Half Broken Things (32 page)

‘Steph, go! Go, for Christ's sake!'

Steph, still holding Charlie, managed to pull at Jean's arm and she, now dumbly bewildered, allowed herself to be led. They hurried in the direction of the house. And Steph even managed to prevent them both from looking back when, a moment later, they heard the hard crack of a croquet ball against the side of Gordon Brookes's head and the first of his long, despairing cries.

Michael got him helpless on the ground, though not completely unconscious, after seven or eight blows. But he would not be quiet. Michael dropped the croquet balls, raced down into the walled garden and returned with the wheelbarrow to find Gordon Brookes attempting to crawl in the direction of his car, shrieking in disbelief and pain. Sweating and weeping with the massive effort, Michael dragged him up by the shoulders. He began to resist, and succeeded in scratching Michael's face. He would not go in the wheelbarrow, but after another blow on the side of the head with a croquet ball he gave a squealing kind of scream and Michael hauled him over and left him draped across it. He heaved the barrow up and pushed it slowly and windingly round to the back. Setting down the barrow on the grass at one side, out of sight of the kitchen windows, he stood up and took several deep breaths. Gordon Brookes lay quiet at last, and limp, facing downwards, his clothes more off than on. Michael wiped his eyes and looked round.

There were roses still blooming against the wall. Was it only yesterday he had wondered about the best time to prune them? He looked down at the wheelbarrow. That would be just the kind of thing Gordon Brookes would know, and now here he was, bleeding from the side of his head that was beginning to look like a cut aubergine. Michael looked away, shaking with pity for the man and with fear for himself. For it was terrifying, how quickly it was possible to go from one to the other, from considering the pruning of roses and setting out croquet hoops, to this moment, looking at a bleeding man heaped in a wheelbarrow and facing the inevitability of the next step. More terrifying still was how much further Michael now had to go. From not far off, birds were singing above the snuffling sounds coming from the man's slack mouth. But when Michael breathed in he could smell roses and warm grass. He grew still, and then quiet, and then he wiped his hands over his eyes again, crossed the lawn and entered the kitchen. Steph and Jean were standing in silence, waiting. Charlie waved and jiggled in Steph's arms when Michael appeared in the doorway.

‘Right,' he said, still breathless, ‘don't worry. Stay here for a bit. I want you to stay here, okay? Make some tea.'

But neither of them could reply. Steph opened her mouth first. ‘l don't know what I did, I don't understand. Why—'

‘Never mind, I'll explain. It'll be all right,' Michael said, tightly. ‘It'll be all right. I'll make it all right. I've got to—' And then he began to feel that strange thing at work again, that way he actually could begin to believe himself when he had other people to convince. ‘It's okay. It's just that, well, I know him. I mean he knows me, he knows about this thing I did. He'd bring the police here and we'd all, well—think about it. See? I'd end up in jail. We all might.' He smiled grimly. ‘You see? What with everything. The stuff I did, the fines, us, the things here. It'd finish everything. I mean, we've got to—you see? Look, just stay in here for a while. I'll deal with it. We've got to be normal.'

‘All right,' Jean said, finding her strength. ‘All right.' She took a deep breath and smiled round bravely. ‘We'll just be normal. Won't we? We'll just get on and make our jam, won't we, Steph? The fruit's all hulled already.' In the moment's silence after she spoke it became understood that neither she nor Steph would ask Michael exactly what he was going to do when he went back outside, and he would not volunteer to tell. They all knew.

Michael wheeled the barrow slowly round, limping from the kicks he had taken on his legs, and stopped at the side of the pool. He had begun to shake again just at the thought of touching Gordon Brookes, who was sliding so far over to one side that his head almost scraped along the grass. He did not dare think about what else he now had to do to him, and could not look at the face as he heaved him over and pulled him off the wheelbarrow. Laboriously, closing his eyes when he could, he dragged him to the edge of the water; it felt as if Gordon Brookes were filled with loose stones. Then he seemed to become aware of what was happening; he mouthed and moaned, and succeeded in raising one hand, flexing his fingers for a second over Michael's bare arm and scratching hard. Michael hissed in pain. Gordon Brookes gurgled and coughed, and his moans rose to pitiful yelping when Michael hauled him over and tipped him into the pool. He landed with a crack on the water. Michael followed, feeling through the cold shock on his groin the warm flow of his own urine. Gordon Brookes, revived by the slap of the water, flailed desperately, as if trying to grab armfuls of it. But he did not have the strength to protest much when Michael grabbed the back of his head and pushed it under. Michael turned away from the sight of the mouth taking great choking bites of water but could do nothing to avoid hearing the panicked snatches of screams as, time after time, Gordon Brookes managed to force his head up hard enough under Michael's hands to snatch at the air. Michael's legs were shaking so much that but for the water he would have collapsed. For it came as a dreadful, slow-dawning shock, how long it took. It was unbelievably long; incredible how much fight and life and air and struggle there was in one man, how often his arms tried to reach and grab at Michael's hands, and how hopelessly; Michael was filled with a kind of respectful horror until, almost exasperated and suddenly fearing that he might not be able to finish this, he gave a great roar, thrust the head down deep into the water with both hands and held it there. Brookes's mouth, still gaping and searching, surfaced only twice more. In its final, slackening, waterlogged gasp Michael thought he heard a note of sorrow. For at least ten minutes more he stood holding his head under, until long after the last throes had stopped. Michael turned his face up to the sky and saw merely a flat, blurred blue through his stinging eyes. Nor, as the minutes passed, could he hear very much, save his own bitter sobbing and the slap of water as the waves made by Gordon Brookes's thrashing arms smacked and subsided against the pool walls.

Michael waded down the length of the pool and hauled himself up. He sank onto the grass at the side and lay stretched out, shaking and weeping, until he had to turn his head and vomit. He shifted some feet away and lay down again. He closed his eyes. The sun's heat pulsed down on him, water dripped from his clothes and soaked around him into the grass, flies buzzed over and landed on his still-twitching body. Then he began to sense that the air carried another scent, freighted with sweetness. He could hear that in the kitchen someone had turned on the radio. Voices from a studio somewhere had started up in polite and amused discussion. The sound rose and mingled and was borne along, bubbling in a commixture with boiling strawberries and sugar that perfumed and corrupted the air. Michael opened his eyes and watched butterflies pass above him. Turning his head, he saw two or three ants among the droplets of water, scaling blades of grass inches from his face. It seemed, then, that life was continuing. He refused to focus on the gently lapping water of the pool some yards away but could not help seeing that its surface sparkled under the sun, as before. Was it outrageous or miraculous, he wondered, that it could look so much the same when everything had changed? How
could
it be the same if, the next time this bright, turquoise water flew upwards in glittering drops into the sun-laden air, it were to be Steph's hand flicking little playful splashes onto Charlie's golden shoulders, rather than Gordon Brookes's desperate, dying limbs jerking and grabbing for a few more seconds of life? Was it possible that you could just lift a corner of this pretty world that Gordon Brookes was suddenly no longer a part of, push him out and drop the corner back in place, and go on as before? For it really did seem as if that were what was happening. Michael closed his eyes again, breathing in sun and the smell of fruit. The voices on the radio stopped, there was a second's pause, a burst of laughter, then the tap of polite applause. Another voice, and then came the pips. He had just killed a man while people somewhere chatted and an audience clapped. Life
was
just going on. And it was incredible to him, as well as a little unnerving, that it was not just other things that were going on as before, but that he himself was, too. Here he was, lying wet on the grass but feeling the same sun, hearing the same birds and voices, smelling the same flowers and fruits. The thought comforted him. He knew he should be changed. He should be inconsolable, but instead was soothed. He knew himself to be filthy, but felt cleansed.

There would be more to do, of course. Michael lay out on the grass for a long time, dozing and thinking, the sun washing him with calm. He glanced at the pool once or twice, fascinated by the tinting of the water around Gordon Brookes's submerged head, until he vomited again. He got up and stretched, made his way into the bathroom of the pool pavilion and washed himself all over. He thought further. There was so much to think about, so many crucial details that he must get right that his head was now filling entirely with them; there seemed to be no space left now for simple terror about the next stage. Nor could he afford to be appalled. He was beginning to realise that if he carried on being sick he would not be able to see the thing through. So he would have to behave as if a part of himself were simply absent. It would be like acting. Neither outrageously callous, nor miraculously calm, just acting. Only in that way would he be able to do what had to be done, but it would not be
him
. Something at his core would be uninvolved.

He presented himself almost nonchalantly at the kitchen door. Inside, the heat was as thick as paint. Steph and Charlie were dozing in the Windsor chair, apparently stupefied by strawberry fumes and just waiting to melt down completely. Jean looked up, with a hot frown, from stirring the glooping, crimson, boiling bath on the stove. She scraped a tide of scum off the surface of the jam with a wooden spoon and blatted it into the sink, then moved over to the fridge and took out a saucer.

‘There are some things we have to do,' Michael said, uncertainly. Steph opened her eyes and murmured. She had not been asleep, after all.

‘Oh! Oh, at last it's done! It's setting!' Jean stood with one forefinger held up. ‘Steph, it's done it, it's set. We've got a set!'

‘Well, thank God for that,' Steph said.

It takes forever to get a set on strawberry jam, I know that now. That day, as I got tireder and tireder, and hotter and hotter, watching the fruit boiling and waiting for a set, I began to regret embarking on the whole thing. I was tempted to tip the whole sticky mess in the bin and forget about jam altogether. Steph thought I should. It's not worth it, she said. She went completely floppy that day, as if she were suddenly too exhausted to take anything in. Bin it, she said. But you can't, can you? You think: if this next little test on a saucer popped in the fridge for a minute doesn't set, it's never going to. If this one doesn't set I'm binning the lot and I'm giving up on jam, full stop. And of course the next test
doesn't
set, but you don't carry out your little threat to yourself. You realise the threat came from the part of yourself that wants to see you fail, and the better side of you thinks: oh no, I've gone this far—I've picked fruit and hulled it, measured sugar, washed and warmed jars, I've stood here stirring and testing till I'm at boiling point myself—I've made too much mess to give up on it all now. But even as you stand there knowing you've got to see it through, you're starting to wish you'd set about it differently. Added pectin from a jar, used some apples or red currants, something. You begin to think you'll never, ever get a set and somehow it's your fault. And then suddenly it sets. So it's all come right in the end, and the struggle has been worth it. Then you understand that this combination of self-chastisement and wisdom after the event was not helpful in any way whatsoever.

We very much regret the vicar, all of us. I'm going to put down as exactly as I can what happened, and then you'll see that although Michael did it, it's impossible to say who was responsible. Was it Steph's fault for bringing the vicar here? She had no idea that he and Michael had, as it were, met before. Mine, perhaps? I'm practically an old woman, but could I have done anything to prevent it? The shock of this stranger turning up with Steph and Charlie was considerable, the shock when he suddenly lashed out at Michael more considerable still, but I am not saying I was too shocked to know what was happening. It simply did not occur to me to do anything other than what Michael asked of me. I wanted to do as he asked. But suppose I had resisted, or said something to Mr Brookes right at the beginning such as, Oh, now, let's all calm down, we can sort this out, surely? But no, I just went back into the house as Michael told me to. And look, even if Michael had instead forced me into the house and threatened me with violence if I tried to interfere, I still wouldn't have been able to prevent what happened, so where's the difference? So I, and Steph too—we did what he told us to. We went into the house and got on with the jam.