‘I have always maintained the importance of aunts as much as possible …’
It was written to her niece Caroline, who had recently become an aunt, and it struck an immediate chord with me, indeed one might almost call it a Road to Damascus moment.
Not the least of the reasons was that precisely the same thing had just happened to me.
I was appalled, I recall, when Cassie told me she was pregnant Not at all thrilled that the even tenor of our ways was about to be disrupted by some small and awkward being who almost certainly would not stop crying. Neither was I thrilled at the prospect of being an aunt, not least because I was quite sure I’d be lousy at it, a prediction that appeared to be true the first time Fergie and Cass went out and left me with Jonah.
In the end I rang my mother. I can’t imagine why.
‘Can you come round?’
‘I’m sure that’s not necessary, darling.’
‘But he won’t stop crying. What shall I do?’
‘How should I know?’
‘But you must know. You had me and Cassie. What did you do when we wouldn’t stop crying?’
‘I really don’t know.’ The silence at the end of the phone told me she was considering the matter. ‘I can only think I must have handed you over to your father.’
As it turned out I wasn’t lousy with Jonah and Elsa. On the other hand, I didn’t discover any long-dead maternal streak either.
‘We always liked you because you didn’t treat us like children,’ Elsa told me once, and for a while I wore it like a medal on my chest, until I realised it wasn’t the truth, or rather not the whole truth. Because the secret of my success with Jonah and Elsa lay in the fact that I divined early on that neither of them was a child, that they were, in fact, from some alien species. With the advantage of having watched Star Trek for most of my adult life, I knew how to deal with aliens, which was to remain scrupulously polite to them to get them off their guard, all the while pretending not to notice that they had corrugated foreheads, or skin ruffles around their necks or shells and body parts in places where you might least expect them.
It’s hard to remember now, looking at Jonah and Elsa, that once they didn’t exist, that once they never were, and that our world, Cassie and Fergie’s and mine, still managed to jog along from day to day without them. It’s for this reason, I guess, that those who have kids can no longer discuss the concept of being without them, kids being so utterly and intrinsically there once they’ve arrived, so utterly blocking out the argument.
Elsa is seventeen now, Jonah two years older. Watching them grow up I became aware of a master plan thwarted.
‘It’s not fair,’ I bawled at Jonah once, tears of relief pouring down my face. ‘I did everything right. I didn’t have kids. This wasn’t supposed to happen.’
He must have been about eleven and all he’d done was to stay out late on his bike while under my protection. In the end I was reduced to lifting limp and begging eyes, screwing up a Kleenex like some Victorian heroine.
‘Don’t ever do that again, Jonah. Ever. Because the fact is, I can’t stand it.’
I saw the knowledge dawn in his eyes, an understanding of the utter frailty of women, in particular those whose names were preceded by the word ‘Auntie’. He laid a brief compassionate hand on my shoulder and his chin gave an old man’s nod.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I won’t.’ And actually, he didn’t.
Once Jonah and Elsa entered my life, I began to see things about kids I’d never noticed before, things I guess that became useful in my writing. Like, for instance, how they live utterly in the present, which is why when you tell them that you’re sorry, but you can’t do X today like you promised, but you’ll go tomorrow instead, they look at you like you’re quite mad and/or burst into furious tears, or like Elsa, who never cried (I used to wish she would), favour you with a hard cold stare that says the trouble with adults is that they simply can’t be trusted – this before turning on her heel, and stumping away in an abrupt and contemptuous manner because, like all kids, the future did not exist for her. I love the way, too, that kids pick up things – phrases, information. I saw Elsa do it when she was only three. She’d heard Fergie say something about our mother. I swear to God I saw her eyes brighten as she heard it; so did Cass, who said, ‘Shhhhh,’ but it was too late. I saw Elsa hug the wonderful words to herself, a few days later, judiciously considering the time was right, letting them out with a lip-smacking triumphant chuckle.
‘You’re from another planet, you, Aunt Riley.’
‘You could be right,’ I said.
The truth about Jonah and Elsa and I is that we have grown up together. Their rites of passage have also been mine, for instance the day that Jonah dropped that obligatory ‘Auntie’.
‘Riley,’ he said, with only a small gulp but the grand air of someone saying something perfectly natural. ‘Where’s my football boots?’
I scrabbled back in my mind through the Parents’ Manual, Chapter 3, Lost Things (Appropriate Answers).
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘More than likely where you left them.’
The day I arrived to take him to the first morning of his work placement, some three or four years on, I put a hand to my mouth in the manner of one confronted by a work of art, new and shocking and moving. I simply didn’t want him to be standing there, looking like that, in his first newly bought suit. What I felt in that moment was fear. No, not fear, white-hot terror, terror coupled with an awful resentment at the inflexible regime called growing up. I didn’t want Jonah to be in that suit, no matter how good he looked (and he did look good). I didn’t want him to be going out there into the world where he would meet other young men a couple of years older than himself who would take him out drinking. I didn’t want him to meet some sharp young miss by the photocopier who would break his heart for the first time. Instead I wanted to lock him up, he and Elsa both, in a cupboard somewhere, or maybe in a tower like in a fairy tale, but most of all to keep them safe, to keep them away from that big bad world out there for ever.
Because when I think of anything happening to Jonah or Elsa, something happens to my heart. First of all it contracts. Which is just the good part. After that it curls up into a hard little ball and comes out through my back screaming. Which is why, when Cassie told me on the morning of Fergie’s party that Jonah was talking about spending his summer holidays travelling in Asia, I reacted as any normal person would do.
‘You can’t be SERIOUS. You can’t POSSIBLY let him go. He’s FAR too young. It’s FAR too dangerous.’
‘Tell me about it,’ she said with an old woman’s look across the top of her spectacles.
Look. It’s quite simple. The way I feel about Jonah and Elsa is this.
I don’t want them to fly, or travel on trains. Certainly not coaches.
I don’t want them to be even mildly friendly with anyone with a car or a motorcycle.
I don’t want them to use their mobile phones in case they rot their brains (except, of course, to check in with me hourly).
I’d like them to be in by ten every night (at least until they’re married).
I don’t want them to take chances with strange diseases, eat anything even mildly carcinogenic.
I don’t want them to run with a glass in their hands, or go up a ladder.
I don’t want Jonah to go to pubs or clubs where other men get drunk or violent.
I don’t want Elsa to walk alone, even to the corner shop, and I don’t want her to go out with anyone I haven’t first had checked out via the Police Computer.
I don’t want them to drink alcohol or do drugs …
‘… in fact, do any damn thing you did yourself …’
‘Just mind your own frigging business, will you, Archie?’
‘But it is my business. At least as much as it is yours.’
‘I think not. I’ve been here all these years. I’ve been with them as they grew up.’
‘And I haven’t.
Quite true. But then whose fault is that, Riley?’
Twice Archie and I have stood beside each other at the font. The first time, at Jonah’s christening. This was my radical phase and I was particularly terse and bolshy.
‘I thought we had an agreement.’
‘For God’s sake, Riley. Cass and Fergie asked me. Fergie’s still my friend, you know. I was his best man, remember.’
‘Hard to forget, Archie.’
Three years later, I merely sniffed when Cass and Fergie announced that Archie would again be sharing the godparental responsibilities, this time for Elsa.
‘Fine. Although I would have thought renouncing the Devil and all his works would come a bit hard for a rank Thatcherite like Archie.’
Neither did I ever feel the need to abstain from chilly comment as Archie’s generous cheques arrived each birthday and Christmas.
‘If you feel you can take the money,’ I said to Jonah, only half joking, one Christmas, ‘knowing where it’s come from. How it’s been skimmed off the backs of all those Third World workers …’
‘They make software. The firm’s in Reading.’
‘He’s a tax exile,’ I said only the other day to Cass, in the manner of one pronouncing on paedophilia.
She said, with a small air of irritation, ‘Why can’t you let it go?’
‘What?’
‘This thing you have with Archie.’
All of which was as nothing when I found out that it was Archie’s latest fat birthday cheque that was going to allow Jonah to take the year out from university and go travelling.
‘Damn you, Archie,’ I said, slapping my glass down on the buffet table at Fergie’s retirement party. ‘Why the hell did you have to encourage him?’
‘He didn’t need encouraging.’ Archie looked down his long nose at me, took a swig of his wine. ‘Anyway, I thought you’d approve.’
‘It’s not like when I did it. That’s the point. Look around you. It’s a bloody dangerous world now, Archie.’
Later Jonah caught me at the buffet table, tried to talk to me about it.
‘I just want to get into other cultures,’ he said.
‘Why bother? Ours is the culture they all want to get into.’
He said, ‘Come on, Riley. Travel. It broadens the mind, right?’
‘Bollocks.’ He was joshing me, trying gently to make a joke of it all and his face fell at the word. ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘it’s all crap, Jonah. This wanting to get into other cultures. You’ll just be like we were, Carrying your own around with you on your back.’
I saw his face fall then, all the enthusiasm depart, and I was sorry. He stammered a little, a habit he has when he’s upset. It made me feel like someone had got hold of my heartstrings and was stretching them.
He said, ‘I just want to see things. Learn about the world.’
‘Why bother? I’m sure one internet café is much like another.’
He said, ‘That’s not fair,’ and it wasn’t, and his face was so full of hurt I didn’t dare look at it.
He said, ‘I thought you’d stand up for me. I thought you’d be on my side.’
He said, ‘I’m only asking to do what you did, Riley.’
Who can say why some places pass you by, why others eat their way into your heart? I don’t know. Maybe it was the heat that did it that day as I stepped down from the plane, the heavy seductive clamminess that dropped down over my head like a blanket. Or there again, perhaps it was the vulgarity of the place, the unashamed American-ness expressed in the vast neon sign flashing on and off as I came in from the airport. All this so different from the chill austerity of Nepal.
Bangkok. Bangkok.
Bang Makok originally. In translation, ‘City of Olives’, according to Jonah’s Lonely Planet Guide lying incriminatingly open on the sofa, although not, as I recall, to Nathan, who maintained it was ‘City of Plums’. Not Bangkok at all to the natives, instead Krung Thep, the name given by King Rama to the new city he founded the other side of the river in the eighteenth century, a shortened version, this being Krungthep mahankhon bowon rattanaskosin mahintara auythaya mahadilok popnopparat ratchanthani burirom-udomratchaniwet mahasanthan-amonpiman-avatansathir-sakkathatiya-visnukamprasit, not a snappy title, I’m sure you’d agree, but romantic, let me tell you, when Nathan wrote it out for me that first night we had dinner together, using a napkin, clicking the top of the pen he took from an inside pocket, pronouncing it afterwards mellifluously in his respectable Thai, making it sound like a love poem.
Krungthep mahankhon, etc, etc. In loose translation: great city of angels, great land unconquerable, grand and prominent realm, highest royal dwelling and grand palace, divine shelter and living place of reincarnated spirits, royal and delightful capital city full of nine noble gems (ten counting Nathan).
There are many things to see and do in Bangkok, according to Jonah’s guide book. Here is a small selection:
The Grand Palace
The Emerald Buddha
The Royal Barges
The Floating Market
Wat Arun
Jim Thompson’s House
Thai Boxing
Khan Dancing
As for me, I saw and did none of these things.
Instead I just went to the Oasis each night and after that to bed with Nathan.
I arrived in Bangkok the day the last American ground troops were pulling out of Da Nang, something I wouldn’t have known but for the headline on the Bangkok Post Zoe was reading in the foyer of the flea-bitten hostel where I booked in on my arrival.
There are always people like Zoe when you travel, people you touch lives with, and on the deepest level, but for only a short while, people you swear you’ll keep in touch with but never do, so that one day you wake up to find yourself wondering what happened to them, how they ended up and who and how often they married. Like Zoe, for instance. Is she a comfortable matron, spreading of hip, the wife of a country solicitor? Is she even now doing the flowers for the church on Sunday? Is she a dominatrix in thigh-length boots, or sitting behind some big desk running some dot com introduction agency? Or is she where she always wanted to be, sipping gin on a terrace somewhere, moaning about where the amah doesn’t dust, and married to a banker? Each and all of these things are possible with Zoe.
It’s Zoe who tells me about the job at the Oasis.
‘It’s not Patpong,’ she says, and it isn’t, sandwiched between a bank and an office block, only the sign with its green neon palm tree, eternally swaying and its ‘Girls’ discreetly flashing on and off, marking it out it from the blameless premises around it.
‘It’s quite respectable,’ she said with a grand Welsh wink. ‘That’s if you want it to be.’ Which it turns out she doesn’t. She’s banking close on a thousand dollars a week from her extracurricular activites.
‘I don’t know why you don’t do it,’ she says, shaking her head in bemusement. ‘You’ll make a lot more money, girl, getting yourself booked out than sitting here talking to them.’
But I just stick to the talking. I’ve got £200 in travellers’ cheques lodged in the safe in that flea-bitten hostel, plenty enough to get me to Hong Kong eventually, and a job on a paper.
‘Never forget, you’re playing at all this,’ Nathan will say one day and I don’t either.
Because it’s words, in the end, always words. They call it ‘nite life’ now, in the guide books, on those sites on the Net, the new lite nightlife, which even now they still like to call ‘naughty’. Only ‘naughty’ never worked for me. Not even back then. Especially back then. A grubby pink nylon curtain of a word, frilled and flounced and pulled over a dark doorway. Back in Bangkok in ’72, I’d hold that word up to the light, try to fit it into the thing like a piece in a jigsaw. I’d try to match it against Lee lying in the lap of her grizzled Australian engineer whose lechery after so long in the East had grown like a boil on his forehead. And I’d watch that word, that ‘naughty’, begin to shrivel and fall apart like a d
ead flower.
‘Thai men no good,’ Lee would say to me, and who could blame her, brought from her village at thirteen by one of those eponymous ‘aunts’ (ah the importance of aunts), brought to serve her countrymen in one of the thousands of backstreet brothels beyond the eyes of the tourists – the Lees of this world and their stories, the living, breathing lifeblood running in and out of Nathan’s dry dusty prose, his graphs and statistics?
‘It’s just so …’
‘What?’
In his hotel room, he’s striding up and down behind me where I sit, pencil in hand, trying to make sense of his writing. I catch the jagged self-derisory smile in the mirror above the table.
‘Say it. Go on. Dull.’ He stops mid-stride, his hands pushed pugnaciously into his pockets.
‘No.’ But I mean Yes and his smile says he knows it.
‘It’s just … difficult. Hard-going. That’s all.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ His shrug bears out the truth of the statement. ‘It’s an academic paper, Riley. It’ll just be read by people as dull and boring as me.’
‘Oh, well.’ For a moment we stare at each other in the mirror. ‘Just as long as it’s not being written to be read by the rest of us.’
One night he calls the foreign sex trade ‘a limpet, a barnacle, a carbuncle …’
I say, ‘Why is it your best words never make it onto the paper?’
Meanwhile, once, it even looks like it might work for Lee. She hooks up with a blubbery red-faced Englishman new to the city and entranced by her waist-length wash of long hair and her ferocious dancing. Within the week she’s leaving stuff in his apartment, standard bar girl fare – a faded T-shirt with a psychedelic motif, a bottle of nail polish, shoes with a heel broken.
‘He virgin before he meet me,’ she says. She rolls her eye, stabs a confident finger on her chest. ‘He marry me. You see.’
But Mama San does see. Mama San’s seen it all before. She shakes her head at Lee, turns a finger on her temple like a screwdriver to the rest of us.
Not Married, Not Bothered Page 10
