Linger Awhile

35 Irving Goodman

1 February 2004. Handcuffs for God’s sake. As if we were violent people. Our arms were crossed with the cuffed wrists spaced apart by a thick plastic bar so that even if I’d had the key in one hand I’d not have been able to use it. Any movement caused pain but when I asked Sergeant Locke to loosen the cuffs he said no. PC Fast pushed our heads down in the regulation manner as we got into the back of an unmarked police car and off we went through Saturday evening streets where Londoners not in handcuffs were starting the weekend in their various ways.

At the police station we went round to the trade entrance and were driven through barred gates to the custody suite. We were taken through a heavy steel gate to the reception area where the custody sergeant sat behind a long counter. It was still early in the evening but the place had an all-night feel and the voices and footsteps were the sound of what is always waiting behind the paper-thin façade of everyday.

PS Locke told the custody sergeant why we’d been arrested, we were booked in, searched, and the contents of our pockets put in evidence bags. Our shoelaces and belts were also taken from us. Grace and I both told the custody sergeant that we couldn’t tell them anything they’d believe and that was duly noted. Our rights and entitlements were read to us and I used my phone call to ring up Artie. ‘Uncle Irv!’ he said, ‘Are you OK?’

‘No problem,’ I said. ‘I just wanted you to know where we are.’ Grace didn’t phone anyone. We were questioned about our health and although my chest was feeling pretty dodgy I didn’t ask to be seen by a doctor; I refused to give them the satisfaction.

After being fingerprinted and photographed we were taken to adjoining cells. Mine had a stale smell as if the air hadn’t been changed for a long time. The door was a solid metal thing with a pass-through slot called a wicket. Next to it was a spyhole. The walls were tiled, the bed was a bench with a thin blue-covered mattress, blue blankets and pillow, and there was a toilet. We were given a cup of tea and something out of a microwave. It tasted brown but I don’t know what it was. When I lay down on the bed I saw, high above me, a printed message on the ceiling:

CRIMESTOPPERS 0800 555 111

Anonymous information about

crime could earn a cash reward

‘Look, Ma,’ I said. ‘Top of the world.’

I tapped on the wall but got no response so I guessed it was too thick. I went to the door, put my mouth close to the wicket, and said, ‘Grace?’ No answer.

‘Grace,’ I shouted, ‘can you hear me?’

‘Yes,’ she shouted back, ‘I can hear you.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘one thing leads to another, doesn’t it. You start reconstituting dead movie stars and this is where you end up.’

‘I still can’t believe that I caused Istvan’s death,’ she said. ‘That’ll always be with me, it’ll never go away.’

‘Everything goes away after a while,’ I said. ‘This whole thing started with me. Don’t ask me to explain how I got fixated on Justine Trimble because I can’t. It must have been some kind of senile dementia.’

‘Three more or less intelligent men,’ said Grace, ‘all with the hots for a woman who died forty-seven years ago.’

‘Weird shit happens,’ I said.

‘You think you’re over that by now?’

‘I’ve told you, Grace, that particular folly’s behind me.’

‘Not beside you? Not in side you?’

‘Nope. All gone.’

‘I’m pretty tired,’ said Grace.

‘I think I’ll try to get some sleep.’

‘Me too. Goodnight, Grace.’

‘Night, Irv. See you later.’

I kept my clothes on and covered myself with both blankets but I still couldn’t get warm. I thought of old King David, how he gat no heat even when they put Abishag the Shunammite in his bed. Grace would have made me warm. Eventually I fell asleep but I kept dreaming and half waking and falling back into the same dream.

In this dream I was Captain Bligh at the tiller of the Bounty’s launch, watching the ship sail away with the mutineers as they threw video cassettes overboard. No, not the Bounty: the name I read on the stern was Body. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said in the dream, ‘I’m not Captain Bligh. What’s this mutiny all about? The crew were always perfectly willing to take my orders. Where am I supposed to go with this boat?’

‘They’ve given you a sextant and a compass,’ said Fallok, ‘and there’s no better navigator than you, Captain.’ How can I suspend my disbelief? I thought. He has such confidence in me as HMS Body sails away and leaves me in command of this overloaded vessel that must face seas too big for it. Smaller and smaller in the distance grows the ship that is no longer mine. And down, down, down goes Justine in the fathomless deep, flickering on the screen of the ocean mind, riding, riding, riding to the blackness and the stillness below the flickering.

I came all the way awake and went to where I’d stood to talk to Grace. ‘Irv?’ she shouted.

‘I’m here,’ I shouted back.

‘I woke up,’ she said.

‘Yes, Grace?’

‘I’m an alone kind of person, really …’ she said.

‘Me too,’ I said.

‘I was wondering …’ she said.

‘Wondering what?’

‘Nothing, really.’

‘Tell me, Grace, go on.’

‘You tell me what you think I was wondering, OK?’

‘OK. You were wondering about me?’

‘Yes. Don’t stop.’

‘Wondering how I feel about you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Grace, when I think about you and me I remind myself that I’m eighty-three years old and I haven’t got a whole lot of future in front of me.’

‘Maybe whatever there is is enough, Irv, if …’

‘If there’s love?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you waiting for me to say something?’

‘I think so.’

‘Fnerg,’ said Inner Irv.

‘I didn’t catch that,’ said Grace.

‘Come on, Grace — I’m too old for this kind of thing.’

‘The question you have to ask yourself,’ she said, ‘is, “Do I feel dead?”’

‘Well, no.’

‘Prove it.’

‘Grace,’ I shouted, ‘I love you, OK?’

‘I love you too, Irv. Well, goodnight then.’

‘Goodnight, Grace.’ We both (she told me later) kissed the air in front of us and went back to sleep.