The Paperchase

by Marcel Theroux

  I was a mediocre student, although my father cherished the belief that both Vivian and I were highly talented. He had great hopes of our following him into the Law, which he managed to capitalise just by the way he said it. One of his fondest fantasies was to pretend that we had in fact already qualified as lawyers. It was flattering and touching, and I colluded in it when he discussed his business with us. ‘I’d like to pick your legal brain on something, Damien,’ he would say, and proceed to mystify me with juridical terminology, as though I were a forty-year-old lawyer, instead of a fourteen-year-old schoolboy struggling to achieve average marks in any of my subjects. ‘I sure could use your mother’s help on this one,’ he would add sadly, although her understanding of corporate law had probably been only slightly more sophisticated than mine.

  Looking back now, I think he was probably lonely, and thinking out loud, and trying to involve us in the only part of his life where he felt he had any competence. But that interpretation was beyond me then, and I felt ashamed of my father and almost protective towards him.

  As a result, I had a secret life of vice which he was unaware of, involving cigarettes, drinking and futile excursions to West London to buy spliff. It all came painfully out into the open some time before my fifteenth birthday. One weekend, I was picked up by the police, drunk, at midnight, in Earl’s Court station. The friend I was with had panicked and left me, passed out, on the platform. My father had to collect me from the police station in the middle of the night. I vaguely remember the dials of the dashboard doubling and quadrupling before my eyes.

  The next day was one of the longest of my life. I was consumed with remorse, and even my tears had an alcoholic tang to them. My father didn’t speak to me for two weeks. I don’t think he had the first idea what to do, poor man.

  Dad’s solution to my waywardness was, even by his standards, spectacularly bad. He decided that he hadn’t been setting enough of an example to me – that I needed to learn that hard work would bring results in my world as they did in his.

  One weekend, I came home to find that Dad had started studying Latin with a tutor called Mr Sandford, an old boy of my school who can only have been about twenty-three and had a tiny blond moustache that looked like it should have been attached to a gerbil’s arse. He insisted on addressing Vivian and me in Latin. If we bumped into him in the hall he would say: ‘Salvete, pueri.’ And Vivian and I would always reply: ‘All right, Mr Sandford,’ like a pair of barrow boys.

  I can only guess that Dad thought that the sight of him conjugating semi-deponent verbs would encourage me to work harder. He couldn’t have been wronger. Around this time, I had to go back to the police station to receive a bollocking from one of the officers, who talked about ‘boys with your opportunities’ and the anxiety I was causing my father. He even brought up my mother’s death; a manipulation that no one had been ruthless enough to try on me before. He made me feel that being middle class meant I had no right to be unhappy, so I assumed I wasn’t.

  In my opinion, this is a common fallacy. Middle-class people have paid for the relative safety of their lives by forfeiting the idea that their vicissitudes qualify as suffering. We are not supposed to be a wounded people. We are not cast in tragedies. We are cast in comedies and farces; we are found on running tracks with our silly blond wigs fluffed up by the wind beside us. There is no Hamlet, Chartered Surveyor of Denmark, no Mr Lear. A middle-class ‘tragedy’ is being run over wearing dirty underwear.

  Real, raw life always seems to be somewhere else: in palaces or shanty towns, not among the clipped hedges of SW18. You can weep your heart out at the sight of the young princess’s coffin being wheeled by on a gun carriage – even a pauper’s grave is somehow full of pathos and terror. But I always had the impression that when middle-class people die, someone just slides us into a filing cabinet, and our silly bodies stink and decay and finally defeat a lifetime’s attempts at hygiene.

  But, let’s face it, the human heart comes in a standard size. No one has a monopoly on misery. Obvious to you, perhaps; but the chief disaster of my life has been my inability to recognise when I was unhappy.

  At some point, Dad really started to enjoy studying Latin. He was a much better student than I was. I wanted to be in a band, and get stoned and chase girls around west London. Dad was assiduous. He worked his way through the set texts, read up on Roman culture, and took Mr Sandford on a week’s holiday to Pompeii, which I only avoided by deliberately giving myself food poisoning with a plateful of raw haddock.

  My scholastic zeal waned in proportion as my father’s waxed. And the upshot of all this was that, thanks to the intervention of Mr Sandford, Dad and I took Latin O-level together, in the gymnasium of my school; with Dad sitting at the desk in front of me: March, pater, and March, filius.

  I remember the whole thing with an awful clarity. In two separate three-hour exams I watched my dad’s head bowed over his desk and listened to his expensive fountain pen scratching away on the paper. In the final exam, he called the invigilator over to complain about an apparent misprint in the unseen translation, and the papers were taken away from us, and we had to wait forty-five minutes while it was established over the telephone that a misprint had indeed occurred and the erratum in question was chalked up on the blackboard.

  The thing that etched it forever on my memory as a terrible moment was the reaction of my fellow students, who treated me with a tender, kindly pity that hurt much more than any name I had been called in the preceding years.

  Dad got an A in the exam and came second overall in the entire country. The boy who beat him was a nine-year-old prodigy from Scotland. I got an E.

  The results were posted to us in America during the summer. Dad shot the cork from a magnum of champagne across the garden on the evening he heard the news. He commiserated with me, but to my eyes the arc of the cork seemed to inscribe the word ‘parricide’ in the night air. Or would have, had I learned enough Latin to know what it meant.

  I did better in my other subjects, and tried to draw some comfort from the fact that the letter from the examination board which Mr Sandford forwarded to my dad, and which he exhibited casually on the dining table without seeming to draw attention to it, began: ‘This remarkable young man …’; as though he were an inky-fingered schoolboy, instead of a middle-aged widower, with most of his life behind him.

  ‘Dad’s such a fucking horse’s arse’ was Vivian’s reaction.

  I toyed briefly with the idea of withdrawing from the economy of success and failure altogether, growing dreadlocks and going to live in a caravan. But instead, I changed schools, opting out of the private system and going to the local sixth-form college, where I discovered I wasn’t as stupid as I’d thought. I went to university in Swansea, eventually, to do Soviet and East European Studies, which might have been some kind of Oedipal attack on my American heritage. I saw less and less of my father, who eventually gave up on London and moved to Italy, where he wrote law textbooks and was finally accepted as a bona fide Englishman. I spent two years after Swansea working in America, and came home to a job at the BBC, which seemed like the answer to all my prayers at the time, but over a number of years, it grew to remind me of my family, in the way that it seemed to be full of bright people competing for too little love and attention.

  SEVEN

  THERE IS A ROCK with a ledge worn into it at the end of the jetty that marks the boundary of the beach nearest to my uncle’s house. When the sea is high, or rough, it’s too dangerous to approach – a single wave could knock you senseless. But on a windless day, with the ocean as flat as the icing on a sponge cake, it is a perfect place to dive from. When my family was still on speaking terms with one another, we used to play here, in the summers when we visited Ionia.

  The game we played was this: each of us had to jump off the rock and turn to catch a soccer ball before we crashed into the water. There were many variations: you could work in a spin or a somersault, or do it with two jumpers who had to pass th
e ball between them and then back to the thrower. It was the best game we had, and it was – not coincidentally – the only family game we played that lacked any sense of competition. We called it Bolder than Mandingo, because that was what you had to shout before you hit the water.

  It was Patrick’s idea to say it, and because of his Boston accent, and the obscurity of the phrase, and perhaps because of Patrick’s obsession with hair loss (this was before the wig), Vivian and I thought we were saying ‘Balder than Mandingo’ as we leaped off the rock. But Mandingo was the title of a sixties novel about an interracial love affair, and ‘bolder than Mandingo’ a plaudit invented by some reviewer for another book.

  Bolder than Mandingo became family shorthand for a leap into the unknown so I decided to write it on the invitations for the party I had before I left London for Ionia. Most of the guests thought it was a reference to a forgotten spaghetti Western, and my friend Stevo turned up in a bootlace tie.

  My four-week notice period at the BBC had concluded the same day. It somehow reminded me of my last day at prep school, when I hung my tie on a lamppost on the way home in a moment of uncharacteristic spontaneity. Afterwards I dreamed about my dead mother telling me off and was racked by guilt and went back to retrieve it, the nylon stripes damp with rain. I probably still have the tie somewhere.

  I was surprised how quickly the decision to leave my job had overtaken me. For a while, it had looked as though I was going to take a sabbatical, and leave a door open back into my old life at the BBC. But then I decided that after six months in Ionia, I would rather come back to London and start afresh than go back to a job I had grown to hate.

  The possibility of change changed everything. The thought that I had no alternative was all that had kept me in my old life, and now that things could be different, they couldn’t stay the same. I couldn’t become a tribesman on Irian Jaya, or a Tatar horseman. But I could live as Patrick had lived. His will offered me that possibility. And his life seemed sufficiently different from mine to be the change I craved. By now, I felt too close to the idea of being free to contemplate anything else. It was that moment suspended between the rock and the ocean when you bunch your knees up and anticipate the cold shock of the water. It was too late to get back on the rock now. Bolder than Mandingo.

  The rather complicated provisions of the inheritance had been simplified by the rumour network in the office. I had come into a fortune, the gossip went, so I was jetting off to start spending it. On my last day, one of the producers, a man called Derek Braddock, came up to me with a mock-quizzical expression on his face as I was clearing out my desk.

  ‘Damien,’ he said. ‘Got a message for you, mate. Couldn’t quite understand it.’ He passed me one of the flimsy pieces of paper that we used for telephone messages. ‘Bloke called Riley. Says he wants his life back.’

  I looked at him for a moment. ‘Life of Riley. Very good, Derek. You’re wasted here.’

  Derek chuckled like a moron. He had a pale and mumpy face – like a photograph of a Great War soldier. I thought: There’s nothing more coercive than a bad joke.

  Wendy had come up alongside him, with her hands behind her back. The dozen or so people in the office crowded around her while she made a short speech about what a pleasure it had been working with me and that I would always be welcomed back if the life of the idle rich ever got too much for me. It seemed churlish to contradict her, so I smiled and made a speech of my own about how much I’d enjoyed working there and how I’d be glad to see any of them on Ionia, if they didn’t mind sleeping on the beach; just joking, they’d always be welcome.

  One of the production assistants had gone out to buy sparkling wine in the lunch break and this was produced, along with a present and a card, amid much teasing about licence-payers’ money and Producer Choice. The present was a book, a thoughtfully chosen anthology of writing about castaways which I made everyone sign. I felt a surge of affection for all of them, even Derek Braddock, whom I’d always found a pain. I thought to myself that even if work had replicated all the faults of my family, at least it had replicated some of its virtues too: the humour, the intelligence, the companionship. For the first time, I felt a sense of loss. For good or bad, the life I had made in London was something of my own, and I was leaving it behind. I was exchanging something real for something unreal. It suddenly seemed like a dangerous swap.

  We went to the pub at five o’clock, a big, shabby crowd of us, looking conspicuously pale and also more awkward together outside the office. Derek Braddock bought an enormous round of drinks and clapped me on the back.

  ‘You’re a mystery man,’ he said. ‘Ten years I’ve known you and this is the first time we’ve had a drink together.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I told him. ‘We had a drink after the US elections.’ Secretly, I was rather flattered that Derek had spared my private life any thought at all.

  ‘One drink in ten years! Oi, Wendy – he’s a mystery man, isn’t he?’

  ‘I’m sure it was more than one drink,’ I said.

  ‘Damien is very … self-contained.’ Wendy laughed. She looked much prettier outside work; her eyes were bright from drinking.

  ‘You’re making me self-conscious,’ I said. ‘Can’t you wait until I’ve left to have this conversation?’

  Derek paused before his pint of lager reached his lips. ‘I’ve always wondered about your secret life,’ he said.

  ‘Secret life? I don’t have one, Derek. I don’t have a life. I go home to an empty flat.’

  ‘What about that girlfriend of yours?’

  I shook my head. ‘Didn’t work out.’

  ‘Pity. She was a looker.’ Derek took a sip of his drink and stared down at the floor, jingling the coins in his pocket with his spare hand. ‘Well, then.’

  I had never been able to dislike Derek properly since I had taken his notebook home one day instead of mine and found a brochure for a holiday home in Spain taped inside the front cover as though it was a talisman of another, better life. ‘Wend your way along the road from Puerto Pollença, while the lights of the porch glimmer in the gloaming.’ Glimmer in the gloaming: you knew that the copywriter who came up with that thought he was Gerard Manley Hopkins.

  I gave the book back to him the next day without mentioning it, but I still felt he had shared a confidence with me, and I experienced a pang of guilt whenever I found myself thinking that he was an arsehole. I said, ‘I’ll miss you, Derek,’ as a kind of penitence. Then he winked back at me as he swallowed his drink and squeezed my arm, and I felt marginally worse. I had an overpowering sense of all the small disappointments that wear you away over the years. I thought of work as a rhythm that marched Derek out of the house in the morning and back into his bed at night. And I remembered how quickly the employees in our department – men, particularly – died after retirement. Because that rhythm had gone, and it was too late for them to find another. Derek was about fifty-five; if he retired now, he would probably have two, three years at most, in which to wend his way back from Puerto Pollença in the gloaming. That was as much of the good life as his body would be able to take.

  ‘Best of luck,’ said Derek. ‘It was nice knowing you – almost.’

  I had to leave early because I had people arriving at nine. I felt miserable slipping away from my colleagues for the last time. Outside the pub it was raining, and I waited under its awning for a couple of minutes. I suppose the alcohol generated a false bonhomie, but looking back at them, flushed and laughing inside the pub, I felt strangely cut off from them. Derek was right; in the time I’d worked there, I hadn’t got close to any of them. I think I just wasn’t that good at making friends.

  *

  I had rented my flat through an agency on a six-month lease to a stockbroker called Platon Bakatin who strode around the place in his Gucci loafers, chatting in Russian on his mobile phone. He liked it, he said, but wanted me to redecorate and was sniffy about the furniture. I guessed that he wanted something more impre
ssive than my worn-out sofa-bed and kilims. I thought of putting my stuff into storage, but it hardly seemed worth it, so I let a furniture dealer come round and take it all away for about seventy pounds. When he named his price I was initially reluctant. I remembered that Laura and I had bought one of the kilims on holiday in Turkey and I didn’t want to part with it. Then I thought, Fuck it; and helped carry the furniture out to the van.

  Repainted, the empty flat seemed like a stranger’s when I got home to it. It was Platon’s home now, I thought. His new sofa stood in the living room, still wrapped in plastic. There was an unfamiliar echo to my footsteps as I walked around the flat. All that was left of me were my clothes, a few crates of books, lamps, an old computer, my records, and me. And soon, all that would be gone. I felt like I was erasing my presence in the world.

  It was odd how many people I ended up inviting to the party. The list of guests was a long one. There’s a big discrepancy between the number of people you feel obliged to invite to a party, and the number of people you feel able to confide in when the sky falls on your head. At least there is in my case. Perhaps other people have a more healthy ratio between the two. I had invited a big crowd of craps who might or might not turn up. And I had invited my friends. More precisely, I had invited Stevo and Lloyd.