Ian McEwan - Nutshell

Try this. He moved to Shoreditch to sample a tryst with Elodie. He vacated the Terrace so Claude could move in and give John good cause to throw Trudy out. The anxious visits, the earnest poetry, even the lost key were feints, lulling her into greater security with Claude, drawing them together.

Claude is pouring more wine. In the circumstances it’s a comfort, how he reaches with dull precision for his most vacuous thought.

‘Fancy that.’

Trudy doesn’t speak for half a minute. When she does, her words are slurred but her resolve is clear.

‘I want him dead. And it has to be tomorrow.’

OUTSIDE THESE WARM, living walls an icy tale slides towards its hideous conclusion. The midsummer clouds are thick, there’s no moon, not the faintest breeze. But my mother and uncle are talking up a winter storm. The cork is drawn from one more bottle, then, too soon, another. I’m washed far downstream of drunkenness, my senses blur their words but I hear in them the form of my ruin. Shadow figures on a bloody screen are arguing in hopeless struggle with their fate. The voices rise and fall. When they don’t accuse or wrangle, they conspire. What’s said hangs in the air, like a Beijing smog.

It will end badly, and the house feels the ruin too. In high summer, the February gale twists and breaks the icicles hanging from the gutters, scours the unpointed brickwork of the gable ends, rips the slates — those blank slates — from the pitching roofs. This chill works its fingers past the rotted putty of the unwashed panes, it backs up through the kitchen drains. I’m shivering in here. But it won’t end, the bad will be endless, until ending badly will seem a blessing. Nothing will be forgotten, nothing flushed away. Foul matter lingers in unseen bends beyond the plumber’s reach, it hangs in the wardrobes with Trudy’s winter coats. This too solid stench feeds the timid mice behind the skirting and swells them to rats. We hear their gnawing and mutinous curses, but no one is surprised. At intervals, my mother and I retire so she may squat and copiously piss and groan. Against my skull I feel her bladder shrink, and I’m relieved. Back to the table, to more scheming and long harangues. It was my uncle cursing, not the rats. That gnawing was my mother at the salted nuts. Incessantly, she eats for me.

In here, I dream of my entitlement — security, weightless peace, no tasks, no crime or guilt. I’m thinking about what should have been mine in my confinement. Two opposing notions haunt me. I heard about them in a podcast my mother left running while talking on the phone. We were on the couch in my father’s library, windows wide open to another sultry midday. Boredom, said this Monsieur Barthes, is not far from bliss; one regards boredom from the shores of pleasure. Exactly so. The condition of the modern foetus. Just think: nothing to do but be and grow, where growing is hardly a conscious act. The joy of pure existence, the tedium of undifferentiated days. Extended bliss is boredom of the existential kind. This confinement shouldn’t be a prison. In here I’m owed the privilege and luxury of solitude. I speak as an innocent, but I conjure an orgasm prolonged into eternity — there’s boredom for you, in the realm of the sublime.

This was my patrimony, until my mother wished my father dead. Now I live inside a story and fret about its outcome. Where’s boredom or bliss in that?

My uncle rises from the kitchen table, lurches towards the wall to turn off the lights and reveal the dawn. If he’d been my father, he might have recited an aubade. But now there’s only a practical concern — it’s time for bed. What deliverance, that they’re too drunk for sex. Trudy stands, together we sway. If I could be upright for one minute I’d feel less sick. How I miss my spacious days of ocean-tumbling.

With one foot on the first tread, she halts to gauge the climb ahead. It rises severely and recedes, as though to the moon. I feel her grip the banister on my account. I still love her, I’d like her to know, but if she falls backwards, I die. Now we’re going mostly up. Mostly, Claude is ahead of us. We should be roped. Grip tighter, Mother! It’s an effort and no one speaks. After many minutes, many sighs and moans, we gain the second-floor landing, and the rest, the last twelve feet, though level, is also tough.

She sits on her side of the bed to remove a sandal, topples sideways with it in her hand, and falls asleep. Claude shakes her awake. Together they fumble in the bathroom, through the spilling drawers, in search of two grams each of paracetamol, a means to hold a hangover at bay.

Claude notes, ‘Tomorrow’s a busy day.’

He means today. My father is due at ten, now it’s almost six. Finally, we’re all in bed. My mother complains that the world, her world, spins when she closes her eyes. I thought Claude might be more stoical, made, as he might say, of sterner stuff. Not so. Within minutes he’s hurried next door to fall to his knees and embrace the lavatory bowl.

‘Lift the seat,’ Trudy shouts.

Silence, then it comes, in hard-won dribbles. But he’s loud. A long shout truncated, as though a football fan has been stabbed in the back mid-chant.

By seven they’re asleep. Not me. My thoughts turn with my mother’s world. My father’s rejection of me, his possible fate, my responsibility for it, then my own fate, my inability to warn or act. And my bedfellows. Too damaged to make the attempt? Or worse, to do it badly, be caught and sent down. Hence the spectral prison that’s lately haunted me. To start life in a cell, bliss unknown, boredom a fought-for privilege. And if they succeed — then it’s the Vale of Swat. I see no scheme, no plausible route to any conceivable happiness. I wish never to be born …

* * *

I overslept. I’m woken by a shout and a violent, arrhythmic jigging. My mother on the Wall of Death. Not so. Or not that one. This is her descending the stairs too fast, her careless hand barely trailing the banister. Here’s how it could end, the loose carpet rod or curling threadbare carpet edge, the head-first downward pitch, then my private gloom lost to eternal darkness. I’ve nothing to hold on to but hope. The shout was from my uncle. He calls out again.

‘I’ve been out for the drink. We’ve got twenty minutes. Make the coffee. I’ll do the rest.’

His dim Shoreditch plans have been ditched by my mother’s lust for speed. John Cairncross is not her fool after all. He’ll kick her out, and soon. She must act today. No time to tend her plaits. She’s given hospitality to her husband’s lover — dumped before she could dump, as they say on the afternoon agony-aunt shows. (Teenagers phone in with problems that would stump a Plato or a Kant.) Trudy’s anger is oceanic — vast and deep, it’s her medium, her selfhood. I know it in her altered blood as it washes through me, in the granular discomfort where cells are bothered and compressed, the platelets cracked and chipped. My heart is struggling with my mother’s angry blood.

We’re safely on the ground floor, among the busy morning hum of flies that cruise the hallway’s garbage. To them the untied plastic bags rise like shining residential towers with rooftop gardens. The flies go there to graze and vomit at their ease. Their general bloated laziness invokes a society of mellow recreation, communal purpose, mutual tolerance. This somnolent, non-chordate crew is at one with the world, it loves rich life in all its putrefaction. Whereas we’re a lower form, fearful and in constant discord. We’ve got the jitters, we’re going too fast.

Trudy’s trailing hand grips the newel post and we swing through a speedy U-turn. Ten steps and we’re at the head of the kitchen stairs. No handrail to guide us down. It fell off the wall, I heard, in a burst of dust and horsehair, before my time, if this is my time. Only irregular holes remain. The treads are bare pine, with slick and greasy knots, palimpsests of forgotten spills, downtrodden meat and fat, and molten butter sliding off the toast my father used to carry to the library without a plate. Again, she’s going at speed, and this could be it, the headlong launch. Hardly has the thought illuminated my fears when I sense a backwards-sliding foot, a forward lurch, an urge to flight, countered at once by a panicky tightening of the muscles in her lower back and from behind my shoulder I hear a wrenching sound of tendons stretching and testing their anchors on the bone.