Still Here (9780748112357), page 25
‘No.’
‘None to make you laugh, none to make you cry.’
‘So people keep telling me.’
‘I feel like I did a master’s in tears. I think I dried myself out I wept so much. There can’t be a lot of moisture left.’
‘Grief,’ I told him. ‘What can anyone do?’
‘I stopped laughing and I stopped eating for two years. Then I started up again. Now I eat when I can find good food and I’m trying in my retirement to build a computer that can create a joke.’
‘Any luck?’
‘Nah. Every one a stinker.’
The next day I sat down with a German dictionary and started to write letters to Marianne Koeppen at an address in Dresden, which I got from the Claims Conference, sent them off; no replies were received. Nothing. Silence. They went into a void. ‘Someone,’ Sam said, looking at me, ‘needs to turn up on this woman’s doorstep and see who she is and what she wants.’ ‘That’s me, I suppose.’ ‘Yes, it’s you.’ ‘And in the meantime,’ said Melanie, ‘the two of you could clear out your mother’s house.’
To sell our childhood home was unbearable. ‘Sell,’ Melanie had said, three years ago when I had just moved to France. ‘No,’ Sam replied, vehement, not while his mother was alive. Melanie wrote to me. I wrote back and I said I would keep out of it. So she rang. ‘You realise we’re paying tax on an empty property and if we sell now we could give the money directly to the kids? It would give them a down-payment for their own homes.’ I said, ‘Melanie, we’re rich. You could open your chequebook and buy them each a house. And if Sam wants to keep it, we keep it.’ ‘So you won’t support me?’ ‘It’s not a matter of taking sides. If Sam has some reason for wanting to hang on to the house then he has a reason, it’s an emotional reason and I’m not going to argue with him.’ ‘That’s your motto, isn’t it, Alix?’ Melanie said. ‘Don’t get involved.’ And she hung up on me. A month later there had been a card asking for forgiveness and I wrote back saying, ‘Nothing to forgive.’ But Mamma was dead now, dead and in her grave two months already. ‘It’s immoral,’ Melanie added, ‘for a good property to stand empty when people are homeless. If you want to hang on to it, turn it into a hostel.’ ‘But it was a family house, it always had been from before us and now some other family should have it.’ ‘Fine, so sell.’ ‘We should.’ ‘But you’ll have to clear it first, the two of you.’ ‘I’m not ready for this, can’t it wait?’ ‘For what? Listen, you’re never going to be ready. It’s a demolition job and no one with a heart can do it.’ ‘I have a heart.’ ‘So do I. And I’ve bought two hundred bin bags, do you think it will be enough?’
One morning, not long after this conversation, my brother and I drove out of the underground car park, on to Mann Island and down Strand Street, along Wapping and Chaloner Street, left on to Parliament Street, up Park Road to Aigburth, and the car turned again towards the river, to our childhood home. The gas was off, the electricity was off, there was still water in the taps. Melanie, who came sometimes to see that the place was not overrun with vermin or wasps or had been squatted or used as a crack house or a needle dump, would let herself in with Sam’s key, look at the dust accumulating on the furniture and think of the house where she had been born, and the people who lived there now, strangers moving among the rooms where she once ran in rabbit pyjamas when she heard her father’s key turn in the lock at the end of the working day. And smelt again the frying of fish in the kitchen and touched the smooth, cold marble of the fireplace in the lounge and saw herself, at seventeen, her face in the mirror, her eyelashes clumped with cheap mascara, thinking of Sam Rebick who earlier in the week had slipped his hand inside her panties and put a finger in the place the blood came from. And she could speak to no one of these thoughts, but me, blushing but wanting to anyway, because she could only cry and cry for the mother she had lost, very suddenly, not like her mother-in-law, but of a heart-attack, which she thought was a disease of fathers not mothers, Etta Harris clutching her arm in the middle of Tesco, leaning on the trolley for support and it rolling away from her so she collapsed on her face on the floor in the paper-towel aisle and when they got her to hospital she was dead at sixty-two. Leaving Manny at sixty-five to watch TV every night with all the lights on, the football pages of the Echo open on his lap, ‘An old man before his time because he’d never known a moment in his life without a woman to look after him. He’ll go like Joe Marks after his wife died. Burns in his suits from his cigarettes and one day he fell asleep with his cigarette lit and burned the house down.’
Sam paid a man to come in once a month in the summer to mow the grass so it wouldn’t run to seed and ruin the neighbours’ lawns. The hydrangea bushes were flowering at the bottom of the garden, new blooms on old wood. There had been heavy rain a few days ago. The grass was overgrown and dandelions were sticking their heads up among the strangling coarse blades.
‘Where shall we start?’
The house has five bedrooms. It has a long sitting room with french windows that open out on to the garden. It has an attic. It has a cellar. It has a box room. It has a big bathroom, which was modernised. And it has a kitchen, which was not.
‘This is going to take days,’ I said. ‘Days and days.’
‘Yes. And the sooner we get started the sooner we’ll finish. So where?’
‘In the kitchen.’
This was a room that was old-fashioned because Mamma did not really like to cook. What she loved to do was entertain and for that she did not need a batterie de cuisine, she needed dishes: Royal Doulton dinner services in white with a narrow green, gold-flecked rim, consisting of dinner plates, side plates and hors d’oeuvres plates with matching serving platters and gravy boats; Royal Albert tea services in floral patterns with teapot, sugar bowl, milk jug, cake plates and side plates, teacups and their matching saucers; wine glasses, sherry glasses, whisky tumblers, liqueur glasses, all cut crystal. And for each of these types of china or glassware there was a minimum of four sets because, out of respect for his sisters and brothers, my father insisted that we keep a proper kosher home with a set of plates for milk dishes and another set for meat dishes, and another two sets for Passover, both milk and meat; and yet another set solely for the meal after Yom Kippur ended, the plates on which was put the food that broke the fast.
Sam had brought boxes and newspapers. Melanie had phoned the house-clearance people. What do we want to keep, what do we want to give away? And what will go into the black plastic sacks to end up on a landfill site?
‘Do you want the china, Alix?’
‘No. Does Melanie want it?’
‘No. And the glasses?’
‘I’ll keep a few. Do you want any?’
‘Melanie and I can’t stand this old-fashioned stuff.’
In an hour we had filled fifteen boxes. Sam said, ‘I’ll make a start on the food cupboards.’
Half devoured by moths where there was something moths could devour, we found: flour, baking powder, unopened packets of biscuits (Rich Tea, Digestives, cream crackers, Ryvita), cans of pineapple rings, cans of baked beans, cans of Weight Watchers soups, cans of tuna, cans of sweetcorn, vegetable oil, sugar, artificial sweetener, skimmed-milk powder, cider vinegar, salt, tea bags, instant coffee, rice, dried thyme, dried mint, a bottle of vanilla essence, three jars of cinnamon, Worcester sauce, Tabasco (some of this up to nine years beyond its use-by date), two hundred pounds in out-of-circulation five-pound notes rolled up in a rubber band inside the flour bag, and a diamond ring inside the packet of skimmed-milk powder. Sam put the ring in the watch pocket of his jeans and the ragged, moth-eaten notes with the Queen’s head consumed, into the glove compartment of his car.
We were working hard, working up a sweat there in our parents’ house, dismantling thirty-nine years of our parents’ marriage and the whole of our own childhood, as we threw away the frying pan in which Mamma fried every egged and floured plaice, sole or haddock the fishmonger ever delivered, the pot in which she boiled the hen for soup (shtetl food, made for my father), because my mother knew that cooking was one of the principal duties of a housewife, a wife who had been saved from the jaws of hell to arrive in a kitchen where she cooked meals and baked cakes and loaded her dishwasher and was in every way a slave to domestic life. ‘But what a thing to be a slave to, Alix, when I could have been a slave in a camp and they would have shot me when I was too worn out to work any more,’ is what she might have said, but never did, for she did not utter a single word about what-might-have-been, preferring only to reminisce about her mother’s damask tablecloths and her linen press with its ironed linen sheets and lace-trimmed pillow-cases, and the smell of her father’s pipe.
When we’d finished the kitchen we started on our own bedrooms. I found: a tangerine-coloured lipstick from 1966, its darkened tallow dried up and no longer viscous enough to leave even a smear on the back of my hand; a blue Revlon eye-shadow; a shrunken palette of eye-black. Hanging in the wardrobe were a spotted Biba blouse with leg-o’-mutton sleeves, a purple Mary Quant mini-dress, which I wore when the Beatles came to play the Liverpool Empire to an audience of teenage girls howling in their frenzy, screaming for no reason other than to add our own throats to the uproar that drowned out the rhythm, the lead, the bass guitars and Ringo’s drums, not to mention John and Paul silently mouthing ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ in the collarless Mod suits that Brian stuck them in. Teenage sexual hysteria. Hormones bursting out of us. Acceptable to open our mouths and scream our desires, those tiny lusts of the thirteen-year-old girl, popping up like our little breasts suddenly popped up one day, when we weren’t looking, unnoticed until we were soaping ourselves in the bath, feeling the tenderness of nipples. The suggestion of a bump beneath our school blouses, and greeted with the same shame and excitement as the first flow of blood. Both coming with paraphernalia, the training bra, the sanitary-towel belt. A lifetime ahead of us of discreet items in our handbags, cupped in the palm on the way to the ladies’ room. And popping up at the same time as those budding breasts, on the bedroom wall, the posters of baby-faced Paul, the least threatening of the Beatles, along with Ringo, the ugly feller, the big-nosed ‘Jewish Beatle’, the one we could imagine being our friend, confiding in him our romantic fantasies of Paul holding our hand in the moonlight.
But I had seen George once in his ‘perfect leathers’, driving down Mather Avenue in a green Vauxhall, and taken off my school beret and flung it in the air so that it soared like a Frisbee above the suburban skies and he honked his horn at me and rolled down his window and shouted, ‘Can you catch it?’ I ran across the dual carriageway in front of him, reached up and impaled it on my index finger, twirled it like a plate, this blue felt spinning school hat. And he laughed and said, ‘If you want a lift, jump in.’ So we drove along through Liverpool to the airport, while he asked me the usual questions: ‘Alix Rebick? Is your dad that doctor in Toxteth?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘He’s famous,’ he said. People called out at us and my hair flew behind me. ‘A magnificent bush, you’ve got there,’ George remarked, in my innocence. ‘Is it hard to comb?’ ‘You can’t comb it, it’s out of the question.’ ‘I’m growing mine. We all are, me and the other lads.’ Then at Speke, when he got his green suitcase from the back seat, he said, ‘Can you get home all right?’ ‘Yes. No problem. I can catch the bus from here.’ ‘Good. See you around. Don’t lose your hat.’ I stood for half an hour by his car in the car park, studying it, memorising it. I had not asked him for an iota of proof of this meeting - forgotten to get an autograph! - and now I am no longer sure if it even happened or was an embellishment or a trick of memory or a fantasy. But here, on the top shelf of the fitted wardrobe, was that blue beret, with the enamelled school badge pinned to it. My records were stacked in a wire rack. My old record player was still sitting on a table. I plugged it in, took out Rubber Soul from its sleeve and put it on the turntable, the stylus rose and moved itself to the spinning disc and fell again. I threw the beret in with the rest of the rubbish. After Rubber Soul had run its course, I unplugged the record player and entombed it in black plastic, tying a knot.
Twenty of the sacks were full when Sam, turning to open the window, found our mother’s ironing-board beside it, an object so worn down with familiarity that it had become invisible and if we stared at the wall a thousand times we would not see it. It was part of the green wall, a raised series of vertical wooden lines, abutting from the surface. Cracked, wooden Utility equipment, purchased in 1947 in the first year of our parents’ marriage, over which my mother had bent to press collars exactly the same way as she had watched the maid Frieda press her own mother’s in Dresden in 1936, when Frieda said, ‘Meine liebe, always first from the inside. See?’ And later to me, ‘Darling, always first from the inside. Do you see?’
Holding it upright - the ironing-board on which Sam’s school shirts had been pressed, and his school trousers and the Paisley Mod shirts he’d worn as a teenager to the Jacaranda, the Casbah, the Cavern and the Mardi Gras where he tapped his toe and danced the Cavern Stomp to the Beatles as well as Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Fourmost, Billy Fury - my brother looked up, his face wet, said, ‘Enough. I can’t stand any more of this.’
I turned. The room was empty. I found him outside on the grass by the yucca plant, sat down next to him on the damp ground. Planes were passing overhead, buzzing in the limpid summer air.
‘I’m sick of it, sick of the lot of it.’
His neck is starting to age, I thought.
‘I’m sick of the house, sick of everything. Sick of my own life.’
I couldn’t believe my big brother, the inheritor of righteousness, was coming out with this claptrap. ‘Don’t be so babyish.’
But still he was in tears.
‘Taking a whole marriage apart like that, you realise our kids will do the same to Mel and me one day? This is what it will come down to, they’ll pick up our stuff and they’ll think, No use for it, it’s rubbish, put it in the skip. I was standing there with that ironing-board in my hand, couldn’t stop myself crying, and I thought, Come on, Sam. Grow up. And that’s when it hit me. I’ve been grown up since my bar mitzvah with barely a break, a couple of years in America and that’s all. A grown-up since I went to the Picton library every day after school, study, study, study, pass your O levels, pass your A levels, get articled, pass your law exams and before you’ve even passed them you’re married.’
‘Why did you marry her?’
‘I’ll tell you why, because I was aching for a fuck. She would let me go so far, but she wouldn’t let me go all the way and I figured I either go down the aisle with her or I go into town and find a prostitute. You know what I did? I got the bus one night, went down to Gambier Terrace with a tenner in my pocket, had a look, turned round and came back home again. Terrified. Scared of the clap, scared of pissing green. The next day I proposed. The minute we’d been to Boodles and got the engagement ring I was in the clear, she’d do it, and I’ve done it with her and no one else ever since. Don’t you think it’s too much to ask?’
‘What about when you lived in America?’
‘Oh, yeah, the commune, except it wasn’t really a commune, just a shared house with brown rice. We were only in it a month, as long as we could stand it, and Mel never wanted to be there in the first place. It was all my idea, she’d have been happy in New Jersey if that’s where I’d taken her. Neither of us could put up with the mess and the disorder. We weren’t raised for chaos, we were brought up to put chaos right.’
‘So now you want to do what you never did at twenty. Any candidates?’
He giggled, his face lit up, his wolfish Rebick grin, my father’s face. Dead leaves on his back. Grass stains on my jeans. Rose petals rotting under their bushes. ‘Yeah . . . Lauren.’
‘Why?’
‘To be honest, I get a hard-on just looking at her. Isn’t that enough?’
‘Thirty years of marriage and you’d throw it away?’
‘You know what? My dick doesn’t have a brain. It doesn’t have that much of a memory and it certainly doesn’t have a conscience. You think I’m going to run away with her? Nah. She’s not a woman you want to sit down and have a conversation with. She’s not the mother of my children and I’m not interested in making her the mother of any future children. I’d just love to fuck her. She’s a walking sex bomb, I want to bury my cock in her until she pulls me in after her and go the oblivion road - fancy dying of a fuck instead of for a fuck.’
‘For Christ’s sake, you can’t talk to me like this.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m your sister, I don’t want to know.’
‘We used to have a go, you and I, when we were kids.’
‘Drop it.’
‘Ally, do you know what it’s been like, this past thirty years? Have you any idea, while you swanned off round the world doing your own thing? I was a father at twenty-four, I had my own firm at thirty with three solicitors working under me.’
‘Don’t give me that. You spent the first five years doing nothing but drugs busts and smoking dope in the evening. You were a layabout, the only solicitor in Liverpool barely making a living.’
‘And maybe I could have been happy carrying on that way. I didn’t want to be famous, I didn’t ask for the burden of being Saul Rebick’s son and, believe me, it was a burden and still is. I remember the night of the riots, Melanie and I were in bed, we were under the blankets making babies, having fun the only way you know how when you’re young and you haven’t got much cash, and the phone rang. It was Dad. He said, “Get down to Toxteth, the People need you.” He said it so you could hear that capital P. What a load of hooey. The more I think back the more I see him for what he was, he was a gas-bag, our father, a bore. What did he know about socialism? It was all self-aggrandisement, he loved the power of it.’
