The Songs

by Charles Elton

  “Just a brother.”

  “How nice. And what’s his name? Is he named after someone in The Grapes of Wrath, too?” She laughed. “Tom, like Tom Joad?”

  “Huddie.”

  “What an unusual name.”

  “He was named after a black blues singer.”

  “Oh — that’s interesting. Where are you at school?”

  “Greenlanes. Do you know it?”

  The woman looked round, surprised. “Yes, of course I do. Actually my daughter went there. Isn’t that a coincidence?”

  “Well, not really,” I said. “You said you lived quite close. Tons of people in Muswell Hill go there.”

  “And she wanted to be a doctor. That’s another coincidence.”

  “Well that’s not unusual. It isn’t as if we both wanted to be taxidermists.”

  “And you’re the sister of my best friend.” The woman seemed curiously excited by all this.

  “That’s a fact, not a coincidence. What’s your daughter’s name?”

  “Sally. Sally Isaacs.”

  “When did she leave Greenlanes?”

  “Oh…when she was sixteen. She loved it there. She had a lot of friends. It was a happy time for us. I hope she’s not forgotten there.”

  “Maybe some of the teachers remember her. I could ask when term starts, if you want.”

  Maybe I was handling the conversation in the wrong way because the woman said rather firmly, “Well…enough about Sally. Tell me more about you.”

  “You know…I need to get back to work.”

  A strange look of panic passed over the woman’s face, as if her leaving was the worst thing that could possibly happen. She looked at me with an odd look on her face.

  “May I ask you something?”

  I shrugged. “If you want.”

  “What is your star sign?”

  What an odd question, I thought. “I don’t believe in star signs. It’s illogical to think that there are only twelve types of people in the world. Why would my destiny be the same as someone starving in Africa just because they were born during the same arbitrary time period as me?”

  “Actually, there are many more variations than twelve. A lot of it depends on what specific time of day you were born and what day in the star sign your birthday is.” She gave a tinkly little laugh. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you don’t believe in birthdays either?”

  “Well, I don’t think they matter much.”

  “So when is yours?”

  I had stopped enjoying talking about myself. I had begun to find the woman rather unsettling.

  “Would you like me to guess?” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Let me just have a go. You’ve got nothing to lose.”

  “Is this a magician thing, like a card trick?” I asked.

  The woman put her hands out, palms up. “No cards. Nothing about my person.”

  “The odds are very high, you know.”

  The woman gave a little laugh. “The odds! I wouldn’t take you for a gambler.”

  “I’m not. Gambling is about chance. I just know a lot about statistics. Do you want to know the odds on being on a plane taken over by terrorists?”

  “I’d rather know the odds on the bus from the Broadway into town coming soon.”

  “You can’t do odds for ‘soon.’ All you could work out is the average waiting time, which wouldn’t help you. The probability of the bus taking the average time to come is no higher than it taking one minute or twenty minutes to come.”

  “Right,” the woman said.

  “The odds on you guessing my birthday are one in three hundred sixty five. Well, I suppose it would be one in three hundred sixty six if my birthday was February the twenty-ninth, which it isn’t.”

  The woman smiled. “Maybe I should make it a bit easier on myself. Shall I try the month first?”

  Rose shrugged. “If you want: that’s one in twelve.”

  The woman closed her eyes. “Okay…the month…the month…it’s…let me think: it’s…”— she suddenly opened her eyes and looked straight at me — “May.”

  I nodded. “That was lucky.”

  “So — the date…” This time the woman did not spin it out. Without any hesitation she said, “The twenty-third.”

  I hated being surprised by things but I could not stop myself looking amazed. The woman was staring expectantly at me.

  “Well?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  The woman gasped and put her hand to her mouth. “And you were born in 1994, that’s right, isn’t it? On the twenty-third of May.”

  I stood up. “I’d really like you to go.”

  “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “Please go.”

  “No, I need to tell you something extraordinary…” Whatever she was going to say was interrupted by the door opening. Lally was standing there.

  “What’s happening? Rosie?”

  I could not think what to say.

  The woman stepped forward and put her hand out to Lally. “I’m Shirley Isaacs and…”

  I decided to confront things head-on: “She’s a friend of Joseph Carter’s and she wants Iz to visit him in hospital,” I said in a rush.

  “What?” Lally said. “If you don’t mind me saying so, I really think that is the most astonishing request from a stranger.”

  “I’m not really a stranger,” the woman said. “Joseph is a dear friend of mine.”

  “I meant a stranger to us.”

  “Are you Mr. Herzl’s wife?”

  “I’m not sure that’s relevant,” Lally said.

  “Joseph might die,” the woman cried. “Don’t you think his father should see him?”

  “Joseph Carter behaved very badly to him, I’m afraid. It’s hard to think of him as his son.”

  “But he is his son!”

  “You have to earn the right to be the son of a man like Isaac Herzl.”

  “No! That’s not true,” the woman shouted desperately. “It’s the other way round: you have to earn the right to be the parent of a child. I had to. Isaac Herzl has to. He’s no different from anyone else!”

  Of all the things the woman might have said to Lally that was the worst. “If you do not go now,” she said, “I will have to call the police and say we have an intruder in the house. I’m sorry.”

  The woman looked at me with a pleading look on her face. I was trembling. I had never seen adults raising their voices at each other before. Nobody ever raised their voice in our house. There was a moment of stillness and then the woman turned and almost ran from the room.

  Lally looked shaken, but resolute. They were all so sure of themselves in this house. They always thought they were doing the right thing.

  “Lally — this is not your house. You don’t own Iz,” I said angrily. “That woman may be mad but it wasn’t nice what you said to her.” That was not the kind of thing children said to adults, but it was true. Anyway, I was sick of being a child.

  I turned from Lally and went out of the room, out of the front door and into the street. I could see the woman up the road and I ran after her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said breathlessly when I caught up with her, “I know you were only doing what you think is right.”

  The woman turned round and put her hand on my arm. “I need to see you again. I need to talk to you about something.”

  I shook my head. “No! I don’t want to.”

  “Rose…”

  I turned away from her and began walking fast.

  “Will you do one thing for me?” the woman shouted.

  I did not stop.

  “Will you and your brother at least talk to your father about Joseph?”

  I stopped and turned round. “My brother’s dead,” I said.

  I cared what Huddie thought and Huddie cared what I thought. That was enough for us. We didn’t much care what anyone else thought. We would have discussed the woman’s visit and we would have decide
d that Iz should be told about Joseph. Lally and Carla would be cross with me, but Iz himself had always taught us that you should do what you believe is the right thing.

  I felt nervous because I hardly talked to Iz these days, and we had certainly never talked about anything personal. Of course I knew from girls at school that, at sixteen, you were meant to avoid talking to your parents as often as you could — and more than that, you were never meant to tell them what you were up to because they would probably stop you doing it. Iz was not like that, and anyway, I wasn’t really up to anything that he might disapprove of. It sometimes made me feel like a failure at being a teenager, but I couldn’t change who I was. Anyway, I had seen some pornography that afternoon in Huddie’s room: that was pleasantly transgressive enough to boast about at school if I had wanted to.

  The next day, I waited till Lally had gone out to the shops to get her and Iz’s lunch and I went up to his room. It was quiet and dark — the curtains had been closed against the midday sun. It smelt musty: an old person-y kind of smell.

  “Iz?” I said.

  In the corner of the room he stirred. Maybe he had been sleeping. “Oh,” he said. “It’s Rose,” but not in a disappointed way, simply as if he was announcing my presence to someone else. Once his voice had been so clear and strong, but now it was throaty and muffled as if it had been eroded like a pebble on the beach.

  “How are you?” I asked him.

  “Old.” He gave a mournful little laugh.

  I couldn’t think what to say next. There was a book on his lap, so I said, “What are you reading?”

  “Engels. The Peasant War in Germany.”

  “I haven’t read that. Shall I put it on my list?”

  He smiled. “It’s heavy going. I tried to read it when I was young. I thought it might be easier now.”

  “Is it?”

  “No.”

  There was silence. Iz had always been hard to talk to.

  Then he said suddenly, “I forget things now. Did I tell you that I thought what you said about Huddie at the funeral was rather extraordinary?”

  I liked him saying that. Although he used to be stridently opinionated about songs and causes and people’s commitment to them, he never expressed approval and disapproval about us. He would probably have said that he wanted Huddie and me to decide things for ourselves, but I wondered whether it was simply that we were too far down the pecking order — there were more important things to express approval and disapproval about.

  “Yes,” he said. “It had gravitas. It was like a eulogy for a fallen warrior who died for his beliefs.”

  The unexpected gift of approval he had given me had somehow got diverted onto the wrong path.

  “I don’t think dying of muscular dystrophy is dying for your beliefs exactly. He wasn’t making a point by dying.”

  I had forgotten how frustrating a conversation with Iz could be. People were always symbols to him. He was passionate about people but I don’t think he understood anything about them at all.

  I had planned to tell Iz about Joseph as gently as I could, but in the end I just came out with it.

  “Joseph Carter is very badly injured. He’s in hospital.”

  “Oh, Joseph.” He nodded his head slowly. “Will he die?” he said in a voice that seemed only half-interested.

  I should have known you could never predict Iz’s reaction to anything. “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Well, that’s good. I can’t imagine what kind of eulogy anybody would give him.”

  “He got attacked.”

  “Who by?”

  “I think it was a friend, someone he knew, anyway.”

  “You always have to be on your guard for that.”

  “For what?”

  “Friends betraying you.”

  “It was a physical attack, Iz.”

  “There are many different kinds of attack. A physical one is not always the most painful.”

  “You could visit him in hospital if you wanted.”

  “Oh no, I don’t think so. He wouldn’t want to see me.”

  “Don’t you feel any kind of bond with him?”

  “Bonds aren’t created by blood. I never had much of a bond with my parents. They disapproved of me so much that they sent me away.”

  “But you were eight or nine! How could they disapprove of you? Sending you away saved your life, didn’t it? They put you on that Kindertransport boat to England to get you away from the Nazis.”

  He looked confused for a moment. “Well, yes. And in fact, being sent away was the best thing that could have happened to me, so I suppose I am grateful to my parents. It helped me become the person I wanted to be. It wouldn’t have happened if I’d stayed behind.”

  I always found being a child rather a humiliating experience, but I suddenly reverted to the neediness of one. “But you feel a bond with us, don’t you?” I said pathetically. “With Huddie and me.”

  “The only kind of bond worth having is an ideological one. I hope we’ll always have that. I think Huddie would have become a remarkable person, Rose. And you will, too.”

  “Maybe that’s because we’re your children.”

  He wouldn’t even give me that much: “I don’t think so. You have to invent yourself. It’s not about who your parents are. Sometimes a friend with a similar philosophy can help. It’s good to have one person you can share everything with.”

  “That was Huddie,” I said.

  “You don’t have many friends, do you?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t either. You question things like me. People don’t like that. They just give you indifference when all you’re looking for is truth.”

  I was pleased: from Iz that was a kind of compliment.

  “Did you have a friend?” I asked. “Someone who helped you?”

  “It was all so long ago,” Iz said dismissively. When he didn’t want to talk about something he always said it was too long ago.

  “But you can’t have forgotten.”

  There was a silence. I think he was deciding whether to go on with the conversation or not. Finally he spoke.

  “No, I haven’t forgotten. He was someone I met just before I went to Israel.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “We lost touch.”

  “It must be sad not to have ever seen him again if he was such a friend.”

  “Yes,” he said, “but you have to cut sentiment out of your life.”

  “But you must think about him sometimes.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I do.”

  I smiled. “So you do look into the past.”

  He thought for a moment and shrugged. “I try not to. It might make you want to go back there. You have to keep moving forward. I always did. I didn’t know what would happen if I stopped. There was so much to do. I had concerts to give. There were countries to go to.”

  He lifted his arm and pointed at the big table where Lally’s scrapbooks and piles of old newspapers were. “Look at that. Those are all the concerts and countries stuck in a book. I feel like a moth with a pin through it.”

  “Isn’t it nice to have a record of your achievements?”

  “Do any of them matter? I only do it to give Lally something to do. She’s led a sad life.”

  “Because of you?”

  “I don’t know why you want to talk about these things. I’m tired.”

  “Lally told me that you had a baby with her that died.” This was like going into a room that had always been locked. This was dangerous territory.

  “She shouldn’t have told you,” he said sharply.

  “I just want to know the truth about things.”

  “Don’t confuse facts with the truth,” he said. “They’re not the same thing. You have to go now, Rose. I’m tired.”

  I couldn’t stop now. “The day Huddie died, when you were in his room — what were you thinking?”

  Iz did not answer for a moment. Then he said, “I was thinking abou
t his name.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I should never have called him Huddie.”

  “Why not?”

  “I loved Huddie Ledbetter. He was the greatest blues singer there’s ever been. I remembered that I had thought of calling Lally’s baby Huddie if it was a boy.”

  “So that’s what you called our Huddie. I think that’s nice.”

  “Huddie Ledbetter died of motor neuron disease, then Lally lost the baby, then Huddie died. There are historic inevitabilities.”

  I was suddenly angry. “There’s no logic to that. It’s ridiculous. A name can’t be jinxed! Huddie isn’t jinxed! Is everyone called Huddie going to die of some strange disease?”

  “Who else would call a child Huddie?” he said quietly.

  “You brought us up to believe in certainties, not superstition! You wouldn’t tell me not to walk under ladders. If something awful happened to me afterwards, it wouldn’t be an historic inevitability. With Huddie, it was just a genetic malfunction.”

  “But that is an historic inevitability.”

  “No! It’s just chance.”

  “I don’t think there is chance. Everything is meant to be. It wouldn’t mean anything if it was all random. There are links that cause things to happen. A chain of events makes revolution happen. A chain of events makes people become the people they’re meant to be.”

  “What about free will? What if you didn’t want to be the person you became?”

  He turned away. “It’s too late by then. You can never go back.”

  Then Lally was in the doorway. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re looking into the past, Lally,” I said. “I know that’s forbidden.” I got up and pushed past her.

  What Iz and I had had was not a conversation that would be picked up where we left off. I knew I would never talk to him like that again.

  Shirley

  SHIRLEY WAS IN BED. She had been in bed since yesterday when she got back from Iz Herzl’s house. She had not even taken her makeup off. This was the first day that she had not visited Joseph and it made her feel guilty and ungrateful because Joseph had helped put her on the trail that she had followed. She thought it was a combination of his and Sally’s energies that caused it to happen like a ball being tossed back and forth between them.

  In Manchester, Sally had led her to Joseph. Shirley had told Rose that she had saved his life, but that was not true. It was Sally who had ensured she got to Joseph’s room before it was too late. All she had done was dial 999.