by Adam Thorpe
As ‘Yellow Submarine’ began with a treble solo in unrecognisable English, he realised that this was probably the worst place in London to meet anyone, short of maybe the HMV store in Oxford Street. A sudden fit of nerves made him want to go to the lavatory.
At which point, of course, Kaja was suddenly walking towards him.
‘Hi!’
‘Hi, Kaja.’
He couldn’t decide, in the last few seconds, whether to kiss her lightly on each cheek or shake her hand, and there was a confusion in which their heads dipped and their hands flapped.
Kaja laughed and put her hands either side of her face.
‘This is so mad!’ she cried.
He could see her more clearly here in the sunlight than he had through the keyhole at Howard’s or in the gloom of the Hampstead church or across the street from the tree. The only difference from six years back was the tiny crow’s feet and an overall look of tiredness. Her hair was loose and long again and chimed precisely with the gilded necklace at her throat, which was like a circle of ancient hammered coins. Her tawny hair would turn heads all on its own: the Estonian strong point, she’d said, once. And her extraordinary blue-green eyes, tending to slate grey when the light couldn’t decide. Her cheekbones were still slightly polished, curving just under the skin: he knew how they felt when they were kissed.
‘Pretty crazy,’ Jack agreed, not feeling like smiling, feeling instead a sudden irritation at her ease and beauty.
‘You’re a bit older,’ she said, her head cocked to one side, running her eyes over his face and hair.
‘You’re not,’ he replied, his irritation going out of him like air from a tyre.
She was dressed in low-cut denim shorts and a thin armless cream singlet under which she was not apparently wearing a bra. He thought he saw a stud in her bared navel, like a golden bead of sweat. The shorts were stonewashed and torn and reached her knees: expensive, he reckoned. He was annoyed that he was sexually excited. He’d forgotten how lithe and gymnastic she looked, with her emphasised shoulders and no-nonsense back – so different from the cowed look of the English. He wondered if she had dressed like a diva deliberately.
‘OK,’ he said, rather coldly. ‘Let’s find our bench. Nice day, yeah?’
They walked up the side of the long, thin stretch of water in virtual silence, commenting only on the ducks. The water was low and smelt slightly rotten from the exposed mud on the edges and around the islands. The ducks were, as usual, very loud, breaking into squabbling fits or individually embarking on a solo riff that echoed up and down and made the little kids here and there pause, then point and squawk in turn. There were not many people, in fact.
They found the bench and sat with a gap of several inches between them. The wicked idea passed through Jack’s mind that passers-by would think of them as a couple, the men admiring the girl. It was especially wicked because a part of him would have liked to have stolen an arm around Kaja’s slim and naked waist, or pressed his lips on the tattoo above her shoulder blade, or removed her Roman-style sandals and squeezed her feet.
‘Is this a crane?’ he asked, almost tapping the tattoo on her bared shoulder.
‘It’s a phoenix,’ she said. ‘Rising up from the ashes.’
‘OK,’ he nodded, hiding his hands under his thighs.
‘I don’t want to be long, Jack.’
‘Oh?’
She was looking straight out at the water and the reeds and the floating birdlife, which included coots and the odd cross-looking swan. The huge willow, to their left, gave partial shade from the sun. Passers-by spoke in mostly Italian or French; the English sounded posh and intellectual and too loud, like cast-offs from some arts programme. A sign indicated the way to the Zoo and to Regent’s College, where Milly used to see a homeopathic doctor called Brian. Jack felt snagged on what he had always known.
‘You see, this could be more serious,’ she said, finally. ‘There won’t be any shooting or stabbing or things like that. Like in Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata. You know that story?’
‘Yeah,’ said Jack, although he’d never read it. ‘Heavy things happen, even so. Or they can do.’
‘I was waiting six years.’
A duck was dipping its head in and out of the water. In and out. Out and shake a bit and look about and in.
This was probably the end of the long plangent phrase that had begun in the park in Tallinn, to the whiff of a cigarillo, to the dipping of a duck’s sleek head the colour of the inside of a mussel shell.
‘Never gave up?’
‘Nope,’ she said.
She took out a creased photograph and showed it to him. He was dismayed to see himself, standing in front of a wooden sheep with a pair of clippers hanging off its rump. Dismayed, because he looked such a twerp, and noticeably younger. Very pleased with himself, he looked. And awkward. A magical time. A madness time.
‘Hey-ho,’ he said.
She put the snap away and replaced it with a packet of Camel cigarettes; she offered him one and he said why not and took it. His eyes met hers for a second and he saw that their colour was also the inside of a mussel shell. He felt he’d got this image from somewhere, maybe a magazine or a novel or a poem he’d read as a stimulus for a piece or as a setting. She lit his and then hers with a plastic Bic lighter, the type he’d seen people use in Paris. He took a drag of his and coughed.
‘At least you didn’t hit me this time,’ he said, slapping his chest. She laughed as he coughed again, apologising. ‘Sorry. I hate cigarettes, really,’
‘You mean, your wife does.’
‘OK, but I agree with her.’
‘She’s very strong, isn’t she?’
‘Yeah.’ He didn’t like Kaja talking about Milly. He felt defensive. His mouth was full of a nasty bush of smoke.
‘First I need to say,’ she went on, ‘that I know about the baby. That one you lost. I know it through your music.’
‘You can’t be serious.’
‘Cantus from the Black Screen.’
‘Wow. Bravo. Worst title in the world.’
‘It’s made me cry. I had to listen a lot to like it, though.’
‘Haven’t been able to have any others, almost certainly as a direct result of losing it. Some kind of… damage. Lessens the chances, anyway.’
‘You believe that?’
‘Medical expert’s opinion, not mine.’
He didn’t like the idea of her sharing in something so personal to him and Milly, and yet he’d deliberately made it public. A toddler wanting something it couldn’t have was screaming at a fair distance, but it grated. It was astonishingly like someone in extreme agony. It stopped and started like a machine. It must be terrible to be next to it, he thought. He brushed a coppery leaf out of his hair.
‘I’m not going to say we haven’t been trying, either,’ he added, feeling the tips of his ears go hot.
‘No problem.’
She took a drag on her cigarette with pouted lips and blew the smoke out immediately. The sunlight, filtered by the willow, was dropping its spare cash on her hair. It was extremely long and so light, lifting in the barely perceptible breeze. Naked, she could still conceal her breasts with it, he thought.
Lathering them.
‘Our son, his damage was –’ she searched for the word – ‘provoked.’
The ‘our’ was significant. It probably meant the father was still involved.
‘You’re talking about his foot?’
‘Yeah. A lot better now, a lot straighter. Plaster and braces and doctors, when he was tiny. It’ll always be a bit short and stiff. You know? The sports drugs provoked it.’
‘Sports drugs?’
‘From when I was a gymnast in Soviet times. I told you this.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
All she’d told him, in fact, was that she’d been forced to take performance-enhancing drugs and maybe that’s why she looked like a teenager. She no longer looked like a teenager, though.
Jack frowned, picturing a grey labyrinth and white-coated figures with needles. ‘Seriously? It was the drugs? What kind of drugs?’
‘Hormonal shit. Friends have researched it, the chemicals we swallowed, and they are looking at their own death, you know? A lot of people in my team, their kids come out damaged, or even dead. We were little weapons in the Cold War. It wasn’t sport. We had to be armed. We had to win, at all cost. Politics.’
She sucked deeply on her cigarette. He wished she didn’t smoke, it wouldn’t help the cancer thing.
‘How’s your mother?’ she asked, which he appreciated, still trying to absorb this sports-and-drugs thing, this after-effect, this damage. Like an old abandoned factory still leaking its poisons into the ground. An interference from the past. He didn’t feel he’d been sympathetic enough, but the moment was over, as moments tended to be.
‘She’s ill, actually,’ he replied. ‘Not good. Blind.’
She nodded. ‘You have the music,’ she said.
‘Me?’
‘Your music. Mr Davenport told me that you don’t write much, but I think what you write is pretty nice.’
He was disappointed in her ‘pretty nice’. As the sentence was unfolding in her soft, foreign lilt he had anticipated something more.
‘Er, pretty nice.’
‘Yeah. It’s OK. I bought all your CDs.’
‘All three of them. Surprised you could find them.’
‘I hunted them right up, of course. I know all the gigs you’ve done, all the lectures. All the ones that popped up over the Internet. I’ve been following you. You gave me a false name, but I searched on the web for Jack and Hayes and Arvo Pärt. It took a few minutes to find you, because this is six years ago. But it found you. In a few minutes. Jack Middleton! Hey! There he is! Nice photo, leaning on the back of a plastic chair and looking cool. No problem getting your address. I cried a lot. You know what name you gave me?’
It had been off-the-cuff, scribbled down at the last moment. He shook his head.
She was looking at him and her eyes had filmed over again. The bench wasn’t bolted in properly and rocked slightly.
‘Stewforth,’ she said. ‘Jack Stewforth.’
‘OK, OK,’ he muttered, turning his head away and hoping she wouldn’t cry outright. Part of him was relieved, though. He hadn’t just been another jerk in a line of shuffling men. ‘So that’s why,’ he said, staring hard at the willow’s long tresses in the middle distance, ‘you used my friend Howard as a cover. To track me. To approach me.’
‘I have to know what Jaan’s father is doing,’ she said, firmly.
‘Er, hang on,’ he began, thinking she was ribbing him.
‘It’s like Kaplinski says, by the way – you know, that poet I kept reading to you? He says, a poem is like taking a walk within yourself. When I look you up, it’s like that kind of poem.’
‘Slight problem: Jaan’s not my son.’
‘He is.’
‘Kaja, I know he isn’t. In fact.’
‘I know you think he isn’t. But he is. And not maybe. Now I’m looking at you, I can tell you straight. Not maybe. For sure.’
‘Um, sorry, but you told Howard – I mean, Howard Davenport told me – that Jaan was definitely the son of a – banjo player. Who liked Cajun. Your shark man.’
Jack felt he was looking at a disturbed, inveterate liar: straight into the untrustworthy depths of the eyes that filled up all their space.
‘I said that because I was so angry.’
‘With whom?’
‘With you. For spying.’
‘Spying?’
‘For listening in like a spy. Why didn’t you plant a microphone? Huh?’ She shook her head as he tried to look as if someone was stepping hard on his toes – comically, painfully guilty. ‘It’s so pathetic and so primitive, looking into a keyhole. Yeah, I saw you there. I was really angry.’
‘You saw me?’
‘I knew it was you. When Mr Davenport mentioned the father, his eyes went like this, over towards the door. Just a flick. And then I saw the eye, in the keyhole. Of course it was you. Who else?’
Jack looked amazed. And so she snorted, contemptuously.
‘You don’t think I haven’t grown up with this? We used to sing songs in the dacha. Estonian songs. They were forbidden. Nationalist agitation. You know?’ He nodded, again not really able to imagine it. ‘Folk songs, beautiful songs. Forbidden. We had to know if someone was listening, hiding. Then we sang, but in fear, and secret. But we sang. For me, a keyhole is really giant. I can see everything behind it. A change of light, a sound, a shadow in it, a movement. A lynx eye, I have. You see? An Estonian lynx. You think I’m really stupid, or what? We had to read people’s eyes and faces all the time. Your own father or sister or uncle can be a spy. Your best friend. All the time we were reading faces. For lies.’
Jack couldn’t reply; he was internally rolling himself into a tight, defensive, woodlouse ball.
The water and the grass and the trees darkened abruptly as the sun went in. An armed battalion of nerves rushed his chest. Really, it was because of Jaan.
He had a son. And he’d known it all along, really. And now he had to take some kind of responsibility. He took a deep breath.
‘OK,’ she said, before he could speak. ‘So now you know. You are his dad. For definite. Because there was no one else. I have my – dignity. I waited for you. I wrote letters –’
‘We moved house,’ said Jack, feebly.
He’d torn the forwarded letters up. Without opening them.
‘Look,’ he said, as Kaja was shaking her head again in contempt, ‘I’m going to have a bash. At being a father. But I want to stay with – with my wife. Milly.’
Kaja looked at him, her eyes reconnoitring the surface of his face as if she was not sure of her ground. ‘What about me?’ she said.
‘You?’
She laughed, pressing the sides of her face, her cigarette burning between her fingers. ‘Shit, this is so mad.’
‘What’s mad?’
‘You wrote me the wrong number and address when you left Tallinn. You gave me the wrong damn name. You shouted something I didn’t get, then you waved like you were on a ship going a really long way away. You didn’t want me to follow, Mr Stewforth, but I have followed.’
‘I said I’d drop you a line. That means write to you.’
‘Another low-rent lie,’ she said.
He bit his lip, feeling annoyance mixed in with the remorse. He watched the smoke rise from his cigarette as it burned back. Perhaps the American lecturer had taught her that ‘low rent’.
‘I got in the way of your life,’ he murmured. ‘Your plans. Ruined things for you. Can I say I’m sorry?’
‘I still studied,’ she said, as if surprised. ‘My parents helped with Jaan, after a couple of years, you know? I did Russian and French and English. I’m beginning my doctorate at the University of Westminster in October.’
‘Wow,’ said Jack, vaguely alarmed.
‘It’s on the aesthetics of Russian Futurism before the Revolution. They threw out symbolism for phonetics, by the way – the linguistics of the language. The music of it, the stuff poets didn’t put in because it was too, you know, like grinding …’
‘Harsh?’
‘Yeah, harsh. It’s real fascinating. Imagine – a native Estonian studying the Russians! That’s integration. Really forgiving. Well, it just got a bit delayed, that’s all. I was married for a year. This guy called Krohn, Estonian-Finnish. Building a supermarket on Haaremaa. I left him. He was into really bad stuff, I didn’t know it. Money stuff, not drugs or girls or all that crap. Money laundry? He got kicked off back to Finland.’
She pulled on her cigarette again, keeping the smoke in for several moments. Jack was impressed by her history. She had somehow seen more than him. He couldn’t imagine it. Mr Krohn, with wide shoulders and a l
oud tie and a broad Finnish face.
‘You kept his name?’
‘I was happy for a few months.’
‘It’s good about your studies, though.’
She was happy with Mr Middleton for only a few days. Ten, maybe. A thin little voice in him declared: I’m paying for this too dearly. All I did was score with her. But he shoved the voice aside and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. The bench rocked again: it was irritating, it didn’t help matters.
‘Some things are always good,’ she said, eventually.
‘I did try to find your place in Bounds Green, on the legendary North Circular.’
‘We have the back room,’ said Kaja, looking down at her sandalled feet. Her toenails were painted a cheery green, like a joke. ‘It only shakes when the really big trucks pass. The toilet is always full of shit. But toilets weren’t too good back home, either. Jaan gets looked after by a girl from Latvia when I’m at work and there’s no school.’
‘You pay her?’
‘I give her English lessons. Exchange. She’s a waitress.’
‘In the same hotel?’
‘I work for an agency. I work in two or three different hotels. Big ones. The pay is really low. Under eight thousand a year.’
‘Cleaner?’
She laughed. ‘They call it room attendant. I did three weeks, it was shit, then they asked me to be a receptionist. I look OK, I speak English and Russian and French. Les jardins, comme des femmes, semblent faire leur toilette pour les fêtes de l’été.’
‘Not bad. Baudelaire?’
‘Flaubert. Madame Bovary. I had to translate the whole paragraph into Estonian one time. It’s a beautiful line. It’s music, you know? And Flaubert is going to be in my paper, too.’
He stroked his chin, nodding, not knowing what to do with his hands. ‘What I really remember about Madame Bovary is bracken getting caught in the stirrups.’
‘Huh?’
He tucked his hands under his thighs and the bench jolted. ‘That, um, that bit before they make love in the wood, when they’re riding along, she and her lover? And he has to lean over to get the bracken out of her stirrup? I was thinking of writing an opera called Madame Bovary. I was seventeen. Really, really ambitious. I had no idea!’