The Autograph Man (2 page)

YHWH

Rubinfine: “Ug ug ug. Bloody hell, I’m hot. Mate, could you not turn that heating off? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Arewethereyetarewethereyetarewethereyet?” Doing the impression of a kid in an American movie who’s tired of a car journey.

I’m not going to kill him,
thinks Li-Jin. His head is hurting. “I am not going to kill you,” he says, eyeing Rubinfine in the rearview mirror.

Rubinfine sucks in his cheeks like a fish. “Hmmm. Now, let’s see. Oh, yes. Er, as if you could in, er,
forty million years.
”

A fairly accurate assessment of the situation, Li-Jin being around 5’ 6” at a push, and Rubinfine being a huge lumbering giant freak of a child.

“You were smaller once,” says Li-Jin.

“Yeah?”

“Oh, yes. Unless my memory plays tricks. Not nicer, mind you—just smaller.”

“The record,” says Adam, “for a man being buried alive belongs to Rodríguez Jésus Montí of Tampa, Florida, who spent forty-six days buried in the Arizona desert breathing through a very long straw-type device.”

“Where’d you
see
all this, exactly?” demands Rubinfine, furiously. “What
channel
? What’d it
look
like?”

“Not on telly at all. In a book. Of records. I read it.”

“Well, shut
up,
then.”

Taking one hand off the wheel, Li-Jin grips an inch of the skin by his temple and starts to rub it between thumb and forefinger. He used to tell his patients that it is useful to imagine the center of your pain as a ball of plasticine or clay and that by kneading it thus you can narrow it down to a thread and then break it off completely. This was a lie.

“Mercy!” shrieks Rubinfine. “Me and Ads first. Alex plays the winner.”

Rubinfine and Adam lock their fingers together. It’s some kind of a game. They want Li-Jin to count to three. But Li-Jin is elsewhere, deep in his own headache. He looks at two waving six-year-olds in an adjacent car, smudgy through the rain-streaked glass, like a sentimental watercolor. He tries to remember when all the children seemed small and unsure. But no, even at six years old Rubinfine was the same suburban tyrant, though with different tactics. Back then, it was all screams and snot and hunger strikes. Rubinfine was the kind of child who would set fire to his own clothing just to see the look on his mother’s face. Adam, if Li-Jin is remembering correctly, has changed utterly. When he was six, he was American. More than this, he had no parents. He was like something out of a book. They all turned up in Li-Jin’s surgery one winter: a blue-black grandfather, one Isaac Jacobs, Adam, and Adam’s little sister . . . name? Anyway, she was the reason. An almond-eyed girl with a bad heart, in need of the United Kingdom’s free medical assistance. All of them black Harlem Jews, claiming the tribe of Judah. Dressed like Ethiopian kings! The adults of Mountjoy took their time accepting the idea of Isaac Jacobs. For Adam it was different. Adam was instantly lord of the playground. Li-Jin smiled at the memory of Alex coming home one day speaking of a “boy from the films,” as if Adam had stepped off the screen into the suburbs, one of those beings of the cinema who never die. But for Adam, it couldn’t last. His accent melted, his body grew. Seven years later and Adam Jacobs is still being punished for ever turning up in a suburb, acting like he was made of magic.

ESTHER—THE GIRL
was called Esther. With hair plaited like a puzzle. They fitted her with a pacemaker.

AND NOW, RUBINFINE
, bored with waiting for permission, has bent back Adam’s wrists. Adam is howling, but Rubinfine is unforgiving.

“The word is
mercy,
” says Rubinfine coolly, releasing Adam, who weeps and blows on his knuckles. “That’s
all
you had to say.”

“We’re stopping here,” says Li-Jin, pulling up suddenly outside a pharmacy. “Any complaints?”

“You smell?” says Rubinfine.

YHWH

When Alex was eleven, when Li-Jin first began to experience his headaches, a Chinese doctor in Soho diagnosed it as the influence of Alex-Li obstructing his father’s
qi.
This doctor told Li-Jin he loved his son too much, loved him like the widower whose child is the last remnant of his wife. Li-Jin was loving Alex in a feminine way instead of a masculine. His
“mu qi”
(maternal air) was excessive, blocking his
“qi-men”
(air gates). This had caused the disturbance.
Nonsense.
Li-Jin rebuked himself for ever succumbing to the superstitions of his own Beijing childhood; he never went to see this man or any other Chinese doctor again. Air gates? Everybody in Mountjoy had a headache. Plane noise, pollution, stress. The unholy trinity of Mountjoy life. It was vanity, surely, to assume that he had been singled out for something special, for the rare tumor, the underresearched virus. Vanity! Why would it be anything more? For a year after the encounter this clever doctor behaved like any one of his stupid patients. Telling himself it was nothing. No tests, continuous pain, muddling on. Even though, somewhere in him, he knew. He always knew.

THE BELL GOES
ting-a-ling. Ting-a-ling!

“Nice weather for ducks!” says the girl behind the counter. Li-Jin brushes off some raindrops and shakes his perfectly straight black hair that becomes wet so easily. Somehow, just by walking into the chemist, he has made her laugh. She is a bird-featured girl, with stiff yellow fans of hair, one under the other under the other, as Li-Jin has seen in the cinema (but surely some years ago?). She has a vast burgundy birthmark climbing her throat by way of five tentacles, like the shadow of some man’s hand.

“It doesn’t rain but it pours!” begins Li-Jin, confidently striding to the till. He parts his legs slightly and lays his small hands on the counter. In the village that crouched at the foot of his English boarding school, Li-Jin learnt all there is to know about this particular conversation and how to have it. Before TV was everywhere, before the catch-phrases, one learnt the sayings, the homilies.

“Of course,” he says, preparing to invent an area at the back of his house that does not exist and never could in the current property market, “my garden will be grateful. There was that cold dry snap last month . . .”

But the girl has decided to be indignant. “Well, I wouldn’t mind, but it went and rained all bloody
last
week anyway! I don’t know, I really don’t . . .”

Li-Jin bends and nods, agreeing that he also does not know, no, not about the rain or about the world and what it is coming to, what with one thing and another; smiling and nodding; waiting patiently for the girl to turn matters around to the transaction. She talks too much. But maybe she has stood here for a long time, bony hip pressed against the counter, eye on the door, forgetting and then cruelly remembering her own birthmark—all of this, for several hours, alone. She could die in here. No one would notice until the smell brought them leering over the counter. Ting-a-ling!

Into this stillness comes the bell again, and Alex walks in, clunks across the room and stands just behind his father, his second in any duel.

“Er, how long you gonner be?” he asks urgently, turning from his father and looking with alarm at the burgundy throat-climber.

“A minute.”

“Sixty elephant, fifty-nine elephant, fifty-eight elephant, fifty-seven elephant, fifty-six elephant—”

“
All right.
Five minutes. Why aren’t you in the car?”

“I think Adam Jacobs may have emotional problems at home. He says the world record for kissing is nine days and seven hours and is held by Katie and George Brumpton of Madison, Wisconsin. With food breaks. Is that—” he begins, raising his hand to point at the girl’s neck, but Li-Jin catches his wrist.

“Day trip,” explains Li-Jin. “My son, his friends. Very noisy. Boys will be boys. Headache-inducing.”

“I see,” says the girl. “Now, any particular brand? Only, they do different sorts of things for different pains these days, you know. No point taking something meant for, well, for example, frontal head pain if you’ve got . . . you know . . . some other type of pain.”

“Dad,” says Alex, tugging at him. “There’s no
time.
”

Finally, finally, he gives her some money and she hands him a bottle of perfectly ordinary paracetamol, which Li-Jin grabs and begins to struggle with. He is still struggling with it in the street, in the rain, even though nothing in that little bottle can help him and he knows it.

“Oh, come
on
—can’t you wait till we’re in the car?”

“No, Alex. My head is hurting
now.
Go on into the car, if I am embarrassing.”

“Dad, I
swear
I think Rubinfine might be a—wotsit—a paranoid schizophrenic. I’m worried for our safety in an enclosed vehicle.”

“Alex,
please.
Damn this thing!”

“Fifteen is the age for boys. Fifteen is when it starts. Do you think the girl in the shop had skin cancer?”

“Birthmark, only.”

“Didn’t you just want it to grow and take over her whole face?”

They get in the car.

“But his
foot,
” Rubinfine is saying very slowly, as one would speak to a retard, “which was inside his
shoe,
came down on Big Daddy’s
face.
Understand?
On his face. Shoe. Face. Shoe. Face.
Capeech-ay? Speaka da Engleesh? You cannot fake a
shoe
coming down on a
face.
”

Adam, who believes himself to be right, begins the whisper of the defeated that only God hears:
“Well, I still say . . .”

“
Bloody
childproof—” says Li-Jin.

Rubinfine, the eldest child in the car, reaches forward, snatches the bottle, and with great disdain and pity uncaps it and hands it back.

YHWH

They sit parked as Li-Jin hunts for a thermos of tea on the floor of the car. Everyone has an argument about fame quantifiables on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 = Michael Jackson and 1 would be somebody like the black woman painted green with two trunks coming out of the top of her head who played the alien Kolig in the film
Battle for Mars.
Okay, so on this scale, where is the wrestler Giant Haystacks?

“Three,” says Rubinfine.

“Six,” says Li-Jin. This is widely scorned.

“Three and a half,” says Adam.

“Two point one,” says Alex-Li.

“Don’t be a royal ug all your life, Alex.”

“No, look, it makes sense. About ten million people watch
World of Sport
every Saturday. I
think
that’s about right. And then there are about forty-nine million people in Britain. That’s twenty-one percent. So two point one. And you can only really say that in the first place if you pretend America doesn’t exist.”

“Alex-Li Tandem, you have just won the Most Boring Idiot of the Year award. Please come and collect your prize. And then piss off.”

“You know how much he weighs, though, don’t you?” says Li-Jin, reaching a hand back to stop Rubinfine delivering his prize punch. “You do know we have a real match on our hands. You do
understand
how big he is?”

“Uh? Who?”

Adam leans forward with that marvelous impression of a frown Li-Jin has noticed in his young patients when he approaches them with a needle. A creased forehead on which the lines are not permanent, a sort of magic.

“Giant Haystacks.”

“
Dad.
Don’t be rubbish. That’s all fixed. Moves may be real or realish, but the end is fixed.
Everybody
knows that. Doesn’t matter how heavy he is. He still won’t win.
Can’t
win.”

“Forty-five stone. Forty-five. Four. Tee. Five. Now: observe this money.”

Li-Jin, chortling to himself, pulls three pound notes and a pen from his shirt pocket and places them on the dashboard. “I am going to write your three names on these three notes. And if Giant Haystacks loses, I will give each of you your note.”

“And what do we have to give you if he wins?” asks Rubinfine.

“You have to promise to be good boys, forever.”

“Oh, great. Ug,
ug.
”

“I WANNA LEARN HOW TO FLY!”

“Electric uggaloo.”

Carefully, in a neat hand, Li-Jin writes the names on the notes and holds them out very slowly and with great ceremony, like a man who has all the time in the bloody world.

“I’ll take mine now, then,” says his son, reaching across for a note. “BIG DADDY RULES OKAY!”

The children speak in slogans now. Li-Jin grew up with clichés. The slogans make the clichés look innocent.

“You’ll take it
if
and
when
you have won it,” says Li-Jin, with a serious face, covering the money with his palm. “Albert Hall, here we come.”

Because it is magic, yes, but there are rules.

And now here are some facts. When Queen Victoria first met Albert she wasn’t really all that smitten. She was sixteen. He was her cousin. They got on well enough, but it was not what you would call a lightning/fireworks situation. Three years later, however, and suddenly he was right up her street. It was love at second sight. She was queen by then. It’s hard to tell whether that’s a significant fact in the story of
How Victoria Fell in Love with Albert the Second Time She Met Him Rather Than the First Like Most People Would If They Were Intending to Fall in Love Suddenly.
What can be said for sure is that after this second visit, Victoria describes Albert in her diary as “excessively handsome, such beautiful eyes . . . my heart is quite
going,
” and then proposes to him, which seems fairly fresh to us with our ideas about the Victorians and how unfresh they were. And then they went and had nine children, which seems rather
more
than fresh. To process the nine-children fact you have to, at some point, imagine Victoria as pretty fresh in the bedroom, and that takes some doing. But still, the facts are the facts. Here’s another one: after Albert dies, Victoria continues to have his razor and shaving bowl—filled to the brim with hot water—brought in every morning to their bedroom as if he were in a position to remove facial hair. She wears black for forty years. These days, there is most likely a name for that sort of thing. Something like: Excessive Grief Syndrome (EGS). But in the late nineteenth century, with a few exceptions, most people were still prepared to call it love. “Ah, how she loved him,” they say to each other, shaking their heads and buying posies for tuppence a bag in Covent Garden or somewhere. A lot of things that are syndromes now had simpler names back then. It was a simpler time. That’s why some people like to call them the good old days.