Эндрю Миллер - Oxygen

‘Like what?’

‘Bickering.’

‘Who was bickering?’

‘Who do you think?’

‘So it’s all my fault?’

‘Can’t you see how ill she is?’

‘Of course I can see! What do you expect me to do about it?’

‘Show some basic consideration.’

‘Well, that’s pretty rich coming from you,’ said Larry, prodding his brother’s shoulder as if to remind him who, between the two of them, had the physical power. ‘Where were you hiding? Eh? Where did you run away to?’

‘You know who you remind me of these days?’ said Alec, scrubbing the non-stick surface off the rice pan. ‘Dad.’

‘I was wondering how long before someone came out with that crap. I just didn’t expect it to be you. Christ! A couple of drinks would improve you no end.’

‘Yeah. I can see how much good it’s done you.’

‘And try getting laid once in a while. I’ll even lend you the money.’

‘Is that what you do? Is that why you two can’t talk to each other any more?’

‘Keep your nose out of it, Alec.’

‘Or were we supposed not to notice?’

‘Go to hell!’

" You go to hell.’

‘What’s going on?’ asked Kirsty.

‘Nothing at all,’ said Larry. He picked up a cloth, and with elaborate care started to dry one of the glasses.

Kirsty frowned, then slid Alice’s mug into the hot water, resting her other hand on Alec’s back. ‘I think she took all her drugs.’

‘Thanks,’ said Alec.

‘She said some weird stuff when we were in the bathroom. Still, I guess she was tired.’

‘What kind of stuff?’ asked Larry.

‘Stuff you say when you’re tired.’ She yawned. ‘I’m gonna put Ella to bed.’

An hour later she went to bed herself. She had moved into the downstairs room with Ella; Larry had shifted his gear upstairs to Alec’s room, where there was an old-fashioned camp bed of tubular steel and wire mesh. There were only single beds in the spare room so this new arrangement had been passed off as a purely practical matter, though who this was intended to fool or reassure, Larry didn’t know.

The brothers finished the clearing up then sat on the sofa in the living room to watch the evening news. After the May election the government was getting busy, declaring a Year Zero, salvaging the nation’s future by making it modern and fashionable. Among the politicians they interviewed there was a strange, compulsive use of the word ‘new’.

Think it’ll work?’ asked Larry.

‘Plus ça change ,’ said Alec. But he admired them for trying. For doing something.

Larry said he thought they were some kind of Khmer Rouge, and that he intended to visit a good old English pub while there was still one left to visit. He remembered a place called the Blue Flame, fifteen minutes’ walk across the fields. Flagstone floors, wooden barrels, not quite clean. A place with pickled eggs and cheap cigarettes.

‘Do you mind?’ It was understood that one of them would have to stay for Alice.

Alec shook his head. ‘I might do some work.’

‘No hard feelings about tonight?’

‘No hard feelings.’

‘Just letting off steam. It’s bound to happen.’

‘I know.’

‘Catch you later, then.’

‘Sure.’

When he was gone, Alec switched off the television. Out of the quiet came the sound of his mother’s coughing, a muffled hacking and retching that reached its crescendo, then slowly died away. He hurried into the garden, crossing the lawn and gulping down lungfuls of milky air. In the summerhouse he struck a match, lit the storm lantern and set it on the shelf by the portrait of Lázár. Then he sharpened his pencils, opened the manuscript of Oxygène, and for twenty minutes performed a kind of mime of work until the deception was no longer tolerable, and he leaned back on the rear legs of his chair to watch the insects that came to the light through the open window, among them a pair of large butter-coloured moths that knocked the dust from their wings on the glass waist of the lantern and flew like manic angels around the playwright’s head.

A little before midnight, Larry returned, crooning some country-and-western number as he clambered over the stile and weaved his way back to the house. Alec extinguished the flame in the lantern and sat on in the dark, long enough, he hoped, for Larry to have got to bed. He didn’t want to speak to him again tonight. Though they had made their peace, he was still shaken by the row in the kitchen, could still feel where Larry had jabbed his shoulder. And where were you hiding? Go to hell! They had fought often enough as kids, as teenagers, passionately against each other for half an hour. But tonight he had seen something new, an anguish that mirrored his own, a depth of trouble he knew nothing about and could not have explained. Kirsty had been right the evening he called San Francisco (and he had been wrong): people change. And how credulous of him, how unthinkably naive, to imagine that his brother would just go on the same, untouched by the disorder that found its way unerringly to others lives – to every life in time. But how was he to understand himself now? What more telling definition of himself could he hope to find other than being what Larry was not? He had never questioned it. Had anyone? It was the easiest way to think about him. So what now? If Larry wasn’t ‘Larry’ any more, who was Alec?

At a quarter to one he recrossed the garden. Flower-heads showed silvery against the dark of the foliage, and the night felt heavy, liquid, the stars not quite in focus. Perhaps it meant a change in the weather, a heavy dew tomorrow. He locked the terrace doors, drank a glass of tap water in the kitchen, and was on the point of switching off the lights in the living room when his attention was caught by the card table in the alcove beneath the stairs. He had put the table there the day after Alice came out of hospital, and at the same time had put the pieces of the little conjuring game back in the box. But now they were out again, the three red cups in a line across the centre of the table. He went closer. Who had taken them out? Larry? Why should he? Certainly not Kirsty. Ella, then. Ella, of course. If nothing else, her obsessive nature betrayed her: the intervals between the cups must have been uniform to within a centimetre or two. But when? And who had she wanted to play with? He crouched, studying the cups in turn, then lifted the middle one.

‘You win,’ he whispered. He picked up the right-hand cup. Still there was nothing. He turned over the last.

Nestled on the baize, like the egg of some giant hornet or dragonfly, was the capsule – shiny blue and shiny red. He picked it up. It was almost weightless, its little load of pharmaceuticals just visible through the slightly dented glycerin skin. The hair prickled on the back of his neck, and he swung round as though expecting to catch Larry or Ella or, God knows, Alice, standing by the door, watching him, seeing the expression on his face, and knowing what he must be thinking. But he was quite alone. Nobody was going to disturb him.

He placed the capsule between his lips, tore a strip from the evening paper, wrapped the capsule, and slid it into the breast pocket of his shirt. Then he put away the cups, closed the box, turned out the lights and went upstairs, pausing for a moment, in a kind of passion, outside his mother’s room.

At 8.45 on a morning of dazzling sunlight, László Lázár stepped down on to the platform at Westbahnhof. In one hand he carried his old blue ‘pilot’s’ bag; in the other a black holdall of tough imitation leather handed to him at the Gare de l’Est the previous evening by a middle-aged man he had never seen before.