The Foreigners Read online

  People have been coming in and out of the house since morning, drinking coffee, eating food, talking with your mother, offering their condolences. Your mother’s completely out of it, zombiefied, so it’s been up to you to play the host. Everyone’s been telling you how brave you are, how well you’re handling your loss. Everyone’s been saying to you if there’s anything they can do, anything at all to help, just let them know.

  You think to yourself: Yeah, you can bring my dead dad back to life. But you say to them thanks, no, there’s nothing you can do, but thank you for asking.

  You are learning something here. How to think one thing and say the opposite. Separate your behaviour from your feelings. And somehow you sense that this will prove a valuable lesson.

  Talk drifts to and fro with the visitors. You hear them say what a talented man your father was. You hear them say he didn’t get the breaks he deserved. You hear them say it was a case of bad timing. Your father didn’t know how to move with the times. Too proud, too stubborn. You hear them say what a waste, what a shame. One man, some record-company executive your father knew, a slimy creep, you overhear saying that your dad and his kind are extinct. Like the dinosaurs, a meteor has come and wiped them out. The comment wasn’t intended for your ears, but still you have to fight the urge to go over and punch the guy’s lights out. Your father was worth ten of him. A hundred of him. You’re only fourteen years of age, but you feel you could happily kill the record-company executive.

  Finally the time comes. You know you can’t put it off any longer. The room has emptied. The room is quiet. Slowly you venture towards the casket, which sits on trestles in one corner. Tentatively you present yourself before the body of your father.

  Everyone who has seen him has said what a good job the morticians have done. So serene, they’ve said. So lifelike.

  But he doesn’t look lifelike to you. His cheeks were never that rosy, his skin that pale, his lips that red. What everyone means, you think, is that the morticians have covered up his injuries well. His shirt collar is pulled up right under his chin. You’d never know he hanged himself. You’d never know that the steel guitar-string he used for a noose all but severed his head from his neck.

  He always said he wanted to be buried with his Feldman Starshine, his prize possession, but in his suicide note he stipulated that the guitar was to be sold off to pay for the funeral and this party. So he lies there with nothing in his arms, just a corpse in a suit. Your mother has, however, stuck one of his guitar picks between his right thumb and forefinger. The small triangle of black plastic is her small tribute. She’s also placed a folded, handwritten note in the casket with him. You don’t need to read it to know what it says. Its content can be summarised in one word:

  Why?

  You stare at him, so calm in repose, so empty, so erased. You feel that someone must be responsible for this. Someone else, not him. It can’t be his fault. Someone drove him to failure. Someone drove him to despair.

  Tell me who it was, Dad, you say in your head. You’re trembling, close to tears. Tell me who it was and I’ll get them for you.

  Of course, no answer comes.

  You want something to remember him by. Not just him, but this moment. You want a tangible souvenir of this sombre occasion and of the vow you have, without realising, just made.

  You pluck the pick from his fingers.

  No one’ll notice, and even if they do, no one’ll say anything. It’s a funeral. No one’s going to raise a fuss at a funeral over something like a guitar pick.

  Later that day, when your father has been buried, you sit in your bedroom with the pick in your hand. Something similarly small and hard has lodged itself in your heart. You feel it there, scratching, chafing away, like a piece of grit inside an oyster. In time, a casing will accrete over it. A pearl will form. A dark, solid, powerful pearl at the centre of your heart that will enable you to do anything and not feel guilty about it. A pearl that will liberate you from conscience and shame.

  You smile to yourself.

  Let it itch.

  SECOND MOVEMENT

  7. Flat

  THERE WAS SOME paper mail in Parry’s box in the hallway of his condominium. Nothing personal, just circulars that met – most of them barely – the conditions for candour and non-intrusiveness laid down in the Unsolicited Correspondence Act. Parry consigned them to the recycling chute immediately upon entering his apartment. His home board was fitted with a filter that performed the equivalent function automatically for electronic junk mail. He checked the screen. The home board had recorded forty-seven hours of television while he was away, using its knowledge of his viewing preferences to select the kind of material it thought he would want to watch. He scanned the list of programme titles and was surprised by some of the choices the home board had made. The TV stations must be up to their old tricks again, getting “generous” with their content-parameter calibrations. The International Broadcast Commission would bring them back into line soon enough.

  Parry keyed up the “Erase All” command and executed it. When was he going to have the time to sit through, or even sift through, forty-seven hours of TV?

  The home board also held a grand total of two phone messages for him. The first had come in at 7.48 that morning. Caller’s location: the Amadeus Hotel. Parry played it. It was Johansen saying that if for any reason he and Avni missed Parry at the airport, Parry was to go directly to the Amadeus. Drop everything. Don’t even pause. Get to the Amadeus a.s.a.p.

  The second message was from Anna and had come in during the afternoon. That one Parry did not play straight away, but left for later.

  He unpacked his suitcases, which Avni had done him the favour of bringing here on her way home at lunchtime, and changed out of his travelling clothes into a sweatshirt and shorts. Avni had switched the air-conditioning back on for him, but the apartment, though cool, nevertheless felt stuffy and unstirred. He slid open the balcony windows to let in some fresh air.

  The fire had faded from the day. Evening sea-breezes licked lukewarmly around buildings and along canals, carrying snatches of sound from various sources: a cheerful cry from a bridge, friend hailing friend; the rumbling drone of a far-off airship; the mournful yowl of a Burmese cat that belonged to one of Parry’s neighbours; a low conversation from a nearby balcony; the splash of somebody diving into a rooftop swimming pool; children giggling. It was not always easy to tell which direction which sound was coming from. Acoustics were deceptive in a city with water for roads.

  Parry went back to his home board and summoned up Music mode. A long list of music-consumption presets presented itself onscreen, with his top ten predilections named first and highlighted:

  Reflective

  Celebratory

  Invigorating (Vintage)

  Mellow Surrender

  Upbeat (Classical)

  Upbeat (Vintage)

  Solitude

  Brass Band Bonanza (Vintage)

  Brass Band Melancholia (Vintage)

  Close-Harmony Chants

  What did he fancy? Something rousing. Lack of sleep was catching up with him, tugging at him like a child who wants to leave. He needed a mental perk. He selected “Invigorating (Vintage)”, and straight away the room was filled with the strains of a tune he recognised from his youth but could not name, a jaunty pop ditty from the days when music was predominantly a personality-based commodity, sold by artiste rather than type. The lyric was typically inane, a paean to an unnamed second-person lover of unspecified sex which did not shrink from such time-honoured imagery as stolen hearts and stars in heaven or the almost obligatory rhyming of “maybe” with “baby” and “waiting” with “anticipating”. None the less Parry stood and listened to the words with an undue raptness, remembering how sophisticated and adult such sentiments had seemed to his adolescent self, these songs like guidebooks to a strange and exciting world he knew he was soon to enter.

  The next song the home board selected dated back even further, t
o his father’s youth, and was a rocking little number pumped along by a distorted, churning guitar figure and some powerhouse drums. Just the sort of thing, in fact, that the old man had liked to put on the stereo and sing along to in order to amuse his children.

  John Parry had been tone-deaf (a trait he had bequeathed genetically to his son, along with baldness and a lack of physical stature). When it came to entertaining his offspring, however, he never let the inability to hold a tune stand in his way. On the contrary, he used to make a virtue of it. He would prance about the living room, croaking hoarsely in a very rough approximation of a melody, and if the song was hard rock he would shake his head as though it were graced with a heavy metaller’s long flowing locks and not merely a band of close-cropped hair that petered out above the level of his ears. Normally he was a reserved man, some might say even staid, and therefore when he let his hair down (so to speak) in this way, it was doubly hilarious, and his antics would leave his son and daughter helpless on the floor, doubled over, clutching their sides, laughing so hard they thought they might be sick. Things became even funnier still if their mother decided to join in by playing the put-upon, long-suffering wife, coming into the room and clucking her tongue and shaking her head despairingly at her husband’s undignified behaviour.

  You know you’re old, Parry thought with a wistful smile, when pop music does nothing more for you than stir up memories.

  As the song ground towards its fade-out and another one began, he settled down on a bare area of the living-room floor to commence his daily exercise routine. A hundred press-ups. A hundred sit-ups. Another hundred press-ups. Another hundred sit-ups, this time diagonal ones, fifty with the left elbow to the right knee, fifty vice versa.

  Flushed and perspiring, he went to the kitchen and charged a glass from the refrigerator’s reservoir of chilled water. As he drank the water he toyed with the notion of playing Anna’s message, but again refrained. It would be a pleasure to hear her voice, but deferring the moment, revelling in the anticipation, was a pleasure in itself.

  He was aware that it was sad and not a little desperate to be making such a big deal over a recording of the voice of a woman who had made it clear to him, without actually saying as much, that she no longer loved him, at least not in the way she used to. It was the kind of behaviour you might reasonably expect from a heartbroken teenager but not from a been-around-the-block bloke who was pushing fifty. All the same, he could not help himself, and indeed he would have thought less of himself if receiving a message from Anna had left him feeling incurious or indifferent.

  He took a long, hard shower, then shaved off his five o’clock shadow, and completed his depilatory ablutions by trimming his nostrils and ears with a pen-size electric clipper. The fact that hair no longer grew where he wanted it to, on the top of his head, but flourished luxuriantly in areas where it was undesirable, such as inside his ears and across his lower back, was, in his view, one of the greatest of the many iniquities of ageing. Greater than the decay in his close vision. Greater than the unavoidable trip to the lavatory in the early morning (he knew now why they were called the wee small hours). Greater than the accumulating scrawny sagginess of his physique, something his exercise routine could retard but not reverse. Greater, even, than the occasional aggravating lapses of short-term memory. Greater than all of these, but not perhaps as great as the sense of time accelerating as he got older, each year seeming to pass more quickly than the previous one; the feeling that he was being hastened faster and faster towards the dark, ineluctable conclusion of his life. He had only just turned forty-nine. He had a good three, four decades in him yet, almost as much time again as he had already had. But he knew that the years remaining to him, however many they were, were going to whisk by with alarming speed, and somewhere near the end of them senility awaited, that clouded twilight of incontinence and incoherence and general decrepitude. And this was an uncomfortable fact that one could only cope with by not thinking about it, and so, as usual, he told himself not to think about it.

  Back in his bedroom, he took his uniform out of the wardrobe and put it on carefully and methodically, taking his time. White shirt. Umber tie. Cream jacket and trousers. Brown shoes. Bronze lapel badge. He examined himself in the full-length wall-mirror. It was good to have the kit on once more. Good to feel the cotton of the suit hanging lightly on his body. Good to be wearing the outward emblem of his vocation, especially after a day spent working in civvies. He knew from his time with the Met. how much the uniform was a part of the job. You were a copper constantly, waking, sleeping, twenty-four hours a day, but never more so than when you were wearing the navy-blue. That was when people looked at you differently and you knew they were seeing what you stood for rather than who you were. There might be respect in their eyes, there might be resentment, but either way they were responding to something larger, something more important, than the mere person in front of them. And pretty soon you yourself came to invest the uniform with the same significance. It was more than just clothing. When you were in it, you stood straighter, your mind was sharper, your senses more acute, your sense of self-worth elevated.

  Now at last, suited and booted, Parry felt ready for Anna’s message. He approached his home board and, with something of a ceremonial flourish, selected Play Message 2.

  “Jack, it’s Anna. Hope you had a good time in England. Maybe you can let me know how it went, when you’ve got a moment. Cissy says to say, ‘Good morrow, good sir.’ That’s it, really. ’Bye.”

  Formal. That was his initial impression. Anna using her clipped voice, the one she normally reserved for domestic staff and official purposes. Not unfriendly by any means, but making it clear that there were things to be done, and done quickly and efficiently. Her accent straying out of its native East Europe towards the south-east of England. Funny how upper-class Home Counties pronunciation continued to be perceived as the stamp of authority wherever and whenever English was spoken. Still, even at the tail-end of England’s long slow decline in international standing.

  He played the message again.

  There was more to it, of course. “It’s Anna.” A year or so ago she would have said, “It’s me,” or even not announced herself at all, knowing he would recognise her voice instantly. The change was small but telling. Then there was that slight pause between “Maybe you can let me know how it went” and “when you’ve got a moment”, suggesting that the subordinate clause was an afterthought, appended in order to make the first part of the sentence seem less of an exhortation, less keen. Greater warmth of tone suffused “Cissy says to say, ‘Good morrow, good sir’”, for with Cecilia they were on safer ground. Cecilia’s affection for Parry was unproblematic. There was no need for evasion or tiptoeing when she was the topic of conversation. With “That’s it, really”, however, Anna was trying to reassert her distance from him, becoming curt again. Too curt, he thought. Overcompensating. The same went for that final “’Bye.” It was barely a word, barely a syllable even. A slamming door. A falling curtain. The snipping of a thread.

  Parry played the message a third time. Having analysed its discrete nuances, he now listened to it as a whole again in order to assess what his response should be. Ringing Anna back straight away was his instinctive urge, but reason dictated caution. That “when you’ve got a moment” was not merely a qualifier, it was an advisory, a warning. Anna was not asking him to find a window in his busy schedule to call her, she was intimating that he should ensure, or at least pretend, that his schedule was so busy and window-free that he would be incapable of calling her for a while. He was to leave it a day or two, perhaps even as much as a week. He was to act as if contacting her was of no importance to him, something to do only if he found himself at a loose end. She thought this would be good for him. It would teach him continence. Self-restraint. She was trying to wean him off her.

  The trouble was, if she really wanted to wean him off her then she ought not to have rung him at all. He saw from the screen that
the call had come in shortly after 3 p.m. That was a bit of a giveaway, in that Anna could not have been aware that he had been at work today. His leave was supposed to last till tomorrow morning. Officially he was still on holiday, and she had known that. Therefore she must have expected that there was a good chance she would get to talk to him in person, and he could only interpret this as a positive sign, a tiny but encouraging indication that his patience was at long last bearing fruit. He did not believe that Anna was on the point of breaking down and recanting. No, not yet. After all she had said to him, after all her adamant declarations in the wake of her husband’s death that they could not continue their affair, he could not see her suddenly caving in and telling him that she had been wrong and begging him to take her back if he would have her. He was enough of a realist for that. Still, the message and its timing gave him cause to feel faintly hopeful. Maybe the months of waiting, of holding back and biding his time, had not been in vain after all. Maybe Anna was beginning to realise that the embers of their affair were not as cold as she had thought. Maybe, in spite of herself, she, too, wanted to see them stirred, relit, rekindled.

  It was getting on for seven p.m. The refrigerator was nearly empty, but from the few items in it and the non-perishables in the kitchen cupboards Parry was able to cobble together a reasonably nutritious and edible supper. He had learned to manage without a microwave oven, that godsend for all bachelors. He had, in his way, become a not unproficient chef.