Эндрю Миллер - Oxygen

In the telephone box on the corner of the road by the church, an Arab girl was hunched down on the steel floor, smoking and talking intensely. László checked his watch, then leaned against the railings to contemplate the sparrows bathing in the gutter, scrupulous little birds, shivering the water from their feathers and hopping about in the sunshine. Ten minutes later the girl came out and László went in. The receiver was warm from her hand still, faintly scented. He dialled very carefully. After three rings he was answered.

‘Is Françoise there?’ he asked.

It was twilight at Brooklands. Larry came out on to the terrace and sat in the canvas chair opposite his brother.

‘Ella in bed?’ asked Alec.

‘Yeah. Mum?’

‘Asleep. I think.’

Larry had a bottle of Teacher’s from the off-licence in Coverton. He had driven out in Alec’s car before lunch and since then had worked his way through half the bottle. He poured himself another two fingers, drank one of them, then leaned forward and said, ‘Ella’s taken something.’

‘Hardly the first time,’ said Alec. He was drinking tea.

‘No. This is different. This isn’t a bracelet or a ring.’

‘Money?’

‘She’s taken a pill,’ said Larry. ‘I don’t know how but we’ve got to get it back.’

‘One of Mum’s?’

‘One of mine. From my wash bag.’

‘What kind of pill?’

Larry shook his head.

‘A painkiller? Sleeping tablet?’

‘I wish.’ He took a deep breath and started to explain, though he knew the story required more context than he could ever hope to provide. He said he had gone to LA to discuss a film deal. He omitted to mention the nature of the film, though he gave Alec something of the characters of T. Bone and Ranch, despite the fact that talking of them in the calm of an English garden made them seem like figures in some outlandish cabaret. He mentioned the hotel, the lunch party, the bathroom, the box. The pills. He’d hoped to make it sound casual and mostly normal, but actually it didn’t sound normal at all.

‘Suicide pills?’

Both of them – a reflex with its roots in the hinterlands of childhood – glanced up at the window above as though the light might suddenly flick on, and Alice lean out, wise to their secrets and demanding explanations.

‘Fucksake…’ said Larry, wincing. He had not introduced the ‘sex’ pills. Nor did he know which of the two Ella had taken because he could no longer remember Ranch’s explanation of the difference. Either way, it didn’t bear thinking about.

Alec blinked behind his glasses for a while. ‘You’re sure it was Ella?’

‘Of course it was Ella.’

‘You talked to her?’

‘For an hour, yesterday, as soon as I found the thing was gone. Again today. She blanked me completely, both times. When I told her how dangerous it was she seemed to understand, but with Ella you never know. I even phoned Hoffmann…’

‘Hoffmann?’

‘Her shrink in Frisco. He’s away at some child homicide convention in Detroit, so I left a message on his machine, then had a panic attack thinking what if he tells Kirsty? Can you imagine? So I called back and left another message saying he was only to talk to me about it. Not that I trust him much.’

‘Did you tell him what she took?’

‘I said she was having a regressive episode. After a while you start to speak like them.’

Alec sipped from his mug. Larry the athlete, Larry the party king, Larry the handsome, Larry the successful, Larry the happy husband. And now Larry the man who kept suicide pills in his wash bag. He hardly knew who he was sitting next to.

‘What on earth were you going to do with it?’ he asked.

Larry shrugged. ‘I meant to chuck them away in the plane.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘That’s not the point any more. The point is getting it back. I’m pretty certain it’s not in the bedroom. I stripped the mattresses. Emptied out the drawers. But she’s good at this now. It could even be in the garden. Can you talk to her? She likes you.’

‘What am I supposed to say? Give Daddy back his pill?’

‘Just try and get it into her head how serious this is.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I can’t believe you had it.’

Larry rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his palm. ‘I feel like I haven’t slept in a year.’

‘What did you do with the others?’

‘Others? Flushed them away. A little late, I know.’ He shook a cigarette from the pack and lit it.

‘I didn’t know things had been so difficult,’ said Alec.

‘Since Sun Valley. Before then, I guess.’

‘You didn’t say anything.’

‘You’ve had troubles of your own.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

Larry laughed – sheer fatigue as much as the whisky. He put a hand on his brother’s knee. ‘You’re a complete fucking mess,’ he said.

‘I manage,’ said Alec.

‘Sure. Do you remember when I went to America for the first time and you were about to spend your year in Paris? You remember that?’

‘Yes,’ said Alec.

‘It feels like the last time I spoke to you.’

‘That was ten years ago.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

Alec shrugged.

‘Did you like it?’

‘What?’

‘Paris.’

‘Yes.’

Larry nodded. ‘That’s good.’ He was looking over the potato field to where night was finally tidying away the tower of the church. It was a view so long etched on to the retina of memory it made him soulful. He saw himself as a boy, and Alec too. He saw Alice as a vigorous woman, and even his father as a man not yet on the edge, his shadow striding across the garden. All of them, their lives flitting like the little bats that dived and swooped around the eaves of the house.

‘I suppose we should have a plan,’ he said. He was starting to drawl. ‘What do you think? Should we have a plan?’

On Thursday evening Kurt Engelbrecht returned to rue Delambre with two plastic bags of groceries in either hand. He carried them into the kitchen, put them on the table and called for László. He had bought more cassis, and there was still half a bottle of white wine in the fridge from the previous evening. At eight o’clock it was early and late enough for an aperitif.

At the bottom of the sink he saw László’s plate, knife and coffee cup from lunch, the plate still with its debris of apple skin and olive stones and cheese rind. It was one of László’s habits – if something so casual, so unconsidered, could be called a habit – together with getting flecks of toothpaste on the bathroom mirror, and now and then forgetting to flush the toilet, that Kurt found mildly provoking, but which he never mentioned in the belief that László was operating a similar restraint in regard to the little blindnesses of his own.

He began to unpack the first bag, putting the vegetables on the wooden rack and arranging the fruit in the big glass bowl. Then he went into the passage and called a second and a third time. There were several reasons for László not to be there: he had stepped out with the mail, or had gone to the tabac for more cigarillos (though with his chest troubling him he had promised to leave them alone for a while); or he had simply gone down on to the boulevard to enjoy the warmth of the evening, buy a paper, chat to Madame Favier at the patisserie. He might even be taking the rubbish out, all credible explanations for his absence, so it seemed strange to Kurt, looking back on it later, strange and significant, that he should immediately have gone to the study with his heart thudding, and opened the door there with such a feeling of dread.