This was the state Spence was in, the summer before Jake started school, when his mother called and told him Cesf was sick. She was going on vacation to New York. Normally she would leave the cat in the charge of Mrs Meenahan next door, but this time it was too much to ask. Mom couldn’t afford to put him in the vet’s and anyway Cesf would hate that. What did Spence want her to do? The cat was dying, in other words. Spence’s Mom was running out on the old guy and wanted Spence’s permission to take him for the lethal injection. Frankly, he’d have been relieved if she’d done the deed and told him about it afterwards, but he could not make himself say the words she was trying to force him to say.
“Don’t do anything. I’ll come over.”
Spence went home, though the cost of the flight, lowest cattle-truck discount rate he could find, was a blow. He left Jake behind, and arrived, due to fixing the trip with minimum disruption for Anna’s work, the day after his mother had left. He found the house empty. As he was wandering around the yard, calling the cat’s name, half-hoping the demise of his old pal could be put off for another few years, Mrs Meenahan rose like a sounding whale on the other side of the fence, and informed him that Cesf had died in the night.
“Oh, um… What happened?”
“Well, I let myself in this morning and found him lying there, half out of the basket like he’d been trying to rise from his bed and fell back, dead.” She drew herself up, her large body contracting like a reefed sail, her eyes big with the importance of it all. “And you came all the way from England, that’s a real shame. Your Mom always said you really loved that cat.”
Mrs Meenahan was a phenomenon Spence had viewed with horror for many years, one of the genuine post-humans, what you actually get when you blend flesh and blood with instant gratification technology. Her plump fists clutched each other upon the swollen, folded bolster of her breasts. “You must be real upset,” she prompted, gazing into his face. He wondered if he hadn’t better just break down and sob like a baby, so she could feed and be satisfied. He thought, if I were a stranger, I would barely be able to tell them apart…
My Mom is a member of the post-human underclass.
“So, um, what did you do with the remains?”
“I didn’t know what-all to do, so I buried him. I hope I did the right thing.”
She came around and showed him the place, a lump in the grass in the middle of the yard. It must have been a big effort, for such a heavy woman. Spence thanked her profusely and obstinately waited until she went away. Then he knelt and peeled back the lump, and found his cat wrapped in a plastic refuse sack, the blue eyes slitted a little way open, the body stiff and ragged like a piece of roadkill. It was about time. Cesf was twenty years old. What was that Cavafy poem? Those old sticks of furniture must still be knocking around somewhere. Something about parting with your lover for a week, and it turns out to be forever?
The Afternoon Sun, yeah—
He fetched a shovel and dug a respectably deep hole in a flower border, where Mom had planted a few straggly rosebushes. He lined it with grass, went and fetched the blanket from the basket in the kitchen, laid the wrapped corpse in the hole, and shoveled the earth down on top. There you are, old boy. Sleep sound.
When he’d fit the turf that Mrs Meenahan had hacked out into place and cleared all traces of a sick old cat from the house, he sat on the back porch in the heat of the declining day. It was July. The white-walled house was quiet, standing four-square in its disheveled plot. The yard—which in England would be a fine big garden, unaccountably left open to the neighbors’ view—was heavy with the scent of the mock orange blossom that rambled along one boundary. When you’ve lived in Britain, the appearance of a lower-middle-class American burb takes on peculiar contradictions. There’s so much space, and yet the houses look like tatty cardboard boxes… I never want to come here again, he thought. We will keep on coming back unless Mom moves, or until she gets sick and goes into a nursing home and dies, but it will never be a homecoming again. When I step from the plane my heart will sink. He felt adrift, as if he’d lost sight of the bank of the river he’d left, while the other shore was far beyond his reach.
He thought of his long, faithful love for Anna, and of the career with Emerald City that he had abandoned after Lily Rose died. He didn’t want to go back and take the other path, become a hotshot software exec with a closet of suits and a record of infidelities a mile long. No doubt there were people in the world making easy money, and people in the world getting phenomenal supplies of wanton fuck: he didn’t envy them, not much. But he had come to a dead center, where all he knew was that he had lost the way. He realized that the idea of getting deeper into self-publishing filled him with disgust. He hated everything about that stupid scheme: the hustling, the smile-and-a-shoeshine, the bright-eyed failure… Long ago, here in the rank woodlands and empty horizons of Manankee County, Mr Acid at his side, he had solemnly sworn that he would live and be happy and have no other gods, because no other gods are worthy of any sacrifice or reverence. He would be different from anybody else… What had become of those vows? He had fallen from grace.
He wondered if Anna had known he was feeling like this, and was that why she’d instantly accepted that he had to derail their finances for a sick cat. Maybe. He knew she worried, and she wanted him to be happy—
She doesn’t need you.
The words came from nowhere and walked over his grave.
Mrs Meenahan came over at dusk with a dish of tuna casserole and half a gelatinous cherry pie. Spence called his Mom, who didn’t seem too cast down by the sad news. He could have tried to get a standby flight and gone straight home. Instead he stayed on, sleeping in his old room, which was full of boxes and smelled of damp and cat shit, and managed to gain several pounds, between moral cowardice and self-pity, before his mother returned and released him from this hiatus.
He came back from America, and his life felt like grubby, outgrown clothes. One day he was baking bread, one of his favorite househusband chores. Jake ran in, wanting a turn at squeezing the dough. Spence sent him off to wash his hands. He darted away crying “Okay Sir! I love you Sir!”… Spence blew up. Spence flew into a dreadful paddy. Spence yelled and made the baby cry.
They sorted it out. Spence apologized abjectly and explained that he was feeling bad because of Cesf. The bread dough was finished and put to proof. Spence and Jake cuddled together on the good old folded futon couch, recovering. Spence, his chin on Jake’s hair, ran the footage over, and this time managed to catch the spurt of agonizing rage, beat it down, and trace it to its source. I would be no one’s servant and no one’s master. I wanted to be a new creature and here I am, trapped, a Dad with no job. Life dragged me under while I wasn’t looking, and she doesn’t need me any more.
Jake covertly spread his hands and examined them, front and back. Snuggled against the hard warmth of daddy’s front, he felt safe again: but he was still looking for the dirt.
Anna arrived home late one evening to find Spence watching Ramone Holyrod on the tv, the same little color tv they’d bought in Sungai, now equipped with a many-To-many set-top box for access to the networlds. Ramone filled the jewel-clear screen, sprawled over a studio couch, talking a blue streak. “The schlock, the shit-blood-vomit-offal-serial-killer territory…that cover’s blown. Everybody knows it was a mere feeble imitation of the female birthright of extreme physical experience, of the unmatched violence and danger of human parturition—”
“Unmatched among mammals,” remarked Anna judiciously. “I s’pose that’s true.”
“So now we get the New Man novel: wimp out, winsome little lady-boy tales. You know, men don’t want to possess women; that’s the cover story. They want to BE women. We’re seeing them start to be out about that now. Well, okay, if there are men who want to become human, at this late date, I’ll buy it. Let them spend their winter in the reeds.” The pundit burst into a demoniac cackle. “If they come back with tits and bleeding once a month, maybe I
’ll listen.”
“She’s quoting herself,” growled Spence. “That’s all she ever does, winds herself up and lets fly a page or two of the latest opus. I call it incitement to gender violence.”
“I don’t know why you watch this kind of stuff,” said Anna. “It only annoys you.” But the face on the screen drew from her an involuntary smile of greeting. “So that’s Ramone, now. She looks very well, doesn’t she.”
“I think she’s had her breasts reduced. They used to be real sloppy and too big. Remember how she always used to hide them under leathers and layers and droopy shawl-things?”
“Oh no,” said Anna firmly, “They weren’t sloppy.”
He wondered under what precise circumstances had his wife become so certain about the consistency of Ramone Holyrod’s breasts. He wasn’t going to ask.
“I’m going to bed.”
Spence stayed where he was, slumped and glowering.
The first days of that September felt like the last of the wine. The parents struggled to accept their loss, but Jake had started school, and he was vanishing from them. The little boy who had been all their treasure was gone, never to return; and it was cruelly hard. At the end of the month the three of them went to a party held by one of Anna’s colleagues. It was the usual thing: a thirties semi-detached, a pleasant room with glass doors open onto the patio and the garden. Complacently dated music; children under foot; twenty or so adults eating Soil Association Certified barbecue from paper plates and drinking wine from plastic cups. Alice, the woman who was holding the party, introduced Spence, for some reason he didn’t quite catch, to a younger woman in a big dark blue shirt and a narrow white ankle-length skirt. She had red-gold hair, combed smoothly to her shoulders but cut short around her face, reminding him somehow of a Japanese woodcut.
“So, hi, Mer. Is that right, Mer?”
She nodded.
“Is that short for anything?”
“Meret.”
“Huh?” She’d been introduced as an artist, whatever that meant. “Oh, I wonder if that is after the fur teacup guy. Meret Oppenheim.”
“Yes, that’s me. Eccentric artist parents. But she wasn’t a guy, she was a woman.”
He felt put in the wrong. She was pretty, but he was looking for an exit.
“I’m so glad to meet you. I really admire your writing.”
This was a first. They all knew about Spence’s literary ventures and were politely uninterested. As far as anyone else was concerned he was Anna’s househusband. He warmed to this girl (she didn’t look more than eighteen). “You’ve read something of mine? Really? Of your own free will? Did you find it online? My God, may I touch you?”
She laughed. “I meant Shere Khan. Of course I’ve read it. I think it’s terrific.”
The penny dropped. “Oh, you’re Meret Hazelwood.”
Spence had been insulted when Fiona the agent suggested he try writing for children, but it had been no effort to rattle off one of the Shere Khan adventures (Jake hanging over his shoulder, first and best critic). The publishers had liked it, in fact they’d liked it so well he’d already turned in the second installment. They had matched him with an illustrator, he’d known she lived somewhere close, but he hadn’t wanted to meet her. So this was she, and thank God he hadn’t said anything rude about her pictures.
“But, um, I thought Alice said a different name,” he bleated, embarrassed, because he really should have known, and because he hadn’t caught the other name, either.
“I’m really Meret Craft. That’s my married name.” Spence was the one caught out, but the girl was blushing: she raised her chin with a brave air of defying her traitor complexion. “But I have read ‘Kes’f.’ I’d read it before.”
“Huh, oh you mean Sef.”
“Weird name,”
“It’s a password I don’t use anymore. Look…can I get you another drink?”
She smiled at him shyly, lips closed. He went to the kitchen to fill their plastic cups with côte de decaying nuclear power station, feeling oddly shaken. So he had a colleague, a colleague of his own, first time since he left Emerald City, how exciting. He thought of Madame Bovary, J’ai un amant, un amant…! In the door to the garden a tall lean guy in green linen trousers and a white Nehru jacket was standing, turned half-profile, his dark hair cut en brosse, beard shadow on his jaw, something familiar about him. Spence took the cups back.
“So was K… I mean Sef, was it true?” asked Meret, smiling more eagerly, showing small white teeth.
“Ah—”
“Is that a very naive thing to ask?”
“Well, it was when I was fifteen, sixteen. I made the boy in the book thirteen because I thought that was sexier: more pubertal. It’s true that I learned to fence, one summer, and had some of those things happen—”
“To be different, because you hated ball games. And the tramp in the woods, who lived under an old hospital bed, and kept the castors oiled so he could sail away on it—”
“If the white-coats came after, yeah, he was real.”
She laughed. “I think you’re telling me what I want to hear. Did you keep up the fencing?”
“Nah. It was way cool, but my D’Artagnan fantasy was short-lived, kind of faded after the duel and all… Don’t you think,” he added, fearing he sounded like an ageing hippie to this child, “that the word ‘cool’ has become the new ‘nice’? Everyone uses it, and thinks they shouldn’t ought to.”
“Pedants think it should only be applied in its proper original sense.”
“Like that guy in Northanger Abbey, fighting against the tide.”
“Oh yes. But what is the proper original sense of ‘cool’?”
As if he would know. Spence cleared his throat. “I’ve heard it’s a Yoruba term, translated into English, originally meaning something quite serious: a state of inner balance, poise, and right measure.” He had a feeling he ought to cut this short and go find Anna. He compromised by hooking Jake out of a passing storm of midgets and introducing him to the lady who had drawn Shere Khan so splendidly. Jake preferred his own portraits of the gallant captain and her crew. He sidled, and wouldn’t stay.
“I’ve seen you with Jake before,” confessed Meret. “And his mother, if that’s who it is taking him to school when you don’t. My two oldest go to the same school. Florrie is in the other kindergarten class; it’s her first term as well. My oldest, Tomkin, is in Year Two. Jake is such a beautiful little boy… Er, he’s adopted?”
“No,” said Spence, grinning. “It’s me. I have, or had, a black granddaddy.”
She blushed like a rose.
The tall guy in the green trousers had come over and stood by her side.
“Spence? It is Spence, isn’t it?”
The half-recognized profile and the name slotted together. Craft. Oh, fuck… It was Charles Craft: thin and prosperous and much improved. They discovered that they were practically neighbors. Charles had his own Gene-Mod nursery company, called Natural Craft. Meret, like Spence, worked at home. What a coincidence! Anna and Spence must come to supper; they must fix a date. Charles was keen, Meret was keen. Anna, when she was tracked down and presented with this coincidence accompli, went into Anna-reticent mode, but was obliged to be reticently keen.
Anna had known that Charles Craft was still in Bournemouth. He had been born around here; he had a right. She’d known about Natural Craft, the family business regenerated. When she had spotted him picking up his wife and two red-headed children outside Jake’s school, she’d felt doomed. She’d been praying ever since that she would never be spotted herself. But if his wife was Spence’s illustrator, she would have to accept her fate.
They had to hire a babysitter for the supper date, an unusual extravagance.
“And I must say,” grumbled Anna, “It is galling to think we are paying good money to spend an evening with Charles Craft!”
Spence raised his eyebrows. “I thought you and he used to be kinda close, at one time.”
“I never liked him much myself, back then. But he’s probably changed.”
“Have you changed?”
Spence looked into the mirror opposite their bed. Spence looked out. His hair was longer than when he’d been an undergraduate, shorter than when he’d worn dreads. His bones were more visible; his skin was still inclined to break out. He rubbed a little concealer into the oily pores around his nose, touched up his eyebrows lightly: “No.”
“Well, there you are. People don’t.”
“Okay, possibly he’s a bit of a shit, but we have to have some kind of social life. You can’t restrict yourself to only knowing the few people you totally like and trust, Anna.”
“I don’t see why not,” said Anna Anaconda.
The Crafts lived with Meret’s parents, a filial and ecologically sound arrangement that had to command respect. The big, double-fronted house, which was called The Rectory, was full of paintings by Meret’s father, nudes and gaudy landscapes in a sugary, photo-realist style that had been fashionable in the sixties. Godfrey was very old, a craggy shambling wreck. Meret’s mother, Isobel, was much younger, and didn’t seem to be the woman featured in the pictures; perhaps that was a previous wife. She had a rather unnerving manner: a wandering glance and a constant, affectless smile. The other guests were Alice and Ken Oguma from the university, a tv journalist called Noelle Seger with her partner, and a something-in-the-city with his graphic-designer wife. Everyone looked sleek and smart, and it was indefinably clear that no one knew the Crafts particularly well. This was reassuring for Anna. A formal dinner party, a collection of near-strangers gathered together to impress each other, was something Spence detested.
Life Page 30
