Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart

by Stephen Benatar

  And with that much money on me, plus a burning desire to be in one of those places where it might accomplish the most good, yes I had certainly been like a young Lord Bountiful bestowing charity and getting a buzz out of doing so. But I was deriving this buzz more because I genuinely wanted to help than because I thought it turned me into such a great fellow. And wasn’t it better to do it even for mixed reasons than not to do it at all? My last life had been so completely wasted I didn’t regard it as astonishing that, given the opportunity, I should go all out trying to justify this one. Who wouldn’t? Okay, I was plainly having setbacks when I’d thought that I was making progress. But nevertheless…

  Though at the moment, it seemed, smugness wasn’t my only problem. Self-pity was pushing its way in.

  Then there came a jolt which signified that the new engine had finally been connected. I was damned if I’d feel self-pity. I blew my nose and wiped my eyes and turned my head back. He appeared hardly to have moved.

  “All right, Zack. I’m sorry. I don’t know where I’ve gone wrong—I mean, not in any vast and catastrophic way—and I can see why that on its own should make you angry. All I can say is, if you’ll tell me where the trouble lies and if it isn’t too late, I’d like to begin again. Please.”

  “No, isn’t too late.” But the steeliness of his expression hadn’t changed.

  “Then tell me how I’ve been dishonest.”

  “I said no. I want you to tell me.”

  “You can’t be talking of the thousand pounds I won?” Over half of it had gone to charities that dealt with famine in the Third World.

  “Can’t I?”

  “Well, you never suggested that I shouldn’t gamble.”

  “And am I suggesting it now?”

  “But then what…?”

  Yet, looking at him, suddenly I saw.

  “You’re saying that of course it wasn’t a gamble?”

  “But more importantly, what are you saying?”

  “No. It wasn’t. You’re right. Yet it didn’t occur to me that I was doing wrong. In fact it seemed…almost a heaven-sent opportunity.” I smiled. Wanly.

  He didn’t. He didn’t smile at all.

  “And should it have occurred to you?”

  “Yes. I suppose it should.”

  “Suppose?”

  “I still can’t help thinking you’re overreacting.”

  “You’ve always thought that everyone was overreacting.”

  “But was it so wrong? All’s fair in love and war. And with bookmakers—”

  “Don’t give me that crap.”

  “I was merely going to say that with bookmakers—”

  “All’s fair in love and war.”

  “Zack. It’s only an expression. I wouldn’t stand by it.”

  “You just did.”

  I tugged at one of my earlobes and decided I shouldn’t try to defend myself. I looked over at the picture of a mother and toddler bouncing a beach ball at Rhyl: Fine sands—bracing air—beautiful scenery. On the other side of a small central mirror there was a father as well: paddling and splashing with his wife and two children at Scarborough. I couldn’t let him get away with it.

  “And anyway, Zack, you’d had almost a year in which to prevent me. Surely you knew why I was saving up so hard?”

  He must have done. Twelve months before, hearing of someone who had done well on the Grand National, I was suddenly reminded that the following year—when I was working at the Times Bookshop in Wigmore Street, instead of, as now, being on vacation from King’s College Cambridge—that in 1956 I had won a few pounds on a horse called E.S.B. He was practically the only horse whose name I remembered, for he was the only horse on which I’d ever won. Definitely not as a result of studying form but because a friend and I had spent a coffee-break that March inventing middle names for our colleagues: one of these being Ernie Blick, a lad in the stockroom so po-faced he inevitably became Ernie Sunshine Blick. It was an adolescent game but for some reason those initials stayed with me long after all the others had faded. I had greatly liked this friend, Kenneth, and as a matter of fact only that same afternoon, my mission having been completed, I’d called in at the bookshop and chatted with him for fifteen very pleasant minutes, initially of course about books, but then about other seemingly unrelated topics including the Grand National. It had been extremely pleasant, yes, but rather melancholy too. I should have liked to speak to Mrs Morton, who had once said when she’d heard me singing from the Noel Coward Song Book (there was a copy of it visible this afternoon—I saw it on the central table; could it be the selfsame copy I had leafed through and sung from previously?), had once said that my tenor voice was charming—she herself, between the wars, had sung in operetta and she had chosen the word with kindness and with care—and who, even as I watched her single out Gone With the Wind for her present customer, had already, in a sense, been dead for countless years; should have liked to speak to Mrs Morton and Jenny Nyman and to Anthea, Annette, Rosemary and many others. So in the end I felt a little wistful as I walked towards the station, for it had been a good time in my life, full of hope, appreciated not simply in retrospect but even as I’d lived it. While talking to Kenneth I had as usual tried to take in every detail, would have loved to see the small canteen again, hear the echo of our laughter and our silly conversations (I particularly remembered a discussion concerning men’s body hair—sparked off by my own arms and William Holden’s chest), would have loved once more to visit the quaint Victorian lavatory with its wooden seat, flowered porcelain and air of cocooned and comfortable solidity. Also, while speaking to him, I’d grown conscious suddenly of straining to glimpse some spark of bewildered recognition in his eyes, as I thought there might once have been in my mother’s outside Warwick House, this probable absurdity being heightened, of course, by my catching sight of a salesman whom I didn’t know and who had presumably been taken on in place of me. Kenneth had sometimes come my way in the evening, travelling on the Met as far as Harrow, but it was too much to hope that tonight would be one of those times for visiting his grandmother. I thought about returning to the shop before the end of my vacation and after some further congenial talk casually suggesting we should meet. But why? We had lost touch, anyway, after the shop had finally closed—someone thought he might have emigrated—and when at a later date I’d tried to track him down again I was no more successful. Perhaps I shouldn’t have returned at all. It was one of the few moments I had felt something close to regret for my Nottingham decision, and it hardly helped that I knew it was illogical.

  Now, scarcely an hour later, I was experiencing a similar uncertainty, a similar illusory pang. It occurred to me I must be tired. “Surely you knew why I was saving up so hard?”

  “Of course I did. It was a test. I kept hoping that you might come to your senses.”

  “It was only—”

  “Ethan, don’t you dare!”

  I’d been going to say robbing the rich to feed the poor. Until a moment earlier I hadn’t even thought of it, not remotely, as being any form of robbing.

  “If you’d got to me sooner I could at least have given the money back.”

  He made no answer. Quite possibly he couldn’t think of one but this didn’t dispose me to feel that I had scored.

  “Anyhow. Just bear in mind,” he said, “that there are tests and tests. This isn’t the end of everything. Catastrophic, remember, was your word, not mine.”

  “What do I have to do to be forgiven?”

  His tone appeared to be lightening. “Well, for one thing, not catch your death of cold. You’d better take this overcoat. I think in all likelihood you’re going to need it more than me.”

  The idea of possessing something of Zack’s gave me pleasure in itself, but the idea of his presenting it immediately after such a very low point in our relationship made it even more valuable. I wondered if that was why he’d worn it.

  “What do I tell them, then, at home?”

  “That you
were given it. That it was warmer than yours. That you then gave your own away.”

  “Is this another test?” I asked.

  14

  Again…no mention of Brian Douglas.

  But a way of dealing with my guilt was beginning to suggest itself. It was outlandish, the sort of inspired lunacy that only came at night and guaranteed you got no sleep. It certainly brought no other guarantee; not even a clear picture of what I would be aiming for. If I spoke of it to anyone but Zack I should either be avoided or sent to a psychiatrist. Yet I knew it to be right—it was as if something had gone click inside my soul—and years before I could even start to put it into practice it was already obsessing me. I believed I had been shown the outline of my life’s work: as nebulous as a figure glimpsed through fog but just as certain to take solid shape.

  And it was all due to Brian Douglas.

  15

  And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, walk before me, and be thou perfect, I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and kings shall come out of thee.

  At ninety-nine? Not bad. Do you think the Lord might have similar objectives for me? (But all I really want is this: that he’ll just get off my bleeding back!) Ninety-nine is currently my own age. Recently, someone asked when I had last got it up. Salacious old bugger. Naturally I wasn’t going to tell him I couldn’t remember, must be thirty years ago at least. That’s an added grievance, of course. Having all this time and still being deprived of a good fuck.

  Not that longevity would be all it’s cracked up to be even with a rampant cock. Well, not for me. Can’t speak for Abram!

  You get so tired. That’s the thing. You’ve had enough. You want to put an end to it. Rest. It isn’t just the aches and pains—and, yes, I really do mean pains—the heart attacks, the strokes, the rheumatism, arthritis. The cataracts, the deafness. Non-stop wheezing. And it isn’t just seeing your mates drop dead all round you, in truth I never had many. It’s everything. It’s the damned monotony, it’s the damned exertion. It’s the damned business of having to get up in the morning and then having to go to bed at night—though knowing you won’t get any sleep. It’s the damned business of having to fill up all the time in between, find food, rely on people who aren’t reliable, people you’d rather spit in the eye of, not have to feel obliged to. We Jews are supposed to venerate old age but I know there’s always someone ready to snicker behind my back, make fun of me, point me out as a freak and an outcast. A leper. I’d rather be a leper—much. You die, of leprosy. Your days are numbered. Me, I don’t even know if my centuries are numbered! My God, before long I’ll be reduced to crawling about on my hands and knees—with creaks in every joint, agony in every movement—seeing nothing, hearing nothing and stinking to the high heavens. That’s not the way I was brought up. Hygiene was always important, who wants to stink? So when you get right down to it it’s not only the tedium and the pain and the exhaustion, it’s all those never-ending small humiliations. When you’re doomed to eternity how are you meant to trim your toenails?

  Too often now I think about my childhood. When I was young I had no time for either of my parents, any of my family. But I was wrong. I see that more and more. I wish I didn’t. It’s sentimental, it’s disgusting. Last night I even had to wipe away rivers of rheum and snot when I allowed myself to reminisce.

  I still see my mother as a young woman, tend to forget that she became a fishwife. Screaming old harridan. Even my father can sometimes seem all right. I hate it that my early years—before that bloody man was crucified—should now be turning into something sacred. Precious. It wasn’t much of a life, even then.

  I’ll tell you what’s precious about life. I’ve thought about this. It’s the fact it’s short, it’s fleeting, you don’t know when it’s going to end. You want to hang onto it, hang onto it at any price. Death is the thing that’s precious about life.

  So when you realize you’re not going to die…

  But don’t think I haven’t tried. I’ve tried by jumping off a cliff. I’ve tried with knife, and rope, and poison.

  Yet nothing works, absolutely nothing, even though I can break every bone in my body—back, neck, arms, legs—which accounts for the shape I’m in now, all the twists and the deformities. I’m not just a freak, I’m a monster, beside me Cerberus would sweep the board at any beauty contest. It also accounts for the fact that, as I said, I can’t even sleep at night, there’s no position I can lie in for longer than three minutes. So no escape, you see. Not even on those rare occasions when I can scrounge a bit of wine. A bit of wine, a whole amphora wouldn’t help! I say scrounge because I haven’t any money, how should I have? Quite often I starve and thereby add to my manifold physical attractions an air of charming emaciation, and to my manifold physical discomforts the ache of gnawing hunger. I’m deprived not merely of food but—far worse—deprived of the consolation of knowing that at least I’ll starve to death.

  So wouldn’t you think I’d have learnt sooner? After that dive off the cliff-top? But the thing was, although the chance of survival was only about one in a million, I’d believed that I, wouldn’t you know, had been that poor, dumb, millionth sap. So I drove a knife through my chest. And, oh God, the agony of it! You need courage to do these things. You need courage to do them and courage to recover from them; or would do if you had the least bit of choice in the matter. And yet, even then, I thought I lived because I’d missed my heart, the physician said I had, anyhow. But in truth it could have been plain desperation that permitted me to think it. After I’d hung myself, and swung three feet above the ground for six whole hours, scrabbling and clawing for my breath, I finally had to acknowledge it: that there was never going to be, ever, any hope of a way out!

  This, though, didn’t stop me from rushing at the henbane, packing it into my mouth, gulping it down unchewed, in the second I fooled myself they might be looking the other way. They, my persecutors. And I got the convulsions all right, the sensation of having swallowed shards of heated glass that burned and tore relentlessly at my gut. But when I was next able to think, in the intervals between the torment, I knew I hadn’t caught them by surprise. Whatever surprises might be going I was the one who’d always be on the receiving end. The bastards.

  Sodding bastards.

  Yet…why the plural? I see I keep on doing it. Persecutors, bastards. Why?

  Of course there’s a lot of nonsense talked these days about a father-and-son act, and I’ve even heard mention of some crazy ghost wanting to turn it into a trio! But when I’m not getting too distracted, I still always think of him, not them—I mean, if I have to think about it at all, which thankfully doesn’t happen often. Him being that same goddamn bullyboy who buttered up Abram and could obviously be pretty free with the goodies if he thought it was going to pay. I mean! Imagine a fellow of my years still being able to get his leg over and squirt his juices in the right orifice. Lucky git. I bet he’d done more than his fair share of sucking up.

  But even luckier git. Better far than fucking. Then Abram gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, an old man, and full of years.

  That’s happiness, true happiness! Beats bonking. Every time.

  Because if I knew that, like him, I should die at a hundred-and-seventy-five—in other words, ninety-nine years down, seventy-six to go, well past the halfway point—then maybe I could bear it. Even looking as I do now, even functioning as I do now, not functioning as I do now, then maybe I could bear it. Just to know that one day all of this would come to an end. Another seventy-six years. Finito.

  But wait.

  Other countries? Other customs? Other times?

  Well, I’ll tell you. In my heart I dared to hope that all that nonsense had been forgotten. Or never seriously intended. Meant only to frighten and confuse.

  For—think about it—sixty years! Over sixty years! Wouldn’t you imagine they’d have felt impatient to get on with it, witness its results, an experiment as exciting a
s that? Because that’s what it would have been, of course. An experiment. (And presumably, in their eyes, an exciting one.) Which perhaps they’d now discovered—glory be—that they weren’t capable of carrying out. Faces all covered in egg! How are the mighty fallen!

  An enterprise dreamt up on the spur of the moment—and possibly fairly soon regretted.

  Though be that as it may, they must have realized they’d let too much time slip by, far too much. “Oh, yes, Cartophilus! You’ll most certainly get to know…” Yet in the first place I was no longer mobile and in the second place I had cataracts. How could I possibly get to know?

  Yet, even so, I was worried. One night I thought about the Witch of Endor—I don’t know what put her into my mind. No way was I thinking of journeying to Endor or of travelling back through past centuries; it was enough that I must travel forward through future ones. (You see, I still hadn’t quite convinced myself.) Besides, I now had a fear of witches, since I’d seen that woman perish in the fire. But the notion remained with me: might witchcraft cure my ills? After all, I couldn’t go on like this, not unless they simply put me in a cage and left me there as some interesting exhibit—a decrepit, aging, floorbound, defecating beast, barely recognizable as human.

  And it defied belief to suppose that that could have been the projected manner of it. Some sort of travelling peep show? “Step right up and see the world’s oldest and ugliest inhabitant!” No, surely not. To get to experience different lands through only the smells that drifted between the bars of some endlessly swaying cage? Or through the barely heard ribaldries of those who came to gawp at me? That couldn’t be what they’d had in mind.

  So the question then remained. If it was going to take place, how was it going to take place? Was it conceivable there could be anyone out there—other than a witch or a warlock or an outcast of some other variety—who might have the potential to help me? And even if they had the potential, would they possess the generosity? Remember, I was penniless. Would it be within their nature to take pity?