The Society of Others

by William Nicholson

  I get a pack of Blu-Tack and stick the notes onto the walls of my room like a frieze. He’ll never know. He never comes into my room even when he’s round here. This is supposed to be giving me respect and my own space and so forth but really it’s about not seeing how he’s failed me. When Am sees the row of fifty-pound notes she’s impressed. She says I’m not like anyone else she knows and this is why she’s attracted to me. She says I’m strange and moody and she’s sure I’ll be famous some day. I say I don’t want to be famous, I just want to be real. That impresses her too. So I say why not do it now, but she says it’s the wrong time for her and we can always just talk. So she talks and I look out of the window where there are pigeons fooling about and then it turns out she’s crying.

  “What’s the matter?” I say.

  “I feel like I can’t reach you,” she says.

  “No one can reach anyone,” I say.

  So she kisses me really passionately and then says, “Did I reach you?”

  What can I say? Everyone lies, out of kindness and pity and cowardice.

  “Sure.”

  She looks at me with her big blue eyes all wet round the edges for what seems like several hours.

  “What would you say if I told you I wanted to end it?”

  “End what?”

  “Us.”

  “Do you?”

  “What would you say if I did?”

  These stupid conversations.

  “I am what I am, Am.”

  “Yes.” Long sigh. “I know it.” Longer sigh. “I should get out, but I can’t.”

  If we’re not going to do it, I’m thinking, you might as well go.

  I don’t say it. People never say those things. They should.

  I say, “I’m kind of tired, Am.”

  “You’re always tired. What is it you do that makes you always tired?”

  “Nothing. I’m tired by nothing. Nothing exhausts me.”

  She thinks it’s a joke but it isn’t.

  Then as she’s looking at me she slips into this parallel universe or something because for a moment she seems quite different. It’s like seeing a small child hiding in her face, peeping out, not knowing I can see her. This small child is so lovely and so unaware that the sight of her makes me catch my breath in surprise. I’ve forgotten that people can be so without guile. She’s so fragile, so bound to be hurt. I almost cry out loud.

  “What?” says Am.

  “You,” I say.

  “What about me?”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  For me beauty isn’t just a look, it’s a feel. I expect it’s like that for everybody. Marilyn Monroe isn’t the most beautiful woman ever, actually she’s got quite a pudgy face if you look at unposed photographs, but she’s got this feel to her that says, I want to please you more than anything. That’s what does it. And actually I personally believe that’s the lost child in her reaching out to be hugged, but because she’s a grown woman it comes out as sex. But then I have a thing about lost children. There was a documentary once on TV about state orphanages in China where tiny children are abandoned to die. I only watched about five minutes of it and then switched over to the news, where people were being blown up in some faraway war. I can handle adults destroying each other. But those babies in unvisited cots.

  Am is crying again.

  “What now?”

  “It’s not fair,” she says. “I’d just decided not to love you.”

  TWO

  So it turns out Gemma’s had her baby and it’s a boy and everyone’s doing fine and he’s called Joey. This happens to be what you call baby kangaroos but it takes all sorts. Joey is coming round to our place to meet us on this day that coincides with my grandfather’s birthday so the plan is the one celebration will do for both. This may sound cheap but is actually good thinking because everyone will be there, except possibly myself. I don’t do family gatherings.

  “You have to come down,” says my mother. “Your father would be so hurt.”

  That’s my mother for you, protecting the man who dumped her for a younger prettier woman, and now there’s even a cuckoo baby to fatten on the love that should be hers. Why doesn’t she hate him? Actually I know perfectly well. You can’t hate my father, he’s one of the world’s few good men. What do you do with a good man who hurts you but doesn’t mean to? You hurt but you don’t hate.

  So I come down to the party making sure to be late only to find that Joey and Gemma and my father haven’t showed yet because Joey hasn’t woken up. This is terrific. I’ll try that one myself. Sorry I’m late, folks, but my sleep is more important than your party.

  “Hail, holy light, offspring of heaven’s first-born!” says my grandfather, holding up both hands like a priest giving a blessing. This is his jokey manner. I don’t know why he has to talk in quotations the whole time, maybe he can’t think of any words of his own.

  “Happy birthday, grandpa.”

  It’s his birthday, he’s seventy or eighty or ninety. I pour myself a tumbler of Bellini, which is the drink my family makes for parties. It’s this fizzy dry Italian wine called prosecco mixed with peach juice, two-thirds wine and one-third juice, and is quite excellent.

  Bellini, the painter it’s named after, is also by way of being a family favourite because he painted this Venetian doge who looks exactly like my grandfather, except my grandfather doesn’t wear the wacky hat with the strings and the hump at the back.

  My mother comes over with a loaded plate of food.

  “Don’t just drink, darling. They’ll be here soon.”

  This is a sequitur?

  She’s put a whole lot of stuff aside for me on this plate. Little sausages on sticks, chicken drumsticks, carrot sticks, cheese sticks, everything sticks. You eat with your fingers and it saves washing up. There are people who actually think about these things.

  My godmother Sheila’s here. She’s waiting for me to say hello. “Hello,” I say.

  “You get taller all the time,” she says. “When will it stop?”

  “I think it’s stopped.”

  A lot of people tell me I’m tall as if I should be proud, but it’s not like I’ve been working at it. Sheila is small.

  “You look exactly like Salvator Rosa’s self-portrait,” she tells me. “He’s wildly dark and handsome and sexy. So that’s a compliment.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “Aut tace aut loquere meliora silentio. Either be silent or let your speech be better than silence.”

  She’s quoting the inscription that forms part of the Salvator Rosa self-portrait. As you can tell, we go in for this game. You too can pose for an Old Master. Fun for all the family.

  I say, “Right.”

  “There. You see.”

  Not much you can add after that.

  “So are you excited about having a new baby brother?”

  “Palpitating.”

  She raises her eyebrows.

  “So. What are you doing with yourself these days?”

  “Oh. This and that. You know.”

  She smiles at me. Her smile is meant to say: I’ll never disapprove of you however much of a failure you make of your life. This is what they call unconditional love, and it’s supposed to be what young people need. Well I’m here to tell you that what young people need is to be left alone. This unconditional-love act is just another scam. Nothing’s free. Nobody butters your toast for the heck of it. The deal is I love you and you turn into this healthy well-balanced individual.

  Sheila is the same age as my mother and she’s just got this job as professor of history of art at somewhere university, which is a tremendous achievement and everyone’s awestruck and impressed except that she’s small and unmarried and childless and looks like a man.

  “There,” said my mother when she heard. “Sometimes the good people do come out on top.”

  “Great,” I said. “Good for Sheila.”

  “She loves you so much, darling,” said my mother. “Do drop h
er a line of congratulations.”

  Sheila picked me out to love when I was born. I was too little to have any say in the matter. The general idea is I’ll inherit her money when she dies. I don’t like to seem ungrateful for the presents she’s given me down the years, but this is all her idea not mine.

  I’m not the only one who feels this way. My mother acts like she’s doing Sheila a favour by lending me to her to love. I don’t think she realises this. Things are complicated by the fact that my mother and Sheila joined the National Gallery as lowly researchers in the same year, and here’s Sheila a professor and here’s my mother still doing picture research for book publishers. That’s because she stopped to have children, which means me and Cat, so somehow neither of them have got what they want and I’m supposed to make it up to them.

  I meant to write that letter of congratulations but in the end

  I didn’t.

  “Well done on the job.”

  “Thank you. I’m about to give my first series of lectures since the appointment. I’m terrified everyone will be sitting there thinking, Why her?”

  They won’t. They’ll be thinking about what’s for dinner.

  My grandfather brings over dear old Emil to talk to me. Dear old Emil is a friend of my grandfather’s from the days when they all lived in Prague or Budapest or Bucharest and had real suffering and acquired real wisdom in cafés and internment camps.

  “Here is our young man,” says my grandfather. “What bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!”

  This as addressed to me is of course a criticism, since I come up short in the bliss department. But is it my fault? He grew up under a repressive regime where it was a radical act to look at a copy of Playboy. And this was before they started showing pubic hair. Some people have it handed to them on a plate.

  Dear old Emil says to me, “So, young man, what next?”

  “I haven’t decided, exactly.”

  “Of course not! The world lies before you. You have no responsibilities. All is adventure.”

  I’m supposed to be happy about this. All I want to do is go back to my room and lock the door.

  “Right.”

  He puts one arm in mine and leads me off into the hall. He has some dear old wisdom for me.

  “Your father worries about you, you know.”

  “Right.”

  “But I tell him, don’t worry. Your son is not you. He follows a different road.”

  “Right.”

  Emil is some kind of shrink. All those old guys who came out of Eastern Europe thinking Playboy was liberating turned themselves into shrinks.

  “But may I ask you to do me a favour?”

  He’s whispering now. I can smell the guacamole dip on his breath.

  “When he comes, say to him, six words.”

  “Six words.”

  “Say to him, dad, I love you, let me go.”

  Seven words.

  “Will you do that for me?”

  “Okay.”

  “Thank you.”

  He squeezes my arm and we go back to the party. Cat finds me.

  “Who rained on your parade?”

  Apparently it shows on my face. Dear old Emil pisses me off with his all-you-need-is-love. Look at what happened to John Lennon and run that by me again. I’m not talking about getting shot dead. I’m talking about living in a hotel room and having Yoko Ono call out for hookers.

  “Sod off, slag,” I say.

  “Oh! Repartee!”

  This is why I don’t do family gatherings.

  Now there’s this great clattering in the hall which turns out to be the arrival of the baby-servicing equipment, followed by the baby. My father’s head appears round the living-room door to say, “Just putting on our bonnet.” Cat and I look at each other. This is not promising. This is a man who uses words for a living and he’s losing it on the pronouns.

  Then they come in. Gemma’s holding the baby in what looks like embroidered wrapping paper and my father’s coming behind like he’s the gift-tag tied on with string. Everyone except me crowds round and looks down the hole in the wrapper and sees I imagine a baby much like any other but they profess astonished admiration. Gemma looks at them looking at her baby like she’s a conqueror exacting tribute. She’s had her shiny black hair cut short and actually looks terrific, her eyes have got even bigger, ditto her mouth. When my mother’s turn comes to worship at the shrine I think how old she looks beside Gemma and how unfair it is, and I try to imagine what my mother’s feeling and stop, because it’s impossible. Then she comes over to me and takes my hand with this odd little smile and says:

  “You will be nice, won’t you, darling?”

  That’s what her mouth says. Her eyes are searching my face like she’s counting my pores. Her eyes are saying: you were my little baby once. Where did you go?

  My mother used to sing us songs on long car journeys. There’s one called Waly Waly that ends:

  But had I wist, before I kissed,

  That love had been so ill to win,

  I had locked my heart in a case of gold

  And pinned it with a silver pin.

  We have an unresolved problem, my mother and I. She minds about my happiness too much. She should mind about her own happiness instead. I have this fear that she wants me to be happy because she’s not happy herself. This is bad news. Just about the only duty parents have towards their children, it seems to me, is to enjoy their life. After all, there they are in the prime of this life they’ve given us, and if they don’t like it, what hope is there for us? Really if you’re a parent you’ve got to be having a good time. And telling me that having children is the true happiness doesn’t cut it at all. That just pushes the problem into the future. Someone somewhere has to be getting the benefit.

  My mother loves art. I’m talking old art, Dutch seventeenth century most of all. When we were still too little to resist she took Cat and me to the National Gallery maybe a million times. She made up these games for us, like King Red, where we had to say why the red was where it was in the picture. There was always some red somewhere, only the painters chose very carefully where to put it because it was the king and bullied all the lower colours. Also there was Spot the Lion with St. Jerome. There’s enough St. Jeromes in the National Gallery to sink a boat. They mostly wear red, and they mostly have beards, and they all have lions except one, and maybe that lion’s hiding. In my favourite picture, where St. Jerome’s sitting in a study like on the bridge of a ship, the lion’s sloping off to one side, getting the hell out of all those weird arches to run free over the distant green hills. That St. Jerome hasn’t got a beard, now that I think of it. Funny the things you remember. The hours I’ve spent pushing at those green ropes, wanting to feel the dark red wallpaper.

  Now here’s my mother spending all day in gloomy old libraries looking for pictures for books other people have written. I know she wishes she’d written the books herself. So secretly her life is a disappointment to her in several ways. I really hate that. The dwindling away of dreams.

  So I pour myself another pint or two of Bellini and my mother goes off to hear what Sheila thinks of the baby and I look round and see my father looking at me. He has this wry smile on his face that says: I don’t take myself seriously. Naturally it’s a lie. My father’s problem is he makes a lot of money doing something entirely invisible, which is writing screenplays. Years ago he wrote a stage play that was the imaginary trial of Judas, it’s called The Mercy Kiss and it was a success and got made into a film and it’s still the only thing he’s ever done that anyone’s heard of. In the family we call it The Messy Curse to show we’re cool about success. People are nice to him and say, Oh yes, The Mercy Kiss, I saw that, it was so good, I loved it. But there hasn’t been anything else since, only money.

  There you go again. The dwindling away of dreams.

  “This must all look quite strange to you,” he says.

  “Everything looks strange
to me,” I reply.

  “Your brother. Your half-brother.”

  “Half a brother. Bee-zarre.”

  He smiles his smile.

  “Gem wanted it so much.”

  I am dumb. My father’s speech is booby-trapped at every word. Gem wanted it? A baby can’t be an it. But maybe he means motherhood, fulfilment, holding hands in the unbroken chain of generations, whatever it is that drives people against every sane self-interest to reproduce. He feels like he has to apologise to me. Mind you, as Cat pointed out to me when we first heard, this new arrival means we both get less money when he dies. Maybe none at all.

  The truth is I don’t care about that. I don’t want his money. Or at least not much of it.

  “You’ll say hello, won’t you? Gem would like it.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  We’re civilised in our family. Everyone gets on really well with everyone else. It’s so much better for the children.

  So I go to pay my respects and Gemma gives me this nervous smile which makes me like her more.

  “How was it?” I say, meaning the birth.

  “Fucking agony,” she says. “Don’t do it.”

  “Okay. I won’t.”

  I can see what my father sees in her. Now it’s time to peer down the hole and greet the new prince. I’m doing this in an entirely neutral spirit of going with the flow and not rocking the family boat, so it comes as something of a shock to meet those wide-open dark dark eyes staring back up at me and to know without the possibility of any doubt that this baby hates me.

  Who knew? I don’t claim to be an expert on babies but there’s all these plump Jesuses on Madonnas’ laps in paintings and sometimes they look a little out of it, but they don’t hate. I didn’t even know babies could hate. I’d have said that was one of those things you learn later, after you get fucked up and betrayed by life in the customary manner.

  “What’s the matter?” says Gemma.

  “He’s frowning,” I say.

  She takes a look.

  “He does that when he’s shitting,” she says. “Six days old and all he does is eat and shit and sleep.” She looks at him proudly.