The Death of Eli Gold

by David Baddiel

  ‘Freda. Calm down, please. Look: we’re here now. Your message just said to come and bring Colette as soon as possible …’

  ‘Yes, well, you’re too late.’

  ‘Too late?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Harvey blinked. He looked round at me. I didn’t know what face to make. I think I shrugged.

  ‘What you mean … Eli – Dad’s …’

  Mommy frowned at him. ‘No, of course he’s not, Harvey! What is the matter with you?’

  ‘Well, I assumed – I thought …’

  ‘Bill Clinton!’

  ‘I’m sorry?!’

  ‘He was coming to see Eli! An impromptu visit! Today!’

  ‘He was?’

  ‘One of his assistants phoned an hour ago!’

  ‘Right. So. Is he coming or isn’t he?’

  ‘Well, no! Not now! I had to put him off!’

  ‘You put him off?’

  ‘I told him Eli was too ill today …’

  Harvey looked at her. ‘Eli is too ill every day, isn’t he?’

  ‘Look, Harvey, it doesn’t matter what I said. I put him off.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Oh God. Because I wanted Colette to be here. I wanted Colette to meet him. And by the time I’d called you the sixth time I realized that wasn’t going to happen! OK?’

  ‘Mommy …?’ I said. She knelt down and started doing up some of the buttons on the front of my dress that had come undone. Her fingers were moving really quickly, though, and the buttons kept slipping away from them.

  ‘Why did you want Bill Clinton to meet me?’

  ‘He used to be president, darling,’ she said. ‘Before you were born. He’s also a good friend of mine and Daddy’s.’

  ‘Then why don’t I know him?’

  ‘Well, because we’ve mainly met him at dinners and festivals and conferences and so on – we’ve never had a chance to have him round for dinner so that you could meet him. Which is why I so wanted you to be here today …’

  ‘Can’t President Obama come?’ I said. ‘I love him. He’s so handsome.’ When I said this I looked at John. I gave him a special look to let him know I really meant it. Mommy did one of her annoying laughs.

  ‘Well, I would love that too, darling. But he’s very, very busy.’

  ‘Look, I’m really sorry, Freda. I am,’ said Harvey. Mommy looked up at him. She breathed heavily, through her nose, like she does when she’s about to forgive someone.

  ‘Well, luckily for you, I just got a call from his office saying he could reschedule. Bill will be coming tomorrow!’

  ‘Oh Mommy,’ I said, ‘That’s great!’

  ‘Right,’ said Harvey. Over Mommy’s shoulder, he looked quite cross. ‘So if – if you knew already that he could rearrange – if you knew when we arrived that everything was OK – why …?’ He didn’t finish that sentence but I knew he meant: why did you shout at me so much?

  Mommy stood up, brushing herself down. ‘It’s the principle of the thing, Harvey. You made me a promise. I mean, what if it had been – what if Eli had been …?’ She looked down at Harvey but up with her eyes. He looked very sad. He did that weird cough he does. He wiped his face with his hands, like he had soap in it or something.

  ‘OK, Freda. It won’t happen again. I’ll take her home again later and make sure that –’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. He’s coming early tomorrow, just after breakfast. It’s the only time he could fit in. She could stay over with me tonight. Elaine could bring in a change of clothes … would you like that, darling? Would you like to have a sleepover with Mommy?’

  I looked at my feet when she said this. I didn’t want to. I was going to be at the hospital all day. I wanted to go home later with Harvey. I wanted to sit in the taxi with Harvey and see if I could make him laugh, like I did before.

  ‘Freda,’ said Harvey, before I could answer. ‘If it’s about what happened today, please: don’t be concerned. I’ll make sure she’s here bright and early tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll make sure, too. I’ll get up and dress myself.’

  Mommy looked like she wasn’t sure, like she didn’t understand why I didn’t want to have a sleepover with her, but then there was some noise from inside Daddy’s room, which made her turn around.

  ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘I’ll call Elaine and she’ll come round later and put out some clothes for you. But straight to bed when you get back. I want you here bright and early for Mr President. I’m counting on you, Harvey.’

  ‘OK, Freda,’ he said. ‘Understood.’

  And then she went back in. Me and Harvey went into the room together. I held his hand.

  * * *

  He is surprised at himself. He does not commit adultery. He has many wives, but he has never been unfaithful. It had occurred to him to try and instigate some kind of impromptu celestial marriage service, here in his room at the Condesa Inn, under the eyes of Jesus; but they would need at least an Elder of His Faith, and he had no idea where to find one. Even if he could have found one, it would have been awkward, following the sealing, waiting for the Elder to leave. Plus, of course, he does not actually want to marry the woman with the pigtails. He is not sure he even truly wanted to sleep with her.

  But when they got back to his room, there was, it seemed to him, no choice. He had to deal with her. If he slept with her – if she was in his bed in the morning – she would not be hanging around outside the hospital, obstructing his destiny. So when she stood there, raising herself up on her tiptoes, he knew the way through was to kiss her. Her mouth was dry and clamped shut, like a child’s, but her eyes were closed as if in great passion, allowing him to look at His Lord and know that he forgave him this small sin in the larger picture.

  Her dress had come off awkwardly: he had tried unbuttoning it at the back, but his hands were big and unused to non-Mormon clothing. Eventually, she stepped away and did it herself, pushing the plaid over her head, allowing him a moment when he could see her body but she could not see him. She was thinner than he had realized. She wore a white bra and blue panties. Her movements to shake herself free of the dress reminded him of her dancing in the bar, jagged, short, arrhythmic.

  She dropped her dress by the room’s only real piece of furniture, a hulking Victorian wardrobe with an oval mirror in the middle of it. When she turned to him, her eyebrows were slanted upwards, like someone hoping not to be hurt. He reached, seemingly to touch her face, and she bent her skin into his hand, but he was reaching for her pigtail, the second of which she had forgotten to untie. Loosening the ribbon stopped her from having lopsided hair, handing her the womanliness she did not know how to affect.

  He took off his clothes, methodically. She waited for him, not knowing where to look. When he got to his white undergarments, he heard her make a noise of surprise. Folding up his clothes, he said:

  – I’m a Mormon.

  – No.

  – Yes.

  She looked at him. Her face was holding back something: laughter or fear, or both. Something seemed to cross her mind.

  – You never talk about him.

  – Who?

  – Who do you think? Eli, of course.

  – Hey, he said. Are we going to have a discussion about literature? Now?

  – No, but …

  And then he hushed her mouth with a kiss, a proper one, forcing her mouth open as he went, drawing on his experience with many women, many wives.

  Now it is just before dawn. He has slipped out of bed and packed his bag, putting the white coat in at the bottom. He has shaved completely, lost both his moustache and the beginnings of a beard that has sprouted since he has been in New York. It feels right: cleansing. Some of the 9/11 jihadis shaved off their beards, too, on the day of their destiny, so as not to look too much like Muslims. He has put his holy white undergarments back on. In the front side of the vest, near his heart, his third wife Lorinda, the best seamstress, has created a pocket, for his pock
et edition of The Book of Mormon. Within this, reverently, he places his gun, his Armscor 206.

  He checks his wallet: he will leave enough money for the bill at reception. He is about to pull on his jeans when he sees, by his bare feet, the plaid dress. He holds it up; holds it against himself, looking in the mirror, like he has sometimes seen women do in the shops in Salt Lake City. He looks over to the bed. She is sleeping soundly, the satisfied sleep, he thinks, of a chick who has not been fucked for years. He surprises himself by the words, which feel like they come from a previous self.

  Then, in an urge that comes from he knows not where, he slips the dress over his head. It falls around him more easily than it had come off her. He looks up. Yes. His hair, of course, is shorter, but not that much, having grown since he begun his journey to New York. In the dim light of the room, all differences melt away. This is why God made him shave. He sees her in the mirror, still alive, the age she would be now: his sister Pauline Gray. He blesses their near-identicality. His gaze grows soft. He leans in and kisses, gently, their joint reflection.

  – For you, he says. For you.

  * * *

  Mandy is angry with her. The nurse is standing in the doorway of her room with her arms crossed. Violet can see the biceps squeezing against the fingers: she is heavy, Mandy, but she also lifts a lot of heavy things – a lot of heavy people. She does not want for either fat or muscle.

  ‘Come on, Violet. Let’s not be mucking about,’ she says. Mandy has no trace of a Nigerian or West Indian accent, but through Violet’s hearing aid she still thinks she picks up on some cadence which speaks of heat and dust.

  ‘But I didn’t sign up for it,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to do it.’ She is sitting on her big velvet chair, facing away from the window.

  ‘Don’t be stupid. Just come down and see what it’s like. Don’t you want to hear everybody’s life story?’

  A child, she thinks. She is speaking to me like a foster child. ‘Not really,’ says Violet.

  Mandy puffs her cheeks out and shakes her head. It frustrates Violet that she cannot explain to this nurse how she is not simply being a curmudgeonly inmate, perversely saying no to everything. Violet appreciates Redcliffe House. She does not like living here, exactly, but she feels grateful.

  ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do,’ says Mandy. ‘The man is here …’

  ‘Yes,’ says Violet. She hears a tapping. It will be the branch along the window.

  ‘He is here, and we were told that we needed to get at least ten of you down there to make it worthwhile.’

  Violet nods. The tapping continues. She knows it is the branch, but something makes her want to turn and confirm that. There is no need to see, just as there is no need to ask, ‘How many people have come?’

  Mandy’s cheeks bulge, betraying a smile. Violet remembers how, when she used to sulk, her mother used to say ‘Come on: let’s see those apples!’ to make her smile. When she did so, her mother would pretend to bite her rounded cheek. She wonders now, when she smiles, what fruit her cheeks look like.

  ‘Nine.’

  Violet sighs and uses the back edge of the chair to lever herself up. She turns away from Mandy to do so. As she thought: it is the branch.

  In the lounge, the man from Life Story Work has organized the ten of them into a semi-circle. He is standing in front of a screen, with a diagram on it very like the one in the pamphlet, with the words IDENTITY and MEANING and PURPOSE and SELF-KNOWLEDGE written across it. When she arrives they all turn to face her. Joe Hillier, who is sitting in a chair next to the screen, facing the others, taps his watch. Violet feels again the impulse to explain, to say that she is not late but was not going to come at all, and then had been forced into it by a mixture of Mandy’s bullying and her own reflexive instinct not to ruin things. She feels this concurrently with the knowledge that she is going to remain silent. She wonders how much of her life has involved this swallowing of impulse.

  A woman hands her a notebook, similar to ones she remembers from school, and guides her to the end of the row of chairs. Violet flicks through the book: it is a series of blank pages. She looks up. The woman, who is blonde – but dyed? – smiles and hands her a pen. Looking around, she sees that they all have similar books and pens.

  ‘Hi!’ says the man, who is holding a clipboard. He has what Gwendoline used to call an upside-down face: bald with a beard. Although it wasn’t very thick; perhaps it was just that thing that men did now, of not shaving. ‘I’m Daniel.’ With an open palm, he gestures towards the blonde lady. His hands are small, like a woman’s. ‘This is Kirsty, who’s helping me today. What’s your name?’

  Violet feels her throat constrict with anxiety, even at this question. ‘Violet.’

  He hovers his clipboard into view, poising a pen above it. ‘Violet …?’

  ‘Gold,’ she says. ‘Violet Gold.’

  ‘Thank you, Violet,’ he says, scribbling. Mrs Gold. In the old days, he would have said Mrs Gold. ‘So … do we need to go over again what Life Story Work is?’

  She feels a collective sigh of frustration go through the group.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I think I understand.’

  ‘Great! If there’s anything you don’t, at any stage, just let me or Kirsty know. Now, where were we? Ah, yes: Joe.’

  Daniel moves aside, revealing Joe Hillier sitting with his legs crossed, looking at Violet impatiently. His right trouser leg has ridden up past his sock, revealing his shin bone tight against the skin.

  ‘Well. I was born in nineteen thirty, in Sheffield. I …’

  ‘Just hold on a minute, Joe,’ says Daniel. He is bent over, fiddling with the controls of a video camera, which is behind the semi-circle of listeners. On the side of the camera, a small red light goes on.

  ‘Sorry, carry on …’

  Joe looks uncertainly towards the camera. His head moves around, as if trying to find some imagined centre of frame. He coughs, ostensibly to clear his throat, but brings up a gobbet of unwanted phlegm at the same time, which he has to spit into a handkerchief. He puts the soiled white rag back into his pocket, which seems to take an age.

  ‘In Sheffield, as I say,’ he says, finally. ‘My father was a boilermaker. I was the eldest of seven. I was expected to become a boilermaker, too, but after a short time serving an apprenticeship I decided it wasn’t for me. I worked as a postman, eventually rising to the rank of postmaster in our …’

  ‘Joe. Sorry …’ says Daniel. He touches a button on the camera. ‘This is great. This is context. But – as I said, the point of Life Story Work is not to tell your whole history from top to bottom. I mean, you can if you want to, when you go off and write your story down, if you have the time and energy, you know, that would obviously be great. But, certainly, that’s not the point today.’ He says this with a little internal chuckle, to indicate that he is not telling Joe Hillier off. Joe nods, nervously. He is imperious, with other old people; not with the young.

  ‘What we’d like today …’ this is from Kirsty, who has glided beside Daniel, ‘… is maybe just a retelling of some central life incident – what we call a Key Life Moment – which will give us some sense of who you are.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know that that works,’ says Pat Cadogan, who has been seated with her arms crossed throughout, her face fixed forwards, but with an expression so avowedly negative it seems somehow to give off a sense of being shaken from side to side. ‘Some of us have had very long and complicated lives, my dear. It’s not so easy to draw out who we are from one incident.’

  ‘Some of us find it a bit hard to remember, as well!’ said Joe Hillier’s friend, Frank. ‘Bit hard to remember what happened yesterday, let alone forty year ago!’

  ‘Oh, don’t be such stick-in-the-muds!’ This is Norma. ‘I’ve got bucket loads of Key Life Moments! I just don’t think I can say them in front of camera!!’ She laughs, loudly, the kind of laugh that invites others to join in.

  ‘Look,’ says Daniel. ‘
It doesn’t have to be such hard work.’ His face has shifted to a frown, away from its former attitude of deep-set civic patience. ‘Someone here must have some moment in their life that they think defines them.’

  Violet looks round. She feels the blankness of all of them in response to Daniel’s language. She wants Joe Hillier to carry on: she is interested that he was a postman. She hadn’t known that. He was a man, before, with a job and a uniform and promotion prospects. He walked from house to house delivering letters, which people in Sheffield waited for with hope and dread. We all did things, before, Violet thinks. Life is not moments – there is something patronizing about a life thought of in moments, rather than as an ongoing thing; it is a young person’s way of imagining what it must be like to be old, projecting that identity will only exist then in fragments.

  She wants to hear what Pat was – a dental receptionist, she once thinks she heard her say – and Norma was a dressmaker, Violet knows, before she gave up to have her four children. This is what defi nes people like us, Violet wants to say: jobs, children. What more do you want?

  ‘Violet!’ says Kirsty. ‘What about you? Do you have a Key Life Moment you want to tell us about?’

  She feels the stiff movement of bone as the room turns to look at her.

  ‘No … I don’t think so …’ she says.

  ‘What about that man?’ a voice opines, loudly. She looks round. The speaker is Pat Cadogan. She is looking at Violet with her eyes narrowing as if holding the other woman in her sights.

  ‘Man?’

  ‘That one who was in the paper. Your … distant cousin. You must have some special memories of him.’

  She says it with a heavy dusting of sarcasm. So it has already happened. Gossip has started; nodding, suspect conversations have been had, concerning the incident some weeks ago now when she asked Joe Hillier for his copy of the Daily Telegraph.

  ‘Sorry,’ says Daniel, ‘I’m just trying to catch up here … you have a cousin who was in the paper?’

  ‘That’s great, Violet,’ says Kirsty, before she has a chance to answer. ‘Maybe you’d like to tell us about him … about your relationship with him … Joe, if you wouldn’t mind?’