The Mule

by David Quantick

  My mother is the independent type, I guess. She’s had to be ever since my father went, raising me and running her store as well (she has a small shop selling kitchenware in town), and while the experience hasn’t made her bitter or cynical in any way, I think any softness in her went out of the window the day my father left us. But she’s quite capable of love and affection in her own way, as is amply demonstrated by the way she is with her dog, Duke. Duke is almost fourteen years old now and as blind and deaf as it’s possible for an animal to be; he’s still continent, most of the time, but whatever it is that my mother feeds him makes him so windy that his entire tiny body shakes every time he breaks wind. As I stepped into the lobby of the hospital and bought some flowers (an unscented variety, in case my mother’s allergies had now expanded to include perfumes), I was looking forward to seeing her, and maybe passing an hour or so in conversation, or even companionable silence.

  * * *

  My mother was in a good mood. I could tell when the nurse cautiously opened the door to let me in and my mother looked over the top of her rimless bifocals and smiled at me. She didn’t put her book down, in fact she went straight back to reading it, but I was just glad she was feeling OK. I gave her the flowers and immediately she said to the nurse – as I knew she would – ‘Put these in water, please.’ My mother, you see, has always wanted to live her life in movies and books, and in a movie or a book, when someone in a hospital bed is given flowers, she always says to the nurse, ‘Put these in water, please.’ It was, if I’m honest with myself, the main reason I had brought her flowers, just so she could ask the nurse to put them in water. And now my mother laid her book down and sighed.

  ‘This really is the most marvellous book,’ she said. ‘I had hoped to finish it before lunch.’

  There was, I couldn’t help noticing, a substantial number of pages remaining to be read in the book, so unless lunch was being served at four o’clock in the morning, I doubted my mother would be finishing it before then. It was just her way of saying that perhaps I could have called to let her know that I was coming to see her. But if I’d done that, she would have said – as indeed Mrs Dreyfuss had – that she wanted no visitors as she didn’t like to be seen in a vulnerable state. I was simply glad that she was so pleased to see me. My mother proffered her cheek to be kissed and then, as she always did, pulled her head away just before my lips touched her skin.

  ‘How lovely to see you, Jacky,’ she said, and I could swear I felt the nurse pause in her search for a flower vase, as if thinking, Jacky? That’s no name for a grown man! Although I may have imagined it. ‘And thank you for the flowers – no, put them over there, please.’

  This time my mother’s fondness for living in a movie confused the nurse, who had found a vase and intended to put it on my mother’s bedside cabinet, which was the only flat surface in the room except for the floor. She settled for placing the vase on the floor and left us.

  ‘How are you, Mother?’ I said. ‘You look well.’

  ‘I am well,’ she said. ‘I just have this swollen ankle but when that goes down, I’ll be going home.’

  She raised her leg under the sheet, in an impressive display of muscle control for a woman in her early seventies.

  ‘How did it happen?’ I asked. ‘Mrs Dreyfuss wasn’t entirely clear on the phone.’

  ‘Mrs Dreyfuss is never entirely clear on the phone,’ my mother said. Then she looked slightly shamefaced. ‘It was Duke.’

  ‘Duke did this?’ I imagined Duke suddenly lunging from his basket to savage my mother and found it hard to picture.

  ‘I did it to myself, really,’ she said, Barbara Stanwyck about to go to the chair. ‘I was going into the breakfast room when I tripped over Duke in the hall. He never usually goes in the hall, do you, Duke?’

  For a moment I thought my mother had begun to lose her mind and was talking to a dog that wasn’t there. Then I became aware of a familiar odour in the room, something between old wet cardboard and the smell of a takeaway meal that should have been thrown away some days ago.

  ‘You brought Duke in here?’ I said, astonished. ‘How many hospital rules is that breaking?’

  As if on cue, the dog stuck his head out from under the bed.

  ‘I told them Duke would die if he was left on his own. I told them he had nobody else and I had nobody else. That’s why,’ my mother added hurriedly, ‘that’s why I didn’t want you to come in. If they knew I had a son they’d ask me why you couldn’t look after Duke.’

  ‘I can’t look after Duke,’ I said. ‘The terms of my lease expressly forbid animals.’

  ‘That’s not the point, dear,’ she said. ‘And please stop doing your face.’

  ‘What do you mean, doing my face? I can’t stop doing my face, because it’s my face.’

  ‘You’ve been doing your face ever since you were a little boy. That expression you make. Every time we told you that you were wrong and you thought you were right, you would make that face. It’s the cowboy trousers all over again.’

  I had no idea what she was talking about, so I ignored her peculiar remark and looked in the mirror. I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary and said so.

  ‘Really?’ She sighed like Katharine Hepburn at a boring soirée. ‘I expect that’s because you’re doing it all the time now. Is everything all right at home?’

  I was taken aback. My mother rarely expressed concern about other people, in case it encouraged them to talk about themselves excessively. I could see the fairness in this, as she also disliked talking about herself, and to be honest, I don’t really like to talk about myself anyway, so it worked well on both sides. But now she was asking me a direct question about my life, and I didn’t really know how to answer it.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said my mother after several seconds, perhaps a minute, had passed. ‘Is it a girl?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ I said.

  ‘Who is she this time?’ said my mother. ‘Another unattainable siren? You really must start dating women who you have a chance with. Of course, that would mean you might actually have a relationship with a real woman …’

  We had had this conversation before and I knew where it was heading. So, perhaps, did Duke, as at that moment he elected to live up to his name and let out a world-class guff.

  ‘Then again, when you did go out with a girl, I was entirely baffled. And so, I suspect, was she. Didn’t she marry your best friend at college?’

  ‘That was years ago,’ I said, moving away from Duke’s mordant cloud, ‘which reminds me. Did you ever hear anyone call me the Mule?’

  ‘The Mule?’ said my mother, Celia Johnson recalling a time long gone. ‘I can’t say that I did. Now that you mention it, you can look somewhat mule-like. I think it’s that expression of yours. Anyway, please go now, I’m very tired.’

  I was used to my mother dismissing me abruptly, and frankly I was glad to go. I didn’t know what she was talking about and she was beginning to annoy me. In fact, everything was beginning to annoy me.

  ‘Goodbye, Mother,’ I said, kissing the air near her cheek. ‘I’ll call Mrs Dreyfuss every day to see how you are.’

  ‘Call her in the mornings,’ said my mother, ‘that way you’ll have more chance of getting some sense out of her.’

  I got to my feet. I wanted to ask her about cowboy trousers but she was either falling asleep or feigning it.

  ‘Aren’t you going to kiss Duke goodbye?’ she said drowsily.

  ‘No, thank you,’ I said, and left. There are limits to filial devotion.

  * * *

  Stress isn’t a large part of my life, in fact it’s something I’ve tried hard to minimise. My reasoning is this: other men, with families and large social circles, cannot hope to avoid stress. It’s there all the time, from crying babies to work colleagues with a beef. But they’d say, I expect, that the bad times go with the good times, and they enjoy being in the bosom of their families or going bowling with their buddies, and so on. I don�
�t have a family and I don’t have any reason to go bowling, so as compensation for that I feel I should enjoy the benefits of a quiet life. I am, as I say, my own boss, I keep my own hours by and large, and the deadlines for translation aren’t too strenuous (because when all is said and done, you’re working on a book that’s already been written, proof-read, edited and published in at least one country). Thus I’m free to live a calm life as a matter of course. I can listen to the radio (not that I listen to the radio very much), I can read (which obviously is something of a busman’s holiday for me) and I can go for long walks or take holidays (I find walking dull, I have to admit, and whenever I go on holiday I wish I was home). At the end of the day, I’m my own man. My stress levels are pared to the bone.

  But not lately. Lately everything seems to be conspiring against me. Even the out-of-the-blue compliment from A.J.L. Ferber was unnerving. In all the years I had worked on her books, she had never praised anybody. Mr Walker-Hebborn himself, who’d signed Madame Ferber to the company, was no stranger to the rough end of her tongue and had never received even the briefest word of thanks when he’d shown his faith in her work by continually bringing out her early, unsuccessful books until finally the public caught on and she became the profitable authoress she is today. And he’s the boss. Everyone else was even more of a target. The woman who designed the cover of There Is No Mountain was woken at four o’clock in the morning by a furious call from Madame Ferber asking why there wasn’t a mountain on the jacket of the book. When she explained that as the book was called There Is No Mountain she felt the image of a mountain was not appropriate, Madame Ferber apparently told her she had missed the whole point of the book and had her sacked. Distributors, publishers, magazine editors had all been the unwitting victims of Madame Ferber’s ire, and woe betide the typesetter who, perhaps growing drowsy in the denser thickets of Madame Ferber’s prose, allowed a typo to slip in or lost a semi-colon (as a writer, A.J.L. Ferber is to the semi-colon what Enid Blyton was to the exclamation mark).

  And yet here was I being singled out for praise by the woman. It made no sense, and in my stressed state I could only imagine that she had some deeper, ulterior motive. Perhaps she was piling up examples of my cupidity (a word she was very fond of, incidentally) in order to present them to Mr Walker-Hebborn and thereby ensure a case for the prosecution so strong that I would never work in publishing again and would end my days teaching useful English phrases to Danish businessmen. Except I don’t speak Danish. Clearly I was becoming too stressed to think clearly. I stopped walking down the street – I was too burned up by my visit to my mother’s bedside to sit on a slow hot bus – and looked at my surroundings. There were two restaurants, a shoe shop and a bar. The day was passing and I had no work to do.

  Three minutes later I was sitting in the bar, a large martini in front of me, and feeling very slightly better. I don’t want you to get the impression that I’m some kind of heavy drinker. I’m not. I don’t keep alcohol in my apartment and I very rarely go out drinking. But on this occasion I felt that a small amount of booze would erase some of the frustrations and irritations of the last couple of days. I drank half the martini and immediately I started to feel better. Who the hell did A.J.L. Ferber think she was anyway? She was just some writer who got lucky because she wrote big, thick books that take up a lot of space on the shelf and people like that kind of thing because they think they’re getting value for money. Walker-Hebborn might as well sell her books by weight: ‘Hi, I’d like some A.J.L. Ferber, please.’ ‘Certainly, sir, would you like two or three kilos?’ ‘Hmm, cut me off six chapters and let’s see how we get on.’

  The more I thought about it, the more I wondered why she was so popular. Because, don’t get me wrong, A.J.L. Ferber was very popular. Not like the crazes you have nowadays where the charts are stuffed with some thick yarn designed to last throughout your foreign holiday, but in a more solid, long-term way. Madame Ferber had been turning out a book every couple of years since for ever was a kid, and she knew how to fill a shelf. All the books had important-sounding titles like Earth Thou Sluggard or A Heavy Woman or Society’s Elephant and they were all pretty much the same book. There was always a woman working for some corporation who nobody appreciated, and she was in a relationship with some man who also didn’t appreciate her. Sometimes she was in love with the man and sometimes she wasn’t, and sometimes it wasn’t a corporation, it was a university or a school or even a church. But it always ended with the woman rising to the top of her profession and dumping the man (who now realised how much he loved her). I had no objection to any of this. I’ve always found feminism rather sensible and I agree that men can be pretty dim. What I did find hard to stomach – and as a translator you have to remember that for me there was no avoiding this, no skipping the pages until the words THE END appeared – was A.J.L. Ferber’s unique brand of philosophy.

  I won’t attempt to explain it here, because I can’t. Suffice it to say that the books are a mixture of mysticism, communism, capitalism, feminism and even anti-feminism. A.J.L. Ferber’s heroines believe in the power of the mind, the triumph of the will, the freedom of the masses and the superiority of the individual. They believe that women are equal to men, that masculinity is a superior trait to femininity, that love will triumph and that love is for sissies. In her long career, Madame Ferber has been accused of being a Nazi, a Red, a lesbian and a raving lunatic. Somebody once said of her that she made Ayn Rand look like A.A. Milne. None of these accusations, however, has prevented her from winning several prestigious literary awards or selling substantial numbers of books.

  She has also, like most successful writers whose books make no sense, a large following of crazy people. You know the type, I guess. They can read meaning into anything, from a reference to early Iron Age religious practices to the fact that the author likes to use semi-colons (and, as I said, A.J.L. Ferber likes to use a lot of semi-colons). If the author’s books also have a vague world philosophy and are filled with phrases like ‘victory of the Power Inside’ and ‘overcoming the Soul Demon’, then it’s Christmas on Riverside Drive so far as these nutjobs are concerned. Which I imagine is also the reason Madame Ferber shuns publicity. She rarely gives interviews, there have been no public sightings since the 1980s and all her money is paid into a special bank account. When she calls me, the number’s withheld, her manuscripts come to me via her agent, and that’s it. Even Mr Walker-Hebborn has hardly met her (I asked him what she was like. ‘Tall,’ he said, ‘tall and rude.’) And now here she was telephoning my apartment to praise me. I wished I could have felt flattered but the whole thing unnerved me. I felt like someone who has a hunch he’s going to be the victim of a prank but doesn’t know what it’s going to be, only that people are being extra-nice to him and therefore it’s going to end badly.

  Maybe I was being stupid. Maybe she liked me – but she had never shown any signs of liking me before. And the way things were going, she’d be swimming against the tide of popular opinion if she did. These last few hours had just been a wash of criticism and failure for me. A stunningly beautiful woman had run out on me thanks to my own stupidity, I’d failed to help her when I was arguably ideally placed to do so and I’d been roundly abused by my own mother just for having a romantic streak. Oh, and I’d learned that everybody calls me a stupid nickname. All in all, things were just hunky-dory and tickety-boo.

  ‘Excuse me?’ said the girl behind the bar, and I realised that I’d just said, ‘Hunky-dory and tickety-boo,’ out loud. If I was a character in a sitcom, I would have made the phrase into an amusing euphonym, so she would think I’d said something normal. But I wasn’t. I was the Mule and I was feeling sorry for myself, so I shook my head, got off my stool, and was about to leave the bar when I saw something on the seat next to me. It was that morning’s newspaper. I don’t read newspapers very often, I find they contain pretty much the same news that’s on the radio and TV, but today I hadn’t listened to the radio or turned on the television.
Besides, this wasn’t headline news, just an inside page of the paper someone had folded to a middle page and carelessly left behind. But it was important enough to me. Under the headline MISSING GIRL – POLICE APPEAL was a photograph I recognised. It was Carrie, the girl I had last seen in a different bar.

  I picked up the paper and left, folding it and placing in my pocket until I could get back to my apartment. Once inside, I took it out and put in on my breakfast table. The photograph was not one I’d seen – that is, it wasn’t one of the images Carrie had shown me. It was a passport shot, in fact, and not a new one. Her hair was different and she seemed a few years younger. But it was definitely her. The text below the photo was frustratingly brief. It said that police had released the photograph in an attempt to get anyone who remembered seeing her to come forward. It also added that the girl – whom they didn’t name, which I thought was odd – had been missing for a couple of days and ‘concerned parties’ were anxious to trace her. All in all, it was one of the vaguest missing person appeals I had ever seen.

  I admit, my knowledge of the whole missing persons process is a bit slender. In fact, my only experience of it comes from the time my father left my mother. He had been supposed to come home that evening and when he wasn’t home by midnight, my mother steeled herself to call the police who, while not exactly mocking her, did manage to suggest that it was perfectly natural for a husband to stay out late and not call the little lady to tell her what he was doing. In fact, the officer on duty, according to my mother, even went so far as to imply that if he were in my father’s place, he too would come home as late as possible. But the shoe was on the other foot when, twenty-four hours later, my mother called the police again, this time entirely distraught, and they were forced to put out an alert.