Fallout

New York was not his city and this was not his life. He bought postcards and wrote them to the people he loved but he did not send them. At night he dreamed the ache of human kindness and every stranger’s face he saw reminded him of home. The title of his play and the name that was not his real name, and other names on other theatres on the crowded billboards of the street, shone on canopies ringed by lights. It was every Broadway film imagining made humble by the rubbish-blowing poverty of the world; nostalgia torn down in the grey afternoon – this is what it feels like, not that, but
this
.

They did not need him at rehearsal so he walked the streets he had become familiar with, then further, to the unknown maze beyond. In the afternoon he went back to the hotel apartment and looking out at the distant heights of the city he thought of her. He did not think that she would come.

Then – England – 1961

Lucasz Kanowski broke his mother out of the insane asylum the quiet way; they went through the back gate. He sprang the padlock with a piece of bent wire, a skill maintained despite grammar school’s refining influence. He brought her some clothes stuffed into his school satchel: a woollen scarf – worried, absurdly, that she would hang herself with it – a cardigan with daisies at the neck and an old coat. He had a pair of wellingtons for her. He had wanted to bring real shoes, ladies’ shoes, but he had not been able to find any. It was possible his father had thrown them all away but that seemed such a decisive step Luke did not think his slow and inward father would have taken it. Wellingtons were not elegant but they would do for his mother’s escape. The grounds of the asylum were large; they would not be missed for a while.

He pulled the iron gate open, crushing the long grass.

‘
Allez-y
,’ he said and she stepped through, lifting her chin and shivering.

They stood together by the road as finches hopped and darted in the hedge. Luke saw that his mother was frightened. She stood quite still, hugging herself, small inside her cardigan.

‘We can catch the bus,’ he said, as if everything were normal, but his thirteen-year-old voice was breaking and nothing sounded normal.

‘
Maman?
Let’s go.’

Looking into her eyes he saw the chasm. People were scared of the insane and thought it was because of what they might do, but Luke knew really they were scared of that gap behind their eyes. Luke wasn’t frightened; it was she who had to live there. He would have done anything to save her. And he still prayed for her, even though his arguments disproving God’s existence were louder these days than the prayers. He prayed, and couldn’t help believing that if he did something right – perfectly right – she might get better.

‘
Maman?
On y va?
’

She glanced at him and smiled. Her skin had a pinkness, the flush of sunlight, as if the blood had begun to flow, and Luke felt the power of rescue. They crossed the road to the bus stop. When the bus came they climbed onto it and sat in silence as it took them away.

Three days before, they had sat together on Seston Asylum’s bare patchy lawn in their splintering chairs among the dandelions, with the tangle of pipes crawling down the walls behind them and the chimneys crowded on the Victorian Gothic roofs above. Hélène had given him one of her most assured looks and said, ‘I read in
The Times
that the National Gallery in London is to make an exhibition of French painting. Cézannes. Renoir.
J’aimerais te le montrer, Luc
.’

Luke’s first thought was that to see paintings if you wanted to, to read books, listen to music, was the very minimum for a tolerable life. Even his father listened to music. Later, when they said goodbye and she left him to go back to the dayroom and do whatever it was she did when he was not there, he said quietly, ‘Shall we go to Lincoln? Look at pictures in a gallery?’

But his mother was a Parisienne and a snob.

‘
Lincoln? So provincial
.’ She leaned close to his ear. ‘
Londres
.’

‘
Londres?
’ Luke could not help half-laughing; bested by a woman, and a feeble one at that.

‘
Chut!
’

Her hair was absurdly messy. She was standing in her slippers on the lino by Rose Ward, her candlewick dressing gown gaping and scorch-marked bruises on her temples from the electroshock therapy. Soft slippered footfalls defined the patients at Seston. The nurses, orderlies, doctors, all had shoes in which they might leave, that tapped or slapped the lino. The patients’ feet were all but silent. Their voices might be loud – sometimes they were very loud – but they were not grounded, and could not be heard.

‘En train ce n’est pas très loin.
’

She was right, by train it was not far at all.

The nurses at the reception desk did not look up as he left through the mesh cage at the entrance, or as the door banged behind him and the catches locked. He had been visiting his mother at Seston since he was five years old, he came and went as he pleased.

Even as he collected the timetables at the library for his mother’s escape Luke felt the weight of the odds stacked against him. He made schedules, lists –

Leave Seston 10 a.m. London train, 11.07.

He had contingency plans –

Event of police, lie.

But he knew that the greatest danger was not the authorities but his mother herself. Taking her away from the hospital, and her medication, she would be jolted from the familiar and vulnerable to a thousand horrors. As the day approached he didn’t dare remind her of their plan in case she let it slip to one of the nurses. It was his alone, his dreadful secret, but Luke believed that if one had the blessing of sanity then self-doubt was cowardly, and so great as his fear of disaster was, in outrage his resolve responded.

Now they emerged from King’s Cross Station, tiny against the vastness of brick and concrete. Thin sooty air. She in her wellingtons and wrapped-round cardigan like a gypsy; he with his home-cut hair, humiliated all at once by context. Mother and son held hands so tightly their bones dug into one another. People passed them by, a man shoving Hélène’s shoulder as he overtook. She shrank away with a mumbled sound through closed lips. Luke knew the sound and recognised danger.

‘
Je ne suis jamais venue ici –
’ She formed the words as if with an unfamiliar mouth. ‘
Tu comprends?
’

Luke hadn’t ever been to London before either but he said nothing.

‘
I say!’
shouted a woman nearby.
‘Taxi!
’ His mother ducked, as if avoiding the swipe of a monster’s paw. Her eyes were all at once wild. Another mumbled sound, this one guttural –
ga
– as she brought her shoulders up and cringed. He realised he could not rely on her for human company, not for the moment. The day ahead was huge and unfettered. He decided to see her as a zoo animal; not less than human, simply other. She was a rare and unpredictable creature; he was a professional, armed with tranquilliser darts. He was ashamed to find himself wishing the tranquilliser darts were real.

‘Don’t worry, I have all the information we need,’ he said, reaching into his pocket and taking out his bus timetables.

She withdrew into herself on the bus, and they were nearly hit by a taxi on the Strand. Once, she began to talk to somebody he couldn’t see, so Luke held her hand and told her what he’d had for dinner the night before. After that – his fault – they went the wrong way down Whitehall, but she had calmed down by then and looked around very happily as they walked back.

Trafalgar Square felt as wide and steady as a field, Nelson’s Column towering in its centre like a talisman.

Once they were inside the gallery itself an exotic normality overtook. And so it happened. For half an hour – more even than that – they walked and looked at pictures and were happy. He had the privilege of her uncluttered brain; her senses wide open, her mind working. He was old enough to know there was danger in imagining God punished or rewarded the people going about the unpatterned world, but he could not help but feel, just this once, that the unjust chaos of his mother’s truncated life had been noticed, and that He had been kind.

‘Close your eyes,’ she said, when they were standing almost alone in a big room, surrounded by Cézannes and Monets. ‘You can
feel
the paintings, no?’

Luke closed his eyes.

‘Or do you think, Luc, if the walls were empty, the air would feel just the same?’

Luke waited with his eyes closed and felt the life of the work around him. It shifted the atmosphere. He thought about genius consolidated by time and the immeasurable charisma of fame. He didn’t know how to put these things into words, only that the paintings seemed to breathe.

‘It’s like being in the room with people,’ he said, and opened his eyes.

They stood, with the quiet pictures framed in gold. Sunlit water. Flowers. Bright southern cliffs.

His mother shrugged. ‘Perhaps you don’t want to believe all
this
is for nothing,’ she said.

He felt embarrassed, caught out, but as they walked on she glanced at him and smiled, and he knew it wasn’t for nothing. They were in the company of greatness and they both knew it and were raised up. He looked over his shoulder as they left, and thanked the pictures in his mind, as his mother took his arm.

Eleven-year-old Nina Hollings gazed up at the two painted sisters, and with glad, moneyed smiles they gazed back down at her. Looking in awe at their linked arms, their velvet and silk, Nina felt exactly what she was: uncompleted by love or beauty.

Behind her, her mother’s voice, clear and strong –

‘Only men can paint women.’ She placed her hands lightly on Nina’s shoulders. ‘Only men make really good
coiffeurs
, and only men can cut clothes properly.’

‘Why?’ Nina did not take her eyes from Singer Sargent’s rendering of the sisters’ tiny waists beneath their party dresses, the dewy life shining from their eyes. ‘Why only men?’

‘Because men desire women, and can create them – even homosexual men. Women hairdressers have no idea at all. Very often they’re jealous and
want
you to look ordinary.’

‘Are there
any
lady artists?’ asked Nina.

‘There are, but they are concerned with ugliness for the most part – as for
couture
!’

Marianne gave a tiny snort and took her green leather gloves from her bag. She began to put them on. Her mother couldn’t run away while she was putting on her gloves so Nina leaned on one leg and performed heel-toe exercises with the rested foot. She looked around the room at the tweedy ladies murmuring in pairs and two students in sweaters, kissing. The girl was in a baggy skirt and flat shoes and the boy’s arm was wrapped around her body.

After a moment Nina said, ‘What about Coco Chanel?’

Marianne chopped the crevices between her fingers.

‘Chanel is a
terrible
couturière. All her good cutters are men,’ she said. ‘Come along now.’

She took her daughter’s hand and they went. Nina stared at the kissing students as they passed. The girl leaned over her boyfriend’s shoulder and gave her a mascara-laden wink.

As they reached the long central gallery, and Trafalgar Square could be seen beyond the doors, Nina said, ‘Look, French Painting. A special exhibition!’

‘Perhaps next time.’

‘One more room?’

‘Just one.’ Marianne sighed, as if another moment with her daughter was a great burden.

Standing before Uccello’s
St George and the Dragon
Nina looked at the long-necked maiden, daintily bound, and the lavishly armoured St George thrusting his lance through the dragon’s eye.

‘It doesn’t say who the princess is,’ she said. ‘And she doesn’t look very frightened, does she?’

Marianne looked at her watch.

‘She’s being saved,’ she said.

And that was that. They left the gallery under a white sky. They were meeting Aunt Mat by the lions.

Some children with tins of birdseed were throwing it for the pigeons swooping low in the air and jostling together on the ground. A little girl was standing like a scarecrow with pigeons perching up and down her arms. She was laughing through her nose, and spluttering. Seed dripped from the folds of her coat. Nina watched enviously as the girl’s father knelt to take a photograph.

‘Disgusting,’ said Marianne, pulling her away.

Aunt Mat was waiting sturdily by the plinth, a giant black lion’s paw behind her head and a carrier over her arm as well as her handbag, the crocodile depths of which held toffees and Player’s No.6. She gave a cheery wave.

‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Did you have fun?’

Nina stared at Aunt Mat’s sensible shoes.

‘Hello, Matilda,’ said her mother, standing like a thorough-bred, one leg extended. She wore a moss-green suit, belted, that stood out like a jewel against the grey.

‘Marianne,’ said Aunt Mat, coolly. She smiled down at Nina, her eyes creasing her powder-soft cheeks. Nina couldn’t smile back.

When her mother smiled her face was not disturbed. Nina had tried it in the mirror but she, like Aunt Mat, was distorted by her smile, like an ape. She didn’t think she would be a beauty.

‘I have an interview,’ said Marianne.

‘Much on at the moment?’ asked Aunt Mat.

‘Oh, you know, it’s dreadfully slow.’

‘You said you were busy last week. Auditions?’

‘I am busy!’

‘Mummy . . . please,’ said Nina in a tiny voice as her hand, despite herself, crept back into her mother’s.

‘Nina . . .’ Marianne knelt as deeply as her skirt would allow and looked into her face.

‘Darling. Please be brave. It upsets Mummy so much when you cry.’

There was a sharp movement beside them as Aunt Mat ground her low-heels into the paving.

‘I adore you,’ whispered Marianne to her daughter. ‘When I am away from you I have a pain in my heart.’

Nina felt her own chest tighten as if a belt was crushing it.

‘Say
goodbye
, darling. Kiss Mummy.’

Last time Nina had begged and clung, crushed her mother’s clothes. She had caused a public scene. There had been ecstasy in the abandon; to have no control, to be abject. Part of her believed it would bind her mother to her, but it had driven her away. Who would want such a desperate creature? She was determined not to cry this time.

‘Goodbye, my darling,’ said her mother, tears shining. But Nina gripped her fingers tightly, not letting go.

‘For God’s sake, Marianne!’ said Aunt Mat. ‘Stop it!’

But Marianne did not stop. ‘My love,’ she said, ‘let me go.’

It was too much. Nina began to cry, falling fast into it.

‘Darling,’ said her mother, ‘I
must
go—’

‘
Why?’
sobbed Nina, tears and spit and snot.