Close Your Eyes (18 page)

I try to explain the psychology of voyeurism and exhibitionism, describing how our two core instincts are survival and reproduction. We can be aroused by danger and aroused by sex and sometimes the brain doesn’t know the difference or confuses the two, and we get excited by acts of rebellion, or exhibitionism, or the fear of being caught.

‘What’s the strangest place you’ve ever had sex?’ he asks.

‘A beach in Turkey, how about you?’

‘A VW Beetle on the vehicle deck of a ferry to Calais.’

‘Tight fit.’

‘That’s what she said.’ He grins and picks up the pie, hungry again. ‘What about this dogging scene? Aside from STDs, aren’t people worried they’ll finish up with someone ugly.’

‘Orgies reduce people to their genitals and erogenous zones. Bodies are mere props.’

I can see Ruiz struggling with the idea. Having grown up in an age when girls played hard to get and boys worked hard to woo them, he’s quite old-fashioned in his views on sex and marriage.

‘So you’re back with Julianne,’ he says, changing the subject.

‘We’re under the same roof.’

‘Sharing a bed?’

‘Not quite.’

‘Same room?’

‘Same floor.’

‘You’re on the floor?’

‘We’re on the
first
floor. Separate rooms. We’re going on a date Thursday night.’

‘Aren’t you a bit old for dates?’

‘What would you call it?’

‘Foreplay.’

‘Very funny.’

Ruiz chuckles and his eyes fold closed and I feel genuine relief for his friendship and humour. After a while I notice that his eyes are open again, watching me.

‘Is everything all right?’ he asks.

‘What do you mean?’

‘There must be a reason that she’s asked you to come back.’

‘Everything is fine,’ I say, aware of how hollow the statement sounds. I collect his plate and empty pint glass and stack them for the waitress. Then I check my phone for messages, aware that the silence is weighing more heavily on me than on Ruiz. Minutes pass. I frame a question in my head. I reword it silently, trying to make it sound casual and conversational. It still comes out badly.

‘When your first wife had cancer did they do any surgery?’

‘A double mastectomy and chemo,’ Ruiz replies.

‘How long afterwards – I mean, how long did she live?’

‘Five years from the diagnosis – the twins were twelve.’

The silence stretches out. Ruiz is studying me, but I know he won’t ask the obvious question.

‘Julianne has ovarian cancer,’ I say, relieved to get it out.

‘What stage?’

‘They’re still doing the tests.’

‘How is she holding up?’

‘OK, I guess. She’s scared.’

‘How about you?’

‘I spent the weekend researching online and talking to cancer victims from all over the place. Helsinki. Chicago. Sydney. I discovered a whole community of people who were happy to talk about their surgery, the aftermath, the percentages, the life expectancy.’

‘Did it help?

‘Maybe. I don’t know. The doctors are talking about Julianne having a hysterectomy.’

‘Good! They should cut it all out. Laura waited too long. She tried all these herbal cures and alternative medicines and macrobiotic diets. They should have just cut it out. Maybe things would have been…’ He doesn’t finish the statement. ‘Do the girls know?’

‘Some of it.’

‘Want my advice?’

I nod.

‘Tell them everything. Don’t keep them in the dark. That’s the mistake I made with the twins. Help them understand.’

‘I don’t want to frighten them.’

‘At least tell Charlie. It helps to have someone to share it with.’

‘I’m sharing it with you.’

‘That’s good,’ he says. ‘Any time.’

We sit opposite each other, saying nothing because words aren’t necessary. Meanwhile I imagine the cancer cells multiplying inside Julianne. She must fight them. She must prevail. I cannot bear the thought of my life without her. The one small mercy of having Parkinson’s was the knowledge that I was likely to go first. I still hope that’s the case, because Julianne is a better person than I am. More deserving.

Today it is too hot to walk. I take my father to the beach and he paddles back and forth in the shallows with his trousers rolled up to his knees and his shirt unbuttoned and flapping around his pigeon chest. He stares at a little boy who is playing with a plastic truck. The boy’s mother smiles at me and I try to remember if my mother ever took me to the beach.

What do I recall about her? Her hoarse voice and husky laugh, her softness, her hugs, her dressing table with its gull-winged mirror, littered with cosmetics and hairbrushes, pins and bands and clips and ribbons. Her favourite winter coat made her look like a Russian Cossack. Her favourite film was
To Catch a Thief
. She loved Elvis Presley, Frankie Valli, Bobby Darin and Tom Jones. She knew how to jitterbug and do the samba, or maybe it was the rumba. I’m not good with dances.

I have only one photograph of her. I hid it from my father. It shows her at eighteen – the age she married – already pregnant with Patrick, but not showing. She’s dancing with a group of friends at a Beatles concert in Liverpool, laughing at the camera. Young. Carefree. She has no idea of what’s coming. Death saved her from growing old.

In the months that followed the accident I would ride my pushbike to the crematorium to visit her grave. I didn’t imagine her as a pile of ashes in a marble urn. Instead I pictured her in the dress she wore in the photograph – the one with the floral sleeves and the black drop skirt that she bought when Aunt Kate got married.

People used to smile at me sadly when they saw me at the cemetery. Some of them were regulars, like the bald man in wellingtons, who had a family plot and spent hours pulling weeds and deadheading flowers. His mother and father and sister were already in residence, which left just enough room for him, he said, ‘when the time comes’.

‘How do you know when the time comes?’ I asked him.

‘You don’t. It just does.’

A young married couple would visit their daughter’s grave. She died at age three. I don’t know what happened to her. I was too nervous to ask. Another regular visitor was an ancient woman who arrived in a big shiny black car with a driver who opened the door for her and carried her flowers. He would set up a chair and she would sit while he arranged the vase. She talked all the time, as though delivering a lecture to someone who should have listened the first time around.

I didn’t tell my father about visiting the cemetery. I kept it a secret, just like the photograph. And I tried not to listen when he railed against my mother, calling her a painted whore and a scheming witch. He accused her of always flirting and showing off her breasts and brushing her hand down other men’s backs and leaning her hip against their groins. He was a hypocrite, of course. I saw the way he looked at other men’s wives and at Agatha’s friends on those few occasions she risked inviting someone home.

I quit school at sixteen and got a job on the rigs, first as a dishwasher and later as a rigger. I worked in Africa, Australia and the Gulf of Mexico and didn’t see my father for eight years. I brought a girlfriend home with me from Miami. We hired a car at Heathrow Airport and drove to Bristol. My father was living in the same house but he’d rented out two rooms upstairs to an Afghan family, whom he despised. I remember knocking on the door for ten minutes before he answered.

‘So it’s you,’ he said, turning back into the house. He was pale and his hands were shaking. Sitting in a grubby armchair, he knocked back four quick beers and then he came to life, telling my girlfriend stories that belittled me.

We had booked into a hotel. He called me ‘Mr Moneybags’ and made me out to be a class traitor. We arranged to meet him later for dinner, but he didn’t show up. A week later his house burned down, killing the tenants upstairs. My father would have died too if a fireman hadn’t pulled him out. The coroner couldn’t decide how the fire started and my father refused to give evidence.

The sky is clouding over and the air growing cooler. I tell my father it’s time to go back. He sits on a rock while I lace his trainers, noticing the purple veins on the back of his ankles and the bony spurs on his heels.

He doesn’t say a word when I drop him back at the nursing home. He doesn’t acknowledge my leaving. ‘I’ll see you next week,’ I say. ‘Do you want me to bring you anything?’

Apropos of nothing at all, he begins telling me how he lost his virginity to a prostitute who had a tattoo of a butterfly on her shoulder and would turn tricks at the Avon Docks. The dockers and stevedores called her the Clifton Butterfly and she worked the streets dressed in a short skirt and fishnet stockings, in all weathers, unable to go home until she’d earned ten shillings.

‘I felt sorry for her and gave her a charity fuck. She gave me the clap. There’s a lesson in that. Never donate to charity.’ He gives me a wink.

I leave him lying on his bed, arms at his sides, as though waiting for the undertaker. Trembling with rage, I walk along a corridor, angry that he can remember the Clifton Butterfly, but he can’t remember my name. My conscious mind hates what I’ve become. Nature has not triumphed over nurture. Both are equally at fault.

I notice an open door, an empty room, a bed and a handful of banknotes on a side table. The occupant is in the en suite bathroom or somewhere else.

I slip inside and take the money, pushing it deep into my pocket.

‘Can I help you?’

Mrs Addison, the supervisor, is standing in the doorway. She normally works in the office upstairs and I only hear from her when the nursing home fees are owed.

‘What are you doing in this room?’

‘I got lost.’

She knows I’m lying.

‘This isn’t your father’s room.’

‘I realise that now.’

I feel a bead of sweat roll over my vertebrae at the base of my spine.

Fuck you, bitch!
I want to scream.
You shut your mouth or I’ll … I’ll …

The balloons make the biggest impression. Hundreds of them are tied to the railings and the iron gates and bobbing from people’s wrists as they gather outside the Church of the Immaculate Conception. Harper’s schoolfriends are carrying large clown-like clusters, all of them purple and mauve, handing them out to mourners and passers-by.

‘Take two,’ says a pretty girl in a short black dress. She ties one to each of my wrists, while explaining that purple was Harper’s favourite colour.

She turns to Ruiz. ‘You want a balloon?’

‘I’m a bit old for that.’

‘You’re not old,’ she says, winking at him. He holds out his hand.

‘Did you see that?’ he asks.

‘What?’

‘She flirted with me.’

‘It’s “Be Nice to Pensioners Week”.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Language. Remember where you are.’

Posters are displayed at the entrance to the church, each featuring a photograph of Elizabeth and Harper. The message above reads: ‘Celebration of Life Service’. There are more photographs in the printed ‘order of service’: Harper on her first day of school, or with a bucket and spade, or riding a donkey, or bouncing on a trampoline, or posing with her friends … Elizabeth has her own photographs that show her changing hairstyles and colours and fashions. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell mother and daughter apart.

On the edge of the churchyard, TV crews and photographers have taken up positions on a footpath, spilling on to the narrow road where a police constable is directing traffic.

Dominic Crowe arrives alone, wearing a black suit and tie, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses. In contrast, Elizabeth’s mother has worn bright colours – a mauve blouse and voluminous white skirt. Becca walks through the gates with Francis, who is carrying the baby in a car seat. People stop, bend and smile at little George. Someone ties a purple balloon to the handle of his carrier.

Inside the church they take a seat in the front row. An organ is playing. Becca turns and makes eye contact with Dominic Crowe, holding his gaze for a several seconds, long enough for something to pass between them.

I’ve been to my share of funerals but this one seems wrong. Most of the mourners are young and won’t have lost someone close to them before. Standing in clusters, unsure of what to say or do, they talk in whispers and hug each newcomer. Harper’s boyfriend is with Sophie Baxter and another girl I recognise from the public meeting. Blake is wearing a purple satin jacket that makes him look like a member of a boy band. He’s sitting on the aisle, occasionally glancing over his shoulder as though expecting the drinks trolley to be along at any moment.

Harper’s brother Elliot is being shepherded by other family members. Dressed for the occasion in a black overcoat, dark grey suit and thin black tie, he looks emaciated and strung out, his face shiny with sweat.

The service begins with a jazzy hymn. The priest opens his arms.

‘The grace and peace of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you,’ he says.

‘And with you,’ is the murmured reply.

‘My name of Father Abermain,’ he says. ‘There are many people still outside. I know it might not seem like an occasion for making new friends, but what better way to celebrate these two lives than to embrace each other. So squeeze up, people, let others sit down.’

The funeral is a simple, sombre affair with gospel readings, communion and prayers before words of remembrance. A friend from school talks of Harper’s artistic talent – her eye for beauty and composition. ‘She was lively, lovely and smart. She was going to change the world.’

Elizabeth’s oldest friend recounts their first meeting. ‘The moment Elizabeth walked into a room she commanded attention. Nobody could ignore her energy, the sparkle in her eye, the spirit that said, “I am here and I will not be ignored.”’

Dominic Crowe is the last to speak, breaking down as he tries to read from a prepared speech. Someone steps up to the microphone and helps him finish.