The Paperchase (11 page)

It was only a glimpse into a single afternoon of three lives, but it implied that the dimensions of my ignorance were vast.

For a few days, I got so caught up thinking about the past that I stopped paying attention to the present. When I came back to myself, it was with the dawning realisation that coming to Ionia had led me to a dead end. It wasn’t a flash of insight – a conversion – but something more slow-growing and deeply rooted: I couldn’t stay. Sooner rather than later, I knew I would have to move forward and that meant leaving the island. What I didn’t – couldn’t – foresee was that going forward would just lead me more circuitously into the past.

AT THE BEGINNING
, when I wasn’t painting, I found myself odd jobs to do: I rooted around in the shed, planted vegetables and put up a bird feeder in Patrick’s Japanese maple tree. I
harvested
pears and peaches from my orchard and delivered some in a brown paper-bag to the Fernshaws with a note thanking them for their help on the day of my arrival. There was no one at home, so I left the bag on the steps of their house. I
occasionally
passed Nathan selling lemonade on the empty highway as I drove back and forth to the Colonial Market for milk and newspapers.

I made a point of stopping every time. He was unfailingly rude, which I began to enjoy in a strange way. It became one of the reliable features of my routine. I always pretended not to notice, and chatted happily to him when I pulled up to buy
his lemonade. He never took off his headphones, but served me with the music leaking out of them into the sunshine.

My proprietorial zest for my new home soon waned. I found living in the house even more uncomfortable than I had
anticipated
. To stay there with time on your hands was to get sucked into the unwinnable war against entropy that Patrick had been waging halfheartedly for years. For every one thing I fixed, two more seemed to break. Or, the quest for the right tool would take me to another part of the house where I would uncover worse damp, more dangerous wiring, or an impassable mountain of crockery that had been stacked up because the cabinet it was intended for needed fixing.

If I was careful, the situation wouldn’t get any worse, but improvements were pretty much out of the question. House and owner had found themselves in a kind of stalemate between order and chaos and things had stayed that way for years. There might have been occasional skirmishes (
grass-cutting
, cleaning windows, taking trash to the dump), but no significant exchanges of territory.

Even though I intended to leave before the summer was up, I wanted to postpone my departure at least until I’d finished my first painting. It was also a way of deferring making a
decision
. I knew I needed time to figure out what to do next. If I went back to London, I would have nowhere to live until Mr Bakatin’s lease expired.

As a result, there wasn’t much incentive to work quickly. But I didn’t fully share Patrick’s talent for procrastination, and one Friday lunchtime in early August, I finished my picture. I hung it up in the summer kitchen; hammering the nail in gave me an illicit thrill. What would Mr Blair of the churchmen’s fund have to say about that? I wondered.

But standing back to look at the completed painting, I felt deflated. It could have been any stretch of coastal Massachusetts. It lacked the sense of menace that I felt up on the widow’s walk, where the disparity between the size of the ocean and the size of the island suddenly became clear.

I gave myself the rest of the day off – which meant a day away from the house. Getting out of the house was a little like coming off a nuclear submarine. Leaving my clothes at the laundromat in the local mini-mall, I was struck by its
spaciousness
and efficiency. Opening the washing machine, I half expected to be confronted by a collection of baseball cards, or a crate of empty jelly jars. Two weeks in Patrick’s house would have made a minimalist out of anyone. I wanted to spend an afternoon in an air-conditioned shopping mall, surrounded by clean glass and the smell of new sneakers.

The sky was clouding over as I drove into Westwich. The road curved past a handful of shingled houses, and for a couple of miles it was shaded with trees. These, and the stone walls that divided up the cleared land into fields, made me think of the Kent countryside – where many of the island’s first settlers had come from. There were still some orchards, but little of the countryside was agricultural. Some of the smaller houses had boats or lobster traps outside them, but the real income of the island came from tourists.

The islanders bitched about them – they drove too slowly or they drove too fast; they had too much money; they spoiled the views with obscenely large holiday homes – but there was no future on the island without them. Still, when motorists fought over parking spaces and rights of way, ‘
I’ll
still be here in September’ was sometimes used as a battle cry.

The traffic was backed up on the main road into Westwich. The bridge into the harbour had been raised to let an
enormous
yacht pass under it. Its sails were raised, but it was travelling under the power of its engines, and the canvas flapped uselessly in the light breeze. The people on deck were the bluebloods of Ionia’s visitors. Theirs was an exclusive lifestyle that centred on the marina and a handful of waterfront properties in fashionable parts of the island. There was a
circuit
of elite cocktail parties that sometimes counted the President among their guests. Ionians were openly proud that they hosted such grand visitors. It always baffled me that
those people came at all. It must be something puritanical in the American character that finds a kind of rugged virtue in the chilly water and craggy beaches of Ionia. It’s nobody’s image of a holiday island. From the ferry, the original houses with their tiny seafront windows look as if they’re narrowing their eyes against the wind.

The ferry from Falmouth had arrived about half an hour earlier. Squadrons of tourists had just rented mopeds from the shops that lined the quay. They looked insectile in their cheap helmets, buzzing around on tiny hornet engines. Six times a day in summer, the ferry from Falmouth disgorged its load of passengers. Many of them made it no farther than Westwich itself. They were content to stroll around the town, visit the Toy Museum, and eat a plateful of fried seafood.

There were big lines outside Grandma Wobbly’s Taffy Pantry, but I had the shopping mall pretty much to myself. I browsed around the bookstore and then went for lunch at a place called the North End Pizzeria. Pixellated giants played baseball on a projection screen in the corner. Outside it was beginning to rain lightly. With the sun extinguished and the streets empty, the town seemed to be practising for the
out-of-season
– the notoriously bleak winters and acres of dull time between Labor Day and Memorial Day that the islanders boasted of having to themselves.

I bumped into Terry and Nathan Fernshaw outside a hi-fi shop in the mall. They’d just finished lunch themselves and Nathan had disappeared to go to the toilet. Terry was
standing
by herself gazing at the stereo equipment. I didn’t recognise her – she was wearing a robin’s-egg blue cashmere sweater, sparkling new white jeans and a pair of clogs. The effect was stunning, but a little odd. It seemed old-fashioned for a woman barely out of her teens.

When she noticed me she gave me a wave and smile. I realised she was thanking me for the apples I had taken round to her house.

I thought she looked beautiful. Standing there, smiling back
at her, but unable to talk to her, I felt a pang of homesickness like a cold finger on my heart.

Nathan appeared from the toilet. He was wearing baggy
hip-hop-style
pants and an LL Cool J T-shirt.

We all drank chocolate milk under an enormous skylight that relayed the spattering of the rain. I couldn’t be sure how much Terry understood of what I said. She never spoke
herself
, although she occasionally made a noise that was her approximation of ‘No, Nathan!’ when she felt her brother was getting out of hand.

‘My mom doesn’t let me drink chocolate milk at home,’ Nathan confided. ‘It makes me hyper.’

I realised Terry was accustomed to a hearing person’s
inability
to understand her language. She was patient with my incomprehension and, like her mother, skilful at using simple gestures to communicate. Nathan was our interpreter of last resort.

The two of them had been shopping, Terry explained. She needed some things for when she went back to school in the autumn. She was in her final year at Gallaudet, a university for the deaf in Washington, DC. She rolled her eyes when I admitted I hadn’t heard of it.

‘Ask your sister if she’s heard of Swansea,’ I said to Nathan.

‘Swansea?’ He finger-spelled it to his sister. She looked baffled.

‘It’s where I went to school,’ I said.

Her face said: Where?

‘Wales. It’s beautiful.’ I mimed big mountains. ‘It’s three thousand miles over there.’ I pointed through the back door of the drugstore.

‘I want to go to Indonesia,’ said Nathan. He was speaking and signing simultaneously. ‘I want to see the Komodo dragons.’ He performed an extravagant mime which concluded with him writhing on the floor. ‘They can swallow a whole goat.’

Terry was trying not to laugh. She warned her brother to take it easy. He was standing on his chair and lurching around
with the frenzied energy of a dog who has just been let out of a car. I felt slightly envious that chocolate milk didn’t have this effect on me.

‘I’m thinking of seeing a film,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s on, but you’re both welcome to come.’

Terry looked doubtful. It hadn’t occurred to me until I said it that she wouldn’t be able to follow any of the dialogue. The gaucheness of my suggestion was overshadowed by Nathan’s reaction. He accepted my invitation by shouting, ‘Yeah!’ and standing up so quickly that he knocked his chocolate milk on to his sister. It spilled on to her lap. She was on her feet, scraping vainly with a napkin at a dark blotch that had spread down the front of her jeans. She was patently furious, both with Nathan and me. She flashed me a look that seemed to say: ‘You bought him the chocolate milk!’

I went to get some sturdier paper towels from the men’s room. As I stood holding the door ajar with my foot,
snatching
fistfuls of the green towels from the dispenser, I could see Terry upbraiding Nathan in sign. He kept looking away abjectly.

The towels made no difference. Terry went to the ladies’ room to try again with soap and water. I wanted to say, ‘It doesn’t look so bad,’ but it would have been a lie. The
pristine
effect was ruined: it looked like someone had poured a bottle of ink on a swan. The colour and location of the stain couldn’t have been more unfortunate. She walked slightly pigeon-toed to the toilet.

‘Your sister’s really cut up about those pants,’ I said.

‘She’s really mad,’ said Nathan. ‘She’s supposed to be
meeting
Michael.’

‘Who’s Michael?’

‘Her boyfriend.’ Nathan slurped the last half-inch of his milk.

Terry came back from the toilet. The ugly stain wouldn’t shift. I could see how badly she wanted to look good for her boyfriend.

‘What time does the ferry get in?’ I asked her.

Terry pointed at her watch and held up one finger.

‘Why don’t you go back home and change?’ I suggested. ‘Nathan and I will go to the movie and I’ll drop him off at your house afterwards.’

Terry considered it for a nanosecond. If she had any
misgivings
about entrusting her twelve-year-old brother to the care of a virtual stranger, they were quickly put in perspective by the stain. She gave him a perfunctory kiss and practically ran to her car, her wooden soles clattering on the tiles of the mall.

Most of the films had already started. We were left with a choice of two: an animated version of the
Mahabharata
that took place underwater, or a stalk-and-slash called
Cross
My
Heart
and
Hope
to
Die.
I would have been happy to skip it
altogether
, but Nathan was keen on the horror film.

‘It’s supposed to be wicked scary,’ he said.

The auditorium was less than a third full. Nathan and I appropriated a whole row and put the popcorn on a spare seat between us.

‘So did you ever see the Queen?’ said Nathan.

‘I’ve had her over for cups of tea once or twice.’

‘Have not.’

‘Have too.’

I felt very conscious of my responsibilities in loco parentis. I don’t think I would leave my child in the care of a man I’d only met two or three times. Laura and I once overheard part of a conversation between two black mums in Battersea Park. ‘Black people might be muggers,’ one of them said to the other, ‘but white people fuck their kids.’

The movie was an absolute dog and I drifted off to sleep about halfway through. The plot contained some or all of the following elements: an Indian burial ground, a girls’ boarding school, an unpopular fat student, heartless prefects, a Ouija board and a portal to another dimension, along with a high
frequency
of bloody murders and sexual shenanigans.

Towards the end of the film, I looked despairingly across at
Nathan as the script yanked another worn garment out of the cupboard of horror ready-to-wears. The coldest hearted and best looking of the fat girl’s tormentors was necking with the young janitor in a row-boat, unaware of the music that announced the imminent approach of the ghostly knife-man.

Nathan’s face was itself a horror cliché. His mouth was slightly open and his eyes wide with fear. I could hear a faint rustling noise as he ground kernels of popcorn reflexively in his hand.

Twenty years earlier I had come to the same cinema with Patrick, Vivian and my father. It had been another overcast day. I had nagged my father to take us to see a 3-D Western called
Comin’ at Ya.
We were given special spectacles to watch the film and Patrick, who wore glasses anyway, had to figure out a way of wearing the two pairs together.

The movie was outstandingly bad, but my strongest memory of that afternoon is looking over to see Patrick with the 3-D glasses fixed crookedly under his own spectacles and shaking his head in resigned disbelief. My father claimed he had dropped his own glasses in the popcorn and had obscured half the screen with a buttery thumbprint.

After the cinema, the four of us had gone to play mini-golf. Vivian somehow managed a hole in one on his last shot and was awarded a free round by the man in the booth.