‘Call anybody but you Daddy,’ says Lula Mae.
Long kiss, long embrace. ‘Time for our last double scotches,’ says Max.
36 Forget fulness Remembered
May 1997. Max’s pages are accumulating. He doesn’t know how Moe Levy’s story will end but he trusts that this will be revealed to him in the fullness of time. Moe has no complaints at the moment. He’s not a writer, he’s a painter, and he’s already done a portrait and many sketches of Lulu.
Max’s mind is kept busy riffling through its files as Max’s memories become Moe’s life. Today he’s recalling a visit to the V & A with Lola. This will be the Moe and Lulu activity in Chapter Nine. No title for it yet. Max’s mind gives him Lola and himself back in early February. Up the museum steps they go, through the revolving doors and into warmth and brightness, long spaces and echoes, years overlapped like fish scales. Bowls and goblets, wine of shadows. Women, men, gods and demons in stone, clay, bronze, ivory. Some with open eyes, some with closed. Fabrics and jewels embracing absent friends.
‘Let’s go to the Nehru Gallery,’ says Lola. They hear music as they approach. On a dais musicians with sitar, tabla, flute and harmonium are playing a classical raga, far-away warm and bright in the dark London winter. The music is not loud but it is very wide. Max and Lola are standing in front of a display case in which they see Shiva Nataraja dancing in bronze, his hair streaming symmetrically to right and left. Dancing in a bronze ring of fire, Shiva Nataraja with his four arms, his hands with drum, with flame, with ‘Fear not’, with pointing to his uplifted left foot. Under his right foot is a dwarf all blackish green with patina. It has a long body, short arms and legs. Under Shiva’s foot it is like an animal, something that goes on all fours. Its baby-face, is it reposeful? Max thinks it is. ‘That’s Apasmara Purusha,’ says Lola. ‘The dwarf demon called Forgetfulness.’
‘Among other things,’ says Max. ‘Is he someone you visit often?’
‘Our lives are made of memories,’ says Lola. ‘Everything up to the present moment, even the word now leaving my mouth, is a memory. I come here every now and then to make sure Apasmara’s still under Shiva’s foot.’
‘He’s a dangerous guy,’ says Max, ‘but even if he got loose he couldn’t make me forget you. Fear not.’
On the page Max is typing, that’s what Moe says to Lulu. ‘I’d just as soon you hadn’t put those words in my mouth,’ says Moe to Max. ‘They seem unlucky to me.’
‘Be brave,’ says Max. ‘We’ve all got to take our chances.’ He goes back to the beginning of the chapter and types in the title: FEAR NOT.
37 Monstrous Virtue
June 1997. Max is chugging along comfortably with Moe and Lulu. Moe and Lulu visit the National Gallery, look at the Claudes, and encounter Linda Lou Powers from Austin. Moe and Linda Lou chat briefly, she says where she works, Moe admires her going-away view and so on. Moe has no need for a research visit to Holborn so Max sends him to Blacks for a new rucksack.
‘This is where you drop by Himalaya Technology and go out for lunch with Linda Lou,’ says Max to Moe.
‘What for?’ says Moe.
‘Hey,’ says Max, ‘don’t come the innocent with me, I’m the guy who’s writing you.’
‘Oh, really?’ says Moe. ‘How often have I heard you say that your characters develop a life of their own and you go with the action that comes out of that.’
‘That’s all very well,’ says Max, ‘but if you can pass up Linda Lou you must be dead from the waist down.’
‘No need to be coarse,’ says Moe. ‘Linda Lou is certainly attractive but Lulu is all the woman I need and all the woman I want. I’ve got no interest left over for anyone else.’
‘My God,’ says Max. ‘I’ve created a monster. So what are you going to do now?’
‘I’m going to go home and stretch a canvas,’ says Moe. ‘Tonight I’m starting a nude of Lulu.’
‘Wonderful,’ says Max. ‘Do you think you’re better than I am?’
‘Let’s just say that I think of you as a demiurge,’ says Moe, ‘a brute creator that gets things started but doesn’t really know what to do with them, OK?’
‘That a character of mine should talk to me like that!’ says Max. ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth.’
‘I didn’t ask to be written,’ says Moe.
38 A Whole New Ball Game
June 1997. Max is utterly gobsmacked by Moe’s put-down. As a writer of fiction he draws on himself, with whatever changes are required for the people he invents. They are taller or shorter than he is, braver or less brave, more honest or less, more aggressive or less. Better at sports perhaps, or talented in ways he isn’t. But never before has one of them assumed the moral high ground and lectured him from there. ‘What do I do now?’ he asks his mind.
‘Explore your material,’ comes the answer.
‘I always do,’ says Max. ‘You know that.’
‘So keep doing it,’ says his mind. ‘You always say that if you knew how the story was going to come out you wouldn’t bother writing it.’
‘Give me a break,’ says Max. ‘This is a whole new ball game and I need time to think about it. Moe has made me so ashamed of myself. Lola is so much more than I realised. She keeps expanding like a flower unfolding. She fills my whole being with what she was to me, all that I never knew until now.’
‘Ever heard the expression, “A day late and a dollar short?”’
‘Yes,’ says Max.
‘There you have it,’ says Max’s mind.
39 The Big Store
July 1997. Max dreams that he’s in a big store. Much bigger than Harrods. Very bright. Full of all kinds of things but it isn’t clear what they are. He seems to have bought something but his hands are empty. A pretty young woman in a black dress is facing him. ‘Thank you for helping me choose,’ says Max.
‘My pleasure,’ says the woman. They’re looking into each other’s eyes so Max kisses her. Tiny kiss, closed mouth. She smiles broadly, almost sings ‘La la la.’ ‘If I can help you with anything else, please let me know,’ she says as Max wakes up.
He looks at his hands. ‘What did I buy?’ he says.
40 Noah?
July 1997. ‘On March twenty-first Lola said she was pregnant,’ says Max. ‘She’d probably been a couple of weeks late with her period before she found out. Say she was due the first week in March, then she’d have been ovulating around the middle of February. That’s when our child was conceived.’
‘Right,’ says his mind. ‘And this is the middle of July so she’s five months gone.’
‘If she didn’t lose the baby when we crashed,’ says Max.
‘I don’t think she lost it,’ says his mind.
‘Why not?’ says Max.
‘It’s in the nature of things that you should have two children that you’ll probably never see.’
‘That’s hard.’
‘That’s your life. Get used to it.’
That night Max dreams the Ark drifting through rain and storm and dark of night. The sky clears and it’s the dawn of a new day. Here’s the Ark stranded on the mountains of Ararat. Here’s the rainbow sign of the covenant. The little door up near the peak of the Ark’s roof opens and Max sees a face. The face of a child, a boy. The boy’s face comes closer, closer. His eyes grow bigger, bigger. ‘Noah?’ says Max.
‘Daddy?’ says the Noah child.