Part 30 (1/2)
”Does Milek like Henry's penthouse?” he asked.
”They've not met.”
”You don't say.”
Denny O'Rourke stirred. His face creased up and his eyes flickered open.
”Pain ...” he groaned.
”I know,” Chrissie whispered.
They watched the waves of agony cross their father's face. They held his hand, avoiding the tubes that ran into his nose, hand and stomach. Chrissie found a payphone in reception and settled down to make work calls. The day pa.s.sed in silence and was beautiful. In the late afternoon, Denny's eyes opened again. He grimaced, looked at the ceiling and squeezed his son's hand. Ellis sat up. He blinked his eyes affectionately. Denny smiled back meekly and drifted back to sleep. He stirred again later as Ellis left the room.
”I'm just popping out for a cigarette, Dad,” Ellis said. He stood over Denny and grinned. ”A lovely, smooth, satisfying smoke, outside in the suns.h.i.+ne. A lovely, lovely ciggie.”
Ellis drew on an imaginary cigarette and exhaled ecstatically. In response, Denny muttered his first distinct words of the day: ”You b.a.s.t.a.r.d ...”
They were days of sunlight and simplicity. Ellis needed no props, no magazines or books. There were no hours. There was only the sunlight that filled the room and his father, lying in bed, squeezing his hand, smiling bravely.
With the breeze playing percussively in the walnut trees and his son and daughter there to a.s.sist him, Denny washed the first of his chemo pills down with a bottle of wine. He said they were celebrating the removal of the headache and brushed aside talk of the shadow that had been detected on his lungs since the operation.
”These pills will take care of that as well, especially with a Chablis like this,” he declared.
Ellis believed him and the belief took root fast and grew vigorously. Chrissie smiled at the men who were her family and knew that her dad would never get well again.
Denny spent the summer sitting in the garden and watched the evening primroses appear, the hedge become speckled white with flowering bindweed, and the walnut trees, whose leaves transformed from orange to green, stand out against light blue skies. He no longer heard the motorway and he ignored the surrounding houses, living within the open country of his mind's eye and noticing only that which enriched his days. The paleness departed from his complexion, his movements became less laboured and the soreness inside him abated, allowing him to laugh out loud again.
In midsummer, as if to take everybody's mind off the shadow on Denny's lungs, Chrissie dumped Milek for Henry the banker and moved into his penthouse overlooking the Thames. Ellis felt he could now ask Milek for work without turning to his sister for help.
”Look, Milek,” he started, ”I know that my sister dumping you, and me drawing a picture of your clients engaged in lesbian s.e.x isn't a great platform, but I was wondering if you'd give me a job.”
”Ellis, I presume.”
”Yes. I really want to work for you and get into photography.”
”OK. No problem.”
And that was it. The job application and interview was over. He started the following week and Milek took him out for dinner and Ellis ate j.a.panese food for the first time and when Ellis saw the bill his heart skipped a beat and Milek threw a credit card into the wicker tray and slapped Ellis on the back.
”Come and meet my new girlfriend.”
Milek seemed to be largely over Chrissie. Carla was Italian and worked as a.s.sistant to a costume designer called Richard. Ellis could not speak to Carla the first time he met her, such was the extent and exoticness of her beauty. Richard was the first gay man Ellis had ever met and Ellis told him so.
”I doubt that, somehow,” Richard replied.
They took to Ellis immediately, the way rich women take to Pomeranians.
”She drinks pints!” Ellis muttered in admiration.
”That's the tip of the iceberg,” Milek confided.
”I'll tell my sister she's a dog,” Ellis said.
Ellis worked six days that week, two in a studio in Wandsworth, one in a forest in Buckinghams.h.i.+re, a day at a lido in south London and the other two doing runs to the labs and stock shop. Milek corrected his invoice and adjusted it upwards.
”You don't calculate your overtime at the normal rate,” he explained. ”Welcome to the joys of time-and-a-half and double-bubble.”
”I've earned six hundred quid,” Ellis muttered in disbelief.
”Doing something you enjoy ... sick, isn't it!” Milek said.
That night, exuberantly happy and with an audience of strangers, Ellis announced that he was spending his first pay packet on taking his dad to Paris. It was an idea born of champagne and j.a.panese lager but as soon as he'd said it he knew he was going to do it. When most places were closed, Milek and his friends led Ellis to a bas.e.m.e.nt bar with black leather sofas and neon floors and, here, Milek took Ellis aside.
”Ellis ... are you sober enough to listen and take heed?”
”Yes ...” and Ellis tried very hard to be.
”The following is non-negotiable, so listen well. You are working for me and when you are out enjoying yourself you are doing it on the money I pay you. You can party, you can drink, you can get high, you can enjoy. But no cocaine. Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, you are banned from cocaine and if you break that I'll kick you out. I've been in your father's house and I've been close to his daughter. I will not allow you to do that drug. No second chances.”
”Are you banned, too?”
Milek nodded. ”These days.”
Ellis paid his dad the five hundred pounds he had borrowed since moving back home. He gave it to him in cash, placed within the pages of Fodor's guidebook to Paris.
In the September suns.h.i.+ne, they walked in the Jardin de Luxembourg, stopping every quarter of an hour for Denny to catch his breath, on a bench within the chestnut groves, or on the low wall around the fountains, beside the lake where Denny stared at the toy sailboats. His hair had turned a little greyer in his illness and in the bright sunlight it was silvery and handsome.
”I've wanted to come to this city all my life,” Denny sighed. ”And now I'm here. Unbelievable, isn't it?”
”Easy, isn't it?” Ellis replied.
Every hour or so, Ellis would ask his dad how he was feeling or if he was tired. ”I feel good,” Denny would reply. Only on the second afternoon, when they had walked through the Marais after lunch, did he need to rest. He caught a taxi back to the tiny Hotel de Maison on rue Monge and fell asleep to daydreams of buying a garret in the Place des Vosges. As Denny slept, Ellis walked the halls of the Musee d'Orsay and bought a print of Redon's Les Yeux Clos because it made him think of his mother. He crossed from the museum to the river and reflected on the day.
It's similar, he told himself, to when you glance up at the sky and the clouds are the shape of a face or a mandolin. You look away and glance up again but either the shape has gone or it's there but without the magic of first seeing it. That's what it's like to walk into the Sainte Chapelle for the first time, if you've not been told what to expect. That's what it's like when the towering columns of thirteenth-century stained gla.s.s first flood into your vision, causing a sensory double-take at the volume of beauty in front of you as you arch backwards to take it all in. At least, that's what it was like when I took my dad there today.
”My G.o.d, Ellis,” Denny whispered, putting his arm round his son. ”We're in heaven. Thank you, dear boy, thank you.”
My pleasure, Ellis whispered, to the fast-flowing river.
Denny telephoned Chrissie from a payphone on the street. When he stepped out of the booth, he wandered away thoughtfully and Ellis followed.
”Oh dear,” Denny muttered, ”I think your big sister is jealous of our trip.”
They wandered towards the dome of the Pantheon and sat in the Place de la Contrescarpe. ”I feel inspired to plan my travels when the evenings set in,” Denny declared.
”And I feel inspired to rent myself a little pad in London,” his son replied.
”I'm glad to hear it. Good for you. Good old Milek.”
They talked about the countries they would visit together and they drank cognac and watched French women.