RW: What would you say your relationship with your wife was like?
[pause]
EG: It was very beautiful.
RW: … OK.
EG: What is your relationship with your wife like, Commissioner Webb?
RW: I’m not married, Mr Gold. eg: Oh? rw: Divorced.
EG: I see.
RW: She was a Mormon, wasn’t she?
[pause]
RW: Pauline …
EG: She came from that background, yes.
RW: But no longer believed?
EG: She had her own belief system. It was longer dependent on the teachings of Joseph Smith, no.
[pause]
RW: In my experience, someone brought up in that environment never entirely loses their faith. Or at least, their need to believe.
EG: Is that right …
RW: My sense is that they simply find something else to worship. Instead of God.
EG: Uh-huh.
[pause: shuffling of papers]
RW: Showing Mr Gold case document R45/110, a testimony from Mrs Gold’s psychoanalyst …
EG: This is from Rosynski?
RW: Yes.
EG: But surely this is unethical?
RW: What is?
EG: Revealing information divested during analysis.
RW: We interviewed him. He gave it freely. But if he hadn’t, we would in a case like this have been able to impose a –
EG: He gave it freely?
RW: Yes.
[pause]
EG: Well, I shan’t be recommending him to any of my friends again.
RW: What do you make of his testimony?
[shuffling of papers]
RW: Mr Gold has handed back document R45/110.
EG: I don’t think it’s ethical for me to see this.
RW: I beg your pardon?
EG: It’s Pauline’s intimate stuff. For me to see it breaks every code that should exist between analyst and analysand.
RW: Are you suggesting – what? – that you reading this might screw up the transference, between Pauline and her analyst?
EG: No. You mistake me –
RW: Hey, I know that there’s a lot of debate in psychoanalytic circles as to when analysis ends – that some people think that it never ends, it’s an ongoing, open-ended process – but you know what: I think death kind of draws a line under it, don’t you?
[pause]
EG: You’re a wit, aren’t you, Commissioner Webb? I bet you really wow them at the annual NYPD dinner. Why did your wife leave you? It couldn’t possibly have been because of your lack of sense of humour.
RW: My wife didn’t leave me.
EG: Oh. You left her? Some younger snatch catch your eye over the doughnuts? Someone with bigger tits and smoother skin who giggled and mooned over how clever and funny you are, how not like a normal cop at all? ‘Oh Commissioner Webb, no one else in the department knows anything about Freud, please do let me put your cock in my mouth while you talk to me some more about transference.’
[pause]
RW: Well, since you won’t read it, let me summarize for you. Arnold Rosynski, who had been Mrs Gold’s therapist for the last four years – her entry into therapy having been suggested by you, Mr Gold: we have no record of your wife ever having any previous psychological issues – he concludes that Mrs Gold was not what he calls an endogenous depressive. That is, he does not think that she was either psychologically or genetically given to depression. That therefore she was a reactive depressive: that is …
EG: I know what a reactive depressive is, Commissioner.
RW: That is, that the depression which Mrs Gold was clearly suffering from, particularly in the last year, was a result of some stress in her life. Only Arnold Rosynski doesn’t think that Mrs Gold’s depression was straightforwardly produced by stress. He describes it as being linked, and he’s clear about this, to your depression.
EG: So she became depressed from living with a depressive. What’s new?
RW: You were depressed because …? eg: Now you see you’ve revealed yourself as not quite as up to speed with psychoanalysis as you pretend to be. If you were, you would perhaps know that finishing the sentence ‘I am depressed because …’ in no more than fifteen words is not that simple.
RW: No. I see that. Perhaps you could help me out then? You haven’t written anything for three years. You have a number of children from previous marriages who I believe you’ve lost contact with. Reviews of your attempts to enter the art world were, to the say the least, mixed. You have prostate cancer.
EG: Well, thanks very much for detailing those things …
RW: … although I believe the cancer is now in remission, yes?
EG: ‘On hold’ I think would be a better way of putting it.
RW: So it was … the depression …?
[pause]
RW: Let’s put that to one side for the moment. Rosynski goes on to say that what seemed unique to him about Mrs Gold’s depression is it wasn’t just caused by your depression – which he admits is not uncommon, it being, as you say, stressful to live with a depressive. He says that he thinks that ‘Pauline Gold felt in some way that to be not depressed while her husband was so depressed was, in some way, a failure: a failure both marital and intellectual. For her to be happy – for her even to be unhappy, but not pathologically or clinically so – while her husband was depressed would indicate a disjunction between the two of them that she was not willing to contemplate. A better description of her condition than reactive depression would be copycat depression.’
[pause]
RW: How is your depression at the moment, Mr Gold?
He stops reading. His face is washed in the white backlight of the screen. He is tired. He shuts the computer down. Feeling himself invisible in the dark, he decides to chance a cigarette. He feels for the packet and lighter and puts a stick in his mouth and lights it. He lies back on the thin pillow of his bed and lets his lungs absorb the kick. Each time the tip glows, he sees, dimly, the face of Jesus.
* * *
The other channels, Violet thinks: how would I get them on my television? She only really understands three channels, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV; and even ITV she never used to watch when she properly watched TV, when she lived in Cricklewood. It wasn’t snobbery – it wasn’t that middle-class 1970s English thing of drawing a horrified line in the cultural sand, on one side of which was Play for Today, Panorama, Face the Music, and on the other Benny Hill. It was choice: she had grown up in a world where there wasn’t that much choice, in any realm – food, husbands, leisure activities – and there was a comfort in that. Lack of choice was a safe place: you just worked with what was at hand, and didn’t fret all the time about getting it wrong. So the idea that, at any given viewing moment, she was at liberty to choose one of three options – it was too much: two was enough.
But now she wanted more: she didn’t just want the three terrestrial channels, or four or five or whatever it was: she wanted Sky and Virgin and Bloomberg and Living and Bravo and TCM and UK Gold. She didn’t know what kind of programmes they showed on these channels, but she had seen their names come up when the nurses flicked through the numbers on the big television in the living room, and assumed that all must have news programmes, like the ordinary channels did. That was what she wanted, news, news like she had read could be found on the television now, ‘rolling’ news broadcasts, the constant giving out of the world’s stories to the world. She had seen something of that on the downstairs TV when it was left on BBC News 24, but that wasn’t quite it. Violet doesn’t know it but what she wants is CNN: she wants the world refracted through America.
She wants news about Eli. Since that first item, caught by chance last week, she has heard his name a couple of times: a discussion on some BBC2 review programme, concentrating mainly on who might next be crowned ‘the world’s greatest living writer’, and an update on his condition on Channel 4’s breakfast news. She was surprised there wasn’t more, as long-drawn-out demises of the famous seemed to provide a good story for TV these days: she remembers that when the footballer George Best went into hospital for the last time, there seemed to be reports on the TV every five minutes charting his worsening condition. Surely Eli’s more important than a footballer? Surely there should be more information about how he is than there was about George Best? But the calibration of fame has not been clear to her for years: she doesn’t know who most of the people who are famous now are, or why they are well known. All she knows is that they are all young. When she herself was young, the famous – a small group: film stars, major politicians, the royal family – were not. So perhaps now that you have to be young to be famous, to be famous and dying is, in most cases, oxymoronic.
She could sit downstairs in the living room but the nurses do not keep the communal television on the news programmes for very long. She has noticed from the way they frown and flick forward whenever a newsreader appears that they are concerned, presumably, that the news might disturb the inmates: all that death, too near the arthritic, liver-spotted knuckle. This presents a problem, though, as the news could sometimes seem the only programme on the television now designed for people over twenty-two, and they have to flick even more quickly through swearing men on panel shows and topless women on reality ones before settling, thumbs aching, on whichever shopping or travel show might provide the requisite reassuring wallpaper. This goes against the mission statement of Redcliffe House to ‘allow residents the highest level of independence their health permits’, but most people had their own televisions anyway, and it meant that at least there weren’t geriatrics rowing over the remote control.
Violet bends down, her back cracking, and looks at the eight buttons to the side of the Hitachi’s bulging green screen. Eight: that had seemed so many, so outlandishly futuristic, when she bought it. Also the buttons – at the time; now two of them don’t work at all – were touch-sensitive, the merest stroke lighting them up red and changing the channel. There had been something sensual in that. Valerie hated this television, Violet remembers: partly because she saw it as an outrageous encroachment on her territory that her sister should have purchased something sophisticated (something with all mod cons), and partly because while watching it for the first time, on a family visit with the young Jeremy and David, Valerie had sneezed, and a split-second later, the channel changed, from BBC2 to ITV. There had been a moment of uncertainty, then Jeremy had started laughing and then David, although he was only four and was mainly laughing because his brother was, and finally Violet herself. Valerie sniffed and adjusted her flower-patterned skirt and looked away, saying, ‘Obviously, there’s something wrong with it’, but the laughter continued, racking up into hysteria at the idea of an invisible bullet of mucus shooting from Valerie’s pinched, oval nostril in a perfect parabola all the way to the touch-sensitive button. Shaking, tears running down her cheeks, Violet remembers feeling stupid and not a little bit scared of her sister’s glowering detachment, but unable to stop, at one with the children and their mad hilarity and unable to get over the invisible fence back to sedate adulthood.
Eight buttons: it wasn’t anywhere near enough now to cover the waterfront of television, even if she knew how to tune them in, if tune them in was what you still did: maybe now you just picked up the channels – what was the word? – wirelessly or whatever. The word made her remember that, of course, she did have a radio – she called it a wireless – a Phillips portable bought she couldn’t remember when: she had stuck a small piece of black gaffer tape, cut into a thin arrowhead, over the wavelength meter where Radio 4 could be found. But even Radio 4 didn’t seem to be mentioning Eli that much: she had heard an item about him on the Today programme the morning after she had seen the television report about his hospitalization but nothing since. Although she didn’t listen as much as she used to now, because of her hearing – most of the time she couldn’t hear it, and turning up the volume made the sound reverberate uncomfortably through the metallic filter of her hearing aid, making her feel as if her head were inside the tinny, tiny speaker.
Perhaps she could ask Gordon, the handyman at Redcliffe House, about how to retune the TV; but she felt she would be wasting his time, or, worse, he might say that she needed to buy some piece of equipment. That was the problem, starting a chain of events that would lead inevitably to her being placed out of her depth, holding out a pathetic piece of paper with some Japanese name scrawled on it to a young man with terrifying hair in a shop full of minuscule plastic gadgets with screens on them so small she couldn’t imagine how they could be viewed without a magnifying glass. Violet often ruminated on scenarios like this, everyday places, everyday errands, where just being the age she was laid her open to extreme humiliation. Lately, her imagination of such scenarios was becoming darker. Thinking on this one she sees herself, once ignored – once the young man has shrugged at the piece of paper and turned away to another customer – screaming and pulling her skirt up and defecating on the grey carpeted floor, between the rows of devices and the rows of cables designed to plug them into each other.
Turn it on, then, she thinks. But she doesn’t: she just stares at the television, at its heft, its wood, its obsolescence; at its eight buttons, two of them not working, and then at the screen. She has the big light on in her room – it was another dark, soaking day – and she can see, in the screen, her room reflected. Violet likes her room – she likes the floral wallpaper, and the little Persian rug, and the dark brown wardrobe, and the neatly made single bed, and the small folding table by the window on which she sometimes ate – but in this reflection, fore-shortened and misted by the opaque television glass, it looks nightmarish. And then, unexpectedly, she sees her face. The only place she sees herself, these days, is in the one mirror in her bathroom, and she tends not to stop and look there: it is too much to see herself naked, to take in all the crumpling and the falling and the folding in of the flesh. It is a job of work.
But here she is, on the television: Violet Gold, on the television. She doesn’t, she thinks, look too bad. She has learnt to expect the worst from shock appearances of herself, in shop windows or taxicab mirrors. She is familiar with the confusion, the moment of uncertainty about who exactly this buttoned-up and snowy-haired old dear hobbling through the puddles might be. But she remembers from when she was younger, from when she used deliberately to look at herself, that some mirrors were better than others. The mirror she particularly liked to see herself in was not a mirror at all: she remembers the one good thing about her journey to work every day, on the tube, was her reflection in the train glass. She first noticed it when she was still with Eli, when her daily route took her down on the Bakerloo line into town, before getting the Drain across to Monument, the stop for International Shipbrokers Ltd. If she could get a seat, and there wasn’t a wall of pinstriped trousers in the way, as the train moved out of the light of the platform and into the darkness of the tunnel, an image would appear, behind the head of the passenger opposite: herself.
She could hold this reflection – given commuter comings and goings, and its disappearance in stations – for most of the journey. Violet had never thought of herself as beautiful, despite her awareness when young that attracting men came easy enough to her; but there was something beautiful about this ghost of her, fading and reappearing against black. She had read in Everywoman that sometimes starlets and models adjusted lights or put Vaseline on lenses in order to disguise skin flaws, and maybe it was just a subway version of this, but there was something else, something more than just the taking away of bad detail. Marriage to Eli had removed most of her sense of self, and when she looked in one of the two mirrors they owned in their tiny flat, she knew that she wasn’t looking at herself for herself, but only for him. He often seemed to be lurking behind her when she looked at her reflection, smiling in the knowledge that he had compiled the checklist she was mentally ticking off. This, though, this foggy angel of the tube, was hers.
And so was this face in the television. She moved closer to it, closer and closer, feeling the wide green static like a force field on her skin. She had read somewhere in some women’s magazine once of electricity being passed through the skin to remove wrinkles. How many million volts would I need, she thinks, not grimly: it just passes through her mind, like any other thought. The ticklish charge was welcoming, like many tiny fingers touching her face. She shuts her eyes, submitting to the fantasy that the static was stroking her, unborn children, reaching up to touch her skin.
She only stays in this position for a second; her back hurts too much to bend for so long. She moves away from the screen, and pushes a finger, bent by arthritis into an arrowhead, against the first button. The machine takes its time, but a second or two later a news-reader appears, a black man – Violet feels that mild jolt of surprise she always feels on seeing one on the television wearing a suit and tie – but, no, it is nothing to do with Eli. Something about bigger taxes on cars that pollute the environment, another of the many, many daily stories that do not involve or concern her. It goes to footage of roads and traffic; she switches it off before one of the people, the Green people, says what kind of world are we leaving for our children? They often say this, and she always wants to say, directly to the television, I haven’t got any children.
There is no news about Eli. But she knows what the ultimate news about her ex-husband is going to be. One day, soon, he will die. So why, she thinks to herself as the rain hits her window hard, do I need to know how he is now? It’s all just – what was the word? The opposite to sequel? It was fine not to be able to remember that one, it was not like forgetting the word for curtains or teapot. Prequel. It’s all just prequel.
The truth, though, was that Violet did not want news. Her craving for it was simply a distortion of her real need, which was to be in advance of the news. Violet knew she was a long way away, in time and space and experience and celebrity, from Eli, but if there was one small shred of her life with him that still counted now it was this: she wanted someone to tell her of his death before the world was told; someone kind, someone nice; someone connected. Her never large sense of self, miniaturized now by age, had only this desire: that she should not stumble upon it in the television or in the papers like everybody else. She had no idea who this person might be, and no real hope of their intervention. But just someone who cared enough to say: Look, I’m really sorry or I hate to have to bring you this information or Violet, I think you should perhaps sit down. Because however much she knew that the news about Eli was coming, she still didn’t want to be surprised, or alarmed, by it.
* * *
‘So what have you got for me?’ says Michaela. The question shakes Harvey, as once again he has been staring. He blinks and looks away, to suggest that he has not been. This looking that he does, at these women – women like Michaela – is different from the usual. It’s not the pressing his nose to the window of Eden that young women inspire, nor the frenzied, scuttling battle of desire and despair his vision fights out every day across the face of Stella. It is a confused looking. He can see that Michaela was once beautiful, but this realization does not inspire the consequent pity – is this patronizing, this pity, Harvey wonders? Would the feminists think so? – that lost beauty usually does. This is because someone has gone into Michaela’s face and rerouted its arc towards decay: someone with knives and syringes and chemicals. The confusing thing for Harvey, however, is that he (Harvey imagines it must be a he – the people who do this, for women, are almost always men) has not exactly rerouted it back to beauty. He has made her face airbrush-smooth, eradicating all the lines and flaps and tiny tree-like veins that connect his eyes directly to darkness. But it is an angular, hard smoothness, like polished wood: it has none of the softness and give and butteriness that causes the young female face to arouse in men like Harvey feelings of hope and wonder – and also, of course, feelings of exclusion and outraged, furious loss.
Michaela’s face, specifically, has, despite strong resemblances – despite, in fact, looking like a polished wood carving of the same face – none of the softness and give and butteriness of the features of her daughter, Lark. This contrast is heightened – the morning sun, when it’s in your face, thinks Harvey – by the thick New York light streaming in from the Sangster’s restaurant window. He is on one side of the table, and on the other sit Lark and Michaela, who, as well as being her mother, is her manager. Next to them sits Josh, her American PR, a large suit of a man with an incongruous shock of black curly hair. They are having tea.
‘Well, I don’t know if my agent told you, but I’m not in the city to work – I’m here because my father is very ill …’
‘No, he didn’t,’ says Michaela. Her face betrays no sympathy, but Harvey cannot work out if this is because her overweening commitment to her daughter’s career has made her cold and unfeeling or because her face betrays nothing of anything any more. There is a short pause, during which his eyes flick across towards Lark. He thinks he picks up, in the move of Lark’s eyebrows, some concern for him, but he cannot look at her for long, she is too beautiful: it is like staring at the sun.
‘Well, so I haven’t been able to spend as long as I would’ve liked working on this …’
As he says this, Josh picks up a mock-up of Lark’s autobiography, which sits on the table between two teapots. The cover image – fitted around a hardback book – is Lark, looking up; her hair falls around the already decided title: Lark: A Songbird’s Story. Josh holds it up with both hands, and stares directly over the book at Harvey.
‘… but it would be a very interesting book to write, obviously, and I have had some thoughts.’
He launches into a rotation of all those words again: relevance blah style blah contemporary artist rhubarb rhubarb MySpace generation. He says this stuff on autopilot: his mouth is saying it, while in his mind he is still wondering what it is about Michaela’s face that marks it out as not-young, despite every mark of ageing having been erased from it. It makes him pleased that he has never brought up the subject of plastic surgery to Stella – it has occurred to him, of course; he has sneaked a look at those Holocausty before-and-after photographs on surgeons’ websites – as the trauma would clearly not have been worth the final result.
‘Sounds great,’ says Josh, when he has finished. Josh beams, his teeth so American white against the blackness of his hair they seem actually to be coming out of his mouth.
‘I don’t know,’ says Michaela. ‘It all sounds a bit like PR bull to me. What about getting to the heart of Lark?’
The heart of Lark?
‘Well …’ Harvey wonders whether to say this. It is the baby elephant in the room. ‘… The thing is, Lark … she is … very young.’
The three of them look at him. To avoid their gaze, Harvey stares down into his tea. It is English Breakfast. The surface of his cup is dappled with a white froth, the result of him pouring into it three pink packets of Sweet ’N Low. Sweeteners are Harvey’s main dietary weapon against weight gain. Yes: he is one of those fat blokes who will slaver his way through innumerable cakes and fried breakfasts and curries thinking this is somehow offset by keeping all beverages sugar-free.
‘And?’ says Michaela.
‘Well, that makes an autobiography quite a … challenge.’
Michaela frowns, which makes Harvey anxious, as he had not thought her forehead capable of it. It flashes through his mind that to register the truth of her reaction to his comment, he needs to think of it along the lines of an equation, something like: D (the actual level of Michaela’s displeasure with his remark) = S (the strength of her frown) – B (the amount of botox in her brow).
‘Well, firstly, Mr Gold, that is your job,’ she says, her accent – Northern Irish – becoming more tart. ‘Secondly, have you not read the PR biog? Lark was a child star. She’s been on TV, in movies …’
Harvey looks across to Lark – he feels, if her mother is going to continue to talk about her daughter as if she is not here, or, more likely, as if she is such an icon already that she can only be referred to in the third person, that he has licence to look. Lark is unreactive – but not in a grand way, not in a way that implies that it is second nature to her being spoken about in this eulogizing manner. She just stays composed. In any case, it is hard for Harvey to make out from her features what might be going on inside her, because inside him, her features make him melt, into one big complacent eye.
Michaela finishes her tirade, her list of Lark’s incredible-for-oneso-young accomplishments. Harvey has a sense, from the way she is fixing him in her glare, that things are not going so well.
‘Maybe …’ he says, one last throw of this shit dice, ‘… if I could listen to some of the songs?’
Lark looks up at this, and her head seems at least to nod. But her mother raises a barrier pair of hands.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Gold, but as I told Alan, all of Lark’s songs are embargoed until the release date. Obviously you understand, with piracy being what it is these days.’
‘So – just let me be clear – I’m supposed to write her autobiography without hearing her sing?’
Michaela takes a deep breath in through her nose; a glance passes between her and Josh.
‘Again, as you should know – I’m beginning to think you didn’t read the brief we sent through at all – the first volume of the autobiography will cover the years up till the date of the publishing contract we signed last April. During which period Lark was not, of course, a recording artist. Volume Two will cover the next ten years, of success. Then, of course, everyone will have heard her songs.’
‘But –’
‘When the time comes – I mean, when you come to write the relevant chapters, you will be provided with some home video footage I took of Lark singing at various school functions, and some teenage demo tapes which I have transferred to MP3. But until the embargo is up, not the new songs. There’s no need.’
Harvey, not knowing what to say, nods and sips his tea. The chemical Sweet’N Low backwash makes him wish he’d brought from home his favourite sweetener, Splenda, in its handy yellow dispenser. His hand even makes a small inward clicking motion as he thinks this, as if to force a tiny phantom pill fall from a phantom dispenser.
‘Josh?’ says Michaela, standing up. Josh, who is the person Harvey has been looking at least, but who it seems has been smiling the whole time, glances up. ‘Perhaps we should just step out of the restaurant for a second …’
‘OK!’ says Josh, in a very upbeat voice, and widens his smile at Harvey, despite the couldn’t-be-clearer implication in Michaela’s voice that the discussion they are about to have, re Harvey’s suitability for the job, is only a formality. Harvey feels himself smiling back at Josh, as, faced with such a big mouth full of teeth, he has to. Inside, though, he despairs. Why did he agree to this? Why did he not just ignore Alan and his stupid urgency? Why, on finding out that Lark was the woman at JFK, did he get impelled by some idiot idea of synchronicity? Of – for fuck’s sake – fate?
‘Mum says you’re staying here …?’
He looks up. Lark is looking at him properly, it seems, for the first time. The absence of her mother seems to have thrown a switch in her. There is still something disconnected, though, about the look. It reminds him of something: what exactly he cannot place. ‘Uh, yes.’
‘So are we.’
‘All of you?’
‘No, Josh – he lives here. In New York.’
‘Yes.’ He notices she does not seem to have a trace of her mother’s accent. She speaks in that part-estuary, part-American voice that all young people who live in London do, but overlaid with a blankness so deadpan it reminds Harvey of the female voice that he has set his satellite navigation system to speak in back home. He always sets his sat nav to this voice, as, still, many years after the 1980s, he feels more comfortable following the directions of women.
‘But me and Mum have a suite on the top floor.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘It’s amazing. It’s got a piano, and a kitchen and a library full of old books …’
‘And a set of Lars Bolanger lacquered boxes and a sage velvet seating area?’
She blinks. Her eyes are as blue as robin’s eggs.
‘Yes. I think so. How did you know?’
Harvey shrugs. He feels himself unable to meet her eyes, or, rather, her face. Her beauty makes him dizzy: he imagines himself fainting, pissing his pants and gasping I love you! all at once. He looks away like a shy teenager, or like Jamie, who looks away when talking to everyone. To find something else to rest his eyes on he picks up the mockup of her autobiography, although this still involves looking at her, because she is pictured on it. He feels assailed by many Larks, by an army of beauty.
‘This looks great,’ he says, just for something to say. She nods. He lifts the book up over his face, a shield between him and her, but the cover, which has not been fitted especially well on the hardback underneath, slips off, in a way that he can only think of as sexual.
‘Oh!’ he says, ‘Sorry.’ The book lands on the table. Harvey feels the lightness of the glossy print of Lark in his hands before looking down. On the cover of the book itself he sees a shape, an abstract imprint of a man’s face, sort of a silhouette and sort of not, and a familiar 1950s font.
‘Fuck.’
‘What?’
‘It’s Solomon’s Testament.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s by my dad. His first book.’ He flicks open the front. ‘It’s a first edition, too. Where did you get this?’
‘I said, there’s a library in our room. It’s full of old books. Josh just took that one off the shelf to put our cover on it.’
He opens the book. I am Solomon Wolff, and this is my testament.
‘So, Mr Gold …’ Harvey looks up. Michaela and Josh have returned from their conference, which was shorter than even Harvey expected. Michaela’s hardly moving features have been arranged into a Sir Alan Sugar/Simon Cowell get-ready-for-something-cruel-but-honest mask. Josh is smiling.
‘Look,’ says Harvey, ‘Let’s save ourselves the bother …’
‘I want him to do it.’
Michaela, Harvey and Josh turn. It is Lark who has spoken.
‘Sorry, Samantha?’ says Michaela.
‘Samantha?’ says Harvey.
‘It’s her real name,’ says Michaela, with some irritation, as if only the surprise of the moment had let it slip out.
‘I want Harvey – that’s your name, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I want him to do my autobiography.’
Josh and Michaela look to each other. For a second, even Josh’s smile seems to falter.
‘Why?’ says Michaela. Harvey feels like saying ‘I am still here, you know.’ Another part of him, however, feels like saying, ‘Yeah … why?’
‘His dad wrote this book. The one that was underneath. Underneath the cover.’
‘He did?’ says Michaela. Josh picks up the copy of Solomon’s Testament, and flicks through the opening pages.
‘Yes.’
‘OK, Samantha … and?’
‘Mum. That can’t be a coincidence. It’s got to be a sign.’
‘Oh. I see.’ Michaela scratches her chin. She is clearly doing some mental calculation, one she perhaps has to do a lot, as to whether it is worth challenging her daughter once she has made a mystical decision of this sort. Harvey notices that even the skin on the back of her hand matches that on her face. He had not expected this shift in the balance of power: it had seemed as if Michaela would brook no dissent over her daughter’s career. But it seems she does, at least from her daughter. After a short, poised pause, she moves her hand down towards him. ‘Welcome aboard, Mr Gold.’
Harvey looks to Lark. She looks back at him, neutrally. I love you! Piss, faint. ‘Thanks very much,’ he says, taking her mother’s hand. Josh leans in, above their handshake, like someone coming into frame. He is still holding Solomon’s Testament; Harvey notices that, for the first time, he is not smiling.
‘Harv, you don’t write like this, do you?’
* * *
So today this happened. When we came in this morning, Dr Ghundkhali took Mommy away to the window and was talking to her over there in a whisper and then she started to look really upset and she started saying, ‘No. She’s old enough. She has to hear it, too’ so I knew straight away there was some bad news and that I was gonna have to hear it.
I didn’t know how Dr G could see that Daddy was getting worse. He looked exactly the same. Maybe all the big machines that are around his bed were giving off signals saying it. When I realized that it was going to be bad news I looked at Daddy and tried to see it. I thought at first that Dr G was going to tell us that Daddy was gonna die, like, today or tomorrow, and so I looked really hard. I wanted to see if I could see that he was about to be a dead person. I couldn’t. I guess he has been dying for quite a long time now so maybe you can’t tell just by looking at him anyway. If someone is dying, I don’t know when the bit where they’re really dying starts. But I looked anyway.
So then Mommy came over and crouched down and she made her face go that way it goes just before she’s gonna say something really important where her eyes go stary and sad at the same time. But before she could speak, I said:
‘I know, Mommy.’
She didn’t say anything then. Just nodded. She grabbed my head and put it on her chest. I could feel her boobies, and beneath them I could hear her heart beating.
I think Mommy wanted that to be that. I think she thought we didn’t have to talk about it any more. Like we both just knew. But then Dr G came over and said, ‘Mrs Gold, if you’re sure you would like Colette to be present, then …’ And then he trailed off without finishing his sentence, like he does a lot.
So then we ended up in this little room down the corridor with lots of charts and black and white photos on the wall, and Dr Ghundkhali said: ‘Eli has an infection now. Of the lungs.’
‘That’s what you breathe through,’ I said. ‘Well, you breathe through your mouth and nose. But the way you pump air in through your mouth and nose is by the action of the lungs.’
Dr Ghundkhali looked at me strangely for like three seconds. Then he nodded and said, ‘Yes. Anyway, we could, of course, give him antibiotics, and it would probably clear up. But in these circumstances …’
And then he didn’t finish his sentence again! I looked at Mommy, but she just looked pale and furious and like her lips were shut really hard. We were sitting on these two grey plastic chairs and Dr G was sitting on the table. Well, not sitting on the table, not like with his legs crossed or anything. His bottom was on the table, but his feet were on the floor. He has really long legs.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Sorry?’ he said.
‘In these circumstances … what?’
He looked a bit surprised. It might have been because he didn’t expect me to know as a big a word as circumstances. Or it might have been because nobody had ever asked him before about what he was going to say in one of those sentences.
He made a face and shook his head and looked over to Mommy, like she was going to help, like she must know what he was about to say and maybe she could tell me. But she just said:
‘Yes, Doctor. What exactly are you implying?’
Then he just looked really embarrassed. He went red. I could see that even though he is from India and has dark skin.
‘Well, Mrs Gold. In these circumstances, when a patient is, as we know your husband to be, terminally ill – if they do get an infection or a virus, sometimes it’s felt to be best …’
There was another long silence.
‘Yes?’ said Mommy.
‘… not to treat him.’
Mommy nodded. She took my hand, and squeezed it tight.
‘Not to treat him?’ I said. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It means, darling …’ said Mommy, looking at me; but then she moved her head round to face Dr Ghundkhali, and she changed her voice, making it really hard, ‘… that Dr Ghundkhali would like to let your father die.’
I looked round at him. I felt my eyes go hard at him, as hard as Mommy’s voice. But also I felt them start to feel a bit wet, like I was going to cry. And then I didn’t know what to do.
‘Mrs Gold,’ he said. ‘I would not like anything of the sort. I’m just telling you what the medical situation is. And, yes, in this situation, some family members sometimes feel that it is more humane to let the patient … go.’
Mommy squeezed my hand harder. I could feel the bad feeling that I sometimes get inside me when grown-ups talk like this. It’s like a cloud in my tummy. And I really want it to burst and get rid of its rain but it just stays full in my tummy. Sometimes it moves around, like my tummy is a whole black sky.
‘Dr Ghundkhali,’ said Mommy. ‘Are you aware of who my husband is?’
Dr Ghundkhali suddenly looked very tired. He looked like he was ill, like he should be the one in hospital.
‘Yes, of course, Mrs Gold.’
‘I’m not sure you do. Not really. I mean, you know who he is and that he is an important man. But tell me: have you read Solomon’s Testament?’
He didn’t say anything.
‘The Compliance of Women? The Teriblo Conspiracy? Criminality?’
‘Mirror, Mirror?’ I said. ‘When it came out it got bad reviews, but now it’s considered a classic.’
He rubbed his face with his hand. ‘I’m not really much of a reader of fiction, I’m afraid. I prefer history.’
‘Oh … I see. Biography? The lives of great men, by any chance?’
‘No, not really. I like microhistory. Footnote history.’
I turned to Mommy to say ‘what’s that?’ but then she said: ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s books about the small stuff. The things we all take for granted. Books about – I don’t know – salt. Mercury. Paper. Plastic. I’m reading one at the moment, would you believe, about dust. Did you know …’
‘Yes, well,’ said Mommy, ‘if you had read some of my husband’s books, perhaps you would have a sense of exactly what life you’re talking about …’ and here Mommy did that thing she sometimes does of putting her fingers up around a word, and moving them up and down as she speaks, ‘… letting go.’
Dr Ghundkhali nodded. He rubbed his face some more. He opened his mouth. Then he shut it again. Then he looked back at Mommy. ‘Right. So we’ll treat Mr Gold’s infection. No problem.’
‘Good,’ said Mommy.
She got up. I got up, too. Dr Ghundkhali got off the table. He opened the door. He held it open. He smiled at me as I went through, but I just gave him a look. I can raise my left eyebrow without raising my right. Mommy says it’s a thing I can do because Daddy can do it, too, and I have seen him do it. He used to do it a lot when I was little. He used to do it when I did something funny or silly and he would do it and laugh at the same time. I used to love that.
But that wasn’t the way I was doing it now. I did it without a smile.