The Death of Eli Gold by David Baddiel

Author:David Baddiel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

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‘So what have you got for me?’ says Michaela. The question shakes Harvey, as once again he has been staring. He blinks and looks away, to suggest that he has not been. This looking that he does, at these women – women like Michaela – is different from the usual. It’s not the pressing his nose to the window of Eden that young women inspire, nor the frenzied, scuttling battle of desire and despair his vision fights out every day across the face of Stella. It is a confused looking. He can see that Michaela was once beautiful, but this realization does not inspire the consequent pity – is this patronizing, this pity, Harvey wonders? Would the feminists think so? – that lost beauty usually does. This is because someone has gone into Michaela’s face and rerouted its arc towards decay: someone with knives and syringes and chemicals. The confusing thing for Harvey, however, is that he (Harvey imagines it must be a he – the people who do this, for women, are almost always men) has not exactly rerouted it back to beauty. He has made her face airbrush-smooth, eradicating all the lines and flaps and tiny tree-like veins that connect his eyes directly to darkness. But it is an angular, hard smoothness, like polished wood: it has none of the softness and give and butteriness that causes the young female face to arouse in men like Harvey feelings of hope and wonder – and also, of course, feelings of exclusion and outraged, furious loss.

Michaela’s face, specifically, has, despite strong resemblances – despite, in fact, looking like a polished wood carving of the same face – none of the softness and give and butteriness of the features of her daughter, Lark. This contrast is heightened – the morning sun, when it’s in your face, thinks Harvey – by the thick New York light streaming in from the Sangster’s restaurant window. He is on one side of the table, and on the other sit Lark and Michaela, who, as well as being her mother, is her manager. Next to them sits Josh, her American PR, a large suit of a man with an incongruous shock of black curly hair. They are having tea.

‘Well, I don’t know if my agent told you, but I’m not in the city to work – I’m here because my father is very ill …’

‘No, he didn’t,’ says Michaela. Her face betrays no sympathy, but Harvey cannot work out if this is because her overweening commitment to her daughter’s career has made her cold and unfeeling or because her face betrays nothing of anything any more. There is a short pause, during which his eyes flick across towards Lark. He thinks he picks up, in the move of Lark’s eyebrows, some concern for him, but he cannot look at her for long, she is too beautiful: it is like staring at the sun.

‘Well, so I haven’t been able to spend as long as I

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