Aleksandar Hemon - Best European Fiction 2013

“Look at you indeed. Do you want to stay the night?”

“Yes.”

“Finish your spaghetti and then call your mam.”

“I already have.”

A couple of weeks after we split up Martha told me that Jamie had begun wetting the bed. Martha took him aside and asked him about it. If fear and disappointment come only in man-size dimensions so too does embarrassment. He bolted from the kitchen and slammed the door on his bedroom. Martha bought a rubber sheet and told me not to mention it to him. A week later he brought the subject up himself.

“I need something,” he said. “I’ll come straight out with it.”

“Yes.”

“No beating around the bush or anything.”

“I’m all ears.”

“A request.”

“Which is?”

“You won’t like it.”

“Jamie!”

“A beating.”

“A what?”

“A beating.”

He was framed in the doorway, a little study in misery. Once more he was the child wrestling with outsize miseries which threatened to engulf him.

“What have you done Jamie? Whatever it is it can’t be that bad.”

“It’s not what I’ve done, it’s what I’m going to do.”

“And what exactly are you going to do that warrants a beating.”

He pulled the chair out from the table and sat in. This is his way of late whenever he has something big to get off his chest. It seems to give him confidence, putting him in a position of strength insofar as a child is ever in such a position. But just then he looked hesitant, teetering on the threshold of a great disclosure but unsure of how to begin.

“What is it you are going to do?” I persisted.

“I come from a broken home,” he began.

“No Jamie, you come from a home divided between two houses, you spend an equal time with each of us. Whoever you want.”

He shook his head, the flaw in the argument too obvious even to him. It was at times like this I had the feeling Jamie was streaking ahead of me, gaining on truths and ideas which by right I should have been handing down to him.

He spoke irritably, “By any definition of the normal family I come from a broken home.”

“Jamie, I’m only guessing but I don’t think this is what you want to talk about.”

“I wet the bed,” he blurted desperately.

“Yes, I know, it’s not a big thing, you’ll get over it.”

“I can’t stop, each night I say my prayers and each morning I wake up covered in wee.”

“God has a lot on his mind Jamie. He’s a busy man, you might have to wait your turn. But wetting the bed is no reason for a beating.”

“I’m going to do something bad, something really bad.”

“We all do something bad at one time or other. What is it you’re going to do?”

“I’m going to kill someone.”

“That is bad,” I conceded. “Do you know who this someone is— it’s not me by any chance.”

He threw up his hands in a gesture of unknowing. “I don’t know,” he said with some exasperation. “You’d want to take this serious because you’ll probably blame yourself later on and I wouldn’t want that.”

“How do you know you’re going to kill someone?”

“There are signs,” he said, “indications.”

“This is that T-shirt. I told you before about going through my stuff.”

“It’s not the T-shirt,” he yelled suddenly, “you’re not listening.”

I held up my hands. “Okay, I’m listening now. What signs?”

“Like I’ve said I come from a broken home and I’ve started wetting the bed.”

“And that’s enough to turn you into a killer?” I felt distinctly odd discussing this with my eight-year-old son. Once more this sense of weightlessness came over me; I felt buoyant, unmoored from myself. From what I remembered none of the parenting manuals Martha showed me had ever covered this kind of situation. However I was certain also I had to see this conversation through to the end. “What has this to do with wanting a beating?”

“The broken home and the bed-wetting are two of the classic signifiers of serial killers in their youth. The third one is parental abuse. In order to have a complete profile I need to have a beating. That is where you come in.”

“Why would you want to kill anyone?”

“It is not that I want to kill anyone—it’s just that that is the way it is going to be.”

“This is ridiculous Jamie. I’m sorry, there are no beatings here today.”

He looked at me sadly and sighed. “You have a responsibility,” he said softly. “Sooner or later the corpses will start turning up. Two with the same MO and signatures might be a coincidence but three points to a serial killer. We have to give the investigation every chance. A full profile would put a halt to me before I get into my stride.”

“This is nonsense Jamie. This conversation is at an end now.” I got up from the table; he grabbed my wrist.

“He was quiet,” he said fervently, “he kept to himself a lot.” He fixed me with a glum stare. “That’s what the neighbours will say when I’m being led away. Of course long before that there will be all the other signs—the low self-esteem, the sexual inadequacies…” His voice trailed away.

“I’m sorry. There’s no beatings here today. Or any other day for that matter.”

He raised his voice. “I’m only telling you, the child is the father of the man.”

I talked to Martha about this the following day. She had finally moved her computer into the small box room I’d used as a workspace when I’d lived there. A couple of personal items around the room claimed the space as her own. One of Picasso’s blue women hung on the wall to her back and a series of little marble Buddhas stood ranked along the windowsill that looked down over the back garden. She knew nothing about Jamie’s big idea.

“He hasn’t mentioned anything to me about it. It sounds like a father and son thing.”

“Does he spend much time on the Internet?”

“Only an hour or two each day, the laptop on the kitchen table where I can keep an eye on him. John, he’s a good boy, I can’t stop him doing everything his friends are doing at the moment. He has it tough enough as it is.”

Every time she talks about Jamie I can see him in her face, the ghost of him flitting through her features: the same wide spacing of her eyes across her nose and the freckles on her forehead which stand out so vividly during these winter months. And it is clear also that if Jamie keeps growing at his present rate he is going to meet the same problems buying clothes as his mother—the narrow hips on which skirts and jeans drape sullenly and the skinny wrists which protrude beyond every sleeve no matter how generous. It pleases me to see these shades of Jamie in her; the sense of continuity gladdens me. Sometimes though I wonder if the causal chain always runs from parent to child; since Jamie’s birth I could have sworn I noticed in Martha a flightiness which lay at odds with her usual downbeat moods. As for myself, while I take it for granted that there is indeed something of myself in my son, I can never quite put a finger on what this something is. If ever I press Martha on the subject she tells me airily that we are both the same age.

“This worries me Martha. You should have heard him, all these technical terms and a rationale as well. And, this beating thing.”

“Did you give it to him.”

“For Christ’s sakes Martha!”

She grinned openly. “I know, I’m winding you up. You’re so easy.”

“Let’s talk to him together, this has me really spooked.”

She pivoted from the chair and kissed me on the cheek. Over her shoulder I could see her computer screen locked in pause, two tiny figures arrested in their progress across some heroic landscape of rolling hills toward a gloomy forest.