Pravda (44 page)

Mercifully (or even more destructively), Lina's rages were always speechless and internal. And though Gabriel genuinely felt for her—was he not a fellow soldier in the silent wars of the subconscious?—he had learned to say nothing when she got this way, as she did three of four times a year. No species of humor, no mode of cordiality, no method of clowning or conversation could draw her out of the tight angry spiral into which her spirit plunged. His every gambit only made it worse. A few days later, when she was herself again, she would calmly explain that a whole host of troubles contributed—her parents' divorce, things not exactly perfect, local rudenesses suffered (perceived or actual), the cold, the wet, the passages of the moon—but no, he was not to worry, it certainly wasn't anything to do with him. More and more, though, he had started to doubt her. No, that too was disingenuous. Actually, he had long been utterly convinced that he was the root cause—the dark energy that caused her universe to continue falling apart when it should by now have stabilized. And if she was not lying to avoid some deeper conflict or issue (and he could think of one or two), then her endlessly generous subconscious was protecting them both from the same by citing the moon. She was displacing. Yes, it was all him.

And so there they were, an hour later, with plastic chopsticks, cartons, and sodden napkins. Desperate. The rain and the cold did not help. Nor that she had not found whatever it was that they were supposed to be looking for. Nor that the whole expedition had been her idea because she wanted to "do something" with her Saturdays. Nor that he was, if anything, in far greater disarray than she. Nor, indeed, that he still loved her with a confusing conviction.

He had watched supportively as she had bought herself her carton's worth. He had watched tenderly as she carefully spread three purpose-recruited plastic bags across her side of the bench to ensure no possibility of dampness. He had watched gingerly as she had put a chopstick's worth into her pretty mouth. He had watched forlornly as she promptly spat it out into her napkin in disgust.

"I can't eat that," she had said, a look of horror on her face—as if they two were alone in some forgotten Vietcong camp facing roach fried rice forever. "I can taste the dye."

"Get something else, then." He was deep into his own carton already.

"How can you eat it?"

"It's not too bad."

She had looked at him as if he were a man capable of surprising her only in his ability to conjure up new lows from human existence. And of course he felt there was nothing else to do but go for another mouthful.

He had meant to antagonize her, perhaps. But he had also actually meant it: there were a million worse meals being served up on the planet every second, and a whole lot of meals not being served up at all. It
wasn't
too bad. He had watched her fold the napkin neatly (almost madly, he thought), lean over, and place it in the nearby bin, following it quickly with the rest of her food. Then she rose silently—incandescent—and set off to get something else to disgust her.

Now she had disappeared

He wondered how much time he had.

Preoccupied wasn't really the word for it.

He was disintegrating.

And even this he wasn't doing properly, because every time one part of his mind began to address the questions, every time he felt the emotional panic rising as he tried once again to confront himself, another part of his mind would remind him of something horrific happening elsewhere on the planet and in so doing render his own problems and predicament infinitely unimportant, unworthy of thought or time or even feeling. And in this way he continually hijacked himself. But this too he only managed to do unsatisfactorily. (Mania, definitely a mania of some sort.) Because of course he continued to live and think within himself, and within himself the questions remained, returning every few hours, cycling back up to the forefront of his mind regardless of the rest of the world and all its undeniably greater misery. Despite these hijacks, despite everything, he was still himself; still young enough, not subjugated, not tortured, not diseased, not dying, but still living where he lived, a healthy representative of the first adult generation of the new century. The very latest wave of humanity. And he was still required to make an intelligent fair-hearted go of it, just as all the parallel Gabriels he imagined among the Victorians or the Renaissance courtiers or the flappers or the Athenian senators or the Minoans or the Aborigines or the Jutes or the twelve tribes of Israel or the Mongols had been required to
make a go of it before him. (Curiously, the beef tasted of ... of real chicken.) And yet it seemed to him that he was uniquely required to live and act against a social background of near-total doubt. Any other Gabriel from any other time and place would at least have been able to believe in
something.
Sure, these other Gabriels might have had a lot of shit on their plates—war, disease, violent death, and so on. (And better chicken.) But not this ... not this complete and utter evaporation of all possible belief, or consistency, or any good way for the intelligent man to live. (Might this pale and watery sphere once have been a proud water chestnut?) These other Gabriels had not had to face the fact that God was now well and truly dead, over, a calamitous joke. They had not had to face the fact that the medieval religions had grown senile, demented, and crazed, unable to contend with or relate to the present world in all its instant and tentacled reality (the flavor was inconclusive—might just as well have been a lychee); that, devoid of any great countervailing idea or ideal, capitalism was sweeping all before it (definite oyster mushroom); that conventional politics had been reduced to little more than a fretful soap ("crab" "stick"); that art was now measured not by any external litmus of quality or skill or even endeavor, and that so many seeming acts of creation turned out to be mere gesture and these were celebrated out of all proportion (prawns again, or maybe ... goat); that all ideas had become small or embarrassing or superficial, languishing in the lowercase (bean sprout—GM, definitely GM); that the strength of an argument was now gauged only by the emotional temperature at which it was delivered; that science had become too fast for the executive or legislative to understand; that the media had grown mad with chasing what they thought the public wanted and the public mad with what the media fed it; that personal experience had become the tyrant of truth (rind? squid? pig's ear?); and that right and wrong were now as lost to the world as a pair of penguins in an underground car park long ago sealed off by an earthquake and flooded over by a tsunami.

All that was left was hedonism and acquisitiveness; all that was left was the self. For the first time in history, it seemed to him (watching the rain drop as the family departed) that for the thinking man, absolutely nothing credible existed; or rather, as he had said to Connie, nothing that could not be readily discredited. And he just wasn't sure the self was up to it. The self much preferred to be selfish.

Worst of all, though, with a third part of himself, he suspected that he was thinking about all this as a deliberate distraction—a
means whereby he might cloak his inability to sort anything out in the secular-holy robes of some spurious and self-deceiving faux humanitarianism. Unbelievable:
yet more horseshit.
Which in turn made him feel guilty. To add to the plain and simple guilt that he already felt—and here the cycle began again—about how he was treating the women in his life whom he sincerely loved...
Both
of them. Yes, both, Ma: two at the same time. Which was the immediate point. And
stop
dodging it, Gabriel...

The veil of rain thickened.

He put down his chopsticks.

Oh Ma, I am the torturer in chief. I am the double traitor with two lives hollow. I am the counterfeiter. I am the simulacrum. I am the one with a shard of ice in his heart. They throw open the secret chapels of their hearts, I walk in, plant my monitoring devices, and leave; they come to me with open eyes, I tweak out their tears. Or else I am hidden, Ma, I am closed off and locked away. Where am I, Ma, where am I, your son? In what lead-lined bunker did you leave me? For what reason? And who ... who am I? This director of propaganda. This creature never present. This looking-glass man.

But for something like seven seconds a month, the power failed, the burning spotlights were all extinguished at the same time, the noise was roundly silenced, his heart slowed its battering, his breathing deepened, and he glimpsed the naked truth stealing across the darkened stage of his mind between costume changes.

And now at last the decision came, not like a butterfly or a ray of celestial light but in the shape of a fat pigeon beaking its way through the daily jamboree of the fallen Chinese.

Leave her. Leave everyone. Do it now. Start it now. Give yourself no choice.

And he set off at a run through the rain like a man chasing a thief that only he could see.

When the call came, she did not recognize his voice. She stood in Susan's hall with the children running this way and that and tried to make sense of what Gabriel was telling her. But she could not process the words—she felt instead as though listening to a stranger describing the actions of a supposedly mutual friend that she wasn't actually sure she knew. "I've left Lina."

"What?"

"I've taken a room. In Chalk Farm."

"What?"

"I'm there now."

"Gabs?"

"In a shared house. There's a guy from work—they were looking for someone. I've given them a deposit. I had to do it straightaway, Is. I've been..."

She clutched the receiver closer, hoping that might help her understand. "Gabs—what—what are you talking about? What have you done?"

"I keep on feeling it all from—" He interrupted himself. "It makes me so angry for every ... About me, I mean. And sad."

"What—what have you done?"

"Sorry. I have made a decision, Is. No idea if it is the right one. But I couldn't carry on. The whole thing was killing me. Trying to think my way through it all. Seeing it from all the different angles. I just got sick of thinking. It's like the way Mum used to say that Kasparov would beat his opponents: he would complicate it and
complicate it until they just got sick of thinking about the problem. Then, eventually, their stamina went. Well, I'm beaten. That's it. I'm moving out."

"Jesus, Gabriel, you're moving out of your flat? You're splitting up with Lina? Are you ... Where are you?"

"And—and I need you to help me. I have to go back and talk to her now—she'll be worried about me, she keeps calling my mobile—but I ... I need you to help me move my stuff out. I've hired a van. I'm picking it up in King's Cross at eight. I'll do the first run tonight—as soon as—or it will be too late. Sort the rest tomorrow."

"Gabriel, where the hell are you?"

"Grafton Terrace."

"Where's that?"

"Chalk Farm."

"That's just around the corner."

"I know."

"I'm coming ... I'm coming now. I'll be there in fifteen minutes. Tell me where exactly."

When she arrived, his behavior was the most unnerving she had ever known, odder even than when she had discovered him earnestly playing charades with total strangers on the heath during one of his boyhood disappearances. He was being grotesquely normal. And yet only she seemed to be able to see through the threadbare ordinariness of his manner. His dark eyes danced with his intelligence and yet they were ringed with tiredness as if with tar; his hair was straggled dry from the rain and smelled of smoke; his jeans were still soaking at the bottom where he'd obviously drenched himself in puddles. And he would not shut up.

Just like that, he introduced her to all his new flatmates, all five of them in their late twenties and early thirties, as if this were just another routine and reasonably considered move in a life of steady progress. There was talk of handy shops. Talk of the local. Talk of a dinner party so that he could get to know their various "other halves." Talk of bills and a few house rules. Talk of a cleaning rota. Talk of the garden's being lovely in the summer. Excited talk of a New Year's party they were planning. He was all agreement, regularity, and straight, easy charm. She couldn't believe he was fooling them. A good actor—she had forgotten that—a very good actor. Because he meant it. While he was saying it, he meant it. And he
made
her
feel discomfited and deceitful for not going along with it. As though she would be letting down not only him but these great new flatmates too: Claire, Chris, Sean, Louis, and Taz. So she just had to stand there and nod and smile and listen.

Stunned, anxious, panicked, she climbed into the moving van at eight the next morning, the Sunday sky raw as pale flesh before the flogging starts. He had not answered his phone all night. She had left three or four messages. And a part of her was plain relieved that he was here, alive, staring dead ahead from behind the blue plastic wheel, dressed in paint-stained green overalls that she could not imagine her brother wearing, let alone owning, in a million years of trying. She took one look at his face and knew that he had not slept for a moment, nor bothered to try. She said nothing. He would speak or not, as he wished. The radio told of yet another leadership crisis. They set off, brother and sister.

After a while he began to talk—brusque and broken sentences, which she did not question. She understood that Lina had last night cried such terrible silent tears that in the end Gabriel had carried her across the threshold in his arms and driven her, wrapped in a blanket, to her mother's in the van. The bitter opposite of marriage, he muttered. Then he himself had gone to his friend Larry's, at one or two. Beyond that, more or less all he would say was that it was not as bad as Mum, not as bad as Mum, not as bad as Mum, over and over again.

He was no longer pretending to be normal, at least. Instead, for the rest of the morning he was mostly silent or blank. She had not known a more suffocating day—the very air seemed to be shrinking and shriveling from the evolving pain.