Finn picked up the candles. When he turned, he found Dilly sitting, crumpled, in the middle of the sidewalk, crying into her bag. He crouched beside her and said gently, ‘Hey, what’s wrong?’
The tears flooded out of her. She wailed. ‘Broken it! I’m an idiot.’ In her hand, still inside the bag, was her camera. The lens was cracked. She sat upright, rigid, with her eyes closed, thrust her chin up to the sky, gritted her teeth and breathed heavily. Finn watched her. She was trying so hard to usher this anger through her, not allow it to engulf her. He was unaware that he was pulling the same faces he made when watching Jackass, appalled by how tormented she could be.
‘JEEEESUS, DILLY…’ She squeezed the words out through her clamped jaw. ‘I COULD KILL YOU! DILLY IS A LOSER.’
Finn found the third person thing pretty weird too. She often did it, and never in a positive way.
‘I have an underwater disposable. You can use that.’
‘No,’ she said, in a dead tone. ‘Thank you.’ She was fighting herself. ‘That’s why I invested in a digital SLR. I was gonna do a little book of all the things in the park that resonated with me, a Wolfgang Tilmanns-stroke-Nan Goldin type thing.’
‘We’ll get it fixed.’
‘Will we? With our money?’
He hated her for that.
‘The park is ruined for me. The whole point for me of the park was this book idea I dreamt up on the plane over. Some of it was Turner Prize stuff – okay, I’m not British – but not on a throwaway fucking camera. The whole book would be photos done all in one day and it’d just get me noticed, without me having to invest months and months of time on it. That’s how these things happen: they just hit a vein. Pow, and you’re in. Everyone’s talking about you.’
He had no idea what she was talking about, and looked for something familiar. The Yoshino cherry trees were in bud. He pictured the sap rising through them. He understood them as fully as he didn’t understand Dilly. Trees made sense to him, a knowledge he had absorbed while working near to them, with people who knew about them, delivering them, handling them, watching and listening, the first time that he had enjoyed learning, allowed knowledge to smuggle itself in without the smell of the classroom.
‘Mind if we do the park another day?’ She spoke with the life gone out of her. It made her sweeter.
Finn took hold of her hand and led her gently away. She took a few deep breaths and talked herself down from the window ledge of being Dilys Annalese Parker or Vela. They passed a young Chinese guy with a massive Afro that bounced and wobbled like a jelly. It gave Dilly pleasure and she revived. ‘So cool…’ she marvelled. ‘Very, VERY knowing. I get his references. Let’s go to SoHo now.’
In the taxi, she waited until they were down on East Houston before mentioning that she had called his brother.
‘How?’ Finn asked, confused. ‘Why?’
‘How? I got his number from your Hemingway book. Why? To ask him if we could stay.’
‘So you did read it,’ he muttered.
‘No,’ she said, ‘not at all, but I glanced inside and saw Jack’s 917 number in your handwriting on the inside cover. No biggie.’
It scared Finn sometimes, to think that he could feel so angry towards someone he made love with. It confused him, and he presumed it made him bad.
‘Anyway,’ she said, sweetly, ‘I like your book, I think it’s cool.’
The taxi was stopped in traffic by a pool hall on the corner of Bleecker Street. Finn yanked open the door and marched away.
She called it his book as if he were writing a novel. Pages yellowed by time, the red band across the book’s cover faded to the hue of a Remembrance poppy, it was the volume of Hemingway stories which Finn had taken from a shelf in the living room on the evening Jack had found their dad dying on the lane and packed Finn off to his uncle and aunt’s house eighty miles away.
With his father not four hours dead, Finn had read ‘Indian Camp’ in the heavy traffic that his uncle blamed him for, accusing Finn of being too slow to pack a bag, too ungrateful of the round trip being made on his behalf. Long after he had finished reading the story, he stared at the pages and watched the rhythmic sodium shadows pace out the distance of his rehoming across the page. And, as his uncle cursed the journey and cursed Finn, Finn’s big brother sat beside their father’s corpse, offering the man a forgiveness on his and Finn’s behalf for which Finn would not have given his permission.
Finn had been writing in the margins of the Hemingway book for the three years since that night. It began with a message to Jack, asking him to fetch him back and not leave him with his aunt and uncle for the ten days until the funeral, the transcript of a text message he never sent for fear he was being selfish. He wrote it instead, and other pleas to Jack, between the printed lines of Hemingway’s stories. He buried his desperation there and they buried his father on Finn’s sixteenth birthday. The book peered out from his suit pocket and he wrote cries for help into it during the eulogy he refused to listen to for its mockery of the truth. Uncle Trevor had leaned across and slapped the book to the floor, the dead weight of his torso pressing against Finn’s ribs. Finn was slight and skeletal then, and, every time he felt his uncle’s breath on him, he resolved to make himself strong.
The stain of Finn’s blood on the open-leaf spine of the book had settled into the paper like ink on a blotting pad, spread its blurred arteries across the margins of the middle page towards the printed words, before running dry. Jack and Holly had been on the plane to New York City when Uncle Trevor grabbed the book out of Finn’s hands and wedged it into the base of Finn’s nose as he screamed at him to ‘take your thick head out of the sodding book’ and to ‘buck up your ideas and show some bloody gratitude for being offered a home’. He had rammed the open palm of his hand against the book, jabbing it into Finn’s face, causing a sac of blood to burst from his nose on to the paper. The blood had acquired a certain painterly beauty in fading, and endowed the open spine with a lipstick kiss.
After that, every rage, every screamed word, every filthy, angry torrent that had spewed out of his uncle’s mouth, Finn had transcribed in minute handwriting, simply worded but relentless in its graphic detail, haphazardly covering every space in the margins and between the lines. Dilly marvelled at the idea that Hemingway’s stories had not been complete until her lover added to them. It made her feel like a part of something.
Finn needed only to hear his uncle’s voice in the house to taste the snot and salt that clogged the back of his throat when he was pushed and shoved and hit, when the back of his neck and the tops of his shoulders were gripped agonisingly tight by angry hands that yearned to get away with greater violence the same way other hearts yearned for love.
When Finn discovered the boxing club, his scribbled words evolved from descriptions of what his uncle did to him to ones about what he was going to do to his uncle, and much later, after he had blown up the shed of the man who killed the dog, he wrote in his room at the detention centre descriptions of hitting his brother so that his brother knew how it felt to be here, and of landing one blow that drew blood and forced Jack to crawl on his knees to a corner far away enough to buy enough time to get to his feet without being hit again, as Finn had had to do on three occasions, each one his birthday.
The book was full. Every moment of harm had been described and dated. To Dilly, it was a work of art, a beautiful object, and it had not registered with her that it represented a bodily experience, that it was real. She could not see beyond the perfection of Finn’s minuscule handwriting, how pleasing it was to the eye, and the poetry of his simple language alongside Hemingway’s. To Finn, who had many times imagined handing the book to Jack and leaving him alone with it, perhaps to observe Jack as he read it, the book was an unwelcome fellow traveller which he wanted to throw from the Brooklyn Bridge and send to the tides.
She caught him up halfway along Mott Street and walked beside him, saying nothing (she wasn’t stupid) but looking at him all the while so that,
when he looked at her, she’d be ready for him. But, he didn’t look at her and she grew tired of waiting and became distracted by the boutiques, which brought out a religious streak in her.
‘Oh my fucking God!’
‘Jesus Christ almighty!’
‘Mary mother of oh my God!’
She stamped her feet at what she called the effortless cool of Café Gitane and squeezed Finn’s hand excitedly as she led him into a vintage clothing boutique. Inside, among faded denim shirts and worn out cowboy boots and corduroy jackets with leather elbow-patches, Dilly became overexcited, holding shirt upon sweatshirt up to Finn’s body, his face indifferent to garments that cost more than the Air India flight over. ‘You’d look so great in this.’
‘Two hundred dollars on a shirt?’
‘Say “bucks” not “dollars”… this belt is incredible. This is perfect for you.’
‘For eighty dollars, I expect my belt to be attached to two pairs of jeans.’
The store assistants wore taut, pained expressions as Dilly rifled through the stock. And Finn could recognise the look on Dilly’s face, or part of it at least, for somewhere amidst the frenzied eyes and open mouth that had taken over her features as she thrashed in a sea of vintage, he saw the breathless hunger in her that he liked. It was sex. This was how she looked during copulation. This was an animal experience for her. It was full of desire, it was about touch and smell, and it brought profound, temporary fulfilment that covered over the unreachable desires.
‘I wish you wore stuff like this. Don’t you have a credit card?’
She reminded him of a riderless horse at the races, the one that could not be stopped and was left to exhaust itself while onlookers prayed it didn’t cause too much damage to itself and others.
‘You know I don’t.’
She stamped her feet and giggled and gave him a hug. ‘I’m sorry! It would just be so great for you and me to be seen out in stuff like this. It’s harmless. I’m not saying it matters, it doesn’t, but it’d also be so awesome. So perfect! It would mean a lot to me, actually.’
Later, she came to an abrupt halt outside the Café Colonial, gasped with pleasure at the look of it, and marched inside. Cradling a cup of coffee in both hands, she continued to scan the décor adoringly. It was all so tasteful and classy. The pale green woodwork against cream-painted brick, the tiled black and white mosaic floor, the huge map of Brazil, which looked old (deliberately tea-stained, she suspected, which is fine, but don’t think you can fool me), advertising posters that by dint of being old appeared innocent and not cynical, a framed Miró poster, the massive ceiling fan. Finn watched her drink it in. It made her look so happy.
She smiled. ‘Isn’t this music awesome?’
He hadn’t really been listening. He did so now. A punky female Irish voice, against a strange biblical piano accompaniment, sang ‘Holy Holy Holy’.
‘I thought you hated religion.’
‘I said I like the song, not believe in it. I hate religion but I quote St Augustine. Everything is a matter of context. That’s true of the whole of life, by the way.’
She reached across and held his hand, looked him in the eye and shivered. ‘The sex is great. I’m sure that when I was nineteen and sleeping with all those nineteen-year-olds they weren’t as good at it as you are.’
He looked down, which she misread as embarrassment. ‘Modest Finn…’ she whispered. She released his hand and returned to her coffee. As she drank it, she looked out across East Houston and the moisture rose in her eyes. She thought about how she had just been in the store. She often revisited past scenes in her life. She played them back as if they’d been taped. It never made for happy viewing. She looked Finn in the eye. ‘There’s a home video of my fourth birthday and I am handed this great big birthday card but there are all these presents around me so I’m not interested in the card and I barely glance at it and hand it to my dad, really dismissive, without looking at him, and grab the presents. My parents love that tape but I hate seeing it, how spoiled I look, how ungrateful I was.’
‘You were four.’
‘So, I make resolutions… about myself. About my behaviour. I hate the word behaviour. I make a list of things I won’t do next time I’m with people. I promise myself I won’t talk again without thinking. But the next time I remember the resolution is the next time I have broken it, and I’m watching myself on rewind, making all the same old mistakes.’
She looked across to a reclaim yard, at the pedestrians caught in a wall of hot sun on Bleecker Street, and began to cry.
‘I wish I could burn the tape. You’re lovely, I’m very lucky,’ she said, to the window-pane. ‘Let’s get our stuff from that shithole and go to your brother’s place. Please.’
6
Jack stood motionless, his body overtaken by flu, his forehead resting against the door as he listened out for their footsteps in the corridor. When the wait became longer than he had calculated, he wondered if Finn and his girlfriend were having sex in the elevator, à la Joan Collins in The Bitch. He had this habit of bestowing upon his brother’s life that which he considered unattainably exotic in his own because, handsome, athletic and solvent though Jack was, he had not yet been consummately seduced.
Hearing them approach, he began to rock back and forth so that when he opened the door he would appear casual, and busy. He found Finn’s Cheshire Cat smile waiting for him, the one that obscured everything else. He still had no idea what lay beneath it. The smile was familiar but Finn had new eyes. They looked out at Jack mechanically, reflective surfaces that unnerved him, although he didn’t realise it and put the queasy feeling down to his ill health.
If there did exist a way to let go of the adoring baby brother and welcome in the tall, powerful, still young man in his doorway, Jack either didn’t know of it or couldn’t bring himself to do it. As he hesitated, Dilly stepped in between the boys and thanked Jack for inviting them, too profusely. With the arm that he had raised in the embryonic stages of a pat on his brother’s back, Jack found himself waving to Finn across Dilly’s body.
‘Don’t get close to me, I’ve got something.’
Jack had imagined a variety of greetings for his baby brother. Being Jack, he’d even rehearsed a few. But, as ever, the unseen, uncontrollable force seemed to take over when he attempted to communicate with Finn, and put words like ‘don’t get too close’ into his mouth, eighteen months since he had visited him last and gotten nothing out of him.
‘Right,’ Finn said.
Dilly scanned the apartment and, seeing just the one bedroom, downsized her maths on Jack’s earnings. Jack saw the disdain written on her face and stood as if he had no right to be there. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he said, and went to the bathroom.
‘When are you going to hit him?’ Dilly whispered.
Finn slumped. Some inner part of him recoiled, the mimosa leaves of his bruised nineteen-year-old heart. She had read the book.
He stared past her to the skyscrapers made pale and paper-thin by the waning sun.
She had read the book.
He stood, cut adrift again from love or anger. And he felt stupid and wondered if he’d have to go through with hitting Jack just to keep her.
‘You read it?’
‘No! How dare you accuse me of that? No way am I that sort of person. I literally opened it up and saw something about hitting him and I went no further. Apologise for accusing me.’
He shook his head, not at her request but at the madness he was on the brink of indulging yet further. ‘I’m sorry.’
Dilly took a shower and the brothers sat side by side on the sofa in a silence moulded by Jack’s fear of saying the wrong thing and appearing inhospitable, the effect of which was a remoteness that made Finn feel like driftwood. After three years alone in the unpoliced province of his uncle’s hospitality, Finn found himself clear, at last, about one thing: the man next to him was merely an older brother, no guardian angel, no protector, no hero. Jack alread
y looked different to him and Finn knew well enough that this was him, the beholder, altered and that Jack was probably unchanged and unchangeable. It left his anger unsure of its target.
‘Nice flat,’ he said.
‘Thanks…’
Finn concentrated on the view of the darkening sky through the window.
‘Apartment…’ Jack added. ‘Dilly seems nice.’
‘Thanks.’
‘A bit older than you?’
‘Clearly. Thanks for having us.’
‘Course. How’s everyone back home?’ Jack asked.
‘I am everyone back home,’ Finn said.
After that, they sat in silence. And after that, Jack turned in for the evening, on account of his cold.
In bed, Dilly was subdued and did not want to make love, citing Jack’s germs and sleeping in the living room as the reason. Finn sat up against the cushions. He looked at the back of the Shaun of the Dead T-shirt Dilly was wearing. It was his Shaun of the Dead T-shirt. He loved her to wear it. It seemed an intimate, softly amusing thing of her to do. He rested his hand on her back. Her skin was warm and a little clammy beneath Simon Pegg’s face. She reached out behind her and squeezed Finn’s finger. He felt that he could detect the building move, a dreamy movement. He pictured all the buildings in Manhattan swaying at night, to rock the adults to sleep. None of his ideas of New York City had children in them. He had no clear sense of what childhood was, anywhere, let alone here.
He felt aware of his brother in the next room, of their bodies in close proximity. He was confused about what he thought of Jack. He had expected it to be simpler, black and white, but they had come from the same parents once upon a time, a short way back in the unfathomable past, and today that seemed to mean something. It surprised him that he cared even a little bit. They lay a few feet from each other now, held in mid-air where the sounds rose from the street to a muted, drifting song of opportunity, and where, hanging on the wall that separated them, was a slightly out-of-focus aerial photograph of the ugly chalet bungalow Finn and Jack’s parents had moved them to against their will. From five hundred feet in the air, Finn and Jack’s home was as inconspicuous as their parents had been at ground level. Finn stared at the wall between them and it grew thicker as it absorbed the hurt and sourness that bewildered him so.
Men Like Air Page 5