Spectacles

by Sue Perkins

  And I guess I am a writer now, and I could write that – I could write the perfect ending. I’d love to, you know. More than anything, I’d love to.

  But it didn’t happen. Why would it? Life doesn’t give you the neatly tied ends of a romcom. The world would be insufferably saccharine if it did, plus we’re so contrary as a species, we’d only sit around longing for the tragedy and agony of unrequited love.

  And yet, in all the loss, something of the family remains – Parker, our arthritic darling, now with blue discs for eyes and pegs for legs – and my beloved Heath, which holds the memories of yesterday in its boughs and meadows.

  This is the tree where you first kissed me. Sometimes it is full of leaf and fills the sky, sometimes it is thin and stark, like it is now. This is the tumulus where we cried that final time. Here is the path where you first held my hand. Here is the wood we made our own. Here are the secret short cuts, the magnolia with one flower, the mournful benches, the familiar pooches. Here they all are.

  We occasionally bump into each other, never arranged, always haphazard. And we walk a little, until our paths home diverge. Look at the emotional palindrome we have become.

  And my feet marching this ground, day after day, tell the tale of

  You and I, you and I, you and I, and trees and sky and always and for ever but

  Gone.

  A Letter to Pickle

  My darling girl,

  First, a confession: I had you killed. I planned it and everything; asked the vet round and a nurse in a green uniform with white piping – all with the express intention of ending your life. Yes, I know. I know you had no idea, because I had been practising for weeks how to keep it from you, and how – when that time came – I could stop my chest from bursting with the fear and horror and unbearable, unbearable pain of it all.

  I sat there, in your kitchen (it was always your kitchen), numb, and filled in a form about what to do with your remains. I ticked boxes as you lay wheezing in your sleep on the bed next door. I made a series of informed, clinical decisions on the whys and wherefores of that beautiful, familiar body that had started to so badly let you down. Then, once the formalities were over, I came in and did what I’ve done so many days and nights over so many months and years. I lay behind you, left arm wrapped round your battle-scarred chest and whispered into your ear.

  I love you.

  So that was my secret. And I kept it from you until your ribs stopped their heaving and your legs went limp and your head fell as heavy as grief itself in my arms. Then, when I knew you were no longer listening, I let it out – that raging, raging river of loss. I cried until my skin felt burned and my ears grew tired from the sound of it all.

  It wasn’t pretty.

  OK. Confession over.

  Now what you also need to know is that this is NOT a eulogy. Quite frankly, Pickle, you don’t deserve one, because, as you are well aware, your behaviour from birth, right up to the bitter end, was unequivocally terrible.

  As a pup, you crunched every CD cover in the house for fun. You chewed through electrical cable and telephone wires. You ripped shoes and gobbled plastic. You dived into bins, rolled in shit and licked piss off of pavements. You ate my bedposts.

  As an adult you graduated to raiding fridges and picnics, you stole ice cream from the mouths of infants, you jumped onto Christmas tables laden with pudding and cake and blithely walked through them all, inhaling everything in your wake.

  You puked on everything decent I ever owned. You never came when called, never followed a path, never observed the Green Cross Code and only sat on command when you could see either a cube of cheese or chicken in my hand (organic, or free range at a push).

  And last, but not least, you shat in my bed (yes, I know they were dry and discreet little shits, but they were still shits, you shit).

  Here’s another thing, while I’m at it. I’m angry. Why? Because you, madam, are a liar. You made me think you were OK. You allowed me to drop you off at our mate Scarlett’s farm and leave you there for weeks while I went away working thinking that all was well. Yet it wasn’t, was it? The cancer fire was already lit, sweeping through your body, laying waste to it while my back was turned.

  I look back at photos sent to me while I was away from you, and I can see it now – that faint dimming of the eyes, the gentle slackening of muscle. The tiniest, tiniest changes in that cashmere fur of yours. It haunts me still. Had I been there, I would have noticed, would I not? Me, your anxious guardian and keeper of eleven and a half years.

  I found out about the lump the day I landed. Scarlett rang me with the news as I boarded a train for Willesden Junction. The most momentous moments can come at the most banal. It had just appeared, out of nowhere, as surprising and fast as you, on your neck. You never did anything by halves, and there it was, the size of a lemon, wrapped round your lymph.

  I took you home the next day, to Cornwall, the place that we love best, and you allowed me, for a while at least, to believe that nothing was wrong. We rose at sunset, in the light of those Disney-pink skies, and walked the ancient tracks together – before you got bored and veered off, full tilt, in search of the latest scent.

  But your lies could only carry you so far before your body gave you away. I saw your chest starting to heave when you took a breath at night. Your bark became hoarse. You no longer tore around the house causing havoc. You were biddable (you were never biddable), you ate slowly (oh, don’t be ridiculous).

  Yet still, the denial. Forgive me for that. After all, we’d beaten it before, you and I. Twice. Even when the vet told me your lungs were hung with cancerous cobwebs and there was nothing more to be done, I went out and started doing. I sped to the health food store and returned with tinctures and unguents and capsules. And there you were having to eat your precious last dinners covered in the dusty yellow pall of turmeric and a slick of Omega 3s. So silly. So silly, in retrospect. I should have let you eat cake and biscuits and toast and porridge. But I thought I could save you. I really thought I could.

  I didn’t ever believe that something as alive as you could ever succumb to something as ordinary as death.

  After all, how could you be sick when you ran and jumped and played, day after day after day?

  And then, I got it. You were doing it all for me. You were dragging yourself into the light, every morning, for me. All of it. For me.

  And as fierce and possessive as my love was, I couldn’t let you do that any more.

  You were eighty years old, by human reckoning. You were eighty years old and you still flew into the boot of the car without assistance (assistance is for old dogs, you didn’t know how to be an old dog), you still strode the Heath with that graceful, lupine lope of yours. You skidded round corners, you sniffed and barked and hectored and lived to life’s outer margins. On the day you died, you pottered for over an hour in the meadows with the sun on your back, without a care in the world. I am so very grateful for that.

  When someone once took a punch at me, you leaped in the air and took it. When I discovered I couldn’t have children, you let me use your neck as a hankie. You were my longest relationship, although I think any decent psychologist would have deemed us irredeemably co-dependent. You were the engine of my life, the metronome of my day. You set the pulse and everything and everyone moved to it. What a skill. I woke to your gentle scratch on the door (it wasn’t gentle, it was horrific and you have destroyed every door
in every house we have lived in – I am just trying to make you sound nice), and the last sound at night was the sound of you crawling under your blanket and giving that big, deep, satisfied sigh.

  I have said I love you to many people over many years: friends, family, lovers. Some you liked, some you didn’t. But my love for you was different. It filled those spaces that words can’t reach.

  You were the peg on which I hung all the baggage that couldn’t be named. You were the pure, innocent joy of grass and sky and wind and sun. It was a love beyond the limits of patience and sense and commensuration. It was as nonsensical as it was boundless. You alchemist. You nightmare.

  Thank you for walking alongside me* during the hardest, weirdest, most extreme times of my life, and never loving me less for the poor choices I made and the ridiculous roads I took us down.

  Thank you, little Pickle. I love you.

  From the four-eyed one who shouted at you, held you, laughed at you, fed you and, for some reason utterly unbeknownst to you, put all your shit in bags.

  X

  Pickle Perkins

  Born: 20-08-02

  Skipped to next destination: 14-01-14

  Back to Black

  In the autumn of 2009, as I turned forty, my life as I knew it ended. I will never know to what extent I pushed it to change and to what extent I was simply a lemming senselessly trundling over that midlife-crisis cliff. I lost my love, my future and my bearings. Completely.

  The house in Cornwall was a wreck. I could neither bear to live in it, nor get rid of it. I simply locked it up and left it – out of sight, out of mind. It became like a museum – the past, preserved in aspic. As each month went on, the place got danker. Blue mould blossomed on the sofas and crept up the walls. Thick boughs of cobwebs hung from the ceiling. I remember driving down, intending to spend the weekend there and clear everything out. I walked into the bedroom and saw Kate’s book still on the bed, upturned, where she had left it. I burst into tears, walked out the door and drove straight back to London.

  I rented a tiny one-bedroom flat on an alleyway down to the Hampstead Ponds. The flat itself was about as soulless a thing as I have ever encountered, but the beagles liked it, and therefore I made do.

  It has such a stagnant feel, that passageway down to the water. The ponds reek of sadness. The fishermen sit there in the autumn and try to catch something other than rusty bikes and gym shoes. People stand by the water watching the ducks and wonder whether to throw bread, or themselves, into the murk. A very famous photograph of Nick Drake was taken right by the little side door that led to my garden. He is mid-lollop, back to the camera, his dog Gus alongside him. I was that close to the great man. I wondered if the sadness he felt and the sadness I felt were a contagion – a plague that ravaged the area. A sadness that not even our faithful hounds could alleviate.

  Every mood should have a soundtrack, and this soundtrack’s name was Brad. Brad was my next-door neighbour, who I was secretly fond of, but he kept even more antisocial hours than I did. At around 2 a.m. he would put on some deeply drearsome 1940s crooner, and the depressing waft would seep through the walls and up the chimney until dawn. I would hammer on his door until it stopped. I’d post expletive-strewn A4 rants through his letter box. Brad would reply on a postcard of Christopher Marlowe or the Earl of Rochester. He had style and class, that one. It seemed almost a shame to report someone of his noblesse to Camden Council for noise pollution.

  Despite the posh postcode, it felt like an unsafe place. Occasionally I’d wake, and a burly fisherman would be in my garden trying to drag his rod out of the water beyond. I had another horrific break-in which still haunts me. After that, after the safety seal was broken, the energy changed, my luck ran out, and everything and everyone seemed to find the flat fair game. Including the local wildlife.

  One night there was the sound of crashing and scuttling in the kitchen. I came out to look in a state of total panic. Pickle and Parker, characteristically, did nothing dogs are supposed to do and merely lay in their baskets, snoring. Minutes passed. Nothing. Not a sound. I was about to return to bed when I noticed something sticking out from beneath the fridge. That something turned out to be a tail. A foot-long tail that could only belong to

  a rat. A dirty rat.

  At which point, I did what any normal human lady would do.

  I moved out.

  Luckily, I had some friends over the road – Jenny and Ewan. She was a fabulous Welsh earth mother, he a slightly deranged but affable stoner. I rang their doorbell.

  Jenny:

  Hey, love, you all right?

  Me:

  No. I’m sorry. No.

  Jenny:

  Jesus, you look as white as a sheet. Come in, come in!

  I scuttle in, still shaking with shock.

  Ewan:

  What is it? Do you need me to sort someone out?

  Jenny:

  Ewan, stop being a prick.

  Ewan:

  What?

  Jenny:

  Come on, love. You tell us what it is. Come on, have a seat.

  Ewan:

  Honestly, though, I’m not that pissed. I can go and sort them out.

  Jenny:

  Ewan! Now what is it?

  Me:

  There’s a rat in my kitchen

  You can imagine how the next five minutes panned out.

  Me:

  There’s a rat in my kitchen.

  Jenny/Ewan:

  What are you gonna do?

  Me:

  There’s a rat in my kitchen.

  Jenny/Ewan:

  What are you gonna do?

  Me:

  I’m gonna fix that rat, that’s what I’m going to do.

  After we’d wrung the life out of that joke (and several minutes beyond), Jenny and I started making up the spare room. Ewan got busy rolling a forty-seven-paper spliff, whilst regaling us with his own personal rat stories.

  Ewan:

  I’ll go kill it if you want. I’ve done it before.

  Jenny:

  Have you fuck. You’ve never killed a thing.

  Ewan:

  Yep, I have. I’ve killed one. I have!

  Me:

  How?

  Ewan:

  I was round my mate’s – on the lash – and I see it scuttling along the skirting. And I just reacted, quick as a flash …

  Jenny:

  You’re so spaced you can’t react to shit.

  Ewan:

  We had a massive ghetto blaster –

  Jenny:

  Ewan! You can’t call it that! Sue, can you call it that now?

  Me:

  I don’t think so. No.

  Ewan:

  Massive thing – twin speakers, the lot. And I kicked it against the rat and it kind of pinned him against the wall so he was trapped. Then I grabbed a CD, threw it, and – BOOM – it decapitated him. Head clean off.

  A pronounced pause.

 
Jenny:

  Ewan, you telling me the rat was killed by a flying CD?

  Ewan:

  Yep.

  Another silence.

  Ewan:

  Ballbreaker. AC/DC. Love that album.

  I moved out a week later.

  It takes me substantially longer to learn life’s lessons than most. I’m stubborn, I’m a creature of habit, and, for all that I’m addicted to experience, I dislike change. So what did I do? I stayed in the same area, and moved around the corner to yet another basement flat.

  My first morning there I was woken by the doors bouncing on their hinges. Above me the ceiling vibrated so intensely that I thought it would cave in. It was rhythmic and heavy. I feared the worst. Sex slavers, porn makers, Grindr addicts …

  I ran upstairs in my Union Jack onesie and pair of Crocs – because I’m classy like that and I like to make a good first impression. I expected to find an orgy going on – swingers in full swing – instead I was greeted by a breezy whip-thin German woman called Jolanda with a pronounced speech impediment.

  Jolanda:

  Hello, I’m Jolanda.

  Me:

  I’m Sue.

  Jolanda:

  Are you calling about the noise?

  Me:

  Yes, it’s horrendous.

  Jolanda:

  Oh. Well, I’m wee-bounding.