Stranger on a Train (29 page)

Jim spoke very little. He broke into large amiable grins when teased for his silence at the table by Bet, or sat low-slung in the near-dark in front of the endless daytime game and talk shows on the TV. If he seemed morose to me, it was likely my own anxieties being projected. There was no obvious tension between Jim and Bet; she chattered and he remained quiet, they had different ways of getting through life but neither expected, or even appeared to want, the other to be more like themselves. They were as solid a couple as any I've come across. Quite different in style, but understanding and tolerant of each other. Each of them knew the burden of sadness they both carried and let the other be the way they had to be to get through it. Though Bet's high-strung neurosis showed itself as tense and fidgety, with a need to drink and talk sadness away, Jim seemed the more troubled because he was the least able to express it. His quietness was not restful, just as his hours in the armchair with a can of beer and the TV blaring did not seem an expression of relaxation but of suppressed anger, of feelings he had no idea what to do with except control like the military man he had been. He was a professional soldier, and had served unquestioningly in postwar Europe, Vietnam and the Gulf War. He had retired because it was coming up for mandatory and because he needed to be home to help Bet with Mikey. Once a day he would go off in the Dodge to the nearby base where he would sit and chat with old comrades and buy cheap cigarettes for him and Bet from the commissary. It was his club, his male home. He'd run a wholesaling business after he came out of the military, but it hadn't worked out. He wasn't a businessman. Now he and Bet lived well enough providing they were careful on their pensions, and Mikey had his own disability allowance. Still, whenever he was at home, I had the impression of an explosion continually not occurring. Jim came alive, however, as if he had been charging during his daytime silence with his on-switch flipped, when Mikey returned home in the late afternoon from his day at the sheltered workshop. The ambulance would pull up and Jim was already outside with Mikey's wheelchair, grinning and joking with the driver and joshing Mikey, standing back as he made his slow, lumbering way out of the back of the vehicle with the aid of a walking frame.

‘Hiya, Mikey,' Bet chirruped when Jim wheeled him into the kitchen, as if he were making a rare and delightful surprise visit, and was not just coming home as he did every day, and would be for the rest of their lives.

‘Hey, Mom, how ya doing?' Mikey shouted, playing back at her, and chuckling his pleasure at seeing his mother and father and the kitchen all there, still unchanged, still welcoming their long-lost boy home.

Mikey was delightful. He entered a room, took a deep breath into his heavily overweight belly and bellowed a great ‘Hi', smiling long and hard into your face, then roaring with laughter, and you were lost in the gaiety. It worked such a charm that, whenever things went a little quiet and a silence fell between people, Mikey would bellow, ‘Hi, how ya doing?' Like a comedian's catchphrase, it was irresistible and touching, that and Mikey's sweet need to keep everyone happy.

‘Oh, Mikey,' Bet laughed, all sadness and fondness.

‘Hey, son, how're
you
doing?' Jim said.

‘Well, I'm doing just fine,' Mikey would shout, like the punchline of a joke, and the hilarity would shimmer around the room.

God knows what Mikey had been like as an undecided youth or a trainee policeman, but as a damaged survivor he made magic. It took a little while to understand his speech, but once your ear was in, you compensated for his slowness in getting his syllables out, his heavy arrhythmic sentences and his stuttering difficulty in articulating words. It even added to the fun, knowing what was going to come (‘Well, I'm doing just fine.' ‘Hey, Jenny, will you marry me?' ‘When are we gonna eat?'), and then its eventual arrival, just as expected. I learned quickly to make fun of Mikey's little ways and to avoid responding to them as tragic symptoms of a broken body and mind.

‘Come on, Mikey, spit it out.'

‘Just … just … just … you w … wait. Donut be in su … su … uch a god … d … d … dam hur … hurry.'

‘Watch your language, young man,' Bet would say severely.

‘Huh, sorry, god … god … goddam it.'

Mikey was like Udi, he wouldn't let you not love him. It was a gift.

But Mikey was no less aware of his affliction than we were. We joked and he joked about the dozen exactly similar radios he had in his room and the multiple copies of his favourite CDs, which he bought over and over again on his Saturday outings with Jim to the mall to spend his week's wages because he forgot he had them already. He stubbornly refused to listen to Jim when he told him he had the new Santana, and insisted on getting it again, because he had no recollection of the pleasure of getting what he wanted the first time, and then the next. If everything felt new, nothing felt old and safe and regular. He forgot that he had eaten and demanded another pizza because he was genuinely hungry, if not for food then for satisfaction. That and the fact that he couldn't exercise had made him considerably overweight. Often he tried to do things for himself that took two or three times as long to do than they would if someone did them for him, but you stood back and let him. Sometimes, though, the frustration would mount up, he would be too slow making a coffee, lighting a match for my or his mother's cigarette, or getting to the loo in time, and he would crash down the mug, sweep the matchbox on to the floor, or slam the door shut on himself in his room, cursing darkly in a way that Bet couldn't stand. Mikey knew exactly what had happened to him, how he had once been, that he could once drive cars and go out with the boys, meet girls, get drunk, have sex, make plans, fail exams because he didn't care, not because he couldn't write, and stay out wherever he wanted for as long as he wanted. He remembered in his grown man's body that he had once been a grown man in other ways before he had been condemned to play the lovable child for all his life. When he shouted his anger at Bet, Jim responded immediately.

‘Don't ever talk to your mother like that.'

Mikey, of course, got over his tantrum quickly enough, forgetting it had happened, but for the rest of the evening Jim would be sunk deep into his armchair, his hand over his forehead, half covering his eyes, while a game-show host urged his contestants to ever higher peaks of hysterical, squealing excitement.

Jim was particularly pleased that I got on with Mikey. It was what had most worried him about my visit. Right at the beginning we had established that he and I had different views of the world. While driving back from the train station Jim had made some passing remark about welfare and liberal pinkos, and I decided I'd better establish my credentials and leave it at that.

‘Listen, Jim, I'm so liberal pinko, I'm virtually blood-red. But we'll manage to coexist for the few days I'm here, won't we?'

‘Sure, so long as you don't try any of your communist world domination tricks on me.'

‘It's a deal. Not a domino will fall. I'm so wishy-washy liberal that I'm prepared to coexist with you.'

‘Just for five days, right?'

‘Yeah, just for five days.'

But his real concern was how I would manage with Mikey. He feared, I think, pity, sentimentality or an open expression of sadness. Once it turned out OK, he relaxed, pleased that Bet had someone to talk to, taking off on his own to the base for longer periods because he felt that she had company. But I was not the best of company, staying for long periods, when Mikey was at work, in the trailer, reading, avoiding Bet's engulfing need to talk, to have the company of another woman, to go over and over the childhood pain she had experienced. I listened for as long as I could, but it was never enough. Jim, full of love for Bet as he was, had stopped listening years ago. Not that Bet stopped talking to him, but he switched off and you could almost see the words slithering around and over him as he sat at the kitchen table thinking his own thoughts or not thinking them. On the second morning of my visit I woke with my eyes pouring tears and feeling as if knives were being turned in the irises. When I staggered into the kitchen from the trailer, Bet found some drops which we tried at the kitchen table, and then, my eyes red raw and streaming, not much improved, she continued with her monologue while I held paper tissues to my face, using up an entire box as each got drenched. She was concerned, but whatever was happening to my eyes had happened before, I told her, and having established that I didn't have to be rushed to hospital, her need to talk reasserted itself, and I sat, weeping and flinching in pain, while she continued with whatever story it was she was telling me.

The same morning I received a letter from England. It was proofs for an article I'd written just before I left, and I had given Bet's address to the editor to send them to me for checking. I was quite pleased to get something that looked like work to keep me in my trailer. That evening, early, I took my hosts out to eat. We went to Bet and Jim's favourite Tex-Mex restaurant. It was in a local mall. Mikey liked it. They knew him well there and joked with him easily. The food was neither here nor there, except there was plenty of it, and as Jim said, ‘It ain't fancy.' Always a plus in his eyes. We had to eat very early because the final game of the World Series was on TV that night. Baseball, American male ritual, Jim and Mikey in front of the TV eating chips and popcorn, drinking beer.

When we got back, Bet snapped on the small TV in the kitchen to see how the preparations for the game were going. What I know about baseball is nothing except that it functions quite like religion for American men. I even had to be told, with eyes rising towards heaven, that the World Series was baseball and not football. I worked out for myself that ‘world' in this case meant just the USA, revealing what Americans really thought of themselves. The men were in the kitchen, Jim explaining that the final was between the Raging Somethings and the Wild Whatevers, when disaster struck. The Wild Whatevers were owned by Ted Turner, and the commentator said that Turner and his then wife, Jane Fonda, were in the stadium to watch their team.

‘Shit!' Jim barked, and Mikey looked up astonished to hear such language from his dad.

‘Oh, Jesus,' Bet groaned.

‘What?' I asked. The atmosphere was thunderous.

‘Turn it off,' Jim said.

‘Jim, it doesn't matter. Just watch the game. You always watch the final of the World Series.'

‘I'm not watching anything that bitch is watching. Hanoi bloody Jane. I don't want to see her ugly traitor's mug on my TV set. Turn it off.'

‘You're not going to watch the game?' I asked.

‘I saw men die in Vietnam while Miss Ho Chi Minh Fonda was prancing around in Hanoi encouraging the Commies to kill American soldiers. She should have faced a firing squad. She ain't going to show her face in my home. Turn the frigging TV off.'

It was the first time I'd heard a real person use the word
frigging.

‘But she was young. Even the GIs thought it was a bad war.'

‘I don't know what kind of war it was, except my country asked me to fight and if necessary lay down my life. I didn't see Hanoi Jane risking anything. Or she thought she wasn't. But I tell you there are people even now who wouldn't go to any picture she was in, not even to spit at the screen. We won't forget. She deserves a bullet for what she did. She'll never be forgiven. How dare she sit in the fancy seats of the World Series final under an American flag? She used to burn it.'

‘Turn that bitch off,' he ordered Bet.

‘Don't be silly. Mikey wants to watch. Jenny's never seen the World Series. Just don't look at her when she comes on screen. Come on, let's pop some corn.'

Jim made a popping noise of his own and stomped out of the kitchen into the darkened lounge. The noise of a quiz show blasted out of the large TV, drowning out the commentator on the kitchen set.

Mikey, Bet and I watched the game with the sound down low. Mikey tried to explain the finer points of baseball to me, while Bet got intermittently excited and punched the air at some unfathomable thrilling moment. We all felt slightly guilty and treacherous, aware of Jim's powerful sulk next door, but equally committed to common sense and doing what all America, except Jim, was at the very same moment doing. I watched the game in much the same way I watched the test card as a child – waiting for something to happen. So far as I could see it was rounders but so slow it made cricket look like an extreme sport. Men in ridiculous clothes posed and gyrated and almost invariably produced no-balls, and so had to begin the posing all over again. When a ball
was
good, someone ran a few yards to the next base, people cheered, the commentators did arcane arithmetic and the whole sequence began again.

‘Excuse me, does anything else happen in this game?'

Mikey and Bet looked at me reproachfully.

‘It's a great game. You don't understand.'

The camera picked out Ted Turner and a matronly, most unrevolutionary Jane Fonda cheering their team on. At the mention of their names by the commentator, the TV in the next room rose several decibels.

‘Hey, Jim, keep it down.'

But he couldn't hear over the yelps of glee as someone gave the correct answer to a question that was worth a whole laundry room full of white goods.

*   *   *

‘How do you like the trailer?' Jim asked the next day.

We had made a trip to Santa Fe, Mikey took the day off work. Santa Fe was, according to Bet, ‘where the artists all live', but wandering around it seemed more full of posers than last night's baseball. Hampstead on a bad but sunny day. In fact, there was the Georgia O'Keeffe museum, which might have been interesting, but when I mentioned it I got a distinctly cool response from my hosts. We went to the tourist shopping street, and once again I found myself staring at modern parodies of cowboy boots and modified saddle bags with mobile-phone holders. I managed to get them to the strangely jolly cathedral, all light and colour, the Mexican influence overriding morose Catholicism. Though the Catholicism fought back. A notice informed the congregation that the holy bones of the tepidly virtuous St Thérèse of Lisieux would be arriving to be venerated on the New Mexican leg of their American tour. Bet lit a candle for Mikey. I just lit a candle in the belief that there ought to be as much light as possible in the world.