Читать книгу Sister Crazy - Emma Richler - Страница 9

My dad is really grumpy now. It happened somewhere back on the road, sometime between his slouching into the driver’s seat and the end of this fifteen-minute journey from our summer cottage to the next village. I don’t know. Maybe he spotted Indians in the hills. Maybe he felt our little wagon train was under threat and we are far, far from any army outpost. Rescue is not likely. He won’t say a thing about it, though, to my mother or to me, his sole passengers. He is a tight-lipped man. Being provider and protector is one devil of a job in a big country, I can see that.

It’s a fine afternoon and the sky is a slaphappy blue but I wish there were a slight breeze, just enough to ruffle the leaves a little, enough to break up the menace of a still, hot day. I want to open the window but my dad would not like this, so I don’t. If you open the window, the air conditioning in the car, one of the few features he knows how to operate without having to ask anyone, will not work properly. I would rather have real air play over my face, but I try not to think about it. I try not to feel tyrannized by air conditioning. We are nearly there. I hope I will not be sick. I feel hot and cold and somewhat nauseous and the tension level in the car is high, pressing on my temples, making my heart race. My mother is looking out of her window and she says something in febrile, purposeful tones. She is always ready to dispel gloom.

‘I just saw the most beautiful bird!’ she says, or something like that. We are nearly there. The Indians are on the warpath and this last stretch of road seems endless to me, fraught with danger. I am unarmed. Dad won’t teach me how to use a gun because I am a girl and it is unseemly and he thinks I won’t need it. He will protect me. I hope so.

I wish he’d say something. I wish I were a boy. Then maybe we would not be taking this sissy journey to the chemist for a herbal remedy for depression and my dad would not be so mad at me.

I could be Doc Holliday. That would be very good. I have a deadly disease and I deal with it in a manly way. I have no time for it. It does not diminish me. There will be no gauzy visions of angels, no lingering goodbyes. I retch and splutter grudgingly into squares of white linen. Goddamnit, there goes another hanky. Pitch it into the fireplace. Good shot.

My woman gives me that boring look, her eyes sparkling with fear and pity.

‘Stop that! Get out! Leave me alone!’

I reach for the whisky and I don’t bother with a glass. It is possible I drink too much. Never mind. As long as I can shoot straight. As long as I can stand up for my friends and walk an unswerving line to the O. K. Corral. On that day, I’ll be wearing my finest, no fraying cuffs.

There’s a knock on the door. Here comes Wyatt. He leans against the door and walks over to the bedside table and picks up my whisky bottle, meaning, this much already? It’s only eleven A.M. We don’t speak, though. Don’t worry, Wyatt. I’ll be there. He knows that. I cough.

‘See a doctor.’

‘No doctors.’

‘Get some rest,’ he says, heading for the door.

Dad just spoke.

‘What?’ I say. ‘Sorry, what?’

‘We are not going to any other shops. Just the chemist. I’ll stay in the car. You have ten minutes.’

I start singing in my head, the tune from the Sturges film Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. O-KAAAY … co – RAAL! O-KAAAY … co – RAAAAL! I almost sing it aloud. I want to, because it might make my dad laugh, but I worry that for once it won’t, that he won’t join in and I’ll feel bad, worse than I do already. The song rises, then dies in my chest and I miss my chance and that’s the hell of this thing, this sissy, crackpot, sneaky disease which is not okay, like consumption with its angry, show-off blood on wads of linen.

‘Jem?’

‘Yes?’

‘Did you hear what I said?’

I can see Dad’s eyes looking at me in the rearview mirror. He has wild brows and his eyes are narrowed, weather-beaten lines running from the corners toward his temples. He is a handsome man in an unruly way and he has a gunslinger’s gaze. This comes from years of squinting into a high sun and into duststorms and sharp night winds. It comes from a perpetual state of wariness and the need to see around things and be ready at all times. Anything can happen but you must stay cool. You have to master the distant look and know how to forage the horizon for looming dangers such as wild beasts, Apaches, and other gunslingers with sharp, squinty vision who might be on your trail.

When my dad talks to me, the little muscles around his eyes bunch up, giving him that gunslinger look. I have the distinct sensation he is not having a good time having to make words, having to speak at all. It’s the way he is and you have to get used to it. His vision is acute, he is the only one in the family who doesn’t need glasses.

‘We are not going to any other shops – just the chemist.’

‘Right.’ My dad looks at the road now.

I practise a gunslinger squint. I can see my reflection in the window, which I keep closed due to air conditioning, and my face is dappled with tree leaves and other passing things, but I can see my eyes. I look silly, because a gunfighter cannot wear glasses and look cool. A good cowboy does not wear specs. I think about those crazy glasses you have to look through at the optician’s, your chin resting in a cup. They are like the periscope sights that a U-boat commander needs to spot enemy vessels. The optician slips different lenses into the apparatus with maddening speed and he keeps saying in bored tones, ‘Better or worse? Better or worse?’ until I want to scream and I am so confused and pressured by him, I stumble out with eyeglasses of magnifying strength. I can spot spiders several paving stones away, but people look spooky. No one should have to see in such gory detail.

Better or worse? I asked myself each time I was put on a new medication. New medications and higher and higher doses. Better or worse? I asked myself, my heart thudding, hallucinating kaleidoscopic visions, sweating through the chic French pyjamas I wore because I felt so cold, soaking my white linen sheets, bringing towels back to bed, scared and ashamed after vomiting into the toilet on the hour through the night. This is a good medication. In small doses it is not always therapeutic. It is definitely helping you and I think you should not keep going on and off it, says the doctor. It is working.

Okay. Cool.

Dad is looking at me again in the mirror. Now what? Nothing. He looks at me this way because he is not all that wild about me right now, the crazy, drugged-up daughter, and also because he is a cowboy and that is the way they look at people. I used to be a cowboy, too. Dad and me in the Wild West, stalking the main street, bringing home the vittles for Maw, not before sliding onto bar stools, our packages falling around our feet.

‘What’ll it be?’

‘Mâcon-Villages,’ I say.

My dad nods and gestures with his eyes for me to repeat this to the barman. My dad does not like to speak French unless it is strictly called for.

‘A glass of Mâcon blanc, please,’ I say.

My dad drinks single malt. Doubles with a splash on the side. He hunkers down over his drink and lights a thin cigar. Thin but not skinny. His eyes slide slowly to one side or upward as he checks out the crowd, but his head hardly moves except for a slight raising of the chin, the better to draw on his cigar. We do not say much.

I know some things my dad does not know. Or care about. For instance, all Scotch malt whisky is produced in a pot still, a distillation of barley. Starch in barley is converted to sugar by virtue of a controlled germination, a process arrested in a peat kiln. Now you have malt. Malt is ground into grist and mixed with hot water in a mash tun, and the sweet liquid, the wort, is drawn off into a fermenting vat. This is now the wash. The wash is distilled into low wines and these are redistilled into raw whisky, the middle distillate with the foreshots and feints removed. It becomes Scotch when it has aged in oak for a minimum of three years. Unblended and the product of a single distillery, it is a single malt. These are the basics.

My dad favours Highland malt although he wouldn’t care to say why. He could not even tell you he specifically likes Speyside whisky. He would not want to discuss it much less hear about why it is different from Islay malt. Okay.

Something else I want to tell my dad. When the whisky is maturing for eight, twelve, fifteen, seventeen, twenty-one years, what this really means is the liquid is concentrating, breathing in the sea and the river and the heather and iodine and breathing out water, esters and alcohol into the atmosphere. In Cognac, the French call this evaporation la part des anges. The angels’ share. I love this idea. I also think it is only fair, because they must have to share a lot of worse things in the thinning ozone and I hope there are a lot of angels gathering over the Highlands, especially Speyside, over Islay and the Orkney Islands and Campbeltown and the Lowlands. I know they have cousins hovering over Cognac and Ténarèze in Armagnac and the Vallée d’Auge, where calvados is made, even wherever the marc is distilled in the wine regions, Champagne and Burgundy. In Cognac, the wine warehouse where old cognac is stored is called le paradis. A lot of angels lurk there and I wish them well.

My dad tips back the last sip of malt. He is ready to go, although I have not finished my drink. That’s okay. I have all my life to drink at my leisure and right now I am with my dad and these are good times and I want to stick with him, go when he goes, go where he goes. At heart, I am not the Doc at all, I am Joey and he is Shane and he is definitely the man to follow.

‘Let’s go. Finished?’

No. ‘Yup,’ I say, rising quickly. We saunter out.

I remember another time, another bar. Dad has Mum on one arm and me on the other. It is late and we are having a nightcap at the Ritz. I like this word ‘nightcap’, putting a cap on the night, tipping your brim at the daytime. There goes another day. Let’s call it a day.

Dad is a bit sloshed and it makes him merry and a bit unpredictable. I sense high jinks. A couple is leaving the Ritz bar as we approach it and they want to greet my dad but he has no time for them, he does not like these people. They begin to say something and there is a look that comes over them. Appeasement, ingratiation. My dad barks at them, ‘Ruff!’ Just like a dog. His hair musses even more. Mum and I fight to quell hilarity. What my dad has done is the equivalent of reaching for his six-shooter, of fluttering his trigger fingers over the holster at his hip. He is a cowboy, don’t they know that? We leave them in our wake, frozen with their mouths agape.

It is great being with my dad. These are good times I am looking back on. I wonder if they will come again soon. Some days, I doubt it. I just don’t see it. Like today, on the way to find a herbal remedy for depression with my dad looking at me suspiciously in the mirror and me fighting the silverfish in my veins and the ferocious urge to throw up all over his posh new car, which is littered, nevertheless, with Visa slips and tomato stalks and empty envelopes. The man can’t help it, he marks his territory out and I, today, these days, am the intruder. Get off my land. Come back when you are well, when you are a cowboy again and can roam with me. I don’t know you now.

Do not cry, Jem, I say to myself. Come on now, do not be a baby. Do not be a girl.

Besides looking back on good times and trying to fathom them, I write my book in my head. It is a survival book, a book of rules. It won’t be long but it will be very useful. Here is rule number one.

1. NEVER LEAVE YOUR GLASSES ON THE FLOOR.

I have discovered there is no loophole to this rule. Even if you say to yourself, okay, I have just set my specs on the floor. I see myself do it, I etch it on my memory. No way I’ll step on them or kick them across the floor. Then it happens. The phone rings and you jump right on top of them or you nap for a minute and shake awake suddenly and swivel your body off the sofa, landing your feet back on the floor. Right onto the specs, goddamnit. So that’s rule number one. Never leave your glasses on the floor. Thank you.

2. NEVER LEAVE YOUR WINEGLASS ON THE FLOOR.

Same potential disasters as above.

When we left the bar that day with our shopping bags, my dad said, ‘Let’s call home. Just in case. We don’t want to have to go out again.’

My dad has seen enough of the world and he has one vision in his mind. It is of a big sofa with a tomato snack by his side and a mess of newspapers all around him. Soon Mum will call out to him, Darling! Supper. Ah, the best moment of the day.

Right now, though, what my dad really wants to do is to chuckle over the fact we could not find truffle butter. When Mum wrote this down on our list he was gleeful. He thought this was hilarious and he was pretty determined to be right about this item not existing out there in the western world as he knows it. In the two places we tried, he made me ask for it, truffle butter being two words too girly for him to utter. At the first shop, he even waited outside, only coming in after it was clear my request had not been met. We laughed.

Before we get to lord it over Mum, my dad has to tackle the public-telephone situation.

‘Jem,’ he says, serious now, ‘we’ll try this one.’

I sigh with anticipation. This will be fun.

He pushes on the door of the nearest booth, meeting resistance.

‘Hey!’ he says. There is a lot of resistance to my dad out there in the physical world. He figures the door business out and drops a coin in after scanning all the instructions wildly and deciding to ignore them. The phone machine swallows the coin and that’s it, no joy. He thumps the machine about three times.

‘Goddamnit!’

I reach in and press coin return and check the slot. ‘Let’s try another one, Dad.’

In the next booth, I can see through the window that he is doing a lot of crazy thumping and is prepared to jump ship. I open the door and reach through the mayhem to press the button under the coin slot, right near the instruction that reads, Press after each coin entered.

‘Oh,’ he says and dials home. He looks back at me in exhilaration. He is about to reveal to Mum the sheer folly of her shopping mission. He can’t wait.

3. GIVE INSTRUCTIONS A CHANCE.

Instructions are sometimes written for those with below expected mental capacity. For instance, on a package of plasters, I read in step two, ‘Apply plaster.’ On a tube of skin salve, ‘Apply a little cream.’ Well, why not? But some instructions are useful. On page one of my video-machine booklet, it says, ‘To reduce the risk of fire or shock hazard, do not expose this equipment to rain.’ I do not know who would watch their TV and video out in a field when it is raining but never mind, this is important information for those people who are tempted. ‘Do not exceed the stated dose.’ This, I find, is important news. I remember a time, in dark days, when I was not Joey or the Doc and I was riding in cars on the way to health shops in search of herbal remedies for depression, yes, I remember a time when this was a vital instruction that I intended to ignore. I wanted very much to largely exceed the stated dose. This was exactly my plan before I decided that I did not want anyone else to wear my agnès b. clothes and that I wanted to finish the novel I was reading but mostly the look I imagined on Mum’s face at the sight of my grim and excessively dosed self on the carpet was too unbearable to contemplate. So I put off my date with death. It was a postponement I had in mind, that is all.

Strange though, I thought, my dad will be okay. He’ll get over it. When you are a cowboy, you see all kinds of things, sudden death and gruesome moments of all varieties, and you just have to endure it all. People depend on you to do this.

‘I’ll be darned,’ a cowboy might say over some gory reality, pulling a fresh cheroot from a shirt pocket, maybe tipping his hat back for a second, swiping the heat from his brow. ‘I’ll be darned. Lookee here.’

When my dad finished his gleeful phone call that day, we chuckled for some time. He bought flowers, white ones which Mum especially likes, on the way home.

‘This’ll keep her busy,’ he cracks, in that Wild West fashion. The fact is, he is crazy about her.

He walks with me. I call it a saunter. My dad has a steadfast, ruminative walk. He takes command of his space. I only ever saw him hurry once, when Mum broke her wrist badly, gardening on a slope, when she was in a state of turmoil over his moodiness. It was a terrible break and he had to drive a long way to a good hospital and I was there too, sitting in the back of the car with my broken-up mother who was making cheery comments to keep us calm, despite a lower arm that looked like bits of snapped kindling. My dad’s back, I could see, was dark with sweat and he was leaning into the steering wheel as if he could impel the vehicle onward this way, or maybe speed us into a happier time zone, a place without injury.

4. NEVER GARDEN ON A SLOPE WHEN IN A STATE OF TURMOIL.

My dad walks with me. He is gripping my neck, loosely he thinks, in a manner suggesting fellowship and affection. It feels good although his grip is a little like those sinks in the hair salon, designed to hold your head in place but actually inviting disaster, such as permanent spinal injury and wholesale numbing of the nervous system. But I like walking with my dad this way. The world is ours. No one would dare pull a gun on us, nor even call out a careless remark. Everyone wants to be us, I can tell.

But who is this man, I cannot help asking myself, who believes that a thump will make a thing function? My dad is a pummeller of dashboards, a boxer of boilers, a rattler of fax machines, telephones, turnstiles and parking meters, a walloper of drinks dispensers, a slapper of remote controls. He is the man you see stabbing a lift button eight or nine times. He is also the one kicking the lawn mower, and pulling and pushing on locked doors, wildly enough to loosen the foundations of a house. It is possible this man had children in order to operate machinery for him. Yes, I think so.

My dad is a sportswriter. He also writes children’s fiction under a pseudonym. In these books, he writes about small children organizing the world around them despite themselves, a world full of human failures, cranks and despots, some with endearing and poignant flaws, others with thunderous bad taste and hilariously inflated egos. He finds these types, these faltering embarrassing types, really funny. These are his people.

To relax, my sportswriting dad watches sports on TV. He would like to be watching TV right now and he hears my little sister’s dancing step close by.

‘Harriet!’

My sister dances in. She is five years old and taking ballet classes. She has the right build but lacks discipline. She is a little too exuberant and has no time for the formality of steps.

‘Yeee-ess?’

‘Will you pass the remote.’

‘Oh Daddy, no! There are bad gamma rays, Jem told me. And soon you will fall asleep, snore-snore-noisy! Just like at the zoo, Ben said. No, Daddy, no, no! Hello! Goodbye!’

My sister is merry and exits with pirouettes and fouettés.

‘Goddamnit!’

Ben races past, a flurry of long limbs. He is usually in a hurry and my dad is not quick enough to catch him. Nor does he always know what to say, how to get his attention. Ben is complicated. I am crazy about him and this is not a problem for me. You have to know how to get through, that’s all.

‘Hey, Jude,’ my dad calls from his prone sofa position.

Jude, who was only passing, backtracks and stands in the doorway of the living room. My brother Jude is a man of few words. He doesn’t see much point in talking a lot. He has a bagel in one hand and a book in the other.

‘Pass me the remote. Did you mow the lawn yet?’

‘Not yet,’ Jude says, unruffled, moving very slowly in the vague direction of the remote control. He picks up a magazine on the way and bites his bagel. He is easily distracted and never in a hurry.

‘JUDE!’

I am looking for Jude. There he is.

‘Ahh! Jem! Who’s my favourite child?’

‘What do you want, Dad?’

I wish I had not come in, but I want Jude. Being bossed around and doing silly tasks for your dad when wearing a holster and cowboy hat is seriously disrupting.

‘Stick ’em up!’ he says, laughing.

I would quite like to shoot him now but I can’t. Never shoot an unarmed man.

This is how it was when we were small kids. It is still a bit like this when we come home to visit, even today. We all have our own machines now and we know how to use them. We don’t ask anyone else. We laugh now mostly about my dad when he is thumping machinery with the full expectation that this will be effective. We smile and try to help out. I think he likes that. Once, though, I saw him try to light a faulty boiler with a match. I wanted to yell at him but could not. I took over the situation but I could not yell at him. He is not a kid, he is my dad.

5. ALWAYS GO TO THE LOO IF YOU THINK YOU MAY NEED TO PEE.

Here are the times when passing up on rule number five is a bad idea. (1) Settling into a cinema or theatre seat and the show is about to begin. Too late. (2) Sitting at your table in a posh restaurant and ordering wine and food. The entrée arrives. Too late. (3) Turning off the lights at night when in bed in foetal position and already half-asleep. Too late. Now you will have tortured dreams featuring gruesome toilet-bowl situations. (4) Car rides with grumpy drivers.

I want to blame my dad for this but that is not the way things work just now. In the world today, all things dark and tumultuous are down to me. My dad’s mood is definitely my fault and I cannot bear to hold up the terrible car journey, the fifteen-minute ride which my dad conveys to me with a look will be as gruelling as a forced march across all the central provinces of Canada. No, I cannot hold up the journey by asking to dash to the loo first. My dad says we are going NOW. Some people rub their hands in glee and say, Now! Others, like my dad, mean only one thing by ‘now’. Now is full of terror.

O-KAAAY … co-RAAAALL! O-KAAAAY … co-RAAALLL! I think of this, too, that my dad must believe if he thumps me, if he takes me by the shoulders and rattles my little bones, gives me a shake momentous enough to reorganize all my vital organs and charge up my circulation and spark up all the neurons and synaptic impulses in my cerebellum, that I, too, will function again. It’s a simple operation. Come back, Jem. Howdy, partner. Long time no see.

We’re there now. Parking, my dad nearly mows down two dumpy ladies wearing stretchy trousers in appalling colours, but it doesn’t even raise a chuckle in our wagon. In good times this would be a great game, using our car like a cowcatcher. Not today, though.

‘Okay. I’m waiting here. Five minutes,’ he announces, not even looking at us, reaching behind the seat for a newspaper and snapping it open at the sports pages.

Mum and I see right away that the chemist/health shop is closed. Oh-oh. Clearly they knew I was coming.

‘Let’s get ice cream,’ my mother says recklessly, not glancing back at the car.

This feels pretty dangerous. I am prickly all over.

I get a tub of coffee ice cream and my mother, almost uniquely refined in her tastes and a really great cook, opts for something truly disgusting with caramel and scary little bits all over the top. For her, this is a throwback to a happy childhood she never actually had. She looks rebellious and gleeful which is cool to behold.

Walking back to the car, I note two things. I don’t need to pee anymore. And my dad is storming toward us, his hands flapping angrily like someone has stolen the car from right under him or maybe a war has begun and we are behind enemy lines. Spotting the tubs of ice cream takes him to a point beyond fury, a place Mum and I do not want to be. I look at her. I am scared now but she smiles beautifully and makes for the car, getting in the back with me. My dad returns to the driver’s seat and tugs the door closed, but he can’t slam it because his car is posh and new and he has to be a bit careful.

‘Aren’t you sitting in front?’ he asks crossly.

‘No,’ she says, and then, more quietly, ‘Home, James.’

I feel a great whirl of hilarity in my stomach now and I look at my mother with shock and delight. I whisper, ‘Home, James’ too. I keep saying it in my head and glancing at her. We eat our ice creams all the way home. I did not get my remedy for depression, but then of course, maybe I did, for a minute or two at least, which is perhaps all a person should rightly expect, I don’t know.

6. HAVE A CATALOGUE OF JOKES OR JOKEY SITUATIONS YOU CAN HAUL UP FROM MEMORY IN DARK TIMES.

You have to work pretty hard at rule number six. Sometimes, not very grown-up jokes are the best. For instance, my brother Gus and I often look at each other across a room and thrust out our lower mandibles, curling the mouth up at the corners, adopting a crazed, wide-eyed expression. Pretty soon we are spluttering into our drinks. It only takes a second. It is not grown-up but it is very reliable for a laugh, whereas jokes about German philosophers are not.

My dad tells one or two jokes I have never understood. One of them involves fishing and gefilte fish. It goes something like this. What happened to all the herring fished out of the X sea? Well! Ha ha ha! It ends up as gefilte fish in Chicago! My dad chokes up and all the sophisticates around him quake with mirth, shoulders akimbo and so on. The second joke is about an Eskimo. My dad went up to the Arctic once to cover some sledging championships or something for Sports Illustrated and he came back with some bizarre souvenirs, such as a sealskin doll for Harriet which smelled so bad she wouldn’t touch it and I buried it in the garden for her, plus some pretty bad jokes. It seems that when Eskimos had to choose English names for themselves for legal reasons or something, they picked whatever favourite activity they had or whatever object they were close to at the time. One lady was a fan of American football and so she called herself Sophie Football. Absolutely hilarious.

Here is another joke my dad finds very funny indeed. One afternoon in late August when I was fourteen or so, I cross the kitchen of our summer cottage on my way outside and see my dad finishing a snack involving bread and tomatoes and spring onions.

‘Hey, Jem.’

I stop. Oh-oh. ‘Yup?’ Will this take long? What does he want? I am aiming to go swimming.

‘Come here.’ He crooks his finger at me. This drives me wild. Having to get closer and closer just to be sent far off to get something for him.

‘I’m here.’ I take one step closer, that’s it.

‘How much pocket money do I owe you?’

‘June July-August.’

‘I’ll flip you double or nothing.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on, Jem.’ Be a man.

‘Okay then.’

I lose. My dad is so happy, he is just delirious with mirth. He goes looking for some more of his kids right away. He tries it out on Harriet and Gus and wins both times. This is one of the funniest things that has happened in the whole of my dad’s life, it seems. He tells the story for years and years. This is the kind of thing that keeps him going.

It is possible, when my dad is stuck in a queue at the supermarket or in a traffic jam, he calls up these jokes, and things improve for him right then, he feels better. You have to find your own thing. My mother saying ‘Home, James’ in a very quiet blithe voice the day we came back from our abortive trip to the chemist that summer, on a quest for some stupid herbal remedy for depression, that makes me smile, it really does, anytime I think of it.

Here is a joke. Can you be a cowboy if you are Jewish? I do not know the punchline. One day I’ll ask my dad, who is Jewish and a cowboy, maybe the only one that ever lived.

7. ALWAYS CARRY A BOOK WITH YOU.

This is a very important rule and easy to slip up on. Here is how. You say to yourself, I have carried that book with me every single day this week and never once have I had time to pull it out and read it. It is making a big fat unseemly bulge in my pocket, it is bumping up against my hip when I walk, it is weighing me down. Today I am not taking it, goddamnit. That is the day your friend is forty minutes late and you are left at the restaurant with the foot of your crossed leg swinging loose and you have studied every face and every painting in the place. That is the day your bus gets caught in a traffic jam or you end up having to take someone to the emergency room and wait four hours for the person to emerge. Always carry a book with you.

Here, though, are two times I had a book with me and it was of no use.

This was the first time. It is my turn for the emergency room. I am there because I cut my hand pretty badly and sometime between diving onto the floor of my flat in a petrified faint and getting into a cab to the hospital, I grab a novel and slip it into my coat pocket. I have paid attention to rule number seven, yes I have. I choose Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac, which I am reading for the second time. But when I am in Casualty, I am too sick to read. I am too sick and too scared. The nurse tries to speed me through. He asks, ‘Why are you so cold? How did this happen?’

I don’t know, I answer. I don’t feel well. I was cutting a bagel. I say this about the bagel because I have just read in a leaflet from a bagel shop that bagel-cutting injuries are a really common occurrence. I remember the bagel legend, too. How a Jewish baker invented the bagel in 1683 to commemorate the good deed performed by King Jan III of Poland. His good deed was this: he saved Vienna from a Turkish invasion. The bread was in the shape of a stirrup due to Jan’s love of equestrianism. In Austria the word for stirrup is Buegel. The name of the shop where I found the leaflet is Angel Bagel. Where was my angel tonight? Drunk somewhere, high on single malt. Nowhere for me. The thing is, I am lying about the bagel-cutting injury.

‘What are all those other cuts?’ the nurse asks.

‘I was reaching into a cupboard and I grazed my wrist on a cheese grater, how stupid can you get?’ I say in a rush.

If my dad saw me now with my cut-up wrists, he would be really really mad at me, although he would not say a thing. He would unstrap my holster and take away my gun. He would unpin my tin star. You are not fit to ride with me, that is what he would mean to tell me. You are no longer my right-hand man.

This brings me to rule number eight.

8. WHEN YOU ARE GOING THROUGH DARK TIMES, PACK UP YOUR KNIVES AND GIVE THEM TO A FRIEND.

I mean all of them, all your knives. If you are at all inclined to slice yourself up in dark times, to pretend you are a tomato, which is an ideal fruit for testing the sharpness of filleting knives, carpet cutters, cleavers, X-acto blades, Stanley knives and safety razor blades, to watch with fascination as the blood rises to the surface in particularly sensitive zones of your body such as wrists and ankles, then rule number eight is one for you. It will mean an expensive period of shopping at Marks & Spencer for ready meals, ones with bite-sized pieces of prawn or chicken in chilli tomato sauce, for instance. Or you can buy pricey pots of tomato sauce or roasted aubergines to put on pasta. Italian clam sauces are available in small jars from the best Italian delis. Or you can just eat a lot of yogurt and nuts and mashed banana. Buy bread in small shapes, i.e., bagels, or baguette de tradition you can break off bits from. It will be all right. If you feel like eating during dark times, you will not go hungry in a house empty of knives.

The second time I paid attention to rule number seven (ALWAYS CARRY A BOOK WITH YOU) and it was of no use to me was when my dad said goodbye to me before I took a coach to the airport on my way back home after my summer holiday, the one which featured the car ride and the quest for a herbal remedy for depression.

I have already waved to my mother. I asked her not to come with me because parting between us is a wrenching business, even for five minutes or so, even if we separate on a shopping expedition or something. I know I cannot go through the airport thing with her, no.

My dad lays his big hands on my little shoulders at the coach station, my two small cases at my feet. I am pretty sure my mother will have slipped some treat into my carry-on bag and I am looking forward to finding it as soon as my dad goes. Something about his two big hands on my shoulders just now has me worried. It feels ominous, like just before Joey warns Shane in the final shoot-out about the man aiming at him from the balcony. You know Shane cannot die, but he could. He could. He comes so close.

‘Jem,’ says my dad in a lower voice than usual.

I glance at his face and then stare at his chest. ‘We have done everything we can. We love you. We don’t know what else to do anymore. You have to look after yourself now. Got your ticket, passport, enough cash?’

‘Yuh.’

‘We’ll see you in a few months. We love you.’

As I watch him walk away from me, a slightly lurching walk, heels making their mark on the ground, arms swinging a little and the hands hovering loose but ready at holster height, I think, One shot. One shot is all it would take.

No, Jem, no. Never shoot a man in the back. Don’t you remember anything?

I want to scream after him, too. I want to scream, ‘Do you love me right now, though? Do you even like me now? Do you?’ But I just get on the coach and stare out of the window into the evening through a veil of tears, and at the airport I cannot read or eat the nice treats my mother stashed for me, I am good for nothing. My dad does not love me and I am on my own, I have to look out for myself, okay. These are my first steps in that direction and all I can do is pace up and down the airport lounge and cry quietly. There are no prizes for behaviour like mine and even rule number seven is of no use to me, goddamnit. I am thinking of making a pyre of my rule book or ripping it up in tight angry irretrievable pieces to flutter over the ocean. Tomorrow maybe. And I will never watch a western again. I hate westerns now.

9. ALWAYS HAVE SOME SPORTS NEWS AT HAND FOR WHEN YOUR DAD IS IN HOSPITAL AFTER A SCARY OPERATION TO DO WITH A FATAL DISEASE.

I’ve got my sports news ready in case my dad can talk to me, even for a few seconds. There was a tumour in him, they cut it out. My dad could have done this himself. Take a shot of cognac, stuff a hanky in your mouth, polish the knife on a rock, cut it out. Like snakebite, no problem. Today I might get to speak to him. Everyone is there with my mother – Ben, Jude, Harriet and Gus, even Ben’s wife and Gus’s girlfriend, who is pregnant. They have all flocked to him from wherever they live and are running and fetching and worrying and trying to joke with Mum and making calls to the outside world. I am the only one not there. Does he know it? Does he know I am not there? I am in the outside world. I just can’t go. I cannot be there. I am on the outside, waiting for calls. Sometimes the boys explain things to me about the operation, but I do not take it in. I have the same feeling when someone is explaining an abstruse political news item to me. It is a nightmare of information. I listen and nod and hope the person will shut up soon. I do not take it in. I tell myself, I’ll work it out later, I’ll find out for myself what this all means.

I have not washed properly in five days, I only splash at the sink. I eat bread and cheese and stay up watching videos of westerns, way into the night, when it is only afternoon for my dad and the family. I watch The Gunfighter, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, My Darling Clementine, and Shane. Shane is my favourite of all time.

‘He’d never have been able to shoot you if you’d seen him!’

‘Bye, little Joe.’

‘He’d never even have cleared the holster, would he, Shane? … Shane? Shane! Come back! … Bye, Shane!’

Finally, Mum puts my dad on the phone.

‘Hey, Dad.’

‘You are going to be fine,’ he says.

What?

‘YOU-are-going-to-be JUST-FINE.’

‘You mean you are going to be just fine, right? You. How are you, Dad?’

‘Everything is going to be all right, you are going to be fine, we are going to be—’

He does mean me.

‘Dad?’

‘Jem, you are—’

‘Dad? Are you okay?’

‘I am okay! I am o-KKKAAY—’

I clasp the receiver even tighter and jump up from a sitting position. I join in. ‘O-KKAAAY … co-RRAAAL, o—’ but my mother has taken the phone from him and I don’t know now. I do not know if he was really singing the tune from Gunfight at the O.K. Corral or not.

Mum stays on the line for only a second or two, enough time to say she’ll call back later or tomorrow and I hang up and sit in the dark room and feel cut off and panicky and manacled by this question. I want to know if my dad was doing the tune from the western with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas playing Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. I need to know. And I wonder if the whisky-soaked angels are still hanging out with my dad, if they are hovering over the hospital, getting all confused, some of them keeling over suddenly and looking surprised and silly. What is going on here? That must be morphine! Some of them want to go, but the big-cheese angel says, Hang in there, this man is a gunfighter and he will get up to pour single malt another day. That’s right, guys, I think. Hang in there.

That is rule number ten. HANG IN THERE.

I practise it, the gunslinger squint.

Hang in there.