CHAPTER TEN - ALEC
“No,” I say, returning from outside.
“No what?” Eliza asks. I find her in the kitchen, which has clearly been renovated and made suitable for the twenty-first century. Or else the First Duke of Whatever the Fok who once lived here was very ahead of his time. She’s making a cup of tea, using the electric kettle. How very goddamn British of her.
“What you said. About the baby. No.”
She places down her mug and squares off to me. “Which part? Can you be specific? I’d like to know exactly which thing you think you’re giving me an ultimatum on, so that when I tell you to go fuck yourself, I can be precise.”
“You said that there’s no way you’ll let me raise it. No. If it’s my child, I will, by God, raise that kid in whatever way I see fit.”
She places her hands on the massive farmhouse table in front of her and leans forward. “Will you now?”
“You’d certainly better believe I fokken will.”
“Hm,” she says, turning to pour the water from the kettle over the tea leaves in her mug. The steam rises as she pours, like some kind of genie in ethereal form, come to spy on our conversation. She turns back, pulls out a chair from the table, and sits with her hands around the sides of the mug. It’s still drafty. While I was out, the rain started again. She’s put on an oversized sweater. The sleeves are too long for her arms and they cover her hands and almost all of her fingers. She looks like an urchin from Oliver Twist. Yet another case in which her Dickensian upbringing peers out from behind her crafted façade.
“Hm? Fok does that mean? Hm?”
“Nothing. Where did you go?
“When?”
“Just now.”
“Around. Down the lane. Why?”
“Did something happen?”
“What do you mean? Like what?”
“I don’t know. Like Saul becoming Paul on the road to Damascus.”
“Fok are those cunts?”
“Charming.” She blows on her tea and takes a sip. “I guess what I’m saying is that I’m surprised you feel so strongly about wanting the responsibility of caring for a child.”
“Why?”
“Because, my precious, you’re the most selfish person I’ve ever known.”
Sometimes I have to stop when Eliza talks to me like that. No one talks to me the way she does. Not even Christine or Danny ever talked to me the way Eliza does. But, for some reason, when she does it, it doesn’t really bother me. I do not welcome it, and if she didn’t, I’d be just as happy. But I don’t have a problem allowing it.
She’s never done it in front of anyone else. Nor would she, I don’t imagine. She knows that if she did, I’d have no choice to take action. Action that no one would be pleased about. And so, for some reason, we’ve fallen into a pattern where she gets to do it in private and I allow it. I think it’s the tacit agreement we have that lets her continue to know she’s special in my world.
I take off my newly rained-upon jacket and place it on the back of the chair across from her that I sit down in. “I’m going to tell you what will happen next.”
“Are you now?”
“Tomorrow, we’re going to leave this place and we’re going to Nara.”
“Are we then?” She takes another sip of her tea. I choose to ignore her annoying and rhetorical questions and I don’t say anything. After a moment, she asks, “Why Nara?”
“I have a house and no active concerns there at the moment. It’s safe and I can have medical staff on site.”
“Nara’s the place where they have the park with all the deer, yes?”
“Once we’re there—”
“Don’t like deer.”
“Once we’re there—”
“Knew a lad once called Trevor. Got bit by a deer tick and developed Lyme disease. Nasty business that. Don’t you have an apartment in Tokyo or someplace a little more cosmopolitan?”
“Will you fokken stop taking the piss?” I slam the table so ferociously that it jolts the mug sitting way across the other side. She sits back. Looks at me. Nods. I go on. “Once the baby comes, we’ll make decisions about what happens then. But, for now, this is what we’re doing. How pregnant are you?”
“Quite.”
“You know what I fokken mean.”
“About eleven weeks, I suppose.”
I start working the math out in my head. “We’ve only been here…”
“It didn’t happen on this jaunt, darling. I imagine it happened on that stopover between the States and Joburg that you took a few months back. Almost three months back, to be precise.”
I pause to think about that. I barely even remember it. It wasn’t official business. I was just getting away. Things with Christine were… complicated, and on my way back to South Africa, I had my pilot land at Heathrow. I called Eliza from the plane and told her to meet me at the airport hotel.
Savagely romantic.
“Yeah, all right,” I say. “Well, this is what’s happening now. So…” I stand, pull my cell phone from my jacket pocket.
“Who are you calling?”
“Whoever I need to. We can arrange for your shit to be sent, after.” As I’m pressing ‘send,’ she steps around the table, pulls the phone from my hand, and ends the call before it can commence. “Oi, give me my phone,” I say, reaching.
She places it down on the table and puts her arms around my waist. She kisses me lightly on the lips and looks into my eyes.
“Alec?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you love me?”
I squint. Not only was I not expecting the question, I don’t have a ready answer. She’s never asked me before. It’s never come up. If I’m honest, I don’t know if I’ve ever even considered it.
“What?” I say in response.
“Do you love me? Simple question. You love Christine. I know you do. You love her desperately and with your whole heart. I’m pretty sure you feel that way about Danny too. I know they love you.” She starts tracing the back of my shirt with her fingernails. Roughly in the area where my tattoo lives. “They love you so much, they’d do absolutely anything in the world for you. They’d go wherever you ask them, do whatever you ask. Kill who you tell them to kill… Anything. And even though you’d never admit it, you’d do the same for them. So,” she says, stepping back from me now and taking my hands in hers, “all I want to know is: Do you feel that way about me? Would you do anything for me? Go to any lengths? Kill for me?”
“Of course I would.”
“OK, well, that’s not really fair. You’re a sociopath. I think you just like killing people. You don’t need an excuse. But the bigger question remains… do you love me?”
“I… I feel like…”
“I didn’t think so.” She smiles. I would call it a sad smile, but it’s not. It’s just… accepting. “Which is fine. Because, honestly, Alec… I don’t love you. I don’t. And I know you don’t care. Which is perfect. Because if you did, you wouldn’t be you and this wouldn’t work. But, dear heart, I’m not sure that I see us raising a child together and living happily ever after. Happily ever afters are for romantics and simpletons. And we are neither of those things. Are we?”
“I’m not trying to be something I’m not or suggest that I’m interested in living a fiction. I’m just—”
“You’re just feeling guilty. But—and please consider seriously what I’m saying—you’re feeling guilty about a whole raft of things that have nothing to do with me. And since you’ve gone and gotten your life right cocked up and aren’t sure you can fix it this time… you’re trying to fix it with me. And Alec, my angel”—she takes a deep breath—“I don’t want to be someone’s fucking consolation prize.”
I’m just about to respond when I am reminded of a short-short story that I once heard described by an oke I knew. He said it was “the scariest thing he could of.” He was a monstrous naaier who was unintimated by anyone or anything. Not even me. Which was a shame for him. Had he been more easily intimidated, he might still be alive today.
But in the moment right before my hands tightened around his throat and he took his last breath, he said, “I ain’t scared.”
“Good for you,” I told him.
And then he looked up at me, smiled, and said, “The only thing what’s ever scared me is this thing I heard once… ‘The last man on earth sits alone in a room. Suddenly… there’s a knock on the door.’” His smile widened and he continued, “Just hope, bru, that—one day—when the knock comes, you ain’t the one sitting in the chair.”
It was such a curious thing for him to say in that moment that I laughed slightly.
And then I choked him to death.
It’s an odd thing to be remembering now. Except maybe it’s not. Because here, in the middle of this isolated estate, miles from nowhere, alone with Eliza in this place that no one knows about…
Suddenly, there’s a knock on the door.