Mr. Fox (14 page)

St. John stepped off the plane. I didn’t follow. He stopped and looked behind him with an expression of mild surprise. “It’ll be all right, Mary. Let them sort this out. She’s gone. We should go, too.”

We talked all the way through passport control and baggage reclaim. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but that didn’t mean anything either way. I have married friends who don’t wear rings. My parents were married and didn’t wear rings. I finally got him to tell me about his paper. He was interested in fugue states. A fugue state is the result of an afflicted consciousness, he said. A person in a fugue state is somewhere between waking and dreaming, with the mere appearance of functioning normally. An already fragile man might suffer strain from some extraordinary life event at nine o’clock one night, then wake up at seven o’clock the next morning and just walk away from his home, his family, his life. He might take a bus or a long train ride, or a flight, and once he is elsewhere he becomes someone else. He’ll take a new name and forget his old one. His handwriting might change; the way he speaks and behaves changes subtly but significantly. He has no memory of his old life—until, abruptly, the fugue wears off, and what’s left is a frightened, exhausted human being, miles and miles from home and unable to recall what he’s seen and said and done since the evening of his dreadful shock.

“You said it wasn’t an interesting subject.”

“Most of these cases are historical. It’s been argued that fugue states are a nineteenth-century malaise, convenient for central European men looking for work in other countries, a disguise for individual attempts at economic migration, that sort of thing.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“No.” His eyes were very bright; they’d been like that since he’d begun talking about his subject. He looked like someone in love. Well, in love the way people were in old movies.

“Are you working with fugue-state patients right now?”

“If I was, I wouldn’t be allowed to discuss it.” He wheeled my suitcase up to the taxi rank. He only had a light-looking hold-all himself. “My car’s parked down there. I’d offer you a lift, but . . .”

“But?”

“But you shouldn’t drive off with strange men you only just met on the plane.”

“Of course.”

(I would have gone with him.)

“It was nice to meet you, St. John. Thanks—” I had no idea what I was thanking him for. He was gazing at me again, with that overwhelming concentration. I seemed to interest him very much—as an artefact, almost.

He drew a business card from his wallet, a pen from the top pocket of his jacket, and rested the card on top of my hard case. “Look—you’ve had a bit of a shock today. And I have some concerns,” he said, writing a phone number on the back. “It’s because your eyes are like a cat’s, you know, and you were struck by lightning. If you don’t phone I’ll assume the worst.”

“Bold,” I said, accepting the card.

He touched my wrist. Lightly, and with just one finger, but I shivered. It wasn’t that his hand was especially cold. I think it was the subtlety. If I hadn’t been looking, I wouldn’t have even noticed what he’d done.
He took my pulse,
I thought.
Stole it.

“Too bold?”

He walked away from me, backwards.

I didn’t know how to answer. I think I just shrugged awkwardly and turned away.

 

 

I don’t do anything I don’t want to do. Not even for curiosity’s sake.

For example: There’s the time I went to Berlin to see a man I liked, a stage magician I’d done a shoot with to promote something or other. The visit went badly. I’d turned up at his door as a surprise, and he didn’t like surprises. If I’d thought about it I would have realised that—a magician must control his props and the space in which he orchestrates his tricks—it looks like play, but the magician’s mind must be as strict as an iron brace. We went for a walk and he told me that I didn’t make much sense to him outside of the photographs. He seemed to be trying to tell me that I was a creature of chaos. I said, “Okay, I’ll go home today.”

The magician said, “Thank you for understanding.” He turned homewards and I stood still.

“Aren’t you coming?”

“No, I’m going home.”

“But your things—”

“Throw them away. I’ll get new things. There are so many, all around.”

“You’re angry.”

“I’m not. I swear I’m not.” I really wasn’t angry. I did want him to go away, though, and quickly, so that I could begin to forget about him. So I smiled, and hugged him, to show that I wasn’t angry. He left, calling after me that I should phone him if I changed my mind about picking up my things. I kept walking. Under a bridge in Prenzlauer Berg I came across a man playing a violin; he was wearing a top hat and dinner jacket, and his notes were apple crisp. Because he was playing so well I looked at him. At first I thought my sight was sun-spattered, but once my eyes adjusted to the tunnel I saw that the scars were really there—harshly moulded welts that gripped half of his face. They crowded his left eye, forced its corner to travel down with them. I stopped walking.

“Wunderbar,”
I said.
“Wo hast du gelernt?”

He didn’t change the pace of his playing. Nor did he look up.

No answer. Sunset lanced through the tunnel, cutting our shadows off at the knees. I found my purse, took out a note, and let it flutter into his violin case. I liked his indifference. I respected it. He finished his piece and packed up his violin, shaking the money out of the case first. It blew away, but I stomped and trapped it under my foot, still watching him, wondering, I suppose, if he would acknowledge me before leaving. “If you want to talk to me you can talk to me,” he said, as he snapped his case shut. “But not here.”

And he leapt to his feet and sprinted away, through the tunnel and across the smooth lawn of the park, through the rose-covered trellises that flanked its gates. He crossed over concrete and, at a mad, desperate dash, through the traffic that whirled along a broad avenue. And I followed, chased briefly by my flying ten-euro note, colliding with pedestrians, knocking handbags off shoulders and newspapers from people’s hands. The violinist’s hat fell off his head, and I picked it up and ran harder, shouting
“Entschuldigung!”
and shaking it joyfully. Near the end of a dimly lit alleyway my quarry knocked on a door in a complicated manner—a series of knuckle raps and openhanded slaps—was abruptly admitted, and tumbled inside. I drew the line at that. I approached the door, which looked like any other door, and placed the top hat to the left of it. Then I went off in search of something to eat. The running had made me hungry. I hope he recovered the top hat—it wasn’t a cheap one.

I’ve wondered, I have wondered, what that chase was all about, but I’ve never regretted leaving the matter at that. I didn’t want to follow the violinist into the company of persons unknown to me. So I didn’t do it.

I decided that I would not be calling S. J. Fox—there was something married about him. So I left his business card in the back of the taxi. I’ve left purses and cameras and mobile phones in the backs of taxicabs and have never once been called back to collect them before the cab drove off. This time the driver called out, “You’ve forgotten something, miss,” and I had to go and pick the business card up.

 

 

I liked to go home. I’d worked hard on the place, repainting a room a month, stencilling bright butterflies in corners, building little galaxies of light with crystal lampshades, pouring gauze over the windowpanes. There was no darkness where I lived.

I let myself in, picked my letters up off the doormat, and walked through two weeks’ quiet, the floorboards soft under my feet, a gentle path to my unmade bed. It looked storm-tossed, just the way I’d left it, just the way I liked it. I lay down, opened letters, and listened to my answer machine. There were hardly any messages. A couple from my agent, about jobs.

As I listened to the messages I looked at an invitation to a fancy dress party, really looked at it, held it close to my face. The words were printed alongside a picture of me, looking too silly for words. They’d done my hair up in Victorian ringlets and dressed me up in a grey wolf suit and a red cape. The snarling wolf’s head was hung around my neck, sharp teeth and bright gums. In the background there were soft multicoloured lights that were supposed to suggest fantasy and imagination. It was for charity. The party was due to start in an hour, and the venue wasn’t far from my flat—not by taxi. I could still go. It seemed wrong not to take a chance to meet people.

There was a shepherd’s crook leant up against my bathroom door—I’d got it on the Portobello Road a few months ago. I considered going to the fancy dress ball as a saucy shepherdess. Or Christ. Or I could go as a saucy shepherdess, and when people asked me if I was a shepherdess I could say “Christ, actually.”

I moved on to the last letter in the heap, the only one addressed to Miel Shaw. It was a dove-grey envelope addressed in thin, dark purple print. Which meant that it was from my father. I had one hundred and twenty-seven other envelopes like it, many of them unopened because they’d arrived on days when I knew I couldn’t cope. The letters were all in a shoebox under my bed. My hoard. I opened the new envelope little by little, sliding a nail along under its sealed flap, from one corner to the other. It took a long time.

The letter was upsetting, so I’ll try to paraphrase it. It had been written by someone else on his behalf—dictated, it seemed, and sent without editing. My father apologised for writing to me—he said he knew that I didn’t like him to. But he had been taken aside and told terrible things about what was happening inside his body. He was dying of colon cancer. He had gone through chemotherapy, and he was still dying. There was a smell in the air—a sweet smell that terrified him and was with him always. He thought it was coming from his stomach. He asked me to visit him at the prison hospice. You’ve never seen such a place, he said.
You couldn’t know that a place like this exists. Come and see me. Just quickly, just once.
Or if I telephoned, if I wrote back—just to show that I was there, that there was someone. He said that he’d seen me in a magazine but that I’d just been paint and porcelain.
Are you really there?
he asked.
Are you?

I folded the letter, put it back in its envelope, and added it to the others in the box.
I don’t care. I don’t care.
He hadn’t put my name in the letter, and that made it easier for me to refuse the letter—it had not been written to me.

I thought I heard something in the next room, a footfall.

I paced through the flat with the reassuring weight of the shepherd’s crook in my hand, checking that all the windows were locked. They were. I was alone. Safe, alone.

All the times I’ve been frightened because of my father. My need for night-lights, my inability to sleep in a room unless I’m able to clearly see all four corners from the bed—and dreams, bad dreams like messengers he sent. All the times he’s frightened me.
Die, then,
I thought.
Die.
And I wondered when he would be gone.

I phoned my lawyer, and I phoned his lawyer, and left messages. Long messages. Part of the reason I changed my name was so that my father wouldn’t be able to contact me. Yet somehow he has always been able to find me. His secretary used to send me cheques twice a year, cuts from my father’s investment yield that he instructed her to pass on to me. But I’ve never cashed them, not under any circumstances. When I moved house I left a post office box as my forwarding address, and I haven’t checked it since. You have to be like that when there’s a person like my father in your life; when you leave places you mustn’t look back or you’ll find him there.

“S. J. Fox, psychiatrist,” I murmured. “S. J. Fox, psychiatrist.” Whilst thinking, I was looking at his card. I’d placed it on my bedside table. The card was so plain, so black-and-white and uncreased, that it made everything around it, the frosted-glass lamp that shone light on it, the framed photograph of my cousin Jonas and me, look insubstantial. I was interested in his work, this St. John Fox. Did he know, could he tell, when a fugue state was coming on? The clinic he worked at was in Cornwall, and that was far away. I covered the card with my letters. There was no point invoking psychiatry in this matter. I am sane and it’s well documented that my father is sane. He seemed fully aware of what he’d done, and he was sorry, so sorry. My father is eloquent and sensitive, fair-haired and fair-skinned. His facial expressions flow into one another with mesmerizing transparency, grief, anguish, scorn. “He gets so worked up,” my mother used to say. She said it lovingly. Then she took to saying it in a puzzled way, then with contempt.

There was always something strange about the three of us together. Little things that might have been fun but somehow weren’t fun. One sunny morning my father made my mother lie down—she was laughing, and she said she wanted to do it, but she was an actress; can you trust an actress and a sunny day?—he made her lie down in the garden in her bikini and he wrote all over her. I can’t remember what he wrote; it was a long poem, in blue ink, an original poem, maybe. I was ten going on eleven. I didn’t like what was happening and I didn’t know why. He wrote on her back first, kneeling beside her; then he made her turn over and wrote all across her front, pressing hard, and the letters were big and ugly, but she pranced around afterwards, holding out her arms and saying things like: “Am I in the poem? Or is the poem in me?” And he just sat in a deck chair as if exhausted by his work and watched her. I thought, Something very mad is going on, she doesn’t like this, but she’ll never say so.

I was taken to a theatre matinee for my twelfth birthday treat; that should have been fun, too. We had the best seats possible, because that’s what things were like with my father. My mother was playing Juliet, and the first two scenes dragged—
blah, blah,
said one actor—Romeo, I presumed.
Blah, blah, blah,
said a second actor; some relative of Romeo’s. Asking him something; merry but concerned.
Blah, blah, blah, blah,
Romeo said, looking downcast for a few seconds before proceeding to jump around and climb things. My father stared into space and I felt my eyes begin to close of their own accord. Until Juliet made her airy appearance, soft and slender—“How now! Who calls?” and suddenly we were listening, Father and I, watching, our heads tilting to take her in, as if we’d never seen her before. The stage makeup exaggerated her eyes, but her mouth was still larger, very much larger. Something from the distant past—a great-grandfather who was an African. She was self-conscious about her mouth and called it her clumsy flytrap, but my Aunt Molly told me that that’s how it should be—when a woman’s lips are larger than her eyes it’s a sign that she’s warm-hearted. Her hair was a bright mass of crinkles, a lion’s mane. Romeo embraced her and she gave herself over to him with eager, trembling bliss. There were quite a few embraces, and my father became conspicuously still and watched with startled pain. I was uncomfortable because I’d never seen her like this before, but he’d seen her perform plenty of times.
It’s only acting,
I thought.
Is he always like that when she acts?