"I kind of feel up to here with multiculturalism": the most disturbing short story to ever appear in ReadingRoom
She put her hands in deep among the baby things to where the guns were. There, beneath the sleepsuits, the tiny cotton t-shirts and the laundered nappies fresh from the washing service, she could feel them: the smooth polished barrels of the Sig Sauers, the hook of the trigger on the P238 with its blunt snout and the round opening where the bullets would come out. Everything was in place—the position of the weapons, the box of ammunition beside them. It was a kind of relief, she said, to touch the various shapes, to be familiar with their contours and outlines, and afterwards she could breathe again. "That was it, exactly," she told me. "Just by reminding myself they were there, I became so calm."
No one else would know where she’d kept them. At the arrest, in all the papers … Her secret never came out, that, tucked up among the clean muslins she would use to wipe Bobby down after he’d sicked up her milk and under piles of Laura’s little pyjamas and miniature knickers and Tim’s prep school shorts and socks and shirts, a pair of Micro Compacts were … nestled. That was the word she used. The cold metal touch of them after the softness of all the baby stuff giving her such pleasure, she said. Pieces that, in their weight and size, embodied perfectly the melding of form and function. "And it’s strange, don’t you think"—she cast her eyes around for a second as though looking for the answer to her question, then smiled, her brilliant lovely smile, and laughed—"that after all I’ve gone through, I would still find them now as I did then, attractive, interesting objects, and that using them was going to be—absolutely—something I wanted to do."
I didn’t know where to look, of course. But this story, report or whatever … Well, it’s not about me. It’s about giving a clear picture, a portrait of the kind of person who would do what she did, who would take her thoughts that far.
"Did you ever think about sending them back?" I asked her at one point, after she’d said straight out that she’d made the purchase for a very definite purpose. "Did you recognise that your thinking was dangerous? That it could only finish with an ending of one kind?" I remember she put her head down as though praying, and for a moment I believed I was going to see evidence of some kind of regret, that she would become the fully comprehensible version of the woman she’d always been—responsible, trustworthy, a loyal friend and good neighbour, the attractive wife and mother who had moved to our street when she was pregnant with her third child, as open-hearted and generous as the next person.
But no. She looked at me and yawned, tucked a strand of blond hair behind her ear. "It was great," she simply said. "I knew when I put the order in to the guy who had the friend with access to the website that those particular items were going to be my 'get out of jail free' card." She laughed. "The whole thing," she emphasised, "my decision, what I did … one great, exceptional feeling of escaping for good a situation I found myself in and wanted no more part of—believe me, it’s all fine."
The "guy who had the friend with access to the website" is no one they have been able to trace so far. I’ve read about these kinds of people, of course, the dark web and all that. I’ve seen the articles and books that show how it’s big business, how everyone is up to something or other; people talk about it now. That you can buy anything online with little in the way of questions asked. And so in this instance: she’d met someone, she said, through a pornography site she used, which she had learned of from one of the mothers in the Thursday morning coffee group for toddlers and babies that she went along to when Tim was at school and Laura in the nursery next door where this whole story, you might say, finds its focus. "Cause and effect", as she liked to put it. One thing leading to another, and a complex aftermath gathered up by a first thought that had preceded all others and which rested in turn upon a certain kind of life with its rules and order and expectations that, on the whole, had always been met. Nothing more dramatic than that, see? She was always reminding me. "Nothing."
Certainly, the transaction itself couldn’t have been more straightforward. She’d simply withdrawn cash in various increments from her own account and deposited it into another she’d been given details of in an anonymous email—quite a bit of the "slush fund", as she called it, for the week’s shopping, which her husband gave her every Monday. "Well, a massive amount, actually," she confided. Such a sum was to cover all her domestic needs, and this was "one of those needs," she said. It was that kind of marriage. Charles was generous, she added, and the amount had only increased as did his time spent away from her, accelerating from the occasional late night at work, to most nights, to the odd weekend as well, along with "business trips" and "vacations with US clients" … She hated all that, but the women she counted as friends said the same about their marriages, she told me. It was just the fact of a certain kind of lifestyle, choices made. "You make your bed; you lie in it. Ha ha," they agreed. "It doesn’t need to be a big deal." And so, perhaps, it didn’t. Or she had learned how to stop allowing it to be—with the deep breathing she was learning in her one-to-one chakra realignment sessions really helping, along with treating herself to something special from Bond Street or Harvey Nicks when she needed to. For there were lots of things she "needed". A lot of women are like that, I know. And so, in turn, the money went out of her account without her husband even noticing, in the way that none of those husbands of her friends might notice what was being spent and how, into some sort of holding reserve, some financial service somewhere. Then that payment, too, must have gone through because the package duly arrived on a cold March morning—a special delivery company she didn’t recognise—and heavy it was to take from the young man who handed it to her, looking her in the eye. "You got that?" he asked, when she’d placed it on the hall table and had her pen poised above the form he’d clipped to a board for her to sign. He tapped her on the knuckle three times with his long index finger. "You gotta sign, sweetheart," pointing to the blank space for her signature, "here." And before she’d whisked the box up to the linen cupboard to hide it away there, she did. She signed.
*
By then the reaction she’d discovered in herself following the incident with the little Pakistani girl at Laura’s nursery had become a marked thing. For yes, she said, that was certainly the catalyst for everything else that followed; where this story, as I wrote before, "finds its focus". Because although weeks had passed since that day, she kept finding the smell of the other child, the family, on Laura’s hands. In the bath at night she’d scrub her daughter all over, her hands especially, using a brush on her knuckles and fingers and under her nails, rubbing at her upturned palms with Laura peering into them—"All gone, Mummy?" —until the child began to cry, "No more dirty!", trying to get out of the water, slippery like a fish and no one could have caught her. It seemed as if something in her daughter, too, had changed, she told me. That awful expression, "No more dirty"—and realising how Laura continued to be in touch with the girl in the hours they spent at the nursery together. It made her shudder. Thank goodness, she told herself, the baby and Tim hadn’t become similarly infected. Bobby was with her most of the time, he was still at that age, so she knew he was alright; and Tim’s class was full of nice, proper British children … But it was indeed starting to feel like a "disease"—her word—since she had realised, back in the autumn, that there were foreigners moving into their special part of the neighbourhood, coming into the nursery next door to Oak Street Preparatory "if you please", as the mothers had taken to saying, as if those people expected their children to begin their education along with their own sons and daughters whose names had been on the waiting list since birth. It was shocking, they all agreed. The way there were so many of them, suddenly, with their strong-smelling foods and chattery languages none of the "home mums", as they started calling themselves, would ever understand. "I’m beginning to feel as though I’m the one who’s the outsider," Caroline Williamson had said just before Christmas at the drop-off by the front gate. "After all, I’m the person paying to be here, and speaking the language others don’t." She’d laughed at that, she said, and she laughed again, loudly and for a long time, when she told me—though, as it turned out, none of it was funny.
The fact is, the people were there. They’d moved in and were growing in numbers, all come through a charity that had been set up in association with their own nursery, she’d found out, which was educating them—"for free, with our money" as Sam Crighton Smith put it—along with providing housing in the big block of flats down by the children’s park. "How does that work, eh?" Sam had asked, point blank, shortly after a group of home mums had been to see the head of the nursery, lovely Mrs Alexander, who they might have thought would be on their side. For how could non-English speakers come in and take up places that were supposed to be reserved? That was not what they were paying private school fees for, was it? "I mean, you go private to be … well, private," was the way she put it—because none of the mothers could believe that this was happening here, in their part of Clapham, the really good part, where one expected to be protected from … "all that". But Mrs Alexander had just talked to them about understanding and patience and the need to open one’s doors with generosity and grace, and a month later more of the foreigners had arrived, and by January there were seven families in all—from Syria, Afghanistan … Wherever there’d been some war or revolution those people were always having, only now here they were in Clapham—and God knows how many children between them. Seven families! "That’s about seven times seven!" the cry went up at the book group. And half the women pregnant again, you could make it out under their robes or whatever it was they wore as they stood in the street with their prams and buggies taking up so much space it could be difficult to park your car. "Actually, would you mind," said Lara Veale, after they’d finished the last international bestseller set in Calcutta by a Commonwealth prize-winning author, "if we just read some nice ordinary English novel next week? I kind of feel up to here with multiculturalism."
I remember how she put her head back when she told me that and laughed another of her strange loud laughs, her mouth wide open. I felt my heart skip a beat. "Look at me," she said afterwards, when she’d regained her composure. "I should be ashamed of myself … Except—you know what?" She looked down at her beautiful hands, one laid on top of the other in a way that was posed, considered: "I don’t care one bit."
This was on one of my early visits. I’d been trying to press her further on those friends of hers, her close neighbours with their book groups and cinema outings to Fifty Shades of Grey and the coffee mornings and yoga sessions designed to get back their pre-baby tummies. I wanted to know whether the sense of unease that was building—I meant generally, among the mothers in the street and surrounding area—gave a sort of … context, I suppose, for the strength of her own reactions. Those "What has the country come to?" kind of remarks that had started a while back, when she realised she was by no means the only one in our street to have voted Leave, gaining traction with the recent developments? But no. She always returned to the same version of her narrative; that it was all her decision. Her plan. That she’d known for some time that something about her nature meant she needed, absolutely had to have, a specific sort of order to her days; to be in control, with everything in its place. That it really was only her idea, and that it was most definitely the foreign child, and the smell of her, an odour she couldn’t bear, now transferred to her own daughter, that was the "trigger", as she put it, and made a little gesture with her two fingers, pointing them together at me as she mouthed the word "ka-pow!"
*
That was it, as I record it: This woman. This neighbour. This friend. A simple case of "cause and effect"—as she herself would put it—that eventually, unbelievably, played out on that late spring morning in April, which in turn had been set off earlier in the year when she picked up Laura at lunchtime as usual and Laura asked if she might go home with Tami, the little girl she was holding hands with, to Pakistan for a playdate. "Pakistan!" She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. That her daughter even knew such a place existed, let alone wanted to spend time with a child who might have come from there. "You can’t go to Pakistan for a playdate," she’d said. "Don’t be silly." But Laura had held onto the child’s hand, saying, "Please! I want to go to Tami’s! I want to!"—and yes, she told me, it was then, precisely, that she recognised how a kind of judgement she’d always held but that no doubt had been made worse by the changes taking place in the neighbourhood had collected around that moment, with her own daughter holding the filthy hand of some little scrap of a girl and not letting go, the mother standing there beside them in a greasy-looking black robe and the gold in her nose and all the rest of it, nodding and grinning, "Okay? Okay?" like some kind of performing monkey. Her having to deal with that, she said, and having to say to Laura, "Not today, sweetie," and then again, louder, because Laura wasn’t listening, the two little girls swinging their hands together and talking their heads off and laughing. "God"—she shook her head when she first told me this part of the story, when she spoke about it for the first time. "I relive it"— the feeling of all the pieces that she had put carefully in place in her life being smashed out of order, something happening that, to her mind, never, ever should have. It had taken "ages", apparently, to get Laura to let go of the other girl and come with her, by which time there’d been tears and a massive row in front of everyone. She’d found herself short of breath as they got down the street, trying to put the situation behind her, because she’d had a sensation, "just here," she told me, touching her solar plexus, "when Laura asked, you know, if she could go to this child’s house, with the mother standing by and … There was this smell. Coming off the pair of them. Passed from the other girl straight onto Laura. I can’t describe it. But I can tell you it made me feel sick."
As I say, that was sometime around the middle of January, when she first registered the shift in herself as something physical, thoughts lying low but already sensible to her by then, insistent. There’d been her catch of breath, a lack of air, the tension in the upper part of her torso with the feeling of her daughter being drawn away from her, as though she was pulling away from her own mother. And never getting the smell off her afterwards was how it seemed, no matter how much she tried, scrubbing and scrubbing to try and get her clean, the way the child reacted to her when she came near at bath times, "No, no, mummy, please!" backing away, "No more dirty!" like a little animal.
And all this was well before she’d even thought of taking the next step, figuring out that she was going to need two guns and so on, that there’d be no time to reload and how the guns would have to be small. I’ve been clear about that in my notes. "You see, I realised I couldn’t stop my daughter playing with the Pakistani girl," was how she put it. Laura continued to talk about her when she came home after nursery, "Tami this, Tami that." And though she no longer saw them together—such was the sure effect of her threat of punishment if she did—she knew the friendship was there, embedded. Out of sight, maybe, within the nursery grounds and walls, but alive and growing—and not only between Laura and the other, who had both started it, she knew, her own daughter the first to let it in, but festering by now among all the children, multiplying and getting stronger while they were playing together, sharing food and toys and glasses of juice …
*
These were the sort of ideas, you understand, that were present in her mind and ran amok there. I’m simply reporting them, the circumstances surrounding this one woman who we all liked and got on with, who had lovely manners and was beautifully turned out and so on—and thoughtful, always helping out with bits of shopping or taking someone else’s child for the morning while the mother was busy … To put in all the details as though to come closer to the facts surrounding the most awful facts. For though by now the whole story is "dead", as journalists would say, and because she has no one else coming to see her I have been allowed to meet with her, once a month in prison visiting hours, just to talk. It’s something someone at our church first recommended, then our vicar got on board. "Go in there," John said to me when I was discussing the matter with him after one of the morning services—this, days after the thing had happened and everyone was in shock, the church open all night with prayer vigils and so on. "You were someone who knew her," he said. "She needs to know that despite it, despite everything, the Church is open to her. That we, her congregation, despite the magnitude of her crime, still love her, can forgive."
Not everyone can, though. Not her husband. He was the first to move away, his mother having taken the other children to Hampshire, I heard. Not Pam Lawrence or Susan MacLeod or Jennifer Morris or the Caxton Taylors or the Williamsons or any of the other families we know who were affected. Not a lot of people could consider it, even, or come close to understanding her by having any kind of sequence of events laid down on paper, the background to the fateful day, the outburst itself that left two children dead and seven injured, Catriona Morris without an eye, the little Williamson boy still in hospital and no one knowing if he’ll ever come out. Though John was right, it is something we need to find out about, the whys and wherefores. And so yes, I might not have been in the group she was close to—those women with their at-home Pilates lessons and pedicures and all the rest of it, their online porn and shopping sites and the husbands with big financial and legal jobs in the City—still, she and I had started chatting at St Cuthbert’s when we used to teach Sunday School together and I need to remind people somehow that, you know, everyone around here always thought she was lovely.
And it was never Catriona Morris and the others that she meant to hurt— you might have guessed as much, of course. It was something, rather, that she only wanted to "nip in the bud" for herself, she said, to do with the particular odour that was spreading and infecting—all these phrases of hers—as a result of circumstances that should never have been present at a three-and-a-half-thousand-pounds-a-term nursery in the first place. For anyone could see where it would all lead, she told me. The next thing, the same charity helping these same people get into the classrooms next door. Taking up the teaching allocation with special lessons for them to learn English—and then what would happen when it came time for the 11-plus for the British children, what then? And after that? With secondary schools and university? Oxford and Cambridge and all the rest of it? When it came to jobs and careers and security? What then? What then? Anything could happen, anything … was where her own thinking was headed, she told me. And truthfully? It had been taking her there for a very, very long time, with nobody around to talk to about it, not really, and Charles never there to listen or discuss anything … only away, or working every hour God gives at Merrill Lynch along with all the other husbands in the street, working twice as hard as they should have to because of Austerity and China and the Asians coming in and getting the top finance jobs, and a lot of companies relocating back to the States or Europe after the no-deal mess London was in … And it had been compounding and amassing, her way of thinking, building up for months beforehand, for months and months, years even … Until there appeared before her, out of the chaos, the little girl who wouldn’t let go of Laura’s hand and Laura herself—this the worst part of all, she said—not wanting to let go.
So all right, that’s where we’ve got to, as I told John. Putting together so- called unrelated events, as they described it in the papers, and trying to make sense of how those seemingly disparate factors might pile up and end with the story of a woman who opened fire at her daughter’s nursery while the children were outside on an Easter egg hunt in the garden, the two young women who were looking after them that day calling out "warm!" and "warmer!" as the children roamed around the flower beds and beneath the trunks of trees, looking for the foil-wrapped chocolates that had been placed there. "Hot!" they may have shouted, as the first gunshot rang out. "Scalding!" before they realised what had happened.
Because "unrelated"—no. Nothing is without consequences or goes forward without the drive that lies behind. All of us know that. "I just wanted to be able to breathe again" was how she put it, how she described being in that linen cupboard of hers—the kind you see replicated all over those big double-fronted houses in South West London; "leafy environs" is the wording on the estate agents’ glossy brochures. A beautiful walk-in linen cupboard, as she has told me many, many times, so generously proportioned there was even room in there for a little stool that her mother had embroidered the cushion for when Tim was born, in cross stitch, with a flower border and Where do we live but in the days? worked in a panel in the centre. During some of her own days, she told me—this long before any of it, before the purchase of the guns, before the families came, before Bobby was born, even—she would go into the cupboard to sit on that little stool and close the door and stay there, quietly, on her own, for some time in the dark. Just to have a sense, she said, of everything being gathered up, and clean and orderly in the same way that the laundry service would deliver clean nappies on a Monday and the neat stacks of all her children’s clothing would be there on the third shelf, piled up every week in tidy rows, every week the same … Was that such a big ask? To want everything to be as she’d planned it? A whole life arranged according to the values she’d always believed in, with nothing to expect but what she’d asked for, and all traces of unpleasantness gone? She looked at me when she said that and smiled, but a sad smile this time, there was no laughter in it. "Remember," she said, and this right from the outset when the whole project of assembling this story first began, with John and the church arranging my prison visits, my getting to know her more and more as she talked about everything that had gone on in that low voice of hers that is modulated and well educated, reasonable and low: "I shot my own daughter first."
Taken with kind permission from Landfall 244, the most recent issue of New Zealand's most distinguished literary journal, edited by Lynley Edmeades (Otago University Press, $30), available in bookstores nationwide.
Next week's short story is "Baby" by Wellington writer John Summers.
