A Thousand Tiny Truths Read online

  My breakup speech was pathetic. Feeling protective of her, I looked at her beautiful face and rambled on about delayed grief, how I needed to get a hold of my feelings. I said that I could practically be her father (untrue, she was thirty-nine), and that she deserved to be with a more immaculate and content and beautifully dressed man, possibly one who spoke her native French (ridiculous, she was half-Swiss and half-Nigerian). What I could not bring myself to say was the truth: you are too complete, you have no unanswered questions.

  Her reaction surprised me.

  “Fine.”

  “Fine?” Was that a trace of a smile I saw at the corners of her mouth?

  “Marcel,” she said calmly. “Ever since we met, I’ve watched you fill every room you enter with your despair and inadequacy. I’ve been patient with you and your . . . atmosphere. I’ve given you my time and my heart. And, in so doing, I’ve neglected myself and my work. The entire time, you’ve taken and taken, but given almost nothing in return. Marcel, someone needs to say it: you may be getting older but you still behave like a child who feels misunderstood. I’ll be happy to see you go and become a proper grown-up.”

  I was startled. Of course, she was right. But it was the trace of pity on her face after she had delivered her scorching assessment, a sadness for me rather than herself, that nearly obliterated me.

  Shortly after things ended, I called up Julian and asked him to meet me for lunch at a restaurant called Wagamama in Earls Court. As soon as we were seated and had placed our order, I slipped off my jacket and told him what was on my mind.

  “What?” he said, when I was finished speaking. “A sign?” He stared at me incredulously from beneath his long eyelashes, two webs of prettiness that always seem out of place on his otherwise rugged face. “Your friend Kiyomi sends you a condolence letter and you call it a sign? Please, Marcel, get a grip.”

  There was a silence while we both seasoned our udon. Then Julian set the spice bottle firmly down on the table and gave me a fatherly frown.

  “You still feel some orphan kinship with Kiyomi. This I understand.” He sighed. “It’s natural to want to rekindle old relationships after someone dies. But for God’s sake you loved each other as children. You’re a middle-aged man now. You can’t go conjuring her up as some romantic soulmate.”

  I watched a noodle slither from his chopsticks onto the floor and realized that there was no point trying to explain. Julian rarely felt the need to visit his past and I still felt possessed by mine. How could he understand that when I saw Kiyomi’s tiny handwriting on that envelope (just at the moment that I was retracting into myself), I felt like she was right here beside me? That I felt her touch, heard her voice? I even turned around to see if she was there. My missing piece.

  How did the past become so blazingly and bracingly present? Now Iris is here making me feel like I have a purpose. Every day I clean her long, dark hairs from the bathroom sink and every morning I tidy the newspaper, which she has taken apart in search of her daily horoscope. Is it love that concerns her? Finances?

  These small gestures of tending to Iris bring me back. She makes me want to be a better, kinder person. I have been so absorbed with myself, so preoccupied with the swirl of my emotions, that I have lost touch with things as they are, with the world beyond my own solitude.

  “Earth to Mr. Spacehead,” she says now, gently punching my arm.

  “Ouch. Why did you do that?”

  “Do you know what I think?”

  “No.”

  “I think you should find that person you love.”

  WHEN OLIVER RETURNED from Stanleyville in mid- December of 1962, he carried a duty-free shopping bag and his dusty Samsonite suitcase, now dull blue, into Pippa and Stasha’s flat and held the suitcase because he didn’t want to put it down on her floor. Then he had an idea and walked with it into the bathroom and placed it in the tub. While he was there, he opened the medicine cabinet and shook a few headache tablets from a bottle and ran the tap.

  There was a ragged hole in his jacket that looked like a giant cigarette burn. His trousers were pouched at the knees. In his shopping bag, he had a tube of Smarties for me, a scarf for Stasha, a bottle of sherry for Pippa.

  He did not smell good. It was a strong, scared, scalpy smell, which even a splash of Old Spice could not disguise. He did not look good. In his face, I could see the razor that had dulled, the food he hadn’t eaten. He was far too thin; if he had let me wrap my arms around his waist, my hands would easily have touched. The hair at his temples was grey. When I looked closely at the wrinkles on his forehead, I saw they were not the kind to be smoothed out again. For days, his stomach gurgled, and he would run off to the toilet. He looked so unwell that when he coughed, even strangers turned to look at him with concern.

  He had come back restless. I could see it in his thighs and the way they jiggled up and down when he sat and the way his hand opened and closed, opened and closed. Even when he passed long spells doing nothing, his body was full of little tics. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He didn’t know how to fill himself with London thoughts again.

  When he spoke, he talked in a dry-ice way. When someone else spoke, he was miles away.

  He was more permissive, though. He let me make my own decisions about how much I would eat, when I would sleep. He didn’t remind me to go brush my teeth before bed. It was unclear whether he wanted to be my father again.

  Back at our old flat at number 95 New King’s Road, Oliver seemed to want only to rest, to slip into sleep, nestle in its hand, lie under its skin. But sleep did not come or it came at the wrong hour. He slept all afternoon, then was up all night sitting in his old chair, reading or squinting out the window at the dark common. The chair springs creaked when he shifted. Sometimes, I sat on a hassock beside him, hoping to be regaled with stories. But no matter how long I sat there, Oliver remained quiet about where he had been and what he had seen during his travels. He was so tightly sealed, when he opened his mouth, I half expected to hear the pop of a Mason jar lid.

  Wherever he had gone, whatever he had seen, remained wordless. But it didn’t matter. Because even if the carnage was a world away, I knew the war had come inside. It joined us at meals, it seeped into my dreams: images of gunfire smoke, strewn bodies, bayonets, trenches, a fleet of ships, nuclear warheads.

  “I know what’s going on out there,” I said one day when I grew bored of Oliver’s silence. “I hear it on the World Report. I can see it on your shoes. Wherever you’ve just been I know it’s not going well.”

  Oliver tilted his head a bit, as if to view me from a different angle, but he still didn’t say anything.

  I took my bicycle to the park across the street and rode it up and down the path.

  When I returned one afternoon, Pippa had stopped by for a visit. She was wearing a yellow dashiki Oliver had brought back for her from Lagos. It was cinched and belted at the waist. The hem was dyed a deep and uneven purple and looked as if she had recently waded through a pool of grape juice.

  Oliver was sitting at the kitchen table. When she put her hand on his shoulder, I could see his entire body grow quiet. She gave me a smile as she gently massaged him. After a little while, she kissed the crown of his head and made her way to the counter, where I was surprised to see her round up the dirty cups and plates and start washing up.

  “I think what we could all use right now is a little domestic routine,” she said, over the running water.

  Oliver and I both looked at her uncertainly, as if she had just suggested we join in a little Catholic prayer or clog dancing.

  She continued, nonchalantly washing dishes, “It’s only natural for Oliver to feel out of sorts for a while. I’m sure it happens to all reporters, what with the overwork and the stress.”

  I found it strange that she was talking about Oliver as if he were not present.

  Oliver apparently found it odd too. “Pippa, I’m sitting right here,” he said.

  “Yes, Oliver. That�
�s right. And the world hasn’t ended. We need to keep going.” She turned off the tap and grabbed a dishtowel.

  After that, for ten straight days, Pippa came over after work, made token gestures of tidying, prepared food to mend Oliver’s body, and played soft music to repair his mind. She pampered us in ways she never had before. To complete Oliver’s recovery, she offered him the cure she knew best, pouring him drink after drink, the tiniest sound of ice tinkling, reverberating, long after I had gone to bed. They stayed up late talking, or sat reading together in silence.

  The best thing that happened was that he no longer picked fights with Pippa. Now that he had wars on the outside, it seemed he didn’t need to multiply them on the inside.

  Mrs. Bowne and I returned from the cinema one afternoon to the sound of the phone ringing in the other room. Oliver waved at us in the hallway, then disappeared.

  I heard him say, “Hello, Oliver speaking.” Then, after a pause: “I was hoping I’d hear from you today. Do you mind waiting a moment?” There were footsteps, then his voice calling out, “I need to take this call. Shop talk. Mum, could you take Marcel for a tea around the corner?” Right before we closed the front door, I heard him say, “Of course . . . I understand. In principle, yes. Absolutely.”

  I could tell from his quick, agreeable voice that he was speaking with someone important.

  The next morning, Oliver was whistling happily to himself.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, pouring myself a glass of milk.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Good sleep?” I asked tentatively, setting the milk bottle down.

  “Hmm. Excellent,” he said.

  His face seemed gentler and I sensed that something significant had happened.

  It was Sunday and I had school the next day, but after an unusually elaborate breakfast, he wrote a note to the headmistress at Kensington explaining I would be absent from classes for the week.

  “Why, Oliver? What will I do instead?”

  “I thought it would be nice to spend some time together.” He smiled in a way that made me nervous.

  “I don’t know. I should probably go to school,” I said.

  “Oh, come on, you’re a smart boy. You can miss a few days.”

  Then, he pushed a pen and paper across the table towards me and told me to write down a list of five places around London I would like to visit that week. A wish list. I should have known right then. I was being granted the same privilege used to placate prisoners awaiting execution and children dying of terminal disease.

  I have faint memories of going to Odeon Leicester Square for a screening of The General starring Buster Keaton. (In the art deco auditorium, I sank back into my faux leopard-skin seat as the dark pink curtains opened.) I vaguely remember visiting Madame Tussaud’s. But what remains etched in my mind are the days we spent at the National Portrait Gallery off Trafalgar Square and the Reading Room at the British Museum.

  At the National Portrait Gallery, we spent hours walking through vast empty rooms, looking at pictures of the Lord-of-This and Duchess-of-That, which crammed the walls from floor to ceiling. I liked the portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds looking off into the distance, hand sheltering his eyes, giving the unmistakable impression that Something Was Arriving. Oliver liked the painting of a thinly moustached Baron, the snide look on his face that made you wonder what or who could deserve such loathing.

  But the dark red hues against the dark wood walls soon made me feel very sleepy. At one point, I thought I was hallucinating. The same three pictures seemed to appear again and again. Mother smoothing child’s hair. Soldier in uniform with gun raised. Politician dressed to inspire confidence. I was tilting my head towards the ceiling, resting my eyes on the tiered mouldings and spots of emptiness, when I felt Oliver take my hand. His fingers curled around my palm. We were standing in front of a portrait and we looked at it and then at each other reflected in the glossy black oil paint. I felt flushed by his open affection.

  “He looks like a nice man,” I said, nodding at the portrait.

  “That’s Napoleon. Not a nice man.”

  I remember the feel of his fingers, cool and dry. Then the feel of his fingers gently releasing.

  We walked through Trafalgar Square afterwards. The quadrangle was filled with lazy pigeons, feeding off birdseed bought in droves by eager tourists. We stopped by the fountain and stared at the blue tiles and scattered coins.

  “Would you like to make a wish?” said Oliver finally.

  I looked at him and replied: “Would you?”

  Oliver tossed his coin in first. I took a little longer with mine. It turned out I had a lot of wishes stored up and I had to wait for them to stop tumbling through my head before deciding on the most important one. (Did Oliver guess that my wish was for him, and his safety? Did Oliver have a wish?) As we walked away, all I could do was picture our coins solemnly acknowledging each other, maybe reaching some sort of understanding.

  At the British Museum we sat in the Round Reading Room under the massive domed ceiling and absorbed vast quantities of information about Captain Cook and peeked at one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. After practising some mirror writing (Lecram dna Revilo) in homage to da Vinci and eating our sack lunch outside, I occupied myself reading Treasure Island under a hooded desk lamp while Oliver made his way along the centre aisle to speak with the librarian. He returned several minutes later carrying a large book and sat down. As my eyes slid over the words on the page in front of me, I noticed the title of Oliver’s book, The History and Customs of Vietnam. The spine made an audible crack as Oliver opened it and began carefully turning the pages.

  “See the flag?” Oliver asked when he caught me looking.

  “Yes.”

  “It says here that the Vietnamese written language uses the Western alphabet.”

  “Oh.” I closed my book.

  “And the second spoken language is French.”

  I looked at him for a moment, then asked, “Oliver, why are you reading all about Vietnam?”

  “The Mekong River is the eleventh longest river in the world.”

  “Oliver?” I said, feeling the panic beginning. “Are you going away again soon?”

  “I should think it makes the Thames look rather puny in comparison.”

  “You can’t go.”

  “Marcel.”

  “You can’t. This would be your fifth big trip.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not asking for your permission.”

  “Will I come this time?”

  “Yes,” he said, shutting the book.

  “Really?”

  “Well, not right away but soon. I promise.”

  “You promise?”

  Oliver placed his hand on my forearm. “I promise. Don’t you trust me?”

  Friday was cancelled. I stayed in bed.

  “I have a headache,” I explained, though it was more of a blank than an ache.

  “But we were supposed to go to—” Oliver stopped to glance down at his list.

  “Cancelled, cancelled, cancelled,” I said.

  I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. I cut my finger on a sharp corner of the medicine cabinet by accident. Then I did it again on purpose.

  As I watched beads of blood drip into the sink basin it occurred to me that I needed to find a way to keep him home. An injury, a hunger strike, some newsworthy event. If only I could make London more exciting, he would never have to leave.

  On Saturday morning during breakfast, there was a knock at the door followed by the sound of a key turning and a slow clacking of heels on the floor.

  Pippa appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. She was wearing a dark blue dress with silver dots. She yawned, still lazy with sleep.

  “Ready?” she said.

  “For what?’ I asked.

  Her eyes looked past me at Oliver. “Didn’t Oliver tell you? I’m taking you shopping today.”

  “Both of us?” I asked, glancing over at Oliver
, who was tapping his fingers against the tabletop.

  He shook his head. “I think I’ll stay in. I have work to do around the flat.”

  I looked back at Pippa and said, “I think I’ll stay home too.”

  “Oh, come on, Mish,” said Pippa. “We’ll get you some new clothes.”

  I was wearing an old jumper and she reached forward and pointed at my skinny wrists sticking out of the sleeves. “Let’s get you a wardrobe more befitting a person of your extraordinary cleverness and startling good looks.”

  I smiled and said, “Okay.”

  We walked to Carnaby Street where Pippa took me to a theatrical costume store and bought me a maroon leisure jacket with narrow lapels and fancy leather winklepickers that squinched my feet. By the time we finished shopping, I looked like an Edwardian lounge singer, but I loved Pippa even more than usual that day. She had not made me undress in the shop aisle (“to save time”) or bought the clothes too large (“for growing into”) as Mrs. Bowne would have done.

  I was so eager to show Oliver my new outfit when we returned home that I ran straight into the flat. But he was not in the living room. I hurried to his bedroom, but he was not there either. I stood by the door, taking in the dresser, the open drapes, the well-made bed and the blue Kenyan spread, then I turned around and ran to the kitchen, where the only trace of him was an unfinished cup of coffee: still warm. Suddenly the flat felt too quiet.

  “Oliver!” I shouted, not for hope of any answer but just to make a noise. There was no response, just the sound of my breath, quick and ragged from rushing around.

  I found Pippa sitting in Oliver’s reading chair, quietly chewing her thumbnail.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “Sweetheart,” she said, holding out her arms.

  I stood frozen, finally understanding.

  “You let him leave without saying goodbye?”

  She was silent. Her lips trembled.

  “He’ll die. He’ll come back ruined. Is that what you want? How could you let him? Why can’t you be the one to leave!”

  Pippa flinched but remained calm. “But he did say goodbye,” she said, taking a note from her purse.