When she was ecstatic, and she was often ecstatic, ecstasy flew from her face like the sun from a mirror. She was living outwardly, towards you, and her face was always watchable because she was rarely bored or dull. She didn’t let the world bore her. And she was some talker, old Eva.
Her talk wasn’t vague approbation or disapproval, some big show of emotion. I didn’t say that. There were facts, solid and chewable as bread, in this feeling. She’d explained to me the origin of the Paisley pattern; I had the history of Notting Hill Gate, the use of a camera obscura by Vermeer, why Charles Lamb’s sister murdered their mother, and a history of Tamla Motown. I loved this stuff; I wrote it down. Eva was unfolding the world for me. It was through her that I became interested in life.
Dad, I reckon, was slightly intimidated by her. Eva was cleverer than he was, and more capable of feeling. He hadn’t encountered this much passion in a woman before. It was part of what made him want and love Eva. Yet this love, so compelling, so fascinating as it grew despite everything, had been leading to destruction.
I could see the erosion in the foundations of our family every day. Every day when Dad came home from work he went into the bedroom and didn’t come out. Recently he’d encouraged Allie and me to talk to him. We sat in there with him and told him about school. I suspected he liked these ink-stained accounts because, while our voices filled the room like smoke, he could lie back concealed in its swathes and think of Eva. Or we sat with Mum and watched television, braving her constant irritation and sighs of self-pity. And all the time, like pipes dripping, weakening and preparing to burst in the attic, around the house hearts were slowly breaking while nothing was being said.
In some ways it was worse for little Allie, as he had no facts about anything. For him the house was filled with suffering and fluffed attempts to pretend that suffering didn’t exist. But no one talked to him. No one said, Mum and Dad are unhappy together. He must have been more confused than any of us; or perhaps his ignorance prevented him from grasping just how bad things were. Whatever was happening at this time, we were all isolated from each other.
When we arrived at her house, Eva put her hand on my shoulder and told me to go upstairs to Charlie. ‘Because I know that’s what you want to do. Then come down. We have to discuss something important.’
As I went upstairs I thought how much I hated being shoved around all over the place. Do this, do that, go here, go there. I would be leaving home pretty soon, I knew that. Why couldn’t they get down to the important stuff right away? At the top of the stairs I turned for a moment and found out. Eva and my father were going into the front room, hand-in-hand, and they were reaching for each other low down, and clutching, tongues out, pressed against each other even before they’d got through the door. I heard it lock behind them. They couldn’t even wait half an hour.
I poked my head through Charlie’s trap-door. The place had changed a lot since last time. Charlie’s poetry books, his sketches, his cowboy boots, were flung about. The cupboards and drawers were open as if he were packing. He was leaving and altering. For a start he’d given up being a hippie, which must have been a relief to the Fish, not only professionally but because it meant the Fish could play Charlie soul records – Otis Redding and all – the only music he liked. Now the Fish was sprawled in a black steel armchair, laughing as Charlie talked and walked up and down, pouting and playing with his hair. As Charlie paced, he picked up an old pair of frayed jeans or a wide-collared shirt with pink flowers on it, or a Barclay James Harvest album, and tossed it out of the skylight and into the garden below.
‘It’s ridiculous the way people are appointed to jobs,’ Charlie was saying. ‘Surely it should happen at random? People in the street must be approached and told that they are now editor of The Times for a month. Or that they are to be judges, or police commissioners, or toilet attendants. It has to be arbitrary. There can be no connection between the appointment and the person unless it is their utter unsuitability for the position. Don’t you agree?’
‘Without exception?’ enquired the Fish, languidly.
‘No. There are people who should be excluded from high position. These are people who run for buses and put their hands in their pockets to ensure their change doesn’t jump out. There are other people who have sun-tans that leave white patches on their arms. These people should be excluded, because they’ll be punished in special camps.’
Charlie then said to me, though I thought he hadn’t noticed me, ‘I’ll just be down,’ as if I’d announced that his taxi was waiting.
I must have looked wounded, because Charlie broke a little.
‘Hey, little one,’ he said. ‘Come here. We might as well be mates. From what I hear we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.’
So I clambered up through the hole and went to him. He bent forward to put his arms around me. He held me fondly, but it was a characteristic gesture, just as he was always telling people he loved them, using the same tone of voice with each of them. I wanted to smash through all that crap.
I reached round and got a good handful of his arse. There was plenty of it, too, and just perky enough for me. When, as predicted, he jumped in surprise, I whipped my hand through his legs, giving his whole beanbag a good tug. He was laughing and wincing even as he threw me across the room into his drum-kit.
I lay there, half crying and pretending not to be hurt, as Charlie continued to pace, flinging flowered clothes into the street below and discussing the possibility of a police force being set up to arrest and imprison rock guitarists who bent their knees while they played.
A few minutes later, downstairs, Eva was next to me on the sofa, bathing my forehead and whispering, ‘You silly boys, you silly boys.’ Charlie sat sheepishly opposite me and God was getting cranky next to him. Eva’s shoes were off and Dad had removed his jacket and tie. He’d planned this summit carefully, and now the Zen of the entire thing had gone crazy, because just as Dad opened his mouth to start talking blood had started to drip into my lap from my nose as a result of Charlie chucking me into his drum-kit.
Dad started off in statesman-like fashion, as if he were addressing the United Nations, earnestly saying he’d come to love Eva over the time he’d known her and so on. But soon he took off from the earthly tediousness of the concrete for a glide in purer air. ‘We cling to the past,’ he said, ‘to the old, because we are afraid. I’ve been afraid of hurting Eva, of hurting Margaret, and most of hurting myself.’ This stuff was really getting on my nerves. ‘Our lives become stale, they become set. We are afraid of the new, of anything that might make us grow or change.’ All this was making my muscles feel slack and unused, and I wanted to sprint up the street just to feel myself alive again. ‘But that is living death, not life, that is –’
This was enough for me. I interrupted, ‘D’you ever think how boring all this stuff is?’
There was silence in the room, and concern. Fuck it. ‘It’s all vague and meaningless, Dad. Hot air, you know.’ They watched me. ‘How can people just talk because they like the sound of their own voices and never think of the people around them?’