by George

by Wesley Stace

  “Yes,” said the doctor apologetically, surveying the scale model chairs in her empty waiting room as she saw me in. “There’s a lack of reading material for grown-ups. I normally work with younger people.” I was an anomaly, a case study.

  A physical exam revealed nothing, despite my bad stomach and occasional nausea, both possible symptoms of the family of disorders that was Dr. Hill’s area of expertise. To my family’s surprise, she had encouraged me to bring George — Reg in particular had thought she would wrest him from me as soon as possible. George was rather larger than the dummies she generally liked to use in therapy, but since he was already implicated, she saw no reason to throw him out of the act. She liked to watch us together, and when, during the first session, she asked him directly, “How can I help you, George?” I answered through him, “Don’t like to talk.” I had never wanted to talk through him, only to have him about me, but it felt comfortable in her office.

  She smiled and thanked him. “I knew you were here for a reason. Now, his grandmother tells me he gradually stopped talking after he found you, George?” George nodded. “Was there anything about you that upset him? Did you remind him of anything?” Her formal white technical coat was at odds with her sympathetic brown eyes. George shook his head. “Was there a particular reason that he stopped when he found you?” I didn’t want to commit myself. I wondered for a moment whether to show her the diary, but I worried that word might leave the confessional. I nodded. “Good,” she said. “Good.”

  At first, our conversations were one-sided, but she was used to that: she spoke, I answered with nods, shakes, and the odd word. There was no emphasis whatsoever on getting me to talk. She allowed me to fall into silence whenever I wanted, while I tried to work out how she maintained her room at such a constantly comfortable temperature and looked at my tiny reflection darting in her fishbowl glasses. She asked me how ventriloquism worked, and George showed her the techniques for substitution, a D for a B and so on. She didn’t push it, and that was that.

  She asked me to keep a journal, full of praise even when I barely covered two pages. I hated the journal, hated even the word I on the page, but its effect on her was so startling that I made myself. I started using we with limited success. And so the weeks passed.

  She asked me what I really enjoyed: I showed her my tobacco tin.

  “I don’t approve, and don’t think I’m going to let you smoke in here, but you have to occupy your mouth with something, I suppose,” she said. “Why did you start?” I showed her Don’s old pewter ashtray, how its curve fitted my back pocket. Everyone around me smoked — Reg, the whole of Crystal Clear, even George — so I thought I’d give it a try. I laid my smoking kit out on the table: the ashtray, the tin, the lighter that fitted perfectly inside, and the dependably solid colour of the Rizla package. “You seem more addicted to the paraphernalia than the nicotine,” she observed, but best of all was the patient ritual: the separation of the strands of tobacco, the allotment of the precise amount in the fold of the paper, the persuasive roll between thumb and index finger, and the tender lick along the top. From urge to ash, I could make a cigarette last an age.

  “The difference between you and most of my patients is that you’re in control of when you speak,” she said. “It’s as though, instead of hunger strike, you’re on speech strike. Or should that be silence strike?” She caught me looking at her and smiled. “Have you given your family your demands?”

  I saw how it appeared: me sitting there, holding on to my schooldays, having a schoolboy speak for me. She asked me to tell her when I was last happy, and to my own surprise, over the next weeks, I told her the story of Upside. Her encouragement was a kind persuader in that peaceful room, shelves lined with academic books, walls covered with children’s drawings, a cassette recorder always running, but I certainly wasn’t yet ready to take the act outside.

  At the end of the Upside story, she handed me the shoe box of tapes, each marked only with my name and a number.

  “Your dummy is good for you, George. You have to be careful about what you say. He slows the process down for you. Write these up for me,” she said. “In the third person, like you’re writing about someone else, or writing lines for an actor. Perhaps you’ll remember other things too.”

  I liked the idea of my past written by someone else. I was starting from scratch and I couldn’t cheat: there was no essay waiting in a desk elsewhere.

  When she asked me about home, I wouldn’t answer. Things had changed even since my first appointment. Reg and Queenie had given up on the parties; they were quite as happy to put their feet up. For mainly recreational reasons, Reg kept a fruit stall for a friend at the local market. Sometimes we coordinated the spoils of work: he’d contribute the veg. Queenie felt quite special.

  Frankie found herself in forced retirement. It became clear that she was no longer considered a bankable lead, but that producers could imagine her in no other role. It was hard to say what had changed. Perhaps I had closed my eyes to a gathering recession. Ricky was rather too candid about it: peerless though she was in her favourite roles, she was still best remembered as a child star in those Bright Spark movies, an image she had not yet managed to shake. I hadn’t thought of her career in this light. She wasn’t a Hollywood star, of course, but I had always assumed she was exactly where she wanted to be. She had certainly never complained. But even in panto, until so recently her undisputed personal showcase, she wasn’t inviolate — there was a new breed of principal boy, younger, better known, on TV, in the charts. When it was announced that next Christmas, she would play not the titular hero (as Bernie would have said) but the good fairy, the trend seemed irreversible. She had to tell the public a new story, Ricky said, make a new marketplace impression, bring herself up to date.

  Queenie shuffled the blame in his direction: the alternatives were too painful. Perhaps he didn’t have his uncle’s connections. After all, he had rather fallen into the job. Everything was complicated by the fact that he was still squiring Frankie. Everyone trod carefully around this awkward detail, a dog mess that might not smell unless it was disturbed.

  Finally, Frankie’s lean spell came to an end. She was unexpectedly offered a part in a new sitcom, Fish Out of Water, playing one of the denizens of a seafront hotel run by an eccentric spinster. This being TV, the alchemist’s stone that transmuted base careers, Ricky was insufferably pleased with himself. The exteriors took her away on location to glamourous Leigh-on-Sea, leaving me with Queenie and Reg for the first extended period in months.

  At dinner the night she left, we sat over Reg’s fricassee, George at my side as usual. I could hardly bear to look at my food. It was time to speak. I wasn’t ready to get back into the world of idle chat immediately, but I couldn’t ask with pen and paper.

  “Queenie?” said George. Reg was startled by this guest-speaking role, but Queenie didn’t take her eyes from her plate. “Did you write Frankie letters from her father in the war?” I asked through my deputy. Even I was a little surprised — I was using a voice only slightly different to my own. She was happy to hear me talk, but her sad smile told me everything.

  “Oh, Georgie. Is that it? Evie arranged for them,” she said. “Letters home from the war hero. Sad, isn’t it? Her father could never have managed them himself. How did you know?”

  “It was obvious. She doesn’t know, does she?”

  “It’s really all she has of him. It would be hard to tell her, particularly for me. Evie could have, perhaps, but not me. It would seem a kind of revenge.”

  “Don’t, love,” said Reg. “Don’t.”

  We sat in the tentative silence of a shared secret. Queenie finally reached out for my hand. “Welcome back, Georgie.”

  When Frankie rang later that night, Queenie announced a breakthrough. She held the receiver at arm’s length as Frankie shrieked.

  With George, I could ask questions, and I was unlikely to be asked many in return: he was my act.

  Dr. Hi
ll was delighted. Outside her office, I may have been talking only in the third person, and through an antiquated automaton, but I was talking.

  “What did he ask?”

  I told her.

  “And were they forged?”

  “Yes.” I saw my next step. I was safe in her confidence. I had invited her question.

  “Is this something that he found out through you, George?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  And, placing him on the floor, I removed the two manuscripts and handed them over.

  The interiors for Frankie’s sitcom, Fish Out of Water, brought her back to town. She insisted we come to the first studio taping, securing a car to drive us to Shepherd’s Bush and, once inside, pink clip-on passes that gave us carte blanche.

  Though the episode was only thirty minutes, the taping itself, counting from the warm-up man, took four and a half hours. “Energy!” he shouted between his jokes, pumping his fist like a victorious boxer. “You’re having a good time!” Our party avoided one another’s gaze. It was one thing to boo and hiss with the kids at Christmas, quite another to be berated into laughter by a sweaty club comedian in ill-fitting black tie; but we were there for Frankie.

  I had seen her in good and bad, but never coarse. Much of the leering blue was aimed at Frankie, the divorcée with the seafront room (“I’d like to see down her front”) and no punch lines of her own, although she had been provided with what seemed to be a catchphrase, used twice: “Very salty!” Her departure put its own wiggling full stop on the last scene as the camera zoomed in. I could imagine the accompanying music — piccolos and tympani. The scarcity of arm squeezing and sideways glances told me Queenie was similarly underwhelmed.

  Pink passes were herded into an antiseptic cubicle, where curls of crisp paper-thin ham protruded from white crusted sandwiches set in wreaths of withered lettuce, to be washed down with flat champagne. Frankie made straight for us, fielding compliments as she fought her way through. “Well? Think it’ll be a hit?”

  Queenie and Reg made enthusiastic noises. It was a pity I had George with me, since his absence might have spared me an opinion. “Very salty!” said George, and everyone laughed.

  Our party mingled, and I saw this as an excuse to test the power of my pink pass. A red glow drew me round the corner and down a corridor to some double doors at which a uniformed guard, lost in the magpie-like admiration of an extravagant silver wristwatch at odds with his BBC-issue attire, stood next to a sign that announced, STAR’S ON SATURDAY WITH BRUCE STAR and a large red warning: TRANSMISSION. The guard, who was considering the watch’s many functions at various distances as it glittered in the fluorescent strip lighting, snapped from his trance as though I had caught him stealing. Eyeing George suspiciously, he snarled, “What do you want?” I said nothing. “I’m not a guard, I’m an actor. So, no offence, but unless you want to make an unscheduled appearance on TV, you might want to bugger off.”

  At a signal from his walkie-talkie, the guard barked at me to keep my distance, and assumed a pose of watchful attention. He seemed to be counting down to himself, taking a calming breath in preparation for whatever lifted off at zero. One side of the double door was flung open, revealing a man’s silhouette against the bright lights within, a camera hot on his heels; beyond, the shimmer, heat, and buzz of the studio. I stood back from the glare, not wanting to ruin the actor-guard’s moment of glory.

  The silhouette saluted the guard, who returned the greeting, his sleeve sliding up his arm to reveal the silver watch. With a triumphant gesture, the silhouette, dressed dashingly in entertainer’s old-fashioned formal, his magnificent rich burgundy-lined cape unfurling around him, brandished the guard’s wrist towards the camera, which had ventured on its tracks to the very edge of the studio. The house band played a climactic chord, and the audience burst into a prolonged round of applause. Removing the watch from the guard with a private wink of apology, the silhouette turned to close the doors. I saw his face for the first time.

  He was in his early forties, his hair slicked down and parted to the left, his neatly cropped black beard hiding a face creased with character, his makeup glistening from the heat beyond. While hidden from the cameras, he took a moment to dab his forehead with a voluminous white handkerchief he produced from somewhere inside his jacket.

  It was then he saw us.

  The applause continued relentlessly behind him, and the voice of Bruce Star announced his name, Tower, inviting him back into the studio. Not knowing what else to do, I smiled, throwing in a wink from George, expecting this to be the end of a short and meaningless interaction. But still the man stared, first at George, then at me.

  The guard, at another short blast on his walkie-talkie, pushed the right door closed. The bearded man, as if waking from a dream to realize he was in the middle of a performance, lurched around to acknowledge his applause, dropping the white handkerchief. Bowing, he strode back inside, and the guard closed the left door behind him. The whole incident had taken no more than twenty seconds. George and I were left staring at the fallen handkerchief, lost for words.

  The actor sniffed, rubbing his wrist where the timepiece had so recently been. It was all in a day’s work, he implied, and the handkerchief was beneath his consideration — such treasures fell his way the whole time — though it was mine if I wanted a souvenir. I stuffed the handkerchief into George’s top pocket and made my way back to the party, where Reg and Queenie were waiting for Frankie, who struggled back in laden with wardrobe, juggling bags. “All aboard. Should we take some of those sandwiches? They don’t look terribly good. How were they?”

  “Very salty” got us another laugh.

  I examined the handkerchief at home. In detective stories from Holmes to Marlowe, handkerchiefs were invariably monogrammed, hats could be identified by the manufacturer’s mark, and matchbooks always had addresses: criminals could be condemned on such scanty evidence. In real life, a clean white handkerchief was more than likely a blank slate that told you nothing. But not this one. I thought I had felt something, and on further inspection, I found a small triangular pocket in one corner, from which I pulled out a neatly folded playing card: the eight of clubs. From this I could deduce one thing, the one thing that I already knew: it wasn’t a handkerchief. It was a magician’s silk.

  Dr. Hill’s reaction to the diaries surprised me. I had expected sympathy in reward for my trust.

  “I thank you very much for sharing this with me. I know you feel you need to keep it private . . . and it’s always a great thrill to meet an author,” she added, referring to my namesake with a smile. “It’s a very sad record, but I’m not sure I see why you feel such a strong need to protect your family from this diary.” She dismissed the papers with a careless flick. “I think your reaction might be disproportionate to the contents.”

  I gave her a quizzical look.

  “Well, your grandmother seems to have moved on successfully from her relationship with your grandfather. She’s happily married again, right? Would she be worried about what Joe said about her in his diary all those years ago?”

  She paused and eyed me. I had a mental image of an onion being peeled.

  “I imagine Joe projected onto your grandmother certain negative attributes that were in fact associated with his mother. It would have made their relationship impossible. Queenie could have been anybody, behaved any way, and it would have made no difference: he had to run. But Queenie obviously wasn’t so distraught that she couldn’t find happiness elsewhere.”

  Quite the reverse, I thought.

  “Do you really think she’d be upset now?”

  I thought about this.

  “And though it would be sad for your mother in some ways, I would think the diary might well give her some longed-for insight into the father she never knew.”

  “But Frankie’s letters!” I said.

  She didn’t even look up when I spoke. “Ah, yes, the letters. It might be disappointing for her to know they weren�
�t really from him, but she’s no longer the fragile child they were addressed to. She’s a grown woman who has survived a long time with the loss of her father. That’s her burden, not yours.”

  Queenie and Frankie certainly had survived, even thrived without Joe. So what was I protecting? I felt empty, as though I hadn’t eaten for a week.

  “And I think deep down you know that your silence isn’t really necessary to protect them. But the diary was illuminating. I was particularly struck by some similarities between you and your grandfather. Would you say you and Joe have anything in common?”

  I hadn’t been expecting this. I shrugged and waggled George.

  “Absolutely. You have in common the author of this diary. It’s interesting that you chose to reenact Joe’s method of talking through him. Perhaps, like your grandfather, you felt that no one was listening to you and you had to disguise your voice in order to be heard. My worry is that you will repeat some of his other patterns of behaviour. By his own account, Joe appears to have been a solitary and melancholy man, and I’d like to guard against you becoming the same.”

  I felt like the redhead with the harelip.

  “My guess is that Joe wasn’t able to trust his mother, and so he wasn’t able to form a loving, trusting relationship with another woman. Do you think this is true of you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  I shook my head again.

  “If Joe did mistrust women, it’s possible that men would have seemed safer and more nurturing in comparison. And yet where is Joe’s father? Barely mentioned in this diary: ‘little more than a presence.’ With no male role model and an overbearing mother, Joe must have been ambivalent: perhaps he tried to love this man who claimed, however humourously, to have modelled himself on Joe’s mother. But what’s relevant here is that Joe wasn’t able to be an attentive, loving father because he didn’t have one himself. Do you see why that’s important?”