Dear Thief: A Novel

by Samantha Harvey

  Such a strange sight to see them only half laughing as they tried to rid you of this thing they were so afraid of. Two of them were holding you down, one or two trying to pull it up over your head. Of course they would get it if they persisted long enough; you were outnumbered. But your soundless, motionless resistance appalled or disappointed them, I think, and there was a moment, just a moment, when they all seemed to pause, to step away and look at the back of the shawl pulled over your head and spread on the ground in front of you like a pool of spilt cream, and entertain the faintest thought that you were not worth it.

  Another moment and they would either have torn it from you in aimless frustration or backed off, sat, drank, concluded: Stupid dyke. Either way, you would have lost. But just as that moment was approaching, you raised yourself up a fraction and straightened your arms in front of you as a child does when being undressed. You offered yourself. There was some laughter and hesitation; one of them stepped forward and rolled the shawl calmly off, then stood, unsure of what to do with it. You sat up and neatened your hair. You were wearing—and I remember it, partly, because it was mine—a white vest top with lace edging that could not have been more feminine or disarming to them, which followed closely the fragile cage of your ribs and the flatness of your stomach and, most crucially for them, I suppose, the great surprise, the ampleness of your breasts, plump and shapely against all the odds. You came to your feet, held out your hand and clicked your fingers for the shawl, which was given. The silver cobra coiled around your upper arm might as well have flicked its tongue at the giver; Petras’ trousers hung at your waist with sudden elegance. It is a beauteous evening, you said, as you eased the shawl back into shape with light tugs here and there, and picked bits of leaf and twig from the wool. It is a beauteous evening, calm and free; the holy time is quiet as a Nun, breathless with adoration.

  And you smiled at them, and they—what did they do? I don’t know, I don’t remember. Did they speak to you again, did they watch you walk off? Because you did walk off, into the woods away from home, declaiming Wordsworth; you must have been shouting by the time you had gone from view, because we could still hear you, you will be glad to learn. But they, what did they do? Who can guess. They slide into the shadows as men do when you have had your final say.

  Iskim back over the last few pages of this letter every so often and I usually wish I could change what I wrote.

  When I wrote, for example, about your indignation at my so-called memory of you and your family in the dunes, and the sand blowing across a buried Petras, I implied, I suppose, that I had made the memory up. But something about that memory is true, isn’t it? I can definitely remember you telling me about this once in the red room at Morda, or in the lanes at Morda, or on the trunk of the fallen horse chestnut in the school fields, or in the cottage at Morda, or in the garden, or in the car, or in London, or in Spain. I’m sure you scuttled your fingers to imitate the bone-dry, flowing sand, and you said, How can bones flow, how can water be dry? And didn’t you even put your head back and open your mouth for a long minute while I sat or drove or cooked or tried, with a cheap parasol, to win back a square foot of shade from the Spanish sun?

  You see, I over-emphasised there my forgery and invention, and under-emphasised the very thing that drove me to write the memory in the first place, which was a sense of sudden closeness or complicity. The truth is that trying to get to the emotional heart of things is so difficult, because emotions morph into one another with such confusing subtlety that what was elation is now fear is now rejection is now rage is now wonder, all depending on the agenda we come at them with. So how can we get to the heart of them when the only heart they really have is our own? And this heart is supremely inconsistent and liable to irrational turns.

  For example, the pearl-fishing trip in the Oykel Valley. Sometimes the centre of this memory is the pearl itself, which represents happiness, a joint achievement, and a time in our lives when we were a family at one with itself. Sometimes the pearl slips to the background of this picture and what emerges as forefront is the moment I mentioned—not more than five seconds long—when I caught Nicolas staring at Teddy and me from the water. For a number of years this was all I could think of when I remembered that trip, because I couldn’t decide why he was staring or what his expression meant. It was a look of love, I knew that, but was that pain behind it, or fear, or intense happiness, or . . . ?

  I began to be troubled by a lack of facts, namely whether this trip happened before or after you first appeared at our door in Morda. I know the pearl-fishing trip was in the April of 1982, and I know you arrived that April, either soon before or soon after, but nothing I did to force chronology onto these events made any difference. I would go over the scene in my mind, but the problem is that the mind is a bad loser and can never accept it doesn’t know best, so what it doesn’t know it invents. Hence it invents, at one moment, the spectacle of our camping equipment spread over the grass in our garden to dry out before we put it away: therefore, you arrived after the trip happened. Yes, you were sitting, not on my coat as I’d previously mentioned, but on the edge of the groundsheet. You wrapped the guy-rope round and round your thumb as you spoke, and never once asked about our camping trip or where we had been.

  At the next moment, it invents the opposite scenario. It does so as soon as I question the veracity of the last, because I’m certain the garden wasn’t full of camping things, or at least if it was it means we had only just that day got back, since Nicolas was always prompt about packing away. So the mind rebounds. It says, Ah, no! We hadn’t just got back after all—we were about to go. The tent was in a heap in Teddy’s bedroom, where Nicolas had removed it from its bag to check it was all there. You were sitting on the floor in Teddy’s room reading stories with him, wrapping the guy-rope around your thumb while the two of you mouthed sounds with lips pouted.

  The chronology mattered so much, or so it felt then anyway, because the interpretation of Nicolas’ expression that day as he waded in the river completely depended on it. Did he look at Teddy and me with such love because he had just, while fishing, had an image of you in his mind and was guilty and threatened by what he felt? Or was it because he hadn’t yet met you and was still happy in his marriage, at an optimum point of devotion before it ebbed away?

  And then sometimes this image too fades to the background and the storm is all I can think of. More recently this is how I tend to remember it, with less and less personal emotion and more as an abstract awe stirred by those incredible tantrums of nature. And now I think: Did I share too much with her? Am I cutting her too much slack? Am I making her think I care more than I do? Because, as I said, I think about the pearl-fishing trip now with detachment, little more, and somehow I wish that when I wrote about it I hadn’t got so carried away with how it was, and had written more about how it is. Just a storm, is how it now is. I should have written a few rudimentary details about when and where, leaving out the digressions about Nicolas’ upbringing and his expression and the salmon fisherman and the hot-water bottles; just the storm and a tree on fire, and our plastic cups tossed into the air, and an eagle plummeting sideways to snatch the bacon rind from the water as our plates reeled downstream. And three bleary little glad faces hardly noticeable behind glass and a veil of rain.

  The longer I go without word from Teddy the more I imagine him with you in or around your hut, out taking photos of the trees or swimming in the static lake against the hum of a generator. You sit outside at a fold-up metal table that squeaks at the joints, on a day that is two degrees short of warm, and gaze into the light. This was how you were with him, benign but largely indifferent. Even when he was clanging a wooden toy against the fridge or screaming at a minuscule injustice, you never minded his presence. But you made no effort to engage in his world, either. I thought of it like the relationship between a human and a dog; human throw stick, dog chase stick, human shall never chase stick. Different types of beings equally united and di
vided by stick. Teddy appreciated your lack of likeness to him, and rarely missed a chance in the evening to curl himself against you in your armchair. You neither cuddled him nor shrank from him; maybe you would rest an arm across his shoulders.

  So you are at the fold-up table, trying to build a Japanese torii out of snapped twigs, and are contemplating how vertical everything is—the trunks of the spruce, the secondary and tertiary branches that shoot straight up in search of light, the light itself falling like a plumb line in faint beams that make you look up for a UFO. Ah, how you would love an alien in this moment. The pitter-patter of intelligent life across the forest floor; you would sit your alien down and ask it to be honest about what it thought of Earth. Honestly (and here comes your frank, unsparing look)—do you think this Earth is wondrous or absurd? You contemplate briefly the possibility that it doesn’t speak English or might be as dull-witted as a stone, but don’t like to bother your fantasy with these trifles.

  Over there Teddy stalks through the trees photographing lichen and leaf veins and insect dances. Or he threads through the water, always a good swimmer. The problem with Teddy is that he bears a false love, and his loyalty is misplaced. He loves you because he thinks you were exiled unjustly, and he prides himself on being the one member of our family who fights this injustice. Edward the fair, Edward the peaceful, watching over you with unquestioning belief in your goodness. He would strip the pines bare one by one if you asked him, just because you asked him.

  Evening comes. There is incense and frying kippers and God beating about in the reddening sky. The sky looks sore. You are wondering why God must be so forceful with everything. You are wondering about Teddy too, how a four-year-old boy grew into this dark, intense man walking the forest with a camera and how from such chubbiness came high cheekbones, carved nose and sharp eyes. If only he would go away and care about something else; it makes you feel guilty that he loves you still, and you hate to feel guilty, the most wasteful of emotions. His very presence is making you waste yourself. You take up a bit of tobacco from the table top and chew it—don’t you—with your shoulder turned against him.

  (But why do you write to her like this? Yannis says. He is taking me around Borough Market, his favourite place in London. A place of modern worship, lofty and vaulted, more populated on a Saturday morning than the church is on Sunday, its roof more light-letting than the great Gothic windows of Southwark Cathedral.

  It’s unhealthy, he says, that you should be writing to her like this, as if she were a friend.

  I wonder if he remembers the comment he made a few weeks ago, about how I live in a draught? The other has left and—what was it he said? ‘They have left, but not shut the door. It must be like living in a room with a draught always coming in.’ This is how he put it, or how I said he put it. So when he takes a sample disc of cacciatore salami from the knife at the Italian delicatessen and asks me why I write to you like this, I say, Do you know, Yannis, that in life there are people who give shelter and people who take it; do you know that the people who take shelter come in from the cold and eat and drink from the cupboards of the people who give it, and sometimes they even make promises about staying and formulate in their minds a future in which they put their dreams to bed, their dreams of long, empty roads leading away from everything that ever tied them down? These people say, to themselves and sometimes aloud, I would like to give up my wandering, finally I would like to be one of the sheltered.

  But one day the givers come down from a night of uneasy sleep and see that the door (which, come to think of it, had always been left ajar) is wide open, and the person who takes shelter is gone. Visible through the opening is a cloud that looks like a fast-dissolving highway. The days go on. The weeks go on and the months. Sometimes—this is more common than you might think—the ones who give shelter think about that highway themselves, this highway of freedom. But they have a temperate and cautious way of living, which means that no sooner do they visualise the highway than they see it dissolve. So they stay in the draught of a room whose door has been left open; they live in and endure the draught of somebody else’s escape for freedom.

  And then, Yannis, I say (as he handles appraisingly some miraculous edible rocks of cheese), you can see perhaps why one day one of them tries to close the door by proceeding as if the past made no impact and the old course of life can be resumed. And why the other one, entirely unconvinced that the past is really in the past, gets up, stands at the threshold of the door and looks for a shadow. A sound or something moving. And calls after the taker of shelter who has left their life so draughty and stripped; stands there calling out.

  What? he says—you are calling for her to come back? No, I tell him, I don’t want her to come back, I just can’t be sure that something of her is not still there. So then I hope your letter is full of abusive swearing, he says; and when I tell him it is perfectly civilised he concludes sadly, Pot plants, you see. I told you. You modern women, pot plants.)

  I suppose you might think that Yannis is not real. See how often he makes a convenient appearance when I have something I want to confide, something it would be awkward to say directly. What stops me having invented him for that purpose? How do you tell the difference between a person made of flesh and one made of words? I know this thought will have crossed your mind once, if not many times, because that is the way you think, by which I mean you think as if everything is a symbol for something else—like God being a sexual fantasy, or a triangle the symbol of creation. For you, nothing is what it actually is, even the desert you live in is an allegory, even the beetroot you eat is a transcendent notion; the more of it you take in, the thinner you get. No wonder you fell into this unlikely devotion to Hinduism and its purposefully symbolic gods, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva—but I know I was talking about Yannis and I know I have started to go off-track.

  Far from Yannis being made up, almost nothing in my life currently is more real than he is. And there are lots of conversations we have that are banal and trivial and signify nothing, which is why they don’t make it onto the page—in fact Yannis is exactly one of those people who can gossip inanely all day about the racing odds, the unpunctuality of buses, the treachery of women, et cetera. Of course I wish his wife would come back to him, but I also wish it won’t be for a long time, or I wish it would always happen tomorrow—you see, to be complicit with somebody is such a thing. He is the only person I have really talked to about you and he billows with opinions about it with typical Cretan hot-headedness, but when the conversation ends it ends, and he pours wine and makes some injurious remark about the government or the health-and-safety people who are always on his back, then asks me if I—if anyone—has actually read D. H. Lawrence. He has been trying with The Rainbow for over two months and his bookmark—not a receipt any more, but a KitKat wrapper—has found its way just past the middle.

  ‘Could you give me an idea what it is fucking talking about?’ he asks gently.

  Is the flesh which was crucified become as poison to the crowds in the street, or is it as a strong gladness and hope to them, as the first flower blossoming out of the earth’s humus?

  He frowns accusingly at the page. ‘Humus?’ He swipes his finger into an imaginary dip and feeds it into his mouth. ‘Humus?’ ‘Yes,’ I laugh, ‘the first flower blossoming out of the thick wet chickpea-and-sesame soil.’ He throws up his hands. ‘Oh, I don’t care, Lawrence was a lunatic,’ he says, and he covers the book discreetly with a copy of the Racing Post.

  * * *

  I say this as if it’s what he does in general, but it’s what he did once, this week, when I told him about your job as a photographer of fake weddings. As an immigrant who has done everything he can to abide by the law and respect his host culture and learn his host language, he felt affronted by a livelihood predicated on dodging the law. By your little business that operated from a newspaper booth under the arches off Villiers Street in Embankment, by all the people living in squats and trying to get passports by
whatever means. He believes these are the kind of people who give immigrants a bad name.

  But I think if he could ever have seen the photographs you took he might have changed his mind, or opened it a little. Those photographs were not the stuff of hasty loveless services in registry offices. They looked pricey, an extravagance the bride’s father had paid for to commemorate what would be a lasting union. No immigration officer could fail to see the sudden, bright and unlikely cross-border love that had sprung up between this louche, wiry Londoner and this lovely young woman from Port Elizabeth or the Karoo, with the luscious orange orchid bursting from her right temple.

  Nobody was to know how the one-size-fits-all dress was gathered in at the back with bulldog clips, or that she had no shoes unless she provided them herself, or that the venue was the tiny back garden of a friend who had an arched iron love seat under a quince tree, and behind that a wall running with passion flower, and not much else besides. Out of frame was the washing line and a child’s tricycle. In the frame, though, you made not just a wedding but a marriage; this was how I put it to Yannis, and it seems I stumbled on exactly the right phrase. Your lens married these people. The photographs were devotional and passionate, just like your Still Life, but also the opposite—because while the still life flaunted the gaping hole at the centre of things, your wedding photos disguised it, or even, I sometimes thought, dispelled it. I always imagined that some of those couples must have fallen genuinely in love when they saw how you had photographed them.