To Heaven by Water

by Justin Cartwright

  ‘Ah there’s the car,’ says Dad, as if he’s found it by chance.

  Under Dad’s care, the Jaguar has been neglected: paper cups, discarded mail, wedges of grass and mud, a sandwich wrapper, a broken pair of sunglasses, a torn road atlas, and an empty tennis-racquet bag lie about, suffering wilt and damp.

  ‘Dad, this car is a tip.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes, it’s disgusting. Look, that paper cup’s like almost alive.’

  ‘Your mother was the tidy one.’

  ‘I’ll clean it for you.’

  ‘You don’t have to. It doesn’t worry me that it’s gone a bit ecological.’

  ‘It’s not ecological, it’s a health hazard.’

  ‘You’re taking on your mum’s role.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning she always believed she had a duty to some higher power to point out my failings.’

  ‘You’re saying I am a nag.’

  ‘She wasn’t a nag. And nor are you. It was just a way of reminding me of my human frailties.’

  ‘But that’s what families are for, to remind you of what you really are.’

  He ponders this as he reverses his Jaguar, almost running over a cat, possibly Sting’s cat.

  ‘Do you believe that? I think that the real you, the one the family sees, is actually the you that suits them. But there’s no point in fighting it because it’s unavoidable.’

  ‘You’re quite perceptive for a geriatric.’

  ‘Am I a geriatric?’

  ‘Yes. Nobody’s fooled by the whacky trainers, I’m afraid.’

  She looks at him as he drives. His skin and his hair have a kind of hue, as though they have been tinted by long exposure to the television lights. Or perhaps the daily application of make-up has dyed him indelibly. The girls at school who played the flute, the oboe or the clarinet seemed to have taken on the appropriately pale, other-worldly look as though the music itself – thin, reedy, haunting – had sapped their vitality, leaving them pupa-like and vulnerable. With Dad there has been a more robust effect: television has given him a sort of matured-in-old-oak-barrels look. People in television are often said to be chameleon-like, but those who say it aren’t talking about skin colour. In this bright light Dad looks as though he has been lightly embalmed.

  ‘Have you spoken to Ed recently?’ he asks.

  ‘We had lunch the other day, and I rang him this morning to thank him.’

  ‘He’s been made a partner at his firm.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘He didn’t mention it. He sounded a bit rough. You know how he goes when he’s had a few drinks, a little like tentative.’

  ‘I think we should take him to dinner or something. What do you say, you and Josh, Ed and Rosalie? And me.’

  ‘And you with Ms Jiggly Wiggly.’

  ‘Ho ho.’

  ‘Can I stay at our house tonight?’

  ‘Of course you can, sweetheart. I would love you to.’

  Now the streets of Camden are embracing them reproachfully, as they return from the higher regions.

  Later in her own bed – her real bed – she feels calm. Josh was scornful, even vicious, about her spending the night at home, but she says her father needs her, just occasionally, which may not be strictly true. Josh is out with his friends watching some football match in a pub, but he would still prefer her to be at her flat waiting for him to return smelling of hops and flatulence. The little room under the eaves where the roof slopes down towards the soggy back garden – it needs work urgently – not only calms her, it makes her optimistic. She can hear Dad downstairs somewhere still moving about. (Little tasks seem to take him some time.) The lime tree is whipping the back wall of the house, showering yellow seed balls on to the dark-green, algae-coated, heaving brick terrace; the neighbourhood cats are out on the noisy prowl; the susurration from Camden Road rises and falls gently, and everything is familiar. She wears one of her mother’s nighties. She thinks yes, maybe I do have a self of a sort.

  Much later her phone rings and wakes her. It’s Josh. He says he wants to come round. He’s drunk.

  ‘No, Josh, you can’t come.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘My father’s here.’

  ‘Oh, are we a little prudish or what?’

  ‘Are you trying to be funny? Because you’re not.’

  ‘I’m coming anyway.’

  ‘Don’t. Please don’t. My father’s asleep and so was I.’

  He rings off. A few minutes later there’s a knock on her door. For a moment she thinks it might be Josh.

  ‘Hello, darling. It’s me, Dad,’ he adds as if she might not recognise his voice.

  ‘Come in.’

  ‘I heard your phone. I was awake anyway. Why are you laughing?’

  His hair, his television hair, hangs over his brow at the front and sticks up at the back.

  ‘Your hair looks odd.’

  ‘I can see where this is heading. I am becoming a figure of fun, an eccentric old goat with crazy hair.’

  He wants to say something to me. But for the moment he can’t express exactly what it is he has on his mind.

  She sees the two of them, Dad sitting on the end of her bed, close but somehow separated by Mum’s death. As though Mum provided them with the means of communication. Although he is thin and has been working out, his nipples are distinctly visible, puckered against the cotton of his T-shirt.

  ‘Dad, did you want to say something?’

  ‘No, not really. I just came up to see if you were all right. Phones at three in the morning are unsettling.’

  ‘It was just my crack dealer.’

  ‘Oh fine. Perhaps we can get a family discount. I’ll go. You’re working tomorrow.’

  He stands up a little stiffly, his head only inches from the roof, and then he bends down to kiss her.

  ‘Mum’s nightie?’

  ‘Yes. Do you mind?’

  ‘Not at all. Lucy, it was good of you to come for a walk.’

  ‘It was a privilege, as Ms Jiggly Tits so movingly demonstrated. She has already told all her friends about you. You’re like a living god to us girlies. We revere you.’

  ‘Oh shit, you can be quite annoying when you try.’

  ‘Funny, that’s just what Ed told me only a few days ago.’

  He pauses, half out of the door.

  ‘You know what Iago said, “I am not what I am.”’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I’m not sure what he meant.’

  ‘OK, well, if I don’t see you in the morning, I’ll give you a ring during the day.’

  ‘Night night, darling.’

  I am not what I am.

  She wonders how much of him she contains. Perhaps it is from him that she gets the sense that there is another life that she could be leading. Is that what he means? I am not what I am. As she falls asleep she remembers what God said: I am that I am.

  7

  The children see the house – this jerry-built late-Victorian villa, enervated by a century and a half of dirty rain – as a shrine. But I – David thinks – have lost any affection I ever had for it. Every day it looks to him more obviously what it is, a box made of bricks, cheaply finished to a plan by a speculative builder so that every house in Inverdale Terrace is similar, although gentrification has given them little flourishes of planting and fruit swags, arrow-headed railings, and large door knockers. Door furniture. Brass, he notices, is being replaced by a sort of brushed aluminium. Multi-layered plants, blue conifers, anodised letterboxes, gravel, slate, pebbles and uplighting decorate an increasing number of the houses in the terrace. He often finds himself thinking about the absurdities and the delusions which govern most lives, what someone called the ‘whole inventory of human disgrace’. When we were a family, here at No. 9 Inverdale Terrace, we were by no means exempt from delusion: family delusion, money delusion, sex delusion. And he, in particular, the anchor of Global Television’s Sun
rise Report for twelve years, was as much prey to delusion as the rest of them. The whole rickety business conducted from a few warehouses near the M25 was a fraud; his position as senior anchor was a fraud. He knew it at the time, but now he regards it with shame. His apparent omniscience, the ramped-up glamour and intensity, the special reports, the reliance on show-business PR, his occasional forays into the field – like a viceroy during the Raj – the cynical nods towards community, the shallow acknowledgement of culture and science, the grovelling subservience to rock stars (until they went into rehab), the trivialisation of politics – eagerly encouraged by spin doctors – the endlessly repeated and meaningless piety about global warming: Get up the fucking polar bear on the fucking ice-floe shot, and conservation: Get that Greenpeace gob-on-a-stick into the studio, and the fascination with celebrity: how many frightened, drug-addled, alcoholic, bitter, pompous and ludicrous ‘celebrities’ had he interviewed in his life? God knows. Setting off every morning at 4 a.m. from Inverdale Terrace with his driver, Ted; reading the papers that Ted had collected for him at King’s Cross; checking, in the last few years, the running order on his Blackberry; phoning his thoughts through on his second Blackberry, speeding through the still-dark, empty streets; making notes, ordering the world to his image and understanding, all in forty minutes. Then he would be in make-up, his suit brought to him with a selection of his famous ties – he was elected Tie-Wearer of the Year three times – attended by little producers coming to see him in streams, holding scripts and revised running orders, like leaf-cutting ants. Seamlessly, effortlessly, he could listen to some raddled journalist analysing Saddam’s latest manoeuvre while listening to the gallery with one ear and catching up with the football scores on autocue, so that he was ready for his famous banter with Jonno Jameson, sports correspondent. His one, undeniable, talent was to keep everything together with urbanity; the contributor and the eager-to-please freelancers and the desperate-to-please academics were held in a silken web; without thinking consciously he knew exactly when to stop someone who was rambling or losing his train of thought or repeating himself, but he did it with a lightness of touch, a quip, a little compliment that left everyone feeling good. Feeling good was important. It came in two categories, feeling good because of light, cheerful elements in the news, and feeling good when some ghastly child murder had taken place because you were confirmed in your strangely pleasurable notion that the world was a shit-hole. The theory, which had Global in its grip, was that you kept the viewers hooked by announcing the exciting, unmissable story coming next, so that nothing tedious, serious or original should permit the idiot viewer to switch channel before the shark attack, soccer transfer or the celebrity scandal. Poisonous snakes and man-eating crocodiles were also effective in this cause, and were kept in reserve for quiet news days.

  When the second Iraq war started, a professor, in a live interview from Oxford, tried to warn of the coming cultural and patriotic reaction that a foreign invasion would inevitably invite, but the gallery kept up a barrage in David’s ear, because the Professor was bald, spoke too fast, and used too many long words; the viewers would switch channel in droves. But what the Prof, whose baldness, anarchic eyebrows and dark, troubled eyes conveyed something of the seer, was saying was absolutely true, that a people is its culture and cannot be persuaded in a short space of time to abandon its ancient prejudices. The producers wanted David to discuss victory, a triumph of good over evil. They regarded this fuddy-duddy as out of touch with the popular mood, which they, of course, could measure.

  ‘Thank you, Professor, that was most interesting, but I am afraid that’s all we have time for this morning.’

  I sold myself. At the villa in Rome, Richard Burton once spoke to him about the Gnostic heresy: we are all potentially divine, but trapped in a material world. Burton seemed to subscribe to this view, and David quickly realised that he did, too. Elizabeth’s children were visiting and they gazed at Burton with sunstruck Californian indifference. Even then, 1966, at the height of his fame, Burton could see personal ruin ahead. He told David that he should have been a quiet Oxford don rather than an actor. Adam managed to find David a small job on the film and he spent a lot of time watching Burton at work: one of his jobs was to make sure his drink supplies were kept stocked. The sets were absurd, with elements of the psychedelic: weighty medieval compasses and protractors and globes and bubbling phials of liquid were scattered about. There were huge leather-bound tomes in cuneiform and Greek and Hebrew and Latin, as if in a lawyer’s office in an unspecified historical time. Behind these was a skeleton which Burton could address to add poignancy to a line about mortality. There were plenty of these. The phials were actively steaming, with multicoloured liquids bubbling away. The liquids had the same garish qualities as the lights in Sabrina, which spurred on the dancers and illuminated the five go-go dancers in gold bikinis suspended above them in cages. They danced as though they were thrashing corn or lassoing a mustang or pulling on a hawser. Even on that kitsch set at Dinocittà, he saw what a great actor can do. And he thought that Burton had some of the divine quality of the Gnostic heresy, because great acting – and probably high culture – strives for divinity.

  He is prone to these high-rent thoughts these days, as if a life of second-rate preoccupations needs some redress while there is time. And that is what he was trying to tell Lucy. Now, sitting here in the family house, vacated by the family, he sees Burton happily and orotundly explaining the Gnostic heresy, glancing at Elizabeth with her astonishingly pale breasts and her cool, flawless face, as if to remind himself that this woman is his reward for possessing – drunk or sober – the divine spark. The trouble is, he doesn’t look completely happy about the deal.

  One night Adam’s Fiat was stolen. The grips at the studio were able to locate it and have it returned, the tank full of petrol. There was cheek-tweaking and knowing gestures to indicate that they all were men of the world. David was entranced: Rome was a kind of epiphany, the happiest he has ever been. It was as if he had never been shown the earth and its possibilities before. He, too, would be a professional actor and live in a vivid, charged world. All these years later he remembers the warm stones of terraces, the hours at the Piscina Olimpica, and sex in the pensione with Jenni in the lingering heat of the afternoon so that their skins made a comical – but to him ineffably sweet – sound, like water on the side of a swimming pool, like the Piscina Olimpica.

  His mobile phone rings.

  ‘Hello, you won’t remember me. I’m the woman with the dog, on the Heath.’

  ‘Sylvie, owner of Wolfie.’

  ‘You remembered. That’s amazing. So, so amazing. I’m flattered.’

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I wondered, and I know this is a bit of a cheek, if you could speak to our book club.’

  ‘I haven’t written a book. Not since the Afghanistan one five years ago.’

  ‘To be honest, you could just chat away and we would ask questions. You’ve had such a fascinating life.’

  ‘Probably less fascinating than it sounds. When would you want to do it?’

  ‘We have a meeting next Friday. It would be such a surprise for the others: CELEBRITY GUEST, TA RA!’

  ‘I’ll have to get back to you.’

  ‘It usually starts at about seven with some nibbles and a drink and then the chat. A reading or a question-and-answer, whatever you prefer, for about an hour, and then we go on to the Rasa. But you wouldn’t have to do that, obviously. I know you are busy.’

  ‘Sounds like fun. I’ll ring you back when I’ve consulted.’

  He finds it difficult to give a straight answer to this kind of request and always takes refuge in the promise to call back, the suggestion of consultation with his non-existent staff, so that he can say no politely. He won’t talk to Cy, his speaking agent, about this one.

  Ms Jiggly Tits. He feels a slight stirring in the blood. Since Nancy died, he has been free to do what he likes, but he has not contempl
ated a sex life. Perhaps he should see what she really wants from him: his instinct tells him that she is not too firmly attached to reality. He’s met a few crazy women in his life. And crazy men, but with men you don’t have to deal with the sex business. It’s a strange thing, the gulf in expectation that separates men and women. A woman friend of Nancy, whose husband had died, joined an expensive dating agency and found that the first two men she met were disturbingly close to being insane, one desperate for sex and for money and the second with a grudge against women, which led him to sneer at her and insult her after a few drinks. He wonders if there isn’t a low-level battle going on, a battle of values. At Global they liked to say that the BBC had feminised itself: the inference was that it had become preoccupied with family and divorce and neglect, and encouraged an unpleasant whine about men: men start wars, men are ruled by pride, men always want to be complimented for routine acts, men can only carry out one task at a time, men are chronically insensitive to the higher feelings of women. What he hears on the street is a rising volume of accusation and lies, men and women running each other down or lying about where they are, what they are doing and why they are late. Mobiles have revealed a new level of deceit and delusion: he often hears, now that he is a Fussgänger, young women, loudly needy, talking chirpily about drinking binges and men – the despised men they also can’t do without. He feels a certain sympathy; perhaps they are obliged to perform like this in public: they must have an assertive persona and they are prepared to advertise it, in the face of indifference. Sometimes he wonders who they are calling: maybe other desperate people who have created a fantasy of a happy, upbeat life of sexual and social fulfilment.