by Adam Thorpe
‘Fish! Fish! Fucky fish!’
Eddie waited for the swell to reach up a few inches below the level of the top of the slab and then put his foot on a flat protrusion of rock underwater and pushed himself off, wincing at the cold. The water pushed him back with alarming force and he struck his shoulder on the slab, grappled to hold it, was sucked off again and realised that the only way to counteract this helpless toing-and-froing was to swim as hard as he could. It was surprisingly easy, once he’d realised that. The swell was only powerful if you were a passive cork in its grip. But if you were active, you were the king. Now that was a lesson in life, already. After a few minutes of thrashing further out and some salty spluttering with the snorkel, he’d got the hang. The mask no longer filled up with seawater when he put his face under, and the silence, the roaring silence, was no longer like death. He gripped the snorkel with his teeth and breathed calmly and slowly, hearing his own breath as a loud sigh, like someone labouring in a lung machine. He swam with his face down, feeling the massive movements of the water playing about his body but not dominating it. It was all willpower, he thought. The rocks, quite close under him, suddenly fell away to a kind of Grand Canyon of a gorge that gave him vertigo. The real shadows were down there, it was like the earth had split to something prehistoric and there were the fish, hundreds of them, nothing overtly spectacular but silvery and blueish and bright-red-spotted and in shoals that slipped past like silk scarves or flocks of starlings. Oh, this was so inspiring. He was on his own. He was all on his own and he was living. At last he was living. This was adventure. The gorge fell away to his right, he was being moved from it without even knowing it, maybe he was way out now and Holly was scanning the horizon. He lifted his face and was surprised to hear the hiss and slosh of water on rock so close: he was a few feet from the same slab, but on the other side. He could hear Ed prattling on and Holly grunting her replies, though they were hidden by the edge of the slab. He lifted his mask and spat and he could see the canyon through the water, a little shallow rift in the bed, nothing at all. Nevertheless, he was exhilarated. Or perhaps because he knew he wasn’t in danger after all, that down there everything just seemed great and dangerous and spectacular, he felt exhilarated. The wind cooled his head. He adjusted his mask and went under again, Ed’s prattling spliced into a silent roar.
‘Can I visit you in California?’
‘Ha ha.’
‘You never know. It can happen overnight. Look at J. K. Rowling. Joseph O’Connor.’
Jonathan felt, in fact, strangely confident that this might well happen to him. It was crazy, really: he was so hard and embittered when it came to certain aspects of life, but there he was being a stupid teenage fantasist, dreaming of wealth and fame.
‘Dave, let’s face it, it’ll be published and after a couple of years of total neglect, it’ll end up here, buried without honours. I mean, look at all this lot. Every one of them was someone’s lovechild. A lifetime’s work.’
‘Six weeks, in a lot of cases.’
‘Yeah, but not all of them. In fact, your shop’s really depressing. All these bloody novels. What a waste of ink and paper.’
‘And all disintegrating. Yellowing. Tanned, as the collectors call it. The process of disintegration has already begun. You know why? Because British publishers are too mean to make their paper acid-free, unlike everyone else in the world. Hurts the profit margins. Costs about a penny for every book. So they print on lavatory paper. In two hundred years’ time it’ll all be a big flaky heap of autumn leaves. That’s what’s called long-term thinking, or caring about literature.’
‘That’s bad. I’d thought it was to do with the environment.’
‘Economics, mate. You tell your jumped-up editor about it tomorrow. See him squirm, I don’t think.’
‘I don’t reckon it’s up to me to tell him that, Dave.’
‘No, you’re compromised now, aren’t you? No resistance now, eh? Blank walls, dumb people. Isn’t that what you called that show you did with those reform kids, back in the glory days? Blank Walls, Dumb People?’
‘Thanks for remembering.’
‘Good show, that was. And don’t go in with your ponytail. That world laughs at men with ponytails.’
‘Seriously, Dave?’
Dave sat on his stool and stroked his beard and looked down at his feet, his awful Save Her Knockers mug cradled in his large hands. No one had come into the shop since Jonathan had been there – over an hour. It had started raining and the passing late-afternoon shoppers grew blurred and distant through the glass of the bay window, on their way to everywhere but in here. Rain suited a cemetery, which is what this was. But there were no mourners, even.
‘It’s not bad, your book, mate,’ Dave said. ‘I guess they’ll love it, however much of a prat you are. Just remember, however, that they’re hard bastards. If they offer you money, make sure it’s a lot. Get an agent, as hard a bastard agent as you can find. You’ve got to meet them on a level playing-field.’
‘I’d never have believed you’d have said something like that, Dave.’
Dave looked at him. His watery eyes were smiling. That’s the only way you could tell if Dave was smiling, because of the great and fulsome mask of beard.
‘Unsavoury. That’s what the world is. Write that on your wrist so you don’t forget it when you’re in there among the gang.’
‘Si, padrone. Un-sav-ou-ry. Now, how do you spell that?’
‘Like fastidium,’ said Dave.
‘Alright?’
‘Yeah. Very alright. Good. Very very good.’
‘You looked like a basking whale.’
‘Shark. Basking shark.’
Eddie was towelling himself down. His ears were semi-blocked, they kept opening and shutting like a trapdoor. Holly still had her head in that bloody manuscript, lying on her belly with her feet in the air, as if she was tanning their soles.
‘Where all de fish, Daddy?’
‘Amazing. They’re down there. Lots of beautiful fishy-wishies.’
‘Don’t talk baby, Eddie. Or he’ll never learn.’
He got down on his haunches to Ed’s eye-level. The wind was cold when it blew onto his wet hair and damp shoulders.
‘All the colours of the rainbow, Ed. Blue, and red, and silver. Little teeny-weeny ones, and huge great big ones, about the size of a car. Really huge and all white with sharp teeth.’
Ed’s mouth was wide open. Holly didn’t react. This annoyed Eddie. She only surfaced from that manuscript to tick him off. The thing was, their literary tastes were different. But it had to be said that she was a useful barometer. She was closer than he was to the mythical average reader, probably because she was a woman: the average reader was a woman. And Holly got a First in English at Oxford and went to Yale for a year, whereas he was a poor Second at Durham. So she knew what she was talking about. She wasn’t dumb. Neither was he, of course. It’s just that he had played too much rugby and screwed too many lovely lonely girls. You can’t do everything, in life.
‘Wanna go!’ Ed cried, reaching up for the snorkel.
‘That’s only for daddies,’ said Eddie. ‘When you’re a big boy—’
‘Wanna go now! Wanna see de fishie-wishie wiv dem teef!’
‘Out of the question,’ said Holly, without lifting her head from the page. Her swimsuit was really very brief; she lay stretched on her tummy on the towel and her naked back curved to the sling that actually disappeared into her cleft, either side of which rose her solid buttocks into which he would like to rub the Mediterranean aromas: lavender and thyme and rue. Slowly. And then some more. God, he really wanted her right now. Ed was banging him on the thighs, tiny hands slapping his wet thighs on which his hair was laddered by the water. Ed was shrieking.
‘He’s tired,’ said Holly. ‘He didn’t have a siesta. He’s gone fradgy.’
She turned the page. The wind kept lifting the pages and she’d had to placate them with the end of the beach bag and her h
and. If Ed wasn’t around, he could just have taken her like that, a way negotiated past the Lycra slip of swimsuit and then right in, inside, into the heat – while she was reading, her attention irresistibly drawn from that bastard text, her breath growing deeper, her sighing and giggling turning into tiny shrieks of satisfaction, his hands finding their own way under the Lycra to the breasts and their secret lovely knobbles—
‘Wanna goooo! Fucky fucky fucky!’
‘Eddie, for God’s sake do something!’
Not even lifting her head.
‘Ed! Stop it! Listen, I’ll go back in and get some nice pebbles, OK? Now stop it!’
Ed gripped one thigh and bit it. Eddie staggered back.
‘He bit me!’
‘Ed, that’s very naughty! That’s what he does at school. You see? I’ve been telling you.’
‘We’ve got an animal as a kid!’
‘Don’t say things like that in front of him. It’ll give him a complex.’
‘It might help if you actually – participated, Holly.’
‘What?’
He swept Ed off his feet and slung him over one shoulder and danced about with him. Ed shrieked with joy. Or maybe anger. Or maybe both.
‘What do you mean, participate?’ shouted Holly over the noise. The sea struck the slab with great force and sent up another white shock of spray.
Eddie stopped dancing about with Ed. Just held him on his shoulder. Ed had gone still. The little naked body was warm on his shoulder.
‘You don’t think I participate?’
‘It doesn’t matter, Holly. Forget it.’
‘I just take a few minutes off after a whole fucking afternoon of it while you were snoring next to me—’
‘I don’t snore and you were reading, actually.’
‘Oh, I’m not allowed to read now, am I?’ Holly shouted. ‘Who looks after him all those evenings you’re partying and out on the piss?’
‘I’m not out on the piss. That’s work. I hate those bloody parties but I’m obliged by my work—’
‘Eddie, you love those parties. Are you going bald, or something?’
‘It’s the water. Anyway, Erika looksh after him very nishe,’ Eddie pointed out, in a bad Estonian accent, trying not to get really cheesed off with his wife.
He’d had a brief crush on lovely young Erika, this year’s au pair, and had made an approach after too much booze following a big launch one night when she’d come in late at the same time as him – but she’d told him, very calmly in her broken English, that she would tell Mrs Thwing if ever he touched again at her bosoms.
‘Erika has most evenings off, my darling,’ Holly growled. ‘Haven’t you noticed? Ed’s dribbling down your back. Ed, that’s not nice.’
Ed had gone quiet because he was watching his dribble – a surprising amount of it – snake down his father’s broad back, and was liberally adding to it from his mouth while his parents were talking. It was foamy, and sparkled in the sun. This would be one of the last observations he’d ever make.
‘Thank you, Ed,’ said Eddie, putting him down. ‘That’s to make me go back in, isn’t it?’ The dribble was a tepid tickle all the way to his swimming shorts.
Eddie did go back in and saw the Grand Canyon loom once more beneath him, the rocks dotted with ruffs of sea anemones that might have been nasty; he heard again the rueful, epic roars of his breaths as the fish shimmied and swayed and sped away, his own hands as unreal out there in front of him as a reawoken corpse’s, pale in the water and faintly menacing. A stretch of sand yielded, just within reach of his fingertips, some flat, silver-streaked pebbles. He brought them out, the sea pushing at him as he left it.
‘These are nice,’ he said, shivering in the gusts of wind but feeling sexy and good after the water. ‘These are like fish. Very valuable, Ed. Very precious.’
‘Vallible,’ said Ed, taking them from him.
Ed sat down on the towel and placed the flat pebbles in front of him.
‘Dees are mine, Daddy,’ said Ed. ‘Vallible. Look, Mummy.’
‘Don’t get my pages wet, honey,’ said Holly. ‘They’re great. Silver and gold. Don’t put them in your mouth, they might be chokeable.’
‘Vallible,’ said Ed.
He’s a great kid, really, thought Eddie. He’s my kid. Our kid. The sun shone on his kid’s hair and turned it golden and the wind moved it like gossamer.
I’ll play with him a bit and then I’ll make for the church, even if I don’t reach it, thought Eddie, making a little house of the pebbles, feeling a pulse of love for his kid, enjoying the air on his freshened-up body. I just need half an hour on my own. I just need half an hour of quality solitude to have in my battery and to draw on when I’m in that fucking place called Jansen House and dealing with fucking accountants and fucking authors and fucking London in general.
‘Look, Ed. A palace.’
Jonathan didn’t know South Kensington at all well. His fifteen years in London had been mostly spent in places like Catford, Hoxton, Whitechapel, bringing art to the people, fighting on the front line of social deprivation with his body as the only weapon. In those days he was toned up, flexible, he’d actually work out every day with exercises honed by Japanese monks many centuries back. When they moved to Brighton he was disappointed by the pebble beach; he’d imagined trying out his Japanese exercises on sand, like the Japanese themselves, making them ten times as hard. These days he felt stuffed, in the full-up sense, with disappointment, with the way in which everything had got worse. That’s what his father, an ex-Army transport supervisor with a limp, would always say: everything had got worse. Even mime had gone so out of fashion it was pretending to be dance.
Jansen House was off the Old Brompton Road and Jonathan was sitting in a fug of quiche in a café run by noisy Italians called Cuppa ’n’ Crust, opposite. He’d arrived much too early, being a drama babe, but that was OK. Jansen House seemed smaller, the second time round. It must have been an upper-class boiler factory, from the look of it, as its brick was a luscious glazed yellow and there was fancy ironwork above the windows. Amazing, he thought, what used to be found in the posh centre: market gardens, saw mills, waterworks, boiler factories. New Demons conjured that era, as if someone contemporary was tripping on all the English past. Elizabethan bear pits, Victorian urchins, gas-fired automobiles and nineteen twenties clothes. After the theatre company had broken up, he devised a one-man show which anticipated the novel, mingling old fairy tales with East End stories. It even had a week’s run at Battersea Arts Centre, at the end of which he felt he was on the threshold of fame. He received a nice review in the Daily Telegraph, of all places, but that was it. A smug bastard with an earring came up to him after the last show and said, ‘I liked the story, but like most other people I hate mime. Drop the mime, man.’
Jonathan had loved mime too much to drop it. He decided that mime subverted consumerism and a society of manufactured images. It empowered the spectator and cost nothing. It took film millions of dollars and hundreds of people to create scenes he could whip up with nothing but his skilled body. Mime was, in fact, dangerous to the status quo. It was more dangerous than words on the page, which also created something out of nothing, out of thin air. But the prejudice against mime, fuelled by the mediocre shits who made money out of manufactured objects and images, had won. He hadn’t performed in years, though he still taught the techniques among the other stuff: what the kids called the ‘moon walk’ went down well, for instance, thanks to Michael Jackson.
‘Jonathan Lewis. I’ve got an appointment with Eddie Thwing. I think I’m slightly early.’
The receptionist gave him a security badge and told him to wait. He ought to have been teaching today at a couple of schools where the kids no longer yelled Shut y’ cake hole but Fuck off wanker and the drama lessons took place in the canteen. But he’d phoned in sick (Marion had phoned for him, in fact). He felt vaguely guilty, letting down the kids, who wouldn’t get a replacement teacher in
time, but maybe they’d enjoy the sudden freedom, maybe they’d have some life-changing experience in that idle hour of theirs, their breath smelling of marmite, the air full of chip grease and mushy peas.
The thing is, you never know what life may bring. Surprise yourself. Don’t rely on the old excuses.
He sat straight in the terrible sci-fi mauve chair, stretching his vertebrae that were beginning to feel the strain of thirty years’ physical theatre, flexing his fingers automatically into a hand ripple, keeping his flower open, the energy uncoiling and flowing through the flower. He’d left the ponytail as it was. Marion had insisted. ‘Take you as you come, that’s what they’ve got to do.’ As if they could be pushed about. His nerves told him that this was not possible. The boiler-factory feel.
Among the people coming in and out, the smart, the clever, the cool, he recognised the living version of a portrait on one of the bigger posters: fleshed out, older looking, her hair no longer dark. The portrait could have been a decade out of date. It was the same with actors. Everyone always looks older because the demon Time is prince. The author looked lonely and small in comparison to her poster, where she was a feline goddess in moody black-and-white, like a bad pastiche of Lauren Bacall. He had definitely heard of her: Anita Barry. Marion had read one of her books on that holiday in Wales where, when it didn’t rain, the mist made everything disappear up to the first few cows next to the cottage. Anita Barry came down and sat opposite him. He nodded and felt a fraud. She must have been rather beautiful, once: now she seemed suburban, elderly. She had a twitch, too: a little spasm of the neck. A faint whiff of spirits saddened the air between them.
‘Like Death Row,’ he said.
He hadn’t really meant to say this. It was a stupid thing to say. Inappropriate. It was nerves. She looked up at him sharply.
‘I totally agree.’
‘Great. Actually, I was joking.’
‘Fellow author. I can tell because you look normal. Is that you?’
She was glancing up at a poster behind his head. He looked, half expecting it to be himself, by some miracle. A bloke in a chef’s hat, well into his sixties, grinned back. He looked groomed and American. Larry Drake, Everything You Were Afraid to Ask About Chefs.