by Tim Lott
In the end, for me, the fear of death overcame the need to have a meaning or to assert an order – a cowardice for which I am eternally grateful. Jean had more courage and, in a sense, more dignity. She had the guts to kill herself and I admire her for it, although, of course, she was quite crazy at the time, with a brain misfiring like a cross-wired laptop. Pressing the keystrokes love, the screen read die. Pressing the keystrokes survive, the screen read die. The damn thing, her mind-machine, was shot.
Is there an antidote to depression, this modern plague? Drugs work, up to a point. From time to time, I still suffer mild, brief depressions, when under stress. Then I will sometimes take Prozac, and it seems to work quickly and well, restoring whatever chemical imbalance that hypothetical flaw in my brain inclines me to. But I need it rarely, hardly ever, because I have written a different story for myself now, with a different premise in mind, with a different question underpinning it.
Once I would just ask myself, as my certainties collapsed one by one: What is true? What is the case? What is the good thing to do? And with my terrible fear of the real answers snapping at my heels – there’s no way of being sure and there’s no one to judge – I would try, with greater and greater urgency, to get things nailed down. That rigidity, that hunger for certainty, led me into a very mad kind of logic. The same was true of my mother.
Do you imagine that you’re immune? I hope you are, truly. Perhaps I really am just a crazy person, a glitch, other. Jean too. And Alan, my uncle, and Art, my grandfather. And Norman with his drinking, and Eileen who froze inside and Marion with her bulimia and Bev’s mother, who took an overdose. I know of so many more.
Doubtless your feet are more firmly planted. Doubtless your deepest assumptions about the world are clear to you and are incontrovertibly the case. Or perhaps, being English, you will say that you are familiar with doubt, and can accommodate it.
However, what you think you know and what you secretly believe may be very different things. Such was certainly true of me, who always styled himself a sceptic. That secret knowledge, which binds you and supports you, may be as invisible as bone and as painful to reveal. That knowledge – that story – may fit reality or may depart from it wildly; but that is hardly the point. All that matters is whether the story holds up and performs its function: to make you feel that you are a good person, and of significance, and that the world is a just and rational place and that you are therefore safe.
Maybe it will hold up, now and in the future. But maybe one day, however well it has worked in the past, suddenly, it won’t – and even the best-tailored stories have their loose seams. Some wrongly shaped or too large fact will present itself. Some nasty – or perhaps even pleasant – surprise. And what then?
Do you think you can do without something firm to trust in?
Do you think it bearable that things are not solid?
Finally, do you believe things can always be framed, contained, brought into focus? It is comforting to think so, almost inevitable. It is a habit I still find irresistible.
For I have finished my book now and, although I do not see it as therapy, I have used it to work through some conclusions that I consider to be firm, to be final. The central one, I suppose, is that my mother was struck, out of the blue, if you like, by depression. That she was a fundamentally happy and contented woman who was subject at one single point in her life to such stresses of a type and power that neither her body nor her mind could cope with. It is a point of view with which everyone who knew Jean seems to concur. Her life was a good life. Her mind was always healthy.
The book is with my publisher and I am content and pleased to have finished it at last. There is a bit of minor editing to do, and some research facts to be confirmed, but I have confidence in it as a document and a record. I am slowly, inevitably falling into the myth that I have secured the True Story of my mother. That I am a Historian. It is over; I have a story now, written down, fixed in time and space, something to hold to that is mine.
The manuscript sits next to my box of family photographs, which are jumbled out of chronological order now, a mess of sepias and lurid colours, and rounded corners, and dead people, and forgotten vistas. They are arranged, you might say, in a more lifelike fashion. A picture of me as a child falls out and I think, as I stare at that small, dreaming stranger, that we are also our own ancestors. The manuscript, the photographs, they are the same really. Perhaps this is why people take photographs. Perhaps this is why people write books. They are attempts to fix in place what is unfixable, what is always moving, twisting and changing as we watch, finally uncomprehending.
There are two more objects on the desk, both of which my father gave me a day or two ago, both of which I have been pressing for for a long time, but both of which hardly seem to matter any more. One is a video of my mother and father, nine months before Jean’s death, at Helen and John’s daughter’s wedding. Coincidentally it is my parents’ thirty-fifth, and final, wedding anniversary. My father has declared it extremely boring, so I have put off watching it. I am tired, tired of the whole thing really.
The other object is a manila envelope. I have only glanced at it, and the documents inside seem unenlightening. It is my mother’s medical records, which I have been asking for for nearly a year. They have at last been released, but, having considered the book to be finished, I have not given them too much attention. They refer almost entirely to her hair and there is nothing from the last week of her life. My mother, it turns out, specifically instructed the doctor, shortly before her suicide, never to release certain of the records in the event of her death. What can this mean? It is mysterious, but it is insoluble and hardly matters any more. I am content to let it rest. I remove the photocopies from the envelope again and take a final look, just in case I have missed anything. I notice, immediately, and for the first time, that the pages are photocopied not just on one side, as I had previously assumed, but on both sides. There are six or seven notes I have not seen. I glance at them. They are faint and hard to read. Again, they seem to concern nothing more revealing than the endless battle with Jean’s alopecia. I put them to one side for the moment.
I take the video out of the box and begin watching. As my father has declared, it is very boring indeed. The visual quality is atrocious and the sound jumbled into murmurs and squawks. The occasional exclamation – ooh, very nice, what a carry on, I can’t take you anywhere, oh, dearie me – is all I can make out. Jean is badly blurred and slips in and out of the frame. She is tanned and wearing what at first appears to be a white matching skirt and blouse, but it is overlit. In fact, like most of the women, she is wearing a floral print combination. Her hips are wider than I remember, but otherwise she looks well, almost glamorous. There are sun-streaks designed into her wig.
The video is set mainly at the reception after the wedding at a modern red-brick hall in Chertsey. There is a set meal, followed by dancing to a live band and, later, a disco. Jean kisses the bride at the line-up. Jack is behind her in a white shirt and black bow tie. Neither appears in the footage of the meal, but when the dancing begins Jack and Jean are there. For the early part, where big-band standards are being played, both are adept and confident. Then the disco begins – ‘Love Train’ and ‘Boogie Wonderland’ and ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ and ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’ – and, like all the others of their generation, they jig and gyrate hopefully, but look foolish and a bit lost. The dancing has no rules now or guidelines even, and they are confused by the freeness of the form. Jean twists and turns, spins and bobs, always smiling. She takes tiny steps and her arms are too stiff. But nobody cares or judges. Everyone is enjoying themselves thoroughly.
Sometimes the camera pans in on Jean and her lips move. She is almost always out of focus, but then everyone seems to be. Bert and Barbara are there, and Olive, and Irene and Bob – the whole gang. The tape is two and a half hours long.
I cry only once, when the tape is nearly over. It is, as I say, my parents’ thirty-fifth
wedding anniversary and someone has told the DJ to play ‘The Anniversary Waltz’. It is a slow and in some odd way melancholy song. They hold each other close and move in time to the music, as they have on this day, year after year after year. Jean mouths the words, but if she is singing I cannot hear her.
The reception finishes with group dancing – the conga, the hokey cokey, then novelty records, the ‘Birdie Song’ and ‘Agadoo’. All the time, Jean can be seen dancing and clapping and mouthing the words, and smiling. She seems to be genuinely having a good time and, to my slight shame, I realize the emotion I am overwhelmingly now experiencing is one not of sadness but of faint embarrassment.
I genuinely cannot see my mother, I realize as I watch the screen fade into snow and static, as a tragic woman. I am sure the story I have told myself must be correct – that in the long run she was an ordinary, straightforward and basically happy woman.
I return to my desk and open the manila envelope to check once more the medical records. As it initially seemed, everything focuses on her hair. In October 1950 the first mention is made of alopecia areata, with two bald patches appearing at her left temple and behind her left ear. She is prescribed something sinister-sounding called Thorium X paint for her head, and various ointments and pomades. In 1952 the paint is applied again, but it is clearly not successful because in June 1953 a dermatologist writes to the GP: These marginal alopecias do not generally go well… there is a likelihood it will go on indefinitely. The doctor then prescribes a course of ultraviolet light. The light treatments seem, briefly, to work, for in November 1954 the consultant dermatologist writes: The patches have cleared up satisfactorily… however, I agree that she now has a further patch. Various ointments are prescribed.
The next note comes in July 1956, six months after my birth. This is the first of the notes that I missed originally because it was copied on the back of another page. It is very, very faint and difficult to read, but I can make out this sentence: It would appear that her present relapse has been going on since the birth of her first child. Potassium bromide and various ointments are prescribed.
There is another note in August 1957 saying that she still has a bad case of alopecia, and ultraviolet light is once again prescribed. Then there is a gap up until February 1959, when a note reports that her hair has satisfactorily regrown and her ‘Ledercort’ has been reduced to 2mg. Clearly, there are some records missing, as there has been no previous reference to Ledercort, which is, my medical dictionary tells me, a ‘corticosteroid, anti-inflammatory drug, also used for replacing body hormones in rare disorders. It was much misused and overused in the 1950s. Side effects can include mood changes, mental disturbances and depression.’
The next entry also suggests a gap has been left. Again, from the dermatologist at King Edward Memorial Hospital, the note, dated 29 April 1959, informs the GP: I have increased her Ledercort of 4mg b.d. and put her back on phenobarbitone gr ¼ b.d.
I am conscious of some faint tremor inside me. This is the first time phenobarbitone has been mentioned, but the note says, ‘I have… put her back on phenobarbitone’, so she has been on it before. I reach for my medical dictionary and begin reading. It tells me what I have already guessed, that phenobarbitone is a tranquillizer, powerful enough to be used mostly in cases of epilepsy.
The next note, like the previous three, I have not seen before. It is dated 27 May 1959 and reads: This patient’s alopecia areata has not improved since I last saw her a month ago. As you know, she has been on Ledercort for the last six months, and I have now reduced the dose. She should continue with Phenobarbitone gr ¼ b. d. indefinitely.
I think it is quite possible that there are many emotional factors playing a part in continuing this reaction, but I was unable to confirm this during outpatients. I have arranged for her to see the Lady Almoner to see whether or not she can find out more about this patient.
I look up ‘almoner’ in my dictionary. It is an old word for a social worker. I look at the word ‘indefinitely’, and think it surely cannot mean what it appears to suggest.
There are only a few notes left now. The next one is dated 23 July 1959. It reads: This patient’s alopecia areata is now very much better. I have now stopped the phenobarbitone and prescribed Largactil 25mg b.d. I suggest she remains on Largactil for three months.
I look up Largactil. It is another name for chlorpromazine. It is a ‘phenothiazine for treating schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, especially paranoid symptoms’.
There are only two more notes. The first, dated 14 June 1961, reads: I saw this patient today. She has not lost any further hair since I last saw her two months ago. I have now stopped her Triamcinolone and prescribed Largactil 25mg b.d., which she should remain on indefinitely for the time being. I am seeing her again in three months.
Triamcinolone is another corticosteroid. The second, and final note, reads: I have seen this patient again with severe alopecia areata of the scalp. No evidence of the hair regrowing can be seen. I have now arranged for her to be fitted with a wig. Internally, I have prescribed phenobarbitone gr ¼ b.d., which she should remain on indefinitely.
I am with my oldest daughter, Ruby-Jean, in the front room of the house I share with my wife, Sarina, in North Kensington. Ruby-Jean’s effect on me has been that I am flooded with feeling now, with tenderness, concern and blind love. The me that was for so long frozen and dead is only a faint memory. I am happy, although I am still unsure of what my story might be, and still itch to work it out. Every time I think I am coming close, it seems to change and warp out of recognition.
Ruby has been painting, but now she is watching a cartoon. Absently, I pick up her paintbrush and dip it in a cup of water. Spread in front of me is a child’s palette and a sheet of cartridge paper.
On the coffee table in front of me is a copy of a magazine that has been pushed through the door, mainly full of estate agents’ ads. It is decorated with lush English landscapes of the type my mother liked to paint. One of the photographs in an advertisement is of Constable’s The Haywain. I stare at it, then dip my brush in the water and idly begin to paint, despite the fact I have always been hopeless at art.
I make an attempt at a tree – it is incredibly difficult. It looks like a smudge, a smear. The grass is all globby, it is pea soup out of a can. I begin to try to imagine what the original scene that Constable painted from must have been like. Then I see that it wasn’t ‘like’ anything. The clouds were never in this place, the grass never in this light, the bird never in that position. It was just a general idea. It was something that Constable made up. And if he had tried to paint what was really there, if he had been absolutely determined, well, it just can’t be done. He’d have gone mad. Because there isn’t anything there, really, if you get close enough. Or, to look at it another way, there are a million things there, all depending on what you select. There are atoms of air, there are worms on the ground, there are birds flying in and out of the frame. The whole thing is flux, is process. The whole thing is a big guess, a bloody great lie. Pan in and it’s an electric void. Pan out, it’s a dot of green on a vast blue planet. Pan out again, it’s an invisible planet in a cold stellar waste.
It is a good painting, I suppose, though not to my taste. It does the job it sets out to do. It puts the world in a frame; it reassures, it seals it off from the chaos of endless air outside. I start again, this time using green for the sky. It is neither better nor worse than my previous efforts, only bad in a different sort of way. I really am pretty awful at this.
I try it again, and again, and again. I do not improve. One of my mother’s landscapes hangs on the wall – a mountain snowscape. It is over-exact, dull, but there is some kind of technical skill, born, perhaps, more of determination than talent. But mine is just a farrago, a mess. It seems to become worse rather than better. I cannot get the hang of it, so I stop and put the paintbrush down. I get frustrated, even slightly angry. I try again, the brushstrokes heavier, more pronounced. Now it look
s like someone has been sick on the paper.
I come to a solution at last, a way of escaping this dilemma, and dilemmas like this. It is so obvious really, I wonder why I didn’t think of it before. I simply put down the paintbrush, screw up the picture and throw it away. Then I walk away and sit down next to Ruby in front of the television.
The cartoon is one of my favourites, The Ren and Stimpy Show. It makes me smile, as always. I turn it up. My daughter turns to me and says something ridiculous and cute. I laugh out loud. She dances to a stupid song that Ren and Stimpy sing, and giggles. I hold her hands and dance too, round and round and round. Unbidden, my eyes brim with tears. I love her so much. The television blares.
She stops and sees the paints and the paper I have discarded in the bin. She picks up the paintbrush and offers it to me.
Daddy paint?
I shake my head, but she will not give up. She just repeats, again and again and again…
Come on, Daddy. Paint a picture. Pleeeeeeeze.
