Dear Thief: A Novel

by Samantha Harvey

  On the whole I do not think of you any more. So it was strange when you came into my mind like that, standing over my bed with your spine stacked tall like a wonder of the world and with the thighs of someone who hasn’t eaten for a year, hovering as if you wanted something.

  Thanks to this I am at my escritoire at just gone four in the morning with my hand welded to a pen with a split nib, suddenly curious about you after years of an incuriosity you might call callous. It’s been a mild and dreary Christmas but now, on Boxing Day night, it has started snowing, and I’ve had to go and find a blanket from the airing cupboard. As soon as the first flake of snow fell I thought of you, as it landed on the pane in that ludicrous wet collapse that removes all the mystery. I tried to put you from my mind but you wouldn’t go, so I got up. That was at about midnight, when the music from the jazz club a few doors down was coming to an end, and it was almost as if the first flake fell on the last note.

  I sat on the edge of the bed trying to breathe in squares, the way a yogi or swami will tell you—breathe in for five seconds, hold for five seconds, out for five, hold for five, in for five. It made me thirsty. Does she think it was worth it? I wondered. This is what came to me when I pictured you there. Not: Is she happy, is she free, is she alive?—no. Does she think it was worth it? I would look to your face for an answer, if only I could see, in reality, in the flesh, that face. I got up for water, then for tea, then I sat in the armchair by the window and watched the snow. It has settled so thickly. Have you ever noticed the absolute chaos and panic of snow if you look up and watch it explode out of the sky? And yet it lands with order and without a hush, and sudden wellbeing is bestowed. How so? You can see people’s happiness condensing in billows of laughter; the few people who’ve walked along the street in the last hour from the bars along Goodge Street have all been laughing.

  What I mean to say is: I haven’t resorted lightly to writing to you. It’s just that you appeared so expectantly at my bed earlier that I wondered if what you wanted was an answer to something, and the only vaguely urgent question I could think of you asking in all our long years of knowing each other was about the gauze of life. My hand has cramped in the process of giving it, and I think it is an uncertain start, an overly cautious and laughably sincere start, everything considered. And now actually I realise that far from wanting an answer, you have probably forgotten you ever even asked. It was seventeen years ago, eighteen even; hard enough to remember what happened two thoughts ago, let alone back in a life since lost.

  But despite having been up most of the night I’m not tired at all and an energy is coming from somewhere behind me that might be the snow, falling without pattern. I wonder now why I didn’t just answer the question when you first asked it. I don’t understand myself, or for that matter the passing of time. Seventeen years! Can you credit this? No, nor can I. It’s late; I’ll make one more tea and go to bed.

  I didn’t go back to bed. I went out in the snow because it won’t stay fresh for long in London. I went along to see Yannis, a Cretan who runs the Greek store on Hunter Street and opens up every day at five a.m. to make his own pitta bread and custard pastries, and we took coffee out onto the road and spelled out sweltering in the snow with our tracks—or, I should say, swelt ering because I did my half upper case, Yannis saved energy by doing his lower, and our halves didn’t quite meet. Yannis loves the snow, I remember this from last year. He relishes its crunch, like biting into an apple, he says. He tells me that Crete is never purified by snow and so it grows ever hotter and more corrupt; I say that the snow does not purify but temporarily shrouds, and ends up becoming dirt if it covers dirt—but Yannis is not ready to hear this and tells me I am like his wife, unromantic; like all modern women, passionate as a pot plant.

  Before you say it, I know. I swore I would never live in London, but that was because of the Cold War. Nobody would take the time to wipe Morda off the map, and if you are raising a child it is of genuine concern that the place they live is not suddenly wiped off the map. Times are different now that we are not waiting for the Russians to extinguish us, even you have to admit it—and people are different too. I think our hearts do have a chance to warm up a little when not so full of fear, and ever since moving here I have found London to have a kind of sincerity, safety and solidness, like a stout old uncle, like Yannis almost.

  There is also of course the jazz club, Jimmie Noone’s (Jimmie’s, as most people call it, and which I can never help reading, with a certain sadness, as ‘Jimmie No one’s’), which goes on until one or two in the morning on a Friday and Saturday night. In the summer the saxophone wafts in through the open window, and below that the clarinet, and below that the river of piano. I drop to sleep with birds singing in my throat. There seems to be no specialism; one night it is swing, the next avant-garde, or big band, bebop, ragtime, or Charlie Parker, Nina Simone and Thelonious Monk tribute evenings, ‘Ruby, My Dear’ played with the tenor saxophone alongside the piano, which makes it far more beautiful to my ears. Countless nights I have gone about life, cooking or reading to the sound of this jazz, and occasionally there will be a singer whose voice will make me stop and listen, or stop and sing, or stand with hands on hips racking my brains for the name of the tune, or look out of the window as if I might be able to see the sound. Sometimes people passing by will dance together in the street, tipping from foot to foot if swing, or swirling limbs if Latin, something like ‘Blue Bossa’. As I can confirm from my living-room vigils, people often stop to dance to ‘Blue Bossa’. I can imagine you doing just the same. And at those times, amongst others, I will think to myself: London, God bless you! For the summers that are warmer and stickier than in the countryside, and for all this free music. And being here then will seem like a homecoming.

  You will know the escritoire I sit at to write this—the one that used to be in the hallway in my parents’ house, with its tambour top that no longer rolls smoothly, and the six miniature drawers full of pointless things my father found and could never bear to part with. I inherited the desk from him, and I have not got rid of those things. I am sorry to tell you that my parents both died by the mid-nineties, my father first, then my mother three years later. Really, they were better than me in so many ways—richer, happier, more travelled, more generous and loving, more panoramic of mind. Since being in my hands the escritoire is a mess. Of course, it was never a mess in their hands, except inside the drawers where it couldn’t offend the eye. So I have invented a foolish little measure for keeping some order, to do right by my father all these years beyond the grave (in the way we do keep trying, all our lives, to do right by our parents, whether we know it or not): there is a piece of Roman jet, a conch and the oval of amber you gave me that sits on the beech like a spoonful of honey; these three are always on the desk somewhere, gauging the mess as groynes gauge the height of the tide, and if I can see them I know—with a sense of daughterly relief—that the mess is not winning.

  I’ve lived in this flat for two years, which is not long in terms of belonging to a place but long enough to be exempt from the charge of passing through. This might account for the look that I know is often on my face, that I catch sometimes in the mirror, a look of wary attachment, suspicious belonging. But then maybe the look is not that at all but just the general cross-purpose muddle of the ageing face in which all kinds of incompatible things have collided. Surprise, torment, pleasure, peace, disillusionment. All of these separately and at once. And on the subject of surprises—and I would like you to contain your mirth and judgement if you can—I have taken full-time work in a care home; maybe this explains the wary look, suspicious of death perhaps, or what awful ambush waits for our bodies around the corner.

  You are opening your mouth to object about this care-home job (like some born-again Christian foisting your light upon the world, you will say), but what of it, my friend? For once you have no right or means to reply, and so I continue. Until I moved here I was living in my parents’ old house, which I in
herited from them with the escritoire and everything else. So large and alive with their successes and love—but you know the house was too big for one person, too big for two people even, and when Teddy and I were there we thought we could hear it expanding around us. When Teddy left home for university four years ago I stayed on for a couple of years until it became unbearable; then I sold it and came to this flat.

  Even before Teddy left we had resorted to living mostly in the kitchen. The red room had fallen out of use since a family of starlings got bold and moved into the chimney stack, and in hindsight I think that was the beginning of their dominion. Those rare occasions when we did use the room the starlings’ occupancy meant we couldn’t light the fire, and so the room was for summer days only, doors open wide to the moths, dust, flies, mice and spiders; Teddy set up his tripod and photographed the room’s gradual surrender to nature, a process that completed itself beautifully during the second winter of the starlings’ stay, when the birds came down through the open damper and got into the house. He caught shots of them in flight above the dresser, in front of the television, in front of the mirror above the fireplace, and it was that one, that single fortunate shot of a starling and its reflection in flight in an Art Deco mirror, that got him his place on a photography course at university and prompted me—now that my only child had, as they say, flown the nest and I was alone—to leave the village.

  I bought this place without looking any further: not so far from Russell Square, much beyond what I could afford, but I had looked on the outskirts and it seemed to me that it wouldn’t do; so I had to use some of the nest egg I’d set aside for Teddy from the sale of my parents’ house in Morda, and even then I couldn’t say that what I bought is anything more than basic. It is one of those many London Regency buildings that lost its decency a good hundred and fifty years ago and was carved into flats, mine having two small bedrooms, a windowless kitchen, a big, light living room, but then this, this magnificent thing—a stained-glass window at the back, in the bathroom, with the image of a hummingbird braking hard at a fuchsia, all electric blues, greens and reds, an uplifting sight when the evening sun comes through and one that makes me think always of Teddy’s photograph.

  Playing cards, hand after hand. Bending willow, shaking boughs for apples, reading erotic scenes from our parents’ novels. Drawing one another’s faces. Drawing on one another’s backs. Knees up in winter by the fire, looking at your father’s sketches of plants and your mother’s photographs of you as a baby clenching your fists. Bolting down the lanes at Morda, hollering, Come on then! It was all about your need to throw yourself at every corner in defiance of what was around it, and so we bolted and ran, and even when we walked it was fast, and even when we sat slouched over a task you were leaning into it, showing your back to whatever doubt said that you were not capable.

  You were going to walk east to west across America, from Rhode Island to a place called Eureka in a straight line. One day you would lay out a map of North America and say, Done that. I would crop my hair like a field of winter wheat, and you were going to rewrite the Talmud in rhyming couplets or otherwise in limericks and publish it as a new religion. We would pave one of Morda’s fields with slabs of granite inscribed over and over with our names. I was going to marry below me and live on love. You would not shave, or wear dresses. You were going to accept death long before you died. I was going to sing: Mozart, Handel, Fauré, Joan Baez, Edith Piaf. I was going to sing and sing, and you were going to compose your new religion and not brush your hair or be precious about your body, which was given you as a strange gift that had come without a label and for whom you had nobody to thank.

  Bolting down the lanes late for school, bolting down those same lanes year upon year late or drunk on your parents’ firewater, which we stole and replaced with lightly brewed tea, knowing it might be years before they noticed. Breaking out like horses and shouting Starka! after the name on the bottle because we liked the way it sundered the Shropshire calm. You brushed off male interest whenever it came, scarce though young men were in our village of farmers and ex-miners. You looked at men sidelong and would respond to their interest by saying placidly, ‘Thank you, no’ and lighting a cigarette.

  Your brother would hand over 50mg of phenylpropanolamine, or 40mg of amphetamine, and he would tell us with a liquid tongue that your father’s assiduous cataloguing of English flora was a final treachery. He had stolen—confiscated—your father’s handmade collections. I remember him (the dull clang as he sat on the piano keyboard, and the back of his shorn head in the mirror behind him, which didn’t seem to belong to the same person as the face, which was wide and kind and always appeared to know something we didn’t—this is how I always think of him, in two mismatched halves)—I remember him leafing through the pad of faint sketches of dandelions, campion, honeysuckle, aquilegia, love-in-a-mist, flicking the pages with the back of his hand as he talked about his friends in Lithuania who were staying to fight for the cause. Because it was one thing to escape communism as your parents had done, but another to deny where you had come from, to start drawing dandelions neatly labelled in the bottom left Taraxacum officinale. It was true, I suppose, that when he showed us the botanical catalogues your father had made of Lithuania’s native hepatica, meadow rue, yarrow, gladioli, the drawings were more eager, the ink more mutinously pressed into the page; because they were not limp inventories like the English catalogues, but urgently amassed proof of what the Soviets were about to wipe out. To which you, who had left Lithuania as a baby and had never known the place, said uncertainly, ‘And yet, who cares?’

  Sitting in what would soon become the red room with the fire lit and our 40 or 50 or sometimes 60mg, while my parents were away for their long stints in India escaping the winter. We played hand after hand of Poker, 21, Gin Rummy, All Fives. These were not games but little parlays with fate; I remember the feeling that each card turned was a renewal of luck, that I could continually play myself out of dead-ends and misfortune, like flinging open a series of gates until one led to the great reward, the ultimate boon. We were surrounded, in the red room, by a sense of divine bounty, something mighty to aim at; so it was with this room. An intoxicating place. It was lined with shelves of religious texts—Christian, Jewish, Roman Catholic, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu: my mother and father could not limit themselves to a single doctrine, they saw the mysticism of faith divide and emblazon itself like a firework, from the books of the Apocrypha to the Hindu moksha, in one explosive rejoicing. And you, marooned in the wet Welsh Borders, rising from our card games erratic and euphoric and irrepressible, plucked books from the shelves, sifted through creeds and, like some creature trying to shake itself dry of the swamp, settled on the Upanishads.

  Brava! These raw songs of Hindu philosophy suddenly in your hands. Sitting once more, as we had as children, on the floor by the fire with your elbows on your raised knees, your top half slung forward, crescent-backed in the pose your mother always said would cripple you. Reading: If everything is in man’s body, every being, every desire, what remains when old age comes, when decay begins, when the body falls? You would turn the two hooped earrings through your left ear in a full rotation as you read, until the lobes flushed crimson.

  Cooking haphazard creations; you liked meat. We once tried to kill a rabbit in the garden but we couldn’t catch it, and when one of your stones did find its target the poor creature turned a gaze on us that dissolved our appetites—such offended surprise, as if it had expected more of us, and then a moment of cold scrutiny that appraised our souls, and then terror and flight. Let us never do that again, I said, and expected you to dismiss me as sentimental. But you nodded, a certain softness and ruth settling in your pout, and tossed your remaining stones into the hedge.

  Cooking pieces of mutton and steak that we found in my mother’s freezer, a deep chest of frozen flesh; you would fry the meat and splash fat against the wall while scowling, as if a cold wind were at your face, and then serve it up on plate
s with nothing but a spoonful of mustard or Crosse & Blackwell pickle or homemade damson chutney. During those winters we ate pounds of fruit that we’d stored from the autumn, from days of footing up ladders in my parents’ garden and shaking boughs and shielding our heads against the apple and plum rain.

  Evenings spent during the winter that crossed over from 1971–2, painting the large room red on a whim. We painted it in one night with an energy that felt inspired, or at least that was how we pitched it to my parents when they returned home from India a week or two later. ‘We felt inspired,’ you said. ‘Please forgive us, didn’t we do a good job?’ My mother stood there blooming an Indian health, a slim, calm, tanned radiance of incense and hard-won spirituality, then inspected the edges around the skirting boards and door frames and found in them something that satisfied her sense of perfection. You had finished them with a two-millimetre watercolour brush and had taken swabs of turpentine to every blemished inch of skirting board. My father just regarded me and said, ‘You’ve grown tall, my love.’ He looked like a man who’d found a prize, then found it again, again, and whose happiness at life was such that the colour of a wall was of the same benign lack of importance as the birth or death of a star elsewhere in the cosmos.