Patrick Flanery - Absolution

Only one thing appeared to have been taken.

‘There is something missing,’ she told the uniformed officer who was leading the investigation.

‘Missing?’

‘My father’s wig.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The tin box containing my father’s wig. He was a lawyer. I kept it on the hearth. It has been taken.’

‘Why should someone wish to take your father’s wig?’

‘How should I know?’

‘Can you describe it?’

‘It was a painted black tin box with my father’s wig inside. The wig he wore when he argued cases in London. Made from horsehair. I don’t know its value. There were more obviously valuable things they might have taken.’

‘What colour was the wig?’

‘White. Grey. It was completely ordinary, as barristers’ wigs go. Like you see on television. Old movies. Costume dramas.’

‘It is a part of a costume?’

‘No. Yes. That isn’t the point,’ Clare said, trying to check her exasperation.

‘Would you like it back?’

‘Of course I want it back. It belongs to me. It can have no meaning for anyone but me.’

‘Except maybe a bald person. You are not bald. Perhaps the person who took it is a bald man. A bald man would need a wig more than you.’

‘That is a ridiculous thing to say. Should I not give a statement?’

The officer stared at her through pale jelly eyes.

‘A statement? I was told you saw nothing.’

‘Don’t you think you should ask me whether I saw anything? I saw things. I saw the intruders, their reflections.’

Clare was told to go back to bed, to one of the guest rooms. Walking upstairs, she passed little plastic shrines, police evidence tents marking drops of blood, snaking all the way to her bedroom door. She could not remember coming downstairs, nor could she remember having seen blood, but the tents suggested this was impossible; there was blood everywhere, and the smell of the invaders came back to her: synthetic, chemical, a kind of orange disinfectant, a bathroom cleaning fluid or deodorizer. Those men had cleaned themselves before they attacked; they knew what they were about. When they left, she was certain, they did not disappear into the waves of numberless shacks that stretched out beneath the mountain to the airport and beyond; they went to private hospitals where questions would not be asked, and then home to wives or girlfriends who would tend their dressings with quiet discretion.

Dawn burned visibly through a crack in the exterior wall, wood and plaster riven by the shotgun blast. Clare was allowed to retrieve the photograph from the floor; although its frame had been broken and the glass shattered, she found that by some miracle the antique print itself was intact, almost unharmed, except for a small scratch in one corner. In black and white her sister Nora stared, stern-mouthed, not at the camera, but into the distance, looking out, imperious, through horn-rimmed glasses, her forehead shaded by a ridiculous white hat, the fashion of many decades earlier. Though she was not middle-aged when the picture was taken, Nora wore a dress of white polka dots against a pale background — probably pink, Clare thought — with satin rosette buttons. It was not a young woman’s cut, dowdy rather than demure. The polka dots of the dress matched her pearl earrings. Nora’s shoulders rubbed against another woman in a light herringbone coat and black straw hat decorated with ostrich feathers. Both looked smug, chins jutting forward, jowls already forming. Clare did not recognize the other woman; they were all interchangeable, sitting in their reviewing booths at identical party rallies. That was how she liked to remember her sister, buttressed against history, in denial of the currents of history, firm-mouthed and frowning, a year or two before her assassination. It was comforting to think of her that way, to imagine her static and immobile.

Marie was beside her again, panting, smelling of wet grass. ‘Of course now you will have to move. They know they can get at you here. It’s too easy.’

‘I will have an alarm. Better burglar bars,’ Clare protested.

‘You need walls. You cannot stay in this country without walls to protect you. Walls and razor wire, electrified. Guard dogs, too.’

There was no doubt that Marie was going to win this battle. Marie, after all, had risked everything. Marie, the assistant, the employed, the indispensable, must be allowed to determine their future domestic arrangements.

‘Marie, what was the car?’

‘I gave the police the registration number.’

‘But what make? What model? Was it old or new?’

‘New,’ Marie hesitated. ‘A Mercedes.’

‘Yes. I thought it would be something like that. You will make appointments with estate agents, tomorrow, won’t you?’

You come out, across the plateau, running close to the ground, find the hole in the fence you cut on entry, scamper down to the road, peel out of the black jacket, the black slacks, shorts and T-shirt underneath; you are a backpacker, a student, a young woman hitchhiking, a tourist, perhaps with a fake accent. Soon it will be dawn. But no, I fear this isn’t right. Perhaps it wasn’t there, not that town — not the one on the plateau, but the one further along the coast at the base of the mountains, and you have gone overland to hide your tracks, not through the centre of town, not where anyone will see you at night, men coming out of bars, remembering in days to come the young woman, taut and determined, hurrying alone in the night. You went overland, up the mountain, circling round the north side of town, up through the old indigenous forest. How many hours’ walk? — twelve kilometres or more, and that’s if you kept near the road. Run, roll, slide over and down the mountain through the forestry land, the plantation, the even rows of tall pines, a grid of growth, into farmland, wide fields, the mountains behind you, the sea in front, and come down to the crossroads, where others linger in the streetlights, women and men, children, people waiting for a taxi or a relative. An old woman with a child tied to her back scrambles up over the rear fender of a vehicle, helped inside by the other passengers as it drives away, ghosting along the coast road on its innocent journey.

And yours — the flight that becomes flight as soon as the bombs detonate — what kind of journey is that? I understand that you were responsible, but how can I know with certainty? How can I know whether it was that particular explosion or another, whether the strangers who came to me later were protecting you from something or someone else, or protecting me?

I have tried to make sense of you in the past, Laura, but each time I try it comes out wrong. I write it but fail to see it. Call it a mother’s blindness. I try again, imagining it another way, but still it seems incomplete.

This new attempt to reconstruct the last days before your disappearance is only for my own sake, because there was never an official account. I begin this diary again, a new final beginning, at the same hour as I have put the pieces in motion that will result in the writing of my own life. The biographer now comes, invading my home and my mind; unlike others, no less malign in their way, I cannot deny him entry.

I dream that someday you may read this and tell me where I’ve gone wrong, so we might enjoy the irony of the imagined and the real grating against each other. In the absence of your own version, I know there must be another, a competing one, which I may yet choose to summon. I speak, of course, of the boy. I know that his is not my story to tell. There are gaps in my knowledge of your final days, but in the story of the boy I have no source upon which to rely other than your own partial account. The boy, perhaps, will tell his own story, in a way that I cannot.