Nutshell(33)

But lately, as I track my mother’s shifting relation to her crime, I’ve remembered rumours of a new dispensation in the matter of blue and pink. Be careful what you wish for. Here’s a new politics in university life. This digression may seem unimportant, but I intend to apply as soon as I can. Physics, Gaelic, anything. So I’m bound to take an interest. A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options – neutrois, two spirit, bigender … any colour you like, Mr Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there’s cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome dogs.

I’ll feel, therefore I’ll be. Let poverty go begging and climate change braise in hell. Social justice can drown in ink. I’ll be an activist of the emotions, a loud, campaigning spirit fighting with tears and sighs to shape institutions around my vulnerable self. My identity will be my precious, my only true possession, my access to the only truth. The world must love, nourish and protect it as I do. If my college does not bless me, validate me and give me what I clearly need, I’ll press my face into the vice chancellor’s lapels and weep. Then demand his resignation.

The womb, or this womb, isn’t such a bad place, a little like the grave, ‘fine and private’ in one of my father’s favourite poems. I’ll make a version of a womb for my student days, set aside the Enlightenments of Rosbifs, Jocks and Frogs. Away with the real, with dull facts and hated pretence of objectivity. Feeling is queen. Unless she identifies as king.

I know. Sarcasm ill suits the unborn. And why digress? Because my mother is in step with new times. She may not know it, but she marches with a movement. Her status as a murderer is a fact, an item in the world outside herself. But that’s old thinking. She affirms, she identifies as innocent. Even as she strains to clean up traces in the kitchen, she feels blameless and therefore is – almost. Her grief, her tears, are proof of probity. She’s beginning to convince herself with her story of depression and suicide. She can almost believe the sham evidence in the car. Only persuade herself and she’ll deceive with ease and consistency. Lies will be her truth. But her construction is new and frail. My father’s ghastly smile could upend it, that knowing grin coldly stretched across a corpse’s face. That’s why it’s needed, Elodie’s validation of my mother’s innocent self. And why she leans forward now, taking me with her, listening tenderly to the poet’s halting words. For Elodie will soon be in interview with the police. Her beliefs, which will direct her memory and order her account, must be properly shaped.

Claude, unlike Trudy, owns his crime. This is a Renaissance man, a Machiavel, an old-school villain who believes he can get away with murder. The world doesn’t come to him through a haze of the subjective; it comes refracted by stupidity and greed, bent as through glass or water, but etched on a screen before the inner eye, a lie as sharp and bright as truth. Claude doesn’t know he’s stupid. If you’re stupid, how can you tell? He may blunder through an undergrowth of clichés, but he understands what he did and why. He’ll flourish, without a backward glance, unless caught and punished, and then he’ll never blame himself, only his bad luck among random events. He can claim his inheritance, his tenure among the rational. Enemies of the Enlightenment will say he’s the embodiment of its spirit. Nonsense!

But I know what they mean.





SIXTEEN


ELODIE ELUDES ME, like a half-remembered song – an unfinished melody indeed. When she squeezed by us in the hall, when she was still, in our thoughts, my father’s girl, I listened out for the alluring creak of leather. But no, today she’s dressed in softer style, more colourfully, I think. She would have cut a figure at the poetry event tonight. When she was wailing in distress her voice was pure. But her account of the visit to the mortuary, clutching at her fiancé’s wrist, was a reminder, as each growling sentence trailed away, of the guttural urbane, her tasty fry-up. Now, as my mother extends an arm across the kitchen table to enfold the visitor’s hand in hers, I hear in the vowels the duck’s quack restored. Elodie’s relaxing into my mother’s confidence as she, the poet, praises my father’s poems. It’s the sonnets she loves most.

‘He wrote them in a conversational style, but dense with meaning, and so musical.’

Her use of tense is correct but offensive. She speaks as if the death of John Cairncross has been fully confirmed, absorbed, publicly acknowledged, historically beyond grief like the Sack of Rome. Trudy will mind more than I do. I’ve been conditioned to believe his poetry was a dud. Today, everything is up for revaluation.