Playing for the Ashes (73 page)

“Goddamn it, Chris. Stop staring at me,” I said from between my teeth. “You’re making me feel like a two-headed baby.”

He turned then. He picked up his fork and thrusted it into a twisted mass of pasta and mushrooms. He twirled the fork too savagely and ended up hoisting a ball-of-yarn mound of pasta towards his mouth. He dropped the mess back into his plate.

Max was chewing rapidly and moving his eye from Chris to me to Chris to me. It was a cautious, bird-like look. He put down his fork. He dabbed at his mouth with a paper napkin printed, as I recall, with the words
Evelyn’s Eats
, which was odd considering that we were in a restaurant called the Black Olive.

He said, “Girlie, have I mentioned? I read about your mum again last week in our local lemon-hued rag.”

I made an effort and picked up my fork. I stabbed it into the lasagna. “Yeah?”

“Quite the woman, your mum seems to be. The situation’s a speck unusual, of course— her and that cricket bloke—but she seems the proper lady, if you ask my opinion. It’s odd, though.”

“What?”

“You’ve never mentioned her much. Considering her growing notoriety, I
fin
d that a bit…peculiar, shall we say?”

“There’s nothing peculiar in it, Max. We’ve been out of touch.”

“Ah. Since when?”

“Since a long time.” I took a deep breath. The vibration continued, but the cramps were beginning to ease. I looked at Chris. “Sorry,” I said in a low voice. “Chris, I don’t mean to be…how I am. Like this. Like any of this.” He waved me off but said nothing. I went on uselessly with, “Oh shit, Chris. Please.”

“Forget it.”

“I don’t mean to…When things get…I get…I stop being myself.”

“It’s okay. You don’t need to explain. I—”

“Understand. That’s what you’re going to say. For God’s sake, Chris. You don’t need to be such a martyr on the spit all the time. I wish you’d—”

“What? Smack you? Walk out? Would you feel better then? Why the hell do you keep trying to push me?”

I threw down my fork. “Jesus. This is nowhere.”

Max was drinking from the single glass of red wine he allowed himself daily. He took a sip, held it on his tongue for five seconds, then swallowed appreciatively. “You’re attempting the impossible, you two,” he noted.

“I’ve been saying that for years.”

He ignored my comment. “You’re not going to be able to handle this alone,” he said to Chris, and to both of us, “You’re fools to think so,” and to me, “It’s time.”

“What’s time? What?”

“She needs to be told.”

It wasn’t exactly tough to put this remark next to his earlier questions and comments. I bridled. “She doesn’t need to know anything from me, thank you.”

“Don’t play games, girlie. Game-playing’s unbecoming. This is terminal business we’re dealing with here.”

“So send her a telegram when I’ve dropped off the hooks.”

“You’d treat your mother that way?”

“Tit for tat. She’ll recover. I did.”

“Not from this.”

“I know I’m going to die. There’s no need to remind me.”

“I wasn’t speaking of you but of her.”

“You don’t know her. Believe me, the woman has resources louts like us only dream about. She’ll pass off my passing off like it was rainwater she was shaking from her Burberry brolly.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But that’s discounting the possibility that she could be of help.”

“I don’t need her help. I don’t want it either.”

“And Chris?” Max asked. “If he does? Both need and want? Not now, but later, when things get rough? As you know they will?”

I picked up my fork. I dug into the lasagna and watched the cheese ooze between the tines like vanilla toffee.

“Well?” Max said.

“Chris?” I said.

“I can cope,” he replied.

“That’s that, then.” But as I lifted my fork to my mouth, I saw the look that Max and Chris exchanged, and I knew they’d already spoken about Mother.

I hadn’t seen her in more than nine years. During the time that I was on the game near Earl’s Court, it had been unlikely that our paths would ever cross. Despite her renown for social good works, Mother had never been one to involve herself with elevating the hearts and souls of the city’s
fle
sh peddlers, and that being the case, I’d always known I was safe from the potential unpleasantness of running into her. Not that I would have cared much had I done so. But it would have put a crimp in my business to have had a middle-aged harpy at my heels.

Since leaving the street life, though, I’d placed myself in a more precarious situation with regard to Mother. There she was in Kensington. There I was fifteen minutes away in Little Venice. I would have liked to forget about her existence entirely, but the truth is that there were weeks when I never left the barge by daylight without wondering if I would see her somewhere along my route to the zoo, to the grocer’s, to inspect a flat needing Chris’s attention, to the lumberyard to pick up supplies for finishing and fixing up the barge.

I can’t explain why I still thought of her. I hadn’t expected to. Rather I had expected the bridge between us to remain thoroughly burned. And it
was
burned physically. I’d burned my half that night at Covent Garden. She’d burned her half with the telegram informing me of Dad’s death and cremation.

She hadn’t even left me a grave to visit in privacy, and that, in my mind, was as unforgivable as the means by which she’d informed me of his dying. So I had no intention that my world should ever again intersect with hers.

The only thing I wasn’t able to do was excise Mother from memory and thought. I’m not sure anyone can accomplish that when it comes to a parent or a sibling. The tie that binds one to immediate family can be cut, but the severed ends of it tend to
flu
tter in one’s face on windy days.

Naturally, when Mother and Kenneth Fleming became the subjects of heavy journalistic speculation some two years ago, those ends began fluttering in my face more often than I would have liked. It’s difficult to explain how I felt, now and again seeing her picture and his in the
Daily Mail
, which one of the technicians religiously brought to the zoo’s animal hospital to read while she was enjoying her elevenses each day. I’d see the photographs over her shoulder. Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of the headline. I’d look away. I’d take my coffee to a table near the windows. I’d drink it down fast with my eyes on the treetops. And I’d wonder why my stomach felt queer.

I originally thought that I’d seen nothing more than proof that she’d carried her lifetime of good works to their logical conclusion by making fact out of theory like a competent social scientist. The hypothesis had always been that, given the appropriate set of opportunities, the disadvantaged could reach the same heights of glory as did the advantaged. It had nothing to do with birth, blood, genetic predispositions, or familial role models.
Homo sapiens
wanted to succeed by virtue of being
Homo sapiens
in the first place. Kenneth Fleming had been the subject of her study. Kenneth Fleming had proved her theory true. So what was it to me?

How I hate to admit it. How juvenile and questionable it really seems. I can’t even relate it without embarrassment.

In keeping Kenneth Fleming in her home, Mother had confirmed my long-held belief that she preferred him to me and had always wished that he were her child. Not just at that point in time when it was reasonable to think that she’d be more than eager to find a replacement for the street slime she’d encountered near Covent Garden Station. But long before that, when I was still at home, when Kenneth and I were both fifth formers at our respective state schools.

When I first saw their photographs in the newspapers, when I first read the stories, beneath my brittle veneer of what’s-the-oldcow-up-to-this-time, lay the unprotected skin of rebuff. Beneath that thin skin, the reaction to rejection festered like a boil.

Hurt and jealousy. I felt them both. And I suppose you’re wondering why. We’d been estranged for so many years, my mother and I, why should I care that she’d taken into her home and her life someone who could play the role of her adult-child? I hadn’t wanted to play that role, had I? Had I?
Had
I?

You don’t quite believe me, do you? Like Chris, you think I’m protesting too much. You’re deciding it wasn’t hurt or jealousy at all that I felt, aren’t you? You’re labelling it fear. You’re reasoning that Miriam Whitelaw isn’t going to live forever, and there must be quite an inheritance involved when she pops off: the house in Kensington and all its contents, the printworks, the cottage in Kent, God only knows how many investments…Isn’t that the real reason, you’re wondering, that Olivia Whitelaw’s stomach did flip-flops the first time she realised what Kenneth Fleming’s presence in her mother’s life might really mean? Because the truth is that Olivia wouldn’t have had much of a legal leg to stand on had her mother decided to leave everything she possessed to Kenneth Fleming. Olivia had, after all, removed herself from her mother’s life in a rather terminal fashion some time in the past.

Perhaps you won’t believe me, but I don’t actively recall those concerns being part of what I felt. My mother was only sixty years old when she became reinvolved with Kenneth Fleming at the printworks. She was in perfect health. I had no real thought of her dying, so I had no real thought of how she intended ultimately to dispose of her possessions.

Once I got used to the idea of Mother and Kenneth together—more, once the oddity of their situation began to strike people when Kenneth continued to do nothing to alter his marital status—my hurt dissolved first to incredulity. She’s over sixty years old, I would think. What’s she planning on happening between them? Incredulity fast faded to derision. She’s making a howling fool of herself.

As time went on and I began to see that Kenneth and Mother’s arrangement suited them fine, I did my best to ignore the two of them. Who gave a hoot if they were mother-son, best mates, lovers, or the biggest cricket freaks ever known to mankind? They could do what they wanted, as far as I was concerned. They could have their fun. They could wiggle and wag in the nude in front of Buckingham Palace, for all that I cared.

So when Max suggested that it was time to tell Mother about ALS, I said no. Put me into hospital, I said. Find me a nursing home. Put me on the street. But don’t tell that old twat anything about me. Is that clear? Is it?
Is
it?

Nothing was said about Mother after that. But the seed had been planted, which may have been Max’s intention in the first place. If that’s so, he’d planted the seed in the cleverest fashion: Don’t tell your mother for her sake, girlie. That isn’t the point. If you’re going to tell her, do it for Chris.

Chris. At the end of things, what is it that I wouldn’t do for Chris?

Exercise, exercise. Walking. Lifting weights. Climbing endless stairways. I
would
be the random victim to beat this disease. I would beat it in the most fantastic manner. I wouldn’t do it like Hawking, a brilliant razor mind confined within an immobilised body. I’d take my mind under complete control, name it master of my body, and triumph over the quakes, the cramps, the weakness, the shakes.

The initial progress of the disease was slow. I dismissed the fact that I’d been told to expect this, and instead I took the disease’s relative inactivity as a sign that my programme of self-recovery was proving effective. Look look, my every stumble-bumble step announced, the right leg’s no worse, the left leg’s unaffected, I’ve got this sod ALS by the curlies and I don’t intend to let him go. But there was no real change in my condition. This period was merely an interlude, a time of irony when I allowed myself to believe I could stop the ebb of the tide by wading into the sea and politely asking the water if it wouldn’t be willing to stick around.

My right leg became loose
fle
sh that dangled from bone. And underneath it hung muscles that twisted, tightened, fought with each other, tied themselves into knots, and loosened into strips of gristle again. I asked why. Why, if the muscles still move, if they still cramp and twist, why why why won’t they do what I want, when I make the demand? But that, I was told, is the nature of the disease. It’s like a high tension electrical wire that’s been damaged in a storm. Electricity still runs through it, sparks shoot out randomly, but the energy produced is useless.

And then my left leg began to go. From the time of the
fir
st fibrillations in the restaurant near Camden Lock, there was no real yielding of the disintegration. It was slow, true, a minor weakness that became ever slightly more pronounced as the weeks went by. But there was no denying that the disease was advancing. Fibrillation increased, building strength from the vibrations until they evolved into agonising cramps. When this occurred, exercise became out of the question. One couldn’t walk, climb stairs, or lift weights when one was concentrating on managing pain without beating one’s head into rotting grapefruit against the nearest wall.

Through it all, Chris said nothing. By that, I don’t mean to say he was mute. He kept me apprised of how the assault unit was managing without me, he talked about his renovation work, he solicited advice about dealing with sticky situations among the governing core of ARM, he chatted about his parents and his brother and made plans for us to make another trek to Leeds to see them.