That was where I first saw your father by the way. Craig’s Close, December 1957. I had been down Rose Street, the usual Friday evening at Milne’s Bar and the Abbotsford. You have heard of the famous ‘Rose Street Poets’, yes, MacCaig, McDiarmid, Robert Garioch, Tom Scott? Shabby old Milne’s was the place to be for a budding poet like yours truly but intimidating as hell for a woman. Today it has probably been tagged with something horrendous like the ‘Poets’ Pub’.
Morven had known for years that I wrote poetry and she took me to Milne’s Bar my first night in town. Straightaway I was hooked, the atmosphere so vibrant. I had never heard such conversation, the politics and the passion, the smoke and the shouts. And the men, the men!
I was intimidated to begin with but such a groupie, everyone deferring to Comrade MacDiarmid when he deigned to drop in, MacCaig holding court like a sardonic head teacher, Mackay Brown’s ancient, unreachable sadness, sucking at you like the tide. I had a little crush on George but he was no looker, I tell you that. Morven said never to let on that I wrote, no matter how good it might be. I was just a woman, tolerated as possible inspiration, more useful for fucking. Even Sylvia Plath would have been laughed out the door, her inferiority predetermined by her sex. So I kept quiet, looking forward to the day when I could reveal myself as the mysterious ‘Samuel Davidson’ whose poems had become a publishing sensation. If only! Because no journal published my work, under that name or any other.
Those men, they were like none I had ever met, sharp and cruel, full of imagination. They were so attractive but I was still so green, I didn’t have the self-confidence to take them on. That is why I gravitated to your father. He could not have been more different, he reminded me of the men in my hometown, not much fun but gravely reassuring. Morven said he would make a ‘great project’ and gave me six months to corrupt him. But I was protective of Edward, he always seemed a bit bemused by the modern world, like he’d fallen asleep in 1895 and wakened up 50 years later. He was always blinking, does he still do that, like everything is a bit too bright?
Your father, yes, your dear father. I was amused by his haughty, militaristic bearing as he marched down the steps of Craig’s Close that first night. He was wearing a long black coat and carrying an umbrella, mud splattered on his well-pressed trousers. The close was narrow enough but I was tipsy and decided to make it more so, making sure he had to squeeze past me. As he did I regaled him with an off the cuff sonnet. He hesitated, then stopped and turned. After all, what man can resist a poem recited by a beautiful woman? His blush was a beautiful rose pink but he accepted my offer of a drink and off we trotted to the Grassmarket.
What a story that would have made! Truly we all crave romance and if you are an emotional pygmy who swallows the lumps in his throat then I pity your underhand need to keep it hidden. In truth it was another projection, the romantic life that could have been mine among that coal-stained Presbyterian stone. I did regale him as he passed but his look, his look, it was cold as Greyfriars kirkyard.
A more tranquil mademoiselle would have let it go with a light-hearted bow and onto the next bar. But I brooded about that face for days. So disdainful, the way he almost shook himself down after turning away, like settling his feathers back in place. Clearly the religious type. I would not have believed he worked in the brewery warehouses. He came across more as a minister-in-waiting, sorry, a priest. Edward, I am quite sure, remains as Catholic as they come. Here in Havana I see so many like him, so many. They each have those invisible stigmata, hidden but indelible.
I stop reading and rub my eyes. My wife’s left one of her face-creams on the computer table. Geranium, maybe lavender. It smells like one of her oily baths. I rub a little bit on my finger, then my face, making sure I do those gentle circular motions under the eyes like I’ve seen her do.
That’s three entries so far. The old bitch is getting into it now, moving up the gears. Is she making up for lost time, or maybe she knew she was running out of time. I never did find out what the terminal cause was. Cancer, heart failure, liver disease. The Big C is probably the most likely. All it takes with cancer is the socially maladjusted specialist telling you to wind the clock to three, four months and start counting down. The shock must be stunning.
How do you begin to deal with a deadline like that? I mean, it’s not like waiting to see who your football team signs in the last minutes of the transfer window. This is a dead-line. My mother might have spent her entire life in some smug Zen present, all that Dead Poets Society carpe diem bollocks. But last orders please and here they come a-tumbling, all the repressed fears and tears of a lifetime, her essential nature finally laid open to the pitiless light.
I scratch my balls, trying to establish the themes of my unexamined life. Nothing comes to mind. I’ll be the grinning death-bed fool. Just keep that sweet morphine coming nurse, not to kill the pain but erase my ghost-faced wife sitting there sneaking peaks at her watch.
I close down the computer and open the curtains. The rubbish wagon has left wide circles in the snow. The bright green bins are out of place, the Stillhouse glowing yellow under the wet paper sky. I can’t remember the last time I saw blue. It’s snowing, it’s always snowing. I watch the hunched figure in the brightly lit weigh-bridge booth. Ronnie most likely, tallying the weight of this week’s grain lorries. His big nose will be running, it’s always fuckin running.
My wife must’ve cleared the bird table in the garden and put out some fresh nuts and seeds. The thickening flurry’s beginning to bury them but no bird swoops down for a last peck. Nothing’s moving but the snow. I’ve never watched the mysterious way that snow piles up without me noticing, even as I watch it. Snow just happens. More exactly, piles of snow just happen. There it is, life examined! That’s as serious as the analysis should be. I’ll refuse my mother’s confessional soul-twitchings, better piles of snow than pangs of conscience.
I see her now, clear as day. She’s on a beach, staring at the quicksilver Caribbean, the sand white as the snow falling beyond the window. The surf’s whispering something she can’t catch but the words will come to her later. That’s what the seething Cuban night is for.
‘Are you up there?’
Of course I’m here mum, I always have been.
‘Jim!’
Waiting, just waiting for you.
‘Jim!’
But it’s not my mother, of course it isn’t.
‘You deaf? Your dinner’s out!’
I still can’t pick out the reason I didn’t tell my wife about Cuba. Was I leaving open the option to re-mould myself? Like I’d turn up in Havana, claim my mother’s dough and disappear into the great blue anywhere, a skip in my step and a Panama hat on my sun-burned bonce. Or did lying just seem the simple option? Maybe more than anything I wanted something I wouldn’t have to share. I felt it was my due but even now, years later, I can’t say why.
Cuba. It crowds closer the more I push it away. This terminal winter, the white fogged moor. There’s all kinds of shapes out there, faces I recognise but am not willing to acknowledge, not fully. The courage to look has to be forced upon me, it’s always been that way. But are you telling me that anyone would willingly choose their own haunting? It’s hard to believe five years have passed. Talk about a story . . . I knew at the time it would have me lost in the mid-distance, a close-up shot as I look back on bold memories. Havana, I’d say, after the requisite dramatic pause, it’s one of those places, a slight frown as I finally return your gaze.
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning
The skinny old guy’s name was Luis. The owner of the casa particular, he’d rented the top floor to my mother for the past thirteen years. She’d tried with minimal success to teach him English.
‘I very, very, sorry,’ he said and shook my hand, big rheumy eyes open wide and watery.
‘Thank you.’
The old man’s face suddenly cracked open in pain. He dropped like a stone to the doorstep, clutching at his left foot. Adelina crou
ched down and put an arm on his shoulder as Luis gritted his teeth and pulled off his sandal. He spent the next five minutes patiently pointing out each scab on his swollen left foot. Occasionally he’d look up, the very picture of self-pity.
It should have been difficult. But it felt more like a role. The person wandering through my mother’s apartment was not me but an actor. I opened a wardrobe, pulled along the hangers. Identikit cotton trousers, size large, long boho skirts. She favoured purples, dark greens, now and then plain white. I held a shirt against my face. Patchouli, the standard hippy scent.
Adelina didn’t follow me. Maybe she thought it wasn’t fitting. She leaned on the balcony and looked across the city. There I was in my dead mother’s apartment, rapidly sobering up.
The flat-roofed bedroom was no more than twelve feet square. About the same size as the Den back at home. Even in the 8pm dark it was hot. During the day it must have been unbearable. There was barely enough room for the single bed and bedside table, a squat wardrobe and small bookcase making up the rest of the furniture. The bed was still mussed up from my mother’s final night. Had she learned to sleep easier over the years? Maybe if I stared long enough her head might re-emerge from the indentation it had left on the pillow.
Among the paperbacks and textbooks on the bookcase were several larger, bound volumes. Photo albums, like the ones my wife kept. I didn’t know what to do, my desire to open them almost perfectly balanced by disgust. This wasn’t something I wanted to do alone.
‘Adelina.’
‘Jim?’
‘Can you help me?’
Hobbling Luis appeared with a tray of coffee. He hovered for a while, staring at the opened photo albums. Where is this? I asked Adelina. Who is this person? When do you think this was taken? She could only help with the photos from Cuba and Peru. Nothing prior. Apparently my mother had said very little about a more distant past. So much for her ‘best friend’.
‘You must not be sad.’
I felt more angry than sad. ‘I’m glad my mother had such friends here.’
‘What is the word you use when something sounds embarrassing because it is so obvious?’
‘A cliché.’
She smiled. ‘Then I apologise for this cliché. She was like an older sister to me.’
I put the albums back on the shelf and lifted a sandal from the floor, running a finger along the dark, sweat-stained indentations. I opened the jewellery box on the bedside table, lacquered rings and silvery chains, endless sundry beads, carved bone pendants. The clothes and jewellery, the bodily odours. Rodriguez’s eulogy came drifting back to me, out of the night.
There was a little shelf under the bedside table. I reached in and found another box, a smaller, wooden one. Inside were more pictures, twelve in all. I went through these more slowly, aware that my heart-rate had picked up slightly. I recognised myself as a child but hadn’t seen any of these photos before. Myself in a coach built pram. In the arms of a stern old woman. On the shoulders of a proud looking man, my father. Hand in hand with my young mother. And a man I didn’t recognise sitting at a desk. He had black tousled hair, troubled eyes.
I stared at the wall. ‘I’ve never seen these before.’
‘It must be so difficult.’
‘No. It’s what I was looking for.’
‘There is so much we don’t know about our parents.’
‘You’re not wrong there!’
‘Have I said something out of turn?’
‘You mean you don’t know?’
‘Know what?’
‘Really?’
‘I’m afraid I am a bit confused.’
‘Did she ever say much about me?’
‘Helen? Well not a lot. I mean, no. Nothing.’
‘There was a reason for that.’
‘I’m not sure – ’
‘She abandoned me, left when I was four years old.’
‘I didn’t – ’
‘She never got in touch.’
I looked out the doorway onto the balcony. The concrete floor was painted burgundy, the walls a light green. Large tropical plants in terracotta pots had been placed here and there. I imagined my drunken mother staring across Havana’s crumble in cotton trousers and a cigarette-holed shirt, listening to the hoots and shouts and sporadic drills, consumptive Ladas. Her bare feet would be scorched by the heat-baked concrete and she’d lift one foot then the other, moving to the rumba from the café 20 metres below. I hated her.
‘I want you to tell me about her. I don’t know anything about her, not a damn thing.’
* * *
7am, the noise from the air-con unit an enervating rattle. Another hangover. Hard white light was already leaching round the blinds. The previous night had receded to an improbable distance. What had seemed so obvious now didn’t fit. I picked up my mobile phone. No calls. The only text had come from my wife just after I landed. Good. Take care. Sun cream!
The sycophantic waiter who cleared my breakfast table said it was a beautiful day and asked if I was taking the tourist shuttle to the beach. I sure am, I said, surprised by my sudden decision. Back home there was no way I’d have gone on an organised tour. But the more I considered it the more I wanted to go, despite the painfully white creature in lime-green swimming shorts peering back from the full-length mirror and begging me to reconsider.
‘Hi there,’ said a young man in shades when I got on the bus.
I sat across the aisle. Thierry had a pretty girlfriend, Monique. I told them I was the manager of a Scottish distillery. Out the lie popped, just like that. I had them hanging on my every word.
Playa de Guanabo was 45 minutes from Havana. I had my first proper look at the city, the winding sea-front shatter of grand buildings, the desert-like expanse of Revolution Square with the memorial to Che, the huge Korda portrait. I remembered growing up in the late 1970s, the news reports from the Soviet Union and the shorthand images of hatchet-faced leaders and khaki parades. Here, the stereotypes had never been mothballed. In Cuba there still was revolutionary graffiti and 1950s American cars, old dancing men with cigars.
The beach was heaving. The Inglaterra tourist gaggle huddled together on a carpet of inter-locked beach towels, as if for safety. We stripped down to our bathing costumes and glanced warily at the bands of wiry young men who roved up and down the sand ogling the women.
This wasn’t the Varadero promise of empty paradise beaches. This was Cuba central, reggaeton pulsing from the wooden beach hut, screaming kids and shouting mothers, strutting, laughing men and sun glinting from bottles of Havana Club. Afterwards, we would say we loved it. We’ll say it was ‘authentic’ and ignore the nervousness we were all trying to hide.
The bullshit flowed. It’s so much easier to talk to strangers when you’re someone else. My wife would have been astonished. I imagined that look, hands on hips at the appraising distance she measured so well. I told everyone I was on a three-month tour of Latin and South America to source new grain supplies. It’s all about sustainability of supply, Thierry. I’d set up a meeting in Caracas with one of Chavez’s advisers about a possible oil deal, apparently.
‘Viva la revolucion,’ said Thierry.
‘Viva Chavez,’ I said.
A passing Cuban in dubiously tight black trunks stopped, breaking into a broad grin. Chavez, Chavez, Fidel, then a long burst of excited Spanish. I waggled my bottle of rum and the man sat down, beckoning over a few friends. Ordinary Jim would have retreated somewhere safer, like the other tourists who smiled politely but buried their heads in books. They fired off questions about Scotland, most impressed by this man who made the famous whisky.
The bus got back to the hotel just after three. Thierry was drunk and Monique horny. She kept tugging at her boyfriend’s t-shirt and whispering in his ear. The lucky Frenchman was in for a fine afternoon if he could get it up. I’d told him about Adelina, how we met on my first night and you’ve got a girlfriend Thierry but man you should try the Cuban women!
The concierge called me over as we walked through reception. ‘Mr Drever. A man has been waiting.’
I turned to follow the pointing arm. Basilio was dozing in one of the leather sofas beside the tourist desk. He had a rucksack at his feet. The concierge tutted and hurried across the foyer, roughly shaking Basilio awake. Basilio reacted angrily, shoving him away and for a moment didn’t seem to know where he was. When he noticed me he immediately calmed down, settling a look of compassion on his sleep-swollen face as he approached the reception.
‘My sympathies. Again,’ he said, offering me the rucksack.
I hesitated for a moment, looking from Basilio to the bag, then unzipped it.
‘Your . . . mother.’
I placed the urn on the concierge’s desk, who quickly crossed himself. Thierry’s sunglasses had slipped down his nose. Monique put a hand to her mouth. Everyone looked at the urn, then me.
I reckoned it was made of pewter. Polished to a fair shine and then tarnished by my fingerprints. I set the urn down beside the TV. It had condensation on it, like the Cristal beer I’d just opened. How was this possible, had it just come out of a fridge, were the ashes still warm?
Silence seemed appropriate so I didn’t turn on the air-con. The heat rose and everything sweated. Urn, beer and me. I finished the Cristal and cracked another, watching beads of water slowly slip down the neck of the urn, round the shoulders and down the body as it tapered in and then out again at the base. I decided I didn’t like it by the TV and moved it to the low coffee table on the other side of the room. It looked much better there, I decided, in the same instant realising I’d just aestheticised my dead mother’s remains. Like an ornament, I was trying to make her best fit. The thought spooked me and I went for a shower.
The Stillman Page 6