Mellow Doubt

by Christopher Brookmyre

Page 3 of 8

My nemesis, my embarrassingly improbable nemesis, did all of this to me. He destroyed my great scheme, wiped out my crew and even cast me down to what he reasonably assumed would be my death. However, my greatest wound, the strike that has had me reeling ever since, he delivered with mere words.

There are four teenage males running along the sand, lanky and awkward, suffering that phase nature has the decency to hide inside a cocoon in other species. They bellow guttural laughs as they bear down obliviously upon the man and his child. The child instinctively moves closer to the man as the group approaches, seeking security, protection. The man smiles down, offering reassurance with a ruffling of the hair, but his eyes remain vigilantly upon the teenagers, positioning himself to deflect any accidental contact.

The man is about my age, I estimate. He looks younger when he smiles, but his true years are revealed as his face sharpens in ready defence. The child resembles him facially; I can see that even from here. Even if he didn’t, there’d be no questioning the relationship: the man is alertly attendant upon the child, but the clincher is that the child looks up at him as though the world is his to command.

“How does it feel to know you’ll never see your son grow up?” I asked him, Larry, my improbable nemesis, when I thought I still held the power of life and death.

“You tell me.”

Now, I’ve analysed and deconstructed this little exchange many, many times in order to exhaust every avenue of interpretation, but even as I did so I knew I was merely trying to find an escape-clause in the small print. I had a gun pointed at his head, so he had to say something to buy himself some time, surely? Granted, but it was still a hell of a thing to just pull out of your arse at zero notice. And as he said it, there was a cold sincerity about him, a conviction that couldn’t be entirely accounted for by mere anger or hatred. Under the circumstances you could hardly have described it as smug, but it was definitely the look of one who knew he had something on me; he wasn’t only telling me I had a son I’ve never met – he was telling me he had.

I have a son.

Through simple deduction and arithmetic I know who by, I know where and I know when. But I do not know him, not even his name, and there are insurmountable reasons why he will never – let’s face it, must never – know me.

So how d’you like them apples?

I didn’t want a child. Like that needs to be said. Hard to imagine fitting much in the way of family life around a busy schedule of assassination and wholesale slaughter. But discovering, knowing he’s out there… oh Larry, you really stuck it to me, didn’t you? He’s loose in my head, toddling around, opening lids and doors and closets, and I seriously don’t want him to see what’s inside any of them.

That, in case you haven’t guessed, is it. He’s in there, and he’s running the show, whether I like it or not.

I have in the past transformed myself, or at least attempted to do so: cast off old trappings and emerged as what I imagined to be something new. But whether it was swapping my Queen records for Bauhaus or my Stratocaster for Semtex, the person inside never changed. Larry called that right. This, though, this truly feels like a transformation by some ancient power far beyond my control. This, as Freddie and the boys put it, is a kind of magic.

I’m forced to see the world through my son’s eyes, as though new to me, my perspective involuntarily transferred. It’s an attempt, if not to feel him, then at least to feel what it’s like to be him. Then I see it once more through my own, and I feel a dread darker than anyone else could know; well, maybe not anyone else, but we’d be talking about a very short list. I feel a dread because I know what kind of men are sharing this world with my son.

Evil men. Men like me.

. . . more