The Death of Eli Gold
The Death of Eli Gold
David Baddiel
A novel from David Baddiel, comedian, columnist and author of the critically-praised The Secret Purposes.As Eli Gold, a famous old writer lies dying in a hospital in New York, his family gather around his bed. His first wife Violet is too old to travel from London but Harvey, their son, who has never emerged from the shadow of his overpowering father, makes the journey. And there is Colette, a six-year old daughter from a second marriage, struggling to make sense of the fact her father is about to leave her.The Death of Eli Gold is a mesmerising family drama which confounds the expectations anyone might have that David Baddiel as a TV comedian. It is the work of a very fine novelist, here writing at the peak of his powers.
DAVID BADDIEL
The Death of Eli Gold
For W.
Contents
Cover (#u97de1515-07af-559e-86e0-c0d357f7f71f)
Title Page (#uc3402cce-7b9f-5955-8d1e-ea45c27b92ea)
Epigraph (#ua3477898-a93a-57bf-9268-e3266df09290)
Part One (#ub93d482f-46cd-561f-9eb5-885844a6dfb7)
Chapter 1 (#u58538085-4b5d-5242-be19-c1ae28fdea45)
Chapter 2 (#u31739788-f34d-5834-a40d-b5277964bf46)
Chapter 3 (#u88cd26fa-c0cd-5a90-8188-a9ec8b5c1f3e)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by David Baddiel (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
… he persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that having sex with whomever you want whenever you want is the cure for ontological
(#ulink_2aa3c483-1536-5568-b254-56ffea31388c) despair
– David Foster Wallace,
reviewing John Updike’s Towards the End of Time, New York Observer 1997
Denise at thirty-two was still beautiful
– Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
I cannot live without Arthur, despite certain inner resources
– Cynthia Koestler, suicide note
(#ulink_ad257351-e244-57f7-a62c-1c449d3358ce)When the same essay appeared in his collection Consider The Lobster, published in 2004, DFW changed ‘ontological’ to ‘human’.
Part One
Chapter 1
My famous daddy is dying. Some grown-ups think I don’t understand what that means, but I do. Jada doesn’t. When her grandma died, Jada told me her mom said that she’d gone to heaven. OK, I said. But then, three days later, Jada told me that she’d asked her mom when she was coming back. So I asked Mommy, and she said she wasn’t; that she’d gone forever. So that’s why I know what it means. It means you go away and you don’t come back.
Me and Mommy go to the hospital every day to see Daddy. The hospital is called Mount Sinai Hospital. Mount Sinai was the place in Israel where God spoke to Moses, and gave him the Ten Commandments. I read about this in a book Elaine gave me called The Beginner’s Bible: Timeless Children’s Stories. When I was younger – like five or something – I learnt the Ten Commandments by heart. I don’t know why I did that. I didn’t even know what all those words meant then. Graven. False witness. Adultery. But I still remember the three that really matter. Thou shall not kill. Thou shall not steal. And honour your father and your mother.
The hospital isn’t much like the picture of Mount Sinai, like it looks in the book. It’s just a big building. It’s right on the park, and from the big window at the end of Daddy’s room I can see a lake. There’s a lake in the picture in The Beginner’s Bible: Timeless Children’s Stories, too, in the chapter about Moses. Moses is halfway up the mountain, holding the Ten Commandments, and looking like he’s really mad about something; there’s a crowd of people at the bottom and, behind them, a lake. Sometimes, when I’m looking out that window, I pretend that the lake in the park is the lake in the book, and that Daddy is Moses, even though he’s always lying on his bed now, and can’t stand up, or hold anything, especially not two big stones. But yesterday, Mommy came over to the window while I was pretending and told me it wasn’t a lake at all, it was the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. I said: what’s a reservoir? She said it’s a man-made body of water. I didn’t understand what she meant by a body of water. How can a body be made out of water? I wanted to ask her, and also who Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is, but then Daddy made that strange noise which is the only sound he makes now, and she rushed back to the bed.
The first time me and Elaine went to the hospital, there were loads of photographers outside. That’s because my daddy is famous. Not like Katy Perry, or Justin Bieber, or any of those guys: he’s famous in a different way. Mommy made me a scrapbook of bits cut out of newspapers from when I was born, and nearly all of them call him the world’s ‘greatest living writer’. I haven’t read any of his books, because I’m still too young to understand them. But when I’m older – maybe eleven or something – I’ll read them all.
Elaine told me to look down when the photographers tried to take a picture of me. Some of them shouted at me – ‘Hi, Colette! Colette! This way!’ – and I nearly looked up, but I didn’t. I just kept looking at the shoelaces in my new Gap shoes, at the white tips of the pink strings.
‘How do they know my name?’ I whispered to Elaine.
‘Because of Daddy,’ she said, but she was walking quickly and keeping her head down, too, and didn’t really explain what that meant. Then one of the photographers shouted at Elaine, ‘Are you another daughter?!’ and it was good that I had my head down because it made me laugh because she’s my nanny and is, like, sixty-five or something!!
Daddy has been dying for a long time, even since before I was six. I know, because on my sixth birthday Elaine gave me The Heavenly Express for Daddy, which is a book to help children understand what happens when their father dies. It had a lot of pictures in it of a man who is a daddy, but much younger than mine, with black hair instead of white, and no beard; but, like mine, he gets ill and has to go to a hospital. Then, God comes and sees the man, and tells him that he’s going to put him on a special train, to come up to heaven and live there with him – but then after that I don’t know what happens, because Mommy took the book away, because she thinks Elaine likes God too much. She took the book away, and said she didn’t believe that children, just because they were young, shouldn’t be told the truth. Especially me, she said, because I’m Daddy’s daughter, and Daddy doesn’t believe in God, even though some of his books are sort of about Him. Daddy, she said – well, she called him Eli, sometimes she calls him Daddy and sometimes Eli – Eli, she said, represents a touchstone of truth in this world. I didn’t know what these words meant, but Mommy closed her eyes tight when she said them and I always know that’s when she really wants me to know something, so I made sure I learnt them off by heart, like my three Ten Commandments.
* * *
Coming through arrivals at JFK, Harvey Gold thinks that, these days, he would make a good immigration officer. What do they do, these guys? They look at faces. They sit in a booth and they check real face against photo-face. Photo-face. Real face. Photo-face. Real face. All day. And me, what do I do all day, he thinks, these days? I check faces. Every face I see, I check: I check it over helplessly, looking, examining, investigating. Harvey, of course, is checking for something else, although he wonders how different it is. The immigration officers, they’re also searching for changes, for what happens to the face when it moves from stasis, from when it’s arranged. They’re checking to see how the face looks once it’s not presented, face-on.
Whatever, he thinks, standing in line amongst the travellers, tired and bright and buzzing: I’d be fucking great. Especially – his red-eye eyes flick upwards, the pupils seeming to scratch against the back of the lids – in this light, this take-no-prisoners, angle-poised airport light. When eventually al-Qaeda decide it’s time to smuggle Osama bin Laden into America, he could have the best fucking Afghanistani surgery his siphoned-off dirty dollars can buy, he could come to my booth cut up and dyed and pixillated, and still I’d spot him. He could come in sex-changed. He smiles to himself at the thought, prompting the businessman standing next to him in the queue to frown. If he had looked closely, which he does not, the businessman might have noticed that Harvey’s smile is not pure, that it contains within it a lingering frond of bitterness.
Harvey’s iPhone, a pocket harp, tings in his trousers: a text. He scrabbles in his jeans, which are tight around the crotch – he feels the crotch of his trousers is always shrinking these days, from the disgust that he carries eternally around with him. He knows without looking that the text will just be AT&T offering him their services, but he glances anyway – and so it is, a message of hope and welcome to America as if from the Pilgrim Fathers themselves. He is about to force the phone back through the thin slits of his front pockets when he notices another text, this one from Stella. He taps on it with his thumbnail, a thumbnail kept long as a throwback to when he used to play the guitar and imagine himself on stage with his foot up on black monitors. Darling, the text says, hope the flight wasn’t too tough. My love goes out to everybody who’ll be there, but most to you. Be safe. XXX
He slides the screen three windows across with his thumb, to find Deep Green. Deep Green is a chess app that Harvey is addicted to. He takes it out at the first sign of boredom or entrapment – states in which his anxiety disorder, as various therapists have christened it, is exacerbated. He now reaches for it instinctively in doctors’ waiting rooms, illegally in traffic jams, and in all queues, because he knows that if he starts to play, the end of the wait will arrive faster. The downside is that Deep Green always beats him. He plays it on Level 4, halfway through its eight settings, and knows he should go down a level but feels that that would be pointless: that any joy there might be in defeating the computer – which for reasons unknown to Harvey has christened itself Tiny: every time he loses he has to suffer a small, smug ting, accompanied by a gloating Checkmate! Tiny wins! – would be undermined by the knowledge that he had to lower its game to get there.
He has only just begun the game – although his thumb is already hovering over the RESIGN button – when he senses the businessman beside him twitch with irritation. He looks up, and realizes that everyone is now waiting for him to cross the green line and approach the booth. He puts the phone away, fumbles for his passport in the bumbag strung badly across his thighs, and remembers at the last moment: the American one. Harvey is, in so many ways, a dual citizen, and US law, always keen to assert its global difference, states in the clearest of tones that all travellers in possession of an American passport must enter the country showing the Spread-eagled Eagle. The immigration officer, who is narrowing her eyes at Harvey as if already interpreting his delay as suspicious, is a woman of about thirty-five. As he approaches the bitter smile returns, and with it the memory of the sex-changed devil, Osama.
Let us be clear about this. Harvey is not smiling – and was not smiling earlier – at the idea of Osama bin Laden in women’s clothes. He is smiling to himself in the manner of a man who has accepted, unhappily, something shitty about himself; who, on this issue and many, many others, has pushed the RESIGN button in his soul. He is smiling to himself because he is thinking: obviously, obviously I’d fucking spot him if he’d had a sex change. Because then he’d be a woman: and women get checked by his eyes a hundred-and-fourteen-fold. This woman, this immigration officer; Harvey will look at her face much more closely than she will his. Even as her eyes perform a thorough and competent scan of his face, flicking occasionally to its corollary on the page – greying, jowly, passport-stern, behind the watery eyes just a hint of teenage memory of going into those photo booths with friends and making stupid faces far too close to the lens – however microscopic her examination, it is as nothing compared to the manic burrowing of Harvey’s gaze all over her skin, Photoshopping her, running her face through the Rolosex in his head, gauging, gauging, gauging: smoothness, symmetry, vulnerability of eye, fullness of cheek, of lip, of hair, thickness and tastefulness of make-up, and, most importantly, of course, resistance or otherwise to the torrent of ageing. Who knew, he thinks, the American phrase entering his head like a passport stamp? Who knew that the power of work, and indeed of international security, would be as nothing compared to that of sexual psychosis?
‘How long have you been out of the country?’ she says, startling Harvey: sometimes when he is staring at them like this he forgets that women can speak. He feels heat flush through him in response. He has hot flushes regularly – he is virtually menopausal with them – but they are not brought on by rising infertility, nor by the temperature of the June New York morning, but by fear. He has nothing to be frightened of, or at least nothing concrete, but for some time now this has been irrelevant to his physical response.
‘I don’t know,’ he says, his voice a little strangled, and aware of its laconically flat Englishness. ‘Ten years? Maybe a bit longer?’
Her eyes, which are brown, and which Harvey has already noticed have running underneath them a series of what women’s magazines call ‘fine lines’, harden.
‘That’s a long time.’
She has taken it as an affront, Harvey realizes. For these sentries posted at the gates of the promised land such a length of absence is suspicious. It is suspect, the very idea that one of their own might want to be away from the mother lode for this long a stretch. What possible delights could anywhere else in the world hold for so long? He feels a movie need to say something weary and sarcastic, but quells it underneath a nod of agreement.
‘Business or pleasure, this trip?’
This makes Harvey pause. He stops running the immigration officer’s skin through a series of forensic sight-based (and, in his imagination, touch-based) tests. What is the answer? It’s multiple choice, clearly, with not enough choices.
‘My father is dying,’ says Harvey, as blankly as he can: he is trying not to make it a proclamation. It is not difficult to assume the blankness: as with all information of great import, both personal and political – births, deaths, relatives, wars, injustice, all the stuff of Hallmark Cards and CNN – the fact of his father’s death is taking a while to bed in. He knows it should affect him – he engages with the idea that such information should shake him to the core, should easily shake down the fog of desire and depression that pumps ceaselessly from the pores of his exhausted, clumpy brain – but viscerally, physically, he doesn’t feel it. He thinks he will, eventually, and is waiting for the moment to strike, but in the meantime remains afloat, abstracted, like a man who has been told that the plumber will arrive at some point between nine and five thirty.
But telling this to the immigration officer doesn’t come out as blank as he wants: he is still trying to put across an idea of himself, the man so socked to by death that he has not known how to answer this question and therefore has told the bald truth. And he senses that there is something sexual here, something flirtatious, or at least, gender-biased: it is not a self that he would have presented to a man. He is trying to make a dent in this woman’s imperviousness by doing the vulnerable thing. Of course, if he had really wanted to make a dent, he realizes, he should have said, ‘My father – Eli Gold – is dying.’
It still works, however. Abashed, muttering sad sorries, she hands back the blue book and waves Harvey on into America. In doing so, their fingertips touch briefly above the eagle’s claws, and for her it is less than nothing, but for Harvey it is a roof of the Sistine Chapel moment, divine electricity passing between their fingers. It passes immediately – Harvey is not a fool, he doesn’t believe in his fantasies; rather, he is persecuted by them – but it leaves its scar, its never-happening scar, with all the others.
He fits the American passport awkwardly back into his overstuffed bum bag, and walks away towards the sunlit plains of the glass-roofed Arrivals terminal. Then he remembers Stella’s text, and puts his fingers back through the half-opened zip, searching for the iPhone. They alight first on his house keys, and then on all the loose puddles of change that, from the outside, make this bag look like it is suffering from a terrible allergic reaction. How could the phone have gone? He was just looking at it! Did he hand it over to immigration officer with his passport? This is why he is wearing the stupid bum bag – a thing that he knows no one wears any more, and which stops him walking properly – in order not to lose stuff. He stops. His life has always been plagued by this, the everyday disintegration of absent-mindedness, especially as regards the whereabouts of vital personal objects – keys, phones, wallets, tickets, other people’s address cards, documentation, jewellery, scarves, gloves – anything that can be carried about the person. But until his soul started to go bad, absent-mindedness was just something he accepted, a default fault, a thing which fucked up his life in little ways every day but wasn’t worth steaming about; now, however, if he realizes he has lost something, he can’t override it, he hasn’t the energy, neither physical nor spiritual. He hasn’t the momentum. These discoveries, these interruptions in his tiny progress, just make him want to stop. Finding out that he has left his wallet at home will make him want to sit down in the street; if he is in the car and the keys are not in the most obvious pocket, he will consider never driving away. The other day he was on the toilet and realized, too late, that he had forgotten to restock the paper roll, and felt, immediately, that there was nothing to do but stay sat on the black MDF oval forever, the shit on his anus hardening over time to a brittle crust.
He stops now, and again wants to sit, here on this faintly marbled floor scuffed with the marks of a million suitcase wheels; sit, cross-legged perhaps, until someone – God, his dying father, a woman, any woman – takes him in hand, finding for him his phone and his sanity. And then, just at the moment when the heavy hands of depression have started to push, gently, almost lovingly, on his shoulders, it rings, reminding Harvey that he put the phone back in his pocket and not in the bag at all. He pulls the iPhone out from its burial in a mini-dump of tissue dust, looks at the screen, and inwardly crumples: Freda. He considers for a moment not answering, pressing instead the DECLINE button, because his relationship with the caller is declining, because her call will only be about the decline of his father, because he, Harvey, seems to be now, perpetually, in decline. He taps ANSWER.
‘Freda.’ The strange thing that caller ID gives you, the need not to say hello?, the end of that querulous enquiry, the end, too, of the way that people can garner some small knowledge about what you think about them simply by the rise or fall in your voice when you do find out who it is: replaced instead by this, this ironic, flat certainty.
‘Harvey. Hi. How are you? How was the flight?’
He shrugs, then feels a bit silly for shrugging on the phone. ‘It was an overnight flight, in coach.’ Coach: a sliver of self-disgust goes through him at having slipped so quickly into the idiom, just because he is in this land, or maybe because, reflexively, he is trying to please Freda. ‘But seven hours isn’t so long. And it’s five times the price for Club. What hotel room would you ever pay five times over the odds to spend seven hours in?’
She doesn’t answer this. The iPhone emits a mournful crackle, before Harvey asks the question he knows she is waiting for.
‘So how is he?’
The pause before she replies is so long, Harvey has time to locate the Baggage Reclaim sign and begin trudging in that direction. As he does so, his gaze is routinely snagged by passing women. His neck hurts from not turning, from the urgent need to follow them as they move past, into places where he is not.
‘Not much changed,’ she says, after long enough for Harvey to have forgotten that she is there.
‘What do the doctors –’
‘Anytime. At best, two months.’
Harvey stops. He has known that his father must have roughly this amount of time left, but Freda’s bald statement of it comes at him like a fist. He had not been expecting this answer so soon: in fact, he now can’t quite formulate what the second half of his question was going to be – ‘What do the doctors think/plan to do/give him for the pain/ look like?’ He was only going to go for some general question, and work up slowly to the big Specific. He knows why Freda is speaking like this: the directness, the refusal to couch, speaks of her ownership of his father – and of his death. With Eli Gold, she must always have arrived first, even at the place of pain.
Harvey’s eyes, moistened a little, more by tiredness than tears, stare into the defocusing distance.
‘Right.’
‘We’ve booked you a room at the Sangster. It’s a new hotel on East 76th Street. It’s very good.’
‘You have?’
‘Yes. I know it’s a bit further away from Mount Sinai then we’d like, but it’s a block from Fifth Avenue, and you can get a cab uptown from there.’
‘No, I wasn’t complaining. I –’ He reddened. He had assumed he would be staying at their Upper East Side apartment, had already imagined sating his curiosity about his father and Freda’s private life by flicking through notebooks and diaries, or perhaps just through living in their furnishings and amongst their artwork; but now he saw how much of a presumption that was, never having been there, and having seen his father only twice in the last ten years, both times in London. He saw how untaken for granted the idea of him staying there must be, and how clearly Freda was confirming his fringe status in the present family circle.
‘We’re still staying at home, but I’m thinking of staying nights at the hospital. It depends on how Eli is. I probably will at some point. But Colette will still be at home.’
‘OK,’ said Harvey, uncertain how to take this, wondering about the buried implication that he might be some sort of paedophile, that, obviously, he couldn’t stay in the same apartment as an eight-year-old girl. He wants to protest that he is very good with children – that he has an unmolested, undamaged nine-year-old son himself – but he quells the urge, partly because Freda may have meant nothing of the sort, and partly because Jamie is, clearly, damaged.
‘Well, thank you. The Sangster. That’s very generous of you.’
He colours as he says it, having realized he has assumed that Freda – or, rather, the ‘we’ that Freda refers to, a mystical duality of her and Eli – will be paying. He wonders if he should enquire, but hesitates, not wanting to get into a detailed discussion about whether they are picking up the tab just for the room, or if minibar and hotel porn surcharges will also be included.
The iPhone crackles again, drawing attention to Freda’s failure to say ‘Don’t mention it’.
‘So shall I …? When shall I …?’ says Harvey, trailing off, accepting his secondary role.
‘Maybe go to the hotel, now … and you can come tomorrow morning?’ She speaks with the American inflection, the vocal hike indicating a question, a possibility for discussion: but Harvey knows better.
‘Tomorrow morning? I was hoping …’ God, how much trailing off am I going to do, he thinks. He is an uncertain fellow, Harvey, in an uncertain situation – the old son returning to see the dying dad, surrounded by his new family – and now it seems as if Freda’s take-no-prisoners certainty has crushed his ability to make even the smallest statement of intent. And, also, he can’t match her: he can’t fold back her steeliness, can’t say that he thinks he should come straight away, because maybe his father might die today. His fingers reach without thought for the plane ticket in his inside pocket, with its devastatingly open return, something that had cost Harvey substantially more money when ordered – a charge which had provoked a moment of irritation, not with his father for the indefiniteness of his time left, but with the airlines, for not having a special close relative’s last days’ exemption clause. It isn’t fair, he thinks, it’s not fair that I have to pay extra because my dad is dying and I don’t know when to book the flight home. Harvey’s heart is heavy with such unfairnesses.
‘Well,’ said Freda, ‘today we’ve already got quite a lot of people visiting … my mother’s here now, and then a group of Eli’s colleagues from Harvard in the afternoon – plus there was talk of Roth coming by some time this week, so … obviously he gets very tired …’
‘Maybe I’ll just go to the hotel and call later.’ This is the best defiance Harvey can offer.
‘Yes. Please do.’ There is a voice off, high and insistent.
‘Yes, darling, in a minute. Mom’s on the phone.’
‘So we’ll speak later.’
‘Yes. Good to have you here, Harvey. Eli will be so pleased to see you. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye.’ He clicks the OK button on his phone, and forces it back into his jeans. Roth? Philip Roth? Harvey loves Philip Roth more than he has ever been able to admit to his watchful-for-literary-slights father. He feels intense desire to meet the dark bard of American sex and clear the decks of his depression, making him wonder, angrily, if he shouldn’t just turn up unannounced at this great literary lunch-time: he is, after all, Eli Gold’s son, the only one of the three adult children who has been prepared to make the journey. Then self-awareness settles like soft snow back upon him, and he realizes how far such an action is beyond him, he who has always hated confrontation anyway, and these days need only to be confronted with the smallest of obstacles for his depleted energy reserves to drain away to nothing.
Harvey moves into the Baggage Reclaim Hall, with its always palpable dynamic of tension and relief, as exhausted passengers wait nervously for their cherished belongings to be spat onto the oval belts. His conveyor, No. 4, is sparsely populated now, the phone call having slowed down his movement here. He can see his suitcase, some Samsonite-alike with pull-out handle – again, due to the particular nature of this particular journey, he didn’t know which of the numerous bags piled up under the stairs to pack – forlornly beginning what looks like its twentieth or thirtieth rotation. A woman he had noticed on the plane, sitting four or five rows in front of him on the opposite side, is there, beginning to look anxious. She is in her early twenties, dirt-blonde long hair parted like that of a Woodstock girl dancing towards the crackly camera, sea-blue eyes, and, even under the whip-lash Baggage Reclaim lights, skin so smooth that if Harvey were to reach out and touch it – as every cell in his hands is urging him to do – his fingers would slip.
Her bag, pink like bubble-gum, tumbles out of the conveyor hatch, the relief registering on her features, softening them even further, and making Harvey remember something one of his many more sexually opportune friends had told him once, about how, while waiting at airports for luggage, he would try and steal a furtive glance at the labels on the suitcases of any waiting attractive women, and then offer to share a taxi in that direction. As she picks up the bag, Harvey, impelled by the thought, does flick his eyes downwards and, catching sight of the zip code, thinks it might be an address near his hotel, but never has any intention of going through with all that stilted ‘Hey, I see you’re going my way’ shite. It just tears another little track through him, the idea that it could be done, that someone else could do it.
An older woman joins her, and helps her heave her bag onto a trolley. She moves away: she hasn’t registered Harvey’s presence, even cursorily. He looks at his watch. He now has time, far too much time. He looks again at his iPhone and ponders the text from Stella. I should call her back, he thinks, let her know I’ve landed. But then the other thing grabs his heart with its cold hands, and, instead, he sits down on the edge of Conveyor Belt No. 5, to watch his suitcase travel round Conveyor Belt No. 4, round and round and round, like a lone ship on the greyest, most mundane of seas.
* * *
Eli Gold’s first wife, Violet, is in her room just finishing lunch when she sees the item on the television news. It has been a day on which she has already veered from her normal routine. She usually watches the one o’clock news in the lounge, even though some of the other residents would always be fast asleep in there by then, and Joe Hillier’s snoring, in particular, was more than loud enough to drown out the words of the newsreader. The more able residents at Redcliffe House are allowed to make their own lunch and eat it in their rooms, and Violet takes this option as often as she can, preparing it – baked beans on toast, a cheese sandwich, a tin of ravioli – in the tiny kitchenette off to the side of the room and eating at the table by the window. Lunch always reminds her of Valerie, who is forever hinting that Violet should move to somewhere more structured, which means, Violet knows, one of the fascist old-age homes, a place where her independence would be taken away, her privacy disregarded, and the other inmates comatose, just because Valerie couldn’t bear the idea of her sister eating on her own from time to time. After lunch, she would normally get the lift down from the fourth floor, and, if it was not wet, walk the path around Redcliffe Square Gardens, which, even with a stick, would not take her more than fifteen minutes, and she was always back at Redcliffe House by five to one, ready to watch the news. She could take the lift back up to her room and watch it there, but even though Violet was a woman who liked to keep herself to herself much of the time, she felt there was no point in living in a place where so many other people lived if she never mingled with them at all: and so she always went into the lounge following her walk, and, with her cream winter coat on her knees, watched the one o’clock news.
Unless it was wet, as on the day she hears the news about Eli, a day on which she hadn’t even bothered going downstairs to check the pavements: the rain had been hitting her window all morning, a downpour blown diagonal across the pane by the wind. Over time, an errant branch from the neighbouring hostel’s enormous oak tree had grown along the walls of the house to lie pressed against her sill, and today she could count the drops on its leaves. She had just finished eating a few slices of ham and some crackers, and had already risen to take the plate into the kitchenette, when the item began.
She is shocked by seeing his face on the screen – at first some footage of him, recently giving a lecture, with the beard and the big shock of grey hair that she vaguely knew he had now, followed by an old black and white photo from round about the time they were married. For a split second, Violet thinks they might even show a photograph of her: him wearing his GI uniform, her on his arm in the white floral dress that she used to wear on their first dates.
They don’t – how could they, she chided herself, when the only photos that have survived of us together are all in that shoebox under the bed? I don’t suppose he kept any. The news moves on to a shot of a tall building in New York, which Violet gathers is a hospital. A doctor, an Indian, is standing in front of a crowd reading some sort of statement. Without her hearing aid she cannot hear what he is saying, but his name – Ghund … khali? – is subtitled below. She puts the plate down and turns away from the kitchenette, feeling her knees crack beneath her. She goes over to the television, a Hitachi ex-rental model made in 1973 which she brought with her when she left her flat in Cricklewood. Even turning the volume up full, she has to stand right beside it, bending her face to the screen to hear what is being said.
‘… is said to be …’ the reporter was now saying ‘… conscious rarely, if at all. His family are by his side. But it seems unlikely at this stage that this man, considered by many to be the world’s greatest living writer, will come home from hospital again. This is Rahim Khan, for BBC News, in New York.’
The screen cuts back to the main studio. The newsreader looks reverent for a second, before going on to a story about an earthquake in Sri Lanka. Violet watches for a minute, then turns it off. She sits back down by the window. The rain is easing, but even if the sun were to come out and dry the pavements, she would not go out for her walk now. Age has made Violet a creature of routine: the big surprise for her – the failing of her body – is easier to manage if she limits all other surprises. Last week, while moving the dial between her touchstones, Radios 3 and 4, she heard a plaintive voice on the wireless singing the words no alarms and no surprises, please, and it made her pause, thinking how true to her own desire that imprecation was now: since some irretrievable day in the past, all news – everything from finding one day that the gate to Redcliffe Square Gardens was unaccountably locked, to feeling the arrival on waking of some new bad ache in her bones, to hearing that another of the residents has died – all news seemed to have become bad news, and so she’d rather it all just stopped, that the news was all in. The only way she could make her life approach this condition was through habit.
But news would still intrude, breaking through the fragile circle of routine. Here it was: Eli in hospital; Eli, who she had not seen or heard from in over fifty years; her first and only husband; the only man to have touched the tender sections of her body except for the surgeon who must have at least held her breast for a few seconds before applying the scalpel to remove it in 1987. The world’s greatest living writer: did that include the letters yellowing in that shoe-box? If she took them out and read them now, which she has not done for many years, would the parchment-like paper mirror her skin, of which the words so sweetly sing? Violet Gold feels suddenly nauseous and stands up, heading as quickly as she can towards the bathroom, more aware than ever of the bandiness of her legs, the ridiculousness of her movement. By the time she gets there the wave has passed, and she feels relieved not to have to bend or, worse, kneel in front of the white china and the tiny puddle – not so much because of the horror of having to vomit, but because of the possibility that she might not be able to get up again. She lowers the plastic seat, and sits, in reach of the red panic button on her left.
Why this? she thinks. Why this physical reaction to the news about Eli? It is not unexpected: the surprise is that he’s lasted so long, what with so many wives – how many since her? Three? Four? – and his generally cavalier approach to all things healthy – although that was a long time ago, and he might have changed. And when they were young everything was different, anyway. He smoked, but so did she: so did everyone. She was smoking when they first met, she remembers; it threw off Eli’s chat-up line. ‘Oh, damn,’ he had said, the first words she heard him speak. He had been leaning against a post in the Rainbow Corner, watching the men and women dance: it was 1944, a Friday night, and the Bill Ambrose Band were playing. Violet was with her friend Gwendoline, who was a hostess, a word Violet was never sure about – the Rainbow Corner was simply the drinking and dancing section of the Red Cross Club in Shaftesbury Avenue, where many American soldiers congregated during the war, and there were always jobs to be had for girls who wanted them, but Violet was never entirely clear what being a hostess involved. Mainly, it seemed, never saying ‘no’ on being asked to dance, and Gwendoline had certainly fulfilled her obligation that night: Violet had spent most of the evening on her own watching her friend’s flower-patterned skirt twirling around five identical pairs of olive-brown trousers. She had just decided she was going to leave after finishing this last cigarette when Eli spoke.
‘Damn …’ he repeated.
‘What?’ she replied eventually, realizing he was expecting some sort of reply from her.
‘You’re smoking,’ he said. His voice was low, a throaty rumble. Violet had met enough GIs by now to recognize it as defining him as from New York or its environs. She glanced at her own cigarette, twisting her hand to her face a little self-consciously.
‘Yes …?’
‘Well, that’s scuppered my plan.’ Violet’s face remained a mask of confusion; she wondered if she’d misheard him over the music. ‘To offer you a cigarette …’ he added helpfully, taking a sky-blue packet of Newport cigarettes out of his breast pocket. His hands, she noticed, were large. Finally she understood; her features relaxed into gentle mockery, the face she reserved for suitors.
‘You could always ask me to dance.’
He shook his head, pausing to light his cigarette. Violet remembers this pause clearly, almost more than anything else about their first meeting. He stopped his head, mid-shake, cocked his lighter, lit his cigarette, took in a deep draught of Newport smoke, and then continued the shake of his head before speaking again.
‘I don’t dance,’ he said, fixing her in his gaze. His face was impassive, challenging: not a hint of apology.
‘You don’t?’
‘I’m a man of words.’
‘I see.’
‘This lighter, for example … do you know what it is?’
Violet glanced down at the squat metal case. She had seen many of them, cupped in the crinkles of American soldiers’ palms.
‘What?’
‘It’s a Zippo. The lighter of choice for the American military. Since last year, Zippo have been producing and distributing them free to servicemen. We’ve all got them. But the shape …’ he weighed the lighter in his palm, the back of his hand moving gently up and down on the lever of his wrist, ‘… is actually modelled on an Austrian lighter. Can’t you tell? The heft of it, the dumb solidity. It’s so Teutonic. So Germanic. And yet …’ he patted his breast pocket ‘… we the Nazi-fighters keep them next to our very hearts.’
Violet felt at a loss to know how to react to this speech. She had never really heard anyone else talk like this – certainly not a soldier, certainly not a man trying to chat her up – and it seemed to leave her with nowhere to go. She understood his point, but could think of nothing to say in addition.
‘They give off a good strong flame though, don’t they?’ was what she said in the end, and instantly felt the banality of it. In answer, he flipped the lid of the lighter again, stroking the wheel twice before the blue flame rose once more from the wick. He moved it closer to her face: she could feel the warmth and smell the butane, its chemical scent dizzying her a little. Through the blue she could see his eyes, what seemed sadness in them now overridden by curiosity. There was an expression Gwen used about men – she used it a lot, in order to make their attention known – saying they were undressing her with their eyes; Violet felt something of this now – not that he was undressing her, because his eyes did not move from her face – but that sense of feeling a man’s eyes on your body, as if his sight were touch. It made her cheeks prickle. She felt, obscurely and for the first time, that when men are examining a woman’s face, their method of weighing her beauty is to search for flaws.
‘What’s your name?’ she said, because she wanted to know, but also because she wanted to be released from his gaze. He smiled, a wider grin than she expected, bringing his nose down over his mouth: he looked suddenly medieval, cartoonish.
‘I shall answer that in what I believe is the customary manner.’ He spoke in an exaggerated cut-glass English accent, waving his left hand in a florid eighteenth-century style. Before Violet had time to react, he stood on tiptoe, lifting the still aflame lighter above his head. It was only then that she realized he was quite a tall man: he had been slouching against the post, and bending down in order to have the conversation with her. He seemed to Violet almost to uncoil.
Her eyes went upwards, to the low ceiling of this section of the Rainbow Corner. Lifting the Zippo to the ceiling created a circle of light, revealing a messy sprawl of signatures, doodles and numbers burnt into the plaster, written by GIs keen to preserve something of themselves in this foreign country, before war or peace took them away. Dodds, 98205D she read, before the flame in the man’s hand began to move, forming a blackening line that slowly became the upright pillar of an ‘E’. Despite the general smokiness of the room, she could detect in her nostrils the acrid smell of burning plaster. A couple of other American soldiers, noticing this familiar custom being performed, clapped and cheered. The man – El someone, it seemed: was he Spanish? – seemed to be absorbed in his task. Most of the names on the ceiling were just scrawls, bearing the marks of having been written on tiptoe, in public and by drunken hands; he had the appearance, however, of deep concentration, as if he were Michelangelo on his back at the Sistine Chapel. The words were bold and clear, and he spent long enough on each letter to burn it thickly into the wood: it looked, by the end, more like an imprint, more like the International Shipbrokers company stamp that her fist had to plonk down over and over again on the envelopes at work, than letters inscribed by hand – by flame. When he had finished, he spent a little while looking up at his name, admiring his handiwork. Violet noticed that he didn’t have a very protruding Adam’s apple – there was no triangular skin stretch in the gullet pressing against his extended neck – which made her glad, as her previous boyfriend had done, and the feel of it pressing against her throat when they were kissing had always put her off.
‘Eli Gold …’ she said, intoning the words, brushing her blonde hair out of her eyes as she tilted her head back to read.
‘E-li,’ he said. He pronounced it ‘lie’. She had said ‘Ely’, like the town.
‘That’s a funny name.’
‘Is it? Eli, Eli, lema sabachtani.’
‘Beg pardon?’
‘It means God. Literally …’ And here he raised the lighter to the ceiling again, although this time unlit, ‘… Elia, the Highest.’
‘In what language?’
Eli’s face creased, his smile revealing his face to be lined for his age.
Somehow, it did not make him look old.
‘Hebrew, of course. Elia’s own language.’
‘Hebrew?’
‘I’m Jewish. On my father’s side.’
‘Oh,’ said Violet, who – having occasionally made the journey from her parents’ house in Walthamstow to Spitalfields for meat and vegetables – had seen some Jews, but only the ones in the big black hats with the curly sideburns. ‘I thought you were an American.’
Eli looked at her, his composure for the first time dented. The lines around his eyes all went upwards, as he stared at Violet’s pretty, open, easy face, a face standing firmly behind the straightforwardness, the frank neutrality, of her statement. Then he laughed, loud, long peals that seemed to drown out even the brass section of the Bill Ambrose band. Violet felt frightened, but unfathomably drawn to the fear. She looked up at his name, still smoking on the ceiling. A swell hit her soul and, as can happen in moments of epiphany, she thought she saw this moment as it would be described years from now, saying to friends, perhaps to children, that it was as if he had been burning the words Eli Gold into her heart. And she did say that, to friends if not to children, and soon came to believe that such was indeed the true quality of her experience. It was only later she realized that Eli had just been writing.
* * *
He is not certain he should be wearing black, in summer. It is not the heat – that is not bothering him, though he is used to the white chill of Utah – but thinks that it might, somehow, give him away. When, earlier, he had ventured into the hospital reception area, an orderly had looked at him suspiciously. This is paradoxical, as he is wearing it to fit in. Where he comes from, no one wears black: not even any of the younger, trendier Mormons, in their younger, trendier sects, the Bullaites, or Zions Order Inc., or The Restoration Church. But he is wearing it, because his third wife, Dovetta, told him that that was the first thing she noticed when she went to New York on her mission trip, On Fire for Christ: everyone wears black.
He wears a black jacket and a black T-shirt. Blue jeans, though. That feels self-conscious, as well, because he is fifty-five, perhaps too old for jeans. Although everyone wears jeans now, even old men; even old women. They hang off them, off their legs. This sense of himself as old, an old man in blue jeans, disturbs him. Not through vanity, even though he used to be a handsome man, and maybe still is, despite the stuck eye. It disturbs him because of the task ahead.
A lot of journalists and photographers are still milling about after the doctor’s statement. Some of them clearly think he is one of them. He has to be a little careful not to be seen in the back of shot when the TV cameras are around. He doesn’t want to be spotted by somebody, somewhere, on some Summit County TV, who might recognize him and question why on earth he is there, knowing that he could not be a well-wisher, or a mourner. Also, when the doctor was talking – when he was going on about blood cell counts and secondary infections and how the hospital was doing everything that could be done – he felt an urge to shout: to heckle. At the words ‘Mount Sinai Hospital understands the responsibility it has been given in caring for this particular patient’ the urge had felt almost uncontrollable; but he used the mental effort of memorizing the doctor’s name – it was a long Indian one, and later he will need to know it – as a means of distracting himself. But now he has decided to leave. It is too early in the process and he is too raw with it. He feels if someone asked him what he is doing here he may just blurt it out.
Plus, he does not even have a hotel. He has not thought anything through. There has not been space for it. He does not have the psychic energy. That is what Janey would call it. Janey is one of his children, the oldest of fifteen, the only one born of his first wife, Leah, before she died. She is a Mormon, but does not believe, as he does, that God was once a man; she rejects the Pearl of Great Price; and, most seriously, she rejects polygamy. She no longer lives with his family.
He remembers the moment of her leaving clearly. In 1993, the Church of the Latter-day Saints, in their regular Baptism of the Dead, baptized Adolf Hitler. Despite their differences with the LDS, his own church – The Latter-day Church of the True Christ – accepted this baptism. A year later, the whole family were at Mount Timpaganos Temple, the beautiful prayer hall only just built to serve the community of American Fork, when the dictator’s name came through in the list of The Endowed. Immediately, Janey got up and left. Next time he heard from her, she had moved to Independence, Missouri, to join the Community.
But he knew, even as he watched her pass through the door, under the mural of the angel Moroni, that Hitler’s baptism was just the catalyst. She had grown disenchanted when he had taken Sedona, his second wife’s daughter, to be his fifth wife. He had seen it when he had gathered the family around him in the living room of their then house, the one at the point in American Fork where East State Road becomes West State Road, and announced his intention. They were crammed in: the house seemed to grow smaller as the family burgeoned. Everyone else was joyful, clapping and rising to congratulate Sedona and her mother, but Janey just stayed on a chair by the window, staring straight at him. He returned her stare, blankly, neutrally, letting his good eye ask her what her problem might be; but this was hard to do, because so many of his wives and children were hugging him, and because her eyes were so full of hurt and disgust and anger. They held each other’s line of vision, while the others danced between them, until at last she turned away and looked through the glass towards the white-tipped mountains of the Utah Valley.
He decides to leave the area around Mount Sinai Hospital to look for a hotel. He cannot, though, afford any of the hotels in the mid-town area. This should not be part of my story, he thinks. I am an avenging angel; I have the weight of destiny on my shoulders. But I cannot afford any of the hotels in the mid-town area.
He walks and walks. His right arm, where he has a touch of arthritis in the elbow, aches with the weight of pulling his suitcase, a blue checked bag on wheels. On his left shoulder blade, the remnants of his tattoo – a Confederate flag, removed soon after joining the Church, because the head of their Temple, Elder James LaMoine McIntyre, known to everyone as Uncle Jimmy, explained to him that the body is perfected after death – itches. To keep him going he recites in his head, for every step, the names of his family. First, the wives: step, Leah, step, Ambree, step, Lorinda, step, Angel, step, Sedona, step, RoLyne. Then, for every step, a son or daughter: step, Janey, step, Clela, step, Fallon, step, Levoy, step, Leah, step, Darlene, step, KalieJo, step, Orus, step Rustin, step, Mayna, step, Prynne, step, Dar, step, Hosietta, step, Velroy, step, Elin. Then, a final step, and a final name: Pauline. Then he begins again. After he has been doing this for a few hours, it occurs to him that three of his children – Darlene, Rustin, Levoy – are, in fact, step-children. This takes him aback for a second, makes him stop. For a moment it strikes him as funny. But he represses the urge to laugh, and reorders it in his head as a sign, a small sign, that there is a pattern to all things. He walks on.
The list allows him to resist New York. He has never been here before – he has never been out of Utah – but he knows enough about it from when he was young, and from what he has seen on the internet, to understand that the City will distract him from his destiny. He keeps his head down, focusing on his feet, on hitting a new name with each foot, and refuses the City – he refuses Park Avenue, even as he walks all the way down it; he refuses the Chrysler Building and the Empire State and the Waldorf-Astoria and Grand Central Station and One And Eleven Madison and all the other temptations of the Kingdom of Man. He refuses even the yellow taxis and the steam rising from the street gratings and the hotdog sellers and the WALK/ DON’T WALK signs, the things about Manhattan that might chime with its movie self, and which might draw him in through living up to its mythology, revealing its icons like a peacock its feathers.
Just as he is getting too hot and tired to continue – the sun has been stoking the air all afternoon, and underneath his clothes his sacred white undergarments are heavy with sweat – he finds a cheap place, on East 25th Street, called the Condesa Inn. The Condesa Inn is a hippy hotel. He likes that. He was a hippy himself, once. He was a Mormon then, too, but a regular one, just born into the Church of the Latter-day Saints, and not too fussed about it neither. Him and his sister used to smoke a lot of dope together, and listen to a band called The Outlaws. He loved her most then. It was at an Outlaws gig when he first saw Jesus – the Azteca in Salt Lake, in 1975. Hughie Thomasson was really going for it, on ‘Searching’, their greatest song, their ‘Free Bird’. Hughie had just sung: Searching through the seven skies/for some place your soul can fly, and hit the strings of his Stratocaster, when he saw him: Jesu, the Lamb, rising from behind the drum kit, arms outstretched, smiling a smile that widened further as Hughie and Billy Jones dug into their guitar battle like the out-there Confederate heroes they were. It filled his heart with joy. When he told Pauline afterwards she was so pleased for him, even though she made a joke about how good the dope must have been that they smoked before they went into the club. He didn’t mind that joke. He knew she knew it was true: and that she would accept, in time, that he had to forsake Salt Lake City for American Fork, and the Church of the Latter-day Saints for the greater truth of the Latter Day Church of the True Christ.
He knows that the Condesa Inn is the hotel he should be staying in, because every room is painted in a different way, each by a different artist. The woman on reception, who looks like she may have been a hippy as well once, shows him photographs of the rooms that are available, and there is one with a picture of Jesus across the wall. The woman says it is not Jesus – she says it is the lead singer of the Flaming Lips – but he knows that it is, because the bearded half-naked figure is enveloped by an angel. Then the woman says:
– Well, if you want it to be Jesus, I guess it’s Jesus. It’s eighty dollars a night, shared bathroom.
He smiles a little, a smile the woman would not be able to read. At home, he shares one bathroom with twenty-one other family members. Most days, the waiting to get into it is so long he ends up going to the bathroom outside, behind the privet hedge that surrounds their small patch of land.
– Is it a smoking room?
– No. We don’t have any rooms you can smoke in any more. You have to go stand outside. Sorry.
– OK. Do you have wi-fi internet access?
– We do. It comes and goes a bit, but, yeah.
– How much does it cost?
– On the house. When you can get it, that is.
– Is there a password?
She picks up a card with the Condesa Inn logo on it, and a pen, and scribbles on the back: H98BCARL. She hands it over, smiling. He looks at it and feels disappointed. He had thought that this word might speak to him: he had thought it would be a word connected with his destiny, or maybe at least with their shared hippiness, OUTLAWS1, or something.
OK, he says, and goes up to the room, with his suitcase. They do have a porter in the Condesa Inn, but he does not want the porter to carry his suitcase, because he only has a small amount of money and cannot afford tips. It contains, along with two changes of outer clothes and five of sacred underclothes, his own copy of The Book of Mormon: An Account Written By The Hand of Mormon Upon Plates Taken From The Plates of Nephi, his Dell PC laptop computer, the photograph of his sister, before she was raped by The Great Satan, wearing her favourite red-check dress, smiling and waving, looking so fine, and his gun. It is the gun, an Armscor 206 .38, which he bought online from GunsAmerica.com, for $308, as new, that has meant that he has to travel all the way from Utah by bus; the gun that has meant he cannot travel by airplane. There are ways of getting a gun on an airplane – he has learnt this from surfing the web, from reading the posts of some of the jihadis – but the ways are difficult and he decided against it. He goes up to the room alone.
Inside the room, the picture of Jesus is bigger than it looks in the photograph. The only window looks out onto the back of some kind of kitchen, and the picture itself is not that brightly painted – Jesus is in a sharp profile, like he might appear on a playing card, and wears a dark red toga, in sharp contrast to the bright blue of the angels’ dress – but still, when he turns to face the mural, it nearly blinds him with light. This is proof for him that it is the Lamb of God, Lucifer’s spirit brother, again. He has to shield his eyes, which hurt like staring at the sun, something he did once when he was a kid during an eclipse, even though his father had told him not to. He did that because he didn’t understand why, if the sun was covered by the moon, you couldn’t look at it. He looked at that eclipse for five minutes, and it was beautiful, so beautiful he didn’t feel the burn in his right eye that would leave the pupil fixed in the middle of the socket, and working always at no more than 20 per cent effectiveness. He thinks of it now as his first intimation that knowing God, really knowing God, always involves pain.
The light fades. He sits on the bed. He takes a deep breath. The room is dusty. He feels as if he can feel the motes in his nostrils. He should change, but there is a comfort in the sweat of his sacred under-clothes drying on him, as if warmed by the heat and light coming off this Christ. He takes out his Dell, and waits patiently as it boots up, and then more patiently as it finds the Condesa Inn wireless signal. Poor, it says, red bars flickering into green. There is something that has been bothering him, bothering him all the way here on the Greyhound, looking out of the window as the landscape flattened towards the east. Google has been key for his destiny – Earth has shown him New York, Street View the area around 1176 Fifth Avenue, Images the internal layout of Mount Sinai, and it was the main search box which led him to The Material, there on unsolved.com – so he has feared being without it. To test it, he types the words ‘death penalty states united states’. It takes a while, but then it comes. He goes to Wikipedia first, an entry: The Death Penalty in the United States. A map comes up, in which most of the states of the country are red, but along the top, blue, a geographical clustering of mercy. The colour of New York, though, is confusing – half yellow, half orange. He goes back to the search box, and replaces the words ‘states united states’ with the words ‘New York’ and presses return again. The sixth entry is called Death Penalty FAQs. Scrolling down, the question appears, in bold: Does New York have the death penalty? And the answer: The death penalty was reinstated in 1995.
Nineteen ninety-five. Two years after his sister died: was killed. He could have done it any time over those two years. And he didn’t. A voice that seems not his speaks in his head: does he regret it? That’s what people are often asked about on TV: regret. And this voice is like a TV interviewer’s voice: polite, friendly, softly spoken. He knows this is not ‘voices in his head’. It is just something a lot of people do, imagine themselves being interviewed on the TV.
– No, he says, speaking out loud. I don’t regret it. He continues in his head: because then I was grieving, and because I thought Janey might come back then and she didn’t, and because I didn’t know until I heard the news that he was dying that I understood what it was that I had to do. It was only then that I knew my destiny. And besides, he is expecting to be caught, and imprisoned, and executed. He is not trying to commit the perfect crime. He is trying to avenge it.
– I don’t regret it, he says again out loud. He raises his chin while saying it, in an act of untargeted defiance, and as he does he catches Jesus’ eye, which looks down upon him with love.
Chapter 2
On arrival at the Sangster, Harvey Gold finds it difficult not to feel a tiny bit disappointed. He was not a man used to staying in five-star hotels if his father (or his estate) were not paying, and it might perhaps have been expected that he would only be grateful; or, if not actually grateful, at least so unaccustomed to this level of luxury as to be mollified by it. There are, however, a number of problems:
1. The Sangster, although a very beautiful hotel, is not what Harvey had pictured in his mind when, in the taxi from the airport – as a check and balance in his head to the oncoming deathbed visit – he had mused expectantly about the prospect of staying in a Manhattan hotel. For Harvey, although himself born on that island and technically a citizen of it, a stay in Manhattan still required a certain amount of cliché: that is, a room at least seventy storeys up, with floor-to-ceiling windows, giving out on a glittering nightscape of Koyaanisqatsi skyscrapers. The lift at the Sangster, however, travels to a maximum only of twenty-two floors, fourteen of which were extraneous to Harvey anyway, as his room was No. 824. It is perfectly comfortable – more than perfectly comfortable – but has a view only of the internal courtyard of the hotel, and is furnished in a faintly European style. Harvey’s entrance into the room, once he’d got over the initial flummox of American tippage – such a pain in the arse, he thinks, handing over a five to a somewhat unsmiling, virtually fancy-dressed porter – is accompanied by a small sinking of the heart, that once again he’d come to America and wasn’t staying with Kojak.
2. He is still not sure who is paying for the room. At reception, he had been asked for his credit card, along, once again, with his passport, but knew that this was standard procedure. Then again, it may have meant that the room was paid for, but he had to provide a surety for any extras. On handing over his HSBC Visa, Harvey had puffed up the courage in his rather pigeon-like chest, and said, to the autumnally suited man behind the desk: ‘Sorry … can I just ask: has my room been paid for in advance?’
It was a question he didn’t feel entirely comfortable asking, since it clearly indicated a hope on his part that it had been, and therefore was likely to generate a sense in the autumnally suited man that this particular resident may not easily be able to pay for the room should the answer be ‘no’. Harvey knew this was the case from the way he raised the tiniest eyebrow and drummed some code out on the keyboard of his computer.
‘It’s been reserved on an AmEx card, sir … yours?’
‘No, I don’t have American Express. Well, I do, but I don’t use it.’ This was true: a lot of shops in Britain didn’t take it, and long, long ago, Harvey had forgotten the PIN. He sensed, on saying this, a suspicion from the receptionist, a resentment not unlike that he had felt at the airport from the immigration official when it had become clear that he owned an American passport but had chosen not to use it: why would you possess such a jewel and not offer it in your palm to demonstrate your kingliness? Harvey felt he could hear the resentment in the way the man went back to his computer, in the heavy dents his fingers made on the keys.
‘I’m afraid I can’t quite make out from the reservation whether or not all charges are to be drawn on the AmEx card, sir. This may be because the booking seems to be open-ended …?’
He phrased the surmise as a question. Harvey felt moved to answer with the information that his father was dying, but sadly not to a nailed-down schedule, hence his room would indeed have been booked for an open length of time. But instead he just nodded and moved away to the lifts.
3. He doesn’t have a suite. On arriving in the room, his first action – before even opening the heavy oak doors of the TV cabinet to check if the pornography channel was hard- or soft-core – had been to take his Sony Vaio laptop out of its silver case, connect it to the Plug and Play wire, and go straight to www.theSangster.com in order to torment himself with what he did not have. Fourteen suites, he had discovered, feature Steinway or Baldwin grand pianos (‘in keeping’, said the unctuously written website, ‘with the hotel’s musical heritage’) tuned twice a week. Harvey didn’t play the piano (although he still had a faint sense of the absurd needlessness of tuning any piano twice a fucking week) but nonetheless felt, on reading this, the deep, deep deprivation of not having one in his room. Further picking away at the scab of his envy, he read about the ‘legendary’ New York suite, on the twenty-second floor, with its sizeable dining room, kitchen, traditional living room, fireplace with faux-quartz logs, antique books, sunburst clocks, Lars Bolanger lacquered boxes, sage velvet seating area, another fucking piano (Steinway – tuned, no doubt, every fifteen seconds), wall-mounted plasmas, state-of-the-art Bang & Olufsen acoustic system and, of course, a ‘two-storey view of the Manhattan skyline’. He closed the computer, wondering, if he had been certain his dad was paying for it, whether or not he would have demanded an upgrade.
These three reasons finesse his dissatisfaction, each one rising and falling at different times on the graphic equalizer of his anxiety. What would his present therapist – No. 8 – tell him to tell himself? I would really like to be in a better room, with a view and a set of Lars Bolanger-lacquered boxes, but the fact that I’m not is not the end of the world. Something like that. He gets up from the leather-topped desk and flops down on one of the two twin beds in his room. Harvey doesn’t much like that either. No matter how posh the Sangster is, the presence of the twin doubles makes it feel like a room at a Travellers’ Rest somewhere on the A41. Against his overhanging gut, he feels the dig of what should have been – according to the décor – an antique silver cigarette case, but is in fact his iPhone. He takes it out, noticing that another text has come in from Stella: Darling, hope you landed safely. Call me when you have a moment.
He remembers then that the phone had trilled again halfway through the journey from JFK, where he had ignored it, because it had arrived just as the taxi set wheel on the Brooklyn Bridge, allowing him to take in his first view for ten years of Manhattan Island. However much the overall idea of this journey has upped Harvey’s already monstrous anxiety levels, he had at least been looking forward to this: this packed vertical Oz, rust-brown and silver, rising from the sea in the limpid light of the morning. It always made him catch his breath, that such an urban sight could be so beautiful. He held the view, sliced across by the cables of the bridge, for some seconds, allowing its splendour to work some small massage on his migranous soul. Then he had caught sight of the gap where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center used to be, and the view became the mouth of a prize-fighter with two teeth knocked out.
Harvey wonders about calling home. Assuming that extras above and beyond the cost of the room are definitely going to be charged to him, he worries about the cost of the phone bill. He knows that phone calls from a five-star hotel are likely to be charged at an absurd number of dollars per minute. He considers using his mobile but then thinks that that too would be very expensive internationally. There is another option: one of the many bills that arrive daily on Harvey’s brown-as-dead-grass welcome mat at home, one of the many direct debits signed years ago and eating away at his solvency ever since, is for some company, who offer – for a small monthly payment – to provide a four-digit phone number that their customers can dial while staying at hotels, especially hotels abroad, before the number of their actual call, and which fix that call at a standard local rate. Which would now be marvellously useful for Harvey if at any point on any trip since signing up to this direct debit he had remembered to write down the fucking four-digit number and bring it with him.
Putting off the decision, he decides to check his email. Harvey gets anxious if cut off from the internet. He hears about writers – he just about considers himself one, even though collating the Dictaphonic outpourings of celebrities rarely seems to qualify him as such – who, as soon as they sit down to write, unplug the modem. Not Harvey: if his home modem freezes, as it periodically does, he panics, diving immediately down on his knees amidst the wires and discarded newspapers and sweet wrappers of his study floor in order to unplug and replug it. While waiting for it to restart, he cannot work – it is as if he himself has frozen. There is no rationale for this – occasionally he needs to Google some fact, but most of the information he needs is already provided by his subjects – but the possibility of exclusion on this worldwide scale is too much. He needs to feel he is in there, one of the myriad upturned mouths sucking on the global InfoMother’s billion teats.
The Sony Vaio rumbles for while, worrying him, and then Windows Mail opens: he hits Send and Receive, and watches the bar fill to a solid blue. He has nine messages. Eight of them are Spam – Ebony Anastasia Does Interracial Dicking Time, MILF Celestine Opens Her Sweet Ass Do You Want Some?, Superhot Trannies Notwithstanding, PlayPoker UK Exclusive Promotion, Hard Erecttion in 20 Minutes, Erectile Dysfunction?, ChitChatBingo, and one which makes him feel a bit weepy entitled Let Us Protect You, Harvey (from an insurance company) – and one from his agent, Alan. He knows what Alan’s email is going to say – he knows it will be delicately poised between expressing condolences for his father’s condition and wanting to know when Harvey is going to deliver the pitch for Lark’s autobiography – but still opens it with a tiny hope, as he opens all emails, that they will carry news of something stupendously positive. It is a message delicately poised between expressing condolence for his father’s condition and wanting to know when Harvey is going to deliver the pitch for Lark’s autobiography.
Harvey pitches for a lot of autobiographies these days, many more than he actually writes. Lark, though, is a tough one, as she has done, as far as he can make out, absolutely nothing. Lark is a pop star, but Harvey, like everyone else, has never heard any of her songs, nor even seen a picture of her. This is because Lark is being kept under wraps. Her record company, her management and her PR agency – who have decided, the way these people can now, that she is going to be huge – have created a new marketing strategy around Lark, whereby she is going to burst forth fully-formed onto the public, Athena from their combined Zeus-like forehead. On some so far unspecified date in the future, Lark will be brought forth to the world – her single, her video, her MySpace page will all be let out at the same time, followed closely by her album, and her autobiography. This is what Harvey is supposed to pitch for. He does have some information about her – Alan keeps on sending it, as attachments to his increasingly urgent emails – but every time Harvey remembers the only fact he does know about Lark – that she is nineteen – he cannot face opening any of them.
He shuts down Mail and opens a document file entitled IdeasJune. Harvey has many places in which he writes down ideas. In his hand luggage, along with a newly purchased copy of Solomon’s Testament – he had wanted, because she was pretty, to blurt out to the girl behind the till at WHSmith in Terminal Four at Heathrow, that he was Eli’s son, and had a first edition inscribed to him at home with the words ‘To Harvey, may you read it when you’re ready …’ and was only buying this one because he hadn’t read it for years and, well, he didn’t really know why he was buying it now but thought he should maybe read it again on the plane over because he was going to see his father on his deathbed – along with that, his father’s masterpiece, sits a Dictaphone, and two notebooks, one covered in gold leather, and one in moleskin. Harvey fetishizes notebooks. He has a drawerful of them at home in his study desk – covered in so many materials (velvet, cloth, zebra print, PVC); large hardbound ones and small; policeman-flicking-it-open-in-the-dock ones – and in all of them he has written thoughts for novels, films, plays, even – in one of them – business ideas. They are not empty. But they are not full either; each one has a series of scrawls, written in Harvey’s lazy script, which end after about five pages. It is partly the act of writing – that is, handwriting – that fails. Harvey likes the idea of opening the gilded notebook, and marking its embossed paper with the varied scents of his mind, but when it comes to it, writing with a pen has become a bit of a faff. More than that: writing with a pen doesn’t feel significant. It feels the preserve, now, of telephone numbers and email addresses hurriedly scribbled on stickies that he knows he’s going to lose. For his words to mean something, they have to be written on a computer. He knows this, yet continues to buy notebooks.
The document IdeasJune has a number of sentences already in it. Some are fully-formed pitches: ‘Reality TV Idea: convince someone they’ve died and gone to heaven.’ Others just phrases, pending novels yet unwritten: ‘Her breasts spilled out of her bra like muscle rain.’ On a new page, Harvey writes:
Film Idea
Title: SHALLOW
John Shallow is obsessed with looks. He is also an immigration officer at JFK. His obsession serves him well in his job because he always checks people’s – especially women’s – faces very thoroughly. But it doesn’t serve him so well in his marriage, which is falling apart.
However, through a long and difficult process, involving much therapy and various epiphanies (? don’t know what these are – something profound/life-changing) he comes to terms with it, and saves his marriage. Just at that point, though, while at work, he spots – because he’s still got the skill (the skill at looking) even though he’s sorted out the problems that come with it – someone coming through immigration who turns out to be Osama bin Laden, incredibly well-disguised, using plastic surgery etc (a woman?). Osama is arrested and overnight Shallow becomes a national hero and a major celebrity.
This leads to loads of sexual opportunities and wrecks his marriage.
Harvey leans back. Something’s not right about it. He highlights the main body of the prose, and then opens the Formatting Palette, and clicks on I. This happens:
Film Idea
Title: SHALLOW
John Shallow is obsessed with looks. He is also an immigration officer at JFK. His obsession serves him well in his job because he always checks people’s – especially women’s – faces very thoroughly. But it doesn’t serve him so well in his marriage, which is falling apart.
However, through a long and difficult process, involving much therapy and various epiphanies (? don’t know what these are – something profound/life-changing) he comes to terms with it, and saves his marriage. Just at that point, though, while at work, he spots – because he’s still got the skill (the skill at looking) even though he’s sorted out the problems that come with it – someone coming through immigration who turns out to be Osama bin Laden, incredibly well-disguised, using plastic surgery etc (a woman?). Osama is arrested and overnight Shallow becomes a national hero and a major celebrity.
This leads to loads of sexual opportunities and wrecks his marriage.
Yes, that feels better. But now – as ever, when he has done a bit of work – Harvey must grant himself some small reward. He turns away from the computer and takes from his pocket a small bottle of blue liquid. However bleak the journey, there were always consolations on coming to America: the Manhattan view was one, and here was another. While pushing his baggage, ill balanced on the trolley, through JFK’s anywhere-in-the-world airport mall, saliva had gathered in the corners of his mouth, sent up from his forever inflamed throat glands, and Harvey had realized that he was hungry. Not straightforwardly for food; there was something specific which was making his mouth water at that moment, something specific that his system was reminding him can only properly be got hold of in America, reminding him a split second before the words formed inside his damp, sleepless skull: sour sweets. Harvey loves sour sweets; he loves the taste contradiction, the sugar fighting the acid, his tongue a pair of apothecary’s scales holding these opposites in perfect balance. He loves the dialectic. And he loves the fact that all things are postponed during the sucking of a sour sweet; that, while the conflict between sweet and sour remains unresolved, Harvey can float, his soul buoyed up by the sensual striving towards that equilibrium, and nothing matters until it’s over. If he could only get hold of enough of the right kind of sour sweets in the UK, he thinks he may never be depressed; instead, he would be happily addicted to them, despite the terrible stomach cramps that eating them always eventually induces. But in the UK, none of the sweets – not Sour Haribos, not TongueBubbler, not even Toxic Waste – were anything like sour enough for him.
Here, however, in this land where contradiction was possibility, there were sour sweets, Harvey knew, that took the concept of sour-sweetness into a whole new dimension. He had seen on the internet, available from various US confectionery sites, boxes of brightly coloured jelly beans, emblazoned with the promises Extra Sour, Extremely Sour, Very Sour Sours. Yes: Harvey has Googled the phrases ‘sour sweets’, ‘sour candy’, and ‘sour confectionery’, wrapping them in inverted commas so as to allow the computer to make no mistakes about his intention. He had Goo-ogled them, in fact, bringing up multiple images of boxes and wrappers to lasciviously stare at. Unbelievably, perhaps, for a forty-four-year-old man, he had even read reviews of some of these sweets. Zours Incredibly Sour Tangerines had got a unanimous five stars on cybercandy.com, and Harvey had been on the verge of getting them to ship a box out when he remembered he was soon to visit his native land – which, at that moment, figured in his head as Willy Wonka’s factory to Charlie.
Half mad with the craving, and once through the small hiccup in customs, he had dashed inside the first available confectionery containing store, leaving his baggage on the trolley outside, aching to be control-exploded by security. The shop had stocked no Zours, leading Harvey into a mad twenty seconds of uncertainty, his eyes riffling through the Hersheys and the Oreos, until finally asking, in a voice hoarse with desire, ‘Do you have any sour sweets?’ The store assistant, a ginger-haired, fuzzy-faced woman, looked blank, so Harvey looked down, ashamed, feeling that her blankness must contain a condemnation, a deadpan amazement that a man of his age should have such adolescent needs; at which stage he noticed that her index finger had stirred from its fellows, and was indicating downwards and to the left. Harvey’s eyes followed, past the brown and green and pinks, and nearly missed it, because it wasn’t in a wrapper: it wasn’t even a sweet as such, in the boiled, solid, chewable and/or biteable sense. But then his eyes did a double-take, and returned to the words emblazoned on the labels of three small bottles perched above a bright rack of bubblegum: Extra Tart Sour Blast Spray.
Harvey could hardly believe it. Even in all his research he hadn’t come across this: a spray, a concentrate. The sour-sweet sensation, literally bottled, distilled, injectable directly onto the tongue like morphine into the pain receptors of the brain. He bought all three bottles for what seemed at that moment like the incredible bargain price of $2.25 dollars apiece. He had intended to wait until he got to the hotel before trying them, in order to savour the moment. Unfortunately, self-control of this order – or, rather, the lack of it – lies at the very heart of Harvey Gold. This was why various lucky travellers who happened to be passing through the gates of Terminal One of JFK that day were treated to the sight of the middle-aged son of the world’s greatest living author standing in the queue for the airport taxis, mouth open and eyes closed in some small ecstasy, spraying what appeared to be a sample bottle of cheap perfume onto his stretched-out thirsty-dog tongue, gradually coating it blue.
Now, in the hotel room, lying prone on one of his two quilted boats of bedding, he offers that same tongue up for another spray. The wardrobe door opposite has swung open from a bizarre attempt he made soon after entering the room to pack his clothes away, giving up almost instantly on the realization that – even if his father should survive longer than Freda’s projected six weeks – Harvey will continue, while here, to live out of his suitcase, like he has always done on every other trip that necessitated a suitcase. On the inner right-hand door of the wardrobe is a mirror, where Harvey can see himself, or, rather, where he can see all those parts of himself that are not hidden by the solid explosion of his stomach rising from the bed like a termite mound from the ground. His tongue is out of his mouth, and looks, blue and upside-down, like a football shirt drying on the washing line of his lower lip. He undergoes a visual epiphany, not unlike when a mirror on the bathroom door swings your toilet seat image into view, making you think: is man but this? This is a thought Harvey has about himself around five times a minute, however, and so he overrides it with a gust of Extra Tart Sour Blast Spray, flooding his aching taste buds with soursweet rain.
After the hit, trying to avoid the aspartame comedown, Harvey shifts his bulk around to the side of the bed and dials his home number on the telephone on the side table.
‘Mr Gold, how can I help you?’ a smooth, sonorous voice says. Harvey wonders, at first, if it is God, finally asking the requisite question, but then realizes his mistake.
‘Sorry, I forgot to dial …’
‘It’s nine for an outside number, sir.’
‘Yes. OK.’
‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’
Harvey thinks: everything?
‘No. Thanks.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
He clicks off, and dials again, adding the magic nine. And then at the last minute he remembers: five hours behind. His eyes flick to the hands of the faux-antique set on the bedside table: quarter to eleven. In England it will be just gone six – and then she picks up. He hears an airy silence, the rustling of sheets and blankets, before Stella’s ‘Hello?’ comes down the line, alarm penetrating her tone even though her throat is husky and clotted with sleep.
‘Sorry, darling … sorry. I forgot about the time difference. Go back to sleep.’
‘Harvey? Are you OK?’
‘Yes. Yes.’ He knows this is never true, but – not just with her, with everyone that asks it – you can’t go through it all, not every time, can you? No, I’m overweight, exhausted, I get these weird pains in my legs, I have constant low-level nausea, I have prostituted what tiny talent I have ghostwriting the lives of idiots, every woman I pass fills me with despair, my child has Asperger’s Syndrome, my father is dying and I deeply, deeply love my wife but can’t bear the idea that she is starting to grow old. And yourself?
‘Your dad … is he …?’
‘I haven’t seen him yet. No change, as far as I know. But look – what time is it there …?’
A shuffling sound. He sees the scene, familiar in his mind, the safety of the half-light, the day not started, her profile shifting towards the digital clock on her bedside draw.
‘Five forty-five.’
‘Yes. So sorry. Go back to sleep.’ He can feel, even across the wide swathe of water, how it’s too late, how his phone call has rushed consciousness up to her surface, like an air bubble floating from the deep.
‘No, it’s OK. I needed to get up early anyway. Jamie’s got the Montgomery Clinic …’
‘I thought that wasn’t until nine thirty.’
‘Yes. Well, I’ve got to wash my hair.’ In his mind’s eye, Harvey sees the process: her lying back in a full, scalding bath, her face surrounded by water, her curls spiralling away like sea snakes, the whole image a benign Medusa. When she rises out of the steam to work on her hair, her fingers on her scalp move with some precise feminine alchemy, so distinct from his soapy plonk and rub. Every so often, she rotates her head from side to side to prevent the liquid pooling in her ears. The intimacy of watching her wash her hair can feel at times overwhelming. And afterwards, when her hair is wet, falling across her face, before she lifts it into a towel – he does not know where to look. She feels too vulnerable, and his eyes too searching.
‘And I’ve got a lot of work stuff to do, as well, so it’s probably a good idea to get started …’
‘Stop trying to make it better for me.’
‘I’m not. I won’t get back to sleep now anyway. And however pissed off I am about that – which is, yeah, a bit – I’m also pleased, Harvey. To hear from you. I thought your plane must have crashed.’
He laughs, but knows she means it. Every time Harvey flies anywhere, Stella assumes his plane will crash. Her kisses, when he leaves, always have a force to them, impelled by a sense that this could be the last time.
‘That would have been on the news.’
‘The CIA might have been keeping it quiet.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. They might have imposed a security blanket.’
‘I think the word you’re after is blackout.’
‘Oh, yeah. But it’s quarter to six in the morning. I can confuse blanket and blackout. Because I’d like both.’
‘How’s Jamie?’
He hears her rearranging the pillows.
‘He’s OK. He was happy enough after school yesterday. Only got upset at bedtime that you weren’t here. Did you read his note?
‘Note?’
‘His picture. I put it in your suitcase.’
He gets up off the bed, still holding the phone. ‘What, as a surprise?’
A soft beat, her patience diffusing. ‘No, I told you it was in there, yesterday.’
‘Oh sorry, I –’
‘It’s OK. You were in one of your nervous flaps when you were leaving. I knew you weren’t really listening.’
‘Hold on, I’ll go and have a look.’
‘It’s in the zip-up pocket. In the top bit.’
He goes over to the suitcase. It is there, a white envelope with the word ‘DAD’ written on it, in Jamie’s painfully immature handwriting. Inside is a piece of asymmetrically folded A4 paper, on one half of which Jamie has drawn a chess set. The figures are not arranged on the board, but around it. They are not rendered exactly, as they would be if Jamie was an extraordinary Asperger’s child, but randomly: it is difficult to make out which are pawns, and which are major pieces. They look like chess figures in the wind.
Jamie has not written anything to go with his drawing, but on the facing half, in Stella’s looping hand, it says: ‘Have a good trip, even though it’s for a sad thing. I love you. J xxx.’ Harvey holds the note in his hand, and feels his heart crack with love.
He comes back to the phone. Before he speaks, having heard him pick the receiver up, she says:
‘That’s exactly what he told me to write.’
‘It’s really nice. Did you suggest the chess thing?’
He says this knowing that both of them would rather their son had chosen the subject himself, thereby indicating that he has, of his own volition, noticed something about his father’s interests.
‘I may have done,’ she says.
She yawns. He sees their bedroom, dark and warm: Stella makes everywhere cosy. They live in Kent, in a cottage on the North Downs, which would be idyllic were it not for the proximity of the M2. Wooed by the oldness, the Englishness, of the place, Harvey had succumbed easily to the previous owner’s trick of enclosing the front garden with a series of tall hedges, obscuring the surrounding countryside. On a final visit before completion, while visiting the upstairs toilet, he had noticed a somewhat busy road in the middle distance, but, infatuated with the place, and too frightened to disturb at this late stage the serious business of property transaction, had put it out of his mind. Now he spends much time in the garden, trying to gauge exactly how loud that muffled roar is, trying to work out how he couldn’t have heard it before, and trying to think himself into Stella’s method of imagining it’s the sound of the sea.
‘I still think you should go back to sleep.’
‘I said: I’m awake now. Look, don’t worry about me. Did you sleep on the plane?’
‘No. You know I can never sleep on a plane.’
‘You should have flown business …’
‘That’s what Freda said …’ A momentary silence follows this: Harvey assumes she has taken the comparison with his father’s wife as an implicit rebuke, which he had not meant, at least consciously. There is an awkward pause, such as can happen even between couples who have been together for fourteen years, and for whom blips of silence are not generally registered. He waits, wondering if it might be possible over the phone, in another country, to hear the sound of the M2.
‘Well, anyway, darling …’ says Harvey, eventually, feeling the spasticity of words said to break such silences, ‘… I’ll call you later.’
‘OK. I love you.’
‘I love you, too.’
It is the truth, however fast it makes his heart dip.
* * *
My daddy seemed a bit better today. The nurses sat him up in bed, and they took off that see-through mask he usually has to wear over his mouth and nose. He didn’t have it on for ages (later on Mommy told me it was over five minutes!). He still didn’t say anything – the nurse had to put the tube back into his neck while he had the mask off, so that probably didn’t help – but Mommy told me to come over and hold his hand. It made me feel a bit funny, because I haven’t held Daddy’s hand before for so long. After a while I started to notice some of the weird things about it: how he’s got loads of these big brown patches (and some black spots) on the top side and how the bones seemed to be poking through the skin, so that it was a bit like holding a skeleton’s hand. The tops of his fingers (around the nails) look sort of yellow, like he’s bruised them or something, and his nails are really long too – I remember Mommy telling me that Daddy’s nails grow really quickly, and he always forgets to cut them – especially the thumb ones, which were so long they were kind of gross. You might think that nails wouldn’t grow when you’re asleep all the time, but they do.
Sometimes this happens, that Daddy’s skin and stuff makes me feel weird. I’ve noticed before that his skin isn’t like mine – obviously! – or Jada’s, or even Mommy’s, but I guess I’ve kind of gotten used to it. I didn’t really notice it at all until Jada said to me that time that thing about how my daddy’s skin looked like it had lots of little holes in it. I said shut up, stupid, like I always do when she says something like that, something just meant to be nasty, but afterwards I couldn’t help looking and it made it hard to forget because I could see what she meant, sort of. His skin looks more like a net than skin; it kind of looks like bits of skin knitted together around all these tiny holes, like wool looks like close up.
His skin looks even more like wool now, because he’s got all these little white hairs coming out of it. Mommy told me it’s difficult for Daddy to shave now – well, it’s impossible for him to shave, but it’s not even easy for anyone else to do it! They’re so worried about cutting him. But he has lots of little white hairs coming out of the tops of his hands, too, even on his fingers, and he never shaved those even when he wasn’t in hospital. I suppose you would need a special kind of tiny shaver to do them, and I don’t know if you can even get them in any store. I got this really funny idea in my head, that I wanted to turn his hand around, and play round and round the garden with it, even though I haven’t played that for years, not since I was a really tiny baby – but still, when I thought about it, I remembered how I used to like it so much, the tickly feeling so nice, as the grown-up’s finger goes round and round, watching it and feeling it at the same time, and waiting, waiting, waiting for the bigger tickle up the arm. I didn’t do it with Daddy’s hand – I mean, I knew it’d be a stupid thing to do – and, besides, I don’t know if he can actually feel a tickle when he’s so ill and dying and everything.
After Mommy told me to hold Daddy’s hand, her cellphone rang, and she was on it for quite a while (you aren’t really meant to have your cellphone on in the hospital, but I think it’s OK for Mommy to keep hers on because Daddy’s so famous). I held his hand and tried not to think about how weird the skin on it was: I tried to look at his face instead, but that’s even weirder really, because Daddy’s cheeks hang really low, and his ears are so big (especially the bottom bit, the soft bit), and his nose is so long, that now because his skin is all grey his face reminded me of an elephant’s face. Which made me want to laugh at first, but I kept it inside, by holding my breath, which I can do for nearly a minute. Anyway, then I started talking, just saying stuff, things that were in my head: I said, ‘I love you Daddy’ and ‘I hope you get better soon, Daddy’ even though I know he’s not going to get better, he’s going to die, but I didn’t know what else to say – it would have sounded really weird to talk about him dying – but it doesn’t matter anyway, it’s just good to say stuff. He can hear me. Mommy always says he can, even though he never says anything, or even nods his head or whatever. Sometimes she tells me to look in his eyes – Look deep into his eyes, she always says, because that’s where he still lives – and where you can see, she says, that he still understands everything. But his eyes were only half open, and what you can see of the inside bit looks really red – I don’t mean just at the bottom of the eyes, that bit’s always been really red on my daddy’s eyes, and kind of wet, and sometimes I used to think his eyes were bleeding, or that maybe, because he’s a genius, when he cries, it’s blood – God! So mad! That’s like something from Twilight (which Mommy doesn’t know I’ve watched – Jada showed me it at her house, her mom never cares what she sees on TV and stuff).
So then I just kept going, saying whatever came out of my head. Mommy was still on the phone and the nurses were moving around the room and that machine that Daddy is hooked up to all the time with the green lines on it kept on beeping, so no one was really noticing. I told him about Aristotle, my cat, about how he’s started to get really fat because while we haven’t been at home the whole time Noda – that’s our housekeeper; she’s from the Philippines – just leaves food out for him, like a whole tin at once!! And then he just goes over and nibbles on it all day like a cow eating the grass. I told Daddy about how last time me and Elaine took him to the vet, the vet said that he needed to lose weight otherwise he might get ill, and so we bought him this cat food they only sell at the vet called Seniors, which is meant for older cats – which he kind of is, too, even though he’s younger than me, six and a half, but you have to times it by ten, so that makes him sixty-five (which is way old, but still quite a lot younger than Daddy) – but it’s good for fat cats because it’s got less protein and stuff in it and that helps to make them thin. But all that’s like a waste of time now because Noda just opens the tin of FancyFeast and pours it all out for him to nosh at all day.
I felt a bit silly talking about Aristotle like this, because I didn’t know if it was the right kind of thing to talk about. I thought maybe I should be talking about something more grown up, but I couldn’t think of anything. I started to feel sad, because I haven’t seen Aristotle that much since we’ve been going to the hospital all the time, and I really miss him. He’s a really sweet cat, with black and white fur and a really cute little pink nose, who always purrs when you stroke him. I think he misses me, too, because he always comes right up to me when we do get to go home, and nuzzles my leg for ages. So because I was thinking about him and about how he wasn’t getting to eat the Seniors that he’s supposed to, I started to cry. Then, I felt really silly, standing there, getting that funny tickle between the corner of your eye and your nose when the tear comes out – I mean not like blubbing crazy, not even sniffling, just one or two tears coming out – but Mommy quickly stopped her phone call and came over, knelt down and gave me the biggest hug, squeezing me so, so tight.
‘Colette! Darling! It’s OK …’ she said. ‘Cry if you want to. Cry. It’s OK.’ She was patting me on the back at the same time, like Elaine sometimes used to do when I was little and had swallowed something bad. ‘It’s OK.’ I was still holding Daddy’s hand. Mommy was smiling, that smile she does when she looks at Daddy sleeping in his bed, or sometimes when she picks up one of his books. Sort of sad and pleased at the same time. ‘We all feel like crying at the moment.’
‘But you don’t cry …’ I said.
She did one of her smiles. ‘I want to. Really. But sometimes when you’re grown up you have to be strong.’ She pulled a tissue from her sleeve and wiped my eyes. ‘Do you need to blow your nose?’
I shook my head. ‘When I say strong I don’t mean like when someone who lifts something really heavy.’ I knew she didn’t mean that. ‘I mean when bad things happen – when the worst things happen – you have to try and keep going. With a smile on your face. To make sure everyone else doesn’t get more upset.’ She touched my cheek. ‘I have to be strong for you.’
I thought about this for a bit.
‘OK. But if you want to cry it’s OK, too, Mommy,’ I said. ‘Maybe when you cry, I can be strong for you.’
Mommy looked so pleased that I said this. But she also looked a bit like she was going to cry there and then. She gave me another really big hug, and then said, in her softest voice:
‘Thank you, Colette. Thank you.’
I wasn’t sure whether or not to say anything about how much I missed Aristotle. Instead I said: ‘Mommy. Is Daddy in a comma?’
She blinked, and moved her head back a bit. ‘I’m sorry, darling?’
‘I heard Dr Ghundkhali say that that’s what Daddy is in. A comma. At first I thought they meant like that little thing you write in a sentence when you want the person reading it to stop, but not for as long as when you do a full stop – I thought maybe it was something to do with Daddy being a writer? – but then I realized it must be a word that sounds the same but means two different things. Like pair. Or been.’
Mommy looked at me. She was making a weird face, all frowny. Then, behind me, I heard one of the nurses – I think it was the one with the curly hair and the banana nose – laugh. I could feel my face going red, because I knew straight away that I must have said something stupid or kid-like, and I hate doing that – I hate doing it in front of anyone, and I especially hate doing it in front of Mommy. I am Colette Gold, and I do not say stupid eight-year-old kiddie things that grown-ups laugh at because they’re so cute. I got so cross that I started to feel another little tear come out, which only made it worse.
‘Colette, darling,’ said Mommy. ‘Don’t get upset. That’s a very good question. You just slightly misheard Dr Gundkhali. He would have said that Daddy was in a “coma”. You see, it sounds a bit like comma, doesn’t it? But it has an extended – like a longer – “o”. Coama.’
‘Oh,’ I said. Then, like I was saying it in slow motion: ‘Coa … ma.’ She nodded, one of her slow nods which makes her fringe move like a little curtain in front of her eyes. No one said anything for a bit. So then I said: ‘Yes, but what does it mean?’
Mommy opened her mouth to speak, but then the hospital door banged really loudly, and a man came in. He was fat, and sweaty, and his suit was too tight for him. Mommy got up, and looked at him for quite a long time without saying anything.
‘Hello, Freda,’ he said.
‘Colette,’ she said. ‘Come and meet your half-brother Harvey.’
* * *
This is too much rain, thinks Violet. She means too much rain to go for her walk, but is aware as she thinks it of a sense that, for some summers now, there has been too much rain. It used to be funny, the unpredictability of British summer, something that she might have commented on with a resigned shrug to her neighbours if they bumped into each other buttoned-up in July, and the neighbours would nod and smile resignedly back, and it was a nice, reassuring, confirmation that they shared the same mock-weary national expectation. But that was just about the way the sun used to stand the country up. It was not about rain like this, like a monsoon, hitting the pavement so hard that filthy fat globules of dust-water fly up from the cracks.
She has opened the frosted fire-glass front door, and is standing on the top step, looking out at Redcliffe Square. She already knows from looking out of her room window – and from the way the stuck branch trembled, like it was freezing – that the weather was probably too bad to venture outside, but she thought it might look better at ground level. It does not. If anything, standing here brings home the problem more clearly, which is not so much the weather as the ground itself, transformed by the rain into an assault course for her and her stick. She does not mind the weather, really: she does not mind getting a bit wet, or having her hair blown into a mess, even though she had only last week been to the hairdressers and had it styled and coloured (plus a root perm to give her some body and to cover the small bald spot just below the crown). But she does mind being attacked by the ground; she minds slipping on a puddle or being blown over by the wind and crashing to the concrete and becoming in an instant one of the residents who has had a fall – the three most dreaded words at Redcliffe House, heard only in whispers, the care home equivalent of Auschwitz’s chosen for selection.
She shuts the door: the cold street air in her nostrils mingles for a second with the sickly overheated scent of the hallway. She had hoped to buy a paper, to see if there was any more news about Eli. Three newspapers – the Mail, the Telegraph and the Express – are delivered daily to the house, but when Violet enters the living room, she sees that, as ever, they have been snapped up by those (mainly male) residents keen to demonstrate their lack of senility. Joe Hillier, she notices, is busy consolidating this demonstration using the Telegraph, the paper which best allows for the requisite amount of page-flapping and harrumphing. Luckily, for Violet’s purposes, Pat Cadogan collars her immediately to give her a long report on the condition of her shingles, allowing her to feign concern while standing at the back of Joe’s chair looking over his shoulder.
Sure enough, Joe turns the page out of the front few pages and all their pressing seriousness about politicians she can no longer remember the names of, and there he is – her ex-husband (the phrase sounds ridiculous, even inside her head), centred on the page, the same black-and-white photograph that had been on television the day before.
‘What is it?’ says Pat, a grimace of irritation breaking though her seen-it-all implacability: she had noticed Violet’s lack of concentration, her failure to nod at her retelling of the last two castigations of the house doctors.
‘Sorry Pat … I … Joe?’
Joe Hillier looks up, but, as Violet is behind him, he simply scans the room, shrugs his shoulders, and puts it down – in a rather matter-of-fact way – to voices in his head.
‘Joe!’ She taps him on the shoulder. He tries to look round, but the turning circle of his neck fails him, and he has to shift his body sideways to see her.
‘What is it?’
‘Would you mind if I had the paper?’
He looks at it, folded now on his lap. ‘This one?’
‘Yes …’
‘Well, I haven’t finished reading it yet.’
He stares at her, with all the truculence that old men reserve for old women.
‘OK. Can I have it when you have?’
‘Well, I think Frank …’ Joe raises an arthritic, yellowing finger towards another resident, a man wearing thick-lens glasses rimmed with heavy, 1960s black frames whom Violet has never spoken to ‘… was next in the queue for the Telegraph.’
‘Well, fine. Just whenever everyone’s finished with it, I’d like the page with that photograph.’
Violet’s natural instinct is diplomatic, and she had been smiling, but her voice, raised by the betrayal within it of a tiny level of frustration, causes a number of men and women in the room – at least, the ones with their hearing aids on – to turn round. Violet had never raised her voice before in three years at Redcliffe House, and it is clear from the uncertainty on some of the residents’ faces that they have no idea who had been speaking.
‘Have it? You mean, keep it?’ says the man who Joe had referred to as Frank.
‘I don’t think that’s House policy, is it?’
He takes his glasses off, in the manner of a board member at an important meeting, dealing with a thorny issue someone else has brought up. Behind them, red threads creep in from all sides of his eyes towards the cataract-white centres, like blood dropped in milk. With a sinking heart, Violet realizes that the two men are going to use her request as a means of pretending they still exist in the world of the living.
‘Absolutely correct, Frank,’ says Joe. ‘The rules state that all newspapers and magazines put out in the communal area for use of the residents must be left in the communal area at the end of the day for recycling.’
‘Oh, for crying out loud Joe Hillier,’ says Norma Miller, one of the more lively residents. She is Welsh – so always addresses people by both their names – and her hair is dyed shockingly blonde for a woman in her eighties. Her face is so engraved with lines it looks, Violet always thinks, like crazy paving: she has smoked her whole life, and is furious that she is not allowed to continue to do so inside Redcliffe House. ‘Don’t be such a stupid old stickler. Let her have the bloody paper if she wants it.’
‘Why do you want it, anyway?’
Violet turns; it is Pat Cadogan who had spoken, her eyes squinting with suspicion. Violet had dreaded someone asking this. She had hoped the newspaper would just be handed over, and she could squirrel it away to her room, but now, as always, events had run out of control. It was why she never spoke up; why she chose, often, not to say anything at all.
‘Oh, no reason, really. I know – I used to know …’ she doesn’t want to say his name; it would just lead further away from the straight line back to her room, ‘… him. The man in the photograph. A long time ago.’
Joe Hillier picks up the paper and shakes the pages out. ‘Barack Obama?’
‘No! Him. On the facing page.’
Joe scans the print. A piece about the arts, about books – worse, a writer of fiction: she could hear in the snort of breath through his solidly packed nostrils that this was an article that he, a man from the north of England, would normally disregard.
‘Eli … Gold. Yes, I’ve heard of him.’
‘Didn’t he kill one of his wives?’ says Frank.
‘No!’ says Violet. ‘It was a suicide pact that went wrong.’
Joe Hillier frowns, though it is unclear whether this is from disbelief, or because the idea of disposing of one’s wife in that way – Joe had lived for fifty-two years with a woman dedicated to making his life a disappointment – suddenly occurs to him as brilliant.
‘Gold …’ says Pat, menacingly; she looks over Joe’s shoulder at the picture. ‘Is he a relative of yours?’
Violet seizes on it. ‘Yes! Yes, he is. A distant … cousin.’
Pat stares at her, her tiny eyes – had they shrunk with age? Weren’t eyes the only part of the body that didn’t do that? – narrowed to slits. Don’t you lie to me is so clearly etched into her expression, it seems to be written on a comic-book balloon attached to her mouth. Violet turns away: she does not want to lie – she is naturally no good at it – but it is so much easier than the truth, which in this case, she thinks, would not be believed. It seems so unlikely, really, even to her, that she, as she sees herself in the big gilt-edge mirror over the living-room fireplace, an ancient husk of femininity, could ever have been loved by him, as he is pictured in the newspaper, so pert and sharp-suited and – a word the young people used to use: or did they still? – cool. She may even be put down as showing the first signs of senility. And even if it were believed, in the unlikely event that someone were to check the information and discover its truth, she knows she would only emerge from her cocoon of anonymity as an object of resentment. It was impossible for such worlds to meet; the one in the paper, even though it was past and dead – the world of fame, and worldliness, and glamour – and this one, Redcliffe House, this apex of mundanity. It was like trying to push together the wrong ends of two magnets; she would be held responsible for forcing such a bad conjunction.
‘All right, then,’ says Joe, shrugging. ‘I’ll ask one of the nurses to hold onto that page for you at the end of the day …’
‘Thank you, Joe. That’s very good of you.’
But of course he forgets, and when she asks the next day all the newspapers have already been sent off for recycling.
* * *
Where were all these women in winter? thinks Harvey, viewing the teeming Manhattan sidewalks from the back windows of another cab. It is not the first time he has had the thought: it seems it comes to him earlier every year, his own deeply dysfunctional first cuckoo of spring. He knows the argument: it’s just the clothes, with their dizzying gaps between belt and top and neck and bra strap, giving onto the soft planes of caramelizing flesh. But that makes no sense to Harvey, because, looking round, he knows for certain that the women who snag his gaze in these clothes would snag his gaze were they dressed head to foot in straw.
Fifth Avenue, the boulevard his driver has chosen to take in order to bring him back from Mount Sinai to the Sangster, is full of shoppers. Harvey is glad he isn’t driving, as looking out onto the fecund streets at this time of year from a vantage point above a steering wheel – whether in London or New York or anywhere – is lethal. Not lethal as in ‘God, man, that’s lethal’, said, say, with a wipe across the mouth on putting back down on the bar a high-alcohol cocktail. Lethal as in looking so hard and so long back over his shoulder, at this woman or that woman or this woman or that woman or this woman or that woman, in order to check out whether her face and front fulfils or undoes the promise of her hair and back, that Harvey drives headlong into the truck/car/bus/building in front. Many is the time, in London, from April to September, that Harvey has had to apply the brake split seconds faster than his leaping heart in order to prevent an imminent body flight through the smeary glass of his Toyota Avensis wind-screen. And many is also the time – about one in four, Harvey reckons – that a clear sight of said woman would, he thinks, have been just about worth, if not actual death, at least being cut screaming from the molten Toyota/truck conjunction with oxyacetylene.
This is a somewhat contradictory thought for Harvey Gold – which is OK, contradiction being his air, his water – seeing as he knows that much of his trouble comes from this type of looking. This looking isn’t pleasure, it isn’t contemplation: like the rest of Harvey’s stuff, it’s symptomatic, pathological, obsessive compulsive. It is desire rendered only as pain, unrequited even in Harvey’s imagination. He is not interested in what he knows he can never have. He is only troubled by it.
There are male friends he has spoken to about this issue who love the streets at this time, including one who, despite having three cars and more than enough money for taxis, always, on travelling into central London in spring and summer, will get the bus, in order to sit on the top deck and leer. Harvey does not understand his friend. Harvey does not understand the idea of the enjoyment of looking. Very early on in their time together, Therapist 4, the Kleinian, had suggested the possibility that Harvey could contain the anxiety looking at women on the street caused him by comparing them to beautiful paintings.
‘You can look at beautiful paintings without being overcome with anxiety – you can in fact look at beautiful paintings and enjoy them …’ she had said, with an air of this’ll sort him out, ‘why don’t you try and think of these women as beautiful paintings?’
‘Because,’ he had replied instantly – always at his quickest when pressed on his own neuroses: the nearest Harvey comes to his father’s speed of mind is his ability always to have an answer for why this or that suggestion will not cure him – ‘when I see a beautiful painting, I have no desire to touch or kiss or lick or fuck the canvas.’
Harvey remembers the face of Therapist 4 at this moment. She was his first woman – chosen deliberately, in the hope that that would be the key – and sixty-three, also a deliberate choice, and had had a minor stroke that caused one side of her mouth to fall faintly out of symmetry with the other. Physiotherapy had got her facial muscles back to about 80 per cent of their pre-stroke strength, but her lips still had something of the look of a falling graph and, in response to this particular remark, seemed to fall just a millidegree further. Harvey took this to mean that he had stumped her, and felt, despite the fact that he was paying her to cure him and therefore not to be stumped, a small thrill of triumph.
‘Are you OK, sir?’ says the taxi driver, a Sikh. Harvey looks away from the window; again he has the impulse to delineate the thousand ways in which he is not. But he says:
‘Fine. Yes. Why do you ask?’
‘You were sighing?’ His accent is Bengali, but the intonation, going up at the end of the sentence to make the observation a question, is American.
Harvey looks at the ID card in the right-hand corner of the glass partition that separates passenger from driver: the words Jasvant Kirtia Singh and a face, most of it covered by turban and beard.
‘Sorry, I didn’t realize …’
‘It is someone you’re seeing at the hospital?’
Harvey looks at Jasvant Kirtia Singh’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. Animated from their I’m-Not-A-Terrorist impassivity on his ID, they are small black beads, birdlike, but framed by eyebrows gently suggesting both enquiry and a willingness to retreat if the passenger does not wish to talk.
‘My father.’
‘He is unwell?’
‘Yes.’
‘I hope he gets better soon …?’
Harvey wonders what to say to this. It has happened a few times, particularly early on, before the obituary writers began sharpening their pencils (or, rather, Googling ‘Eli Gold’): he would tell someone that his father was ill, and they would offer some encouraging words indicating hope of a return to health, and Harvey would have to face saying, No. He isn’t going to get better. The next stage of the conversation would then be stunted, and Harvey would feel at some level rude for having burdened them with this information. It crosses his mind, therefore, just to tell the taxi driver that his father is indeed on the mend – after all, he is not someone who needs to know the truth, nor is ever likely to find out that he has been lied to anyway. But Harvey doesn’t: even the tiniest lies will up his already heightened anxiety levels.
‘I don’t think so …’ he says, and the Sikh’s eyes hold his for a second, then move up and down as the back of his turbaned head nods in sad understanding.
‘I am sorry,’ he says, for the first time not framing the statement as a question.
Harvey is grateful, however, to have his mind brought back to his father. He feels, with his gratitude, a stab of guilt that he should be thinking about his sense of exclusion from the huge variety of female flesh out there so soon after seeing his father on his deathbed for the first time. Harvey knows what the world demands: there are certain things, of which the death of your father is certainly one, that must drive all other thoughts from your head, filling your sky as effortlessly as a wide-winged black eagle, but the truth – Harvey’s truth, yes, but he senses that here, for once, he is not alone – is that the widower at his wife’s funeral is for a second snagged by the breasts of the female mourner standing on the other side of the grave, straining against her tight black jacket; that the father at his son’s hospital bed is distracted, against all his will, by the curving back view the nurse creates as she reaches up to change the little boy’s drip. It is the source of men’s deepest shame, the ever-presence of the penis; or, to be more exact, the incongruity of the penis, its continued presence on those occasions when it would be so clearly in accordance with every idea of human dignity for it to be absent.
Harvey tries his best, though. He attempts to use his short-term memory – the pictures in his head of where he has just been – to drive himself into mental propriety. He thinks hard: he focuses. But not in that modern self-help, how-to-improve-your-golf-swing way – he actually does his best to make his mind’s eye like a camera lens, closing telescopically on the world around him to see only the immediate past.
Eli’s room had been in Geriatrics, at the end of a long, bright corridor, on whose walls were hung a number of photographs commemorating the opening of the new Geriatric Medicine Facility, by Martha Stewart, in 2007. Outside the room itself stood a hulking security man, both black and dressed in black. He held one huge finger, his index, to his ear, pressed against a Bluetooth cellphone earpiece. ‘ID, sir,’ he said, managing to pack into those two words all his adamantine non-negotiability on this requirement
Harvey’s stomach fell. He hadn’t, of course, considered that access to his father’s hospital room might be controlled: a stab of resentment towards Freda for not mentioning it went through him. He could have brought one of his two passports, but they were both in his bum bag, presently in his hotel room, flung over the twin bed he had chosen not to sleep in – a decision he had remained uncertain about throughout the long jet-lagged night, even swapping beds for twenty minutes at around 5 a.m., hoping that the other mattress might be soft enough to grasp what little oblivion the dark still offered.
‘I don’t …’ he began, and saw the security man’s wide face settle into stone. ‘Look. I’m his son. I’m Eli Gold’s son.’
‘Can you prove that, sir?’
This took Harvey aback. He realized that without some kind of documentation, he could not. He did look a bit like his father – they shared fleshy, porous noses, and skin that looked as if it might need shaving four times a day – but not having seen him as he was at present he could not even confidently claim a resemblance. And as for any other inheritance: well, Harvey possessed neither the genius nor the charisma, although he wondered why he was thinking this, as he was not sure how he would demonstrate either in the hospital corridor, and even if he could, doubted they would count as an access-all-areas code.
‘I’ve got a credit card …’
‘I’ll need a photo-ID, sir. There’s a lot of journalists and crazy people might want to get into this room.’
‘Yes,’ Harvey said, and then remembered that he did have his driving licence on him. He unbuttoned his jacket – because, despite it being forty degrees in Manhattan, he was wearing a dark blue, buttoned jacket; uncertain and jet-lagged this morning he had decided that the occasion of going to see his dying father necessitated some formality – and reached into the inside pocket for his wallet. He scrabbled through the variety of useless cards in the leather slits – how many fucking membership cards for defunct DVD rentals did he own? – until he spotted his shrunken head on the pink picture card. Handing it to the security guard, Harvey felt nervous, under pressure; the moment came into his mind when Jimmy Voller, the swarthy Brooklyn hero of Eli’s brutal third novel Cometh the Wolf, has to produce his passport at the door of an East Berlin brothel to persuade the madam that he is neither Turkish nor Moroccan, the two nationalities she has decided to bar entry to.
The security guy removed his finger from the earpiece – Harvey noticed that he was not, in fact, in telephone communication with anyone, and wondered if the finger-in-the-ear stance had just been to make him look more like security guys always do – and took his time scanning the details of the licence. Harvey had never spotted the parade of weird tiny vehicles on the back of it before – what is that, he thought, a VW Beetle? And that looks like the silhouette of the van in Scooby-Doo. They seemed tinier than ever, perched in the security guy’s mighty hand. He produced a clipboard, which, also being black, had remained invisible before, camouflaged against his enormous black puffa jacket. Harvey wondered who was paying for this guy: the hospital? His father? The government? Waiting for what seemed a stupid amount of time for his name to be checked against the names on the clipboard, Harvey felt absurdly like he was trying to get into some sort of exclusive nightclub.
Eventually, the security man looked up, scrutinizing Harvey’s face as if it were another card. He gave him his licence back.
‘Just stay here a second, please, sir …’ He turned, with a slow movement not unreminiscent of an oil tanker listing to port, and went into the room. Harvey dropped his head to look through the recessed glass window in the door. The room was spacious, and well furnished in a hospital way, but oddly windowless. In the foreground, he could see Freda on her knees, talking to a girl – Colette? – a doctor, a nurse and, in an alcove off to one side, the bottom edge of what must be his father’s bed. An image flashed through his mind of the comedy medical clipboard that should be hanging there, marked in black with a zigzag graph hurtling downwards, but all he could see were chrome bars and white sheeting.
The security guy hovered behind Freda, waiting for her conversation with the child to end. His finger had returned to his ear. Harvey had a moment of wondering if the security guy’s finger, so wide it completely obscured the earpiece, was bigger than his own penis, and then immediately feared that such a thought might be racist. He took out a bottle of Extra Tart Sour Blast Spray and gave his tongue a quick atomize. He removed his iPhone from his other pocket and tapped a few moves into Deep Green, but could see straight away that he was heading for a quick Checkmate! Tiny wins! so put it back. He considered, not for the first time, how quickly he panicked, while waiting: how quickly he needed to distract himself, before his mind and body went somewhere bad. Thinking about his body makes him suddenly feel a need to piss. Micturation, or the urge to do so, comes upon him like this these days, with no build-up, no gradual turning of the tap. He knows it is something to do with his battered and bruised prostate, the internal organ he has always been most conscious of: it will be, he knows, swollen or shrunken or just generally giving up its hanging walnut ghost, but he cannot bring himself to go to the doctor to check it out. Not because he is embarrassed about it, but because his GP in Kent is a young and pretty Pakistani woman, and there is no way he can go to the surgery and ask her about his prostate without it looking as if it’s a ruse to get her to put her finger up his anus. Even as he makes the appointment he will feel the receptionist suspecting his motivation. He needs to get over this concern, he knows, partly because Eli’s first brush with cancer was of the prostate, and partly because he actually would quite like the GP to put her finger up his anus.
The security guy was still hovering over Freda like the alien ship in Independence Day over earth as she talked. ‘Fuck it,’ Harvey said to himself, and walked quickly down the corridor, and found the rest room. Rest room. It could be restful in the toilet, Harvey felt, although only if you were sitting down – something he chose to do more and more these days, whatever the character of the ablution – but even then only really in your own private toilet, where any anxiety about sharing intimate information with strangers could not intrude. The door was locked. Harvey tried it a few times, as if under the impression that perhaps there was something wrong with the lock, but really to make it clear, to the present user, that someone was outside waiting. Eventually, the door opened, and Harvey drew back: the person exiting was a woman – Korean? Chinese? Malaysian? he felt bad about not being able to tell the difference – with tired eyes. There was no reason why it should not be a woman – the rest room door had no trousered or skirted hieroglyphic on it – but Harvey instantly wished to withdraw his aggressive shaking of the handle, somehow more acceptable had the occupant been male. It flashed through his mind to say – ‘Oh sorry, I thought you were a man’ but he quashed it. Instead, a glance passed between them, a glance he has – this is the word, guilty though he feels about it – enjoyed before. If Harvey is waiting to use a unisex toilet, on a train, say, or in a private house at a party, and a woman comes out, Harvey enjoys (he knows it’s wrong but still allows himself the minute, tawdry thrill) the moment in which their eyes meet. He thinks the glance means that, for a second, they have both shared an image of her sitting on the seat with her pants down and the sound of liquid on china, or metal. This is the glance that passed between him and the nurse. As ever, he felt bad about enjoying it, but still. He noticed, though, that she squinted at him uncertainly, as if catching that something about Harvey’s look was not accidental, so he looked away, covering his shame by moving quickly into the cabin.
When he came back to the door to Eli’s room, the security guy was waiting, finger in ear. He looked Harvey up and down once more, and then stepped aside. Harvey chanced a friendly nod at him, which was met with a blank stare, making Harvey worried that his friendly nod may have been misinterpreted as ‘see?’, but continued on past his gravitational presence and through the door.
The first thing he noticed on entering was that the room was not windowless. In fact, the bed faced a floor-to-ceiling glass rectangle, looking onto exactly the view of Manhattan – across Central Park, towards downtown – that Harvey so covets. He drank it in – or, rather, since what hit him with a rush is not beauty but envy – he sucked it up, the sweep of sky and skyscrapers, before turning and saying, ‘Hello, Freda.’ His stepmother looked up – it had never occurred to him with the same force before; two years younger than him, that was still, technically, what she was. She stared at Harvey for so long – the oddity of their interaction reinforced by her being on her knees – that he started to wonder if she was trying to remember who he was.
‘Colette,’ she said eventually, ‘come and meet your half-brother, Harvey.’
When the girl looked up, her face under her curls was set in a tight frown. She may have been crying, although not, Harvey thought, out of sadness: her expression contained that classic mix of rage and self-pity that children’s faces emit when they have just been told off. She did not do as she was told; she did not come and meet him, but stayed where she was, raising her chin defiantly and staring as if he was complicit in – perhaps even the mastermind of – whatever slight had just been perpetrated against her.
Or maybe she was sad, about her – their – dad dying, and this was just what she looked like when she was sad. After all, Harvey had never met her before. He had been sent a photograph soon after her birth of the three of them at their New England lodge (not by Eli: the accompanying note, including the statement, ‘Eli is so overjoyed about his new child’ was all in Freda’s hand). Eli, in a big fisherman’s jumper, grinning beneficently, his arms around Freda, her trademark proprietorial smile cross-fertilized with an element of self-conscious sheepishness, as if to say, ‘Can you believe what little me has ended up with?!’, and in her lap, the baby. Harvey wondered who had taken it, as it was too professional – the light too dappled, the wood-panelled walls of the lodge too burnished, the composition of the threesome too perfectly arranged – to have been done on a self-timer. It looked, he thought, like something from OK! magazine. But he could not relate his memory of that infant, looking out at him from the photograph with something of the complacent gaze of a cow, to this fierce child with the thermonuclear stare.
‘Hello,’ he said: the word felt stupid in his mouth. Colette just nodded at him, and Harvey felt suddenly furious at Freda for spiking his route to his father’s bedside with this introduction, impossible as it was to brush off because of the absurd and irreducible fact of him and this thirty-six-years-younger girl being siblings. Freda must have known that his first thought would be to get to Eli’s bedside – and Harvey had really wanted to do this, although not so much because he just wanted to see his dad, more that he wanted to get the first sight of him over with. He was scared about it. Approaching the door, he had felt much like he had as a kid watching Dr Who, knowing that a new monster was about to appear. The ten-year-old Harvey, trembling beside his mother (who let Dr Who under her steel bar of what Harvey was allowed to watch, although in later series changed her mind, deciding that the Time Lord’s always-female assistants were becoming oversexualized) in his blue, bi-planed pyjamas, would not hide behind the sofa. He would, rather, watch intently, wanting the monster to appear as soon as possible; the worst thing was not knowing. He wanted to face it, so that he could know the fear, hold it and calibrate exactly how bad it was going to be.
‘Last time I saw you, you were a tiny baby,’ he said, his voice sounding astringent against the sentiment, holding down his rage at having to have this conversation now. Surreptitiously, he flicked his eyes over towards his father’s bed, more of which was visible from this angle. The movement of his eyes sideways reminded him of the painful glancing action always prompted by an attractive woman across a room. He could see the thin hump of a wasting body underneath bedding, but still not the face. It was facing the face that filled him with dread.
‘You saw me when I was a baby?’ said Colette.
‘No. I saw a photo …’
‘Oh. OK.’ She looked at him. Her frown deepened, producing little lines on her forehead. ‘Why is your tongue blue?’
The awkward stalemate this response induced was broken by the sudden appearance of Freda with her arms outstretched. Harvey, opening his to accept the hug, looked at her frame, spread like a net in front of him, and thanked the Lord again that he didn’t find her attractive. Although younger than him, and a woman – normally enough for his needs – there was something about Freda that inhibited Harvey’s reflex interest. She had that parched-face look so common to female humanist academics that Harvey felt they should try their utmost to avoid, thinking that they had fallen into the exact trap – unfemininity – which Victorian patriarchy had predicted for women should they become learned. This particular intellectual conundrum was a hangover not from his father but his mother, who, despite being herself a female humanist academic, and an arch-feminist, never emerged from her bedroom without a cosmetic face mask three inches thick.
It had occurred to Harvey many times that, physically, Freda was the opposite of everything Eli usually went for in women – except in respect of her youth, relative to him. It did not go unnoticed by Harvey that that was, as it were, the last thing to go – that all the other staples of Eli’s desire could be sacrificed, but not this one, not even in his dotage.
The hug went on for some time. Harvey, who had been hugged by Freda before, felt in it, as ever, no particular love or affection for him: but much love and affection for the idea of hugging. This one was tighter and longer than usual, but still somehow failed to convey any sense that she was pleased to see him. Uncomfortably, however, it did give him time to feel the full length of her body against his – the emotional distance between them allowed him, in a bleak, detached way, to take stock of her body in a way that he never had before – and, then, much to his consternation, come away from the hug, in spite of his long-held notions about her mannishness, with a hard-on.
‘Go …’ said Freda, pulling back from him, Harvey hoping against hope not because she had noticed it. She was speaking in what sounded to him like a stage whisper. ‘Go to him. Speak to him.’
‘Speak?’
‘He understands. He hears.’
Harvey nodded, not wanting to say anything that might disturb her reverence. The tumescence in his pants subsided. He choked down an urge – with him most days, although undoubtedly charged up by the situation – to shout an obscenity at the top of his voice. He walked towards his father’s bed, his feet padding against the quality carpet of the room.
Glancing back, he saw that Freda had crouched down again to whisper to Colette. The doctor and nurse in the room were busying themselves with notes and drips and bleepers: none of them offered to guide him – neither geographically nor spiritually nor even educationally – through the scene. Harvey felt again like a nonentity in some exclusive club, unable to make his presence felt. It even flashed through his mind to say Don’t you know who I am? He wished Stella were here, to hold his hand, even though Harvey was uncomfortable with hand-holding, because it made him feel more aware of the fact of fear, and because, sometimes, he could feel the small bones in her hands.
These thoughts were halted by the interruption into his vision, finally, of his father. Even then it wasn’t as Harvey had imagined it, a kind of naked confrontation with mortality. Eli’s head was propped up against the pillow, and covered nose to mouth with an oxygen mask. Attached to various intravenous ports, six or seven different tubes curled around his bed and into his body, like he was being gently cradled by an octopus. Machines, humming and bleeping and oscillating with sine waves, surrounded him in a stately circle, as if his father were whatever invisible deity lurks in the centre of Stonehenge. It felt to Harvey that all this apparatus was designed not just to keep Eli from death, but also his visitors: that it formed a buffer zone between them and the reality of his condition. So much so, in fact, that the sight of his father was almost an anti-climax after all the girding of his loins. Where is he? he wanted to say, and not in a metaphorical way – not in a This shrunken shell of a human being cannot be My Father! way – but physically: he wanted to rummage through all this stuff, all the sheeting and the wires and the plastic, chucking it over his head like a man sorting through the trash, to find him.
He also felt he couldn’t see him because of the things that were not there. People assume that the way to reveal an object is to remove its external trappings, but that doesn’t hold true for the human object. Glasses, for example: Eli had for Harvey’s whole life worn thick black beatnik spectacles, and without them, as now, he was somehow not Eli. The lack of glasses, along with the lack of a cigarette in his mouth – something Harvey had also grown up conditioned to see, although Eli had finally given them up two years ago – was not an unmasking. It just made him look like someone else.
But then Harvey looked more closely – having realized that he had been focusing on all the last-days’ paraphernalia exactly to avoid doing that – and, indeed, there he was: in the wet, grey clumps of hair stuck to his temples, wisps curling away from his skin like they always did; in the deep trench-like lines on his forehead – the same ones that he has just seen reproduced in miniature on his half-sister’s brow – whose up or down state the child Harvey had desperately relied upon to monitor his father’s otherwise unguessable moods; in the remnants of his beard, its close trimming evocative of his decline like some upside-down Samson, but bringing back to Harvey a distant memory of Eli scraping his emery stubble against the virgin cheek of his son, who would protest, but laughingly, finding the touch both abrasive and delightful, redolent of the rough promise of the adult world; and perhaps most of all in his hands, which were still, despite the pulse meters and the blood clots and the mountainous veinscape rising angrily from their backs, sheathed in the same skin, brown and rough as bark, and still incongruously large, still, even here, suggesting strength, the hands of a labourer, on the end of arms which had avoided heavy lifting their whole life. Harvey, a sucker for comparisons, found himself looking at his own hands by contrast – he’d done this before, of course, but the OCD lizard king in his brain always required new checks – raising his right one a Reiki hover away from his dad’s. It looked small, but Harvey has always known he has small hands, girl’s hands, easy prey for ‘you-know-what-they-say-about’ jokers. He wondered how the DNA divides it up – what fall it is of the cellular dice that has given him his father’s nose, mouth and skin, but his mother’s eyes and hands.
He did not know what to do. He felt that the correct – the polite – thing to do was to speak, as Freda had advised. But looking at his father again – less like his father, and more like a mad scientist had given up halfway through making a robot version of his father – the idea of speaking was clearly ridiculous. He felt not unlike he always did in church or synagogue, fighting an urge, during the endless roll call of praise and plea, to shout ‘No one’s listening! No one’s even there to listen!!’ And what was he supposed to say? Dad: it’s me? Since even those keeping the faith in Eli’s ability to hear did not believe, presumably, that the dying man could see as well, this would then require him to say, in explanation – ‘Um … Harvey’ – like he was on the phone. And then what? How are you? Oh my God, it would just be a fucking phone call. Something more supportive? I’ve just come to say I’m going to be here for you … oh no. No. I am a dual citizen, he thought, but I will never become that American. He didn’t know what to say. He wondered who the people were who did, in this situation. He looked round, as if, at any minute, they might come into the room and tutor him.
Even the first word he might say – Dad – felt weird. It was a word he’d always had problems with. Eli had left Harvey’s mother at a time when his son – six, after all – called him Daddy. There was then a period of some years when Harvey hardly saw his father at all, but still referred to him, in his absence, as Daddy. Thus, when he began to see him again, at increasingly irregular intervals in his teens, he found he had missed out on that poignant slide from Daddy into Dad that marks out children’s first maturity. He addressed him as Dad at this point, but it felt somehow wrong, and he found himself wanting to say Daddy: not in the front of his head – like any other post-pubescent boy, he was keen to avoid any word or deed that might make him seem childish – but in his gut, in the reflex part of his linguistic centre. When he saw Eli, the word that formed in his mind was Daddy. Latterly, a number of different titles for his father were attempted, knowable as the word Harvey used following ‘Hello’ when seeing his father or hearing his voice on the phone – Father; Eli (never comfortable); Dad (still not right); an attempt at irony, Pater. Now, by his deathbed, his mind was saying, again, Daddy.
He decided not to think about it, and just trust what might come out. He coughed, something of a stage ahem. It emerged from his mouth much louder than he had expected, in a weird croak-grunt, shattering the quiet of the room. Freda had taken Colette outside for some form of pep talk, and the doctor had been whispering to one of the nurses, no doubt detailing some complex medical issue, although Harvey had been unable not to wonder if it was flirtation. Both of them looked over, surprised for a moment, before going back to their huddle. And then, at that point, almost as if he had heard, Eli stirred. His hands, one of which was still just underneath Harvey’s, stiffened, the long fingers – whose nails had, Harvey noticed, been neatly trimmed – extending like sickles. His eyes even opened, although the pupils were long gone, high up into his head, revealing just two grey-white ovals, slivers cut from an English sky. Under the oxygen mask, his mouth, previously lopsided into a shape, ironically, like a speech balloon, opened further on that side, and from the weird aperture came a sound that was part-howl and part-yawn, with something oddly synthetic in it as well, not unlike the note produced by a theramin. It was loud, and deeply disturbing: a noise that knew and did not know, like a cow makes at the touch on its temple of the stun gun, a distress call back to this world from the black country.
Immediately, the doctor and the nurse rushed over, in their long coats. Freda burst back through the door, trailing Colette, still sulky. Harvey stared at the blind, raging stump of his father, guilt-stricken, convinced that somehow this atrocious convulsion must be his fault. ‘What’s happening?’ he said. ‘Is he waking up?’
‘No,’ said the doctor – Indian, Harvey guesses, with short, tufty hair combed forward to cover a receding hairline – ‘he does this from time to time.’
He does? thought Harvey. Over the last few weeks, Freda had somehow implied to him that Eli’s unconsciousness was serene – even, perhaps, that the coma was itself a work of art, a kind of late period ripeness-is-all evocation of tranquillity. Not this – this roaring zombie, this Eli Agonistes.
Freda had taken hold of his hand, clutching it with both of hers. ‘He’s still so strong,’ she said, looking up at Harvey. ‘So strong.’
Freda’s face, constipated with hope, forcing out the positive from this indigestible horror – something pitiful in that, Harvey realized: this woman, for whom it was such a prize, capturing Eli, never quite realizing how much she would have to pay for it, and how soon – it is Freda’s face which seems to reflect back to Harvey from the window of the cab as the light of the Sangster forecourt creates of its glass a mirror. It dissolves like aspirin in water as men in autumnal uniforms come gliding towards the passenger door in order to smooth his passage to the lobby.
* * *
He has spent two days now in his room at the Condesa Inn, going over The Material. He has gone over The Material many times before but he thinks that now, so close to the act, it has a different force. It feels shaping and controlling: it feels as if it’s making clearer what he has to do. The why helps the how, he thinks.
He has not contacted his wives. It has crossed his mind often on his journey to do so. He would prefer to write to them than to telephone. He feels that he could Lie for the Lord – lying to preserve a greater spiritual truth, a Mormon practice that Uncle Jimmy explained to him once – easier that way. But none of his wives are allowed to have a computer, or use email, and, at any rate, the only computer in the family house is the Dell, which sits at this moment on the white sheet of his bed, cradled underneath by his crossed legs. He knows what his absence will have occasioned. Ambree, as the most senior now that Leah is dead, will have called a meeting. It will have been held in the kitchen, because, although the living room is bigger, the kitchen is the enclave of the wives, and they will have found it easier to shut the door to the children, although RoLyne would still probably have brought in Elin, his youngest, to breast-feed her. He is confident that Ambree, the most virtuous of his wives, will have led the meeting to the correct decision – despite protests from, he suspects, Angel and maybe even Sedona – that he was their husband, and he knew best: that if he had taken it upon himself to disappear for days without explanation, why, that was no different from Our Lord deciding to enter the desert for forty days in order truly to understand Himself and His Mission. Our job, he was sure she would say, our job as his celestial wives, is in the meantime to care for his house and his children, and be ready to welcome him on his return.
Having thought this through, the urge to communicate with his loved ones recedes, and he turns back to The Material. The intermittent wireless connection at the Condesa Inn troubles him, but also helps. It helps because it makes it harder to watch streaming internet pornography, tube8, or pornhub, or keez, which he normally watches a lot. Thus the intermittent connection is a good thing, as he would feel ashamed of watching these in front of Jesus, and, also, they distract him from his destiny.
The ones that don’t distract him are GunAmerica, and Justice Coalition, and Unsolved, and Restless Sleep, and the jihadi ones. A part of him likes them best. He is even enrolled on the forum at al-jinan.org under the name Pbuh53. Pbuh – he found this out on another website – is the Islamic name for Jesus. He wasn’t sure about this: he was worried it might be seen by God as saying that he himself was Pbuh, was Jesus – writing it into the electronic login form, he felt the butterflies in his stomach that he always feels when he thinks he might be doing something wrong by the Lord – but he went ahead, because it was surely a way of spreading His Name amongst the heathen. And then the site told him he had to add some numbers too, so he wrote his age, as well. That was two years ago.
He enrolled on al-jinan because, when he hears the jihadis speak, something in him stirs. He likes the fierce commitment to God; he likes the language, the poetry of rage, purged of all the trivial inflections of modernity; and he likes the belief in – no, the knowledge of – destiny. To know absolutely both the nature and the quality of destiny – to know what role God has chosen for you and exactly how heroic that role is – that is what he would want for himself. He watches some of the videos that suicide bombers make before they embark on their missions, and he sees in their eyes no sway, no diversion, and it inspires him, even as he knows that the Jesus-less path they have chosen is wrong. He sees how only revenge inspires true religiosity.
And, of course, like him, they are fundamentalists. That is why he calls Eli Gold The Great Satan. It is sort of a joke – a joke he tells only himself – but it is a joke with a purpose. It inspires him to hate him more; to remind him of what the writer stands for; and also to help him to think like the jihadis do, about destiny.
He opens the Dell lid: the square light of the screen shines in the dimness of the room, a hot, white beacon showing him the way. He is not on al-jinan. He is looking, for perhaps the hundredth, or the two hundredth, time at the transcript on www.unsolved.com. Unsolved has a lot of these transcripts which purport to relate to unsolved crimes. The one he reads, over and over again, is an interview between Police Commissioner Raymond Webb and The Great Satan. The interview took place on 15 June 1993. His third and index fingers caress the mouse tracking pad expertly, bringing the transcript into plain view:
RW: So, Mr Gold, I’m sorry to have to make you do this …
EG: How sorry are you exactly? Not sorry enough to not want to bring me down here at a time of deep personal grief.
[inaudible]
EG: Yes, well … how long will this take?
RW: Not long, sir. We just need to go over some of the facts.
EG: Facts …
RW: Sir?
EG: May I have some coffee?
RW: Er … yes, I guess.
[inaudible]
RW: Showing Mr Gold case document R45/100 … do you recognize this?
EG: Yes.
RW: Mrs Gold showed it to you before she took the pills …?
EG: Yes.
RW: And then sealed it in this … showing Mr Gold case document R45/101 … envelope?
EG: Well, I didn’t watch her lick the glue.
[pause]
RW: What did you make of it?
EG: What did I make of it? For fuck’s sake, Commissioner …
RW: Webb.
EG: … Webb, it wasn’t a seminar …
RW: But she had been one of your students. When you met.
[pause]
EG: I really don’t see –
RW: ‘I have no desire left for life. Surrender is preferable to despair. I go, to the soft quiet land: and I thank my love for leading me there.’
[pause]
RW: Are you OK?
EG: I shall be.
RW: Sorry to … I know it’s upsetting.
EG: It’s beautiful. I think.
RW: Yes. Yes, it is. But –
EG: Yes?
RW: I thank my love for leading me there. What did she mean by that?
[pause]
EG: You are asking a question of the dead, Commissioner.
RW: No, Mr Gold, with the greatest respect, I’m asking it of the living. Because you, of course, despite also writing a suicide note, are still alive.
He hears some shuffling in the corridor outside of his room. It could be the cleaner, a Filipino woman, who has tried to get into his room to clean six or seven times over the course of the last two days, or it could be the man next door, who caused him to wake up in terror last night with the sound of what seemed to be nails scratching against the other side of the wall. He shuts the lid of the Dell as if caught looking at something he should not be.
Chapter 3
I didn’t want to go in and see Daddy today. Aristotle is definitely missing me. When I sit in my bed at night reading my story, he comes and sits on my chest, right up by my face. I can feel his whiskers tickling my nose. And then he purrs, really loudly, much louder than he normally does, like he’s like so, so happy that I’m there. Then he usually goes away, but this morning he was still there in the morning! I told Jada this and she said he probably went away during the night and came back just before I woke up but I think he was there all night, ’cos I felt this big weight on my chest where he’d been sitting, and like I said before he’s gotten really fat while we’ve been at the hospital every day so it was really something, like even after I got up it was like he was still sitting there, or like his ghost was still sitting there or whatever.
Also Jada has got the DVD of Marmaduke and she wanted to come round after school and have a movie night. She said she’d bring popcorn and everything. So after Noda had done serving us our breakfast, I asked her – Mommy – that is.
‘Mommy? Can I stay home today?’ I said.
She didn’t say anything at first, just carried on cutting up her eggwhite omelette into little slices, like she likes to. I don’t know why she likes to do that. It’s like what people do for a baby who can’t cut stuff himself yet. I hate it when she does that.
‘Mom?’ I said, ’cos I wasn’t sure she’d even heard. But then she put her knife and fork down.
‘Yes, darling,’ she said, in that voice she has which means she’s cross with me but won’t admit it, ‘I heard you. I’m just wondering why you don’t want to come to the hospital with me.’
‘I didn’t say I didn’t want to come to the hospital! I just asked if I could stay home!’
‘Well, staying at home means you won’t come to the hospital. Doesn’t it?’
I took a drink of water. I only drink mineral water. I like Volvic, Evian, and a fizzy one from Europe called San Pellegrino. This one was Evian.
‘Yes,’ I said, when I put my cup down, which has a picture of Aristotle on it – I mean the real Greek guy, not my cat! Mommy bought it for me when we went to the Metropolitan Museum, ‘but it doesn’t mean I don’t want to come. It just means I just want to stay at home today more.’
Mommy got out of her chair and came and crouched down really near me, so that her eyes were the same height as my eyes. Her eyes, which are greeny-brown, were all watery, and the white bits had little lines of red in them, those kind of tiny strings of red you get in your eyes when you rub them a lot. Mom took hold of my hand.
‘Colette … I really think you should come …’ she said. With her other hand, she brushed my fringe, kind of like she was brushing it out of my eyes, but it was never in my eyes. This made me shiver a bit. I could feel lots of stuff inside me that I wanted to say. I could feel it wanting to come out like I was going to throw up, like the words were food or maybe something that wasn’t food that I shouldn’t have eaten, like when Jada told me she once swallowed an earbud.
‘But it’s so boring in the hospital! They don’t have anything for me to do there, and the TV is just on CNN all the time, and the only toys they have are for babies! And no one who’s my age ever comes there and I have to meet lots of creepy people like that fat guy Harvey – and he’s like my brother and I haven’t even met him before!’
I didn’t think I was screaming or anything when I said this, although I knew it must have been quite loud, because Noda came out of the kitchen making that face that she makes when she thinks something’s wrong, but Mom just shook her head and did a little wave of her hand, and she went back in again.
‘Colette. Firstly, could you not raise your voice to me like that? And secondly, could you not talk in that stupid way you’ve just learnt off the TV?’
I didn’t say anything. I looked down at my plate. My pancakes had gone cold. I could see the syrup on top of one of the cranberries had gone all hard. I heard her breathe really deeply. I was so annoyed by then that even that annoyed me, hearing her breathe really deeply. It was like it was louder than it needed to be, like she was making sure I heard her breathe.
‘Darling,’ she said after a bit – her voice had gone softer, because she wasn’t telling me off any more – ‘you always knew that you had half-brothers and sisters that you’ve never met. Harvey’s just one of them.’
‘Well, I don’t like him. He’s fat and sweaty and he smelt funny.’ She opened her mouth to tell me off then, but before she could speak, I said: ‘And he upset Daddy.’
Her mouth stuck open at that for a bit, like a fish. Her face went different.
‘Do you think so?’
‘God, yeah! He was really upset when he saw him. It was like he was saying Could someone please get that guy out of here!’
She smiled, that stupid smile that means Oh darling you don’t understand. ‘I don’t think so, darling.’
‘Who are the others?’ I said.
‘What others?’
‘The other brothers and sisters.’
Her forehead went all lined. ‘Colette. I’ve told you all this before.’
‘I know but that was ages ago.’
Mommy tutted, and looked at her watch. It was a present from Daddy. It’s got diamonds in it and everything.
‘Apart from Harvey, there’s Simone, who lives in France. And Jules, who lives in Los Angeles …’
‘Is that a boy or a girl?’
‘It’s a boy. A man.’
‘Has he got any children?’
‘No, he’s gay.’
I know what this means. Mommy told me this when I was little. It means he can have sex with men, even though he is a man. Women can do it, too, with women. I don’t know about girls and boys. When I was little, Mommy used to say it means a man can fall in love with a man, or a woman with a woman, but now I know it means they can have sex, too.
‘How old are they?’
‘Uh … Jules is about fifty, I think. Simone is … I don’t know. She never tells anyone her age, Daddy says.’
‘Why not?’
Mom just shook her head. ‘I guess she’s fifty-something, too.’
‘Are they coming to see Daddy, too?’
Mommy made a bit of a weird face when I said this, like she’d hurt her tongue or something.
‘I don’t think so, darling. That’s all a bit complicated.
‘You’re doing that thing.’
‘What thing?’
‘Of not telling me something because you think I won’t understand.’
She did a big sigh and tucked her hair behind her ears. There are red veins on the top of her ears.
‘So why do I have to go every day, when they aren’t even coming at all!’
‘Col …’
‘They’re Daddy’s children, too!’
She looked a bit surprised when I said this. I guess I did say it pretty loud again. Although I don’t know if that was why she was surprised. It was more like I was saying something she didn’t know. She didn’t say anything for a bit, just stared at me. Then she did another big breath.
‘Listen, Colette, I know how hard it must be for you, seeing Daddy like he is now …’
‘Yes,’ I said, because I could tell that this was the best thing to say to get her to let me stay home. But when I said it, I felt really sad inside, like it was just true.
‘… but – you know how we’ve talked about how – how Daddy’s not coming back from the hospital?’
‘Yes. He’s going to die there.’
‘… yes.’
‘But he is going to come back.’
Mommy kept on looking at me, doing that thing she does of really looking at me, like she can see right behind my eyes into my brain or something. ‘No, darling, he isn’t …’
‘Well, how are we going to have the funeral then?’
‘Oh. Well. Yes. His body will come back. Well, not to here exactly, but …’ She stopped speaking and turned to look out of the window.
‘Daddy wants to be cremated, doesn’t he?’ I said. Cremated was a word I got taught by Elaine just before Daddy went into his hospital. Mommy told her to teach me all the death words, cremated, coffi n, undertaker, postmortem, bereavement, funeral (although I knew that one already) and mourning, which although it sounds the same is different from morning. After I had learnt all these, I went and found out a few others by putting the word ‘Death’ into Google onto Daddy’s computer: decomposition, decay, rigor mortis, and putrefaction.
‘Yes, darling … but the point is: he isn’t coming back, not really. And I know it’s hard but I think it’s important that you come to the hospital because – here’s the thing – nobody knows when Daddy is going to die. And I think it’s really important that you are there when that happens.’
‘But why?’
‘Colette …’ She put her hand on top of mine. I was looking away. I didn’t want to look at her because I was cross and I kind of knew that what I was saying was wrong but I didn’t really know why, and I knew that she would be doing that thing with her eyes again and if I looked at her doing that it would maybe make me cry proper or be more mad. ‘I don’t expect you to understand. Maybe if I was Daddy – maybe if I had his words – I could explain it to you. But for now, you’ll just have to trust me. Because you have to be there not just for him, but for you. I know that if you’re not there when Daddy dies, when you’re older, you’ll regret it. You know what regret means, don’t you?’
I nodded, but without turning round to look at her. ‘It means when you do something and then you think you shouldn’t have.’
‘Yes. Or in this case, when you don’t do something and then you think – maybe for your whole life – that you should have.’ She took my chin in her hand and moved my face back so that she could look at me. I thought about holding my neck stiff so she couldn’t do that, but then I thought that might hurt, and also I wasn’t so cross by this time.
‘But won’t Simone or Jules regret it that they won’t be there?’
Mommy’s lips went all tight. ‘That is their decision. Which they will have to live with. So, Colette …’ she said. ‘Of course, it’s up to you. I don’t want you to be there if you don’t want to be there. But I just want you to think about what I’ve said. And while you’re thinking about it, I’m going to go and get ready to go. And if you still don’t want to come with me when I come back, that’s fine.’
And then she got up and went out of the dining room. I sat there for a bit, eating little bits of my cold pancake with my fingers. Then I started rubbing the bits before I put them in my mouth and they went all spongy. Aristotle came up and rubbed the side of his face on my leg. He was purring, and it was like he was saying, It’s OK: you can go. I’m OK. So I thought, OK, I’ll go. I kind of knew that that was what I was going to do all along.
But when I got down from the table and picked up my knapsack – the one shaped like a rabbit – I had a weird thought, which was: I wonder what Daddy would do. I don’t mean what he would do really, because Daddy wouldn’t want to watch Marmaduke, he never even watches any films, but I just meant if he was like me or if I was more like him or whatever. Because Mommy sometimes says to me when I don’t know what to do about something – she says: OK. What would Daddy do? And I thought: he wouldn’t go. He’d stay in and do movie night.
* * *
Eli and Violet were married quickly, in the manner of wartime romances. Eli was one of many American soldiers stationed in the UK in preparation for the D-Day landings, and the possibility that he might not return from Europe propelled their engagement almost as fast as the Nazi bullets over the dunes of Normandy. This possibility – that Eli might be killed in action – was what defined their love in its early stages. It was a possibility that Eli seemed to hold, Violet felt, ironically: he would talk about his chances of dying with a smirk and a raised eyebrow, his voice slowing to that Geiger-counter drawl it always did when he wanted to signal that nothing of what he was saying was serious. She had never met anyone so infused with irony, so unable to present any statement as the thing itself, always implying that nothing was truly meant. This applied across the board to Eli’s discourse, whether in the matter of their love, his death, or who they should invite to their wedding.
The one picture Violet still owns of their wedding day lies in the same shoebox that contains Eli’s love letters. Her back cracks like an ice cube tray as she bends to pick it up from underneath her single bed, laid as ever with too much bedding – her bed seems to have a belly, Violet always thinks, reminiscent of those on the malnourished African children she sometimes sees on the television news. She once mentioned this to one of the maids, Mandy, but then felt anxious that it might have been a wrong thing to say, as Mandy, like all the maids and most of the nurses, is black. The presence of so many coloured people makes Violet anxious. She is not intrinsically racist: like most of her generation, it is more that the presence of black people around her, existing in a taken-for-granted, unremarked-on manner, serves as a constant reminder that the world is no longer the one she knows.
The box, however, is too far under the mattress for her to reach just by bending, and getting down on her knees is out of the question – she imagines the joints turning to powder at the first touch of the hard, dark lino. Bewildered, she sits down on her one armchair, a high-backed plum-red reproduction antique, last reupholstered in 1973, but still plush enough to look faintly outrageous in this setting. Violet knows that if she sits long enough, she will forget what it was she was concerned about, anyway: when this first started to happen it was intensely worrying, but lately she has begun to think of it as a comfort.
Before her memory has a chance to erase the issue of the shoebox, though, she remembers her walking stick, waiting for her at the door like a faithful dog. Getting out of the chair, with its relatively deep cushion, is difficult; halfway up, her elbows lock and her arms tremble – making her look for a second like a gymnast straining on the parallel bars – before she pushes herself off.
She retrieves the stick from the door. Violet’s walking stick was a present from her sister: as Valerie didn’t forbear to mention, it cost over £40. Violet likes it, likes the feel of the silver-plated handle, and knows the stout brown wood of the shaft will not easily break, but has enough of a sense of irony herself to feel the sad absurdity of a walking stick being her one luxury item. She goes back to the bed – not a long walk: her room, kitchenette included, is something of a shoebox itself – and, bending again, flails the stick back and forth under the bed, knocking out first her crocheted slippers, before hitting something heavier with a clang: it is her chamber pot, thankfully empty. She breathes heavily, and tries again: this time, her stick alights on something that feels right. She drags it towards her and, sure enough, eventually, the edge of the shoebox, its top askew, appears by her feet.
Another difficult bend to pick it up: the box is heavier than she had imagined. When she sits back down with it on her lap, she realizes why this is – having thought the shoebox contained only her letters from Eli and her wedding photo, it has over the years become a more general repository. Inside are crinkled black-and-white photos of her nephews and nieces as children, less crinkled, colour photos of their children, a random brooch, an old purse, and the letter from Redcliffe House saying how pleased they were to accept her application for a room. There are also photographs of her, eerie images of her girlhood, so po-faced it seems as if she must have grown up in a much earlier era, before people understood that the thing to do on camera was smile, plus one fragment of her as a young adult on a beach, waving and grinning and holding her coat around herself for warmth. And then there it is, sepia as a cell from a silent film: her wedding photograph. It has a strange, lopsided composition: she is standing flanked by her family, her mother and father and Valerie, their smiles tight with self-consciousness, but there is no one except Eli on his side, because he didn’t invite any relatives.
Violet remembers the day. It was April, and spitting with rain. She had wanted to wait until later in the summer so as to guarantee the weather but the shadow of Eli’s imminent dispatch to France made that impossible. In the photograph, the rain has polished the steps of Streatham Town Hall, on which they are standing, black. Violet had always imagined a church wedding, but Eli hadn’t been keen.
‘Why not?’ Violet had said, already feeling the clench of anxiety in her stomach that always accompanied any attempt to challenge him. This discussion took place in the Piccolo, a café near Liverpool Street station: he had only time for a short meeting before catching a train back to his barracks near Colchester. It was January, and the radiators were on full blast, steaming up the windows – though the one they were sitting by produced more noise than heat, for which Violet, in her woollen winter coat, was grateful.
‘Oh, come on, Birdy,’ he said, his eyes fixed on his spoon, idling in the froth of his coffee, ‘let’s not fight.’
Birdy was a name he had started calling her one night coming back from the pictures. They used to go every Friday to the Streatham Astoria, a place Violet loved. It was like an Egyptian palace, she thought, with its columns and murals and friezes in red, green and gold; even in the ladies’ toilets there was a wall-painting of a figure bathing in a lotus pool. They’d seen a movie about a female internment camp in France, in which the prisoners put aside all their differences to help hide a group of shot-down British airmen from the Nazis: it was called Two Thousand Women. One of the women was played by Jean Kent, who Eli always said Violet looked like. In the film, this character was called Bridie, and Eli said, on exiting the Streatham Astoria, that he was more convinced than ever that Violet looked like her, so he swapped round the I and the R and started calling her Birdy. It made no real sense, but formed part of a happy memory, and so had stuck.
She looked away, hurt by the implication that they were a couple who regularly fought, the truth being that their relationship – or, at least, what sense of their relationship she could garner from an engagement conducted so far mainly in letters and snatched meetings – ran very smooth, certainly compared to what she had seen in other couples. Gwendoline and her husband rowed so much that Violet sometimes wondered if Henry, a conscientious objector, wasn’t trying to fight his own war within the confines of their tiny flat in Shoreditch.
She also knew, however, that their freedom from fighting depended on her assumed complicity; so felt the fist in her stomach tighten, even before she decided to continue:
‘Is it … is it because you’re Jewish?’
He looked up, his face set behind the shield of his trademark grin, the one that brought his nose over his mouth, making him look, Violet thought, Jewish. ‘Of course it’s because I’m Jewish.’
‘But your mother wasn’t. Was she? Catholic, you said. So it doesn’t matter, anyway.’
Eli lit a cigarette. He still had the Zippo. There was too much petrol in it, and the flame seemed to cover half his face, making Violet back off.
‘And you’ve told me you don’t believe in religion, anyway.’
‘I don’t.’
‘So what difference does it make?’
He frowned. The lines on his face, very pronounced in the grey light falling through the window, joined up to form circles, like contours around a mapped hill. She had noticed now many times how Eli’s facial lines served to exaggerate – to underline – his every mood.
‘Well, when I say I don’t believe in religion, what I mean is: I don’t believe in it. Any of it. So getting married in a church – a building which only exists because one thousand nine hundred years ago the Jews got so fiddly about the pissy little dos and don’ts of God-bothering that a whole new mutant religion had to be born out of its already exhausted old womb – that seems to me even more hypocritical than doing it in a synagogue …’
The radiator between them coughed and shook violently, like an old smoker waking up. Eli looked at it with interest.
‘What about me?’ Violet said. ‘What about what I want?’
He glanced at her, surprised. She felt her own eyebrows forming virtually the same expression: the idea of Violet introducing her desires into their conversation – indeed, the idea that Violet had desires, or, at least, desires that could be put up in conflict with Eli’s – was as startling to her as it was to him.
‘Birdy,’ he said, putting his two hands on the one of hers that was resting on the table: she felt their enveloping weight and warmth. ‘What’s more important? Getting married, or where we get married?’
She looked at his eyes, scanning them for insincerity. In this instant, their deep brown seemed to her the opposite: the substantial brown of leather book covers and panelled walls. And if eyes are the windows to the soul, like her mother was always saying, then substance, tangibility, something in Eli’s soul to hang on to, was what she needed to see in those windows. She knew that his words could as easily have been said by her to him – he was the one who didn’t want to get married in a church – but this fleeting moment of Eli being serious – serious, for once, about them – was more important.
‘You’re right, of course,’ she said, adding her other hand to the hand pile on the table. Their four hands together, his two in between hers, looked like a sandwich in which the dark meat filling could not be contained by the two small slices of white bread. The radiator croaked again, and then gushed, as the hot water inside forced its way along the cast-iron coils.
‘It must be like a coral reef,’ said Eli, looking away from her towards the sound.
‘Sorry?’
‘Inside the radiator. The water’s having such a hard time getting through it, heating it up – inside, it must be studded with rocks of fur and scale, sprouting off the sides and up off the bottom, like a coral reef.’
Violet looked towards the heating implement. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Have you got a pen?’
She shook her head.
‘What, nowhere? Not in amongst all the God knows what you carry in your handbag?’ Underneath its normal New York insouciance, his voice betrayed, a hint of petulance.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said, picking her handbag up off the floor and starting to file through it anyway. ‘You’re the one who wants to be a writer.’
‘I know.’ He opened his palm. ‘But I’m also the one who can’t keep hold of anything.’
She tutted, although smiled at the same time, pleased at the notion of coupledom – you’re this, I’m that, my weaknesses, your strengths – that this declaration assumed.
‘Why don’t …?’ Violet began, about to suggest asking the waitress, but before she could finish he had leant across the table, his pinched waist awkwardly angled against the Formica edge, and extended his long index finger towards the window. On the fogged-up glass, he wrote: Inside the radiator, a coral reef.
‘What use is that?’ she said, as he sat back in his chair, surveying his handiwork with a satisfied air. Various other diners in the Piccolo were looking round from their tea and cakes and staring. Violet felt annoyed by this action. When he had written on the ceiling in the Eagle it had felt spontaneous, a sheer outpouring of self, but this had an element of self-consciousness about it, of deeply considered writ-erliness. It felt contrived. ‘Are you going to telephone a glazier? To cut the window out for you?’
She noticed you could now see through the window, or at least through the bits of window revealed by his letters. This fractional view obscured the daily commotion of the Liverpool Street forecourt, lending its towers and turrets something of the collegiate calm the architect must have intended.
Eli, however, was still looking entirely at the window. ‘I don’t need to take it away,’ he said. ‘I’m sure that’ll do as an aide-mémoire.’
* * *
How many therapists, then, has Harvey Gold been through? The answer, leaving aside the many friends and minor acquaintances who he has, in his more frantic moments, forced to listen to his troubles, is eight. They are:
1. Prof. Stephen J. Wilson, professor of child psychology at the University of New York 1957–78, a Winnicottian (trained, in fact, under the man himself), writer of numerous significant case studies and one commercial work, Neither Angels nor Monsters, bought in its millions in 1966 by young American family-starters desperate to escape the parenting traps of their parents. Eli met Wilson at a party in 1974 thrown by Susan Sontag, just after splitting with Harvey’s mother, his third wife: Joan, the pale-faced postgraduate student he had settled upon as the prospective third way between Violet’s artlessness and Isabelle’s sophistication. Joan was always a feminist, but had become, immediately following Eli’s desertion, arch; he mainly switched off during her recriminations, but had managed to catch ‘and no doubt you haven’t even stopped to think about what your fucking selfish fucking behaviour will do to our child …’ On meeting the professor, therefore, it occurred to him he could kill two birds with one stone: rebut at least one section of his ex-wife’s rants, and gain a further bit of cachet with the New York literary salon, enamoured as it was at the time with psychoanalysis, by putting his six-year-old son into therapy. This, at least, is how Harvey now reads the fact of his having had a short series of sessions with Professor Wilson. Of the sessions, and of Professor Wilson himself, he has very little memory, although, once in a while, in his dreams, an image of his father seems to merge with that of a smiley, kindly, white-haired benevolent, who emerges from behind a plain white door to say: ‘Now Harvey – do you remember when the bed-wetting started?’
2. Donovan (‘Donny’) Lanes, a counsellor, really, rather than a proper therapist, who Harvey saw once a week while an English student at Leicester Polytechnic in the mid- to late 1980s. This was during a period, Harvey knows now, when he was not depressed. He thought he was depressed, but in fact he was simply attracted by the idea of depression, in order to cement some sense of his own seriousness. Actual depression, Harvey knows now, is quite different, being a condition much less like the student Harvey imagined – something gaunt and brooding and gravitas-gaining while at the same time sexy; Socrates crossed with Robert Smith of The Cure – and more like a continual panic attack crossed with severe influenza.
Donny’s main focus was Harvey’s mother, which struck Harvey at the time, even before he was an old hand at therapy, as a little route one. It being the mid- to late eighties, however, it may have been less about his counsellor adopting a crude Freudianism than a fascination Donny developed with Joan, the proto-feminist. When Harvey talked of Joan – of her bookish, pinned-back beauty, of her endless fury with Eli, of her insistence on keeping him always informed, even as a child, of her agonizing and infinitely various menstrual issues, of her aggressive intelligence, of her ongoing project to write a feminocentric response to Solomon’s Testament called The Solo Woman’s Testament – he could see in his counsel-lor’s eyes an excitement, a love even, growing at this picture he was painting of an undiscovered English Gloria Steinem. Harvey could almost see the book cover forming in Donny’s mind – Joan Gold (she had kept the name, despite everything): A Woman’s Struggle by Donovan Lanes – even as he once again took her side on another instance of what Harvey had previously thought of as a clear infliction of maternal damage.
Donny was particularly energized by Harvey’s revelation that Joan had, in her late thirties, become a lesbian. Harvey had known, even at the time, even in the confusion of puberty, that his mother had made this choice politically. All Joan’s choices were political, and, at the same time – in Harvey’s opinion – psychological: motivated, that is, by a need to enact some kind of revenge on Eli. Because this revenge was ongoing – Joan never seemed able to find the emotional or sexual act that could completely cancel out the outrage of his leaving – it had to conform to the changing political tapestry of the times. The politics of the mid-seventies necessitated that her revenge take the form of sleeping with – and dismissing from her life immediately afterwards – an enormous number of unsuitable men; the politics of the late seventies and early eighties required becoming a lesbian. As he grew into adolescence, Harvey found it hard to believe that, ten years after their divorce, the anger inside his mother towards her ex-husband could still be powerful enough to impel her towards a completely new sexuality. In truth, the teenage Harvey, already the person he is now, already astounded, flabbergasted, by the pin-down force of desire, simply could not accept that sexuality could be shepherded in this way. Sexuality, Harvey thought and thinks, directs you, not the other way round. He feels guilty about this; it makes him, in his mother’s language, a reactionary.
The sessions – and particularly any attempts to talk freely on this subject, of sexuality and its discontents – were hampered a little by Harvey’s growing suspicion that Donny was gay. This was not something which Donny proffered, but he did, Harvey noticed, have a tendency to draw any conversation towards the subject of safe sex. Moreover, he was, when not counselling, the singer in a local electronic duo, and Harvey had noticed that all the singers in the electronic duos of the time, The Pet Shop Boys, Soft Cell, Erasure, all had something in common. He wasn’t sure about Sparks.
Harvey tried very hard, in a very mid-1980s way, to think himself into a space during the sessions where it didn’t matter that Donny might be gay, but it was problematic. Firstly, because Harvey assumed, despite his possession at the time of hair so stiff with Studioline it made him look like a permanently alerted porcupine, that Donny found him attractive; and secondly, because, even though Harvey was not then depressed, from the tiny acorns of his faux-depression the enormous black leafless tree of his real depression would still grow, and it was women, obviously, and the tension between his desire for every other pixie-booted one he saw on campus, and his fractured and difficult relationship with his girlfriend-from-home, Alison, a timid, passive aggressor with a sharply cut bob, which formed the basis of much of his emotional complaint. Suspecting that Donny might be gay, and therefore not subject either to the desire for, nor the demands of, women, made Harvey feel like talking about it all to him was, as it were, preaching to the never-going-to-be-converted: too alone, even in the distinct separation of the therapy room. When he spoke of his terror, for example, of the prospect of splitting up with Alison, Donny would nod sympathetically, but Harvey thought he could detect a certain blankness in his slightly bulbous blue eyes, and attributed this – despite Harvey’s complete ignorance of the lifestyle – to Donny living within a world where sexual traffic was always free-moving, and the idea of desire becoming bogged down in the dull pull of attachment was anathema.
Two months before he left college, however, Alison left Harvey: for Donovan Lanes, who was neither, it turned out, gay, nor entirely ethical about passing on revelations from his sessions to the partners of some of the students he was counselling. There was then a period of fifteen years, during which Harvey disavowed therapy.
3. Laurence Green, a straightforward no-nonsense Freudian. He even had a white beard and glasses. The now genuinely depressed Harvey – clinically depressed, to give it the term that separates the illness from the everyday experience – did the sessions on a couch and everything. He used to face Laurence’s formidable bookshelf and wonder, since Laurence used to say virtually nothing, whether the solution to how he felt could be found in any of them. His hot flushes: could they be sorted by Bruno Bettelheim’s The Art of the Obvious? The suffocating tightness in his throat: would there be something on that in Separated Attachments and Sexual Aliveness by Susie Orbach? The raised, banging heartbeat: any joy in Self in Relationships: Perspectives on Family Therapy From Developmental Psychology, edited by Astri Johnsen and Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson? When, having given up on prompting a response from Laurence, the sessions would fall into silence, the name Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson would sometimes rotate at high speed in Harvey’s head – Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson Vigdis Wie – until he wanted to scream. This tic had also happened to him on other occasions with the names Benedict Cumberbatch, Barack Obama, Tiscali broadband and the phrase ‘Apples, hazelnuts, sultanas, raisins, coconut, bananas’.
4. Adrienne Samson, the sixty-three-year-old Kleinian. Their sessions were somewhat overshadowed by the death, halfway through their time together, of Harvey’s mother. Joan had always been powered by rage, a magnificent, sometimes inspiring rage, but then came the great forgetting, the neurological airbrushing, of Alzheimer’s, which meant that she forgot what it was she was angry about. Harvey never quite realized how much he felt for his mother until she got ill. When the time came to move her to a residential nursing home in Ashford, and the manageress of the Day Care Centre in London that she had been attending said to him: ‘We’ll miss her: she’s so sparky and fun and interesting – she really perked things up here …’, he found his throat closing and tears of sadness and pride welling in his eyes.
As the disease worsened, Joan imagined that she was still married, and that Harvey, on his visits to the nursing home, was Eli. Eventually, Harvey found it easier just to go along with this idea. The more Harvey accepted the role of Eli, the more Joan was placated: he even bought a pair of glasses exactly like Eli used to wear in the 1960s in order to avoid his mother asking where his glasses had got to. He saw, at these times, even if only through the distorted lens of dementia, a version of something he had no memory of, which perhaps only existed before he was born or when he was very young: his mother happy and in love. He got a sense of what marriage to Eli might have been like before it went bad; he saw peace on her face. He wondered how it would have been – what it would have done, or not done, to him – to have been brought up by a mother like this. The visits were, in a bleak way, blissful.
The leaving of them, however, was not. Every time he said goodbye, Joan would die more than a little. She would panic; then she would get angry. For Harvey, these moments were a weekly microcosm of his parents’ divorce. There was comfort in that at least – that by the time he reached the door of her tiny room, Joan, shouting at him to fuck off and not come back ever, was recognizable once more as the mother he knew. Towards the end, though, this pattern changed. Then, when he left she would only get sad. Once, she asked, with great clarity, ‘Which wife am I again?’ To which it occurred to Harvey to say, the only one, my love, but he found that it felt wrong to lie within the lie, and so simply answered, truthfully, ‘The third.’ Another time, Harvey turned back to say goodbye and she had taken all her clothes off. She did not pose for him in some grotesque sexual way. She simply stood there. It seemed to Harvey a statement of self, of wanting to strip all things away in the hope of being re-seen and re-found. It seemed to him like that for a moment, before he closed his eyes.
Adrienne found much to chew on here. She suggested, more than once, that Harvey taking on the role of Eli in these visits was not something he was doing just to keep his demented mother calm, but that it had an oedipal motivation. She pointed out that he had referred, often, to his mother’s singular beauty when she was young. Harvey, who had only been talking about his mother’s beauty because he thought it might relate to his general over-investment in beauty, and therefore to his wider issues with women, and who found the basic idea that all men unconsciously want to fuck their mother absurd, countered that if the Eli-acting was serving a buried need, it was more likely to be a desire to be like his father, the Great Man he so clearly had not grown up to be. But he didn’t truly believe that either. It was just something he said in therapy, used as he was by now to playing the game. In his heart, he really, really thought he was just doing it to help his dying mother have the version of reality she wanted.
5. Zoe Slater, an EMDR specialist. EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, involves a therapist moving his or her finger backwards and forwards while the person with the problem watches it and thinks about their problem. It’s based on the idea that a state similar to REM-sleep is induced by the eye movement, which mollifies the memory of whatever it is that causes the watcher anxiety. It was designed for people with serious post-traumatic stress – rape victims, shell-shocked soldiers – and Harvey, knowing this, felt bad, trying, while following Zoe’s finger, to focus on his narcissistic, ignoble little sexual pain. Plus Zoe was reasonably attractive – certainly for a therapist, who, on both sides of the gender divide, tend to think that facial hair and elasticated waistbands are the very dab – and looking for a long time at her finger would tend to lead Harvey’s mind the wrong way.
6. Dr Anthony Salter. A proper psychiatrist, Harvey’s only one. A very small man – Harvey often wondered if he could legally be classified a midget – Dr Salter seemed to be mainly interested in a tiny, idiosyncratic memory, which was that when Harvey was a young child, and started crying, or being upset about anything, Eli used to say to him: stop hacking a chanik. Harvey had only mentioned this in passing, and explained to his psychiatrist that it was just his father speaking, as he often would, in nonsense language, but Dr Salter came back to it again, and again, as if stop hacking a chanik might be the primary cause of Harvey’s psychic ills; so much so that after a while Harvey felt moved to say to him – although never did – stop hacking a chanik. Dr Salter’s other main proffered solution was to prescribe antidepressants. Harvey would come back after a few weeks, to tell him how the antidepressant hadn’t worked, and he would prescribe another one.
7. Dr Xu. Dr Xu was not an actual psychotherapist, but an acupuncturist and specialist in Chinese massage. Harvey went to him because his depression had become by this time so bodily, so located in his chest and his legs and his skin that he thought only manipulation of his frame could help. He still often thinks that the way to peace is for him to be touched: that if he could have someone permanently stroking him – on his back; on his feet; wherever it is on the body that the reassurance centres lie – his anxiety would be brought under control.
Dr Xu did his best to pull and prick Harvey’s depression out. Harvey wasn’t sure about the underlying ideas of acupuncture – the meridians, the yin and yang organs – but he knew that Karl Marx had said that ‘the only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain’ and, not being prepared to flagellate himself with thorns, wondered if pins in his skin might do the trick. And it worked: in the room. Lying on his back, looking not unlike the bloke out of Hellraiser, he would find himself distracted by the pain out of depression. The skips and jumps of electrical current induced along his muscles by connecting needles did seem to be clearing his system of something; or maybe the cold evidence they presented, that the body is simply a machine, made him feel more positive than usual about the prospect of finding a fix.
It only worked, however, while it was happening. It only worked when the needles were in his flesh. By the time he returned to his house from Dr Xu’s practice in Sevenoaks, a journey of some thirty-five minutes, Harvey would be feeling as anxious as ever. To try and extend the life of the treatment effects, Dr Xu prescribed Harvey some extraordinarily foul-smelling herbs, the drinking of which as tea made him more depressed than ever. Dr Xu did also offer him the odd piece of psychotherapeutic advice, consisting mainly of the not unheard-before imprecation that he should live in the moment. It would be proper to report that Dr Xu did not fall into the stereotype here and tell Harvey that he should rive in the moment: it would be proper but it would not be true. Harvey felt, for a whole host of reasons, that he should not laugh at this, but since Dr Xu, when offering this homily, himself always laughed, as he also did while applying needles, prescribing herbs, walking on Harvey’s back, or offering him the buttons of the Visa machine for payment, it seemed almost rude not to.
Even without the Chinese pronunciation, Harvey has never been keen on the live-in-the-moment thing. He knows people think it is the key to happiness, but it seems to him that he, driven by his physical impulses, lives always in the moment. If he buys a sandwich at 10 a.m., intending to eat it for lunch, he will eat it as soon as he gets back to his house at 10.15. If he feels tired, wherever he is, he falls asleep. If he sits down at his computer intending to spend four hours writing ghost-biography, he will spend three hours and forty-five minutes of that allotted time watching internet pornography. That is what living in his particular moment is: and it has brought him to a depression so severe it feels as if large weights have been sewn onto the inside of his skin.
8. See below.
‘But obviously, I can’t get back in time for the session,’ says Harvey, frantically looking at his watch. The phone call to Dizzy Harris has gone on for over five minutes, and he knows, since he is still unable to remember the fucking pre-dialling number, that it is costing him a fortune in hotel charges. ‘I’m in New York. I can’t leave because my father might die any day. You’re my therapist. Have a fucking heart.’
There was a silence on the other end of the line, a silence that Harvey took to be judgemental. This made him feel furious in two ways: first, because he was being judged – in that particularly infuriating non-reactive therapist’s way – and secondly, because those five seconds of silence just cost him, he reckoned, ten dollars.
‘As you know, Harvey, I’m entirely sympathetic to your situation,’ said Dizzy in his measured burr: Dizzy speaks posh Scottish, an accent that modulates very easily into patronizing. Harvey hates that tone, especially now, when he feels that it is being measured out in small Dickensian piles of his coins. ‘But most of my clients, if not all of them, are in difficult situations emotionally. And they all have to work with me according to the same rules. Which I did explain to you at the beginning.’
Why, thinks Harvey, did I go with this twat? I should have known straight away from the name: what kind of therapist – no, what kind of twat – calls himself Dizzy? Not even as a nickname – Dizzy is his name, or at least he’s made it his name, it’s on his books, the ones forever lined up prominently on his shelves: Psychological Dysfunction and Mental Wellness, by Dizzy Harris. Overcoming Bad Belief by Dizzy Harris. Beyond Anxiety Disorder by Dizzy Yes That’s Right You Heard Me Dizzy Harris. Dizzy calling himself Dizzy is all part of what’s wrong with Dizzy, which is that he is a self-styled colourful character, the type of person who might wear a multi-coloured waistcoat, although in his case he announces his colourfulness by wearing, for the sessions, a velvet smoking jacket and bow tie. For the first session the bow tie was at least matching; but latterly he has greeted Harvey at the door of his west London consulting rooms wearing one that has been striped, and another polka-dotted.
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David Baddiel
A novel from David Baddiel, comedian, columnist and author of the critically-praised The Secret Purposes.As Eli Gold, a famous old writer lies dying in a hospital in New York, his family gather around his bed. His first wife Violet is too old to travel from London but Harvey, their son, who has never emerged from the shadow of his overpowering father, makes the journey. And there is Colette, a six-year old daughter from a second marriage, struggling to make sense of the fact her father is about to leave her.The Death of Eli Gold is a mesmerising family drama which confounds the expectations anyone might have that David Baddiel as a TV comedian. It is the work of a very fine novelist, here writing at the peak of his powers.
DAVID BADDIEL
The Death of Eli Gold
For W.
Contents
Cover (#u97de1515-07af-559e-86e0-c0d357f7f71f)
Title Page (#uc3402cce-7b9f-5955-8d1e-ea45c27b92ea)
Epigraph (#ua3477898-a93a-57bf-9268-e3266df09290)
Part One (#ub93d482f-46cd-561f-9eb5-885844a6dfb7)
Chapter 1 (#u58538085-4b5d-5242-be19-c1ae28fdea45)
Chapter 2 (#u31739788-f34d-5834-a40d-b5277964bf46)
Chapter 3 (#u88cd26fa-c0cd-5a90-8188-a9ec8b5c1f3e)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by David Baddiel (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
… he persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that having sex with whomever you want whenever you want is the cure for ontological
(#ulink_2aa3c483-1536-5568-b254-56ffea31388c) despair
– David Foster Wallace,
reviewing John Updike’s Towards the End of Time, New York Observer 1997
Denise at thirty-two was still beautiful
– Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
I cannot live without Arthur, despite certain inner resources
– Cynthia Koestler, suicide note
(#ulink_ad257351-e244-57f7-a62c-1c449d3358ce)When the same essay appeared in his collection Consider The Lobster, published in 2004, DFW changed ‘ontological’ to ‘human’.
Part One
Chapter 1
My famous daddy is dying. Some grown-ups think I don’t understand what that means, but I do. Jada doesn’t. When her grandma died, Jada told me her mom said that she’d gone to heaven. OK, I said. But then, three days later, Jada told me that she’d asked her mom when she was coming back. So I asked Mommy, and she said she wasn’t; that she’d gone forever. So that’s why I know what it means. It means you go away and you don’t come back.
Me and Mommy go to the hospital every day to see Daddy. The hospital is called Mount Sinai Hospital. Mount Sinai was the place in Israel where God spoke to Moses, and gave him the Ten Commandments. I read about this in a book Elaine gave me called The Beginner’s Bible: Timeless Children’s Stories. When I was younger – like five or something – I learnt the Ten Commandments by heart. I don’t know why I did that. I didn’t even know what all those words meant then. Graven. False witness. Adultery. But I still remember the three that really matter. Thou shall not kill. Thou shall not steal. And honour your father and your mother.
The hospital isn’t much like the picture of Mount Sinai, like it looks in the book. It’s just a big building. It’s right on the park, and from the big window at the end of Daddy’s room I can see a lake. There’s a lake in the picture in The Beginner’s Bible: Timeless Children’s Stories, too, in the chapter about Moses. Moses is halfway up the mountain, holding the Ten Commandments, and looking like he’s really mad about something; there’s a crowd of people at the bottom and, behind them, a lake. Sometimes, when I’m looking out that window, I pretend that the lake in the park is the lake in the book, and that Daddy is Moses, even though he’s always lying on his bed now, and can’t stand up, or hold anything, especially not two big stones. But yesterday, Mommy came over to the window while I was pretending and told me it wasn’t a lake at all, it was the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. I said: what’s a reservoir? She said it’s a man-made body of water. I didn’t understand what she meant by a body of water. How can a body be made out of water? I wanted to ask her, and also who Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is, but then Daddy made that strange noise which is the only sound he makes now, and she rushed back to the bed.
The first time me and Elaine went to the hospital, there were loads of photographers outside. That’s because my daddy is famous. Not like Katy Perry, or Justin Bieber, or any of those guys: he’s famous in a different way. Mommy made me a scrapbook of bits cut out of newspapers from when I was born, and nearly all of them call him the world’s ‘greatest living writer’. I haven’t read any of his books, because I’m still too young to understand them. But when I’m older – maybe eleven or something – I’ll read them all.
Elaine told me to look down when the photographers tried to take a picture of me. Some of them shouted at me – ‘Hi, Colette! Colette! This way!’ – and I nearly looked up, but I didn’t. I just kept looking at the shoelaces in my new Gap shoes, at the white tips of the pink strings.
‘How do they know my name?’ I whispered to Elaine.
‘Because of Daddy,’ she said, but she was walking quickly and keeping her head down, too, and didn’t really explain what that meant. Then one of the photographers shouted at Elaine, ‘Are you another daughter?!’ and it was good that I had my head down because it made me laugh because she’s my nanny and is, like, sixty-five or something!!
Daddy has been dying for a long time, even since before I was six. I know, because on my sixth birthday Elaine gave me The Heavenly Express for Daddy, which is a book to help children understand what happens when their father dies. It had a lot of pictures in it of a man who is a daddy, but much younger than mine, with black hair instead of white, and no beard; but, like mine, he gets ill and has to go to a hospital. Then, God comes and sees the man, and tells him that he’s going to put him on a special train, to come up to heaven and live there with him – but then after that I don’t know what happens, because Mommy took the book away, because she thinks Elaine likes God too much. She took the book away, and said she didn’t believe that children, just because they were young, shouldn’t be told the truth. Especially me, she said, because I’m Daddy’s daughter, and Daddy doesn’t believe in God, even though some of his books are sort of about Him. Daddy, she said – well, she called him Eli, sometimes she calls him Daddy and sometimes Eli – Eli, she said, represents a touchstone of truth in this world. I didn’t know what these words meant, but Mommy closed her eyes tight when she said them and I always know that’s when she really wants me to know something, so I made sure I learnt them off by heart, like my three Ten Commandments.
* * *
Coming through arrivals at JFK, Harvey Gold thinks that, these days, he would make a good immigration officer. What do they do, these guys? They look at faces. They sit in a booth and they check real face against photo-face. Photo-face. Real face. Photo-face. Real face. All day. And me, what do I do all day, he thinks, these days? I check faces. Every face I see, I check: I check it over helplessly, looking, examining, investigating. Harvey, of course, is checking for something else, although he wonders how different it is. The immigration officers, they’re also searching for changes, for what happens to the face when it moves from stasis, from when it’s arranged. They’re checking to see how the face looks once it’s not presented, face-on.
Whatever, he thinks, standing in line amongst the travellers, tired and bright and buzzing: I’d be fucking great. Especially – his red-eye eyes flick upwards, the pupils seeming to scratch against the back of the lids – in this light, this take-no-prisoners, angle-poised airport light. When eventually al-Qaeda decide it’s time to smuggle Osama bin Laden into America, he could have the best fucking Afghanistani surgery his siphoned-off dirty dollars can buy, he could come to my booth cut up and dyed and pixillated, and still I’d spot him. He could come in sex-changed. He smiles to himself at the thought, prompting the businessman standing next to him in the queue to frown. If he had looked closely, which he does not, the businessman might have noticed that Harvey’s smile is not pure, that it contains within it a lingering frond of bitterness.
Harvey’s iPhone, a pocket harp, tings in his trousers: a text. He scrabbles in his jeans, which are tight around the crotch – he feels the crotch of his trousers is always shrinking these days, from the disgust that he carries eternally around with him. He knows without looking that the text will just be AT&T offering him their services, but he glances anyway – and so it is, a message of hope and welcome to America as if from the Pilgrim Fathers themselves. He is about to force the phone back through the thin slits of his front pockets when he notices another text, this one from Stella. He taps on it with his thumbnail, a thumbnail kept long as a throwback to when he used to play the guitar and imagine himself on stage with his foot up on black monitors. Darling, the text says, hope the flight wasn’t too tough. My love goes out to everybody who’ll be there, but most to you. Be safe. XXX
He slides the screen three windows across with his thumb, to find Deep Green. Deep Green is a chess app that Harvey is addicted to. He takes it out at the first sign of boredom or entrapment – states in which his anxiety disorder, as various therapists have christened it, is exacerbated. He now reaches for it instinctively in doctors’ waiting rooms, illegally in traffic jams, and in all queues, because he knows that if he starts to play, the end of the wait will arrive faster. The downside is that Deep Green always beats him. He plays it on Level 4, halfway through its eight settings, and knows he should go down a level but feels that that would be pointless: that any joy there might be in defeating the computer – which for reasons unknown to Harvey has christened itself Tiny: every time he loses he has to suffer a small, smug ting, accompanied by a gloating Checkmate! Tiny wins! – would be undermined by the knowledge that he had to lower its game to get there.
He has only just begun the game – although his thumb is already hovering over the RESIGN button – when he senses the businessman beside him twitch with irritation. He looks up, and realizes that everyone is now waiting for him to cross the green line and approach the booth. He puts the phone away, fumbles for his passport in the bumbag strung badly across his thighs, and remembers at the last moment: the American one. Harvey is, in so many ways, a dual citizen, and US law, always keen to assert its global difference, states in the clearest of tones that all travellers in possession of an American passport must enter the country showing the Spread-eagled Eagle. The immigration officer, who is narrowing her eyes at Harvey as if already interpreting his delay as suspicious, is a woman of about thirty-five. As he approaches the bitter smile returns, and with it the memory of the sex-changed devil, Osama.
Let us be clear about this. Harvey is not smiling – and was not smiling earlier – at the idea of Osama bin Laden in women’s clothes. He is smiling to himself in the manner of a man who has accepted, unhappily, something shitty about himself; who, on this issue and many, many others, has pushed the RESIGN button in his soul. He is smiling to himself because he is thinking: obviously, obviously I’d fucking spot him if he’d had a sex change. Because then he’d be a woman: and women get checked by his eyes a hundred-and-fourteen-fold. This woman, this immigration officer; Harvey will look at her face much more closely than she will his. Even as her eyes perform a thorough and competent scan of his face, flicking occasionally to its corollary on the page – greying, jowly, passport-stern, behind the watery eyes just a hint of teenage memory of going into those photo booths with friends and making stupid faces far too close to the lens – however microscopic her examination, it is as nothing compared to the manic burrowing of Harvey’s gaze all over her skin, Photoshopping her, running her face through the Rolosex in his head, gauging, gauging, gauging: smoothness, symmetry, vulnerability of eye, fullness of cheek, of lip, of hair, thickness and tastefulness of make-up, and, most importantly, of course, resistance or otherwise to the torrent of ageing. Who knew, he thinks, the American phrase entering his head like a passport stamp? Who knew that the power of work, and indeed of international security, would be as nothing compared to that of sexual psychosis?
‘How long have you been out of the country?’ she says, startling Harvey: sometimes when he is staring at them like this he forgets that women can speak. He feels heat flush through him in response. He has hot flushes regularly – he is virtually menopausal with them – but they are not brought on by rising infertility, nor by the temperature of the June New York morning, but by fear. He has nothing to be frightened of, or at least nothing concrete, but for some time now this has been irrelevant to his physical response.
‘I don’t know,’ he says, his voice a little strangled, and aware of its laconically flat Englishness. ‘Ten years? Maybe a bit longer?’
Her eyes, which are brown, and which Harvey has already noticed have running underneath them a series of what women’s magazines call ‘fine lines’, harden.
‘That’s a long time.’
She has taken it as an affront, Harvey realizes. For these sentries posted at the gates of the promised land such a length of absence is suspicious. It is suspect, the very idea that one of their own might want to be away from the mother lode for this long a stretch. What possible delights could anywhere else in the world hold for so long? He feels a movie need to say something weary and sarcastic, but quells it underneath a nod of agreement.
‘Business or pleasure, this trip?’
This makes Harvey pause. He stops running the immigration officer’s skin through a series of forensic sight-based (and, in his imagination, touch-based) tests. What is the answer? It’s multiple choice, clearly, with not enough choices.
‘My father is dying,’ says Harvey, as blankly as he can: he is trying not to make it a proclamation. It is not difficult to assume the blankness: as with all information of great import, both personal and political – births, deaths, relatives, wars, injustice, all the stuff of Hallmark Cards and CNN – the fact of his father’s death is taking a while to bed in. He knows it should affect him – he engages with the idea that such information should shake him to the core, should easily shake down the fog of desire and depression that pumps ceaselessly from the pores of his exhausted, clumpy brain – but viscerally, physically, he doesn’t feel it. He thinks he will, eventually, and is waiting for the moment to strike, but in the meantime remains afloat, abstracted, like a man who has been told that the plumber will arrive at some point between nine and five thirty.
But telling this to the immigration officer doesn’t come out as blank as he wants: he is still trying to put across an idea of himself, the man so socked to by death that he has not known how to answer this question and therefore has told the bald truth. And he senses that there is something sexual here, something flirtatious, or at least, gender-biased: it is not a self that he would have presented to a man. He is trying to make a dent in this woman’s imperviousness by doing the vulnerable thing. Of course, if he had really wanted to make a dent, he realizes, he should have said, ‘My father – Eli Gold – is dying.’
It still works, however. Abashed, muttering sad sorries, she hands back the blue book and waves Harvey on into America. In doing so, their fingertips touch briefly above the eagle’s claws, and for her it is less than nothing, but for Harvey it is a roof of the Sistine Chapel moment, divine electricity passing between their fingers. It passes immediately – Harvey is not a fool, he doesn’t believe in his fantasies; rather, he is persecuted by them – but it leaves its scar, its never-happening scar, with all the others.
He fits the American passport awkwardly back into his overstuffed bum bag, and walks away towards the sunlit plains of the glass-roofed Arrivals terminal. Then he remembers Stella’s text, and puts his fingers back through the half-opened zip, searching for the iPhone. They alight first on his house keys, and then on all the loose puddles of change that, from the outside, make this bag look like it is suffering from a terrible allergic reaction. How could the phone have gone? He was just looking at it! Did he hand it over to immigration officer with his passport? This is why he is wearing the stupid bum bag – a thing that he knows no one wears any more, and which stops him walking properly – in order not to lose stuff. He stops. His life has always been plagued by this, the everyday disintegration of absent-mindedness, especially as regards the whereabouts of vital personal objects – keys, phones, wallets, tickets, other people’s address cards, documentation, jewellery, scarves, gloves – anything that can be carried about the person. But until his soul started to go bad, absent-mindedness was just something he accepted, a default fault, a thing which fucked up his life in little ways every day but wasn’t worth steaming about; now, however, if he realizes he has lost something, he can’t override it, he hasn’t the energy, neither physical nor spiritual. He hasn’t the momentum. These discoveries, these interruptions in his tiny progress, just make him want to stop. Finding out that he has left his wallet at home will make him want to sit down in the street; if he is in the car and the keys are not in the most obvious pocket, he will consider never driving away. The other day he was on the toilet and realized, too late, that he had forgotten to restock the paper roll, and felt, immediately, that there was nothing to do but stay sat on the black MDF oval forever, the shit on his anus hardening over time to a brittle crust.
He stops now, and again wants to sit, here on this faintly marbled floor scuffed with the marks of a million suitcase wheels; sit, cross-legged perhaps, until someone – God, his dying father, a woman, any woman – takes him in hand, finding for him his phone and his sanity. And then, just at the moment when the heavy hands of depression have started to push, gently, almost lovingly, on his shoulders, it rings, reminding Harvey that he put the phone back in his pocket and not in the bag at all. He pulls the iPhone out from its burial in a mini-dump of tissue dust, looks at the screen, and inwardly crumples: Freda. He considers for a moment not answering, pressing instead the DECLINE button, because his relationship with the caller is declining, because her call will only be about the decline of his father, because he, Harvey, seems to be now, perpetually, in decline. He taps ANSWER.
‘Freda.’ The strange thing that caller ID gives you, the need not to say hello?, the end of that querulous enquiry, the end, too, of the way that people can garner some small knowledge about what you think about them simply by the rise or fall in your voice when you do find out who it is: replaced instead by this, this ironic, flat certainty.
‘Harvey. Hi. How are you? How was the flight?’
He shrugs, then feels a bit silly for shrugging on the phone. ‘It was an overnight flight, in coach.’ Coach: a sliver of self-disgust goes through him at having slipped so quickly into the idiom, just because he is in this land, or maybe because, reflexively, he is trying to please Freda. ‘But seven hours isn’t so long. And it’s five times the price for Club. What hotel room would you ever pay five times over the odds to spend seven hours in?’
She doesn’t answer this. The iPhone emits a mournful crackle, before Harvey asks the question he knows she is waiting for.
‘So how is he?’
The pause before she replies is so long, Harvey has time to locate the Baggage Reclaim sign and begin trudging in that direction. As he does so, his gaze is routinely snagged by passing women. His neck hurts from not turning, from the urgent need to follow them as they move past, into places where he is not.
‘Not much changed,’ she says, after long enough for Harvey to have forgotten that she is there.
‘What do the doctors –’
‘Anytime. At best, two months.’
Harvey stops. He has known that his father must have roughly this amount of time left, but Freda’s bald statement of it comes at him like a fist. He had not been expecting this answer so soon: in fact, he now can’t quite formulate what the second half of his question was going to be – ‘What do the doctors think/plan to do/give him for the pain/ look like?’ He was only going to go for some general question, and work up slowly to the big Specific. He knows why Freda is speaking like this: the directness, the refusal to couch, speaks of her ownership of his father – and of his death. With Eli Gold, she must always have arrived first, even at the place of pain.
Harvey’s eyes, moistened a little, more by tiredness than tears, stare into the defocusing distance.
‘Right.’
‘We’ve booked you a room at the Sangster. It’s a new hotel on East 76th Street. It’s very good.’
‘You have?’
‘Yes. I know it’s a bit further away from Mount Sinai then we’d like, but it’s a block from Fifth Avenue, and you can get a cab uptown from there.’
‘No, I wasn’t complaining. I –’ He reddened. He had assumed he would be staying at their Upper East Side apartment, had already imagined sating his curiosity about his father and Freda’s private life by flicking through notebooks and diaries, or perhaps just through living in their furnishings and amongst their artwork; but now he saw how much of a presumption that was, never having been there, and having seen his father only twice in the last ten years, both times in London. He saw how untaken for granted the idea of him staying there must be, and how clearly Freda was confirming his fringe status in the present family circle.
‘We’re still staying at home, but I’m thinking of staying nights at the hospital. It depends on how Eli is. I probably will at some point. But Colette will still be at home.’
‘OK,’ said Harvey, uncertain how to take this, wondering about the buried implication that he might be some sort of paedophile, that, obviously, he couldn’t stay in the same apartment as an eight-year-old girl. He wants to protest that he is very good with children – that he has an unmolested, undamaged nine-year-old son himself – but he quells the urge, partly because Freda may have meant nothing of the sort, and partly because Jamie is, clearly, damaged.
‘Well, thank you. The Sangster. That’s very generous of you.’
He colours as he says it, having realized he has assumed that Freda – or, rather, the ‘we’ that Freda refers to, a mystical duality of her and Eli – will be paying. He wonders if he should enquire, but hesitates, not wanting to get into a detailed discussion about whether they are picking up the tab just for the room, or if minibar and hotel porn surcharges will also be included.
The iPhone crackles again, drawing attention to Freda’s failure to say ‘Don’t mention it’.
‘So shall I …? When shall I …?’ says Harvey, trailing off, accepting his secondary role.
‘Maybe go to the hotel, now … and you can come tomorrow morning?’ She speaks with the American inflection, the vocal hike indicating a question, a possibility for discussion: but Harvey knows better.
‘Tomorrow morning? I was hoping …’ God, how much trailing off am I going to do, he thinks. He is an uncertain fellow, Harvey, in an uncertain situation – the old son returning to see the dying dad, surrounded by his new family – and now it seems as if Freda’s take-no-prisoners certainty has crushed his ability to make even the smallest statement of intent. And, also, he can’t match her: he can’t fold back her steeliness, can’t say that he thinks he should come straight away, because maybe his father might die today. His fingers reach without thought for the plane ticket in his inside pocket, with its devastatingly open return, something that had cost Harvey substantially more money when ordered – a charge which had provoked a moment of irritation, not with his father for the indefiniteness of his time left, but with the airlines, for not having a special close relative’s last days’ exemption clause. It isn’t fair, he thinks, it’s not fair that I have to pay extra because my dad is dying and I don’t know when to book the flight home. Harvey’s heart is heavy with such unfairnesses.
‘Well,’ said Freda, ‘today we’ve already got quite a lot of people visiting … my mother’s here now, and then a group of Eli’s colleagues from Harvard in the afternoon – plus there was talk of Roth coming by some time this week, so … obviously he gets very tired …’
‘Maybe I’ll just go to the hotel and call later.’ This is the best defiance Harvey can offer.
‘Yes. Please do.’ There is a voice off, high and insistent.
‘Yes, darling, in a minute. Mom’s on the phone.’
‘So we’ll speak later.’
‘Yes. Good to have you here, Harvey. Eli will be so pleased to see you. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye.’ He clicks the OK button on his phone, and forces it back into his jeans. Roth? Philip Roth? Harvey loves Philip Roth more than he has ever been able to admit to his watchful-for-literary-slights father. He feels intense desire to meet the dark bard of American sex and clear the decks of his depression, making him wonder, angrily, if he shouldn’t just turn up unannounced at this great literary lunch-time: he is, after all, Eli Gold’s son, the only one of the three adult children who has been prepared to make the journey. Then self-awareness settles like soft snow back upon him, and he realizes how far such an action is beyond him, he who has always hated confrontation anyway, and these days need only to be confronted with the smallest of obstacles for his depleted energy reserves to drain away to nothing.
Harvey moves into the Baggage Reclaim Hall, with its always palpable dynamic of tension and relief, as exhausted passengers wait nervously for their cherished belongings to be spat onto the oval belts. His conveyor, No. 4, is sparsely populated now, the phone call having slowed down his movement here. He can see his suitcase, some Samsonite-alike with pull-out handle – again, due to the particular nature of this particular journey, he didn’t know which of the numerous bags piled up under the stairs to pack – forlornly beginning what looks like its twentieth or thirtieth rotation. A woman he had noticed on the plane, sitting four or five rows in front of him on the opposite side, is there, beginning to look anxious. She is in her early twenties, dirt-blonde long hair parted like that of a Woodstock girl dancing towards the crackly camera, sea-blue eyes, and, even under the whip-lash Baggage Reclaim lights, skin so smooth that if Harvey were to reach out and touch it – as every cell in his hands is urging him to do – his fingers would slip.
Her bag, pink like bubble-gum, tumbles out of the conveyor hatch, the relief registering on her features, softening them even further, and making Harvey remember something one of his many more sexually opportune friends had told him once, about how, while waiting at airports for luggage, he would try and steal a furtive glance at the labels on the suitcases of any waiting attractive women, and then offer to share a taxi in that direction. As she picks up the bag, Harvey, impelled by the thought, does flick his eyes downwards and, catching sight of the zip code, thinks it might be an address near his hotel, but never has any intention of going through with all that stilted ‘Hey, I see you’re going my way’ shite. It just tears another little track through him, the idea that it could be done, that someone else could do it.
An older woman joins her, and helps her heave her bag onto a trolley. She moves away: she hasn’t registered Harvey’s presence, even cursorily. He looks at his watch. He now has time, far too much time. He looks again at his iPhone and ponders the text from Stella. I should call her back, he thinks, let her know I’ve landed. But then the other thing grabs his heart with its cold hands, and, instead, he sits down on the edge of Conveyor Belt No. 5, to watch his suitcase travel round Conveyor Belt No. 4, round and round and round, like a lone ship on the greyest, most mundane of seas.
* * *
Eli Gold’s first wife, Violet, is in her room just finishing lunch when she sees the item on the television news. It has been a day on which she has already veered from her normal routine. She usually watches the one o’clock news in the lounge, even though some of the other residents would always be fast asleep in there by then, and Joe Hillier’s snoring, in particular, was more than loud enough to drown out the words of the newsreader. The more able residents at Redcliffe House are allowed to make their own lunch and eat it in their rooms, and Violet takes this option as often as she can, preparing it – baked beans on toast, a cheese sandwich, a tin of ravioli – in the tiny kitchenette off to the side of the room and eating at the table by the window. Lunch always reminds her of Valerie, who is forever hinting that Violet should move to somewhere more structured, which means, Violet knows, one of the fascist old-age homes, a place where her independence would be taken away, her privacy disregarded, and the other inmates comatose, just because Valerie couldn’t bear the idea of her sister eating on her own from time to time. After lunch, she would normally get the lift down from the fourth floor, and, if it was not wet, walk the path around Redcliffe Square Gardens, which, even with a stick, would not take her more than fifteen minutes, and she was always back at Redcliffe House by five to one, ready to watch the news. She could take the lift back up to her room and watch it there, but even though Violet was a woman who liked to keep herself to herself much of the time, she felt there was no point in living in a place where so many other people lived if she never mingled with them at all: and so she always went into the lounge following her walk, and, with her cream winter coat on her knees, watched the one o’clock news.
Unless it was wet, as on the day she hears the news about Eli, a day on which she hadn’t even bothered going downstairs to check the pavements: the rain had been hitting her window all morning, a downpour blown diagonal across the pane by the wind. Over time, an errant branch from the neighbouring hostel’s enormous oak tree had grown along the walls of the house to lie pressed against her sill, and today she could count the drops on its leaves. She had just finished eating a few slices of ham and some crackers, and had already risen to take the plate into the kitchenette, when the item began.
She is shocked by seeing his face on the screen – at first some footage of him, recently giving a lecture, with the beard and the big shock of grey hair that she vaguely knew he had now, followed by an old black and white photo from round about the time they were married. For a split second, Violet thinks they might even show a photograph of her: him wearing his GI uniform, her on his arm in the white floral dress that she used to wear on their first dates.
They don’t – how could they, she chided herself, when the only photos that have survived of us together are all in that shoebox under the bed? I don’t suppose he kept any. The news moves on to a shot of a tall building in New York, which Violet gathers is a hospital. A doctor, an Indian, is standing in front of a crowd reading some sort of statement. Without her hearing aid she cannot hear what he is saying, but his name – Ghund … khali? – is subtitled below. She puts the plate down and turns away from the kitchenette, feeling her knees crack beneath her. She goes over to the television, a Hitachi ex-rental model made in 1973 which she brought with her when she left her flat in Cricklewood. Even turning the volume up full, she has to stand right beside it, bending her face to the screen to hear what is being said.
‘… is said to be …’ the reporter was now saying ‘… conscious rarely, if at all. His family are by his side. But it seems unlikely at this stage that this man, considered by many to be the world’s greatest living writer, will come home from hospital again. This is Rahim Khan, for BBC News, in New York.’
The screen cuts back to the main studio. The newsreader looks reverent for a second, before going on to a story about an earthquake in Sri Lanka. Violet watches for a minute, then turns it off. She sits back down by the window. The rain is easing, but even if the sun were to come out and dry the pavements, she would not go out for her walk now. Age has made Violet a creature of routine: the big surprise for her – the failing of her body – is easier to manage if she limits all other surprises. Last week, while moving the dial between her touchstones, Radios 3 and 4, she heard a plaintive voice on the wireless singing the words no alarms and no surprises, please, and it made her pause, thinking how true to her own desire that imprecation was now: since some irretrievable day in the past, all news – everything from finding one day that the gate to Redcliffe Square Gardens was unaccountably locked, to feeling the arrival on waking of some new bad ache in her bones, to hearing that another of the residents has died – all news seemed to have become bad news, and so she’d rather it all just stopped, that the news was all in. The only way she could make her life approach this condition was through habit.
But news would still intrude, breaking through the fragile circle of routine. Here it was: Eli in hospital; Eli, who she had not seen or heard from in over fifty years; her first and only husband; the only man to have touched the tender sections of her body except for the surgeon who must have at least held her breast for a few seconds before applying the scalpel to remove it in 1987. The world’s greatest living writer: did that include the letters yellowing in that shoe-box? If she took them out and read them now, which she has not done for many years, would the parchment-like paper mirror her skin, of which the words so sweetly sing? Violet Gold feels suddenly nauseous and stands up, heading as quickly as she can towards the bathroom, more aware than ever of the bandiness of her legs, the ridiculousness of her movement. By the time she gets there the wave has passed, and she feels relieved not to have to bend or, worse, kneel in front of the white china and the tiny puddle – not so much because of the horror of having to vomit, but because of the possibility that she might not be able to get up again. She lowers the plastic seat, and sits, in reach of the red panic button on her left.
Why this? she thinks. Why this physical reaction to the news about Eli? It is not unexpected: the surprise is that he’s lasted so long, what with so many wives – how many since her? Three? Four? – and his generally cavalier approach to all things healthy – although that was a long time ago, and he might have changed. And when they were young everything was different, anyway. He smoked, but so did she: so did everyone. She was smoking when they first met, she remembers; it threw off Eli’s chat-up line. ‘Oh, damn,’ he had said, the first words she heard him speak. He had been leaning against a post in the Rainbow Corner, watching the men and women dance: it was 1944, a Friday night, and the Bill Ambrose Band were playing. Violet was with her friend Gwendoline, who was a hostess, a word Violet was never sure about – the Rainbow Corner was simply the drinking and dancing section of the Red Cross Club in Shaftesbury Avenue, where many American soldiers congregated during the war, and there were always jobs to be had for girls who wanted them, but Violet was never entirely clear what being a hostess involved. Mainly, it seemed, never saying ‘no’ on being asked to dance, and Gwendoline had certainly fulfilled her obligation that night: Violet had spent most of the evening on her own watching her friend’s flower-patterned skirt twirling around five identical pairs of olive-brown trousers. She had just decided she was going to leave after finishing this last cigarette when Eli spoke.
‘Damn …’ he repeated.
‘What?’ she replied eventually, realizing he was expecting some sort of reply from her.
‘You’re smoking,’ he said. His voice was low, a throaty rumble. Violet had met enough GIs by now to recognize it as defining him as from New York or its environs. She glanced at her own cigarette, twisting her hand to her face a little self-consciously.
‘Yes …?’
‘Well, that’s scuppered my plan.’ Violet’s face remained a mask of confusion; she wondered if she’d misheard him over the music. ‘To offer you a cigarette …’ he added helpfully, taking a sky-blue packet of Newport cigarettes out of his breast pocket. His hands, she noticed, were large. Finally she understood; her features relaxed into gentle mockery, the face she reserved for suitors.
‘You could always ask me to dance.’
He shook his head, pausing to light his cigarette. Violet remembers this pause clearly, almost more than anything else about their first meeting. He stopped his head, mid-shake, cocked his lighter, lit his cigarette, took in a deep draught of Newport smoke, and then continued the shake of his head before speaking again.
‘I don’t dance,’ he said, fixing her in his gaze. His face was impassive, challenging: not a hint of apology.
‘You don’t?’
‘I’m a man of words.’
‘I see.’
‘This lighter, for example … do you know what it is?’
Violet glanced down at the squat metal case. She had seen many of them, cupped in the crinkles of American soldiers’ palms.
‘What?’
‘It’s a Zippo. The lighter of choice for the American military. Since last year, Zippo have been producing and distributing them free to servicemen. We’ve all got them. But the shape …’ he weighed the lighter in his palm, the back of his hand moving gently up and down on the lever of his wrist, ‘… is actually modelled on an Austrian lighter. Can’t you tell? The heft of it, the dumb solidity. It’s so Teutonic. So Germanic. And yet …’ he patted his breast pocket ‘… we the Nazi-fighters keep them next to our very hearts.’
Violet felt at a loss to know how to react to this speech. She had never really heard anyone else talk like this – certainly not a soldier, certainly not a man trying to chat her up – and it seemed to leave her with nowhere to go. She understood his point, but could think of nothing to say in addition.
‘They give off a good strong flame though, don’t they?’ was what she said in the end, and instantly felt the banality of it. In answer, he flipped the lid of the lighter again, stroking the wheel twice before the blue flame rose once more from the wick. He moved it closer to her face: she could feel the warmth and smell the butane, its chemical scent dizzying her a little. Through the blue she could see his eyes, what seemed sadness in them now overridden by curiosity. There was an expression Gwen used about men – she used it a lot, in order to make their attention known – saying they were undressing her with their eyes; Violet felt something of this now – not that he was undressing her, because his eyes did not move from her face – but that sense of feeling a man’s eyes on your body, as if his sight were touch. It made her cheeks prickle. She felt, obscurely and for the first time, that when men are examining a woman’s face, their method of weighing her beauty is to search for flaws.
‘What’s your name?’ she said, because she wanted to know, but also because she wanted to be released from his gaze. He smiled, a wider grin than she expected, bringing his nose down over his mouth: he looked suddenly medieval, cartoonish.
‘I shall answer that in what I believe is the customary manner.’ He spoke in an exaggerated cut-glass English accent, waving his left hand in a florid eighteenth-century style. Before Violet had time to react, he stood on tiptoe, lifting the still aflame lighter above his head. It was only then that she realized he was quite a tall man: he had been slouching against the post, and bending down in order to have the conversation with her. He seemed to Violet almost to uncoil.
Her eyes went upwards, to the low ceiling of this section of the Rainbow Corner. Lifting the Zippo to the ceiling created a circle of light, revealing a messy sprawl of signatures, doodles and numbers burnt into the plaster, written by GIs keen to preserve something of themselves in this foreign country, before war or peace took them away. Dodds, 98205D she read, before the flame in the man’s hand began to move, forming a blackening line that slowly became the upright pillar of an ‘E’. Despite the general smokiness of the room, she could detect in her nostrils the acrid smell of burning plaster. A couple of other American soldiers, noticing this familiar custom being performed, clapped and cheered. The man – El someone, it seemed: was he Spanish? – seemed to be absorbed in his task. Most of the names on the ceiling were just scrawls, bearing the marks of having been written on tiptoe, in public and by drunken hands; he had the appearance, however, of deep concentration, as if he were Michelangelo on his back at the Sistine Chapel. The words were bold and clear, and he spent long enough on each letter to burn it thickly into the wood: it looked, by the end, more like an imprint, more like the International Shipbrokers company stamp that her fist had to plonk down over and over again on the envelopes at work, than letters inscribed by hand – by flame. When he had finished, he spent a little while looking up at his name, admiring his handiwork. Violet noticed that he didn’t have a very protruding Adam’s apple – there was no triangular skin stretch in the gullet pressing against his extended neck – which made her glad, as her previous boyfriend had done, and the feel of it pressing against her throat when they were kissing had always put her off.
‘Eli Gold …’ she said, intoning the words, brushing her blonde hair out of her eyes as she tilted her head back to read.
‘E-li,’ he said. He pronounced it ‘lie’. She had said ‘Ely’, like the town.
‘That’s a funny name.’
‘Is it? Eli, Eli, lema sabachtani.’
‘Beg pardon?’
‘It means God. Literally …’ And here he raised the lighter to the ceiling again, although this time unlit, ‘… Elia, the Highest.’
‘In what language?’
Eli’s face creased, his smile revealing his face to be lined for his age.
Somehow, it did not make him look old.
‘Hebrew, of course. Elia’s own language.’
‘Hebrew?’
‘I’m Jewish. On my father’s side.’
‘Oh,’ said Violet, who – having occasionally made the journey from her parents’ house in Walthamstow to Spitalfields for meat and vegetables – had seen some Jews, but only the ones in the big black hats with the curly sideburns. ‘I thought you were an American.’
Eli looked at her, his composure for the first time dented. The lines around his eyes all went upwards, as he stared at Violet’s pretty, open, easy face, a face standing firmly behind the straightforwardness, the frank neutrality, of her statement. Then he laughed, loud, long peals that seemed to drown out even the brass section of the Bill Ambrose band. Violet felt frightened, but unfathomably drawn to the fear. She looked up at his name, still smoking on the ceiling. A swell hit her soul and, as can happen in moments of epiphany, she thought she saw this moment as it would be described years from now, saying to friends, perhaps to children, that it was as if he had been burning the words Eli Gold into her heart. And she did say that, to friends if not to children, and soon came to believe that such was indeed the true quality of her experience. It was only later she realized that Eli had just been writing.
* * *
He is not certain he should be wearing black, in summer. It is not the heat – that is not bothering him, though he is used to the white chill of Utah – but thinks that it might, somehow, give him away. When, earlier, he had ventured into the hospital reception area, an orderly had looked at him suspiciously. This is paradoxical, as he is wearing it to fit in. Where he comes from, no one wears black: not even any of the younger, trendier Mormons, in their younger, trendier sects, the Bullaites, or Zions Order Inc., or The Restoration Church. But he is wearing it, because his third wife, Dovetta, told him that that was the first thing she noticed when she went to New York on her mission trip, On Fire for Christ: everyone wears black.
He wears a black jacket and a black T-shirt. Blue jeans, though. That feels self-conscious, as well, because he is fifty-five, perhaps too old for jeans. Although everyone wears jeans now, even old men; even old women. They hang off them, off their legs. This sense of himself as old, an old man in blue jeans, disturbs him. Not through vanity, even though he used to be a handsome man, and maybe still is, despite the stuck eye. It disturbs him because of the task ahead.
A lot of journalists and photographers are still milling about after the doctor’s statement. Some of them clearly think he is one of them. He has to be a little careful not to be seen in the back of shot when the TV cameras are around. He doesn’t want to be spotted by somebody, somewhere, on some Summit County TV, who might recognize him and question why on earth he is there, knowing that he could not be a well-wisher, or a mourner. Also, when the doctor was talking – when he was going on about blood cell counts and secondary infections and how the hospital was doing everything that could be done – he felt an urge to shout: to heckle. At the words ‘Mount Sinai Hospital understands the responsibility it has been given in caring for this particular patient’ the urge had felt almost uncontrollable; but he used the mental effort of memorizing the doctor’s name – it was a long Indian one, and later he will need to know it – as a means of distracting himself. But now he has decided to leave. It is too early in the process and he is too raw with it. He feels if someone asked him what he is doing here he may just blurt it out.
Plus, he does not even have a hotel. He has not thought anything through. There has not been space for it. He does not have the psychic energy. That is what Janey would call it. Janey is one of his children, the oldest of fifteen, the only one born of his first wife, Leah, before she died. She is a Mormon, but does not believe, as he does, that God was once a man; she rejects the Pearl of Great Price; and, most seriously, she rejects polygamy. She no longer lives with his family.
He remembers the moment of her leaving clearly. In 1993, the Church of the Latter-day Saints, in their regular Baptism of the Dead, baptized Adolf Hitler. Despite their differences with the LDS, his own church – The Latter-day Church of the True Christ – accepted this baptism. A year later, the whole family were at Mount Timpaganos Temple, the beautiful prayer hall only just built to serve the community of American Fork, when the dictator’s name came through in the list of The Endowed. Immediately, Janey got up and left. Next time he heard from her, she had moved to Independence, Missouri, to join the Community.
But he knew, even as he watched her pass through the door, under the mural of the angel Moroni, that Hitler’s baptism was just the catalyst. She had grown disenchanted when he had taken Sedona, his second wife’s daughter, to be his fifth wife. He had seen it when he had gathered the family around him in the living room of their then house, the one at the point in American Fork where East State Road becomes West State Road, and announced his intention. They were crammed in: the house seemed to grow smaller as the family burgeoned. Everyone else was joyful, clapping and rising to congratulate Sedona and her mother, but Janey just stayed on a chair by the window, staring straight at him. He returned her stare, blankly, neutrally, letting his good eye ask her what her problem might be; but this was hard to do, because so many of his wives and children were hugging him, and because her eyes were so full of hurt and disgust and anger. They held each other’s line of vision, while the others danced between them, until at last she turned away and looked through the glass towards the white-tipped mountains of the Utah Valley.
He decides to leave the area around Mount Sinai Hospital to look for a hotel. He cannot, though, afford any of the hotels in the mid-town area. This should not be part of my story, he thinks. I am an avenging angel; I have the weight of destiny on my shoulders. But I cannot afford any of the hotels in the mid-town area.
He walks and walks. His right arm, where he has a touch of arthritis in the elbow, aches with the weight of pulling his suitcase, a blue checked bag on wheels. On his left shoulder blade, the remnants of his tattoo – a Confederate flag, removed soon after joining the Church, because the head of their Temple, Elder James LaMoine McIntyre, known to everyone as Uncle Jimmy, explained to him that the body is perfected after death – itches. To keep him going he recites in his head, for every step, the names of his family. First, the wives: step, Leah, step, Ambree, step, Lorinda, step, Angel, step, Sedona, step, RoLyne. Then, for every step, a son or daughter: step, Janey, step, Clela, step, Fallon, step, Levoy, step, Leah, step, Darlene, step, KalieJo, step, Orus, step Rustin, step, Mayna, step, Prynne, step, Dar, step, Hosietta, step, Velroy, step, Elin. Then, a final step, and a final name: Pauline. Then he begins again. After he has been doing this for a few hours, it occurs to him that three of his children – Darlene, Rustin, Levoy – are, in fact, step-children. This takes him aback for a second, makes him stop. For a moment it strikes him as funny. But he represses the urge to laugh, and reorders it in his head as a sign, a small sign, that there is a pattern to all things. He walks on.
The list allows him to resist New York. He has never been here before – he has never been out of Utah – but he knows enough about it from when he was young, and from what he has seen on the internet, to understand that the City will distract him from his destiny. He keeps his head down, focusing on his feet, on hitting a new name with each foot, and refuses the City – he refuses Park Avenue, even as he walks all the way down it; he refuses the Chrysler Building and the Empire State and the Waldorf-Astoria and Grand Central Station and One And Eleven Madison and all the other temptations of the Kingdom of Man. He refuses even the yellow taxis and the steam rising from the street gratings and the hotdog sellers and the WALK/ DON’T WALK signs, the things about Manhattan that might chime with its movie self, and which might draw him in through living up to its mythology, revealing its icons like a peacock its feathers.
Just as he is getting too hot and tired to continue – the sun has been stoking the air all afternoon, and underneath his clothes his sacred white undergarments are heavy with sweat – he finds a cheap place, on East 25th Street, called the Condesa Inn. The Condesa Inn is a hippy hotel. He likes that. He was a hippy himself, once. He was a Mormon then, too, but a regular one, just born into the Church of the Latter-day Saints, and not too fussed about it neither. Him and his sister used to smoke a lot of dope together, and listen to a band called The Outlaws. He loved her most then. It was at an Outlaws gig when he first saw Jesus – the Azteca in Salt Lake, in 1975. Hughie Thomasson was really going for it, on ‘Searching’, their greatest song, their ‘Free Bird’. Hughie had just sung: Searching through the seven skies/for some place your soul can fly, and hit the strings of his Stratocaster, when he saw him: Jesu, the Lamb, rising from behind the drum kit, arms outstretched, smiling a smile that widened further as Hughie and Billy Jones dug into their guitar battle like the out-there Confederate heroes they were. It filled his heart with joy. When he told Pauline afterwards she was so pleased for him, even though she made a joke about how good the dope must have been that they smoked before they went into the club. He didn’t mind that joke. He knew she knew it was true: and that she would accept, in time, that he had to forsake Salt Lake City for American Fork, and the Church of the Latter-day Saints for the greater truth of the Latter Day Church of the True Christ.
He knows that the Condesa Inn is the hotel he should be staying in, because every room is painted in a different way, each by a different artist. The woman on reception, who looks like she may have been a hippy as well once, shows him photographs of the rooms that are available, and there is one with a picture of Jesus across the wall. The woman says it is not Jesus – she says it is the lead singer of the Flaming Lips – but he knows that it is, because the bearded half-naked figure is enveloped by an angel. Then the woman says:
– Well, if you want it to be Jesus, I guess it’s Jesus. It’s eighty dollars a night, shared bathroom.
He smiles a little, a smile the woman would not be able to read. At home, he shares one bathroom with twenty-one other family members. Most days, the waiting to get into it is so long he ends up going to the bathroom outside, behind the privet hedge that surrounds their small patch of land.
– Is it a smoking room?
– No. We don’t have any rooms you can smoke in any more. You have to go stand outside. Sorry.
– OK. Do you have wi-fi internet access?
– We do. It comes and goes a bit, but, yeah.
– How much does it cost?
– On the house. When you can get it, that is.
– Is there a password?
She picks up a card with the Condesa Inn logo on it, and a pen, and scribbles on the back: H98BCARL. She hands it over, smiling. He looks at it and feels disappointed. He had thought that this word might speak to him: he had thought it would be a word connected with his destiny, or maybe at least with their shared hippiness, OUTLAWS1, or something.
OK, he says, and goes up to the room, with his suitcase. They do have a porter in the Condesa Inn, but he does not want the porter to carry his suitcase, because he only has a small amount of money and cannot afford tips. It contains, along with two changes of outer clothes and five of sacred underclothes, his own copy of The Book of Mormon: An Account Written By The Hand of Mormon Upon Plates Taken From The Plates of Nephi, his Dell PC laptop computer, the photograph of his sister, before she was raped by The Great Satan, wearing her favourite red-check dress, smiling and waving, looking so fine, and his gun. It is the gun, an Armscor 206 .38, which he bought online from GunsAmerica.com, for $308, as new, that has meant that he has to travel all the way from Utah by bus; the gun that has meant he cannot travel by airplane. There are ways of getting a gun on an airplane – he has learnt this from surfing the web, from reading the posts of some of the jihadis – but the ways are difficult and he decided against it. He goes up to the room alone.
Inside the room, the picture of Jesus is bigger than it looks in the photograph. The only window looks out onto the back of some kind of kitchen, and the picture itself is not that brightly painted – Jesus is in a sharp profile, like he might appear on a playing card, and wears a dark red toga, in sharp contrast to the bright blue of the angels’ dress – but still, when he turns to face the mural, it nearly blinds him with light. This is proof for him that it is the Lamb of God, Lucifer’s spirit brother, again. He has to shield his eyes, which hurt like staring at the sun, something he did once when he was a kid during an eclipse, even though his father had told him not to. He did that because he didn’t understand why, if the sun was covered by the moon, you couldn’t look at it. He looked at that eclipse for five minutes, and it was beautiful, so beautiful he didn’t feel the burn in his right eye that would leave the pupil fixed in the middle of the socket, and working always at no more than 20 per cent effectiveness. He thinks of it now as his first intimation that knowing God, really knowing God, always involves pain.
The light fades. He sits on the bed. He takes a deep breath. The room is dusty. He feels as if he can feel the motes in his nostrils. He should change, but there is a comfort in the sweat of his sacred under-clothes drying on him, as if warmed by the heat and light coming off this Christ. He takes out his Dell, and waits patiently as it boots up, and then more patiently as it finds the Condesa Inn wireless signal. Poor, it says, red bars flickering into green. There is something that has been bothering him, bothering him all the way here on the Greyhound, looking out of the window as the landscape flattened towards the east. Google has been key for his destiny – Earth has shown him New York, Street View the area around 1176 Fifth Avenue, Images the internal layout of Mount Sinai, and it was the main search box which led him to The Material, there on unsolved.com – so he has feared being without it. To test it, he types the words ‘death penalty states united states’. It takes a while, but then it comes. He goes to Wikipedia first, an entry: The Death Penalty in the United States. A map comes up, in which most of the states of the country are red, but along the top, blue, a geographical clustering of mercy. The colour of New York, though, is confusing – half yellow, half orange. He goes back to the search box, and replaces the words ‘states united states’ with the words ‘New York’ and presses return again. The sixth entry is called Death Penalty FAQs. Scrolling down, the question appears, in bold: Does New York have the death penalty? And the answer: The death penalty was reinstated in 1995.
Nineteen ninety-five. Two years after his sister died: was killed. He could have done it any time over those two years. And he didn’t. A voice that seems not his speaks in his head: does he regret it? That’s what people are often asked about on TV: regret. And this voice is like a TV interviewer’s voice: polite, friendly, softly spoken. He knows this is not ‘voices in his head’. It is just something a lot of people do, imagine themselves being interviewed on the TV.
– No, he says, speaking out loud. I don’t regret it. He continues in his head: because then I was grieving, and because I thought Janey might come back then and she didn’t, and because I didn’t know until I heard the news that he was dying that I understood what it was that I had to do. It was only then that I knew my destiny. And besides, he is expecting to be caught, and imprisoned, and executed. He is not trying to commit the perfect crime. He is trying to avenge it.
– I don’t regret it, he says again out loud. He raises his chin while saying it, in an act of untargeted defiance, and as he does he catches Jesus’ eye, which looks down upon him with love.
Chapter 2
On arrival at the Sangster, Harvey Gold finds it difficult not to feel a tiny bit disappointed. He was not a man used to staying in five-star hotels if his father (or his estate) were not paying, and it might perhaps have been expected that he would only be grateful; or, if not actually grateful, at least so unaccustomed to this level of luxury as to be mollified by it. There are, however, a number of problems:
1. The Sangster, although a very beautiful hotel, is not what Harvey had pictured in his mind when, in the taxi from the airport – as a check and balance in his head to the oncoming deathbed visit – he had mused expectantly about the prospect of staying in a Manhattan hotel. For Harvey, although himself born on that island and technically a citizen of it, a stay in Manhattan still required a certain amount of cliché: that is, a room at least seventy storeys up, with floor-to-ceiling windows, giving out on a glittering nightscape of Koyaanisqatsi skyscrapers. The lift at the Sangster, however, travels to a maximum only of twenty-two floors, fourteen of which were extraneous to Harvey anyway, as his room was No. 824. It is perfectly comfortable – more than perfectly comfortable – but has a view only of the internal courtyard of the hotel, and is furnished in a faintly European style. Harvey’s entrance into the room, once he’d got over the initial flummox of American tippage – such a pain in the arse, he thinks, handing over a five to a somewhat unsmiling, virtually fancy-dressed porter – is accompanied by a small sinking of the heart, that once again he’d come to America and wasn’t staying with Kojak.
2. He is still not sure who is paying for the room. At reception, he had been asked for his credit card, along, once again, with his passport, but knew that this was standard procedure. Then again, it may have meant that the room was paid for, but he had to provide a surety for any extras. On handing over his HSBC Visa, Harvey had puffed up the courage in his rather pigeon-like chest, and said, to the autumnally suited man behind the desk: ‘Sorry … can I just ask: has my room been paid for in advance?’
It was a question he didn’t feel entirely comfortable asking, since it clearly indicated a hope on his part that it had been, and therefore was likely to generate a sense in the autumnally suited man that this particular resident may not easily be able to pay for the room should the answer be ‘no’. Harvey knew this was the case from the way he raised the tiniest eyebrow and drummed some code out on the keyboard of his computer.
‘It’s been reserved on an AmEx card, sir … yours?’
‘No, I don’t have American Express. Well, I do, but I don’t use it.’ This was true: a lot of shops in Britain didn’t take it, and long, long ago, Harvey had forgotten the PIN. He sensed, on saying this, a suspicion from the receptionist, a resentment not unlike that he had felt at the airport from the immigration official when it had become clear that he owned an American passport but had chosen not to use it: why would you possess such a jewel and not offer it in your palm to demonstrate your kingliness? Harvey felt he could hear the resentment in the way the man went back to his computer, in the heavy dents his fingers made on the keys.
‘I’m afraid I can’t quite make out from the reservation whether or not all charges are to be drawn on the AmEx card, sir. This may be because the booking seems to be open-ended …?’
He phrased the surmise as a question. Harvey felt moved to answer with the information that his father was dying, but sadly not to a nailed-down schedule, hence his room would indeed have been booked for an open length of time. But instead he just nodded and moved away to the lifts.
3. He doesn’t have a suite. On arriving in the room, his first action – before even opening the heavy oak doors of the TV cabinet to check if the pornography channel was hard- or soft-core – had been to take his Sony Vaio laptop out of its silver case, connect it to the Plug and Play wire, and go straight to www.theSangster.com in order to torment himself with what he did not have. Fourteen suites, he had discovered, feature Steinway or Baldwin grand pianos (‘in keeping’, said the unctuously written website, ‘with the hotel’s musical heritage’) tuned twice a week. Harvey didn’t play the piano (although he still had a faint sense of the absurd needlessness of tuning any piano twice a fucking week) but nonetheless felt, on reading this, the deep, deep deprivation of not having one in his room. Further picking away at the scab of his envy, he read about the ‘legendary’ New York suite, on the twenty-second floor, with its sizeable dining room, kitchen, traditional living room, fireplace with faux-quartz logs, antique books, sunburst clocks, Lars Bolanger lacquered boxes, sage velvet seating area, another fucking piano (Steinway – tuned, no doubt, every fifteen seconds), wall-mounted plasmas, state-of-the-art Bang & Olufsen acoustic system and, of course, a ‘two-storey view of the Manhattan skyline’. He closed the computer, wondering, if he had been certain his dad was paying for it, whether or not he would have demanded an upgrade.
These three reasons finesse his dissatisfaction, each one rising and falling at different times on the graphic equalizer of his anxiety. What would his present therapist – No. 8 – tell him to tell himself? I would really like to be in a better room, with a view and a set of Lars Bolanger-lacquered boxes, but the fact that I’m not is not the end of the world. Something like that. He gets up from the leather-topped desk and flops down on one of the two twin beds in his room. Harvey doesn’t much like that either. No matter how posh the Sangster is, the presence of the twin doubles makes it feel like a room at a Travellers’ Rest somewhere on the A41. Against his overhanging gut, he feels the dig of what should have been – according to the décor – an antique silver cigarette case, but is in fact his iPhone. He takes it out, noticing that another text has come in from Stella: Darling, hope you landed safely. Call me when you have a moment.
He remembers then that the phone had trilled again halfway through the journey from JFK, where he had ignored it, because it had arrived just as the taxi set wheel on the Brooklyn Bridge, allowing him to take in his first view for ten years of Manhattan Island. However much the overall idea of this journey has upped Harvey’s already monstrous anxiety levels, he had at least been looking forward to this: this packed vertical Oz, rust-brown and silver, rising from the sea in the limpid light of the morning. It always made him catch his breath, that such an urban sight could be so beautiful. He held the view, sliced across by the cables of the bridge, for some seconds, allowing its splendour to work some small massage on his migranous soul. Then he had caught sight of the gap where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center used to be, and the view became the mouth of a prize-fighter with two teeth knocked out.
Harvey wonders about calling home. Assuming that extras above and beyond the cost of the room are definitely going to be charged to him, he worries about the cost of the phone bill. He knows that phone calls from a five-star hotel are likely to be charged at an absurd number of dollars per minute. He considers using his mobile but then thinks that that too would be very expensive internationally. There is another option: one of the many bills that arrive daily on Harvey’s brown-as-dead-grass welcome mat at home, one of the many direct debits signed years ago and eating away at his solvency ever since, is for some company, who offer – for a small monthly payment – to provide a four-digit phone number that their customers can dial while staying at hotels, especially hotels abroad, before the number of their actual call, and which fix that call at a standard local rate. Which would now be marvellously useful for Harvey if at any point on any trip since signing up to this direct debit he had remembered to write down the fucking four-digit number and bring it with him.
Putting off the decision, he decides to check his email. Harvey gets anxious if cut off from the internet. He hears about writers – he just about considers himself one, even though collating the Dictaphonic outpourings of celebrities rarely seems to qualify him as such – who, as soon as they sit down to write, unplug the modem. Not Harvey: if his home modem freezes, as it periodically does, he panics, diving immediately down on his knees amidst the wires and discarded newspapers and sweet wrappers of his study floor in order to unplug and replug it. While waiting for it to restart, he cannot work – it is as if he himself has frozen. There is no rationale for this – occasionally he needs to Google some fact, but most of the information he needs is already provided by his subjects – but the possibility of exclusion on this worldwide scale is too much. He needs to feel he is in there, one of the myriad upturned mouths sucking on the global InfoMother’s billion teats.
The Sony Vaio rumbles for while, worrying him, and then Windows Mail opens: he hits Send and Receive, and watches the bar fill to a solid blue. He has nine messages. Eight of them are Spam – Ebony Anastasia Does Interracial Dicking Time, MILF Celestine Opens Her Sweet Ass Do You Want Some?, Superhot Trannies Notwithstanding, PlayPoker UK Exclusive Promotion, Hard Erecttion in 20 Minutes, Erectile Dysfunction?, ChitChatBingo, and one which makes him feel a bit weepy entitled Let Us Protect You, Harvey (from an insurance company) – and one from his agent, Alan. He knows what Alan’s email is going to say – he knows it will be delicately poised between expressing condolences for his father’s condition and wanting to know when Harvey is going to deliver the pitch for Lark’s autobiography – but still opens it with a tiny hope, as he opens all emails, that they will carry news of something stupendously positive. It is a message delicately poised between expressing condolence for his father’s condition and wanting to know when Harvey is going to deliver the pitch for Lark’s autobiography.
Harvey pitches for a lot of autobiographies these days, many more than he actually writes. Lark, though, is a tough one, as she has done, as far as he can make out, absolutely nothing. Lark is a pop star, but Harvey, like everyone else, has never heard any of her songs, nor even seen a picture of her. This is because Lark is being kept under wraps. Her record company, her management and her PR agency – who have decided, the way these people can now, that she is going to be huge – have created a new marketing strategy around Lark, whereby she is going to burst forth fully-formed onto the public, Athena from their combined Zeus-like forehead. On some so far unspecified date in the future, Lark will be brought forth to the world – her single, her video, her MySpace page will all be let out at the same time, followed closely by her album, and her autobiography. This is what Harvey is supposed to pitch for. He does have some information about her – Alan keeps on sending it, as attachments to his increasingly urgent emails – but every time Harvey remembers the only fact he does know about Lark – that she is nineteen – he cannot face opening any of them.
He shuts down Mail and opens a document file entitled IdeasJune. Harvey has many places in which he writes down ideas. In his hand luggage, along with a newly purchased copy of Solomon’s Testament – he had wanted, because she was pretty, to blurt out to the girl behind the till at WHSmith in Terminal Four at Heathrow, that he was Eli’s son, and had a first edition inscribed to him at home with the words ‘To Harvey, may you read it when you’re ready …’ and was only buying this one because he hadn’t read it for years and, well, he didn’t really know why he was buying it now but thought he should maybe read it again on the plane over because he was going to see his father on his deathbed – along with that, his father’s masterpiece, sits a Dictaphone, and two notebooks, one covered in gold leather, and one in moleskin. Harvey fetishizes notebooks. He has a drawerful of them at home in his study desk – covered in so many materials (velvet, cloth, zebra print, PVC); large hardbound ones and small; policeman-flicking-it-open-in-the-dock ones – and in all of them he has written thoughts for novels, films, plays, even – in one of them – business ideas. They are not empty. But they are not full either; each one has a series of scrawls, written in Harvey’s lazy script, which end after about five pages. It is partly the act of writing – that is, handwriting – that fails. Harvey likes the idea of opening the gilded notebook, and marking its embossed paper with the varied scents of his mind, but when it comes to it, writing with a pen has become a bit of a faff. More than that: writing with a pen doesn’t feel significant. It feels the preserve, now, of telephone numbers and email addresses hurriedly scribbled on stickies that he knows he’s going to lose. For his words to mean something, they have to be written on a computer. He knows this, yet continues to buy notebooks.
The document IdeasJune has a number of sentences already in it. Some are fully-formed pitches: ‘Reality TV Idea: convince someone they’ve died and gone to heaven.’ Others just phrases, pending novels yet unwritten: ‘Her breasts spilled out of her bra like muscle rain.’ On a new page, Harvey writes:
Film Idea
Title: SHALLOW
John Shallow is obsessed with looks. He is also an immigration officer at JFK. His obsession serves him well in his job because he always checks people’s – especially women’s – faces very thoroughly. But it doesn’t serve him so well in his marriage, which is falling apart.
However, through a long and difficult process, involving much therapy and various epiphanies (? don’t know what these are – something profound/life-changing) he comes to terms with it, and saves his marriage. Just at that point, though, while at work, he spots – because he’s still got the skill (the skill at looking) even though he’s sorted out the problems that come with it – someone coming through immigration who turns out to be Osama bin Laden, incredibly well-disguised, using plastic surgery etc (a woman?). Osama is arrested and overnight Shallow becomes a national hero and a major celebrity.
This leads to loads of sexual opportunities and wrecks his marriage.
Harvey leans back. Something’s not right about it. He highlights the main body of the prose, and then opens the Formatting Palette, and clicks on I. This happens:
Film Idea
Title: SHALLOW
John Shallow is obsessed with looks. He is also an immigration officer at JFK. His obsession serves him well in his job because he always checks people’s – especially women’s – faces very thoroughly. But it doesn’t serve him so well in his marriage, which is falling apart.
However, through a long and difficult process, involving much therapy and various epiphanies (? don’t know what these are – something profound/life-changing) he comes to terms with it, and saves his marriage. Just at that point, though, while at work, he spots – because he’s still got the skill (the skill at looking) even though he’s sorted out the problems that come with it – someone coming through immigration who turns out to be Osama bin Laden, incredibly well-disguised, using plastic surgery etc (a woman?). Osama is arrested and overnight Shallow becomes a national hero and a major celebrity.
This leads to loads of sexual opportunities and wrecks his marriage.
Yes, that feels better. But now – as ever, when he has done a bit of work – Harvey must grant himself some small reward. He turns away from the computer and takes from his pocket a small bottle of blue liquid. However bleak the journey, there were always consolations on coming to America: the Manhattan view was one, and here was another. While pushing his baggage, ill balanced on the trolley, through JFK’s anywhere-in-the-world airport mall, saliva had gathered in the corners of his mouth, sent up from his forever inflamed throat glands, and Harvey had realized that he was hungry. Not straightforwardly for food; there was something specific which was making his mouth water at that moment, something specific that his system was reminding him can only properly be got hold of in America, reminding him a split second before the words formed inside his damp, sleepless skull: sour sweets. Harvey loves sour sweets; he loves the taste contradiction, the sugar fighting the acid, his tongue a pair of apothecary’s scales holding these opposites in perfect balance. He loves the dialectic. And he loves the fact that all things are postponed during the sucking of a sour sweet; that, while the conflict between sweet and sour remains unresolved, Harvey can float, his soul buoyed up by the sensual striving towards that equilibrium, and nothing matters until it’s over. If he could only get hold of enough of the right kind of sour sweets in the UK, he thinks he may never be depressed; instead, he would be happily addicted to them, despite the terrible stomach cramps that eating them always eventually induces. But in the UK, none of the sweets – not Sour Haribos, not TongueBubbler, not even Toxic Waste – were anything like sour enough for him.
Here, however, in this land where contradiction was possibility, there were sour sweets, Harvey knew, that took the concept of sour-sweetness into a whole new dimension. He had seen on the internet, available from various US confectionery sites, boxes of brightly coloured jelly beans, emblazoned with the promises Extra Sour, Extremely Sour, Very Sour Sours. Yes: Harvey has Googled the phrases ‘sour sweets’, ‘sour candy’, and ‘sour confectionery’, wrapping them in inverted commas so as to allow the computer to make no mistakes about his intention. He had Goo-ogled them, in fact, bringing up multiple images of boxes and wrappers to lasciviously stare at. Unbelievably, perhaps, for a forty-four-year-old man, he had even read reviews of some of these sweets. Zours Incredibly Sour Tangerines had got a unanimous five stars on cybercandy.com, and Harvey had been on the verge of getting them to ship a box out when he remembered he was soon to visit his native land – which, at that moment, figured in his head as Willy Wonka’s factory to Charlie.
Half mad with the craving, and once through the small hiccup in customs, he had dashed inside the first available confectionery containing store, leaving his baggage on the trolley outside, aching to be control-exploded by security. The shop had stocked no Zours, leading Harvey into a mad twenty seconds of uncertainty, his eyes riffling through the Hersheys and the Oreos, until finally asking, in a voice hoarse with desire, ‘Do you have any sour sweets?’ The store assistant, a ginger-haired, fuzzy-faced woman, looked blank, so Harvey looked down, ashamed, feeling that her blankness must contain a condemnation, a deadpan amazement that a man of his age should have such adolescent needs; at which stage he noticed that her index finger had stirred from its fellows, and was indicating downwards and to the left. Harvey’s eyes followed, past the brown and green and pinks, and nearly missed it, because it wasn’t in a wrapper: it wasn’t even a sweet as such, in the boiled, solid, chewable and/or biteable sense. But then his eyes did a double-take, and returned to the words emblazoned on the labels of three small bottles perched above a bright rack of bubblegum: Extra Tart Sour Blast Spray.
Harvey could hardly believe it. Even in all his research he hadn’t come across this: a spray, a concentrate. The sour-sweet sensation, literally bottled, distilled, injectable directly onto the tongue like morphine into the pain receptors of the brain. He bought all three bottles for what seemed at that moment like the incredible bargain price of $2.25 dollars apiece. He had intended to wait until he got to the hotel before trying them, in order to savour the moment. Unfortunately, self-control of this order – or, rather, the lack of it – lies at the very heart of Harvey Gold. This was why various lucky travellers who happened to be passing through the gates of Terminal One of JFK that day were treated to the sight of the middle-aged son of the world’s greatest living author standing in the queue for the airport taxis, mouth open and eyes closed in some small ecstasy, spraying what appeared to be a sample bottle of cheap perfume onto his stretched-out thirsty-dog tongue, gradually coating it blue.
Now, in the hotel room, lying prone on one of his two quilted boats of bedding, he offers that same tongue up for another spray. The wardrobe door opposite has swung open from a bizarre attempt he made soon after entering the room to pack his clothes away, giving up almost instantly on the realization that – even if his father should survive longer than Freda’s projected six weeks – Harvey will continue, while here, to live out of his suitcase, like he has always done on every other trip that necessitated a suitcase. On the inner right-hand door of the wardrobe is a mirror, where Harvey can see himself, or, rather, where he can see all those parts of himself that are not hidden by the solid explosion of his stomach rising from the bed like a termite mound from the ground. His tongue is out of his mouth, and looks, blue and upside-down, like a football shirt drying on the washing line of his lower lip. He undergoes a visual epiphany, not unlike when a mirror on the bathroom door swings your toilet seat image into view, making you think: is man but this? This is a thought Harvey has about himself around five times a minute, however, and so he overrides it with a gust of Extra Tart Sour Blast Spray, flooding his aching taste buds with soursweet rain.
After the hit, trying to avoid the aspartame comedown, Harvey shifts his bulk around to the side of the bed and dials his home number on the telephone on the side table.
‘Mr Gold, how can I help you?’ a smooth, sonorous voice says. Harvey wonders, at first, if it is God, finally asking the requisite question, but then realizes his mistake.
‘Sorry, I forgot to dial …’
‘It’s nine for an outside number, sir.’
‘Yes. OK.’
‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’
Harvey thinks: everything?
‘No. Thanks.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
He clicks off, and dials again, adding the magic nine. And then at the last minute he remembers: five hours behind. His eyes flick to the hands of the faux-antique set on the bedside table: quarter to eleven. In England it will be just gone six – and then she picks up. He hears an airy silence, the rustling of sheets and blankets, before Stella’s ‘Hello?’ comes down the line, alarm penetrating her tone even though her throat is husky and clotted with sleep.
‘Sorry, darling … sorry. I forgot about the time difference. Go back to sleep.’
‘Harvey? Are you OK?’
‘Yes. Yes.’ He knows this is never true, but – not just with her, with everyone that asks it – you can’t go through it all, not every time, can you? No, I’m overweight, exhausted, I get these weird pains in my legs, I have constant low-level nausea, I have prostituted what tiny talent I have ghostwriting the lives of idiots, every woman I pass fills me with despair, my child has Asperger’s Syndrome, my father is dying and I deeply, deeply love my wife but can’t bear the idea that she is starting to grow old. And yourself?
‘Your dad … is he …?’
‘I haven’t seen him yet. No change, as far as I know. But look – what time is it there …?’
A shuffling sound. He sees the scene, familiar in his mind, the safety of the half-light, the day not started, her profile shifting towards the digital clock on her bedside draw.
‘Five forty-five.’
‘Yes. So sorry. Go back to sleep.’ He can feel, even across the wide swathe of water, how it’s too late, how his phone call has rushed consciousness up to her surface, like an air bubble floating from the deep.
‘No, it’s OK. I needed to get up early anyway. Jamie’s got the Montgomery Clinic …’
‘I thought that wasn’t until nine thirty.’
‘Yes. Well, I’ve got to wash my hair.’ In his mind’s eye, Harvey sees the process: her lying back in a full, scalding bath, her face surrounded by water, her curls spiralling away like sea snakes, the whole image a benign Medusa. When she rises out of the steam to work on her hair, her fingers on her scalp move with some precise feminine alchemy, so distinct from his soapy plonk and rub. Every so often, she rotates her head from side to side to prevent the liquid pooling in her ears. The intimacy of watching her wash her hair can feel at times overwhelming. And afterwards, when her hair is wet, falling across her face, before she lifts it into a towel – he does not know where to look. She feels too vulnerable, and his eyes too searching.
‘And I’ve got a lot of work stuff to do, as well, so it’s probably a good idea to get started …’
‘Stop trying to make it better for me.’
‘I’m not. I won’t get back to sleep now anyway. And however pissed off I am about that – which is, yeah, a bit – I’m also pleased, Harvey. To hear from you. I thought your plane must have crashed.’
He laughs, but knows she means it. Every time Harvey flies anywhere, Stella assumes his plane will crash. Her kisses, when he leaves, always have a force to them, impelled by a sense that this could be the last time.
‘That would have been on the news.’
‘The CIA might have been keeping it quiet.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. They might have imposed a security blanket.’
‘I think the word you’re after is blackout.’
‘Oh, yeah. But it’s quarter to six in the morning. I can confuse blanket and blackout. Because I’d like both.’
‘How’s Jamie?’
He hears her rearranging the pillows.
‘He’s OK. He was happy enough after school yesterday. Only got upset at bedtime that you weren’t here. Did you read his note?
‘Note?’
‘His picture. I put it in your suitcase.’
He gets up off the bed, still holding the phone. ‘What, as a surprise?’
A soft beat, her patience diffusing. ‘No, I told you it was in there, yesterday.’
‘Oh sorry, I –’
‘It’s OK. You were in one of your nervous flaps when you were leaving. I knew you weren’t really listening.’
‘Hold on, I’ll go and have a look.’
‘It’s in the zip-up pocket. In the top bit.’
He goes over to the suitcase. It is there, a white envelope with the word ‘DAD’ written on it, in Jamie’s painfully immature handwriting. Inside is a piece of asymmetrically folded A4 paper, on one half of which Jamie has drawn a chess set. The figures are not arranged on the board, but around it. They are not rendered exactly, as they would be if Jamie was an extraordinary Asperger’s child, but randomly: it is difficult to make out which are pawns, and which are major pieces. They look like chess figures in the wind.
Jamie has not written anything to go with his drawing, but on the facing half, in Stella’s looping hand, it says: ‘Have a good trip, even though it’s for a sad thing. I love you. J xxx.’ Harvey holds the note in his hand, and feels his heart crack with love.
He comes back to the phone. Before he speaks, having heard him pick the receiver up, she says:
‘That’s exactly what he told me to write.’
‘It’s really nice. Did you suggest the chess thing?’
He says this knowing that both of them would rather their son had chosen the subject himself, thereby indicating that he has, of his own volition, noticed something about his father’s interests.
‘I may have done,’ she says.
She yawns. He sees their bedroom, dark and warm: Stella makes everywhere cosy. They live in Kent, in a cottage on the North Downs, which would be idyllic were it not for the proximity of the M2. Wooed by the oldness, the Englishness, of the place, Harvey had succumbed easily to the previous owner’s trick of enclosing the front garden with a series of tall hedges, obscuring the surrounding countryside. On a final visit before completion, while visiting the upstairs toilet, he had noticed a somewhat busy road in the middle distance, but, infatuated with the place, and too frightened to disturb at this late stage the serious business of property transaction, had put it out of his mind. Now he spends much time in the garden, trying to gauge exactly how loud that muffled roar is, trying to work out how he couldn’t have heard it before, and trying to think himself into Stella’s method of imagining it’s the sound of the sea.
‘I still think you should go back to sleep.’
‘I said: I’m awake now. Look, don’t worry about me. Did you sleep on the plane?’
‘No. You know I can never sleep on a plane.’
‘You should have flown business …’
‘That’s what Freda said …’ A momentary silence follows this: Harvey assumes she has taken the comparison with his father’s wife as an implicit rebuke, which he had not meant, at least consciously. There is an awkward pause, such as can happen even between couples who have been together for fourteen years, and for whom blips of silence are not generally registered. He waits, wondering if it might be possible over the phone, in another country, to hear the sound of the M2.
‘Well, anyway, darling …’ says Harvey, eventually, feeling the spasticity of words said to break such silences, ‘… I’ll call you later.’
‘OK. I love you.’
‘I love you, too.’
It is the truth, however fast it makes his heart dip.
* * *
My daddy seemed a bit better today. The nurses sat him up in bed, and they took off that see-through mask he usually has to wear over his mouth and nose. He didn’t have it on for ages (later on Mommy told me it was over five minutes!). He still didn’t say anything – the nurse had to put the tube back into his neck while he had the mask off, so that probably didn’t help – but Mommy told me to come over and hold his hand. It made me feel a bit funny, because I haven’t held Daddy’s hand before for so long. After a while I started to notice some of the weird things about it: how he’s got loads of these big brown patches (and some black spots) on the top side and how the bones seemed to be poking through the skin, so that it was a bit like holding a skeleton’s hand. The tops of his fingers (around the nails) look sort of yellow, like he’s bruised them or something, and his nails are really long too – I remember Mommy telling me that Daddy’s nails grow really quickly, and he always forgets to cut them – especially the thumb ones, which were so long they were kind of gross. You might think that nails wouldn’t grow when you’re asleep all the time, but they do.
Sometimes this happens, that Daddy’s skin and stuff makes me feel weird. I’ve noticed before that his skin isn’t like mine – obviously! – or Jada’s, or even Mommy’s, but I guess I’ve kind of gotten used to it. I didn’t really notice it at all until Jada said to me that time that thing about how my daddy’s skin looked like it had lots of little holes in it. I said shut up, stupid, like I always do when she says something like that, something just meant to be nasty, but afterwards I couldn’t help looking and it made it hard to forget because I could see what she meant, sort of. His skin looks more like a net than skin; it kind of looks like bits of skin knitted together around all these tiny holes, like wool looks like close up.
His skin looks even more like wool now, because he’s got all these little white hairs coming out of it. Mommy told me it’s difficult for Daddy to shave now – well, it’s impossible for him to shave, but it’s not even easy for anyone else to do it! They’re so worried about cutting him. But he has lots of little white hairs coming out of the tops of his hands, too, even on his fingers, and he never shaved those even when he wasn’t in hospital. I suppose you would need a special kind of tiny shaver to do them, and I don’t know if you can even get them in any store. I got this really funny idea in my head, that I wanted to turn his hand around, and play round and round the garden with it, even though I haven’t played that for years, not since I was a really tiny baby – but still, when I thought about it, I remembered how I used to like it so much, the tickly feeling so nice, as the grown-up’s finger goes round and round, watching it and feeling it at the same time, and waiting, waiting, waiting for the bigger tickle up the arm. I didn’t do it with Daddy’s hand – I mean, I knew it’d be a stupid thing to do – and, besides, I don’t know if he can actually feel a tickle when he’s so ill and dying and everything.
After Mommy told me to hold Daddy’s hand, her cellphone rang, and she was on it for quite a while (you aren’t really meant to have your cellphone on in the hospital, but I think it’s OK for Mommy to keep hers on because Daddy’s so famous). I held his hand and tried not to think about how weird the skin on it was: I tried to look at his face instead, but that’s even weirder really, because Daddy’s cheeks hang really low, and his ears are so big (especially the bottom bit, the soft bit), and his nose is so long, that now because his skin is all grey his face reminded me of an elephant’s face. Which made me want to laugh at first, but I kept it inside, by holding my breath, which I can do for nearly a minute. Anyway, then I started talking, just saying stuff, things that were in my head: I said, ‘I love you Daddy’ and ‘I hope you get better soon, Daddy’ even though I know he’s not going to get better, he’s going to die, but I didn’t know what else to say – it would have sounded really weird to talk about him dying – but it doesn’t matter anyway, it’s just good to say stuff. He can hear me. Mommy always says he can, even though he never says anything, or even nods his head or whatever. Sometimes she tells me to look in his eyes – Look deep into his eyes, she always says, because that’s where he still lives – and where you can see, she says, that he still understands everything. But his eyes were only half open, and what you can see of the inside bit looks really red – I don’t mean just at the bottom of the eyes, that bit’s always been really red on my daddy’s eyes, and kind of wet, and sometimes I used to think his eyes were bleeding, or that maybe, because he’s a genius, when he cries, it’s blood – God! So mad! That’s like something from Twilight (which Mommy doesn’t know I’ve watched – Jada showed me it at her house, her mom never cares what she sees on TV and stuff).
So then I just kept going, saying whatever came out of my head. Mommy was still on the phone and the nurses were moving around the room and that machine that Daddy is hooked up to all the time with the green lines on it kept on beeping, so no one was really noticing. I told him about Aristotle, my cat, about how he’s started to get really fat because while we haven’t been at home the whole time Noda – that’s our housekeeper; she’s from the Philippines – just leaves food out for him, like a whole tin at once!! And then he just goes over and nibbles on it all day like a cow eating the grass. I told Daddy about how last time me and Elaine took him to the vet, the vet said that he needed to lose weight otherwise he might get ill, and so we bought him this cat food they only sell at the vet called Seniors, which is meant for older cats – which he kind of is, too, even though he’s younger than me, six and a half, but you have to times it by ten, so that makes him sixty-five (which is way old, but still quite a lot younger than Daddy) – but it’s good for fat cats because it’s got less protein and stuff in it and that helps to make them thin. But all that’s like a waste of time now because Noda just opens the tin of FancyFeast and pours it all out for him to nosh at all day.
I felt a bit silly talking about Aristotle like this, because I didn’t know if it was the right kind of thing to talk about. I thought maybe I should be talking about something more grown up, but I couldn’t think of anything. I started to feel sad, because I haven’t seen Aristotle that much since we’ve been going to the hospital all the time, and I really miss him. He’s a really sweet cat, with black and white fur and a really cute little pink nose, who always purrs when you stroke him. I think he misses me, too, because he always comes right up to me when we do get to go home, and nuzzles my leg for ages. So because I was thinking about him and about how he wasn’t getting to eat the Seniors that he’s supposed to, I started to cry. Then, I felt really silly, standing there, getting that funny tickle between the corner of your eye and your nose when the tear comes out – I mean not like blubbing crazy, not even sniffling, just one or two tears coming out – but Mommy quickly stopped her phone call and came over, knelt down and gave me the biggest hug, squeezing me so, so tight.
‘Colette! Darling! It’s OK …’ she said. ‘Cry if you want to. Cry. It’s OK.’ She was patting me on the back at the same time, like Elaine sometimes used to do when I was little and had swallowed something bad. ‘It’s OK.’ I was still holding Daddy’s hand. Mommy was smiling, that smile she does when she looks at Daddy sleeping in his bed, or sometimes when she picks up one of his books. Sort of sad and pleased at the same time. ‘We all feel like crying at the moment.’
‘But you don’t cry …’ I said.
She did one of her smiles. ‘I want to. Really. But sometimes when you’re grown up you have to be strong.’ She pulled a tissue from her sleeve and wiped my eyes. ‘Do you need to blow your nose?’
I shook my head. ‘When I say strong I don’t mean like when someone who lifts something really heavy.’ I knew she didn’t mean that. ‘I mean when bad things happen – when the worst things happen – you have to try and keep going. With a smile on your face. To make sure everyone else doesn’t get more upset.’ She touched my cheek. ‘I have to be strong for you.’
I thought about this for a bit.
‘OK. But if you want to cry it’s OK, too, Mommy,’ I said. ‘Maybe when you cry, I can be strong for you.’
Mommy looked so pleased that I said this. But she also looked a bit like she was going to cry there and then. She gave me another really big hug, and then said, in her softest voice:
‘Thank you, Colette. Thank you.’
I wasn’t sure whether or not to say anything about how much I missed Aristotle. Instead I said: ‘Mommy. Is Daddy in a comma?’
She blinked, and moved her head back a bit. ‘I’m sorry, darling?’
‘I heard Dr Ghundkhali say that that’s what Daddy is in. A comma. At first I thought they meant like that little thing you write in a sentence when you want the person reading it to stop, but not for as long as when you do a full stop – I thought maybe it was something to do with Daddy being a writer? – but then I realized it must be a word that sounds the same but means two different things. Like pair. Or been.’
Mommy looked at me. She was making a weird face, all frowny. Then, behind me, I heard one of the nurses – I think it was the one with the curly hair and the banana nose – laugh. I could feel my face going red, because I knew straight away that I must have said something stupid or kid-like, and I hate doing that – I hate doing it in front of anyone, and I especially hate doing it in front of Mommy. I am Colette Gold, and I do not say stupid eight-year-old kiddie things that grown-ups laugh at because they’re so cute. I got so cross that I started to feel another little tear come out, which only made it worse.
‘Colette, darling,’ said Mommy. ‘Don’t get upset. That’s a very good question. You just slightly misheard Dr Gundkhali. He would have said that Daddy was in a “coma”. You see, it sounds a bit like comma, doesn’t it? But it has an extended – like a longer – “o”. Coama.’
‘Oh,’ I said. Then, like I was saying it in slow motion: ‘Coa … ma.’ She nodded, one of her slow nods which makes her fringe move like a little curtain in front of her eyes. No one said anything for a bit. So then I said: ‘Yes, but what does it mean?’
Mommy opened her mouth to speak, but then the hospital door banged really loudly, and a man came in. He was fat, and sweaty, and his suit was too tight for him. Mommy got up, and looked at him for quite a long time without saying anything.
‘Hello, Freda,’ he said.
‘Colette,’ she said. ‘Come and meet your half-brother Harvey.’
* * *
This is too much rain, thinks Violet. She means too much rain to go for her walk, but is aware as she thinks it of a sense that, for some summers now, there has been too much rain. It used to be funny, the unpredictability of British summer, something that she might have commented on with a resigned shrug to her neighbours if they bumped into each other buttoned-up in July, and the neighbours would nod and smile resignedly back, and it was a nice, reassuring, confirmation that they shared the same mock-weary national expectation. But that was just about the way the sun used to stand the country up. It was not about rain like this, like a monsoon, hitting the pavement so hard that filthy fat globules of dust-water fly up from the cracks.
She has opened the frosted fire-glass front door, and is standing on the top step, looking out at Redcliffe Square. She already knows from looking out of her room window – and from the way the stuck branch trembled, like it was freezing – that the weather was probably too bad to venture outside, but she thought it might look better at ground level. It does not. If anything, standing here brings home the problem more clearly, which is not so much the weather as the ground itself, transformed by the rain into an assault course for her and her stick. She does not mind the weather, really: she does not mind getting a bit wet, or having her hair blown into a mess, even though she had only last week been to the hairdressers and had it styled and coloured (plus a root perm to give her some body and to cover the small bald spot just below the crown). But she does mind being attacked by the ground; she minds slipping on a puddle or being blown over by the wind and crashing to the concrete and becoming in an instant one of the residents who has had a fall – the three most dreaded words at Redcliffe House, heard only in whispers, the care home equivalent of Auschwitz’s chosen for selection.
She shuts the door: the cold street air in her nostrils mingles for a second with the sickly overheated scent of the hallway. She had hoped to buy a paper, to see if there was any more news about Eli. Three newspapers – the Mail, the Telegraph and the Express – are delivered daily to the house, but when Violet enters the living room, she sees that, as ever, they have been snapped up by those (mainly male) residents keen to demonstrate their lack of senility. Joe Hillier, she notices, is busy consolidating this demonstration using the Telegraph, the paper which best allows for the requisite amount of page-flapping and harrumphing. Luckily, for Violet’s purposes, Pat Cadogan collars her immediately to give her a long report on the condition of her shingles, allowing her to feign concern while standing at the back of Joe’s chair looking over his shoulder.
Sure enough, Joe turns the page out of the front few pages and all their pressing seriousness about politicians she can no longer remember the names of, and there he is – her ex-husband (the phrase sounds ridiculous, even inside her head), centred on the page, the same black-and-white photograph that had been on television the day before.
‘What is it?’ says Pat, a grimace of irritation breaking though her seen-it-all implacability: she had noticed Violet’s lack of concentration, her failure to nod at her retelling of the last two castigations of the house doctors.
‘Sorry Pat … I … Joe?’
Joe Hillier looks up, but, as Violet is behind him, he simply scans the room, shrugs his shoulders, and puts it down – in a rather matter-of-fact way – to voices in his head.
‘Joe!’ She taps him on the shoulder. He tries to look round, but the turning circle of his neck fails him, and he has to shift his body sideways to see her.
‘What is it?’
‘Would you mind if I had the paper?’
He looks at it, folded now on his lap. ‘This one?’
‘Yes …’
‘Well, I haven’t finished reading it yet.’
He stares at her, with all the truculence that old men reserve for old women.
‘OK. Can I have it when you have?’
‘Well, I think Frank …’ Joe raises an arthritic, yellowing finger towards another resident, a man wearing thick-lens glasses rimmed with heavy, 1960s black frames whom Violet has never spoken to ‘… was next in the queue for the Telegraph.’
‘Well, fine. Just whenever everyone’s finished with it, I’d like the page with that photograph.’
Violet’s natural instinct is diplomatic, and she had been smiling, but her voice, raised by the betrayal within it of a tiny level of frustration, causes a number of men and women in the room – at least, the ones with their hearing aids on – to turn round. Violet had never raised her voice before in three years at Redcliffe House, and it is clear from the uncertainty on some of the residents’ faces that they have no idea who had been speaking.
‘Have it? You mean, keep it?’ says the man who Joe had referred to as Frank.
‘I don’t think that’s House policy, is it?’
He takes his glasses off, in the manner of a board member at an important meeting, dealing with a thorny issue someone else has brought up. Behind them, red threads creep in from all sides of his eyes towards the cataract-white centres, like blood dropped in milk. With a sinking heart, Violet realizes that the two men are going to use her request as a means of pretending they still exist in the world of the living.
‘Absolutely correct, Frank,’ says Joe. ‘The rules state that all newspapers and magazines put out in the communal area for use of the residents must be left in the communal area at the end of the day for recycling.’
‘Oh, for crying out loud Joe Hillier,’ says Norma Miller, one of the more lively residents. She is Welsh – so always addresses people by both their names – and her hair is dyed shockingly blonde for a woman in her eighties. Her face is so engraved with lines it looks, Violet always thinks, like crazy paving: she has smoked her whole life, and is furious that she is not allowed to continue to do so inside Redcliffe House. ‘Don’t be such a stupid old stickler. Let her have the bloody paper if she wants it.’
‘Why do you want it, anyway?’
Violet turns; it is Pat Cadogan who had spoken, her eyes squinting with suspicion. Violet had dreaded someone asking this. She had hoped the newspaper would just be handed over, and she could squirrel it away to her room, but now, as always, events had run out of control. It was why she never spoke up; why she chose, often, not to say anything at all.
‘Oh, no reason, really. I know – I used to know …’ she doesn’t want to say his name; it would just lead further away from the straight line back to her room, ‘… him. The man in the photograph. A long time ago.’
Joe Hillier picks up the paper and shakes the pages out. ‘Barack Obama?’
‘No! Him. On the facing page.’
Joe scans the print. A piece about the arts, about books – worse, a writer of fiction: she could hear in the snort of breath through his solidly packed nostrils that this was an article that he, a man from the north of England, would normally disregard.
‘Eli … Gold. Yes, I’ve heard of him.’
‘Didn’t he kill one of his wives?’ says Frank.
‘No!’ says Violet. ‘It was a suicide pact that went wrong.’
Joe Hillier frowns, though it is unclear whether this is from disbelief, or because the idea of disposing of one’s wife in that way – Joe had lived for fifty-two years with a woman dedicated to making his life a disappointment – suddenly occurs to him as brilliant.
‘Gold …’ says Pat, menacingly; she looks over Joe’s shoulder at the picture. ‘Is he a relative of yours?’
Violet seizes on it. ‘Yes! Yes, he is. A distant … cousin.’
Pat stares at her, her tiny eyes – had they shrunk with age? Weren’t eyes the only part of the body that didn’t do that? – narrowed to slits. Don’t you lie to me is so clearly etched into her expression, it seems to be written on a comic-book balloon attached to her mouth. Violet turns away: she does not want to lie – she is naturally no good at it – but it is so much easier than the truth, which in this case, she thinks, would not be believed. It seems so unlikely, really, even to her, that she, as she sees herself in the big gilt-edge mirror over the living-room fireplace, an ancient husk of femininity, could ever have been loved by him, as he is pictured in the newspaper, so pert and sharp-suited and – a word the young people used to use: or did they still? – cool. She may even be put down as showing the first signs of senility. And even if it were believed, in the unlikely event that someone were to check the information and discover its truth, she knows she would only emerge from her cocoon of anonymity as an object of resentment. It was impossible for such worlds to meet; the one in the paper, even though it was past and dead – the world of fame, and worldliness, and glamour – and this one, Redcliffe House, this apex of mundanity. It was like trying to push together the wrong ends of two magnets; she would be held responsible for forcing such a bad conjunction.
‘All right, then,’ says Joe, shrugging. ‘I’ll ask one of the nurses to hold onto that page for you at the end of the day …’
‘Thank you, Joe. That’s very good of you.’
But of course he forgets, and when she asks the next day all the newspapers have already been sent off for recycling.
* * *
Where were all these women in winter? thinks Harvey, viewing the teeming Manhattan sidewalks from the back windows of another cab. It is not the first time he has had the thought: it seems it comes to him earlier every year, his own deeply dysfunctional first cuckoo of spring. He knows the argument: it’s just the clothes, with their dizzying gaps between belt and top and neck and bra strap, giving onto the soft planes of caramelizing flesh. But that makes no sense to Harvey, because, looking round, he knows for certain that the women who snag his gaze in these clothes would snag his gaze were they dressed head to foot in straw.
Fifth Avenue, the boulevard his driver has chosen to take in order to bring him back from Mount Sinai to the Sangster, is full of shoppers. Harvey is glad he isn’t driving, as looking out onto the fecund streets at this time of year from a vantage point above a steering wheel – whether in London or New York or anywhere – is lethal. Not lethal as in ‘God, man, that’s lethal’, said, say, with a wipe across the mouth on putting back down on the bar a high-alcohol cocktail. Lethal as in looking so hard and so long back over his shoulder, at this woman or that woman or this woman or that woman or this woman or that woman, in order to check out whether her face and front fulfils or undoes the promise of her hair and back, that Harvey drives headlong into the truck/car/bus/building in front. Many is the time, in London, from April to September, that Harvey has had to apply the brake split seconds faster than his leaping heart in order to prevent an imminent body flight through the smeary glass of his Toyota Avensis wind-screen. And many is also the time – about one in four, Harvey reckons – that a clear sight of said woman would, he thinks, have been just about worth, if not actual death, at least being cut screaming from the molten Toyota/truck conjunction with oxyacetylene.
This is a somewhat contradictory thought for Harvey Gold – which is OK, contradiction being his air, his water – seeing as he knows that much of his trouble comes from this type of looking. This looking isn’t pleasure, it isn’t contemplation: like the rest of Harvey’s stuff, it’s symptomatic, pathological, obsessive compulsive. It is desire rendered only as pain, unrequited even in Harvey’s imagination. He is not interested in what he knows he can never have. He is only troubled by it.
There are male friends he has spoken to about this issue who love the streets at this time, including one who, despite having three cars and more than enough money for taxis, always, on travelling into central London in spring and summer, will get the bus, in order to sit on the top deck and leer. Harvey does not understand his friend. Harvey does not understand the idea of the enjoyment of looking. Very early on in their time together, Therapist 4, the Kleinian, had suggested the possibility that Harvey could contain the anxiety looking at women on the street caused him by comparing them to beautiful paintings.
‘You can look at beautiful paintings without being overcome with anxiety – you can in fact look at beautiful paintings and enjoy them …’ she had said, with an air of this’ll sort him out, ‘why don’t you try and think of these women as beautiful paintings?’
‘Because,’ he had replied instantly – always at his quickest when pressed on his own neuroses: the nearest Harvey comes to his father’s speed of mind is his ability always to have an answer for why this or that suggestion will not cure him – ‘when I see a beautiful painting, I have no desire to touch or kiss or lick or fuck the canvas.’
Harvey remembers the face of Therapist 4 at this moment. She was his first woman – chosen deliberately, in the hope that that would be the key – and sixty-three, also a deliberate choice, and had had a minor stroke that caused one side of her mouth to fall faintly out of symmetry with the other. Physiotherapy had got her facial muscles back to about 80 per cent of their pre-stroke strength, but her lips still had something of the look of a falling graph and, in response to this particular remark, seemed to fall just a millidegree further. Harvey took this to mean that he had stumped her, and felt, despite the fact that he was paying her to cure him and therefore not to be stumped, a small thrill of triumph.
‘Are you OK, sir?’ says the taxi driver, a Sikh. Harvey looks away from the window; again he has the impulse to delineate the thousand ways in which he is not. But he says:
‘Fine. Yes. Why do you ask?’
‘You were sighing?’ His accent is Bengali, but the intonation, going up at the end of the sentence to make the observation a question, is American.
Harvey looks at the ID card in the right-hand corner of the glass partition that separates passenger from driver: the words Jasvant Kirtia Singh and a face, most of it covered by turban and beard.
‘Sorry, I didn’t realize …’
‘It is someone you’re seeing at the hospital?’
Harvey looks at Jasvant Kirtia Singh’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. Animated from their I’m-Not-A-Terrorist impassivity on his ID, they are small black beads, birdlike, but framed by eyebrows gently suggesting both enquiry and a willingness to retreat if the passenger does not wish to talk.
‘My father.’
‘He is unwell?’
‘Yes.’
‘I hope he gets better soon …?’
Harvey wonders what to say to this. It has happened a few times, particularly early on, before the obituary writers began sharpening their pencils (or, rather, Googling ‘Eli Gold’): he would tell someone that his father was ill, and they would offer some encouraging words indicating hope of a return to health, and Harvey would have to face saying, No. He isn’t going to get better. The next stage of the conversation would then be stunted, and Harvey would feel at some level rude for having burdened them with this information. It crosses his mind, therefore, just to tell the taxi driver that his father is indeed on the mend – after all, he is not someone who needs to know the truth, nor is ever likely to find out that he has been lied to anyway. But Harvey doesn’t: even the tiniest lies will up his already heightened anxiety levels.
‘I don’t think so …’ he says, and the Sikh’s eyes hold his for a second, then move up and down as the back of his turbaned head nods in sad understanding.
‘I am sorry,’ he says, for the first time not framing the statement as a question.
Harvey is grateful, however, to have his mind brought back to his father. He feels, with his gratitude, a stab of guilt that he should be thinking about his sense of exclusion from the huge variety of female flesh out there so soon after seeing his father on his deathbed for the first time. Harvey knows what the world demands: there are certain things, of which the death of your father is certainly one, that must drive all other thoughts from your head, filling your sky as effortlessly as a wide-winged black eagle, but the truth – Harvey’s truth, yes, but he senses that here, for once, he is not alone – is that the widower at his wife’s funeral is for a second snagged by the breasts of the female mourner standing on the other side of the grave, straining against her tight black jacket; that the father at his son’s hospital bed is distracted, against all his will, by the curving back view the nurse creates as she reaches up to change the little boy’s drip. It is the source of men’s deepest shame, the ever-presence of the penis; or, to be more exact, the incongruity of the penis, its continued presence on those occasions when it would be so clearly in accordance with every idea of human dignity for it to be absent.
Harvey tries his best, though. He attempts to use his short-term memory – the pictures in his head of where he has just been – to drive himself into mental propriety. He thinks hard: he focuses. But not in that modern self-help, how-to-improve-your-golf-swing way – he actually does his best to make his mind’s eye like a camera lens, closing telescopically on the world around him to see only the immediate past.
Eli’s room had been in Geriatrics, at the end of a long, bright corridor, on whose walls were hung a number of photographs commemorating the opening of the new Geriatric Medicine Facility, by Martha Stewart, in 2007. Outside the room itself stood a hulking security man, both black and dressed in black. He held one huge finger, his index, to his ear, pressed against a Bluetooth cellphone earpiece. ‘ID, sir,’ he said, managing to pack into those two words all his adamantine non-negotiability on this requirement
Harvey’s stomach fell. He hadn’t, of course, considered that access to his father’s hospital room might be controlled: a stab of resentment towards Freda for not mentioning it went through him. He could have brought one of his two passports, but they were both in his bum bag, presently in his hotel room, flung over the twin bed he had chosen not to sleep in – a decision he had remained uncertain about throughout the long jet-lagged night, even swapping beds for twenty minutes at around 5 a.m., hoping that the other mattress might be soft enough to grasp what little oblivion the dark still offered.
‘I don’t …’ he began, and saw the security man’s wide face settle into stone. ‘Look. I’m his son. I’m Eli Gold’s son.’
‘Can you prove that, sir?’
This took Harvey aback. He realized that without some kind of documentation, he could not. He did look a bit like his father – they shared fleshy, porous noses, and skin that looked as if it might need shaving four times a day – but not having seen him as he was at present he could not even confidently claim a resemblance. And as for any other inheritance: well, Harvey possessed neither the genius nor the charisma, although he wondered why he was thinking this, as he was not sure how he would demonstrate either in the hospital corridor, and even if he could, doubted they would count as an access-all-areas code.
‘I’ve got a credit card …’
‘I’ll need a photo-ID, sir. There’s a lot of journalists and crazy people might want to get into this room.’
‘Yes,’ Harvey said, and then remembered that he did have his driving licence on him. He unbuttoned his jacket – because, despite it being forty degrees in Manhattan, he was wearing a dark blue, buttoned jacket; uncertain and jet-lagged this morning he had decided that the occasion of going to see his dying father necessitated some formality – and reached into the inside pocket for his wallet. He scrabbled through the variety of useless cards in the leather slits – how many fucking membership cards for defunct DVD rentals did he own? – until he spotted his shrunken head on the pink picture card. Handing it to the security guard, Harvey felt nervous, under pressure; the moment came into his mind when Jimmy Voller, the swarthy Brooklyn hero of Eli’s brutal third novel Cometh the Wolf, has to produce his passport at the door of an East Berlin brothel to persuade the madam that he is neither Turkish nor Moroccan, the two nationalities she has decided to bar entry to.
The security guy removed his finger from the earpiece – Harvey noticed that he was not, in fact, in telephone communication with anyone, and wondered if the finger-in-the-ear stance had just been to make him look more like security guys always do – and took his time scanning the details of the licence. Harvey had never spotted the parade of weird tiny vehicles on the back of it before – what is that, he thought, a VW Beetle? And that looks like the silhouette of the van in Scooby-Doo. They seemed tinier than ever, perched in the security guy’s mighty hand. He produced a clipboard, which, also being black, had remained invisible before, camouflaged against his enormous black puffa jacket. Harvey wondered who was paying for this guy: the hospital? His father? The government? Waiting for what seemed a stupid amount of time for his name to be checked against the names on the clipboard, Harvey felt absurdly like he was trying to get into some sort of exclusive nightclub.
Eventually, the security man looked up, scrutinizing Harvey’s face as if it were another card. He gave him his licence back.
‘Just stay here a second, please, sir …’ He turned, with a slow movement not unreminiscent of an oil tanker listing to port, and went into the room. Harvey dropped his head to look through the recessed glass window in the door. The room was spacious, and well furnished in a hospital way, but oddly windowless. In the foreground, he could see Freda on her knees, talking to a girl – Colette? – a doctor, a nurse and, in an alcove off to one side, the bottom edge of what must be his father’s bed. An image flashed through his mind of the comedy medical clipboard that should be hanging there, marked in black with a zigzag graph hurtling downwards, but all he could see were chrome bars and white sheeting.
The security guy hovered behind Freda, waiting for her conversation with the child to end. His finger had returned to his ear. Harvey had a moment of wondering if the security guy’s finger, so wide it completely obscured the earpiece, was bigger than his own penis, and then immediately feared that such a thought might be racist. He took out a bottle of Extra Tart Sour Blast Spray and gave his tongue a quick atomize. He removed his iPhone from his other pocket and tapped a few moves into Deep Green, but could see straight away that he was heading for a quick Checkmate! Tiny wins! so put it back. He considered, not for the first time, how quickly he panicked, while waiting: how quickly he needed to distract himself, before his mind and body went somewhere bad. Thinking about his body makes him suddenly feel a need to piss. Micturation, or the urge to do so, comes upon him like this these days, with no build-up, no gradual turning of the tap. He knows it is something to do with his battered and bruised prostate, the internal organ he has always been most conscious of: it will be, he knows, swollen or shrunken or just generally giving up its hanging walnut ghost, but he cannot bring himself to go to the doctor to check it out. Not because he is embarrassed about it, but because his GP in Kent is a young and pretty Pakistani woman, and there is no way he can go to the surgery and ask her about his prostate without it looking as if it’s a ruse to get her to put her finger up his anus. Even as he makes the appointment he will feel the receptionist suspecting his motivation. He needs to get over this concern, he knows, partly because Eli’s first brush with cancer was of the prostate, and partly because he actually would quite like the GP to put her finger up his anus.
The security guy was still hovering over Freda like the alien ship in Independence Day over earth as she talked. ‘Fuck it,’ Harvey said to himself, and walked quickly down the corridor, and found the rest room. Rest room. It could be restful in the toilet, Harvey felt, although only if you were sitting down – something he chose to do more and more these days, whatever the character of the ablution – but even then only really in your own private toilet, where any anxiety about sharing intimate information with strangers could not intrude. The door was locked. Harvey tried it a few times, as if under the impression that perhaps there was something wrong with the lock, but really to make it clear, to the present user, that someone was outside waiting. Eventually, the door opened, and Harvey drew back: the person exiting was a woman – Korean? Chinese? Malaysian? he felt bad about not being able to tell the difference – with tired eyes. There was no reason why it should not be a woman – the rest room door had no trousered or skirted hieroglyphic on it – but Harvey instantly wished to withdraw his aggressive shaking of the handle, somehow more acceptable had the occupant been male. It flashed through his mind to say – ‘Oh sorry, I thought you were a man’ but he quashed it. Instead, a glance passed between them, a glance he has – this is the word, guilty though he feels about it – enjoyed before. If Harvey is waiting to use a unisex toilet, on a train, say, or in a private house at a party, and a woman comes out, Harvey enjoys (he knows it’s wrong but still allows himself the minute, tawdry thrill) the moment in which their eyes meet. He thinks the glance means that, for a second, they have both shared an image of her sitting on the seat with her pants down and the sound of liquid on china, or metal. This is the glance that passed between him and the nurse. As ever, he felt bad about enjoying it, but still. He noticed, though, that she squinted at him uncertainly, as if catching that something about Harvey’s look was not accidental, so he looked away, covering his shame by moving quickly into the cabin.
When he came back to the door to Eli’s room, the security guy was waiting, finger in ear. He looked Harvey up and down once more, and then stepped aside. Harvey chanced a friendly nod at him, which was met with a blank stare, making Harvey worried that his friendly nod may have been misinterpreted as ‘see?’, but continued on past his gravitational presence and through the door.
The first thing he noticed on entering was that the room was not windowless. In fact, the bed faced a floor-to-ceiling glass rectangle, looking onto exactly the view of Manhattan – across Central Park, towards downtown – that Harvey so covets. He drank it in – or, rather, since what hit him with a rush is not beauty but envy – he sucked it up, the sweep of sky and skyscrapers, before turning and saying, ‘Hello, Freda.’ His stepmother looked up – it had never occurred to him with the same force before; two years younger than him, that was still, technically, what she was. She stared at Harvey for so long – the oddity of their interaction reinforced by her being on her knees – that he started to wonder if she was trying to remember who he was.
‘Colette,’ she said eventually, ‘come and meet your half-brother, Harvey.’
When the girl looked up, her face under her curls was set in a tight frown. She may have been crying, although not, Harvey thought, out of sadness: her expression contained that classic mix of rage and self-pity that children’s faces emit when they have just been told off. She did not do as she was told; she did not come and meet him, but stayed where she was, raising her chin defiantly and staring as if he was complicit in – perhaps even the mastermind of – whatever slight had just been perpetrated against her.
Or maybe she was sad, about her – their – dad dying, and this was just what she looked like when she was sad. After all, Harvey had never met her before. He had been sent a photograph soon after her birth of the three of them at their New England lodge (not by Eli: the accompanying note, including the statement, ‘Eli is so overjoyed about his new child’ was all in Freda’s hand). Eli, in a big fisherman’s jumper, grinning beneficently, his arms around Freda, her trademark proprietorial smile cross-fertilized with an element of self-conscious sheepishness, as if to say, ‘Can you believe what little me has ended up with?!’, and in her lap, the baby. Harvey wondered who had taken it, as it was too professional – the light too dappled, the wood-panelled walls of the lodge too burnished, the composition of the threesome too perfectly arranged – to have been done on a self-timer. It looked, he thought, like something from OK! magazine. But he could not relate his memory of that infant, looking out at him from the photograph with something of the complacent gaze of a cow, to this fierce child with the thermonuclear stare.
‘Hello,’ he said: the word felt stupid in his mouth. Colette just nodded at him, and Harvey felt suddenly furious at Freda for spiking his route to his father’s bedside with this introduction, impossible as it was to brush off because of the absurd and irreducible fact of him and this thirty-six-years-younger girl being siblings. Freda must have known that his first thought would be to get to Eli’s bedside – and Harvey had really wanted to do this, although not so much because he just wanted to see his dad, more that he wanted to get the first sight of him over with. He was scared about it. Approaching the door, he had felt much like he had as a kid watching Dr Who, knowing that a new monster was about to appear. The ten-year-old Harvey, trembling beside his mother (who let Dr Who under her steel bar of what Harvey was allowed to watch, although in later series changed her mind, deciding that the Time Lord’s always-female assistants were becoming oversexualized) in his blue, bi-planed pyjamas, would not hide behind the sofa. He would, rather, watch intently, wanting the monster to appear as soon as possible; the worst thing was not knowing. He wanted to face it, so that he could know the fear, hold it and calibrate exactly how bad it was going to be.
‘Last time I saw you, you were a tiny baby,’ he said, his voice sounding astringent against the sentiment, holding down his rage at having to have this conversation now. Surreptitiously, he flicked his eyes over towards his father’s bed, more of which was visible from this angle. The movement of his eyes sideways reminded him of the painful glancing action always prompted by an attractive woman across a room. He could see the thin hump of a wasting body underneath bedding, but still not the face. It was facing the face that filled him with dread.
‘You saw me when I was a baby?’ said Colette.
‘No. I saw a photo …’
‘Oh. OK.’ She looked at him. Her frown deepened, producing little lines on her forehead. ‘Why is your tongue blue?’
The awkward stalemate this response induced was broken by the sudden appearance of Freda with her arms outstretched. Harvey, opening his to accept the hug, looked at her frame, spread like a net in front of him, and thanked the Lord again that he didn’t find her attractive. Although younger than him, and a woman – normally enough for his needs – there was something about Freda that inhibited Harvey’s reflex interest. She had that parched-face look so common to female humanist academics that Harvey felt they should try their utmost to avoid, thinking that they had fallen into the exact trap – unfemininity – which Victorian patriarchy had predicted for women should they become learned. This particular intellectual conundrum was a hangover not from his father but his mother, who, despite being herself a female humanist academic, and an arch-feminist, never emerged from her bedroom without a cosmetic face mask three inches thick.
It had occurred to Harvey many times that, physically, Freda was the opposite of everything Eli usually went for in women – except in respect of her youth, relative to him. It did not go unnoticed by Harvey that that was, as it were, the last thing to go – that all the other staples of Eli’s desire could be sacrificed, but not this one, not even in his dotage.
The hug went on for some time. Harvey, who had been hugged by Freda before, felt in it, as ever, no particular love or affection for him: but much love and affection for the idea of hugging. This one was tighter and longer than usual, but still somehow failed to convey any sense that she was pleased to see him. Uncomfortably, however, it did give him time to feel the full length of her body against his – the emotional distance between them allowed him, in a bleak, detached way, to take stock of her body in a way that he never had before – and, then, much to his consternation, come away from the hug, in spite of his long-held notions about her mannishness, with a hard-on.
‘Go …’ said Freda, pulling back from him, Harvey hoping against hope not because she had noticed it. She was speaking in what sounded to him like a stage whisper. ‘Go to him. Speak to him.’
‘Speak?’
‘He understands. He hears.’
Harvey nodded, not wanting to say anything that might disturb her reverence. The tumescence in his pants subsided. He choked down an urge – with him most days, although undoubtedly charged up by the situation – to shout an obscenity at the top of his voice. He walked towards his father’s bed, his feet padding against the quality carpet of the room.
Glancing back, he saw that Freda had crouched down again to whisper to Colette. The doctor and nurse in the room were busying themselves with notes and drips and bleepers: none of them offered to guide him – neither geographically nor spiritually nor even educationally – through the scene. Harvey felt again like a nonentity in some exclusive club, unable to make his presence felt. It even flashed through his mind to say Don’t you know who I am? He wished Stella were here, to hold his hand, even though Harvey was uncomfortable with hand-holding, because it made him feel more aware of the fact of fear, and because, sometimes, he could feel the small bones in her hands.
These thoughts were halted by the interruption into his vision, finally, of his father. Even then it wasn’t as Harvey had imagined it, a kind of naked confrontation with mortality. Eli’s head was propped up against the pillow, and covered nose to mouth with an oxygen mask. Attached to various intravenous ports, six or seven different tubes curled around his bed and into his body, like he was being gently cradled by an octopus. Machines, humming and bleeping and oscillating with sine waves, surrounded him in a stately circle, as if his father were whatever invisible deity lurks in the centre of Stonehenge. It felt to Harvey that all this apparatus was designed not just to keep Eli from death, but also his visitors: that it formed a buffer zone between them and the reality of his condition. So much so, in fact, that the sight of his father was almost an anti-climax after all the girding of his loins. Where is he? he wanted to say, and not in a metaphorical way – not in a This shrunken shell of a human being cannot be My Father! way – but physically: he wanted to rummage through all this stuff, all the sheeting and the wires and the plastic, chucking it over his head like a man sorting through the trash, to find him.
He also felt he couldn’t see him because of the things that were not there. People assume that the way to reveal an object is to remove its external trappings, but that doesn’t hold true for the human object. Glasses, for example: Eli had for Harvey’s whole life worn thick black beatnik spectacles, and without them, as now, he was somehow not Eli. The lack of glasses, along with the lack of a cigarette in his mouth – something Harvey had also grown up conditioned to see, although Eli had finally given them up two years ago – was not an unmasking. It just made him look like someone else.
But then Harvey looked more closely – having realized that he had been focusing on all the last-days’ paraphernalia exactly to avoid doing that – and, indeed, there he was: in the wet, grey clumps of hair stuck to his temples, wisps curling away from his skin like they always did; in the deep trench-like lines on his forehead – the same ones that he has just seen reproduced in miniature on his half-sister’s brow – whose up or down state the child Harvey had desperately relied upon to monitor his father’s otherwise unguessable moods; in the remnants of his beard, its close trimming evocative of his decline like some upside-down Samson, but bringing back to Harvey a distant memory of Eli scraping his emery stubble against the virgin cheek of his son, who would protest, but laughingly, finding the touch both abrasive and delightful, redolent of the rough promise of the adult world; and perhaps most of all in his hands, which were still, despite the pulse meters and the blood clots and the mountainous veinscape rising angrily from their backs, sheathed in the same skin, brown and rough as bark, and still incongruously large, still, even here, suggesting strength, the hands of a labourer, on the end of arms which had avoided heavy lifting their whole life. Harvey, a sucker for comparisons, found himself looking at his own hands by contrast – he’d done this before, of course, but the OCD lizard king in his brain always required new checks – raising his right one a Reiki hover away from his dad’s. It looked small, but Harvey has always known he has small hands, girl’s hands, easy prey for ‘you-know-what-they-say-about’ jokers. He wondered how the DNA divides it up – what fall it is of the cellular dice that has given him his father’s nose, mouth and skin, but his mother’s eyes and hands.
He did not know what to do. He felt that the correct – the polite – thing to do was to speak, as Freda had advised. But looking at his father again – less like his father, and more like a mad scientist had given up halfway through making a robot version of his father – the idea of speaking was clearly ridiculous. He felt not unlike he always did in church or synagogue, fighting an urge, during the endless roll call of praise and plea, to shout ‘No one’s listening! No one’s even there to listen!!’ And what was he supposed to say? Dad: it’s me? Since even those keeping the faith in Eli’s ability to hear did not believe, presumably, that the dying man could see as well, this would then require him to say, in explanation – ‘Um … Harvey’ – like he was on the phone. And then what? How are you? Oh my God, it would just be a fucking phone call. Something more supportive? I’ve just come to say I’m going to be here for you … oh no. No. I am a dual citizen, he thought, but I will never become that American. He didn’t know what to say. He wondered who the people were who did, in this situation. He looked round, as if, at any minute, they might come into the room and tutor him.
Even the first word he might say – Dad – felt weird. It was a word he’d always had problems with. Eli had left Harvey’s mother at a time when his son – six, after all – called him Daddy. There was then a period of some years when Harvey hardly saw his father at all, but still referred to him, in his absence, as Daddy. Thus, when he began to see him again, at increasingly irregular intervals in his teens, he found he had missed out on that poignant slide from Daddy into Dad that marks out children’s first maturity. He addressed him as Dad at this point, but it felt somehow wrong, and he found himself wanting to say Daddy: not in the front of his head – like any other post-pubescent boy, he was keen to avoid any word or deed that might make him seem childish – but in his gut, in the reflex part of his linguistic centre. When he saw Eli, the word that formed in his mind was Daddy. Latterly, a number of different titles for his father were attempted, knowable as the word Harvey used following ‘Hello’ when seeing his father or hearing his voice on the phone – Father; Eli (never comfortable); Dad (still not right); an attempt at irony, Pater. Now, by his deathbed, his mind was saying, again, Daddy.
He decided not to think about it, and just trust what might come out. He coughed, something of a stage ahem. It emerged from his mouth much louder than he had expected, in a weird croak-grunt, shattering the quiet of the room. Freda had taken Colette outside for some form of pep talk, and the doctor had been whispering to one of the nurses, no doubt detailing some complex medical issue, although Harvey had been unable not to wonder if it was flirtation. Both of them looked over, surprised for a moment, before going back to their huddle. And then, at that point, almost as if he had heard, Eli stirred. His hands, one of which was still just underneath Harvey’s, stiffened, the long fingers – whose nails had, Harvey noticed, been neatly trimmed – extending like sickles. His eyes even opened, although the pupils were long gone, high up into his head, revealing just two grey-white ovals, slivers cut from an English sky. Under the oxygen mask, his mouth, previously lopsided into a shape, ironically, like a speech balloon, opened further on that side, and from the weird aperture came a sound that was part-howl and part-yawn, with something oddly synthetic in it as well, not unlike the note produced by a theramin. It was loud, and deeply disturbing: a noise that knew and did not know, like a cow makes at the touch on its temple of the stun gun, a distress call back to this world from the black country.
Immediately, the doctor and the nurse rushed over, in their long coats. Freda burst back through the door, trailing Colette, still sulky. Harvey stared at the blind, raging stump of his father, guilt-stricken, convinced that somehow this atrocious convulsion must be his fault. ‘What’s happening?’ he said. ‘Is he waking up?’
‘No,’ said the doctor – Indian, Harvey guesses, with short, tufty hair combed forward to cover a receding hairline – ‘he does this from time to time.’
He does? thought Harvey. Over the last few weeks, Freda had somehow implied to him that Eli’s unconsciousness was serene – even, perhaps, that the coma was itself a work of art, a kind of late period ripeness-is-all evocation of tranquillity. Not this – this roaring zombie, this Eli Agonistes.
Freda had taken hold of his hand, clutching it with both of hers. ‘He’s still so strong,’ she said, looking up at Harvey. ‘So strong.’
Freda’s face, constipated with hope, forcing out the positive from this indigestible horror – something pitiful in that, Harvey realized: this woman, for whom it was such a prize, capturing Eli, never quite realizing how much she would have to pay for it, and how soon – it is Freda’s face which seems to reflect back to Harvey from the window of the cab as the light of the Sangster forecourt creates of its glass a mirror. It dissolves like aspirin in water as men in autumnal uniforms come gliding towards the passenger door in order to smooth his passage to the lobby.
* * *
He has spent two days now in his room at the Condesa Inn, going over The Material. He has gone over The Material many times before but he thinks that now, so close to the act, it has a different force. It feels shaping and controlling: it feels as if it’s making clearer what he has to do. The why helps the how, he thinks.
He has not contacted his wives. It has crossed his mind often on his journey to do so. He would prefer to write to them than to telephone. He feels that he could Lie for the Lord – lying to preserve a greater spiritual truth, a Mormon practice that Uncle Jimmy explained to him once – easier that way. But none of his wives are allowed to have a computer, or use email, and, at any rate, the only computer in the family house is the Dell, which sits at this moment on the white sheet of his bed, cradled underneath by his crossed legs. He knows what his absence will have occasioned. Ambree, as the most senior now that Leah is dead, will have called a meeting. It will have been held in the kitchen, because, although the living room is bigger, the kitchen is the enclave of the wives, and they will have found it easier to shut the door to the children, although RoLyne would still probably have brought in Elin, his youngest, to breast-feed her. He is confident that Ambree, the most virtuous of his wives, will have led the meeting to the correct decision – despite protests from, he suspects, Angel and maybe even Sedona – that he was their husband, and he knew best: that if he had taken it upon himself to disappear for days without explanation, why, that was no different from Our Lord deciding to enter the desert for forty days in order truly to understand Himself and His Mission. Our job, he was sure she would say, our job as his celestial wives, is in the meantime to care for his house and his children, and be ready to welcome him on his return.
Having thought this through, the urge to communicate with his loved ones recedes, and he turns back to The Material. The intermittent wireless connection at the Condesa Inn troubles him, but also helps. It helps because it makes it harder to watch streaming internet pornography, tube8, or pornhub, or keez, which he normally watches a lot. Thus the intermittent connection is a good thing, as he would feel ashamed of watching these in front of Jesus, and, also, they distract him from his destiny.
The ones that don’t distract him are GunAmerica, and Justice Coalition, and Unsolved, and Restless Sleep, and the jihadi ones. A part of him likes them best. He is even enrolled on the forum at al-jinan.org under the name Pbuh53. Pbuh – he found this out on another website – is the Islamic name for Jesus. He wasn’t sure about this: he was worried it might be seen by God as saying that he himself was Pbuh, was Jesus – writing it into the electronic login form, he felt the butterflies in his stomach that he always feels when he thinks he might be doing something wrong by the Lord – but he went ahead, because it was surely a way of spreading His Name amongst the heathen. And then the site told him he had to add some numbers too, so he wrote his age, as well. That was two years ago.
He enrolled on al-jinan because, when he hears the jihadis speak, something in him stirs. He likes the fierce commitment to God; he likes the language, the poetry of rage, purged of all the trivial inflections of modernity; and he likes the belief in – no, the knowledge of – destiny. To know absolutely both the nature and the quality of destiny – to know what role God has chosen for you and exactly how heroic that role is – that is what he would want for himself. He watches some of the videos that suicide bombers make before they embark on their missions, and he sees in their eyes no sway, no diversion, and it inspires him, even as he knows that the Jesus-less path they have chosen is wrong. He sees how only revenge inspires true religiosity.
And, of course, like him, they are fundamentalists. That is why he calls Eli Gold The Great Satan. It is sort of a joke – a joke he tells only himself – but it is a joke with a purpose. It inspires him to hate him more; to remind him of what the writer stands for; and also to help him to think like the jihadis do, about destiny.
He opens the Dell lid: the square light of the screen shines in the dimness of the room, a hot, white beacon showing him the way. He is not on al-jinan. He is looking, for perhaps the hundredth, or the two hundredth, time at the transcript on www.unsolved.com. Unsolved has a lot of these transcripts which purport to relate to unsolved crimes. The one he reads, over and over again, is an interview between Police Commissioner Raymond Webb and The Great Satan. The interview took place on 15 June 1993. His third and index fingers caress the mouse tracking pad expertly, bringing the transcript into plain view:
RW: So, Mr Gold, I’m sorry to have to make you do this …
EG: How sorry are you exactly? Not sorry enough to not want to bring me down here at a time of deep personal grief.
[inaudible]
EG: Yes, well … how long will this take?
RW: Not long, sir. We just need to go over some of the facts.
EG: Facts …
RW: Sir?
EG: May I have some coffee?
RW: Er … yes, I guess.
[inaudible]
RW: Showing Mr Gold case document R45/100 … do you recognize this?
EG: Yes.
RW: Mrs Gold showed it to you before she took the pills …?
EG: Yes.
RW: And then sealed it in this … showing Mr Gold case document R45/101 … envelope?
EG: Well, I didn’t watch her lick the glue.
[pause]
RW: What did you make of it?
EG: What did I make of it? For fuck’s sake, Commissioner …
RW: Webb.
EG: … Webb, it wasn’t a seminar …
RW: But she had been one of your students. When you met.
[pause]
EG: I really don’t see –
RW: ‘I have no desire left for life. Surrender is preferable to despair. I go, to the soft quiet land: and I thank my love for leading me there.’
[pause]
RW: Are you OK?
EG: I shall be.
RW: Sorry to … I know it’s upsetting.
EG: It’s beautiful. I think.
RW: Yes. Yes, it is. But –
EG: Yes?
RW: I thank my love for leading me there. What did she mean by that?
[pause]
EG: You are asking a question of the dead, Commissioner.
RW: No, Mr Gold, with the greatest respect, I’m asking it of the living. Because you, of course, despite also writing a suicide note, are still alive.
He hears some shuffling in the corridor outside of his room. It could be the cleaner, a Filipino woman, who has tried to get into his room to clean six or seven times over the course of the last two days, or it could be the man next door, who caused him to wake up in terror last night with the sound of what seemed to be nails scratching against the other side of the wall. He shuts the lid of the Dell as if caught looking at something he should not be.
Chapter 3
I didn’t want to go in and see Daddy today. Aristotle is definitely missing me. When I sit in my bed at night reading my story, he comes and sits on my chest, right up by my face. I can feel his whiskers tickling my nose. And then he purrs, really loudly, much louder than he normally does, like he’s like so, so happy that I’m there. Then he usually goes away, but this morning he was still there in the morning! I told Jada this and she said he probably went away during the night and came back just before I woke up but I think he was there all night, ’cos I felt this big weight on my chest where he’d been sitting, and like I said before he’s gotten really fat while we’ve been at the hospital every day so it was really something, like even after I got up it was like he was still sitting there, or like his ghost was still sitting there or whatever.
Also Jada has got the DVD of Marmaduke and she wanted to come round after school and have a movie night. She said she’d bring popcorn and everything. So after Noda had done serving us our breakfast, I asked her – Mommy – that is.
‘Mommy? Can I stay home today?’ I said.
She didn’t say anything at first, just carried on cutting up her eggwhite omelette into little slices, like she likes to. I don’t know why she likes to do that. It’s like what people do for a baby who can’t cut stuff himself yet. I hate it when she does that.
‘Mom?’ I said, ’cos I wasn’t sure she’d even heard. But then she put her knife and fork down.
‘Yes, darling,’ she said, in that voice she has which means she’s cross with me but won’t admit it, ‘I heard you. I’m just wondering why you don’t want to come to the hospital with me.’
‘I didn’t say I didn’t want to come to the hospital! I just asked if I could stay home!’
‘Well, staying at home means you won’t come to the hospital. Doesn’t it?’
I took a drink of water. I only drink mineral water. I like Volvic, Evian, and a fizzy one from Europe called San Pellegrino. This one was Evian.
‘Yes,’ I said, when I put my cup down, which has a picture of Aristotle on it – I mean the real Greek guy, not my cat! Mommy bought it for me when we went to the Metropolitan Museum, ‘but it doesn’t mean I don’t want to come. It just means I just want to stay at home today more.’
Mommy got out of her chair and came and crouched down really near me, so that her eyes were the same height as my eyes. Her eyes, which are greeny-brown, were all watery, and the white bits had little lines of red in them, those kind of tiny strings of red you get in your eyes when you rub them a lot. Mom took hold of my hand.
‘Colette … I really think you should come …’ she said. With her other hand, she brushed my fringe, kind of like she was brushing it out of my eyes, but it was never in my eyes. This made me shiver a bit. I could feel lots of stuff inside me that I wanted to say. I could feel it wanting to come out like I was going to throw up, like the words were food or maybe something that wasn’t food that I shouldn’t have eaten, like when Jada told me she once swallowed an earbud.
‘But it’s so boring in the hospital! They don’t have anything for me to do there, and the TV is just on CNN all the time, and the only toys they have are for babies! And no one who’s my age ever comes there and I have to meet lots of creepy people like that fat guy Harvey – and he’s like my brother and I haven’t even met him before!’
I didn’t think I was screaming or anything when I said this, although I knew it must have been quite loud, because Noda came out of the kitchen making that face that she makes when she thinks something’s wrong, but Mom just shook her head and did a little wave of her hand, and she went back in again.
‘Colette. Firstly, could you not raise your voice to me like that? And secondly, could you not talk in that stupid way you’ve just learnt off the TV?’
I didn’t say anything. I looked down at my plate. My pancakes had gone cold. I could see the syrup on top of one of the cranberries had gone all hard. I heard her breathe really deeply. I was so annoyed by then that even that annoyed me, hearing her breathe really deeply. It was like it was louder than it needed to be, like she was making sure I heard her breathe.
‘Darling,’ she said after a bit – her voice had gone softer, because she wasn’t telling me off any more – ‘you always knew that you had half-brothers and sisters that you’ve never met. Harvey’s just one of them.’
‘Well, I don’t like him. He’s fat and sweaty and he smelt funny.’ She opened her mouth to tell me off then, but before she could speak, I said: ‘And he upset Daddy.’
Her mouth stuck open at that for a bit, like a fish. Her face went different.
‘Do you think so?’
‘God, yeah! He was really upset when he saw him. It was like he was saying Could someone please get that guy out of here!’
She smiled, that stupid smile that means Oh darling you don’t understand. ‘I don’t think so, darling.’
‘Who are the others?’ I said.
‘What others?’
‘The other brothers and sisters.’
Her forehead went all lined. ‘Colette. I’ve told you all this before.’
‘I know but that was ages ago.’
Mommy tutted, and looked at her watch. It was a present from Daddy. It’s got diamonds in it and everything.
‘Apart from Harvey, there’s Simone, who lives in France. And Jules, who lives in Los Angeles …’
‘Is that a boy or a girl?’
‘It’s a boy. A man.’
‘Has he got any children?’
‘No, he’s gay.’
I know what this means. Mommy told me this when I was little. It means he can have sex with men, even though he is a man. Women can do it, too, with women. I don’t know about girls and boys. When I was little, Mommy used to say it means a man can fall in love with a man, or a woman with a woman, but now I know it means they can have sex, too.
‘How old are they?’
‘Uh … Jules is about fifty, I think. Simone is … I don’t know. She never tells anyone her age, Daddy says.’
‘Why not?’
Mom just shook her head. ‘I guess she’s fifty-something, too.’
‘Are they coming to see Daddy, too?’
Mommy made a bit of a weird face when I said this, like she’d hurt her tongue or something.
‘I don’t think so, darling. That’s all a bit complicated.
‘You’re doing that thing.’
‘What thing?’
‘Of not telling me something because you think I won’t understand.’
She did a big sigh and tucked her hair behind her ears. There are red veins on the top of her ears.
‘So why do I have to go every day, when they aren’t even coming at all!’
‘Col …’
‘They’re Daddy’s children, too!’
She looked a bit surprised when I said this. I guess I did say it pretty loud again. Although I don’t know if that was why she was surprised. It was more like I was saying something she didn’t know. She didn’t say anything for a bit, just stared at me. Then she did another big breath.
‘Listen, Colette, I know how hard it must be for you, seeing Daddy like he is now …’
‘Yes,’ I said, because I could tell that this was the best thing to say to get her to let me stay home. But when I said it, I felt really sad inside, like it was just true.
‘… but – you know how we’ve talked about how – how Daddy’s not coming back from the hospital?’
‘Yes. He’s going to die there.’
‘… yes.’
‘But he is going to come back.’
Mommy kept on looking at me, doing that thing she does of really looking at me, like she can see right behind my eyes into my brain or something. ‘No, darling, he isn’t …’
‘Well, how are we going to have the funeral then?’
‘Oh. Well. Yes. His body will come back. Well, not to here exactly, but …’ She stopped speaking and turned to look out of the window.
‘Daddy wants to be cremated, doesn’t he?’ I said. Cremated was a word I got taught by Elaine just before Daddy went into his hospital. Mommy told her to teach me all the death words, cremated, coffi n, undertaker, postmortem, bereavement, funeral (although I knew that one already) and mourning, which although it sounds the same is different from morning. After I had learnt all these, I went and found out a few others by putting the word ‘Death’ into Google onto Daddy’s computer: decomposition, decay, rigor mortis, and putrefaction.
‘Yes, darling … but the point is: he isn’t coming back, not really. And I know it’s hard but I think it’s important that you come to the hospital because – here’s the thing – nobody knows when Daddy is going to die. And I think it’s really important that you are there when that happens.’
‘But why?’
‘Colette …’ She put her hand on top of mine. I was looking away. I didn’t want to look at her because I was cross and I kind of knew that what I was saying was wrong but I didn’t really know why, and I knew that she would be doing that thing with her eyes again and if I looked at her doing that it would maybe make me cry proper or be more mad. ‘I don’t expect you to understand. Maybe if I was Daddy – maybe if I had his words – I could explain it to you. But for now, you’ll just have to trust me. Because you have to be there not just for him, but for you. I know that if you’re not there when Daddy dies, when you’re older, you’ll regret it. You know what regret means, don’t you?’
I nodded, but without turning round to look at her. ‘It means when you do something and then you think you shouldn’t have.’
‘Yes. Or in this case, when you don’t do something and then you think – maybe for your whole life – that you should have.’ She took my chin in her hand and moved my face back so that she could look at me. I thought about holding my neck stiff so she couldn’t do that, but then I thought that might hurt, and also I wasn’t so cross by this time.
‘But won’t Simone or Jules regret it that they won’t be there?’
Mommy’s lips went all tight. ‘That is their decision. Which they will have to live with. So, Colette …’ she said. ‘Of course, it’s up to you. I don’t want you to be there if you don’t want to be there. But I just want you to think about what I’ve said. And while you’re thinking about it, I’m going to go and get ready to go. And if you still don’t want to come with me when I come back, that’s fine.’
And then she got up and went out of the dining room. I sat there for a bit, eating little bits of my cold pancake with my fingers. Then I started rubbing the bits before I put them in my mouth and they went all spongy. Aristotle came up and rubbed the side of his face on my leg. He was purring, and it was like he was saying, It’s OK: you can go. I’m OK. So I thought, OK, I’ll go. I kind of knew that that was what I was going to do all along.
But when I got down from the table and picked up my knapsack – the one shaped like a rabbit – I had a weird thought, which was: I wonder what Daddy would do. I don’t mean what he would do really, because Daddy wouldn’t want to watch Marmaduke, he never even watches any films, but I just meant if he was like me or if I was more like him or whatever. Because Mommy sometimes says to me when I don’t know what to do about something – she says: OK. What would Daddy do? And I thought: he wouldn’t go. He’d stay in and do movie night.
* * *
Eli and Violet were married quickly, in the manner of wartime romances. Eli was one of many American soldiers stationed in the UK in preparation for the D-Day landings, and the possibility that he might not return from Europe propelled their engagement almost as fast as the Nazi bullets over the dunes of Normandy. This possibility – that Eli might be killed in action – was what defined their love in its early stages. It was a possibility that Eli seemed to hold, Violet felt, ironically: he would talk about his chances of dying with a smirk and a raised eyebrow, his voice slowing to that Geiger-counter drawl it always did when he wanted to signal that nothing of what he was saying was serious. She had never met anyone so infused with irony, so unable to present any statement as the thing itself, always implying that nothing was truly meant. This applied across the board to Eli’s discourse, whether in the matter of their love, his death, or who they should invite to their wedding.
The one picture Violet still owns of their wedding day lies in the same shoebox that contains Eli’s love letters. Her back cracks like an ice cube tray as she bends to pick it up from underneath her single bed, laid as ever with too much bedding – her bed seems to have a belly, Violet always thinks, reminiscent of those on the malnourished African children she sometimes sees on the television news. She once mentioned this to one of the maids, Mandy, but then felt anxious that it might have been a wrong thing to say, as Mandy, like all the maids and most of the nurses, is black. The presence of so many coloured people makes Violet anxious. She is not intrinsically racist: like most of her generation, it is more that the presence of black people around her, existing in a taken-for-granted, unremarked-on manner, serves as a constant reminder that the world is no longer the one she knows.
The box, however, is too far under the mattress for her to reach just by bending, and getting down on her knees is out of the question – she imagines the joints turning to powder at the first touch of the hard, dark lino. Bewildered, she sits down on her one armchair, a high-backed plum-red reproduction antique, last reupholstered in 1973, but still plush enough to look faintly outrageous in this setting. Violet knows that if she sits long enough, she will forget what it was she was concerned about, anyway: when this first started to happen it was intensely worrying, but lately she has begun to think of it as a comfort.
Before her memory has a chance to erase the issue of the shoebox, though, she remembers her walking stick, waiting for her at the door like a faithful dog. Getting out of the chair, with its relatively deep cushion, is difficult; halfway up, her elbows lock and her arms tremble – making her look for a second like a gymnast straining on the parallel bars – before she pushes herself off.
She retrieves the stick from the door. Violet’s walking stick was a present from her sister: as Valerie didn’t forbear to mention, it cost over £40. Violet likes it, likes the feel of the silver-plated handle, and knows the stout brown wood of the shaft will not easily break, but has enough of a sense of irony herself to feel the sad absurdity of a walking stick being her one luxury item. She goes back to the bed – not a long walk: her room, kitchenette included, is something of a shoebox itself – and, bending again, flails the stick back and forth under the bed, knocking out first her crocheted slippers, before hitting something heavier with a clang: it is her chamber pot, thankfully empty. She breathes heavily, and tries again: this time, her stick alights on something that feels right. She drags it towards her and, sure enough, eventually, the edge of the shoebox, its top askew, appears by her feet.
Another difficult bend to pick it up: the box is heavier than she had imagined. When she sits back down with it on her lap, she realizes why this is – having thought the shoebox contained only her letters from Eli and her wedding photo, it has over the years become a more general repository. Inside are crinkled black-and-white photos of her nephews and nieces as children, less crinkled, colour photos of their children, a random brooch, an old purse, and the letter from Redcliffe House saying how pleased they were to accept her application for a room. There are also photographs of her, eerie images of her girlhood, so po-faced it seems as if she must have grown up in a much earlier era, before people understood that the thing to do on camera was smile, plus one fragment of her as a young adult on a beach, waving and grinning and holding her coat around herself for warmth. And then there it is, sepia as a cell from a silent film: her wedding photograph. It has a strange, lopsided composition: she is standing flanked by her family, her mother and father and Valerie, their smiles tight with self-consciousness, but there is no one except Eli on his side, because he didn’t invite any relatives.
Violet remembers the day. It was April, and spitting with rain. She had wanted to wait until later in the summer so as to guarantee the weather but the shadow of Eli’s imminent dispatch to France made that impossible. In the photograph, the rain has polished the steps of Streatham Town Hall, on which they are standing, black. Violet had always imagined a church wedding, but Eli hadn’t been keen.
‘Why not?’ Violet had said, already feeling the clench of anxiety in her stomach that always accompanied any attempt to challenge him. This discussion took place in the Piccolo, a café near Liverpool Street station: he had only time for a short meeting before catching a train back to his barracks near Colchester. It was January, and the radiators were on full blast, steaming up the windows – though the one they were sitting by produced more noise than heat, for which Violet, in her woollen winter coat, was grateful.
‘Oh, come on, Birdy,’ he said, his eyes fixed on his spoon, idling in the froth of his coffee, ‘let’s not fight.’
Birdy was a name he had started calling her one night coming back from the pictures. They used to go every Friday to the Streatham Astoria, a place Violet loved. It was like an Egyptian palace, she thought, with its columns and murals and friezes in red, green and gold; even in the ladies’ toilets there was a wall-painting of a figure bathing in a lotus pool. They’d seen a movie about a female internment camp in France, in which the prisoners put aside all their differences to help hide a group of shot-down British airmen from the Nazis: it was called Two Thousand Women. One of the women was played by Jean Kent, who Eli always said Violet looked like. In the film, this character was called Bridie, and Eli said, on exiting the Streatham Astoria, that he was more convinced than ever that Violet looked like her, so he swapped round the I and the R and started calling her Birdy. It made no real sense, but formed part of a happy memory, and so had stuck.
She looked away, hurt by the implication that they were a couple who regularly fought, the truth being that their relationship – or, at least, what sense of their relationship she could garner from an engagement conducted so far mainly in letters and snatched meetings – ran very smooth, certainly compared to what she had seen in other couples. Gwendoline and her husband rowed so much that Violet sometimes wondered if Henry, a conscientious objector, wasn’t trying to fight his own war within the confines of their tiny flat in Shoreditch.
She also knew, however, that their freedom from fighting depended on her assumed complicity; so felt the fist in her stomach tighten, even before she decided to continue:
‘Is it … is it because you’re Jewish?’
He looked up, his face set behind the shield of his trademark grin, the one that brought his nose over his mouth, making him look, Violet thought, Jewish. ‘Of course it’s because I’m Jewish.’
‘But your mother wasn’t. Was she? Catholic, you said. So it doesn’t matter, anyway.’
Eli lit a cigarette. He still had the Zippo. There was too much petrol in it, and the flame seemed to cover half his face, making Violet back off.
‘And you’ve told me you don’t believe in religion, anyway.’
‘I don’t.’
‘So what difference does it make?’
He frowned. The lines on his face, very pronounced in the grey light falling through the window, joined up to form circles, like contours around a mapped hill. She had noticed now many times how Eli’s facial lines served to exaggerate – to underline – his every mood.
‘Well, when I say I don’t believe in religion, what I mean is: I don’t believe in it. Any of it. So getting married in a church – a building which only exists because one thousand nine hundred years ago the Jews got so fiddly about the pissy little dos and don’ts of God-bothering that a whole new mutant religion had to be born out of its already exhausted old womb – that seems to me even more hypocritical than doing it in a synagogue …’
The radiator between them coughed and shook violently, like an old smoker waking up. Eli looked at it with interest.
‘What about me?’ Violet said. ‘What about what I want?’
He glanced at her, surprised. She felt her own eyebrows forming virtually the same expression: the idea of Violet introducing her desires into their conversation – indeed, the idea that Violet had desires, or, at least, desires that could be put up in conflict with Eli’s – was as startling to her as it was to him.
‘Birdy,’ he said, putting his two hands on the one of hers that was resting on the table: she felt their enveloping weight and warmth. ‘What’s more important? Getting married, or where we get married?’
She looked at his eyes, scanning them for insincerity. In this instant, their deep brown seemed to her the opposite: the substantial brown of leather book covers and panelled walls. And if eyes are the windows to the soul, like her mother was always saying, then substance, tangibility, something in Eli’s soul to hang on to, was what she needed to see in those windows. She knew that his words could as easily have been said by her to him – he was the one who didn’t want to get married in a church – but this fleeting moment of Eli being serious – serious, for once, about them – was more important.
‘You’re right, of course,’ she said, adding her other hand to the hand pile on the table. Their four hands together, his two in between hers, looked like a sandwich in which the dark meat filling could not be contained by the two small slices of white bread. The radiator croaked again, and then gushed, as the hot water inside forced its way along the cast-iron coils.
‘It must be like a coral reef,’ said Eli, looking away from her towards the sound.
‘Sorry?’
‘Inside the radiator. The water’s having such a hard time getting through it, heating it up – inside, it must be studded with rocks of fur and scale, sprouting off the sides and up off the bottom, like a coral reef.’
Violet looked towards the heating implement. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Have you got a pen?’
She shook her head.
‘What, nowhere? Not in amongst all the God knows what you carry in your handbag?’ Underneath its normal New York insouciance, his voice betrayed, a hint of petulance.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said, picking her handbag up off the floor and starting to file through it anyway. ‘You’re the one who wants to be a writer.’
‘I know.’ He opened his palm. ‘But I’m also the one who can’t keep hold of anything.’
She tutted, although smiled at the same time, pleased at the notion of coupledom – you’re this, I’m that, my weaknesses, your strengths – that this declaration assumed.
‘Why don’t …?’ Violet began, about to suggest asking the waitress, but before she could finish he had leant across the table, his pinched waist awkwardly angled against the Formica edge, and extended his long index finger towards the window. On the fogged-up glass, he wrote: Inside the radiator, a coral reef.
‘What use is that?’ she said, as he sat back in his chair, surveying his handiwork with a satisfied air. Various other diners in the Piccolo were looking round from their tea and cakes and staring. Violet felt annoyed by this action. When he had written on the ceiling in the Eagle it had felt spontaneous, a sheer outpouring of self, but this had an element of self-consciousness about it, of deeply considered writ-erliness. It felt contrived. ‘Are you going to telephone a glazier? To cut the window out for you?’
She noticed you could now see through the window, or at least through the bits of window revealed by his letters. This fractional view obscured the daily commotion of the Liverpool Street forecourt, lending its towers and turrets something of the collegiate calm the architect must have intended.
Eli, however, was still looking entirely at the window. ‘I don’t need to take it away,’ he said. ‘I’m sure that’ll do as an aide-mémoire.’
* * *
How many therapists, then, has Harvey Gold been through? The answer, leaving aside the many friends and minor acquaintances who he has, in his more frantic moments, forced to listen to his troubles, is eight. They are:
1. Prof. Stephen J. Wilson, professor of child psychology at the University of New York 1957–78, a Winnicottian (trained, in fact, under the man himself), writer of numerous significant case studies and one commercial work, Neither Angels nor Monsters, bought in its millions in 1966 by young American family-starters desperate to escape the parenting traps of their parents. Eli met Wilson at a party in 1974 thrown by Susan Sontag, just after splitting with Harvey’s mother, his third wife: Joan, the pale-faced postgraduate student he had settled upon as the prospective third way between Violet’s artlessness and Isabelle’s sophistication. Joan was always a feminist, but had become, immediately following Eli’s desertion, arch; he mainly switched off during her recriminations, but had managed to catch ‘and no doubt you haven’t even stopped to think about what your fucking selfish fucking behaviour will do to our child …’ On meeting the professor, therefore, it occurred to him he could kill two birds with one stone: rebut at least one section of his ex-wife’s rants, and gain a further bit of cachet with the New York literary salon, enamoured as it was at the time with psychoanalysis, by putting his six-year-old son into therapy. This, at least, is how Harvey now reads the fact of his having had a short series of sessions with Professor Wilson. Of the sessions, and of Professor Wilson himself, he has very little memory, although, once in a while, in his dreams, an image of his father seems to merge with that of a smiley, kindly, white-haired benevolent, who emerges from behind a plain white door to say: ‘Now Harvey – do you remember when the bed-wetting started?’
2. Donovan (‘Donny’) Lanes, a counsellor, really, rather than a proper therapist, who Harvey saw once a week while an English student at Leicester Polytechnic in the mid- to late 1980s. This was during a period, Harvey knows now, when he was not depressed. He thought he was depressed, but in fact he was simply attracted by the idea of depression, in order to cement some sense of his own seriousness. Actual depression, Harvey knows now, is quite different, being a condition much less like the student Harvey imagined – something gaunt and brooding and gravitas-gaining while at the same time sexy; Socrates crossed with Robert Smith of The Cure – and more like a continual panic attack crossed with severe influenza.
Donny’s main focus was Harvey’s mother, which struck Harvey at the time, even before he was an old hand at therapy, as a little route one. It being the mid- to late eighties, however, it may have been less about his counsellor adopting a crude Freudianism than a fascination Donny developed with Joan, the proto-feminist. When Harvey talked of Joan – of her bookish, pinned-back beauty, of her endless fury with Eli, of her insistence on keeping him always informed, even as a child, of her agonizing and infinitely various menstrual issues, of her aggressive intelligence, of her ongoing project to write a feminocentric response to Solomon’s Testament called The Solo Woman’s Testament – he could see in his counsel-lor’s eyes an excitement, a love even, growing at this picture he was painting of an undiscovered English Gloria Steinem. Harvey could almost see the book cover forming in Donny’s mind – Joan Gold (she had kept the name, despite everything): A Woman’s Struggle by Donovan Lanes – even as he once again took her side on another instance of what Harvey had previously thought of as a clear infliction of maternal damage.
Donny was particularly energized by Harvey’s revelation that Joan had, in her late thirties, become a lesbian. Harvey had known, even at the time, even in the confusion of puberty, that his mother had made this choice politically. All Joan’s choices were political, and, at the same time – in Harvey’s opinion – psychological: motivated, that is, by a need to enact some kind of revenge on Eli. Because this revenge was ongoing – Joan never seemed able to find the emotional or sexual act that could completely cancel out the outrage of his leaving – it had to conform to the changing political tapestry of the times. The politics of the mid-seventies necessitated that her revenge take the form of sleeping with – and dismissing from her life immediately afterwards – an enormous number of unsuitable men; the politics of the late seventies and early eighties required becoming a lesbian. As he grew into adolescence, Harvey found it hard to believe that, ten years after their divorce, the anger inside his mother towards her ex-husband could still be powerful enough to impel her towards a completely new sexuality. In truth, the teenage Harvey, already the person he is now, already astounded, flabbergasted, by the pin-down force of desire, simply could not accept that sexuality could be shepherded in this way. Sexuality, Harvey thought and thinks, directs you, not the other way round. He feels guilty about this; it makes him, in his mother’s language, a reactionary.
The sessions – and particularly any attempts to talk freely on this subject, of sexuality and its discontents – were hampered a little by Harvey’s growing suspicion that Donny was gay. This was not something which Donny proffered, but he did, Harvey noticed, have a tendency to draw any conversation towards the subject of safe sex. Moreover, he was, when not counselling, the singer in a local electronic duo, and Harvey had noticed that all the singers in the electronic duos of the time, The Pet Shop Boys, Soft Cell, Erasure, all had something in common. He wasn’t sure about Sparks.
Harvey tried very hard, in a very mid-1980s way, to think himself into a space during the sessions where it didn’t matter that Donny might be gay, but it was problematic. Firstly, because Harvey assumed, despite his possession at the time of hair so stiff with Studioline it made him look like a permanently alerted porcupine, that Donny found him attractive; and secondly, because, even though Harvey was not then depressed, from the tiny acorns of his faux-depression the enormous black leafless tree of his real depression would still grow, and it was women, obviously, and the tension between his desire for every other pixie-booted one he saw on campus, and his fractured and difficult relationship with his girlfriend-from-home, Alison, a timid, passive aggressor with a sharply cut bob, which formed the basis of much of his emotional complaint. Suspecting that Donny might be gay, and therefore not subject either to the desire for, nor the demands of, women, made Harvey feel like talking about it all to him was, as it were, preaching to the never-going-to-be-converted: too alone, even in the distinct separation of the therapy room. When he spoke of his terror, for example, of the prospect of splitting up with Alison, Donny would nod sympathetically, but Harvey thought he could detect a certain blankness in his slightly bulbous blue eyes, and attributed this – despite Harvey’s complete ignorance of the lifestyle – to Donny living within a world where sexual traffic was always free-moving, and the idea of desire becoming bogged down in the dull pull of attachment was anathema.
Two months before he left college, however, Alison left Harvey: for Donovan Lanes, who was neither, it turned out, gay, nor entirely ethical about passing on revelations from his sessions to the partners of some of the students he was counselling. There was then a period of fifteen years, during which Harvey disavowed therapy.
3. Laurence Green, a straightforward no-nonsense Freudian. He even had a white beard and glasses. The now genuinely depressed Harvey – clinically depressed, to give it the term that separates the illness from the everyday experience – did the sessions on a couch and everything. He used to face Laurence’s formidable bookshelf and wonder, since Laurence used to say virtually nothing, whether the solution to how he felt could be found in any of them. His hot flushes: could they be sorted by Bruno Bettelheim’s The Art of the Obvious? The suffocating tightness in his throat: would there be something on that in Separated Attachments and Sexual Aliveness by Susie Orbach? The raised, banging heartbeat: any joy in Self in Relationships: Perspectives on Family Therapy From Developmental Psychology, edited by Astri Johnsen and Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson? When, having given up on prompting a response from Laurence, the sessions would fall into silence, the name Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson would sometimes rotate at high speed in Harvey’s head – Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson Vigdis Wie Torsteinsson Vigdis Wie – until he wanted to scream. This tic had also happened to him on other occasions with the names Benedict Cumberbatch, Barack Obama, Tiscali broadband and the phrase ‘Apples, hazelnuts, sultanas, raisins, coconut, bananas’.
4. Adrienne Samson, the sixty-three-year-old Kleinian. Their sessions were somewhat overshadowed by the death, halfway through their time together, of Harvey’s mother. Joan had always been powered by rage, a magnificent, sometimes inspiring rage, but then came the great forgetting, the neurological airbrushing, of Alzheimer’s, which meant that she forgot what it was she was angry about. Harvey never quite realized how much he felt for his mother until she got ill. When the time came to move her to a residential nursing home in Ashford, and the manageress of the Day Care Centre in London that she had been attending said to him: ‘We’ll miss her: she’s so sparky and fun and interesting – she really perked things up here …’, he found his throat closing and tears of sadness and pride welling in his eyes.
As the disease worsened, Joan imagined that she was still married, and that Harvey, on his visits to the nursing home, was Eli. Eventually, Harvey found it easier just to go along with this idea. The more Harvey accepted the role of Eli, the more Joan was placated: he even bought a pair of glasses exactly like Eli used to wear in the 1960s in order to avoid his mother asking where his glasses had got to. He saw, at these times, even if only through the distorted lens of dementia, a version of something he had no memory of, which perhaps only existed before he was born or when he was very young: his mother happy and in love. He got a sense of what marriage to Eli might have been like before it went bad; he saw peace on her face. He wondered how it would have been – what it would have done, or not done, to him – to have been brought up by a mother like this. The visits were, in a bleak way, blissful.
The leaving of them, however, was not. Every time he said goodbye, Joan would die more than a little. She would panic; then she would get angry. For Harvey, these moments were a weekly microcosm of his parents’ divorce. There was comfort in that at least – that by the time he reached the door of her tiny room, Joan, shouting at him to fuck off and not come back ever, was recognizable once more as the mother he knew. Towards the end, though, this pattern changed. Then, when he left she would only get sad. Once, she asked, with great clarity, ‘Which wife am I again?’ To which it occurred to Harvey to say, the only one, my love, but he found that it felt wrong to lie within the lie, and so simply answered, truthfully, ‘The third.’ Another time, Harvey turned back to say goodbye and she had taken all her clothes off. She did not pose for him in some grotesque sexual way. She simply stood there. It seemed to Harvey a statement of self, of wanting to strip all things away in the hope of being re-seen and re-found. It seemed to him like that for a moment, before he closed his eyes.
Adrienne found much to chew on here. She suggested, more than once, that Harvey taking on the role of Eli in these visits was not something he was doing just to keep his demented mother calm, but that it had an oedipal motivation. She pointed out that he had referred, often, to his mother’s singular beauty when she was young. Harvey, who had only been talking about his mother’s beauty because he thought it might relate to his general over-investment in beauty, and therefore to his wider issues with women, and who found the basic idea that all men unconsciously want to fuck their mother absurd, countered that if the Eli-acting was serving a buried need, it was more likely to be a desire to be like his father, the Great Man he so clearly had not grown up to be. But he didn’t truly believe that either. It was just something he said in therapy, used as he was by now to playing the game. In his heart, he really, really thought he was just doing it to help his dying mother have the version of reality she wanted.
5. Zoe Slater, an EMDR specialist. EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, involves a therapist moving his or her finger backwards and forwards while the person with the problem watches it and thinks about their problem. It’s based on the idea that a state similar to REM-sleep is induced by the eye movement, which mollifies the memory of whatever it is that causes the watcher anxiety. It was designed for people with serious post-traumatic stress – rape victims, shell-shocked soldiers – and Harvey, knowing this, felt bad, trying, while following Zoe’s finger, to focus on his narcissistic, ignoble little sexual pain. Plus Zoe was reasonably attractive – certainly for a therapist, who, on both sides of the gender divide, tend to think that facial hair and elasticated waistbands are the very dab – and looking for a long time at her finger would tend to lead Harvey’s mind the wrong way.
6. Dr Anthony Salter. A proper psychiatrist, Harvey’s only one. A very small man – Harvey often wondered if he could legally be classified a midget – Dr Salter seemed to be mainly interested in a tiny, idiosyncratic memory, which was that when Harvey was a young child, and started crying, or being upset about anything, Eli used to say to him: stop hacking a chanik. Harvey had only mentioned this in passing, and explained to his psychiatrist that it was just his father speaking, as he often would, in nonsense language, but Dr Salter came back to it again, and again, as if stop hacking a chanik might be the primary cause of Harvey’s psychic ills; so much so that after a while Harvey felt moved to say to him – although never did – stop hacking a chanik. Dr Salter’s other main proffered solution was to prescribe antidepressants. Harvey would come back after a few weeks, to tell him how the antidepressant hadn’t worked, and he would prescribe another one.
7. Dr Xu. Dr Xu was not an actual psychotherapist, but an acupuncturist and specialist in Chinese massage. Harvey went to him because his depression had become by this time so bodily, so located in his chest and his legs and his skin that he thought only manipulation of his frame could help. He still often thinks that the way to peace is for him to be touched: that if he could have someone permanently stroking him – on his back; on his feet; wherever it is on the body that the reassurance centres lie – his anxiety would be brought under control.
Dr Xu did his best to pull and prick Harvey’s depression out. Harvey wasn’t sure about the underlying ideas of acupuncture – the meridians, the yin and yang organs – but he knew that Karl Marx had said that ‘the only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain’ and, not being prepared to flagellate himself with thorns, wondered if pins in his skin might do the trick. And it worked: in the room. Lying on his back, looking not unlike the bloke out of Hellraiser, he would find himself distracted by the pain out of depression. The skips and jumps of electrical current induced along his muscles by connecting needles did seem to be clearing his system of something; or maybe the cold evidence they presented, that the body is simply a machine, made him feel more positive than usual about the prospect of finding a fix.
It only worked, however, while it was happening. It only worked when the needles were in his flesh. By the time he returned to his house from Dr Xu’s practice in Sevenoaks, a journey of some thirty-five minutes, Harvey would be feeling as anxious as ever. To try and extend the life of the treatment effects, Dr Xu prescribed Harvey some extraordinarily foul-smelling herbs, the drinking of which as tea made him more depressed than ever. Dr Xu did also offer him the odd piece of psychotherapeutic advice, consisting mainly of the not unheard-before imprecation that he should live in the moment. It would be proper to report that Dr Xu did not fall into the stereotype here and tell Harvey that he should rive in the moment: it would be proper but it would not be true. Harvey felt, for a whole host of reasons, that he should not laugh at this, but since Dr Xu, when offering this homily, himself always laughed, as he also did while applying needles, prescribing herbs, walking on Harvey’s back, or offering him the buttons of the Visa machine for payment, it seemed almost rude not to.
Even without the Chinese pronunciation, Harvey has never been keen on the live-in-the-moment thing. He knows people think it is the key to happiness, but it seems to him that he, driven by his physical impulses, lives always in the moment. If he buys a sandwich at 10 a.m., intending to eat it for lunch, he will eat it as soon as he gets back to his house at 10.15. If he feels tired, wherever he is, he falls asleep. If he sits down at his computer intending to spend four hours writing ghost-biography, he will spend three hours and forty-five minutes of that allotted time watching internet pornography. That is what living in his particular moment is: and it has brought him to a depression so severe it feels as if large weights have been sewn onto the inside of his skin.
8. See below.
‘But obviously, I can’t get back in time for the session,’ says Harvey, frantically looking at his watch. The phone call to Dizzy Harris has gone on for over five minutes, and he knows, since he is still unable to remember the fucking pre-dialling number, that it is costing him a fortune in hotel charges. ‘I’m in New York. I can’t leave because my father might die any day. You’re my therapist. Have a fucking heart.’
There was a silence on the other end of the line, a silence that Harvey took to be judgemental. This made him feel furious in two ways: first, because he was being judged – in that particularly infuriating non-reactive therapist’s way – and secondly, because those five seconds of silence just cost him, he reckoned, ten dollars.
‘As you know, Harvey, I’m entirely sympathetic to your situation,’ said Dizzy in his measured burr: Dizzy speaks posh Scottish, an accent that modulates very easily into patronizing. Harvey hates that tone, especially now, when he feels that it is being measured out in small Dickensian piles of his coins. ‘But most of my clients, if not all of them, are in difficult situations emotionally. And they all have to work with me according to the same rules. Which I did explain to you at the beginning.’
Why, thinks Harvey, did I go with this twat? I should have known straight away from the name: what kind of therapist – no, what kind of twat – calls himself Dizzy? Not even as a nickname – Dizzy is his name, or at least he’s made it his name, it’s on his books, the ones forever lined up prominently on his shelves: Psychological Dysfunction and Mental Wellness, by Dizzy Harris. Overcoming Bad Belief by Dizzy Harris. Beyond Anxiety Disorder by Dizzy Yes That’s Right You Heard Me Dizzy Harris. Dizzy calling himself Dizzy is all part of what’s wrong with Dizzy, which is that he is a self-styled colourful character, the type of person who might wear a multi-coloured waistcoat, although in his case he announces his colourfulness by wearing, for the sessions, a velvet smoking jacket and bow tie. For the first session the bow tie was at least matching; but latterly he has greeted Harvey at the door of his west London consulting rooms wearing one that has been striped, and another polka-dotted.
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David Baddiel
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A novel from David Baddiel, comedian, columnist and author of the critically-praised The Secret Purposes.As Eli Gold, a famous old writer lies dying in a hospital in New York, his family gather around his bed. His first wife Violet is too old to travel from London but Harvey, their son, who has never emerged from the shadow of his overpowering father, makes the journey. And there is Colette, a six-year old daughter from a second marriage, struggling to make sense of the fact her father is about to leave her.The Death of Eli Gold is a mesmerising family drama which confounds the expectations anyone might have that David Baddiel as a TV comedian. It is the work of a very fine novelist, here writing at the peak of his powers.