You Left Early

by Louisa Young

  *

  I became obsessed with the questionnaire in the Guardian Weekend Magazine. Answering the questions each week was a way of taking my emotional temperature.

  When were you happiest?

  Robert Lockhart

  What is your greatest fear?

  Robert Lockhart

  What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

  Robert Lockhart

  What or who is the romantic love of your life?

  Robert Lockhart

  What was your most embarrassing moment?

  Robert Lockhart

  How do you relax?

  Robert Lockhart

  What is the worst thing anyone’s said to you?

  Robert Lockhart

  Who would play you in the film of your life?

  Robert Lockhart

  What would your super power be?

  Robert Lockhart

  What did you want to be when you were growing up?

  Robert Lockhart

  What does love feel like?

  Robert Lockhart

  Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?

  Robert Lockhart

  If you could edit your past, what would you change?

  Robert Lockhart

  What single thing would improve the quality of your life?

  Robert Lockhart

  What is the closest you’ve come to death?

  Robert Lockhart

  What song would you like played at your funeral?

  Robert Lockhart

  What is the most important lesson life has taught you?

  Robert Lockhart

  *

  I woke to his misery; I slept alongside it at night. If I said nothing, was I neglecting him? If I said something, was I taking on his responsibility? If he didn’t do the exercises he wouldn’t improve. He didn’t do them. He’d been asleep. They said, get up, have structure. He couldn’t. I couldn’t make him. I couldn’t help him. (I was helping him. Not enough.) So I left him alone. That’s all. As with the alcoholism, he had to sort it out himself. The echoes were unbearable and I had no preparation for that.

  The moment Lola left the house I cried. He tried to comfort me.

  The district nurse said, My, you’re looking so much better.

  I didn’t know – still don’t – if it was the Swan, or the drug that was better than the other drug, which did this to him.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  My Street, Spring and Summer 2011

  I am always happy when I see now a little red metal lid from a vodka miniature, sharp-edged and shiny, lying in the street, because each little red lid I see tells me that not every little red lid I saw in the street back in the day was one of his, which tells me that perhaps sometimes when I saw them and thought, my stomach collapsing, Fuck, fuck, he’s drinking again, he might not have been. Then I feel bad about letting it make me happy, because each little red lid still denotes somebody drinking a vodka miniature in the street, and that is never going to be a happy story. But Robert was particular about litter. He didn’t like the idea of birds eating things that might damage them.

  2011 was a very shrunken year. The burden of hope remained heavy – they said things would improve and yet things did not improve, so I stopped expecting, and I hoped only very quietly. I think this made things easier for both of us. I was gentler with him. I got over my fear and dislike of the word carer. The last thing he or I had wanted me to be was his carer. I was his girlfriend, he was my boyfriend; it was important to both of us that he wasn’t redefined by his illness as being dependent on me. (My hospital technique was just to swan around as if I owned the place, and if anyone questioned I’d smile vastly and gesture vaguely and say, ‘I’m with him.’) But now, minding about a word was a luxurious detail, no longer relevant in our limited lives. This was a different universe of romance. He needed looking after; I looked after him. He dragged himself the two hundred yards up the road to Paolo’s – he had to sit on a neighbour’s low wall halfway, for a rest – and texted me later saying could I pick him up. The subsidised cab service couldn’t understand his speech when he rang. He missed appointment after appointment through sheer exhaustion. It was an immense effort to get to the hospital. For months he was having fittings for a plate to be made for his mouth. It would make his speech clearer. He wanted this.

  In spring he started smoking again. He said it was his only pleasure, and I poured a bottle of Jevity over him, in fury, as he lay in the bed. My logic – if he was going to continue to sabotage himself, even now, then so would I. Not my proudest moment.

  The roses were out again. He’d managed a year.

  In late summer he was sitting on the neighbour’s wall when I unexpectedly came round the corner, and saw a flash of something red in his hand.

  I took the empty quarter bottle physically from the pocket where he was trying to hide it; walked up the road.

  *

  He went back to Camden for six weeks. It was a horrible kind of flashback, only worse, because – because of everything. When I visited I’d lie down with him on his single bed and try not to say the wrong thing, just hold on to him, if he wanted.

  I didn’t know if he was engaging with it, and assumed that he wasn’t, really. Couldn’t. But he did! I have the papers (see p. 402). It surprises me still to see the positivity and strength, the clarity and ambition in what he wrote. They ended with: ‘I am still angry and even embarrassed about my relapse, but I have learnt from it. And finally, just something about my four and a half years of sobriety – it got better and better. Never again do I want to return to that hell.’

  *

  I had no idea whether or not he drank after he came back from Camden that time. It seemed impossible for me to have any opinion or feeling by then. Anything I did might cause him pain or shame. He seemed tiny, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

  Him, at the door of the back bedroom: ‘Lou?’

  Me: ‘I’m downstairs.’

  Him: ‘Oh good.’

  He’d go about his business. Coughing, rumbling about. Pissing in the loo (not too bad a day). Lurching downstairs. Putting his coat (or mine) on over his pyjamas and going to sit on the doorstep. Drift of fag smoke (pretty good day).

  Putting his coat (or mine) and jeans on over his pyjamas and saying, ‘Where’s me sticks, Lily?’ (very good day).

  ‘In the corner, love.’

  ‘I’ve lost me specs, Lily.’

  ‘Yer’ve not, Bert, they’re on yer ’ead.’

  Lily and Bert were longstanding hyper-Northern personae, for mocking our age and domesticity.

  Step by careful step on his sticks he proceeded to Paolo’s cafe, resting on the way.

  Sometimes he would say: ‘Are you going to the library?’ And I would say, ‘No.’ And he would say, ‘Hmph.’

  I carried on making soup. I stopped and started the feed pump. I wished he’d never come off the morphine. I was afraid to have any emotion because I loved him and I was so angry.

  *

  Around this time My Dear I Wanted to Tell You was shortlisted for several prizes, and won the Galaxy Prize for the audiobook, with his music. I told him and he was proud.

  The title became ever more ironic and multi-layered. Initially it had been about the phrase on the field postcard: ‘My Dear, I wanted to tell you before any telegram arrives’; and the fact that facially injured soldiers often couldn’t speak, physically, and about the old true cliché of returning soldiers never talking about the war. Now it incorporated everything about Robert too: Robert who used to love everything so much and be so brilliant, and could now do virtually nothing. Robert who had talked for England, until he no longer could. Robert who never asked, ‘Why me?’ He knew why him.

  *

  In December Jackie celebrated her birthday by having an all-day session of playing Beethoven Quartets at my mother’s house. At New Year a great tree in our forest fell: Louis’s beloved mother died, in Ghana. In early Januar
y, Jackie, Lola and I went for five days in Morocco: a break. Absconding. Comfort. Sometimes people assume I must have felt guilty about this, but I didn’t. I was doing my best, and if you’re doing your best there is no reason for guilt. (The problem with that, though, is that different people have different bests and it is tempting to compare them. Robert’s self-loathing during his alcoholic years was partly because he felt he was doing his best, but that his best was far worse than other people’s: mine, for example. This left him with two harsh interpretations: either this really was his best, in which case perhaps he should just remove his wretched toxic self from the sight of better humans, or he was lying to himself and others about it being his best, in which case he was a nasty manipulator stringing his victims along and should likewise remove his wretched toxic self etc.)

  I had a realisation while I was away: that when someone I love is unhappy or angry I too, like Robert, take it personally. It’s the same damn thing. Because I don’t want them to be upset I become upset because I can’t prevent it. Which makes it worse. And who am I to prevent it? It’s not mine. It’s just another way of being obsessed with someone else’s behaviour at the expense of my own.

  I remember being on the white Moroccan roof in clear cool sun, hot bitter coffee, long loving conversations, riding horses along the Atlantic beach with seven dogs. Taking a call on the back of a horse in the dunes from the district nurse who didn’t know how to unblock the feeding tube. Pretending to Lola that wasn’t what I was talking about.

  But you know what? He’d been clear of cancer for fourteen months.

  Part Six

  2012—

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  A&E and ICU, 22-23 January 2012

  On Sunday, 22 January 2012, I woke at the usual kind of time— Can you tell this is the day he died? By the way I put it? Well, it was and it wasn’t.

  I went in to check on him and his tube, as usual. I had a strong urge to lie down beside him, like a young woman’s longing, to just shove him over and get in with him. But he wasn’t in his bed – which was like the budgie not being there and the cage door still being closed.

  He could only be at Paolo’s. I dressed and went down there. He was in the dingy little yard at the back, in his velvet-collared coat, with double espresso, fag and the Observer, complaining about its (lack of) classical music coverage. I ordered my coffee and went through and sat with him. It was good to see him up but I still only wanted to lie down with him. We chatted: his gurgling voice, my concentration, his laboured sips at his coffee, my inured ignoring of his cigarette. My Dear I Wanted to Tell You was starting on Radio 4 the next day. Book at Bedtime. He was proud about that.

  He said he was hungry. There is a particular joy when the sick person shows even the tiniest enthusiasm, even – specially – for the most ordinary thing. I said, ‘Good.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘Sign of life,’ I said. ‘I’ll make you soup.’ His long-term plan that his first meal would be over-cooked tortellini with extra sauce at the Italian had recently seemed over-ambitious.

  He wondered when Lola would be off. She had finished school, got into university and was about to go travelling.

  ‘Ten days,’ I said.

  ‘Already?’ he said, in his tongue-nailed-down voice. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be here. I’ll look after you.’ There was no jokey echo to this. Just kindness. I liked that.

  I gave him a lift the eight hundred yards to his AA meeting. He said, ‘Don’t pick me up, love, I’ll probably go for a coffee afterwards. What are you doing?’

  ‘Seeing my mum,’ I said.

  ‘Send her my love.’

  ‘She worries about you,’ I said, out of the car window, as I dropped him off.

  ‘Tell her I’m fine,’ he called, and clumped off up the path to the church hall, where the survivors were gathering by the door, smoking. Sticks, skinny legs, overcoat, wintry lunchtime, London.

  I went to see Mum, told her he was fine, and decided to stop in at the Coronet in Notting Hill to see War Horse. Cinema is escapism, isn’t it? I quite liked it, thought as usual about how Robert could have done better music.

  I came home afterwards and was settling in when there was a knock on the door: a stranger in a woolly hat – a young man, polite, agitated. He said something about Robert, the Princess Victoria, and Hospital. He was Will, a barman who’d known Robert for years. Robert had been having lunch and he’d had a fit. I should go there. Did I want him to come. No of course not, why would I?

  I drove down the Fulham Palace Road thinking, ‘Just another Robert emergency, you’ll leave another bit of yourself that you can ill afford behind.’ And, ‘Having lunch?’

  A&E. A long wait.

  Why so long? They could just direct me to him.

  They took me through and put me in a little beige room; a little beige room without him in it. I was puzzled. Was this going to be a bigger drama?

  A further wait. I didn’t like it. Whispering behind the door jamb.

  A doctor came in. Two, actually. Young men. They said some things.

  damage

  oxygen

  lack

  twenty-two minutes—

  and to each rational question I raised, they said

  no

  no

  no

  They said, brain damage.

  I thought, well he’s had that before, and anyway he has loads of brain. The doctors were looking significant. It seemed I needed to respond.

  ‘How much brain damage?’ I said. I said, ‘Is he conscious?’

  ‘No.’

  I can’t remember the other words they said. I asked what that meant in practical terms, and one of them said, ‘His brain is not able to support his heartbeat, or his breathing.’ It was something like that. ‘There is not enough function.’

  I had to circle it a couple of times before getting the full view of the landscape. He’s unconscious. He won’t be conscious again. He won’t be conscious again? What—

  No

  I think I said, ‘No more Robert?’

  Like a three-year-old. No more Robert? Bewildered.

  He’s on a life-support machine. Without it, he can’t breathe and his heart won’t beat. ‘You know what kind of person he was, what he would want.’ I have no idea why they are saying this, though it seems urgent. There are more tests they need to run to confirm something which it seemed would make not the slightest difference but it had to be done and couldn’t be done yet because there had to be a period of time between the first test and the—

  Was?

  Can I go to him?

  Of course.

  At what stage did I find out what had happened? Did the boy who came to the door tell me? Or someone at the hospital?

  He’d ordered roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and broccoli, and he had tried to eat it, and he had choked.

  The pub people didn’t know his history; they didn’t know he couldn’t eat. Did anyone give him the Heimlich manoeuvre? It was Sunday lunch in a gastropub. Families in there. The dad of the neighbouring table had held him upright. Laura, the six-foot Aussie barmaid with the glamorous white streak of hair, had been with him. They’d called the ambulance.

  He’d ordered roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and broccoli? He what the FUCK?

  He is on a gurney in the back of A&E, in a gown. Numbers on a whiteboard; cardiac studs on his chest, cannulas. He’s propped up, the sheet tenting over his knees very pale and smooth, all perfectly him, but his mouth is distorted, pulled about by the ventilator tube strapped uncomfortably tight with a small length of gauze.

  ‘Can he feel that?’

  No.

  Too many nos.

  He looks eight hundred years old. The plastic ID bracelet gives his name as unknown. ‘He’s not unknown,’ I say in fury. ‘I know him.’ I hold his hand; he holds it back, tight, and my heart fills with joy. His eyes are closed.

  He’s in a coma. Boyfriend in a coma. He’s been in comas before. N
ot like this. He’s brain dead. Someone used the term. Perhaps me. His brain is dead.

  And with a sudden swoosh, you are again in a new universe, dragged there in Robert Lockhart’s slipstream. And you blink, and you start to adapt.

  What do you do with a person in a coma? It is a panicky thought and I respond in a panicky way. You play them music. I’ve seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

  I decide I just won’t tell Lola this is happening and that way she need never know or be upset about it. I had always wanted her to love him and now here he is causing more grief and trouble.

  I have no headphones.

  I open his eyelids with my fingers and stare at him. His eyes so blue and clear and empty. I can’t position myself within his gaze to look him in the eye without climbing up on top of him and the gurney and everything. I think – Well, just do that then, Jesus, if ever you could just do anything you can just do anything now. But I don’t.

  Streams of black blood shit are coming out of him. They clean him up, over and over. They are called Michael, Richard and Greg. He is wearing the same kind of gown as when he was in intensive care after surgery, so lively, writing lists of everything he would do without speech or eating or walking or piano playing.

  A child in the waiting room has a cough.

  After an hour or two I ring Louis. Lola is at his. I tell him. I slip outside to the car park and ring Swift. I say, under the pollarded plane trees, ‘Robert is dying.’ She doesn’t know what I mean. Finishing dinner with her children, Sunday night. I say, ‘No, really. He really is.’

  There is a young Italian doctor who seems to want to unplug him now. I think I stare at her. She fades away.

  I want to hear what you have to say about all this, my love. I know what I think. I want you.

  Louis and Lola appear. I have marzipan; Lola makes me eat it. She has brought headphones. I still just want to lie down in his arms; it’s all I’ve wanted all day.