Noah's Ark (11 page)

‘And tea,’ she said. ‘You could say I was a vegetarian couldn’t you? Tannin and nicotine. God, but I don’t half crave a bloody steak sometimes, don’t you?’ She had evidently been to the public library and was now shaking cigarette ash liberally into her
large-print edition of GBS which lay in her shopping bag alongside an economy-size bag of bone-shaped dog biscuits. ‘You can even get nostalgic for the gristle, so long as you’ve got your teeth. Never call me an ambulance,’ she said, reverting to a former theme. ‘When they get you in hospital at my age, you see, they don’t bloody let you out. Then it’s nothing but nurses wheeling you to the bloody lavatory along with all the other grumbling old hags till you join the coffin queue. Once a year at Christmas you get “Knees Up Mother Brown” and that’s your lot till you get your bloody shroud. Paper shrouds for paupers, eh? I’d sooner be boiled up in a pot and fed to the dogs.’

‘Yes,’ Ali said. ‘I do see your point.’

In the taxi and at the neighbour’s prompting, they smoked one more cigarette apiece.

‘My name’s Margaret,’ she said. ‘You’re the girl next door.’

‘Yes,’ Ali said, colouring slightly at the memory of the emperor’s whore.

‘You’ve got a new boyfriend,’ Margaret said, as though reading Ali’s thoughts. ‘Hope he’s an improvement on the last one, but I doubt it. I never understood men. Only dogs. All that bloody male ego. All that conceit. I never had the time for it. Nor for sex either. Never came to terms with it.’ The taxi driver, young, handsome, brown-skinned and sleekly moustached, engaged in a brief spasm like a noiseless cough and glanced furtively sideways as if to commune with a miscellany of hard porn concealed within the glove compartment. ‘I accept the sex in the dogs, of course,’ she said, ‘but for myself I find it galling to remember that I’m here on earth as a result of it.’ She tapped the driver sharply on the shoulder. ‘Are you a Muslim?’ she asked, pronouncing the word as though it were a bad taste on the tongue.

‘Come again?’ said the driver, but she turned again to Ali. ‘They have no place for spinsters in their religion, you see,’ she said with haughty disdain. ‘Their women are all either wives, concubines or mothers. It’s the same in all these bloody tinpot
religions.’ She described a tremulous semi-circle with her arm, to denote a regrettably infinite variety of blind heathen. ‘Jews too. They can’t sit next to a woman on the bus, you know, in case she’s having her monthlies.’

A hint of colour had returned to the neighbour’s gravel-textured cheek, as though the subject of men had excited her somehow, in spite of her protests. At the door of the house, where she strenuously insisted upon paying, the neighbour drew her week’s pension money carefully from a plastic wallet giving off stray dog hairs, counted out the fare with arthritic hands and pointedly denied the driver his tip. Whether she did so on grounds of race, sex, creed or simple frugality, Ali was not to discover.

In the neighbour’s kitchen where she made a pot of tea, Ali encountered a poverty and decrepitude beyond her own imaginings. It hung in the blackened cobwebs which wrapped the ceiling in oily swathes. It hung in the hot-water cylinder, rusted now into uselessness, and in the green tarnish upon the nickel-plated teaspoons. Dogs scratched at food and scraps which lurked in the patches of exposed hessian backing the ancient linoleum on the kitchen floor. A small sprouting of mushrooms was visible under the enamelled cabriole forelegs of the gas cooker where Ali boiled the water. The upper floors were a storm of plastic dustbin bags spilling a lifetime’s collection of jumble-sale clothing and bric-à-brac, among which purple nylon cardigans appeared to predominate. A faded Christmas wreath and a somewhat moth-eaten velour-covered plastic bulldog adorned the mantelpiece, flanking an old West-clox alarm, now ticking its way stridently towards two-thirty. A number of small dogs twitched in dreams, or gnawed at their own balding elbow joints. Naked live wires flirted with each other in the worn electric flexes which trailed in hair-raising profusion across the floor to the only electric power socket. On the window ledge, old Margaret was growing carrot-top trees in saucers.

‘We’ll have another cigarette, shall we?’ she said, nestling among grimy pillows. ‘Have one of mine.’

Ali found her the box. ‘We oughtn’t to smoke,’ she said, in passing deference to Noah whom she was currently standing up. ‘They ruin your health, cigarettes do.’

‘Don’t you bloody believe it,’ said the neighbour with bitter conviction. ‘If these things killed you the government would be handing them out free to the elderly. Get rid of us quicker. There’s more of us all the time, you see, and we’re expensive to keep – even in this bloody squalor.’

‘I must go,’ Ali said, glancing nervously at the alarm clock. ‘I have to make a ‘phone call.’ But the discarded elderly have ways, subtle and various, of holding on to such attention as offers itself. And, besides, Ali was charmed by her spirit.

Noah was in a meeting when Ali tried at three and when she finally got him at three-thirty he was outspokenly not pleased.

‘You didn’t show,’ he said angrily. ‘What the hell happened to you?’ Ali entered upon what seemed to him a predictably extended and breast-beating circumlocution having to do with a telephone booth and a somewhat eccentric person of considerably advanced years. The rest was a macabre haze through which he gleaned resignedly that Ali’s life had become entangled yet again with another neighbourhood case for the Social Services Department.

‘She can’t hold down her food,’ Ali said in earnest tones. ‘I’m quite serious. She vomits. She lives on egg-white and crackers.’

‘Protein deficiency,’ Noah said briskly. ‘Listen, Al. Can you make it to eat Italian with me tonight? Can you organise a babysitter? I’d really like to eat out with you.’

‘I’ll try,’ Ali said, ‘but it won’t be easy.’

‘How come?’ Noah said. ‘What do you usually do for a sitter?’

‘I don’t go out,’ Ali said. There was a pause following upon this altogether truthful utterance during which Ali felt fairly sure that Noah – his mind already energetically occupied with linguini and egg-plant – was counting under his breath to control impatience.

‘I’ll set it up for a sitter to come at seven-twenty,’ Noah said. ‘Leave it with me. It’s no problem.’ His awesome armour of competence against the adult terrors of telephones and bureaucrats appeared to her without chink. And how was it that his mind’s clockface would incorporate categories such as ‘seven-twenty’, where her own knew only the crudities – the big hand pointing either straight up or straight down, like the clock on
Playschool.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Will you really?’

‘Listen, I’m working till late,’ Noah said. ‘Call for me here around seven-forty. And for Chrissake, don’t be late. I didn’t eat lunch, remember? Neither did you, I imagine. I want you to take care of yourself, Al.’

‘I shared the old lady’s crackers,’ Ali said. Noah’s laugh was brief, jarring and inappropriate.

‘Was that with or without the egg-white?’ he said.

‘What?’ Ali said stupidly.

‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘Just act like I never said it. Did you get to see your doctor yet?’

‘Yes,’ Ali said. ‘He’s going to do all those things you said, like the X-rays and whatnot.’

‘That’s good,’ Noah said. ‘That’s excellent.’

‘Noah,’ Ali said cautiously. ‘You wouldn’t think of looking at her, would you? The old lady. She needs to see a doctor. She really does. Much more than I do.’

‘Me?’
Noah said. ‘You asking me? If she needs a doctor, call her doctor. She’s got to be registered with a doctor.’

‘She isn’t, that’s the point,’ Ali said. ‘She’s terrified that a doctor will put her in hospital.’

‘So maybe she needs a hospital,’ Noah said. ‘For sure she needs to be registered with a doctor. Call the District Family Practitioners Committee if necessary. Hold it. I’ll get you the number.’

‘No thanks,’ Ali said. ‘It wouldn’t be ethical.’

‘Al,’ Noah said, with effort, ‘she isn’t my patient, you understand. Visiting sick old ladies isn’t my job.’

‘I know that,’ Ali said. ‘Lungs are your job. You told me.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ Noah said. He had only recently emerged from a ninety-minute meeting: ninety minutes spent hustling for funds on an empty stomach. ‘When you cling with such ridiculous and high-minded tenacity to the values of childhood, what is that supposed to do for me? Is that supposed to make me feel guilty?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ali said.

‘Me too,’ Noah said, clearing his throat. ‘I’m sorry too. I’m sorry to upset you. I want for you to do what’s reasonable, that’s all. Don’t do too much. Don’t take on the sins of the world, Al. To play Jesus Christ as you do: isn’t that a kind of arrogance, wrapped up as humility?’

‘Well,’ Ali said, ‘possibly.’

It was five minutes later, during a brisk perusal of the Yellow Pages, that Noah discovered the absence of a single locally based babysitting agency in the city.

‘Oh shit!’ he said. Arnie, who encountered him at that moment, laughed.

‘Don’t look at me,’ he said. ‘I’m busy this evening. I’ll call up a couple of women I know if you like.’ Noah, who had just spent a measure of his committee time exerting himself, successfully, in the business of extending Arnie’s research grant, looked up irritably.

‘The relevant question is whether any of the women you know would make suitable candidates for the job,’ he said. ‘This is a decent, overprotected, middle-class kid I have in mind.’

‘Ali’s kid?’ Arnie said. ‘Sure. I don’t make it an absolute rule to consort with women of dubious repute. Did your dear lady ever turn up by the way?’

Noah raised his eyes to heaven. ‘She got entangled with some goddam comatose geriatric in a ‘phone booth,’ he said. ‘She just called me to explain.’

Arnie laughed again, feeling quite correctly that the misfortunes of others were the proper stuff of comedy.

‘Gesundheid,’
he said.

Ali’s skin cancer lesions first diminished, then obligingly disappeared in response to regular applications of a Swiss pharmaceutical cream prescribed by the epidemiology department. The wandering IUD was, unhappily, less amenable to persuasion. A series of abdominal X-rays revealed it lurking, half-embedded, behind Ali’s large intestine and – having perforated her uterus – it was removable only by surgical incision under general anaesthetic which required a week-long stay in hospital. While Noah gnashed his teeth on Ali’s behalf, Ali herself was occupied with hand-wringing on behalf of her daughter, because Camilla would need to survive a week without her.

‘No problem,’ Noah said. ‘She’ll be my guest.’

For Noah to stay in her own house with Camilla was, Ali knew, unthinkable. The bedding gave him asthma. Furthermore, Mervyn might turn up at any time and discover him there. But how would Camilla cope away from her mother in a boxy house with whirring light switches? And didn’t Noah’s work keep him in the hospital until much too late? And what was to be done about her piano practice or her daily packed lunches or, above all, her habitual bedwetting? Urine stains on Noah’s brand-new beds!

Noah, for whom the prospect of daily sandwich-making and nightly child incontinence beckoned with no undue menace, waved these anxieties aside as minor inconveniences and proposed that Camilla take the bus from school to the hospital each
afternoon to do her homework in the secretary’s office. He concentrated his attention upon Ali’s anxiety that Mervyn would appear and cause trouble. In preparation for this eventuality he overrode Ali’s qualms and saw to the changing of her front and back door locks. Then he recommended that Camilla abandon her piano playing for the week to avoid a possible encounter with her father. One thing only, Noah hazarded, might cause Mervyn to claim rights of guardianship over his daughter and that would be the discovery of another man assuming the role in his place.

Noah had met Mervyn just the previous week and had not been favourably impressed. He had called on Ali one evening after work as he did with regularity and had found Ali sitting tensely upright upon one of her creaking wicker chairs, the colour oddly high in her cheeks. Mervyn was at the ironing board at the far end of the room rigorously ironing his pyjamas. Eva didn’t own an iron, he said. She was above such things. Perched beside him on the asbestos ironing mat was a glass of Noah’s own bourbon whisky which Mervyn had found in Ali’s cupboard. The bottle was near him on the table.

‘Have a drink,’ Mervyn said, playing genial host to the newcomer. He held the bottle to the light to examine its contents.

‘Bourbon is a woman’s drink,’ he said, smiling at Noah man-to-man. ‘My wife drinks while I’m away.’

Noah, who had no intention of embarking upon a public competition for the ownership of Mervyn’s wife, politely downed a glass of his own whisky and talked noncommittal generalities for twenty minutes. Then – gauging that Mervyn was bent upon outstaying him and that to have the man there ironing his nightwear all evening would be of no particular benefit to Ali – Noah left. No person of sense ironed pyjamas, he reflected, especially not in another person’s house. Not unless he wished to convey messages. Mervyn was hurling messages at Ali’s conscience which were absolutely clear: that he had unconditional rights in her household and her person; that as a person stooping there to woman’s work, he deserved at once pity for his reduced
situation and praise for his advanced habits. The knowledge that this person of malevolent, fickle intensity had ever had the power to dazzle Ali – his Ali – or possibly had it still, stuck all evening like a bone in his throat. Her course was crystal clear, goddammit! Ali was to make an application without delay for a court order barring Mervyn from access. He proposed the course next morning but Ali wouldn’t agree to it. Mervyn paid the mortgage, she said. The house was in his name. How could she? And how could people who had once cared for each other be reduced to behaving like that?

‘Bullshit,’ Noah said, but for the time it got him nowhere.

For Camilla, that week with Noah was recalled as a golden time and as quite memorably glamorous, first of all because on the Sunday evening, after she and Noah had settled Ali into her hospital bed in a new, tucked-cotton nightdress and had taken their leave of her, Arnie had joined them for a lovely supper in the walled garden of a city pub where – while the men praised English beer, and ate quiche and talked shop – Camilla drank two whole glasses of fizzy lemonade and ate cold sausages with lashings of delicious mustard pickle and played with the publican’s cat. The mustard pickle was nothing short of heaven and the publican had given her such a nice lot of it.