Sister Crazy

Jude and I had discovered one use for Talking Man’s urgent monotone. It was easy to induce dementia in him by making incomplete jerks of varying lengths on his vocal cord so that he’d only speak fragments of his stock phrases, which you could interrupt at random until he sounded ready for the white jacket with the long sleeves tied up at the back. This game had limited amusement value and Jude and I indulged in it only when flagging and war-weary and vulnerable to hilarity. I yanked Talking Man’s ring pull in jerks. ‘ATT-’ … ‘-DOWN BE-’ … ‘-HANDS ON-’ etc. We started yelling at each other.

‘Make me a peanut butter sandwich now!’

‘Have you done your homework!’

‘No!’

‘What’s for supper!’

‘Ask Mummy!’

‘Ask her yourself!’

‘Dismissed!’

‘Okay!’

‘Shut up!’

Jude and I are only fifteen months apart, and in spite of ourselves, I guess, we have a twin mentality, which time and distance cannot take away. Those are the facts. Jude likes to say from time to time, ‘You were a mistake. You were not supposed to happen.’

Considering I am not my parents’ last born, I do not take this seriously. I came too soon, okay, I can deal with that. I let him have his fun, though. I let him think I am slightly alarmed, but I am not. I have doubts about many things but I am absolutely sure that I was born out of love, despite my affinity for wartime.

Jude and I were steeped in World War II, although we were born some fifteen years after it ended. Knowing about the war gave me a sense of distinction, as if I, too, had suffered and overcome, emerging with my own badge of courage. I knew it as a black-and-white time, a place of shadows and relentless drizzle and austerity, of necessary violence and amazing resilience, a world in bold focus. I was there and Jude was with me.

Now I am in the room full of clocks where the voice calls out, WAKE UP! MOVE ALONG! HONEY, IT’S TIME!

I look at Action Man in 1999 and connect only with the name; everything else is strange to me. The packaging screams its gaudy colours of fire and blood and tropical locations, having all to do with fantasy and nothing to do with the high stakes and redemption that we played for. Even the man looks different, rubbery and matte-finished, with a sunbed tint and the vain five-o’clock shadow of the gigolo, not of the man suffering sleep deprivation and high anxiety. The men are marketed now under different names, clamorous titles of hollow intensity: ‘THE BOWMAN!’ ‘ROLLER EXTREME!’ ‘AGENT 2000!’ ‘SKY DIVER!’ ‘CRIMEBUSTER!’ ‘OPERATION JUNGLE!’ ‘SURF RESCUE!’ They have special vehicles: GYRO COPTER, and POLAR MISSION TURBO 4x4 fires as you drive! Mission cards are included and a disclaimer is written on the boxes, in more demure print: ‘Action Man™ does not identify with any known living person.’

Picking up these packages in the toy department, pretending to be shopping for a son or nephew, I feel a little scornful and superior. But what do I know about war? I crave the old me. Now I miss things like decision and certainty, beginnings and endings. In grown-up life, there are few demarcations. It is a great battlefield with constantly shifting fronts, that’s how I see it. Where, for instance, do I end and Jude begin? When does childhood end? No one ever said anything.

We were all corralled by our parents into watching a Steinbeck dramatization one evening in extreme youth, probably The Grapes of Wrath, and we lay on the floor in front of the TV stunned, literally, by the Great Depression. Everyone in the drama wandered about wearing skimpy, threadbare clothing and droopy expressions, speaking in defeated monotones, going to sleep on hard floors after a meal of one bulbous parsnip. The mother woke up the children at five in the morning, nudging them into readiness for another cotton-picking day. ‘Honey,’ she said to each one of them, followed by a gloomy pause, ‘it’s time.’ This scene happened at least eight times in the drama. My sister and I were sniggering wrecks by bedtime, hardly able to negotiate the stairs for hilarity. Waking up for school from then on we would say to each other, ‘Honey.’ BIG PAUSE. ‘It’s time.’

1914–1918. 1939–1945. I marvelled at a world at war and I could not fathom anything but conflict, beginning and ending with shocking decisiveness. I could not imagine the home front. I could not picture any casual activity at all. Surely shops were empty and gardens overgrown and any person without a gun in foreign fields could only stand on a rooftop with a helmet and torch or sit fretting by a window in a darkened house, straggly-haired and wide-eyed with grief and worry but steeled by virtue. Films, therefore, that showed the truth – that is, some semblance of normality going on at home while battles raged – were downright distracting to me.

‘I don’t understand, Jude. Why are they in a restaurant? Jude, why is she laughing? Jude, when is this happening? What is going on?’

Jude did not always answer me, at least not right away. Sometimes he would answer me several hours from the time I asked a question, or even the next day. I was used to this. That time, for instance, Jude came back from one of his Robin Hood sorties to the sweetshop. Jude stole sweets with his friends and shared them out at home. I found this diligent generosity poignant. So Jude said to me suddenly, passing me a red fruit gum, my favourite, ‘He is on leave. He is home recovering from a wound. She is hysterical due to war. It is not really a happy laugh.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Okay, thanks.’

I always knew which conversation he was resurrecting. I just did.

We were leaving home, where we were born, and moving to my dad’s country, where he was born, and we were sailing there on the SS Pushkin. We packed. Action Man packed. Jude decided we had to be a bit ruthless and thin out the equipment and the wardrobe. We could not take everything with us, so we made packages to sell to Jude’s friends. I did not know any girls in my convent school who played with Action Man; it was not a suitable marketplace. Besides, a convent does not encourage the entrepreneur.

Jude and I took shirt cardboard from Dad’s drawer and sewed on items of uniform, ironing the clothing first of all. The tunic would be displayed just so, one arm flung out and the other laid across the chest at an angle. The trousers we attached by two stitches and set in profile, the waistband tucked under the skirting of the jacket. Jude had stronger fingers and he stitched the shoes below the trousers and attached the hat or helmet above the jacket collar, where the head would be. The accessories were arrayed to one side, under the outstretched arm: gun, belt, pouch, water bottle, etc. There might be extras of our own design such as a book, a hanger, real braces with snaps, undies, or a vest. This gave the package real distinction. Jude then wrote out prices – £1.10, £1.70, etc. – and some slogan in eye-catching lettering: ‘MAKE YOUR MAN THE SMARTEST IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD!’ for instance. He even supplied stars at the bottom of the cardboard display sheet which you could collect and redeem against further purchases.

‘But Jude,’ I said, ‘what will we give away? We are taking the rest of the stuff with us. And we won’t even be here.’ I had visions of irate schoolboys clutching stars and yelling our names accusingly, forcing their way through a crowded quayside where the SS Pushkin was docked. But Jude waved all objections aside simply by looking at me with his slow gaze and not answering. In a finishing touch, we covered each cardboard sheet with cellophane and Jude took the packages with him to school.

I had an idea we could sell Talking Man. He could be marketed as a sort of special business extra – Casualty Man. Because mostly you would not want to sacrifice your best men in a scene with a lot of extras, and it was realistic to have strewn bodies, it would be a bonus to have a Casualty Man just for the sake of verisimilitude. I said we could advertise Talking Man right away as the FREE GIFT with stars, which would solve that little deception in one stroke. People would know what they were aiming for and it might even quicken sales.

Jude said, ‘I’ll think about it.’ This meant no.

What should I do with Talking Man? He was too pathetic to take with us and to me he suggested unmarked graves and dead men in transport ships, only recognizable thanks to identity bracelets. I thought of dockside welcoming committees, wailing women and stoical fathers with bleeding hearts and stone-cold corpses under shrouds on stretchers. And so I left Talking Man behind, accidentally on purpose. Forgive me, Talking Man, Ugly Man, One Foot, Enemy, Traitor, LMF Man, Shell-Shock Man, Missing in Action Man, Transvestite Man, Misfit Man – over and out. Au revoir, old thing; cheerio, farewell, goodbyee.

Jude is a foreign correspondent now.

I had a dream recently that I was on assignment with him. Real Action Men now. We are running in a crouched position in the water, along the edge of a river. We have automatic rifles. I am thrilled and I feel safe. My brother is a war correspondent and he cannot be killed. He fires at snipers while we scamper along but misses intentionally, signalling to them merrily. I am charged with pride. I glance back at the snipers and see in their faces a calculated pretence of gratitude. They do not care that Jude spared them and suddenly I know they will shoot him. I need to warn him but it is too late. They shoot me. My face is falling into the water, I fall slowly. Oh-oh. My back feels hot.

‘Jude, am I hit? Jude, am I?’

Jude says, ‘No. No.’

‘Oh, I think so,’ I say, smiling a little. ‘Yes, I think so, Jude.’

I am aware of the coming oblivion, the terrible loneliness of death, and I see this reflected in Jude’s eyes as I fall into his arms. I know we are too far from help. His look is grave, wary; he is speechless with impending loss, although his actions are careful and practical, plugging the exit wounds with his fingers, supporting my drooping head, as if in not recognizing death rushing toward me, he can prevent even this.

Jude has a knack of choosing to investigate a place that is about to be torn apart by hostilities, a place rife with fanatics and con men. He has a tendency to stand up in press conferences and ask provocative questions in the most unassuming way, with gravity and charm. He is probing and brave and he rallies people to him. I hope his charm will protect him. I hope his charm is bulletproof.

I watch him walk away from me after sharing a drink on the eve of an assignment and I note the loping strides he takes, even though he is not a tall man. I note his head tilted to one side slightly, tilted in thought, and that he moves away at a pace never faster than ambling, although I know his bags are not packed and he leaves in less than three hours. To my surprise, I think of Talking Man. I imagine I hold the ring pull of his speech cord and the farther Jude walks from me, the longer and tauter the cord becomes. I must hold tight because if I let go, Jude will find himself, I envisage, rooted to the spot, and with the release of the tension he will feel real fear for once, and there will come from his mouth a vulnerable rush of speech, a babble of strange words, and he will be lost.

Wherever he is, and no matter what, even flying gunfire and so on, Jude calls me on the telephone when he is reporting from a war-torn place. Wherever he is. He might ask me a sporting question. How is my team doing? Who scored? He might send me on an errand. Please water my plants. Please call my office. Please prune the peony bush. He might describe the meal he just ate, his room, or some arresting vision he has seen in the strange place he is in. This time, though, I have not heard from him in twenty-three days. I wake up sometimes in the middle of the night. I am wide awake, my heart is hammering, my throat parched, my teeth aching from clamping my jaw shut in fitful sleep. I call out his name and I ask, ‘Where are you?’ I say it a second time, more quietly, ‘Where are you?’

I am in the room full of clocks and now there is no voice, just ticking. It’s okay. I’m holding tight, I won’t let go.

Angels’ Share

My dad is really grumpy now. It happened somewhere back on the road, sometime between his slouching into the driver’s seat and the end of this fifteen-minute journey from our summer cottage to the next village. I don’t know. Maybe he spotted Indians in the hills. Maybe he felt our little wagon train was under threat and we are far, far from any army outpost. Rescue is not likely. He won’t say a thing about it, though, to my mother or to me, his sole passengers. He is a tight-lipped man. Being provider and protector is one devil of a job in a big country, I can see that.

It’s a fine afternoon and the sky is a slaphappy blue but I wish there were a slight breeze, just enough to ruffle the leaves a little, enough to break up the menace of a still, hot day. I want to open the window but my dad would not like this, so I don’t. If you open the window, the air conditioning in the car, one of the few features he knows how to operate without having to ask anyone, will not work properly. I would rather have real air play over my face, but I try not to think about it. I try not to feel tyrannized by air conditioning. We are nearly there. I hope I will not be sick. I feel hot and cold and somewhat nauseous and the tension level in the car is high, pressing on my temples, making my heart race. My mother is looking out of her window and she says something in febrile, purposeful tones. She is always ready to dispel gloom.

‘I just saw the most beautiful bird!’ she says, or something like that. We are nearly there. The Indians are on the warpath and this last stretch of road seems endless to me, fraught with danger. I am unarmed. Dad won’t teach me how to use a gun because I am a girl and it is unseemly and he thinks I won’t need it. He will protect me. I hope so.

I wish he’d say something. I wish I were a boy. Then maybe we would not be taking this sissy journey to the chemist for a herbal remedy for depression and my dad would not be so mad at me.

I could be Doc Holliday. That would be very good. I have a deadly disease and I deal with it in a manly way. I have no time for it. It does not diminish me. There will be no gauzy visions of angels, no lingering goodbyes. I retch and splutter grudgingly into squares of white linen. Goddamnit, there goes another hanky. Pitch it into the fireplace. Good shot.

My woman gives me that boring look, her eyes sparkling with fear and pity.

‘Stop that! Get out! Leave me alone!’

I reach for the whisky and I don’t bother with a glass. It is possible I drink too much. Never mind. As long as I can shoot straight. As long as I can stand up for my friends and walk an unswerving line to the O. K. Corral. On that day, I’ll be wearing my finest, no fraying cuffs.

There’s a knock on the door. Here comes Wyatt. He leans against the door and walks over to the bedside table and picks up my whisky bottle, meaning, this much already? It’s only eleven A.M. We don’t speak, though. Don’t worry, Wyatt. I’ll be there. He knows that. I cough.

‘See a doctor.’

‘No doctors.’

‘Get some rest,’ he says, heading for the door.

Dad just spoke.

‘What?’ I say. ‘Sorry, what?’

‘We are not going to any other shops. Just the chemist. I’ll stay in the car. You have ten minutes.’

I start singing in my head, the tune from the Sturges film Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. O-KAAAY … co – RAAL! O-KAAAY … co – RAAAAL! I almost sing it aloud. I want to, because it might make my dad laugh, but I worry that for once it won’t, that he won’t join in and I’ll feel bad, worse than I do already. The song rises, then dies in my chest and I miss my chance and that’s the hell of this thing, this sissy, crackpot, sneaky disease which is not okay, like consumption with its angry, show-off blood on wads of linen.

‘Jem?’

‘Yes?’

‘Did you hear what I said?’

I can see Dad’s eyes looking at me in the rearview mirror. He has wild brows and his eyes are narrowed, weather-beaten lines running from the corners toward his temples. He is a handsome man in an unruly way and he has a gunslinger’s gaze. This comes from years of squinting into a high sun and into duststorms and sharp night winds. It comes from a perpetual state of wariness and the need to see around things and be ready at all times. Anything can happen but you must stay cool. You have to master the distant look and know how to forage the horizon for looming dangers such as wild beasts, Apaches, and other gunslingers with sharp, squinty vision who might be on your trail.

When my dad talks to me, the little muscles around his eyes bunch up, giving him that gunslinger look. I have the distinct sensation he is not having a good time having to make words, having to speak at all. It’s the way he is and you have to get used to it. His vision is acute, he is the only one in the family who doesn’t need glasses.

‘We are not going to any other shops – just the chemist.’

‘Right.’ My dad looks at the road now.

I practise a gunslinger squint. I can see my reflection in the window, which I keep closed due to air conditioning, and my face is dappled with tree leaves and other passing things, but I can see my eyes. I look silly, because a gunfighter cannot wear glasses and look cool. A good cowboy does not wear specs. I think about those crazy glasses you have to look through at the optician’s, your chin resting in a cup. They are like the periscope sights that a U-boat commander needs to spot enemy vessels. The optician slips different lenses into the apparatus with maddening speed and he keeps saying in bored tones, ‘Better or worse? Better or worse?’ until I want to scream and I am so confused and pressured by him, I stumble out with eyeglasses of magnifying strength. I can spot spiders several paving stones away, but people look spooky. No one should have to see in such gory detail.

Better or worse? I asked myself each time I was put on a new medication. New medications and higher and higher doses. Better or worse? I asked myself, my heart thudding, hallucinating kaleidoscopic visions, sweating through the chic French pyjamas I wore because I felt so cold, soaking my white linen sheets, bringing towels back to bed, scared and ashamed after vomiting into the toilet on the hour through the night. This is a good medication. In small doses it is not always therapeutic. It is definitely helping you and I think you should not keep going on and off it, says the doctor. It is working.

Okay. Cool.

Dad is looking at me again in the mirror. Now what? Nothing. He looks at me this way because he is not all that wild about me right now, the crazy, drugged-up daughter, and also because he is a cowboy and that is the way they look at people. I used to be a cowboy, too. Dad and me in the Wild West, stalking the main street, bringing home the vittles for Maw, not before sliding onto bar stools, our packages falling around our feet.

‘What’ll it be?’

‘Mâcon-Villages,’ I say.

My dad nods and gestures with his eyes for me to repeat this to the barman. My dad does not like to speak French unless it is strictly called for.

‘A glass of Mâcon blanc, please,’ I say.

My dad drinks single malt. Doubles with a splash on the side. He hunkers down over his drink and lights a thin cigar. Thin but not skinny. His eyes slide slowly to one side or upward as he checks out the crowd, but his head hardly moves except for a slight raising of the chin, the better to draw on his cigar. We do not say much.

I know some things my dad does not know. Or care about. For instance, all Scotch malt whisky is produced in a pot still, a distillation of barley. Starch in barley is converted to sugar by virtue of a controlled germination, a process arrested in a peat kiln. Now you have malt. Malt is ground into grist and mixed with hot water in a mash tun, and the sweet liquid, the wort, is drawn off into a fermenting vat. This is now the wash. The wash is distilled into low wines and these are redistilled into raw whisky, the middle distillate with the foreshots and feints removed. It becomes Scotch when it has aged in oak for a minimum of three years. Unblended and the product of a single distillery, it is a single malt. These are the basics.

My dad favours Highland malt although he wouldn’t care to say why. He could not even tell you he specifically likes Speyside whisky. He would not want to discuss it much less hear about why it is different from Islay malt. Okay.

Something else I want to tell my dad. When the whisky is maturing for eight, twelve, fifteen, seventeen, twenty-one years, what this really means is the liquid is concentrating, breathing in the sea and the river and the heather and iodine and breathing out water, esters and alcohol into the atmosphere. In Cognac, the French call this evaporation la part des anges. The angels’ share. I love this idea. I also think it is only fair, because they must have to share a lot of worse things in the thinning ozone and I hope there are a lot of angels gathering over the Highlands, especially Speyside, over Islay and the Orkney Islands and Campbeltown and the Lowlands. I know they have cousins hovering over Cognac and Ténarèze in Armagnac and the Vallée d’Auge, where calvados is made, even wherever the marc is distilled in the wine regions, Champagne and Burgundy. In Cognac, the wine warehouse where old cognac is stored is called le paradis. A lot of angels lurk there and I wish them well.

My dad tips back the last sip of malt. He is ready to go, although I have not finished my drink. That’s okay. I have all my life to drink at my leisure and right now I am with my dad and these are good times and I want to stick with him, go when he goes, go where he goes. At heart, I am not the Doc at all, I am Joey and he is Shane and he is definitely the man to follow.

‘Let’s go. Finished?’

No. ‘Yup,’ I say, rising quickly. We saunter out.

I remember another time, another bar. Dad has Mum on one arm and me on the other. It is late and we are having a nightcap at the Ritz. I like this word ‘nightcap’, putting a cap on the night, tipping your brim at the daytime. There goes another day. Let’s call it a day.

Dad is a bit sloshed and it makes him merry and a bit unpredictable. I sense high jinks. A couple is leaving the Ritz bar as we approach it and they want to greet my dad but he has no time for them, he does not like these people. They begin to say something and there is a look that comes over them. Appeasement, ingratiation. My dad barks at them, ‘Ruff!’ Just like a dog. His hair musses even more. Mum and I fight to quell hilarity. What my dad has done is the equivalent of reaching for his six-shooter, of fluttering his trigger fingers over the holster at his hip. He is a cowboy, don’t they know that? We leave them in our wake, frozen with their mouths agape.

It is great being with my dad. These are good times I am looking back on. I wonder if they will come again soon. Some days, I doubt it. I just don’t see it. Like today, on the way to find a herbal remedy for depression with my dad looking at me suspiciously in the mirror and me fighting the silverfish in my veins and the ferocious urge to throw up all over his posh new car, which is littered, nevertheless, with Visa slips and tomato stalks and empty envelopes. The man can’t help it, he marks his territory out and I, today, these days, am the intruder. Get off my land. Come back when you are well, when you are a cowboy again and can roam with me. I don’t know you now.