Babel, page 39
At last he found a pile of rope knotted through with what looked like weights. He prayed it wasn’t needed for anything important and dragged it over to the trunk. Securing the rope around Professor Lovell was a nightmare. His heavy, stiffening limbs did not move easily; the corpse seemed in fact to be actively resisting them. The rope, horrifically, snagged on exposed and jagged ribs. Robin’s hands, sweaty with fear, kept slipping; several agonizing minutes passed before they got the rope snugly around the professor’s arms and legs. Robin wanted to tie a quick knot and be done with it, but Ramy was adamant they take their time; he didn’t want the ropes to disentangle as soon as the body hit the water.
‘All right,’ Ramy whispered at last, yanking at the rope. ‘That should do it.’
They each took an end of the corpse – Robin the shoulders, and Ramy the feet – and hoisted it out of the trunk.
‘One,’ Ramy whispered. ‘Two . . .’
On the third swing, they lifted Professor Lovell’s body over the railing and let go. It seemed an eternity before they heard the splash.
Ramy bent over the railing, scrutinizing the dark waves.
‘It’s gone,’ he said at last. ‘He’s not coming up.’
Robin couldn’t speak. He staggered several steps back and vomited onto the deck.
Now, Ramy instructed, they simply went back to their bunks and acted normal for the rest of the voyage. Simple, in theory. But of all the places to commit a murder, a ship midvoyage had to be one of the worst. A killer on the street could at least drop his weapon and flee the city. But they were stuck for two more months at the scene of the crime, two months during which they had to maintain the fiction that they had not blown a man’s chest apart and dumped his body into the ocean.
They tried to keep up appearances. They took their daily strolls around the deck, they entertained Miss Smythe and her tiresome inquiries, and they appeared for meals in the mess, thrice a day on the clock, trying their best to work up an appetite.
‘He’s just feeling under the weather,’ Ramy answered when the cook asked why he hadn’t seen Professor Lovell for several days. ‘He says he’s not very hungry – some kind of stomach affliction – but we’ll bring him something to eat later.’
‘Did he say what’s precisely the matter?’ The cook was a smiling and gregarious man; Robin couldn’t tell if he was prying or just being friendly.
‘Oh, it’s a whole host of minor symptoms,’ Ramy lied smoothly. ‘He’s complained of a headache, some congestion, but it’s mostly nausea. He gets dizzy if he stands up for too long, so he’s spending most of his days in bed. Sleeping quite a lot. Could be seasickness, although he didn’t have any problems with it on the way over.’
‘Interesting.’ The cook rubbed his beard for a moment, then turned on his heel. ‘You wait right here.’
He strode out of the mess at a fast clip. They stared at the door, stricken. Had he grown suspicious? Was he alerting the captain? Was he checking on Professor Lovell’s cabin to confirm their story?
‘So,’ Ramy muttered, ‘do we run now, or . . . ?’
‘And go where?’ Victoire hissed. ‘We’re in the middle of an ocean!’
‘We could beat him to Lovell’s cabin, perhaps—’
‘But there’s nothing there, there’s nothing we can do—’
‘Shush.’ Letty nodded over her shoulder. The cook was already striding back into the mess, holding a small brown sachet in one hand.
‘Candied ginger.’ He offered it to Robin. ‘Good for upset stomachs. You scholars always forget to bring your own.’
‘Thank you.’ Heart hammering, Robin took the sachet. He tried his best to keep his voice level. ‘I’m sure he’ll be very grateful.’
Luckily, none of the rest of the crew ever questioned Professor Lovell’s whereabouts. The sailors were none too fascinated by the daily dealings of scholars they’d been paid a pittance to transport; they were more than happy to pretend they did not exist at all. Miss Smythe was a different story. She was, likely out of sheer boredom, desperately persistent in making herself useful. She asked incessantly about Professor Lovell’s fever, the sound of his cough, and colour and composition of his stool. ‘I’ve seen my share of tropical diseases,’ she said. ‘Whatever he’s got, I’ve surely seen it in among the locals. Just let me have a look at him, I’ll get him fixed right up.’
Somehow they convinced her that Professor Lovell was both highly contagious and painfully shy. (‘He won’t be alone with an unmarried woman,’ Letty vowed solemnly. ‘He’ll be furious if we let you in there.’) Still, Miss Smythe insisted that they join her in a daily prayer for his health, during which it took Robin all he had not to retch from guilt.
The days were terribly long. Time crawled when every second contained a horrible contingency, the question will we get away? Robin was constantly sick. His nausea was wholly different from the roiling unease of seasickness; it was a vicious mass of guilt gnawing at his stomach and clawing at his throat, a poisonous weight that made it hard to breathe. Trying to relax or to distract himself was no help; it was when he slipped up and lost his guard that the sickness redoubled. Then the buzzing in his ears grew louder and louder and black seeped into the edges of his vision, reducing the world to a blurry pinprick.
Behaving like a person demanded tremendous focus. Sometimes the most he could do was to remember to breathe, hard and even. He had to scream a mantra in his mind – it’s all right, it’s all right, you’re all right, they don’t know, they think you’re just a student and they think he’s just sick – but even that mantra threatened to spin out of control; if he relaxed his focus for just one second, it morphed to the truth – you killed him, you blew a hole in his chest and his blood’s all over the books, all over your hands, slick, wet, warm—
He was scared of his subconscious; of letting it wander. He could dwell on nothing. Every thought that passed through his mind spiralled into a chaotic jumble of guilt and horror; always solidified into the same bleak refrain:
I have killed my father.
I have killed my father.
I have killed my father.
He tortured himself with imagining what might happen to them if they were caught. He projected the scenes so vividly they felt like memories – the short and damning trial, the disgusted looks from the jurors; the manacles around their wrists and, if not the gallows, then the long, crowded, miserable journey to a penal colony in Australia.
What he couldn’t wrap his mind around was what a truly fleeting moment the actual killing had been – no more than a split second of impulsive hatred, a single uttered phrase, a single throw. The Analects of Confucius made the claim sìbùjíshé;* that even a four-horse chariot could not catch a word once uttered, that the spoken word was irrevocable. But this seemed like a great trick of time. It did not seem fair that such a minuscule action could have such reverberating consequences. Something that broke not only his world but Ramy’s, Letty’s, and Victoire’s should have taken minutes at least, it seemed; should have required repeated effort. The truth of the murder would have made more sense had he stood over his father’s body with a blunt axe, bringing it down over and over into his skull and chest until blood sprayed across both their faces. Something brutal, something sustained, a true manifestation of monstrous intent.
But that did not describe what had happened at all. It had not been vicious. It had not taken effort. It was all over so fast, he hadn’t even had time to deliberate. He couldn’t remember acting at all. Could you intend a murder if you couldn’t remember wanting it?
But what kind of question was that? What was the blasted point of sorting through whether he’d desired his father’s death or not, when his ruined corpse was incontrovertibly, irreversibly sinking to the bottom of the ocean?
The nights were far worse than the days. At least the days offered the temporary distractions of the outdoors, the rolling ocean and spraying mists. At night, confined to his hammock, there was only the unforgiving dark. Nights meant sweat-drenched sheets, chills, and shakes, and not even the privacy to moan and scream out loud. Robin lay with his knees curled up to his chest, muffling his frantic breathing with both hands. When he managed snatches of sleep, his dreams were fragmented and horrifyingly vivid, revisiting every beat of that final conversation until the devastating finale. But the details kept changing. What were the last words Professor Lovell had said? How had he looked at Robin? Had he really stepped closer? Who had moved first? Was it self-defence, or was it a preemptive strike? Was there a difference? He wrecked his own memory. Awake and asleep, he examined the same moment from a thousand different angles until he truly no longer knew what had happened.
He wanted all thoughts to stop. He wanted to disappear. At night, the black, endless waves seemed like utopia, and he wanted nothing more than to hurl himself over the side, to let the ocean swallow him and his guilt into its obliterating depths. But that would only condemn the others. How would that look, one student drowned and their professor killed? No excuses, however creative, however true, could extricate them from that.
But if death was not an option, perhaps punishment still was. ‘I have to confess,’ he whispered to Ramy one sleepless night. ‘That’s the only way, we have to end it—’
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ said Ramy.
He scrambled madly out of his hammock. ‘I mean it, I’m going to the captain—’
Ramy jumped up and caught him in the passageway. ‘Birdie, get back in there.’
Robin tried to push past Ramy for the stairs. Ramy promptly slapped him across the face. Somehow this calmed him, if only due to shock – the blinding white pain wiped everything from his mind, just for a few seconds, just long enough to still his racing heart.
‘We are all implicated now,’ Ramy hissed. ‘We cleaned that room. We hid the body for you. To protect you. We’ve all lied a dozen times now; we are accessories in this crime, and if you go to the hangman, you doom us all. Do you understand?’
Chastened, he hung his head and nodded.
‘Good,’ said Ramy. ‘Now back to bed.’
The only silver lining to this whole grotesque affair was that he and Ramy were finally reconciled. The act of murder had bridged the gap between them, had blown Ramy’s accusations of complicity and cowardice out of the water. It didn’t matter that it had been an accident, or that Robin would take it back immediately if he could. Ramy no longer had any ideological grounds to resent him, for between them, only one of them had killed a colonizer. They were co-conspirators now, and this brought them closer than they ever had been. Ramy took on the role of comforter and counsellor, witness to his confessions. Robin didn’t know why he thought speaking his thoughts might make anything better, for saying any of it out loud only served to make him more confused, but he was desperately grateful that Ramy was at least there to listen.
‘Do you think I’m evil?’ he asked.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘You’ve been saying that a lot.’
‘You’ve been ridiculous a lot. But you’re not evil.’
‘But I’m a murderer,’ he said, then said it again, because the words were so absurd that the very act of forming the vowels felt bizarre. ‘I took a life. With full deliberation, with full intent – I knew what the bar would do to him and I threw it, and I watched it break his body, and in the moment before I regretted it, I was satisfied with what I had done. It wasn’t an accident. It doesn’t matter how much I wish I could take it back now – I wanted him dead, and I killed him.’ He took a shuddering breath. ‘Am I – what kind of person do you have to be to do that? A villain. A blackhearted wretch. How else does that happen, Ramy? There’s no in-between. There’s no rule under which this is forgivable, is there?’
Ramy sighed. ‘Whoever takes a life – it will be as if they killed all humanity. So says the Qu’ran.’
‘Thanks,’ Robin muttered. ‘That’s comforting.’
‘But the Qu’ran also speaks of Allah’s infinite mercy.’ Ramy was quiet for a moment. ‘And I think . . . well, Professor Lovell was a very bad man, wasn’t he? You acted in self-defence, didn’t you? And the things he did to you, to your brother, to your mothers . . . perhaps he did deserve to die. Perhaps the fact that you killed him first prevented unforetold harm from coming to others. But that’s really not your decision to make. That’s God’s.’
‘Then what do I do?’ Robin asked miserably. ‘What do I do?’
‘There’s nothing you can do,’ said Ramy. ‘He’s dead, you killed him, and there’s nothing you can do to change that except pray to God for forgiveness.’ He paused, tapping his fingers against his knee. ‘But the question now is how to protect Victoire and Letty. And your turning yourself in doesn’t do that, Birdie. Neither does your torturing yourself about your worth as a human being. Lovell’s dead, and you’re alive, and perhaps that’s what God willed. And that’s as much comfort as I can offer.’
The four of them took turns losing their minds. There was an unspoken rule to this game: one of them was allowed to break down at a time, but not all of them at once, for the duty of the saner heads was to talk the mad one down.
Ramy’s favourite way of panicking was to voice all his anxieties in extravagant, incredibly specific detail. ‘Someone will go to his cabin,’ he declared. ‘They’ll need to ask him a question – something inane, something about the arrival date or about payment for passage. Only he won’t be there, and they’ll ask us about it, and finally somebody will get suspicious and they’ll search the whole ship, and we’ll pretend we’ve no idea where he’s gone either and they won’t believe us, and then they’ll find the bloodstains—’
‘Please,’ Victoire said. ‘Please, for the love of God, stop.’
‘Then they’ll send us to Newgate,’ Ramy continued, intoning grandly as if narrating an epic poem, ‘and St Sepulchre’s bell will ring twelve times, and a great crowd will gather outside, and the next morning we’ll be hanged, one by one . . .’
The only way to get Ramy to stop was to let him finishing narrating the entire sick fantasy, which he always did, with more and more ludicrous descriptions of their executions every time. They actually brought Robin some relief – it was relaxing, in a way, to imagine the very worst that could happen, since it took the terror out of the unknown. But it only ever set Victoire off. Whenever these conversations occurred, she’d be unable to sleep. Then it would be her turn to lose her head, and she’d nudge them awake at four in the morning, whispering that she felt bad about keeping Letty up, and they would have to sit above deck with her, whispering inane stories about whatever came to mind – birdsong, Beethoven, departmental gossip – until the gentle reprieve of dawn.
Letty’s bad spells were the hardest to deal with. For Letty, alone among them, did not understand why Ramy and Victoire had come so readily to Robin’s defence. She assumed they’d protected Robin because they were friends. The one motive she understood was that she’d seen Professor Lovell seize Robin’s collar in Canton, and abusive fathers was something she and Robin had in common.
But since she saw Professor Lovell’s death as an isolated incident, not the tip of an iceberg, she was constantly trying to fix their situation. ‘There have to be ways to come clean,’ she kept saying. ‘We can say Professor Lovell was hurting Robin, that it was self-defence? That he’d lost his mind from stress, that he began it all, and that Robin was only trying to get away? We’d all testify, it’s all true, they’d have to acquit him – Robin, what do you think?’
‘But that’s not what happened,’ said Robin.
‘But you could say it’s what happened—’
‘It won’t work,’ Ramy insisted. ‘It’s too dangerous, and more, it’s a risk we absolutely don’t need to take.’
How could they tell her she was being delusional? That it was insane to imagine that the British legal system was truly neutral, that they would receive a fair trial, that people who looked like Robin, Ramy, and Victoire might kill a white Oxford professor, throw his body overboard, lie about it for weeks, and then walk away unscathed? That the fact that she clearly believed all this was only evidence of the starkly different worlds they lived in?
But since they couldn’t tell her the truth, Letty was undeterred. ‘I’ve got a new idea,’ she announced after they shot down her self-defence proposal. ‘So, as you all probably know, my father’s quite an important man—’
‘No,’ said Ramy.
‘Just let me finish. My father was rather influential in his time—’
‘Your father’s a retired admiral, put out to pasture—’
‘But he still knows people,’ Letty insisted. ‘He could call in some favours—’
‘What kind of favours?’ demanded Ramy. ‘“Hello, Judge Blathers, here’s the thing – my daughter and her dirty foreign friends have had their professor killed – a man crucial to the Empire, both financially and diplomatically – so when they’re up for trial I’ll need you to just go ahead and proclaim them innocent—”’
‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ Letty snapped. ‘What I’m saying is, if we tell him what happened and explain it’s an accident—’
‘An accident?’ Ramy repeated. ‘Have you covered up accidents before? Do they just look the other way when rich white girls kill people? Is that how it works, Letty? Besides, aren’t you on the outs with the admiral?’
Letty’s nostrils flared. ‘I’m only trying to help.’
‘We know,’ Robin said quickly, desperate to diffuse the tension. ‘And I’m grateful, truly. But Ramy’s right. I think it’s best that we keep all this quiet.’
Letty, glaring stiffly at the wall, said nothing.
Somehow they made it back to England. Two months passed and one morning they woke up to London on the horizon, shrouded in its familiar gloomy greys.
Feigning Professor Lovell’s illness throughout the journey had turned out to be simpler than even Victoire had expected; it was apparently very easy to convince an entire ship that an Oxford professor had a remarkably weak constitution. Jemima Smythe, for all her efforts, had finally grown tired of her clammed-up company, and made no efforts to draw out their parting. The sailors said hardly as much as a word of farewell when they disembarked. No one paid much attention to four travel-worn students making their way through the Legal Quays, not when there were goods to unload and pay to collect.
