longer?’
Her eyes, which are brown, and which Harvey has already noticed have running underneath them a series of what women’s magazines call ‘fine lines’, harden.
‘That’s a long time.’
She has taken it as an affront, Harvey realizes. For these sentries posted at the gates of the promised land such a length of absence is suspicious. It is suspect, the very idea that one of their own might want to be away from the mother lode for this long a stretch. What possible delights could anywhere else in the world hold for so long? He feels a movie need to say something weary and sarcastic, but quells it underneath a nod of agreement.
‘Business or pleasure, this trip?’
This makes Harvey pause. He stops running the immigration officer’s skin through a series of forensic sight-based (and, in his imagination, touch-based) tests. What is the answer? It’s multiple choice, clearly, with not enough choices.
‘My father is dying,’ says Harvey, as blankly as he can: he is trying not to make it a proclamation. It is not difficult to assume the blankness: as with all information of great import, both personal and political – births, deaths, relatives, wars, injustice, all the stuff of Hallmark Cards and CNN – the fact of his father’s death is taking a while to bed in. He knows it should affect him – he engages with the idea that such information should shake him to the core, should easily shake down the fog of desire and depression that pumps ceaselessly from the pores of his exhausted, clumpy brain – but viscerally, physically, he doesn’t feel it. He thinks he will, eventually, and is waiting for the moment to strike, but in the meantime remains afloat, abstracted, like a man who has been told that the plumber will arrive at some point between nine and five thirty.
But telling this to the immigration officer doesn’t come out as blank as he wants: he is still trying to put across an idea of himself, the man so socked to by death that he has not known how to answer this question and therefore has told the bald truth. And he senses that there is something sexual here, something flirtatious, or at least, gender-biased: it is not a self that he would have presented to a man. He is trying to make a dent in this woman’s imperviousness by doing the vulnerable thing. Of course, if he had really wanted to make a dent, he realizes, he should have said, ‘My father – Eli Gold – is dying.’
It still works, however. Abashed, muttering sad sorries, she hands back the blue book and waves Harvey on into America. In doing so, their fingertips touch briefly above the eagle’s claws, and for her it is less than nothing, but for Harvey it is a roof of the Sistine Chapel moment, divine electricity passing between their fingers. It passes immediately – Harvey is not a fool, he doesn’t believe in his fantasies; rather, he is persecuted by them – but it leaves its scar, its never-happening scar, with all the others.
He fits the American passport awkwardly back into his overstuffed bum bag, and walks away towards the sunlit plains of the glass-roofed Arrivals terminal. Then he remembers Stella’s text, and puts his fingers back through the half-opened zip, searching for the iPhone. They alight first on his house keys, and then on all the loose puddles of change that, from the outside, make this bag look like it is suffering from a terrible allergic reaction. How could the phone have gone? He was just looking at it! Did he hand it over to immigration officer with his passport? This is why he is wearing the stupid bum bag – a thing that he knows no one wears any more, and which stops him walking properly – in order not to lose stuff. He stops. His life has always been plagued by this, the everyday disintegration of absent-mindedness, especially as regards the whereabouts of vital personal objects – keys, phones, wallets, tickets, other people’s address cards, documentation, jewellery, scarves, gloves – anything that can be carried about the person. But until his soul started to go bad, absent-mindedness was just something he accepted, a default fault, a thing which fucked up his life in little ways every day but wasn’t worth steaming about; now, however, if he realizes he has lost something, he can’t override it, he hasn’t the energy, neither physical nor spiritual. He hasn’t the momentum. These discoveries, these interruptions in his tiny progress, just make him want to stop. Finding out that he has left his wallet at home will make him want to sit down in the street; if he is in the car and the keys are not in the most obvious pocket, he will consider never driving away. The other day he was on the toilet and realized, too late, that he had forgotten to restock the paper roll, and felt, immediately, that there was nothing to do but stay sat on the black MDF oval forever, the shit on his anus hardening over time to a brittle crust.
He stops now, and again wants to sit, here on this faintly marbled floor scuffed with the marks of a million suitcase wheels; sit, cross-legged perhaps, until someone – God, his dying father, a woman, any woman – takes him in hand, finding for him his phone and his sanity. And then, just at the moment when the heavy hands of depression have started to push, gently, almost lovingly, on his shoulders, it rings, reminding Harvey that he put the phone back in his pocket and not in the bag at all. He pulls the iPhone out from its burial in a mini-dump of tissue dust, looks at the screen, and inwardly crumples: Freda. He considers for a moment not answering, pressing instead the DECLINE button, because his relationship with the caller is declining, because her call will only be about the decline of his father, because he, Harvey, seems to be now, perpetually, in decline. He taps ANSWER.
‘Freda.’ The strange thing that caller ID gives you, the need not to say hello?, the end of that querulous enquiry, the end, too, of the way that people can garner some small knowledge about what you think about them simply by the rise or fall in your voice when you do find out who it is: replaced instead by this, this ironic, flat certainty.
‘Harvey. Hi. How are you? How was the flight?’
He shrugs, then feels a bit silly for shrugging on the phone. ‘It was an overnight flight, in coach.’ Coach: a sliver of self-disgust goes through him at having slipped so quickly into the idiom, just because he is in this land, or maybe because, reflexively, he is trying to please Freda. ‘But seven hours isn’t so long. And it’s five times the price for Club. What hotel room would you ever pay five times over the odds to spend seven hours in?’
She doesn’t answer this. The iPhone emits a mournful crackle, before Harvey asks the question he knows she is waiting for.
‘So how is he?’
The pause before she replies is so long, Harvey has time to locate the Baggage Reclaim sign and begin trudging in that direction. As he does so, his gaze is routinely snagged by passing women. His neck hurts from not turning, from the urgent need to follow them as they move past, into places where he is not.
‘Not much changed,’ she says, after long enough for Harvey to have forgotten that she is there.
‘What do the doctors –’
‘Anytime. At best, two months.’
Harvey stops. He has known that his father must have roughly this amount of time left, but Freda’s bald statement of it comes at him like a fist. He had not been expecting this answer so soon: in fact, he now can’t quite formulate what the second half of his question was going to be – ‘What do the doctors think/plan to do/give him for the pain/ look like?’ He was only going to go for some general question, and work up slowly to the big Specific. He knows why Freda is speaking like this: the directness, the refusal to couch, speaks of her ownership of his father – and of his death. With Eli Gold, she must always have arrived first, even at the place of pain.
Harvey’s eyes, moistened a little, more by tiredness than tears, stare into the defocusing distance.
‘Right.’
‘We’ve booked you a room at the Sangster. It’s
