The Death of Eli Gold. David Baddiel

were all these women in winter? thinks Harvey, viewing the teeming Manhattan sidewalks from the back windows of another cab. It is not the first time he has had the thought: it seems it comes to him earlier every year, his own deeply dysfunctional first cuckoo of spring. He knows the argument: it’s just the clothes, with their dizzying gaps between belt and top and neck and bra strap, giving onto the soft planes of caramelizing flesh. But that makes no sense to Harvey, because, looking round, he knows for certain that the women who snag his gaze in these clothes would snag his gaze were they dressed head to foot in straw.

      Fifth Avenue, the boulevard his driver has chosen to take in order to bring him back from Mount Sinai to the Sangster, is full of shoppers. Harvey is glad he isn’t driving, as looking out onto the fecund streets at this time of year from a vantage point above a steering wheel – whether in London or New York or anywhere – is lethal. Not lethal as in ‘God, man, that’s lethal’, said, say, with a wipe across the mouth on putting back down on the bar a high-alcohol cocktail. Lethal as in looking so hard and so long back over his shoulder, at this woman or that woman or this woman or that woman or this woman or that woman, in order to check out whether her face and front fulfils or undoes the promise of her hair and back, that Harvey drives headlong into the truck/car/bus/building in front. Many is the time, in London, from April to September, that Harvey has had to apply the brake split seconds faster than his leaping heart in order to prevent an imminent body flight through the smeary glass of his Toyota Avensis wind-screen. And many is also the time – about one in four, Harvey reckons – that a clear sight of said woman would, he thinks, have been just about worth, if not actual death, at least being cut screaming from the molten Toyota/truck conjunction with oxyacetylene.

      This is a somewhat contradictory thought for Harvey Gold – which is OK, contradiction being his air, his water – seeing as he knows that much of his trouble comes from this type of looking. This looking isn’t pleasure, it isn’t contemplation: like the rest of Harvey’s stuff, it’s symptomatic, pathological, obsessive compulsive. It is desire rendered only as pain, unrequited even in Harvey’s imagination. He is not interested in what he knows he can never have. He is only troubled by it.

      There are male friends he has spoken to about this issue who love the streets at this time, including one who, despite having three cars and more than enough money for taxis, always, on travelling into central London in spring and summer, will get the bus, in order to sit on the top deck and leer. Harvey does not understand his friend. Harvey does not understand the idea of the enjoyment of looking. Very early on in their time together, Therapist 4, the Kleinian, had suggested the possibility that Harvey could contain the anxiety looking at women on the street caused him by comparing them to beautiful paintings.

      ‘You can look at beautiful paintings without being overcome with anxiety – you can in fact look at beautiful paintings and enjoy them …’ she had said, with an air of this’ll sort him out, ‘why don’t you try and think of these women as beautiful paintings?’

      ‘Because,’ he had replied instantly – always at his quickest when pressed on his own neuroses: the nearest Harvey comes to his father’s speed of mind is his ability always to have an answer for why this or that suggestion will not cure him – ‘when I see a beautiful painting, I have no desire to touch or kiss or lick or fuck the canvas.’

      Harvey remembers the face of Therapist 4 at this moment. She was his first woman – chosen deliberately, in the hope that that would be the key – and sixty-three, also a deliberate choice, and had had a minor stroke that caused one side of her mouth to fall faintly out of symmetry with the other. Physiotherapy had got her facial muscles back to about 80 per cent of their pre-stroke strength, but her lips still had something of the look of a falling graph and, in response to this particular remark, seemed to fall just a millidegree further. Harvey took this to mean that he had stumped her, and felt, despite the fact that he was paying her to cure him and therefore not to be stumped, a small thrill of triumph.

      ‘Are you OK, sir?’ says the taxi driver, a Sikh. Harvey looks away from the window; again he has the impulse to delineate the thousand ways in which he is not. But he says:

      ‘Fine. Yes. Why do you ask?’

      ‘You were sighing?’ His accent is Bengali, but the intonation, going up at the end of the sentence to make the observation a question, is American.

      Harvey looks at the ID card in the right-hand corner of the glass partition that separates passenger from driver: the words Jasvant Kirtia Singh and a face, most of it covered by turban and beard.

      ‘Sorry, I didn’t realize …’

      ‘It is someone you’re seeing at the hospital?’

      Harvey looks at Jasvant Kirtia Singh’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. Animated from their I’m-Not-A-Terrorist impassivity on his ID, they are small black beads, birdlike, but framed by eyebrows gently suggesting both enquiry and a willingness to retreat if the passenger does not wish to talk.

      ‘My father.’

      ‘He is unwell?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘I hope he gets better soon …?’

      Harvey wonders what to say to this. It has happened a few times, particularly early on, before the obituary writers began sharpening their pencils (or, rather, Googling ‘Eli Gold’): he would tell someone that his father was ill, and they would offer some encouraging words indicating hope of a return to health, and Harvey would have to face saying, No. He isn’t going to get better. The next stage of the conversation would then be stunted, and Harvey would feel at some level rude for having burdened them with this information. It crosses his mind, therefore, just to tell the taxi driver that his father is indeed on the mend – after all, he is not someone who needs to know the truth, nor is ever likely to find out that he has been lied to anyway. But Harvey doesn’t: even the tiniest lies will up his already heightened anxiety levels.

      ‘I don’t think so …’ he says, and the Sikh’s eyes hold his for a second, then move up and down as the back of his turbaned head nods in sad understanding.

      ‘I am sorry,’ he says, for the first time not framing the statement as a question.

      Harvey is grateful, however, to have his mind brought back to his father. He feels, with his gratitude, a stab of guilt that he should be thinking about his sense of exclusion from the huge variety of female flesh out there so soon after seeing his father on his deathbed for the first time. Harvey knows what the world demands: there are certain things, of which the death of your father is certainly one, that must drive all other thoughts from your head, filling your sky as effortlessly as a wide-winged black eagle, but the truth – Harvey’s truth, yes, but he senses that here, for once, he is not alone – is that the widower at his wife’s funeral is for a second snagged by the breasts of the female mourner standing on the other side of the grave, straining against her tight black jacket; that the father at his son’s hospital bed is distracted, against all his will, by the curving back view the nurse creates as she reaches up to change the little boy’s drip. It is the source of men’s deepest shame, the ever-presence of the penis; or, to be more exact, the incongruity of the penis, its continued presence on those occasions when it would be so clearly in accordance with every idea of human dignity for it to be absent.

      Harvey tries his best, though. He attempts to use his short-term memory – the pictures in his head of where he has just been – to drive himself into mental propriety. He thinks hard: he focuses. But not in that modern self-help, how-to-improve-your-golf-swing way – he actually does his best to make his mind’s eye like a camera lens, closing telescopically on the world around him to see only the immediate past.

      Eli’s room had been in Geriatrics, at the end of a long, bright corridor, on whose walls were hung a number of photographs commemorating the opening of the new Geriatric Medicine Facility, by Martha Stewart, in 2007. Outside the room itself stood a hulking security man, both black and dressed in black. He held one huge finger, his index, to his ear, pressed against a Bluetooth cellphone earpiece. ‘ID, sir,’ he said, managing to pack into those