– Hi, says the blonde woman.
She is maybe twenty years younger than him. He has seen her here before, hanging around the sidewalk outside Mount Sinai. She always carries an enormous shoulder bag, with the strap across her like a sash, and wears a woollen beanie hat, rows of green and purple and orange. Sure enough, she is wearing it now, even though the temperature, when he checked on www.weatheroutthere.com this morning, is going to be in the eighties.
– Hi, he says, although he prickles at the approach. What does she want?
– I’ve seen you here a couple of times, she says, brightly. He nods, but is uncomfortable with the thought that he has been noticed.
– You’re not a journalist, are you? – No. I’m not.
She smiles, like she knew that.
– I guess you’re here for the same reason as me, then, huh?
He does not know what to say to this. She is acting like some people do, all familiar, like she has seen his face and decided that they are friends.
– What’s that? he says, eventually.
She smiles again. Her teeth are discoloured, not yellow or grey but just not quite white. She raises herself on tippytoes, and moves her face towards his. He backs off, instinctively, but still her mouth is close enough for her to whisper; he feels her breath in his ear.
– You love Eli Gold.
She hits every word of the whisper, like there’s a full stop between each. She moves back down again and looks at him, wanting to find his eye.
His first instinct is to tell the truth: to say, No, I hate Eli Gold, and have come to bring him justice. However, he knows this would be a bad idea. It is time to Lie for the Lord.
– Yes. You’re right. I’m his biggest fan.
She opens her eyes wide, and waves her index finger this way and that, like he has sometimes seen black women doing on Jerry Springer.
– No way, baby. That … would be me.
He knows how to play along now, so he smiles, which feels strange on his face, like he can feel every little muscle doing it.
– I think not.
She makes a face like she is sucking a lemon.
– Ur … OK.
She puts both hands into her bag. She takes out a photograph and holds it in his face.
– Do you have one of these?
He squints at it. It is a photograph of her, smiling, in a bathroom – he can see the edge of the toilet behind her – holding an old book, hardback, with some red and black old-style modern-art image on the front. Above the image are the words: The Teriblo Conspiracy. Her finger appears around the frame of the photo. Her nail, which has a neat line of dark under the pale crescent, points to the book.
– It’s a first edition.
Another photo appears in front of his face. It is the book again, but shot close up. It is held open at the title page, on which there is a scrawl of some sort.
– Signed.
She takes the photos away from his face, revealing her face, triumphant. She puts the photos back in her bag.
– Why photographs? Why don’t you just carry the book around with you?
Her face screws up.
– Are you mad? What if it got stolen? Or damaged? It’s an old book – published in 1961, as I’m sure you know – and just exposure to the air will yellow the pages. I keep it in a humidor.
– A what?
– A humidor. It’s a box to store cigars in. I got it on eBay. Keeps them at a constant temperature. And humidity.
– Cigars …
– And books. Obviously. Anything you put in it.
– Why is it in a bathroom?
– The humidor? It’s not.
– No. That photograph. You’re standing in a bathroom. –
Oh. The light. I don’t have much light in my flat. The bathroom has the brightest bulbs.
He nods. He looks up from the photograph to her. He makes a defeated face.
– Well, no, I don’t have one of those.
She raises her chin proudly. She rummages in her bag again, getting out some cards. She holds them up in a fan in front of his face. All of them are photographs of The Great Satan, relaxing, smiling, looking jaunty, looking wise.
– All signed. I have others at home.
– Did he sign these for you?
She snorts with laughter. The wings of her nostrils contract into a V-shape. He imagines it raw and red in the base of that V, maybe even eczema-spotted, when she has a cold.
– Of course not. I got them on eBay, too. I’ve never met Eli Gold.
He notices how she always refers to The Great Satan by his full name. Then her eyes, which are a pale green, narrow at him.
– Why? Have you?
He thinks about how to answer this for a second, and then decides to tell the truth. He does not like lying, Lying for the Lord aside. He will not go on to tell her the whole truth, of course, but it is good, when he can, to minimize lying.
– Yes.
It was just the once. He – although none of his wives or children – had been invited to the blessing of his sister’s marriage. It was in 1986. Her and The Great Satan had married in secret, but she wanted some kind of event afterwards, so they had a blessing on Martha’s Vineyard, in New England. Later, he would come to see this as ironic, because of Chappaquiddick. But at the time, he had been happy enough for her. He knew she was gone from his life – she had been gone for a long time, ever since she moved to New York and went to college – but on that day, it didn’t matter. He forgave Eli – he still would call him that then – for taking his sister away from him, because she looked so blissful and beautiful.
He only spoke to him once. The blessing, which was non-denominational, took place in the grounds of a lodge, which Eli owned. Like most of Martha’s Vineyard, it overlooked water, not the sea but one of the island’s many small internal lakes. In the evening, there was dinner and speeches and dancing in a marquee. His sister and Eli danced the first dance – to ‘Just One Of Those Things’ – but then Eli, already in his sixties, was too tired, and sat down, not on the top table but right next to him, in a chair vacated by a woman who had spoken no words throughout dinner and who had now stood up to dance.
– Hi, he said.
This was a time when he would still address people before being spoken to. Eli carried on just breathing, looking down at the floor, which was made of wood even though they were in a tent. It was spring: cold enough at night on the Vineyard for the older man’s breath to steam in the soft marquee light.
– Hello, said Eli, eventually. He looked up at him. Eli’s face, close up, was a crazy mess of lines.
– Are you OK? he said.
– Never better.
– Really?
– Hey. I’ve been tested. I have the blood pressure of a man half my age. And the sexual capability of one a third of it.
– Oh, he said, great. But then felt a little silly responding seriously to this when he looked into Eli’s eyes and they were laughing; not telling him that that was a joke, that what he had said was not true: just laughing.
– And, you know what? Even if I have, it’s true, felt a little winded by the dance, hey … I’ll soon be up again, buoyed, energized – made young again by the sight of, and here his eyes turned to face the dance floor, my wife! Look at her, would you? I mean: just look at her!
He looked round. Other couples were joining the floor now, but Pauline was still dancing on her own, like she used to when they were kids, except that wild jerky child movement had all gone into grace, a sweet, swinging grace, like a blade of grass on a summer breeze. She was in a trance, brought on by joy and music, and, for a second, the two men just watched and drank in her dancing.
– Already you see, Eli said, I’m reborn. She’s like vitamins for me. She’s intravenous! He leapt up, indeed like a man half his age, and almost skipped towards her, opening his arms as he went.
– I’m her brother, he said, her twin brother: but he was long gone.
He doesn’t tell the blonde woman any of this. He says, into her wide, insecure stare:
– At a reading.
– What? Where? He stopped giving public readings thirty years ago!
He looks at her. She looks a little like she might cry. He does not know what she wants: whether to be told it is a lie, that he was only trying to best her and has never met her idol; or that he has, and that he therefore holds within him whatever great secret she has always assumed such a meeting would unearth.
– Yeah, he says, I’m older than I look.
* * *
We went into the Maternity Unit today in the hospital. I was just looking at the sign in the elevator, and Elaine annoyed me because she saw and she said, ‘That means the place where the babies are born’ and I said, ‘I know.’ I mean I hadn’t been completely sure but I sort of did know.
Anyway, I love babies: they’re so funny. So I said can we stop and have a look. And Mommy said she wanted to go straight up to Daddy’s room, but that it was OK for me and Elaine to go in and join her upstairs later. It’s all part of me knowing about what she calls the facts of life. It’s a funny phrase, that, isn’t it? The facts of life. When Mommy says it she means sex and stuff, but it should mean loads of other things as well.
It was nice in the Maternity Unit. There were lots of drawings and photos up on the walls, and even some balloons. It felt really different from Daddy’s floor. I guess it would. When we came in there was a nurse at a desk who asked us which mother we were visiting, but then Elaine told her who we were, and even though she didn’t know another nurse came over and said that was all right. When we were walking away I heard the first nurse say, ‘Are you sure?’ and the other one say, ‘Yeah, it’s the famous writer’s daughter’ and the first one said, ‘So what?’ and the other one said, ‘Oh I don’t know. Anyway, it’s an old lady and a little girl. It’s not like it’s a man come in creeping around.’ There were loads of babies in there. There were some being fed milk from boobies, and some from bottles and some who were asleep in cots. Elaine always asked the mommies if it was OK for me to go and look at them. One of them – he was called Alexie – looked really like a little old man. He had a little woolly cap on and when I put my finger in his cot he held onto it really tightly. His face screwed up and I couldn’t get my finger out at all. ‘Look at him,’ said Elaine. ‘He’s holding on for dear life.’
As we went out we passed somewhere called the Labour Ward. I heard someone screaming in there. It was really frightening.
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘That’s someone having a baby,’ said Elaine.
‘Why are they screaming?’ I said.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘because it hurts.’
‘Hurts? How?’
Elaine went a bit red and carried on walking.
‘Elaine?’ I said. I could tell from her being quiet that this was one of those times when she didn’t agree with Mommy about me and the facts of life.
‘It’s a birthing pool,’ she said, when I caught up with her, which didn’t answer my question at all.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a little round pool of warm water that ladies sit in when they give birth. It’s supposed to be a nice, natural place to do it in.’
I nodded, and looked back. There was another big, horrible scream, and some bad swear words.
‘Do they have a dying pool?’ I said.
* * *
Harvey doesn’t believe in God. He knows that God does not exist. He knows it as pure fact, like he knows that stone is hard and that his room does not have a panoramic view of New York City. And yet he carries with him a completely contradictory sense that life is, in fact, patterned. These patterns are godless, but they are patterns. Harvey cannot quite articulate how, intellectually, he contains this contradiction, but in Spasms of the Soul, the collection of essays that first moved Eli away from fiction into metaphysics, resuscitating his writing career at the turn of this century, his father says:
When faced with the regular argument that a divine being could not possibly allow bad things – war, cancer, famine – to exist in the world, believers in God should say – instead of going on at length about free will – that God is interested in neither good nor evil but simply in his greatest act, creation. He is an artist. He is, in truth, a post-modern artist: unconcerned by morality or balance or even narrative.
This gets quite close to how Harvey feels about it, although he does not know if, when his father wrote this, he was an atheist. He knows that Eli was very committed to unbelief when he was young, but he did turn, in later life, a bit mystical. There’s a fair amount about religion in the later philosophical essays (including the famous pronouncement on Israel – ‘The Jews have enough people who dislike them already without actually being in the wrong’ – which led to an official condemnation by the Anti-Defamation League) and much mulling over the subject of God, although often in ways which seems to equate Him, more or less, with Eli Gold.
Anyway, it’s things like this – like Lark turning out to be a) staying in the same hotel and b) the woman he had seen waiting for her luggage at JFK – that make him sense the acute presence of these patterns. It doesn’t bring him any closer to God. He feels that they are malevolent, these patterns, that they contain synchronicities designed to destabilize his small chance of peace – and he knows that for them to be malevolent, for him to ascribe to these patterns a moral condition, is to accept an idea of intelligent design to the universe. Which completely fucks up his atheism. He sometimes likes to think, assuming in his head a raffish, Oscar Wilde-like air, I don’t believe in God; but I do believe in the Devil. He never actually says this out loud, however, which is probably for the best.
He knows Lark is this woman because of the jpg on the front cover of the PR PDF, Alan’s attachment Lark1resend. He hadn’t been absolutely sure it was her at first – however much not in need of airbrushing, and good lighting, and extra make-up she had been in the airport baggage hall, all this had obviously been added to her publicity picture, distorting her away from his memory – but applying to the picture his usual face-searching skills, zooming in on it until the pixels blurred, had convinced him. The girl with the Woodstock hair, who stabbed Harvey with her beauty at the airport, is Lark.
So Harvey has begun to work on a pitch for her autobiography. It is stupid, he knows, that this is how he has got over his ghostwriter’s block. After all, he would have been able to guess, without opening Lark1resend, that Lark would be attractive – either straightforwardly beautiful, or, at the very least, quirkily sexy. Why it makes a difference that he happens to have seen this particular beautiful young woman before he does not know. He does not know why that coincidence impels him on to pitch for writing the story of her short life more than if he had opened the attachment and she’d just been any beautiful young woman.
He has begun work on her autobiography even though thinking about meeting her makes him anxious. Harvey knows he is a beauty addict. He knows he craves beauty like a junkie craves crack. And like a junkie trying to stay clean, he tries therefore to avoid beauty. This is, unfortunately, much harder to do. It’s much harder to come off beauty than crack. You don’t see crack walking down every street; you don’t see it constantly glorified and celebrated on the TV, in magazines, at the cinema, in song; you don’t see it on billboards imbued with the message YOU NEED THIS. His method – his way of getting by – is to accept the ambush but not the trap; to fix but not to fixate. His eyes, he knows, will be caught, his life every day hit by a series of little stops, but that aside, he will not dwell there. He will not sit down with beauty – other than Stella’s, of course: a beauty he is not so much sitting down with as chasing into tunnels.
So the idea of spending time, of actually being with Lark, disturbs him, but he blanks it out as best he can, thinking that he can always shield himself with a Dizzy-style mantra – I would love to kiss or lick or fuck Lark – all the things, in fact, that I do not want to do to beautiful paintings – but the fact that I can’t is not the end of the world. Something like that. He can cope with her, he tells himself: it is just work. Work-wise, though, there is very little to go on in the PR PDF. It just talks hazily about Lark in the usual modern myth-making ways: about her relevance, her unique personal style, her status as a contemporary artist, her quirky and subversive sense of humour, and her amazing connection to her audience. Trying to come up with a genuine angle, a real way into her, is like trying to hold water in his hands. For a start, there is absolutely no indication, in the tiny précis of her life given in the press release, of the thing that, as a biographer, he would normally look for first: struggle. Her parents were themselves in show business – father an actor, mother a model – and she seems to have been groomed, from a very early age, for stardom. He realizes the way forward – the way most likely to get him the job – is simply to rewrite the press release: to give back to the people in control of Lark what they have already decided to hear.
In terms of his own integrity – which he surprises himself by thinking about – Harvey has squared it by deciding that whatever he writes doesn’t matter anyway, not once Lark becomes, as she clearly will, famous. Harvey, although not famous, has spent long enough around fame to know that the version of the person it presents is always wrong. Once they are out there, stuff about them gets around that is all just hearsay, but somehow, because it is written down in newspapers, on autocue scripts, on the internet, it becomes truth: not just the half-truths, but the quarter-truths, the eighth-truths, the absolute zero-truths. It all becomes, somehow, gospel: like the Gospels.
So he has started work. He has just written the first words of his pitch – a lark is a bird; but it can also mean a merry prank, a joke, a thing of laughter and joy – and is about to highlight/delete when his iPhone rings. He looks at the lit-up micro-window: Stella.
‘Hi,’ he says.
‘Hi, darling,’ her voice responds. She sounds alert, upbeat, through the transatlantic crackle. ‘How are you?’ Her voice modulates easily, with no crunching self-conscious gear change into concern.
‘I’m fine. Yeah.’ He pauses. ‘Working.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Don’t sound so surprised …’
‘OK, I won’t. And Eli?’
‘Yes, he’s … well, no, not fine. I don’t know. I’m not aware of any change. I’ve still only seem him the once.’
‘You haven’t been back?’
‘Stell … I’ve only been here a couple of days.’
‘Three. Three days.’
‘It’s still two days here. Two days and a bit. It’s still only the morning of the third day, I mean.’
‘Yes, I know what you mean … Hi?’ A man’s voice rumbles in the background. ‘Oh, thanks. Brilliant. Yeah, I’ll be off in a minute.’
Harvey waits a requisite amount a time, before saying: ‘Was that Godard?’
‘It was Geoff.’
Stella works – three days a week – as a solicitor, in Maidstone. Her office, which he has been in twice, had been a challenge even for Stella to cosy up, but she has made a good fist of it, bringing in lamps so as to negate the flickering downlight, placing a furry rug under her desk, changing the regulation blinds for an old pair of red curtains. He is always amazed at how much her surroundings matter to her.
‘Was he trying it on?’
‘No, he wants to show me this new people-finding software we’ve had put in to the system.’
‘People-finding?’
‘Yeah, it’s linked to government databases. Allows you to access the whereabouts of anyone, anywhere. Anyone who might know something about one of our cases …’
‘I see. And does he perhaps want to show you this software, while leaning over you – looking down your office blouse? I don’t know why I don’t come in and punch Mr Goddard’s lights out.’
She laughs. ‘Yeah, yeah. Stop pretending.’
‘I’m not pretending.’
‘Yes, you are. You love it, Harvey. You love it if any man burns any kind of tiny candle for me. Makes you feel all puffed up and proud.’
‘Like a peacock.’
‘Exactly. Even if that man is a fifty-eight-year-old conveyancing specialist with psoriasis.’ Harvey laughs: but then she continues: ‘It helps you believe that I may not be such a dried-up old skank, after all.’
Harvey doesn’t reply. ‘How’s Jamie?’ he says, after a while.
‘He’s fine. Good,’ replies Stella. ‘I’m going to have a chat with Mrs Irshad when I pick him up – he seemed a bit worried this morning about his eight and his nine times tables – but otherwise – you know how it is …’
Harvey does. Jamie goes to Blue Hill, a special school in Rochester. It is a brilliant school, specifically designed for children with dyslexia, dyspraxia and what the brochure describes as ‘specific learning and language difficulties’ – which would include Asperger’s. He had gone to various schools in London before, and never settled: at Blue Hill, he seems to be approaching something like happiness.
Stella’s mention of Jamie’s multiplication problem nags at Harvey, reminding him of his secret issue with his son’s Asperger’s. Jamie is not a movie Asperger’s kid. He is, as far as his condition will allow him to be, sweet-natured, but he has no special talent: he cannot sketch St Paul’s Cathedral in charcoal from one viewing, he cannot in a flash tell you what day of the week 21 May 3080 is, cannot look at a confectionery jar and instantly guess how many pear drops are in there, and cannot go into a casino and win millions on blackjack because of a computer-like card-counting ability. Although Harvey loves his son, he can’t help feeling that this is at some level unfair: that the sheer slog that he and Stella have had to go through to deal with Jamie’s condition – the lack of speech for years, the shutting down for no apparent reason, the tantrums, the obsessive itemization of every Pokémon card ever made – should have some kind of payback. And underneath this secret issue, another one, even more secret: a notion that Jamie’s condition represents a trickle-down degradation of Eli’s genius. That he, Harvey, with all his neuroses and anxieties and depression, has inherited only the backside of genius: and that he has passed on this shredded gene to his son in the form of Asperger’s, this particular form of Asperger’s, all idiot and no savant.
‘When are you seeing him again?’ says Stella.
‘Who?’ says Harvey, thinking she means their son, and wondering if this is the beginning of some kind of pressure to come home.
‘Who do you think?’
‘Eli? Oh, I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘Well … the whole visiting Dad thing is kind of regimented – lots of people wanting to get in there – and Freda, she seems to be in control of it all, and you know I’ve always had a weird relationship with her.’
‘So?’
‘Well, she hasn’t told me when I can come again.’
‘Harvey. You’re his son. The only one of his adult children who’s bothered to turn up to visit him on his deathbed. You don’t have to get an OK from his fourth –’
‘Fifth.’
‘Fifth wife, in order to get to his hospital bed.’ There is a beat. ‘Five? Is it really five?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who am I forgetting?’
Harvey, glad of the small respite from the scratchy subject of his access to Eli, puts out his fingers for counting.
‘Violet. That was his first one. Then Isabelle, the French film star.’
‘Mother of Simone and Jules. Who didn’t bother to come.’
‘They didn’t not bother. They fell out with Dad. Years ago.’
‘At least they had enough contact to fall out with him.’
‘Yes, anyway: then, there’s Mum. Then the one we don’t really talk about …’
‘Pauline Gray.’
‘Shh. For us Golds that’s like saying Voldemort.’
‘Us Golds. Of course.’
‘Then Freda. Obviously.’
‘So which one did I forget? Violet, I think. The first one. Do we know anything about her?’
‘No. I’ve never heard Dad talk about her.’
‘So that’s two wives us Golds don’t talk about. Is she still alive?’
‘No idea. Maybe it’s in one of the biographies? I should read one.’
He hears a tsk sound over the line. He knows it portends his wife getting back down to business, having enough with distraction. ‘Anyway, Harvey, you must get over there. Your father’s very ill. He might die at any moment.’
‘Stella, Freda’s his wife …’
‘And I’m your wife. Who let you go to America at a really difficult and inconvenient time.’
‘Oh, come on: don’t make me feel guilty about going to see my dying dad.’
‘So go and see your dying dad!!’
Harvey pauses: then starts to laugh. After a beat, he can hear Stella joining in.
‘Sorry … sorry, darling … I shouldn’t have shouted …’ she says, through her laughter. ‘And you told me you were working, which is really great, so …’
‘No,’ he says, ‘you’re right. It’s idiotic.’ He is relieved; she has let him off, for the moment, the anxiety about Lark. ‘I’m gonna go for a run, and then go right there.’
‘Why don’t you run there?’
‘What?’
‘Well, it’s only about – what is it – about five blocks away? You could run along the park.’
Harvey tosses this around in his mind. ‘But then I’ll be in my running gear. And all sweaty.’
‘So?’
‘Well …’ he feels a hot shoot of embarrassment, the prescience of having got something wrong: but this is not painful. Harvey likes the transformation of embarrassing moments into anecdotes for Stella, presenting himself as a naïf, an unfortunate, who, hoping only for the best, seems cursed with wondering into social discomfort – these stories make her laugh, and sometimes hug him. He wonders, occasionally, if perhaps he seeks out embarrassment – for he seems to find himself confronted with the sensation often – as material to make his wife look upon him fondly.
‘I went quite smart last time.’
She doesn’t laugh, but he can hear the smile. ‘Did you? Oh, darling, that’s so sweet.’ Another pause. ‘How smart?’
‘A jacket.’
‘Not a tie? Your suit?’
‘No.’
‘Thank Christ for that. If he’d have woken up he’d have thought it was his funeral.’
Harvey laughs at this joke, although it is not so ridiculous an idea. He hates wearing suits, and has only brought one for this trip: a black one.
‘Sorry, Harvey, I can hear my other phone ringing. Listen, darling: seriously. It doesn’t matter what you wear. It doesn’t matter if you’re a bit sweaty. Go and see your dad. If it was me, I’d be running there every day. Like the wind.’
Harvey looks out the window once more. He wishes he did have the view he always covets, because that might show him the way: the way across Central Park, to his father.
‘I love you, Stella.’ It is not difficult to say: it is not as ash in his mouth.
‘I love you too, darling.’ And she is gone.
* * *
Valerie, Violet’s sister, stands in her room at Redcliffe House looking out of the window. She has been standing there for the last fifteen minutes, talking. Violet has not heard everything she has said, and certainly would not have been able to remember it all anyway: but she has noticed the standing. Valerie is only three years younger than her, but never misses an opportunity to make clear to Violet her greater level of health and fortitude. She has always found ways of making clear to Violet how much better her life is than her sister’s – particularly since Eli became famous. Eli was not long in staying with Violet after the hail of praise that rained down on him following the publication of Solomon’s Testament, propelling him through the high windows of celebrity and genius, but still, it was Violet who was with him when he was writing it, Violet who could say (although she almost never did), my ex-husband Eli Gold and people would instantly be impressed; therefore it was Violet who had made the better match, trumping at a stroke Valerie’s certainty that that would always be her, with her marriage to Michael, a chartered surveyor from Bexley Heath. Deeply, without ever admitting it to herself, Valerie felt that there was something unfair – something not in the rules – about Violet bringing into play (however unwittingly) fame: one’s husband’s career, money, houses, children, number and intensity of close personal friendships with local dignitaries – these were the categories on which she could rank their status. Fame, or an association with it, blew all these away: it didn’t belong in her intricate calibrations of social standing, but made those calibrations seem faintly ridiculous, and for this Valerie could never forgive her sister.
So here she was – after years of demonstratively mentioning to Violet Michael’s progress to partnership, and the success at various redbrick universities of her two sons, Jeremy and David, and the whole family’s movement upwards to bigger and better houses in Bushey, and many other signifiers of small-world success – here she was, deliberately standing in Violet’s room for fifteen minutes. Michael was dead, of what Violet always imagined was a blessed heart attack four years ago; the sons were middle-aged and married with their own children, who Valerie did often mention, Violet being childless, but not that often, seeing as Jeremy would not let her see her grandchildren and David had moved to Australia; the biggest house, the one she and Michael had continued to live in long after their children had left, had been sold, replaced by a one-bedroom flat in Stanmore. Valerie had one card left to play and she played it with a firm and extremely well-moisturized hand: her relative youth. She was saying a lot of things, but, really, Violet knew she was only saying one thing, over and over: You’d have probably had to sit down by now.
‘… I mean surely it could be a little bigger. And the view! That tree is just in the way. Couldn’t they get the council to trim the branches?’
Violet nodded, understanding that this was just a sub-section of Valerie’s triumphalism, meaning of course I don’t have to live in an old-age home. The problem with Valerie, Violet found, was not so much her pettiness, or passive aggression, but her transparency. Her motivation shone so clearly through every action that it was all Violet could do sometimes not to shout ‘I know! I know why you’re saying this! I get it!’
But then, so much of the world seemed obvious after Eli. Valerie didn’t like to mention Eli at all (when telephoning Redcliffe House, she would always make a point of asking for her sister by the name they once shared, Evans – Hello there: can I speak to Violet Evans, please – even though, since Violet called herself Gold, and was registered as such, this would always lead to confusion); but when forced to, she would talk about Violet’s experience with him as if it had been a form of abuse. But what exactly, Violet wondered, was the nature of the abuse? It wasn’t physical, not in the straightforward sense: he never hit her. Nor was it sexual, exactly – she was an adult, and she consented to everything, and even, sometimes, enjoyed it. Psychological, then. Well, yes, she was unhappy much of the time; he neglected her, first for his work and later for other women; she had a miscarriage. But this was so par for the course for women of her generation, before feminism forced both genders to recast marital behaviour previously thought of as standard as unacceptable.
It was complexity: that was the abuse. Being with Eli was like being hit over and over again with complexity, more dizzying and disorientating to the young Violet than a cosh. A simple soul – that was how, through the misty glasses of self-pity, she sometimes saw her pre-Eli self. She had believed the world was as it was. Even as the bombs rained down on London, and in Wannsee Reinhard Heydrich was outlining how a half-Aryan might be exempt from extermination unless he were possessed of a ‘racially especially undesirable appearance that marks him outwardly as a Jew’, still, the young Violet had no reason to doubt that the universe was essentially as suggested by the slogan ‘A Nice Hot Bovril Is Better Than A Nasty Cold’.
Eli, though, presented her with a version of the world in which everything she knew was wrong. At first that was exciting: Eli seemed to be able to display all sorts of secret, new knowledge. Not just about things of which she knew nothing, but in combinations that she had not thought possible. He was a Jew and a Catholic; a God-hater who could quote the Gospels by heart; he liked classical music and jazz – Louis Armstrong and Mahler; he loved all sorts of books, philosophy and fiction and poetry, and if there was one thing Violet had learnt from her time at school it was that if a man loved books he wasn’t that bothered about girls, but the opposite was true of Eli (he also really liked and knew about sport, or sports as he called it, something else which didn’t fit with liking books).
Physically, too, he confounded her. His nose was too long and more bulbous at the end than it should be; the skin on his cheeks was overcrowded with hair follicles, each one so marked and ringed sometimes when he fell asleep – as he did often, in the middle of the day, stretched out on the floor even though the bed was just there – she would start counting them; the lobes on his ears were long and hanging, like those of a much older man – but taken together his features seemed to work. Or, rather: Eli’s absurdly heightened sense of self, his sheer power of identity, seemed to manage his essentially unharmonious features into a taken-for-granted version of male beauty. His face challenged you to find it unattractive.
And he was thin enough for her to imagine, if it was anyone else, that given the wrong sort of contact he might snap like tinder, but there was something sinewy and contained about his skeletal frame, as if it held much greater power than his weight would suggest. But then he ate like a horse, as her mother said on one of the few occasions that she fed him. Violet remembers her mother saying it, and thinking immediately that Eli would hate the cliché. Cliché was a word that Eli had taught her. He didn’t take her that far into his intellectual lair, but this much he had uncompromisingly imparted: cliché covered the waterfront of everything he despised. It had taken her a while to understand what the word actually meant – to understand that it covered more than just proverbs, more than just a stitch in time saves nine; and that although it was a French word, it was English, too – but by the time of this meal she knew, if only by the hot pinch of anxiety that accompanied her mother’s words.
As it was, he only smiled between mouthfuls and said, ‘No, Doris: I eat like a ravenous dog.’ Her mum pursed her lips a little and stirred her stew with her fork, uncertain about being contradicted, but perceptive enough to know that his analogy was the more correct: put food down in front of Eli, and it would be gone so quickly, Violet sometimes wondered if it were not a magic trick. Sometimes, she would put plates down for the two of them, go back for the salt and pepper, and by the time she returned he had finished. Another contradiction – a thin man who ate like a fat one; a cerebral man, but a man of great appetite.
Once, late at night in bed, Violet brought up the subject of living with her parents. She had imagined that after their marriage they might live for a small time in the house in which she had grown up, as most of her friends had done, but Eli had insisted on finding somewhere independent for them, even if all they could afford was a room the size of two cupboards suffused with the thick smell of dough. It was a speech she had carefully rehearsed: she knew Eli had wanted them to be together, by themselves, but – seeing as, so far, his work at the post office and her job in the typing pool at International Shipbrokers Ltd wasn’t putting enough in the bank for them to rent somewhere better – maybe they should just move back in with her mum and dad? Just for a little while? It would mean – and this, she thought, was her trump card – that maybe Eli wouldn’t have to work so hard at his job and would have more time to write.
Eli just carried on reading – some book by some American writer whose recent acclaim she knew just made him angry – and said, without looking up: ‘I couldn’t take the chewing, Birdy.’
‘It’s not that bad,’ Violet said, pleased at least that he had been jokey about it, and pleased in a deeper way that he had noticed this idiosyncrasy of her mother’s.
‘Anything is bad that involves the mouth which goes on that long. Apart from …’
She leant over and put her hand over his lips. His eyes, locked with hers, laughed. It was true enough. Her mother had a habit of chewing every morsel of food for an inordinately long time.
‘It’s because when she grew up they didn’t have much food. Even less than we have now. So that’s what Nana – that’s what her mum told her to do.’
She took her hand off, having felt his lips curve upwards on the soft skin of her palm. It was a mild night: her hands and feet were not cold in bed like they sometimes were. They had a coal fire in the room, but Eli could never be bothered to light it.
‘Hmm … OK,’ he said, a word she had found herself using recently, even though Gwendoline would chastise her for trying to sound American. ‘But did Nana take into account the fact that your mother would one day wear dentures? What the fuck do Mom’s false teeth look like? Don’t tell me she leaves them in a glass of water at night – to clean the food off those gnashers she’d need some battery acid. Or maybe a machine gun.’
Violet laughed, a bit louder than she might have done, to cover up feeling guilty: there was something sacrilegious about the idea of joking like this – this violently – about her parents.
‘I could probably still get one from my old unit. A gun. What do you think?’ The book fell out of his hands and off the bed, as he mimed, with surprising grace and certainty, holding an invisible M917 Browning and spraying a round of bullets towards the offensive dentures. ‘Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat-tat!!’
‘Shh,’ she said, worried that he might wake the neighbours. The walls of the house were very thin: Mrs Black from the bedsit below had already knocked on their door three times to complain about the sound of Eli typing at all hours, visits which Violet had kept from her husband, partly so as not to disturb him, but also because he might respond to the news by going downstairs and shouting at the old woman about being bourgeois, whatever that meant.
He sat back in bed and placed his hand on her breast. She could feel the hair on his knuckles brushing her other one. She knew this meant that the talk of moving back in with her family was over.
‘What about your parents?’ she said, with just an edge of resentment.
‘What?’
‘Your parents. We never talk about them.’
He took his hand off. ‘That’s because they’re cunts.’
Violet winced: the word was like a little lash.
‘You shouldn’t talk about them like that.’
‘Why not? They’re my parents. And you’ve never met them. You wouldn’t know if they were cunts or not.’
‘Stop saying that.’
‘My father in particular. He is a terrible cunt. He used to hit me with his belt. And he’s a fat cunt, too, always has been, so it’s a long belt, which he would swing high above his fat head before bringing it down with all his fat weight on my tiny ass.’ He shifted his pillow matter-of-factly, plumping it so that he could sit back comfortably against the wall. Violet felt him settling into his subject. ‘That’s when I was lucky enough to get it on the ass, as opposed to around the face.’
She turned round and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘That’s terrible, love.’ Love felt slightly wrong in this context: it often did when she said it to Eli, not just the verb but also the noun.
‘And here’s the kicker. He doesn’t even drink.’
‘Like you.’
‘Like me.’
She had noticed this. All the men she knew before Eli drank. All the men she knew before Eli met and lived and gave of themselves in the pub: it was their place. It was one of the many confusions for her about their marriage, one of the many practical confusions: what were they supposed to do in the evening if they were not to go to the pub? Many evenings Eli would just stay in and write, and as she did not want to go to the pub by herself, more often than not she would end up spending all night staring at the unlit fireplace.
‘So he didn’t even have that excuse: he’s just a pure sadist. Or he just really hated me.’
‘Eli, I’m sure that’s not true.’
He looked at her, and in his eyes there was contempt – another word that she would not have used before Eli, but she knew it now.
‘How can you be sure of that?’ She didn’t answer. ‘Come on, Birdy, I’d really like to know? How can you be sure?’
‘Because …’
‘He’s my father? My dad? My old man? My parent?’
Violet didn’t answer. She felt the pressure of water pooling behind her eyes.
‘He cheats on my mother all the time, do you know that?’ Eli continued, picking up a cigarette packet – Benson and Hedges: he had given up Newports after the war – by the side of the bed.
‘Cheats?’
‘Unfaithful, Birdy. He fucks other women.’
She had known what it meant: had just been repeating the word. ‘How do you know?’
His lighter flashed bright in the room, dark except for Eli’s tiny table lamp on top of the chest of drawers. The inside of its orange flower-patterned shade was burnt in three places, three brown-black blobs backlit by the 40-watt bulb. The tip of the cigarette glowed red. Violet saw a small cloud swirl from his mouth before Eli sucked it into his lungs, sharp and fast, the same way he consumed food.
‘He boasts about it.’
‘To his son?’
Eli nodded. ‘And to his wife.’
There was a silence. Eli reached up, over the drawer that a few months earlier had killed Violet’s baby, and clicked the light off. It was always up to him when the light went off in their room. Most nights, Violet went to sleep straight away. It was like the switch on the light was a switch on her that Eli controlled, on to look at her naked form, off when he was finished. But this time she stayed awake, aware that, as usual, he did not go straight to sleep, but smoked for a while longer in the dark. She knew that sleep was difficult for him, which was another new complexity; before Eli, she had never heard of the word insomnia, having not imagined sleep to be a condition any more diffi-cult to achieve than waking.
She wondered about what Eli had told her. She wondered why, despite these good reasons to hate, she still felt so uncomfortable with his hatred. She had been brought up with love. Her mother and father existed as concrete blocks of herself. To imagine them so negatively – to imagine them as available for critical analysis of any kind – was to make of one’s parents separate beings, and this felt like untangling the genetic code itself.
But also she wondered if it were true. She had realized this about Eli – that he never quite told the truth. It was the most complicated of his contradictions. He was obsessed with the truth – he would go on and on about how all the writers who everyone else thought were great didn’t tell the truth: the truth about men, and the truth about life, and this was the big thing that Eli Gold’s novels, when they were published, were going to do. And yet, whenever he told a story about something that had happened to the two of them – either back to her, or on the rare occasions where they were in company – the bare facts were always changed and embellished. Violet always told people stuff unvarnished – it never occurred to her to add bits and pieces to make life more interesting. Eli didn’t just add bits and pieces: he pushed events around, he made people say things they hadn’t said, he brought in people who weren’t there – sometimes he would add a whole new ending, changing the entire point of the story. His motive in those cases was clear: to make mundane stories funnier or more entertaining. But here – with this thing about his father – why would anyone do that? Change facts to make things more horrible, more awful than the truth? She felt, obscurely, that Eli would want to do that; but she wouldn’t have been able to articulate why.
‘And your mother,’ she said eventually, the darkness making her feel more exposed, drawing attention to her speech, ‘why is she a …?’
‘Cunt?’
‘Yes.’
Eli drew the sheet over himself, and turned away. She reached out and stroked his back for a few seconds, knowing for sure at least this about her husband, that he liked to be touched. Between his shoulder blades the skin was taut and furred.
‘For not leaving him,’ he said, quietly.
Violet’s stomach rumbles, shaking her from her reverie. The smell of food, or, rather, of cooking – of boiling and fat and elephantine pans – is a constant in Redcliffe House, but normally the body only tunes into it at mealtimes. The noise of her guts is loud enough to make Valerie, proudly unpossessed of a hearing aid, turn. Violet blushes, feeling the heat on her face. She wonders how her skin looks, how the blush will colour around the topology of her face, whether the red will go orange and pink in the whorls on her cheeks. She wonders how it is that she still blushes over this, or any, exhibition of her bodily function, here in this world where involuntary rumbling and farting and pissing and shitting are part of the texture of everyday life. She wonders how strange it is that as the body fails it shows itself more, turning itself inside out and amplifying all its doings. One thing she knows, however, is that all this wondering – it didn’t happen before Eli.
* * *
Harvey hates running. He doesn’t understand what people who like running say about running. People who like running say: ‘It’s hard at first, but then you really get into it.’ No, he thinks, as he watches yet another jogger power effortlessly past him on the running track surrounding Central Park’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, quite the opposite. It’s OK for about twenty-five seconds when you start, and then it becomes an awful, sweat-soaked miasma of pain, and the more you run, the worse it gets. People who like running say: ‘It’s meditative: I get to think about so many things while I run.’ Harvey thinks about one thing: running. How much it hurts, and how soon it’s going to stop.
Nonetheless, he runs. He runs to lose weight – although that would not seem to be working, seeing as his weight has remained on a steady upward trajectory since 1994 – and he runs to pay lip service to the idea of keeping fit, but, much more, he runs because it is the only thing that really works for depression. There is a terrible, typical irony in this, in that the major symptom of depression is stasis: depression means exactly that, to be pressed down, and therefore not to want to move; to sit or lie with that weight, in bed, or on a chair, or on the floor. It’s a struggle every time to put on his baggy tracksuit bottoms, but running’s capability of combating depression is – just – worth the depression induced by the idea of running.
Harvey has come to this conclusion after many years of combining therapy with antidepressants. He has tried every antidepressant on the market. Of the standard SSRIs, Prozac made him woozy and insomniac; Paroxetine made him more anxious than before; Citalopram had no effect; Zoloft made him fat. All of them made him anorgasmic. All those teenage years of wishing there was something you could take to hold off orgasm, but it turns out, he would think during the long drawn-out Stella-obviously-bored-and-wishing-it-was-over pumping, it’s hell: who wants to be endlessly tickled once someone has amputated your ability to laugh? The tricyclics were worse: Amitriptyline he’d taken when younger as a sleeping pill, and thus had built up an immunity to, and Imipramine – well – Imipramine just appeared to melt his brain. He would be sitting at his computer and wondering if the radiation from the screen had somehow got inside his head it was so hot. He’d tried a number of newer drugs, including Venlafaxine, an SNRI (Harvey often wondered when they were going to produce a category of anti-depressants called INRI; or perhaps RNLI), which, just out of curiosity – and maybe out of a desire to make it seem like the taking of these drugs was recreational – he used to snort. He would take the two tiny plastic domes apart, like two halves of a Russian doll, spread the powder into a line, and sniff it up through a rolled-up tenner. This had the effect neither of making it more fun, nor of helping it to work. The last one he remembers taking was Buspirin, a cocktail antidepressant – part anxiolytic, part serotonin reuptake inhibitor – which may have been good, but by then he’d taken so many it was impossible to tell: he had no memory of what his default chemical balance was any more.
He stopped taking them, partly because he realized that they did fuck all and partly because he discovered, following one particular incident, that coming off them is worse than coming off crystal meth. He had been in Hong Kong, pitching for Jackie Chan’s autobiography, when his hotel room was broken into, and all his belongings, including his toiletries, stolen. He had three days left before his flight home, and no means of getting hold of a new packet of Buspar or Zoloft or whatever it was. He spent the three days – one of which was supposed to be in the company of Jackie – in his bare hotel room, unsleeping, throwing up, shaking violently and convinced that a colony of ants were burrowing a series of tunnels into his bones. He never got the Jackie Chan gig.
So now he runs. And often, five minutes into a run, he can feel the moment when depression lifts – or, rather, when it bursts. It’s a painful release, similar to that when dabbing Bonjela on his mouth ulcers, like the pain has to maximize before it will go away. He feels the depression in combination, all physical symptoms – hot flushes, pins and needles, anxiety shoots in the stomach – all coming together as one, like when dying people revive for one last time before they vanish. He didn’t always know that running could temporarily relieve depression; he remembers sitting in a Jacuzzi at his local gym after twenty-five minutes on the treadmill and thinking, almost in tears, God, Paroxetine really works.
Another runner, a woman, goes past him along the line of the water. Harvey wonders about trying to catch up with her to see what she looks like. Sometimes he does this while running, justifying it to himself as physically advantageous, a kind of fitness-aiding, less precarious version of his need to get in front of female pedestrians when in his car. Use her unknown beauty as a pacemaker, he tells himself, and starts to move faster, but it turns out that sexual curiosity, even though it may seem to Harvey the most powerful force in the world, isn’t quite enough to take him up to the requisite speed. As her back disappears into the distance, the sun begins to punch its way through the clouds, and a shaft of light moves across the reservoir, making the rhythm of her feet seem in tune with nature.
Harvey takes his iPhone out of the front pocket of his hooded top, and slides a sweaty thumb across the screen in search of the iPod function. He is wearing Bose Noise-Reducing headphones, and has created a new playlist specifically for this run. Harvey cannot just run: he needs to have a number of things in place, things that make it bearable, and the most important is music. He sometimes spends so long creating playlists in order to carry him through his runs that there is no longer any time left to run. When he got his first iPod, he thought: this is the answer, the way through to fitness (music had always been his preferred palliative to the pain of running, but occasional attempts to jog with CD Walkmans and battery-powered radios had proved abortive). And for a while it was: he must have run more often in the first six months after Apple introduced the iPod than at any other time in his life. But then he begun to realize that digital music, so far from improving his listening experience, was destroying it. The thing about pleasure, Harvey has come to realize, after much time not realizing this, is that it has to be rationed or it becomes meaningless. When he was young, music was important to him in ways he knows it will never be again, not simply because only the young truly engage, in an identity franking way, with music, but also because in order to listen to a favourite track, he had to go to his record collection, select the album by hand, clean the vinyl, and position the needle precisely over the correct circular groove. This meant that Harvey – lazy even when young, even before laziness transmuted into the stasis of depression – never did that thing that some of his friends would of listening to the same track over and over again. But it wasn’t just laziness. When he found a song that raised the goose pimples on his flesh – an important sign: Harvey has always looked to his body for evidence of what he does and doesn’t like – he would decide immediately not to play it again for some time, because he knew that the song’s power would have a half-life; that there would come a moment where he would fall out of love with the song, just as he would fall out of love with the various women he attached himself to, and that that moment needed to be deferred as long as possible.
Digital music had screwed all that up. Now, songs that he loves – songs that he thought he might always love, that might keep the goose pimples coming indefinitely – bore him. He does still love these songs, but, because of the ease of access to them which iTunes has provided, he loves them like he still loved the women he continued to be with after the passion had gone. He loves them but the love is underpinned not by desire but nostalgia: by the memory of what they once did to him. He loves them but they do not move him any more: they raise no goose pimples on his flesh. Sometimes he looks for them on his arms, but they never come, and he knows, anyway, that goose pimples are something you feel and then look at, never the other way round. One song – Radiohead’s ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ – is actually now undergoing the painful process of goose-pimple death. During the refrain at the end – Thom Yorke plaintively repeating, over and over, ‘If I could be who you wanted …’ Harvey can almost feel them coming – there is still the slightest stiffening of the hairs on at least one arm – but it’s fleeting, comparable to the movement that might be caused by a light breeze. Once, the ending of ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ could make his arms feel like they were made to brush horses.
It doesn’t make the playlist for this run, which Harvey has put together – even writing the songs down, in his gold leather notebook – with one eye to stiffening his resolve in regards to turning up at his father’s deathbed unsanctioned by Freda:
‘Father, Son’, Peter Gabriel
‘Someday Never Comes’, Creedence Clearwater Revival
‘A Little Soul’, Pulp
‘Everyone Says Hi’, David Bowie
‘Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp’, O. C. Smith
‘Never Went To Church’, The Streets
‘I am Woman’, Helen Reddy
‘Not Pretty Enough’, Kasey Chambers
‘Let Me Be Your Yoko Ono’, Bare Naked Ladies
The first five songs are the ones he can find in his library that are actually about fathers and sons. ‘Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp’, which is about a mother who turns to prostitution in order to feed her fourteen children following her husband’s desertion, is not strictly relevant, but Harvey was reckoning on the run taking at least half an hour, and he had to fill up the playlist somehow. Thinking laterally, he then moved away from the parental idea and towards trying to find something self-bolstering, something that would take away the anxiety – not the big anxiety, not his umbrella anxiety, but the local anxiety about feeling that he isn’t really allowed to just turn up at the hospital. The sort of song that had come to mind was one of those big reach-for-the-skies ballads that X Factor and American Idol hopefuls are so keen on – singing out, they imagine, their stellar destiny: all those songs with the word hero in them, ‘Search For The Hero Inside Yourself ’, or ‘A Hero Lies In You’, or ‘Holding Out For A Fucking Hero’. However, he doesn’t like these songs, which means that, rather than searching for the hero inside himself, Harvey has had to search for a song that might make him feel a bit heroic within the songs he already has, and the only one turned out to be ‘I Am Woman’.
His finger taps at the screen, trying to get the volume control to slide up. He is entering his final circuit round the reservoir. More joggers go past him: this time a woman with red curly hair, next to her a male trainer. Harvey watches them go: I am coming last in this race, he thinks. A small part of him wonders if he is deliberately not going that fast, in order to put off the moment of arrival at hospital; another part of him knows that such psychological complexity is all very well, but ignores the greater truth that he is less a runner than a slow plod-der, operating somewhere on the borderline between jogging and power walking. He glances behind him, his neck, unhappy with the movement on top of a bouncing spine, threatening a crick: two more approaching. He imagines himself in the kind of hotel room he always craves, looking out at all the joggers in Central Park: anorexic women in headbands trying to shake off that last sticky pound of flesh; red-faced puffers in suffocating tracksuits; ancient happy-faced couples thinking that these limping miles represent another few months in the life bank; Nike-uniformed almost-athletes radiating their health and power, a living representation of the new zero-tolerance city, free to run in the park without fear of mugging. What were they all doing? Why did they all need to run? Were they all depressed? I had not thought depression had undone so many, Harvey thinks, and then feels embarrassed at the adolescent reference.
‘I Never Went To Church’ by The Streets is just finishing. Tears well in his eyes at its lachrymose working-class poetry, its straightforward setting of the coordinates of love and death on the father–son graph. He can feel his ears sweating into the leather cushions of his headphones: they are big proper headphones, not in-ear ones. Harvey has never found a pair of in-ear ones that don’t become out-ear ones while jogging, so he wears these ones, aware that he looks a bit silly, a bit like a very sweaty DJ. As he comes off the running track, back towards Fifth Avenue and Mount Sinai Hospital, he hears Helen Reddy start up: I am woman … It doesn’t work at first – it doesn’t pump him up. There are tracks that can do this while running: that can make him suddenly take off, his feet and lungs made exuberant by song, powered by music. Reddy’s jaunty feminist anthem, though, has an apparent lyrics problem: she’s not, he thinks, really speaking to me, is she? But then, as he runs on the spot, waiting for the WALK sign to contradict the DON’T WALK sign and allow him to cross Fifth Avenue, the music swells, and Reddy starts singing about how she might be bent, but she can’t broke, it all just makes her more determined etc etc, and it sort of all becomes relevant, to him, to Harvey Gold. Simplistic, yes; imbued with that tinpot heroic defiance that Americans so love, yes; but sometimes when you are running and exhausted and on the edge of collapse both physically and psychologically that stuff doesn’t really matter: and so, he can feel the music do its trick, raising him up to the higher ground, and, because he is running on the spot, it feels like it’s actually winding him up, so that when the green WALK light does eventually come on, he’s off like a rocket, his feet sweeping over first tarmac and then sidewalk in double time, triple time, as the backing singers and the brass take it to the bridge. It’s what he needs to hear, as he powers up Museum Mile, seeing pedestrians swerve in anticipation of his approach. Lost in music, unembarrassed for the moment about his voice, made more tone-deaf than ever because he can’t hear it above Helen Reddy’s, he joins in: singing about how strong he is, how invincible – and there it is, the looming grey-black central tower of Mount Sinai, from whose top floor he can imagine his father’s sightless eyes looking out. He reaches the reassuring blue canopy of the Madison entrance, and, feeling his soul swell, he shout-sings: I am woman! It doesn’t halt him – if anything it makes him feel more lifted – but at the same time it makes him laugh, and then, the laughter breaks up his breathing and forces him to cough, and he deflates, all the air and energy rushing out of him like a flying balloon, holding onto the side of the revolving doors while doctors come in and out, one or two of them looking as if they might ask him whether or not he needs to be admitted. He shakes his head, but at the same time can’t breathe: no sound comes out of his mouth. He takes out his iPhone to halt the doctors looking at him, to avoid embarrassment, to stop the music which now is making him feel mad, but also because he thinks of the iPhone as something of a mother box, the sentient mini-computer worn by Mister Miracle and Orion and Metron in Jack Kirby’s New Gods series, comics he remembers reading as a very little boy still living in America. The mother box always saved them when they were at their most vulnerable. He knows that thinking this in terms of his own present predicament is completely ridiculous, but still, getting out the iPhone does in fact work – yes, it is his mother box: just holding it in his hand and looking at the still blue earth on its screen calms him down, and jump-starts his lungs, allowing him to breath normally, stopping him from having to think about which songs on the machine might be picked out to form a suitable playlist for dying.
Although, in hindsight, Harvey agrees with Stella that the jacket he wore last time he came to see Eli was overdoing it, he wishes now, watching the enormous brick head of the security guard shake slowly from side to side, that he was wearing it again. It probably wouldn’t make any difference, but the edge might be taken off the unauthorized nature of his showing up here if he was wearing … he doesn’t know: anything, rather than this sweat-soaked hoody and falling-down tracksuit pants complete with has-he-shat-himself? gusset and oversize headphones. However much he doesn’t feel unlike one, at least he wouldn’t actually look like a homeless nutter.
‘Oh come on,’ he says, knowing that one thing that never changes these blokes’ minds is an irritated tone of peevish entitlement, but finding it coming out of his mouth nonetheless, ‘you know who I am. You let me in on Monday.’
The guard breathes heavily out of his nose: the exhale, to Harvey, had just a tiny element of a snarl.
‘I let a number of people in on Monday, sir.’
‘And you remember me?’
The guard raises an eyebrow, as if to say, Don’t try and get into my head. Mind games cut no ice with me. His hand goes to his earphoned ear.
‘I let a number of people in on Monday, sir, and I would let any of those people in again today, were their names on the list. Your name is not on my list. For today.’
Harvey feels his anxiety symptoms, damped down by the run, starting up again, one by one: throat constriction, heaviness in his legs, hot flushes, nausea.
‘Am I on the list for tomorrow?’
‘Would you like me to check, sir?’
‘Well, if you could tell me the day when my father is going to die, and then the day my name is under, and persuade me that the former day is after the latter, that would be most reassuring.’
The snarling exhale again, followed by a flicking up of the black clipboard to his chest: Harvey sees the small indentation the plastic makes in the puffy satin of the jacket. He decides to try a different tack.
‘Look, mate,’ Harvey is never comfortable with mate, neither as a jocular, friendly form of address nor as a stressed grace note of aggression, but he finds it coming out of his mouth here nonetheless, ‘what’s your name?’
‘My name?’
‘Yes, your name.’
The security guard looks at him for what seems to Harvey an inordinately long time before answering: ‘John.’
‘OK, John, the thing is … is it really John?’
‘What?’ For a moment, the security guard looks genuinely angry, possibly because he is thinking What did you assume my name was? Leroy? Winston? MC Secure?
‘No, I just thought – y’know – John. It’s a bit obvious. Like I’m not saying you are – but when you are – I don’t mean you, specifically, I mean one – when one is lying – about one’s name, John’s like the first name you think of.’
The blank look again: then, very Americanly:
‘Sir: my name is John.’
Harvey nods. ‘OK, John.’ What to do here? Harvey sometimes tries, when faced with irrationality, to become, in response, over-rational: to outflank the person blocking him or arguing with him or shouting at him by a detached deconstruction of the situation. It is a strategy learnt from his father. It is worth a go, he thinks.
‘The thing is, John, though, when someone dies – especially when that person is important or famous and stuff – people can kind of go into a sort of competition over them. Over who controls their death. Who owns it. Because nothing says this person is the one that really matters in my life more than being the one who owns your death. Right?’
John blinks rapidly at him, drawing Harvey’s notice to his eyelashes, which are long and womanly. Have I gone so far, Harvey thinks, that I am now unable not to notice female features, even when they are on male faces?
‘And here’s the thing: Freda’s great, of course, but she is …’ he says, intending to open out his thoughts, to touch on the uselessness of such competition, the speciousness of the idea that death can be owned, the family harmony and openness that would surely be preferable at this time, and other, attendant, thoughts, but John interrupts.
‘Someone has to be in control, sir,’ he says, ‘in every circumstance. Even death. And in this case …’ and here he jerks his anvil neck backwards to gesture inside the room: Harvey follows the movement towards a quarter-view of Freda’s back bent over the bed, ministrating, ‘… it is Mrs Gold.’
Harvey’s soul sinks. He remembers, too late, how this strategy learnt from his father only ever works for his father.
‘Excuse me,’ says a voice beside him. Harvey looks round. A man is waiting, hovering, almost as if he is waiting in line to speak to the security guard, but not quite: something about him suggests that he would be able to walk straight into the room, with perhaps no more than a passing nod at the gatekeeper, but is too polite to do that while Harvey is stuck. Harvey looks at him, at the springy, receding grey hair and the black eyes, and the air, despite his age, of muscularity, of contained power, and then they come, goose pimples so large and fat it feels as if a layer of clothes have moved away from his body.
‘Mr Roth … I’m Harvey … Eli’s son …’
‘Well, pleased to meet you, Harvey, even at such a sorry time. Please …’ he says – and there it is, the passing nod: it is returned by the security guard with an accepting shift to the side – grasping the door handle and opening the door slightly, ‘let me follow you in.’
* * *
So some more people came to see Daddy today. Some new doctors I hadn’t seen before, and my weirdo half-brother and Uncle Philip, who’s another really famous writer. He’s like the No. 2 best writer in the world after Daddy. I call him Uncle Philip but he’s not really my uncle he’s just a really old friend of Daddy. When I heard he was coming I said to Mommy maybe Uncle Philip’ll be pleased that Daddy is dying ’cos then he’ll be the No. 1 writer in the world, but she said no, because him and Daddy were such friends – ‘notwithstanding,’ she said, ‘Philip’s terrible review of Absent in Body in the New Yorker, which Eli was of course good enough to forgive him for – eventually …’ I have no idea what she was talking about; she does that sometimes, and when you say What? or Sorry? or I don’t understand she does that breathy laugh and that little wave of her hand in front of her face, which means that she’s kind of forgotten that you’re there.
So there was him and the doctors and The Larvae – that’s what I’m calling him – it wasn’t my idea, it was Jada’s, I was telling her on the phone about how creepy my half-brother was and how he my makes my skin crawl a bit like it does when I know there’s a scary bug in the room, and she said, ‘Harvey the Larvae’. I didn’t know what larvae was but they’ve just done it in science class. She told me – urggh – and I felt a bit tickly inside about calling him that – it seemed a bit too horrible, but it made me laugh and she said it again and before you knew it that’s what we were calling him.
So, anyway, I don’t know what it is about The Larvae that makes me feel weird about him, but I didn’t feel so bad about calling him that after what happened today. He came in following Uncle Philip – and Philip was really nice: he came right up to me and said hi and shook my hand and said how sorry he was that Daddy was ‘poorly’ – that was the word he used, ‘poorly’: I liked it – but The Larvae came in just looking at the floor and not looking at me and Mommy like he wasn’t even supposed to be there even though he is Daddy’s son. He was wearing this horrible running top and trousers and he looked all red. Mommy smiled at him and gave him a kiss on the cheek but I was watching and I could see that her lips didn’t touch his skin and I knew that meant that she wasn’t really pleased to see him. She gave Philip a proper hug, one of her specials that go on for like over a minute. He kissed her. I couldn’t see his lips from where I was standing but I’m sure they touched her skin. Mommy’s got lovely skin, especially for a Mommy. Some of the mommies at my school are the same age but look a load older.
The Larvae didn’t say much to me – he smiled but the sort of smile when you don’t mean it, like when you don’t really want to have to your picture taken. I could tell all he was interested in was Uncle Philip. It was like he sort of couldn’t believe that Philip was there. I saw him when Philip was talking to Mommy or one of the doctors, just staring at him with his mouth open and his eyes all wide like Philip was a magical king or Robert Pattinson or someone.
Anyway then – like ALWAYS – all the grown-ups went and stood around Daddy’s bed like meerkats looking at him and looking at each other and I went and sat in my chair in the corner with my Nintendo DS Lite. Mommy didn’t want me to have a DS Lite at first – she doesn’t approve of video games, so we haven’t got an Xbox or a Nintendo Wii or anything. I have got a computer – a Macbook – but Mommy got them to set it at the shop so I can only look at websites that she likes, like kbears.com or learnit.org. There’s something called Stardoll that Jada’s a member of, where you get to make your own girl who you can dress up and buy make-up for, which she’s showed me once at her house, and I really liked it, and tried to get Mommy to join me (you have to pay, like, ten dollars a month for it) but when I showed her she said I couldn’t. I said why but she wouldn’t explain; but later I got up in the night after they put me to bed to go the bathroom and I heard her talking to Daddy (this was before he got properly sick) about it, and she said all this stuff about sex, and children, and abuse, which I know is a really bad thing. I didn’t know how Stardoll could be that. Then she stopped speaking suddenly and I thought that maybe she’d worked out I was listening so I went back to bed.
But then when Daddy got really sick and we started to have to spend so much time in the hospital that Dr Chang (who works with Dr Ghundkhali) said to her that maybe she could get me a DS Lite, because otherwise, he said, ‘it could just get too boring for a kid’. Mommy got a bit angry at that, because I don’t think she thinks it’s at all boring in the hospital, but then he said quickly – maybe because he could see that she was angry – that you can get Brain Training. Mommy didn’t know what that was, but Dr Chang explained, and I could see she still wasn’t sure, but I said I would like one, and then just at that point Daddy made a small moan so she kind of just said oh all right yes, because I think she didn’t want to think about it any more.
So now I play on it a lot of the time we’re at the hospital. I have Brain Training and Dr Kawashima – who looks a bit like Dr Chang, only older – has put me up to Level 4 on the writing and Level 3 on the math. Jada gave me her copy of Purr Pals, and sometimes I play that as well. I have three kittens I look after. One of them is just like Aristotle and of course I named him Aristotle. I was feeding him with the stylus, when Uncle Philip said he had to go. He said goodbye to Daddy first – well, he didn’t say anything, he just held Daddy’s hand for quite a long time – and then Mommy. She gave him another big, big hug, and then moved away from him but still holding his hands a bit like they used to dance in the olden days. She was smiling at him but crying at the same time: not big crying – just one or two tears coming out of her eyes. I went back to feeding Aristotle and then started him off playing with the ball of wool and when I looked up they were still holding hands. Then he came over to me and bent down and I showed him Purr Pals and he pretended to be interested in it for a bit like grown-ups do, and then said, ‘It was lovely to see you, Colette: I hope I see you again soon’ and stroked my hair which I don’t really like people doing but he had such a nice face and big, strong old man hands that I didn’t mind.
Then he got up and I think he was looking around for The Larvae to say goodbye to him, but then he popped up, from behind him, with a really worried look on his face and said:
‘Mr Roth … I just wanted to say … something I’ve been wanting to say to you for ever …’
And then he stopped and looked over his shoulder back towards Mommy like he was checking whether or not she was listening or something but she wasn’t, she was in one of her huddles with all the doctors, and straight away I knew what he wanted to do. I don’t know how this happens to me sometimes. Maybe it’s to do with being the daughter of the world’s greatest living writer or something, but sometimes I can just tell what people are going to say before they say it. Ages ago, when I was like, seven, Jada was going to tell me that she thought maybe she liked Hairspray more than she liked High School Musical now, but all she got to say was ‘Colette’ and I said, ‘I know. Me too …’ and that was it, we both just knew what it was she’d been going to say. It’s amazing.
Anyway, I knew he wanted to tell Uncle Philip that he thought he was a really great writer. Not just that: I knew he wanted to tell Uncle Philip that he was the best writer in the world. Already. Like before Daddy was even dead. That he thought that even before Daddy was even dead, Uncle Philip was the No. 1 writer in the world. I wasn’t going to let that happen. So when he turned his head back round again, I stood up and said, really loudly:
‘Daddy can hear everything that is said in this room. He might look like he can’t, but he can. He can hear everything!’
They both turned to look at me. Uncle Philip just looked a bit confused, but I knew I was right because The Larvae looked really, really frightened, and kind of caught out, like Leo from the next door apartment looked when Mommy came into my room and caught him showing me his winky-wonk.
‘He can hear everything and he can understand everything!’
Everyone was looking at me now, all the doctors and nurses as well, and I thought about telling them. I thought about saying, ‘Harvey was about to tell Uncle Philip that he was the best writer in the world!’ but instead I just stared and stared at him, letting him know that I knew. And then Mommy rushed over and gave me a hug, and said, over and over again, You’re right darling he can, you’re so right, he can hear everything.
Then no one said anything: and then Philip turned back to The Larvae and said, ‘Sorry, Harvey, what was it you wanted to tell me?’ But he just shrugged his shoulders and looked down and mumbled something about hoping to see him another time and so Philip smiled and nodded and put his coat on and left.
I carried on just staring at The Larvae. He stared back at me. He looked sort of sad but sort of furious as well. Then Mommy, who was still holding onto me, turned round, and then we were both staring at him.