Eating Air

by Pauline Melville

  As the train continued Victor’s enlightenment spectacles of reason and optimism suddenly fell off and for a minute he saw the world as a seething panorama of terrifying ogres, potential murderers, random violence, pagan coincidences and meaningless events. He shut his eyes until reality had passed and his normal illusions were back in place.

  *

  Victor dozed off and missed his stop. He had to call Vera and ask her to pick him up at the next station.

  Over coffee at the kitchen table Victor explained the political purpose of his play. Vera, wearing a brightly coloured kimono, sat opposite him in her spectacles, her elbows on the table. She listened with an oppressive intensity that gave the impression that her listening was more important than what Victor was saying. He forgot what he was talking about for a minute and then plunged on:

  ‘The curtain goes up and the play starts with a massive storm and forks of black lightning. Parzival is sheltering in a launderette. You see Parzival is the only non-believer who seeks the grail. It’s a theme that has resonance for the current tensions between Islam and the West.’

  ‘But does this play tell us what people are really like?’ enquired Vera.

  ‘No. Of course not. This is political theatre. It tells people what they’re supposed to be like.’

  ‘What part do you have in mind for me?’

  ‘Kundrie the Monstrous,’ Victor announced with enthusiasm. He grabbed the script from his satchel to read aloud the description of the character. ‘She is fashionably dressed in gold brocade and peacock feathers. Talented. Speaks many languages. She travels on a Hungarian mule. Seductress and sorceress. She is a hailstorm, destructive of happiness. She always brings grief. She has coarse black hair, a dog’s nose, tusked jaws and dirty fingernails.’

  Vera looked doubtful:

  ‘Shouldn’t we be doing a play about asylum seekers?’

  ‘No. This is the fault line of the day. The Parzival legend came out of the Crusades and the conflict with Islam. Its roots go back to Cuchulain, Adonis and Dionysus. They are all various aspects of Dionysus. The title of the play is Dionysus Revisited. You look worried but listen to this. Kundrie also doubles as Venus, goddess of beauty. Really she’s a symbol of American capitalism always re-inventing itself.’

  ‘American capitalism is not doing too well at the moment.’ Vera sounded unconvinced.

  ‘But the play ends with Venus making a long solo speech to the audience explaining the world situation and suggesting a solution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.’

  Vera looked at the script with renewed interest.

  ‘You’re probably right, Victor. These are the issues we should be addressing.’

  Victor jumped to his feet and gave the air a feeble punch. He executed a dance of triumph like a stick insect attempting to tango. Vera stood up:

  ‘Now Victor. Why don’t you take the dog for a walk in the grounds and let me have a quick read of the script then we can talk some more. You go off for a wander. You know we might even get Mark to direct it if he manages to stay over here. He’s been running a touring improvisation theatre in Australia for years.’

  Victor’s heart sank. He had other directors in mind with good commercial track records. Besides, he wanted as little to do with Mark as possible. Vera whistled for the Borzoi which came bounding down the stairs and jumped all over Victor, knocking his coffee cup over with her tail.

  ‘Poor darling.’ Vera ruffled the dog’s ears. ‘She’s got fox-mange. Fox-mange is hugely expensive.’

  Victor walked out on to the wet grass of the garden and tried to shoo the dog away from him in case he contracted some variety of fox-mange himself. He let the animal loose and it bounced off and disappeared through a hedge to dash round in circles in a field. Victor made his way to the barn, went in and shut the door to make sure the dog couldn’t join him. He sat there for a while wondering what had happened to Mark Scobie. There was no sign of him in the house and he hadn’t liked to ask Vera. Now he particularly didn’t want to bring up his name in case Vera pressed the case for Mark to direct the play.

  After half an hour he slipped out of the barn and called the dog who was sniffing at the trunk of a nearby tree. The creature came lolloping over and shook itself, spattering Victor with drops of water. Together they made their way back to Vera in the kitchen.

  Vera got up from the cluttered table and waved the script at him as he came in. She beamed:

  ‘I like it very much. The Royal Court Theatre has been begging me to do something there for a long time. I shall ring them and see if they’re interested.’

  Victor aqua-planed over his anxieties about the play’s director:

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ he said. ‘By the way, I forgot to ask. How’s Alex? Where is he these days?’

  ‘He’s in Sri Lanka with the remnants of the Tamil Tigers. He wanted to do an interview with Hector Rossi – do you remember him? – but I persuaded him against it. Frankly, I thought the Tamil Tigers would be a safer bet.’

  With much embracing and mutual congratulations the two said goodbye. Victor waited for the train back to London in a state of hopeful perturbation.

  On the train Victor studied the man sitting opposite him and envied him for not being, as Victor himself was, burdened with the worries of state. There was nothing distinctive about him. He looked to Victor like any average man from some office somewhere. Victor stared at his red tie and white poplin shirt. Here was a man, eating a sandwich, reading the paper, wiping his mouth; a man who was doubtless kind; a man preoccupied with family life who was not gnawed to the bone like Victor by political ideology. Victor felt the tears come into his eyes. The ease with which he was becoming tearful these days was a bit of a problem. Could he be wrong? Was he, Victor, so completely out of step with the rest of the nation?

  When the train drew in to Victoria the two men got off and John Buckley took a taxi to the MI5 offices for his meeting with the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, leaving Victor to make his way home by tube to Camden Town.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Buckley sat across the desk from Sir Peter Gray, head of the Secret Intelligence Service. Gray was speaking. As he listened, Buckley tried a little experiment. Every now and then he looked away and tried to recall Gray’s features. They always escaped him. It was a forgettable face; an indoor face unmarked by any strongly held belief or crisis of conscience. It was a face that had slid through school and into the prefecture; a face that had bent over university examination papers and then glided effortlessly into the civil service.

  ‘We’ve lost credibility,’ Gray was saying. ‘You only have to read the newspapers and join the dots to see that. Nobody’s forgiven us for the intelligence fiasco on Iraq. The tube bombings didn’t help and we had no prior intelligence on the Glasgow airport incident. I’m worried too that there’s going to be a change of direction with the new Obama administration. Just when things were going our way with ID cards, secret police cooperation throughout Europe and so on. We want to get all that legislation through without there being an uproar over civil liberties and that’s always easier to do after an event of some sort. It helps push the government in a certain direction. There are votes in anxiety. In some ways an attack would be useful as long as we could either pre-empt it or immediately pick up the perpetrators.’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘We need to create an enemy and then defeat it. Something on a reasonably big scale.’

  ‘Haven’t we got enough enemies without needing to invent them?’

  ‘Sure. I’m not underestimating those threats. We wouldn’t take our eye off the ball. But we’re not in control of their timing. What we need is a propaganda event. Propaganda of the deed as they used to call it.’

  ‘Are you talking about a few minor explosions somewhere?’

  ‘Something bigger.’

  Buckley frowned:

  ‘The trouble is that anything big would need experienced operatives from Spec
ial Operations or the military. You’d need someone from the Royal Engineers. They know how to blow up bridges and roads and so on. That’s the problem. Too many people knowing about it. It would be better to persuade one of the already active groups of jihadis or militants to do something but that requires infiltration and that takes time. The whole department is rushing to recruit and train Arabic speakers and young Muslims but we’re nowhere near ready to place agents provocateurs yet.’

  Gray could tell that the idea interested Buckley by the way he was starting to mull over possibilities. He pushed further:

  ‘An attack need not necessarily be here on home turf. It would be useful if something could be proved to have been organised from here – with immediate arrests and so forth. Rather like Hamburg in relation to the Twin Towers. Something would have to happen. Nipping a plot in the bud before anything has taken place doesn’t have the same impact. Perhaps Special Branch might help.’

  ‘Special Branch hate us. They look on us as over-educated pen-pushers. They despise us because we don’t have powers of arrest. The most effective thing would be to “turn” someone already active within a group. Someone who needs money or needs something that we can give them. Someone who is beginning to have doubts about the cause. Or someone that has a secret.’

  ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘I’d have to think about it. There have always been secret agents who turn into revolutionaries and revolutionaries who turn into secret agents. We’ve been keeping an eye on Hector Rossi. He’s been in contact with another old Palestinian activist. They might be planning something – which I rather doubt but you never know. We can have them picked up. Special Branch are quite skilful at making arrests which alarm the public and then quietly letting people go later when there’s no evidence.’

  ‘Well look into the whole thing, would you? And let me know.’

  The two men stood up. The afternoon had grown grey and overcast. Through the plate-glass window a small squat tugboat could be seen emerging from between the rust-red iron stanchions of Vauxhall Bridge. It was the only movement. Otherwise, in the dull light the view of the Houses of Parliament took on the lifeless lines of an austere Victorian engraving.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  ‘I’m dying Ella.’ Alice de Vries looked up at her daughter from the bed. ‘Go and get a bottle of champagne. I’ve had a lovely life. We’ll have a drink.’

  Ella had made a bed up in the small dining room next to the kitchen when her mother could no longer manage the stairs. Alice’s sister Doris came on some nights to keep vigil at the bedside. Death like birth is not a precise art. It was five days since the doctor had said that Alice would not last much longer. Ella brought down a mattress and slept on the floor by her mother’s side.

  The next morning Alice looked at Ella and pulled an ominous face:

  ‘I’ve never been too tired to get up before. Why did I have to go and get old? You’re a good girl to come back.’

  Her hair against the pillow was ragged like white flames around her head. In the kitchen next door the kettle whistled on the gas stove and the frying of sausages and tomatoes made a spluttering noise as Doris poked them round in the pan. Alice grumbled:

  ‘I haven’t got the strength of a louse. Look at me.’ She flicked back the eiderdown to reveal two spindly legs poking out from her winceyette nightie. ‘My shanks have gone to nothing. I’m wasting away. My legs used to be like beer barrels. I’m not going to last much longer, I can feel it. I’m up the creek without a paddle. I’m going tomorrow.’

  But she did not go the next day or the day after. Neighbours came in to say goodbye:

  ‘They haven’t called you yet, then,’ said the woman from next door who dropped in on her way to work.

  ‘Yes they have. But I haven’t gone, that’s what,’ Alice said, lifting her head from the pillow and waving her fingers over the sheet.

  ‘How are you, Alice?’ The postman put his head round the door.

  ‘Just hovering, thank you.’

  It is rare for a woman to flirt on her deathbed but Alice de Vries was an exception. One of her admirers, an old man of eighty-five, arrived carrying a battery-run cassette player. He sat by the bed and fiddled around until he fixed the cassette in the slot. Then he switched it on and played ‘Plaisir d’amour’. She fluttered her eyelashes and smiled at him coyly. Later the old man was seen in tears walking away from the house with the cassette player under his arm.

  Alice managed to swallow a mouthful of tinned salmon which Ella fed to her in bed:

  ‘That’s luxury. I haven’t had tinned salmon since your father died. That tea was lovely. Well, that’s the last tea I’ll ever have. And another thing. Never take any notice of deathbed promises. They’re all a load of rubbish.’

  But it was not her last tea. Several days later she was still there. Ella recognised the look of exasperated impatience that came over her mother’s face.

  ‘I’m a long time dying, aren’t I? Oh come on. Let’s get it over with.’

  Only when the visiting nurse took out Alice’s teeth to moisten her mouth with damp cotton wool did Ella realise that her mother was ancient. Curlicues of old flesh swirled like the curved indented lines on a seashell. Alice’s face seemed made entirely of dizzying whorls, like an ever-moving weather chart with isobars of frowns and smiles and troughs of high pressure or low pressure whenever she raised her eyebrows. The doctor had left Ella a bottle of Oromorph in case Alice was in any distress or pain. The chart of Alice’s face changed abruptly to forecast suspicion as she examined the bottle that Ella held up for her to see:

  ‘The doctor left this for you.’

  ‘That doctor’s trying to poison me,’ she said.

  The next day when Ella bathed her mother’s face there was a movement under the blanket at the other end of the bed.

  ‘I’m woggling my foot to see if I’m still alive,’ she said. ‘Yes. I am.’

  When Hector phoned Ella whispered down the phone in the front room:

  ‘No. I can’t leave. Sorry. Can’t really talk now. I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘There’s a lot of troubles in the world,’ said Alice. ‘I’m finished. Ooh what a shame. And there’s so much to do in the world. I don’t want to leave all this, you know.’

  ‘All what?’

  ‘All this washing up and wiping down.’

  Sometimes Ella held the bowl while she vomited. The vomit was dark cherry-red. While she was still able to get out of bed Ella and Doris helped her on to the commode. The days passed. Alice became progressively weaker but continued to examine her own death.

  ‘Why is this taking so long? What time is it? Nine o’clock? Silly doctor. He said I hadn’t got long. I thought I’d be dead by five.’ Then her mind wandered and she asked: ‘How do you spell artichoke?’

  Once when Ella bent over the pillow to hear what she was saying a small wizened fist came from below the sheet to give her a playful punch on the nose. Alice’s younger sister Iris came down from London to say goodbye.

  ‘I wish I wasn’t going,’ said Alice.

  ‘Going where?’ asked Iris.

  ‘Berserk,’ answered Alice. And then later she touched the wallpaper beside her with her work-worn hands and fingered the yellow and gold bedspread. ‘I don’t want to leave all this.’ She examined her hands. ‘Look at these hands. More wear and tear than a pig’s nose.’

  One night at two o’clock Ella called the local nursing team because she could no longer tell whether or not her mother was breathing. A nurse arrived with a doctor. The doctor lifted Alice’s nightie and gave her a final injection:

  ‘Your daughter is here with you,’ he said.

  ‘Wonderful. Lovely. You should see her dance,’ murmured Alice.

  Ella was left on her own. She held her mother’s hand. Alice was still warm but not moving. After a few hours Ella called the medical team again:

  ‘I think she’s dead. I can’t tell.’ She whispered in case her mother could still
hear.

  When the nurse came back she closed Alice’s eyes. In death Alice looked slightly windswept and hoydenish as if she were resting after a struggle or as if she were on a boat at sea, never looking back, setting off on some new journey having left everything else behind.

  It was four o’clock in the morning. Ella was on her own. Her mother’s death had seemed so natural that she did not shed any tears. Two hours later and before daylight a black windowless van pulled up outside the house.

  ‘We’re going to put mother in a black plastic bag now. Perhaps you’d like to wait upstairs.’ The lugubrious man from the funeral parlour clasped his hands together and waited for her to leave. Ella climbed the narrow stairs. When she came down again the rumpled bed was empty with only an indentation where her mother had lain.

  Ella watched the windowless van draw away.

  Minutes after the van left there was a knock on the door and Donny stood there. He was wearing a tweed suit and a black raincoat. His hair and moustache were silver. His face was set in its own folds of tragedy. His embrace was strong and reassuring. They sat together drinking teas as if they had never been parted.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ Ella said. Donny looked surprised.

  ‘Of course I would come.’