by Rick Gekoski
‘I give you best price!’
‘Yes! Yes! She’ll have it. How much?’ I offered half the amount.
‘Hungry, sah!’
‘Are you sure?’ Suzy held the garment uncertainly. I had confused her by switching categories. Was it for Lucy? Would it suit her?
Back at the hotel, after a revolting walk of some fifteen minutes, beseeched by beggars of the heat and dust, the children paid off by the front gate, I made straight for our room, convinced that the stench of the market followed me across the marbled foyer, carried subtly on the jasmine-conditioned air. I spent the next ten minutes in the shower, soaping and gelling and scrubbing. I sniffed my hands, and they carried still the odour of dung and spice. I washed them again.
The ritual of changing into freshly laundered clothes was soothing, and with each layer – freshly ironed socks and underwear, a crisp cotton shirt with a touch of starch, and finally the careful donning of my mushroom linen suit – I felt as if I were being reincarnated. I put my filthy clothes in the hamper, ready for the hotel butler to pick up and return – pristine – tomorrow. Draped over the chair were Suzy’s nightgown and bathrobe, and on the floor lay discarded underthings, for she had changed, God knows why, before we went to the market. Getting clean to get dirty.
The unshowered Suzy was standing on the veranda, her rumpled carrier bag with the silk shirt in it on the recliner beside her, looking over the gardens and the water below. The late afternoon air was freshening. I opened a bottle of wine from the fridge, and poured a glass for each of us.
My box of cigars was in the safe in the wardrobe. I opened it ceremoniously, spirits already lifted by the anticipation of my evening treat. The hotel had a humidor in the bar, next to which a stagey turbaned gentleman with silk robes and silkier moustaches stood at attention, whose sole employ was pompously to facilitate the choice of a cigar for anyone willing to fork out the hefty price for importation from Havana to a five-star palace in Rajasthan. That didn’t bother me. Good for them. But the cigars – I was informed before coming – might not withstand the travel, and would deteriorate further languishing in an inadequately moisturised humidor. They would be brittle to the touch, crack and crumble in the mouth, and shed outer leaves in the hand. I saw a florid gentleman, the evening before, expostulating furiously as he peeled the dried outer leaves off the Bolivar Churchill for which he had paid the equivalent of £65.
Forewarned, I’d brought a box of twenty-five Montecristo No. 2s, opened it in London and smoked three cigars – just enough to create room for two peeled halves of a new potato – and resealed it firmly, tapping the nails back into place. The cigars would stay moist for our full three weeks, allowing my usual one a day. Twirling it between my fingers, I snipped the torpedo end, and gradually heated the tip, turning it slowly and regularly, until a red glow showed across the entire area, blew on it gently, then slightly more firmly. I took the first, the most highly anticipated, the perfect first draw, held it in my mouth, exhaled slowly, allowed the smoke to surround my face – indeed, stepped right into it – and took a deep breath. Richer than a glass of great claret: earth, cinnamon, cream, perhaps a hint of vanilla, also some chocolate, perhaps a homeopathic trace of manure. Even in the morning, when the smoke would have settled and infused the curtains – and as Suzy would remark (again) her clothes (I like it when it infuses mine) – it would still, in its lingering staleness, be one of the great smells of the world. And quite enough, just then, to get the filth out of my nostrils as effectively as the water had expunged it from my pores.
Joining Suzy on the veranda, I offered a glass of wine to her unresponsive hand. She looked out over the lake, unmoved, sucking at a cigarette. Why the smoke did not penetrate her clothing, while mine did, was one of the unexplained mysteries of our marriage. Her claim, which had no merit that I could detect, was that her Sullivan & Powell tipped cigarettes emitted only the mildest and least penetrative of odours. Unlike my Montecristos.
‘Never again,’ I said. I may actually have shuddered. I remember some involuntary movement, a full body tremor. ‘I’m happy to see the sights. I like our driver. But keep me off the streets. They utterly disgust me.’
She half turned, and took a long drink of the wine, lips pursed as if against excessive acidity, some crass grapefruity sauvignon perhaps. It wasn’t. Along with my box of cigars, I had imported an adequate supply of Meursault, which had travelled better than I had.
‘Tell me about disgusting,’ she murmured, not meeting my eye.
I came up behind her and put my arms around her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, ‘this is all my fault.’
‘I know,’ she murmured, ‘you’re doing your best. It was asking too much of you . . .’
I kissed her neck, which smelled of the market and humid air.
‘There’s still time before dinner,’ she said. ‘Let me have a quick shower.’
She ‘felt at home’ in India, she said, though this was our first trip together. She’d been determined to save me the discomforts of such a visit, but eventually I had insisted: if she felt that India was (in some idiotic way) ‘her spiritual home’, then the least I could do, before we both dropped off the perch like dead parrots, was to accompany her there.
She would happily have abjured the palaces and luxury hotels with which India is now so amply provided, and stayed instead in simple hostelries, or – more desirable yet – with ‘real Indian families’, as she had on previous visits with various friends. (I don’t know what ‘unreal’ Indian families would have been. Except, of course, for her own.)
Her parents Henry and Sophia – latterly Sir and Lady – lived in a Georgian rectory in Dorset, which they purchased in their late-thirties with money gouged out of the City. They proceeded to reinvent themselves as stereotypes, took up country pursuits with the idiotic enthusiasm only urban refugees can generate. They hunted (fox), fished, went on bracing walks in wellies, planted a kitchen garden, were active in the local church, and provided occasional jobs for a number of locals, whom they, not entirely discreetly, called yokels. Their only deviation from the county norms was in their choice of governesses for the children, Suzy and her older brother Rupert. Not for them the sulky and hormonally hyperactive au pair – ‘trouble on wheels, my dear’ – nor indeed, did they look for the sort of nanny self-advertised in The Lady. No, they wanted only Indian women, of mature age, to look after their children. They wanted an ayah, and indeed a succession of them were called just, and only, that. The local gentry sneered, but Sir Henry was triumphantly unrepentant: ‘It’s what they would have done, if they’d thought of it first. Too late now.’
And so Suzy grew up, in their Dorset idyll, a foster child of Empire. Sir Henry encouraged Ayah to read Indian stories, sing Indian songs, draw pictures of tigers, elephants, and parrots, make Indian sweets, and otherwise indicate to the children that there was something other – if not something more – than the long tedious days of West Country life. He could hardly wait to catch the 6.50 train from Dorchester to London every Monday morning and spending the week at his set in Albany. He had some grand times there, and Sophia left him to it. It was rather a relief, she said.
On the raised dais, slumped next to the couple as they exchanged rings, was their dog Bruno, an ungainly slobbering half-breed, tarry black, bleakly unappealing, intermittently dangerous. He’d twice bitten their postman, and their mail now had to be picked up at the local post office. The ring had been attached to a string around his neck, and the wedding celebrant, who to my surprise wore neither beard nor sandals, had some difficulty getting it off the beast’s neck, and into the hands of the increasingly anxious groom.
Further noxious blather ensued. Suzy’s crimson parrots seemed to mock and threaten me, as her hand released the firmness of its grip, and became still, coolly resting in mine. When the groom, finally, kissed the bride, with more enthusiasm than I thought seemly, the pleasure on Lucy’s face soothed me. Next to me Suzy wiped her tears. Our daughter was married
.
I presume it should be a happy memory, but its edges are frayed and foxed by sadness. Happiness is fragile at the very moment of pleasure-taking, so easily defeated by a toothache or an itinerant virus. And past happiness? That lovely weekend at Lake Garda? The week that Suzy’s first novel came out? Delicate, easily bruised, soon rotten, evanescent. Do we lie on our deathbeds remembering such nonsense? Who cares? Who cared?
I was undelighted by Lucy’s choices and prospects, though I am unsure, as things developed and she entered fully into her life as wife and mother, whether I was right to worry so. And now worry seems a pallid, almost desirable state of mind compared to my daily dose of helplessness, desperation and withdrawal. Oh, to have some worries! School fees. Recalcitrant teenagers. Marital disharmony. Any of the above, please. All of the above. Anything, rather than this.
When Lucy was three, I recall her slight and wispy in a favourite cotton dress, white with tiny pink hearts perhaps – I can’t remember – but in the story I am constructing she looks dreamy in it, worn unfashionably long for one so tiny, floaty and ethereal as an angel. She would walk alongside as we went to the local shops, reach up on tiptoes and, if I leant down, put her hand in mine. We weren’t holding hands, hers was too slight to grasp mine, yet, but I would enfold her tiny fingers in my palm, and squeeze them as gently as if I were testing a downy apricot in the supermarket, anxious to avoid bruising.
I found myself whistling quietly as the song drifted through my head: Johnny Mathis’s ‘Misty’, a sentimental ballad that I had always scorned, though when I was sixteen my first girlfriend found it moving, though not moving enough. I get misty, just holding your hand. The metaphor felt surprisingly appropriate, for such a rotten song. Love fills every available space, soaks, suffuses and diffuses like a sea mist filling a room. Distances recede, all you can see is what is in front of your face. It makes you feel soggy. Nothing is better than love.
It was striking, only a year or so later, when Lucy had gained a couple of inches and no longer had to tiptoe, nor I to lean, that we could walk hand in hand, she giving me an answering squeeze, as firm as she could. We were both aware, I felt, of some new dimension to our relations, something grown up, reciprocal but diminished. I had stopped singing ‘Misty’ by then – you had to lean down to feel that way.
Her childhood reappears, now, only in cloudy vignettes that I rather suspect I have invented, or at least elaborated considerably. I suppose it doesn’t matter. We reconvene what time allows, and the arc of our stories is drawn from the few incidents that we recall, or make up. Most of my memories of her as a tiny girl are set in the summer. In the winter she was a demon, felt the cold terribly, shivered and sniffled, and resolutely refused to wear warm clothing when she went out. One Christmas Suzy bought her a chic olive green duffel coat with wooden toggles, which Lucy loathed from the very moment it emerged from its wrapping paper and refused to wear.
‘No buttons!’ she would howl. ‘No! No! No buttons!’
I was inclined to struggle and to confront, hold her steady and force her arms into the sleeves, to insist on doing up the dreaded toggles.
‘Not buttons!’ I said, trying to keep calm. ‘Toggles! Toggles good, buttons bad!’ I pushed her little arms firmly into the sleeves and commenced toggling her up. If she cried, too bad. Children have to be taught to stop crying. ‘Do hold still! How are you going to keep warm without a coat?’
‘Don’t you say that to me! No buttons!’
What was so objectionable about buttons was unclear. She hated them on a blouse, on pyjamas, on a coat. We eventually capitulated, for Lucy was amenable to zippers, which she liked to play with, and (particularly) to Velcro.
‘Velcro! For fuck’s sake. I have a daughter who loves Velcro . . . Kill me,’ said Suzy, initiating a lifetime’s disappointment with her daughter’s tastes. She even disapproved of Lucy’s Laura Ashley phase: ‘all those cutesified anodyne patterns, the awful pastel colours, the sheer drab mediocrity of it. She’s Welsh, you know.’
‘Who is?’
‘Laura Ashley. All you need to know.’
Call me a damn fool, but I loved it, at least on Lucy. Her mother would have looked soppy swanning about in all those flowery garments, but on a three-year-old they looked peachy.
I want to remember Lucy’s dress as it was, that summerised day walking to the newsagent’s. I scrunch my eyes up to replay it, to see us walking so slowly and happily up the street, hand in hand. Some sort of little girly dress, wispy and delicious. I can make one up if I want to. I try a variety of colours and patterns, of the kind that she loved. Pink? For sure. Polka dots against a cream background? Or perhaps white? I try them on her. She looks – we’re in the present tense all of a sudden – she looks gorgeous in it – cream is better! So delighted and free, aware of herself.
That was the past, then: not immutable, oddly biddable, malleable. There was no one to object, and it no longer mattered. The past is something we make and remake, remember or disremember – same thing, almost. You can polka-dot it, change times and seasons, rewrite the dialogue, rearrange the cast of characters. There is no dissembling in this. Most is lost, the vast percentage of what we have been. This is what it is to be a person, and it gets worse as you get older.
‘Worse?’ Not that, not quite. As we age, our stories are reduced until the constituent flavours are enhanced and concentrated. And sometimes, as in this story of little Lucy, too great a concentration gives not pleasure but something closer to pain, as a reduction of the essence of sensual pleasure, say, would produce something unendurable. As my recollection of my little daughter causes me to smile and to wince.
I am reduced to this. I live in reduced circumstances, left with the unendurable intensity of wormwood and gall (whatever they are), with fading hints of honey. There is something both inevitable in this, as we move towards the final telling of our final stories, the last version of ourselves, and something moving.
This journal? A coming-of-old-age book, dispirited, hopelessly knowing. For what happens, faced squarely, is loss. Loss of what we have been, loss of the history of our dear loved ones, loss of the incidents and narratives that have defined us.
I cannot locate much by way of gain in this process, save that most of what I have forgotten wasn’t worth remembering. Good riddance really, like clearing the attics before the house is sold.
So what? I can’t even remember the plot of the novel I read last week. Or its title. I struggle sometimes to remember what the names of common objects are, I keep losing things. A fork, a sofa, the Prime Minister. I am still a master of adjectives and verbs, and pretty damn good at summoning adverbs, but I am losing my nouns at an alarming rate.
I would worry about early onset Alzheimer’s, only I’m not young enough for it. But you can get away with a lot when there is no one to talk to but yourself, and you know you are ‘misty-fying’, like one of those fade-out images in a film, but you are watching it by yourself, and can turn your head at the scary bits, whine a little and put your paws over your eyes.
How do I remember myself? Or Lucy? Or Suzy? Why should I?
I cannot bear dogs, they disgust me. Why would a civilised person welcome such a creature into an otherwise orderly home? No matter how cunningly disguised by fluff and fealty, all I see is a shameless slobbering arse-sniffing leg-humping scrotum-toting arsehole-flaunting filth-spreader: as profligate a shitslinger as Kahlil Gibran, only closer to the ground. If I presented myself like that I’d be hauled away, no matter how much I licked your face or howled on your grave. No dogs in heaven.
I particularly detest my neighbour’s dog, whose hideous noises are sufficient to awaken the dead, or at least the dying. I gather it is called Spike, and it looks the part, with a face composed of overlapping layers of fat mysteriously transformed into muscle. Hard blubber, hideously prophylactic: not even his proud owner could have stroked that face tenderly.
I don’t know what sort he is. Are they called breeds? I can’t tel
l one from another. I’m not even very good with people. When I taught, I would make up a class physical appearance list on the first day, correlating physical characteristics to names in my desk diary. It was ever so helpful, and within a couple of weeks I wouldn’t need it any more. But for the first days, it gave me a sense of intimacy with my new charges that I could recognise them so easily, as long as I could take a peek at my list and their faces.
One day, leaving the teaching room with a surprisingly pressing need for the loo, I left my (closed) diary on my desk, rather than putting it in the top drawer as usual. On my return, five minutes later, Fatboy Linus was crying at the back of the room, Cross-eyed Charley had exacerbated his disability so radically that he can have seen nothing but his own nose, and Acne Andy – I was told – had run out of the room, scratching himself madly. I didn’t see him again for a week.
The next morning I received a brusque note from the Head:
Dear Darke,
I have had one or two parents on the phone, regarding an unfortunate incident in your classroom. Could we have a word about this? I will be free between 4.15 and 4.40.
Best,
Anthony
He was a pacific fellow, liked but mildly mocked by his staff, and he hated confrontation. The very word ‘parent’ made him anxious, and if you attached ‘concerned’, or even worse, ‘irate’, he reached for the Panadol and drew the curtains.
I entered his study at 4.15 on the dot, to find him pacing in front of the fire. His room was over-heated, as if some objective correlative of his state of mind, and he had never been known to open the window. He smoked a pipe of some noxious Balkan mixture (not Sobranie) to add to the fug. It was hard to see, and harder yet to breathe. The idea, I presume, was to make the place uncongenial to visitors, while he himself was inured to it, smoked as a kipper.
‘See here, James, we have something of a to-do about some damn book of yours . . .’
