by Tim Lott
Henry offered me his hand as he left. I can remember the smell of his pipe tobacco – the mysterious inscription on the tin read BORKUM RIFF – and the gentle, almost feminine clutch of his long fingers, with their buffed and rounded fingernails, as if very recently manicured. His palm felt dry and warm and I imagined it to possess the character of sweetness in some way. It made me think, oddly, of cake.
In those days people, outside of formal situations, didn’t shake hands very often – it was considered rather ‘continental’. Henry made it seem very natural. He smiled at me – as I remember it, after shaking my hand, he even ruffled my hair, thoughtfully pushing it back down into style afterwards. My father would never have dared do such a thing. Had he ventured it, I would have shrunk away and he would have wiped his hand on his shirt afterwards – but it seemed quite acceptable, even reassuring, coming from Henry.
He made his way out to his car, which was of a shape and style I had never seen before, both domestic and faintly sensual at the same time (it was a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, a swan among ducks in the midst of the Morris Minors, Anglias and Cortinas that made up the inventory of vehicles in my street).
He waved through the open car window, still with his pipe poking from his mouth, inclining it slightly downwards in farewell. Then there was the blare of the exhaust pipe, a cough of backfire, and he took off at what seemed a dangerous rate of acceleration.
For all the impression he had made on me, his light and colour faded like an expiring firework. Buthelezi House had that muffling effect on all experience. Even memory was submerged in a grey-green tide of non-eventfulness which I believed would never withdraw.
But it did, and when it did, I looked back on that drowned banality as a blessing. It was all, really, I knew of innocence.
Two
Ten months after Henry’s visit, my mother and I were having breakfast together. With her carefully bobbed hair, mail order-catalogue clothes and a perpetual pinafore that miraculously never showed a stain, she lived her life by principles of kindness and self-sacrifice towards my father and myself, qualities that both of us took entirely for granted. Evie always had a worried look on her face, because she was, in fact, perpetually worried – about nothing in particular and therefore everything.
I had one A-level paper left to sit – in History – and I was way behind in my revision. My thoughts that morning were all of the First World War and its causes. My studies seemed to ask of me why wars in general happened, a conundrum that I considered insoluble. As I ate, I was chewing over the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and weighing its effects on the future against those of the Triple Entente. I barely registered – as usual – my mother’s presence. She was sitting in front of me with a copy of the Daily Express, eating lumps of old white bread spread with large chunks of peanut butter – peanut butter was possibly her only strong preference in food, always the crunchy variety – and she didn’t look like she was enjoying herself. But she hated waste, so she would always eat anything in the larder or fridge, even if it was going off, rather than throw it away. I had seen her scrape mould off any variety of provisions, declaring its effects to be harmless, even beneficial.
I heard a small sound, rather like glottal stop without a word to make it manifest. It was enough to make me look up. On my mother’s face, an expression had fixed itself that made her look even more worried than usual.
For once her anxiety had a cause. She seemed unable to breathe. She pointed frantically at her throat, then began clawing at it with her fingernails. She seemed like she was about to vomit, but didn’t.
I was in the midst of taking the final bite of a Danish-bacon sandwich. Her fist, holding a butter knife, was suspended in mid-air, as if an invisible force was supporting her wrist while the rest of her was collapsing. Then the knife fell, and she followed it. I waited, numbly, stupidly, for her to get up, but she didn’t move. I could not tell if her chest was still rising and falling under her pinafore. Her right arm had become jammed awkwardly under her torso.
Her eyes bulged like pale green grapes invaded by tendrils of red veins. Her face, in contrast, was draining of colour. She didn’t move or speak. It all happened too quickly for me to be frightened. I rose, knocking my plate to the floor, where it shattered into two symmetrical fragments. Ketchup smeared the tiles and for a second I thought about fetching some paper towels to wipe it up. I even reached down to pick up the plate, before letting it drop again, understanding finally that there was a more urgent task to be undertaken.
Having no phone, I considered running to the kiosk on the corner, but it was unlikely to be operative. It was always being dismantled by vandals. I knew because I was one of them. Instead, I bent down and freed my mother’s arm from under her. She grunted, but otherwise remained insensible. Her eyelids fluttered, revealing yellow-white underneath. If she had had a heart attack – which I for some reason assumed – I knew that if the brain was starved of oxygen for more than a few minutes, it would suffer irreparable damage.
I bent over Evie and put my lips to hers in order to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I had done a safety drill in swimming class as a child – that would have been about six or seven years previously – and I only slightly remembered the technique.
Her lips were warm, but bluish in tinge. I could taste saliva on them, and felt a shamed revulsion. I blew, feeling as ridiculous as I was panicked. I straddled my mother, there on the kitchen floor. I pressed down on her ribcage. But I wasn’t sure at which point I should apply pressure. When I was breathing into her? Or when I stopped breathing into her? I didn’t know what I was doing. But I kept on doing it – doing something, anything that might have an effect, that might restore the suddenly precious safety and predictability of my life. I could feel my mother, lumpen, beneath me. I felt certain that her respiration could be repaired, even though she had made no noise or movement since I had freed her arm.
I kept working at it. I thought as it went on I would get more proficient, but I fumbled it even more. Because of my indecision, I kept changing my technique. One moment I would be breathing into her as I pushed the torso down, the next when I let go. I improvised like this for several minutes. My mother remained stricken, falling further, deeper, it seemed, into immobility and unconsciousness. I decided I had no choice but to leave her and to go and ask someone for the use of their phone.
I didn’t know anyone in our block who had a phone. But there were two neighbours, in the private houses over the road, who were connected to the telephones lines that were strung across our street like social boundaries. One was to the south of the block – the Cartwrights. That was about two hundred yards away. One was to the north – the Gibbonses. That was only a hundred yards away.
I was embarrassed to call on the Gibbonses. Old Ma Gibbons disliked me because I had once put a football through her front window and run away. She knew it was me – I have no idea how, since she wasn’t actually at home when it happened. She had challenged me on the subject several times, insisting that I pay for the damage, but I always sulkily denied it. She was a heavy woman, with a thin, mean mouth and a way of looking at you that squeezed out shame like a smear of perspiration.
Although Ma Gibbons and her phone were closer, I ran to the Cartwrights’ house. With every stride, I felt time sliding towards the irreversible. The house was fronted with a low brick wall, a rockery and a short concrete drive. There was a handwritten note stuck under the doorbell announcing that it was out of order. I could see, through a ridged glass panel set in the front door, the Union Jack they had framed on their hall wall. I could also see the outline of the red telephone on a small laminated shelf.
The door knocker was lightweight and cheap and jammed up with rust. It seemed to make no more noise than a pebble falling to the ground from a child’s pocket, so I starting hammering on the glass panel with my fist. No one came.
I thought of breaking in, of smashing the glass. It would have been a rational thing to do. The
y would have forgiven me. I went so far as to pick up a lump of sandstone from the rockery with that intention in mind, but let it drop from my hand.
I didn’t stop to consider how ironic it was that the custom and practice of politeness my mother had considered more paramount than any other virtue was now edging her towards a place where manners had no purchase. Instead, I turned and ran to the other end of the street, back past the rude block of Buthelezi House, trying not to visualize my mother stretched out on the kitchen floor. I guessed it was now more than five minutes since she had collapsed, and I had, effectively, done nothing. In fact, I had almost certainly made things worse by my incompetent attempts to give artificial respiration.
I bolted up Ma Gibbons’ path and rang the bell. It produced a trembling and uncertain jangle rather than the more common bing-bong. She answered almost immediately. I don’t suppose she was that old really, by today’s standards – no more than sixty-five – but she was already, despite her size, baggy-skinned, white-haired and carved with canyons of wrinkles. She looked at me in astonishment, as if was I readying myself to attack her. Still in my pyjamas, my hair wild, my feet bare, I must have looked like a lunatic.
Once I had caught my breath and yanked out the bare facts of what had happened, she guided me into her front room, where she kept the phone. I was shaking so much that I dropped the receiver; she retrieved it from the floor and told me in a crisp tone to sit down. But I remained standing, shifting anxiously from foot to foot and hugging myself for comfort. She made the 999 call herself, only asking me to confirm the address and the spelling of my surname and of Buthelezi House. After she hung up, I refused her request for me to wait with her. She then said she would come with me to Buthelezi House, but I insisted that she stayed put. The bubble of time I felt stranded in seemed too private, the air too thin, to support another inhabitant, however well-meaning.
I returned to the flat, where my mother remained inert and in precisely the position in which I had abandoned her. There was nothing to do but wait. I sat down on a kitchen chair and tried to avoid looking at the space on the floor that she occupied. I understood that the second hand continued to orbit the face of the carriage clock on the windowsill above the stained-yellow sink with its rubber-nippled taps, but it seemed to be measuring nothing whatsoever. There was just my mother and me, suspended in a continuous, strange, present moment. My sense of helplessness was like an injury. I could hear my own breath, laboured, coming fast. It didn’t sound like my breath at all. I risked a look at Evie. Her face was the colour of the sugar that was spilt on the floor.
After a while, my breathing returned to normal. My fear had consigned itself to a place of suspension. I had stopped shaking. Instead, I started to find it puzzling that this immutable presence, partially out of sight on the other side of the table, this continuation and source of my very self could behave in such an improbable fashion. I felt a flash of anger towards my mother, as if she had deliberately chosen to do this to inconvenience me. To embarrass me. I had no template for how to behave in such circumstances. In all honesty, I wanted to make myself a cup of hot chocolate, but it seemed disrespectful. It was also peculiar – I never drank hot chocolate, it was my father’s particular treat. Yet I felt it would be obscurely comforting.
I shifted chairs and looked down on her, like a god. I felt myself becoming more and more motionless within – not out of calmness, but in a state of weird congealment, as if an epoxy had been added to a glue.
When the ambulance men arrived I remained sitting there, still wondering whether or not to make myself that cup of hot chocolate. There was nothing else on my mind: it was an unsolvable koan. When the doorbell rang, I remember wondering who it might be. I only realized that it was the ambulance when I became aware of the flashing blue light stroking the kitchen window.
The two medics didn’t take long to work out what I, at some level, knew already, although they put on a small performance for my sake – chest compressions, an injection of something or other, mouth-to-mouth, even paddles to shock the heart back into function, which made my mother jump like a frog I had once seen on a dissection table when an electrical current was put through it.
One of the medics muttered, regretfully, that it was a shame they hadn’t got there earlier. He looked not much older than me – a novice, I supposed. I remember asking him, while his more senior partner was distracted, how late was it? How late?
‘A few minutes earlier, then . . . perhaps . . .’
He allowed the sentence to trail off when he saw his senior glaring at him reprovingly. The older man no doubt understood how many of the scenes he was called to held suspended within them the seeds of regret and self-punishment, interest on the inescapable debt of grief. The torments of decisions not taken, the revenge of the past on the present.
But now it was too late for me, just as it was too late for my mother. The koan was solved. I had killed her. My stupidity, my lack of decision, the ludicrous flight to the Cartwrights instead of Mother Gibbons had robbed my mother of any chance of survival.
She hadn’t – it turned out – had a heart attack at all. She had been choking on the peanut butter and stale white bread – number one choking risk for adults, I later discovered – and had fainted from lack of oxygen, and only then suffered a coronary. I actually knew the Heimlich manoeuvre. If I had used it instead of trying to give her a mangled version of the kiss of life, I was sure I could have saved her.
They wheeled in a steel gurney and laid her gently on it, as if she could be made comfortable in some fashion. It was simply more theatre. I remember thinking that they might as well stuff her in a sack.
It was just after she had been loaded on to the trolley that my father arrived. Ma Gibbons must have phoned him. I hadn’t thought to do it myself.
He was not numb and still in the way I had been. He didn’t seem to notice I was even there. He became immediately hysterical. I had never seen him in anything like this condition before. He screamed and wept. He fell to his knees. Then he rose again, threw himself across my mother’s body and had to be gently pulled away.
It disappointed me. It was no way to behave.
They found the Amontillado and offered him a glass. He knocked it back and demanded another. After the scene had played itself out – the quiet words of meaningless consolation, the request that he place himself ‘safely’ upon a seat – the reality of the situation was clarified to me. The pile of matter on the trolley was simply that – a rapidly decaying heap of organic waste.
I remember wondering what caused decay. Was it the action of micro-organisms and bacteria? Or was there something implicit in the nature of organic matter that returned to dust by its own volition, a structure collapsing, like a building with its foundations removed falling in slow motion?
Then they took my mother away. Ray was still sobbing and calling her name. Shortly after she had gone, he fell into silence. He and I spent much of the following hours simply staring at the floor and not saying anything. Death snatches the words right out of your throat. Language shrinks and becomes too diminished to be of any use.
In the end I made myself a cup of hot chocolate. I remember how extraordinarily good it tasted.
Three
My father did not stage much of a recovery. Once the hysteria had faded, it appeared he had lost something essential to his proper functioning. He became withdrawn and monosyllabic. I never saw him eat anything after that, other than the occasional biscuit or dry piece of toast, more often than not charred. His grieving was appalling for me to behold, as if I had lost two parents rather than the one. But the feeling of grief I was waiting for never really arrived. If I felt anything at all, it was anger – overwhelming, inarticulable, directionless. If my father was reticent, I became stony and silent.
A few days after my mother’s death, we went shopping for coffins, or ‘caskets’ as the funeral trade insisted on labelling them. This task struck me as obscene, but I couldn’t quite bring myself
to condemn my father to facing it alone. Even in his grief, he worried about being taken for a ride – ‘They get people when they’re at their most vulnerable’ – so we visited several to see if we could get the ‘best deal’.
The funeral directors we saw all seemed more or less out of the same mould – men, grave, with smiles forensically scoured to remove all trace of happiness. Solemn acceptance and quiet resolution seemed to be their stock-in-trade. At the first one we visited, we heard a sharp, brief burst of laughter from a back room. The man behind the counter ignored it. I couldn’t help but imagine the backroom staff making jokes over the corpses – fooling about with the cosmetics they used to render the cadaver ‘lifelike’, or rearranging the anguished facial features into comic expressions.
I had entered some psychological space I had never encountered before – a place of suspension, of non-feeling, of robotic movements that merely signalled the presence of life, rather than vitally representing it. My father and I flicked through the catalogues of coffins in the way my mother used to pick through the Grattan catalogue to order winceyette pyjamas or ‘authentic’ Toby jugs. The colour reproduction in the second funeral director’s catalogue was lurid – it reminded me of those Chinese-restaurant menus that illustrated the dishes with brazen photographs of flayed ducks and unholy intestinal parts.
We delayed the final choice until we made our third call, the Co-op funeral store. It was, unlike the other two, much more reminiscent of a practical, no-nonsense shop front. My father and my mother both trusted the Co-op because it was collectively owned and they were Labour voters – though Ray, I knew, had talked of switching because of ‘all this union nonsense’. Evie tried to shop at the Co-op whenever she could and collected Co-op Dividend Stamps, which could be redeemed for a discount on goods. The stolidity of the brand appealed to my father, and he made approving noises as we entered: ‘This is the sort of thing that’s much more my mark.’
