Unravelling Oliver(27)
He was dead in his bed and I told him look after Mammy in the mud Nurse Marion is my favourite one she’s here in the daytime and gives me sweets our secret Alice didn’t come yesterday, or last week, or lots of weeks. I seed Miss Noreen and Nurse Marion fighting. Miss Noreen made Nurse Marion cry Nurse Marion asked me about Barney and where he lives I telled Nurse Marion that Barney is my friend and she ringed him up and now he is visiting me every day he telled me that Alice is in Happyland drawing pictures and flying around in a chair. She is not in the mud. He sweared me that and Barney always telled the truth. Barney says we can visit Alice when I am growed up, but I think I am a growed-up. Barney says I must be growed up more.
12. Oliver
My study is a high-ceilinged room at the rear corner on the left-hand side of the house. When Alice’s father was alive, he might have used it as an office or a den, but when we moved in, it was a kind of playroom for Eugene. Full of soft toys, picture books and an old record player, it was grubby and disorganized. In the centre of the room, on an old, foul-smelling rug, there was a chair that might have been more suited to the kitchen – Shaker-style, with spokes emanating from the seat to a bar across a low back, and arm rests. It had been painted many times over the years, and several layers of blue, red and yellow paint flaked under the general grime. This apparently was Eugene’s ‘flying chair’. I suppose I should have been flattered that my first book inspired the flying chair, but it certainly was not what I had in mind.
The room was bright and airy, however, with two tall sash windows dominating the two exterior walls, one looking out to the back lawn, the other on to the side path of the house. The two interior walls were decorated in floral wallpaper, punctuated here and there with Disney posters, Duran Duran wall charts and Michael Jackson album covers.
It was the only room in the house with a sturdy brass lock on the door, and I insisted that this was the only room in which I would be able to write. Alice was at first reluctant, but I persuaded her that we could fit out a room upstairs for Eugene – in what would have been her old bedroom (we had moved into her parents’ bedroom). One day, when she and Eugene went out for the afternoon, I stripped the room bare, gutting it, and dragged all the detritus on to a bonfire at the end of the garden. The fuss that ensued was unwarranted, in my opinion. Eugene was most upset about the damn chair. As if the house were not full of chairs, all of them better than that particular specimen. He sobbed like a baby, and I realized quickly that I could not live with this kind of disturbance.
I redecorated the room to my own taste. A gentleman’s room, with teak panelling and bookcases lining the interior walls, and heavy velvet curtains framing the windows. I had the long-disused fireplace opened up, and I placed my antique mahogany partner’s desk at an angle facing the two windows. At an auction, I later purchased a leather upholstered library chair, a standard lamp to be placed behind my chair, and also a desk lamp with a green glass shade. Subtle lighting is very important. From a company in the UK, I purchased a leather-bound desk blotter, and, from a vintage bookseller, a few select first editions with which to fill my bookcases. Within a few short weeks, the room looked like a writer’s room, and indeed, on the few occasions when I have granted interviews at home, the interrogator has in every instance remarked on how atmospheric the room is, exactly how they imagined the study of an award-winning author. As if, just by getting the look right, the words would flow.
Alice knew that I must not be disturbed. It pleases me that she thought my genius required isolation and silence. I used it to good effect when that little moron Eugene wanted to know what was in the green wooden box. Alice never showed much curiosity, but Eugene would not give up. He was obsessed by it. On the few occasions that I allowed Eugene and Alice into the room, he would waddle over to the bookcase and look up to the top shelf, where I had placed it.
‘What’s in the box, Oliver? What’s in the box? Is there a monster in the box, Oliver? What’s in the box?’
‘Nothing,’ I would insist, ‘just boring birth certificates, passports and insurance documents. Nothing to interest you.’
‘Show me! Show me! I want to see what’s in the box! Show me what’s in the box!’, stamping his foot for emphasis, and I would call Alice and complain that he was disturbing me, and demand that she remove him from my presence. He would often hover outside the door, waiting for me to come out, and as soon as I opened it, he would dart in on top of me. ‘What’s in the box, Oliver?’
Eventually I informed Alice that I could no longer write while Eugene lived under our roof. She agreed finally to his moving out when I found an obliging care home willing to take him. It was not cheap, a fact that Alice seemed not to appreciate. She accused me of ‘hating’ him. She overestimated my feelings for her brother: I simply did not want him around.
Alice continued to whinge for years, used to bring him out to the house at Christmas time for the first couple of years, but every single time it reopened the arguments and I felt it was in everybody’s best interests just to put a stop to it. The last Christmas that he came, I got him alone in the kitchen and told him a very special story in words that he could understand, and made it very clear that he would be unwise ever to visit again. Afterwards, he just walked up and down the hall with his coat on, backwards and forwards, muttering to himself. Alice was beside herself with worry and kept asking him what was wrong, but thankfully he had understood my little story and kept his stupid drooling mouth shut. Then he started to cry, and Alice took him back to the home. Later, when I pointed out the wisdom of my decision not to accommodate an overgrown baby who was clearly disturbed, she walked out of the house and didn’t come back for three days. Her first act of rebellion. I knew she would be back though. I never doubted it. She loved me too much. I never had to see the buffoon again, though Alice persisted in visiting him.