‘Beautiful! Every time I see you, you look even more like an angel.’
‘Ha! Like a really chubby cherub, you mean.’
Auntie Ada vigorously shook her hands in my father’s direction, as if to erase his sniggering stupidity. She and Mia-Mia were the only two people in the world I could think of who had ever said nice things about how I looked, things that I myself had never noticed. Even tonight, when Karl had appeared to harbour amorous intentions, he hadn’t made the slightest attempt to seduce me with words, as if I ought to have known to make do with his bare proposition. Although, consciously at least, I had never before thought about my friend in that way, I could have given a detailed physical description of him with my eyes closed. If anyone had asked him, would he have been able to say what shade of brown my hair was; or what length; or how strikingly my pale purple lips came to life when I smiled; or how delicately curved were my lashes and what colour were my eyes? His were an extraordinary blue that gleamed with iridescence…
‘Don’t you pay any attention to his nonsense. You’re a healthy young girl, as pretty as the prettiest English rose. And you have your mother’s magnificent eyes, may God rest her beautiful soul.’
Auntie Ada never missed an opportunity of pinpointing anything in which I differed favourably from my father. After clamping my chin between fingers made crooked prematurely by arthritis, and tearful with a joining together of sadness and joy, she stared into my eyes open-mouthed, as though filling her lungs with a gust of reinvigorating mountain air.
‘George’s are like painted jellied eels,’ she snorted, bringing herself back to the world with a roaring guffaw not unlike that of her brother’s. And with her mouth still twisting mischievously, ‘Shifty, squinty, tiny and liquid,’ she spat, pointing with a twitch of her nose at my father. Then tightening her grip of my cheeks, she turned back to face me, widening her lips into a smile as though to mark out the breadth of her love for me. ‘Whereas yours, well! They take one’s breath away with their brightness. Like giant wells of goodness they are, emerald jewels that sparkle like Val’s.’
‘Wells are full of water,’ my father puffed while shifting in his chair, still behind The Weekly Magic News. ‘And giant wells are even more liquid than eels.’
‘It’s true, auntie Ada.’ After using it to rub an eye with, I held out the hook of my left index finger.
Auntie Ada let go of my face to slap with both hands the contrary evidence out of the way. ‘Your eyes are pellucid,’ she said. And then hissing at the back page of The Weekly Magic News, ‘Whereas his are more like the miasma of a swamp.’
Craning over his paper, my father goggled to the best of his ability at his sister. ‘These, I’ll have you know, are the eyes Val fell in love with, and she never once complained about either their size or their affliction.’
‘That woman was a saint.’
‘And it’s an allergy. I would hardly call an allergy a miasma.’
‘I was not referring to your allergy.’
‘Come on now, the girl,’ said my father as he slowly bent his head in my direction. ‘I thought we’d agreed that we’d keep all our differences private, and you know it’s what Val would’ve wanted.’
‘Val was too good for you. You didn’t deserve her, what she saw in you I’ll never understand. I mean look at you, George. You’re fat, you’re short, you’ve got hardly any eyes in a face that’s full of ears, nose and mouth, and as if it isn’t bad enough that you’re as bald as a coot, you will insist on wearing that ridiculous toupee.’
‘I’m muscular, not fat - as I’m sure my Mia-Mia would be happy to confirm. And I could easily be tempted to remind you, Ada, my love, that all my friends at school without exception thought that you were actually… But no, I’ve no wish to be mean.’
‘Thought that I was what, beaten up by hardship and looking twice my age? Well, they wouldn’t have been wrong. We’ve been as short and as fat and as ugly as each other ever since we were kids, we’ve neither of us been blessed in the way God decided to put us together. But you’ve been blessed in a way that I haven’t and you certainly didn’t deserve, first with Val and now with your daughter. Forty-five and on a good day I might look like I’m sixty, what gift have I had to keep me looking young? I should be glad of my arthritis, I suppose! God forbid I should be accused of being ungrateful…’
‘Look, Ada, let’s not be raking up the past and blaming God for whatnot. You’re my sister and I love you, and as I’ve tried to tell you already I’ve no wish to be mean, because I know that you’re just angry that we’ve lost her.’ And with that, my father tried to hide himself again behind the crumple of The Weekly Magic News.
‘Lost her, you say!’ Auntie Ada gave out a wounded growl, her stridency fired up under memory’s strain. ‘Ten years, George, ten years almost to the day since you killed her, that’s how long it’s been, and you still haven’t looked your own child in the eye to beg her forgiveness, and not just for that, with her mother still barely in the grave, you very nearly murdered your daughter as well!’
‘Ada, that’s enough!’ The Weekly Magic News was on the floor. Half-risen from his chair, my father loomed as though frozen in mid-motion, his legs still bent and his arms hanging loose like an ape’s.
As she made a leap towards him, auntie Ada burst with violent sobs into tears, and somewhere near the middle of the distance between them she stopped, her thick frame trembling opposite my father’s bending bulk. Then as she turned around slowly to make her way upstairs to the bathroom, where she would lock herself up for at least half an hour, slumping back into his chair my father disappeared behind The Weekly Magic News.
I remembered every one of a thousand variations of that scene like a dream: my father scowling in his chair, auntie Ada sniping angry words at him, then stomping towards him as though ready to strike him, gaining ground and then retreating. Shrinking into a corner I would watch them without ever taking part, supposing in my bookish understanding of the world that this must be what people meant by grief.
3
Otto Dix
Just a handful of zigzags away, Karl’s house in Cross Street belonged to a different world. Over an expanse of beam upon beam of solid oak, the piano room was also the living room, and the dining room, and the kitchen, full of shiny bright orange Formica. The piano was old, but had once belonged to someone very famous. The rest of the furniture was Scandinavian, wooden and modern. Sliding glass doors opened out to a miniature patio so immaculately uncluttered and tidy that it looked like it belonged to a minimalist doll’s house. I had never seen the rooms upstairs, but if the bare-walled downstairs was anything to go by, I imagined order and brightness and space and sharp angles. Karl lived comfortably in the sparseness of this spotlessness alone with his mother, a robust, sharp-mannered Bavarian brunette who spoke impeccable English with the faint trace of an accent I had the impression she hated. Every time she spoke, her struggle to suppress it took a visible toll on her face.
Unlike me, who in my family history found only consternation, Karl seemed to revel in his, and in his deadpan manner made a habit of relating it to me anecdotally, not in any logical order and certainly not chronologically. Frau Angela, as he liked to refer to his mother if he didn’t feel like using the affectionate “Mami”, was a Schmidt who had married a philandering Smith (the son of a Smith who had married a Greek) and then, when it dawned on her what he was up to, divorced him and proudly reverted to Schmidt, whereupon Karl’s father, a gifted neurosurgeon, had “thrown a black stone behind him” (as his Greek half might have said), and emigrated to Australia with Sigrid, a chirpy blonde nurse from Stockholm in Sweden. Frau Angela (who was now Dr Schmidt) had then insisted on a hyphenated surname for their son, and Karl duly became a Schmidt-Smith, a tongue twister of a mouthful that the cruelty of children had in no time contracted to “Shitsmith”.
“The cruelty of children” had been Karl’s own expression, and in one way it was typical of his attempts to set himsel
f apart from his stories. I had witnessed the juvenile cruelty of calling him “Shitsmith” first hand, and Karl’s complete indifference to it had been so natural it couldn’t have been faked. But on many other occasions, the remoteness of his stories felt more like a deliberate smokescreen.
Striking parallels ran through our lives. We had both lost a parent at around the same age, and we both blamed our fathers. In Karl’s case, the parent he blamed was also the one he had lost. But the biggest difference was that most of the time I felt an uncontrollable need to vent my emotions. Karl seemed to want to keep his under wraps.
‘What are these black stones that the Greeks throw behind them?’ I wasn’t trying to bait him. I was genuinely curious.
‘It’s just an old saying.’ The gesturing had stopped, abruptly the gaze became sharp and the hint of a smile disappeared. The iron mask hadn’t quite dropped, but it was clear Karl disliked being interrupted. I suspected he had carved up his life into blocks of entertainment to make it less painful, and losing their flow made his stories come apart, exposing the parts that he tried to keep hidden.
‘I know it’s just a saying, Karl, but what does it mean?’
‘It means cutting off from the past.’
‘And is that what your father said he was doing?’
He glowered at me only very briefly. ‘I think he did Mami a favour,’ he shrugged, his face smoothing out as he wrested back control of his story. ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at her, but she’s actually quite brilliant.’ The hands were in the air, and as the gaze became warm there was again the same hint of a smile. ‘And it’s not just by coincidence she’s here. My grandfather had planned for his daughter to leave Germany long before it actually happened – he must have predicted not only the war but also the German defeat. Did you know his name was Karl?’
Of course I knew; in his animated, tongue-in-cheek way, he had told me the story many times before. Some years before the war had started, with Germany already in the stranglehold of Hitler and the Nazis, grandfather Schmidt, a wealthy Munich dealer who specialised in “decadent” art, had had the foresight to cut out of its frame a canvas by Otto Dix and have it sewn by his wife into the lining of her coat, together with its provenance papers. He had then very wisely handed over the remainder of his stock to the Gestapo. During the war he fought valiantly to stay alive, and succeeded, eventually surrendering himself to the British. A year after Germany’s defeat, awkward in a coat that was too big, his daughter disembarked at Dover in the company of her young fiancé, lieutenant Euripides Smith.
Otto Dix bought Angela and Euripides the opportunity of a good education. When Karl was born in 1952, Euripides was at the tail end of his medical training, and Angela had been awarded a First Class Psychology degree, and then in just two years had successfully completed her doctorate on Wilhelm Reich. She wrote prolifically, contributing to many publications. Turning the predominant orthodoxy on its head, The Interpretation of a Nightmare, her voluminous paper on Freud, had ruffled many feathers and generally caused quite a stir.
‘When they met in Munich, she fell for my father head over heels, and the bastard pretended to reciprocate, while behind Mami’s back he carried on screwing every Ulrika, Astrid and Frieda. I think grandfather Karl would’ve probably preferred an American bridegroom, but beggars can’t be choosers, apparently not even when they’ve got an Otto Dix up their sleeve, so in the end he made do with my dad.’
‘Just as well or you wouldn’t be here.’
‘Which he wouldn’t have done if he’d known what my dad was getting up to,’ Karl went on, and before I could speak, ‘yes, yes, just as well he didn’t or I wouldn’t be here.’
‘Does he write?’
‘He died a few months later. His wife had been killed in an air raid, and after bartering a painting for a new life for his daughter, which I’m sure is what he did, he must’ve felt that he had nothing more to live for.’
‘I meant your father.’
‘I was six when he moved out, just seven when he moved to Australia, but unfortunately I remember him clearly. He even introduced me to Sigrid, who’s at least a foot taller than him, and kind of bent to one side. Dad looks like a pillar-box, and she’s the leaning tower of Pisa.’
‘Swedish women are often very tall,’ I blurted out dumbly.
‘My father’s never written, but she has. Every year she sends a postcard on my birthday inviting me to visit them in Sydney. And every year she adds a postscript, to say my father sends his love. Mami says he’s too ashamed to write to me directly. Personally I say he’s an arsehole.’
‘So you haven’t written back.’
‘Mami says I should, but I haven’t.’
‘You’ve thrown a black stone behind you, as your Greek part might have said.’
‘Mami and I have both moved on.’ I read his steely glance as a warning: I had pushed him far enough.
‘And your father’s mum and dad?’ There were ready-made questions I knew he enjoyed.
‘Dead within a year after my parents got married. Rat-tat-tat, shot by a firing squad in Greece.’ Karl had made a gun by bending one arm, and moved it left to right in a rapid shooting gesture.
‘Really, by firing squad?’
‘Wrong place, wrong time, wrong side in the wrong civil war, if there’s ever a right civil war.’
‘That’s so awful, your poor dad…’
‘Greeks like a bit of tragedy, it’s in their blood.’
Having got over Euripides’ flight in a jiffy, Frau Angela worked hard, and her enterprise had been rewarded: her practice as a Reichian therapist was thriving. To give her son free rein with the piano, she saw her clients in a small, rented flat just a little further east towards Highbury Corner.
Tonight, Karl had made no mention of his past. Tonight, moments after he had threatened me with hell, while we squabbled over the significance of words and what I liked to read, I had looked him up and down and seen a different Karl, almost irresistibly attractive. And after my ineptly getting back at him for using Mami’s words, Karl had used words that were entirely his own.
‘Let’s go upstairs to my room.’
4
Magic
In the house where I grew up, I felt like an illusion in a box full of horrors. I played with toys that broke when I touched them, and when I touched them again put themselves back together. One wall in the room where I slept resembled an exhibit of restraints used in torture: handcuffs, padlocked belts, spiked iron collars. Against another, a menagerie of animals squirmed in inadequate cages while their stuffed predecessors watched them with glass eyes from their perches. Everything apart from my mattress, my wardrobe and a solitary chair, served as stage props in their public mistreatment. One of Mr Magikoo’s best-known tricks involved pulling a rabbit out of two different hats; it was a spellbinding conjuring feat in which by sleight of hand the mutilation of the rabbit was concealed.
My room itself was a windowless box that once every year was dismantled, removed, and then reassembled in music halls and theatres in a grand tour of the country, from Blackpool to Great Yarmouth to Brighton and Bristol and Bath, serving to conceal Mr Magikoo in his trick of disappearance and becoming The Invisible Man. In a lightning flash of darkness, my room would be gyrated on a crudely constructed mechanical axis, its revolution brought to a standstill by a stagehand at precisely the spot where my father would at just the right moment slip behind a curtain and fall through its door. My room would then again be very quickly rotated, so that when the curtain fell open, the audience would see just a solid blank wall. Then in another lightning flash the curtain would be drawn, my room would go around on its mechanical axis, and when it came to another standstill my father would leap out of the door and through the curtain, tumbling over as he fell onto the stage. By the time he was back up on his feet, ready in a lingering finale to pull back the curtain, the door would have again disappeared. It was comedy and mime, rather than magic, but the audiences apparen
tly loved it.
When I was eight, even I had been a prop – stage name: Little Magik Matchstick. Had my father shown any sign of contrition, and some small degree of warmth towards the six-year-old girl whose mother he had publicly singed by electrocution, then perhaps I might have managed to forgive him. Instead, when I had barely recovered from my loss – by the good grace of a measles epidemic I had at least been spared being a witness to my mother’s execution – Mr Magikoo conjured up in his sick imagination a bright new number for his Magikal Extravaganza, in which his daughter would simulate the narrowest of escapes from being sliced like a carrot into pieces. In an optical illusion that required her to be thin, Little Magik Matchstick would slither intact through an apparently impossibly small gap between two razor-sharp blades that slid back and forth across each other like a double-sided vertical guillotine – stage name: Sweeney Todd.
The Madness of Grief Page 2