Читать книгу The Death of Eli Gold - David Baddiel - Страница 8

Chapter 2

On arrival at the Sangster, Harvey Gold finds it difficult not to feel a tiny bit disappointed. He was not a man used to staying in five-star hotels if his father (or his estate) were not paying, and it might perhaps have been expected that he would only be grateful; or, if not actually grateful, at least so unaccustomed to this level of luxury as to be mollified by it. There are, however, a number of problems:

1. The Sangster, although a very beautiful hotel, is not what Harvey had pictured in his mind when, in the taxi from the airport – as a check and balance in his head to the oncoming deathbed visit – he had mused expectantly about the prospect of staying in a Manhattan hotel. For Harvey, although himself born on that island and technically a citizen of it, a stay in Manhattan still required a certain amount of cliché: that is, a room at least seventy storeys up, with floor-to-ceiling windows, giving out on a glittering nightscape of Koyaanisqatsi skyscrapers. The lift at the Sangster, however, travels to a maximum only of twenty-two floors, fourteen of which were extraneous to Harvey anyway, as his room was No. 824. It is perfectly comfortable – more than perfectly comfortable – but has a view only of the internal courtyard of the hotel, and is furnished in a faintly European style. Harvey’s entrance into the room, once he’d got over the initial flummox of American tippage – such a pain in the arse, he thinks, handing over a five to a somewhat unsmiling, virtually fancy-dressed porter – is accompanied by a small sinking of the heart, that once again he’d come to America and wasn’t staying with Kojak.

2. He is still not sure who is paying for the room. At reception, he had been asked for his credit card, along, once again, with his passport, but knew that this was standard procedure. Then again, it may have meant that the room was paid for, but he had to provide a surety for any extras. On handing over his HSBC Visa, Harvey had puffed up the courage in his rather pigeon-like chest, and said, to the autumnally suited man behind the desk: ‘Sorry … can I just ask: has my room been paid for in advance?’

It was a question he didn’t feel entirely comfortable asking, since it clearly indicated a hope on his part that it had been, and therefore was likely to generate a sense in the autumnally suited man that this particular resident may not easily be able to pay for the room should the answer be ‘no’. Harvey knew this was the case from the way he raised the tiniest eyebrow and drummed some code out on the keyboard of his computer.

‘It’s been reserved on an AmEx card, sir … yours?’

‘No, I don’t have American Express. Well, I do, but I don’t use it.’ This was true: a lot of shops in Britain didn’t take it, and long, long ago, Harvey had forgotten the PIN. He sensed, on saying this, a suspicion from the receptionist, a resentment not unlike that he had felt at the airport from the immigration official when it had become clear that he owned an American passport but had chosen not to use it: why would you possess such a jewel and not offer it in your palm to demonstrate your kingliness? Harvey felt he could hear the resentment in the way the man went back to his computer, in the heavy dents his fingers made on the keys.

‘I’m afraid I can’t quite make out from the reservation whether or not all charges are to be drawn on the AmEx card, sir. This may be because the booking seems to be open-ended …?’

He phrased the surmise as a question. Harvey felt moved to answer with the information that his father was dying, but sadly not to a nailed-down schedule, hence his room would indeed have been booked for an open length of time. But instead he just nodded and moved away to the lifts.

3. He doesn’t have a suite. On arriving in the room, his first action – before even opening the heavy oak doors of the TV cabinet to check if the pornography channel was hard- or soft-core – had been to take his Sony Vaio laptop out of its silver case, connect it to the Plug and Play wire, and go straight to www.theSangster.com in order to torment himself with what he did not have. Fourteen suites, he had discovered, feature Steinway or Baldwin grand pianos (‘in keeping’, said the unctuously written website, ‘with the hotel’s musical heritage’) tuned twice a week. Harvey didn’t play the piano (although he still had a faint sense of the absurd needlessness of tuning any piano twice a fucking week) but nonetheless felt, on reading this, the deep, deep deprivation of not having one in his room. Further picking away at the scab of his envy, he read about the ‘legendary’ New York suite, on the twenty-second floor, with its sizeable dining room, kitchen, traditional living room, fireplace with faux-quartz logs, antique books, sunburst clocks, Lars Bolanger lacquered boxes, sage velvet seating area, another fucking piano (Steinway – tuned, no doubt, every fifteen seconds), wall-mounted plasmas, state-of-the-art Bang & Olufsen acoustic system and, of course, a ‘two-storey view of the Manhattan skyline’. He closed the computer, wondering, if he had been certain his dad was paying for it, whether or not he would have demanded an upgrade.

These three reasons finesse his dissatisfaction, each one rising and falling at different times on the graphic equalizer of his anxiety. What would his present therapist – No. 8 – tell him to tell himself? I would really like to be in a better room, with a view and a set of Lars Bolanger-lacquered boxes, but the fact that I’m not is not the end of the world. Something like that. He gets up from the leather-topped desk and flops down on one of the two twin beds in his room. Harvey doesn’t much like that either. No matter how posh the Sangster is, the presence of the twin doubles makes it feel like a room at a Travellers’ Rest somewhere on the A41. Against his overhanging gut, he feels the dig of what should have been – according to the décor – an antique silver cigarette case, but is in fact his iPhone. He takes it out, noticing that another text has come in from Stella: Darling, hope you landed safely. Call me when you have a moment.

He remembers then that the phone had trilled again halfway through the journey from JFK, where he had ignored it, because it had arrived just as the taxi set wheel on the Brooklyn Bridge, allowing him to take in his first view for ten years of Manhattan Island. However much the overall idea of this journey has upped Harvey’s already monstrous anxiety levels, he had at least been looking forward to this: this packed vertical Oz, rust-brown and silver, rising from the sea in the limpid light of the morning. It always made him catch his breath, that such an urban sight could be so beautiful. He held the view, sliced across by the cables of the bridge, for some seconds, allowing its splendour to work some small massage on his migranous soul. Then he had caught sight of the gap where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center used to be, and the view became the mouth of a prize-fighter with two teeth knocked out.

Harvey wonders about calling home. Assuming that extras above and beyond the cost of the room are definitely going to be charged to him, he worries about the cost of the phone bill. He knows that phone calls from a five-star hotel are likely to be charged at an absurd number of dollars per minute. He considers using his mobile but then thinks that that too would be very expensive internationally. There is another option: one of the many bills that arrive daily on Harvey’s brown-as-dead-grass welcome mat at home, one of the many direct debits signed years ago and eating away at his solvency ever since, is for some company, who offer – for a small monthly payment – to provide a four-digit phone number that their customers can dial while staying at hotels, especially hotels abroad, before the number of their actual call, and which fix that call at a standard local rate. Which would now be marvellously useful for Harvey if at any point on any trip since signing up to this direct debit he had remembered to write down the fucking four-digit number and bring it with him.

Putting off the decision, he decides to check his email. Harvey gets anxious if cut off from the internet. He hears about writers – he just about considers himself one, even though collating the Dictaphonic outpourings of celebrities rarely seems to qualify him as such – who, as soon as they sit down to write, unplug the modem. Not Harvey: if his home modem freezes, as it periodically does, he panics, diving immediately down on his knees amidst the wires and discarded newspapers and sweet wrappers of his study floor in order to unplug and replug it. While waiting for it to restart, he cannot work – it is as if he himself has frozen. There is no rationale for this – occasionally he needs to Google some fact, but most of the information he needs is already provided by his subjects – but the possibility of exclusion on this worldwide scale is too much. He needs to feel he is in there, one of the myriad upturned mouths sucking on the global InfoMother’s billion teats.

The Sony Vaio rumbles for while, worrying him, and then Windows Mail opens: he hits Send and Receive, and watches the bar fill to a solid blue. He has nine messages. Eight of them are Spam – Ebony Anastasia Does Interracial Dicking Time, MILF Celestine Opens Her Sweet Ass Do You Want Some?, Superhot Trannies Notwithstanding, PlayPoker UK Exclusive Promotion, Hard Erecttion in 20 Minutes, Erectile Dysfunction?, ChitChatBingo, and one which makes him feel a bit weepy entitled Let Us Protect You, Harvey (from an insurance company) – and one from his agent, Alan. He knows what Alan’s email is going to say – he knows it will be delicately poised between expressing condolences for his father’s condition and wanting to know when Harvey is going to deliver the pitch for Lark’s autobiography – but still opens it with a tiny hope, as he opens all emails, that they will carry news of something stupendously positive. It is a message delicately poised between expressing condolence for his father’s condition and wanting to know when Harvey is going to deliver the pitch for Lark’s autobiography.

Harvey pitches for a lot of autobiographies these days, many more than he actually writes. Lark, though, is a tough one, as she has done, as far as he can make out, absolutely nothing. Lark is a pop star, but Harvey, like everyone else, has never heard any of her songs, nor even seen a picture of her. This is because Lark is being kept under wraps. Her record company, her management and her PR agency – who have decided, the way these people can now, that she is going to be huge – have created a new marketing strategy around Lark, whereby she is going to burst forth fully-formed onto the public, Athena from their combined Zeus-like forehead. On some so far unspecified date in the future, Lark will be brought forth to the world – her single, her video, her MySpace page will all be let out at the same time, followed closely by her album, and her autobiography. This is what Harvey is supposed to pitch for. He does have some information about her – Alan keeps on sending it, as attachments to his increasingly urgent emails – but every time Harvey remembers the only fact he does know about Lark – that she is nineteen – he cannot face opening any of them.

He shuts down Mail and opens a document file entitled IdeasJune. Harvey has many places in which he writes down ideas. In his hand luggage, along with a newly purchased copy of Solomon’s Testament – he had wanted, because she was pretty, to blurt out to the girl behind the till at WHSmith in Terminal Four at Heathrow, that he was Eli’s son, and had a first edition inscribed to him at home with the words ‘To Harvey, may you read it when you’re ready …’ and was only buying this one because he hadn’t read it for years and, well, he didn’t really know why he was buying it now but thought he should maybe read it again on the plane over because he was going to see his father on his deathbed – along with that, his father’s masterpiece, sits a Dictaphone, and two notebooks, one covered in gold leather, and one in moleskin. Harvey fetishizes notebooks. He has a drawerful of them at home in his study desk – covered in so many materials (velvet, cloth, zebra print, PVC); large hardbound ones and small; policeman-flicking-it-open-in-the-dock ones – and in all of them he has written thoughts for novels, films, plays, even – in one of them – business ideas. They are not empty. But they are not full either; each one has a series of scrawls, written in Harvey’s lazy script, which end after about five pages. It is partly the act of writing – that is, handwriting – that fails. Harvey likes the idea of opening the gilded notebook, and marking its embossed paper with the varied scents of his mind, but when it comes to it, writing with a pen has become a bit of a faff. More than that: writing with a pen doesn’t feel significant. It feels the preserve, now, of telephone numbers and email addresses hurriedly scribbled on stickies that he knows he’s going to lose. For his words to mean something, they have to be written on a computer. He knows this, yet continues to buy notebooks.

The document IdeasJune has a number of sentences already in it. Some are fully-formed pitches: ‘Reality TV Idea: convince someone they’ve died and gone to heaven.’ Others just phrases, pending novels yet unwritten: ‘Her breasts spilled out of her bra like muscle rain.’ On a new page, Harvey writes:

Film Idea

Title: SHALLOW

John Shallow is obsessed with looks. He is also an immigration officer at JFK. His obsession serves him well in his job because he always checks people’s – especially women’s – faces very thoroughly. But it doesn’t serve him so well in his marriage, which is falling apart.

However, through a long and difficult process, involving much therapy and various epiphanies (? don’t know what these are – something profound/life-changing) he comes to terms with it, and saves his marriage. Just at that point, though, while at work, he spots – because he’s still got the skill (the skill at looking) even though he’s sorted out the problems that come with it – someone coming through immigration who turns out to be Osama bin Laden, incredibly well-disguised, using plastic surgery etc (a woman?). Osama is arrested and overnight Shallow becomes a national hero and a major celebrity.

This leads to loads of sexual opportunities and wrecks his marriage.

Harvey leans back. Something’s not right about it. He highlights the main body of the prose, and then opens the Formatting Palette, and clicks on I. This happens:

Film Idea

Title: SHALLOW

John Shallow is obsessed with looks. He is also an immigration officer at JFK. His obsession serves him well in his job because he always checks people’s – especially women’s – faces very thoroughly. But it doesn’t serve him so well in his marriage, which is falling apart.

However, through a long and difficult process, involving much therapy and various epiphanies (? don’t know what these are – something profound/life-changing) he comes to terms with it, and saves his marriage. Just at that point, though, while at work, he spots – because he’s still got the skill (the skill at looking) even though he’s sorted out the problems that come with it – someone coming through immigration who turns out to be Osama bin Laden, incredibly well-disguised, using plastic surgery etc (a woman?). Osama is arrested and overnight Shallow becomes a national hero and a major celebrity.

This leads to loads of sexual opportunities and wrecks his marriage.

Yes, that feels better. But now – as ever, when he has done a bit of work – Harvey must grant himself some small reward. He turns away from the computer and takes from his pocket a small bottle of blue liquid. However bleak the journey, there were always consolations on coming to America: the Manhattan view was one, and here was another. While pushing his baggage, ill balanced on the trolley, through JFK’s anywhere-in-the-world airport mall, saliva had gathered in the corners of his mouth, sent up from his forever inflamed throat glands, and Harvey had realized that he was hungry. Not straightforwardly for food; there was something specific which was making his mouth water at that moment, something specific that his system was reminding him can only properly be got hold of in America, reminding him a split second before the words formed inside his damp, sleepless skull: sour sweets. Harvey loves sour sweets; he loves the taste contradiction, the sugar fighting the acid, his tongue a pair of apothecary’s scales holding these opposites in perfect balance. He loves the dialectic. And he loves the fact that all things are postponed during the sucking of a sour sweet; that, while the conflict between sweet and sour remains unresolved, Harvey can float, his soul buoyed up by the sensual striving towards that equilibrium, and nothing matters until it’s over. If he could only get hold of enough of the right kind of sour sweets in the UK, he thinks he may never be depressed; instead, he would be happily addicted to them, despite the terrible stomach cramps that eating them always eventually induces. But in the UK, none of the sweets – not Sour Haribos, not TongueBubbler, not even Toxic Waste – were anything like sour enough for him.

Here, however, in this land where contradiction was possibility, there were sour sweets, Harvey knew, that took the concept of sour-sweetness into a whole new dimension. He had seen on the internet, available from various US confectionery sites, boxes of brightly coloured jelly beans, emblazoned with the promises Extra Sour, Extremely Sour, Very Sour Sours. Yes: Harvey has Googled the phrases ‘sour sweets’, ‘sour candy’, and ‘sour confectionery’, wrapping them in inverted commas so as to allow the computer to make no mistakes about his intention. He had Goo-ogled them, in fact, bringing up multiple images of boxes and wrappers to lasciviously stare at. Unbelievably, perhaps, for a forty-four-year-old man, he had even read reviews of some of these sweets. Zours Incredibly Sour Tangerines had got a unanimous five stars on cybercandy.com, and Harvey had been on the verge of getting them to ship a box out when he remembered he was soon to visit his native land – which, at that moment, figured in his head as Willy Wonka’s factory to Charlie.

Half mad with the craving, and once through the small hiccup in customs, he had dashed inside the first available confectionery containing store, leaving his baggage on the trolley outside, aching to be control-exploded by security. The shop had stocked no Zours, leading Harvey into a mad twenty seconds of uncertainty, his eyes riffling through the Hersheys and the Oreos, until finally asking, in a voice hoarse with desire, ‘Do you have any sour sweets?’ The store assistant, a ginger-haired, fuzzy-faced woman, looked blank, so Harvey looked down, ashamed, feeling that her blankness must contain a condemnation, a deadpan amazement that a man of his age should have such adolescent needs; at which stage he noticed that her index finger had stirred from its fellows, and was indicating downwards and to the left. Harvey’s eyes followed, past the brown and green and pinks, and nearly missed it, because it wasn’t in a wrapper: it wasn’t even a sweet as such, in the boiled, solid, chewable and/or biteable sense. But then his eyes did a double-take, and returned to the words emblazoned on the labels of three small bottles perched above a bright rack of bubblegum: Extra Tart Sour Blast Spray.

Harvey could hardly believe it. Even in all his research he hadn’t come across this: a spray, a concentrate. The sour-sweet sensation, literally bottled, distilled, injectable directly onto the tongue like morphine into the pain receptors of the brain. He bought all three bottles for what seemed at that moment like the incredible bargain price of $2.25 dollars apiece. He had intended to wait until he got to the hotel before trying them, in order to savour the moment. Unfortunately, self-control of this order – or, rather, the lack of it – lies at the very heart of Harvey Gold. This was why various lucky travellers who happened to be passing through the gates of Terminal One of JFK that day were treated to the sight of the middle-aged son of the world’s greatest living author standing in the queue for the airport taxis, mouth open and eyes closed in some small ecstasy, spraying what appeared to be a sample bottle of cheap perfume onto his stretched-out thirsty-dog tongue, gradually coating it blue.

Now, in the hotel room, lying prone on one of his two quilted boats of bedding, he offers that same tongue up for another spray. The wardrobe door opposite has swung open from a bizarre attempt he made soon after entering the room to pack his clothes away, giving up almost instantly on the realization that – even if his father should survive longer than Freda’s projected six weeks – Harvey will continue, while here, to live out of his suitcase, like he has always done on every other trip that necessitated a suitcase. On the inner right-hand door of the wardrobe is a mirror, where Harvey can see himself, or, rather, where he can see all those parts of himself that are not hidden by the solid explosion of his stomach rising from the bed like a termite mound from the ground. His tongue is out of his mouth, and looks, blue and upside-down, like a football shirt drying on the washing line of his lower lip. He undergoes a visual epiphany, not unlike when a mirror on the bathroom door swings your toilet seat image into view, making you think: is man but this? This is a thought Harvey has about himself around five times a minute, however, and so he overrides it with a gust of Extra Tart Sour Blast Spray, flooding his aching taste buds with soursweet rain.

After the hit, trying to avoid the aspartame comedown, Harvey shifts his bulk around to the side of the bed and dials his home number on the telephone on the side table.

‘Mr Gold, how can I help you?’ a smooth, sonorous voice says. Harvey wonders, at first, if it is God, finally asking the requisite question, but then realizes his mistake.

‘Sorry, I forgot to dial …’

‘It’s nine for an outside number, sir.’

‘Yes. OK.’

‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’

Harvey thinks: everything?

‘No. Thanks.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

He clicks off, and dials again, adding the magic nine. And then at the last minute he remembers: five hours behind. His eyes flick to the hands of the faux-antique set on the bedside table: quarter to eleven. In England it will be just gone six – and then she picks up. He hears an airy silence, the rustling of sheets and blankets, before Stella’s ‘Hello?’ comes down the line, alarm penetrating her tone even though her throat is husky and clotted with sleep.

‘Sorry, darling … sorry. I forgot about the time difference. Go back to sleep.’

‘Harvey? Are you OK?’

‘Yes. Yes.’ He knows this is never true, but – not just with her, with everyone that asks it – you can’t go through it all, not every time, can you? No, I’m overweight, exhausted, I get these weird pains in my legs, I have constant low-level nausea, I have prostituted what tiny talent I have ghostwriting the lives of idiots, every woman I pass fills me with despair, my child has Asperger’s Syndrome, my father is dying and I deeply, deeply love my wife but can’t bear the idea that she is starting to grow old. And yourself?

‘Your dad … is he …?’

‘I haven’t seen him yet. No change, as far as I know. But look – what time is it there …?’

A shuffling sound. He sees the scene, familiar in his mind, the safety of the half-light, the day not started, her profile shifting towards the digital clock on her bedside draw.

‘Five forty-five.’

‘Yes. So sorry. Go back to sleep.’ He can feel, even across the wide swathe of water, how it’s too late, how his phone call has rushed consciousness up to her surface, like an air bubble floating from the deep.

‘No, it’s OK. I needed to get up early anyway. Jamie’s got the Montgomery Clinic …’

‘I thought that wasn’t until nine thirty.’

‘Yes. Well, I’ve got to wash my hair.’ In his mind’s eye, Harvey sees the process: her lying back in a full, scalding bath, her face surrounded by water, her curls spiralling away like sea snakes, the whole image a benign Medusa. When she rises out of the steam to work on her hair, her fingers on her scalp move with some precise feminine alchemy, so distinct from his soapy plonk and rub. Every so often, she rotates her head from side to side to prevent the liquid pooling in her ears. The intimacy of watching her wash her hair can feel at times overwhelming. And afterwards, when her hair is wet, falling across her face, before she lifts it into a towel – he does not know where to look. She feels too vulnerable, and his eyes too searching.

‘And I’ve got a lot of work stuff to do, as well, so it’s probably a good idea to get started …’

‘Stop trying to make it better for me.’

‘I’m not. I won’t get back to sleep now anyway. And however pissed off I am about that – which is, yeah, a bit – I’m also pleased, Harvey. To hear from you. I thought your plane must have crashed.’

He laughs, but knows she means it. Every time Harvey flies anywhere, Stella assumes his plane will crash. Her kisses, when he leaves, always have a force to them, impelled by a sense that this could be the last time.

‘That would have been on the news.’

‘The CIA might have been keeping it quiet.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. They might have imposed a security blanket.’

‘I think the word you’re after is blackout.’

‘Oh, yeah. But it’s quarter to six in the morning. I can confuse blanket and blackout. Because I’d like both.’

‘How’s Jamie?’

He hears her rearranging the pillows.

‘He’s OK. He was happy enough after school yesterday. Only got upset at bedtime that you weren’t here. Did you read his note?

‘Note?’

‘His picture. I put it in your suitcase.’

He gets up off the bed, still holding the phone. ‘What, as a surprise?’

A soft beat, her patience diffusing. ‘No, I told you it was in there, yesterday.’

‘Oh sorry, I –’

‘It’s OK. You were in one of your nervous flaps when you were leaving. I knew you weren’t really listening.’

‘Hold on, I’ll go and have a look.’

‘It’s in the zip-up pocket. In the top bit.’

He goes over to the suitcase. It is there, a white envelope with the word ‘DAD’ written on it, in Jamie’s painfully immature handwriting. Inside is a piece of asymmetrically folded A4 paper, on one half of which Jamie has drawn a chess set. The figures are not arranged on the board, but around it. They are not rendered exactly, as they would be if Jamie was an extraordinary Asperger’s child, but randomly: it is difficult to make out which are pawns, and which are major pieces. They look like chess figures in the wind.

Jamie has not written anything to go with his drawing, but on the facing half, in Stella’s looping hand, it says: ‘Have a good trip, even though it’s for a sad thing. I love you. J xxx.’ Harvey holds the note in his hand, and feels his heart crack with love.

He comes back to the phone. Before he speaks, having heard him pick the receiver up, she says:

‘That’s exactly what he told me to write.’

‘It’s really nice. Did you suggest the chess thing?’

He says this knowing that both of them would rather their son had chosen the subject himself, thereby indicating that he has, of his own volition, noticed something about his father’s interests.

‘I may have done,’ she says.

She yawns. He sees their bedroom, dark and warm: Stella makes everywhere cosy. They live in Kent, in a cottage on the North Downs, which would be idyllic were it not for the proximity of the M2. Wooed by the oldness, the Englishness, of the place, Harvey had succumbed easily to the previous owner’s trick of enclosing the front garden with a series of tall hedges, obscuring the surrounding countryside. On a final visit before completion, while visiting the upstairs toilet, he had noticed a somewhat busy road in the middle distance, but, infatuated with the place, and too frightened to disturb at this late stage the serious business of property transaction, had put it out of his mind. Now he spends much time in the garden, trying to gauge exactly how loud that muffled roar is, trying to work out how he couldn’t have heard it before, and trying to think himself into Stella’s method of imagining it’s the sound of the sea.

‘I still think you should go back to sleep.’

‘I said: I’m awake now. Look, don’t worry about me. Did you sleep on the plane?’

‘No. You know I can never sleep on a plane.’

‘You should have flown business …’

‘That’s what Freda said …’ A momentary silence follows this: Harvey assumes she has taken the comparison with his father’s wife as an implicit rebuke, which he had not meant, at least consciously. There is an awkward pause, such as can happen even between couples who have been together for fourteen years, and for whom blips of silence are not generally registered. He waits, wondering if it might be possible over the phone, in another country, to hear the sound of the M2.

‘Well, anyway, darling …’ says Harvey, eventually, feeling the spasticity of words said to break such silences, ‘… I’ll call you later.’

‘OK. I love you.’

‘I love you, too.’

It is the truth, however fast it makes his heart dip.

* * *

My daddy seemed a bit better today. The nurses sat him up in bed, and they took off that see-through mask he usually has to wear over his mouth and nose. He didn’t have it on for ages (later on Mommy told me it was over five minutes!). He still didn’t say anything – the nurse had to put the tube back into his neck while he had the mask off, so that probably didn’t help – but Mommy told me to come over and hold his hand. It made me feel a bit funny, because I haven’t held Daddy’s hand before for so long. After a while I started to notice some of the weird things about it: how he’s got loads of these big brown patches (and some black spots) on the top side and how the bones seemed to be poking through the skin, so that it was a bit like holding a skeleton’s hand. The tops of his fingers (around the nails) look sort of yellow, like he’s bruised them or something, and his nails are really long too – I remember Mommy telling me that Daddy’s nails grow really quickly, and he always forgets to cut them – especially the thumb ones, which were so long they were kind of gross. You might think that nails wouldn’t grow when you’re asleep all the time, but they do.

Sometimes this happens, that Daddy’s skin and stuff makes me feel weird. I’ve noticed before that his skin isn’t like mine – obviously! – or Jada’s, or even Mommy’s, but I guess I’ve kind of gotten used to it. I didn’t really notice it at all until Jada said to me that time that thing about how my daddy’s skin looked like it had lots of little holes in it. I said shut up, stupid, like I always do when she says something like that, something just meant to be nasty, but afterwards I couldn’t help looking and it made it hard to forget because I could see what she meant, sort of. His skin looks more like a net than skin; it kind of looks like bits of skin knitted together around all these tiny holes, like wool looks like close up.

His skin looks even more like wool now, because he’s got all these little white hairs coming out of it. Mommy told me it’s difficult for Daddy to shave now – well, it’s impossible for him to shave, but it’s not even easy for anyone else to do it! They’re so worried about cutting him. But he has lots of little white hairs coming out of the tops of his hands, too, even on his fingers, and he never shaved those even when he wasn’t in hospital. I suppose you would need a special kind of tiny shaver to do them, and I don’t know if you can even get them in any store. I got this really funny idea in my head, that I wanted to turn his hand around, and play round and round the garden with it, even though I haven’t played that for years, not since I was a really tiny baby – but still, when I thought about it, I remembered how I used to like it so much, the tickly feeling so nice, as the grown-up’s finger goes round and round, watching it and feeling it at the same time, and waiting, waiting, waiting for the bigger tickle up the arm. I didn’t do it with Daddy’s hand – I mean, I knew it’d be a stupid thing to do – and, besides, I don’t know if he can actually feel a tickle when he’s so ill and dying and everything.

After Mommy told me to hold Daddy’s hand, her cellphone rang, and she was on it for quite a while (you aren’t really meant to have your cellphone on in the hospital, but I think it’s OK for Mommy to keep hers on because Daddy’s so famous). I held his hand and tried not to think about how weird the skin on it was: I tried to look at his face instead, but that’s even weirder really, because Daddy’s cheeks hang really low, and his ears are so big (especially the bottom bit, the soft bit), and his nose is so long, that now because his skin is all grey his face reminded me of an elephant’s face. Which made me want to laugh at first, but I kept it inside, by holding my breath, which I can do for nearly a minute. Anyway, then I started talking, just saying stuff, things that were in my head: I said, ‘I love you Daddy’ and ‘I hope you get better soon, Daddy’ even though I know he’s not going to get better, he’s going to die, but I didn’t know what else to say – it would have sounded really weird to talk about him dying – but it doesn’t matter anyway, it’s just good to say stuff. He can hear me. Mommy always says he can, even though he never says anything, or even nods his head or whatever. Sometimes she tells me to look in his eyes – Look deep into his eyes, she always says, because that’s where he still lives – and where you can see, she says, that he still understands everything. But his eyes were only half open, and what you can see of the inside bit looks really red – I don’t mean just at the bottom of the eyes, that bit’s always been really red on my daddy’s eyes, and kind of wet, and sometimes I used to think his eyes were bleeding, or that maybe, because he’s a genius, when he cries, it’s blood – God! So mad! That’s like something from Twilight (which Mommy doesn’t know I’ve watched – Jada showed me it at her house, her mom never cares what she sees on TV and stuff).

So then I just kept going, saying whatever came out of my head. Mommy was still on the phone and the nurses were moving around the room and that machine that Daddy is hooked up to all the time with the green lines on it kept on beeping, so no one was really noticing. I told him about Aristotle, my cat, about how he’s started to get really fat because while we haven’t been at home the whole time Noda – that’s our housekeeper; she’s from the Philippines – just leaves food out for him, like a whole tin at once!! And then he just goes over and nibbles on it all day like a cow eating the grass. I told Daddy about how last time me and Elaine took him to the vet, the vet said that he needed to lose weight otherwise he might get ill, and so we bought him this cat food they only sell at the vet called Seniors, which is meant for older cats – which he kind of is, too, even though he’s younger than me, six and a half, but you have to times it by ten, so that makes him sixty-five (which is way old, but still quite a lot younger than Daddy) – but it’s good for fat cats because it’s got less protein and stuff in it and that helps to make them thin. But all that’s like a waste of time now because Noda just opens the tin of FancyFeast and pours it all out for him to nosh at all day.

I felt a bit silly talking about Aristotle like this, because I didn’t know if it was the right kind of thing to talk about. I thought maybe I should be talking about something more grown up, but I couldn’t think of anything. I started to feel sad, because I haven’t seen Aristotle that much since we’ve been going to the hospital all the time, and I really miss him. He’s a really sweet cat, with black and white fur and a really cute little pink nose, who always purrs when you stroke him. I think he misses me, too, because he always comes right up to me when we do get to go home, and nuzzles my leg for ages. So because I was thinking about him and about how he wasn’t getting to eat the Seniors that he’s supposed to, I started to cry. Then, I felt really silly, standing there, getting that funny tickle between the corner of your eye and your nose when the tear comes out – I mean not like blubbing crazy, not even sniffling, just one or two tears coming out – but Mommy quickly stopped her phone call and came over, knelt down and gave me the biggest hug, squeezing me so, so tight.

‘Colette! Darling! It’s OK …’ she said. ‘Cry if you want to. Cry. It’s OK.’ She was patting me on the back at the same time, like Elaine sometimes used to do when I was little and had swallowed something bad. ‘It’s OK.’ I was still holding Daddy’s hand. Mommy was smiling, that smile she does when she looks at Daddy sleeping in his bed, or sometimes when she picks up one of his books. Sort of sad and pleased at the same time. ‘We all feel like crying at the moment.’

‘But you don’t cry …’ I said.

She did one of her smiles. ‘I want to. Really. But sometimes when you’re grown up you have to be strong.’ She pulled a tissue from her sleeve and wiped my eyes. ‘Do you need to blow your nose?’

I shook my head. ‘When I say strong I don’t mean like when someone who lifts something really heavy.’ I knew she didn’t mean that. ‘I mean when bad things happen – when the worst things happen – you have to try and keep going. With a smile on your face. To make sure everyone else doesn’t get more upset.’ She touched my cheek. ‘I have to be strong for you.’

I thought about this for a bit.

‘OK. But if you want to cry it’s OK, too, Mommy,’ I said. ‘Maybe when you cry, I can be strong for you.’

Mommy looked so pleased that I said this. But she also looked a bit like she was going to cry there and then. She gave me another really big hug, and then said, in her softest voice:

‘Thank you, Colette. Thank you.’

I wasn’t sure whether or not to say anything about how much I missed Aristotle. Instead I said: ‘Mommy. Is Daddy in a comma?’

She blinked, and moved her head back a bit. ‘I’m sorry, darling?’

‘I heard Dr Ghundkhali say that that’s what Daddy is in. A comma. At first I thought they meant like that little thing you write in a sentence when you want the person reading it to stop, but not for as long as when you do a full stop – I thought maybe it was something to do with Daddy being a writer? – but then I realized it must be a word that sounds the same but means two different things. Like pair. Or been.’

Mommy looked at me. She was making a weird face, all frowny. Then, behind me, I heard one of the nurses – I think it was the one with the curly hair and the banana nose – laugh. I could feel my face going red, because I knew straight away that I must have said something stupid or kid-like, and I hate doing that – I hate doing it in front of anyone, and I especially hate doing it in front of Mommy. I am Colette Gold, and I do not say stupid eight-year-old kiddie things that grown-ups laugh at because they’re so cute. I got so cross that I started to feel another little tear come out, which only made it worse.

‘Colette, darling,’ said Mommy. ‘Don’t get upset. That’s a very good question. You just slightly misheard Dr Gundkhali. He would have said that Daddy was in a “coma”. You see, it sounds a bit like comma, doesn’t it? But it has an extended – like a longer – “o”. Coama.’

‘Oh,’ I said. Then, like I was saying it in slow motion: ‘Coa … ma.’ She nodded, one of her slow nods which makes her fringe move like a little curtain in front of her eyes. No one said anything for a bit. So then I said: ‘Yes, but what does it mean?’

Mommy opened her mouth to speak, but then the hospital door banged really loudly, and a man came in. He was fat, and sweaty, and his suit was too tight for him. Mommy got up, and looked at him for quite a long time without saying anything.

‘Hello, Freda,’ he said.

‘Colette,’ she said. ‘Come and meet your half-brother Harvey.’

* * *

This is too much rain, thinks Violet. She means too much rain to go for her walk, but is aware as she thinks it of a sense that, for some summers now, there has been too much rain. It used to be funny, the unpredictability of British summer, something that she might have commented on with a resigned shrug to her neighbours if they bumped into each other buttoned-up in July, and the neighbours would nod and smile resignedly back, and it was a nice, reassuring, confirmation that they shared the same mock-weary national expectation. But that was just about the way the sun used to stand the country up. It was not about rain like this, like a monsoon, hitting the pavement so hard that filthy fat globules of dust-water fly up from the cracks.

She has opened the frosted fire-glass front door, and is standing on the top step, looking out at Redcliffe Square. She already knows from looking out of her room window – and from the way the stuck branch trembled, like it was freezing – that the weather was probably too bad to venture outside, but she thought it might look better at ground level. It does not. If anything, standing here brings home the problem more clearly, which is not so much the weather as the ground itself, transformed by the rain into an assault course for her and her stick. She does not mind the weather, really: she does not mind getting a bit wet, or having her hair blown into a mess, even though she had only last week been to the hairdressers and had it styled and coloured (plus a root perm to give her some body and to cover the small bald spot just below the crown). But she does mind being attacked by the ground; she minds slipping on a puddle or being blown over by the wind and crashing to the concrete and becoming in an instant one of the residents who has had a fall – the three most dreaded words at Redcliffe House, heard only in whispers, the care home equivalent of Auschwitz’s chosen for selection.

She shuts the door: the cold street air in her nostrils mingles for a second with the sickly overheated scent of the hallway. She had hoped to buy a paper, to see if there was any more news about Eli. Three newspapers – the Mail, the Telegraph and the Express – are delivered daily to the house, but when Violet enters the living room, she sees that, as ever, they have been snapped up by those (mainly male) residents keen to demonstrate their lack of senility. Joe Hillier, she notices, is busy consolidating this demonstration using the Telegraph, the paper which best allows for the requisite amount of page-flapping and harrumphing. Luckily, for Violet’s purposes, Pat Cadogan collars her immediately to give her a long report on the condition of her shingles, allowing her to feign concern while standing at the back of Joe’s chair looking over his shoulder.

Sure enough, Joe turns the page out of the front few pages and all their pressing seriousness about politicians she can no longer remember the names of, and there he is – her ex-husband (the phrase sounds ridiculous, even inside her head), centred on the page, the same black-and-white photograph that had been on television the day before.

‘What is it?’ says Pat, a grimace of irritation breaking though her seen-it-all implacability: she had noticed Violet’s lack of concentration, her failure to nod at her retelling of the last two castigations of the house doctors.

‘Sorry Pat … I … Joe?’

Joe Hillier looks up, but, as Violet is behind him, he simply scans the room, shrugs his shoulders, and puts it down – in a rather matter-of-fact way – to voices in his head.

‘Joe!’ She taps him on the shoulder. He tries to look round, but the turning circle of his neck fails him, and he has to shift his body sideways to see her.

‘What is it?’

‘Would you mind if I had the paper?’

He looks at it, folded now on his lap. ‘This one?’

‘Yes …’

‘Well, I haven’t finished reading it yet.’

He stares at her, with all the truculence that old men reserve for old women.

‘OK. Can I have it when you have?’

‘Well, I think Frank …’ Joe raises an arthritic, yellowing finger towards another resident, a man wearing thick-lens glasses rimmed with heavy, 1960s black frames whom Violet has never spoken to ‘… was next in the queue for the Telegraph.’

‘Well, fine. Just whenever everyone’s finished with it, I’d like the page with that photograph.’

Violet’s natural instinct is diplomatic, and she had been smiling, but her voice, raised by the betrayal within it of a tiny level of frustration, causes a number of men and women in the room – at least, the ones with their hearing aids on – to turn round. Violet had never raised her voice before in three years at Redcliffe House, and it is clear from the uncertainty on some of the residents’ faces that they have no idea who had been speaking.

‘Have it? You mean, keep it?’ says the man who Joe had referred to as Frank.

‘I don’t think that’s House policy, is it?’

He takes his glasses off, in the manner of a board member at an important meeting, dealing with a thorny issue someone else has brought up. Behind them, red threads creep in from all sides of his eyes towards the cataract-white centres, like blood dropped in milk. With a sinking heart, Violet realizes that the two men are going to use her request as a means of pretending they still exist in the world of the living.

‘Absolutely correct, Frank,’ says Joe. ‘The rules state that all newspapers and magazines put out in the communal area for use of the residents must be left in the communal area at the end of the day for recycling.’

‘Oh, for crying out loud Joe Hillier,’ says Norma Miller, one of the more lively residents. She is Welsh – so always addresses people by both their names – and her hair is dyed shockingly blonde for a woman in her eighties. Her face is so engraved with lines it looks, Violet always thinks, like crazy paving: she has smoked her whole life, and is furious that she is not allowed to continue to do so inside Redcliffe House. ‘Don’t be such a stupid old stickler. Let her have the bloody paper if she wants it.’

‘Why do you want it, anyway?’

Violet turns; it is Pat Cadogan who had spoken, her eyes squinting with suspicion. Violet had dreaded someone asking this. She had hoped the newspaper would just be handed over, and she could squirrel it away to her room, but now, as always, events had run out of control. It was why she never spoke up; why she chose, often, not to say anything at all.

‘Oh, no reason, really. I know – I used to know …’ she doesn’t want to say his name; it would just lead further away from the straight line back to her room, ‘… him. The man in the photograph. A long time ago.’

Joe Hillier picks up the paper and shakes the pages out. ‘Barack Obama?’

‘No! Him. On the facing page.’

Joe scans the print. A piece about the arts, about books – worse, a writer of fiction: she could hear in the snort of breath through his solidly packed nostrils that this was an article that he, a man from the north of England, would normally disregard.

‘Eli … Gold. Yes, I’ve heard of him.’

‘Didn’t he kill one of his wives?’ says Frank.

‘No!’ says Violet. ‘It was a suicide pact that went wrong.’

Joe Hillier frowns, though it is unclear whether this is from disbelief, or because the idea of disposing of one’s wife in that way – Joe had lived for fifty-two years with a woman dedicated to making his life a disappointment – suddenly occurs to him as brilliant.

‘Gold …’ says Pat, menacingly; she looks over Joe’s shoulder at the picture. ‘Is he a relative of yours?’

Violet seizes on it. ‘Yes! Yes, he is. A distant … cousin.’

Pat stares at her, her tiny eyes – had they shrunk with age? Weren’t eyes the only part of the body that didn’t do that? – narrowed to slits. Don’t you lie to me is so clearly etched into her expression, it seems to be written on a comic-book balloon attached to her mouth. Violet turns away: she does not want to lie – she is naturally no good at it – but it is so much easier than the truth, which in this case, she thinks, would not be believed. It seems so unlikely, really, even to her, that she, as she sees herself in the big gilt-edge mirror over the living-room fireplace, an ancient husk of femininity, could ever have been loved by him, as he is pictured in the newspaper, so pert and sharp-suited and – a word the young people used to use: or did they still? – cool. She may even be put down as showing the first signs of senility. And even if it were believed, in the unlikely event that someone were to check the information and discover its truth, she knows she would only emerge from her cocoon of anonymity as an object of resentment. It was impossible for such worlds to meet; the one in the paper, even though it was past and dead – the world of fame, and worldliness, and glamour – and this one, Redcliffe House, this apex of mundanity. It was like trying to push together the wrong ends of two magnets; she would be held responsible for forcing such a bad conjunction.

‘All right, then,’ says Joe, shrugging. ‘I’ll ask one of the nurses to hold onto that page for you at the end of the day …’

‘Thank you, Joe. That’s very good of you.’

But of course he forgets, and when she asks the next day all the newspapers have already been sent off for recycling.

* * *

Where were all these women in winter? thinks Harvey, viewing the teeming Manhattan sidewalks from the back windows of another cab. It is not the first time he has had the thought: it seems it comes to him earlier every year, his own deeply dysfunctional first cuckoo of spring. He knows the argument: it’s just the clothes, with their dizzying gaps between belt and top and neck and bra strap, giving onto the soft planes of caramelizing flesh. But that makes no sense to Harvey, because, looking round, he knows for certain that the women who snag his gaze in these clothes would snag his gaze were they dressed head to foot in straw.

Fifth Avenue, the boulevard his driver has chosen to take in order to bring him back from Mount Sinai to the Sangster, is full of shoppers. Harvey is glad he isn’t driving, as looking out onto the fecund streets at this time of year from a vantage point above a steering wheel – whether in London or New York or anywhere – is lethal. Not lethal as in ‘God, man, that’s lethal’, said, say, with a wipe across the mouth on putting back down on the bar a high-alcohol cocktail. Lethal as in looking so hard and so long back over his shoulder, at this woman or that woman or this woman or that woman or this woman or that woman, in order to check out whether her face and front fulfils or undoes the promise of her hair and back, that Harvey drives headlong into the truck/car/bus/building in front. Many is the time, in London, from April to September, that Harvey has had to apply the brake split seconds faster than his leaping heart in order to prevent an imminent body flight through the smeary glass of his Toyota Avensis wind-screen. And many is also the time – about one in four, Harvey reckons – that a clear sight of said woman would, he thinks, have been just about worth, if not actual death, at least being cut screaming from the molten Toyota/truck conjunction with oxyacetylene.

This is a somewhat contradictory thought for Harvey Gold – which is OK, contradiction being his air, his water – seeing as he knows that much of his trouble comes from this type of looking. This looking isn’t pleasure, it isn’t contemplation: like the rest of Harvey’s stuff, it’s symptomatic, pathological, obsessive compulsive. It is desire rendered only as pain, unrequited even in Harvey’s imagination. He is not interested in what he knows he can never have. He is only troubled by it.

There are male friends he has spoken to about this issue who love the streets at this time, including one who, despite having three cars and more than enough money for taxis, always, on travelling into central London in spring and summer, will get the bus, in order to sit on the top deck and leer. Harvey does not understand his friend. Harvey does not understand the idea of the enjoyment of looking. Very early on in their time together, Therapist 4, the Kleinian, had suggested the possibility that Harvey could contain the anxiety looking at women on the street caused him by comparing them to beautiful paintings.

‘You can look at beautiful paintings without being overcome with anxiety – you can in fact look at beautiful paintings and enjoy them …’ she had said, with an air of this’ll sort him out, ‘why don’t you try and think of these women as beautiful paintings?’

‘Because,’ he had replied instantly – always at his quickest when pressed on his own neuroses: the nearest Harvey comes to his father’s speed of mind is his ability always to have an answer for why this or that suggestion will not cure him – ‘when I see a beautiful painting, I have no desire to touch or kiss or lick or fuck the canvas.’

Harvey remembers the face of Therapist 4 at this moment. She was his first woman – chosen deliberately, in the hope that that would be the key – and sixty-three, also a deliberate choice, and had had a minor stroke that caused one side of her mouth to fall faintly out of symmetry with the other. Physiotherapy had got her facial muscles back to about 80 per cent of their pre-stroke strength, but her lips still had something of the look of a falling graph and, in response to this particular remark, seemed to fall just a millidegree further. Harvey took this to mean that he had stumped her, and felt, despite the fact that he was paying her to cure him and therefore not to be stumped, a small thrill of triumph.

‘Are you OK, sir?’ says the taxi driver, a Sikh. Harvey looks away from the window; again he has the impulse to delineate the thousand ways in which he is not. But he says:

‘Fine. Yes. Why do you ask?’

‘You were sighing?’ His accent is Bengali, but the intonation, going up at the end of the sentence to make the observation a question, is American.

Harvey looks at the ID card in the right-hand corner of the glass partition that separates passenger from driver: the words Jasvant Kirtia Singh and a face, most of it covered by turban and beard.

‘Sorry, I didn’t realize …’

‘It is someone you’re seeing at the hospital?’

Harvey looks at Jasvant Kirtia Singh’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. Animated from their I’m-Not-A-Terrorist impassivity on his ID, they are small black beads, birdlike, but framed by eyebrows gently suggesting both enquiry and a willingness to retreat if the passenger does not wish to talk.

‘My father.’

‘He is unwell?’

‘Yes.’

‘I hope he gets better soon …?’

Harvey wonders what to say to this. It has happened a few times, particularly early on, before the obituary writers began sharpening their pencils (or, rather, Googling ‘Eli Gold’): he would tell someone that his father was ill, and they would offer some encouraging words indicating hope of a return to health, and Harvey would have to face saying, No. He isn’t going to get better. The next stage of the conversation would then be stunted, and Harvey would feel at some level rude for having burdened them with this information. It crosses his mind, therefore, just to tell the taxi driver that his father is indeed on the mend – after all, he is not someone who needs to know the truth, nor is ever likely to find out that he has been lied to anyway. But Harvey doesn’t: even the tiniest lies will up his already heightened anxiety levels.

‘I don’t think so …’ he says, and the Sikh’s eyes hold his for a second, then move up and down as the back of his turbaned head nods in sad understanding.

‘I am sorry,’ he says, for the first time not framing the statement as a question.

Harvey is grateful, however, to have his mind brought back to his father. He feels, with his gratitude, a stab of guilt that he should be thinking about his sense of exclusion from the huge variety of female flesh out there so soon after seeing his father on his deathbed for the first time. Harvey knows what the world demands: there are certain things, of which the death of your father is certainly one, that must drive all other thoughts from your head, filling your sky as effortlessly as a wide-winged black eagle, but the truth – Harvey’s truth, yes, but he senses that here, for once, he is not alone – is that the widower at his wife’s funeral is for a second snagged by the breasts of the female mourner standing on the other side of the grave, straining against her tight black jacket; that the father at his son’s hospital bed is distracted, against all his will, by the curving back view the nurse creates as she reaches up to change the little boy’s drip. It is the source of men’s deepest shame, the ever-presence of the penis; or, to be more exact, the incongruity of the penis, its continued presence on those occasions when it would be so clearly in accordance with every idea of human dignity for it to be absent.

Harvey tries his best, though. He attempts to use his short-term memory – the pictures in his head of where he has just been – to drive himself into mental propriety. He thinks hard: he focuses. But not in that modern self-help, how-to-improve-your-golf-swing way – he actually does his best to make his mind’s eye like a camera lens, closing telescopically on the world around him to see only the immediate past.

Eli’s room had been in Geriatrics, at the end of a long, bright corridor, on whose walls were hung a number of photographs commemorating the opening of the new Geriatric Medicine Facility, by Martha Stewart, in 2007. Outside the room itself stood a hulking security man, both black and dressed in black. He held one huge finger, his index, to his ear, pressed against a Bluetooth cellphone earpiece. ‘ID, sir,’ he said, managing to pack into those two words all his adamantine non-negotiability on this requirement

Harvey’s stomach fell. He hadn’t, of course, considered that access to his father’s hospital room might be controlled: a stab of resentment towards Freda for not mentioning it went through him. He could have brought one of his two passports, but they were both in his bum bag, presently in his hotel room, flung over the twin bed he had chosen not to sleep in – a decision he had remained uncertain about throughout the long jet-lagged night, even swapping beds for twenty minutes at around 5 a.m., hoping that the other mattress might be soft enough to grasp what little oblivion the dark still offered.

‘I don’t …’ he began, and saw the security man’s wide face settle into stone. ‘Look. I’m his son. I’m Eli Gold’s son.’

‘Can you prove that, sir?’

This took Harvey aback. He realized that without some kind of documentation, he could not. He did look a bit like his father – they shared fleshy, porous noses, and skin that looked as if it might need shaving four times a day – but not having seen him as he was at present he could not even confidently claim a resemblance. And as for any other inheritance: well, Harvey possessed neither the genius nor the charisma, although he wondered why he was thinking this, as he was not sure how he would demonstrate either in the hospital corridor, and even if he could, doubted they would count as an access-all-areas code.

‘I’ve got a credit card …’

‘I’ll need a photo-ID, sir. There’s a lot of journalists and crazy people might want to get into this room.’

‘Yes,’ Harvey said, and then remembered that he did have his driving licence on him. He unbuttoned his jacket – because, despite it being forty degrees in Manhattan, he was wearing a dark blue, buttoned jacket; uncertain and jet-lagged this morning he had decided that the occasion of going to see his dying father necessitated some formality – and reached into the inside pocket for his wallet. He scrabbled through the variety of useless cards in the leather slits – how many fucking membership cards for defunct DVD rentals did he own? – until he spotted his shrunken head on the pink picture card. Handing it to the security guard, Harvey felt nervous, under pressure; the moment came into his mind when Jimmy Voller, the swarthy Brooklyn hero of Eli’s brutal third novel Cometh the Wolf, has to produce his passport at the door of an East Berlin brothel to persuade the madam that he is neither Turkish nor Moroccan, the two nationalities she has decided to bar entry to.

The security guy removed his finger from the earpiece – Harvey noticed that he was not, in fact, in telephone communication with anyone, and wondered if the finger-in-the-ear stance had just been to make him look more like security guys always do – and took his time scanning the details of the licence. Harvey had never spotted the parade of weird tiny vehicles on the back of it before – what is that, he thought, a VW Beetle? And that looks like the silhouette of the van in Scooby-Doo. They seemed tinier than ever, perched in the security guy’s mighty hand. He produced a clipboard, which, also being black, had remained invisible before, camouflaged against his enormous black puffa jacket. Harvey wondered who was paying for this guy: the hospital? His father? The government? Waiting for what seemed a stupid amount of time for his name to be checked against the names on the clipboard, Harvey felt absurdly like he was trying to get into some sort of exclusive nightclub.

Eventually, the security man looked up, scrutinizing Harvey’s face as if it were another card. He gave him his licence back.

‘Just stay here a second, please, sir …’ He turned, with a slow movement not unreminiscent of an oil tanker listing to port, and went into the room. Harvey dropped his head to look through the recessed glass window in the door. The room was spacious, and well furnished in a hospital way, but oddly windowless. In the foreground, he could see Freda on her knees, talking to a girl – Colette? – a doctor, a nurse and, in an alcove off to one side, the bottom edge of what must be his father’s bed. An image flashed through his mind of the comedy medical clipboard that should be hanging there, marked in black with a zigzag graph hurtling downwards, but all he could see were chrome bars and white sheeting.

The security guy hovered behind Freda, waiting for her conversation with the child to end. His finger had returned to his ear. Harvey had a moment of wondering if the security guy’s finger, so wide it completely obscured the earpiece, was bigger than his own penis, and then immediately feared that such a thought might be racist. He took out a bottle of Extra Tart Sour Blast Spray and gave his tongue a quick atomize. He removed his iPhone from his other pocket and tapped a few moves into Deep Green, but could see straight away that he was heading for a quick Checkmate! Tiny wins! so put it back. He considered, not for the first time, how quickly he panicked, while waiting: how quickly he needed to distract himself, before his mind and body went somewhere bad. Thinking about his body makes him suddenly feel a need to piss. Micturation, or the urge to do so, comes upon him like this these days, with no build-up, no gradual turning of the tap. He knows it is something to do with his battered and bruised prostate, the internal organ he has always been most conscious of: it will be, he knows, swollen or shrunken or just generally giving up its hanging walnut ghost, but he cannot bring himself to go to the doctor to check it out. Not because he is embarrassed about it, but because his GP in Kent is a young and pretty Pakistani woman, and there is no way he can go to the surgery and ask her about his prostate without it looking as if it’s a ruse to get her to put her finger up his anus. Even as he makes the appointment he will feel the receptionist suspecting his motivation. He needs to get over this concern, he knows, partly because Eli’s first brush with cancer was of the prostate, and partly because he actually would quite like the GP to put her finger up his anus.

The security guy was still hovering over Freda like the alien ship in Independence Day over earth as she talked. ‘Fuck it,’ Harvey said to himself, and walked quickly down the corridor, and found the rest room. Rest room. It could be restful in the toilet, Harvey felt, although only if you were sitting down – something he chose to do more and more these days, whatever the character of the ablution – but even then only really in your own private toilet, where any anxiety about sharing intimate information with strangers could not intrude. The door was locked. Harvey tried it a few times, as if under the impression that perhaps there was something wrong with the lock, but really to make it clear, to the present user, that someone was outside waiting. Eventually, the door opened, and Harvey drew back: the person exiting was a woman – Korean? Chinese? Malaysian? he felt bad about not being able to tell the difference – with tired eyes. There was no reason why it should not be a woman – the rest room door had no trousered or skirted hieroglyphic on it – but Harvey instantly wished to withdraw his aggressive shaking of the handle, somehow more acceptable had the occupant been male. It flashed through his mind to say – ‘Oh sorry, I thought you were a man’ but he quashed it. Instead, a glance passed between them, a glance he has – this is the word, guilty though he feels about it – enjoyed before. If Harvey is waiting to use a unisex toilet, on a train, say, or in a private house at a party, and a woman comes out, Harvey enjoys (he knows it’s wrong but still allows himself the minute, tawdry thrill) the moment in which their eyes meet. He thinks the glance means that, for a second, they have both shared an image of her sitting on the seat with her pants down and the sound of liquid on china, or metal. This is the glance that passed between him and the nurse. As ever, he felt bad about enjoying it, but still. He noticed, though, that she squinted at him uncertainly, as if catching that something about Harvey’s look was not accidental, so he looked away, covering his shame by moving quickly into the cabin.

When he came back to the door to Eli’s room, the security guy was waiting, finger in ear. He looked Harvey up and down once more, and then stepped aside. Harvey chanced a friendly nod at him, which was met with a blank stare, making Harvey worried that his friendly nod may have been misinterpreted as ‘see?’, but continued on past his gravitational presence and through the door.

The first thing he noticed on entering was that the room was not windowless. In fact, the bed faced a floor-to-ceiling glass rectangle, looking onto exactly the view of Manhattan – across Central Park, towards downtown – that Harvey so covets. He drank it in – or, rather, since what hit him with a rush is not beauty but envy – he sucked it up, the sweep of sky and skyscrapers, before turning and saying, ‘Hello, Freda.’ His stepmother looked up – it had never occurred to him with the same force before; two years younger than him, that was still, technically, what she was. She stared at Harvey for so long – the oddity of their interaction reinforced by her being on her knees – that he started to wonder if she was trying to remember who he was.

‘Colette,’ she said eventually, ‘come and meet your half-brother, Harvey.’

When the girl looked up, her face under her curls was set in a tight frown. She may have been crying, although not, Harvey thought, out of sadness: her expression contained that classic mix of rage and self-pity that children’s faces emit when they have just been told off. She did not do as she was told; she did not come and meet him, but stayed where she was, raising her chin defiantly and staring as if he was complicit in – perhaps even the mastermind of – whatever slight had just been perpetrated against her.

Or maybe she was sad, about her – their – dad dying, and this was just what she looked like when she was sad. After all, Harvey had never met her before. He had been sent a photograph soon after her birth of the three of them at their New England lodge (not by Eli: the accompanying note, including the statement, ‘Eli is so overjoyed about his new child’ was all in Freda’s hand). Eli, in a big fisherman’s jumper, grinning beneficently, his arms around Freda, her trademark proprietorial smile cross-fertilized with an element of self-conscious sheepishness, as if to say, ‘Can you believe what little me has ended up with?!’, and in her lap, the baby. Harvey wondered who had taken it, as it was too professional – the light too dappled, the wood-panelled walls of the lodge too burnished, the composition of the threesome too perfectly arranged – to have been done on a self-timer. It looked, he thought, like something from OK! magazine. But he could not relate his memory of that infant, looking out at him from the photograph with something of the complacent gaze of a cow, to this fierce child with the thermonuclear stare.

‘Hello,’ he said: the word felt stupid in his mouth. Colette just nodded at him, and Harvey felt suddenly furious at Freda for spiking his route to his father’s bedside with this introduction, impossible as it was to brush off because of the absurd and irreducible fact of him and this thirty-six-years-younger girl being siblings. Freda must have known that his first thought would be to get to Eli’s bedside – and Harvey had really wanted to do this, although not so much because he just wanted to see his dad, more that he wanted to get the first sight of him over with. He was scared about it. Approaching the door, he had felt much like he had as a kid watching Dr Who, knowing that a new monster was about to appear. The ten-year-old Harvey, trembling beside his mother (who let Dr Who under her steel bar of what Harvey was allowed to watch, although in later series changed her mind, deciding that the Time Lord’s always-female assistants were becoming oversexualized) in his blue, bi-planed pyjamas, would not hide behind the sofa. He would, rather, watch intently, wanting the monster to appear as soon as possible; the worst thing was not knowing. He wanted to face it, so that he could know the fear, hold it and calibrate exactly how bad it was going to be.

‘Last time I saw you, you were a tiny baby,’ he said, his voice sounding astringent against the sentiment, holding down his rage at having to have this conversation now. Surreptitiously, he flicked his eyes over towards his father’s bed, more of which was visible from this angle. The movement of his eyes sideways reminded him of the painful glancing action always prompted by an attractive woman across a room. He could see the thin hump of a wasting body underneath bedding, but still not the face. It was facing the face that filled him with dread.

‘You saw me when I was a baby?’ said Colette.

‘No. I saw a photo …’

‘Oh. OK.’ She looked at him. Her frown deepened, producing little lines on her forehead. ‘Why is your tongue blue?’

The awkward stalemate this response induced was broken by the sudden appearance of Freda with her arms outstretched. Harvey, opening his to accept the hug, looked at her frame, spread like a net in front of him, and thanked the Lord again that he didn’t find her attractive. Although younger than him, and a woman – normally enough for his needs – there was something about Freda that inhibited Harvey’s reflex interest. She had that parched-face look so common to female humanist academics that Harvey felt they should try their utmost to avoid, thinking that they had fallen into the exact trap – unfemininity – which Victorian patriarchy had predicted for women should they become learned. This particular intellectual conundrum was a hangover not from his father but his mother, who, despite being herself a female humanist academic, and an arch-feminist, never emerged from her bedroom without a cosmetic face mask three inches thick.

It had occurred to Harvey many times that, physically, Freda was the opposite of everything Eli usually went for in women – except in respect of her youth, relative to him. It did not go unnoticed by Harvey that that was, as it were, the last thing to go – that all the other staples of Eli’s desire could be sacrificed, but not this one, not even in his dotage.

The hug went on for some time. Harvey, who had been hugged by Freda before, felt in it, as ever, no particular love or affection for him: but much love and affection for the idea of hugging. This one was tighter and longer than usual, but still somehow failed to convey any sense that she was pleased to see him. Uncomfortably, however, it did give him time to feel the full length of her body against his – the emotional distance between them allowed him, in a bleak, detached way, to take stock of her body in a way that he never had before – and, then, much to his consternation, come away from the hug, in spite of his long-held notions about her mannishness, with a hard-on.

‘Go …’ said Freda, pulling back from him, Harvey hoping against hope not because she had noticed it. She was speaking in what sounded to him like a stage whisper. ‘Go to him. Speak to him.’

‘Speak?’

‘He understands. He hears.’

Harvey nodded, not wanting to say anything that might disturb her reverence. The tumescence in his pants subsided. He choked down an urge – with him most days, although undoubtedly charged up by the situation – to shout an obscenity at the top of his voice. He walked towards his father’s bed, his feet padding against the quality carpet of the room.

Glancing back, he saw that Freda had crouched down again to whisper to Colette. The doctor and nurse in the room were busying themselves with notes and drips and bleepers: none of them offered to guide him – neither geographically nor spiritually nor even educationally – through the scene. Harvey felt again like a nonentity in some exclusive club, unable to make his presence felt. It even flashed through his mind to say Don’t you know who I am? He wished Stella were here, to hold his hand, even though Harvey was uncomfortable with hand-holding, because it made him feel more aware of the fact of fear, and because, sometimes, he could feel the small bones in her hands.

These thoughts were halted by the interruption into his vision, finally, of his father. Even then it wasn’t as Harvey had imagined it, a kind of naked confrontation with mortality. Eli’s head was propped up against the pillow, and covered nose to mouth with an oxygen mask. Attached to various intravenous ports, six or seven different tubes curled around his bed and into his body, like he was being gently cradled by an octopus. Machines, humming and bleeping and oscillating with sine waves, surrounded him in a stately circle, as if his father were whatever invisible deity lurks in the centre of Stonehenge. It felt to Harvey that all this apparatus was designed not just to keep Eli from death, but also his visitors: that it formed a buffer zone between them and the reality of his condition. So much so, in fact, that the sight of his father was almost an anti-climax after all the girding of his loins. Where is he? he wanted to say, and not in a metaphorical way – not in a This shrunken shell of a human being cannot be My Father! way – but physically: he wanted to rummage through all this stuff, all the sheeting and the wires and the plastic, chucking it over his head like a man sorting through the trash, to find him.

He also felt he couldn’t see him because of the things that were not there. People assume that the way to reveal an object is to remove its external trappings, but that doesn’t hold true for the human object. Glasses, for example: Eli had for Harvey’s whole life worn thick black beatnik spectacles, and without them, as now, he was somehow not Eli. The lack of glasses, along with the lack of a cigarette in his mouth – something Harvey had also grown up conditioned to see, although Eli had finally given them up two years ago – was not an unmasking. It just made him look like someone else.

But then Harvey looked more closely – having realized that he had been focusing on all the last-days’ paraphernalia exactly to avoid doing that – and, indeed, there he was: in the wet, grey clumps of hair stuck to his temples, wisps curling away from his skin like they always did; in the deep trench-like lines on his forehead – the same ones that he has just seen reproduced in miniature on his half-sister’s brow – whose up or down state the child Harvey had desperately relied upon to monitor his father’s otherwise unguessable moods; in the remnants of his beard, its close trimming evocative of his decline like some upside-down Samson, but bringing back to Harvey a distant memory of Eli scraping his emery stubble against the virgin cheek of his son, who would protest, but laughingly, finding the touch both abrasive and delightful, redolent of the rough promise of the adult world; and perhaps most of all in his hands, which were still, despite the pulse meters and the blood clots and the mountainous veinscape rising angrily from their backs, sheathed in the same skin, brown and rough as bark, and still incongruously large, still, even here, suggesting strength, the hands of a labourer, on the end of arms which had avoided heavy lifting their whole life. Harvey, a sucker for comparisons, found himself looking at his own hands by contrast – he’d done this before, of course, but the OCD lizard king in his brain always required new checks – raising his right one a Reiki hover away from his dad’s. It looked small, but Harvey has always known he has small hands, girl’s hands, easy prey for ‘you-know-what-they-say-about’ jokers. He wondered how the DNA divides it up – what fall it is of the cellular dice that has given him his father’s nose, mouth and skin, but his mother’s eyes and hands.

He did not know what to do. He felt that the correct – the polite – thing to do was to speak, as Freda had advised. But looking at his father again – less like his father, and more like a mad scientist had given up halfway through making a robot version of his father – the idea of speaking was clearly ridiculous. He felt not unlike he always did in church or synagogue, fighting an urge, during the endless roll call of praise and plea, to shout ‘No one’s listening! No one’s even there to listen!!’ And what was he supposed to say? Dad: it’s me? Since even those keeping the faith in Eli’s ability to hear did not believe, presumably, that the dying man could see as well, this would then require him to say, in explanation – ‘Um … Harvey’ – like he was on the phone. And then what? How are you? Oh my God, it would just be a fucking phone call. Something more supportive? I’ve just come to say I’m going to be here for you … oh no. No. I am a dual citizen, he thought, but I will never become that American. He didn’t know what to say. He wondered who the people were who did, in this situation. He looked round, as if, at any minute, they might come into the room and tutor him.

Even the first word he might say – Dad – felt weird. It was a word he’d always had problems with. Eli had left Harvey’s mother at a time when his son – six, after all – called him Daddy. There was then a period of some years when Harvey hardly saw his father at all, but still referred to him, in his absence, as Daddy. Thus, when he began to see him again, at increasingly irregular intervals in his teens, he found he had missed out on that poignant slide from Daddy into Dad that marks out children’s first maturity. He addressed him as Dad at this point, but it felt somehow wrong, and he found himself wanting to say Daddy: not in the front of his head – like any other post-pubescent boy, he was keen to avoid any word or deed that might make him seem childish – but in his gut, in the reflex part of his linguistic centre. When he saw Eli, the word that formed in his mind was Daddy. Latterly, a number of different titles for his father were attempted, knowable as the word Harvey used following ‘Hello’ when seeing his father or hearing his voice on the phone – Father; Eli (never comfortable); Dad (still not right); an attempt at irony, Pater. Now, by his deathbed, his mind was saying, again, Daddy.

He decided not to think about it, and just trust what might come out. He coughed, something of a stage ahem. It emerged from his mouth much louder than he had expected, in a weird croak-grunt, shattering the quiet of the room. Freda had taken Colette outside for some form of pep talk, and the doctor had been whispering to one of the nurses, no doubt detailing some complex medical issue, although Harvey had been unable not to wonder if it was flirtation. Both of them looked over, surprised for a moment, before going back to their huddle. And then, at that point, almost as if he had heard, Eli stirred. His hands, one of which was still just underneath Harvey’s, stiffened, the long fingers – whose nails had, Harvey noticed, been neatly trimmed – extending like sickles. His eyes even opened, although the pupils were long gone, high up into his head, revealing just two grey-white ovals, slivers cut from an English sky. Under the oxygen mask, his mouth, previously lopsided into a shape, ironically, like a speech balloon, opened further on that side, and from the weird aperture came a sound that was part-howl and part-yawn, with something oddly synthetic in it as well, not unlike the note produced by a theramin. It was loud, and deeply disturbing: a noise that knew and did not know, like a cow makes at the touch on its temple of the stun gun, a distress call back to this world from the black country.

Immediately, the doctor and the nurse rushed over, in their long coats. Freda burst back through the door, trailing Colette, still sulky. Harvey stared at the blind, raging stump of his father, guilt-stricken, convinced that somehow this atrocious convulsion must be his fault. ‘What’s happening?’ he said. ‘Is he waking up?’

‘No,’ said the doctor – Indian, Harvey guesses, with short, tufty hair combed forward to cover a receding hairline – ‘he does this from time to time.’

He does? thought Harvey. Over the last few weeks, Freda had somehow implied to him that Eli’s unconsciousness was serene – even, perhaps, that the coma was itself a work of art, a kind of late period ripeness-is-all evocation of tranquillity. Not this – this roaring zombie, this Eli Agonistes.

Freda had taken hold of his hand, clutching it with both of hers. ‘He’s still so strong,’ she said, looking up at Harvey. ‘So strong.’

Freda’s face, constipated with hope, forcing out the positive from this indigestible horror – something pitiful in that, Harvey realized: this woman, for whom it was such a prize, capturing Eli, never quite realizing how much she would have to pay for it, and how soon – it is Freda’s face which seems to reflect back to Harvey from the window of the cab as the light of the Sangster forecourt creates of its glass a mirror. It dissolves like aspirin in water as men in autumnal uniforms come gliding towards the passenger door in order to smooth his passage to the lobby.

* * *

He has spent two days now in his room at the Condesa Inn, going over The Material. He has gone over The Material many times before but he thinks that now, so close to the act, it has a different force. It feels shaping and controlling: it feels as if it’s making clearer what he has to do. The why helps the how, he thinks.

He has not contacted his wives. It has crossed his mind often on his journey to do so. He would prefer to write to them than to telephone. He feels that he could Lie for the Lord – lying to preserve a greater spiritual truth, a Mormon practice that Uncle Jimmy explained to him once – easier that way. But none of his wives are allowed to have a computer, or use email, and, at any rate, the only computer in the family house is the Dell, which sits at this moment on the white sheet of his bed, cradled underneath by his crossed legs. He knows what his absence will have occasioned. Ambree, as the most senior now that Leah is dead, will have called a meeting. It will have been held in the kitchen, because, although the living room is bigger, the kitchen is the enclave of the wives, and they will have found it easier to shut the door to the children, although RoLyne would still probably have brought in Elin, his youngest, to breast-feed her. He is confident that Ambree, the most virtuous of his wives, will have led the meeting to the correct decision – despite protests from, he suspects, Angel and maybe even Sedona – that he was their husband, and he knew best: that if he had taken it upon himself to disappear for days without explanation, why, that was no different from Our Lord deciding to enter the desert for forty days in order truly to understand Himself and His Mission. Our job, he was sure she would say, our job as his celestial wives, is in the meantime to care for his house and his children, and be ready to welcome him on his return.

Having thought this through, the urge to communicate with his loved ones recedes, and he turns back to The Material. The intermittent wireless connection at the Condesa Inn troubles him, but also helps. It helps because it makes it harder to watch streaming internet pornography, tube8, or pornhub, or keez, which he normally watches a lot. Thus the intermittent connection is a good thing, as he would feel ashamed of watching these in front of Jesus, and, also, they distract him from his destiny.

The ones that don’t distract him are GunAmerica, and Justice Coalition, and Unsolved, and Restless Sleep, and the jihadi ones. A part of him likes them best. He is even enrolled on the forum at al-jinan.org under the name Pbuh53. Pbuh – he found this out on another website – is the Islamic name for Jesus. He wasn’t sure about this: he was worried it might be seen by God as saying that he himself was Pbuh, was Jesus – writing it into the electronic login form, he felt the butterflies in his stomach that he always feels when he thinks he might be doing something wrong by the Lord – but he went ahead, because it was surely a way of spreading His Name amongst the heathen. And then the site told him he had to add some numbers too, so he wrote his age, as well. That was two years ago.

He enrolled on al-jinan because, when he hears the jihadis speak, something in him stirs. He likes the fierce commitment to God; he likes the language, the poetry of rage, purged of all the trivial inflections of modernity; and he likes the belief in – no, the knowledge of – destiny. To know absolutely both the nature and the quality of destiny – to know what role God has chosen for you and exactly how heroic that role is – that is what he would want for himself. He watches some of the videos that suicide bombers make before they embark on their missions, and he sees in their eyes no sway, no diversion, and it inspires him, even as he knows that the Jesus-less path they have chosen is wrong. He sees how only revenge inspires true religiosity.

And, of course, like him, they are fundamentalists. That is why he calls Eli Gold The Great Satan. It is sort of a joke – a joke he tells only himself – but it is a joke with a purpose. It inspires him to hate him more; to remind him of what the writer stands for; and also to help him to think like the jihadis do, about destiny.

He opens the Dell lid: the square light of the screen shines in the dimness of the room, a hot, white beacon showing him the way. He is not on al-jinan. He is looking, for perhaps the hundredth, or the two hundredth, time at the transcript on www.unsolved.com. Unsolved has a lot of these transcripts which purport to relate to unsolved crimes. The one he reads, over and over again, is an interview between Police Commissioner Raymond Webb and The Great Satan. The interview took place on 15 June 1993. His third and index fingers caress the mouse tracking pad expertly, bringing the transcript into plain view:

RW: So, Mr Gold, I’m sorry to have to make you do this …

EG: How sorry are you exactly? Not sorry enough to not want to bring me down here at a time of deep personal grief.

[inaudible]

EG: Yes, well … how long will this take?

RW: Not long, sir. We just need to go over some of the facts.

EG: Facts …

RW: Sir?

EG: May I have some coffee?

RW: Er … yes, I guess.

[inaudible]

RW: Showing Mr Gold case document R45/100 … do you recognize this?

EG: Yes.

RW: Mrs Gold showed it to you before she took the pills …?

EG: Yes.

RW: And then sealed it in this … showing Mr Gold case document R45/101 … envelope?

EG: Well, I didn’t watch her lick the glue.

[pause]

RW: What did you make of it?

EG: What did I make of it? For fuck’s sake, Commissioner …

RW: Webb.

EG: … Webb, it wasn’t a seminar …

RW: But she had been one of your students. When you met.

[pause]

EG: I really don’t see –

RW: ‘I have no desire left for life. Surrender is preferable to despair. I go, to the soft quiet land: and I thank my love for leading me there.’

[pause]

RW: Are you OK?

EG: I shall be.

RW: Sorry to … I know it’s upsetting.

EG: It’s beautiful. I think.

RW: Yes. Yes, it is. But –

EG: Yes?

RW: I thank my love for leading me there. What did she mean by that?

[pause]

EG: You are asking a question of the dead, Commissioner.

RW: No, Mr Gold, with the greatest respect, I’m asking it of the living. Because you, of course, despite also writing a suicide note, are still alive.

He hears some shuffling in the corridor outside of his room. It could be the cleaner, a Filipino woman, who has tried to get into his room to clean six or seven times over the course of the last two days, or it could be the man next door, who caused him to wake up in terror last night with the sound of what seemed to be nails scratching against the other side of the wall. He shuts the lid of the Dell as if caught looking at something he should not be.