The heads of other tenants poked out of their flats as she was carried down the stairs. Before I left I hammered a nail into the broken window-latch, I don’t know why, the damage had after all, been done. Perhaps an afterthought, a child who stamps on a dead bee after it has stung him.
‘Natural causes,’ the Doctor said morosely, smelling faintly of Olbas oil. I hadn’t questioned him, I wanted to believe it, yet I felt an invisible fire was drawing closer to me, to my mum; if I tried to deny it maybe the wind would change and no-one would get burnt… time would help me realize there were no hands over her rumpled mouth, and whatever Nana had imagined had visited her, it had been exorcized and would go to the grave with her.
I called Madame Raffele, an elegant Parisian in her fifties who did her washing and grocery shopping. After she’d finished crying I gave her the address of the morgue and asked if she could help me organize the funeral. Then I called my mother again, the brass key in my fingers changing colour as I twiddled the dragon’s head, but there was no answer. I imagined the wings of her mobile creations, softly turning on their moorings in the conservatory. My mother likes to make dinosaurs, papier-mâché dinosaurs.
- 2 -
The sun broke halfheartedly through the London clouds and played upon her parquet floor, the beak of a pteranodon staring down at me from among her hanging vines.
‘Just like that, you’re off?’ She said indignantly.
‘Well, once I’ve got my flat rented out which’ll take a few weeks. It needs freshening up. And then there’s the funeral to think about and a few articles to finish.’
She looked at me with tired eyes. ‘What about your work at The Independent, you’re just finding your feet?’
‘Mum, I’m not a staffer, I write a few pieces for them that’s all. Maybe I’ll organize a few commissions for Southeast Asia. Anyway, I have an idea for my publisher, for a new book. I want to research it while I’m out there. And it’ll be a short trip, two, three months tops.’ I added this to make her feel better. I had no idea how long it would take.
‘But you didn’t research your last book like that.’ I could feel the hooks flying invisibly across the space between us, anchoring me to the safety of her Richmond house. Not another of her boys going to that opium-addled corner of the world. The Orient, her most hated word in the English vocabulary.
‘That’s because the last book was set in London Mum… look- you can’t write a book about a place without going there, it’s absurd. Well, maybe some people can but I can’t, I’m not a good enough writer. I don’t have that sort of imagination.’
She nodded impotently, the can of worms open, wriggling through the long grass of her memory. She wore a woollen cardigan, her hair tied back off her forehead, hurriedly piled in a bun. She’s elegant my mum, as if by accident. I suppose grace is something you’re born with. To change the subject I looked up at the dinosaurs circling slowly above. ‘You ever thought of selling any of these?’
She broke off from her thoughts, ‘Never really thought about it. Do you think anyone would actually want one?’
‘Well, when I come back I wouldn’t mind one in my kitchen. Why dinosaurs of all things, it seems odd to keep making the same thing?’
A lock of blond hair fell on her cheek. I noticed it was turning grey. She pushed it away and smiled at me. ‘I suppose there’s something sad about them, one meteor and they just disappeared overnight. Despite their size they didn’t stand the test of time. Not like cockroaches. Don’t you think that’s sad?’
I opened my knapsack. ‘I found this notebook in Nana’s secret tin, you remember the tin?’
‘The one hidden in the kitchen? Wasn’t so secret, bless her.’
‘It has a list of numbers, maybe Dad’s old war buddies. Some are U.S codes, but not all of them, there are a few listed in Bangkok. Some of those guys may still be around there, I know a lot of veterans stayed in Asia and didn’t want to come back.’
I was in enemy territory - we never talked about the war, at least not in this house. It was sacrosanct, a code of silence. Mum was making no attempt to alter this so I continued, ‘Gerald King, Lucan Maybury…’
She cut me dead, ‘Al, these telephone numbers were written so long ago they’ll be dead. Leave it in the past where it belongs.’
I sat beside her on the couch, taking her hand in mine, ‘How can it belong in the past when it’s never been dealt with in the present? I know he died in Vietnam, but I don’t know where exactly, I don’t know why.’
Like secrets buried in an old rag doll, talking about it brought away the stitching. She looked back at me. ‘So all that prelude about going to Southeast Asia to research a book was just guff? You’re going to look for your father’s bones?’
I looked at her squarely, and when I uttered the next sentence it felt like the most sensible thing I’d said in years. ‘I’m going to write my next book about him. I should have written it ages ago.’
She sniffed, ‘You’ll be alright Al, you can write something else.’
‘I haven’t written anything else in over six months, it’s called writer’s block. And I’m tired of travel writing, stories that lie forgotten in hairdressers and people’s lounges. I want to write something decent… make my mark. Look, here’s my plan, I start in Hanoi in North Vietnam-’
‘I know perfectly well where Hanoi is Alain.’
‘-then head south to Saigon. On the way down I can check out the battlegrounds and spend a little time on the coast. See, nothing too dangerous in that is there?’
She fixed me with the same look she’d trained on me when I took myself to the boxing gym at thirteen and returned with a bruised eye. ‘You’re really going?’ She said, pasting glue to a hatchling dinosaur, adding little squares of newspaper to create the bulge of its thigh. I nodded determinedly.
‘Well if you’re seeking the truth… here goes. Your father was in Laos when... They called it “The Secret War”. It wasn’t supposed to have happened, the war I mean. That’s where… that’s where we think he died.’
‘Laos? I thought it was in Vietnam Dad disappeared.’
She left the conservatory, I heard her footsteps trail into the kitchen, ‘Do you want a sandwich or something?’
Laos, the place on the matches; Ravens Bar, Vientiane, Laos. It was the new buzz location among travel Eds, ecotourism and temples and all that. I’d even thought about going but it up until now it was always a little too close to Vietnam for comfort. The sun had suffocated under the clouds. Perversely, I was excited, I was going to a place of spicy dishes, brown skin and dark eyes, faraway from southwest London; away from queues, commuters and the vice of ill-defined winters we’d come to expect. It felt like an escape.
She came back in with coffee, as usual too many sugars. Outside, the Thames swelled with a new fall of rainwater, there were leaves on its banks the colour of copper coins.
‘Mum, I took something else out of Nana’s flat.’
‘The Tiffany lamp?’
‘No.’ I withdrew the photo-frame and turned him around to face her, ‘I thought you might want to have him back where he belongs.’
She put her hand to her mouth, softly shaking her head. My father looked at the old living room in which he’d spent so little time; nothing much had altered except for the dinosaurs and my mother who was thirty-six years older.
‘Do you want it?’ I asked. She nodded in silence and took him in her hands.
‘Handsome bugger wasn’t he? After him no one seemed right. I did try and meet someone but… I suppose I just gave up.’
‘Maybe it’s time you had a little company again?’
She shook her head shyly, ‘I’ll go and turn the bacon.’
We ate our sandwiches in silence. She always bought her bacon from a Polish butcher in St Margarets, next to the decrepit film
studios. She put down her plate mid-mouthful and went to the corner of the room with the picture, carefully placing it on the piano.
Later, at the door, she ruffled my hair and hugged me for a long time, ‘If you’re going to Laos you’re going to need a few jabs, it’s full of creepy crawlies. And it’s corrupt too, put a foot wrong and you can disappear out there.’
I looked over at her ‘Free Palestine’ placard parked by the front door ready for marches. Why had she kept quiet about Laos all these years?
That afternoon I toyed around on Google and visited Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree website to find out a bit more about where I was going. Vietnam was tourist friendly, no war bitterness and steadily commercializing after the equivalent of open trade ‘glasnost’. In fact it was overrun, and Saigon was now called Ho Chi Minh City. As to Laos, it said it was the size of England, much of it thick jungle and there were no more than a few major roads, and they weren’t brilliant; plus a few pockets of old style Indochinese sophistication in certain cities. For the rest it was mainly jungle and mountains and rice growing flatlands in the south. “A truly magical country lost in jungle and time.”
Apparently Laos was also opening up to free trade with other countries, was peopled by sixty different tribes and one of the twenty poorest nations on earth being taken to the cleaners by its neighbour, China. They ate bats, spiders, poached relentlessly and yes, there were still tigers in the deep, original-growth forests. Plus clouded leopards, endangered gibbons and a few stubborn opium growers on the alpine slopes. I couldn’t believe I’d never been. Immediately it caught my fancy and I started jotting down a list of editors who might like a feature on the country. Trekking, ecotourism, kayaking, boutique hotels… same old shit, different title.
Toward the end of the day I went to an estate agent to organize renting my flat. If I was going to the Orient, I had to make it quick before I lost my nerve… before it all seemed whimsical. The agent said the place would go for nine hundred a month, more if I painted it up beforehand. And the minimum rental term was six months. I could get a lot written in six months, and besides, there was nothing to keep me here; a failed relationship to outrun, a few friends who had settled down and had kids, plus a peripatetic career as a freelance journalist. It didn’t matter where I was based. Going away was the best thing I could do. And it was work after all.
Maybe something changed in me, a gear switching, a tipping point had been reached with my decision to leave. I felt excited, people suddenly looked more attractive and that afternoon I began noticing details more, as if I’d woken up from a long slumber. I called my best friend Skip, an actor with a face that leapt right out of a toothpaste ad. He answered immediately.
‘You’re a bit keen, I thought you said you liked to let the phone ring a few times.’ I said.
‘Hey, who am I fooling? Apart from British Gas and Blockbuster, no-one of any importance calls anyway.’ He sounded a little flat, probably scratchy from spending the day in his Clapham flat; tapping furiously on his X-Box controller, rummaging through shadowy levels of Prince of Persia, getting depressed and trying not remind himself he was close to forty, still hadn’t had a regular gig on TV and it was six months since his last decent stage job.
‘Al, why don’t actors look out of the window in the morning?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Because they’d have nothing to do in the afternoon.’
I always knew when he was down, despite the fact he kept a brave face from the rejections he suffered on a weekly basis. He was eminently readable, your best friends always are. ‘What are you up to?’ I asked,
‘Watching Jaws, the bit where Quint gets eaten. It’s not quite the same when you know they had three spare sharks and they were made of plastic.’
‘Yeah.’
‘So how was Paris?’
‘My nan passed away.’ I answered flatly.
‘Oh mate, I’m really sorry, I know you were… well you were close weren’t you?’
‘Kind of. When I was a kid. I hadn’t seen her for ages. Funeral’s next week… strangest thing is she died while I was there. I met her, she sent me away for a few hours and when I came back she was dead.’
‘Maybe she was waiting for you to come back, maybe she held on specially.’
He always said the right thing. ‘Do you know anything about Laos, Skip?’
He surprised me, ‘It’s much fought over by the Chinese for its teak trees and tiger’s balls for Pekinese duffers who can’t get a hard on. They use them like Viagra. Also much of it is forest. I love the sound of it. Why do you ask?’
‘I’ll tell you later. Did you get that Police series?’
His voice switched down a gear, and I cursed myself for asking. ‘Never ask an actor if he got a job unless he tells you, Al. Why? Because, believe me he will tell you. And no, I didn’t get the job.’ I could see him shaking his head despondently. ‘Same old shitty story, “We’ll get back to your agent.” I’m sat here thinking I should have studied Maths and been an accountant.’
‘You wouldn’t be watching Jaws while other people were at work if that was the case.’
‘That’s what worries me - I’m almost forty and still living like a fucking teenager. Still, it’s not all bad… I got a commercial for Jif. You know, the stuff that looks like jizz.’
‘Jif cleaning fluid? That’s great.’ In an afternoon he could earn what I made in two months of slaving away at stories.
He laughed. ‘I have to dress up as a bottle of Jif in a suit and dance on a giant sink. For god’s sake, I never thought I’d be doing that by now, it’s degrading. I should be playing the RSC and doing the odd Indy film.’
‘Think of the money. Listen I’m going to Bangkok.’
‘Nice, newspaper work?’
‘No, I’m off to do a little research for a book. I’ll be gone for a few months.’
He tried to disguise his disappointment, ‘Jesus, I’m a walking ad for SAD, I could kill for some sunlight you lucky bastard.’
‘Why don’t you come? After all you just got a commercial.’
‘Nah, I’d love to mate but I’ve got to stick around in case any work comes up. Anyway, I won’t get paid for another month.’
I thought about it a beat. ‘Give yourself a break… leave London for a bit. I can lend you the money in the meantime. Apart from the ticket out there it should be dirt cheap.’
‘Love you long time!’ He chuckled in his best oriental rendition.
‘So what do you think? You could just come out for a couple of weeks, maybe a month?’
‘And miss the majesty of an English winter?’
‘Rain you mean.’
He was quiet a moment. ‘Fuck it, I’m coming!’
‘Serious?’
‘Course I’m serious. Besides, you need someone to watch your back.’
I thought back to the broken latch on Nana’s window, the map and the book of matches on the rooftop. My mobile rang in the other room. I said goodbye to Skip and caught my reflection smiling back at me. I think it was the first genuine smile in the last eighteen months; I almost looked younger. I rushed to the phone with barely contained excitement.
My Mother sounded a little spaced. ‘Darling, this is really strange, I’ve just had a telephone call.’
‘From who?’ I asked.
‘He wanted to know if he could come round and say hello. I haven’t heard of these men in thirty five years. Bizarre after our last exchange, isn’t it?’
‘Slow down a bit Mum, who?’
‘Casbaron, Sammy Casbaron, he’s a Nam Veteran - he was in the war with your Father apparently.’
The name didn’t sound like any of those listed in Dad’s Moleskine diary. Maybe I’d missed one.
‘Where is he?’ I asked.
She sounded confused, as if the past was racing back in a blur. ‘He’s staying at the Knightsbridge Hilton and he has to go back to Bangkok tomorrow. He said he’d love to meet you.’
I thought about the time meeting him might save me, not having to get in touch with the US Army Veterans Association - which is what I’d have to do if the old telephone numbers no longer functioned. Sloppy journalists always look for shortcuts. ‘So what did you tell him?’
‘Well I said ofcourse you’d like to meet him, if you were free. I thought it might be of some help with your book.’
Typical Mum, she’d fight you tooth and claw until the point she knew it was futile, then after that you couldn’t have a better cornerman.
‘So when is he coming?’
‘Tonight, can you make it?’
‘He’s going back to Bangkok tomorrow?’
‘That’s what he said. I don’t want to meet him on my own, why would I? But maybe it would save you having to go out there. Will you come?’
‘Of course I’ll come. I love you, Mum.’
‘One condition,’ she added, ‘I don’t want to hear any talk of Dad while I’m in the room.’
‘Done.’
That evening I went to meet Sammy Casbaron. Mum asked me to get there for 8pm and I made sure I was ten minutes early. Leaves were blowing across the road and my old MG was spluttering with a cold. Just as well I was leaving for the winter, it probably wouldn’t make it anyway. Mum answered the door of their red-brick Victorian in a smart pink jumper and navy blue dress; her hair tied up to reveal some earrings Dad had bought her, sapphires set in silver-shaped shells. She hadn’t worn them since his memorial ceremony. He bought her those she claimed, because I was conceived on a beach on a deserted island in Thailand. But stranger still for a woman who refused to wear make up, she had on some kohl eyeliner that made her look like Catherine Deneuve - I wished she’d go outside dressed like this once in a while, she could be a real head-turner when she wanted. Trouble is she never did, as if some small part of her was still waiting for my father to return some day.
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