by Anne Peile
‘I’ll go out again.’
‘Oh no you won’t. You’re going nowhere. You try and leave and we’ll have you arrested as well as him. And you’d better tell us when this all started, because if you were under sixteen we’ll get him for that as well.’
Again I said, ‘He didn’t know, he thinks that I am someone else.’
‘Like hell he does. He always was a randy bastard but I never knew he was a filthy rotten pervert as well.’ She pushed me again.
At the door I paused; I do not know, even to this day, whether it was a child’s boast to incite envy or if it was the jealous barb of one grown woman to another. I said, ‘It’s me he loves. I am the only one that he’s ever loved.’
My mother lifted her hand and struck me on the side of my face. In the instant that the slap hit me I saw Lin beyond her. My sister started and blinked at the impact.
In my room I knelt on the floor and rested my head on the bed. To stop the gibbering of panic I tried to think of all the times when I had felt ill or afraid and compare them to the present so that it might not seem so dreadful. I wished that I knew some prayers properly. I wondered if there were words from hymns that would do in place of praying. I thought back to the last time when I had joined in with the singing of hymns, at assemblies in the hall of the junior school, the trees of Wandsworth Common visible beyond the windows.
I wondered when Jack would return from delivering his work. I tried to visualise the old Citroën, nosing round the twilight corners behind Oakley Street where the last flowering shrubs hung over garden walls and dropped petals onto the pavements.
My throat was becoming very painful; it had begun to close and I prayed to God, asking to be so ill that I would be taken to hospital so that Jack and Eunice would come.
At about ten o’clock my mother opened the door. My throat hurt so much that each word I spoke seemed to scrape on it.
‘I’ll go, you needn’t worry, no one will know. We might go and live in France anyway. Please let me out now.’
‘I’ll let you out all right,’ she said.
The road was usually empty at that time of night. From someone’s house you could hear the closing theme music for the News at Ten. Oddly though, I saw that a knot of people were gathered. There was Ron, with Tommy Sutton and two other men, and Lin and my mother. Ron’s security van was parked there too, on its side was painted ‘Peace of mind – Priceless’. The two big Alsatian cross dogs were inside, making the van’s suspension rock in their frustrated attempts to pace and prowl.
‘You take her in with Tommy,’ Ron said to Lin.
‘Where are we going?’ I had little voice to use.
‘We’re going to sort him out,’ Ron replied as he and my mother got into the van. I thought we must be going to Oakley Street. I thought what an odd caravan we would make, arriving in the wide roadway. I wondered if Eunice would look down at us from behind the curtains we had hung together and whether she might take me in and hide me. I would ask her if she would try and help me to persuade Jack to forgive me. I needed to explain to him that I had had to lie to him because it was the only way open to me: I could not not be loved by him.
We were not going to Oakley Street. We were going towards the river, but another stretch of embankment, to The Galleon. Its bars were already closed. In his rolled-up shirtsleeves, Lin’s boyfriend stood outside awaiting our arrival. The others parked by the concrete terrace. Ron motioned to Tommy Sutton to park at a distance, then he and my mother came across and Tommy and Lin got out and they locked me in.
‘Make sure the bloody doors are locked,’ my mother said and walked around the car, trying each chromed handle, yet not looking in at me. She and Ron walked back to the terrace. I saw that a wind was blowing from the reiver, scattering the contents of the big ashtrays on the terrace tables and making the collapsed sun umbrellas strain like ship’s fittings. Ron took the undisciplined dogs from the back of the van, they plunged and yarled on their leads like unbroken horses. The group stood waiting in a knot by the door of the terrace bar.
The old Citroën turned into the car park entrance. One of them had telephoned and told him that he must come. I saw him park near the building, too far and too dark for me to call him, even if my voice had not been almost lost. Jack got out of his car and I saw my mother step forward from the group to approach him. I thought how badly she must have aged in his eyes and I was almost sorry for her. Although I could not hear the words I saw from her stance and mannerisms that she was shouting at him. I saw his tall elegant body in the old jersey, at first he seemed only to listen, because he was polite and patient and well mannered. Then he began to respond, using his hands to illustrate his words, more than once I saw him shake his head. My mother spat at him.
Ron and his two companions and Lin’s boyfriend advanced towards my mother and father. Tommy Sutton stood back with Lin. Jack was the tallest of them all. I could still see his head, even when they surrounded him. The dogs were so maddened that Ron was holding them by their collars. Then I could not see Jack’s head anymore because he had fallen.
Within the group some secondary confrontation seemed to begin. One or two were shouting at each other. Tommy Sutton had moved some way away beside the river wall. I saw that the big man in shirt sleeves had bent down to the ground and he must have called Lin to him. Moments later I saw her tear herself from the knot of people and run at Tommy Sutton. The river’s breeze was lifting the ends of her clothes and hair. She grabbed at his lapels and for a moment it looked as if they were acting out some wild wind-shrieking playground game and that soon they would turn and spindle into some rhyming chant. But Lin was screaming at him and the wind snatched up and blew me her words, ‘For Christ’s sake, get her out of here. He’s dead, he must have hit his head when he fell. He’s dead; get her out of it, for Christ’s sake.’
Tommy Sutton drove me to his mother’s house in a road off the south side of Clapham Common. All night long I sat in the front living room. There was a polished radiogram and each ornament stood upon a circular mat of pink crochet work. I knew that they would have thrown my father’s body into the river. I knew that when the morning came I must go into the water and look for him. I thought that he probably was not really dead. As a young man one summer night he had swum for miles out to sea from the beach at Porthcawl, just to follow the path the moonlight made upon the water, he told me that. I would be able to revive him and make him better. They would not have realised that he had only been unconscious. They were stupid people who did not understand. I must find him and bring him back to life. I knew that when I did the fall itself it would be frightening but that it would be all right because he had gone before me. I did not, ever, want to think that Jack had been afraid. Even normal children do not ever wish to contemplate the possibility that their father could be afraid.
For a time I did not feel sad because I knew that there was not long to wait until I could find him. But then I thought of Eunice and of how she would now be alone on the third floor of the house in Oakley Street. This prospect was so unbearable that I could not contain it. I thought that I must howl out loud but then I saw Tommy Sutton’s craft knife on the side table; his hobby was marquetry work. With this knife, as I saw what Eunice would be made to face, I made repeated neat shallow cuts on the back of my left hand in order that I could bear it. The pattern of the cuts resembled pins spilled in the bottom of a workbasket.
I knew that they would say nothing, my mother and Lin and the others from the car park of The Galleon. They would say nothing and they would get away with it, like city people do; they become no more than shadow figures in a modernist painting, no eyes or ears or mouth, seeing and telling nothing, fading back into the concrete angles. And the deceased, John ap Rhys Owen, my father Jack, would be seen as neither the first nor the last, merely one among many who choose to end their life among the drowned dead of the River Thames. The coroner would record him as a man in late middle age with a history of alcohol problems, unpre
dictable, temperamental, as artists are known to be. The river would have washed away from his body all trace of my anointing of him, early in the morning of his last day. The Galleon’s manager, Lin’s boyfriend, would affirm that there had been a man, middle-aged and morose, drinking alone in the bar earlier that evening. He might even have amplified his evidence with a description, portraying how the man had snarled in that way that drunkards have if the pot man tries to collect their glass before it is empty.
I saw the dawn come beyond the pink curtains. I got up from the chair in the neat room and left the house and walked to the river. It did not take me long. Few others were about so early. Beside Albert Bridge the sweet dew scent was rising from the Battersea earth as it must have done when all that land was market gardens still. I let myself fall and I did not feel afraid.
But it must have been delirium by then because an hour had passed and I had not moved at all.
Until the very last moments of his life Jack believed that I was what made him complete, he told me so, with a sense of wonder. And he would say, ‘Christ, I’m a lucky bastard; I must be the luckiest man alive, to have you. Who would have thought it, at my age.’
He lamented for all the people in the world who would never feel such things. Sometimes there was the air of the votive, the supplicant, in the way that he looked at my face and all of me and laid his hands upon me. Many times, when he had finished making love to me, I had him lying in a state of abandonment, prostrate across my body as if he had fallen down before me. Like the line from the sacrament of marriage, I suppose.
Then, in those last moments of my father’s life, people with mob faces contorted into their own caricatures had told him that it was not so. His beloved girl was a liar and much, much worse besides. When she had taken him by the hand she was not leading him into the places of rapture that he, in his foolishness and his vanity, had supposed. The wind-stirred grass was really the moving of snakes and people’s eyes were only empty sockets. They heaped him with horror for what he had done. I saw them do it, I watched Jack lift his hands to his head. In a desperate fleeting hope I thought that he was refusing to listen to what they said, that it was just his old familiar gesture of pushing back his hair when it fell forwards on his forehead and that he was about to turn and make his way home to Oakley Street where I would go and find him and we would close the door on all that was in the world outside. But it was not, he was covering his eyes. He was despising himself for what they showed him he had done. I had to see him as he saw himself damned.
I could not have got him back from that place; probably not ever. Amid his horror and lamentation he would, at some stage, have remembered that first afternoon in the room above Phene Street and the last moment at which he could have turned away from sin.
But when the time of his guilt and shame and mourning was completed, I think he would have patiently and determinedly reconstructed his life, in that same methodical way that he had done before, after the chaos and the drinking.
He would never have touched me again but, when he saw that I could not live without him, I am sure that he would have let me stay on in the room in Oakley Street. He was a kind man. He would not have turned me out and made me leave him completely. After a while he might even have let me kiss him goodnight. And, day by day, month by month, year by year, I would have planned it so that imperceptibly, with each chaste goodnight, my lips could light upon his dry cheek a hair’s breadth closer to his mouth.
They took my father’s body to the mortuary of St James Hospital. St James Hospital is in Balham, just beyond Wandsworth Common. If I had still been at school I could have looked across from one of the pepper pot towers to the rooftops and windows of St James.
They must have laid him on something like a cold flat bed. When he was exhausted by making love he was very still in his sleep afterwards. I used to have to listen with utmost concentration to hear the inspiration and expiration of his breathing. If I had been allowed to see my father dead I would have knelt down beside him to try and hear the breath again. I would have watched through the night if needs be and I would have taken his hand and held it to make it warm again. Sometimes, when I leaned over him to kiss him, the ends of my hair would brush across his face and that would wake him or at least make him stir. I expect that they would have closed his blue eyes so I would have kept my eyes closed as well, then we would each be seeing the other only inside our heads.
If I could not have made him warm and breathing again then I would have taken off any clothing I had and lain down beside him and instead he could have passed his coldness into me so that we were both of us become numb. Just before the coldness took hold I think I would have heard him speak to me to tell me that it was all all right. Once in the room in Oakley Street he said to me, ‘I hope you know how much I love you, Susanna, because, God help me, I could never put it into words.’
PART TWO
From the very beginning, they gave me a room of my own. The ceilings are high and the paint-work uniformly cream. The bed too is high, markedly raised above the linoleum floor, and in the wall behind it there are metal sockets of various kinds and a call bell. I think that the sockets are for emergency equipment on occasions when I may do myself harm. In the door there is a glazed square with a grid of wire inside it. People observe me through it, sometimes I know when there is a face there, and sometimes I do not bother to notice. There is nobody’s face in the world that I want to see but when it is Bonnie Jean I know that she will always smile.
It was easy to become adapted to living here because for the first months I was what Trevor calls very doped up. I slept, or I merely gazed into the foreground space a great deal, dozing with my eyes open. I was conscious of things going on around me only in so far as you notice a fly buzzing against a windowpane or a television set in another flat. Therefore, by the time I was more aware of my surroundings and they reduced the dosages, I was already accustomed to this place.
Beyond the window it is South-west London still, but somewhere near Tooting Common so I see no familiar landmarks. What I do see are the network of covered walkways and the external metal staircases. It is an extraordinary work of engineering, this institution. Precisionist painters in ’thirties America made pictures of buildings like this, although theirs were in the main factories and warehouses, not, I think, mental hospitals. Sometimes I read assiduously on painting and painting styles, sometimes I am unable to – in the illustrative plates just the placement of a hand or the fall of light from a window or the portrayal of the sitter’s age can set me off. In the beginning Trevor and the man in charge who conducted my first assessment would ask me why I was so interested in art. I told them that I did not know, I just was.
‘I think you do know, Susanna,’ said the man in charge.
‘Piss off,’ I replied and I began to worry at the stripe of dark red stitches up my arm.
I am very knowledgeable now but only in the areas on which I have been able to obtain works of reference. Sister Anna Maria, the nun with the library trolley, does her best but such books are not easy to come by and so there are extensive gaps in my learning. Whole genres must go uncomprehended.
Here in the room in the asylum at Tooting Bec I play a waiting game and so do they, those who have charged themselves with making me better. At first I presumed that they only wanted to cure me of my grief, which was ridiculous, and to stop me cutting my hands and then my left arm. I can tell you that did not work either, the flesh of that limb being quite transformed nowadays. I do not think that my father, who once told me about a man in an American novel who was so obsessed with women’s arms that he got an erection just at the sight of bare ones, would be able to recognise it anymore. The thing being that when I cut it a lot infections take hold and so now there is considerable scarring, my skin like the moon’s surface or an arid landscape of pits and cracks, sometimes flushed and febrile. Human bodies can produce all by themselves the most marvellous tones and pigments, simply by the processes of
injury or of sickness. From a bookstall on the Left Bank Francis Bacon once bought an old volume on diseases of the mouth; he recorded that he was entranced by the beauty of the coloured illustrations.
It is only the left one that I cut; I am quite particular about that. At morning break in the brown painted cloakroom of Clapham County School a third-form girl read out extracts from the teenage magazine Jackie. The air was redolent with the smell of plimsolls and cheese and onion crisps. The magazine was a special edition for Valentine’s Day; it offered salient facts in heart shaped frames stating that February 14th was the birds’ wedding day and that the Romans chose the third finger of the left hand for the ring because it had the closest connecting communication to the heart. I went home and told Lin but she said how the hell would they have known that.
After a time in the Springfield Hospital at Tooting Bec I came to understand that it was not simply the grieving or the cutting that they are seeking to address. They are waiting for my admissions: for me to admit that I remember what I did, to tell them about it, all of it, and to acknowledge that it was wrong. Good luck to them in their endeavour. I have been here a long time now. Bonnie Jean has saved for and enjoyed a trip home to family in Barbados. The main man from my very first assessment, whom I dislike for his pipe smoking and for other things, has been on a lengthy sabbatical. I hoped that on his return he would eschew our pointless weekly sessions but he did not. His name is Derrick Hearn and you can sometimes glimpse him in his private moments applying a plastic comb to his hair on which, unfashionably, he uses Brylcreem. I sense that he intends to make some sexual advance towards me and to write a paper on my state of mind and deviancy. If he ever did the first I would harm myself good and proper. I do not know, as I have been sectioned, whether I have any rights to stop him doing the second.
