The Death of Eli Gold

by David Baddiel

  He notices the package, which may have been there for some time – it is lying next to some bills which arrived last week – because it has his name on it: Harvey Gold. He must have failed to spot it before amongst all the other Gold-addressed letters arriving in each delivery. Picking it up – it is heavier than he expects – he sees that it is marked with an official stamp: Toledo County Law Enforcement Office, it says. Bunce. Bunce has sent him some mail. A small shiver goes through him: this can’t be good. But curiosity overtakes him, and he opens it. The thought goes through his mind of the small, ornate dagger that his mother’s mother used to open mail with. There is an orange-brown book inside, like a school rough book. He opens it, scans a page or two, confused, not getting it at first, and then, in terror, shutting it as quick as he can. It is so quick that he is not certain what he has seen exactly, but he is sure enough to know he must not open it again. He feels white-hot fear mixed with repulsion: the image comes back again of the spider on Luffa’s face. He cannot understand what he is holding in his hands. He checks the envelope. There is a note inside, printed on Toledo County Prosecutor headed notepaper.

  Harv,

  You seemed to be very keen to know about my work. So here’s a taste of the kind of shit I have to deal with every day, Bunce.

  So it is real. He will not open it again, but the images that he had seen, before he understood what he was looking at, coalesce like monsters forming from the fog with this new information. It was some words, some psychotic scrawl, illustrated with grainy images of – he stops his mind from saying it, thankful at least for the grain.

  Bunce: what the fuck. WHAT THE FUCK. What if someone else – what if Elaine had taken this along with the batch of mail to the hospital … what if Freda had opened it … what if … But there will be time for that. First he must get rid of this book, quickly. Its very presence is contaminating. But he does not know how to get rid of it. He does not want to throw it into the trash – fuck off! He shouts at himself in his mind, for thinking in American even at this time of crisis – into the rubbish bin, the rubbish bin, as he knows that journalists sometimes go through the garbage – rubbish – of famous people. In fact, it happened to Eli, just after Pauline committed suicide. He could put it in a bag, maybe? And go and find a bin on the street? But he feels that his fear would radiate, making him give off suspicious vibes: he has a premonition of being stopped and searched by policemen, and then trying to explain to them: ‘No, Officer, you see – I have a friend who works in sex crime, especially this kind of thing, and I was talking to him a while ago about his work, and clearly he thought I required further elucidation …’ Jesus. His heart beats faster at the thought. Elaine, he knows, is bringing Colette home for lunch today, they could be back at any moment, and he isn’t dressed yet, and he has to destroy it.

  Burn it. Burn it, he thinks. His father used to have matches and lighters everywhere, before he gave up smoking. He runs into Eli’s study and begins overturning everything – books, papers, photographs. Nothing. He goes to the living room. Surely there must be some somewhere, he thinks, surely Freda is one of those women who consider candles more vital than food, but a frantic search of the drawers and cupboards yields nothing. Fuck fuck fuck fuck metronomes in his mind.

  He runs back to the kitchen. If only they had a gas stove … he decides to give the Rayburn a shot, even though he is frightened of it, the enormous green tinderbox, having preferred to eat takeout or microwaveable food throughout his stay. He picks the book up from the table, holding it at a comical arm’s length, and goes over to the cooker. He lifts up the right-hand plate cover: it is like opening the lid of an enormous, overheated teapot. Then he lifts up the left hand one: the plate underneath seems to be hotter. He puts the book onto it.

  Breathing heavily, he stands and watches. Nothing happens for a second. Then smoke begins to rise from underneath the book. The edges begin to blacken. Good. Good. He is still thinking good when the smoke alarm in the kitchen goes off. The sound is painfully piercing. It fills his already full head with its noise. He looks up. The alarm is above his head, a small beige circle of hell. There is a large soup ladle, one of many expensive looking utensils hanging on the wall behind the Rayburn. He takes the ladle off its hook and jumps up, trying to hit the alarm. He succeeds once or twice. It makes no difference. What’s best? he wants to shout, What should I do? While it is still refusing actually to burn, smoke has begun billowing out from under the book like a Victorian industrial chimney stack, great big clouds of black, indicative, it seems to Harvey, of the boundless evil contained within. What, he thinks, is Satan himself about to emerge from it?

  He decides to try and forget the alarm and focus on the book. First he must get it off the Rayburn plate, but that turns out to be no simple task. The bottom has stuck to the metal, and it rips, blackened bits of paper showering his face and hands. He throws it into the sink and turns the tap on: it hisses. He has to get a spatula out of the drawer, and begin scraping at the stove, trying to remove the black-brown square from the centre of it. The smoke alarm, impossibly, seems to increase in both pitch and volume. The paper won’t completely come off, so he gives up and shuts the plate cover. Then the doorbell goes.

  He throws the spatula down in rage, and goes to open the apartment door. It is the next-door neighbour, a middle-aged woman he has seen once or twice in the lift.

  ‘Hi …’ he says.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you, but I heard the alarm. Is there a fire? Do we need to clear the building?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘No. It’s just the smoke alarm going off.’

  ‘Without a fire?’

  ‘Yes. It must be – must need new batteries, or something.’

  She looks uncertain: the alarm’s ring, which must be much louder to her ears now that he has opened the door, does not sound like it is lacking in electronic power.

  ‘But …’ she says.

  ‘It’s fine.’ He turns and shuts the door.

  Back in the kitchen, the smoke hangs all over the air: Harvey experiences that moment of shock when returning to a room in which a fire has not been properly ventilated, of how much more smoke there is than previously realized. He goes to the sink, not really wanting to look into it. The remains of the book are now in the right-hand sink. In the left-hand one there is a waste-disposal hole. Is that the answer? The book is still too intact to go in there. He cannot imagine anything worse than blocking the waste-disposal unit with this. They’ll get a plumber out, he’ll pick it out of the pipes bit by bit …

  He looks down into the right-hand sink. The book sits there like some awful cockroach that cannot be killed, one of the ones that will still be alive after a nuclear winter. The manic song of the alarm continues. Perhaps I should just kill myself, he thinks. After all, people must be used to members of Eli’s family committing suicide by now. It might just be the simplest thing. Although then people will find the book and think I killed myself because I was a secret paedo. But what should I care, if I’m dead.

  He looks round the kitchen. He has an idea. He turns the tap back on. He watches the book, already soaked, become more so, as if he is trying to drown it. Flakes float in the water as it rises. Then he lifts it, sopping, towards the food blender, which sits on the marble-topped breakfast bar conveniently close to the Rayburn. He drops the book into the blender. Even half-burnt and soaked, it doesn’t fit very easily, and he has to poke it down towards the blades with a wooden spoon. Then, for good measure, he fills a cup from the tap and adds more water. It crosses his mind to add other ingredients, to make it mulch easier: vegetable oil perhaps? Just do it! screams the voice in his head.But he has to fit the top of the blender back on, and then match up some small indentations on the machine between the plastic and the glass for it to work. This takes him six or seven goes: it is not an operation designed to be done under this kind of pressure. Finally, it seems right. He looks for the buttons. It is a Krups blender, much more expensive than the one they have at home,
its base a chunky silver ballast dotted with switches. The top options are smoothie, milkshake, puree, ice crush and soup: below that, pulse or blend. He has never known what the difference is. He presses smoothie, and pulse.

  The machine whirrs, and shouts, and in a nanosecond the book vanishes, transformed into gloop. He lets it run for a minute just to make sure, and then turns it off, its noise dying like a siren, revealing the continued pinging scream of the smoke alarm underneath. Harvey prises open the lid and looks down at his handiwork. A small grey bog bubbles at the bottom of the blender: something that looks less now like Satan might emerge from it than Shrek. There is no sign, though, of the images it once contained. He begins to breathe more easily for the first time since he opened the package. He wrenches the glass jug off the base of the blender. When he turns round, ready to pour it into the waste-disposal unit, Elaine and Colette are there. He hadn’t heard them come in because of the smoke alarm.

  ‘Hello?’ says Elaine. ‘Is everything OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ‘Why is the smoke alarm going off?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘How long’s it been going?’

  ‘A little while.’

  ‘Were you cooking something?’

  ‘Yes. I was cooking something.’

  Elaine stares at him. So does Colette.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sausages.’

  It is the first thing that comes into his head. Elaine shakes her head. She looks up at the alarm.

  ‘I’ll go and call the super and he can come and sort it out,’ she says, going out of the kitchen.

  ‘Were you going to have a smoothie with it?’ says Colette.

  Harvey now stares at her. ‘What?’

  She nods at the jug he is holding.

  ‘With the sausages.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I was.’

  ‘Can I have some?’ she says.

  ‘Er …’

  ‘What flavour is it?’

  It’s kiddie-porn flavour, all right? It’s a fucking paedo-delight crush.

  ‘No …’ he says. ‘It was meant to be … I dunno … kind of a mixture – but I think it went wrong.’

  And quickly, before she can stop him – risking, in so doing, their fragile new-found amiability – he pours the horrible evil mess down into the waste disposal, and switches it on, making another awful screaming noise to add to the still-going smoke alarm. He watches it swirl round and round, washed away into the underworld.

  He has just turned the tap on, to wash and wash again the glass jug, when Elaine comes back into the kitchen, holding his iPhone.

  ‘It’s ringing. It was in the living room. I couldn’t hear it, but I saw the light come on.’

  She hands it to him. He feels the back of her hand as she does so, gently wrinkled like a peach. On the front of the phone is the name Freda. He reaches for the green slide-to-answer box, but it’s too late, it’s gone to answerphone. A box comes up on the screen, with his stepmother’s number. Missed Calls: 8.

  Chapter 14

  Her name is Lisa. His name, he has told her, is Hughie. He had been approaching Mount Sinai Hospital when she ran up to him. As her smiling face approached, fast enough for her pigtails to fly across it, he realized that today was not the day of his destiny. That no day could be the day of his destiny as long as she was likely to be standing outside the hospital, which she did every day. She was always liable to get in his way, to want to talk to him, to ask him what he was going to do today. He should not have spoken to her in the first place: if he had ignored her, then she would have forgotten about him, and he could at any point, when the time came, slip in unnoticed. Now he would have to deal with her.

  She was wearing the plaid dress, again; like his sister, again. He had got a sense that she had picked up something from him about this outfit, because there was no sign any more of the woollen hat. She was waving in front of her face a piece of paper. It was a print-out of a discussion on a website devoted to The Great Satan, allthatglittersisnot.com, in which someone on a forum was saying that the writer had had a miraculous recovery and might not die after all. He surveyed the excited words. It did not feel like truth; but it made him feel the need to get on with his destiny. He looked up at her thin, make-upless face, the eyes brimming with false hope, and said:

  – So we should go and celebrate. I know a great place.

  She had thought he meant a bar nearby, but he wanted to be near his hotel; so they have taken the subway downtown, to a bar he has passed a few times, and liked the look of. All the fittings are pine. A Confederate flag hangs on the far wall. The jukebox plays ‘Sweet Melissa’, by The Allman Brothers. The bar is called Why Not?

  They sit across from each other at a central table. Her face is still alight with the same excitement that first burst out of it when he suggested this drink. He could read in it a release of pain. It may have been years since she has been asked on a date. She may never have been. He thinks that, perhaps, the obsession with The Great Satan operates as a compensation for that lack, and feels a rounded self-satisfaction at the acuity of his psychological observation.

  Their drinks arrive, two Budweisers. He does not drink at home, nor has done since arriving in New York. He does not remember, in fact, when he last had a beer. It is quite a moment, then, to wrap his hand around the cold bottle, to feel the drips of condensation melt into his palm, to smell the hops as the fizz tickles his moustache, and, at last, to suck it down. The beer does more than quench his thirst: some deep part of him feels watered. She, meanwhile, glad-handles the bottle like a Southern Senator shaking hands with a black voter, shivering and grimacing with every gulp.

  – You don’t like the beer? he says

  – No, no. It’s nice. She untwists one of her pigtails, letting her hair on that side fall around her shoulder.

  – The bar …?

  She looks around her. Three or four men, all balding, with facial hair, sit at the bar. Two more, one wearing a cowboy hat, are playing pool.

  – Well … it’s a tiny bit … hick …

  – I like it, he says.

  – Ironically, right?

  He shakes his head.

  – We can go somewhere else if you’d like?’

  – No, no. It’s interesting, I guess, to be somewhere so … male. Men are good at that, aren’t they? Just being men. But I’ve always felt – you know that bit in The Compliance – when Joanne says ‘It’s a front, being a woman, a construct. The hair, the make-up, the unattainability, the sense of mystery: none of us really knows how to do it. The only people who really know – who really know what being a woman is all about – are transvestites.’ I love that. It’s one of the things you feel about Eli, as a woman reader, how unbelievably he’s able to put himself into the minds and bodies of his female characters …

  He nods. She looks at him, expecting confirmation, communion. But he can’t give it to her. He is not like the Holocaust deniers, the men who so hate the Jews and their enormous lie that they have to immerse themselves in every last gas-chamber detail, stepping every day into a bath of everything they disavow, in order to shore up their truth. He has not read any of The Great Satan’s books – the idea of doing so, in fact, revolts him. All he has done, and all he will ever do, is go see the Butter Mountain.

  He will have to deal with her, now, before his cover is blown. And then something happens which makes him know that he is in the last days of his destiny. ‘Sweet Melissa’ ends, and onto the jukebox comes Hughie Thomasson’s cracked and yearning voice, singing of some place your soul can fly. The Outlaws. The Outlaws.

  – Lisa, he says. Would you like to dance?

  * * *

  Mommy swore a lot today. She said the f-word about a hundred times, the s-word about fifty times, and some others I haven’t heard before but I’m really sure are swear words. When me and Harvey got to the hospital s
he started off straight away, in the corridor outside Daddy’s room.

  ‘Harvey!’ she said. ‘What the f-word is going on? I asked you to do one f-wording thing when you moved into the apartment. Keep your f-wording cell on. Listen out for it. And you can’t even f-wording do that, you little s-word.’

  I guess she was really p-worded off. (That’s a joke, by the way.) Even John looked a bit embarrassed.

  ‘Look, Freda, I’m sorry …’

  ‘Sorry isn’t good enough, Harvey!’

  This is something Mommy says a lot. She says it to me sometimes, when she’s cross. I never understand it. If you’ve done something wrong, you can only say sorry. So how can it not be good enough?

  Dr Ghundkhali poked his head out of Daddy’s room, but when he saw it was just Mommy shouting, he went back inside.

  ‘Maybe we should go somewhere – your room at the end or something …’ Harvey said.

  ‘What for?’

  Harvey nodded his face at me. I think he meant that they shouldn’t have a big row in front of me. He doesn’t know that I’ve heard Mommy having rows with lots of people. With Elaine, with Miss Howner, with people on the phone, even, once, with Daddy.

  ‘Oh f-word off, Harvey. Colette’s heard all these words before, it turns out. And like you care, anyway. If you cared about her feelings, you’d have made sure to listen out for your cellphone. It’s about time that Colette realized what a useless half-brother she really has!’

  I felt a bit bad for Harvey when she was saying this. I specially didn’t like the way Mommy said the word ‘half ’, like she was really saying that we weren’t properly related or something.

  ‘Mommy,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it was Harvey’s fault. The smoke alarm was going off and …’

  ‘The smoke alarm was going off? F-word! Were you burning the place down, too?’