The Last Act of Love

by Cathy Rentzenbrink

  But the news story and the image of poor Tony Bland, another bright, lovely boy who liked football, stayed with me. I didn’t want to think about it, but I couldn’t escape the knowledge that some people thought it was better for Tony not to be alive. What did that mean for Matty?

  As the year went on, I got sadder and sadder. I went to some of my classes, but the French terrified me. I’d become mute. I could hardly speak in my own language unless I was medicated with alcohol, so it was a torture to try to express myself in another. English classes were a bit better, though the lecture rooms we had to go to for Shakespeare made me feel claustrophobic.

  I had a tutor for Critical Practices I liked. He waved my essay on Russian Formalism at me, and said, ‘This is exceptional. You can really write. I’ve been showing it round the department.’ I felt a flicker of enjoyment, a memory of how good it felt to enthuse a teacher, but it disappeared.

  At the end of the year, in my final tutorial with him, he looked at me rather sadly and said, ‘I don’t think you ever really surpassed the high point of Russian Formalism.’

  I no longer had any interest in achieving things. Once, I had cared. I could still remember my despair when I got 93% to Kelvyn Prescott’s 94% in our English exam at school – I had been able to accept that he was better than me at Maths, but I had thought of English as my territory – but now that grit, determination, even interest was gone. I was simply finding a way to crawl through time rather than caring about what I did with it.

  I went home a bit less and stayed in Leeds more, hardly leaving my student flat. I slept all day and then stayed up all night, drinking and playing cards or Scrabble with Sophie until she went to bed, and then drinking and reading on my own. I cried myself to sleep most mornings to the backdrop of birdsong and the first light coming through my curtains.

  Mum realized everything had gone haywire with me and she suggested I go away for a few days. She picked me up and drove me to a retreat in North Leeds that had been recommended to her. She had brought me everything she thought I might need for the duration, including cigarettes. She sat on my bed with me and held my hand.

  ‘I wonder if I could have another child?’ she said. ‘It might not be too late. Would that make things better for you?’

  I was overwhelmed by her love for me, but I didn’t want another sibling. I wanted the one I’d lost. I couldn’t see how a baby would measure up to the vast hole left by the pre-accident version of Matty.

  The retreat was OK. There was a library, where I read lots of P. G. Wodehouse, and I found it a relief to not have to put on an act, to be surrounded by people who knew how sad I was.

  After a few days Mum picked me up and took me back to Lupton Flats. She’d tidied my room, changed the bedding, washed up all the dirty crockery. It was no longer a den of squalor. She also arranged for me to see a therapist called Jane once a week.

  The first time I went to see Jane I took a cartoon I’d torn out of the Spectator. It showed a man on a couch and the speech bubble said something like, ‘I had a wonderful childhood. It’s being grown-up that I can’t handle.’

  I didn’t tell many people about the therapy, and if I did, I called it ‘going to the nuthouse’, but I liked Jane. I liked the Klimt print on her wall, the boxes of tissues dotted around her room. I liked the couch, though I never lay on it. Jane definitely did me some good. We talked about the idea of Matty One and Matty Two, how I couldn’t connect what he was now to what he had been, and how it felt disloyal to the Matty who was left to grieve for the Matty that we’d lost. We worked out during those sessions that I finally knew that he wasn’t going to get better and that I needed to concentrate on accepting the situation as it was.

  Mum didn’t have another baby, though they did get another dog, deciding on a pure-bred Labrador who would have a gentle temperament around Matty. They chose him from a kennels in Leeds, where his name was ‘Midnight Galaxy’. We called him Murphy after the Irish stout that was a big seller in the pub. He was no replacement for Polly, but we grew to love him and he encouraged us to go out for long walks along the riverbank. We’d walk for miles, along farmland with grazing cattle, watching the herons landing and fishing. Murphy was never a dog to chase a stick on dry land, but he came into his own in the water. He would watch the stick being thrown into the fast flowing river, work out the trajectory, and set out on a course to intercept it. He was an astonishingly dim dog, and apart from this one trick, he only ever showed intelligence about the pursuit of food.

  I carried on seeing Jane all the way through my second year and became a bit less insular. She diagnosed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and said she thought that all my difficulties were a direct result of what had happened to Matty. She didn’t think I was mad.

  I could see that it was better to be crying soberly at Jane than to be crying all over anyone who would listen when I was drunk, and I realized that I could contain the extremes of my sadness within the fifty minutes I spent sitting in her armchair or, sometimes, on the beanbag on the floor. I tried to behave more like a normal person when I was out in the world, and it worked. I became cheerful, even boisterous. No one had the least idea how I felt on the inside.

  FILLE UNIQUE

  On my twenty-first birthday, the card my parents gave me had a large cheque and an advert for a Renault Clio tucked inside it. We all liked the TV adverts with Nicole and Papa. I chose a purple one, and not only did all our customers call me Nicole for a while, but I started calling my dad Papa; and it stuck. It became a long-standing joke whenever we were serving together. It was the first time we’d managed to feel a little bit positive about anyone’s birthday since the accident.

  A drunk customer, congratulating me on being lucky enough to have a brand new car, said, ‘Of course, it will all come to you now,’ waving his hands around at the pub. Another told me that my dad must be making too much money out of them if he could afford a new car for me. It wasn’t unusual for people to say this sort of thing. The downside of having the pub was that people were obsessively interested in us and could swing quickly between fondness and resentment. If we got a new carpet for the bar, half our customers would say ‘nice carpet’, and the other half would say we should put the price of the beer down instead of wasting money on furnishings. I was used to people speculating over my boyfriends and my future, and this wasn’t the first time that someone had made the link between Matty’s accident and my eventual financial benefit. I never knew what to say. Could these people know me so little that they’d think I’d be able to see it as some kind of silver lining? Now that I was spending time with people who weren’t from Yorkshire, I realized it was a peculiarly Yorkshire trait to take pride in being unpleasant and intrusive. ‘I speak as I find,’ people would say imperiously at the bar after causing someone great offence.

  I was getting a bit fed up with the lack of privacy, with everyone knowing everything about us.

  Once, when I was behind the bar, someone said, ‘I saw your dad in the doctor’s this morning. What’s up with him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I didn’t know he was there. Should I go and ask him so I can come back and put you in the picture?’

  Matty’s birthday came round a month after mine. We had always tried to have some sort of a celebration, but three and a half years after the accident it was becoming increasingly difficult. Presents were impossible. If there was anything at all that we thought might improve his life, we wouldn’t wait for his birthday to hand it over. I usually gave him a CD. I’d wrap it up, put it into the hand that wasn’t twisted up with spasticity, move his fingers over the wrapping paper and open it with him.

  Three days after his birthday, Matty was admitted to Killingbeck Hospital. His lungs were full of fluid, and despite the strongest antibiotics his condition had deteriorated. The inside of his mouth was coated with a sort of scabbing, and when we tried to ease it off with a sponge stick it left raw flesh beneath. We pointed this out to a nurse. ‘Well, he is very poorly
,’ she said, clearly thinking there were bigger things to worry about.

  We drove to the hospital and back every day through labyrinthine roadworks, washed and cared for Matty as usual, and watched as the medical staff suctioned the yellowy green slime off his lungs. Once, to give ourselves a change from the hospital canteen, Mum and I went out for a walk in the freezing February air and had lunch at a pub down the road. I ate half a plate of liver and onions and then went to the loo and threw it all up. I looked at myself in the mirror and rested my hot forehead against it and closed my eyes. How could it just keep getting worse? How much more could I bear? I felt trapped in a never-ending narrative of awfulness.

  There was talk of an operation – they wanted to drill a hole into one of Matty’s lungs to relieve the fluid inside, pretty much the same as they’d done at Pontefract Hospital two years previously; he still had the scar. Matty was last on the list for theatre that day because they didn’t want his infection to harm others using the operating table, and as we waited in his small room for the porters to take him down, he started to let out a soft moaning sound, which increased in volume until it was audible throughout the ward. Suddenly a spurt of foul-smelling thick yellow pus burst out from the old scar and splashed all over the sheets. I had the taste of sick in my mouth but choked back the urge to vomit. The operation was cancelled; the doctors had their hole. They pumped in antibiotics and put a drain in so that the rest of the filthy sludge could be removed, and we could look forward to returning him home again.

  After three weeks in Killingbeck, Matty came home with a tube coming out of his side and a bag to collect the pus from his lung. The homecoming was subdued. Every other time he’d come close to death and then survived we’d treated it as a triumph. This was the first time I caught myself wondering if it might have been better if he’d died. Would Matty have wanted this life? Unable to do anything except open his eyes, have epileptic fits, occasionally make noises when in pain? I didn’t allow these thoughts to develop, nor did I see how I could ever voice them to my parents, but they were there.

  I became obsessed with what would happen if Matty died, as neither of us had been baptized, and I had read novels where the unbaptized weren’t allowed to be buried in church grounds. I didn’t dare ask anyone about this, so instead announced that I’d decided I wanted to be baptized and thought Matty should be too. My parents went along with it, though they probably thought it was deranged, and I went to see our local vicar, who arranged it all. It was a hot summer’s day when we went to the church, but cold when we stepped inside. I hoped to feel something – I wanted to be moved by God; I thought that life looked like it was a whole lot easier if you had religious belief. But I wasn’t touched in any way I noticed, and Matty made no response to having holy water splashed on his face, though I hadn’t expected he would. Still, I’d achieved my aim. If he died now, he could be buried in our local church if we wanted.

  The time came for me to go away to France for a year as part of my degree. I didn’t want to leave home and be so far away from my family, and had various conversations with my parents about whether I could change my major to English and not go, but I was too numbly lethargic to do much about it and couldn’t summon up the energy to ask the necessary questions. I hadn’t done any of the various things you had to do to be a teaching assistant, so I ended up taking the option that seemed the least effort and going to a language school in Caen.

  I drove down to Portsmouth and took the midnight ferry to Caen. Jane had suggested I try to write things down, so I bought a notebook with a picture of the Eiffel Tower on it from the ferry shop and sat in the bar staring at it and drinking mini bottles of red wine. I couldn’t find any words. I wrote down the names of the French authors I was studying: Molière, Racine, Sartre, Camus, Appolinaire, Simone de Beauvoir. The purple ink looked pleasing against the white page. All those dead French men and one woman. I couldn’t manage anything else.

  I spent my first night in France in a tiny hotel in Caen. I chose my meal from the prix fixe menu: a steak that came with salsify – a yellowish vegetable that I’d never seen before – and a half carafe of red wine. I ate slowly, drank quickly and thought how Matty would never eat a meal alone in a French restaurant like this. This led me to wondering what we’d all be doing now if the accident had never happened, if I’d made him get that lift home with me, if he was still undamaged. I couldn’t visualize the person I’d be now. Was there a parallel-universe version of me uncrippled by pain and love and able simply to enjoy the consumption of unfamiliar vegetables and experiences?

  I found somewhere to rent in Courseulles-sur-Mer, a small seaside town built around one of the D-Day landing beaches that had been taken by the Canadian forces, where many of the streets referenced the war: rue du 6 Juin, avenue de la Combattante, avenue de la Libération. My little studio flat was in a three-storey apartment block on rue des Canadiens – one room with a sofabed, a tiny balcony, a coin cuisine with two hob rings, a sink and a fridge, and a bathroom with a three-quarter-size bath and a bidet that I used to wash my underwear in because I was scared of the launderette. Rubbish went down a vide-ordure, a little chute out in the passageway. Once, drunk, I threw my door keys down it by mistake and had to go and forage in the basement, where I found them perched on the top of everyone else’s refuse. My favourite thing was the pigeonhole postboxes at the entrance of the building. I felt a frisson of grown-up enjoyment as I filled my name in on my own little box.

  An interesting mishmash of people of all nationalities congregated at the language school. Our teacher was a tiny, dapper chap who carried a little handbag and liked talking about Dickens, particularly Marteen Choozleveet. After class, we’d sit in the canteen playing cards and drinking fiercely strong coffee that came out of a machine and only cost two francs. We all spoke mainly French to each other, as it was the language we had in common, and I felt a flicker of pleasure that I was playing cards in French with German, Japanese and Russian friends. We asked each other questions about our lives, but I couldn’t bring myself to try to explain Matty’s situation in French – I could hardly manage it in English. So I learned how to claim I was an only child and lied in response to the brothers or sisters question: ‘Je suis fille unique.’

  Most of us were students, but some were partners of French people trying to brush up their language skills.

  ‘That’s the thing about France,’ said one of our American classmates, picking at her lunch. ‘You fall in love with a guy and follow him home, and then you find out that his countrymen plaster goddamn mayonnaise all over every single little thing they make you eat.’

  There was one English guy who could hardly speak French at all who told us that his French girlfriend didn’t know any English.

  ‘It’s not just sexual, though,’ he said.

  ‘Hmm,’ said one of the other English students as he walked off. ‘Perhaps they play a lot of chess.’

  I was drawn to a Welsh girl called Rhian. She wore floaty clothes and long scarves and enormous dark eyes shone out of her pale face. She was a Baptist and didn’t drink. There was another Baptist among us who went on and on about being ‘in the front line for God’, and kept saying ‘rock on for Jesus’. She had a French boyfriend, also a Baptist, who she’d met through church, and she talked a lot about how much she wanted to have sex with him and how they were both being tempted. He came to see her once and she proudly introduced him to everyone. He was tall and thin with an enormous nose and it was difficult not to imagine them resisting temptation together.

  On my way home in the evenings I’d call into Champion, the large supermarket on the outskirts of Courseulles. There were wonderful things there. Lobsters lurked in massive tanks, and ready-made hors d’oeuvres were laid out in beautifully regimented lines behind counters. I’d look at them for a while: tiny asparagus tips perched on crab mousse, blinis with smoked salmon and a smattering of caviar. Sometimes I’d imagine what they’d taste like, but I never bought anything. They seem
ed a bit grand. Always I’d turn away from what seemed like another world and go instead to buy bread, cheese and tomatoes. This, to me, was still a feast, the baguettes crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. I bought Camembert, Brie and a pungent square called Pont-l’Évêque. I loved the sumptuous redness of the tomatoes, nothing like the watery orange balls that were sliced up and plonked next to the cress in an English salad. And then booze, of course. I filled my trolley with booze. I’d have a couple of beers as I ate and then open a bottle of red wine. Most nights I opened a second.

  I spent a lot of time in Second World War cemeteries and in the war museum in Caen, which was called Un Musée pour la Paix. I worked in the library there on my dissertation about the French Resistance, pondering whether I’d be better able to cope with Matty’s situation if we were living during a war, when death and disablement were more commonplace. If he were shot in front of me as we were embarked on some clandestine activity for the Resistance, would I throw myself on his body and wait for my own bullet or would I fade into the crowd, wanting to survive? I met an Auschwitz survivor in the library, a lovely man who took an interest in my studies and liked to talk to me in English about his experiences. He told me he was born in Lithuania and had been deported to Auschwitz from France, where he was working as a decorator. He credited his survival to being able to pick up languages very quickly, which meant he could joke with the camp guards.

  I dreamt about Matty a lot. Sometimes he was better, but with some kind of modification – he was very little, or only had one leg. I spent these dreams reassuring him that everything would be OK. Other times he’d be in sepia, like the young Jewish men in the photos I was looking at in the library. I needed to warn him of an approaching danger, but he wouldn’t listen.

  At weekends I’d pick Rhian up from the church family she was staying with and we’d go sightseeing. When we stood on the ramparts of Mont Saint-Michel, I remembered being there with Matty on a school French exchange trip where I’d drunk too much vodka, and Matty had been upset and his crying face was the last thing I’d seen before I passed out. It felt like a million years ago. I could hardly grasp that Matty had once cried over me as I now cried over him.