Picture Me Gone (4 page)

Y
ou’d never think of matching Catlin and me up as friends. She’s loud, skinny as a twig and pretty much insane. I’m quiet, solid and think things through. Cat always jumps first, before she has time to be swayed by facts. While I’m cautious. But I love how bright and daring she is, like a shooting star. She’s not like anyone I’ve ever met, and sometimes I wonder why she’s friends with me.

Once she dragged me upstairs to our clubhouse to look at a cardboard box. Inside were two rats.

I stared at her.

Two rats had gone missing from the school science lab the week before and everyone was hysterical because they were at large. Some people wouldn’t even use the school toilets in case they bobbed up in the water underneath them, which apparently happens.

You’re a
rat-napper
? I was appalled. How’d you get them out of the building?

Cat pointed at her feet, grinning.

What? I said. You stuffed them in your
shoes
?

Almost. And then she reached down and picked up one of the rats and slipped her hand and the rat into a sock, removed her hand, tied the sock loosely at the end, and voilà, it was the perfect rat carrier. Being schoolroom rats, they were overfed and a bit dopey from being passed around, so inside the dark sock they just curled up and dozed.

Where’d you learn that trick?

Made it up, she said, which figured. Most of what Cat tells me she makes up, but she’s so entertaining it doesn’t matter. I prefer her explanations to the real ones anyway.

Her plan was for us to train the rats to carry messages through the sewers—though what messages and to whom was kind of up for grabs.

We weren’t allowed to name them, she said, because then we’d get attached, which was extremely unprofessional. So they became Rat One and Rat Two. The first time I picked up Rat One, he scooted up my arm and scrambled down into my shirt.

The next day when two girls jumped up on chairs in the science lab screaming that they’d seen a rat, I didn’t even turn round, just said not to bother, there were no rats. Everyone stared at me suspiciously, like,
How does she know?

Anyway, on Tuesday we fed the rats cheese and biscuits and bits of sausage and grass, but by the time we got home from school on Wednesday they had chewed through the cardboard box and were gone.

We never saw them again. Catlin’s mum kept complaining that she heard chewing in the cupboards at night, and her dad said, Don’t be stupid you must be imagining things, and apparently there were big fights, though in that family there were always big fights. Cat said she thought the escaped rats were the straw that broke the camel’s back between her parents, i.e., ruined their marriage once and for all. There was no way I could tell her that she was wrong, that it was obvious from the first time you met her parents that they just didn’t like each other and would have got divorced sooner or later, rats or no rats.

It must be horrible to realize that you come from two people who never should have got together in the first place.

After the rat incident, we started spending more time at my house, where everyone got along and there was no shouting. Looking back, I wonder whether that was one of the reasons we stopped being friends.

One time when we had to go back to her house after school, we found her mum out and everything perfectly tidy and all the windows in the house closed up tight, despite the fact that it was a beautiful spring day. It was cold and gray inside, like no one had told the house that winter was over. And outside, trees floated with blossom and birds sang.

We picked up our code books from the clubhouse even though we didn’t play spies much anymore, and we didn’t even bother checking the fridge. We just wanted to get out of there.

Mum doesn’t hear rats anymore, Cat said. They’ve deserted us, like a sinking ship.

She looked downcast, so I squeaked
Avast ye hearties!
and
Mizzen ye swarthy poop deck!
and we slammed the door and ran back to mine, shouting in pig-pirate all the way. And when we arrived, Gil called hello from his study, Marieka showed up with bunches of asparagus, and you could smell hyacinths through the windows. At the time I thought it was nice but maybe it was horrible for Cat.

The following year, when we weren’t speaking, it occurred to me that her new personality actually made sense—that kissing boys and smoking weed and stomping out of class and insulting teachers and generally acting about a hundred times worse and louder than you really are is what you might do if you didn’t want to think about having to go home to that sad gray house.

T
ranslating books is an odd way to make a living. It is customary to translate from your second language into your first, but among my father’s many friends and colleagues, every possible combination of language and direction is represented.

Gil translates from Portuguese into English. Most translators grow up speaking two or three languages but some speak a ridiculous number; the most I’ve heard is twelve. They say it gets easier after the first three or four.

The people I find disturbing are those with no native language at all. Gil’s friend Nicholas had a French mother and a Dutch father. At home he spoke French, Dutch and English but he grew up in Switzerland speaking Italian and German at school. When I ask him which language he thinks in, he says: Depends what I’m thinking about.

The idea of having no native language worries me. Would you feel like a nomad inside your own head? I can’t imagine having no words that are home. A language orphan.

Perhaps this worries me because it is not a million miles away from my reality. Marieka grew up speaking Swedish first, then English; Gil learned Portuguese, French and English as a child. I can understand conversations in most of these languages, but the only one I speak properly is my own.

Marieka rolls her eyes when Gil tries to explain syntactic semiotics or tells us his theory of typologies over breakfast. His grandad was a miner, his father became a teacher, but Gil trumped them all with a PhD in applied linguistics.

Remember your roots, Mum says, and hmphs. Semiotics!

I love to hear Gil talk but don’t always pay attention to the words. When I do listen, I rarely know what he’s talking about, but neither of us really minds. Sometimes it puzzles me that he’s my father, given how differently our minds work. Perhaps I was switched at birth and my real father is Hercule Poirot.

Marieka’s mother was Swedish-Sudanese and though she’s fair-skinned like her father, she has beautiful red-and-gold hair, like a shrub on fire. Gil says he was first attracted to Mum’s hair and only afterward listened to her playing. It was a concert his friend dragged him to and he spent the first half thinking about a paper he was writing and only looked up after the interval to see this woman with wild curls playing the violin.

Marieka couldn’t believe anyone would come backstage and appear not even to have noticed the music. She’s used to it now, but at the time thought he was eccentric, possibly mad.

I once asked my parents why they didn’t ever live together before I was born and Gil just said, We were happy as we were.

He says he never thought of another woman, not even once, after he met Marieka, and then in the same sentence says, Do you think I’ll need my gray suit in Geneva? and Marieka smiles and says, Yes, my darling, you’ll probably need it.

Marieka notices the world in what she calls a Scandinavian way, which means without a lot of drama. I register every emotion, every relationship, every subtext. If someone is angry or sad or disappointed, I see it like a neon sign. There’s no way to explain how, I just do. For a long time I thought everyone did.

That poor man, I’d say, and Marieka would look puzzled.

Look! I’d say. Look how he stands, the way his mouth twists, how his eyes move around the room. Look at his shoulders, the way his jacket fits, how he clutches his book. Look at his shoes. The way he licks his lips.

The impression was so clear—a great drift of hovering facts—it amazed me that she couldn’t see it. But Gil says human capacities are vast and varied. He doesn’t understand how people can speak just one language. Certain combinations of chords make Marieka wince. I peer into souls.

Of course, most people don’t pay attention. They barge into a situation and start asking questions when the answers are already there.

Where’s Marieka? for instance. Gil’s favorite.

I look at him. What day is it? Which fiddle has she taken? Which shoes?

Three simple observations tell me instantly where she is and how long she’ll be gone. But Gil always asks. Flat shoes, I tell him. Because of the stairs. There are five flights of stairs up to the place where she practices quartets. Otherwise she nearly always wears heels because she likes to be tall. And if you manage to miss the shoes, the baroque violin is gone.

Sometimes I go along with Marieka because they rehearse in the viola player’s tiny flat at the top of an old building with long windows looking out across Covent Garden. If I lie on the floor and rest my chin on my hands, my eyes reach just over the narrow skirting board and I can pretend I’m in a balloon, floating high above London. I took Catlin along once but she couldn’t keep quiet.

When we first heard that Matthew had disappeared, Marieka and Gil had a long conversation about what to do.

What if it’s
not
fairly straightforward? Marieka asked. And Gil answered in a murmuring voice that I couldn’t hear.

I don’t want Mila mixed up with that mumblemumble family and you know what I buzzbuzz about Suzanne.

Well, I do happen to know what she buzzbuzzes about Suzanne. She doesn’t much like her, though she also says it’s hard to be likable when you’re so unhappy. But Marieka knew Suzanne before Owen died, and says that even then she never seemed to be telling the truth. I wonder why I haven’t seen Suzanne since I was four. Gil says he and Matthew are like brothers, but when did they last meet? Are they like brothers who have grown apart?

What do you think? asks Marieka. I can’t hear the answer, but I know my father well enough to imagine what he’d say. Matthew just gets like this sometimes. I’m sure it’s nothing serious. We’ll go over as planned. He’ll be home by the time we arrive. He
is
my oldest friend. And in any case, it’s been much too long since I’ve seen him. Perhaps I can mumble bumble fumble tumble humph.

I have heard stories of the two of them as boys hanging out in the cemetery behind their school, talking about girls and drinking themselves unconscious on cider. I’ve seen pictures, long before Gil and Marieka met, of the two young men brown from the sun and grinning in Spain, Scotland, the Alps. In pictures they look handsome and young, their friendship tested only briefly by a girl they both loved. In one photo both of them have an arm round her but her head is turned and she’s smiling at Matthew, who looks straight into the camera. Gil’s face is in shadow.

Once when his mother was ill, Matthew lived with Gil’s family for a whole year. He and Gil shared a room, staying up half the night reading comics Matthew stole from the local shop.

Stole?

Matthew, Gil says, not me.

What happened to his mother?

She died, Perguntador. The summer he was fifteen.

I would like to have known them back then, though I suspect that Gil, young, wouldn’t be all that different from Gil not-young. I have heard how they sat next to each other during the eleven-plus and later their A-levels—Matthew clever at history, Gil at languages, both offered places at Cambridge.

Two grammar school boys from the butt-end of Preston, Gil says. On the day the news came we felt like gods.

Gil used summers to study and write. Matthew hitch-hiked round the Black Sea, climbed Annapurna, taught English in East Africa.

Marieka phones back. She sounds the same as always on the phone.

Hmm, is what she says now, when I tell her about cute baby Gabriel and Honey and the feeling in the beautiful glass house. And then she sighs, and says, Do be careful, my darling, families can be so complicated.

I tell her I will be careful, and that I love her, and then I give the phone to Gil. His whole body uncurls when he speaks to her.

For a minute I feel like crying because I miss Marieka, but then I see her in my head saying, Do you imagine I’m not with you, silly?

We are three. Even when we are just two, we are three.