The Man In The Seventh Row (25 page)

Thinking aloud, Laura notes Dr Holliday's politeness and composure; no one could guess what he is really feeling. Holliday thinks, aloud: 'Good. I don't need to listen to Laura's whining a minute longer.'

A bell rings and the station announcer's voice is heard.

'The train now standing at Platform 4 is the 3.10 to Yuma.'

Holliday rises and touches Laura's shoulder as he passes. She wonders if he might change his mind and reappear, but she knows that he has gone, and she is left with Dear Fred. Or is she?

'Dear Fred,' she tells him that evening.

'What is it my dear?'

'I have decided to leave you.'

'But what about the children?'

'I'm leaving them too. They're appalling, spoilt brats.'

'Well,' says Dear Fred, 'that Rachmaninoff record is mine.'

'You're welcome to it,' says Laura.

27

Roy always checked the room thoroughly before he and Rosebud left a hotel or motel. As often as not he would find her toothbrush still lying by the basin in the bathroom. Roy checked as usual before they left the Roosevelt, while Rosebud watched the latest Oscar preview on the television.

'Can I see that film?' she asked.

Roy glanced at the set and saw John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, in hand-me down
Reservoir Dogs
suits, talking about burgers. Travolta was claiming that in France they call a quarter-pounder with cheese a Royale with cheese. But surely, thought Roy, they would not actually call it a 'Royale with cheese,' they would call it a 'Royale avec fromage'. Or would it be a 'Royale au fromage'?

'Can I, Dada?' repeated Rosebud.

'What?' said Roy.

'See that film,' said Rosebud, with a slight note of exasperation in her voice.

'When you're older,' said her father. It was a reply with which she was painfully familiar by now.

'But I will see the hamburger man next week?'

'Well,' said Roy, 'We'll see all the big black cars arriving. And maybe you'll see him getting out.'

They would be back in Los Angeles the day before the ceremony and Roy had promised they would go to the Shrine Civic Auditorium in downtown
LA
to see the parade of limousines.

'Look, Dada,' Rosebud had said at the sight of her very first big black limousine, shortly after arriving in
LA
. 'That's a very big taxi.'

They checked out of the Roosevelt and joined the solid flow of cars, coaches and trucks and drove for mile after mile without ever leaving Santa Monica Boulevard until eventually they came to the wide, blue ocean, turned north and headed up Pacific Highway Route One through Santa Monica and Venice. The traffic began to move a little more freely on the eight-lane coastal freeway as it left the urban sprawl of Los Angeles behind and passed oil wells and offshore drilling platforms.

Rosebud was excited because Dada had promised they would stop at the beach somewhere and play with her bucket and spade. She would also get to see the enormous fairytale castle which had been the real-life house of the man whose sledge was called Rosebud. She sat in the back of the car turning the little handle that wound up her music box, and she and Roy sang along as it played 'Singin' in the Rain'.

'I-I-I'm singin'-in-the-rain, Just ...' And when it wound down, getting slower and slower near the end, Rosebud would wind it up again and again until she was bored.

'When will we be there?' she asked.

All children ask that question on all car journeys. Roy could not answer because he was not quite sure where 'there' was going to be. He had not worked out where to play on the beach, where to stop for lunch, where to stop for the night. He looked at the map and noticed that they had recently passed Point Dume. It might have been an omen, for that was the point at which Rosebud discovered she did not have her Eaty and burst into tears.

Roy stopped the car, opened the boot and searched around in her bag without much expectation. He never normally packed Eaty; Rosebud carried him. The favourite cuddly toy was not in the bag. Roy had checked the hotel bedroom floor, checked every surface, checked under the beds, checked under her pillow, but then he got to thinking that Eaty must still be in the bed, down at the bottom, so that even when the sheets were pulled back he would remain there unnoticed in the dark recesses.

Roy promised to telephone the hotel, and Rosebud's distraught wailing gave way to irregular sobs. But their room back at the Roosevelt had not been made up yet and the clerk asked Roy to phone back in the afternoon. Roy and Rosebud walked along the beach hand in hand, with Roy assuring her that Eaty would turn up again, and they would collect him before they flew home, and she would have him to cuddle on the long flight back to London. Occasionally Rosebud stopped to pick up a little shell or a fragment of a shell, from the beach, dust the sand from it, and put it in the pocket of her red duffle coat.

'Do you promise?' she said.

'Yes,' said Roy, not entirely certain that he was in a position to do so. What if the maids just bundled up the sheets and they went off to the laundry without them ever noticing Eaty, he wondered. And what were his chances of getting another similar Eaty if that did happen? They had looked at toys at Universal Studios, but he couldn't remember what they had. Rosebud was more interested in the
ET
ride than the
ET
toys.

'You promise we'll get him back,' said Rosebud with the earnestness that only small children possess. 'Cross your heart and hope to die.'

'Cross my heart and hope to die,' said Roy. 'May the world swallow me up if you don't get Eaty back.'

It began to rain when they left the beach. They had burgers for lunch, and Roy could not get the concept of a Royale with cheese out of his mind. Rosebud covered her burger in ketchup. Roy ordered chilli with his.

'This is a really good burger, Dada,' said Rosebud and Roy overtipped. When they stepped out from the diner there was a half rainbow bent across the sky. Rosebud wanted to see if they could find the end of it. They drove towards the point at which it seemed to hit the ground, but they never found it.

'We never ever find the end of rainbows,' said Rosebud. The rain stopped, the rainbow faded, but curiously the sky grew darker and the sun disappeared behind clouds.

They drove northwards, not talking much, but listening to the radio, which played a lot of Garth Brooks. Roy switched to another station. A few minutes later Garth Brooks was on that station too.

The traffic became more leisurely as they neared the city of Santa Barbara. Roy was sure Santa Barbara had some connection with
The Graduate
. Didn't Dustin Hoffman drive down the Pacific Highway in the other direction from Berkley to try to stop Katharine Ross marrying someone else?

White-walled, red-roofed Spanish revivalist villas were dotted across the hillside. They checked into an old-fashioned motel with white stucco walls, and Roy telephoned the Roosevelt Hotel to check whether they had found Eaty. He was asked to hang on for a minute or more while the necessary inquiries were made. Rosebud stood silently, expectantly, by his side, looking up at him with her enormous blue eyes, begging him to say they had found Eaty. But they hadn't.

'All the rooms have been changed and nothing has been handed in,' said the formal, female voice on the other end of the line. 'I'm sorry sir. Have a nice day.'

Roy smiled at Rosebud and her eyes lit up in reply.

'Yes,' he said, 'they've found him.' He could not bring himself to tell her anything else. She jumped up and down in her delight. He would check out the malls for a replacement or phone Universal Studios and ask about
ET
cuddly toys.

They walked down State Street to the old wooden wharf, where he bought her a strawberry ice-cream from one of the stands. The sky was dark and the clouds pregnant with rain, but Rosebud wanted to walk along the beach. It was wide and empty and she skipped ahead of Roy down by the water's edge. He could hear thunder rumbling across the San Rafael Mountains. A few drops of rain became many, splashing on the sea and thumping into the sand.

'I-I-I'm singin'-in-the-rain' trilled Rosebud, unconcerned by the weather now that she knew that Eaty was safe.

The rain was heavy now and the sky dark; illuminated occasionally by a flash of forked lightning high overhead. A few seconds later the thunder would come.

'Rosebud,' Roy shouted, for his daughter was some way off, 'we should go back now.'

Rosebud danced like Gene Kelly. 'Just singin' ...' But the the thunder and the wind swallowed most of her words. 'Happy again ...'

Roy could feel the water running down the back of his neck inside his jacket and dropping from his hair onto his face. Rosebud had stopped ahead of him and was laughing and indicating something. Far out to sea sunshine burst through the darkness and danced on the water. The sky was blue and arching across it was the most perfect rainbow Roy had ever seen, ethereal smears of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, each colour vivid and distinct. No chance of finding the end of that one. The rain was washing the strawberry ice-cream from Rosebud's cone onto her hand, but even at this distance Roy could see the big happy smile on her face.

The beach lit up brightly for a moment like someone had switched on floodlights. But the lighting was not entirely even all over the beach. It seemed to centre directly on Rosebud, as if she pulled the light out of the sky into herself. The beach darkened again. Rosebud stood looking at Roy for a moment, with a look of surprise in her eyes. The ice-cream fell from her hand and very slowly, as if Roy were watching in slow-motion. Rosebud collapsed onto the sand.

Roy ran awkwardly, almost stumbling across the beach on all fours, but he knew, even then, in his heart, that Rosebud was dead.

He held her lifeless body in his arms. Tears poured down his cheeks, mingled with the rain, and fell onto Rosebud's face, which held a look of confusion.

Roy stood, with his little daughter in his arms. He knew she was dead, but he refused to believe it. He stood waiting for her to say it was a joke, all an elaborate joke that he could not quite fathom. He waited for her to come back to life like
ET
did in the film. If he waited long enough she would jump down from his arms, with a mischievous little laugh, and continue singing in the rain, as if nothing had happened. She could not be dead.

People did come back to life. It was not just
ET
and Christ that did it. Ordinary people came back to life too. He lay Rosebud on the ground and pushed at her chest without knowing what he was, or should be, doing. He pinched her nose and breathed into her lungs. He did it again, like he was blowing up a balloon and he thought he could feel her body inflate beneath him. He did it again but when he took his mouth away from hers she just lay there, inert. He simply wasn't any good at practical things, and never had been. He gripped his two hands together, fingers interwoven. He lifted his arms above his head and brought the sides of his hands down together on her chest, not quite as hard as he could, for he did not want to hurt her any more than was necessary. Nothing happened. He pinched her nose and breathed into her mouth again. And again. And again. Nothing happened. He was vaguely aware of people running along the beach towards him and an arm around his shoulder. Then he did not remember anything else. Everything went black.

***

He woke up aware of sunshine pouring through the window and the white freshness of linen sheets against his skin. And then he felt a knife slice through his heart and twist in his gut as he remembered what had happened. He had trouble sleeping in the months ahead. Sometimes he did not sleep at all. Sometimes he would wake in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, silently screaming. If he did get to sleep and make it through to morning before waking, he would never wake up thinking about Rosebud. That was the cruellest twist of all. He would wake up without a thought in his head. But it only ever took a second for memories of Rosebud to come flooding back. It was the suddenness of realising all over again that she was dead, of freeze-framing that awful picture of her standing on the beach, in her red duffle coat, with a strawberry ice-cream in her hand and a look of confusion on her face. That was the worst thing of all.

It was like someone had paused the video at that moment, but there was no rewind button with this film. The picture remained frozen for an eternity before giving way to jumbled untidy images of Rosebud's collapse and Roy's hopeless ignorant attempts to blow or pummel life back into her.
ET
came back to life. If this were a movie, Rosebud would have come back to life. There would probably be a sequel, and another film after that. But this was not a movie. There was no happy ending to Rosebud's story, no resurrection, no spaceship to carry her home.

Roy did not take her home. Jo flew out to join him and they had her buried in a field near the beach.

'To join him' is not the right phrase. It implies an intimacy that no longer existed. Roy did not want to go home, and was surprised when Jo agreed to his suggestion that Rosebud should be buried in Santa Barbara. Jo flew to
LA
and drove up Pacific Highway Route One, but she never really joined Roy. They were together only in the most literal, physical sense. They sat side by side with the body in a little commercial chapel, but they grieved alone, without touching. Jo did not stay at the same motel and they hardly spoke to each other. When they did speak it was about little practical things. The big things remained unsaid.