The Boy Who Could Keep a Swan in His Head

by John Hunt

  There were also lots of Arabs on camels when they slaughtered a column of the retreating Turkish army; however, he couldn’t remember Omar Sharif being in that part. “No prisoners!” Lawrence had shouted because the Turks had recently killed all the people from the village of Tafas.

  “Third Truth.”

  The mustard mine dumps were getting a purple topping. Phen picked up his haversack, placed it on his lap, yet stayed seated. He’d never felt this tired before. His mind limped to a halt. He turned to the man in the hat, waiting for instructions.

  “The Third Truth is now over to you. You must decide how far and wide you want to see.”

  “It’s not just three times,” he heard his voice say. “I’d like Lawrence of Arabia to end when he rides in his white-and-gold robes between the two mountains, and all the Bedouins stand on the ridge and call out his name. But everyone knows it ends when he dies in a motorcycle crash on a country road back in England.”

  11

  Juxtaposition

  /juks-te-pa-zish’en/ noun

  When Phen arrived home, his mother gave him a big hug and told him everything was fine before he could ask if anything was wrong. She offered him a cup of tea then laughed because she hadn’t even given him the chance to take his backpack off. There had been a little incident this morning, just before she was about to go to work. It was pretty much sorted now and there was no need to worry. Mr Lansdown, her boss, had given her the whole week off! She made it sound as if it were a spontaneous holiday gesture and clapped her hands in delight. Plus, how about buying fish and chips from Manny’s shop on the corner? There was absolutely no need to slave away in the kitchen on a Monday night, didn’t he agree?

  Phen agreed and enquired if the little incident had anything to do with his father. “Yes, it did.” She paused to admire his detective work while hanging his school blazer over a dining-room chair. He was informed that another doctor would pop in tonight just to check on everything. “Better safe than sorry.” He nodded as his mother brought him a cup of hot water. He could see the teabag resting on the breadboard, but said nothing. She sat down at the opposite side of the table and moved the empty fruit bowl sideways. Now that there was no obstruction between them, she smiled her widest smile and opened her eyes expectantly.

  “Now tell me about your day. How was school?”

  His mother was ecstatic to hear he was a tree and thought he’d be brilliant. She was sorry Mrs Tulip was gone. Although she’d never met her, she seemed like a nice person. She also hoped Kobus Visser’s leg would soon mend. Adan Karim certainly sounded like an interesting young man. He should invite Jimmy the Greek around; he hadn’t been to their flat in ages. Although there was no mention of Vernon MacArthur’s rude words, she agreed with her son that he certainly had a high opinion of himself. His mother explained that those people got their own comeuppance and he shouldn’t worry about it. “The wheel turns,” she further elaborated. Finally all that was left was Wolraad Woltemade; however, he didn’t feel like discussing a drowning horse.

  “That’s all,” he said, and had a sip of warm water.

  “Good!” His mother clapped her hands again in glee.

  Phen nodded and began to stand. He knew sooner or later he had to get past the dining room and into the dark corridor. He also understood that at the end of that black tunnel his father’s bedroom door would be closed. What he didn’t know was what to expect on the other side. He had no idea what a heart attack looked like. It was a strange juxtaposition of words. It sounded so aggressive. Who had assaulted his father’s heart? Was it a skirmish, a mugging or a full onslaught? And why was it that only hearts were attacked? Heads ached, stomachs cramped, ankles twisted, he’d heard that spleens, whatever they were, ruptured and necks whiplashed, but only hearts got attacked.

  “Lots of vinegar,” she said, “on my chips.”

  Phen had never seen his mother like this before. She was turning herself into another person. Determined to smile, even at the empty fruit bowl, she had found some mysterious source of energy. Her body seemed to have electricity running through it. Her hands jerked and her arms waved. She circled the dining-room table at high speed and laughed at jokes aimed at herself as she tied and untied her apron. Finally she decided to take it off and hang it behind the kitchen door. With a hand on each hip she stared at the unused teabag, shrugged and put it back in its box.

  “You okay?”

  “Perfect.”

  Phen saw the thick, almost caked powder strategically smoothed over the dark circles under her eyes. The lipstick was new and very red. She had wanted to put on a good face but was exposed by the bright dining-room light with its unshaded and relentless glare. Like a slightly crooked mask it accentuated rather than concealed. Quick to interpret the young boy’s look, his mother turned to the mirror and dabbed her face with a tissue.

  “Can I g-go … into his room?”

  “Of course!” She immediately spun around and blocked his way. Then she hugged him again so suddenly he was caught off guard. His arms were trapped down by his sides with his body at an awkward angle. While he waited to be released he tried to stand tall and put on a man-size set of shoulders. When his arms were finally free he patted his mother on the back the way he’d seen Uncle Ed do. The gentle tapping, like Morse code, seemed to send a message they both understood. The electricity in his mother began to drain away. Her body slumped. She stepped back from her son but held on to his right hand. She squeezed it absent-mindedly before rubbing it vigorously.

  Phen waited, arm outstretched. His mother’s eyebrows arched as if she’d suddenly remembered something yet chose to remain silent. Finger by finger she let her son’s hand go.

  “Everything changes,” Phen said.

  “That it does.”

  “Nothing stands still.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Even when we think nothing is happening, everything around us is moving. S-so we mustn’t be impaled on the present.”

  “True. Well spoken.” She nodded, impressed by the richness of his vocabulary. “We shall not allow ourselves to be harpooned by today.”

  Phen never saw his father that night or the next morning. Between leaving to get the fish and chips and his return, everything had changed. The illness of his father and what it meant could no longer be contained in a hug and the slow release of a hand. By the time he opened the front door, not one but two specialists were in the closed bedroom. His grandmother, wearing black stockings to match the rest of her outfit, was deliberately positioned with one foot in the dining room and one in the lounge. The human blockade held her nose.

  “Did you order any fish and chips with your vinegar?”

  Phen felt cheated; he’d been conned. He’d wanted to keep this small. He and his mother could cope if everyone just let them be a team. His gran, even the other doctors, weren’t necessary. He could be the man of the house if he was left alone. When he heard Uncle Ed was also on his way, his annoyance reshaped itself into a brittle panic. There was obviously a direct relationship between the size and seriousness of the heart attack and the number of people getting involved. There were just too many. Like Wolraad Woltemade’s horse, he was going to drown.

  Uncle Ed arrived with a box of chocolates. “Not really appropriate,” he said. “Couldn’t think of anything else.” Mairead thought it was a wonderful gesture, put them in the sideboard and locked the drawer. The lounge became the waiting room. The clicking of his gran’s knitting needles, the ticking of the clock. After half an hour Uncle Ed asked if he may take his jacket off. His gran thought that that would be absolutely fine and patted her hair like the old lady in the park. In return, a second round of tea was offered as well as an apology for the stubborn smell of vinegar.

  “It’s the best I can do,” she said, pointing disapprovingly to a side plate with Marie biscuits fanned out like a deck of cards.

  “Quite alright, I’ve had dinner.”

  Without asking permission, Ph
en put the radio on and sat cross-legged six inches in front of the Grundig. He caught the beginning of Lux Radio Theatre presented this and every Monday night for your listening pleasure. The voice promised simply the finest in radio drama. A man had been found wandering on the windswept dunes of Swakopmund in South West Africa, yet he had no recollection of how he got there or who he was. The police feared he was up to no good. The diamond fields of the Skeleton Coast tended to attract an unsavoury bunch. Intriguingly, his well-tailored suit seemed to tell another story. Why was the only item found in his wallet a photograph of a beautiful woman? And who was she?

  When Phen realised the gentle tapping at the door wasn’t a sound effect he jumped up. As he invited Zelda Hillock in, Mairead moved to block her entry into the lounge. Uncle Ed beamed over her hunched shoulders that swayed like a cobra about to strike. As the man of the house, Phen chose to split her defence. He moved past his grandmother on the left while indicating to Zelda that she should move right. Uncle Ed shook her hand firmly and said he was delighted. Maintaining impeccable etiquette, Phen mentioned he was sure Mairead had met or seen Zelda before. Mairead nodded. Zelda gave her a little wave.

  “I don’t want to disturb. I just heard the news and wanted to know if I could help in any way.”

  “Won’t you have a seat?” Uncle Ed ushered her to a chair. He then resumed his position opposite her and continued to smile. The thick cloth covering her swivel seat caught her white miniskirt and tugged it upwards. It took Zelda a few attempts to catch the material. Each time she lifted herself, the chair would spin left or right and emit a risqué squeak. Eventually she found the edge of her skirt and pulled it down. Now that she no longer had to wriggle, the chair fell silent. Zelda folded her hands across her lap and returned Uncle Edward’s smile.

  “Sorry,” she said, “this knitted fabric gets caught on everything.”

  “Enchanted,” said Ed.

  “You say you think you’re German yet your English is very good. And if I’m not mistaken, that’s a Savile Row suit.”

  Phen wondered if he should turn the radio off.

  The passage door opened and Phen’s mother emerged with the two specialists. Her extreme exhaustion contrasted against their Laurel and Hardy-ness. They both wore dark suits, black ties and white shirts, but one was tall and thin, the other round with a thick black moustache. Phen immediately put bowler hats on both of them. They seemed somewhat surprised by the diversity of their audience. Each grabbed the back of a dining-room chair and held it like a lectern. Laurel spoke first, as befits the older, more serious-looking partner. He cleared his throat and touched his temple twice, the way a speaker taps a microphone to get your attention. Everyone stood and waited.

  Maybe there comes a time when specialists feel an emotional connection gets in the way of science, when any attempt at a bedside manner becomes a distraction.

  “We can,” he said, “determine with some degree of certainty that the patient did have a heart attack this morning.”

  Hardy nodded.

  “The severity of this incident is more difficult to ascertain. The heart muscle requires a perpetual supply of oxygen-rich blood to sustain its function. The coronary arteries feed this supply. If these become narrowed, this function is compromised.”

  “Compromised,” said Hardy.

  “This narrowing is caused by fatty deposits, something akin to plaque on your teeth. When this plaque gets hard, it breaks off and you have something called a plaque rupture. We believe this might have happened, leading to a blood clot forming around the plaque. This, in due course, blocked the artery, therefore starving the heart muscle of oxygen and thus precipitating a heart attack. This is all, of course, subjective hypothesis on our part, but our finding would be consistent with the symptoms displayed.”

  “Hypothesis,” Hardy concurred.

  Phen knew the individual words were English, yet the sentences were from another language. He’d never heard medical speak before. And they were clearly talking about a thing, not a human, and certainly not about his father. His father had a name and a face just like they did. He had to be more than a set of blocked parts.

  “He needs rest,” continued Laurel.

  “Bed rest,” added Hardy, perhaps worried that the eclectic crowd needed more specific instructions.

  “And no excitement.” Laurel’s eyes briefly darted towards Zelda.

  This furtive action brought about a stumbling silence that suddenly hardened. It was made more awkward because the gathered audience didn’t know what to say or ask. Like students attending a lecture, they weren’t even sure if they were allowed to speak. Laurel tapped his temple again yet declined to say any more. Hardy stared at the wedding photograph on the sideboard table, perhaps trying to place the bald man standing in front of him. Phen moved closer to his mother in an attempt to break the hush, although this seemed only to add to it. His mother put her finger to her lips, indicating that any sound was inappropriate. A strange staring contest developed. You could look anywhere provided it wasn’t in the direction of another human being. It was left to Mairead to break the deadlock.

  “Oh, my giddy aunt!” she said, holding a single knitting needle.

  The two doctors looked confused, momentarily wondering if this was in reference to a medical condition. The tone, however, made it clear the exclamation was aimed at Dennis in the next room. The implication was that some silliness on his part had contributed to his present condition. Like a man who’d tripped over a spade in the garden, his negligence had knocked some plaque into one of his arteries. She looked back at the two in their suits and waited for confirmation of her assessment.

  “Rest,” was the best Laurel could do as he rubbed the slightly worn handle of his doctor’s bag.

  “And keep him comfortable,” added Hardy. He had no doctor’s bag. Instead, he stroked the back of the dining-room chair.

  “I suppose,” said Mairead, “whit’s fur ye’ll no go past ye.” The doctors stared blankly ahead. “What will be will be.”

  “Right!” said Ed, suddenly emboldened and trying to take charge. However, his enthusiasm was short-lived as he immediately turned to the others for help.

  It was at this point that Phen realised he’d been a fool to think it was all about what people said. It was all about what they didn’t say. Words were used to talk around what really mattered. To surround and hide the truth. To keep it in some secret place. Grown-ups could claim they weren’t lying because they were so good at camouflaging. It was the silence that leaked the truth through.

  “Ha, ha, ha, ha, haa! You must take me for a fool! Do you think because I’m stationed in Swakopmund I’m some country bumpkin? Now you claim the name Gustav rings a distant bell? We have a lot of fish on this coast, sir, and I smell a red herring.”

  Suddenly everyone was listening to the radio. The loud, bitter laughter had arced through the lounge and landed in the dining room. The two doctors didn’t know what to do with the gleeful sniggering other than lean forward into the dialogue.

  “May I have some water, please?” The upper-class accent turned the request into a demand.

  “Do you think that will help bring your memory back?”

  “I’ve done nothing wrong, committed no crime.”

  “That still waits to be determined. Sergeant! Keep this man in a cell overnight.”

  The firm slamming of the prison door snapped the room out of its trance. By the time the metallic sound of keys turning in a lock was done, the room had found some movement. Zelda placed an arm around Phen’s mother and whispered something in her ear. Mairead picked up the Marie-biscuit plate and dismissively offered tea. Sensing this was their moment, the doctors turned with military precision and headed towards their exit. Ed let out another “Right!”, opened the door with a slight bow, then closed it behind them.

  Again the silence that said everything.

  “Don’t worry.”

  Phen knew this was adult opposite-speak. He returned
his mother’s smile anyway.

  “Everything will be fine,” she said. “They are the best specialists. The top cardiologists – heart doctors – in the country.”

  “They look like Laurel and Hardy,” Phen blurted. The words shot out his mouth with a velocity he’d never managed before. They flew off his tongue without any preparation.

  The room was as stunned by the speed of the delivery as it was by the sentence itself. There were no stilted gaps between each word. No rehearsed pauses. The indignation, maybe even outrage, had melted the words into a perfect fusion. Phen watched Zelda’s arm drop from his mother’s shoulders as she spun towards him. Marie biscuits tumbled to the floor and rolled like mad wheels in the grooves of the parquet flooring. Ed, who was in the act of sitting down, hovered for a moment then relaunched himself into the vertical position.

  Silence, but this time of a different kind.

  It was Mairead, again, who released the group with a sound Phen could not recall ever having heard before. It was deep and rumbling and came from a place not often used. It grew in intensity and pitch as it tried to find a way out. Initially a cough trying to catch its breath, and then something else with a different rhythm. An erratic exhaling and inhaling – the sound was strange but not entirely unpleasant. And when the room realised this was how Mairead laughed, it became infectious.

  Phen was amazed at the power of one sentence. Even as he tried to retrieve the runaway Marie-biscuit wheels from under the sideboard, the room still reverberated with the aftershock of his sentence. Uncle Ed snorted helplessly as if his laughter lived, tightly packed, up his nose. Zelda lay across the couch trying to get her breath back. She was stretched out with only one foot on the floor. Phen’s mother giggled in continual bursts and moved sideways. She was leaning against the sliding door and her weight was slowly pushing it closed. Mairead unceremoniously fanned her face with the side plate and leaned hard on the Grundig, its bowed legs grimly determined to carry her weight.