Written on the Body (7 page)

Opposite me, the relaxed smart houses built on the park showed yellow at one window, black at another. A figure pulled the curtains, someone opened the front door, I could hear music for a moment. What sane sensible lives. Did those people lie awake at night hiding their hearts while giving their bodies? Did the woman at the window quietly despair as the clock pushed her closer to bed-time? Does she love her husband? Desire him? When he sees his wife unlace herself what does he feel? In a different house is there someone he longs for the way he used to long for her?

At the fairground there used to be a penny slot-machine
called ‘What the Butler Saw’. You jammed your eyes against a padded viewfinder, put in the coin and at once a troupe of dancing girls started tossing their skirts and winking. Gradually they cast off most of their clothes, but if you wanted the coup de grace you had to get in another coin before the butler’s white hand drew a discreet blind. The pleasure of it, apart from the obvious, was depth simulation. It was intended to give the feel of a toff at the music hall, in the best seat of course. You could see rows of velvet seats and a rake of Brylcreemed hair. It was delicious because it was puerile and naughty. I always felt guilty but it was a hot thrill of guilt not the dreadful weight of sin. Those days made me a voyeur, though of a modest kind. I like to pass by bare windows and get a sighting of the life within.

No silent films were shot in colour but the pictures through a window are that. Everything moves in curious clockwork animation. Why is that man throwing up his arms? The girl’s hands move soundlessly over the piano. Only half an inch of glass separates me from the silent world where I do not exist. They don’t know I’m here but I have begun to be as intimate with them as any member of the family. More so, since as their lips move with goldfish bowl pouts, I am the scriptwriter and I can put words in their mouths. I had a girlfriend once, we used to play that game, going round the posh houses when we were down at heel making up stories about the lamplit well-to-do.

Her name was Catherine, she wanted to be a writer. She said it was good exercise for her imagination to invent little scenarios for the unsuspecting. I don’t want to be a writer but I didn’t mind carrying her pad. It did occur to me, those dark nights, that movies are a terrible sham. In real life, left to their own devices, especially after 7 o’clock,
human beings hardly move at all. Sometimes I panicked and told Catherine we’d have to call the ambulance.

‘No-one can sit still for that long,’ I said. ‘She must be dead. Look at her, rigor mortis has set in, not so much as a squint.’

Then we’d go to an arthouse showing of Chabrol or Renoir and the entire cast spent the whole picture running in and out of bedrooms and shooting at one another and getting divorced. I was exhausted. The French crack on about being an intellectual resource but for a nation of thinkers they do run around a lot. Thinking is supposed to be a sedentary occupation. They pack more action into their arty films than the Americans manage in a dozen Clint Eastwoods.
Jules et Jim
is an action movie.

We were so happy those wet carefree nights. I felt we were like Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes. I knew my place. And then Catherine said she was leaving. She didn’t want to do it but she felt that a writer doesn’t make a good companion. ‘It’s only a matter of time’, she said, ‘before I become an alcoholic and forget how to cook.’

I suggested we wait and try and ride it out. She shook her head sadly and patted me. ‘Get a dog.’

Naturally I was devastated. I enjoyed our wandering nights together, the brief stop at the fish shop, falling into the same bed at dawn.

‘Is there anything I can do for you before you go?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Do you know why Henry Miller said “I write with my prick”?’

‘Because he did. When he died they found nothing between his legs but a ball-point pen.’

‘You’re making it up,’ she said.

Am I?

I was sitting on the bench smiling soaked to the skin. I wasn’t happy but the power of memory is such that it can lift reality for a time. Or is memory the more real place? I stood up and wrung out the legs of my shorts. It was dark, the park belonged to other people after dark and I didn’t belong to them. Best to go home and find Jacqueline.

When I got to my flat the door was locked. I tried to get in but the chain was across the door. I shouted and banged. At last the letter-box flipped open and a note slid out. It said
GO AWAY
. I found a pen and wrote on the backside.
IT’S MY FLAT
. As I feared there was no response. For the second time that day I ended up at Louise’s.

‘We’re going to sleep in a different bed tonight,’ she said as she filled the bathroom with clouds of steam and incense oils. ‘I’m going to warm the room and you’re going to lie in the tub and drink this cocoa. All right Christopher Robin?’

Yes, with or without a blue hood. How tender this is and how unlikely. I don’t believe any of it. Jacqueline must have known I’d have to come here. Why would she do that? They’re not in it together are they, to punish me? Perhaps I’ve died and this is Judgement Day. Judgement or not I can’t go back to Jacqueline. Whatever happens here, and I held out no great hopes, I knew that I’d split myself from her in ways that were too profound to heal. In the park in the rain I had recognised one thing at least; that Louise was the woman I wanted even if I couldn’t have her. Jacqueline I had to admit had never been wanted, simply she had had roughly the right shape to fit for a while.

Molecular docking is a serious challenge for bio-chemists. There are many ways to fit molecules together but only a few juxtapositions that bring them close enough to
bond. On a molecular level success may mean discovering what synthetic structure, what chemical, will form a union with, say, the protein shape on a tumour cell. If you make this high-risk jigsaw work you may have found a cure for carcinoma. But molecules and the human beings they are a part of exist in a universe of possibility. We touch one another, bond and break, drift away on force-fields we don’t understand. Docking here inside Louise may heal a damaged heart, on the other hand it may be an expensively ruinous experiment.

I put on the rough towelling robe Louise had left for me. I hoped it wasn’t Elgin’s. There used to be a scam in the undertaking trade whereby any man sent to the Chapel of Rest in a good suit of clothes had the lot tried on by the embalmer and his boys while he, the deceased, was made ready for the grave. Whoever the clothes best fitted put a shilling on them; that is, the shilling went in the Poor Box and the clothes went off the dead man’s back. Obviously he was allowed to wear them while ritual viewing took place but as soon as it was time for the lid to be screwed down, one of the lads whipped them off and covered the unfortunate in a cheap winding sheet. If I was going to stab Elgin in the back I didn’t want to do it in his dressing gown.

‘That’s mine,’ said Louise as I came upstairs. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Do you remember when you and I were caught in that terrible shower on the way to your flat? Jacqueline insisted that I undress and she gave me her dressing gown to wear. It was very kind but I longed to be in yours. It was your smell I was after.’

‘Wasn’t I in mine?’

‘Yes. All the more tempting.’

She had lit a fire in the room with the bed she’d called a Lady’s Occasional. Most people don’t have open fires any more; Louise had no central heating. She said that Elgin complained every winter although it was she not he who bought the fuel and stoked the blaze.

‘He doesn’t really want to live like this,’ she said, meaning the austere grandeur of their marital home. ‘He’d be much happier in a 1930s mock Tudor with underfloor hot air.’

‘Then why does he do it?’

‘It brings him huge originality value.’

‘Do you like it?’

‘I made it.’ She paused. ‘The only thing Elgin’s ever put into this house is money.’

‘You despise him, don’t you?’

‘No, I don’t despise him. I’m disappointed in him.’

Elgin had been a brilliant medical trainee. He had worked hard and learned well. He had been innovative and concerned. During his early hospital years, when Louise had supported him financially and paid all the bills that accumulated round their modest life together, Elgin had been determined to qualify and work in the Third World. He scorned what he called ‘the consultancy trail’, where able young men of a certain background put in their minimum share of hospital slog and were promoted up the ladder to easier and better things. There was a fast-track in medicine. Very few women were on it, it was the recognised route of the career doctor.

‘So what happened?’

‘Elgin’s mother got cancer.’

In Stamford Hill Sarah felt sick. She had always got up at five o’clock, prayed and lit the candles, gone to work preparing the day’s food and ironing Esau’s white shirts. She wore a headscarf in those early hours, only placing her long black wig a few moments before her husband came downstairs at seven. They ate breakfast and together got into their ancient car and drove the three miles to the shop. Sarah mopped the floor and dusted the counter while Esau put his white coat over his prayer shawl and shifted the cardboard boxes in the back room. It cannot truly be said that they opened their shop at nine, rather they unlocked the door. Sarah sold toothbrushes and lozenges. Esau made up paper packets of medicine. They had done so for fifty years.

The shop was unchanged. The mahogany counter and glass cabinets had been where they were since before the war, since before Esau and Sarah bought a sixty-year lease to carry them into old age. On one side of them, the cobbler had become a grocery store had become a delicatessen had become a Kosher Kebab House. On the other side, the take-in laundry had become a dry cleaners. It was still run by the children of their friends the Shiffys.

‘Your boy,’ said Shiffy to Esau. ‘He’s a doctor, I saw him in the paper. He could bring a nice practice here. You could expand.’

‘I’m seventy-two,’ said Esau.

‘So you’re seventy-two? Think of Abraham, think of Isaac, think of Methuselah. Nine hundred and sixty-nine. That’s the time to worry about your age.’

‘He’s married a shiksa.’

‘We all make mistakes. Look at Adam.’

Esau didn’t tell Shiffy that he never heard from Elgin any more. He never expected to hear from him again. Two
weeks later when Sarah was in hospital unable to speak for the pain, Esau dialled Elgin’s number on his Bakelite sit-up-and-beg telephone. They had never bothered to get a later model. God’s children had no need of progress.

Elgin came at once and spoke to the doctor before he met his father at the bedside. The doctor said there was no hope. Sarah had cancer of the bone and would not live. The doctor said she must have been in pain for years. Slowly crumbling, dust to dust.

‘Does my father know?’

‘In a way.’ The doctor was busy and had to get on. He gave his notes to Elgin and left him at a desk under a lamp with a blown bulb.

Sarah died. Elgin went to the funeral then took his father back to the shop. Esau fumbled with the keys and opened the heavy door. The glass panel still had the gold lettering that had once announced the signs of Esau’s success. The upper arc had said
ROSENTHAL
and the lower,
CHEMIST
. Time and the weather had beat upon the sign and although it still declared
ROSENTHAL
, underneath it now read
HE MIST
.

Elgin, close behind his father, was sick to the stomach at the smell. It was the smell of his childhood, formaldehyde and peppermint. It was the smell of his homework behind the counter. The long nights waiting for his parents to take him home. Sometimes he fell asleep in his grey socks and shorts, his head on a table of logarithms, then Esau would scoop him up and carry him to the car. He remembered his father’s tenderness only through the net of dreams and half-wakefulness. Esau was hard on the boy but when he saw him head down on the table, his thin legs loose against the chair, he loved him and whispered in his ear about the lily of the valley and the Promised Land.

All this cut at Elgin as he watched his father slowly hang his black coat on the peg and shrug his arms into his chemist’s uniform. He seemed to take comfort from this regular act, didn’t look at Elgin but got out his order book and sat muttering over it. After a while Elgin coughed and said he had to go. His father nodded, wouldn’t speak.

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ asked Elgin not wanting an answer.

‘Can you tell me why your mother died?’

Elgin cleared his throat a second time. He was desperate.

‘Father, mother was old, she didn’t have the strength to get better.’

Esau rocked his head up and down up and down. ‘It was God’s will. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. How many times have I said that today?’ There was another long silence. Elgin coughed.

‘I have to be getting on.’

Esau shuffled back round the counter and dug in a large discoloured jar.

He gave his son a brown paper bag full of lozenges.

‘You have a cough my boy. Take these.’

Elgin stuffed the bag in his overcoat pocket and left. He walked as hard as he could away from the Jewish quarter and when he reached a main road he hailed a cab. Before he climbed in he dumped the bag in a bus-stop bin. It was the last time he saw his father.

It’s true that when Elgin began, he didn’t realise that his obsessional study of carcinoma would bring more substantial benefits to himself than to any of his patients. He used computer simulations to mimic the effects of rapidly multiplying rogue cells. He saw gene therapy as the likeliest way out for a body besieged by itself. It was very sexy medicine. Gene therapy is the frontier world where
names and fortunes can be made. Elgin was wooed by an American pharmaceutical company who got him off the shop floor and into a lab. He’d never liked hospitals anyway.

‘Elgin’, said Louise, ‘can no longer wrap a Band-Aid round a cut finger but he can tell you everything there is to know about cancer. Everything except what causes it and how to cure it.’