Killing Murgatroyd

I remember well the day that I killed Murgatroyd.

He was in my class at school, and an avid concertgoer. The summer when I killed him he was often up at the Royal Albert Hall, a regular in the long queue for places in the Prom area.  One Saturday, he was absent from class.  We all knew that he was Promming again, even though his mother would write that he had been sick and unable to attend school that day.  At some point the form master asked "Where's Murgatroyd?" - and before I could stop the words, driven by who knows what adolescent impulse to tell a secret or simply to curry favour, I had blurted out "He's up at the Proms, Sir!" - and immediately wished that the earth would swallow me up as my schoolmates looked on with horror at what I had done.

I felt terrible at the time for having snitched - albeit involuntarily on a schoolmate.  But as with a hundred other experiences of childhood I learnt to live with it, and soon forgot it.

As I soon forgot Murgatroyd after I left school to go to university, and our ways parted.  We had not been particularly close, so when I heard a few years later that he had been killed in a car accident I naturally regretted his death but felt it barely at all.  I realise now that this was wrong.  Because in fact I caused his death in that accident.

When Murgatroyd came back to school the week after that Saturday, he was naturally reprimanded by the form master for lying.  An embarrassing moment for him, no doubt, but one that seemed to have to further serious repercussions.  Except that it led to his death.  Because by my thoughtless action I had changed his life.  Remove my words from that Saturday and you remove the knock-on effects on Monday.  And with a different Monday there would have been a different Tuesday, and so on all the way down to that fatal hour when he was killed in a car.  If the car had been a second earlier or a second later, would he have been killed?  Probably not.  So my words that day had led, slowly but inexorably, to his death, whose responsibility was therefore mine.

This, of course, is absurd.  My action may have changed Monday for him, but by Tuesday the ripples it sent out into his life were tiny. By Wednesday they were almost non-existent.  In terms of demonstrable causality, my actions could have had no direct effect on that last day of his life.  I am therefore absolved of his death.

Or am I? As we now know through Chaos Theory - which, however much it suffers from over-exposure, is a respectable mathematical technique with proven applications and dramatic consequences - the tiniest changes in a system may feed through to huge effects later on.  Although my faux pas that childhood Saturday may not have caused the accident, it did alter the world infinitesimally.  More relevantly, it altered Murgatroyd.  Had I not said those fateful words, his reaction at the time of the crash might have been sufficiently different that he would have lived.  In this sense, then, I did kill him, just as all of us have killed everyone who has died after we were born, simply by virtue of our world-changing existence.

(2.5.92)

See also Moody Sonnets - Maths, Murgatroyd And Murder

Index