Now I crossed a doorway and activated the answering machine. Using the rewind button I found the message I wanted, which was logged at around eight o’clock that morning. Martin. It’s your old friend Phoebe here. I have something to tell you. Something to pass on to you. It’s been bothering me for twenty-four years and I don’t see why it shouldn’t start bothering you. Expect a communication. Goodbye.
It was her vendetta voice: not wholly unamused, but seriously embittered, with authentic grievance in it, something narrow-eyed and white-lipped (seldom the case when she taunted shifty suppliers of office furniture, evasive bookies, and the like). So authentic, indeed, that I felt the urge to consult my conscience about Phoebe Phelps. But before I could consult it, I would first have to find it…Twenty-four years: 1977. I thought for a moment and wondered, Was it that business with Lily? Surely not: that business with Lily was something I got away with. Wasn’t it?
Well, I would find out.
The coffee cup, the ashtray, the open exercise book…He sat slumped at his desk. To repeat, it was September 12, 2001; and for the time being his work in progress (a novel) seemed neither here nor there – nor anywhere else. The way he now saw it, this particular fiction, and for that matter fiction itself (Middlemarch, Moby-Dick, Don Quixote, etc.), was demoted to nonentity – by World War III or whatever it was that announced itself the previous day.
He would soon learn that all the novelists (and all the poets and dramatists) were being asked by the Fourth Estate to write about September 11. Ian had already written about it (and Christopher, of course, had already written about it). Salman and Julian would be writing about it. All of them were asked, and all of them said yes. What else was there to write about? What else was there to do?
Asked that morning by the Guardian to write about September 11, he said yes. And so he turned to a fresh page and scrawled ‘September 11’ at the top of it. He wrote his fiction and his journalism in the same exercise books, so he just turned to a fresh page and began to unearth his parallel self: the one that wrote about reality, in editorial (or op-editorial) mode.*1 He usually made this switch with reluctance, even with some self-pity; but that morning he went about it with numb resignation. Then he just sat there, numbly smoking.
The part of him that produced fiction, he felt, was in any case shutting down for ever. And how did it feel? If you took its pulse, that day, it felt like a very minor addition of grief, to be tacked on to the grief that was due to the thousands of dead (no one yet knew how many thousands – eight, ten?) and most particularly, most essentially, to those who found themselves leaping from the Towers: leaping out into the blue, and dropping seventy, eighty, ninety floors rather than stay for another instant within. They fell at the rate of thirty-two feet per second squared, and, as we later heard with our own ears, exploded like mortar shells when they hit the ground; they were not suicide bombers; these people, they were suicide bombs; and some of them were themselves already on fire…
So no fiction, thank you (he couldn’t be doing with fiction), because fiction was partly a form of play – and reality was now earnest.*2
With his stiffened (and throbbing) right hand he reached out and wrote 1) all over again the world seems bipolar. And, yes, it really did…One day in the very early 1990s Martin made an announcement to Nat and Gus (they were perhaps seven and six). ‘I’m so glad you won’t have to live out your childhood under that shadow. As I did.’ He meant what he said and they peered up at him, all meek and grateful…The shadow he had in mind derived from the Cold War and the equation E=mc2: in other words (in Eric Hobsbawm’s words), the forty-year ‘contest of nightmares’. And that shadow did go, or it receded – to be replaced, yesterday, by another shadow. And what did that shadow derive from?
‘It’s an ideology within a religion,’ said Christopher on the phone. ‘This is fascism with an Islamic face.’*3
In any event one thing was plain enough. The twelve-year hiatus – beginning on November 9, 1989, with the abdication of Communism – the great lull, the vacuum of apparent enemylessness (during which America could cosily devote a year to Monica Lewinsky and another year to O. J. Simpson), came to an end on September 11, 2001. And he already sensed that the new hatred, like the old, was somehow inward looking and self-tormented, and that its goals were unachievable and therefore unappeasable. Planetary agonism had resumed; and all over again the other half of the world (very roughly speaking, but so it felt) was out to kill his kids.
The doorbell sounded.
Special delivery
The doorbell sounded. Which would be a shattering development at any time. He wasn’t expecting anyone (he very seldom expected anyone); and besides London on that Wednesday morning, yes, distant London, an ocean away, had an inert and abject air to it, sparse, silent – in fact sick to its stomach (even the buildings looked squeamish and tense), with few people
