Stray Love (3 page)

The second portrait I ever drew was of a woman, her dark eyes set in a white circle. My mother’s absence became the charged field within which I would eventually become an artist.

I
RIS IS INQUISITIVE
. I have learned that unless I keep her occupied at all times, she is inclined to poke around. (The sort of restraint she demonstrated with my mother’s suitcase has passed.) Her custom is to delve. She does not speak so much as interrogate.
What do you do
and
Are you good at your job
and
Do you have to work all the time
and
Why is your studio door locked
and
Can I see your drawings sometime
and
Who lives here with you
and
Don’t you ever get lonely by yourself
and
What about children
and
Where is your father
and
Can I meet him one day.
She tips back in her chair and awaits my response. I say,
So do you have more Spanish homework today
and
Why don’t we discuss that book you were reading last night
—but she will not be diverted. I am reminded of yet one more reason why I avoid children, why I have remained intentionally childless. Children make ruthless biographers and terrifying judges.

Today, I dressed up in my “funny old clothes” and took Iris for lunch at a popular Mediterranean deli around the corner. We were served by a waitress in a short blue dress and red ankle boots. Brown freckles and full lips. Long amber hair. Bare calves. She walked with the staccato grace of a beginner fashion model. I smiled at her, and she stopped her walk to smile back, a batting of her eyelashes followed by a sexy flick of her hair.

I was lost in my little fantasy when Iris, without an ounce
of bashfulness, and in a perfectly adult tone, said, “Do you have a crush on her?”

“Iris, please,” I said, between sips of beer. “I’m just thinking.” But, a few minutes later, my eyes continued to follow the waitress.

Iris interrupted again. “I don’t think you want to get involved with her.”

I looked at her quizzically.

“Too young,” she said, spurting lemon into her water glass. Then, in an embarrassing stage-whisper,
“Dark roots. She dyes her hair.”

Back at the flat, she approaches me with a black camisole she has unearthed from a crevice in the settee:
Did this belong to your old roommate?

I feed her organic sausage, which she disembowels because she hates the “idea of casing.”
Organic or not, what is it anyway?
She tells me I would look better if I wore nicer eyeglasses, and maybe grew some dreadlocks. She says I live like I don’t earn a very good living.
Where’s your PlayStation? Your microwave?

I want to congratulate Kiyomi on raising such a rude, outspoken, sure-footed child. Life for her will be simpler.

“Is there anything here that you
like?”
I ask.

After a long silence, she says she likes my moccasin-style Wallabees. “Very old-school. Good choice.”

I nod, momentarily awash with happiness. I want to hug her for liking my shoes.

What’s become of me? Having Iris here is turning me into a basket case. Everything is suddenly visible; everything, from my IKEA chairs to my childlessness to the ancient muted colour of my walls, feels regretful.

But what is there to regret?

I am an illustrator, drawing editorial cartoons and book covers and portraits for magazines. I work regularly for the
Guardian’
s G2 section. Julian, the art director there, has become my closest friend. My style, the way I arrive at a drawing—constantly modifying, erasing, redrawing, a blend of line and smudge—is fashionably expressive. One critic described me as having a “wonderfully suspicious pen,” and said that I seem to draw “even solid things” as though I were “testing their truth and accuracy.” I had to laugh when I read that.

It is approaching seven o’clock, the hour of Kiyomi’s nightly call. I don’t know what to make of the wave of excitement rising inside me. For the past two nights, she has stayed on after speaking with Iris and giving me a summary of her mother’s progress. “Claudio is flying in tomorrow from Rome. The doctor says there is a good chance she’ll wake up again. I’m almost sure she knows I’m here,” she says to me. “I can tell by watching the monitor.” Her tone for lack of sleep is wistful. We reminisce.

“Do you remember …?”

I’ve been spending so much time in the past, it’s nice to have company.

“It’s incredible, Marcel,” she says quietly, tonight. “All those things that happened and people we knew—it’s all still inside us, isn’t it.”

H
WEN
I
WAS NEARLY EIGHT YEARS OLD
, Oliver walked into his office and asked to be moved off rewrites. “I am twenty-nine,” he said. “The age of settling down or ramping up.” Two weeks after his reassignment to the city desk, Oliver took me to my first fire. It was an apartment block just north of the Park
Lane Hotel in Mayfair. I think he figured that little boys like firemen, metal engine bells with brass clangers, giant ladders.

By the time we arrived, the guests and tenants had already been evacuated and were standing on the sidewalk watching the flames with their dazed campfire faces. Half the building was gone, just a deadly mess of blackened wooden beams and bare pipes and softly falling flakes of ash. Oliver sat me on the hood of a parked car and walked off to do interviews. Buzzing with excitement, I found it hard to sit still and kept sliding off the car.

A few minutes later, I left the car to look for Oliver. I hopped over sooty puddles of muck and found him standing behind a fire truck, speaking with two distraught women. He was scrawling notes across the lines of his steno pad. I held onto his wool coat while he continued with his interview. His voice was serious, but he looked happier than I had ever seen him.

There’s no question that Oliver hit his stride that year. He wrote about everything that passed as news. He removed his overshoes and entered burgled mansions in Hampstead and funeral parlours in Putney. He walked gingerly through crash sites on the A414 and along the bloodied paths of fatalities, trailing the murders and suicides in the city. He always had his notepad at hand.

In the evenings he studied books on world history and read articles on journalism. My own reading had improved. My eyes now passed quickly over paragraphs, pages. What had been halting and hesitant was now soft and flowing. I sat with him while he practised writing leads and honed interview techniques. Sometimes he carried home photos of other people’s families and homemade biscuits that bereft mothers shoved in his pockets. I had seen it the day of the Park Lane fire. He was
drawn to the lips and shoulders of sad women, the ones patting tears off their faces and fumbling with infants in their arms. A chorus of weeping. Damsels in distress. He loved people who could be comforted. I noticed he began stocking his pockets with tissues and chocolate candy for the children.

On good days, he floated home. On bad days, he slipped through the door swiftly, as though shutting out the world. When he thought I wasn’t looking, he headed for the closet full of my mother’s things. Once I spied on him from the living room. I saw him dig out a scarf from a box, letting the fabric slip through his fingers. I watched, surprised, as he scrunched up a dress and squeezed it against his ear. What was I to make of this behaviour?

Now, when Oliver wasn’t at the office, he spent more and more time in his room.
Tock, tock, tock
…
click:
spacebar.
Tock, tock, tock
…
ding!:
end of line.
Ssssshhhhhp:
carriage return.
Trrrrisshhht:
ripping of carbon-copy paper. Then back again to the
tock, tock, tock.
A thousand tiny hammers striking the page non-stop. Had they been real hammers he could have built a house, or even a replica of Buckingham Palace, for all the time he spent bashing away.

Tock, tock, tock.
The steady clacking of a clunky, messy precomputer world. Out of that time, it’s the tiny things that I remember.

Even back then I knew Oliver was restless. By now it was early 1960 and British society was on the brink of upheaval: labour strikes, racial and working class unrest in the North, moral turmoil over relaxed sexual standards, the beginning and end of the banning of a novel called
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
And what was Oliver up to? He was reporting on Royal events and
travelling on the tube, the new trains sparkling in their red liveries, to cover stories about tennis players and shipyard vandals—with a child at his side. London was still full of rough edges after the war: boarded-up shops in Hampstead, bricked-up houses in Camberwell, a scrapyard in South London, an empty littered field near Ipswich. The luckier neighbourhoods had the cranes and wrecking balls, the noisy jackhammers and promises of new council housing. I watched it all whiz by from the comfort of my train seat.

Oliver put on a brave face but I could see he was completely miserable. People on the tube would squint to read the press pass he pinned to his coat:
009 Scotland Yard.
Sometimes they thanked him for his role in fighting the Irish Republican Army, who were busy performing acts of sabotage in Northern Ireland. Sometimes they would offer him their seat as a gesture of respect. He would always grumble and decline.

I made my own press pass:
123 Scotland Yard.
And while Oliver scribbled in his blue-backed notebook, I sketched in mine, recreating scenes with intricate detail. I wanted to be useful. I believed I could help record evidence. But I had developed my own way of drawing. There was no circle with spokes for sun; no clouds perched on rectangles for trees. I dispensed with stick figures and matchstick men—no m’s for gulls or jackknife smiles or eyes like black buttons. If asked to produce a cat, I might draw the soft part of a feline ear instead of the usual circle with two triangles.

I sketched while riding beside Oliver on the bus, on the tram, on the tube. While sitting amid a sea of white faces, watching the tennis semi-finals at Wimbledon, I discovered perspective (how if you drew something small and higher on the page it would look far away). I stumbled upon a rule of proportions,
how the bottom edge of an ear and the tip of a nose often line up, while sitting beside Oliver in the press area of the Royal Courts.

One day after covering a pig-breeding contest in Suffolk, Oliver decided he couldn’t take his work any more. He called his editor. “I’m having an existential crisis over here. I need more demanding assignments,” he said. “Put me back on hard news. I want violent break-ins and senseless vandalism and—”

“I’m sorry, Oliver. But someone else already has that beat.”

So in the summer of 1960, eager to preserve his sanity, Oliver left the
Chicago Tribune
and took a job as a staffer for a small fledgling news agency called Novus Press. Novus was picked up by nearly two hundred newspapers—everything from the
Seattle Chronicle
to the
Bombay Herald.
Its slogan was “The Thinking Man’s Syndicate.” The bureau office was packed with overstuffed filing cabinets, shabby furniture and a gang of eager twenty-year-old journalists Oliver called “Lego men.” Every day they produced stories with modular blocks of text that could quickly be snapped apart and slotted into empty news-holes and still make sense.

After he moved to Novus, Oliver stopped taking me on assignment because the jobs became more dangerous. Mrs. Bowne agreed to come stay for a few weeks until he could make other arrangements. He worked the crime beat—took to sleeping in his clothes, ready to rush off to tawdry rooming houses in Earls Court or drug-infested clubs in Soho or dark alleys in Shoreditch at a moment’s notice. He watched riverfinders dredge the Thames for bodies and paramedics dealing with the aftermath of suicides at Hornsey Lane Bridge. He worked nonstop, sometimes fourteen-hour days, Monday to Sunday. In his spare time he took notes on the international
news. Earthquakes, civil wars, military coups, famine, he wanted to keep up with the larger plots. The big, bad, outright sad stuff.

Thus began the parade of babysitters. They came and they went. Lily, Mary, Julie, Helen … I took liberties under their supervision. I ate with my fingers, avoided green vegetables, filled up on shortbread. “When Oliver is here, he always lets me …” I would say, making up all sorts of outlandish things.

Oliver did not take much to any of them. But before long, he was thankful when a babysitter was even-tempered and relatively tidy. By month three, he could look at the cheery happy-face Lily had arranged on a plate with a sausage and two mushrooms, and utter a sincere and charitable: “Well, isn’t that clever.”

In the evenings, though, all I heard was
tock, tock, tock … ding.
I reflected on those tiny hammers and imagined them making dents on the page, on me.

One evening, in desperation, I took out the letters I had hidden under my mattress. I had collected three in total. All of them were typed on pale pink writing paper, printed with a blue hospital crest.

Then came a thicker envelope addressed in Dr. Scranton’s familiar scrawl. In it were a folded white cardboard chart with lots of dates and numbers and checkmarks, and the following pink note: