Tin Man

by Sarah Winman

  When he came back he poured out a small measure of Scotch in his water glass. He stood at the window and drew the curtains wide. South Park was dusted in white and the streets were empty. He drank the whisky and leaned against the books. He glanced down at the photo of the three of them, Michael, him and Annie. Annie loved her books. That’s how he’d surprised her on their sixth wedding anniversary. Led her blindfolded from her job at the library, to what would become her own bookshop in St. Clements, and there, restored her sight with two brass keys. Michael had been waiting inside with champagne, of course. What am I going to call this place? she said, as the cork flew across the floor. Annie and Co., they suggested, trying hard not to sound too practiced.

  Ellis flicked the catches and opened the window wide. He shuddered, unprepared for the incoming freeze. He knelt down and stuck his arm out the window. He clenched his fingers, opened his fingers. Clenched them, opened them. He was diligent and did exactly what the nurse had told him to do. He suddenly felt tired again and the bed looked far away. He tugged at the duvet and pulled it toward him. He wrapped himself up and fell asleep on the floor.

  The heat of the room eventually woke him. He was wedged up against the radiator after a restless night of bad thinking. He had no idea what day it was but had a sudden recollection of a phone call with Carol, a promise to check the heating in their house later that day. He sat up and smelled his armpits. There was something murky lurking in the fibers, and he got up and went across to the bathroom and ran a bath. The throbbing in his hand had subsided and he wrapped his arm in a plastic bag as the nurse had told him to.

  * * *

  • • •

  OUT IN THE GARDEN, the crisp air felt good to breathe. Blue skies had nudged out the gray of yesterday and for a brief moment, in the faint rays of winter sunshine, the promise of a new season teased and the snow had already turned to mush in its presence. Ellis leaned back against the kitchen wall with the sun on his face.

  You all right, Ellis?

  Ellis opened his eyes. He was surprised the young man standing at the fence knew his name.

  Yeah, not too bad, he said.

  What happened?

  Ellis smiled. Fell off my bike, he said.

  Shit, said the student.

  Wait, said the student, and he disappeared inside. He came back out with a steaming mug.

  There you go, he said. Coffee. And he lifted the mug across the fence.

  And Ellis didn’t know what to say. He felt fucked up a bit from the pills and the sleep but it wasn’t that really, it was the gesture that unsettled him, the kindness that made the words catch in his throat and, eventually, he said, Thank you. Thank you, your name, I—

  Jamie.

  Yes, right. Jamie. Of course. Sorry.

  Anyway, enjoy it. I’m going back in. If you need anything, let us know.

  And the kid was gone. Ellis sat down on the bench.

  The coffee was good, it wasn’t instant, it was real and strong, and stopped the hunger. He needed to shop. He couldn’t remember when he ate more than toast. He drank the coffee and looked across the garden. It had been quite a haven once. Annie’d had the vision and she’d turned it into a seasonal palette of rotating color. She took out books and studied them late into the night, sketched out her ideas. She halved the lawn and planted flowers and shrubs he could never pronounce. Tall grasses became water in the wind, and around the bench the joy of nasturtiums every summer. You can’t kill nasturtiums, she’d once declared, but he had. All those delicate, brilliant ideas had withered in the shade of his neglect. Only the hardy remained beneath the overgrown brambles. Honeysuckle trailers, camellias, they were all in there somewhere, and he could see thick clusters of scarlet heads shining out of the undergrowth like lanterns. Weeds grew around him, along the borders by the back door and kitchen. He bent down and picked up a handful and they came away surprisingly easily from the soil.

  He felt warm liquid trickle from his nose and he wondered if he had the start of a cold. He searched for a handkerchief but had to make do with the hem of his shirt. When he looked down he saw blood. He held his hand under his chin and caught the pooling blood as best he could. He went back into the kitchen and pulled off a wad of kitchen roll, which he clamped hard to his nose.

  He sat down on the cold tiled floor and leaned back against the fridge. As he reached for more paper, it was then that he imagined his wife’s hand instead. He closed his eyes. Felt her hand in his hand and the softness of her lips leaving a shimmering trail across his arm.

  You’re so distant these days, she said.

  I’m an idiot.

  You are, she said, and laughed. What’s got into you?

  I’m stuck.

  Still? she said.

  All the things you were going to do, she said.

  I miss you.

  Come on, she said. You could still do them. This isn’t about me. You know that, right, Ellis?

  Ell?

  Where have you gone?

  I’m here, he said.

  You keep fading out. You’re really annoying these days.

  Sorry.

  I said, This isn’t about me.

  I know.

  Go find him, she said.

  Annie?

  He kept his eyes closed long after she was gone. He felt the cold of the room, the hard floor. He heard blackbirds and the persistent drone of a fridge. He opened his eyes and pulled the compress away from his nose. Not bleeding now. He staggered up and felt so much space around him he almost choked.

  * * *

  • • •

  BY THE AFTERNOON the snow had virtually gone but he kept to the roads because the roads had been salted. At Cowley Road he waited for a break in the traffic and crossed. He looked about for his bike but couldn’t see it in the vicinity. He couldn’t imagine anyone would want it, top of the range it wasn’t. Cost him fifty quid ten years ago and even then, everyone said he’d been done. Time for a change, he thought. The pain in his arm prompting his sudden equanimity.

  He remembered the night of his accident, how he had been distracted by a light in Mabel’s old shop, and he turned back toward it and tried the door. It was locked, of course, with no sign that anyone had been about. He peered through the opaque swirls of dried Windex into a ramshackle interior overflowing with junk. He found it hard to equate that cluttered space with the one of his boyhood. A faded green curtain used to hang at the back, separating commerce from home. To the right of the curtain, a table. On top of the table a cash register, a record player and two piles of records. The display at the front was made up of sacks of vegetables and crates of fruit. In the middle, opposite the door, an armchair that smelled of tangerines every time you sat in it. How was it possible the three of them had moved about this space with unequivocal ease?

  It was Mabel who had asked him to join her the night Michael arrived in Oxford after his father’s death. A friendly face of similar age to her grandson. He remembered standing where he was standing now. Him and Mabel, the welcome party. Both nervous, both quiet. The streets silenced by snow.

  For years after, Mabel used to say that Michael came with the snow because that was the only way she could remember the year he moved in with her. January ’63, it was, thought Ellis. We were twelve. Thereabouts.

  They watched Mr. Khan’s minicab slow down and stop in front of the shop. He got out of his car and raised his hands skyward, and said, Oh, Mrs. Wright! What a wonderful thing is snow!

  And Mabel said, You’ll catch your death out here, Mr. Khan. You’re not used to it. Now did you remember my grandson?

  Oh, indeed! he said, and he raced round to the passenger door and opened it.

  One prodigal grandson, he said, with two suitcases full of books.

  Come in, come in, said Mabel, and the three of them huddled around a small electric heater that was
losing the fight against the night’s sudden freeze. Mr. Khan walked through with the suitcases and disappeared into the back, his footsteps heavy on the stairs and on the landings overhead. Mabel introduced the boys and they shook hands formally and said hello, before self-consciousness stifled them. Ellis noticed the cowlick at the front of Michael’s cropped dark hair and the horizontal scar above his upper lip—the result of a fall against a table, he’d later learn—a feature that, in the wrong sort of light, could turn his smile into an unexpected sneer: an idiosyncrasy that would become more developed over the years.

  Ellis went to the window. The clock ticked quietly behind him, light from the Italian café spilled yellow onto the white street in front. He heard Mabel say, I expect you’re hungry, and Michael said, No, not really, and he came and stood next to Ellis, instead. They looked at one another in the reflection of the glass and snow fell behind their eyes. They watched a nun make slow and careful progress toward the church of St. Mary and St. John next door. Mr. Khan came back into the room and pointed.

  Look! he said. Penguin! he said, and they laughed.

  Later that night, in Michael’s room, Ellis said, Are they really full of books?

  No, just the one, said Michael as he opened a suitcase.

  I don’t read, said Ellis.

  What’s that then? said Michael, pointing to the black book in Ellis’s hand.

  My sketchbook. I take it everywhere.

  Can I see?

  Sure, and Ellis handed over his book.

  Michael flicked through the pages, acknowledging images with a slow nod of his head. He suddenly stopped. Who’s that? he said, holding open a page at a woman’s face.

  My mother.

  Does she really look like that? asked Michael.

  Yes.

  She’s beautiful.

  Is she?

  Don’t you think so?

  She’s my mother.

  Mine left.

  Why?

  He shrugged. Just walked out.

  D’you think she’ll come back?

  I’m not sure she knows where I am anymore, and he handed back the sketchbook. You can draw me if you want, he said.

  OK, said Ellis. Now?

  No. In a couple of days, he said. Make me look interesting. Make me look like a poet.

  * * *

  • • •

  ELLIS TURNED AWAY from the window. A bus inched into view and he crossed the road and waved it down. He sat alone at the back and closed his eyes. He felt groggy all of a sudden. The disorientation of mixing memory and medication.

  * * *

  • • •

  HE RARELY WENT to his father’s house when nobody was there, rarely went when only his father was there, truth be told. He did anything to avoid the wordless connection neither felt comfortable with. He got off the bus before he needed to and walked the rest of the way under a sky that was becoming overcast again. What was it about these roads that plunged him into a state of childlike anxiety?

  The light had virtually disappeared by the time he reached the front door, and a feeling of foreboding had taken hold. He put the key in the lock. Inside, the sound of traffic retreated and the gray light darkened, and it could have been evening. He felt nervous and unsure, now it was just him alone with the years.

  The house was warm, and that was all Carol had wanted to know, whether they’d left the heating on to counteract the imminent freeze. He could go now, and yet he didn’t. The perverse pull of the past drew him inside to the back room, virtually unaltered since the days of his youth.

  The room smelled of dinner, still. A roast. They always had a roast the night before they went away because they never knew what the food would be like at the hotel. That was his father’s thinking for sure. He looked about. The table, the dresser—that dark slab of oppressive oak—the mirror, so little had changed. The armchairs might have been re-covered but tug away the maroon and navy fabric and the melancholic imprint of the past was still there. He opened the curtains and looked out onto the garden. Faint patches of snow amidst the rockery.

  Crocus heads wistful and purple, and the car factory over there showing a fake dusk. He noticed the carpet had been changed but the overwhelming hue of brown hadn’t. Maybe Carol had put her foot down? Maybe she had said either it goes or I go. Maybe Carol was the kind of woman who could make those demands without repercussion. He stood in front of the wall opposite the door where his mother’s painting of the Sunflowers used to hang.

  She would suddenly stop in front of that painting, and whatever she was saying or doing at that precise moment came to an abrupt halt in the presence of the color yellow. It was her solace. Her inspiration and confessional.

  One afternoon, not long after Michael had come to live in Oxford, they came back to the house together and it was the first time his mother, Dora, and Michael had met. He remembered how charmed they were by one another, how engaged they were in conversation almost immediately, how Michael maneuvered her seamlessly into the space his own mother had vacated.

  He remembered how Michael stood in front of the painting of the Sunflowers with his mouth wide open and said, Is that an original, Mrs. Judd?

  And his mother said, No! Good Lord no—how I wish it was! No. I won it in a raffle.

  I was just going to say that had it been an original, then it might be of considerable value.

  His mother stared at him and said, How funny you are.

  She brought sandwiches in from the kitchen and placed the plate down in front of them and said, D’you know who painted it?

  Van Gogh, said Michael.

  Dora looked at her son and laughed. You told him.

  I didn’t! he protested.

  He didn’t, said Michael. I know quite a lot.

  Eat, she said, and the boys reached for the plate.

  He cut his ear off, said Michael.

  That’s right, said Dora.

  With a razor, said Michael.

  Why’d he do that? asked Ellis.

  Who knows? said his mother.

  Madness, said Michael.

  You don’t say? said Ellis.

  I would’ve cut off something more discreet, said Michael. Like a toe.

  All right, all right, said Dora. Enough now. D’you know where van Gogh came from, Michael?

  Yes. Holland. Same as Vermeer.

  See—he really does know a lot, said Ellis.

  You’re right, said Dora. Holland. And the colors he was familiar with there were earth colors, dark colors, you know, browns and grays. Dark greens. And the light was like here, flat and uninspiring. And he wrote to his brother Theo that he had a great desire to go south—to Provence in France, that is—to search for something different, a different way of painting. To become a better artist.

  I like to imagine how it would have been for him, stepping out of the train station at Arles into such an intense yellow light. It changed him. How could it not? How could it not change anyone?

  Would you like to go south, Mrs. Judd? asked Michael.

  And his mother laughed and said, I’d like to go anywhere!

  Where’s Arles? said Ellis.

  Shall we see, said his mother, and she went to the dresser and pulled out an atlas.

  The pages fell open heavily at North America, and a cloud of dust rose. Ellis leaned forward as countries and continents and oceans flicked by. His mother slowed at Europe, stopped at France.

  Here we are, she said. Near Avignon. Saint-Rémy and Arles. That’s where he painted. He searched for light and sun, and found both. And he did what he set out to do. Painted using primary colors, and their complements, too.

  What’s a complement? Ellis asked.

  Complementing colors are ones that make the other stand out. Like blue and orange, said his mother, as if reciting off the page. />
  Like me and Ellis, said Michael.

  Yes, she smiled. Like you two. And primary colors are?

  Yellow, blue and red, said Ellis.

  That’s it, said Dora.

  And the composites are orange, green and purple, said Michael.

  Bingo! said Dora. So who wants cake?

  We haven’t got to the Sunflowers yet, said Michael.

  No, we haven’t, she said. You’re right. OK, so Vincent hoped to set up an artists’ studio down there in the South because he was keen to have friends and like-minded people around him.

  I think he was probably lonely, said Michael. What with the ear thing and the darkness.

  I think he was, too, said Dora. 1888 was the year, and he was waiting for another artist to join him, a man called Paul Gauguin. People say that, in all probability, he painted the Sunflowers as decoration for Gauguin’s room. Did lots of versions of them too, not just this. It’s a lovely thought, though, isn’t it? Some people say it’s not true but I like to think it is. Painting flowers as a sign of friendship and welcome. Men and boys should be capable of beautiful things. Never forget that, you two, she said, and she disappeared into the kitchen.

  They listened to the sound of a cake being brought to a plate, a cutlery drawer opened, Dora’s happiness in a song.

  And look how he painted! said Dora, suddenly propelled back into the room by a new thought. Look at the brushstrokes, you can see them. Thick and robust. Whoever copied this, copied his style too because he liked to paint fast, as if he was in the grip of something. And when it all comes together—the light, the color, the passion, it’s—

  The sound of a key in the lock made her fall silent. His father strode past them into the kitchen. He said nothing but made noise. Kettle heavy on the stove, cups, drawers opening, banging shut.

  I’m out tonight, said his father.

  Fine, said Dora, and she watched him leave the room with a mug of tea.

  And when it all comes together? asked Ellis.