The Death of Eli Gold

by David Baddiel

  ‘I Never Went To Church’ by The Streets is just finishing. Tears well in his eyes at its lachrymose working-class poetry, its straightforward setting of the coordinates of love and death on the father–son graph. He can feel his ears sweating into the leather cushions of his headphones: they are big proper headphones, not in-ear ones. Harvey has never found a pair of in-ear ones that don’t become out-ear ones while jogging, so he wears these ones, aware that he looks a bit silly, a bit like a very sweaty DJ. As he comes off the running track, back towards Fifth Avenue and Mount Sinai Hospital, he hears Helen Reddy start up: I am woman … It doesn’t work at first – it doesn’t pump him up. There are tracks that can do this while running: that can make him suddenly take off, his feet and lungs made exuberant by song, powered by music. Reddy’s jaunty feminist anthem, though, has an apparent lyrics problem: she’s not, he thinks, really speaking to me, is she? But then, as he runs on the spot, waiting for the WALK sign to contradict the DON’T WALK sign and allow him to cross Fifth Avenue, the music swells, and Reddy starts singing about how she might be bent, but she can’t broke, it all just makes her more determined etc etc, and it sort of all becomes relevant, to him, to Harvey Gold. Simplistic, yes; imbued with that tinpot heroic defiance that Americans so love, yes; but sometimes when you are running and exhausted and on the edge of collapse both physically and psychologically that stuff doesn’t really matter: and so, he can feel the music do its trick, raising him up to the higher ground, and, because he is running on the spot, it feels like it’s actually winding him up, so that when the green WALK light does eventually come on, he’s off like a rocket, his feet sweeping over first tarmac and then sidewalk in double time, triple time, as the backing singers and the brass take it to the bridge. It’s what he needs to hear, as he powers up Museum Mile, seeing pedestrians swerve in anticipation of his approach. Lost in music, unembarrassed for the moment about his voice, made more tone-deaf than ever because he can’t hear it above Helen Reddy’s, he joins in: singing about how strong he is, how invincible – and there it is, the looming grey-black central tower of Mount Sinai, from whose top floor he can imagine his father’s sightless eyes looking out. He reaches the reassuring blue canopy of the Madison entrance, and, feeling his soul swell, he shout-sings: I am woman! It doesn’t halt him – if anything it makes him feel more lifted – but at the same time it makes him laugh, and then, the laughter breaks up his breathing and forces him to cough, and he deflates, all the air and energy rushing out of him like a flying balloon, holding onto the side of the revolving doors while doctors come in and out, one or two of them looking as if they might ask him whether or not he needs to be admitted. He shakes his head, but at the same time can’t breathe: no sound comes out of his mouth. He takes out his iPhone to halt the doctors looking at him, to avoid embarrassment, to stop the music which now is making him feel mad, but also because he thinks of the iPhone as something of a mother box, the sentient mini-computer worn by Mister Miracle and Orion and Metron in Jack Kirby’s New Gods series, comics he remembers reading as a very little boy still living in America. The mother box always saved them when they were at their most vulnerable. He knows that thinking this in terms of his own present predicament is completely ridiculous, but still, getting out the iPhone does in fact work – yes, it is his mother box: just holding it in his hand and looking at the still blue earth on its screen calms him down, and jump-starts his lungs, allowing him to breath normally, stopping him from having to think about which songs on the machine might be picked out to form a suitable playlist for dying.

  Although, in hindsight, Harvey agrees with Stella that the jacket he wore last time he came to see Eli was overdoing it, he wishes now, watching the enormous brick head of the security guard shake slowly from side to side, that he was wearing it again. It probably wouldn’t make any difference, but the edge might be taken off the unauthorized nature of his showing up here if he was wearing … he doesn’t know: anything, rather than this sweat-soaked hoody and falling-down tracksuit pants complete with has-he-shat-himself? gusset and oversize headphones. However much he doesn’t feel unlike one, at least he wouldn’t actually look like a homeless nutter.

  ‘Oh come on,’ he says, knowing that one thing that never changes these blokes’ minds is an irritated tone of peevish entitlement, but finding it coming out of his mouth nonetheless, ‘you know who I am. You let me in on Monday.’

  The guard breathes heavily out of his nose: the exhale, to Harvey, had just a tiny element of a snarl.

  ‘I let a number of people in on Monday, sir.’

  ‘And you remember me?’

  The guard raises an eyebrow, as if to say, Don’t try and get into my head. Mind games cut no ice with me. His hand goes to his earphoned ear.

  ‘I let a number of people in on Monday, sir, and I would let any of those people in again today, were their names on the list. Your name is not on my list. For today.’

  Harvey feels his anxiety symptoms, damped down by the run, starting up again, one by one: throat constriction, heaviness in his legs, hot flushes, nausea.

  ‘Am I on the list for tomorrow?’

  ‘Would you like me to check, sir?’

  ‘Well, if you could tell me the day when my father is going to die, and then the day my name is under, and persuade me that the former day is after the latter, that would be most reassuring.’

  The snarling exhale again, followed by a flicking up of the black clipboard to his chest: Harvey sees the small indentation the plastic makes in the puffy satin of the jacket. He decides to try a different tack.

  ‘Look, mate,’ Harvey is never comfortable with mate, neither as a jocular, friendly form of address nor as a stressed grace note of aggression, but he finds it coming out of his mouth here nonetheless, ‘what’s your name?’

  ‘My name?’

  ‘Yes, your name.’

  The security guard looks at him for what seems to Harvey an inordinately long time before answering: ‘John.’

  ‘OK, John, the thing is … is it really John?’

  ‘What?’ For a moment, the security guard looks genuinely angry, possibly because he is thinking What did you assume my name was? Leroy? Winston? MC Secure?

  ‘No, I just thought – y’know – John. It’s a bit obvious. Like I’m not saying you are – but when you are – I don’t mean you, specifically, I mean one – when one is lying – about one’s name, John’s like the first name you think of.’

  The blank look again: then, very Americanly:

  ‘Sir: my name is John.’

  Harvey nods. ‘OK, John.’ What to do here? Harvey sometimes tries, when faced with irrationality, to become, in response, over-rational: to outflank the person blocking him or arguing with him or shouting at him by a detached deconstruction of the situation. It is a strategy learnt from his father. It is worth a go, he thinks.

  ‘The thing is, John, though, when someone dies – especially when that person is important or famous and stuff – people can kind of go into a sort of competition over them. Over who controls their death. Who owns it. Because nothing says this person is the one that really matters in my life more than being the one who owns your death. Right?’

  John blinks rapidly at him, drawing Harvey’s notice to his eyelashes, which are long and womanly. Have I gone so far, Harvey thinks, that I am now unable not to notice female features, even when they are on male faces?

  ‘And here’s the thing: Freda’s great, of course, but she is …’ he says, intending to open out his thoughts, to touch on the uselessness of such competition, the speciousness of the idea that death can be owned, the family harmony and openness that would surely be preferable at this time, and other, attendant, thoughts, but John interrupts.

  ‘Someone has to be in control, sir,’ he says, ‘in every circumstance. Even death. And in this case …’ and here he jerks his anvil neck backwards to gesture inside the room: Harvey follows the movement towards a quarter-view of Freda’s back bent over the bed, min
istrating, ‘… it is Mrs Gold.’

  Harvey’s soul sinks. He remembers, too late, how this strategy learnt from his father only ever works for his father.

  ‘Excuse me,’ says a voice beside him. Harvey looks round. A man is waiting, hovering, almost as if he is waiting in line to speak to the security guard, but not quite: something about him suggests that he would be able to walk straight into the room, with perhaps no more than a passing nod at the gatekeeper, but is too polite to do that while Harvey is stuck. Harvey looks at him, at the springy, receding grey hair and the black eyes, and the air, despite his age, of muscularity, of contained power, and then they come, goose pimples so large and fat it feels as if a layer of clothes have moved away from his body.

  ‘Mr Roth … I’m Harvey … Eli’s son …’

  ‘Well, pleased to meet you, Harvey, even at such a sorry time. Please …’ he says – and there it is, the passing nod: it is returned by the security guard with an accepting shift to the side – grasping the door handle and opening the door slightly, ‘let me follow you in.’

  * * *

  So some more people came to see Daddy today. Some new doctors I hadn’t seen before, and my weirdo half-brother and Uncle Philip, who’s another really famous writer. He’s like the No. 2 best writer in the world after Daddy. I call him Uncle Philip but he’s not really my uncle he’s just a really old friend of Daddy. When I heard he was coming I said to Mommy maybe Uncle Philip’ll be pleased that Daddy is dying ’cos then he’ll be the No. 1 writer in the world, but she said no, because him and Daddy were such friends – ‘notwithstanding,’ she said, ‘Philip’s terrible review of Absent in Body in the New Yorker, which Eli was of course good enough to forgive him for – eventually …’ I have no idea what she was talking about; she does that sometimes, and when you say What? or Sorry? or I don’t understand she does that breathy laugh and that little wave of her hand in front of her face, which means that she’s kind of forgotten that you’re there.

  So there was him and the doctors and The Larvae – that’s what I’m calling him – it wasn’t my idea, it was Jada’s, I was telling her on the phone about how creepy my half-brother was and how he my makes my skin crawl a bit like it does when I know there’s a scary bug in the room, and she said, ‘Harvey the Larvae’. I didn’t know what larvae was but they’ve just done it in science class. She told me – urggh – and I felt a bit tickly inside about calling him that – it seemed a bit too horrible, but it made me laugh and she said it again and before you knew it that’s what we were calling him.

  So, anyway, I don’t know what it is about The Larvae that makes me feel weird about him, but I didn’t feel so bad about calling him that after what happened today. He came in following Uncle Philip – and Philip was really nice: he came right up to me and said hi and shook my hand and said how sorry he was that Daddy was ‘poorly’ – that was the word he used, ‘poorly’: I liked it – but The Larvae came in just looking at the floor and not looking at me and Mommy like he wasn’t even supposed to be there even though he is Daddy’s son. He was wearing this horrible running top and trousers and he looked all red. Mommy smiled at him and gave him a kiss on the cheek but I was watching and I could see that her lips didn’t touch his skin and I knew that meant that she wasn’t really pleased to see him. She gave Philip a proper hug, one of her specials that go on for like over a minute. He kissed her. I couldn’t see his lips from where I was standing but I’m sure they touched her skin. Mommy’s got lovely skin, especially for a Mommy. Some of the mommies at my school are the same age but look a load older.

  The Larvae didn’t say much to me – he smiled but the sort of smile when you don’t mean it, like when you don’t really want to have to your picture taken. I could tell all he was interested in was Uncle Philip. It was like he sort of couldn’t believe that Philip was there. I saw him when Philip was talking to Mommy or one of the doctors, just staring at him with his mouth open and his eyes all wide like Philip was a magical king or Robert Pattinson or someone.

  Anyway then – like ALWAYS – all the grown-ups went and stood around Daddy’s bed like meerkats looking at him and looking at each other and I went and sat in my chair in the corner with my Nintendo DS Lite. Mommy didn’t want me to have a DS Lite at first – she doesn’t approve of video games, so we haven’t got an Xbox or a Nintendo Wii or anything. I have got a computer – a Macbook – but Mommy got them to set it at the shop so I can only look at websites that she likes, like kbears.com or learnit.org. There’s something called Stardoll that Jada’s a member of, where you get to make your own girl who you can dress up and buy make-up for, which she’s showed me once at her house, and I really liked it, and tried to get Mommy to join me (you have to pay, like, ten dollars a month for it) but when I showed her she said I couldn’t. I said why but she wouldn’t explain; but later I got up in the night after they put me to bed to go the bathroom and I heard her talking to Daddy (this was before he got properly sick) about it, and she said all this stuff about sex, and children, and abuse, which I know is a really bad thing. I didn’t know how Stardoll could be that. Then she stopped speaking suddenly and I thought that maybe she’d worked out I was listening so I went back to bed.

  But then when Daddy got really sick and we started to have to spend so much time in the hospital that Dr Chang (who works with Dr Ghundkhali) said to her that maybe she could get me a DS Lite, because otherwise, he said, ‘it could just get too boring for a kid’. Mommy got a bit angry at that, because I don’t think she thinks it’s at all boring in the hospital, but then he said quickly – maybe because he could see that she was angry – that you can get Brain Training. Mommy didn’t know what that was, but Dr Chang explained, and I could see she still wasn’t sure, but I said I would like one, and then just at that point Daddy made a small moan so she kind of just said oh all right yes, because I think she didn’t want to think about it any more.

  So now I play on it a lot of the time we’re at the hospital. I have Brain Training and Dr Kawashima – who looks a bit like Dr Chang, only older – has put me up to Level 4 on the writing and Level 3 on the math. Jada gave me her copy of Purr Pals, and sometimes I play that as well. I have three kittens I look after. One of them is just like Aristotle and of course I named him Aristotle. I was feeding him with the stylus, when Uncle Philip said he had to go. He said goodbye to Daddy first – well, he didn’t say anything, he just held Daddy’s hand for quite a long time – and then Mommy. She gave him another big, big hug, and then moved away from him but still holding his hands a bit like they used to dance in the olden days. She was smiling at him but crying at the same time: not big crying – just one or two tears coming out of her eyes. I went back to feeding Aristotle and then started him off playing with the ball of wool and when I looked up they were still holding hands. Then he came over to me and bent down and I showed him Purr Pals and he pretended to be interested in it for a bit like grown-ups do, and then said, ‘It was lovely to see you, Colette: I hope I see you again soon’ and stroked my hair which I don’t really like people doing but he had such a nice face and big, strong old man hands that I didn’t mind.

  Then he got up and I think he was looking around for The Larvae to say goodbye to him, but then he popped up, from behind him, with a really worried look on his face and said:

  ‘Mr Roth … I just wanted to say … something I’ve been wanting to say to you for ever …’

  And then he stopped and looked over his shoulder back towards Mommy like he was checking whether or not she was listening or something but she wasn’t, she was in one of her huddles with all the doctors, and straight away I knew what he wanted to do. I don’t know how this happens to me sometimes. Maybe it’s to do with being the daughter of the world’s greatest living writer or something, but sometimes I can just tell what people are going to say before they say it. Ages ago, when I was like, seven, Jada was going to tell me that she thought maybe she liked Hairspray more than she liked High School Musical now, but all she
got to say was ‘Colette’ and I said, ‘I know. Me too …’ and that was it, we both just knew what it was she’d been going to say. It’s amazing.

  Anyway, I knew he wanted to tell Uncle Philip that he thought he was a really great writer. Not just that: I knew he wanted to tell Uncle Philip that he was the best writer in the world. Already. Like before Daddy was even dead. That he thought that even before Daddy was even dead, Uncle Philip was the No. 1 writer in the world. I wasn’t going to let that happen. So when he turned his head back round again, I stood up and said, really loudly:

  ‘Daddy can hear everything that is said in this room. He might look like he can’t, but he can. He can hear everything!’

  They both turned to look at me. Uncle Philip just looked a bit confused, but I knew I was right because The Larvae looked really, really frightened, and kind of caught out, like Leo from the next door apartment looked when Mommy came into my room and caught him showing me his winky-wonk.

  ‘He can hear everything and he can understand everything!’