The Death of Eli Gold
A novel from David Baddiel, comedian, columnist and author of the critically-praised The Secret Purposes.As Eli Gold, a famous old writer lies dying in a hospital in New York, his family gather around his bed. His first wife Violet is too old to travel from London but Harvey, their son, who has never emerged from the shadow of his overpowering father, makes the journey. And there is Colette, a six-year old daughter from a second marriage, struggling to make sense of the fact her father is about to leave her.The Death of Eli Gold is a mesmerising family drama which confounds the expectations anyone might have that David Baddiel as a TV comedian. It is the work of a very fine novelist, here writing at the peak of his powers.
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DAVID BADDIEL
The Death of Eli Gold
For W.
Contents
… he persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that having sex with whomever you want whenever you want is the cure for ontological>1 despair
– David Foster Wallace,
reviewing John Updike’s Towards the End of Time, New York Observer 1997
Denise at thirty-two was still beautiful
– Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
I cannot live without Arthur, despite certain inner resources
– Cynthia Koestler, suicide note
>1When the same essay appeared in his collection Consider The Lobster, published in 2004, DFW changed ‘ontological’ to ‘human’.
Part One
Chapter 1
My famous daddy is dying. Some grown-ups think I don’t understand what that means, but I do. Jada doesn’t. When her grandma died, Jada told me her mom said that she’d gone to heaven. OK, I said. But then, three days later, Jada told me that she’d asked her mom when she was coming back. So I asked Mommy, and she said she wasn’t; that she’d gone forever. So that’s why I know what it means. It means you go away and you don’t come back.
Me and Mommy go to the hospital every day to see Daddy. The hospital is called Mount Sinai Hospital. Mount Sinai was the place in Israel where God spoke to Moses, and gave him the Ten Commandments. I read about this in a book Elaine gave me called The Beginner’s Bible: Timeless Children’s Stories. When I was younger – like five or something – I learnt the Ten Commandments by heart. I don’t know why I did that. I didn’t even know what all those words meant then. Graven. False witness. Adultery. But I still remember the three that really matter. Thou shall not kill. Thou shall not steal. And honour your father and your mother.
The hospital isn’t much like the picture of Mount Sinai, like it looks in the book. It’s just a big building. It’s right on the park, and from the big window at the end of Daddy’s room I can see a lake. There’s a lake in the picture in The Beginner’s Bible: Timeless Children’s Stories, too, in the chapter about Moses. Moses is halfway up the mountain, holding the Ten Commandments, and looking like he’s really mad about something; there’s a crowd of people at the bottom and, behind them, a lake. Sometimes, when I’m looking out that window, I pretend that the lake in the park is the lake in the book, and that Daddy is Moses, even though he’s always lying on his bed now, and can’t stand up, or hold anything, especially not two big stones. But yesterday, Mommy came over to the window while I was pretending and told me it wasn’t a lake at all, it was the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. I said: what’s a reservoir? She said it’s a man-made body of water. I didn’t understand what she meant by a body of water. How can a body be made out of water? I wanted to ask her, and also who Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is, but then Daddy made that strange noise which is the only sound he makes now, and she rushed back to the bed.
The first time me and Elaine went to the hospital, there were loads of photographers outside. That’s because my daddy is famous. Not like Katy Perry, or Justin Bieber, or any of those guys: he’s famous in a different way. Mommy made me a scrapbook of bits cut out of newspapers from when I was born, and nearly all of them call him the world’s ‘greatest living writer’. I haven’t read any of his books, because I’m still too young to understand them. But when I’m older – maybe eleven or something – I’ll read them all.
Elaine told me to look down when the photographers tried to take a picture of me. Some of them shouted at me – ‘Hi, Colette! Colette! This way!’ – and I nearly looked up, but I didn’t. I just kept looking at the shoelaces in my new Gap shoes, at the white tips of the pink strings.
‘How do they know my name?’ I whispered to Elaine.
‘Because of Daddy,’ she said, but she was walking quickly and keeping her head down, too, and didn’t really explain what that meant. Then one of the photographers shouted at Elaine, ‘Are you another daughter?!’ and it was good that I had my head down because it made me laugh because she’s my nanny and is, like, sixty-five or something!!
Daddy 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.
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