Lambert Prodigal

Shortlisted for the Polari Prize
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-446-0
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

SHORTLISTED FOR THE POLARI PRIZEHapless fifty-something Jeremy Eldritch is scraping together a living in Paris, writing soft-core pornography as 'Nathalie Cray'.When his all but estranged sister tells him that their father is dying, he reluctantly returns to his parental home in the English countryside. Confronted with a life he had always sought to escape, Jeremy begins an emotionally fraught journey into his family's chequered past - back to his mother's unexpected death in a Greek hospital years earlier, and even further back, to the moment at which the Eldritch family fell apart.A bold new take on the queer coming-of-age story, Prodigal deftly reconsiders the nature of trust, death, and the things we do to one another in the name of love.

Charles Lambert is the author of several novels, short stories, and the memoir With a Zero at its Heart, which was voted one of The Guardian readers' Ten Best Books of the Year in 2014.In 2007, he won an O. Henry Award for his short story The Scent of Cinnamon. His first novel, Little Monsters, was longlisted for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Born in England, Charles Lambert has lived in central Italy since 1980.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lambert, Charles

Leseproben

1

JEREMY

The call comes when he least expects it. He’s tidying away what’s left of lunch – some cold meat wrappers, a crust of baguette – when the phone rings, in that short-tempered peremptory way machines have. He almost doesn’t answer it; he’s been fending off unwanted offers of insurance, unlimited broadband, crates of discount wine for months now. His name must be on some list somewhere – Jeremy Eldritch, sucker, with a five-star rating after it to indicate the extent of his gullibility. Or maybe four. Why be so hard on himself always, so unforgiving? These past few weeks he’s found himself saying no with unexpected ease, behaving with a brusqueness he’s superficially ashamed of, but deeply pleased, even smug, to find as part of his telephone repertoire. I’m getting bad, he’s said to himself. Even my mother would be ashamed of me. I’m finding my teeth after all these years of pandering to people I’ve never met and would almost certainly hate to the deepest pit of my heart if I did, as they would me. He throws the paper and crust towards the bin two feet away, wipes his greasy hands on a tea towel hanging from the oven door and picks up the phone.

It’s his older sister, Rachel. ‘You’d better get back here,’ she says. ‘He’s on his way out.’

Jeremy lives on the fourth floor of a building ten minutes’ walk away from Place de Clichy in the seventeenth arrondissement, his favourite part of Paris. In the days when people read Henry Miller, long before he lived here himself, he’d use the man’s Quiet Days in Clichy as a sort of cultural landmark. Not exactly my idea of quiet, he’d say, referring to the book, more like a movable fuck-fest of very little literary worth, and people would leap to Miller’s defence, or not, depending on their age and sex and artistic pretension, or look at him with an anxious glance, surprised to hear such language from such an apparently mild and amenable man.

This is the smallest flat he’s ever lived in, just under eighteen metres square, a truncated cupboard masquerading as a kitchen, an all-purpose living space not much larger than a decent walk-in wardrobe, a bathroom small enough to shower while crapping and still be able to rinse one’s razor under the tap. It was sold to him as a studio and might even have had room for a desk or drawing board of some kind if he hadn’t squeezed a double mattress in the space between the cooker and the door to the bathroom, now a sort of improvised futon Jean-Paul produced by lifting the mattress up with the sort of strength the adrenalin of rage produces and flinging it against the wall. It skulks there, a drunken observer, its back against the plaster, a sheet hanging rakishly down from one corner, while Jeremy eats and writes and reads at the round wooden table that takes up most of the rest of the room. Jeremy sleeps on the horizontal part of the mattress, a not quite rectangular rhomboid with a couple of pillows thrown at the wider end and a duvet gathered at the other. He waits for Jean-Paul to come back and sort things out. He has been waiting for just over two months.

What made him buy the flat, other than its price and the fact that he likes small places, prefers them even, was the honey-coloured parquet and the window, which reaches to the ground and gives onto a courtyard and blue-grey roofs of weathered zinc and is altogether too splendid for the room in which it finds itself; a situation, Jeremy feels, that has some affinity to his. His favourite position is to sit at one side of the table with his back to the mattress, looking out through the wide-open window, his feet on a small wooden box that once held a magnum of champagne and is now filled with letters from the time when people wrote them, his arms crossed loosely above his stomach in the restful position of a man on his own tomb. He’ll have a book somewhere near his chair, or his laptop, or the manuscript he’s working on, but will have abandoned it to watch the gently urban wind in the leaves of the courtyard’s single tree, which may be a lime or may be something quite different, but which he continues to think of as a lime. He’ll be watching the leaves as the wind turns them white and then dark again, and the movement of the young man in the window opposite, who has no time at all for Jeremy and who wanders around his slightly larger studio in pyjamas or less, a large bowl of coffee cupped in his elegant white hands, and whose presence contributed in no small measure to Jean-Paul’s final fit of jealous rage.

Jeremy has been in this flat for the past seventeen years, in or near Batignolles for almost twenty-five, in Paris for thirty-four, give or take the odd few months elsewhere, for reasons of the heart or penury. He was dispatched here by his mother when no other solution seemed feasible, with the address in his wallet of a girl she’d known at school, who’d married someone in publishing, the business card of a hotel she’d stayed in briefly before she married his father, in whose company she didn’t say, some traveller’s cheques for the first few months and a copy of a guide to the churches of Paris she’d claimed to have bought in a local jumble sale, trusting that some kind of solace might be gained from it. He studied the names as the ferry pitched its way towards Calais. Saint-Denys. Saint-Gervais-et-Saint-Protais. Saint-Germain-des-Prés. What a saintly city it must be, he mused. He’d read French at university but spent his year out in Montpellier and only passed through Paris twice. He was saving it for when he was in love, he told himself, which made it feel vast and hopeless; the depth and span of its stations dispirited him, the elegance of its men, each one of them single and aloof and self-sufficient. His mother’s hotel, though, set him right within hours, when one of the kitchen hands followed him back to his poky, single-bedded room and gave him a lesson in a brusque and richly communicative sexual argot his three interrupted years at Exeter hadn’t prepared him for at all. So this is Paris, he thought, his face in the pillow as a slim Algerian whose name he never caught left teeth marks in his shoulder.

His mother’s friend’s husband had turned out to own not a publishing house but a sizable printing works to the south of Paris. He caught the train out there one late autumn morning, enjoying the sense of being a foreigner these journeys within the larger journey always heightened. I don’t belong here, he found himself repeating in mantric rapture, in time with the leafless poplars that lined the railway track as soon as the city and its suburbs were behind him. I don’t belong here. And its counterpoint. And so I’ll stay.

He was met at the station by a short man with a large moustache who introduced himself as the general manager of the works, which impressed Jeremy, as it was no doubt meant to. The man drove him to a smallish factory on the outskirts of the town, with a row of sedately smoking chimneys, their off-white pads of vapour sloping away to the side in infantile chorus like something from an impressionist painting. The printing works were behind this, in a squat red-brick manoir-like building, from which came the sound of machinery, an arrhythmic thudding that nonetheless reminded Jeremy of his journey and gave him a sense of inevitability he realised he had been craving. He wondered what was being printed behind such mundane walls. What had seemed like a courtesy visit took on a new importance.

The manager walked him round the works, explaining each stage of the process, but Jeremy’s French was barely up to it, and what he did understand made it all seem more mysterious. He watched a young man his age set type, his hands like birds after seed, and didn’t want to know any more than that; that hands had made it. He heard the presses at work, glistening black giant looms weaving words, or text as he had learned to call it during supervisions with his teachers, always with the epithet holy in his head, as though the words were measured out by gods who wished both to remain secret and to be obeyed. The author was dead, but the printer survived, the actual artisan of the text, a man no older than he was, fine-featured, stooped like a heron over water, all of these images of birds tumbling one after the other; perhaps there was some sort of narcotic in the ink they used, he thought, as he stumbled behind his brisk, gesticulating guide until he was suddenly in an office, the distant thud of the printing attenuated by music he couldn’t place. Something that reminded him of Satie, but wasn’t.

A man unfolded himself from behind a desk and held out his hand. He announced, in rumbling, accented English, that he was Jeremy’s mother’s friend’s husband, presumably to show off his grasp of the genitive. Jeremy sat down in the seat provided and let the man talk for a little until he could make up his mind about what he thought. The man was tall, large-boned, with long, slightly thinning hair and expressive hands he was clearly proud of; he’d catch sight of them suddenly and pause, as if surprised by such contingent elegance. His name, he said, was Armand. Jeremy wasn’t sure which name this was, his first or second. He glanced above the man’s head to what looked like a university degree, framed in gilt, and saw the name Armand Grenier in blood-red copperplate across its centre. The truth, thought Jeremy as he cautiously glanced around the rest of the room, its cabinets and glass-fronted...