Al's Well

by Dark, Gregory

  “After that time with the drink – being confronted by all that mess at the house, all those empty cans and bottles – I was, I don’t know, a bit … circumspect, let’s say, about going back to the house again. And yet I was pulled to it with incredible force. I mean, incredible force. It was like the early days again of quitting smoking. You know, when you’re revolted by it – I mean, it is a disgusting habit, right? – and yet drawn to that disgusting habit like it was the greatest thing that ever existed. You really hate it and you crave it at one and the same time. Same deal.

  “It wasn’t either the house that I craved. It was the mess. And the fact that Al was living in it. That was another element I both hated and craved. So, phoning’d have been of no use. He’d have tidied the house – he wasn’t that far gone. Or if he hadn’t, the message would have become more apparent. He’d have been baying not at the moon, but at me. He’d have tidied, gotten rid of the empties, depizza’d the paintwork. The acceptable face of Al living alone would again be presented. And that didn’t do it for me. Not at any level.

  “I found myself opting to go to shops that took me past the door. Then I found myself actually detouring to do so. And then I started detouring and checking whether he was in or out.

  “I lasted three days.

  “It was nine o’clock that morning. Al was always in his studio by nine o’clock. Usually before. Regular as clockwork. More regular. But still – sixth sense, I guess, something like that – I kept real quiet. I mean, burglar quiet. Made sure the latch didn’t shoot back in a rasp, you know what I’m talking about. And Al was shouting from upstairs. Something like, ‘The water’s getting cold, honey. You coming or what?’ And then, also from upstairs, from the direction of our bedroom, a woman’s voice. ‘J’arrive,’ she said in that mock testiness of new ‘amour’. ‘J’arrive.’ Nothing something-like about those words. ‘J’arrive,’ she said and I can hear her saying it just as clearly as if it were five minutes ago.

  “‘J’arrive.’”

  +++

  “You haven’t phoned me, Mike.”

  “You asked me not to.”

  “You never used to do what I told you to do.”

  “Not true.”

  “And you’re not ‘honey’ing me either.”

  “I have always, honey, done exactly what you told me to do.”

  “Not in bed.”

  “In bed, Trove, I know better.”

  “I’m in bed now.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I’m in bed, Mike, and you didn’t call me.”

  “I apologise.”

  “I like it when you apologise.”

  “I do a lot of it, Trove.”

  “You do it so well.”

  “I’ve had so much practice.”

  “Apologise to me again.”

  “There is such a thing, Trove, as too much practice. I need to see you again.”

  “That wasn’t a pausette.”

  “A full-fledged pause, you’re right.”

  “A pause, maybe, and a half.”

  “X-rated, you’re right. An entitled-to-vote pause.”

  “I only left yesterday.”

  “It’s too long. I need to see you again.”

  “I haven’t recovered yet.”

  “When can we see each other again?”

  “We said, remember, we needed time apart?”

  “I do remember.”

  “You couldn’t even go a measly twenty-four hours without calling.”

  “You called me, Trove.”

  “You spend your whole life, hon, splitting hairs?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Oh!”

  “What?”

  “The way you say ‘sorry’, Mike.”

  “I thought you liked it.”

  “I love it.”

  “And that’s why you’re complaining?”

  “Not complaining. Sighing in appreciation.”

  “Right.”

  “Complaining too, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “It makes me gooey. I hate it, Mike, that it makes me gooey. I hate being gooey, for Christ’s sake. Like I hate you.”

  “Hate me?”

  “For making me gooey. You know how many pairs of knickers I’m getting through these days? Daily, I mean? You know how much more washing I have to do, Michael? I should be suing you for damage to my hands.”

  “Such beautiful hands.”

  “Ever been to Madrid?”

  “Of course.”

  “I think, Mike, I could sneak a weekend to Madrid in three weeks.”

  “When will you know?”

  “I have this possessive lover, you see.”

  “Right. Any idea when he might let you know, Trove?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “No, Mike. What are you talking about? You mustn’t call me. We had an agreement, remember?”

  +++

  My dearest Trove,

  I do begin to see how it is people find solace in the confessional. I start to feel lighter having written these letters to you. When I finish each one (I mean), I feel a little lighter.

  It’s all a very new experience to me. Maybe not virginally new, but certainly adolescently. I’ve been trying to remember: was my up-bringing to do with not having feelings or was it to do with suppressing them? To be honest, I can’t remember any longer. If truth be known, it was probably some kind of amalgam of them both. Crying wasn’t actually forbidden either at home or at school. But it was … not even discouraged … it was just unusual. Inappropriate. Ordering sushi in an Indian restaurant, wearing jeans to Ascot. Not done. A mark of social impropriety, of unawareness or uncouthness.

  In ‘Brief Encounter’ did they even kiss? You remember, the wartime film about a clandestine, almost illicit, romance? With Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson. I don’t think they ever kissed. In order to distance himself from adulterous temptation, Trevor Howard’s prepared to bury himself in the African jungle, but he’s not prepared to kiss. There was still a lot of that kind of … I don’t know what it was … going on in my childhood. What was it? Double-standards? Dishonesty? Hypocrisy? It was all of those things, of course it was, and yet it wasn’t just those things. There was something within it, whatever it was, striving to be noble or honourable or something. There was a certain selflessness attached to it, I think, or some sense of obligation trying to worm its way through a miasma of less honourable intentions.

  I don’t think we can ever forget about our parents that they stopped Hitler. No generation needs an aim beyond that, nor an achievement. (The achievement of our generation, however, has just been to allow greed off the lead. That, though, is another story.)

  In war, emotions have to be checked. If you allowed yourself in war to feel everything you needed to, you’d soon become catatonic, unable to do anything at all. And our primeval instincts for survival debar that from happening. So, we go into emotional lock-down. You and I, Trove, we were brought up in the emotional lock-down.

  I first found emotions … I was going to say, I first found emotions with Eva, but that simply isn’t true. For all their suppression, I’d had emotions all my life. Even intense ones. They were like guilty secrets. I don’t think I ever bedded a girl without loving her. However briefly. Even the drunk or stoned one-night stands of adolescence. I wanted intensely, certainly hated intensely, felt … mostly intensely. But I strove lackadaisically and fought without fervour. Inside I was Lenin or Prince Hal; but outside I was Estragon or Buster Keaton. Maybe the Mona Lisa would be more accurate. I think it was obvious something was happening within. It was what that something was which was the enigma. To me, I’m talking about. I was an enigma to myself. Not to anyone else.

  I’m not too sure any of us are enigmas to others. I don’t think we, as individuals, are considered by our acquaintances to be worthy of too much thought. I don’t think our acquaintances think of us in those ter
ms, as being enigmas or paradoxes or whatever. What you see, they think, is what you get. You’re either a good bloke or a pain-in-the-arse.

  And how many relationships does that screw up? Before they’ve even started, I mean.

  It wasn’t even with Eva that I started letting emotions out. They were already, you know, seeping through the cracks. I suppose, what it was, with Eva I was encouraged to let out my emotions.

  what I didn’t realise – not until I met you – the only emotions I was encouraged to let out were the safe ones: Oh, being incensed by Reagan, for instance, or by some wickedness perpetrated by Thatcher. It was okay, with Eva, to rant about such things, about the evils of evil people. No, it was alright to complain about such things: Ranting was not encouraged!

  It was alright to complain that I was tired, or to canoodle that I was feeling randy; alright to moan about work or the weather or the interest rate. It was even okay to start acknowledging things that weren’t okay. I was allowed to be frustrated or feel short-changed. Not too much. But some.

  What became different with you was that with you I was able also to acknowledge the unsafe emotions. Emotions that you might find threatening or that you intuited I might find threatening. All the anger welling inside. That Mount Vesuvius of anger. Welling, did I say? Gurgling, more like, spitting, rumbling, belching. The molten lava of that anger.

  And it is dangerous – they are, such eruptions, such threats of eruption. There is a violence and a strength in them which is intimidating and scary. Only an idiot would not be frightened of it – and in awe of it.

  I can’t remember who it was who said, “Courage is not an absence of fear. Courage is having the fear and triumphing over it.” I think it might have been Mandela but it doesn’t really matter who said it, its truth speaks for itself.

  And that was your courage, Trove.

  And your courage it was which led me to unmask mine. And that’s what now makes it worse. Because now I know that somewhere in me there is courage and I can no longer find the bloody thing.

  Know the frustration of mislaying your glasses or your car keys? It’s that kind of deal. Only a hundred times worse. A thousand times bloody worse.

  And that caused the problems with my sleeping.

  There was a time in my adolescence – a particularly dreadful time in what was generally, and almost exclusively, an awful time – a time when I had so many nightmares I started to get frightened of going to sleep. Touch wood, I’ve never returned to quite such a dreadful sleep pattern. But if that was the Pacific Ocean, I have since had my Mediterranean blues. And I have had my Black Seas.

  When Eva was dying, that was one Black Sea. Fractious sleep I had then. An almost cantankerous sleep. A gnarled, embittered old hag I had then of sleep. The odd nightmare now and again. Made worse by the fact I couldn’t scream in my sleep for fear of waking her.

  And when I first started my affair with you …

  No, around you I had three different types of sleep. The first I misunderstood. The first I thought then was the sun blazing. I thought it was an awakening, almost an epiphany.

  The second was waves of blue. Radio-wave-like, not sea-waves – but like sea-waves I was surfing them. Bronzed, even muscular, certainly fit. Young and strong. Except that I wasn’t astride them but rather nestled by them. It was, I think, almost uterine. I think they were trying to nourish me, the waves. Those blue waves, royal blue and navy blue, light blue and lighter. Yes, those waves were the womb, I thought, and the bright light, that was birth.

  And in the middle, there was the sleep of nothing. Just a blackness, just a void. Not unpleasant. Not a nightmare, not even a bad dream. If there was unpleasantness it was that of the vapid. That was all at the beginning. And at the beginning I gave not one of them any mind. If an acknowledgement, a cursory one. Mostly none at all.

  Over time I started to realise one thing about these sleeps: I wasn’t being refreshed by them. It would be an exaggeration to say that I was waking up as tired as I went to sleep, but I was waking up tired. And jaundiced. Tired physically, in other words, and tired emotionally. And the emotions that I could feel – and what I could feel of them, which wasn’t much – had a staleness about them. Teeth uncleaned for a day. Not seriously dodgy – not uncleaned for a week. The morning after a one-night stand where there’s no toothbrush to be had.

  And I realised that everything I’d been feeling was stale. All the emotions in my larder had passed their sell-by dates not weeks before, but years. Decades. I realised the bright light wasn’t birth, it wasn’t even sunlight. It was a white light, rather, similar to white sound – a cacophony of sensation so extreme it destroys all subtlety or nuance.

  I realised the blue of the radio-waves was not uterine but was my engulfment by a tsunami. And the darkness I thought vapid was the blackness of despair to which I had become inured. And I wasn’t sleeping well because I wasn’t living well.

  The famous soliloquy in ‘Hamlet’, it refers to ‘that sleep of death’. Well, mine was the sleep of life. I was not refreshed by my sleep because my life was stagnant. ‘For in that sleep of life,’ I might well have written, ‘what dream may come if we just shuffle on this mortal coil?’

  You were my wake-up call. I started to understand that. ‘Started’ because I’m not nearly as bright as I like to imagine myself.

  And I also started to understand – mostly because you helpedme to understand – that with you it was safe not only to feel but to express. I startedairing the emotions, started to open windows, started to let out some of the rankness anddankness.

  And then I started to feel.

  There was an onrush suddenly of emotions. An avalanche of them. I started to feel. And it was ten zillion sensations at a time – ten zillion zings. A Hallelujah Chorus of zings. But also ten zillion nips and stings.

  What I tried to do, I tried to stuff that whole avalanche into the one, albeit vast, container: the love increasingly I felt for you. I thought that’s what it was, in fact. I thought, these huge feelings, they were all manifestations of my love. No, wrong: off-shoots, rather, from the same trunk. Without the trunk, no off-shoots. And, thinking about it, I was probably right. Except that often the off-shoots had nothing whatever to do with the trunk. Which was, say, a Californian redwood. But the shoots? Some were orchids, others were holly; some nettles, others dock-leaves; some pine-cones and others pineapples. And some were squirrels or icebergs or the Sydney Opera House. Or Black Forest Gateau.

  I should always be grateful to you for that. I should be, but I’m not. And I’m not sure why I’m not. Maybe because, mixed in with reverence for a creator, there is also resentment. Always. You don’t die unless you live. The price of life is death, the price of admission. That which created you also, and simultaneously, created the germ that will destroy you.

  You didn’t create me, of course. But you unveiled to me a huge unknown part of me. And that unveiling is an act of creation. Maybe it’s that that inhibits my gratitude. Please don’t misunderstand, it’s not something I’m proud of, the surliness of that gratitude. In fact I don’t like me for it. But then, as a matter of fact, I don’t like me a lot. And for a lot of different reasons.

  I’m sure there must be some irony involved in that. That you have helped me to reveal myself to me, but the me that’s been revealed to me is someone I don’t like. Or, to be more accurate, who has more characteristics that I don’t like of the person who had anyway a whole heap of characteristics I never liked.

  Who was the first Chinaman who decided to keep an egg for a hundred years? And why? And what if, having kept it for a hundred years, he hadn’t liked it? Would that have been irony? And if not, what would it have been? Well, whatever that would be – or would have been – the ersatz irony – that’s what this is now. That’s what it feels like.

  I don’t even like the honesty I’ve found which enables me to write this letter. I’m not sure, just at the moment, where this honesty is taking me. There is only one pla
ce I want to be taken, and that’s closer to you. I’ve got a horrible feeling that’s precisely not where I’m being taken. In fact, it feels – if I’m being taken anywhere at all and am not just spiralling out of control – it feels like I’m being pulled away from you.

  I’ll close therefore before being dragged further away.

  I love you – Mike xxx

  Chapter 11

  Maison d’arrêt de Toulouse-Seysses, 7th July 06

  Dear Trove:

  Thank you so much. It was – you cannot imagine – so special, looking round from the dock, seeing you there. Your sad little smile of encouragement, eyes glistening their support. The surprise was wonderful, a little magical even.

  There’s no point dwelling on what was said today. Facts are not the truth. And what’s least truthful about them is that that is exactly what they pretend to be: the truth.

  The fact of the matter – the awful, shameful fact of the matter – is that I remember so little – so almost nothing. Of the night itself, that maybe you’d expect. But I remember too so little of the build-up. And about that as well I feel really guilty. I was going to write, as guilty as I do about the death itself. But that would be patently absurd. And certainly not true.

  I am struggling to get at the truth. I’ve started ‘the’ letter to you I can’t remember how many times. Style isn’t about whim, I’ve discovered. It’s not about aesthetics or literacy or anything else even close to those things. It’s simply a method of excavating the truth. And that’s why, I suppose, it’s so damn difficult. Still, nil desperandum.

  Yes, how apposite: nil desperandum. ‘Never despair,’ I suppose you’d translate that as. It’s sometimes hard. But, yes, one day I will crack it. And, yes, each day I do. Each day that I do not despair I have somehow cracked it.

  Please look after yourself. Once again, thank you so very much for having come today. I suspect you have an idea of how much that meant to me. You cannot know how very much. With my love – Al x.