The Paperchase (7 page)

She came in and I introduced her to Lloyd and Stevo. Her presence somehow exaggerated the atmosphere of oppressive maleness that we had managed to create between us. I gave her a drink and told her that more people would be along soon, but I didn’t fully believe it myself.

Stevo’s phone call conjured up a mob of people who spilled in at about half past ten. All of them were unknown to me; most of them were unknown to Stevo. By that time, some other guests had come, so the party didn’t seem quite so bedraggled, or quite so male as it had at the beginning.

Once I had managed to stop nursing the party as though it were a sickly baby, it managed to thrive by itself and develop an unpleasant, vaguely rowdy personality that was all its own. Stevo’s obnoxious friends commandeered the hi-fi. I went over to help out and a man with shiny silver trousers shook his head at me and said: ‘This geezer’s got crap records.’

Cravenly, I agreed with him and went into my kitchen to make a coffee.

Tina came in and I made her one too and bitched about Stevo’s friends. We both agreed that the guy in silver trousers was an arse and I began to wish I’d made an effort to get to know her before my leaving party.

‘So how are you settling in?’ I said.

‘Settling in?’

‘To your flat.’

‘Oh right.’ A smile replaced her puzzled frown. ‘I’ve been living there for two years, Damien.’

‘Wow, two years. Time flies when you’re doing night shifts. It doesn’t seem so long since Mary was down there heating up soup on her Baby Belling.’

Stevo came into the room to find more alcohol. He was drunk and his contact lenses must have been irritating his
eyes because they looked big and wet like a spaniel’s. Tina and I both looked at him.

‘Her Baby Belling?’ she said.

‘It was like a fifties time warp down there. Distempered walls. No central heating. She came over from Estonia during the war. It was funny actually. She used to leave jars on the stairs outside her door for me to open. She had arthritis, so she couldn’t get the tops off. It was sauerkraut jars, Pepto Bismol or toilet bleach. Do you think that tells some kind of story about her digestive system?’

She laughed. You know you’re getting closer to an English person when you share a joke about bowels or toilets.

Buoyed up by her engaging laughter I went on: ‘Her husband was Polish. He was a barber, she told me. Get this, though: she said his business had been ruined by Beatlemania. Because no one wanted to get their hair cut!’

‘The estate agent said she went to an old people’s home,’ said Tina.

‘Oh no – she died in the flat. In fact, Stevo was with me when they broke down the door.’

‘Oh dear. I think I would rather not have known that.’

The room suddenly seemed so quiet, I thought I could hear church clocks ticking over graveyards across south London. I was trying to resurrect our conversation when Tina said: ‘Your brother is Vivian March, isn’t he? I’m a big fan of his films.’

I was smiling politely and nodding and about to move on to something else, but from behind us Stevo’s voice said, slowly and clearly: ‘Oops.’ And then. ‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘Why
oops
?’
said Tina, blushing. ‘Do you not get along?’

‘We had kind of a falling-out,’ I said. ‘It was a shame because we used to be close.’

‘I didn’t know you did such a good
reasonable
,’
said Stevo to me pointedly. Tina looked very uncomfortable.

Stevo had a tendency of springing surprises like this: he would call attention to some private matter when you were with someone you barely knew, forcing you either to take
them into your confidence, or leave them feeling paranoid and excluded.

‘Stevo’s exaggerating,’ I said. ‘It’s really no big deal.’

Stevo loitered around the kitchen until Tina said she’d better go. She shook my hand, thanked me for the party and left.

‘Thanks for that, Stevo,’ I said. ‘We were getting on nicely until you arrived.’

‘You mean, until you told her that the flat was built on the site of an Indian burial ground.’ Stevo flashed me a smile of grey, wine-stained teeth.

People who didn’t know Stevo thought he was tricky and self-seeking. I’m not sure. I would have thought that someone really tricky and self-seeking would appear to be a self-sacrificing
ingénu.
Stevo certainly seemed tricky, but maybe it was a protective display like the yellow and black stripes on a stingless insect. I don’t know. In those days, I suppose I was like Patrick, who believed that everyone was tricky and self-seeking. When I got to Ionia, I found a letter in his basement in which he’d written: ‘Human beings have evolved to be assholes.
Homo
simpaticus
is lying at the bottom of Olduvai Gorge with a flint handaxe in his rib cage.’

‘Have a toke of this,’ said Stevo, waving a conciliatory spliff in my face.

I hate pot, spliff, grass, whatever you call it. I could hardly wait to start smoking it when I was at school. Stevo and I would go buy it together in west London, and I think for a couple of years we smoked exclusively beef stock cubes and Oregano. This prevented me from finding out how much I disliked the drug itself. Also, Vivian has always been a smoker and it took me a long time to accept that someone with so much of my DNA could have a fundamentally different reaction from me to a simple stimulant. So a very common experience for me would be this: I would be having a good time at a party or concert. Someone would pass round a joint as though it were as innocuous as a box of after-dinner mints.
I would take one, two, three ill-advised puffs and spend the next two hours rooted to the spot, as though I’d been struck by a curare-tipped blowgun dart. Anyway, these are the kinds of things you find out about yourself, you learn to say no, and you improve with age.

‘Nice one,’ I said, taking the joint from his fingers, and inhaling greedily.

‘Skunk,’ said Stevo. ‘You want to take it a bit easy with that.’

I held the fumes in my chest and smiled at him. A stray tendril of smoke curled into my eye and made it water.

‘Thanks,’ I said, and passed the joint back to Stevo and rinsed my mouth out with wine.

‘I just wanted to say, you know,’ Stevo began, draping his arm over my shoulder. ‘We’ve had our ups and downs over the years. You’re a very difficult person, but you’ll always be my friend. I love you, mate. You’re such a character.’

‘Are you all right, Stevo?’

‘Yeah – why do you ask?’

‘You’re being unusually generous.’

‘I had one and a half Es off Fabrice in the pub – but that’s not why I said it.’

I began to feel light-headed and full of giggles – giggles that pushed upwards from my stomach like bubbles in sparkling wine. At the same time, I felt a familiar paranoia building up. I was finding Stevo difficult to talk to and wasn’t sure if it was me, or him, or the drugs. I went out of the kitchen and sat down on the sofa in the living room.

Lloyd had taken his shirt off and was dancing in the middle of the room. This clownish, playful Lloyd made fewer and fewer appearances, but it was always reassuring to see that his body was still capable of usurping its gaolers. I smiled weakly at him, but by now I was feeling too sick to move.

Someone came and sat next to me in the empty seat, so to forestall conversation I put my arm over their shoulders and patted them on the back, as if to suggest I was beyond the
reach of verbal communication. After a while, sitting upright was too active a position. I didn’t want to lie down in front of everyone, so I went into my bedroom. I put one foot through the bedclothes and on to the floor to keep the bed from revolving. That was the end of the party for me. I could hear shouts and laughter coming from the sitting room, but I wasn’t able to get up and join in. I just lay there like a corpse at a wake. At the end of the evening some of my friends came in to pay their last respects. Stevo leaned over and ruffled my hair with a sweaty hand. I acknowledged them all by feebly waggling my fingers and groaning, then they filed silently out of my flat for the last time.

THE HOUSE I HAD
inherited had been built in the 1880s by a sea captain called Edward Nethers who made his money from whaling – the industry for which Ionia and the neighbouring islands became famous in the nineteenth century. Patrick had bought the house from one of Captain Nethers’ granddaughters, who had grown too infirm to live there alone. She cried when she left it for the last time and gave my uncle a photo of her granddaddy, looking severe in Victorian side-whiskers. Patrick kept the photograph on the mantelpiece in the library – or the room Patrick had designated the library: it was hard to imagine Captain Nethers with his nose in any book but a hymnal or a tide table. Alongside it Patrick put the original title deed to the property and an aerial photograph of the house.

The house was neither old, by English standards, nor large, by American ones; but it was handsome and considered a good example of the island’s architecture. Summer visitors would sometimes make the detour to look at it, occasionally coming up to the porch and asking Patrick’s permission to take photographs. He was invariably courteous and would take them on a tour of the property before sending them away with brown paper bags of the hard little fruits that grew in his garden: apples, pears, peaches that were somehow tasty despite being very furry and juiceless.

It was a house that a child might draw, sketching out a crude oblong for the body, a triangle for the roof, regularly placed windows and a door in the middle. It was made of timber, two storeys high, with sides painted a blinding white, a steeply pitched roof and black wooden shutters on every window. One year, Vivian and I helped Patrick to paint the whole thing, using tall ladders to reach up to the eaves. It was an enormous job, and we had agreed to do it for what seemed like a huge fee: fifty dollars – between us. But it was a week’s work and we finished each day exhausted and splattered with paint. Patrick always talked about covering the woodwork with vinyl siding, which would have spared him the trouble of having it painted, but he was too much of a purist to do it.

On the roof of the house, the Captain had built what is known in the region as a widow’s walk. This was a form of balcony, like a crow’s nest in a ship, that was reached through a hatch in the attic. From it, the island looked like an island, with the sea suddenly huge and menacing. Widows, I suppose, would patrol them hoping to catch a glimpse of a familiar sail on the horizon. Or muse on the immensity that had swallowed their husbands. Patrick used his mainly to check on his TV aerial, which would get blown down periodically in strong winds.

There were two other buildings on the property: a stable off to one side, and a summer kitchen on the seaward side of the house. I don’t know if this was characteristic of the region or
a unique example. Since the Nethers family wanted their house to remain cool in summer, the Captain had built a tiny one-room outbuilding to cook in during hot weather. Patrick almost never cooked anyway, so he barely needed one kitchen, let alone two. The summer kitchen contained a bed, a life mask of Keats, a fridge, a vintage jukebox and about thirty egg-weighers.

As I mentioned before, Patrick liked to collect things. A second fridge in the main house contained nothing but ice-cream scoops. The mechanical bank that he had left my father in his will came from a collection of about fifty. Patrick owned more than two hundred glass cup-plates; four complete sets of the works of Dickens; six filing cabinets full of 45s for the jukebox. And there were incipient collections everywhere of things that he was not consciously collecting but that had begun to propagate: blenders and tinned food; playing cards; piano rolls by the player piano; an alphabet of vitamin pills in the bathroom cabinet; lawnmowers and hand tools in the shed, which also contained a rusty cider-press and a trap for the deceased pony Spellvexit.

(An egg-weigher, as the name suggests, is a device used for weighing eggs.)

The main house had entrances front and back. The one that faced the street was shaded by an elaborate wooden awning and a stand of trees. The entrance on the seaward side faced the summer kitchen and looked down the slope to the marsh and the ocean beyond it. I remember this space as teeming with life on Patrick’s birthday or during August barbecues. Patrick, or more likely one of his twenty something girlfriends, would be tending the barbecue – an antique that had a metal chimney and looked as though it was for smelting iron ore; Dad would be cajoling the rest of the family into a game of cricket; Vivian and I would be trying to persuade whoever was our age and female to come on a tour of the property. The sun would be high and bright; the sea glittering beyond the marshes; and the grass so green, and so much
trouble to cut, rolling under the apple trees, to the shady part of the garden.

‘The grass,’ said my Aunt Judith. ‘It was always the grass. “I’ve got to go back and cut my grass.” I think he used to lie awake at night and hear it growing.’

Judith had met me at Logan Airport. Stocky and tanned, she stood out in the crowd because of her make-up and dark glasses. She was in her late fifties, the middle child of five – the oldest after Patrick and my father but with none of their eccentricities. The first thing she did was give me a hug, enveloping me in her chunky arms and the smell of her perfume. ‘Is that all you’ve got?’ She pointed at my luggage. I told her I had just brought the essentials: egg-weighers, ice-cream scoops.

She laughed. ‘Yuh. Cup-plates. Croquet mallets.’

On the way down, she started telling me that she had seen Patrick for the last time three Easters earlier. He had left early to cut the grass, she said.

‘He just came to eat. He looked awful.’
Offal
was how she said it, which made it sound even more evocative. ‘I mean, really awful. His hair!’

‘Strictly speaking, it wasn’t his,’ I said.

She rolled her eyes. ‘He had a plate piled this high with food.’ She took her hands off the steering wheel to indicate a mound about six inches deep. ‘He went back twice for more. I’d made some Swedish meatballs and offered him some. “Not for me,” he said. He pointed at them. “Pure death.”
Pure
death!
“I’m dieting,” he said.’

‘Do you think he meant it or was he trying to be rude?’

She took her eyes off the road to look at me. ‘You know what, Damien, maybe he was, but I don’t care.’ As a true Bostonian, she gave ‘care’ two full syllables:
ki-ya.
‘I would have done anything for him. He was my brother. He knew that I loved him.
I
can put my hand on my heart and say: My conscience is clear.’
Kli-ya.

The subject of the will hovered in the air between us and made the atmosphere in the car, despite the air-conditioning, seem faintly oppressive.

‘The will must have come as a surprise,’ I said finally.

Judith turned towards me, pursed her lips, sighed and pursed her lips again. ‘I’ll be honest. I was hurt. I don’t want you to think I’m jealous, because I’m happy for you. Really. I’m hurt for my girls. Damien, they loved him. They loved him so much. But he didn’t just not think of them, he deliberately hurt them. He gave Tricia those stupid books. It was so mean-spirited. They would have been happy with so little.’

Outside the car, the numbers on the exits were counting down our approach to the bridge. I found myself saying: ‘You must come visit. I’d like people to look on it as a family house.’

Judith startled me by saying, ‘I know you do. And I know that you and Patrick were close.’

I looked out of the window at the struts of Sagamore Bridge, thinking that I knew neither of these things myself.