The Searcher

by Tana French

“I’m contrary by nature,” Cal explains. “The more people try to shoo me away from something, the more I dig my heels in. I always was that way, even as a little guy.”

“You can do that; no one’ll give you hassle. People around here respect a man who keeps to himself. It’s just a woman that makes them nervous as cats.”

“Etiquette is the stuff you gotta do just ’cause that’s how everyone does it. Like holding your fork in your left hand, or saying ‘Bless you’ if someone sneezes. Manners is treating people with respect.”

Over the last few years it’s been brought home to him that the boundaries between morals, manners and etiquette, which have always seemed crystal-clear to him, may not look the same to everyone else. He hears talk about the immorality of young people nowadays, but it seems to him that Alyssa and Ben and their friends spend plenty of their time concentrating on right and wrong. The thing is that many of their most passionate moral stances, as far as Cal can see, have to do with what words you should and shouldn’t use for people, based on what problems they have, what race they are, or who they like to sleep with. While Cal agrees that you should call people whatever they prefer to be called, he considers this to be a question of basic manners, not of morals.

Everyone was always talking about talking, and the most moral person was the one who yelled at the most other people for doing the talking all wrong.

“Morals,” he says in the end, “is the stuff that doesn’t change. The stuff you do no matter what other people do. Like, if someone’s an asshole to you, you might not be mannerly to him; you might tell him to go fuck himself, or even punch him in the face. But if you see him trapped in a burning car, you’re still gonna open the door and pull him out. However much of an asshole he is. That’s your morals.”

“If you don’t have your code,” Cal says, “you’ve got nothing to hold you down. You just drift any way things blow you.”

The wind combs the heather and gorse with a low ceaseless rustle. Its smell has a sweetness almost too cold to catch. The sky is a fine-grained gray, and from somewhere in its heights a bird sends down a pure wild whistling.

That’s what that shift in the air meant, the one he and Trey both felt as they squatted by the sideboard, the cold implacable shift that’s familiar to him from a hundred cases: this isn’t going to have a happy ending.

Whatever people do, right up to killing, nature absorbs it, closes over the fissure and goes on about its own doings. He can’t tell whether this is a comforting thing or a melancholy one.

the look like there are none of the usual processes between his ideas and his actions, and the ideas aren’t ones that would occur to most people’s minds.

This seems like the kind of thing he should know instantly, on instinct, but he has no idea whether it would be right or wrong. This unsettles him right down to the bottom of his guts. It implies that somewhere along the way he got out of practice doing the right thing, to the point where he doesn’t even know it when he sees it.

He had spent most of the past year fumbling in the dark trying to disentangle complications, and complications behind complications; he didn’t seem to know how to stop.

He was so deafened by the locust buzz of all the anger and the wrongness and the complications surrounding him, he couldn’t hear the steady pulse of his code any more, so that he found himself having to turn to other people’s—a thing that in itself was a fundamental and unpardonable breach of his own.

Cal wouldn’t have known how to explain that it wasn’t that he couldn’t handle the job any more. It was that one or the other of them, him or the job, couldn’t be trusted.

’Twasn’t the laws that were the problem.” He looks out over the fields, at the pink sky. “It’s a hard aul’ place, this. The finest place in the world, and wild horses wouldn’t drag me out of it. But it’s not gentle.

Despite not having touched a drop of booze yesterday, he has the same feeling he associates with hangovers, a heavy, prickly disinclination towards everything around him. He wants today over and done with.

He doesn’t want to say what he’s about to say. He would like to leave this afternoon undisturbed, let it unroll itself in its own slow time across the newly plowed fields, to the rhythms of their work and the west wind and the low autumn sun, right up until the moment when he has to wreck everything.

Cal feels a flood of relief, chased by something thornier and harder to identify.

Cal realizes, with a grief so deep and exhausting that he wants to sink to his knees and put his forehead down on the cool grass, how badly she wants to keep coming round.

Cal understood: he had hoped she would be pleased, but he had seen enough victims to understand that trauma shapes feelings into forms you would never expect.

The attack had cracked her mind all over, like a dropped mirror where the pieces are still in place but the whole doesn’t function right any more.

It makes the situation bloom with a seductive, ephemeral intimacy, like they’re the last people left awake at a house party, caught up in a conversation that won’t count tomorrow morning.

“Are you gonna get hassle, though?” “What, for being a loose woman, like?” She grins again. “Nah. The aul’ ones’ll talk, but I don’t mind them. It’s not the eighties; it’s not like they can throw me in a Magdalen laundry. They’ll get over it.”

“Seems like I’m always looking for something to hold me down. It just never works out that way.”

To quiet her, he starts to sing, so low it’s half a hum, hoping Lena won’t hear through the wind. The song that comes out is “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” same as he used to sing for Alyssa when she was little and couldn’t sleep. Gradually Trey relaxes. Her breathing slows and deepens, and the shine of that eye fades among the shadows.

Lena may not be the most accommodating person in the world, but she alters the balance of the house in a way he likes.

There’s always gonna be just one more thing left to do. You gotta know when to stop.”

He looks at that beat-up, half-comprehending face and feels his throat thicken for all the things the kid is just starting on, all the rivers she’ll have to struggle across that she hasn’t even glimpsed on the horizon.

The morning has turned lavishly beautiful. The autumn sun gives the greens of the fields an impossible, mythic radiance and transforms the back roads into light-muddled paths where a goblin with a riddle, or a pretty maiden with a basket, could be waiting around every gorse-and-bramble bend. Cal is in no mood to appreciate any of it. He feels like this specific beauty is central to the illusion that lulled him into stupidity, turned him into the peasant gazing slack-jawed at his handful of gold coins till they melt into dead leaves in front of his eyes. If all this had happened in some depressing suburban clot of tract homes and ruler-measured lawns, he would have kept his wits about him.

Cal learned a long time ago never to underestimate the spectacular natural wonder that is people’s stupidity.

Cal looks at her and finds himself floored by both the vast importance and the vast impossibility of saying the right thing, at a moment when he can barely piece together a thought.

“All’s you can do is your best,” he says. “Sometimes it doesn’t work out the way you intend it to. You just gotta keep doing it anyway.”

He wonders, without necessarily believing in ghosts, whether their ghosts wander. It comes to him that even if they do, even if he were to take up his coat now and go walking the back roads and the mountainsides, he wouldn’t meet them. Their lives and their deaths grew out of a land that Cal isn’t made from and hasn’t sown or harvested, and they’ve soaked back into that land. He could walk right through those ghosts and never feel their urgent prickle. He wonders if Trey ever meets them, on her long walks homewards under the dimming sky.

“That’s what I came looking for,” he says. “A small place. A small town in a small country. It seemed like that would be easier to make sense of. Guess I might’ve had that wrong.”

he wonders whether she would lie down with him, and whether, if she did, he would wake up in the morning knowing, for better or for worse, that he was here for good.

The day has a strange, unshakable wartime calm, as if the house is besieged so thoroughly that there’s no point thinking about it until they see what happens next.

He’s moved into a place that he knows well from the job: a circle where even the air doesn’t move, nothing exists but the story he’s hearing and the person telling it, and he himself has dissolved away to nothing but watching and listening and readiness. Even his aches and pains seem like distant things.

In the window behind his head, the fields are a green so soft and deep you could sink into them. Wind blows a whisper of rain against the glass.

Life seems like a big thing when it takes four days for all of it to leave a man. When it’s gone in a few seconds, it looks awful small all of a sudden. We don’t like to face up to that, but the animals know it. They’ve no notions about their dying. It’s a little thing, only; you’d get it done in no time. All it takes is one nip from a fox.

“We lose enough of our young men,” Mart says. It seems to Cal that he should sound like he’s defending his actions, but he doesn’t. His eyes across the table are steady and his voice is calm and final, underlaid by the quiet patter of rain all around. “The way the world’s after changing, it’s not made right for them, any more.

Now there’s too many things you’re told to want, there’s no way to get them all, and once you’re done trying, what have you got to show for it at the end?

The women do be grand anyway; they’re adaptable. But the young men don’t know what to be doing with themselves at all.

Even though he understands that in many ways it’s the truth, the words don’t come out easily. It frightens him that he can’t tell whether he’s doing the right thing or the wrong one.

She’ll be looking for ways to feel like the world can still be normal. Laughing is good.”

He thinks about how things will grow where his own blood soaked into the soil outside, and about his hands in the earth today, what he harvested and what he sowed.

He brings out the cake, too: when he was a kid, shouldering the weight of heavy emotions always left him hungry.