by Jacob Beaver
Dedication
To my mother and sister, back at home,
and to my wife, Linda,
here at home
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part 1
You have probably heard of my brother, Stephen Mallory, the daredevil English reporter who parachutes into war zones armed only with a video camera. He is famous now, which is what he always wanted. One day Hollywood will make a movie about him. That’s where he lives—Hollywood, or somewhere nearby. I’ve never been to his house, although I live in America too. But I live in a different America, far away in the mountains of North Carolina. I’m happy here. I feel blessed every day, and for that I thank God. Also, strangely, I thank Stephen. So, Steve, if you ever read this, please try to regard it as a kind of long thank-you note. You will hate me for it, no doubt, but I am not out to slander you or settle old scores. My aim is to tell the truth about certain events that changed the course of my life. As it says in Galatians, “Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?”
Ten years ago, when nobody had heard of Stephen Mallory, when he was just another freelance journalist running around London, he made a short film called The Man Who Walked on Water. You can google it if you like. I haven’t bothered to google it because I was there during the filming—because I am still there, in a sense. And anyway, it’s an awful film. My brother is an idiot. I love him because he’s my younger brother, but Steve always was loud and crass, stupid about people and the mysteries of other lives. What Steve likes is Big Ideas. Ten years ago, Steve’s Big Idea was to fly out to East Tennessee, where a man had reportedly walked on water, and to get this man on film, suspended between heaven and earth, water lapping his toes. Or to expose the man as a fraud. Or both. Whatever happened, the title of the film would sell it, he hoped. The BBC hoped so too. They gave Steve £20,000.
At the time, I was living back at home with our parents. Aged thirty-five, I was in my old bedroom again, at the top of the house, gazing across Muswell Hill at the evening lights of North London, just as I’d done as a teenager. The difference now was that those twinkling lights didn’t beckon me. They held no radiant promise. I had planned to be a rock star, and the plan had failed. So I fell into other things, as failed rockers do—as most of us do. I became a “set technician” for TV ads, or in other words, a carpenter. And I met a girl, and we bought a nice flat, and I was happy for a number of years. Looking back, I was happy. She wasn’t, evidently. One day she told me she’d met someone, and a week later she was gone. This someone turned out to be a hotshot TV producer, a rising star. I knew the guy. I’d worked for him once. I’d liked him. Now I hated him, of course, and I hated myself. I hated the whole world, all those lovely twinkling lights. Their loveliness made me cry, standing there in my old bedroom, late at night and drunk, very drunk.
I realize now that I was having a breakdown, a collapse, a falling apart. I don’t know what to call it, precisely, but I do know that I had been heading there for a long time, perhaps my whole life. Back then, I understood nothing. All I knew was that life was hell. When I think of those days, what I remember most is a kind of blackness around the edge of things. It’s hard to explain, but the blackness seemed to creep over me, like the blackness that engulfs the screen at the end of those old Looney Tunes cartoons, shrinking the circle of light down and down until . . . That’s all Folks! Sometimes, as I rode my motorbike to work, weaving through the London traffic, the darkness would descend and I almost closed my eyes. How simple it would be. Just twist the accelerator and . . . That’s all, folks.
Also, I was drinking. I drank in pubs at lunchtime, in restaurants after work, at home alone. Often I’d end up half naked in front of my laptop, surrounded by empty wine bottles and ogling beautiful women as they caressed themselves to ecstasy. In the morning I’d have a hangover and another bill on my credit card. The mornings were terrible.
One such morning, a Saturday, Steve showed up. I was lying facedown on the sofa in the living room. My mother was washing up breakfast and my father was raking leaves in the back garden. They were in their sixties. My father had just retired from the police force, and he was happy about it. He could easily spend the whole day doing small jobs that no one else cared about, like raking leaves and stuffing them into green plastic bags. Stupid, I thought. I think differently now. My father cared about the little details of his life, of our lives, which is another way of saying that he loved us. Since he died, three years ago, the garden has gone wild.
I was half asleep when Steve walked into the living room and started yelling at me. Steve always yells. He was born with the volume turned way up. Because everything excites him. That day he was excited to eat breakfast—my mother had made him poached eggs, his favorite—and he was excited about a new pair of shoes he’d bought, with springs in the heels, which made you bounce as you walked. I heard Steve telling my mother about this in the kitchen, and then he bounced back into the living room and slapped me on the head.
“Wake up, fuckface!” he said. “I want to talk to you.”
I sat up, very slowly, feeling that darkness at the edge of things.
Steve was wearing a tight blue suit with a silvery sheen. I had to smile. I’d never seen Steve in anything but jeans and T-shirts. Baggy T-shirts. Steve is short and chubby, with thin blond hair that sort of floats around the top of his head. With his pale eyes and his silver-blue suit bulging at the shoulders and thighs, he looked like the mad killer in a gangster movie. And the bouncy shoes didn’t help. They had thick black soles and seemed orthopedic—an outward symbol of the killer’s crippled insides.
“What?” he said.
“That,” I said, pointing.
“This? This is classy. Cost me three hundred quid. I’m trying to look serious here. I’ve got stuff going on. I can’t lie around on sofas all day. And neither can you.”
“Oh, piss off.”
Steve just nodded, as if time would tell—and it did, actually. But I was annoyed. Steve is seven years younger than me, yet he always bosses me around. He bosses everyone except my mother. And somehow, amazingly, he gets away with it. People do what he says. He has no charm at all, quite the opposite. What he has is energy. Energy flares off him, like the silvery light on his ridiculous suit. And it sparks other people. It wakes you up. It woke me up that Saturday morning, because I could see that something was coming. And here it was:
“Now listen, I’ve got a proposition,” Steve said. He hunched down on our father’s footstool, stretching the seams of his suit. “John-Boy, this is good for you and me. There’s money here. Travel, too.”
My name is John. John-Boy was an old family joke. When Steve called me John-Boy, I knew I was in trouble. Steve can be relentless when he wants something from you. My father and I called him the Terminator, another old family joke.
So, Steve told me about his Big Idea and the BBC money, and I congratulated him. It was impressive. Even Steve seemed impressed with himself. He said, “I’m still in shock. Twenty grand! And I’m a nobody!”
“Well, you’ve got a degree in journalism. You’ve had stuff in the Sunday papers.”
Steve scowled. “The BBC don’t give a shit about that. I’m a chancer, and they know it. But I do have something.” He paused and spread his hands, like a magician revealing a rabbit. “I have Florentino Pagazzi.”
Now I laughed, despite my hangover, despite the blackness looming around us. Even on my worst days, I still had a sense of humor. Someth
ing could make me laugh when I was dying inside, which didn’t make sense to me until recently, when I realized that laughter isn’t about happiness. Laughter is a ripple of light from above, a parting of the dark seas, a glimpse of forever. Make of that what you will. I believe it deeply, but I can’t explain myself.
Anyway, Steve told me that Florentino Pagazzi was an award-winning cameraman, a friend of his, who knew people at the BBC.
“It’s all about who you know, right?” Steve said.
Wrong, wrong. I disagreed completely. Who you know is irrelevant. Lots of people knew Saddam Hussein, and look where that got them. Saddam Hussein was now on the run, and Iraq was in ruins. Right then I could hear gunfire from the kitchen, where my mother was watching TV. (A few years later and Steve would be on that TV, running towards the gunfire.) No, the point is whether you like the people you know. Do you admire them? Do they inspire you? But I said nothing. Steve wouldn’t have listened anyhow. He was busy telling me that £20,000 really wasn’t that much, once you’d factored in the fees for Florentino and his soundman, plus flights and hotels, plus editing costs, and on and on. What it came down to was that Steve needed an assistant, and he’d picked me for the job, and that’s why he was pacing around our parents’ living room in his shiny blue suit, waving his arms and glancing at his watch. He had a business lunch in an hour, he said, and then he was going to book the flights. I had to make up my mind now, this moment. Yes or no?
I said yes. Why I said it I still don’t know. I could have resisted the Terminator. I could have told him I had lots of work on, which wasn’t true but who cares? I could have told him I didn’t feel like getting on a plane with people I’d never met, and flying to a foreign country for reasons that were unclear at best, and that would lead to nothing for me except discomfort and lack of sleep. I could have said I didn’t even want to get off the sofa. But I didn’t. I said yes, and for that, and for what happened after that, I thank Steve.
* * *
Three days later we all met at Heathrow. The airport was crowded. I remember that because I arrived first, and I stood near the check-in desks trying to spot Steve among the elderly autumn holidaymakers. Many of them wore hiking shoes and hi-tech, multipocketed costumes. English people are weird like that. When they leave the country, they buy all these clothes they’d never normally wear, as if travel requires a kind of military preparedness. Most of them were probably going to Greece or southern Spain, but they looked like they were headed for outer space.
I was wearing what I always wore—boots, jeans, leather jacket—and hoping it wasn’t too hot in Tennessee. I have to admit I didn’t know where Tennessee was. I only knew it was in the South, which made me think of Forrest Gump and Gone with the Wind and Deliverance. If we’d been going to New York I’d have thought of Goodfellas. My ideas about America all came from movies. In fact, most of my ideas about the world came from film and TV, much of it American. I’d never been anywhere outside Britain, apart from a couple of holidays in Mediterranean resorts full of Brits, which didn’t really count. So, although I wasn’t dressed like the people around me, I understood how they felt. For me, Tennessee was outer space.
I spotted Steve’s fair hair floating through the crowd, and I waved to him. He grimaced back at me. Steve could hardly walk, let alone wave. He had a backpack slung over one shoulder, a laptop over the other, and a briefcase in each hand. He dropped all this stuff around him and stood there panting. I just stood there. I mean, I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t have anything to say. We’re brothers. We don’t make polite conversation. Of course, I had lots of questions about Tennessee, but Steve couldn’t answer them. He had only been to America once, the year before. He’d flown to Miami, with a photographer, to do an article about bums living among the super-rich. Steve had strolled along the beach handing out cash in exchange for photographs and life stories. The photos were so sad. You can imagine them: dirty people drinking from paper bags as night falls over glittering seafront condos. Steve called his article “The End of the American Dream.” That was his Big Idea at the time. But what did Steve know about American dreams? More to the point, what did he know about Tennessee? I had asked him this. He’d told me we were going to East Tennessee, which was mountains. Then he said something about hillbillies and banjos. In other words, Deliverance. Like me, he was thinking of movies.
Florentino Pagazzi was another story. He’d been everywhere, it seemed. As soon as he appeared, I understood why Steve liked him.
Tino, as he called himself, was in his early fifties. He was small and wiry and tanned golden brown. All of him was golden brown, including the dome of his head, which was smooth and spotted, like a speckled egg. The most striking thing about him, though, was his eyes. They never stopped moving. As he approached us, wheeling several cases and bags, and even as he shook hands with me, his dark eyes flickered about, scanning the crowd, as if something might happen at any moment. What he was hoping to see, I don’t know, but he was always like this, looking. And he always had a faint smile. The smile told you that he was friendly, up to a point, and that he was a man of the world. Both things were true. As we waited for the soundman, I learned that Tino had shot films on every continent. Back in the 1970s he’d filmed a documentary about the Appalachian Trail, for French TV, and he joked about his troubles with the Tennessee accent. His own accent was pure Italian, all teeth and tongue. Although he was based in London and spoke a rattling, exuberant English, he never said hello or goodbye. It was always “Ciao!”
“Ciao!” he said now, eyes darting, as a man walked towards us carrying a large metal case. The man set his case down slowly. Then he straightened slowly. Then he took a slow, deep breath and said, “Hey.”
The man’s name was Dave something—Smith maybe, or Brown. I’ve forgotten now. Everything about him was instantly forgettable. During the whole trip I don’t think he spoke more than fifty full sentences. All I remember is his BO, which stayed in my nose, and the round birthmark on the back of his neck, exactly like a button you might push. I doubt anyone had ever pushed it. Dave was about my age, unmarried, probably permanently, and nothing seemed to surprise him, to rouse him, to buck him up, not even my brother. He wasn’t melancholy. He just seemed to have a very, very slow pulse. Perhaps that’s why he was a good soundman. When the chips were down and the moment was upon you, the fleeting moment at which the camera was pointed, any small mistake spelled disaster. At least that was how Tino behaved. Dave simply held up the microphone and eyed his equipment.
We got our boarding passes and queued at passport control, and then Steve and Tino charged off through duty-free. Despite his size, Tino moved fast, and Steve bounced right along with him in his bouncy shoes, leaving me and Dave yards behind—which set the pattern for the trip. That was fine with me. I was happy to follow behind with Dave, since Dave required zero conversation and I could think my own thoughts. Right then I was looking out at the jumbo jets on the tarmac and wondering at the immense power that kept them in the air. I had only flown twice in my life, on smaller planes. They creaked and lurched about, as if they might come apart, and I threw up both times. This looked worse. Jumbo jets were heavy. What would happen if an engine failed? Was there a backup? Or could the plane fly with one engine? Wouldn’t it go in circles, spiraling down and down and down, until . . . That’s all, folks.
I had an aisle seat on the plane, in the middle row, next to a skinny woman with red hair. I still think about that woman sometimes. Her face was like a knuckle, white and bony. Beside her were two boys—a little kid and a toddler. They had the same red hair and knuckle faces, and both wore black skullcaps. As the plane taxied for takeoff, all three bowed their heads and started murmuring. Then we rocketed into the sky. The plane climbed sickeningly and banked hard. Spread out below me, intricate as a circuit board and seemingly endless, was West London. My heart skipped a beat, it really did. But here’s the thing: no one else even glanced out the window. On my left, the mother and her two son
s were still mumbling into their laps. On my right, across the aisle, Steve was tapping at his big silver PowerBook. Beside him, a woman was thumbing the in-flight magazine, and behind them a young couple were screwing in their earbuds. Really? I thought. You don’t care? In the blink of an eye you’re thousands of feet up in the air, and the view down doesn’t interest you? I suppose they’d all seen such views on TV, in higher definition. So why bother with it? Change the channel. In fact, most people around me were doing just that—changing the channels on their seat-back video screens, looking for something good. But what does “good” mean? There’s a question. It’s the kind of question I ask myself a lot these days, now that I am beginning to know who I am, and to understand the hell I carry inside myself.
Again I say, make of that what you will. I’m talking with hindsight. As I sat on that plane, I was merely surprised by the behavior of the other passengers. The man in front of me was the most surprising. He’d been jabbing the controls of his video screen, and now he barked at a passing stewardess.
“This blimming thing won’t work,” the man said. “What am I meant to do for eight hours? Don’t tell me I’m in economy and so I just have to sit here and twiddle my thumbs. Sod that. I want an upgrade.”
The stewardess made soothing noises and fingered the controls, but the man kept barking. I thought he might hit someone. It was entirely possible he’d make a break for business class and go down fighting. He was a tough character. From what I could see of him, he looked about sixty, but his neck bulged with muscle and his hair was jet black. Thankfully, his screen came on and the stewardess sashayed off. But the man wasn’t done yet. He pushed his seat back into my knees, then gave another mighty push, which achieved nothing although it hurt me. I winced, and the woman beside me smiled. Her kids were watching cartoons. She sat with her hands folded.