Live a Little, page 8
“Don’t worry,” “Peanut” was saying in a voice Shimi had never heard before. A voice of the purest wheedling sweetness. A voice as corrupt as the smell that had filled Shimi’s house in the months his mother was dying in it. “Relax. I know exactly what I’m doing. You’re safe with me. This is nothing.”
But nothing was nothing for Shimi Carmelli.
* * *
—
“HAVE IT YOUR way,” Manolo Carmelli had conceded when his wife said she saw nothing wrong in Shimi’s sitting on the floor by her feet measuring his head with a tape measure. But what he said and what he believed were two different matters. There was something not right with the boy. There had always been something not right with the boy. He confiscated the tape measure when he next saw it lying about and would have done the same with the ceramic phrenology bust had he not paused long enough to see an elegance in the object. Shimi clearly loved the bust with its weird markings, dividing the brain’s capacities to think from the brain’s capacities to feel; and there could be no doubt that some of the crayon pictures and plasticine replicas he was making had a peculiar beauty.
“What you should be doing, if you’re so concerned,” his wife had told him, “is getting him to take an interest in something else.”
“Like what?”
“Cars, maybe.”
“Cars! Him!”
Manolo’s brother was an importer of toys and games and even during rationing was somehow able to lay his hands on things you couldn’t any longer find in the shops. Having learnt of Manolo’s worries about Shimi, he bought the boy a globe of the world which Shimi spun once and never touched again, a chemistry set which Shimi couldn’t be bothered to experiment with, and finally a compendium of magic. AMAZE YOUR FRIENDS it said on the box. Shimi had never amazed anyone. He didn’t get the chance to do so this time either. Ephraim, muscling in on everything as he always did, mastered the tricks before Shimi got round to reading the instructions, making a silver ball dance under his chin, holding glasses of water upside down without the liquid spilling. “Abracadabra,” he liked saying, poking a little wooden wand into Shimi’s chest. Shimi walked away. This wasn’t magic. Magic changed the world. Magic made you not have tried on your mother’s bloomers. Maybe even made you love your brother. This stuff was mere footling illusion. If it had been a compendium of necromancy that taught how to change the composition of your own heart or erase an event from the book of life, not just dispel it from your memory but make it not have happened, he’d have shown some interest. He mentioned this to Uncle Raffi, who stared at him hard, walked out of the room without saying anything, and came back weeks later with a book on cartomancy. “This is the nearest I can get to what you asked for,” he said, ruffling Shimi’s hair. “It will teach you the art of divination by playing cards. Have fun with it.”
And Shimi did. Divination struck him as a version of phrenology, in that it discovered the springs of human action outside individual decision making. What happens happens, whether you want it to or not. It is all decided before you come along—and yet, maybe, maybe, you can change the course of consequences. Take Ephraim, who stole attention, stole the light, stole all the cheek and brazenness going. Did he choose Ephraim? No. Why would he ever have chosen a brother who blotted him out? Ephraim was simply one more external instrument of unhappiness. But did Shimi have to remain in thrall forever to such instrumentality?
Cartomancy turned out to suit Shimi’s temperament and he soon became adept in it. Thanks to his extraordinary memory and strong powers of concentration he was able to call up quickly the astrological import of every card he fanned out in the course of a divination—as, for example, that an eight of hearts presaged an unexpected visit from someone you loved, the five of clubs an offer that couldn’t be refused, the six of diamonds a tumultuous falling-out. Few people are able to resist hearing about their future when it consists of unexpected visits and offers they’d be foolish to refuse. So, within their little circle word spread about his powers. All Sonya’s sisters heard about it, invited him down to Spitalfields, and showered him with praise. Uncle Raffi had a card printed for him. Avoid calamity! Let Shimi the Great tell you about your life before it happens.
But time soon showed that Uncle Raffi had it wrong. Divination wasn’t a warning; it was a harsh light shed in advance upon a fait accompli.
His mother died and that was that. Shimi might have been to blame but that didn’t mean he could have saved her. He kept up the cartomancy but with a diminished sense of his powers. That seemed to be the recurring story of his life so far: diminished powers, apart from the power to remember.
And then his father vanished into the night. Shimi had been expecting it, but again could not have done anything to stop it. He had been expecting it because of the way his father had been looking at the two boys after their mother died. It wasn’t, Shimi thought, that he held them responsible. But they were flesh of their mother’s flesh and hers was rotting away in the dark while theirs was flagrantly alive. In such circumstances he didn’t doubt that he would have vanished into the night himself. He had no idea where his father fled to. Perhaps to a neighbouring suburb where he was living in disguise. With another woman, perhaps. Or as a woman. Who knew? Perhaps he too had once tried on his mother’s underwear.
Uncle Raffi was unable to provide information as to his whereabouts. He shrugged his shoulders. “My brother!” he said, which could have meant anything. He began to take less interest in Shimi too. It ran in the family. One minute you were interested, the next you weren’t.
Shimi wondered if he were made of similar stuff. Out of sight, out of mind. “That leaves just us, then,” he said to Ephraim.
“No, it leaves just you,” Ephraim replied.
“Why, where are you going?”
“To find him.”
The thought had not even occurred to Shimi.
But, for the time being at least, Ephraim did not go anywhere. It had been enough just to say he was a more conscientious son than Shimi, and threaten to leave him in the lurch.
She was once voted Mother of the Year, but let her tell it. She needs the practice. She does memory-enhancing puzzles on an iPad her boys bought her for her last birthday, but no puzzle exercises your memory so well as the puzzle of your life.
She gets Euphoria to test her.
“Ask me who I am.”
“Who are you, Mrs. Beryl?”
“I’m not sure you’ve grasped the principle of this, Dementievna.”
“I’m Euphoria, ma’am.”
“Are you now? In that case, Euphoria, since you know who you are, will you ask me who I am?”
“I know who you are, Mrs. Beryl.”
“But I don’t.”
“You are—”
“No, stop! I have to remember by myself. Do you see that certificate on the mantelpiece, between the photograph of two children I don’t recognise and the framed letter from the Lord Chamberlain inviting me to Sandy’s investiture—a word it is a miracle I remember and would be an even greater miracle if you understood—”
“Shall I bring it to you, Mrs. Beryl?”
“No, just read it to me.”
“It says ‘I hereby certify that Beryl Dusinbery has satisfied the examiners…’ ”
“Are you sure that’s what it says?”
“Yes, Mrs. Beryl.”
“Has satisfied the examiners in what?”
“ ‘In the programme in Moral Science. And is hereby awarded…’ ”
“All right. That’s not it then. You’ll just have to take my word. I was Mother of the Year.”
“I am not surprised, Mrs. Beryl.”
“There is no reason to be sarcastic, Euphoria.”
Euphoria is horrified by the imputation. “I am speaking my heart, ma’am. I am always telling Nastya what a good mother you are.”
“And she, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear, doesn’t believe you.”
“She doesn’t see what I see, Mrs. Beryl.”
“And what’s that?”
“How proud you are of your sons and their families.”
“Evidently the Mothers’ Union saw what you saw, Euphoria. I am grateful to you all.”
So what did the Mothers’ Union see?
Let her tell it.
* * *
—
I DON’T KNOW why I asked the stupid girl to look for a certificate. It was a medal. Still is a medal, presumably, if I knew where to find it. Some floozy from daytime television made a speech saying I was an example.
An example to or an example of, I wondered.
Given in recognition, the citation read, of the extraordinary contribution, thanks to my mothering, my sons had made, and their sons and daughters, in so far as I knew them, were still making, to the political, financial, and cultural wellbeing of the country. So I suppose you could say it was really a medal to them. Or to my womb from which had sprung, taking the long view, more ministers than there were ministries, more parliamentary advisers than there were parliamentary parties, more CEOs of government-friendly FTSE 100 companies than the FTSE could accommodate, more greasers than there were palms to grease, one announcer on independent radio, and two television critics.
I exaggerate but only to revive the dying art of hyperbole. On which subject—greasing, that is, not hyperbole—it was Blair who presented me with the medal. Hung it round my neck as though he were garlanding me with a wreath made of butter and kissed my cheek. “Something very American about this,” he laughed. “That should please you then,” I retorted. He smiled from ear to ear. Never believe it when you hear that expression. No one can smile from ear to ear. But Blair could. I didn’t hate the man the way my boys did. No cause or person had ever united them before. Only Blair. That alone was reason to fall in love with him, or at least reserve judgement. Then he prosecuted what my youngest son Tahan, the possibly gay human rights lawyer, called an illegal war and on the grounds that Tahan had never yet been right about anything, though I much preferred him to his brothers, I became a Blair supporter. I think the phrase is Blair Babe, though at seventy-seven I was a touch old for that. “He has warm lips,” I told his detractors.
“He’s deranged,” they said.
“Every man is deranged once he kisses me,” was my reply.
Do I believe that? I only believe things while I’m saying them. Believe any longer than that and you stray into fanaticism.
What I don’t believe is anything a human rights lawyer, in particular Tahan—no matter that I care for him—has to say. Illegal war! As opposed to?
My sons didn’t just disparage Blair, they disparaged the medal he hung around my neck. They objected to my being rewarded for their success or, which amounted to the same thing, their success being traced back to me. What they’d achieved they’d achieved in spite of, not thanks to. They had a point, but in spite of, I reminded them, is also a debt. If you make something of yourself to escape your mother it’s your mother who gave you the head start. All I ever wanted for my children, I lied in my acceptance speech, was for them to be healthy and happy. Success never mattered. I held my breath for them every hour they were out of my sight. I worried about house fires, road accidents, terrorism, war—legal or illegal—disease, head lice. Nothing mattered to me except getting them through. The mere fact of survival was enough. Dear God, just let them live. And then you pray even harder for their children because there are more of them now to be devastated by any mishap. So the “caring” never finishes…My eyes glistened.
What do you think? Worth a medal in itself.
If you think, as my boys clearly did, that the Mothers’ Union should have forged a few more for the army of au pairs and nursery maids and baby-changers and nannies that actually brought them up, I’d ask you not to forget that it wasn’t the mere fact of being looked after and kept alive that made my family what it is; it was the stern intellectual example I set them when I was there, and the spiritual stimulus they received from me even when I wasn’t. However much they chafed against the little maternal Sparta I made for them, they would have fared nothing like so well in Arcadia.
* * *
—
AND NOW A message to their children’s children: Say “Hello, Great-grandma” and then beat it. My time is precious. I need to listen to the sound the plates of my brain make as they sidle past each other like ships that piss, excuse me, in the night. I had a husband, or he might have been a lover aspiring to be a husband, who thought it was funny to call a possibility a pissabolity. An Australian, naturally. Quite pissably he’s alive somewhere still, one of the pending, in a leaky old home in Queensland trying to remember—now that he can’t pass water without yelling out in agony—what it was about piss he found so funny.
What’s so funny, girls?
Nothing, miss.
Nothing will come of nothing….
My teaching trajectory was spectacular, though I say so myself. I began as an assistant in a northern village primary, handing out crayons, and reached the dizzy heights of Head of Just About Everything in a Hampshire school that numbered foreign royalty among its pupils. Nothing will come of nothing, Your Royal Highnesses. Rien de rien. Nada de nada. I was wrong there. For them, everything came from nothing. Neither moral nor intellectual nothingness stood in their way. But that’s a tedious thought. When did it ever?
That was a long time ago. Half of them will be dead now. Maybe all of them. Long lined up like ice mints in their frosty little coffins.
How good a job did they make of it? I wonder. How many died, as they say, like a man?
There’s a joke—dying like a man. I should sooner teach the world to die like a woman. The women, in my experience, don’t go out screaming, ravaged by failure, having to revisit the site of every botched opportunity one more time before they can accept that life has not delivered. One more time, one last laceration. Being less grandiose—I don’t say less grand—women are less disappointed. Expect not that much and you lose not that much. For me, it’s not the looking back on loss and underachievement I fear. I have that in my cabinets. The one thing I can’t file away is the habit of self-communing. I’ve known myself so long I will miss me. Miss my company. Miss the talk.
That’s the unimaginable part—me not talking to me. Or should that be I not talking to me? The rules of grammar, too, are going.
Me talking to I?
I talked, grammatically, to Arnold—Arnold Fini I liked to call him—for three whole days before realising he was dead.
Never mind who he was. A passer-through. Think of me as a holy place, and you won’t have difficulty thinking of him as a pilgrim. A tourist of sorts, anyway, with his Michelin Green Guide in his pocket. Word gets around. If you happen to be in the vicinity, Princess Schh…is worth a detour. Women get passed on by men, like a foul rumour.
Hence Arnold Fini knocking at my door. I don’t remember how long he stayed with me alive. But dead he stayed three days.
Three days! Couldn’t I tell? Was I unable to distinguish between flesh and blood and a cadaver? Not that straightforward, as it happens, with men of Arnie’s calibre.
What about the one-sidedness of the conversation? What about the rigor mortis? What about the stench?
So who are you to ask—the police?
The answer I gave them, I give you. I have always been a soliloquiser—audience enough for my words, accustomed to the half-company of men lacking the acuity or the patience to keep up. Were I to have waited for them to respond, I’d have lost my thread. So I talked and talked and left it to them whether or not they wanted to follow me.
Three days conversing to a dead man?
I know how it sounds.
But I have to tell you—Arnie was a very good listener.
A very good dissembler, too, though I suppose that amounts to the same thing.
He’d been—where had he been? Basel. Somewhere like that. Switzerland. He’d asked me along, to hold his Michelin guide, while he scrutinised Holbein’s dead Jesus, but I’d said no fear. Basel? Cuckoo clocks?
So he went on his own and took in what greater men than him had been taking in for centuries. Christ on his back with his mouth open, fresh off the cross, as dead as meat.
“Why that in particular?” I’d asked him before he left.
“Pivotal painting,” he told me.
“What’s turning on it?”
“Modernity.”
I kissed his cheek without pleasure or affection and off he went carrying a copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.
“Why that?” I thought of asking him, but knew the answer. Because dear deranged Fyodor rolled the Holbein out of art history and into modern madness science first by nearly fainting in front of it—thank the God who doesn’t exist that wifey was standing by with the smelling salts—and then by having that idiot/saint Prince Munchkin or whatever his name is describe the painting as sufficient to make a man lose his faith. Arnie wasn’t sure whether he had faith or not—I didn’t only go for atheists, let it be noted—but what he did have was art. He was art crazed, always on the point of fainting in front of some work or other himself. I didn’t dare walk him past the Royal Academy in case the odour of pictorial genius leaked out and knocked him over. Otherwise he had a strange way of showing his passion. He was a Dadaist after his time and a conceptualist before it. He didn’t paint—couldn’t paint, I suspect—but when he saw something that moved him he “became” it. Sat for hours on end with his hands folded low between his thighs in a blue dress borrowed from me in imitation of Cézanne’s portrait of his wife. He became an Ingres nude, a Matisse odalisque, a classical athlete, and, serially, Géricault’s inmates of the asylum, all reason fled from their sad faces and, subsequently, his own. He had a soft spot for idiots and cadavers. Get to know what it’s like to be the subject, he believed, and you get to know the artist.
But nothing was nothing for Shimi Carmelli.
* * *
—
“HAVE IT YOUR way,” Manolo Carmelli had conceded when his wife said she saw nothing wrong in Shimi’s sitting on the floor by her feet measuring his head with a tape measure. But what he said and what he believed were two different matters. There was something not right with the boy. There had always been something not right with the boy. He confiscated the tape measure when he next saw it lying about and would have done the same with the ceramic phrenology bust had he not paused long enough to see an elegance in the object. Shimi clearly loved the bust with its weird markings, dividing the brain’s capacities to think from the brain’s capacities to feel; and there could be no doubt that some of the crayon pictures and plasticine replicas he was making had a peculiar beauty.
“What you should be doing, if you’re so concerned,” his wife had told him, “is getting him to take an interest in something else.”
“Like what?”
“Cars, maybe.”
“Cars! Him!”
Manolo’s brother was an importer of toys and games and even during rationing was somehow able to lay his hands on things you couldn’t any longer find in the shops. Having learnt of Manolo’s worries about Shimi, he bought the boy a globe of the world which Shimi spun once and never touched again, a chemistry set which Shimi couldn’t be bothered to experiment with, and finally a compendium of magic. AMAZE YOUR FRIENDS it said on the box. Shimi had never amazed anyone. He didn’t get the chance to do so this time either. Ephraim, muscling in on everything as he always did, mastered the tricks before Shimi got round to reading the instructions, making a silver ball dance under his chin, holding glasses of water upside down without the liquid spilling. “Abracadabra,” he liked saying, poking a little wooden wand into Shimi’s chest. Shimi walked away. This wasn’t magic. Magic changed the world. Magic made you not have tried on your mother’s bloomers. Maybe even made you love your brother. This stuff was mere footling illusion. If it had been a compendium of necromancy that taught how to change the composition of your own heart or erase an event from the book of life, not just dispel it from your memory but make it not have happened, he’d have shown some interest. He mentioned this to Uncle Raffi, who stared at him hard, walked out of the room without saying anything, and came back weeks later with a book on cartomancy. “This is the nearest I can get to what you asked for,” he said, ruffling Shimi’s hair. “It will teach you the art of divination by playing cards. Have fun with it.”
And Shimi did. Divination struck him as a version of phrenology, in that it discovered the springs of human action outside individual decision making. What happens happens, whether you want it to or not. It is all decided before you come along—and yet, maybe, maybe, you can change the course of consequences. Take Ephraim, who stole attention, stole the light, stole all the cheek and brazenness going. Did he choose Ephraim? No. Why would he ever have chosen a brother who blotted him out? Ephraim was simply one more external instrument of unhappiness. But did Shimi have to remain in thrall forever to such instrumentality?
Cartomancy turned out to suit Shimi’s temperament and he soon became adept in it. Thanks to his extraordinary memory and strong powers of concentration he was able to call up quickly the astrological import of every card he fanned out in the course of a divination—as, for example, that an eight of hearts presaged an unexpected visit from someone you loved, the five of clubs an offer that couldn’t be refused, the six of diamonds a tumultuous falling-out. Few people are able to resist hearing about their future when it consists of unexpected visits and offers they’d be foolish to refuse. So, within their little circle word spread about his powers. All Sonya’s sisters heard about it, invited him down to Spitalfields, and showered him with praise. Uncle Raffi had a card printed for him. Avoid calamity! Let Shimi the Great tell you about your life before it happens.
But time soon showed that Uncle Raffi had it wrong. Divination wasn’t a warning; it was a harsh light shed in advance upon a fait accompli.
His mother died and that was that. Shimi might have been to blame but that didn’t mean he could have saved her. He kept up the cartomancy but with a diminished sense of his powers. That seemed to be the recurring story of his life so far: diminished powers, apart from the power to remember.
And then his father vanished into the night. Shimi had been expecting it, but again could not have done anything to stop it. He had been expecting it because of the way his father had been looking at the two boys after their mother died. It wasn’t, Shimi thought, that he held them responsible. But they were flesh of their mother’s flesh and hers was rotting away in the dark while theirs was flagrantly alive. In such circumstances he didn’t doubt that he would have vanished into the night himself. He had no idea where his father fled to. Perhaps to a neighbouring suburb where he was living in disguise. With another woman, perhaps. Or as a woman. Who knew? Perhaps he too had once tried on his mother’s underwear.
Uncle Raffi was unable to provide information as to his whereabouts. He shrugged his shoulders. “My brother!” he said, which could have meant anything. He began to take less interest in Shimi too. It ran in the family. One minute you were interested, the next you weren’t.
Shimi wondered if he were made of similar stuff. Out of sight, out of mind. “That leaves just us, then,” he said to Ephraim.
“No, it leaves just you,” Ephraim replied.
“Why, where are you going?”
“To find him.”
The thought had not even occurred to Shimi.
But, for the time being at least, Ephraim did not go anywhere. It had been enough just to say he was a more conscientious son than Shimi, and threaten to leave him in the lurch.
She was once voted Mother of the Year, but let her tell it. She needs the practice. She does memory-enhancing puzzles on an iPad her boys bought her for her last birthday, but no puzzle exercises your memory so well as the puzzle of your life.
She gets Euphoria to test her.
“Ask me who I am.”
“Who are you, Mrs. Beryl?”
“I’m not sure you’ve grasped the principle of this, Dementievna.”
“I’m Euphoria, ma’am.”
“Are you now? In that case, Euphoria, since you know who you are, will you ask me who I am?”
“I know who you are, Mrs. Beryl.”
“But I don’t.”
“You are—”
“No, stop! I have to remember by myself. Do you see that certificate on the mantelpiece, between the photograph of two children I don’t recognise and the framed letter from the Lord Chamberlain inviting me to Sandy’s investiture—a word it is a miracle I remember and would be an even greater miracle if you understood—”
“Shall I bring it to you, Mrs. Beryl?”
“No, just read it to me.”
“It says ‘I hereby certify that Beryl Dusinbery has satisfied the examiners…’ ”
“Are you sure that’s what it says?”
“Yes, Mrs. Beryl.”
“Has satisfied the examiners in what?”
“ ‘In the programme in Moral Science. And is hereby awarded…’ ”
“All right. That’s not it then. You’ll just have to take my word. I was Mother of the Year.”
“I am not surprised, Mrs. Beryl.”
“There is no reason to be sarcastic, Euphoria.”
Euphoria is horrified by the imputation. “I am speaking my heart, ma’am. I am always telling Nastya what a good mother you are.”
“And she, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear, doesn’t believe you.”
“She doesn’t see what I see, Mrs. Beryl.”
“And what’s that?”
“How proud you are of your sons and their families.”
“Evidently the Mothers’ Union saw what you saw, Euphoria. I am grateful to you all.”
So what did the Mothers’ Union see?
Let her tell it.
* * *
—
I DON’T KNOW why I asked the stupid girl to look for a certificate. It was a medal. Still is a medal, presumably, if I knew where to find it. Some floozy from daytime television made a speech saying I was an example.
An example to or an example of, I wondered.
Given in recognition, the citation read, of the extraordinary contribution, thanks to my mothering, my sons had made, and their sons and daughters, in so far as I knew them, were still making, to the political, financial, and cultural wellbeing of the country. So I suppose you could say it was really a medal to them. Or to my womb from which had sprung, taking the long view, more ministers than there were ministries, more parliamentary advisers than there were parliamentary parties, more CEOs of government-friendly FTSE 100 companies than the FTSE could accommodate, more greasers than there were palms to grease, one announcer on independent radio, and two television critics.
I exaggerate but only to revive the dying art of hyperbole. On which subject—greasing, that is, not hyperbole—it was Blair who presented me with the medal. Hung it round my neck as though he were garlanding me with a wreath made of butter and kissed my cheek. “Something very American about this,” he laughed. “That should please you then,” I retorted. He smiled from ear to ear. Never believe it when you hear that expression. No one can smile from ear to ear. But Blair could. I didn’t hate the man the way my boys did. No cause or person had ever united them before. Only Blair. That alone was reason to fall in love with him, or at least reserve judgement. Then he prosecuted what my youngest son Tahan, the possibly gay human rights lawyer, called an illegal war and on the grounds that Tahan had never yet been right about anything, though I much preferred him to his brothers, I became a Blair supporter. I think the phrase is Blair Babe, though at seventy-seven I was a touch old for that. “He has warm lips,” I told his detractors.
“He’s deranged,” they said.
“Every man is deranged once he kisses me,” was my reply.
Do I believe that? I only believe things while I’m saying them. Believe any longer than that and you stray into fanaticism.
What I don’t believe is anything a human rights lawyer, in particular Tahan—no matter that I care for him—has to say. Illegal war! As opposed to?
My sons didn’t just disparage Blair, they disparaged the medal he hung around my neck. They objected to my being rewarded for their success or, which amounted to the same thing, their success being traced back to me. What they’d achieved they’d achieved in spite of, not thanks to. They had a point, but in spite of, I reminded them, is also a debt. If you make something of yourself to escape your mother it’s your mother who gave you the head start. All I ever wanted for my children, I lied in my acceptance speech, was for them to be healthy and happy. Success never mattered. I held my breath for them every hour they were out of my sight. I worried about house fires, road accidents, terrorism, war—legal or illegal—disease, head lice. Nothing mattered to me except getting them through. The mere fact of survival was enough. Dear God, just let them live. And then you pray even harder for their children because there are more of them now to be devastated by any mishap. So the “caring” never finishes…My eyes glistened.
What do you think? Worth a medal in itself.
If you think, as my boys clearly did, that the Mothers’ Union should have forged a few more for the army of au pairs and nursery maids and baby-changers and nannies that actually brought them up, I’d ask you not to forget that it wasn’t the mere fact of being looked after and kept alive that made my family what it is; it was the stern intellectual example I set them when I was there, and the spiritual stimulus they received from me even when I wasn’t. However much they chafed against the little maternal Sparta I made for them, they would have fared nothing like so well in Arcadia.
* * *
—
AND NOW A message to their children’s children: Say “Hello, Great-grandma” and then beat it. My time is precious. I need to listen to the sound the plates of my brain make as they sidle past each other like ships that piss, excuse me, in the night. I had a husband, or he might have been a lover aspiring to be a husband, who thought it was funny to call a possibility a pissabolity. An Australian, naturally. Quite pissably he’s alive somewhere still, one of the pending, in a leaky old home in Queensland trying to remember—now that he can’t pass water without yelling out in agony—what it was about piss he found so funny.
What’s so funny, girls?
Nothing, miss.
Nothing will come of nothing….
My teaching trajectory was spectacular, though I say so myself. I began as an assistant in a northern village primary, handing out crayons, and reached the dizzy heights of Head of Just About Everything in a Hampshire school that numbered foreign royalty among its pupils. Nothing will come of nothing, Your Royal Highnesses. Rien de rien. Nada de nada. I was wrong there. For them, everything came from nothing. Neither moral nor intellectual nothingness stood in their way. But that’s a tedious thought. When did it ever?
That was a long time ago. Half of them will be dead now. Maybe all of them. Long lined up like ice mints in their frosty little coffins.
How good a job did they make of it? I wonder. How many died, as they say, like a man?
There’s a joke—dying like a man. I should sooner teach the world to die like a woman. The women, in my experience, don’t go out screaming, ravaged by failure, having to revisit the site of every botched opportunity one more time before they can accept that life has not delivered. One more time, one last laceration. Being less grandiose—I don’t say less grand—women are less disappointed. Expect not that much and you lose not that much. For me, it’s not the looking back on loss and underachievement I fear. I have that in my cabinets. The one thing I can’t file away is the habit of self-communing. I’ve known myself so long I will miss me. Miss my company. Miss the talk.
That’s the unimaginable part—me not talking to me. Or should that be I not talking to me? The rules of grammar, too, are going.
Me talking to I?
I talked, grammatically, to Arnold—Arnold Fini I liked to call him—for three whole days before realising he was dead.
Never mind who he was. A passer-through. Think of me as a holy place, and you won’t have difficulty thinking of him as a pilgrim. A tourist of sorts, anyway, with his Michelin Green Guide in his pocket. Word gets around. If you happen to be in the vicinity, Princess Schh…is worth a detour. Women get passed on by men, like a foul rumour.
Hence Arnold Fini knocking at my door. I don’t remember how long he stayed with me alive. But dead he stayed three days.
Three days! Couldn’t I tell? Was I unable to distinguish between flesh and blood and a cadaver? Not that straightforward, as it happens, with men of Arnie’s calibre.
What about the one-sidedness of the conversation? What about the rigor mortis? What about the stench?
So who are you to ask—the police?
The answer I gave them, I give you. I have always been a soliloquiser—audience enough for my words, accustomed to the half-company of men lacking the acuity or the patience to keep up. Were I to have waited for them to respond, I’d have lost my thread. So I talked and talked and left it to them whether or not they wanted to follow me.
Three days conversing to a dead man?
I know how it sounds.
But I have to tell you—Arnie was a very good listener.
A very good dissembler, too, though I suppose that amounts to the same thing.
He’d been—where had he been? Basel. Somewhere like that. Switzerland. He’d asked me along, to hold his Michelin guide, while he scrutinised Holbein’s dead Jesus, but I’d said no fear. Basel? Cuckoo clocks?
So he went on his own and took in what greater men than him had been taking in for centuries. Christ on his back with his mouth open, fresh off the cross, as dead as meat.
“Why that in particular?” I’d asked him before he left.
“Pivotal painting,” he told me.
“What’s turning on it?”
“Modernity.”
I kissed his cheek without pleasure or affection and off he went carrying a copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.
“Why that?” I thought of asking him, but knew the answer. Because dear deranged Fyodor rolled the Holbein out of art history and into modern madness science first by nearly fainting in front of it—thank the God who doesn’t exist that wifey was standing by with the smelling salts—and then by having that idiot/saint Prince Munchkin or whatever his name is describe the painting as sufficient to make a man lose his faith. Arnie wasn’t sure whether he had faith or not—I didn’t only go for atheists, let it be noted—but what he did have was art. He was art crazed, always on the point of fainting in front of some work or other himself. I didn’t dare walk him past the Royal Academy in case the odour of pictorial genius leaked out and knocked him over. Otherwise he had a strange way of showing his passion. He was a Dadaist after his time and a conceptualist before it. He didn’t paint—couldn’t paint, I suspect—but when he saw something that moved him he “became” it. Sat for hours on end with his hands folded low between his thighs in a blue dress borrowed from me in imitation of Cézanne’s portrait of his wife. He became an Ingres nude, a Matisse odalisque, a classical athlete, and, serially, Géricault’s inmates of the asylum, all reason fled from their sad faces and, subsequently, his own. He had a soft spot for idiots and cadavers. Get to know what it’s like to be the subject, he believed, and you get to know the artist.
