Is This the Way You Said?

by Adam Thorpe

  Eddie Thwing had stopped laughing and the plates had been taken away. He ordered a second bottle of sake.

  ‘Fermented rice,’ he said, again. ‘The only thing to drink with puffer fish. The glass of rum before we go over the top. Kampai!’

  The two glasses slammed down. Jonathan was aware of a little suspended animation about his own movements. His unsupported back hurt. He shifted from his strict lotus position into something approximate, rolling his ankle-bone painfully against the floor.

  ‘Why did you write your book?’ asked Thwing, all of a sudden.

  The malevolence had been tucked away. That was good.

  ‘New Demons? I can’t say. I don’t know. I mean, I do and I don’t. I wanted to escape. Parallel world. I’m a drama teacher – physical theatre, mime, impro, situations. You know, trying to teach kids to be tolerant, open-minded, freeing them up. Not movie stars, or musicals, that glitter stuff.’ He was moving his hands around too much. The editor looked on over his small and perfect sake glass, impassive, the neutral mask. Only the eyes disturbed. ‘So what I was really – I mean, originally I wanted to settle for a story, y’know?’

  Eddie Thwing nodded. He’d heard all this before, no doubt.

  ‘Then the story – well, it went on and on. I kind of – escaped into it. The job, it’s a bit – it kind of bleaches you out. Tough kids, tough schools, bad conditions, all that. It can be really heavy.’

  ‘They say it is.’

  ‘I don’t know whether you have kids, but . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, I don’t know whether—’

  ‘I heard.’

  The editor’s hand was trembling. There was a long moment of silence between them. The gamblers could be heard through the bead curtain – joking, or maybe arguing, with the chirrup of a mobile through the faint, deep suggestion of the music. The kitchen itself was silent until the swing door opened, and even then it was muted.

  ‘Right,’ said Eddie Thwing. ‘Alright. Look, what I really want to know is . . .’ He sighed, the kind of sigh that follows a crying fit. This poor sod is definitely having a nervous breakdown. Jonathan had seen it before, in the staff room. People crack up differently. ‘What I’m trying to get to is the nub. The root. The half-past-two-in-the-morning root, when you still haven’t got to sleep and you’re thinking. Because you can’t stop thinking. You’ve got a bottle of brandy inside you and it makes no fucking difference. Because you haven’t found it.’

  ‘OK,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘It’s not OK. If you hadn’t written anything, if you’d just stuck to your . . . humble position in life, and not reckoned like every other . . . fucker in the country that you could apply pen to paper and write, then I would not be . . . in my present position. Which is that of . . .’

  He was searching for the word. His speech was broken-backed, with pauses for breath.

  ‘I don’t know,’ mumbled Jonathan. This was really, really disappointing. The guy was panting, now, as if he’d run a long way. What was he – thirty-nine? Forty? Overweight. Out of condition. Off his rocker. I could just get up and leave, he thought, but something said no, don’t do that. Cowardice, maybe. Not wanting to let the audience down. See this through, you lot. See it right through to the end of its curve where the crock of gold lies that is us, clapping and smiling.

  ‘Which is that of a very . . . sad . . . broken . . . person. Y’know, she said to me –’ He drained his glass and refilled it, still not touching his food – ‘she said to me, Is this the way you said we’d have had to have gone, to get there? Something like that. And I remember thinking – this was on the way . . . up, onto the headland, on that fucking track . . . will o’ the wisp . . .’ He drank again, having clearly lost the thread.

  Make the offer, guys. Keep it going. Don’t block.

  ‘Thinking?’

  ‘I remember thinking . . . how amazing that sentence was. The grammar of it. The structure. The whole thing. She’d said it, y’know, without aforethought. The way you do. It’s probably not even correct. Who cares? I have authors who can’t spell, who can’t spell grammar, Jesus Christ – but who cares? I don’t. We have to punctuate for them. Semi-colons, y’know? Commas. And they think we’re grateful.’

  Jonathan nodded. The editor was rambling, drunkenly. This was better. The vitriol had been appeased somewhat by more poison, like an antidote. He pictured his father spitting venom and then subsiding in front of Z Cars, the Gilbert’s gin drowning him in slumber. Peace, at last. He shifted his body and his knee twinged.

  ‘Yeah. Anyway, she said this, and I thought that, and this was all before. Like before the dinosaurs. Like before Hiroshima. Like before that kid in Iraq lost his arms because we blew them off. Y’know, I didn’t care about him, when it happened. I never watch the news. Too busy. Don’t go to the theatre, either. Too busy. Or cinema. But now I care. I mean, I’m cross about it. About all the kids in Iraq or Africa or wherever. The dead ones. And so she said that . . . before. And I can fucking touch it. Her voice. Her saying it. But it’s lying on the other side, isn’t it?’

  The word ‘touch’ had left spittle on his lower lip.

  ‘Before what, exactly?’

  Jonathan knew what it was now: the poor sod’s wife had gone off with someone else. An author, maybe. The affair uncovered. Wasn’t that what Dave had said – that it was a world where everyone had affairs? And this guy, this famous editor, had been struck down by the knowledge. The sake was flashing pleasantly in Jonathan’s body, all over, illuminating it from within.

  The waiter came out from the kitchen, the man with the calculator apparently shouting after him. Or maybe having an argument with the chef, the master. The heavy swing door swung back and hid it all. The waiter, who had beads of sweat on his nose and upper lip, took their plates.

  A long silence.

  He would stab melons, plunge a carving knife into a great deal of melons over the days, but Eddie didn’t know that yet, lying sleepless on the hotel bed in Andros. Holly had cried herself, with the help of her emergency tranquilisers, to some kind of sleep. Melons, because that’s what Holly had said they used in films for the sound effect of a knife blade in flesh: it gives just the right resistance.

  At this moment, however, he had not yet formulated what he was going to do to Jonathan Lewis; there was only a great, blurred rage. He couldn’t see this from the hotel, but the pages that hadn’t sunk had now joined the circle of plastic bags and other flotsam circling outside the sea cavern, the moonlight making it resemble a great O of foam. Glottal sounds of satisfaction came from deep within the sea cavern. Gulps of deepest pleasure.

  Eddie would have liked to have made his way back to the rocks on the headland and studied that O, right now he would have liked to have done that. The moon was bright enough. He rose carefully, inching out of bed so as not to wake Holly, and stood in his pyjama briefs outside their room, on their little veranda. Ed’s toy cars were parked where he’d left them, any old way, and this had annoyed his parents, you could fall over on them, but each one was at the end of a trajectory begun by a little hand that was now no longer able to do that, or anything else. It was no longer around. Eddie knew that, now. He was certain of it. He had been certain of it, if he thought about it, right from that moment he had first seen that Ed was not with Holly on the slab.

  He had run down and cut his foot, because his sandal had broken, and he had limped onto the slab where Holly was just climbing out of the water, shivering, holding the bright pink snorkel.

  ‘He’s in there, he’s in there, he’s in there.’

  ‘Jesus Christ it’s OK this can’t be true.’

  ‘He’s in there he’s in there he’s in there—’

  ‘I’m getting him out, it’ll be OK, fuck, it’ll be OK, it has to be OK—’

  The water seemed bigger and heavier and stronger: the sea-bed was on hydraulics and was tipping up and the sea was lifting and striking the slab with great force. But that’s only
the way it seemed: really, the sea was just the same as twenty minutes ago.

  ‘Get him out, get him out. You had to go for your fucking walk, didn’t you?’

  She started screaming at him. She was a fury. She just stood there shivering and shaking in her minimal swimsuit and screamed at him, screamed at him about this little walk, this modest excursion of his up to the church, not even up to the church, just a stroll for a few minutes, it was terrible, the way she tore him apart as he swam about, dipping his head under, using the other pair of goggles that leaked because the better pair had gone. Little Ed had gone in with the goggles and the snorkel, he had gone in deliberately and Holly had not been aware of what he was doing. Or maybe he had just dipped his head in to see the amazing fishes and the white fish the size of a car with sharp teeth – Ed was a brave kid, plucky, that would have attracted him.

  Eddie stood now outside their room watching the strips of foam now and again whiten in the moonlight on the sea beyond the sand, and the sea was beautiful at night, the moonlight glittered on it, softer than the sun, kinder on the eyes. He could make out the bulk of the headland, and the scents were sweeter than in the day, the scents of thyme and lavender and rue and maybe anise like in California. Then Holly had howled like an animal and – he had seen this from the water – she had lifted the manuscript and thrown it into the water. That was the worst thing she could have done to him, professionally speaking. It broke all the rules. For all he knew, it might have been the only copy of the book – some authors were that stupid. The pages snowed down and scattered themselves on the water around him. Fuck that, he thought. He dipped his head into the water again, always terrified of what he might see, but saw nothing, saw only the Grand Canyon with its silvery fish and its sea anemones, the strip of sand with its flat pebbles, the blue haze of distance before the goggles filled up. He even dived right down (he wasn’t using the snorkel) but panic left very little breath in his lungs and he kept having to burst up again, half choking, the sound of Holly howling breaking over him like a reason for staying under for ever in the calm of fish and sea anemone.

  He would really like to go up there in the moonlight and have one more look. Maybe Ed had just wandered off. Maybe he was snuggling up to the goat right now. Though the men had spent three hours on the headland, the shepherds and the hotel keeper’s sons and the local police and the local drunks: fat men and thin men and boys who had shot up and down the track on their scooters. Even a few women went up, daughters and wives, and a couple of Germans and some Americans who were actually Greek.

  ‘Ed! Ed! Ed!’ they kept shouting, like a massive flock of seagulls. The whole headland had become Ed. The parents hadn’t told anyone about the snorkel in the sea. Or the locals would not have bothered to scour the headland for him, to help them in their distress. They’d have known.

  Even so, it had been embarrassing, causing such a stir: Eddie had actually thought that, momentarily forgetting what it was all about. None of it had sunk in beyond the shallowest level of his brain, unless you counted the wobbliness in his knees.

  But before they had gone back and told everybody that Ed had disappeared and been given a stiff shot of something fierce the hotel keeper had made out of lemons from his lemon orchard, Eddie and Holly had had a fight. He had come out of the water, totally exhausted and weak with despair, and Holly had shrieked at him about the walk and Eddie had pointed to the pages floating or sinking around the slab – six hundred and thirteen of them – and said, ‘And what about that? That fucking book? You weren’t watching. You were in charge. You were totally deep in your fucking book.’

  Her book, he had called it, shouting at her. Her book.

  She had called him a bastard and leapt at him, slapping him with her hands, flailing, completely beside herself with sorrow and disbelief. He had nearly fallen off the slab, her nails took skin off his shoulders and chest, she was tough, she had almost made the Olympic alpine ski team, but he had controlled her, gripping her wrists, the ex-rugby player’s strength finding itself again and teasing her down to the ground as she squirmed and flailed and bit. Prop forward, he had been, at school and university.

  Then she collapsed, sobbing. Curled up like a little girl. As if someone was kicking her over and over. She knew. She knew Ed had not just wandered off to see the goats. The little palace of flat pebbles was still upright. Ed had added an extension. The pink snorkel from the trash shop had floated. Ed had not. The plastic snorkel had been retrieved. Ed had not. All this was mystifying and terrible to his father, standing at half past two or three in the morning, gazing on the sea in moonlight, wishing he had a cigarette. But a beautiful sense of Ed as part of the sea, like a sacrifice, came over him then. It was because it was Greece and the intensity of grief and loss had in it a diamond fragment of wonder, too: that you were part of the great cycle of life and death, of losing and becoming, of flux and change and renewal. It was the last beautiful moment Eddie was to experience for years, and mainly the result of his hypnagogic state of exhaustion and the moonlight on the calm Grecian sea: from then on in, it would be the dull bite of depression and the background boom of rage. That would be his grief. And drink.

  The need to blame, too. Not the gods. There were no gods. And if there were, they were out of reach.

  Your book is gripping, dark and dangerous. Let’s meet. Very soon. Give me a ring.

  Melons. He worked out for hours on melons.

  Authors, he would grunt, at each stab. Authors.

  But standing there in the moonlight, wanting to go up onto the headland where (if this was, say, a Luxor novel) he would find Ed nestled, pale and shining, against the flank of that solitary goat by the stream, like a vision, perhaps real, perhaps not, Eddie was not yet over the abyss. He was in the shallows, still, and wanting a cigarette, as well; wanting things to be as they were the day before; wanting to have taken another way so as not to have got where he was right now, here, after all.

  The fugu arrived on large white plates, the transparent slices of flesh spiralling like petals to a little heap of pockmarked skin in the middle.

  ‘A peony,’ said Eddie Thwing. ‘Or a chrysanthemum. I forget which. That’s surgery for you. That’s beauty. That’s art.’

  Jonathan felt pretty excited. This strange guy from another world was going to a lot of trouble to impress him. He had to be impressive back.

  ‘This is the deadly puffer fish?’

  ‘Let’s hope it’s not deadly,’ Thwing replied. ‘Remember, if you can’t feel your tongue, stop eating. Immediately. Mind you, it’s too late by then. Thousands have died in Japan, over the years. A famous Kabuki actor, even.’

  The waiter was hanging around by the bead curtain. He was like a bodyguard. It was as if they were scoring, or something. He looked anxious about it. The lounge music had stopped. Perhaps the bar had been emptied, for ceremonial reasons.

  Two little bowls held a lime and some soy sauce. The petals were beautiful. He’d so wanted to be a master Kabuki actor, at one time. He’d considered going to Tokyo, but as with so much else he’d been a coward. Now what was he? He didn’t know. He was bewildered. This was certainly better than Scots Road Secondary, that’s all he knew.

  He caught a petal in his chopsticks and put it in his mouth. It was good. It was very good.

  Thwing hadn’t yet touched his.

  ‘She was caught up in it,’ he said, suddenly. ‘She told me that before she threw it into the sea. She couldn’t understand why, it wasn’t like her not to keep an eye on Ed. My kid. She’s a worrier, you see. But you’d gripped her.’

  Jonathan’s lips were beginning to tingle. His tongue, too. It was the strangest feeling. In fact, it did remind him of his first-ever kiss. Sally McLeod. His heart started to beat solidly and rather fast. He’d thought the whole thing was one of those stupid style things, the latest rich-man’s fad, that nothing would happen. But something was happening. He wasn’t really able to concentrate on what Eddie Thwing was saying, that was the t
rouble.

  ‘Alright, is it?’

  Thwing’s eyes were red.

  ‘It’s weird,’ said Jonathan. ‘My lips, it’s like I’m – the Delphic oracle – or something. I feel I’m about to utter great truths.’

  ‘That’s just the poison. Don’t kid yourself. Eat up, go on.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s . . . ?’

  ‘He’s a master. He’s an itamae. That’s cost Jansen House nearly £200. I ordered it two days ago.’

  ‘I really appreciate it.’

  ‘Eat up, then. You can stroke the lime with it. Not the soy sauce. That’s sacrilege.’

  Jonathan put each petal into his mouth one by one, spiralling down to the centre. The taste was of far-off lemons and pale seas. There was something like singing coming from somewhere, very Japanese, very pleasant. The waiter crossed over to the swing door and opened it a little and peered in. The singing was live and in the kitchen, very jolly, perhaps an ancient love song. It didn’t seem to please the waiter.

  ‘That sounds like the chef singing,’ said Eddie Thwing. ‘That’s the sake. Poor old Kaze. He doesn’t usually drink sake. But I do so like to loosen them up, these perfect, anal Japs.’

  Jonathan smiled because it was a joke and his lips glittered with tiny stars, tiny terrible stars that had scattered through onto his tongue as if he’d dipped his tongue into fairy land. He was at the heart, now: that pale, shining little heap of skin at the heart. He took almost all of it onto his chopsticks, only the odd sliver sliding off.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Eddie Thwing, who was toying with his untouched peony of fugu.

  The singing was louder. The waiter coughed and looked even more anxious. He went into the kitchen, the door closing behind him, muting the song. It really was a very jolly song, the chef’s song – in Japanese. Then there was a bit of shouting and it stopped.

  Jonathan swallowed the pale slivers of puffer fish skin. As they slid down into him, he experienced a kind of rush to his heart which was extraordinary and wild, a little like the first time he had whirled successfully in that master class all those years ago. He wanted to tell Eddie Thwing about this connection, about whirling like a dervish, but his tongue wouldn’t move. It wouldn’t move at all. His lips were covered in ants. His tongue was a dead thing, nibbled by tiny fish.