by Ed Siegle
Dentistry might have changed, but teeth still held that magic. Why were there so many odes to the eyes? Lovers did not connect through a touching of corneas – mouths sealed the moment of union or betrayal, teeth chewed the morsels which saved the hungry, while eyes wept impotent. When Joel had first met Debbie he’d been attracted to many of her physical features, but when she smiled: what beauties! White and mighty, curved in a line with a tiny kink: imperfect perfection.
When he’d changed out of his tunic, Joel knocked on the door of Tony’s surgery.
‘Come in,’ Tony said.
Joel entered and sat in a wooden chair culled from some church hall. Tony sat at an old bureau, finishing paperwork. A few years ago Joel would have found it much more awkward to ask for time off, but Tony was retiring at the end of the year, and Vicky and Joel had noticed that he was showing signs of winding down. His skin was tanned from garden and golf course – he was taking more days off to play. His hair was still more blond than grey and seemed longe on the nape – an almost youthful look. Joel marvelled at men of sixty-odd who still looked fresh from the box. He wondered how Gilberto would have looked, had his life not been ambushed. He pictured his father and Tony together – head by head, wrinkle by wrinkle. Joel wondered if there was anything crumpled in Tony’s life. He’d been through some difficult times – the death of his wife, a few years back – but to look at him you wouldn’t know it.
Tony put the lid back on his fountain pen, turned to Joel and smiled. ‘So, how’s the stomach?’
‘The stomach?
‘Dodgy curry, wasn’t it?’
If Joel didn’t know him better, he might have thought Tony was smirking.
‘All good now, thanks,’ said Joel.
‘So where did you get it from?’
‘A prawn madras.’
‘No, I mean which restaurant – to make sure I avoid it.’
He was definitely smirking. It wasn’t the first time recently, either. Joel felt a little put out. Your boss wasn’t supposed to guess what you were up to – or rather, he was meant to have the decency not to show he knew. How was a younger generation meant to have a sense of sin if old-timers were too obvious about having seen and done it all?
‘Bengali Bungalow,’ said Joel.
‘Haven’t heard of that one.’
Probably because I’ve just made it up, Joel thought.
‘So, what can I do you for?’ Tony asked.
Joel thought about telling a lie, but he hadn’t prepared anything. ‘Did I ever tell you about my father?’
Tony looked at Joel with a warm blend of care and concern. That was more like it, Joel thought. The Tony I know. ‘Well,’ continued Joel, ‘it seems he might be alive, after all.’
‘Wow – that’s incredible!’ the older man said. ‘Wasn’t he supposed to have… years ago?’
‘That’s right – although, it might sound a bit funny, but I was never sure, you know, I always had a feeling –’
‘So how’s this come to light? Did he get back in touch with you? Or with your mother?’
‘Nothing like that, no,’ Joel replied. ‘I saw him on the news.’
‘So he’s over here?’
‘No, no – it was a clip from Rio.’
‘Ohhh!’
Tony seemed almost pleased. Joel felt a little annoyed: was Tony worried that if his dad were over here it might affect Joel’s work? Surely there were more important matters at stake? And hadn’t Tony considered Joel might want to go and see his dad, in Brazil? Distance didn’t make a resurrection any less real.
Joel’s annoyance made him shed all scruples about asking for leave at short notice.
‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ he asked.
‘The good or the bad?’
‘The good news is, I’d like time off to go and see him.’
‘Go and see him?’
‘Look, I know it’s a pain in the arse, but it’s now or never. I’ve been waiting for this chance for twenty-five years.’
‘Of course,’ said Tony. ‘You must go, no question. Of course you must. Just let me know when you’re thinking of –’
‘That’s the bad news,’ said Joel. ‘I’m hoping to fly out on Friday.’
‘This Friday?’
‘This Friday.’
Tony let out a whistle. ‘For how long?’ he asked.
‘A couple of weeks, I guess. I don’t really know.’
‘OK,’ Tony said eventually. ‘Two weeks or so it is.’ He stood up and offered his hand. ‘Good luck,’ he said, as they shook.
‘Knowing him, I’m going to need it,’ said Joel.
‘Bring me back a bottle of that stuff – what’s it called?’
‘Cachaça?’
‘Lethal stuff with the limes and business.’
Since when had Tony been drinking caipirinhas? How the hell did he even know what a caipirinha was? No one was indispensable, so they said, but it was supposed to hurt a little bit when you were gone. Joel had expected Tony to be considerably inconvenienced by the fact that he was leaving a full list of patients – and here Tony was, thinking about cocktails. That was the trouble with the 21st century: too many old people, with too much money, having too much fun. What ever happened to donning beige, seizing up and whining about standards? They ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Joel left the surgery and turned into London Road. He walked past electrical stores and bicycle shops, past a bus stop outside Iceland clogged with carrier bags. People waited for buses, smoking. Tattoos crept from collars, schoolkids in messed-up uniforms scrapped. A man in a suit willed the right bus to appear with eyes left empty by an office day. Another man in thick glasses nodded at Joel, and he smiled back as he passed and said, ‘Hello, John.’ Being acknowledged by patients made Joel feel like a proper local; he felt he had seen more of Rio than some parts of Brighton. He had read that in Rio you could take a tour of the favelas to learn about the real lives of the invisible millions. Perhaps someone should run a tour to Whitehawk, hidden over the back of town, to show the softer side of a Brighton ghetto: living rooms fashioned by Changing Rooms, gardens inspired by Titchmarsh, children with addictions no more serious than to PlayStation. Set middle-class minds at rest.
Debbie walked into North Laine, looked at a halter-necked dress in a window and wondered if it would make her arms look fat. Joel will be here any minute, she thought. Once upon a time the prospect of his arrival would have made something inside her skip; these days it triggered more of a lurch. She thought again about the final, pointless argument. It hadn’t been anything like their worst and she wondered if it had any qualities which distingushed it from the rest, other than its position at the very end of a broken chain. They had been watching one of his favourite films, Central do Brasil. Debbie had made a gentle remark about the reluctance of Dora to mother the boy Josué, which pricked a comment from Joel about the boy’s quest – to find his dad – which triggered a retort from Debbie about men being big babies, which led Joel to make a sarcastic remark about Debbie’s one-track mind, which provoked a dig from Debbie about being lost up a dead-end road without his fucking compass, which led to a folding of arms, a brewing silence, a simultaneous finger-pointing rant, and to Debbie throwing a snow globe of Paris at Joel’s head. The City of Love. The city that sadly arrowed past his ear and failed to crack his skull.
She felt a bit bad about the snow globe, though it also had to be acknowledged that adult life provided too few opportunities to hurl things. Whether it had helped was a different question. Chucking ornaments was not necessarily the best way to rescue the two of them from the whirlpool in which they’d been spinning: never happy enough to commit; never committed enough to be happy. They loved one another – they’d said so even as they called it quits – but they’d never quite managed to get married, have children, make plans. Most of their friends were sailing happily into the distance while Debbie and Joel had been doing the doggy-paddle. And now the father issue
had re-emerged. Debbie didn’t wish to form a view before she’d heard the facts, but she had always feared it would haunt him again. It had never really gone away.
Debbie looked at a cream top decorated with pairs of cherries. Destined for a younger girl, she thought, unless I feel like looking a fool. She sensed someone behind her and smelt the mildly antiseptic aroma of the surgery.
‘Would you look at that and go sixty quid?’ said Debbie.
‘Um…’ said Joel.
‘I’d look at it and go twenty,’ she said.
They walked through the Lanes. Joel made jokes about the tiaras and vintage armaments in the windows of shops they passed, and Debbie looked for subtext. They reached the sea near the Palace Pier and leaned against the rail, and Joel wondered when the starlings would come back to swoop and morph against the evening sky, which made him think of the very first time he’d watched them, in the autumn of ’76, not long after he started at senior school, and he thought about the day he came in and sat by the window and noticed kids glancing at him. Some of them smiled, nervously, especially the girls, and he guessed his mum must have told the teacher, and his teacher must have told the class. I’m like the Man in the Iron Mask, thought Joel: the Boy Whose Father Died. He could see his classmates’ eyes hid questions – how did he die? How does it feel? Was it murder? But as time went by he realised none of them was going to ask. They’d been told not to mention it, no doubt. He was grateful for that, he really was, but…
But it wasn’t that simple, was it? There was no real need for sympathy – because his dad was still alive. If he was dead, where was the evidence? That was the first thing they looked for in Agatha Christie books. Without a body or evidence, or a body of evidence (he liked this joke), there was no proof. If his dad’s body had been lost they would still be trying to find it – a corpse wasn’t something you lost and forgot all about. If they had found it, they would have said so. If it wasn’t lost and it wasn’t found… then perhaps it wasn’t a corpse at all. Books and films were full of this kind of riddle, and sooner or later a clever loner would come along and work it out.
‘Have they found the body yet?’ he asked his mum one day.
Jackie was drinking tea and froze in the middle of dipping her biscuit, so that it sogged into the mug. He expected one of her lectures, but instead she just said no and looked unhappy. He thought it would be a good idea to change the subject.
‘Can I go to Kevin’s?’
‘Where does he live, petal?’
‘Whitehawk.’
Jackie looked at her watch as if it was significant. ‘Not today, darling,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s not convenient.’
Joel knew there was no way round the veto of convenience. ‘Is Whitehawk a favela?’
‘No,’ said his mum sharply. ‘There aren’t any favelas here. And don’t let me hear you say that again. It’s very rude.’
Rudeness was another concept he was getting used to. He wondered who was really being rude.
Jackie moved from job to job. She worked in Woolies, then as a cleaner at a school. In Brazil they’d had a maid. She wanted something more office-based, so she could use her brain, but someone else always seemed to get the nod. Then in the spring of ’77 she saw an advert for a cashier at a betting shop. She rubbed along well with the old-timers and found she had a knack for the odds. Towards the end of the year life started to pick up and Jackie plucked up the courage to call their lawyer in Brazil. If he could sell the Ipanema flat, she could put down a deposit on a house. She wanted to make sure Joel had something for the future.
It was complicated, the lawyer said. She would need the death certificate to transfer the property into her name. In the meantime there were months of bills and condominio to pay. The bank account was almost empty and he hadn’t even taken all his fees. If the bills weren’t paid, the flat might be seized.
A nice lady at a cartório, a register office, said there were complications with the death certificate. There’d been a change of personnel and filing system. She couldn’t find Gilberto’s file. It could take time. If Jackie came in person there would be ways of speeding it up. Every time she called, something had changed. One day she received a letter from the cartório asking for certified copies of her birth and marriage certificates, letters of reference from her employer and her parents. She rang to explain her estrangement from her family, to find that the nice lady no longer worked there and a new man could find no reference to her case. In a desperate moment she rang the old flat and a woman who sounded suspiciously like the nice lady picked up the phone, then hung up when Jackie started to scream at her. Jackie rang and rang, but no one answered and one day the line was dead. The money in the bank ran out and the lawyer stopped taking calls.
Through 1977 Joel allowed himself the luxury of crying on anniversaries, making a pact with his father that his parting promise not to cry could have exceptions which proved the rule of his resilience. The allotted occasions were his own birthday in July, Gilberto and Jackie’s birthdays in May, and the 18th of December – the day of Gilberto’s second arrest. Sometimes Joel would buy his mum flowers on these days, which she greeted with great joy – not being privy to the reason. One date he couldn’t keep was that of Gilberto’s death, and every date that passed which wasn’t that date gave him a secret confidence. Sometimes he laughed about it with his father in his room. He made sure he kept the mementoes in his shoebox in order. He’d always felt safe in the order of his father’s surgery so he kept the pictures of Brazil in a uniform pile, pressed into a corner of the box. Joel became anxious about the chaotic state of the house. He started to hoover, tidy and dust. He arranged ornaments symmetrically.
In December 1977, Joel noticed that Jackie’s calls to Brazil had stopped. She no longer took him to one side, every month or so, to tell him about progress with the – certificate. Joel found it hard to understand her attitude: matters did not seem to have been resolved. She was spending more time out with Miriam. Sometimes, when they came back after the pub, Joel could hear male voices. Jackie hummed as she did the washing-up, planted flowers. And so one day as Jackie was hoovering, Joel kicked a switch on the wall and the machine whined into silence. He pulled her over to the sofa.
‘I want to know what’s going on,’ said Joel, sitting with folded arms.
‘What do you mean, petal?’
‘What are we doing about Dad?’
‘There’s nothing we can do,’ she said. ‘No one will talk to me and –’
‘But where is he, Mummy?’
Jackie looked pained. ‘He’s dead, darling.’
‘But where’s his body?’
‘I’m not sure exactly, the lady said… well, she couldn’t be sure –’
‘But how do you know?’ Joel rolled his eyes.
‘Know what, petal?’
‘That he’s D-E-A-D!’
‘Because they told me, honey, and you know what he said himself… oh, Joel, I know, I’m sorry, my petal, but –’
‘You don’t know anything. The lady lied and stole our flat, and the lawyer lied and stole our money and everyone lied to hide –’
‘Oh, stop it, petal, please stop it. I know how much you’d like it not to be true, but he’s gone, my petal, he’s gone forever.’
‘No, he hasn’t.’
‘He has, petal.’
‘He hasn’t,’ insisted Joel, taking her hands, ‘don’t you see? He’s hiding away until the coast is clear. He’ll come and live with us here, when he’s ready; he’s just waiting –’
Jackie stood up. ‘Waiting where and waiting why? It’s been two years, Joel. Two years. If he isn’t dead then he doesn’t want to see us.’
Joel looked up at his mother and thought, I hate you.
Jackie sat down and took Joel’s limp hands.
‘He would want to see you, he would. But he can’t, because he’s dead. He’s dead, petal, and you need to understand that fact, awfu
l as it is. He’s dead. I think we should talk about this more. I should have realised. I thought you were better, you seemed so much better. I can help you, petal, Mummy can help you.’
‘Help yourself, petal,’ said Joel.
He lay on his bed but he didn’t cry. He felt the wires in his veins pulling his fingers tight. She was wrong and she would be sorry. He couldn’t lie still. He had to get out of the house. He wanted to hurt her. He ran downstairs and put his head round the door.
‘I’m going to Kevin’s,’ he said.
Joel slammed the door and ran up the road, over the top of the hill, round the bowl of Queen’s Park and along a couple of streets until the buildings started to change. On one side stood houses which were tall, white and square at the front, some with small gardens. On the other the houses were lower and grey or pebble-dashed, grouped together in pairs with gaps between them, some of which were filled with rubble. He turned a corner and saw more houses up the sweep of the hill to the left. They had staring windows but looked all right. This couldn’t be it.
He cut across the houses and up the side of a hill. As he climbed he noticed a peculiar feeling in his stomach and felt a bit sick, as if there were fear in the air, and he started to think about the mountain, Pedra da Gávea, but stopped himself. He sat on chalky earth in a copse halfway to the top and made himself look at the town below which peeped through thin and leafless trees. You couldn’t see through one tree in Brazil, let alone a forest of them. Beyond town the sea glinted through the colourless trunks. Seagulls squawked above. The silhouette of a high-rise cut the distant pier in two.
Joel climbed to the crest of the hill where the wind had teased brambles across the ground like a wispy comb-over. There was no sign of Whitehawk. He wondered why they hadn’t claimed the spare part of the hill. No doubt it was different in Britain but he wished his mum would clarify. She used to explain everything, or if she couldn’t his dad would make something up. A lie was better than nothing. He kicked stones along a path and wondered if his mum was looking for him. He came to a field and was surprised by the grandstand of the racecourse that looked out across a hidden valley in which lay lines of houses, most of them red brick. Joel wondered if that was it. It didn’t look like a favela. The houses were bigger – proper homes which looked as if they belonged. In Rio the boxes clung on to the tops of hills and fell down their slopes. Joel could see cars driving up paved roads, small gardens and people scurrying, just like in other Brighton streets. He wondered why his mum had made such a fuss.