by Louisa Young
It was a sunny morning, with big trees heavy in leaf, cow parsley and tall knotty grass and hedgerows full of May-blossom and a house full of people who looked as if they knew what was going on, and what to do about it …
Other people! Other people who knew that this horrorland exists, and who had a kind of bridge from it to reality! Functional people. Ordinary everyday life, with reason, and calmness, day and night, meals, manners … consensual reality. It was, then, a world from which I too had been torn. His condition was far too big for one person. Once it has its claws in, it eats up everyone in sight. It smells the love we have for them and hurtles down it like lightning down a conductor, and eats us too.
‘He does look frail,’ says one of the functional people, doubtfully. They are worried about his leg, how will he be, getting up and down the stairs with the plaster still on.
No music, it’s banned. I think, He won’t like that, but actually he thinks it’s probably as well, as other people would want to play things he couldn’t bear to hear. And rooms are shared. ‘But I might want a wank,’ he says. He’s serious. Yup, he can’t go to rehab to save his life because he might want a wank.
Everybody has to help clear up! This makes me laugh. (Our domestic arrangements are thus: he makes a lot of mess, is on sticks, will never tidy or clean anything in his life, and if he did he’d do it badly and break things. Even moving about, his natural progress is like one of those all-terrain vehicles on caterpillar tracks, which just goes wherever. He steps in things, and never looks before he sits down. He will sit in a plate of food and not notice. So, I could clean up after him (nope). We could fight about cleaning for the rest of our lives (nope), or he could pay for a cleaner. He pays for a cleaner. I have never had a cleaner before. I am happy. He’s happy. He feels that he is contributing.)
There’s a tennis court. He used to be rather good at tennis. Yes yes yes, I think, take him, please, help him, please, help him save him help him save himself help him make him better.
He talks to a woman called Carmel. I know he’ll like her. Something in her face. Fifties, been through it. I have a small fantasy: he will sober up and get better and become a counsellor and help other addicts. He could go round schools and give talks to teenagers, saying yes, look – alcohol is not a joke. It’s not a game.
A very pretty young girl is leaving, low-slung belt on her jeans, mother in a big car, a pot of dark mauve hydrangeas on its roof. The others are lining up outside the entrance, with their cigarettes, to send her off. Robert is interested in this.
On the way back to London I’m quiet because I don’t want to say to him GO THERE GO THERE LET’S TURN ROUND!
Let him think, let him decide. That much I know.
Open car, English lanes, May morning, A29, A24, outside Leatherhead. Tooling along, back to town.
He’s moving his feet. Is there a spark from his cigarette, burning his ankle? He’s not smoking. Has he dropped his cigarette? He isn’t smoking. No smell of smoking. He’s waving his hands. Is it a wasp, or a bee? At his feet? In his face? He’s calling out – roaring, arms flailing. No wasp or bee. He sounds angry. Does he hate me? Because I took him there? Is he is he is he what is he?
Robert!
He’s jerking, head going back, froth at his mouth.
Bear left, mirror signal manoeuvre go left traffic coming up behind not too fast tension control nowhere to go ah grass verge wide under signpost for roundabout Dorking A2003. Pull up.
999.
Too long.
Not native English speaker.
North on A29, not north of A29.
Dual carriageway.
Near …?
Before roundabout.
Heading north.
A24?
North of Bearsholm.
A fit.
In the car.
Yes.
No.
Please.
Handbrake? Have I turned the engine off?
Traffic. Blackbird singing.
Froth and blood. Kind of vomit. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday lunch.
‘Put your head forward darling. It’s OK it’ll be OK. Ambulance coming.’
Blood on his jacket.
He’s calming down. Holding him in my right arm, phone in left.
Jerking. Have my calm. Give me your panic, have my calm.
What about my panic, where is that going?
999 again.
English speaker.
An ambulance drives past, was it our one?
Please. Please.
He’s staring at me. Blue blue eyes white white face. Shocked.
Still now. Slumped.
Darling.
Holding him. Seatbelts.
Traffic.
Cow parsley.
Big sign, A2003. Last year.
Blank eyes.
‘You’ll be OK, the ambulance is coming.’
‘Why?’
Oh.
‘You had a fit.’
Blank face, questioning.
Oh.
Brain damage? Stroke?
For a moment I am thinking: This is it. This is you, this is how it is now. And I must look after you. So in that split second I made the decision: OK. I will. It wasn’t really ever a question.
He’s blank.
‘Do you know who you are?’ I ask.
Pause.
Oh shit.
‘Robert,’ he says.
Pause.
‘Lockhart.’
Pause.
So I am pleased, and I breathe, for what seems to be the first time.
‘Who am I?’ I ask him, thinking I am kind I am gentle I am not demanding I am me I am smiling I am not panicking.
Pause. Quizzical look. Is he teasing me?
‘Louisa.’
Pleased that he knows. Him and me both pleased that he knows me.
‘Do I love you?’ I asked.
What a strange question, I think. It’s all in slow motion. Underwater. He needs to think.
‘What a strange question,’ he says. His mouth is frothy and unclear.
Yes, I am talking to his subconscious. Evidently I want to get the question in now, while he won’t notice.
‘Well?’ I say.
Dunno gesture. ‘Do you?’
‘Yes,’ I say, lovingly, cheerfully, as to a frightened baby. I am calm I am strong don’t be scared I’m looking after you.
‘What do you do?’ I ask. I mean him to say, composer, or something, like holding up fingers, what day is it. He doesn’t know what day it is.
‘Pay the bill with a cheque,’ he says. ‘Very expensive.’ The fees at Farm Place perhaps? I wonder.
He said ‘play the bill’. His mouth is still bloody. He’s bitten his tongue. It’s swollen and white.
‘Do you know where we’ve been today?’
He gives a shiver of a shake of the head – dunno.
And the ambulance comes, bearing a big man, with training. A competent man, who does the right things. A normal man. A layer of tension shivers off me – I am no longer solely responsible for us.
I answer the questions, and learn that it was an alcoholic epileptic fit, an electrical storm in the brain, and that he won’t remember it.
Robert thinks we’ve been out to lunch. That’s what he thinks he’s paid for.
There’s no alcohol in him now, blood sugar 6.9.
He is so pale.
No, I say, we won’t go to hospital, if that’s OK. Yes, his alcoholism is being seen to. Thank you. Rest, yes, of course. Repetition? Fine. Of course, yes, his own GP. Call-out report, thank you.
All the way home Robert and I repeat the questions, repeating the repetitions.
For the first time, it occurs to me, he could have killed me too.
Why did I not send him to hospital then? I didn’t know this was the pattern of a disease. I didn’t put things together, the trees to make up the wood, and the path ahead.
The doctor said, You get fits when you have be
en drinking heavily for a long time and then you suddenly stop. He hadn’t had a chance to have a drink that morning – we had set off before he could make his customary trip up the road to get the paper and, as I now found out, the vodka miniatures he drank in the phone box. It was the lack of alcohol that caused the fit. That’s what the doctors had meant, years before, about giving up being dangerous. His response, when the doctor explained, was still, ‘So that means I should keep on drinking?’
And she said, You’ll be dead in three years. She said, You need a brain scan and liver-function test and to see a pancreas specialist. He didn’t go. I didn’t make him. I couldn’t make him. It’s his responsibility, right? I ordered powdered enzymes for the pancreatitis though, because he didn’t do the Internet (he never had an email address). He thought of it as mine. ‘Have you got any Miles Davis on your Internet?’ he’d ask. Yes. And I found him a clip of Rachmaninoff on a boat, smiling.
It was two and a half years since I’d said I’ll be your girlfriend if you stop drinking and get a shrink. I was still asking the same questions: Am I supporting? Or am I enabling? Do I stick around in hope? Or save myself now? Is this the time it’s going to work? We’ve been in worse places before. Have we?
If this had been someone else I’d have looked at them and said, What a fool, what a saga of wasted love.
The sadness. Self-pity whispered at me: Nobody has wanted your good love. You might as well waste it on him. What else has love got up its sleeve for you? All it has ever done is torment you and shame you.
Unspoken, I said, I hate him. Can I love him if I want to kill him? Just to see him I want to cry. To think of him I want to cry. When does a person decide what to do? How can a person decide when?
I didn’t want to leave him. I wanted him to be well.
Chapter Fourteen
King’s Lynn, 2004
Either twin might turn up at the house, and you wouldn’t know which was coming. I kicked the Evil Twin out of the house many many times, and refused him entry, but often it was Robert himself who reappeared, the Sweet Twin, apologetic, ashamed, beautiful, desirous of betterment, needing and asking for help.
The plaster stank when it was removed. They sawed down the side with a circular blade like a pizza slicer, and his leg was thick with dead skin. The bath afterwards was a corker. He showed his son the soft mound of flesh that had settled so neatly on to the inside of his bony ankle, and how the hair ran sideways, not downwards like the rest. Jim stroked it in appalled fascination, and Robert joshed him about turning the pad round like the dial on a washing machine, so the hair could be vertical like it should be on a leg. For Jim, Robert washed and shaved, girded his loins, pulled out his sense of humour. They played cripple football in the street on Robert’s crutches, went out for lunch, never stopped talking. Jim’s big eyes soaked him up.
He was writing the score for a Dutch film called Lepel – Spoon – about a small boy who ran away from an evil button-thief to live in a department store with a wild girl and a lovesick store detective. It is an enchanting film, and his music was gorgeous, with the sweeps of full orchestral magnificence and lush, peculiar melodies that surprise people who didn’t know Robert well, who hadn’t clocked that his cynical presentation was closely intertangled with a ferocious, hungry romanticism. There is one yearning waltz tune I find myself whistling most days. This music made me love him so much. It was a sign. The foot breaking off had been a nadir. He was trying. He wasn’t drinking. There was hope. There were plenty of days of ah, yes, this is how it should be, when good, relaxed, normal things happened: Robert working with Steve at the studio, picking him up there, running into old friends, Isobel the fixer, the musicians. The first screening. Meeting the director – Willem van de Sande Bakhuyzen. Robert loved to despise directors but he liked this one. This is the kind of thing, I thought. We could live, like this.
Lola and I were travelling a lot, doing book tours: Spain, Italy, Edinburgh. In September she started Big School, and we were on Blue Peter. In October the second of our Lionboy books came out. During half term she came with me for the first leg of the US book tour, then flew back alone from New York with her new skateboard to be with her dad while I went on to Connecticut, Milwaukee, Chicago, San Francisco, LA, back to London and straight on to the Frankfurt Book Fair.
The Evil Twin grew stronger when we were away. When we got home he sometimes scared me with his crashing about, late at night. I felt my vulnerability, so unprotected, feeling it in my breasts, aware that this was not how you should feel about your lover.
Sometimes he’d sit with Lola while she ate her supper. I’d tense as he’d chat, she would sense that and respond accordingly. Often she would just leave when he came in. He played for her approval; asking her questions, but about things which interested him, not what interested her. He didn’t know what interested her. He might have guessed it wasn’t how Scriabin had died of a pustule in his mouth – but the Evil Twin didn’t think about other people. She was eleven. She’d given up piano lessons. I was sad about this but I knew why, and who could blame her? I would give music back to her later – I wouldn’t let her lose the joy of it because of him. The irony of that would be too much. Or – in my dream – he would give it back to her. When he’d been sober for as long as he was drunk, the debt would be paid. They’ll be back to square one, and she could start to like him, and eventually to accept his gifts. This was my idea.
‘Sweetheart,’ I say to him, in a cautiously admonitory tone. I can’t bear the little drama unfolding around the kitchen table. And he can’t bear the emotional tone of my voice, the patronising twist that I can’t help, so he mocks my London pronunciation of the word: swee’heart. As well as the emotional offence he takes, he feels that for me, a posh girl, to drop an H or glottal-stop a T is pretentious. He is a great believer in the class system. Without it, and its being rigorously upheld, he would have so much less to resent. I feel that accents are as much geographical as class influenced, and that any Londoner might naturally acquire any London intonation. I don’t like being called pretentious, because I’m not.
‘You so enjoy resenting things, don’t you?’ I say meanly.
‘No I don’t!’ he says. ‘I sincerely wish there was less in the world demanding to be resented. Really I do.’
‘If you just stopped resenting innocent things that you can’t change, you would save so much energy.’
‘Oh, fuck off and do some yoga,’ he says.
‘Yeah, I’ll leave you to play with your imaginary enemies.’
‘Yeah,’ he says, mocking my way of saying it. ‘Yeah.’
He protects himself with an armour of irrelevance, taking hold of the wrong end of the stick any time the right end doesn’t suit him. How much easier to criticise the way someone pronounces a word than to deal with what they’re saying. How telling that the pronunciation he most mocks is the way I say ‘problem’. ‘Problim,’ he’ll say, shaking his head. How incorrigible I am, honestly, listen to me. Problim.
Lola has left, slipping away to do her homework.
He has lost his house keys again. I’ve been wondering whether I should just not get any more cut for him. Leave him outside. Put a gate at the top of the garden path so that if he comes back at night without the keys he can just go away again, instead of waking us with his banging, making me lie there in misery praying that Lola upstairs can’t hear him, until at last I can’t bear it, and go and let him in, and put him in the sitting room, and build a barricade of fear and shame across the door so that he can’t come out.
My girl, thank God, sleeps through most of this. I think. I can’t ask her. Because if she has slept through, by mentioning it I would alert her to a danger of which she would otherwise be unaware.
In December Steve had a party at the studio, and Murray Gold was there, the young wunderkind who was doing the music for the new Doctor Who, and he said wow, Robert Lockhart, he’s meant to be some kind of genius. I clung to this passing compliment like a w
oman with not very much to cling to.
And then a long-delayed appointment came up, and he just went. Finally.
Community drug and alcohol treatment and recovery services provide a range of specialist substance misuse interventions … Our outcome data shows people who use our services are more likely to overcome their dependence. We provide high quality, Care Quality Commission registered substance misuse services to help people overcome their dependence and achieve recovery … highly skilled, multi-disciplinary teams … personalised care … planned treatment and recovery packages … community detoxification and psychosocial support to either control drinking or maintain abstinence—
Gosh.
Three days later, he was in the Max Glatt Unit, part of a hospital in Ealing. I wished it was further away and for longer, but it was Rehab – Reprogramming Robert, he called it – and he was going. He cracked jokes all the way in the car. There was an undertaker’s near the clinic with the same name as a rugby player. He looked at the pubs and said, ‘It’s strange to think I’m never going to have a drink again.’ I held that phrase to me. I would have hung it round my neck on a chain if I could.
Check us! On the way to REHAB.
Also, he would be out of my hair and safe for the duration. This was a relief not to be underestimated.
The unit was a remarkably depressing place. A pool table, noticeboards, a junkie girl in a vest who locked him in the cracked-melamine kitchen and showed him her pierced nipples. All types. Asian boys, old Irish potato-noses. Hand in all your belongings. No bedside light, and when I took one in for him it had to be checked and it didn’t come back till the day he was to leave. After three days he was allowed to go on the approved and accompanied team walk to the hospital shop. In the lead-up to Christmas, the addicts sat on their institutional couches, jaded and fish-eyed as the TV rolled out ad after ad for Tia Maria, for gin, for whisky, for Southern Comfort, for being young, sexy and drunk, because that, by God, is how to have a good time; or for being around a cosy laden table with your happy smiling children and loving spouse drinking Baileys and champagne and brandy and port because that, by God, is how to be a good and settled member of society.
