Between Each Breath

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘Anyway, I’m a receptionist,’ she said, and he was conscious of having upstaged her with his twaddle about bracken, his early ambition, his precociousness.

  ‘I’m glad you’re not a cleaner.’

  ‘Except I’m sick of guys coming to the desk and trying to pick me up.’

  Jack nodded, ears reddening.

  ‘You know,’ she went on, ‘as a cleaner you have to check the tissue level with your finger?’

  ‘The tissue level?’ he snorted.

  ‘Well, why not? If they’re too low in the box you throw it out and put a new one. If a guest finds no tissues in the box, it’s the worst thing, apparently. For the guest and for you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Worse than a mark in the toilet. You get fired. I looked in the garbage bags in the corridor and what did I see? That most of the boxes we dumped had half their tissues still in. A big waste, huh? I thought of the answer. Can you think what?’

  He couldn’t quite work out whether this was serious or not. Maybe it was some elaborate metaphor. He savoured the movement of her mouth as she talked.

  ‘Nope, sorry.’

  ‘And you think you’re a genius?’

  ‘I wish I did.’

  ‘OK. You have a red line to say it’s running out, like on the ticket roll for the cash machines in stores. This line could be printed on the last fifteen or let’s say twenty tissues inside the box. Then we don’t need to use the finger test and there’s no waste. It’s a great idea, huh? That’s how I’m going to be rich.’

  He nodded, feeling vague and solitary.

  ‘Pretty good idea, Kaja. Listen, until that happens I’d like to get you out of your crap place. I mean, support you, obviously. Even if we don’t do a DNA test.’

  ‘A DNA test?’

  He waved his hand about, dismissively. ‘Just a formality. Check I am the father. A legal thing. I mean, I trust you, personally speaking, but I think there’s this kind of formal process …’ He scratched his hair, uncomfortable.

  She looked at him and said: ‘You haven’t understood me. He’s yours. Your son.’

  ‘I know, but –’

  ‘Fuck your formal test.’

  He was shocked, and his face burned. He stared out at the lake, where something – maybe a large fish – had seemed to leap out of the water and back again. He didn’t want to look at her as she berated him, rocking the bench.

  ‘Do you think I’m also a liar? I didn’t have any man after you, not for two years. You know what it’s like, with a baby? Full time? You don’t say anything? How can you do this? I’ve not one moment stopped loving you. I listen to your music and I look at your pictures on the Net and I love you even more. I’ve had your baby. He needs his daddy, doesn’t he, now? You know?’ His head was bowed. He gave it a tiny little nod, as if the cogs in his neck had seized up. ‘I was so nervous of meeting you and now I’m screwing it. But Jaan needs his daddy. Huh? What do you think of this?’ she insisted, loud enough and intensely enough that a passing elderly couple looked over at them, faintly amused by this picturesque tiff in the park.

  His head stayed bowed. The ground was intricately detailed between his feet: innocent little stones, dust and earth, a crushed bottletop, the torn Snickers wrapper like a broken flower.

  ‘How’s the fox?’ he asked, very quietly, at the ground. ‘That fox in the cage? Without your father?’

  ‘The fox?’ She gave a short, harsh laugh. ‘Oh, still there. My mom feeds him. She calls it Mik-mik. So it’s got a name, now.’

  ‘Well, you should have called it Jack,’ he said.

  He spent a lot of the next few days shuttling between Hampstead and Hayes, accompanying his father to Hillingdon Hospital. They’d catch the bus opposite the Travel Inn, a few minutes’ walk from home.

  Jack was amazed at how Hayes, like so many other places, kept on declining despite being surrounded by wealth, by a trillion-pound consumer boom, by an England soggy with credit. The familiar Waitrose had gone, replaced by a huge Lidl the colour of waste water. Dunstan’s the greengrocer’s and Dagley’s for hardware and Hepworth’s the tailor’s and the corner shop where they’d slice your butter off the main chunk and slap it into shape with wooden palettes: they’d all long gone, of course, but now it was mostly naff boutiques, fluo-bedecked cost-cutters and grimy games arcades – if there was anything at all. The Uxbridge Road walloped through with even more merciless-ness, not much better than the North Circular. The tatty pub he would go to as an underage schoolboy was now a dolled-up chain bar with a permanent gaggle of what looked like junkies outside, dressed in burberries and bright white trainers, leaning on the Happy Hour board. Unfortunately, Jack and his father had to pass it on the way to the bus stop. They kept to the far side of the street but were ritually jeered, C-words and F-words falling like hail.

  ‘Used to it from the army,’ was all his father said.

  ‘I’d like to, but I don’t think I’d better risk saying anything back.’

  ‘That’s just what the yobbos want, John. They’d break your fingers if you were lucky. We ought to bring back national service. Get them digging holes to sleep in under driving rain in November.’

  Looking at him sideways, Jack saw a great anger well hidden, the vein at the temple thick below the cap.

  ‘Maybe it was always like that,’ he ventured. ‘We’ve just forgotten.’

  ‘Rubbish. This lot are subhuman. And most of them aren’t even coloureds.’

  His mother was out of immediate danger but, rather worryingly, had moved up to the penultimate floor, the sixth, which was Geriatric. Above Geriatric, like the afterlife right at the top, was Children. Above Children was the sky. She was thinner but perky. His father was exhausted. Nobody seemed to remember she was blind. It was never the same nurses and their grasp of English was imperfect. The sister put a big sign saying BLIND PATIENT on the bed-end but it made no difference: a nurse would hold out a glass of water for her to take, or nod instead of acknowledging her request in words.

  ‘It’s cultural,’ his father said. ‘They’re not taught their Ps and Qs wherever they come from.’

  ‘One or two are nice,’ said his mother, leaning back and sighing against her pillows.

  The wounds where the screws fixed the skull brace to her bone were infected. There were concerns about MRSA, but no action was being taken apart from the odd wipe with disinfectant. The place struck Jack as a kind of huge monument to illusion, especially up here in Geriatric. If you went beyond the surface, you hit an existential despair as hard as concrete. And there was no pause: death would wait for no man. He kept thinking, however, of that little Chinese chap with the plastic bag, standing in the way of a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square.

  Jack began to smell of the hospital, even after he’d showered and changed his clothes. It had seeped beneath his skin. Even Milly detected it. The journey was a pain and he couldn’t concentrate enough to read on the train. All he could think of was Kaja and Jaan. Especially Jaan. He was juggling with eggs, and they weren’t either wooden or hard-boiled. He’d tried to phone since their meeting in Regent’s Park, but Kaja had not been friendly. Uncompromising, she was.

  The lakeside meeting had ended unsatisfactorily, to say the least:

  ‘So? What d’you think?’

  ‘I don’t know, Kaja. I’ve got my life here. My wife’s, um, expecting a baby,’ he added, convincing himself it was half true.

  They had made love again yesterday. Milly hadn’t had PMT, after all. She’d drunk a lot of wine and relaxed and they’d done it on the sofa, in front of Newsnight and its report on Afghanistan.

  ‘So?’

  The ducks were suddenly raucous, hysterical, like an introductory drum roll.

  ‘So. I’m keen not to … We can agree on some sort of…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘As I said,’ Jack pressed on, conscious that he had to get down to the real McCoy or go on slipping about; ‘well, I’d really like to support Jaa
n. Financially. I’ll work it out.’

  Kaja stared at the ducks on the lake. A little boy was trying to shoo them away with angry jerks of his arm. No, he was feeding them. The bread peppered the surface and the ducks pivoted about. The boy’s throw was wild and some of the bread went behind his head. His mother came up, holding his arm and spoiling it. Kaja was watching them, her mouth puckered at the corner. Now it didn’t look like a smile, it looked like annoyance.

  ‘Getting you out of that crap flat and into something decent, for a start,’ Jack repeated. A woman in a jacket like Milly’s appeared, setting his pulse rate into woodpecker mode. Milly might happen to be in Regent’s Park. She might have cancelled her Devon trip and be heading down this path right now. Easily. Or someone he knew. Andrew Beak. Abigail Staunton. Or one of Milly’s friends. Olive Nicholson.

  ‘Money,’ Kaja said, nodding.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Not too painful.’

  ‘Don’t follow.’

  ‘You’ll catch up with it.’

  Jack didn’t mean to shrug, but he did. Kaja was foreign, he thought. Locked away on a Soviet island for most of her life. Her English irritated him; it wasn’t as good as she thought it was. On the other hand, sometimes his own voice sounded awful to him. Flat and uninteresting. Too comfortable with its Englishness. Middlesex nasal. He wished he had a foreign accent.

  ‘What I want,’ Kaja said, carefully, ‘is my son to have his father.’

  ‘That’s what he will have. I promise. I can see him. We’ll be all Canadian and decent about this.’

  She looked straight into his eyes. He was saying stupid things, or sensible things badly.

  ‘And me?’

  ‘Yup,’ he said, looking away; ‘I can see you too. To talk.’

  Bevvy! someone shouted, like an alarm call.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Just stay friends. Just friends.’ He felt he was sounding like a teenager on another bench in another park. He was forty-three. He fixed his jaw and tried to feel forty-three.

  Bev-vay! Echoing over the water. Self-conscious.

  She nodded. ‘That’s nice for you,’ she said. ‘Everything’s real nice for you. You know he’s being teased at school? His foot? And for his English? The other kids teasing him? He’s unhappy. And me? Why am I here? Because of Jaan. Because of you.’

  Jack spread his hands modestly, his eyes glancing off hers as she stared. He wondered why he wrote music. He wondered why he lived at all. The little boy was now screaming and being dragged off by his mother on tiny rotating legs, the ducks keeping their distance.

  ‘The thing is, if my wife finds out about Jaan …’ He gave a demonstrative sigh, rubbing his forehead with his fingers. It’ll be worse for everyone, he wanted to say. But his voice wouldn’t come. For the first time he regretted entering the Café Magnolia six years ago. Magnolia? That wasn’t the name. Christ, he’d forgotten the name! Marjoram? Margarine! Majestic! He wanted to laugh. He was going mad. Who had led who on? There’s the ecstatic, and there’s just getting on with life. You can’t build a life on the expectation of the ecstatic.

  ‘That’s real nice for you,’ she said, as if she hadn’t heard him.

  She then got up impatiently, shaking the loose bench so that Jack thought it was tipping over backwards for a second and took evasive action and felt idiotic, thrusting half out and flinging his hands forward.

  She threw her cigarette stub on the ground. He could see she was crying. She stared at the stub smoking on the path with red, glistening eyes, hands thrust in her back pockets. Her back was so straight, a real prize gymnast’s back and shoulders. A passing trio of goofy, round-shouldered delinquents whistled at her. She didn’t even flinch. Jack avoided meeting their gaze as they looked back, whooping, from under the back strap of their caps. A boy passed the other way, his iPod turned up so loud it was audible, like a distant aviary of parrots. Magyar. Mohammed. Café Mandible.

  ‘What did you want, then?’ he asked, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. ‘Hoping for? In the way of… more?’

  What she’d then answered kept echoing in his head for days, especially in the hospital, sitting next to his mother:

  ‘To take the nails out of my hands and feet.’

  Milly was seeing a lot of Claudia Grove-Carey. Roger, having written off her car and given himself a knock on the head, complained of dizzy spells. This meant Claudia did everything while Roger stayed most of the day in a deckchair in the garden. By the end of the week in which Jack had met Kaja in the park, Roger was under observation – Claudia had said ‘under surveillance’ by mistake – in the Royal Free. Deprived of alcohol, he was giving the nurses a hard time. Work was not so frantic, it seemed, that Milly couldn’t take the odd afternoon off and look after the baby while Claudia ‘got out’.

  Milly would come back home and burst into tears. She reckoned there was nothing lovelier in life than looking after a baby, than holding it, than kissing its head through the soft hair. She had everything, she said, and she had nothing. Jack tried to console her, but very little remained in his batteries after the hospital visits.

  He thought about what they had done in the kitchen a few days back and felt bad that he’d slipped up. Maybe their kid had ended up drying in Milly’s hand. Charitably, she had said it was her fault, and drunk too much over the fish pie. The petits pois had been as soft as school peas.

  The first proper meeting between himself and Jaan was to take place on Monday, so Jack would have found the weekend a strain anyway. And it was spent either entertaining (‘killing off’, as Milly put it) those they owed meals to, or accumulating further debt. Milly felt exhausted so the killing off was done in restaurants, as was currently acceptable among their set, while the debt was incurred yet again at the indefatigable Nicholsons’ after shuffling in the crush at the Matisse exhibition, where the smell of ageing bodies and stale perfume reminded Jack of the hospital.

  The whole process seemed to consume the entire two days, leaving nothing to themselves. Exotic holidays in places only aid workers or film crews would ever visit a few years back were still being unrolled in tedious detail. The Hewlett-Arkwells had spent a fortnight in August walking in Nepal with their three young kids, casually referring to it as if they’d been on a weekend excursion to the Lakes. Jack felt dull and inadequate. Very small potatoes, as his mother would have put it. An older couple at the Nicholsons’ had an antique wooden yacht and had just sailed to the Canaries and back. They were a coppery red all over, slicked with self-esteem.

  ‘The trouble is,’ the wife drawled, ‘everyone these days is so obsessed with money, money, money. There’s so much more to life than money. Well-being, for instance.’

  And everyone had agreed, although Jack had said (keeping up his reputation with the Nicholsons): ‘Did your boat come free, then?’

  Which Milly thought was rude, informing him later that the couple had lost their only daughter through drugs.

  Milly, of course, was against flying and tourism or even using the car for anything but essentials. But it wasn’t just that: it was also lethargy. Jack couldn’t be bothered. It was the whole organisational thing. Tickets, advance booking, the lot. The only area he vaguely hankered after was the islands of the White Sea, for reasons he’d long forgotten; maybe a book about Russia from childhood. Haaremaa had got close.

  To cap it, they went to a concert at the Wigmore Hall on Sunday evening – only because Jack had faithfully promised Barnaby he’d go. Barnaby was an old friend from College days who played harpsichord and was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Milly fell asleep. The performance was dry and below par – almost at typewriter level. Afterwards, Jack gave Barnaby a hug and said it was fantastic.

  He was very nervous about the meeting with Jaan, in case it proved a let-down for both parties. Unexpectedly, this proved to be the case.

  Kaja had suggested Kensington Gardens, by the Peter Pan statue, straight after the viola lesson. Jack had bought a bi
g red plastic football which turned out to be irritatingly light: it was a blustery autumnal day and the ball kept curving up and away. Jaan’s club foot meant he found the game frustrating instead of pleasurable. Kaja watched from the trees for a while then slipped away.

  He’d forgotten to ask whether she’d told Jaan that Jack was his father, so he didn’t quite know how to play it. In a film, he’d have given him a hug, but he didn’t dare do that until he knew whether Jaan knew.

  Watching Jaan struggle to kick the ball, he decided to change the game. He came up closer.

  ‘Let’s play catch!’

  Jaan was hopeless at catching, too. He didn’t seem to be enjoying himself. He looked round for his mother. Jack walked over to the ball and tapped it from palm to palm, fist to fist, but the ball seemed to have a life of its own in the gusts. The boy smiled briefly and then stopped himself. Jack began to scratch at the fluo-green price tag, without much success. It was too hot and the stickiness stayed. The child squinted up at him.

  ‘Do you know cricket?’ Jack said.

  Jaan shrugged. ‘Kaja? My mum?’

  He’d already got a trace of Enfield. ‘She’s gone for a little walk.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s sunny.’

  He tried to catch Jaan’s eye but the boy was deep in thought. He evidently didn’t like looking people in the eye, or being looked at. It was a kind of extreme shyness. He was a sad little boy, in many ways. But then a smile would break across his face and the sadness seemed like something else: a deep interiority perhaps. Maybe he was a prodigy. Maybe he’d taken after his father. Jack had never been able to kick balls or catch them properly, either.

  There was a boisterous group of French schoolkids around Peter Pan, otherwise he’d have shown Jaan the statue close up. Instead, they watched the model boats on the Round Pond. Jaan wouldn’t take Jack’s hand, but just stood in a very absorbed way, standing in his jeans and bright red sweatshirt near the water, following a raucous little speedboat as it circled manically at the behest of a round-shouldered man in khaki fatigues.