RW: Just one more question … Mr Gold?
[unidentifiable noise … door opening?]
RW: When you get back home … will you be keeping to your half of the pact? Will you be trying again to commit …
[door slam]
Chapter 17
Harvey is still not entirely sure he can use his phone in the terminal building at JFK. Speaking on it now, in the Virgin check-in line for Economy, he checks furtively every so often in case that terrifying flight marshal should be patrolling the area. All he sees, though, is an electronic poster advertising first L’Oréal, then some new Cameron Diaz movie.
‘Oh, my God. My God. But you’re all right. Are you? Are you hurt? What about Colette?’
It is his wife’s voice. In the background he can hear the sound of a kettle boiling and cereal packets rustling. Jamie will be having his breakfast. Tuesday: Corn Flakes. The sound recedes as she moves through to their hallway to avoid disturbing their son with this story.
‘No, I’m fine. She’s fine, too. She didn’t get hit by the bullet, just by the butt of the gun. She was concussed, but fine.’
He notices that a man from the group in front, who is very fat but carries only a tiny suitcase, has looked round at him. His eyes, tiny in the flesh of his face, demonstrate a clearly piqued interest. How long has he been listening? All the way from Stella: my dad was shot this morning? Harvey gives him a hard stare. The man turns round, with no sense of abashment.
‘And Eli?’
‘Well, obviously, he’s dead.’
‘Killed … Jesus …’
‘No, I’m not sure.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There was no blood. The bullet hit him in the side of the head, but no blood came out.’
‘Is he a vampire? Sorry, darling, wrong time …’
‘No, that’s OK. He might have been. But, no, his doctor said in all likelihood he died some time before the bullet hit. Some time during the scuffle. Or maybe even while I was saying goodbye. Which means, I suppose, that he – Pauline’s brother – won’t get charged with murder.’
The first group at the check-in desk move off, with their boarding passes. The line shifts forward. Harvey, who has no trolley, has to kick his luggage in the direction of the very fat man. How hard would I have to kick my suitcase for it to fly into his enormous arse?
‘Saying goodbye, though. That was weird. I was just doing it to stall, really. And also, you know this thing they say in crime films – it happens in Silence of the Lambs – how you have to humanize the victim? Try and make the killer see him or her not as an object, but as a real person?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think that’s what I was doing, sort of. Without quite realizing it. In the process of saying goodbye to him, I was trying to make Pauline’s brother see him as a real person. Except …’
‘What?’
‘When it came to it, the person that I made him see that Dad was – I don’t know if that helped. I don’t know if I made him seem like a person who shouldn’t … die. I guess.’
There is a silence at the other end of the line. He feels Stella’s empathy cogs whirring.
‘So, you never really said goodbye? It was all just a tactic?’
He considers this. In his pocket, his fingers play with the wrapper of a Sour Apple Bomb Colette had given him much earlier today.
‘It was. But, no. I said goodbye. More than I ever thought I was going to.’
‘OK, Jamie. Just hold on. I’m coming.’ Her voice shifts down to a semi-whisper: their son’s Asperger’s radar is up. ‘Fuck. What about the police?’
‘I’ve given them a statement already.’ He doesn’t say that the name of the policeman who took his statement, in the privacy of Freda’s little room down the corridor, was Webb, and that when he had asked him if he had a relative who had worked in the NYPD, the answer had been yes: his father.
‘They said you can go?’
‘Well, no one stopped me. It was chaos at the hospital. And John – the security guy who’s been standing outside Eli’s room this whole time? He was great, just led me through the madness.’ To Harvey’s surprise, John had also, as they had got to the hospital entrance, said, ‘I owe you, man’ and hugged him – Harvey, completely smothered by his puffa jacket, found it strangely blissful, security guy become security blanket. Once released, Harvey had wanted to say, ‘No, I owe you, man’ – after all it had been John who had actually fought the assassin, John who had brought him down – but he hesitated, not wishing to come over like a white man trying to sound black, and, in the moment of uncertainty, John had just turned and gone back to his job.
‘I still can’t get my head around this. Especially that you took him on.’
‘I didn’t take him on. I just talked.’
‘But when the little girl came in …?’
‘I just jumped up to grab Colette. Get her out of his way. Protect her.’ She is so unprotected.
‘Yeah, but you might have – darling, you could have been killed.’
The group in front shift to load their luggage onto the weight machine. The check-in woman, revealed by their parting heads, is smiling at them all. She wears a bright red blazer, with lipstick to match. Harvey’s tired eyes begin their search of her face and body: and then, quite suddenly, he can’t be bothered.
‘You’re a hero,’ says Stella. She says the phrase without irony: something of an achievement, in this day and age.
‘No.’
‘Harvey. You are.’
He thinks: I suppose I am, of sorts.
‘What about the funeral? You aren’t staying for that?’
‘No. That’ll be Freda’s gig. As will the enormous memorial service in a month’s time. I don’t think I can handle it. Plus I really want to come home.’
‘How was Freda?’
‘Distraught. But also … I don’t know. I think the drama of it suits her. I think she wouldn’t have been able to cope with him just quietly slipping away.’
‘Was she thankful to you?’
‘For what?’
‘For taking on the mental man! For saving her daughter’s life!!’
‘Oh. Yeah, sort of.’ In fact, Freda had been mainly concerned, reasonably enough, with Colette’s welfare, and then simply with the fact of Eli’s death. She had cried manful, stoic tears. In his mind’s eye Harvey had seen her transform – in the bustle of the room, with bodies being moved out, and policemen asking questions – into a classical widow, assuming the mantle of dignified grief as easily as a great actress dons Jocasta’s black. This is what she will be for the rest of her life, forever wreathed in the sad smile of memory: she will be her Yoko Ono. As he had left, though, Freda had grasped his hand and looked him in the eye for far too long, until he had to look away, embarrassed, which Harvey had taken to be the dignified grieving widow version of her trademark hug: and therefore forgiveness and thanks, of a type.
‘I think,’ he continues, ‘she was already working on her speech to the reporters.’
‘The news is out, then? Already?’
‘No. But it will be soon. They know something’s up. There were more than usual gathered outside Mount Sinai.’ Loads of them: the weirdo fans were all there, too, one of them, the blonde in pigtails, barefoot, wearing a man’s overcoat, much too big for her, and crying, as if she already knew.
‘Has everyone who should know been told?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Before it’s in the news …’
‘Oh. Yeah. The police or the hospital will tell Simone and Jules. They won’t release the information to the press until after they’ve been informed.’
‘God. I still can’t get my head round it. I know this is a clichéd thing to say but – stuff like this doesn’t happen to people like us, does it?’
‘No,’ says Harvey. ‘But it does happen to people like Eli. He’d have loved it as a way to die. Now he’ll be more famous than ever.’
He
is at the check-in desk.
‘Hello, sir,’ says the Virgin Lady. ‘Travelling to London today?’
‘Yes,’ he says.
‘Listen, darling, I’ve got to go.’
‘OK. Be safe. For God’s sake.’
‘Just one thing. Sorry, I’ll be with you in a minute.’ The Virgin Lady nods, and looks away discreetly. He bends his face more into the phone and lowers his voice. ‘I think maybe – well, I hope – that now Dad’s dead – well not just that, a whole load of stuff that’s happened here – anyway, the point is, I think I might be: better. A bit. With everything.’
She knows, of course, what he is talking about. There is a silence at the other end of the line. He can hear Jamie humming in the background, a tuneless song.
‘Really?’ she says.
‘Yes,’ he says. He says it with emphasis, because he so wants it to be true. He has no idea whether it is.
‘OK, good. Let’s hope so.’
The Virgin Lady looks back towards him. Though she smiles radiantly, her eyes are saying that he and a number of other passengers behind him, some of whom are looking annoyed, have a plane to catch.
‘Stell, I’ve got to go. I love you.’
It comes back unhesitatingly. ‘I love you, too. And, Harvey, I’m sorry. About your dad.’
‘Don’t be,’ he says. ‘Really. It was time for him to go.’
He puts the phone back in his pocket, clumsily failing, under the social pressure of the check-in queue, to click END CALL properly. To his right, the electronic poster rotates once more, flicking from Cameron Diaz to a new beautiful female face: it is Lark, looking direct to camera, holding a guitar, and subtitled simply with her name and the word Astray. He does not see it; just as he does not hear a small voice, his wife’s, continue from another part of the world:
‘Harvey? Hold on. Isn’t there someone else who should be told?’
* * *
Violet Gold is straining to put on a sock. It is a blue woollen one, one of a pair which are now slightly too big for her feet. Her feet – unlike other parts – are not a section of her body that she would have thought capable of shrinkage, but she is sure these socks used to fit her perfectly. Because they are too big, the wool always concertinas around her ankle when she stands up, and she knows how socks worn in that way can present a version of a person who has given up. Not so much, though, as not being able to get one on at all.
Some of the residents at Redcliffe House dress themselves and others don’t. It is the Rubicon between the living and the living dead, and Violet does not wish to cross it, at least not today. She has managed to get the right one on, presumably, she thinks, because her right hip is in better shape than her left. She sits on her bed, holding the limp woollen tube uselessly in her hand. It is navy blue, to match her skirt.
She tries again. But she cannot bend far enough on that side; her body locks, with her fingertips flailing the sock halfway down her haunch. It is as if someone is holding her down there, forcing her to come to terms with the realization that the skin on her shin is so thin the bone is visible. She rocks backwards on the bed and tries to put the sock on from below, but her legs do not come up above her as they would have done when she was younger. Instead, her torso ends up flat on the bed, with her lower half hanging off the end. She is not sure she can move. Off to one side of the bed, within reach, is the red panic button. But pressing it – since she will be found with one sock on and one sock off, and therefore the evidence that she can no longer dress herself will be incontrovertible – means crossing the Rubicon.
She remains there for some time, the smell of the kitchen’s numerous breakfasts fading in her nostrils. There is something pleasurable about it. With one sock on and one sock off, she can imagine that she has stopped time: nothing can progress until such an in-between condition is resolved. Life will not move on, surely, until her other sock is on, so perhaps it is best to just lie still and assume that she has found in this tiny domestic interstice the means to cheat death.
There is a knock on the door. Her heart beats fast: or, at least, fast for her, these days. A surreal thought crosses her mind, that it is good that all parts of the body age at the same rate; good, in other words, that her heart is old and baggy because if it was young and pert the banging it would be capable of would surely crack her powdery ribs.
‘Hello?’ she says.
‘Are you decent?’ comes back Mandy’s voice.
Violet wonders what the answer to this is. There is something indecent about the way she is lying, something that in a younger woman might be thought of as sexual, so therefore, she assumes, will look on her twisted and grotesque. And there is something indecent about the thought that being found like this may mean that she will never get to dress herself again.
‘You’ve got a visitor,’ says Mandy.
‘My sister?’ she says. Why would she come at this time? And without telephoning first?
‘No. A lady.’
Violet blinks at the ceiling of her room. It is like a blank screen on which she tries to project who this might be. Only Valerie ever comes to see her. Only Valerie has ever come to visit her at Redcliffe House. The shock of it being someone else, in fact, gives her system a jolt, enabling her to sit upright on the bed just as Mandy, taking her silence as acquiescence, opens the door. She smiles at Violet – also somewhat unusual – and then steps aside, allowing a woman into the room. ‘Hello,’ says the woman, and then, noticing Violet’s feet: ‘Oh, sorry, were you just getting dressed?’
‘Um … I was, yes, but it’s fine.’ She does not know who this woman is, but visits, especially from young people, are currency in Redcliffe House, raising the receiver of the visit in everyone’s estimation. Besides, something about her suggests that she has good reason to be here. Violet feels a trickle in her mind of what it might be about. She looks to Mandy, who is perched nosily at the door. ‘Thank you, Mandy,’ she says. Mandy’s smile fades as she goes.
‘Do sit down,’ Violet says, standing. She puts her feet into her slippers and gestures towards her chair. ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’
‘Um. Yes. But, please: I’ll make it. Through here?’
‘I’m fine to make the tea, really.’
‘OK,’ says the woman, reddening. Violet has seen this shadow play before with the other residents, where a young, able-bodied visitor offers some small form of help, and then feels, once told that it is unnecessary, that they should not have offered it, and that what they had thought was kindness may have been interpreted as condescension.
‘Don’t worry, please,’ she says, ‘I would have been just as happy for you to make it. But I know where everything is. Sugar? Or perhaps you’d like coffee?’
‘No, tea is fine. And no sugar, thank you.’ She sits down. How old can she be? Forty, even? She is slim, and her face is finely framed by much curling reddish hair. Violet wonders when last this amount of hair, hair with life like this, was in this room. As the woman’s body makes its first contact with the chair, Violet feels suddenly self-conscious about her surroundings. It must seem all so musty to her, she thinks. Will the seat still be warm from when she sat in it this morning, naked, trying to build up the energy to put her clothes on? Will this warmth disgust her?
‘Tea with no sugar it is then,’ she says, and turns towards the kitchenette.
‘Violet,’ says the woman. She turns back. ‘It is Violet, isn’t it? Violet Gold?’
‘Yes …?’
‘I’m so sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Stella. Stella Marsten.’
‘Right. Well, it’s lovely to meet you, Stella.’
‘Yes. I mean … it’s lovely to meet you, too. My husband’s name is Gold. Harvey Gold.’
The trickle in Violet’s mind swells. ‘Let me make that tea,’ she says.
* * *
In the hung moment, while this tea is being made in London, Harvey Gold takes one more call before he leaves America. Due to an air traffic buil
d-up, his flight has been delayed on the tarmac for over an hour. He has taken the phone out to turn it off, or maybe just switch it to aeroplane mode, although he is not sure about this, as it may power down somewhere across the Atlantic, leaving him bereft at Heathrow. The stewardess, who is doing the safety demonstration, is right by him – every time her arms stretch out in front of her in another section of her pointless life-saving mime, her bright red hip judders in the corner of his vision. Distracted, he has begun the process of changing his home screen from an image of the earth to one of Stella and Jamie, but flicking through his photo library he so far cannot find a perfect one – either Stella does not look quite as he would like, or Jamie is making one of the weird faces he tends to make when being photographed, or he himself is in the picture, which seems somehow inappropriate. The nearest is one of his wife and son from a family holiday a couple of years ago in Spain, standing outside a restaurant on the Cap de Creus, the unearthly rock formation that crumbles along the coast two hours north of Barcelona. Stella looks nice – it is sunset, and the deep red light throws her light tan into good relief – and Jamie is looking away across the sea, which means his face is still. And the restaurant, Harvey remembers, was called the Restaurant at the End of the World, which seems right, if he is going to replace the world with this picture. But then, looking at it again, widening it and closing up on it by splaying his fingers across the screen, he has become unsure, and instead has started playing chess again, when the phone rings.
‘Dizzy,’ he says. ‘I’m on a plane.’
‘I see.’
‘I’m coming back to London.’
‘Ah …’
Harvey looks across the two other passengers in his row – an old couple, the woman reading, the man staring into space – to the window. All he can see are aeroplanes coming in, trundling on the tarmac towards their gates. Nothing seems to be heading out apart from them.
‘You’re not going to comment about that? About what it might mean about my father?’
‘Harvey, we’re not in a session now. We can talk about that when we are.’
‘Yeah. Well. Sorry, Dizzy, I should have said this earlier, but I’m not planning to come back.’
The Death of Eli Gold Page 44