by William Boyd
‘I saw this stunning creature with her left leg in a huge plaster cast sitting in the front row. Quite threw me off my stride,’ Zane says, taking Chi-Chi’s phoneless hand.
‘No pun intended,’ Bethany says.
‘Ha-ha, clever clogs,’ Zane says.
‘No champagne for me,’ Chi-Chi says. ‘I left my water in the bedroom.’
She places her phone on the arm of the sofa, unfolds herself, and strides across the room in that splay-footed, buttock-clenched way dancers walk, Bethany notes. Zane takes the unwanted glass of champagne back to the bar and, as his back is turned, Bethany picks up Chi-Chi’s mobile and quickly reads the text she was about to send. She knows one shouldn’t do this, just as one shouldn’t read a person’s diary or letter, but it’s a temptation that no one can resist.
The text reads: ‘Missing U xxxxx’. Bethany puts the phone down.
‘How old is she?’ Alannah asks. She and Bethany are standing in the kitchen on Christmas morning. Alannah is preparing the capon for roasting.
‘It’s hard to tell,’ Bethany says, breezily. ‘You know that smooth-skinned Chinese look, almost ageless in some strange –’
‘Or rather: how young is she?’ Alannah interrupts, rephrasing her question with a sneer.
Bethany says Chi-Chi was taking Zane’s course at Brandiwine University.
‘How disgusting,’ Alannah says, ripping the heart and liver from the capon’s body cavity. ‘One of his students. Same old sad story. Leopards and spots.’
‘Part-time mature students,’ Bethany corrects her. ‘She was recovering from an injury, she’s a dancer, really.’
‘Even more disgusting,’ Alannah says, ‘a lap dancer, I assume.’
‘She seems very nice,’ Bethany says, loyally, deciding not to tell her mother that Chi-Chi is pregnant. She offers to peel the potatoes instead before she goes over to the Fedora Palace Grand for her Christmas lunch.
Chi-Chi opens the door, gives a small shrill cry of pleasure and hugs Bethany.
‘Happy Christmas,’ Bethany says, handing Chi-Chi the present she’s brought her.
It’s a first English edition of Novaville with a photograph of the snarlingly handsome, long-haired Zane Mellmoth on the back, when he was a history lecturer at East Battersea Polytechnic in the 1980s.
‘Where’s Dad?’ Bethany asks, going to the window to survey the grey silent city below her, looking down on a police car speeding noiselessly along the Embankment, blue lights winking.
‘He’s in the gym,’ Chi-Chi says. ‘Want something to drink?’
Bethany asks for a vodka and cranberry juice. Unthinkingly, she asks Chi-Chi if she can smoke.
‘I quit,’ Chi-Chi says and taps her belly, ‘and little Arnie wouldn’t like it.’
She hands Bethany her drink. ‘What star sign are you?’
‘Ah … I’m Pisces,’ Bethany says.
‘Cool,’ says Chi-Chi, picking up her phone and checking for messages. She looks up.
‘We’re going to get along. I’m a Taurus.’
‘The fish and the bull,’ Bethany says, suddenly given pause by a worrying thought.
‘How old are you, Chi-Chi?’ she asks. ‘If you don’t mind me asking. My asking.’
‘I’m twenty-two,’ Chi-Chi says, putting down her phone on the bar. ‘Where is that Zane? Gym-bunny. I’m gonna go get him.’ She pauses at the door. ‘Room service should be here any minute to set up the table.’
Bethany goes to the bar and tops up her drink with a gurgle of vodka. Taurus, she thinks. Sholto was a Taurus and his birthday was in May. Bethany’s birthday is 7 March … She and Chi-Chi are both twenty-two. Which can only mean that Chi-Chi is younger.
Bethany paces round the room munching on peanuts trying to stem her craving for a cigarette and trying to come to terms with the fact that she will soon have a stepmother who is younger than her.
‘Don’t forget you’ll also have a half-brother called Arnie,’ she says to herself. Arnie Mellmoth …
Chi-Chi’s phone begins to ring – that Dial M for Murder ringtone – from the bar. Bethany goes over to the bar and looks at it. She picks it up and is about to say: ‘Hello, Chi-Chi’s phone’, when an American man’s voice starts talking without introduction.
‘Chi-Chi babe don’t speak don’t speak it’s six in the morning and guess where I am – naked in my hot tub drinking wine. Guess what I’m doing? I can’t wait for you to come home. Talk dirty to me baby talk dirty –’
‘Hello?’ Bethany says. ‘Who is this?’
Click. The phone goes dead.
Bethany places it carefully back on the bar.
The suite door opens and in come her father and Chi-Chi.
‘No sign of room service?’ Chi-Chi asks.
‘This capon is delicious,’ Bethany says to her mother. ‘We should have castrated cock more often.’
She’s glad she’s hungry as she found herself unable to eat much in the Fedora Palace Grand. Her father had ordered the full ‘Christmas turkey with all the trimmings’ lunch, Chi-Chi chose a salade niçoise and Bethany, for some reason, distractedly ordered a selection of sushi and sashimi. Then the thought of eating raw fish had turned her stomach. She was feeling nauseous enough anyway after overhearing that brief monologue from the naked man in the hot tub.
She asked if she might step outside for a cigarette and her father told her to use the balcony off the bedroom. Bethany stood there, high up on the tallest edge of the Fedora Palace Grand, drawing deeply on her cigarette, now feeling both vertiginous and nauseous. When she came back in, her father and Chi-Chi were kissing.
They exchanged presents. Chi-Chi and her father gave her a black cashmere sweater. Chi-Chi was entranced with her copy of Novaville – ‘My God, look at Mr Too-Cool-for-School! Look at your hair, dude!’
She turned to Bethany, smiling: ‘I see where you get your looks.’
Bethany smiled back, queasily. Bethany gave her father an old copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton that she had found in an antiquarian bookseller’s when she was looking for Yves Hill.
Chi-Chi flicked through it. ‘This seems kind of cool,’ she said.
‘It’s not quite what you think,’ Bethany said. ‘I just love the title.’
When she leaves, her father says he’ll ride down to the lobby with her.
In the lift Bethany says: ‘Dad, how can you afford all this?’
Zane smiles. ‘I just sold the game rights to Novaville,’ he says. ‘And NBC renewed my contract.’
Bethany has forgotten her father has another life as a TV pundit on all things urban.
‘Life is pretty good at the moment,’ he continues. ‘What with Chi-Chi, et cetera.’
‘You never told me she was younger than me,’ Bethany says.
‘Age is just a number,’ Zane says, taking her hand and kissing her knuckles. ‘It’s not an issue. Chi-Chi may be only twenty-two but she’s far wiser than me. I learn from her.’
Bethany decides to drop the subject.
As they stand in the chill afternoon air, waiting for a taxi, the sky darkening as the winter night rushes on, Zane asks: ‘Have you told Alannah about me and Chi-Chi?’
‘Not really,’ Bethany says, carefully.
‘She should know. She’d want me to be happy.’
Bethany says she’ll tell her everything after Christmas.
‘How is she?’ Zane asks. ‘I’m upset she won’t talk to me.’
‘She’s great,’ Bethany says, ‘you know Mum.’
She decides not to tell him about Alannah’s flourishing business as a conference organizer, or her appalling choice in men. Alasdair, Trevor, Jean-Pierre, Jason, Severiano, Kwame, Nigel and Sergei had all entered Alannah Mellmoth’s life for a while and then abruptly exited. So many things not said.
‘She’s doing well,’ Bethany says, loyally.
Do it now.
While they are stacking the dishwasher Bethany says to her mother, ‘Mum – we nee
d to talk.’
‘Let’s tidy everything up, first,’ Alannah says, pragmatically.
Later they sit down with their glasses of wine and both light cigarettes.
‘Fire away,’ Alannah says.
‘Dad’s going to marry his girlfriend,’ Bethany says.
‘Good luck to her.’
‘She’s younger than me,’ Bethany adds.
Her mother makes a face as if she’s just smelt the world’s worst smell.
‘She’s pregnant,’ Bethany goes on.
‘That’s repulsive.’
Bethany takes a sip of her wine.
‘And I think she’s having an affair.’
‘Fantastic!’ her mother exults. ‘Brilliant!’ Then she looks shrewdly at her. ‘How do you know?’
Bethany explains about the phone call and the naked man in the tub asking for dirty talk.
Alannah takes this all in, nodding assent: ‘Pretty conclusive evidence, I would say.’
Then Bethany asks her: ‘What should I do?’
‘Do nothing,’ Alannah says immediately. ‘Nothing. It’s none of your business. What if you hadn’t picked up her phone? Pretend it never happened.’
‘Maybe the child’s not his,’ Bethany says. ‘He’s got a right to know, surely.’
‘It just keeps getting better and better,’ Alannah says. ‘If you tell him I’ll never forgive you.’
Bethany lies in bed wondering what to do. What to do with her life and what to do about her father. She can hear her mother pottering around in the kitchen above her head and it pains her to realize that she is back at home again with her mother. Back in South Kensington, living in her old basement bedroom.
Her life is regressing, she feels: one step forward, two steps back. There is a new year coming – everything has to change, she has to reclaim her independence. She forces herself to think about Zane and Chi-Chi. She loves her father – and that love is unaffected by the clarity with which she sees him – but it seems to her, at the very least, unfair that she should say nothing given that she is all too aware of the existence of the naked man in the hot tub. If Zane knew about it also, Bethany reasons, then at least he would have the opportunity to talk things over with Chi-Chi and hear her side of the story, before they plighted their troth in Bali and little Arnie was born.
She sits up and reaches for her phone. She feels certain and unequivocal about what she’s about to do and at the same time odd and strangely shaky, as if she is crossing some invisible boundary in her life. Maybe this is what she needs – maybe this is the first new step forward. No going back. It is her choice and therefore her responsibility. Do it now. She brings up her grandmother’s number on her phone. She calls and her father answers. She asks about the long drive to Devon. Send my love to Granny, she says. They talk about how good it was to be with each other at Christmas, finally, and agree it was a great lunch.
Then Bethany asks him: ‘Dad, are you alone?’
‘Well, I’m alone in the hall,’ he says. ‘Why?’
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ Bethany says, sitting up, straightening her spine like a dancer. ‘It’s about Chi-Chi …’
Five …
Bethany stands outside the No Parking Gallery in Dalston waiting for the owner and the gallerist, Howard Christopher, to open the door for her. He is always there, no matter how early she arrives, and sometimes she wonders if he lives in his office – though she knows full well he has a large house and large family (issue of two wives) in Victoria Park.
‘Coming, Bethany, darling,’ she can hear his deep voice calling from the back, somewhere. He is a friend of her mother – and it was this friendship that secured Bethany the job as a gallerina in No Parking. Her mother shaping her destiny, once again. The gallery is named after a prominent ‘No Parking’ sign set on the kerb outside its front door. Thinking about names, Bethany realizes that Howard Christopher’s name is in fact two Christian names. Funny that, she thinks, not having a proper surname.
Bethany goes down to Howard’s basement office with his morning jug of fresh orange juice. They chat about the day’s business – one exhibition leaving, preparing for another being installed – as Howard opens his fridge to take out the vodka bottle. He tops up his glass of orange juice with an inch or so of vodka. He waves the bottle at Bethany but she declines. Howard takes out a ready-rolled spliff from a cigarette case and lights up.
‘Very excited about the new show,’ he says. He looks at her, shrewdly: ‘You all right, lovely baby?’
Bethany says she’s fine, thanks.
In fact Bethany is troubled this morning by something she read in a newspaper on her short but arduous bus journey to Dalston from Stoke Newington. The average lifespan of a human being, she had read, is around 1,000 months. This is entirely reasonable, she understands, and logical, but it has made her ill at ease. It doesn’t seem nearly enough – somehow much worse than knowing one might live to be eighty or more. Eighty years seems improbably long. One thousand months appears almost terrifyingly brief. She does a quick calculation – she has already used up 274 months and what has she achieved in her life? Nothing.
Rod Hurt, the sculptor, supervises the deposition of his show. Bethany stands by his side with a clipboard as they go through the various works.
‘Bin it,’ Hurt says, ‘bin it, bin it. Keep the wood. Bin it, bin it.’
Hurt’s show was called Missing. And what was missing was the artwork itself: there was a presentation of the raw material – a symbolic block of wood, a chunk of marble, pile of clay, sack of plaster, planks of driftwood, seashore pebbles and so forth. Hurt had made a sculpture from similar materials and had then destroyed it. So set beside the granite rock was a pile of granite chips, by the tree trunk a mound of wood shavings, a cone of ash by the driftwood, iron girder transformed to crushed steel ingot, and so forth.
Bethany had said to him at the show’s opening that she kept trying to imagine what was in between. ‘Exactly, that’s the point,’ Hurt said. ‘And what you imagined was probably better than what I did.’
Seeing the wanton and carefree dismantling of Hurt’s show has increased Bethany’s angst. And it is ‘angst’, she realizes – genuine angst, not the blues or PMT or simply feeling fed up. She is going through a minor but compelling crisis of an ontological sort. The message of Hurt’s absent artworks plus the knowledge that she has only around 700-odd months left of life on this planet has shaken her up, somewhat. She will be twenty-three soon and all she has to show for these years, these months, is a series of truncated false starts. Leaving college and abandoning her degree; failing to get into drama school; the novel she started and set aside, unfinished; her short unhappy experience as a film extra – she could go on and on. Nothing seemed to click, or fit. Everything she dreamed of appeared to stall, or she was distracted, or else other people messed it up.
And look at her now – now she was a VARP – a ‘Vaguely Art-Related Person’.
The VARP acronym was something else she’d read about and it made her unhappy. She had thought that becoming a gallerina might open doors, might help her with her photography project and the book she was planning to accompany it, but now she wondered if it was just another dead end. Still, at least the next show in No Parking was by a photographer, Fernando Benn, not that she’d heard of him. Perhaps this might be the opportunity she was waiting for.
On the walk from the bus stop after her day’s ‘work’ Bethany passes a derelict garage. In the middle of its forecourt a plant seems to be growing out of concrete.
She takes her camera out and photographs it. It’s a small vigorous buddleia that has somehow managed to root itself, grow and flourish in a minute fissure. Bethany’s photography project, and its eventual book, is a series of images of plants growing out of rocks – or bricks, or paving stones. It’s going to be called Suffering from Optimism and this shot of the buddleia in its patch of oil-stained garage forecourt might be perfect for the cover. She has many photos
of buddleias – she marvels at how they seem to grow in impossible unnourished places – on roof edges, in dry gutters, in the grouting of brick walls. In fact the buddleia is probably her favourite flower.
Fernando Benn’s show at No Parking is called ‘WAR’/WAR. It consists of a series of huge photographs, six feet by six, of famous war photographs – all classic shots, almost all familiar to Bethany. Fernando Benn has cut them out of books, pinned them on his studio wall, photographed them so that they are framed by the background and blown them up.
Benn is standing in the middle of the gallery idly supervising the hang. He’s a man in his forties wearing a leather jacket, jeans and red cowboy boots. He hasn’t shaved for a few days.
‘Great, fantastic,’ he says. ‘No, no, leave it there. It’s fine.’
Bethany asks him if she can get him a coffee or a water.
‘I’ll have one of Howard’s vodka and oranges,’ Benn says. When Bethany hands him his drink she senses him looking her up and down.
‘You’re new,’ he says. ‘You weren’t at No Parking for my last show. What’s your racket, darling?’
Bethany says she’s interested in photography.
‘Photography is dead,’ Benn says with a cough-laugh. ‘Who was it who said that? Now we’re in the digital age photography has lost its veracity because it can be manipulated so easily – yeah? The photographic image has lost its power.’
‘But you’re a photographer,’ Bethany says, unreflectingly, reasonably. ‘How can you say that?’
‘I’m not a photographer,’ Benn says, a little wearily, ‘I’m an artist who chooses to work in lens-based media.’ He gestures at his photos. ‘These are digital pictures of photos shot on film. It’s the only way they can achieve any power, any veracity.’
Benn favours the glottal stop in his conversation. Veraci’y. He smiles at her.
‘Like a cannibal eating the brain of his enemy to make him stronger. Yeah?’
When Bethany arrives home that night, at the house in Stoke Newington where she lives with her boyfriend Kasimierz, she is still thinking about Fernando Benn’s assertion and wondering therefore if her own project is rendered meaningless. Should she abandon Suffering from Optimism? Another dead end?