The Ruby Slippers (18 page)

Where do these words go, he wonders? How far do they reach? To his own ears only? This shell of a person, does it hear a single thing? Is any kind of mind in there? ‘But listen, you gotta know this – the slippers, the ruby slippers, we found them, we rescued them, and they’re safe.’ Does any of what he’s saying matter at all, or is he just a stupid old man talking to himself? It is so strange. A body is there: the dome of her head, the shell of her body and, inside it, the slowed clock of her heart – organs and parts in which a billion thoughts and feelings have sprung in their time, but lying now, silent and unknowable.

‘Anyways, that’s about it. It’ll take me a couple of visits to get things shipshape, but don’t worry, Rosa, it’ll all be fine.’ He stands back, his piece said, and watches and waits, just in case something behind those closed eyes might amount to a person who could also be watching and waiting. ‘Ah well . . .’ he says finally, and seeing no sign of anything in the petrified face, raises his hand, gives a little waggle of his fingers, as if saying goodbye to a child, and walks away, leaving the emptiness of her there upon the bed.

And yet something is there, something of who she once was – in her and of her and around her – the imprint, the dense but invisible traces of her being, the remembered energy of her contained in the void. And preserved, stored in that energy, is the order of her life, her story.

And this exists, too, in another place, for once, many years ago, when she had lucid moments among the crazed, when she had the benefit of time and space among the clamouring days, Old Rosa wrote her story down and left it in a place where even now it waits to be found and unfolded to he or she whose fate or fortune is to find it . . .

■ ♦ ■

Malachi McBride gazes out over the city that made him and in which he once had such purpose. He puts his hand square on the bench at his side, feels the coarse grain imprint on his palm. He reads the already faded plaque on the rail: ‘Nancy Taylor, taken from us 2003. A woman who loved Central Park as she loved life’.

‘Stupid woman,’ he says for the ears of Donna Inez, who also stands gazing out at the great city. But even he enjoys going to the Park if it’s bright like today, and he is not dead yet to passing things: the freshness of the air, the scent of pine. But he does not love life, not any more. There surely will be no one to raise a plaque for him, not this Filipino nurse-woman who he has cruelly used, not his own son who he hasn’t seen in years. And what would it mean anyway if he were gone to worms? People are stupid and sentimental when it comes to death. Why are there so few like him, who see it for what it is – an ending and that is that – and who will not cry out for priests and be a hypocrite at the last?

‘Onward!’ he barks and lurches down the path, the maid ludicrously tripping along to keep up with him. Why does she even bother? Why doesn’t she tell him to fend for himself for an hour or two while she goes off to feed the ducks or whatever pleases her? He is perfectly capable of driving himself along and doesn’t need her to tuck the blanket over his knee and make him drink water from plastic bottles, so why should she bother? The chair crunches purposefully along towards the nature reserve, arriving at the brow giving over the west side. In his largesse, McBride allows Inez to catch up and pause for breath. Beside them, two lovers are entwined on a bench. Spring, he thinks. Nature and its ruthless puppetry. The marionettes in question are a middle-aged man in a suit and a bohemian-looking girl, much younger, and they are kissing as if one of them is about to be led away for execution. Inez turns away, her gaze discreet to the end, but McBride, unabashed, manoeuvres the chair even further into their space and pronounces matter-of-factly: ‘Rugged but dull corporate guy fucks uppity college chick!’ There is a stunned moment, the lovers’ lips still pressed together. But then they draw apart, staring dumbstruck at McBride, who gazes back, unflinching, and says, ‘That is a hell of a bitch’s brew in the making!’ The woman is open-mouthed now in disbelief. Inez, too mortified to look either of them direct in the eye, crabs across and slams the chair forward and out of harm’s way as McBride calls back over his shoulder, ‘Close your mouth, honey, before something disgusting makes its home in it!’ The man starts angrily towards him and Inez summons a strength beyond her stature to shove the chair over the brow – and away he goes, flying solo like a boy on a sledge. He has become wicked, she thinks, out of control, just as spoilt children can sometimes become. It cannot go on like this.

■ ♦ ■

It has done James good, if nothing else, to be out in the bracing day, to feel the first touch of spring and exorcise thoughts that have recently set his mind into such a dark cast. He has walked the length and breadth of the Park, loving as always the idea of a wilderness-bounded square in the metropolis. And along the way there have been revelations: plaques and plates he has never noticed before, each, named for someone who had one day stopped living, but whose brief flourishing was now memorized in the growing of trees: beech and birch, plane tree and plum, and over there on a grassy loop by the pond, a tulip tree with its canopy of bell-shaped beauty.

Then there are the benches, some stout and useful, others fine and ornate. The inscriptions here are more direct, offering simple invitations to citizen, passer-by and tourist to sit and share what that lost person once possessed. ‘Here was their favourite spot’, ‘This was a sight they loved’, ‘The view from here gave them joy’. And encoded in these messages, the deeper exhortation to stop, take pause and contemplate the way of things, the ever-reaping cycle.

James wonders how many of the people sitting along this path – the woman feeding pigeons; the bespectacled black man eating sandwiches; or the old man in the wheelchair and his nurse – have known the person their bench was named for. Would this be their daily homage to husband, mother, father, wife? ‘Saul Liebowicz, died 1978’. ‘Henry Ellinor, much beloved; 1990’. ‘Nancy Taylor, taken from us, 2003’.

He quickens his step, keen to complete his quest. OK, so maybe he won’t go for a tree or a bench, but something will come up. Around the keen sweep of path by the pond, he goes, climbs the shining steps and pays to enter the zoo’s mock-colonial quarter. And as he drifts between the compounds and the disguised cages that house a thousand species, James learns from helpful notices that many of the inmates are sponsored. Could these animals say something in their yowls and screeches for the dead as well as for the living? Which of these would Paolo wish to be named for? If each of us has an animal alter ego, which one would neat, dark Paolo be – wolf-cub or wildcat, mandrill or marmoset?

He climbs to the highest point within the zoo, a concrete outcrop shaped and textured dirty-white to imitate the Arctic wastes. In his hand is a brochure, all about donations and bequests. He stops to take in the facts and figures of every animal worthy of a donor-dollar, from stick insect to hippopotamus. He is impressed to discover how the zoological people have harnessed science and nature to create conditions for new life: calf, cub and pup to be wondrously conceived and reared within these walls.

He looks down from the highest point at the animal continents spread out below him. Behind him is a great shapeless window of plate glass set in rock, fronting a large water-filled tank. Turning to look, he sees an adult polar bear appear up on a ledge, starting, as if to order, a restless pacing this way and that. And soon James’s attention is taken away from the wider view and claimed by the time-tainted bear, so that he becomes lost in watching the demented animal as it thrashes side to side, then plunges down from sight, appearing in the tank to make an underwater encore of the same joyless and never-to-be-undone dance. Plain as day, this is suffering. Animal captivity syndrome, isn’t that what it’s called? To give money for a creature to be born and live its life forever yearning.

It’s pretty much dark by the time James completes his round. He is tired and there’s a chill in his bones. But as he comes to the bridge, something alarming happens: hurtling straight at him comes the iron mass of the wheelchair man. He is bang in its path and his heart stops dead, commanding his feet to do the same. The chair comes crunching to a halt and the man in it lets out his own expression of surprise: ‘Well, well, well!’ And then the nurse arrives, looking at them both, nonplussed, until James stops gawping and says unguardedly, childishly, ‘Dad . . . What . . .? What happened? I had no idea . . .’

‘Of what, pray?’ enquires the old man in his calm but cunning way.

‘Of this . . .’

McBride looks at him with undisguised contempt. ‘You look a little shocked, my son. Well, work it out. I sure as hell am not sitting here for fun.’ James lowers his gaze – however undeserving of respect this man might be, it isn’t nice to stare. But can he help it? The dad that James remembers was fit enough to row an ocean; the dad he sees before him now fills him only with despair – the jaundiced face carved with shadows and everything about him negative and dire. No wonder he’s dumbstruck. McBride, though, is not stuck for words: ‘So . . . time flies,’ he chortles. ‘And we’re all full of surprises. How about you? What’s new with you? Like, are you still a lousy faggot, or did you finally grow out of it?’ James hears the nurse gasp to be witness to such casual malice. Outrageous, the old man is as outrageous as ever – cruel, as life has been cruel to him.

‘Excuse me, but I think I have to leave,’ James says, with as much dignity as he can muster, but his father is unrelenting:

‘Ex–cuse–me. Just listen to the mincing little queer.’ The nastiness of it, such vile mimicry, so hurtful – making a naughty little boy of him all over again. James walks away, staggers away, everything around him a blur, the old shame galloping inside. He gets to a distance, stops and puts out an arm to brace himself against a wall, his head bowed, his shame on show for all to see.

A still small voice speaks at his shoulder. Inez has followed him, broken away from her master to come and reassure this poor young man, who seems decent: ‘Excuse me, I cannot help but hear what was said. He does not mean it. He cannot mean it.’ James turns to face her, finding a little of his lost composure – enough to ask of her, ‘Tell me, how long have you been looking after that man?’

‘Nine months,’ she says, all small of voice. ‘Why?’

‘Because then you know he means it. Tell me, do you care for him all the time?’

‘Twenty-four hours, seven days a week.’

‘Wow, you must have the patience of a saint. So, tell me about it, what has he got?’

James begins to gather himself and to breathe more freely as she tells him, discreetly and as quickly as time will allow, about his father’s disease and how he might have a couple of years if he’s lucky. She tells him also about his father’s waning powers and his waxing misbehaviour. And all the time, as she is telling him, she keeps glancing behind her to see how far the chair has travelled, until finally, when she sees it go out of sight, she scuttles away, saying, ‘I’m sorry, I must go . . .’ As she does, she raises her eyes, transmitting to him a look of kindness, a mother’s gaze to a needy child, and turns and hurries away, leaving him there to pull himself together and find his way home.

And on the bridge, looking down on all this, stands a figure, neat and inconspicuous. Solemn-faced, unblinking, Jack watches, privately sharing in James’s sorrow.

■ ♦ ■

All the way up in the elevator, McBride is flushed and talking nineteen to the dozen – a spoilt brat notching up hits on his new catapult. ‘How about that?’ he yammers. ‘Did you see him, that scrawny little piece of piss, that mincing gay? That was my son,
my son
, you understand?’ He seems somehow proud of the pathetic fact, exultant, or is it simply his anger and disappointment coming out in such a strange and twisted passion? He turns his curiosity on her: ‘You spoke to him; what was that about? Whaddya say to him?’

‘I told him that you did not mean what you said.’

‘You damn fool!’ he splutters with laughter. She says nothing, fixes her gaze on the buttons lighting up with each passing floor. It alarms her to think that his behaviour during their walks has progressed from discreet asides to cruel insults openly directed at anyone who might unwittingly offer a red rag to the bitter old bull. Bad enough to abuse the lovers on the bench, whose privacy he so mercilessly invaded, but to talk to his own flesh and blood like that . . . the son he has not seen since who knows when? McBride himself has gone quiet, as if reading her thoughts. As the elevator doors open, he pronounces, almost reasonably, ‘You think I’m terrible, but I just say what other people think and never dare to come out with. Cripple’s prerogative.’

First thing inside the apartment, she fills the coffee pot. He is in the living room, surveying the Park in its dusky glow. He is quiet now, she thinks, but just watch, soon he will start up again, no doubt picking on her family back home, making them out to be oriental trash when in fact she has brought each one up to be God-fearing and respectable. Every day he believes he can buy her off and all his sins will wind back to zero. His ‘occasional transgressions’, he calls it. God may forgive him, but she will not let him off so easily. ‘The park was beautiful,’ he calls out, uncommonly sensitive. And then following up with: ‘What a shame the rest of life is such shit.’

She sets cup and saucer on the tray and plunges the cafetière, as he pours out more of his vileness: ‘You know, if I were in your place I might be tempted now and then to just slip in a little extra something, something to . . . help me along, make it all go away. Wouldn’t that be so nice?’ Her hand freezes in the act. So, he is coming out again with this terrible talk. ‘I wouldn’t blame you. I deserve it after all.’ She crosses herself against his blasphemy. He has taken to dropping these bombs now and then. It goes to show how wicked he has become.

But it isn’t quite shocking enough to stop Inez from doing what next she does. Satisfied that McBride is safe in the living room, she takes a bottle of tablets, Oxycontin, his high-strength painkillers, empties three into a saucer and, with the back of the spoon, grinds them down. All his talking big about killing himself and her helping him on his way, it’s all boasting and bluffing, of course, because he trusts her to be the saintly Catholic woman who never thinks such things. Carefully, lovingly even, she empties the granules into his coffee and stirs them in. Strong, bitter Arabica, just as he likes it. Three tablets only, but then he drinks an awful lot of coffee. Normally, he would be right about her being too holy to have such thoughts, but he should never have said bad things about her darling children, so far away, who she longs to hold in her arms. Can he not see that every time he hurts them it is unbearable agony to her? It is like taking poison.