by Helen Dewitt
He said
Cheeky bastard aren’t you—sorry.
I said
What?
Then I said Oh. I said It doesn’t matter. What would you really like?
He said:
I’d like some fish and chips. Would you like some fish and chips? Why don’t we go out and get some fish and chips and I’ll finish this when we get back.
I thought this might be a good sign, maybe it was an excuse to put off doing it, maybe he would realise he was making excuses and didn’t really want to do it.
We went out to the High Street. I dropped off the video and we went on to get cod and chips at a place nearby. I thought people probably thought he was my father.
The staple food at home was peanut butter and jam sandwiches. Sometimes we had peanut butter and honey for a change. I was trying to eat my fish as slowly as I could to make it last. He ate two chips and a piece of the fish and he said
This is shite. They’ve done something to it. I can’t eat this.
He was about to throw it away when I said it tasted all right to me. I said I would eat his if he didn’t want it.
He handed it over and we walked through the streets while I ate.
I tried to make it last as long as I could to put off going back. I couldn’t believe I was walking beside Red Devlin, that he had gone through all the years of saying Sure you can and Oh go on and all the years in the cell and the months trekking cross-country to be walking here with me.
Of course, one of the things people had always complained about was that Red Devlin was not at all particular about his friends.
At one time Red Devlin had a friend who belonged to a club. I don’t think it was the Portland but it was that kind of club. They used to go there and have a few drinks and one night they ran into a man who owned a chain of supermarkets. The man was angry and aggrieved because he wanted to open a supermarket in Wales, a supermarket on a scale never before seen west of the Severn, and though he had got planning permission and carried out feasibility studies local residents were making a nuisance of themselves. The supermarket was supposed to be built on a field that wasn’t being used for anything, and the local residents claimed that children played there and that their lives would be blighted if they could play there no more.
Red Devlin’s friend had heard this story or others like it too often to enjoy it and he soon excused himself. Red Devlin continued to talk to the man, who pointed out that children could play anywhere, that it was not as if he were planning to build over a park it was just a field and that he was a businessman.
Red Devlin said: Kids. The things they get up to.
The man said: I am a simple businessman.
Red Devlin said: This round is on me.
The man said: No no—
Red Devlin said: I insist
The man said: I insist
I insist
I insist
I insist
I insist
But Red Devlin insisted and the man was touched because if you are rich everybody thinks you are made of money.
This time Red Devlin didn’t even say Sure you can or Oh go on. The man said: As I was saying, I am only a simple businessman
and Red Devlin said: Your hands are tied.
The man said: Precisely. My hands are tied
and Red Devlin said: With the best will in the world
and the man said: My hands are tied.
Your hands are tied, said Red Devlin.
My hands are tied, said the man.
Your hands are tied, said Red Devlin.
My hands are tied, said the man.
Where is this field again? said Red Devlin.
Wales, said the man.
Much the best place for it, said Red Devlin.
It’s a fantastic location, said the man.
I wish I could see it, said Red Devlin. Shame it’s in Wales.
We could go in my car, said the man, but I gave my driver tomorrow off because I’m in meetings all day.
Same again? said Red Devlin.
This is mine, said the man and Red Devlin said No I insist.
They talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and the man said My hands are tied and Red Devlin said Your hands are tied and This is my round and the man said No I insist and Red Devlin said No I insist.
Then the man said: Wait a minute! We’ll take a taxi!
They took a taxi to Wales and in the taxi the man explained various aspects of the movement of capital, Say a bakery goes bust, he explained, if it goes bust it’s because it does not represent the most effective use of resources in the locality, it goes bust, the stock is sold off, of course I’m taking a very simple example, all the ovens and mixers don’t just vanish off the face of the planet they are bought and used for another business which utilises them in a cost-effective manner new jobs are created somewhere else people forget to look at the bigger picture and Red Devlin agreed that they did.
They reached the field a little before 7:00. The sun was just coming up. In the middle of the field was flattened bare dirt where people played football, and around that grass, with tall weeds and some bushes around the edges of the field and a row of willow trees where the field followed a river. The man explained the advantages of the location for a supermarket and he explained that it was too good an opportunity to pass up and that his hands were tied, and Red Devlin said Your hands are tied.
Then they went into the town to have breakfast. They talked about this and that and from time to time the man would observe that his hands were tied and Red Devlin would agree that they were. At 9:00 the man suddenly remembered why he had given his driver the day off. He began to laugh, and he said a lot of things to Red Devlin which he left to the imagination when he later told the story in ‘My Biggest Mistake’. Then he called his secretary on his mobile to tell her he had food poisoning and could not make his meetings. He hung up and (as he explained in ‘My Biggest Mistake’) said some more things to Red Devlin until the air literally turned blue. He pointed out that Red Devlin did not know the first thing about business and Red Devlin agreed that he did not. The man said My hands are tied and Red Devlin said Your hands are tied.
They walked around the town. There was a wall along the seafront with some rocks at the bottom, and a village green a few feet across. They went back to the field and saw mothers with small children; they went away for lunch and when they came back they saw boys playing football. The man said it was too late to go back. Red Devlin agreed that it was too late to go back. But even though it was too late to go back the field was developed in a much more modest way than originally planned, and though the businessman knew he was every kind of fool he cancelled the supermarket and improved the site only by adding a set of goalposts and some swings and slides. Later the man would occasionally have a drink with Red Devlin and reminisce about Wales and turn the air blue again for old times’ sake.
I remembered this story and I remembered stories about really terrible people Red Devlin had known. There was a story no one knew much about, only a few details had come out after the man in question had been found stabbed to death in a Bangkok canal, and there was a story about a man who had owned a carpet factory in Pakistan a man who prided himself on the quality of his carpets naturally he regretted the necessity but the fact was if you did not use children you did not get the same quality he was a simple businessman his hands were tied and yet one day he set aside the business habits of a lifetime.
I was down to my last chip when I thought I knew what to say.
I said: What if a person was doing something terrible because everybody else did it or anyway some people did it, and then they stopped even though everybody else was doing it and it was dangerous to stop? Wouldn’t that be a dazzling act of goodness?
He said: It could be.
I said: But in that case don’t you see that all the time? Or couldn’t you if you wanted? I thought
I didn’t know how to go on, I was embarrasse
d to mention all the insane things people had done because they’d talked to Red Devlin.
Red Devlin didn’t say anything. He looked at me, and then he looked at two or three people walking by, and then he looked at the ground.
After a while he said
All I have to do is open my mouth.
He said
That’s what I thought when I was locked up I thought I had to get out because otherwise—
He walked on for a while and then he said
—and when I got out I saw that was what everybody thought they were waiting for me to—
He stopped suddenly on the pavement. He looked at me and he said:
Open Sesame.
I said What?
He said Open Sesame. Here I am back at last to say Open Sesame so people who were just doing what they had to do because everybody has to do what they have to do because everybody is waiting for somebody to say Open Sesame and it’s not a thing that just anybody can say so here I am and I’m saying it and they can stop
I said: I just meant that there was a possibility
He said: That people will do something if they hear the magic words? Or that they will by miraculous dispensation do without the magic words?
I said: That’s not fair. Suppose you were born into a society
He said: Most people are
I said: A slaveowning society
He said: A society of slaves
I said: All I meant was
He said: I liked the Bad Samaritan better. I suppose a Good Samaritan sleeps better nights.
We had turned into his street again, and now he talked to me patiently. He had been saying things that he wanted to say but now he said things he didn’t especially want to say but which he thought would make me sleep better nights. He said patiently
You don’t understand. It’s not a question of what’s fair to expect. Some people do what they do because everybody does it and it doesn’t make them sick that that’s what everybody does it makes them feel trapped once or twice but better most of the time. If somebody says the magic words they wake up for a little while and go to sleep again. You think I should stop feeling sick if somebody does something because they hear the magic words, but it’s not a question of should, it’s a question of what happens. It doesn’t. That is it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t and that’s why I can’t say it any more, I just look at people. Sometimes I look at them thinking What are you waiting for and sometimes I look at them and say What are you waiting for.
We went into the house. We went back upstairs and he explained patiently that if he could go on waking people up for 50 years by saying Open Sesame you could probably say he should do it even if he felt sick but actually he couldn’t say it any more to anyone who was waiting for him to say it. So it just came down to what we had talked about before.
I said: Were you waiting for me to say Open Sesame?
He said: I’m not now, anyway. I’d better write those letters.
He sat down at the desk again and started writing, and I sat down in my chair. It was about midnight. After a while I fell asleep.
I woke up a couple of hours later. There were four or five envelopes on the desk. Red Devlin was sitting on the bed with his back against the wall; I could see the whites of his eyes. I turned on the lamp beside my chair, and now I could see that the pills on the dresser were gone.
He said
Are you my son?
No, I said.
He said
I didn’t think so. I’m glad.
He laughed and said
I didn’t mean that the way it sounds. I just meant you could do better.
That was the last time he laughed. He sat quietly, looking down, as if it tired him to look into a face. I didn’t say I didn’t think I could do better.
After a while his eyes closed.
I waited two or three hours until I was pretty sure there was nothing left but a thing in corduroy trousers and a blue shirt. The clubbed child and the weeping eye and the smiling chessplayer were gone. I took his hand in mine. It was still warm, but cooling. Then I sat on the bed beside him and put his arm over my shoulder.
I sat beside him while the body grew cooler. I thought at one point that if I called a hospital the organs could still be transplanted, but I thought his wife would be upset if she came home to find that even the mortal remains did not remain. In one sense, of course, it is absurd to feel better because the corpse of one’s beloved is anatomically complete; to embrace a dead body with a kidney.
I wished I’d discussed it with him. I did not think his wife would enjoy arriving at a more rational position immediately after discovering the fact of his suicide.
I tried to remember how long it took rigor mortis to set in. I put his arm by his side again and cried on its chilly shoulder. It was all right to do this now that it couldn’t make him feel he had to make an effort, maybe even that he had to go on being sick.
I spent the night beside it. I felt better with the dead thing beside me, reminding me that he had killed the clubbed child and the weeping eye.
In the morning his cheek was ice cold. It was about 5:00 when I woke up; the light was still on. I lay for a little while by the hard, cold thing on the bed, thinking I should get up and do something. I thought: Well anyway he doesn’t have to get up. He’d said once that he woke every morning at 5:00 and lay staring at the ceiling for two or three hours, hoping to fall asleep again and telling himself he might as well get up. After five or ten minutes he would see the smiling chessplayer for the first time that day, and tell himself he might as well get up, and lie staring at the ceiling.
I put on his denim jacket, and emptied the pockets. Then I took the letters from the table and went down the street to post them.
6
A good samurai will parry the blow
I got home one night about 9:00. Sib was typing Sportsboat and Waterski International.
I thought I could slip upstairs, but she looked up. She said: Is something the matter?
I said: No.
She said: So what’s not the matter?
I said: Well
I said: Somebody killed himself. I told him about Jonathan Glover and leaving your wife but he said that wouldn’t help.
Sib said: Well
She put her hand on my shoulder.
I thought: Why am I keeping her here?
I kept thinking that I had let Red Devlin go where he wanted to go and he’d never done anything for me. I kept thinking I should say You go right ahead.
I said: Do you ever think about Jonathan Glover? Maybe you should leave the country and get another job. Go somewhere where you don’t need a work permit.
Sib said: You mean go back to the States? But I don’t want to go back to the States.
I said: Why not?
Sib said: You can’t get Nebraska Fried Chicken. It’s too depressing for words.
I thought I should not let her get away with this. I was still wearing his jacket; Red Devlin wouldn’t have let her get away with this.
I said: You could stop typing British Ostrichkeeper and get another job.
Sib said: There are too many people I don’t want to see. Anyway why are we talking about my problems? Tell me about this person who died. Were you friends?
I said: What’s the point in talking about him? He doesn’t have any problems. There’s no one to have his problems any more. Why don’t you go back?
Sib said: I don’t want to talk about it
Sib said: You know, whenever my father met somebody stupid who’d been to Harvard he took it as a personal insult.
I said: This is a reason not to go back to the States?
Sib said: You should have heard him when they gave a chair to Dr. Kissinger, a man with the blood of millions on his hands.
I said: For this you’re typing British Ostrichkeeper?
Sib said: The thing is
Sib said: It’s just
Sib paced up and down. At last she said: You know,
I don’t know if you know this, Ludo, but if you have a motel you can always buy another motel.
I said: What?
Once you’ve got one motel you can always get another, said Sib. And if you can get another you can’t really pass up that kind of opportunity.
I said: What?
Sib said: It’s something you only really understand once you own a motel.
I said: As I was saying
Sib said that her Uncle Buddy had vaguely imagined that making a success of a motel might be a route out of accountancy, and that even at 30 it might not be too late to try something different. She said her mother had imagined that making a success of a motel might be a way of paying for musical training, since with her background she was not likely to win a scholarship anywhere she might actually want to go. She said her father had put up the money for the down payment and her mother and uncle had thrown themselves into making it a success, and one day it turned out her father had spotted the potential in another location.
I said: But
Sib said the thing was that the whole scope for profits in motels lies in spotting previously unspotted potential, and that her father had turned out to have an unsuspected flair for it. She said the potential of a place consisted in its being a place people were going to want to be in a few years’ time, and for it to be unspotted it had to be a place nobody wanted to be when you were buying the building or site for a future motel.
I said: But why
Sib said few places with unspotted potential boasted even an amateur chamber music society, let alone a symphony orchestra, so that musicians were even less likely to want to spend a lot of time in one than all the other people who had—
I waited for Sib to go on. I thought maybe if I didn’t say anything at all she would finally explain.
My father never talked about his father, said Sib. My mother complained constantly about her parents, who were always sending presents of sweaters from Philadelphia.
I waited for Sib to go on, and after a pause she went on:
A brown paper parcel would arrive at a motel going up on the outskirts of Pocatello. ‘Oh, my, God,’ my mother would say, splashing neat Scotch into a glass and drinking it in a single swallow. ‘Well, might as well open the damn thing.’ She would tear open the brown paper, tear open gold paper, open the shallow box from Wanamaker’s and lift from the layers of tissue paper a cashmere sweater in pale lemon or chartreuse or frosted plum, with mother-of-pearl buttons. ‘Well, might as well try the damn thing on,’ she’d say at last, shrugging into it and rucking the sleeves up to her elbows in the what-this-old-thing way she and her friends always wore cashmere sweaters. She’d take out a cigarette, crack a match and light up, sucking the smoke in deep though she always said it played merry hell with the voice. ‘It’s the hypocrisy of it that really gets to me,’ she’d say, and she’d sit down to start a note that began ‘Dear Mom, Thank you so much for the scrumptious sweater’ and sit smoking and staring into space.