The Death of Eli Gold

by David Baddiel

  Violet looks again at her card and at all the numbers crossed out. She thinks of all the pages, all the numbers, in Solomon’s Testament that speak of her: of Queenie.

  ‘I’ll have it,’ she says, putting her hand up.

  Chapter 11

  Harvey is in the sauna. Eli’s apartment has a sauna. It is in the back of his and Freda’s en-suite bathroom. He is not entirely sure he is allowed in either the sauna or the whole bedroom area. It makes him feel – well, it makes him feel like a child going into his parents’ bedroom when they are not there. This raises in him complicated issues. When he was young, his bedroom was next to his parents’. His nights in it are one of very few memories he has of the time when Eli and his mother were still together, because of the noises. It is possibly these noises – more than his mother’s slander, more than the world’s assessment – that shaped Harvey’s early idea of his father.

  Many children, of course, have to deal with the noise of their parents’ lovemaking, but the sound of Eli and Joan making love was particularly disturbing. Joan emitted a high-pitched note, not unlike a yodel – which would not in itself have been unpleasant, were it not accompanied so discordantly by Eli, who wailed and roared like a wounded walrus. To a five-year-old boy this sound was terrifying. Once, he had got out of bed, having wet himself in fear, and knocked on his parents’ door, screaming Daddy, daddy, what’s the matter?, only to be ignored; not out of neglect, but simply because his sobbing whisper was inaudible beneath his father’s outpourings.

  The sound that orgasm forced out of his father’s mouth was so seared into the young Harvey’s brain that, if asked, he could still do a passable impersonation of it now, thirty-eight years or so since he last heard it. He has actually once publicly reproduced it, as a teenager, during a discussion amongst his friends about how disgusting it was to imagine parental sex. This led to each of them in turn doing an impression of the illicit sounds they had variously heard through their bedroom walls, and much scornful giggling. When it came to Harvey, who took a deep breath in and gave it everything – he was, he remembers, rather pleased with the accuracy of his rendition, having never ventured it out loud before – there was no giggling. All his friends just stared at him. Some of them looked like they might cry.

  One side effect of having this sound echoing round his head his whole life has been a nagging conviction that none of the sex he has ever had can possibly have matched up to his father’s experience of it. No matter how much he enjoys sex, Harvey has never felt the need, at orgasm, to keen like a mourner at an ayatollah’s funeral: thus he feels that he is missing out. This inferiority pleasure complex is not helped by Eli’s own delight in his own sexual self-image. In the mid-eighties, the New Yorker had printed a cartoon of Eli as a satyr, dancing on a pile of books and wives. Eli had had it framed: it was still up in his study, in pride of place above his desk.

  Harvey has taken his iPhone into the sauna, and is listening to a playlist in there, through his Bose headphones. He has also taken a book, a paperback copy of Mirror, Mirror. It is the same issue as running: although a sauna is supposed to be relaxing, it is, in the main, uncomfortable and boring, and the only way he can get through it is with distraction. Harvey has no willpower for discomfort and boredom: considering how much he has to have on board to get through a run, or a sauna, he often wonders how he would have managed in a labour camp, or the fourteenth century.

  Initially, he took his laptop in as well, but while replying to an email – from Ron Bunce, asking for his present address – he found that he was dripping onto the keys, so has left that outside the door. He thinks, though, that the iPhone should be fine: they have mobile phones in hot countries. He is not sure about the book, but it is one of ten copies he found in a box underneath the stairs. Eli and Freda’s apartment has two floors. On the wall as you step up the stairs, there is a series of sketches by Matisse; a gift, Elaine has told him, from Henri’s son Pierre.

  He has created a sauna playlist. It has no theme. He considered basing it on being in the sauna, but then realized that songs with the word ‘hot’ in the title would refer to the wrong sort of hot. ‘Hot’ by Avril Lavigne; ‘Hot In Here’, by Nelly; ‘Don’t You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me’ by The Pussycat Dolls. Despite being someone for whom desire feels like it was always in the front of his brain, plastered there, a D where Hester Prynne has an A, pop music that was too upfront about sex made him feel uncomfortable. He did do a quick iTunes search, and discovered that there is an Elton John song called ‘Sweat It Out’, but the idea of Elton sweating – perhaps with the flu – made him feel a bit sick.

  He sits naked on the second level of the sauna, a white towel protecting his buttocks from the heat of the pine boards. Most of the sand in the wall-mounted hourglass near the door has already emptied out of the top bulb. Harvey turned it round when he came in, but he does not know how long one inversion of it represents in time. He assumes not actually an hour. The sauna coals sizzle with water poured on them from a wooden bucket on the floor (he hadn’t bothered with the ladle, preferring the excitement of the heat hit that comes from sploshing the entire contents straight on). He watches his stomach as the droplets form, forcing their way through the folds. He knows it is just water, but thinks it must be pushing some fat out too. The dry air burns in his nostrils. A small bottle of Volvic – of which there are about fifty in the apartment’s enormous four-door fridge – sits by his side: it is already too warm to be pleasant to drink.

  Mirror, Mirror sits unopened by his side, its pages tickling his right haunch, making him aware of the fact of his buttocks spreading. He thinks it would be good for him to read it, but he becomes more interested in his varicose vein. Harvey has a varicose vein on his left inner thigh. He doesn’t know how long he has had it. There seems, in the case of the varicose vein, to have been no starter vein, no tiny lesion that he might have thought ‘Hmm?’ about before realizing what it was and becoming obsessed with its growth. No: one day it was just there, vivid and red and scratchy, like someone overnight had grafted a tiny leafless tree just under his skin. It revolts him, the varicose vein, but it entrances him: a combination he is familiar with. The heat seems to make it more livid, because he can see it clearly even in the dim light of the sauna; its flattened-insect irregularity contrasting with the clean lines of the pine beneath.

  He takes a swig of the warm Volvic and attempts to switch his attention to Mirror, Mirror. As sometimes when the physical world – and, particularly, his physical world, his body in all its heavy presence – threatens to overwhelm him, he imagines that there is an escape that can be made to the life of the mind. Thus Harvey has at home books about, for example, chess; quantum physics; Kierkegaard; Stalingrad; the new economics; the history of Islam; modern British art; cosmology; Renaissance architecture; the psychology of apocalypse; Benjamin Britten; and many others of that ilk, all of them purchased not because of any innate interest in their subject matter, but because of this notion that people who think about such stuff – about Kierkegaard or quantum physics or Benjamin Britten – must therefore not spend all their time thinking about the unending itchiness inside their testicles, or how much they want another sour sweet even though their stomach already hurts from the acid, or the lines on their wives’ faces. Harvey does not know whether these people do or do not think about such things; but he knows that he only ever reads five pages of these books before needing a shit, a wank or a cry.

  He opens Mirror, Mirror at the first page, but only gets as far as In this land of ours, before a fat drop of sweat lands on the prose. Fuck. He looks around for a towel, pointlessly, knowing that you cannot dry paper with a towel, and then the music coming into his ears – Spandau Ballet’s ‘Through The Barricades’ – halts, as a call comes in. Shit. You can forget that the iPhone is a phone. He feels caught out, for a host of reasons. He is naked, in the sauna, a sauna he’s not absolutely sure he’s allowed to use. He’s just dripped onto one of Eli’s lesser works. A
nd he’s listening to ‘Through The Barricades’ by Spandau Ballet. Although the call has cut off the MP3, he still thinks that maybe the caller will somehow know.

  He holds up the phone to his eyes. It is hard to see. He has to blink sweat out of his eyes, plus the screen has misted up. He can’t see the name. Perhaps this was a bad idea. He decides to chance it.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Harvey?’

  Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit.

  ‘Dizzy.’

  ‘Hello, Harvey. How are you?’

  Why the emphasis on the are? Harvey puts the phone down on the wood: he can speak via his headphones.

  ‘I’m OK, thanks.’

  ‘Good. Great.’ There is a pause: Harvey imagines that Dizzy is looking at the mirror that sits above the mantelpiece in his room, straightening his bow tie.

  ‘So … the session has come and gone.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t get a message that you had found anyone else to take up the time …?’

  ‘No … I didn’t … I kind of forgot about it.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Sorry, Dizzy. I also – I couldn’t think of anyone who I could ring up and suggest therapy to. Seems a bit … rude.’

  ‘Ah …’ says Dizzy. Dizzy is king of saying Ah in that leading way, the way where you can almost hear the ellipsis.

  ‘Well, don’t you think?’

  ‘No, I don’t, actually, Harvey. I think that shows a rather one-dimensional attitude to therapy. The implication that needing it is a failure, and that therefore to suggest to someone that they might need it – even just try it out for one session – would be to imply a failing on their part. Surely that isn’t something you think?’

  ‘Er …’

  ‘And, besides, I think it rather depends on how you make the suggestion. And who to. Someone close to you would surely appreciate it. Stella, perhaps? Did you ask her?’

  ‘Stella?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Harvey bristles at the mention of her name. He does not feel it is in Dizzy’s gift to bring her up. And he worries about Dizzy’s knowledge: is there in his tone an element of blackmail? Like, if Harvey doesn’t pay up this £130, he will go to Stella with what he knows? With his knowledge of all Harvey’s fears?

  Aha! Harvey wants to say. But she knows! I have told her! The excitement of this triumph over Dizzy is, however, quickly deflated by the memory of the conversation in question. He had thought, that day at Tower Bridge, that he never could tell her, that he must swallow this pitiful pill and never even shit it out it was so shameful, but it was too big inside him: he felt the pressure of it at all times, pushing and kicking to get out like some devil baby from a Hammer Horror film. And, of course, Stella was his best friend: who else can you tell your terrible secrets to?

  He told her, having built up to it for weeks, finding every excuse possible why he shouldn’t say it today, knowing that the truth was that he shouldn’t say it any day. But one night, chock-full of depression, allergic with anxiety, it spilled out of him, in a mess of apologies and qualifications and protestations of love despite this terrible thing that he was saying. What did she say? Just what a lady ought, of course. Fuck off, you cunt, is the thing he remembers especially clearly: said, not shouted, deliberately, straightforwardly, even-handedly; and followed the next morning by her packing two suitcases and leaving with Jamie, before Harvey, exhausted with the telling and the crying and the sleeping on the sofa, woke up.

  During the two-month period she was gone, Harvey cried almost solidly. He found after a few weeks that many of the daily things that you would have thought you would have to stop should you burst into tears in the middle of them were in fact perfectly doable while crying. Making a sandwich, watching daytime TV, sitting on the tube, masturbating: all these things, once you got over the initial self-pity/humiliation hump, were more than manageable with salt water flooding down your cheeks. If, however, as it sometimes did, the crying became howling, with added face-crumpling and mouth-wobbling, most of these activities became untenable, with the exception of masturbation, which became, if anything, more piquant.

  Crying was also a particularly prominent activity for Harvey during the many, many phone calls to Stella that he made at this time and also in the three meetings they had: once at the flat she was renting in east London, after Harvey had banged on the door in the middle of the night, and twice at a service station on the M2, a venue chosen by Stella, possibly because it was equidistant from each other’s dwellings, but more likely, Harvey thought, because the light was incredibly harsh in there, designed to make everyone underneath it look like all they ever consumed was tobacco and scratch cards; and that therefore, in a very Stella-ish way, she was deliberately presenting him with the worst possible view of the thing he was frightened of: with her worst possible face.

  But when he wasn’t tied to her – when she wasn’t his woman – this didn’t work. When she wasn’t his woman all he could see, even in the Medway Moto Canteen, was that she was beautiful, and that he missed her and Jamie more than he could express. There was much pleading and convincing and pledges of change, and eventually Stella and Jamie came back. Harvey was overjoyed; his heart brimmed with love and relief; things were better than before, because they had been pulled back from the brink; and so he felt, right up until the moment, two weeks after Stella’s return, when the three of them went out for a blowy country walk under an especially harsh slate-grey sky and he turned to his love and all the bad feelings started again.

  ‘Thanks for the thought, Dizzy, but I don’t actually think Stella is in need of therapy.’

  There is silence at the other end of the line. Is this costing me, thinks Harvey? It is, isn’t it? It costs me when someone phones me abroad.

  ‘OK,’ says Dizzy, eventually. ‘Well, I’ll expect a cheque in the post, then.’

  ‘Yes. A hundred and thirty pounds.’

  ‘Two hundred and sixty now, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You were due to have a session this morning.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry, I forgot.’

  ‘Obviously, you’re still away. You didn’t think about letting me know that?’

  ‘Well. Would it have made any difference?’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To the charge.’ Fuckhead, Harvey is desperate to add.

  Silence again. The break in the conversation makes Harvey realize he is sweating astonishingly. It is as if he has been out naked in the rain. In the auricles of his ears, underneath the padding of the Bose headphones, there are two small ponds. He feels that if he moves his head quickly, they will overflow.

  ‘And what about next week’s session?’

  ‘I don’t know, Dizzy. I very much doubt I’ll make that either.’

  ‘Perhaps we should think about stopping.’

  This comes rather abruptly, without, as Harvey would have expected, a big dramatic pause, indicative of the immensity of such a step.

  ‘Um …’

  ‘If you’re going to be, as clearly you are, away indefinitely …’

  It is indefinite, thinks Harvey, isn’t it? Death. Even as it is fucking definite, even as it is the definite thing. And then he thinks, yeah. Let’s stop. Let’s stop this shit, this talking and talking and talking about me. But as he thinks about it, he can feel, his heart rate, already far too high for a man of his weight because of the sauna, rise, and more sweat come through his skin. He shifts his buttocks to stop them sticking to the pine. Why this anxiety? Do I think that maybe Dizzy and his mantras and his whole shift-a-must-have-to-a-preference shtick is going to work? Or is it just that all break-ups terrify me, all goodbyes?

  Harvey’s uncertainty allows Dizzy an opening:

  ‘Well, we needn’t decide now. But obviously, the longer it goes on …’

  ‘The higher the bill,’ says Harvey.

  Dizzy sighs, the sigh of the higher man, the one who is tired of dealing with all these people who mus
t bring him down all the time.

  ‘… the longer it will take for the treatment to have any effect. But, meanwhile, if you are going to worry about the cost of keeping the sessions open, remember you could still take my advice about asking a friend to take them up.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And also …’

  Harvey suddenly cannot hear what Dizzy is saying. He suddenly feels too hot. It occurs to him that he feels dizzy, and this doesn’t help the situation, as the idea of feeling Dizzy, perhaps untying his bow tie and then unbuttoning his shirt and fondling him sexily up and down his concave chest, infects his imagination and makes him feel nauseous as well.

  ‘Dizzy, I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Right, well …’

  He can hear that Dizzy is continuing, but his voice sounds more and more distant, the sonic equivalent of looking out from a rising plane and seeing the landscape miniaturize. It makes Harvey think that he may be slowly blacking out, fading out like a disco track. The phrase Mine is the last voice you will ever hear comes into his head, the thing that was said at the start of some CND movie he remembers from the 1980s, before all this started, when all his anxieties were simply political – and he desperately doesn’t want that last voice to be Dizzy’s, which now sounds not unlike that of the human-headed fly quietly screaming ‘Help me!’ as the spider approaches at the end of the 1950s version of The Fly. Or perhaps it is his voice; perhaps he is the fly and Dizzy the spider. Either way, he has to get out. He stumbles down from the second level of the sauna, narrowly missing knocking over the hot coals, and falls through the pine door with its little window, noticing as he does so that all the sand in the wall-mounted hourglass has seeped out of a hole in the bottom.

  He blacks out, and then comes to, his cheek cold against the tiled floor of Eli and Freda’s ensuite bathroom, a minute later, or it could possibly be three hours. He feels as if there is something on his head, but in a phantom way, like you sometimes feel two hours after you’ve taken off a hat. It is his headphones; they are still on his head, but not pressed close to his ears any more. Harvey takes them off, and realizes what has happened: the plastic on the headphones has melted in the sauna, and warped, moving the earcups away from his ears. Once shaped like a sideways C, they are now more like an upside-down V. It’s as if, while in the sauna, each side of the earphones has developed a lazy lob.