The Last Act of Love

by Cathy Rentzenbrink

  From a high tower we looked down towards the rocks below, and I wondered if lovelorn medieval monks had ever thrown themselves off.

  After our days out, I’d drop Rhian off then go home via the supermarket and drink till I was off my face. I couldn’t stand being alone with thoughts of my poor, broken brother. I couldn’t turn off the light. I’d drink until I dropped, or read until I fell asleep with the book still in my hand. I clutched books to me like a child with a comfort blanket. I’d wake in the night on the sofa – I rarely bothered to pull it out into a bed – and listen to the World Service while smoking. I was so sad, and I didn’t know if I was sad simply because of what had happened to Matty or because I was mad.

  After three lonely months of sending letters home to be read aloud to Matty about what a great time I was having, it was Christmas and I could go back. Rhian accompanied me as far as the service station on my route that wasn’t too far for her dad to come and pick her up from. She wasn’t going to come back to France but was instead heading on to Russia for the rest of the year. I was going to miss her. She gave me a box of pastels and a drawing pad as a parting gift.

  Up the M1, then towards the North. The first sign that I was nearly home was the plumes of smoke from the power stations that surrounded us: Drax, Ferrybridge, Eggborough.

  It was getting dark by the time I turned off the motorway and drove down the winding road towards Snaith. I passed the Rainbow, passed the scene of Matty’s accident, his old school, into the village, past the church and the library. I was suddenly nervous and drove around the block a couple of times, looking at the Christmas lights on the houses and pubs.

  I pulled into our car park and braced myself against the Yorkshire cold as I got my stuff out of the boot. I’d bought gifts for everyone who worked in the pub or with Matty. Wine, calavados, jars of tripes à la mode de Caen to give to our Saturday afternoon back-room customers who often prepared snacks to sustain them through a long afternoon of watching the racing and liked something disgusting called chitterlings. The fruit tarts had a dishevelled look and the Camemberts were giving off a bit of a whiff after their long drive.

  As I walked into the bungalow, Matty was propped in a seated position on the sofa, pillows under his spastic arm, and one of the people who looked after him was massaging his feet. There was something biblical about it, and I realized in that moment that we’d constructed a crazy world around a wounded messiah. I didn’t think it should go on. I didn’t think Matty should go on.

  I thought, ‘He is fucked and this is fucked-up.’

  I sat next to Matty and looked into his eyes, their awful blankness. There was no sparkle, no sign that anything was going on. I held his hand and told him bright and cheerful lies about France, but I knew there was no longer any point in talking to him. He was gone. I now felt more sure than ever before that it would have been better for him, better for everyone, if he’d died on the night of the accident.

  CHEER UP, LOVE

  It was a grim Christmas. I held my new certainty to myself like a shameful secret. The high point was when I won £50 playing a domino game called ‘Barmy’ on Boxing Day. The low point was when I was talking to Mum while she was showering Matty in his trolley and noticed that he had a slight erection. I’d seen this before; we used to think of it as a positive sign that something was happening in his brain. Now, remembering the time when Matty went with his girlfriend to the doctor’s to get the morning-after pill when they’d had a condom failure, it seemed utterly tragic that his wrecked body could still register a flicker of residual sexual interest. That night I dreamt that my parents died and that it became my responsibility to look after Matty. In the dream, I couldn’t get the hoist to work and dropped him on the bathroom floor.

  I set off back to France on 7 January, taking the midnight ferry and waking up on a recliner seat on the morning of my twenty-second birthday. I drove to Courseulles along the coast road with ‘The Body of an American’ by the Pogues playing on repeat, to find that my little flat was freezing and there were no letters in my postbox. I opened the birthday present my parents had sent me off with. Two jumpers: one blue, one brown. I wondered if I should try to do something, and then realized that, now Rhian had left, I didn’t have a single number for anyone in France. I thought about taking myself out for a meal in one of the restaurants along the seafront.

  There was no hot water, but I felt filthy after sleeping in my clothes on the ferry and decided to make a bath by boiling pans of water, but it took too long and when I spilt a bit over my hand I gave up. After running my hand under the cold tap for a few minutes, I put the World Service on and cuddled up under my duvet with a bottle of red wine, smoking and reading. I was stuck into a trilogy of books called La Bicyclette bleue, essentially a Gone With the Wind-style storyline set on a French vineyard during the Second World War, and I read them again and again.

  I limped through January and February, only going to some of my classes. I’d spend hours dithering about whether or not to leave the flat, but was only ever really motivated out of it by the need to buy more booze. I’d grown to hate this time of year, which was cold, and then had first Christmas, then my birthday and then Matty’s to get through. I hated the way that the accident had made times that should have been joyous even worse than normal days. I couldn’t bring myself to phone home on Matty’s twenty-first birthday and go through the charade of the phone being held to his ear so that I could talk to him. I did send him a picture: a drawing I’d done with Rhian’s pastels of the view over the rooftops from my little balcony. It wasn’t very good.

  I began to find words. I bought orange Rhodia notebooks with squared paper and scribbled away in purple ink. I wrote down observations about France and started writing a novel. The heroine was a bit like me but much thinner and prettier with silvery blonde hair. Her twin brother was in PVS and she was trying to work out how to live on without him. She was called Ursula and he was called Danny, which were names my parents had considered giving to us – Ursula because Mum was reading Women in Love when she got pregnant, Danny because Dad liked the song ‘Danny Boy’. I don’t know why I made them twins. Perhaps I wanted to feel as though I’d once shared a womb with Matty, not just the back seat of the car.

  On St Patrick’s Day night I phoned home. Dad was making Irish stew for the whole pub and the band had just arrived. I longed to be there, surrounded by warmth and noise, drawing shamrocks, love hearts and people’s initials into the creamy foam heads of the pints of Guinness. My answer was to go to Champion, buy a bottle of whisky and drink it all, playing the Pogues and chain-smoking Gauloises.

  The weather got warmer. One evening, I was loading my shopping into the boot in the Champion car park when some English boys saw my number plates and ran over to chat. I was more than ready to be befriended. They were posh and boisterous and one of them, Charlie, lived round the corner. The other two were both called Simon, Tall Si and Small Si, though even Small Si was over six feet. They made me laugh. I drank beer with them, giggled at their girlfriend stories, played Frisbee on the beach. Me! I thought. Me playing Frisbee on the beach! I hung around with them in town, sitting on the grass at the place de la République or drinking beer in the bars and then staying over at the Simons’ flat. They made up endless variations of ‘She was only the landlord’s daughter but she lay on the bar and said pump’.

  Charlie and I drove in and out of town together a lot, listening to the radio which played a mix of French and English music. We liked a singer called Francis Cabrel, and were amused by a rap song half in English, half in French that included the line, ‘Life’s a bitch and then you die, voilà.’ The most played song was ‘A Girl Like You’ by Edwyn Collins.

  I liked Charlie and liked driving around with him in his red Golf. I’d told him about Matty the first time we’d got drunk together, and he’d held me as I cried. One of the towns nearby was called Matthieu, and as we drove by it one sunny day, Charlie told me that a friend called Matt was planning to
pinch a road sign to take home. I was eating cherries and spitting the stones out of the window.

  ‘We could get one for you,’ he said, smiling sideways at me. ‘You could take one home for your brother.’

  I was moved by this suggestion. Charlie was exactly the sort of person Matty would have been friends with, which made me wish Matty were here to play Frisbee on the beach, spit cherry stones out of car windows and steal his own road sign.

  It was the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day and there were celebrations everywhere. All the cafes had signs that said ‘Welcome to our liberators’, though none of the people working in them looked either welcoming or grateful. It was bittersweet witnessing elderly Americans trying to bond with apathetic waiters by describing their wartime experiences in loud English.

  One Saturday near the end of our time in France, after we’d all spent the day on the beach drinking, I agreed to go bungee jumping with the boys, never really thinking I’d go through with it.

  They came to pick me up the next morning. I heard beeping from the car park and looked down to see Charlie hanging out of the car window.

  ‘Come on! Time to go jump off a bridge!’

  Tall Si was in the passenger seat, so I got into the back with Small Si.

  Charlie drove all the way there, while the boys kept saying that I’d have to tuck my T-shirt in and told stories of girls showing off their breasts as they hung upside down.

  We arrived at the Viaduc de la Soulevre and it was beautiful: a disused bridge over a valley with a river flowing below. We queued, paid and got weighed. I was embarrassed when they wrote our weight on our hands – 69 kilos for me. I wouldn’t mind weighing that now, but at the time I thought I was fat.

  Then it was a long wait whilst we watched the other people. Some jumped out confidently into the air, some plopped reluctantly over the edge with their eyes shut. There were no girls. I saw three men get to the edge and then not be able to do it, and knew that if the old Matty were here, he’d jump with magnificent exuberance. The sun was shining and I started to feel pleased with myself, a bit adventurous, even a bit cocky. I told the boys I’d go first, and tucked my T-shirt into my jeans. The operator fixed the harness around my Doc boots and then, because I could no longer move my feet to walk, helped me shuffle out to the edge.

  There was a camera at the jumping-off point. I waved at it and grinned as I charged out into the air and waited for the blissful falling.

  Afterwards, as I sat on the riverbank below and watched all the boys leap, I felt completely alive. We climbed the steep steps of the valley and collected our souvenir T-shirts, put them on and sat in the bar drinking beer and watching the video footage of our jumps. I loved the way I looked, smiling and laughing into the camera. I looked free, unfettered.

  We drove back to Caen via a fairground where we went on terrifying rides that almost made bungee jumping look easy, high on adrenaline. I felt like a proper young person with proper friends, and that night I phoned home.

  ‘I went bungee jumping, Dad. It was amazing.’

  ‘What did you do that for?’ he answered, his voice in my ear, a country away. ‘I’ve got one brain-damaged child, I don’t want another.’

  That brought me down to earth.

  ‘Cheer up, love, it might never happen.’

  I was in the ferry terminal at Ouistreham writing into one of my orange notebooks when a lorry driver stopped at my table to say something. I hadn’t heard him.

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘Cheer up. It might never happen.’

  I stared at him. It might never happen? But it has, it did.

  He made a face and moved off, and I sat shaking at the table. Didn’t I have enough to contend with without putting up with that?

  I tried to keep calm by sketching his face into my notebook, giving shape to his weedy moustache, his snaggled teeth. I was working away at my novel, which now had a title. It was called The Survivors’ Club. Ursula was deciding not to go home to England after the year in France. She was looking for jobs in Europe, was going to drop out of university, had realized that she had to cut herself off from her family if she were to survive.

  I wasn’t doing that. I didn’t want to go home, but I was still going back. I didn’t want to see the Matty who was being kept alive in his own special little house; I wanted the Matty who would have been there at the bungee jumping. I’d never taken Charlie up on his offer to steal me the road sign because there didn’t seem any point.

  I got on the ferry and sat near a window, smoking. I felt like I was splintering into little bits. I watched the quayside in the curiously grey Normandy sunlight, and thought how my dad, if he were there, would be taking an interest in all the activity on shore, watching the men make the boat ready. I thought how terrible it was that we’d become so scared as a family. We hardly dared cross a road without waiting for the green man. All the life and joy had been shunted out of us by Matty’s accident and was now being squeezed out of us by the act of keeping him alive. All of our love for him had gone wrong. Would it have been better if we’d loved him less, had worked less hard to keep him alive? He’d surely be in a better place if we’d let the doctors stop treating him years ago, if it could all be over for him.

  Tears were running down my face. I didn’t know how I was going to be able to talk to my parents about all this, but I knew I had to find a way.

  As we set sail, I watched a man walk to the end of the pier and then turn into a pigeon and fly off.

  I shook my head. I’ve been reading too much about crazy French novelists, I thought. Either I’m having a surrealist moment, or I’ve gone completely mad.

  SNAITH HALL

  It wasn’t as hard as I thought in the end. Mum looked terrible when I got home, thin and haggard. She’d had her fortieth birthday while I was away, and having always looked so pretty and young, now she was drawn and old. And Dad was piling on weight. He’d always been big and strong, but was starting to look fat. Matty, of course, was the same as always.

  ‘Hello, old chap, bonjour, mon vieux,’ I said.

  I felt I had to put on a bit of a show for everyone else. I sat next to him for a bit, holding his hand, and as usual there was nothing, not an iota of a response. I felt a huge wave of compassion for this poor creature, this shell of a person. I couldn’t believe that anyone would want to live like this – though at least, I thought, he didn’t know that he lived like this. This thing, this entity, bore no relation to our Matty. I looked into his vacant eyes. I no longer expected to see any evidence of his soul; rather I hoped that there was no soul there to suffer.

  ‘Mum looks bloody awful,’ I said to Dad when we went out for a drink together. ‘I don’t think she can carry on.’

  ‘We’re stuck,’ said Dad. ‘We don’t know what to do. There isn’t anything else.’

  ‘There must be,’ I said. ‘Let’s talk to her about it.’

  The next day we all took Murphy down to the riverbank and had a long talk. We couldn’t talk at home because of Matty and because of all the people who looked after him popping in and out. With the distance that being in France had given me, I could see that the bungalow was like a hospital for one person with everything revolving around Matty’s care. There were notice boards with drug regimens and charts showing his temperature, pulse and respiration pinned up on them, the physio room with a tilt table, wedges and oxygen tanks. The cupboard was full of Ensure, bed linen, towels, suppositories, Epilim, convenes, bags for urine. My parents’ lives were not a priority. They had little privacy – they shared a bedroom with Matty – and not much identity beyond being part of Matty’s care team. Perhaps at one time, when there was a prospect of improvement, this huge subjugation of the rest of the family had felt like a good and right thing. Now it seemed perverse. It felt like the three of us were sitting on Matty’s funeral pyre and refusing to get off.

  ‘I don’t think this can go on, Mum,’ I said as we watched Murphy swimming for sticks.

  ‘
I know it’s mad,’ she said. ‘I know he doesn’t know where he is or who we are, but what can we do? We’ve seen hospital wards where no one cleans a wet or soiled bed unless visitors are expected. We can’t do that to Matty, whether he’s aware of it or not.’

  We talked to our GP about our plight, and he arranged a week’s respite care in Goole hospital to give us time to formulate a plan.

  We had been offered a hospital place at Scunthorpe or Goole on Matty’s discharge from Leeds all that time ago, but now it was made clear that a permanent hospital bed was no longer on offer, so we visited various care homes in the area. But none of the staff seemed to understand that it was possible to have as non-existent a level of response as Matty did.

  ‘Oh, you can leave him here without any worries,’ said a breezy matron. ‘Just let us know his signals, his yes and his no, and we can do exactly what you would do.’

  If he had signals for yes and no we wouldn’t be here, I thought, and we got out of there as fast as we could.

  We found the ideal solution in our own village, a small care home called Snaith Hall run by a kind family who knew us and knew the story. We wanted to have our own carer come in each day to do his bath, so that we could be sure he wasn’t overlooked if they were busy.

  ‘It’s not necessary,’ said gentle Mr McEnroe in his soft Irish accent. ‘We’ll care for him well. But if it helps you to do that then we have no problem with it.’

  In August, five years after the accident, Matty was moved into Snaith Hall. Sue had helped with Matty’s care in the bungalow and was happy to go into the Hall every day to do his bath. Mum went to visit every Sunday and sat with him for an hour or two, reading from the papers. I went with her the first time but found it too sad to see him there. Although I knew this was the best solution, although the Hall was very pleasant, although I knew Matty wasn’t aware of anything, I still felt terribly guilty at the thought of him being there alone.