Thing of the Moment

by Bruno Noble

  Lunch would be spent trying to guess what the gifts from Dad were, on one occasion thinking of funny things the poorly wrapped bicycles marked Sherah and Sharon could be, as though we hadn’t really known. Hula hoops and flying saucers had been the best guesses and they had been Seamus’s. Of course, the correct guesses would have been a new bike for Sherah and Sherah’s old bike for Sharon. ‘It’s as good as new after the thorough cleaning I gave it!’ had said Dad, in response to a withering look from Nonno, Mum’s father. ‘Look, I changed the brake blocks, I fitted new ones,’ he’d added weakly.

  Nonno had left the room.

  Dad’s face had sagged, then crumpled, as though the effort of Christmas cheer were too much for him. His nose and eyes had collapsed and disappeared into his sharp, ridged chin that had slumped to his chest as though in defeat in a battle he had been waging under the winking green and red lights of the Christmas tree.

  *

  I liked being part of the trickle of churchgoers on Christmas morning that swelled as we passed the doors of other Christians. Sherah, Seamus and I had taken our Holy Communion under Mum’s direction and yet we didn’t attend church regularly. Mum had done her bit out of loyalty to one part of her family tree by giving us Hebrew names, Dad would joke, and to the other by bringing us up as Catholic; and yet, whenever I tried to engage Mum on such issues, she ducked them. She, I knew, had tried several Catholic churches around South London before settling on the one nearest us. I wasn’t quite sure whether she had been actively seeking Polish congregations or trying to avoid them.

  I walked alongside Mum, making a big show of checking the time on the digital watch she had given me. She was distracted, not herself, apprehensive. I held her arm tightly and chatted inconsequentially. I wanted to make her feel better but didn’t know how. Neighbours greeted us and Mum pulled herself together, her absorbed air replaced by a masking smile.

  Christ the King was a pale grey brick building of no architectural merit, despite its architect of note. It squatted at the bottom of a long hill at the top of which presided the Anglican St Mary’s Church, emblematic of the country’s attitude to the two religions, Dad had once said – the Protestant above the Catholic.

  I liked the hymn-singing best of all and looked at the choristers and altar boys and girls with envy, wishing that church could be another performance event for me but afraid that the sentiment and emotion such engagement risked bringing with it would expose me as hollow, not spiritually worthy. I thought of the man Dad had read about in the paper who was found to have no brain, just a layer of brain cells around the inside of his skull, but emptiness where grey matter should have been. That was me, I felt, at a personal level: cut me in two and you’d find nothing, just an inner lining to an exoskeleton that walked and talked like a human being.

  ‘Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my body, which will be given up for you,’ pronounced Father John, holding a wafer up for his congregation to see. He paused, then placed it on his tongue and swallowed it. The reflected light on his glasses hid his expression.

  Father John reached for a chalice, the choir sang and the congregation queued. I stood in line between my siblings, uneasy not because I considered myself to have sinned and not because I hadn’t been to confession, but because the doctrine of transubstantiation bothered me.

  ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.’

  The idea of eating someone’s flesh was unsettling, at best. That it was Jesus’ struck me as idolatrous to an extreme. Father John offered me the wafer. I trembled and took it. Father John blessed me. The body of Christ tasted faintly of what I imagined to be starch and dishwater as it dissolved between my tongue and palate.

  Isabella

  I didn’t hold my expulsion from the Bobeckyj household against Mrs Bobeckyj at all. She and her husband had been kind and sensitive, if slightly distant, surrogate parents and my leaving brought a tidy resolution to the complication that Tomasz and I had been knotting for each other, one that untangled only gradually over months of Sundays on which I was invited to visit Cosmo for lunch.

  And then there was the care home and the novel company of a dozen teenage girls who, I would learn over the next two years, were blemished but beautiful butterflies, all the more admirable for having been damaged.

  We had our own rooms and shared four bathrooms and two kitchens and a communal room across two floors. Mr and Mrs Bankes lived on the premises and either Miss Robbie or Miss Heverfet was there daily. It was as Miss Heverfet and Miss Lafontaine were introducing me to my new family, to use Miss Heverfet’s term, or housemates, to use Miss Lafontaine’s, that I found myself in front of a girl I hadn’t seen in five years and yet recognised instantly, despite the massive change she had undergone.

  ‘Kimberley!’

  Kimberley said nothing and, blushing beneath lowered eyelashes, edged back into her room while Miss Heverfet moved on to her neighbour.

  ‘You know each other?’ asked Miss Lafontaine.

  ‘And this is Frederica. She’s been with us a month. Frederica, this is Isabella.’ Miss Heverfet made the introduction loudly so as to preclude my reply, demonstrating an understanding of the nature of such encounters that Miss Lafontaine had yet to grasp.

  ‘Freddie,’ said Frederica once Miss Heverfet and Miss Lafontaine had departed, and shook my hand quite formally.

  I had never met anyone like Freddie. She mixed tact and delicacy with candour and bluntness that I found disorienting until I recognised that she was open about herself and yet discreet about others. She was like the lemon sherbet sweets I had once been fond of: initially hard and bitter and, later, sweet and effervescent. She didn’t ask me how I knew Kimberley but, as though relishing being in charge and no longer the new girl, sat me down and made me tea and toast and spoke about the home, its timetable and rules, her routine and her aspirations.

  Ambition, I came to learn, was considered a virtue in the home. When Freddie spoke it wasn’t to explain why she was there but to talk about her future. As the other girls on my floor drifted in and out of the kitchen, welcoming and introducing themselves to me, it occurred to me that I needed neither a rescinded nor an alternative history but an intended future, a goal, an aim, something I had come closest to contemplating when it had been suggested to me that I stay on at school after the age of sixteen. In between cups of tea, preambles and digressions, I smiled and nodded and leant forward and back, doing my utmost to adopt a body language that spoke of my attentiveness and interest while I sought an appropriate reply to the question of what I was hoping to do should I be asked, but I wasn’t; the girls tiptoed around my future with all the sensitivity they demonstrated around our personal histories.

  ‘It’s what Have-a-fit and Blobby go on about,’ said Freddie, slumped in a kitchen chair. ‘Ambition, ambition, ambition. They want you to look forward, not back. Ambition is their “thing”. Choose your direction. One step at a time. Aim high, aim low – it doesn’t matter. Aim high and reach your target – bravo! Miss it – well, at least you tried and are at a different place from where you started. Aim low and – succeed or fail – it doesn’t matter: re-set. That kind of thing.’ She sat up. ‘It works for me.’ She tossed her black hair back and bunched it with both hands, her armpit hairs, visible through her short T-shirt sleeves, surprisingly bushy. ‘I’m going to be a singer. I’m going to go to music school in London. Opera.’

  ‘Are they… nice?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Miss Heverfet and Miss Robbie.’

  ‘Oh, they’re okay. We call them that because Have-a-fit can fly off the handle sometimes and Blobby,
well, she is a bit fat, you must admit. We don’t call her that when Kimberley’s around, of course.’

  ‘She’s not well, is she?’

  ‘No.’ Freddie frowned and looked into her mug. ‘It doesn’t work for her.’ She looked out of the window, as though what might work for Kimberley were hidden in the flowerbeds and bushes that bordered the care home’s garden. ‘I think that, for some people, they have to look back. You know, to understand and accept. Therapy and all that. Come to terms with things. I think Kimberley has to do that first. Verdi and Puccini. You know, the opera I want to do.’ She finished her tea, her eyes just visible above the lip of her mug.

  I knew that Kimberley hadn’t followed me into the kitchen for fear of what a public encounter might entail, what reaction it might trigger, and was grateful to her for it. I guessed that her embarrassment was greater than mine and her confusion more profound; neither of us had been prepared to see the other and both of us had to undergo considerable mental readjustment, to brace ourselves for the introduction of a daily reminder of our former lives. The shame we feel when we see ourselves through the eyes of others is of a sharper quality than the self-disgust we experience in front of a mirror, when we can allow our eyes to glaze over and add self-pity to the mix. I wondered whether social services had failed to connect the dots or whether they were intentionally reuniting me with Kimberley, Kimberley whom I had only ever seen in states of distress or undress or both, countless times for a number of years.

  ‘You could knock on her door, you know,’ said Freddie.

  I did.

  As Kimberley rose from her chair by the window to welcome me, the room grew darker and I noted that she was the width of her single bed. Her voice was a whisper, a spectre of a sound that contrasted preternaturally with the huge body and thick, bull-like neck it emanated from. The waif of a girl who had stood and swayed in Papa’s study that first evening I had met her now resembled a minotaur, her widely spaced eyes and her ears protruding from her lank hair like nubbins of horn only adding to the likeness. We talked, she in her armchair and I on her desk chair, about the home, the routine and the staff. Our questions were on issues of little consequence, our pasts never referred to, our prospects not alluded to. Gradually, the light ebbed from Kimberley’s room, so that I could no longer distinguish her features against the still pale sky and, yet, dark trees’ and distant houses’ silhouettes. She sat, an amorphous mass against the curtains and the back of her armchair, bleached of the personality and character a body imputes to a person, her voice carrying like the plaintive cry of pan pipes, expressive of pain, humiliation and despondency despite the banality of our topics of conversation.

  Sharon

  Dad hid behind the newspaper and Mum performed menial kitchen tasks while wearing a dressing gown and an abstracted look of anxiety. She opened and closed a kitchen cupboard without looking in or removing anything from it. She leant, her back to the kitchen sink, her head bowed, her shoulders hunched, her two hands wrapped around a mug of coffee as if for warmth.

  Seamus pushed his chair back from the table.

  ‘Just stay a moment,’ said Mum. ‘Dad,’ she said to Dad, who hadn’t turned the page of his newspaper in a conspicuous while. She put her empty mug in the dishwasher and walked deliberately to him. Slowly, firmly, she took away the newspaper, folded it and placed it on the radiator by the window. Sherah raised her eyes from a magazine and looked at Seamus and me. ‘There’s something we need to tell you,’ said Mum, standing behind Dad with her hands on his shoulders.

  Dad rubbed his face with his hands and untied and retied his dressing gown cord and looked up at Mum who gave his shoulders a gentle push.

  ‘The thing is,’ said Dad, ‘Mum and I thought that… Well, you know, Mum and I love each other very much and we love you very much. However, well, you know, we thought we might live separately for a while – not for a long time, but just for a while, you know, just for a change.’

  Seamus looked from Dad to Mum while Sherah looked at Seamus and me.

  Seamus said, ‘You’re splitting up.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mum.

  ‘No,’ said Dad. Then, ‘Only for a short time. To begin with.’

  ‘For a short time to begin with,’ snorted Sherah.

  ‘You’ve taken your time about it,’ said Seamus. ‘Is this the bit when you say you’ll always love us and tell us it’s not our fault? And that you’ll be best friends? That’s what my friends say you’ll say. Is it you who’s moving out, Dad?’

  Dad, taken aback, answered, ‘Only around the corner.’

  ‘So we’ll see you at weekends?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘And at other times too, of course.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Seamus. ‘At least I won’t be the only one anymore whose parents are married.’ He looked at me and Sherah. ‘You both knew, didn’t you?’

  I didn’t know how to respond, and was certain that my confusion was written on my face.

  Seamus looked at Mum and Dad. ‘Why am I always the last to be told anything?’

  Mum and Dad protested weakly and looked from Seamus, who made no move to get down from the table, to me.

  My parents looked pale in the wan December light. They maintained their positions, one sitting, one standing, like statues on a stage set, the play long over. I was overcome with love for them. They had drifted apart without my realising it was happening and I had taken the silences and the trivial disputes to be a normal part of family life, preferring to think with every passing day that I had misheard or imagined the conversation between Mum and Wanda or that Mum and Dad had changed their minds. Maybe, if they had separated once and got back together, they could do so again. Or, maybe, if I hadn’t come along to complicate things, they might still want to be together.

  I stood and hugged them, one arm around Dad’s neck and the other around Mum’s waist.

  ‘I love you,’ I said, ‘and I hope it will be just for a short time,’ and Mum, Sherah and I started crying while Dad patted my arm and Seamus looked on, surprised, as though he might have missed something.

  Mie

  It occurred to me that, for flight, where a bird needed wings, I needed a foreign language.

  I spun the globe that stood on a shelf at the back of the classroom, east to west, to find that Spain is at the same latitude as Japan. I stared wistfully at the square Iberian peninsula; we were taught neither Spanish nor Portuguese at school. I didn’t look east from Japan, the thought of losing myself more metaphorically than actually in the desolate blue expanse of sea quite terrifying. What are we when, silver-bulleted, we cross the ocean thousands of metres above it? The thought of flying above land, however, held no fear; I would remain rooted by the swiftly moving tendrils of my imagination. To the north of France: Britain. There was a symmetry I found appealing: Japan and Britain, insular parentheses either side of the Eurasian landmass.

  Too proud to underperform academically, I did well in all my classes; the ones I really excelled in were language classes and, specifically, foreign languages: English and German. I loved the precision that language could convey when needed and, too, the ambiguity and poetry at other times. It became evident to me that I would study a language at university. I found German to be like mathematics; surgically, thrillingly precise with straitjacket-like qualities and an abrasive sound of metronomically regimented jackboots, not unlike our harsh, barked Japanese. Indeed, German was too like Japanese and, indeed, Germany too like Japan. Both languages place the verb at the end of the sentence and have polite and informal forms of speech. Both countries lost the last great war and, at some profound level, the more I learnt, the more I was put off German by the fact that the Germans, like we Japanese, wore the world war like a badge of shame. I didn’t want to remain in a losers’ club.

  English, by contrast, was the language of victors; it was democratic, with the one form of address. It brought the verb closer to the subject with the emphasis on the subject doing the doing rather than t
he object being done to. English was active, not passive. It was liberating, with rules that only went so far. One needed a poem to remember how to pronounce tough, bough, cough, dough and hiccough, thorough, slough and through. There were no rules; it was down to you. It was up to me. Aus, bei, mit, nach, seit, von, zu take the dative but what rule governs English prepositions? Mrs Watanabe, despite her excellent English (or so we thought), only ever risked losing her composure when explaining prepositions that, in our language, had been subsumed into compound verbs that, in effect, made the learning of these almost automatic. Was I the only one to notice the silent plea she would make to the English assistant as she removed her glasses with one hand and ran the back of the other against her brow?

  Our German language assistant was a big blonde farmer’s daughter in pigtails, thick glasses and dungarees who desperately wanted to be liked. The more Ursula tried to impress us with the Japanese she had learnt and the more she tried to ingratiate herself with us, the more we disliked her. We had been brought up to revere our teachers but, as we recognised a mutual sentiment in the implacable Mrs Watanabe – who detected our malevolent attitude to Ursula and yet did little to discourage it – we grew to despise the stranger who had parachuted into our midst. Her Japanese language skills were her eventual undoing; we soon learnt that, easily frustrated with our reluctance to communicate in her native language, she would lapse into Japanese and, ultimately, as we watched her anxiety levels rise and enjoyed her total capitulation to explaining in Japanese what she had been so desperate to tell us in German, we learnt little.

  Margaret, in contrast, appeared to understand not a word of Japanese and to be quite indifferent as to whether she was liked. Her hair was light brown in colour and of medium length and her face and hands quite free of make-up and jewellery. She wore jeans, woolly jumpers and Hush Puppies shoes and kept her arms straight and her hands clasped in front of her, whether standing at the front or the back of the class or leaning over our desks to assist us with our work. She spoke English a little loudly but slowly and clearly, and when spoken to in Japanese would reply, ‘I’m afraid I speak no Japanese. Can you please repeat that in English?’ Initially, we didn’t believe her but she remained so benignly beaming when some pupils, out of earshot of Mrs Watanabe and keeping an innocent smile on their faces, addressed her as busu, putaro or kusobabaa, when she was anything but ugly, a tramp and a farty old woman, that we quickly decided that she could, indeed, not understand a word of our language. So we doubled our efforts to communicate to her in hers and, consequently, learnt English fast.