Paul Theroux - The Family Arsenal

At Ward’s in June, where Mayo had introduced Brodie to Hood, the young girl was refused a drink. But she had taken it as a great joke and in the Ulster and Munster Room, while Mayo and Hood were drinking, had said, ‘I’m under-age!’ She had started to roll a joint and Hood showed her how to do it with one hand. Mayo said, ‘She’s on the run,’ and Brodie, with the tobacco in her hand, had watched Mayo say this; she smiled as if she had been complimented on her clothes. They treated her with excessive kindliness, as if they had just adopted her. Hood remembered how they had driven back to Deptford in the ice-cream van, how he had said, ‘So you’re the Euston bomber.’ She had looked at Mayo and giggled. Then she had asked Hood to stop at a corner shop. She had gone in and bought a bag of toffees, which she poked into her mouth for the rest of the drive. Hood said, ‘She looks scared to death.’ Murf had come later, with his satchel of powder and his case of clocks. The dark curtains went up on the front windows in the house on Albacore Crescent. Hood had trusted Mayo, but from the moment he set eyes on Brodie and Murf he felt insecure with this fragile family. He knew he could not rely on them: they were too reckless to be trusted, they took no precautions. They had no experience, so they had no belief; but still he felt protective towards them.

He had asked Brodie what it had been like to plant a bomb. She said, ‘It was in this carrier bag. I shoved it in one of them lockers. Is that what you mean?’ He pressed her for a motive. She was imprecise, uncomprehending. Yet she could be specific when she talked about herself. ‘Mayo saved me,’ she said. ‘I was a mess.’ He enquired further. She said, ‘ Anorexia .’ Her smile appalled him more than the word.

The frying pan smoked with overheated fat. Mayo seemed not to notice it. She cracked the eggs on the side of the bowl, but they broke and dripped in her hand. Hood said, ‘Let me do that. You’re making a hash of it.’

‘Get away,’ said Mayo. She moved aside, spinning the bowl to the floor. ‘Now look what you made me do.’

She knelt quickly to pick up the fragments of yolk-smeared glass, and Hood helped, tossing them into the waste-basket. Then he saw Brodie’s bare feet, her thin ankles. She was at the door to the hall, squinting in the light, yawning lazily like a child whose sleep has been disturbed.

‘What’s all the noise?’ She saw Mayo. ‘Oh, you’re back.’

‘Hello, love,’ said Mayo. ‘You all right?’

Brodie nodded and broke into another yawn, her mouth wide open; her teeth were small and unstained. ‘Okay,’ she said pushing her hair back. ‘I just heard the racket and I was wondering.’

‘Get a load of her,’ said Hood. Brodie wore her purple tee-shirt. There was a wrinkle of sleep — a pink welt — on her cheek, and another across the tattoo on her arm.

‘I was getting the most fantastic flashes,’ she said. She moved towards the painting. ‘Hey.’ She unrolled it on the table, still yawning, keeping the canvas spread with her hands and touching it, seeming to study it with her slow fingers, like a learner at braille, tracing the loops of the collar, the contours of the man’s dark clothes. At this angle, Hood saw a gleam in it he had not noticed before, a softer light falling across the figure’s hand, relaxing it and answering the light on the face, dignifying the skin with a gentle sallowness. And he saw a tension of concern that was almost a smile on the mouth and the beginnings of motion in the legs — one knee canted left as if starting a dance-step. The clothes were not the stiff material he had seen earlier, but the level pelt of blue velvet with bluer folds crushed into it. Around his neck was a silver chain with square links and depending from it the medallion of a dead animal: a fox. Brodie smoothed the paint with her fingers, helping Hood see, and still touching it, still identifying its deft features, she said, ‘Anything on telly?’

He wanted to reply — to mock — but he was gagged. He was angry with himself, for the girl’s dismissal, that pale child’s blindness parodied his own reaction. Anything on telly! She had bettered him and with this new glimpse of the painting he felt reproached.

‘Have you had anything to eat?’ asked Mayo.

Brodie said no and let the painting roll itself on its own stiffness. She yawned again. ‘I’ll have a cup of tea.’

‘You’ll have to do better than that, my girl. Look at yourself — you’re getting skinny. Have some scrambled eggs at least.’

‘I’m not hungry —’

‘You’ll do as I say —’

Hood listened: mother and daughter, scolding and whining. Watching them bark and circle each other nagged all his desire away; their careless noise drove off his lust and killed his affection and left him with annoyance. Brodie brushed an eggshell to the floor; Mayo picked it up; and that simple action — the girl blundering, the woman righting it — caused in Hood an unreasonable anger. He wanted to shout. Instead, he moved Mayo aside and finished making the meal himself, saying, ‘Tell her to set the table.’

Brodie insisted on eating with the television on. Hood said, ‘One of these days I’m going to put an axe through that thing.’

Brodie pointed. ‘He’s on Dad’s Army .’

‘Eat,’ said Mayo.

‘Aw.’ Brodie picked up her fork and went on smiling at the television programme. It was a comedy, a pair of mimics quacking.

— Do you play an instrument?

— I pick my nose.

— That’s a start. Speaking of noses, what would you do if your nose went on strike?

— Picket!

‘Murf’s missing it,’ said Brodie.

‘Who taught you to cook?’ said Mayo.

‘If you don’t like it don’t eat it,’ said Hood.

‘Stop fighting,’ said Brodie. She put down her fork and picked up a banana from the basket of fruit. She peeled it, took it in her mouth and champed at the television.

‘See her eat that banana, honey? A symbol she hates her father. Remember that.’ Hood rose, went into the kitchen and came back with the painting. He held it against the wall, where Brodie’s Magic Roundabout poster was tacked. He said, ‘How about putting it here?’

Mayo was clearing away the plates, Brodie still watching television; neither one made a comment, but when Hood began prising the tacks from the Magic Roundabout poster, Brodie said, ‘Don’t do that’

‘I need the tacks.’

‘Don’t take it down. It’s mine. There’s more drawing-pins upstairs.’

‘Then pick your ass up and get them.’

‘No.’ Brodie glowered at the television.

‘Stop it, you two,’ Mayo called from the kitchen.

Hood threw the poster aside and put up the self-portrait, securing its top edge with a row of tacks. Its lower edge lifted and curled like a scroll. Hood stepped back. The man seemed to have moved slightly from the window and his gaze was no longer tense but mildly relieved, starting to smile. Hood had the impression that the wide-brimmed hat the man held in his hand had, earlier in the evening, been covering that fine hair. The peevishness, the anxiety, was gone from his face: Hood saw contentment in the dark eyes and light starting at the edges of the room where there had been shadow and old varnish.

He said, ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s poxy,’ said Brodie. ‘I like mine better’ — the poster was on her lap — ‘but I’ll put it in my room where you can’t touch it.’

‘I’ll do the same with this,’ he said.

Mayo drifted in saying, ‘I’ve done the dishes — thanks for the help.’ She looked at the self-portrait. ‘Incredible,’ she said. ‘It works beautifully in this room. Too bad we have to keep it upstairs.’