Marcel Theroux - The Paperchase

I laughed in spite of myself. Vivian smiled. When he was funny, he was also strangely remote from me: it reminded me of the distance between us.

‘Turns out he didn’t quite get the all clear. They ran tests on everything, you know what American doctors are like: fingers up the back-bottom, checking the old chap, cholesterol levels, chest X-rays, blood sugar and God knows what else. He had some sort of discoloration on his arm and they wanted to check that out, too. Anyway, the stool sample showed up little traces of blood, so they had to have him back for a colonoscopy, and found a tumour.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah, that was my reaction. He was in hospital a week while they removed it. They did what’s called a “resection” — they just cut out about fifteen centimetres on either side of the lump and then join the two ends together. The procedure itself is no big deal, actually. I went to see him a couple of times, including on the day of the operation. I was with him when they wheeled him into the operating theatre. He was all groggy just before he went under. I was holding his hand and he kind of whispered something to me. I had to bend down to hear it. I’ll give you five hundred bucks if you can guess what it was.’

‘“ Veni, vidi, vici ”? “It is a far, far better thing …”?’

‘That’s two guesses and they’re both wrong.’ He paused for dramatic effect. It was a serious story and my suggestions were unwelcome. He paused, as though waiting for my flippant remarks to disperse. ‘He was whispering, “Bolder than Mandingo”. Bolder than Mandingo! Remember that dumb game? He was making a joke. They could have been his final words. I was proud of him.’

‘I’ll have to ask him about it when I see him,’ I said. I knew that Vivian hadn’t been trying to make me feel like a disloyal son, but I did anyway. I wanted to tell him that I was going to see our father now, but I was afraid it would have sounded defensive, or like a boast.

Vivian stretched forward over the steering wheel and then settled back into the seat. ‘This reminds me of when you slashed my arm with your Swiss Army knife,’ he said.

I found myself repeating the explanation I gave at the time. I had been sixteen, and travelling up to Maine with Vivian and my father. ‘It was an accident. I didn’t mean to cut you. I was just threatening you with it.’

‘Just threatening me? Just threatening me? Ha!’ He laughed to himself for what seemed like a long time. ‘Just threatening me. Did you hear that, honey?’ Lolita in the back said nothing. She was listening to a Walkman. ‘I must remember that.’

I stared out of the window trying to think of a similar outrage that Vivian had committed against me so as to erase his moral superiority, but I couldn’t remember any. The cruellest thing my brother had done had been completely unintentional. He had grown four inches taller than me by the time I got back home from my first term at university. And he not only had usurped my height, but had taken on a kind of sneering superiority in his way of speaking that can only have been an imitation of me. Everything he didn’t like was dismissed as ‘sad’ or ‘tragic’, which was slang for ‘contemptible’, and while I still caught glimpses of the old, soft Vivian when I overheard him talking to his friends, I never saw it again myself.

About a year after that, I found a diary in the drawer of his desk when I was looking for a pencil sharpener and leafed through it — pretending to myself that I wasn’t sure it was a private notebook — and found myself referred to as ‘that weirdo Damien’. I carried on reading it in the hope of finding something complimentary as an antidote, but only discovered further remarks in the same vein and a couple of short sentences where he said I was so staid that he felt sorry for me. I think I was hurt, apart from anything, by how little I featured in his internal life, more than by the tone of my few appearances there.

‘What was the kid’s name?’ my brother asked suddenly.

‘Which kid?’

‘The kid at your cook-out.’

‘Nathan?’

‘Nathan.’ My brother pronounced it with a sonorous finality, as though it were the tag on a folder of observations he was tucking away into a mental filing cabinet. ‘I’m hungry. There’s a couple of Twinkies in the glove compartment,’ he said.

I opened the packet and passed one to him: sticky and corn-coloured like a barely damp bath sponge. He stuck half of it into his mouth. ‘Want one?’ he said — except his mouth was so full it sounded like Wampum?

‘No thanks.’

At the airport drop-off I hugged him awkwardly. ‘Thanks for the lift,’ I said.

‘No sweat. Judy and I are flying back to LA in a week, but please look us up if you’re out there.’

‘Did you give her a sleeping pill?’ I said.

‘She’s had a busy week,’ he said.

‘Up early for kindergarten?’

‘Don’t spoil it, Damien.’

‘Sorry.’

We shook hands.

‘I promise to return your calls if you promise not to have your assistant make them,’ I said.

‘Deal.’

He walked me to the check-in desk. ‘You’re flying to Frankfurt?’ he said. ‘Why the hell would you want to go there?’

‘It’s the transport hub of Europe, mate. Connecting flight to Pisa.’

He looked at me in astonishment. ‘You’re going to see Dad?’

MY FATHER’S HOUSE was an hour’s drive from the airport. He had a big villa that looked out over olive terraces. I suppose the landscape had been chopped out of the hillside by the Etruscans, but the depth of my historical reference is such that winding roads and hills and vineyards mainly evoke a mythical location which I think of as Car Advert Country.

I parked on the verge and walked through the front gate. The housekeeper indicated in signs that Signor March was round the back, tending to his garden somewhere.

I found him at the foot of the slope, among his beehives. He wore one of those veiled hats and was moving an object that might have been a wooden tray, but that was obscured with teeming black bodies. Around him, the bees seemed to make solid shapes in the air, like translucent curtains being pulled this way and that by the wind.

‘Stay where you are,’ he said. ‘I’m moving the queen.’

‘No gloves, Dad? Don’t they sting you?’

‘They sting me — but it prevents arthritis, so I’m happy to put up with it.’ His voice was slightly muffled through the layers of cloth around his face. ‘I forgot where you said you were staying.’

‘A schoolfriend of Laura’s has got an old mill outside Lucca,’ I said. I decided it wasn’t really a lie, since the statement was true, even though the inference I expected him to draw was false. Laura and I had spent the New Year there ten years earlier, but I hadn’t seen the woman since.

‘Woman friend?’ asked my father.

‘Yup.’

‘You should have brought her along. Is it a romantic entanglement?’

For some reason I thought of the moustachioed dragon who had studied my passport photo like a chess puzzle before giving me a room in her guest house. I smiled. ‘No. Unfortunately not.’

When my father took off his hat, I noticed he had lost weight. It made his features more prominent. His hair had been cropped into an unintentionally fashionable style, and with his beaky nose and beady eyes I thought he bore a striking resemblance to a baby eagle.

‘Vivian told me you’d been ill,’ I said.

He waved his hand dismissively. ‘Nothing worth bothering with.’ Then he changed the subject. ‘You’ve never been here before, right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Do you have time for the tour of the house?’