The Songs

by Charles Elton

  That was the problem with free-form thinking: it could take you to places you did not want to go, but as he was stuck on this particular train, he might as well go on.

  The ironic thing was that it had been Isaac Herzl who helped Alan and Joseph get started, or rather, it was what Lally called Joseph’s “betrayal” of him that did it. When they were at Oxford, they had begun writing songs together, little musical sketches and topical parodies that they performed in pubs and at end-of-term events. Alan played the guitar or the piano and Joseph sang, although his voice was no more than serviceable. They thought that wearing dinner jackets would make them seem sophisticated. One of their friends had a father who worked for the BBC. He had seen them perform when he was up in Oxford visiting his son and one day he called Joseph. He was producing a late-night satirical show and a singer had dropped out at the last moment. He was desperate: Could Alan and Joseph throw something together?

  Joseph did not know where the idea for the song came from. It was only afterwards that he remembered the radio playing it that day in the Bar Italia. The song was a few years old now, but everyone still remembered it. It was their version of “Where Do You Go To, My Lovely.”

  They put it together very quickly. They didn’t know whether it was good or not, but it made them laugh. When they read it to the producer over the phone, he liked it, so they went down to London. The show was live, which was nerve-wracking, but they had time to rehearse it before. The costume designer had kitted them out with camouflage fatigues, big boots and Che Guevara berets. Alan played the guitar, and they both sang.

  You sing like Angela Davis

  And you dance like Herbert Marcuse

  You’re holding an Uzi machine gun

  While you’re bemoaning the fate of the Jews, yes you are.

  You’re off to the land that is promised

  You’re suddenly becoming Kibbutz-y

  The girls are simply so stunning

  You hope you’ll find radical tootsie, yes you do.

  But where do you go to, my Lefty

  When you’re alone with your songs?

  Will you tell me the hurt that’s so painful

  When you’re thinking of the Viet-Cong, yes please do.

  Your name is heard in high places

  You were a friend of that nice Malcolm X

  He sent you a rifle for Christmas

  But you wished it had been some Semtex, yes you did.

  You live in a lovely big mansion

  In the leafy hills of Muswell

  You talk of the plight of the homeless

  But don’t they need mansions as well? Yes they do.

  What really got them the publicity was that some of the reviews picked up the fact that Joseph was Iz Herzl’s son. He had not intended for that to happen, but he guessed the producer had leaked it. It did not matter too much to him. People would have guessed that the song was, if not precisely about Iz Herzl, then at least inspired by him. He was all over the place then, singing at demonstrations in Trafalgar Square and being arrested outside the US Embassy and going to South Africa.

  It did not take long for the letter to arrive:

  Dear Joseph Carter,

  I am using the name you prefer because I wonder if you are worthy of the name Isaac Herzl gave you —Joe Hill Herzl. Although you have a biological connection to him, I find it hard to think of you as his son now.

  Your song was a shocking act of betrayal towards a man who has used his talents only for the good of other people. You will not find a more distinguished man to demean. If he were to cut you out of his life like a canker, I would not blame him and I think one day you will bitterly regret it.

  Your song is hardly an adequate response to the kindness he showed you when you sought him out some years ago. Despite the evident pride you take in your private school education, good manners have clearly passed you by. I think it would be best if you made no attempt to contact him again.

  Lally Herzl

  Joseph had not even thought what effect the song might have on Isaac Herzl — their intentions were genuinely more satire than attack — but Lally’s letter left him shocked. He was not entirely sure why: it was not as if he had any expectation of a relationship with him. It was not as if being cut out of Isaac Herzl’s life was going to make any difference to him. But a thread had been broken, even if it was gossamer thin, even if it would hardly bear the weight of a feather. He shared everything with Alan and Shirley, who were now engaged, but this he did not share.

  Still, it meant that when Alan and he were trying to get their first show off the ground some of the producers they spoke to remembered their television appearance: “Oh yes — you’re those guys who…” The show was eventually put on at the King’s Head in Islington. The reviews were good. Then the producer of a show that was in trouble out of town called them in to write some new songs for it. The show came into London, was unexpectedly a success and went to Broadway. They were up and running.

  Joseph ranged over the shows they had done — the successes, the ones that were labeled “disappointing” and had a short run, the ones with toxic reviews that closed, losing the entire investment, the ones with good reviews that were called “ahead of their time” and nobody came to see. The screaming, the sackings, the compromises — and, always, the lonely hotel rooms.

  Now he felt sad. Maybe he was dead and in limbo, waiting to be admitted to the final hotel room where he would stay for all eternity, the one with the rotting bowl of fruit and the empty minibar. He would only have the Gideon Bible on the bedside table for inspiration, thinking about musicals called Moses!

  He tried to do a kind of hum in his head, to fill it with white noise so he could block off any more depressing thoughts. He did not want to find himself moving on to Gav. He had an uneasy feeling that Gav had something to do with where he was and what had happened to him.

  Rose

  I DID NOTHING DIFFERENT when I went into Huddie’s room on the day he died. That morning, it was the normal routine. I always turned on his computer first, then I went to the bathroom and put toothpaste on his toothbrush, took the deodorant and aftershave lotion from the cupboard and put them on his bedside table. I put a cloth under the tap and wiped his face and mouth and pressed the button that raised him up in the bed. It was not good to leave him on his back too long because the fluid collected in his lungs.

  The only thing that wasn’t normal was that he was dead and I had known that from the moment I went into his room. It was not that I was telepathic or could feel that his spirit had left his body and was lurking in a corner or whatever rubbish people think to make themselves feel better. There was just a different kind of silence in the room.

  I sat by his bed for a while. I did not touch him or hug him or plant a kiss tenderly on his forehead like people do in films. I would not have done those things when he was alive so why would I do them when he was dead?

  I felt quite calm. As I came out of his room, the front door was opening and Lally came in.

  “Huddie died in the night,” I said.

  “What?” Maybe she had not heard.

  Then I went into the kitchen, where Carla and Joan were making coffee.

  I said it again: “Huddie died in the night.”

  I’m not sure why there was a look of such incomprehension on their faces. It was hardly a surprising piece of news, like the roof being blown off. Anyway, I wasn’t going to wait while it sunk in. I wanted to tell Iz. I brushed past Lally standing in the hall looking confused and went upstairs.

  “Rosie!” she called. “What’s happening?”

  I knocked on Iz’s door and went in. As I closed the door I heard a wail from downstairs. The news had sunk in.

  The room was dark. Iz was still asleep and I drew the curtains so the light would come in. I hoped that might make him wake up, but it didn’t.

  “Iz,” I said, then I said it a bit louder. I went to his bed and gently pulled at his arm. I hadn’t seen Iz in bed sin
ce I was a child.

  He opened his eyes.

  “Iz — Huddie’s dead. He died in the night.”

  “Huddie?” he said, as if he couldn’t quite remember who Huddie was. Then he looked at me with his eyes wide open.

  I repeated it: “Huddie died.”

  After a moment, there was a tiny movement in his face and eyes. If you had filmed it and slowed the film down so you could examine it frame by frame, you might have been able to tell what the look meant, but I couldn’t.

  Then the door burst open and the women crowded into the room. Out of all of us, Lally was the only one who was crying. Nobody seemed to know what to say or what to do, but they looked at Iz as if he was going to give us some kind of guidance. All he said was, “Can I see him?”

  When he had dressed, Lally helped him down the stairs and he went into Huddie’s room and closed the door behind him. He was in there for about half an hour. We were all waiting outside when he came out.

  As he passed us, Lally put her hand on his arm and said, “Iz…” but he ignored her and walked slowly to the stairs. There was no expression on his face. It looked to me as if it had been carved out of the stone on Mount Rushmore.

  There was a lot of hugging from Carla and Lally. I had even had a stiff hug from Joan, which had not been pleasant. I wasn’t sure what their hugging was meant to achieve. They liked to do things in front of everybody else. I didn’t. All the things I was feeling about Huddie were private. They were mine and I was not going to share them with anyone else.

  Later in the morning, Huddie’s doctor came and examined him. He said there would have to be an autopsy. I was not quite sure why: there were not going to be any surprises, like discovering he had been bitten by a poisonous snake.

  We did not know any undertakers so we found one on the internet and they came surprisingly quickly. Undertakers obviously had a uniform — black suit, white shirt, black tie — but I would not have thought the worse of them if they had been dressed like Huddie in a tracksuit and T-shirt. I suppose most deaths are the same for them so the only glimmer of surprise on their faces was when they asked what kind of coffin the family would like and I said to them, “It should be the cheapest.” They obviously thought that was disrespectful, but I did not want something in mahogany that had shiny brass handles and a satin lining. Huddie would not have felt comfortable in that. And I supposed Carla would want the cheapest, too, because it would be cardboard or wicker or something and be biodegradable. Then, if anyone gave her an eco-audit, she would come out with flying colors.

  The undertakers asked whether we would like them to take the body now or we would like it to stay overnight. Of course I knew that when you were dead you were dead — no brain function, no heartbeat, nothing that constituted life — so I said that I did not mind one way or the other, but when the body was taken out on a wheeled stretcher, Huddie covered by a sheet that was too short for him so his feet were sticking out, I knew that what I had said to the undertakers was not really true.

  The funeral was at Golders Green Crematorium. As there weren’t going to be any hymns, we had to fill it out with something. We agreed that the headmaster of his school could say something, and then one of the doctors who had looked after him. I knew they would say nothing of any interest, not to Huddie anyway, so I said I would speak at the beginning. I was a little nervous about doing it and I spent the evening before the funeral preparing it. I wanted to get it right, not so much for Huddie as for myself, just like I got my debating speeches right at school.

  The crematorium was very full and we walked slowly — Iz had to use his stick all the time now — to the front pew. I was not sure why Joan was with us, but I made sure I didn’t sit next to her.

  When everyone had settled down, I walked up to the front and began to speak.

  “You probably think Huddie would be pleased that there are so many people here. I shouldn’t think so. He would have been the first to point out that statistically you’re likely to get a bigger turnout at the funeral of someone young. You’re probably mourning the experiences he didn’t have and being sorry that he didn’t have time to become the person he would have been. Well, don’t worry on Huddie’s account. He didn’t need time to become the person he would have been because he already was and he always had been.

  “Huddie knew so many things. He knew that the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia has the highest vertical tide range in the world. Ungava Bay in northern Quebec has the second. They make a particular kind of gin there because a rare plant called Labrador tea gives it a special taste and color. The Labrador dog does not actually come from Labrador but Nova Scotia, where the original inhabitants were called ‘aboriginal,’ a word most people think refers only to indigenous Australians. These were the kinds of connections Huddie made as he moved across the world. He wrote them down in a notebook and later, when he found it hard to grasp a pen, I wrote them down for him, although he actually remembered them pretty well. He was lucky: the brain doesn’t need muscles to work. There was nothing much he could rely on, but he knew that his brain would never betray him like everything else in his body was doing.

  “You could ask how relevant these journeys were to Huddie’s life, but he could find relevance in everything. On that particular journey he left the Aborigines in Australia and eventually arrived on an island called Pingelap, which is meant to be one of the most beautiful places in the Pacific — clear water and coral reefs and lots of fish — but there is one flaw to the inhabitants’ lives: there is a recessive gene on that island. Huddie certainly understood that, even though it’s a different recessive gene to his. It’s called achromatopsia. The sufferers are called achromats. I suppose you could call Huddie a Duchenner, as if they’re names of sports teams. The Pingelap gene causes complete color blindness — they literally only see in black and white. It’s found in one in ten people on the island. Duchenne is found in about one in seven thousand people so Huddie’s odds against inheriting a recessive gene were better in Muswell Hill than on Pingelap although he said the climate was not so good. He lost almost everything, but at least he could always see and know things in color.

  “You’re privileged to have known someone who could start off in the morning at the Bay of Fundy and by the end of the day reach Pingelap without leaving his wheelchair. I don’t know much about funerals but I think you’re meant to thank people for coming. I’m not going to thank you. You’re lucky to be here.”

  As I walked down the aisle, I could see some surprised faces when I did not stop at our pew but kept on going to the door at the back. I wasn’t going to stay and listen to the headmaster and the doctor give their eulogies: Huddie was snuffed out like a candle, he fought the disease with all the strength he had, he was the bravest person I knew, he bore it stoically, none of us will ever forget him. It would all be white noise to me. Anyway, it wasn’t really true. He wasn’t brave and he didn’t bear it stoically. Why should he? The only thing to come out of the funeral would be an urn of ashes. I was not sure what I would do with them yet but I thought I would probably flush them down the lavatory. That would have made Huddie laugh.

  When I got home, I was happy to be the only one there. I didn’t want to see anyone and I could begin to sort out my schoolwork. In the days since Huddie had died I had done almost nothing, but soon I planned to pull myself together and get back to all the things I wanted to learn and all the books I had to read to learn them.

  Nothing in Huddie’s room had been moved and I liked it like that. It was still his room even if he was not there anymore. It would always be his room. I was planning to move my stuff into it and sleep there, but I did not want to do that yet although I was happy to spend most of my time there. After all, I had spent most of my time there when Huddie was alive. I would enjoy sleeping in his bed because it was one of those electrical ones that raised your back up when you pressed a button so I would be able to read in bed without all the hassle of getting the pillows right.

  I had tid
ied his things and had washed his T-shirts and tracksuit bottoms. Huddie liked everything to be clean. I had started to listen to the talking books I had downloaded for him onto his iPod, all the Thomas Hardy ones he had liked, but I did not really enjoy being read to: just by the way the reader spoke, by the pauses they left and the inflection they gave certain words, they were imposing their interpretation on the book and I was not really interested in other people’s interpretations.

  I sat by his empty bed for a while. Even though, of course, I tried not to look into the past, I did find myself thinking about the last time I had seen Huddie. It was hard to be objective about someone you knew so well. His hair looked as if it had been cut with garden shears. It was greasy, too — getting Huddie’s head over the sink to wash it had become harder. One of the arms of his glasses had come off and it was attached by a paper clip, which made the glasses crooked on his face. He had spots on his forehead and by the side of his mouth. His teeth were yellow and snaggled. I did not care what anybody else might think about his appearance. He just looked like Huddie to me, which was to say that he looked as perfect as anyone could be.

  Shirley

  “COMFORTABLE?” Shirley said. “What does that even mean?”

  The nurse looked nervous. “Well…”

  “Does it mean that he’s got his feet up in an easy chair? Is the central heating at the right level? I didn’t ask if he was comfortable, I asked how he was. You don’t have to treat me with kid gloves. I told you before: I’m a doctor’s daughter.”

  “I’ll get the doctor.”

  She had got to know all the doctors in the hospital in Manchester. They finally realized that she knew what she was talking about. Now, in London, where Joseph had been moved when his medical insurance kicked in, she had to start all over again. She had preferred it up there — the hospital was buzzing with activity and there were always doctors and nurses around. Here, on the private, there were deserted corridors and closed doors and muted voices. The food was probably better, but that would not matter to Joseph, who looked like a marionette with the various wires and tubes coming out of him or going into him.