Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Douglas Galbraith
Dedication
Title Page
1. How did it start?
2. Abraham and Isaac
3. How did it really start?
4. Protect and survive
5. Men and women
6. In the grown-up world
7. Hatred
8.
9. Flood
Postscript
Copyright
About the Book
What do you do when your wife abducts your children? This was the question facing Douglas Galbraith when, in 2003, he returned home to Scotland from a few days’ work in London.
The house was silent, empty and locked; his four and six-year-old sons’ pyjamas lay on the bedroom floor. And on the doormat, confirmation from the Post Office of a forwarding address – in Japan. He has not seen them since.
But my son, my son is infinitely more than a personal tale of sudden loss and one man’s attempts to find his sons. Writing with astonishing range and insight, Galbraith tackles the deepest questions about who we are and how we treat each other. Here is an intensely provocative journey through complex and controversial territory: child murder, tsunami, international conventions, hatred, cultures at war.
my son, my son is a searing memoir and a call to arms which will provoke passionate debate. It has a haunting eloquence and, against the odds, a grim sense of humour. It goes to the very heart of relations between parents and children, men and women, and between races – to the heart of what it is to be alive.
About the Author
Douglas Galbraith was born in Glasgow in 1965 and is the author of three novels, The Rising Sun, A Winter in China, and King Henry. He lives in Scotland.
Also by Douglas Galbraith
The Rising Sun
A Winter in China
King Henry
my son, my son
1 How did it start?
SUMMER IN SCOTLAND, the little drama almost five years ago to the day I start writing this – these things take time. It is Fife in particular, an untypical part of a largely rough country – calm waves of land capped with a richer soil that patchworks the view with ripening crops instead of hill, moor or stubbornly improved pasture. There is something almost Kentish about it, though no hop-fields these days and not yet any vineyards under the thickening air. It is less spoiled also – less concrete, fewer people, narrower and less cluttered roads and beyond the low horizon the North Sea and a fringe of undeveloped sandy strands and coastal cliffs promising, it is said, fossils and gems to the patient hunter. Watercolourists speckle the old fishing villages, drinking in the endless supplies of terracotta, whitewash and ultramarine. Awestruck golfers come from across the world for the course they must play just once before they die. There is a picturesque university where adolescents freeze through crystalline winters as they are invited to take an interest in the Grand Unified Theory or the doomed efforts of Justinian. It is a place people choose, a good place to bring up a family.
The scene is a railway station, just a halt on the line really, a post-Beeching survival spared a few decades ago not for the more distant trainless town but for the RAF base at Leuchars, for the convenience of officers wishing to take part of their leave in the London clubs, for the more punctual keeping of appointments in HQ or Whitehall. It was all very serious then – the colourless graphics of the 1950s showed how the Soviet nuclear strike force could be expected to descend from the north-east, how life as we knew it would end if only they could get past the interceptors. That has all long gone and the warplanes thundering in the cloudless sky are not defending anyone now. We are safe – it is 2003 and the maps on the briefing room walls are of Basra and Baghdad.
The service up from London pulls away and I watch the homecomings and the visitors being greeted. The minicabs make off with their fares, then a bus collects its passengers from the shelter. It is not a busy time and I am soon alone with one other traveller. I look over the car park, searching for a patch of dirty red which indicates our permanently unwashed car and my wife and sons come to collect me and make the twenty-minute journey to our home. Nothing yet, but it doesn’t matter on such a warm and luminous evening.
They were there four days ago, two boys six and four years old, a little grumpy at being dragged out on some trip that had nothing to do with them. They are different, though clearly a pair with the same straight chestnut brown hair, the same deep brown eyes and the skin by no means dark, but not quite fair either, a skin that takes the sun easily and might suggest, if you saw them out of context, something southern. In another country they stand out, but in multi-ethnic Britain – and that includes even Fife these days – they are noticed only for themselves. Their names, if you were to overhear them, would be a more helpful clue: the little one with his head and face so much rounder than his brother is Makoto, his elder brother Satomi. He was once called something else, but even I call him Satomi now, as did all his schoolmates ten days earlier at the first, and almost certainly last, sports day I will ever attend as a parent.
It’s a small country school, probably no more than twenty pupils, two teachers in a pretty stone schoolhouse not much changed or expanded since it was built for the purpose a hundred years back. It’s been there long enough to name its own address – School Brae, from the top of which the fertile levels of the Howe of Fife and the worn Lomond Hills can be seen through the classroom windows, now green, now white as the year turns. The field of competition is the village recreation ground, just an acre and a half with swings and a roundabout at one end. Makoto, still a year too young to be a pupil, amuses himself on these as the action unfolds. A sportsman emerges, face grim with effort and aggression as he gets his chest increasingly covered with gold stickers – never enough, it seems; one to watch for the future. Satomi is happier with his honourable collection of silver and bronze, perhaps having inherited his father’s disdain for winning. The final event is a longer race around the perimeter. Satomi falls back, flopping with exhaustion, but delighted all the same as he runs towards me and breathlessly declares ‘I ran faster than somebody’.
Already self-contained at four years old, Makoto has paid no attention at all to the proceedings. Besides myself the other particular observer of Satomi’s efforts has been his mother. Expressionless, determinedly apart, this small Japanese woman, Tomoko by name, looks on frigidly and with mounting anxiety as she watches her son, so visibly different from her, interact with western teachers and western children and all in a western language. Though no rational investigator could find any evidence for it, she is sure in her own mind that everyone else there is part of a conspiracy to loosen her grip on her children. No one would suspect she has any connection with me. Indeed, she is clearly concerned not to have any connection. All afternoon she will not look at me or speak a single word, even to explain why she is not speaking. This is not unusual. The behaviour neither surprises me nor, at this late stage in a long decline, embarrasses me. We look like a couple who have had a row that morning, although in truth there has been an openly declared and exhausting war for the last five years. On this occasion there is something different about it, something of the extremist in her insistence that I do not exist, that her children’s father is simply not there, not to be thought of. It was a necessity, I suppose, given what she had planned. The signs were there, clear in retrospect, but in those days there were still things I didn’t believe people were capable of and I couldn’t read them correctly. I was outclassed in deception. With some regret, I know that will never happen again.
Sports day is over and it’s time to go. The red car – the one I am waiting for a fortnight later at the station – is parked by the side of the road with its doors open, Makoto already strapped into his seat in the back. The goodbyes are made, his elder brother’s foreign name chorused by a dozen childish Scottish voices. What did they make of such a strange word? Nothing, it seems now as I search my memory for details, nothing at all. They pronounced it confidently, thoughtlessly – any pleasant word would do for a name, none was worth fighting over or meant anything other than the person who bore it. That’s Primary One for you – all the damage of life not yet done.
I think back on this as I pace the platform and check my watch. The other traveller is still there, the only other person now. I glare at the public telephone, but she is standing too close to it and would overhear. I radiate a desire for her to move away but she insensitively drifts a step closer. Cars emerge from a bend in the road and run along a short straight past the station before disappearing amongst the outlying houses of Leuchars. Traffic is light now and I can hear individual engines approaching before I can see anything. I stare at that point where they first become visible, willing the next one to be red. Sometimes it is, though not the one I’m waiting for. I’ve been away four days and I want to see my boys.
‘See you Thursday,’ Tomoko said to me the previous Sunday as I got the train down. She was not always convincing, but was at her best that day: completely natural, which can’t have been easy.
I was looking forward to getting away and felt no guilt about it, though I would later. As a writer my workplace was a room in the house with the latest drawing of a train being pushed under the door by Satomi, or Makoto walking in whenever he liked to pull all the books off the shelf until he found Livy’s War with Hannibal – not out of precocious genius but on account of the fascinating picture of a lion on the cover. I made desultory efforts to defend this space, but they were never wholehearted – the child always being more interesting than the work. I lived with my children very nearly every day of their early lives and skipped all the articles in the Sunday newspapers about work–life balance or workaholic absentee fathers as having nothing to do with me. In the adult household this constant mutual presence was perhaps not such a good thing. The opportunities for periodic escape offered by more conventional careers, the relieving and low-risk infidelities of the sales conference or team-building weekend have no doubt saved more marriages than any of us will ever admit. These are not a feature of the writing life, which has to fall back for its Bunburying on the self-declared ‘research trip’ and it was in this light that I saw my journey to London: necessary, but also welcome. Whether excessive contact with the mother of my children hastened the end or delayed it is difficult to say; it was, after all, just such a rare period of absence that she was waiting for.
What do I recall of a short trip to London in the summer of 2003? I find, as I come to write this, that much is already vague or lost. What did I read on the train on the way down? I can’t say now – something enjoyable to add to the holiday mood, or did I pose with a sternly intellectual work-related tome like Documents on the Rape of Nanking or Auden and Isherwood’s self-absorbed Journey to a War? I do remember why I was going: to fulfil my part of a publishing contract for two novels, to earn a living, to provide. More specifically to root around in the Newspaper Library at Colindale on the trail of the fears and desires of western expatriates in China in 1937, the stage for my story.
The details have gone again – nothing remains from getting in to the cheap hotel just off the Bayswater Road, or the rest of that first night away in the warm London summer, a foreign climate for me. Then, next morning, breakfast in a café somewhere or on the move as I head down into the Tube and change lines to turn north and the long run through an unfamiliar townscape. I’m recognisable as the outsider; too interested in the novelties passing by and constantly checking that I haven’t managed to get myself lost yet. Hampstead, Golders Green, Hendon Central. I get out at the next stop and find the place with unaccustomed ease. I’m an old hand at libraries. Too old, I think sometimes and they give me an ambiguous feeling now – partly of confidence at knowing the ropes, partly of doubt, of failure at still being there at all when so many of the readers I knew have moved on to what seem to me, in my ignorance, more concrete lives. Apart from the staff they are disturbingly peopled; largely by the young going through the hoops of a tertiary education from which they are sure to move on soon, and then at the other end the living warnings who always fill me with dread. I’ve never known a research library without at least one super-articulate tramp, the sort of character one imagines was treated unjustly in a fellowship election in the late 1950s and has struggled ever since to regain his equilibrium. They come in for warmth in winter and sit as motionless as the furniture before suddenly coming to life and growling alarmingly at the name of an old enemy honourably cited in the latest journals. I edge away, but then catch my own face in the glass of a dusty cabinet and am hit by that surge of fear – the same as last time, only worse.
I convince the librarians of my good faith (not always easy) and settle in to the cinematic dark of the microfilm reading room. The pages of the China Press for late 1937 stream by and I begin to pick out the novelist’s raw material; all the most highly coloured and poignant and pregnant ephemera the historians so reliably leave out. Seventy years ago is an interesting time – at once distant and near; part history, but for others very definitely living memory. I peer into the world when my parents were small children, the age my own children are now. The events recorded are as distant and strange for me as the Iraq War or the attack on the World Trade Center towers will be for them, idling through a history book or watching a documentary some time in the 2070s. The period dress, the outmoded vehicles, the distinctively inferior picture quality of early digital video will all mark it as remote until they recall with a start ‘I was four then; that’s my era too, or just about. I can almost remember it.’
The trick of the novelist is not to be learned about his material, but to cultivate in himself the illusion that what he knows is truly a memory; that he did not read it, but recalls it from having been there, just there where I can recognise myself in the crowd – that man in the trilby and the white shirt with the wide collar. I was a better dresser in the thirties. I become the one who looks up and then runs for the shelter as he hears the air-raid siren, the one who bought a Shanghai corporation lottery ticket from the kiosk that morning and sat through the matinée at the Grand, staying for the Paramount newsreel and even for the Popeye cartoon at the end, though he never found it funny.
North London recedes and the western enclaves of Shanghai in the late 1930s take over. I drink a cocktail in the Metropole Garden – Don José and his orchestra entertaining – and catch up on the news. The Sino-Japanese War has moved inland. It’s happening elsewhere now but civilians are still being bombed from the air; not out of malice particularly, but rather a sincere inability to hit the right target while pursuing one’s ideals. For all the Chinese propaganda – 400 NIPPONESE PLANES DOWNED says one column – it’s a one-sided affair. Japan is the killer; my wife’s people, and to a lesser extent my children’s people too. I peer closely and refocus the projected newsprint as I make another note. I am not much troubled by the thought, believing that these connections, if they exist at all, cannot be dangerous over such distance and time. I have built my life on the assumption that ties of this sort can be broken or easily superseded by others more intimate, reasonable and humane. In the quiet whirr of cooling fans and the heat of projector lamps I spectate on the suffering once caused by clashing identities and even now do not expect to become personally involved.
In the edition for 4 September 1937 I find an interesting byway of history, deception and the heart. It concerns the one truly great image of the Sino-Japanese War, a photograph that only needs to be seen once to be always remembered. It shows a sturdy baby boy alone in the ruins of South Station, Shanghai moments after it had been bombed by the Empire of Japan. It is one of the images of the century, recognised by many even when they do not know exactly what it shows. The child is tonsured in the local manner, conspicuously well fed and even shod with sandals, though he can hardly have started to walk. Every detail speaks of his parents’ care for him, but now his white shirt, clean that morning, is dark with blood. He sits up straight, mouth open – this is a photograph you can hear – and cries with all his strength. In the background there is a litter of corrugated iron panels blasted from the station roof in the same storm of shrapnel and debris that has nearly killed him. Most disturbing is the child’s solitude, his apparent helplessness. This is what gives the image its power to move, what prompted the description for a recent usage of the picture: ‘The Last Creature Alive in South Station, Shanghai’. It is also completely untrue. Look to the left where now you see only blank paper shading towards the edge of the book. Is it in any way questionable? Does it arouse the slightest suspicion that you might have been misled? Probably not – in some ways we are all too trusting.
The picture in its famous – inevitably one must say in its iconic – form is in fact an artfully selected single frame taken by H. S. ‘Newsreel’ Wong, first on the scene for Metrotone News. What has been cut out from the left-most third of this scene, either by Wong’s choice of composition or by a picture editor later cropping it, is the boy’s father and his elder brother, about six years old, holding himself erect and still as he looks directly at the camera from where he stands by the tracks. He has just been put there by his father who at this very moment, this 1/30th of a second, is in the act of moving back into the picture to put his hands under the arms of his infant, pick him up and take both his children home. For all we know the South Station baby, at the age of seventy-five or six, is still alive and well. The suggested caption of the China Press for the fuller picture was ‘A father trying to help his two badly shocked and injured children’. This version was distributed at the time, and yet it never took root, the ‘abandoned’ South Station baby remaining the preferred form to this day. It has stayed that way because it makes a more powerful appeal, though to what exactly is a dark question. If one assumes the best of intentions – that it was an editorial decision to create a more powerful anti-war image – the affair has ended ironically. The manipulated history of the picture is now best known among the wilder fringes of modern Japanese nationalism. Here it has a new purpose: not to say that the baby was never abandoned, but rather that, as a ‘fake’ image, it should lead us to doubt that he was ever bombed, that his shirt was ever soaked in blood, that he was ever in pain or fear; to doubt even that much of the Sino-Japanese War ever happened at all.
Hunger and growing eye-strain call me back to London in 2003. I flick the switch to turn the reader off and head out for lunch. There was a café just across the road, perhaps right by the underground station, and I think it was here in this marginal, resigned place that I took a break three days in a row; three cups of coffee and, presumably, something to eat. Though I haven’t checked and would not be surprised if it is wrong, my memory of the view from the window always shows me an overcast and sometimes rainy scene. I can recover nothing else from those three hours but think it likely, because it is such a strong habit of mine, that I bought and read a newspaper each day. Pursuing this clue I find myself five years later in another library at the other end of the country, trying to do for myself what I usually do for historical and semi-fictional characters: recovering a recent, but already partly lost history. What was the news in late June and early July 2003? I wind through another coil of microfilm and find that my expectations have become wildly prejudiced against the facts. The banning of fox hunting, a Green Paper on civil partnerships, and the death of Katharine Hepburn were the leading talking points of the day. Violence in Iraq and Afghanistan is there, but less prominently than I assumed. It was the early, relatively quiet days of the occupation – the coming insurgency not yet in gear, optimism still just about possible without seeming a fool or an obvious propagandist. One reason for forgetting whatever it was I read over those three lunchtimes is the visual dullness of modern newspapers when compared to what I had seen in the archive. Today there is a more strict graphical self-censorship by which written reports of death – ‘Imam and nine others killed at mosque’ – are illustrated by a photograph of the living and uninjured framed by a half-demolished wall as if this might convey the reality of warfare while at the same time maintaining an all-important decency.
Later, at the hotel, lethargically looking on from the bed, I know it must have been the same on the television news, a coy sluicing of dilute blood from the steps, voiced over with that sinister and rarely challenged excuse that the rest is too distressing to broadcast. It’s the family viewing version of history – values confused, truthfulness half-hearted at best and, for what it’s worth, with no ambition to add to our stock of great images.
*
My routine for the trip is established and the work is going well. These days I think of visits to libraries and archives as a sort of raid – a typical fantasy metaphor for those leading unacceptably inactive lives – get in, get what you want, get out and away before that dead air penetrates too deeply into the lungs. I’ve heard that modern zookeepers stimulate their more thoughtful charges by placing food in hard to get places and I wonder if librarians might make a small dent in the joylessness of writers and academics by placing obstacles in their way: a booby trap here, an electrified shelf there, the odd page impregnated with deadly poison. There would be casualties of course, but perhaps not so many as to outweigh the general elevation of spirits, the happy bragging later in the pub of how one cheated death during the recent consultation of an encyclopaedia, the sweet solemnity of mourning fallen comrades.
I will, no doubt, have considered the telephone in the hotel room squatting on the melamine chipboard side table by the box of lilac tissues and the tourist leaflets. Call home? The parent’s taste for freedom never lasts more than a few hours, or days at most before we’re missing them again. What have my boys been up to? It would mean talking to my wife – not easy, perhaps not even possible. The mere thought deters me and I make no calls at any time from London, settling instead for looking forward to that Thursday evening when I’ll step off the train and be with them again in the flesh.
This pattern is broken one evening by the coincidental presence in London of an old friend. We arrange to meet and spend some of our time at the Globe Theatre on the South Bank. On the stage a disaster unfolds, one so total and unredeemed that by the end of the evening the critics have been drawn into an inappropriate relationship with the production – namely, one of pity. The next day, flinching from its concentrated awfulness they comment generously on how rare it is to be able to see a staging of Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage and note the quality of the incidental music. Two lessons are delivered at once: if a theatrical piece is still so rare after several centuries it is rare for a reason, and if the incidental music is offered as a reason for going, on no account go. The groundlings, a few busloads of foreign students, are still too young and uncertain of what they deserve to do anything other than feign appreciation. No doubt the language barrier saved them from the worst – wax in the ears of these new Odyssean travellers. In just the same way, I suppose, that it would save me from the pain of enduring an evening of below-par kabuki at the Minami-za. This is a very contemporary production, that is to say one in which the director nakedly yearns for authorship and brings an abundance of his own ideas to the text. In this case it’s worth a try as the text isn’t up to much; not a play at all really, just a cut and pasted undergraduate translation of an epic, but not especially dramatic Roman poem. The gods manipulate mortals who, dressed as children in a playground setting, manipulate the only thing too defenceless to stand up to them, a real human child, though played in this instance by a plastic doll moved around the stage by some character I never quite got the hang of. It isn’t working, and the mixed expressions of panic and anger in the actors’ eyes tell me I’m not the only one to have noticed this. With a long hour to go I drift off and look up at the circle of blue above the Globe’s open courtyard. I watch airliners cut across it, unconcerned about who might be in them or where they are going. Perhaps I should think better of the play now, give it some credit for the durable wisdom of those old themes – that blindness is universal, the condition varying only in degree, that we never see what touches most intimately on our fortunes until it is too late.
It ends. There is a kindly excess of applause while my friend and I bolt for the doors. What then? I can plausibly reconstruct a few beers, the pleasure of finding ourselves in agreement on the latest news as we proceed smoothly to diagnosis, prescription and a better, though imaginary world. We are sunk deep in the heart of the Iraq lie with the occupation forces still hotfoot in pursuit of the non-existent doomsday machines that have justified it all. I look back on those days as one of the three diverse episodes in my life (and perhaps in the life of any stay-at-home Briton born in 1965) that gave me some insight into what it is to live in a totalitarian society where the pretended belief in untruths has become mandatory. The first was the Falklands War and the middle chapter came with the sense of being bullied into a moronic consensus on the death of the Princess of Wales – a kitsch drama managed to no small extent by the same impresarios at work in 2003. The Iraq adventure is already going wrong, but the best newspapers are still printing articles hailing the victims’ liberation and anticipating fearful discoveries any day. My friend and I share astonishment at the flagrancy of these lies, at the submissive idiocy of believing them. We agree that we could not be so easily fooled. Just a little theatrically I look over my shoulder – is it safe to say these things?
Around closing time there is the sense – maudlin, laughable, obviously drink-fuelled – that if we of our generation, not as individuals you understand but our sort, had been the ones to seek power rather than to shrink from it in disgust, much suffering could have been avoided. That philosophers make reluctant kings – so rarely make kings of any sort – is one of the most regular patterns of human affairs. From this there arises in the world-weary mind a concern that the greatest episodes of human destruction occur not by mischance, but through a mechanism that reliably guides the most inadequate to those positions from which they can do most harm. They may have nothing to recommend their candidacy, but still the way opens before them. Where does the fault lie? Surely it is only partly in the fact that the levers of power are none too clean, and partly in the hygienic prissiness of all the better types who keep their distance: the commentators, the academics, the journalists, the social novelists, all the sterilely articulate who make a career out of implying how much better the world would have been if only they hadn’t stood by and done nothing.
What does all that mean? It means it’s closing time. My friend and I part.
‘Too bad about the play.’
I make my way westward across the hot dark city, rattling in the Tube, emerging at Marble Arch to amble down the Bayswater Road. I’m trying to follow the thread of these thoughts convinced, as one is after the requisite number of beers, that I’m on the trail of something worthwhile. But I’m too tired and it’s too late and I am relieved in any case from making any further efforts by the appearance of a large fox. It is about three metres away, just behind the railings of Hyde Park. The ground is elevated above the pavement so we find ourselves precisely eye to eye. I move towards it a few inches in what I imagine to be an unthreatening manner, and then a few inches more. The fox does not retreat but continues to stare at me and there we remain, fixed for half a minute until it loses interest, turns slowly away and lopes out of sight. Someone, I suppose, would write a poem about it – but I just go to bed.
I slip back into the thirties for one last day at the newspaper library; the hostess bars, the mediums and fortune-tellers advertising in the classifieds, the price of an Empire Flying Boat ticket to Penang, an announcement that the Tokyo Olympics would definitely go ahead in 1940, the bombing raids, the refugees, the lies. I pack up at the end of the day and am left with one last image of the place. From behind me comes a rapid skittering sound and an exclamation. At last someone has stumbled on the joke microfilm reader – there’s one in every library, placed there by bored librarians in search of entertainment. This one has been cunningly rigged to unravel the film in the wrong direction and to operate at only two speeds; zero, and super-turbo. I give the chap a bit of time to sort himself out, but when I turn round I find that he is still deeply enmeshed in his own Norman Wisdom moment – a hapless Laocoön of the thinking life, embarrassed at being brought low by thirty metres of celluloid serpent. His problem seems all the worse for being witnessed by me. I give him an encouraging smile and slip out.
*
And so the train back north, alone on the platform at Leuchars station with the jets still thundering overhead. I have already dialled my home number once from the public telephone and now dial again and listen to it ring and ring. They must be on their way, then – just a confusion about the times. I think back to our parting the previous Sunday. Could there have been any misunderstanding? The right day was clearly mentioned, followed by a needling ‘have fun’. I construct reassuring scenarios but cannot stop the fear rising. There are other possibilities, possibilities that have threatened in the past, that have had certain, perhaps inadequate, precautions taken against them. They are possibilities that have also been suppressed, shied away from, cheaply bargained with for another year of peace. Humanity’s talent for living in a double reality explains a lot that would otherwise seem strange – why we don’t save ourselves, why we build cities at the foot of volcanoes, even when we don’t have to.
I abandon the wait and start making my way home by public transport. This involves two buses and then a taxi ride of four or five miles. It cannot be much before ten o’clock when I arrive. The house has not burned down, it is not surrounded by police cars. Although it is still light, it is also past the children’s bedtime and so I notice that all the curtains are open. The red car stands on the driveway. The garage door is open. The doors of the house are locked and I have no key. I become very conscious of the possibility of being observed from the other houses which curve around ours in a tight cul de sac, so I move through a side gate into the back garden. There I pace for a long time, partly working over the problem of how to break into my own house, but mostly struggling with the fear of what I might find inside. In truth it is not the prospect of finding Tomoko’s small, manipulative corpse that bothers me. It is the other thing – that extreme and unspeakable news story one sees once or twice a year, blowing in sensationally from a far-off country, always impossible to understand. Something makes me believe she is capable of it and that’s why I don’t want to know what’s in my house.
I get a screwdriver from the garage. My breath is short and my hands trembling as I lever open a window and climb in. The place is very silent and I stand still for several minutes before being able to make any decision. There are eight principal rooms. That’s seven others to enter – seven thresholds, seven doors to be opened. Very slowly I go round them all, hesitating before entering each one. On the way I notice that an item of furniture is missing. Books have gone from the shelves and where there were two prints hanging together on the wall there is now only one. I go upstairs to the bedrooms. Everything is neat and empty. I come to the closed door of the master bedroom, the appropriate setting for horrors and tragedies. Inside there is nothing worse than two pairs of pyjamas lying in the middle of the floor in vaguely child-shaped heaps. They have my boys’ fresh smell and my hallucinating skin detects a warmth that can no longer be real.
Downstairs I notice a single letter on the doormat. It is from the Royal Mail and is addressed to Tomoko. It was not her plan that it should have been sent, let alone seen by me. It is the one imperfection of the crime scene, the lead one expects in a piece of mass-market fiction before the story really gets going. I open it and read that they are pleased to confirm her instructions for forwarding mail to her new address: Studio Shinmido, Yodogawa, Osaka, Japan.
I find myself back in the garage, though I’m not sure why – perhaps it is just to return the screwdriver. I know something of the law, I know something of Japan and Britain too, I know a great deal about Tomoko, and so I know I will never see my children again. Outside, a neighbour goes by, carrying a watering can to a flowerbed. I draw back to avoid being seen. My heart is fluttering strangely, but will not stop. I see the miniature bow and arrow I made for Satomi, the red dragon kite we flew at the beach and Makoto’s tricycle. I look up and see the open rafters, the looped cable hanging from a nail.
2 Abraham and Isaac
WHEN SHOULD YOU kill your children? The question occurs rarely to the modern parent and mostly for mundane reasons, or in the absence of reason. The cases – and there is a steady stream of them – are prized by the media and always assured of a substantial audience. We are strongly drawn to these stories, the strength of the emotions they elicit, the need for comforting expressions of collective outrage and grief, the aesthetic satisfaction of spectating on the fundamentally tragic. There’s no doubt about it, from the sophisticated horror-frisson of Medea all the way down to the latest freezer baby stories from France and Germany, we all have an appetite for a good parental child-killing.
The presentation of these episodes follows a well-worn format – fathers hurting mothers after losing out in family breakdown; mothers engaging in a bit of after the fact contraception (bad), or acting while under the compulsion of a mental illness (not exactly good, but still deserving of a little compassion from the more advanced sources). Other instances, typically where the perpetrator is intellectually subnormal, are born simply of the need to have the greatest possible effect on a defenceless subject, or out of boredom, or sadism, or an inability to cope with anything very much at all. In these cases, more psychiatrically than socially interesting, the child becomes an instrument, played for a few months or even years until, during a more forte passage, it breaks and the whole ghastly story comes out and metamorphoses cathartically into a public inquiry – the ritualism of which requires that the words ‘never again’ be pronounced at some point during the tiresomely familiar proceedings.
These and other similar varieties are secular child-killing; our day and age’s particular form ranging from simple moral incapacity through temporary emotional imbalance to the extremist and carefully plotted protest against the culture of mass divorce – the only adequate expression of hatred for the victorious partner, the only way of repossessing what one has been intolerably dispossessed of by the family courts. In the extensive typology of infanticide (allowing that the crime can include some pretty grown-up infants), these forms have one thing in common that clearly identifies them as a set: no one approves of them. No reason is offered, however confused or bizarre, as to why these killings might after all be acts of virtue. It will seem odd, especially to the enlightened reader, even to raise such an idea, but to ignore this possibility lacks cultural breadth as well as a sense of history. It is to look away from the fact that close to the dark heart of our moral tradition a child-killer is held up as an honourable figure and a model for action. According to this tradition, there is a right time to kill your child and it is good to do so. Naturally, we rush to say these things are all in the dim and distant past, but as we remember from our own childhoods, we must first check under the bed before being quite sure the monster is gone.
Abraham, for the sake of convenience, is the monster’s name; or Avraham, or Ibrahim if you prefer. Other cultures and times have other names and other stories, but for us, for now Abraham will do. While this alarming character still features in the Child’s First Book of Bible Stories, that volume doesn’t sell quite as well as it used to and so it might be worthwhile briefly recounting the essentials. Abraham had a special relationship with God who favoured him with numerous messages from on high. One day the message from God to Abraham was that he should take his only son Isaac to a place he would point out to him and there cut his throat and burn his corpse as an offering. Abraham was keen to obey – the Bible tells us that he rose especially early the next morning so that he could get everything organised. Once he had gathered a couple of servants together and loaded up his ass with chopped wood for the fire, he went off with Isaac to find the right place to kill him. After a few days of wandering Abraham decided that one of the hills looked suitable. He told his two servants to wait while he and his son climbed the hill to worship. He told his servants that they would both return. He loaded up the wood on Isaac’s back, making his son carry the fuel for his own sacrificial pyre to the top of the hill. Abraham carried the knife himself. When Isaac asked his father about the lack of an animal to sacrifice, he was told not to worry about that – God would provide. It goes largely unnoticed that Abraham had a distinctive, if rather disturbing sense of humour. Once there, an altar was built and the wood arranged for the burnt offering. Abraham tied up his son, no doubt fearing ungodly resistance as soon as young Isaac realised that his poor old dad had lost his marbles. Abraham took his knife and was on the very point of murdering his child when – and one can only apologise for the weakness of the plotting – an angel appeared and told him not to bother because it was really the thought that counted. A ram, trapped in a nearby thicket, was slaughtered instead.
At no point in the story is there any suggestion that Abraham is not actively intent on killing his child. Indeed, that is the essential element – he would have failed the test had he not been such a willing executioner. Abraham as a child-killer, from whom Isaac has just been rescued in the nick of time, is even more beloved of the Lord than he was before. For this great virtue there is a great reward. God speaks to Abraham again and tells him: because you have done this, because you have put this voice in your head before your own child I will multiply your children and your children’s children as the stars of heaven and the sand on the shore. Because you have obeyed my voice your children shall be part of all the nations of the earth. And here, precisely, is the heart of the story – that the mind of Abraham was not unique and isolated in a single time and place, but that it was a reservoir, the poisonous contents of which have flowed down through the generations and been inherited by us all.
So much for the old story. Does it still mean anything today? Could it, in this modern world? In one very direct, though rare, way it does. While Moloch- or Baal-related murders are unheard-of simply because the myths and parables of these cults are now largely unknown, the persistence of Abrahamic religions means the persistence of the story. And the persistence of the story occasionally means the persistence of the act.
On 6 January 1990 Cristos Valenti, after a period of problems with alcohol and growing psychosis, spent the day doing chores at his home in California. God had been speaking to him quite a lot over the last few months and did so again that day while he was painting the house. He required Cristos to offer him his daughter, the ‘little one’, as a sacrifice. As in the original version, the emotional flatness of the main actor is a notable feature. In this case, and partially to his credit, Cristos did later tell the authorities that the message nearly caused him to fall off his ladder. But it was only surprise that caused this and not doubt. In the evening he read from the Bible to his youngest child and explained the pictures to her. The other children of the household fell asleep in front of the television and then their mother, exhausted from her cleaning job, also fell asleep. Cristos left the house with his daughter and drove with her to a nearby park. They walked together to a grove of trees, that most ancient of settings for symbolic acts. There he told her to lie on the grass and recite a Christian prayer while he took out a knife and killed her. He looked up at the stars and then prayed by the body for a short while before picking it up and returning home. It was his eldest daughter, the dead girl’s older sister, who answered the door. ‘Call the police,’ said Cristos Valenti, ‘I’ve given her to God.’
The date is significant: Epiphany in the calendar of the killer’s religion, the night the wise men saw the star that would lead them to the birthplace of Jesus. Not long before being killed by her father the girl had been in a school Nativity play, playing the role of a star. In subsequent statements to the police Valenti explained with poignant and obviously damaged simplicity, that ‘God needed her, to put her in a star’. From the purely textual point of view it is clear that there has been a confusion here between Abraham and Isaac and the Nativity stories. But that, perhaps, is a side issue.
At the ensuing trial Valenti maintained the manner of a man who knew he had done the right thing. The jurors heard evidence that he was mentally ill and, notwithstanding that they largely shared his religion, tended to view his claims about messages from God as confirmation of madness. They also received an explanation from the judge that malice aforethought was required for there to be a conviction of murder in the first degree. In the serenity with which Cristos had carried out the killing, the moral self-confidence of his statements to police, and his untroubled demeanour in court it was hard to find much evidence of that. He was acquitted of murder.
One would want the case to be unique, a freakish curiosity of the criminal record of no wider significance – but it is not so. Only four years later Robert Blair, while holidaying with his wife and son in Concord, New Hampshire, conceived the notion that God wanted him to kill his son. In a later local newspaper report he specifically cited the example of Abraham and Isaac. Just as Abraham had to offer his sacrifice at an appointed place revealed to him from on high, so also for Blair it was essential that the killings (this sacrifice was to include his wife as well as his son) take place in the required location, in this instance a particular room in a Concord motel – the room in which the idea had first occurred to him. He was a patient man, and eighteen months elapsed before the family booked in again and rented the room they had stayed in before. On the afternoon of 25 March 1996 Blair walked to a nearby hardware store and bought a hammer which he hid under the bed in the room. That evening he discussed with his wife his belief that he should kill their son, showing her the hammer he intended to use. The idea was poorly received and Blair pretended to give it up, depositing the hammer in a bin outside. That night while they slept God revealed to Robert Blair that ‘he would be cast into a lake of fire’ if he welched on the deal. In addition, he heard the voice of an angel commanding him to go through with it. He went outside to retrieve the hammer and did what he believed he had been told to do.
Blair testified in his own defence at the trial, remarking confidently to the jury that ‘in my opinion, I’m sane. I acted under the command of God. I do not suffer delusions or hallucinations . . . I was very rational . . . I understood what I did.’ The jury agreed with him and convicted him on two counts of murder. Oddly, Blair was soon to repent of his declaration of sanity and launch a quixotic appeal. The grounds were, amongst others, that he was probably mad after all and that the first court had erred on a technicality by not allowing him enough time to discuss with the jury just how dangerous he really was. Unsurprisingly, the appeal did not succeed.
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