by Bella Pollen
‘I’ve been offered a job,’ I told Wolf. A young NBC journalist working in Cambodia had committed suicide. Her papers had finally been found, along with her diary. The network wanted someone to retrace her journey and cover the MIA story at the same time. It was something I was really interested in doing it but I’d been finding excuses to put off the decision for as long as possible.
‘You could come too now that you’ve quit and are on welfare.’
Wolf looked up questioningly.
‘I already agreed to go,’ I told him.
daniel
As soon as Bevan appears round a bend in the drive, Rory stops the Rover and gets out. From here the house is still magnificent. When he shuts his eyes he can conjure up the drive before the elms were cut down. Their replacements, limes and turkey oaks, stand nearly 15 feet high. One day, not in Rory’s lifetime perhaps, but one day, the drive will look like it did when we were boys. The trees will outlive us all.
Spring is on its way. The buds are swelling on the horse chestnuts. The grass around my headstone has shot up to knee-high. Rory slings the dead flowers into the nettles then opens the plastic bag that he’s brought with him from London. Inside is a photograph frame: a picture of a fantastically sexy girl wielding a whip – he leans it against the headstone. He crouches down and scrawls a message across the glass with a felt tip. ‘Daniel, you fucker, thought you could do with a change.’
Rory waits for Alistair in the office where he reads the crumpled remains of the Telegraph. It’s not that he’s worried about getting the money back for the seaweed machine, it’s just that it’s so brain-damaging, the relentlessness of the whole thing. Trying to pre-empt Dad’s financial gaffes is like trying to second guess the direction a frog will jump next. He reads a biographical account of Ted Hughes’s marriage, occasionally, Eeyore-like, surveying the bulging pile on the desk, but old habits die hard. Furious with himself, he throws the Telegraph down and works the mail methodically until he hears a door slam and his name being shouted.
‘Office,’ he shouts back.
The buckles of Alistair’s gumboots make a clicking noise as he walks down the hall.
‘The fence to the old paddock needs replacing,’ he says from the doorway, as though he’d seen his son at breakfast rather than nearly two months previously. ‘Come take a look at it with me?’
‘Dad, we need to talk.’
‘And bring that farming catalogue, would you?’ Alistair flutters his hand. ‘Padded thingy near the bottom, could have something useful in it.’
Rory hands over the catalogue.
‘Dad.’
‘Deer have been a bloody nuisance this spring.’ Alistair slices through the envelope with his letter opener. ‘We’re going to have to fence all the new trees as well.’
‘Pa,’ Rory says very quietly.
Nervous, Alistair fumbles with the envelope, dropping its contents to the floor.
Rory bends down, ‘I need you to listen, please just for a minute—’ then he breaks off. What he’s handing his father is not a farming catalogue with its comforting photographs of ploughed fields and Massey Fergusons but a copy of a video with the words ‘For your next bonfire’ scrawled over a Newsline label.
* * *
‘Something the matter, Rory?’ Alistair queries innocently.
Rory is looking thunderous. He paces back and forth across the small room. Nanny, Grandpa, Ma and Pa sit in Nanny’s room, all glued to the small screen.
‘It’s just that you seem a little ill at ease,’ Alistair says, enjoying his son’s discomfort hugely.
‘I didn’t particularly want you to see this,’ Rory says through gritted teeth. ‘I didn’t particularly want anyone to see it for that matter.’
‘Shame about the twenty million Americans then,’ Alistair quips cheerfully. He turns his attention back to the television and gives a tremendous guffaw. He pats Nanny’s knee.
‘Oh Nanny, you have such screen presence, I’ve always thought so.’
Nanny looks deliciously pleased with herself. She carefully fingers another almond slice on the plate in front of her.
‘Too bad our nice Miss Munroe wasn’t around when Rory cut up the dining room curtains so he could dress like Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music,’ Alistair says.
Audrey glances at Rory apprehensively.
‘Remember, Nanny?’ Alistair gently removes the remains of Nanny’s paper napkin from her mouth.
‘I do, yes indeed.’
Rory stops pacing and looks at the screen just in time to catch Alistair and Audrey sipping whisky through their curly-wurly straws. The shot cuts to Grandpa holding the Chinese figurines in his hands. Rory has already seen the sequence of this footage and is terrified of what’s coming next. He thinks of the weeks ahead spent fending off journalists, his grandfather in the spotlight, his family humiliated and ridiculed.
‘Right, we’re not watching this any more.’ He leaps up and attempts to switch off the television, cursing himself for not warning his father about Maggie.
Alistair grips his arm, ‘Shut up and stop being a bore.’
‘And do sit down,’ Nanny commands.
On screen, Alistair is leaning on the dairy door, the baby beaker clipped to his dirty Barbour, painstakingly describing his recipe for buffalo face packs. The dread footage of Grandpa, or even any reference to it is not yet evident, nevertheless Rory can hardly bear to watch. His own commentary, rather than Maggie’s, is running over the visuals so he cannot see that somehow she has achieved something rather remarkable. She has caught the eccentricity and yet the charm, she has shown the snobbery but also the sadness but as still no sign of Grandpa and his swastika knife appear on screen, Rory’s relief gives way to other less noble emotions. Alistair looks closely at his son and quite correctly reads embarrassment hidden behind the scowl on his face.
And at that moment, something dawns on me – what Maggie must have known all along and Rory has singularly failed to understand – that however bizarre our parents’ moral codes and way of life might seem to the rest of the world, they are perfectly ordinary to them. People can be happy with the way they’re portrayed as long as you show them just the way they are and judging from my father’s response Maggie has succeeded in doing just this.
‘What a pompous twit you turned out to be, Rory,’ Alistair says lightly. ‘I rather thought we’d brought you up better than that.’
Rory looks wildly at him.
‘I may not be the world’s most successful businessman, but at least I try. In fact, your mother and I spend all our time trying to keep Bevan going for you.’
‘For me?’ Rory finally loses it. ‘For me?’ He jumps to his feet again. ‘How can you say that. I hate this bloody house,’ he howls.
‘No,’ Alistair shouts, ‘I hate this bloody house.’
‘What are you talking about, Dad?’ Rory’s totally wrong-footed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Exactly what I said. I hate this bloody house.’
‘Dad, this is your home, this has always been your home.’
‘Yes, it’s my home,’ Alistair says vehemently, ‘but God knows it’s no fun any more. Has it never occurred to you that we kept it going for Daniel, that we keep it going for you? For your children?’
This hits Rory low in the guts and winds him totally. ‘But why did you never say anything?’ he eventually manages.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Alistair says wearily. ‘I don’t suppose you ever asked.’
* * *
In London, Rory shows the film to Benj. Five minutes aren’t up before Benj is laughing his head off. He quickly apologizes and snaps opens another can of Coca Cola. When the credits finally roll, he says, ‘So she didn’t shop Grandpa after all … and how guilty out of ten do we feel?’
‘All right, all right,’ Rory says grudgingly, ‘I suppose you think I should go after her.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, she’s completely unsuitable.’ Benj helps himself to anothe
r slice of toast and cod’s roe. ‘You know these American women, they all insist on central heating.’ He ignores the dirty look. ‘Besides, you can’t trust these foreign correspondents, she’d be off with a scud stud in the blink of an eye.’
This is too much for Rory’s frayed nerves. ‘Screw you,’ he takes a swipe at his cousin. Benj ducks. ‘That’s not to say you shouldn’t apologize though.’ Benj calmly squeezes more lemon onto the cod’s roe. ‘You were, after all, particularly vile to her.’
‘So you are saying I should call her then?’ Rory says hopefully.
‘Let’s not exaggerate,’ Benj says. ‘A brief note would be more than adequate.’
* * *
To say what? Maggie had not sent a note. He’d taken the envelope out of the dustbin at Bevan and given it a good shaking. Why had she sent it? Professional courtesy? Where was the boyfriend and was he still around? Why had she sent it to Bevan and not to London? These questions are all irrelevant but serve as reasonably good excuses not to leave a message every time he calls and gets her answering machine. The fact is Maggie’s film has made him think. She’s reached a kind of truth he has been unwilling to face. She’s presented his life to him, everything he stands for, and he’s unsure how he feels about such painful exposure. He knows too that his anger is misdirected. The real culprits were around long before she appeared; himself, our father, me for copping out so spectacularly. Is there anything else you ever wanted to be? Maggie had asked. Not the eldest son, Pa had said. Rory feels a tightness like a rubber band around his heart and the pain sends him underground.
* * *
One night about a week later he has a dream. It’s after the fire and he’s sneaked up to the east wing. The forbidden east wing. He stands by the door, terrified by the blocked shapes of furniture shrouded in dust sheets. I am in the middle of the room wearing my games kit; shorts, an Aertex shirt and scuffed Clarks sandals. He watches me as I walk round in circles, humming the same tune over and over again. I smile at him, he smiles back. Then without warning the floorboards give way and I slip through. My arms are thrown out to him but he is rooted to the spot until the moment I disappear. Only then, as if magically released, is he able to rush to the hole. He looks down and sees me, he stretches out his arms but I am still falling. I will fall for ever.
He wakes up in a cold sweat. For a while he lies there, darkness encircling him, then, knowing sleep is impossible, goes to the kitchen for some water. He knocks against the drainer and saucepans clatter to the floor.
Saucepans clatter to the floor. Take the bike, Daniel, take the bike.
The Bevans are a careless family, we lose a lot of people. Alcohol, pills, guns, self-loathing, fear, weakness, guilt …
Saucepans clatter to the floor. And now I am there, back in the house. I am with him.
I pick up the pans and stack them one by one on the drainer.
‘What’s up?’ says Rory, sleepy and crumpled from the doorway.
‘I’m having a little problem sleeping.’ I balance the last saucepan on top of the plate rack.
‘It would help if you went to bed,’ he says and I can tell how annoyed he is.
‘How ’bout I borrow the car?’
‘Again?’ His tone is sarcastic. ‘It’s only just back from the body shop.’
‘I need to go out.’ I try to keep the alcohol from my voice, then I think, Damn him – why the hell should I?
‘Go out. Where? It’s four in the morning.’
‘See a man about a dog. Ha.’
‘You’re drunk.’ He takes the bottles from the dustbin. ‘Christ, Daniel.’
‘Tanked, tiddly, pissed, pie-eyed, bibulous, soused, shaken and stirred but not drunk, so what’s new?’
‘Daniel you promised.’
‘Oh, my friend, be warned by me that Coca Cola, milk and tea are all the human frame requires and with that the wretched brother—’
‘Daniel, just go to bed.’
‘I want to go to Highgate. To the cemetery.’
‘Well I’m not letting you take the car so you’ll have to bloody well walk.’
‘It’s fifty degrees below zero!’ I shout at him.
‘Take the fucking bike then,’ he shouts back.
Take the bike, Daniel, take the bike.
And he hurls the padlock keys at my feet.
* * *
In the back of the cupboard, behind the Domestos and the Ajax, Rory finds the bottle of whisky. He unscrews the lid and drinks it. The brown liquid slides down his throat like treacle.
He wakes about six hours later. He makes it to the loo just in time. When he surfaces again it’s two o’clock in the afternoon and someone is beating a gong inside his head. He endures another bout of vomiting after the first coffee. After the fourth coffee he takes a cold shower and calls Maggie.
maggie
Ever since I worked for Newsline I have kept two packed suitcases in the closet by my front door. They’re there for quick escapes. One is labelled hot, the other, cold. Inside the hot suitcase are three pairs of cotton combats, T-shirts, boots, and plenty of underwear. I searched the loft for some books to throw in as well. I always seem to take more books than clothes and leave them wherever they get finished. It’s nice to drop a well-thumbed paperback in places you’ve been. It feels a little like carving your name onto a tree.
When the phone rang, I let the machine pick it up.
‘I was going to hang up again, but…’
I recognized his voice immediately. Held the book tight in my hand.
‘But then I wondered whether all those consecutive hang-ups might not seem a little creepy even by New York standards so—’
I grabbed at the portable under my bed.
‘Christ, Maggie,’ I heard the surprise in his voice, ‘I didn’t think … you’re up early.’
A month ago I would have told him that I was up early a lot, that I wasn’t sleeping too good, but, crouched on the floor I didn’t know what to say. Even the simplest of sentences seemed beyond my power so I just said I was packing.
‘You’re going somewhere? When are you back?’
‘Oh you know, this year, next year, sometime, never.’
‘There was a long pause. ‘Look I just called to say … well … how have you been?’ His voice took on my own stilted tone.
‘Fine … you?’
‘Good … great.’
Wonderful. After three months of silence we were finally speaking, the way two people speak when they know a tree might fall on their head any second.
‘Why did you call, Rory?’ Three months was a long time. What was I hoping for? I had no idea, an apology? Some kind of acknowledgement that I was not the total bitch he thought. But there was nothing but silence down the end of the line.
‘Rory, I’m leaving this evening. I’m going to Cambodia and…’
‘I’m sorry,’ he cut in, ‘I’m obviously keeping you.’
‘No, no, it’s fine,’ I trailed off and the conversation drifted even further out of reach.
‘OK, well … it was nice to talk to you,’ he said and I felt pride kicking in. I had got real efficient at not thinking about Rory these days. Keep tearing off the scab and it doesn’t heal.
I dug my nails into my hand. ‘Yeah, you too,’ I said and hung up the phone.
daniel
In the white sunlight of late afternoon, amongst the usual limo hassling and police whistling of JFK airport, Rory throws his holdall into a yellow cab.
‘Bowery, corner of Rivington Street,’ Rory says, ‘and please hurry.’
* * *
Maggie had said that her flight was this evening. It is now four o’clock. Four o’clock is afternoon. Five o’clock is still afternoon. Six is a hybrid hour, between afternoon and evening. Six is the earliest an evening can reasonably be expected to begin. This evening lasts until tonight. Seven is this evening, so is eight. Nine is pushing it. Ten o’clock is definitely tonight. Rory does his sums and reasons therefore that
Maggie’s flight is due to leave between six and ten o’clock, which means she would have to leave the house between three-thirty and seven-thirty giving him a four-hour window of opportunity – except judging by traffic it will probably be four-thirty before he arrives, knocking one pane out of his window. Still, three out of four is a 75 per cent chance, Ladbrokes would give him 3–1. If Maggie were a horse, these would be good odds. But hang on – Maggie didn’t say flying this evening. She said leaving. That could mean leaving the apartment this evening which could mean flying tonight. This changes the odds considerably. Anything is possible.
* * *
As he presses the intercom on the outside of Maggie’s building, noises from the real world penetrate his consciousness almost for the first time since he’s left London. The air is warm and carries the smell of frying food. Sun gleams off the stainless steel of fridge doors and sink tops along the street. Traffic streams ceaselessly by. Then the door he’s leaning against buzzes violently and he stumbles in.
maggie
‘Two minutes,’ I shouted at the intercom, ‘Oh and could you please help me down with my bag?’ I left the front door open, suitcase zipped shut in front of it and looked around quickly for my backpack. When, instead of the driver from Tel Aviv cars I’d been expecting, Rory bounded through the door, there was no way my mouth would open, let alone have words come out of it.