Man with a Seagull on His Head

by Harriet Paige

  They sat in silence, their old comfort blanket. In the early days, conversation in English had been a struggle. Silence, by comparison, was a solace, and lying back in it together a kind of addiction, persuading them that they could communicate on a deeper level. Sometimes it felt like they could, as if something were really happening in the silent spaces between. At other times it was just as if they had nothing to say. And she felt it now, this closeness and this distance, their unique capacity and complete inability to communicate.

  He squeezed her shoulder: always his touch was just a little too much, and made her stiffen and flinch when she wanted only to soften. She felt, in its tenacity, a sudden sense of their freedom disappearing, of his mother’s impending arrival, and in his smile, when he turned to her, a twist of regret, as if they’d never really discovered what that freedom was, or how to use it. She’d felt the same thing, the looming of a great bind and change, an anxious kind of joy, when she’d been expecting their child.

  A baby! She’d thought herself too old for that kind of thing. And she was, as it turned out. It had died inside her before she’d felt any sign it was alive. Never before had she felt the desire for a child, but afterwards it burned through her whole body. They’d tried again but there’d been no more babies. The loss was too much to talk about. And now La Mamma was coming to them to die.

  “Look at him!” said Vito, nodding at a gull standing flat-footed on the sand, its head cocked, its cruel eye turned upon them. “He knows. He knows, don’t you fella? He knows more than you think, Jenny. They’re not dumb, these birds.”

  Jennifer looked at the gull, and it looked back, as if waiting for her to say something. Did he really know?

  Vito knew all about the birds. And the fishes. Any creature you like: giant squid, water buffalo, hippopotamus. He filled his spare hours with nature programmes. The long evenings were one vicious mating ritual after another. The world around them was erupting in fertility: dense schools of fish, skies brimming with birds, insects writhing and squelching in the rich mulch of the rainforest floor. Jennifer kept one eye on it all—on little slimy sacks of glue-eyed young and dominant males locking horns—while she sat in her chair knitting teddies for children in Africa.

  Vito kicked his foot out and the gull flapped and hopped and then took off across the beach and out over the water, letting out a high, shrill cry. Jennifer followed it with her eyes, watching its wide white wings rising and falling in long, powerful strokes and then stretching out, perfectly still, as the bird soared and glided in a slow diagonal across the blue sky.

  Their house was up on the Cliffs. They weren’t cliffs exactly—rather higher ground that gave a view over the sea—but hills weren’t common in Southend so they tended to make a fuss over the few there were. At the top were the tea gardens and the bandstand, and then the park descended in tiers, with winding paths and a set of steps offering long and slow or short and steep routes down to the Esplanade.

  The best houses were to be found looking out over the water along the Royal Parade: tall and elegant with lead-roofed verandas and wrought iron balconies. Theirs wasn’t one of the best houses, but it was a good house all the same, located just round the corner overlooking a well-tended square. With just two bedrooms it was not large, but it was certainly big enough, and in their ten years of marriage they’d had no reason to move. When Jennifer had moved her furniture in from the bedsit she’d felt at last it had found its rightful home, and this alone was enough to validate her decision to marry. She polished it almost daily, just as her mother had always done right into old age, and allowed herself to feel a little smug towards her elder sister, whose offer of the furniture after their mother’s death had always felt like an insult, knowing as she did the cramped conditions Jennifer had been forced into. Rosemary had disappointed her. But how could she argue? Her sister had a family; Jennifer was alone. It was enough, in Rosemary’s mind, to give her a right to move into the family home, casting Jennifer out even after all those years of caring for their mother.

  Jennifer sometimes felt that she and Vito should have done more to make the house their own. It was only this year, in preparation for La Mamma, that they’d done anything in the way of home improvements, converting the dining room into a downstairs bedroom and adding a little lean-to extension to house a bathroom. The outside, though, had always been well kept, and Jennifer got a little pleasure from returning home each evening to the prettiest house in the terrace. There were window boxes filled with red geraniums running along the sills of the bay window, three white hydrangea bushes whose pom-pom flowers clustered along the top of the low front wall, and six neat, well-swept steps leading up to the front door, which were going to pose a problem for La Mamma. They’d had handrails put in last week: thick tubes of pale grey steel that made two institutional flat-topped arches on either side of the steps and announced to their neighbours they were making allowances, accommodating. Jennifer sometimes passed such houses, hidden within a normal terrace but with some little touch like these rails, or lettering on the windows, or a sign staked in the front garden: something that marked them out as not a house at all but a dental surgery or an old people’s home or a nursery.

  Inside, they peeled off into their separate routines of a normal weekday homecoming: Vito upstairs to change and Jennifer into the kitchen to start the dinner. The evening sun was stretching through the window above the sink on its final long, low burn, the light as sweet and sticky as the remnants of vanilla ice cream on her lips. She felt a little drunk. A giddy kind of feeling as if the world had loosened its grip, letting her reel a little, unsupported. Her life felt suddenly light around her shoulders, as though she might wriggle out of it. She wasn’t sure she liked it. She’d always enjoyed the feeling of being held in: a good secure waistband around her stomach, a buttoned-up tailored jacket, tightly laced shoes. Marriage, she always thought, would feel much the same: like a well-fitting skirt suit. At the best times, it did. How appropriate and valid she sometimes felt when, moving about the kitchen, say, she remembered herself a wife. But she found there was still plenty of room inside for loneliness, for regrets.

  But marriage to Vito was an unexpected thing to have happened, a thing she often reminded herself she should be grateful for. It had taken her places she’d never expected to go. To Italy, for a start, although she’d seen nothing of it but Vito’s hometown of Stilo. Twice a year they caught a plane to Lamezia Terme and drove across the toe of Italy, through the mountainous forests of Calabria where short men foraged for mushrooms and kidnappers hid their victims. Jennifer caught glimpses of the sea from the windows of their small rented car before they descended deep into the valley where Vito was born. And for two weeks she ate pizza and drank strong, sweet coffee and felt more keenly than ever the absence of children as the women around her gabbled their dialect and eyed her with a puzzled expression as though they couldn’t quite see the point of her.

  The people of Stilo were short and old and suspicious, the vegetables dark and shiny and lush. The streets so narrow you could walk down the middle and, stretching out your arms, touch the buildings on either side. The afternoons so hot you had to shutter yourself inside and sleep. Sometimes she ventured out in these dead midday hours, the clatter of plates like the rattle of bones, and those who stared out from the darkened doorways and shady street corners—the very old and the very young, the dogs and the donkeys—did so with such direct, unflinching eyes that she felt herself invisible. Now and then a brass band would strike a mournful note through the afternoon, drawing the living from their cool tombs to follow another of their number to the cemetery, which grew and prospered at the bottom of the hill.

  In the evenings—every evening—she and Vito took a stroll up to the Basilica, a tiny Byzantine chapel surrounded by cacti and scrawny chickens, and watched over by a thin and silent man whose cigarette stubs gathered in the dusty earth outside the entrance. As she stood at the top of the hill l
ooking down on the crumbling stone maze of streets and alleys that had kept her prisoner all day, and the bells of the domed church below tolled out across the desolate valley, something seemed to gather and rise from the town, which revealed it in that instant not as a dying place, but one more deeply alive than she had ever known. She didn’t belong there. She had no point. And yet she felt there was a point. In Stilo—this forgotten, faraway little place—there was a point. There’d be no more reason to go there now that La Mamma was coming to Southend.

  She filled the kettle to boil water for the pasta, poured olive oil into a pan and set garlic frying over a low heat. Then she went to check on the room they’d prepared for La Mamma. They’d bought a new pine set—a single bed, bedside table, chest of drawers, wardrobe—and on the low surfaces Jennifer had laid out the white crocheted cloths she was sent each Christmas from Vito’s cousin. They’d had the room papered in a pretty rose sprig, and a border with larger, fuller blooms went round the room just above the picture rail. Tomorrow she would pick flowers from the garden and put clean towels in the little ensuite, another place where handrails had been added. But for now she just sat down on the bed, feeling the springs give way beneath her. She moved a little, up and down—bed hopping—and let her mind slip its moorings, float downriver past art galleries and penthouses filled with paintings (of her!) and a lot of love, until the smell of garlic from next door brought her back to this little pink room. A sudden tightness about the ribs, and with it a vague intimation of her first solitary moments of married life when, lying in the dark with her husband a steadily breathing presence beside her, she’d felt a sudden and frightening dwindling of possibility as, above, she saw the sparks of other selves and lives and loves, only then revealing their existence as they wheeled and eddied off into the night like tiny squealing fireworks.

  “So—” began Vito, plunging his fork deep into his bowl of spaghetti. Jennifer recognised it as more of an audible setting to task than a prelude to conversation and, sure enough, the fork was loaded, lifted to his mouth, taken out clean, and plunged back in the bowl without another utterance. He was immediately absorbed in his eating, busy and content. She wanted to say something. She picked up her fork and paused to try and catch his eye across the table, giving him the chance to look up and see that something had happened today. She wanted to share it with him, and yet keep it secret too. If he could just notice a change in her, maybe that would be enough.

  “Amanda Matheson came in today,” she said, for she thought suddenly of the little girls whose blond heads, like spume upon the waves, rose in her memory as expressive, somehow, of her giddy, weightless feeling. “With all four of the girls,” she added.

  “Four she got now?”

  “Yes, four,” Jennifer said, trying not to be disappointed with him. “Samantha and … oh, I forget their names but they’re little angels, all of them.”

  “Did you burn the garlic?”

  “A little, maybe.”

  “You got to watch it. Don’t take your eyes off it. I know what you’re like. You have the flame too high, and then you go wandering off. You just need to melt it, very gently, gently, and don’t—”

  “Vito?” she said firmly, and waited for him to stop eating and look up at her.

  “What? What is it, Jenny?”

  Why couldn’t she say anything?

  “Did I ever tell you I was once the Southend Carnival Queen?”

  He laughed, not unkindly. “I think that was a long time ago, Jenny.”

  “Not so long! I can still remember it. I can still remember it like it was yesterday,” she said, speaking quickly, trying to generate some real feeling. “They had the final in the Odeon. Me and five others. Derek de Marney was the judge—you must know Derek de Marney? He was the first truly handsome man I’d ever seen in the flesh!” She laughed, trying to manufacture the excitement, the glorious warmth of winning. But all that had stayed with her after all these years was the press of the Mayor’s belly as he led her in the first dance at the gala ball, and little Robert Ferris, with whom she’d ended the evening, letting him touch her breast through the thick white satin of her dress. She said: “When they called out my name I could hardly stand for happiness!”

  Vito had at last stopped eating. His cutlery rested on the side of his plate and his attention was turned upon her face.

  She met his eyes. “Do you think I’m … nice to look at?” she said quietly.

  “I think you’re lovely,” he said. “The most lovely thing in the whole of Keddies, remember? That’s why I picked you. Straight off the shelf. Hey, what’s the matter?” He reached his hand across the table in search of hers. “You’re a silly thing. You know what? I’m going to buy you a present.”

  She laughed.

  “No, I mean it. I’m going to buy you whatever you want. You name it. Anything. Venice? You want to go to Venice? I’ll take you to Venice. I’ve got the money, the money is no problem, we’ve got more money sitting around than—”

  “Vito, I don’t want anything.”

  “There must be something.”

  “No, really, the only thing I ever wanted was—”

  “I know, you want to go to Positano, but I think Venice would be more romantic. Won’t you come with me to Venice?”

  “Vito, your mother is coming to live with us tomorrow.”

  “Yes,” he said, and sighed. “Poor Mamma.” And that was that.

  “I’ve done some chicken if you want it,” she said, gesturing to the hob where a few flat pieces of breaded chicken lay waiting in the frying pan. “And there’s salad … on the side.”

  “Yes,” he said distractedly, for he’d noticed the time on his watch. “Do you see? It’s eight o’clock already. We’re missing the dolphins, Jenny. Your favourites. Let’s take it in front of the television tonight. Come on, special treat.”

  Seven

  This Saturday, as for the last five Saturdays, Grace Zoob was walking her daughter to the studio on Bruton Place to have her portrait painted. It was a group portrait, Mira just one of an ensemble. “Oh, but the most important one, my darling,” Grace told the child, who by now, at the sixth sitting, needed a little persuading.

  They held hands as they waited for the green man at the crossing beside The Ritz on Piccadilly. Mira called the green man Ray and the red man George: “Because the green man is moving and the red man is lying down.”

  George was in one of his holes and spent a lot of time in bed.

  “Bye bye, George,” she said, waving at the traffic light as they set off, quite sprightly, across the road.

  There’d really been no need to wait. It was early, and even here the traffic was still sparse. The one low red car that did approach as they hit the middle of the road came to a slow and satisfied stop as if pleased at the interruption: a chance to break, look around, move the gear stick, rev up again. The sky was a cold, clear blue. The streets were empty, the buildings tall, and Grace Zoob felt that way too: tall and empty, like something made of glass. Sometimes it was a joy to be empty. To hold that clean space inside your stomach that came from being out and about before breakfast. It made her feel so light and so powerful. She had an inkling she might just become something marvellous were she never to eat again.

  They crossed onto Berkeley Street and Mira ran on ahead, her shoes patting against the pavement like peals of laughter. The light was so crystalline, Grace fancied she could see the thread that linked them, sticky and glistening and bowing in the morning air. She never felt more connected to her daughter than when she watched her from afar like this, as if the little girl were her own childhood self, still there, running on ahead somewhere in the pure, sunlit distance.

  Mira stopped at the bottom of Berkeley Square and the two of them walked on together, hand in hand once more, past the Bentley showroom. The cars inside were so dashing with their grinning silver grilles and d
evouring eyes, ready at any moment to pounce and shatter their plate-glass cage. And next door a shop selling crumbling ancient art, with always a big smooth-eyed Buddha in the window who looked at her in an entirely different way: he sat back, knowing, knowing something secret, something hidden. She was only waiting for the day that would send her through one door or the other to buy something: a Bentley or a Buddha, she didn’t know which.

  And then round the corner into Bruton Place, a tidy back street of small-scale studios and warehouses. Even the vans which came to collect and deliver were toy-like, always clean with well-painted lettering on their sides as if taken fresh from the box.

  The studio was number 37 and Grace lifted Mira so she could ring the bell. They were buzzed in and climbed the narrow wooden stairway to the first floor, where the door was open and opera poured lavishly out onto the landing. Gregoire, the bastard, was standing behind his easel at one end of the room. He ignored them as they walked in.

  The room stretched across the entire top floor of the building, but this was a small building and so the room was not large. There were metal-framed windows at both ends, bare floorboards, a large potted plant in one corner, and a wooden bench across the centre. This was the setting for all Gregoire’s portraits, so potently familiar that the room now had the feel of a painting itself: the dirty, scuffed-up floorboards as if textured with oil paint, the plant’s smooth leaves streaked with brushstrokes of green, even the sky outside the window, so clear and pale it seemed still wet.

  The other sitters had arrived already. Two women and two men. They loitered separately around the walls, bending and stretching as if gearing up for a dance class, all keeping their distance from the bench, whose narrow hardness would soon bore into their spines for three long hours. Grace had plenty of friends who’d sat for Gregoire; she knew of its crippling boredom. She’d sat round dinner tables and been the only one not able to throw her head back and remember the pain. “Oh the ache,” “the ordeal,” “the boredom of sitting still,” “—and naked! I was a nude of course, weren’t you?” It seemed a decadent kind of boredom, an exquisite kind of pain, and Grace so wanted to know it too, but she had never been asked to sit.