Singularity

by Charlotte Grimshaw

  For Ford there was something oppressive about Sundays. In the sleepy silence and peace his mind did its own equivalent of spitting on the pew. It had always been like this. But Sundays now, the new Sundays, were something far more like torture.

  He sat down. The chair creaked and cracked. He read four pages, wondered, should he move away from here, find a new house? Somewhere near the sea. Or perhaps a year’s sabbatical at an overseas university … These thoughts gave him a feeling of excitement that was like another kind of emptiness.

  The birds’ claws scratched and scraped on the roof iron. They swooped down onto the lawn, looking for the old crusts he’d thrown out. It was summer. That morning when he walked (staggered) up the path in his robe to collect the newspaper at 7am the cat from next door came slinking towards him, its belly low, head down, growling melodramatically, a live bird clamped in its jaws. The bird flapped one mangled wing. He ran at the cat, cursing. If he’d caught it he would have kicked it in the head. What sense was there in this? He lived alone. At other times the cat was his friend.

  In the middle of the previous year Ford’s widowed mother-in-law, Mrs J Bandaranaike, had slipped on the mossy deck of her Te Atatu Peninsula bungalow, and broken her hip. Her cries for help were eventually answered by a neighbour, and she was carried off to hospital. When she was released Ford’s wife May, her third and favourite daughter, began spending the weekends with her, helping out. Often he joined them on Sunday afternoons, dutifully raking leaves, emptying bins, sitting on the deck with the little bright-eyed old invalid, sipping tea and watching the tide coming in over the silvery inlet. Mrs Bandaranaike had a strong line in wry, acid jokes — she and May spent their afternoons laughing in a sly, in-joke way, while Ford dreamed like a big, awkward bear on his deckchair, only surfacing when the old lady poked him humorously with her walking stick and asked for some small favour, more tea, or to adjust the awning to keep the sun off, services he was eager and grateful to provide.

  The late Mr Bandaranaike, an eye surgeon, had been a secretive, repressed person; it was from her mother that May inherited her radiance and humour, her easy-going love of the comical and quirky. She had married Ford in a spirit of, what could he call it, hilarity? That was almost not too strong a word. Not that he was a very bad catch. But he was big and lumbering and not Sri Lankan. The senior Bandaranaikes were not opposed, luckily for him. They were tolerant, neutral. Being fiercely patrician Sinhalese, the only thing they would have regarded as a disaster would’ve been if their beautiful May had come home with a Tamil.

  He enjoyed his Sunday trips to the Peninsula. Mrs Bandaranaike’s house was a long, single-storyed wooden structure built directly above the water, with a view across the gulf to the city and a stretch of tangled garden in front, through which a track wound down to the shore. May and Ford would walk down to the edge of the big shallow bay, skim stones onto the mudflat, watch the sun go down over the city buildings in the distance. Together they threw off Sunday’s dreary grip. They always returned in good spirits and, if they felt like it, May and Mrs J would disappear into the kitchen and prepare something good — May cooking and Mrs J directing from the kitchen table, and they would eat out on the deck, the old lady’s legs swathed in green cloth to ward off mosquitoes.

  On the last evening they spent there together, Mrs J described a severe storm in Galle, where her family lived.

  ‘It was terrible,’ she told Ford, laying her hand on his arm. ‘The whole family had gone out just before the floods came. They returned to a horror.’

  ‘Oh God,’ he said, making the appropriate face. ‘What?’

  ‘All the servants had been washed away!’

  May, coming in with a teapot, laughed out loud. The light shone on her face. A moth rocketed off the lamp, fluttered wildly, and landed in her hair. She put her smooth brown hand up to her forehead, looked down at them with her startling, intelligent eyes.

  Ford drank moderately at Mrs J’s, enough to be legal but exhilarated by the dash down the motorway, weaving among the tail lights of cars hurrying in from the west. He noted how wild and unrestrained the driving was on that section of the motorway. The western suburbs are famously the home of boy racers, petrolheads, white motorcycle gangs. It was on this road one heavily raining Sunday, without Ford to drive her, to look after her, that May, returning from an evening with Mrs J (Ford was at home, working on a journal article) was passed by a car full of stoned skinhead youths who cut her off, causing her to skid and lose control and to crash head-on into the base of an overhead bridge.

  May was a qualified anaesthetist. She had passed the exams to become a consultant just before she died. Ford thought about this. As she passed from consciousness to unconsciousness to dying, did she know, with forensic accuracy, what was going on?

  The night she died. It was around eleven when he heard the knock on the door. Out in the street a car alarm beeped and whooped. He had been reading, stretched out on the bed. May had told him she would be visiting her mother after a late shift at the hospital. When he opened the door, expecting her with her arms full of books and papers or having dropped her keys down a grating or some such thing, he saw two cops, one old, one young, and in the face of the younger he saw a tremor of excitement, a suppressed thrill.

  They made Ford sit in a chair.

  ‘She’s died,’ he said, thinking of Mrs J. A rich sadness. He saw May at the scene, kneeling and gazing upwards, two professional fingers pressed to her mother’s neck. Mrs J’s body — sprawled in the garden where she’d tumbled off the deck stairs, or crumpled in the bathroom: electrocuted/slipped on soap/drowned. Perhaps she’d fallen asleep over a book while oil burned in the forgotten frying pan …

  The elder policeman was talking. Ford was confused by the habit police are trained into, of describing incidents in the regulation tense. ‘She’s been cut off by another driver. Every effort has been made. Unfortunately she’s been seriously injured and …’

  ‘She doesn’t drive,’ Ford said, antagonistic, scornful as a teenager. It was the first sign of what he was to become in the weeks and months that followed: a person stupider, more bewildered and ashamed than the competent adult he had been.

  There was a pause. The younger cop dipped his head and made a small sound.

  ‘We’re talking about Dr May Bandaranaike? Your wife?’

  Ford stood up, looked at the younger cop. His face burned.

  ‘Just what is this about?’ he asked reedily.

  The elder cop launched in again. ‘She’s been in a serious car accident. She’s been cut off by another car.’

  Ford walked away from him into the kitchen, picked up his keys and returned. ‘I’m ready. What do we need to do?’ May needed him. Action must be taken at once.

  But there was nothing to be done. Nothing anyone could do. They held up their hands, urging him to sit, at least to stand still.

  ‘She’s dead,’ the younger policeman blurted, as if he couldn’t stand this any longer. The elder frowned at him and he shift ed on his big feet and looked down.

  Fragments of what followed (Ford winces, thinking back, poor Simon): they extracted his brother’s name from him, rang him and asked him to come.

  Simon and his wife got out of bed and drove over. They arrived to a fraught scene: some ancient memory had led Ford to an ancient packet of cigarettes on top of the high bookcase; he was working his way through it at a dizzying rate while pacing and talking non-stop and drinking wine from a bottle he’d found in the kitchen. He remembers the elder cop chasing him round the couch with a mug of hot sweet tea, the younger flapping his hands and surreptitiously opening a window as the room filled with foul smoke. Some small amount of wrestling with the wine bottle: ‘It’s not the best way, mate.’ He felt like a monstrosity, like Frankenstein’s monster, as if he should burst out of the house and run baying through the foggy streets, pursued with revulsion and fear by normal, decent folk. Panic, horror, a sense that he had become grotesque, all this rose in h
im as he confronted his younger brother in his designer clothes, his shoes without socks. (Simon is a rich and successful doctor; these days he’s a sort of obstetrician and gynaecologist to the stars.) Ford leered at him, raised his bottle and said, ‘So they’ve brought you along for the show.’

  Simon said nothing. A feeling of pure woe struck Ford; he had a sense of his old self whirling away. He would never get it back, not properly.

  Simon’s wife Karen took the bottle from Ford’s hands.

  The policemen began tiptoeing gratefully to the front door. Ford heard Karen seeing them off: ‘Under control now. The shock. Of course.’

  And then a hushed conference at the door. Would Simon accompany them? Would only take half an hour. To spare the grieving husband (and to save having to deal with him). Simon was summoned into the hall. ‘No problem,’ Ford heard him say.

  Karen made cups of tea while Ford’s brother rode into town in the back of the police car and laid formal eyes, for the last time, on May’s face. He signed the papers. Ford let it happen, but he regrets it now. It should have been him. He could have stood it. If he wasn’t there to hold her hand as she died, he should have been there soon after. These details added up: somewhere, behind one of the doors in his mind, is a festering compost heap of shame.

  That morning, the morning after, Ford lurched from his room, where he had slept for two hours, fully clothed and face down on top of the bed, and found Karen asleep on the couch under a mound of blankets. Sunlight shafted through the windows and the evidence of his binge was scattered everywhere — ash, cigarette butts, red wine stains on the carpet, the empty bottle rolling on the deck. (And an old liqueur bottle — where had he dug that up from?) A wine glass, broken at the stem, lay in two pieces in a patch of light on the dining table. There was a peaceful, exhausted air in the house, like the morning after a wild student party.

  Simon was sitting at the table out in the garden, a sleeping bag wrapped around his shoulders. Ford opened the French door. It had been a cold night. There was frost on the lawn.

  A weird numbness had invaded Ford’s brain. The only thing he felt, every now and then, was horror that he felt nothing. He also had the sense that the ‘horror’ was a small, badly stitched seam that would burst into a vast and unmanageable hole if he inspected it too closely.

  Ford told Simon he was sorry if he had been ‘difficult’.

  Simon said, ‘We just watched you until you ran out of steam.’

  Ford looked sharply at his brother, but there was nothing in his face except weariness and sorrow.

  ‘Fuck you,’ Ford said.

  Simon looked up, startled. ‘What do you mean?’

  Siblings. They were bickering already. ‘Sorry I ruined your evening,’ Ford went on, mechanically.

  ‘For Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Sorry you had to go to the …’ he couldn’t finish. ‘To identify … Because I was “indisposed”.’

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ Simon said.

  Ford spent the day sinking through several more layers of madness. At noon he went to sleep, after which he rocketed off the couch with a single idea in his mind.

  ‘I have to see her,’ he announced, staggering into the kitchen. Simon and Karen were eating sandwiches. They looked up warily. He snatched the phone and rang the police station. Put through to one department and then another, he glared at Simon, glassy-eyed. ‘If you don’t see them it doesn’t sink in,’ he said, cupping his hand over the receiver.

  A stern-voiced woman came on the line. It was not possible to see the deceased at this time, she explained. There were procedures. Investigations. The serious crash unit, and so on.

  ‘My brother’s seen her. Why can’t I?’ Ford demanded, as though the policewoman was his mother and he was six years old, and deprived of a treat. He caught Karen glancing at Simon, and treated her to the foulest look. The woman transferred him to an authoritative male voice that took a different, more disconcerting tack. ‘May I ask exactly why you wish to see the body at this particular time?’ (Is there something you’d like to tell us, sir?)

  ‘I’m having trouble understanding that what has happened is real,’ Ford said.

  Needless to say, this did not get him what he wanted.

  ‘Better to see her tomorrow, once she’s been looked after.’

  ‘Looked after?’ Ford shouted. ‘What does that mean, looked after? She’s dead.’

  God knows what the policeman thought, what notes he was taking down. (Ford felt guilty of something all the time, but what? Everything.) Or, perhaps more likely, he thought very little of it. Ford supposed he was nothing the policeman hadn’t encountered before. In his lowest moments, when he caught a whiff of that dung heap of humiliation he carried around inside, he found it hard not to believe that the world wasn’t sniggering at him during those days, rolling its eyes, looking on in suspicion and disgust while he, the mad widower, flailed and flapped like a dying bird.

  Karen was near the end of her tether, and needing to get back to her children, left with her mother on the midnight dash to Ford’s house. She stood up, rolled her neck and said, ‘I think you should go and lie down.’

  Ford took a step towards her. ‘You go and lie down.’

  Simon tried to get him to eat something, at the same time managing to signal to Karen, with repeated frowns, that she should shut up.

  Ford looked at them, nearly crazed with contempt and then, quite suddenly, all the rage went out of him. There was a metallic taste in his mouth. He sat down and accepted a sandwich.

  He tried to make things right. ‘I’m sorry, Karen. You go and get the kids. Thank you for coming.’

  Karen gathered up her things. At the door he apologised some more.

  ‘You’re in shock,’ she said dryly. She combed her short blonde hair with her fingers. She couldn’t wait to get away, understandably enough. She hadn’t got on very well with May, who used to make uncharitable jokes about her, and once, although Ford wasn’t sure on what evidence, told him Karen was ‘a nasty little redneck’.

  Simon stayed with Ford for nearly a week. He took time off work and simply followed Ford around. Together they drove out to Mrs J’s. (Sitting with May’s grieving mother and sisters, Ford came close to unpicking the fragile little seam in his mind — horror came close and he reeled with the nearness of it and had to walk away with Simon down to the bay.)

  He went with Ford to the funeral parlour where they stood over the alien waxwork of May. Her forehead had been damaged and patched over. There were matt areas of pastel-coloured paste. Her newly lopsided face glistened with make-up and her hair was curled in an unfamiliar style. This was what the police had meant by her being ‘looked after’. Ford pressed his lips to her forehead. She smelled of chemicals. He felt nothing.

  Out in the street a line of blackbirds on the telephone wires, cottony cirrus in the sky. Suburban stillness. He held onto Simon’s arm. Some terrible damage was being done to him. He couldn’t feel it, but he knew the weapon was there, gouging his heart to shreds. He followed his brother like a sleepwalker, like one of May’s patients, unconscious under the surgeon’s scalpel. When I wake, he thought, it will be too late. I will be in pieces, too near death to feel.

  After the funeral he stayed with Simon and Karen out at Whangamata, and tried to behave himself in front of their children. Little Marcus, Claire and Elke took him walking along the beach and he held their hands and inspected rock pools and made them laugh by hopping with his trousers rolled up through the freezing stream. They ate Karen’s organic meals and took short walks around the coast. Late at night he watched reruns of old TV shows with Simon. Throughout he felt, how could he describe it? Outside himself. He lived through those ‘recuperative’ days as an automaton, while another self howled outside the window, beating his fists against his face.

  May used to be fond of Simon. She flirted with him. He is a handsomer version of Ford, not as big, not as loud and (Ford asserts, sibling-competitive) not as force
ful. He has a big medical practice in town.

  May flirted with him in her wicked, playful way, but he has ‘boundaries’ and ‘standards’. You wouldn’t get very far trying to draw him into a life of crime. Not like …

  Ford and Simon’s father. When Ford first met May, he’d been entertaining the idea of re-establishing a connection. (What was he thinking?) He had not seen his father, Aaron Harris, for a long time. Aaron had left off menacing their mother with late-night phone threats, and was reputed to be holding down a steady job. He must have got control of his drinking, was Ford’s optimistic conclusion. Perhaps now was the time to mend old rift s, start afresh.

  Ford rang him. He should have been put off by the cacophony in the background — someone tuning up a trumpet, over which a woman’s voice rose in wailing, anguished protest.

  ‘You try living in a boarding house,’ Aaron said morosely, drawing on his cigarette and blowing out in a series of rich hacks and gasps. Ford heard the low moan of a saxophone, someone shouting. ‘Fuck off, cunt!’

  ‘Friends of mine. Practice,’ he said.

  ‘Putting the band back together?’ Ford said, in high spirits, buoyed by the presence of beautiful young Dr Bandaranaike, who was lounging on the end of his bed and watching with an encouraging smile. Ford had been seeing her for three months. He had briefed her on his childhood, his father’s violent drunkenness, his mother’s suffering. Their escape into the arms of an aunt, and his mother’s eventual remarriage to Warren Lampton, a good man.

  ‘It sounds like a Dickens novel,’ May purred, although Ford doubted she’d ever got through one of those — she was strictly a science and maths boffin. She had fastened on the idea of Ford’s father, was ‘dying to meet him’. He sounded ‘so picturesque’. All her incitements lulled him, spurred him on. (He was in love with her; he was off his head.) Her robust sense of comedy, he thought, would see them through any difficult bits.