High Dive

by Jonathan Lee

  “You are better at this than me. I don’t care much about colours.” She paused. “Are you staying optimistic, Moose?”

  “That depends. Is it possible to be optimistic about life without being optimistic about your own specific life?”

  “If you’re still thinking in riddles you are all right. Did you cut yourself shaving?”

  “Possibly.”

  Moose felt rather than heard Engelbert’s feathery sigh. Time to make some effort. You saw a little boy and you wanted his approval, the future to give the past its blessing.

  “So,” Moose said. “Engelbert. What’s your favourite flavour lolly?”

  Engelbert narrowed one eye. “Big,” he said.

  “Good choice, good choice. Size is important. And—next question—how old are you?”

  To this Engelbert also said “big,” so Moose politely enquired again.

  “Three,” Engelbert said.

  “Nearly three. Still a month to go, haven’t you?”

  “Three,” Engelbert said, frowning, and Marina conceded the point.

  “Is this perhaps your auntie, then?”

  There was a pearl of saliva in the corner of Engelbert’s mouth, on the side swollen by the lolly, and Marina dabbed at it with a tissue. “Auntie,” he said. His stare announced that they’d already covered this ground.

  “And can I assume your mother, Mari’s sister, is a fan of the other Engelbert? The singer?”

  The child looked alarmed.

  “Mr. Humperdinck,” Moose said.

  “Urgh,” Engelbert replied.

  “Humperdinck.”

  “Urgh.”

  They had encountered another misunderstanding. Moose decided to croon out a lyric from Engelbert Humperdinck’s classic “Release Me” by way of example.

  Engelbert let a decent interval pass, then burst into a shoulder-shaking chuckle. “Silly!” he said, pointing a mini finger at Moose. “Big! Silly.” The joy in his voice was pure—oh, it was pure. Instinctive, unimpeachable. It took hostage that childlike part of Moose that was still receptive to balloons and pink wafer biscuits, that sketched small turds in the margins of notebooks, that felt almost three years old.

  “You’re right,” Marina told Engelbert, her mouth hovering close to his ear, her long fingers smoothing his hair. “People can be silly, can’t they?”

  “Him silly,” Engelbert said definitively. He looked a little put out.

  “He’s right. I’m silly. A note was actually left on my car recently, making a similar point.”

  Being singled out for comment by a fresh, miniature human: it was a very special feeling. Moose felt 20 or 30 per cent drunk. The pain massing in his chest as he laughed was not altogether unpleasant.

  The three of them watched Nurse Monica Jones folding things, straightening things, stacking things, arranging things, packing things and lifting clipboards from the ends of beds. You could hear a high wind outside and imagine old leaves coming loose from great trees. There was something acceptable about death, something soft and almost amiable, until you considered the very specific inconveniences it would bring about. The fact you’d miss your daughter’s wedding, for example. Miss the chance to remarry yourself. To be a grandfather. He’d never meant to stop at one child.

  Marina was speaking. “Actually, Adolfa isn’t any big fan of the Humperdinck you were talking about. She named him because she loves the music of Engelbert Humperdinck the composer. The German who did the Hansel and Gretel opera. Our papa was a musician. The Humperdinck you are thinking about actually took his stage name from the German composer, you know.”

  “You have a sister called Adolfa?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she likes German classical music?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Just wanted to get my facts straight,” Moose said. “Unusual names, in your family.”

  “This is coming from a Moose,” she said.

  He twisted a little in the bed, enjoying the spark in her expression, and propped himself up at a better angle. “They tell me I’ll be out of here in forty-eight hours, Mari.”

  “Wow. That is great.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What will you do first, when you are free?”

  “First? First, I guess I’ll take a walk.”

  She nodded. “That sounds like a good idea.”

  A walk. Yes. He missed the greens and blues of the sea, the feeling of the water tickling between his toes on weekly beach strolls, triple-scoop ice cream in one hand—coffee vanilla chocolate, vanilla choc-mint choc-chip—and an enlivening can of Coke in the other.

  “Being ill, Mari. It’s really no fun at all.”

  “Yes. My sister has diabetes.”

  “Adolfa?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “She qualified for a clinic trial, in London. She will go there two days a week, for three months. So I will get to spend a lot of time with this special small person.”

  Engelbert smiled. Milk teeth white and aligned. And had the kid been tanning?

  He asked Marina some more questions about preparations for the PM’s visit. They talked for a while about the allocation of staff to different tasks. In the past she’d proven herself to be valuable counsel on subjects as diverse as boiler repairs and British dining-room etiquette. He’d recently found a book confirming her opinion that salt cellars and pepper mills should always be removed from the dining table after the main course. She understood hotel work was about putting on a show. He loved watching her backstage. Often she was drinking a Bloody Mary, the tip of her tongue removing pulp from her gums.

  Perhaps the greatest mystery about Marina was her continued status as a single person. Her aloneness was an inalienable right but also a source of mass confusion among the Grand’s male population. Jorge had once told Moose (over a plate of leftovers in Chef Harry’s kitchen) that the game show Marina’s ex-husband used to present on Argentinian television had involved, among other challenges, a segment where audience members had to fart on demand.

  Engelbert leaned his head back into Marina’s chest and studied Moose with an intensified, possibly rivalrous curiosity.

  “So,” Marina said, “how do you plan to prepare for the next heart attack?” It was as if she were asking about a long weekend coming up.

  “Jesus, Mari.”

  “A man must be prepared for the worst thing. When I visited last, you looked worse. I didn’t want to ask. But today, cheered up. Colour.” She smiled.

  “I’m forty-five. I’m young.”

  “My second husband? Forty-six when he finished.”

  This interested Moose. “Second husband?”

  “Yes. I was twenty-five, skinny, full of love. Older men get older, this is the issue.”

  “Right.”

  “He fell out of a window.”

  “Oh.”

  “People bought me these cards, these flowers. Two hundred at the funeral. But it did not matter. He had begun to drink. Drink drink drink. All the time drinking. The pavement was the best place for him, in a way. This is what I came to see.”

  “Well, I’m sure he had his qualities.”

  “He had nothing in his favour. He lacked ambition.”

  “Well, you don’t want a Macbeth in your bed.”

  Marina shook her head. “He was not Scottish, but the whiskies he drank, the cigars he smoked. They burned at his throat. He sounded like Kermit the Frog.”

  “Do you think…with the window…Do you think it was…?”

  “It is possible. I feel he was trying to cut himself loose from a deep misery.”

  “Oh, so he’d had a trauma?” For some reason Moose felt deeply relieved.

  “The trauma was his whole life. Once he turned forty-five he couldn’t even get a hard-up.”

  “On.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He was limp, yes? You kiss him, you touch his ear with your tongue, your han
ds stroking him, and nothing.”

  “—”

  “Moose?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “And he didn’t care about my desire.”

  Moose swallowed.

  “My desire to make films. Movies. I always wanted to be the woman version of Kurt Land.”

  “Oh.”

  “El Asalto. Films about people in poverty, trying to make an honest life. People working out who they are in relation to the world, you know? And I was going to do a disaster movie too. An earthquake in Buenos Aires. But instead of an earthquake happening at the start of the movie, like in every other disaster movie, and people fleeing and some dying and others recovering, you know—instead of that it would happen at the end.”

  “Why?”

  She was silent for a moment. “Because sometimes the before is more interesting than the after, no? Heading towards the impact. What is beautiful about a dive? It isn’t the splash, is it?”

  He thought about telling her a good dive didn’t involve a splash.

  “I wanted to sing about what the lives were like before the quake, the day-to-day, what gets lost—that’s the song I wanted to sing.”

  “Like a musical,” Moose said.

  She blinked. “No, Moose.”

  “Have we talked about this? You wanted to direct, to produce?”

  “I went to film school for two years, but then the government changed again. There were the kidnappings. Then Cámpora. The return of Perón. Scholarships for film school was not the priority.”

  “I only ever really read about the Falklands,” Moose said.

  “Same with everyone. Now I am more keen on photography. I have three photographs in my first show next June, a thing in the gallery on Royal Pavilion Gardens. One is a pair of photos of the islands, in fact. Before the destruction and after. The other is of a pig. It’s almost impossible to get pigs to look up, yes? So, it is an unusual photo. He looked up for me.”

  “Of course he did.”

  “This is why I don’t want to progress higher. I told you this, no? Guest Relations suits me fine. I have time to pursue my interests.”

  “Right. No. I’ll come to your show, Mari, I will. It’s great news. I didn’t know about all this. I had no idea you wanted to do films and stuff. I’m going to definitely come. I’ll probably buy something. One of the photos.”

  “You couldn’t afford.”

  “No, right. So how much are we talking?”

  “Expensive,” she said slowly, extending the word beyond its means. “It would be nice to have you there, I will give you the invite, but if you don’t come I won’t pee on your grave.”

  “Much appreciated. Although, you’d be welcome to!”

  You’d be welcome to. You’d be welcome to? What kind of unspeakable pervert was he? It was the latest in a series of missteps that edged him further away from her loveliness, her deep soft voice, her beautiful blunt talk and slow careful smiles.

  “You should see a lawyer about your will, Moose. And an accountant. About the investments and trusts, things like this. Freya’s future, in case. A backup, yes?”

  Backup: somehow the phrase took the red right out of his blood. “I’m not going to die, Mari, and there isn’t money to put in trusts and stuff. Forty hours and I’m out of here. Thirty-nine, almost.”

  “My papa used to say this: ‘Only by providing for family does the man achieve immortality.’ ”

  “To be honest, Mari, I was hoping to achieve it by not dying.”

  “The world is bigger than us,” she said, nodding. “Both my husbands were blind to this. My third fiancé also.”

  “Third?”

  “You will probably be fine, but you must assume you will not. You cannot shut yourself off from the reality. No man is an Ireland.”

  He wanted to pick her up on the pronunciation, correct the error, but to do so would be petty and—after all—Ireland was an island, so it sort of worked, and the idea of islands was probably linked to the non-musical she wanted to make. He had to resist the lure of small things, irrelevance.

  There was a long silence. Because what else was there? Apart from detail. Apart from the weird beauty of irrelevant things. His thoughts were drawn all the time towards silliness and insignificance. The bigger stuff could swallow you whole.

  He wondered if the current silence was an awkward silence or a non-awkward silence. He thought probably it was an awkward one, but comforted himself with the idea that silences, like events, like good films, like good news, could maybe be perceived differently by different people.

  “Engelbert,” Moose said. “Look! Look at this!” He pointed at the strip of blue paper tacked around his wrist, inviting the child to play with it. Engel wasn’t interested. He was nuzzling his nose into Marina’s left nipple, eyes closed, his fingers clutching at her sleeve, his leg hooked over her thigh, never letting go.

  “Oh, Moose,” Marina said, looking sad. “Do you remember when we met? It feels like years ago.”

  “It was,” Moose said.

  “Yes, exactly. Years. You were so muscly!”

  It was a past-tense compliment, but he’d take it and cherish it. “Thank you,” he said.

  When the time came for Marina and Engelbert to leave, he felt a quiver of sad foreclosure. Marina leaned down, inviting him to kiss one of her bold, butterscotch cheekbones. Her hair smelt of fudge and for a lovely moment a strand of it was caught between his lips. Engel consented to a high five.

  —

  Was all this his fault, this heart thing? It was and yet it wasn’t. He knew in some locked-up part of himself that he was responsible for his body’s decline, and yet he also could not part with the gorgeously irresistible idea that everything was accidental.

  He had been living in London when the news of his dad’s death came through. Still young: twenty-two. At that time he spent his mornings tutoring maths students in a ramshackle east London building that smelt of mould, supplementing his income on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons by lifeguarding at the London Fields Lido. He was also doing occasional bits of concierge work at a hotel owned by a friend of a friend. The lido job he did mainly to avail himself of free physiotherapy on his right leg in the little clinic out back. His knee was struggling under the weight of all the training Wally Clark was encouraging him to do on the ten-metre platform. Always tried to conceal the pain from Wally, but Wally always knew. He knew Moose was a very good diver, but knew too that he was never going to be a great one. That he’d started too late to be great and that while he might get a few statuettes from the smaller national meets, might even squeeze through the qualifiers for something as big as the Commonwealth Games, he was never going to bring home medals. The first time Wally had seen him dive he’d said, “What’s with your arms, Phil? In mid-air you look like a moose.” There was something inherently sticky about nicknames, particularly in the world of sport. False world, really. Made-up rules, achievements out of proportion. All part of the pleasure.

  Undeterred by Wally’s constant curbing of expectations, still more or less in the mindset of the winner he’d been at school, Moose used to travel most evenings to the Merton School of Diving and Trampolining. The journey was slow on the way there and quick on the way back. After a session with Wally his shoulder blades felt like huge leaden wings and his brain, which for the previous two and a half hours had been tensely alive to every mischievously blunt instruction issuing from his mentor’s lips, was rocked into a state of exquisite fatigue. At home he’d have a late dinner with Viv, and then she’d go back to her papers.

  The call from his mother came on a Tuesday morning, around eleven thirty. He borrowed a friend’s Ford, was in Brighton within an hour and a half, one wing mirror lost to a line of parked cars. His father was still on the carpet in the living room and the doctor from number 18 was there. A fatal heart attack while smoking in his favourite threadbare chair. No drama. Just fell over. Finished. His mother had dry eyes, was matter-of-fact, but her hands wer
e shaking and shaking. The body didn’t look like a dead body should look. His father had the faintly disgruntled expression of a man interrupted mid-task. His hands were on his stomach, peaceful, as if they realised they no longer had the right to reach for things. Pack of cigarettes next to him. Two Luckys left. Moose got a spare bed sheet and put it over the body.

  Someone dies and a lot of questions are born, some of them overblown and others worth examining. What really was the point? What was the point in all that training, all that rigour and precision, the denying yourself ice cream, the desperate nausea after the two-hundredth sit-up? All his life he’d focused on exercising himself. After his father’s death the me-ness of it all—the fanatical self-discipline—felt, for the first time, like selfishness. Would something bigger always intrude on your plans? When was the last time he’d done anything for anyone else? Shouldn’t he and Viv be taking weekends away, having three-course meals somewhere? They’d only been married a year. Why hadn’t he made it to his father’s birthday dinner? Had his father’s constant encouragements when it came to sports actually been a form of coercion? Was his mother, by showing no apparent interest in his athletic feats, the parent who in fact had granted greater freedom all these years—the freedom from expectations?

  A few weeks went by without exercise. Thoughts were a sufficiently tiring self-obsession. His father didn’t call to ask for updates on the dives he was trying. He didn’t call because he was dead. For a while Moose had really felt that his father would call, would call him soon, and that they’d have a chance to discuss what the afterlife was like. It was the absence of all future communications that was so shocking.

  The coffin was made from the wood of Aberdeenshire larches. Very durable. No chemicals. No polish and no stain. No screws, either; only old oak dowels. Cost him all the savings he had.

  The idea a life could be boxed up into neat, discrete phrases. Probably it was bollocks. There were times before his father’s death when he ate doughnuts for breakfast and curry for dinner and caught colds and didn’t exercise for two days or three. There were times after his father’s death when he went on long runs and went to the gym and ate expensive muesli in the mornings. The diving didn’t stop straight away. He kept going. Years passed. He switched into and out of coaching. But something changed that day he saw his father dead on the floor. A turning point occurred.