Mr Toppit (30 page)
Authors: Charles Elton
“Are you okay?” I asked. I knelt down beside her.
“I wish you weren’t going to America,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” I knew she wasn’t just talking about me being away. “I don’t understand why Toby didn’t come. He said he would. Well, he said he would if he could but he said it as if he meant to come. You know when people
are saying things just to be polite. Claude’s furious, but I didn’t
absolutely
say he was going to come.”
“I’m really glad he didn’t,” I said.
Her nose was dripping. “I liked him,” she said. “I thought he was exotic. You’re just jealous.”
“Of what exactly? His size? His dyed hair?”
She laughed, and put her hand on mine. She handed me a bottle of clear liquid.
“What is it?”
“Grappa
. It’s made from all the grape crap left behind after they’ve done the wine. Claude loves it. It’s Italian. Don’t drink it all.”
The
grappa
seemed to avoid my stomach and go straight to my head.
“Do you know that Graham Carter has five children?”
“That many?”
“So fucking fertile. Bettina, Olivia, Mary, Prudence, and you know what they call the boy? Podge.
Podge!”
“That can’t be his real name.”
“I’m pregnant,” she said. “Isn’t that a bore?”
I didn’t know what to say. Her eyes held mine. There was an odd look on her face. “You watch everything, don’t you?” she said. “You observe it and take it all in and process it. What do you do with it when it’s inside you? It must
fester.”
“Like in
The Addams Family
. Do you remember him?”
“What was he? I loved him. The uncle? That’s right.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be drinking.”
“I won’t be pregnant for long. I hate babies. They squall and they never laugh at your jokes. What do you think Martha would say?”
We both seemed to be ignoring the fact that her eyes were
brimming with tears. “Do we care? She didn’t even say good-bye today,” I said.
“Anyway, I still haven’t forgiven her for burning all that stuff. All Arthur’s
things
. How could she do that?”
“You saved some of it,” I said.
“Big deal. Some charred bits and pieces.”
I took another swig of
grappa
. “I like this,” I said. She took the bottle and had some, too. It was almost finished now.
“You don’t have to go. Do you really have to go?” Then she groaned.
“Ohhh
… I don’t know why everything’s so …”
I would have liked to know what she was going to say, what she thought everything was, but from above us there were hoots of laughter, then Claude and Rani clattered down the stairs. By now, I had lost the rhythm of how it had been in Claude’s room so it was a shock to have them invade the little hideout Rachel and I had created by the pay phone under the stairs.
They wanted us to go outside. He grabbed Rachel’s arm and pulled her to her feet. My head was spinning. They might have been singing.
Outside the street was quiet and the air smelled new and fresh. Oxygen surged into me and I could feel the blood racing through my veins. Rani had his Beefeater’s hat on and he was making the kind of screeching noise you might make if you were skiing down a mountain. I tried to picture us all back in Claude’s room but it seemed too long ago.
Claude was rattling the gate that led into the gardens in the middle of the square, but it must have been padlocked. It might have been him who was the first to try climbing over the railings, or it might have been Rani. Then we were in the gardens and Rani was lying on the ground holding his bare leg, which
was bleeding. Rachel and Claude were trying to climb a tree. I lay down and put my cheek against the damp grass. It was hard to get the order of everything right. I don’t know whether the police came then or whether I had fallen asleep and it was later. Then there was the van, and then there was the police station, and then there was filling in forms. Maybe Rani was with us or maybe he had been taken to the emergency room. Everybody seemed to be talking about his leg. It seemed that we had Disturbed the Peace and although the policeman I talked to kept repeating, “This is a serious offense, sir,” I couldn’t see that what we had done was so serious. Maybe Claude felt the same. I could hear him shouting at somebody down the corridor.
I don’t know what time they let us go, but it was starting to get light when we walked back to Claude’s place. I slept for an hour or two in a sleeping bag on the floor. When I woke up, all I could hear was Rachel and Claude snoring. They still had their clothes on and were fast asleep on his bed. The room was a tip. Bottles and glasses, overflowing ashtrays, and plates with the remains of Claude’s Thai food were all over the place.
I had to get to the airport and collected my stuff together as quietly as I could, although I don’t think a nuclear bomb would have woken them. I’d been going to leave a note, but I couldn’t think of anything to say so I just let myself out.
Once I had gone through check-in and was in the departure lounge I had the strange sense that I had escaped unscathed—from what, exactly, I wasn’t sure. I felt free and clear of everything: nothing could touch me. Then, as I was looking through the magazines on the newsstand, my heart jolted. Propped up next to the piles of newspapers was an
Evening Standard
placard
on which was written in big black felt-tip capitals: HAYSEED BOY POLICE CAUTION.
If I’d thought Martha wouldn’t have heard about it yet, I was wrong. I rang her just before the flight was called and she was icy with anger. By that time I had had half an hour to let it settle, and as I talked to her on the phone, watching passengers come and go with their luggage, listening to the noise of the busy airport, the world seemed normal again. What did it matter? It was just a blip, so small as to be imperceptible in the scheme of things.
In Martha’s scheme of things, however, the scale seemed to be different. “How could you be such a fool?” she shouted. Suddenly I was sick of everything, sick of
Hayseed
, sick of us all being locked together.
I thought for a moment, and I said, “Because I’m special,” and then I hung up on her.
I had to go back to Los Alamos to do the show. I left there when I was five or six and I’d never been back. I’d forgotten the color everything was in those mountains. People call it red but it isn’t close, not even pink. It’s a kind of terra-cotta. A dirty color, but it looks clean with the sky and all that air. I don’t know what you’d think of it, Luke. It would look like the moon if you came from England.
I didn’t recognize Los Alamos at all. No connection. Nothing came back. There’s even a Starbucks there! It looks like anywhere else now. They’ve paved the roads, of course, and there are more of them, but I hardly even recognized Fuller Lodge, it seemed so small. Los Alamos was originally some school for rich kids but they kicked them out when the army took it over in the war, and that was the schoolhouse. There’s a lake by Fuller Lodge called Ashley Pond, and when I was a kid, it seemed vast and open, like it went on forever. Someone even told us it was bottomless, just went all the way down to the center of the earth. Now it’s surrounded by buildings and it’s like a pissy little thing that wouldn’t go higher than your ankles if you jumped in.
In my head Los Alamos is my dad’s place. I don’t remember much about it except him. And Paully a bit—the kid who lived next door to us. There’s Alma, of
course, but I try to siphon her out of it. She sort of spoils it for me with her moods, her drinking, and her grousing about the heat, the cold, the bugs, and the Jews. Jews! The whole place was filled with Jews, all those foreign scientists who had come over from Europe to build the bomb. We couldn’t have won the war without them, though I don’t feel too good about it now. Most people don’t. Now they think the war would have ended anyway; they just wanted to test the bomb on people. Still, it was an achievement, the bomb, an amazing piece of work done in those conditions, and I’m proud of what my dad did, not that he was much more than a technician. He wasn’t high up or anything, but they couldn’t have done it without guys like him.
Everybody had doubts then. First the Russians were our allies, then they weren’t. What were people meant to think? And that place—Los Alamos—must have been like a hothouse of secrets and gossip. They must have talked about whether what they were doing was right, whether the bomb technology should be kept from everyone else. Work was all they did. There weren’t football games or TV, and people cared then. It isn’t like now when nobody gives a shit about what’s happening.
They didn’t want me to do the Los Alamos show. Nobody’s heard of it, nobody cares, the advertisers won’t like it, yada yada. That’s what they said, but it was more than that—they were frightened. Anyway, I forced them into it. I can’t just talk to movie stars tub-thumping some new movie. The whole civil liberties issue is as important now as it was then. That’s what the show was about. You may not get your security clearance revoked now, like
they did to Oppenheimer, the man who ran Los Alamos, but the government’s always watching you.
The weird thing is, I see pictures of Oppenheimer and get him confused with my dad. He was tall and thin, too, legs like a stork. I certainly didn’t inherit those genes. You always see Oppenheimer wearing a hat in pictures and my dad wore one, too, so I think of him when I see Oppenheimer. Now, I know that’s crazy, but I’ve got nothing to connect my memories to, Alma saw to that. No photos of him, no papers, nothing. She destroyed them all. When we cleared out the house in Modesto there was zip. For such a terrible housekeeper, she was certainly thorough.
That’s why I did the Alzheimer’s show, got one of the biggest audience shares we’ve ever had. The letters we got! Thousands! It touched such a nerve in people. You know, what parents pass on to their kids is so important and that’s what I was talking about, not the medical effect of Alzheimer’s, though that’s pretty terrible, too, but how it destroys what I called the “Legacy Gene.” I just came up with that phrase and already people are using it. There’s something in people that wants to pass stuff on to the next generation—experience, wisdom, life lessons, call it what you want. And that’s what Alzheimer’s takes away, not just your own memories but the ability to pass them on. That’s the harm it does. That’s the killer.
I was kind of nervous about doing it, but I’m glad I did. Bringing on Alma, I mean. You could have heard a pin drop. Of course, we had doctors and Alzheimer’s experts on the show, and I had a couple of families who talked about how they’d suffered, but I had to make it
personal. That’s what people love. That’s why the show’s so popular, I think, because I bring it all back to me.
At the end I just announced Alma, and Erica brought in the wheelchair. She’d had to be pretty heavily sedated—you never know what she’s going to do. I didn’t want her to launch into one of her tirades. But she was good as gold, just sat there staring into the audience with a blank face. It couldn’t have worked out better. I knelt down by the wheelchair and said quietly, “Alma, do you know where you are? You’re on television.” Didn’t react at all. Then I took her hand and said, “If only you could share your past with me. I need what’s in your head,” and I stroked her hair. I said, “I know it’s there, Alma, but it’s been hidden away.” By this time I was pretty cut up. You can imagine. I had to turn away from the cameras.
When we got Alma out of the studio the medication must have been wearing off because she began to shout and scream. Erica was wonderful. Best carer we’ve had. The first ones when we moved to LA were terrible, couldn’t cope with Alma at all. Erica was in control from day one. No nonsense. She’s good with her but strong. Alma knows where she can go and where she can’t. It’s better now we keep the gate on the path up from the guesthouse locked. She can’t fall over on the slope. You should get to know Erica. I hadn’t realized how tough the Dutch were. Erica says it’s from living below sea level with just those walls to stop the water flooding everywhere. Such a strong woman. That face. Like something from Mount Rushmore.
It’s different for you. You’ve still got him, your dad. He’s always there. Martha sees to that. She keeps his
memory alive for you and Rachel. You wouldn’t get her going around destroying things. And you’ve got the books. Oh, that’s such a legacy for you, Luke, such a shining beacon, like those Olympic torches that the old Greeks passed from runner to runner. And you’ll be able to hand them on to your children. You can hold up the books and say proudly, “Look, this is me! I am Luke Hayseed. This was my father’s legacy to me and this will be my legacy to you.”
Laurie did talk a lot but she didn’t actually spew all that out in one long session. If she had, I’d have been asleep in about five minutes. I’ve put it together from the various conversations I had with her while I was in Los Angeles. Other people’s pasts just aren’t that interesting, so I’ve cut it down a lot to give the flavor.
With her show being on five days a week, and the never-ending planning needed for the upcoming ones, you would think you’d want to wipe the old ones from your mind as soon as they’d gone out, but she talked about the Los Alamos show a lot. One evening she asked if I wanted to watch it. She had a VHS of it, but couldn’t get her video-player to work and I thought I might be off the hook. In the end, she called through to the poolhouse and got Travis, who was living there for the summer, working as what she called her “gofer,” to come and set it up.
It was odd seeing Laurie on television. The surprise was how good she was. She was sort of just like herself but different at the same time. She certainly looked a lot better, which was probably the makeup, but she moved more fluidly, too. At home she sometimes limped a little because she was having trouble with her knees, but on the set, despite her size, she seemed to glide around as if she was on castors, shoving microphones into people’s faces and talking to the camera.
Actually, the show was surprisingly interesting. The first bit
was some footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after they had been hit with those bombs. Then Laurie was in an old army truck with an open back, joggling around with a lot of old guys as they were being driven to Los Alamos where the first bombs had been built. They had all worked there and she was asking what they remembered, and then there were clips of them walking round Los Alamos, interspersed with old photos of the place.
