Evangelista's Fan (18 page)

She'd always been an impatient person. As a child, when she woke before dawn, she used to yell at the sun to come up. And once she'd decided on a thing, she wanted to make it happen straightaway.

At eight, she called Steve and asked him to come by. He arrived at nine with his roller skates round his neck. Leota made coffee.

‘Steve,' she said, ‘I've seen everything all wrong.'

‘What do you mean, Leota?'

‘Well. I don't need the bubble after all. You see? It was typical of me to think about a bubble, to think about plastic protection, just like my old visor, but I don't need it.'

‘What are you going to use, then? A barrel?'

‘No. I'm going to use nothing.'

‘Come on . . .'

‘It's what I want to do. You won't be able to put me off, so don't try. I'm a Georgia girl and stubborn. But I need one last favour from you, dear.'

‘Leota . . .'

‘I want you to drive me there. If I went alone, I could lose my nerve. And I want to do it tonight. It has to be night, because I don't want to petrify any Japanese or French tourist. And tonight feels good to me. So if your mother would very kindly lend you the Toyota . . .'

Steve got up. He put his roller skates on the floor and lit a cigarette. He walked to the window and smoked silently for a moment, then he turned and said: ‘I want to be absolutely clear what you're telling me.'

‘I'm telling you that I'm sorry,' said Leota. ‘Sorry for everything. Sorry for all the things I didn't properly understand and sorry, in particular, that you're being sent away to the moon.'

‘It's not the moon,' said Steve.

‘Near,' said Leota.

‘It's not enough,' said Steve. ‘It doesn't explain it.'

‘Well, it's too bad,' said Leota. ‘That's all I can say. That's it.'

He arrived in a pick-up truck. He said: ‘The days when I can borrow the Toyota are gone.' He told Leota that the pick-up belonged to the father of a bass guitarist.

Leota had chosen her outfit carefully: clean white underwear and white socks; blue-pants, bought at Queens Quay, Toronto; a white silk blouse and a pale-blue wool jacket with a little silver monogram on the pocket; white shoes she normally only wore in summer. She'd washed and combed her short white hair and fixed two jade earrings to her still soft ear lobes.

‘You look nice,' said Steve.

‘Thank you, dear,' said Leota.

When they left, towards midnight Leota didn't look back at the house that Packard had built for her and where, she had to admit, she'd been foolishly happy. She kept her eyes straight ahead on the moonlit road and all her mind was on the tiny particle of the future that remained. She and Steve didn't speak until they turned off the main highway leading to the Falls and started down an old track that led nowhere but in amongst some trees and stopped at a barbed-wire fence. A hundred yards beyond the fence was the Niagara River. ‘I know this,' said Steve, out of the darkness, ‘it's a place where I've been.'

Leota didn't ask what he'd been here for. Instead, she said: ‘It's so very kind of you, dear, to help me in this way. I hope you won't get into any kind of trouble on my account.'

‘Don't think about that,' said Steve.

He stopped the car and they both got out. They were some way upstream from the Falls, but they could hear them, even
feel
their nearness in the ground underneath them. They stood very still, holding onto the truck. It was a cold, cloudy night with no stars.

Leota had been precise about the arrangements she wanted. She would walk on her own through the trees to the water's edge. She would wait there a few minutes. Meanwhile, Steve would drive back onto the highway and park up in the Falls parking lot. Then he would go and stand at the rail – exactly where they had stood on their visit – a few feet from the lip of the waterfall. He was to carry a strong flashlight. With the flashlight, he was to scan the water, looking for Leota's bobbing head, and, when he found it, he was to fix the light on her. ‘Your light,' she'd said, ‘will be the last thing I see and it will be like a star. You must be certain to follow me all the way, till I'm over and gone.'

They hung back by the truck, getting cold, because neither of them knew how to say goodbye. So then Leota just started to walk forwards, without a word. She was at the fence and climbing through when Steve called out: ‘Wait! Leota, wait a minute!'

She was on the other side of the fence now. Steve ran towards her and, with the barbed wire between them, put his arms round her. She was much smaller than him. She reached up and put a kiss on his tattooed heart.

At the water's edge, she took off her shoes. She felt no fear at all. ‘None, Pack,' she said. ‘So there you are.'

She was impatient, in fact, to get into the surging green river. Her only worry was that her body was too light to fall straight down under the guillotine of water. She thought it might reach the lip and go flying outwards – as once had happened to a young boy – and arrive in the pool below still alive. But this was a small risk. No one else had survived the Falls without the protection of a barrel.

She let time pass, but then she didn't know how much of it had gone. She'd heard Steve drive away in the truck, but she couldn't tell whether he would have taken up his position at the lip yet and switched on the flashlight.

She waited five more minutes, gauging the time by counting. Then, she put her white shoes side by side and got into the water.

It was so cold, it took her thoughts away. And the current was far stronger and wilder than she'd imagined. She was like flotsam in it, being whirled round like a fairground car. Waves broke over her and her mouth filled with water. She choked and spat. She tried to hold her head high, to swim properly, to grab her thoughts back. She'd believed that the green river would be easy and lead her gently to the edge, but it fought her, as if jealous of her destination, as if it wanted to claim her before she reached the fall.

With her bony hands, with her legs in blue pants, with her neck and chin, she fought its intention. Each time she surfaced, she could see, to her delight, the yellow beam of Steve's flashlight directed at her from the bank. As long as that light was there, she believed the river wouldn't take her. And when she knew at last that she was there; when, in the final second, she felt the water become calm before it slid her over and hurled her down, she found a voice to raise against the thunder. ‘Hey!' she yelled. And it was to Leota as if all the world could hear her and would remember this moment of hers for years and years to come: ‘Watch this! The last booby!'

John-Jin

  

When I was a child, the pier was a promising place.

You walked along and along and along it, with all its grey sea underneath, and at the end of it was the Pavilion.

‘Now,' my father used to say, ‘here we are.' He was a person who enjoyed destinations. Inside the Pier Pavilion were far more things going on than you could imagine from the outside; it was like a human mind in this one respect. You could drink tea or rum or 7-Up in there. You could play the fruit machines or buy a doll made of varnished shells. You could shoot at a line of tin hens to win a goldfish. You could talk about your life to a fortune teller or ride a ghost train. There was a section of the great glass roof from which flamenco music came down. And under the music was a Miniature Golf track.

My father and I used to play. Our two miniature golf balls followed each other over bridges and through castle gates and round little slalom arrangements until they reached their destination. This destination was a wishing well and every time we played both of us had to make a wish, no matter who won the game. My wishes changed with time, but I know now that my father's did not. I wished for a pair of wings and a trampoline and a pet reptile and flamenco dancing lessons. My father wished for John-Jin.

Then, when I was ten, the Pavilion detached itself from the pier in a storm and moved five inches out to sea.

I remember saying: ‘Five inches isn't much.' My father replied: ‘Don't be silly, Susan.' My mother took my hand and said: ‘It's a building, pet. Imagine if this house were to move.'

They closed the whole pier. Things separated from their destinations can become unsafe. When we went down to the beach, I used to walk to the locked pier gates, on which the word ‘Danger' hung like an advertisement for an old red car, and watch the tugs and cranes dismantling the Pavilion bit by bit. They towed it all away and stacked it on a car park. Their idea was to raise all the money it would cost to bring it back and rebuild it and join it onto the pier again, but no one said when this would be.

It was the year 1971. It was the year I got my flamenco shoes and began my Spanish dancing lessons. It was the year that John-Jin arrived.

He was Chinese.

He'd been left wrapped in a football scarf in a woman's toilet in Wetherby. He'd been found and taken to a hospital and christened John-Jin by the nurses there. How he came to be ours was a story nobody told me then. No one seemed to remember, either, what colour the football scarf was or if it had a team name on it. ‘The details don't matter, love,' said my mother, changing John-Jin's nappy on her lap; ‘what matters is that he's with us now. We've waited for him for ten years and here he is.'

‘Do you mean,' I said, ‘that you
knew
he was going to come?'

‘Oh, yes.'

‘So you had someone waiting in that toilet all that time?'

‘No, no, pet! We didn't know
where
he was going to come from. We never thought of him being Chinese necessarily. We were just certain that he'd arrive one day.'

He was as beautiful as a flower. His eyes were like two little fluttering creatures that had landed on the flower. If I'd been an ogress in a story, I would have eaten John-Jin. I used to put his flat face against mine and kiss it. And I entertained him when my parents were busy. They'd put him in a baby-bouncer that hung from a door lintel and I'd get out my castanets and put on my flamenco shoes and dance for him. The first word he ever said was
olé
. When he learned to stand up, he went stamp, stamp, stamp in his red bootees.

‘Don't wear him out, Susan,' said my mother. ‘He's only one.'

‘I'm not,' I said. ‘I'm helping him get strong.'

When he was in bed sometimes, with his gnome night-light on, I'd creep into his room and tell him about the world. I told him about the building of a gigantic wall in China and about the strike of the school dinner ladies. I told him about the Miniature Golf and the wishing well. I said: ‘The Pier Pavilion was there and then not. There and then not. And that happens to certain things and I don't know why.'

Making the pier safe took two years. People in our town were asked to ‘sponsor a girder'. You could have your name cast in the girder and then you would be able to imagine the waves breaking against it. I liked the idea of the sea breaking against my name, but my parents decided that it was John-Jin who needed his own girder more. They said: ‘You never know, Susan. Doing this might help in some way.'

We needed help now for John-Jin. Something was going wrong. He could do everything he was meant to do – talk, bounce, walk, laugh, eat and sing – except grow. He just did not grow. Nobody explained why. Our doctor said: ‘Remember his origins. He's going to be a very small person, that's all.' But we thought that was a poor answer.

We kept on and on measuring him. He grew in minute little bursts and stopped again. When he was three, he could still fit into the baby-bouncer. I wanted to buy him his first pair of flamenco shoes, but his feet were too small. At his nursery school, he was seven inches shorter than the shortest girl. The little tables and chair were too high for him and the steps going up to the slide too far apart. The nursery teacher said to my mother: ‘Are you seeking advice from the right quarters?' And that night, my parents sat up talking until it got light and I went down and found them both asleep in their armchairs, like old people.

The next day, we all went out in an eel boat to see John-Jin's girder bolted onto the pier. John-Jin kept trying to reach down into the eel tank to stroke the eels; he wasn't very interested in his girder. My mother and father looked exhausted. It was a bright day and they kept trying to shade their eyes with their fingers. I thought the girder was beautiful – as if it had been made in Spain. It was curved and black and John-Jin's name stood out in the sunlight. This was one of the last girders to be put in place. Our eel boat was anchored right where the pavilion used to be. And so I said to John-Jin: ‘Pay attention. Look. Without your girder, they couldn't have finished mending the pier.' He blinked up at it, his straight, thick eyelashes fluttering in the bright light. Then he turned back to the eels.

‘Where are they going?' he asked.

My parents took John-Jin to a specialist doctor in Manchester. Every part of his body was measured, including his penis and his ears. My mother said: ‘Don't worry, Susan, he's far too young to feel embarrassed.'

A course of injections was prescribed for him. He had to go to the surgery every week to get one. I said: ‘What are they injecting you
with
, John-Jin?'

‘Something,' he said.

‘Just a growth hormone, dear,' said my mother.

I was going to ask, what is a ‘growth hormone'? Where does it come from? But a time in my life had come when I couldn't carry on a conversation of any length without my thoughts being interrupted. The person who interrupted them was my flamenco dancing partner, Barry. He was fifteen. He wore an earring and a spangled matador jacket. When I danced with Barry, I wore a scarlet flamenco skirt with black frills and a flower from Woolworths in my hair. And so, instead of asking more about John-Jin's growth hormones, I went dancing with Barry in my mind. I replaced the subject of growth hormones with the smell of Barry's underarm deodorant and the sight of his shining teeth. I knew my mind was a vast pavilion, capable of storing an unimaginable quantity of knowledge, but all that was in it – at this moment in my life – was a single item.