The Exhibitionist, page 8
Lucia was expecting to find her cold, was thinking of this as a research trip: that marvellous triangular nose, the Joan of Arc warrior halo. Perhaps, she’d thought, I’ll be able to use her. She kept an eye on her lovely skull.
But Priya asked direct questions: did her parents meet at the Galty in Cricklewood? Did she know about Weaver’s Lung? Who in her family believed in God? What did she read? She wanted to know about the act of art itself. And she seemed surprised that Lucia was not, like her, an only child. ‘So what do you have?’
‘I . . . I . . .’
‘Well?’
‘I have a lost brother.’
‘As in dead?’
‘As in lost. He . . . We’re not in touch. He’s younger, a bit. After Dad died . . .’
‘Does he still see your mam?’
‘Barely,’ said Lucia and Priya nodded once, and started telling her about urinary infections among female MPs, upper-arm squeezes from male MPs, invitations to hospital bedsides and wakes. ‘Weekends at home it can be three or four Asian weddings.’
‘Are they friends, some of them? Your . . . constituents?’
‘Of course. But there’s a veil. They want you to be perfect. They’ll say: “Ooh get you, Mrs Menon, you’re in the shop!” and I’ll say “MPs need bin-liners too”. Mostly, everyone wants you to come to their events and launches and special dinners. My diary is . . . mental. I get twenty invites a week, just at home. Loads more in London.’
‘So London’s not home?’
‘Christ, no. Although it’s just mine, so I love it for that. I mean, not Sid’s.’
‘Oh. I see.’
‘Do you?’ said Priya, grinning. ‘Anyway,’ she said strictly, ‘the invitations are an honour. It all matters. It’s a privilege to help them.’
‘Of c—’
‘It’s because I believe in things,’ she said. ‘Women, immigrants, schooling, you know, the absolute basics, so everyone asks. It sounds awful, but they’re just so desperate for someone to help them, to be seen. The forms are . . . so if I can sort benefits, ring someone in housing, it changes their lives. Or just listen to the poor sods. They send me . . . items. You should see my office, it’s awash.’
‘With . . . ?’
‘Every time I do something, even local radio, there are millions of thank-you cards. Padded granny ones, primary-school kids – oh my God – but also presents. Books, hand-made jewellery, boxes of caramelized nuts . . . the other day on Newsnight I said I liked marmalade, and eleven different people brought Seville oranges and jam jars to the office.’
‘In Parliament?’
‘No, you muggins. The shop. Back in Coventry.’
‘What’s it like?’ Lucia asked, cleverly. ‘Where you work?’
Priya shrugged. ‘The constituency office? Not interesting. Bigger than my Westminster one, which is all neat and smart, identical to everyone else’s, very close-fitting doors and ergonomic deskage. The Coventry one’s just a big pile of boxes, crap, campaigning leaflets. Outside a bus-stop. Next to a laundrette. Lots of grannies looking in and shaking their heads.’
Later, when they were talking about their childhoods, Priya said her mum, mam, was ‘angry’. Then she said, changing the subject, ‘it helps to have a spouse who’s good at the local meet and greet back home. And Sid is.’
She said that being stuck in the Chamber or the Strangers’ bar, socializing for work until midnight, all the unhealthy food, booze, being wired all the time, made it hard to sleep.
‘What do you do?’
‘Listen to the radio. Text my friends. Worry. Plot. Winding down is . . . well. Now, I need a real drink, so you’d better go before the fun begins.’
And later still, pulling on her coat in the doorway, Lucia found herself wanting to discuss sandwich toasters, the pros and cons. She wanted to say, ‘I’d love a vodka,’ but she wasn’t that sort of person. Instead, she found herself accidentally telling Priya that, three years ago this coming February, something horrible happened.
She indicated the general area. Priya looked her in the eye. She didn’t make a stupid joke, or appear disgusted, or seem to see Lucia as a woman under a death-cloud, pathetic and doomed.
She said: ‘After that kind of trauma, shock, some sort of PTSD would be normal. Physical, psychological . . . Did you get depressed?’
And Lucia, who has rarely said that word even to herself, hesitates.
‘Did you?’
‘I suppose . . . Ray says I was horrible. So maybe. Although he thinks he was brilliantly supportive, etcetera. That he nursed me. He did try. Maybe I was traumatized, I haven’t thought . . . My role was to be the sad patient.’
‘Surprise. And are you . . . reconciled?’
‘With him?’
‘No, with –’ and she looked down, below Lucia’s chin, her throat, her chest, her, say it, breast-bone. ‘With what happened.’
‘Oh.’
‘Are you?’
‘No,’ Lucia said, swallowing. ‘We’re not reconciled.’
14
Dragging his wheelie-case, Martyn, Jess’s virtually fiancé, huffs up Brixham Hill.
What makes a man? Courage. Courage, and chest hair. Shouldn’t he be able to plan for himself and Jess unilaterally? If they lived down here he could work at a little school, not toil all day through Higher special access requirements and piano-hire accountability committees.
‘No way,’ Jess always says.
‘But your family are desperate for us, you, to move to London.’
‘You don’t believe that? Just because Dad says it’s a phase, living up here, doesn’t mean he wants me back. And Leah loves pretending she’s street, you know, “going Camden” and “the ginger line”, but it’s all front. They’re like monks; they think that beyond the borough you’d just . . . fall off the world.’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘It is. Leah says she’s fine, but does she have a choice? And Patrick . . . it’s awful. He needs help. Have you noticed he’s getting shyer? Maybe he’s agoraphobic. Or depressed; don’t boys get schizophrenic?’
‘You have to stop trying to rescue them.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they’re fine. You’re meddling. Just leave them. Don’t you want us to be happy?’
So far, his hopes for a healing of the Great Rift have been dashed. If, instead of obsessing over her father’s imaginary crimes, she allowed herself to grow closer, they could ditch their rented tenement flat in grey Edinburgh, where he does his marking in industrial ear-protectors, thanks to an infestation of students, and find a pretty London terraced house close by. He could invite his old friends and show them what a man he has become.
Better still, almost too wonderful to contemplate, they could be installed in Patrick’s old bedroom, steering the Hanrahans back into happiness. This warmth could be theirs, full-time, and he knows how to achieve it. Nothing will make them more delighted than if he brings Jess permanently home.
When will she appreciate what she has? He is ever more awash in nostalgia for Jess’s upbringing, not his own. There must be a German word for that.
Take the cellar; the first time he saw it, he felt an almost erotic thrill. The single bulb, swinging at head-height, revealed a gloriously filthy world: solid wooden boxes carelessly dumped in a corner; rusted bottle-racks, the cells irregularly filled, like honeycomb. It made his mouth water. The floor appeared to be actual dirt, like in a forest. An armchair-sized wire hedgehog stood by the door, its prongs covered in empty bottles: Ray apparently once had a scheme to sell sloe gin.
Martyn still can’t get over his refusal to recycle, despite the council’s jazzy flyers. Ray doesn’t believe in the environment; ‘I refuse,’ he says, ‘to join this charade.’ Lately, in Edinburgh, Martyn has been throwing old newspapers into the general rubbish and, as Ray points out, the world twirls on.
And Martyn isn’t an outdoors man, but the part that most haunts him is the garden. He drifts down the rills and inlets of his favourite daydream; becoming a gentleman farmer in the Hanrahans’ back garden. Imagine inviting friends for drinks. Imagine growing up here, in this secure wildness, encircled by hedges tamed by Patrick’s terrifying electric saw. The Hanrahans’ garden, really several stuck together, is outrageous: ridiculously wide and long and overgrown, an accident of haphazard planning, protected ash trees, encroachment on adjoining land. They have many neighbours, mostly furious. One night, allegedly, Ray made Patrick move an entire fence.
There are stretches of crumbly walls and ragged hedgerow; at least two sheds; Patrick’s caravan; a home-made pergola draped with rotten unripened grapes. It’s so vast that even in late winter, shorn of leafage, from the caravan one can’t see the plum tree; from the bay and rosemary one can’t see the house. It smells of fermenting windfalls, wet leaves, mortality.
Jess is childishly furious about the neglect. Yet, when he suggests the obvious solution, she overreacts. She’s upset that her childhood bedroom has been ‘requisitioned’ as her father’s office, box-files everywhere, a napping chair, a drafting-table, Paisley’s eviscerated toys. She disapproves of her father’s old friends, cartoonists and so forth, who come over for booze, leaving drips round the toilet. To Martyn it seems relaxed, and isn’t that a jewel to be prized? The untidiness is funny, the creative dramas exciting, and the invisible rules, like museum lasers, keep him on an adrenalized high.
Like Achilles rounding the walls of Troy, crimson hands and lust in his heart, he is picking up speed. As he passes through the Tufnell Park ticket-gate, nodding at the tough-looking TFL man, there’s a curl of excitement in his chest. He has always wanted to swing down from the vines, to be tested. Every man needs a quest.
Lately Jess has been possessive about time to herself. It’s ridiculous; they are a couple, she shouldn’t be having long baths in silence. If he so much as pops in to sit on the loo and update her with the day’s news, she turns grumpy. It’s all down to that awful skinny woman, Astrid Pringle. She’s where the rot set in.
Martyn is a man now, with white hairs in distressing places. Isn’t it time he took charge?
Which brings to mind the last time he and Jess, etc. He’d been having a conversation about it, in his mind, for weeks beforehand. Fat little kiddies, grandchildren for the in-laws; Ray would welcome him much more warmly. They’d all be excited to have Jess close by. And, although Martyn rarely shirks his spousal responsibilities, sometimes his, well, focus, seems to lapse. He needs a certain amount of imagination. Others, he’s sure, do the same; although not, obviously, Jess. She’s a tricky girl but he knows her mind; he’s definitely all she wants.
Afterwards, pleasingly sweaty, having attempted to repay her in kind but slightly nodding off more than once, he again thought: no, don’t mention it now. Talk about it in the morning, when she’s fresh. He was smiling into his pillow at the thought of Ray’s gratitude; Leah’s respect; even, perhaps, the joy of Patrick.
And his thoughts drift, as they do more than perhaps they ought, to poor old Patrick, Patch, tinkering away in self-imposed caravan isolation. Jess once mentioned a bad fight with Ray. Patch is only a stepson but grew up with Ray, in this warm, welcoming house; what a waste of a perfect childhood. He is, Ray says, not street-wise: no sense of humour. Sharp-profiled as a doomed wartime pilot, clean-shaven, very tightly wound, he has never married; no known girlfriends. He once said: ‘I don’t do touch.’
What does this mean, precisely? Martyn would give money to know.
Fathers, too, are not something Martyn’s qualified to handle. On first sighting Martyn, Ray turned his head like a disgusted eagle and Martyn, who had been reading up on his reputation, his bracing irascibility, genuinely thought he might faint. Ray sat on the edge of the sofa, coaxing wax from his ear with an unbent paperclip, wearing the grin which, Martyn now knows, signifies triumph over lesser life-forms.
But Martyn was sleeping with this man’s sweet hazelnutty daughter; at least, he probably would that very night. And he was runty, with mad-professor hair and Beano knees; not tall and well shaped like the rest of them, but a prawn of a man. With her lashy green-and-blue eyes and heavy hair, the tentative way she holds her head forward, like a camel, Jess was out of his league, visually. Even his clothes were wrong. Jess had warned him not to be smart but he’d worn a jacket anyway, in defiance, with Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations poking from the pocket. He hadn’t known how Ray dislikes academic striving, over-education; teachers, in fact.
Ray looked him over through his big black-framed glasses, lingered on his lapels, and Martyn knew that he had erred. Ray Hanrahan could sling him downstairs with one hand; his expression suggested: I know you, and I don’t like what I see.
Now that he understands Ray’s struggle, it’s moving how his adult children, exes, brothers, still gather around him, like a family of attractive gorillas around a silverback. He’d expected Ray to be gaunt and dry and English; Jess has a touching politeness, which he assumed was the family way. So imagine his surprise to be insulted, repeatedly: ‘Thingy,’ ‘you idiot,’ or, twice, ‘that wee tartan arse’. It took him some time to realize that Ray Hanrahan may appear like an impatient Anglo-Saxon despot – that scowling bonhomie, the voice – but he’s all heart. Martyn learned to bring him tales of others’ misfortune, like a cat laying torn mice at his feet. The comments about Martyn’s lack of a father, the fact that he is deaf in one ear, are all affection. Patrick’s big mistake is showing fear.
And still, whenever Martyn thinks he’s identified his level in Ray’s mysterious hierarchy, a dubious friend will drop by and Martyn becomes invisible. Only Patrick is lower. But he’s guessing that a bit of decisive manliness, some emphatic family values, as demonstrated this weekend, will turn it around.
Lucia was daunting, too, for about an hour: the grey streaks, the pale, squarish face and soulful eyes, distracted, presumably, by her Art. She lives so much in her studio, and in her head, but Martyn is sure he has her blessing. He tries to be sensitive about her illness, not to be seen looking. Jess was still distraught about it when they met, most of a year afterwards. To Martyn she was just another girl, sitting near his table at a raucous leaving do at the Star of Leith, December 2007; young at twenty-eightish, not a drinker then, so quite flirty. She was just starting at Dalziel’s, with a sweet freshly hatched yolkiness after struggling through her PGCE. He’d had a difficult week, a series of upsetting misunderstandings now buried in the past, and had thought: I might find comfort here. And once they’d got together, him well established in Edinburgh, a confident sophisticated Head of Geography, well, deputy, at St Jerome’s and ready to move on, he’d been so pleased to have a girlfriend that he hadn’t even considered her parents, much, but they sounded like horrible hippies. Jess claimed her father hadn’t spoken to her during teacher-training, not once; she cried about it occasionally.
‘How could he possibly mind?’
‘He thinks I betrayed him.’
‘Oh, come on. By getting an education?’
She frowned at him. ‘You can’t imagine how bad it was,’ she said, as if there’d been a war.
‘He just missed you.’
‘He says I’m . . . a snob. And other things.’
‘But he’s a sophisticated man. London, bohemians, doesn’t that . . . ?’
‘Believe me. Don’t even mention your degree unless . . . You’ll understand, if you come?’
‘Maybe,’ he’d said. He knows all about sand kicked in faces. And what kind of son would spend that train fare on visiting someone else’s family, while his mother sits alone at home in Dalry, Ayrshire?
Jess hadn’t yet decided that Ray had let her mother down; she was still warm about him, hoping for closeness. ‘We eat,’ she said. ‘Endlessly,’ and Martyn thought of his mother, cling-filmer of single sausages, diluter of tinned soup; the microwave disinfected to its eye-teeth. Hers is not a house in which a man can relax.
Then Jess confided about her artist father. ‘You must have seen Screw?’
‘I . . . maybe.’
‘Though he’s more abstract now. Much more. He was a bit famous once; he might be again. If he worked. But he can’t.’ And Martyn had chosen not to pry.
Then, as they laboured up Brixham Hill the first time, Jess said, ‘I warn you, it’s a madhouse. Maybe you should have gone to the barber. We should have brought a better bottle. Remember not to kiss me in front of them, Dad says it’s not fair on Leah. Though he’s . . . oh God. This is probably a mistake.’
But, within hours, he knew he was home. His sticky soul was nourished by the sight of the hallway, the wide floorboards whose sheeny grain remind him of mighty oaks, the original Ark. He couldn’t get over the size of the television; the fridge, big as a mortician’s but in a desperate state, rammed with luxury: Bakewell tarts, miniature pork pies, pre-grated cheese. The noise was exhilarating, as far removed from his knife-scraping childhood silence as life on the ocean floor. There was limitless alcohol, reclining on the sofa like a pasha, swaddling central heating, not a light turned off, not a coaster used, and a mighty chunk of next door’s lilac blazing in the illegal fireplace.
‘Don’t the neighbours mind?’ he’d asked.
‘He wears brown socks. Probably a nonce,’ said Ray.
Jess says the house makes her feel sick, that if they weren’t so middle-class it would be condemned. She claims that without Patrick’s repairs it would slither down Brixham Hill.
Maybe this weekend he’ll see more of Patrick. Patch looks up to Ray, yet persists in annoying him with acts of cussedness: vegetarianism, longish hair, the caravan. Ray calls him the Wild Toddler of the Woods. When Patrick sneezes, Ray rolls his eyes, makes that trill of disgust. ‘God’s sake!’ he’ll growl. He must be, thinks Martyn with an ache of older-brotherly feeling, an unhappy man. Ray likes commenting on his absent-mindedness, his distraction: ‘Look at him. He doesn’t live in the real world.’
