by Alice Jolly
He holds my hand against his cheek a moment longer, then he leans down and kisses my forehead, so gently that I hardly feel his lips. I want to catch hold of his hand but I know that I mustn’t. He turns and walks away. The street is monochrome and swept by a cutting wind. Other people weave around him, heading towards the station, or pushing to cross the road. At the corner he looks back and waves.
I’m gripped by a black panic. I must run after him and stop him, say those vital words I needed to say, whatever they were. But he’s gone and I’m alone, gasping for breath. He’s dying, dying. The word echoes in my head. I step back into the doorway of a building, my hands flailing, as I try to push images of that child away.
The child is far out on the beach. She wears a blue smocked dress and she’s making patterns in the mud with her new ladybird Wellington boots. When she looks up, she sees that her father is far away, down towards the sea. A russet-coloured dog, which belongs to Mr Reynolds, the farmer, has followed them down the beach. It races on sprawling legs, barking and leaping to snap at flies. The sky is bronze and the wind pulls this way and that. The yellow clouds flap like sheets cracking on a line. In the distance thunder stirs. Gulls swoop overhead, screaming.
The child pulls at the end of her plaits, which are secured with see-through purple bobbles, then she runs to follow her father. He stands at the water’s edge, where lines of grey lace froth and fade across the sand. The sun is setting over the sea, its rays divided like the spokes of a wheel, breaking down through the edges of the clouds. The child’s father is held by the light, and the edges of him are turned fiery red. She stops still to watch him there, seeing his hair standing on end, his hands waving.
Then she runs towards him and he sweeps her up in his arms, holding her too tight. His eyes are bright as flames. The child grips at his jumper, feeling the softness of it in her hands. This is her favourite jumper – a grey turtleneck with a cable stitch running down the front. Over his shoulder she watches the sea roll up the beach towards them, slow, and then slide back. Next time will it come too close and suck up their legs? Her mother would be angry if she knew that they were out on the beach at the time when the tide turns.
Her father puts her down and then bends to talk to her. He’s telling her about a place he went to once. It’s a place called Mexico and it’s on the other side of the globe, but it has a beach as well. Not like this one – a beach of turquoise and gold. And in that place, at certain times, stars come down to the earth. Is that what he’s saying? The child can’t hear properly because of the sea and the screaming of the gulls, but she loves the words anyway.
She says–couldn’t you make that happen here? And her father says that perhaps it might be possible. Perhaps if they used her butterfly net then they might be able to catch a star.
And that place on the other side of the globe – is that where Aunt Amelia and Rob live? she asks. The letters which come from there have blue postmarks and parrot stamps.
No, her father says, not there. That’s Rhodesia – another place very far away.
Can we go to Mexico? Can we go?
Her father is silent and his arms are still. The thunder growls, and the wind pulls at the child’s dress. The sun is lost behind a cloud and the beach turns dark. We should go back, her father says. But the child doesn’t want to go. A sudden squall of rain comes in from the sea, splattering across the sand. The dog runs close to them, crouches, barks and then dives away. Further up the beach it stops, watching them, barks again, then whines. The child stares back up the beach. The gate which leads to the lane is tiny in the distance.
The child’s father is looking out over her shoulder, at the sea. The clouds hang low now and are the colour of pewter. The rain falls harder, dancing through the air, tossed this way and that by the wind. The child watches her father’s eyes. Something far out at sea has taken hold of them and keeps them there. The child turns, trying to see what it is, but everything is lost behind a curtain of grey.
The sea draws breath. A line of water dashes towards them, and the child feels the pull of it around her new boots. Her father’s shoes and the bottom of his trousers are soaked. A crack of thunder shakes the sky, a fork of lightning splits the horizon.
The child feels her father’s hand gripping tight around her wrist. She’s still looking back at the sea, but he’s pulling her up the beach. Her boots flap and suck in the mud, and rain batters down onto her bare arms. She can’t see the gate, or the lane, or the sea wall. But the dog is ahead of them, barking again and again. Her legs ache and it hurts to breathe.
She imagines the sea behind them. Like a great monster it will gather itself together. Black and slimy, with red eyes, it will gush up the beach, carrying them with it. The lane will be flooded, the gate ripped from its hinges, the trees pulled up by their roots. The black water is clinging to her legs. It will catch hold of her and her father, and fill their mouths with blackness.
Run, her father says. Run. He reaches down and lifts her up. His breath rasps in his throat and her swinging legs bump against him. She imagines saltwater filling their mouths, their noses and ears. Soon they will be swept down into the deep and her father will not be able to keep hold of her hand. She’ll be wrenched away from him and swallowed in darkness.
Then suddenly she’s at the gate and her mother is there with her face screwed up tight. Rain has plastered her hair across her cheek. She wears no hat or coat but a pair of binoculars swings from her shoulders. She’s shouting at them but the child can’t hear the words. The girl’s father puts her down and her foot touches mud. One of her new ladybird boots has gone. She pulls at her father’s hand. My boot. My boot.
I’ll go back, her father says. No, no, her mother shouts.
Let me go with him. Let me go with him.
Her mother catches hold of her hand, tight, as her father runs back down the beach. The child pulls on the end of her arm, screaming, Let me go. Let me go. She kicks and thrashes, falling down into the mud. Her mother tries to pick her up, but still she punches and struggles, her head shaking back and forwards. She turns her head and bites into her mother’s wrist, but although her mother cries out, she doesn’t release her grip. The child kicks, her one boot smashing against her mother’s shin. For a moment her face comes close to her mother’s. She sees eyes set hard, and a mouth gripped shut.
Then her father is back beside them, holding her boot. Sobbing, the child takes it from him and he reaches down and picks her up. Together, they all go through the gate and hurry up the lane, heads bent against the weight of the rain. The strands of barbed wire which edge the lane rattle in the wind. Ahead of them, Marsh End House, redbrick and solid, stands up too high in the flat and battered landscape.
They cross the drive, which is half-underwater, then enter the house. The back door slams shut. Now the only sound is wet clothes dripping on to the tiled floor and the lid of a pan rattling on the hob. The child stares down at her dress and the one boot which she holds in her hand. Everything is caked brown with mud. Her mother is shouting at her father. For God’s sake. You promised me, you promised me. You of all people. And look at her, just look.
The child is pressed against her mother’s stiff mackintosh. But she wants to say, No, no. You don’t understand. Because it isn’t fear that is making her cry. Her father stands near the back door, quite still and silent – but he understands, he knows. She wants to be back out on the beach with sun breaking through the cloud and the tide turning.
From the kitchen the boiling pan rattles on its ring, and then, with a hiss, liquid spills across the top of the oven. The child’s mother goes to turn the pan down and fetches a blanket from a cupboard under the stairs. She tugs off the child’s muddy dress and wraps her in the scratchy blanket. The girl’s father is still staring out through the panes of the back door towards the sea.
What are you doing? The mother’s voice is stretched tight.
I’m waiting, the father says.
For what? There’
s nothing there.
Her father doesn’t turn around.
Come away from the door. There’s nothing there.
There is, the child says.
No, there isn’t.
I saw it. I saw a monster.
Be quiet. The child’s mother pulls the scratchy blanket too tightly around her. The child is still watching her father but her mother catches hold of her chin and forces her face towards her. Monsters? Don’t be so stupid. There aren’t any monsters. But the child knows her mother is lying.
The No Name Café, Moscow
November 1990
I met Jack every day, hurrying from the college to the No Name Café. When I arrived, I’d wipe a circle in the steamed-up glass of the window. And then I’d see him there, and he’d always be writing in a blue notebook. A pen would be gripped in his hand, and his tortoiseshell half-moon glasses would be perched on the bridge of his nose. Sometimes I’d just stand there and watch him for a while before going in. I liked to see his thick fingers around that slim, green pen. And I liked his stillness, and the way he looked up occasionally, staring into the air, thinking.
With him, for the first time, I was not alone.
If the weather was more than normally bad, we’d sit in that café for hours, talking and talking, until it seemed that the words themselves were quite worn out. Often we talked about my childhood, my father, the reasons why I couldn’t make decisions. Jack had theories on all of that. When he asked me questions about myself he never let me get away with easy answers. He could be harsh and critical if he suspected any evasion or pretence. He would never say anything directly against Rob but he made it clear that he thought I was throwing my life away. ‘When are you going to stop playing roles in other people’s movies,’ he said, ‘and decide for yourself what you want?’
He was extraordinarily well-read. He knew about medicine, religion, philosophy, astronomy, art, ancient history. But it wasn’t his knowledge which impressed me, it was his ability to turn an idea around and see it in a totally new way. Frequently I was annoyed by him, but I indulged him because I understood that he had an urgent need to pass his ideas on to someone, before it was too late.
I was always trying, in a pathetic way, to find some means of impressing him. I told him about all the different places I’d lived in, and expounded the benefits of travel. But, despite having travelled far more widely than me, he wasn’t convinced. ‘Is it so interesting?’ he’d say. ‘Really, do you think that? I mean, isn’t a tree in London as interesting as a tree in Moscow? You know, the desire to be free can be its own prison.’ When he said that, it was as though someone had switched on a light inside my head.
On another occasion I talked to him about Rob’s work. I supposed that he would be interested because he did care passionately about what was happening in Russia. But he said that he was too old for all of that. At his age he could only really put faith in the possibility of changes in individuals. Then he said, ‘I suppose, on a personal level, that people get fascinated by situations like this because big problems can be so much easier to deal with than small ones.’ I didn’t reply because I didn’t want to think about what he might mean.
On days when the weather was better, he showed me Moscow as no one else could have done. Before I met him, it had seemed to me like a city designed by Escher. Nothing joined together in the way I expected. Street-names, people’s names, even the names of the Metro stops seemed to change all the time. If I asked directions, people turned away, frightened to be seen talking to a foreigner.
But with Jack it was different and I started to understand the city. Often we just wandered, making decisions about which street to walk down according to where a ray of sunlight might be found. On other occasions Jack took on the role of tour guide, taking me to the Tryetiakov Gallery, the Novodyevichii Convent, Tolstoi’s House and Victory Park. He also took me to churches, many of which were newly reopened, their icons recently put back in place.
I loved the way he looked – that swept-back hair and slightly hooked nose. Those strange golden-green eyes with their dark lashes, and their suggestion of something exotic, powerful, ancient. Those smooth circles of blue at the side of his eyes where his glasses normally sat. I loved his otherness, the fact that I knew him, and I didn’t. Both of us were clear from the beginning that our friendship couldn’t last, and perhaps that was part of what gave it such intensity. We both felt as though we were being given something which we weren’t really allowed. Rented time – that’s what Jack called it.
A couple of times, when cold and hunger got the better of us, we sat in the sterile dining room of an Intourist hotel and had lunch. Even in those places the food was barely edible. I paid for those meals because Jack never had much money. And it wasn’t just some delay in funds being transferred from the States. He really didn’t have money. He’d come to Moscow because an American government aid programme had offered him some work. Usually they would never have considered him. He hadn’t practised medicine for nearly twenty years and he’d written articles that were considered extreme. But American neurologists who can speak Russian are hard to find, he said, and so he’d got the job. But now it was at an end, and so was the money.
Occasionally a cheque for a few dollars arrived – royalty payments on books he’d written years before – but that was all. In Moscow he rented a room in the apartment of an elderly woman – Mrs Galina Pastukhova – who’d once worked for his family. She had a small dog called Kashtanka whose antics he described to me in rather too much detail. He didn’t have a house back in the States, or any family. He had been married once but his wife had died more than twenty years ago. All he possessed was the day he was standing up in. He wanted no dealings with material things, no clutter, no distractions. It was a waste of time to ask him what he might do next month, or even next week, because he really never thought about such things.
He believed in all sorts of stuff that I thought cranky – past lives, astrology, faith healing and leylines. He also told me that having one of his molars taken out had cured the arthritis in his knee. It surprised me that someone so intelligent should believe such things, but I never said so. As a young man he’d experimented widely with drugs and he explained to me that the mind is a limiting mechanism which keeps us from seeing too much. Drugs get rid of those limitations, he said.
He was incredibly easily pleased. A packet of shortbread, a bunch of flowers, the colour of the paint on a particular door – those things made him happy. He enjoyed the fact that our birthdays were two days apart. I was more interested in the day in between. I never let him say anything about the age difference between us because I wouldn’t allow it to have any importance. But it did have an effect on our friendship. Twenty-nine, sixty-four – that immutable equation. I had something he didn’t have, and would never have again. I was powerful as I’d never been before. Our friendship was the only thing in my life which I knew to be truly mine.
30/16 Ulitsa Pravdy, Moscow
December 1990
Maya’s note was written on mauve paper which smelt faintly of lavender. I found it lying on the kitchen table when I got back from an afternoon with Jack. How had it arrived there? Had Rob left it for me that morning? My name was written on the envelope in watery blue ink. The handwriting was unsteady, with a shaky flourish to the capital letters. I took off my coat, and one of my jumpers, then pulled the envelope open to find three scrawling lines covering the entire page. Would be lovely to see you. Do come round any time. I laid the note down on the table, vaguely hoping that it might just evaporate, but it lay there, solid and insistent.
I wanted to sit down and do nothing for a while, but since I’d been in Moscow I’d lost the ability to do that. My mind was churning around, replaying the conversations I’d had with Jack. I’d just spent an afternoon with him but still there were a hundred questions I wanted to ask him. I felt as though I was on the brink of understanding some vital idea which would unravel every mystery, but no matter how
hard I tried, I couldn’t quite fix that idea in my mind.
I started to tidy the kitchen and picked up a rubbish bag which needed taking downstairs. As I opened the door of the flat, I heard small feet tapping across the landing. It was the little girl from next door. The sound of her feet, and the pattern of her movements, had become familiar. Left foot, right foot, both feet together. The game she played was a kind of hop-scotch organized around a deep crack which ran across the concrete of the landing. She made her way along the length of that crack, jumping from one side to the other. Left foot, right foot, both feet together.
She stopped when she saw me, fixed me with her blank eyes, then went on. Her arms stuck out sideways because she wore so many layers of clothing. Around her, the landing was filled by a greenish glow from low-hanging striplights which stayed on all day and all night. A star-shaped fracture glittered in one of the panes of the landing window. Behind the glass, long icicles hung down. Left foot, right foot, both feet together.
I went back into the kitchen and found a tin of chocolates that one of Rob’s colleagues had brought over from New York. I picked out three and went back to the landing. The child’s tiny, pinched hand reached for the chocolates. She stared at the coloured cellophane wrappers, then pushed them down deep into the pocket of her skirt. I’d given her chocolates before but I suspected that she didn’t eat them. I think she thought them too precious for that. I tried a few words of Russian but she didn’t seem to understand.
As I moved towards the stairs, a rising cry came from above and a splintering crash. The bag of rubbish slid from my hand. The little girl stood on her left leg, like a stork. I heard a door open downstairs and an elderly man came out, disturbed by the noises from above. I’d seen this old man often before, and his wife. Both in their eighties, they were known to be staunch Communists. His suit was always clean, the creases sharp. Sometimes he wore a chest full of medals. She wore a buttercup-yellow cotton dress, a neat cardigan, a cloth tied on her head. The old man peered upstairs for a long moment, shook his head in contempt, then disappeared back inside his flat, shutting the door.