“Is he at death’s door?” I said, and (may God forgive me), “Will it be quick?”
“Cross fingers,” she smiled, and Lowell got up to start packing the car.
We drove towards Ernest on a bright clear day. He said he woke up to the dry powder blue of the sky and he knew we were coming. The Severn Bridge looked like the entrance to Heaven in an old film I’d seen about a pilot who’d rather not die yet, thanks all the same, because he’s just met a nice lady and only recently started to enjoy himself. The service station on the other side where we stopped for coffee looked like the mouth of Hell.
Later, much later, I told Ernest this. We were playing cards. He said I played poker like a professional. Apparently, I shuffle like a croupier.
“And by the way,” he told me, “it’s only in a film you can decide not to die because your life has taken a sudden turn for the better.”
I smiled, and kissed him on the forehead, and fanned the whole deck of cards out with one snap of my hand.
It was Thurston who showed me how to handle cards. He knew hundreds of tricks. He had this one where the card you chose would end up ripped in half in your back pocket and he wouldn’t ever tell me how it was done. “Magic” was all he said whenever I asked him. He said his Uncle Mac taught him but I knew that was a lie because I once saw Mac try to shuffle a deck and it was like he was doing it with his feet. By then I knew that Uncle Mac wasn’t even his uncle, just some guy he’d met at a hostel, just another stray like me.
I thought about Thurston in the car all the way to Ernest’s place. I remembered the look on people’s faces when he pulled that card trick, the wonder, like he’d given them just what they’d been hoping for, like they were kids again just for a second, until they leant in towards him and said, “How?”
Partly, I was glad he’d never told me. It would have ruined it, probably, to know.
Four hours after we left home, we drove into Ernest’s garden like tourists, suitcases piled up in the back, shopping bags and a black collapsible bicycle crowding at the windows to get out.
“If he’s dead already, it all stays in the car,” Hannah said.
I opened my window, which was tinted and stole the colour from everything, like driving in black and white. The house was a warm golden yellow in the sun, tall with dark latticed windows and narrow brick chimneystacks. Lowell turned the car on the gravel drive and it scuttled over the stones like a roach. To our left was a copper beech hedge, the colour of old coins, to our right a view of the vivid green garden through an iron gate in the wall. The wind moved in the leaves and I could hear birdsong, and music coming from somewhere inside. I tried to picture someone lying upstairs in a darkened room, listening to a violin concerto, reeking of decay and disinfectant while we swooped in to stake our claim. I wondered if he heard the growl of our tyres on his gravel, the beat of our wings.
“Look out, Ernest,” I said. “Here come the vultures.”
Lowell braked too hard and the bike caught me on the side of the head with a punch.
“Ouch!” I said.
Hannah retouched her make-up, pressed her lips together. “Be quiet, Iris. If you haven’t got anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all.”
I wanted to ask if, under those rules, any of us might ever speak again, but I kept my mouth shut.
Ernest wasn’t dead, not yet. He wasn’t on his doorstep to meet us either. Lowell brought the car to a halt and frowned into his rear-view mirror. Birds scattered and resettled at the tops of trees and the front door stayed shut, as if nobody was in. Hannah balled her hands into fists and took an in-breath that didn’t seem to end. Lowell passed her a paper bag and she breathed into it in quick little sips and flapped her spare hand back and forth in front of her face.
“Are you hyperventilating?” I asked. I’d never seen anyone do it in real life before.
She let out a high-pitched whine like a steam kettle.
“Stay calm,” Lowell told her, reshaping his Superman kiss-curl with one finger. “We’re on the home straight.”
“Yeah,” I said, “maybe he’s kicking it right this minute. Cling to that hope.”
Truth is, I felt pretty high-pitched myself. My head was full of white noise and I couldn’t sort one sound from another, like everything was demanding to be heard at once, like I’d been turned inside out and exposed to the loud air. I don’t suppose I expected to feel normal. It’s not every day you get to meet the dad you never had.
Lowell and my mother clamped iron smiles to their faces and we got out, slamming the doors behind us. I turned my back on the house and looked out over the garden, across the fields, towards the woodland and the distant, shadowed hills. I breathed. Some species of tree are specially adapted to withstand and encourage fire. Some rely on it for their survival, to ensure their domination over other species, and to clear the soil and canopy for new growth. Trees look like their own shadows when they’re burning. Flames fan out and eat up a hillside, way quicker than you’d think.
The front door swung open just as Hannah and Lowell reached it. The nurse must have run down as soon as she saw us.
“Welcome,” she said. “Do come in.”
Hannah and Lowell acted like they hadn’t seen her. They know how to treat staff, how to exploit a potential VIP situation with disdain and to their own advantage. They learnt that, at least, in the States, if nothing else. I caught up and followed them in, met the nurse’s eye, tried to say in a smile that I was sorry about them and that I wasn’t the same. I wasn’t sure if she got it.
The square entrance hall had deep tall windows and a high-backed chair drawn up to the fireplace. The walls were washed grey, and on the dull stone floor a thin bright yellow rug marked the pathway to the staircase, like the sun’s pathway on the sea. I thought my shoes would leave marks on it, but they didn’t.
Ernest might have had minutes to live but we still took our time about it. We had to check on the state of the art before we checked on him. First, Hannah wanted to show us the Joan Miró in the old kitchen, the Chagall lithographs and the Braque in the hall. She went all weak-kneed at the Picasso prints and the Modigliani in the dining room.
“I had that valued ten years ago,” she said to Lowell behind her hand, whispering, “over four million.”
Lowell put his hand on her arm and gave it an imagine-what-it’s-worth-now squeeze.
They were like this couple I saw at a gallery once. She was wearing silver jeans, I remember, and the sound of his boots on the gallery floor were like gunshots, shouting look-at-me, look-at-me, look-at-me. They wanted to buy a painting. They didn’t even care which one. They just stood in front of the brightest and the loudest and said, “How much?”
I thought of them while Hannah and Lowell grinned up at the Modigliani.
“Tip of the iceberg,” she said, beaming at him like she’d swallowed a torch.
However rotten their core, I have to admit Lowell and my mother make a handsome couple and a damn good entrance. I watched them getting into character on the way up the stairs, walking with their shoulders back and their stomachs sucked in, shutters down on their eyes and catwalk sneers on their faces. It was like Fashion Week had arrived. The mannequins, Thurston used to call them, the rare times they came up in conversation; mannequins one and two. As in, Thurston: Will mannequin one let you stay out that late? Me: She won’t even know it. Thurston: What does mannequin two do all day? Me: Mirror work mainly.
“You