This Party's Got to Stop

by Rupert Thomson

  A correspondence began. There would be days, even weeks, between e-mails. At least the lines of communication were open, though. Ralph’s personality would shift from offbeat to businesslike – I had no real purchase on it – but what didn’t seem to be in any doubt was his willingness to see me.

  The following summer, as my travel plans took shape, I suggested that maybe we could meet twice – once to break the ice, since it had been a long time, and then again because I had some questions I hoped he could help me with. Now our reunion was only a few weeks away, I was adopting the cautious tone that he had used at the beginning of our correspondence: ‘break the ice’, for instance, was a phrase I remembered from his letter. He promptly became playful. Questions? he said. Sounds like an interview. And then, What’s all this about it’s been a long time? It’s only twenty-three years or so … By early December, though, just days before my departure, he had taken to reassuring me. Listen, I know it’s been a while, but you know who I am and I know who you are, so it’ll be fine.

  Did I, though?

  Did he?

  Like a Reservoir

  The weekend before I’m due to go on holiday with Hanne, Robin and I have a party in the garden. Temperatures have been up in the eighties for several days; the lawn is studded with daisies, and a heady perfume lifts off the roses that sprawl across the garage wall. Robin puts his wind-up gramophone on the stone plinth where the statue of the rabbit used to be and starts singing along to crackly recordings of George Formby, Noël Coward, Douglas Byng and Marlene Dietrich. Oh – see what the boys in the back-room will have … Bernard appears, immaculate as always in a dark green jacket, a white shirt, and a thin black tie. Robin tries to persuade him to join in. Come on, Bernard. I bet you’ve got a lovely voice. Bernard giggles. No, no. I’m afraid it’s not true. Jenny Martin drops in. So does a family from Lewes. As darkness falls, we light a bonfire behind the hedge. We wrap sausages and potatoes in silver foil and bake them in the ashes.

  Later, I find Robin sitting outside the kitchen, his back against the wall. Next to him is Lola, one of the girls from Lewes. She has dyed copper-coloured hair, and her full lips glisten in the dark. I settle on the flagstones nearby, which still glow with the heat of the day. Lola is gazing at Robin, but he is staring up into the sky and doesn’t realize. Suddenly, all I can think about is kissing her. She’s only sixteen, though – she might even be fifteen – and anyway, it’s Robin she fancies. When I pointed Lola out to a doctor friend of ours a while ago, he glanced at her, then sucked some air in through his teeth and muttered, Jailbait.

  I notice Robin’s twelve-string guitar leaning against the glasshouse. ‘Why don’t you sing? I love it when you sing.’

  He gives me a look.

  ‘I do,’ I say.

  ‘Not drunk enough,’ he says.

  Later still, with a Bowie album playing on the stereo, I stand on my own in the kitchen garden. The fire is so hot that my face feels glazed. Sparks shower upwards, past the apple trees; the black air seems to snuff them out. Near the end of ‘Moonage Daydream’, the guitar soars like a kind of heartache, then tightens and accelerates, each note a curved blade cutting into the soft, dark folds of the night, and I think of the last postcard I sent Hanne. I still feel very sad about Dad, not deep down, but just under the surface, very still and huge, like a reservoir …

  Reservoir, I hear her murmur. What is reservoir?

  I fly to Munich on the last Monday in June. Hanne picks me up in her yellow VW and we drive through the night, over the Alps and down on to the northern plains of Italy, the autostrada slick and trembling in the heat. Three days later, we arrive in Positano, checking into the hotel where I stayed the previous summer. The price of a room has doubled. The next morning, when we walk down to the beach, we discover that access is now controlled; there are rows of brand-new colour-coded sunloungers, and you have to pay a daily rate. I look for a fisherman called Salvatore. He always wore a white singlet and baggy dark blue shorts, and his calf muscles bulged like a couple of roast chickens. I had lunch with him once, on a trestle table by the sea. We ate that morning’s catch – grilled white fish, with bright wedges of lemon – and when I told him I had fallen for a girl from Hamburg he let out a raucous belly-laugh. I stop at various bars and shops and ask for him by name. Most people seem to know him, but their answers are vague, contradictory. He was here last week. I saw him. He’s moved. He’s working somewhere else. Where? I’m not sure. Further down the coast. His absence takes some of the joy out of our return.

  That evening we order our usual drinks – Campari soda for Hanne, chilled Cinzano Bianco for me. I knock my glass over almost as soon as it arrives. It was the table, I say. It’s got a slope to it. We have been spilling our drinks ever since the holiday began, so much so that we are keeping a tally. We have turned our clumsiness into a game, inventing excuses each time it happens, but I can’t help feeling that it must be significant, that some sort of truth is being hinted at. The waiter brings me another Cinzano. Every now and then, my eyes move to the narrow street outside. A part of me is longing for Salvatore to walk past, and I find myself thinking of Willard Bowen, a man I met in New York in 1976.

  ‘The same thing happened with him,’ I tell Hanne. ‘He just vanished.’

  I first saw Willard Bowen in a grocery store on Seventh Avenue. I was trying to decide which kind of orange juice to buy – Minute Maid or Tropicana – when a raspy voice behind me said, Get the Minute Maid. Turning, I caught a glimpse of a man disappearing round the end of an aisle. When I walked out of the store five minutes later, he was standing on the corner. Unshaven, with cropped grey hair, he wore a short-sleeved shirt and loose grey trousers. Pulled down low over his eyes was a visor with a see-through green plastic brim, which made me think of old-time newspapermen. We started talking. I told him I couldn’t afford the $9 a night I was paying at the International Hostel on Riverside Drive, and that I was looking for something cheaper. He said I could stay with him and his family. No strings attached, he said, licking his dry lips. I thanked him, but said I’d go on looking.

  Two days later, as chance would have it, we met again. I was sitting outside the New York Post Office when he showed up at the bottom of the steps. By then, I had become dispirited. The $20-a-week boarding-houses I had found all seemed to be run by tattooed amputees in wheelchairs, or gloomy, sweat-stained perverts. Thin hardboard partitions separated one box-like room from another. Cockroaches skittered across the lino floors, and the beds – if you could call them beds – were bustling with lice. As one proprietor told me, in a narrow, unlit hall, People only come here to fucking die. Willard repeated his offer, and I decided to take him up on it. His ‘family’ consisted of a nephew, Joe, who walked with a limp – he had been shot in the foot while serving in Vietnam – and Russell, a twenty-year-old runaway from Georgia. Willard had found Russell sleeping rough on a park bench, and was drawing social security on his behalf. I lived with them for seven weeks, first in one room on West 23rd Street, then in a cold-water apartment on Tenth Avenue, next to a gas station. Willard would start drinking at ten in the morning – beer with vodka chasers. To begin with, I would go with him, usually to the nearest Blarney Rose. Later, I would explore the city. In those days, Manhattan had a jittery, feral atmosphere – especially in Hell’s Kitchen, our new neighbourhood. You learned to walk as if you knew where you were going. You never looked at a map. In the evenings, we sat on the fire escape, Willard smoking a cigar. Once, Joe sang Elvis songs. He didn’t have a guitar, but his voice was so powerful it made the walls vibrate. Russell almost never spoke. I’m going out, I heard him say to Willard once, and then he was gone for three days. That summer Jimmy Carter received the Democratic nomination, and when delegates flew in for the convention, all the drug-dealing and prostitution was shunted west on to Ninth and Tenth Avenues in an attempt to preserve the city’s reputation. Black girls gave truck drivers blow jobs in the twenty-four-hour parking-lot opposite our building. Junkies sh
ot up in broad daylight. A pimp was stabbed. Sirens wailed, blue police lights whirled. As Willard said, Who needs TV? Though it was hot – a muggy, steamy, almost vegetable heat – we slept fully clothed on bare mattresses; there was a bath in the kitchen, but I don’t remember using it. Once, in the night, I woke to find Willard fumbling at the buttons on my jeans. Willard, I said, don’t. Oh, come on, he murmured. I turned on to my side, away from him. You said no strings. He slunk back to the window, muttering. I felt petty, ungrateful. He had opened up a whole new world for me. What had I given him?

  By August, I had become restless. America was out there, waiting: Los Angeles, San Francisco – Nashville, Tennessee. Willard tried to persuade me not to go. He wanted to adopt me as his son. He would get the proper forms, he said. Do it legally. He was serious. The radio was tuned to a local New York station, and Elton John and Kiki Dee were singing ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’, one of the big hits of the summer. I don’t know, I said. What about my father? Willard told me he had a farm in Kentucky. He had money too. Look. His bank statement showed a balance in excess of $300,000. But I couldn’t quite believe what he was showing me – and anyway, I was desperate to travel. Sitting by the fire escape, the gritty New York light behind him, Willard shook his small shaved head. I’ll come back, I told him. In three months’ time. He shook his head again, then spat through the casement. You won’t come back. I will, I said. I promise. As a sign of my good faith, I left a cardboard box with him. Inside were a pair of black patent-leather shoes, a transistor radio, and a paperback copy of Riders in the Chariot. Willard didn’t find my gesture even faintly convincing. He thought these were things I had no further use for.

  In early November, I caught a Greyhound bus from Fort Lauderdale, arriving in New York at seven in the morning. The smell of neat spirits and toasted pretzels was so familiar that walking out of Port Authority felt like returning home, but several months had passed, and the air now had a vicious winter snap to it. I buttoned my jacket and hurried over to Tenth Avenue, my sense of urgency increasing with every step. I was eager to prove to Willard that I was as good as my word – and I had stories for him too. I knew he would like the one about me losing my virginity on red satin sheets in New Orleans. And the one about me going to a party in the Hollywood Hills with the actors who played the inmates in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And the one about me finding 8,000 pesos on the tarmac outside the bus station in Mexico City. But when I pressed his buzzer, nobody answered. I went looking for the building’s super. He was in the basement, fixing the boiler. He had sticking-up white hair and a stomach that wobbled like a balloon full of water. They moved out, he told me. Couple months ago. I asked if he knew where they had gone. He threw his cigarette butt on the floor, then rubbed his swollen belly. Last I heard, the guy was up on 110th Street, he said, selling newspapers.

  Feeling like a detective, I jumped on a C train going uptown. Wide and busy, 110th Street ran along the south side of Harlem, and there were newspaper vendors on almost every corner. I worked my way from west to east, describing Willard Bowen as best I could. Sounds like a bum, one of the vendors said, and I thought of Willard’s bank statement and wondered whether it was real. In my first hour I must have spoken to fifteen or twenty men, but none of them had seen anybody who answered to my description.

  I was about to give up when a wiry little man with the lean, sharp face of a ferret told me he had talked to Willard two weeks ago. He couldn’t say where Willard was living, though. I mentioned Joe and Russell. No, he didn’t remember nobody like that. I thanked him, then moved away. Half a block later, I came to a standstill. Hundreds of people, all moving in different directions. We’d had two chance meetings, Willard and I. This, surely, was the moment for the third. But no, nothing. What would a real detective do? He would check every bar in the neighbourhood, and every grocery store. He would knock on doors, ask questions. He would stick at the task for as long as it took. I didn’t have much time, though. I was flying back to England in a day or two.

  As I walked reluctantly towards the nearest subway entrance, I wondered if it would occur to Willard that I had looked for him. When Christmas came, and I still hadn’t appeared, what would he think? Would he realize that he had made it almost impossible for me to find him, or would he conclude, bitterly, that his prediction had been accurate, and that when I left the apartment on Tenth Avenue I’d had no intention of returning? Would he assume that I had tired of him? That I’d had better offers? That, in the end, I simply didn’t care enough? You won’t come back, he had said. You’ll never come back. But I did. He wasn’t there.

  Three years later, in New York again, I went through the phone directory and found a Bowen, W. Willard hadn’t had a phone in 1976. Why would he have one now? All the same, I dialled the number. There was no reply. I called several times during my visit, but nobody ever answered. I left New York believing he was dead.

  ‘It’s a sad story,’ Hanne says.

  ‘I should have gone on looking.’

  ‘You tried.’

  I shake my head. ‘Not hard enough.’

  We say goodbye to Positano. Back along the Amalfi coast, then south through the suburbs of Naples. Dust and rubble everywhere. Circus posters hang in tatters under flyovers, and the roads are so pitted with potholes that Hanne has to drive in second gear. Turning east, we make for the Gargano. It’s July now; the land is white with heat.

  Another café-bar. When my drink arrives, condensation mists the glass. The last of the sun tints the upper storeys of the houses opposite. Down here, in the shade, I gaze at the olives on their saucer. Such an eerie colour. They could be stones from a broken necklace – pieces of beryl or green amethyst. Hanne knocks her Campari over. There was a flying insect, she says. Did you see?

  After three weeks, Hanne drops me at Munich airport. She can’t stay long; she starts work tomorrow, and it’s a five-hour drive to West Berlin. Though we haven’t talked about splitting up, or even mentioned it as a possibility, I feel an intense nostalgia as she walks back to her car. Our holiday in Italy has altered nothing; there is still the crude, blunt fact of my father’s death, which hasn’t just interrupted our life together but has also, somehow, called the whole relationship into question.

  As I board the plane, I notice that the sky has darkened above the main terminal building. It is only midday, but lights show in all the windows. Half an hour goes by. My fellow passengers are shifting in their seats. Then a strange sound begins above my head, as if dozens of people are attacking the roof of the plane with hammers. A woman screams. I peer out of my window. Hailstones the size of apricots are bouncing off the tarmac. The noise is so loud that I can’t hear what the man next to me is saying. When the storm has passed, the captain makes an announcement. He is very sorry, but the aircraft has almost certainly been damaged. We will have to disembark. As we traipse back to the terminal, I glance at the plane. Its fuselage is dented all over, symmetrically, like a golf ball.

  In Departures, the roof is leaking, and there are puddles everywhere. A large woman in a floral-print dress loses her footing. It takes two men to help her up. She has twisted her ankle, though, and cannot walk. The British have started drinking. I hope Hanne’s all right. I wish I could call her, but she’ll still be on the motorway. I find a paper and try to read. We are told a replacement aircraft is being flown in, though no one knows when it is due. There are outbursts of defiant singing from the British. A paunchy, balding man in an England football shirt gives me a wink. Don’t mention the war, he says. Later, he slips on a wet patch, and his bag of duty-free goes flying. The whole building reeks of Bacardi after that. It’s hours before we’re able to board another plane. I don’t reach Eastbourne till midnight.

  On my first morning back, Robin tells me that Ralph sold Dad’s bureau desk while he, Robin, was visiting friends in Lewes. He says he’d had his eye on the desk for ages; he would have been happy to pay each of us our share of what it was worth. Although I sympathize w
ith him, and agree that Ralph ought not to have acted without consulting us, the loss of the desk doesn’t affect me. But then he mentions that Ralph has also sold the Braque lithograph that used to hang above the fireplace in Dad’s bedroom. An auction house called Edgar Horn has given us £2,000 for it.

  ‘But that’s only four hundred each,’ I say to Ralph, when he returns from work that evening. ‘It would have been better to keep it in the family.’ Even as I speak, I realize I am sounding just like Dad.

  ‘It seemed like a fair price.’ Ralph is avoiding my eyes, but he doesn’t look guilty, let alone apologetic.

  ‘I wish you’d asked.’

  ‘You weren’t here.’

  ‘You could have waited till I got back. I liked that picture. I wanted to keep it.’

  ‘You never said anything.’

  ‘We never discussed it.’

  ‘Look, we had to make some progress. We have to sell everything that has any value, otherwise the will won’t go to probate before we move out of the house.’ Ralph pauses. ‘Anyway, I don’t think it was very good. I couldn’t even tell what it was.’

  ‘It was a man driving a chariot.’

  ‘I couldn’t see that. And it was ugly – the colours …’

  ‘I thought it was ugly too,’ Robin says.