Tributary

‘He’s not missing — that would imply anyone actually missed the old bastard.’

‘Don’t talk about Daddy like that!’ Pippa protested, her lips tautening to a trout-like jut of indignation.

‘Oh, come off it, Pip,’ said Harry languidly, puffing at his poorly rolled joint, bulbous, wrinkly and yellow, a dying man’s finger, ‘you hated him as much as me, maybe even more.’

Pippa shook her head violently, like a child refusing a spoonful of medicine, in that frenzied way that admitted no distinction between urgency and earnestness, that made the vigour of one’s denial into a proof of their righteousness.

‘You say ghastly things when you smoke those … drugs.’

‘I don’t think it’s the drugs, Ms. Reagan,’ Harry mocked, aping his sister’s peremptory whinny. ‘It’s more likely the twenty-two years of cruelty to me and everyone I’ve ever loved.’

Pippa hung her head as if ashamed, but Harry knew from the furrow of her flaxen brows she felt pensive, not penitent.

‘Oh for fuck’s sake, what? I know that look, just come out with it,’ Harry snapped. Contrary to received wisdom, he found that marijuana made him tetchy, not mellow, that the acrid fumes clung to him like an itchy sweater on a hot day, made his chest tighten until he felt both frenzied and confined, desperate for a movement that only dizzied and thus provoked him further.

‘You said ‘hated.’’

‘What?’

‘You said I hated Daddy even more than you. Past tense. Don’t speak of him as if he’s dead. It’s … not right’.

‘So I did,’ laughed Harry. ‘Wishful thinking…’

Pippa gasped, making ready to remonstrate with Harry, but before she could he had launched himself down the hill, his cadaverous six-four frame bunched up into a squat missile, sprawling into a jumble of overgrown limbs at his descent’s end.

Watching Harry lie there, panting and grinning, a boy again in the tangle of flattened hydrangeas, Pippa couldn’t help but laugh with him, couldn’t fight the momentary feeling that perhaps he was right: perhaps they might all be better off without Daddy around …

*

‘We understand this is an extraordinarily stressful time for you all, so we’ll keep things as brief as possible’.

‘Yes, summer is a bloody stressful time for us — it’s nearly thirty degrees out and we have all the pigmentation of uncooked poultry’.

The two officers exchanged mute glances.

‘Excuse me?’

‘I said summer’s a bloody …’ began Harry.

‘I heard what you said,’ interrupted the shorter of the officers, PC Steve. He was a kindly but dull man with a bald, misshapen pate and rounded shoulders, all of which leant him a faintly simian cast.

‘I just find it hard to believe your father’s been missing for over a week and you’re cracking wise,’ he concluded with a priggish sniff.

‘Cracking wise … Christ, I know you’re a policeman but do you have to speak exclusively in clichés?’’ Harry simpered over his mug of tea.

‘Excuse me,’ PC Steve quavered, his smooth, pebbly head flushing pink.

‘All I’m saying, officer,’ Harry went on, sipping facetiously at his tea, ‘is that you’re not Humphrey Bogart. Mind you, you’ve got the height for it, or lack thereof …’

The taller officer tried and failed to stifle a chuckle, whereupon his hunched companion pulled out a set of cuffs.

‘Do you want to be arrested, pal? Because right now you’re the chief suspect in this investigation.’

‘Chief suspect, how charming. I’ve never been picked first for anything before!’ Harry beamed with mock-delight, presenting his two bony wrists to the officer as if already manacled.

‘I can’t deal with this fucking weirdo, I’ll be in the car,’ PC Steve blustered, thundering out into the gravelly driveway, his cuffs clanging uselessly in his wake.

‘God, I thought bobbies loved a bit of banter. He’s a sensitive sort, that Steve.’

The taller officer smiled blankly, stroking his broad, impassive face slowly.

‘You were rather unkind to the poor fellow,’ the officer rejoined tonelessly.

‘He was small and stupid and surly, he brought it on himself,’ Harry replied, his nostrils flaring almost imperceptibly.

‘Would it be fair to say, Harry,’ started the officer, drawing a seat at the creaky mahogany table, ‘that you’re an angry man?’

Harry burst into laughter, punching the table with his heavy white fists.

‘Is that what passes for criminal profiling these days? You’ll have to try a bit harder than that, Officer…’

‘Officer Crawley. Benjamin Crawley’.

‘Yes, well, Mr Crawley, I’m no angrier than the average twentysomething, disillusioned private-school type. Positively sanguine compared to my peers, believe me’.

‘I can believe that,’ said Officer Crawley. His grey eyes, as earnest as they were alert, seemed to cut through Harry’s cold cerulean stare, like the hoary light of dawn exposing and thus undoing a lake's brilliance, fracturing its crystalline façade into darker hues, broken shadows...

‘I’m going to be very blunt, Mr Bentham,’ said Officer Crawley, leaning forward conspiratorially, like a drunkard at a bar on the cusp of some sentimental revelation. ‘Did you kill your father?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No,’ Harry repeated firmly, leaning in too.

‘Then why,’ said Officer Crawley, his voice the level but beseeching pitch of a man genuinely confused, ‘are you so blasé about this whole investigation? There’s a very real chance,’ he broke off and, remembering that Pippa and Mrs Bentham were in earshot, lowered his voice, ‘that your father is dead. Does that not bother you?’

‘Of course it doesn’t,’ snapped Harry loudly, the table creaking under his shifting weight.

‘He was a violent, mean-spirited, drunken bastard, and if he is still alive,’ Harry spat, preempting Crawley’s inevitable parroting of Pippa’s past-tense interrogation, ‘he is still all of those things. You won’t get another word out of me without my solicitor present, which is a shame for you as he’s fucking good.’

A long, gravid silence followed, unbroken but for the rattle of the damask curtains, the windswept swaying of its heavy, tessellated body casting a hallucinatory spell on the room.

Finally, Pippa interjected.

‘Would you like some more tea, Officer Crawley?’

Crawley said nothing; he merely nodded wordlessly and receded back into the seat of his chair. PC Steve had been right: these people were fucking weirdos.

*

Harry and Pippa sat under the gazebo drinking sweet vermouth and playing cards.

‘Ask Mother if she’s sure she won’t join us,’ Pippa cooed, thumbing listlessly through her deck.

‘Bored already?’

‘No, just distracted. Besides, you always beat me…’

‘Be that as it may,’ Harry yawned, draining his tumbler in one swift gulp, ‘Mother will say no like always. In case you hadn’t noticed, she’s practically agoraphobic.’

‘Don’t be silly, she just doesn’t like the gazebo. She said it looks small and kitsch,’ Pippa retorted balefully.

‘Yes, yes I’ve heard all that nonsense before. She wanted a pavilion but Father was too tight-fisted to spring for one, blah blah blah. When’s the last time, Pippa,’ Harry paused dramatically, pouring another measure, ‘you saw Mother leave the house?’

Pippa fell silent with thought as Harry loomed above her, expectant but not impatient.

‘I… I can’t remember, come to think of it. Possibly years…’ Pippa trailed off, frowning.

‘Have a guess why,’ Harry pressed on, his glass already half-empty. His voice, Pippa noticed, was now slightly tremulous, tender even, with emotion.

‘I don’t know, Harry.’

‘Sure you do.’

Pippa said nothing.

The gathering wind threshed at the regiment of willows, drooping as if depressed in the ebbing twilight.

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Harry said at last.

‘Where?’

‘The creek. I’ll bring some of Father’s brandy?’

Pippa again said nothing, but her eyes, a fainter blue than Harry’s own, a shade more pliant, perhaps, flashed with assent in the spreading dark.

*

It was now midnight. The flask of brandy near-emptied, the floor had taken on an accusatory slant for both Harry and Pippa about an hour ago.

‘Sooooo,’ Harry slurred, sinking into the cool moist loam of the riverbank, ‘do you want to know why Mother never leaves the house anymore?’

‘Not if it’s something … unpleasant,’ Pippa replied, her starchy air easing under the brandy's warm spell. ‘Well, maybe. I don’t know.’

‘You’re a big girl now, Pippa. Almost twenty. Do you want to know or not?’

‘Fine,’ Pippa sulked, drawing her coat around her mouth as if it were a shield. ‘You’re clearly keen to tell me.’

‘Because…’ Harry gurgled, snatching a small, triumphant final swig from the bottle, which he was now brandishing like a microphone.

‘...Because the last time Mother went out to see the few rem…remaining friends s--s-she had in this godforrrsakeenn village,’ he sputtered, gesticulating theatrically, as if he were a lawyer addressing a packed gallery at court.

‘Father beat her so badly she could barely walk for a week. Said she was sleeping around. You know what she was actually doing? She was helping Fiona Wheatstone pick out a balustrade for her mezzanine,' he snarled, breaking off into high, mirthless laughter.

'I don't believe you. You're a liar. A cruel lying bastard just like Daddy always said!' Pippa yelled, her cheeks agleam with hot, fresh tears, iridescent in the moonlight, like drops of dew snaking down a leaf.

‘You’re unbelievable, a spoiled little bit … I’m not wasting my breath anymore, fuck it…’ Harry trailed off, turning away.

The hostility Pippa had been wrestling for the last fortnight — little sparks of anger that kindled every time Harry made some sneering jibe, some off-handed remark, about Daddy in that sinister bass of his, icy and remote as a fjord — flared into white-hot rage. Almost unconsciously, Pippa hoisted herself onto Harry’s back, blindly pummeling him.

Ordinarily, Harry would have hurled Pippa off with ease; they had fought often and he had never come to any harm, nor even approached anything like serious exertion. Sleep-deprived and drink-sodden, however, he buckled under Pippa’s tiny frame, careening headfirst into the river.

For a few drunken moments, neither knew what had happened, even inhabited the frozen, thoughtless present with gratitude, let the clean, clear river cleanse their haggard bodies, felt briefly innocent in the salving simplicity of water … until, as in a dream, their reverie dissolved, impaled on the jagged edge of reality.

They began hyperventilating almost in unison, screaming through mouthfuls of water. Both could — and did — swim back to the bank; it was not drowning, but rather the sharp chill of the water that frightened them. Harry’s asthma had improved with age, but not much: he had nearly died of a bronchial episode in his late teens.

Clambering to their feet, both stripped to their underwear, swearing and panting noisily.

‘I’m so sorry, Harry, I’m so sorry!’ Pippa squealed.

‘I’m not leaving,’ Harry wheezed, his bony, glistening chest dipping inward, hard and concave, more like a horseshoe than a human body, ‘until you tell me you believe me.’

‘What,’ Pippa snapped, ‘this isn’t the time, you could die Harry!’

Harry simply laid back on the bank and folded his arms.

‘Alright, I believe you, Harry. Please just get up, I believe you.’

‘Do you remember when I was a boy and I used to come here all the time? D’you wanna know why I stopped coming?’ Harry trembled, as if on the verge of crying.

‘Yes, Harry, darling, I want to know why. Tell me while we walk,’ Pippa implored sweetly, clasping his hands in hers.

Harry got up slowly, shivering, his eyes wide and maniacal, almost lupine, in the moonlight.

‘Pippa?’

‘Yes, dear.’

‘Where’s … the rest of the brandy?’

*

It was now half-five in the morning. Dawn neared, its saffron stretching across the sky, Nature's promise, ushered in by the soft incantatory trill of the waking thrushes.

Harry had told Pippa everything last night, everything except the one thing she wanted to know yet needed not to …

He had told her why he had stopped coming to the river, how as a gangling boy of twelve he had sat gazing into its depths, swigging a can of beer he had secreted from the pantry. He had told her, too, of how Father had followed him down there, how his face suddenly, as if by apparition, snarled up at him from the water in hateful ripples. He had told her, finally, of how Father had thrusted him into the river, had held his head down until his lungs were aflame and all was black, releasing him, at last, with a single violent jerk before stalking away, wordlessly, back home.

Harry had not, however, told Pippa why he had started going back to the river recently, nor of how he brooded for hours, sometimes exultant, oftener empty, above Father's corpse, yet still under its spell somehow, a tributary which even run dry refused attrition.

*

Harry was himself the river now: forever running, running, running, without origin or end …