Stray Love (31 page)

“I’m not sick, just sad … and confused,” I said. “Are you free to take a walk?”

“I think so,” she said, tentatively, backing up the stairs to ask Natsumi for permission.

When she returned, she was wearing Claudio’s fisherman sweater over a flowery dress.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

So we left her flat and went walking.

We walked and walked through the streets of London. She did not try to snap me out of my self-pity. Only once did she take a rain-drenched pile of leaves and throw it at me. Otherwise, she accompanied me that day through every stage of my grieving. When I hissed at strangers, she held my hand and vouched for my goodness. She kissed me so I would remember that lips were not just for biting. She reached into my jacket pocket and found a blunt drawing pencil to remind me that hands were not just for clenching or pushing away. That night, with the house to ourselves, we lay down together in her bed.

What can I say about our first sexual encounter? It was a kind of shock, I think. Kiyomi had indulged me for so long, I had not noticed her becoming more hungry, more beautiful. Now it was her turn to be indulged. Without a word, her body told me she was sick and tired of being invisible, of dealing with my bloody-mindedness. She clutched and groaned and pinned me down, pressing my wrists into the bed, giving vent to her own bottled-up feelings. As my body fused and shuddered with hers, I thought I might die from pure pleasure. I had not known that making love could produce such an intense degree of dazzlement and dislocation, such rowdy forgetting.

The next morning, I watched Kiyomi sleep, her slender arms wrapped loosely around a pillow, her long black hair spread across the sheets. The sun had risen, glinting off a glass bottle on her dresser. Eventually Kiyomi felt the weight of my gaze and opened her eyes. A smile spread across her face.

“Stay right where you are,” she said, as she climbed on top of me, arching into a sunbeam, revealing the tidy bones of her rib cage.

In that sunstruck room, I felt something microscopic move inside me, a little weight shift: the ball bearings of sadness scattering.

I forgave Oliver first. I stepped away from his power and presence, but I forgave him.

Then I forgave Stasha, my secret aunt.

Pippa would take longer.

In the summer of 1972, the year I turned twenty, Kiyomi and I walked all the way to Burlington Arcade for wedding rings, to Portobello for wedding clothes and to the Registry Office on Marloes Road for a wedding licence. We were children, the same age Oliver and Pippa had been when they married. (What could we, or they, have known?) The day we married, Kiyomi resembled a Celtic druid in her green-velvet hooded cape. And in my marching band jacket, I was twice taken for Jimi Hendrix. Afterwards, we walked to Holland Park and sat on a bench where Kiyomi tied tin cans to my ankle and tossed fistfuls of rice in the air. I was halfway through my studies at St Martin’s School of Art. Jimi Hendrix had been dead for two years. We did not invite any of our family to the ceremony.

My mother’s death was something I had imagined frequently. I’d be in the middle of working, or watching football on television, or sharing drinks with friends in a restaurant, and, all of a sudden, a death scenario would overtake me. It left me in a panic each time. Even when Pippa’s circumstances were stable, even when she had surmounted whatever (housing, creative or personal) struggles she had recently been facing, I could not escape the feeling that bad news was imminent. Every time the phone rang at night, my nerves jangled. It reached
the point where the phone itself began to upset me—not such an irrational fear, as it turned out. In the end, the news did come by phone, though not in the middle of the night. It came at half past eleven in the morning, early enough to catch me off guard.

It was a doctor calling from Royal London Hospital. Pippa had been discovered by her close friend and neighbour, Mrs. Almeida, who had gone around to visit, called her name and found she didn’t respond. Realizing that the door was unlocked, Mrs. Almeida let herself in and found Pippa lying in bed and knew, instantly, that something was not right. On the nightstand were several open bottles of prescription medicine. There were tablets scattered across the floor. Though Pippa was rushed to hospital by ambulance, the doctor said she went into cardiac arrest shortly after arriving at Emergency. “I’m very sorry for your loss,” he said. It was August 2, 2001.

The next few days passed slowly. I remember numbly taking on the cremation arrangements, and organizing the funeral at Brompton Cemetery two days later. There were thirty of us, a subdued assortment. A few friends and neighbours, black cotton dresses blowing in the breeze. Oliver, stricken and pale, Stasha flown in from her home in Cardiff, gripping my hand, her eyes filling and emptying like rain barrels as she stared at her sister’s plot. We were sheltered from the city by a high brick wall, a fine drizzle on our faces. I stood there in a stupor, focusing on blades of grass, hearing sparrow song from every tree. I felt the wind swish against my cheek. Death was bending the world, making it feel hallucinatory. I remember thinking,
So this is how she died.
She could have been lost to a railway train or a bridge but, instead, she died of sudden heart failure,
of pills, of a slow unwinding. At one point Stasha whispered, ”
It’s a miracle she lasted so long, really.
“

I watched Oliver cry. I envied his tears, his straightforward bereavement. The same man who had been suspicious of emotional intensities now shuddered and sobbed like a child. Meanwhile, I walked around like an automaton, as if stepping into his repressed old shoes.

“We were supposed to go for lunch,” Mrs. Almeida said at the funeral, her voice faltered slightly. Her eyebrows were thin and pencilled in wide arcs of concern. “It’s such a shock—”

“It’s not a shock,” I said, cutting her short.

Poor Mrs. Almeida. I reached out my hand to erase the sting from her face. “Mrs. Almeida,” I said. “I was wondering if you’d do me a favour and accompany me back to my mother’s flat.”

Mrs. Almeida hesitated, clearly too smart to be fooled by my sudden change in tone, but in the end, she agreed. Her stiff face turned kind once more.

The flat was drafty and cold when we arrived the next day. The gas had been turned off. It felt echoey and bare, even though it was cluttered with Pippa’s belongings.

Mrs. Almeida had brought a Thermos of tea and some honey cake. She warded off the demons with her stocky efficiency, crocheted tunic and purple slacks, helping me decide what would be kept and what would be packed away to charity, odd boots, chipped plates, well-worn cushions.

I touched Pippa’s coat, tweedy and overlarge, draped over a chair. I touched the empty sleeve, the fallen hem, and Mrs. Almeida sighed behind me.

In the days that followed, I kept myself busy. I worked frantically, and watched television until I passed out from exhaustion on the settee. I watched Tony Blair get re-elected and the twin towers fall in New York and the war in Afghanistan officially begin. I funnelled my grief into the more general tragedies.

Now that she’s gone, I’d like to be able to remember her simply. I’d like my memories to sweep me past the muddy and dangerous places. I’d like to imagine her as a fashionable, free-spirited woman who loved art and cheap sentimental music, who had all sorts of strange and beautiful insights.

For this to happen, I need to forgive us both. I need to forgive her for abdicating, for not being an emotional haven. And I need to forgive myself for deserting her in my turn. Because I did desert her. I did not know how else to cope. She frightened me with her attraction to outcasts, her transience and needy charm. It was too much. The way she wrapped herself in Peruvian shawls and spoke of herbs that removed wind dampness from the body. The Garfield mug and tacky faux-Italian plates she salvaged from someone else’s trash. The bad shoes she wore that deformed her feet so that, in the end, she struggled to get around. I grew tired of doling out money and advice and reassurance. As she became stranger and more unpredictable, as she hobbled along looking more and more vagrant, I began to pity her. Yes, it is the perennial story of how the old and marginal are faded out of our lives. But, in my defence I would like to say that it was dread, not indifference. I was seized by the fear that one night I’d get that call—the one telling me she had killed herself.

So I withdrew. What made this possible was my belief that she had rejected me first.

I’ve decided to make you a cake.

The day before she died, she had left me a strange voice-mail message, which I skipped over the first time I noticed it. It took me several days after her passing to work up the courage to listen more carefully. And when I finally did, I would have laughed if my stomach hadn’t knotted in pain at the mere sound of her voice.
Pippa making a cake?
I pictured spilled milk, great puffs of flour, the crunch of eggs against a bowl, soggy mounds of paper towel on the counter.

Then, in the middle of turning my mother into a dumb cartoon, I stopped. Who was I to assume incompetence? What did I really know of her last hours, days, years? Her possible talents for sponge cake, frosting, fondant?

It is time to let the contradictions and incongruities speak, to acknowledge that there were moments of intense loneliness and disappointment in my childhood but also moments of wonderful variety and freedom; to admit that I missed my mother and to some extent my real father, but that I was surrounded by caring people (some wild, some proper) who stepped forward to fill the breach, who showed me love.

There were other possible outcomes for my life. For years I chose the easiest path. I took my atypical childhood and became a typical man. Charming but closed, occasionally accompanied but mostly solitary, I’ve pushed plenty of nice people, women and men, away. I’ve lived twenty-odd years, since Kyomi and I parted, without any expectations for the future, any notion that life, or I, would change.

And until Iris came along, I told myself that was just fine.

The suitcase turned up the day I visited my mother’s flat with Mrs. Almeida. I was staring at a pile of recent mail when Mrs.
Almeida came from the bedroom clutching it to her chest.
I think I found something,
she said, placing it on the coffee table.

It was a simple cardboard case, fastened with twine, hastily knotted and criss-crossed in every direction. I was reminded of one of Christo’s wrapped objects. I reached out to touch it, then began untying the knots. At some point, Mrs. Almeida noted the futility of my efforts and went to get a kitchen knife. I tucked the blade under a length of twine and lifted it up.

What I saw inside flooded me with incomprehension. There were drawings I had done, photos, letters I had written from Vietnam, postcards, a book report on
David Copperfield,
a set of baby teeth in a film container, my first spoon, a stuffed owl, a collage I had made in my mid-twenties, an anti-Apartheid T-shirt I had designed in my early thirties. My heart struggled to absorb it all. Here was her love.

Through all the twists and turns of her life, here was proof that she had been watching.

I picked up a photo of Pippa leaning against a car, long sweep of hair and Cleopatra eyes.

Mrs. Almeida leaned over to look.

“What a beauty. Even at the end she could still turn a head.”

I
N THE DINING ROOM NOW
, I am sitting at the table across from Iris. We’ve just returned from a nearby juice bar and Pippa’s closed suitcase is laid out between us.

Iris picks up her domed plastic glass, takes a sip of fuchsia liquid and says, “Can we open it now? Can we peek inside?”

I nod.

A moment later, Iris opens a small pillbox she has pulled from the case. “What is it?”

“It’s baby hair.”

She hesitates, impressed by the strangeness of the items, then begins setting them one by one on the table, outtakes of my life. Precious nuggets and debris. She is looking through a few postcards of Tu Do and the Continental. It makes me miss Saigon. I’ve never been back. I wonder what became of Dinh and Anh and Arnaud? Is there a plaque somewhere in memory of Joseph? I want to see the trees that have been replanted along the boulevards, eat a mangosteen …

I snap from my reverie to find Iris holding up a photo of a very young Pippa, sitting on a park bench.

It has been over six months since Pippa died. In recent days, I have seen her on every corner, in every movie and magazine. I see her in an eddy of leaves in the street and the orbit of birds in the sky. If there is an afterlife, I know she is turning over stones and dreaming up a world of maximum disorder. At the best and worst of times, I see her in myself, in my habits of avoiding the hurry of crowds, in the greater comfort I sometimes find with strangers over friends and family, in my love of drawing, and in the strong affection I have for sleep and long aimless walks. A stray is a dog who has snapped its leash, a chord at the end of a song, a straggle of green growing amidst rock. It is the part of us in revolt. Maybe we all have a stray inside ourselves. Pippa’s was just more obvious.

When Iris is done and everything is packed away once more, I close the suitcase. Iris lifts her juice, winter sunlight blazing on the plastic cup in her hand, straw searching for a last rattle of liquid.

She rolls up the twine, sets the shambly ball on the table and smiles. After two weeks with Iris, I can see that she does not pity me. She has a disconcerting habit of trusting the empirical
universe, of seeing objects without the shadows thrown on them. I realize I am holding my breath. So I exhale.

It’s time to release my mother’s ghost so that I can free up both arms for the present.

A stormy February morning. When I leave for the airport it’s raining. The raindrops are falling from incandescent clouds. Iris and Oliver have decided to wait back at the flat. I’ve brought my sketchbook in case I’m early.

This morning when I woke up, I decided,
Today, I’ll veer from habit. Today, I’ll unplot myself.
I put on a white tunic shirt and beige jeans, clothes I never wear, and calmly walked out into the living room.