She narrowed her eyes, for all the world like a police interrogator. ‘What is it, then?’
I gripped the now-familiar cube of cardboard, taped over its planes, slightly softened at the corners. ‘If you must know,’ I said, ‘it’s my grandfather.’
She pursed her lips, raised her eyebrows: a minuscule arching inflection of her face. Really, it was too strange. Her face was so familiar, that expression so known: where had I seen her before?
‘Your grandfather?’ she repeated.
I shrugged. I was not, I felt, bound to provide her with any explanations. ‘He’s been feeling a little under the weather lately.’
‘Seriously? You carry him around with you?’
‘So it would seem.’
She passed the monkey wrench from one hand to the other. ‘Ari tells me you help children with speech impediments.’
I winced. ‘The term “impediment” is generally considered to be a little pejorative. You might try “challenged”.’
A diva-ish sigh. ‘Speech-challenged, then.’
‘Well, I did. A long time ago.’
Her extraordinary eyes – I’d never seen eyes like them, pale green they were, with darker circles around their edges – flicked over me assessingly, desperately. Her exquisite porcelain face acquired an expression of vulnerability, and it was easy to tell that it was not an arrangement to which her facial muscles were accustomed. ‘You think he can be cured?’
I hesitated. I wanted to say I didn’t like the term ‘cured’ either. ‘I think he can be helped,’ I said carefully. ‘He can be helped a great deal. As a post-grad, I was involved in a research programme to help kids like Ari but it’s not strictly my line of—’
‘Come,’ she said, in the imperious manner of one used to being obeyed. I half expected her to click her fingers at me, like a dog-owner. ‘You can hold the jack while I tighten the wheel and you can tell me about this programme. Come.’
I thought: no, I won’t come. I thought: I won’t be bossed around by some hoity-toity madam. I thought: she’s used to getting what she wants because she happens to possess the face of a goddess. I thought: I will not come anywhere with you. But then I did. I steadied the jack while she replaced the wheel. I told her what I could remember about the dysfluency programme while she turned the bolts. I looked away, with effort, when the hem of her shirt got separated from the waistband of her overalls. I did what a good man might do: I helped, then left.
Later that night, I was lying on the bed in the B-and-B, contemplating the remains of my dope stash, which wasn’t, I was realising, going to last me until my return. How could I have neglected to buy enough at that dodgy bar in Dublin? I didn’t stand a chance in hell of getting any more around here. Would weed even grow in Ireland? I mused. Wasn’t there just too much damn rain?
There was a knock at the door and my landlady, a Mrs Spillane, a woman with hair that stood out around her head, like dandelion down, and an apron surgically attached to her front, stood there. I had hastily stubbed out the joint and done that pathetic smokers’ wave in front of me – why do we do that? – but her expression was that of a woman who knew she was being robbed but couldn’t yet prove it.
‘Mr Sullivan,’ she said.
‘Yes?’ I said. I even pulled myself straighter, as if to withstand and refute accusations of getting high, alone, in the middle of nowhere, thousands of miles from home.
‘This came for you.’ She was holding, I now noticed, a small parcel, wrapped in a calico bag.
‘Thanks.’ I put out my hands to take it but she pulled it away. She glanced up and down the corridor, as if checking for the presence of the FBI. ‘She wants to see you,’ she whispered.
‘Who does?’ I replied, noticing that I, too, was whispering. It appeared to be catching.
Mrs Spillane examined me at our new proximity. I wondered for a fleeting moment what she saw: a large American man, starting to grey at the temples, the whites of his eyes scribbled with red calligraphy? Could she read, in its runes, my jet lag, my long-term insomnia, a dope habit and unassailable paternal grief? Hard to tell.
‘
She
does,’ my landlady said, leaning forward, attempting what seemed to be a wink.
Dope makes most people paranoid but I couldn’t blame on the drug my ever-present sense that the world was against me: I’d had it even before I’d started out on this bender. What was she saying to me? Was I missing something?
‘I’m sorry,’ I began, ‘but I have no idea—’
She thrust the package into my hands. For a second, I had a mad notion that my ex-wife had somehow caught up with me and sent some noxious parcel: excrement, the semen of her lover, the severed head of the dog.
Then I looked down at the familiar blue tape bisecting some cardboard. It was Grandpa.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘How did—’
‘You left it beside
her
car. When you were helping
her
.’
I clutched Grandpa to me. I remembered placing him to one side in order to winch down the jack but how could I have forgotten to pick him up?
‘Sorry, Grandpa,’ I muttered.
‘God rest his soul,’ Mrs Spillane said sententiously, crossing herself.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you. Well,’ I reached for the door, ‘I think I’ll turn in and—’
Mrs Spillane put her hand on the door to stop it closing. ‘She wants to talk to you.’ She was whispering again.
‘Who does?’
She sighed, exasperated. ‘
She
does.’
‘You mean the – the woman with …’ I had, in my dope-addled state, to concentrate hard so as not to say
the great rack
, ‘… the hair?’
Mrs Spillane put her face close to mine. She was frowning, examining me, as if she had been considering buying me but was coming to the conclusion that I had too many defects.
‘Do you know how to find her?’ she whispered, with another glance over her shoulder.
‘What?’
Mrs Spillane hesitated. ‘You don’t know?’
‘Should I?’ I said, wondering how long she and I could go on conversing in questions.
‘She didn’t tell you?’
I was floored for a moment but then came back with ‘Why would she?’
Mrs Spillane said, ‘Hmm,’ thereby breaking the spell. She turned, abruptly, and said, ‘I need to make a telephone call.’
I was left there, with Grandpa, standing in the doorway. I shut the door and leant my head into its glossy wood. Something about seeing the water-flow grain of it at such close proximity made a decision rise in me like sap: I’d had enough. This cryptic nonsense was my breaking point. Enough with the rain, the dope, the evenings alone, the carting Grandpa about. Instead of igniting the rest of that joint, I was going to pack and drive to the airport. I’d get an earlier flight home: I’d got what I’d come for and I couldn’t take the surreal turn to the minds of the people here. I was a fish not so much out of water but way up the shore and over the beach road. I would leave Ireland and never come back. I would go home and try to repair what was left of my life.
I pushed myself upright. I crossed the room, flipped open my suitcase and started tossing things into it. I was dithering about how Grandpa should travel – carry-on or hold – when there was another knock at the door.
Mrs Spillane stood in the corridor, as before: the apron, the hair, the crossed hands. ‘She’ll be expecting you tomorrow,’ she said, in a hushed, sepulchral tone. ‘The crossroads at ten.’
‘Huh?’
‘I told her breakfast would be finished by eight thirty so you could come earlier but Claudette said ten suited her best.’
‘Hang on a second—’
‘I’m to give you directions to the crossroads. I’ll have a map for you at breakfast.’
She disappeared, stage right, and I was left staring at an open door.
Typical, I thought, slamming it. A woman like that would naturally have a pretentious name.
‘She couldn’t be called something like Jane or Sarah,’ I ranted to Grandpa, as I hurled books into my case. ‘No, nothing like Amy or Laura or Clare. It would have to be something foreign and fancy, like Claud—’
Halfway through uttering her name for the first time, something gave way. It was as if the bricks and timber of an edifice were falling all around me. I suddenly saw, I suddenly remembered where I’d seen her before. She had been a dancer. Or was it a doctor? I’d seen her as an amputee, a murderess, a detective, a nanny. I’d watched her be French, Spanish, Italian, Persian. She’d escaped death and she’d died of cancer, car accidents, pneumonia, tiger attack. She’d killed and been killed. I’d seen her be fifteen, I’d seen her be sixty. She’d fought, punched, stolen, lied, cheated, saved lives, given birth, given head, shot, swum, danced, dressed, undressed, over and over again, for all of us.
To apply the word ‘famous’ to her wouldn’t be entirely accurate. Fame is what she’d had before she’d done what she did; what came afterwards went beyond, into a kind of gilded, deified sphere of notoriety. These days, she was known less for her films than for having vanished right at the height of her career. Poof. Ta-da. Just like that. Thereby making herself into one of the most speculated-about enigmas of our time.
I don’t know if she’d thought ducking out like that would lessen her fame but it had only the opposite effect. The press tend not to take such temerity lightly and the celluloid geeks – those oft-bearded types who will recite entire scripts at the drop of a hat, swap continuity errors or spot background cameos by pre-fame actors – even less so. She was still, however many years on, the subject of much debate. They were always wondering how she had done it, why she had done it, where she had gone, if she was still alive, who she might still be in touch with, and would she ever come back? They were forever trying to track her down, posting possible sightings of her on the internet, complete with smudged, grainy shots of someone who bore a passing resemblance to her. I’m not much of a movie-goer but even I knew the contours of her story: her relationship with that director, their controversial collaborations, her tempestuous reputation, then her disappearance. Hadn’t she attacked some journalist or photographer? Didn’t she walk out in the middle of making some movie, causing some major studio to go into receivership? Something like that. Whatever had happened, she had pulled off the thing that people of her ilk must dream about all the time: she’d left her life, she’d pulled the plug, she’d disappeared.
And I had found her.
There is a man at a desk. His head is bowed, forehead resting in his hands. The computer screen casts his hair, his clothes in a cool, leucistic glow.
There is a man at a desk and the man is me.
I sit there, in my office, head propped in fists. I see: the edge of my desk, the nap of my trousers, the heels of my shoes and, far below, a parallelogram of orange departmental carpet. I am still wearing my coat, still toting my bag. There is a vague smell off me, of offices, of crowded trains, of places I try to avoid. My bag jostles beside me in the chair, neither on nor off the ergonomically moulded arm, as if fighting for its share of space.
From beyond the door comes the sound of students, rolling along the corridor, chatting, complaining, shoving each other. The click-clack of heels. An electronic plop as a phone receives a message. Someone saying, who would have believed me, anyway? in a cross voice.
The lecture is delivered. The words have been spoken, the sentence deconstructed. The students have been enlightened as to the difference between pidgins and creoles. They have the theory of creole grammar, hopefully, tucked into their heads. I stood in front of them for an hour. I moved through the lecture. I gave eye contact. I allowed time for questions. I did what I’d come here to do.
And now? I am meant to be leaving for the airport. I should be collecting my things, getting my desk in order, answering a few final emails.
Instead, I am unable to do anything besides sit at my desk. My mind zigzags, like a bluebottle, from Brooklyn to Nicola Janks, unable to settle on either one. My father, this goddamn party, and now this.
I raise my head. In the searchbox of my browser are two words. They have been there since I got back to my office half an hour ago.
‘Nicola Janks’, my screen tells me, minuscule pixellations arranged to form the letters of her name. I don’t think I’ve ever typed it before, predating as it did the arrival of computers in my life. A strange thought, now, those years in which we existed quite happily without their constant presence.
The cursor, next to the
s
of ‘Janks’, flashes on and off, awaiting instructions: my tap on the return key, a faithful hound, ready to do my bidding, to retrieve whatever I request.
I’ve been sitting here all this time, debating whether or not I want to know. Whether or not I should hit that key. What will happen if I do, what will happen if I don’t? Will anything change, either way? The thought that swirls like flotsam on the surf in my mind is: please. Let it not be that year. Let it not have been then. Let her have died in the late eighties, the early nineties. Let her have made it into her thirties, comfortably so. Let her have had an accident, been hit by a car, knocked off her bike, fallen down a cliff. Let her have contracted some rare, incurable disease. Above all, let her have died quickly, painlessly, in the company of people who loved her. What more, after all, can any of us ask?
Just let it not have been in a forest, alone, in the velvet grey of dawn.
Please
.
When I was a kid, I used to love doing those puzzles where you get a page scattered with seemingly random dots. You have to connect them, number by number, with a pencil line, drawing form out of chaos, eliciting sense from mess. The part I liked best was about halfway through, when you could look at what you’d done, and what was to come, and try to guess what it was. A rocket? A tractor? A palm tree, a sailboat, a dinosaur, a beach? It could be anything. The best ones were those that misled you. You thought it was going to be a railway engine, but it resolved itself into a dragon with smoking nostrils. You thought you saw a cat, but all along you were drawing an iguana.
That same feeling of dislocation between what you thought you were doing and what you actually did envelops me as I sit there, as I press my elbows into the surface of my desk. All along I’d thought my life had been one thing but it now seems it might have been something else entirely.