Child - B

by Tom J Vowler

 …what can love forgive?

In April 1973, when Curry was nearly ten months old, a tracker found the baby's brokenbody left on a flee trail after an interaction between Group 5 and a silverback. Examination of the corpse revealed ten bite wounds of varying severity. One bite had fractured the infant's femur and a second had ruptured the gut…Curry was my first introduction to infanticide among the Visoke gorillas.

Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist

Irwin was tied to a tree with chains. Approximately a thousand people were present, including some women and children on the edge of the crowd. Members of the mob cut off his fingers and toes joint by joint, mob leaders carried them off as souvenirs.

A.F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching

It may not necessarily have been the biggest or the most complex molecule around, but it had the extraordinary property of being able to create copies of itself. But now we must mention an important property of any copying process: it is not perfect. Mistakes will happen…

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Can the heart burst if it beats fast enough? And what about the lungs – surely these delicate sacks of life have a breaking point? Was it best to keep up this pace and reach an inhaler sooner, or slow for some temporary relief? Daniel wondered what his dad would do if the petrol gauge hugged the red: foot down probably, hare-like. The wrong approach, of course. He had run for one maybe two miles, slowing only when the sloping field threatened to pull him over. Rhythm was everything; but rhythm and terror weren't comfortable around each other.

For the first few minutes he'd been aware of others, dispersing like shrapnel from the epicentre; aware of the peripheral blur they made on his retinas. He thought it was Shaun to his left; not exactly following him, but not parting from him either. And there was a further unsettling sensory input, as the stench of smoke from his t-shirt found his nostrils .

The oppressive summer had meant shorts for weeks now and without looking Daniel could sense the throbbing of rashes and stings where he'd maintained a straight line through thicket and nettle.

The town was rising to him now and he slowed, desperate, quaffing for air. Nothing stays the same, he thought. A stand-in teacher had once told his class that summers seem to last forever as a child because as a proportion of your life they are larger than each subsequent one. This summer was over, ended by significance rather than autumn.

Shaun was right behind him now. What's the matter – can't you outrun an asthmatic? he wanted to say between wheezes. He picked up speed again. The only sound the thud thud of shoes on grass. They fell towards the town, a fat orange sun and still pollen giving it the feel of a soporific slow-motion scene from a film.

Without word, as if choreographed, the pair crossed the bridge into the town before taking off in opposite directions. Daniel pulled up, his lungs finally in complete dispute with his will. Bent forward, hands on knees, he turned and watched the back of his friend disappear through the morass of queuing cars and oblivious shoppers.

One

‘Idiots, it's a bomb! Anthrax comes in envelopes.'

‘I heard they have anthrax bombs now, anyway.'

‘Who does?'

‘Well, if it's in the air, we're dead already.'

‘If I had anthrax as a kid, can I get it again?'

And so on. As weeks went, this was a dull one. Local news was failing miserably to compete with global sensations, so Michael was unsurprised to see his colleagues exploiting the suspect package for all its worth. He'd been last into the office, so had to endure four different versions of the morning's events – the conspiratorial gusto increasing with each.

‘Check the post mark,' said the girl from sales, whose name eluded Michael. ‘See if it's foreign.'

Everyone seemed to be in the newsroom – people from sales, IT, faces Michael only vaguely recognized - the morning apparently suspended since the arrival of the post.

‘They have sleeper cells here as well, you know,' said Anthony, who should have been busy interviewing Oxham's under-8 chess champion. ‘Apparently there's been a clandestine order to target newspapers like us.'

Michael booted up his computer, for now resisting the show. He made a mental note (though suspected a literal one was necessary), to start washing his cup out on Fridays – as the bottom few millimeters of his spoon were gripped by the tacky paste of Friday's residual coffee. At least doing it now would spare him from the evolving absurdity. Collective madness had, he thought, gone full circle from the articles they'd all been encouraged to produce of late, into the community and back to the newsroom via reporters, culminating in this standoff not incongruous in a Bond film. The small brown package, addressed in child-like scrawl to ‘The Newsroom, Oxham Gazette', had leaked some ochre yellow powder onto a desk; and that, it seemed in today's climate, was all it took.

Indeed, the whole country seemed contaminated by a collective paranoia since the attack on New York last month. Britain had leapt to its transatlantic friend's side - standing shoulder to shoulder (or knee to shoulder) - and was now, according to various dusted-down and wheeled-out authorities, a target itself. Media in the States had been sent, among other things, anthrax - and reports of white powder in envelopes had begun cropping up domestically, though had proven to be little more than flour or talcum powder on analysis.

An ardent hoax culture had blossomed within weeks, from the man who'd sprinkled white powder in Canterbury Cathedral, to the Heathrow-bound flight diverted when a powdery substance (later identified as biscuit crumbs) was spotted on the aisle floor.

It felt to Michael, though, that this town, his town, was especially susceptible to hysteria, eagerly developing whatever brand of madness was in national circulation, and adopting it as its own; Oxham was a faithful and reactionary microcosm of the country. Last month, following a BBC documentary on the prevalence of child abuse, two paediatricians had bricks heaved through their suburban lounge windows. Oxham: home to the small minded and culturally challenged.

And now it was unseen spores that gripped otherwise sane people with terror. The nineties obsession with the virus, be it real or electronic, had found a new mutation.

Simon Keane, Oxham Gazette's young editor, was today struggling to balance an annoyance at the lack of work being done, with a gnawing disquiet at the drama; a disquiet born mainly from his strong editorial stance condoning the imminent war against terrorism; a stance that had seen a shift in readers' letters from prosaic whining to fervent patriotism.

‘For Christ's sake, bombs aren't shaped like that,' said Simon, with only a hint of conviction. ‘Don't you watch films with bombs in them?'

‘Actually, they come in all shapes and sizes these days,' said Michael, finally helpless to resist the allure of hysteria.

‘Right, everyone chill,' said Simon. This was a phrase Michael would gladly have wagered his meagre salary on his editor using at least once a day, although the absence of expletives was novel. Like hearing nails pulled down a blackboard, the wince on hearing it was automatic. He remembered reading a piece on Clinton's aides mischievously removing the Ws from all keyboards in the White House shortly before George Dubya's inauguration, and fantasised about similarly removing ‘chill' from Simon's vocabulary.

Looking into Simon's eyes Michael thought that through the consternation he could detect a glimmer of excitement; that at last the war had come to sleepy Oxham, something his editor was striving for and had tenuously achieved through various features on families of local soldiers, and a rather sanctimonious piece on just how tolerant we were, letting these people build a mosque in Oxham.

Michael had employed much tactical nous and diplomacy to avoid large-scale conflict with Simon since 9/11. He was prepared to bow to the inevitable jingoism of ‘Our Boys Go To War' headlines in the current climate, as well as the fusing of opinions in such a provincial backwater, but having to be part of it, reinforcing it, left him feeling soiled at times. And the Gazette was one of those local weeklies that also covered salient national news, often pasting it near stories of corrupt Oxham councillors, as if all news, regardless of scale, was of equal interest and importance to readers. It was during such national crises, and their ubiquitous debate, that Michael was invariably branded a liberal chatterer: a do-gooder lacking resolve and conviction, as Simon would put it. In reality, although he often stood on the periphery of populist opinion on such divisive matters, it was his withdrawal and disinclination to defend the labels thrown at him that marginalized him.

At twenty-nine Michael was only five years younger than his editor, which somehow left him bridging the gap between Simon and the rest of the junior reporters. He could comfortably do either's intellect, either's sense of humour, but only transiently - following what seemed like a perennial pattern of not quite fitting in. He just got so confused by their value system, the rules that let you enter their moral arena. Social quarantine it was. Michael sighed at how you could feel quite so lonely on such a busy planet.

‘Can you smell marzipan?' said Michael to no one in particular. Heads twitched and sniffed away before returning subservient gazes to Michael - now the self-designated authority on terrorist attacks on local newspapers - for an explanation. ‘I mean, explosives usually smell of marzipan or almonds. But if it's anthrax it'll be odourless.'

He tried not to enjoy his newly-found clout, but his stoicism was being gratefully accepted as paternalism by the others. The scene was developing a life of its own, like the fear that burgeons from children's imaginations on hearing a ghost story. There was, he thought, a subtle point in these situations when the one-liners used to shrug off reality waned and trepidation took over. No one truly believed the parcel was dangerous on an individual level, but as a group - the most effective level for hysteria to function - anything now seemed likely.

Simon jumped in before Michael's power grew further. ‘Does anyone know where the protocol for stuff like this is kept? There must be some rules.'

‘You're the editor,' said Anthony, trailing off at the last word to minimise the sarcasm.

‘Right, save any work and we'll all go and line up in the bloody car park or something.'

‘That'll be the Birkenhead Principle then, will it?' added Michael. ‘Get the women and children out first.'

‘Shouldn't we tell everyone else in the building or put a blanket over it?' continued Anthony, as he saved his three hundred and fifty words on next month's visit by an ex-Gladiator, and headed for the door.

‘Of course, Ant,' said Simon. ‘I forgot all about that latest piece of anti-explosive paraphernalia, currently revolutionising the fight against urban terrorism - the blanket . What is it they say about “a little knowledge...”?'

Anthony hated being called Ant.

‘It's “a little learning…”,' Michael said to himself, but was betrayed by his vocal chords.

‘What is?' snapped Simon.

‘ “A little learning is a dangerous thing” not “knowledge”.'

‘Fuck's the difference?'

‘Well…' Michael began halfhearted, wary of his near iconic reputation for pedantry. ‘A little knowledge can't be dangerous, can it? Learning implies a process, with a start and finish. Flying a plane when you'd only learnt half the manual wouldn't be too clever, whereas all general knowledge of flying is probably going to help you.'

‘So, are you saying those terrorists who flew into the Twin Towers had enough knowledge to do so but hadn't really learned to fly?'

‘Whatever, Simon.' Michael loathed his own dogmatic ability to split even the thinnest hairs, but could seldom help himself. It was wise to avoid another debate with Simon on the events of September 11 th . The man was obsessed with how news of disasters broke and was covered, and would be capable of launching an effective verbal attack from multiple directions – his knowledge of the subject as informed and up-to-date as anyone's. It was where Simon wanted to be, Michael supposed; reporting sensation and catastrophe to whomever wanted it. It was what was meant to make them all tick.

Michael was getting fed up with the farce now, and with the realisation that it was chucking it down outside and that any bomb disposal robot would stand little chance of negotiating the chaotic clutter that was the newsroom, marched over to the source of today's madness.

‘No, Michael!' cried the girl from sales, giving the impression to any outside observer that he was about to perform some heroic, bodyguard-like act of altruism. He picked up the innocuous-looking object, now with Holy Grail status, and tore at one of the neat folds, thinking that perhaps it wasn't raining hard enough to risk adorning the walls of the newsroom with journalists.

Shielding it from his audience, partly to increase suspense but also to avoid catching sight of the infectious fear he sensed behind him, he gingerly pulled the contents from its wrapping.

‘Well…?'

Michael turned, poker-faced: ‘Well, if that new Chinese Herbal Centre in Levington Road is one of those furtive cells you were talking about, we're in trouble!' he said, sharing the latest publicity-seeking free samples of alternative medicine, one of which had split. ‘ Good for arthritis, colds, asthma and constipation …apparently.'

‘Fuck's sake,' said Simon.

The entertainment was over and Michael watched as reporters skulked back to their desks, as schoolchildren return to class after the monthly fire-alarm drill. The moment had passed, as was the ephemeral nature of news, wherever it occurred. The metaphorical buzz soon became a literal one: hard drives began to whir again as keyboards informed them about the previous few days in Oxham.

The air, always dry and musty in the newsroom, was also pungent with the personnel influx, and Michael could already sense the prickling on his forehead that would become an angry rash by the day's end. Newsrooms (at least the ones he'd frequented) were rarely salubrious places of work.

Michael barely suffered from the insidious stress synonymous with his trade; he could even (if pushed) revel in the pressure of deadline - the creation of something from nothing, which would often literally become nothing again by the end of the day. In a curious way a newspaper's fugacious existence added to its magnum opus , like an ice sculpture losing form as the sun rose, or a canvas reused by an artist, denigrating their previous work yet giving it an immediacy, a venerable quality, at the same time. And he loved the fat odour of ink and machinery in the pressroom during print, which came to be addictive after a couple of years. It was just the people he served, and their mostly inane stories that increasingly needed the word ‘like' removed. I was like on my way back from the dentist… (But quotes were supposed to be verbatim, so Michael would cruelly leave most of them in.) He thought how in two hundred years there'd be only fifty words spoken in the world. One of them would be ‘like'.

Sarah thought this snobbery, but where would it end? Her answer was to periodically propose a move to pastures less rural. And she was right, of course: his fallow talents had outgrown the Oxham Gazette and few understood his indifference to moving to a national or a magazine, a natural progression most young reporters sought after half the time Michael had been here. Devon suited him, though. He needed it.

Anthony, meanwhile, having clearly forgotten about Kasparov junior, came off the phone to Oxham police station and announced that there had been a burglary in Queen Street last night, that the sponsored police parachute jump raised £746 for some children's charity, and the missing schoolgirl, Danielle Thomas, had yet to turn up at friends or relatives. Michael ducked his wan face behind his monitor for the morning, hoping this last story was as spurious as the ‘bomb'. He clicked on the My Documents icon, purposefully ignoring Simon's request for someone to make his coffee.

Two

Getting out of London by car was a metaphorical orgasm, thought Hannah. There was the initial excitement and rush of escapism as concrete was swapped for greenbelt, carbon monoxide for oxygen; the frantic stop/start and accompanying realisation that the ride would be spasmodic, multi-paced. There was the catharsis offered by departure, the anticipation of an arrival and its resultant satiation. Yet, as often with sex, there was a post-experience disillusionment in leaving the city behind, a sense that the travelling was always better than the arriving. Not that she had arrived. There was at least an hour and a half to the south coast, depending on traffic, followed by a trip west this afternoon to check out the latest lead.

As leads went, this one was tenuous in the extreme and the day already had a desultory feel to it. Hannah was used to trails going cold before picking up again, but there'd been nothing to report back to her employers for a month now. Normally, following such an intelligence drought there would be the impending issue of justifying her retainer, but Hannah knew several others had failed abjectly before her, and figured she had a few more weeks before the Wilkinsons dispensed with her services. Still, a visit in the flesh to present some carefully spun progress would go a long way to achieving this.

A quick scan of the back seat of her 306 was as much an anxious habit as a mental checklist. Even if her laptop, camera and numerous other electronic devices were absent, she'd not turn back now.

Despite her Peugeot only being a few years old, Hannah felt a trade-in was on the cards soon. She liked its anonymity, its ability to blend in, but felt it wasn't quite the right image now she was somewhat established. And image was second only to reputation in getting work in this merciless industry. Yes, an Audi would be better. Perhaps even a Beemer wasn't too gaudy; a little macho, but that wasn't a bad thing. It was time to come out.

Private investigators had come a long way since Shoestring . It was no longer compulsory to be a stubbly, unkempt, hard drinking and hard smoking social misfit of a man, although Hannah did both smoke and drink hard. And the hackneyed image of disastrous relationships had some truth. But there was an altogether more corporate air to the vocation these days - one of slick legitimacy, of responsibility and professionalism. Staying in good shape was seen more as a requisite than an option; go into any swanky gym in London these days and you'll find one or two private dicks soaked in sweat. Mental and physical fitness could usually prolong what could otherwise become a fugacious existence.

Technology had been the other sweeping change to the trade. Whether looking for a runaway teenager or a cheating spouse, the internet was often the place to begin. Most people would be aghast at how much of their lives is plastered across cyberspace. People's lack of imagination when creating passwords also helped. And great strides had been made in surveillance equipment, a fact that Hannah felt contributed to the ever-thriving divorce rate.

But despite being completely au fait with the tools of her trade, Hannah rarely got the really lucrative jobs – the industrial espionage or celebrity death threats. As a woman - and a one-person band - she was often dismissed as both an amateur and a bored housewife. The first of these labels was, by definition, inevitable initially (and not gender specific), and the second farcical to anyone who knew her views on marriage. Other diatribes from (presumably) threatened men included that lesbian, slapper, Dick Van Dyke, and less offensively, but no more accurate, Miss Marple, that bird in ‘Silence of the Lambs' (almost a compliment), and Juliet Bravo .

Initially all her advertising had read H. Matthews, Private Investigator , in an attempt to generate more work, but the ones who had a problem with her gender hung up at first contact anyway, so H became Hannah.

This current charge was keeping her in fags and booze as well as paying her gym subs, but the size of the bonus for a result was what kept Hannah focused - hence this beyond-the-call-of-duty trip south. She knew of the case prior to her procurement and had heard the industry whispers, but was taken aback by the highly organised and furtive campaign that lay behind the now near-passive scenes. Her employers had two or three investigative agencies on their books at any one time, seemingly obsessed with a favourable outcome; an outcome that would presumably mean bad news for those Hannah sought. But that was a matter for others. She also discovered that the histrionics of the tabloids, so prevalent all those years ago, had mutated into an insidious, relentless burrowing - always courting and colluding with the Wilkinsons, but always from shadowy sanctuary.

The traffic had all but cleared now and the 306 sped southwards along the A3, filled with the bass of a Manics CD. Hannah thought how the road appeared to be continually downhill as it cut south through rural Surrey , as if it were subject to the earth's curvature. Giant foreboding pylons shot out of wooded canopies, stretching into the winter-blue sky, looking down on her like marching metallic beasts. Within forty minutes she was on a single carriageway, her speed curtailed by the occasional pictorial village. In between these the road would open up again and the scale of everything would change. Hannah noticed how everything seemed larger here: not just the houses and cars, but as if it'd all been designed using a different scale. Hedges were taller, grander; regimented firs dwarfed her - adding to the sense of exclusion and detachment. The road itself felt bigger, more sumptuous, which was curious as Hannah often spent long hours on the country's motorways. Passing entrances to houses set half a mile back, she tried guessing whether the occupants belonged to the traditional rural elite or were part of the augmenting IT nouveau riche. Her indifference soon suppressed any desire to work it out.

She was good at what she did. Technology was still no substitute for certain qualities crucial to the art of detection. Contacts in the right places and the ability to extract information from them produced more results than anything else. And being a woman, a woman of appreciable, if not obvious beauty, had its advantages in such extraction. Hannah hadn't actually slept with anyone in the gathering of intelligence, mainly as the implication of such was usually enough. But she reckoned she would if all else failed. A fuck had as much meaning as you chose to give it.

She'd not had a substantive relationship for years. The last boyfriend had been unable to accept the end of their six-month frisson. Apparently Hannah was the one ; he'd never felt like this before; they were so good together; children were an option. Ian had come to these conclusions with the minimum of consultation with her. Annoyingly, she was given several chances to reconsider, to see sense, and was forced to adopt not so much a cruel to be kind approach, more a cruel to be totally rid of the man approach.

Hannah had presumed the phone calls and letters would cease in time; but the extent of his obsession unfurled more with each day. His behaviour had never warranted police involvement: annoying, concerning, baffling (given the brevity of the relationship), but not threatening, and never illegal.

She came home one day to find him sitting on her doorstep, sobbing.

‘This has to stop,' she'd said, making no eye contact as she found the keyhole.

He flipped from apparent misery to cold assertion in a second. ‘You can't cut someone and then complain when they bleed on you, Hannah.'

Moving house had seemed a radical solution, but certainly did the trick. She'd expected him to re-establish contact once her name and business started appearing in public; but he never did. She decided to give, if not men then at least relationships, a wide berth for the foreseeable future.

A sluggish Bedford van saw that the 306 remained in third. She smiled. How completely weak men could be. More than any drug or financial reward, the possibility of sex with certain women could cause the total suspension of any number of morals, sworn oaths and promises. It struck Hannah as being such a handicap. And apportioning blame at the feet of the humble gene - well, that was surely a male subterfuge of epic delegation. Why can't men take some responsibility? Or at least direct it in the right vicinity. Society defined the aesthetic boundaries; it's the image-makers who determine what enslaves men - not their genes. Hannah was just grateful her soma type was flavour of the century: a body that, at twenty-eight, still held its form and allure, despite regular abuse. During a drunken evening out, a friend had once asked Hannah why she hated men so much. Despite this being news to her, she reflected for a moment before answering that she just hadn't met any she liked yet.

The coiled road suddenly opened up. As a précis to her thoughts (and to prompt their end) she pressed hard on the 306's accelerator, didn't bother to indicate, and careered disdainfully past a steady convoy of three male drivers and eventually the Bedford – one hand on the steering wheel, the other igniting a Marlboro Light.

© Tom J Vowler 2005

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