‘That kind of thing.’
‘What’s yours?’
‘Gosh,’ she said, ‘I don’t think we’re supposed to tell.’
‘What happens when you find the answer?’
‘Well, you get a Buddhist name, and it’s like the first stage.’
‘Enlightenment by instalments.’
‘Don’t be such a Brit, Alec. I know you think it’s the Moonies.’
‘No I don’t,’ he said. ‘I envy you.’
‘How’s Alice?’
‘She has to rest a lot.’
‘Is Brando still coming?’
‘He’ll be here tomorrow,’ said Alec. He didn’t share the general enthusiasm for Brando. All that charm and authority. He suspected Brando did not approve of him either. The translator. The ineffectual son.
‘Larry’s just sick with worry,’ said Kirsty. ‘And it’s not as if he has much to take his mind off it.’
‘He’s not working?’
‘If he could just get back on the show…’
‘Dr Barry.’
‘I know it wasn’t Shakespeare or anything.’
‘I never knocked it. Is he there?’
‘He’s in LA. Some “business” trip.’
‘He said he’d call,’ said Alec.
‘Well, that’s Larry. But I know he wants to speak to you. He talks about you more than anyone.’
‘Really?’
‘I guess he thinks he should be over there. Maybe. I don’t know. I mean, why would he tell me what he thinks?’ The telephone bleeped like sonar. Alec heard her sniff and sigh. ‘Poor Alice. I really love her.’
‘Come on,’ he said, afraid that she would start something in him. ‘Do some Zen breathing. How does it work?’
‘Ella,’ she said, ‘are you on the extension, honey?’
There was silence, then a tiny, hesitant, ‘Yes.’
‘It’s your Uncle Alec. Calling from England. Say hello, honey.’
Alec waited. At last, a faintly lisped hello crossed the six thousand miles between them.
‘It’s night here,’ he said, talking to the girl. ‘A little while ago I heard an owl hooting at the end of the garden. Maybe you’ll hear it when you come for Granny’s birthday.’
‘She’d love that,’ said Kirsty. ‘Now put the phone down, baby, and let me talk with Uncle Alec. Come on, Ella, put it down…’ There was a subtle click. ‘She does that all the time. I really want to get her more help but it’s so darned expensive.’
‘Is she still borrowing stuff?’
‘Larry found one of my earrings in her booty last night. At least he knows where to look for them. She likes you, Alec.’
‘I haven’t seen her for a year.’
‘She remembers you.’
‘Has Larry picked up the tickets?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Why don’t you all fly together?’
‘I want to finish this course. I know it’s selfish but Endo’s too good to miss.’
‘You’re right,’ said Alec. ‘Solve your riddle. Then come.’
‘Have you tried scalp massage?’ she asked. ‘You use your fingertips to move the scalp over the skull, like you’re washing hair.’
‘Is that a Zen thing?’
‘Not everything’s Zen, Alec.’ She paused, trying to recall what she had been taught earlier in the day. ‘Well, maybe it is. Anyway, you should do it for Alice. It’ll make her feel good.’
‘Not if I did it,’ he said. He found the idea absurd to the point of comedy.
‘You’re not such a klutz.’
‘Thanks.’
‘How’s your Romanian guy? Or was he Albanian or something?’
‘Hungarian.’
‘Right. Didn’t you say he was some kind of old freedom fighter? A sort of Che Guevara?’
‘Something like that.’
‘I know it’s a lousy time for you, Alec. Larry’ll be there soon.’
‘The cavalry!’
‘I hope you two aren’t going to fight.’
‘Why should we?’
‘Well, brothers do. Remember Cain and Abel? But maybe you’re the one who can help him.’
‘Help Larry?’
‘People change, Alec.’
‘Do they? I thought they just got more like themselves.’
She laughed but didn’t sound very amused. ‘I guess.’
‘Has something happened?’
‘Just the usual. Give hugs to Alice.’
‘Sure. Kiss Ella for me.’
‘Get some sleep,’ she said, ‘you sound tired.’
‘I’m on my way,’ he said.
‘Take care now.’
‘You too.’
‘I know things are going to work out somehow.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m glad you called.’
‘Bye-bye.’
‘Bye.’
She rang off and Alec slowly hung up the receiver. Help Larry? This was a novel suggestion. A disturbing one! What had she been hinting at? What type of trouble? He tried for a moment (staring at the wall as though at a screen) to do what he had not done in a long, long while: to have a view of his brother’s life, an objective take on it, but he realized he simply didn’t have the information any more – certainly not the kind of private information that might make sense of an expression like ‘the usual’. But then, how did a knowledge of a person’s circumstances weigh against a knowledge of his character? A character in Larry’s case that Alec still believed he knew better than Kirsty, if only because he had known it first and was himself written into it. He knew what Larry was made of. Perhaps she had meant ‘help Kirsty’. People were forever calling out in confusing ways.
He boiled the kettle for tea, brewed it in a cup, dropped the tea bag into the swing-bin and opened the fridge for the milk. On the shelves were the empty plastic tubs that had once contained the ingredients of Alice’s diet, souvenirs from the time when she had sought to guard herself against the cancer’s return, to make herself inviolate by consuming only the purest and most wholesome of foods. The search for these foods had been expensive and time consuming, and seemed largely useless now; all that vigilance and fibre, those trips to health-food co-ops for boxes of misshapen vegetables brought out to the car by people who looked in desperate need of a blood sausage. But nothing that might provoke the beast had been allowed into the kitchen, and the effort had perhaps rewarded her with a few extra months of comparative health, though in the end organic broccoli and alfalfa seeds would not save your life, and Alec swung shut the fridge door more firmly than he’d meant to, rattling half-empty bottles of flower remedy and vitamin C, of shark cartilage, emulsified linseed capsules, and a dozen others that had once teasingly suggested themselves as the necessary elixirs.
Sipping his tea, he crossed the living room and went the length of a short corridor of scuffed and torn lino into the ‘playroom’. In the twenty years since he and Larry had used it as a den the room had become a kind of depositary, a ramshackle museum of family history, the boards piled high with junk. He had visited the room on the previous two nights at about the same hour, each time on the pretext of starting to determine what from among this tidal wash of oddments might be kept, though the truth – which standing in the doorway he now admitted to himself – was that the room still retained for him something of its air of refuge. It soothed him, and among those stations of the night that were becoming increasingly apparent to him, it was an interlude of calm, a place where he could breathe the gentle anaesthetic of nostalgia.
Some of the objects in the room had reached their last declension, existing only in a stubborn limbo of silence and inutility. Others were immediately eloquent. A beige and purple oil heater of curious design, sitting where it had been placed perhaps fifteen years before, instantly revived a scene of winter evenings after school, a scent of oil mingling with the smell of sausages or fish-fingers, and the wafting all-pervasive smoke of Alice’s cigarettes. And from the box he had emptied the previous evening he had pulled out, as though lifting something precious and extraordinary from the pharaoh’s tomb, a single tan boxing glove, lone memento of his slogging matches with Larry, fights which, however temperately begun, often ended with a flurry of wild punches, and Alec on the floor bawling with frustration, while Larry stood over him, anger already cooling to remorse as he glanced nervously at the door.