The Death of Eli Gold

by David Baddiel

  Everyone was looking at me now, all the doctors and nurses as well, and I thought about telling them. I thought about saying, ‘Harvey was about to tell Uncle Philip that he was the best writer in the world!’ but instead I just stared and stared at him, letting him know that I knew. And then Mommy rushed over and gave me a hug, and said, over and over again, You’re right darling he can, you’re so right, he can hear everything.

  Then no one said anything: and then Philip turned back to The Larvae and said, ‘Sorry, Harvey, what was it you wanted to tell me?’ But he just shrugged his shoulders and looked down and mumbled something about hoping to see him another time and so Philip smiled and nodded and put his coat on and left.

  I carried on just staring at The Larvae. He stared back at me. He looked sort of sad but sort of furious as well. Then Mommy, who was still holding onto me, turned round, and then we were both staring at him.

  Chapter 6

  RW: What would you say your relationship with your wife was like?

  [pause]

  EG: It was very beautiful.

  RW: … OK.

  EG: What is your relationship with your wife like, Commissioner Webb?

  RW: I’m not married, Mr Gold. eg: Oh? rw: Divorced.

  EG: I see.

  RW: She was a Mormon, wasn’t she?

  [pause]

  RW: Pauline …

  EG: She came from that background, yes.

  RW: But no longer believed?

  EG: She had her own belief system. It was longer dependent on the teachings of Joseph Smith, no.

  [pause]

  RW: In my experience, someone brought up in that environment never entirely loses their faith. Or at least, their need to believe.

  EG: Is that right …

  RW: My sense is that they simply find something else to worship. Instead of God.

  EG: Uh-huh.

  [pause: shuffling of papers]

  RW: Showing Mr Gold case document R45/110, a testimony from Mrs Gold’s psychoanalyst …

  EG: This is from Rosynski?

  RW: Yes.

  EG: But surely this is unethical?

  RW: What is?

  EG: Revealing information divested during analysis.

  RW: We interviewed him. He gave it freely. But if he hadn’t, we would in a case like this have been able to impose a –

  EG: He gave it freely?

  RW: Yes.

  [pause]

  EG: Well, I shan’t be recommending him to any of my friends again.

  RW: What do you make of his testimony?

  [shuffling of papers]

  RW: Mr Gold has handed back document R45/110.

  EG: I don’t think it’s ethical for me to see this.

  RW: I beg your pardon?

  EG: It’s Pauline’s intimate stuff. For me to see it breaks every code that should exist between analyst and analysand.

  RW: Are you suggesting – what? – that you reading this might screw up the transference, between Pauline and her analyst?

  EG: No. You mistake me –

  RW: Hey, I know that there’s a lot of debate in psychoanalytic circles as to when analysis ends – that some people think that it never ends, it’s an ongoing, open-ended process – but you know what: I think death kind of draws a line under it, don’t you?

  [pause]

  EG: You’re a wit, aren’t you, Commissioner Webb? I bet you really wow them at the annual NYPD dinner. Why did your wife leave you? It couldn’t possibly have been because of your lack of sense of humour.

  RW: My wife didn’t leave me.

  EG: Oh. You left her? Some younger snatch catch your eye over the doughnuts? Someone with bigger tits and smoother skin who giggled and mooned over how clever and funny you are, how not like a normal cop at all? ‘Oh Commissioner Webb, no one else in the department knows anything about Freud, please do let me put your cock in my mouth while you talk to me some more about transference.’

  [pause]

  RW: Well, since you won’t read it, let me summarize for you. Arnold Rosynski, who had been Mrs Gold’s therapist for the last four years – her entry into therapy having been suggested by you, Mr Gold: we have no record of your wife ever having any previous psychological issues – he concludes that Mrs Gold was not what he calls an endogenous depressive. That is, he does not think that she was either psychologically or genetically given to depression. That therefore she was a reactive depressive: that is …

  EG: I know what a reactive depressive is, Commissioner.

  RW: That is, that the depression which Mrs Gold was clearly suffering from, particularly in the last year, was a result of some stress in her life. Only Arnold Rosynski doesn’t think that Mrs Gold’s depression was straightforwardly produced by stress. He describes it as being linked, and he’s clear about this, to your depression.

  EG: So she became depressed from living with a depressive. What’s new?

  RW: You were depressed because …? eg: Now you see you’ve revealed yourself as not quite as up to speed with psychoanalysis as you pretend to be. If you were, you would perhaps know that finishing the sentence ‘I am depressed because …’ in no more than fifteen words is not that simple.

  RW: No. I see that. Perhaps you could help me out then? You haven’t written anything for three years. You have a number of children from previous marriages who I believe you’ve lost contact with. Reviews of your attempts to enter the art world were, to the say the least, mixed. You have prostate cancer.

  EG: Well, thanks very much for detailing those things …

  RW: … although I believe the cancer is now in remission, yes?

  EG: ‘On hold’ I think would be a better way of putting it.

  RW: So it was … the depression …?

  [pause]

  RW: Let’s put that to one side for the moment. Rosynski goes on to say that what seemed unique to him about Mrs Gold’s depression is it wasn’t just caused by your depression – which he admits is not uncommon, it being, as you say, stressful to live with a depressive. He says that he thinks that ‘Pauline Gold felt in some way that to be not depressed while her husband was so depressed was, in some way, a failure: a failure both marital and intellectual. For her to be happy – for her even to be unhappy, but not pathologically or clinically so – while her husband was depressed would indicate a disjunction between the two of them that she was not willing to contemplate. A better description of her condition than reactive depression would be copycat depression.’

  [pause]

  RW: How is your depression at the moment, Mr Gold?

  He stops reading. His face is washed in the white backlight of the screen. He is tired. He shuts the computer down. Feeling himself invisible in the dark, he decides to chance a cigarette. He feels for the packet and lighter and puts a stick in his mouth and lights it. He lies back on the thin pillow of his bed and lets his lungs absorb the kick. Each time the tip glows, he sees, dimly, the face of Jesus.

  * * *

  The other channels, Violet thinks: how would I get them on my television? She only really understands three channels, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV; and even ITV she never used to watch when she properly watched TV, when she lived in Cricklewood. It wasn’t snobbery – it wasn’t that middle-class 1970s English thing of drawing a horrified line in the cultural sand, on one side of which was Play for Today, Panorama, Face the Music, and on the other Benny Hill. It was choice: she had grown up in a world where there wasn’t that much choice, in any realm – food, husbands, leisure activities – and there was a comfort in that. Lack of choice was a safe place: you just worked with what was at hand, and didn’t fret all the time about getting it wrong. So the idea that, at any given viewing moment, she was at liberty to choose one of three options – it was too much: two was enough.

  But now she wanted more: she didn’t just want the three terrestrial channels, or four or five or whatever it was: she wanted Sky and Virgin and Bloomberg and Living and Bravo and TCM and UK Gold. She didn’t know what kind
of programmes they showed on these channels, but she had seen their names come up when the nurses flicked through the numbers on the big television in the living room, and assumed that all must have news programmes, like the ordinary channels did. That was what she wanted, news, news like she had read could be found on the television now, ‘rolling’ news broadcasts, the constant giving out of the world’s stories to the world. She had seen something of that on the downstairs TV when it was left on BBC News 24, but that wasn’t quite it. Violet doesn’t know it but what she wants is CNN: she wants the world refracted through America.

  She wants news about Eli. Since that first item, caught by chance last week, she has heard his name a couple of times: a discussion on some BBC2 review programme, concentrating mainly on who might next be crowned ‘the world’s greatest living writer’, and an update on his condition on Channel 4’s breakfast news. She was surprised there wasn’t more, as long-drawn-out demises of the famous seemed to provide a good story for TV these days: she remembers that when the footballer George Best went into hospital for the last time, there seemed to be reports on the TV every five minutes charting his worsening condition. Surely Eli’s more important than a footballer? Surely there should be more information about how he is than there was about George Best? But the calibration of fame has not been clear to her for years: she doesn’t know who most of the people who are famous now are, or why they are well known. All she knows is that they are all young. When she herself was young, the famous – a small group: film stars, major politicians, the royal family – were not. So perhaps now that you have to be young to be famous, to be famous and dying is, in most cases, oxymoronic.

  She could sit downstairs in the living room but the nurses do not keep the communal television on the news programmes for very long. She has noticed from the way they frown and flick forward whenever a newsreader appears that they are concerned, presumably, that the news might disturb the inmates: all that death, too near the arthritic, liver-spotted knuckle. This presents a problem, though, as the news could sometimes seem the only programme on the television now designed for people over twenty-two, and they have to flick even more quickly through swearing men on panel shows and topless women on reality ones before settling, thumbs aching, on whichever shopping or travel show might provide the requisite reassuring wallpaper. This goes against the mission statement of Redcliffe House to ‘allow residents the highest level of independence their health permits’, but most people had their own televisions anyway, and it meant that at least there weren’t geriatrics rowing over the remote control.

  Violet bends down, her back cracking, and looks at the eight buttons to the side of the Hitachi’s bulging green screen. Eight: that had seemed so many, so outlandishly futuristic, when she bought it. Also the buttons – at the time; now two of them don’t work at all – were touch-sensitive, the merest stroke lighting them up red and changing the channel. There had been something sensual in that. Valerie hated this television, Violet remembers: partly because she saw it as an outrageous encroachment on her territory that her sister should have purchased something sophisticated (something with all mod cons), and partly because while watching it for the first time, on a family visit with the young Jeremy and David, Valerie had sneezed, and a split-second later, the channel changed, from BBC2 to ITV. There had been a moment of uncertainty, then Jeremy had started laughing and then David, although he was only four and was mainly laughing because his brother was, and finally Violet herself. Valerie sniffed and adjusted her flower-patterned skirt and looked away, saying, ‘Obviously, there’s something wrong with it’, but the laughter continued, racking up into hysteria at the idea of an invisible bullet of mucus shooting from Valerie’s pinched, oval nostril in a perfect parabola all the way to the touch-sensitive button. Shaking, tears running down her cheeks, Violet remembers feeling stupid and not a little bit scared of her sister’s glowering detachment, but unable to stop, at one with the children and their mad hilarity and unable to get over the invisible fence back to sedate adulthood.

  Eight buttons: it wasn’t anywhere near enough now to cover the waterfront of television, even if she knew how to tune them in, if tune them in was what you still did: maybe now you just picked up the channels – what was the word? – wirelessly or whatever. The word made her remember that, of course, she did have a radio – she called it a wireless – a Phillips portable bought she couldn’t remember when: she had stuck a small piece of black gaffer tape, cut into a thin arrowhead, over the wavelength meter where Radio 4 could be found. But even Radio 4 didn’t seem to be mentioning Eli that much: she had heard an item about him on the Today programme the morning after she had seen the television report about his hospitalization but nothing since. Although she didn’t listen as much as she used to now, because of her hearing – most of the time she couldn’t hear it, and turning up the volume made the sound reverberate uncomfortably through the metallic filter of her hearing aid, making her feel as if her head were inside the tinny, tiny speaker.

  Perhaps she could ask Gordon, the handyman at Redcliffe House, about how to retune the TV; but she felt she would be wasting his time, or, worse, he might say that she needed to buy some piece of equipment. That was the problem, starting a chain of events that would lead inevitably to her being placed out of her depth, holding out a pathetic piece of paper with some Japanese name scrawled on it to a young man with terrifying hair in a shop full of minuscule plastic gadgets with screens on them so small she couldn’t imagine how they could be viewed without a magnifying glass. Violet often ruminated on scenarios like this, everyday places, everyday errands, where just being the age she was laid her open to extreme humiliation. Lately, her imagination of such scenarios was becoming darker. Thinking on this one she sees herself, once ignored – once the young man has shrugged at the piece of paper and turned away to another customer – screaming and pulling her skirt up and defecating on the grey carpeted floor, between the rows of devices and the rows of cables designed to plug them into each other.

  Turn it on, then, she thinks. But she doesn’t: she just stares at the television, at its heft, its wood, its obsolescence; at its eight buttons, two of them not working, and then at the screen. She has the big light on in her room – it was another dark, soaking day – and she can see, in the screen, her room reflected. Violet likes her room – she likes the floral wallpaper, and the little Persian rug, and the dark brown wardrobe, and the neatly made single bed, and the small folding table by the window on which she sometimes ate – but in this reflection, fore-shortened and misted by the opaque television glass, it looks nightmarish. And then, unexpectedly, she sees her face. The only place she sees herself, these days, is in the one mirror in her bathroom, and she tends not to stop and look there: it is too much to see herself naked, to take in all the crumpling and the falling and the folding in of the flesh. It is a job of work.

  But here she is, on the television: Violet Gold, on the television. She doesn’t, she thinks, look too bad. She has learnt to expect the worst from shock appearances of herself, in shop windows or taxicab mirrors. She is familiar with the confusion, the moment of uncertainty about who exactly this buttoned-up and snowy-haired old dear hobbling through the puddles might be. But she remembers from when she was younger, from when she used deliberately to look at herself, that some mirrors were better than others. The mirror she particularly liked to see herself in was not a mirror at all: she remembers the one good thing about her journey to work every day, on the tube, was her reflection in the train glass. She first noticed it when she was still with Eli, when her daily route took her down on the Bakerloo line into town, before getting the Drain across to Monument, the stop for International Shipbrokers Ltd. If she could get a seat, and there wasn’t a wall of pinstriped trousers in the way, as the train moved out of the light of the platform and into the darkness of the tunnel, an image would appear, behind the head of the passenger opposite: herself.

  She could hold this reflection – given commut
er comings and goings, and its disappearance in stations – for most of the journey. Violet had never thought of herself as beautiful, despite her awareness when young that attracting men came easy enough to her; but there was something beautiful about this ghost of her, fading and reappearing against black. She had read in Everywoman that sometimes starlets and models adjusted lights or put Vaseline on lenses in order to disguise skin flaws, and maybe it was just a subway version of this, but there was something else, something more than just the taking away of bad detail. Marriage to Eli had removed most of her sense of self, and when she looked in one of the two mirrors they owned in their tiny flat, she knew that she wasn’t looking at herself for herself, but only for him. He often seemed to be lurking behind her when she looked at her reflection, smiling in the knowledge that he had compiled the checklist she was mentally ticking off. This, though, this foggy angel of the tube, was hers.

  And so was this face in the television. She moved closer to it, closer and closer, feeling the wide green static like a force field on her skin. She had read somewhere in some women’s magazine once of electricity being passed through the skin to remove wrinkles. How many million volts would I need, she thinks, not grimly: it just passes through her mind, like any other thought. The ticklish charge was welcoming, like many tiny fingers touching her face. She shuts her eyes, submitting to the fantasy that the static was stroking her, unborn children, reaching up to touch her skin.

  She only stays in this position for a second; her back hurts too much to bend for so long. She moves away from the screen, and pushes a finger, bent by arthritis into an arrowhead, against the first button. The machine takes its time, but a second or two later a news-reader appears, a black man – Violet feels that mild jolt of surprise she always feels on seeing one on the television wearing a suit and tie – but, no, it is nothing to do with Eli. Something about bigger taxes on cars that pollute the environment, another of the many, many daily stories that do not involve or concern her. It goes to footage of roads and traffic; she switches it off before one of the people, the Green people, says what kind of world are we leaving for our children? They often say this, and she always wants to say, directly to the television, I haven’t got any children.