The Death of Eli Gold

by David Baddiel

  It is this that Violet Gold remembers most from that night: this realization, forming a small protective armour around her during the reading, so that even as the evidence of Eli’s inevitable excision from her life by celebrity came alive – in the tense wonder with which the audience hung onto each word, in the shared conviction that they were witnessing the birth of a star, but above all, in the rapt attention of the women, an attention that was also, she could sense, a waiting, for the moment in which Eli’s eye would alight on one of them and choose – even as all this seethed around her, she felt protected; she felt contained.

  She puts the photograph down, and picks up the book.

  Chapter 12

  Since Harvey has been staying at the family apartment, some relaxation seems to have occurred in Freda’s timetabling of his visits. It was Elaine’s doing. Coming into the living room to pick up Colette the day after Harvey’s unfortunate blackout in front of the sauna, she said, while waiting for her charge to put her coat on:

  ‘Coming?’

  Harvey looked up from the TV: American Idol, a rerun. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘To the hospital.’

  He switched the sound down on the remote control, although he had been quite enjoying this particular rendition of Shania Twain’s ‘You’re The One’.

  ‘Er … am I …?’ He didn’t want to say allowed.

  ‘Yes, Harvey, are you coming to the hospital?’

  Colette appeared by her side: she was dressed in some weird polka-dotted dress, making her look like a miniature 1950s housewife. Harvey saw the girl’s face fall at her nanny’s question. Why does she hate me so much? He glanced back at the TV. The commercials had started abruptly, like they do on American channels. It was one of the very many adverts featuring handsome men of a certain age working hard and playing hard – in this case, canoeing, playing basketball, riding along a sunlit coastal road in a convertible, five of them in one car, laughing, their full grey hairstyles bobbing in the wind – which turn out to be for drugs which will reduce the size of the prostate. They were all so happy, these men: smiling and waving and looking so fine. The picture froze on their exultant faces, and the words Improved Flow, Comfortable Release, Less Urgency, Fewer Visits, Relaxed Passing came up in a tower on the right-hand side of the screen. Then, with the sound dipped, an authoritative male voice quickly listed the side effects: drowsiness, headaches, nausea, dizziness, in rare cases the development of breast tissue.

  ‘Obviously, if you’re busy today …’

  Harvey looked at her: she was smirking a little, but it was not unfriendly – her sarcasm was not malign, insofar as it was provoked by an assumption that to be by his father’s bedside was, after all, the reason he was here. He flicked at the remote control, but failed to switch off the TV: it changed channels instead, to a film, Austin Powers, the first one, the moment when the wife of one of Dr Evil’s henchmen receives a phone call about the death of her husband.

  ‘No, no. Just give me a minute.’

  On their arrival at the hospital, Harvey felt, for the first time, unquestioned: John the security man may even have given him what he likes to think of as a friendly nod.

  Since then, there have been more visits, and he is beginning to feel part of the Eli deathbed elite. He knows, of course, that the key is Colette, that she is operating for him like an Access-All-Areas lami-nate, and that if he did not have her by his side, then things would revert.

  This access is, however, something of a double-edged sword. Fighting to get into the room, however damaging it may have been to Harvey’s much-damaged self-esteem, did at least give his visits a focus. It also meant that he didn’t have to spend all that much time there. Now, he realizes, actually spending hours and hours in a room waiting for the occupant of that room to die is – what is it? For some reason he thinks of it in terms of what footballers say about a difficult match ahead: a big ask. It is a big ask. Most of the time he simply does not know what to do. Freda is in near-constant consultation with the doctors: when she is not, she seems perfectly able – serenely happy, in fact – to minister to Eli, to do all the things Harvey would feel incredibly awkward doing, mopping his brow with a damp cloth, stroking his hand, talking – fucking talking, she has no problem with, no self-consciousness about – to him. Colette spends much of the day playing with her various toys, or reading, or being taught by Elaine in the other room, the one that Freda now sleeps in, or doing some mopping and stroking and talking herself. Sometimes she writes her diary.

  Harvey finds, as well, that he cannot look at his father for long. It is a bad word, but what he feels is disgust: and not a moral disgust, but straightforward disgust: disgust at the smell, and the bedsores, and the sight of bone through skin. Sometimes, it is in the mix of mechanical and organic that disgust will burrow – for example, in the nasogastric tube that goes into his father’s nose. As a child, Harvey had been fascinated and horrified by the inside of his father’s nostrils, how they could possibly be so hairy: it seemed to him that the hair in there was so thick and packed that surely he couldn’t breathe, the ends of it sticking out like fronds, so strong and pointed he used to think that if you were to tweak them like a Jew’s harp they might make some discordant music.

  The sight of the white wire ploughing through this now wilted nasal forest adds a new layer of disgust to the old. Harvey has read somewhere about disgust – that it will turn, if the mind starts to feel trapped within the orbit of the object of disgust, to fear. He is used to wanting not to see the bad thing but knowing it is there so having to look regardless: all those fucking idiot mind games that his mind plays on itself. So he finds himself making more and more excuses to leave. He gets cups of coffee from the café, or loses chess games to Deep Green, or heads outside to get some air and see if he can spot any of the regular Eli-weirdos hanging around waiting for news – there is a blonde woman in pigtails who has caught his eye a couple of times – or just wanders round the hospital. He has become quite well versed now in all the departments: Cardiology, Haematology, Oncology, all the proper medical words for what can go wrong with the human body. They make him think of that BT advert on British TV in the 1980s with Maureen Lipman saying to her O-level-failing grandson, ‘You’ve got an ’ology!’ He wonders if the boy she was talking to has, now, got one of these other ’ologies.

  He also finds himself going on the first inkling of pressure in bladder or sphincter, to the toilet. He has discovered that, compared to the atmosphere around Eli’s bed, it is indeed something of a restful room. Returning from the toilet on his last visit, he bumped into Dr Ghundkhali in the corridor, who said:

  ‘Are you OK?’

  Harvey looked at the doctor’s concerned face. He was so taken aback by the approach that the normal response – No I’m morally and intellectually bankrupt, my body itches all the time, my therapist is charging me for all the time I’m away, my half-sister hates me, I’ve been here too long now to still be jet-lagged, but somehow I still am, and of course all the other stuff: wife, dad, blah blah blah – did not even properly run through his mind before he said:

  ‘Yes, I think. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Well because – I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but I’ve noticed you go to the toilet … a lot.’

  ‘Um, do I?’

  ‘Sorry, I – it may be, of course, that you’re just under a lot of stress.’

  ‘Yes, I guess.’

  ‘That can have an effect on bowel function. But you also seem to spend an awful long time in there.’

  Can’t a man go the shitter without surveillance? formed in his mouth, although it wasn’t really what he wanted to say. What he wanted to say was: it’s nicer in there than – pointing to Eli’s door – in there. Come in with me, doctor, and I’ll show you. You can even have a go on my chess app.

  ‘No, really I’m fine. Although …’

  ‘Yes?’ Dr Ghundkhali brought his hand to his radically clean-shaven face and pinched his thumb and forefinger togeth
er, dimpling his chin.

  ‘I do worry about … the other thing.’

  ‘The other …?’

  ‘Urination. I do do that a lot. I wonder if I should have my prostate checked out.’

  Can you make me like one of those men in the advert, doctor? Smiling and waving and looking so fine? Riding the coastal highway into the far distance unconcerned by any need on their long great journey for a toilet stop?

  ‘OK. How old are you?’

  ‘Forty-four.’

  ‘Have you had a PSI ever?’ Harvey shook his head: he had no idea what that was. ‘When was your last rectal exam?’

  ‘Um … I haven’t had a rectal exam.’

  ‘At all?’

  ‘Well, maybe when I was much younger.’

  Dr Ghundkhali nodded, a measured, slow nod, like a man getting to the meat of the matter.

  ‘Well, first thing we need to do is one of those.’

  Harvey felt his mouth go a little dry. ‘Now?’

  ‘No!’ he said, laughing. ‘I’ll organize one with one of our nurses. You’re in here most days at the moment, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harvey, for it seemed that now he was.

  Today, Eli is being washed. It is unlucky, or at least, challenging, that Harvey and Colette’s entry through the door – Elaine having dropped them off at the entrance of the hospital, in order to go and visit her mother downtown – coincides with the nurse, with something of an inappropriate flourish, lifting the sheet off the lower half of his body and removing the bed pan, before applying a disinfected sponge.

  Harvey looks to Freda, who is standing by the bedside, giving off a sense that this is a job she could do better. She turns: he expects her to glance at Colette, perhaps to register a desire to protect her sensibilities, but in fact her eyes alight on him. ‘Should I take Colette down to the café for a drink?’ he says, trying to help.

  ‘No, no,’ says Freda, irritatedly. ‘She’s seen him washed before. Haven’t you, darling?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ says Colette, going over and holding her mother’s hand facing the bed, as if to make the point. Freda turns to look, too.

  ‘But …’ Harvey says, not sure what he is going to say.

  ‘He never shrank from the body, Harvey. He made of the body, in all its oozing and flowing – in all its blood and horror – something beautiful. It’s worth remembering that when you feel the instinct to look away.’

  She says this – in that intent voice that she uses when she is being super-serious, and about Eli she is only ever super-serious – without facing Harvey, in order to illustrate, through staring at her husband, now having his legs being pulled apart, that she would never look away. But Jesus, Freda, Harvey wants to say, that’s in his work: this is life. This is an old man in a coma having his frightful body exposed to pitiful sight. I don’t think it’s what he would want. It is pointless, however. Harvey realizes that, for her, Eli is, as it were, undegradable; even having his testicles lifted to wipe clean the terrible detritus underneath cannot demean him. He feels, too, a contradiction in her attitude, that despite what she has said she would quite like him to turn away, to turn away and go off on one of his aimless wanders through the hospital, because this ritual, of watching Eli being cleaned, seems to him less, in truth, about abiding by the great man’s literary worship of all bodily form and function, and more about licence: about how because she is his wife and Colette is their daughter they can see this. They are allowed. This – this deep and awful intimacy – it is their final prize.

  He, however, is not sure he is allowed, even though she has just told him not to look away. So he stays, locked into this contradiction: trapped near the object of disgust. He begins to feel nauseous. He tries to focus on a single point on Eli’s body, a bit like when Jamie gets car sick and Stella tells him to stare at a stationary point on the horizon. His eyes fix on some innocuous part – a rib, a knee – but they are drawn back to the thing he most wishes not to see, his father’s penis, a sickening bundle of skin framed uselessly by sparse tufts of grey-white pubic hair. All that trouble, Harvey thinks. All that trouble – all those wives, all those children, all those friends betrayed – in the service of this pallid balding grub.

  ‘I’m going to the toilet,’ he says.

  In the taxi, on the way back to the apartment, Colette says:

  ‘Harvey?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know any of our brothers and sisters? The other ones.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Well, no. I don’t know them. I’ve met Simone. And me and Jules exchanged a couple of Facebook messages once. But he didn’t seem to really want to be friends. Do you know them?’

  ‘No. I knew Daddy had other children but me and Mommy never really talk about them. Although we did a while ago, for the first time.’

  This corresponds to what he knows about Freda, who would under normal circumstances not countenance acknowledging the other marriages, and certainly not the fruits of them. He wonders if this conversation Colette had with her represents something of a breakthrough, like Arab countries deciding to recognize, if not condone, Israel.

  ‘Why won’t they come and see Daddy?’

  They are in a traffic jam along Fifth Avenue. On their right, people file in and out of the Guggenheim Museum. Harvey has never been there, but he wonders how many Great Men’s wares are shown in there, and how many of these men – while painting and sculpting their passports to Greatness – turned over poor old Peggy.

  ‘I don’t know exactly. I think maybe they feel loyal to Isabelle. To their mother.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means … I guess it means that when Daddy left their mommy their mommy wasn’t very pleased about it, and so the children feel like it might be a betrayal – might be something that seems like it’s against her – if they came.’

  Colette’s brow pinched. Harvey has a momentary insight into where the lines on her face would be, in years to come.

  ‘So what about your mommy? Wasn’t she upset when Daddy left her?’

  ‘Yes. She was really upset, and really angry.’

  He has a vision of his mother, tearing up Eli’s clothes with her bare hands. When was that? The first or second time he left her? Did she even do it? Maybe he has just transplanted this idea of what angry women do when left onto her history. He suddenly sees himself as the world might see him, the pole-axed son of the arch-feminist and the arch-misogynist. I never stood a fucking chance, he thinks about himself.

  The cab turns along East 59th, into Park, but the traffic there is no better. A woman, beautiful from behind, walks up the sidewalk. He wants the taxi to move. He wants to see if the front confirms the back: it makes him anxious not to know, even though he is aware that such a confirmation will only depress him. A transit train rumbles past on the track to their left, taking passengers into Harlem, and The Bronx, parts of New York Harvey has never been and will never go.

  ‘So why have you come?’

  ‘Because she’s dead.’ Although so, Harvey thinks, is Isabelle, long, long dead. Perhaps her children hold her in the memory more than he holds his mother. Or perhaps they just hold the memory of her anger more. They are, after all, half-French.

  ‘So you wouldn’t have come if she wasn’t?’

  The jam clears a little, and the car begins to move. The woman comes closer, close enough for Harvey to track the seesaw-swing of her buttocks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, tearing his eyes away from the window. ‘She never liked it that I got back in contact with Dad in my twenties. She thought it wasn’t loyal. But it was up to me. It was what I wanted to do.’

  Colette thinks about this, her face placid. Harvey doesn’t know how much she understands of it. He doesn’t know how much he understands of it. They are nearly past the walking woman. He turns to see her face, knowing he will only get a few seconds to make the judgement, to see if the promise has been kept, but the taxi swerves away, down 10
0th Street, back towards the park.

  ‘Traffic,’ says the driver, in some unplaceable accent. Harvey feels furious, cheated. He longs for the engagement he had with Jasvant Kirtia Singh. Colette comes out of her brown study and says:

  ‘Daddy’s winky-wonk …’

  This breaks Harvey out of his self-pitying funk.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It made Jules and Simone. And me and you. Didn’t it?’

  ‘Um … yes, I guess. Not on its own, of course.’

  ‘No, I know.’

  Harvey looks at her, not sure what she knows. Him and Stella have not had the full birds and bees conversation with Jamie, even though he is old enough to hear it now, because of his echolalia. Stella in particular had been concerned that telling him about all that might lead him into something that would seem to others like Tourette’s, saying penis and vagina and womb and sperm and egg out loud in all sorts of public situations. Harvey had gone along with it, although he wasn’t sure, because he didn’t want his son to be the only one at school who didn’t know, and also because of a secret admiration he has for people with Tourette’s – a belief that they are not diseased, but, rather, possessed of some virulent manic honesty.

  She probably knows it all, he thinks. Nothing seems to have been kept from her. Although she did say winky-wonk, at least, a child’s word; be thankful for small mercies.

  ‘A long time apart …’ he says.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean it made me in 1966. Or 1965, whenever him and my mum … and then you. Much more recently.’

  Colette frowns. Tiny lines appear again above her bushy-for-herage eyebrows. Harvey feels a sudden burst of affection and pity for her. She is, he can see, doing the maths, but he feels how she is also calculating – as she clearly has to do often – something which she should perhaps not have to do yet, some new and troubling equation of the spirit, one of many rebalances of the adult-child books.