by Nina George
* * *
—
That first summer gave way to a first autumn, winter, and spring; became a year, followed by a second; and then began the final summer.
Eddie never said, “Stay!” or “Don’t go!” and so I kept coming. I often spent the first days and nights at her place sleeping as if I were half-dead because the naps I grabbed in airport transit, lounges, trains, and long-distance buses were never sufficient, and in any case I never slept for very long or very deeply anywhere. I sometimes imagined how it might be to spend the rest of my life with Eddie. One thing was for sure: I would never sleep badly again. Was that love, or merely gratitude?
I had absolutely no trust in my capacity for love. My love was powerless and fainthearted.
Sometimes I’d be in London after an interview tour but wouldn’t tell Eddie. She didn’t deserve to be used as a pillow. During those nights I wouldn’t go home, as I used to, and I avoided the light and the echoing emptiness of my flat. Only when I could barely stand for fatigue, and the days and outlines of objects grew hazy, did I give in and go to her place. The key was always in the cavity.
* * *
—
The last day begins with faint sunshine. An October day.
I watch Eddie dip her forefinger into the pan of milk on the stove to test if it’s already hot enough for her coffee. She has been doing this for so long that it’s now completely automatic, and she would check the temperature even if the milk were already boiling.
She turns around, and I quickly close my eyes. I’ve no idea why I do this because I could spend hours ogling her bare legs below her shirt, her furrowed brow, and her mouth as she blows on the milk. We often watch each other across the room, holding a conversation with our eyes, but this time I hide the fact that I’ve been observing her.
I’m scared of her expression today and what it might signal. Today.
I sense her shadow as she comes over to the bed and the slight cooling effect as it falls on my face. I can feel myself sliding into trouble, as if the bed were a grassy slope. It’s one of those days when life could go either way. I feel like throwing back the covers and inviting her to lie down beside me with her back against my tummy so that she won’t look at me or speak.
Eddie does speak, though. “I love you,” she says. “I want you forever and beyond, in this life and every other.”
I open my eyes and answer, “I don’t want you.”
Eddie scowls at me as if I’ve just slapped her for no reason. That same moment I know that it’s a lie, but in my shame and confusion I stay stubbornly silent rather than immediately taking back what I’ve said. I should cry, I love you! I panicked. I’m sorry. There are reasons. They might not be real, but…
The opportunity is gone, and I see that the door Eddie has held open to me for three summers has now slammed shut, and the life I might have begun sweeps away from me like a tree trunk caught in the rapids.
“No,” I beg, meaning this sight of the future drifting away, but her voice quivers with controlled rage as she orders, “Out! Clear off! Get out!”
My voice fails me in the light of my knowledge that I’ve just broken Eddie’s heart. I can hear it screaming, even as she orders in a faint but controlled voice, “Out, Henri. Clear off!”
I get up and dress. She doesn’t watch. I can feel myself fading and diminishing because those eyes are no longer trained on me. But still I don’t manage to say anything or take the three steps toward the spot where I can hear her breathing. She is not weeping. Oh my God, what have I done? I pick up my bag and walk over to the door. What am I doing? I turn round and stare straight into her chill eyes, longing—no, pleading for her to say something. Something like, “Stay!” or “Don’t go!” or “You were lying just now, weren’t you?”
I was.
I can feel my growing pain and only now do I recognize the feeling behind it. So this is love?
I’m incapable of saying anything. My life silently shrinks, as if I’ve denied myself a lifetime of opportunities. Love, children, and nights when I might finally have slept. No more dread of death.
Seven days later I reach into the cavity for the key, and it’s gone.
Sam
“Oh man!” shouts Scott as we cross the bridge to Hammersmith station. He cannot hide his excitement that we’re actually on our way to Eddie’s publishing house, Realitycrash. He’s tried his best to act cool by twiddling an unlit cigarette in his fingers, wearing shades, dressing in a black roll-neck sweater and gray trousers, and turning up his jacket collar like one of those French existentialists you see in photos from the seventies.
“Oh man!” Scott exclaims again. “We’re totally unprepared for real life, mon ami. I mean, rent, insurance, death and that. We have no idea.” He is holding the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, sketching shapes in the air. “And instead they send us into exams about vector geometry and amino acids. You, my accidental rebel, are the only one they can’t force to go. Are you planning to take the tests sometime soon, or are you going to whistle while your immediate future disappears down the drain?”
I don’t answer. I haven’t missed all the entrance tests for St. Paul’s. Only the ones I don’t consider essential—although my mother would presumably have a different opinion. I couldn’t care less, though. I can’t stay at school while my father is fighting for his life and Maddie is perhaps only waiting for someone to discover what she likes.
“Wait a second,” I mumble. We stop on Hammersmith Bridge. I’m standing on the very spot where my father was rammed by a car. Not far away, a man in a threadbare tuxedo is sitting on a piece of cardboard and leaning back against the railings. He’s the beggar in the video.
There are thousands of places in the world like this strip of asphalt. Thousands of places where something ends—a life, a belief, a feeling—and none of them resembles a graveyard.
The man in the tuxedo is keeping a close eye on us.
Scott leans on the green cast-iron railings next to me. They’re warm with stored-up heat from the sun. My thoughts turn to Maddie, and the resulting sensation is exactly like this spot: full of warmth and fear.
I peer over the railing. It’s a hell of a long way down to the water.
Scott is still talking. “Everything they teach us is one huge distraction. Binomial formulae, the citric acid cycle, French grammar, perspective drawing, ovulation, triple jump, continental drift, haplotype analysis…all so that none of us gets it into his head to ask, ‘So what’s it like to die?’ ‘How do you find a flat?’ ‘How do you find the right woman?’ ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ or ‘Would you jump from here if it really mattered, and how do we know when it really matters?’ ” Scott removes his shades and looks at me earnestly. “You know, mon ami, they never mention the most important thing in life.”
“And what might that be?” I ask.
“How to be happy.”
I screw up my eyes against the sun and feel the railing against my back and simultaneous convulsions all over the world. I study the Thames, which doesn’t seem to be a mixture of the Atlantic and the North Sea, just as it isn’t clear what most things and most people consist of. Worry, nostalgia, grief, desire, childishness, or tenderness.
They don’t teach you that at school either. How’s it even possible that all these different worlds can exist simultaneously? School. The city. My father in a coma. This bridge, from which my father jumped to save a girl’s life. This street, where a car crashed into him. All over the world there are places where people’s lives are ripped apart.
“Are the very places to blame? Do they hurl you into a different dimension if you happen to walk past them? Or might it be that you read or think some words one day and all at once you’ve left your own life, as if you’d stepped off a bus at an unscheduled stop?”
“Wow,” says Scott. “I have abs
olutely no idea, but thanks all the same for answering. Maybe next time your answers will bear some relation to my questions and existential reflections.”
Both of us gaze down at the river in silence.
I have nothing of my father’s. No coffee cups, no watches, not even any memories. I don’t know what I should cling to.
It’s unfair to be thirteen. It’s unnecessary. It’s the moment when life reveals its fifth and sixth cardinal points—error and despair. How am I supposed to know what’s right and what’s important?
I’m no longer a boy, but I’m not yet a man. I’m in between. I don’t know what makes you wake up one morning, see some girls, and suddenly not find them quite so bad. Well, one particular girl anyway. I don’t know why I’ve begun to worry about my appearance and what I should do with my life. I’m quite sure that I’ll never be able to kiss another girl without thinking of Maddie. I press my lips together; I know it looks stupid, but it’s always been my way to stop myself from crying.
The torment, the joy, and the pounding heart. The happiness of thinking of a girl and missing her without really knowing her. The pain of not knowing if she even notices I’m there. The sweet tickle in my heart when I think of her. All of those things, simultaneously.
“No,” I say, finally responding to Scott’s remarks about how teachers, grown-ups, and the whole world keep quiet about the most important issue there is—how to be happy. “No, that’s not it. What they keep secret is how we notice we’re happy.”
Here and now I’m happy, and at the same time I’m not. Fear and warmth. Happiness and despair.
We came onto this bridge as inquirers, but we’re leaving it as something else, taking our first steps toward finding answers, knowing that we’ll no longer accept what other people say as we once did. We must now learn to recognize things on our own.
* * *
—
An hour later we reach the East End. Scott tries to pretend he’s not overawed by Realitycrash. Eddie was expecting us, but I can see how tense and tired she is. She leads us to the bookshelf containing all the books her company has ever published, and here Scott’s cool facade finally cracks.
“Ray Bradbury!” he lets slip, as jittery as a five-year-old in a sweet shop. “Isaac Asimov! Kurt Vonnegut!”
“Well, we did once have the paperback rights,” Poppy says behind us. Scott spins around, and I witness a strange scene. I can feel Scott’s heart initially swell, as if unfolding like a paper kite, and then crash to the floor. He changes—forever. He looks at Poppy and his world will never be the same again, and I see it all and yet I don’t know why or if it is of any use.
Andrea brings some mugs of steaming tea, a plate of scones, some cucumber canapés, and a bag of incredible-smelling Cornish pasties. But Scott can’t eat a bite of it. Who could when his whole inner life is being rearranged, brick by brick?
We learn about blurbs and cover designs. “We argue over the front and back covers for longer than we discuss the four hundred pages in between,” Poppy explains, and I catch Scott staring in rapture at her black-painted lips as she speaks. “Most people pick up a book because the cover or specific words on the back appeal to them.”
“Which ones?” Scott asks.
“Unfortunately, we have almost no idea, Master Scott,” Ralph says curtly. “The truth is that nobody knows why people buy the books they do.”
Poppy asks Scott what he’s reading at the moment, and naturally his answer—The King of Dreams by Robert Silverberg—makes an impression. When Poppy puts the same question to me, Scott answers for me, “He’s always carrying Jane Austen with him,” before pulling Pride and Prejudice from my bag.
“Hands off!” I hiss.
“Oh,” says Eddie. “A library edition. It’s lovely. May I?”
It’s hard to watch somebody else hold something that Madelyn has touched and that contains her experiences and thoughts and dreams. However, Eddie handles Madelyn’s book with great care, as if it were a small animal. She opens it and reads the slip stuck to the inside front cover, studying the various entries and the date and the name of the most recent borrower.
Quietly she says to me, “Madelyn Zeidler. The ice maiden.”
I stare at her quizzically. Why does she call Madelyn the ice maiden? It’s true, though: Madelyn is trapped behind a transparent wall of frozen memories and ice-encrusted hopes.
I hear that the others are still discussing cover designs and blurbs.
“The girl on the fifth floor,” Eddie says.
I nod. The pressure in my heart grows until I think it is going to turn inside out. I’d dearly love to tell Eddie everything, but when I try to put into words how thinking of Maddie makes me feel, nothing comes out. It’s a wound that consumes me, like laughter waiting to be heard. It is my rampant hope of being with her and the terrible fear of having to endure a lifetime without her.
“Excuse me, I need the toilet,” I mumble.
When I come back after what feels like five thousand years, Eddie’s standing in the kitchenette, still clasping the book.
“It’s Maddie’s birthday in three days,” I say. “And nobody knows what she likes. It’s important to know, just as important as with Dad.”
She waits, nods, and replies, “I know what he likes—and I hope he likes it so much it’ll bring him back.”
“Nobody knows Maddie, apart, maybe, from—”
“The librarian.”
I shrug my shoulders. It suddenly strikes me as a stupid idea.
“Maybe we should go to Oxford,” Eddie suggests, “and take the book back.”
“Yes, maybe. I could go in the holidays if—”
“No, Sam, I don’t mean in the holidays, I mean now. Let’s drive to Oxford now and visit Madelyn’s library. Let’s set off straightaway and find out what else she enjoyed reading.”
My mouth must be hanging open like a cow’s as I stare at her, but she’s being completely serious. I think of Maddie’s birthday in three days’ time and I realize that there’s practically nothing in her coma book and that my heart is still attempting to turn itself inside out and scream and sing its emotions when I think of her.
“Straightaway? Really?” I ask. Perhaps she’s only putting me on. Maybe this is all a cruel joke.
Eddie puts her hands on her hips. “Yeah, straightaway,” she replies. “Let’s do it. Let’s look for Maddie.”
As she says this, it’s as if a door has been opened in my life and the sunshine comes pouring in.
I call to Scott, “Eddie and I are off to Oxford. See you this evening, okay?”
Scott takes a peep at Poppy, shrugs, and remarks with all the self-assurance of an almost-fourteen-year-old, “Sure. I’m still needed here.”
Sunlight is flooding through every window in my day.
* * *
—
Twenty minutes later Eddie is getting in the lane to take the main road to Oxford. The weather’s living up to every cliché about England: it’s drizzling.
“Your father was never like a British shower,” Eddie remarks out of the blue. Her hands on the steering wheel are relaxed, but she has her eyes firmly trained on the road ahead. “If people were weather, your father would be an Atlantic storm.”
My tummy suddenly feels hot, and a deep, hungry hole forms in my chest. Carry on, I silently plead. Please tell me more about him.
The corners of her mouth twitch. “We didn’t talk very much when we first met, as if words would have spoiled everything. Words are the sandpaper that scratches away at a feeling until there’s nothing left. I first saw your father in one of the huge ruined buildings around here. They still hold tango nights there to this day, and back then I used to tango almost every night.” She smiles, and her face takes on a beautiful, unfettered glow. “When I saw him standing there, in the near-darkness, with all tha
t loneliness and longing in eyes that were concentrating so intensely on me, it seemed as if I could see everything he had ever been and everything he would become. And he was staring at me as if he’d glimpsed something that had shaken his life to the core—and that something was me.”
She shakes her head, seemingly incapable of comprehending this fact, and stares ahead at the street rather than at me, refusing to glance back so as not to burst her fragile bubble.
“I was agitated, as if it were a performance, and I felt sick, as if before a flight. Dizzy with my desire to be close to him and feel his eyes on me. I couldn’t have said anything even if I’d wanted to. I was paralyzed by joy and anxiety.”
She overtakes a shuttle bus from Heathrow to Oxford.
“Henri always sat in the same chair in my flat—an old Eames a publisher friend gave me as a housewarming present twenty years ago. From time to time, I stare at that chair and chat to your father as if he were still sitting on it. But it all happened a very long time ago, even though it feels like only yesterday.” Her eyes are glistening now, and it has nothing to do with the oncoming headlights.
“What happened?” I ask. There’s so much I want to know. Why didn’t they stay together? I don’t know my father and I don’t know Eddie either, but it sounds as if they are two nuances of the same word.
“He didn’t love me the way I loved him, that’s all.” A single tear trickles down her cheek. “It can happen, Sam. It unleashes a war in your heart. You’re fighting against yourself, and you always lose.” She glances across at me. “Sometimes it’s the other way around and the other person thinks of you more often than you think of him, or loves you more. Love’s such a stupid cow!”
I have to laugh.
“It’s true!” she adds, flicking the windscreen wipers onto full power.
We drive for a few miles in silence. I think of Maddie. If she were a form of weather, then she’d be a summer breeze. I also reflect that we may not come away with any discoveries. Perhaps we should try to meet Maddie’s friends or her teachers. But how are we supposed to find them? My thoughts drift to my father. Did he have any friends? Did they like him? Did he ever mention me to them?