Collected Stories (80 page)

I was standing beside her, and with her head down she looked at me sideways.

‘I’ll make you some tea,’ I said, and she even nodded.

Before, during one of her late-night wanderings, she had found me masturbating in front of some late-night TV programme. It must have been some boy group, or Bowie. ‘I know what you are,’ she said. She was not disapproving. She was just a lost ally.

I made a cup of lemon tea and gave it to her. As she stood sipping it, I took up a position beside her, my head bent also, attempting to see – as she appeared to vibrate with inner electricity – what she saw and felt. It was clear that there was no chance of my ever being able to cure her. I could only become less afraid of her madness.

In his bed, Father was still snoring. He wouldn’t have liked me to be with her. He had taken her sons for himself, charmed them away, and he wasn’t a sharer.

She was almost through with the tea and getting impatient. Wandering, muttering, scratching: she had important work to do and time was passing. I couldn’t detain her any more.

I slept in her chair in the front room.

When I got up, my parents were having breakfast. My father was back in his suit and my mother was in the uniform she wore to work in the supermarket. I dressed rapidly in order to join Dad as he walked to the station. It had stopped raining.

I asked him about his day, but couldn’t stop thinking about mine. I was living, as my therapist enjoyed reminding me, under the aegis of the clock. I wanted to go to the studio and talk; I wanted to eat well and make love well, go to a show and then dance, and make love again. I could not be the same as them.

At the station in London, Father and I parted. I said I’d always look out for him when I was in the area, but couldn’t be sure when I’d be coming his way again.

I have gathered the equipment together and now I am waiting for them to arrive. They will not be long; they never are.

You don’t know me personally. My existence has never crossed your mind. But I would bet you’ve seen my work: it has been broadcast everywhere, on most of the news channels worldwide. Or at least parts of it have. You could find it on the net, right now, if you really wanted to. If you could bear to look.

Not that you’d notice my style, my artistic signature or anything like that.

I film beheadings, which are common in this war-broken city, my childhood home.

It was never my ambition, as a young man who loved cinema, to film such things. Nor was it my wish to do weddings either, though there are less of those these days. Ditto graduations and parties. My friends and I have always wanted to make real films, with living actors and dialogue and jokes and music, as we began to as students. Nothing like that is possible here.

Every day we are ageing, we feel shabby, the stories are there, waiting to be told, we’re artists. But this stuff, the death work, it has taken over.

Naturally we didn’t seek out this kind of employment. We were ‘recommended’ and we can’t not do it; we can’t say we’re visiting relatives or working in the cutting room. They call us up with little notice at odd hours, usually at night, and minutes later they are outside with their guns. They put us in the car and cover our heads. Because there’s only one of us working at a time, the thugs help with carrying the gear. But we have to do the sound as well as the picture, and load the camera and work out how to light the scene. I’ve asked to use an assistant, but they only offer their rough accomplices and they know nothing, they can’t even wipe a lens without making a mess of it.

I know three other guys who do this work; we discuss it amongst ourselves, but we’d never talk to anyone else about it or we’d end up in front of the camera.

My closest friend filmed a beheading recently, but he’s not a director, only a writer really. I wouldn’t say anything, but I wouldn’t trust him with a camera. He was the one who had the idea of getting calling cards made with ‘Weddings and Beheadings’ inscribed on them. If the power’s on, we meet in his flat to watch great movies on video. He’s jokey: ‘Don’t bury your head in the sand, my friend,’ he says when we part. ‘Don’t go losing your head now. Chin up!’

He isn’t too sure about the technical stuff, how to set up the camera, and then how to get the material through the computer and onto the internet.

It’s a skill, obviously.

A couple of weeks ago he messed up badly. The cameras are good-quality, they’re taken from foreign journalists, but a bulb blew in the one light he was using, and he couldn’t replace it. By then they had brought the victim in. My friend tried to tell the men, it’s too dark, it’s not going to come out and you can’t do another take. But they were in a hurry, he couldn’t persuade them to wait, they were already hacking through the neck and he was in such a panic he fainted. Luckily the camera was running. It came out underlit of course, what did they expect? I liked it – ‘Lynchian’ I called it – but they hit him around the head, and never used him again.

He was lucky. But I wonder if he’s going mad. Secretly he kept copies of his beheadings and now he plays around with them on his computer, cutting and re-cutting them, and putting on music, swing stuff, opera, jazz, comic songs. Perhaps it’s the only freedom he has.

It might surprise you, but we do get paid, they always give us something ‘for the trouble’, and they even make jokes: ‘You’ll get a prize for the next one. Don’t you guys love prizes and statuettes and stuff?’

But it’s hellish, the long drive there with the camera and tripod on your lap, the smell of the sack, the guns, and you wonder if this time you might be the victim. Usually you’re sick, and then you’re in the building and in the room, setting up, and you hear things, from other rooms, that make you wonder if life on earth is a good idea.

I know you don’t want too much detail, but it’s serious work taking off someone’s head if you’re not a butcher, and these guys aren’t qualified, they’re just enthusiastic, it’s what they like to do. To make it work on television, it helps to get a clear view of the victim’s eyes just before they cover them. At the end they hold up the head streaming with blood and you might need to use some hand-held here, to catch everything. It has to be framed carefully. It wouldn’t be good if you missed something. (That means that ideally you need a quick-release tripod head, something I have and would never lend to anyone.)

They cheer and fire off rounds while you’re checking the tape and playing it back. After, they put the body in a bag and dump it somewhere, before they drive you to another place, where you transfer the material to the computer and send it out.

Often I wonder what this is doing to me. I try to think of war photographers, who, they say, use the lens to distance themselves from the reality of suffering and death. But those guys have elected to do that work, they believe in it. We are innocent.

One day I’d like to make a proper film, maybe beginning with a beheading, telling the story that leads up to it. It’s the living I’m interested in, but the way things are going I’ll be doing this for a while. Sometimes I wonder if I’m going to go mad, or whether even this escape is denied me.

I better go now. Someone is at the door.

It is winter, an ordinary day, no worse than any other. I drop my son at school. A few minutes after nine I am leaving the playground, along with the Muslim women, the Africans, the Czechs and the middle-class executives in their suits, already tapping into their Blackberries. I always enjoy the walk home, the relief and freedom of solitude, and will think over everything I have to do, errands, shopping, a lunch, before picking up the boy again.

Outside the school a woman catches my eye. We mothers see each other twice a day, often for years. She looks nice, the sort I might get along with. We smile, but have never spoken or gone for coffee.

‘Want a lift?’ she asks. It is beginning to rain. We introduce ourselves and get in her car. ‘Don’t you live by the park? I’ll drop you on the corner,’ she says. ‘I hope that’s okay. I have a little time, but I have to get to work.’

I wonder why she offered to give me a lift, if she’s not really going my way. Wearing black, she has a slightly frantic look, as though she didn’t have time to finish getting ready. But which of us mothers doesn’t look like that?

As I am pulling on my seat belt, she begins to tell me about her son, who is a year younger than mine. He has ‘behavioural problems’, odd and difficult moods. He is being tested for several illnesses, attention deficit, autism and something else, I forget. She describes their visits to the numerous specialists, experts and doctors he sees a lot of now. It is a moving story, and not an uninteresting or uncommon one.

A few moments later she stops the car where the streets diverge, and I open the car door, about to get out. I know this street, and today, on the pavement, there is a local madman, very tall, hair askew, talking furiously to himself, and with a strange gait, taking huge exaggerated steps, like a giant striding across continents. At the end of the street he stops and returns.

The woman continues to speak, and I nod and listen, as she describes a doctor. In my right hand is my phone and my bag; the other hand is still holding the door. Because of the madman, I close it again and lock it.

When I turn to her and mouth some comforting words, I begin to see that the woman has no interest in my response, that there is nothing she wants from me. I only have to be here, a person, that’s all.

I look at her face, her clothes, her rings, her shoes, and she watches me reach for the metal door handle again. I see the madman has passed and it would be a good opportunity to get on with my day. I open the door. I appear to gather myself and my possessions up again, but she keeps going.

As I sit there, I become aware, amazed even, that nothing I might do, or attempt to say, will make any difference to this woman. I was brought up to be polite. In fact I believe that if I am rude, I will be hated. My husband is different: he is not afraid of being offensive, he even enjoys it. He would open the car door, say goodbye, and be gone. ‘What does it matter?’ he’d say. ‘They’ll survive.’

More than anything I want him to phone me now, to interrupt this, to help me understand. The woman is speaking quickly but every detail is clear; it is not the wild jumble of a psychotic, nor the monotonous tone of the depressive.

‘The doctor was nice, he wore a suit, he asked my son many questions. He asked to talk to him privately. Well, I said …’ You would think there’d be a pause here, but she has clearly developed her gift for making her sentences run on. ‘We tried another doctor, recommended by someone else … Now, of course, my husband and I are having our difficulties …’

I can see her eyes taking in my hand on the door handle; this is a look from her, not a glance, but my obvious desire to escape has no effect.

She begins to do this terrible thing. To prove to myself that I don’t lack courage, I attempt to interrupt, opening my mouth to take a breath, but with hardly the first word out of my throat she raises her finger at me and says, ‘Just let me finish.’

This must have been going on for fifteen or twenty minutes. Is there something about me which invites such abuse? What would it be? How could she have picked it up when I have never spoken to her before?

After an hour – yes, an hour – I am becoming claustrophobic; I cannot speak, cannot make myself heard. Unsaid words are throttling me. Something in my right eye is vibrating. My breathing is shallow, my legs feel crushed. Surely she can hear that I am angry, and see that she is assaulting me, that I am being crushed under an injustice. But I am mesmerised. My husband would say that this must have happened to me before, yes with mother, in the kitchen, or on the phone, and sometimes with friends, but does it follow that I want this all the time?

Soon an hour and a quarter has passed: more, even; I have lost my bearings. She has forgotten me, and I have forgotten myself, as if she has planted a virus in my mind which slowly wiped away my memory, my volition, my entire identity.