‘Not by chance, no,’ says Anna.
‘Anna’s a writer,’ I say.
‘You are?’
‘A ghost-writer, yes.’
‘And she wants to help me write my story.’
‘I’ve never met a proper writer before,’ says Billy. ‘I mean, I know Leon writes, but he shreds it all before anyone reads it. So what kind of books have you ghosted?’
‘Gossipy memoirs, mostly,’ says Anna. ‘Nothing very interesting yet.’
‘But Leon’s story’s interesting, right?’
‘More interesting by the minute,’ says Anna.
‘I knew he had secrets,’ says Billy.
‘Anna knows more of my secrets than I do,’ I say.
‘Family stuff,’ Anna explains.
‘Have you been to his house yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘But he’s told you about the room, right?’
‘The room?’
‘I helped build it for him, then I helped him find the furniture as well, which was hard, Leon’s fussy and it all had to be right – well, all except the telephone, of course, which personally I didn’t agree with, but Leon said not to worry, the telephone was fine - and now he lets me write in it sometimes, if I’m off and he’s not using it.’
‘Right, Billy,’ I say. ‘I think we’ve taken up enough of your time.’
‘And he can paint really well, did you know that?’
‘That I did know,’ says Anna.
‘Don’t forget to say hello to your dad,’ I say. ‘Is he well?’
‘Still a bit down about me moving out, but he’ll get over it. I work with him, so it’s not like he doesn’t see me. And I like to visit mum by myself every Sunday. I was there this afternoon, then I went for that smoke.’
‘That smoke and that couple of pints,’ Anna reminds him.
‘Your mum lives around here?’ I ask.
‘Oh, man, I thought I’d told you. She’s in Highgate Cemetery; we lost her a while back. Dad’s not really left-wing - well, he’s more left-wing now than he used to be, proper bigoted skinhead he was in his youth - but anyway he wanted her buried near Karl Marx. For the company, he said. And it’s true, the place is always busy.’
The world of everything and everywhere is shrinking all the time…
‘I’ll call you soon about using the room. And you guys should definitely date! Trust me, I’m gifted like that.’
‘I hope to see you again,’ says Anna.
‘One more reason to date then,’ Billy yells back from the middle of the road.
‘Had you realized we were wearing identical trainers?’ Anna asks me while she waves goodbye to Billy.
‘Bright red too, but no,’ I say, ‘I hadn’t. Had you?’
Anna shakes her head.
‘Billy’s lovely,’ she says. ‘And if he’s gifted like that, maybe we should take his advice.’
‘He’s even lovelier when he isn’t so hyper,’ I say. ‘But imagine if he’d seen us at the cemetery.’
‘You mean because we kissed? I don’t think he’d have minded, he just wouldn’t have suspected we were twins.’
‘The strangest things are happening today,’ I say.
Dusk
‘Death in Venice,’ says Anna.
The evening is as clear as the day was, and in spite of the cold we are happy to be alone outside, at the table furthest from the light that floods the entrance, and separated from the pavement by a box of geraniums damaged by the onset of frost. The twilight of the city hangs disproportionately dense in the air, as if readying to swallow the light of the stars with its early anaemic fluorescence. A burst pipe up the road has made the asphalt wet, and rivulets of water run mud by the kerbside. The traffic is light, and as the few cars that glide past take inordinate care not to splash, the sounds of the street are slow and metallic, a twanging and reverberating buzz, low but insistent, like the muffled clanking and clanging of sterilised surgical tools. The noise from inside – a shrill monolith of chattering voices – falls heavily out of the door whenever it opens, to mingle momentarily with the relative stillness of outside, and within it Anna recognizes fragments of favourite music: I have apparently made a good choice, and next time we should drink our drinks indoors.
Having drunk most of my half of the bottle of Pinot Noir we are sharing – we have yet to extract even one from the mountain of olives – I am at risk of being over-romantic; as I totally lack the experience, I must know this by instinct instead.
‘That was the first thing that came to my mind.’
‘I’ve not read Death in Venice,’ I say.
‘I meant the last shot of Dirk Bogarde in the film, dead on that deckchair with hair-dye dribbling down over his cheeks.’
I’ve not seen the film either,’ I say. ‘And I don’t think I’ve heard of Dirk Bogarde.’
Anna gasps with faked incredulity.
‘But you’ve heard of Visconti.’
‘I think he knew Fellini.’
‘You’re a Fellini fan,’ says Anna.
‘A big one,’ I say.
‘And I know what that means,’ Anna says. ‘It means you’ve watched all his films, you’ve watched them all several times, and probably you’ve never watched anything else.’
‘You’re mocking me,’ I say.
‘I’m not mocking you at all, I actually envy your passion.’
‘My obsessiveness, you mean.’
‘I’d rather call it passion,’ Anna says. ‘But I’m not sure what I’d rather call you.’
‘So Leon doesn’t roll off your tongue.’
‘It doesn’t really, no. What you need… But it’s not for me to tell you what you need.’
‘No, say. Please.’
‘What you need is to be happy to be you, and Leon just seems part of an evasion.’
‘I see that you’ve worked out one more riddle,’ I say.
‘It’s not hard, if you know there’s an evasion.’
‘Would you rather call me Jack?’
‘Jack’s a throwback, you’ve moved on from being Jack. And I know Leon helped you to do that, but I think you’re still halfway to somewhere else.’
‘Moving on is exhausting,’ I say.
Anna smiles. ‘If you’re happy with Leon, then I’ll just have to get used to him,’ she says.
‘But if I invent another name we’ll both be happier.’
‘Not invent one, exactly.’
‘I think there might be something you’re not so keen to tell me,’ I say.
‘Let’s kiss first,’ says Anna.
In the intensity of that kiss I feel a forewarning. We’re about to get down to the nitty-gritty, it seems to be saying: to the nub, to the crux, to the centre of the circle we have taken such care to approach in a long-winded spiral. Even as I am lost in its warmth, so faintly but self-consciously short of the earlier abandon, I recognize within this kiss the kindness of an act of pre-emption. And when it seems to have begun to taper off, I equally self-consciously choose to renew it, and my kiss is an act of surrender.
8
Rebirth
Freedom
My world is the world, and the world of everything and everywhere never shrinks for long. Somewhere a mother is choking back her tears while she clutches very lightly the hand of her son, waiting to smile when he opens his eyes, because she knows that whenever he opens his eyes he remembers. And when he doesn’t close his eyes she will be there, and that will be the time for tears. While I kiss Anna Tor in an act of surrender, a woman pays a meagre amount for a death, and as he separates each note with a click between his fingers, the impoverished man she has lured into being an assassin calculates if he should murder the woman instead; in his world she deserves to be dead. In my world while a curious machine travels deep into space in order to gather and photograph dust, children starve, or kill, or drown in the sea that divides us. In the world of everywhere a tall executioner straps an expressionless man to a gurney, and seated in neat rows o
f chairs there are witnesses eager to witness: how quickly and painlessly lethal will be the injection? And in the world of everything I love Anna Tor.
Freedom is finding a place in the world.
‘How are you with politics?’ asks Anna.
‘I’m not really political,’ I say. ‘But I think that people should look after each other. It’s a frightening world, more frightening because there’s nothing else.’
‘Did your father ever talk to you about Chile? You know you were born there, so he must’ve said something. Unless it was Mary who told you.’
‘I read where I was born in my passport. My father sat me on his desk on the day when it arrived and he pointed at the words with his finger: Place of birth, Santiago. “Shall we find it together on the globe?” he said, and suddenly this ball with a map of the world had been taken off its axis and was lying in my lap, and I wished I could’ve thrown it in the air and kicked it. “This is where we are,” my father said, and now he pointed with his finger at a dot on the map. “Spin it,” he said, and while I slowly spun the globe between my hands, his finger traced the route to Santiago. “Here!” he said, and the globe came again to a standstill. “Santiago, capital of Chile - the wonderful place of your birth.” I can’t remember how old I was exactly – eight or nine, I think – but I remember very clearly that I burst into tears. “I don’t want to be alone in Santiago,” I said, “it’s too far away.” My father snatched the globe out of my lap and lobbed it in an arc out of view – it must’ve landed softly in his desk chair behind me, and the next day it was back on its axis. “No one’s going to Santiago,” he said, “we’re all going to stay here together. Let’s not even think about Santiago any more, you’re right, it’s too far away.” And when I did think about Santiago again, maybe a year or two later, the Santiago moment must’ve passed, and when I asked him, my father didn’t have a lot to say about the wonderful place of my birth. He’d been offered a job teaching English, Mary had wanted to go so they moved there for a couple of years, and when they came back, they came back with me. That was really all there was to Santiago, he said, except that probably it was best not to mention Santiago to Mary, because her memories of being there were not very happy. “Was it my fault?” I asked him. “Wasn’t I a good baby while I lived in her belly?” He put his arms around me and he squeezed me so hard that it hurt. “You’ve always been good,” he said. “And nothing’s ever been your fault.” But I didn’t believe him. I could never figure out whose fault anything was, so I always used to imagine that some of it had to be mine. It seemed fairer that way.’
‘Fairer for a child to take on the fault of the adults?’
‘I don’t think I minded.’
‘Of course you minded.’
‘Really, I don’t think I did. It made me feel more like an adult.’
‘But a child shouldn’t feel like an adult. A child should want to feel like a child.’
‘Are you getting angry on my behalf, Anna Tor?’
When I speak about my past, I may often describe it in colourful words, but the colour altogether lacks depth; it consists of the single dimension of knowledge, and what intricate layers of feeling there once might have clustered behind it are gone – as though evaporated in a cloud of indifference. And if I am disinterested in the part of the past I can still remember, what chance for any past far beyond?
Anna’s strategy so far has been to store away her questions until first she has filled in what she can of the gaps. In no particular order, my father and her mother had been lovers; her father and my father had been friends; there is a letter from my father in my pocket addressed to Jack Faro. And most importantly my fantasy or fear has been confirmed: Mary was not my “biological” mother – and I find myself averse to the chilling designation that reduces my existence to a purely physiological root, rather than to any psychological dilemma regarding true identity or knowledge of self. Good or bad, and whether biological or not, Mary was my relative truth. But then our purpose today is “the whole truth”, in other words writing a story.
The world of everything and everywhere is also the world of all time, yet it has not so far included the past of the country of my birth.
‘Tell me what you know about Chile,’ I say.
Freedom is acknowledging the past.
‘It’s so hard to know where to start,’ Anna says.
‘You said that when you called me,’ I say.
‘I remember,’ Anna says. ‘And my mind has again gone blank, and it’s not because I’ve come unprepared. I’ve thought about this moment many times, and I’ve rehearsed in my head what I’d say, sometimes out loud just like Billy, and every time the order of the words was different, because it seemed that the order of the words was important and I needed to make sure I got it right. But meeting you… it’s thrown everything up in the air, and it’s made it more important than before to get it right, because I’m not just imagining you now, I’m sitting by your side and I’m holding your hand, and I’m not sure if we’re doing the right thing any more, digging up the past for the sake of a story. I don’t want us to go on if this is becoming too painful.’
‘It’s not painful,’ I say. ‘The past, it’s true, has always been a strange place for me, and having to go over it again with you makes it seem even stranger, but no, it’s not painful. And Chile doesn’t even feel like a part of the past, either good or bad. But I was born there, we were both born on that dot on the globe that I had in my lap, and that’s a good part of the past, I suppose, so yes, I’d like to know how it happened.’
‘Okay then,’ says Anna. ‘Let’s just start somewhere randomly. Does the date of your birthday mean anything to you?’
‘It’s your birthday too.’
‘I meant the date itself,’ Anna says.
‘9/11,’ I say. ‘It means something to everyone.’
‘9/11 was in 2001.’
‘I know when it was,’ I say. ‘I even know what I was doing when it happened. It was my twenty-eighth birthday, and I’d just sold my last Picasso.’
Let’s talk about my mother
‘September 11, 1973,’ says Anna. ‘Do you know what happened in Chile on the actual day we were born? The country’s President was murdered in a military coup. There was fighting in the streets, targeted killings, many people died. It was Chile’s 9/11, except the terrorists were soldiers, and the outcome was dictatorship for more than twenty years.’
‘Pinochet,’ I say.
‘General Augusto,’ says Anna.
‘I remember,’ I say. ‘He was arrested in London.’
‘Arrested in London on a warrant from Spain, and actually detained for more than a year, but in the end they let him go. “Universal jurisdiction” isn’t such a popular concept, not with those in government at least, which doesn’t surprise me.’
‘And the President was Salvador Allende,’ I say.
‘A Marxist martyr,’ says Anna.
‘Like Che Guevara,’ I say.
‘Not like Che Guevara at all,’ says Anna. ‘Generally revolutionaries are repressive. Allende was elected, he wasn’t a guerrilla.’
‘Times were different then,’ I say.
‘Times were bad in different ways then,’ says Anna.
‘Let’s not talk politics,’ I say. ‘Let’s talk about my mother.’
‘Your mother,’ says Anna, but then she stalls, and she’s able to continue only by beginning somewhere else. ‘Your father was a teacher,’ she says, as if by recapitulation she might be able to ameliorate the past. ‘Mine was a doctor. A gynaecologist. He and my mother were in Chile when my mother became pregnant, and she decided that that was where she wanted to give birth, so they stayed, my father found a hospital job and they rented a small apartment. Mary and your father were already there…’
‘And obviously my mother was as pregnant as yours,’ I say.
‘Yes. Her name was Beatriz. Only your father called her Bea, no one else. No one else was allowed to. She
was a journalist, intelligent, progressive, left-wing…’
‘But not a revolutionary,’ I say.
‘An idealist fighting for democracy,’ says Anna. ‘Chile had a long democratic tradition, or at least it was long by Latin American standards, but it was already under threat from the moment Allende came to power. For his supporters Allende was a symbol; for his opponents a dangerous precedent that needed to be thwarted at all costs. Beatriz understood the likely consequence of this, and she warned the opposition that they needed to be careful what they wished for - if their tactics succeeded, the alternative wouldn’t be a different, better, more convenient and acceptable democracy, it would be a brutal regime and a fascist military state, which would use their own actions to legitimize itself. But her warnings went unheeded, and when the fostering of chaos inevitably brought about the coup, your mother was an obvious target.’ Having charged at full tilt into History mode, Anna pauses before she recoils: ‘Beatriz was beautiful,’ she says, as though in a spontaneous calibration, and shifting us abruptly from a résumé of History to an intimately personal connection. ‘My mother showed me her picture. I have it with me if you’d like to see it.’
‘Half my life is in your bag,’ I say, evading her question.
Anna smiles again. ‘Is this still okay for you?’ she asks.
‘You’re about to tell me that my mother was a hero,’ I say. ‘Of course I’m okay.’
‘Your mother, and my father too,’ says Anna, but then she backtracks to pick up on how the photograph she carries in her handbag has come to be passed down from my mother to hers, then to Anna and perhaps now to me. ‘Beatriz and my mother were best friends growing up, and they’d always kept in touch.’
‘And your mother introduced her to my father.’
‘I think he was already in love with my mother, but he and my father had become good friends. And I suppose my mother was preoccupied with me at the time.’
‘Don’t pregnant women fall in love?’
‘She already loved my father.’
‘But that didn’t stop her later.’
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