For something to come right, to have someone say, yes, here he is, seemed an impossibility, a tiny sweetener in all the oceans of bitterness in which I was currently drowning.
‘You have him?’ I said.
There was a slight pause, as if the girl was taken aback by my emotion.
‘Yes,’ she said again.
‘Well, where is he?’ I’d heard that funeral homes dispose of ashes if they are not taken away by relatives. I wanted to know where he’d been scattered, so I could tell the family and we could decide what to do with Grandma.
But instead of saying, we chucked him out the back door, into the sea breeze, into the nearest rose bush, over a convenient cliff, she uttered the unbelievable sentence: ‘He’s in the basement.’
For a mad moment, I had an image of Grandpa pottering about in a low-ceilinged but pleasant space, dressed, as he so often was, in slacks, a mustard-yellow shirt and a bow-tie, spending the last twenty years rearranging storage jars or setting up a ping-pong table or sorting nails in toolboxes or whatever the hell it is people do in basements. We thought he was dead, I would shout. But he’s just been in your basement all this time!
I cleared my throat and tightened my grip on the phone. ‘The basement?’
‘Shelf Four D.’
‘Four D,’ I repeated.
‘When do you want to come and collect him?’
The question took me by surprise. It had never occurred to me that Grandpa would need to be fetched, like a child from a birthday party. I realised in that moment that I hadn’t really expected to find him: the whole thing had been a distraction for me during the lowest point of my life thus far. To have found him was discombobulating, unexpected, unreal.
Ireland: I pictured damp hillsides of vivid green, stone bridges arching over silvering streams, women with an abundance of auburn hair running their fingers up the strings of harps.
‘Next week,’ I almost shouted, ‘I’ll come next week.’
Which was how I ended up alone, in the middle of rural Ireland during spring break, ten years ago, alternately drinking myself into oblivion or eating takeaways in a series of B-and-Bs with slippery bedcovers and single portions of milk.
I say ‘alone’, when actually I was accompanied by my grandfather, who was sporting a small, taped cardboard box and occupied the passenger seat of the hire car. He and I got along very well, which was not quite how I remembered it when he was alive.
‘Remember that time you spanked me with a hurling stick for sassing you at table?’ I would say, as we bowled across the Irish countryside, which looked surprisingly close to how I’d imagined it, hump-backed bridges and all. Lots of sheep, though: more than I’d ever thought possible.
Or: ‘How about that time you told my sister that no decent man would have her because she ate a lamb chop with her fingers?’
Grandpa kept his counsel. He didn’t even complain when I ground the gears on the stick-shift or wavered to the wrong side of the road or ate only potato chips and Guinness for lunch or fired up a joint when it was way past my bedtime.
Then, one day near the end of my allotted fortnight, I was driving from the coast in the direction of the border. Grandpa and I were discussing whether or not we would head elsewhere to check out the scene – Galway, maybe, Sligo, or over the border to Ulster – whether or not we’d had enough of Ireland (I was pretty sure he had). I was rounding a bend when I caught sight of a child at the side of the road. Just crouching there, his chin in his palms.
There was something about him that didn’t seem quite right. I hit the brakes and backed up slowly, lowering my window.
‘Hey, kid,’ I said, in my friendliest voice. ‘Everything OK?’
He stood up. He was barefoot, six or seven years old, and was dressed in a weird, padded-jacket thing that looked as though it had been made by free-spirited people under the influence of something fun.
He opened his mouth and the beginning of a sound came out. It might have been ‘I’ or possibly ‘my’. It was followed by silence. But not any kind of silence: a terse, freighted, agonising silence. He stared intently at the ground in front of him, his jaw locked, his hands balled into fists. I could see his little chest struggling to draw in breath. He looked in my direction, then away. He was covering for himself pretty well, something I always find just heartbreaking: the bravery of it, the struggle, the small ways kids find to cope. The boy glanced skywards, in imitation of someone deep in thought or giving what he might say some consideration, but I wasn’t fooled. I had, a long time ago, been a research assistant on a programme for stuttering and I was remembering all those kids we worked with, mainly boys, for whom speech was a minefield, an impossibility, a cruel requirement of human interaction.
So I took a deep breath. ‘I see you have a stutter,’ I said, ‘so please take as much time as you need.’
He flicked his eyes towards me, and his expression was incredulous, stunned. I remembered that, too. They can’t believe it when you’re so open about it.
Sure enough, the kid said, in the rushed diction of a long-term stutterer: ‘How did you know?’
He didn’t sound Irish, I wasn’t surprised to hear. He looked like a blow-in, a settler – I’d heard there were English hippies in the area.
I leant on my car window and shrugged. ‘It’s my job. Sort of. Or it used to be.’
‘You’re a sp-sp—’ He stumbled, just as I’d known he would, over the term ‘speech-therapist’. Ironically, it’s a phrase almost impossible for a stutterer to say. All those consonant clusters and tongue-flexing vowels. We waited, the kid and I, until he’d got out an approximation of the term.
‘No,’ I said finally. ‘I’m a linguist. I study language and the way it changes. But I used to work with kids like you, who have trouble speaking.’
‘You’re American,’ he said and, as he did so, I realised his pronunciation was more complex than I’d originally thought. There was English in there, mostly, but something else as well.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Are you from New York?’
I took out a cigarette from the glovebox. ‘I’m impressed,’ I said. ‘You have an ear for accents.’
He shrugged but looked pleased. ‘I lived there for a while when I was little but mostly we were in LA.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘Is that right? So where are your mom and dad right now? Are they—’
He interrupted but I didn’t take it the wrong way: kids like him have to talk when they can, whether there’s a gap in the conversation or not. ‘We had a house in Santa Monica,’ he blurted, not answering my question at all. ‘It was right on the beach and Maman and I went swimming every morning until one day the men showed up and Maman took the flare from the boat and she – she – she—’
He came to the end of this intriguing burst of articulacy and began to struggle in silence, cheeks red, the volatile confederacy of his tongue, palate and breath dissolving into chaos and strife.
‘Santa Monica is beautiful,’ I commented, after a while. ‘It sounds like you had fun there.’
He nodded, his mouth shut tight, not trusting himself to speak.
‘So you live over here now? In Ireland?’
He nodded again.
‘With your mom? Your …
maman
?’
Another nod.
‘And where is she? Is she …’ I wondered how to put this without sounding threatening ‘… nearby or …?’
He jerked his head behind him.
‘She’s back there?’
‘Th-th-th-the … t-t-t-tyre … bur-bur-burst.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘OK.’ I pulled up the handbrake and got out of the car. I smiled at him but didn’t get too close. Kids can be jumpy, and rightly so. ‘You think she could use some help?’
Dog-like, he dived into the bushes and reappeared on a track I hadn’t noticed. He grinned and set off, zigzagging one way, then the next. We went round a bend, then another, the kid shinning up a tree and down again, turning every now and again to regard me with amusement, as if it was a great joke that he had procured my company like this. At the approach of another bend, he dived again into the undergrowth. There was the sound of a rustle, a giggle, and then a woman’s voice: ‘Ari? Is that you?’
‘I found a friend,’ Ari was saying, as I came around the bend.
Up ahead on the track a van was raised on one side with a jack. A woman was crouched beside it, tools spread out around her. The sun was so strong that she was just a silhouette, and her hair was so long that it brushed the ground.
‘A friend?’ she said. ‘That’s nice.’
‘Here he is,’ Ari said, turning towards me.
The woman jerked her head around and rose up from the ground. At this point, I could only register that she was tall, for a woman, and thin. Too thin, her collarbone standing out like a coat-hanger from her chest, her wrists a circumference that suggested to me she might not possess the strength required to wield those tools. She had a mass of honey-coloured hair and her mouth was screwed up in a displeased pout. She was wearing a pair of overalls, rolled up over a pair of mud-encrusted wellingtons. She was not at all my type. I remember consciously forming this thought. Too skeletal, too haughty, too symmetric. She had a face that seemed somehow exaggerated, as if viewed through a magnifying-glass: the features excessive, the eyes over-large, widely spaced, the top lip too full, the head disproportionately big for the body.
She tilted her head, she spoke, she gestured: she did something, I don’t remember what. All I knew was that the next moment she looked perfect, startlingly so. This would be my first experience of her protean quality, the way she could appear to be a different person from second to second (a major reason, I’ve always thought, that cinematographers loved her). One minute, she seemed too thin and kind of bug-eyed, if I’m honest; the next she was flawless. But too flawless, like the ‘after’ illustration in a plastic surgeon’s office: cheekbones like cathedral buttresses, a mouth with a deeply grooved philtrum, pearled skin with just the right amount of freckles across the impeccably tilted nose.
I’d later find out that she’d never darkened the door of a plastic surgeon, that she was, as she liked to say, 100 per cent biodegradable. I’d also find out that the filthy overalls concealed a pair of stupendously pneumatic breasts. But, at the time, I was thinking that I preferred women with a bit of curve on them, women whose bodies welcomed yours, women whose beauty was flawed, unusual, held secrets of its own: a touch of orthogonal strabismus, a nose as ridged and stark as that on a Roman coin, ears that protruded just a touch.
The bony Botticelli bent down, picked up some kind of wrench and brandished it at me. ‘Hold it right there!’ she shouted.
I stopped in my tracks. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, and almost followed this with,
I come in peace
, but stopped myself just in time; might I be just a little bit stoned still? It was possible. ‘I mean you no harm.’
‘Don’t come any closer!’ she yelled, waving the wrench. Jesus, the woman was jumpy.
‘It’s OK,’ I said soothingly, holding up my hands. ‘I’ll stay right here.’
‘Who are you? What do you want?’
‘I just met the kid out on the road. He said you had a flat tyre and I came to see if I could help. That’s all. I—’
She half turned, still keeping her eyes on me, and let off a long speech, to the kid, in French. Ari replied and I noticed that he didn’t seem to stammer in French. Interesting, I caught myself observing.
Non
, Ari kept saying, in a slightly exasperated tone.
Non, Maman, non
.
‘How did you find me?’ she shouted.
‘Huh?’
‘Who sent you?’
‘What?’ I was confused now. We seemed to be stuck in a bad spy novel. ‘No one.’
‘I don’t believe you. Somebody’s put you up to this. Who is it? Who knows I’m here?’
‘Look,’ I said, fed up now, ‘I have no idea what you’re … I was just passing and I saw a kid all on his own at the side of the road and I stopped to see if he was OK. He mentioned the flat and I thought I’d come see if you needed any help. By the looks of things,’ I gestured towards the van, ‘you’ve got it covered so I’ll head off.’ I raised my hand. ‘You have a good day.’ I turned to the kid. ‘Goodbye, Ari. It was nice meeting you.’
‘G–’ he tried, ‘g-g-g—’
I looked him in the eye. ‘You know what you can do if you get tripped up by the first letter of a word?’
Ari looked at me, with the trapped, ashamed gaze of a stutterer.
‘Substitute something easier, something that launches you off on a different sound. I’ll bet,’ I said, ‘that a smart boy like you can think of lots of other ways to say “goodbye”.’
I turned and headed off down the track.
Behind me, Ari shouted, ‘See you!’
‘Perfect,’ I threw back over my shoulder.
‘
Hasta la vista!
’ he shrieked, jumping up and down.
‘You got it,’ I said.
‘So long!’
I turned and waved. ‘Take care.’
‘Au revoir!’
‘Adios.’
I got around the first bend before I heard feet behind me. ‘Hey!’ she called. ‘Hey, you.’
I stopped. ‘Are you coming after me with your monkey wrench? Should I be scared?’
‘What’s that you’re carrying? Is it a camera? I know it’s a camera. I want you to take it out and remove the film, here, in front of me, so that I can see you do it.’
I stared at her. My main thought was for Ari: should he really be living with someone so totally loco? No wonder the kid had challenges with verbal fluency, living with a mother suffering such extremes of paranoia, such delusions, such fears. A camera? Remove the film? Just for a moment, though, as we looked at each other, something flickered across her face that seemed familiar: the slight dipping of her eyebrows into a frown. I’d seen that expression before. Hadn’t I? Did I know this woman? A disconcerting notion, when you’re in the middle of nowhere, thousands of miles from home.
‘Is it a camera?’ she insisted, pointing at my hands.
I looked down and saw, to my surprise, that I was holding Grandpa’s taped box. I must have reached for it as I got out of the car. He’d always liked a little air, had Grandpa.
‘It’s not a camera,’ I said.