The Book Of Evidence Read online

  And paused. Everything was in its place, the boats in the harbour, the road, the white houses along the coast, the far headland, those little clouds on the horizon, and yet – and yet it was all different somehow from what I had expected, from what something inside me had expected, some nice sense of how things should be ordered. Then I realised it was I, of course, who was out of place.

  I went into the newsagent's, with the same cramp of fear and excitement in my breast as I had felt the first time. When I picked up the papers the ink came off on my hands, and the coins slipped in my sweaty fingers. The girl with the pimples gave me another look. She had a curious, smeared sort of gaze, it seemed to pass me by and take me in at the same time. Pre-menstrual, I could tell by her manner, that tensed, excitable air. I turned my back on her and scanned the papers. By now the story had seeped up from the bottom of the front pages like a stain, while reports on the bombing dwindled, the injured having stopped dying off. There was a photograph of the car, looking like a wounded hippo, with a stolid guard standing beside it and a detective in Wellington boots pointing at something. The boys who had found it had been interviewed. Did they remember me, that pallid stranger dreaming on the bench in the deserted station? They did, they gave a description of me: an elderly man with black hair and a bushy beard. The woman at the traffic lights was sure I was in my early twenties, well-dressed, with a moustache and piercing eyes. Then there were the tourists at Whitewater who saw me make off with the painting, and Reck and his ma, of course, and the idiot boy and the woman at the garage where I hired the car: from each of their accounts another and more fantastic version of me emerged, until I became multiplied into a band of moustachioed cut-throats, rushing about glaring and making threatening noises, like a chorus of brigands in an Italian opera. I nearly laughed. And yet I was disappointed. Yes, it's true, I was disappointed. Did I want to be found out, did I hope to see my name splashed in monster type across every front page? I think I did. I think I longed deep down to be made to stand in front of a jury and reveal all my squalid little secrets. Yes, to be found out, to be suddenly pounced upon, beaten, stripped, and set before the howling multitude, that was my deepest, most ardent desire. I hear the court catching its breath in surprise and disbelief. But ah, do you not also long for this, in your hearts, gentlepersons of the jury? To be rumbled. To feel that heavy hand fall upon your shoulder, and hear the booming voice of authority telling you the game is up at last. In short, to be unmasked. Ask yourselves. I confess (I confess!), those days that passed while I waited for them to find me were the most exciting I have ever known, or ever hope to know. Terrible, yes, but exciting too. Never had the world appeared so unstable, or my place in it so thrillingly precarious. I had a raw, lascivious awareness of myself, a big warm damp thing parcelled up in someone else's clothes. At any moment they might catch me, they might be watching me even now, murmuring into their handsets and signalling to the marksmen on the roof. First there would be panic, then pain. And when everything was gone, every shred of dignity and pretence, what freedom there would be, what lightness! No, what am I saying, not lightness, but its opposite: weight, gravity, the sense at last of being firmly grounded. Then finally I would be me, no longer that poor impersonation of myself I had been doing all my life. I would be real. I would be, of all things, human.

  I took the bus to town, and got off at a street where I used to live years ago, when I was a student, and walked along by the railings of the park in the warm wind under the seething trees, my heart filled with nostalgia. A man in a cap, with terrible, soiled eyes, stood on the pavement shaking a fist in the air and roaring obscene abuse at the cars passing by. I envied him. I would have liked to stand and shout like that, to pour out all that rage and pain and indignation. I walked on. A trio of light-clad girls came tripping out of a bookshop, laughing, and for a second I was caught up in their midst, my side-teeth bared in a frightful grin, a beast among the graces. In a bright new shop I bought a jacket and trousers, two shirts, some ties, underwear, and, in a flourish of defiance, a handsome but not altogether unostentatious hat. I thought I detected a slight stiffening of attention when I produced Charlie's credit cards – my God, did they know him, did he shop here? – but I turned up my accent to full force and dashed off his signature with aplomb, and everyone relaxed. I was not really worried. In fact, I felt ridiculously excited and happy, like a boy on a birthday spree. (What is it about the mere act of buying things, that it can afford me so much simple pleasure?) I seemed to swim along the street, upright as a sea-horse, breasting the air. I think I must have been feverish still. The people among whom I moved were strange to me, stranger than usual, I mean. I felt I was no longer of their species, that something had happened since I had last encountered a crowd of them together, that an adjustment had occurred in me, a tiny, amazingly swift and momentous evolutionary event. I passed through their midst like a changeling, a sport of nature. They were beyond me, they could not touch me – could they see me, even, or was I now outside the spectrum of their vision? And yet how avidly I observed them, in hunger and wonderment. They surged around me at a sort of stumble, dull-eyed and confused, like refugees. I saw myself, bobbing head and shoulders above them, disguised, solitary, nursing my huge secret. I was their unrecognised and their unacknowledged dream – I was their Moosbrugger. I came to the river, and dawdled on the bridge, among the beggars and the fruit-sellers and the hawkers of cheap jewellery, admiring the wind-blurred light above the water and tasting the salt air on my lips. The sea! To be away, out there, out over countless fathoms, lost in all that blue!

  I went – everything was so simple – I went into a bar and bought a drink. Each sip was like a sliver of metal, chill and smooth. It was a cavernous place, very dark. The light from the street glared whitely in the open doorway. I might have been somewhere in the south, in one of those dank, tired ports I used to know so well. At the back, in a lighted place like a stage, some youths with shaven heads and outsize lace-up boots were playing a game of billiards. The balls whirred and clacked, the young men softly swore. It was like something out of Hogarth, a group of wigless surgeons, say, intent over the dissecting table. The barman, arms folded and mouth open, was watching a horse-race on the television set perched high up on a shelf in a corner above him. A tubercular young man in a black shortie overcoat came in and stood beside me, breathing and fidgeting. I could tell from the tension coming off him that he was working himself up to something, and for a moment I was pleasurably alarmed. He might do anything, anything. But he only spoke. I've lived here thirty-three years, he said, in a tone of bitter indignation, and everyone is afraid. The barman glanced at him with weary contempt and turned back to the television. Blue horses galloped in silence over bright-green turf. I am afraid, the young man said, resentful now. He gave a tremendous twitch, hunching his shoulders and ducking his head and throwing up one arm, as if something had bitten him on the neck. Then he turned and went out hurriedly, clutching his coat around him. I followed, leaving my drink half-finished. It was blindingly bright outside. I spotted him, a good way off already, dodging along through the crowds with his elbows pressed to his sides, taking tight, swift little steps, nimble as a dancer. Nothing could stop him. In the thickest surge of bodies he would find a chink at once, and swivel deftly from the waist up and dive through without altering his pace. What a pair we would have made, if anyone had thought to link us, he in his tight shabby coat and I with my fancy hat and expensive clutch of carrier bags. I could hardly keep up with him, and after a minute or two I was puffing and in a sweat. I had an unaccountable sense of elation. Once he paused, and stood glaring into the window of a chemist's shop. I waited, loitering at a bus-stop, keeping him in the corner of my eye. He was so intent, and seemed to quiver so, that I thought he was going to do something violent, turn and attack someone, maybe, or kick in the window and stamp about among the cameras and the cosmetic displays. But he was only waiting for another shudder to pass through him. This time when he flung u
p his arm his leg shot up as well, as if elbow and knee were connected by an invisible string, and a second later his heel came down on the pavement with a ringing crack. He cast a quick look around him, to see if anyone had noticed, and gave himself a casual little shake, as if by that he would make the previous spasm appear to have been intentional too, and then he was off again like a whippet. I wanted to catch up with him, I wanted to speak to him. I did not know what I would say. I would not offer him sympathy, certainly not. I did not pity him, I saw nothing in him to merit my pity. No, that's not true, for he was pathetic, a maimed and mad poor creature. Yet I was not sorry for him, my heart did not go out to him in that way. What I felt was, how shall I say, a kind of brotherly regard, a strong, sustaining, almost cheerful sense of oneness with him. It seemed the simplest thing in the world for me to walk up now and put my hand on that thin shoulder and say: my fellow sufferer, dear friend, compagnon de misères! And so it was with deep disappointment and chagrin that at the next corner I stopped and looked about me in the jostling crowd and realised that I had lost him. Almost at once, however, I found a substitute, a tall fat girl with big shoulders and a big behind, and big, tubular legs ending in a pair of tiny feet, like a pig's front trotters, wedged into high-heeled white shoes. She had been to the hairdresser's, her hair was cropped in a fashionable, boyish style that was, on her, grotesque. The stubbled back of her neck, with its fold of fat, was still an angry shade of red from the dryer, it seemed to be blushing for her. She was so brave and sad, clumping along in her ugly shoes, and I would have followed her all day, I think, but after a while I lost her, too. Next I took up with a man with a huge strawberry mark on his face, then a tiny woman wheeling a tiny dog in a doll's pram, then a young fellow who marched resolutely along, as if he could see no one, with a visionary's fixed glare, swinging his arms and growling to himself. In a busy pedestrian thoroughfare I was surrounded suddenly by a gang of tinker girls, what my mother would have called big rawsies, with red hair and freckles and extraordinary, glass-green eyes, who pushed against me in truculent supplication, plucking at my sleeve and whining. It was like being set upon by a flock of importunate large wild birds. When I tried to shoo them away one of them knocked my hat off, while another deftly snatched out of my hand the carrier bag containing my new jacket. They fled, shoving each other and laughing shrilly, their raw, red heels flying. I laughed too, and picked up my hat from the pavement, ignoring the looks of the passers-by, who appeared to find my merriment unseemly. I did not care about the jacket – in fact, the loss of it chimed in a mysteriously apt way with that of its discarded predecessor – but I would have liked to see where those girls would go. I imagined a lean-to made of rags and bits of galvanised iron on a dusty patch of waste ground, with a starving dog and snot-nosed infants, and a drunken hag crouched over a steaming pot. Or perhaps there was a Fagin somewhere waiting for them, skulking in the shadows in some derelict tenement, where the light of summer fingered the shutters, and dust-motes drifted under lofty ceilings, and the rat's claw in the wainscoting scratched at the silence, scratched, stopped, and scratched again. So I went along happily for a little while, dreaming up other lives, until I spotted a whey-faced giant with rubber legs clomping ahead of me on two sticks, and I set off after him in avid pursuit.

  What was I doing, why was I following these people – what enlightenment was I looking for? I did not know, nor care. I was puzzled and happy, like a child who has been allowed to join in an adults' game. I kept at it for hours, criss-crossing the streets and the squares with a drunkard's dazed single-mindedness, as if I were tracing out a huge, intricate sign on the face of the city for someone in the sky to read. I found myself in places I had not known were there, crooked alleyways and sudden, broad, deserted spaces, and dead-end streets under railway bridges where parked cars basked fatly in the evening sun, their toy-coloured roofs agleam. I ate a hamburger in a glass-walled café with moulded plastic chairs and tinfoil ashtrays, where people sat alone and gnawed at their food like frightened children abandoned by their parents. The daylight died slowly, leaving a barred, red and gold sunset smeared on the sky, and as I walked along it was like walking under the surface of a broad, burning river. The evening crowds were out, girls in tight trousers and high heels, and brawny young men with menacing haircuts. In the hot, hazy dusk the streets seemed wider, flattened, somehow, and the cars scudded along, sleek as seals in the sodium glare. I got back late to Charlie's house, footsore, hot and dishevelled, my hat awry, but filled with a mysterious sense of achievement. And that night I dreamed about my father. He was a miniature version of himself, a wizened child with a moustache, dressed in a sailor suit, his pinched little face scrubbed and his hair neatly parted, leading by the hand a great, tall, dark-eyed matron wearing Greek robes and a crown of myrtle, who fixed me with a lewd, forgiving smile.

  I have had a shock. My counsel has been to see me today, bringing an extraordinary piece of news. Usually I enjoy our little conferences, in a lugubrious sort of way. We sit at a square table in a small airless room with no windows. The walls are painted filing-cabinet grey. Light from a strip of neon tubing above our heads sifts down upon us like a fine-grained mist. The bulb makes a tiny, continuous buzzing. Maolseachlainn at first is full of energy, rooting in his bag, shuffling his papers, muttering. He is like a big, worried bear. He works at finding things to talk to me about, new aspects of the case, obscure points of law he might bring up, the chances of our getting a sympathetic judge, that sort of thing. He speaks too fast, stumbling over his words as if they were so many stones. Gradually the atmosphere of the place gets in at him, like damp, and he falls silent. He takes off his specs and sits and blinks at me. He has a way of squeezing the bridge of his nose between two fingers and a thumb which is peculiarly endearing. I feel sorry for him. I think he truly does like me. This puzzles him, and, I suspect, disturbs him too. He believes he is letting me down when he runs out of steam like this, but really, there is nothing left to say. We both know I will get life. He cannot understand my equanimity in the face of my fate. I tell him I have taken up Buddhism. He smiles carefully, unsure that it is a joke. I divert him with tales of prison life, fleshing them out with impersonations – I do our governor here very convincingly. When Maolseachlainn laughs there is no sound, only a slow heaving of the shoulders and a stretched, shiny grin.

  By the way, what an odd formulation that is: to get life. Words so rarely mean what they mean.

  Today I saw straight away he was in a state about something. He kept clawing at the collar of his shirt and clearing his throat, and taking off his half-glasses and putting them back on again. Also there was a smeary look in his eye. He hummed and hawed, and mumbled about the concept of justice, and the discretion of the courts, and other such folderol, I hardly listened to him. He was so mournful and ill at ease, shifting his big backside on the prison chair and looking everywhere except at me, that I could hardly keep from laughing. I pricked up my ears, though, when he started to mutter something about the possibility of my making a guilty plea – and this after all the time and effort he expended at the beginning in convincing me I should plead not guilty. Now when I caught him up on it, rather sharply, I confess, he veered off at once, with an alarmed look. I wonder what he's up to? I should have kept at it, and got it out of him. As a diversionary measure he dived into his briefcase and brought out a copy of my mother's will. I had not yet heard the contents, and was, I need hardly say, keenly interested. Maolseachlainn, I noticed, found this subject not much easier than the previous one. He coughed a lot, and frowned, and read out stuff about gifts and covenants and minor bequests, and was a long time getting to the point. I still cannot credit it. The old bitch has left Coolgrange to that stable-girl, what's-her-name, Joanne. There is some money for Daphne, and for Van's schooling, but for me, nothing. I suppose I should not be surprised, but I am. I was not a good son, but I was the only one she had. Maolseachlainn was watching me with compassion. I'm sorry, he said. I smiled and shrugg
ed, though it was not easy. I wished he would go away now. Oh, I said, it's understandable, after all, that she would make a new will. He said nothing. There was a peculiar silence. Then, almost tenderly, he handed me the document, and I looked at the date. The thing was seven, nearly eight years old. She had cut me out long ago, before ever I came back to disgrace her and the family name. I recalled, with shocking clarity, the way she looked at me that day in the kitchen at Coolgrange, and heard again that cackle of raucous laughter. Well, I'm glad she enjoyed her joke. It's a good one. I find a surprising lack of bitterness in my heart. I am smiling, though probably it seems more as if I am wincing. This is her contribution to the long course of lessons I must learn.