Chop Chop (9 page)

I tried to avoid her for the rest of the term. We stood at opposite
ends of parties. In the library I pretended I hadn't seen her. We never spoke again. I still thought about her often, though they were angry thoughts, free of lust. When lips are used to curse you it is necessary to imagine their kisses differently. And this friend of mine, not so much of a friend as all that, it turned out, bought me a drink in the union bar the next week and listened sympathetically to my story, putting in the odd word about the evils of women and the perils of love. Only later did I realize this act was an admission of guilt on his part. He, I discovered, was the guy Rachel was seeing. It seems that is my fate. Forever finding out wrongs committed against me after the fact, in sideways and roundabout ways. Not hurt by the presence of the firing squad, but by the sight of one soldier among them who has not bothered to shave.

—

Reluctantly, I put my thoughts of Harmony into the same box. I was too proud, or too insecure, to let such a debacle happen again. I accepted, as best I could, that she was not interested in me. I had shown weakness, that was why. It wasn't just women either—it was everyone. All animals could smell it. All animals despised it. My own dear father, whose number often flashed up on my phone late at night as I drifted into sleep, was a case in point. To whomever invented the mute function, I give daily thanks.

And yet, trapped in this loveless kitchen, I did begin to miss home. Things had been simpler there. I hesitate to say better, but my status had certainly been higher, at least with one of my parents. In the end, nagged by memories I had no control over, I wrote my mother a short e-mail three weeks before Christmas saying that I was well, that I had found work and would not be able to visit over the festive season. I affected a breezy style. London was full of interest, and I had made many new friends.
Pentelho. Pussyclot. Bumfuck.
I asked how they were and if she had got any further with the garden after I'd left. When I had been there that summer the two of them were going to Lindy Hop classes in the gym opposite the train station. I asked how it was coming along. I didn't know what else to ask them. The Internet café down by Chalk Farm seemed like too public a place to ask them if they were still arguing at night, or if my father was still sneaking off to the bookie's with the grocery money. I couldn't ask if my mother still hated working in that care home or if the tree still blocked out the sitting room light or if the spoons were still bent. I couldn't ask because I knew the answers. So I asked how the neighbors were, whom I hadn't spoken to in five years. Looking back, I realize this might have come across as desperate.

—

The next day I received a reply from my mother. All my attempted breeziness had been read as sincerity. The phrase “full of interest” had obviously worried her. It's also full of pollution and people looking to take advantage of you, she wrote, as if a boy, a man, of almost twenty-three couldn't look after himself. Still, I appreciated her concern. On that second point, particularly, she had a lot of experience.

I'm sorry to say the garden has fallen back a little since your visit—a nice way to describe my four months of purposeless regression—I've been out a few times with the gloves when I'm not at the Grove but those weeds will keep coming. There was an incident at Lindy Hop with your father and we won't be going back. It's all “he said, she said” and I shan't bore you with the details. The tutor has agreed not to press charges. Your father insists it was a misunderstanding. The group was of the opinion that, whatever exactly happened,
personal property and personal space should always be respected. I've given up trying to defend that man. All I know is it's a shame, as we never went out anywhere as it was, and this is what happens when we do.

I keep trying to remember what granny used to say about marriage, as a deal two people struck. She said it so often I never bothered to listen. I only remember the bit about love having nothing to do with it. But there was a deal, she said, and you both had to keep your end up. I've stopped expecting that of your father. Maybe when that happens, when someone can't change, the deal is off.

Sorry to end on a sad note, dear, the restaurant really does sound exciting. Are you the sous chef?

Love, Mum.

P.S. The neighbors are still arseholes.

Those tangled, tenacious weeds. My mother among them, forthright, embattled, with scything flourishes of personal disclosure. I had forgotten that about her. How she could announce, over the breakfast table, that there was no female receptionist at the mechanics and my father would be out on his ear if he ever lied about who was calling again. You could see where Sam had got his plain speaking.

Yet this message did not comfort me as I had hoped. In fact, I regretted ever starting the correspondence. Nothing had changed. It was hard enough carrying around one set of anxieties as it was. Sending that e-mail had been a moment of weakness; I tried to put its words from my mind. But I kept thinking of my mother, sitting down in that hardly used study to write to me, my father's sports channels blaring from the next room, and I saw the clouds of sadness that lagged beneath the surface of her handsome face as she
typed, in that big overcast house, she and him, the two of them alone. Knocking about in an old life that no longer fitted them. Unable to let go of what they were before they were strangers to each other.

Inevitably I found myself retracing further, back to my elder brother, Sam. That was when we had all become strangers to one another. When my mother sent me up with his dinner, the hot bowl of soup wrapped in a tea towel so I did not burn my tender hands, and I would place it on his bedside table slightly too far away, just a little out of his reach, so he would have to stretch for his supper. I don't know why I did it; I worshipped my brother. Every time I climbed those stairs I wanted only to help him, to make him well again. But—and here was that cruelty again, the moment weakness was revealed—when I saw those dim eyes, that forehead beaded with sweat, the limp limbs beneath the covers, I was filled with disgust. This sad specimen was not the Sam I wanted to help. He was an impostor in Sam's bed, in his body. Let him get his own soup. Let him strain. Perhaps I wanted to test him, or to test myself: to see if I could ignore the groans of someone I loved, to see if I was strong enough. Whatever the reason, it plagues me still. There are many other moments when I was kind to him, but that's not the way memory works. Only this, and what it led to, feels real.

T
olstoy says that happy families are all alike, while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. I'm not saying he got it wrong, but it's the kind of sentence that makes more sense in a book than it does when you try to hold it up against your own life. I mean, it has a pure sense, as an axiom that makes people nod their heads and say, “Old Tolstoy's nailed it again.” It's exactly the right side of conspiratorial: everyone feels included and everyone feels unique. But when I look at my own family I can't separate it so easily into happy and unhappy, good and bad. I don't see it in terms of light and shadow, like those oil paintings you find in Catholic churches, The Randall Clan Cast Out of Paradise and such. Our happiness was never a concrete state; the unhappiness was built into it. Grandmother saw that, the cataractic old sage. Part of my parents' joy in those early years, I am sure, was knowing exactly what misery they had so far dodged. And part of their misery today, I have no doubt, is knowing the specific joy they once had.

Ramilov and Racist Dave know where this story ends: The Fat Man giving me the look of death, a locked door reverberating with shouts and whacks, blood that will not stop. Images that will remain with me, I expect, no matter what I do. But my self-appointed editors do not know the history that precedes those moments, the images from my family album that still sneak up to slit my throat. We can't choose what we remember or what we forget—for me, these early memories keep floating to the surface. Ramilov accuses me of being cagey about my home life—well, this snapshot of my family
is for his benefit. But it is also for mine: I need to set this all down if I am going to explain what happened.

It was the summer of my eighth birthday, the summer before everything really fell apart. My brother and I ruled the footpaths and backwaters, charging around them on our bikes, he always ahead of me, a blur of motion, his reddish-brown hair already autumnal against the deep summer greens. In woodland clearings we would throw our bikes to the ground and build great forts and dens from fallen boughs, camping out until dusk, when we knew the golf would end and our father would look up from the television and realize we were not there.

I have happy memories of those early summers. Yet remembering them brings me no joy. Perhaps all memories are inherently sad, even the happy ones, and should for that reason be avoided. Nostalgia is not so much the recollection of things past as the recollection of things you are no longer connected to.

Sometimes on those long childhood afternoons my brother would build a fire and we would sit up against it, enjoying the unnecessary warmth, while he told me about his new school. He'd swapped the coat-of-arms place for a secondary with its welcome sign in three languages. This was very sad news to me at the time. I was a smart little boy, who wore a shirt and tie with his shorts, and I wanted desperately to wear the cap of that fancy school. (I never did get the chance. I went to the multilingual state, where they locked me in the cleaning cupboard during break.) But always with my brother this sort of information was given without bias. Instead of prayers, now he had assembly. Instead of Latin, it was now sex education. He told me about his new classmates and teachers: the girl whose mother provided a tin of cold baked beans for her field trip packed lunch, the boy with a library of video nasties in his
room, the time Mrs. So-and-so started crying in class and the headmistress had to finish the lesson. He and his new friend Josh Phillips fighting the whole school in the playground after lunch.

I remember, even at that age, being struck by how my brother spoke about people, infinitely more generous and forgiving than I was. He was twelve, with a sneering father and hormones to boot. He had no business being such a saint, such a bold and upright specimen. I, by contrast, was a weak plant: I straggled and crept. To this day I look up to that twelve-year-old, still wiser than me though I am nearly twice his age. Isn't that also strange? That I have grown older than my older brother. That one day a child might be older than his parents or grandparents. Perhaps this is why I still look up to Sam. I have been compromised by time; he has been preserved by it.

On such a summer's day we found the wasps' nest. We were tearing through the scrub behind the golf course when my brother brought his bike suddenly to a halt and pointed at a large, dirty-white bulb hanging from a tree in front of us. It bulged obscenely, its wedding cake tiers swollen and lopsided. A veil of wasps surrounded it, buzzing, teeming, darting this way and that on their errands. Naturally I was afraid and told Sam we should go, our father would be missing us. A strange phrase that, which can be true and false at the same time. Sam, however, was not afraid.

“Look,” he said, holding his face right up to it. “Look, it's fine.”

And the wasps flew about him, unbothered by his presence. A miracle to little me: my saintly brother at one with the perils of nature. But when he pulled his face back from the nest and into view again there was blood running down it. His nose was pouring with the stuff. “Untold claret,” as Ramilov would say.

“What?” he said, seeing my look. “What's wrong?”

Then he put his hand to his nose and felt the gushing blood, saw
it falling in long, stretching drips onto his football shirt. Just a nosebleed, he said at first, it did not matter. But the nosebleed would not stop, it was coming thick and fast, and I could see that my brother was worried now. That really scared me, as my brother was never worried about anything. So we pedaled back to the house as fast as we could, my brother bleeding all the way, and found our father in his usual spot, trying to eat his milkless cornflakes with a bent spoon from a supine position. When he saw the blood on Sam's face he leaped up, the quickest I have ever seen my father move.

“What's happened?” he cried. “Did your brother do this?”

A nice assumption, which says a lot about my father's attitude toward me.

As he blocked Sam's nose I told him about the nest in the woods, how the nosebleed had come on all of a sudden. “
Bey neber dutched me
,” my brother kept saying through the clods of tissue. But my father was adamant the two events were connected. The wasps had harmed Sam in some way, and had to pay. At his insistence we led him back to the nest, with Sam bleeding all the way. Through the fence beside it you could see the golf course he used to visit with such regularity, a few argyle sweaters doing the rounds not so far away. Now the golf club was once more in our father's hand—I believe he had selected a nine iron for this shot—and he was lining himself up for a long, unorthodox swing. We pleaded, my brother and I, for him to leave the nest alone. The wasps had done nothing, we begged. The argyle sweaters had stopped and were looking over at us.

“Go on, Marty!” one of them shouted. “This one's for the cup!”

We hoped our father might recognize them and recoil in shame. We prayed for the yips to strike him at the moment of his swing. But our father had no such hang-ups with destruction. Order must be restored. He swung cleanly, brutally; a shattering hit. A pro might have been proud of that strike. The wasp nest exploded into
a million pieces, blanching us with dust, to sarcastic cheers from the argyles. Inside the wedding cake shell you could see the most elaborate and incredible tunnels, a complex network of connection and information. And there was my father, Big Chief Pale Face, blinking stupidly beside it. It made you wonder who knew more about order.

Then the wasps were upon us. They were, no finer point on it, pissed. Their buzzing had gone up three notches, like a chainsaw hitting wood. They came for my father mostly, they seemed to have a pretty good idea what sort he was, but for my brother and me too, stinging wherever they could, a furious cloud, a biblical plague crawling under our shirt collars and up our shorts. We ran from those forsaken links with the laughter of the argyles at our heels, a tribe of jerky hollering vandals, a family united at last. My mother put us in the shower one by one, and when we emerged our new welts shone like medals.

Of course my father would not hear a word about it. He had played the right shot, made the right call. He knew all about wasps. This was how you dealt with them. On the subject of Sam, however, he was less certain. Sam, who did not stop bleeding all day, growing whiter and wilder, his eyes stretching with fear, until it became clear he needed medical attention. In an instant he became the disputed territory between my parents, a shorthand for all that was tainted and unresolved. Those two have been collapsing in slow motion ever since. It will not be long now.