He sat back in bed and placed his hand on her breast. She could feel the hair on his knuckles brushing her other one. She knew this meant that the talk of moving back in with her family was over.
‘What about your parents?’ she said, with just an edge of resentment.
‘What?’
‘Your parents. We never talk about them.’
He took his hand off. ‘That’s because they’re cunts.’
Violet winced: the word was like a little lash.
‘You shouldn’t talk about them like that.’
‘Why not? They’re my parents. And you’ve never met them. You wouldn’t know if they were cunts or not.’
‘Stop saying that.’
‘My father in particular. He is a terrible cunt. He used to hit me with his belt. And he’s a fat cunt, too, always has been, so it’s a long belt, which he would swing high above his fat head before bringing it down with all his fat weight on my tiny ass.’ He shifted his pillow matter-of-factly, plumping it so that he could sit back comfortably against the wall. Violet felt him settling into his subject. ‘That’s when I was lucky enough to get it on the ass, as opposed to around the face.’
She turned round and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘That’s terrible, love.’ Love felt slightly wrong in this context: it often did when she said it to Eli, not just the verb but also the noun.
‘And here’s the kicker. He doesn’t even drink.’
‘Like you.’
‘Like me.’
She had noticed this. All the men she knew before Eli drank. All the men she knew before Eli met and lived and gave of themselves in the pub: it was their place. It was one of the many confusions for her about their marriage, one of the many practical confusions: what were they supposed to do in the evening if they were not to go to the pub? Many evenings Eli would just stay in and write, and as she did not want to go to the pub by herself, more often than not she would end up spending all night staring at the unlit fireplace.
‘So he didn’t even have that excuse: he’s just a pure sadist. Or he just really hated me.’
‘Eli, I’m sure that’s not true.’
He looked at her, and in his eyes there was contempt – another word that she would not have used before Eli, but she knew it now.
‘How can you be sure of that?’ She didn’t answer. ‘Come on, Birdy, I’d really like to know? How can you be sure?’
‘Because …’
‘He’s my father? My dad? My old man? My parent?’
Violet didn’t answer. She felt the pressure of water pooling behind her eyes.
‘He cheats on my mother all the time, do you know that?’ Eli continued, picking up a cigarette packet – Benson and Hedges: he had given up Newports after the war – by the side of the bed.
‘Cheats?’
‘Unfaithful, Birdy. He fucks other women.’
She had known what it meant: had just been repeating the word. ‘How do you know?’
His lighter flashed bright in the room, dark except for Eli’s tiny table lamp on top of the chest of drawers. The inside of its orange flower-patterned shade was burnt in three places, three brown-black blobs backlit by the 40-watt bulb. The tip of the cigarette glowed red. Violet saw a small cloud swirl from his mouth before Eli sucked it into his lungs, sharp and fast, the same way he consumed food.
‘He boasts about it.’
‘To his son?’
Eli nodded. ‘And to his wife.’
There was a silence. Eli reached up, over the drawer that a few months earlier had killed Violet’s baby, and clicked the light off. It was always up to him when the light went off in their room. Most nights, Violet went to sleep straight away. It was like the switch on the light was a switch on her that Eli controlled, on to look at her naked form, off when he was finished. But this time she stayed awake, aware that, as usual, he did not go straight to sleep, but smoked for a while longer in the dark. She knew that sleep was difficult for him, which was another new complexity; before Eli, she had never heard of the word insomnia, having not imagined sleep to be a condition any more diffi-cult to achieve than waking.
She wondered about what Eli had told her. She wondered why, despite these good reasons to hate, she still felt so uncomfortable with his hatred. She had been brought up with love. Her mother and father existed as concrete blocks of herself. To imagine them so negatively – to imagine them as available for critical analysis of any kind – was to make of one’s parents separate beings, and this felt like untangling the genetic code itself.
But also she wondered if it were true. She had realized this about Eli – that he never quite told the truth. It was the most complicated of his contradictions. He was obsessed with the truth – he would go on and on about how all the writers who everyone else thought were great didn’t tell the truth: the truth about men, and the truth about life, and this was the big thing that Eli Gold’s novels, when they were published, were going to do. And yet, whenever he told a story about something that had happened to the two of them – either back to her, or on the rare occasions where they were in company – the bare facts were always changed and embellished. Violet always told people stuff unvarnished – it never occurred to her to add bits and pieces to make life more interesting. Eli didn’t just add bits and pieces: he pushed events around, he made people say things they hadn’t said, he brought in people who weren’t there – sometimes he would add a whole new ending, changing the entire point of the story. His motive in those cases was clear: to make mundane stories funnier or more entertaining. But here – with this thing about his father – why would anyone do that? Change facts to make things more horrible, more awful than the truth? She felt, obscurely, that Eli would want to do that; but she wouldn’t have been able to articulate why.
‘And your mother,’ she said eventually, the darkness making her feel more exposed, drawing attention to her speech, ‘why is she a …?’
‘Cunt?’
‘Yes.’
Eli drew the sheet over himself, and turned away. She reached out and stroked his back for a few seconds, knowing for sure at least this about her husband, that he liked to be touched. Between his shoulder blades the skin was taut and furred.
‘For not leaving him,’ he said, quietly.
Violet’s stomach rumbles, shaking her from her reverie. The smell of food, or, rather, of cooking – of boiling and fat and elephantine pans – is a constant in Redcliffe House, but normally the body only tunes into it at mealtimes. The noise of her guts is loud enough to make Valerie, proudly unpossessed of a hearing aid, turn. Violet blushes, feeling the heat on her face. She wonders how her skin looks, how the blush will colour around the topology of her face, whether the red will go orange and pink in the whorls on her cheeks. She wonders how it is that she still blushes over this, or any, exhibition of her bodily function, here in this world where involuntary rumbling and farting and pissing and shitting are part of the texture of everyday life. She wonders how strange it is that as the body fails it shows itself more, turning itself inside out and amplifying all its doings. One thing she knows, however, is that all this wondering – it didn’t happen before Eli.
* * *
Harvey hates running. He doesn’t understand what people who like running say about running. People who like running say: ‘It’s hard at first, but then you really get into it.’ No, he thinks, as he watches yet another jogger power effortlessly past him on the running track surrounding Central Park’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, quite the opposite. It’s OK for about twenty-five seconds when you start, and then it becomes an awful, sweat-soaked miasma of pain, and the more you run, the worse it gets. People who like running say: ‘It’s meditative: I get to think about so many things while I run.’ Harvey thinks about one thing: running. How much it hurts, and how soon it’s going to stop.
Nonetheless, he runs. He runs to lose weight – although that would not seem to be working, seeing as his weight has remained on a steady upward tra
jectory since 1994 – and he runs to pay lip service to the idea of keeping fit, but, much more, he runs because it is the only thing that really works for depression. There is a terrible, typical irony in this, in that the major symptom of depression is stasis: depression means exactly that, to be pressed down, and therefore not to want to move; to sit or lie with that weight, in bed, or on a chair, or on the floor. It’s a struggle every time to put on his baggy tracksuit bottoms, but running’s capability of combating depression is – just – worth the depression induced by the idea of running.
Harvey has come to this conclusion after many years of combining therapy with antidepressants. He has tried every antidepressant on the market. Of the standard SSRIs, Prozac made him woozy and insomniac; Paroxetine made him more anxious than before; Citalopram had no effect; Zoloft made him fat. All of them made him anorgasmic. All those teenage years of wishing there was something you could take to hold off orgasm, but it turns out, he would think during the long drawn-out Stella-obviously-bored-and-wishing-it-was-over pumping, it’s hell: who wants to be endlessly tickled once someone has amputated your ability to laugh? The tricyclics were worse: Amitriptyline he’d taken when younger as a sleeping pill, and thus had built up an immunity to, and Imipramine – well – Imipramine just appeared to melt his brain. He would be sitting at his computer and wondering if the radiation from the screen had somehow got inside his head it was so hot. He’d tried a number of newer drugs, including Venlafaxine, an SNRI (Harvey often wondered when they were going to produce a category of anti-depressants called INRI; or perhaps RNLI), which, just out of curiosity – and maybe out of a desire to make it seem like the taking of these drugs was recreational – he used to snort. He would take the two tiny plastic domes apart, like two halves of a Russian doll, spread the powder into a line, and sniff it up through a rolled-up tenner. This had the effect neither of making it more fun, nor of helping it to work. The last one he remembers taking was Buspirin, a cocktail antidepressant – part anxiolytic, part serotonin reuptake inhibitor – which may have been good, but by then he’d taken so many it was impossible to tell: he had no memory of what his default chemical balance was any more.
He stopped taking them, partly because he realized that they did fuck all and partly because he discovered, following one particular incident, that coming off them is worse than coming off crystal meth. He had been in Hong Kong, pitching for Jackie Chan’s autobiography, when his hotel room was broken into, and all his belongings, including his toiletries, stolen. He had three days left before his flight home, and no means of getting hold of a new packet of Buspar or Zoloft or whatever it was. He spent the three days – one of which was supposed to be in the company of Jackie – in his bare hotel room, unsleeping, throwing up, shaking violently and convinced that a colony of ants were burrowing a series of tunnels into his bones. He never got the Jackie Chan gig.
So now he runs. And often, five minutes into a run, he can feel the moment when depression lifts – or, rather, when it bursts. It’s a painful release, similar to that when dabbing Bonjela on his mouth ulcers, like the pain has to maximize before it will go away. He feels the depression in combination, all physical symptoms – hot flushes, pins and needles, anxiety shoots in the stomach – all coming together as one, like when dying people revive for one last time before they vanish. He didn’t always know that running could temporarily relieve depression; he remembers sitting in a Jacuzzi at his local gym after twenty-five minutes on the treadmill and thinking, almost in tears, God, Paroxetine really works.
Another runner, a woman, goes past him along the line of the water. Harvey wonders about trying to catch up with her to see what she looks like. Sometimes he does this while running, justifying it to himself as physically advantageous, a kind of fitness-aiding, less precarious version of his need to get in front of female pedestrians when in his car. Use her unknown beauty as a pacemaker, he tells himself, and starts to move faster, but it turns out that sexual curiosity, even though it may seem to Harvey the most powerful force in the world, isn’t quite enough to take him up to the requisite speed. As her back disappears into the distance, the sun begins to punch its way through the clouds, and a shaft of light moves across the reservoir, making the rhythm of her feet seem in tune with nature.
Harvey takes his iPhone out of the front pocket of his hooded top, and slides a sweaty thumb across the screen in search of the iPod function. He is wearing Bose Noise-Reducing headphones, and has created a new playlist specifically for this run. Harvey cannot just run: he needs to have a number of things in place, things that make it bearable, and the most important is music. He sometimes spends so long creating playlists in order to carry him through his runs that there is no longer any time left to run. When he got his first iPod, he thought: this is the answer, the way through to fitness (music had always been his preferred palliative to the pain of running, but occasional attempts to jog with CD Walkmans and battery-powered radios had proved abortive). And for a while it was: he must have run more often in the first six months after Apple introduced the iPod than at any other time in his life. But then he begun to realize that digital music, so far from improving his listening experience, was destroying it. The thing about pleasure, Harvey has come to realize, after much time not realizing this, is that it has to be rationed or it becomes meaningless. When he was young, music was important to him in ways he knows it will never be again, not simply because only the young truly engage, in an identity franking way, with music, but also because in order to listen to a favourite track, he had to go to his record collection, select the album by hand, clean the vinyl, and position the needle precisely over the correct circular groove. This meant that Harvey – lazy even when young, even before laziness transmuted into the stasis of depression – never did that thing that some of his friends would of listening to the same track over and over again. But it wasn’t just laziness. When he found a song that raised the goose pimples on his flesh – an important sign: Harvey has always looked to his body for evidence of what he does and doesn’t like – he would decide immediately not to play it again for some time, because he knew that the song’s power would have a half-life; that there would come a moment where he would fall out of love with the song, just as he would fall out of love with the various women he attached himself to, and that that moment needed to be deferred as long as possible.
Digital music had screwed all that up. Now, songs that he loves – songs that he thought he might always love, that might keep the goose pimples coming indefinitely – bore him. He does still love these songs, but, because of the ease of access to them which iTunes has provided, he loves them like he still loved the women he continued to be with after the passion had gone. He loves them but the love is underpinned not by desire but nostalgia: by the memory of what they once did to him. He loves them but they do not move him any more: they raise no goose pimples on his flesh. Sometimes he looks for them on his arms, but they never come, and he knows, anyway, that goose pimples are something you feel and then look at, never the other way round. One song – Radiohead’s ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ – is actually now undergoing the painful process of goose-pimple death. During the refrain at the end – Thom Yorke plaintively repeating, over and over, ‘If I could be who you wanted …’ Harvey can almost feel them coming – there is still the slightest stiffening of the hairs on at least one arm – but it’s fleeting, comparable to the movement that might be caused by a light breeze. Once, the ending of ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ could make his arms feel like they were made to brush horses.
It doesn’t make the playlist for this run, which Harvey has put together – even writing the songs down, in his gold leather notebook – with one eye to stiffening his resolve in regards to turning up at his father’s deathbed unsanctioned by Freda:
‘Father, Son’, Peter Gabriel
‘Someday Never Comes’, Creedence Clearwater Revival
‘A Little Soul’, Pulp
‘Everyone Says Hi’, David Bowie
>
‘Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp’, O. C. Smith
‘Never Went To Church’, The Streets
‘I am Woman’, Helen Reddy
‘Not Pretty Enough’, Kasey Chambers
‘Let Me Be Your Yoko Ono’, Bare Naked Ladies
The first five songs are the ones he can find in his library that are actually about fathers and sons. ‘Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp’, which is about a mother who turns to prostitution in order to feed her fourteen children following her husband’s desertion, is not strictly relevant, but Harvey was reckoning on the run taking at least half an hour, and he had to fill up the playlist somehow. Thinking laterally, he then moved away from the parental idea and towards trying to find something self-bolstering, something that would take away the anxiety – not the big anxiety, not his umbrella anxiety, but the local anxiety about feeling that he isn’t really allowed to just turn up at the hospital. The sort of song that had come to mind was one of those big reach-for-the-skies ballads that X Factor and American Idol hopefuls are so keen on – singing out, they imagine, their stellar destiny: all those songs with the word hero in them, ‘Search For The Hero Inside Yourself ’, or ‘A Hero Lies In You’, or ‘Holding Out For A Fucking Hero’. However, he doesn’t like these songs, which means that, rather than searching for the hero inside himself, Harvey has had to search for a song that might make him feel a bit heroic within the songs he already has, and the only one turned out to be ‘I Am Woman’.
His finger taps at the screen, trying to get the volume control to slide up. He is entering his final circuit round the reservoir. More joggers go past him: this time a woman with red curly hair, next to her a male trainer. Harvey watches them go: I am coming last in this race, he thinks. A small part of him wonders if he is deliberately not going that fast, in order to put off the moment of arrival at hospital; another part of him knows that such psychological complexity is all very well, but ignores the greater truth that he is less a runner than a slow plod-der, operating somewhere on the borderline between jogging and power walking. He glances behind him, his neck, unhappy with the movement on top of a bouncing spine, threatening a crick: two more approaching. He imagines himself in the kind of hotel room he always craves, looking out at all the joggers in Central Park: anorexic women in headbands trying to shake off that last sticky pound of flesh; red-faced puffers in suffocating tracksuits; ancient happy-faced couples thinking that these limping miles represent another few months in the life bank; Nike-uniformed almost-athletes radiating their health and power, a living representation of the new zero-tolerance city, free to run in the park without fear of mugging. What were they all doing? Why did they all need to run? Were they all depressed? I had not thought depression had undone so many, Harvey thinks, and then feels embarrassed at the adolescent reference.
The Death of Eli Gold Page 20