Stray Love (8 page)

Silence.

He resumed packing, finally laying out a neatly folded dressing gown and placing on it a toothbrush, hairbrush, shaving kit.
Flick, flick.
Two metal latches being closed.
Squinch, squinch.
A canvas strap being tightened around the bulging leather case.

Then he walked over to the windowsill and brought back a plant and placed it on the ground by the door for Pippa to take to her flat. He showed me a locked box in the closet, which contained important papers, and said he was leaving a key with Pippa in case of emergency. He told me that I was the man of
the house now and that I needed to be brave, but he didn’t tell me what either of those things entailed.

When the flat was in order, he turned to me. He smiled a smile of leaving and forgetting, a smile that was new.

“I’m not going to let you leave me,” I said.

“I’m not
leaving
you,” he said. But he didn’t sound very convincing.

In fifteen minutes Oliver would be making his way through the gates at Heathrow, climbing onboard a plane and flying off to Nairobi–Kampala–WhoKnewWhere. It was December 5, 1961.

I pretended that this was not happening. I was Marcel Lawrence, almost ten years old, trying not to cry as the man who had been the centre of my life, the man who had told me he loved me, placed his hand around mine and shook it. To distract myself I concentrated on stuffing extra pens into his suit pockets. If Oliver was set on leaving, if he was going to insist on using war as an escape hatch, I wanted him to be well prepared. A war requires
things:
provisions, tools, armour. Oliver smiled at the pens, clicking one appreciatively.

I looked closely and tried to learn his face by heart. His suit was a boring navy blue and Pippa teased him: “Are you going undercover, Oliver Lawrence? Are you some kind of unmarked man?” She was wearing a black dress with a small detachable white plastic collar. Her knitted black beret was now on my head, where she had adjusted it, in the French fashion.

The departure announcement finally came over the Tannoy, a metallic-sounding voice: “WE REQUEST THAT PASSENGERS ON EAST AFRICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 006 KINDLY PROCEED TO GATE C.”

Oliver leapt up immediately and embraced us. Then he walked through the security check, without even the courtesy of hesitating. His eagerness was the final blow. My knees weakened and a soft, stricken “oh” escaped my lips as the departure gate doors closed and Oliver became one of the tiny figures crossing the tarmac. I tried not to think of the plane becoming a flaming fireball.

Pippa led me to a row of seats right beside the Welcome to Britain sign. No sooner had I sat down than I broke down weeping. She stroked my hand until my tears stopped and we sat for a bit longer, listening to more announcements over the Tannoy, more departures, city names popping up, then fading away. Singapore, Moscow, Johannesburg, Helsinki. Pippa played with a string of large plastic beads she had pulled from her purse and we watched a crowd of travellers forming around us. There were suitcases in shiny plastic and old leather, reds greys pinks browns navies, some of them lying on their sides in tiredness. I felt I had been deposited with Pippa like a parcel. Suddenly it was too much. I needed to get away from all the goodbyes: the squalling infants and anxious parents and weepy couples and even the brisk businessmen with their snappy handshakes. All the partings seemed to be adding up inside me.

“Pippa? Can we go?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “I thought you’d never ask.”

We walked to the airport bus and she suggested that we go to the Natural History Museum and see some dinosaur skeletons to get our minds off things. It should have worked, but it was no use. I walked around the museum replaying every minute of Oliver’s departure, barely registering the prehistoric bones and polished glass vitrines.

When we returned to Pippa’s flat, she poured herself a
glass of brandy and smoked a cigarette down to its end. Then it seemed to occur to her that we should eat so she clattered about the kitchen and heated up a tin of beans and buttered a heel of bread.

“I’ll make up a bed,” she said lazily, when we were finished eating.

I told her I could do it myself but she insisted, going off in search of blankets. I could tell that she was trying to make me feel welcome, but her efforts felt unnatural. She billowed sheets onto the sofa. And even though she fluffed my pillow, there was something about her distracted manner that made me shiver a little.

I
T’S STRANGE TO THINK
that I am responsible for the child sleeping in the other room. A few minutes ago I went and turned off the bedside lamp and found Iris curled up in a nest of sheets and blankets, her puffy
Artemis Fowl
dropped to the floor, every page she’s read dog-eared in case she needs to go back and comb over clues. Just before bed, I consented to a pillow fight. We both needed to release some stress. Sometimes Iris acts as if we’re having a sleepover party. She keeps saying we should be eating more cake.

I took her to see Oliver tonight. His flat was in disarray, even worse than mine, a heap of paper spilling across every surface, scribbled notes, contact sheets, old clippings (some yellow and brittle), the protean makings of a book. Lately, I feel his age more acutely. He is still slim and courtly at age seventy-two. But he is slower moving than before and I can’t help but see his domestic surroundings as a sign of entropy. He used to be tidy but now he doesn’t seem to notice stains and dirt and
dust as much. I am alert to these things—the empty Scotch bottles in the wastepaper basket, the unwashed coffee cups in the bedroom, the fruit flies swarming over a bowl of overripe bananas. The gradual slide towards the slovenly. I have seen where it can lead.

“Don’t you have a broom?” Iris asked Oliver, taking an anthropological interest in the mess. “Can’t you cook?” she said, inspecting the tower of takeaway containers and leaky sauce packets in the kitchen. Giovanna’s Italian. Sid’s Curry Palace. Yan Chu’s House of Szechuan.

She trailed two fingers over a Thai silk runner, tapped a dusty brass Buddha on the head. Then she calmly removed a stack of magazines from a chair and sat down.

I left Iris and Oliver to get acquainted while I went to the nearby grocer’s. When I returned, Oliver looked over his glasses at me.

“Iris, here, was just telling me about her conception, how her mother had a syringe of sperm from an unknown man injected into her …”

“Vagina,” Iris said helpfully. She was playing with the zipper on her sweatshirt, tugging it up and down. “My mother sometimes calls it her ‘vegetables.’ She likes to use crazy words for … stuff.”

I nodded, left Oliver shifting uncomfortably in his seat, and wandered off to the kitchen.

For all his faults, for all his clumsy attempts at motherly things, Oliver has proven to be utterly loyal to me. I placed the bag of food on the counter and began to unpack my supplies: salmon, couscous, a salad mix. A few minutes later, I was slicing a cucumber when I heard Iris telling Oliver about her grandmother.

“They think I don’t know what happened but I do. I know she was very hurt in an accident and that she might die. They think I shouldn’t know because I’m only eleven.”

I put down the knife. I suddenly remembered the blotchiness in her face when she stepped out of the bathroom this morning.

How does it happen? At what point is she born, the baffled, wounded adult of tomorrow? Is eleven what we react to for the rest of our lives?

I don’t want to be worried. The shirker in me wants to pretend I haven’t overheard her, but I raise the subject on our way home, unleashing a series of difficult questions.

“Will my grandmother get better?”

“I hope so.”

“Will she
die?
“

“The hospital is taking good care of her. But, yes, it’s possible she could.”

I have resolved to be truthful, to answer her questions the way she needs them to be answered. She keeps playing with the locket around her neck. She heaves a deep, loud sigh. Then she has a thought.

“Can we make her something? Maybe a package? Some drawings.”

The words
Iris, your grandmother Natsumi is in a coma
form on my tongue, then dissolve. How does one actually avoid being a dreadful parent? I know from experience that too much honesty can tear a child down. It’s a delicate balance: neither denying nor overwhelming the young, truth without cruelty.

“Yes,” I say, finally. “That’s a very good idea. We’ll make her a package.”

We’ll make
her
a package to cure
our
sadness, I think.

I
HAVE SEEN THE CLIPPINGS
from those first years that Oliver went overseas. I know what Oliver saw, where he travelled. But in those days I was divided between wanting to know and not wanting to know. I was struggling with my anxieties. My anxieties won.

In January, Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. Oliver flew from Nairobi to Leopoldville to cover the funeral, where he followed a wailing procession of mourners through the streets.

I pretended he was in Lancashire.

In February, Oliver trekked deep into the forests of Kenya to speak with Mau Mau rebels about the conditions in the British prison camps.

I pretended he was in Suffolk.

In early March, in Accra, Oliver met with Ghanaian Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, who reflected on his mortality a few weeks after an assassination attempt.

I pretended he was in Essex.

In late March, he travelled to the Tanzanian capital of Dar es
Salaam where he wrote of the desecration of a Union Jack flag by a mob of students. In Tanzania, he also visited houses abandoned by departing British families. He took photographs of rooms strewn with the items they had chosen to leave behind: stuffed antelope heads, stained zebra rugs, half-empty bottles of Boodles and Dewar’s. He described expat stores whose shelves had become “a cemetery for dusty boxes of gravy mix and powdered Yorkshire pudding,” expat schools in whose empty classrooms he found the same Beatrix Potter books he had once read to me.

I pretended he was in Surrey.

In Guinea–Bissau (mid-April), he met with a gentle, charismatic leader named Amilcar Cabral who had just formed a party to overthrow the Portuguese.

I pretended he was in Northumberland.

In June, Oliver returned to Leopoldville and followed the tuba player in a brass band that marched down Boulevard Albert on the Congo’s first anniversary of independence. He then flew to Elisabethville, in the secessionist province of Katanga, where protesters were in the streets with banners blazoned
NO
UN
FORCES
. Later that day, he walked through wild bush with a Belgian doctor who claimed to be a witness to Patrice Lumumba’s still unresolved murder.

I pretended he was in Cornwall.

“How are the bicycle lessons coming along?” Oliver asked the next time he called home.

“I’m still wobbly,” I said.

At the Elisabethville Airport, Oliver’s bag was thoroughly searched. Among the confiscated items was a drawing I had done that evidently looked like a map of Katanga’s mining region, but was, in fact, a recent sketch of Mrs. Bowne’s hand.
The intricate lines they had mistaken for roads and rivers were merely tendons and veins.

As Oliver made his way around Africa, his stomach cramped, his bowels loosened, his pale skin burned and peeled a dozen times. He developed a heat rash, his eczema worsened. Yet even as his body fell apart, he had never sounded better. (Pippa said the work focused his anxieties or, at least, gave them different names: secession, assassination, rebellion.)

When he telephoned us, the calls were brief and newsy, limited to details worth sharing on an expensive foreign line. Everything I said carried a tinny echo. Sometimes there was an issue that needed tackling (school, my aversion to dentists, a lingering cough, a clothing budget). Usually Oliver would start by speaking with Pippa and then move on to me.The choppy quality to our conversations was heightened by the fact that I had no mental picture of Oliver’s life whatsoever. I wondered, for example, if he was travelling around by camel.
Had he met any Bedouin?
I asked if he was buying interesting hats. Did he shop at an outdoor bazaar? By the same token, Oliver was losing touch with England. He spoke to a younger me, to the long-ago child he used to carry in his arms.

At night I prayed for global tedium. I prayed for mornings when the newspapers would be filled with happy or, at very least, boring foreign news. Peaceful transitions. Decent leaders. Animals rescued from poachers. Minor train accidents. Nonfatal crowd stampedes.

Pippa had fallen in love with an American movie actress named Jean Seberg and began adopting her look: tight black pedal-pushers, narrow penny loafers, a short pixie cut. She wore lots of stripes—striped boatneck tops and striped dresses; blue, red,
thin, thick, but always horizontal—and quoted random lines from a French movie called
Breathless,
which she must have seen half a dozen times.

I had always seen Pippa as a winding coil of energy, eager to wrap herself around anything and everything. Movies. Books. Music. People. She was always in a state of life-hunger, pumping and squeezing creative inspiration from every encounter. But living with her provided me with a different perspective. It wasn’t just the moments of distraction that I had noticed the first night. Now I was learning her quieter movements, the tempo of her breathing, the rhythm of her sleep, the frequency of her sighs. I was discovering that she was not inexhaustible. Some nights her voice was dreamy with medicine tablets and wine and I would listen to her slow, zigzagging stories until she nodded off, her face loose and flushed. There were mornings, cloudy mornings, when she would go out wearing her big sunglasses because she didn’t have the energy to “put on her face.” There was school and work to give structure to our days, but there were nights when she looked at me with tired, watery eyes, as if I were a puzzling visitor.

“Why do you take so many tablets, Pippa?” I asked one day as she opened a pill bottle. We had just finished a meal of hamburgers and Ribena.

“Because I want to sleep.”

“What stops you from sleeping?”

“Thinking. Old thoughts.”

She walked around the room, picking things up and putting them down, like a bored customer. Then she walked over to the window and mused aloud: “Do you ever wonder what life would be like without the hedges?”

I walked over and joined her. She tapped on the glass,
pointing at a house in the distance where each bush had been aggressively sculpted.

“I just
loathe
them. Those immaculate green spheres. The hurt smell of them when they’re freshly clipped. A perversion, that’s what it is. Imagine the arrogance of trying to give something in nature a better shape.” She turned to me. “You can’t change people, Marcel. Not by force. Not if they don’t want to be changed.” Then she looked out the window again. “I want to go walking by the Thames today. It’s a perfect day for a walk.” And though she might have preferred to go alone, she invited me along anyway.

We walked along the south bank from Tower Bridge towards Lambeth Bridge. It was one of the highest tides of the year, with the Thames rising to hide more of the shoreline than usual. We passed couples and sightseers with cameras who had stopped to admire the view of London. We flipped through the secondhand books at the book stalls under Waterloo Bridge and Pippa nodded to various people she seemed to know: a young man in a mod suit playing saxophone, an older man in a duffle coat selling budgies. At Lambeth Bridge, the crowds thinned out and the sky began to darken and we sat down on a raised bench to watch the river’s surface. The water churned, sparkling with glints of silver light, an eerie green darkness below.

Pippa fidgeted with the buttons of her coat and swept back loose strands of hair as we sat there in silence. Then she suddenly started speaking, vaguely, at first, but then more intimately. She told me about a man she once loved who used to walk with her by the river and how open and alive the city had felt when they were out strolling together. She said that after they were separated, the streets suddenly felt narrow and dead.

The entire time she talked, she stared out at the river, her
shoulders hunched slightly forward. She seemed to be speaking to its current rather than to me, which was just as well because I had no interest in discussing the man she had loved. Even if it was a long time ago, it made me feel jealous on Oliver’s behalf.

“Pippa,” I said, placing my hand on hers. “I want to go home.”

There was no answer.

“Pippa?”

It was as if I weren’t there any more.

Finally, forcing a smile, she turned to me and said, “It’s a beautiful evening. The wind has died down and look.” She pointed across the river at the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, lights twinkling in the night. “It’s been a lovely day with you, Mish.”

The fact that Pippa tended to avoid anything resembling a domestic pattern made my presence a special challenge. I could see how hard she was trying, even when she wasn’t the model caregiver. When I hinted, for instance, that the sofa was perhaps a little too makeshift for me, she quickly turned her studio back into a guest room, even painted the walls a sunflower yellow. When I withdrew or seemed too introspective, she reacted immediately. “Time for us to go out,” she would announce matter-of-factly. “Mustn’t get gloomy!”

“Remember, Mish,” she said one afternoon. “Misery does not make you a better or more enlightened person. It just makes you miserable. Take my parents. I don’t think they’ve ever gotten over the war. Or look at Oliver. Now there’s a man who loves his misery. My God, he coddles it like a pet.”

I shot her a warning look to let her know I didn’t like it when she said bad things about Oliver but she didn’t seem to
notice. She was too busy holding out her hand, stroking the invisible misery animal nested on her palm.

“I’ve never met anyone with such unbelievable self-pity. But you can be different, Mish. You don’t need to cling to sadness,” she said, lowering her hand to the ground, shooing the misery animal away. “See? I let go of mine.”

To cheer me up, she took me to Queens Ice Rink in Bayswater to see the figure skaters. We sat in the viewing stands on a cold wooden bench watching the couples glide like swans across the indoor ice. Pippa called out names for all the different techniques:
lutzes, salchows, cherry flips
and
axel jumps.
I pretended that she was my mother, that we had just come from the Soviet Union where she was the leading light of the Olympic figure-skating team.

We were sipping our tea and sharing a tube of Smarties when I suddenly blurted: “Do you think you’ll want to be a mum one day?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, keeping her eyes on the rink. “Why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering. I thought you might want to have children of your own.”

“Maybe one day.”

I waited for her to say more but she was back to watching the skaters, murmuring “perfect axel,” swinging her legs like a little girl.

“Tell me something,” I said, watching her. “What were you like when you were my age?”

“What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. Anything. Something.”

“All right,” she said. “Let me think … something, something …”

But what came out was more than one something. It was a pile of somethings. She told me about arriving in Canada as a war refugee in 1941 at the age of ten and growing up within the small Polish community in Montreal, where she and Stasha attended Polish school every Saturday and church on Sundays and tried to pass as English speakers the rest of the time, slowly erasing their accents by copying announcers on the radio. She told me about collecting pebbles and pressing flowers, how from an early age she had shown an interest in objects that were small and precious. She told me about going to regular school and being told by classmates that she smelled like stinking cabbage and urine, that she was a stupid Polack.

While all of these somethings crowded my mind, Pippa searched her purse and brought out a small photograph taken of her family in Montreal. I examined it carefully: snowflakes floating in the air, four people standing on metal stairs outside a dreary-looking brick house. The father stood with a slight hunch on the lowest step. The mother, pudgy and unsmiling, held the railing near the top. Between them were two light-haired girls in long skirts and dowdy winter coats.

“Just look at us,” Pippa said. “No wonder people thought we were a bunch of potato-filled peasants.”

“I wish your classmates didn’t call you names,” I said, returning the photograph. “People are mean to me too,” I said to comfort her.

She smiled but didn’t say anything.

“It’s true. But I can’t imagine anyone ever being mean to you.”

“Oh, Marcel. No one has it easy.”

Then she swept the air with her hand as if to clear away all the hurt, all the mess.

I looked back at the skaters and wondered,
Where were Oliver’s stories?
It wasn’t the first time the question had occurred to me, but Pippa’s story made it feel more significant. Everyone had childhood stories. Why were there no pictures of Oliver’s family? Why was there anger as well as sadness on his face whenever someone mentioned his mother? What about his father? I couldn’t think of a reason why anyone would not talk about his parents, even if they
were
dead.

The week after we went to the ice rink, Pippa announced that we were going to a “real party.” She was wandering around the flat in a bra and a cream-coloured half-slip that was stretched tight between her hip bones. There was a long bumpy scar down the centre of her tummy, whiter than her skin. Her face was lit up by sunset coming through the window.

I had been napping on the sofa, and roused myself slowly while Pippa dashed around getting ready, calling out: “Wake up, lazybones.” Within ten minutes she was dressed in a smart olive tunic with a black corset belt around her waist. Her eyes were dramatically lined with bold wings. She held up an outfit she had chosen for me—grey school shorts and a black jumper. Once I was dressed, she de-linted me with a roll of sticky tape.

The party was held in a cold warehouse in Camden Town belonging to a former shoe manufacturer. Many of the windows were broken and criss-crossed with planks of wood. There were loud banging pipes, and after climbing five flights of stairs we found ourselves in an enormous, crowded room.

Pippa grabbed my fingers and led me across the floor, making introductions. I seemed to be the only child in the group and it took me a while to overcome my shyness and keep track of names: Oy-A, Shibata, Ryszard, Lukacs, Nam, Mikkel,
Le Vanni … The artists I met spoke with French, Japanese, Hungarian, Danish accents and delivered their thoughts in whispery snippets or long impulsive glides. From what I could tell, they seemed to spend most of the year wandering from city to city, living, as one man put it, “on the outer rim.”