She wakes again. They’ve met a handful of times and have barely begun to talk about their lives. She gave the impression that her situation is less complicated than it really is. He did the same. It was only human.
She wakes again. This thing felt so good, so clean, but they were building it out of concealments and evasions and other people’s pain. She remembers how Helen stood beside him. She remembers Adam, the fig tree and the Irish princess.
She wakes again.
a diversion from a conclusion
Raif is passing Helen in the hallway of the flat when he pulls her into an embrace.
I’m ready now, he says. You do understand, don’t you?
Of course.
(Does she?)
It’s almost two years and I’ve been meaning to … I keep thinking I should …
Should what?
Take her back. Her ashes. They’re still here, you see, over there.
Helen has discovered Liis’s ashes already but hasn’t said so. She’s tried to respect the fact of them, there on the shelf, still in the ugly tube the crematorium supplied. She’s glad Raif wants to take them away.
To Estonia? That sounds like a good idea. I could come with you.
No. Thank you but—
I can look up flights, hotels, that kind of thing. When are you thinking of going?
As soon as I can.
He holds Helen more tightly.
It’s been really hard to think about and now I need to get it done. You do understand, don’t you?
She’s kind enough to say yes and so he spends an hour making arrangements and another hour at his desk waiting for her to go to sleep. He answers every outstanding message and three times starts to write to Iris but stops himself. After all, their flirtation has already gone too far. When Iris and Helen were standing there together after the funeral he’d felt exposed, which meant that there was something to hide. He’d stood there looking from one to the other, realising that he hadn’t thought of either of them as entirely real. Nor had he thought what he was doing with Iris (a couple of meetings, a lunch, a few messages) applied in any way to his life with Helen. Of course it did. He just hadn’t thought.
Raif tells himself that he needs to commit properly to Helen and the first step in this is to conclude Liis’s death. And Helen understands. He can see now that the weight on his chest is not the old pain of his marriage but guilt. He’s a good man. He will not write to Iris.
*
So Raif puts Iris back beside her husband and children, and travels to Estonia, where he makes his way to the sea. This is the conclusion that he now seems to want so urgently but he’s taken aback by the shallow scurrying water and can’t bring himself to hold the ashes in his hands. In the end he opens the cardboard tube and trails it behind him as he walks along the edge of the water imagining a silver stream. His feet grow wet and he welcomes the cold when it comes and walks further than he has to before trying to sink the tube. In the end he just lets it go.
He walks until he finds a friendly-looking bar and there is a woman in a silver coat. When he gets back to London they start to send messages.
Thank you for the photo of you in your silver coat. You look very beautiful. Here’s one of me.
The picture he sends her is striking. With the sun behind him, he is almost in silhouette. It was taken by Helen soon after they started seeing each other.
Since coming back from Estonia he is preoccupied. Helen assumes he’s thinking about Liis so says nothing. He’s thinking, most of the time, about the woman in the silver coat. He sits in the same room as Helen sending and receiving messages as if to prove to himself that there’s nothing wrong with this.
Thank you for your picture, shadow man, but I’m not sure I can see you. You are a mystery. I will be in London in April and I will bring my silver coat.
My life is a mystery even to me. I would like to meet you in April when the cherry blossom unfurls.
Unfurls? You are a poet, no?
I am not a poet. I am a shadow.
He tells her now that writing to her makes him happy because really he is so sad.
Shadow man, why so sad?
Because I have a broken heart.
At night he doesn’t look at the photo of the woman in the silver coat but at one of Meike. It is of a group at a dinner, including him. He zooms in on her hand, which is raised just in front of her cleavage. She is holding a strawberry dipped in cream. After a moment he zooms out again. This happens deep in a dream. He does not know what he is doing – as much as anyone can not know such things.
He loses his phone often and one day finds that Iris has called three times in an afternoon without leaving a message. He makes a note to call her back.
There are many things of which he is ashamed: that he hasn’t published another book and so has neither sought nor been offered promotion, that he never corrects people who mispronounce his name, that he did not insist to Liis on meeting her family, that he never asked her what he most wanted to, that he finds Helen both onerous and vital, and that he enjoys the numbness he feels and takes the pills he’s been given in the hope that it will increase.
this is all true
It is out of what we do not know and cannot say that we take shape.
Raif wept by the side of the road on Christmas Day because he couldn’t take a good enough picture of the setting sun. He met Iris in the New Year to draw her out about what position she might take in the debate. He lost an old friend and went to his funeral, which reminded him that he had to do something about Liis’s ashes. He scattered them in the sea and then got drunk and poured his heart out to a stranger in a bar because there was nothing else to do. He came home to Helen.
This is all true. It is what’s happened and how Raif would explain himself. It would surprise him to know that he’s writing to the woman in the silver coat to stop himself writing to Iris. Or that he took his wife’s ashes to Estonia to prove to his mother (whose end he can glimpse now) that he has learnt how to manage the dead. Or that he went to the historian’s funeral convinced that by entering his father’s past, he would be able to summon him. And he has turned towards Helen so as to have somewhere to put feelings that he isn’t yet ready to understand. And because he is starting to feel close to her.
love
David is running towards his daughters when everything stops. They are standing at the top of the hill shouting at him to come and see – what? He’ll never know because at that moment he contracts within his body and loses all force and reach. The hill rocks and then swallows him.
When he wakes up he knows where he is and who he is. He starts to get out of bed, only they still have him plugged into the machines. He doesn’t struggle. He understands perfectly. He smiles at the person in the next bed, who doesn’t respond, probably because he – or she – is so far away.
A young man leans over him.
How are you feeling? he asks.
David loves his mouth.
Like Gulliver! he says and the stranger smiles.
David loves him.
He must have fallen asleep. The machines have gone. There are people sitting beside his neighbour’s bed and a child playing on the floor. A woman comes to help David sit up but he doesn’t need her, he’s fine.
On another day, or is it the same day, the woman sits beside him, shows him pictures and asks him lots of questions. David stares at the pictures because she keeps pointing. He nods and when she asks says no, he doesn’t feel unwell, just very tired. While they are talking he starts to need something. He needs it more and more and so he stands up. There is a great pressure but he knows what to do. His hands find his penis. Where to put it? He sees a white bowl on the wall across the room and knows that this is what he’s looking for and so he walks over, being careful not to step on the child, and relieves the pressure in a yellow stream. When he sits back down on his bed, the woman pulls the curtains and asks more questions.
They run tests for hours, or
days, he isn’t sure. Time lies around him like empty fields. He can walk the painted line. He can touch his nose and her nose back and forth. He identifies every animal and object on the cards and writes his name clearly.
You’ve filled an entire page with your signature! the doctor says, leaning over to see.
I love you, he says and takes hold of her breast.
Someone pulls his hand away.
For a while he’s in a big room where he loves everybody. He tries to get close to them in the pressing together that brings such joy, only someone always moves him away.
One day David manages to walk out of the hospital. He steps into the road as if to greet the traffic and when a driver stops and tries to persuade him back onto the pavement, he punches her. Then he lies down. Several people drive round him, some taking pictures, before the hospital staff arrive.
The decision is made to move him to a secure residential unit across the city. Iris is asked to be present when he’s put into the ambulance. She has a calming effect and there are many papers to sign. He has to be strapped into his seat – like a cross between a baby and a lunatic she says with a laugh to his sister, who stores this away as further evidence of Iris’s cold heart.
Kate keeps asking Iris why they can’t see him. She speaks quietly in long streams as if trying to wear away her mother’s resistance but afraid of raising her voice.
He’s better now. You said. He doesn’t even have to stay in bed. We saw him when he had it, he practically died there right in front of us, remember? So why shouldn’t we see him now?
He’s very unhappy at the moment because he doesn’t understand.
Understand what?
How to be.
Lou says much less. She hates how all this has made her mother look so small and sound so hollow.
What do you mean, how to be? What sort of fucking nonsense is that?
Iris reaches out her arms to Lou, who steps back.
He was supposed to have MS! What’s a stroke got to do with it?
I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does. It may be connected, perhaps not.
What about the doctors? They’re supposed to know! Did you know? That he was going to have a stroke? You know the symptoms, don’t you? They’re online!
Please don’t go looking stuff up. You’ll only scare yourselves.
We know what he’ll be like. It says. You have to let us see him because we know. It fucking says.
Kate lines up beside her sister, looking just as coldly at Iris, whispering It fucking says.
Lou is shaking. Iris had been turning away just as she turned away from their questions when their father moved out, only this time Lou has stopped her. She has said what she wanted to say and for once her mother has listened. She has the words now, and the voice. What might she say next? They are all shaking.
Iris explains to the doctors that she and David had been in the process of a divorce and that his sister is responsible for all decisions regarding his care. She gives them her number. His sister turns up at the house one evening and they have a hissed conversation on the doorstep about why Iris won’t let the girls see him.
They must lie awake at night imagining the worst, his sister says.
It is the worst.
Iris cannot bring herself to explain that David had decided not to come back, let alone why he had to leave, and so she must endure his family’s judgement. If this had happened at his sister’s, where after all he lived, she would have been the one who went to the hospital, signed the forms and answered the questions. Iris forwards letters from the hospital unopened.
The day after David had his stroke she kept picking up her phone and putting it down again, having forgotten who it was she meant to call. If she’d looked later, she would have seen that she rang Raif three times but she will have no memory of this. Her mind swept it aside even as she pressed the numbers. Otherwise she’d have to think about what it might mean.
She can’t think about anything because life has become a hellish oscillation. David is and isn’t dead. He is and isn’t her husband. She loves him and she doesn’t. She cannot after all recover her old life, nor can she anticipate a different one. For now Iris will be one of the people who go out into the city armoured against it. If she lets herself feel anything then she will have to feel something about this.
*
When Iris arrives at the secure unit, she’s buzzed through one heavy glass door after another. She tells herself that it’s not so bad. There are places to sit, even a small garden.
He won’t wash, the nurse says. He’s difficult to manage because he’s still got his strength.
He seems very medicated.
We don’t want to use restraints.
David has no grace now that he has no style. He looks peculiar and small. When he sees Iris he tries to leap up to prove the miracle of his recovery but there’s a problem with distance. It takes so much longer for his hand to make contact or for his foot to reach the floor. And he’s still in the waiting room. Isn’t it time to go home? But the lovely woman is here. He wants to push himself inside her at any point he can find.
To Iris he looks both childish and geriatric as he rocks back and forth vaguely rubbing himself.
You need a shower, she says. I’ll run it for you. Get undressed.
David doesn’t want to undress because he’s no longer certain of his edges but now the woman is taking off his clothes and it’s alright. His edges remain. Even so he refuses to be led towards the shower. Fuck it, she says, and starts to unbutton her top. Very quickly her body is there in front of him and he follows it. When she’s under the falling water, he can’t see her body any more and so he goes to find it.
Iris is shocked to find herself so close to him again. But it’s not him. His breath has a metallic tang that is so alien to her that it makes her want to vomit. She craves the dry dark scent of his skin but when she presses her face to his chest, she smells onions, shellfish and milk. She knows this body better than any other. It hasn’t outwardly changed. But her mind insists it’s not him because it doesn’t smell like him.
She takes a long time, making sure the water doesn’t get in his eyes, flinching from nothing. His hands move towards her breasts but are too tired to reach them. He shoves his penis between her legs a few times but so vaguely that she barely registers it. She washes him until he smells of nothing and then she clings to him and weeps. The way David takes her head and presses it to his is so familiar that she wants to stay there forever, being held by him until they’re both washed away.
She hardly sleeps and tries to exhaust herself by walking to work through the bare park under black trees, along grey streets. She pays a student to be there after school for the girls when David used to be and continues to move her debts from one card to another. The girls grow taller overnight.
Iris can admit that coming home is easier now that David will never be there. She thinks of him as removed from their world – not in the end by her – and of herself as the engine of life for her girls.
Perhaps you should let them see him, says Max.
See what?
He’s still himself, isn’t he?
He’s—
She’s about to say that David is his animal self but that’s not strictly true. He’s a pathetically recognisable version of his human self. The girls would find it tormenting.
Iris focuses on her work. She spends a lot of time thinking about humidity and the abrasive qualities of dust but she also takes a speck of paint from a wooden mask, sets it in resin and has it scanned in an electron microscope. She then breaks down its components, cross-references and locates the mask to the east of Nigeria pre-1900. Today she is assessing items taken from a psychiatric ward in the 1940s which include thirty-six coat hangers, four skipping ropes and one game of snakes and ladders. She prefers paint and metal to organic materials that need so much protection from change. Anything once living cannot be fixed. Nothing will stop it breaking down.
We open up the body in the hope of finding the truth or the future. Someone has to be willing to take another person apart, or at least able to stop thinking of them as a person. How do you accomplish this other than by repetition? You cut open bodies until you don’t think of them as that. Henry VIII allowed the anatomy schools the bodies of four hanged criminals a year. Charles II increased this to six.
These dissections were carried out in public as if part of the punishment, a further terror and peculiar mark of infamy. Even if your body remained intact, in law it belonged to no one and so the bodysnatchers supplying anatomists in the nineteenth century were committing no crime. Like a psychoanalyst entering the mind, they tunnelled into the grave from imperceptible angles and drew out what they could, leaving no trace on the surface. There was plenty of demand for their services. The price of a corpse increased tenfold in twenty years.
A mortsafe was an iron grille or cage in which a coffin was placed before burial to protect the corpse from being taken. After six weeks or so, when the body had decayed beyond the point of being of any use to the anatomist, the mortsafe would be removed and hired out to someone else. The practice was for there to be two locks and for separate people to hold the keys.
The structures we borrow in order to protect ourselves cannot keep us intact. Our need for them reveals how vulnerable – or should that be susceptible – we are to being carried off, opened up, exposed.
the new
Perhaps falling in love in middle age is in part the desire to experience fixity again, to take hold of another so as to put ourselves in place. To do this we change how we live, what we enjoy, how we dress, who we spend time with, and we call this new.
In the City of Love's Sleep Page 14
