Darke

by Rick Gekoski

  Nothing to say. I’m not used to this. I have spent my poor wasted land of a life being paid to say things, until they ran out, and then I did.

  Our everyday emotional lives are so ludicrously over-valued, our feelings so intensely interrogated and inflated, that it is no longer possible to be mildly unhappy, a bit chagrined, sad rather than devastated. Everything is hyperbolic, stretched out and de-natured, and when the time comes, appropriately charged language is no longer available: ‘The weather was miserable’, ‘The in-laws’ visit was a catastrophe’, ‘I was so distressed when England lost the Test Match’, ‘She was inconsolable when she tore her new frock’. So what am I to say as I watch my wife bleeding and dying? That it is horrible, and I am devastated?

  Better to say nothing and to write nothing. If I cannot speak, therefore I must be silent. The observation was made by a rather clever soldier in the First War. After that he became a schoolmaster and interfered with boys, which I suppose is what schoolmasters do. After that he became a philosopher.

  Other writers returning from the war should have obeyed the injunction, and kept their counsel. What we think of as the great poetry of the Great War is largely tosh.

  If I should die, think only this of me:

  That there’s some corner of a foreign field

  That is for ever England.

  Dreadful. Or the sloppy, weak irony of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. He was dead before it was published, and people were too kind to remark how poor it was. Either because they didn’t know better or (worse) because they thought this the best that could be said.

  Better they’d shut up. When soldiers come home from war, they do not speak of it, or if they do, only in muttered phrases indicating that what they have within them is inexpressible. Impossible to convey. What are they to say? The only words that convey the burden and depth of the horror are the names of the places: the Somme, Gallipoli, Auschwitz.

  Suzy is dying, and asleep. I sit and write by her bedside. The rest is silence, even these words are silence, they emanate from the silence, and are silenced by it.

  Leaning forwards, I could hardly make her out. Her throat gurgled, and she tried desperately to clear it, spitting out gobs of what was not quite sputum. She was drowning, her lungs inexorably filling. The nurses were able to extract some of the fluid, but her lungs refilled. I sat next to her, listening, cringing, past any remedy of hope or consolation. If I could have worn our earphones, I would have done so. Instead, I tried to find things to do, elsewhere.

  She was a parcel of decomposing tripe. What remained was a sound issuing from her vocal cords like a final ghostly exhalation. As if she had passed and had only this final phrase to transmit.

  ‘I’m sorry . . . I couldn’t do better . . .’

  Some sort of regret? Perhaps many sorts of many regrets? But not that old classical judgement of the adventures of her soul upon this earth? No. No words of wisdom? Not likely. Never. Not Suzy or even Suzy’s ghost.

  She could hardly sleep any more, save when the medication kicked in and the pain abated and she closed her eyes. Her face in repose took on a mask-like gessoed beauty, spare-boned, denuded of flesh and hope, fixed in a terrible serenity, still, her, just.

  She was almost gone. If she recognised me, or even Lucy, it rarely registered in her features. She didn’t respond, or appear to hear. The light had gone out of her eyes, which stared outwards but did not see. Everything that had mattered, Bobo and Lucy, our long years together, her writing and attempts at writing, the moments of bliss and sorrow, all had passed, and were as nothing, lost as a dream is lost, momentarily vivid, quickly faded.

  She was somewhere, to be sure, but somewhere other, from which she would not return. She had set herself facing the dark, and whether her isolation was willed or imposed made no difference. She could rouse herself momentarily to get some liquid into her, but relapsed immediately. Still, there, and gone.

  I dreaded her death, longed to sit next to her warm abandoned carapace, if only for a few more moments. Wished her dead too. And I felt a similar – is it appropriate to say so? – a similar disconnect from the world. I did not respond when the nurses talked to me, hardly summoned a word for Lucy, who came for a couple of days at a time. She said that ‘when the time comes’ she would take a leave of absence from work, and move in with me ‘to see it through’. But Lawrence assured us that there was still time to pass, too much time, not too little.

  As Suzy’s ghost gurgled and hacked, striving for just that tiny sustaining moment of inhalation, I fancied that we were both suffering, clogging, filling up, past all intervention or hope of love. I did whatever I could to help her, when I was able. Little things: cold washcloths, more slivers of ice, plumped pillows, changing her position on the bed, though only when she was sufficiently drugged up. Closed curtains to keep it dark, with only a night light in the corner of the room, like Lucy used to have when she had nightmares. One evening, after a particularly stressed and distressing afternoon, I propped her up and gave her some warm tea with Manuka honey to drink through a straw – I’d got her used to the sweetness gradually, said it was good for her and had great medicinal qualities. She managed to get it all down, a tiny bit at a time, and soon fell into a deep sleep. Her features relaxed, and the absent flesh seemed to expand and fill itself, so that I could see, for those moments, her Suzy face, the young, the beautiful . . . untroubled at last.

  Goodnight, my darling, sleep well.

  I sat and held her hand as she descended, and then I did too.

  We are lumps of meat that live and then die. Material. The soul doesn’t leave the body at the point of death. What does is gas and air and, if there is anything left in kidney or bowel, some of that too.

  There’s your soul for you.

  I sat with her, with her body, and wished to remember, summoned images but they were grey and desiccated, and nothing came alive any more than she did. Moments ago she’d been a person, however wasted, a person who liked Dorset crab and cottages in Wales and her darling daughter, who laughed till she cried for hardly any reason at all – and a flicker later, carrion, the fearful rush of blood stilled. Gone? Not entirely. She lingered in the air not fully swooshed away yet into the unimaginable distances. I tried to hold onto her, but one look at her poor dear body made it clear: it was not her, not any more.

  May God have mercy on her soul?

  Lucy arrived in a few hours, and rang Lawrence, who came immediately, standing by the bedside for a moment, holding Suzy’s poor limp hand, still and warm, in his, and nodded as if to himself.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and sat down on the bedside chair, putting his head into his hands, and wept loudly and unselfconsciously, wiping his eyes and blowing his nose. I stood in the corner watching him, envious of his generosity, his bountifulness. I had the desire but not the capacity to weep. My life has been a vale of unshed tears.

  We sat together for a time, unspeaking. Minutes passed in the silence, perhaps many of them. Time seemed suspended, we were embedded in the amber silence. There was nothing to be done, nor anything to say.

  Lawrence was more than professionally sympathetic. He had loved Suzy. But he was puzzled by her quick passing.

  ‘It is so difficult for us to predict,’ he said. ‘As I told you. But I thought she had a few weeks to live. It takes time for the systems to close down.’

  Lucy was sitting on the other side of her mother’s bed, as we kept a vigil over her body. ‘But you told us,’ she said, with a wan smile, ‘it might be anytime . . .’

  ‘Yes, but I am still curious . . .’

  ‘. . . and you have been quite wonderful to all of us. I know Mummy cared for you, she felt she was in the best possible hands.’ Lucy knew that he had fancied Suzy, fancied her daughter too, the disgusting old goat.

  ‘A post-mortem would clear things up, and put our minds at rest.’

  Lucy began to cry, and rose to stand by him and to take his hand. ‘Oh, dear Lawrence, please no. S
he has suffered enough. I can’t bear thinking of her being cut up on a slab. It’s so horrible! And what for? She was dying anyway, so she was lucky enough to go sooner than scheduled. That’s good, isn’t it?’

  He did not, I noticed, let go of her hand.

  Lucy gave him another squeeze. He purred with condolent delight.

  ‘We don’t want our minds at rest,’ she said. ‘We wish to put her to rest!’

  He considered for a moment. ‘I understand. Perhaps you should now call the funeral home and arrange for her body to be picked up. Do you have anyone in mind?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lucy. ‘I will ring them. The funeral will be in Oxfordshire. I hope you’ll be able to come.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, sir,’ said the burly man from the undertaker’s. He was dressed in a shiny black suit with frayed cuffs, which might have fitted him ten years ago, but was now stretched too tightly around his ample gut. He was presumably required to keep his jacket buttoned up, which was not only unflattering but, given his present chore, genuinely unsafe. He could barely move his arms away from his body.

  I stood in front of him on the stairs, ready to steady him as he fell, or to catch Suzy’s body as it slid off the stretcher and plummeted into the hallway.

  He was wheezing as he backed down the stairs, his equally challenged colleague above us, bending low to keep his end of the stretcher at step-level, thus achieving something almost flat. Suzy’s body, recently and gently strapped to the surface, did not move a bit.

  At the top of the stairs, Lucy was helping the top man by steadying the stretcher, bent double, huffing and crying and gasping.

  Every two steps we paused, muttering ‘easy now’ to each other, ‘no hurry’. We eventually arrived in the hallway thoroughly winded, and they unrolled the wheels and uprights from the bottom of the stretcher, so that the body – the body – was now resting at bed level.

  ‘There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?’ Bottom man was bent over with his hands on his knees. The two of them paused for a few moments, catching their breath, or perhaps they were waiting for a tip. Lucy stood quietly by her mother’s body, her hand resting gently on Suzy’s shrouded shoulder.

  A few moments later – I can hardly recall the passing of that time, the opening of the door, the wheeling out of the stretcher with its cargo of sticks and parchment, the placing in the back of the undertaker’s vehicle, the closing of the doors, the meaningless thanks and pleasantries – the van drew away from the kerbside and joined the sparse line of traffic as she set out on her final journey westward, where we would join her in a few days’ time.

  We stood in the doorway, holding each other gently, watching the car draw away, becoming smaller and smaller as it proceeded down the road, until it was lost to us when a lorry drew up and covered the tail-lights. We craned our necks for a few moments, peering into the flickering darkness, but the lights were gone.

  Part III

  I hate this. I know everything involves compromise, and I am fully aware that the range of my loathing is panoptic. I have always rather prided myself on this, which I regard as a form of discrimination. Dr Johnson loved a good hater.

  But this is surprisingly grating. Perhaps I started out on the wrong telephonic foot, enquiring from the gormless boy on the Europcar Rentals line why they had banished their ‘e’?

  He did not understand. Why should he? Perhaps no one had enquired before. Perhaps no one cares except me, who am hyper-sensitive to the comings and goings of the letter ‘e’. In my first year at school, my fellows christened me Darky, which soon morphed into Sambo, by which cursed moniker I was plagued until the age of thirteen, when I made my transition to Winchester, and became once again, and finally, James. Darke, James Darke.

  ‘Europe’ has an ‘e’ at the end. There is no reason to drop it when conjoined with car. Why do you inflict this illiteracy on your customers?’

  ‘I’m so sorry . . . Can I help you, sir?’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Do you want to rent a vehicle?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  I hung up. I had only rung the damned missing-e company because they deliver cars direct to your door, pick them up again when you say, and offer a choice of ‘Prestige’ BMWs and Mercedes which, I hoped, might have tinted windows. But I never got far enough to enquire.

  Perhaps I was not ready – quite – to go out? I thought I wanted to. I needed to. But if missing letters in absurd corporate names were putting me off, it was clear that some resistance was manifesting itself.

  I had not once left the house in the last eight months. This morning, opening the back door into the garden, bravely, and putting a foot out into that formerly congenial space, caused me to blink at the direct sunlight, and to gasp at the feeling of openness. Not that I was very exposed, in a walled garden overlooked by a few flats. But I felt vulnerable, as if one of their windows contained a sniper whose sole desire, for all these months, had been to wait for me patiently, and then to assassinate me.

  Looking about, there were signs of new life. It was – I had hardly been aware of it – sometime in the spring, May perhaps, and the daffodils were up amongst the weeds, and a carpet of bright pink and orange primulas aired themselves in the shade beneath the tree. Lilacs too, bless them. Ample symbols of regeneration, if you were looking for them, but all I saw was a cruelty so acute that it seemed designed to mock me, my own aridity and despair.

  Suzy’s garden was out there, just. What would it have been like if I’d exited through my fortress door, stood revealed on my doorstep, with pedestrians meandering by, cars swooping and honking like cross geese? I have always been sensitive to noise, but a sudden movement alarms me as well. A lorry trundling by, so one could feel the air move as it passed. A child rising from its stroller, demanding an ice lolly.

  I fear that a neighbour – not that I know any of them – might be curious to see, at last, some sign of life from the empty house. One who might, even, come by to say hello? It’s an intolerable thought. What if it were Spikeman, whom I had not seen since the curious incident of the dog in the daytime, gone to take his pooch for a constitutional? He wouldn’t recognise me, but the brute would begin to cry at the very sight of his water-boarder. Or perhaps he’d attack, froth-jawed, bespiked, murderous for revenge?

  I might have created the very conditions under which I have to stay inside. This irony was not wasted on me, but my major feeling, shamefully, was relief, as if an agoraphobic had been spared a bracing day at the seaside. I did not wish to go out. I wouldn’t.

  I will. I was not sure what the residue of my moral courage now consisted of, but I had never intended a life-time sentence in solitary confinement. A period of retreat and contrition, some time to recover, yes. To write, of course. To avoid unpleasantness, that too.

  Well, I was not recovered. But I had written much of what needed to be recorded. Not purged, you cannot do that. And unpleasantness was what I could not go on avoiding. I would seek it out, in my tinted-window Prestige vehicle, because, unsought, it would morph into some unforeseeable awfulness that I am unable to contemplate – tumorous.

  I had to get into the bloody car and direct it for an hour and a half through noise and movement, sunlight and people. Whether my – more than fastidious – my lunatic aversion to my fellow man abided, I could not quite say. I had made my peace with Bronya, and established a non-noisome relationship with the workmen, delivery boys, doctor and dentist and hairdresser and computer programmer who occasionally entered my house, and the sight and smell of them no longer nauseated me. Touch of queasiness perhaps, but tolerable in ones. How would I do in a crowd? I knew the answer to that. Avoid crowds.

  Each morning, I might venture out cautiously, and gradually increase both the distance that I travelled and the amount of time that I spent in the street. Perhaps a week of that would enable me to reconnect with my gormless interlocutor at the car rental firm. (I tried various other intact-e firms – Hertz, Budget and Enterprise, for instance �
�� but they did not have what I needed, save for an ‘e’.)

  I was diminished. I had lost weight, perhaps quite a lot of weight. My clothes hung on me, but it had been a long time since I saw myself in a looking-glass. Thank God for that. In the mornings, though, I couldn’t make do without a small shaving glass, else I would have cut myself badly. I could not abide the thought of growing a beard as hermits do, and had always disliked men who hid behind them, and pitied their wives who got all bushied up. My face does not appear in the glass until I have applied the soap with my brush, nor do I pause to examine myself once the straight razor has done its chore. But in that brief moment, when the last of the soap is cleared, my skeletal face mocked me, as if ready to shed the remnants of the tight residual flesh, to emerge cleansed to the bone.

  My personality, such as it is, had become equally skeletal. I agreed with Suzy that self-esteem is for idiots, but self-respect is something other, the very basis of the moral life, and I had none of that either. I could not act because I could hardly find a reason to prefer one action to another. Or, when I was able to, I could not summon the will or strength.

  My temper, had I had someone against whom to direct it – I wish I had – is fierce, unprompted, inhuman and improbably silly. I derived no pleasure from this. Indeed, I got as little pleasure as I could. It’s surprising how it falls away. I didn’t listen to music, I didn’t read much any more, in the absence of Bronya I hardly ate, and though I drank, I did so for the effect not the pleasure of the grape. I wrote, but you could hardly call that enjoyment (or even writing).

  This inventory of my shortcomings might go on and on. My lacks, my emptiness, my fatuity. I used to have a life, though, I remember it – I miss it. Though diminished in appearance, temper and appetite, I am not some sort of monk. Just a penitent. And I’d had enough of it. I would start out slowly. Slop peach juice down the front of my dressing gown, uncaring, head out in the direction of the world.