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Turning for Home

Page 21

by Barney Norris


  In my own youth, anorexics simply died, there was very little else for it. Or a few of them, if they seemed mad enough to whichever doctor examined them, were put away, and God knows what became of them then, but psychiatric hospitals at that time were not places one ever really emerged from again. Those people, I suppose, were consigned to a life’s forced feeding. We should be glad those days are gone. I live through an age where gifted people have worked very hard to understand a problem, and as a result, an illness that would have killed my granddaughter when I was young has been turned into something she can live with, and recover from, and perhaps one day get clear of.

  It seems like luck, the way it comes and claims you. Good luck and bad luck befalling you drop by drop, till the steady flow is a whole life, enough to fill a story. I don’t like to believe in luck, not really. I tried never to allow for chance to play a part in any of my professional life: I was always a meticulous planner. But when you look at a person’s life, that is sometimes what it seems like. Things just rise up and claim you, and mark you for greatness or mark you for tragedy, and the route of your life is mapped by forces entirely beyond you.

  I look out of the window at the garden. Kate and Sam are returning to the house, holding hands, walking close together. It is beautiful to look at her, and see her surviving, and taking hold of what she can of the love in the world. She has come through. She can walk through an evening holding someone’s hand again. She can smile in the light of evening as if nothing else matters.

  In the storm of a life, there have to be arms that hold you, or the whole world can come to seem too terrible to face. I always wanted to protect Hattie from everything; I thought the job of a husband was to stop all harm ever coming to the one you loved, ever again. But Hattie died, and then all my ambitions were revealed to have been futile all along, to have been the ideals and dreams of a boy who didn’t know the truth about anything. Sometimes people just die, and nothing can be done about it. I hope it still mattered to Hattie that I longed to protect her, and cared, and tried as the days ran down to keep doing what little I could. Perhaps it helped a little at the end of the long day to find at least the person you had ended up loving would have kept you safe, if there had only been a way for them to do so.

  In the last days Hattie looked out at me from inside the prison of her body, and still her eyes were the same eyes I had always loved. I sat with her and held the hand of the love of my life, and we stayed silent, and looked at each other, remembering our yesterdays. They told you to try not to cry, because the dying need people to be strong around them. I cried every day. We had been so happy, and it seemed so unfair to know everything was ending. A heart attack was kinder. Something unexpected, something quick. Or if it were only possible to come and go like swallows, and never know that in a moment’s time you would fly back out of the hall you had been momentarily passing through.

  When she died it was her eyes that went. The eyes I had loved and kissed when we were young, when we were a boy and a girl in Oxford and courting, that went blank at last and told the end of her story. I closed them then, and kissed her for a last time, and she was released from the pain. I held my pain close to me, and guarded it, and never wanted to let it go, because no matter how much it hurt, it was all I had left of her now. It was all I had left that seemed worth keeping. Because what else could matter to me ever again, now she was gone? I am glad I had the time I did with Hattie; I am grateful for every kingfisher I ever saw; I am grateful for every evening I spent outdoors. The rest was noise.

  Kate and Sam come into the kitchen, tired and smiling.

  ‘Are you all right, Grandad?’ Kate asks.

  ‘Quite all right, thank you.’

  ‘I wish you’d let us help.’

  ‘I’m happiest getting on with things myself. Quite preoccupied today.’

  ‘You know even if we don’t have any more parties, you’re not going to be able to get rid of us,’ Kate says. ‘We’ll still turn up for your birthday, and take you to the pub maybe, and there’ll be nothing you can do about it.’

  Few are as lucky as I have been. I’ve been lucky all my life, because there have always been people who cared what happened to me.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I say, ‘I hope we’ll still have a gathering.’

  They are beautiful, after all, the afternoons I spend with my family. It has been a great privilege to live them.

  from Interview 93

  In the eighties, I was part of a squad set up to go after high-profile targets. The assassination of a high-ranking Brit caused significant disruption, and also drew significant attention, of course. These kinds of wars are all about publicity. You’re always telling the story of what you do, everything is an act, you’re telling the story with every act. We used to get together drinking in this pub and identify potential targets. Usually we’d go after anyone. Sometimes people got ruled out because they were difficult to get to. Every now and then you’d get a veto for some other reason. They wouldn’t let us go after Betjeman because he was a poet. Can you believe that? And there was a guy came to these meetings to run the rule over things on behalf of the leadership, and cross names off the list if he had to. If he thought they were diplomatically useful. Frank Dunn, his name was. Did a lot of messenger-boy work. He liked to say he kept his distance but he was the kind of guy had a hand in everything, I think, he just didn’t leave much trace. Academic kind of guy, he had a job at Queen’s, then ended up over at Oxford. He used to rule people out because they were more use above ground, kept out of their coffins. Like there was this civil servant we wanted to go for one time, say, there was a guy called Robert Shawcross. We thought we could get to him, but Dunn said he came in handy after Enniskillen, so we had to leave him alone.

  Kate

  SAM AND I stay at the house overnight, and it isn’t like when I stayed here with Joe. We have a dinner of tomatoes and bread and cheese with Grandad, and then he suggests we might both sleep in the same room I slept in last night. I feel like a grown-up, to be allowed to take Sam to bed with me. And I feel sorry for Joe, because he was so young; he should have been right at the start of so many stories, but the world chose a different fate for him.

  In our room, I sit Sam down on the bed and take his hands in mine. ‘I want to tell you something,’ I say.

  ‘OK.’ Sam eyes me warily.

  ‘You said this afternoon you wanted to take me seriously. And I want that. I’d love that. I want to take you seriously too, and see what happens. So there’s something you need to know that I haven’t talked about before.’ I look around me at the confines of the bedroom, the big dark wardrobe, the freestanding mirror. I wonder where to start. ‘I spent the night with Joe here once.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘Grandad put us in different rooms, so we waited till we thought he’d gone to sleep and then Joe crept in here with me.’

  ‘I bet your grandad knew,’ Sam says with an involuntary smile. ‘Bet he was testing you. Might have thought less of you if you stayed in your own rooms.’

  It’s a surprising thought. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just like your grandad, I think he’s cool. And old people were young people too once, weren’t they, they know what happens. He was probably just testing you.’

  I shrug. ‘Maybe. Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to tell you about.’

  ‘What do you want to tell me?’ Sam looks at me kindly, trying to put me at ease, and I realise I’m afraid he’s going to judge me or hate me, or decide there’s too much distance between us for him to cross after all. I try to breathe steadily, but I can feel my lip starting to shake, my eyes filling.

  ‘I’ve told you about what happened to Joe,’ I start, and allow myself to remember the night for a moment. I remember the call when it came, where I was sitting in the old flat in Kennington, the programme I was watching at the time. I remember the run to the Tube and the heat as I stood helpless, pressed against the doors, wishing I could som
ehow travel faster. I remember Lizzy’s face at the hospital, the way she had to tell me what had happened to the boy we both loved.

  ‘Yes.’ Sam squeezes my hand, and waits, knowing not to speak while I search for words.

  ‘The thing is that he isn’t dead.’

  Sam doesn’t speak for a moment. ‘He’s not …?’

  ‘No. I just don’t see him. He lived through the accident, but he was very disabled by it. He has no speech, no mobility. He has a respirator and he’s in a bed, in a hospital in London for people who’ll never get better. I used to go and see him at first. And I used to tell myself, no matter how much it cost me in here’ – I beat against my chest to show him what I mean – ‘I’d always keep going. I’d always sit with him for the rest of his life and not leave him alone. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t keep visiting him. It hurt me so much, and I started to get ill – you know what happened to me. I started to get ill and I just couldn’t cope any more. So I stopped going to see him. That was when I left London. That was when I ran away.’ I’m crying now, the tears running down both sides of my face. I do nothing about them. This is the story I never talk about with anyone, the shame that burns me from the inside out every minute of every day I am trapped in like amber, the cloying guilt that drowns me. ‘I thought if I just got some distance from him, I could get back control of myself. I used to just go there and sit by him on those plastic chairs and cry, because I couldn’t do anything for him, and that wasn’t good for him. I think I upset him whenever I was there. So I thought if I went away for a month or two, I could go back and be strong for him. But nothing changed once I was away from there. I felt just the same. So I couldn’t go back, because nothing was any better, everything hurt just as much. More and more time passed, and I didn’t feel any stronger. I just stopped going. I abandoned him. I think that was why I started to punish myself, you see? I think that was how I got ill.’

  And then after all that, when I was coming out of all that suffering, I had met someone. I had kissed another boy, and allowed the thought of life moving on to enter my mind. I look at Sam where he sits on the bed beside me, and know that part of the reason I need to tell him this now is that being with him feels like another betrayal, no matter how happy he might have made me. The worst feeling of all is being willing for life to go on. He’ll need to understand that, if we’re going to take each other seriously. He’ll have to help me see the time I spend with him in a different light to the bleak cold light of the betrayal my whole life has been washed in since that night.

  It was a long time before I let another person near me. Only my father, and Lizzy, and no one else. After the accident I spoke to no one except Lizzy for a little while, because no one else seemed real. The times we both visited Joe were the only times in my life when I believed that I was where I was supposed to be, no matter the pain the visits caused me. So I clung to her friendship, because Lizzy helped me get through the sorrow of those hospital hours, with her kindness, her patience. She found a way to be glad that Joe was alive, when sometimes I couldn’t see one. She seemed to really believe it was better he’d lived like this than died, and that held me together for longer than I could have managed on my own. And no one else ever quite understood, and whenever I was anywhere else but there with Joe and Lizzy, I felt I was far from any sense of home, far away from the centre.

  Sam still hasn’t said anything. I can’t tell whether he’s giving me the space to keep talking, or just taking it all in. He nods again, then reaches out to dab with his cold fingers at the tears on my cheeks.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says quietly. He looks stunned.

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t told you. I didn’t know how. It makes me ashamed that I can’t get back to him.’

  ‘So you don’t go any more?’

  ‘I can’t. I think about it all the time, but I feel like I’ve failed him. I don’t deserve to go and see him any more. I haven’t gone there since my diagnosis.’

  Sam swallows. ‘It must make it very hard to be with me.’

  I feel a rush of love for him then, hearing him understand. ‘Yeah. Sometimes it … it feels like letting him down again,’ I say.

  ‘I can see that. So, are you trying to tell me … I mean – would you rather not be with me?’ Sam looks at me, his face as innocent and kind as it always is, and I smile.

  ‘No. I would really, really like to be with you, if you don’t hate me for keeping that secret. I just have to learn how. And I have to ask you to be patient. Because it might take me a long time. To know how to be close to other people.’

  ‘I get that,’ Sam says.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I think I do, yeah. And you know what, that’s all right. I can be patient.’

  ‘Do you want to be though?’ I’m waiting for him to tell me what he really thinks, to get up from the bed, to walk out and leave me.

  ‘Yeah. I’d like to. I mean, if you’ll let me try,’ Sam says.

  ‘All right then.’

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ Sam says, ‘I don’t think you’ve let him down. I think you got ill. I don’t think he’d think you let him down. I think he’d see it was pretty clear how much you loved him.’

  He puts his arms around me, and for a moment I could swear I’m playing out two scenes with two different boys in this room at the same time. Sam could almost be Joe, those brief years ago, sneaking into the bedroom in the midnight’s pitch-dark to hold me. I could swear that I’m living both feelings for an instant, as the days of my life weave into one another. And why not? Every gemlike, brilliant, different day meets with the past in the end, and becomes an irretrievable part of it, and perhaps in the mind’s eye it’s possible to leap and glide from one to the other.

  It’s only a passing illusion, and it’s falling from me now like a dress from my shoulders. No one ever goes back. I thought of Joe because I would have liked to see him again as he was, just as I would have liked to try being young again, but that’s another time now, another life really, and this is different. So I hold on tight to Sam and we lie down together, awake and silent, side by side and not saying a word till late into the night.

  Sometimes I think I’m an island. Bound all round by sea, and all alone, with no hope of ever reaching out beyond myself, ever making land anywhere else and reaching some other person. Sometimes I think I’m adrift on a raft, and way beyond sight of the shore I set out from, and paddling in hope that there’s an island out there somewhere waiting for me, caught in the tides as they turn me away from the direction I’m longing to travel. All I know is that I live held fast in the empty, vast embrace of the blue sky, the bright water, the loneliness I have learned to call being alive.

  The following morning we have breakfast with Grandad and he gives us a lift back to Andover station, where they’re putting up one of those second storeys to the car park made of scaffolding, like the ones you pass at Farnham or Fleet. The old flour mill looms half-derelict above it, and suburbia stretches out street after street on every side. We catch a packed train to Bristol, standing all the way.

  By the next morning I’ve decided that I’ll let things with Mum lie quiet for the time being – but not for ever. We didn’t get very far when we talked at the party, but at least we tried. I still get angry and petulant like a child when I’m around her, and I hate myself for it, and don’t want to bring out that side of myself. So it’s going to take a little more time. I’ll carry on meeting Dad in public places, and we’ll have lunch, and I’ll send my love to Mum through him, because that’s all I can offer for now, but at least it’s a start. Dad will forgive me for being so difficult. We’re close, and nothing can interrupt that closeness now. He saved my life. I expect it makes him sad we’re apart, because families are supposed to be all together, really, and he must want that as much as any other father. But it isn’t really so strange for distances to grow up between people. Children always grow a little apart from their parents, just as the branches of any tree strain aw
ay from the roots and up to the light. I know that a time will come when I’ll have to be strong, and speak to Mum again properly. I’ve realised, spending time with Grandad, that my parents are going to grow older. I don’t want to run out of time to have the conversations we need to have. At some point, we have to decide what we want to be to each other in the final reckoning. Although that time is a way off yet, as far as any of us can know.

  I get a call from Grandad the following week to say he’s given Frank Dunn my number. The following day, I get a call from Frank himself, asking me whether I would still be interested in the assistant librarian position that he mentioned was coming up at his college. A week later, I go to an interview, imagining it’ll most likely be a waste of time, just an excuse to spend a day seeing the sights in a nice city, a favour that won’t quite come off because no amount of goodwill will compensate for my lack of experience. That isn’t quite how things turn out. I’m offered the position the following week.

  I talk to Sam about the offer. Really, there’s never any question of my doing anything other than accepting. So we agree to try to make it work. If we are supposed to be together then a few miles between us for a little while won’t matter all that much. Sometimes these long-distance relationships pay off, after all. I move to a village called Eynsham, a twenty-minute bus journey outside Oxford, and set about learning the lines of a new life, and Sam and I start to visit each other at weekends.

 

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