Still Here (9780748112357), page 26
I was enraged by my brother. I wanted to grab him by his thinning hair and slam his head down on the concrete path.
‘How dare you? His patients loved him.’
‘Of course they did, Saul Rebick, the abortion king of Liverpool. How many of the ones he did away with do you think were his?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘He must have had a dozen women on the go at any one time. Didn’t you cotton on?’
The sun went out. A cloud did not pass before it, I mean it was extinguished and darkness fell upon the land like the darkness of the firmament before God divided the heavens and the sea.
‘He had affairs?’
‘Not exactly affairs, more like little quickies, twenty-minute stands when the door was shut, no wonder his waiting room was always full. Mamma had to keep the bitches away from his hospital bed when he was dying. She wouldn’t let a single one in, why should she? ‘
‘I don’t believe you. Why didn’t I know any of this?’
‘Oh, Ally, you worshipped him, you never noticed because he made you his little princess but any other female was fair game. And the one who was beaten up in all this was Mamma. She wanted to put an ocean between her and Germany and he wouldn’t let her, not because he was committed to the Cause but because he had so many women on the go he could never extricate himself from all of them. She wanted to start a new life, she wanted to go somewhere where everyone was an immigrant, and he buried her here. He wouldn’t even let her apply for reparations, and you know why? If you ask me it was because he was frightened that if she had some money of her own - not just the cream, that was a family business - she’d just up and leave, she’d go to America by herself, come hell or high water. And that was not an option because not only did he have to have the affairs he also had to have the Dresden-doll wife, the beautiful refugee he’d saved.’
‘I refuse to believe Daddy would behave like that, it’s not the man I know.’
‘Really? Now why would you say a thing like that, the way you used to flirt with him, competing with your own mother for your father’s attention? It was disgusting. I used to be embarrassed for you.’
‘Are you implying some kind of abuse? Because if you are you’d be dead wrong.’
‘Of course not, that wasn’t Dad’s style, not in the slightest. He wasn’t interested in little girls, he was a womaniser, and when I got married I made my decision, that the last person I was going to take after was him. I was going to be a faithful husband come hell or high water and I picked a girl I knew would be a faithful wife.’
‘So what are you planning to do now? Walk out on Mel?’
‘I don’t know. Do I love her? Of course I do. How could I not? She’s part of my life, the mother of our kids, she has everything a man like me could look for in a woman, she’s tough and brave and loving and truthful and she’s kept her figure, which shouldn’t matter but it does. What’s wrong with her? Nothing. Nothing is wrong except that I don’t want to be married to the same woman for sixty years, and if I live till I’m eighty that’s how long I’ll have been married to her. Now I realise that men aren’t made for decades of sexual boredom. I lie in bed every night thinking how I’d like to sell up, give Mel half of everything, maybe more, maybe two-thirds, and just vanish. I’d go to America, see all the places I’ve never seen, Motown, Memphis, Nashville, all of it. Be a bum.’
‘How banal.’
‘What?’
‘It surprises me that you could be so predictable.’
‘That’s rich, coming from you, Ms Why Does No One Love Me.’
‘Such a pattern - the middle-aged man tells his wife he’s going out for a packet of cigarettes and two years later there’s posters of him on the Tube. “Have you seen this man? His family are desperate to hear from him.” Starting a new life, how possible do you think that is? It’s a Jack Kerouac fantasy, something from On The Road. You’re fifty-two years old and you’re still daydreaming about driving a convertible on Route 66. Grow up.’
‘I’m not entitled to daydreams?’
‘So you admit that’s all they are?’
‘Possibly.’
‘And what about Mel?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Is she as sick of sex with you as you are of sex with her?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Could she have had affairs?’
‘No way.’
‘Why are you so sure?’
‘She’s too self-disciplined.’
‘So you’re saying you’re weak.’
‘Maybe I am. But aren’t I entitled to some weaknesses?’
‘Not when you damage other people.’
‘You? You say that? Sniffing around Joseph Shields like a dog, trying to lick his balls.’
‘Listen to me. Maybe I’ve made a mess of my life but I’m not going to have you hurt Melanie for some half-baked fantasy. Go and have your affair, have half a dozen if you like, but you belong here and you belong with her.’
‘The reason you think I belong here is so you can belong somewhere else. One of us had to stay and you were damned sure it wasn’t going to be you. Why is any of us still here in Liverpool? Give me one good reason. Nine million people passed through this place, nine million went to America and we had to stay where we were. I’ve had it. The city’s finished, face it. It’s a shell, a theme park.’
‘You’ll pull everything down on top of you. You’ll be walking down Fifth Avenue with a rug on your head and a trophy wife on your arm. You’re pathetic.’
‘I’m pathetic? You’ve never even made a viable relationship, every one you got bored with. What was the longest you’ve ever lasted? Five years with Alan?’
‘Oh, don’t talk to me about Alan.’
‘What was the matter with him?’
‘The silence. I thought his monosyllables represented something deeper, some profundity that drew me to him out of sheer curiosity. It was unusual and relaxing to live with someone who never spoke. When we first met I thought it would take me a whole lifetime to plumb those depths but he was a lake frozen over. You couldn’t drill a hole in the ice.’
‘You looked good together.’
‘I know. We did.’
‘He was taller than you, a very handsome man.’
‘Yeah, I could get them in those days.’
‘You were eye-catching. The two of you together, I remember you had a necklace of fake diamonds and you wore them with that red slippery dress, you came into a room, the pair of you - he always wore good suits, years before anyone else did - and everyone turned their heads. You brought him back to Liverpool and you looked like film stars getting off the train at Lime Street.’
‘He rang me a few years ago. We had a drink together.’
‘What’s he up to?’
‘Jesus Christ came into his heart.’
‘Jesus Christ!’
‘He works with his hands doing the Lord’s work.’
‘Saving souls?’
‘Carpentry. He makes furniture.’
We began to laugh. And could not stop. And we were rolling around on the ground, screaming with pain and laughter. If a stranger had witnessed this conversation I know what they would have thought, that things had been said that never could be retracted, that would fester into wounds that wouldn’t heal, that grudges would be borne, that nothing could be the same between us ever again, but it wasn’t like that with me and Sam. We dug our knives in deep and then withdrew them, but nothing we said to each other could ever do any lasting damage. Tempers flared and died down like a match applied to tissue paper. I would talk to him again about our father, I would think about everything he had said, find the flaws in the argument, challenge him, make him give a full account of his allegations. And if they were true, then everything would change, but not between Sam and me.
Neither did I believe he would leave Melanie. Or go to America. Or fuck Lauren, though one day, sooner or later, he would find someone, and he would choose her in exactly the same way as his eyes had lit on his cousin’s wife, because she oozed sex appeal, because it came off her like hot breath, because you would be able to smell her hormones in the air around her skin. And Melanie would be apart and separate from this coupling, would be kept in the dark so he could end it almost as soon as it started. Because the truth was deeper than the dirty desires, the truth was his hatred of chaos, he couldn’t live a life that way, wasn’t built for it. I was, not him. ‘When a client comes in to see me,’ he once said, ‘some smack-head or gangster or petty crook, I look at them and see mess. Everything is an explanation for an explanation so you can’t follow it, and I go home and think about how these people live. Personally I couldn’t stand it. When they leave my office I’ve given them something they never had before, I give them a story. It’s sound. It’s logical. They only have to remember it. I make sense of the chaos and if they stand up in the dock and tell that story, just as I told them to, they’ll get off. But the minute they start telling the truth, the complex, complicated truth, then they’re finished. I’m not persuading them to perjure themselves, I’m only pointing out that the truth will not set them free, it will get them locked up. And I know this not because I’m an expert on the law but because I’m the child of immigrants. And you know what immigrants do, don’t you? They tell the authorities what they want to hear. Every immigrant who wants to get on in life does this. Every immigrant who insists on authenticity sinks.’
So that was why I knew he couldn’t do it. The story he’d concocted for me, about his simple, simply urgent need for extra-marital fucks, was his attempt to get himself off in the court of the Rebicks. I don’t know if he’d convinced himself, never mind the judge and jury, who would consist of me, his wife, his kids, and the whole of Liverpool.
‘We’d better press on,’ I said. ‘Loads more to do.’
We got up, our limbs stiff from the damp ground. ‘I feel like an old man,’ my brother told me.
We went back to work with a vengeance. An hour later Sam came and stood in the door holding towards me a glass of water.
‘You want this?’
‘Yes. What you said about Dad, how much of that was true?’
‘A lot of it. Most. He had loads of affairs.’
‘Yet it was Mamma’s hand he held when he was dying.’
‘There had to be a hand to hold.’
‘Who will hold yours when you are dying if you leave Melanie? Who will you know at eighty who knew you at twenty? Who will remember you when you were young?’
‘Who’ll hold yours?’
‘That’s cruel.’
‘I know.’
‘Then to hell with you. Go to America. Be it on your own head. Whose side do you think your kids will take?’
‘They’re grown-up now. They don’t need me.’
‘Such a family man.’
‘How long should any man have to put up with this? A whole life? Part of it? Do I have to spend all my days gritting my teeth? When do we get our declaration of independence? When do we get our bill of rights?’
‘Oh, Sam, don’t you know there isn’t one? I come home to an empty house and whatever I have left undone remains undone. The clock ticks. The dust settles. The silence has my voice in it alone. I have absolute authority over myself. You want this? Take it. It’s yours.’
My mother’s wardrobe. Sunlight with dust in it. Strange metallic scents. Perished crumbling rubber diaphragm in a blue plastic case. Pearl necklaces. Gold watch. Diamond clips for unpierced ears. Rows of skirts and blouses and dresses. A drawer full of stockings and underwear. Bras, pants, half slips. Sachets of dead lavender to scent her smalls. Shoes with wooden shoe-trees or balled-up tissue paper stuffed into the toes. Her emerald engagement ring on my little finger. Her mink held around my shoulders and, looking at myself in the mirror, I thought, Mamma would kiss me and cuddle me now, seeing me like this, dressed like this. Daddy’s clothes, his suits, his sports jackets, his ties, his shirts. Sam far away at the other end of the house. Free for a moment to try them on, a jacket would fit me fine. What should I wear, Mamma? What do you think would suit me?
Opening the bathroom door, behind it, hanging on a hook, Daddy’s yellow silk Paisley dressing-gown, the one my mother brought home from the hospital with his silver Ronson lighter and a half-finished packet of cigarettes and his leather slippers. On his deathbed, shrunk to a hundred-pound doll, unable to swallow, tubes down his throat, his skin yellow, a bad smell coming off him. ‘Give me a kiss, darling.’ I shrank away, touched his face lightly with my lips and my breast brushed his birdy chest. ‘Alix,’ he whispered, ‘don’t deny me, after everything.’ ‘What do you want, Daddy?’ ‘Kisses and cuddles, my gorgeous girl.’ But I only held his hand, my fingers tight around his bones. He closed his eyes. ‘You’re right,’ his breath replied, ‘who would look at me like this?’
The house grew emptier, the rooms grew larger. We did not know the space we once had. We took down the velvet curtains, folded them and put them in the pile for the charity shops. Light flooded the halls and landings. Our parents came here in 1954, from a flat on Lark Lane. Finally, when we had removed from the house all the relics of our parents’ forty-three-year marriage, we took what we didn’t want to the landfill site.
And I thought then of the words of the opium eater, Thomas de Quincey, who came to Liverpool in 1810 and witnessed the fire that utterly destroyed the slave warehouses. At Everton he had a vision, standing on the brow of the hill in short, springy grass, the air blowing very fresh from the water, and invisible to his eyes because they weren’t there yet, the Second World War observation point on Perch Rock and the oil-drilling platforms in the Irish Sea. This very morning in the year 2000 a pretty refugee from Albanian Kosovo, wearing a cherry red cardigan, scolds her son, dressed in red and white Liverpool away strip, who is watching a container ship coming out of the North End docks. A man smoking a pipe with his back towards the sea looks across the estuary towards Wales, observes the mountains and thinks of a cycling holiday he and his late wife had when they were young and of her sitting on her Raleigh in a buttercup cotton dress, a scarf in matching material left over from the Simplicity pattern tied round her head to protect her hair. Where the factory that cures the tobacco that the man smokes in his pipe, and the factory that spins the white and black striped sugar lumps called Everton mints, which the boy in the Liverpool strip is sucking as he watches the container ship, his mother taking out her comb and running it through his hair as he wriggles from her grasp - here de Quincey stood too and he saw this:
‘Obliquely to the left lay the many-languaged town of Liverpool; obliquely to the right the multitudinous sea. The town of Liverpool represented the earth with its sorrow and its graves left behind, yet not out of sight nor wholly forgotten.’
Not wholly forgotten, Mamma. Not wholly forgotten.
Joseph
The phone rings, you pick it up, you think you know who it’s going to be, you’ve got beyond excitement and expectation. The voice at the other end introduces a problem, because in my work problems are what come to me, particularly from the artists who tell me that I don’t know fuck all about creativity and that their paintings can’t be hung this way or that way or on this or that kind of surface and every one of them claiming to detect exactly what my plans are for my hotel and to have expressed their utter disagreement even before I’ve got a word out. Secrecy is a thing with me. I don’t put up a picture on the side of my building site saying, ‘It’s going to look like this.’ Let ’em wait. I intend to wow the city.
But the truth was that I no longer got as many of those calls as I did, the problems had all been receding and at last I could see the light ahead, the completion date. Alix had fixed it for me. The day after I had that conversation with her about Michael, I was drinking coffee once again in Starbucks and trying not to give in to a bagel and cream cheese, waiting for Sam to show for the meeting we had arranged with Brian Humphreys’ lieutenant. Then my cellphone cheeped and it was Sam to say something had come up, he had to get to court, he couldn’t make it and he would try to rearrange. At that moment I saw Alix walk past, raised my hand and beckoned her in and told her I was free, did she want to go to lunch? But even as I was speaking I had the idea: why not let her take the meeting? I mean, in all probability this kid could handle anything, it would be a delightful notion to see Alix in action against a hoodlum. At first she said no way, she didn’t know that type of person any more, she would be out of her depth, but after quite a bit of pleading on my part she eventually agreed at least to tag along and we got up to go to Wood Street where my meeting, a guy named Ritchie Sylvester, had a club.
As we walked over I asked how her lunch had gone with her long-lost cousin.
‘A revelation, in many ways,’ she said. ‘You think you know exactly who people are just by looking at them but really you understand nothing about them at all. The impressions you form are largely valueless.’
‘I deal with how things look and the aim is that what you see is what you get.’
‘You have no secrets, personally, I mean?’
‘There may be corners.’
‘Hidden pockets of neurosis?’
‘I don’t know about that. Are you neurotic? Most women are.’
‘I’m a terrible hypochondriac.’
‘You know the one about the guy who goes to his doctor and he tells him, “You got three months to live”? Then he gives him a bill for a thousand dollars. The dying man says, “I can’t afford this.” So the doctor says, “Okay, I’ll give you another three months.”’
‘That’s an old joke.’
‘I’ll try to come up with something more current next time.’
We turned off Bold Street into Concert Square and she was reminiscing, telling me how quiet it used to be here, just a block from all the smart stores where her mother once strolled in high heels in the fifties, shopping for shoes and hats and handbags, and only a step away the alleys with their small businesses: a tea-shipping company, a hairdressers’ suppliers, an old clothes shop, a pub for merchant seamen who sailed out of Genoa, a Chinese kitchen-equipment store for the restaurants on Duke Street. All gone away, she said. Then the time of dereliction and emptiness, abandonment and desertion, trees growing on the upper storeys, kids kicking balls against a wall, junkies shooting up, people lost and forgotten. All gone away, too. ‘For on the eighth day, after he had rested,’ she said, ‘God woke up with a start and accomplished the chroming of Liverpool, resurfacing an entire city so you could see your face in it or lay out a line of cocaine, and that night the angels went out clubbing.’
