Listening in the Dusk Page 17

  Cassiopeia. Perseus. The Great Bear. In five minutes they just wouldn’t be there. Nothing would. At this thought I experienced such a moment of panic as I don’t know how to describe. I had to wait for it to pass.

  The gun felt heavier than I’d remembered, and terribly cold. They say you should put it in your mouth, but I didn’t have the courage. I don’t know why it should need more courage, but it does, so instead I pointed it to the side of my head, and sat there nerving myself … nerving myself. Other people have done it … I can do it … just one tiny tug on the trigger …

  “What the hell are you up to …?”

  The voice … the dark circle of the head sliced into the stars, and straight away I pulled the trigger.

  He died instantly. It seemed the purest chance that it was him and not me. If he hadn’t chanced to be walking on the grass instead of along the lorry track … If I hadn’t chanced to be behind this particular clump of gorse rather than another … If I hadn’t chanced to take so long arranging myself in a comfortable position … Such trivial and arbitrary differences of time and place, and then it would have been me, not him. So little difference — one man or the other. All random chance …

  I remember slipping away through the dark bushes, not feeling anything in particular. Only gradually it came to me what I’d done. I’m a murderer now, I thought. It was the strangest thing, though, I felt no guilt, nor even any fear of being caught, which of course looked like being a near certainty; my footprints must have been everywhere, and I hadn’t the ghost of an alibi. No, what I felt was an extraordinary exhilaration, such as I’ve never known before: a sense of enormous worth, of achievement. “I’ve killed a man, I’ve killed a man!” I found I was saying to myself as I walked down the street next day, as I queued for stamps at the Post Office. I’ve killed a man: you haven’t, you poor drip; and nor have you … nor you. I have — I’ve killed a man; and I felt about ten feet tall.

  Another thing: it seems to have wiped out completely the shame of being a failed suicide. It has given me such strength; next time I shall not dither and hesitate and fail, because now I am a person who can inflict death. I wasn’t before, but now I am.

  July 5th. The hunt is on: TV, newspapers, the lot, but somehow I don’t feel it’s anything much to do with me.

  I’m an outlaw, I’ve put myself outside the law, and so its workings don’t really concern me. I have crossed a frontier, and there is no going back. I find myself in a place of amazing freedom. I can do anything.

  Sunday July 10th. Blazing hot day. Lying in the gorse, only slightly shaded from the sun, and watching the human vermin pullulating below. They are all over the building sites, screeching, picnicking, dropping trails of litter. When I half-close my eyes, and see through my eyelashes, they look like one of those hospital films of abdominal operations — a huge, shuddering mass of flesh, mindlessly pulsating and executing bizarre and monotonous convolutions. If I took a pot-shot into the middle of the mass, what would be the difference?

  Ah, but I need my bullet for myself.

  Or is it that I don’t dare?

  I wish I had more courage. Or more bullets. Or something. It’s a cop-out, just shooting myself only, I ought to take a few others with me out of this over-populated world.

  And that very night, he did. And the following night too. Though the entries at this point were only barely legible, they left no doubt as to the fearful facts.

  Tuesday July 12th. THE MONSTER STRIKES AGAIN. This is today’s headline. Well, of course it is. But I ask myself, what are the criteria of monsterhood? In almost any other period throughout the history of mankind, what I’ve done would pass as perfectly normal. The young human male who aspired to any sort of important status in his tribe would have killed quite a few men by the time he was my age, certainly more than I have. The reason I’m a monster is not that I’ve killed three men, but that I’ve killed them now, in the twentieth century.

  Who will be the next victim, everyone is asking, and so am I. How do I know until I see him? I knew this last time because he looked so miserable, this one, as he stumped along, glaring at the ground, his face all twisted up with years and years of grievance and bad temper. I’d noticed him earlier, in the afternoon, jabbing with his thumb at a folded paper and snarling something about the front elevation. Having destroyed Flittermouse Hill and every creature in it, they aren’t even going to be happy with their victory. They are planning already to be miserable and discontented.

  I sat near his body for a long time, waiting for it to be found, and as the beginnings of dawn shimmered over his dead face, I saw with my own eyes the vastness of the peace I had created, the sudden gentleness. The grievances, the anxiety, the ill-temper, all were gone, and as the sun rose he lay with his blood soaking into the short grass, a sacrifice to the Powers of Earth, which of course are the worms and the soil-bacteria on whom the rest of life depends, and to whom these trickles of blood are a rare and wondrous feast. This is the first good, creative thing that this fat and pallid body has ever done: sacrificed at sunrise as so many of our ancestors — his and mine — must have been sacrificed likewise, on this very hill.

  There followed a quotation from some author. Alice promised to try and track him — or her — down:

  “Killing is an act of creation … Why is it a crime to kill? It is, on the contrary, a law of nature … Killing is a law thrust by nature into the very profoundest impulse of our being …”

  The diarist adds a rider:

  I don’t know if this author had actually killed anyone, but he’s certainly got it right. It’s nothing to do with any Lust to Kill’: it’s the exercise of an ancient and deeply-implanted skill; one that has lain dormant all one’s life, but is suddenly in perfect working order the moment occasion for its use arises. I would imagine that this is how a woman must feel having her first baby. The hitherto unused muscles of her womb suddenly springing into powerful and totally efficient action, with no practice, no previous training.

  That’s the way it feels. It’s easy. That’s the amazing thing.

  But a few days later, a different note was struck:

  July 17th. I feel shaken this morning, in fact a bit shattered, for last night it all went wrong. I fired from too far away, I think, and instead of being killed at once, he was injured. I hadn’t meant that at all. I ran up to him. “I’m sorry … I’m sorry!” I told him, “I didn’t mean to hurt you, I only meant to kill you!” I tried to help him, for lying there he looked like any other living creature in distress. But I couldn’t do anything. I just got myself covered in blood, and so I ran away and phoned a hospital. Anonymously, of course, I don’t want to put myself into their hands, just like that. Not yet, anyway.

  It’s amazing, really, that they haven’t caught me by now, and I can’t help feeling that my indifference to whether I get caught or not must have something to do with it. For a murderer, my behaviour must be very untypical, and this may be putting them off their stroke.

  One or two more, and then it’ll be my turn. I’m glad I decided on that second gun when I had the chance; now, if something goes wrong, I’ll still be able to finish myself off. I have the courage for it now, I know I have. In fact, it will hardly need courage, for I have become familiar with death, he has become an old friend.

  Just before they come for me, I will do it. The rush of adrenalin will help me, as I see them closing in.

  It didn’t, though. They closed in too suddenly, perhaps; or the rush of adrenalin came too late. Or something.

  Anyway, they got him. They took him alive, which he had sworn they should never do.

  Chapter 24

  Alice’s words hung in the quiet room unanswered. “Do you want to throw it away?” she’d asked.

  It was after midnight. She was exhausted, and so must Mary be after their day-long journey into tragedy. Had she made a mistake in more or less forcing Mary to sit down and read the diary with her? It was bound to upset her — to re-awaken all the dread
ful memories — but was it not better, in the long run, to face everything that had to be faced, and then begin putting it behind you, rather than have it for ever hanging over you?

  “Or shall we keep it?” she continued.

  Mary still did not speak, but sat, head in hands, her mouth pulled into a thin, down-turned line, like an old woman, by the pressure of her tense palms. Alice felt obliged to go on talking, to hold at bay, somehow, the terrible silence which threatened to become irreversible.

  “The way it seems to me,” she hazarded, not even knowing yet how she was going to finish the sentence. “The way one could look at it, I mean, well, in some ways hasn’t reading it made you feel a bit better? I mean, obviously these were dreadful crimes, no one is going to argue with that, but at least he imagined he had a purpose … In his own eyes, he was doing it for something. Fighting single-handed for a cause …”

  At this last word, Mary’s head jerked up, her eyes sharp with the feverish glitter of exhaustion as well as panic.

  “A cause! But that’s the worst thing of all, the lawyers said! All the time, preparing for the trial, they were insistent that the whole question of Julian working for a cause must be kept strictly out of it. Juries have no sympathy for causes, they told us. They are likely to view a crime committed for a cause in a much worse light than the same crime committed for money, or revenge, or some other sort of personal gain. And anyway, they told us, the Judge would disallow it. He would instruct the Jury that the rights or wrongs of any cause whatsoever were outside their terms of reference: it was their duty to decide only two things: first, were they satisfied that the alleged crimes had been committed; and second, were they satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that it was the defendant who’d committed them.

  “And of course it was beyond reasonable doubt. Julian never made the slightest effort to deny any of it.”

  “No, well, he wouldn’t, would he?” Alice pointed out. “It’s obvious from the diary that he wanted the world to know what he’d done and why he’d done it. He felt that he was striking a blow, making a huge, unforgettable gesture on behalf of, well, of life on earth. That’s what he felt he was doing, and he wanted the world to know it. He didn’t know, I imagine, all this about judges disallowing discussion of principles, of ethical fors and againsts, in Court. Besides, he never expected to be in Court, did he? He planned to finish himself off before it came to that. He says so — over and over again — and my reading of it is that he truly and honestly meant it. Not all suicides do; but I’m sure he did.”

  “Oh, yes. I’m sure too. He even talked of it to me, long before all this. When we first heard that they were going to build on Flittermouse Hill, that’s when it was. He felt awful about it; I knew he did, though I suppose I didn’t quite realise how awful. Well, I felt awful too, but of course it wasn’t quite the same for me. I’d already left home, you see, I was at college by then, my life had already moved on to somewhere else, if you know what I mean, while his hadn’t. He was still there, still at school, still living at home, right in the thick of it. I didn’t realise … Well, I did, but I didn’t see what I could do about it; except go with him on those demos and things, whenever I was home; and a bloody lot of use that was!”

  She paused, and reached out absently for one of the biscuits which had been virtually their sole sustenance during the day.

  “And another thing, Alice, which would have gone against him, the fact that it was not only a cause, but a cause that concerned animals. You know, the idea of valuing animal life above human life. It gives people the shudders.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Alice was beginning, thinking about this being a nation of animal-lovers, but Mary interrupted.

  “It is so, Alice,” she insisted. “It really is. You know how horrified everyone is if a motorist swerves to avoid a dog and hits a pedestrian? There’s a national outcry. Whereas if he’s swerved to avoid a sack of potatoes and had had exactly the same accident, no one would have said a word; it would just have been an unlucky accident. And that time two or three years ago — do you remember?—when a man drowned trying to rescue his dog from a rough sea, and a policeman got drowned too trying to save him? It was a scandal for days, endangering human life for the sake of a dog. Whereas if exactly the same tragedy had occurred as a result of him swimming out after a lilo, there’d have been no fuss at all. It would have been just one more unfortunate bathing fatality. It was because it was a dog — an animal — that’s what caused the moral outrage.

  “It’s true, Alice. People do feel this horror. And on top of all this his cause, as you call it — Nature, and animals and things — could only have been harmed. A woman I know from the Animal Guardian Group said it would set the cause back a hundred years if it ever became known why Julian had run amok like that. I assure you, Alice — I’ve lived with all this awfulness for long enough to know this for certain — it’s better to kill for sheer wickedness than for the sake of an animal. People feel like that. They just do.”

  “And do you feel like that?” Alice had hesitated for several seconds before putting the question; and straight away it was clear that she had said the wrong thing.

  “It’s not fair! It’s not fair!” Mary cried. “Why should you expect me to feel differently from the way other people feel? I don’t want to feel differently! I want to be ordinary! I want to feel the way other people feel, I want to think the way other people think. I want to think ordinary thoughts; and so would you if you’d been through what I’ve been through!

  “Oh, Alice, it’s not my thing! I’ve been dragged into it. It’s like being kidnapped in mistake for someone else … it’s not fair!

  “Sometimes, Alice, I envy him, I really do. I envy all these dreadful criminals because they actually did commit their crimes, themselves; it’s in their nature to do whatever they did, they’re kind of all of a piece with it. And I’m not. How can I be? It’s not in my nature to be the sister of a murderer, I wasn’t born for it, it’s something I don’t know how to be, something I can’t be, it’s impossible …”

  By this time her voice was almost lost in gusts of exhausted weeping, and the single desperate plea was all that Alice could distinguish amid the uncontrollable sobs:

  “I want to be ordinary! All I want is to be ordinary! Surely that’s not much to ask …”

  Actually, it is a lot to ask. Too weary to follow up this thought, Alice summoned up all her remaining energies for the task of persuading Mary to go to bed. Tomorrow — today, rather, for it was long after midnight — would be Saturday, the first day of the new job in the supermarket, and as this fact crossed her mind Alice knew, with absolute certainty, that Mary must be made to go to it, no matter what she was feeling like. It was a watershed, on the other side of which might surely lie the new life she had been so hopelessly seeking all this time. No way must she be allowed to oversleep, to lie in bed till it was too late to go, sobbing I can’t, I won’t and What’s the point, my life is in ruins.

  And so, heartless though it seemed at such a juncture, Alice reached out both hands and yanked Mary to her feet, tears and all.

  “Come along. Pull yourself together (the one phrase you must never use, all the books say so, as Mary would well know; which would make the shock of hearing it all the more salutary). Come on, it’s nearly two and you’ve got to be out of the house by eight and properly dressed, too, looking your best. How do you think you’re going to do that if you go on crying all night? Let alone getting the money right in the till. Never mind that discrepancy of ten pounds, you’ll be getting a discrepancy of hundreds if you don’t get any sleep.

  “Listen. You said just now you wanted to be ordinary. So, OK, be ordinary; an ordinary working girl off to an ordinary job at which she’s ordinarily efficient and picks up an ordinary pay-packet at the end of the day. A girl who looks ordinary, too, not one with red eyes and a swollen face and can’t stop sniffing. Now, get on! Out of that door, down those stairs, and into bed. I’ll bring you a hot drink
in ten minutes, and then that’s got to be the last we hear of you until the alarm goes in the morning. Here you are; I’ve set it for seven, and if I don’t hear you moving around by seven fifteen, I’ll come and drag you out of bed. Right?

  “Out, then. Don’t just sit there. Make yourself scarce. Which is Old-Speak for ‘Fuck Off’, in case you haven’t come across it before!”

  Chapter 25

  The effect seemed to be little short of miraculous. Well before eight, Mary must have been up and away, or so Alice concluded, glancing into the room on her way downstairs. She had made the bed, too, and flung the window open at the bottom before leaving. Both good signs, though the latter was admitting so icy a blast of damp January air that Alice could not refrain from closing it. A pity: Mary’s flinging of it open on to the wild, windy outdoors, after all these weeks of cowering away from everything, seemed to indicate a wonderful lifting of the spirit, a revival of confidence and hope.

  Of course, this had been almost bound to happen, sooner or later. The living mind, just like the living body, is resilient beyond the wit of man to comprehend. Just as an injured body will instantly set about mobilising all the appropriate mechanisms of repair and healing, so also will the mind. Nor do these processes of repair demand any particular co-operation on the part of the sufferer. Without encouragement of any sort, a burned area of skin will form for itself a blister, beneath the shelter of which new skin can regenerate. It will do this whether the victim wants it to or not; whether he is conscious, unconscious, happy, unhappy, crossed in love, on top of the world, sunk in apathy or intending to die, his body will go on quietly doing its job regardless. So, likewise, will the mind. However great the trauma, however terrible the shock, or how hopeless the situation, the mind will very soon set in motion the forces of recovery. Even during the period of apparently total despair, the process will already have begun, far below the level of awareness, and the final breakthrough may take the sufferer himself quite by surprise.