Also Jada has got the DVD of Marmaduke and she wanted to come round after school and have a movie night. She said she’d bring popcorn and everything. So after Noda had done serving us our breakfast, I asked her – Mommy – that is.
‘Mommy? Can I stay home today?’ I said.
She didn’t say anything at first, just carried on cutting up her eggwhite omelette into little slices, like she likes to. I don’t know why she likes to do that. It’s like what people do for a baby who can’t cut stuff himself yet. I hate it when she does that.
‘Mom?’ I said, ’cos I wasn’t sure she’d even heard. But then she put her knife and fork down.
‘Yes, darling,’ she said, in that voice she has which means she’s cross with me but won’t admit it, ‘I heard you. I’m just wondering why you don’t want to come to the hospital with me.’
‘I didn’t say I didn’t want to come to the hospital! I just asked if I could stay home!’
‘Well, staying at home means you won’t come to the hospital. Doesn’t it?’
I took a drink of water. I only drink mineral water. I like Volvic, Evian, and a fizzy one from Europe called San Pellegrino. This one was Evian.
‘Yes,’ I said, when I put my cup down, which has a picture of Aristotle on it – I mean the real Greek guy, not my cat! Mommy bought it for me when we went to the Metropolitan Museum, ‘but it doesn’t mean I don’t want to come. It just means I just want to stay at home today more.’
Mommy got out of her chair and came and crouched down really near me, so that her eyes were the same height as my eyes. Her eyes, which are greeny-brown, were all watery, and the white bits had little lines of red in them, those kind of tiny strings of red you get in your eyes when you rub them a lot. Mom took hold of my hand.
‘Colette … I really think you should come …’ she said. With her other hand, she brushed my fringe, kind of like she was brushing it out of my eyes, but it was never in my eyes. This made me shiver a bit. I could feel lots of stuff inside me that I wanted to say. I could feel it wanting to come out like I was going to throw up, like the words were food or maybe something that wasn’t food that I shouldn’t have eaten, like when Jada told me she once swallowed an earbud.
‘But it’s so boring in the hospital! They don’t have anything for me to do there, and the TV is just on CNN all the time, and the only toys they have are for babies! And no one who’s my age ever comes there and I have to meet lots of creepy people like that fat guy Harvey – and he’s like my brother and I haven’t even met him before!’
I didn’t think I was screaming or anything when I said this, although I knew it must have been quite loud, because Noda came out of the kitchen making that face that she makes when she thinks something’s wrong, but Mom just shook her head and did a little wave of her hand, and she went back in again.
‘Colette. Firstly, could you not raise your voice to me like that? And secondly, could you not talk in that stupid way you’ve just learnt off the TV?’
I didn’t say anything. I looked down at my plate. My pancakes had gone cold. I could see the syrup on top of one of the cranberries had gone all hard. I heard her breathe really deeply. I was so annoyed by then that even that annoyed me, hearing her breathe really deeply. It was like it was louder than it needed to be, like she was making sure I heard her breathe.
‘Darling,’ she said after a bit – her voice had gone softer, because she wasn’t telling me off any more – ‘you always knew that you had half-brothers and sisters that you’ve never met. Harvey’s just one of them.’
‘Well, I don’t like him. He’s fat and sweaty and he smelt funny.’ She opened her mouth to tell me off then, but before she could speak, I said: ‘And he upset Daddy.’
Her mouth stuck open at that for a bit, like a fish. Her face went different.
‘Do you think so?’
‘God, yeah! He was really upset when he saw him. It was like he was saying Could someone please get that guy out of here!’
She smiled, that stupid smile that means Oh darling you don’t understand. ‘I don’t think so, darling.’
‘Who are the others?’ I said.
‘What others?’
‘The other brothers and sisters.’
Her forehead went all lined. ‘Colette. I’ve told you all this before.’
‘I know but that was ages ago.’
Mommy tutted, and looked at her watch. It was a present from Daddy. It’s got diamonds in it and everything.
‘Apart from Harvey, there’s Simone, who lives in France. And Jules, who lives in Los Angeles …’
‘Is that a boy or a girl?’
‘It’s a boy. A man.’
‘Has he got any children?’
‘No, he’s gay.’
I know what this means. Mommy told me this when I was little. It means he can have sex with men, even though he is a man. Women can do it, too, with women. I don’t know about girls and boys. When I was little, Mommy used to say it means a man can fall in love with a man, or a woman with a woman, but now I know it means they can have sex, too.
‘How old are they?’
‘Uh … Jules is about fifty, I think. Simone is … I don’t know. She never tells anyone her age, Daddy says.’
‘Why not?’
Mom just shook her head. ‘I guess she’s fifty-something, too.’
‘Are they coming to see Daddy, too?’
Mommy made a bit of a weird face when I said this, like she’d hurt her tongue or something.
‘I don’t think so, darling. That’s all a bit complicated.
‘You’re doing that thing.’
‘What thing?’
‘Of not telling me something because you think I won’t understand.’
She did a big sigh and tucked her hair behind her ears. There are red veins on the top of her ears.
‘So why do I have to go every day, when they aren’t even coming at all!’
‘Col …’
‘They’re Daddy’s children, too!’
She looked a bit surprised when I said this. I guess I did say it pretty loud again. Although I don’t know if that was why she was surprised. It was more like I was saying something she didn’t know. She didn’t say anything for a bit, just stared at me. Then she did another big breath.
‘Listen, Colette, I know how hard it must be for you, seeing Daddy like he is now …’
‘Yes,’ I said, because I could tell that this was the best thing to say to get her to let me stay home. But when I said it, I felt really sad inside, like it was just true.
‘… but – you know how we’ve talked about how – how Daddy’s not coming back from the hospital?’
‘Yes. He’s going to die there.’
‘… yes.’
‘But he is going to come back.’
Mommy kept on looking at me, doing that thing she does of really looking at me, like she can see right behind my eyes into my brain or something. ‘No, darling, he isn’t …’
‘Well, how are we going to have the funeral then?’
‘Oh. Well. Yes. His body will come back. Well, not to here exactly, but …’ She stopped speaking and turned to look out of the window.
‘Daddy wants to be cremated, doesn’t he?’ I said. Cremated was a word I got taught by Elaine just before Daddy went into his hospital. Mommy told her to teach me all the death words, cremated, coffi n, undertaker, postmortem, bereavement, funeral (although I knew that one already) and mourning, which although it sounds the same is different from morning. After I had learnt all these, I went and found out a few others by putting the word ‘Death’ into Google onto Daddy’s computer: decomposition, decay, rigor mortis, and putrefaction.
‘Yes, darling … but the point is: he isn’t coming back, not really. And I know it’s hard but I think it’s important that you come to the hospital because – here’s the thing – nobody knows when Daddy is going to die. And I think it’s really important that you are there when that happens.’
‘Colette …’ She put her hand on top of mine. I was looking away. I didn’t want to look at her because I was cross and I kind of knew that what I was saying was wrong but I didn’t really know why, and I knew that she would be doing that thing with her eyes again and if I looked at her doing that it would maybe make me cry proper or be more mad. ‘I don’t expect you to understand. Maybe if I was Daddy – maybe if I had his words – I could explain it to you. But for now, you’ll just have to trust me. Because you have to be there not just for him, but for you. I know that if you’re not there when Daddy dies, when you’re older, you’ll regret it. You know what regret means, don’t you?’
I nodded, but without turning round to look at her. ‘It means when you do something and then you think you shouldn’t have.’
‘Yes. Or in this case, when you don’t do something and then you think – maybe for your whole life – that you should have.’ She took my chin in her hand and moved my face back so that she could look at me. I thought about holding my neck stiff so she couldn’t do that, but then I thought that might hurt, and also I wasn’t so cross by this time.
‘But won’t Simone or Jules regret it that they won’t be there?’
Mommy’s lips went all tight. ‘That is their decision. Which they will have to live with. So, Colette …’ she said. ‘Of course, it’s up to you. I don’t want you to be there if you don’t want to be there. But I just want you to think about what I’ve said. And while you’re thinking about it, I’m going to go and get ready to go. And if you still don’t want to come with me when I come back, that’s fine.’
And then she got up and went out of the dining room. I sat there for a bit, eating little bits of my cold pancake with my fingers. Then I started rubbing the bits before I put them in my mouth and they went all spongy. Aristotle came up and rubbed the side of his face on my leg. He was purring, and it was like he was saying, It’s OK: you can go. I’m OK. So I thought, OK, I’ll go. I kind of knew that that was what I was going to do all along.
But when I got down from the table and picked up my knapsack – the one shaped like a rabbit – I had a weird thought, which was: I wonder what Daddy would do. I don’t mean what he would do really, because Daddy wouldn’t want to watch Marmaduke, he never even watches any films, but I just meant if he was like me or if I was more like him or whatever. Because Mommy sometimes says to me when I don’t know what to do about something – she says: OK. What would Daddy do? And I thought: he wouldn’t go. He’d stay in and do movie night.
* * *
Eli and Violet were married quickly, in the manner of wartime romances. Eli was one of many American soldiers stationed in the UK in preparation for the D-Day landings, and the possibility that he might not return from Europe propelled their engagement almost as fast as the Nazi bullets over the dunes of Normandy. This possibility – that Eli might be killed in action – was what defined their love in its early stages. It was a possibility that Eli seemed to hold, Violet felt, ironically: he would talk about his chances of dying with a smirk and a raised eyebrow, his voice slowing to that Geiger-counter drawl it always did when he wanted to signal that nothing of what he was saying was serious. She had never met anyone so infused with irony, so unable to present any statement as the thing itself, always implying that nothing was truly meant. This applied across the board to Eli’s discourse, whether in the matter of their love, his death, or who they should invite to their wedding.
The one picture Violet still owns of their wedding day lies in the same shoebox that contains Eli’s love letters. Her back cracks like an ice cube tray as she bends to pick it up from underneath her single bed, laid as ever with too much bedding – her bed seems to have a belly, Violet always thinks, reminiscent of those on the malnourished African children she sometimes sees on the television news. She once mentioned this to one of the maids, Mandy, but then felt anxious that it might have been a wrong thing to say, as Mandy, like all the maids and most of the nurses, is black. The presence of so many coloured people makes Violet anxious. She is not intrinsically racist: like most of her generation, it is more that the presence of black people around her, existing in a taken-for-granted, unremarked-on manner, serves as a constant reminder that the world is no longer the one she knows.
The box, however, is too far under the mattress for her to reach just by bending, and getting down on her knees is out of the question – she imagines the joints turning to powder at the first touch of the hard, dark lino. Bewildered, she sits down on her one armchair, a high-backed plum-red reproduction antique, last reupholstered in 1973, but still plush enough to look faintly outrageous in this setting. Violet knows that if she sits long enough, she will forget what it was she was concerned about, anyway: when this first started to happen it was intensely worrying, but lately she has begun to think of it as a comfort.
Before her memory has a chance to erase the issue of the shoebox, though, she remembers her walking stick, waiting for her at the door like a faithful dog. Getting out of the chair, with its relatively deep cushion, is difficult; halfway up, her elbows lock and her arms tremble – making her look for a second like a gymnast straining on the parallel bars – before she pushes herself off.
She retrieves the stick from the door. Violet’s walking stick was a present from her sister: as Valerie didn’t forbear to mention, it cost over £40. Violet likes it, likes the feel of the silver-plated handle, and knows the stout brown wood of the shaft will not easily break, but has enough of a sense of irony herself to feel the sad absurdity of a walking stick being her one luxury item. She goes back to the bed – not a long walk: her room, kitchenette included, is something of a shoebox itself – and, bending again, flails the stick back and forth under the bed, knocking out first her crocheted slippers, before hitting something heavier with a clang: it is her chamber pot, thankfully empty. She breathes heavily, and tries again: this time, her stick alights on something that feels right. She drags it towards her and, sure enough, eventually, the edge of the shoebox, its top askew, appears by her feet.
Another difficult bend to pick it up: the box is heavier than she had imagined. When she sits back down with it on her lap, she realizes why this is – having thought the shoebox contained only her letters from Eli and her wedding photo, it has over the years become a more general repository. Inside are crinkled black-and-white photos of her nephews and nieces as children, less crinkled, colour photos of their children, a random brooch, an old purse, and the letter from Redcliffe House saying how pleased they were to accept her application for a room. There are also photographs of her, eerie images of her girlhood, so po-faced it seems as if she must have grown up in a much earlier era, before people understood that the thing to do on camera was smile, plus one fragment of her as a young adult on a beach, waving and grinning and holding her coat around herself for warmth. And then there it is, sepia as a cell from a silent film: her wedding photograph. It has a strange, lopsided composition: she is standing flanked by her family, her mother and father and Valerie, their smiles tight with self-consciousness, but there is no one except Eli on his side, because he didn’t invite any relatives.
Violet remembers the day. It was April, and spitting with rain. She had wanted to wait until later in the summer so as to guarantee the weather but the shadow of Eli’s imminent dispatch to France made that impossible. In the photograph, the rain has polished the steps of Streatham Town Hall, on which they are standing, black. Violet had always imagined a church wedding, but Eli hadn’t been keen.
‘Why not?’ Violet had said, already feeling the clench of anxiety in her stomach that always accompanied any attempt to challenge him. This discussion took place in the Piccolo, a café near Liverpool Street station: he had only time for a short meeting before catching a train back to his barracks near Colchester. It was January, and the radiators were on full blast, steaming up the windows – though the one they were sitting by produced more noise than heat, for which Violet, in
her woollen winter coat, was grateful.
‘Oh, come on, Birdy,’ he said, his eyes fixed on his spoon, idling in the froth of his coffee, ‘let’s not fight.’
Birdy was a name he had started calling her one night coming back from the pictures. They used to go every Friday to the Streatham Astoria, a place Violet loved. It was like an Egyptian palace, she thought, with its columns and murals and friezes in red, green and gold; even in the ladies’ toilets there was a wall-painting of a figure bathing in a lotus pool. They’d seen a movie about a female internment camp in France, in which the prisoners put aside all their differences to help hide a group of shot-down British airmen from the Nazis: it was called Two Thousand Women. One of the women was played by Jean Kent, who Eli always said Violet looked like. In the film, this character was called Bridie, and Eli said, on exiting the Streatham Astoria, that he was more convinced than ever that Violet looked like her, so he swapped round the I and the R and started calling her Birdy. It made no real sense, but formed part of a happy memory, and so had stuck.
She looked away, hurt by the implication that they were a couple who regularly fought, the truth being that their relationship – or, at least, what sense of their relationship she could garner from an engagement conducted so far mainly in letters and snatched meetings – ran very smooth, certainly compared to what she had seen in other couples. Gwendoline and her husband rowed so much that Violet sometimes wondered if Henry, a conscientious objector, wasn’t trying to fight his own war within the confines of their tiny flat in Shoreditch.
She also knew, however, that their freedom from fighting depended on her assumed complicity; so felt the fist in her stomach tighten, even before she decided to continue:
The Death of Eli Gold Page 9