Unravelling Oliver(56)
‘I was born to write!’ they might say, or ‘I couldn’t do anything else!’ Pathetic.
If anybody had bothered to work it out, I did credit the old man with writing the books, in the form of my pen name.
My wife, I had always thought, was a mouse, but now she had sharpened claws and revealed a feline arrogance I had never seen before. When I returned after my quick diversion to Nash’s, I found she had broken the lock on the wooden box, and the leather-bound books were on the kitchen table beside her. Her suitcase, only recently unpacked from her trip to the French cookery school, stood beside her. So she was leaving me. Fine. No problem. Off you go.
Only then, she calmly told me that the suitcase was packed for me, that she was returning the books to Madame Véronique, that I must leave her house. I told her she was being ridiculous. It did not have to be this way. I started to explain myself. Where was the harm in publishing what would probably have been discarded anyway?
Alice did not want to listen. My whole life was a lie, she said, reminding me that it was the books that had made her fall for me in the first place, reminding me of some of the more cringe-worthy things I may have said to her at one time or other – ‘I couldn’t write these without you’, ‘You’re my inspiration’ – and of the many dedications to her on the acknowledgement pages: ‘… and finally my best to Alice, without whom none of this would be possible’.
I realized something I had failed to notice for the last thirty years. You don’t have to love a person. You can love the idea of a person. You can idealize them and turn them into the person you need. Alice loved the person that she thought I was. One way or another, I have managed to kill all the people who have loved me so far.
Where is my mother? Where is she? Couldn’t she have loved me? I may have killed her too. The whore.
Jean-Luc, my little friend, I remember the small arc of your arms around my shoulders and the heft of you as I piggybacked you around the terrace.
Monsieur d’Aigse, who showed me nothing but generosity and kindness, you opened your heart and your home to me and made me welcome when I offered you nothing in return but death, and then later, theft.
Laura, you were a normal happy girl until I chased you and somehow poisoned you to the point when death was your only option.
Shame flooded my head and I felt again like the boy who was not good enough to see his father because he had spilled juice on himself, like the boy whose father inspected him like one would a horse, looking for defects.
When I attacked Alice for the second time, these thoughts went through my head as I punched and kicked and bit and slammed and dropped and wrenched and tore.
24. Barney
I couldn’t believe my eyes when I answered the door very late that night three months ago to find Oliver covered in blood. At first I thought he’d been in a car accident. He was shaking like a leaf, but he said he wasn’t hurt and when I looked a bit closer, I could see that he didn’t have any wounds.
‘Jesus, what happened!?’ says I.
‘It’s Alice,’ he says, ‘she needs help.’
I’m glad my mam is dead now because if she’d been around for this, her nerves would have been shot and I wouldn’t be allowed out of the house.
I left Oliver sitting in a chair in my hallway and ran over to Alice’s. The hall door was wide open and I went in, dreading what I was going to find.
She was in the kitchen. At first sight I thought it was just a load of laundry piled up against the back door, waiting to go into the machine, but then I noticed smears of blood across the floor and on the wall above and I realized that it was Alice. God, the image of that will never leave my head, so help me. I knelt down by her side and lifted her head. Her breathing was shallow, but she was conscious. I was crying now, as I tried to hold her and reach the phone on the wall behind her. Little frothy bubbles of blood were coming out of her mouth. I roared at the 999 people to get an ambulance and gave them the address. They said they’d send the guards too, but I dropped the phone because I couldn’t hold Alice and talk to them at the same time. I wanted to be talking to her. In films on the telly, they always say that you should try and keep the victim awake because if they lose consciousness, they die, so I was talking to her, telling her to hang on, and she was looking at me, the beautiful eyes that I had loved my whole life, even though I had no right. She was trying to say something but I told her to save her energy, and the sight of the blood pouring out of her was terrible and I held her close and said, ‘It won’t be long now, hang on, love, hang on.’ She did say a word and I guessed it before she finished saying it. ‘Eugene,’ she said and then she passed out.
The ambulance came and took her away, and then the guards arrived and I remembered that Oliver must still be sitting in my hall. I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but by now I obviously knew he’d done it. I remembered how snotty he’d been in Nash’s earlier in the evening when he threw a pack of fags at me. He was covered in her blood. So I told the guards where to find him, and watched as they escorted him out of my house. He looked up at me, all that swagger and confidence gone out of him, and I realized that no matter how educated he was, how rich or how posh, I was a better man than him. I always had been.
All those years ago, when he stole her from me, I didn’t put up a fight. I practically gave him my permission. I thought Alice deserved someone better than me. I should have fought for her.