by Glen Duncan
‘Seven!’ Skinner was here and Ross felt a gentle benevolence towards the world. He forgave Eugene and Chick the overheard doubts and shifty looks and loud avoidance of the subject after the first suspicion had begun creeping in, and the detonation of forgiveness was, despite the already fiery armour of heat on his limbs, a more intimate and urgent inflagration. Gold bars that were brass. Two each, yes? It went like a woof of burned fuel in his chest, as the referee said, ‘Box on!’ and Ibrahim, with a flatfooted dogged shuffle and a face showing consciousness pared to the single goal of staying on his feet, came towards him. We’ll play again, Monroe, God had said rippling past him like a windblown ribbon as he’d left the Malaysian’s shop in Lahore, but for now…
Now thinking was an enormous weight he had to get out of his way. Rockballs’s words were live again: ‘Start thinking about anything else and you might as well tie one hand behind your back.’ You could slip into a cold palsy, numbed by the ifs and hows. Skinner with ducked head had turned and was making his way closer to the ring. Ross had a brief mental image of the Englishman ringside holding up two passports with the Satanic grin of contempt. There had been Skinner and there had been Kate and God had between them let his, Ross’s, will go free into the gold and the relief of being righteously chastised. If he hadn’t let Kate go that day, would he have her now? God doodled baroquely in wood grain and stone lode but there was room in creation for amusing little circles, too, ten years in your life but a split-second whim in His. Not what was fair but what was entertaining. And on the ifs went (Ibrahim’s body shots were coming again, the same urgent dumb argument that wouldn’t, would not be contradicted, so Ross would keep throwing the gruelling down-tilted jabs and short left hooks until he got his mind wholly back, then—): if Robbie hadn’t broken his arm, if Eugene hadn’t told him to get a sick note, if Agnes hadn’t made a show of Carruthers’s clap, if he hadn’t been hacked at and pneumonia’d in ’47 which was if Hector hadn’t gone to Bombay after Bernice, if they’d loaded the bales from the off side instead of the near…Were the ifs a line or a swarm? Could you go all the way back? Was one if the starting point or was every if? What about Kate’s? But if you allowed Kate’s you allowed everyone’s, even, now, Ibrahim’s.
And while all this was going on he was waiting (which pleased him, in a corner of himself ) with tugged-at concentration for that lift-shaft up the middle to open wide. If you get a man with a right cross once, Rockballs used to say, don’t think he’ll have learned his lesson. If he gets up, give him another right cross exactly the same and watch the idiotic bastard go down again. Somewhere in the back of his right shoulder Ross was winding up the Popeye roundhouse. Some punches, Rockballs had said, have been packed away since the beginning of time. They find their way into fighters now and then, and believe me, boys, you’ll know when you’ve got one in you.
Ahmed Ibrahim wrapped his arms round Ross. Resting. It was a delight to Ross, as if his opponent had very gently thrown himself on his mercy, knowing it was right and proper that there would be none given. It was often like this, gestures with love’s tenderness. In the ring the two of you fashioned gentleness with violence. Clem was screaming indecipherably from his corner. Ross knew what: the left. Watch for the left. With Ibrahim’s warm weight on him he smiled, because even with the mess of thinking in his way, the ifs like an infinitely receding line of barbs or a vast cloud of flies, he knew to watch for the left, was watching for it, would, in a moment when the ref stepped between them and relieved him of the loverish weight, be watching for it still, because even this resting might be a ruse.
Ibrahim took three paces backwards from the referee’s push. Looked at Ross with a face of tired surprise, as if the world was ending and how curious and touching it was for the two of them, strangers, to be witnessing it together. Ross smiled at him and in the moment before the referee’s command to box on glanced down to his right, where the Englishman who was not Skinner, but a much older man with the hair and the white shirt and paisley tie but with also a plump moustache had at last made it to the ring and was looking up at the fighters, one of whom (himself, Ross thought) he had money on, without recognition of anything other than the possibility of gain. Ross’s legs emptied but his will held him up. Not Skinner but something like an emissary carrying, if there was any remaining doubt, the message that Eugene and Chick and Kate, in their silent suspicion, had been right all along.
‘Box on!’ the ref shouted. Ross turned, had two or three seconds to begin the struggle with the desire to see the mind of God at work (would it be more entertaining if, because of—) before the left hook, which by the rhythm Ross had learned wasn’t due yet (and which had been waiting for its release into the world since the beginning of time), came early.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
options
(London, 2004)
I find a pay-and-display bay two streets from Skinner’s in Shepherd’s Bush. It’s a dull, cold afternoon of measly wind-whisked rain. Pasha, in a black trilby and a charcoal woollen overcoat he’s had for twenty years, insists on paying for the parking, and today I haven’t got what it takes to argue. I’m a state of electrified weakness which reminds me of nothing so much as my first day at school; fear and inevitability, my rank negligibility in the face of the implacable occult powers that be. In a matter of minutes the quest, my father’s quest–my father’s past, I suppose–one way or another, will be over. Even if this isn’t the man we’re looking for, somehow I know the last of the momentum will be spent today.
‘But the daughter,’ Pasha said last night. ‘What the hell are we going to do with her there?’ I wasn’t sure what he was planning to do without the daughter there. Knock Skinner out? Kick his zimmer from under him? Overload his hearing aid? None the less, I’d arranged things.
‘She’s not going to be there, Dad,’ I told him. We were halfway through a bottle of Bushmills (old times’ sake); I’d committed the mortal gastro-sin of giving the old man his Main Meal in the evening, rather than at his sacrosanct noon, and now according to his singular logic there must be a few wets ‘to help us digest’. ‘She said three o’clock, right? So we get there at two. Gives us an hour alone with him. I don’t know what you want to say to him, but an hour’s going to have to be enough.’ He contemplated his scotch. ‘What are you going to say to him?’
Not the first time I’d asked. He wouldn’t be drawn. Instead he lifted his chin and closed his eyes for a second. ‘That’s between me and him. You don’t get involved.’ He’d been shocked at the state of my room. The papers. Everywhere. ‘What kind of bleddy organization is this, son?’ he wanted to know, peeping in. ‘I mean how are you going to…?’
‘It’s on computer,’ I told him. ‘It’s all on computer. I’ve got my own system, Dad, trust me.’
‘Looks like someone’s burgled in here, men.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said. ‘You worry about Skinner, let me worry about The Book.’
‘But how can you keep track with this sort of chaos?’ I swung the bedroom door shut and hustled him back into the lounge.
Vince phoned earlier to say he was staying out. Thanks to ‘a delicious entanglement’, I haven’t seen him since the day before yesterday. Pasha knows Vince is gay, or rather in his parlance is a ‘gay bugger’, and has lived long enough to respond to homosexuality with a vaguely perplexed live-and-let-live shrug. He went through a period of anxiety when Vince first moved in, in case via cohabitational contagion I became a gay bugger myself, but that’s all passed. Vince is fond of him, and of my mother, who rather likes the modern sophistication her son’s sharing his home with a homosexual confers on her.
Hands in pockets and collars up against the rain, Pasha and I leave the car and walk the two blocks back to Uxbridge Road. He’s unnaturally quiet. London’s perceptual cacophony–takeaway whiffs, sodden litter, car honks, siren whoops, hoardings, a wino, a jogger–might as well be blank silence for all it’s penetrating his mood. I keep trying to make small talk–this is w
here that waitress I was seeing used to live; I come through here driving out to the M4 to go to Melissa’s; traffic’s always a nightmare–but there’s no reaching him. He looks small and out of place. I forget how old he is. When I went to meet him off the coach at Victoria, his face peering out from the tinted window, looking for me–what if I wasn’t there to meet him? My son I’d’ve been absolutely bleddy confused in this city–hurt my heart with its need, his relief when he spotted me, his wave and scurry to get his bag. Mater had put him up sandwiches and a flask of coffee. He’d done the Sun crossword on his own, not the same pleasure without her. What he really loves is to pick it up after she’s left two or three clues unsolved, solve them, then toss it back to her, saying, ‘There you are, I’ve done it,’ and have her say, facetiously, ‘Oh yes, well, obviously I had to wait for Mastermind to come and put the finishing touches,’ while he chuckles and rubs his paunch.
‘Fox Road,’ I say. ‘This is the one. 46B we want.’ Two rows of Victorian three-storey terraced houses face each other across Fox Road’s seen-better-days tarmac, rain-speckled cars parked nose to tail along both kerbs. Our pace has slowed. I glance at the house number over Pasha’s shoulder: 22. Not far.
‘Dad?’
As if with telepathic agreement we come to a halt. The old man is looking not at me but down at the pavement. There’s a soaked and trodden newspaper page stuck there, advertising a microelectronics sale at Currys, but he isn’t seeing it. This is a new look on his face, a sort of depressed, introspective nervousness. Suddenly I feel sad as hell. ‘Dad? Are you okay?’
‘Yeah, I’m all right.’
‘You sure?’
He clears his throat. ‘Funny thing, eh?’ he says. ‘After all these years.’
I fish in my pockets, pull out a pack of Marlboro (seems I’m smoking again, officially, what with Janet Marsh, what with Scarlet, what with the fucking Cheechee Papers) and light up from a Putti matchbook. It has the desired distraction effect.
‘What the hell? You’re smoking again now?’
‘I’ve been under a lot of stress, Dad.’
‘What stress?’
He needs this little stall for time. So do I. It won’t be long enough. How could it be? Fifty years remembering and now here we are. Here he is.
‘Don’t tell Mum,’ I say.
He doesn’t respond, has in a moment drifted back into himself, looks down at the pavement again.
‘Come on, Dad. Let’s get this over with.’
We hear him before we see him. The shocking sound of someone too old to be making sounds like a child. 46B is the basement flat. Six stone steps with an old man in a raincoat lying at the bottom of them. He’s on his front, one arm up by his head with a bunch of keys clutched, the other trapped underneath him. One leg of his trousers has ridden up, revealing a thin, varicosed calf, a quality old-man sock, a slip-on old-man shoe. His face is pressed against the wet stone, an upper set of jolted-out dentures inches from the mewling mouth. His eyes are pinched shut. They’re like babies, you see, my son, my mother said to me, years ago, of the old people she looked after in the nursing home. When people get that old, they go like they were when they were tiny. They can’t do these things for themselves. Because of a clash of shifts (my dad on nights at Goodyear, Maude away on a school trip, no babysitter she trusted) my mother had taken me with her for her night shift at Westfield. I was supposed to be asleep in the staff room but I’d heard her going off to make her rounds, followed her and seen through an open bedroom door her wiping the copiously beshitted backside of a lint-haired, frail-skulled old man. It’s all right, Ernest, she was saying. It’s really all right. There’s no need to upset yourself. I’ve seen it all before. Ernest had been lying on his side with his pyjama bottoms down, whimpering. When she came back to the staff room I crawled into her lap and said I don’t like it, Mummy, I don’t like it. The place stank of urine and medicine, but I pushed my face up close to her neck and wrapped my arms round her and there was Nivea and L’Air du Temps. But these poor people are alone, sweetheart. They can’t help themselves, that’s all. They’re like little babies, you see? It happens to us all when we get old.
Pasha and I stand for what feels like a long time in paralysed silence looking down from the top of the steps. Skinner’s aware of us but I can tell he doesn’t know what’s real. We could be phantoms, Martians, anything, the ground could open up and swallow him, he could wake up and find he’s five years old in bed with fever. However this happened, it’s exploded his mental order. His face, momentarily opened by the shift we’ve made in his peripheral light, pinches again, and with eyes closed he releases a moan.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I say, hurrying down the steps. My shadow falls over his face. ‘Listen. I’ll call you an ambulance. Just lie still. Don’t try to move.’
He does move, however. The key-clutching hand grabs my arm. ‘Please,’ he says, upper-toothlessly distorted. ‘No ambulance. I’m all right. No ambulance. Just help me up.’
‘You should lie still,’ I tell him, thinking of Gilliam’s Baron Munchausen saying, ‘No doctors, no doctors.’ Broken hip? Knee? Arm? Thinking, too: Christ, this is when you need a fucking mobile phone (I’ve resisted, all these years with heroic anachronism; even Pasha’s making noises about getting one these days) but I’ll buzz one of the other flats or next door or—
‘I’m all right. I’m all right.’
With an ugly twist and shudder and grimace he gets the trapped arm out and pushes himself up on to one elbow. Reaches for and with disgust clasps the dentures. ‘Get me inside. It’s the red key, the red one.’
Between us, since he continues to protest ferociously against the ambulance, we get him up and, after I’ve located the red-tabbed front door key, into the flat’s surprisingly spruce hallway. The geography of the place chimes: it’s the same as mine. The hallway goes all the way back to the kitchen, three rooms to the right, living and two bedrooms. The bathroom will be off the kitchen, a little yard or garden at the rear.
‘Kitchen,’ he says, disentangling his arm from where, since I’ve seen the manoeuvre on telly, I’ve wrapped it over my shoulder–probably threatening dislocation. ‘In the kitchen. I’m all right, for Christ’s sake.’ He leans on my father’s trembling forearm and limps forward. Pasha himself hasn’t said a word, has barely looked at the man.
The whole place smells professionally clean. Janet’s money. A grey and black striped cat comes tink-tinking from one of the rooms to watch us getting him settled. The kitchen’s big enough for not just a small oak dining table and four chairs (the floors are stripped but with lengths of dark-green non-slip covering laid across the primary routes) but also a new-looking two-seater leather couch facing the window, on to which we lower him. He shoves his dentures back in with a muffled clack.
‘You need that disinfecting,’ my dad says. The left knee of Skinner’s trousers is torn, revealing a cut and a bloody graze just below the kneecap. The rain has stopped. A pleasant dull, rinsed light fills the kitchen. I imagine the Englishman in here with his steaming morning coffee and toast and Times, the cat in an oblong of sun licking its paw. Noise is scarce, the place says, layers of afternoon and nighttime silence have been laid down and absorbed.
‘Don’t fuss,’ Skinner snaps. Then softens. ‘Sorry. It’s that bloody third step. I’m not senile. I’ll be fine. My daughter’s coming soon.’
‘You get an infection, it’ll be no joke,’ my dad says, standing looking down at the bloody knee. ‘Might need a couple of stitches even.’
My body tingles with my inability to think of a single useful thing to say or do. I stand in the middle of the kitchen floor, observed by the cat. The crockery from breakfast is in the sink. A calendar on the wall opposite me is a month behind current time. Skinner, shaking, breathing heavily with a slight wheeze, peels the trouser tear apart and examines. The graze is deep and raw, the cut sullen with blood. I keep thinking of the desolation of his face, lying there in the rain. Underneath the ti
ngling uselessness another feeling, an intimation of emptiness. Endings.
‘My daughter’ll be here soon,’ Skinner says, sitting back. ‘No need to trouble yourselves now.’
‘We were coming to see you,’ I blurt. ‘I’m the person your daughter told you about? I was coming to talk to you about your book?’ Statements as questions because I irrationally believe they’ve a better chance of restarting a stalled memory.
For a moment all three of us are silent, as if I’ve said something obscene.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘My name’s Owen Monroe. Your daughter, Janet, said you wouldn’t mind talking to me about your book, Raj Rogue. For my thesis?’ The name’s out before I realize. Monroe. I look at Skinner for signs of detonation. Nothing. My father, still in trilby and overcoat, stands with his hands in his pockets, scrutinizing not his old adversary but the cat, who has jumped up on to the couch and is pushing his head against Skinner’s absently fondling hand. ‘This is my father,’ I say. ‘I hope you don’t mind him coming along. We were early, you see, then we saw you. We were going to go and get a cup of tea.’
It’s too much for the old man, the other old man, Skinner. His face crinkles with the effort of piecing all this together. I don’t know what state I’d imagined Pasha would be in, but whatever I’d imagined it wasn’t this deflated version of himself. Then I realize: Skinner looks old. Ancient. All but the faintest wispy half-tonsure of hair’s gone. The eyes live waterily in deep thin-skinned orbitals behind the magnifying lenses of his spectacles, which miraculously have stayed on through fall and rescue. The cleft, if it’s there, is lost among countless other lines. The skin of his long jowls is translucent and finely fractured. This was a delicately masculine face once. Those cheekbones would have been something; now they advertise the skull, say bone, bone outlasts all this surface nonsense. That’s what my father wasn’t expecting. The most obvious thing. He blinks, taking it all in, now that he’s had the courage to really look.
