A Thousand Tiny Truths Read online

  At night I prayed for global tedium. I prayed for mornings when the newspapers would be filled with happy or, at very least, boring foreign news. Peaceful transitions. Decent leaders. Animals rescued from poachers. Minor train accidents. Nonfatal crowd stampedes.

  Pippa had fallen in love with an American movie actress named Jean Seberg and began adopting her look: tight black pedal-pushers, narrow penny loafers, a short pixie cut. She wore lots of stripes—striped boatneck tops and striped dresses; blue, red, thin, thick, but always horizontal—and quoted random lines from a French movie called Breathless, which she must have seen half a dozen times.

  I had always seen Pippa as a winding coil of energy, eager to wrap herself around anything and everything. Movies. Books. Music. People. She was always in a state of life-hunger, pumping and squeezing creative inspiration from every encounter. But living with her provided me with a different perspective. It wasn’t just the moments of distraction that I had noticed the first night. Now I was learning her quieter movements, the tempo of her breathing, the rhythm of her sleep, the frequency of her sighs. I was discovering that she was not inexhaustible. Some nights her voice was dreamy with medicine tablets and wine and I would listen to her slow, zigzagging stories until she nodded off, her face loose and flushed. There were mornings, cloudy mornings, when she would go out wearing her big sunglasses because she didn’t have the energy to “put on her face.” There was school and work to give structure to our days, but there were nights when she looked at me with tired, watery eyes, as if I were a puzzling visitor.

  “Why do you take so many tablets, Pippa?” I asked one day as she opened a pill bottle. We had just finished a meal of hamburgers and Ribena.

  “Because I want to sleep.”

  “What stops you from sleeping?”

  “Thinking. Old thoughts.”

  She walked around the room, picking things up and putting them down, like a bored customer. Then she walked over to the window and mused aloud: “Do you ever wonder what life would be like without the hedges?”

  I walked over and joined her. She tapped on the glass, pointing at a house in the distance where each bush had been aggressively sculpted.

  “I just loathe them. Those immaculate green spheres. The hurt smell of them when they’re freshly clipped. A perversion, that’s what it is. Imagine the arrogance of trying to give something in nature a better shape.” She turned to me. “You can’t change people, Marcel. Not by force. Not if they don’t want to be changed.” Then she looked out the window again. “I want to go walking by the Thames today. It’s a perfect day for a walk.” And though she might have preferred to go alone, she invited me along anyway.

  We walked along the south bank from Tower Bridge towards Lambeth Bridge. It was one of the highest tides of the year, with the Thames rising to hide more of the shoreline than usual. We passed couples and sightseers with cameras who had stopped to admire the view of London. We flipped through the second-hand books at the book stalls under Waterloo Bridge and Pippa nodded to various people she seemed to know: a young man in a mod suit playing saxophone, an older man in a duffle coat selling budgies. At Lambeth Bridge, the crowds thinned out and the sky began to darken and we sat down on a raised bench to watch the river’s surface. The water churned, sparkling with glints of silver light, an eerie green darkness below.

  Pippa fidgeted with the buttons of her coat and swept back loose strands of hair as we sat there in silence. Then she suddenly started speaking, vaguely, at first, but then more intimately. She told me about a man she once loved who used to walk with her by the river and how open and alive the city had felt when they were out strolling together. She said that after they were separated, the streets suddenly felt narrow and dead.

  The entire time she talked, she stared out at the river, her shoulders hunched slightly forward. She seemed to be speaking to its current rather than to me, which was just as well because I had no interest in discussing the man she had loved. Even if it was a long time ago, it made me feel jealous on Oliver’s behalf.

  “Pippa,” I said, placing my hand on hers. “I want to go home.”

  There was no answer.

  “Pippa?”

  It was as if I weren’t there any more.

  Finally, forcing a smile, she turned to me and said, “It’s a beautiful evening. The wind has died down and look.” She pointed across the river at the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, lights twinkling in the night. “It’s been a lovely day with you, Mish.”

  The fact that Pippa tended to avoid anything resembling a domestic pattern made my presence a special challenge. I could see how hard she was trying, even when she wasn’t the model caregiver. When I hinted, for instance, that the sofa was perhaps a little too makeshift for me, she quickly turned her studio back into a guest room, even painted the walls a sunflower yellow. When I withdrew or seemed too introspective, she reacted immediately. “Time for us to go out,” she would announce matter-of-factly. “Mustn’t get gloomy!”

  “Remember, Mish,” she said one afternoon. “Misery does not make you a better or more enlightened person. It just makes you miserable. Take my parents. I don’t think they’ve ever gotten over the war. Or look at Oliver. Now there’s a man who loves his misery. My God, he coddles it like a pet.”

  I shot her a warning look to let her know I didn’t like it when she said bad things about Oliver but she didn’t seem to notice. She was too busy holding out her hand, stroking the invisible misery animal nested on her palm.

  “I’ve never met anyone with such unbelievable self-pity. But you can be different, Mish. You don’t need to cling to sadness,” she said, lowering her hand to the ground, shooing the misery animal away. “See? I let go of mine.”

  To cheer me up, she took me to Queens Ice Rink in Bayswater to see the figure skaters. We sat in the viewing stands on a cold wooden bench watching the couples glide like swans across the indoor ice. Pippa called out names for all the different techniques: lutzes, salchows, cherry flips and axel jumps. I pretended that she was my mother, that we had just come from the Soviet Union where she was the leading light of the Olympic figure-skating team.

  We were sipping our tea and sharing a tube of Smarties when I suddenly blurted: “Do you think you’ll want to be a mum one day?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, keeping her eyes on the rink. “Why do you ask?”

  “I was just wondering. I thought you might want to have children of your own.”

  “Maybe one day.”

  I waited for her to say more but she was back to watching the skaters, murmuring “perfect axel,” swinging her legs like a little girl.

  “Tell me something,” I said, watching her. “What were you like when you were my age?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know. Anything. Something.”

  “All right,” she said. “Let me think . . . something, something . . .”

  But what came out was more than one something. It was a pile of somethings. She told me about arriving in Canada as a war refugee in 1941 at the age of ten and growing up within the small Polish community in Montreal, where she and Stasha attended Polish school every Saturday and church on Sundays and tried to pass as English speakers the rest of the time, slowly erasing their accents by copying announcers on the radio. She told me about collecting pebbles and pressing flowers, how from an early age she had shown an interest in objects that were small and precious. She told me about going to regular school and being told by classmates that she smelled like stinking cabbage and urine, that she was a stupid Polack.

  While all of these somethings crowded my mind, Pippa searched her purse and brought out a small photograph taken of her family in Montreal. I examined it carefully: snowflakes floating in the air, four people standing on metal stairs outside a dreary-looking brick house. The father stood with a slight hunch on the lowest step. The mother, pudgy and unsmiling, held the railing near the top. Between them were two light-haired girls
in long skirts and dowdy winter coats.

  “Just look at us,” Pippa said. “No wonder people thought we were a bunch of potato-filled peasants.”

  “I wish your classmates didn’t call you names,” I said, returning the photograph. “People are mean to me too,” I said to comfort her.

  She smiled but didn’t say anything.

  “It’s true. But I can’t imagine anyone ever being mean to you.”

  “Oh, Marcel. No one has it easy.”

  Then she swept the air with her hand as if to clear away all the hurt, all the mess.

  I looked back at the skaters and wondered, Where were Oliver’s stories? It wasn’t the first time the question had occurred to me, but Pippa’s story made it feel more significant. Everyone had childhood stories. Why were there no pictures of Oliver’s family? Why was there anger as well as sadness on his face whenever someone mentioned his mother? What about his father? I couldn’t think of a reason why anyone would not talk about his parents, even if they were dead.

  The week after we went to the ice rink, Pippa announced that we were going to a “real party.” She was wandering around the flat in a bra and a cream-coloured half-slip that was stretched tight between her hip bones. There was a long bumpy scar down the centre of her tummy, whiter than her skin. Her face was lit up by sunset coming through the window.

  I had been napping on the sofa, and roused myself slowly while Pippa dashed around getting ready, calling out: “Wake up, lazybones.” Within ten minutes she was dressed in a smart olive tunic with a black corset belt around her waist. Her eyes were dramatically lined with bold wings. She held up an outfit she had chosen for me—grey school shorts and a black jumper. Once I was dressed, she de-linted me with a roll of sticky tape.

  The party was held in a cold warehouse in Camden Town belonging to a former shoe manufacturer. Many of the windows were broken and criss-crossed with planks of wood. There were loud banging pipes, and after climbing five flights of stairs we found ourselves in an enormous, crowded room.

  Pippa grabbed my fingers and led me across the floor, making introductions. I seemed to be the only child in the group and it took me a while to overcome my shyness and keep track of names: Oy-A, Shibata, Ryszard, Lukacs, Nam, Mikkel, Le Vanni . . . The artists I met spoke with French, Japanese, Hungarian, Danish accents and delivered their thoughts in whispery snippets or long impulsive glides. From what I could tell, they seemed to spend most of the year wandering from city to city, living, as one man put it, “on the outer rim.”

  I listened, trying to look intelligent by nodding a lot. I gathered that they were big on bartering. They would exchange a typewriter for a carton of cigarettes. They would perform a dance for a bowl of stew. Even though they were broke, they would do crazy things like paint their last few pound notes white.

  It struck me that art was like a secret club and that being an artist earned you a ready-made identity. I wanted to fit in. I told a woman with pencil eyebrows and shiny red lips that I liked the square patterns on her shirt.

  The woman grinned a gap-toothed smile.

  I told a man: “I like the style of your trousers.”

  The man looked down at his trousers, clearly moved.

  The room grew more crowded and Pippa released my hand.

  I began to feel more comfortable. When offered a glass of water I gulped it down. The adults were drinking wine from tumblers, empty mason jars, china cups, anything but wineglasses.

  I imitated the clipped exclamations used by several of the German artists. “Jonas!” I shouted at a filmmaker. “Great name! I like saying that. Your tie! It’s very nice!”

  Adults liked compliments.

  I turned to Pippa and lifted my shoulders: Am I doing well? But she had drifted off. I glanced around the huge room, searching for her. Seeing that there was nowhere to hide, I tried not to panic. I waited a few minutes, then made my way around the perimeter of the room. I walked with my hands behind my back in the manner of a man taking a thoughtful promenade, then managed another loop with hands in pockets. When I was done my third loop, I noticed clusters of people forming.

  It turned out that “real party” actually meant major havoc. Everywhere I looked, there was something going on. There was a woman singing only with vowels and a man climbing a ladder while holding a large teapot of water in one hand. There was another man sitting at the top of a tall pillar, printing out cardboards signs that he handed down to people below. The messages said: Talk to me. Ignore me.

  I found Pippa sitting at a table wearing a headset and listening to a tape recorder. There must have been instructions on the recording, because every now and then she would stand on her chair or lift her leg or do something equally strange. She held out an extra headset for me. I put it on and listened to a woman’s voice saying: stand up and stomp the floor with your right foot twenty times. If your leg gets tired, slow down but continue.

  Pippa soon wandered off and I was in mid-stomp when I noticed a skinny girl with shiny black hair walking across the room. She seemed right at home. She stopped to say something to the man on the ladder, who was now using his teapot to pour drops of water into a metal basin below. Plink, plink. It was possible that what she said to the man was Why not pour it faster? because suddenly there was a gush of water and the sound of heavy rain hitting a tin roof. He shook the teapot of the last drops. The girl nodded and stepped back. When he climbed back down, people milling around clapped as though he had finished something.

  I set down my headset and when I looked up again, the girl was standing next to me. I could see now that she was about my age.

  “Enjoying yourself?” she said.

  “It’s not too bad.”

  “I’m Kiyomi.”

  “I’m Marcel.”

  I looked down and noticed she wasn’t wearing shoes. Her toes curled and uncurled.

  “Is your mother doing something too?” she asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Is your mother performing tonight?”

  “I don’t have a mother.” I had never come right out and said that before.

  There was a silence while she looked me over. I suddenly worried that I had ruined things by being so open, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  “Who’s that, then?” she asked, pointing at Pippa in the corner.

  I took a look. “That’s Pippa. She’s my guardian.”

  We stood watching for a moment. Pippa was speaking to a rich-looking woman dressed in a beautiful Chinese coat. It was embroidered with golden bridges and rippling river scenes and glowed like metal in the light. Pippa touched the coat.

  “She’s a window dresser,” I said, sitting down beside her at the edge of the table.

  “All the men are staring at her but she doesn’t even notice. I think she’s very pretty, don’t you?”

  I nodded and felt the heat rise in my face.

  “She’s beautiful,” she continued, “but unhappy.”

  I looked at Kiyomi. Who was this girl? What else had she noticed?

  “Here,” she said, and reached into the pocket of her grey smocked dress and handed me a peppermint.

  We carried on talking, with Kiyomi stating opinions and me agreeing with them, taken aback by her confidence.

  “Natsumi will be on next. She’s my mum.”

  Just then, a woman walked out into the centre of the room. She stripped down until she was wearing a paper frock, then stood motionless. I thought she might be the most exhausted-looking woman I had ever seen, but then she spotted Kiyomi and her expression lifted. The chatter around us died down and I noticed the sound of paper being crumpled and torn coming from a set of speakers. I glanced around and tried to figure out what was going on. It was amazing how everyone just watched and listened, agreeing to go wherever the performance took them—no matter what it said or didn’t say.

  I looked at Kiyomi. Her eyes peeked out from underneath long bangs and she seemed far-away. Even when her mother ripped open the side o
f her paper dress, revealing her naked backside, her expression stayed neutral. I had the sense that Kiyomi was waiting for the performance to be over. The second it ended, she turned to me, and sighed.

  I didn’t know what to say about her mother’s performance so I said, “I’ve never met my father.”

  “Well,” she said, “I guess we have that in common.”

  She nudged me with her elbow and said, “Hey, don’t look so serious.” Then she slung her arm around my shoulder. “Don’t worry. I like you, Marcel. Even when you’re serious.”

  After she sauntered off to find her mother, I was still charged by her presence. It was as though the mere act of sitting with her had tuned my senses. Someone went to open a window, and the wind blew a spray of rainwater into the room. Beads of water sparkled in the light.

  At some point I grew drowsy and drifted off to a corner to sleep. I don’t know how long I dozed, but when I finally awoke—jarred by a chair toppling over under the weight of too many coats—I looked down at my legs and saw that someone had placed a wool cape over me as a makeshift blanket.

  A few minutes later I found Pippa standing by the entrance, talking to a very tall man with thick grey hair. He was taller than the door frame. His trousers hung on legs as long as stilts. He wore a badge that said President of Maldeb. I noticed a stick protruding from his right fist and asked him what he was holding in his hand. He unfurled it. A blank flag. He looked pleased and presidential.

  “It’s very beautiful,” Pippa said. “He’s the President of Maldeb. That’s Bedlam spelled backwards.” She shared this information quietly, as if it were a delicate secret.

  When I finally sank into bed that night, I was unable to sleep. I stared at my clock and wondered what Oliver was doing. I looked out the window at the sky and pictured Oliver looking at the same sky. I didn’t like the idea that Oliver was happier wherever he was, but I didn’t want him to be miserable either.