The Chemistry of Tears

by Peter Carey

  “To me, yes.”

  I was so determined not to bawl, I suppose I glared at him.

  “We are going to have a very small team,” he said. “We will have a procedures meeting you can tolerate.”

  I had begun to snivel, but I did grasp what he was up to—finding a way for me to continue in employment.

  “Ceramics are all Margaret’s friends. I can’t bear it.”

  “Hilary isn’t.”

  “Heather. The little lesbian.”

  “She has a perfectly lovely little baby.”

  “Spilled her coffee, that one?”

  “Will she be acceptable? Catherine, you really must have mercy on me. Please.”

  But I wished to punish him. I could not tolerate him being alive.

  “We all miss him, old love. Not like you do. But he was my friend for thirty years.”

  “Yes, I know. He loved you. I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. Forgive me.”

  Sorry, sorry, sorry—how British we were. I thought he was fetching a handkerchief from his pocket, but then I saw it was a small glassine bag filled with white powder.

  Of course I was an adult. I knew exactly what it was, but it was giving me an unsafe feeling to watch him tap it up and down. “What’s that?”

  “Painkiller.” He spilled a small pile onto the table top, slightly yellow and rather crystalline.

  I don’t know him at all, I thought, not really the tiniest bit.

  “That was rather risky wasn’t it?” I said.

  “Compared to what?” He produced his wallet and found a Barclaycard with which to chop the powder fine. I thought, he means compared to stealing notebooks.

  “Jesus, Eric. Stop it.”

  But he had no intention of stopping anything. “You know, Catherine,” he said, and he was once again the dreaming Buddha but busy with his chop, chop, chop. “You know when himself wanted a little toot, he would never talk to a dealer.” He smiled directly at me. “No one would ever think of Matthew as a nervous chap, but he was very antsy about drug dealers.”

  “You were our drug pimp?”

  “Let’s say, every time you had a recreational experience, someone else took care of the low-life aspects.”

  He set aside a very small amount of powder, what is called a “bump” by those who know. I thought, I’ll say “no” of course. He took a ten-pound note from his wallet, rolled it up, and hoovered.

  “What about me?”

  “Very well then, just a little.”

  The former speaker of the House was still chipping so I lowered a blind. Then I applied the ten-pound note and felt the cocaine whoosh itself around my nasal cavities and then that lovely medicinal drip down the back of the throat.

  “So,” he said, and he was at it with his Barclaycard again. “Here is how I propose we deal with the edifice.”

  “OK,” I said when he had finished whatever it was he said.

  “OK?”

  “Thank you Eric. I’ve been a cow. I’m sorry. Can I have a little more, please Eric?”

  He smiled at me, but I must have appeared absolutely wretched with my sunken blackened eyes.

  “Do you know why I wanted to meet you in the greasy spoon?”

  “The greasy spoon particularly?”

  “I had driven the Mini there to give you. Not the easiest thing to do in the circumstances, given it had to be registered first. Did you know when applying to register a rebuilt Mini one must declare whether one’s fucking chassis or monocoque body has been replaced or modified in any way? That took my own mind off things. Anyway I had it parked in front of the greasy spoon. I told you, but you refused to see it.”

  “You should have said.”

  He helped himself to a big fat line and edged another line towards me. “You saw it.”

  “I would have recognized it.”

  “He wanted you to have it. Himself.”

  It could not possibly be true, but I wanted to believe it just as all stupid people want to believe in what they want.

  It was weeks and weeks before I understood Eric had gone up to Beccles and basically stolen our car, but for now I took another line and instructed him to put the remainder well away from me.

  “Where is it now, the Mini?”

  “I’ll bring it round for you.”

  “That’s awfully sweet, but I could not bear to see it.”

  “Later.”

  “Yes, later.”

  “Everything passes,” he said. “You will not feel like this forever.”

  But I would. I had no doubt.

  He was at my cupboards then and I knew he was searching for aluminium foil in order to leave a “little toot” for me. I snatched my handbag and put it on the floor. He returned to his chair and placed his gift before me. He held my gaze and his eyes were rather moist.

  “Catherine, I have to go to an awful meeting with Sir Necktwist, if you know who I mean. We are going to compare our admittance numbers with the bloody Tate. Do you know the Ministry of Arts has to subsidize the Swinburne twenty-three quid for every punter through the door? The Tate need only five, I hate them.”

  He gave a funny little smile, all contorted and wrung out and I remembered what he had suffered when his wife ran away. I kissed him on his rough broad cheek.

  “I’m OK,” I said. “I’m sorry I forgot you loved him too.”

  He rather crumpled then, poor Eric, not for long. When he left, I immediately went to the bedroom and began to read.

  Henry

  CARL WAS SUMPER’S GOLDEN shadow, following him up and down the stairs. Sometimes they were both sequestered above the gorge and I would hear, or imagine, amidst the roar of water, fine sharp hammer blows as they pegged away, also small explosions, like stuttering fireworks, gunshot or dry pine catching in the fire. Their door might spring open, slamming rudely against the wall, and next would appear that wheaten-haired child, laughing, hippity hoppity. I confess it hurt my heart. Soon I would observe him from a window, leaping across the fallen stooks, like a lucky hare recovered from the trap, speeding strangely across the harvest stubble, on his way to places I could not pronounce. He was surely an immensely clever little fidget, returning with his oily secrets wrapped in handkerchiefs or rags.

  In my German hours I could bear to think of little else but what progress they were making with their secret instruments. Would they not hurry? Could I not push them faster? I was half maddened by the puzzle of their sounds. Was that gunpowder? Was that success? Was that failure? The manufacture involved all my emotions to an exhausting degree.

  If I enquired with any subtlety, Sumper would pretend to misunderstand, or he would use his mobile eyebrows to affect a comical astonishment. Worst of all, he made me fear that he was not following my instructions.

  Why, he would ask, would an educated Englishman want a cheap and gaudy circus trick?

  “Herr Sumper,” I replied—every time I took the bait—“you have accepted the commission and my money too. You know time is of the essence.” And so on.

  “But a duck you do not need.” Et cetera.

  Then: “I have come all the way to Germany.”

  “Who wants to copy Vaucanson? Vaucanson was a fraud. The duck’s digestion did not work. Its anus was not connected to its bowel. Do you understand, Herr Brandling? You love your child and now you are spending money to deceive him.”

  Late one morning I was called to drink coffee, a most unusual treat so therefore not a situation in which I expected to be mocked.

  “Do tell us, Mr. Brandling, do all English fathers deceive their sons?”

  The offensive fellow winked at Carl who twisted his fingers around each other, squirming in his seat to contain his amusement and thus, poor servile boy, betrayed me. As for his mother, she clearly judged me the agent of my own distress. Forgive them all.

  I am normally placid—indeed, it is said to be my flaw—yet I am a strong man too. I have a great capacity to suffer. I can eat dirt and carry rocks upon my b
ack, but I could not let Percy suffer through their indolence. What good was a duck if he could not live to see it? Would a father not be more useful for him than a wind-up toy? In my passion I forgot my situation. I pushed away my milky coffee. In my room, I packed what would fit into my walking sac. I “borrowed” one of the stout ash sticks kept in a box by the door. I did not say goodbye, but goodbye was what I meant. I must go home.

  Soon thereafter I was greeted by the mistress of the inn. It had been my first impression that she was a comic figure but by now I knew this was in no way true. Never mind, it was for one night, then back to England. The old procuress thought me rich and I did not disabuse her. She gave me her best room and said she would dry my clothes by the kitchen fire.

  Rage did not make me reasonable. I thought, I will go home tomorrow. I did not yet consider that I had neither funds nor home to return to. I thought, to hell with everything. I will do what I wish.

  I rejected the asparagus and ordered veal stew and dumplings. The first glass of yellow wine arrived wrapped in a pearl-white cloud of condensation. I felt a quite ridiculous confidence. It was really not until the fourth glass that the dark cloud settled on me. Cloud? It was a rock to crush my chest. I had no home to go to. I had had my childish outburst and tomorrow I would have to go crawling back inside my cage.

  I was in this miserable condition when the door swung open and a damp wind blew across the room. It was the relentless Sumper, of course, his great wet head shining like a river rock. When he sat at my table I thought, thank heavens, he is sucking up.

  He sat sideways, his great legs splayed out, surveying the room.

  “There are beings superior to this,” he announced (as the landlady, bending and bobbing deferentially, served his stein). “If there were not superior forms of life to this,” he said, “I would hang myself.”

  I thought, is this an apology? He would not look at me. The stein returned to the table and was replaced immediately while the procuress, again, performed her servile dance. I noticed how studiously the habitués avoided looking at us. They understood Sumper had the power to harm. Of my true nature no one had the least idea, particularly not me.

  “Don’t be concerned,” he said, still avoiding my eyes, “not one of them speaks English.” He called, “Who speaks English?” and none dared answer.

  “There,” he said triumphantly. But he had only proved himself a boor.

  “Are these truly human?” he cried in that great booming voice. “Look at them. Tell me your opinion,” he demanded. And finally he turned his chair and I realized there was something shifty in his gaze. Is he frightened he will lose me?

  “Come Brandling, what do you think?”

  I thought I had put myself in thrall to a most eccentric bully, but I gave him the courtesy of a civil answer, saying that our fellow drinkers looked very human to me, all gathered together in their differences and similarities, the marks of toil on their common people’s hands, the sad erosion of life upon their features. I thought to relate to him certain parts of “The Stigmata of Occupation” wherein the author studies corpses and remarks on the swollen fingers of washerwomen, the particular calluses of metal-workers and coachmen and the similarity of the thumb’s expansion in shoemakers and glass-blowers. He also gives instructions for boiling the skin and nail clippings of suspected copper-workers. A “beautiful blue colour” is a positive sign.

  He followed me closely, to an unusual degree.

  “So,” said he when I had finished. “That is your opinion?”

  “A little more than opinion.”

  “Yes, of course, they have stigmata, as you say.” (Was this the first time he agreed with anything I said?) “But do they have souls?” he demanded.

  “Yes, like all men.”

  There, finally, I saw his mind move elsewhere and of course his interest could never be in “all men,” only in himself.

  “This is my birthplace, can you imagine? When I understood my mother had carelessly delivered me into such company, can you understand my rage? But you can fathom none of this,” he said. “You are English.”

  I groaned before I knew what I had done.

  “You were not born locked up in this dung heap,” he said angrily. “You do not believe in ghosts and hobgoblins and the sacred heart of Jesus. You have travelled. It does not help to be able to identify the stigmata of their occupations. Even when alive, these creatures you see do not travel. They stay here with their hairless thighs, their depressed chests, their fairy stories. They have Puss in Boots but they have no idea the entire universe is changing. They cannot imagine a magic beyond a bean. They have never seen a simple threshing machine. They have not known the Englishmen I knew, the machines I helped make. You have no idea how insulting it is that you should ask me to make this toy. Of course,” he said quickly, “you meant no offence, I understand.”

  “All men,” I said, “need money to live.”

  “I am not making it for profit,” he said, “but because you love your son.”

  “You also have a son,” I blurted. What made me say it, I have no idea. To stop him? To cancel him? In any case, I knew Carl was not his son.

  “Are you blind?” he cried. “This boy is no one’s son. He is what these idiots would call an angel. If they knew the truth they would crucify him. Of course the ignorant father dragged him off in the middle of a riot. He might as well have offered up a Dresden bowl, he had no idea of the treasure. The universe is blessed that the child was not really cracked and broken. Beer,” he called, or words to that effect. “You do not want a duck,” he declared.

  “You accepted my plan.”

  “I am instructed to make something far superior.”

  “It is I who instructs you.”

  Then suddenly his manner was very soft and gentle. He laid his big hand on top of my arm and grasped it. “Henry,” he said. “We need each other.”

  I have met men like this before, fierce, hard, rude, but capable of this swift seductive kindness. When he said our need was mutual I believed it was the truth. His eyes turned soft as silk inside their bony case. He leaned closer and, with that great hand still holding me, spoke softly. “What are you doing with your life? To what use is it put? What higher purpose do you serve?”

  He would dominate and use me, so he thought. Alas, I must use him. “Dear Sumper,” I said, “you must make me the duck or I will make you very sorry.”

  He stood suddenly. I thought, what now?

  He would leave the inn. I with him.

  “You are a sad man,” he said as we came out onto the muddy track. “You have suffered a loss.”

  I thought, be calm, he cannot know that.

  I followed him down off the saddle of the road, down into the clear under-forest. I thought, he is a fraud but I was, quite suddenly, hot all over.

  As he walked, he belittled the fairytale collector, saying he was a simpleton who bought whatever stories the peasants invented for him in the winter. They were not real fairy stories at all. He however, he told me, had a twenty-four-carat fairy story. He was thinking he might trade it with the fairytale collector for something useful.

  I thought, none of this is true. Also, I have not seen a single piece of clockwork, not an axle or a wheel.

  He said, a mother had a little boy of seven years who was so attractive and good that no one could look at him without liking him, and he was dearer to her than anything else in the world. He suddenly died, and she could find no consolation …

  I needed him. I let him talk.

  “She wept and wept,” he told me. However, not long after he had been buried, the child began to appear every night at the very places he had sat and played while still alive. When the mother cried, he cried as well, but when morning came he had disappeared. The mother could not stop her weeping, and one night he appeared in the white shirt in which he had been put to rest.

  To listen was a torture. Had I not been desperate for his services, I would have stopped his ugly mou
th.

  “He had the little laurel wreath still on his head. He sat down on the bed at her feet and said, ‘Oh, mother, please stop crying, or I will not be able to fall asleep in my coffin, because my burial shirt will not dry out from your tears that keep falling on it.’ This startled the mother, and she stopped crying. The next night the child came once again. He had a small lantern in his hand and said, ‘See, my shirt is almost dry, and I will be able to rest in my grave.’ Then the mother surrendered her grief to God and bore it with patience and peace, and the child did not come again, but slept in his little bed beneath the earth.”

  He was cruel and vile. I struck him on his big stone forehead, just beside the eye. He staggered. I kicked him in the groin. He doubled, letting out a girly shriek. Then I am afraid I became careless of my life for I knocked him and kicked his great meat carcass until he made no noise. What a lot of him there was, curled up amongst the mat of fir needles like a broken deer.

  I was a fool. He had been my only hope. I returned to the inn and went to sleep.

  MY TEMPER WAS RARE and awful, as frightening as a plunging horse that is better shot than fed. It had never helped me, never once. In this case, I was very lucky I had not murdered Sumper.

  Next morning I dressed, doing up my buttons with swollen hands, already anticipating the nasty consequence of victory.

  The girl brought my breakfast, but I could not eat, knowing only that I had made a mess of everything.

  Then Sumper arrived and I was ashamed to see the raw colours of his cheeks, the almost naked bone, the damage I had caused the only person who could save my son.

  When I left the inn he followed me wordlessly into the dark fir forest where I smelt my death. I anticipated the type of clearing where such matters are always settled. Low Hall, Furtwangen, it is all the same. Percy, I forsook thee.

  We came to open farmland. The sun was reappearing in the western sky. The white charlock, which was obviously as much of a pest in Furtwangen as is its yellow brother in Low Hall, touched the morbid scene with falsely cheerful light.

  “Where do we go?” I asked. “Let us get the business done.”