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СКАЧАТЬ winter and lonely as a cabin in the Yukon. He shivered in his eyrie and went out into the cold for coffees and tartines beurrées to eke his money out and came back in to the novel he was working on and it sat staring at him silently as if it were a former friend who didn't wish to speak to him any more.

      But Francois, the man who had loaned him the flat, had the French intellectual's passion to make a library of experience. He had one room full of books and tapes of old films and pornographic magazines. One of the books was a biography of John Garfield. Reading it, he knew he had been right about Jules Garfinkel all those years ago. He still loved this man, his trying to stay true to where he came from, the intensity of his political beliefs, the passionate dishevelment of his life, the dread of betraying his friends that finally burst his heart and left him lying dead in an awkward place before he had time to testify in front of the Un-American Activities Committee.

      There were no tapes of Garfield's films, which was maybe just as well, for he feared looking at former magic and finding it had been reduced to a few tricks. But there was the book of John Garfield's life and it talked him through a part of that winter like a friendly ghost. If you're in the shit, it said, I've been there too. Remember the way I was? And he did. How he entered rooms as if he were challenging their contents; the jutting face that prowed bravely into whatever was happening like a ship cleaving unknown waters; the hurt puzzlement of the eyes looking into their own wrongdoing.

      He faced a bad time and stared it down. John Garfield helped. But he was still left wondering how far he had travelled towards being whoever he really was.—

      MIRROR, MIRROR, ON THE WALL, Who the hell am I at all? He wondered how many times he had looked in a mirror for confirmation of himself. He was doing it again. He saw the reflection of the open suitcase that was behind him on the bed. His attempt at packing was a mess. Not only had he never learned to pack, he suspected he had never learned to unpack.

      ‘What are you staring at. Dad?’

      Megan stood in the doorway. She was giving him her own stare, those remorselessly innocent eyes that made him feel he was facing a plenary meeting of the Spanish Inquisition.

      ‘Nothing, Meganio.’

      ‘You were so.’

      ‘No. Ah was just lookin’.'

      ‘You were so. You were staring and staring. Into the mirror.’

      ‘Ah wasn't really staring and staring. Ah was just staring. I was just checking I was there.’

      That seemed to make sense to her.

      ‘This it. Dad?’

      She held up his toilet-bag.

      ‘It is, it is. You are a total cracker.’

      She came across and handed him the bag.

      ‘I put things in.’

      ‘Thank you, Princessa.’

      He dropped the bag on the bed and, as he turned back, he noticed the self-containment of her standing there. He felt the utter wonder of her presence and he lifted her up and spun her in the air, laughing. She was smiling calmly. He set her down on the floor.

      ‘Is that all?’ she said.

      ‘Well. Ah suppose it'll have to do. Where's Gus?’

      She shrugged and walked out.

      He picked up the toilet-bag. He smiled at how well Megan had done. Then he noticed that she had also included Gill's L'Air du Temps. He laughed to himself and put the perfume on the window-ledge. He looked at the open suitcase. Was that enough? He could never tell. At least he had his one formal suit in it. Just in case. Just in bloody case. He thought of taking the suit back out, for packing it felt like signing the death certificate already. You should never welcome the bad stuff. If it wanted to come in, let it beat the door down. No. The suit stayed. Superstition doesn't change the rules, it just lets you refuse to learn them. You have to learn them. Would he ever learn them?

      He crossed to the window and looked out at Grenoble. He fingered the bottle of L'Air du Temps. Perhaps Megan thought his uncertainty about himself extended to gender. Or did she see him as inhabiting the same not quite reachable place of certainty where he had sensed his own father to be? He hoped not. He hoped it was different for girls. He hoped it would be different for Gus, too. He hadn't even been able to tell his father about Cran, though he had wanted to.

      Two feelings had held him back, instinctively. The first was that it seemed unmanly. He was seventeen and had left school. He should be able to look after himself - too late to run home from the playground, picking hardened blood from your nostrils, to receive from your mother the sweet solace that the rest of the world is wrong and a plate of tattie soup that warms your insides like ointment for the soul, to receive from your father advice on the politics of fear and kitchen lessons on how to deliver a good left hook. There had to come a time when the womb was shut, owing to the fact of your being too big for effective re-entry. It was a pity, though.

      The second was, paradoxically, that his father would have understood Cran and the cavernous brutishness where so much of his nature seemed to reside, littered with the bones of dead compassion. For part of his father, too, lived in those shadows. The very fact that his father would have recognised Cran, though he had never met him, had created in his mind a bond between the two men, one which excluded him. Somehow he must have sensed that you didn't gain admission to that dark brotherhood by invitation. You had to earn it for yourself. Somehow he had come to know it was his father most of all who blocked the entrance, shaking his head, acknowledging his own powerlessness to let Tam pass, implying with every spontaneous gesture of his nature that the only way past him was through him.

      (There is a code of rules here I didn't make and don't control, he seemed to be saying, and the core of the code is this: no entry but by the force of your own nature. I will offer help but it will be weirdly codified help and it's down to you to crack the code. Take me on and win your entry. Don't and stay outside.)

IT IS SUNDAY MORNING

      HE LIES AWAKE IN MICHAEL AND MARION'S BED, luxuriating. (As usual on a Saturday night, they have been staying at Marion's mother's.) He reflects on his talent for long, deep sleeps. He can do this even in the living-room with noise all around him. (‘If sleep wis brains, son,’ his father has said, not without a hint of jealousy, ‘you'd be a genius.’) He thinks of the girl he took home from the dancing last night. Marilyn Miller. It was pleasant - bruised lips and delicate adumbration of firm breasts. He has discovered the word ‘adumbration’ recently. He likes it. Adumbration. To adumbrate. He had done some adumbrating last night, but nothing more. Only adumbrators need apply was obviously Marilyn Miller's motto. Adumbration. One for the files. He would have to find an excuse for using the word in front of his father.

      (‘Okay, smartarse, so ye've swallied a dictionary. Noo tell us whit ye mean.’

      ‘Look, Feyther, I'm just tryin' to adumbrate this basic idea.')

      Marilyn Miller. She has an auntie who lives in Melbourne and it seems that this auntie once lost a baby. The night before the miscarriage, Marilyn's auntie dreamt that a nun stood at the foot of her bed, sneering and shaking her head. That is amazing, isn't it? A prophetic dream, one that's definitely got the edge on Auntie Bella's dreams about nocturnal visits to the shops. Isn't it strange how two dances with a stranger can open doors on to experiences you never imagined? People are amazing.

      Marilyn Miller. СКАЧАТЬ