The White Family

by Maggie Gee

  A rush of relief; he would always be there. Like the head on a sixpence, never wearing out … but growing smaller, somehow, as the world grew larger. A few more steps, and she saw he was asleep, upright as ever in his good blue pyjamas but his eyes closed, his mouth slightly open. She hoped he hadn’t snored; Alfred was too proud to snore in front of other people. She would never let him, if she were with him. But they had been parted, after a lifetime.

  I suppose that pride won’t help us, now.

  How did my Alfred come to be here? Alfred of all people, who never was in hospital, Alfred who never took a day off work, Alfred White who was never ill.

  But we all come here. I shall come here.

  She shrugged the voice away, impatient.

  The ward was getting ready for visiting time, combings of hair, straightenings of dressing-gowns, eyes turned longingly towards the entrance where faces from the other world might appear, younger, healthier, bearing gifts. Faces that once seemed ordinary, now brightly coloured, glowing, miraculous.

  Why was he still sleeping? There was so much to do. In her bag there were documents for him to sign. Only now did she realiz–e how foolish she had been, letting everything be in Alfred’s name, the house, the pension book, the bank account.

  Darren had got angry, on the phone. He rang so rarely, and it was gone eleven, the middle of the night, it seemed to May, and she was so drowsy and confused that she’d spilled out all her worries, and cried. And he’d made her feel a fool. ‘What do you mean, you can’t draw any money? You mean Dad always got the money? How could you be so bloody daft …?’

  But then, she had never really pleased her sons. Even the names she chose annoyed them. Darren and Dirk … They were film star names that Alfred was unsure about, but he said ‘That’s your department, May. Women know better than men about names.’ Their daughter was Shirley, after Shirley Temple. Then Dirk and Darren. She had done her best, though Dirk, the youngest, always complained. May had loved Dirk Bogarde with swooning intensity; his sideways smile, his dark deer’s eyes, the narrow elegance of his body, and though he had mysteriously changed, become old and angry and homosexual, she still felt she had let him down, giving his name to someone who despised it.

  Dirk was sulky, but Darren was rude. ‘…You’ve never even had a banker’s card? I can’t believe it, it’s unbelievable …’ He shouldn’t have talked to her like that. She had heard him be sharp with his wives and children – worse than sharp, worse than his father – but he had no right to be sharp with his mother. Why couldn’t he be nice, like Thomas? Thomas was Darren’s oldest friend, and he had always been kind to her. Thomas didn’t make her feel old and stupid. (Yet he was quite successful too. As she’d once told her son, when he was rude about Thomas, Thomas was a real writer. And Darren had gone silent. She knew it hurt him.)

  Of course Darren lived in a different world, where women had armfuls of credit cards, and wrote all the rules to suit themselves …. Whereas with Alfred, everything had been laid down. Rules that were lost in the mists of time, walls he built and cemented in till that red-brick labyrinth became her life.

  Only now nothing seemed quite safe any more. The walls were shifting. The sea was rising.

  May stared at the chart at the foot of his bed. The marks were mean and small, as usual, and she squinted at them, but they told her nothing.

  There were languages you weren’t meant to read. Medical people had their secret language. May’s mother had felt that about all books, that they were meant for other people, better people, richer people with drawling voices, the ladies who sometimes peered in through the window of her father’s workshop where he sat mending shoes, only coming in doubtfully, little mouths pursed, holding their skirts as if they might get dirty. Her father read books, history, politics, not books for women, he told her impatiently, books for men, serious books. But May knew different; both parents were wrong.

  Because books were meant for everyone.

  Of course there were writers she couldn’t understand. Some she could like without understanding, but some she was affronted by because she felt they didn’t want her to understand. If so, she could do without them. There were plenty of writers who spoke her thoughts.

  Did doctors want people to understand? Probably not. It was probably less trouble. That way, they didn’t have to get into arguments. But it didn’t matter, she told herself. They were professionals. She trusted them. They were a bit like priests, in their clean white coats, and the nurses were like women tending a temple … She wished she could pray. She wasn’t really religious, but Alfred looked so little, so lonely.

  There must be a prayer. Shirley would know it. May found herself praying, in a kind of dream, praying to the past, or the future, or the doctors, and the words came slowly, refused to come …

  Do what You like to him, but get him out … Send him back to me. He wants to be out … he needs to be outside, in the light. Please, if there’s Anyone … or Anything …. we’ve done our best … You know we tried … family was everything to us … There’s the kids to think about … especially Dirk … he’s no more than a baby … he needs his dad … Do what You like to him, but send him home.

  4 • Dirk

  I’ll die before I get to the hospital, thought Dirk. Die of a fucking heart attack. They’re killing me. All of them. Fucking killing me.

  He rested his head against the window of the bus, leaning away from the fat cow in a sari who was taking up three-quarters of the seat. The thud of the engine beat a sickening rhythm through the bones of his head, so he jerked upright again. No fucking rest for the fucking weary.

  His heart was full of furious dread. Dad would be lying there, looking … different. Horribly different. Everything changed. And Mum by his side, little, miserable, that fluttery, stupid, awful look she had had since Dad had his fall or whatever. She’d stopped cooking, hadn’t she? She was never much cop at it but last night she’d done something disgusting with tuna and the rice was burnt black like mouse droppings. As if Dirk wasn’t busy all day and didn’t need his tea when he got home … Now his parents had to go and let him down.

  And the bus had kept him waiting for half an hour. Three bloody buses went sailing past while he was ringing up the till in the shop. Then as soon as he got out to the bus stop, sod all. It was freezing cold, with a bitter wind. So then he’d gone in the pub for a drink. First you felt warmer. Then colder than ever. And he had to go back to the bus stop and shiver. He could have walked but his trainers hurt him, pressing on his corns, savage, spiteful. They were cheap, weren’t they. Because he was poor. Going by bus was for poor people too.

  Which was why they fucking mucked you around when you tried to pay with a five pound note (it wasn’t like a twenty, or even a ten).

  The driver had looked at Dirk as if he was rubbish. ‘What’s this?’ he had said. ‘I don’t want this. Haven’t you read the notices? Can you read? It says “Tender exact money please.” In plain English.’

  And so on and so on, blah blah blah, while Dirk tore his pockets searching for change, and there wasn’t any, not even ten pee, and the whole bus was glaring and muttering as if it was Dirk’s fault the driver was a tosser.

  They’re all in it together, of course. Look around this bus and you can see it. Ninety per cent coloureds. Well, fifty, at least. And the driver’s coloured, so they’re on his side. And he has the fucking cheek to talk about English. As if they owned it. Our speech. Our language. (Tender exact money … that’s not proper English. Does a normal bloke use a word like ‘tender’?)

  The trouble is, they do own most things. They’ve taken over the buses, and the trains. And the bloody streets. You can’t get away from them.

  Not down our pub, mind. They know what’s good for them.

  The woman next to Dirk was very old and very fat, perched awkwardly upon the seat. A man’s overcoat half-covered her sari. Indian people smelled of funny food. As the bus rounded a corner, she suddenly flung out one great fat arm
upon Dirk’s lap. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked her, stiff, outraged, but he didn’t want to touch the arm to move it away. She smiled and nodded, not understanding, muttering some mumbo-jumbo at him. He turned away, furious, disgusted, but there was no way to escape her body, brown, gigantic, pressing upon him, old people, he hated them, and now his dad was suddenly old.

  He felt beneath his jacket for the thing he kept there that always comforted him, always helped him. His fingers found it, pressed it – pressed – pressed until there was no more blood in his fingers, pressed until all the life was gone, and when the pressure reached the point of pain he released it again, and breathed a bit easier, for he could simply cut them up, if he had to, slice off their limbs, their eyes, their hair …

  Women and coloureds. They were everywhere.

  He’d never liked women. Except his sister, till she went funny, till she went mad. And now he hated her worse than the others. Because Shirley had once been something of his own, she used to make him feel he was a bit special, but then she’d turned against her own flesh and blood.

  He hated his family now. Except Dad.

  Flesh and blood. It was meat. It was nothing.

  5 • Thomas

  Thomas was back in his high flat, writing. Or staring at the manuscript he should be writing. He was trying to write about the Death of Meaning, but would it mean anything to anyone else? He had a page by Mikhail Epstein open in front of him, which last week had seemed to explain the world. ‘Post-postmodernism witnesses the re-birth of utopia after its own death …’

  He scratched his head. Was he growing more stupid? Less modern, perhaps? Less post-postmodern? Thomas’s mind began to drift.

  Sex snapped on to it, like a magnet.

  Could he hear Melissa above his head? Four o’clock. She would still be in school. Mornings and evenings were the hopeful times when he might hear her sweet feet padding on his ceiling.

  Melissa. The first Melissa I’ve known. The name is cat-like and swift, like her. Honey-tongued, delicate, purring, golden …

  Very groomed, was Melissa, in the early mornings, when he chanced to meet her on the stairs. Stumbling back upwards with his milk and his Guardian and his pyjamas under his clothes, he sometimes heard her come tip-tipping downwards in her brisk black booties with their sexy eyelets –

  Six slick eyelets, slim pale ankles. She smelled of cinnamon, apples, musk, and soap and cornflakes and cleanliness. He probably smelled of old beer and bad breath but she still favoured him with her celestial smile, always slightly surprised, as if she thought she was on the moon and had just discovered that someone else lives there. ‘Oh, hello. You’re up early.’ As if she wasn’t always up early. Her job was so hard he shuddered to think of it, teaching hordes of savage young children. How could they ever appreciate her?

  I could protect her. I could look after her …

  Actually of course he had little to offer. A bad track record with relationships, a three-bed flat in a seedy part of London, a day job as senior librarian, one novel, written eight years ago (influenced by Proust and Woolf and relativity theory, though no one noticed – The Wave, the Bridge and the Garden, a title he now agreed was too long), a middling income he overspent, a guilty slither of credit cards, a second-hand car, a gift with words, his amazing penis, currently unused, needing tenderness, loving, licking …

  Melissa does like me. It isn’t an illusion.

  But her eyes were bright, unkindly young, seeming to pierce beneath his skin.

  Am I any good? Is there any point to me? What shall I leave behind on this planet?

  Books. Words. The English language. I try to serve it. (And other languages. We have to now. Three-hundred-odd languages are spoken in London, and people expect us to have books in all of them. Which is fair enough … Or maybe too fair. Sometimes I feel it’s all gone too far. But I’m not allowed to think things like that. Librarians are servants of the people.)

  He was writing his second book, very slowly. He’d been writing it for five years, to be honest. Postmodernism and the Death of Meaning. Perhaps non-fiction was harder than fiction. He hadn’t exactly got a publisher, though he’d sent a synopsis out to nine or ten editors, and one of them responded very encouragingly, wishing him the best of luck with finishing it, but begging him not to send the manuscript in case it should get lost in the post. Thomas still blushed with indignant shame, remembering what his ex-wife had said: ‘It’s twaddle, isn’t it, you great lummox. Is this all you learned at university?’ (Could she be right? Was he wasting his time?)

  It was Thursday, the library’s half-closing day, the day when his book should be sprinting along. Pull yourself together, he told himself. Forget about the book and set off for the hospital. See how Alfred’s getting on.

  It didn’t seem believable that he was in hospital. Alfred who was never ill … A man of iron, Darren’s Dad. They’d kept him in for a week already.

  Thomas had decided to go and visit now, at once, in case Alfred died. Not that he often went round to the house (every few years? twice a decade?) – but he liked to know Alfred was there. Somewhere. The family he had always known. Safer than his. More stable than his parents, who had broken up, hopelessly, three years before they died, in different hospitals, still rowing by proxy. May wasn’t a good cook, but she’d always made him welcome.

  Darren must be forty, if I am. Darren White the Golden Boy. He’s a journalist. Doing very nicely. The twenty-first century belongs to them, the e-mail he-men, the four-a.m.-faxers. Darren’s just married for the third time. Must have found someone younger, glossier.

  Will he come back, now his father’s ill?

  He always treated his family like dirt. Even his mum, who was nice to all of us hungry boys, piling in for tea after a football match. Alfred could be a bit sharp at times, but May was a darling, with her slow sweet smile and her dry sense of humour and passion for reading. I thought May did Darren’s English homework, but I was probably wrong. He had a knack with words. We both loved writing, in our different ways …

  Melissa knows about Egyptian writing. She’s teaching her kids to write hieroglyphics, though quite a few of them still can’t write English. But Egypt’s on the National Curriculum. (She had blue-green eyes, like Egyptian stones. Goldy brown hair, and small golden freckles …)

  He told himself to forget about her. He had things to do, he had grown-up worries.

  Thomas shaved too fast, cutting himself. He’d given up his beard twelve months ago. Melissa said it made him look younger. Yet he felt quite old as he emerged, blinking, into the thin late sun of wintry London.

  As he walked, his thoughts returned to the library. Something faintly disturbing had happened that morning. A young black man had approached the Inquiry Desk. ‘W King’, he had written his name. It was a face Thomas had seen before, he knew, though there were so many black students in the library. He sometimes thought the readers were mostly black, until he made himself count, one day. Funny how your mind played tricks on you. He guessed at the Christian name: Wesley? Wayne?

  The young man’s face was memorable, high-cheek-boned, fine-featured. His eyes were peculiarly intimate, golden-brown with a steady gaze. Often Thomas didn’t meet people’s eyes – it got very tiring, dealing with the public – but this young man demanded to be looked at. ‘I left my name. I forgot some stuff. The man on the desk said he wasn’t a librarian.’ The punters always got puzzled by this, when the staff doing obviously librarian-like things, putting books on shelves, sitting at the Inquiry Desk, denied they were librarians – but it was the truth; most of them weren’t, because it cost more to have qualified staff.

  As the young man gazed into his eyes, Thomas remembered why his name was familiar. It was written on those fanatical notes Suneeta had found the day before. ‘For the past four hundred years, the white man has been pumping his blood and genes into the blacks, has been diluting the blood and genes of the blacks … Many black homosexuals acquiesce in this racial death-wish.’ O
bsessionally neat italic writing. And then he began to feel vaguely threatened, for W King, having reclaimed his notes, proceeded to eyeball Thomas closely as he read him a wish-list of titles, including two books by Eldridge Cleaver, and One Hundred Years of Lynchings. As the boy pronounced the titles, he had given a curious half-smile, half-laugh, at Thomas, and Thomas was aware of the boy’s height, and youth, and his long strong fingers, playing with a pen.

  Frowning, he walked on into the cold, taking the road that passed the Park.

  W King. He must live round here. He found himself peering at passing black youths with more than usual attention, then told himself to forget all about it. Libraries were always full of nutters. Parks, libraries … where else could they go?

  It was hard to imagine the Park without Alfred. He was always in there, keeping an eye, guarding the flowers, bullying the kids when they tried to chase balls over the newly-bedded primulas, shouting at dogs, unblocking the drinking-fountain, forming little friendships with menopausal ladies, touching his cap to older ones, looking out for vandals in the toilets …

  I don’t want anything to happen to Alfred.

  Instead of going straight to the hospital, Thomas turned in through the gates of the Park, magnificent tottering fairy-tale things, Victorian curlicues of iron-work.

  Inside, the council asserted itself with a new municipal notice-board. No Littering, No Soiling, No Golfing: No Motorcycles, No Camping, No Caravans. Were they afraid of Hell’s Angels and gypsies?

  This was England. If in doubt, keep them out.

  6 • May

  You weren’t allowed to sit on the bed.

  It was the only regulation she knew, from long ago when she gave birth to Dirk. May didn’t like to break the rules, but the armchair was stuck right up by the bedhead where Alfred would get a crick in his neck from talking. She sank down on his bed with a sigh of content.