Equivocator

by Stevie Davies

  ‘Elise is, yes, alive – and well – if rather frail. At least, in one sense she’s frail. In other ways, the most powerful character I know.’

  Our father, in his arrogance, assumed he could hold his two broods apart forever. Did he think himself not only invincible but invisible, slipping between adjacent worlds? Well, he did get away with it, didn’t he? He was invisible. He is invisible. Meanwhile Rhys Salvatore watched and waited, hungry for any leavings his idol left unconsumed.

  ‘How much did your mother know?’ I ask.

  ‘Mummy didn’t tell me things she thought would hurt me. If you decide to speak to your mother about all this, Sebastian, greet her from me – if that seems the right thing. But if you feel that would make her unhappy – it’s bound to really, isn’t it? – say nothing.’

  ‘Thank you, Ava. And we’ll meet? You and I?’

  ‘I think we should. Oh dear. Hang on just a minute.’

  There’s a siren or car alarm going off. Or – no – someone is crying. The wail gains in volume and pitch. Ava’s back at the phone and explaining that it’s her baby, Luca. ‘He’s teething or something and didn’t exactly sleep last night.’

  I could not have guessed. A sort-of nephew. A hint of a future. The voice of my sort-of sister has altered tone and timbre and a blessed ordinariness enters into our exchange. She has morphed in my mind. I see Ava now as a woman in posset-stained pyjamas, hair all over the place, holding things together, just about.

  ‘Dieter, will you take Luca? Dieter! Thanks. Give him some Calpol? What time did we give the last dose? – Just a minute, Sebastian. – Can you take him, Dieter? – OK, my partner will sort Luca out while we finish. When you come down to it,’ Ava says, quite matter-of-factly, ‘our father was not just a bigamist – he seems to have been a bit of a sex tourist. There was apparently another relationship in Egypt, Sebastian, another family. There are letters in Arabic. Did you know that?’

  *

  I’ll ask her. Straight out. What did you know, Elise? What do you remember? How did it affect you? No, of course I won’t. That would be sheer brutality. I need to absorb this. Meet Ava. Talk it through with Jesse.

  Elise has something to ask or tell me, that’s clear. She’s like an athlete on her marks, an impression reinforced by her hoodie and trainers and the impatient jiggling of one knee. Meanwhile I may as well take the chance to calm down from the intense emotion. Fetching deep breaths, I carry tea out on to the veranda. The city lies greyly amorphous under low cloud, swallows casting brief reflections on the unruffled water.

  ‘When did I ever ask you for anything, Sebastian? Seriously, when?’

  ‘Well – never really, Elise. But you can ask me for things, of course you can. For anything.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. Mrs Nextdoor has got her daughter in a stranglehold. A head-lock. I overheard her telling someone that your son is your son till he gets him a wife but your daughter’s your daughter for the rest of your life. And really, I did quail for the daughter when I overheard that. It’s a bleak lookout to have to wait for your life until the ancientry kicks the bucket. Although I have to say that Daughter seems a jolly soul and not to mind. I suppose the jollity’s part of the role. Her name is Milly.’

  ‘So – you don’t wish you’d had a daughter?’

  ‘No, dear, I’ve been a daughter, and that is plenty. If I had had one, you can be sure I would not have named her Milly. Milksop kind of name, like Milly Molly Mandy. Sebastian, you are your own person. That’s enough for me. Whether I was ever enough for you – is another matter.’

  I reach over to adjust Elise’s cardigan round her shoulders and, with a wincing shrug, she extricates us. ‘Well, enough of that. And I’m not cold. I’m not a bodiless head, you know!’ she tells me, incomprehensibly.

  ‘Well – no. But –‘.

  ‘Frankly, dear, I’ve a yen to swim. Not in a chlorinated pool with ninnies trolling up and down in lanes. Real swimming, Sebastian. In the sea. I’m thirsty for it! You can wear your underpants when you come in – what colour are they? – navy, fine, nobody will mind or even look.’

  The sea at Rotherslade’s still as a millpond – a mercurial shade of grey, and the tide well on its way in. Elise is fine on the steps but the high bank of pebbles leading down to the soft sand is slightly hair-raising. How strange: she’s lost a good inch in height. But she’s fit and so far has suffered no falls with their attendant breakages. I hold tight to her hand. One can imagine the fragile bones snapping – and, if they did, she’d never be the same. It would mark the beginning of her downfall. The thought of taking Elise into the icy sea fills me with trepidation.

  She sits in a folding chair, silent, hands clasped in her lap, and seems pleased with everything, from the drifts of fishy-smelling weed to the headland’s dark green flank. In the old days she was a prodigious swimmer.

  ‘You know Dora came here to die?’ she says. ‘My old Marxist pal. Surely you remember Dora? She drowned herself. Just by those rocks over there. I was so happy for her. I did a little jig when I heard.’

  ‘Happy for her? You did a jig?’ My worst suspicions are confirmed.

  ‘It was a good way to go, Sebastian.’

  ‘I hope you aren’t thinking of following in her wake. Because, if so, I’m marching you straight back to –‘

  ‘Relax. Dora was ill. She chose a better way. It was a rational choice. Anyway, down to business.’

  The sun has broken through a film of cloud and the sea glows like pearl. Elise fits on a pair of prescription goggles. Optician’s free offer with reading specs. What do I think?

  ‘You look the business. The real deal.’

  ‘Are those your manpants? Don’t worry, nobody’s looking.’

  Hand in hand my mother and I pick our way through the muddle of pebbles and shells towards the sea. Gentle waves lisp in and break softly at our feet; there’s almost no surf.

  As I cringe and cower, Elise takes off. I watch her freestyle out, an efficient glide, paddling herself forward. Where Dora died, Elise lives.

  Afterwards I swathe her in sweaters, towel her feet and hair. Your son’s actually your son for the rest of your life, I think. Yours, my darling, will never get him a wife, after all. Or a husband, come to that. I pour tea from the thermos and ask if her thirst is quenched now. She thinks it is, for the time being. Don’t fuss, she silently admonishes me: for this is life, the fullest life, and we have to live it now. Somewhere inside myself, as I minister to her, I feel that my heart is breaking. Elise has learned to live within the passing moment but I stand nakedly open to losing her. The secret of Ava has retired to the perimeter of my mind.

  ‘What I fancy,’ Elise says, ‘is chips from the cafe.’

  ‘Fish with them?’

  ‘All right then, why not? Yes, and afterwards, ice cream. Find out what flavours they have. Debrief the girl exhaustively. You don’t need to come back to tell me – if there’s chocolate, that’s my first choice, especially with pecans – then mint, not strawberry, though strawberry is better than nothing. Don’t come back with nothing. And coffee – Americano, not cappuccino if we’re having chocolate ice cream. But otherwise – fine. Oh, could you also get a bar of chocolate – hazelnut – in case we get peckish later?’

  ‘Anything else?’

  She gives it some thought. ‘Not for the present.’

  Although it turns out that Elise can’t finish the chips, she makes a remarkably good fist of it, and lapses back, patting her belly, saying that this is the life and why don’t we look into purchasing a beach hut?

  ‘I have something important to show you at home,’ she says. ‘An item of attire. It will change our lives!’

  She has never been remotely interested in how she looks. I give up.

  On the way back to Colomendy, she says, squeezing my hand, ‘Funny to think that last year I’d have been glad enough of a visit from the Old Man’s Friend.’

  ‘How do you mean? The Old Man’s Friend?’<
br />
  ‘Pneumonia. Carries you off with no fuss. A nice little dose of pneumonia once seemed all I could reasonably hope for. To cease upon the midnight with no pain.’

  ‘I’m sorry you felt like that, Elise, when you first came here. You should have said. Or I should have known.’

  ‘Anyway. Sorry to hear about Jesse,’ she says. ‘Never mind, dear. Friendship is the great thing. Think of George Herbert – how does it go? – And now in age I bud again. But you have to seize the moment. To get budding. The Ancient Romans knew that, Catullus and so forth.’

  My head swims. Catullus met the Old Man’s Friend a very long time ago.

  ‘I’ve lost interest in my autobiography, I’m afraid. I’ve stuck all the junk in the green recycling bag.’

  Elise looks sleepy when we arrive back at Colomendy. But also exultant. With a flourish, she opens the wardrobe door to disclose what looks like a hanged man. It’s a wetsuit. She brings it out proudly and shows me the extras: a rash vest, a strange little helmet, rubber gloves and bootees. The suit looks impossibly heavy and cumbersome. And that’s where I come in, apparently. To help her in and out of it.

  ‘So we can keep going all year round,’ Elise explains.

  5

  STREPSIADES: Vortex? Well, that’s something I didn’t know. So Zeus is now no more, and Vortex rules instead of him …

  PHEIDIPPIDES: Who says that?

  STREPSIADES: Socrates of Melos and Chaerephon—they know about fleas’ footprints.

  Aristophanes5

  There were partners before Jesse, some closer than others, none bonded to me as kin. They came and went, leaving little trace. I remember the ritual of stripping the bed the moment they’d gone, bundling sheets into the washing machine, with their rank spoor of random sex.

  One morning I opened my eyes to see a blond guy prowling my bedroom. Blondie had silently dressed and was lifting my wallet delicately from my jacket pocket. He fingered out maybe two thirds of the notes. Every so often he checked that I was still asleep. I studied him through my lashes. The guy’s attention swivelled to the shelf of Egyptian deities. He weighed them in his palm, like a connoisseur. A silver replica of Anubis. Real silver? Any value? You could almost hear the ticking of his pea brain. Blondie hadn’t seemed to take to the jackal god. His fingers hovered over several miniature ankhs, in rather the way my mother ponders the choice of chocolates. Unexpectedly, Blondie returned to snatch Anubis. Into his pocket he slipped the god of death.

  The guy’s flaxen hair stood on end like a corn stook and he appeared, in the shaft of daylight, all of sixteen, though he must have been twice that age. His skin wasn’t good, acne-pitted from adolescence. He had the decency or prudence to leave my cards intact. I observed him curiously, fascinated by his experienced frisking of my belongings. Blondie was tough – clearly used to regular workouts at the gym – but I felt safe in challenging him. As I grabbed his wrist, he capitulated with a foolish simper. I turned out his pockets and took everything, including Blondie’s own wallet, which I emptied. Ron, was that his name? Rod? Something with R? Or not with R at all? Just – basically – no one. The guy was prey and I let him go. And the odd thing was, I felt rather exhilarated than otherwise by the encounter.

  Shall I return to this barren cycle of predation when Jesse leaves? Perhaps I’m an addict and should check in to some clinic. There has been a relentless thrill in my night walks, in the anticipation rather than the outcome, slamming into some anonymous body, without consequence. Losing Jesse, the bed will be barren, food hand-to-mouth. I’ll ride the circle line of conferences and speaking engagements. I’ll teach my graduates and peer into each fresh face for something that has escaped me.

  Don’t be like your father, Seb. Find another way. He called the girl Azizam. There was a daughter. Another family in Egypt? Really? And? Who else? What if there are others too, like the spawn of sperm-donors who’ve fathered a thousand children? It’s laughable. I don’t want to know.

  Salvatore’s concluding talk is eagerly awaited, though not by Mary, who welcomes me back to the conference like a sceptical friend of many years’ standing. Or rather, an inseparable friend of her scepticism. She also took a break, she tells me, spending a day in Pembrokeshire to seek out ancestors – but, hey, she fell in love instead. With the hedgerows and the heathland and the sea. I nodded off, Mary says, on a bed of thyme and red fescue. You can sometimes feel the earth’s slow heartbeat beneath you, and then you wake, and there’s no time. None at all. Just this moment. Your bony hip rests on the calcite of limestone. As we amble back to the campus, she’s describing the puffin colony and flocks of sanderlings haring hilariously along the tide line. It’s a joy, it’s a privilege, Mary says, to view such life and to have our moment and know that we are related. Close kin to birds and fishes, our surname ought to be Euphanerops: the first fish with fins at its butt-end. Legs-to-be that propelled us out of the slime.

  We wander down towards the khaki beach, wind tossing strands of hair across her mouth, grit lodging in the bud of my eye. Is this autumn that’s approaching in the seethe of leaves as we mount the wooded incline towards the bay? A remnant of last year’s copper beech leaves still adheres to the mother tree, archaic deaths challenging for space with new deaths.

  I could tell Mary everything. And perhaps I shall. Just not now. Until I’ve got everything I can out of Rhys. And meanwhile, I’ll enjoy her company. In her plaid shirt, frayed jeans and cowboy boots, Mary looks more than ever like a country and western singer. Any minute she’ll burst into song: OK, so you’re a rocket scientist? – That don’t impress me much! I tell her this; she laughs and, taking my arm, asks after my mother. The more she hears about Elise, the more impressed Mary is. Why don’t we travel back to London together tomorrow, and stop off in Cardiff to say hi to Mom? And I’m not to forget that there’s an ever-open invitation to Montana: a dinosaur with my name on it is waiting in a cave.

  Mary’s skinny jeans are in rags: distressed and destroyed, she explains – these being technical terms. She does it herself with a razor, the trick being to avoid ripping the under-layer of white cotton. No need to go for designer distress and destruction when you can make the mess yourself. I laugh aloud. Tell me something I don’t know. We wander the tide-line, past the dunes with their charred remains of cold fires. The salt-pickled log where I sat that first day – I can see it, further out now, and Salvatore’s has been washed away by the tides. We end up at the Lido where hardy children are splashing about on the verge of winter. Mothers huddle at the edge, hugging themselves.

  Over coffee I ask about Rhys: has Mary seen anything of him? It seems he’s retired to his Gower cottage, like Horace to the Sabine farm, to recreate himself in preparation for his lecture. For oddly enough, considering his charismatic reputation, Mary has heard that he suffers from performance nerves. He anguishes in advance over every word of a public lecture, racked with self-doubt. But when the dreaded hour arrives, he’ll soar up in an afflatus, abandoning the script to extemporise.

  I plan to do a citizen’s arrest on Rhys, is how I phrase it to myself. Face-to-face I’ll put the questions I’ve feared; tell him about the conversation with Ava; ask about Dad. The questions will be answered, or not answered, and laid to rest. I’ve texted Jesse to explain I’ll be home tomorrow with much to tell him. Locating kin? I have it already. I pledge myself to work at finding a remedy for the breach between us.

  The closing lecture is a celebrity event. Salvatore’s name has worked its magic, for numbers are swollen with students taking advantage of free entrance. Mary, Jarvis and I slide into the back row of the packed theatre, to hear a talk entitled ‘Hauntology: The Third Lobe’. The students seem to be part of a fan club. A young woman with green hair informs Mary that, once, Rhys spoke for six hours, breaking for lunch on the dot and resuming in mid-sentence – and that everyone came back. It was in Paris. They honour ideas there, they dare to think – Rhys is an original, a dying breed.

  ‘You – are –
kidding,’ says Mary. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘No, really.’ The green girl’s eyes behind her fashionably owlish specs are quite round. ‘He’s a legend? You know? My friend was there. Said it was, like, apocalyptic? Intellectually?’

  I am mesmerised by the green hair. It seems to segue into a sheen of purple.

  Mary says, ‘My god, the old windbag. Let me out.’

  ‘Give it a go though,’ the girl urges.

  ‘No way. I don’t have time to throw away.’

  ‘Honestly though. Stay. You’ll be mesmerised. Do you like jazz?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Mary says. ‘But what’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Rhys’s speaking is, like, a riff? – a Charlie Parker solo? You know? Just as you think it’s ending, off it goes again?’

  The guy next to her cranes round. ‘Rhys has a quarrel with Death,’ he says. ‘Endless procrastination, endless deferral. And you need to hear him out, you’re part of the music, right? Takes you up with him beyond where your mind can go, it’s true.’

  The aisles are crammed, in defiance of Health and Safety. No escape. Fug of carbon dioxide. I’m feeling awry. Shit. Green hair. Quarrel with death. Family in Egypt. The Messenger tribe. I have a daughter. Third Lobe.

  ‘What’s the Third Lobe exactly?’ I ask the fan club. They’ve no idea but the thought excites them.

  In the antechamber just beyond the swing door I spot Salvatore hovering, havering. The very tall Chairperson bends to him; seems to be coaxing, caressively, her hand on Salvatore’s sleeve. Thinking of running away, are you? That would make for a nice short lecture. But now he’s at the lectern, in a dark suit without a tie. His forehead gleams with sweat. His mouth opens. We wait. He waits.

  ‘I live my death in writing,’ Salvatore informs us breathily, as an opener. ‘I posthume as I breathe. But I digress!’

  And everyone laughs, roars, claps. At least, the cognoscenti do. As if he were a pop star recalling past hits. Why the laughter and applause? No idea. Mary has no idea. She mimes garrotting herself.