Harvey is in the sauna. Eli’s apartment has a sauna. It is in the back of his and Freda’s en-suite bathroom. He is not entirely sure he is allowed in either the sauna or the whole bedroom area. It makes him feel – well, it makes him feel like a child going into his parents’ bedroom when they are not there. This raises in him complicated issues. When he was young, his bedroom was next to his parents’. His nights in it are one of very few memories he has of the time when Eli and his mother were still together, because of the noises. It is possibly these noises – more than his mother’s slander, more than the world’s assessment – that shaped Harvey’s early idea of his father.
Many children, of course, have to deal with the noise of their parents’ lovemaking, but the sound of Eli and Joan making love was particularly disturbing. Joan emitted a high-pitched note, not unlike a yodel – which would not in itself have been unpleasant, were it not accompanied so discordantly by Eli, who wailed and roared like a wounded walrus. To a five-year-old boy this sound was terrifying. Once, he had got out of bed, having wet himself in fear, and knocked on his parents’ door, screaming Daddy, daddy, what’s the matter?, only to be ignored; not out of neglect, but simply because his sobbing whisper was inaudible beneath his father’s outpourings.
The sound that orgasm forced out of his father’s mouth was so seared into the young Harvey’s brain that, if asked, he could still do a passable impersonation of it now, thirty-eight years or so since he last heard it. He has actually once publicly reproduced it, as a teenager, during a discussion amongst his friends about how disgusting it was to imagine parental sex. This led to each of them in turn doing an impression of the illicit sounds they had variously heard through their bedroom walls, and much scornful giggling. When it came to Harvey, who took a deep breath in and gave it everything – he was, he remembers, rather pleased with the accuracy of his rendition, having never ventured it out loud before – there was no giggling. All his friends just stared at him. Some of them looked like they might cry.
One side effect of having this sound echoing round his head his whole life has been a nagging conviction that none of the sex he has ever had can possibly have matched up to his father’s experience of it. No matter how much he enjoys sex, Harvey has never felt the need, at orgasm, to keen like a mourner at an ayatollah’s funeral: thus he feels that he is missing out. This inferiority pleasure complex is not helped by Eli’s own delight in his own sexual self-image. In the mid-eighties, the New Yorker had printed a cartoon of Eli as a satyr, dancing on a pile of books and wives. Eli had had it framed: it was still up in his study, in pride of place above his desk.
Harvey has taken his iPhone into the sauna, and is listening to a playlist in there, through his Bose headphones. He has also taken a book, a paperback copy of Mirror, Mirror. It is the same issue as running: although a sauna is supposed to be relaxing, it is, in the main, uncomfortable and boring, and the only way he can get through it is with distraction. Harvey has no willpower for discomfort and boredom: considering how much he has to have on board to get through a run, or a sauna, he often wonders how he would have managed in a labour camp, or the fourteenth century.
Initially, he took his laptop in as well, but while replying to an email – from Ron Bunce, asking for his present address – he found that he was dripping onto the keys, so has left that outside the door. He thinks, though, that the iPhone should be fine: they have mobile phones in hot countries. He is not sure about the book, but it is one of ten copies he found in a box underneath the stairs. Eli and Freda’s apartment has two floors. On the wall as you step up the stairs, there is a series of sketches by Matisse; a gift, Elaine has told him, from Henri’s son Pierre.
He has created a sauna playlist. It has no theme. He considered basing it on being in the sauna, but then realized that songs with the word ‘hot’ in the title would refer to the wrong sort of hot. ‘Hot’ by Avril Lavigne; ‘Hot In Here’, by Nelly; ‘Don’t You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me’ by The Pussycat Dolls. Despite being someone for whom desire feels like it was always in the front of his brain, plastered there, a D where Hester Prynne has an A, pop music that was too upfront about sex made him feel uncomfortable. He did do a quick iTunes search, and discovered that there is an Elton John song called ‘Sweat It Out’, but the idea of Elton sweating – perhaps with the flu – made him feel a bit sick.
He sits naked on the second level of the sauna, a white towel protecting his buttocks from the heat of the pine boards. Most of the sand in the wall-mounted hourglass near the door has already emptied out of the top bulb. Harvey turned it round when he came in, but he does not know how long one inversion of it represents in time. He assumes not actually an hour. The sauna coals sizzle with water poured on them from a wooden bucket on the floor (he hadn’t bothered with the ladle, preferring the excitement of the heat hit that comes from sploshing the entire contents straight on). He watches his stomach as the droplets form, forcing their way through the folds. He knows it is just water, but thinks it must be pushing some fat out too. The dry air burns in his nostrils. A small bottle of Volvic – of which there are about fifty in the apartment’s enormous four-door fridge – sits by his side: it is already too warm to be pleasant to drink.
Mirror, Mirror sits unopened by his side, its pages tickling his right haunch, making him aware of the fact of his buttocks spreading. He thinks it would be good for him to read it, but he becomes more interested in his varicose vein. Harvey has a varicose vein on his left inner thigh. He doesn’t know how long he has had it. There seems, in the case of the varicose vein, to have been no starter vein, no tiny lesion that he might have thought ‘Hmm?’ about before realizing what it was and becoming obsessed with its growth. No: one day it was just there, vivid and red and scratchy, like someone overnight had grafted a tiny leafless tree just under his skin. It revolts him, the varicose vein, but it entrances him: a combination he is familiar with. The heat seems to make it more livid, because he can see it clearly even in the dim light of the sauna; its flattened-insect irregularity contrasting with the clean lines of the pine beneath.
He takes a swig of the warm Volvic and attempts to switch his attention to Mirror, Mirror. As sometimes when the physical world – and, particularly, his physical world, his body in all its heavy presence – threatens to overwhelm him, he imagines that there is an escape that can be made to the life of the mind. Thus Harvey has at home books about, for example, chess; quantum physics; Kierkegaard; Stalingrad; the new economics; the history of Islam; modern British art; cosmology; Renaissance architecture; the psychology of apocalypse; Benjamin Britten; and many others of that ilk, all of them purchased not because of any innate interest in their subject matter, but because of this notion that people who think about such stuff – about Kierkegaard or quantum physics or Benjamin Britten – must therefore not spend all their time thinking about the unending itchiness inside their testicles, or how much they want another sour sweet even though their stomach already hurts from the acid, or the lines on their wives’ faces. Harvey does not know whether these people do or do not think about such things; but he knows that he only ever reads five pages of these books before needing a shit, a wank or a cry.
He opens Mirror, Mirror at the first page, but only gets as far as In this land of ours, before a fat drop of sweat lands on the prose. Fuck. He looks around for a towel, pointlessly, knowing that you cannot dry paper with a towel, and then the music coming into his ears – Spandau Ballet’s ‘Through The Barricades’ – halts, as a call comes in. Shit. You can forget that the iPhone is a phone. He feels caught out, for a host of reasons. He is naked, in the sauna, a sauna he’s not absolutely sure he’s allowed to use. He’s just dripped onto one of Eli’s lesser works. And he’s listening to ‘Through The Barricades’ by Spandau Ballet. Although the call has cut off the MP3, he still thinks that maybe the caller will somehow know.
He holds up the phone to his eyes. It is hard to see. He has to blink sweat out of his eyes, plus the screen has misted up. He can’t see the name. Perhaps this was a bad idea. He decides to chance it.
‘Hello?’
‘Harvey?’
Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit.
‘Dizzy.’
‘Hello, Harvey. How are you?’
Why the emphasis on the are? Harvey puts the phone down on the wood: he can speak via his headphones.
‘I’m OK, thanks.’
‘Good. Great.’ There is a pause: Harvey imagines that Dizzy is looking at the mirror that sits above the mantelpiece in his room, straightening his bow tie.
‘So … the session has come and gone.’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t get a message that you had found anyone else to take up the time …?’
‘No … I didn’t … I kind of forgot about it.’
‘Ah.’
‘Sorry, Dizzy. I also – I couldn’t think of anyone who I could ring up and suggest therapy to. Seems a bit … rude.’
‘Ah …’ says Dizzy. Dizzy is king of saying Ah in that leading way, the way where you can almost hear the ellipsis.
‘Well, don’t you think?’
‘No, I don’t, actually, Harvey. I think that shows a rather one-dimensional attitude to therapy. The implication that needing it is a failure, and that therefore to suggest to someone that they might need it – even just try it out for one session – would be to imply a failing on their part. Surely that isn’t something you think?’
‘Er …’
‘And, besides, I think it rather depends on how you make the suggestion. And who to. Someone close to you would surely appreciate it. Stella, perhaps? Did you ask her?’
‘Stella?’
‘Yes.’
Harvey bristles at the mention of her name. He does not feel it is in Dizzy’s gift to bring her up. And he worries about Dizzy’s knowledge: is there in his tone an element of blackmail? Like, if Harvey doesn’t pay up this £130, he will go to Stella with what he knows? With his knowledge of all Harvey’s fears?
Aha! Harvey wants to say. But she knows! I have told her! The excitement of this triumph over Dizzy is, however, quickly deflated by the memory of the conversation in question. He had thought, that day at Tower Bridge, that he never could tell her, that he must swallow this pitiful pill and never even shit it out it was so shameful, but it was too big inside him: he felt the pressure of it at all times, pushing and kicking to get out like some devil baby from a Hammer Horror film. And, of course, Stella was his best friend: who else can you tell your terrible secrets to?
He told her, having built up to it for weeks, finding every excuse possible why he shouldn’t say it today, knowing that the truth was that he shouldn’t say it any day. But one night, chock-full of depression, allergic with anxiety, it spilled out of him, in a mess of apologies and qualifications and protestations of love despite this terrible thing that he was saying. What did she say? Just what a lady ought, of course. Fuck off, you cunt, is the thing he remembers especially clearly: said, not shouted, deliberately, straightforwardly, even-handedly; and followed the next morning by her packing two suitcases and leaving with Jamie, before Harvey, exhausted with the telling and the crying and the sleeping on the sofa, woke up.
During the two-month period she was gone, Harvey cried almost solidly. He found after a few weeks that many of the daily things that you would have thought you would have to stop should you burst into tears in the middle of them were in fact perfectly doable while crying. Making a sandwich, watching daytime TV, sitting on the tube, masturbating: all these things, once you got over the initial self-pity/humiliation hump, were more than manageable with salt water flooding down your cheeks. If, however, as it sometimes did, the crying became howling, with added face-crumpling and mouth-wobbling, most of these activities became untenable, with the exception of masturbation, which became, if anything, more piquant.
Crying was also a particularly prominent activity for Harvey during the many, many phone calls to Stella that he made at this time and also in the three meetings they had: once at the flat she was renting in east London, after Harvey had banged on the door in the middle of the night, and twice at a service station on the M2, a venue chosen by Stella, possibly because it was equidistant from each other’s dwellings, but more likely, Harvey thought, because the light was incredibly harsh in there, designed to make everyone underneath it look like all they ever consumed was tobacco and scratch cards; and that therefore, in a very Stella-ish way, she was deliberately presenting him with the worst possible view of the thing he was frightened of: with her worst possible face.
But when he wasn’t tied to her – when she wasn’t his woman – this didn’t work. When she wasn’t his woman all he could see, even in the Medway Moto Canteen, was that she was beautiful, and that he missed her and Jamie more than he could express. There was much pleading and convincing and pledges of change, and eventually Stella and Jamie came back. Harvey was overjoyed; his heart brimmed with love and relief; things were better than before, because they had been pulled back from the brink; and so he felt, right up until the moment, two weeks after Stella’s return, when the three of them went out for a blowy country walk under an especially harsh slate-grey sky and he turned to his love and all the bad feelings started again.
‘Thanks for the thought, Dizzy, but I don’t actually think Stella is in need of therapy.’
There is silence at the other end of the line. Is this costing me, thinks Harvey? It is, isn’t it? It costs me when someone phones me abroad.
‘OK,’ says Dizzy, eventually. ‘Well, I’ll expect a cheque in the post, then.’
‘Yes. A hundred and thirty pounds.’
‘Two hundred and sixty now, I’m afraid.’
‘Really?’
‘You were due to have a session this morning.’
‘Oh. Sorry, I forgot.’
‘Obviously, you’re still away. You didn’t think about letting me know that?’
‘Well. Would it have made any difference?’
‘To what?’
‘To the charge.’ Fuckhead, Harvey is desperate to add.
Silence again. The break in the conversation makes Harvey realize he is sweating astonishingly. It is as if he has been out naked in the rain. In the auricles of his ears, underneath the padding of the Bose headphones, there are two small ponds. He feels that if he moves his head quickly, they will overflow.
‘And what about next week’s session?’
‘I don’t know, Dizzy. I very much doubt I’ll make that either.’
‘Perhaps we should think about stopping.’
This comes rather abruptly, without, as Harvey would have expected, a big dramatic pause, indicative of the immensity of such a step.
‘Um …’
‘If you’re going to be, as clearly you are, away indefinitely …’
It is indefinite, thinks Harvey, isn’t it? Death. Even as it is fucking definite, even as it is the definite thing. And then he thinks, yeah. Let’s stop. Let’s stop this shit, this talking and talking and talking about me. But as he thinks about it, he can feel, his heart rate, already far too high for a man of his weight because of the sauna, rise, and more sweat come through his skin. He shifts his buttocks to stop them sticking to the pine. Why this anxiety? Do I think that maybe Dizzy and his mantras and his whole shift-a-must-have-to-a-preference shtick is going to work? Or is it just that all break-ups terrify me, all goodbyes?
Harvey’s uncertainty allows Dizzy an opening:
‘Well, we needn’t decide now. But obviously, the longer it goes on …’
‘The higher the bill,’ says Harvey.
Dizzy sighs, the sigh of the higher man, the one who is tired of dealing with all these people who must bring him down all the time.
‘… the longer it will take for the treatment to have any effect. But, meanwhile, if you are going to worry about the cost of keeping the sessions open, remember you could still take my advice about asking a friend to take them up.’
‘Right.’
‘And also …’
Harvey suddenly cannot hear what Dizzy is saying. He suddenly feels too hot. It occurs to him that he feels dizzy, and this doesn’t help the situation, as the idea of feeling Dizzy, perhaps untying his bow tie and then unbuttoning his shirt and fondling him sexily up and down his concave chest, infects his imagination and makes him feel nauseous as well.
‘Dizzy, I’ve got to go.’
‘Right, well …’
He can hear that Dizzy is continuing, but his voice sounds more and more distant, the sonic equivalent of looking out from a rising plane and seeing the landscape miniaturize. It makes Harvey think that he may be slowly blacking out, fading out like a disco track. The phrase Mine is the last voice you will ever hear comes into his head, the thing that was said at the start of some CND movie he remembers from the 1980s, before all this started, when all his anxieties were simply political – and he desperately doesn’t want that last voice to be Dizzy’s, which now sounds not unlike that of the human-headed fly quietly screaming ‘Help me!’ as the spider approaches at the end of the 1950s version of The Fly. Or perhaps it is his voice; perhaps he is the fly and Dizzy the spider. Either way, he has to get out. He stumbles down from the second level of the sauna, narrowly missing knocking over the hot coals, and falls through the pine door with its little window, noticing as he does so that all the sand in the wall-mounted hourglass has seeped out of a hole in the bottom.
He blacks out, and then comes to, his cheek cold against the tiled floor of Eli and Freda’s ensuite bathroom, a minute later, or it could possibly be three hours. He feels as if there is something on his head, but in a phantom way, like you sometimes feel two hours after you’ve taken off a hat. It is his headphones; they are still on his head, but not pressed close to his ears any more. Harvey takes them off, and realizes what has happened: the plastic on the headphones has melted in the sauna, and warped, moving the earcups away from his ears. Once shaped like a sideways C, they are now more like an upside-down V. It’s as if, while in the sauna, each side of the earphones has developed a lazy lob.
He realizes now that this was what had been making Dizzy’s voice fainter while in the sauna – and therefore what had induced his panic attack. He sits up, and crosses his legs, and tries to force the headphones back into shape so that they can fit onto his head. They snap in two. He has a moment of pure depression, so total and so instant it feels cartoonish, like his Buddha-like body has been covered, suddenly, in tar.
* * *
Today he does not go uptown. Today, instead of walking all the way up Park Avenue, or taking the subway from 23rd straight up the green line to 86th, he takes it downtown. He is searching for the final sign. He cannot quite find it, in the Condesa Inn, in The Material, outside Mount Sinai. There have been some half-signs – the picture of Jesus, the steps marking his stepchildren – but he is looking for the last one, the one that will jump-start his destiny. What he wants is certainty: moral, religious and temporal, something that will make him know that now is the time. So he is going to Ground Zero.
He feels, as he rides towards the World Trade Center station, like a spy, undercover, much like the way he does at the hospital, amongst people, like the blonde woman in pigtails, there to pay their respects. Because he is not going to Ground Zero to pay his respects either. He is going there because he wants to feel as certain about his destiny as Mohammed Atta did about his.
Plus: his opinion of the 9/11 attacks is not the same as most of his countrymen, or indeed most citizens of the West. In their church, members are encouraged – through claiming as many state benefits for their enormous families as possible – to Bleed the Beast. The Beast is America. That is how his Church thinks of his country. Sometimes this attitude fights with that part of him which remembers loving The Outlaws, or which can still feel the outline of the Confederate flag underneath his skin, but then he thinks about how the America that he used to love, the one that Hughie Thomasson sung his heart out for, is nothing like the wide godless swathe that he has travelled across to be here.
When the World Trade Center was blown up, it wasn’t taken in the usual way in American Fork. It did not shock his community. Like all members of all the Churches of the Latter-day Saints and all their sects and offshoots and splinter groups, he knew what it was: a herald of The End of Days. There had been so many portents, and he had committed them all to memory: the pure gospel of Jesus Christ, restored, and taught in His Church – this happened, on 6 April 1830; Elijah returning and giving the priesthood keys – this happened, on 3 April 1836; the Jews returning to Jerusalem and Israel – this began in 1881. Some of the portents had yet to occur. The building of a Mormon temple in Israel; a meeting of the Leaders of the Church with angels and Jesus in Adam-Ondi-Ahman, the site – in Missouri – where Adam and Eve lived after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden; and a separate appearance of Christ at the Temple in Saline County, Illinois. These things had not happened. But the Book of Revelation was clear: wars will be poured out upon all nations; nations will gather to fight Israel; and the wicked will be consumed by fire. Who were the wicked, if they were not the men and the women feeding the Beast financially? The very same men and women consumed by the jihadis’ fire on September 11, 2001? And was it not the case that The Book of Mormon teaches that we must welcome these signs, these symptoms of His Coming, for they portend only the final and eternal triumph of the Just? If ye are prepared, then shall ye not fear, says the Doctrine and Covenants of Joseph Smith. And he is prepared; he is prepared.
Coming upon the site, he is surprised at how destroyed everything still is, a carved-open dust bowl, as if the attack only happened last week. There is something magical about skyscrapers, which makes it seem as if they should be able to rise up again just like that. But no: nearly a decade later, and still they seem only to have laid the foundations of the Freedom Tower and the Memorial and whatever else they are building here. It is a wilderness of canvas and tents and POST NO BILLS fences. He wonders if it would have been better if they had just cleared the area and left it empty: if that would have been more conducive to standing here now and remembering the dead. It would certainly have been more conducive to his own needs. He feels, looking at the multitude of JCBs shifting mountains of mud from one place to another, and the crazy mess of scaffolding and brickwork, the prickle of frustration that he has felt often on this trip – this mission, as he thinks of it – that the world will not conform to his destiny. He has come here expecting epiphany, expecting revelation, but those things are hard to find on a building site.
He decides to take one of the many tours on offer. There are seven men and five women on the tour, all tourists: Germans, Japanese, one or two other Americans. They stand on one of the platforms looking over the site, huddled together, while Sylvia, a woman with oval glasses and close-cropped hair, wearing round her neck a laminate, which says TributeNYC: OFFICIAL TOUR GUIDE, begins to speak, loudly, above the noise of machinery:
– So, everyone happy? Can everyone see me? Does everyone speak English?
She has an upbeat, driving voice. There is some awkward shifting about, some nodding; a German says Ja.
– So, first, some history. The Twin Towers were dedicated in 1973. They were originally very controversial. Oh my Lord. Bigger than the Empire State Building! People weren’t sure about that. People said they lacked character. That it was bad that they were bigger than the Empire State Building, trouncing on such a great symbol of the city. But very soon they became part of the New York skyline. And people began to love them more than the Empire State Building. When you went up the Empire State Building, you were away from the view. But here, in the World Trade Center elevator, it was just glass, straight glass, and your stomach – well, it went a little crazy!
He drifted off. He felt tired. It was difficult to sleep in the Condesa Inn, even more difficult than at home, where sheer numbers in the one house mean that some bed is always creaking, because the man next door has continued to do that thing of dragging his nails down the wall in the middle of the night. He would wake to hear it every night, terrified, scrabbling for the light: the sound was too frightening to listen to in the dark. He has knocked on the wall. He has shouted: stop that! He has prayed, and wondered while he was praying if the sound was itself a sign, or Satan, who always lives in the room next door.
His attention refocuses on Sylvia as she begins to speak about it, the thing he wants to hear:
– Many people do not know that September 11, 2001 was not the first day that the World Trade Center was attacked by Islamic terrorists. On January the 26th, 1993, a truck filled with 1500 pounds of explosives, planted by a man called Ramzi Yousef, detonated in the underground garage of the North Tower. Six people were killed. Although their deaths have been overshadowed by more recent events, we do not forget them here today. No, sir. But it makes you wonder, don’t it? They tried before. So. What is it about this particular building, these two towers, that so outraged the fundamentalists?
It’s the height, he thinks, immediately, pleased at the quickness of his mind’s answer, pleased to know instinctively what it is for them. It’s the height. The arrogance: it’s the saying that we, us, America – we’ve got the biggest cock in the world. That, plus the Babelness of it, the reaching into the sky to disturb God.
– Which brings us, neatly I guess, to those more recent events. She takes a deep, dramatic breath. And out. It was the first day of school. It was primary day. It was the day we New Yorkers were viciously, horrifically attacked.
Sylvia’s expression has hardened; her voice has slowed, to a more emphatic rhythm. His fingers reach for the photograph in his pocket. He has not brought the one of his sister on her own, smiling and waving, looking so fine: he has brought another one, of him and her when they were toddlers, being held up by their mother. He slips it out of his pocket and stares at it, listening all the time to Sylvia’s voice become more outraged.
It is a black-and-white photograph. Their mother is standing in front of Lake Utah, holding them both up to camera. She is smiling, but her eyes betray boredom, in tune with his memory of her, a woman whose commitment to herself had remained entirely undented by children. This was not a political position: even if feminism had ever made it to Utah – instead of falling, with all the other great irruptions of the 1960s, into the Grand Canyon – it would have been irrelevant to how his mother chose to live her life. She had no sense of the world beyond.
This is why he loves his sister so much. Their father being mainly drunk, and their mother mainly herself, he and his sister had brought each other up. He has not had therapy, or any of that faggy shit, and is not given to self-analysis, but he knows in his bones that this is why his sister matters so much. She made him his breakfast, taught him how to tie his shoelaces, rubbed his back when he had childhood bugs that made him throw up all night. He knows that when he thinks of his sister, after all the grief and the anger, and the burning, religious need for revenge, underneath all that there is gratitude, the gratitude that he assumes people who have been brought up properly feel in the pit of themselves for their parents.
They are – were – twins. Being boy and girl, they are – were – not identical. Except in this photograph. In this photograph he thinks they look identical. They could both be boys, or girls. He has often wished that, somehow, they could have been identical. More of her would seem to have survived. He could look in the mirror and see her. Dimly, he senses there is something else: a need to merge with her, to bring back childhood and safety and someone looking after him, because the five wives and the fifteen children do not look after him, they look to him to look after them. If he merged with her, he would hear her, and she would tell him, surely, that his destiny was right, needed, and at hand.
– Imagine, if you can, how it was for the people who worked in the towers that day. To be at work – a normal day – with your colleagues and friends. Maybe sharing a bit of gossip before you actually got down to it. We all do that at work, don’t we?
A couple of the group laugh politely; the Japanese couple genuinely.
– Maybe, because you work in the World Trade Center – because you work in the tallest building in the world …
Sylvia says this with intensity, and pauses after it, as if it has some moment beyond the obvious: then takes a deep breath and continues,
– … perhaps you look out at a clear and cloudless blue sky, and think about how nice it might be to be outside, soaking up the sun.
He concentrates on the photograph. At the same time he takes Sylvia’s advice; he imagines how it was for the people that day. But not the people that she is talking about, the ones who worked in the towers. He thinks about how it must have been for the hijackers, in their cramped, sweaty cockpits, fighting off uncertainty and panic and confusion and the sound of the passengers wailing and banging on the door, with the repeated hammer of Allah Akhbar: God is great, God is great, God is great, over and over and over again. Finding in those words their destiny. Building a wall with those words against the unfitting flailing world.
He looks at himself and his sister held up by their mother and thinks of the 9/11 hijackers. Grant me that certainty, oh Lord. Just a piece of it. Show me a sign. Sylvia says:
– And then perhaps you might imagine how it was for me, just setting off for work, just checking my hair in the hallway mirror, when I heard a voice on the radio say that an aeroplane had crashed into one of the towers at the World Trade Center. Which one? I thought. Which one? Kept on repeating in my head. And God forgive me, God please forgive me, I was praying that it was the North Tower. Because my brother, my darling dearest brother Dan – he worked on the ninety-fourth floor of the South Tower.
He looked up at Sylvia. She had looked away from their group, up, into the empty unbuilt-upon sky, to that phantom ninety-fourth floor. He had been expecting her to say her son or daughter. She looked old, at least as old as himself, but that did not of course mean that the person she was grieving for was her child. That was just what he had expected. Something to do with her being a woman: that’s who women grieve for, their children.
She stays looking, up, up. The sky is not so blue today: it is greyer, sitting heavy on the air and making it muggy. But Sylvia still peers into it, narrowing her eyes as if indeed it was that other day’s blue sky and within it her brother has come into focus, waving, or falling, or stringing a tightrope between buildings to escape. This is the sign, he is sure: this sister looking for her brother.
– He was my younger brother. He’d only just got the job. People think that it was just financiers and moneymen working in the towers, but there were many other firms who rented office space there. He just worked for Regus, an employment agency: manning the phones, helping people find work. He had brown hair, brown eyes, he was maybe fifteen to twenty pounds overweight, he liked prog rock, and he was the proudest father of his two kids, my nieces, Faye and Zoe. All he ever wanted was for life to be good for them. Better, maybe, than it was for us. And you know what? Until September 11, 2001, he was doing really well with that.
She keeps looking in the sky all the time she is talking. A sister looking for a brother; for vengeance; for destiny. He is so sure it is the sign he feels tears in his eyes. Tears of joy, tears of thanks, tears of finally found purpose. Not tears, he is absolutely certain – he knows this because he can see them welling in the eyes of others in his group, and he needs no mirror to know his are shinier, brighter, fatter with truth – not tears of sadness over the wasteful, useless death of Sylvia’s darling dearest brother Dan.
* * *
I love Daddy so much – with all my heart – but he’s really starting to smell. Today, when we arrived at the hospital, I went to kiss him and tell him I love him like I always do, and I noticed it even before I put my lips on his cheek. I like kissing Daddy, even though the look of his skin since he’s been in hospital does make me feel weird. I used to like it a lot when I was little. I liked the feel of his beard, all rough on my skin. I didn’t like it when he shaved, like he sometimes did before he went out at night to get a big award or something. Sometimes he would kiss me on the lips, but sometimes he would move his face so that his cheek was there for me to kiss. He would move his face in a funny way that made me laugh, like someone had snapped his head to one side.
The thing is, I’ve got a really AMAZING sense of smell. Jada says it’s like a superpower; like I should have a secret identity, and be called Smellgirl or Supersmell (I wasn’t so sure about that because the trouble with the word smell is that even though it can mean that you’ve got a great sense of smell it can also mean you smell, so Smellgirl or Supersmell might be superheroes who just smell a lot. I wouldn’t want people to think I was like, the Human Skunk). I don’t know what this superhero would do – I guess I could follow the trail of a baddie, if I knew what he was supposed to smell like.
So when I got close to Daddy today I suddenly caught this really gross whiff. Like gone-off broccoli. It made me feel sick, so that I didn’t want to kiss him. So because Mommy was talking to Dr Ghundkhali, and no one else was looking, I didn’t kiss him, I just moved my head away at the last minute.
I didn’t say anything to anyone about the smell. I wanted to, but I knew it would just sound really childish, saying to one of the doctors, ‘Why does my Daddy smell so bad?’ And anyway, I know why he smells so bad. It’s because he’s dying.
(I did tell Jada about it when she phoned me – she has her own cell! – after we got back home. She said: ‘Maybe they should make like special deodorants or something for people who are dying.’ Which I thought was a really good idea. I mean, just because you’re dying doesn’t mean you don’t care about that stuff. It’s never too late to make a first impression, Elaine says. Although I guess this would be more like a last impression.)
The thing was, though, I felt really bad about not kissing Daddy. I started to think that maybe if I didn’t kiss him like normal at the start and at the end of my visit then maybe he would die. I mean, like, straight away, maybe as soon I went home, or maybe even when I was there. And then as soon as I thought that all the machines started beeping like mad, and he started making that awful groaning noise he makes, and the nurses started rushing in and crowding round his bed, and I started to feel really bad because I thought it was all my fault, that because I didn’t kiss him he was going to die. So I rushed over to his bed, too, but I couldn’t get through to Daddy because all the doctors were all there, all five or six of them and some of the nurses and Mommy, too. I wanted to scream, ‘Let me through! I have to kiss him!’ but I knew they would all just think I was being a stupid little kid. So I told him in my thoughts. I thought maybe if he can hear me when I talk to him even though he’s in a coma maybe he can hear my thoughts as well. I told Daddy in my thoughts that I was really sorry that I hadn’t kissed him, and that I would definitely kiss him before I left, whatever he smelled like, double extra hard, and please don’t die before I do that.
Anyway, after about five minutes, the machines stopped beeping and everything calmed down, and the doctors moved away, and then it all went back to normal. Then, when it was time to go, I went over to Daddy’s bed again. His mask was on his face again. It looked like it was too tight, like when they take it off there would be red lines on his cheeks. His hair was lying over his forehead, which was all sweaty. It was like whatever had happened today, when he’d started to make all that noise and the doctors had all rushed round, had been really tiring for him. I brushed his hair back, and said: ‘That’s better, now.’
Then I reached up on tiptoe and put my lips against his cheek and gave him the double extra hard kiss I had promised. If my kisses do help him live then he should live twice as long as he was going to because of that one. I would have made it even longer but I was holding my breath because of the smell.
* * *
In one hand, Violet Gold holds Bigger Than Big by Chris Noth, and in the other, Solomon’s Testament by Eli Gold. Eeny meeny miny mo, she thinks, catch a nig– but then she stops herself, even in her thoughts, remembering that that word was out of bounds now, and feeling the fear and confusion that she always feels around the shifting sands of linguistic acceptability, the dread that she is going to get it wrong.
She opens Bigger Than Big:
It is 12 May 2008. Tonight is the night of the premiere of the Sex and the City movie, in London. Hundreds of screaming fans line the red carpet outside the Odeon cinema in the city’s famous Leicester Square, waiting for a glimpse of their heroes: of the women who play Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte. And of me. I play Big. The male lead in the movie. The sex object, people say, for the millions of women who have religiously watched the TV series for years. And yet I am not there. I have chosen to be with my son, instead. He is four months old.
She puts it down. She feels that flatness behind the eyes she sometimes feels when reading Eli’s book, that sense that these words are not meant for her, and that understanding them will be hard work, like reading in a language enough like English to pick up about a quarter of the meaning.
She holds up Solomon’s Testament again, without opening it. When she does this – when she just feels the 530-page heft of it, and looks at the first edition cover, with its strange abstraction of a face, an image once so modern, now so dated – the book loses its new fluidity and reverts to what it has been for her for many years: something stolid and fixed, an ornament, a keepsake, gathering dust on her shelf harking back to an ever-receding point in her life.
Violet remembers when Eli first came home with a copy of the book. He was so happy, as happy as she had ever seen him. He kept on reading it, which seemed odd to her, as he had written it, and so must have read it many times already. But she could see he got so much joy out of seeing his words in print and between covers. It had taken him a long time, and involved overcoming many obstacles, to force it into that form. Before embarking on the novel, Eli had written a number of short stories and submitted them to a magazine called Horizon: they had all been turned down. His pages would be returned generally with a cursory note, although once a man called Cyril Connolly had written a few paragraphs acknowledging that he had talent but explaining why his writing wasn’t quite right for them. Violet remembers his name because she remembers reading the letter over Eli’s shoulder, and saying that she thought it was nice that Mr Connolly had taken the trouble to write, considering that he wasn’t going to use any of the stories. She shudders at the memory of it: both at her cloying naivety and at the image lodged in her mind of how Eli had looked round at her, his normally lazy eyes electric with rage.
‘I’m so full of it,’ he said.
‘So full of what?’
‘Of everything he says. And it’s all so wrong. So fucking wrong. Now I have to live all day with all the reasons he’s so wrong. It’s like a letter in my head.’
‘Are you going to write it?’
‘What?’
‘The letter. To Mr Connolly.’
He squinted at her, like he couldn’t make her out.
‘No, Birdy. I just meant that my mind is full with a letter I could write. But, I could, I guess … what do you think?’
Violet, not entirely used to offering her husband advice, nodded. ‘If you think it might change his mind,’ she said.
Eli laughed. ‘It won’t do that.’
‘Won’t it?’
‘No. You can change people’s minds about politics, and you can change their mind about whether or not they want a slice of cake. But you can’t change their mind once they’ve made a statement of taste. You can argue with them all you like, but the best, the absolute best you can get to, once they’ve said they don’t like something, is a shake of a head and the words: I’m sorry, I’m simply don’t like it.’
‘So …’
‘So, you’re right. I should write a letter to Mr Connolly.’ The name came out super sour: Violet blushed, aware that he was sarcastically echoing her politeness. ‘It won’t achieve anything, but it will make me feel better, and it might stop me hearing all the arguments in my head all day.’
Violet felt guilty about this conversation, even though she never found out whether or not Eli actually posted the seven-page letter that he wrote in response to Cyril Connolly’s rejection. The fear that he might have – and that it might have made things worse for him – hung heavy with her for weeks.
She eventually realized, however, that in some fundamental way Eli did not take these rejections to heart; or, at least, did not store them in that part of his heart which had any bearing on his stone-cold sense of his own genius. When, on occasion, Mr Harlow, the boss of International Shipbrokers Ltd, had called Violet into his office and reprimanded her for typing errors, her first instinct was always that he was right, that she was a poor worker, and that her typing should really be much better by now. But even though they made him first angry and then depressed, the rejection letters did not make Eli question whether there might be something wrong with his work. He did not even consider it: his self-confidence acted like a silver shield to criticism, against which it deflected and dispersed like light. Criticism existed only outside of himself, evidence of the world’s stupidity, or, at best, of its unreadiness to accept his genius as yet.
It was typical of Eli, Violet thinks with hindsight, that he should have given up trying to get short stories into magazines like Horizon, and chosen instead to leapfrog that hinterland of a writer’s career and get on with a novel. His prove-them-wrong engine just continued expanding. The fury that fuelled seven pages of pointless prose to Cyril Connolly combined with all of Eli’s other furies to create the fire underneath Solomon’s Testament. He received numerous rejection letters for that, too, but by then it was like he had built from them a paper ark, on which he was sailing confidently against the current of their idiot opinion towards the harbour of his success. And when, eventually, in 1954, Weidenfeld & Nicolson published the book in a small print run of only two thousand copies, he gathered up every rejection letter he had ever had – including Cyril Connolly’s – and threw them down the toilet.
‘Why didn’t you put them in the fire?’ she said, putting her coat on to go down to the box at the end of the street and telephone a plumber. It was mid-winter. ‘At least then they might have helped to warm the room.’
He smiled at her and shrugged, and did not say Because that would have been too glorious for them and because the act of throwing my rejection letters down the toilet makes a statement about what they are, as the symbolism would have been marred by an admission of its meaning.
Sitting in her room at Redcliffe House, with the sky darkening outside her window and the smell of lunch still seeping through the floorboards, she remembers the first arrival of Eli’s book. It did not come in a parcel – although other copies would, many of them, cluttering up the place; her husband brought it home from the publishers. He kept reading it and laughing, as if it contained jokes he had never seen before. He sat in the one comfy chair they had in their bedsit, letting the fire go out, and laughed and laughed. This confused Violet still further, as the few glances that she had stolen at the manuscript had not revealed anything that she, a fan of Tommy Trinder, could conceive of as funny.
The very first time he came home with the book, he was, for a moment, like a little boy. It turned out that he had walked all the way from Soho to Walthamstow – and had run the last two miles, holding the book aloft like an Olympic torch. When he came through the door, the first thing he said was ‘Birdy!’ He called her: and when she came, wiping her hands on her apron, he kept saying it. ‘Birdy! Birdy, Birdy, Birdy …’ And he held the book out for her; not to read, but just to see, like a prize he had won, and won, it sounded to her ears, for her.
In fact, as she would come to realize later, what Eli had brought home was a bomb, ticking and ready to smash through the windows of their life. The fuse was not yet lit, but it was when the first signifi-cant review came out – a rave in the Daily Telegraph by Donald Davie ending, ‘Solomon’s Testament drags the novel, kicking and screaming, into the future.’ Violet had not considered this. She had accepted for a long time that Eli was writing a book, and that that was something mysterious and not for her, but she had thought of it as a closed act – she had not imagined any life beyond it, except that perhaps, at some point, Eli might write another book. His writing, she assumed, would carry on in parallel to their lives – he would still work at the Post Office, and she at International Shipbrokers Ltd – and that he would no doubt carry on writing much as other men carried on flying pigeons or collecting stamps. She thought of it, in other words, as a hobby; and in so thinking, she felt she was not diminishing it – many of the men she had known before marriage who flew pigeons did so with the same passion and intensity that Eli wrote.
What she was not expecting was that with the book would come the world: the world, that is, of the newspaper and the radio and the television, the world as projected onto the imagination of the ordinary by the mechanisms of fame. This was the great surprise. Today, sometimes, she watches the TV or sees the garish colour photographs in the newspapers, and thinks that children growing up now must see through to that world as easily as she once saw through her family’s kitchen window to their back garden, and that getting there must feel as simple as walking through the door. But when she was young, there was no passage there at all. She went to the movies, and she listened to the radio, and the life that was represented there – both the fictional life, and the life of the stars, which seemed, when she read about it in the newspapers, no less fictional – seemed to come from some other side, like the dead to the living, or perhaps the living to the dead. It would have been as easy for her to enter into that life as to enter into the cinema screen or the radio valves. Indeed, such a wish – even as she might dream of Stewart Grainger or Eric Portman – never even occurred to her. The idea of being famous herself, which so stalks today’s young that it seems not even an aspiration but an entitlement, would have been for Violet so far away from possibility as to live beyond the realm of the imagination. Fame was another planet; another dimension.
With hindsight, however, she could see how it was not like that for Eli. After the Daily Telegraph review came out, a journalist came to see him – a hunched, little man with a bad cough, who just knocked on the door, without a by your leave – and Eli didn’t blink. He led him straight through to their tiny room, and when, a couple of minutes later, she walked in with cups of tea for the both of them, her husband was talking freely of his destiny: of always knowing he would be a writer, of being sure from the beginning of his muse, of realizing very early on that he wasn’t meant to work in the Post Office for the rest of his life. She knew it wasn’t a lie, it wasn’t put on for the journalist: he had always been like that. It just took it to happen for it to become clear. Eli slid into fame as though into a bespoke tailored suit.
For Violet, though, fame was like finding a secret room in a house that you had lived in for years, a room you never knew was there, and, through a combination of fear, and uncertainty about whether you were allowed to, never went into. The nearest she came to it was a reading Eli gave at Foyles two months after the publication of Solomon’s Testament. She had never been into Foyles but had passed it on Charing Cross Road, not bothering to go in, most of the titles on display in the window being by writers that she had only heard of via Eli’s furious bedside rants. When she arrived – it was a Wednesday night, and cold – she was taken aback by the sight of a series of posters which had been put up on the main window. These posters had an image of the book cover on them, and the words ‘A READING FROM THE NEW LITERARY SENSATION’ written below. Above was the date and time, and then Eli’s name, and then a photograph of her husband which she had never seen before. Such was the economy of expectation at Weidenfeld & Nicolson regarding Solomon’s Testament that the photograph of Eli on the back inner flap of the first printing was simply an old picture that he had provided: a photograph of the two of them, taken on Brighton beach the previous summer, from which Violet had been excised. In that picture, Eli had looked like he always did when having his photograph taken: smiling not entirely naturally, his arms folded, a little hunched against the sea wind, but with some real joy breaking through the self-consciousness. He was both at ease and ill at ease, as people are having heard someone shout the word cheese – in this case Gwendoline, the only one of her friends to own a camera, who Eli had rather surprisingly allowed on this daytrip. But in this other photograph, the one in the window at Foyles, he had acquired that thing which people who are regularly photographed have, that way of looking and being looked at that seems at once utterly natural and completely mythological. How did he know how to do that? she thought. And so quickly? Was it the cameraman telling him what to do, or had he just done it, instinctively?
When she came into the shop – it felt exciting, going into a shop after six o’clock, like Christmas, when they stayed open late – about two hundred chairs had been set up in front of a small wooden stage, to create a mini-theatre. It was not enough: the place was packed, and many people were standing around behind and by the side of the chairs. She was taken aback by the audience, who were all younger and better looking than she had expected. An assumption remained within Violet, that people interested in books must be either old, or old before their time: but this crowd seemed to be mainly in their twenties, and fashionable. A lot of the men had glasses, but not wiry old-man ones – thick black ones which they wore in a way that suggested a sort of arch thoughtfulness, rather than myopia. The women were pretty: most of them wore trousers and some denim jeans, which Violet had seen in the shops but did not own a pair of. She felt old in her pink striped silhouette dress, which she had picked out especially for tonight. She couldn’t make out whether she was, in fact, older than most in this audience: when she looked closely, some of them, both men and women, seemed more lined than her, and one or two might even have dyed their hair, but everyone gave out some overall message of youth, some indefinable mix of confidence and fashionability that Violet had thought did not extend beyond one’s early twenties.
A woman in a smart blue dress suit was taking what appeared to be tickets, which inspired in her the familiar stab of anxiety that she had got something wrong, having arrived without one (not realizing that tickets would be needed for a reading in a bookshop). She thought about turning round and leaving, to spare everyone the embarrassment, but then a bald man with glasses appeared and said:
‘Mrs Gold?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m the duty manager for tonight. Can I get you a seat?’ He pointed her towards a chair in a middle row, over the back of which a small piece of paper had been folded, bearing the legend RESERVED.
‘Thank you,’ said Violet. ‘My pleasure,’ he said, turning to go. Partly to delay the embarrassment of forcing the people already seated in the row to stand up and partly because she really wanted to know, Violet touched his arm at the elbow, saying:
‘Excuse me … sir.’
‘Yes, Mrs Gold?’ he answered, smiling, she assumed at her use of sir.
‘How did you know it was me?’
He reached into his inner jacket pocket and produced a torn piece of paper. He handed it over. It was a picture of her, waving, and grinning, and holding her coat against her body for warmth. It was the other half of the photograph of Eli on Brighton beach that had served, originally, as his book jacket photograph. She knew that Eli had had the photograph returned from the publishers, although she hadn’t seen it around their bedsit for a while.
‘Mr Gold gave me this and told me to watch out for you. And make sure you got a good seat.’
She looked up at the duty manager. He, at least, looked as old as his years. She held out her hand, offering back the photograph.
‘No, no. Please. I don’t …’ He trailed off, avoiding the phrase need it any more. ‘Have a nice evening, Mrs Gold.’
She is moved enough by the memory to go and fetch the photograph from her shoebox, now perched on the bedside table – she had no wish to go through the palaver of fetching it from underneath the mattress again. It lies on top of all the bits and pieces of her life, just below her wedding photo. Barring some yellowing at the edges and a certain cloudiness about the image that she does not remember, it has not aged much: certainly, she thinks, glancing up from it to the mirror on the wall above, not as much as her.
She holds it to the mirror, just above her face, a bit like the referees in football matches do their red and yellow cards. Because the photograph is blocking one eye she can see it better, the enforced wink helping to break through the minor cataracts that blur her peripheral vision. And she thinks how wrong it all is. Not time, or the loss of herself, the disjunction between this woman in the photograph and who she is now – despite those things creating in her a visceral sense of wrong, she knows that they are deeply right, or, at least, deeply true – but how none of it means quite what it should. If this was a film, she would still possess both halves of this photograph, and the camera would close in on both fragments now, with her sad face hovering above the tear, a clear symbol of her fractured marriage. Or perhaps the photograph she would own would be the glamorous publicity one of Eli that had been on the Foyles poster, and that would have been torn away from some image of her, to suggest how fame rent him from her. It makes no sense that this photograph of her, ripped away from the image of Eli, actually stands as a keepsake of a moment of kindness towards her; of a small break in his solipsism which surprised her by making her realize that he did sometimes care for her when she was not there.
It is this that Violet Gold remembers most from that night: this realization, forming a small protective armour around her during the reading, so that even as the evidence of Eli’s inevitable excision from her life by celebrity came alive – in the tense wonder with which the audience hung onto each word, in the shared conviction that they were witnessing the birth of a star, but above all, in the rapt attention of the women, an attention that was also, she could sense, a waiting, for the moment in which Eli’s eye would alight on one of them and choose – even as all this seethed around her, she felt protected; she felt contained.
She puts the photograph down, and picks up the book.