Gut Symmetries (16 page)

'You look nothing like sixty-one.'

She simpered and blushed. 'You always were a good son.'

'Let me take you home.'

'If you want to wait you can. I finish at six o'clock.'

Six o'clock. He stood in the dismal staff room while his mother hung up her pink overall in the grey metal locker. She put on her hat and coat and slipped her arm through his. Together they walked out towards the water. She took the wharf way home. A street lamp shone into the opaque river leaving an orange reflection. He thought of her polishing the brass plaques and how he fancied he had seen the fire of them, once, a long time ago in the harbour of New York. His secretary, Uta, had told him a story about her own soul flashing across the waters towards her. He had been surprised. That was not the sort of woman she seemed to be; so practical, so self-contained. Beautiful to a young man away from home. He had given her presents, clothes, perfume. And there was a night when . . .

He pushed the memories aside. After he had left New York she had sent him a tie. Silk. Red with white spots. It had worn through with wearing it, he had worn it for so many years. He kept it though, in the drawer with his handkerchiefs. A piece of time worn through.

Arm in arm, David and his mother, walking together as they used to walk when he waited for her to finish work and cook him kippers juggled down from their rack in the chimney. He could taste them, and his happiness, both warm in his mouth.

'Where are you staying?' she said.

'With you?'

They walked. Walked slowly past the rusted rings where the ships tethered. Walked by the packing depots empty as cathedrals. They walked by the pub with the pianola. Walked by the new gift shops selling candlesticks made out of salvaged railings. 'People are not recyclable,' he thought. 'I should enjoy being melted down into something new.' For the splinter of a second, his mind, luminous, reached forward. Then he checked himself as he always did. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. The night was dark.

They went in. He felt a sense of relief and irresponsibility. This was his boyhood home. This was his mother's house. His sea-boots were still in the cupboard, the exhausted rubber thin as skin. His pea-coat was behind the door. Nobody would come for him here.

He found his blue roll-neck sweater, incongruous over the trousers of his suit, but he pulled it on anyway. His mother watched him as she mashed the potatoes.

He ate with his elbows on the table. Eating with his fork in his right hand. She poured him a glass of Guinness.

While she ate her own meal she silently answered her own question. 'You would not have been any happier, David, if you had stayed here with the other men.'

She told me that, later, almost in self-defence. I took her hand. If my father had not been haunted by an imagined past, he would have been haunted by an imagined future. Standing still, he would have envied movement. Moving, he longed to stand still. He was not a dissatisfied man. He was a man who could never quite learn the lines he had scripted for himself. Even at his most enthusiastic for a role, some part of him could not forget that it was a role. He did not know how to merge himself into one. A little less consciousness, or a little more, might have saved him. As it was he suffered.

He was ashamed of suffering. Well-off people were not allowed to feel suffering. When they did, it became a kind of public hanging, exposed to the 'Serve him right' fascination of the crowd. He wondered, idly, if there should be some Government guidelines on how much a person could have in the bank and still be allowed to suffer.

He was a self-made man. He was a blue-collar boy who could afford a tailor. He thought of himself as working class but other people found that absurd. The company he kept was well-off stock from well-off stock. They were the ones in positions of power. They were the ones who succeeded to control just as the aristocracy succeeded to title. The right homes, the right schools, the right connections, the right expectations. All of that was rewarded and when a man like him broke in through the window and took his place at the table, he had to be twice as good and still they made light of his achievements. Still would not quite believe that he was a street boy with a scholarship and more yearning than they knew was in the whole world. They acted as though it was just a fluke that more people like him weren't in the same position as so many people like them. And sometimes they hinted he had had it easy. And sometimes, quite openly, they called him a thug. He had energy, no one could deny that, and a mission about him, that frankly, they found vulgar. They wanted to like him but he just wasn't a likeable man. Too awkward, too angled, too arrogant, too proud. Odd that he got on so well with the workforce.

He was lonely. None of his friends, his own kind, his own type, had done as well as he had. He had sailed away from that life and there was no passage of return. When he met people he had known, the downtrodden ones were overawed and the middle-class failures patronised him. He had been lucky of course. Of course. And now. he was an island unto himself visited for goods and water.

His wife was an alcoholic. His fault he knew. His children had been brought up with the right schools, the right connections, the right expectations. They hardly ever visited. And Alice, whom he loved, had turned out to be three times as good, and hated him, he thought, for what he had become.

It was over now, suffering and striving. He had re-made his Will, leaving his wife their house and more than enough money. The rest, his shares, investments, capital, he had put into trust as scholarship money for poor children. One of them, maybe, would manage what he had not, and make sense of the contradictions.

He washed his plate, kissed bis mother, and went upstairs to the little room where he had slept. It was cold but he did not care. He lay in bed, listening to his mother stacking the pots and pans. His right side felt heavy and numb. His left side, lighter, freer. He usually held it rigid in fear of the twitch. It was a dog he had to muzzle.

He slept and in his dreams he was steering the
Godspeed
again and his wife had given birth to his daughter and he had lit the river red with flares. Further back, and he was in New York taking his secretary on the ferry to Staten Island. He had held her hand, and later they had made love in a children's animal park. Further back, and he was courting his own wife, black hair blue eyes and Irish green in the wit of her. Was that him, dashing, untidy, and full of promise? He had promised ... he had lied.

Trident Shipping. A young man with ruddy cheeks, never quite at ease on an office stool. A young man spending his summer evenings loading the ships with his mates. Sam! Ted! He called them but they did not hear. David! His other self did not turn round. He tried to follow David home, but the man was not himself, it was a lad, eleven or twelve, in a smart uniform on his way to a fee-paying school. David waited for the lad all day long, and saw him at last, returning, dejected, confused, with a cut over his eye. The boy kissed his mother, threw his satchel into a corner and ran out to play. 'Your uniform, David. Your uniform.' Her voice was lost. The lad was in bed now, breathing steady, in, out, breathing through time.

In the night David had a stroke. In the morning he was paralysed on his right side. He could not call out. He could not speak.

I sat by my father's bed, holding his hand, thinking him, feeling him, not knowing how else to communicate. He was not dead but he had no life. This was the room I had slept in on those years of party nights. I did not expect to see my father in the same narrow bed.

'He won't know you,' said Grandmother. Would he not? His brain and his body were speaking different languages now and there was no interpreter between. If I talked to him would he understand?

I began to tell him a story. A story of mirrors and handkerchiefs, of winter and New York. Of a man I had wanted to marry, of his wife whom I loved. Of spaghetti and numbers, paintings and the Algonquin Hotel. The Ship of Fools, and he and I on it.

I should have preferred it to be neater, tauter, the pace of a mystery, the thrill of a romance. What I had were fragments of coloured glass held up to the light . . . This is my signal flashing towards you.

It was a strange Confessional chamber. My father was as invisible and remote as a priest. What I could not have told him in life, I told him in this absence of life. I poured my brimming heart into the huge space of him. Tears pressed under his closed eyelids and filled the gutters of his cheeks. His tears, his fluid self. My father washed back into the river that had made him. The waters claiming him at last.
Rheingeld.
The gold in him unhardened as sun on the water. I thought we were hand in hand again, picking over the jetsam of the tide, able to speak, my father and I. To say what it was and to forgive.

He died in the oval of his tears.

My mother insisted that the funeral tea be served at the Hotel Ra-Ra (décor Merseyside-Egypt). The hotel, that had catered for the shipping trade in its handsomer days now wrung a living out of salesman incentive weekends and marketing days for the frozen-fish industry. It had a sorrow about it unrelieved by the magnificent marble steps and Lalique lamps. Its kitsch Anubis lay exhausted in the foyer and its replica of Cleopatra's Needle had been patched with aluminium foil. Our tea had been laid out in the Pharaoh Room. Drinks were in the Pyramid Bar.

'Once there was nowhere like it,' said my mother.

Once? She had stayed in enough hotels to realise that there could never be anywhere like it. Benefiting from its frozen-fish connections, the hotel was offering mummified prawns, ice still clinging to their carcasses as though they were waiting to be rejuvenated in the next century. After the prawns came the sandwiches. Funeral Sandwiches on specially ordered black rye bread. I read the list. Egg. Egg and tomato. Egg and cress. Egg Mersey. When I asked the waitress about Egg Mersey she told me with Nefertiti hauteur that it was egg without the yolk.

'Hard-boiled-egg-white sandwiches?'

'Suit yourself.'

As I progressed up the meal table I found the disappeared yolks. Each yolk had been cut in halves and stood, dome up, on a platter. This was called Egg Peaks.

'What a lot of egg,' I said to no one in particular.

'There was a mix-up,' said Nefertiti. 'I was told you were Merry Hen.'

'Merry Hen?'

'"Britain's Brightest Egg". It's their conference tomorrow.'

'And today is my father's funeral.'

I left her, nonplussed, defensive, and went over to my grandmother who was sitting alone beneath a browned palm tree. She had a plate of Funeral Sandwiches and a glass of sherry.

'I'm sorry,' I said.

'It doesn't matter.'

No. It doesn't matter. The funeral is for the living not the dead. It would have amused my father to see the grey and guilty men flocking round my mother in the Pyramid Bar.

'There's worse to come,' she said.

She meant the Will. She had told me what my father had done. My sisters, who had married richly, expected to be richer still. As Jane Austen heroines everywhere, they were perfumed with love but smelled money. Tomorrow we would have to go to London for the reading of the Will.

'Let's go home.'

We reversed through the fire-door behind Grandmother's chair. Outside, the streets were busy with shoppers, and it was neither the blaring plate-glass nor the deadly absurdities of the Hotel Ra-Ra that made me feel giddy but the space in between them. The engulfing space between flat earth and tilted earth. The space where I could fall and float between their lives and mine.

Death the Revealer. When he throws back his hood what is it that he uncovers? His face or ours? Our faces usually hid from one another behind assumption and complacency. Our faces turned away even when our bodies are turned near. Do I want to look at you, afraid of what I might see? I prefer to look through you, round you, with you, anything to avoid the intensity of one single face. And will you look at me, hood thrown back, vulnerable? They did, curiously, unnerved, and looked away quickly. There was something wrong with that woman. They saw me raw. They drew their own hoods tighter. Death the Revealer in my liquid stare.

Walk with me. Hand in hand through the nightmare of narrative. Need to tell a story when no story can be told. Walk the level reassuring floor towards the open trapdoor. Plank by plank to where the sea begins. This is a sea story, a wave story, a story that breaks and ebbs, spilling the boat up on the beach, dragging it out to a tiny dot. Life asail on its own tears.

Walk the plank. The rough, springy underfoot of my emotions. The 'I' that I am, subjective, hesitant, goaded from behind, afraid of what lies ahead, the drop, the space, the gap between other people and myself.

Hear me. Speak to me. Look at me.

'Look at me,' said Grandmother. Yes look at her. Spiny as a jujube tree, sweet as a julep, ju-jitsu-minded with a heart like a jubilee. Energy, work and heat in the joule-force of her. A wryneck jynx, sudden turn of the head. Woodpecker bird at the World Ash Tree.

We were walking home. Everybody else playing Saturday donkey, pannier laden either side with vegetables and meat. The queues at the bus-stop, the shop-neon switching off, the roar of the garbage trucks clearing forests of cardboard. All this familiar and far away. I wanted to buy something the way I want to flex my fingers when they are chilled. Still there? All still there? Normal, and I a part of it. If all these lives are as before why not mine?

I stopped and got a couple of Mars Bars from a paper-stand.

'Old lady hungry is she?' said the vendor. I thought he meant the chocolate and I glanced at Grandmother walking like a question mark beside me. I was holding her hand and in the other she was holding the plate of Funeral Sandwiches from the Hotel Ra-Ra. Gently, I put them on the pavement and we walked on.

My father used to do magic tricks. His favourite was to flounce a red silk handkerchief over a tumbler of water and toss it at one of his friends. As they stepped back in dismay, expecting to be doused, the handkerchief fluttered harmlessly at their feet, no trace of the airborne H
₂
O.