Nutshell(12)

‘Leaves a trace?’

‘Everything leaves a trace. You have to consider the advantages. Easy to get hold of, even in summer. Carpet cleaner does the job but doesn’t taste as nice. A joy to administer. Goes down a treat. We just need to disassociate you from the moment when it does.’

‘Me? What about you?’

‘Don’t you worry. I’ll be disassociated.’

That wasn’t what my mother meant, but she lets it pass.





SIX


TRUDY AND I are getting drunk again and feeling better, while Claude, starting later with greater body mass, has ground to cover. She and I share two glasses of the Sancerre, he drinks the rest, then returns to his plastic bag for a burgundy. The grey plastic bottle of glycol stands next to the empty, sentinel to our revels. Or memento mori. After a piercing white, a Pinot Noir is a mother’s soothing hand. Oh, to be alive while such a grape exists! A blossom, a bouquet of peace and reason. No one seems to want to read aloud the label so I’m forced to make a guess, and hazard an échézeaux Grand Cru. Put Claude’s penis or, less stressful, a gun to my head to name the domaine, I would blurt out la Romanée-Conti, for the spicy cassis and black cherry alone. The hint of violets and fine tannins suggest that lazy, clement summer of 2005, untainted by heatwaves, though a teasing, next-room aroma of mocha, as well as more proximal black-skinned banana, summon Jean Grivot’s domaine in 2009. But I’ll never know. As the brooding ensemble of flavours, formed at civilisation’s summit, makes its way to me, through me, I find myself, in the midst of horror, in reflective mood.

I begin to suspect that my helplessness is not transient. Grant me all the agency the human frame can bear, retrieve my young panther-self of sculpted muscle and long cold stare, direct him to the most extreme measure – killing his uncle to save his father. Put a weapon in his hand, a tyre wrench, a frozen leg of lamb, have him stand behind his uncle’s chair, where he can see the antifreeze and be hotly incited. Ask yourself, could he – could I – do it, smash that hairy knob of bone and spill its grey contents across the squalor of the table? Then murder his mother as sole witness, dispose of two bodies in a basement kitchen, a task only achieved in dreams? And later, clean up that kitchen – another impossible task? Add the prospect of prison, of crazed boredom and the hell of other people, and not the best people. Your even stronger cellmate wants daytime TV all day for thirty years. Care to disoblige him? Then watch him fill a yellowed pillowcase with rocks and slowly turn his gaze your way, towards your own knob of bone.

Or assume the worst, the deed is done – my father’s last kidney cells are sheared by a crystal of poison. He’s thrown up his lungs and heart into his lap. Agony then coma then death. How about revenge? My avatar shrugs and reaches for his coat, murmuring on his way out that honour killing has no place in the modern polis. Let him speak for himself.

‘Seizing the law into your own hands – it’s old hat, reserved for elderly feuding Albanians and subsections of tribal Islam. Revenge is dead. Hobbes was right, my young friend. The state must have a monopoly of violence, a common power to keep us all in awe.’

‘Then, kind avatar, phone Leviathan now, call the police, make them investigate.’

‘What exactly? Claude and Trudy’s black humour?’

Constable: ‘And this glycol on the table, madam?’

‘A plumber suggested it, officer, to keep our ancient radiators unfrozen in winter.’

‘Then, dear future best self, get yourself to Shoreditch, warn my father, tell him everything you know.’

‘The woman he loves and reveres planning to murder him? How did I come by such information? Was I party to pillow talk, was I under the bed?’

Thus the ideal form of powerful, competent being. What then are my chances, a blind, dumb invert, an almost-child, still living at home, secured by apron strings of arterial and venous blood to the would-be murderess?

But shush! The conspirators are talking.

‘It’s no bad thing,’ says Claude, ‘that he’s keen to move back here. Put up a show of resistance, then let him come.’

‘Oh yes,’ she says, cold and satirical. ‘And make him a welcome smoothie.’

‘I didn’t say that. But.’

But I think he almost did.

They pause for thought. My mother reaches for her wine. Her epiglottis stickily rises and falls as she drinks, and the fluid sluices down through her natural alleys, passing – as so much does – near the soles of my feet, curving inwards, heading my way. How can I dislike her?

She sets down her glass and says, ‘We can’t have him dying here.’

She speaks so easily of his death.

‘You’re right. Shoreditch is better. You could visit him.’

‘And take round a bottle of vintage antifreeze for old times’ sake!’

‘You take a picnic. Smoked salmon, coleslaw, chocolate fingers. And … the business.’

‘Haaargh!’ Hard to render the sound of my mother’s explosive scepticism. ‘I dump him, throw him out of his house, take a lover. Then bring him a picnic!’

Even I appreciate my uncle’s umbrage at ‘take a lover’ – as in, one of nameless many, of many yet to come. And it’s the ‘take’, it’s the ‘a’. Poor fellow. He’s only trying to help. He’s sitting across from a beautiful young woman with golden braids, in bikini top and cut-offs in a sweltering kitchen, and she’s a swollen, gorgeous fruit, a prize he can’t bear to lose.