Remedy is None Read Online Free PDF Page B

You’ll get the education an’ the good job. You’ll make somethin’ oot yer life. Ah ken ye can dae it, son. You’ll have the university an’ the education . . .’
    So that was what he had been left with, a mouthful of shibboleths, a few magical words that he kept muttering like an ‘open sesame’, that he was passing on to Charlie as if theywere the keys to all the doors he had always found closed, had bled his fists against. That was how he had been left to finish, mouthing a few empty incantations, broken and bemused, surrounded by the painful mystery of his ‘failure’. He wasn’t just allowed to die. A man had to die. That was nothing. But nobody had the right to destroy a man before he died. And he had been destroyed. This wasn’t the way he should have died. It had been made this way. This wasn’t something just happening now. It must have happened a long time ago, and no one had noticed. A man had had everything taken from him, had been destroyed, and nothing had been done.
    ‘You’ll be a’ right. Charlie. Wi’ a university education. You’ll no’ be like me. The guid jobs. The big money.’
    The last will and testament, a few words they had taught him painfully, punishing him when he neglected their importance. That was all he had left. When Charlie thought of the man his father had been and realized what he had been made now, and then thought that it had all happened in the utter isolation of his lonely self, he seemed to understand something for the first time. He knew what it must have been to be his father. And the insight was blinding, seared his mind, cauterizing it clean of every other thought. The injustice of it cleft his mind like lightning, and something vague and terrible followed in its wake, like distant thunder. But he could give it no shape, could form no definite thought from it as yet. Only one bitter word kept hammering on his mind as on an anvil. Bastards. Bastards. But what it was forging there he did not know. He just sat looking at his father, branding that image of him on his thoughts, and the small wooden carving on the bedhead above him, a cross inset in a diamond, stamped itself on his mind like a hieroglyph of hate.
    His father’s voice was petering out, but he was still trying to talk on, as if it mattered. He had lost the grip he had been keeping on his pain and his body was visibly racked. Charlie thought of the agony he had suffered to wait and talk to him. And what could Charlie say that could be commensurate withwhat his father had suffered? Nothing. He felt more bitter than he had ever felt before. He choked with inarticulate rancour. This was so wrong. His father was completely mistaken. But he had neither the time nor the words to tell him so. Nothing Charlie could say to him would make any difference. Speech dwindled to meaninglessness dropped into this chasm. Words withered in his breath. This was beyond talk. Something else was necessary. Something else.
    Charlie just wanted his father to sleep now. That was all that could help him. As if from a great distance, he heard a car draw up outside the house. The front door was opened. Footsteps came slowly up the stairs, and Charlie felt that he was in a room where they could never join him. As the doctor came in, Charlie’s father reached out to hold on to Charlie, as if not wanting to be gagged with morphine.
    ‘Ah’m talkin’ tae Charlie,’ he said.
    He was groggy with pain. Charlie barely noticed the doctor. He had hold of his father’s hand in an incongruously formal gesture of handshake.
    ‘It’s a’ right, Feyther,’ he said. ‘Ah hear ye. Ah’m listenin’,’ pushing back the pyjama sleeve. 6Ah know whit ye mean. Ah know it, Feyther. Ah know.’
    The doctor came forward. Come on, Charlie thought, give it to him. Let him sleep. It’s over for him. But not for us. Not for us.
    ‘God bless ye, Charlie,’ his father said. ‘God bless ye.’
    John stood in the doorway awkwardly. The needle