Escape From Shangri-La

  ‘But you’ve got to promise you won’t go off on your wanders again,’ said my mother, wagging her finger playfully at Popsicle. ‘Frightened us half to death, you did. Promise?’

  ‘Promise,’ Popsicle replied, holding up his hand. ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’

  ‘We don’t want you doing that either,’ she said, and we all laughed at that, even my father.

  ‘Well,’ my mother went on, getting to her feet, ‘now that’s settled, we can get on with life, can’t we? And you know what that means, don’t you, Cessie Stevens?’

  ‘No.’ But I knew exactly what she was getting at.

  ‘I have this feeling that, in all the excitement, you might have forgotten something.’ I played dumb. ‘Your violin practice?’ There was no point in arguing. I made the best of it and got up to leave.

  ‘You want me to come up and hear you?’ my father asked.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I replied. I was so angry with him, and I wanted him to know it. ‘Popsicle’ll come, won’t you? We’ll do some Beatles songs.’

  ‘“Nowhere Man”,’ said Popsicle, as I helped him to his feet. ‘We’ll do “Nowhere Man”.’

  So we went upstairs and, sitting on the bed in my room, Popsicle taught me ‘Nowhere Man’ till I knew it through and through. I played. He sang. We were good together, very good. But my mind wasn’t on it. I just couldn’t enjoy it as much as I usually did. I kept thinking of my father downstairs, and I kept wishing I hadn’t been so cruel.

  When I’d finished, Popsicle looked at me for a while, and then he said, ‘You and me, we’re friends, aren’t we? And friends have to be honest with each other, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve always been good to me, Cessie. You spoke up for me last night, and I shan’t forget that, not ever. But you mustn’t judge your dad like you do. You mustn’t hurt him. You’re the apple of his eye, you are. So you be kind to him, eh? There’s a girl.’

  Popsicle had been reading my mind again, and I wondered how he did it.

  6 AND ALL SHALL BE WELL

  IT WAS SOON AFTER THIS THAT I BEGAN TO NOTICE Popsicle talking to himself. I’d hear him in his bedroom, a muffled monologue, so muffled that I could never make out much of what he was saying. I noticed too that he was becoming more and more absent-minded. Once, he went wandering out into the garden in the rain with just his socks on; and time and again he’d make the tea and forget to put any tea in the pot. He’d think that lunch-time was tea-time and tea-time was lunch-time. Every time he’d try to laugh it off and call himself a ‘silly old codger’, but I could see that it worried him as much as it worried us.

  Then one day he lit a bonfire too close to the garden shed and Mr Goldsmith’s fence. I wasn’t at home when it happened. I was out at Madame Poitou’s for my violin lesson. When I came back the fire-engine was already there and a pall of brown smoke was hanging over the house. I ran inside. Popsicle was sitting on the bottom stair in the hallway, his face in his hands, and my mother was crouched down beside him trying to comfort him.

  ‘It’s not your fault, Popsicle,’ she was saying. ‘These things happen. Why don’t you go upstairs and have a nice wash? You’ll feel a lot better.’ His eyes were red, his face tear-stained and besmirched. He went up the stairs very slowly.

  I followed my mother out into the garden. It was a mess out there, a real mess. The fire-fighters were packing up and going. As one of them passed us, he stopped. ‘Could have been a lot worse, missus. Whatever does he think he was doing anyway? First he builds a bonfire too close to the shed and then he goes off and leaves it. Got to be a bit doolally, if you ask me.’

  When they had all gone I gave her a hand tidying up what we could in the garden. We raked all that was left of the garden shed into a pile of charred timbers and soggy ashes. She worried on and on about what Mr Goldsmith from next door would say about his fence when he got home from work. And she worried on about Popsicle too.

  We were an hour or so clearing up the worst of it. My wellingtons were covered in mud by this time, so I had to take them off at the back door before I went in. I was padding through the hallway into the kitchen when I felt it. The carpet was sodden under my bare feet. I charged upstairs to find the basin overflowing, and the bathroom awash. I turned off the tap and pulled out the plug.

  Popsicle was in his room, sitting on his bed and staring into space. I sat down beside him.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Popsicle,’ I said. ‘It’s just a rotten old garden shed. It was falling down anyway. Dad’s been moaning on about it ever since we moved here. He was going to get a new one. Honestly he was.’ But nothing I could say seemed to bring him any comfort.

  Then he muttered something, something I couldn’t quite hear. ‘Sorry?’ I said, leaning closer.

  ‘Shangri-La.’ He clutched at my hand as he spoke. ‘Shangri-La, I don’t want to go to Shangri-La.’ I could see in his eyes that he was terrified. He was pleading with me, begging me.

  ‘What’s Shangri-La?’ There was an echo in my head, an echo of something he’d said before.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ The tears were running down his cheeks, and he didn’t even trouble to wipe them away.

  ‘If you don’t want to go there,’ I said, ‘then no one’s going to make you, I promise.’ He seemed happier at that.

  ‘You promise?’ he said. I laid my head on his shoulder, and after a while I felt his arm come round me. That was how my mother found us some time later. She helped Popsicle to wash, and put him to bed.

  We spent the rest of the day mopping up. But there was still water dripping from the lightbulb into a bucket in the hallway when my father came in from work. I explained what had happened, how none of it had been Popsicle’s fault, just bad luck, that’s all. ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘now you can have your new garden shed like you wanted.’

  They exchanged knowing glances. I knew then that they were both, in some way, blaming Popsicle for what had happened. My father walked out into the garden to inspect the damage and left the two of us alone. It was then I remembered what Popsicle had said to me earlier.

  ‘Where’s Shangri-La?’ I asked my mother.

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  ‘I just wondered. Read it in a book somewhere.’ I didn’t want to say any more.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s a sort of imaginary paradise, high up in the mountains, the Himalayas, I think. A kind of heaven on earth, you could call it. Just a story of course. Doesn’t exist, not really.’

  But I couldn’t forget the fear in Popsicle’s eyes when he’d spoken of it. Imaginary or not, Shangri-La was real enough to him.

  After the garden-shed fire, I would often find myself alone in the house with Popsicle. My mother was in and out of school getting ready for the new school year; and my father, of course, was as busy as ever down at the radio station, always leaving the house early and getting home late. I was to keep a watchful eye on Popsicle; and above all, they said, I mustn’t let him wander off on his own. As it turned out, he didn’t seem to want to. He seemed to be as content with my company as I was with his. Having Popsicle at home was a boon for me. I was dreading going back to school, because I knew I’d have to face Shirley Watson and the others. Just the thought of them looking at me, laughing at me, made me go cold inside, but Popsicle kept my mind off all that – most of the time anyway.

  We did everything together. He’d listen to me playing my violin, and I’d listen to him reciting his favourite poems. It was strange. He couldn’t even remember where he lived, but he knew his poems off by heart, dozens of them. I wasn’t sure I always understood them, but I loved listening to him, because when Popsicle read poetry he made the words sing.

  What he still looked forward to most though was our daily walk to the park to feed the ducks. Once out there in the park he just loved to talk, never about his past though, and never about my father. He loved to think out loud. As with the poems, I have to say I couldn’t always follow all of it
, but I listened all the same because I knew he was confiding in me, trusting in me, and I felt honoured by that.

  The day it happened we were on our way back home from the park. We had to stop at the shop for some milk. He was tired by this time, but that never stopped him talking. ‘Have you ever thought, Cessie?’ he was saying. ‘Have you ever thought that this is all a dream? All of it, the ducks, the pond, this shop, you, me, all of it, nothing but a funny old dream. Maybe all you do when you die is wake up, and then you don’t remember anything anyway because you never remember dreams, do you? You know what they say, Cessie? They say in the last two minutes before you die you live your whole life over again. Looks like I’ll have to wait till then to remember. Be a bit late by then, bit late to do anything about it, I mean.’ He was frowning now. There’s something I’ve still got to put right, Cessie, I know there is, something I’ve got to do. Trouble is, I can’t for the life of me remember what it is.’

  We were inside the shop by now and walking along past the breakfast cereals and the coffee and the tea, towards the fridge at the back. Popsicle had stopped talking. I was a while finding the two-litre carton of semi-skimmed I was looking for. When I turned round Popsicle had vanished. I panicked, but I needn’t have. I found him almost at once near the check-out desk. He had taken a tin off the shelf.

  ‘What’ve you got?’ I asked him.

  ‘There’s something, Cessie, something I’ve remembered,’ he said.

  I read the label out loud. ‘Condensed milk?’

  ‘All I know is that I like it,’ he went on, ‘that I’ve always liked it.’ He was looking at me strangely, as if I wasn’t there. ‘There were searchlights. There were searchlights and I couldn’t get out. I couldn’t get out.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know, Cessie. That’s the trouble, I don’t know what I mean. But this, this tin is part of what I’ve got to remember, I know it is. I can’t think, Cessie, I can’t think.’ His eyes were tight closed and he was banging the tin repeatedly against the side of his head. Everyone was looking at us now, so I bought the milk and the tin of condensed milk, took Popsicle by the arm and left the shop as quickly as I could. All the way home he was lost in himself, and that was how he stayed.

  After that he wouldn’t go out for his walk any more. He wouldn’t read his poetry. He’d simply sit in his chair in the sitting-room, frowning incessantly and gazing into nowhere. If ever I offered to play my violin for him, he’d just shake his head. Whatever my mother put on his plate he refused to touch, not even pancakes and maple syrup, and he adored pancakes and maple syrup. ‘The look of it doesn’t taste nice,’ he said. He said such odd things these days. She was worried about him, and I could see my father was too; but I wasn’t. I knew what they didn’t know, that he’d discovered a clue to his past and was struggling to work out what it meant. Once he’d worked it out, then the door to his memory would open and everything would be fine. I was sure of it.

  Each night I lay awake wondering what the significance of a tin of condensed milk could possibly be. I asked myself again and again whether or not I should tell anyone about it, but I decided that what passed between Popsicle and me when we were alone was our private business and no one else’s. I felt it would be like informing on him, like breaking a confidence. So I said nothing.

  Popsicle had hardly eaten a thing now for a week. He was so frail he had to be helped up the stairs to bed. He didn’t shave any more. He didn’t wash any more. He never got out of his dressing-gown and slippers. Nothing seemed to interest him. He’d even stopped listening to my father on the radio. All day and every day, he’d just sit there rocking back and forth, humming tunes to himself and rubbing his knees. Like Aladdin, I thought, like Aladdin rubbing his lamp. He was making a wish and rubbing, but, unlike Aladdin, no amount of rubbing brought out the genie to make his wish come true. I was watching him sink deeper and deeper into despair and there was nothing I could do about it.

  My mother tried all she knew. She tried threats. ‘You don’t eat this and I won’t ever make you pancakes again.’ She tried blackmail. ‘You don’t go out and feed those ducks of yours and they’ll die.’

  My father tried sweet-talking Popsicle out of it, but he very soon gave up in exasperation.

  ‘If you ask me,’ he said, ‘he’s just being downright difficult. My mother always said he was a moody devil. She wasn’t far wrong either.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ I cried. ‘He’s not doing it deliberately. He’s just sad, that’s all. He’s trying to remember, and he can’t. How would you like it, if you’d lost your memory?’ Tears of anger always came too easily to me, and I wished they wouldn’t. He was judging Popsicle, blaming him, and that was so unjust, and so unfair.

  Then one evening they called in Dr Wickens. He spent a good half hour alone with Popsicle. I sat on the stairs outside and tried to eavesdrop – unsuccessfully – until my mother found me and fetched me into the kitchen, where all three of us sat and waited.

  It was some time before the doctor came into the kitchen. He sat down heavily, and packed his stethoscope into his black bag. He smiled at me over his glasses.

  ‘Well,’ he began, ‘I’ve had a good look at him. The good news is that he’s continuing to make a good recovery from the stroke. His right arm’s not as strong as I’d like it to be just yet, but apart from that he’s got the constitution of an ox. He’s got a thumping strong heart, and his blood pressure’s fine. Lungs as clear as a bell.’ He paused.

  ‘So what’s the bad news?’ my father asked.

  ‘Well, I don’t think it’s that serious, not yet, but he is depressed. He won’t talk to me much, so I can’t say how depressed exactly. Depression is not uncommon after a stroke. And of course there’s this loss of memory. That can’t have helped. So he’s going to need some treatment.’

  ‘What sort of treatment?’ my mother asked.

  ‘Hopefully, it can be dealt with by a short course of antidepressant pills. And perhaps a spell in a nursing home may be necessary for a while. We’ll see. Let’s hope it won’t come to that. The pills should set him right, get him eating again, get him on his feet, help him take more of an interest in life.’

  So they did, and when the transformation came, it came so soon and so suddenly that it took us all completely by surprise. It was two or three days later, on Sunday afternoon. My father was out in the garden, rebuilding the fence with Mr Goldsmith, who had been very good about it, considering everything. My mother was ironing in the sitting-room – again. I was curled up with a book on the sofa – a six-pages-a-minute horror book. Popsicle was upstairs lying down on his bed, as he had been more and more often just recently. He’d eaten a little bit of his lunch – we’d all noticed that – but he’d been just as uncommunicative as ever. Suddenly we heard him calling out. ‘Up here,’ he cried. ‘Cessie, come up here!’ I was upstairs in an instant, my mother hard on my heels.

  He was sitting up in his bed and chuckling. The tin of condensed milk was open on his lap and he was licking the spoon clean. He held up the tin to show us. It was quite empty. ‘Cessie,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a riddle for you. Do you know why elephants have good memories?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Why do elephants have good memories?’

  ‘Because they eat a lot,’ he said, wagging the spoon at me. ‘And . . .’ Now he was wagging it at my mother. ‘And because they wash themselves too.’ He rubbed his stubbly chin, and was grinning hugely. ‘And maybe, just maybe, because they shave as well, every day.’

  ‘Popsicle.’ My mother put her arms round him and hugged him. ‘Popsicle, you’re better. You’re feeling better, aren’t you?’

  ‘A whole heap, and I’m not talking elephants either – if you know what I mean.’ And at that his chuckling broke into guffaws of laughter.

  ‘What is this stuff?’ my mother asked, taking the empty tin off him. She was wrinkling her nose at it disapprovingly.

  ‘Ah,’ said Pop
sicle enigmatically. ‘That’s magic that is, pure magic.’ He swung his legs off the bed. ‘Give us a hand up, Cessie, there’s a girl.’ He was standing between us, still holding on to my arm, when my father came into the room.

  The two of them looked at each other, and for a while neither seemed to know what to say.

  ‘Put you all through it a bit, didn’t I?’ said Popsicle.

  ‘A bit,’ my father agreed.

  ‘Black dog days. I’ve always had them, all my life. I don’t rightly know how I get into them. But I’m out now, and all on account of a tin of condensed milk. Got me thinking.’ He steadied himself against my shoulder.

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s about time this old elephant had a wash and brush-up,’ he said, and without another word he went off to the bathroom. It wasn’t long before we heard him singing ‘Yellow Submarine’, full volume too.

  To my mother’s huge delight and relief, before he went to bed that night he ate three syrupy pancakes, and downed two mugs of hot chocolate, five spoonfuls of sugar in each. That tin of condensed milk had reminded him of something, and something important too, I was sure of it. I waited until he was in bed, and then I went in to see him. He was reading.

  ‘T.S. Eliot,’ he said. ‘Good poet, he is. Listen to this:

  “And all shall be well and

  All manner of things shall be well”

  He’s right too.’

  ‘You know something, don’t you?’ I said. ‘You know where you live. You’ve remembered, haven’t you?’

  ‘No. I’m afraid not, Cessie. But I’m getting there. I’ve made a start.’

  ‘What then? What’ve you remembered?’

  ‘It’s only a little thing, but a little thing is something. Every night when I’m home, I have three teaspoons of condensed milk, always have done. Helps me sleep. Helps me think straight. I can see them lined up on the shelf above the sink in my kitchen – dozens of tins of condensed milk. I can see them, up here in my head. Only a little kitchen – not enough room to swing a rat, let alone a cat. I’m telling you, Cessie, it’s coming. All I need is my condensed milk each night to oil the old memory. It’ll get it working again, I know it will.’