Picture Me Gone

  We weren’t allowed to name them, she said, because then we’d get attached, which was extremely unprofessional. So they became Rat One and Rat Two. The first time I picked up Rat One, he scooted up my arm and scrambled down into my shirt.

  The next day when two girls jumped up on chairs in the science lab screaming that they’d seen a rat, I didn’t even turn round, just said not to bother, there were no rats. Everyone stared at me suspiciously, like, How does she know?

  Anyway, on Tuesday we fed the rats cheese and biscuits and bits of sausage and grass, but by the time we got home from school on Wednesday they had chewed through the cardboard box and were gone.

  We never saw them again. Catlin’s mum kept complaining that she heard chewing in the cupboards at night, and her dad said, Don’t be stupid you must be imagining things, and apparently there were big fights, though in that family there were always big fights. Cat said she thought the escaped rats were the straw that broke the camel’s back between her parents, i.e., ruined their marriage once and for all. There was no way I could tell her that she was wrong, that it was obvious from the first time you met her parents that they just didn’t like each other and would have got divorced sooner or later, rats or no rats.

  It must be horrible to realize that you come from two people who never should have got together in the first place.

  After the rat incident, we started spending more time at my house, where everyone got along and there was no shouting. Looking back, I wonder whether that was one of the reasons we stopped being friends.

  One time when we had to go back to her house after school, we found her mum out and everything perfectly tidy and all the windows in the house closed up tight, despite the fact that it was a beautiful spring day. It was cold and gray inside, like no one had told the house that winter was over. And outside, trees floated with blossom and birds sang.

  We picked up our code books from the clubhouse even though we didn’t play spies much anymore, and we didn’t even bother checking the fridge. We just wanted to get out of there.

  Mum doesn’t hear rats anymore, Cat said. They’ve deserted us, like a sinking ship.

  She looked downcast, so I squeaked Avast ye hearties! and Mizzen ye swarthy poop deck! and we slammed the door and ran back to mine, shouting in pig-pirate all the way. And when we arrived, Gil called hello from his study, Marieka showed up with bunches of asparagus, and you could smell hyacinths through the windows. At the time I thought it was nice but maybe it was horrible for Cat.

  The following year, when we weren’t speaking, it occurred to me that her new personality actually made sense—that kissing boys and smoking weed and stomping out of class and insulting teachers and generally acting about a hundred times worse and louder than you really are is what you might do if you didn’t want to think about having to go home to that sad gray house.

  nine

  Translating books is an odd way to make a living. It is customary to translate from your second language into your first, but among my father’s many friends and colleagues, every possible combination of language and direction is represented.

  Gil translates from Portuguese into English. Most translators grow up speaking two or three languages but some speak a ridiculous number; the most I’ve heard is twelve. They say it gets easier after the first three or four.

  The people I find disturbing are those with no native language at all. Gil’s friend Nicholas had a French mother and a Dutch father. At home he spoke French, Dutch and English but he grew up in Switzerland speaking Italian and German at school. When I ask him which language he thinks in, he says: Depends what I’m thinking about.

  The idea of having no native language worries me. Would you feel like a nomad inside your own head? I can’t imagine having no words that are home. A language orphan.

  Perhaps this worries me because it is not a million miles away from my reality. Marieka grew up speaking Swedish first, then English; Gil learned Portuguese, French and English as a child. I can understand conversations in most of these languages, but the only one I speak properly is my own.

  Marieka rolls her eyes when Gil tries to explain syntactic semiotics or tells us his theory of typologies over breakfast. His grandad was a miner, his father became a teacher, but Gil trumped them all with a PhD in applied linguistics.

  Remember your roots, Mum says, and hmphs. Semiotics!

  I love to hear Gil talk but don’t always pay attention to the words. When I do listen, I rarely know what he’s talking about, but neither of us really minds. Sometimes it puzzles me that he’s my father, given how differently our minds work. Perhaps I was switched at birth and my real father is Hercule Poirot.

  Marieka’s mother was Swedish-Sudanese and though she’s fair-skinned like her father, she has beautiful red-and-gold hair, like a shrub on fire. Gil says he was first attracted to Mum’s hair and only afterward listened to her playing. It was a concert his friend dragged him to and he spent the first half thinking about a paper he was writing and only looked up after the interval to see this woman with wild curls playing the violin.

  Marieka couldn’t believe anyone would come backstage and appear not even to have noticed the music. She’s used to it now, but at the time thought he was eccentric, possibly mad.

  I once asked my parents why they didn’t ever live together before I was born and Gil just said, We were happy as we were.

  He says he never thought of another woman, not even once, after he met Marieka, and then in the same sentence says, Do you think I’ll need my gray suit in Geneva? and Marieka smiles and says, Yes, my darling, you’ll probably need it.

  Marieka notices the world in what she calls a Scandinavian way, which means without a lot of drama. I register every emotion, every relationship, every subtext. If someone is angry or sad or disappointed, I see it like a neon sign. There’s no way to explain how, I just do. For a long time I thought everyone did.

  That poor man, I’d say, and Marieka would look puzzled.

  Look! I’d say. Look how he stands, the way his mouth twists, how his eyes move around the room. Look at his shoulders, the way his jacket fits, how he clutches his book. Look at his shoes. The way he licks his lips.

  The impression was so clear—a great drift of hovering facts—it amazed me that she couldn’t see it. But Gil says human capacities are vast and varied. He doesn’t understand how people can speak just one language. Certain combinations of chords make Marieka wince. I peer into souls.

  Of course, most people don’t pay attention. They barge into a situation and start asking questions when the answers are already there.

  Where’s Marieka? for instance. Gil’s favorite.

  I look at him. What day is it? Which fiddle has she taken? Which shoes?

  Three simple observations tell me instantly where she is and how long she’ll be gone. But Gil always asks. Flat shoes, I tell him. Because of the stairs. There are five flights of stairs up to the place where she practices quartets. Otherwise she nearly always wears heels because she likes to be tall. And if you manage to miss the shoes, the baroque violin is gone.

  Sometimes I go along with Marieka because they rehearse in the viola player’s tiny flat at the top of an old building with long windows looking out across Covent Garden. If I lie on the floor and rest my chin on my hands, my eyes reach just over the narrow skirting board and I can pretend I’m in a balloon, floating high above London. I took Catlin along once but she couldn’t keep quiet.

  When we first heard that Matthew had disappeared, Marieka and Gil had a long conversation about what to do.

  What if it’s not fairly straightforward? Marieka asked. And Gil answered in a murmuring voice that I couldn’t hear.

  I don’t want Mila mixed up with that mumblemumble family and you know what I buzzbuzz about Suzanne.

  Well, I do happen to know what she buzzbuzzes about Suzanne. She doesn’t much like her, though she also says it’s hard to be likable when you’re so unhappy. But Marieka knew Suzanne
before Owen died, and says that even then she never seemed to be telling the truth. I wonder why I haven’t seen Suzanne since I was four. Gil says he and Matthew are like brothers, but when did they last meet? Are they like brothers who have grown apart?

  What do you think? asks Marieka. I can’t hear the answer, but I know my father well enough to imagine what he’d say. Matthew just gets like this sometimes. I’m sure it’s nothing serious. We’ll go over as planned. He’ll be home by the time we arrive. He is my oldest friend. And in any case, it’s been much too long since I’ve seen him. Perhaps I can mumble bumble fumble tumble humph.

  I have heard stories of the two of them as boys hanging out in the cemetery behind their school, talking about girls and drinking themselves unconscious on cider. I’ve seen pictures, long before Gil and Marieka met, of the two young men brown from the sun and grinning in Spain, Scotland, the Alps. In pictures they look handsome and young, their friendship tested only briefly by a girl they both loved. In one photo both of them have an arm round her but her head is turned and she’s smiling at Matthew, who looks straight into the camera. Gil’s face is in shadow.

  Once when his mother was ill, Matthew lived with Gil’s family for a whole year. He and Gil shared a room, staying up half the night reading comics Matthew stole from the local shop.

  Stole?

  Matthew, Gil says, not me.

  What happened to his mother?

  She died, Perguntador. The summer he was fifteen.

  I would like to have known them back then, though I suspect that Gil, young, wouldn’t be all that different from Gil not-young. I have heard how they sat next to each other during the eleven-plus and later their A-levels—Matthew clever at history, Gil at languages, both offered places at Cambridge.

  Two grammar school boys from the butt-end of Preston, Gil says. On the day the news came we felt like gods.

  Gil used summers to study and write. Matthew hitch-hiked round the Black Sea, climbed Annapurna, taught English in East Africa.

  Marieka phones back. She sounds the same as always on the phone.

  Hmm, is what she says now, when I tell her about cute baby Gabriel and Honey and the feeling in the beautiful glass house. And then she sighs, and says, Do be careful, my darling, families can be so complicated.

  I tell her I will be careful, and that I love her, and then I give the phone to Gil. His whole body uncurls when he speaks to her.

  For a minute I feel like crying because I miss Marieka, but then I see her in my head saying, Do you imagine I’m not with you, silly?

  We are three. Even when we are just two, we are three.

  ten

  Catlin always talked about running away, but not in the usual way where you seek out your real parents who are rich and glamorous and gave you up for adoption by mistake and have regretted it ever since.

  She wanted to run away to Brussels or Washington, DC, and head up an international spy ring that would save the world from mass destruction, preferably at the very last second. This she would accomplish by writing an impossibly elaborate computer program involving twenty-eight prime numbers coded into one uniquely high-spec iPhone. I tend to drift off when she talks tech.

  All of our spy games involved threats to the free world and invasion by evil enemies while we plotted routes through underground tunnels known to no one but us thanks to a map Cat discovered in the catacombs under the British Museum in an ancient box sealed with a curse.

  Untouched for two hundred years, Cat said. Feast your eyes, matey.

  I feasted my eyes on an ancient-looking folder, scarred and burned round the edges, and even though I knew she’d used an old iron to burn the edges and make a bit of ordinary card look antique, I was impressed. It did look old.

  Wow, I said, reaching for it. But she pushed my hand away and made me put on bright blue washing-up gloves, which had a satisfying forensic appearance when used out of context. With my gloves on, I was allowed to hold the file while Cat dusted it with baby powder for fingerprints.

  Just as I thought, she said with a mad gleam in her eye. Last handled by foreign operatives.

  Really? How can you tell? I was genuinely curious.

  Look closely, she whispered. See how the fingerprint whirligigs go backward? That’s foreign.

  I must have looked skeptical because Cat bristled. Fine, don’t believe me. You think I care?

  I believe you, I said.

  As you should, young Mila. As you should.

  And the date? I asked. I didn’t want to piss her off again.

  She held one of the pieces of burned paper from the file up to the bare lightbulb in the clubhouse. As I thought, she said. It’s ninety percent linen, distinct greenish hue (that was from the walls in the clubhouse, which were painted green and gave us a greenish hue too), made in Czechoslovania between . . . hmm . . . 1918 and 1920.

  You had to give the girl credit.

  And then she carefully looked at all the information in our file, while I drew an approximation of a stencil in red pencil at the top of every page:

  If we’d managed to hang on to the rats, we could have tied coded notes to their legs, but instead we worked on innocuous-sounding phrases for our code books that would allow us to exchange vital information in public. When I say we worked on phrases, what I mean is that Cat made them up and I said they were good. Here are some examples:

  Take an umbrella = TRUST NO ONE

  I’m thirsty = I HAVE NEWS

  What’s for dinner? = WE’VE BEEN BETRAYED

  Nice curtains = WE’RE DOOMED

  If I ever suggested a phrase, Cat would think of a reason why it wasn’t quite right, so after a while I stopped bothering. I didn’t mind though, just continued on with my TOP SECRET lettering, which got more and more professional-looking until you might have thought we had a real stamp.

  Are you getting a picture of our relationship? The thing is, I could have chosen a more straightforward friend, but I didn’t. It never really occurred to me that the friends you choose reveal you. Take Matthew and Gil. Gil required a leader and Matthew a follower. With Cat and me, I was the anchor. I would never, for instance, stuff rats into socks.

  It was all good fun, except that I never got to be the one who made the twenty-eight-digit prime-number code to save the world, despite understanding prime numbers far better than Cat did. She thought you could just have a mystical feeling about a number, no matter how many times I told her that prime meant not being divisible by anything. To Catlin, thirty-nine was a prime number because it looked sinister. Despite it totally not being one.

  As for her elaborate save-the-world fantasy—well, maybe it wasn’t a random choice. I would rather have played something else occasionally, like orphans or explorers or hospitals. But if my family had been like hers, I might have been equally desperate to come up with the right combination of prime numbers to make the world safe again.

  eleven

  Gabriel and his babysitter are back from playgroup. Her name is Caryn, C-a-r-y-n in case we were thinking of going with the usual spelling, and she looks uneasy when we tell her that Suzanne isn’t home yet but it’s all right, she can go. She says, No, it’s OK, I’ll just fix his boddle in case Mommy’s delayed.

  But Mommy isn’t delayed, she’s back, still looking stressed, but happy to see Gabriel and also—though somewhat less so—us. She asks if I like DVDs and gives me a choice of Titanic or Amélie. I don’t really care, but choose Amélie. I start to watch the movie and it’s fine, but I want to know what Suzanne and Gil are talking about more than I want to watch Amélie save the world.

  Gil says, What else? And Suzanne answers with a sigh.

  Maybe he’s having an affair with one of his students. I don’t know.

  And then I am inside the head of a person with a young child whose husband has gone missing and I am much more upset and panicked than Suzanne. What if he’s dead? screams this person with a child. What if I never see him again?

  But nothing about
Suzanne is screaming. When I say this to Gil, he nods as if he’s noticed the same thing. I suspect there’s more to this marriage than we know, he says. And of course Owen changed everything. Most couples who lose a child don’t stay together.

  I’ve been thinking about the connection between language and thought. Languages that read from left to right picture the passage of time moving left to right. If a French speaker tells the story of a cat catching a mouse, time starts at the left and moves to the right. Hebrew and Arabic speakers start with the cat and the mouse on the right and time passes to the left. So it’s not just a question of words.

  I try to remember this when I talk to Suzanne and imagine how time moves in her brain. Maybe it stopped when Owen died. Or got dammed up like logs in a stream. Or just goes round and round like the clock icon on a computer. She seems like a person made of glass. Tap her and she’ll shatter into a billion pieces.

  It is difficult having a conversation with a glass person but she watches patiently when I hold Gabriel and feed him his boddle, even though I can tell she wants him back. Honey desperately wants to protect the baby. She makes a faint noise in her throat and Suzanne shoos her away. Suzanne is not a horrible person masquerading as a nice one, just an angry one pretending to be normal.

  Perhaps she is the sort of person who says nothing for fear of exploding with words. In my presence, at least, she doesn’t ever mention Matthew. The language that structures her thoughts seems to be one that no one else speaks. And she avoids the only other creature who shares her loss. I think the dog’s unhappiness frightens her.

  Gabriel is too young to notice. I play a game with him where I lower a toy mouse on a string over his face and jerk it up again. He laughs and laughs and then out of nowhere his face collapses and he starts to howl. Suzanne swoops in and picks him up, saying, Mommy’s here. Gil looks at me.

  I walk over to the thousands of books displayed on the walls, run my hand along them and pick one out; Caravanserai, it’s called. Camels. Women draped in black. Men squatting, drinking tiny cups of tea. Low square buildings decorated with inscriptions I can’t read. It looks hot and quiet and slow.