Heaven Has Eyes

by Philip Holden

  “How long are you here for?”

  “Ten days,” she squeaks.

  He turns his head again, and squints at the Singapore passport. She clears her throat to speak. When she and Jian Wei meet English people socially now, they’ll sidle up to him afterwards. Where is his wife from? Holland? Scandinavia? Eastern Europe? From Mars, he’ll say, rolling his eyes. On these moments of arrival, she has to trim vowels, plump up consonants, feel her way back into a forgotten accent.

  “I’m visiting my father.”

  He looks up again, scrunches up his face, and then she’s waved through. After customs, she collects her luggage, and then calls her father to let him know she’s landed. The phone rings and rings again: and then his voice, flustered, lilting, just before the answerphone clicks in. No worries, she tells him. I’ll just pick up the car and be on my way.

  • • •

  She takes her time to drive from the airport to her father’s house. In the airport parking lot, she checks the rental car over slowly, fingers clutching keys in the morning chill. No dents. A single scratch on the driver’s door. Inside, when the door clenches shut, a faint smell of cigarette smoke, and the momentary puzzle of the gear lever, with its gate and rubbery clutch. She breathes deeply. Depress the clutch. Turn the key. Shift up into first. And then her body remembers. She drives out, through a maze of slip roads, onto the motorway, through landscape just waking up, blanketed in mist.

  After an hour, halfway on her journey, she stops at a service station for a breakfast she doesn’t really need, a bitter coffee and a limp croissant bought with shiny, unfamiliar coins. In the market town near where he lives, she takes another unnecessary detour to the supermarket to stock up, wandering, jet-lagged now, through aisles of cook-chill foods, her basket growing heavier with each step. There are some things she cannot find here. Chicken on the bone she can get from the butchers’. Green beans, at a pinch, will fill in for long beans.

  Even when she reaches his village, a few streets away from the house, she finds herself pausing again. She pulls into a side road next to a new block of flats. From here she can look out over the valley, over the flat roof of the primary school. She remembers when it first opened: how she and her classmates, in their new blue-checked uniforms, walked past the old school and continued up the hill, into a new life. No more high windows or wrought iron railings: everything was soft, low-slung, streamlined, white ceiling tiles mirroring those on the floor. A central pond, where the class cultured frogspawn, watching tadpoles bud, wriggle free, and then grow into tiny frogs, inching their way out of the water. Pinpricks on her forehead. A thin rain is falling now, as soft as fur, catching in her hair. She turns to the car, to the red brick of the new flats stacked up behind a discreet signpost. Sheltered Housing. She recognises the building now from photographs held up over Skype: this is a place her father has told her he likes, that he wants to look at more closely.

  • • •

  He has said he’ll leave the house unlocked, but the door will not open. She presses the doorbell and hears it echo somewhere, deep within the house. Silence. No footsteps. She fishes in her bag for a key that turns smoothly in the lock, but the door remains stubbornly closed, even when she pushes against it with all her weight. Then something in her remembers again: she turns the key back, pushes up as she turns the doorknob and the bolt clicks open. Then the door is pulled inwards, and she finds him standing there, still unnervingly tall, still structurally solid, this ruin of a man.

  He leads her to the lounge. There’s a lamp lit at the table by the window, and a pen at rest next to the easel. He has sat here waiting for her, working, fingers crinkling over a tiny, postage-stamp-size piece of drawing paper. He sits.

  “Kath. How was your flight?”

  “Fine.”

  “And the drive down?”

  “Don’t get up,” she says. “I’ll just get my things and put them in the bedroom. And then tea?”

  “Cup of tea,” he repeats, but does not move.

  The room’s like a cave, its walls papered with his prints.

  A sketch of a young man in a hammock under a palm tree. The covers from the books he illustrated in London in the 60s, and then the later work, the free-flowing abstract designs. In the last few years, arthritis has meant that he can no longer work on such a large scale. He makes small, postage-stamp-style drawings, and has them blown up at a printer to the size of magazine covers. The newest are prominently displayed. Pen lines wriggle, together, and then apart. If she looks closely, she sometimes thinks she can glimpse the trace of a human form in them: the angle of an elbow, or the remembered curve of a waist that his hands can still trace.

  On the coffee table by the window, she notices, are the brochures from the sheltered living developments and residential homes she has helped him order. He has, in an unusual gesture of neatness, arranged them in a pile, topped with a small red notebook and a pen. This should reassure her, but it does not. The pile is hard, angular, bright with smiling photographs. There is no art to these brochures: they should not be in the house. In the passageway, and then on the narrow stairs, carrying her suitcase up to her room, she feels suddenly numb. Like that moment on a childhood beach, years ago, when she stubbed her toe against a rock. When she looked up to golden sands running out forever to the sky, and then clutched her father’s hand, waiting for pain to come.

  In the next day or two, they fall a little too easily into a rhythm. The house is stuffy, especially in the evening and early night. Hot air rises, her father says, stating the obvious, but he has no fans, even on the upper storey, and he keeps the double-glazed windows tightly shut. Before she sleeps, she opens one, and so wakes to billowing curtains and a morning chill on her face, to traffic, and the voices of children on their way to school. Her father’s room is next to hers, but she leaves the old fashioned bathroom with its iron tub and chequerboard tiles to him, and showers downstairs. In the morning she writes, messages Jian Wei, or dips into the work emails that never quite stop. After a time, she hears him stirring through the wall. Drawers open, and the wardrobe door clicks shut. She keeps her own door ajar, so that she can hear him pad slowly to the bathroom. Running water, and then the gurgle of the cistern. She waits. She does not want to rush him.

  After half an hour or so, she descends to the living room, and opens the curtains. Sunlight dapples the sketches and prints on the wall. When the wind stirs the trees in the garden, it whisks the light into strands, always in motion. Only the brochures sit still in their neat row on the coffee table, and she thinks again of that unasked question about Singapore. Then she goes to the kitchen and makes tea. Milk for him, not directly from the bottle, but from the milk jug he keeps in the fridge. Add hot water, so that it’s not too strong. Filter the water from the kettle, to remove the limescale. There are other rules to remember, in this house, habits to unlearn. In Singapore, she fills up the kettle and boils water for the day; here, he says, it is best to only boil enough water for a single cup. Later, when she washes the plates in the sink, he will tell her that there’s no need to rinse them, no need to waste water.

  For an artist who thrives on chaos, he has made surprising efforts to impose order on his life. He has bought a pill box for medication, which he fills up once a week, a clear plastic wheel with segments for each day’s dose. She has been over each pill and capsule with him, thinking to help. But he knows the dosage in each case, and what the medication is for. She is the one who forgets, and whose bustling presence jostles him out of the rhythms and rituals he has set for himself. He makes his own breakfast, and they sit opposite each other, mugs of tea in hand.

  “How did you sleep?”

  “The usual.” He smiles. “I’ve never been a great sleeper.”

  She thinks of her mother, how she’d once been very tired out, after a long drive, and she’d said the next morning that she’d slept so well, just as you sleep as a child. But for Kathy now, what she remembers from childhood are those sleepless nigh
ts when you were thinking, when you couldn’t sleep because of all that delicious knowledge, when your mind was racing round and round, rubbing over new things. You think a lot, her form teacher had said to her one day. I bet you find it difficult to sleep at night, and she’d laughed, in relief, at recognition that there was someone else out there like her, that, in this, if in nothing else, she and this thin, bird-like woman were one of a kind.

  “I was looking at the albums in my room last night,” she says.

  He looks up from his tea.

  “The one from Seletar Camp. When you were stationed there.”

  “You found that?”

  “Shall we look through it together some time?”

  He nods, and then suddenly she finds herself saying, “Dad, we need to talk. About the future. You know …”

  He nods and smiles, then turns to picking at a capsule with clumsy fingers. He wears hearing aids now, she knows: tiny silver pearls that nestle inside the ear. Perhaps he has forgotten to put them in, or the batteries have run out: perhaps he has not heard her? He swallows his pills one by one, and then drinks his tea. She can hear her voice slowing down, flickering, fading out. And then he begins to talk, on a tangent. The troopship out. The cantonment outside Seletar Camp gates. Firecrackers at New Year. The heat made his hands sweat, so he found it difficult to sketch. In Jalan Kayu, there was a curry shop he and his mates went to, where you could get your curry with bread in mess tins. Will she cook curry for him this time? Later, when he is in the sitting room, she will search for the capsule she knows he has dropped on the floor, tidying up the crumbs he has let fall on the carpet.

  • • •

  Each morning, they visit places on the list they have put together, places busy with bright euphemisms: shelter, respite, home. They make a good team, this father and daughter. Each place is different. Some are clearly mistakes. One of the first is an old Victorian mansion, hidden behind overgrown trees at the end of a long drive. In its sitting room, empty rows of plastic chairs line a wall opposite a blaring television. Most of the patients, the manager tells them, are resting in their rooms, and then corrects himself. Most residents. The halls are lined with linoleum and smell of soap: every now and then, there is a sign forbidding staff to use mobile phones. When they leave, the manager unlocks the door for them, and locks it again behind them. They stand in the driveway, looking up at the pebble-dashed gables, the blank dormer windows high up among the pine trees. And then they shake their heads at exactly the same time, and smile conspiratorially.

  After each visit, they go for a pub lunch, driving off into the country. They cannot quite find what they are looking for. There are gastropubs, their bars refitted in light, unvarnished wood. They serve organic local produce on wooden platters, on stripped tables on which traces of paint artfully linger, but with uncomfortable seats. He blinks in the unexpected sunlight, and complains about prices. Other pubs at first seem less changed. Sepia photographs on the walls, a smokeless fire that pub staff keep on forgetting to bank, a menu of roasts and puddings. There’s a thinness here, as if the whole building were a stage set that, standing up, you could peer behind. He makes the orders, uncomplaining, but somehow going through the motions. If you pray long enough, her mother once said to her, you might come to believe. What does he miss now? Bars fusty with cigarette and pipe smoke, a cast iron grate clogged with embers. Plump and lumpy jacquard cushions on the chairs, walls lined haphazardly with etchings and horse brasses, faux leather menus stamped with gold letters, sticky in the hands. In the next few days, they range further, but they are never quite satisfied. On these drives they go on, she thinks, he wants to arrive at a place that no longer exists.

  He has told her of this place, and she has been there as a child. An imagined England, in those decades after the War. His brothers and sisters left that Northern country town to go out into the world. Of all of them, he went farthest, to Singapore. A life lived in black-and-white, he’s told her. And then suddenly colour arrived. I had my fun, of course, before you were thought of. He had returned after his posting, to the capital city. He worked hard. He had talent: he could draw, and make things with his hands. Everything had its place, its own logic: he was part of a larger story. He met someone like him, a young woman from another Northern city. Her mother. Kathy sees them now in the photographs he keeps in albums upstairs, smiling, in front of a new car, or a new house. After a time, she is also in the photographs, chubby, golden-haired child. It is always sunny. But if she looks more closely, her face is overexposed, its contours bleached out, with scratches for eyes.

  When she closes the album, she can find only hints of this world he has left behind, faint as the crumbs he leaves on the carpet. The parade of shops in the village is full of banks, chain stores, or charity shops: not the butcher, baker and fishmonger of her childhood. After the book club he attends at the library, retirees gather, and talk wistfully of topics she imagined were long forgotten: Empire, cricket, the monarchy. At times, he too is irritated. They haven’t travelled, he tells her. They haven’t seen the city, or the world. So it isn’t here, this place they want to find again to share. Not in the clatter of coffee cups, the whispers about immigrants and outsiders that she hears both here and in her new home. Somewhere else. The world she finds at times in Singapore, a sudden treasure plucked out of the sediment of everyday life. When Jian Wei’s father passes a “shilling”, warm to the touch, into her hand. Or their discovery of Khong Guan iced gem biscuits, in great golden tins, in a provision store. “How did you eat them?” she’d asked Jian Wei, and he’d explained how he’d always tried, with milk teeth coming loose, to prise that tiny cone of icing away from the biscuit, whole, and then let it melt in the mouth.

  “Me too.”

  Soulmates, she thought. In all the world, at last, there is someone like me.

  • • •

  They look at sheltered housing now. The next place impresses at first. An old red sandstone Catholic school that has been rebuilt into something like a condominium, with padded, noiseless lifts. The manager is a young man with glasses, crisply professional, arms full of leaflets and folders, tripping himself up with statistics. He gives them a tour. There’s a garden with raised beds for easy access—no bending down!—a library, a games room, even a gym. Better than a condo, her father jokes with her, and she can see he’s tempted.

  The apartments are small, but neatly furnished, with double-glazed windows, a galley kitchen, and a bathroom with grab rails and a bathtub that opens at the side, like a car door. And of course there’s a shared dining room, their guide says, in the other block. For later. They have coffee in the library downstairs, a converted chapel, thickly carpeted, with narrow stained-glass windows and sofas you can’t quite settle back in, a magazine rack and a coffee urn.

  “I’ll leave you here,” their host tells them. “Any questions, just call me.”

  He stands up, cup and saucer cradled carefully in his hand. He doesn’t care for the artwork on the walls. From China, he tells her, mass-produced on a production line of workers, each one added a few scripted brushstrokes. But there’s something else niggling at him.

  “You can afford it, Dad. We’ve done the sums.”

  It’s not that. He shrugs, swings his arms, trying to pluck words out of the air. She, meanwhile, gently takes the cup and saucer from his hand, and places them on the coffee table. It’s all a little too beautiful, he tells her. Quiet. Like a museum. He would be well taken care of. But he would be an exhibit, brought out of storage each morning, dusted, and displayed.

  Yet on the third day, the development he’s talked about with her before, next to the school, proves better. It’s smaller than it seemed to her on the first day, that time she paused on the way to the house. Less raw and new, too: more intimately aged. The manager bustles cheerfully through the sitting room, introducing her father to the residents. He’s visited before, and they already know him: they are more curious about her. She finds herself drawn into a long
conversation, or perhaps more rightly a monologue, with a gentleman in a tweed jacket, about the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, that fortress with all its guns facing outwards. She listens, irritated, but not having the heart to correct him. When she looks up, the woman sitting next to him catches her eye, and then raises her eyebrows, knowingly. After an hour, she pries her father away, and they walk in what seems like triumph down the drive to the car.

  • • •

  One night she cooks curry for him. Easy enough, with the Prima Deli packets she’s brought, full of sachets she lines up on the kitchen counter. His knives are all blunt, so she sharpens one to chop the chicken, fumbling with a rusty potato peeler that threatens with each pass to slip and gash her hand. After that, things are easier. Low heat on the stove, and the sauce thickens, velvety, its smell stealing into every corner of the house. He comes to the kitchen table early, sets the table with spoons and forks, and then slices a baguette, his brow furrowed, hands clumsy as mittens. Like father like daughter.

  When they eat, he spoons up the curry greedily, a little too fast, then coughs.

  “Water?”

  He’s tearing, but he waves her away.

  They settle down to eat slowly, in companionable silence. When he finishes, she notices how his bowl is wiped completely clean, without a trace of sauce, the bones placed carefully on a side plate. The bread, too, has all gone. He still follows that injunction to clean your plate, drummed into him as a small boy in school eighty years ago. A boy just like the one in those book covers on his living room wall, sketched out in only a few lines, in a smart coat, freckles clustering like bees on his face. He pauses, looks down.