Read Online The Light of Day: A Novel by Graham Swift - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Graham Swift
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Pretend you’ve walked through the wrong door. This wasn’t for me, it was for somebody else . . .
Pity crashing into something else.
And afterwards the possibility that it was all a “moment of madness”—that old get-out, that tired old formula—and they might carry on as if nothing had happened. As if it wouldn’t be for him (and for her) like some infection that was inside him now.
And, anyway, by then, the scent was thickening in the air.
The charitable case: for him, for Bob. It hit him from nowhere, like wildfire. And he hadn’t wanted to be burned.
And Kristina? So poor and helpless. She was twenty-two. Life had plucked her up and thrown her back into temporary childhood—perhaps—or made her grow up quicker than most. Older than her years. And so: an older man. And, in any case, she’d bloomed. Plucked up and set down in the land of comfort and plenty. Wimbledon.
Enough to make her burst, at first, into girl’s tears. In that kitchen. But what did she care now, when she’d lost so much? What did she owe the world? A stateless person, only half within the law.
All those months, years—all the time—she must have thought it: I might have been there and not here. I might be dead too, worse than dead. I might have had to watch while they shot the others first, raped the others first, then shot them. She’d always know it. But here she was in a warm bed in Wimbledon. Lawns and trees. What were the rules now? The feeling of protection sliding, for her too, into something else.
A rebound: you were robbed, now you take. And are the young so easily damaged anyway? So soft? Helen: she knew she was hurting me. You’re only young once and there’s a kind of savagery in it. That brother, the dead soldier, the handsome waiter. He’d been gunned down. But he’d fucked all those foreign girls, as many as he could, as if he knew he didn’t have long.
“I asked her what she’d thought, George—of her brother just having his way like that, treating them like prey. You know what she said? She said it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like that at all. She said if he hadn’t been her brother she’d have joined the queue.”
I still think of these things, still on the case. The job that never stops. It’s not enough sometimes just to watch and note. You have to put yourself into the picture, into their shoes.
His shoes—the man lying under this slab, under a bunch of roses. I think of him falling through his life.
How did it begin? How did it carry on—once Sarah knew and before there was, by tight-lipped agreement, that flat in Fulham? They—she—couldn’t just kick her out. She was an asylum seeker: she had their asylum. The rules of charity. But hadn’t they been smashed?
A simple question. Where did they
do
it—Kristina and Bob? You have to ask it (Sarah must have asked it). You have to ask, in my job, these simple squalid mechanical things. And put yourself in the scene.
Under their roof? Hardly—not any more. In his office? In his gynaecological consulting room. In Harley Street. In the Parkside Hospital. Signing on as some bogus private patient? The strictest privacy. It always teeters (I know, I’ve seen) into farce. A senior medical man with his trousers down.
In the black Saab? Or, for God’s sake, wherever they could. On Wimbledon Common for God’s sake. Just up the hill. Handy. Just over the road from the Parkside. It’s big enough, you can get hidden enough. Enough thick trees. And even a relish in it, the danger of it—now their cover was blown anyway. An extra thrill. They might have fucked against a tree like people who own nothing. Part of her wants it, likes it like that, and he understands. (It also drives him crazy.)
On Wimbledon Common. Why not? Things happen there, in broad daylight. People get mugged, raped, killed. Or pump themselves full of chemicals. These chunks of wilderness.
Just a stone’s throw from his grave—just over there, beyond the cemetery fence.
Pity crashing into something else.
And afterwards the possibility that it was all a “moment of madness”—that old get-out, that tired old formula—and they might carry on as if nothing had happened. As if it wouldn’t be for him (and for her) like some infection that was inside him now.
And, anyway, by then, the scent was thickening in the air.
The charitable case: for him, for Bob. It hit him from nowhere, like wildfire. And he hadn’t wanted to be burned.
And Kristina? So poor and helpless. She was twenty-two. Life had plucked her up and thrown her back into temporary childhood—perhaps—or made her grow up quicker than most. Older than her years. And so: an older man. And, in any case, she’d bloomed. Plucked up and set down in the land of comfort and plenty. Wimbledon.
Enough to make her burst, at first, into girl’s tears. In that kitchen. But what did she care now, when she’d lost so much? What did she owe the world? A stateless person, only half within the law.
All those months, years—all the time—she must have thought it: I might have been there and not here. I might be dead too, worse than dead. I might have had to watch while they shot the others first, raped the others first, then shot them. She’d always know it. But here she was in a warm bed in Wimbledon. Lawns and trees. What were the rules now? The feeling of protection sliding, for her too, into something else.
A rebound: you were robbed, now you take. And are the young so easily damaged anyway? So soft? Helen: she knew she was hurting me. You’re only young once and there’s a kind of savagery in it. That brother, the dead soldier, the handsome waiter. He’d been gunned down. But he’d fucked all those foreign girls, as many as he could, as if he knew he didn’t have long.
“I asked her what she’d thought, George—of her brother just having his way like that, treating them like prey. You know what she said? She said it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like that at all. She said if he hadn’t been her brother she’d have joined the queue.”
I still think of these things, still on the case. The job that never stops. It’s not enough sometimes just to watch and note. You have to put yourself into the picture, into their shoes.
His shoes—the man lying under this slab, under a bunch of roses. I think of him falling through his life.
How did it begin? How did it carry on—once Sarah knew and before there was, by tight-lipped agreement, that flat in Fulham? They—she—couldn’t just kick her out. She was an asylum seeker: she had their asylum. The rules of charity. But hadn’t they been smashed?
A simple question. Where did they
do
it—Kristina and Bob? You have to ask it (Sarah must have asked it). You have to ask, in my job, these simple squalid mechanical things. And put yourself in the scene.
Under their roof? Hardly—not any more. In his office? In his gynaecological consulting room. In Harley Street. In the Parkside Hospital. Signing on as some bogus private patient? The strictest privacy. It always teeters (I know, I’ve seen) into farce. A senior medical man with his trousers down.
In the black Saab? Or, for God’s sake, wherever they could. On Wimbledon Common for God’s sake. Just up the hill. Handy. Just over the road from the Parkside. It’s big enough, you can get hidden enough. Enough thick trees. And even a relish in it, the danger of it—now their cover was blown anyway. An extra thrill. They might have fucked against a tree like people who own nothing. Part of her wants it, likes it like that, and he understands. (It also drives him crazy.)
On Wimbledon Common. Why not? Things happen there, in broad daylight. People get mugged, raped, killed. Or pump themselves full of chemicals. These chunks of wilderness.
Just a stone’s throw from his grave—just over there, beyond the cemetery fence.
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