by Weldon, Fay
It isn’t wise to be too happy: to dance around empty courtyards in a state of elation. Something will happen to bring you back to a sober state, a proper mode of anxiety. Something happened.
Something happened in the shade of the fig tree which leaned its branches over the courtyard wall. I’ve never liked fig trees. The branches are too bare, the leaves too oddly shaped, their green too muted: the flesh of the fruit too delicately, corruptly scented. A man was standing there: or not standing there. Perhaps not a man – hardly more than a boy. I saw the thin wrists and the red and yellow knitted cap he liked to wear, and knew it was my half-brother Robin. I couldn’t see his face clearly and I was glad of that.
‘Is that you, Robin?’ I asked.
‘That’s me,’ he said, or didn’t say.
‘What is it now?’
‘It’s all very well,’ he said, ‘but what about my grave?’
‘Oh my God,’ I said, ‘I knew there was something!’ Every August it was my habit to go to the cemetery and clear my brother’s grave, picking up the litter the year’s winds had swept in: his grave was in a walled corner – rather like the corner where he now stood, I realised – where rubbish was apt to accumulate. This annual clearing of Robin’s grave was the only gesture of sentiment I allowed myself – and see how it confounded me!
‘I just thought I’d remind you,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t really matter!’
Was he in my head, a memory taken flesh? I scarcely knew. What difference did it make?
And he smiled, my dead brother Robin smiled, and shrugged, and left it to me, in death as he had in life. Up to you, sister Sandra, do what you want!
‘I won’t,’ I said to this non-existent lad. ‘I’ll work something out. I will not go back. I’m with Jack.’ What woman doesn’t do it – use her duty to a man to get out of an obligation. Can’t see Mum today because she has to cook her husband’s dinner: can’t bake the PTA cake because she has to meet him at work. Can’t lay your ghost, Robin. Sorry. Jack needs me!
‘Tell you what,’ I say. ‘We’ll compromise, Robin. I’ll get your grave seen to, somehow. I may not do it, but it will be done.’
And he goes, though whether or not he’s satisfied by this, I can’t tell. Or I dismissed him. At any rate he wasn’t there any more, though for a time there lingered on the wall a slight Hiroshima-type shadow, and it did seem a little chilly. A lizard on the wall even scuttled back home. I wasn’t frightened. The ghosts of the past are always there – I just hadn’t reckoned on their tenacity, their capacity to travel.
I went into the village in search of a telephone box. I would have to ring my friend Alison. I had sworn not to, of course, but to make a clean break: give in but once to the longing for continuation, for familiar voices, places, and you’d be doing it all the time. Alison today was fine, but what about Central TV tomorrow, and Matthew the day after next, and the Sun peering through windows trying to get my boobs in the bath next week – and oh Jack, dear Jack, goodbye Jack, common sense triumphs over love, or lust.
Since Robin’s death I have become both tough and frivolous. It was not my will: it has just happened.
My brother Robin was mad. Either he inherited insanity from my mother, or acquired it from her, or else his brain, from close proximity to hers, learnt the same painful but no doubt interesting tricks, of wandering in and out of those areas of consciousness barred to decent folk, for their own protection. My mother, though mad, was beautiful, and married when I was five, a pleasant Englishman called Simon, a breeder of horses, frequently bankrupt, in one of her more apparently sane periods, when she didn’t stare at me, or him, with her mad glare, her devil’s brow, plotting how best and horribly to murder us, but softly and sweetly, though always sadly, knowing, only too well I fear, the temporary nature of her kindness. Robin was born when I was six and I loved him greatly and not enviously at all: he was witness not just to my mother’s ordinariness, but to my kind stepfather’s promise of permanence. And a bright, handsome, beaming child Robin was. Only sometimes, even when he was very small, would his face fall into a kind of stillness, a remoteness: and sometimes if I disturbed him in this state, offered him a sweet or a ride on my bicycle to stir him out of it, he would look at me with a hostility which I could not bear to see, and which reminded me of my mother. I did what I could to please him, to protect him from her fate.
‘Mum’s got a headache,’ I’d say, ‘that’s all,’ when he seemed upset at one of Tamara’s bursts of violence, or when she washed the same knife ten times over, complaining of germs, dashing with every jerky movement our hopes of ordinariness. Simon resisted to the end the notion of his wife’s, my mother’s, insanity. But I knew it even before they were married: when I was four, five. I was a wary child, given to smiling and turning away wrath, in case it was murderous. Robin, a fraction more obtuse than I, just a little more self-defending, wilful in his insistence on being happy, became merely confused. Tamara showed him once how to pull the wings off flies. ‘You’re a boy, so you’re bound to do it,’ she said, demonstrating. ‘There! Now you know how.’ It was as if, doing her best, she’d learned the maternal role by heart, but got it wrong. She taught me how to do it too –
‘It isn’t right for a girl to know less than a boy, in order to get to the same place.’ So I pulled the wings off flies when she was looking, and didn’t when she was not, and instructed Robin to do the same. I daresay I merely added to his confusion. He had her Knight’s move in thought to come to terms with, and I, zooming my pieces Bishop-like here and there, must have made his poor head dizzy. My stepfather was the King, a slow mover from square to square, always under financial attack, always moving out of trouble just in time. The Queen, the all-powerful, she who should be obeyed because she could be trusted, had long since left the board. We were on our own, Simon, Robin and I, playing a dismal end game we were bound to lose while wingless flies lay in heaps around. I knew my value, though: knew my way out: survival at home, steeling my heart against the pain of fearing my own mother, and progress at school. I would educate myself out of home, into freedom. When I was nine, and Robin was three, I taught him to read. I saw the same solution for him.
By the time he was twelve I could no longer hide from myself his resemblance to my mother: by the time he was fifteen he was expelled from his school; he took odd jobs and was fired from them: he was abusive and hostile at home and stared day after day at the television, trying to work out some connection between the images on the screen and the real world, and then, when he felt he had succeeded, had learned the patterns of behaviour and response which other people seemed somehow just to know, would go out and do likewise. Batter, bash and snarl. Better, I daresay, if only just, than copying the behaviour of invisible masturbating demons, as my mother did, and for which when Robin was nine, and myself fifteen, she was first put away. If anyone looked at Robin wrongly, in a bus, or on the street, and it was difficult so not to do, for his eyes looked so bright and odd and he wore a battered straw hat with the crown punched out, and a wing collar and tie, he would follow John Wayne’s example and knock them down with a cry of ‘A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do’, which would have been funny – and I think he meant it to be funny; there was always an underlying quality of double-take in his peculiar behaviour, which from time to time gave me false hope: he was just a pretender, then, after all, taking refuge from trauma, not just flesh of her flesh, brain of her brain, mad of her madness – but which in the event meant prison sentences, probation officers, social workers, and definitions of insanity, but no treatment, no hope, no cure.
Enough of all this. Robin is dead: he jumped under a train, a brave kind final act of kindness to me (if not the train driver) and his father and his grandmother, with whom we presently all lived, who could then put his existence behind us, consoling ourselves with the thought that he, our brother, our son, our grandson, had been merely one of evolution’s mistakes, and had to go: the sooner snuffed out the better. This was cer
tainly Robin’s own view of his life. And better he went before the genes had a chance to carry on into the next generation, and prove themselves viable: for the mad, albeit distressing to themselves and others, can survive and propagate very well thank you. He was punch drunk in the end, of course, confused, whether by the drugs or electric shock therapy they gave him before throwing him out and saying ‘there’s nothing we can do’ – or else, more likely, by the sheer battering of the thoughts within his head, panicking like the birds in a chimney, soot flying, black everywhere, apparently exitless. Our existence, if you pay it any attention, is unbearably distressing.
6
A Telephone Call
I called my friend Alison collect, at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Handicap, where she worked. The French operator did not really wish to connect us, and let me know it, but my will prevailed upon hers.
‘Alison!’ I say, expecting warmth, pleasure, ‘where have you beens, what’s been going ons, oh you wild mad impetuous thing; are you okays’ and so forth. But no: her voice is cold.
‘Oh, it’s you, Sandra. I’m just off to a meeting.’ Now I live in fear of offending my friends. I don’t have so many I can afford to lose them. If I don’t hear from them for a time I get nervous: I think what have I done, what have I said: if they’re curt or quick or off to meetings I’m sure it’s my fault.
‘I’m phoning from France.’
‘Oh, that’s where you are. What do you want?’
‘I want you to do something for me.’
‘That figures.’
I consider this. The phone gives three sharp peeps to remind me that time is money. So much the French do for each other. An old man with a gnarled face and wearing a dusty black beret peers through the glass at me. Perhaps he is the ghost of Tourist France. He dribbles a little and goes away, leaving a wet patch on the glass, but that may still be an effect, rather than a fact, like Robin’s Hiroshima shadow earlier.
‘Alison, what’s the matter?’
‘Nothing’s the matter, just some things are more important than others, and the hydrocephaly rate is up 2.8 per cent over last year, and another eight children without brains were born in the London Regional Authority in the last quarter.’
‘A statistical anomaly.’
‘I certainly hope so. I heard you’d run off to France; I thought you’d be back by now.’
‘This is for keeps.’
‘So you keep saying. Actually, I am rather cross with you, Sandra.’
‘Why?’ My heart beats faster. The dribble has evaporated, leaving a milky patch on the glass. I think he was real.
‘I’ve settled down: it’s time you did. You’re – how old – forty-five?’
‘Forty-two.’
‘And I don’t like being taken advantage of. I don’t like being your raw material. And poor Matthew! You’ve led him such a dance, Sandra.’ And this is my friend. He’s been getting at her. Ringing her up, putting his side of the story. It isn’t a story, of course, only an event: but he’s trained to make consecutive sense out of random happenings, and get people put away for years as a result. He’s a hot-shot for the prosecution: a no-hoper for the defence.
‘Raw material, Alison?’
‘A story you wrote, Sandra. At least, I suppose you did. It’s my life story and in this week’s Nursing Times for all the world to see.’
So there it was. They’d actually published my ‘A Libation of Blood’ and Alison, the spoilsport, was kicking up a fuss.
‘You just flail about,’ she says, ‘making trouble for everyone. Why don’t you have a baby and settle down?’
‘Because it might be in fashion and not have a brain,’ I say, and she has the grace to laugh – she’s not hopeless, Alison, and I’m curling and uncurling inside with joy, and can’t show it. A story published! Only in the Nursing Times, it’s true, and who’s going to read that, except by bad luck Alison herself. It must be something to do with her job, I suppose. ‘Nursing of the paediatric problem case’ or some such article, drawn to her attention. But it’s a beginning. Will Jack mind me being a writer? Will he encourage my talent, or stifle it? I reckon he’ll be all right, so long as I write about my friends, not him. ‘The story’s not about you, Alison, not really,’ I say, more craven because she is my friend, than I would be with a colleague, an acquaintance, a stranger.
‘Oh yes,’ she says coolly, ‘separated from her husband, pregnant with twins and in genetic counselling, and nothing at all to do with me! I really must get to this meeting. I can’t sit gossiping all day.’
‘This is not gossiping,’ I say. ‘Robin’s birthday’s coming up. Will you visit his grave for me and tidy up?’
There is a long silence.
‘No,’ says Alison. ‘Do it yourself.’
Alison’s end
Alison put the phone down, and then picked it up and called her boyfriend. What was his name? I had to remember back to my story in the Nursing Times – I could hardly give the poor man a face, let alone his name – though I’d met him a dozen times or so. (Truly acceptable good kind men seem to me somehow anonymous: or perhaps it is that I don’t truly believe in them.) Yes of course Bobby – a steady enough name, in fiction as in life. Lucky old Alison, mother of more than enough, now with Bobby.
Alison put the phone down and then picked it up and called Bobby. (What I am writing now is, of course, wishful thinking. This is how I imagined it, walking down the dusty, bungalow-and-geranium lined French road, towards the market square, the heat of the pavement seeping through the thin soles of my canvas shoes, upset, trying not to cry. And perhaps, who’s to say, I get it right.)
Alison put the phone down and then picked it up and called Bobby at the BBC.
‘Bobby,’ she said, ‘Sandra just rang from France.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Bobby. ‘What’s she doing in France?’
‘Don’t you remember,’ said Alison. ‘She left Matthew a couple of weeks back and ran off somewhere with someone and the Sun was in our front garden trying to find out all about it.’
‘Darling,’ said Bobby, ‘I can’t keep up with your friends. My friends are not like yours, thank God.’
‘And I was upset and put the phone down on her.’
‘Then call her back and say you’re sorry. Do you mind, darling, I’m in the middle of a recording. The spina bifida scandal.’
‘Well, I’m supposed to be at a meeting about hydrocephalus funding.’
‘They can’t start without you.’
‘Nor can your lot start without you. And I can’t call her back because she was in some village in France in a phone box. Poor Sandra. I’m afraid I upset her.’
‘What did she want?’
‘She wanted me to tidy up her brother’s grave. You know, the mad one who died. And I said no.’
‘But why?’
‘She can’t go on using her family as an excuse for ever.’
That’s enough of that conversation. You get to the painful point and it’s time to move on.
I’ll take up Bobby and Alison’s conversation later on that evening, as they sit in front of the fire, or more likely, lean side by side against the rail of the oil-fired Aga, warming their bums. (Forget it’s mid-summer. This is author’s licence. It’s my first novel.)
‘Of course I’ll go and do the grave,’ said Alison.
‘Do you know where it is?’
‘I was at the funeral. Poor Sandra. Her mother was there with her keepers: they’d let her out for the occasion. She didn’t even recognise Sandra. Her own daughter!’
‘What about her father?’
‘Men never played a large part in her early life.’
‘She’s making up for it now.’
‘Yes,’ said Alison. ‘And biting the hands that feed her.’
Ouch. I’ll take them on to in bed, after love.
‘What really gets me,’ said Alison, ‘is that story about me and you. She’s using us.’
‘Wh
at story?’
Let her get out of her nice warm bed and go all the way downstairs in her nightie, stubbing her toe on a child’s toy, to find a copy of the Nursing Times. Then let Bobby have to sit up in bed and read it, first finding his glasses. They’ll be tired in the morning.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ said Bobby. ‘It’s a good story. It’s based on you and me, but perfectly affectionate, and very nice about your mother. I like the title. You’re being much too sensitive.’
‘Now I feel dreadful,’ said Alison. ‘Supposing she needs me? I think I’ll brave Matthew in the morning and try to find out where she is and go over to France and bring her home.’
‘That’s better. That’s what friends are for. What about our work?’ asked Bobby, suddenly cautious, like his author.
‘It’s a Bank Holiday weekend,’ said Alison, and though her author is aware that there isn’t such a weekend so early in August, she chooses to overlook this inconvenient fact. Thus plot makes liars of us all. I shall put Alison and Bobby’s story ‘A Libation of Blood’ in the appendices. Turn to it now, if you so wish. Otherwise continue with the main narrative.
