by Stuart Evers
She kisses him on the top of his head and he looks up and smiles. She thinks of the Mars Bar again. Him eating it on the way out of the newsagent’s.
‘Do you often get light-headed?’ she says.
‘What?’ he says.
‘You said you got light-headed and that’s why you had that Mars Bar. I just wondered if it happens a lot.’
‘Not really,’ he says. ‘Sometimes, but it happens to everyone, doesn’t it? It was nothing, just leaving the house without breakfast, that’s all.’
‘I’ve told you I don’t mind making—’
‘I know, but I can sort my own breakfast out. I’m not a hopeless case, you know?’
‘I know that, love. But still—’
‘I’m fine, okay?’ he says. ‘It was just the once.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I just worry, that’s all.’
‘Go and worry about Kath,’ he says.
She kisses him.
‘See you in bed,’ he says.
In the car she pauses with the key in the ignition. She never wanted an affair; she only wanted a lover. The way the French do it; the gentility of a marriage with an outlet for unspent passion. But there is nothing French about this, nothing elegant.
She pulls out of the driveway and takes a left at the end of the road. She realizes she hasn’t said goodbye to the boys. She almost turns back.
‘Do not die,’ she says. ‘Do not have an accident.’
The Swettenham Arms is a grotto; a thatched roof and wattle and daub. It looks inviting, like a coach house from an old book. The kettle’s boiling, she says, as she parks the car.
He is sitting in the snug, a glass of beer in front of him. Evie goes to the bar and orders a gin and tonic. She sits down at the small table. He is smoking and she is smiling, dumbly.
‘I told you never, under any circumstances, to call the house,’ she says, still smiling.
‘I needed to see you,’ he says. He is not looking at her but down at the ashtray.
‘I must be mad,’ she says.
‘There is only madness,’ he says, finally looking up. The beard and the eyes; the curl of smoke. ‘That’s all there is.’
‘You’re drunk, aren’t you? Drunk and bloody stupid.’
He takes a sip of his drink then takes her hand. She pulls it away.
‘You risk everything for me,’ he says. ‘Everything. And all I do is talk. I talk and talk and you listen and nothing changes. I’ve been thinking about it since you left. Nothing else. And it can’t wait, not another moment.’
Ross tries to put his hands on hers again and again she quickly moves hers away. She wonders whether something has unhinged him; whether he has always been unhinged. Idiot. She says it out loud and he looks at her, laughs and shakes his head.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes.’
He looks at her fixedly now. ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘Listen.’
He stubs out his cigarette, rubs his hand across his mouth.
‘I want you to leave Jim,’ he says. ‘I want you to leave Jim with the boys and come and live with me.’
She laughs; head angled back, exaggerated.
‘I want to have a child with you,’ he says quietly. ‘Our own child. Just ours.’
She has a taste like aspirin in the back of her throat. He is holding her hands suddenly, and she does not pull hers back, not straight away. Such blue eyes, such a scrabbly beard. How beautiful a girl would be with his eyelashes. The air is warm and muggy. Somewhere there are bombs.
Ross as father. Drunk drivers, a kidnapping, whooping cough, leukaemia, meningitis, cot death, railway electrocution, fireworks, a fall from a tree.
‘I mean it,’ Ross says. ‘I mean every word.’
She pauses before standing up.
‘It’s time to go,’ she says.
‘No,’ he says. ‘No it isn’t.’
She doesn’t say anything. She gets up and leaves and does not look back. She does not want to see the baby in his arms; she does not want to see her blonde hair. She does not want to see her mouth calling mama.
Outside, her car and his. Side by side. She gets inside hers, puts the key in the ignition. Later he will do the same.
There will be no accident on the way home. They will neither die nor be injured, lose a limb or eye. They will no longer talk of bombs or unborn children. They will, the two of them, disappear into family life, wander into it, fall into it, fade slowly into it. They will, the two of them, never be seen again.
YOUR FATHER SENDS HIS LOVE
1
He can remember everything. A whole life, all of it. Every moment, every detail; every breath, every beat. Everything, all the way back to the moment of his birth. Sitting in the annexe, under lamplight, of this he is momentarily certain. Certain he can relive every last second; certain he can live his life over. A whole life in a straight line from birth to death; from childhood to old age. No digressions. No jokes. No anecdotes. Just truth following truth, fact following fact. How simple, how easy it seems, sitting in the annexe, under the lamplight. How simple and clear.
A video recorder begins to pull and wind; another stops spooling. There are three more in the annexe, all silent, all programmed. He looks down at the rug, up at the blank television screen. He does not remember everything. He cannot remember everything; the very idea is ridiculous. He cannot recall the moment of his birth any more than he can his first breath. He cannot even remember his mother’s face.
Instead of breath and cry, he recalls a line in one of his notebooks. Second volume, fifth page, sixteenth section. He wrote it in a hotel room in Great Yarmouth: shabby dresser, wrinkled sheets. This is a true story; I know, I made it up myself. It was written in pencil, the only thing he had to hand, beneath a series of jokes about Red Indians and above the outline for a barbershop routine.
He can remember everything in the notebooks. Every joke, every idea; every sketch, every pun. He knows this is true. Turn seven pages and the third line is in blue ink, written while on a flight to Barbados. I came home to find my son taking drugs – all my best ones, too.
The two books are locked in the wall safe. They once had their own bag, once toured and travelled along with Bob. They no longer leave the annexe. They were once stolen. His whole life, from first to last. When they stole them, they took everything from him. He still says that. He still says they stole the books. They stole his life. They.
In London, in its white heat and cold winters, four dead sons. Four stillbirths, four long silences, four coffinless mournings. He remembers the taxi rides, but not the hospitals. The taxi rides.
One in winter: the taking off and on of gloves, the wrapping of scarves, the look on his wife’s face, on her raided face. Do not speak. Do not make light. Do not joke.
One in summer: the cabbie picking him up alone, back to the Golders Green house. The cabbie’s feminine eyelashes, his vinegary body odour. A joke told and Bob’s laugh. Bob’s second dead son and him laughing.
‘You can have that one for free,’ the cabbie said.
‘You’ll never make it as a cabbie if you give passengers tips,’ Bob said and the cabbie laughed and Bob laughed. Bob caught his own reflection in the rear-view mirror, pale as bone, hair quick-laced with grey.
Another in wind-blown October, alone again. A silent cabbie aside from his metronomic sniffing. Asking the cabbie to stop at the off-licence and buying a bottle of Scotch, looking at the cigars. The single ones in tins, packs of three and five. A moment braced with emotion and then nothing. A packet of Player’s, too. Make it two packs of Player’s. Outside, the taxi idling, two old Jews walking past. His mother’s voice. The way she said Jew. If she’d known about the dead boys, she’d have said she’d warned him. She’d warned him but he’d not listened.
What did I say? What did I say at the outset? You never listen. You never learn. You may as well have married a Jew. At least the Jews have all the money. The Irish just have chippy shoulders and thieving hands. No wonder the c
hildren keep dying. No wonder there’s no son and heir. You should . . . a nice girl. A nice English girl. Nice manners. A sherry drinker. Clean limbed and well-spoken. Robert, dear, I love you, which is why I say—
Oh that face! The mole with the plucked hairs, her skin the same pallor as his; her wrinkled, clawing hands. Her arrival at his wedding, the service she said she would not attend, dressed – as in a joke – in black. Crown to toenail in black, a veil too. Such impeccable comic timing. He wished his was as natural.
The last death in the heart of May’s confusion. A different hospital, the same outcome. He left his wife to rest and took a taxi to a woman’s apartment in Maida Vale. He drank her wine, went to her bed, and afterwards looked out of her window, looked out over stands of trees and parkland, not thinking of his wife’s fitful sleep, not thinking of his four dead sons. Or thinking of them all. He cannot now be sure.
Nineteen-fifty-two, and the fifth boy arrived three months early. So small, so early and so small, three months prem. But breathing, yes; alive, yes. Incubated, a wriggle of a boy, sharing the white sheets with a girl more runtish kitten than human child. Bob named her Victoria. A queen in waiting. His son he named Gary. Nothing so royal, just a name they both liked. Victoria soon lost her sight. He prayed for his son to keep his sight. The son was unblind; a small, almost cruel, mercy.
Days and the specialist called them in, days of watching and waiting, the blind child queen taken to her parents; Gary alone on the white sheet. In the hospital there were no pretty nurses or battle-axe matrons. There was carbolic and bleach, uncomfortable chairs, corridors that ran like slick highways. Bob and his wife held hands as they entered the pipe-smoked room the consultants shared. The specialist was a woman, neat and tidy, twin-set and pearls. Best in her field, best anywhere. Sitting behind her desk, uncapping a fountain pen.
The specialist invited them to sit. Bob and his wife held hands over the chair arms. The specialist looked down at the file – thin lips, no make-up, hood-eyes, a wiggish hairdo – then up at them.
‘There is no easy way to say this,’ she said. ‘But the tests are clear and they are irrefutable. Your son has cerebral palsy.’
They must have looked. Looked blank perhaps.
‘Gary is a spastic,’ she said.
She went on. She told them she was sorry, but Gary would never speak, would never hear, would never walk, would never sit himself at a dinner table. She explained in her measured, careful way the ramifications, but all Bob heard was spastic. Her thin lips moving: spastic. Her bobbing head as she looked to her notes: spastic. The look of professional sympathy as she took off her spectacles: spastic. She had used the word without affect, without thought, and Bob had never heard it spoken before, and could never now unhear it. Spastic. That boy and the word. That beautiful boy. That heart-breaking boy.
The annexe is broadly cruciform, the western end longer than planned, extended to accommodate a series of tall octagonal spinners arranged in two banks, heading down to a small round window. On each wall is a unit, in each unit nine shelves, each shelf the height of a VHS cassette plus a quarter inch. Stacks of tapes, some still in cellophane, on the floor and on the desk. The used tapes are labelled and sorted, dated and shelved. An assistant is employed on Wednesdays and Thursdays. He is to tidy up, to label and sort. Bob is never present. He has seen him only twice since he was hired: a pudgy fellow, beetle-browed, the sort who wishes to solve a joke rather than laugh at it.
Bob pours Scotch and gets up from the sofa, crack in the knees, ache in the neck. He walks to the first spinner. As a collection it is kitsch. Every casing, screwhead and stretch of tape documents something in which only he is interested. A library of himself. Thirty-minute memories. Bob pulls out a tape at random. A drama called The Flip Side. In it he plays a DJ, a right-wing DJ, plays him with a fire and zeal and a sense of menace; his best work, some of his best work, taut and polished and the director afterwards saying that he should do more serious work, tread the boards, Pinter, Osborne, those kinds of people. He holds the tape, Maxell 180, more programmes on the tape, but the only one worth considering is The Flip Side. There is no other example in the world. It exists only in the memory of those who watched it and, thirty-five years later, are still alive and still recall a television drama that was shown only once. It is a plastic legacy, this junk he has collected.
The last time he’d seen The Flip Side was twelve years ago. An old friend disputing that Bob had ever done anything aside from making money presenting game shows.
‘The Flip Side,’ Bob said, ‘1966, The Flip Side. The Radio Times called it one of the boldest and most chilling performances they’d ever seen. The Flip Side. They said I should go on the stage. They said they’d not seen anything like it. Pinter, Osborne, those kind of people. I won a fucking award for that.’
And Bob made the friend put on his shoes and carry his glass to the annexe and they settled down to watch The Flip Side. The tape began. Bob was some twenty years younger. He was using an American accent, shaky but not without skill. Bob watched himself, Bob’s eyes only for the screen, only for himself. The friend took the remote control and pressed pause.
‘Go on, then,’ the friend said. ‘Do it. You want to do it, you know you want to.’
Bob looked at himself as a young man; a young man paused on the television screen. He smiled at the friend and stood.
‘And do you think, listeners,’ he said, ‘that this is acceptable? That this is the way we are to raise our children these days? With these kinds of morals? With these kinds of codes? We need to think of the children. We need to protect them, we need to nurture them, not pervert them. Not indulge them with such poison and fallen idols . . .’
Standing, Bob delivered line after line, the accent better, more mature than on the videotape. Bob acted and Bob paced, acted and paced as he had decades before, as though life were contingent on his performance. Behind the revival, Bob’s younger face was paused, a telephone to his ear. Before Bob could finish, the younger man disappeared, the video recorder automatically releasing the tape. Bob delivered his last line in front of the blank screen. He paused, then bowed, wiped away the sweat from his brow with a pocket square.
Bob remembers his friend’s face: soft and sallow, framed with tight white hair, tobacco teeth, long nose. The way the friend scratched the stubble of his cheek, put down his glass and gave quiet applause. He remembers that but not asking him to talk to Simon for him.
‘Shall I do another?’ Bob said, standing up, moving to the spinners. ‘Pick one. Pick any tape and give me the first line. First line and I’ll do the lot. All the parts, all the lines.’
The friend smiled and shook his head.
‘Don’t think I can’t,’ Bob said. ‘Don’t think I can’t, because you know I can.’
The boy was light in the hand, his legs pedalling air – getoffgetoffgetoffgetoffgetoff – until he was arcing through the air onto the small bed. Simon was crying. Bob slapped him across his eight-year-old face.
‘Now you listen, you nasty piece of work,’ Bob said. ‘Listen to your father and stop your crying.’
He wanted to say: ‘Or I shall give you something to cry about.’ This was how it had gone with his father. Bob sat down on the bed. The boy was howling, a stuck animal, grunting.
‘Now look,’ Bob said, calming voice, calming, a hand on the boy’s arm, then an arm around him. ‘You look at me,’ Bob said. ‘Shhh and look at me.’
Bob combed back the boy’s hair, his unruly natural quiff.
‘When your brother was born,’ Bob said, ‘when your brother was born, he wasn’t very well. We didn’t know what was wrong with him. The doctors they did their tests. And we waited for the results. The results came back and it was cerebral palsy. They told us to see a specialist. And the specialist, she told us Gary was a spastic. That’s what she said. And I’d never heard that word before. Now, Simon, I’ve been called some bad names in my time, and I’d never heard such a bad word before. And
I haven’t heard a worse one since. So when I heard you call Gary that, when I heard you use that awful word, I couldn’t believe my ears. I couldn’t believe my own son would be able to use that word to taunt his own brother. So I want you to apologize to Gary and I want you to swear you’ll never use that word again. Not now, not ever. Do you understand?’
Simon nodded.
‘And you promise? Promise on your life?’
Simon nodded.
‘Because I can send you away if you do. Don’t think I can’t, because you know I can.’
Simon leaned in to his father and cried as he was held. Bob took him to his brother’s room. Bob watched him, red-eyed, say sorry to his brother; kiss his brother on his handsome face. On his handsome cheek. And the handsome boy seemed to smile and Bob smiled too and it was all smiles. Neither Simon nor his father mentioned it again.
It was a week before Simon was alone again with his brother. That week the word had become a mantra: secret and silent. Finally alone together he seethed the word through clenched jaw and teeth, up close, right in his handsome face, right in his well-turned ear. Called him spastic until the word was just sound, was as violent as a blow.
2
He has a single bag, all other belongings back in the cold of his Lambeth flat, unwatched, perhaps already robbed. He can hardly remember now whether he even Chubb-locked the door. Sure he did. A home invader’s welcome to it all. Squatters will have to clean it up first. Take bleach to the toilet. Remove all his boxes and papers. Fumigate the sofa and bed. Weeks now. Should have given someone a key. Rented it out. Some time he will have to go back. Yes. Yolanda next door will keep a look out. He will go back some time and open the door and all will be the same. No power. No heat or light. But the same.
He sits on the edge of the bed. His is the cheapest room he could find. The junkies live here. The local junkies, not even the tourists. Thai rent boys. Thai hookers. Off shift, somewhere to crash. It is a place without conversation: just corridor nods, the meeting of tired eyes. There is a kind of cafeteria next door and his room backs onto its kitchen. He hears voices and the clank of pans all day and all night. He likes the percussion. He likes the simple, plain room. A mattress. His bag. Putty-coloured walls. A dim swinging bulb that jumps when people walk above. He preps the works, ties off, shoots and lies down on the slender bed.
