Patrick Flanery - Absolution

‘So I should be paying for the privilege of being surveilled.’

‘Huh? Ja, well, they’ve got dogs, too, fully armed response with semi-automatic weapons and there are panic buttons in every room of the house, even the bathrooms and cupboards, in case of real emergency, but they’re disguised, so the attackers won’t know, and they’re not an eyesore, not red like some are.’

‘Then how should we be able to find them if we panicked?’

‘Ja, well, absolutely nothing to worry about. At least as long as we got rule of law. God knows how long that lasts, though, hey?’

The real emergency , he suggested, was that one might flee in stark terror to the interior of a cupboard and be trapped, quarry awaiting a hunter. But who would get past the wall in the first place? Inside, the house itself was, without question, splendid, and Clare could imagine being happy in it. With space enough for Marie to have a proper administrative area, Clare would be able to remove herself entirely from all external concerns, should she so wish. There was a vast garden, too, and no neighbours to the rear, save the slopes of the mountain and the occasional hikers who followed its trails — and they, it seemed certain, would never attempt to scale her deadly ivy. The trees were tall enough and the wall itself so high that there was no fear of being overlooked, even outside, swimming in the pool, except perhaps by the neighbour on one side. Still, she disliked the idea of paying for her own imprisonment, paying to be watched by a security firm likely as not to turn over its surveillance to a branch of the government, or perhaps even worse, to a corporation that would compile records detailing her daily habits, her food preferences, her alcohol intake, her sleeping and waking, and sell such data to other companies wanting to market their goods to her, goods made by the wives, daughters, and sisters of the petty intruders against whose incursions she would be employing the security firm to protect her. There could be no protection against the currents of history.

Marie was ecstatic. The windows were equipped with remote-controlled metal shutters manufactured by a company called Tribulation; these could be closed at night, entombing them in reinforced steel. There was a special ventilation system with a reserve generator. What would happen in the case of a fire or an electrical failure? Would they ever escape? The alarm could be set to exclude their bedrooms and bathrooms at night, while motion sensors in the rest of the house would respond to something as innocent as a cushion resettling itself on a couch or a spider crawling across the wall.

‘Once the alarm is set,’ the man said, ‘nothing must fall down, nothing must drop, nothing must stir, or you’ll have the guys down here in no time. Guaranteed response is five minutes max, but they’re just around the corner anyway, so it would be more like two for you. Not much can happen in two minutes. You can go to sleep at night feeling nice and secure.’

Clare wondered if the estate agent, blond and fat as he was, knew what could really happen in two minutes. Anything was possible within two minutes, but perhaps with a panic button the two minutes could be rendered inconsequential, the response always already responding, the dogs always slavering for battery-acid blood and orange disinfectant skin. She guessed that the estate agent, let her call him Hannes, had a wife and daughter, and that he had recently had cause to fear for them both on some horrible occasion — and fear, too, what intruders with a will and no conscience, no system of moral principles, might commit.

When she heard it, the price was astounding, although she could easily afford it. Her knowledge had not kept pace with the property market and she was still thinking in rates of nearly five decades past, when she and her husband bought that vulnerable house on Canigou Avenue, her house with a gaping wound in the wall of its master bedroom. She wondered if the estate agent recognized her name. It seemed more likely that he did not read, and would not like what he read if he opened one of her books.

‘You two ladies will be very safe here. And it’s that kind of neighbourhood, if you know what I mean, where people don’t mind what two ladies do.’

Marie looked at Clare. There was no reason they should correct his misunderstanding. Clare had never imagined herself as anything but feminine, even if feminine at one-and-a-half times life size. But her very size made men — and for all she knew, other women, too — speculate about the alignment of her affections.

‘Yes. The rich don’t care what two ladies get up to. I’m sorry you thought it remarkable,’ Clare said, smiling down on him, and she could tell from his flinch that she had been ungenerous. He was only trying to be cosmopolitan, a man of the world.

Clare expected that her invasion and subsequent move would make news, appearing in the headlines and on the nightly broadcasts, off and on, for several weeks. There were only a small number of national celebrities and she liked to count herself amongst them. The media, she thought, would enjoy gloating over the apparent retreat of a champion of an open society into a fortress of personal security. Reporters would deliver dull updates from outside her new home. Editorials would wonder if she herself kept a gun, suggesting that one should know the business of one’s own house; guns were anti-progressive. Marie might have killed one of the invaders, but there was no way to know. As far as Clare knew, no one had turned up at any hospitals complaining of gunshot wounds that matched the calibre of Marie’s elegant little arm — then again, the police had not been in touch to tell her one way or the other.

In the event, Clare’s move went unnoticed. But if the press ever did come to call, she knew what she would say:

‘My fortress is the envy of the president; he says all old ladies should be so lucky. He speculates that I shall die here. Do you think that’s a veiled threat or an acknowledgement? An admission of guilt? Never mind, the fortress will protect me. I do not keep a gun, though I know how to use one. That is the legacy of frontier life, knowing how to care for and fire a gun, knowing what a gun will do. Have you ever fired a gun? No? Ever held one? No. Oh, someone once had a gun in your house, but he was a guest, a policeman, and unloaded it, and placed it on top of the refrigerator, to put you all at ease while you ate your dinners, as if that would put you at ease. No, that is not the same thing as knowing how to handle a rifle, which I am entirely capable of doing. We had ours hidden in a safe in the floor. My father learned to shoot a gun as a boy. His father, my grandfather, was a farmer who thought it sensible that his sons should know how to protect themselves in the bush. He taught my father and his brother to shoot, and when they grew up into men, they taught my sister and me and my cousins to shoot, frail English girls shouldering guns nearly as long as our own bodies and taking aim at nothing to start with, the usual nothings (tins, bottles, trees), then being encouraged to take aim at more horrible targets. The first thing I killed with a gun was my cousin’s horse, because she could not kill what she had loved. To the men it was just my cousin’s horse, and it was injured — I cannot recall the nature of the injury — and nothing could be done for it, and this, my irresponsible grandfather and uncle and father thought, should be my initiation into killing. It took five shots; I had such bad aim at first. The first two struck nowhere near the head, and I nearly shot off my father’s foot, and the poor horse had to be settled again, and then three more shots until it was dead. They should have let me kill a dog first, because a dog is only a dog, it degrades itself hourly, but a horse is something more than human. It was like killing a god rather than an animal, and I did it badly. What does that do to the mind of a child? Today they would put my father in prison on charges of child abuse or endangerment, but at the time he thought he was instructing me in the ways of our country. He was a man of the law, not of the land. How was he to know the harm he was doing? Of course he should have known.