Stray Love (15 page)

Last weekend, I rented a car and took Iris to Beckenham. The affluent Bromley suburb has changed little in complexion or politics since I lived there. It has yet to elect anyone other than a Conservative as its MP, and it is still row upon row of identical houses and shrubbery. Simply put, it remains an anxious place for me. But black-haired Iris, clomping about in her puffy parka and outsized trainers, seemed not to mind walking into a tea shop filled with unfriendly, pasty-faced Britons. She
plopped down on a chair and adjusted her Velcro shoes (
rrrp, rrrp
)
,
unsnapped her coat, forcing the room to accept her, an indelicate Asian girl exercising her right to be part of things.

I found myself watching her back, irritated by and admiring her at the same time, trying to imagine how it would feel to be so at ease in the world that you just presume you belong from the beginning. Was she emancipated, or naive? Over our cups of milky Tetley tea, I considered my buttoned-up heart and her unzipped cheeriness and decided maybe the problem was one of tailoring.

On our way home, I stopped the car to show her the old house on Copers Cope. It is still a wallop every time I see it.

“Don’t you want to look around?” she asked.

“No.”

She didn’t say anything. She just opened the door and got out.

Some days I think I am not a man, but rather a bundle of bristling apprehensions.
Haunted
is one word for it. This inability to cast away the shadows of my childhood, this constant sense of double vision, where past fogs the present. I am a memory of myself. Someone frowns, somebody uses a particular tone of voice, and all my fortifications crumble.

Here is how it goes. I spot a Muslim family in public. I see the woman in hijab and Shetland sweater and her well-behaved children, who are used to being treated like see-through humans, and it’s all so familiar. I see them and I think of my friend Chris, so timid and correct. Of how hard he strived to appease. Another moggy.

A
T MY NEW HOME
, Mrs. Bowne crocheted and listened to
andante cantabiles
and
divertimentos
on the radio while I sat
on the lawn, drawing. There was a wooden trellis that afforded privacy from the neighbours, but I had discovered it was needless. While the neighbours never seemed to figure out my position in the household (it didn’t help that Mr. Bowne introduced me to people as “the lodger”), they were far too wrapped up in their cozy lives to show much interest in me. At most, I shared the status of the quiet Korean exchange student a few doors down. We were temporary, separate, and maybe a little disappointing—on a par with the benign pygmy goats recently donated to the Children’s Zoo.

When Mrs. Bowne told the Hensons next door that Oliver was away reporting on “the conflicts” in Southeast Asia, you could see their bafflement. They did not say,
“Ah.”
Their faces did not indicate whether they thought this a brave or foolish way to be spending one’s working days. When she explained to our other neighbours, the introverted Marlatt sisters, that Oliver was travelling around the world, they smiled and said, “Little Oliver?” Their idea of travelling was holidaying at Bexhill-on-Sea, pulling up in the car, breaking out a picnic basket.

“What do they know?” Mrs. Bowne said to me later, in a huff.

Their disinterest convinced her that I should learn more about what Oliver was up to. She bought a large map of the world, mounted it on my bedroom wall and stuck red-tipped pins in all the cities Oliver had ever visited. She bought a book titled
The Reporters,
which featured portraits of famous frontline journalists. There was a photo of Ernie Pyle typing in the middle of a field in Normandy, another of a dashing and swarthy Robert Capa with cameras dangling around his neck. “If your pictures aren’t good,” the caption read, “you aren’t close enough.”

I appreciated her effort but it was unnecessary, because underneath a slew of other emotions, I
was
genuinely proud of Oliver. The fathers of most of my classmates had horribly boring jobs. There was no flying off to faraway places for those fathers, no lying on hard ground while shells whistled above, no being at the mercy of fever and tarantula, land mine or sniper fire. No narrow scrapes or glory.

And on top of that, I had recently discovered that Oliver’s career could help me.

At school, Chris and I had befriended a boy named James Eliot. James was a sturdy redhead with skin so pale it looked as if he had never stepped into the sun. He was prone to rashes and obsessed with taxidermy. He loved Davy Crockett and on Saturdays he wore a raccoon-fur hat with a tail hanging down the back. He peppered his speech with shock words (
rape, cunt
and
cock
being among his favourites). He often said “I win,” even when it wasn’t clear a game or contest was under way. The fact that he was a redhead meant he was subject to verbal abuse (Copper-top, Ginger Snap) and treated as either a dangerous fireball or a coarse clown. He was always being reprimanded for tardiness or insolence. What impressed me most about James was his boyishness. James was mud and sweat and shredded fabric and blistered hands. He was a jam-stained thief, a cheat, a prankster, a torturer of helpless insects.

The first time I noticed his stretched socks slouched around his ankles, I thought to myself:
This is a boy with flaws and dreams.

It could have gone either way. By which I mean, he could have become our friend or our bully. The first time we talked, I narrowly escaped a beating for using “a snooty high-class voice.” Even after we were friends, he made it clear he didn’t like it when I “dribbled on” with stories of London, which he
referred to as “a shitty town full of poncy intellectuals.” His father, who worked as a lorry driver for Smith’s Crisps, had told him this. Stories I made up about Oliver’s adventures, however, were a different matter.

“Oliver had malarial fever and almost died.”

“Yeah? What else?”

“He had a motorcycle accident in Uganda.”

“And?”

“Angola. A soldier whacked his head against a wall and tore out a clump of hair.”

“Were there any scars when he came home?”

I nodded, looked down at my feet.

“You lucky bastard. Tell me more. What’s the worst mess he ever got into?”

“He wrestled a king cobra to death.”

“A king cobra? No! Are you serious? Those are the kind that can kill you with one bite. Fuck.”

James’s raspy whisper of a voice drew me closer. And as he became more present in my life, Chris retreated. I felt guilty about this, but helpless to change it. I wanted to be bad. I wanted to belong to the normal world of troublemakers. I wasn’t a saint like Chris. James dared me to climb fences, to cut worms in half, to run faster, to fly higher.

Whenever I looked up I saw Chris watching us, partly hidden in the shade, studying the bark of trees, or fidgeting and nudging rocks with his feet. When we trespassed into gardens or charged across the river, I often sensed him there. A mouse boy. A weird outsider who made me feel like a weird outsider. He was the only one who could see how poorly and self-consciously I wore my new recklessness, the only one I had the power to reject, and so, for a time, I did.

Then, in late March 1963, my home life began to fall apart again. Mr. Bowne had a stroke and spent a week in hospital. When he returned, Mrs. Bowne swaddled him in blankets and placed him in a chair in the parlour.

Around the same time, a meeting at the Old Council Offices in Beckenham was held to address a town plan in case of nuclear attack. The Cuban Missile Crisis had ended but the topic on everyone’s mind was still atomic war.

I heard Mrs. Bowne pacing the hallway, back and forth, checking on Mr. Bowne. I saw her frighten when the wind shook the windows of the house. Her face said it all: the future was uncertain.

In the weeks that followed, the town was swept up in a flurry of preparation. Those who still had their concrete Andersen bomb shelters, neglected since the terrible days of the war, cleaned them out. Others, who had only known better times, built makeshift dugouts. In the back garden on Copers Cope, part of the lawn had been re-sown after the war to cover the old air-raid shelter. There was still a hump where the turf didn’t match. While Ramon restored the shelter, I pictured Oliver taking safe haven in the deep depths of the clay soil: a boy still too young to board an airplane or imagine a life outside of England.

Mrs. Bowne restarted a war pantry and did her best to buy extra tins and nonperishables every time she went shopping. Soon there was a towering reserve of food and packets and bandages and baking powder, an “Armageddon kit” she spent her energy assembling until she was forced to sit down from exhaustion, catching her breath and clutching her heart. Sometimes I caught her standing in the garden with her eyes closed, waving her arms about, trying to visualize “pleasant things.”

Then, one morning, the threat was unaccountably over. At Copers Cope, everyone’s worst nightmares about a looming holocaust were packed away. The nuclear bomb was not going to be dropped after all. Well, at least not today. Windows sealed against radiation were unsealed. Tins began migrating from the shelter back to the kitchen, but when that became too much of a bother, the shelter was turned into a pantry extension.

Mrs. Bowne went back to listening to “Housewives’ Choice” on the
BBC Light Programme.
She resumed driving around in her Morris Minor with the windows open and her white hair flying in the wind. I tried to act happy, even when she became a fan of Deanna Durbin, a rival to Judy Garland, best known for her song “Can’t Help Singing.” But I had the same recurring nightmare for many more weeks—a blast surge, a rising white cloud, orphans shuffling through the ashes and wintry light of Hiroshima. It was the dream that annihilated all other dreams. Having been to the brink, I found it hard to forget the feeling.

One day, I ran through the rain, ran through the river, ran to the edge of town, past rows of identical houses, flowery gardens, and I knew I had to find a way out of the suburbs. I wondered when Oliver would come for me, as he had promised.

On my eleventh birthday there was still no sign of Oliver. Not even a card. When Mrs. Bowne noticed me sitting at the table, numbly double-checking the mail the postman had just delivered, she rinsed her hands and walked over and gently stroked my hair.

Vilma and Ramon arrived with presents wrapped in ribbons. Ramon made canapés of crackers and tinned oysters and passed them around. Mrs. Bowne had baked a sponge cake. I received a coloured pencil set, a knitted vest, a model airplane, and a hammer and caulking.

“Those are from me,” Mr. Bowne said, pointing at the hammer and caulking. “It’s about time you learned something practical.” He tilted his head back when he spoke. His voice sounded gargly after his stroke, but his words were as abrupt as ever. During his recovery, he had rediscovered his old library, books with pages that required an entire arm to turn. Books with a vinegary smell. When he wasn’t reading about ancient battle fleets, he was writing long, angry letters to Prime Minister Macmillan for hastening the decline of the British Empire. Each letter took him an eternity to finish.

While Mr. Bowne worked hard to steady his shaking hand and quavering script, I knew that the earth was undergoing a stroke of a different nature. Its own lines were quavering. Former borders were being redrafted. The British government had transferred power to Nigeria (1960), Sierra Leone (1961), Tanganyika (1961), Uganda (1962), and now Kenya (1963). Mr. Bowne would have been furious to know that under his own roof, I was celebrating this sweep of independence; that I had re-shaded former pink spots of empire on my world map; that my crayon was already primed over Zambia and Malawi.

Now that Mr. Bowne didn’t go to the garden conservatory very much any more, he had entrusted me to feed his rabbit and water his plants. Though he had never been a particularly happy man, and had treated me with disdain, I was still sad to see him so downhearted, so filled with imperial disappointment. Mrs. Bowne thought his spirit was broken by the stroke but I knew better.

After a while, he stopped reading and writing. I often found him sitting with his eyes closed. He was sinking into himself, retreating. Sometimes, I caught him with a smile on his face and I knew that he was back there in that world that no longer existed, some long-ago time when the sun never set.

In the spring of that year, I went through a growth spurt. Everything was lengthening and stretching: bones, hair, dreams. Everything ached. Mrs. Bowne shook Epsom salts into a metal laundry tub and ran warm water so I could soak my ankles and feet when I woke up moaning in pain. She balanced a hot water bottle on my knees.

She was such a good nurse, I didn’t realize that weeks of caring for us night and day were taking their toll. Then, in the middle of April, while I was at school, Mrs. Bowne was wallpapering the kitchen when she had a mild heart attack. It began with a sudden pain in her left arm, then a tightening in her chest. Mr. Bowne was napping in the other room and didn’t stir when she called for him. She was left to telephone an ambulance on her own.

She was only at the hospital for the afternoon, stubbornly refusing to spend the night. At her doctor’s urging she said yes to bedrest at home.

The next day, Vilma took leave from work. She rented a cot and put it in the parlour so her mother wouldn’t have to climb the stairs, and we all learned how to crank the bed up and down. Dressing her for the part of a patient, Vilma bought her mother a dowdy nightgown that fell past her ankles. The whole experience brought out a sharp side of Vilma I had never seen before. Soon after, I overheard her telling Ramon, “She’s too old to be caring full-time for a young child. How Oliver expected her to cope is a mystery.”

She followed me with her eyes as I moved about the house. She, the nervous china shop owner, and I, the bull. Only, instead of a plate or vase, what I had broken were her mother and father.

For the next week or so, I kept to myself, sat in corners and read. The radio played constantly. Otherwise, I could hear
nothing but the creaking of Vilma’s footsteps in the halls as she tended to her parents. The pantry dwindled. I ate less and less, thinking that if Mr. Bowne had been in a state to notice, he would have been pleased.