The Knot

PRAISE FOR MARK WATSON AND HIS NOVELS:

ELEVEN

‘Funny, sharply observed and unexpectedly moving . . . The connections are ingenious and there are some very dark undertones, admirably handled’ The Times

‘A moving story with a twist about how our lives touch others in ways we don’t even realize. If you loved One Day by David Nicholls, this is for you – and will stay with you long after the last page’ Cosmopolitan

‘Watson’s latest novel proves he has a gift for tender prose and emotive storytelling . . . Eleven is an intelligent, witty and heart-warming tale with a significant message – and his most accomplished book to date’ Time Out

‘In a neatly plotted series of events, eleven characters tumble domino-like towards the conclusion, a result initially sparked by a single happening one snowy winter’s day. Watson’s prose displays a delicate touch and, unsurprisingly given his stand-up roots, there are plenty of perceptive observations’ The List

‘Loved it. Devoured in a day. He has such a fine tone’ Tim Minchin

‘A great read, showing not only Mark’s sense of humour but his brilliantly acute observation of human nature . . . Sad as well as funny with a fascinating set of characters. It really is difficult to put down. If you like Nick Hornby or David Nicholls this is a must-have for the summer’ North West Evening Mail

‘By turns moving, hilarious and always heartfelt – the kind of book Nick Hornby fans will adore’ Daily Telegraph, Australia

‘Hugely recommended. Gentle, compassionate, unusual and thought-provoking’ Chris Cleave

BULLET POINTS

‘Brilliantly hilarious and hilariously brilliant . . . William Boyd and Woody Allen have a bastard lovechild and his name is Mark Watson’ Stephen Fry

‘It is unnervingly accomplished’ Observer

‘A fledgling Nabokov for the Big Brother generation’ Independent

A LIGHT-HEARTED LOOK AT MURDER

‘An intelligent, humane and desperately funny tale’ Independent

‘Packed with brilliant observation’ The Times

‘Will Self with humility’ The List

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To Paul

PROLOGUE

You are at a wedding at a country church one Saturday. The bride and groom are friends of yours from university, the latest in a long line to tie the knot over the past couple of years. The women’s high heels sink slightly into the soft ground of the churchyard, where gravestones bear faded names. The crowd trickles through the enormous bell-shaped door to be met by those unmistakable church smells: old wood, stale flowers, dusty books.

You watch the players preparing for action. The vicar in his stifling robes has another wedding to do after this one; the photographer sprinkles fag-ash onto the sacred grass. The organist tootles away in welcome, sending surreptitious texts in between tunes to arrange the delivery of his new fridge. You’re aware that almost identical scenes are being played out simultaneously around Britain. You’ve been to five weddings this year, and came close to getting married yourself once: you’re at the sort of age where these events seem to litter the calendar, especially in the summer months.

The service rattles by. The vicar pauses mock-theatrically for a second after inviting the congregation to declare if they know any reason why the couple may not be joined in matrimony. There is silence and everyone laughs. When he pronounces the lovers married, applause and gentle whooping ring around the old beamed roof. The photographer, forbidden to use his flash during the service, fiddles with a long lens. The mother of the groom bats away a tear as the organist bashes out the recessional and the married pair walk triumphantly through the beaming ranks of their friends.

At the reception in a nearby hotel you sit next to a man you vaguely knew at university who is now an anaesthetist. There is soup, chicken, booze. The best man’s speech includes a handful of jokes he plundered from a website the night before last. The photographer, still on duty, prowls the function room for informal shots of relatives. He dampens his hunger with a spare bowl of soup, meant for someone who cancelled at the last minute. Eventually the dining gives way to dancing, tentative at first, then energetic. Some of the older people are now sitting with cups of tea at the fringes of the room discussing recent family developments, nibbling doubtfully at slices of the freshly cut cake. You kiss the groom on the cheek. You dance with the anaesthetist until he slopes off to the Gents and you don’t see him again.

By now you have had four glasses of wine and consider the day a big success. In a heady mood you join in the dancing. The longer the dancing goes on, the more completely you forget about the organist, the vicar, the waiters, the photographer: all the people for whom the wedding, the biggest day of the participants’ lives, was simply a stint at work.

The photographer has been on his feet – or occasionally his haunches – for seven or eight hours by the time he finally packs the various lenses into their cases and stashes them in his bag. On the memory card of his camera are more than five hundred pictures of people he doesn’t know Unnoticed by anyone, bag slung over his shoulder, he leaves the celebrations. He loads the bag carefully into the boot of his Escort. He sits at the wheel for a few moments, poring over an aged book of roadmaps: he’s never quite got used to these new navigation gadgets. When he snaps the light off again, he realizes how long a day it has been.

He smokes a last cigarette, stubs it out in a plastic ashtray and starts up the engine. It will be late when he gets home.

This has been my Saturday-afternoon routine for more than thirty-five years. I’ve heard Mendelssohn’s march more than a thousand times. I have seen marriage vows broken on the same day they were made, witnessed a jilting at the altar, slept with a bridesmaid when I should have been taking her picture, watched a man die of a stroke as his newly wedded daughter was leaving the church. I don’t think there is anything that can happen at a wedding which I haven’t seen.

And yet of the tens of thousands of people I have photographed, very few would recognize me if they saw me today; in fact few would remember that I was ever there. That may sound a pessimistic thing to say, but being invisible has had its advantages.

Part One

I

I was born in 1950 and given the inauspicious name of Dominic Kitchen. I am seven years younger than my brother Max and nine years younger than my sister Victoria. Being the youngest member of the family by such a margin gave me a lingering feeling of being permanently behind everyone else, especially my brother. If I found something out, Max would already know it; whatever I achieved, he would either have done it already, or looked into it and deemed it unworthy of his attention. In short, I’d turned up too late. Max himself did everything possible to encourage me in this belief.

On one of London’s many Park Streets, where we lived at number 40, a lot of houses had been bombed a few years earlier, and many of the others – as Victoria once cheerfully remarked – were so ugly that they ought to have been. Between the uneven semis, London’s austere post-war sky hung like a bowl of dirty water. There was a corner shop where Victoria worked at weekends; a bit further along, a pub called the Shipmate fuelled up the Irish labourers who were plastering the area back together. Finsbury Park itself was half a mile down the road, and it was here I went with my mother on Saturday afternoons, to bob to and fro on the wet swings, while everyone else was at the football. My father was a sports journalist, covering Arsenal for the local paper, though his writing style suggested a much grander audience. When I think of being very young, I remember lying in bed in the corner of Max’s room he had reluctantly surrendered to me, listening to Dad downstairs wiring his reports to the office. ‘Arsenal Defeated by Virtuoso Goal.’ A patient chuckle, as his words were misheard at the other end. ‘No, no: virtuoso. V, i, r . . .’

My earliest memory is being lifted up by Dad to throw a scrap of bread at the one duck hardy enough to brave a foul February afternoon.

The duck watched me throw the bread for some minutes before sidling over, as if humouring us. ‘Here he comes!’ said Dad, holding me out over the water like a trophy. ‘What lovely luck, to see a duck!’ This was easily the funniest sentence I had heard in my four years, and I squealed with laughter. A few minutes later he repeated his success – ‘what a great hoot, to see a coot!’ – as a snow-white forehead emerged from rushes. And then on the way out of the park, ‘I never heard of so many birds!’ as a well-aimed throw of more bread brought a bickering pack of pigeons to our feet. Every boy looks for proof of his father’s greatness: mine was Dad’s ability to make up rhymes.

He had a fine head of black hair which never went grey, and glasses which gave him the appearance of intellectualism. ‘These,’ he used to say, tapping them, ‘saved me from the Army.’ On winter afternoons his glasses misted up and he wore a red-and-white football scarf, knitted by Mum years before. Mum had no interest in football; her only opinion on the game was that a man ought to wear a nice scarf when watching it.

It wasn’t until I was six or so that I was allowed to make my first visit to the Arsenal ground with Max and Dad. I was given an old scarf of Max’s and tottered along apprehensively behind him, amid a gang of shouting, smoking, laughing men in cream coats and hats. I had no real enthusiasm for the game; just a strong sense that, if I managed to enjoy it, I would raise myself in their estimation. The stew of the crowd thickened through the narrow streets leading up to the football ground, and strange ingredients were thrown in: hollering programme-sellers, policemen on enormous horses. It felt as if everyone were converging on the stadium not for entertainment, but for some serious and frightening purpose. Max talked showily about different players, ignoring me as best he could, and sighed each time Dad took my arm to guide me around a new obstacle.

‘That,’ said Max, pointing at a sign for Victoria Street, ‘was named after our sister.’

‘Really?’

He snorted. ‘Of course not. My God, you’re thick.’

‘No need for that, Max,’ said Dad, too mildly to make any impression on my brother. Neither of our parents raised their voices as a rule, and certainly not to reprimand Max, who was top of his class, talented at cricket, and would end up at Oxford.

He was a streaky, wily kid, with greasy curls and an expression of cunning which scarcely ever relaxed. They say if you see the boy of seven, you see the man, or something like that: I’m getting fuzzier on these things as I get older. Anyway, it was certainly true of Max. In the faded leather album of my baby photos, Max’s face appears creased in calculations of what I will cost him in attention. It’s a fox-like face, unboyishly nuanced and knowing, and it seems already to know the high-flying life in store: the pin-striped shirts and monogrammed pens, the financial operations, the easy, cynical banter with blonde divorcées in West End nightspots.

When we got inside the stadium, the mass of bigger humans was even more daunting: thousands of white faces packed together, so tightly it was impossible to look at one and say which body it belonged to. Dad went off to join his colleagues in the press box, and though I heard him say ‘Look after him’, I knew Max had no such intention. The terrace was jammed with limbs and bodies; behind me a boy of about sixteen was using my shoulder as a shelf to get a better view. There was a vast roar as the teams took to the field, and it swelled as the game progressed. Each surge of noise had a threatening quality; I felt as if the shouting were out of control, might sweep me physically off my feet. Max joined in hoarsely, his just-broken voice rising in confident yells. I wanted desperately to pee, but could not ask my scornful brother where to go, and would never be able to make my way back.

Eventually there was a goal, and the men all around us yelled louder than ever, rocking with delight. The crowd staggered this way and that across the terraces, like a pantomime horse whose actors are going in different directions; I lost my footing and cracked my knee on the concrete. Tears sprang into my eyes as a stranger yanked me to my feet. Max glanced across in distaste and, with a demonstrative sigh, beckoned me to follow him. Without taking his eyes off the game he led me up the long slope of steps and delivered me to the press box. Dad was hunched over his notebook scrawling the strange hieroglyphics used by journalists before computers arrived.

‘What’s up, Dominic? Not enjoying the game?’

I shook my head wretchedly.

‘Come and help me with the report, then.’

The atmosphere of studiousness in the press box was comforting. The journalists sipped mugs of grey tea and conferred with each other. ‘Who took that shot?’ ‘Danns, I think.’ ‘Oh well,’ said Dad, ‘they’ll never know, anyway, they weren’t here.’ A laugh from everyone. The journalists were all bespectacled and kindly-faced, like him: for some while afterwards I thought all reporters had the same pair of glasses, the way firemen had helmets. In between his note-taking, Dad amused me by pretending to speak to various imaginary characters under the desk. ‘It’s a goal, Mr Mole!’ A couple of the other reporters tried to join in: ‘Close game, Mr Mole!’

‘That doesn’t rhyme,’ I objected.

‘He’s right, Clive,’ said Dad, and everyone laughed again. I was delighted to find that, here in his workplace, Dad was the person everyone listened to.

‘Perhaps you oughtn’t to come until you’re a bit bigger,’ he suggested as he left the box, shaking hands with each of his colleagues, and I nodded gratefully. What I really wanted, though, was not a reprieve from football, but the secret of enjoying it, as everyone else seemed to.

The next time Arsenal played, I stayed at home, watching Victoria prepare for a party by trying on hat after hat from her formidable collection. My mother bustled about in the kitchen, baking a cake and singing in her absentminded way, ‘The way your smile just beams . . . the way you something-something.’

Dad and Max came home at half past five, Max full of shrill bluster about the referee – ‘Bloody idiot should have brought his guide dog!’ With them came Mr Linus, our next-door neighbour. Mr Linus was athletic-looking, nimble, as thin as the washing line that hung in his garden. He was an antiques dealer, with a moustache like the ones sported by pilots in war films. His wife was the physical opposite: pink and flabby as a blancmange, slow-moving, always propping herself heavily against the fence to gossip loudly with my mother. Although he sometimes went to the football with Max and Dad, Mr Linus supported the rival team, Tottenham.

‘So, has Dominic been down the Arsenal yet, or is he doing the decent thing and holding out for a proper team?’

‘No, Dominic doesn’t like football,’ Max called from the hall.

‘Doesn’t like it? Blimey O’Reilly,’ said Mr Linus, sipping his tea.

This was the first time it was spoken as a fact, and almost from that moment sport and I became official enemies. But it was still the key to Max’s acceptance, so from time to time I tried to join in his noisy skirmishes with other teenagers on our street. One Sunday afternoon they were kicking a tennis ball around; some lump of a youth hoofed it into the garden of an unfriendly old couple who were renowned confiscatory. There were general groans. Max summoned me from my vantage point in our patch of front garden.

‘Reckon you can get over that wall?’

My heart sagged. ‘I’ll try.’

‘If you can get the ball back,’ said Max, ‘you can play.’

I scrambled over the wall, skinning my knee, and scampered onto the forbidden lawn expecting to be shouted at. I fetched the ball and got back over the wall and the game went on just as before. Not sure which team I was meant to be on, I ran around after the rush of shrieking boys, always a few steps behind, never getting to kick the ball.

‘I thought you said I could play,’ I said to Max, next time there was a pause in the game.

‘You are playing. You just aren’t any good.’

There was a worse snub early in my first year at secondary school. Max was a prefect by now and about to apply to Oxford; at night, he studied soundlessly under the Anglepoise lamp, whose white glare nudged at the edges of my eyelids as I tried to sleep. If I shuffled around, or fell asleep and started to snore, he would sigh peevishly. ‘Can you not be quieter? I’m trying to work.’

Towards the end of the Christmas term we were playing rugby, as on every Wednesday afternoon, on a pitch which successive weeks of matches had raked up into a broth of mud. It was horribly cold and my hands were pink and stiff and caked in dirt. At one point I had shoved them down my jumper, only to be passed the ball; I fumbled it and was knocked down enthusiastically by a twelve-stone boy who already had a moustache. When at last it was time to go I ran to the pavilion where we were meant to change before being ferried back to school in ancient creaking buses. The changing rooms smelled sourly of sweat and of liniments used by older players, the stench of sport: it hung so densely in the air that I doubt they have got rid of it even now, more than forty years on. The floor was strewn with clumps of muck shaken from boots, and little puddles of water left by those brave enough to stand in the icy showers. Sometimes the class troublemakers would sweep your clothes off the changing bench into the puddles: this was called ‘puddling’, and everyone went out of their way to be friends with the boys who were best at it.

That afternoon my fingers were so leaden with cold that I struggled to do up the buttons on my shirt, and saw with alarm the other boys getting ahead of me in the race to be dressed. My right boot was tied with a double bow, and I’d run the laces along the underside to make sure they stayed fastened: one of the pieces of advice Dad had given me on my first day. Now, mud was packed down so thickly along the bottom of the boot that I couldn’t get at the laces, and my freezing fingers picked in vain at the knot. I tugged at the boot, more and more furiously, but it was so filthy that it was impossible to grip. I sat in my shirt, tie, shorts and boots, comically half-dressed, mud on my hands, feeling the cold grip of panic.

The engines of the buses were growling outside and the quickest boys were already on their way. One or two glanced pityingly at me. The changing room emptied, the boot was stuck, and I wanted to weep. In desperation I tottered outside, my boots as useless as ice-skates on the hard ground. I had no plan, just a vague hope of finding a teacher who might help me discreetly, but then I caught sight of Max.

He was walking with a mate, a rogue called Rowlands who was sometimes to be found lurking around our kitchen, accepting handouts of cake from Mum. Now he cupped an illicit cigarette in his hand. ‘Max!’ I called.

‘Hey,’ said Rowlands with a mocking grin, ‘is that Kitchen Minor?’

Max shrugged and walked on as if I were not there.

‘Yes!’ I called after them. ‘I am! Max!’

‘I believe it is your brother, Kitchen,’ said Rowlands, clawing his hair out of his eyes.

‘Good detective work,’ said Max, still not looking round.

‘Max, help!’ I shouted, but the two of them went on their way.

My cheeks burned; the wind whistled through the pavilion and lashed at my exposed legs. The bus driver honked at me to hurry up. I went back into the changing room, gathered up my jumble of muddy sportswear, and hobbled miserably across the car park. The sight of me half-dressed brought a throaty chorus of mirth from the thirty or so boys on the bus; even the teacher broke into a grin. ‘An interesting interpretation of the school uniform, Kitchen,’ he said. ‘Might you have taken off your boots and put your trousers on?’

‘I couldn’t get them off,’ I muttered. This was received with even more laughter. I sat in the one remaining seat next to an unpopular, odd-smelling boy called Stephens, looked out of the window and pretended not to cry.

When we got back to school things were even worse; I had to trail across the playground in my disarray, avoiding everyone’s eye. I’d begun to feel as if I would be dressed like this well into my adult life. By the school’s imposing black gates I looked for Mum, whose fingers could have unpicked a knot tied by the devil himself. Although the school was close enough to us to walk home, she liked to come and collect me, the youngest of her children. But today something had detained her, and here instead was my sister Victoria.

She was wearing a hat, as usual: a red beret, beneath which her hair flicked at the tips of her ears. She had a Louise Brooks haircut, very short and even; it was too short for Mum’s liking, one of several traits our mother found unbecomingly boy-like. Victoria wore a green double-breasted coat with large black buttons, which I’d heard our mother describe as ‘an extravagance’. The colour alone was a shock to the eye. In the middle of the dowdy grey-and-brown crowd she stood out like a living person in a waxwork museum. Her large lips curled into a quizzical grin as I neared.

‘Dommo! What the hell happened?’

‘Stuck,’ I muttered.

‘Was Max not around?’

‘He ignored me.’

‘I’ll kill him when we get home,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Right, hang on for dear life.’

She gestured to the school gates. I gripped the ironwork and Victoria clamped her hands around the gooey edges of the left boot, prising it from my foot quite easily. Behind me, what had begun as further jeering was beginning to die away. Victoria was twenty, and there was an ease about her which none of the boys – and in fact few of the parents or teachers – could match. She turned her attention to my other foot.

‘Christ,’ she said, wiping mud from her hands onto her own boots, ‘this is a stubborn little fucker.’

A wolf-whistle came from one of the watching crowd behind me. Victoria’s head swivelled, reminding me of one of the birds in Finsbury Park, and her glinting eyes sought out the whistler, a rat-faced youth called Sanderson. She shot him a look of such disdain that his face went bright red in half a second. The other boys’ braying now fell on him, and I felt my back straighten. Then I lurched sideways, almost thrown off my feet, as Victoria gave a mighty tug on the boot.

‘I told you to hang on!’ We both laughed; she wiped her hands again and renewed her grip. I looked at her fingernails, painted red, now smeared with dirt. She gave a little shout and tore the heavy boot away from my foot.

‘Victory is ours!’

There was good-sported clapping from a couple of the watching parents, and she wiped her brow with the back of her hand in an exaggerated gesture, like a mountaineer at the summit. Then from somewhere among the spectators came the voice of Rowlands, my brother’s friend. ‘Heard you were good with your hands!’

Neither I nor my classmates could have said exactly what this meant, but Rowlands’ gang began to laugh. It was now Victoria’s turn to colour. Then she drew back her left arm and let the boot fly. In front of the startled spectators it skimmed through the air and struck Rowlands clean on the ear. He yelped and staggered backwards, his hand pressed to the side of his head. There was an uproar of laughs, shouts and cheers. Victoria scooped up my school bag and grabbed my arm.

‘Shoes on! Let’s run!’

Like an outlaw’s sidekick I charged down the road with her, heart pounding in my ears as I ran to keep up, exhilarated. We ran until we reached the Shipmate on the corner of our road, panting and laughing wildly.

‘Well, Dam,’ she said as her breath came back,’ don’t tell Mum, but we may have to go shopping for a single boot.’

•   •   •

After this celebrated episode Victoria became a regular talking point among my peers, and sure enough