news desk takes all his articles maybe when he gets back we can go up to the Lake District, unwind together.”
“That, Mother,” Katerina answered, “is impossible.”
“Promise to study?” he said to Edgar.
“You were the one,” Edgar said, “who told me school was like what that caste does in India – maiming their children young so they'll always be able to earn a living. As crippled beggars.”
“That's true.” Neill rubbed his head, imagined the gray hairs growing silently, ruthlessly. “I said that.”
“You say lots of things.” Katerina tossed him her best smile, one she practiced in the cloakroom mirror before going out to that nauseous little creep with the curly Afro and the earring. Trying to slip his puny prick into my daughter. Go ahead, he told her silently, with his eyes. Go ahead and see what you get.
The phone rang and in a single fluid motion Beverly was up and after it.
“It's just a circus,” Neill said. “We play the clown, the tightrope walker, you name it. In the end the audience goes home.”
“What is?” Edgar said.
Beverly returned. “Just Timothy.”
“Just Timothy.”
“Same case, different argument.”
Château Lascaze, the bottle said, 1981. He emptied it and scanned the buffet for another. “In October, 1981 where were we? Does anybody remember? When these grapes were plucked from the sun –”
“School,” Edgar said.
Katerina nodded. “School.”
“I must've been bent over my desk at The Times, pounding out my daily thousand pointless words, beside Quilliver and his bloody cigarettes and graveyard cough – you know, they've found passive smoke's more cancerous?”
“Because it isn't filtered,” Edgar said.
He smiled at Beverly. “That was long before Timothy. What in heavens, my dear, had you to do back then?”
She made a show of thinking. “October’81. That wretched accident case. Woman lived but her husband didn't. Nine months of plastic surgery. Sued the drunken driver in the other car and lost.”
“Long, sure hand of the law. Rewarding the guilty. Justifiably flailing the innocent.”
“She said the strangest things. They reanimated her in hospital, dead but they brought her back. Said she'd risen up out of her body and traveled down a tunnel toward the light, but decided to return. Do you suppose –”
“Journalists aren’t supposed to suppose.” He went to the kitchen and brought back another bottle.
“Neill,” she whispered.
“Even if you did care I wouldn't –”
“Don't have so much, Neill.”
From his pockets Neill extracted a Swiss Army knife, opened it and uncorked the bottle. “Long swift arm of the law. Furious fist of timorous Timothy.”
“You're never serious. Except when you're talking about yourself. Your deep problems of love and death.”
Across the table Katerina yawned. Edgar rose like a butler who'd momentarily forgotten himself and sat at table with his masters. “The dishes call.”
Neill poured a full glass, raised it to the light. “Don't answer.”
“Afterwards can I go and play music?” Edgar said. “Just till midnight?”
“Be on the last Tube,” Beverly said.
“And you?” Neill turned to Katerina.
“Going to Max's. We have a calculus assignment.”
And fiddle his liverish prick, he said for her. See the Crusader departing for the Holy Land, shunned by his own kind. “Whatever happened to the time-honored idea of figuring things out for yourself?”
“She does better over there,” Beverly said.
“With his own place,” Katerina added, “why would he want to come here?”
“Nothing left,” Neill smiled at Beverly, “but for you and me to have our quiet evening at home.”
“I've got to work on that case.”
They carried the dirty plates into the kitchen, loaded the dishwasher and turned it on. It started with a self-satisfied hum. To be so inanimate, Neill thought, so free. Please God, where are we? These stars we travel through, this universe of magic and sorrow, what is it? We this amalgam of cells and dreams, this falseness.
Upstairs in the bathroom he poured the last of his wine into the toilet, felt guilty and drank the dregs. Just don't understand. Dear God, I just don't. Right away the answer came to him: all that counts is wrath.
Love doesn't matter? he asked.
No, came the answer, it surely doesn't. Drink no more.
But what would that change? What else do you have?
He took a leak and flushed the loo, the red and yellow liquid sucking down. Every drop of the Thames goes through nine people, says the National Rivers Association, between the Cotswolds and the Channel. Drinking piss, we are, cradle to grave.
Clasping the empty glass to his chest he wandered back down the corridor with the blue-red Persian runner that Bev had paid good money for, to the head of the stairs. At forty-two he shouldn't be afraid of tripping down the stairs. Trick is to have each foot well posed. Like each question posed but never answered. Dear God, if I could only understand.
THE DOOR SWUNG open, damp urine odor rushing out, no light. Broken glass underfoot, tinkle of a bottle cap. Smell of corpses beneath the rubble.
It was a long low cellar with a gaping window at the back. Footsteps clattered into the alley behind her; Rosa ducked into the cellar, shut the door. The men dashed past, three or four, frightened, gasping. One tripped on debris and fell with a crash of metal then ran onward, wailing.
Streets away a Kalashnikov barked; death seeking someone. A whoosh and wham of shells against the next hill. A scream – no a ricochet; anguished metal hunting a home in flesh.
More men ran into the alley, panting, halted, clink of steel on steel. A crackle of Hebrew on the radio. “Damn you,” she said, pressed herself back into the corner of the cellar, beside the window, reached under her raincoat into the sack round her waist and took out a grenade.
A rocket swooshed over. The ground shivered, a roar split the night. Chunks of wall and ceiling pattered down, one punching her shoulder.
Bullets whacked and crashed into the alley, an M16, uphill. Galils chattered back, someone called out, Israeli. Again the Galils roared, the noise deafening through the street door. A man was moaning, as if he'd had the wind knocked out of him. Another whispered, Israeli, then harsher, louder. Ahead, the Galil spat more bullets down the alley. She bent over her sack of grenades, trying to cover them, fearing the noise would explode them.
Sounds of choking, ripping cloth, someone speaking fast in Hebrew about a medic in five minutes and a recoilless rifle; she couldn't understand.
A spent round pinged down into the street. Stab of light under the door, fifty-caliber bullets hammering off distant walls.
The Israelis broke the door and dragged the wounded man into the cellar. They shut the door and snapped on a flashlight. One tall and broad-chested, on the floor, gut shot. Another trying to compress the wound while a third held the light, tearing open a medical kit.
Her heart was beating so hard she couldn't hear what they said. Steps thumped across the ruined floor overhead – more Israelis taking up positions. No. The Israelis in the cellar were silent, holding their guns, listening. The wounded man's legs began to quiver