Читать книгу An Exceptionally Simple Theory (of Absolutey Everything) - Mark Winkler - Страница 6

Chris and Sylvia

I put Schultz out, though his brown eyes implore me not to. Schultz now tolerated rather than adored, all greying chops and gas and bad breath. I make sure the windows and doors are secured, switching off lights behind Tracy and Gabriel as I go, turning on the alarm before I squeak-thunk my way up the stairs. Gabriel has retired to his crepuscular, doorless lair without saying good night. Tracy is in our bathroom, naked, rubbing vitamin oil onto the scars that run like fine white cords under each breast. She’s been doing this every evening for six months since the implants; I don’t have the heart to tell her that if the scars haven’t gone by now, they never will. I pee – one leg, one crutch, one dick – hoping that this simple act will purge my body of the evening’s excesses of beer and tequila, yet knowing that it won’t and that I’ll remember them well enough in the throbbing light of day.

I get into bed, lie there with a forearm over my eyes. Tracy emerges from the bathroom. I start making gentle sleeping noises and shift my arm a fraction so that I can spy on her from beneath it. Tracy has white stuff on her face, a bare Pierrot clown halfway through its make-up session. Her body has hardened over the years and is now gym-stringy and ungenerous, if not actually undernourished. Ribs join the sternum like the bones of a skiff above the too-large breasts, asymmetrical abs appear and disappear across her midriff as she breathes. She has taken to Brazilians; the welcoming, fluffy nest that she once shared so generously is now mean and tight-lipped, prickly to the touch, its cropped exclamation mark of hair contradictorily and disturbingly pubescent. She walks over to the mirror, checks out the flatness of her stomach from the side, runs her forefingers along the blades of her hip bones, turns to look at herself over her shoulder, cups her bum-cheeks in her hands and lifts them up slightly. The cheeks each produce a folded overhang of skin – flaccid rather than fat – against the top of her thighs when she lets them go. It won’t be long before she raises the subject of a bum-lift with me. But she won’t be doing so tonight. She is frowning, turns the frown on me.

“You were weird this evening,” she says.

“I’m sleeping, Trace,” I lie.

“You were thinking of Dalia.”

“Oh my fuck,” I say, more surprised that I actually hadn’t been thinking of Dalia at all than at the accusation.

“Of course you were. You always think of Dalia on New Year’s Eve.”

“Well, this year was different. She never entered my mind.”

“You were weird, especially at first. You only chilled after a few beers.”

I hear Gabriel’s voice in my head: Don’t say “chilled”, Mom.

“You know how I am with new people.”

“You’re thirty-nine, Chris. You’ve been meeting new people since you were two.”

“Well before that, actually. And I’ve always been exactly the same with all of them.”

“Only on New Year’s Eve.”

I don’t feel like an argument. The bed is sucking me in, wrapping me in its seduction, unconditionally promising me the sweetness of sleep. Tracy finds some skin-firming unguent or other and turns back to the mirror to rub the stuff onto her buttocks.

“Whatever,” I say.

Gabe: Don’t say “whatever”, Dad.

“So you were thinking about her?”

I lift myself up on my elbows even though I don’t want to. “Tracy, I was not thinking about her. I was chatting and laughing with the best of them. I had fun. And so did you, by the look of things.”

Tracy snorts quietly, puts on an old T-shirt of mine, gets into bed, switches off the light, turns her back to me. I automatically put my hand on her hip. She shakes her butt like a wet dog and wriggles to the far edge of the bed, out of reach. This strange woman, my once-wife, this lodger who shares my bed, who won’t share herself. I am furious with her, not because she is rejecting my advance – which in the first place wasn’t an advance, and in the second is used to being rejected – but because I hadn’t thought of Dalia until Tracy mentioned her name, and now I will probably be thinking about her all night.

“Thanks for doing that thing of yours,” I say, to show her that I am a bigger person than she might suspect.

There’s a silence. But then she can’t help herself.

“What thing?”

“That thing you do to distract people from trying not to look at my leg.”

“I didn’t know I did a thing like that.”

Sometimes an old person’s problems become a young person’s again.

New Year’s Day for the last five years has brought with it the ritual of going to visit my mother. Not that I don’t visit her during the year, which I do, as often as I can bear it, but the day used to carry with it the promise of new hope, and that’s why I started doing it.

I suppose professionals with couches and notepads would call it denial, but originally my hope was that it wasn’t Alzheimer’s, that her dilliness, once so endearing, was temporarily magnified by my father’s death, that everything would be okay again once she had mourned and accepted his passing.

And then, of course, there’s the guilt.

My mother – or Sylvia, as I now think of her, because she is no longer the mother who raised me, and because to her I am now a sometime nurse, a sometime doctor, her husband, the ghost of her own father or brother – Sylvia lived with us for almost a year after my father died. Towards the end of that time, Tracy and I began referring to her as The Poltergeist: taps left running, the fridge standing open, laundry in the garbage, dentures in the cutlery drawer, the gas cooker turned up high to heat an invisible pot. Then, one evening, The Poltergeist was replaced by a demon at once sublimely innocent and chillingly dangerous.

Tracy and I, as we used to do back then, had gone out for an evening together, leaving Gabriel in the bath while Sylvia supervised. We returned from dinner and a movie to find the boy still in the tub, shivering, turning blue, scrubbed pink, crying hysterically. Sylvia had not allowed him to get out, because she was certain that he’d just got in; every time he tried to climb out of the tub she forced him back again, forced him to wash himself, and when after the sixth or seventh wash he refused to do it again, she took the soap and the facecloth and scrubbed him down herself, kept on scrubbing until we came home. From the foot of the stairs we heard her shouting – and Sylvia never shouted – shouting that the child, who was barely ten, had to wash himself before he’d be allowed out of the water. And Gabriel, almost hypothermic, red from scouring himself in trying to appease his grandmother, flayed almost to bleeding where she had taken over and continued the scrubbing, crying in gasping sobs at a nightmare that had gone on for four endless hours. Tracy pulling Gabriel from the bath, wrapping him in a towel, also crying by now, screaming at me as though I had been the perpetrator. Me leading Sylvia to her room by an elbow, hating the dotty half-smile on her face as much for what it signified as for what it didn’t. Her words making the hair on my neck stand up as I ushered her into her bedroom: “Isn’t it time for Gabriel’s bath now?”

In the morning I feel as though I have cotton wool in my ears and cellophane over my eyes. A distant headache from the beer and Barry’s tequila. Fuzzy, not in my skin. I invite Tracy and Gabriel to come to the care home where Sylvia now lives, not because they’ll accept, but because I should. They are both still asleep: when I whisper in her ear, Tracy shakes her body beneath the duvet as though she is having a small fit, kicks her legs, moans, burrows deeper. Gabriel simply turns away from me, folds a pillow around his head, holds the sandwich together with his forearms.

It’s early and the roads are New-Year’s-morning quiet. One or two joggers are already up and at it, three cyclists swap slipstreams. Along De Waal Drive, the carcass of an abandoned car lies on its back in the grass that grows on the median. I slow the Audi. See skid marks, glass, stains of fluid on the road, yellow police tape. For auld lang syne.

The nurse behind the reception desk is short, plump, pink, her upturned nose a comical complement to her looks – the inadvertent humour of genetic splicing. Her breasts spill onto the counter as she works on some papers, and they stay there when she looks up to greet me.

“Hello, Mr Hayes. Happy New Year; so nice to see you after all this time.”

The devil in the unsaid bits.

She walks me down corridors that smell of old people, urine, carbolic. Fusty, funky. The dust in the shafts of summer sun tastes of aspirin. Withered people, husks from which the spiders of age have sucked the juices, leaving only thin skin with scabs that won’t grow over and thoughts that won’t connect. An outburst – anger, frustration? – from a tall man with a metal cane. Crumpled women in wheelchairs stare down the tunnels of time to worlds of porcelain dolls and tin soldiers, worlds before television or stereo FM broadcasts. The nurse warns me that Sylvia has deterio­rated, and that the disease which broke her mind is now breaking her body. Lucid periods ever more infrequent, mere punctuations in full-blown dementia. She has forgotten how to walk, had done, a month ago. She has to be fed, diapered, cleaned. She fears many things, sees many others, most of which are not there. She rages at everything and nothing. And is raging, I see, as we walk into her room.

“Why don’t you fuck off and get me breakfast?” Sylvia growls at the nurse and snaps her head around to glare at the window.

“I’m so sorry,” I say to the nurse: an absurd apology, but Sylvia had never in her rational life spoken like that.

The nurse puts her hand on my arm. “Don’t apologise. It’s part of the whole thing, and believe me, we’re used to it.” She turns to Sylvia, goes down on her haunches beside the wheelchair. Knees turning from plump pink to anaemic white as the skin stretches over them. “You had breakfast not half an hour ago, darling. Remember – yoghurt, tea, some nice eggs?”

“Ali’s wife always brought the freshest eggs,” Sylvia says to the window, to the wind-polished sky beyond. “When she told me they were going to bulldoze District Six I told her to stop being silly, and then they did and I could do nothing to help.” She turns to the nurse, looks her up and down, raises her eyebrows. “My nurses do not squat on the floor. They stand proud. And look at your uniform, girl, good heavens, you only have half of it on! Not even tights, just bare legs! You leave me no choice but to report you to the duty sister.”

The nurse stands up, strokes Sylvia’s shoulder, pats it.

“She used to be a nurse herself,” I say. “A sister, actually. So.” Again, an absurd apology.

“I know. She’s always carrying on about our uniforms. I suppose they were kind of different in her day.” She smoothes the blanket over Sylvia’s knees, adjusts the curtain to shade the old woman’s eyes from the morning sun.

“Just ring the bell if you need help,” she says to me.

“Hi, Mom,” I say once the nurse has left us alone. Sylvia turns towards me; perhaps it is the unexpected tone of a male voice that catches her attention.

“Doctor, these people never feed me and my hip hurts. Why all the hiking when my hip hurts? I lost my boots on Sunday.”

“Sylvia – Mom, it’s me, Chris.”

“Chris, Chris . . . rhymes with piss.”

“Chris, your son.”

She grunts as though I am lying. “Never had a son. Borrowed one once. And when I lost the library card, well, you should have heard the . . .”

I turn her wheelchair towards the bed, sit on the floral cover, look into her faraway blue eyes and tell her my news. Gabriel – yes, your grandson – blossoming into a tall and handsome young man. So clever. Draws like Frank Lloyd Wright, like Raphael. Sends his love. So does Tracy – you remember Tracy, of course you do, she’s fine, as pretty and sweet as ever. We have squirrels in the roof, can you believe that? Old houses and their maintenance – it’s not the money, you know, Mom, it’s the complications of it all, the effort, it’s the knowledge that you’ll just have to fix it all over again soon. Same for everything, all the stuff in the house, the cars, the business. You work so hard to get it, then you have to work twice as hard to keep it together, to keep it meaning something. As Dad used to say, it’s like trying to put an octopus into a string bag. Keep fixing, doing, forgetting to be. Who wrote “the centre cannot hold”? I don’t remember. Barry played his guitar at the New Year’s party. It was awful, he really shouldn’t have. Sorry, Ma. I shouldn’t whine so much – it’s small stuff, really. A big new contract for the firm, a mixed-use centre in the middle of town, exciting project, progressive client, great budget.

There’s nothing there. She’s staring at the sky through the window again, so I try a different tack.

You wouldn’t believe how much Tracy’s changed. Been going to gym so much she could probably do a full triathlon with a millstone around her neck. Like biltong now, though. And had her boobs done six months ago. Biltong with breasts, well. I never minded her real ones, but she insisted, said she wanted it for her, not for me. Now she’s got tits like a porn star, which is ironic because we hardly have sex any more. Never, actually. Hardly talk, either, unless it’s to bitch. She uses her new tits like an assault weapon, blam – or should that be blam-blam? – in your face. Even a gay guy couldn’t help gaping.

Still nothing.

And to tell you the truth, Gabriel is so different, difficult, I don’t know what to do with him. I’m struggling to keep up with the changes in him. The body and the brain and the emotions of him all growing at different rates, in different directions. It’s not what he does, it’s what he doesn’t do. I’m scared for him – scared that he’ll grow up into a non-person, because non-people get sucked into non-lives. He’s sixteen now – how is he possibly going to live to seventy? He can barely cross the street on his own, can’t hold a conversation unless it’s to beg for something or whine. Yes, he has problems – but we all do, don’t we? I mean, look at you. Look at me. Just look. Just look at the two of us.

Nothing. No thing. No. Thing.

Do you realise it’s nineteen years since Dalia died? Nineteen years since she died pretty much in my arms. And you know what, I don’t miss her. Haven’t missed her for years, didn’t even think about her last night, when. I feel bad about it, feel like I should still be pining, feel guilty that I’m not. Is it okay that the space has been filled by the days in between? Is it okay for her to be dead and for the hole she left to be filled with memories of everything that’s happened since? Is it okay that I’ve filled the hole with good sense, money, family? Or should I have preserved the hole by stuffing it with cotton wool or beeswax? I don’t know.

I look at the backs of my hands, the pores of them. Turn them over, feel the hardened heel of one with the thumb of the other. Breathe in the closeness of the room.

I have this tugging, Mom. This tugging right here, in the middle of me, as though something is trying to pull me down. Or up. Or along. Trying to pull me somewhere else. Or trying to pull something out of me. Maybe it’s my stomach or spleen or something. I’ll get it checked out at my next physical, so don’t nag me about it. It’s a tugging that’s trying to pull me right, but I can’t follow it until I know what I’ve done wrong. Or. Or maybe it’s everything tugging in all different directions from the same anchor point – Tracy one way, Gabriel the next, the firm the other, the squirrels and the teeth and the endless slow decay of things another way yet. Gravity downwards, youth backwards, hope forwards, memory sideways, the future up, the past down, the present whichever way present circumstance dictates. Do you know what it could be, Mom, this pulling of me in all directions? Not, huh? I was hoping, but. I wonder if Dad would have known. He knew everything worth knowing – except maybe how to make money. Do you still miss him, Mom? I do. I miss you both, actually.

And then, the glaze clears and the eyes focus.

“Chris?”

“Yes, it’s me, Mom.” The sudden acid threat of tears at the corners of my eyes. Maybe a few minutes, please, just three minutes, two, one even, where the fog lifts.

But.

“Hmph. I never knew a Chris.” The arms cross and the glaze returns, and with it a fascination with my stump. I try one last time. “I’m Chris,” I say. “Your son.”

“Michael?”

“No, Chris.”

A shake of the head. “I never had a son. Borrowed one once until –”

And then her head snaps up and her eyes widen and fill with tears. Are they old tears, dammed up behind those blue eyes for years, decades, carrying dissolved within them the sorrows of a lifetime, or are they new ones, divined overnight or over breakfast to wash away new fears, fears yet unfaced?

“Get out of the bathroom!” she wails. “You know you may not come into the bathroom when the door is closed. Oh my, I can’t believe you’re sitting right here staring at me while I’m in the bathroom! For shame!” She puts her hands over her face and sobs with the horror of it and then the air in her room thickens with the instant rot of shit, its rough bass notes and bitter-sweet top notes saturating the stuffiness and, I fear, my clothes – I fear me, my hair, my skin, my bones – so I hold my breath, lean over to kiss her powder-soft, blue-marbled temple goodbye.

The sky has been torn open by the strong southeaster – if a smoker tossed a cigarette out of a car window right now, the entire mountain would be aflame. But only the runners are about; the smokers are all still in bed, nursing sore heads, regretting.

There are police cars and tow-trucks at the stranded vehicle now. Men are standing about, their jackets worried by the wind as they scratch their heads and wonder how to right the car.

Is that how they’d left my car all those years ago? Abandoned for the night after being eviscerated, its occupants split up and ferried in different directions, one to the hospital to be revived, the other to the morgue?

Nineteen years. Nineteen years since I lost my leg along with the part of me that lived in it, that fraction of my twenty-one gram soul, the part the surgeons never told me I had lost. A New Year’s party, Dalia driving after her usual night of limes-and-soda, me pissed-but-not, making up nonsense couplets. Dalia laughing, pulling off when the light turned green, and then. Then.

Then.

Then I remember why I hate “Auld Lang Syne” so very much. I find myself hoping that the occupants of the upended car are either properly dead or properly alive, not in some ruined place in between.

I am struggling to go home, my car complicit with my mood, slowing to a crawl before I notice: after Sylvia, I cannot face the indolence of Tracy, Gabriel sleeping through his most vibrant hours. I turn off the highway after the University and take the steep little road up to Rhodes Memorial. Hop through the car park, feel surprised to find the coffee shop open. It’s too windy to sit outside; a yawning waitress ushers me inside. There are Christian posters on the wall. The waitress brings me a menu and a badly designed pamphlet that poses the question, Does God Exist? and provides possible answers next to three tick-boxes: Yes, No, Maybe. When was I last in a church? I don’t know – God in man’s image and all that. I push pamphlet and menu aside and tell the waitress that just a coffee will do. She looks relieved. “Glad you didn’t order tequila, I couldn’t deal with the sight of it right now,” she says and shivers. I’m tempted to change my order, to demand a tequila and to down it while she watches, but I don’t.

I’m the only patron, but the coffee takes an age. When it arrives it is tepid, and I suspect that party-girl forgot about it and left it standing after it was poured. Or perhaps she was in the restroom, temporarily incapacitated by her night on the town. I mean to complain, or to rile her by asking what the Bible teaches about excess, but I can’t be bothered. Instead, I watch the wind tearing at the stone pines while on the other side of the Flats it piles clouds onto the tops of blue mountains, like a great cosmic child trying to see how much ice-cream it can cram into a cone before it all falls out.

I don’t have the experience or the practice that nurses have. It has to be easier when you’re a nurse – your charges are the organs, the lives, of other people. It must be a simple matter – no, a necessary one – to let a carapace grow over your softer bits, to build dense layers of keratin, and to top it all off with Teflon so that the ornaments and the food and the words that are thrown at you cannot pierce.

I am unprepared for any of it, have no such protection. Unprepared most of all for the barb of denial, the sting and the burn of it. My defences are paper-thin, academic – she is ill, she is mad, and none of it is her fault. I know she is in control of neither her mind nor her mouth, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to go back to the home, to shake the old bitch, slap her, shout at her – for hours if need be – until something sinks in and there’s some kind of acknowledgement.

But the truth can be told in different ways. The accepted truth, one I’d held to all my life, is that after Michael and Sylvia adopted me, I became their son; I suppose now she, or her disease, has simply rephrased it. Because she is factually correct, of course. She’d never had a son: there had never been conception, never been a birth, so no panting or pushing or blood or torn birth canal, no placenta, no cabbage-cradled breasts or cracked nipples. Sylvia had never had a son, she’d simply had one handed to her.

But still.

I go home because there is nothing else to do. Pick up the dog shit on the lawn – one leg, one crutch, one poop-scoop. Make lunch because the combination of antibiotics and alcohol is still hurting Tracy, and Gabriel would rather eat Coco Pops straight from the box, starve even, than make himself a sandwich. Afterwards I sketch out some ideas, not very good ones, for the new Murray development that I’ll have to start on in earnest next week.

Google nothing. Read a book whose words don’t hang together despite the writer’s respect for syntax, grammar, story. Feed Schultz because nobody else will. Long for nightfall. Shower when it comes, go to bed. Lie there thinking about the son that Sylvia never had.

And then, at three in the morning, Gabe snoring, Tracy deceptively peaceful in sleep, even the squirrels quiet, the question: the endless, forever question, poking always just beneath the fabric of me, perfectly defined, but like a malevolent spirit never spoken of. The question now stabbing, at last, through the heavy cloth of sleep like a needle through skin –

Then who did?