CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

There is a finely furnished modern hotel room lined with soft carpet and velvet curtains. The corpse of a young Samoan woman is lying on the bed. The door leading to the room has been smashed by machine-gun bullets and the corridor beyond is gouged with bullet scars and littered with dozens of cartridge cases, bits of wood and metal, broken glass, and the body of a young Maori. Each object is a part of an enormous mystery.

I lean against the wall. So strange, that I should kill him. I don’t understand it. Here I am, staring down at him, shaking my head and speaking his name over and over: Apirana.

We were the survivors of millions. How could it happen?

I look down, dazed, at my shoes. There are glistening flecks of spittle and blood on them. When I try to unfasten the laces my hands can’t do it, but I have to take the shoes off, so I rip the laces out and hurl the shoes away. Why do people die with their eyes open? What do they see?

Now he knows. Don’t you? He tricked me. Gave me that gun. Knew I would do it. Finally, he decided, he saw the way out, he knew how it had to be ended. I thought I could break him down by flinging a few words out of the dark at him. But he used me to cancel all that. To pay it back, and escape.

When I drove to Coromandel, to Thames, I remember thinking, What if they are counting on this? As I checked in at the motel at Thames and paused at the bottom of the stairs holding the iron rail that vibrated, I was wondering if I had been even more skilfully manoeuvred than I would have believed, into going up this staircase with the bottle of sleeping pills clinking in my pocket. The alternative, of course, was that it would never have occurred to them that I would have the guts to do anything remotely like this.

The spiral of the iron handrail curving round reminded me of the ribonucleic chains, the resonance of proteins that could be vibrated apart, and the genetic sleep in every one in a million that could be shaken awake; the survival mechanism. Near the top of the stairs I had lifted my head to look at the great scatter of starlight over the Coromandel Peninsula, thinking of spiral nebulae and how immensely important our research was, in the pattern of the universe, how worthwhile, at a distance; and I’d stumbled and nearly fallen. When I clutched the handrail I thought: If the universe wanted to stop me, it had its chance there. Then the absurdity made me laugh as I entered the motel room and locked the door. The self-destroyer doesn’t want to die by accident.

I am very methodical. My work has made me believe that almost nothing can happen by accident.

I remember: what? Holding the bottle of sleeping pills and wondering if this was a mistake. To make myself know why I had decided to do this I would have to force my mind to betray itself, to break down the last remnants of the instinct for survival at any cost. I had no idea how hard that would be, how much terror it could make. It would be terminal.

Now I arrive at it again. I have to cheat a far worse, more imbecile, senseless, existence. But it will still not be easy, unless I comprehend, at least a part, a fragment.

It does not take long to break open Perrin’s metal box. I carry it to the dining room on the top floor and tip all the papers out onto a table. There are thin card folders, memos stamped with security numbers, minutes of secret meetings. And a small diary, entries written in a biro scrawl like the secretions of an insect. It is all about bureaucratic scheming, mostly financial. Perhaps written to justify himself in case he fell dead some day. I flick from page to page. Then I see what might be my name. Smoothing the book open, I take it closer to the window. The sun is dissolving the clouds over the harbour, the shadows of the clouds sliding quickly across the water. I look down at the diary.

…difficult decision but have advised D-G it would be best to withhold such information from Hobson as it might jeopardise the entire project. In the early days not much was known about the effects of radioactive isotopes on chromosomes, and precautions were somewhat haphazard.

The tests show no abnormalities in the children of any other staff members and the consensus would seem to be that infantile autistic symptoms of the kind manifest in the Hobson child cannot be linked with any certainty to radioactive genetic damage to the male parent. Dr Franklin is the only dissenting opinion; from his research into immunology he believes that genetic alteration rather than damage has taken place. This seems academic to me and in any case incapable of proof. The consequences are equally unfortunate.

I move away from the window. Chairs and tables push against me. I sit down and fix the book flat on a table under my hands. After a while I move my hands aside and stare down at the pages again.

We are a relatively small unit and the departure or defection of any staff member would be a serious setback. I would regard Hobson’s psychological and neurological condition as demanding particular scrutiny in view of this. Have given assurances to D-G on basis of Report 7A/42.

The pages seem to turn themselves as though the light is splitting them apart and fastening them down. Later I see only this reference, jotted amongst notes about research grants:

Re. Hobson child, it now seems that syndrome includes self-destructive behaviour characteristic of lethal factors in genetic mutants even at basic cellular level.

I look out of the window. It may be afternoon by now, a bright day with a blue sky and violently glittering water. I close Perrin’s book. If anyone was here, I could hand it to them and could say, very clearly: Yes, I killed him.

A carbon copy of Report 7A/42 is in one of the folders, a thin piece of almost transparent paper. It is packed with the usual psychological jargon. I am peculiarly calm, but the process of decoding the jargon and seeing what it means has a shocking effect. The sentences spill out like maggots from the paper, coming alive, unfolding themselves as I read, spilling over the edges. I think I even hear a rustling noise, and I stop, and it goes and then returns, like the whispering which once surrounded me in the empty spaces of the great room full of light. And I go on reading.

What always seemed so ordinary to me is transformed, turned inside out. The words make me see myself very close, from a distance. I become ‘the subject’, and secret observations of my behaviour produce words like ‘paranoia’, which means a fear in the subject that he is being secretly observed. There is mention of suspicion and withdrawal, of self-destructive impulses. The subject may compensate by a series of sleeping or waking dreams which assume for him the force of reality itself. The most central aspect of all this is the control of the memory. The ability to change or obliterate the past in specific areas may become automatic, no longer a conscious act. It may be a means of holding back bad memories or a compensation for not being able to affect the course of everyday events in the present. Something which is a conscious weakness becomes an unconscious strength. At that level it can produce psychopathic results. Actions can be destructive whilst the mind remains creative and inventive. Dreams retain the truth and replay it, a super-reality.

The subject sits at the table and lets the almost weightless piece of paper float from his hand.

At the motel I had spread out the sleeping pills on my palm and known what would make death beyond all doubt. What had I admitted to myself that would account for such an action? I had realised that Perrin would die, I even imagined him entering the research centre at that moment and switching on the machines; but that was a matter of betrayal for us both, not demanding a death from remorse or guilt in return. It would seem accidental. What else? Peter was dead and Joanne had gone. How many tablets was that worth?

I put my head back now and gaze up at the white ceiling. From a long way off, the faint glitter of reflections on water sends wavering ribbons of soft light very slowly across the surface above me. The real light on the water, I know, is hard and metallic, it hurts the eyes. I remember the Maori hiding beneath it, and the downward pressure of my hand. Then the struggle, against a force of my own making, a will inside me to blot him out. Gradually the image of his head sinking, and the face that just died in the corridor below with its eyes that refused to see me and mouth that spoke to nothing even as it drowned on itself, both blur into the image of the child I helped to death. Now I know I am going beneath that surface myself, here, in the room with the liquid reflections rising across the walls to the ceiling, the memory pressing on my face and submerging the resistance in my mind. I know that I killed Peter. A darker flood rises even above that, like the death pouring from the mouth of the body below. I hated him, the child was an embodiment of what I hated, a parody of myself; sealed off from all feeling of life. My gift to the world was a mutation of my own nothingness. The shock when his eyes had finally looked at me was recognition. We saw ourselves in each other.

The self-deceptions break down like a shell of bone collapsing under pressure. The realisation bursts inside me with enormous force: the lethal factor is within myself; it is me. My reflection is all that stares back from glass and water and unclosed eyes. I was the cause. Worse still, immune to the Effect. The mechanisms meant for my removal had gone massively wrong, events had turned inside out like the twist in the Moebius loop or the endless protective repetition of the double helix.

Disconnected images revolve in front of me and begin to overlap in loose focus. There is a world somewhere which continues without me; and yet my consciousness can perceive it. There is another, full of clear sequences trapped in a mind of broken matter, a circle of limbo where beasts squat and run and a figure I seem to recognise appears from mists over and again, and I must kill it and escape. There is a world in which doctors discuss the continued brain activity and rapid eye movements of a patient deep in a barbiturate coma and wonder what kind of world he inhabits. And a future in which a scientist’s hand moves to switch off a machine an instant before it pulses back into the electromagnetic grid of an entire planet a resonance which will be the decoding and unravelling note of all basic protoplasm, so that only those with the strangest immunity would be isolated from the transformation. Or the instant is missed, and there is a world vibrating as if struck by a massive hammer. In another world, evolution enters a new dimension.

I am standing on the flat roof in bright sunshine. The images twist round, inseparable, tightening together like the strands of a rope. I look down. I have the power to break them. It is a sheer drop to the flat concrete of the path next to the street ten stories below.

I look round. It is a fine afternoon. I remember so much. I think of being alone in the motel room at Thames in the nearness of ages ago as I selected some tablets and swallowed them. But it was uncertain, not like this. Now I climb over the safety rail and stand on the edge of the drop. No remorse. This will be complete, and finished. I believe in nothing else. Because nothing could be worse.

All I have is the power to end.

I lean outwards and let go.

The pull of the earth takes hold of my spine, my limbs spread over space. There is the breath-beat of falling, spiralling, the air pushing hard for a moment and then letting go. The light splits open my eyelids. It is brilliant, drained of colours, painful. An immense silence rushes around me. My throat is trying to make a noise, to beat it back. The light pulses red. Then the silence explodes.

I was sitting bold upright in bed breathing fast and staring at the wall. The daylight was streaming into the motel room through the slats of the blinds. I seemed to have been awake, and asleep, for ages. I lay back and remembered where I was. The silence persisted. My watch at the bedside had stopped at 6.12. Reaching out, I shook it and the second hand began flicking round again. How long had it been stopped? I got up and went to the window which looked out onto the main road; my arm moved up towards the cord of the blind. What?

I paused. What was happening? The casual movement, everyday, ordinary, towards opening the blind had been interrupted by something, by an impulse to stop, which had no sensible origin at all. It was so curious and extraordinary that I was pausing not because of the impulse itself but in a conscious effort to find a reason for it. But I had forgotten. My mind seemed to resist. The silence pressed in thickly. It was exactly like forgetting the name of a place you’ve visited dozens of times; it’s just on the tip of your mind but you can’t find it. You stop and think, and when there’s no answer you go on. Perhaps, later, you will know.

Then I reached up and opened the blind to the enormous light.