Meeting the English (12 page)

‘I've come in for some food,' he said, to the eggs.

‘Are you staying?' said Myfanwy.

‘No,' said Jake, ‘I'm away for a bit. Then I need my place back at Dad's. What's Juliet doing there?'

‘She thinks she's helping,' said Myfanwy.

‘You need to get her out,' said Jake. ‘Or move the nurse guy downstairs. Stru-anne. Or out. I need my room, OK? My room in Yewtree. It's important to me. It's my headspace.' And he sat down at the table and gulped the eggs, his bright eyes with their long, starry, wide-spaced lashes fixed on Myfanwy while he ground on more pepper with the outsize grinder. Then he wriggled back into his trousers and went off into the rain, leaving the plate on the table.

Myfanwy washed the plate, tracing its egg trails for the lines of a map, but he didn't ring, or reappear at all, not all that summer.

*   *   *

After the storms, it got hot again. Hot, so hot, it seemed the globe had stilled on its axis, with England stuck nearest the flame, on ‘roast'. The days seemed to grow no shorter: the flood of news stalled, then soured. People held hands in Latvia, did strangely civic things in Poland, and it was frankly hard to care. One night in Southwark a barge careened slowly into the cruiser
Marchioness,
and fifty-one people died, and what this meant no one could bear to say. House prices in London stagnated, like the canals.

In Cuik, the High School rejoiced in the record Higher results of Struan Robertson, and Mr Mackay, Science teacher, even pulled out the old honour board, long stacked in the staffroom cupboard, and wondered if there were some way of putting Struan's name on it. In Baker Street, the GCSEs of Juliet Prys and Celia Huntington were not anticipated with the same enthusiasm.

In Yewtree Row, neither Jake nor Myfanwy had been seen for twenty-five days. Jake had disappeared so utterly that Struan had nearly forgotten him, had decided that his midnight visit was some sort of hallucination, that he must be in Edinburgh, as Juliet said. Myfanwy, meanwhile, manifested herself only as Mr Riley, the painter, ‘Come to do the window frames, for Mrs Prys.' Shirin shrugged, and said, ‘If she's paying,' and it seemed she was: little packets of money appeared weekly in the top small drawer of Phillip's desk. Mr Riley made his way irregularly round the house, an undercoat here, a bit of putty there: a wee, silent, grey-haired man with the knack of being in a room when you didn't expect him, curled in the pool of light from an unbuckled sash window, like a cat.

Now, waking alone, marooned in his chair, in his unstrung body, Phillip Prys saw the warm light on the study wall in the morning, and the gold of the curtains, and sometimes remembered the previous morning, and that it had been the same. Often, he remembered the name of the season, too: summer, and even his age, and that this was the year something had happened: an accident.

‘You're coming back into yourself,' said Struan, settling him back into his chair after his nap, and the left eyelid twitched distinctly. The little finger on the left hand moved these days too, and the eyes – or at least the left one – certainly focused. But on the whole, for Phillip, this made things worse: sleep did not come to relieve him so easily or so often; he knew he wet himself and had to be washed; and the film script had gone, its pages falling away like petals in a wind.

‘Do you think he's still in there, old Phil?' asks Giles, as he always does when he visits. Giles is a useless visitor. He does nothing but sit by Mr Prys' side looking anxious. Struan is getting ready to hand him
David Copperfield,
again, when Giles says:

‘It's the idea that he's trapped in there, old Phil, don't you know?'

Struan says: ‘Well, a couple of times, sir, he has seemed to blink as a signal.'

‘Yes,' says Giles, ‘that's it. Juliet told me. She said he did it on the Heath, said he wanted to go the pond.'

‘I take him up there every day,' said Struan.

‘Yes,' said Giles. ‘But, any sign of it, you know, happening again. The blink?'

Struan shakes his head.

‘Could have been a trick of the light, I suppose,' says Giles, hopefully.

‘Mr Giles,' says Struan, ‘you know, children's books…'

‘Don't deal with them,' says Giles, reflexively, ‘frightfully difficult market.'

‘Aye,' says Struan. ‘No, but you know when they draw tortoises?'

‘Perhaps,' says Giles, getting ready to leave if Struan reveals himself to be a secret author.

‘Well,' says Struan, ‘they draw them like the tortoise can get out of its shell. Like the shell is the overcoat and there's a wee creature in there that can take its coat off if it wants?'

‘I suppose so,' says Giles.

‘Well, it's not like that,' says Struan. ‘The shell is the skeleton. The wee creature inside doesn't have any ribs or that. The shell
is
the tortoise.'

‘And?' says Giles.

‘I guess what I'm saying is, Mr Prys is a guy who's had a stroke. The stroke's no an overcoat. He cannae take it off.'

‘Right,' says Giles. Phillip does look a bit like a tortoise, now Struan mentions it: the brown, scaly skull, the shell of the rug, the half-closed, yellow-brown eyes.

‘So you think he won't recover, then?' says Giles, and Struan sighs.

*   *   *

The truth was, Struan was in no greater hurry than Giles to have Phillip suddenly semaphoring with an eyelid, or otherwise demanding change. It had all been going so well, the last three weeks, since the night of the Grand Stramash. The first week, it had been cooler, and had even rained a couple of times, and even now it wasn't so bad, because Juliet had taken him to Woolworths, which turned out to be just on the Finchley Road, and he now owned a pair of perfectly usable flip-flops, three plain T-shirts, and a collarless shirt from the Oxfam round the corner which Juliet insisted was trendy and just the thing and was OK, actually, after he'd given it a boil wash.

He wasn't even hungry any more. Shirin had instituted lunch, in the kitchen, every day after Mr Prys was fed and down for his nap. Struan, Juliet, and Shirin all sat round the kitchen table, and Shirin and he ate omelettes and drank spicy soup and stuffed pitta breads with brown and green stuff which often turned out to be really good. Struan was a convert to tomato salad, made with the skins steamed off and slatherings of pepper and oil. He got double because Juliet passed him hers.

Something had definitely happened to Juliet. She had stopped eating: she sat through all of lunch with a lettuce leaf in front of her, chattering. She peeled herself ten carrots every morning, put them in the fridge, and ate them through the day, her eyes dark and shiny over her hard-working jaw. She got up early in the morning and did Jane Fonda in the front room. She accompanied Struan on his late-night jogs, though she let him do the last couple of miles on his own. She had tidied up the bathroom, arranging her wee pots on the shelf in order of size. She was visibly thinner, her legs moving more freely as her jeans bagged to the ground, a pointy little face emerging through the chins, and she talked faster than ever, so much that sometimes Struan even wondered if she was on something.

But, ‘This is the real me,' Juliet had said, more than once, ‘coming through,' so maybe that was it, maybe she was just better without Myfanwy always on her back, and without Celia, actually, who she had only visited the once. She was certainly less moany, and even getting quite handy with Phillip. She refused to read him
David Copperfield,
but had dragged out the wee portable telly from a cupboard in the study, and rigged it up to work, fuzzily, with a yellow-tinted picture like an old Polaroid.

‘Dad always watched this,' she said to Shirin, ‘didn't you know? Honestly, half the time he said he was writing something he was in here, watching the racing. When I was little, he used to let me sit on the sofa sometimes and pick the winners. I always picked the horse with the maddest name.' And now they watched the races again, Phillip and his daughter, in the hot afternoons, with the curtains closed, and, occasionally, Juliet phoned in a bet to his William Hill account for a horse with long odds and a silly name. Toobuggers had come in second at Cheltenham, and the account was £5 up on the season.

After lunch, while Phillip was napping in the study, and Shirin was working upstairs, and the curtains were drawn against the sun all over the house, Struan had got in the habit of joining Juliet for more telly in the front room. The BBC were rerunning
Flamingo Road,
and it was rubbish of course, but he liked watching with Juliet, their bare feet up on the wicker sofa, sucking ice cubes and chewing carrots and giving out points for the stupidest haircut, and shouting, ‘Snog! Snog!' in the love bits. It reminded him of spending the night at Archie's, when Archie's mum let them watch
Starsky and Hutch
and made them popcorn. Years ago, before Struan had got so stupidly old.

Juliet was generally a bit quieter in the afternoons (sometimes she even crashed out gummily on the sofa) but in the evenings, when they went for their stroll with Phillip, out to the Heath in the thick warm air, she would revive, and rabbit on like she was on helium, leaving Struan to say, ‘Uh-huh,' and keep the wheelchair out the ruts.

‘I talk about myself the whole time, don't I?' she said, sometimes, but Struan didn't mind, she wasn't boring. She was funny about Celia and the new boyfriend, for instance, and listened with huge respect, her fringed head on one side and her pink mouth in a very serious pout, when Struan opined that any boyfriend who only visited at night, who wouldn't meet parents or friends, and insisted on sex with a wee girl who was blatantly not well at all, either didn't exist or was a total shit.

‘I don't think Seal's making him up,' said Juliet. ‘She looks really shiny and weird and religious about it. She's even managing not to get any thinner. I don't think she could put that on, exactly. And you know she's really up for the sex bit. She says he's just, you know, uncontrollable. Got, what do you call 'em, urges.' But when Struan told her that in his opinion boys' urges were no more uncontrollable than girls' urges, she was immensely pleased.

The Pond, though, was the best thing. That was mostly why Struan was feeling better. He'd found the Men's one now, decided that the nude swimming policy did not apply to Scots, and struck up a friendship with a shaven-head New Zealander called Bill who insisted, for their first few meetings, on calling Phillip Struan's ‘lover' and that they both had a thing for older guys. Bill's own lover was in the Royal Free, dying of what Bill called ‘the bleeding obvious', and Bill was taking something called ‘me time' every morning in the Pond. Struan worked out that Bill's ‘lover' must be a man during one of his Heath walks with Juliet and so was able to leave what Juliet now called his ‘Cuik face' gaping on a hillock. Bill was a serious swimmer, timing Struan up and down the pond, and insisting he join him with the free weights afterwards, but he was great with Phillip too, sitting with him while Struan had his swim, and wiping his mouth and moving him on the sweaty wheelchair as easily as Struan did himself. It was Bill, not Struan, who had first said, ‘He wants to get in the pool, you know, Struan, does old Phil. See the way his eyes follow you?'

And it was Bill who had turned up next day with a light tubular metal chair, and Bill, with his weightlifter's muscles and lifeguard's training, who had held Phillip's head and shoulders as they eased him onto it, and Bill who helped to carry him into the shallows. That first day, they had done no more than wet Phillip's feet. Today, they'd been further in, sitting the chair so deep that Phillip's calves were lifted and his ancient feet floated up in the healing gloop like a pale and peculiar pond weed. ‘He's loving it, Struan,' said Bill. ‘Loving it. Tomorrow, we'll give him a dip. What do you say?'

Struan thought about it all the way home. He could shower Phillip down quite well at the pond, he reckoned, with Bill's help. Phillip never moved his bowels before the five o'clock suppository. He didn't think pee would matter all that much. It was possible. At any rate, he could talk to Shirin about it.

So, when he got home, he settled Phillip with the racing, and made Shirin a cup of coffee. He had the hang of the wee silver gadget now, and was even beginning to prefer the result to instant. He stirred in a spoonful of sugar the way she liked it, then carefully mounted the stairs to the master bedroom. He hoped she might come out and they'd hang around on the stairs as they did most days, now, for ten minutes or even twenty, talking about stuff. Phillip and Zoroastrianism, his mother and Death. All that.

‘Is that for me?' said Mr Riley, by his elbow.

‘No,' said Shirin, ‘I am sure it is for me.' And she reached out and took the cup, and before he knew it, Struan was in Shirin's actual bedroom with the sheets turned down and the dressing gown on the bedpost, and was being beckoned past that, even, into the bathroom.

‘He is such,' said Shirin, ‘a disconcerting small man.' And Struan giggled. ‘Well really,' she said, ‘you don't find him?'

The en suite didn't seem like a bathroom, because it was full of Shirin's easel, and her tiny palettes, and miniature brushes in vials of bright liquid. There was water in the bath, and just noticing that for some reason made him blush. ‘My studio,' said Shirin, and smiled. ‘All this time and you haven't been in.'

‘Nearly a month,' said Struan.

‘Is that all?' said Shirin. ‘It seems like for ever.'

The floor trembled slightly beneath Struan's feet: Juliet, on the floor below, was doing her Jane Fonda. There were pictures everywhere, stuck to the walls with drawing pins, one of top of the other. Some of them were sketches: recognizably Phillip asleep in the wheelchair, a head and shoulders which surely belonged to Juliet, but also photos, and things torn from magazines, and bits of what looked like the instruction manual of Phillip's wheelchair—