Mr Toppit

by Charles Elton

  Claude was rattling the gate that led into the gardens in the middle of the square, but it must have been padlocked. It might have been him who was the first to try climbing over the railings, or it might have been Rani. Then we were in the gardens and Rani was lying on the ground holding his bare leg, which was bleeding. Rachel and Claude were trying to climb a tree. I lay down and put my cheek against the damp grass. It was hard to get the order of everything right. I don’t know whether the police came then or whether I had fallen asleep and it was later. Then there was the van, and then there was the police station, and then there was filling in forms. Maybe Rani was with us or maybe he had been taken to the emergency room. Everybody seemed to be talking about his leg. It seemed that we had Disturbed the Peace and although the policeman I talked to kept repeating, “This is a serious offense, sir,” I couldn’t see that what we had done was so serious. Maybe Claude felt the same. I could hear him shouting at somebody down the corridor.

  I don’t know what time they let us go, but it was starting to get light when we walked back to Claude’s place. I slept for an hour or two in a sleeping bag on the floor. When I woke up, all I could hear was Rachel and Claude snoring. They still had their clothes on and were fast asleep on his bed. The room was a tip. Bottles and glasses, overflowing ashtrays, and plates with the remains of Claude’s Thai food were all over the place.

  I had to get to the airport and collected my stuff together as quietly as I could, although I don’t think a nuclear bomb would have woken them. I’d been going to leave a note, but I couldn’t think of anything to say so I just let myself out.

  Once I had gone through check-in and was in the departure lounge I had the strange sense that I had escaped unscathed—from what, exactly, I wasn’t sure. I felt free and clear of everything: nothing could touch me. Then, as I was looking through the magazines on the newsstand, my heart jolted. Propped up next to the piles of newspapers was an Evening Standard placard on which was written in big black felt-tip capitals: HAYSEED BOY POLICE CAUTION.

  If I’d thought Martha wouldn’t have heard about it yet, I was wrong. I rang her just before the flight was called and she was icy with anger. By that time I had had half an hour to let it settle, and as I talked to her on the phone, watching passengers come and go with their luggage, listening to the noise of the busy airport, the world seemed normal again. What did it matter? It was just a blip, so small as to be imperceptible in the scheme of things.

  In Martha’s scheme of things, however, the scale seemed to be different. “How could you be such a fool?” she shouted. Suddenly I was sick of everything, sick of Hayseed, sick of us all being locked together.

  I thought for a moment, and I said, “Because I’m special,” and then I hung up on her.

  Laurie

  I had to go back to Los Alamos to do the show. I left there when I was five or six and I’d never been back. I’d forgotten the color everything was in those mountains. People call it red but it isn’t close, not even pink. It’s a kind of terra-cotta. A dirty color, but it looks clean with the sky and all that air. I don’t know what you’d think of it, Luke. It would look like the moon if you came from England.

  I didn’t recognize Los Alamos at all. No connection. Nothing came back. There’s even a Starbucks there! It looks like anywhere else now. They’ve paved the roads, of course, and there are more of them, but I hardly even recognized Fuller Lodge, it seemed so small. Los Alamos was originally some school for rich kids but they kicked them out when the army took it over in the war, and that was the schoolhouse. There’s a lake by Fuller Lodge called Ashley Pond, and when I was a kid, it seemed vast and open, like it went on forever. Someone even told us it was bottomless, just went all the way down to the center of the earth. Now it’s surrounded by buildings and it’s like a pissy little thing that wouldn’t go higher than your ankles if you jumped in.

  In my head Los Alamos is my dad’s place. I don’t remember much about it except him. And Paully a bit—the kid who lived next door to us. There’s Alma, of course, but I try to siphon her out of it. She sort of spoils it for me with her moods, her drinking, and her grousing about the heat, the cold, the bugs, and the Jews. Jews! The whole place was filled with Jews, all those foreign scientists who had come over from Europe to build the bomb. We couldn’t have won the war without them, though I don’t feel too good about it now. Most people don’t. Now they think the war would have ended anyway; they just wanted to test the bomb on people. Still, it was an achievement, the bomb, an amazing piece of work done in those conditions, and I’m proud of what my dad did, not that he was much more than a technician. He wasn’t high up or anything, but they couldn’t have done it without guys like him.

  Everybody had doubts then. First the Russians were our allies, then they weren’t. What were people meant to think? And that place—Los Alamos—must have been like a hothouse of secrets and gossip. They must have talked about whether what they were doing was right, whether the bomb technology should be kept from everyone else. Work was all they did. There weren’t football games or TV, and people cared then. It isn’t like now when nobody gives a shit about what’s happening.

  They didn’t want me to do the Los Alamos show. Nobody’s heard of it, nobody cares, the advertisers won’t like it, yada yada. That’s what they said, but it was more than that—they were frightened. Anyway, I forced them into it. I can’t just talk to movie stars tub-thumping some new movie. The whole civil liberties issue is as important now as it was then. That’s what the show was about. You may not get your security clearance revoked now, like they did to Oppenheimer, the man who ran Los Alamos, but the government’s always watching you.

  The weird thing is, I see pictures of Oppenheimer and get him confused with my dad. He was tall and thin, too, legs like a stork. I certainly didn’t inherit those genes. You always see Oppenheimer wearing a hat in pictures and my dad wore one, too, so I think of him when I see Oppenheimer. Now, I know that’s crazy, but I’ve got nothing to connect my memories to, Alma saw to that. No photos of him, no papers, nothing. She destroyed them all. When we cleared out the house in Modesto there was zip. For such a terrible housekeeper, she was certainly thorough.

  That’s why I did the Alzheimer’s show, got one of the biggest audience shares we’ve ever had. The letters we got! Thousands! It touched such a nerve in people. You know, what parents pass on to their kids is so important and that’s what I was talking about, not the medical effect of Alzheimer’s, though that’s pretty terrible, too, but how it destroys what I called the “Legacy Gene.” I just came up with that phrase and already people are using it. There’s something in people that wants to pass stuff on to the next generation—experience, wisdom, life lessons, call it what you want. And that’s what Alzheimer’s takes away, not just your own memories but the ability to pass them on. That’s the harm it does. That’s the killer.

  I was kind of nervous about doing it, but I’m glad I did. Bringing on Alma, I mean. You could have heard a pin drop. Of course, we had doctors and Alzheimer’s experts on the show, and I had a couple of families who talked about how they’d suffered, but I had to make it personal. That’s what people love. That’s why the show’s so popular, I think, because I bring it all back to me.

  At the end I just announced Alma, and Erica brought in the wheelchair. She’d had to be pretty heavily sedated—you never know what she’s going to do. I didn’t want her to launch into one of her tirades. But she was good as gold, just sat there staring into the audience with a blank face. It couldn’t have worked out better. I knelt down by the wheelchair and said quietly, “Alma, do you know where you are? You’re on television.” Didn’t react at all. Then I took her hand and said, “If only you could share your past with me. I need what’s in your head,” and I stroked her hair. I said, “I know it’s there, Alma, but it’s been hidden away.” By this time I was pretty cut up. You can imagine. I had to turn away from the cameras.

  When we got Alma out of the studio the me
dication must have been wearing off because she began to shout and scream. Erica was wonderful. Best carer we’ve had. The first ones when we moved to LA were terrible, couldn’t cope with Alma at all. Erica was in control from day one. No nonsense. She’s good with her but strong. Alma knows where she can go and where she can’t. It’s better now we keep the gate on the path up from the guesthouse locked. She can’t fall over on the slope. You should get to know Erica. I hadn’t realized how tough the Dutch were. Erica says it’s from living below sea level with just those walls to stop the water flooding everywhere. Such a strong woman. That face. Like something from Mount Rushmore.

  It’s different for you. You’ve still got him, your dad. He’s always there. Martha sees to that. She keeps his memory alive for you and Rachel. You wouldn’t get her going around destroying things. And you’ve got the books. Oh, that’s such a legacy for you, Luke, such a shining beacon, like those Olympic torches that the old Greeks passed from runner to runner. And you’ll be able to hand them on to your children. You can hold up the books and say proudly, “Look, this is me! I am Luke Hayseed. This was my father’s legacy to me and this will be my legacy to you.”

  Luke

  Laurie did talk a lot but she didn’t actually spew all that out in one long session. If she had, I’d have been asleep in about five minutes. I’ve put it together from the various conversations I had with her while I was in Los Angeles. Other people’s pasts just aren’t that interesting, so I’ve cut it down a lot to give the flavor.

  With her show being on five days a week, and the never-ending planning needed for the upcoming ones, you would think you’d want to wipe the old ones from your mind as soon as they’d gone out, but she talked about the Los Alamos show a lot. One evening she asked if I wanted to watch it. She had a VHS of it, but couldn’t get her video-player to work and I thought I might be off the hook. In the end, she called through to the poolhouse and got Travis, who was living there for the summer, working as what she called her “gofer,” to come and set it up.

  It was odd seeing Laurie on television. The surprise was how good she was. She was sort of just like herself but different at the same time. She certainly looked a lot better, which was probably the makeup, but she moved more fluidly, too. At home she sometimes limped a little because she was having trouble with her knees, but on the set, despite her size, she seemed to glide around as if she was on castors, shoving microphones into people’s faces and talking to the camera.

  Actually, the show was surprisingly interesting. The first bit was some footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after they had been hit with those bombs. Then Laurie was in an old army truck with an open back, joggling around with a lot of old guys as they were being driven to Los Alamos where the first bombs had been built. They had all worked there and she was asking what they remembered, and then there were clips of them walking round Los Alamos, interspersed with old photos of the place.

  Then they were in the studio having a discussion about the rights and wrongs of building the bomb in the first place, and whether it was wrong to have doubts and if that made you subversive. It was all pretty theoretical. She talked about the power of the FBI to destroy people’s lives, called it—of course—the “Mr. Toppit of our democratic system.” Big nervous laugh from everyone. Then she took her microphone into the audience and talked to some people who had FBI files and whether they had got access to them under the Freedom of Information Act. There was one guy, sitting in a corner with his face in shadow, who had been involved in some student revolutionary stuff and had been living under an assumed name for twenty years because the FBI was still after him.

  Then she went back onto the stage and sat down. The lights dimmed and she was talking straight to the camera. “Doing this show has been a journey for all of us,” she said, gesturing at the guys she had gone to Los Alamos with, “a journey into a past that many people in this country would rather forget. I want to know and I want to remember. My father, Rudolph Laurence Clow, was one of the men who worked with Oppenheimer, and I spent some of my childhood in Los Alamos.” I realized she must have been storing this up: she hadn’t mentioned it all through the show.

  “My father wasn’t a top guy like Oppenheimer, he was low-level, a technician, just another guy in overalls working in the lab. But they couldn’t have done it without people like him. You know what? He had some doubts. Doubt isn’t illegal in this country. Never was. Skepticism isn’t a federal offense. I don’t know what sort of trouble he got into, some kind of security issue, but they kicked him out, took away his clearance, like they did to Oppenheimer after the war. They removed my dad’s right to work at what he did best. Last I remember, he was working in a photo lab developing people’s vacation pictures. A man who helped in ending the war. That’s not right. Can I find out what happened to him there? Can I get the FBI to show me his file? The wheels of bureaucracy grind pretty slow in Washington. What I do know is this: his life was destroyed. All I know is that he left us and I never saw him again, a man lost to time and history. One of the many, then and now. Thank you for taking this journey with me.” She stared at the camera for a moment, then bowed her head and the credits rolled.

  She stopped the tape. “I wish you could have known my dad,” she said.

  “What happened to him? I mean, after.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Lost to time and history,” she repeated. I had a sneaking suspicion it wasn’t entirely her own phrase.

  “People can’t just vanish.”

  “This is a big country.”

  “Maybe you should hire a private detective,” I said.

  She threw back her head and laughed. “You’ve seen too many movies.”

  The buzz of the intercom made us jump. There were phones all over the place and you could call any part of the house. You could even call the garage. It was Erica, calling from the guesthouse at the other end of the garden where she lived with Alma.

  Laurie picked up the phone. “Tell her I can’t come now,” she said. “I’m with Luke. Tell her I’ll see her in the morning. She should be asleep anyway.”

  I glanced surreptitiously at my watch. It was only nine o’clock, but I’d already discovered in LA that people did things at strange times.

  “Have you given her the Xanax? If her back’s really painful try the Percodan … Yes, two. You coming up?” Laurie smiled. “That would be great. See if you can find BJ and Marty.” They were Erica’s cats, two big, fat, long-haired Persians, who required a lot of grooming or they might drown under all their fur.

  “Erica’s going to come and do my knee,” Laurie said. “She’s like a healer. She approaches everything in a holistic way. You’ve no idea what poisons we have in our bodies, the crap doctors give you.”

  Before long, Erica came in with a basket over her arm and BJ draped over her shoulders like a shawl. She was very tall and thin, her hair scraped back and held in a tight ponytail. Her face was all bone—cheekbones and jawbones and weird bones around the side of her head that moved behind her skin like ball bearings when she spoke. There was no fat on her: I had seen her play tennis and there were great cords of muscle on her legs and arms as if her body was operated by a pulley system.

  As soon as Erica was in the room BJ jumped off her shoulders. “Look!” she said. “She needs her friend Laurie!” She spoke the kind of English that was so precise she had to be foreign, with just a tiny sibilance that pushed a word like “needs” towards “neadsh.” In fact, BJ didn’t head anywhere near Laurie but scuttled under the sofa.

  “Poor little baby,” Erica said. “I think she might have met a coyote in the garden. Bad monsters! Marty’s still out there, but she’s a little toughie.” The thought was rather exciting: it seemed impossibly exotic to be somewhere where there might be proper wild animals, not just dull old squirrels or dormice, lurking around, ready to attack.

  “Is Alma out for the count?” Laurie asked, and Erica did a little mime, putting her head on her shoulders, closing her ey
es, and letting her tongue loll out. Laurie hooted with laughter. Erica looked pleased. “Now,” she said, putting the basket on the table, “let us look at the patient. Your knee, please, madam.”

  Laurie raised her leg onto a footstool in front of her chair and Erica knelt beside her. “I have that nice lavender oil you’re fond of, Laurie, or the bergamot. You choose. I think the skin absorbs the lavender better. It’s a little lighter.” She turned to me. “Now. What will Luke do during our little procedure?”

  I could see the problem. Erica had rolled up Laurie’s black trouser leg, which had hit the obstacle of her thigh where the material had bunched and come to a halt. The trousers would have to come off.

  “Honey, why don’t you go see what Travis is up to?” Laurie said. “He might take you out for a drive. He’s supposed to be looking after you.”

  “Supposed to be looking after you” had a ring about it that I didn’t entirely like, implying not only that I needed looking after but that someone had to be assigned to do it—but at Laurie’s there were people to do everything. The drive was sometimes so full of the cars and trucks of those who had come to do things in the house and garden that the intercoms would be buzzing all the time because someone was needed to move their vehicle so that someone else could go in or out.

  Travis was a couple of years older than me. He stayed in the poolhouse, in the small dark space behind the changing room. He had helped Laurie in the studio when she did her hospital radio show back in Modesto and she had brought him down for the summer. He took care of odd jobs for her and drove her around on weekends when Stan, her other driver, didn’t work.

  Jesus and Ronnie came every day to sort out the swimming pool. They didn’t speak much English. Lupe and her daughter, Consuela, were the housekeepers. They did the cleaning and cooking. They didn’t speak much English either. Ruthie and Bob were a husband-and-wife gardening team, who arrived every morning to do the lawns, the plants, and the watering, and had arguments with Jesus and Ronnie because the grass round the pool always had brown patches where they spilled chemicals.