The Songs

  Now it was time to put his plan into action: “Will you be joining the Haganah or the Irgun?” he asked. “They were responsible for bombing the King David Hotel last year, weren’t they? And isn’t there another group? Palmach, is it?”

  Iz looked surprised. “Oh,” he said, “I didn’t know anyone outside Israel knew about such things.”

  Maurice knew about such things. He had spent the day at the library in Ashford learning about such things.

  “The Irgun are a bit more aggressive, aren’t they?” he asked confidently.

  “Well, they are certainly prepared to take more risks, I think.”

  “I suppose everyone in Israel hates the British?”

  Iz thought for a moment. “Well, we certainly hate what they are doing to us. All we want is our country back.”

  “Yes — didn’t we promise it to you thirty years ago? It was rotten of us to renege on that. There was some declaration, wasn’t there? What was it called? The Balfour Declaration? Or maybe it was the Sykes-Picot one, I can’t remember.” He didn’t want to sound too much of a know-all.

  Iz looked unsure. “Yes, I think it was something like that.” Maurice clearly knew more about it than he did.

  “I’d love to see the old city in Jerusalem,” he said. “All that history! They say the Wailing Wall is extraordinary. The Dome of the Rock, too. And I would do anything to see Masada. That was where you made that incredible stand against the Romans, wasn’t it?” Then he paused. “You know, not all the British are bad. Some of us want you to have your own country, to go back to Israel.”

  “You don’t take the British side?” Iz said, surprised. “You’re British.”

  “Well, patriotism’s a state of mind, isn’t it?” Maurice said airily. “I don’t feel very British. You’ve got to be objective about your country, weigh up the pros and cons. Anyway, we should be grateful to you. There have been so many great Jews: Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Trotsky. Even Houdini was Jewish!”

  In the library encyclopedia there had been a list of the fifty most influential Jews, but Maurice could not remember any more. Anyway, it was time to stop. He did not want to overplay his hand.

  They sat in silence for a moment. Then Iz said, “Do you know a Great Russell Street in London?”

  “I don’t really know London very well, I’m afraid. Of course, I want to live there one day. I think it’s very exciting. There’s so much political activity. Why do you ask?”

  “The Jewish Agency is in that street. I’ve never been there. That is where I will start the journey to Israel. When they call you, you must drop everything and go.” He laughed: “How foolish it would look if I got lost.”

  “I think my uncle has a map of London,” Maurice said. “I could look it up for you, if you wanted.”

  “Thank you. You know, you’re different to people around here. I have not met someone like you before. You’re my only friend who is not Jewish.”

  And you’re my only friend, Maurice thought.

  Then Iz did something strange. He leaned over and gently took Maurice’s wrist in his hand. He ran his fingers lightly over the thin pink ridges. “These scars, I saw them the other day. How did you get them?”

  Maurice felt himself turning red. Now it was his turn to give Iz an evasive answer: my hand went through a glass window; I was caught on some barbed wire; a dog attacked me.

  He took his hand back from Iz. He took a big breath. “Sometimes I cut myself. A razor blade, maybe a pin, anything sharp really. If I get angry, if I get frustrated by something, it calms me down. I don’t know why. I mostly did it at school — it was so awful there. I don’t think I will cut myself again, though. I haven’t done it for a while, not since I’ve been here.”

  Iz smiled sadly. “I am sorry for your frustration,” he said. “I know what that’s like: when you want to change things and you can’t. I hope it will be easier for me to do it in Israel. But I think you are brave and strong, Maurice. You will bring about change. You will achieve great things in this country.”

  Maurice felt tears come into his eyes. He looked away from Iz. He wanted to say: But I don’t want to stay if you’re not here. Let me go with you, we are comrades.

  Instead he said, “I think we could achieve great things together.”

  “Yes,” Iz said. “If only that were possible. But I should go now, go back to work.”

  “Well, goodbye, Isaac.” Maurice had never called him by his name before. He would not call him Iz: that was for everyone else.

  “Yes,” Iz said, and they stood up. “We will see each other again soon, I hope.”

  Rose

  BECAUSE ONE of the many things Huddie did not do anymore was go to school, the local education authority made periodic checks on him. He was in a category that was called “student with additional needs.”

  Until six months before, he had gone most days. The school provided a van with a hydraulic tailgate that could raise his wheelchair and get it into the back. He had begun to find school increasingly difficult. The problem was that everyone was so polite. They were helpful and kind, but there was a formality in their behavior that made him feel awkward. Nobody ever told him a joke. If a group of pupils were heading towards him in the corridor laughing, their laughter would have wound down by the time they got to him. They would stop and talk to him, even though none of them, including Huddie, really knew what to talk about. What he needed was some friends. What he wanted was a girlfriend.

  When Huddie could still see some possibilities at school, he had asked a girl out, although he admitted he was slightly unsure what they would do and where they would go. He told me he liked her so much that he would be her stalker if it was possible to stalk someone in a wheelchair. When he summoned up the courage to ask her, she said that she couldn’t because her boyfriend would be so jealous. It had made him smile for a moment to think that he might be a threat to someone’s relationship but he knew she did not have a boyfriend. That was why he had asked her out in the first place.

  After that, he had said that he did not feel strong enough to go to school anymore. I knew that this was not entirely true — he could have gone on going, at least for a while longer, if he had wanted to. It was not a failure of strength, it was a failure of hope.

  After lunch, I cleaned Huddie up in preparation for the meeting with the education person. I didn’t want anyone to think he was neglected. We put a clean pair of trackies on him and the T-shirt that I’d had printed for him that said: “You don’t have to be dying to live here, but it helps.”

  Huddie looked tired. He had got so thin and his skin seemed transparent.

  “Couldn’t we just cancel it?” he asked wearily.

  “It’s better just to get it over with. If we say they can’t come they’ll think you’ve been chained up in the attic covered in shit and eating out of a dog bowl. Then they’ll take you into care.”

  “Don’t raise my hopes,” Huddie said.

  The special needs facilitator hardly looked any older than us. He bounced into the room over to Huddie and put out his hand, which was awkward because Huddie could not raise his hand to shake his. The man withdrew his hand rather awkwardly.

  “You’re looking good,” he said cheerfully. Huddie didn’t look good. He hadn’t looked good for a while now, but I presumed that being cheerful was one of the skills the man needed for his job.

  He sat down on the chair next to Huddie, then turned to me.

  “Will a parent be joining us?”

  “No, I’m afraid a parent has had to go out,” I said.

  “Oh. Right. Well, that’s fine. So…Huddie.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve got a bit of a checklist to go through. We want to cover the waterfront.”

  “Okay.”

  The man looked down at the clipboard on his lap. “Number one: your additional educational needs — are they being delivered on a consistent basis? I know you have a tutor who comes in, but we can offer extra tuition if you
need it.”

  “I don’t think Huddie really needs anything extra,” I said. “He’s probably further ahead than anyone else in his year. I should think he could do his A Levels now.”

  “If I could use a pen,” Huddie laughed.

  “We would provide someone who takes dictation.”

  “I think it would be hard to write an essay that way,” Huddie said. “You couldn’t go back and correct anything, could you?”

  “Well, the service is there if you change your mind,” the man said briskly. “Number two: we offer career guidance in year ten. Would that be appropriate?”

  “What kind of career are you thinking of?” I asked.

  “Let’s not be negative,” he said cheerfully. “Let’s keep an open mind.”

  “The power of positive thought,” Huddie said.

  “Exactly. Just have a think about it. Number three: your social interaction needs. Are they being met?”

  “I don’t really get out much.”

  “There are all sorts of activities. Haringey provides wheelchair basketball training. Would that be of interest?”

  “It doesn’t sound like my kind of thing.”

  “There are organizations, lots of clubs.”

  “Duchenne Anonymous?” Huddie said.

  The man roared with laughter. “What a wonderful idea! At least there’s nothing wrong with your sense of humor. Number four…”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but can you not number everything? It makes it seem like Huddie’s a shopping list.”

  “Point taken. It’s all bullet points these days, isn’t it? Okay, let’s move on. Are your access needs being fulfilled on a consistent basis?”

  I was so tired of all this. “Why don’t you ask about Huddie’s access wants instead? They’re not the same as his access needs. He needs to have his wheelchair pushed but he doesn’t want to have his wheelchair pushed. He needs to be taken to the loo but he doesn’t want to be taken to the loo. He doesn’t want four people to carry him up the stairs in his wheelchair and he doesn’t want to wait alone at the bottom of the stairs for five minutes while the four people are summoned to carry him up the stairs. But what he mostly doesn’t want is for people to look at him in the way they look at people like him when they’re fulfilling his access needs.”

  The man nodded his head. “Right,” he said, and wrote down something on his clipboard, then looked up. “Well, we’re here to help. Anything we can do.”

  After he had gone, we sat in silence. That was unusual for us, but recently Huddie had begun to talk less and less. It felt like the air was gradually being squeezed out of the things we talked about.

  I finally said, “I’m sorry, Huddie. I don’t know why I did so much talking.”

  “That’s okay. We know what we want to say, so it doesn’t matter which one of us says it.”

  “Do you want to do anything now? Do you want me to read to you?”

  “Actually, I’m tired. Do you mind leaving me alone for a while?”

  “Sure,” I said as brightly as I could. In the little rowboat of Huddie’s life, now springing more and more leaks, the feet of clumsy strangers stepping in made the boat rock dangerously and it took a while for it to right itself.

  I left Huddie for a couple of hours. When I went into his room it was almost dark. You could easily forget that Huddie couldn’t switch on the lights himself. Maybe I had come in too quietly. It wasn’t exactly that he jumped in surprise but I knew the little twitch his body gave was as close as he got to it.

  “Hold on,” he said abruptly, but I had reached him too soon. His fingers were on the keyboard of his computer and he was trying to move them quickly, which was hard for him. He was trying to turn off the computer and I could see why: on the screen there was a naked man and woman. She had his penis in her mouth and was pushing what I thought must be a dildo in and out of her. The sound was turned off and it looked strange that they were doing whatever they were doing in complete silence. It must have taken Huddie a long time to make all the keystrokes to get to the site.

  I tried to compute the different ways I could handle the situation. I wondered whether I should turn the computer off, but I would not normally have done that and I knew I should behave normally. What I did was to move behind the desk his computer was on so I would not be looking at the screen.

  Huddie’s face was in shadow, but the light from the screen lit up the rest of him. I could see the problem: his tracksuit bottoms were made of thick material and he could not touch himself properly unless they came off, and that was impossible for him to do. There was almost nothing that hadn’t been taken away from Huddie, but this seemed to me the cruelest thing of all in Huddie’s world, already bursting to the seams with cruelties.

  I thought about what to do for a moment, then I came to his side of the computer but kept my back to the screen. I pushed the wheelchair away from the desk and Huddie’s hands came away from the keyboard and fell by gravity into his lap.

  “You spend too much time on that computer,” I said breezily. “You’re going to get that repetitive strain thing. Do you need to change? Did your lunch get down your throat or is it all over your trackies? Huddie, they’re so gross! Anyway, black’s not your color.” I gave a little laugh: “Gray’s better — it doesn’t show up the food so much.” That was the kind of joke we normally enjoyed.

  I bent down on my knees in front of him and began to pull on the legs of the tracksuit. “I can’t do this all on my own, Huddie,” I laughed. “You’ll have to move a bit.”

  He did his little squirm and, with difficulty, the tracksuit bottoms came off. I kept my eyes closed. I did not want to look at his penis, but I hoped it was a good size because I knew that boys always wanted that. It was fortunate that it was not a muscle: it was blood pressure that controlled it. I hoped that everything would work: luckily his fingers still had some grip in them.

  “Have a nap,” I said as I was leaving. “You didn’t sleep well last night. I’ll make sure nobody disturbs you. I’ll keep watch.”

  I waited an hour — I wasn’t entirely sure how long something like that took for boys — and then went back. Huddie had fallen asleep. He wasn’t used to so much exertion, I supposed. His head lolled over sideways and I raised it so that it was straight. It was important to keep the airways open.

  On the screen a couple of other men had joined the couple. They all looked as if they were having a good time. I switched the computer off. I knew I would not be able to get Huddie’s tracksuit bottoms on without waking him, so I went to the bathroom and brought out a clean towel, which I laid over his lap, and then wrapped a blanket round him. I would help him to go to bed later, and listen to some music with him while he fell asleep.

  When Huddie woke up he would be embarrassed even though, really, there was nothing to be embarrassed about. I knew that we would never talk about it, but I would have liked to be able to tell him that I would help him again if he wanted.

  Joseph

  SEEMING LIKE A DREAM was not the same as actually being a dream. That much Joseph understood. On the other hand, for all he knew, it could perfectly well be one. Anyway, it didn’t matter much.

  He went through the possibilities of where he might be and what might have happened to him to put him in whatever place he was. In the end, he thought it must be a hospital. He could dimly feel prodding and poking sometimes which could well be doctors. Anyway, he was comfortable, but maybe if he was in hospital he was being pumped with morphine.

  He used to spend a lot of time thinking about what songs to write or what to eat or where to go. Because he had no need to do any of those things now he had time to just think, but he was not sure how enjoyable an experience that was. He was like a jazz musician riffing on the piano, moving up and down the keyboard trying to find some notes he remembered.

  Maybe he had a kind of Alzheimer’s thing on top of everything else. Didn’t that make you forget whether you had put the kettle on but give you total re
call of what happened at your fifth birthday party? Well, he certainly remembered that. It was when he had gone to live with his grandparents after his mother had died. It was clearly a long time since they had given a birthday party: they did not seem to know that you were meant to invite other children. There were certainly no magicians or clowns like Shirley and Alan had hired for Sally’s parties in the days when marmite sandwiches and potato crisps and pink cake might be tempting for her.

  He thought his mother had died of breast cancer, but he was not sure: he supposed that in those days people did not talk about either breasts or cancer. Now people talked of little else. His grandparents were long dead and he did not miss them. He sometimes said that they were kind people, but what he really meant was that they attended to his needs without complaint — that was on the same wavelength as “kind” but not precisely the same thing. But he would never speak ill of them. They could not have wanted to take in a five-year-old boy. Particularly one whose mother had rejected everything they stood for and gone off to London to join the Communist Party — that was a first for a girl from St. Albans in those days — then took up with a bearded radical with subversive intent, not only a Jew but one who did not keep it quiet and broadcast it by singing his Jew songs. It was no surprise to them that he had impregnated her and abandoned her practically the moment she had the baby. They said that it was typical of “that world.” Joseph thought it might have been worse for them if he had not abandoned her. Would they have really wanted him to come and have a family Christmas with them? Joseph had no idea how observant a Jew Isaac Herzl was, but he did not think that cooking kosher turkey would play to his grandmother’s strengths.

  She would often say, “Enough about that man!” but they never seemed to get enough of him. At breakfast, reading the newspaper, his grandfather would sometimes pass it to his wife. She would take a quick glance and give it back to him, letting out a sigh that sounded like the last breath of a dying woman. There was a review of a concert, or some quote from Isaac Herzl about an atrocity that had been committed in a far-off country that his grandparents had never heard of. Joseph thought that they would have preferred an atrocity in a familiar place, like the Isle of Wight or Tenerife. And when they read that Isaac Herzl had been arrested at a demonstration, they looked pityingly at Joseph: on top of everything else, he was now the child of a jailbird.