TWO
THE PERSONNEL MANAGER, a jug-eared Irish bruiser called Graham Toohey, gave me compassionate leave. He sounded relieved when I said it was my uncle that had died.
‘I thought for a moment it might have been your brother,’ he said.
No such luck, I thought.
‘I loved The Omega Man.’
‘Well, I’ll be sure and tell him,’ I said.
I couldn’t get on a direct flight to Boston at such short notice, so I ended up flying into Newark that night and renting a car.
The transatlantic flight finished off my flu and the strangely purposeful behaviour that had accompanied it. I found myself waiting for the courtesy bus outside the arrivals terminal and wondering what on earth I was doing there. It was nine at night by the time I’d finished the paperwork for the rental car, and the thought of the journey ahead made me regret having come. The car seemed as vast and awkward as a yacht. After adjusting the mirrors and starting the engine, I tried to signal to turn left out of the parking lot, but only managed to switch on the wipers, which scraped to and fro sporadically over the bone-dry windscreen all the way through Manhattan, while I muttered, ‘In this country, we drive on the right,’ to myself as a mnemonic.
The sight of Manhattan coming into view across the Hudson cheered me up. It looked like a — like a what? — something jewelled and glittering. It was my first glimpse of the city in ten years. And there was something a bit sad about seeing something you were part of getting along fine without you. It was like bumping into a former lover who is wheeling a baby in a pushchair: life goes on in your absence.
My last memory of the place was of me and my brother Vivian lugging packages to the vast all-night post office on Thirtieth and Eighth to be sea-freighted back to England. I had given my brother a hug and handed him the keys to my studio flat on West Twenty-first Street. It had been cold, because I remember a very black homeless man was lying above a steam vent to keep warm. The smoke seemed to billow around him, as though he were the remains of spontaneous combustion, or a burnt offering.
Somewhere between New Haven and Providence I had had enough of driving. The radio and periodic blasts of air from the open window weren’t enough to keep me alert, and I found myself dropping off at the wheel. I didn’t feel ready to join Patrick in the funeral home, so I pulled off the interstate and found a motel. I can’t remember the name of it. Was it an Econolodge? A Comfort Inn? A Motel 6? A Knight’s Inn? A Day’s Inn? A Budgetel? An E-Z Rest? Whatever it was called, it had a huge glass window draped in orange cloth and fronting the parking lot, a remote control stapled to the bedside table, which was scarred with cigarette burns, and a wide, saggy bed, like the back seat of a limousine, from where I continued to steer the rental car in my dreams, carefully guiding it down the right-hand lane of the highway.
*
The funeral home was fiercely air-conditioned. The only person without goose pimples was Patrick, peering out of the hatch of his coffin, his face waxy, his hairy fingers entwined over his chest and padlocked with a rosary. His nostrils were more cavernous than I remembered; his features greyer and more jowly. His blond wig had been decorously arranged over the top of his papery head. I had once been so used to Patrick’s weird hair — the wigs followed experiments with comb-overs, transplants, weaves, and pate-dye — that I was surprised when people drew attention to it. I took his appearance for granted and somewhat resented people who didn’t. No one pointed out men wearing baseball caps, or beards. Why point out the wig?
But seeing him after so long, with his old grey face on the pillow, I saw why people had been so surprised. ‘Wig’ didn’t really do it justice. I kept thinking of the word ‘syrup’ from ‘syrup of figs’ — the Cockney rhyming slang for a wig. Patrick’s was a golden syrup flowing over his head. It was the hair of a surfer, or a 3-D Jesus, and it looked decidedly odd on a man of sixty-three whose natural hair colour had been raven black.
I touched the back of Patrick’s hand gingerly and made the sign of the cross, and said a Lord’s Prayer up to ‘Give us this day our daily bread’, which was all I could remember. My hand was drawn to the golden curls of his wig. Almost inadvertently, I found myself giving it a valedictory pat. The sensation of the wiry hair on my fingers stayed with me for the rest of the day.
The people around me seemed oblivious to the presence of the corpse. The only sign that they were aware of it was in the hushed tone of their voices. No one appeared to recognise me either. Being ten years older was like being in disguise. I retreated to one of the side tables to get a drink and bumped straight into my father.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘how kind of you to have come, Vivian.’
How kind of you to have come: he said it so precisely that it threw me for a second, it didn’t even sound like English.
‘Damien, Dad,’ I said. ‘I’m Damien.’
‘Damien! Well … The two of you … so very alike now. You’ve filled out.’
He was wearing a dark suit and one of his Jermyn Street cravats. He looked, I thought, like a Hollywood English butler — something he was probably aware of himself. His hair was greyer, but there was still a good deal of it. It makes nonsense of genetics that Dad should have so much hair and Patrick so little. But age had made them more alike in other ways — the jowly faces, cartilaginous noses, the same shaggy eyebrows with the odd overgrown hair poking out of them: stalks of wheat in a windowbox. Dad’s was a fuller version of the face in the casket.
‘Work is making me fat,’ I said.
‘Really? I always found it kept me thin.’ He patted his paunch. ‘I gather you’re still at the Beeb?’
‘Still at the Beeb,’ I said. ‘Still at the Beeb.’
‘Jolly good.’ To my shamelessly Anglophile father, ‘Working for the BBC’ was right up there with ‘took silk’, ‘reading Greats’, and ‘someone in the City’. I had never managed to explain to him that the BBC I worked in was a kind of high-tech post office, full of underappreciated people grumbling about the pay and conditions.
At that moment, I had the feeling I always had talking to my father: the feeling that he was looking down on my life from very high up without too much interest. He was outwardly impressive, like the deity of a pre-Christian religion: a totem pole, or a King Log, an Ark that you carried around the desert to intimidate your enemies. But it was a bluff. He couldn’t intercede for his people. The box was empty. Even his sonorous, mid-Atlantic voice seemed to have a wooden echo.
‘Seen anything of old’ — he checked himself for a beat — ‘Vivian?’
‘We haven’t spoken for a couple of years,’ I said, trying very hard not to make it sound like a rebuke.
‘Ah!’ boomed the voice of the Ark. His shaggy eyebrows flew upward like divots, but he said nothing further. He knew that if he asked too many questions, he ran the risk of unearthing tiresome information.
*
The body was buried the following morning on the family plot in West Dennis. It was a bright May day. At the last minute, one of the readings in the service was reassigned to me, because I had come the farthest to attend it. My brother Vivian had not bothered to turn up.
My steps echoed through the church as I walked back to my pew from the lectern. My ears were still blocked up from the flight, and the effort of projecting my voice made me lightheaded.
My father then read an extract from the Book of Common Prayer. I had to admit it sounded good. His foghorn of a voice filled the room:
‘The days of our age are three score and ten,’ he read. ‘And though men be so strong, that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; so soon it passeth away and we are gone.’