Paradise Read online

  I think my father would agree. Also a gardener, but a greenhouse man, my father. She has her perennials, her bedding plants and shrubs and he breeds up his succulents, cacti, bromeliads, listens to Radio Four and sits inside his little glass walls, smoking at his house leeks and staring. Although he very rarely drives, my father has a motorist’s attitude to glass—behind it, though perfectly visible, he will act as if unseen: sighing, yawning, scratching and pestering at his thermos far more easily than he ever does indoors. My brother and I fell into the habit of seeing him without seeing, rather than take offence at the obvious implication—that he couldn’t relax at home with us.

  Father will be in his greenhouse now, undoubtedly. It’s no more than one yard across by three, crowded with defensive greenery and gravel-lined benches, but he dashes away towards it as if he were escaping some savage confinement by a lucky fluke. When his headaches are particularly bad, I’ve known him sleep there.

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  My father padding one foot up and down on the tiny pump that’s nudging air into a wrinkled inflatable mattress. A type of Lilo, I’ve never seen it before and it looks fun: unsuitable for adults.

  “Absolutely sure.”

  It’s obvious that my mother is asking him about more than the mattress and equally plain that he is already decided and no longer minds this discussion, either way. What they are really talking about, I haven’t a clue. Father has that placid look he takes on when he’s about to make a run for it outside: he seems peaceful as—uffha, uffha, uffha, uffha—he pumps in air and Mother is trying to look at his face but, fighting shy of personal engagement, he’s ducked his head and is firmly aiming his concentration at his foot, as if the pumping were some strange phenomenon and therefore fascinating. A tuft of his fringe has fallen forward towards his eyes and is making him look younger and more like my brother who is upstairs and already asleep, because he is younger than me—but I’ll tell him about this later, I will wake him up. uffha, uffha

  “Well, Peter.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  uffha, uffha, uffha, uffha

  Occasionally, it seems that my parents have been together for so long they have run out of words for each other, or have found something else they can use between themselves that I can’t hear.

  uffha, uffha, uffha, uffha

  They don’t speak again, but she keeps frowning and he pumps and they are definitely having an entire, silent conversation.

  My father kneels and disconnects the air tube from the valve—it wheezes—and allows himself a glance up to my mother’s eyes. And this rushes in a tenderness between them, quick and complete, with a wash of some type of pain across them both which even I can feel and which they seem to welcome, even like. It makes the kitchen feel slightly pinched around me. Then she touches his head, very lightly and he turns to me— I didn’t make a noise, but probably he has remembered I am there—and he makes this kind of shrug, looking very breakable for a moment and happily perplexed.

  It takes him quite a while to work the mattress out and clear of the kitchen door—he really should have set the pump up in the greenhouse, I don’t know why he didn’t. By the time I’ve finished seeing him struggle it outside and then go up the lawn into the dark where his hideaway is hiding, my mother has already slipped off into the rest of the house and I am by myself. I decide that I won’t tell my brother about any of this, after all. The parts of the story that are most important would be impossible to say.

  And my brother? He does the things that brothers do—he makes me a part of a family and not an only child, which is important. Early solitude does great harm. Whereas, he’s a point in my favour and, born four years after me, he was my very first exercise in responsibility. For most of my childhood, I assumed we would be together for a very long time and eventually we’d buy a house to share and we’d look after ourselves and have great times. This isn’t the way things have turned out— which is hardly a surprise—but it does seem odd that we see each other so little now.

  He comes to mind quite often, though: he did this morning, when I saw those children, that quiet son. The time before that, I’m almost sure, I was in a tunnel: sitting in the dark leather passenger seat of a stranger’s car and suddenly thinking of Simon. Somebody must have explained my position to me because I was quite aware that my journey would start soon and would not involve taking a drive, not right then. Because the car was waiting on a narrow train ( just a flat bed and some girders holding up a metal roof ) and in a moment the whole thing would take off into a twenty-, thirty-minute tunnel, screaming clear under a mountain range while I focused on relaxation and fighting for breath. After that it was permissible to leave, go on my way.

  And none of this was fun. I’d popped out into awareness beside a cheery driver who was talking in a German kind of English about having met his wife on the Internet—although he wasn’t especially ugly or mad so this seemed barely credible. The wife was sitting behind me, I think, with someone else, a shorter woman, brown-haired. As the train lurched off, I was reflecting on the unpleasantness of my position and cubic capacity when the German—or maybe Swiss, or maybe Austrian— guy yelled above the surrounding batter and drum that he could open the window if we’d like. Before any of us could ponder this, he’d stretched out his arm in the gloom and punched up the skylight, laughing away.

  Horror blasted in immediately: a whirling shove of violent air, the stink of risky machinery, violent filth, long-dead construction workers, frightened blood: beyond that was a noise so loud it immediately ceased to be a sound—was only a sweat and a writhing variety of fear. I was sitting in a stationary car (albeit inside a moving vehicle) but I was also drowning in a sensory crush that anyone sane would associate with a massive accident. I couldn’t avoid believing this was a sign, a premonition of something appalling and close at hand.

  The Austrian/German/Swiss guy kept laughing, his face tinged with green and shadow from the dashboard glow. I could see that he was speaking, now and then, but I couldn’t hear him and I wished that my brother was with me, that Simon could be there, too. Not Simon as he is—I wanted Simon the smaller person in a knee-length overcoat that made him look like a miniature businessman, Simon whose hair was cut by my mother for years, very neat, Simon who would have loved the tunnel and made it easy for me to do that, too, or Simon who would have been scared of it and allowed me to be courageous, to forget myself. Simon with the blue eyes, like mine.

  As he wasn’t there, I solved the problem by the one logical method available. I precipitated a blackout with what I think was apricot schnapps: very successfully, as it happens, because I cannot recall the far end of the tunnel, or another moment of the laughing Swiss/Austrian/ German and his two companions. I do not know why I was with them, where we went, or how they came to abandon me, or why I abandoned them—there isn’t a scratch or a stain left to prove they weren’t my invention, a florid lie.

  My whisky is down to the final glass, that always adds a weight to the moment, a solemnity in my wrist when I pour out the last. And this is the lesson of life: all that was full will be emptied.

  But there’s always the chance of resurrection, a bar at hand to sort things out. In this case, it’s back downstairs and beyond reception on the right—I took note. I’m getting incredibly tired again, so what I have here should ease me into a nap. Then I’ll wander to the lift, go down and reconnoitre the place, and, as long as last night involved no embarrassments, I should be able to start the day up merrily. No one’s day really begins much before teatime. You may be out of bed and moving before then, but that will only be for the convenience of some employer or invalid relation. Left to your own nature, you’ll discover that mornings are not indispensable: plenty of daylight left to you in the summer, after four or five, and no more than wet dark to greet you the rest of the year.

  I’m nibbling the final mouthfuls, letting them sting my lips, winking my goodbye to the trustwort
hy bottle, the black label and white script, the tasteful sort of evening dress they put against the naked glass. And was this a present that someone else gave me, or was it a gift I intended to give? Or did I just buy this for me? Sometimes I am generous with me.

  But sometimes I am other things, which I should probably find out about—how me and myself have been getting along lately. Draped over my only chair, I’ve left a hooded sweatshirt—one that is familiar and which I like. It has the marsupial brand of large, front pocket which—yes, indeed—contains my wallet, which contains—yes, indeed—fifty pounds in stickily new English notes (so I went to a cash machine, then) and a grey, metallic credit card in the name of M. H. Virginas.

  If that rings any bells they are very quiet and far away—M. H. Virginas.

  Still, all is well, because Virginas may have money and I will not. All is less well, because—examining the back of the card—Virginas has a signature which is complicated and strange and I have no recollection of what I may have signed when I arrived here and may well be unable to reproduce said signature on request. I do not have forgery in my nature. Even less great, Virginas may have cancelled the card.

  I should try it in a cash machine later.

  No. Can’t remember the number, or how I got it, or if I did.

  But I have fresh money and how else would I have managed that?

  Foreign exchange—new notes from a bureau de change. I have been abroad, that would make some sense . . .

  Another aeroplane threatens across the horizon and the noise of it pushes me into a forceful recollection of myself sitting, extremely recently, in a khaki-coloured booth, a khaki-coloured wicker lampshade very close to my head and khaki walls behind—in fact, the whole sodding place is fawnish/beigey/khaki, now that my memory bothers to take a look. I’m squashed in with too many people and one of them is—fancy me knowing this—Kussbachek, or a friend of Kussbachek, or a man who says he is one or both of these things—he can be his own friend if he wants. I am mine.

  I came here to meet a friend of Kussbachek, who is himself a friend of Doheny, who is another friend’s friend, or something equally repetitious along those lines—I’m not taking a great deal of interest at this time.

  Instead, I am being nervous for various reasons—mainly because this is Hungary and Hungary’s currency is absurd. I have a huge roll of valueless notes covered in Vlad the Impaler hats and moustaches in my pocket and this is sending telegraphic messages to anyone who wishes to assault me and otherwise steal it away—thugs and muggers are closing in on the bar from miles around. I can hear them.

  Don’t get me wrong, Budapest is a beautiful place and I do try to concentrate on this. Beauty is truth and truth is sometimes beauty and beauty is often good company—although it does also lead to deaths—but not so much to petty theft and I feel that I am most at risk of that.

  And things with me are, in other ways, not right. As I walked here it was raining too much and a dog in a steel-mesh muzzle was giving me looks and then over the road (Szekely Utca: I had to memorise that), over the road there was this man—I could see him clearly through a basement window, chopping lazily at pale meat. No butcher’s shop, no restaurant, no explanation for his actions on hand: only the man in his dirty white apron, hacking his cleaver through the meat, a lot of meat, eyes on a level with my knees and the window stretched wide open in the drenched heat.

  There is no one else in the bar, only Kussbachek and me, four men who know Kussbachek and a mouse-brown woman with wilting clothes who asks me loud questions about ethnic matters that I do not understand. She, for instance, has ethnic misgivings about the waiter. I have no reservations about him myself, as he is swift and wise and smiles every time I announce to him one of the two useful things I have learned to say in phonetic Hungarian.

  “Kerem adjon erzeshteluh neetort kersunum.”

  I pronounce this very badly, gluing it together as I go, but it will make any waiter in Hungary laugh and then bring me a glass of white spirits, or fruit-flavoured turpentine, or other local delicacies. Hungary boasts many local delicacies.

  “Please give me an anaesthetic, thank you.”

  I can also say sorry which is the most important word in any country you may visit. Forgive me, excuse me, oh dear—every language seems to have a pleasant, shortish word that will imply all three, that will save you in uncomfortable circumstances and help others to forgive. It is therapeutic to forgive.

  But I think I leave the bar without inspiring any therapy. Afterwards, when the rain has stopped, there is loud dancing somewhere horrible—an uneasy queue and then dancing, or watching dancing while developing a thirst, it isn’t clear.

  I am certain, though, of my ears roaring with silence and our party being larger—ten or twelve—when we start to cross the bridge. All of the bridges here are famous for jumpers, but this is the newest and the favourite. People drop from this one daily, maybe more often than that. If they don’t die the first time, they scramble ashore and try again— somebody tells me this, or a story not unlike this. There were Imperial jumpers and then Communist jumpers and now there are Capitalist jumpers: people remaining dissatisfied, no matter what their government claims to be.

  A fox-eyed man is explaining this to me but I am distracted because the bridge is becoming unlikely. Its dim cables are fraying and chattering, up in the dark, and the pale bow of its surface is beginning to be scoured by a current, a drag that leads everyone’s feet off to the side until we are single file, close beside the barrier, bouncing playfully against it, as if we may hope it will snap. Below us there are patches of random light that make the water visible, uneven as raw glass and racing. I watch it and I find that I understand the Danube to be a long and highly determined river and undoubtedly the force of it surging through the bridge could tug at the liquids in any human body (we are all mostly liquids) and draw them in its own direction, sideways: it could even haul at us until we tumble over the guard rails tonight and are wrapped up in the cold of its eddies and rushed away. Politics and despair may not be killing anybody—it may be their essential moisture that’s at fault.

  I want to set this suggestion in front of the group for their approval and am only interrupted by two of them who yank at my shoulders and lead me away from the parapet and tell me to stop leaning over so far and laughing. I would protest, because I haven’t laughed at anything— have been mute—but I do not because, retracing our steps, everyone in our group simultaneously sees the lights of the fine, high hotel where one of us is staying and can order drinks for unlimited periods, or where one of us is keeping drinks in bottles that we can take advantage of very soon, or where we can be warm and friendly together with the bottles we already have in our pockets and hands and with those same bottles’ local and delicate insides.

  Beyond that, there’s nothing until 8:42 this morning—only a soft, neutral space within which I would like to suggest that a meeting occurred between myself and Kussbachek with a passing-on of thanks, or greetings, or messages from family and friends, or some other communications of importance. Also M. H. Virginas must, at some point, have responded to my conviviality by placing his or her credit card in my wallet, or by lending the card to me, but neglecting to give me a note of the necessary return address. I don’t know. This is how my stories stop, they peter out into more and more lists and I find myself saying or far too often and thinking that a life rich in possibilities is not, in other ways, perpetually delightful.

  Kussbachek—if my mother had been meeting a Kussbachek, or an M. H. Virginas, for that matter, she would have brought a little present with her. She would have paid her visit properly. In Hungary, I didn’t do what she taught me. This is the way with me—I was brought up well, but the details of that don’t always show.

  Whereas my mother gets it right. If she knows someone, her gifts to them will be precisely the next thing they would have thought to like: if they’re strangers, she’ll give them something which appears to be less specific, but is st
ill very pleasant and useful. Lithe wooden boxes, unusual cufflinks, a silk handkerchief: what she offers doesn’t really matter, the key lies in the way she can guess exactly what each recipient happens to lack. Whatever small need you have—too minor to bother yourself about, an indulgence you won’t admit, a kind of tiny shame—she will know it and let you know it and then fulfil it and make it go away.

  The wrapping, that’s important as well: special paper, origami folds, ribbon, on at least two occasions real ribbon you could use again. Only what if a wasteful person didn’t, what if they just ripped and cut at everything until it was turned into rubbish and nothing more? When I was small I would worry about that—the carelessness of others, their lack of appreciation. Here was my mother, offering nice things to people who might not deserve them and she was spending money on them that she ought to maybe keep by for herself and that was unsettling. And the niceness of the things was a problem, too. When she sent me off to other children’s birthdays, to Christmas events, I would be given a present to pass on and I would know that it was too much, too pretty, an embarrassment for everyone which made people think of her oddly when they shouldn’t dare. My own Christmases and my brother’s—they were overshadowed by perfect wrapping and presents we could only get at by spoiling something. We tried to be so excited that we didn’t mind hurting all the work she must have done, we tried to focus solely on how happy she seemed to let us burrow through her packaging and find wooden ducks, or a kaleidoscope, or whatever. But we didn’t always manage to be as glad as she was—or I didn’t, anyway.