Эдвард Докс - Pravda ['Self Help' in the UK]

“Don’t ask.”

“And those fights you used to have with him. You screaming. Bloody hell, Is, it makes me cringe just to think about them.”

“Not as much as me.” They came to the edge of Pond Square.

“Now I think about it,” Susan said, “the last time I saw him—God, it must have been before you went—the last time I saw him was in your kitchen. He started telling me all this rubbish about how hard it is out there and you’ve got to learn your lesson and pull your weight and pay your way and all of that. He was so snide. I didn’t know what to say. I was furious.”

“There’s nothing to say. Dad just repeats himself to anyone who is around. Or he used to. It’s a kind of self-validating mantra or something.”

“And I thought, Hang on a minute—I work seventy hours a week and what the hell has he ever done, anyway? Six or seven jobs on local rags—part-time at best—while his wife has worked solidly for twenty-five years as a copy editor on a serious and stressful newspaper in her second bloody language.”

Isabella had to smile.

“Apart from anything else,” Susan said, “it’s very hard to understand why a man like your dad, who’s basically had a pretty good life, should have such a sense of grievance.”

“That’s just it. That’s exactly it.” Isabella nodded and turned her head to meet her friend’s eyes, appreciative of the accuracy of the observation. “He does have this overwhelming sense of grievance. And it sort of permeates everything he says and does and thinks. He can’t get away from it. Every conversation, every action, everything has some reference to this grievance of his. Which we all have to acknowledge and dance around, even though none of us—including him—have any idea what specifically he is so aggrieved about.”

“I guess it’s also a way of building himself up,” Susan suggested. They were walking along one side of the square, watching for a break in the traffic.

“If you’re doing better, he wants to pull you down,” Isabella said. “If you’re doing worse, he wants to gloat. He’s only got one mode of discourse. He can’t converse—all he can do is goad.”

“Maybe that’s just how he is with people our age, Is, or his children or something.” Susan shrugged. “Maybe he’s completely different with other people when you’re not around.”

They crossed the main road and walked toward the Grove, the tall Georgian houses seeming all the finer in the sharp winter’s sun.

Susan looked across. “Have you thought what you are going to ask Francis?”

“I’m going to ask him lots of questions about the house and I’m going to be very normal and then—”

“No. You need to actually ask him outright if he was your dad’s lover, Is.” Susan’s expression was pure, wholehearted sincerity. “You need to do that. You have to be absolutely no shit now. And you’ve got to start today. If you don’t, I will. I mean it. You cannot spend the rest of your life kowtowing to whatever messed-up version of reality your dad enjoys. We’ll just have to think of a way of telling Gabs.”

Two hours later, Susan caught the bus back down the hill and Isabella set out alone, wearing her friend’s gloves for the return walk, the sky still a burnished December blue. She knew two more things for certain now: that she could enter her old home without weirdness after all, and that gentle old Francis had indeed been her father’s lover. Most of all she felt relieved. But, curiously, she also felt (at last) that she was nearly as old as her father and mother—not in age, but in the sense that she was no less an adult than they, and not in the fake way she had pretended to be an adult in her twenties but for real: parity. Perhaps it had been Susan’s influence.

The cemetery tours were thriving. Old ladies bossily shepherding groups this way and that.

Karl fucking Marx.

Fierce histrionics or fierce history (there was, as ever, no way of telling), she had once seen her mother cry real tears at that grave. Tears for the parlous state of her marriage, tears for her fate, tears for the fate of nations. Or tears for Karl himself and all the murder done in his name. Impossible to know. Impossible even to guess. But she could remember the afternoon clearly—could see the fresh flowers, bright yellow and crimson, lying scattered on the hard cut stone, could the hear the hushed voices of the visitors (as if the dead might be further offended—beyond the final insult of mortality), could feel her mother, not much older than she was now, letting go of her arm to press the heel of a hand into the corner of one eye, then the other.

And even as an eight-year-old girl, Isabella was conscious that she was supposed to see her mother’s tears. And conscious that she was absolutely not supposed to see them. That was the whole reason she had been brought along: to see tears and not to see tears.

The sickness was on him. The sleeping pills were wearing off. He hadn’t got any. All he had to do was get up, somehow. Go. Find some. (Call Grisha.) Then this would be over. He hadn’t got any. (Club Voltage—go there.) The stink was unbearable—acrid. Each cramp a fresh agony. Make it quicker, God, make it quicker. You bastard. Make it quicker. The smell was the worst thing. And this was him: this body, in these moments. He was this man. Cramp. Shudder. Flesh like a gray plucked goose. (All he had to do was get up.) His stomach squirting. So onto his side, braced against it. His eyes squeezed shut and watering. His nose streaming. Then eyes open again—used syringes. Onto his back. The sallow ceiling. So ill. He was sweating the mattress sodden. Then eyes shut—a blackness made of headache reds and flashing yellow shapes. He wanted to die. All he had to do was get some. (Get up and go. Find. Easy. Half an hour?) He was hot. His armpits wet. He wanted it over. (No. Stay—take the rest of the pills.) He could not keep his legs still. Twitching, shifting, jittery. Worms burrowing through his stomach. So back onto the other side. The pain in his bones, an aching that seemed to dwell in his marrow’s marrow. Oh God. All he had to do was get some, end it. Then it would be over. (Don’t take the pills. Get up and go.) Lizards’ feet on his skin. A nip. A tremor. Take the rest of the pills. Use them all up now. Adrenaline. Oh God, he hadn’t got any. All he had to do was get some. Roll over. The sear of a sudden spasm. Oh. God. There was liquid shit in the bed now. He could not do this. He could not believe this. He could not believe that this was he, living and conscious through these moments. This was his life. And he had made it so. (All he had to do was get up. If he got up, he could stop the pain. Go out. Get some.) He gulped at the water. He swallowed the sleeping pills, all six. Make it quick. Take this from me, God, you bastard. I owe nothing. (All he had to do.) I have nothing. I know nothing. I am nothing.

Gabriel doubled back on the Northern Line, a trip no Northern Liner truly enjoyed: down to Camden, then across the platforms, and then up again to Chalk Farm. Felt like treachery, somehow, going up the other branch. He broke ground, the swarming city there to greet him, walked left around the sharp corner, and so set off up Haverstock Hill. He was looking forward to drinking, Sunday or not. He bent forward as the incline bit. The morning’s frostiness had been replaced by an unusually strong wind; it was one of those dark and low-skied cloud-scudding London nights when the windows rattle in their casements and the tarpaulin that hangs on the scaffolding flaps and slaps as if it might fly away at any second. Sudden gusts snatch at scarves, toss careful hair awry, or chivvy at the cracked chimneypots and threaten to tear the roof tiles loose, and the forgotten trees sway and creak, heavy branches bending hard upon their natural snap.