by Sarah Winman
Work?
Not the same. I’m still on nights and it messes with my head. I don’t know how you did it, Ell.
I know.
You’re not coming back, are you?
No.
Fuck it, Ell. You let me down. I should’ve heard it from you, not from that fucking twat Glynn. You have to do better with people.
I’ll do better.
It’s no fun being your friend. Jesus.
And I’m keeping your tools, he added.
Ellis smiled. You should. Garvy gave them to me, I give them to you. It’s continuity, right?
What are you going to do?
I don’t know yet, said Ellis.
You should get away.
You reckon?
Yeah. Take a gap year.
Ellis laughed. OK.
Billy? said Dan, quietly.
I know. We’ve gotta go.
Yeah, yeah. Go.
Billy took out a pen and quickly scribbled on a scrap of paper. There’s my number, he said. Call me sometime.
I will, said Ellis.
They left in opposite directions. Ellis was almost at the gate when Billy shouted out his name. He turned. There he was with his arm raised high. Follow the Yellow Brick Road, Ell!
* * *
• • •
FOLLOW, FOLLOW, FOLLOW, FOLLOW, Annie and Michael sang arm in arm along Hill Top Road. June 1978. Two weeks before the wedding. Michael had organized the stag and hen and had merged them into one. Travel light, he’d said. Flip-flops, shorts, that type of thing. Ellis watched them up ahead. The doors to Mabel’s van were open and Michael had unfolded a large map that the breeze was lifting. He heard Annie ask, So where are we going, Mikey?
Not telling, he said, and he refolded the map and threw it under the seat. All aboard, please, he said. Last one in’s a sissy.
Ellis jumped into the back, last.
Sissy, they said.
Music, please, copilot, said Michael.
Annie bent down and put the cassette player on her lap. Michael handed her a tape. “Road Trip Mix” on the label. She put the tape into the machine and pressed play: “Heroes,” David Bowie. They screamed. They wound down the windows and sang out loud into summer dusk as the familiar roads of Headington slipped away behind them. Michael accelerated onto the A40, and the old van shook with effort and weight.
Through Eynsham, Burford, Northleach.
They listened to Blondie, Barry White, Donna Summer.
Through Bourton on the Water, Stow on the Wold.
They listened to Abba.
In the middle of “Dancing Queen,” the van changed direction but Ellis didn’t say anything. He leaned forward and put his hands on Michael’s shoulders. And during “Take a Chance on Me,” he did something unusual and sang the solo whenever Agnetha someone sang the solo. At the end of the song, he said, Garvy taught me that.
And they cried, Garvy! Garvy! Garvy! and the old van shook as if it was laughing.
The sky was losing light and Ellis noticed Michael glance at his watch. Soon the recognizable cityscape of home came back upon them.
Mikey? said Annie.
Mikey looked at her and grinned.
They returned through Summertown, through St. Giles. Don’t say a word, he said, and they obeyed. Looked out at the University buildings, illuminated and grand, at the pubs with students congregating outside.
Michael pulled up in Magdalen Road. They followed him into the shop and through to the back. The kitchen was dark and silent and Michael opened the back door. They walked out into a garden lit by scores of candles masquerading as stars. And in the middle of this constellation, two tents side by side, and behind the tents a large paddling pool where a lone boat floated with a tealight on its hull. It was simple, it was daft, it was beautiful, it was Michael.
Let me show you to your room, he said, and he walked them to the larger tent. Inside were sleeping bags zipped together. May I suggest a swim in the lake tomorrow? he said. Weather permitting, of course.
They changed immediately into denim cutoffs and flip-flops. The evening was cool, so jumpers hid T-shirts and Ellis built a fire in a ring of bricks. They all turned to look as the back door opened.
Ah, said Michael. Here comes the gypsy of the old fen, the Lighter of Lights.
What’s that? said Mabel, holding a bottle of champagne.
The deaf gypsy of the old fen, said Michael.
Go on with you, she said, and she opened the champagne, which took a while, and Ellis handed around mugs stained with tea and they drank from these mugs and they toasted three times.
To you two! said Michael.
To us! said Annie.
For nothing to change, said Ellis.
And that was the night Michael ran across the road to the Italian restaurant and brought back plates of spaghetti vongole, which no one had ever tasted before. A bottle of red wine, too, Chianti Ruffino in a basket. This is fancy, said Mabel.
The next morning, he and Annie awoke to the sound of rain. They dozed and huddled close as the damp crept in. They heard the sound of the back door open, flip-flops running across the grass.
Knock knock, said Michael. Coffee! And he tugged the zip down and his beaming face filled the space.
Look how handsome he is, said Annie.
It’s unbearable, said Ellis.
Budge up, said Michael, water dripping down his forehead. One cappuccino and two espressos, he said. The Italian pastries in his pocket, miraculously dry.
They settled down to a morning of Scrabble, speeding up the game with double points for dirty words, which Ellis won. Lunchtime, the gypsy of the old fen came out with sausage sandwiches, and afterward the clouds broke up and the sun cast hazy rays toward the earth and the tents began to steam. Annie helped Mabel off with her shoes, and together they went for a paddle, and Mabel said, All this, and we’re still in Oxford.
I’m going to light the candles again tonight, said Ellis.
Do it, said Michael.
And when light fell, the constellations flickered, and Ellis sat in the pool with a wooden boat rocking by his foot. The boat capsized when Annie and Michael got into the water.
I don’t ever want to settle, said Ellis, looking from one to the other.
I won’t let you settle, said Annie.
And I won’t let you settle, and Michael handed him a mug of champagne.
Ellis drank. Where are we again? he said, looking around.
Greece, said Annie. An island called Skyros.
The fishing boats are coming in, said Michael. Look. You can see their lights coming to shore.
So what’s the plan for tomorrow? said Ellis.
More of the same, said Annie. Stay on the beach. Maybe a cycle around the island, later. We don’t want to overdo it, do we? We’ve got so much time.
* * *
• • •
IT WAS MAY DAY, and students still had flowers in their hair. Ellis’s cast was off and he cycled through town and down St. Aldate’s to the river. The sun had come out for the first time that afternoon and the towpath was busy.
He turned off into Long Bridges where the river was still, where an occasional breeze rippled the surface when he wasn’t looking. He moved away from the bridge toward the concrete bank hidden by a thick hedge of brambles, and there he undressed. He was shy at first. He sat on the side with his feet in the water and his hands in his lap. A shout from a rowing cox the other side of the trees, and the thump of blades slicing the river was the sound of Oxford in spring. The fleeting glimmer of bikes speeding along the path to his left. He slipped into the cold water and his nakedness felt electrifying. Mud squeezed between his toes, and he half-expected to feel the familiar flicker of minnows around his ankles as he used to do. He swam in the wake of a mallar
d and felt the pleasure of the sun breathing hard on his arm. As he swam, a memory came to him. The last summer with his mother, it would have been. He could see her again, lying among the crowds on the opposite bank, and she was laughing. She had just asked Michael what book he was reading and he held it up and said, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. He said they were doing the American Civil War at school and they had to present something to class about Abraham Lincoln. He had chosen to do a poem about Lincoln’s death. It wasn’t easy, he said. And the book had been banned, once, on account of its sexual content.
That’s what had set his mother off laughing. Sexual content? she said. Did Mrs. Gordon at the library tell you that?
She’s a liberal educationist, he said.
Really? A liberal in Cowley? And pigs might fly.
It’s a poem about grief, he said.
Grief? she repeated. And then she said, Are they ready for you, Michael?
For my recital?
No, she said. Are they ready for you? Is the world ready for you?
He smiled and said, I’m not sure, and he began to read the poem out loud to her, hitting the last word of every sentence, to make sure she heard the rhyme.
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring . . .
And Ellis remembered thinking he would never meet anyone like him again, and in that acknowledgment, he knew, was love. He could see his mother concentrating on Michael’s words, how enraptured she was. And when he stopped, she bent down and kissed him on the head and said, Thank you. Because everything she held on to and everything she believed in came together in that unexpected moment. The simple belief that men and boys were capable of beautiful things.
His mother stood up and all eyes were upon her. She walked down to the river and climbed down the steps until she was mid-waist in water. Michael ran after her and said, Dora! Pretend to save me from drowning, and he jumped in and swam out to the middle of the pond with his arms and legs kicking and flailing. And there he waited for her, ignoring the laughter that came from the side. And his mother did it. She swam over to him and silenced people’s ridicule. She calmed him, told him not to panic, and she reached under his arms and gently pulled him the length of the pond through dappled light and ripples. And all the way, Michael quoted,
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells . . .
Ellis lifted himself out of the water and sat on the side. He covered his lap with a T-shirt, conscious of the possible appearance of children, and he dried off in the sun. He closed his eyes and his body softened. He wondered again why he hadn’t gone to the talk with them that long-ago evening. And he didn’t push the thought away as he usually did, but he stayed with it, listened to it because it couldn’t hurt him today, not there.
It was a book talk, that’s all, about what? He still couldn’t remember. They hadn’t even stayed for the duration, that’s why they were found out near Binsey. Annie loved to drive out there, that’s how he knew it was her idea and not Michael’s. Oh, Annie. Bad idea. Bad.
He remembered how the floorboards had just been delivered and he sat out in the garden with a beer, looking up at the sky, noticing its stillness, thinking how beautiful it would have been to be in a plane right then, the three of them again, heading toward a new horizon. He remembered music that night—Chet Baker, trumpet not vocals—and he remembered thinking how lucky he was to love them. That he should’ve had such a thought used to wake him up in a sweat.
That was the world he inhabited between the time of it happening and the time of him knowing. A brief window, not yet shattered, when music still stirred, when beer still tasted good, when dreams could still be hatched at the sight of a plane careering across a perfect summer sky.
The doorbell rang and he thought it was them, but it couldn’t have been them, could it? Because they each had a key. He opened the door and the policemen seemed too young to bring bad news, but they did. They walked him into the front room, where time evaporated. He thought he’d blacked out, but he hadn’t. It was life as he knew it shutting down.
They drove him to the hospital. There were no sirens or flashing lights, there was no hurry because it was all over. Annie looked peaceful. A bruise around her temple, stupid really, that that’s all it took. And when he told the nurse he was ready to see Michael she said that the doctor would be along in a minute. He sat and waited in the corridor with the policemen. They got him a cup of tea and a Kit Kat.
The doctor led him to an empty room where he told him Michael had been taken to the morgue. Ellis said, Why? Is that normal? And the doctor said, Under the circumstances it’s normal. What circumstances? said Ellis.
We found a cluster of lesions down his right side. Kaposi—
—I know what they’re called, said Ellis.
Michael had AIDS, he said.
I don’t think so, said Ellis, and he reached for a cigarette but the fucking doctor told him he couldn’t. He would’ve told me, he said.
He walked out into the night and he wanted to speak to someone but there was no one left. His father and Carol were waiting for him at the front gate. Talk to me, Carol kept saying. Talk to me. But he never did.
He scattered Michael’s ashes down by his favorite stretch of river, as per instructions. He was alone. The wind bit hard across the meadow. It was the end of summer.
* * *
• • •
DUSK WAS FALLING. Ellis sat out in the garden under a blue sky streaked with gold and lilac. Jazz played from next door. The students had borrowed his collection of Bill Evans, and they were cooking. The kitchen door was open and he could hear the clash of pans, beer bottles being opened, and the murmur of a recipe. He liked to listen to them, he had grown fond of their ways.
He felt cold after the swim. He hadn’t yet showered and he went back inside to get a jumper. It was on the armchair by the fire, and he put it on immediately. He stopped in front of his mother’s painting and wondered, as he so often did, what she’d been looking for. He found the painting peaceful, so could it have been as simple as that? Peace? He didn’t think so, but some mornings, when light fell on the canvas, the yellow did something to his head. Woke him up, made him feel brighter. Was that it, Mum? Was it? He turned round and caught his foot on the cardboard box he’d brought back from his father’s. He knelt down. When? he said to himself. If not now, then when?
He tore the tape away from the top and the brief glimpse of a shirt made him draw breath. He picked up the box and took it outside to the bench. He came back and grabbed a half-opened bottle of wine from the fridge and a glass that lived on the draining board. He sat in the garden and waited for his nerves to settle.
He had no idea what he’d kept or what he’d jettisoned all those years ago. What he never forgot, though, was his shock at how little Michael had owned. One chair. A radio. A few books. His flat was a lonely space or a clever space. Minimalist to the extreme. It was a place of contemplation not distraction. A place of thought.
He lifted the clothes from the box and placed them on his lap. The pale blue T-shirt he and Annie got him from New York, the neckline frayed because he never took it off. Ellis held it up to his nose and didn’t know what to expect, the only smell was a faint trace of washing powder lifting the must. A white linen shirt, a navy cashmere sweater, miraculously untouched by moths. A striped Breton top wrapped around a copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. On the inside cover “The Property of Cowley Library” had been crossed out and replaced with the name “Michael Wright.”
Across the fence, “My Foolish Heart” played for the second time that evening. Ellis poured out the wine and drank.
From the box, he brought out a large envel
ope that he emptied beside him. A mix of ephemera from a drawer, that’s what it looked like. Torn-off images from magazines, a crumpled black-and-white photograph of him and Michael caught off guard at a bar in France looking sun-bronzed, nineteen? and rightfully invincible.
Another photo, this one of him and Annie on their wedding day, staring at clouds of confetti as if it was cherry blossom instead. An invitation to an art opening in Suffolk—Landscapes by Gerrard Douglas. A color photograph of Mabel and Mrs. Khan outside the shop, the day Mrs. Khan came to work there. Testament to a rare friendship that spanned nearly thirty years. They are wearing brown aprons and their arms are around one another, and they are looking at the camera and smiling. Mabel’s white hair has been set by rollers as it always was, her cheeks colored by the simple joy of living. She would never retire. What’s the point of that? she always used to say. And now postcards—Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Barbara Hepworth. A folded newspaper, an Oxford Times dated 1969. He was about to put it to one side when he realized it was the first article Michael had ever written. It was about Judy Garland.
The day she died, Ellis remembered, Michael played the Carnegie Hall album. He opened the shop door and turned the volume up high. It was his way of honoring her. People came in to listen and Mabel gave out medicinal sherry and something stronger for the regulars. Afterward, Michael begged the Times to let him write something, to get away from making tea and making copy, and in the end he wore them down and they agreed he could write about Garland as long as there was Oxford interest too. And he found someone in Summertown who had been to the concert itself in ’61, and he based the article around that—local interest combined with global phenomena—the lifelong fan who would now transfer her affection to the daughter. It was something, wasn’t it? Center of the Universe, this shop, Michael used to say. Oh, we were. We were.
Another photograph, but this one of a man he didn’t know standing next to an easel. He is wearing shorts and his chest is covered in paint. He is smiling. On the easel is a portrait of Michael. On the back of the photograph the letter “G.”
