The Death of Eli Gold. David Baddiel

has been dying for a long time, even since before I was six. I know, because on my sixth birthday Elaine gave me The Heavenly Express for Daddy, which is a book to help children understand what happens when their father dies. It had a lot of pictures in it of a man who is a daddy, but much younger than mine, with black hair instead of white, and no beard; but, like mine, he gets ill and has to go to a hospital. Then, God comes and sees the man, and tells him that he’s going to put him on a special train, to come up to heaven and live there with him – but then after that I don’t know what happens, because Mommy took the book away, because she thinks Elaine likes God too much. She took the book away, and said she didn’t believe that children, just because they were young, shouldn’t be told the truth. Especially me, she said, because I’m Daddy’s daughter, and Daddy doesn’t believe in God, even though some of his books are sort of about Him. Daddy, she said – well, she called him Eli, sometimes she calls him Daddy and sometimes Eli – Eli, she said, represents a touchstone of truth in this world. I didn’t know what these words meant, but Mommy closed her eyes tight when she said them and I always know that’s when she really wants me to know something, so I made sure I learnt them off by heart, like my three Ten Commandments.

      * * *

      Coming through arrivals at JFK, Harvey Gold thinks that, these days, he would make a good immigration officer. What do they do, these guys? They look at faces. They sit in a booth and they check real face against photo-face. Photo-face. Real face. Photo-face. Real face. All day. And me, what do I do all day, he thinks, these days? I check faces. Every face I see, I check: I check it over helplessly, looking, examining, investigating. Harvey, of course, is checking for something else, although he wonders how different it is. The immigration officers, they’re also searching for changes, for what happens to the face when it moves from stasis, from when it’s arranged. They’re checking to see how the face looks once it’s not presented, face-on.

      Whatever, he thinks, standing in line amongst the travellers, tired and bright and buzzing: I’d be fucking great. Especially – his red-eye eyes flick upwards, the pupils seeming to scratch against the back of the lids – in this light, this take-no-prisoners, angle-poised airport light. When eventually al-Qaeda decide it’s time to smuggle Osama bin Laden into America, he could have the best fucking Afghanistani surgery his siphoned-off dirty dollars can buy, he could come to my booth cut up and dyed and pixillated, and still I’d spot him. He could come in sex-changed. He smiles to himself at the thought, prompting the businessman standing next to him in the queue to frown. If he had looked closely, which he does not, the businessman might have noticed that Harvey’s smile is not pure, that it contains within it a lingering frond of bitterness.

      Harvey’s iPhone, a pocket harp, tings in his trousers: a text. He scrabbles in his jeans, which are tight around the crotch – he feels the crotch of his trousers is always shrinking these days, from the disgust that he carries eternally around with him. He knows without looking that the text will just be AT&T offering him their services, but he glances anyway – and so it is, a message of hope and welcome to America as if from the Pilgrim Fathers themselves. He is about to force the phone back through the thin slits of his front pockets when he notices another text, this one from Stella. He taps on it with his thumbnail, a thumbnail kept long as a throwback to when he used to play the guitar and imagine himself on stage with his foot up on black monitors. Darling, the text says, hope the flight wasn’t too tough. My love goes out to everybody who’ll be there, but most to you. Be safe. XXX

      He slides the screen three windows across with his thumb, to find Deep Green. Deep Green is a chess app that Harvey is addicted to. He takes it out at the first sign of boredom or entrapment – states in which his anxiety disorder, as various therapists have christened it, is exacerbated. He now reaches for it instinctively in doctors’ waiting rooms, illegally in traffic jams, and in all queues, because he knows that if he starts to play, the end of the wait will arrive faster. The downside is that Deep Green always beats him. He plays it on Level 4, halfway through its eight settings, and knows he should go down a level but feels that that would be pointless: that any joy there might be in defeating the computer – which for reasons unknown to Harvey has christened itself Tiny: every time he loses he has to suffer a small, smug ting, accompanied by a gloating Checkmate! Tiny wins! – would be undermined by the knowledge that he had to lower its game to get there.

      He has only just begun the game – although his thumb is already hovering over the RESIGN button – when he senses the businessman beside him twitch with irritation. He looks up, and realizes that everyone is now waiting for him to cross the green line and approach the booth. He puts the phone away, fumbles for his passport in the bumbag strung badly across his thighs, and remembers at the last moment: the American one. Harvey is, in so many ways, a dual citizen, and US law, always keen to assert its global difference, states in the clearest of tones that all travellers in possession of an American passport must enter the country showing the Spread-eagled Eagle. The immigration officer, who is narrowing her eyes at Harvey as if already interpreting his delay as suspicious, is a woman of about thirty-five. As he approaches the bitter smile returns, and with it the memory of the sex-changed devil, Osama.

      Let us be clear about this. Harvey is not smiling – and was not smiling earlier – at the idea of Osama bin Laden in women’s clothes. He is smiling to himself in the manner of a man who has accepted, unhappily, something shitty about himself; who, on this issue and many, many others, has pushed the RESIGN button in his soul. He is smiling to himself because he is thinking: obviously, obviously I’d fucking spot him if he’d had a sex change. Because then he’d be a woman: and women get checked by his eyes a hundred-and-fourteen-fold. This woman, this immigration officer; Harvey will look at her face much more closely than she will his. Even as her eyes perform a thorough and competent scan of his face, flicking occasionally to its corollary on the page – greying, jowly, passport-stern, behind the watery eyes just a hint of teenage memory of going into those photo booths with friends and making stupid faces far too close to the lens – however microscopic her examination, it is as nothing compared to the manic burrowing of Harvey’s gaze all over her skin, Photoshopping her, running her face through the Rolosex in his head, gauging, gauging, gauging: smoothness, symmetry, vulnerability of eye, fullness of cheek, of lip, of hair, thickness and tastefulness of make-up, and, most importantly, of course, resistance or otherwise to the torrent of ageing. Who knew, he thinks, the American phrase entering his head like a passport stamp? Who knew that the power of work, and indeed of international security, would be as nothing compared to that of sexual psychosis?

      ‘How long have you been out of the country?’ she says, startling Harvey: sometimes when he is staring at them like this he forgets that women can speak. He feels heat flush through him in response. He has hot flushes regularly – he is virtually menopausal with them – but they are not brought on by rising infertility, nor by the temperature of the June New York morning, but by fear. He has nothing to be frightened of, or at least nothing concrete, but for some time now this has been irrelevant to his physical response.

      ‘I don’t know,’ he says, his voice a little strangled, and aware of its laconically flat Englishness. ‘Ten years? Maybe a bit longer?’

      Her eyes, which are brown, and which Harvey has already noticed have running underneath them a series of what women’s magazines call ‘fine lines’, harden.

      ‘That’s a long time.’

      She has taken it as an affront, Harvey realizes. For these sentries posted at the gates of the promised land such a length of absence is suspicious. It is suspect, the very idea that one of their own might want to be away from the mother lode for this long a stretch. What possible delights could anywhere else in the world hold for so long? He feels a movie need to say something weary and sarcastic, but quells it underneath a nod of agreement.

      ‘Business or pleasure, this trip?’

      This makes Harvey pause. He stops running the immigration officer’s skin through a series of forensic sight-based (and, in his imagination, touch-based) tests. What is the answer? It’s multiple choice, clearly, with not enough choices.

      ‘My father is dying,’