A Thousand Tiny Truths Read online

  He put in a request for his first foreign assignment and asked his editor to consider his qualifications. Had he not proven his dedication?

  When Pippa eventually returned six weeks later, Oliver behaved as if she had never marched out. He complimented her on her new black dress and Pippa eyed him with suspicion, as if waiting for him to say something mean. She seemed almost disappointed when he didn’t.

  While this went on, I stayed by her side, taking deep breaths to fill myself with her smoke and soap smell, and to verify that she was really back. I trailed behind her as she walked around the flat opening the curtains and windows, saying: “Why is it so dark and stuffy in here?”

  Soon after that, one night when I returned with Mata Hari from Mrs. Harling’s flat carrying a loaf of bread and reciting scenes from The Avengers, Pippa and Oliver both rose to greet me. They exchanged looks; then Oliver cleared his throat.

  “We were just discussing things,” he said. “We were wondering whether you would you like to spend more time with Pippa?”

  It took me a minute to comprehend this. Finally, I nodded and walked over to Pippa, wrapped my arms around her waist.

  Oliver promised to come back, improved.

  I probably would have been more worried had he used the term war reporter but what he said was “foreign correspondent,” which, in my mind just evoked a faraway scribe. Oliver was going overseas.

  “Actually, Kenya for starters. East African Airways, Flight 006, disembarking at Nairobi Embakasi Airport. After that I fly to Kampala.”

  It was a golden opportunity. “Chance of a lifetime,” he said. He was tired of covering House of Lords luncheons and break-and-enters and casino busts in Mayfair. “Foreign correspondent” had a calm ring to it. It conjured an image of Oliver travelling by lumbering elephant through game parks, one hand raised to block the sun, then, on solid ground again, shaking his pen and blowing on the tip as he jotted down his impressions.

  There were vaccinations and visas and forms to fill. There were provisions to buy: Ovaltine, Twinings, Marmite, Nescafé. I was fairly relaxed until we visited Silverman’s surplus store in the east end of the city to get Oliver “kitted.” On any other occasion, I would have considered the shop a Mecca, but now I followed Oliver through the aisles with growing concern. At Silverman’s, the provisions were more sinister: mountains of khaki and camouflage and webbing. What on earth were we doing in a place that sold ration packs, helmets, boots and tactical vests? I picked up a thick silver disc and read the label out loud.

  “Respirator canister. What’s this for, Oliver?” I asked, as casually as I could.

  “It fits onto a gas mask.”

  Oliver was holding up a tan jacket. He lifted his glasses and perched them on his head, studying the weave of the fabric.

  “Is it indestructible?” he asked the salesclerk, a tiny man with a puff of white hair.

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Can it repel animals?” Oliver asked, giving me a wink.

  The clerk looked at him with some confusion.

  “Sir,” he said calmly, “it’s a simple jungle suit.”

  “Yes, but my son wants to know, is it thick enough to deflect a rampaging rhino?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “A stampeding hippo?”

  “You never know, sir.”

  In this surreal mood of preparation, the days passed. Oliver grew silly, buoyant and generous.

  And at the same time, my initial enthusiasm began to wane. The exciting prospect of spending more time with Pippa was now accompanied by the dreadful feeling that Oliver’s departure had another personal meaning: even though he called me his “son,” I feared that he had given up on me. It was only a matter of time before he disappeared, just the way my mother had.

  “Oliver?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take me with you. Take me to Nairobi.”

  “I can’t.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “Several weeks. I don’t know.”

  “Will you come back?”

  “Of course I will. Now go to sleep.”

  I watched as Oliver packed water purification tablets, parachute cord, a pen knife, mosquito netting, earplugs and a shortwave radio. I watched as he folded clothes for hot, dry and monsoon seasons, clothes that made me wonder, What kind of place was he going to where he would need both a fancy suit and a rubber rain poncho?

  Oliver walked around rehearsing basic phrases in Swahili—Jina lako ni nani? Nina swali. Kwa nini?—which he explained was the lingua franca of much of East Africa and would be necessary for his work there.

  “Oliver?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was wondering if you’d consider not going for a year or two?”

  “Don’t be silly. I won’t be away long and I’ll call every week.”

  I walked across the room, returned with a framed photo of myself and passed it to Oliver to pack. Then I lay down on the bed and placed my head on the pillow. I reached my arms out on either side of myself feeling paper everywhere. Itinerary notes, marked-up phrase books and puffily folded maps.

  “Oliver?”

  “Yes?”

  “Where did you say you’d be going after Nairobi?”

  “Kampala.”

  “You’re sure that’s safe?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Silence.

  “Look, Marcel, Pippa has promised to help you keep up with your studies. She will be in touch with your teacher and the headmistress.”

  I nodded. “I’m going to learn to ride my bicycle while you’re gone. Then you’ll let me come, right?”

  Silence.

  “What if my mother comes back while you’re gone? If you leave the country, you might miss her.”

  Silence.

  He resumed packing, finally laying out a neatly folded dressing gown and placing on it a toothbrush, hairbrush, shaving kit. Flick, flick. Two metal latches being closed. Squinch, squinch. A canvas strap being tightened around the bulging leather case.

  Then he walked over to the windowsill and brought back a plant and placed it on the ground by the door for Pippa to take to her flat. He showed me a locked box in the closet, which contained important papers, and said he was leaving a key with Pippa in case of emergency. He told me that I was the man of the house now and that I needed to be brave, but he didn’t tell me what either of those things entailed.

  When the flat was in order, he turned to me. He smiled a smile of leaving and forgetting, a smile that was new.

  “I’m not going to let you leave me,” I said.

  “I’m not leaving you,” he said. But he didn’t sound very convincing.

  In fifteen minutes Oliver would be making his way through the gates at Heathrow, climbing onboard a plane and flying off to Nairobi–Kampala–WhoKnewWhere. It was December 5, 1961.

  I pretended that this was not happening. I was Marcel Lawrence, almost ten years old, trying not to cry as the man who had been the centre of my life, the man who had told me he loved me, placed his hand around mine and shook it. To distract myself I concentrated on stuffing extra pens into his suit pockets. If Oliver was set on leaving, if he was going to insist on using war as an escape hatch, I wanted him to be well prepared. A war requires things: provisions, tools, armour. Oliver smiled at the pens, clicking one appreciatively.

  I looked closely and tried to learn his face by heart. His suit was a boring navy blue and Pippa teased him: “Are you going undercover, Oliver Lawrence? Are you some kind of unmarked man?” She was wearing a black dress with a small detachable white plastic collar. Her knitted black beret was now on my head, where she had adjusted it, in the French fashion.

  The departure announcement finally came over the Tannoy, a metallic-sounding voice: “WE REQUEST THAT PASSENGERS ON EAST AFRICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 006 KINDLY PROCEED TO GATE C.”

  Oliver leapt up immediately and embraced us. Then he walked through the security check, without even the courtesy of
hesitating. His eagerness was the final blow. My knees weakened and a soft, stricken “oh” escaped my lips as the departure gate doors closed and Oliver became one of the tiny figures crossing the tarmac. I tried not to think of the plane becoming a flaming fireball.

  Pippa led me to a row of seats right beside the Welcome to Britain sign. No sooner had I sat down than I broke down weeping. She stroked my hand until my tears stopped and we sat for a bit longer, listening to more announcements over the Tannoy, more departures, city names popping up, then fading away. Singapore, Moscow, Johannesburg, Helsinki. Pippa played with a string of large plastic beads she had pulled from her purse and we watched a crowd of travellers forming around us. There were suitcases in shiny plastic and old leather, reds greys pinks browns navies, some of them lying on their sides in tiredness. I felt I had been deposited with Pippa like a parcel. Suddenly it was too much. I needed to get away from all the goodbyes: the squalling infants and anxious parents and weepy couples and even the brisk businessmen with their snappy handshakes. All the partings seemed to be adding up inside me.

  “Pippa? Can we go?”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  We walked to the airport bus and she suggested that we go to the Natural History Museum and see some dinosaur skeletons to get our minds off things. It should have worked, but it was no use. I walked around the museum replaying every minute of Oliver’s departure, barely registering the prehistoric bones and polished glass vitrines.

  When we returned to Pippa’s flat, she poured herself a glass of brandy and smoked a cigarette down to its end. Then it seemed to occur to her that we should eat so she clattered about the kitchen and heated up a tin of beans and buttered a heel of bread.

  “I’ll make up a bed,” she said lazily, when we were finished eating.

  I told her I could do it myself but she insisted, going off in search of blankets. I could tell that she was trying to make me feel welcome, but her efforts felt unnatural. She billowed sheets onto the sofa. And even though she fluffed my pillow, there was something about her distracted manner that made me shiver a little.

  IT’S STRANGE TO THINK that I am responsible for the child sleeping in the other room. A few minutes ago I went and turned off the bedside lamp and found Iris curled up in a nest of sheets and blankets, her puffy Artemis Fowl dropped to the floor, every page she’s read dog-eared in case she needs to go back and comb over clues. Just before bed, I consented to a pillow fight. We both needed to release some stress. Sometimes Iris acts as if we’re having a sleepover party. She keeps saying we should be eating more cake.

  I took her to see Oliver tonight. His flat was in disarray, even worse than mine, a heap of paper spilling across every surface, scribbled notes, contact sheets, old clippings (some yellow and brittle), the protean makings of a book. Lately, I feel his age more acutely. He is still slim and courtly at age seventy-two. But he is slower moving than before and I can’t help but see his domestic surroundings as a sign of entropy. He used to be tidy but now he doesn’t seem to notice stains and dirt and dust as much. I am alert to these things—the empty Scotch bottles in the wastepaper basket, the unwashed coffee cups in the bedroom, the fruit flies swarming over a bowl of overripe bananas. The gradual slide towards the slovenly. I have seen where it can lead.

  “Don’t you have a broom?” Iris asked Oliver, taking an anthropological interest in the mess. “Can’t you cook?” she said, inspecting the tower of takeaway containers and leaky sauce packets in the kitchen. Giovanna’s Italian. Sid’s Curry Palace. Yan Chu’s House of Szechuan.

  She trailed two fingers over a Thai silk runner, tapped a dusty brass Buddha on the head. Then she calmly removed a stack of magazines from a chair and sat down.

  I left Iris and Oliver to get acquainted while I went to the nearby grocer’s. When I returned, Oliver looked over his glasses at me.

  “Iris, here, was just telling me about her conception, how her mother had a syringe of sperm from an unknown man injected into her . . .”

  “Vagina,” Iris said helpfully. She was playing with the zipper on her sweatshirt, tugging it up and down. “My mother sometimes calls it her ‘vegetables.’ She likes to use crazy words for . . . stuff.”

  I nodded, left Oliver shifting uncomfortably in his seat, and wandered off to the kitchen.

  For all his faults, for all his clumsy attempts at motherly things, Oliver has proven to be utterly loyal to me. I placed the bag of food on the counter and began to unpack my supplies: salmon, couscous, a salad mix. A few minutes later, I was slicing a cucumber when I heard Iris telling Oliver about her grandmother.

  “They think I don’t know what happened but I do. I know she was very hurt in an accident and that she might die. They think I shouldn’t know because I’m only eleven.”

  I put down the knife. I suddenly remembered the blotchiness in her face when she stepped out of the bathroom this morning.

  How does it happen? At what point is she born, the baffled, wounded adult of tomorrow? Is eleven what we react to for the rest of our lives?

  I don’t want to be worried. The shirker in me wants to pretend I haven’t overheard her, but I raise the subject on our way home, unleashing a series of difficult questions.

  “Will my grandmother get better?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Will she die?”

  “The hospital is taking good care of her. But, yes, it’s possible she could.”

  I have resolved to be truthful, to answer her questions the way she needs them to be answered. She keeps playing with the locket around her neck. She heaves a deep, loud sigh. Then she has a thought.

  “Can we make her something? Maybe a package? Some drawings.”

  The words Iris, your grandmother Natsumi is in a coma form on my tongue, then dissolve. How does one actually avoid being a dreadful parent? I know from experience that too much honesty can tear a child down. It’s a delicate balance: neither denying nor overwhelming the young, truth without cruelty.

  “Yes,” I say, finally. “That’s a very good idea. We’ll make her a package.”

  We’ll make her a package to cure our sadness, I think.

  CHAPTER 3

  A Thousand Tiny Changes

  I HAVE SEEN THE CLIPPINGS from those first years that Oliver went overseas. I know what Oliver saw, where he travelled. But in those days I was divided between wanting to know and not wanting to know. I was struggling with my anxieties. My anxieties won.

  In January, Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. Oliver flew from Nairobi to Leopoldville to cover the funeral, where he followed a wailing procession of mourners through the streets.

  I pretended he was in Lancashire.

  In February, Oliver trekked deep into the forests of Kenya to speak with Mau Mau rebels about the conditions in the British prison camps.

  I pretended he was in Suffolk.

  In early March, in Accra, Oliver met with Ghanaian Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, who reflected on his mortality a few weeks after an assassination attempt.

  I pretended he was in Essex.

  In late March, he travelled to the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam where he wrote of the desecration of a Union Jack flag by a mob of students. In Tanzania, he also visited houses abandoned by departing British families. He took photographs of rooms strewn with the items they had chosen to leave behind: stuffed antelope heads, stained zebra rugs, half-empty bottles of Boodles and Dewar’s. He described expat stores whose shelves had become “a cemetery for dusty boxes of gravy mix and powdered Yorkshire pudding,” expat schools in whose empty classrooms he found the same Beatrix Potter books he had once read to me.

  I pretended he was in Surrey.

  In Guinea–Bissau (mid-April), he met with a gentle, charismatic leader named Amilcar Cabral who had just formed a party to overthrow the Portuguese.

  I pretended he was in Northumberland.

  In June, Oliver returned to Leopoldville and follo
wed the tuba player in a brass band that marched down Boulevard Albert on the Congo’s first anniversary of independence. He then flew to Elisabethville, in the secessionist province of Katanga, where protesters were in the streets with banners blazoned No UN Forces. Later that day, he walked through wild bush with a Belgian doctor who claimed to be a witness to Patrice Lumumba’s still unresolved murder.

  I pretended he was in Cornwall.

  “How are the bicycle lessons coming along?” Oliver asked the next time he called home.

  “I’m still wobbly,” I said.

  At the Elisabethville Airport, Oliver’s bag was thoroughly searched. Among the confiscated items was a drawing I had done that evidently looked like a map of Katanga’s mining region, but was, in fact, a recent sketch of Mrs. Bowne’s hand. The intricate lines they had mistaken for roads and rivers were merely tendons and veins.

  As Oliver made his way around Africa, his stomach cramped, his bowels loosened, his pale skin burned and peeled a dozen times. He developed a heat rash, his eczema worsened. Yet even as his body fell apart, he had never sounded better. (Pippa said the work focused his anxieties or, at least, gave them different names: secession, assassination, rebellion.)

  When he telephoned us, the calls were brief and newsy, limited to details worth sharing on an expensive foreign line. Everything I said carried a tinny echo. Sometimes there was an issue that needed tackling (school, my aversion to dentists, a lingering cough, a clothing budget). Usually Oliver would start by speaking with Pippa and then move on to me. The choppy quality to our conversations was heightened by the fact that I had no mental picture of Oliver’s life whatsoever. I wondered, for example, if he was travelling around by camel. Had he met any Bedouin? I asked if he was buying interesting hats. Did he shop at an outdoor bazaar? By the same token, Oliver was losing touch with England. He spoke to a younger me, to the long-ago child he used to carry in his arms.