Meeting the English (13 page)

‘I thought I ought to show you this,' said Shirin, pointing at the square of shining colour in the middle of the easel, ‘before I sell it. There has been a lot of interest, already.'

Struan peered. The picture was no bigger than a pocket notebook, and had such a smooth surface, it was hard to believe it had been painted at all. It portrayed a glittering, enamelled tower, on either side of which knelt a young knight in armour and a maiden in white. On the top of the tower lay the frame and seat of what was clearly Phillip's wheelchair, delicately leafed in gold. The rest of the chair, the brake and wheels, was being carried away by birds of prey with hooked beaks and golden wings. ‘Vultures?' asked Struan.

‘No,' said Shirin, ‘golden eagles. Look, it is the Highlands.'

And Struan looked, and saw that the background to the picture was a tiny blue mountain range in a cerise sunset.

‘It's awful good weather for the Highlands,' he said, smiling.

‘We are allowed this,' said Shirin, ‘good weather. In a picture. In our minds. Do you like it?'

‘The picture?' said Struan.

‘Yes,' said Shirin, ‘I am asking because it is from your idea.'

‘I thought you thought I was awful ignorant that day.'

‘No,' said Shirin, ‘I did not. Do you like the picture?'

Struan thought it was like having a butterfly land on your hand, when the sun was shining, and you see all the wee gleaming feathers. He was going to say so when Mr Riley suddenly rose into view on the other side of the window, framed by a single astragal.

‘Aye,' he said, ‘I like it.' He put the painting back on its stand. Shirin was gazing up at him with her strange, foil-backed eyes, expecting more of him.

‘Of course,' said Shirin, ‘you could say that I simply feed back to an English audience hackneyed stereotypes of the East which they are all too eager to receive. Images made palatable with a thin postmodern gloss. People have.'

Struan opened his mouth. He was thinking about caramels with a hard chocolate coating. His tongue was sweating.
Oh,
said Blondie, from below,
your hair is beautiful.
Mr Riley wiped a chamois cloth over the other side of the curved, thin glass, and it was as if he were wiping over Struan's skin, leaving all of it flushed and alive.

And then, in a violent unzipping of the air, the doorbell rang. Struan ran down the stairs, but Juliet had already answered, Juliet in her tight shiny workout gear with her mad wee ponytail bang on top of her head. Struan stood on the landing with his mouth open, horrified. For there, in button-up jeans and sunglasses, his cheeks half-shaven and his hair flicked, resurgent, stood Mr Fox.

11

In order to get rid of his teacher, and stop him coming in the house – which was obviously what he one hundred per cent intended to do – Struan had to say he would meet him for a drink in the pub. Mr Fox said they should go to the Flask on Flask Walk, just down the road, that very evening at half-past eight. Struan was enormously bothered by the whole thing. He paced round the house with his shoes off his great feet and arms loose, hangdog.

‘Shirin says it's OK. She's says she's going out at six but she'll be back by eight, she'll stay with Dad. Why do you want to say no?' said Juliet, rapidly, doing her leg lifts on the carpet. Struan sat down beside her.

‘I'm underage,' he said, helplessly. Juliet's eyes were strange and shiny. It had been weird, but impressive, the way she talked to his Mr Fox. Like he was their age. Like he was a person.

‘Oh, honestly,' said Juliet. ‘Honestly, Struan, you're ten foot tall and nearly eighteen anyway. Jake started going to the pub when he was twelve. What are you worrying about?'

‘I'm not Jake,' said Struan. ‘And anyway, I've never been.'

‘You've never been in a pub?' said Juliet, incredulous.

‘Well, ay, of course I have,' said Struan, ‘like, for events. My dad's wake. With adults. But I've never been on my own.'

‘Well,' said Juliet, ‘you're not going on your own. You're going with your teacher.'

‘That,' said Struan, ‘is what I'm worried about.'

‘But he's a nice guy, this teacher,' said Juliet, ‘isn't he? It's not like me going to the pub with Miss Kirwan, is it. And anyway, he's left. He said he was working in a publisher's. So he's not your teacher any more. He can be your friend. He was your favourite teacher, wasn't he?'

‘No really,' said Struan. ‘Not being too big for my boots or anything, I think I was his favourite pupil, but he wasn't my favourite teacher. My favourite teacher actually was Mr Mackay.'

‘Why?' said Juliet.

‘He was just this nice old guy who told you stuff,' said Struan, rubbing hopelessly at the Persian rug with his fist, nostalgic, suddenly, for the formaldehyde and certainty of Mr Mackay's bleak lab. Mr Mackay hadn't said anything at all to him when his dad died, not even that Struan could slack off the homework. If anything, he had set him extra. But he had got the leaflets for medicine and dentistry for the universities for him, and put them in his hand at the end of class one day, and told him he expected Struan to read them and make his choice and apply by the end of the week. He told him he should aim for the best. But Struan hadn't even asked Shirin about the pond, he realized. About bathing Phillip. He'd got too wrapped up in himself, and that wee picture.

‘No,' said Juliet, sitting up and facing Struan, ‘I mean, why didn't you like this Fox guy? He looked really young and cool to me, I never got anyone like that teaching me.'

‘I do like him,' said Struan, ‘and I appreciate, you know, that he tried to help me and that. I'm not ungrateful. It's just – I could never work out what he wanted. I always felt a wee bit false with him.'

But Juliet had returned to her leg lifts. She grinned at Struan from behind one thigh, just like Jane Fonda on the video cover, and even Struan realized she couldn't have done that two weeks previously: there would have been more thigh than face. Juliet must have lost about a sixth of her bulk – that couldn't really be healthy.

‘Look,' said Juliet, ‘I'm coming too, you know. Shirin will say it's OK. So you don't need to worry. I've been to lots of pubs. Lots and lots and lots.'

And she sprang up and danced out the room in her new, over-bouncy, Kids-from-
Fame
manner, leaving Struan to feed Phillip, and settle him and mosey down to the kitchen and eat lunch, all in that preoccupied, browsing giraffe way he had with him when he was worried, the one that Myfanwy, observing him through the basement window on her way in with Mr Riley's money, found so particularly irritating.

*   *   *

Phillip is taking his lunchtime nap, carefully flexed and laid out on the hospital bed, a cotton rug over his knees. He is dreaming of the Pond. He can see his body, its arms outstretched, floating above him in the green waters of Hampstead Pond. Soon, soon, he will slide back into it, his arms will smooth on his hands like gloves, his legs will slip into the long boots of his shins, and then his nose will crest the water, his eyes will blink in the sun, and he will jack-knife in the brightness and he, all of him, will swim off swift as Mr Jeremy Fisher. Then the blanket itch, the trouser sweat, the aching neck will be gone for ever, and the Scottish Boy will be there at the side of the pond with a towel.

Bits of him are fully asleep during this dream, and his eyes are shut. There's a pleasant sepia wash over everything. Then he hears Myfanwy's voice, and he tries to open his eyes, but because of the trouble he has with the mechanism of the eyelids, the drawbridge system, the counterbalances, the whatever it is, rusty weights on chains probably, that pull the lids up, he can't do anything about it. She is saying: ‘I haven't gone anywhere, you know, Phillip,' and all he can see is the red plumbing of his eyelids.

Not that he needs to see her, really. He knows in his bones that Myfanwy has never gone anywhere, ever, that she is the boards and attic and dust of this house and that the dreams of ponds and Scottish boys and racing on the telly and Shirin's cool hands holding his head are but shadows and the play of the light. Myfanwy is his wife, and all the others, sweet Shirin, the one with the horse, even his first love, purse-lipped Dilys of the valleys with her library card and her Da and her abortion, are fleeting dreams.

*   *   *

Juliet takes two pills (it needs to be two, these days, to get the springy-heeled feeling) and calls Celia, who she has only seen once since she went round to drop the bombshell about Jake being rusticated, and Celia pretended she didn't care, like she had never even heard of Jake. Celia was reconsidering Oxford, she told Juliet the next time, she thought Cambridge might be more liberal and free-spirited.

Juliet does the phoning on the stairs, while she puts polish on her toenails. The stairs: partly because she is now able to bend all the way to her feet without pushing through rubber rings of fat, and partly because it feels brilliant to tuck the phone between her chin and her shoulder, and twine the wire under her ankle, like a busy girl in a film.

‘I can't hear you,' says Celia.

‘A double date,' says Juliet, shouting into the receiver.

‘What do you mean?' says Celia.

‘You bring Mr Mystery along to the Flask this evening. I'll give him the once over.'

‘He's busy,' says Celia.

‘All night?' says Juliet.

‘Maybe,' says Celia, ‘anyway, who are you bringing?'

‘My date,' says Juliet. It seems to her that Mr Fox looked at her with great approval, that morning, with his big shining eyes. He asked her if she would be sure to come, at least twice.

‘Someone,' she says.

‘Juliet,' says Celia, ‘I know you're not seeing Struanne. You know that, don't you? You are not going out with him. And anyway, it's Results Day tomorrow.'

‘All the more reason to have a night out,' says Juliet, ‘and anyway, Celia, I'm starting not to believe this boyfriend of yours. I'm thinking, if I don't meet him soon, I might have to tell your mum you're having delusions. Anorexics do, you know.'

Juliet puts the phone down. Her heart is racing unpleasantly, and she is sweating all over. The pills did that, when you first took them. She untangles the phone, pulling the wire over her head. A plume of black hair falls on the stair carpet. Juliet tugs at her fringe, and more hairs come, painlessly, softly, as if they'd been loosened. She stares at them, thatching her wet palm, and thinks, quite distinctly, ‘Que será será,' and stumps up the stairs humming. On the landing there is Shirin and she says: ‘Juliet, do you want to go shopping?'

Oh, what a day, what a sunlit day this is turning out to be!

12

Phillip was afraid, that was Struan's feeling. Something had happened to make him afraid, something during the nap. A dream?

He'd changed him, now, and sat him up, and wiped his face down with cold flannels, and combed his grey-black hair, but still Phillip kept sweating, the droplets forming on his brown pate like dew. His eyes were open, focusing. It was a hot day, humid, but not as hot as all that. Struan remembered something he had read about cats, in one of Mr Fox's dirty books, in fact: that if they were very frightened, if you threw them off a building, for instance, their paws sweated.

Struan sat beside Phillip and took his hand. The big loose fingers were cool and hard and damp. He scootched over and got his face into the position he reckoned Phillip could see the best: high up and on the left. ‘Mr Prys,' he said, ‘are you OK?' and Phillip's brown left eye, isolated in its lashes, aswim in his freckled slack face, closed and opened again.

Struan breathed in. ‘Can you do that again?' he said. And Phillip did.

‘OK,' said Struan, leaning forward, ‘Mr Prys, don't try too hard, OK? No big deal? But if you can hear me, for sure, blink, OK?'

And Phillip Prys did. He was trying to shut both eyes, Struan saw, but the muscles of the left worked better than the right, giving him a sleepy leer.

‘Right,' said Struan, calmly as if he'd been doing this all his days. But Shirin and Juliet had gone off on their shopping trip, giggling. The nurse wasn't due for three hours. It was him on his own.

‘Mr Prys,' he said, ‘excuse me, are you frightened of something? Are you upset? Can you give me a wink for yes?'

And the beery eye opened, and shut.

‘Has something happened?' asked Struan. ‘Something bad, just now?' And Phillip winked again.

‘OK,' said Struan, ‘right, just hang on a wee mo, OK?'

Struan had recently been reading about Daniel Day-Lewis in the film
My Left Foot,
and, thinking about feet and bits of chalk, he ran to the desk. Typewriter, notebook, blotter: all as Phillip had left them on his last morning. He thought he could write out a list mebbe, or the alphabet, on a piece of paper, then Phillip could blink at the right thing, but he couldn't find any paper, it was crazy. He rummaged through the drawers and in the end picked up Phillip's big spiral-bound notebook, and flipped over the notes –
Giles 10 am – Boy in novel son of mine manager?
– and scatological cartoons of Salman Rushdie till he got to a blank page. In Phillip's swish ink pen, in big letters, he wrote down things he could think of that might be frightening Phillip, or worrying him, just: Dream, Jake, Death, Myfanwy, Money.

And just then there was a cracking noise, and a shaft of brighter light. Mr Riley had opened the small sash window, sideways, from outside, the way you can only open sash windows if you are a sash window specialist and have done something to the frame, and now he stepped into the room from the garden.

Mr Riley looked at Phillip, and Struan, and the desk, and the notebook which said DEATH MYFANWY in large capitals.