Meeting the English
Read Meeting the English Online
Authors: Kate Clanchy
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Contents
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For Matthew
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It is easier for them; they are English.
Alasdair Gray,
The Fall of Kelvin Walker
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Bathgate no more
Linwood no more
Methil no more
Lochaber no more.
The Proclaimers,
Letter from America
It was March, 1989, and the weather was unseasonably warm; but no one worried about that, then.
Phillip Prys, playwright, novelist, was brushing his teeth in the en-suite bathroom of his large house in Hampstead. The incisors had yellowed over the years with nicotine â much like his study ceiling â and there was a brown crack in the left canine, but Phillip was pleased with the molars. Sound to a man. Every morning, he counted them in and rubbed them over with his noisy hard-bristle toothbrush; jaw wide as a crocodile's as he shone up the back ones.
In the mirror his head, brown and speckled as a breakfast egg, dipped, spat, rinsed. On the windowsill, the padded Roberts radio belly-ached on about Salman Rushdie and failed to mention the letter to
The Times
Phillip had put his name to, just two days ago. Not that the letter was his idea: Giles had sprung it on him: and you could hardly say you were pro-fatwa, could you, these PC days? Not even to your agent in the privacy of Simpson's.
Absurd. He'd married one now, hadn't he? A foreigner. An Iranian, no less. The ravishing, the twenty-six-year-old, the petite, the scented Shirin, slowly dressing at this very moment in the adjoining room. Some racist he was. No, what Phillip felt â and he'd said this to Giles, openly, after a few drinks, mind â was, when it came right down to it, Rushdie had stolen a bit of a march on the rest of them with the whole business. Because, look, Giles, Rushdie might be brown, but he was a posh boy at bottom, wasn't he? Went to Eton, didn't he? Oxford? And with fairy tales like
Midnight's Arses
and
One Hundred Years of Buggery
hogging the book market, people were forgetting about the class system here in Britain, weren't they? Pulling the splinter out of the brown chappie's eye and forgetting the bloody pit-prop in bloody Wales, isn't it? Phillip always became more Welsh when he drank.
Giles had said nothing. In fact, he'd had the cheek to start folding his napkin. So Phillip had asked him directly â of course Giles was a queer, that wasn't the point â he must have noticed that the real stories, stories of the men of the valleys, rugby-playing men and their sons, those stories were going out and this posh namby-pamby gossamer was coming in instead, written by women half of it. Angela bloody Carter. And Giles had said, gesturing at Phillip's latest royalties statement, open between them on the table, but Angela sells, old chap, so does Rushdie. They
sell.
And then he'd told Phillip he was going to retire.
Retire. Giles! Giles gone grey all of a sudden, all his soft sideburns, grizzled. Shocking. As if they'd thrown a bucket of talc on him between the acts, while Phillip was in the circle bar, lining up the pink gins. Giles, in the name of Heaven! You could weep for him, so you could, like poor bloody Arthur Scargill and his men and all the other victims of Thatcher, no such thing as society and other bollocks. In the other room, Shirin yawned: small visceral noise from a strong pale throat.
Phillip wiped the last foam from his lips. He breathed in. Today was, after all, a beautiful day. The new leaves on the chestnut tree were unfurling, and Shirin was sitting on his bed, putting on her lipstick with an exact, exquisite hand. Listen! The tootle of birds, the tiny firecracker of Shirin's dress being electrically tugged over Shirin's tights. Phillip laid down the flannel and picked up the TCP.
Thirty years he'd lived in the house in Yewtree Row. Twenty his MG had twinkled at him from its snug parking place across the street. Giles at the end of the phone for what â thirty-five? Longer than Shirin had been alive, clever little orchid in the greenhouse of Tehran. But the MG would stay and Giles could be replaced. One of the smart young men in the office would be honoured, honoured. Of course he would. Phillip would ring him up and say: âBird tootling in a tree, what's the bugger called, for chapter 2?' and get the answer, just as he always had. The thought was worth a song. Phillip liked to carol through his TCP â âBread of Heaven', in Welsh, with his head thrown back â a special knack of his.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
His jaw was at its very widest when the spasm hit. The TCP gurgled down his throat, and its precise burn, etching the tonsils, was Phillip's last clear memory. He fell to the ground and jerked as if he were being shaken by an invisible policeman. He made a series of bad plumbing noises, rusty groans and burps. Spittle leaked from a corner of his mouth. His legs thrashed, then his head, and this all went on for a very long time, as if Phillip were being uncharacteristically brave, as if he were refusing to give up an answer.
All the while, and evenly as a flag in a steady breeze, the radio talked about the fatwa and moved on to the weather, and then to news just coming in about an oil spill, a very large one.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
Of course, it was all a terrible shock for Shirin. They kept telling her so in Intensive Care, after she had revived Phillip, carried him downstairs in a fireman's lift, and delivered him to Casualty at speed in the MG which she was not, in fact, licensed to drive. Phillip was stable now, and Shirin should have a cup of tea, one with sugar, said the handsome young consultant. She should place her narrow hips on a plastic chair and smooth back her heavy shining bob of hair, and he would draw up his matching chair and explain everything in his best, grown-up, low voice.
You see, probably, the blood clot had been around for ages, bobbing around in Phillip's bloodstream. Phillip was sixty-two? A vulnerable age. Did Phillip smoke? Untipped? And drink? Pink gin was a strong choice. The young consultant looked like a jogger. His eyes were preternaturally bright, blue as glass. He explained that Phillip's arteries might, because of the smoking, be furred and narrower than average. It must all be hard for Shirin to understand, especially just now, butâ
âHe is suffering a revolution?' asked Shirin, in her tremendously posh voice with its just perceptible Iranian âr', fixing the consultant the while with her famously lucent amber eyes.
âWell,' said the consultant, âyou could say that. Are you familiar with the circulatory system, Mrs Prys?'
âYes,' said Shirin, looking at the ceiling, âterrifically.' And so the consultant started on about Phillip's clot, how it would have started as something barely tangibleâ
âAll revolutions start like that,' said Shirin, âdo they not? Just a few people? A few, did you call them, platelets? We need a strong tyrant, perhaps, to put them down?' There was a pause.
âWas Mr Prys recommended,' asked the consultant, âaspirin? At any point?'
âPossibly. He would never take such a thing,' said Shirin. The consultant shook his head.
âIt's not always easy to make that generation see that drink is not a friend,' he said.
âHis ally,' said Shirin, brightly, âhis comrade. From the days of the Long March!'
âYou know,' said the consultant, âyou should consider putting your feet up for a minute.'
âI think,' said Shirin, âthat after all, this is not a revolution, so much as a coup? We have a roadblock, do we not? This clot it is blocking the circulation? And nowâ¦'
âI think I'm losing your thread,' said the glassy-eyed consultant, who had grown up in Harrogate. And so he went off to fill in forms, and Shirin, who was a painter, sat looking at Phillip's liver-spotted hands with the tubes stuck in them, laid out by his sides, like a pietà . She knew about all this.
After the roadblocks comes the random firing. Rapidly, the streets fill with the injured and the lost, with backfiring ambulances, with gunfire and the reports of gunfire; in moments, the storm troopers arrive and the fires start. Then, the black government vehicles, the ones you'd hoped were rumours, cruise the streets in their sleek silence. Now, the city puts up its shutters, and gets behind them. Now, the new order, the months and years of damage. Last time, she had got away.
She picked up one of Phillip's hands, carefully. It was only slightly cooler than normal, but it felt hard, like the cast of a hand.
âDarling,' said Shirin, âyou'll be in for months.' And, as if in reply, Phillip's catheter bag filled with pee.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
1989: at that time, hardly anyone carried phones, and the phones that were carried were ridiculous, and their bearers objects of fun. There were still messages, then: phone boxes, faxes, answer-machines, pagers, telegrams, Filofaxes, bike couriers, notes. There were pigeonholes in all sorts of places and out-of-the way organizations, and billets-doux and death threats were put in them.
Of course, things often went wrong. You could hang a movie or a novel on a missed message, then; Phillip in his weary later years had done so several times. Conversely,
getting through
to people was a full-time job for legions of loaf-haired ladies â women who should have been sent to university instead of typing school; who, if they had, would have been running the company instead of the sweaty oafs in pinstripe behind them. Shirin was particularly good at
getting through,
though she operated on an entirely autodidactic, freelance basis. If she hadn't been, as she pointed out to Phillip the first time she opened her little green Filofax containing the home numbers of the American ambassador, Douglas Hogg, Salman Rushdie and Charles Saatchi, she would be dead by now, or barefoot and nameless in a prison in Tehran.
Getting through
wasn't just about contacts, you see, it was also about focus, delegation, and intuition. For instance, reaching Phillip's children from his second marriage would have taken Shirin several hours from the call box at the Royal Free Hospital, so, despite the names that Myfanwy, Phillip's second wife, had called her at their previous meeting, Shirin phoned her directly, and, when she found her not at home, succeeded, in a single brilliant swoop, in having her paged in Waitrose on the Finchley Road.
In fact, this was the kind of thing Waitrose liked to manage particularly well. Whisked to the Manager's teak-lined office, Myfanwy was kindly sat down in the Manager's own leather chair with lean-back feature. She used this to the full as she listened to Shirin saying
en suite
and
crisis.
And when she replaced the receiver and murmured, âMy husband. Stroke,' and closed her eyes, the Manager did not hurry her, but slipped discreetly forward with a glass of water.