The Killing Room (3 page)

III

Margaret had never quite understood the Irish concept of the wake – a celebration of the life, rather than a mourning of the death. How could you celebrate a life that was gone, something that once was vital and full of hope and warmth and giving, that now was cold and dead? Like the procession of bodies that had passed through her autopsy room, all animation extinct, just meat on a slab.

She could not bear to think of her father like that. She had not even had the courage to view his body, laid out in his coffin, colour carefully applied to his face by the mortician in an attempt to create the illusion of life. In any case, she knew, it was not her father who lay there. He had long vanished, existing now only in the memories of others, and in flickering, fading images on old home movies from the days before video tape. They had never bought a video camera.

There were always the family photo albums. But Margaret felt that these fixed, two-dimensional images rarely caught the person. They lacked the spirit that was life and character, a personality. They were just moments in time without any reference point.

She heard voices raised in laughter coming from the living room, the chink of glasses, and felt resentful that these people should come into her father’s home on the day he was buried and take his passing so lightly. She slipped out of the kitchen and moved down the hall to the room at the back of the house which had been his den. She shut the door on the sounds of the wake and listened to the silence. The room was laden with it, what little light remained of the late afternoon soaked up by the heavy net curtains. If there was anything left of him, it was here in this room where he had spent so much time. She breathed in the smell of him in the dry, academic atmosphere of his own private space. Everything had been left as it was from the day he dropped dead in his lecture room at the university from a massive coronary thrombosis. Quick, painless, completely unexpected. The best way to go, Margaret thought, except for those who remained, devastated by the suddenness of it, left to cope with the huge hole it made in all their lives.

She wandered around touching things. His books, hundreds of them gathering dust on the shelves. All the great modern American writers. It had been his subject, his speciality. Steinbeck, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and, of course, Hemingway, who had grown up just a few streets away in this quiet upscale Chicago suburb. All thumbed and marked and annotated. She picked one out.
Winesburg
,
Ohio
, a collection of short stories by Sherwood Anderson. The pages were yellowing now around the edges, the paper dry, almost brittle. It fell open at a story called
Hands
. She remembered it. A sad story about a simple man whose love of children led to a tragic misunderstanding. There were copious notes down the margins in her father’s tight distinctive handwriting, the hallmark of a generation.

She moved to his desk. A piece of English reproduction furniture. Mahogany, with red leather inlay. It was chipped and scarred from years of use. Papers and books were piled untidily around his iMac desktop computer. A half-smoked pipe lay in an ashtray, the pale scrapings of his teeth around the mouthpiece of the black stem. As a child she had loved the sweet smell of his tobacco. She ran her fingers lovingly round the smoothly polished cherrywood bowl. He had no doubt intended to relight it. Now he never would.

In a frame to the left of the computer, partially obscured by a pile of unmarked exam papers, was a photograph of Margaret in her graduation gown. She moved the papers to get a better sight of it, and felt a strange ache as she saw the young face below the mortar board gazing back at her out of the picture, full of hope and youthful idealism. She wondered how often her father had looked at it in idle moments. Wondered what he had thought of her. Had he been proud or disappointed? As a little girl she had adored him. And he had given her so much of his time, so much of his love. But since her teens they had not been particularly close, and now she regretted it. It had been her fault. She had been too busy making a life for herself that had nothing to do with her parents. A life that had turned to failure and disappointment. And now there was no going back. No way to say, Sorry, Dad, I loved you really. She quickly turned the frame face down on the desk and turned on the computer, just for something to do. It whirred and hummed as it booted up its operating system, before presenting her with its desktop screen. From here she could access all his files. Mainly they were word-processing documents. Lectures, notes for students, a critical analysis of some new American classic. There were letters, too. Hundreds of them. But she had no interest in violating his privacy.

He had only recently gone on-line, discovering that he could stay easily in touch by e-mail with his daughter in China. All it took was a click of the mouse. But, then, beyond his initial enthusiasm for the Internet, he had not had much to say to her, and his e-mails had tailed off. She wondered what use he had made of the Net, and booted up his browser, a piece of software that connected him to the worldwide web, allowing him to visit any one of millions of Internet sites around the globe. The default page that it took her to was the HomePage of his Department at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Down the left side of the screen were four tabs, like name tabs on folders in a filing cabinet, which is what they were – or, at least, their electronic equivalent. While she waited for the UIC HomePage to load, she pointed the on-screen arrow to the HISTORY tab and a file opened up as if she had drawn it out of a cabinet. This showed the last five hundred Internet sites her father had visited. She went to the top of the list, the last site he had gone to on the day before he died. It was something called
Aphrodite Home Page
. She clicked on the Internet Explorer icon beside it and within seconds the screen was wiped black, and photographs of naked women began downloading under headings like
SAMANTHA
–
Click me to watch live
, and
JULI
–
I like women
.

Margaret’s face flushed red. A mixture of shock, embarrassment, revulsion. She went back to HISTORY and downloaded the next address on the list. More pornography.
ASIAN BABES DO IT FOR YOU
. Skinny Asian women with silicon boosted breasts revealed parts of their anatomy that Margaret had only ever seen on the autopsy table. She felt sick. Her dad was accessing pornography on the Internet. Her
dad
! She could not reconcile this with the sweet, gentle man she knew as her father, the most scrupulously fair and honest man she had ever known. But, then, she thought, had she ever really known him at all? Why would he want to look at filth like this? Men, she knew, had needs that women simply didn’t understand. But her
dad
?

She didn’t hear the door of the den opening and was startled by the sound of her mother’s voice. ‘What are you doing, Margaret? Everyone’s asking where you are.’

Margaret was flustered, as if caught in some illicit act. She quickly moved the arrow to shut down the computer before her mother could see what was on the screen. ‘Nothing,’ she said guiltily. ‘Just going through some of dad’s stuff.’

‘Well, there’ll be plenty of time for that,’ her mother said. ‘You have guests to see to.’

Margaret bridled. ‘They’re not
my
guests,’ she said. ‘You invited them. And, anyway, they seem to be having a pretty good time through there, drinking dad’s Scotch. They won’t want me spoiling their fun.’

Her mother sighed theatrically. ‘I don’t know why you bother affecting the grieving daughter. You had no time for him when he was alive. Why start pretending now?’

Margaret was stung, both by the unfairness and by the truth of her mother’s words. ‘I’m not pretending,’ she said, fighting back the tears. She hated her mother to see any sign of weakness in her. ‘I loved my dad.’ She hadn’t realised just how much until she had received the phone call in Beijing. ‘But don’t worry. I won’t cause any posthumous embarrassment at your funeral by pretending I ever felt anything about you.’

She saw the colour rise on her mother’s cheeks and experienced an immediate stab of regret at her cruelty. Her mother had always had the knack of bringing out the worst in her. ‘In that case,’ her mother said coldly, ‘perhaps you’d be better not going.’ She turned back to the door.

‘You never loved me, did you?’ The words were out before Margaret could stop them, and they halted her mother in her tracks. ‘That day my brother drowned. You wished it had been me and not him.’ Her mother turned and flashed her a look. Things that had never been said, feelings long suppressed, were bubbling to the surface. ‘You spent your life wishing failure on me because I could never live up to the expectations you had of him. Your boy. Your darling.’

Her mother’s jaw was trembling. Her eyes filling. But like her daughter, she would show no sign of weakness. ‘I didn’t have to wish failure on you, Margaret. You brought all the failure you could ever need on yourself. A failed marriage, a failed career. And now an affair with some … Chinaman.’ She said the word as if it left a bad taste in her mouth. ‘And don’t talk to me about love. You don’t know the meaning of the word. You were always so self-contained. So cold. All those people you cut open. Just so much dead flesh to you. You never needed anything from anyone, did you? And never gave a thing of yourself.’

Margaret’s eyes were burning. Her throat felt swollen. She wished she had never come home. Was it true? Was she really so cold, so ungiving? Her mother had always been squeamish about her decision to become a pathologist, but she had never realised just how much it disgusted her. The words hurt. She wanted to hurt back. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘that’s because I took after you. You were always the Queen of Frost.’ She paused. ‘And maybe that’s why dad had to go looking for his sexual pleasures on the Internet.’ As soon as the words were out she regretted saying them. But there was no way to take them back, and she remembered the lines from one of her father’s favourite poems –
The moving finger writes: and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it
.

All the colour that their argument had raised on her mother’s face drained out of it. The carefully controlled façade slipped, and she looked suddenly haggard and old. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked quietly.

Margaret found she couldn’t meet her eye. ‘Nothing, Mom. We’re just being stupid here. Trying to hurt one another, ’cos dad’s gone and left us and who else are we going to take it out on?’

Her mother nodded towards the computer. Her voice had become very small. ‘He spent hours in here on that damned thing.’ She looked at Margaret. ‘Your father and I hadn’t made love for years.’ She became hesitant. ‘But I had no idea …’

Margaret closed her eyes. There were things about your parents you’d rather you never knew.

‘I’m not interrupting anything, am I?’

Margaret opened her eyes and saw a young man standing in the doorway. For a moment, in the semi-dark, she had no idea who he was. It was his voice which sparked off the memories of those pre-graduation years. ‘David?’

‘That’s me,’ he grinned. ‘Thought I’d show my face. You know, for old time’s sake. But, hey, you know, if this is a bad moment …’

‘Of course not, David.’ Margaret’s mother had immediately recovered herself, slipping back into the role of the bravely grieving widow. ‘But if you’ll excuse me, I really should be seeing to my guests. I’ll leave you two to get reacquainted. It must be quite some time.’

David nodded. ‘Almost ten years.’

‘I’ll speak to you later, then.’ The widow smiled and was gone, leaving Margaret and this ghost from her past standing in the silence of her dead father’s den.

‘Ten years?’ Margaret said, for something to say. ‘You sound like you’ve been counting.’

‘Maybe I have.’ He stepped into the room and she saw him a little more clearly. Sandy hair, thinning now, a lean good-looking face, strong jaw, well-defined lips. David Webber was tall and powerfully built. She remembered those arms holding her, his lips on her neck. And unaccountably she burst into tears. ‘Hey,’ he said, and immediately he was there, those same arms drawing her to him, and she surrendered to the comfort of his warmth and strength and made no effort to stop the sobs that broke in her chest.

For a long time he just held her and said nothing, until gradually the sobs began to subside. Then he drew the hair back from the streaky wetness of her face and smiled gently down at her. ‘What you need is to get out of here,’ he said. ‘I’m going to take you to dinner tonight. And if I don’t have you laughing by the end of the evening, I’ll pick up the tab.’

Which made her smile, in spite of everything. She remembered how she had always insisted they went Dutch, and how he had always made her laugh.

IV

Her life flashed before her eyes, like that moment people experience just before they believe they are going to die. All the familiar places she had haunted as a student, and then later during her residency at UIC Medical Centre. She had been more of a hermit during her time at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office.

The cab took them along Armitage, lights blazing in the early evening dark. On Halsted they had passed familiar-looking restaurants, a bar where she had once spent an hour drinking with a boyfriend, waiting for a table in a nearby eatery. By the time it was ready they were too drunk to eat.

Now she saw the used CD store where she used to browse when she was low on funds, only in those days they still sold vinyl, too. And the little speciality tea and coffee shop where she had got her favourite blend of roasted beans and Earl Grey tea by the pound. And all the chi-chi shops and boutiques where she would happily spend hours picking out what she would buy if only she could afford it.

They passed under the El, and Margaret suddenly began to get a bad feeling. ‘Where are we eating?’ she asked.