The Making of Henry (15 page)

Driving home from Liverpool, scene of his father's greatest éclat to date, he sits, hunched quietly, looking into the headlights of the oncoming cars.

And then, out of the blue, in a ditch of its own making on the other side of the road, a car on its back, exquisite like a sculpture in the yellow-fever moonlight, a thing designed for speed become utterly still, except for one of its rear wheels, spinning, spinning with infernal beauty, as though powered by a battery designed for that very purpose.

Some sights, however inconsequent, you see for ever. Henry still sees that spinning wheel, though in his memory he suspects he turns it slower than it turned in actuality, and bathes it in more yellow moonlight than there really was. Milking it. Smoking it. Or maybe just wanting to invest it with greater significance than it warranted. Never sure, Henry, whether he is doing enough or too much justice to event. Perhaps because he draws too big a distinction, unless he draws too small a one, between event and him. Is this an uncertainty which is bound to follow when you take no interest in world history?

But then his father took no interest in world history either, yet to Henry there never seemed to be an event that didn't have his father at the centre of it. Mr Busy. Forget Superman: it was Henry's father who was always first on the scene. And who always knew what to do. He was one of those men, Henry's father, who are born to make a human bridge of their own back, to be the rope down which the injured slide, to hold crumbling apartment blocks apart, to scoop unconscious babies from under the wheels of runaway trains, to take Rivka Yoffey to the Midland. Did the bastard breathe fire, Henry sometimes wondered, only in order to put it out? Was
that
it?

Mindful in disaster, he didn't slam on his brakes, not with oil and water on the road – oh no, not Henry's father – but slid gently into the verge. That's the way to do it, Henry. Suit the driving to the conditions, even in an emergency – correction,
especially
in an emergency. Then he was off, across the road almost before he'd stopped, his paper-magician's jacket with its big patched pockets flying behind him. And he was strong. If need be he would right the upturned vehicle with his own hands, then peel it open like a sardine tin. He was wrenching at a door and all but had it off by the time Henry was out of his seat. Henry not one of those in whom catastrophe finds a hero. Henry more circumspect, weighing up the pros and the cons, not wanting to make a bad business worse.

Cometh the hour, cometh not Henry.

Your fault, Dad, you were always there before me.

If we waited for you, Henry . . .

Don't rationalise it. You were always there before me because you wanted to be there before me. Had I run you'd have raced me.

There were people dying, Henry
.

There were always people dying. And you were always the first to find them.

You think I should have left it to you find them? You were just a
boy.

So how was I ever to learn to be a man?

Not by seeing people decapitated in their cars.

Ah, that! Thanks, Dad. At least no one can say you never called a spade a spade.

Henry only got to hear about people with their heads missing at the inquest where, red and incoherent, he had been subject to cross-examination – asked questions anyway, which was tantamount to a cross-examination as far as Henry was concerned – in the matter of what he'd witnessed. To which his answer, probe him as they might, was precisely nothing. In our family, Henry tried to explain, it is my father who does the witnessing.

For the moment he had joined his father at the ruined car, its wheel spinning, smoking in the night, his father had clapped a heavy hand across Henry's eyes and twisted his head from the scene. Not for you, Henry. Not for you to behold what's happened here.

‘Wave a car down,' he'd said, ‘quickly, go on, now!' His voice urgent, in command, but from the immeasurable depths of adult sorrow. Henry knew the sound. Keep the sight of death from the kid –
that
sound. Used on Henry before, first when poor Anastasia decided to give up the ghost while they were visiting her mob-handed in hospital, suddenly, as though that was the only way to get rid of them, the grey creeping across her face like the afternoon light passing from the Pennines; and then again when a neighbour popped in to get his breath and without a word of explanation collapsed on their living-room carpet, his lips fluttering as though in final indecision. On both those occasions, and with a tenderness which surprised and doubly saddened Henry, his father had covered his eyes and led him away.

Never the women who did it, never his mother, always his father.

In this way Henry had got to thirteen with death all around him, with death nudging into the peripheries of his vision, but without ever having actually seen – actually been allowed to rest his eyes on – a dead person. And now here he was again on the East Lancashire Road, denied another golden opportunity.

He was grateful at the time. He consented. He let his head be turned away. He wasn't sure he could have coped with anything horrible anyway. And someone had to flag down a car. Because that too was being grown up – standing in the road and flagging down a car.

But there has to be a first time, doesn't there? You can't go on being protected from mortality for ever. And yet that seemed to be his father's intention – to keep him out of the club.

Until when? Until exactly when, Dad?

Until you were old enough
.

And you were the one who said I was tied to my mother's apron strings.

Not the same thing. You'd be dealing with the dead in good time.
There was no reason to hurry it
.

Wasn't there? Do you know what it felt like? It felt as though you wanted the big stuff all to yourself. I couldn't get near. You wouldn't let me near.

Trust me, Henry, it wasn't a competition. I'd have been only too
glad for you to have taken over, gezunterheit, but you were too young.
I found my sister dead in bed when I was six years old. My grandmother, God rest her soul, died with her arms round me when I was
ten. She died in my face, Henry. I swallowed her last breath. I couldn't
have wished any of that on you. But I didn't want more for myself,
I can promise you that. I'd had my fair share. More than my fair share.

Maybe those events were the making of you.

They weren't
.

How do you know?

I know
.

You'd have been a better man without?

I'd have been another man without
.

Dad, you might not have been a man at all. You might have ended up like me.

No. You're the Stern Gang's doing.

And then, the day Henry leaves home to go to university, it happens again.

Both his parents are intending to take him to the station to see him off – along with his grandmother Irina, and his surviving great-aunts Marghanita and Effie. But that's too many. It will embarrass the boy, the Girls see that. So it's down to just his mother and his father and then, at the very last minute, his mother cries off.

‘It will upset me too much.'

Izzi Nagel open his arms to the heavens. ‘Why should it upset you seeing your son off to university? It's what you've always wanted.'

‘That's why it will upset me.'

‘How can getting what you've always wanted upset you?'

Ekaterina exchanges looks with her son. What a husband! You marry a man from North Manchester and this is the subtlety you have to live with. He eats fire and thinks getting what you want must make you happy.

‘You take him. Just see he gets a nice seat in a comfortable compartment.'

‘Look,' Henry says, ‘I don't want any of this. Let Dad drop me at the station. That'll be fine.'

On the way out of the house he hears his mother whispering to his father. ‘Don't dare drop him at the station. Go through with him. Make sure he's got his ticket and settle him on the train.'

He hugs his mother. These are not yet kissie-kissie times. Love you, Mom / Love you, son has not yet been imported from the United States of Schmaltz. In matters of human relations the English are still clinging on to dignity, the Nagels more tightly than most. ‘Enjoy yourself,' she says, patting his cheek. ‘And don't forget you are as good as anybody.'

‘I will. I won't.'

‘But don't be too much of a snob either. Try to value other people's talents.'

‘I won't. I will.'

‘And write.'

‘No choice, it's an essay a week.'

‘No, you fool, I mean write to me.'

Henry wishes, though he knows she means nothing by it, that his mother hadn't called him a fool on the day he leaves home to go to university.
Fool
. Does he want that to be the last word he hears her say? But then he is upset, wavering, his insides rattling around in his body, his voice not firm. This will be further from her than he has ever been. Love you, Mom.

More matter-of-fact, being seen off by his Dad. No word problems, because between his father and himself there are no words. Words will come later.

‘You got everything?'

‘Yep.'

‘Ticket?'

‘Yep.'

‘And you know where you're getting off?'

‘Yep.'

Goodbye then, handshake, wink, maybe a bit of rough stuff around the shoulders – that should have been it. But his father decides to see him on to the train. Mr Busy. ‘Here,' he says, motioning to Henry's bags, ‘let me take those.'

Never a sight Henry likes to see, whether he already has reason to be distressed or not, his father carrying another person's bags, even when they're Henry's. A distinguishing feature of the man, of course, no doubt about it, the alacrity of his public spirited-ness. Got a bad back, can't move your furniture, need a push because your car won't start, want your party to go with a bang – call Izzi Nagel. Demeaning, isn't it, Dad? Demeaning to be at everyone's beck and call?

A question he means to ask. Why did
you
have to be the butler for all and sundry? Who appointed you dogs body of all Manchester? But he will need more than his usual amount of courage for that one. You don't demean the demeaned.

Sometimes Henry thinks he can actually smell it on his father's breath. Servitude willingly suffered. Vassalage. Sour and a little too warm. So that's what slaves smell of – egg and onion toasted in petroleum.

On to the luggage rack his bags go, anyway. Neatly stored. Little Lord Fauntleroy with his manservant (who also happens to be his father), Izzi.

With all the fussing, the train is filling up around them. Henry finds a table with just one sleeping person opposite. He'd have preferred nobody, but at least this person is wearing railway employee's uniform and so might be getting off shortly. Might even be planning to drive the train when he wakes. Henry's father makes sure Henry's settled comfortably.

‘You won't forget to write to your mother.'

‘Nope.'

Then he pulls a small packet from his inside pocket. ‘Something for you to read,' he says awkwardly. Not Henry's father's sort of sentence. Nor Henry's father's sort of gesture. Is this the first gift they have exchanged, without the intercession of Ekaterina, man to man? Henry is so astonished he thinks he is going to cry. A book, a book from his father!

But before he can say so much as thank you, his father does what he is always doing and claps his hands over Henry's eyes. ‘Quick,' he says, ‘come on, off the train, quick.'

Oh, shit! Henry thinks. What now? What this time? What tragedy has he conjured up for me today?

And everything happens so quickly – for Henry of course does not struggle, but goes quietly, putty in his father's hands – that when he next opens his eyes he is on the platform, and his father is in urgent conversation with the guard, and everyone is up out of their seats, looking, wondering, and people are running, and an urgent request for a doctor is going out over the Tannoy, though as Henry knows from experience, a doctor will be too late. Kaput, whoever you are, once Izzi Nagel has found you.

‘The man opposite me?' Henry asks, as though he needs to.

‘Yes,' his father tells him. Compassionately. That old deep adult sorrow, keeping from Henry what must be kept. ‘A heart attack, I'd say. Probably died in his sleep.'

Then Henry remembers that the man did look a little green. So has he seen a corpse at last? He doesn't think so. He didn't really look. And he didn't really know the man was dead. It can't count as looking upon death, can it, if you don't know it's death you're looking upon.

Thus, on my first foray into manhood, Henry thinks, does my father deny me once again. The ghoul he is, the fucking ghoul!

For a moment it occurs to Henry to wonder whether his father planted the dead man there, has always been planting dead men there, as milestones marking the stages of Henry's freedom from dependence. Except that there have been no stages of Henry's freedom from dependence. He will die dependent.

Once the body has been removed, propped up in a station wheelchair, like unwieldy luggage, the train gets underway again. To be on the safe side – his father's idea – Henry is in another compartment. Henry concurs with this. He doesn't want to catch anything. Malaria, rabies, bubonic plague – whatever the dead infect you with.

A mile out of Manchester he unwraps the gift his father gave him. It's a picture book, with diagrams. Henry suspects the first picture book with diagrams he has ever owned.
Origami – Let's
Fold, it's called.