by Louisa Young
It wasn’t really a novel. I don’t know what happened to that print-out, or to the card, which I’d bought on a trip to Amsterdam with Lola to meet the Dutch publishers of Lionboy. I used the painting again in my later novel My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, where Nadine the unwilling nurse is sheltering in a trench outside Étaples, where she has scarpered because she believes Riley Purefoy’s lie that he no longer loves her, whereas in fact he has had half his face blown off and rebuilt, and he does not want her pity, and she sees almond blossom against the dawn sky, and recalls a pre-war dream of going with him to Amsterdam to look at art.
*
After weeks of silence, he rang me on 13 November. Six months to the day since my Churchillian ultimatum. He got the bloody day right.
‘So we’re broken up now,’ I said.
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Not till the evening.’
‘Are you going to do anything about it?’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I’m going to do everything about it.’
Parrot. He did nothing.
I thought, by doing nothing, he is telling me, quite clearly, that there is no hope for him, and I should step away, just like he said at the beginning, like a melodramatic teenager, only it’s true. A phrase recurred in my head: ‘Please, tell the lady that I have the honour to be a thorough reprobate and not a woman alive can save me now …’ Where’s that from? (Dostoyevsky, as it turns out. The Brothers Karamazov.)
It was not for me to save him. I had faith in his ability to do it himself. I looked for our happy ending. I believed in happy endings.
So, November to March. Four winter months. I know which shops he hobbled to, while he could still hobble. I know which shopkeepers sold him drink. I know which cab firms he rang to bring him vodka and fags, every day.
Should I have moved him to the middle of nowhere in the countryside? Should I have bribed the cab firms and the off licences not to serve him? Should I have tied him up in the cellar?
I knew nothing but sadness. Did I feel anything? Yes – cut off and blank. Brutalised. Nasty word. It all seemed such a waste. My hopes had been so high, and now that I had no hope, I couldn’t even remember what hope was. I felt foolish, to remember how I had felt. What kind of fool hopes? A foolish fool. And that cynicism made me sadder.
I could not write because my feelings were cauterised. How could I entrance a reader when I was so bogged down, so untouching, so nothing?
The only feeling that rose, from time to time, like a dragon rearing out of mud, flaming on its long neck, was fury. It aimed for Robert, and bit and stung him, which was not fair because despite his stupid choices and his many abused opportunities he did not deserve to suffer more.
I didn’t like anything. There’s a word for it: anhedonia. Same root as hedonist. I wanted desperately to write this story of Robert and me, and the enemy. I knew it was a story worth telling but I’d start thinking about it and I’d start crying – because of all that had happened, and because I couldn’t write it. And apathy was killing me. Depression, procrastination, going back to bed. I was afraid. I didn’t know where to take my poor mind now. It felt so tender; so small and scared. I was all frozen up, the frozen sea within to which Kafka was so keen to take an axe.
I remember sitting in Swift’s car outside her house in floods of tears, and her saying, ‘But would you and Robert get back together?’ and me almost throwing up, retching and shaking and saying ‘NO. NO. Never.’
Chapter Eighteen
An Italian Restaurant, 2007
I went on a date with another man. I felt I owed it to my friends who would like to see me happy. I met him at a wedding; let’s call him Jack. He took my number and invited me to dinner. He was shaggy, intelligent and quite attractive. A journalist.
He was there at the restaurant when I arrived. He was drunk. The service was attentive, so we ordered quickly. The third thing he said, as the starters arrived, was, ‘All Muslims are bastards and should be nuked.’ I thought of my friend Amira and her sons Younus and Ali, of nice Mrs Bhutt next door. I would have left but because of the starters I followed the rules of propriety and not being mean to restaurant staff. I disputed his point and we ate.
He wanted to arm wrestle. I felt not.
The main course arrived. We talked about travel, his work, my other life in Italy.
He started to cry. I was sorry for him but not very.
I declined pudding, and he invited me to go to Italy with him. He felt I would love Italy, had I ever been?
I was out of there by 9.15, hiding in my car as he walked past, me on the phone to Swift, in desperate need of someone human to wash my brain with sane talk.
The next day he rang to apologise.
‘Which bit are you apologising for?’
‘The crying.’
The crying had been the one bit I hadn’t minded.
It seemed clear to me that I preferred my own alcoholic.
Chapter Nineteen
Australia, March–April 2007
On his forty-eighth birthday – 26 March 2007 – a year to the day after the fit in Oxford – Robert was in hospital, and, after some thought, I visited him. He was thin beyond belief. Five foot eleven, seven and a half stone. His hair was long down his back; his beard was scraggy, his cheeks sunken, his skin waxen and yellow, like, though I didn’t recognise it then, a dead person’s. His pale eyes were enflamed. He looked like Franz Liszt painted by El Greco, or a very old candle, or someone dug out of a peat bog where everything had kept on growing after death. I hadn’t seen him since that time on the street when he had told me he wasn’t fit to be seen by me. He’d been in a coma, and had not been expected to come round, but he did. He’d been expected to die, but didn’t. This I heard secondhand.
He heard me coming and recognised my footsteps.
‘Oh my word,’ he said, in genuine pleased amazement.
He thought it very kind of me to have come all the way to Australia to see him. We weren’t in Australia. We were in Hammersmith. He was concerned about my luggage. Was it still at the opera house? Sydney, I assumed. He meant Covent Garden. Apparently I had left it there after a row we had in the bar. We’d never been there together.
He offered to send a taxi for it. I said it wouldn’t be necessary. Had I come straight from the airport, he wondered. Where was I staying?
‘At home,’ I said. ‘This is Charing Cross Hospital.’
Amazement again. Why was he in hospital? He thought it was a hotel. George Best had been coming in every day for a few rounds of backgammon. Debussy had been by as well. There was a tournament. Spike Milligan had accused Robert of cheating in the final.
Nobody would tell me what was going on, because I was not Robert’s next of kin. They would only tell him. But he was in Australia playing backgammon with George Best, so what good was telling him?
I had carefully not made myself next of kin. I knew all about co-dependence now. I knew now that alcoholism is a weird, sneaky trickster, where rule number one of being anywhere near the afflicted is to act against your natural instincts. He’s ill? Don’t look after him. Don’t even feed him or put his T-shirt in with the rest of the washing. You love him? Don’t carry out any of the normal acts of love. Respect him by leaving him the space to see clearly what he has become, and only then can he learn, and know, and seek help. So I was not next of kin. I was just the ex-ish girlfriend who they’d rung because he gave them my number.
I made a list:
Alcoholic neuropathy: nerve damage to the extremities, when your feet cling to the ground and your knees circle like the little jointed wooden mannequin on elastic strings; push a thumb up under the wooden base and you topple, but your feet don’t want to move. That was him at the bus stop, him on the landing saying his legs didn’t work.
The fall on the icy night in January 2004. Was there a fight, as he said at first? I still don’t know. The triple fracture, the Captain Scott heroics in the snow.
Pancreatitis: the retchi
ng and vomiting all night because you can’t produce enzymes properly, so you don’t digest food and don’t get your vitamins and minerals, you are malnourished, you are sick.
Hepatitis: your liver swells and hurts and can’t process the toxins with which you are flooding it. You turn yellow. Next stop cancer or cirrhosis.
Insomnia. Not surprising, but don’t underestimate it.
Ditto tinnitus
Depression. Strange how we forget that alcohol is a depressant. Because it is so very cheerful in the beginning, and we can take it at face value for years and years. Strange how we forget how hideous depression actually is, and how we can fail over and over again to put two and two together.
Epilepsy.
Today there was something new: Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome. Imagine being blind drunk, legless, slurring, you can’t remember a thing the next day. Imagine that the wind changes, and you’re stuck like that. If you don’t eat, but drink vodka instead, for months on end, you starve. Vodka is not a balanced diet. The lack of vitamins, particularly vitamin B, damages your brain and nervous system. Your walking, movement, eyesight, speech and memory begin to fail. If you do it long enough you go mad. You don’t know where you are or what you’re doing. You are at the mercy of fate, defenceless, hopeless, starving, raving, on the streets of the city. Your legs fold beneath you, words fail in your mouth, thought flails in your mind. You froth and fall. Anything could happen to you. You could die. You would die. Thousands of people die every year of drink and its sicknesses.
His good neighbours had found him naked, shit-stained, bony, comatose and foetal on the stairs, and had called an ambulance. They did this twice a day for a week, because the hospital wouldn’t or couldn’t hold him, and he would hobble home. In the end, because you can’t be sectioned on private property, the doctor upstairs (I don’t know her name, but if she’s reading this: thank you, and I hope you got the letter he left for you) escorted him out into the road so the police could section him and take him back yet again to A&E, which forced the hospital to keep him in for long enough to notice that he wasn’t just drunk, he had this condition, where the wind had changed.
Under the new wind, his mind struggled like the God of the Old Testament to separate the light from the darkness, to bring order to chaos. The tough, rational brain, longing for order, tried desperately to do its job: to make sense. The brain deprived of normal memory finds snatches of memory within itself, and patches them together into something that looks vaguely like a possible truth – and then believes it. It invents what it longs for, out of whatever is to hand. It’s called confabulation: putting the stories together.
*
I visit again. He calls to greet me before I am visible. His father is a Parisian taxi driver. He had dropped Debussy off!
‘Paris? We’re still in Hammersmith, darling.’
‘What?’ he cries, astounded. He’s forgotten that he can’t remember. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re not in Paris. Any more than you were in Australia last week.’
‘I was in Australia? Oh, no. Wasn’t I?’
‘No.’
He laughs, remembering, and says, ‘Well, at least I’m getting closer to home …’
My own knees give way a little with tenderness at this. I remember how much I adore him. Remember – the opposite of dismember. To put back together the parts and recreate the whole.
We talk about his condition, and about what’s happened. I steer his stories towards consensual reality. He warms up, as it were; reconnects, slowly. Then after about an hour of pretty normal conversation, he says, ‘Anyway, how’s your son? Still playing the saxophone?’
*
The hospital staff have had trouble telling what is confabulation and what are more glamorous aspects of his former reality. Debussy, no. But Dustin Hoffman on Broadway, and the double first from Oxford? Actually, yes. But why should they be able to identify the scraps of truth? It’s all peculiar enough at the best of times. Sitting in a hospital corridor I thought: we all confabulate. The difference is that most of us will put together more or less the same observations in more or less the same order and call it facts. But I know that I too have invented what I long for, or even what I can bear, out of whatever I had to hand.
I sit with him. We talk. I watch him sleep. He squints at me when he wakes. Late in the evening a doctor comes round, a young and pretty woman. She says, almost in passing, that he will be like this forever now, and probably never walk again.
Oh.
I cry, which means I don’t watch his reaction. Then I look up, ashamed of the immediacy of my selfishness, and take his hand. What does this mean to him? I don’t know if it has been said before. Is this how they tell you something like this? It doesn’t seem proper. Don’t you get a special appointment in a little room; someone saying, ‘Sit down, we have bad news’?
And yet a doctor has just said it.
Does Robert know?
It seems at the same time desperately serious and utterly unreal.
‘Why are you crying?’ he asks, sympathetically. He has already forgotten what the doctor just said.
I cry more.
If the lorry driver I yelled at on the way home is reading this, I’m sorry, it wasn’t your fault.
I just started immediately on the important job of confabulating a reality in which the fact of his psychosis and disability could co-exist with some sense – any sense! – of things being somehow bearable.
Of course that’s what I did. It’s what people do.
I was getting there, too.
*
I read up. The overall message was vast, complex, and either contradictory or so dependent on variables that it had to be presented that way. Whatever. It scared the daylights out of me.
Wernicke-Korsakoff’s Syndrome consists of two stages: Wernicke’s Encephalopathy – disorientation, confusion, mild memory loss; the person being very underweight, involuntary jerky eye movements or paralysis of the muscles that move the eye; poor balance; followed by Korsakoff Syndrome – severe loss of memory. Loss of initiative. Confabulation: experienced by a small number of Korsakoff sufferers. Difficulty in acquiring new information or skills … personality changes … apathy, lack of emotional reaction. Not knowing they have the condition. Believing that their memory is functioning normally. Problems with concentration, planning, making decisions and solving problems.
What’s happening is that the front of the brain is shrinking. Thiamine is used in the formation of blood vessels; without it they begin to leak. High doses of injected thiamine can reverse the encephalopathy in a few days, otherwise permanent brain damage can result, and can be fatal. Where it’s untreated, or treated late, Korsakoff syndrome usually develops. Blood leaks from capillaries in the parts of the brain that form new memories and control muscle co-ordination. If the leaking continues the patient becomes unconscious. The leaked blood then clots and, as it solidifies, damages the brain tissue around it.
I had written in my Book of the Heart about the physical sensation of the heart sinking; of people claiming to have felt it. I had not felt it before, myself.
Initially I took away three simple messages. His memory is physically filled with clotting blood. Those failed hospital visits where thiamine was not given were several of his nine lives. And the phrase ‘what level of recovery (if any)’.
And then others leapt out, alarming, sometimes contradictory, specific to him and to how I was going to respond.
‘They may need weeks of practice to learn simple information. For example, if they move to new accommodation, the route from their bedroom to the kitchen.’
‘Sufferers may have difficulty in telling whether two songs are the same or different.’
‘If left to themselves, they rapidly sink into silence.’
‘Testing carried out immediately after detoxification can give misleadingly pessimistic results.’
‘Long-term residential care.’
‘Traditional the
rapeutic alcohol treatment regimes involve … exactly the skills in which the brain-damaged person may be deficient.’
‘For some people [alcoholism] ceases to be an issue as they forget their need to drink.’
I think about how funny he would find that. I wonder if he will ever find things funny again.
But he joked about being closer to home now he thought he was in Paris. I read somewhere that being able to take the piss out of yourself is a sign of certain sanity.
The disease had come roaring out of the emotional, the moral, the behavioural, and lurched into view as the unmistakably physical. Everything that had been creeping around was now out in the open; all those symptoms added up. Now he’s not just unsteady, he’s ataxic. He’s not just shaky, he has peripheral neuropathy. He’s not just thin, he has malnutrition. He’s not just drunk and a pain in the arse, the capillaries of his brain are leaking blood which is clotting in his memory. Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome. He was in a coma. He’s in a hospital gown. It’s real.
And again, thank God, at last, I was not alone with it.
*
Lola and her friends were watching The Notebook, a film in which the heroine has amnesia. By the end of each day, for about five minutes, she remembers her true love, and everything he has done for her. They are together and joyous. Then the next morning she’s forgotten him again. The girls all came out of Lola’s room weeping.
I thought, In the past six weeks I have had to tell Robert three times that he left me, because he didn’t remember. Is that not tragic? I can’t say this to the young girls: ‘Hey, looky here, it’s real.’ I don’t want them to know it’s real.
Each time I told him he left me he was outraged. ‘No!’ he cried. ‘Why would I do that? I didn’t do that! I love you!’
*
The two most stupid things Robert ever said to me were: ‘You were never in love with me, were you?’ and ‘Did I hurt you much?’ Oh yes and – ‘I know exactly what’s going on, I know what to do.’
