David Baddiel - The Death of Eli Gold

‘But you don’t cry …’ I said.

She did one of her smiles. ‘I want to. Really. But sometimes when you’re grown up you have to be strong.’ She pulled a tissue from her sleeve and wiped my eyes. ‘Do you need to blow your nose?’

I shook my head. ‘When I say strong I don’t mean like when someone who lifts something really heavy.’ I knew she didn’t mean that. ‘I mean when bad things happen – when the worst things happen – you have to try and keep going. With a smile on your face. To make sure everyone else doesn’t get more upset.’ She touched my cheek. ‘I have to be strong for you.’

I thought about this for a bit.

‘OK. But if you want to cry it’s OK, too, Mommy,’ I said. ‘Maybe when you cry, I can be strong for you.’

Mommy looked so pleased that I said this. But she also looked a bit like she was going to cry there and then. She gave me another really big hug, and then said, in her softest voice:

‘Thank you, Colette. Thank you.’

I wasn’t sure whether or not to say anything about how much I missed Aristotle. Instead I said: ‘Mommy. Is Daddy in a comma?’

She blinked, and moved her head back a bit. ‘I’m sorry, darling?’

‘I heard Dr Ghundkhali say that that’s what Daddy is in. A comma. At first I thought they meant like that little thing you write in a sentence when you want the person reading it to stop, but not for as long as when you do a full stop – I thought maybe it was something to do with Daddy being a writer? – but then I realized it must be a word that sounds the same but means two different things. Like pair . Or been .’

Mommy looked at me. She was making a weird face, all frowny. Then, behind me, I heard one of the nurses – I think it was the one with the curly hair and the banana nose – laugh. I could feel my face going red, because I knew straight away that I must have said something stupid or kid-like, and I hate doing that – I hate doing it in front of anyone , and I especially hate doing it in front of Mommy. I am Colette Gold, and I do not say stupid eight-year-old kiddie things that grown-ups laugh at because they’re so cute. I got so cross that I started to feel another little tear come out, which only made it worse.

‘Colette, darling,’ said Mommy. ‘Don’t get upset. That’s a very good question. You just slightly misheard Dr Gundkhali. He would have said that Daddy was in a “coma”. You see, it sounds a bit like comma , doesn’t it? But it has an extended – like a longer – “o”. C oa ma.’

‘Oh,’ I said. Then, like I was saying it in slow motion: ‘Coa … ma.’ She nodded, one of her slow nods which makes her fringe move like a little curtain in front of her eyes. No one said anything for a bit. So then I said: ‘Yes, but what does it mean ?’

Mommy opened her mouth to speak, but then the hospital door banged really loudly, and a man came in. He was fat, and sweaty, and his suit was too tight for him. Mommy got up, and looked at him for quite a long time without saying anything.

‘Hello, Freda,’ he said.

‘Colette,’ she said. ‘Come and meet your half-brother Harvey.’

* * *

This is too much rain , thinks Violet. She means too much rain to go for her walk, but is aware as she thinks it of a sense that, for some summers now, there has been too much rain. It used to be funny, the unpredictability of British summer, something that she might have commented on with a resigned shrug to her neighbours if they bumped into each other buttoned-up in July, and the neighbours would nod and smile resignedly back, and it was a nice, reassuring, confirmation that they shared the same mock-weary national expectation. But that was just about the way the sun used to stand the country up. It was not about rain like this, like a monsoon, hitting the pavement so hard that filthy fat globules of dust-water fly up from the cracks.

She has opened the frosted fire-glass front door, and is standing on the top step, looking out at Redcliffe Square. She already knows from looking out of her room window – and from the way the stuck branch trembled, like it was freezing – that the weather was probably too bad to venture outside, but she thought it might look better at ground level. It does not. If anything, standing here brings home the problem more clearly, which is not so much the weather as the ground itself, transformed by the rain into an assault course for her and her stick. She does not mind the weather, really: she does not mind getting a bit wet, or having her hair blown into a mess, even though she had only last week been to the hairdressers and had it styled and coloured (plus a root perm to give her some body and to cover the small bald spot just below the crown). But she does mind being attacked by the ground; she minds slipping on a puddle or being blown over by the wind and crashing to the concrete and becoming in an instant one of the residents who has had a fall – the three most dreaded words at Redcliffe House, heard only in whispers, the care home equivalent of Auschwitz’s chosen for selection .

She shuts the door: the cold street air in her nostrils mingles for a second with the sickly overheated scent of the hallway. She had hoped to buy a paper, to see if there was any more news about Eli. Three newspapers – the Mail , the Telegraph and the Express – are delivered daily to the house, but when Violet enters the living room, she sees that, as ever, they have been snapped up by those (mainly male) residents keen to demonstrate their lack of senility. Joe Hillier, she notices, is busy consolidating this demonstration using the Telegraph , the paper which best allows for the requisite amount of page-flapping and harrumphing. Luckily, for Violet’s purposes, Pat Cadogan collars her immediately to give her a long report on the condition of her shingles, allowing her to feign concern while standing at the back of Joe’s chair looking over his shoulder.

Sure enough, Joe turns the page out of the front few pages and all their pressing seriousness about politicians she can no longer remember the names of, and there he is – her ex-husband (the phrase sounds ridiculous, even inside her head), centred on the page, the same black-and-white photograph that had been on television the day before.

‘What is it?’ says Pat, a grimace of irritation breaking though her seen-it-all implacability: she had noticed Violet’s lack of concentration, her failure to nod at her retelling of the last two castigations of the house doctors.

‘Sorry Pat … I … Joe?’

Joe Hillier looks up, but, as Violet is behind him, he simply scans the room, shrugs his shoulders, and puts it down – in a rather matter-of-fact way – to voices in his head.

‘Joe!’ She taps him on the shoulder. He tries to look round, but the turning circle of his neck fails him, and he has to shift his body sideways to see her.

‘What is it?’

‘Would you mind if I had the paper?’

He looks at it, folded now on his lap. ‘This one?’

‘Yes …’

‘Well, I haven’t finished reading it yet.’

He stares at her, with all the truculence that old men reserve for old women.

‘OK. Can I have it when you have?’

‘Well, I think Frank …’ Joe raises an arthritic, yellowing finger towards another resident, a man wearing thick-lens glasses rimmed with heavy, 1960s black frames whom Violet has never spoken to ‘… was next in the queue for the Telegraph .’

‘Well, fine. Just whenever everyone’s finished with it, I’d like the page with that photograph.’

Violet’s natural instinct is diplomatic, and she had been smiling, but her voice, raised by the betrayal within it of a tiny level of frustration, causes a number of men and women in the room – at least, the ones with their hearing aids on – to turn round. Violet had never raised her voice before in three years at Redcliffe House, and it is clear from the uncertainty on some of the residents’ faces that they have no idea who had been speaking.