Live a Little, page 16
The service passes Shimi by. It is like being at school again. He cannot concentrate on what is being said. He had a wandering mind, his teachers said. They threw chalk and chalk dusters at him and still he looked out of the window, unaware. They called it daydreaming; Shimi called it thinking at his own speed. He remembers the A. E. Housman poem he’d read in class then couldn’t get out of his head. Everyone else was on to the next poem. Why did Shimi have to keep pace with them?
“When the bells justle in the tower, / The hollow night amid, / Then on my tongue the taste is sour / Of all I ever did.” You couldn’t read that and then move on seamlessly to Browning. He tries to remember if he ever talked to Ephraim about Housman’s poem. Housman was a homosexual. Yes, he knows it’s ridiculous to suppose that Ephraim was bound to like his poetry on that account. Shimi Carmelli is an old man from another age, but even he grasps that not every homosexual is interested in every other.
So don’t “Oh, Shimi!” him.
But on that question, how many of the mourners—how many of them are? Shimi wonders, not daring to look around.
Back at school again, Shimi barely hears what’s being said, though every word should be precious to him. He’s back in the tower being justled by the bells, tasting the sourness on his tongue. It’s bad luck for him that he has recalled the Housman; the poet’s sourness sets off Shimi’s own. It is wrong he wasn’t called on to help arrange this funeral. Wrong he wasn’t given a seat at the front. Wrong he hasn’t been asked to deliver a eulogy. What would he have said? He rehearses a speech. Ephraim and I were very close when we were young. He had a great spirit of adventure. You should have seen him shoot down any German plane that strayed into Little Stanmore airspace. But he was possessed of great tenderness too. You should have seen him with our mother when she was dying….
Meanwhile the coffin sits unlooked at on the belt that will convey it through the flames. And the reminiscences have begun. What good company. How he filled any room with his laughter. The lives he touched. The lives he saved. Shimi, standing smouldering at the back of the chapel, picks that up too late. The lives he rescued? Was that the word he heard? Rescued! A woman is unable to finish a story about her father and all Ephraim did for him. From the mourners’ assent this story and others like it are well known. Agreement unites the mourners. In another place there would be applause. Shimi hears the words “I was an alcoholic for forty years,” and this too can be vouched for by everybody here. “I was given up for lost until Ephraim…” People turn to one another and nod. That was Ephraim.
Did he rescue them all, Shimi wonders.
A celebrant offers consolation for the non-religious. Shimi knows what he thinks of that. There is no consolation for the non-religious.
And now one of Ephraim’s favourite songs. In the spirit of the event Shimi thinks it’s going to be Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” but it’s Marvin Gaye. “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Who was his brother?
Then comes the reading. From a South American novelist, though it could have come from the back of a greeting card. Have the honesty to do the thing you want to do and have the courage to be yourself. The end. I know what I would say were I speaking, Shimi thinks. I would say have the courage to be someone else. As Ephraim did? Yes, as Ephraim did. Because the stories about him describe another Ephraim to the one Shimi knew.
Then the hammer blow of horror when the belt bearing the coffin begins to move. There is more music. A heavy, jeering, mirthful beat. An assault on tears. The music of indomitability. “Another One Bites the Dust.”
So is it all a joke?
“Eph’s sense of humour exactly,” he hears someone say. And needs to get outside.
* * *
—
BACK OUT ON the gravel no one is in any hurry to leave. If anything, there are more people here now than before. There is universal agreement. A lovely, fitting service. Ephraim would have enjoyed it. Shimi looks for Mark. While he’s searching, a somewhat lewd-looking man in his sixties with bad skin comes over to introduce himself.
“You used to know my father,” he says.
This isn’t another joke is it? This isn’t Ephraim’s son? But no, no one could be so malicious, not even Ephraim’s son, supposing him to have one.
“Remind me,” Shimi says.
“Perkin Padgett.”
Shimi slaps his head. “ ‘Peanut’ Padgett!”
“I never heard him called that.”
Shimi apologises. “Peanut” just popped into his head. It could have been worse. “Penis” Padgett could have popped into his head.
“And how is your father?” Shimi wants to ask, but he can guess the answer. Instead he says, “Your father and I were good friends. I don’t remember him being a chum of Ephraim’s, though.”
“They met in rehab.”
Shimi is relieved. Rehab is one up from prison. But for what offence did “Peanut” Padgett need rehabilitating, apart from all-round disgustingness of person? In a rush, he remembers the day “Peanut” loosened his belt. Was “Peanut,” too, put away for consorting with another man?
“So did my brother help your father the way he seems to have helped everybody else?”
“He did, actually, yes. They weren’t exaggerating in there. He was one in a million, your brother. You lost contact with each other, I gather.”
Gather!
“Yes.”
“Was there a falling-out?”
“Not really. We just drifted apart. We were living in different parts of the country and had different interests. I don’t know how Ephraim described it.”
“Pretty much the same way, I think. I didn’t know him as well as Dad did, but I did hear him talk about you occasionally. I think he believed you disapproved of him.”
“For what?”
“He had some wild friends. Maybe he thought you disapproved of them.”
“Was your father one?”
“Dad? Wild? God, no. All he wanted after a hard day in his bookshop was to come home, watch television, and open a bottle of sherry.”
“He had a bookshop?”
“Yes. The Book Worm in Borehamwood. You never went there?”
“Never. But I remember he was interested in books.”
Obscurely, Shimi was pleased for him. An ambition realised lit up everyone associated with it.
But he was also envious. What ambition had he realised?
“His precious books, yes, though he neglected those when the drinking devil was in him. Enter Ephraim. He understood.”
“One of the last things Ephraim told me was that he’d started drinking. I didn’t really believe him.”
“Oh, he drank all right. But he put it to good use. Same with his time in prison. Alcoholics Anonymous employed him as a Prison Liaison Officer I think it was. He was good with people who’d fallen a long way down the ladder.”
“Was Perkin in prison with him too?”
“Nah. Dad never had the balls to do anything bent.”
Then he must have changed drastically, Shimi thinks.
Mark comes over to join them and the two men shake hands warmly. Shimi suffers a second pang of envy. Ephraim died in a circle of friends. How will he die?
He succeeds in walking Mark aside. “This prison thing…?”
“You want to know what was he in for?”
“I can guess. But was he in there long?”
“Less than a year. But what do you think he was in for?”
Shimi straightens his back and makes himself taller. I am Ivan the Terrible. I am Rasputin. He makes an easy come, easy go motion with his hands. What his brother was, he accepted. There’s no shocking someone who’s been where Shimi’s been.
But Ephraim’s friend is not deceived. “Your brother loved you, you know,” he announces with odd formality, “but he said you had a Little Stanmore mentality.”
Shimi reels as from a blow. “If it’s your intention to wound me,” he says, “you have succeeded. Though that wouldn’t be hard to do today. But yes, undoubtedly Ephraim was the bolder of the two of us.”
“I don’t mean to wound you. I don’t believe Ephraim would have wanted to wound you either. He wasn’t that impressed with the way his own life had worked out. He worried for you, that was all. He thought you never properly got away from where life began for you both, and that as a consequence you took things hard.”
“He was probably right.”
“He said he wished you could have punished yourself less.”
“And his punishment? What was that? What was his crime?”
“Not what I think you think. Theft.”
“Theft! What the hell did he thieve?”
“A gypsy caravan.”
Shimi catches his breath. He has to stop himself laughing. “He told me he’d bought it off a gypsy he’d met at Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“I’m sure he meant to. But the paperwork proved too much for him.”
“Let me get this straight in my mind. Do you mean he stole the business or the caravan?”
“Well the business would not have been much without the caravan. What he got done for was sneaking the caravan off the South Pier at Blackpool and towing it to Brighton.”
“You can’t sneak a caravan off a pier.”
“As he found out.”
“And he went to prison for trying?”
“It was still the fifties, remember. I know that because 1959 was the year my dad went down. They took theft a little more seriously then. And the gypsy proved vindictive.”
Shimi does the calculations. 1959 was the last year he saw Ephraim. Had his visit in some way precipitated Ephraim’s felony?
“And your father, if you don’t mind me asking,” he asks. “What did he get done for?”
Mark laughs. “An act of gross indecency. 1959 for you. If you think things are bad today…”
Shimi rubs his eyes. “Things are always bad.”
“I agree. Which is why we need men like your brother.”
Rather than men like you…
Shimi’s done. Ah yes, my brother. Who was or wasn’t a thief, who was or wasn’t a homosexual, who was or wasn’t an alcoholic, who was—well, there are no two views about this at least—a saint.
He puts out his hand. “A pleasure,” he says. Which it hasn’t been.
Enough’s enough. Ephraim will be burnt to ash by now. There’s nothing more to hang around for.
Some aspects of ageing are voluntary. Shimi decides to walk like an old man.
He makes his way heavily along the memorial avenue of shrubs and trees towards the gate, burdened by years if not by grief—he knows he has no right to grief. Plaques mark the places where the ashes of somebody’s mother or father, sister or brother have been scattered. To the left of him is a separate, sadder ground for sons and daughters. And a smaller, sadder one still for babies. It’s like an abandoned nursery. Dolls, teddy bears, greeting cards, propped against urns or just lying on the ground. For all the order, it is as though a hurricane has been through. Or Jesus, marauding for sunbeams.
Shimi keeps to the main path and breathes in the foliage. Briefly, the idea of being returned to nature consoles him. But what if you didn’t come from nature in the first place?
On his way out, by the arched Gothic gate to the main road, he sees an old woman sitting on a mossy bench. Sometimes, talking of nature, the old on mossy benches can look as though they have grown there. This old woman doesn’t. She is too alert, in her own way as much an enemy of growth and greenery as Shimi. Is she here for Ephraim or the next deceased? He didn’t see her in the chapel. That, though, tells him nothing; there was much he didn’t see and didn’t want to see in the chapel. She doesn’t look infirm, but there is a wheelchair parked beside her. She beckons Shimi who instinctively backs away. His record with people in wheelchairs isn’t good.
Can she possibly know this about him? She rises, anyway, and waves her stick at him. She looks perfectly steady on her feet. “Mr. Carmelli!” she calls. “Do me the goodness of at least acknowledging me. I am right, aren’t I? You are the brother.”
The haughtiness of her manner, the authority in her voice, and the straightness of her posture, all things considered, reassure him. This is no human wreckage looking for assistance he can’t give. Quite the opposite. Sinew for sinew, bone for bone, the human wreckage, this time, is him. There is something of the sibyl about the old woman, as though she is there, at the gate to her cave, to ward off the living and protect the dead. How many secrets is she privy to? How can she be so confident he is Ephraim’s brother?
The moment he approaches she resumes her seat. He is not to consider himself an equal. As though obedient to her movements, a rook settles on the back of the bench. A leaf falls onto her lap. The woman looks up as though to castigate the tree from which the leaf has fallen and at that moment the sun which had put in a brief appearance is eclipsed by clouds. From the direction of the car park an African woman appears, leading a tiger. No, not leading a tiger, though Shimi doesn’t see why not. In her tight, tribal-print dress she splashes the bleached-out cemetery with colour.
Shimi is easily cowed by authority, even when it isn’t supported by the supernatural. “I am Ephraim Carmelli’s brother, yes,” he says, in the manner of one making a formal confession.
“You couldn’t be anyone else. You bear the mark.”
“What mark?”
“The Carmelli mark. Ephraim spoke of it.”
Shimi is nonplussed.
“I am making light with you,” the old woman says. “I suspect someone has to. You resemble him, is what I mean.”
“You knew him?”
“Of course I knew him. Why else would I be here? How else could I remark on the resemblance?”
“Well, if you mean to be original you have succeeded. I never thought we were alike.”
“That would have been because you weren’t able to look into your own eyes. Come closer to me. Closer still. Yes, I look into yours and I see what I saw in his.”
What happens next, Shimi wonders. Does the rook peck the sockets of his eyes clean? Does the African woman disfigure him with her nails? Is this the moment when the ground splits at last, throwing up its accumulation of ashes?
He steadies himself by steadying his voice. “I am touched that you see something of my poor brother in me. A part of him remains alive, in that case. But I am surprised by it. What of Ephraim is it that you see in my eyes?”
“You will have to give me a moment to find the words. Euphoria, my thesaurus.”
“Yes, Mrs. Beryl,” the African woman says. But no book passes between them. Does this too pertain to the paranormal?
To describe what she sees in Shimi’s eyes the old woman closes her own. “Bravado masking affliction,” she says at last with satisfaction. It is as though she has passed a test she has set herself.
Shimi, too, takes his time.
“Well?” she asks. “Do you intend to honour my description with a comment?”
Shimi sighs. He could do with a thesaurus himself. “I cannot speak for his affliction but I can for my bravado. I have none. As you see, I quake before you. And your retinue.”
“Retinue? Retinue is good. That’s you he’s referring to, Euphoria. So straighten up. And stop holding on to that damned wheelchair, girl. Let it career away if it wants to. I warned you not to bring it. As for your bravado, Mr. Carmelli, I’m in no position to argue with you about that. You must, at your age, know yourself. Ephraim had enough for both of you. He could stare down any misfortune. I have known many men but few of his character.”
“Thank you.”
“Why are you thanking me? It is no compliment to you that I praise him.”
The sternness of her manner dislodges the familiar rook.
“I thank you on his behalf,” Shimi says.
“You can no more thank on another’s behalf than you can apologise.”
Shimi smothers a sigh. It’s beginning to feel a long day. “I am pleased he was admired, that’s all.”
“Why, didn’t you admire him?”
“Not enough.”
“Were you close? Let me rephrase: did you think of yourself as close to him?”
Shimi hears what she’s not saying. That Ephraim didn’t think of himself as close to Shimi.
“Not as close as we should have been.”
“And whose fault was that?”
Is he obliged to answer? “Mine,” he says, obliged or not. “Mine entirely.”
“You say that too quickly.”
“It’s what I believe to be true.”
“It wasn’t what he believed to be true. He said he ought never to have abandoned you.”
“He didn’t.”
“Sit down,” she orders.
He sits. But not too close.
She regards him strangely, as though he might have dropped from the trees. “Remind me what you were saying.”
“That Ephraim didn’t abandon me. He did other things but not that.”
“Perhaps you misremember.”
“I’m not so fortunate.”
“Wait till you misremember everything.”
But as he makes no reply to this, she goes on to ask “Do you feel he has abandoned you now?”
“How could I not? A younger brother has no business dying before an older. But that’s just fancy.”
She has a long face, almost as long as his. She uses the full length of it to show sorrow of which he would not have thought it capable. Could those storm-grey eyes shed tears?
“I understand you,” she says. “It can be terrible when they leave. At least when some of them do. Others you can’t wait to see the back of.”
