Fit. Arnold’s car had central locking, controlled from the driver’s seat. Traffic was shooting past. I had the impression we were standing still. But we must have been going at least as fast as a strong freestyle swimmer. Ten minutes to cover seven miles. Not at this rate. Siobhan would be on board already. She was great but it upset her that all I wanted to do was talk to her and loiter in her presence for as long as she happened to be around. She wanted love, or sex, or both, I wasn’t sure, which made it strange she’d put up with me for so long. One time we did come across Arnold on the big white ship, just when Siobhan was crying over something I’d said. There are people who treat crying as like sighing or yawning but I hate it, it’s a catastrophe. Once when I was wee there was a primary school trip to the city reservoir and we were walking along the foot of the dam wall and I saw some drops of water dribbling down the concrete by my head and I screamed to the teacher that the dam was about to burst. Everyone laughed and the teacher, who never missed an opportunity for a bit of child-battering, gave me a thump on the back of the head. I was relieved. I really had thought the dam was going to burst. What got me wasn’t so much the thought of all of us and Mrs Swynton getting swept away by a wall of water but the chest-hollowing innocence of the first little driblets, the inadequacy of the warning they were of the thousands of tons of dark, cold, merciless water pressing against the concrete. They did warn you, but they told you nothing of how deep and overwhelming their source was. I hadn’t cried since I was a boy. That was something I could have asked Pastor Samuel about.
Arnold had tried to comfort her. It’d been terrible. She kept coming up against not liking him as much as she felt she should and he kept coming up against the fucking apocrypha every time something more than inane pleasantries were called for. He hadn’t been like that before. When I heard him telling her, instead of not to pay any attention to the crap I’d said, that 60 per cent of single women in their thirties were in stable relationships by the time they were forty, the thought of him scribbling away about fantasy women in his cell, struggling to meet some deadline for fear he’d get his head kicked in, and getting infected with the spores of instant harmless wee fictions for instant meaningless wee rewards, almost set me going without the pastor’s help.
We were quiet up to the city boundary, him crawling along, leaning back in the seat, one hand on the wheel, ignoring the cars overtaking us, staring ahead, placid and blinking, and me trying to work out how to open the door, the effect on the fabric of the jacket of rolling and skidding for a few yards, the effect on the fabric of me, the result of grabbing the handbrake and pulling it sharply upwards, calculations of time, distance and speed, and what about going by Kincardine, a place of great and famous beauty by night.
The moment the dual carriageway came in sight Arnold stamped on the accelerator and we were away. We had five minutes to get to the terminal. Once we were up to 90, I started to think we’d make it. By the time the needle shook on 110, I was thinking we wouldn’t.
We’ll just fly across, then, I said.
Arnold didn’t say anything. We came up behind a Mercedes dawdling along in the fast lane at 80 or so. With two sharp movements of the wheel, we slid into the slow lane and back again in front of the Merc, missing a rusting hatchback by the thickness of paintwork.
Don’t do this, Arnie, I said. It’s not important. Slow down. We’ll get there.
I thought you liked it, said Arnold. Just to see what happens.
I never did anything to give you that idea.
You fucked my daughter without wearing a condom, said Arnold.
People get older suddenly. It builds up and comes breaking through. One instant the age you’ve been for years, the next, the age you’ll be for years to come. A dream one night, a drink, a cloud crossing the sun, a word, a thought, and you lurch backward into the next age like a drunk going over the balcony. I felt as if I’d been seized by eight relentless hands and had clingfilm pressed down over my face and body and I couldn’t fight it, it was becoming part of me and that was me for the rest of my life with this extra, unwanted, itching skin.
As things stood the rest of my life was being measured out in red cat’s eyes beaded along the A90, and the vision of the long cat of after dark expired at the water’s edge, if not sooner. Arnold, I said, Arnie, wait, OK. Whatever you think, let’s talk. Let’s take time to talk. We’ll go down the waterfront and get a carryout and sit up all night and talk it over. All weekend if you want. I can’t talk when you’re driving like this. It’s putting the wind up me.
Arnold laughed. Putting the wind up you! he said. Good. Scientists say thirty per cent of the human brain is set aside exclusively to react to fear.
Bollocks, I said. Sixty.
The laugh went out of Arnold’s face. He was leaning forward, his chin almost over the wheel, staring ahead. I don’t know I want you to talk, he said.
Come on Arnie. She was 17, she knew what she was doing.
She was 16.
OK,