Stray Love (13 page)

“See the flag?” Oliver asked when he caught me looking.

“Yes.”

“It says here that the Vietnamese written language uses the Western alphabet.”

“Oh.” I closed my book.

“And the second spoken language is French.”

I looked at him for a moment, then asked, “Oliver, why are you reading all about Vietnam?”

“The Mekong River is the eleventh longest river in the world.”

“Oliver?” I said, feeling the panic beginning. “Are you going away again soon?”

“I should think it makes the Thames look rather puny in comparison.”

“You can’t go.”

“
Marcel.
“

“You can’t. This would be your fifth big trip.”

“I’m afraid I’m not asking for your permission.”

“Will I come this time?”

“Yes,” he said, shutting the book.

“Really?”

“Well, not right away but soon. I promise.”

“You promise?”

Oliver placed his hand on my forearm. “I promise. Don’t you trust me?”

Friday was cancelled. I stayed in bed.

“I have a headache,” I explained, though it was more of a blank than an ache.

“But we were supposed to go to—” Oliver stopped to glance down at his list.

“Cancelled, cancelled, cancelled,” I said.

I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. I cut my finger on a sharp corner of the medicine cabinet by accident. Then I did it again on purpose.

As I watched beads of blood drip into the sink basin it occurred to me that I needed to find a way to keep him home. An injury, a hunger strike, some newsworthy event. If only I could make London more exciting, he would never have to leave.

On Saturday morning during breakfast, there was a knock at the door followed by the sound of a key turning and a slow clacking of heels on the floor.

Pippa appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. She was wearing a dark blue dress with silver dots. She yawned, still lazy with sleep.

“Ready?” she said.

“For what?’ I asked.

Her eyes looked past me at Oliver. “Didn’t Oliver tell you? I’m taking you shopping today.”

“Both of us?” I asked, glancing over at Oliver, who was tapping his fingers against the tabletop.

He shook his head. “I think I’ll stay in. I have work to do around the flat.”

I looked back at Pippa and said, “I think I’ll stay home too.”

“Oh, come on, Mish,” said Pippa. “We’ll get you some new clothes.”

I was wearing an old jumper and she reached forward and pointed at my skinny wrists sticking out of the sleeves. “Let’s get you a wardrobe more befitting a person of your extraordinary cleverness and startling good looks.”

I smiled and said, “Okay.”

We walked to Carnaby Street where Pippa took me to a theatrical costume store and bought me a maroon leisure jacket with narrow lapels and fancy leather winklepickers that squinched my feet. By the time we finished shopping, I looked like an Edwardian lounge singer, but I loved Pippa even more than usual that day. She had not made me undress in the shop aisle (“to save time”) or bought the clothes too large (“for growing into”) as Mrs. Bowne would have done.

I was so eager to show Oliver my new outfit when we returned home that I ran straight into the flat. But he was not in the living room. I hurried to his bedroom, but he was not there either. I stood by the door, taking in the dresser, the open drapes, the well-made bed and the blue Kenyan spread, then I turned around and ran to the kitchen, where the only trace of him was an unfinished cup of coffee: still warm. Suddenly the flat felt too quiet.

“Oliver!” I shouted, not for hope of any answer but just to make a noise. There was no response, just the sound of my breath, quick and ragged from rushing around.

I found Pippa sitting in Oliver’s reading chair, quietly chewing her thumbnail.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Sweetheart,” she said, holding out her arms.

I stood frozen, finally understanding.

“You let him leave without saying goodbye?”

She was silent. Her lips trembled.

“He’ll die. He’ll come back ruined. Is that what you want? How could you let him? Why can’t you be the one to leave!”

Pippa flinched but remained calm. “But he did say goodbye,” she said, taking a note from her purse.

I grabbed the paper from her hands, squinting for a second before I understood that Oliver had written backwards, in his best da Vinci scrawl.
What a time to be playful,
I thought, as the words slowly formed through my tears.

tseraed, lecraM

desimorp i rebmemer

em tsurt

revilO evol

That was it? I turned the paper over, then once more. No explanation? How could this be?

I could feel heat building in my body, my arms flailing, objects crashing to the floor. African soapstones, wall hangings, ceramic trinkets Oliver had carted back from his travels. I ran around pulling down all the words he had taped up for me. There were no words to express how I felt. I did not stop when Pippa tried to block me or when she held my arm or even when she cried quietly, “Please, no.”

It took me days to settle down. My mind kept replaying my final week with Oliver. But gradually, I slipped back into my life. At school I memorized pi to nine decimal places, the science behind rainbows, the order of the planets.

By mid-month there had been several apologetic phone calls and postcards from Oliver. When I finally agreed to speak to him on the phone, the distance felt horrible and far greater than the actual miles.

At school, I learned Linnaean classification and the countries of South America from north to south (“I already know this!” I announced to the class). As a result, I also learned the meaning of
swot:
a smarty-arse, a know-it-all who thought he was cleverer than the others.

Then, at the end of the month, just as I began to feel less upset, Pippa was fired from her job at Marks & Spencer. She spent two days in bed in such an extreme state of exhaustion, I don’t think she even lifted her head. Then, on the third day, she got up and said, “I’m going to take a little stroll around town.”

After that, the strolling happened at all hours, and without notice. It was worse than ever before. I’d leave a room with her in it and I’d come back a minute later to discover her gone. When she reappeared, she often had male company,
friends
she claimed to have encountered near Waterloo Station or Holborne or wherever she happened to have found herself. Stasha was working nights at a hotel so I was left alone to watch Pippa sashay around the flat, or giggle like a girl while she fried up my supper and poured drinks for her guest. Once I watched her do a circle dance around a strange man named George, while wearing a feather boa and nightie. She moved her shoulders back and forth in this snakelike way that made even George look uncomfortable.

More and more I began to fend for myself. One day she forgot to pick me up at school or send anyone else in her place, so I made my way home alone on the bus. When no one answered the door, I found the hidden key and let myself into the flat. I busied myself doing homework, exploring Pippa’s vanity, and setting the table. By six o’clock I realized that I was on my own, so I made toast for supper, feeling momentary pride in my self-sufficiency. By nine o’clock, I did not have the slightest idea what to do. My stomach was growling. I missed Oliver horribly. I thought about breaking something, but the flat was such a mess of clothes and dishes, I didn’t see the point.

An hour later, I was so distraught I went to the bathroom and sliced my forearm on the medicine cabinet. At first I felt no
pain but then the throbbing started, much worse than the last time. I had never seen so much blood come out of me. It dripped down my arm, through my fingertips onto the bathroom tile. It made me feel weirdly calm. For days I had felt nothing but a vague and mounting uneasiness, but the cut felt sharp and simple. I turned on the tap and watched the blood braid the water and run down the plughole. I turned off the tap and grabbed a towel and made my way to the living room, where I picked up the phone.

After several rings, I heard Mrs. Bowne’s sleepy voice say, “Hello?”

Just that one word was all it took. When she said it again, I started pouring out my heart.

Stasha came home at midnight and immediately saw my cut. I was standing shirtless at the kitchen sink, tackling the dirty dishes that had piled up.

“Jesus Christ,” she said.

I stopped lathering. The bubbles in the sink made soft popcorn noises.

“It was an accident. It doesn’t hurt” was all I could think to say.

Stasha pulled me towards her and gave me a long hug. Then she took me to the bathroom and dressed my wound with a long strip of gauze, even though the blood had dried. She wrapped and wrapped until I looked like a soldier at the Battle of the Somme. “Marcel,” she said. “Please don’t tell Pippa how you got this.
Promise
me.”

I had no idea, of course, that Mrs. Bowne, even after being reassured by Stasha that the cut wasn’t serious enough to need a doctor, would call Child Services to arrange for me to be sent
to Beckenham. But the next night I heard Pippa screaming at Stasha in her bedroom.

“What’s wrong with my goddamn lifestyle? I won’t let that meddling bitch put him in a children’s home or pack him off to Australia. I know what those bloody people at Child Services do with their castoffs.” I heard a thump and pictured her falling to the floor. But the screaming continued, “What do you mean he needs a fucking break? From what? From me? Why is everyone always judging me?”

I put my hands over my ears. Why did she carry on like that? I thought my head was going to rip open.

An hour later, Stasha came into my room and closed the door. She put her head in her hands. Then she looked up, staring at me hopelessly. “I spoke to Mrs. Bowne last night, Marcel. You called her, didn’t you.”

I turned away.

“Well, she wants you to go live with her for a while. She wants to take care of you.”

“I don’t—want to—go to—Australia,” I said, beginning to cry.

“Of course not. You’re going to Beckenham and we’ll visit you as much as we can. Please, Marcel, don’t worry,” she said. Then, she squeezed my hand and whispered, “Listen, I can fight for you to stay here if you want.”

I closed my eyes and shook my head. I had no time for heroic adults any more; their efforts just made me tired.

When I woke up the next morning, the social worker was standing in our kitchen patting her curly grey hair. The kitchen was clean and there was a glass of Ribena and a slice of buttered toast waiting for me on the table. Stasha was boiling water for coffee. There was no sign of Pippa.

“Hello, Marcel. My name is Dorothy,” the social worker said. She told me to have a seat and asked how I was feeling.

When I said I felt perfectly fine, she looked over at Stasha, then reached out her hand and gently touched my bandaged arm. Stasha gave a nod.

Suddenly, Dorothy was asking about my cut. She wanted to know what I had “hoped to achieve” by injuring myself.
Achieve?
I couldn’t really explain it. I didn’t know if I did it so that Oliver would come back or so the inside hurt would find its way to the surface and, then, disappear. My words came out in fits and starts but Dorothy nodded encouragingly. She was a big warm radiator of patience. When she asked me if I had any future intentions to harm myself, I told her
no,
that sharp implements had lost their interest, which was true. And this seemed to satisfy her.

“Well, Marcel, I think it’s time to have a proper home, isn’t it, love? Everything is going to be all right but you need to trust me.”

I watched her pull a notepad and pencil out of her briefcase. “I hear you like art. Do you have a favourite painter? Would you like to draw something today?”

I looked at the pad and pencil she had pushed towards me and shook my head.

“I’m quite fond of Frank Paton’s work. Have you seen his kitten paintings?” she asked.

I shook my head again. I watched how her pinky stuck out when she took a sip of tea.

“Is Oliver coming back?” I asked. “I want to live with him.”

“I understand,” she said, lightly tapping the notebook with her fingers. “And the long-term plan is to get you two back together. But in the short term, you’ll have a warm bed with
Mrs. Bowne. You look like a patient boy. Do you think you can wait?”

I didn’t want to wait. I had already spent so much time waiting. I nodded.

Dorothy arranged to get me the next day. Stasha and Pippa, asserting their love, encouraged me to leave most of my belongings with them. In the end, I packed lightly: a toothbrush, warm winter clothes,
The Disasters of War,
a few sketchbooks, a pencil case, and my Qantas koala. I didn’t own a suitcase so I used two carrier bags from Tesco. No matter how straight I stood, I knew I looked pathetic with my bags and my bandaged arm.

When I went to say goodbye to Pippa, I found her sitting on her bed, paging through the telephone book. With one hand still turning pages, she smiled a stupid fake cheerful smile and told me that “through determination and diligence” she was going to help me find out what had happened to my mother. I didn’t know what to say. I had the sense that she was making up words on the spot, bluffing in the way that children sometimes do when they’re trying to make themselves look better or stop a guilty feeling. And that smile. She had probably taken too many pills. I knew she wanted me to greet her offer with enthusiasm, but all I could do was sigh loudly, thinking of her chronic inability to follow through.

O
N THE DAY
I
LEFT FOR
B
ECKENHAM
, I awoke taller, my voice deeper. When I lifted my Tesco bags, and they sprang up effortlessly, I saw that my arms were longer, stronger. When I stepped onto the street, I was sure my shoes were too tight; I had outgrown them. By the time Dorothy and I arrived at Charing Cross Station, I was as big as a man.

I had decided to be brave. Wherever she was, I would make my mother proud. I would not cry.

On the train, I leaned against the window and stared out at the blurred scenery. Dorothy spent the journey filling in answers to a crossword puzzle, single words in small caps scattered about the grid.

“One more stop,” I said finally, without looking at her.

She nodded, without looking up.

I had spent enough time with Mrs. Bowne to know she was very kind, but it felt different to be in the position of having to depend on such kindness. The moment I stepped onto the platform at Beckenham Junction, my stomach began to knot.

I could feel my hands pulsing around the handles of my
carrier bags as we made our way to Copers Cope Road. I took every opportunity to dawdle along the tree-lined streets. Every time I spotted a chestnut on the ground, I would stop, place my bags on the ground, pick up the chestnut and break open the spiky shell, throw the shell into the closest leaf pile, and place the prize in my pocket. Dorothy took many deep breaths waiting for me, but did not complain.

When we finally arrived at the house, Dorothy rang the doorbell and stood back, holding her briefcase and adjusting her wool cape. After a few seconds we heard footsteps. A hand appeared and lifted the striped canvas blind decorating the door.

“Marcel,” Mrs. Bowne said, opening the door. Her hair was arranged on top of her head. She wore a saggy brown cardigan over a beige dress. Her legs and feet were bare.

“Well, don’t just stand there gaping,” she said, breaking into a wide smile.

Dorothy introduced herself while I stepped inside. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust but when they did I noticed Mr. Bowne skulking by the shadowy parlour entrance in a bulky olive-grey cardigan and knee-high Wellingtons. The outfit, plus the flushed appearance of his skin, the soil on his hands, the way he lurked, gave him the aura of an unhappy gardener. I wondered if the Bownes had made a secret pact to dress only in drab earthen shades.

“Orange Pekoe?” said Mrs. Bowne, and she led the way down the narrow hall, leaving Mr. Bowne grasping the domed banister.

We had just poured the tea when a door slammed upstairs. Mrs. Bowne looked at the ceiling. Then she picked up a cookie and began to chew it thoughtfully. I glanced at Dorothy, who smiled supportively. She reached over with a finger and stilled my right thigh, which was hopping up and down.

The house on Copers Cope, which had been requisitioned during the war from a wealthy family, still had a web of bells for the maids and servants. The heavy wood doors seemed to slam without warning and the endless stairs let loose creaky sobs as I made my way to and from Oliver’s old attic room.

Yet despite these house noises, I got up the first morning already feeling I had entered a quiet, new existence. The floors were not littered with magazines, old coats, brassieres or strange lists from Stasha’s artist friends that said:
crying machine, disappearing machine, danger box, eternal time clock.

I soon came to realize that unlike Pippa, Mrs. Bowne did not run her house like a European-style hostel. She did not make extra sets of keys and hand them around. I did not have to worry, for instance, about walking into the kitchen and encountering two semi-nude strangers hunched over a plate of spaghetti someone had cooked the night before.

Life with Mrs. Bowne was a wonky television set (the picture revolving and disappearing without warning during
Emergency Ward 10
)
,
endless clean towels in the lavatory, fresh bars of soap (no lumpy ends hardening on the bath rim), Union Jack tea towels and christening mugs, large sugared doughnuts stuffed with hot strawberry jam from the corner bakery. And Sunday family dinners.

As the days passed, I gained perspective. It was as if the strangeness of my former life could not fully reveal itself to me until I stepped out of it.

For as long as I could remember Mrs. Bowne had paid monthly visits to London. She would spend the afternoon at the flat on New King’s Road, then travel back to Beckenham by evening.
Often we would sit around the table and play Scrabble. At some point she would serve lemon sponge cake she had brought and tea and begin telling me stories. Oliver would never talk about himself but sometimes, when it was just the two of us, Mrs. Bowne would offer me snippets.

“Tell me about Oliver’s parents,” I asked one afternoon. I was eight years old. We were sitting outside in the small back garden. The wind was nudging the last dry leaves from the trees. I could almost hear the soft crackle of them reaching the ground. “There aren’t any pictures,” I said.

“No. There wouldn’t be.”

“Where did they go?”

“The pictures?”

“No, the parents.”

She turned back to her Scrabble tiles, rearranging them. “Well. Oliver’s father died at Dunkirk.”

“And his mother?”

She sucked in her breath.

It’s a sad, grim story and no wonder he didn’t want to rake over it all. It goes like this: Long ago, before I was born, Oliver lost his mother in the war. It happened in Penge on the outskirts of London in 1941. Oliver’s mother had been leading a visitor on a tour of their council house. There was an air-raid siren, Oliver hid, a bomb fell, a ceiling collapsed, the house burned. I’ll be right back, his mother had promised, minutes before she died.

Oliver was ten when he arrived, a war orphan, at Mrs. Bowne’s house, wrapped in a paramedic blanket and carrying the book he had been reading when the bomb fell. When Mrs. Bowne stepped forward to hug him, he let the book fall to the floor. When she picked it up and tried to place it in his hand
again, he shook his head. He no longer wanted the book. Even though the pages were intact, it was useless. It could no longer tell him anything but the story of how it was interrupted.

In time,
she told him, everything will get easier in time. In time he would learn to read a book again, sleep through the night, walk across open spaces, look at an open blue sky, play with boys his age. In time he would be happy.

As he settled in, he would sometimes stop whatever he was doing—holding a fork, touching a doorknob, washing his hands—and get a faraway look in his eyes. “Where are you, Oliver?” Mrs. Bowne would ask. But he would just shake his head and continue—holding a fork, touching a doorknob, washing his hands.

“How much time?” Oliver asked.

Somewhere deep down I knew that Oliver’s Blitz story was my story too. My memory in a way. It was the reason Oliver did not believe in childhood. He had lost his own childhood to war and then to work. What made the story especially tragic was that Oliver never once told it himself. The saddest stories are the ones people tell about others’ tragedies.

What made the story at all bearable was Mrs. Bowne’s obvious love for Oliver. Of the four war orphans Mrs. Bowne had billeted during the Blitz years, it was clear that Oliver was her favourite. He was the one who came to her a sad lump of putty, forty-five pounds of human clay. He was the one she shaped like a patient sculptor.

In addition to raising four war orphans, Mrs. Bowne had three children of her own. All of them—Zena, Ramon and Vilma—were named after silent-era movie stars. Zena had married and moved to Mallorca. Ramon worked at a pharmacy on
Beckenham High Street but was also an amateur chef. And Vilma was a bus conductress on a London double-decker.

It didn’t take me long, after arriving at Copers Cope Road, to fall in love with most of the Bownes. Mrs. Bowne, for the way she entertained my big questions such as
Does God exist?
(“It depends on what you mean by
exist.
I doubt you’ll
smell
him, for instance; or hear him cough; or see his
shadow
…”) For her optimistic common sense (the way she still kept a kettle of clean water so there would always be a cup of tea if a bomb fell on the water main). Ramon, who arrived on Sundays with home chemistry demonstrations, like baking soda and vinegar volcanoes. Zena, who sent ceramic cats for her mother’s collection. Even Vilma, who grumbled but still let me click her ticket puncher like a castanet.

But Mr. Bowne I loved not at all. At every meal, he sat across the table, glowering every time I lifted a forkful of food to my mouth. No matter how much the others treated me as part of the household, he did his best to make me feel unwelcome.

“He just sits there and stares,” I said one morning to Mrs. Bowne.

“Who does?” she asked.

“Mr. Bowne. I don’t think he likes the sight of me.”

“Oh, don’t you worry. He’ll warm to you soon enough.”

We exchanged a look acknowledging the unlikeliness of this.

I tried not to mind it when he emerged from his garden conservatory and accused me of chipping dishes that were already chipped. Or when he blamed me for tracking mud on the rug when it was clear that the footprints matched his own boots. At first I protested, but soon I saw no point. I apologized for mistakes I hadn’t made: smudges on the windows, missing butter cookies, a broken door handle. No child’s thoughts are pure and
I thought he could see through me to some wickedness buried somewhere inside. Maybe he knew the truth about me. Maybe everything that went wrong
was
my fault. Maybe I was the reason my mother left.

Because I was suspected, I began to behave suspiciously. My hand trembled when I was asked to pass Mr. Bowne the salt shaker. Anxiety gripped me as I carried a cup and saucer across the room. My hands broke things, and I caught a glimpse of the person I was meant to become.

Dorothy dropped by every week to see how I was doing. When I asked after Stasha and Pippa, she told me they weren’t allowed to visit until I had settled in. She said they were “triggers,” which meant that if I saw them I might get upset and cut my arm again. She spoke gently, evenly, as if I were a child that might need talking down.

But phone calls were allowed and Pippa called every few nights to make sure I was not too unhappy. She had never fussed so much before. Some nights I felt that I was speaking not to her but to her bad conscience.

I asked her finally if she had found out anything about my mother.

“Have you started looking for her?” I asked.

“Yes, Mish. No news yet. But I really have started looking.”

Something about the simple, clear way she said this made it sound sincere.

A few weeks after I arrived, Kiyomi sent a card from Copenhagen. The card was stuffed in an envelope along with a delicate drawing she had done of Rita Hayworth wearing a slinky green dress. I placed this picture with the other mother look-alikes I kept in my sketchbook. I held the book against my
ear and pretended to hear them: a chorus of mothers singing sad songs of regret and longing, aching for their little boy.

At the Bownes’ I slept in Oliver’s old attic bedroom with its sloping blue walls and its army cot. Everywhere I turned, there were musty traces of him: a book of Greek mythology with his name scribbled on the title page, a desktop globe, a football in the closet, a picture of a ship carved on the desk. I felt that I was getting to know him better. I found his old pencil set in a desk, and, then, at the back of a dresser drawer, a collection of shrapnel and shell casings. When I showed Mrs. Bowne the contorted metal pieces, she declared them too strange and sad to keep, but I convinced her that they were too strange and sad to throw away; so, together, we washed the objects carefully, and set them on the bookshelf, one by one.

I remember watching as she carefully polished and neatened them with her crooked hand, as though they were fancy jewels and not ugly bits of aftermath. What impressed me most was how she could change her mind so wholeheartedly. It made her trustworthy in my eyes.

I knew that for weeks she had been furious at Oliver for going away to Saigon and putting himself at risk. She refused to use the words
foreign correspondent;
refused to dignify him with a legitimate title. She said he was “behaving like a cowboy” and “shirking his responsibilities.” Why couldn’t he cover local stories? She still considered the Beckenham triplets story he had written in 1959 a career pinnacle. Three babies to one mother. Now
that
was a story!

Bright House Primary School was one of the newest schools in Beckenham. The shorts were grey flannel, the cap and blazer were a gory red. The school emblem, a red and white winged
lion, was so poorly rendered I thought at first it was a fox attacking a swan. There was only one other beige boy in the school and I didn’t meet him right away because he had chicken pox the week I started. I climbed the steps to the two-storey brick building every morning, trying to be inconspicuous. I might as well have dressed in a spacesuit or a gorilla costume.

On the third day of class, a gang of boys formed a ring around me during recess, slowly circling like sharks. My bladder seized, recognizing my plight immediately.

“What’s your name?” demanded a tall boy with chapped knees.

“Marcel.”

“What kind of name is that? You French?” “Sort of.”

“Where do you come from?”

“London.”

“Why’d you come here for?”

“Got kicked out of my old school.”

“Yeah? You staying here for a while, then?”

“Yeah, my father is a war reporter. He travels all over the world.” I adjusted my satchel, feeling the contents (ruler, compass, notebooks, texts, pencils) shift against my hip. I was sure we had clicked. I was wrong.

“So? What do you say?” the boy declared, expressionlessly. “Are you ready?” He hooked his right arm up through the air in a tight jab.
Swish.
Then the other arm.
Swish.
He began dancing around me, throwing punches in the air, sharp matchstick limbs jutting and angles forming like some Futurist sculpture. It took me a moment to realize that I was about to be attacked. I saw his fist flying towards my face and heard the boys around us let out a collective “Oooff!”