‘What a dick,’ Gael says.
Sive clacks her tongue. ‘So he must only have been forty-one or two when he went to the States. He stayed illegally for fourteen years. He got a job as a crop duster in a farmland. Oklahoma of all places. Snakes and everything, they have. It was risky work too and it didn’t get him far off the ground. But it was something. The swooping and turning kept him dizzy. Which he liked. It was a disaster of a plane, I suppose. He flew it half cut. And on top of it all, he started gambling. You see, when the temptation’s there on your doorstep … He used the plane as a wager more than once, he said, though it wasn’t his. When the boss’s son found him one morning, slumped and sick in the cockpit, they said if he ever tried to work in Oklahoma again, they’d lend their plane to the police to go after him. He left via Mexico. By the time he got home, his only son was long gone. Auntie Beverly offered to put him up if he’d spend a month in rehab. Which he did. He taught all the patients card counting. And a few of the nurses! He remembered his way with people. Comradeship. What Ruth had loved him for.’ Sive pauses and checks her rearview mirror, but it’s clear. ‘He needed the counselling, really. Grief is its own addiction and he wanted badly to be sober. His aunt knew grief. How it could be raw and recent even after their scent has left the house. The laundry basket. The silk lining. So he went to her. She was at the age that his presence around the place was relished and needed. He took care of her and she of him. He got a telemarketing job, of all things.’ Sive says this a little sarcastically. As if she’s trying to mask a touch of embarrassment. ‘Bev had all this money, but he insisted. To remember what it’s like to just be in society. Do the things we’re supposed to do.’
‘I get that,’ Gael says.
‘The day you pushed us together in the Tate Modern, he’d come to speak to a curator about Beverly’s private collection. She’d given him orders to donate a few pieces when she died. And she had done. Died. He was lonely all over again, but was trying to treat grief in a new way and that was the serendipity of his interest. We were both rebounding. He off a gong. Me off a snare drum.’ Her words have some vibrato to them.
The tyres on the road are calming, though they shouldn’t be. ‘Why wouldn’t he tell me all this? Doesn’t he think I’d want to know? Or that I have a right to know, even?’
Sive’s voice is low, now, and circumspect. ‘He won’t talk about death to people who haven’t experienced it. They can’t relate and he doesn’t want to make them try. That’s a generosity. It’s the most difficult thing; the existence of life’s opposite, hovering over us always as a possibility. Just a flippant iteration of events. You haven’t experienced death yet – not of anyone you really knew or loved. But soon you will. Your grandfather. Hopefully.’
‘Jesus, Mum.’
‘Well. He’s being mocked by his body. Betrayed by his mind. It’s harrowing, even to witness.’ She opens the window to let the cold air brace her. ‘I wish to God he’d written a will while he was sensible. Given directions to take him to Switzerland, which is what I know he wanted. He hasn’t the presence of mind to stockpile his morphine. The rare time we have him home, I leave him in the bathroom for an hour with the cabinets wide open so he might grab a few bottles of what’s there. But you can place something in a person’s hand and, as irresistible as you think it will be, it’s up to them to close their fingers around it. Such is our morality. Anyway, enough of this.’ She shakes her head. ‘Art will wonder what you said to me.’
They pull up to the flat, but it’s dark now and the lights are off.
II
Gael had asked how Art was free to do what he pleases, but she didn’t mean free. She had never believed him to be free, or anything close. She didn’t know a single person who was free in the way she understands freedom. A conceit that had stayed with her from King’s College (by editing her contractor’s essays rather than attending lectures, but however you get your vegetables) was Isaiah Berlin’s concepts of positive and negative liberty, from the module Political & Social Philosophy, which, to Gael, might well have been called: Everything.
Negative liberty is definable by what’s not stopping us – which doors aren’t closed to us. Freedom from persecution, harassment, discriminatory barriers. The right not to be shot down for what we choose to worship or say or wear. But it doesn’t enable us to pursue things. A good education. Scandinavian furniture. A full card of coffee stamps. A Green Party presidential candidacy. The doors open to us are positive liberties. Goals we’re free to go after. Or should be.
What Gael had found troubling was how appalled her peers were to discover that the latter liberty was unavailable to them. Firstly, as citizens. That the state can’t offer it, because for some to act how they choose and to pursue their goals, others have their freedoms infringed. Newton’s third law. His privilege is her restraint. ‘Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows,’ Berlin said. (To Gael, the question was clear: how does one become an orca?) The only way a state could enable positive liberty would be to ‘ascertain’ and homogenize the People’s desires. Cut to Kim Jong-il. And even if it were possible for a state to facilitate positive freedom, it might not be desirable to do so.
But personally, Gael wonders, can you have positive liberty if you can slip around or fit through or dance over the respective constraints? If technically you know your purpose and can realize it – you want to be a ballerina and you’re born into an affluent, supportive family, you do all the lunges, audition for Juilliard and get in, put on the tights and so on, pas de hurrée – are you then fully, positively free? (Assuming your instructor doesn’t say: You’re fat; get thin or get out. Taxpayers don’t say: We only support extremely pretty ballerinas. Statistics don’t say: This isn’t a viable career; here’s a job in insurance. Probability doesn’t break your neck; reciprocity, your spirit.) Assuming absolute rationality and zero external limitations, aren’t there other forms of constraint?
How that desire was formed to begin with. Your body type was a harbinger of leotard. Your mother who worked in insurance bought you pointe shoes when you were three. You’re a closeted lesbian and ballet was the only career that would let you ogle the female form without having to type your truth into the search bar. Pressure, manipulation, ignorance, repression, false consciousness, weakness, fear.
Art wasn’t enslaved by external forces, but by internal ones. He got the licence. He was admitted to the air force. He rose above his father’s derision. And now he’s here, cheery as a bumblebee, with paralysed wings. The most obvious of Sive’s barriers are external, so that’s some consolation to Gael. And Guthrie? Alas, Berlin accounted for him, too. ‘The subject himself can’t be the final authority on the question of whether he is free.’
There’s a photograph on the wall above Sive and Art’s dining table that’s more expensively framed than the others. It’s of Jarleth standing by Guthrie on the altar at the twins’ baptism. Jarleth is holding Ronan, and Guthrie has Soraca. They are tilting the babies over the basin, cupping their gauzy skulls. Guthrie looks starkly young, like a child sitting on a hospice bed and being told to take their grandparent’s hand. He looks deeply alarmed, too, as if he has been taken straight from the cooling hospice bed to the law firm to discover an enormous inheritance of debt. Gael imagines the artwork label.
Title: ‘They Know Not What They Do’
Medium: Baby on doily
Year: 2009
‘Thought I shot a good one there,’ Art says, ‘caught your dad looking dead smug. But then his face just stayed that way. Lucky both of you took after your mum, sides your colourings.’
Gael drops her gaze to her plate.
It’s Christmas Eve. A candlelit supper of meatloaf, boiled chestnuts and string beans, à la Art. It’s just the three of them, dreamily calm, but for Bob Dylan rasping out carols in the background.
Sive says, ‘I think my tolerance for comically bad music is at quota, Art. Do you mind?’
‘I’ll do it,’ Gael says, and get
s up. Searching through the record collection, she recalls an American composer she’d come across in New York. Frederic Rzewski, famed for his piano composition, ‘The People United Will Never Be Defeated!’ which was a series of variations on the Chilean song ‘¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!’ which was, at first, a celebration of the socialist Salvador Allende government but later became the anthem of the resistance against Pinochet’s regime. Gael finds it on YouTube and plugs the (Cash Converters leaving-gift) speaker system into her laptop.
‘What’s this?’ Sive asks.
‘Not sure how to pronounce his name,’ Gael says. ‘See if you like it.’
Sive pulls a face that warrants a monocle.
They listen. Quietly eat. The plonky scaling sound of it. The distinctive, march-like opening that leads into a melodic, lullabyish section, frisking around something more historic. The fast progression; prowling agitation. The backing away from; stampeding towards. The discordant statements of class that make the piece increasingly rousing – now anti-pretentious; now phrenic – as if the simplicity of the introduction and the rallying cry it’s based on were never simple or polarizing. That had been just another compromise for the gamut of discontent, which doesn’t fit on a stave or a placard. How have we come here, already? From alliterated slogans to this?
By mid-November, Occupy movements worldwide surpassed a thousand. The central conversation had shifted from austerity measures to economic inequality; love and rage the subtexts. It had truly bloomed. And all that blooms must wilt.
On November 15th at lunchtime, a week after Gael had run the New York Marathon, two thousand riot police ringed Zuccotti Park. She was no longer staying there, then, but she saw on the news how the bulldozer had rolled in. How the subway stops were shut down. The Brooklyn Bridge closed. A sound cannon boomed through Lower Manhattan. The library she’d volunteered at was thrown into a skip. She still had Camus in her handbag, which she opened. Later, she read in his Notebooks: ‘It’s a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.’ It seemed all part of the great contradiction that his writings were going for free in the People’s Library.
The music, too, contradicts. There’s a crashing sound that makes Sive and Art jump when Rzewski bashes the piano’s fall board, as accompaniment for a sforzando chord. He plays several triads like this, with huge pauses and the most delicate plucking of high notes in between. He barks, to lend rasp to a chord. A pause. Then, he begins to whistle hauntingly over the music, which gains fluidity and conventional beauty for just a moment, before frenzy recoups the sound and forsakes coherence. Just as it reaches nightmarish havoc, Rzewski diminishes it again to delicate notation and whistling.
The doorbell becomes part of the music, at first. Then, Art casts Gael a strange look. His round green eyes radioluminesce in the half light.
‘Was that the doorbell?’ Gael asks.
‘Yerrit was.’ He makes no motion to get up.
Nor does Sive, who’s trying to dig her fork into a chestnut that keeps crumbling like a floury potato.
‘O … kay?’ Gael says, ‘I’ll get it, then.’
Art curls out his lower lip and Sive says, ‘Could you.’
Gael sweeps her hair across from her temple and walks slowly down the corridor, heart bleating. She turns the lock on the front door and pulls it in. A jab of adrenaline to the circulatory system, which sometimes has the effect of making the chest feel stood on.
‘Harper.’
She is dressed all in black, but not in dungarees or a boxy silk shirt or a hand-knit Christmas sweater. The coat is old and covered in pilling and the black slacks are the wrong size. Tight on the thighs and far too long. She’s carrying a travel bag, and a huge brown-paper-wrapped item is propped against her shoulder. A gift? Her eyes are sunken and scorched and unfocused.
‘Are you okay? Come in.’
But neither of them makes any movements.
Harper blinks and strokes the package’s brown paper. ‘It’s Guthrie’s painting,’ she says. ‘I don’t wanna refund, or anything. But Mom died, so.’ Her chin begins to tremble, but she stills it like a pilot finding less turbulent air. ‘I don’t really wanna see it. And I know he was sad to lose em all, so.’
Gael’s tears come as a kind of cough. Like a barked chord she didn’t anticipate. She steps out to move the painting so that she can embrace Harper, but Harper says ‘Don’t,’ and carries the painting in herself. She sets it just inside the hallway against the wall and leads herself into the open-plan lounge where Sive and Art are stood by their places at the table. When Sive sees Gael crying, she covers her mouth and nose in a kind of prayer gesture. They must have known. Art has come round from the table and is holding his hand out to Harper.
‘You’re shorter than I’d imagined,’ he says.
Not up to comebacks, Harper hugs him and her muffled words are: ‘Thanks for everything.’ This must move Sive because she starts cleaning up plates, which is a rudeness Gael didn’t think her capable of. Gael paces up and down the hall, trying to catch a breath; telling herself over and over to get a hold of herself, that this reaction is selfish in the darkest way, but then stop Gael stop Gael stoppit stop is all she can manage. Her breaths thread so many needles. Art and Harper are talking quietly on the sofa and Sive is packing the dishwasher. The cold glare of fluorescent light in the kitchen feels like an incursion on the dark warmth they’d been basking in, their scotopic vision now lost. The dish clattering peters out. Sive clears her throat a few times and blows her nose. Then emerges to introduce herself to Harper.
Harper’s voice is hoarse. ‘Since Jarleth’s such an ass, you must be a friggin goddess, to have made Gael.’
‘Well …’ Sive says, ‘you …’ and tears up, which she doesn’t often do in front of strangers, perhaps to protect people from the heavy sorrow she extends. To have broken through to Gael, you must be an angel … is perhaps what Sive had been thinking? To have elicited love? ‘I’m so sorry,’ Sive says. She tries to stymie this indulgence, putting her hands in her trouser pockets formally, as if getting the body language right means the rest will follow. ‘I’ll make us some coffee.’
Art’s sitting beside Harper on the sofa when Gael comes into the lounge. She expects Harper to look her way and say something impossibly strong, but she doesn’t. She’s watching Rzewski on the laptop with the piety of a kid watching cartoons. It’s now half an hour in and the music has changed tone, as if the left hand can’t hear the right and doesn’t know they’re in different key signatures and, no matter how dexterously and accurately they play the notes, it will never sound of fellowship.
‘I can play that,’ Harper says.
Art laughs, knowing her humour would come. He pats the arm of the sofa like a dog.
Sive emerges from the kitchen, a tea towel pressed against one eye. ‘Can you?’
Harper nods. ‘It’s like, the Occupy anthem. Well, Rage Against the Machine was the Occupy anthem. That trumped Rzewski on popularity. But Rage doesn’t do piano parts.’
Sive stares at Harper, as if at a long-lost sister. ‘Sugar and cream?’
‘Uh-huh,’ Harper says.
Sive can’t know if this Americanism is a yes or no but it’s unimportant. She points to the electric piano, which they’ve moved from the study to the living room, where anyone else would have a TV. ‘Feel free to tinker around on that thing if it would relax you. Or if you want to go to sleep, you might be jet-lagged … Or are you hungry? … Anything.’ Sive dips back into the kitchen alcove and there’s the sound of coffee grains being scooped and dropped into the cafetière.
Gael’s watching the laptop too, her back against the wall. She doesn’t know what’s required of her, or what’s wanted. Sive’s behaviour is as much of a shock as the news and the arrival. Gael goes into the kitchen to put biscuits on a plate and she sees Sive leaning on the counter, collecting herself. She starts when Gael lays a hand on her back.
‘What is it?’
Sive shakes her head so silver strands of hair fall from her French twist. She doesn’t make eye contact with Gael and barely watches what she’s doing. ‘She’s just so young.’ Gael’s back is to the counter and Sive is faced towards it. Sive won’t look up. ‘Pass me the tray on top the fridge there, would you.’
Harper’s six years older than Gael, but her mum had only been fifty.
Someone’s hit pause on the video and the static fizz of the dormant speakers fills the room. The forecast anticipated snow and it sounds as if it’s come and all the windows are ajar. Harper and Art aren’t talking. After a few moments, the first three chords explain their quiet. Gael sets the tray on the counter and glances at her mother before moving into the living room, where Harper is on the picnic-furniture piano stool, hitting the next three chords so heftily, the impulse is to grab her, to protect the instrument. She takes long pauses where there should only be minim-rests. Then the next phrases are like brusque rapping on a door and it seems accidental that the notes are right. Are they? Now they’re right, surely. She has transitioned into the lighter, sweeter stretch of music, grade-five sort of stuff; melody all in the right hand, bouncy left hand rounding out the chord, a bit of the polka about it. Harper is doing her straight-backed playing Gael had observed in London, with no movement or dynamics. Her coat is off and she’s wearing a shapeless turtleneck black sweater, which can’t belong to her.
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