by Nina George
“I’ll come back later to do the tactile test. How’s Maddie’s dancing today?” Marion asks, as if this question includes some kind of code word.
The physiotherapist is kneeling behind the girl. Almost imperceptibly she shakes her head. Maddie can’t see this, but I can. “No response,” Liz mouths.
I watch Maddie, who’s allowing her arms and legs to be yanked around like a puppet’s, but this time I detect no movement beneath her impassive expression. Her coma seems very different from my father’s, though. She keeps so still that it’s as if she doesn’t want to be found, but she’s not as distant and immersed as he is. She’s in there somewhere, hoping that nobody will come across her, like a little girl playing hide-and-seek.
I don’t need to ask how she is. She’s not well. Not well at all. Wherever she is, she’s completely alone. I peer into her eyes and strain even harder to feel something more or communicate that I know how she’s feeling. And yet I have my doubts. Maybe I’m just imagining all of this.
“May I come again tomorrow, Maddie?” I ask her after a while.
Since she doesn’t immediately say no, I interpret her silence as an “Oh, all right then.”
“I’m going to escort you back to the lift now, Sam,” says Marion in a calm, friendly voice, but beneath the sweetness I pick up a hum of irritation.
What have I done wrong? Have I done something wrong?
* * *
—
We’ve barely entered the nurse’s common room when Marion hisses, “If you think you’re going to pay the occasional visit to a girl in a coma for some kind of thrill, Samuel Valentiner, perhaps even take the odd covert snap to boast to your school friends until it eventually gets tedious and you don’t feel like coming, I’m warning you that we will never, I repeat, never, let you in here again. Do I make myself clear?”
Wordlessly I nod and feel my cheeks grow hot again.
“Good, I’m glad. It hasn’t been clear to the sightseers who’ve come up here in the past to ogle some vegetables. If it’s clear to you, then I won’t need to have a word with your dad about his son poking fun at helpless children, and—”
“You wouldn’t have far to go. My dad’s on the second floor.”
Marion exhales slowly and closes her eyes, as if she were pulling herself together. Her anger dissolves like a tablet in water. “I’m sorry, Samuel. I’m very sorry to hear that.” Her blue eyes are gentle now, but they are brimming with questions.
“We don’t give up easily here, Sam,” she says gravely.
“May I come again?” I ask, to preempt any further questions about my father, for that’d be like walking across a bed of nails. “I don’t mind asking Maddie’s parents for their permission.”
Marion rubs the root of her nose. “Oh, sweetie,” she eventually says, her voice despondent. “If only it were so easy.” She takes a deep breath. “Madelyn’s special.”
“I know,” I say.
“No, you don’t. You don’t have a clue, Jon Snow.” She smiles and flicks open the book she was writing in earlier. She hands me a newspaper cutting, then continues. “Madelyn Zeidler is eleven years old. For the past seven years she has been studying dance with the Elizabeth Parker Dance Company in Oxford. She’s won sixteen prizes and a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dance here in London. She’s performed in two music videos by the French singer Zaz, each of which has had more than a million views on YouTube. She can do flips and twists and hold her breath for two minutes underwater. But unfortunately…”
It’s this “unfortunately” that is described in the article. Seven months ago, the Zeidlers were traveling to Cornwall for a family holiday when one of their tires burst. Their motor home skidded onto the wrong side of the road, where it collided with a lorry transporting four show horses. Three horses, the driver, and almost everyone in the motor caravan died: Maddie’s mother, Pam; her father, Nick; her brother, Sebastian; her grandmother Catherine; Maddie’s aunt Sonia; and her uncle Nigel. Maddie and a mare called Dramatica were the only survivors.
MADDIE SOLE SURVIVOR AS FAMILY WIPED OUT, runs the headline.
“Madelyn is all alone in the world, Samuel. She has no close relatives, not even an uncle, a cousin, or some shrill spinster aunt who wears oversize earrings. She’s a ward of the state.”
So the Queen takes care of her, I think, because any other thought makes my head hurt.
“At first, Maddie’s old dance teacher, Elizabeth Parker, came from Oxford a few times and showed Liz and the other physiotherapists here how to keep Maddie’s body moving. She showed us and Maddie videos of Maddie dancing, and noted the things Maddie does and doesn’t like.” She holds up the book. “But then Mrs. Parker tripped over a loose paving slab and broke her hip, so nobody visits her any longer.”
“Definitely not the Queen,” I mumble.
Marion has a pained expression on her face. “It’s Madelyn’s birthday in twenty days’ time. She’ll be twelve. Her first birthday without a family, surrounded by strangers in a place that isn’t her home.” Her voice quavers with compassion, full of sunny gold—a rare color in today’s world. “You see, Sam? She has nobody. And if you make friends with her—”
“Then I’m responsible for her.”
Marion’s blue eyes shine. “Yes. That’s correct, Sam. Can you do it? Do you want to? Are you genuinely willing to be responsible for someone you don’t know?”
The same question God put to Eddie earlier. Only now do I understand how she must be feeling. The air feels heavier, and many things that once seemed important no longer have any significance.
* * *
—
Five minutes later I’m standing beside C7. I have no idea how or why I came to be here or what I expect from my father. I want to tell him about Maddie, Eddie, and the rest. Tell him I’d no idea I was like Jon Snow.
I hear Scott say, “He’s in a coma, Valentiner. Why can’t you get that into your thick skull?” But who else am I supposed to talk to? I can’t think of a single other person with whom I could discuss the fact that I don’t want to leave a girl I don’t know alone at the end of a corridor. Only him.
Or Eddie. She knows all about reality crashes. But if I told her about Maddie, then I’d have to tell her about my mother and everything else. So I’m here, having pulled on the rustling smock and put on the stupid mask through which I sound like Darth Vader with a bunged-up nose. I’m here because my father looked at me, and there was something in his eye that gripped me and wouldn’t let go.
Now my father’s face is a no-man’s-land. His wrinkles are silent. They’re no longer laughing, no longer suffering or thinking. His body too is more hunched than before, like an abandoned house.
I search for him. With Maddie just now, I detected a distant glimmer of loneliness and expectation. I think of God’s circles. My father is on the outer edge of life. I try to find him. “Hi, Dad,” I say quietly.
When someone’s ill, seriously ill, you tend to forget all his or her other characteristics. Timothy, a boy in our class, contracted a rare form of cancer and died a year later. All anyone who remembered him ever said was how brave he was, as if fighting cancer had been his full-time job. Nobody mentioned that Timothy had also been the best at cannonball dives into the pool and had once rescued a kitten from a tree. So I try to view my father as not only sick, as more than almost dead. He would know what I should do.
God comes up to the bed, breaking my concentration. “Samuel.”
The two of us gaze at my father, and I reach for my dad’s hand and squeeze it. He doesn’t squeeze back.
“He isn’t there,” I whisper.
“No. His soul’s left its home.” Dr. Saul’s voice sounds different, as if he himself has just woken up from a long slumber.
“Will it ever find its way home?”
“If we take good care of i
t, yes.”
I lean forward, gently kiss my father’s inert cheek through my face mask, and whisper in his ear so quietly that God can’t hear, “I’m going to take care of Maddie’s home and of yours too. And I’m going to find you.”
* * *
—
As I emerge from the Wellington into the outside world, which bears almost no relation to life inside the hospital, it takes me a few seconds to recognize the leather-clad figure leaning against a powerful motorbike and staring at me with some concern.
“Hi, Sam,” Eddie says. “Your mother isn’t really picking you up, is she? Because she didn’t give you permission to come here in the first place, right?”
“Y-yes she did,” I stammer.
She hands me a helmet that’s a little too big for me. “You’re as bad a liar as I am. Come on, let’s go.”
Eddie
The gray streets of London stream past like rivers of sun-baked asphalt beneath the wheels. I feel the thrum of the motorbike’s accelerating engine between my legs and in my stomach and biceps. I catch whiffs of typical city aromas as they fly by. London always seems to smell of food wherever you go—doughnuts, chips and fried rice, hot soup and crispy waffles. There’s no other city in the Western world where the fragrances of fresh cooking are so present.
I keep the 500cc BMW on a tighter rein than usual with the boy snuggling against my back. He’s precious cargo, the son of the man who was my sun and my moon. Who was with me as I breathed and slept, a fount of desire and tenderness. My greatest failure. My greatest love.
Sam shows natural balance in the saddle and no sign of fear. Making this boy’s acquaintance has filled me with an absurd surge of joy, despite the terrible circumstances that brought us together.
Coincidences, my father used to say, are surprising events whose meaning only becomes apparent in retrospect. They’re a chance to change your life, and you can either seize that opportunity or spurn it. My mother hated that attitude. Coincidences scared her, whereas for my father they were a source of happiness and curiosity.
* * *
—
While Sam was upstairs, I dropped in to see Henri. Fozzie Bear was reluctant to let me in. “Okay then, but only for a minute.”
How awfully quickly a minute passes! Henri seemed so drained. I told him what I’d wanted to tell him over two years ago but didn’t. Now, though, I whispered that old prayer to his silent body.
“Don’t go!”
We were always reaching for each other’s hand when walking, talking, or eating. When we read, each of us would hold a book and yet at the same time we would maintain contact through our fingertips. I can still feel his forefinger circling my fingertip, faster when his book got tense, and more slowly when he relaxed.
His hand caressed me. His hand, his eyes, his laughter, and his body—they all caressed me. When he told me he didn’t love me, it was as if he’d suddenly pulled out a gun as we held hands and shot me through the heart.
* * *
—
Sam and I reach the East End and we soon turn off into Columbia Road. He gazes around wide-eyed as I let him dismount in front of Café Campania, which is next door to the old tulip warehouse where my publishing offices and flat occupy the two upper attic floors above an advertising agency and a tailor’s shop.
His face is red and his eyes all shiny from the ride, and he seems younger than when we set out. When he stepped out of the Wellington in his blue suit, he resembled an earnest, pensive little old man who was nonetheless determined to endure the wicked tricks life plays and the even crueler wiles of death. Now, in his school uniform, with his rucksack on his back, he actually looks like a teenager again.
“Have you ever been to the East End before?”
He shakes his head and drinks in every detail of his new surroundings. On weekends Columbia Road metamorphoses into London’s flower market. It’s one of the few remaining roads in the city that hasn’t yet degenerated into a typical pedestrian zone populated exclusively by Zara, Urban Outfitters, Primark, and their ilk. There are over eighty small proprietor-run shops here, each boasting a different-colored front or awning. It looks like the world’s longest street café on a sunny day. I sometimes forget that the experience is drabber and less kaleidoscopic in other London streets.
Sam, whose Colet Court uniform marks him out as a member of the status-driven middle class, takes his first tentative steps in this world, like a hypersensitive cat pricking up its ears and testing the air with its whiskers.
I tuck my helmet under my arm and go into Café Campania to order two cups of freshly brewed oolong tea and a plate of scones. My editorial team at Realitycrash Publishing comes here every day for coffee, as I’ve set up a beverages tab to compensate somewhat for their paltry salaries.
I’ve held dozens of meetings with authors around Campania’s cast-off classroom and kitchen tables, which Benito and Emma have lovingly collected, refurbished, and decorated with pots of herbs. Those writers described their imaginary worlds to me, each hoping I would publish their manuscript and turn them into an author so that they might devote their lives to storytelling.
How I would have loved to sign them all, because every one of the writers I invited to a meeting after reading through their manuscript had a talent for conveying a message beyond words. That’s the magic of literature. We read a story, and something happens. We don’t know what or why, nor which sentence was responsible, but the world has changed and will never be the same again. Sometimes it takes us several years to realize that a book tore a hole in reality through which we could escape from the pettiness and despondency of our surroundings.
Emma prepares a small tray, and when Sam timidly approaches, his eyes glued as always to the floor, she shakes his hand and says, “Hi, I’m Emma. And who are you, handsome companion of my favorite publisher?”
He blushes and mumbles his name. He’s standing a few feet from the table with an old globe on it where Henri and I would sit when he returned from his encounters with the world’s most amazing people and I didn’t have enough in my flat to make breakfast. His flights often landed very early in the morning, so he would slip the key from its hiding place in the courtyard wall and let himself into my loft while I was sleeping. When I opened my eyes, he’d be sitting on my bed with his back to the wall, watching me. How many lonely evenings did I spend hoping that he’d be there when I woke up the next morning?
“Sam?”
He turns to me, and for a split second I glimpse the young Henri in the schoolboy’s features. My longing for Henri, his warm body, his skin, his scent, and his voice, is tearing my heart apart.
We sit down on opposite sides of the table. I spin the paper globe, whose continents have been re-created from old sepia maps. I stop it with my finger on South Sudan and tap a tiny blue ink mark.
“Your father was here,” I say quietly. I spin the ball again. “And here,” I say, pointing to the Canadian Rockies, and then repeat the process several times, pointing to Kabul, Colombia, Tierra del Fuego, Moscow, Damascus, Tibet, and Mongolia. Henri would draw dots on this globe with a pen to show me where he’d been.
Sam runs his finger over the surface. “I’ve got all his reports and portraits at home,” he whispers. His eyes are very bright and piercing. “He learned to ride in Mongolia. In Canada he met the professor who walked out on his family one day and went to live in the wilderness. And in Damascus he tracked down a former tutor of Arab princes and princesses.” He touches the various spots again before asking, “What is he like?”
He says “is,” not “was.”
I study the pen marks and recall every single time Henri made a new one. He never made a fuss, never made a show to emphasize “Look at all the places I’ve been.” He did it seriously and meticulously, as if this small globe were the only record of his search. Only now does it strike me that that’s
what it was—a search. Henri was scouring the earth for himself.
“He was…,” I begin, then swallow to relax my constricted throat and correct myself. “He’s the best listener I’ve ever met. When your father listens to someone, it feels as if the speaker is the most important person in the whole world. He can get anyone to talk. It’s as if you perceive who you are better in his presence, and by simply being there he encourages you to express things of vital importance to you, which you’ve never voiced for fear of being laughed at. Or because you weren’t aware of them. Henri inspires people to reveal their true selves.”
Memories cascade over me, for instance the lilt in Henri’s voice on the odd occasion he forgot to mask the fact that he’s a Frenchman who changed his name from Le Goff to Skinner.
“Your father’s from Brittany. Actually, he ran away from Brittany, leaving everything behind: his mother tongue, his dead father, his dead grandfather, and the graves of his mother and grandmother. I didn’t realize how lonely a person can be until I met Henri. Having no one who knew you before you knew yourself, no one to love you just for being you. Having only yourself to fall back on cuts you off from the world.”
Henri spoke perfect English, but he never talked about himself, let alone his emotions. Who knows, perhaps we are incapable of expressing who we really are in a foreign language.
I recall our last conversation. It was here, and Henri had followed a cup of tea with several shots of whiskey. There were dark circles around his eyes. He was a driven man who was both running away from himself and searching for his true identity. He’d never be fast enough to throw himself off his trail. I’ve noticed that genuinely special people never recognize that they’re special.
“I’m writing about drug barons in Myanmar, who categorize the world into the poor, the rich, and addicts. I’m going to meet a woman who lends her uterus to other couples and divides the world into guilty and not guilty. The couple bear no guilt for their childlessness, but this allows her to make up for the guilt she believes she bears from a previous life. I’ve spoken to an eleven-year-old prodigy called Jack who’s already a better musician than Coltrane or Cincotti. Jack says that when you love something you must practice, and when you’re good at something you must practice even harder. What else are our long lives for? Those are the little fellow’s precise words. Just goes to show that he’s smarter than any of us.”