Something to Tell You (35 page)

“I attempt to take care of your daughter’s mental health and in exchange I get free accommodation in New York?”

“As if I were the only one with woman problems. You know I was watching you in the Sootie.”

“You saw me watching my ex. What did you think?”

He said, “I was wondering what such a sight would do to someone’s head. I only hope you’ve been seeing Ajita.”

I told Henry that the last time I’d been to the house, to see Rafi, I’d stroked Josephine’s hair in the kitchen. Not only because I wanted to, or because she had a headache, but because I’d been in search of the mole I’d seen in the Sootie. Of course I wasn’t able to find it. Then I realised I’d been looking on the wrong side. But had it really been her there? Had it really been me?

Henry touched my hand. “Old chap, I know she’s an agony, but do what you can for my daughter. If I don’t get that picture back, or if it gets damaged, I’m going to be hurting in the nuts.”

Not long after I’d said goodbye to Henry—he would stay in the bar, read the paper and finish the bottle—Valerie rang.

She was keen to invite me to dinner but, of course, wanted to talk about Lisa and the Hand. I could take some of her talk but turned down the party—for which she had gathered a stellar cast of American film agents—as I suspected she’d use it as an opportunity to get me into one of her “little rooms,” where she’d go on more about Lisa.

Now she was saying to me, “Of course, with Lisa, there’s no reason for all that combing through the past you usually do. There just isn’t time for that nonsense. This is an emergency situation, as she slips away from us into insanity.”

I told Valerie I would consider her request to help Lisa—help her
what?
—but added that I didn’t believe there was much I could do personally. Not that I believed that saying no meant anything to this family.

Nevertheless, I didn’t expect to hear from any of them quite so soon.

The doorbell rang.

That evening, when my last patient had gone, I was preparing to have dinner with Ajita. She had rung earlier and said she had a free evening; would I join her at the Red Fort in Dean Street? When I turned my phone on, I saw she had texted me to say she was tired and was going to bed. I was disappointed: Hadn’t she dreamed and yearned for me tirelessly for years, as I had about her? Now, probably in response to my diffidence, she could hardly get out of bed for me.

Restless and horny, I was considering a visit to the Goddess; later, maybe I could go and find Henry and Bushy. I wanted, at least, to see whether Bushy had been able to perform without me.

So I thought it might be Wolf at the door. But it was Lisa standing there, holding her bicycle and—unusually for her—smiling.

“Ready?”

“Was I expecting you?”

She shrugged and continued to smile under her damp woolly hat. I wasn’t ready for anything except for a walk, despite the rain. I didn’t want to invite her in as, no doubt, she’d have stayed until Tuesday. I grabbed my coat and went out.

“You ride it,” she said, pushing the bicycle towards me. “We’re going on a journey.” Some of the way I rode the bike, which was big and heavy, particularly when she sat on the rack, this ungainly, two-bodied burden heaving itself up the Fulham Palace Road. The rest of the way she trotted behind me.

“Where to?”

“Somewhere calming,” she said. “You’ll like it.”

Beside Bishops Park we came to a locked gate—and, after opening it, to what appeared to be a field. There were lights in a couple of sheds, but otherwise it was dark in a way it rarely is in London.

“Come on,” said my tour guide.

What could I do but follow her across, trying to avoid puddles? It was hopeless; my feet sank into the mud, and my beloved green Paul Smith loafers, which I’d got in a sale, were waterlogged. I was furious, but what was the point of stopping or complaining now?

At the end of the allotment, not far from the river, we came to a shed and she led me in, using a torch. She lit candles. We sat on wooden crates, and she rolled a cigarette. I noticed an old picture of her father pinned to the wall, ripped from a newspaper. Water dripped on our heads.

“I love to sit here,” she said. “It’s meditative. But it gets damp.” She was quiet for a bit. “What do you think of me taking the Ingres?”

“It’s your inheritance. What difference does it make whether it’s today or another day?” Picking up a candle, I peered at the shelves. “This is more interesting. What are these things?”

“Objects I picked out of the river mud and cleaned.”

Half-crushed Coke cans; shards of crockery; rusted keys; glass; a plastic bottle stuffed with mud; a showerhead; a length of metal pipe. Some had been cleaned; other pieces were enshrouded in a skin of grey mud. Here these broken pieces had some uncanny, compelling force, making you want to look more closely at them and wonder about their provenance.

“I’m impressed.”

“Anyone can do it. All you need is a bucket and a toothbrush. Oh, and a river.”

There was a pile of books: Plath, Sexton, Olds, Rich. “You’ve been reading.”

For some reason I was thinking of the library my father had made in Pakistan, and wondering whether anyone used it now.

She said, “My parents don’t know I do it. They’d get too excited.”

“You’re writing too.” I was looking at a pad with slanted writing on it.

“Don’t tell. You understand why I don’t want them to know?”

“Your secret is how much you resemble your parents,” I said. “But you’re entitled to your privacy. As they are to theirs. Did you see your father’s piece in the paper?” She almost nodded. “What did you think?”

Last weekend Henry had written an open letter to Blair, saying he was resigning from the Party he’d joined in the mid-60s because Labour had become dictatorial, corrupt and unrepresentative. Apart from the egregious lying, there had been insufficient debate over Iraq. Dissent was not encouraged in the Party, which was now run for television rather than with the aim of redistributing wealth and power. What had Blair achieved, apart from the minimum wage and the proposed extension of pub opening hours? For Henry, the Labour Party, along with other organisations, including corporations, had moved towards the condition of being cults, a project which not only claimed your loyalty but your inner freedom.

Henry had brought the piece round to me for discussion. It was strong polemical writing, penned in a fury, and was given half a page in a liberal Sunday paper by the editor, a friend of Valerie’s. What surprised Henry was the number of friends and colleagues who rang to say how much they admired his stand and what he’d said.

After the piece appeared, he was asked onto
Newsnight;
he spoke on the radio and wrote again to the paper. He had plenty to say, and found that people considered him intelligent and eloquent. He’d taught, but he’d never much talked about politics, or even the theatre, in public, because he feared losing his temper and saying something insulting or crazy. I told him he was respected because he wasn’t some penny-a-line hack or raddled politician. I hated to say the word, it had become so devalued by pomposity and contempt, but Henry was an intellectual, and doing what they were supposed to do.

I said to Lisa, “A lot of people admire your father. If we’re in a war, he’s rebelling with his words.”

“Great, he’s telling everyone he’s against the war. How brave. He’s leaving a party he should never have joined.” She was speaking quickly. “Why doesn’t he actually support the insurgents in Iraq, and the bombers and resisters around the world? Why doesn’t he accept the idea of the struggle moving to Britain? Everyone says—even the government—that the response is coming, that we’re going to get it here, in London. Blair has brought retribution on himself and on us. Even one of your politicians, Robin Cook, said we’d have been better advised bringing peace to Palestine than war to Iraq.

“Why doesn’t Dad say that our corruption and materialism are so decadent that we have actively earned all that we have coming?” She was shaking her head, as though to clear her mind of fury. At last she said, “I’m sick of what I have to say. Why don’t you tell me what you are doing at the moment?”

“I was just writing, for months,” I said. “About a girl. But going nowhere, you know.” She seemed to nod. “Then I found a subject. It emerged. Or it was there all the time. Guilt.”

“Yes?”

“The notion of. How it works. Or what it does. The Greeks. Dostoevsky. Freud. Nietzsche. “There is no feast without cruelty,” Nietzsche writes. Guilt and responsibility. Conscience. All the important things.”

“Why such a subject? Do you have a lot on your mind?”

“Well, yes. It’s difficult to escape. Among other things I had an argument with my son.”

I told her about it. The previous Sunday, Rafi had reluctantly come to spend the day with me. I was lying on the sofa reading the paper; we were listening to music; Rafi was on the floor, sitting at my feet. He’d been sitting there sullenly, playing with one of his lighted machines. Occasionally he gave me the finger or, if I was lucky, two fingers. When he walked past me, he liked to give me a shove, pretending it was an accident. Was I like this? Probably. Miriam certainly was. Being a good parent means bearing this, up to a point.

Now he began to pinch me, hard. I was either ignoring him or paying him too much attention. I told him to stop, several times, but he was enjoying it, giggling and smirking. “You can’t take it, eh?” he said. “Weak man. I’m never coming here again, you haven’t even got Sky. We have to go to the pub or to your sister’s to watch football. It’s shit here. Can’t you get a girlfriend?” Pinch, pinch.

I drew back my foot and kicked him on the top of his head, hard. He didn’t make a sound, his head just dropped. He looked up at me, his brown eyes uncomprehending, as if he’d suffered the most tragic betrayal possible. “My head is numb,” he said. He got up and screamed. “I can’t feel my head!”

He ran to lock himself in the bathroom. He was hurt, but not enough to forget his mobile. He phoned his mother many times. When I got him out of there, he spent the rest of the day in a cupboard, and I had to stand outside, begging him to come out, muttering to myself, “Once, you little fucker, for years I gave up my sexuality to be with you, now be nice to me!”

In the end, I left him to it and went back to the newspapers. That evening, when he went home, I saw he’d pissed in the cupboard. He informed Josephine I’d stamped on his head, trying to kill him.

I rang Josephine to apologise and explain, anticipating a thrashing. I told her the boy had learned what fathers can do, what monsters they might turn into, when pushed. He had sought my limit and had found it. I said I was ashamed; at the same time I was defensive. She was sympathetic. Since she had been working—and she was sure this was the reason—he had attacked her on a few occasions, pulling her hair and frightening her. Other times he ran away into the street, not returning for an hour, giving her a fright. Now that he was becoming difficult, we had to stand together. If she and I were to speak again—and we both wanted to, I was sure of it—he had to be the conduit; we could only love one another through him.

It gratified me, this solidarity. I had been rendered sleepless by hurting him. But he had a strong ego. He didn’t bear grudges; he was too interested in the world. The next time I saw him he was trying to learn to play his electric guitar, which I had to tune for him. Meanwhile he wanted me to hear the new music he liked, which he played through his computer while giving me little glances to gauge my approval.

Lisa said, “And here’s me—still arguing with my father.”

I said, “Lisa, why don’t you cheer me up by reading to me?”

“Are you sure?”

“I want to hear the poem. Now you’ve dragged me all this fucking way in the rain, you might as well do something for me.”

She spat out her cigarette, ground it into the floor and began to read without enthusiasm or emphasis; her face twitched and her tongue flicked. After about ten minutes she stopped.

I thanked her and said, “Haven’t you published before? I have some vague memory of you saying you had.”

At Oxford, I seemed to recall, she read English and wrote a thesis on “Madness and Women’s Poetry.”

“Yes, in student papers. No one noticed.”

I said, “You want me to show these to someone?”

“Suppose they want to publish them? I can’t be an artist.”

“You might be one already.”

“My parents are snobs. So-called artists came to the house all the time. I refuse to worm my way into Mummy and Daddy’s affections that way.”

“Loving you has to be difficult?”

“Why not? They didn’t even want me to become a social worker. And when I became one, they took no interest, they never asked me about my cases.”

I said, “Use a pseudonym.”

“For my cases?”

“I didn’t mean that, but it’s a good thought.” I sighed and stood up. “I’m going.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve asked too much of you. I’m interested in what you think. I can’t find anyone to talk to—someone who hears me right. I dream of the sea, over and over.”

“You want a child?”

“Shit, you foolish man, I hope not. You’ve gone too far.”

I was laughing and I could see she wanted to kiss me, and I let her, tasting this stranger standing in front of me with her tongue in the front of my mouth. When she pushed her body against mine and I reached for her breast, I wondered if I might respond, if there might be something there. She slid down my body. I let her blow me, which I considered some recompense for my doomed shoes.

She said, “I didn’t think the poem would be enough for you. We’re both lonely. Sleep here, you can smell the river and hear the rain.”

“Not tonight.”

She got up. “I’m not young or pretty enough for you.”

“And vice versa.”

She dropped the writing pad in a large plastic bag and gave it to me. I had opened the door when she said, “Take this as well.” I guessed it was the Hand, wrapped in several layers of newspaper, still in its frame. I shoved it into the side of the bag.

The rain fell like nails. The sludge had thickened. Lisa’s was the only shed now lighted, and it was a desolate place. I wondered whether the bag might be porous in some way, thus destroying the Hand.

With mud sucking at my feet and my trousers soaked up to the knee, I was trudging across a waterlogged allotment in the dark, hauling a masterpiece and some poems in a Tesco carrier. It was also the night Henry was accompanying Bushy to his second gig, a private party. A rich man was entertaining some business associates with a bunch of hookers. Henry had been afraid Bushy would play too much of the “mad stuff,” which he had been sure to warn him against.

Bushy wanted to do the gig without my help, but they’d suggested I join them. Earlier, I’d considered getting a cab and going over for a drink, but I would resemble a drowned jackass. By the time I’d walked home, I was exhausted.

I woke up at two. At three I unwrapped the Hand and looked at it, placing it here and there in the room. It wasn’t large, about 14 by 16 inches, and on grey paper, luminous with intelligence, tenderness and beauty. Ingres, for one, hadn’t been wasting his time. I placed it on the mantelpiece next to the whore’s Christmas card.

Just before I went to bed, I checked my phone. There was a peculiar message from Bushy, who should have had better things to do that night. “Info arrived,” it said.

Next morning Wolf came to collect his washing, which he’d put in my machine. He came in and out of my place as though we were close friends. I should have stopped it; but I’d thought he wouldn’t return. He had said he didn’t like to visit me, since the first thing you saw, on entering the hall, was yourself, in the coffin of a full-length mirror.

It wasn’t until almost lunchtime, when I was in the middle of a particularly troublesome case—a woman had taken to punching herself, like the guy in
Fight Club
—that I realised the Hand had gone.

Wolf, of course, had some instinct for these things. He’d have known it was a good picture; how good, I’m not sure. I rang him and wondered whether he might be intending to return it anytime soon.