We Had It So Good (14 page)

“I heard people did,” says Susie. “Someone flew right across the Grand Canyon, a lot of people saw it.”

“It's just an urban legend. No one can fly unless you're a bird. No ingested chemical can overcome gravity.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“What do you mean? I'm not your dad.”

“You
sound
like my dad.”

“I'm not old enough to be anyone's…” But he is. Not only does he have two kids of his own but technically, just about, if he'd started really early, if he had been precociously sexual, and found someone willing to do it with him (though he wasn't and no one would), this girl could be his daughter. Which was absurd because he was not that old, just thirty-two.

The scenery of the southern coast is utterly beguiling, this is where someone like him could live, with the ocean ever present and a few strange plants whose names he doesn't need to know growing by the roadside. Everything is big and meaningful and Susie, leaning her head out of the van window, points up to the sky, to a bird she thinks she's seen there. “Is that an eagle?”

“I don't know, I don't know what an eagle looks like.”

“Do you mind if I sing a little?” she asks, turning to him. Hey! she has dimples.

“Do you have a good voice?”

“I sang in the church choir.”

“Okay, give it a try, I'll listen. But no hymns. I'm not into that stuff. What else can you sing?”

“Are you okay with Leonard Cohen?”

“Of course, I grew up on him.”

“He's super cool for an old guy.” And opening her mouth she begins to sing in a lovely voice of Marianne, to whom the speaker is saying good-bye. “That's my daughter's name. She's Marianne, also. A friend of ours named her for that song, that is, she and my wife cooked up the name, I had no say at all but I'm glad that's what they chose.”

Stephen remembers Grace standing by the bed in the hospital, as he might have thought the bad fairy would have hovered over the cradles of newborn infants in fairy tales had he been brought up in European darkness, where lives were fated and doomed from the outset. But he merely thought that Grace cast an unwelcome shadow over the sleeping head of his baby girl whose startling blue eyes and dark head-down marked her out as a human being with visible characteristics. Grace had lit a cigarette, the smoke wreathed around the newborn's head, drawn into her lungs by the two tiny points of her adorable nostrils. “I think she's Marianne, like in the Leonard Cohen song. So long, Marianne, because I'll always be saying good-bye to her.”

The girl next to him scratches her flat belly. “I got a bite,” she says. “I slept in the forest somewhere and it was full of bugs.”

“You slept in the forest all by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“You weren't frightened?”

“No, I grew up in the wilderness, it doesn't scare me.”

“What will happen when you get to Mexico? Do you know people there?”

“No. But I'll be okay. I'll find the people with the peyote and they'll take care of me.”

“People can be nasty. You should watch out.”

“I never really met any who were, not in my hometown.”

“You're too innocent. You really should reconsider this whole thing. Are you in school? Don't you have studies?”

“I was, but I didn't find it interesting. I don't think I could survive if I didn't have this trip. I know it's going to be amazing. I just have to get to Mexico. I read up all about it, it's the place I should be, I'm sure of that.”

“Here's San Diego,” says Stephen. “I can't take you any farther. I'll pull over somewhere, you shouldn't find it too hard to get a ride. If you get in any trucks, just tell them you're angel beaver.”

“I know that already.”

“Good.”

He pulls over and she leans across and puts her arms round him. “Here's a hug for you,” she says. He lightly kisses her on the cheek and on the same impulse which caused him to pick her up, he suddenly asks (and the words come out of his mouth before he's thought them), “Listen, can you do me a favor?”

“What do you want?”

“A kiss, that's all.”

“You want me to kiss you?”

“Yes, and that's it, I promise. I won't touch you anyplace.”

“Sure.”

She smells not too clean from her long road trip and her hair is dirty close up, but she kisses like she means it, which is all he really wants, with his tongue in her mouth and hers in his. His hand moves automatically toward her breast but he stops himself. “You can if you want,” she says. “I don't care.” So he feels her breasts. Over her shoulder he can see the mattresses in the back where his kids have slept their way across America. Can he do this? Does he even want to? Oh, Susie. Oh, Susie Sue.

I
n the house in Canonbury there were rooms that Marianne was not permitted to enter. It was a house which was all stairs, and corridors, doors with numbers on them, and some of these doors were always locked and others were not. Behind certain doors she could hear the sound of cats. In your childhood places seem more vast, they contract with age, but the house in Canonbury went on expanding, even after Marianne eventually left home.

A closed door would open suddenly to reveal an empty room, the carpets decorated with faded ivy patterns, and where the cats had lived there were stiff ammonia-smelling patches. Cold ceramic plates of gas fires stood in the fireplaces. Workmen came and removed them. False ceilings of Styrofoam squares were taken out to reveal ornamental ceiling roses and decorative cornices. Weeks later, the rooms were high, light and painted white or dragée-colored pastels. One afternoon, her father took her by the hand and opened a door which led to a place she had only seen from the window of her bedroom, the garden. The house just went on growing as Marianne grew.

A single door was always closed to her. Behind a sign,
Do Not Enter, Silence,
she could hear the sound of low voices, often weeping. One visitor to the closed room arrived in a chauffeur-driven car and the driver waited for her outside, smoking on the street.

Marianne dismissed these arrivals and departures. Her mother had a great many friends who came and went at exact intervals but she was always there, from when Marianne awoke in the morning, was given her breakfast, walked to school, was picked up again for lunch, returned back to school and then there her mummy was, waiting yet again at the gates with the other mummies. And only in the school holidays did she understand the vast extent of her mother's social network and how implacably she was prepared to ignore her own daughter when these idle gossips were present, behind that closed door with its unfriendly signs.

(There is no point to a little brother.)

When they returned from America, back to the top-floor flat in Canonbury, Stephen went haywire for a few weeks. Every evening after the kids had gone to bed he lit a joint and put on his Beach Boys, Lovin' Spoonful and Jefferson Airplane records, leaving Andrea to do the housework and look after the children. It was the point in the marriage when Andrea, looking back, could see that the whole thing could have gone under. He turned away from her in bed as if her flesh was repugnant to him, he averted his face when she was changing into her clothes, stripped down to her bra and panties. The children were patches of fog moving across the floor. He was going to leave her, she didn't know he had already failed.

“All I do is work a job,” he said. “I recycle press releases. I might as well invent a better breakfast cereal.”

“Yes, but there are jobs and jobs,” she said, stubbornly. She was going to save her marriage. She had got what she wanted, they had not moved permanently to America, but she knew he thought she had entrapped him, somehow. He must stay trapped, happily trapped.

She found an advertisement in the
Guardian
for researchers to work on BBC science documentaries for the Open University. The
programs would not just be in the chemistry or pharmaceutical field, he would be able to cover the whole spectrum. A science degree and a background in science journalism was required, he had both. Inquiries revealed that a researcher became a producer. He might even be sent on location to film primates, that would be fun, he consented, reading the advertisement. “I'll go for it,” he said.

And it turned out it was fun. It brought out in him the latent polymath who had sat in the science library reading about the glories of particle physics, or watched the space capsules hurtle toward the moon, or synthesized his own LSD.

Stephen thought of the voyage over on the SS
United States,
of the cabin boy who ran along the gangways in his Prince Edward jacket, carrying coffee and dry cleaning for the gilded passengers. Of the first-class staterooms, and his own tiny cabin below the waterline, too small even to sit up and read in bed. It was a process of emigration, he now understood. He had waved good-bye to the Statue of Liberty, and Manhattan had receded behind him. Goodbye. Good-bye.

The only person he ever told about the girl in the van was Ivan. “She was so pretty until you got up close, and then she smelt of not having washed much lately, that's what I chiefly remember about the whole thing. That she didn't have a good smell and afterward, all I could think about was that maybe she had some disease, I don't even mean the clap, herpes would have been bad enough. Imagine if I gave Andrea herpes, it would have killed me. Yet I still wonder what happened to her. I wanted to give her money, just to make sure she had somewhere to sleep, but giving her money would have looked really insensitive.”

“It was nothing,” Ivan said. “Absolutely nothing. Don't give it another thought.”

Ivan was in Gibson Square on the other side of Upper Street. It was permanently, obstinately wealthy. The square lived on opulently,
despite the petrol-fumed dusty main road it lay alongside of, where coffee was a beige, sweetened drink served from a metal urn.

What Stephen liked about Ivan was that he had no principles, just ideas flitting about his mind from moment to moment. He was like a kid chasing soap bubbles, how could you despise him for that? The idea of now was to eat tremendously expensive meals on the company expense account and go out with actresses.

“The orgone thing was correct in a certain sense,” Ivan said. “We're a mass of desires, Andrea was the person who convinced me of that. We are doomed to be irrational so any political system based on reason has to fail. You can accuse me of selling out, but I only make people aware of the things that make them happy.”

“Candy bars?”

“Yes. Why not?”

“Fish fingers?”

“Very useful if you have kids. The portion size is right for them. Don't you feed your kids fish fingers?”

“Yes, we do, but…”

“There isn't a but, Stephen. You saw them advertised. You bought them. No?”

Stephen had no idea how they came to buy fish fingers for the children. He just knew they were in the kitchen, waiting to be heated up and served with ketchup. He had no idea why they always bought the same brand and not random ones. He calculated the mathematical possibilities of always buying random products, it was far more likely than buying the same ones every week, yet they didn't. There must have been something they liked about Birds Eye, yet there was nothing special about it. What was going on? The problem troubled and baffled him. He felt that there must lie in the unexplored territory Andrea called his subconscious all kinds of irrational pathways, a maze of knots. Neural pathways would have to be relaid.

And Ivan just sat there and smiled, sitting at his matte black
ash dining table, laying out a line of coke. He was still the same boy who had driven through the night to see the white horse carved in the hillside. He was like his old man, the barrister, Stephen thought, who took the bus to chambers, put on his wig and the rest of the legal fancy dress and then came home and read a book about the whirling dervishes.

“Have you heard anything from Grace?” Ivan asked.

“Andrea has. She's traveling in Latin America.”

“Cuba didn't work out?”

“I don't know what happened there, I just know she's in Nicaragua at the moment.”

“Poor Grace.”

The coke took hold of them and they stared exultantly out of the window to the square, which inexplicably had filled with sunshine, though Stephen thought that on his side of Upper Street there were border guards who did not grant it permission to enter.

In 1981, Ralph, turning sixty, was tired of the responsibility of the sitting tenants, some of whom had already been there when his father had bought the house during the war for five hundred pounds, cash. He had been the custodian of the property after his parents died, they had wanted him to bring up his family in it and he'd let them down. There had been a fiancée for a couple of months but that was as far as it ever got. He would have liked to move to Finchley, but that was just a pipe dream. If he could sell the house to Stephen and Andrea, they might tolerate him in a couple of rooms, which was all he needed; he could close down the underwear shop and live on the interest from the house sale. He could practice his conjuring tricks all day long and take long pleasurable naps. It was enough. He'd never wanted more, except what he could not have, what he understood would always thwart him, forbidden longings that he subsumed in magic, which was also all about concealment.

“We
should
buy it,” Andrea said.

“Why?”

“It's a good house. The area is coming up, it will be harder to buy if we wait.”

Stephen could not work out why he was resisting. His father had owned his own home, it was a point of pride with him that he had put down a deposit on a house as soon as his first child was born, though he had never quite made it to that middle-class accessory of Californian life, the pool in the yard. But that was L.A. Everyone owned their own home in California, you were a dolt if you did not. This was London, a place that people like him came to temporarily.