Human Pages

by John Elliott

  in the most profound depths.

  (Soleares of Romerillo)

  Over recent months, haphazardly at first, fitting it in when time allowed, then more methodically with specific goals, Agnes Darshel had tried different ways to pick up her father’s traces. Increasingly, they had left her with a heightened sense of his absence, his nothingness, which her imagined figure of him filled less and less.

  The name that he had used, the name she and her mother had called him by, had proved, on investigation, to be false, and the history that accompanied it highly dubious. Foundation stones of family, date of birth and country of origin, crumbled under the weight of the repetitive bureaucratic stamp: NO RECORDED VALIDATION.

  Surviving photographs in her possession likewise yielded scant tangible presence. The majority consisted of Sula, her mother, alone or in the company of relatives or friends. Fading notations in her mother’s rounded script detailed the relevant background of dates, places and occasions, but revealed nothing of him. Presumably for some of them he had been there but always unseen, careful to be out of camera shot.

  At times, when glancing at a particular group or solo portrait, Agnes sensed that it might have been his eye which had aligned the frame, his finger which had triggered the exposure, and none more so than the snaps where she, herself, made her entrance: Mom and Dad’s beloved baby, their captivating infant, who crinkled up her face at the photographer with unconcealed glee.

  In the few instances where he did show up, he had somehow managed to turn away, right at the inapposite second, so that half his features were blurred or else he had surrounded himself with the only available shadow, in which he languished, barely discernible. Whilst everyone gazed good-naturedly or mockingly back at the camera, his eyes seemed deliberately averted in a conscious subversion of the normal rituals and mechanics of the process. None of these images took her any further forward. She had no clue as to how he would look twenty-five years on.

  Her next step, taken somewhat reluctantly, had been to go back to Saint Callou, the town upstate where the three of them, father, mother and daughter, had once lived, contentedly it had seemed, to see if she could still locate some of his former friends, fellow musicians, workmates, casual acquaintances, anyone in fact, who remembered something about the enigma of René Darshel and could shed light on what had become of him.

  One by one, she visited the places her mother had talked about so animatedly in the days before her death, only to discover time had obliterated the printing works where he had been an operative, and fashion had cancelled the music venues where he had played trombone. The bars and restaurants that remained now sported other names, different themes and changed clientele. Each night, on her return to her motel room, possibility after possibility whittled down under the thick, insistent black-marker stroke of a further deletion.

  Then one morning, when she was on the verge of packing her bags and going, a breakthrough happened. A retired used-car salesman, who had traded with her father a couple of times, surfaced beside her at the counter of the Oak Leaf diner. He set her on the track of someone else. They, in turn, pointed her to other sources. New entries began to multiply in her notebook, and, because they ranged far and wide across several states, she left Saint Callou at the end of the week in revived spirits.

  Back home in the city, she sent a blank tape to each of them requesting information. After a worrying gap of nothing arriving, her mailbox slowly began to contain the odd return. At first, they scarcely covered the bottom of the cardboard box—which had previously housed twelve one-litre cartons of Bethany’s Grapefruit Juice—she kept in the hall cupboard, then they spread across her bedside table and eventually into another smaller cardboard box. More and more of her leisure time became disturbed by the compilation of cross references that she annotated from the dates they quoted, the places they had seen him in, the contexts of their relationship and the new leads they afforded. It slowly dawned on her that his pursuit was inexorably becoming her pursuit, and, if she continued in this vein, what she considered as her life was in danger of being taken over and relegated to the margins. She, therefore, resolutely put away the new arrivals unheard. After all, he could be dead, she told herself. Her enterprise could all have been a dreadful waste of time, but the recurrent image of her mother’s last despairing, imploring looks and her outstretched fingers trying to people empty space would not allow the matter to be dropped so easily. The search for her father must continue. Whatever the result, it was her duty to persist.

  The irony was, however, that just as the initial trickle of information had swelled into a gush, which threatened to sweep away her normal routine, now the flow began to dry up. No further tapes came. Decreased sightings of her father from 1963 onwards culminated in a total blank. No one in the network she had built up had seen or heard of him in the last nineteen to twenty years. In spite of her renewed efforts, another chapter had closed. She was left with a void.

  In the following months, his name alone was all she possessed to plug the emptiness. She played with it, in odd moments, as though its constituent letters held his past and future. She pulled and pushed at them. She teased them out of sequence and reluctantly put them back as they were. René. René Darshel. People on the tapes uttered its syllables so easily, so smoothly, without hesitation, unaware that they were mouthing a lie, a camouflage, which he or others had constructed, leaving first Sula, and now herself, to disentangle its true significance. And what of her own name? He had surely robbed her of that in the same way that his abandonment of his wife and five-year old daughter had robbed her of her childhood.

  Through the wearisome hours, at the end of what were turning out to be ever more humdrum and unsatisfying days, Agnes shuffled the variants, regrouping the letters of his name again and again. Where was or who had been Dan Shelere, Len Shradeer, Earl Henders, Red Lashreen, Ned Hersaler, Les Herrande, Sal Dreherne, Ran Shelrede? What would a ‘share lender’, a ‘slender Lehar’, a ‘harden seller’, a ‘real H sender’, a ‘Dr Sen healer’ do?

  Needless to say, his name was only a surface. Its components, its globules of consonants and vowels, were nothing more than an echoing enigma. She sought refuge from the impasse in the embargoed collection of tapes, listening to them in repeated snippets as she drove to and from work, scavenging for anything that she might have missed in the first place.

  They told her about his skinny arms, his hairline that had started to recede, the way he used to blink rapidly when he came out of shade into bright light, the murmur of his voice, like a monotone you had to strain to catch, as if he had only been voicing his own thoughts for his own hearing. They confirmed that he had stood over there, that he had sat in that particular chair, that he had gone out of that door into that yard, into that street, which, of course, was unrecognisable now, just like the neighbourhood, just like the city, just like life itself. He had been a person who had strayed into their lives when they, too, when all was said and done, had been someone else. Yet, for her sake and her enquiry, they had tried so hard to picture, to explain, to recover the basis of their encounters and transactions with the ghost they still thought of as René Darshel.

  ‘Let me see, it must have been not long after I came out of the army. Spring 1961 . . . ’

  ‘ . . . Mary had only just moved away that same September when he used to drop by. She didn’t phone for a while and then we heard she was engaged to a boy in Lexboro.’

  Once they had located the relevant time for themselves, the vestiges they then attributed to him embodied that time alone, a reconstructed past in which such things had been possible. Today, they averred, no one was like that. No one displayed that particular mix of sensibilities.

  His presence flickered through their words, their silences, their different accents, like a will-o’-the-wisp, perceived briefly in the uncertain trajectory of their own memories. One thing, however, did stand out. She gleaned a common thread from her repeated listening, a minimally stated constant re
frain: his habit of suddenly not being there, of departing without any prior hint or announcement.

  ‘You’d look up and he’d be gone.’

  ‘I’d see him again and off he’d go without a word.’

  ‘At that time, he’d be with me sometimes. We’d sit and talk. He always told your mother he was somewhere else. I’m sorry ’bout that, but, anyway, I’d be frying him some food. We had a kind of a thing going, you understand, nothing deep. Or I’d get up to do something, brew the tea or coffee, see to my hair, fix myself. Most times he’d be gone. Now, let me see, one time he did hang around. On account of the weather, as I recall. Heavy rain and flooding, too. That time he stayed the afternoon. That was the only time. Reckon it could have been the last time I saw him.’

  ‘You won’t know this, but I remember seeing you when you were only a toddler. Sula brought you down to the works to meet him. Quite a crowd of us were there. René’d slipped off somewhere. Nobody picked it up to begin with. Mind you, he often talked about you. That’s right. I’d say in his own way he was as proud of you as any father. He’d got something on his mind though and I don’t think it was doing him any favours. Some days he never turned up and I know for a fact he wasn’t always at your home. The boss wore it for a bit, ’cause René was a good worker, fast and skilful. The boss liked him. To tell the truth, most people did. He was an easy-going guy, but there was something that wasn’t meat and potatoes like the rest of us. You’d never say he was settled down, not to the job, not to anything maybe. In the end, he just went. Before the inevitable happened, some said. Later, I learned the boss had told Lucas, Lucas Armitage that is, or was, he’s been dead a couple of years, “If you ever see him again, or if he ever gets in touch, tell him I’ll have him back.” But nothing came of it. I think Lucas felt bitter towards your father for some reason . . .’

  Hearing their halting testimonies for a second or third time, Agnes realised he had disappeared out of their lives exactly as he had gone from her mother’s and her own. A secret, shameful relief nurtured itself within her consciousness as she grew more and more confident that none of them recalled him with lasting love. She stopped taking the tapes with her in the car, and then, one evening while looking at their disarray, the physical husks of her fruitless search, she scooped them up from the floor and sofa and consigned them back in their two cardboard boxes, whose flaps she sealed down with sticky tape. They fitted snugly into the space beside her shoes at the bottom of her bedroom cupboard.

  Funnily, however, their voices would not stay there. When she poured a coffee during break-time, while she set out the papers for the day’s boardroom meeting, when she dialled long distance and got an engaged tone, when she felt the sluice of a hot shower pummel against her skin on her return home, they whispered in her ear, ‘I never knew he had a daughter.’ ‘You’ll forgive me asking if you look like him or if you take after your mother, whom I never met.’

  The wounds she had imagined healed long ago now started to pulse and reopen. It was all so unfair. She felt hot tears scald her eyelids and her hands would shake at stupid moments. Colleagues looked gingerly at her and asked if she was okay. She shook her head in reply but said, ‘It’ll pass. You know what it’s like when someone leaves. I’ll get over it. Thanks for asking.’ Oh God, she thought, I’m treating him as though he were my lover. Anger against his renewed power spilled over when she was alone, causing her to curse him to hell and to decide to have nothing to do with him, but the litany of voices she had thoughtlessly unearthed linked them both irrevocably together: René, Sula, Agnes, an unbroken circle. There was no real escape. Her search would have to go on. Where or how she did not know, but if she were to regain peace of mind she would have to find him and bring him to book for his countless derelictions because, above all others, she was his most legitimate accuser.

  Yet it had not always been so. The voices also stirred her own vague memories, which mingled with theirs as the tapes slowly turned on their spindles. Memories where, rather than seeing him clearly, she sensed his omnipresence, his gigantism of being, the shapeless, all encompassing, nearness of his face, the smell that did not belong to either herself or her mother.

  There had been a window seat somewhere. She had been hoisted up in his arms, laid down, then hoisted up again. His strength had wrested open a door at the end of a corridor, a door so huge, so anchored by a heavy spring, that no one else could make it budge. She felt the grasp of his hand round hers. It guided her. It gently drew her back and gathered her to his side. The hand which opened, after she had closed her eyes at his command, to reveal . . . what? Whatever it had been, a sweet, a trinket, it would not manifest itself, but the sensation of promise, the magic spell of waiting, remained.

  When he had left their home for good and she had half understood what it meant, she had created a special nest for herself behind an old green velour sofa. She tried to talk to him there, rubbing her cheek against the fabric and counting up to forty-five, and then to fifty, in an attempt to bring him back through the open door. It did not work. No number, however varied, produced the desired effect.

  She was aware, of course, that her mother’s adult chronology had already disputed these childish glimpses of past events. Moving from apartment to apartment, the layout of one compared to another, had all fitted schematically in Sula’s recollection of circumstances, reasons and dates. The corridor Agnes spoke of had existed, but not the door with the heavy spring. The colour of the sofa was brown, and the upholstery imitation leather. They never lived in a room that had a window seat and, most telling of all, she had been a few weeks short of her fifth birthday, not her fourth, as she had imagined, when he finally disappeared. What, therefore, could she possibly gain in replaying these flawed and dim phantasms, which her mother had been at such pains to dispel? They might as well belong to the little girl of Earl Henders or Les Herrande for all the good they did.

  The shameful truth was she had used her father’s departure, together with the terrible mystery it had created, as a potent weapon throughout her childhood, and into her young adolescence, against the pettiness of her mother’s daily expectations. The stultifying rules of acceptable behaviour, which bound Sula and with which she sought to bind her daughter, were there to be broken. He had done it. He had walked away regardless and he had not skulked back. If he cared, he had chosen to ignore it. If he loved, he had deliberately set it aside. His example opened up the wide, exciting world of freedom and indifference, which she had seized on in a thousand ways to prick and deflate her mother’s certainties and circumvent her dearest hopes. When she had been deliberately late in getting up in the morning, when she had refused to go to school, when she had picked at the food her mother had prepared, pushing it dismissively to the side of her plate, when she had dawdled on the way home and would not come in at night, he had been at her side mouthing softly so that only she could hear, ‘no, no, no, you needn’t.’

  Given time, however, her defiant ‘no’ had changed into a hesitant and then resolute ‘yes’. As adulthood and independence approached, his influence steadily waned, until he became merely an unwanted remnant of her consciousness, no more important than the outmoded clothes she used to wear or the playthings which had long since been banished to yard-sale boxes.

  In contrast to his wilful egotism, she began to appreciate her mother’s selflessness over the years in its true light. Sula had lived and worked uncomplainingly without a man, firmly shutting out the chance of a lover interfering in their lives. When Agnes had thrown René back in her face, she had borne it with good grace, free from bitter rejoinders. The reality was Sula had been her citadel, within whose walls, in spite of her repeated attempts to breach them, she had found a constant and loving refuge.

  Separated at first by a neighbourhood, then by hundreds of miles, she had drawn ever closer to her mother as the years progressed. Every time they met, no matter how great the interval, they found themselves quickly in tune, playing to a score they instinctivel
y understood. Agnes, invariably, arrived with the current man in tow, whom she teased and cajoled into paying court to Sula, while she sat watching her mother’s dormant coquettishness get the better of her matronly reserve with ill-concealed relish.

  Most of the men had left when she had asked them to, and Sula seemed not to mind every time a new Harry replaced a former Ivan. The few who persisted in sticking around both received and inflicted pain. A pain which proved to be only a passing discomfort when one terrible, never to be forgotten night the phone rang at her bedside, and, as she answered it through growing chills of apprehension, the bluest of blue Mondays with a vengeance came to call. Sula had cancer. She had told nobody. The emergency operation had been too late. The doctors wanted to talk.

  Agnes showered, too shocked to weep. She dressed, packed a bag with a new emptiness filling the pit of her stomach and drove until the feeble light of dawn stretched through the sun-drenched morning to the oppressive heat of an airless July afternoon.

  Throughout the ensuing days, days without hope according to the doctors’ prognosis, she kept vigil at her mother’s hospital bed, watching the morphine levels mount in the attempt to ease and cradle her frail and pain-racked body, which only a short time ago had felt so vibrant to the touch, so solid in the parting embrace.

  As for Sula, it seemed she filled her remaining days with him. She implored Agnes to join him, repeating endlessly the times when the three of them had gone to Eithe ponds, the times on the shore when the light would not fade and they had no money, no money at all, but it had not mattered because, dear God, they had been together in time. Time draining away, Agnes thought, days, weeks at most, and here he was intervening at the last gasp, an absentee whose name her mother had not spoken for years, blundering in to spoil what she was desperate to say and feel.

  *

  Something was missing, something dreadful. It agitated Sula’s hands and arms in spite of the ice which numbed her bones. She felt too weak to rise, too weary to do what she had to do. René had vanished. She pointed to the very spot on the ceiling where a moment ago his face had been, but Agnes foolishly maintained it was only the moving shadow caused by the changes in cloud and sunlight. It was the same when she heard his voice calling to her so distinctly from the corridor. Agnes returned with a determined shake of her head. In the end, unable to do more, she had to make do with a promise that Agnes would faithfully rejoin him wherever he might be. Exhausted, she fell back on the pillow. Agnes’s hand rested on hers. Its weight was almost too much to bear, yet she took comfort from the knowledge that his name had been on both their lips.