Where to Find Me

by Alba Arikha

  He said nothing else after that, and was quiet all the way home.

  My mother decided that we should see Dr Glass a few more times.

  We did. The sadness didn’t go away. But its burdensome weight did, at least for me. And then, one morning, Walter rang to say that Lucie’s body had been found on the Dorset coast, not far from where it had happened. Her body had washed ashore during the storm. A fisherman had found her.

  “We can bury her now,” he said.

  I asked my mother what Lucie had looked like when she was found, but didn’t get an answer. The main thing, she said, was that she had been found, and we could finally lay her to rest.

  Lucie was buried in France.

  My parents went to the funeral, and we stayed with my godmother, Nancy, my mother’s old friend. She was a painter and lived above a Thai restaurant in Covent Garden. The smell of Thai food often wafted through the windows, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  She made us cookies and let us watch television until very late that night.

  The next morning her daughter Anna, a fashion student who wore plaits and a large turquoise ring on her index finger, showed me how to bead necklaces. Then she put on a Supertramp record loudly, and we held hands and danced in the living room to ‘Breakfast in America’.

  Ben jumped up and down and laughed. There was hope, I thought. Everything was going to be all right from now on.

  *

  We moved to Notting Hill in December 1983, one day after the IRA bombed Harrods. It was an unfortunate coincidence, and my mother wanted to postpone the move so that we could honour the dead, but my father told her it was a ridiculous suggestion, that life couldn’t stop for us just because it had for others.

  So we moved.

  Compared to our Hammersmith flat, there was something cavernous about this new house, a period building on Oxford Gardens. Our furniture looked suddenly small within the grandeur of the rooms, especially in the kitchen and the sitting room, which overlooked a beautiful secluded garden with a large pear tree and rosebushes. The bedrooms themselves, four in all, smelled of fresh paint. They had high ceilings and windows with wrought-iron bars. Some of them were in poor, dilapidated condition, as was a lot of the house, which needed a makeover. “We’ll get to it eventually,” my mother said. “And at least we’ve done it,” she added. “We’ll never forget what happened, but we can start anew,” she repeated, in a confident voice. “With Walter,” she added.

  Walter still had a flat in Chelsea, but it felt empty without Lucie, he said. So increasingly, especially when he and my father had had too much to drink, he stayed over. “I’d rather not risk that drive,” he would say. “Safer to stay put.”

  He stayed put a lot, and I was delighted; I loved his company.

  Walter slept in the attic. It was a quiet room, with a slanting roof and a double bed with lions carved on its headpost. There was a small blue basin, which didn’t work, a relic from the previous owner, and a mahogany chest of drawers that had once belonged to my grandfather. The room had a slight smell of hay, or something rural, and my mother joked that a farmer must have lived there before us. My father reminded her that an artist had lived there before – hardly a farmer – and she laughed, although I couldn’t understand why it was funny. But at least they were laughing.

  Two days after Christmas my father, who had slipped a disc as a result of “the accident”, as my parents labelled it, was able to stand up straight again, and my mother said it was a sign. By January, she had taken up yoga and enrolled at the Open University. “I’m going to become a therapist,” she announced. “I want to get an MA, open my own clinic and help people. Better than we were able to help ourselves,” she added, smiling. Ben could not help himself – neither could we, seemingly, help him. We glossed over it, because none of us knew how to handle the problem. Still, I was relying on my mother to save him: she had to. That’s what parents did, wasn’t it?

  Then in the middle of it all my grandfather Fredrik died.

  My mother flew to Oslo for the funeral, alone. She didn’t want my father to accompany her. When she returned, she seemed upset, which I hadn’t expected her to be.

  “I should have made peace with him,” she said, sounding fragile. “But how could I? He betrayed my mother with another woman. And now there’s Olav. He was at the funeral, you know. A beautiful little boy. He’s one year old now. And my brother was there too, with his new wife. She’s very nice. They promised to come and visit next time they’re in London. They have a son your age, Ben.”

  I wasn’t interested in my uncle, but in Olav. She had never mentioned his name before. We discussed the baby and my grandfather’s “other woman”. “A simple young woman who didn’t really know what she was getting herself into. But now she does,” my mother added. “Now she really does.”

  Hilde, my mother continued, wanted to help. She had forgiven her husband everything, including his mistress and child. She had always loved Fredrik.

  I found that an odd concept to take in. From what I had seen of my grandfather, there wasn’t much to love or to forgive. He had always looked old and unhappy. But aside from our trip to Norway a few years back, we hardly knew him. Perhaps there was a whole other side to him. A gentler, softer side. There must have been. Otherwise, why would a woman so young and so pretty fall in love with him?

  So I found myself grieving for him. Not for the man I knew, but for the one I didn’t. For the missed opportunities in my life. For the fact that, had I made an effort, or had my mother made peace with him, I might have grown to love my grandfather.

  And had I spent more time with Lucie, I might have grown to love her as well.

  *

  Whenever he talked about that fateful day at the sea – which, as the years went by, became a rarity – Ben relived it. I could see it on his face, the way his voice became heated when he spoke. It was as if he were hiding behind Lucie again, making faces and wiggling his fingers. As if he were back in the sea, fighting the waves.

  “I want you to be happy and annoying again,” I said to him once. “I want my brother back. I miss you.”

  If those words touched him in any way, he didn’t show it. By then, he showed very little of himself, except for anger.

  My parents, on the other hand, showed more of themselves than I wanted to see. Whenever they relived the story, their words were fuelled by alcohol. Who had been responsible for the drowning became a regular topic of conversation. The result was a repeat of what I had witnessed that night when Walter had come for dinner. But by then Ben and I knew better than to remain seated, and left the two of them to their own devices, their inebriated squabbles echoing through the stairwell.

  We grew up, Ben and I, and the squabbles diminished in their frequency. But when they flared up again, the results were always the same. It soon became apparent that no matter how many years went by, how many hours of therapy we had undergone, the final conclusion of who had ultimately been responsible for Lucie’s plight would never be determined, at least not as far as my parents and Ben were concerned.

  I felt differently. I blamed the sea and I still do. It was a fluke, one we had to learn to live with. Lucie’s selfless gesture, the way she had dived in without a second thought, would never leave us, however far we fled. She had left invisible particles of herself behind, and although they were clearing with time, something of her would always remain. I was sure of it.

  I had heard a program on the radio about trauma and how it affected families. The man interviewed, a psychologist from an eminent university, had discussed the “repercussions of trauma on the family unit”. During the course of the interview, he had used the word “dysfunctional”. That word, and his definition of it, struck a chord. Had we become such a family? Unable to read the signs, as he described it?

  “The line between boundaries and blame will be harder to demarcate,” the psycholo
gist explained. In our case, both had been blurred. Blame covered our family like an invisible pall, and boundaries had become unenforceable. As painful as it was to hear an actual explanation of what I had, until then, deemed to be a temporary situation, it served to quell my anxieties and answered some of the questions I had been grappling with until then.

  When I relayed the man’s words to my mother, she refuted my theory with an overreaction I could only interpret as further proof that what I had heard was accurate. “There’s a big difference between trauma and dysfunction,” she snapped. “We’re hardly dysfunctional. We’re coping with the situation.”

  “No, we’re not,” I answered back.

  “That’s your opinion, not mine.” she declared. “Think what you wish.”

  I don’t know if she shared this information with my father; I suspect not.

  The eminent psychologist had also talked about that: death and grief, how to cope with it and the importance of communication. He had mentioned how trauma can alter one’s internal space, and how finding one’s bearings again was a sign of recovery.

  My parents hadn’t found their bearings. They still argued over who had been responsible for the drowning in the first place. Until that was resolved, they would remain disoriented, searching for an internal space I was now certain they would never find again.

  4

  My father’s play opened on a cold December evening. We left early, dragging a reluctant Ben with us. It was one of the only times I ever saw my mother threaten him. “This is a very important night in your father’s career. If you don’t make the effort and come with us, he will send you away. And I mean it. So you’re coming, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “Where will he send me away to?” Ben sniggered. “Prison?”

  “A military boarding school,” my mother retorted. “Where you’ll be whipped into shape from dawn to dusk.”

  I smiled, and I saw Ben do the same. The chances of that happening were highly unlikely. But for once he didn’t protest. He shrugged his shoulders and even took a shower, which he hadn’t done for as long as I could remember. He came out of his bedroom wearing black jeans, a crumpled shirt and spray-painted trainers. But the fact that he was there at all was sufficient for my mother to refrain from commenting on his attire.

  We jumped into a cab and arrived at the theatre to find a throng of people at the front entrance. My father, taller than most, waved at us from among the crowd. The play was advertised on a large poster: “a month in the country: ivan turgenev directed by leon karalis”. As he walked towards us, a journalist brandishing a large camera asked us to stand together, so that he could take a family photograph.

  I still have it, among my old notebooks and paraphernalia. The four of us smiling at the camera, Ben standing behind us all, head lowered, shoulders hunched. The photographer had yelled “C’mon lad, show us your face!” to no avail.

  He took the picture anyway, one of the last recorded memories I have of us standing in a room together.

  We were ushered into a private area. A few people were congregating around my father. Walter, other family friends, acquaintances, members of the theatre. My father introduced us all proudly, his arm around Ben, who was struggling to retain his usually gloomy composure. For the first time in years, I heard him make small talk with Nancy and a man I didn’t know. Then we were asked to come inside the hall and take our seats.

  A man came on stage and talked a little bit about Turgenev, the actors, the theatre itself and my father. He then left the stage, the lights dimmed and the performance began.

  It was unlike any of my father’s usual minimalist, avant-garde plays. Here the lavish costumes, the setting and the acting were on a par with the best productions I had ever seen. I watched as Natalya fell in love with Alexei, and thought of my own relationship with Arun and what might happen if I were to meet another man.

  The previous week, lying naked in bed, he had twiddled my hair and held a lock between his fingers. “Your hair is jet-black like Indian girls’,” he said. “Beautiful.” He paused and looked at me gently. “Could I have a lock to take home with me?”

  “Yes,” I nodded.

  He stood up and retrieved a pair of small scissors from his jacket. “I brought them with me,” he said, blushing.

  He carefully cut off a small lock of my hair and placed it in his jacket pocket. “I’ve been wanting to ask for a while,” he admitted, lying back next to me.

  Was this his way of telling me that the end was near? I wondered.

  Our relationship had changed. We had grown up during those two years, and although the love was still there, it burned less ardently than it had during our first few months together. We knew each other well now. We had had fights – shouting matches even – which often resulted in him hanging the phone up on me, leaving me incandescent with anger. Arun was stubborn, especially when it came to politics. He considered Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister, weak and ineffectual, and resented the notion of empire, and all it had done to India. “You may have built our railways, but you destroyed our people,” he often ranted, his eyes flashing with anger, as if I had been personally responsible for India’s ills. “Marxism is the only way out,” he continued. “The only way our people will be freed from mass poverty, exploitation and social divisions.”

  I looked at him and scoffed. “So you’re actually telling me that you would be happy living in India as a Marxist?”

  “I certainly would,” he retorted.

  “And Cambridge?” He had not only gained a place, but a scholarship to boot. “The Mayfair apartment you live in? Your parents with all their talk of landed gentry and good marriages? Do you think Marxists live comfortably and talk about good marriages?”

  “I’m different,” Arun replied confidently. “I’m enlightened.”

  “Actually, I don’t think you are,” I said.

  He took it badly and shouted at me. I walked away, and he ran after me down the street and begged me to forgive him. I did, half-heartedly. But in truth, something about him had changed. Arun had become more assertive, more confident. Tinges of modesty with flickers of hubris. Maybe I had outgrown him after all.

  A sound next to me interrupted my thoughts. “Wow.”

  It was Ben. He was staring at the stage, his mouth open, his body hunched forward so as to take it all in. I wanted to squeeze his hand, but then decided against it: I didn’t want to break the spell.

  When the play was over, there was a standing ovation. For the actors and for my father, who was rushed to the stage, and who bowed to thunderous applause. My heart burst with unmitigated pride for him, and I joined my mother and Walter and shouted “Leon! Bravo Leon!” – our voices filled with muffled tears and emotion.

  And then I turned to Ben. “What did you think?” I asked him.

  “Not bad,” he said, reducing the vigour of his applause.

  “And the acting?”

  He nodded. “Yes. The acting. That was good. I want to do that. I want to pretend to be someone else,” he said, avoiding my gaze. “That’s what I want to do.”

  And I knew then that my brother had found his vocation. He was going to take up the mantle Lucie had left in her wake.

  *

  It was a sunny Saturday, a June afternoon, two weeks after Arun and I had split up.

  I was in my bedroom studying for my A levels, trying to concentrate on my history exam. My father was in Paris, and Ben had gone to stay with a friend. My mother had offered to take me shopping to cheer me up, but I had declined. I had to study, no matter how upset I was about our breakup. Every so often I would burst into tears at the thought of Arun, reaching for the box of tissues that sat on my desk. My parents had been comforting and supportive. The previous evening, my mother had cooked us a lamb stew, and we had gone to see a film together. Even Ben had accompanied us, although he later assured
me that it was for the film and not because he felt sorry for me. “I don’t want you to get any ideas,” he said firmly. “I don’t like that guy. He’s a pretentious weirdo. I think it’s actually great that you’re not together any more.”

  “Shut up, Ben,” I snapped.

  I tried not to pay heed to Ben’s comments, because he liked very few people, and had hardly exchanged a word with Arun.

  But his words stung nonetheless.

  A few weeks more and school would be over. The summer appeared in front of me, filled with possibilities. My parents had rented a house in France, in the Loire Valley. We were to spend some time there before I met up with a few friends, on a tour of Spain. I had been offered a place at Oxford and I was looking forward to it all. A new life was about to begin for me. I needed to get out of London in order to forget Arun; everything about the city reminded me of him: the streets we had walked on, the shops, the cafés, the school gate, the park bench where we had first kissed.

  “Hang on to the stuff that really upsets you,” my father had told me. “That way it will make the separation easier to cope with.”

  I did, and it worked. But then, something would remind me of Arun – a phrase, a song, an Indian accent – and all my anger would dissolve into an intense longing for him.

  But I hung in there, as my father told me. I didn’t call or write to him. I was stubborn that way, just as Arun was. And I knew that once I left London, everything would become much easier. I had saved some money from tutoring lessons. My parents were buying my train ticket and, unbeknownst to them, Walter had slipped me two £50 notes that smelled of fresh ink. “Take these for an emergency and keep them to yourself,” he had told me.

  Walter still came to visit, though less often than he used to. He had sold the shop in Bridport and was opening a new one on the New King’s Road. My mother was helping him set it up. She had cut down on her patients and was working three days a week, spending her spare time scouring for antiques with Walter. I could tell that she was enjoying it, that she wanted Walter to succeed and be happy again. That’s what she often told us. “He needs to find happiness, perhaps with a new woman.” He no longer slept late in the attic bedroom, as he often used to, when he and my father had shared too many whiskies. He had bought himself a small flat on Smith Street, in Chelsea. My mother had found it for him, and Walter seemed very grateful. So grateful that a few times I wondered whether he was secretly in love with her. Whenever she spoke, or when she was near him, he seemed acutely aware of her presence, so aware that he wouldn’t move unless she did. It was as if his body was invisibly attached to hers. But of course that wasn’t possible, because Walter was like family, and my mother loved my father, not him.