Tamar (12 page)

They came back a few days later, around teatime, and asked if it would be all right if they had a look in Dad’s “study.” Mum wanted to know what for, of course. Tweedledum said that “the department” was having trouble tracing some of the papers to do with “the project” Dad had been working on, and perhaps he’d brought them home. Mum wasn’t too happy about it, but she took them upstairs to the back bedroom, where Dad had his desk. When they got there, Tweedledum — or it might have been Tweedledee — said, “Thank you, Mrs. Hyde,” and shut the door in her face. When they came back down, they were carrying two cardboard files. They gave Mum a receipt for them and off they went. Some time later, Mum discovered that a load of old bank statements and phone bills had disappeared as well, but I don’t think she did anything about it. She had a lot on her plate too.

I’m ashamed to say that I started eavesdropping on her phone calls. But then, what else could I do? Nobody was telling me anything, and I was aching, aching for . . . I don’t know. Big things, I guess, like certainty, hope, understanding; things that ten-year-olds aren’t supposed to concern themselves with. Things that are hard to replace once you’ve lost them. Things you aren’t supposed to lose in the first place. Our phone was in the hall, in the recess under the stairs, so it was easy to hear her from the upstairs landing, driving myself crazy trying to imagine the other half of the conversation.

“Oh, hi.”

So it wasn’t Gran or Grandad.

“No, nothing at all. Well, sort of numb, really . . . Pardon? I don’t know. Very quiet a lot of the time. Up in her room, yes.”

In a lower voice, talking about me.

“I know you do, Andrew. That’s one of the reasons it’s always a comfort talking to you.”

Ah, Andrew. Oily Andy, her boss.

“I know. Yes. Sometimes I think . . . I dunno, a letter from Brazil, or somewhere. A call saying they’ve found his clothes on a beach in Dorset . . .”

I wanted to run down and cry
“No!”
but I stayed still, clutching the banister.

“Yes, I know, I know. But it’s a melodramatic bloody
situation,
Andrew . . . Well, of course I’ve thought about that, but . . . No. Funnily enough that’s the one thing I’m fairly sure of. I’m certain I’d have known if anything like that was going on. Yes, I know, still waters run deep and all that, but no, I really don’t think so. That’s what the police think, though. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? It’s the usual reason.”

There were quite a few calls to and from Andrew, and fairly soon Mum started working full-time. She had to, I daresay. So I started spending more and more time at Gran and Grandad’s. I’d go there most days after school because Mum was never back before six or half past. Then she started going away for a day or two, for work, or to conferences at the weekend, and I’d stay over at their flat. They made their spare bedroom into my room, and bit by bit I took a lot of my stuff over there. Pretty soon I was living with them as much as I was living with Mum.

Looking back, it must have been hard on her. It was a big house to be alone in. I remember one time when I was there with her, watching
Coronation Street,
and she said, “I’ve been thinking about your birthday, love.”

It must have been my thirteenth.

“I thought you might like to do something on the Saturday, perhaps. Have you thought about it at all?”

And I said, “It’s okay, Mum. It’s sorted. Gran and Grandad are taking me and Lauren and Emma to the cinema. Then we’re all going out for pizza, and Lauren and Emma are sleeping over at the flat.”

“Oh,” Mum said, and then I looked at her, thinking, Uh-oh!

So I said, “I’m sure it would be okay if you came too. You can, if you like.”

“Um, well, I’ll see,” she said. “Seems like you’ve got it all worked out anyway. Sounds great.”

Then we went back to
Coronation Street
. I felt bad, but I knew it was okay really. Mum was probably thinking that she could spend the weekend with Andrew after all. Cynical little cow, wasn’t I? But then, why not?

I’d put Dad away by then. He wasn’t lost or gone or dead. In my head (or maybe my heart) I’d put him somewhere safe. He was tucked up in a tiny drawer that was one of hundreds of tiny drawers in a great big chest of drawers inside a great big cupboard, and the cupboard was in a locked secret room at the end of an endless corridor that was one of hundreds of endless corridors in a great big house. And that was fine. Until Grandad jumped into the sky and sent me back along those half-forgotten corridors, and I found myself standing in front of the little drawer labelled
DAD
wondering if it was full of nothing but dust and bones, or worse.

I must have hated him, surely.

I suppose you’d say that Gran was heart and Grandad was head. At first, he didn’t do much except help me with my homework. Gran did everything else. She wasn’t what you’d call a great cook, but she had a talent for conjuring something out of nothing. She’d had to learn to do this during the war, she said. I’d always been a picky eater, and I was worse after Dad went. I’d got a bit skeletal, to tell the truth. Mum worried and nagged at me about this, but Gran didn’t; maybe that’s why I started to eat, and then enjoy, the strange little meals she invented for me. She gave me a human shape again.

If I was ill, Gran would sit with me and fetch me things and watch daytime TV with me. When my periods started, it was Gran who went to the chemist’s and got me the things I needed and talked to me about it all, very straightforward, very Dutch. It was Gran, not Mum, who went with me to Marks & Spencer and bought me my first bra. But all the time she was slipping a little bit farther away. She was like sunlight on a cloudy day or shadows on a lawn: here, then gone, then back again. In the shady patches her two languages would get thickly entangled, and I’d have to appeal to Grandad to explain what she was saying; but sometimes he couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Sometimes she would sit in her armchair with a book or watching the telly and I’d look at her and realize that she’d gone. Often when she was like that the only thing she would say was my name.

“Tamar.”

And I’d go and kneel beside her and hold her hand and say, “Yes, Gran?”

“Tamar.”

“I’m here, Gran. Do you want something?”

“Tamar.”

Grandad would just watch, not saying anything, his eyes wet and magnified behind his glasses.

He loved her. It was dead simple, the way he loved her. Seamless. His love was like a wall that he’d built around her, and there wasn’t a chink or flaw in it. Or so he thought. But then she started to float out of the real world, his world, and he was like a little boy trying to dam a stream with stones and mud, knowing that the water would always break through at a place he wasn’t looking at. There was nothing desperate about the way he did it, though. He was always calm, it seemed. Expecting the worst and determined not to crack. She started to get up in the night and turn on all the taps, and he would get up too and stand quietly beside her watching the endless flow of water as if he found it as fascinating as she did. Then he’d guide her back to bed before turning the taps off. One night I heard something and went into the living room and saw the two of them standing out on the balcony. He’d wrapped his dressing gown around her, and I heard him say, “Yes, you are right, Marijke. The traffic is like a river of stars. Would you like to watch it some more, or go back to bed?”

When the calls started coming in from police stations, he handled them as if it were just business, something that happened in the normal course of things. He’d call a taxi, get his coat, rescue her, and return the stolen goods to the supermarket. (Usually it was exotic fruits, sometimes just bags of rice or potatoes.) I never once heard him complain or curse, not even so much as sigh. At first I thought he was being pigheaded stubborn, refusing to recognize the reality of the situation. Sometimes I thought he was just too distant from the world, not really grasping what was going on. But it wasn’t like that at all. He and Gran had gone through terrible things when they were young, during the war. Bravery — endurance, all that — was a deep part of him. In other words, he was being heroic. It took me a long time to see it.

It’s a very private thing, losing your mind. And all sorts of people, complete strangers, get involved. It was that, the invasion of his privacy, that started Grandad crumbling. And the fact that all those people — the social workers, doctors, police, psychiatrists — were younger than him, and not as clever, but more powerful. He felt — he must have felt — control slipping away. And what he did was build the wall higher, work harder to dam the stream, fight even more fiercely to keep the world at arm’s length.

Mum and I both knew that Gran would have to go away sooner or later. Mum was good; she treated me like a grown-up; we talked about it all. But with her it was the practical stuff. What if this happens? Do you think we should do this or that? What about the flat? And so on. Which was missing the point, really. It was a small thing that made me realize. I went to the flat after school one day and got out of the lift, and Grandad was standing there in his coat. He couldn’t hide the fact that he was hoping to see Gran, not me. She’d gone wandering. He looked straight past me at the empty lift, and his face just collapsed. I understood then that his walls had fallen at last. That while we’d all been focusing on Gran, he was the one desperate for support, for love. Standing there by the lift, looking up at his desolate face, I realized that there was only one person who could provide it. And it scared me. I didn’t think I was up to it.

He was not what you’d call a lovable man, my grandad. It wasn’t that he was cold, exactly. It was more as though he had a huge distance inside himself. There’s a game I used to play with my friends. One of us had to think of someone we all knew, and the others had to work out who it was by asking questions like “If this person was a musical instrument, what would it be?” or “If this person was a place, what would it be?” I used to think that if Grandad were a place, it would be one of those great empty landscapes you sometimes see in American movies: flat, an endless road, tumbleweed blown by a moaning wind, a vast blank sky. And after Dad disappeared, he withdrew even further into this remote space.

It was a funny thing, a surprising thing, that brought him back to me. It was algebra.

I collided with algebra in my first year at secondary school, and it sent me reeling. The very word itself seemed sinister, a word from black magic.
Algebracadabra.
Algebra messed up one of those divisions between things that help you make sense of the world and keep it tidy. Letters make words; figures make numbers. They had no business getting tangled up together. Those
a
s and
b
s and
x
s and
y
s with little numbers floating next to their heads, those brackets and hooks and symbols, all trying to conceal an answer, not give you one. I’d sit there in my own little darkness watching it dawn on the faces of my classmates. Their hands would go up —
“Miss! Miss!”
— and mine never did. The homework reduced me to tears.

“I don’t see the point of it,” I wailed. “I don’t know what it’s for!”

Grandad, as it turned out, liked algebra, did know what it was for. But he sat opposite me and didn’t say anything for a while, considering my problem in that careful, expressionless way of his.

Eventually he said, “Why do you do PE at school?”

“What?”

“PE. Why do they make you do it?”

“Because they hate us?” I suggested.

“And the other reason?”

“To keep us fit, I suppose.”

“Physically fit, yes.” He reached across the table and put the first two fingers of each hand on the sides of my head. “There is also mental fitness, isn’t there?”

Behind us, Gran was watching a comedy game show with the sound off.

“I can explain to you why algebra is useful. But that is not what algebra is really for.” He moved his fingers gently on my temples. “It’s to keep what is in here healthy. PE for the head. And the great thing is you can do it sitting down. Now, let us use these little puzzles here to take our brains for a jog.”

And it worked. Not that I ever enjoyed algebra. But I did come to see that it was possible to enjoy it. Grandad taught me that the alien signs and symbols of algebraic equations were not just marks on paper. They were not flat. They were three-dimensional, and you could approach them from different directions, look at them from different angles, stand them on their heads. You could take them apart and put them together in a variety of shapes, like Lego. I stopped being afraid of them.

I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but those homework sessions were a breakthrough in more ways than one. If Grandad had been living behind an invisible door, then algebra turned out to be the key that opened it and let me in. And what I found wasn’t the barren tumbleweed landscape that I’d imagined. It was not like that at all.

I’d known for a long time that he was fond of puzzles. When I was younger he used to send me letters with lots of the words replaced by pictures or numbers. They always ended 02U, which meant
Love to you
, because zero was “love” in tennis. He was often disappointed when I couldn’t work them out. Or couldn’t be bothered to. Now I discovered that Grandad’s world was full of mirages and mazes, of mirrors and misleading signs. He was fascinated by riddles and codes and conundrums and labyrinths, by the origin of place names, by grammar, by slang, by jokes — although he never laughed at them — by anything that might mean something else. He lived in a world that was slippery, changeable, fluid.

He lured me into the weirdness of crosswords. He bought two newspapers, the
Independent
and the
Guardian
, every day, glanced at the news without too much interest, and then settled down to do both crosswords. At first I simply sat and watched him fill in the grids by some mysterious process. I watched as the tip of his pen moved from one white square to another, not forming letters, almost hearing him think. Then, in a flurry of writing, he would fill the squares and I would have no idea how he did it, how he locked one word into another. But he didn’t try to explain it until I asked him to.