by Adam Thorpe
Sad.
And so she left early, hooted at by the estate’s resident louts who’d noticed something going on and were hanging about in the rain outside to vex the invitees.
‘Everything OK with you and Milly?’ his sister ventured, with a fifty-year-old beautician’s smirk, her sun-scorched skin now the subject of elaborate care and shielding. She had no trace of an Australian accent, unless it was interchangeable with Middlesex.
‘Um, as ever. Pretty brill, in fact,’ said Jack, faux poshly, sounding like Hugh Grant. And wanting to kick her.
He saw death everywhere, of course. He took a break for a day on the Sussex Downs and saw three ravens perched on a telephone wire. He felt vacuum-packed, somehow. He was nearly run over twice in Hayes and once in Hampstead, dazedly not looking, all three drivers equally elsewhere on their mobiles. One morning there were some magnificent white clouds piled up over the Heath, sailing overhead, and he thought about the rotary dryer in the wind and laughed. Passers-by thought he was a daftie, from the looks they gave him.
He had to fetch his mother’s wedding ring from the hospital, a few days later, with Donald. A smart young woman with snappy high heels emerged from Relative Support, which was being redecorated: a man in white overalls was applying sealant above the door and they walked the length of a low-ceilinged corridor on builder’s sheets Donald kept catching his foot in.
‘Sorry about the mess,’ said the woman, whose name tag said Yvonne, ‘but it’s got to be done.’ She was not unattractive.
‘It’s all relative,’ Jack joked, but Yvonne didn’t respond.
The room they were shown to was a narrow, pretend lounge, with drab easy chairs in light green. Yvonne went off to fetch the ring. Jack and his father didn’t say a word. The pictures on the walls were off-the-peg modern – trim landscapes of wintry, angular trees. Jack was sure he’d seen the same pictures in a hotel. The builders were whistling and laughing in the corridor outside. There was no daylight. The low, Formica table had a pile of leaflets on What To Do After A Death. Jack would have appreciated a leaflet on What To Do After Death, but no one knew what happened then, let alone what you did. There was no piped music, for once. Just the decorators.
The woman returned with a large brown A3 envelope marked Moyna S. Middleton and tipped it as though she were tipping out powder and something dropped into Donald’s palm.
His father stared at the ring, as if it wasn’t recognisable. It looked much smaller than when Moyna had been attached to it. Fifty-five years before, Donald had worked this over her knuckle and into her life; now he didn’t know what to do with it, it was so very small – a golden sliver under the neon strip light.
Yvonne, in her kindly, counsellor’s voice (as if she was encouraging him to perform a trick), suggested it went back into the envelope. He dropped it in and Jack took the envelope; he recognised that Donald was done, crumbling at the edges of his soul.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I think that’s it, if there’s nothing more.’
They mumbled their thanks and made their way out, squeezing past the metal ladder in front of the door where the man in white overalls was whistling. He was running the nozzle of the sealant plunger along the gap between the ceiling and the wall, the wall stripped to the ragged, patched glue of its original trim. The smell got down Jack’s throat. It made him feel even more exhausted, as if he’d gone on a great journey that had taken them decades to accomplish.
‘The lords of the ring, us two,’ he commented.
His father didn’t hear. He was so bewildered Jack had to take his arm. They walked slowly down the main corridor towards the blaze of light at the exit, with squeaking trolleys and harassed relatives passing the other way.
Jack wondered what Milly would do with the ring he’d worked over her knuckle twelve years ago, now it was redundant.
I’m in Hell, he thought. What I have to do is get out.
In Hayes, inside the big new grey Lidl-cum-aircraft hangar, getting basics under the neon glare, Jack was seized by a kind of grief fit. It seemed to come up from his toes, without warning, in the milk products aisle next to the yogurts – flowing through his knees and up via his belly to his throat. He covered his face with one hand and – there was nothing he could do about it – he sobbed. He would have liked to have howled, but it was not the place. He was sobbing for his mum, not for Mill – not even for Jaan. The metallic smell of the refrigerated counter, its glow and hum, reminded him of mortuaries, although he’d never been in one. He couldn’t believe he’d never see his mother again. It was something to do with the wrapping-up of his childhood and youth, the performance finally over, with no applause. Just a pin-drop silence.
She preferred apricot yogurts, with not too many bits in. She’d lean right over the pot, holding the pot tight and aiming the spoon carefully in. Everything was a complex operation, except sleep. He could write a grief piece with the sound of the spoon scraping, the interesting internal acoustics of the yogurt pot, soft-blowing clarinets and rubbing timpani.
He wished he was twenty years younger, knowing all the things he knew now.
His whole body was shaking, but he couldn’t stop it. A woman next to him, reaching for a tub of cream, said, ‘Nice to see someone having a good laugh, for a change.’
He had been permitted to stay in Hampstead, as Milly was mostly down the road in Belsize Park. Slowly, reluctantly, he was removing the traces of his presence, starting with the study. It was surprisingly easy, as long as he had big enough boxes and didn’t have to worry too much about what went where. He felt cross and inadequate, dazed and tearful. He spent quite a few nights at Hayes, though, once his siblings had gone back to their respective continents. His father needed the company.
His brief performance in Stockholm was a surreal break. Among the reticent Swedes, a bright-faced young American lecturer told him he was ‘like Bernstein run backward’. It was surprisingly cold and there were about twenty people in the hall.
He was starting to watch what grown-up folk called ‘outgoings’ fairly carefully. Milly was going for the whole hog, as she went for the whole hog in everything she did – from sex to diet to waste reduction. He felt a new pleasure in accepting a puny, underpaid commission from the Almeida Festival simply for the extra dosh it would supply. He offered his services as a hack reviewer to various music magazines, and readvertised himself as a composition and advanced piano tutor. He bought cheaper toothpaste. He borrowed CDs from the library instead of buying them. He took the bus and, a few times, his bicycle. He worked away at Trip Hazard without the help of wine gums, bringing back the Shostakovich reference, dropping the boy trebles as being too Britten-like, planing away at the Arabic hints until they were barely discernible. At first he reckoned that, one day soon, once the Hampstead house was sold, he would start looking for a bedsit in somewhere like Bounds Green. He could picture it: small, pale and bare, with the bed up on bricks and chairs made out of packing cases and spring sunlight through uncurtained glass.
He kept waiting for his mum to phone. He wanted to ask her about that revolving washing line.
Then his ideas changed. There wasn’t a magic moment of recognition, a flash, a satori: it just evolved in a kind of cross-rhythm.
Milly and Claudia both came to Hampstead one afternoon, with the baby. Jack was watching children’s TV on the box, his feet up on the table, an open can of ale in his hand, an empty can of ale on the rug. He felt like walking straight out, but stayed put, playing the miserable oaf, pretending – by looks alone – that he’d acquired a colossal cocaine habit. Or heroin, even.
Mill went straight off to the kitchen. Claudia smiled down at him, holding the baby. She was slightly less worn-looking, just as slim and attractive, her figure stencilled against the window light. Baby Ricco was pulping her sharp breast with a pudgy little hand.
‘Hi, Jack.’
‘Hi, Claudia.’
‘What’s this programme?’
‘Down on the funny farm.�
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‘I hope we stay friends, y’know?’
‘We could do a ménage à trois,’ he said, pretending to be caustic but actually, for one weird moment, finding it not such a bad idea. He could bathe with them, watch them search for bath crystals in each other’s cracks, before hoeing the fields or picking the olives somewhere where cypresses punctuated the view and the heat smelt of wild herbs.
She left. He heard a peal of laughter from the kitchen. Two peals of laughter, pretty mocking. He stayed resolutely staring at a singing pantomime cow nuzzling a young polo-necked presenter with hair like Perry Como. When they left, they didn’t say goodbye.
Then Howard, back from Sicily, had phoned him one evening at Hayes. Jack had to leave the table in the middle of supper with his father, who didn’t know most of it. He arranged to meet Howard for an early pint near Covent Garden the next day.
They sat outside among hearty office workers working steadily through several swift ones in lieu of facing home. Howard waggled his healed finger, only a little stiff, and Jack congratulated him. His friend had grown a moustache like the wings of a wren, and was patchily sunburned. As usual, he claimed this would be his last ever visit to Sicily.
‘It’s crazy,’ he said. ‘Completely rotted out by the Mafia. EU money pouring into its bottomless pockets. The decomposing heel of Europe.’
‘But you’re paid well.’
‘But I’m paid well.’
‘And the sun shines.’
‘And the sun shines.’
‘And there’s lots of cock.’
‘And Etna,’ said Howard, wistfully. ‘Great wastes of black lava. Did I say it?’
‘What?’
‘Makes the whole human endeavour feel totally and completely pointless? Not me.’
When Jack had filled him in on the long litany of consequence, he claimed to be baffled. ‘Completely baffled. Gutted, too. If I’d known, I wouldn’t ever have suggested –’
‘Hey, forget it,’ said Jack. ‘You were just her alibi.’
‘Jaan? Planning to see him?’
‘Well, I miss him.’
‘Go see him. Pronto.’
Jack sighed. ‘Maybe. Or maybe kids are better without their dads screwing their little heads up.’
‘Yo,’ said Howard, ‘leave it to the stepfathers. Did anyone ever tell you your hair’s just like Hitler’s, if a bit more voluminous? By the way, don’t be in any doubt that Jaan is going to be a massive viola player, one day,’ he added, with an unusual seriousness in his voice.
Jack nodded, wincing at the elephantine bellows from the office workers. He wondered what it took to be a part of that. To be normal. ‘Just as long as it doesn’t erode a correspondingly massive canyon in his life, Howard.’
‘Oh, he’ll be much too busy keeping his viola in tune in the fucking heat,’ said Howard, although it was now much cooler. ‘I’m going to sue the Yanks for that. And the Chinese.’
‘And the Brits,’ said Jack. ‘And everyone else bar Milly.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t dare sue our Milly,’ said Howard, pulling a silly, frightened face which annoyed Jack, although he pretended to smile.
‘You know why Jaan limps, by the way? Why the club foot?’
Howard nodded. ‘I do. Wait for this. Those nasty Communists gave his mum drugs before her gymnastics championships. A sad legacy of harm.’
‘No, she told me. I knew already. I was just wondering whether you knew.’
Jack was feeling a twinge of jealousy, which probably showed in his face. What hadn’t she told Howard?
He went back to sort out his things, one morning, and found Milly crying in the garden room.
‘I’m so in need of approval,’ she said, blowing her nose. ‘All the time. I’m like something out of fucking Dante. Even when I’m happy. Like I am now.’
‘Um, why Dante?’
‘I don’t care. I’ve put the house up for sale, by the way. We need to discuss it with the solicitor. Fifty-fifty on the gain, even though it was all my family’s money, originally. The gain’s incredibly massive, even in five years.’
‘I don’t want a bean,’ said Jack, suddenly feeling very certain about this, as if he was on his own and composing and allowing in a savage shift, a real yorker.
‘You what?’
‘Ground zero. My mum’s left me a bit. There’s my stuff I can sell. I think the piano’s mine. Ten grand’s worth, for a start.’
‘Are you just blowing off, as usual?’
‘Money money money. Yuk. Fink on it, Mill.’
When Hampstead was sold in early December for, yes, silly money, he moved in with his father full-time in Hayes. Claudia and Milly, laughing and sporting with little Ricco in Belsize Park, were taking the odd flight over to Pisa to house-hunt; Jack found this hypocritical, ecologically speaking, but kept his mouth shut. Since they never asked him to open it, this was not hard.
His boyhood bedroom swallowed him up. He felt like the snow leopard in its cage, with the odd wispy reminder of the Himalayas. He had nowhere to put most of his books, or even many of his pictures – framed posters, portraits of favourite composers, a hand-coloured plate from Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Natural Curiosities he’d stumbled across in Delft as a student and blown a month’s grant to buy. Everything Milly had bought him – small modern originals or limited prints by well-known artists he didn’t really go for – he’d sold at an auction house in north Finchley, along with the piano. The antique oil of the woman bathing (for his thirty-fifth) was bought by a chippy gallery owner who called it ‘rococo junk’, but notched up a decent price. The early nineteenth-century ceramic lantern, with its original candle, he did not sell. It was worth at least a couple of grand, but he felt superstitious about parting with it. The rest went.
It wasn’t easy to do this. Or rather, it was frighteningly easy.
The bed in his old room felt narrow and too short, although it was a normal-sized single; he remembered going to the stores with Donald and Moyna to choose it. He was, what, thirteen? He remembered the embarrassment of the huge bed department, with beds wherever you looked; it made him feel that sleeping was weird, that human beings were weird, that something very private was being turned inside out and made public under the bright neon lights: couples testing the bounce on oyster-shaped doubles with padded sides next to posters of women in nighties and medical-looking diagrams of spines, everybody very serious about it because sleep is serious, except for a balding man who lay down on a Dunlopillo and pretended to snore. His parents were urging him to lie down on the mattress in front of a pretty shop assistant in high heels and he’d started to take off his shoes and the assistant had found this really funny, tapping the strip of plastic at the end of the bed, where you placed your heels, with her biro. Really amused, she was.
He was a natural curiosity himself. He’d gone on a long journey and come back to where he’d started out. He was the Ulysses of subtopia. Actually, it was an insignificant, pathetic journey. You bastard.
Donald came along to the Purcell Room for the performance of Waters of the Trip Hazard. A few of the composers – including Jack – were interviewed on Radio 3. As usual, despite flicking through his Selected Baudrillard beforehand in search of some killer phrase for any occasion, he found the others wittier and more intellectual, freighted with arcane, encyclopedic knowledge about the history of music. Even the young Abigail Staunton defied her Top Shop look and sparkled with references to the Gerber Variable Scale, imperialist assumptions and her recent trip to Lebanon. Above all, they knew what they were doing when they composed. His reference to Shostakovich was mangled by nerves. If he’d been asked to spell him, he’d have probably got it wrong.
He was entirely dissatisfied with his piece the moment he heard it live during the scratch rehearsal. It was the only piece without anything resembling a bomb sound. It went on and on, his inspired ideas flopping about in the mud of the well-behaved but unworked-at performance. The mechanical bleeper sounded nothi
ng like a hospital cardiogram, it just got in the way. Even the title looked somehow dated and pretentious next to the others, and his photograph – taken hurriedly with a digital by Milly three years back for one of his CDs – made him look in urgent need of the loo, which fitted the title perfectly.
The audience in the Purcell Room – he could sense this as if it was written above their heads – were very patient flowers during his sixteen minutes. He squirmed internally, clutching his chin in the back row. The whole thing was overworked, a mess. He would have to blow himself to smithereens and start again.
Afterwards, in all the usual revolting back-slapping, he was barely tickled. Tansy Davies came up to him and offered encouraging things, but no one else said much – including Donald. And then a new senior producer at Radio 3 called Gary Soames gave him a nuggety little commission, for the week up to St George’s Day the following year.
‘New music about England,’ the producer said, beaming over the champagne. A lot of people in Radio 3 beamed, these days. ‘Recorded, not live. For a new heavyweight slot called Air Chambers. Reputed composers only need apply. Part of our commissioning end. Subject inspire you?’
‘Um, ancient England, yes,’ said Jack, rather automatically. ‘Silbury Hill, green roads, harebells on the downs, ancient fertility rites, all that. Neolithic and mysterious. You know. Really dark, not folksy.’
He suddenly realised, as Gary Soames nodded with half an ear clearly cocked to George Benjamin saying something in a group just next to them, that he sounded New Agey rather than clever and original.
‘Perfect,’ said the producer, who was possibly younger than him but seemed more senior, with large, square teeth and a lazy eye Jack tried not to notice. ‘That’s absolutely perfect. Exactly what the others said, funnily enough. Length about ten, twelve minutes max. Very exciting. A little pre-recorded gossip with you, and then in.’
‘Sounds good.’