The Death of Eli Gold

by David Baddiel

  There is no news about Eli. But she knows what the ultimate news about her ex-husband is going to be. One day, soon, he will die. So why, she thinks to herself as the rain hits her window hard, do I need to know how he is now? It’s all just – what was the word? The opposite to sequel? It was fine not to be able to remember that one, it was not like forgetting the word for curtains or teapot. Prequel. It’s all just prequel.

  The truth, though, was that Violet did not want news. Her craving for it was simply a distortion of her real need, which was to be in advance of the news. Violet knew she was a long way away, in time and space and experience and celebrity, from Eli, but if there was one small shred of her life with him that still counted now it was this: she wanted someone to tell her of his death before the world was told; someone kind, someone nice; someone connected. Her never large sense of self, miniaturized now by age, had only this desire: that she should not stumble upon it in the television or in the papers like everybody else. She had no idea who this person might be, and no real hope of their intervention. But just someone who cared enough to say: Look, I’m really sorry or I hate to have to bring you this information or Violet, I think you should perhaps sit down. Because however much she knew that the news about Eli was coming, she still didn’t want to be surprised, or alarmed, by it.

  * * *

  ‘So what have you got for me?’ says Michaela. The question shakes Harvey, as once again he has been staring. He blinks and looks away, to suggest that he has not been. This looking that he does, at these women – women like Michaela – is different from the usual. It’s not the pressing his nose to the window of Eden that young women inspire, nor the frenzied, scuttling battle of desire and despair his vision fights out every day across the face of Stella. It is a confused looking. He can see that Michaela was once beautiful, but this realization does not inspire the consequent pity – is this patronizing, this pity, Harvey wonders? Would the feminists think so? – that lost beauty usually does. This is because someone has gone into Michaela’s face and rerouted its arc towards decay: someone with knives and syringes and chemicals. The confusing thing for Harvey, however, is that he (Harvey imagines it must be a he – the people who do this, for women, are almost always men) has not exactly rerouted it back to beauty. He has made her face airbrush-smooth, eradicating all the lines and flaps and tiny tree-like veins that connect his eyes directly to darkness. But it is an angular, hard smoothness, like polished wood: it has none of the softness and give and butteriness that causes the young female face to arouse in men like Harvey feelings of hope and wonder – and also, of course, feelings of exclusion and outraged, furious loss.

  Michaela’s face, specifically, has, despite strong resemblances – despite, in fact, looking like a polished wood carving of the same face – none of the softness and give and butteriness of the features of her daughter, Lark. This contrast is heightened – the morning sun, when it’s in your face, thinks Harvey – by the thick New York light streaming in from the Sangster’s restaurant window. He is on one side of the table, and on the other sit Lark and Michaela, who, as well as being her mother, is her manager. Next to them sits Josh, her American PR, a large suit of a man with an incongruous shock of black curly hair. They are having tea.

  ‘Well, I don’t know if my agent told you, but I’m not in the city to work – I’m here because my father is very ill …’

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ says Michaela. Her face betrays no sympathy, but Harvey cannot work out if this is because her overweening commitment to her daughter’s career has made her cold and unfeeling or because her face betrays nothing of anything any more. There is a short pause, during which his eyes flick across towards Lark. He thinks he picks up, in the move of Lark’s eyebrows, some concern for him, but he cannot look at her for long, she is too beautiful: it is like staring at the sun.

  ‘Well, so I haven’t been able to spend as long as I would’ve liked working on this …’

  As he says this, Josh picks up a mock-up of Lark’s autobiography, which sits on the table between two teapots. The cover image – fitted around a hardback book – is Lark, looking up; her hair falls around the already decided title: Lark: A Songbird’s Story. Josh holds it up with both hands, and stares directly over the book at Harvey.

  ‘… but it would be a very interesting book to write, obviously, and I have had some thoughts.’

  He launches into a rotation of all those words again: relevance blah style blah contemporary artist rhubarb rhubarb MySpace generation. He says this stuff on autopilot: his mouth is saying it, while in his mind he is still wondering what it is about Michaela’s face that marks it out as not-young, despite every mark of ageing having been erased from it. It makes him pleased that he has never brought up the subject of plastic surgery to Stella – it has occurred to him, of course; he has sneaked a look at those Holocausty before-and-after photographs on surgeons’ websites – as the trauma would clearly not have been worth the final result.

  ‘Sounds great,’ says Josh, when he has finished. Josh beams, his teeth so American white against the blackness of his hair they seem actually to be coming out of his mouth.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Michaela. ‘It all sounds a bit like PR bull to me. What about getting to the heart of Lark?’

  The heart of Lark?

  ‘Well …’ Harvey wonders whether to say this. It is the baby elephant in the room. ‘… The thing is, Lark … she is … very young.’

  The three of them look at him. To avoid their gaze, Harvey stares down into his tea. It is English Breakfast. The surface of his cup is dappled with a white froth, the result of him pouring into it three pink packets of Sweet ’N Low. Sweeteners are Harvey’s main dietary weapon against weight gain. Yes: he is one of those fat blokes who will slaver his way through innumerable cakes and fried breakfasts and curries thinking this is somehow offset by keeping all beverages sugar-free.

  ‘And?’ says Michaela.

  ‘Well, that makes an autobiography quite a … challenge.’

  Michaela frowns, which makes Harvey anxious, as he had not thought her forehead capable of it. It flashes through his mind that to register the truth of her reaction to his comment, he needs to think of it along the lines of an equation, something like: D (the actual level of Michaela’s displeasure with his remark) = S (the strength of her frown) – B (the amount of botox in her brow).

  ‘Well, firstly, Mr Gold, that is your job,’ she says, her accent – Northern Irish – becoming more tart. ‘Secondly, have you not read the PR biog? Lark was a child star. She’s been on TV, in movies …’

  Harvey looks across to Lark – he feels, if her mother is going to continue to talk about her daughter as if she is not here, or, more likely, as if she is such an icon already that she can only be referred to in the third person, that he has licence to look. Lark is unreactive – but not in a grand way, not in a way that implies that it is second nature to her being spoken about in this eulogizing manner. She just stays composed. In any case, it is hard for Harvey to make out from her features what might be going on inside her, because inside him, her features make him melt, into one big complacent eye.

  Michaela finishes her tirade, her list of Lark’s incredible-for-oneso-young accomplishments. Harvey has a sense, from the way she is fixing him in her glare, that things are not going so well.

  ‘Maybe …’ he says, one last throw of this shit dice, ‘… if I could listen to some of the songs?’

  Lark looks up at this, and her head seems at least to nod. But her mother raises a barrier pair of hands.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Gold, but as I told Alan, all of Lark’s songs are embargoed until the release date. Obviously you understand, with piracy being what it is these days.’

  ‘So – just let me be clear – I’m supposed to write her autobiography without hearing her sing?’

  Michaela takes a deep breath in through her nose; a glance passes between her and Josh.

  ‘Again, as you should know – I�
�m beginning to think you didn’t read the brief we sent through at all – the first volume of the autobiography will cover the years up till the date of the publishing contract we signed last April. During which period Lark was not, of course, a recording artist. Volume Two will cover the next ten years, of success. Then, of course, everyone will have heard her songs.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘When the time comes – I mean, when you come to write the relevant chapters, you will be provided with some home video footage I took of Lark singing at various school functions, and some teenage demo tapes which I have transferred to MP3. But until the embargo is up, not the new songs. There’s no need.’

  Harvey, not knowing what to say, nods and sips his tea. The chemical Sweet’N Low backwash makes him wish he’d brought from home his favourite sweetener, Splenda, in its handy yellow dispenser. His hand even makes a small inward clicking motion as he thinks this, as if to force a tiny phantom pill fall from a phantom dispenser.

  ‘Josh?’ says Michaela, standing up. Josh, who is the person Harvey has been looking at least, but who it seems has been smiling the whole time, glances up. ‘Perhaps we should just step out of the restaurant for a second …’

  ‘OK!’ says Josh, in a very upbeat voice, and widens his smile at Harvey, despite the couldn’t-be-clearer implication in Michaela’s voice that the discussion they are about to have, re Harvey’s suitability for the job, is only a formality. Harvey feels himself smiling back at Josh, as, faced with such a big mouth full of teeth, he has to. Inside, though, he despairs. Why did he agree to this? Why did he not just ignore Alan and his stupid urgency? Why, on finding out that Lark was the woman at JFK, did he get impelled by some idiot idea of synchronicity? Of – for fuck’s sake – fate?

  ‘Mum says you’re staying here …?’

  He looks up. Lark is looking at him properly, it seems, for the first time. The absence of her mother seems to have thrown a switch in her. There is still something disconnected, though, about the look. It reminds him of something: what exactly he cannot place. ‘Uh, yes.’

  ‘So are we.’

  ‘All of you?’

  ‘No, Josh – he lives here. In New York.’

  ‘Yes.’ He notices she does not seem to have a trace of her mother’s accent. She speaks in that part-estuary, part-American voice that all young people who live in London do, but overlaid with a blankness so deadpan it reminds Harvey of the female voice that he has set his satellite navigation system to speak in back home. He always sets his sat nav to this voice, as, still, many years after the 1980s, he feels more comfortable following the directions of women.

  ‘But me and Mum have a suite on the top floor.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘It’s amazing. It’s got a piano, and a kitchen and a library full of old books …’

  ‘And a set of Lars Bolanger lacquered boxes and a sage velvet seating area?’

  She blinks. Her eyes are as blue as robin’s eggs.

  ‘Yes. I think so. How did you know?’

  Harvey shrugs. He feels himself unable to meet her eyes, or, rather, her face. Her beauty makes him dizzy: he imagines himself fainting, pissing his pants and gasping I love you! all at once. He looks away like a shy teenager, or like Jamie, who looks away when talking to everyone. To find something else to rest his eyes on he picks up the mockup of her autobiography, although this still involves looking at her, because she is pictured on it. He feels assailed by many Larks, by an army of beauty.

  ‘This looks great,’ he says, just for something to say. She nods. He lifts the book up over his face, a shield between him and her, but the cover, which has not been fitted especially well on the hardback underneath, slips off, in a way that he can only think of as sexual.

  ‘Oh!’ he says, ‘Sorry.’ The book lands on the table. Harvey feels the lightness of the glossy print of Lark in his hands before looking down. On the cover of the book itself he sees a shape, an abstract imprint of a man’s face, sort of a silhouette and sort of not, and a familiar 1950s font.

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s Solomon’s Testament.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s by my dad. His first book.’ He flicks open the front. ‘It’s a first edition, too. Where did you get this?’

  ‘I said, there’s a library in our room. It’s full of old books. Josh just took that one off the shelf to put our cover on it.’

  He opens the book. I am Solomon Wolff, and this is my testament.

  ‘So, Mr Gold …’ Harvey looks up. Michaela and Josh have returned from their conference, which was shorter than even Harvey expected. Michaela’s hardly moving features have been arranged into a Sir Alan Sugar/Simon Cowell get-ready-for-something-cruel-but-honest mask. Josh is smiling.

  ‘Look,’ says Harvey, ‘Let’s save ourselves the bother …’

  ‘I want him to do it.’

  Michaela, Harvey and Josh turn. It is Lark who has spoken.

  ‘Sorry, Samantha?’ says Michaela.

  ‘Samantha?’ says Harvey.

  ‘It’s her real name,’ says Michaela, with some irritation, as if only the surprise of the moment had let it slip out.

  ‘I want Harvey – that’s your name, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I want him to do my autobiography.’

  Josh and Michaela look to each other. For a second, even Josh’s smile seems to falter.

  ‘Why?’ says Michaela. Harvey feels like saying ‘I am still here, you know.’ Another part of him, however, feels like saying, ‘Yeah … why?’

  ‘His dad wrote this book. The one that was underneath. Underneath the cover.’

  ‘He did?’ says Michaela. Josh picks up the copy of Solomon’s Testament, and flicks through the opening pages.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK, Samantha … and?’

  ‘Mum. That can’t be a coincidence. It’s got to be a sign.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’ Michaela scratches her chin. She is clearly doing some mental calculation, one she perhaps has to do a lot, as to whether it is worth challenging her daughter once she has made a mystical decision of this sort. Harvey notices that even the skin on the back of her hand matches that on her face. He had not expected this shift in the balance of power: it had seemed as if Michaela would brook no dissent over her daughter’s career. But it seems she does, at least from her daughter. After a short, poised pause, she moves her hand down towards him. ‘Welcome aboard, Mr Gold.’

  Harvey looks to Lark. She looks back at him, neutrally. I love you! Piss, faint. ‘Thanks very much,’ he says, taking her mother’s hand. Josh leans in, above their handshake, like someone coming into frame. He is still holding Solomon’s Testament; Harvey notices that, for the first time, he is not smiling.

  ‘Harv, you don’t write like this, do you?’

  * * *

  So today this happened. When we came in this morning, Dr Ghundkhali took Mommy away to the window and was talking to her over there in a whisper and then she started to look really upset and she started saying, ‘No. She’s old enough. She has to hear it, too’ so I knew straight away there was some bad news and that I was gonna have to hear it.

  I didn’t know how Dr G could see that Daddy was getting worse. He looked exactly the same. Maybe all the big machines that are around his bed were giving off signals saying it. When I realized that it was going to be bad news I looked at Daddy and tried to see it. I thought at first that Dr G was going to tell us that Daddy was gonna die, like, today or tomorrow, and so I looked really hard. I wanted to see if I could see that he was about to be a dead person. I couldn’t. I guess he has been dying for quite a long time now so maybe you can’t tell just by looking at him anyway. If someone is dying, I don’t know when the bit where they’re really dying starts. But I looked anyway.

  So then Mommy came over and crouched down and she made her face go that way it goes just before she’s gonna say something really important where he
r eyes go stary and sad at the same time. But before she could speak, I said:

  ‘I know, Mommy.’

  She didn’t say anything then. Just nodded. She grabbed my head and put it on her chest. I could feel her boobies, and beneath them I could hear her heart beating.

  I think Mommy wanted that to be that. I think she thought we didn’t have to talk about it any more. Like we both just knew. But then Dr G came over and said, ‘Mrs Gold, if you’re sure you would like Colette to be present, then …’ And then he trailed off without finishing his sentence, like he does a lot.

  So then we ended up in this little room down the corridor with lots of charts and black and white photos on the wall, and Dr Ghundkhali said: ‘Eli has an infection now. Of the lungs.’

  ‘That’s what you breathe through,’ I said. ‘Well, you breathe through your mouth and nose. But the way you pump air in through your mouth and nose is by the action of the lungs.’

  Dr Ghundkhali looked at me strangely for like three seconds. Then he nodded and said, ‘Yes. Anyway, we could, of course, give him antibiotics, and it would probably clear up. But in these circumstances …’

  And then he didn’t finish his sentence again! I looked at Mommy, but she just looked pale and furious and like her lips were shut really hard. We were sitting on these two grey plastic chairs and Dr G was sitting on the table. Well, not sitting on the table, not like with his legs crossed or anything. His bottom was on the table, but his feet were on the floor. He has really long legs.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Sorry?’ he said.

  ‘In these circumstances … what?’

  He looked a bit surprised. It might have been because he didn’t expect me to know as a big a word as circumstances. Or it might have been because nobody had ever asked him before about what he was going to say in one of those sentences.