The Making of Henry (16 page)

It bears a brief inscription on the title page, in childish writing. ‘
For Henry, on the occasion of you going to university, Dad
.'

The next corpse that comes Henry's way is his father's. Struck down by a hammer-blow of guilt and sorrow. Nothing to stop Henry this time. Carte blanche. No one to shield his eyes or to usher him into another room or to order him to flag down a passing car. Now's your chance, Henry. Go on. Go on, do it. Go contemplate the awful majesty of death to your heart's content.

His mother, too. But his mother has been damaged and he knows that's beyond him. Whereas his father, they tell him, has an air almost of serenity and looks like a young boy again.

And his breath? Henry wonders. Will his breath still be sour?

Forgetting there won't be any breath.

Either way, it's far too late for Henry now. He isn't man enough to look.

SIX

Although Henry is always the first person in the country to get a flu jab, he is also always the first person in the country to get flu.

Without the jab, he tells himself, it would have been even worse.

In fact, Henry likes having flu. It reminds him of being jealous. The same aching of the limbs, as though his bones – his clavicles, his femurs, his humeri (words he's looked up in an atlas of the human skeleton) – have overheated and become new centres of the senses for him; the same lazy throbbing of the temples, like warm jets of water flushing through his brain cells; the same submission to the caprices of the body and its blood. When he is jealous, Henry can barely move his head, so drowsily heavy, like a sunflower at evening, does it become; and so it is when he has flu. For these reasons, Henry has always preferred jealousy and flu to any other sexual activity.

He imagines, Henry, that he looks rather spectacularly hollow on his pillows, the rims around his eyes purple, his lips faintly parted, his cheeks blazing. Not as beautiful as when he was young and the bones showed their burning tracery through his flesh, alarming whoever cared for him at the time, but he has a grander backdrop for his sufferings today, a softer and more billowing bed, an altogether more elegant bedroom with its row of seven little windows – one for each dwarf – looking out, not over the deathly Pennines, but the park, the West End, the City, an extruded horizontal of teeming London, a fluttering letter-box diorama of the metropolis from which, for a cruel day or two, flu has parted him. If you have to be ill, Henry thinks, this is the place to be ill in. He tries to imagine his father unwell here, but he cannot connect him with the pillows, cannot picture his cheek upon them. Which just goes to show that a person is not a person full stop, but changes with his habitat. As Henry's habitat is changing him, like a hand constantly soothing his brow. So if this had been my place of birth, instead of up
there
, what would I have been, Henry wonders.

Happy, for one.

Successful, for two.

No one I recognise, for three.

On Sunday morning Moira brings him strudel in a plastic container. She lets herself in now, with her own key, then makes him tea. ‘Fluids are essential when you've got a cold,' she tells him.

‘I haven't got a cold, I've got flu.'

She fluffs his pillows. ‘It's a little early in the year for flu. People don't get flu in August. You've got a cold.'

‘I'm too weak to argue with you,' he says. ‘Which proves I've got flu.'

‘And I am not prepared to humour you, which proves you've only got a cold.'

‘Feel my forehead.'

‘And?' she asks.

‘What temperature is it?'

‘Hot.'

‘See.'

‘Henry, your forehead is always hot. You're a hot-headed person.'

‘That's because I've got flu all the time.'

No, she could say, but doesn't, that's because you're jealous all the time. Yes, she has noticed it. They have been going out for three or four weeks, no more, but already he is jealous of his own shadow. When they pass a shop window which offers them their reflection he pauses so that he can admire them together. Henry in his dotage and a woman young enough, almost, to be his daughter. That's when she observes that he is jealous of himself for being with her.

He has an antique tray which moves up and down his bed on oiled brass tracks. The opulence of this place! On this tray, Moira lays out strudel for him and strong tea. And of course aspirin.

‘You take too many of those,' she tells him.

‘A man of my age can't take too many aspirin. It prevents the blood clotting. The only reason I am not having a heart attack now is aspirin.'

‘Fine, Henry, so long as you don't prick your finger.'

‘Why, what will happen if I prick my finger?'

‘You'll bleed.'

‘Of course I'll bleed. If you prick me do I not bleed?'

‘To
death
, Henry! Think how thin your blood must be by now. It'll drain out of your finger in seconds.'

‘All of it?'

‘Every last drop.'

He thinks about it. ‘I can't stop taking aspirin,' he says at last, cutting into the strudel, ‘I need them for my migraines.' Then he tells her about the spider, the daddy-long-legs which sat on his brain while his mother laboured to hold him back from a disgusting world.

‘And you've had migraines ever since?'

‘On and off.'

She is sitting by his bed in a tasselled chair which must have intrigued and baffled Henry's father, so dainty is it, so unlike anything that ever came from his workshop. ‘What is this?' Henry imagines his father saying when he first saw it. ‘A sofa for fairies?'

Moira is no fairy, which might be why she appears uncomfortable in it, on the edge, fiddling with her earrings.

She shakes her head at Henry. ‘I seem to have spent my life,' she says, ‘undoing what mothers have done to their sons.'

‘Well, one must suppose you wouldn't accept the job if you didn't like it.'

‘Who said I've accepted it?'

‘You're turning me down?'

‘Don't personalise everything. When it comes to remothering I'm turning you all down, I've had enough of it.'

‘Who's “all”?'

Their eyes meet. Hers very Baltic this morning, Henry's rheumy, the colour of strudel. Then she turns her face from him and gets up, going to the window, where the world of men undone by mothers stretches further than the eye can see.

‘For a start, Aultbach has suddenly developed a limp,' she says.

‘I thought the strudel wasn't quite perfect today,' Henry says. ‘But what's that got to do with his mother?'

‘It's got to do with me, it's got to do with me having to mother him.'

‘I thought he had a girlfriend.'

‘He has, but she doesn't mother. Then there's Lachlan, then there's you . . .'

‘Lachlan? What's Lachlan been asking you to do?'

‘Same as you. Tuck him up in bed. Spoon him cake and give him aspirin.'

‘Tuck him up in bed? You visit Lachlan's bed?'

She remains at the window, her head averted. He loves the back of her. The front of her too, but the back of any woman Henry cares about is more poignant and therefore more sensual to him. When you've got jealous flu the receding parts of a woman are what you want to look at.

She is wearing a cream suit, well tailored, the waist nipped in, the skirt straight with an insolent slit at the back, not just a parting in the material but a wilful slash, a touch of tartiness which the elegance of the cut otherwise belies. The way Henry likes it. On her feet high-heeled summer shoes, a lattice of fine straps, her painted toenails showing. Her weight is on her left foot, unbalancing her, giving her an impatient look, as though she would rather be somewhere else. But she must also know that when she stands like that her skirt tautens across her buttocks, and therefore she cannot want Henry to want her to go.

‘You're all ill, you men,' she says at last. ‘It's a beautiful summer's day out there and you've all got something wrong with you.'

‘That's because we're all old,' Henry says. ‘But there's no reason to be irritable with me just because you've been visiting Lachlan's bed.'

‘I haven't been “visiting his bed”. He isn't well, you're all not well, and he asked me to bring him round some patisseries.'

‘The way you used to do with his stepmother? Is he planning to resurrect the tradition? Including cremation?'

‘I don't know what he's planning.'

‘But you took him some.'

‘How could I refuse? He's recently bereaved. He's a customer. And I was coming to see you anyway.'

‘You mean you delivered him patisseries this morning, on the way to me? You're telling me you've already been there? You've done him first?'

‘It's not a crime, Henry.'

‘That depends on how long you stayed –'

‘I didn't stay.'

‘– and on whether he got fresher strudel than I did.'

‘Well, you've nothing to worry about on that score – he doesn't like strudel.'

‘So on what score do I have something to worry about? Croissants? Or do
millefeuilles
run in the family? Let me see if I can guess how he likes them – confectioner's cream, I'd say, I doubt he's a custard man . . . yes, confectioner's cream. Which just leaves the method of delivery to be determined . . . By tongue, I'd say. Am I getting warm?'

She turns to face him, denying him her back. In anger, her face loses its lopsidedness, as though it is contentment which makes her crooked. ‘Grow up, Henry,' she says.

But how can Henry grow up, given the eye of the storm of her skirt, its still point, where the horizontal tension meets the vertical, that eloquent square of fraught silence which only an engineer or a philosopher of space possesses the science to explain? Let Hell freeze over while Henry's standing in it, discoursing with the Devil, and let a woman scurry through the icy flames with that square of silence screaming from her skirt – Henry knows which phenomenon will engross him more.

‘Come here,' he says, reaching out for her, bravely, despite his fevered state.

But before he can touch her she has quit the room – skewering his carpet with her high heels, her hair tossing like a pony's, the slit of her skirt gaping more lewdly than Henry in his influenza can bear – leaving him trapped under his antique tray, the crumbs and the cold tea. ‘Call me when you're feeling better,' she shouts as she opens the door. ‘And you should know that we don't use confectioner's cream at Aultbach's. That would have been your mother.'

Aultbach's – t,t,t. Her lapping of the t his final torment.

His poor mother.

Not enough she used confectioner's cream, but now, in death, where she cannot defend herself, she must be derided for it. What's Henry's duty here? He has never known. Stand up for your mother every time another woman speaks slightingly of her and the truth of it is you have no women left.

She'd warned him how it would be. ‘They'll make mincemeat of you,' she'd prophesied. ‘You won't know how to resist. They'll twist you round their little finger. They'll get you to cut my heart out to prove how much you love them, and you'll do it.'

And she was right. How could she be otherwise? Who knows women better than a mother? And who better knows her son? First chance he gets, Henry is fist-deep in his mother's innards, scalpelling out her ventricles and whatever else they fancy while he's in there. Aorta, anyone? Small intestine? Pancreas? And then he's off, running, running, dispensing maternal organs like a second Mother Teresa let loose among the bloodsuckers. Whereupon he stumbles, whereupon the heart falls from his slippy grasp, whereupon, of course, of course, the heart cries, ‘Are you hurt, my son?'

Christ! These mothers!

And what does Henry, in the dirt, do then?

Attacks the pulp of pumping muscle, that's what, throttles it, berates it, cries ‘Will you shut the fuck up, Ma!', then remembers himself, his task, his sacred duty, and resumes running to the woman, the women, just as his mother said he would.

The women who don't give a shit how hurt Henry is.

Was that another reason, yet another among hundreds, she held him back from the world, kept him inside her as long as she decently could, and then bound him in ribbons to her side, reading to him of callous men and girls with skin as fine as angels' wings – because she knew he would have no choice but to knife her once she let him go?

It would help if he knew more men. He could ask them. Is this what you did too, is this what we all do? Is this what we essentially
are
?

But he's got rid of all the men he knew. Friends. What do you do with friends? Hang on to your friends, someone should have told him – maybe the wife or girlfriend of one of the friends in question – hang on tight to your friends, Henry, you'll need them when you're old. But then he'd have fallen for her, wouldn't he, loved her for her foresight and intelligence, worshipped her for her wisdom and acuity, and asked her to have dinner with him – and bang would have gone another chum.

His father's no use. His father was a brute, crashed like a herd of elephants through the fine web of undergrowth which bound Henry to his mother and then, when he was finally called upon to feel his way gently, felt too much – felt too much too suddenly – and let his own heart give out. What sort of example was that?

Henry's heart could give out, too, remembering the desertion of his mother. It's cake talk that does it. Confectioner's cream. He sees it as a measure of her loneliness, the extent to which he and his father had abandoned her, that she should have been reduced to that. She could talk of nothing else the weekend he nipped across from the Pennines to see her and found her in the kitchen – a room in the house she had once upon a time claimed she needed a guide dog to help her to locate – up to her ears in piping nozzles and spatulas. ‘What are you doing?' he had asked, afraid her sensitivity had finally tipped her over the edge. ‘I'm scrolling, Henry,' she told him. ‘Look – it's like decorating a church. It's like sculpting. I love doing it. You've no idea. It's like a whole new world. I just love it.' She seemed possessed, inordinate. ‘Did you actually bake that thing?' Henry asked, seriously frightened for her now. ‘Don't be ridiculous! When did I ever bake a cake?' ‘When did you ever scroll, Ma?' She kissed him, pulled him to her so he could smell the marzipan in her hair. ‘The cakes, I buy,' she said. ‘Dead plain. Nothing on them. The rest I do. See this? It's called a crimping knife. Guess what I do with it.' ‘You crimp?' ‘Exactly. I crimp, Henry! I flute, I pipe, I letter, I emboss. Aren't you proud of me?' What could he say? That he would have been had there been less hysteria in the enthusiasm? That it had always been understood between them that they were too civilised ever to embrace a craze, that they were professional sufferers and bleeders, nothing else, and that they had only to look at her husband, his father, if they needed to be reminded what a hobby did to you?