Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

She touched my cheek and smiled. ‘I don’t need to turn you into a criminal. I just needed to be sure.’

*

He was up on his feet and scanning the spines of our hardbacks when I returned. Against all my objections, Leonora had arranged the books in the front room by size, resulting in a frankly absurd collocation of volumes: Rat Pack Confidential next to Borges’s Collected Poetry, beside The Joy of Cooking.

‘You have a fine quantity of books, Dr …’

‘Slopen.’

‘Yes …’

I pulled out my Norton Critical Edition of Milton as a kind of offering and gently nudged him with it. He took it, peered at the cover — no sign of the longsightedness you’d expect from a man his age — and handed it back to me. ‘We’ll have no more Milton, sir. I have a lively appreciation of his merits, but no one would wish Paradise Lost to be any longer. I do not share your high opinion of “Lycidas”. The diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing.’

‘That’s Johnson’s opinion.’

‘That, sir, is my opinion.’ He glared at me fiercely. Written down, Jack’s words have a comic quality that was entirely absent at that moment. His size, his deep and grating voice and his belligerent manner made him an intimidating presence.

When I was a boy, I once took home a gull that I found on Wandsworth Common. For some reason, it allowed me to pick it up and carry it to our house. To this day, I don’t know what, if anything, was wrong with it. With its fishy eyes and scissor-like beak, it had, at best, an ambiguous pathos. But I was so eager to play the role of saviour that I didn’t notice.

After a couple of hours, it grew fed up with being coddled and turned truculent, snapping at my sister’s hair and flying around the living room. My dad ended up jamming it in a cardboard box and taking it back to the common.

Jack had something of the same aura, even when he was asleep. With its shaved head and prominent nose, his sleeping visage resembled the death-mask of a Victorian criminal.

Still, he came obediently up the stairs at the promise of being shown the books in my study. He was less steady negotiating the ascent and had to stop on the landing where the staircase turns at a right angle in order to adjust his limbs. When we reached the study, I pointed to the armchair and he sat down heavily. After an instant, he took a small notebook and a Pentel from his pocket; he evidently used them for jotting down memoranda; but, having opened the book, he wrote nothing, simply holding the pen over the page as if their mere presence was a comfort to him.

‘Who are the other members of your household?’ he asked.

‘Just me.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Five o’clock.’

‘How … how did I come to this place?’ The confidence he’d shown asserting his judgement about Milton had evaporated. In its place was a profound bafflement. Suddenly, he was as vulnerable as a little child. You could see why Vera was so protective of him. I could see there were other questions behind the ones he dared to ask: Who am I? Who are you? What’s going on? I know from my own experience of reawakening that the sense of amnesia is so total and so distressing that you do everything you can to avoid acknowledging it.

‘Why don’t you rest here for a while?’ I said. ‘We can put your things away after supper. I’m going to pop round to the supermarket and get a chicken. Is roast chicken okay with you?’

While I was speaking, it struck me that he was having difficulty following my words. He looked intently at my face, as though he was sorting through a mass of incomprehensible verbiage for a clue to my meaning. Finally, there was a glimmer of understanding. ‘Roast fowl?’

‘That’s right,’ I said.

He wagged his head with an odd subcontinental nod that seemed to signify assent.

I had a scintilla of anxiety about leaving him unattended in the house; however, it turned out that he had no intention of being left alone. As I was getting my coat, I heard him labouring down the stairs, and, despite my repeated suggestion that he stay indoors, he walked out with me into the street without a coat, apparently indifferent to the rain which had begun to fall since his sister’s departure.

‘Why is nothing known of the habits of your country?’ he asked.

This dazed but voluble and seemingly reasonable companion bore no relation to the mute lump I’d encountered in the basement of Malevin’s London home. For all the oddness of his conversation, he didn’t attract a second glance in Costcutter. In his sweatpants and stained T-shirt, he looked like one of the Polish builders who pop in for jars of bigos and sauerkraut.

My country? What was he talking about? I could only think he meant South London. ‘That’s an exaggeration,’ I said, ‘but I know what you mean. People are just snobbish about it. My wife was the same way. There’s a perception that it’s a bit grotty, but, as you can see, it’s actually green and quite pleasant. How about you? Where are you from?’

‘Lichfield. My father, God rest his memory, was a bookseller there.’

‘Of course he was.’

*

Since Leonora had left, there hadn’t seemed much point in cooking. It was nice, somehow, to have a guest in the house. We used to roast a chicken most Sundays, when the kids were small, sometimes having it as our evening meal at five so we could eat together. I poured myself and Jack a glass of wine; it was probably contraindicated for both of us: we were both on medication. Behind the day’s excitement lurked that nagging feeling of grief, and the simple act of preparing the chicken for the oven — butter, lemon and a sprig of thyme in the cavity, salt and pepper — recalled dozens of happier occasions when I had performed the same task.

It would be a while before the food would be ready so I suggested to Jack that he might like to have some bread and cheese in the meantime.

We kept our bread in a big blue-ware crock that Leonora had found discarded on the pavement about ten years earlier outside a house that was being renovated. Her original idea had been to use it as a planter, but after we had scrubbed it clean, it looked so pretty that it seemed a pity to fill it with dirt again. We used it for storing bread, and I improvised a cover with a wooden chopping board that I cut to fit with a neighbour’s jigsaw. The crock itself was decorated with blurry flowers and swags of foliage and pastoral characters frolicking. I’m not sure I ever looked at it with much attention, but, as I rummaged in it for the sliced loaf I’d bought that morning, Jack couldn’t take his eyes off it. His lips moved and I heard the rumbly bass voice with its mushy sibilants say: ‘I am fallen among savages .’

‘Savages?’ I said.

‘Nay, sir, worse . Depend upon it.’

He wagged his head at me and his eyes took on their ferocious beadiness. ‘Is it not to be supposed that the heathenest savages in Creation, though ignorant of their redemption, know better than to defile the staff of life with night-soil? ’

His emphasis threw me for a second, but then I grasped the cause of his outrage. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ I said. ‘This isn’t a toilet. It’s a bread crock.’ Then, baffled by the intensity of his outraged eyes, I added, redundantly: ‘For putting bread in.’

‘Sir, you are refuted by the shape of this vessel which sensibly proclaims it to be a po. Who are you that claim to love the poetry of Milton, yet are so coarse as to make no distinction between nutritive and excrementitious matter?’

It should have been obvious then — if such a profoundly unlikely thing could ever be obvious. His verbal powers and deep curiosity about the world in which he had found himself bore no relation to my — admittedly slight — understanding of autism. Even a savant should have had a trace of his sister’s accent, but he had none; he spoke no Russian, but could make himself understood in Dutch, a language which Vera didn’t speak at all.