A Thousand Tiny Truths Read online

  I looked at her quizzically.

  “Too young,” she said, spurting lemon into her water glass. Then, in an embarrassing stage-whisper, “Dark roots. She dyes her hair.”

  Back at the flat, she approaches me with a black camisole she has unearthed from a crevice in the settee: Did this belong to your old roommate?

  I feed her organic sausage, which she disembowels because she hates the “idea of casing.” Organic or not, what is it anyway? She tells me I would look better if I wore nicer eyeglasses, and maybe grew some dreadlocks. She says I live like I don’t earn a very good living. Where’s your PlayStation? Your microwave?

  I want to congratulate Kiyomi on raising such a rude, outspoken, sure-footed child. Life for her will be simpler.

  “Is there anything here that you like?” I ask.

  After a long silence, she says she likes my moccasin-style Wallabees. “Very old-school. Good choice.”

  I nod, momentarily awash with happiness. I want to hug her for liking my shoes.

  What’s become of me? Having Iris here is turning me into a basket case. Everything is suddenly visible; everything, from my IKEA chairs to my childlessness to the ancient muted colour of my walls, feels regretful.

  But what is there to regret?

  I am an illustrator, drawing editorial cartoons and book covers and portraits for magazines. I work regularly for the Guardian’s G2 section. Julian, the art director there, has become my closest friend. My style, the way I arrive at a drawing—constantly modifying, erasing, redrawing, a blend of line and smudge—is fashionably expressive. One critic described me as having a “wonderfully suspicious pen,” and said that I seem to draw “even solid things” as though I were “testing their truth and accuracy.” I had to laugh when I read that.

  It is approaching seven o’clock, the hour of Kiyomi’s nightly call. I don’t know what to make of the wave of excitement rising inside me. For the past two nights, she has stayed on after speaking with Iris and giving me a summary of her mother’s progress. “Claudio is flying in tomorrow from Rome. The doctor says there is a good chance she’ll wake up again. I’m almost sure she knows I’m here,” she says to me. “I can tell by watching the monitor.” Her tone for lack of sleep is wistful. We reminisce.

  “Do you remember . . . ?”

  I’ve been spending so much time in the past, it’s nice to have company.

  “It’s incredible, Marcel,” she says quietly, tonight. “All those things that happened and people we knew—it’s all still inside us, isn’t it.”

  WHEN I WAS NEARLY EIGHT YEARS OLD, Oliver walked into his office and asked to be moved off rewrites. “I am twenty-nine,” he said. “The age of settling down or ramping up.” Two weeks after his reassignment to the city desk, Oliver took me to my first fire. It was an apartment block just north of the Park Lane Hotel in Mayfair. I think he figured that little boys like firemen, metal engine bells with brass clangers, giant ladders.

  By the time we arrived, the guests and tenants had already been evacuated and were standing on the sidewalk watching the flames with their dazed campfire faces. Half the building was gone, just a deadly mess of blackened wooden beams and bare pipes and softly falling flakes of ash. Oliver sat me on the hood of a parked car and walked off to do interviews. Buzzing with excitement, I found it hard to sit still and kept sliding off the car.

  A few minutes later, I left the car to look for Oliver. I hopped over sooty puddles of muck and found him standing behind a fire truck, speaking with two distraught women. He was scrawling notes across the lines of his steno pad. I held onto his wool coat while he continued with his interview. His voice was serious, but he looked happier than I had ever seen him.

  There’s no question that Oliver hit his stride that year. He wrote about everything that passed as news. He removed his overshoes and entered burgled mansions in Hampstead and funeral parlours in Putney. He walked gingerly through crash sites on the A414 and along the bloodied paths of fatalities, trailing the murders and suicides in the city. He always had his notepad at hand.

  In the evenings he studied books on world history and read articles on journalism. My own reading had improved. My eyes now passed quickly over paragraphs, pages. What had been halting and hesitant was now soft and flowing. I sat with him while he practised writing leads and honed interview techniques. Sometimes he carried home photos of other people’s families and homemade biscuits that bereft mothers shoved in his pockets. I had seen it the day of the Park Lane fire. He was drawn to the lips and shoulders of sad women, the ones patting tears off their faces and fumbling with infants in their arms. A chorus of weeping. Damsels in distress. He loved people who could be comforted. I noticed he began stocking his pockets with tissues and chocolate candy for the children.

  On good days, he floated home. On bad days, he slipped through the door swiftly, as though shutting out the world. When he thought I wasn’t looking, he headed for the closet full of my mother’s things. Once I spied on him from the living room. I saw him dig out a scarf from a box, letting the fabric slip through his fingers. I watched, surprised, as he scrunched up a dress and squeezed it against his ear. What was I to make of this behaviour?

  Now, when Oliver wasn’t at the office, he spent more and more time in his room. Tock, tock, tock . . . click: spacebar. Tock, tock, tock . . . ding!: end of line. Ssssshhhhhp: carriage return. Trrrrisshhht: ripping of carbon-copy paper. Then back again to the tock, tock, tock. A thousand tiny hammers striking the page non-stop. Had they been real hammers he could have built a house, or even a replica of Buckingham Palace, for all the time he spent bashing away.

  Tock, tock, tock. The steady clacking of a clunky, messy pre-computer world. Out of that time, it’s the tiny things that I remember.

  Even back then I knew Oliver was restless. By now it was early 1960 and British society was on the brink of upheaval: labour strikes, racial and working class unrest in the North, moral turmoil over relaxed sexual standards, the beginning and end of the banning of a novel called Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And what was Oliver up to? He was reporting on Royal events and travelling on the tube, the new trains sparkling in their red liveries, to cover stories about tennis players and shipyard vandals—with a child at his side. London was still full of rough edges after the war: boarded-up shops in Hampstead, bricked-up houses in Camberwell, a scrapyard in South London, an empty littered field near Ipswich. The luckier neighbourhoods had the cranes and wrecking balls, the noisy jackhammers and promises of new council housing. I watched it all whiz by from the comfort of my train seat.

  Oliver put on a brave face but I could see he was completely miserable. People on the tube would squint to read the press pass he pinned to his coat: 009 Scotland Yard. Sometimes they thanked him for his role in fighting the Irish Republican Army, who were busy performing acts of sabotage in Northern Ireland. Sometimes they would offer him their seat as a gesture of respect. He would always grumble and decline.

  I made my own press pass: 123 Scotland Yard. And while Oliver scribbled in his blue-backed notebook, I sketched in mine, recreating scenes with intricate detail. I wanted to be useful. I believed I could help record evidence. But I had developed my own way of drawing. There was no circle with spokes for sun; no clouds perched on rectangles for trees. I dispensed with stick figures and matchstick men—no m’s for gulls or jackknife smiles or eyes like black buttons. If asked to produce a cat, I might draw the soft part of a feline ear instead of the usual circle with two triangles.

  I sketched while riding beside Oliver on the bus, on the tram, on the tube. While sitting amid a sea of white faces, watching the tennis semi-finals at Wimbledon, I discovered perspective (how if you drew something small and higher on the page it would look far away). I stumbled upon a rule of proportions, how the bottom edge of an ear and the tip of a nose often line up, while sitting beside Oliver in the press area of the Royal Courts.

  One day after covering a pig-breeding contest in Suffolk, Oliver decided he cou
ldn’t take his work any more. He called his editor. “I’m having an existential crisis over here. I need more demanding assignments,” he said. “Put me back on hard news. I want violent break-ins and senseless vandalism and—”

  “I’m sorry, Oliver. But someone else already has that beat.”

  So in the summer of 1960, eager to preserve his sanity, Oliver left the Chicago Tribune and took a job as a staffer for a small fledgling news agency called Novus Press. Novus was picked up by nearly two hundred newspapers—everything from the Seattle Chronicle to the Bombay Herald. Its slogan was “The Thinking Man’s Syndicate.” The bureau office was packed with overstuffed filing cabinets, shabby furniture and a gang of eager twenty-year-old journalists Oliver called “Lego men.” Every day they produced stories with modular blocks of text that could quickly be snapped apart and slotted into empty news-holes and still make sense.

  After he moved to Novus, Oliver stopped taking me on assignment because the jobs became more dangerous. Mrs. Bowne agreed to come stay for a few weeks until he could make other arrangements. He worked the crime beat—took to sleeping in his clothes, ready to rush off to tawdry rooming houses in Earls Court or drug-infested clubs in Soho or dark alleys in Shoreditch at a moment’s notice. He watched river-finders dredge the Thames for bodies and paramedics dealing with the aftermath of suicides at Hornsey Lane Bridge. He worked nonstop, sometimes fourteen-hour days, Monday to Sunday. In his spare time he took notes on the international news. Earthquakes, civil wars, military coups, famine, he wanted to keep up with the larger plots. The big, bad, outright sad stuff.

  Thus began the parade of babysitters. They came and they went. Lily, Mary, Julie, Helen . . . I took liberties under their supervision. I ate with my fingers, avoided green vegetables, filled up on shortbread. “When Oliver is here, he always lets me . . .” I would say, making up all sorts of outlandish things.

  Oliver did not take much to any of them. But before long, he was thankful when a babysitter was even-tempered and relatively tidy. By month three, he could look at the cheery happy-face Lily had arranged on a plate with a sausage and two mushrooms, and utter a sincere and charitable: “Well, isn’t that clever.”

  In the evenings, though, all I heard was tock, tock, tock . . . ding. I reflected on those tiny hammers and imagined them making dents on the page, on me.

  One evening, in desperation, I took out the letters I had hidden under my mattress. I had collected three in total. All of them were typed on pale pink writing paper, printed with a blue hospital crest.

  Dear Mr. Lawrence,

  I am pleased to report that the patient has completed her first phase of treatment. She will continue coming twice a week on an outpatient basis as we now consider her to be a light case. Her sister has agreed to provide lodgings.

  Sincerely yours,

  Dr. Samuel Scranton

  Dear Mr. Lawrence,

  We are happy to report that the patient has shown great progress and has recently acquired employment through our volitional work placement program.

  Yours truly,

  Nurse Stephanie Inglis

  on behalf of

  Dr. Scranton

  Then came a thicker envelope addressed in Dr. Scranton’s familiar scrawl. In it were a folded white cardboard chart with lots of dates and numbers and checkmarks, and the following pink note:

  Dear Mr. Lawrence,

  The patient has commenced the final phase of her quinalbarbitone treatment. As per her wishes, she will be fully discharged at the end of the month. She asked us to inform you that based on her success in the vocational placement program, she has acquired a summer apprenticeship in France. She is confident that the change of scenery will be most beneficial.

  Sincerely yours,

  Dr. Samuel Scranton

  My heart was still beating madly when I finished reading the last letter. I ran my hand over the thin paper. Then I folded it up and slipped it, along with the others, into an old pillowcase, and returned it to its hiding place under my mattress.

  One night shortly after, Oliver came into my room and explained that he had started looking for a school for me to attend. He and Mrs. Bowne no longer felt equipped to oversee my education in the way they had before.

  “Anyway, it’s probably time for you to meet people your own age.”

  I panicked. Did he know about the letters? Was this some form of punishment? I pleaded with him to reconsider, silently vowing never to snoop again.

  “I promise I’ll be good.”

  “You are good.”

  “I’ll be even better.”

  He patted me on the leg. “Consider it a new opportunity.”

  A week later, Oliver dragged me off to Draycott Grammar School near the posh neighbourhood of Chelsea. When we arrived, we discovered a dirt playing field and a cluster of children passing through a gate labelled Boys towards a multi-storey brick building. It was a fracas of duffle coats, grey shorts, falling socks, knobby elbows and chapped knees. We watched from the street. Before long the centre of the field was full of faces—pallid faces, doughy faces, rosy-cheeked faces. There was laughing and stomping about and attempts by the stronger boys to humiliate the weaker ones.

  Oliver, toughened street crime reporter, looked on in horror, as if he were witnessing the end of civilization. He had just grabbed my coat-sleeve to leave when a skinny boy standing at the edge of the field noticed us watching and walked over.

  “May I help you, sir?” he asked, stopping to brush his Oxfords with a handkerchief.

  “Well, I, we,” Oliver stammered. “Would you kindly lead us to the headmaster’s office?”

  “I’d be happy to, sir.”

  The boy led us into the school and down a corridor, past the trophy display, past team photos and artwork tacked to a corrugated board. When we reached the office, Oliver told me to sit on a bench in the hallway and wait for him while he met with the headmaster’s secretary. The boy sat beside me on the bench and after smiling shyly at each other, we both fixed our eyes on the wall clock, its bland clock face and lazy clock hands.

  As the minutes dragged on, I stood up and tried to listen through the door. I heard Oliver say that he had always planned to keep me at home with a tutor. He’s a bright boy but . . . mostly adult company . . . But his mother believes that a social education would benefit him . . .

  When he was finished, the boy led us out, waving as we exited the gates.

  “I’ll see you again, then,” he called after us.

  “I hope so,” Oliver called back.

  Any concerns Oliver may have had about my entering school bobbed away on a river of courteousness.

  The sun ducked behind a cloud. The mention of my mother had left me shaken, but I knew better than to ask about it.

  Having lived most of my first eight years without the steady company of other children, initially I felt I was being merged into a sea of grey uniforms moving in one direction.

  The world of school was a sudden ambush of sounds and smells: bells and sirens, bubbling glue pots and freshly planed wood and wet paint. I held my breath as I made my way down the hallways to the cafeteria, trying not to inhale pork drippings, boiled cabbage, floor polish, tomato ketchup and Persil washing-up liquid.

  I knew I was different from other children but I didn’t know at first how much it mattered. Within days, I began to realize that I did not belong. I did not have the right sort of skin (the skin of bed linen and clouds), or the good sort of hair (the hair of fineness and flight). I did not have the right sort of parents. I listened to the teacher reading a story one morning and looked down at my desk. I saw a beige hand pressing the white pages of an open book. I raised my hand in front of me and saw the colour of my skin as something separate from myself. I turned my hand over, palm facing upwards revealing my paler wrist, then turned it back over. So this was how people saw me.

  For the first week, my classmates ignored me with aggressive indifference. They moved around me slowly, a snake coi
ling, squeezing tighter and tighter. In my loneliness, I looked for the polite boy. I imagined us becoming friends, but I never saw him again.

  A seed of uncertainty was planted in me at Draycott. Or maybe the seed was there all along and Draycott merely fertilized it. But, I was suddenly very aware of white boys in the world. Even when I was alone, I felt myself carrying their presence in my body. There were no words to name this, but I sensed that I was not the same person I had been when school began.

  At the same time, I was secretly curious about white boys. At ease in the world, they seemed to follow poor rules of hygiene, appeared not to worry about proper enunciation, mumbled incomprehensibly, called each other bad names as a sign of affection. They were reckless, flighty, dishevelled. Yet their surnames—Underhill, Bridgewater, Forbes–Heathcote, Clayton—carried the weight of things accepted and traditional.

  I was introduced to the school tradition of “Colours,” awarded for academic and sporting achievement. A wooden spoon was a mock award, a disgrace usually given to an individual or team that had come last in a competition, but sometimes also to runners-up, i.e., the ones unable to throw heavy balls at people with alarming speed. The prefects, I discovered, were more intimidating than the teachers, marching around like brawny thugs, bellowing “Consequences!” whenever they saw anyone misbehaving. They could turn you in to the headmaster and get you three strokes of the cane if you weren’t careful.

  I learned how to scan my surroundings, interpret everything in terms of potential risk.

  Despite such precautions, there were moments of inevitable horror. For example, there was the day we read William Blake as part of a unit on verse and poetic structure. Halfway through the lesson, thirty boys turned the pages of thirty copies of Songs of Innocence to a poem called “The Little Black Boy.” All of a sudden, it was as if a bright cone of light had beamed down on my head.

  Then there was the time the teacher asked the class to write a poem beginning with the words “Your locks.”