The Death of Eli Gold

by David Baddiel

  Harvey remembers the face of Therapist 4 at this moment. She was his first woman – chosen deliberately, in the hope that that would be the key – and sixty-three, also a deliberate choice, and had had a minor stroke that caused one side of her mouth to fall faintly out of symmetry with the other. Physiotherapy had got her facial muscles back to about 80 per cent of their pre-stroke strength, but her lips still had something of the look of a falling graph and, in response to this particular remark, seemed to fall just a millidegree further. Harvey took this to mean that he had stumped her, and felt, despite the fact that he was paying her to cure him and therefore not to be stumped, a small thrill of triumph.

  ‘Are you OK, sir?’ says the taxi driver, a Sikh. Harvey looks away from the window; again he has the impulse to delineate the thousand ways in which he is not. But he says:

  ‘Fine. Yes. Why do you ask?’

  ‘You were sighing?’ His accent is Bengali, but the intonation, going up at the end of the sentence to make the observation a question, is American.

  Harvey looks at the ID card in the right-hand corner of the glass partition that separates passenger from driver: the words Jasvant Kirtia Singh and a face, most of it covered by turban and beard.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t realize …’

  ‘It is someone you’re seeing at the hospital?’

  Harvey looks at Jasvant Kirtia Singh’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. Animated from their I’m-Not-A-Terrorist impassivity on his ID, they are small black beads, birdlike, but framed by eyebrows gently suggesting both enquiry and a willingness to retreat if the passenger does not wish to talk.

  ‘My father.’

  ‘He is unwell?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I hope he gets better soon …?’

  Harvey wonders what to say to this. It has happened a few times, particularly early on, before the obituary writers began sharpening their pencils (or, rather, Googling ‘Eli Gold’): he would tell someone that his father was ill, and they would offer some encouraging words indicating hope of a return to health, and Harvey would have to face saying, No. He isn’t going to get better. The next stage of the conversation would then be stunted, and Harvey would feel at some level rude for having burdened them with this information. It crosses his mind, therefore, just to tell the taxi driver that his father is indeed on the mend – after all, he is not someone who needs to know the truth, nor is ever likely to find out that he has been lied to anyway. But Harvey doesn’t: even the tiniest lies will up his already heightened anxiety levels.

  ‘I don’t think so …’ he says, and the Sikh’s eyes hold his for a second, then move up and down as the back of his turbaned head nods in sad understanding.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he says, for the first time not framing the statement as a question.

  Harvey is grateful, however, to have his mind brought back to his father. He feels, with his gratitude, a stab of guilt that he should be thinking about his sense of exclusion from the huge variety of female flesh out there so soon after seeing his father on his deathbed for the first time. Harvey knows what the world demands: there are certain things, of which the death of your father is certainly one, that must drive all other thoughts from your head, filling your sky as effortlessly as a wide-winged black eagle, but the truth – Harvey’s truth, yes, but he senses that here, for once, he is not alone – is that the widower at his wife’s funeral is for a second snagged by the breasts of the female mourner standing on the other side of the grave, straining against her tight black jacket; that the father at his son’s hospital bed is distracted, against all his will, by the curving back view the nurse creates as she reaches up to change the little boy’s drip. It is the source of men’s deepest shame, the ever-presence of the penis; or, to be more exact, the incongruity of the penis, its continued presence on those occasions when it would be so clearly in accordance with every idea of human dignity for it to be absent.

  Harvey tries his best, though. He attempts to use his short-term memory – the pictures in his head of where he has just been – to drive himself into mental propriety. He thinks hard: he focuses. But not in that modern self-help, how-to-improve-your-golf-swing way – he actually does his best to make his mind’s eye like a camera lens, closing telescopically on the world around him to see only the immediate past.

  Eli’s room had been in Geriatrics, at the end of a long, bright corridor, on whose walls were hung a number of photographs commemorating the opening of the new Geriatric Medicine Facility, by Martha Stewart, in 2007. Outside the room itself stood a hulking security man, both black and dressed in black. He held one huge finger, his index, to his ear, pressed against a Bluetooth cellphone earpiece. ‘ID, sir,’ he said, managing to pack into those two words all his adamantine non-negotiability on this requirement

  Harvey’s stomach fell. He hadn’t, of course, considered that access to his father’s hospital room might be controlled: a stab of resentment towards Freda for not mentioning it went through him. He could have brought one of his two passports, but they were both in his bum bag, presently in his hotel room, flung over the twin bed he had chosen not to sleep in – a decision he had remained uncertain about throughout the long jet-lagged night, even swapping beds for twenty minutes at around 5 a.m., hoping that the other mattress might be soft enough to grasp what little oblivion the dark still offered.

  ‘I don’t …’ he began, and saw the security man’s wide face settle into stone. ‘Look. I’m his son. I’m Eli Gold’s son.’

  ‘Can you prove that, sir?’

  This took Harvey aback. He realized that without some kind of documentation, he could not. He did look a bit like his father – they shared fleshy, porous noses, and skin that looked as if it might need shaving four times a day – but not having seen him as he was at present he could not even confidently claim a resemblance. And as for any other inheritance: well, Harvey possessed neither the genius nor the charisma, although he wondered why he was thinking this, as he was not sure how he would demonstrate either in the hospital corridor, and even if he could, doubted they would count as an access-all-areas code.

  ‘I’ve got a credit card …’

  ‘I’ll need a photo-ID, sir. There’s a lot of journalists and crazy people might want to get into this room.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harvey said, and then remembered that he did have his driving licence on him. He unbuttoned his jacket – because, despite it being forty degrees in Manhattan, he was wearing a dark blue, buttoned jacket; uncertain and jet-lagged this morning he had decided that the occasion of going to see his dying father necessitated some formality – and reached into the inside pocket for his wallet. He scrabbled through the variety of useless cards in the leather slits – how many fucking membership cards for defunct DVD rentals did he own? – until he spotted his shrunken head on the pink picture card. Handing it to the security guard, Harvey felt nervous, under pressure; the moment came into his mind when Jimmy Voller, the swarthy Brooklyn hero of Eli’s brutal third novel Cometh the Wolf, has to produce his passport at the door of an East Berlin brothel to persuade the madam that he is neither Turkish nor Moroccan, the two nationalities she has decided to bar entry to.

  The security guy removed his finger from the earpiece – Harvey noticed that he was not, in fact, in telephone communication with anyone, and wondered if the finger-in-the-ear stance had just been to make him look more like security guys always do – and took his time scanning the details of the licence. Harvey had never spotted the parade of weird tiny vehicles on the back of it before – what is that, he thought, a VW Beetle? And that looks like the silhouette of the van in Scooby-Doo. They seemed tinier than ever, perched in the security guy’s mighty hand. He produced a clipboard, which, also being black, had remained invisible before, camouflaged against his enormous black puffa jacket. Harvey wondered who was paying for this guy: the hospital? His father? The government? Waiting for what seemed a stupid amount of time for his name to be checked against the names on the clipboard, Harvey
felt absurdly like he was trying to get into some sort of exclusive nightclub.

  Eventually, the security man looked up, scrutinizing Harvey’s face as if it were another card. He gave him his licence back.

  ‘Just stay here a second, please, sir …’ He turned, with a slow movement not unreminiscent of an oil tanker listing to port, and went into the room. Harvey dropped his head to look through the recessed glass window in the door. The room was spacious, and well furnished in a hospital way, but oddly windowless. In the foreground, he could see Freda on her knees, talking to a girl – Colette? – a doctor, a nurse and, in an alcove off to one side, the bottom edge of what must be his father’s bed. An image flashed through his mind of the comedy medical clipboard that should be hanging there, marked in black with a zigzag graph hurtling downwards, but all he could see were chrome bars and white sheeting.

  The security guy hovered behind Freda, waiting for her conversation with the child to end. His finger had returned to his ear. Harvey had a moment of wondering if the security guy’s finger, so wide it completely obscured the earpiece, was bigger than his own penis, and then immediately feared that such a thought might be racist. He took out a bottle of Extra Tart Sour Blast Spray and gave his tongue a quick atomize. He removed his iPhone from his other pocket and tapped a few moves into Deep Green, but could see straight away that he was heading for a quick Checkmate! Tiny wins! so put it back. He considered, not for the first time, how quickly he panicked, while waiting: how quickly he needed to distract himself, before his mind and body went somewhere bad. Thinking about his body makes him suddenly feel a need to piss. Micturation, or the urge to do so, comes upon him like this these days, with no build-up, no gradual turning of the tap. He knows it is something to do with his battered and bruised prostate, the internal organ he has always been most conscious of: it will be, he knows, swollen or shrunken or just generally giving up its hanging walnut ghost, but he cannot bring himself to go to the doctor to check it out. Not because he is embarrassed about it, but because his GP in Kent is a young and pretty Pakistani woman, and there is no way he can go to the surgery and ask her about his prostate without it looking as if it’s a ruse to get her to put her finger up his anus. Even as he makes the appointment he will feel the receptionist suspecting his motivation. He needs to get over this concern, he knows, partly because Eli’s first brush with cancer was of the prostate, and partly because he actually would quite like the GP to put her finger up his anus.

  The security guy was still hovering over Freda like the alien ship in Independence Day over earth as she talked. ‘Fuck it,’ Harvey said to himself, and walked quickly down the corridor, and found the rest room. Rest room. It could be restful in the toilet, Harvey felt, although only if you were sitting down – something he chose to do more and more these days, whatever the character of the ablution – but even then only really in your own private toilet, where any anxiety about sharing intimate information with strangers could not intrude. The door was locked. Harvey tried it a few times, as if under the impression that perhaps there was something wrong with the lock, but really to make it clear, to the present user, that someone was outside waiting. Eventually, the door opened, and Harvey drew back: the person exiting was a woman – Korean? Chinese? Malaysian? he felt bad about not being able to tell the difference – with tired eyes. There was no reason why it should not be a woman – the rest room door had no trousered or skirted hieroglyphic on it – but Harvey instantly wished to withdraw his aggressive shaking of the handle, somehow more acceptable had the occupant been male. It flashed through his mind to say – ‘Oh sorry, I thought you were a man’ but he quashed it. Instead, a glance passed between them, a glance he has – this is the word, guilty though he feels about it – enjoyed before. If Harvey is waiting to use a unisex toilet, on a train, say, or in a private house at a party, and a woman comes out, Harvey enjoys (he knows it’s wrong but still allows himself the minute, tawdry thrill) the moment in which their eyes meet. He thinks the glance means that, for a second, they have both shared an image of her sitting on the seat with her pants down and the sound of liquid on china, or metal. This is the glance that passed between him and the nurse. As ever, he felt bad about enjoying it, but still. He noticed, though, that she squinted at him uncertainly, as if catching that something about Harvey’s look was not accidental, so he looked away, covering his shame by moving quickly into the cabin.

  When he came back to the door to Eli’s room, the security guy was waiting, finger in ear. He looked Harvey up and down once more, and then stepped aside. Harvey chanced a friendly nod at him, which was met with a blank stare, making Harvey worried that his friendly nod may have been misinterpreted as ‘see?’, but continued on past his gravitational presence and through the door.

  The first thing he noticed on entering was that the room was not windowless. In fact, the bed faced a floor-to-ceiling glass rectangle, looking onto exactly the view of Manhattan – across Central Park, towards downtown – that Harvey so covets. He drank it in – or, rather, since what hit him with a rush is not beauty but envy – he sucked it up, the sweep of sky and skyscrapers, before turning and saying, ‘Hello, Freda.’ His stepmother looked up – it had never occurred to him with the same force before; two years younger than him, that was still, technically, what she was. She stared at Harvey for so long – the oddity of their interaction reinforced by her being on her knees – that he started to wonder if she was trying to remember who he was.

  ‘Colette,’ she said eventually, ‘come and meet your half-brother, Harvey.’

  When the girl looked up, her face under her curls was set in a tight frown. She may have been crying, although not, Harvey thought, out of sadness: her expression contained that classic mix of rage and self-pity that children’s faces emit when they have just been told off. She did not do as she was told; she did not come and meet him, but stayed where she was, raising her chin defiantly and staring as if he was complicit in – perhaps even the mastermind of – whatever slight had just been perpetrated against her.

  Or maybe she was sad, about her – their – dad dying, and this was just what she looked like when she was sad. After all, Harvey had never met her before. He had been sent a photograph soon after her birth of the three of them at their New England lodge (not by Eli: the accompanying note, including the statement, ‘Eli is so overjoyed about his new child’ was all in Freda’s hand). Eli, in a big fisherman’s jumper, grinning beneficently, his arms around Freda, her trademark proprietorial smile cross-fertilized with an element of self-conscious sheepishness, as if to say, ‘Can you believe what little me has ended up with?!’, and in her lap, the baby. Harvey wondered who had taken it, as it was too professional – the light too dappled, the wood-panelled walls of the lodge too burnished, the composition of the threesome too perfectly arranged – to have been done on a self-timer. It looked, he thought, like something from OK! magazine. But he could not relate his memory of that infant, looking out at him from the photograph with something of the complacent gaze of a cow, to this fierce child with the thermonuclear stare.

  ‘Hello,’ he said: the word felt stupid in his mouth. Colette just nodded at him, and Harvey felt suddenly furious at Freda for spiking his route to his father’s bedside with this introduction, impossible as it was to brush off because of the absurd and irreducible fact of him and this thirty-six-years-younger girl being siblings. Freda must have known that his first thought would be to get to Eli’s bedside – and Harvey had really wanted to do this, although not so much because he just wanted to see his dad, more that he wanted to get the first sight of him over with. He was scared about it. Approaching the door, he had felt much like he had as a kid watching Dr Who, knowing that a new monster was about to appear. The ten-year-old Harvey, trembling beside his mother (who let Dr Who under her steel bar of what Harvey was allowed to watch, although in later series changed her mind, deciding that the Time Lord’s always-female assistants were becoming oversexualized) in his blue, bi-pl
aned pyjamas, would not hide behind the sofa. He would, rather, watch intently, wanting the monster to appear as soon as possible; the worst thing was not knowing. He wanted to face it, so that he could know the fear, hold it and calibrate exactly how bad it was going to be.

  ‘Last time I saw you, you were a tiny baby,’ he said, his voice sounding astringent against the sentiment, holding down his rage at having to have this conversation now. Surreptitiously, he flicked his eyes over towards his father’s bed, more of which was visible from this angle. The movement of his eyes sideways reminded him of the painful glancing action always prompted by an attractive woman across a room. He could see the thin hump of a wasting body underneath bedding, but still not the face. It was facing the face that filled him with dread.

  ‘You saw me when I was a baby?’ said Colette.

  ‘No. I saw a photo …’

  ‘Oh. OK.’ She looked at him. Her frown deepened, producing little lines on her forehead. ‘Why is your tongue blue?’

  The awkward stalemate this response induced was broken by the sudden appearance of Freda with her arms outstretched. Harvey, opening his to accept the hug, looked at her frame, spread like a net in front of him, and thanked the Lord again that he didn’t find her attractive. Although younger than him, and a woman – normally enough for his needs – there was something about Freda that inhibited Harvey’s reflex interest. She had that parched-face look so common to female humanist academics that Harvey felt they should try their utmost to avoid, thinking that they had fallen into the exact trap – unfemininity – which Victorian patriarchy had predicted for women should they become learned. This particular intellectual conundrum was a hangover not from his father but his mother, who, despite being herself a female humanist academic, and an arch-feminist, never emerged from her bedroom without a cosmetic face mask three inches thick.