Eating Air

by Pauline Melville

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  On the day of her mother’s funeral Ella helped her aunts to make sandwiches for the guests. Ella could hear Donny’s voice in the kitchen, his voice so much deeper than the others. At eleven o’clock the hearse arrived like a shocking and unwanted guest that everyone had secretly hoped would never turn up. Ella sat in the first car with Donny. Their car followed her mother’s hearse through the lanes of Kent. It was as if Alice was leading them on one last adventure through the pale misty fields sown with blue-green cabbages. In the church at the crematorium Donny stood next to Ella holding the funeral programme. For the first time she realised what a tuneful voice he had.

  When all the guests had left after the funeral tea Ella slipped out of her black dress and walked about in the flame-coloured petticoat she had brought back with her from Brazil. She and Donny cleared everything away. After they had finished Donny opened a bottle of wine. He sat in Alice’s old armchair and Ella sat on the floor beside him and leaned her head against his knee.

  ‘You can take anything of mum’s that you think you might need.’

  Donny looked around the room and shook his head:

  ‘I don’t need anything,’ he mused. ‘All these material things that float past you during your life, the houses, the rooms that pass over you, the paintings on the wall that fly by – it’s like walking through a train. I don’t need anything. To love nobody and to be loved by nobody, that’s my freedom.’

  Donny had spent some years working on the fishing trawlers off the Portuguese coast before going back to the Norwegian fjords and then over to Iceland. Something about one of the cartoon posters on the wall reminded him of Rabelais. He started to talk about Gargantua and Pantagruel.

  Ella twisted around on the floor to look up at him:

  ‘I’m always surprised at what you know.’

  ‘I read on board ship when I get the chance. What was that piece you read at the funeral?’

  ‘It was from The Tempest. Mum saw me dance the part of Ariel once. I thought that bit was right for her funeral:

  … We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on, and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.

  ‘How did the piece begin again?’ asked Donny.

  ‘It started with “Our revels now are ended.”’ Ella jumped up and fetched the volume of Shakespeare. She found the passage. Donny took the book and read it out loud slowly and with panache, savouring each word. Then he flicked through and came across another passage and read that:

  … But this rough magic

  I here abjure, and, when I have required

  Some heavenly music, which even now I do,

  To work mine end upon their senses that

  This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,

  Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

  And deeper than did ever plummet sound

  I’ll drown my book.

  Donny leaned back in the chair fingering his silver moustache:

  ‘That word “plummet” – did you know that the same ways of measuring depth with a plumb-line are still used today? The word comes from the Latin. That’s where we get the word plumber.’

  He looked through the book again and chose one of Shylock’s speeches to read out loud. He read slowly with great gusto and relish – like a pirate. Then he put the book down:

  ‘Well, now my revels are just beginning. Where’s her record player?’ He looked through some of the records that Alice had collected over the years and picked out an old Beatles album.

  ‘Don’t put it on too loud. What will the neighbours think? After a funeral?’

  He turned it down a little. But after a short while Ella could not resist the music and suddenly jumped up and danced a few steps. The room was small and crowded with furniture. She loosened her hair, let it tumble to her shoulders and raised her arms over her head. She wore a lacy black vest and the orange petticoat flared out with the movement of her hips as she wove her way around the chairs and side-tables and the sofa.

  ‘Mum would love us doing this,’ she said. ‘But there’s not enough room.’

  Donny’s green hazel eyes gleamed with appreciation:

  ‘I love you dancing.’

  For a moment a shadow came over her heart as she thought of Hector. She stopped and went over to lie in Donny’s arms:

  ‘Why did you never come and see me performing then?’

  ‘I can’t bear to be trapped in the middle of a row of seats.’

  ‘I’ve been asked to be part of a gala charity performance at Covent Garden. They want me to do a short piece which I danced in Brazil. It’s just a matinee. I’d like you to come. There might be drinks at someone’s house afterwards.’

  ‘Well I might come there then, not to the show, just for the wine. Unless it’s at one of those middle-class places where you get cut off at the knees by a glass fucking coffee table.’

  Ella giggled as she lay in his arms and stroked his forehead. There was that odd compulsion to tell him about Hector. After a pause she said:

  ‘Do you remember somebody called Hector from when we lived in Bethnal Green?’

  Donny anticipated her next words:

  ‘Stop. I don’t want to know.’

  She was unable to resist:

  ‘He lives in Kent now. Not far away.’

  ‘So what?’

  After a while she said:

  ‘What makes you so wild and impossible?’

  ‘I’m not wild. I’m just honest.’

  ‘You are wild. Mr Undecidable – neither one thing nor the other. You’re always contrary.’

  ‘No I’m not.’ Donny became thoughtful. ‘It’s when you give people up that you become wild. Family and so on. You’re not living then. You’re out of it. When the responsibility goes – you’re free to do anything you want. You’re free from sadness and happiness. It’s then that you become really dangerous.’

  It was half past four in the morning by the time they finished talking and went to bed.

  *

  A week later they were watching television when Donny leaned forward to look more carefully at the screen:

  ‘Isn’t that what’s-her-face?’

  The screen showed the crowd at a film premiere waiting outside a London cinema to see the celebrities walk down the red carpet. Paparazzi and press cameras formed a host of poke-bonneted old women, black-clad gossips huddling together alongside the red carpet, their non-stop tongues clicking and flashing ferociously as they shrieked towards each newly arrived victim. Klieg lighting drained the scene of life.

  Vera Scobie stood next to Alex on the red carpet giving a practised smile to the cameras. She had aged considerably.

  ‘Vera Scobie, you mean.’

  ‘No.’ Donny was pointing to the woman standing behind Vera Scobie. The woman with blonde curls, wearing a low-cut dress, who stood in front of the cameras, looked charmingly rueful. She tossed her head back in a way that showed off, with seeming innocence, her cheekbones.

  ‘My god. You’re right. I think it’s Hetty Moran.’ Ella peered more closely at the television and stared at the image of Hetty who, after all these years, still managed to gain magical access to any apparently sealed world. The camera moved on. Ella laughed:

  ‘Goodness. That’s a surprise. It looks like her. I wonder what she’s doing these days.’

  Donny switched off the television, stood up and stretched.

  ‘I’m going to bed. I don’t want any more of the past catching up with me. Never did like the past. It leaps at your throat like a mad dog.’

  Ella stayed curled up on the sofa until she began to grow cold. She had never spoken to anyone about the car crash and the police driver’s death. It remained a buried secret. She looked at Donny’s shoes thrown down by the sofa. After a while she switched the lights off and went upstairs.

  Chapter Fifty

  On the night of the funeral Hector had driven on impulse over to Ella’s mother’
s cottage to offer his condolences. Through the window he saw Donny’s silver hair gleam in the lamplight. Donny was tapping the arm of the chair with his hand in time to the music as Ella spun around the room. Hector watched them from outside for ten minutes and then drove home. He was surprised at how the sight affected him with a mixture of anger and confused pride. The bond between Donny and Ella looked unbreakable, as if it had its roots in another world.

  At home his resolve stiffened. There was no point in continuing to see Ella. The relationship could go nowhere. Affairs of the heart were enfeebling. That great spreading weakness called love had thrown him off track. It was a distraction from the serious political activity he had been missing. He took a decision. He telephoned Mark:

  ‘Can we meet? I don’t want to speak on the phone.’

  The two men met in a pub in Folkestone. Mark ordered the drinks and waited by the bar. Hector noticed that the pale waxen complexion of Mark’s younger days had been replaced by a coarser pastiness, pockmarked by an adult bout of chickenpox. From habit Hector checked that they were out of range of the CCTV camera.

  ‘What exactly do you need me to do? I might not be able to do much. My daughter is still a priority. I can’t leave her.’

  Mark seemed centred and relaxed:

  ‘We’re not asking much. We need your Dungeness fisherman to take us across the Channel. That’s all. I have a false passport so I’m fine but the others don’t want to use their passports.’

  ‘I can organise the fisherman if you give me the money. If you want to avoid standard surveillance I suggest you travel to Dungeness on the children’s light railway. No-one would be expecting you to use that.’

  ‘Good idea. Thanks.’ Mark sipped a beer. ‘What decided you? I really thought you’d given up.’

  Hector frowned:

  ‘I don’t know. Conscience. The bankers make me sick. Governments worldwide rush to save them. I can’t wait for a mass movement. I’ll be dead before one coalesces in this country. Seeing Khaled recently too – that’s reminded me of Lebanon, Gaza and this country’s complicity in everything – torture and so on. The political parties are all full of tossers. I’m forced back to tiny individual direct actions. Crazy maybe but what else is there to do? Who is this banker you’re targeting?’

  ‘A man called Butterfield. The bank has been a major player in Holland’s colonial past. It was founded on the proceeds of slavery. It’s a symbolic act really. On the other hand if the banking system is wobbling we might as well give it a push.’

  ‘Let me know when the time comes and I’ll meet you in Dungeness.’

  The two men grasped hands in affirmation of something they thought had been lost.

  Hector drove home with a sense of renewed empowerment. There was that old excitement of the hunt. The outlines of houses and the cars on the road around him seemed preternaturally bright and clear as he put his foot down on the accelerator and sped along the M20.

  *

  That night he phoned Khaled in Preston. Khaled sounded tired and disappointed:

  ‘I’ve come to a dead end. I don’t think I’m going to find this half-brother of mine.’

  He’d traced his brother’s mother to a small terraced house with a storm porch. An elderly man wearing a raffish orange waistcoat let him in. Khaled’s first glimpse through the open door was of a pair of feet in slippers, a lap covered in a rug and then there she was, sitting in a wheelchair under the window, an old shy Highland woman with a magnificent coif of white hair swept back from a long haunted face. Khaled went over to shake her hand. She was humble but dignified and slightly overawed by her visitor.

  ‘What shall I say to him?’ Khaled heard the anxiety in her voice as she turned to her husband.

  ‘He’s very nice. You’ll find something to say.’

  She gestured towards the bed:

  ‘You want to know about my first husband – your father. Sit down there on the bed.’

  Khaled sat down as she continued:

  ‘Well he was tall and he was arrogant. He was older than me and he never told us about you. We never knew he had another son.’ She leaned over to hand Khaled some photographs. ‘He’s deid the noo and I’m married to Eric here so I don’t suppose it all matters. There’s a lot of your people in Preston now, Pakistanis. We’re on the way out and you’re on the way in.’

  ‘I’m Palestinian.’

  ‘Oh well. It all begins with “p”, I suppose.’

  Khaled studied the photographs of his father taken in North Africa, a European stranger in military uniform:

  ‘I believe I have a half-brother.’

  ‘Och aye. I gave birth to ma own grave-digger there. Dinnae ask me where he is. I dinnae ken.’

  ‘Can you tell me anything about him? Perhaps I could track him down.’

  ‘We called him Donny to distinguish him from his dad. I had him in Edinburgh.’

  Khaled listened carefully as Mrs McLeod told the story of his half-brother.

  *

  His birth had been marked by a fall of snow.

  The maternity hospital in Edinburgh was a draughty chilly place. The soup they gave her was grey like a bowl of clouds. They had put her in a side room on her own after he was born because of the amount of blood she lost. She lay high on the hospital bed under starched white sheets. For the first two days she felt dangerously well and excited as if she were flying or the bed were airborne. Gradually she came down to earth.

  On the third morning she woke and noticed a bright diffuse light all around her. It was so noticeable that she pulled the sheet over her head to see if it was still visible. It was. Even with her head under the bedclothes there was a luminosity in the room. For a few moments she thought she was phosphorescent.

  When she finally pulled down the sheet and looked towards the window she realised that it was snowing outside. A bone of frost lay in the bottom right-hand corner of each window pane. The room was freezing. Her body was warm beneath the covers but her face was exposed to the icy chill of the unheated room. The baby lay in his cot in the corner. Outside, only a few hundred yards away, a blizzard of snow had settled over the green mounds of Arthur’s Seat. Now the snow was falling in earnest, mummifying everything in huge clumsy bandages. She raised herself up on her elbow and looked out of the window. As she looked something odd happened. The whole of Arthur’s Seat appeared to break up, the outline became ragged as if the hill had exploded and then settled back to its old shape. She looked away and blinked but when she looked up it happened again. Gingerly, she lowered her feet onto the cold linoleum and shuffled over to the window. She pushed back her auburn hair and put her hands up to feel her tender milky breasts.

  When a nurse came in she asked her about it.

  ‘That’s just the white gannets blown off course from the Bass Rock,’ said the nurse. ‘The flock takes off and settles back down again. It looks like it’s an explosion.’

  Pale light from the snow threw the shadow of the cot rails onto the wall making a huge cage around the baby, which was squalling like a bagpipe gone berserk in its cot.

  ‘Oh, shut up, shut up,’ she said, lifting the infant now rigid with fury into her arms and trying to soothe him. But his body arched back as though from the very first he was trying to launch himself out of her arms.

  Khaled listened carefully to the white-haired old lady who spoke now in tones of accusatory grief.

  ‘I blame his grandmother. Filling his head with all those stories about the army. We were staying with her in Lochinver. Donny was eight. He was playing outside. Then in the silence of the mountains came this buzzing noise like an invasion of bees. The noise grew louder until it filled the whole sky. Around the curve of the mountain came this platoon of Seaforth Highlanders marching to that snarling sound of the bagpipes. I’d always tried to keep him away from the army. Ma two brothers were killed in the war. So was ma father. But as soon as he saw them Donny said, “I don’t want to be a civilian. I want to be a soldier.” And he
never changed his mind. He joined up as a boy soldier. I saw him once after he left the army and I never saw him again. He just disappeared. We looked everywhere for him but it was nae use.’

  Khaled did not know how to comfort the old woman:

  ‘I’ll do my best to find him.’

  ‘Och. It’s nae use. We’ve been trying for thirty years.’

  Khaled sounded tired and defeated as he relayed all this to Hector. He’d tried various registers of births and deaths without any luck.

  ‘I’m coming back. It was worth a try. I’ll come and say goodbye to you and then I’ll go back to Hamburg. I need to go home now. I’ve been watching the news … the news about Gaza … It’s sickening.’

  Hector could hear the distress in Khaled’s throat that prevented him from finishing the sentence.

  *

  The next morning while Donny was still in bed Ella telephoned to book a rehearsal room in a Folkestone dance studio where she could take up her ballet exercises again. She was looking forward to it. The gala was a benefit performance to raise money for retired dancers. Ella joked that she was one of them and was dancing to raise money for herself. She resumed a regular routine of barre work and exercise which physically refreshed her.

  Donny stayed at home in front of the television with a firm grip on the remote control, flicking backwards and forwards between programmes every few minutes. Ella could tell he was growing restless. One day she came home to find him packing his bags upstairs:

  ‘Are you going away then? Aren’t you going to stay and see me dance?’

  ‘I might come and see you dance but I’m going for a wander first. Give me the theatre ticket anyway. I’ll head towards London. I might walk.’

  ‘Walk to London?’ Ella looked at him in astonishment.

  ‘Yes.’ Then he added with irritation, ‘Don’t keep asking me things. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll walk. Maybe I’ll take a bus.’

  ‘I’ll drop you at the bus station if you like.’

  ‘Don’t bother. I feel like walking. I want to be on foot for a while.’