A Thousand Tiny Truths

by Kyo Maclear

  “You have no secure means to support a family. Your position in this country is precarious,” he said. “Don’t you understand? She doesn’t want to hear from you any more.”

  As her pregnancy advanced, Pippa became despondent. She lay in bed for hours, looking blankly at the ceiling. Oliver forced her to take walks, reassuring her that she would recover after the baby was born. They would return to the way they were before.

  He said he would help her raise her baby. He listed all the ways he would be a good father. He would be patient and tender. He would always come to the rescue. He would not indulge in irresponsible bouts of drinking. He would be mature.

  In his twisted fashion, Oliver was a deep romantic. When he realized he’d lost the love of his life, he did everything he could to get her back.

  “Your mother loved you,” said Pippa, that first afternoon.

  “Pippa,” I replied. “You are my mother.”

  When I looked up, her face was shiny with sweat and soaked with tears. I had been staring at my knees, listening so carefully and feeling so shocked and disordered by what she was saying, I didn’t notice that she had been crying. I was aware suddenly of her ragged breathing. It was hard labour, pushing out the long-unspoken.

  “There’s something more I need to know,” I said, trying to swallow. I felt my throat swelling, closing.

  My father arrived in England from South America knowing no one. His name was Wilson Fredericks. He was twenty-three years old. I don’t know if he found the British betterment he hoped for. What he found was hard labour of another sort, and the racket of railway development on the miles of track between London and the South End. He travelled that line in a special train working with eight other men on a unit for earth-boring. The cutting blade was diesel powered and danced into the earth, making holes three feet wide and twelve feet deep. Slowly, the special train inched its way through the quiet countryside, planting steel masts secured with concrete. Surrounded by clouds of smoke and steam, he spent most of his days in the middle of nowhere, dreaming of being a writer.

  Beyond his name, which is recorded on my birth certificate, I know that he was born in New Amsterdam in what is now known as Guyana. From Pippa (never one for common details), I know that he swirled his tea without ever clinking his spoon against the side of his cup; had beautiful penmanship; always arrived early for an appointment; was slim and elegant, but felt insecure about his boyish good looks and once tried to whiten the hair at his temples with paint.

  Pippa never got over him. Three years after I was born, following a brief stint in a psychiatric hospital, and then a stay in Paris to recuperate, she found him. He had married a woman from Trinidad and there was a baby on the way. He was living in Tooting in South London. He rode his bicycle everywhere.

  “I still want you,” he said.

  Still in love, she moved back to London to be close to him, but when he wouldn’t leave his wife, she returned to her tiny studio apartment in Montmartre, Paris.

  He died in a bicycle accident when I was seven years old.

  To this day, I picture him meandering around on his bicycle, drawing lines that traverse the lines created by others, lines more errant and true than anything I could create on paper.

  “You look so much like him,” Pippa said, taking my hand.

  She was almost finished telling me about my father when Oliver returned to sit with us. I knew he had been listening from behind his bedroom door.

  “I loved you,” he said quietly, taking a seat beside Pippa. “I just wanted to take care of you. All I ever wanted was that everything work out for us.”

  Pippa touched his face and said, “You can’t keep feeling guilty about it, Oliver. You need to live your life now and stop worrying about what happened.”

  We all put on coats and went to Eel Brook Common, walking one behind the other, Pippa, then Oliver and then me. We needed space and quiet for our own thoughts. It was late afternoon and a golden orange light shone behind the leafless trees, black silhouettes that from a distance looked like paper cutouts. We walked over the submerged brook, through the still air. There were no bomb bits for Oliver to step over, no frightening doctors for Pippa to avoid. The paths were remarkably even. I watched our shadows join together on the ground.

  What were we?

  A family?

  It struck me at that moment that what connected Oliver and Pippa was their brokenness. Her suffering coddling his. His loss pampering hers. Both aware of how instantly the pattern of everyday life can be shaken.

  We stopped and watched a swirl of leaves and paper dancing busily in the street. Pippa reached her hand out for mine.

  “Is it too late?” she asked.

  I said nothing, just tilted my chin at the birds in the branches.

  I was thinking: It is better to be a bird and have no story.

  What a shock it was for me to realize that after finding out the truth, I would want my old false notions back. That after having all the gaps in my story filled, I would crave some fog, some not-knowing. No matter how many times Oliver and Pippa tried to explain or insist that their lies and concealments had a noble purpose, were meant to protect me, their apologies fell all around me like doomed snowflakes, melting instantly.

  In the months that followed, my behaviour plunged to new levels of wretchedness. I entered rooms like a tornado, bursting with the slightest provocation into a temper or tears. I challenged their judgment at every opportunity. One particularly bad night, I smashed Oliver’s typewriter to the floor while he looked on fearfully. (“You taught me language,” said Caliban to Prospero, “and my profit on’t is I know how to curse.”) I ate with my hands. I let my hair grow wild and strutted down the street, daring clean-cut boys to say anything. I got into fights, came home with black eyes and bruises, skipped school, took up smoking and drinking, became a surly teenager.

  Of course, days and weeks passed when I was all right to Pippa and Oliver. But for much of the next five years, I was a moody terror.

  In the newspapers, I saw myself in the dark gleaming faces of guerilla soldiers moving through the jungle; children languishing in refugee camps; protestors marching in discontent. I dreamt of all my counter-lives. I read everything I could find about Vietnam and Guyana. I embraced a revolutionary blackness to offset the many times I wished I was white and ordinary. I felt my small and private rage swell into something large and world-shattering.

  “Why are you so angry?” Pippa asked on my fifteenth birthday.

  “WHY DO YOU THINK I’M SO ANGRY!”

  I came to resent goodwill. Goodwill could not conquer the resentment I felt at being lied to and poorly loved. In shedding the gratitude of the orphan, I hurt people I did not intend to hurt, including Mrs. Bowne, who called me a “beast” when I threw a birthday gift from Pippa at the wall. It was a copy of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, the play my real father had been reading when she first met him riding the bus.

  My family—the various people who partially raised me—watched the decline in my behaviour and appearance with disappointment. Despite my self-absorption, I noticed a new affection developing between Oliver and Pippa, a quiet unity. It angered me even more, to watch the two people who had betrayed and hurt me now aligning.

  I stopped drawing. I decided that drawing was an anesthetic. I spared no one, not even myself.

  In the middle of trying to make myself as unwantable and miserable as possible, at the point when I had nearly cemented my status as a dangerous outsider, I finally sought Kiyomi’s help.

  It was October of 1968. I had confided in her over the years but I had been so trapped in my blinding rage that on the one occasion she tried to offer her opinion, I exploded, accusing her of disloyalty and of siding with Oliver and Pippa. From then on, she put up with my misdirected rants with wary patience, somehow surviving the strains of being friend to an emotional tinderbox.

  Now, at age sixteen, I could see that I had become an angry young man, a man destined f
or loneliness, who walked through life feeling misread, who found it increasingly difficult to trust anyone or to speak about things that mattered to him. If I did not want to end up like Oliver, I realized, I needed to do something. It was that fear that finally brought me to Kiyomi.

  “Is it catching?” she said when she saw me on her front step. She took several steps back from the door.

  “I’m not sick, just sad . . . and confused,” I said. “Are you free to take a walk?”

  “I think so,” she said, tentatively, backing up the stairs to ask Natsumi for permission.

  When she returned, she was wearing Claudio’s fisherman sweater over a flowery dress.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  So we left her flat and went walking.

  We walked and walked through the streets of London. She did not try to snap me out of my self-pity. Only once did she take a rain-drenched pile of leaves and throw it at me. Otherwise, she accompanied me that day through every stage of my grieving. When I hissed at strangers, she held my hand and vouched for my goodness. She kissed me so I would remember that lips were not just for biting. She reached into my jacket pocket and found a blunt drawing pencil to remind me that hands were not just for clenching or pushing away. That night, with the house to ourselves, we lay down together in her bed.

  What can I say about our first sexual encounter? It was a kind of shock, I think. Kiyomi had indulged me for so long, I had not noticed her becoming more hungry, more beautiful. Now it was her turn to be indulged. Without a word, her body told me she was sick and tired of being invisible, of dealing with my bloody-mindedness. She clutched and groaned and pinned me down, pressing my wrists into the bed, giving vent to her own bottled-up feelings. As my body fused and shuddered with hers, I thought I might die from pure pleasure. I had not known that making love could produce such an intense degree of dazzlement and dislocation, such rowdy forgetting.

  The next morning, I watched Kiyomi sleep, her slender arms wrapped loosely around a pillow, her long black hair spread across the sheets. The sun had risen, glinting off a glass bottle on her dresser. Eventually Kiyomi felt the weight of my gaze and opened her eyes. A smile spread across her face.

  “Stay right where you are,” she said, as she climbed on top of me, arching into a sunbeam, revealing the tidy bones of her rib cage.

  In that sunstruck room, I felt something microscopic move inside me, a little weight shift: the ball bearings of sadness scattering.

  I forgave Oliver first. I stepped away from his power and presence, but I forgave him.

  Then I forgave Stasha, my secret aunt.

  Pippa would take longer.

  In the summer of 1972, the year I turned twenty, Kiyomi and I walked all the way to Burlington Arcade for wedding rings, to Portobello for wedding clothes and to the Registry Office on Marloes Road for a wedding licence. We were children, the same age Oliver and Pippa had been when they married. (What could we, or they, have known?) The day we married, Kiyomi resembled a Celtic druid in her green-velvet hooded cape. And in my marching band jacket, I was twice taken for Jimi Hendrix. Afterwards, we walked to Holland Park and sat on a bench where Kiyomi tied tin cans to my ankle and tossed fistfuls of rice in the air. I was halfway through my studies at St Martin’s School of Art. Jimi Hendrix had been dead for two years. We did not invite any of our family to the ceremony.

  My mother’s death was something I had imagined frequently. I’d be in the middle of working, or watching football on television, or sharing drinks with friends in a restaurant, and, all of a sudden, a death scenario would overtake me. It left me in a panic each time. Even when Pippa’s circumstances were stable, even when she had surmounted whatever (housing, creative or personal) struggles she had recently been facing, I could not escape the feeling that bad news was imminent. Every time the phone rang at night, my nerves jangled. It reached the point where the phone itself began to upset me—not such an irrational fear, as it turned out. In the end, the news did come by phone, though not in the middle of the night. It came at half past eleven in the morning, early enough to catch me off guard.

  It was a doctor calling from Royal London Hospital. Pippa had been discovered by her close friend and neighbour, Mrs. Almeida, who had gone around to visit, called her name and found she didn’t respond. Realizing that the door was unlocked, Mrs. Almeida let herself in and found Pippa lying in bed and knew, instantly, that something was not right. On the nightstand were several open bottles of prescription medicine. There were tablets scattered across the floor. Though Pippa was rushed to hospital by ambulance, the doctor said she went into cardiac arrest shortly after arriving at Emergency. “I’m very sorry for your loss,” he said. It was August 2, 2001.

  The next few days passed slowly. I remember numbly taking on the cremation arrangements, and organizing the funeral at Brompton Cemetery two days later. There were thirty of us, a subdued assortment. A few friends and neighbours, black cotton dresses blowing in the breeze. Oliver, stricken and pale, Stasha flown in from her home in Cardiff, gripping my hand, her eyes filling and emptying like rain barrels as she stared at her sister’s plot. We were sheltered from the city by a high brick wall, a fine drizzle on our faces. I stood there in a stupor, focusing on blades of grass, hearing sparrow song from every tree. I felt the wind swish against my cheek. Death was bending the world, making it feel hallucinatory. I remember thinking, So this is how she died. She could have been lost to a railway train or a bridge but, instead, she died of sudden heart failure, of pills, of a slow unwinding. At one point Stasha whispered, “It’s a miracle she lasted so long, really.”

  I watched Oliver cry. I envied his tears, his straightforward bereavement. The same man who had been suspicious of emotional intensities now shuddered and sobbed like a child. Meanwhile, I walked around like an automaton, as if stepping into his repressed old shoes.

  “We were supposed to go for lunch,” Mrs. Almeida said at the funeral, her voice faltered slightly. Her eyebrows were thin and pencilled in wide arcs of concern. “It’s such a shock—”

  “It’s not a shock,” I said, cutting her short.

  Poor Mrs. Almeida. I reached out my hand to erase the sting from her face. “Mrs. Almeida,” I said. “I was wondering if you’d do me a favour and accompany me back to my mother’s flat.”

  Mrs. Almeida hesitated, clearly too smart to be fooled by my sudden change in tone, but in the end, she agreed. Her stiff face turned kind once more.

  The flat was drafty and cold when we arrived the next day. The gas had been turned off. It felt echoey and bare, even though it was cluttered with Pippa’s belongings.

  Mrs. Almeida had brought a Thermos of tea and some honey cake. She warded off the demons with her stocky efficiency, crocheted tunic and purple slacks, helping me decide what would be kept and what would be packed away to charity, odd boots, chipped plates, well-worn cushions.

  I touched Pippa’s coat, tweedy and overlarge, draped over a chair. I touched the empty sleeve, the fallen hem, and Mrs. Almeida sighed behind me.

  In the days that followed, I kept myself busy. I worked frantically, and watched television until I passed out from exhaustion on the settee. I watched Tony Blair get re-elected and the twin towers fall in New York and the war in Afghanistan officially begin. I funnelled my grief into the more general tragedies.

  Now that she’s gone, I’d like to be able to remember her simply. I’d like my memories to sweep me past the muddy and dangerous places. I’d like to imagine her as a fashionable, free-spirited woman who loved art and cheap sentimental music, who had all sorts of strange and beautiful insights.

  For this to happen, I need to forgive us both. I need to forgive her for abdicating, for not being an emotional haven. And I need to forgive myself for deserting her in my turn. Because I did desert her. I did not know how else to cope. She frightened me with her attraction to outcasts, her transience and needy charm. It was too much. The way she wrapped herself in Peruvian shawls and spoke
of herbs that removed wind dampness from the body. The Garfield mug and tacky faux-Italian plates she salvaged from someone else’s trash. The bad shoes she wore that deformed her feet so that, in the end, she struggled to get around. I grew tired of doling out money and advice and reassurance. As she became stranger and more unpredictable, as she hobbled along looking more and more vagrant, I began to pity her. Yes, it is the perennial story of how the old and marginal are faded out of our lives. But, in my defence I would like to say that it was dread, not indifference. I was seized by the fear that one night I’d get that call—the one telling me she had killed herself.

  So I withdrew. What made this possible was my belief that she had rejected me first.

  I’ve decided to make you a cake.

  The day before she died, she had left me a strange voice-mail message, which I skipped over the first time I noticed it. It took me several days after her passing to work up the courage to listen more carefully. And when I finally did, I would have laughed if my stomach hadn’t knotted in pain at the mere sound of her voice. Pippa making a cake? I pictured spilled milk, great puffs of flour, the crunch of eggs against a bowl, soggy mounds of paper towel on the counter.

  Then, in the middle of turning my mother into a dumb cartoon, I stopped. Who was I to assume incompetence? What did I really know of her last hours, days, years? Her possible talents for sponge cake, frosting, fondant?

  It is time to let the contradictions and incongruities speak, to acknowledge that there were moments of intense loneliness and disappointment in my childhood but also moments of wonderful variety and freedom; to admit that I missed my mother and to some extent my real father, but that I was surrounded by caring people (some wild, some proper) who stepped forward to fill the breach, who showed me love.

  There were other possible outcomes for my life. For years I chose the easiest path. I took my atypical childhood and became a typical man. Charming but closed, occasionally accompanied but mostly solitary, I’ve pushed plenty of nice people, women and men, away. I’ve lived twenty-odd years, since Kyomi and I parted, without any expectations for the future, any notion that life, or I, would change.