Mr Toppit (41 page)

It was a song that always seemed to be around that summer, one of those infectious tunes with jangling acoustic guitars and harmonies, and a slight reggae beat. You heard it in the background, on transistor radios and ghetto blasters in the park, and it was somehow already inside your head without you ever being conscious of how it had got there.

At university I hadn’t listened to much music and wasn’t part of the crowd who swapped records, went to gigs, and had posters of very cool singers on their walls, so my receptors were pretty unresponsive, and it was a while before I concentrated on it enough to register the words. Even then, only half listening, I didn’t make the connections. I even sort of knew that the song was by Travis Buckley but I still hadn’t put two and two together. First, I’m not sure I even knew his last name, and second, LA was a long time ago and I’d done enough thinking about it at the time.

Still, there must have been a moment when I suddenly saw it—heard it—clearly, like one of those optical illusions that look like two profiles in silhouette until you see them again and realize they’re actually a vase or something. What I do remember is going to a record store on the way back from work and looking under B in Rock/Pop. There were two albums by him and the sleeves both had the same idea: the first was a photograph of a road sign, which gave the album its name,
Slow—Children
, and the second, a different road sign,
Ped X-ing
. His next album
would probably be called
Beware—Landslides
. There were photographs of Travis on the back and they made me smile for no other reason than that they were unmistakably like him, even five years since I’d last seen him.

When I got back to the flat I shared with Adam and listened to the second album properly, the one with the song on it, I realized he had changed two things. He had tinkered with the chorus, and instead of “I watch you through my eyes/Until the summer ends,” it was now “I’m dazzled by your eyes/Until the summer ends/I know how hard you’ve tried/To force the pain to mend.” It made me laugh to think he had taken to heart Erica’s point about who else’s eyes he could be seeing her through. I don’t suppose there are many other hit songs with a lyrical contribution from Erica Hauer. And, of course, she was wrong: it had been better as it was before.

The other thing was the title: while he never actually told us the title when he was talking about it that evening in Los Angeles, he had said he was writing a song about Merry. Now it was called “Song For Rachel.” Maybe he felt she fitted more naturally into Erica’s “special person” category, or maybe it was simply that he was trying to write a song about a girl in some kind of pain, and when he met Rachel he had realized Merry was an amateur in comparison.

After Los Angeles, after Wade, there were the years of drift. People thought that that was when she started to unravel, but that wasn’t how I saw it. People talked of her as being “different” but I don’t know what she was meant to be different from. She was always the same to me, or maybe it was simply that I knew the unraveling had started much earlier and was used to it.
I knew, in Laurie’s incredibly irritating stream-to-river analogy, where and when the first bubbling trickle had broken through the soil.

She had money, which was either the problem or not, depending on how you looked at it. Because of some tax-planning thing, the benefit of a portion of the copyrights had been passed to Rachel and me, not by Martha—I should think she did everything she could to prevent it—but by Toppit Holdings AG, the Swiss corporation created to hold and exploit the copyright in Arthur’s books. Don’t ask me. I didn’t use any of it.

What she did with the money was to travel, with Claude at the beginning, but later, always on her own. When he died, when the AIDS became full-blown, she was in Nova Scotia. It was often islands she went to. She liked Cozumel. She liked Sri Lanka. She liked Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine. She quite liked Menorca, but only in the winter. She had a bad experience on the Florida Keys so she only went there once. You can see the attraction of islands: contained, womb-like, elemental, safer somehow. Maybe she felt that, on an island, the access points to threat or danger might be more clearly identifiable.

Of course she wasn’t away all the time. Of course she came home sometimes, either to Linton or to the flat Martha kept in London. Her visits were often preceded by a variable but consistent set of signals that were as unmistakable to me as the equivalent signals (the dog off his food, unusual activity in the wasps’ nest, a certain cloud formation at sunset) would be to an earthquake diviner. There would be a postcard from an unlikely place. Although cryptic and characteristically vague, it would contain one unequivocal statement, which was that, sad though it would be for both of us, there was no possibility of a reunion
in the foreseeable future. “Because of the palaver over the boat, it doesn’t look as if I’ll be able to extract myself until the New Year. Damn and blast!” ran one such postcard from Crete. Or from Cuba: “Talk about voodoo! I had my cards read and the old girl said that home was full of dark forces, so I’m staying put for the time being.”

They were always relentlessly breezy and littered with exclamation marks. As only one card ever came from each place, I guessed they were sent when the time had come for her to go, when her bluff had been called or the game was up or some disaster had happened, and the sending of a card indicating such a firm plan to stay made her feel her departure was a sudden whim rather than the necessity it had clearly become.

Of course, she did not always head for home. It was the postcards allied to certain other significant portents that indicated an early return.

Usually, until he became too ill, there was contact from Claude, as if he could sense her getting close. It might be a phone call that didn’t appear to be about Rachel at all: “Luke?” He was the only person who could turn “Luke” into a two-syllable word. “That restaurant we all went to last summer, the Thai one where they did that noodle thing, you can’t remember the name, can you? I’m looking for somewhere to take Justin tomorrow. It’s his birthday.”

He always got round to Rachel eventually. He was lost without her. She had begun to cut him off, as she had all of us. “Have you heard from Madam?”

“I had a postcard.”

“When is she coming back?”

“I’m not sure, Claude.”

“Will you tell her to call me?”

He was sometimes “just in the area.” He was sometimes “passing through on the off-chance.” The last time I saw him was in the coffee bar at the supermarket in Linton. He was wearing aviator sunglasses and sharing a doughnut with a boy who was young even by Claude’s standards. He looked terrible. He had always been thin, but not like he was now.

As I walked towards him, he rose from the orange plastic chair with a papal gesture of the arms. “This
is
a surprise,” he said.

“Why? I live here.”

“Yes, but
I’m
just passing through. Isn’t this extraordinary?” He turned to his friend.
“This
is who I was talking about,” he said, in a what-a-coincidence voice. “Rachel’s little brother.
Luke
. You know.” They exchanged a glance that had a certain conspiratorial content. He turned back to me. “We’re on an architectural tour.” The idea that the medieval churches of Dorset were on, or even part of, his silent friend’s agenda required a certain suspension of disbelief. “Is your …” he mouthed “mother” “…  in residence? The thing is, I’m still trying to find all that crusader stuff she asked me to look up so I’m
far
too embarrassed to speak to her.” And then, in a down-to-business voice, “Now. Have you heard from Rachel?”

The other thing that tended to happen was an influx of packages delivered for Rachel. They tended to arrive within a few days of each other, so presumably they had been ordered in one go with some cumulative purpose that was hard to fathom from their diverse contents.

A catalogue from a plus-size women’s wear wholesaler was curious enough for someone who had flirted with anorexia while other girls were going through their pony phase, but when it arrived in the same post as the brochure from a company
that manufactured prosthetic limbs, even Martha raised an eyebrow. There was the Hot-As-Hell Creole Spice catalogue, the Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Copenhagen’s Christmas gift catalogue, the Philadelphia cream cheese cookbook, a bibliography of large-print books and their publishers, issued by some society for the blind with a special supplement of books-on-tape.

I suspect, although I don’t know for certain, that on what was to be her last day in wherever she was, when whoever she was with had dumped her or when her credit card had been snipped in half or swallowed whole by the machine because she hadn’t bothered to pay the bills, she was filled with a sense of purpose and would begin telephoning. “I wonder if you can help me,” she would say, when she got through, or “Would it be possible for me to speak to the person who deals with …” She would certainly want to explain to someone the precise reason for her request, to get them to understand her rather unusual need for the heavy-duty fish kettle as soon as possible or why she had to see the handbook of registered children’s entertainers so urgently.

Then, because children had suddenly come into her mind, she might get on to the firm that made children’s clothes from natural undyed fabrics, and a whole host of possibilities would spin in front of her like a roulette wheel. Leaving might not be such a bad thing. In fact, there was now an actual reason to leave. She could set up an office or a secondhand-clothes shop or a consultancy business and … And what? Something good would come of all this, even though Julian or Pascal or Pietro had been such a shit. Yes, she would go home.

A taxi would come up the drive a day later, or a week later. Rachel would be pale and tired, but buzzy with enthusiasm for
her new scheme. Martha tended to keep out of her way as much as possible, and for the first few days Rachel would spend a lot of time on the telephone, dropping her voice if anyone came into the room. She would only talk about her project in the most general terms. She had spotted “a niche in the market,” or she had realized that “There’s one service you can’t get for love or money outside London.” The idea had come to her “on a
bateau-mouche
going under the Pont Neuf,” or “when I found this extraordinary shop
literally
in the middle of nowhere.” But what the idea was, precisely, was not to be divulged until she had done more research.

But then things began to change: she spent less time on the phone; her morning appearances became later and later until sometimes she didn’t appear at all; she didn’t want any lunch, she was going to have a sandwich on the run; Claude was arriving any minute and there was so much to do before he came. And then, most telling of all, she began to spend all day in Arthur’s study, with only an espresso machine, which had arrived by special delivery from Rome, for company.

Like a child trying to run away from home, she had reached the garden gate and then, too frightened to go on, had returned to what she was trying to leave: all her schemes, which had once seemed so fertile and full of promise, finally evolved, by some strange Darwinian process only understandable to her, into
Hayseed
projects. What had begun during one particular stay as a business plan for opening a chain of sandwich shops, to be financed by someone she had met on Long Island, morphed into a catalogue of plant references in the
Hayseed
books, which she was going to sell in garden centers—only half finished, anyway, by the time Claude appeared in his new reconditioned MG Sprite to whisk her off to the villas of the
Veneto or a boat on the Marne. I would run into people in London who knew her, and I would politely answer their questions about the annotated manuscripts Rachel was preparing for the University of Texas, or the limited edition of Lila’s unused drawings she was working on, or the
Hayseed
board game she was devising “with the people who invented Trivial Pursuit.”

All the while she traveled, and even after she came home for the last time and the traveling stopped, there was one thing she never lost, one thing she always managed to keep with her when she was mugged in Cyprus or held up at gunpoint in Costa Rica or her luggage was lost by the airline or stolen from her hotel room: a stone, worn round her neck on a silver chain, with a chakra mandala symbol painted on it in red, the symbol that indicates grounding, balance of physical body, and clearing of fear.

Mr. Toppit has come and gone
. These were the enigmatic words that were found scrawled on the wall in Rachel’s room after she had gone. Some of the newspaper stories talked about her “escape,” but I remembered Dr. Honey’s sanctimonious statement that Broadmeadow Clinic was not a prison and I preferred to believe that she had simply checked out.

In the days that followed, I found a strange fascination in seeing our lives spread across the papers. Unlike Laurie, we didn’t have fleets of lawyers and press people to hush up the story. Anyway, as Dr. Honey had said to me, they weren’t strangers to the children of well-known figures at Broadmeadow and so many members of staff were probably getting backhanders from newspapers and clicking away with secret
cameras that even Laurie’s crack team would have had difficulty in plugging the holes.

Without the graffito the story might have faded away quite quickly but it brought another element into play: the mysterious words were just enough to shift the narrative up a gear and give the papers the opportunity to rehash the old stories about the phenomenon of the books but with a quirky twist of mystery.
“Hayseed
Girl’s Cryptic Message—Clue To Disappearance?” The question mark in the
Daily Mail
story was appropriate because nobody had any real idea whether Rachel’s words meant anything or were just one of the many unanswerable—or, at any rate, unanswered—enigmas that were such a major factor in the success of the
Hayseed
saga.