The Execution - Hugo Wilcken

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I didn’t exactly know what to say. He just sat there, with his bloodless face. After a while he said, so what am I going to do now? and rocked a little in his chair. Then I spoke … We had some sort of conversation, which I can’t remember now. He must have told me it was his wife, that she’d had a car accident, that it had taken place in Oxford, where he and his wife lived. I hadn’t known they lived in Oxford. It seemed a pretty long way for Christian to commute every day.

      He looked so completely helpless that I suggested I drive him down to Oxford, to the hospital. I had plenty of things to do that afternoon, and no doubt someone else in the office would have done a much better job of looking after Christian, but he’d been with me when he’d found out about his wife, so somehow it seemed like my responsibility. He sat there in complete silence, still rocking in his chair and hugging himself. So eventually I stood up and said: come on, we’ve got to go, you can’t sit here all day. I sort of got him up and took his jacket off the hanger on the back of the door and helped him into it. He was like a zombie.

      We were caught up in a snarl at Marble Arch but got onto the motorway pretty quickly after that. We didn’t talk. While I’d been negotiating traffic on the way out of London the silence seemed normal, but then we were flying down the motorway and it felt like there was a void that needed to be filled. On several occasions I caught myself on the point of initiating small talk, more or less as a reflex action. But that would have been even less appropriate than the void. The car engine hummed so softly and evenly in the background that after a while I couldn’t hear it any more, and it seemed as if we were in total silence. At first I didn’t feel awkward but gradually an air of acute embarrassment invaded me. I thought of putting the radio on to break the spell, but in the end decided against it. It occurred to me that I’d been in a bit of a daze as we’d left the office, and that I’d forgotten to say to anyone where we were going or that we wouldn’t be back. I had my mobile phone with me though and I thought of calling, but then decided against that too. I couldn’t easily tell them about Christian’s wife over the phone – not as he sat there beside me, in any case.

      I glanced over to Christian occasionally. He was as rigid as an Egyptian statue, hands symmetrically resting on his thighs, staring blankly at the number plate of the car ahead. He was sitting so still that he didn’t seem himself. Normally, Christian squirms in his seat and wrings his hands and agitates his body, like a schoolboy or a poor sleeper. It irritates me, that habit of his.

      As I drove in silence, I thought about Christian. We’ve worked in the same department for a year and a half but he’s been at Africa Action much longer. I don’t dislike him, but on the other hand I don’t particularly get on with him either. Despite his age there’s something of the adolescent about him. With his lank, greasy hair, dirty jeans and John Lennon spectacles he looks like a seventies student. It’s as if he developed a look in his teens, then never changed it. He’s got a politically naïve outlook and he probably considers himself some kind of anarchist. That doesn’t stop him getting intensely involved in office politics – he thinks everyone’s always slighting him but ninety per cent of the time it’s not true. Then again, not to do him down too much, he does have his more positive side. He’s honest and friendly when he’s not being paranoid and generally you can reason with him. I suppose you could say he believes in the work as well.

      Something’s happened to him over the past couple of months though, and everybody at the office has noticed it. He’s become more erratic. There’ve been days when he hasn’t turned up for work. Sometimes he looks like he’s been drinking or doing drugs. He’s been acting a bit weirdly with people too – the other day I heard him shouting at Fiona, when normally he’s the last person to raise his voice.

      I missed the turnoff, but didn’t notice for a while. Eventually I turned round at a junction and joined the traffic going the other way. This business of overshooting the turnoff seemed to snap Christian out of his zombie phase. He started wriggling about in his seat. Then as we were hitting Oxford, he suddenly said: ‘They’re going to ask me to identify the body. But I don’t want to. As long as I don’t identify the body, she’s still alive.’ I didn’t really know what he was on about, but replied: ‘Don’t be stupid.’

      He started looking around, glancing out the window, craning his neck strangely like a cat peering out of a cat-box. I also noticed that his hands were shaking quite a bit now. Just before we got to the hospital, he reached into a pocket of his suede jacket and pulled out a pack of rolling tobacco. Normally I’d have asked him if he could wait until we arrived, since I don’t like smoke in the car, but I let it pass. He was still peering out the window, and rolled the cigarette very quickly without even looking at his hands. His hands completely stopped shaking as he rolled the cigarette, then started shaking again immediately after, so that he had trouble lighting it. It reminded me of my dead grandmother, who’d had Parkinson’s but could still play the piano without fumbling a single note.

      We got to the hospital. I told Christian to go into Casualty while I parked the car, but he wouldn’t. He just sat there, puffing away at his rolled cigarette – which kept going out, so he had to keep relighting it – and not saying a word. It annoyed me for some reason. I found a parking space, got out, and went round to his side to help him out. But still he wouldn’t budge. Finally he whimpered: ‘I can’t go in, I can’t go in.’ I said: ‘Of course you can,’ and tugged at his arm. At that he started to tremble, not just his hands, but his whole body, his face too. I thought he might cry as well, and I certainly wanted to avoid that. I didn’t want a scene, but on the other hand I could hardly force him into the hospital. I said: ‘Why don’t we just have a wander round, just take it easy?’ I’d noticed a small park in the hospital grounds, and my idea was to take a walk there. I thought it might sort of limber Christian up for the hospital.

      Then I had another idea: ‘Listen, I’ve got a tiny bit of dope on me, enough for a joint. We could have a joint first, then go into the hospital after. What do you say?’ I had this scrap of dope left over from the bag Stephen Pusey had given me. It’d been sitting in the glove box for the past month or so and I’d almost forgotten it was there.

      We walked over to the park. It was a depressing affair with weed-ridden flower beds, gravel, visitors pushing patients around in wheelchairs. Christian was walking very slowly and I had my hand under his armpit, as if he too were a patient. It must have looked ridiculous since he’s quite a bit taller than me. We sat down on the only free bench and I got out the bag and handed it to Christian: ‘Here, you roll it, you’re probably better at it than me.’ I watched with fascination as Christian’s twitching and trembling stopped once more during the few moments it took him to roll the joint. Then he lit up and drew heavily on it, before passing it on to me wordlessly. I took a small drag and hardly inhaled – I didn’t want to let Christian smoke by himself but I did have to drive back to London. Nonetheless I could feel my muscles relax from that one half-drag. It was having an instant effect on Christian as well. The trembling didn’t exactly stop, but it kind of slowed down and got less intense. I passed the joint back and he smoked the rest of it over the next few minutes, staring into the gravel and muttering ‘Ah well, ah well’ from time to time.

      He smoked the joint right down, then after a final drag he tried to throw the end onto the ground. But it stuck to his fingers and he couldn’t shake it off, so he rubbed his hands together and the remaining paper and crumbs of tobacco blew away in the wind: ‘Damn, I burnt my finger!’ and he put his finger in his mouth. That occupied him for a moment and then he looked up. I could see from his eyes that he was pretty out of it. He was gazing at the bench opposite us, which was next to a fountain that didn’t work. On the bench sat an extremely old woman with a blanket round her shoulders in spite of the warm weather, and a middle-aged woman, probably her daughter, who was shouting at her: ‘I said, Eileen and Jack are moving to America!’ But the old woman was paying no attention whatsoever – she was making a strange clicking sound with her teeth. Christian turned to me and said: ‘Look at those two women. The sick one’s not paying a blind bit of notice to what the other one’s saying. It’s pretty funny!’ He started laughing and then so did I. I said: ‘You’re right, she couldn’t give a damn!’ and we both laughed again. After we’d finished laughing, Christian put his hand on my shoulder and said: ‘You’re a friend. You know that?’

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