by Tim Parks
He went straight to the gate and rang a bell. He waited. Perhaps this madness is an old illness recurring, he thought, the way TB recurred after years of dormancy. The dormant madness keeps itself alive in dreams and then breaks out into your daylight world. In the end it hadn’t seemed so unfamiliar. It hadn’t really surprised him to see snakes in the sky and drawings on the wall. Maybe it’s sanity that is the parenthesis, John thought. The other people at the gate paid no attention to him.
A sort of vapour had begun to steam off the muddy street. The air had grown milky. The morning’s brightness was fading. John rang again. Madness is alive in dreams, he thought, waiting for a moment of weakness to break out. It waits for a crack in your defences. Then it bursts over you like a river in flood. Your ordinary self is overwhelmed. A lab is a parenthesis within a parenthesis, John thought. Why was his mind racing so much? Why am I telling myself these strange things? What he remembered most of all was a sense of acute suffocation. Please God, don’t let it come back. It had begun sitting in the rick with Jasmeet, it had risen and risen, then overwhelmed him as he stepped into the hotel room. He’d been knocked over and suffocated. There had been the pressure of an enormous wave breaking. He was in the surf. Whatever he’d done afterwards had just been an attempt to fight his way out.
‘Hello. Sir?’
The gate was ajar. A small face looked out and up at him. ‘The clinic is opening at seven, sir.’
Others had jumped to their feet and were crowding around.
‘I’m John James,’ John said. ‘My mother works here. Dr Helen James. I have to see her urgently. It’s very urgent. Perhaps I can wait inside, if she isn’t here yet.’
He was an elderly man with a loose red Rajasthan turban, his jacket unbuttoned, eyes bloodshot but alert.
‘Dr James has done the night duty,’ he said. ‘Come in, sir. You are welcome.’
Mother is here. John’s heart leaped. Now! He would see her now. The adventure was over.
The old man padlocked the gate behind, though it was only a few minutes till seven. He was bent, bow-legged.
‘You must take off your shoes, sir.’
‘Yes, sorry.’
Why did he always forget? To the right of the door were three shelves of green cotton slippers. He took off his sandals. The doorman waited. There was nothing large enough for John’s big feet. Numbed with excitement, he squeezed into two odd things and stumbled after his guide.
‘I don’t know if you are finding her in ward or in surgery, sir.’ The man scratched a tangle of hair below his turban. He looked at his watch. ‘In ward,’ he decided.
They began to walk along the corridor. Suddenly, John wanted to flee. The place stank of disinfectant. He wants to flee, but only because he knows it is too late to flee; he is already in. Everything tugs towards the decisive moment. There are no more distractions. There is no more India between himself and his mother. Only a short stretch of corridor.
John had to shuffle his feet to keep the slippers on. He hadn’t been able to get his heels in. To his right the wall was plastered with notices in Hindi, to the left dirty windows gave onto a drab courtyard. It was squalid and alien. But it is Mother who will be caught by surprise, he thought. I have got things to tell her that will change her life. She will have to listen to me now. It was Mother who couldn’t escape.
The porter pushed open a swing door. Daylight was broken into a mesh of thin beams by the half-raised blinds. It lay in streaks on the green beds where patients were stirring or sleeping. John saw a little boy turning fitfully this way and that, his mother sitting beside him. A tall young woman in white coat and headscarf came towards them. The porter spoke to her in Hindi. She too glanced at her watch.
‘I didn’t know Dr James had a son,’ she said.
‘I live in London,’ John told her.
‘That is lucky for you,’ the nurse smiled. ‘But Dr James is still in her surgery,’ she told the porter. ‘I think she has had a bad night. There was a boy who was very sick.’
‘It’s urgent,’ John muttered. ‘About my father.’
‘I am taking you to surgery,’ the porter said. ‘This way.’
There was a sweeper at work in the corridor now, then three boys hurried past carrying pans of steaming dough with oven cloths.
‘Rashid!’ Someone was calling.
They turned a corner. ‘Dr James’s surgery,’ the porter announced. He knocked and stepped aside to let John enter.
‘Rashid! The bins!’
John pushed the door. Inside, the room was dark.
‘Mum?’
There was a strange, stuffy, sweetly medical smell.
‘Mum, it’s John.’
Suddenly alert, he stepped back. She isn’t here, he decided. No one was in the room. But he was on his own. The doorman had hurried off, rattling his keys.
John went in again. His hand felt for a switch on the wall but didn’t find it. A thread of light penetrating the space at floor level began to reveal the furniture in shadowed relief. There was a large desk directly in front of him. To his left a glass cabinet gleamed and there must be a fan turning slowly overhead, unseen.
Above all, there was the smell. A thick smell. It was strange. The air was thick. John took a step forward and put his hand on something white. A sheet of paper lay on the desk with a slim black pen placed across it. How purposeful it looked! Like a knife. John pulled his hand away and, turning, saw that the light came from under a blind drawn down over a French window. Beyond the desk now he glimpsed the corner of a mattress.
‘Mum?’
Moving his head a little, he saw a foot. John stood still. No, he didn’t wish to wake her. There was a bare white ankle. He stepped back and picked up the paper from the desk. He didn’t want to disturb his mother if she had had a bad night. Standing very still, he was aware of that unhappy moment in her bedroom with the elephants in his hand. I should have apologised.
‘Mum?’
She didn’t reply. She has had a bad night, he told himself, and is sleeping soundly. It was that deep regenerating sleep of early morning. Jasmeet too had been enjoying her sleep. You could see how her body was cuddling into itself, savouring itself.
Uncertain how to behave, John found he was picking up the paper from the desk. He moved instinctively and suddenly. He snatched it up. The pen rolled off and clattered to the floor. It was amazing how much noise it made. He held his breath. Had she woken? Mum worked so hard. There was only the click and whir of the fan slowly turning.
John looked at the piece of paper in his hand. It was covered in writing. He lifted it to his face. The lines were very neat. It was definitely her writing. ‘Dear Paul,’ he read. The letter wasn’t addressed to him. ‘After much …’
But it was too dark to read easily. The light is coming from below rather than above. The floor by the window is bright and everything else is shadowy. Who was Paul? he wondered. I really mustn’t wake her if she has had a bad night. What did it matter if he put off the meeting by an hour or two? Why am I scared? he wondered: ‘You are always afraid to ask, John.’ He seemed to hear her voice. ‘You never ask.’
‘Mum?’ he called softly. He knew it wouldn’t wake her. But if she was awake she would hear. Then I will ask. I will ask to know everything. That’s what I’ll ask.
John waited. And he would ask if she cared for him, he thought; he would be direct and open; he would ask her to come back to London with him.
‘Mum?’
When she didn’t reply he withdrew into the corridor, the letter in his hand. ‘Dear Paul,’ he read. The handwriting was definitely his mother’s, neat and controlled and purposeful.
Dear Paul,
After much thought I have decided to give you my support for a biography of Albert. It will be easier to write when I am not around. Albert’s life deserved a biography, if only because he did everything to avoid the limelight and to hide his genius. He had seen his own family torn apart by a struggle between his broth
er and his father, a struggle in which a girl became involved in a rather ugly way, and though he never spoke of the details I know that all his anthropological and behavioural research was driven by the question of how such catastrophes come about and how they might be foreseen and avoided (perhaps this explains his enthusiasm for taboos).
By some strange chance – because at the bottom of everything there is always a casual meeting – by some odd chance, Albert became my destiny and I his. To be honest, I could never understand why the world wouldn’t worship him. He was a man who helped me a great deal, forgave me a great deal and even brought up as his own a son he must have known was not his. Though he believed in nothing beyond this world, his profound wish was for life to be graced with ceremony and beauty and I believe, in his death, we did create a ceremony of some kind, an act of love, as you, with an intuition I confess surprised me, immediately described it.
Over these last few months I have tried to free myself from that ceremony and from Albert, but the more I try to go on with my old routine and recover my appetite for life, the more I feel that these things were possible for me only when Albert was there. I also discover that no ceremony exists alone. Each calls to the next, like festivals in a calendar. Tonight it is raining hard after a long dry spell. It was raining that night in January too. Here beside me there is a young man who knew Albert and who I know is longing to follow him down the river of forgetfulness. Before I get too poetic I shall show him the way.
So you have your story, Paul. You have your book. It will serve you much better than a trip to Bihar. You have girlfriends and children to get back to. You are not cut out for my kind of work. You are too vain and you would be doing it out of an inverted vanity, to do battle with yourself. In parting, many thanks for the flattery of your attention. I bequeath you all Albert’s papers, videos and audio tapes. You can have everything you find. In return I would be most grateful if you would attend to the cremation. There are no financial assets to dispose of.
With fondness,
Helen
Ps. I have sometimes felt that Albert sent you to me to point me in this direction. I know that this is an odd and irrational thought, but I wanted to share it with you. Albert always believed a task is best performed by he who does not know it has been assigned to him. Ashes in the river by the Wazi Bridge, please.
John read and reread this letter three or even four times. What was it about? He didn’t seem able to read it right through slowly and carefully as he always did with any work that mattered. The words repulsed and deflected his eyes so that he found himself skipping up a couple of lines, or down three, now to the left, now to the right; his gaze wouldn’t settle and he was labouring to piece together glimpses and snatches: the rain, the river, the Wazi Bridge, a family torn apart by struggle.
John shook his head in frustration. The corridor was getting busy and he was in the way. A heavy trolley passed, laden with small portions of rice in tinfoil. There was a huge pewter teapot. People were hurrying to get in line. A man carried a child in his arms, while another trotted beside him clutching his trousers.
John stepped back into his mother’s office and closed the door after him. There was a key in the lock and, by some unhappy instinct, he turned it. Again he was struck by the powerful smell, sweet and medical and unpleasant. What did she mean, when I’m not around? Was she returning to London? A son he must have known was not his. What on earth was that about? Do I have a brother? Why can’t I read it properly? It was written clearly enough. There wasn’t a single correction on the page. Again he lifted the letter to his eyes, but again there wasn’t enough light here in the surgery. His mother’s assured and upright handwriting blurred in a web of hieroglyphics. Cremation? Financial assets. He did not understand who it was all addressed to, or why.
John stood between the door and the desk. There was nothing on its surface but a stethoscope, some printed papers in a big stack, and a shallow box with pairs of sterilised gloves. John touched one. It was a rubber the colour of condoms, a stretchy, sticky transparent grey-brown. There had never been anything particular in his parents’ cupboards, he remembered, when he had searched through them with adolescent inquisitiveness: the bedside table, the drawers and stored boxes. He had gone through everything any number of times. School friends had boasted of their discoveries, of revealing letters, pornography, even a gun. But John’s curiosity had come up against the cool opacity of his parents’ perfect marriage, their irreproachable lives.
Still standing by the desk, the letter in his hand, John felt incapacitated, paralysed. He was staring at the stethoscope now. It definitely had a rubbery snakey look. ‘In a moment you’ll be ill again,’ he muttered. ‘Snakes make you ill.’ I must wake up now, he thought. He was close to panic. No, I must wake her up. Come on, get going, get talking, shouting, doing, before your mind gives way again.
Everything was so fragile. John is sure now that there is something he must understand, something he must absorb into himself, but without breaking apart, if possible, without going to pieces. If only he could read whatever it was, like a graph in a report, he thought, like a printout in the lab. If I could read what I have to learn coolly and calmly. Instead it is bubbling up inside him, it will shoot out like vomit. Why on earth had he eaten so much? John is intensely afraid that at any moment consciousness will be drowned in convulsion.
‘Mum?’
Once again he began to move round the desk to where she lay asleep. Immediately there was the foot again. She hasn’t moved. There was a slim white calf. But it was darker here.
He stopped. Now that he had seen where the light came from, John could easily have gone to the window and yanked up the blind, thrown everything open. He knows that. Surely Mum will be delighted to see her son, even if she hasn’t slept well. Why does he hesitate, then, moving inch by inch round the bulky desk?
Because I’m afraid to disturb of course. On the floor by the mattress, he sees a half-dozen small boxes, green and white, yellow and white. His eye takes them in but they mean nothing.
‘Mum?’
John crouched, but jumped back at once.
She was naked. It’s the first time he has ever seen his mother’s naked thighs and buttocks. He was frightened. He had seen something else too. He feels sick.
John retreated round the desk and stood leaning on it, his hand pressed over his mouth. You’re dreaming, he told himself. He definitely felt nauseous. He waited. He began to breathe hard, deeply. Don’t vomit. Wait. Breathe. I’m dreaming.
John was panting now, panting and waiting. It’s the waiting of someone preparing to plunge. He understood that. Someone shivering on the bank. Get ready for the shock when the water hits you. If he didn’t plunge, the banks would burst anyway and he would be overwhelmed.
Or maybe you should just go, he told himself. Go. Leave the room. Mum won’t want to wake up and find you’ve seen her naked, will she? Go and wait outside till she wakes up. That’s what a good boy would do.
‘Mum!’ he yelled, and stumbled round the desk. These stupid slippers he picked up don’t fit. He tripped. He caught a loose toe on the corner of a mat and almost fell over their two bodies. He banged his knee. The noise will wake her.
It hasn’t.
John looked. Again he had to put his hand over his mouth. His mother was quite naked clasped around a thin, long figure with a head of cropped black hair. John stopped and stared at the woman’s luminous skin in the deep shadow.
‘Mum?’
She was embracing the man on the narrow mattress. Her arm was round his shoulders, her knee was round his thighs. ‘Mum! For Christ’s sake!’ Why won’t they wake up? He got down on his knees, grabbed her shoulder and pulled.
The skin is cold and slightly damp. John stopped. He was breathing hard again. What is she doing? This is different from Jasmeet’s sleep, he thought. There isn’t the same hum, there isn’t the same pleasure.
‘Please wake up,’ he muttered.
It was
a boy, he saw now, not a man. Who is it? Is this Paul? Then he stood again. They wouldn’t want him to be there when they woke up, would they? That would be a shock for them. To be discovered. No, he must wake them up and disappear in the same instant, so as not to offend.
Then he was angry. When did Mum ever embrace me like this? When had he ever seen her naked? It’s the son the letter mentioned, he thought. A son he must have known was not his. The boy is brown-skinned. He can’t be Dad’s. Was that why they never wanted you to visit?
His mother’s smooth back and buttocks looked so finely curved, so strangely young. She was a girl. How could she look so young?
‘Mum, wake up!’
He yelled the words now at the top of his voice. He was exhausted.
‘She’ll never wake up, John,’ a voice said.
John stopped shouting and listened. There was nothing. The light under the shutter had grown more intense. There was a deep silence in the room now. But it’s the silence of people who have deliberately fallen silent. Not of absence. It is shadows brooding. Or as when you arrive in a place, a clearing, a wood, the upstairs bedroom in the abandoned house, and you know someone is hiding here. Yes. Maybe more than one. They hurried to hide here when they heard you coming. They managed to disappear exactly as you arrived. It’s you they hide from, John. Always. They were hiding in the shadow, hiding and mocking.
‘Dad?’ he called. John swayed on his feet. ‘Dad, is that you?’
He was shaking now. But I haven’t gone crazy this time, he realised. The room was silent. Not yet at least. They are dormant, he told himself of the two figures on the mattress. It wasn’t the same sleep as Jasmeet’s sleep, it wasn’t a sleep of presence and soft sighs and a forehead that puckered and smoothed. They are dormant, then they will spring to life.
He looked at them. The man was a boy, an adolescent, foreign, horribly thin, not attractive at all. Any moment now they will sit up and rub their eyes and be ashamed.
John stared, frowned. You don’t lie naked beside a son, he muttered. He had no memories of closeness with his mother, no remembered smells of bedtime embraces. There were two syringes on the floor beyond the pillow. His mind clouded and unclouded.
