China Mieville - This Census-Taker

“My father killed my mother.”

The man watched me. The schoolteacher shook the two big books she carried. “He’s allowed to confront an accuser,” she said, not to me. “That’s the law.”

“A little boy like that, though?” the hunter said. They frowned at me.

“This is your mother’s writing,” the teacher said. “Isn’t it?”

It was a big hand of sweeps and curves. Some of the letters were nearly full circles. All of them staggered up and down and around the paper’s lines.

When she taught me letters, my mother had done so with those pamphlet scraps, those cheaply printed books and stock inventories and instructions for machines. Occasionally she’d shown me ledgers and other handwritten papers from I don’t know where, in various inks and in various hands, but it was only when the teacher asked me this question that I understood that every such piece had been written by a different person, or different people, in the cases where one piece of writing was corrected and overwritten with another, as I’ve done with a few pages of the second book that I continue.

I’d seen my mother writing many times but I’d never seen her handwriting.

The letter was on thick paper in a pale blue ink that I knew she’d used but that I’d seen my father use too, to render details on his drawings of keys.

“He killed her and he put her in the hole,” I whispered. “He puts the things he kills in the hole. Sometimes he kills people and he puts them in there too.”

The officers looked at each other. “Show us,” the man said. “Show us the hole.”

They let Drobe come with me but they told Samma she couldn’t. I think they were concerned she’d challenge them if she didn’t like what transpired: she raged at them when they told her she had to stay, hard enough and with enough authority to surprise them, and that it seemed to verify their intuition. They can’t have known, as I didn’t yet, that she wouldn’t leave the town. As if to lose contact with its pavings would bleed her of something.

The three officers took Drobe and me on that long walk, the clough winding in and out of sight to one side, fronted here and there with wire, the tough slope of the hill curving away on the other. The hunter, then the schoolteacher, then Drobe and I, the window-cleaner behind us so we couldn’t run away. As we entered the uplands I started to cry.

The woman turned and gave me a solicitous grimace. “Yes,” she said. “I know. It’s not nice to see our parents fighting.”

The hunter called out, “Show us the hole.”

I went trembling to him and pointed a way off the path to ensure we’d reach it without passing my house.

“Where’s my father?” I said.

“You’re all right,” the hunter said.

I stopped when we saw the cave mouth and turned to face the path below us.

“You’re all right,” he said again. He conferred quietly with the other man and pointed him to the track. The window-cleaner nodded and went that way and the hunter came back to me. “Don’t you worry,” he said.

He went first into the cleft. He beckoned me after and the teacher nudged me forward. Drobe took my shaking hand and climbed with me over the rock at the entrance. Inside the cold shadows my legs were weak.

“Stay behind me now,” the hunter said.

The teacher and he went into the shadows to the edge of the rubbish hole. Daylight reached inside the fabric of the hill but that rip was perfectly dark. The woman shone down a light. I pressed my back against the rock wall.

I thought of my mother’s hands hauling her up. Of her climbing all grave-mottled and with her face scabbed with old blood, her arms and legs moving like sticks or the legs of insects, or as stiff as toys, as if maybe when you die and come back you forget what your body is.

“You see anything?” the teacher said. She stepped back and shrugged.

“Look,” the man said. He took the flashlight and tilted it so the beam climbed from the hole as I imagined my mother doing with her face wrong and fungus in her hair. “What’s that?”

“No,” the woman said. “That’s moss or something.”

He squinted. “Well,” he said. He turned to me. “So.” He looked helpless. “There’s no way down.”

I made myself go forward till I could see white residue on the rocks.

“He’s cleaned it,” I said. “My mother must have banged it and got blood on it when she went.”

My father leaning carefully down with a sudsy mop. Soap-water wetting what was below. Down inside the hill, a second hill: a mound of trash and corpses decaying in layers and coated in hill dust in the dark. At its top, like a triumphant climber, my mother, looking sightlessly up at me with soap in her eyes.

“Why would he clean bare rocks?” The teacher wasn’t being cruel. She didn’t understand me and was trying to talk me out of terror.

She whispered to the hunter. He looked at me and sat cross-legged with the abyss at which I couldn’t stop staring behind him. “Now listen,” he said to me. “So. My friend—”

She interrupted. “Colleague.”

“My colleague. She has the law in those books. You can’t just punish people on say-so.” He didn’t sound practiced at this soft voice. “You say your mother’s down there. You see we can’t go down there. So put a light on a chain and lower it to see? How deep does it go? How much does it twist on the way? We won’t see anything.”

I imagined that glint descending like a star falling slowly toward my mother.

“It’s what you say against what he says,” the man continued. “And we do have the letter.”

“She ain’t write that,” Drobe said. “Come on.”

“His father says she did,” the teacher said.

“What if he said something about you?” the hunter asked me. “What if he said you stole something or you killed a person, and we just said, ‘Oh, well then, if you say so, we’ll do law on him, then.’ You wouldn’t like that, would you? That wouldn’t be fair.” He looked over his shoulder into the black.

“She did write it.”

That was my father’s voice.

He was stood at the cave mouth next to the window-cleaner in his sash. I saw my father and I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t feel my hands. He looked straight at me and I made a noise in my throat.

Drobe stepped between us. Later I remembered that and I loved him for it.

“What did you bring him for?” the hunter shouted. “I said we’d come when we were ready, didn’t I?”

“He wanted to come see,” the window-cleaner said. “What should I stop him for?”

“For fuck’s sake.” The hunter shook his head.

“What?” said the other man. “You got something to say to me? Say it to me.”

“I did, didn’t I?” the hunter said. “I said, ‘ For fuck’s sake .’ ”

“She wrote that letter,” my father said. He was speaking to me. “We were fighting,” he said. He blinked repeatedly and I could feel his tremendous worry. He took a step toward me and I lurched back and Drobe moved to meet him.

“She was good for me,” my father said, “and I was good for her too, but not in the end.” He looked beseeching. “I’m sorry you saw it. You shouldn’t have. I was asking her not to leave, is what you saw. For you and me. For you more than me even because you needed her. I know that, I know. I wanted to stop her, I’m sorry I couldn’t. But you mustn’t go. You mustn’t go.”

He seemed to see Drobe at last, standing in his way. My father whispered to him, “Move.”

His voice was sudden and different and cold and Drobe instantly obeyed.

“I’m sorry your mother went away,” my father said to me. “I’ll make sure we’re all right, you and me.”