he
A Novel
ALSO BY JOHN CONNOLLY
THE CHARLIE PARKER STORIES
Every Dead Thing
Dark Hollow
The Killing Kind
The White Road
The Reflecting Eye (Novella in the Nocturnes Collection)
The Black Angel
The Unquiet
The Reapers
The Lovers
The Whisperers
The Burning Soul
The Wrath of Angels
The Wolf in Winter
A Song of Shadows
A Time of Torment
A Game of Ghosts
OTHER WORKS
Bad Men
The Book of Lost Things
SHORT STORIES
Nocturnes
Night Music: Nocturnes Volume II
THE SAMUEL JOHNSON STORIES (FOR YOUNG ADULTS)
The Gates
Hell’s Bells
The Creeps
THE CHRONICLES OF THE INVADERS (WITH JENNIFER RIDYARD)
Conquest
Empire
Dominion
NON-FICTION
Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels (as editor, with Declan Burke)
Parker: A Miscellany
New York • London
© 2017 by John Connolly
Jacket photograph © Shutterstock.com
First published in the United States by Quercus in 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.
Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
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e-ISBN 978-1-63506-059-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Connolly, John, 1968– author.
Title: He : a novel / John Connolly.
Description: New York : Quercus, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017047145 (print) | LCCN 2018008222 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635060591 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635060607 (library edition) | ISBN 9781635060577 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781635060584 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Laurel, Stan–Fiction. | Hardy, Oliver, 1892–1957–Fiction. | Motion picture actors and actresses–Fiction. | Comedians–Fiction. | Motion pictures–United States–History–20th century–Fiction. | Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)–Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6053.O48645 (ebook) | LCC PR6053.O48645 H4 2017 (print) | DDC 823/.914–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047145
Distributed in the United States and Canada by
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10104
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
www.quercus.com
For Jennie, with love
And the heart has become so tired, and the longing so vast.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Chapter 146
Chapter 147
Chapter 148
Chapter 149
Chapter 150
Chapter 151
Chapter 152
Chapter 153
Chapter 154
Chapter 155
Chapter 156
Chapter 157
Chapter 158
Chapter 159
Chapter 160
Chapter 161
Chapter 162
Chapter 163
Chapter 164
Chapter 165
Chapter 166
Chapter 167
Chapter 168
Chapter 169
Chapter 170
Chapter 171
Chapter 172
Chapter 173
Chapter 174
Chapter 175
Chapter 176
Chapter 177
Chapter 178
Chapter 179
Chapter 180
Chapter 181
Chapter 182
Chapter 183
Chapter 184
Chapter 185
Chapter 186
Chapter 187
Chapter 188
Chapter 189
Chapter 190
Chapter 191
Chapter 192
Chapter 193
Chapter 194
Chapter 195
Chapter 196
Chapter 197
Chapter 198
Chapter 199
Chapter 200
Chapter 201
Chapter 202
Chapter 203
Author’s Note
1
At the Oceana Apartments, at the dawning of the last days, he chases butterfly memories.
Through the open window comes the sound of breaking waves. He has always loved the sea, long captive to its amniotic pull. So he lives here in this small apartment,
lives here in Santa Monica,
lives here with his wife,
lives here with the dream of who he was and the reality of what he has become.
He is old. He will not live much longer, here or anywhere else.
On this, the last set of his life—the walls, and the ocean behind—he is missing his marks. He is faltering in the final steps of the dance. The enchained recollections of his life have begun to slip away, until soon he will no longer have the power to bring to mind even his own name. So he tries to hold on to his memories, because each one that escapes, never to be recovered, represents a further dissolution of the self.
When all the memories have departed, so too will he.
The dead have no recall.
He was famous once.
No, he and Babe were famous once. But now Babe is gone, and he is alone.
Babe.
Every regret in his life holds the echo of this name.
He can remember meeting Babe, and he can remember losing Babe, but the events between are like paints imperfectly mixed, swirls of color and texture, each representing a single, beautifully ordinary day, a conversation perfect in its inconsequence, a moment of transitory joy, its essence both preserved yet elusive.
These remembrances are gemstones tumbling to the ground, shattering on impact. He struggles to retrieve the fragments, to maintain his hold upon them and comprehend their disparate meanings.
These remembrances are snowflakes swirling in his path. They melt in his hand at the instant of connection, so that he is left only with the chill of loss.
These remembrances are flickering images on a screen.
Two figures in a dance eternal.
He and Babe.
Now only he.
2
The mind is a theater. It cannot be allowed to go dark. It must be maintained.
This is what his father does, Arthur Jefferson, his sire; a rescuer, a restorer, a proprietor of auditoriums in British towns. He bears A.J.’s name for more than half of his own life, and A.J.’s features for much longer. He becomes a simulacrum of A.J., and A.J.’s disappointment in him is compounded as a consequence.
He is a child, eclipsed by his father’s shadow.
Now he, this child, is watching A.J. as A.J. stands in the Eden in Bishop Auckland, admiring the new lights, the upholstered rows, the gilded paintwork, just as A.J. will stand in the Royal in Consett
in the Royal in Blyth
in the Tynemouth Circus in North Shields
in the Metropole in Glasgow
(because, A.J. will tell him, there is a rhythm to names, and a poetry to places)
each one saved from the dark by A.J. the impresario, A.J. the dramatist, who invents plays to draw the crowds to his venues, words tumbling from him so fast that A.J. can barely write quickly enough to bind them to the page before they drift away. But A.J.’s ideas are light, and only verbiage lends them weight. Slowly A.J. learns. A.J. is no playwright. The dramas cease, to be replaced by sketches and skits.
All this he witnesses, boy and young man, this moon to A.J.’s sun, and in attic rooms he practices his stage routines before empty seats and the scrutiny of mannequins.
3
It is 1906.
Pickard’s Museum, the Panopticon; formerly the Britannia Music Hall, and the haunt of whores. Old, even by the standards of these places, and hard with it, but Glasgow was always this way.
A.E. Pickard, with his Van Dyke beard and cutaway suit, will install waxworks in the Panopticon, and a carnival. A.E. Pickard, with his distorting mirrors and images of Chinese torture, will install a freak show in the Panopticon, and a zoo. The shadows of the Panopticon, the Pots & Pans, will smell of hay and shit, and the despair of human and animal alike.
He is the bonus on this night, the extra turn, no billing. He is sixteen years old, and is wearing clothes liberated from A.J. He shortens and patches, he tucks and cuts, all in the same room in which he perfects his turns. Only the coat he leaves untouched, because it is his father’s best.
He blinks against the lights in this primitive place. No seats in a room that can billet only a trio for musical accompaniment, and poor scrapings at that: laced ladies who smell of sherry and mothballs, and struggle to make their instruments heard above the clamor of the Audience, assisted by a pianist who once dreamed of performing symphonies.
He begins. In that moment he loses himself, and will never be found again.
And the Audience laughs: not against him but with him, like the wind blowing in a well-turned sail; and he feeds upon it, and it washes over him as the many become one, harmonizing in their joy.
Only as he takes his bow does he see his father.
It is amateur night. A.J. has come to sup with A.E. Pickard, and perhaps to seek out new meat for his own grinder. What A.J. witnesses is his son in borrowed threads—a familiar coat, a top hat fresh from the box—cavorting unexpectedly on a dusty stage for the drunks and the catcallers.
He cannot read the expression on A.J.’s face, but he knows that A.J. has no tolerance for secrets, gives no succor to indiscipline. He runs, but not to his mother, not to Madge.
(And later, as he tries to recall the scent and the beauty of her; and later, as he searches in vain for her grave, its marker lost; and later, on the set of the Oceana Apartments, he will think that he should have run to Madge more often, because as he treads the boards of Pickard’s Museum the final sands are already funneling through the hourglass of his mother’s life, and she will be dead within two years.)
So he does not seek safety at home, behind Madge’s skirts. He ventures to the Metropole, A.J.’s lair. He will confront the old lion in its den.
A.J. is waiting for him, waiting for him to explain the ruined trousers, waiting for him to explain the purloined coat. The top hat is gone; he loses it in his flight from the stage, and the pianist crushes it beneath his boot and displays the remains for the amusement of the Audience, believing it to be a prop, a dud, and not A.J.’s beloved handmade silk hat.
A.J. summons him to the office. A.J. is already drinking a whisky and soda. This does not bode well.
The gags, says A.J. Where did you get the gags?
And he shares with A.
J. the attic rooms, the hours spent honing each line, each step, reflected only in a dusty mirror and the dead eyes of dolls. And he shares with A.J. the sallies stolen from Boy Glen and Nipper Lane. And he shares with A.J. the routines that he alone has created, these poor imitations, these counterfeit claims.
A.J. listens. A.J. does not speak.
He wants to remind A.J. that they laughed. The Audience, those hard men and women of Glasgow—no turn left unstoned—laughed.
At him.
For him.
I heard them, says A.J., although he has not yet spoken to A.J. of the laughter. I was there. I witnessed all.
He starts to cry.
He signs on with A.J.’s company for £1.5/- a week.
A.J. says that he still owes him a top hat.
4
At the Oceana Apartments, he is with Babe.
Babe is dead.
But Babe is always with him.
It is long before the dead days, and he and Babe are walking together in New York. Babe stops to speak with the son of a shoeshine man, Babe’s face a beacon of delight. Now Babe can run his routine.
Babe tells the boy that Babe also was born in Harlem, and the boy, already in thrall to this man familiar from the screens of the black-only theaters, can do no more than gaze in further wonder as Babe feeds the punch line.
—Harlem, Georgia!
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.
Babe laughs, and the boy laughs with him, and Babe tips the father a dollar and gives the son a dollar too, because the gag was worth it.
But then, Babe has always been a soft touch.
He and Babe walk on.
Would the shoeshine man and his son have laughed as hard or as loud, he wonders, if they knew that Oliver Hardy—Babe’s father, his progenitor—lies buried down in Harlem, Georgia alongside his second wife, the sister of the Magruder plantation heirs, and therefore slave owners also; or that Babe’s father was an overseer, a middleman, employed to keep the darkies subdued and their masters satisfied, and a former soldier who served willingly in the Confederate army under Captain Joshua Boyd as part of Ramsey’s Volunteers, only to be wounded for his trouble in the Battle of Antietam?
Oliver Hardy died in the year of Babe’s birth, so Babe never knew him, but every man lives his life touched by intimations of his father, and none more so than Babe, because in form and demeanor Babe is his father’s son. He has been shown by Babe the photograph of the patriarch, is aware of the resemblance. He has read the treasured cutting from the Columbia paper describing Babe’s father: “open, jolly, funful . . . covered all over with smiles . . . lives to eat, or eats to live . . . this Falstaffian figure.”