Claudette, you said.
‘Claudette,’ he repeated, took your hand and shook it; he was holding a drink with his right hand so he shook with his left. It had a strangely unbalanced, one-sided feel. ‘I am pleased to meet you. Very pleased.’ He kept your hand in his for a moment longer than necessary. ‘I’ve never met anyone whose name suits them so perfectly.’
You withdrew your hand. You took a swig of your drink. You weren’t sure whether whatever was happening here – if anything was happening – was a good idea. Would it be embarrassing at work if you slept with this man? You hadn’t been in the office long enough to judge. Did you even want to sleep with him? You’d never been with someone like him – your boyfriends, to date, had been students, as you had so recently been. You’d never slept with a grown-up. You felt you needed to decide where you stood in the next few minutes because things seemed to be moving quite fast. It wasn’t right to lead people on, you knew that, so you needed either to cut and run or stay and see how things progressed. You dithered as you swished ice cubes round your glass.
Timou was still talking about his film, about how you should be in it. This irritated you at such a basic level that it was putting you off the whole idea of him. It was so shallow a chat-up line, so obvious, so well-worn, that you felt insulted to think he might view it as effective. How dare he think that nonsense would work on you? Did he think you were a child?
You shoved your straw back in your glass as he told you he’d been watching you all week. You had, he said, a particularly mobile face, a way of frowning that he liked, a bone structure that took natural light well. That’s it, you decided. You wouldn’t sleep with him. You’d wrap things up, then head home.
‘You’d be great in the role,’ he was saying, in a low voice. ‘Absolutely perfect.’
You groped under the table for your bag. ‘But I’m not an actress,’ you said, lifting your bag onto your lap.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is precisely why you are so perfect. I don’t want actors in my film, people who have been trained, like circus animals, to display themselves to a camera in a certain way. It makes everything so formulaic, so conscious. I’m going to use people who have never been near a film-set before. It will make things fresh and unpredictable. I want to rip up the rulebook of film-making and this is one way to take things a stage further. No professional actors. Real people only.’
You stared at him. He stared back at you. It was like playing that game where you’re waiting for one of you to blink first.
‘I’m not making a pass at you,’ he said and, you couldn’t help it, you blinked. ‘I swear. I don’t mix work and romance. I have a girlfriend back in Gothenburg,’ he said, then added: ‘We went to art school together.’
‘But I have a job,’ you said. ‘And I don’t want to be an actress.’
He reached out for a strand of your hair. It was long but not as long as it will be later. He lifted it to the light then tugged it, as if it were something he required and it was inexplicably stuck.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘how about making an exception, just this once?’
Down at the Bottom of the Page
Niall, San Francisco, 1999
Niall Sullivan waits, standing on the school steps – his father is, of course, late. He holds his arms slightly away from his body so that the early fall air may pass around him, between his limbs and his torso, between his fingers where webs might have been in another life. His skin, the outermost layer of him, prickles and seethes like lava. If he stands still enough, his clothes won’t rasp against it. This is one of the ways Niall has developed to deal with his eczema. Coping strategies, the doctor calls them.
At the sound of his father’s car coming around the corner, Niall steps sideways, twice, then back, a move that reminds him of the knight on a chessboard, and conceals himself behind a pillar.
He opens his schoolbag, pulls out his binoculars, loops their strap over his head and leans around the pillar just enough for a clear, close-up view of his father, sitting behind the wheel of his car.
Daniel, he thinks to himself, arrives nine minutes late. Facial expression tense, gloomy – worse than this morning.
Niall was recently allowed to withdraw his first ever book from the adult section of the library. It had been about asteroids, and the layout of the page had been different from anything he had ever seen before. The text had been scattered with small numbers, and right down at the bottom of the page, in very small type you had to squint to read, there were extra facts. ‘Footnotes’, his father had told him they were called, when Niall had asked, and shown him how the numbers linked and guided you to the right information. Niall had been enthralled by this system, struck by its beauty, the way there could be one main narrative and right there, at the bottom of each page, additional helpful information on all the things you couldn’t understand. He decided there and then that his life needed footnotes and that he, Niall, should be the one to provide them.
Squinting through his binoculars at his father, Niall commits his observations to memory. Nine minutes late. Distracted, gloomy. He packages them up. He files them neatly at the foot of his page, where he will keep them until later, until he’s called on to refer back to them. There.1
As he watches his father, he is conscious of the thought entering his mind that to rub the inflammation of his wrist with the side of that binocular strap might feel good, might give him some relief.2 He squares up to this thought. He looks it in the eye. He puts it from him.
Niall eases back his cuff to consult his watch, which is strapped, as always, over the top of his white medical gloves. He squints into the sky. He lifts the binoculars again. He watches his father for another minute and a half, during which time Daniel sits with his head in his hands, fidgets back and forth in his seat, appears to be arguing with himself, grimaces, rubs at his chin.
Niall couldn’t say how long he has been making observations, gathering information about his father;3 he also couldn’t articulate exactly what he’s looking for. He just knows it is something that must be done. He tries it on his mother, tries to compile footnotes on her actions and movements, but she is more difficult to pin down. She seems to sense what he’s up to, succeeds in eluding him, in finding his hiding places. Daniel has an air of absorption, of oblivion, that makes him a prime subject. There is, Niall has realised, a lot that Daniel doesn’t notice.
The thing about spying, Niall thinks, as he steps out from behind his pillar and starts making his way across the parking lot, is that things which at the time seem irrelevant might later turn out to be crucial. You just never know. Like the time he overheard his mother, on the telephone, say, in her instructive voice, you ought to try living with a passive-aggressive, and Niall had repeated the phrase to himself and had later asked his father what it meant. His father had told him passive-aggressive was an example of something called an oxymoron and then, after a moment, had asked him who his mother had been talking to. Was it her cousin? his father had wanted to know, and Niall had had to say, no, it was Chris. Who’s Chris? his father had asked and Phoebe had chimed in to say that Chris worked with Mommy and that one day Chris had been with Mommy when she’d come to pick Phoebe up from kindergarten and had taken them both for ice-cream, that he and Mommy had split a sundae, except that Mommy said she shouldn’t eat that kind of thing, and Chris said, Whyever not? but ended up eating way more than Mommy, which Phoebe thought wasn’t fair at all. Their father, Daniel, had listened to this very carefully. He had, Niall noted, turned off the radio to hear it better. And when Phoebe had finished, he’d had his new faraway look on his face, as if he was thinking about something else entirely. Then he had said, huh, and Niall had footnoted this.4
He pops the catch on the car door and climbs in. His father jumps, just as he always does, gives him a huge grin,5 and says, ‘Oh, hey. I thought I was going to have to come in and spring you out of there.’
Spring you out, Niall knows, is a reference to jail, which is entirely
appropriate for school, an establishment Niall likes and loathes6 at the same time.
Niall fastens his seatbelt but doesn’t say anything; his father doesn’t expect him to chat,7 which is a relief after the rest of the world’s population.
‘So,’ his father continues as he swings the car out of the school gates and into the road, ‘I got us an appointment for two o’clock, which we should just about make, but whether we’ll be seen on time is quite another matter.’
Niall inclines his head. He touches his binoculars, which are now zipped inside his windcheater, feels the twin rims of their lenses. His schoolbag rests on his knee and its presence there feels reassuring, apt.
‘How are you doing, anyway?’ his father says, without taking his eyes off the road. ‘You holding up?’
Niall lifts his shoulders, lets them fall and the weft of his shirt fabric catches and claws at the worst parts of his skin. Not long, he tells himself, inside his head, not long to go.
His father reaches out and turns over one of Niall’s hands. Together, they look down at the medical glove, which is spotted with rust-brown at the wrist, at the finger joints, across the palm.
‘Hmm,’ his father mutters. ‘I told her8 we should have gone yesterday.’
Niall curls his hand back into itself. Then he looks at his father. ‘You OK?’ he says.
‘Me?’ His father seems surprised. The car pulls up at a red light and he glances at Niall. They look at each other for a moment. ‘I’m great,’ his father says, in a slightly hoarse voice, breaking eye contact. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
The funny thing about his father is that Niall can sense what he’s thinking and feeling. He can tune in to his father’s mind as if it were a radio station.9 Right now, he can tell his father is upset but pretending not to be. He has the simmering, maddened, slightly dangerous look Niall once saw in the eyes of a horse kept back from its race. This fills him with a specific kind of dread: when his father is in this mood, anything may happen.
Niall shifts his feet, left over right, then right over left, then left over right again, trying to discern which arrangement feels appropriate for now.
‘Onwards,’ he says, and his father revs the engine by way of answer.
Niall has been coming to the Paediatric Acute Dermatology Daycare Unit10 his whole life. It’s a place for the city’s most severe, most afflicted: you don’t get to come here if you have a bit of an itch now and then, a slight rash on the backs of your knees. This is for kids who are inflamed with eczema, head to foot, kids for whom normal clothes and unbroken sleep are impossibilities.11
So, once a week, Daniel does what he calls rearranging his schedule and he brings Niall here, to the unit, where nurses in hats and much-washed tunics mix ingredients in little ceramic bowls and click their tongues in sympathy as they smear Niall with the cool, clay-like substance,12 until he looks like a child ghost, a mime artist,13 then wrap him, toe to neck, in merciful paste bandages. The relief can last a whole day, if Niall is careful, if he can manage to keep the wrappings intact.
So Niall loves the unit. It means twenty-four hours off his maddening, exhausting condition. It means an afternoon out of school. It means that he gets to sit next to Daniel in the waiting room, while Daniel grades papers.14 His father always brings something to occupy Niall,15 if he has work to do: a magazine or a book or set of magnets or, once, a pedometer, so that Niall could fix it to his belt and walk up and down the corridor, recording how many steps it took to get from the drinks machine to the UV lighting room.
Today, though, his father is not grading papers. He has the papers on his lap. Niall can see the half-marked one at the top of the pile, in slightly smudged black ink, but his father is not looking at it. He is glaring at the ceiling, as if it has offended him in some way, and he is tapping the end of a marker pen against his teeth.
The hardest part, Niall knows, is the waiting. It is now 14:27, almost half an hour after their appointment. The heat in the room is cranked right up16 and sunlight fills the space, softening the plastic covers of the chairs, making the stacks of wilting magazines hot to the touch. Niall crouches by the table, setting in motion the gyroscope that Daniel has brought him today, the glinting structure spinning away from his white-gloved hands.
The nurse appears in the doorway, a blue column of surgical scrubs against the off-beige of the clinic walls, and runs a finger down the list of names on her clipboard.
It will be Niall walking across the floor, in just a moment. She’s going to say his name, he is sure.17 He can see her lips, her jaw getting ready to form the initial n sound; he watches her draw breath. It will be his turn, he knows it.
The nurse speaks a name.
It is not his.18
Niall curls his gloved fingers – nails kept short, always, filed down to the nub, but even so – and takes a deep breath, like a swimmer catching sight of an enormous wave, like a hiker learning that there are many more miles to go. He is aware of his skin, his surface, his outer layer, responding to this disappointment, a heated surge between his clothes and that part of him he thinks of as his ‘self’.
The itch, the discomfort, the rash, the inflammation, the redness, the maddening, distracting ailment: this is not him. It is not who he is. There is him and there is his condition. They are two entities, forced to live in one body.
It is 14:36. Niall swallows, pressing his clipped nails into his palms where, even through the layers of protective cotton gloves, he can feel their power, their force. Another half-hour, maybe more.
He breathes again, shakes the hair out of his eyes, tries to concentrate on the gyroscope but there is a stinging, torched sensation along his inner arm, between his shoulder blades, around his neck, circling his ankles like a tourniquet.
The door to the treatment room clicks shut, admitting that other family (a mom, a dad, a little girl, younger than Phoebe, with a raw, bleeding, scaled complexion that is not as bad as his). And he and his father are alone in the waiting room.
Next to him, there is a sudden, lunging movement. His father is up, out of his seat. He seems to spring forward, scattering papers and coats and spectacles. All the strength, frustration and fury that Niall knows his father keeps coiled deep within him is about to be unleashed and Niall quails. He flinches. He says, ‘Dad? Dad?’ without even being conscious of deciding to speak because he knows that his father has been building up to this ever since he got into the car – before that, even. Niall doesn’t know what his father is about to do – he never knows in moments like these – but what he does know is that it won’t be good.
‘Dad!’ Niall hisses, in the hope that he can recall his father to himself.
But Daniel vaults over the coffee-table, over the soft-cornered magazines, the leaflets about emollients and skin-safe detergents, the unloved toys in plastic boxes. He crosses the room in two strides, and when he reaches the opposite wall, he stops only to seize a pen from his jacket pocket and Niall sees what Daniel is about to do.
‘Dad,’ Niall says, ‘don’t – please don’t. Don’t. You mustn’t. Please. Dad?’
His dad doesn’t listen. Niall hadn’t really expected he would. When his dad is like this, nothing gets through to him19 – he is insensible to pleas, reason, requests, begging. He brandishes his marker pen aloft, like a dagger, and then he begins to deface the dermatology advertisements, one by one, muttering as he goes.
‘I cannot,’ he is saying, through clenched teeth, ‘look at these things for a second longer. The day has come, my friends. It’s time for a bit of truth.’
Niall has no idea if his father is addressing the posters or the people in them. What difference would it make? His dad has always hated these advertisements; they make him livid. They are stuck to each available space of wall and feature smiling children sporting organic cotton underwear or clothing with flat seams or scratch mitts that fasten around the shoulders. What enrages his father is that the skins of the models are perfect: pale, smooth, untroubled, at peac
e. They bounce on beds in the closed-end pyjamas, they pose with their gloved hands clasped cutely under their chins, they gambol about on lawns, apparently unaware that they have been buttoned into a paediatric strait-jacket, from which they will be unable to free their hands without adult assistance.
‘I mean,’ his father is saying, as he gives the grinning girl patches of dermatitis around her mouth and down her neck, ‘how difficult would it be to find a model with actual eczema? To feature a kid who genuinely needs this stuff?’ He moves on to the children on the lawn, adding hives and infected staphylococcus spots20 all over their legs. ‘Instead they insult us by implying the condition is unphotogenic, unpalatable. It’s hypocrisy of the most heinous kind. Why should we, of all people, be forced to look at this crap?’
He is working fast, graffiti-ing each poster in turn. He does it methodically, working from left to right. The boy in the buttoned scratch sleeves is acquiring a nasty inflammation on his torso, reaching right down to the wrists; a baby next to him now has oozing lesions on its neck and ankles.
Niall sits on his chair, clutching his gyroscope, riveted, appalled. ‘Dad.’ He whispers this to his father’s back, terrified that a nurse might hear him, stick her head out of the door and see his father engaged in this activity. What would happen if he was caught? Would he go to jail? Did that happen if you graffitied hospital posters?
‘Yeah?’ his father booms, without turning, evidently unworried about alerting any passers-by.
‘Dad,’ Niall whispers again, the word barely formed in his mouth. ‘Don’t.’
‘Relax,’ his dad says, pen lid gripped between his teeth. ‘There’s no one about. These things have had it coming, they really have.’
‘Please don’t.’
At the sound of footsteps in the corridor, his dad steps away from the wall, hops over the table and sits down. Niall is finding he can breathe again when a nurse opens the door. He sits upright, alert, ready to rise. Help, is all he can think. Help is here, at hand, on the way.