Evangelista's Fan (15 page)

At supper, addressing both Karen and Rachel, Tom says: ‘I want to talk about our situation. I promised you I'd find a way out of it. And I still mean to. I don't want you to think I've just given up.'

‘No, Tom,' says Karen, ‘you're not a person who gives up.'

‘It's not your fault anyway,' says Rachel.

Tom pushes away his half-finished meal and lights a cigarette. He doesn't often smoke and the cigarette tastes old. ‘I thought,' he says, ‘I would have a word with the insurance company.'

Karen says: ‘I don't think the insurers can do anything, Tom.'

‘Well,' says Tom, ‘they will have some idea about the future – about when the value gap might start to close.'

Rachel is looking at Tom's face intently, as though it were a map of the world. ‘Do you think it will ever?' she asks.

‘Yes,' says Tom. ‘Yes.'

He sees the summer pass. The insurers say that they really do not know when the value gap may start to close and they dare not guess. The temperature of the sea rises and then starts to fall again. Tom promises himself that, before the winter comes, he will do the thing he has planned.

It requires the hiring of a boat. He chooses a Saturday morning in September when the air is bright. As he manoeuvres the boat out of the harbour, he looks back and sees, half hidden by trees, his new house, waiting.

He is four or five miles out when he throws the anchor. He can see the grey smudge of a ferry going towards Harwich and wonders whether, for some of the Dutch passengers coming over from the Hook of Holland, this may be their first sighting of England. When Karen first saw England, she and her friend Else said together: ‘It looks a bit like home.'

He checks his equipment carefully. He knows certain important things are being done incorrectly: he should have a reserve valve on his cylinder; he should not be diving alone.

He lets himself tip backwards into the water and goes down slowly, barely moving his flippers, his lamp directed onto the depth gauge at his wrist. He has no idea how far he has to dive before he starts to see it, the life of the true deep. For the first hundred feet of his fall, there seems to be nothing but himself and the drifting bladderwrack and the bubbling of his own breathing.

But then they start to swim into his light: shoals of silver herring; the brown swirl of an eel; a kite-shaped ray with its dancing tail; the blue bodybags of squid; the fingers of cuttlefish; the first red fronds of deepwater seaweed.

For a while, he hangs still, poised where he is, turning and turning his head so that his lamp beam makes an arc and every arc reveals a new picture. He opens his arms to everything he sees, like he used to open his arms to Rachel when she was a small child. With every suck of compressed air that he takes, his feeling of elation increases.

He goes lower, lower. He's no longer looking at his depth gauge. And then, just ahead of him, he sees a dark mass and feels his body pressed by an underwater current. The mass moves by him and on, and thousands of brownfish rush from its path and Tom knows that something vast is down there with him and he chooses to believe that he's found a whale.

He turns and starts to follow it. He scans it with his lamp, but he can see nothing, only the small fish darting from its path. He wants to touch it, to hold onto it, to become its passenger. He wants it to lead him down.
Only by going deeper and further can anything be solved
.

Tom doesn't know whether he can keep pace. He has to swim as fast as he can, taking in a lot of air, but he does keep pace until he feels the mass suddenly drop away beneath him. It drops and he's stranded there alone, at some mid-point, foolishly kicking his flippered feet. Then he makes the steepest dive he's ever made in his life. Briefly, he thinks of Jason's face wearing a look of terror, then of Jane Fonda wearing a striped leotard and hanging from a wallbar by her feet, and then of nothing, nothing but the beauty of the dive. It doesn't matter whether the thing that leads him down is a whale or not. It's a whale in his mind, just as the Scoutmaster and the thurifer were real people in his mind. It is something alive which, in its every moment of existence, can express its own individual purpose. He has only to follow it and he will attain perfect clarity of thought. The deeper he goes, the more euphoric he feels.

And then, without warning, he's in darkness. He remembers it from his sea-bed crying, this darkness-of-the-grave, and with a heavy arm reaches up to switch on his lamp. But no light appears. The battery of his lamp is used up.

In a mere few seconds he feels a drunken sickness come on and now he can't say if this darkness is the real, external darkness of the deep sea or only a darkness of his mind. Far, far away, weak and soft, he hears Karen's voice say: ‘Oh! This darkness of us northerners, this blackness of ours . . .'

Sick as he feels, he knows that he must take control. Karen must be his light now, Karen and Rachel, there on the dry cliff, in a dry wind, with the sun on their hair.

He starts to swim up. But he's lost all sense of time. For how long has he been following the imaginary whale? And how deep is he? Without a light to shine on his depth gauge, he has no means of knowing.

So one question only remains, the question of equity: is the sum of water above him greater than the corresponding sum of compressed air left in his cylinder, or is the sum of the air greater than the sum of the water? He says it like a mantra, over and over, to calm him, to keep his sickness in check:
Which is greater? Which is greater?

Somewhere far above him his bossy angels wait in the bright September sun and all he can keep trying to do is swim upwards to meet them.

Bubble and Star

  

Leota Packard had been born and raised in Georgia, not far from Jimmy Carter's home town of Plains. But when she was twenty, she left the South and never returned.

Once in her subsequent life – during the Carter presidency – she found her mind wandering like a lost child back to her mother's porch swing; and there it sat for a few minutes, rocking to and fro, watching the fields. Above the fields, it saw creatures dancing in the air – gnats and fireflies. But this wasn't its usual habit. If Carter hadn't become President, it might never have gone back. Because normally it stayed in Canada, where Leota lived after her marriage to Eugene Packard, a Canadian plastics manufacturer. It stayed in the bright and tidy house Packard built for them two miles from Niagara Falls. It was perfectly happy there and seemed to have no need or inclination to remember the past.

But then, when Leota and Packard were old, when the plastics company had made them rich, when they had lived together for fifty years, the subject of Georgia came back suddenly into Packard's head. Not into Leota's head, but into Packard's. He began saying to strangers at parties: ‘Leota is old enough to remember slavery.' The mouths of the strangers would gape and their eyes turn towards Leota, but she would ignore them and look at Packard through the purple sun visor she wore in all weathers and say: ‘Those people were not
slaves
, Pack.' And he would reply: ‘They were not free, neither, Leota. And that's the truth.'

He was getting angry with the world.

Leota watched him through her visor and wondered when this anger had started.

She decided it had begun the day they went to the unveiling of a painting.

He said to her as they set out: ‘Take off that frigging visor, Leota! You see the world through cough linctus.'

She replied: ‘I like it that way, Pack.'

‘OK,' he said, ‘but it's not the way it
is
!'

‘How can you say what way it
is
? Everyone sees it differently.'

‘Not me,' he said, ‘not any more. I see it as IT IS!'

The painting was black. They sat with friends and neighbours in two rows in the town gallery and looked at it and there it was, a black square on a beige background with nothing in it but black, black. The gallery had raised $100,000 to acquire it and yet it looked completely and utterly worthless. Leota had taken off her visor, but as they all sat there in silence she put it on again so that there would be a new kind of magenta colour to the border of the black square.

The artist was introduced to the audience. His name was Pethcot and he wore round black glasses, like pebbles. He smiled and preened and was about to begin to talk about his marvellous square when Packard stood up and said: ‘I guess I always knew your world was hollow. Now I get it; it isn't only hollow, it's filled with crap.'

He walked out of the gallery and Leota followed him. For all that day and most of the night, he sat on a chair with a board over his knee, playing Solitaire and mumbling: ‘Cheats and liars! Don't
speak
to me . . .'

There was a side of him which had always been down on things, hard on things, including himself and the factory. Asked what the factory made, he had often replied: ‘We make trash and the cans to put it in.' He knew ‘plastic' wasn't a popular word; it was a word Canadians worried about. Leota reminded him: ‘If you manufactured from wood, Pack, they would worry about the trees, but everything has to be made of something.' He answered that anxiety wasn't always rational, any more than despair was rational. ‘Who's talking about despair?' asked Leota. ‘Everyone,' said Packard. ‘Every soul alive.'

This didn't seem rational to Leota. She reminded Packard that one of the products made by the factory was an incubator housing. She said: ‘The parents of those babies in your incubators may have been in despair for a while, but when they see their babies aren't going to die they're happy as birds.'

‘Nah,' said Packard. ‘Wrong. You don't see to the heart of things, Leota. They're happy as birds
for a while
, only until they remember how easily it was going to come.'

‘How easily what was going to come?'

‘Death. The whole vanishing thing.'

‘Pack,' said Leota, ‘stop it. You're a normal man, not a poet. Get your mind on something real. Think of the Blue Jays and the great season they're having!'

‘I don't give a fly's arse for the Blue Jays,' said Pack.

‘Why not? Baseball used to be your craze.'

‘Well, it's not any more. I'm through with baseball.'

Leota thought: it's OK to be through with a craze if you can replace it with something else, preferably another craze, even something as trivial as TV game shows. Crazes kept people alive. If you didn't care one way or another about anything, you died. She reminded Pack that Burt Lancaster had kept birds in Alcatraz and this had helped him to go on living, day after day. But Packard only laughed: ‘That dates you, Leota! You saw that film in black and white. It predates your visor.'

She didn't mind being teased. Pack was a large man. Large men were often teases. And she'd lived with him for fifty years, just the two of them, no children, no pets, and survived it all and still loved him. But she decided she did mind him getting angry with the world. She minded it for two reasons: 1. she knew that anger takes all the fun and joy out of everything, and 2. it made her feel guilty. It made her wonder whether she shouldn't start to be angry too – whether anger, when you got old, was the only appropriate emotion left. And she'd always been very accepting of the world, never analysed anything with care. Even in her dreams of Georgia, she saw fireflies, not black workers in the fields with their backs bent. It was shameful when she thought about it. And the people who
were
angry with everything – like Steve Cairns, the seventeen-year-old son of their neighbours, who fought with his father and stole from local stores and left vomit in the driveway – made her frightened. She couldn't help it. Steve Cairns terrified her, him and everybody like him, all the angry punks and bullies. She wanted them to leave Canada. She wanted to send them to the frozen moon.

She lay beside Packard and looked at his white hair on the pillow. She'd noticed, at the unveiling of the black square, that his hair had started to stick out crazily from his head, stiff and wild, as if electricity were fizzing through it. She supposed that fury could generate an electrical charge. Electricity could be made by unexpected things, like the left front door handle of her car, which gave her a slight shock each time she touched it. If Packard's hair got too straight and startling, it might be time to take him away somewhere, to one of the islands in the Hudson Bay, where there was nothing to feel angry about, no charlatan painters, no trash in the water, no TV news of wars and homelessness. Or, she might advise him, simply, to go to the Falls.

Pack had been raised within sight of them and had said all his life that he was ‘proud to know the Niagara'. It was there that he went when something upset him. He frequently reminded Leota, when he returned from these expeditions, that 3,000 tons of water
per second
went over the lip. He said: ‘Most people in the world live hundreds of miles from any astonishing thing. They don't feel wonder any more. They don't know
how
to feel wonder. And it is wonder, Leota, and that alone that keeps man in check. I'm telling you.'

He didn't need to tell her, really. She could remember watching the stars over Georgia and everyone on the porch saying they felt small and insignificant. And it wasn't as though the subject of the Falls didn't crop up when people visited them from America or England, because it did. One of Packard's favourite pastimes was to re-tell the stories of the stunters, the people who had tried to defy the Falls in barrels or other contraptions ‘of their own pathetic making'. Packard despised the stunters, ‘the boobies', as he called them, for trying to make profit from the Falls.