An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [15]
We were ready for Pudding.
And then the calamity.
Every day of my second pregnancy, I thought of Pudding, of course. But I tried not to think of the exact circumstances of his death. At first I was worried I’d stay in bed weeping, and then I thought: If I remember everything, I’m done for. If I remember, I will walk to the nearest hospital and ask for a nice bed in the psychiatric wing, I promise to be quiet, I promise I will not ask for narcotics, just keep me, nurse, for a few months. In May you can transfer me please to maternity. I am not crazy, but I am being careful: I am not crazy, but if I’m not careful I will take a wrong step and end up in the forest. Sometimes I can feel it happening: my memory, my bad memory, my untrained memory. It creeps toward that time, the end of April 2006, a child warned away from dangers and therefore obsessed by them. Help me. We need to grab it by the scruff of the neck: not yet.
Not yet.
It was Maud who told me the story of that tragic drunk woman, and Maud who put me off the close by hospital in Marmande: her son, Finn, was born there black-and-blue from a hard delivery. Maud, who our landlady paid to look after Savary, was our social life, along with her Anglo-Irish boyfriend, known at the bar where they drank as Jack the Irish Two — there were so many Jack the Irishes that they needed to be numbered. Maud’s father, who sometimes visited, was Jack the Irish Three. Jack and Maud lived ten minutes away from us in an old presbytery with Maud’s four-year-old daughter, Madeleine, and two-year-old Finn; a lovely lemonade yellow, lion-headed retriever; and a cat named, by Madeleine, Two-Dogs.
Maud was in her late twenties, with messy boy-cut blond hair and a wicked sense of humor. Jack was about fifty, tall and thin and ponytailed: he looked like the bass player of some band that had been medium big in the 1970s. They both drank a lot. We called them the Sots. They invited us over to dinner parties with their other Anglophone friends: a plumber named Eric and his sad wife, Marie; straw hatted Ted and his wife, Elaine, who were older and more cheerful; and a voluble, chubby, sexy woman named Lola, who had a Greek boyfriend named Pete. Lola’s father was Indian and her mother English; she had caramel skin, striped hair, and an extensive wardrobe of colored contact lenses. The blue ones made her look as though she were developing cataracts, and the green ones as though she were about to turn into the Hulk. Her boyfriend, Pete the Greek, spoke scarcely any English but liked to deliver long monologues about hunting and what he’d learned about American police by watching Cops: “America? Gun. Security. Boom: no problem. Person? In house? Gun. Look up. Boom. Fox? No good. So, boom. No dead. Black. Pig. Me, friend, boom boom. No dead.” Lola spoke to him in Greek. She was fluent but had such a thick cockney accent that I swore I was always about to understand her — it sounded as though she were saying, “Acropolis Demetrius where to, Guvnor? Sophocles Melanoma, ’ave a pork pie.”
The dining room at the presbytery was long and rectangular, filled mostly with a long rectangular table. Everyone smoked. Everyone drank. Even Finn, the two-year-old, a sweet and goofy kid who spoke, as far as I could tell, Esperanto, drank: he had to be stopped from emptying the dregs of beer bottles left on the table. The next carafe of wine was always warming on the woodstove. On winter nights they closed the shutters against the cold, and it was like being sealed up in a wall.
The night of Jack’s forty-ninth birthday party fell on the last night of hunting season, and so Pete the Greek wasn’t around, having vowed to bag a wild boar. Lola herself had to go home early, to attend to her business: she produced a kind of phone-in television infomercial that showed on English cable. Originally she’d supervised what