Dear Thief: A Novel Read online

  Three years on, when the marriage collapses, you and your mother move to Deptford and live in a house next to a piece of derelict and apocalyptic ground bafflingly named Twinkle Park, and you seek girls with fringes to allay your homesickness. How do you really feel about fringes? How do you really feel about the scraps of New England accent that still hang around your speech when you are losing confidence and feel threatened? If America is what protects you, and if America is thousands of miles away in a life you barely even had, what protects you?

  So now you are thinking about your future and your career, about lights, how to get a paid job doing lighting for stage or screen, and though you are twenty-five you haven’t slept with anyone, fringe or no, for eighteen months—or hadn’t, that is, until a month before and what could now be called the Night of the Bones, though you are not sure about the momentousness of this title. The affair might come to nothing and then it will be lumbered with a label that portends something big. Better just to say, since that night on the filthy Thames beach. Or more rightly, since the morning after that night on the filthy Thames beach.

  Later on Nicolas turned off the spotlight and we found our way backstage with torches. In the wings we made a nest of blankets and drapes that we found in the dressing rooms, and an Oh! Calcutta! banner, which we used as a sheet. We stripped off without any mention of each other’s spotlit sexual summaries, because he knew enough of my bored promiscuity to be determined to make it a thing of the past, and I knew enough of his outgrown fetish for the neat and the safe to be determined to make him kiss my fringeless forehead and wish himself well clear of his boyhood and his New England pumpkins. ‘I will marry you if you like,’ Nicolas said—‘but I have no money.’ I asked him what it cost to get married but he had no idea. I said, ‘I could sell some things, I have a bracelet, a bike I’ve never ridden, I have a piano.’

  ‘Oh! Calcutta!’ he grinned, and eased himself on top of me. We lay still. He asked me which particular part of my body I was ashamed of and I told him the part between the crown of my head and the soles of my feet. Maybe because he felt I meant it, he seemed pleased. Whole-body shame is part of a bleak and complex way of being that has nothing to do with gardens laid neatly to lawn. ‘You’re a baroque,’ he said, ‘an irregular pearl, one that isn’t spherical or symmetrical.’ ‘The cheapest, then,’ I answered. ‘Unique, though, and beautiful.’ I sighed: ‘How embarrassing—in this torchlight you’ve mistaken me for somebody else. In the morning light you’ll look at me and quickly dress and scurry away.’

  ‘Like all women,’ he said, ‘you refuse to accept a compliment—why can’t you?’ ‘Why can’t I?—because at school they called me a giraffe.’ He laughed. ‘It must be those two horny growths on your forehead.’ And then he asked, in a voice close to sleep, if I would go pearl-fishing with him one day.

  History, of course, knows the answer to this question, it knows the long night-drives up to Scotland and poses the question in hindsight: how many holidays is a woman supposed to endure camping by the Oykel River in a freezing Scottish springtime while her husband looks for pearls? For that matter, how many trips to antique shops hunting out rubies or San Carlos peridot or Baltic amber, combing for jet, bartering at mineral fairs? Will there be a reward for this in the afterlife or has it all been in the name of selflessness? And yet at the time of course the answer rushed to my lips without pause.

  He turned our torches out and told me to listen. Could I hear that high-pitched sound, that wailing? I answered no, too deafened by the darkness. It was the thickest, dustiest, most crowded darkness I have ever known. He told me that a year or two before there had been a show, the Royalty Follies, that used dolphins, and the dolphins had lived in a tank in the theatre for weeks. And now they haunted the theatre and could be heard. We lay in calico, velvet and dust, awake and asleep all night, but I didn’t once hear them. I only heard the braking and whistling of underground trains until they stopped for the night and when they started in the morning, and had an awareness of a beautiful intention I now had for my life, the intention to be happy. ‘There!’ Nicolas would whisper once in a while, perhaps into my neck or into my mouth. ‘A dolphin, did you hear it?’ But I never did hear it. I just kept thinking, maybe saying, with a kind of anxious joy: ‘I have a piano, a Bechstein I got for my eighteenth birthday, we could sell that.’

  When morning came we had no notion of it. I held the torch up while Nicolas looked in his pockets for a watch. I stared upwards into that band of torchlight and saw dust caught and falling, in exactly the way meteors fall. Each particle of dust left a tail, and seemed to appear from nowhere as a burst of light and then dissolve. I don’t know why it should be that such small things can sometimes take up so much of our attention and imagination, but this dust is one of the sharpest memories I have so far in my life.

  I suppose the world is constantly producing things of wonderment, every moment, at every scale, and one time in every million or so our minds will be such that we will be open to seeing it. To see the silver effervescing of that dust was as beautiful a sight as any mountain or waterfall; but then, when I saw it, I was in love and as happy as a human being can be. Of course this helped. The world is heavily changed by the way we perceive it; in all my reticence and doubt, this is one thing even I haven’t been able to dispute.

  February 2002

  And you? Content?

  No; somewhat less than content. If I think about this desert of yours I see trees rather than sand, but it is a sparse scattering of trees, which are very upright, pines or birches, and in the middle a house, or more likely a hut. In this hut a table with a single chair and a bed, in fact the charpoy my parents brought back from India for you, but the base has holes in it where the ropes have come unknotted. Here you lie at your maximum discomfort without a mattress and with your legs falling off the end; charpoys were not made for your Eastern European stock—nevertheless you do have a pile of blankets, not particularly soft, but thick and heavy enough to keep you warm. Under the charpoy on the floor are your clothes, a pair of shoes and a pair of boots. In this spare and functional scene your womanliness lives in one single object—the fine, soft shawl over the back of the chair, ingrained with years of perfume and pulled shapeless where you have worked your fingers through the crochet.

  There are also a small number of books and a solid-fuel stove and, let me see, a sandwich toaster. My imagination grants you electricity. If you are to have electricity then there is also an overhead bulb and a pump to supply water from the spring and—no, the luxury must stop there. On the whole you have a towering nonchalance about food and also the suspicion you reserve for everything that tells you you need it; but even so it is amazing what you’ve been able to make in that sandwich toaster. Toasted honey sandwiches are the supper staple and you also find that sliced apple and honey works, as does pear, and if those fruits, then why not vegetables—you boil them first on top of the stove and there it is: toasted carrot-and-swede sandwiches, or beetroot-and-cabbage, and potato dumplings; you’ve toasted a piece of gammon, smoked sausage, eel, and sometimes you’ve dispensed with the bread and clinched a filleted perch or herring between the ridged grills and eaten it off the hotplate. Who needs an oven? you mutter with a cigarette between your lips.

  What is around you? Nothing. I see no neighbours or even a lake that would give the wilderness meaning, I just see these scattered trees for an indefinite distance. Early in the morning you come out of your hut and stretch. You collect pine needles from the ground to make a mulch for growing vegetables on the nine-feet-square plot you’ve dug over behind the hut, where you have some potatoes, carrots, mint, beans and peas, that sort of thing. Beetroot that keeps going into October, swedes into January. You grow them without gusto and with the almost reproachful lack of fuss that makes everything and everyone want to do its best for you, to be the one thing to hook your attention.

  I suspect you walk for some part of the day out in the maze of trees and drop cigarette butts
to guide your way back. By and large, though, you sit at the table and study the Upanishads. You appraise every word of them, each abstruse, unwavering and rousing word. Book II of the Taittiriya Upanishad, the book of joy: Man’s elemental Self comes from food: this his head; this his right arm; this his left arm; this his heart; these legs his foundation. You get up and pace. Food gives rise to the Self? Food gives rise to the Self? The Self—Atman—is in food, and rises from food to vegetation to earth to water to air to Spirit to Brahman. Atman and Brahman are in the eel pressed indecorously between two pieces of stale bread! In the lowest things the glow of universal Spirit—but wait, the elemental Self, the living Self, the thinking Self. Legs are the elemental Self, but is the head, the brain, the mind? Is the mind elemental or living or thinking? They who think of food as Spirit shall never lack. Shall never lack! Brahman in the eel, the smeared pork grease, the beetroot!

  Often, these little revelations. They give you a radiant smile. You proceed at one page a day, if lucky, and when you have finished the ten books you start again, Book I, The Lord: This is perfect. This is perfect. Perfect comes from perfect. At one time you’ll close your eyes, sit back and hook your hands over the ridges of your hips in pure pleasure at those opening words; at another time you’ll flatten your hand across the page in undiluted fury. What is perfect? Nothing is perfect! This is pompous. This is pompous. Pompous comes from pompous. Maybe you’ll throw the whole volume on the fire like you do the other books you hate, except its lies would probably put the fire out.

  Later you will deride yourself for your lack of cultivation after all this time and for the way you live like an animal, or less than an animal, because at least animals mate and stay busy. You—you are just killing time on Earth before you can be allowed to die. On the loneliest or most self-denying of days you will try to affirm yourself again by writing a postcard to the one person on Earth you find simple enough to love. Dear Teddy, I’m well and still living in the desert, you’ll say.

  Your last choice of postcard was exemplary, the chihuahua in the Tommy Cooper hat, and it warms me because I know why you chose it from whatever display carousel in whatever town you happened to be in. We watched Tommy Cooper die onstage in front of an audience who laughed because they thought it was part of the act, and though you never said it in so many words, I know you’ve felt this could be an analogy for your life. You were dying onstage in full view of everyone. This was the first thing I thought when I found your postcard to Teddy: she’s making a point, and the point is that she’s dying in such a way that everybody thinks she’s deep in the act of living. She is dying. She wants me to know, yet she doesn’t want me to take it seriously, at least no more seriously than you could take a chihuahua. No sooner does she make the cry for help than she lets loose the wry smile.

  I see you pushing the half-written postcard to the side of the table and cooking up the mushrooms you foraged without the slightest idea of edibility. You pull the chair close to the table and take up your knife and fork with a serene hum. You eat with your back straight and your hair combed, in case it turns out to be your last supper.

  As for me, most days I make an effort to do good. I flannel down withering bodies in baths and give insulin injections into bellies. I am asking a woman how it was to grow up during the war and, before she knows it, the needle has been in and come out again. Their poor bodies are pricked like dough with all the drugs in and the blood out. I help them get to their rooms to find a thing it turns out they never owned and which they wanted for a purpose they can’t remember, so we go slowly back to the chair from whence we came and say nothing of it. I spend much of the day taking people to the toilet, pulling down their underwear and waiting for the movement that was so urgent a minute before but which doesn’t come.

  It’ll come when it’s ready, I say, which means nothing more or less than that. It isn’t to say it’ll come when we’re ready. Maybe we’ll have returned again to the chair and there won’t be time to get back to the toilet. What does it matter? We speak of dignity, but dignity is nothing more than being accepted. I feed them, I clear the food from their laps, I dab the spilt tea off their collars, I help them on with their nightclothes and out with their teeth, I snap the lids off their vials, I see past their rages, and furthermore they let me. The pay is abysmal and it isn’t true that job satisfaction, as such, makes up for it. It isn’t like a hospice that aids people as restfully as possible towards death, but more like an alpine crevasse in which people hang as desperately as possible onto life, and increasingly one they don’t even want. There isn’t any satisfaction in supporting the insupportable. For me, the satisfaction comes from somewhere else. One day I lifted the loose flesh of an old woman’s breast so I could wash underneath and I passed no judgement. I used to think: Why does it come to this? Why do we suffer? Why can’t you piss now that we’re here in the place people piss, rather than piss over there? If you pissed in the right place there’d be no pads, no rubber sheets. Why must our breasts collapse? Why must our teeth come loose?

  I lifted that flaccid breast and all I thought was: Oh well, breast gone to the dogs. When I looked up at the woman’s face I saw a person who had borne the brunt of a joke, and without thinking I squeezed her hand and laughed. She looked down at her chest and began to laugh too, and as I carried on washing her neck, shoulders and arms the laughter died down into smiles that were so full of the shared joke that each time we caught one another’s eye we started up again.

  What is it to be acceptable? Isn’t it just for somebody to accept us? The thought comes: Why can’t you feed yourself? Why does it come to this? Then the better thought comes: I accept you. But acceptance takes so much effort; am I really equal to the task? If I am asked to do overtime at work I refuse, because too long there makes you brutal. Sometimes I can feel it myself when I start seeing the place as an opportunity to scrape together a little more money and then realise in bitterness that the exhausting toil of it isn’t worth the money scraped. I take it out on the bodies that generate the never-ending toil by being a little less gentle, a little less patient, a little more coercive, and then I hate them for being so easily coerced.

  I always wanted a gentle nature. I was over forty by the time I realised I was not going to develop one. My father had one, my mother too underneath the effusive spirit, which meant that it was in my genes and that there would be an onset at some point in life—a sudden, incurable onset of gentleness. The day it struck me that this wasn’t going to be the case was the day I saw Teddy being the diplomat, just like my father. I’d gone to pick him up after a night at the cinema and when I pulled up he was walking over to a group of men fighting. I watched him, a sixteen-year-old, extend his arms between the two factions and part them like curtains, without force or threat. Nobody would touch Teddy, he was dovelike; my father would have done just the same in that situation with the same effect, not only calming violence but converting violence into calm.

  I know now that the gentle gene skipped a generation. It had come to Teddy by adolescence and most likely long before that. I heard you say, ‘If a thing you want isn’t coming by nature, then you must make it come by design; if you can’t design it either, spoof it.’ With this in mind I applied for the job at a care home just off the Finchley Road, up near Swiss Cottage—The Willows it’s called, and I do not (am I too serious?) join the others in calling it The Wallows. At work I do gentle things and through them I feel more like my father and Teddy. In feeling more like them I act more like them, and then feel more like them; the circle is virtuous as far as it goes. I hear stories that repeat on ten-minute loops, I pluck the hairs from a woman’s chin, I put dressings on a man’s bedsores, I hold the hand of a ninety-year-old screaming at her bowl of stewed rhubarb and look patiently into the back of her mouth at the vibrating uvula. I shrug as I remove the bowl. ‘I don’t like rhubarb much, either,’ I say. I put a steady hand against her cheek, against all their cheeks. It’s alright, I tell them. I don’t mean it is going
to be alright, I mean it is now, already, so long as it can be accepted.

  Happiness doesn’t come in the way I expected; not a massing of good things over time, but a succession of small, strange and unowned moments—the sun makes a hot oblong on the bedroom floor and I stand in it with my eyes closed. The coriander germinates in the window box and up comes the seedling. The bled radiators stop knocking at night. Just after the first bar of Coltrane’s ‘Naima’ I’m reminded of ‘Ruby, My Dear’ and at the end of ‘Ruby, My Dear’ I’m reminded suddenly of Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’. New connections! As if the world’s hands are joined. I spent over half my life waiting for the accumulation of happiness and then I realised that it doesn’t accumulate at all, it just occurs here and there, like snow that falls and never settles. Not the drifts that you and I imagined we would plough ourselves into, but instead gently, opportunistically, holding one’s tongue out to catch the flakes.

  Anyway, this morning when I caught my reflection getting out of bed, I was young; it must have been something to do with the movement, the transition that made me look it. I got dressed without looking again. Late morning I went out to meet Ruth, whom I know you’ll remember because she delighted you; a paediatrician, you’d said with a nod when I told you. ‘Oh, to be a sick child and be in Ruth’s hands,’ you said. ‘Doesn’t she make you feel comforted somehow, as if humankind is working? As if all the old loose ends are now accounted for?’