Kill [redacted] E-Book

Anthony Good

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 440

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

'Provocative and compelling, it is a spectacular debut' - Daily Mail ____________ Is murder ever morally right? And is a murderer necessarily bad? These two questions waltz through the maddening mind of Michael, the brilliant, terrifying, fiendishly smart creation at the centre of this winking dark gem of a literary thriller. Michael lost his wife in a terrorist attack on a London train. Since then, he has been seeing a therapist to help him come to terms with his grief - and his anger. He can't get over the fact that the man he holds responsible has seemingly got away scot-free. He doesn't blame the bombers, who he considers only as the logical conclusion to a long chain of events. No, to Michael's mind, the ultimate cause is the politician whose cynical policies have had such deadly impact abroad. His therapist suggests that he write his feelings down to help him forgive and move on, but as a retired headteacher, Michael believes that for every crime there should be a fitting punishment - and so in the pages of his diary he begins to set out the case for, and set about committing, murder. Waltzing through the darkling journal of a brilliant mind put to serious misuse, Kill [redacted] is a powerful and provocative exploration of the contours of grief and the limits of moral justice, and a blazing condemnation of all those who hold, and abuse, power. ONE OF THE BEST DEBUT NOVELS of 2019 (the i )

Leseprobe

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Anthony Good, 2019

The moral right of Anthony Good to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

The excerpt from Hacking for Dummies by Kevin Beaver is reproduced with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., through PLSclear.

The excerpt from Hacking Wireless Networks for Dummies by Kevin Beaver is reproduced with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., through PLSclear.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 567 9

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 685 0

EBook ISBN: 978 1 78649 568 6

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For my father, who wanted to see this in print, and didn’t.For Hayley, always.

Publisher’s Note

After taking legal advice, the publisher has obscured all references to or descriptions of actual living persons in the novel. Several characters’ names have also been changed, in order to distance the fiction from the real events and personalities it was inspired by.

How settle that account? I am entitledto exact payment, of course. Every Debitmust have its Credit, the First Golden Rule.But payment in what form?

B. S. Johnson, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry

Every tyrant shall another know.

The Thousand and One Nights

The last words I said to my wife: “Please don’t leave.”

It was an argument. She left. Those were the last words.

Angela wants to know more. She always wants to know more. Now she asks me to write about it – not just talk. She thinks I’ll be more forthcoming, perhaps.

I said to my wife, “Please don’t leave,” while we were arguing, and she said she was going to be late and so she had to leave, and she did, and on her journey she was killed by an explosion on the Underground.

Apparently my last entry wasn’t enough. So I’m tasked again with writing another entry on the same subject.

Clearly, I don’t have a talent for confession.

Dear Angela,

This is my fourth attempt at writing this letter. It is NOT a “Self-Expression”.

There is a man I hate and I want to talk about him. But you have to know my reasoning first. I can’t skip straight to the end, though I think about it every day. Because I want you to hate him, too. I want you to understand my reasons, and agree. I’d like you to try to refute my reasons, and fail. I’d like you to try very hard. I want you to admit that I’m right. But you wouldn’t let yourself – would you?

This letter isn’t going well.

I missed last week’s appointment with Angela – to my surprise, she rang me. In truth, the phone ringing was surprise enough in itself.

I don’t find Angela attractive. Is that the truth or am I writing it to hurt her?

The truth is I haven’t had a sexual thought in years. I look forward to discussing these points on Wednesday.

And again, the old topic:

Angela asks for the details, for the content of the argument, the time of day, how the morning had started, the first sign of disagreement, was it me or my wife that started it – is that my guilt, for starting the argument, for being angry the last time I saw her? – or is it that she was angry with me, she started it and was angry with me and that’s my guilt, that I can never re-live the last part and have her not-angry with me, that we were denied any reconciliation? –

The explosion nearly split the train carriage in half. It put a hole in the top and bottom. If I’d wanted to, I could have gone to court and listened to their explanation of precisely where my wife had been sitting, or standing, when the explosion occurred. I could have listened to them describe the injuries she incurred, in the long list of injuries that day. Well, I didn’t.

Will you try to get rid of this anger? I ask.

(She doesn’t respond. Her silence is greater than mine.)

I’m not sure I want it gone, I say.

Perhaps I’m free-associating, now, I tell her. Can you be free-associating while talking about it?

(I keep pausing like this, as if she’ll answer.)

I’m trying to work out my anger. I know it has an object. An objective, maybe.

I look at her directly, which she doesn’t like, I don’t think.

There’s a real person that I’m angry at. I can tell you his name, what he looks like.

Then I stare at her, just to measure her curiosity. To measure her technique. There are silent ones and chatty ones, and Angela seems like something else. Like both, or neither. It can’t be productive to be comparing her like this, so much, in my mind.

“Who is it?” she asks, and I wonder whether it’s curiosity or technique guiding the question – my neurosis or hers?

█████████,I say. It’s the first time I’ve said it aloud in many years. █████████, I say again (though I don’t know whether that’s neurosis or technique either).

I wait to see if she’ll ask a question. I practically will a Why? from her lips, which never comes. I scratch my face, cover my open mouth.

I don’t think it’s fair, I say. What happened to my wife.

Not just my wife.

My daughter.

Myself.

My father.

Paul, of course. And his family.

If you were to ask me, I say, that’s where this sickness has come from. You probably think of it like that, as a sickness. An acting out of something or other.

She writes something down. If it was one of the other ones – one of the other therapists – I’d guess it would involve the word transference. That’s the catch-all. But who knows what Angela’s writing? It could well be the necessary ingredients for her dinner.

Are you even listening? I ask.

She looks at me.

“To every single word,” she says.

She told me to stop endlessly referring to the process of my therapy. She banned me from using her name, which seems an ineffective prohibition. I won’t stoop to giving her an alias. She told me I’m frightened (she may have used the word scared at some point, as well) of engaging with the tasks she sets.

I pretend to believe in Good and Bad, Right and Wrong – but what have I really done? I’ve been subject to the most heinous injustice, and what do I do? – I mope, watch daytime television, attend endless therapy, sit at home, break things, act like an adolescent.

The fact is, someone caused it. Someone did this to me. It was wrong.

Is my anger at myself? At my unhappy victimhood?

This is what I have to do:

Delineate the Causes.

Identify the Principal Actors.

And then?

The People Who Matter to Me

My wife

My daughter Amy

Paul, a former pupil and family-friend

Paul’s family

Frank (aka Frankie), a close friend of mine

Angela, my therapist, for whom I’m writing this list

My wife played the piano. She earned money, sometimes quite a lot, writing jingles for advertisements, mostly. She had a deep respect for her clients, who would often make very odd requests. Sometimes she’d be paid as an arranger. She would take a melody and make it fit a variety of timespans – five seconds, fifteen seconds, thirty, forty-five, etc. Often, this work came to her after it was abandoned by the original composer, who no doubt felt such a procedure denigrated their work. Sometimes she’d have to make an old jingle sound more modern. In these cases, I remember, she had learned to do very little: the client, for whom she had great tolerance, would never want to deviate from the original work, but nevertheless would want to get their money’s worth. She’d usually change the key or the time signature or remove some extraneous notes or make a particular chord louder (or softer). She would complete her changes in an afternoon, but deliver the manuscript many weeks later. These briefs were the most handsomely paid.

She’d sit and play into the evening. If I was lucky, I’d arrive home to her playing and I’d soften my entrance. I’d defer our usual kiss – instead I’d go to my study and put away my bag, whatever folders I was carrying. Only once did I indulge myself by going to the bedroom and lying down, listening with my eyes closed.

If she was playing haltingly, repeating chords or phrases, I’d know she was closing in on her goal. But if I was lucky, she’d be very far from it – utterly lost, even. When she had no idea what to put into her thirty or forty-five seconds, I might sit in my study, above her, and listen as she invented whatever pleased her. It’s difficult for me to imagine those times.

The old piano still stands there – the upright she intended to replace with a baby grand (a full grand was too immodest for her liking) were she ever to become a millionaire. Sometimes I go to that old piano and lift the fallboard, and poke a key, with no intention except to hear a note. It sounds bright; I can’t tell if it needs tuning or not, but of course it must. I imagine I can play a single chord. I imagine my hand in the right shape.

If I’m in a particularly self-pitying mood, I’ll open the lid of the stool and stand one of her manuscripts on the music tray. I sit, and pull the stool closer, as if I might play. Then I look at her handwriting, at the dots and lines and numbers and crossings-out.

On my blackest day, I turn to her last manuscript – it is unfinished. I look at where the pencil marks stop.

Paul

He was one of my students. He was a Year Seven and I barely had cause to ask his name, being that he appeared a quite solemn and well-meaning boy, except that his shoes were not correct.

Regarding the school uniform I was always to-the-letter. In my brief career as a policeman I had the same attitude – enforce the small things, was my motto. The small things make a character. What I mean is that it’s the everyday details that accumulate and begin to shape us. They are the life-changing things we can control. The life-changing things we cannot control come in the form of tragedy (a car crash) or fortune (winning the lottery) and both tend to destroy rather than build character.

On average I stopped half a dozen boys on account of improper uniform every day. Mostly it was the shoes. Young men have a thing about shoes just as strong as young ladies, and for very much the same reason. Shoes were the main way these boys compared themselves with each other. Apart from the usual acts of intimidation, of course.

And so it was one day I came across a young, solemn Year Seven whom I addressed for his non-regulation shoes. They were black AstroTurf football boots with defiant white trim.

His excuse was first-rate: they didn’t have the right shoes yet. They being his family, of course. I liked, and was intrigued by, that “yet”. He said it very meaningfully. I asked him why not – he said his mum hadn’t got round to it.

This excuse, or similar, was fairly old even two decades ago. When confronted by Authority, boys will seek to hide behind Propriety – this often manifests itself in raising Ethnic boundaries, or, failing that (in young Paul’s case), luring authority into the sensitive area of Family, where it must tread very carefully and usually make a hasty retreat.

I said I expected him to have proper shoes next week, and he nodded.

I asked him if that would be a problem, and he said, No, sir.

Then I told him to fix his tie, and he looked down at his chest in crooked appraisal. So I adjusted his tie for him and dismissed him with a pat on the shoulder.

When I discuss my retirement, it’s in guarded language. I speak about it defensively, as if about a mistake.

Angela tells me – reassures me? – one of the reasons for the long course of my therapy is the need to disentangle two kinds of loss. This is Angela’s scheme: that the root of my emotional malfunction is the double-whammy of losing my job and losing my wife in fairly close succession.

She asks me how I’d planned to spend my retirement, and I believe it’s just a way to underline her point.

Dear Angela,

This is my fifth attempt at writing this letter. It is NOT a “Self-Expression”.

There is a man I hate. You have to understand my reasoning. I can’t skip straight to the end, though I want to. Because I want you to hate him t

Dear Angela,

This is my sixth attempt at writing this letter. It is NOT a “Self-Expression”.

I thought I was above hate all my life, and now look at me.

One teacher – at wits’ end, shortly before his resignation – asked me:

“I’m paid to teach them, am I to police them as well?”

Of course! Police them foremost! How else will we teach them? We flatter ourselves when we talk of our roles as Teacher and Headteacher – better call ourselves Constable and Superintendent instead.

He told me he respectfully disagreed. To which I said no he didn’t, he disagreed and saying the word respectfully was neither here nor there, respect wasn’t something you issued from your mouth.

And then I said, You don’t know the first thing about Respect.

It was an ugly moment.

She told me to “zone in” on the “big points” and “expand” upon them. She said I was too “deliberately oblique”, which I thought was presumptuous.

I’m sure she’ll dock me more points for prefacing this passage with her critique. Every Wednesday for fifty minutes I sit with her and talk – she asks her questions, I am deliberately oblique – and at some point she reads over what I’ve written, my journal, if that’s what it is – except it’s always a loose sheet of paper or two.

She doesn’t wear glasses, except to read. She swallows quite often, when glancing down the page. When finished, she gently lays the page back on her desk, like a living thing being put to rest. And, gallingly, when the time is up, she asks me whether I want to keep it. And – more galling, even – I say I do.

I’ve not kept hidden my opinion that her vocation can be boiled down to a matter of guesswork and answering questions with questions. Or worse – silence. But all the same, I come. Because it has occurred to me that, apart from fifty minutes every Wednesday, I hardly utter a word to anyone.

She’s told me to address everything I write – from now on – to my daughter Amy. I told her this wouldn’t be conducive to my self-expression, as she calls it.

“You’re not the Headmaster of the World.” That was one of Amy’s sayings to me.

And then, much later, with a touch less venom: “You’re not the Headmaster any more.”

Amy is distant. She doesn’t like me. I believe she blames me for what happened to her mother, in a way. It’s not always easy for me to be frank with her. I believe she interprets this as coldness.

When we meet, there is a politeness about our conversations. There is an awkward formality, like we’ve been appointed to these roles of father and daughter when, really, we have nothing in common.

When she was small, her mother called her “Daddy’s Little Girl”, but I think it was hopefulness on her part. Amy was a very adoring child and perhaps she did focus her affections slightly in my favour. But when she reached adolescence she grew to hate me – because, of course, I was the disciplinarian. She felt I treated her as just another pupil. I can appreciate how it might have been, how it might have seemed I was indifferent to her.

She was utterly, utterly wrong, of course. Yes, to an extent I treated her as my pupil. But I have no capacity to decode a girl’s psychology – I barely made progress with the woman I lived with for nearly thirty years. So when I was stern with her, and she cried, I floundered. Even the tenor of her crying was different from a young boy’s – fuller, less ashamed.

When a young boy cries – and tries not to – he may appreciate a hand on the shoulder, encouragement such as “keep your chin up”, and – importantly – nothing more. Anything more is to further emasculate him, to heighten his shame.

When Amy cried and I didn’t know how to respond, she would storm away – often to her mother. This wasn’t an option any of my boys had, of course. I was, in this way, critically undermined.

I remember this conversation I had with her, when she was perhaps fourteen. We were sitting sullenly at the dining table. To my mind, I must have been enforcing some prohibition, perhaps I was preventing her from seeing her friends, or punishing her for coming home late or a bad mark. A kind of detention. I had my books open in front of me, which I normally kept to my study. I could feel her glaring at me as I wrote. She had her Science exercise book and textbook in front of her, and was meant to be doing her homework, but she’d made a performance of closing both – I remember it was this, above all, that irked me: the petulant drama, which made her wretched to me. I had made the mistake of standing, walking around to her, and opening her books, one after the other, and then sitting down again, and turning to my own materials and reviling myself, in my mind, for entering into her performance.

She, of course, closed her books again, this time with a casual flick of the wrist. I admit I looked at her then as a problem. I was, at that moment, trying to solve her. She was defiant, but without a sense of what she actually intended to do – apart from, that is, disobey me. I stared at her a while, and she said,

“Why are you looking at me?”

I held my pen slightly above the page, poised. I stopped myself from capping it, laying it down meaningfully – stopped myself from entering further into histrionics. I said,

“Which, of the two of us, do you think has the greater determination?”

“I don’t care,” she said without a pause, and looked away. I went back to my page, with my pen still poised above it, but was at a complete loss as to what I’d intended to write. It was only a second later, perhaps, that Amy threw her exercise book across the room.

I didn’t follow the trajectory of the book, but kept my gaze on the child. Then she reached for her textbook. She must have felt my stiffening – must have sensed the stakes were raised, now. Looking back, I should have stopped her then – with her hand on the textbook, with the book still on the table, with the picture frame still hanging on the wall. Of course, to her mind there was no way she was going to stop, not without some kind of intervention, perhaps even physical. She was, perhaps, looking to be stopped. But that was never my style. So she threw the book and it flapped heavily against the wall – hit the edge of a framed picture, some dreary watercolour my mother had given me, I think. It fell, the glass cracked.

I grabbed her by the wrist and raised her out of her chair. I hit the back of her thighs, six or seven times – still with one of her arms held above her. She wailed even before the first strike. I let her sink, crying, back down on to the table, then I went and picked up the book, unruffled its pages and laid it down in front of her heaving, small body, and asked her,

“Why don’t you throw it again?”

She tried to run out of the room, but I caught her again by the wrist. She flailed and kicked at me with her free limbs. I felt rotten, at how puny she was, at how unfairly matched we were. I held her, dangling from one arm again, until she couldn’t cry and scream any more.

Her mother stood in the doorway, asking what on earth was going on. I told her our daughter had taken to throwing books. She frowned, came forward, and Amy reached for her, but she held back. When she left the room, Amy screamed all the harder, still with her one arm held high above her, not even struggling any more.

Angela said,

“In introducing the scene of your abuse of Amy, you referred to it as a conversation.”

I admit I felt angry at that word, abuse. I thought it over, trying to find the most compact and forceful rebuttal.

She said, “A grown man hitting a child repeatedly – how is it not abuse?”

The difference, of course, is this: on the rare occasion I hit my daughter, it was to discipline her. It wasn’t out of sadism or mere meanness. The violence (as Angela is so fond of describing it) is a consequence of her action.

“She asked for it, is that what you think?”

I had to hold down my indignation at this. Asking for something and causing something are two different things. Asking implies understanding. I can cause someone’s death without asking for it.

She waited, as usual, for me to carry on. She held her silence for over a minute, as did I. I pushed my glasses against the bridge of my nose, and held them there firmly against the bone.

“And so, as you see it, she caused the beatings.”

“How many do you suppose there were?” I asked.

She looked up at me, tried to subdue her surprise, as far as I could tell – she had her reading glasses on, was holding my confession in front of her. She looked at me over her glasses.

“Do you think the number is important?”

“Guess,” I said.

She shook her head. “I’m not going to guess at such things.”

“You said beatings.”

She put down the page.

“Guess how many, then. You have already.”

“I haven’t.”

“I wrote about a single instance, but how many times did I beat my daughter? What was the extent of my abuse?”

She looked at me evenly, like I was acting out.

“I’m not going to play games,” she said. “I’m not going to guess. It’s not productive.”

“Because you’d be wrong,” I said. I leaned back. “Your whole job is not being wrong,” I said. “And still you are.”

“All right, then,” she said. “I’ll be wrong for you.” She took off her glasses, swallowed. “Given your character, given your – ” she paused, as if to stop herself, but carried on “ – inability to express your emotional state, combined with your fear of vulnerability, and above all your controlling, domineering behaviour, all in all I’d say the beatings would be consistent. You believe, as a headmaster at the time, that you were, by definition, fair, a stickler for rules, even. The child throws two books and you punish her for the published textbook, not for her exercise book. Her exercise book is of no value. In an act of defiance, but, ultimately, an act of comparison, she throws the textbook, to see what the difference is. Well, the difference is enormous.” She pauses, to take a breath. “So, really, I’d guess you’d beat her every time she failed to uphold some high moral standard of yours, utterly opaque to her. I don’t know much about your daughter, but I’d guess a child would fall far from your standards quite often. You’re shaking your head.”

I was.

“So how wrong was I?” she said.

“Dead wrong,” I said, still shaking my head. I cleared my throat, half in victory. “Dead wrong.”

“So tell me, then,” she said.

“Twice,” I said. “It happened twice.”

If she was surprised, she didn’t show it.

“Twice in twenty-five years. That is the extent of my abuse.”

She won’t read my Self-Expressions (her awful phrase, not mine) any more. There’s no point, she says, if they always circle back around to the manner of my therapy. They are, in that case, counter-productive.

Counter-productive is not a phrase I would ever use.

Angela (I can use her name now, if she won’t read it anyway) often uses words and phrases I’d never use myself.

I asked her, in that case, whether she felt she’d failed, with regard to my Self-Expressions. She said there were many strategies for coming to terms with trauma.

“Perhaps we’ll come back to them,” she said, “later.”

When I’m willing to engage.

This notion of engagement would come up at the school sometimes. It was a favourite of the younger teachers. Not engaging meant you were generally misbehaving. Whenever a teacher was sat in front of me, across my desk, with the boy sitting next to them, and the teacher used that phrase “refusing to engage”, or “not engaging’’, or “he really must engage more”, I secretly sided with the boy.

In my attempt to slip the word, I might address the boy, “Now, why aren’t you paying attention in English, or History or whatever their class was?”

And the boy might eye me, with lowered chin, while the teacher piped up, saying, “It’s not just a matter of his attentiveness . . .” and I would feel the strength of my failure.

I appointed some bad teachers in my time. Sometimes, you just need the numbers – the bodies to attend the classrooms, just hired presences, whether they can teach is really less important. A Presence, to keep Order.

So if a good teacher left, it wasn’t always possible to replace them sufficiently. So I settled with a Presence rather than a Teacher. How many, in my time? A dozen? Two dozen? The best would always leave too soon. I never ranked a teacher by my personal attachment to them or by how likeable they were, but I could see a few of those teachers were loved by the boys. Actually loved. I wondered at that – imagined how it must feel. I didn’t envy them it; I was just grateful such a thing were possible. Imagine going to your workplace and being actually loved there?

When they left – when I read their brief letter of resignation, full of goodwill and sentiment – sometimes I admit I struggled not to despair. I thought of the boys’ disappointment. But the worst of all would be the wretchedness I felt, when I filled the hollow space they’d left with a Presence.

One time it was Paul sitting across from me at my desk, with a Presence sitting sternly by his side. He was a Year Nine by then. It was only the second time we’d met, but I remembered his face, his manner. He had a kind of bemused innocence about him, not really disputing the teacher’s charges. He’d grown a little in the interval between our meetings.

“So, Paul, do you understand why whatever the teacher’s name was has kept you with us today?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why do you think it is?”

He looked up at his accuser and made a good guess:

“I wasn’t paying attention in class.”

“And why’s that?”

And he shrugged, looking away.

“You were talking to your friends throughout whatever their name was’s lesson? Look at me when I’m speaking to you.”

He turned to me, quite despondent.

“Is that right?”

He shrugged again.

“Well?” – a little irritated.

“Yes, sir.”

“And what were you talking about?”

He paused, as if the question were merely rhetorical.

“Tell me what you were talking about.”

He shrugged again.

Quite softly: “If you shrug once more you’ll be in Saturday Detention.”

The look of horror was quite golden.

“Why?”

I shrugged.

He looked at his teacher – for help, perhaps. The teacher began, “You mustn’t shrug, it’s bad manners –” but I raised my hand to shush them.

“If you don’t know something, Paul, you must say, ‘I don’t know, sir.’ Or ‘I’m not sure.’ Or, if you prefer the idea of coming to school at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning for two hours, you should sit there slouched in the chair and shrug your shoulders at the next question I ask. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

I sat back, inhaled deeply.

“So what were you and your friends talking about in whatever their name was’s class?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“You don’t remember?”

“No, sir.”

“Good!” I said. “And presumably you don’t remember the content of the lesson either?”

Hesitatingly, in case it was a test, “Not all of it, sir.”

I nodded. “Very good.” I turned to the referral slip which was lying next to my ring binder on the desk. It had the teacher’s comments about why Paul had to attend a detention with the Headmaster – something like, “Paul once again refused to engage with lesson. Persistently talking, disrupting class again.” “Again” was underlined. I scratched my brow, realigned my glasses.

“Do you remember anything from today?”

Paul frowned, unsure.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Is there one thing that you can remember from your lessons today?” I asked. “Anything at all,” I said.

The boy’s eyes widened. His mouth opened slightly. He looked at his teacher again, who appeared trance-like – who now took non-engagement to an art form.

“What lessons did you have today?” I said.

He falteringly recited the procession of lessons that day, with one or two corrections.

I nodded. “And what do you remember of them?”

He pursed his lips, his gaze shifted madly – I could see he was mentally emptying the rucksack and picking through the contents. As it were.

“It can be anything at all from the lesson. A fact, a personality. A rule of grammar, if you must.”

He settled back in his chair and a small smile broke across his face. He shook his head – then stopped himself, in case it might be interpreted as shrugging’s brother, and said, “I can’t, sir.”

“Not a thing?”

He shook his head again, not stopping himself any more. “My mind’s gone blank.”

I thought to say something like, “Its native state.” I was inclined to meanness at that moment, because, I knew, I was being confronted with failure. It was about the only thing we three in that room shared in common – Paul’s failure.

Those first nights, trying to sleep without her next to me – they were nearly the worst.

Those very first mornings, when I awoke to her absence, and had to remember what had happened – they were the worst.

Small things would crush me quite easily. With regularity. It took me an age to finally throw away a discarded drink bottle she’d drunk from. And you can imagine how I treated the mug still half-full with her tea – from our last morning together. Still warm, I imagined, from the touch of her lips, days later, though of course it was dead cold when I finally tipped it away.

Why my daughter hates me:

1)    (She doesn’t hate me)

2)    Because I treated her not as a daughter but as a pupil

3)    Because I was emotionally closed to her

4)    Because I was fastidious (she thought) which she doesn’t like in people

5)    I was terrible at buying presents

6)    I was terrible at receiving presents

7)    I was terrible at enthusing about things children are wont to enthuse about

8)    I met her distance with my own

9)    I never tried to overcome her distance, in fact was vaguely pleased by it, it settling the issue of my emotional closed-ness, etc.

10)  Because, in contrast, I loved her mother so utterly, and that was unfair (she thought)

11)  Because, in contrast, I was so attentive, absorbed, enchanted + delighted by her mother, + tolerant and forgiving and sympathetic and in love with her rule-defying, even though I was so stringent with everyone else

12)  Because she misunderstands the difference between loving and being in love, which is a treachery worse than emotional closed-ness (for her boyfriends)

13)  Because she suspects I’d prefer what happened to her mother to have happened to her instead – NOT true

14)  Because even though I wouldn’t want that ever to have happened to her especially, I probably, even so, would have coped

15)  Because she thought my treatment of two family members – wife and daughter – to be irrationally different and unfair and completely on a separate scale, because she didn’t understand that I simply held one woman, in particular, above all the standards I held everyone else to

16)  Because she’s female and so she compared herself to her mother, and probably needed me to demonstrate prototypical male qualities that she would take forward with her for the rest of her life – I was to be the standard-bearer of maleness, if you believe all that, and my aforementioned distance, etc., distorted her attitude + outlook, etc., forever. (She + Angela in agreement there no doubt.)

17)  Because if she’d been a boy I would’ve preferred it (SHE thinks) – NOT true, but my behaviour, emotional closed-ness, etc., would have been more compatible with a boy + (s)he wouldn’t have compared him/herself with his/her mother AND

18)  None of the business with Paul would have happened.

I will admit I hate him. Even though I prided myself long enough on being above hate, since hate was ignorance, as I saw it, before. But now it’s the only certain thing I feel.

And when I see his face on the television, I imagine what I’d do. I fixate on it so that the news ends long before the vivid images in my mind, particularly when I strangle him, with the force I exert on his Adam’s apple with my thumbs, left thumb high, right thumb low, so I can press on his throat to shut it tight.

And I’m actually clenching my jaw, staring at the television screen, and sometimes my arms are raised as if I might grab him from the screen, though he’s long gone from it, though the news isn’t even on it any more, just my arms slightly raised and my jaw clenched and my thumbs, especially, feeling for his windpipe and Adam’s apple, and a tingling sensation that runs down the back of my neck, or the side of my face, that comes in waves, or not at all.

So, that is hate.

And that is the part I won’t tell Angela.

For the past week I’ve not kept up my notes/journal. Last Monday morning my computer failed to switch on.

I generally use the radio as my connection to the outside world, day-to-day, but my notes/journal have become an important ritual. Without them/it I felt cut-off from something necessary.

I think I tried to switch the computer on ten to fifteen times. Perhaps more. I nearly swore. I made fists, tensed my bowels. I half-considered putting my fist through the screen.

It was a bad week for my relations with electronic appliances. Just the day before, the washing machine paused mid-wash and beeped loudly, and the panel that usually shows a timer instead showed error-14. I felt very lonely, then.

On the same day, on my way to the hospital, my Oyster card wasn’t recognized by the ticket barrier. It was just a momentary glitch – it happens now and again, that I have to present my Oyster card a second time before the barriers open. I’m sure it must happen on thousands of occasions every day. But it seemed at the time like a correlation. That the world of electronics – or perhaps just the world – had taken against me.

I wrote some notes by hand. They were filled with crossings-out. I suppose this is why Angela wanted me to write these notes by hand in the first place: so that the process was visible. No doubt the printed pages of A4 are less interesting to her.

But in any case those handwritten scraps felt like a different thing altogether. I actually burned them. I can’t remember what they said.

I have a new computer now, and barely any idea how it works.

There was a little ritual, where I showed the old computer the new. I practically told it that it was being replaced. I made some tea, listening to the World Service – this was all just a few minutes ago. I took the old computer outside to the street and smashed it against the ground. I picked it up and smashed it again. I think I did it a third time.

A person saw me and pretended not to see. Then I picked up the largest pieces and chucked them in the bin. I was sweating. I kicked a few bits to the road, but still there was plenty of glass and plastic remains.

Then I sat back down, where I sit now. I had to stop – it took me a few moments to realize I’d got some blood on the keyboard. It’s from my hands. I half-thought it was from the old machine.

Me: Do you remember how she used to play?

Her: Of course.

Me: It was lovely, wasn’t it?

Her: It was.

Me: And do you remember she’d sit you on her lap, sometimes, while she played?

Her: Really? I don’t remember that.

Me: You don’t? You were quite small.

Her: How old was I?

Me: Quite small. Possibly only a year or two. Perhaps you don’t remember.

Her: Tell me.

Me: She’d sit you on her lap and play with her arms around you.

Her: Really?

Me: You’d throw in a note sometimes – or sometimes a whole fist of notes – and she’d try to accommodate it. Play around it, do you know what I mean? You really don’t remember?

Her: Oh, Dad.

Me: It was really lovely.

Her: Come here, Dad.

Me: And have I told you, sometimes I’d come home and she’d be playing? She’d be composing one of her commissions.

Her: It’s OK.

Me: It was funny, one time – I fell asleep listening, and when I woke up she’d completed the whole piece.

Her: It’s OK. It’s OK.

Me: And, you know, I had the strangest dream. It’s funny.

Her: What’s that?

Me: I had the strangest dream.

Her: (quietly) Say it again?

Me: The dream I had, it was so strange, with her music through it.

Her: A dream? Was it nice?

Me: It was.

█████████: I want to strangle you and feel your pulse fade beneath my fingers.

I want you to know why I’m strangling you, and, before you lose consciousness, for you to agree with my reasoning.

I want to commemorate your death with songs and happy proclamations. The children will light a fire, the TV channels will run specials, and the artists will all compete for public commissions to mark this day. The day I stood over you with your neck in my hands and your weakening pulse fluttering against my thumbs.

There are the notes I share with Angela, and there are the notes I keep to myself. Perhaps this is what she means by my being opaque.

In the night I sensed something in my lower back. I turned on to my side and grimaced – not quite painful: more the feeling of being marked, like the brush of a nettle before the sting enters your blood.

By morning I could barely move. The pain in my back was quite extreme. Deep breaths were treacherous.

Even peripheral movements, like extending my arm, seem to tug against that plane of my back. Not the spine, but the muscular base, distinctly the left side – not muscular enough.

I’ve reviewed, in my mind, the shenanigans with the computer, tried to replay each wild movement – to identify, if I may, the precise moment of trauma. The possibility of such movements, now, seems a crazy fantasy. I’d struggle, now, to even give the computer a stern look.

Most galling, obviously, is how, in the longer view, the computer won.

I telephoned the hospital, asking them to tell my father I wouldn’t be visiting. Having reached the front room, I didn’t have the will to get back to bed, and so sat there until evening, trying to doze.

My new computer is a sleek abomination. The old machine, as much as I hated it by the end for its infirmity, was at least familiar.

This thing, by contrast, is impenetrable. All my old applications, my familiar routines and shortcuts – all gone. Now I have this glossy fortress instead. The text is as sharp as print, and each window is accorded a soft shadow. But where the hell is everything?

In my current crippled state, there’s little else I’m capable of except sitting in front of a computer, and so I’ve been studying it. I’ve discovered that underneath the shiny, drop-shadowed exterior, the operating system is UNIX-based. As soon as I opened a new terminal session, forsaking the lush desktop in favour of plain text, I was taken back to a similar moment, decades ago: hunched (less painfully then, it should be said) over a black terminal screen in my office in the dead of night, entering commands with slow fingers, with two large textbooks whose names I forget (one of them was something plain like Computer Networks Vol. 3) and a notepad where I’d try to describe which commands did what.

My night-time tutorials at the computer were my desperate effort to understand a new threat: the internet.

A few years after the school had been connected to the internet, I experienced my first IT crisis. One of the boys at the school, a cunning and over-achieving Year Nine boy, had deployed a computer virus that had spread to every host on the network, rendering them inoperable. Every machine had to be laboriously reformatted. Our email server was effectively destroyed, as well as those of several other schools (though in those days it hardly mattered, since no one really used email).

It was easy enough to find the culprit – he’d achieved legendary status in the schoolyard, an unlikely feat for such a bookish lad (which only further gilded his fame). He didn’t even deny his crime, such was his honesty. Initially I was too amazed by the enormity of his achievement to discipline him. I wanted answers – how? How had he wiped out the school’s network? Had he physically tampered with the machines? Did he have any accomplices? You have to understand my ignorance of computer systems was total in those days.

He was a smart boy but too daunted, or just too inarticulate, to explain the mechanism of his IT blitzkrieg. So I arranged to speak with his parents to discuss his crime (which I couldn’t myself describe), and his father explained that he was the one to blame: he worked with computers and his son took an avid interest, and like a father teaching his boy how to light a fire and hunt, he’d been showing him how to network two machines, how one could speak to another, what port scanning was and where the danger lay.

So it was the boy’s father who counselled me on our IT systems and recommended a consultant to perform a full audit of our networks. This was in the days when information security was only considered by financial corporations and the military – so I accepted his excuse that he couldn’t provide me with any references because of the nature of his work. He (the consultant) wrote a ten-point wish list to improve the school’s cyber security posture. At the time, his every bullet point was gibberish to me. Slightly worse was that our IT teacher understood him almost as little.

Top of his list was switching (migrating in his parlance) every machine to a different operating system. A monumental change, it turned out – and one I had no understanding of whatsoever. But I could see well enough that my ignorance was preventing me from reasoning about the threat I faced, like a village elder trying to describe a thunderstorm. I had no choice but to begin that laborious job of understanding, a job that began with the soul-destroying sentence: TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) was specifically designed to provide a reliable end-to-end byte stream over an unreliable internetwork.

I first met her at the school. She was a music teacher. She came to my office shortly after joining, so we could discuss how she was settling in. I was struck by her, of course, even if I refused to admit I thought she was beautiful.

I can never know what she really felt, on that first occasion we met. We never really revisited it. We weren’t quite old enough, I don’t think, to consider such nostalgia essential, yet. So I can never be sure whether she thought me handsome, or precisely how her feelings towards me – though I hate the immodesty of saying it – developed.

That first time, I’d been distracted by my apprehensions of a different meeting that night. I was at war with the governors. I was new at the school, and I was crass and young(er) I suppose, and I explained to them that, despite whatever impressions I may have given them in the interviews leading to my appointment, actually my opinion was that parents had essentially no role in the running of a school, and in particular no role in the exercise of necessary discipline regarding expulsions, etc., and that if they were dissatisfied with my actions they could perhaps write me a letter, and not to phone or try to intercept me in person, and of course they could always seek, in the very worst case, my dismissal, through the official channels. I was rather confrontational about it. Well, they had written me a letter. More than a letter.

And in the midst of these hostilities, she came into my office and sat down, and looked at me for only a moment, and said – as if she weren’t my subordinate – “You look haunted.”

I was somewhat taken aback.

“I’ve had a busy day,” I said, I think, or something like it. I was intensely distracted, by the interaction of so many contra emotions, topped with her unexpected remark.

We talked a little aimlessly at first, from what I remember. She sensed my distraction, my inability to quite look her in the eye. I asked how her first week had gone. She said the boys were a bit undisciplined, that in truth she was spending a lot of class time getting them to shut up (as she put it), that she’d spoken to some of the other teachers for advice and they’d all told her something different.

I inhaled deeply – gradually my war with the governors was receding to mere background noise in my mind. I didn’t realize, then, quite what a rough time she’d been having, since she seemed at that moment so unperturbed, even light-hearted.

“Your last school was all girls,” I said. I took my glasses off, momentarily, before putting them back on. “I suppose it was a different dynamic.”

“A bit, yes.”

“The problem, in regard to the boys, is that you’re a woman.”

She was impassive as I broke this to her.

“It’s very difficult, for a woman, to command their respect. You have the advantage of not being overweight, with no visible deformities or the like, so you’re not a target in that way – though actually being attractive can be equally problematic, or more so – ” I began to blush at my error “ – by which, I mean – ” I tried to look at her evenly, and then looked away “– it’s not simply a matter of physical appearance.” I regretted that word physical. I took a breath, as if to start again.

“The fact is, your gender will work against you. That’s not to say it’s the only factor, of course. I think, in general, a woman can less afford to be kind in the classroom, with boys . . . You seem a kind person, at least.”

She shrugged. “Not especially. I’ve tried not to shout at them, since – ” she gave it some thought, appeared to imagine herself screaming at the class, and I got a glimpse of the difficulties she was facing, which I only really learned about much later “ – since I think I’m not much good at shouting. I already know it’s no good to do something half-baked.”

“What have you been trying?”

“Well, I’ve been putting them in detention like mad. But even that’s a struggle. I tell them they have detention and they don’t turn up. I have to chase them through their form tutors. It’s a bit thankless, I suppose.”

“It’s early days, yet. Every teacher has to bed in.” I closed my eyes, in a kind of resigned fury, at myself. Bed in. I’d stumbled upon every euphemism and innuendo, it felt like, and surely the next inevitable step was to mention fornication outright.

“Is that so?” she said, a little coquettishly – a little tiredly. “I hope that’s the case. I just can’t see myself lasting very long, at this rate.”

“Well, I’m very sorry to hear that,” I said. I chewed on my lower lip. “Perhaps I should sit in on a few lessons. That’ll help, in the short term.”

She appeared unconvinced. “In the short term,” she echoed.

“That’ll help get you over this slump, I hope – and I may be able to offer some insight to the boys’ personalities. Often it’s a matter of identifying the chief actors. If you can pacify them, the whole group comes under control.”

She tilted her head. I believe she found my strategizing appealing.

“I think that’d be helpful,” she said.

I smiled at her, was able, finally, to look her in the eyes a little, before saying, “Give me your teaching timetable, and I’ll let you know what lessons I can sit in on. Give the little bastards a surprise.”

Her momentary shock, I remember. Her feigned horror at my words, her excitement (I like to think). Perhaps that was the moment I really fell for her.

My back is relenting. But when I try to touch my toes it feels like the brace of my pelvis is about to crack.

It’s laughable, how little I can fold towards the ground. I thought the pain was muscular before, but this other pain feels like a misalignment of bone, or as if my lower skeleton is dense with cancer.

I can barely even gesture at my toes. And when I straighten up, the old pain, the one that seems to reside in the muscles, surges back, redoubled. From the kitchen I can hear the kettle boil, and the sound of a news announcer just above it. I imagine him – the news announcer – young and fit, and I envy him. The kettle switches off, and I dig my fingers into my back, as if I might excavate the rotten abscess, or the rampant cancer, or the outgrowth of bone.

Angela inspired me today.

I was still wincing in pain from my back, and I had plasters on my fingers from where I’d cut myself on the computer casing. I must have looked a wreck. She showed concern and asked me about my injuries. I told the story – offered to bring her the notes, but she declined – but I told it in a way so that she laughed. Then she stopped herself and pointed to her temple and asked where I’d got the bruise from, and I said it was nothing to worry about, that the back was killing me most.

I think it was on account of my appearance that she took a softer tone with me. In fact, the whole thing was less formal. She even discussed her own stresses, from her colleagues and her boyfriend (he believes she is always analysing him; she is, most of the time). And she came back always to My Case – or Your Case, as it is from her perspective. She was circumspect, advisory – I did hardly any talking.

I told her she was acting unusually (I avoided the word unprofessionally). She told me that many in her profession would agree. She smiled almost sinisterly at this. Many of her colleagues, the older ones especially, she said, would berate her for her unanalytic behaviour.

I was beginning to suspect Angela was something of a dark horse, not the staid mediocrity I’d presumed her to be. I was slightly overwhelmed when she turned her gaze back upon My Case.

“I think you’re suffering because of your relationship with people. You relied on your wife to socialize you. In a way, she was your main connection to the rest of the world, to how other people think and feel. Then, this awful event happened, and anyone would struggle to come to terms with it. But it’s doubly traumatic because it takes away the companion who has helped you every day for the past twenty-odd years. Tell me if what I’m saying upsets you.

“The loss of that companionship, and the manner of that loss, has caused you to retreat into yourself – but rather than feeling sadness or depression, as is more usual, you’ve rejected grief. To a great extent you’ve refused to grieve.”

I admit I laughed at this.

“You’ve even shut yourself off from your daughter’s grief. Instead, the hurt expresses itself in these damaging patterns of behaviour. Physically damaging, even – ” she gestured at me, at my miserable, hunched figure.

“Instead of being sad, you’re angry. But you won’t even admit that much. The world doesn’t touch you. You’re aloof and superior, you consider therapy beneath you, but secretly you crave it. You undermine all the exercises I give you, you mock them and chide me about them, but you do them all, without fail.

“And it’s because your whole life you’ve been able to live by the illusion that you’ve been in control. You’re the Headmaster – what you say, goes. Even the bad teachers are your fault, you think. Then you retire and suddenly your world falls apart. And now in the most difficult way you have to accept that you’re not in control.

“And you have to cede some of that control. Let your daughter back into your life. But, most importantly, you have to accept this: that there was nothing you could’ve done. That what happened to your wife was beyond anyone’s control. It wasn’t your fault.”