by Rick Gekoski
Or is it? These gummy spots of time that inexplicably adhere when so much more is erased, how do we account for their tenacity? Why do I remember holding little Lucy’s hand, but not bathing her, or combing her hair? Why do I have such a meagre store of memories about her?
Or indeed of myself? My childhood prior to the age of five has largely been erased, leaving only smudgy traces, generated largely, I suspect, by old family photographs. There I am, aged three, feeding the ducks in Regent’s Park with Granny and Grandpa. They are dressed in the stuffy adult garb of the 1940s, he in a wide-lapelled suit and trilby, which he wears at a surprisingly jaunty angle, she in stiff undergarments that make her look like a dummy in the window of Selfridges. Grandpa has a funny short moustache, black in the middle, but grey at the sides. Grandma’s is sparser, with one long wispy hair.
They pose before the camera – who is taking the picture? – uneasy and formal, summoning a smile that will not emerge, required by the form to look happy. Which, if you only took the damn camera away, they were.
They loved taking me to the park on Saturday mornings. The fat white ducks would come out of the water and waddle up to us as we opened our bag of stale bread. Close to my feet, quacking. The cement path was slippery in the rain, covered with yucky duck poo. Granny held my hand, and I fed them with my other. It was exciting and frightening. I had to hold my hand up high or the greedy duckies would grab the bread with their beaks, right out of my fingers. Maybe they’d try to eat my finger too. I can see this, I can remember it. I have constructed it out of the raw material of the photo and something buried in me, undead.
My schoolboy and undergraduate years, largely undocumented in the family album, are available to me as through a mist. I was self-conscious about being photographed and intellectually opposed to it. I refused to own a camera, or to appear before one. Recording, rather than living, I would sniff. I wish I had known better, but why would I? Later on, Suzy and I travelled a bit, as little as I could negotiate. I am of Larkin’s party with regard to ‘abroad’. I disapprove of it. Even dear Lucy’s childhood reappears only in vignettes that I rather suspect I have invented, or at least elaborated considerably.
Opening her third letter, I knew things were about to get a lot more memorable. Anyway, I don’t have enough time left to me to forget painful things, though I let a lot of the non-essential stuff slip away happily enough.
My short term memory is shot, shocking in its absence. Sometimes I don’t even remember what it is I am trying to remember. I have invented a set of rituals that help get me through my daily chores, to evade the casual eclipses of my mind:
Teeth brushed? Feel the toothbrush. Is it wet? Surprisingly hard to tell sometimes. Never mind, doesn’t hurt to brush again.
Flies zipped? Wait for another wee, it’ll be coming soon. Remember to zip. Forget.
Had my coffee? Don’t empty the plunger, and see if the grounds are wet.
Drunk enough water? Suzy says I get very dehydrated and it makes me grumpy and low on energy. I never remember to keep myself topped up. Do not know how to remedy this. Nor do I remember if and when I have. Keep a bottle of water on various tables, see how full it is (if I have indeed remembered to fill it).
Eaten lunch? Who cares?
Taken my pills? Need to make a note each time. Pad in bathroom next to pills on the shelf, with list. Remembered to note taken pills on list? Sometimes. Most of them are prophylactic, which may mean I am a hypochondriac. Statins to warn off cholesterol, beta blockers for fibrillations, tranquillizers for life.
I resent having gout, but the medication has unpleasant side effects so I won’t take it. Better to suffer (a lot!) very occasionally. It migrates from toe to ankle to knee, and once it has set in I hobble and swear for a week. It’s unfair. I am the wrong demographic: I eat abstemiously, though perhaps I drink a bit too much, and I hardly carry an excess pound, even at my advanced, unexercised age.
Gout is a somatic metaphor, as that irritating American woman with big black hair used to say. I am overheated, swollen, aching, need to take to my bed and get off my feet. My first attack came a month after Suzy was diagnosed, though I had no idea what it was. I thought I must have bumped my ankle. I’m always bumping into things. But after three days, when it was swollen and red and throbbing and felt like a knife was stuck in it, it occurred to me that it must be the old Semitic blight.
Dad!
I came by the house yesterday, to find it virtually boarded up. The door has been changed, and my key will not work. There is no letter box! How did you do that? And why? No door knocker. The bell hardly rings.
And there’s a spyhole? Who are you so afraid to see? It has to be me, doesn’t it? You’re hardly a target for the Mafia. No, it’s Me!! Your daughter!!! Whose mother has just died!!!!
For God’s sake, what is wrong with you? I rang the bells of the neighbours, but no one even knows who you are. Ah, the friendly joys of London life, the mutual concern, the sense of community! That nasty fellow next door said he thought he’d seen you peering out the back window into his garden, and wanted to know more about you. There was something creepy about him, as if he could do horrid things. Nice neighbour that one is!
This means you are in there, hiding, like some neurotic Victorian spinster. I banged on the door, and came back later and did it again. I left a note on it, so perhaps you will know what I was feeling. (The note was not half as angry as I am now!)
For pity’s sake – for your own sake, for mine – for all of us, come out. It cannot be as bad out here as it must be in there.
I’m furious with you, but we need to be together. I can get over the anger if you will only meet me halfway. Any way. Just meet me. This cannot be allowed to go on, I fear for what it is doing to you, and to me, and to us. Mummy would be appalled.
There’s nothing the matter with you! She’s the dead one – so you have to be the live one!
Lucy
The only good news is that the next letter was shorter. The contents were predictable.
If you cannot see me – yet – I hope you might meet with someone – maybe that funny George from school? He seems harmless. But you have to let someone in or that outer door is going to become an inner one. A symbol. It already is. Is everyone locked out? I hope not! Even prisoners are allowed visitors. If they will allow them.
Which was tolerable enough, and hardly hurt a bit. But then, this next missive:
You bastard! How could you? Even after these months I cannot believe that you could sink so low. First you abandon your loved ones. You lock yourself up like a lunatic. OK my therapist says I have to understand the extremities of grief. To understand, to forgive you. If I ever see you again.
But this takes the biscuit: you fired Bronya! How dare you! She wanted to help! I told her everything. About you and Mum and how terrible it all was. She has been trying to get you out of yourself, make sure you eat, tried to rekindle some warmth in you, get you interested in books and talk again.
And you get frightened, poor little you. Somebody getting a touch too close? Fired her by email! Without the guts even to do it to her face, you just slink away. Coward! There she is, living on nothing, sharing a room in Uxbridge, sending a few pounds a month home. Being kind to you. Oh no! Thanks anyway.
And the funny thing is, she says she forgives you.
I don’t.
Go to Hell. Stay there.
Bronya? Lucy? What? How? I have never used the term – it’s a cliché beloved of second-rate novelists and makers of worthy documentaries – but here it comes: dumbfounded. Even that is thin and inadequate . . . The hell with the little Spartan boy, I feel some exclamations coming on: Bronya! Lucy!
What the fuck?
Lucy never swears, this is totally out of character for her, whose girlhood reaction to Suzy’s foul mouth was to offer to wash her own out with soap. I would feel proud of the vulgar new her if I wasn’t numb with astonishment.
Of course the letter was written two
months ago, before Bronya’s night-time visitation. My God! Lucy would now know about that too. Which means, does it not, she might have let herself in, instead of Bronya? Too frightened, I suppose.
Could she have put Bronya up to it? It’s outrageous! Darling Bronya, maybe you could sneak in, and throw the old man, you know, how we say in English, a pity fuck?
And she accuses me of abusing Bronya, of treating her instrumentally!
For the first time I feel inclined to answer. To fight back. I’m sick of cowering and being abused. A rent girl. Hot Sex from Sofia! That’ll get the old codger up and about!
Bitch.
This is the last letter I will write.
I no longer have a mother but I am close to her. She is dead but not to me.
I have a father? No. No father. He is alive, but not for me.
I hope you are scalded by shame, but I doubt it.
Goodbye.
And then, postmarked a month later, an overstuffed envelope, the last of the series.
Dear Daddy,
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
I don’t want to lose you, but you’re lost. Wherever I look you’re not there. I don’t know what to do. I know I can’t leave you marooned or hiding like a hermit in a cave, or whatever it is you now are.
Sam says I am being a wimp (he means, as usual!) and that I ought to let him come down to London with me and a hammer and a screwdriver and an axe if needs be, and simply roust you out, drag you blinking into the light. That’s not like him. He hates fights and confrontations, but he’s so angry with you, and so frustrated.
I’m not, not any more. I am sort of, I don’t know what to call it, I always get so anxious even talking to you, much less writing, you’re so pernickety and precise. When I was little – and not so little! – I was shy and tongue-tied, not because I am basically like that, but because you made me feel bashful and inadequate, as if whatever I said or did was never going to be right, not quite up to your high standard. Standards. I was such a compliant little girl, so easily hurt, so anxious not to cause that unpleasant wince you make when something isn’t quite good enough, when your eyebrows raise a little, and your mouth purses: an opinion, an action, a way of saying. A sentence.
But, who cares? I am sort of post-angry. Not resigned, I’m certainly not that. I know I need to reclaim you, get you back to yourself, and to me. And to your family, which, however much you shrug, is basically all you have, all that matters. You don’t know this, but it’s true.
I also know that Sam’s way won’t work, it’d make things much worse. You can drag a hermit out of his cave, but all he’ll do is blink and shrink and slink back.
For God’s sake, people lose their partners, people die, it happens rather a lot. We suffer from it, we are knocked sideways, we grieve. But we don’t run away, don’t hide like a mole in a hole – I hope that offends you, I’m sick of having to interrogate my metaphors.
We knew Mummy was dying, she was ready to go, it was a relief and a release for all of us when she finally passed away. So why are you so determined to follow her, to pass away from us all, from yourself?
This is the closest I’ve ever got – God isn’t this sad? – to talking to you frankly, and fully, with proper feeling and in my own stumbling way, my own voice, do you call it? Ever since I was a girl you’ve loomed in my imagination like a mythical figure, not God exactly, but someone strong and silent and towering, who needs to be placated, and whose judgements will be severe. Not wrath. No. I can hardly recall you raising your voice to me. Just some sort of remote being that one ought never to displease, but often does.
One? I know whenever I call myself that there’s something gone wrong. One? Who’s that? Posh talk, crap. I’m just trying to say I have always been in awe of you, and wished there could be some real communication between us. Or do I mean some communion? Like there was between Mummy and me. Yes, I know we fought, and I know she was always trying to remake me in her image, but she was there, she cared.
And you know what? Is this pathetic? I took her for granted. Mummy was always there, on the phone, in my house, in my face. And you never were. I’d ring, and you’d pass as little time as you could asking the obvious questions – How’ve you been? How’s little Rudy? – never anything about my work or friends, because you have no idea what I do, or who I love – and grudgingly at last do give my regards to Sam. Hold on, I’ll get Mummy.
Mummy I could take for granted. I had her. It is you I have . . . what? I don’t know the word. I wanted to say yearned for, but that sounds icky. Maybe you’ll know what I mean, you’re so good with words, and I’m so halting and lame.
Rudy keeps asking me where you are, and where you went. At first I said you were very sad after Gramma’s death and needed to be alone. Rudy said that was OK, but the next day he asked, ‘Does Gampy have to be alone still?’ Then I said you were ill, but not very, not like in a hospital. And now what am I to say? That for some reason, some unfathomable reason, you do not care to see him, or me, or Sam? He’s a child, he thinks everything is about him. And he knows that his grandfather has abandoned him.
And to me, ever and always, if a ghost a very dear ghost. Undead, just frozen. Tell me what I can do to warm you up, anything, whatever, anytime. Tell me and I will come. Ever since I left you at Paddington, so long ago it seems now, so very long, I have been desperate to talk to you. There’s still issues we need to talk about, aren’t there? I’m not sure if they can be resolved, but for goodness’ sake can we find a way to talk? For once? And at last?
You can rely on me. Can I rely on you?
Lucy xxxx
What is one to say to that?
The Mercedes – the windows mildly tinted, insufficient for an endangered Colombian drug lord, but better than nothing – arrived precisely at 9 a.m. A courteous young woman knocked at the door, dressed in an unnaturally crisp, unbecoming uniform of synthetic material, printed in bilious discordant tones, festooned with the corporate logo, as if to mock me. ‘EUROPCAR! EUROPCAR!’ She took me efficiently through the paperwork, copied my licence details onto the form, tried to sell me various unnecessary insurances, asked me to initial the document in a variety of places, handed over the keys, and made off. A colleague in another Europcar (a Ford) waited at the kerbside for her.
I was ready to go, because the rental car was parked illegally just outside the house. I could have put one of those fill-out forms for visitors in the windscreen, and kept it there for a few hours, but what’s the point? The longer I delayed, the less likely I was to get myself going.
It was hardly a Prestige Mercedes, merely a basic – the Americans call them compact – E-class saloon, of the sort that rightly become taxis in Berlin, which impress everyone who rides in them except the Germans. I should have asked for a top-of-the-range Vauxhall, an altogether better (and cheaper) vehicle. What a sucker I am.
I felt happy in it nonetheless. I put my luggage in the boot, adjusted the seats and mirrors (not as easy as it sounds), found Radio 3 on the stereo, and placed my provisions on the seat next to me. Thermos of coffee, mobile phone, downloaded route instructions from the AA website, bottle of water, Valium, digoxin, paracetamol, ibuprofen, and a hip flask of brandy.
It should only take an hour and a half. I started the car and moved slowly away. Unused to the automatic transmission – a barbarous invention that takes the fun, and control, out of driving – I missed the clunky solidity of my beloved 3.8. Nothing like those old Jaguars (not Jags) to anchor you to the road. The Mercedes, in comparison, felt as if it were floating. But there was none of the anxiety that I had anticipated, cocooned from the world, with that curious and inappropriate sense of privacy and invulnerability that afflicts we drivers, until we run over a dog. It’s so comfortable to be behind the wheel, I love driving, and the car, though underpowered and pedestrian, handled neatly and accurately as I took it through the first turns and roundabouts on the way to the M40.
It was so fine, it felt new – renewin
g – listening to a Bach Brandenburg Concerto, entering the Westway, humming along, waving a finger conducting the orchestra. I hadn’t felt so alive – indeed, I had hardly felt alive at all – since Suzy died. Because of a car? Not quite . . . but it helped. Perhaps I should get the Jaguar out of the garage when I got back, smarten it up.
At the ramp on the entry to the A40 there was a sign announcing Road Works, and we came to a halt, inching ahead for the next twenty minutes. Next to me was a filthy nondescript van with a youth playing his stereo so loudly that I could feel my steering wheel vibrate. The music – if it could be called that – was harrowingly invasive. Rapping? Heavy metals? It rasped like a file against my nerves, and of a sudden I was enraged that I should be so thoughtlessly subjected to it.
I wound down my window and gesticulated towards the driver. He neither saw nor heard me, nodding his head to the thump! thump! thump! of the bass, lost in his hideous, empty, meaningless little world. I was filled with a loathing so intense that it quite took my breath away. I wished I’d had some Spikedog-repellent to throw in his eyes. I looked at the seat next to me, hoping to locate something else – if not better – to throw out of the window to attract his attention.
A bottle of Valium tablets! Not for throwing, for relief! Cap off, wash 10 mg down with a glug of water. It tastes of plastic. Could I throw the bottle itself? That’d work, but then there is no water. It’d be worth it, after all I still had my thermos. I lowered my electric window, grasped the water bottle firmly in my right hand, and took aim. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, strapped into a seat, unable to turn sideways. I might use a side-arm backhand motion, remembering Suzy’s tips when she’d tried fruitlessly to teach me tennis (rather like teaching a canary to ride a bicycle). No wrist action. Single, taut sweeping motion. Steady backswing, wide shoulder turn, eye focused, follow through. I can do this, I counselled myself, thinking of my aim when I’d lobbed Spikedog his retributions.
The van’s window was partially open, the sound issuing from it like a sub-nuclear blast. I could feel it on my face, my cheeks wobbled. A good shot might actually hit him between the eyes. Even a poor one would make a thump against his window. But even as I contemplated this revenge, I knew I couldn’t pull it off physically. Emotionally I was ready for a fight, yearning for one, but there was too little space, too small a target. The damn bottle would bounce off the door frame and bop me on the nose. Life begins as tragedy and ends as farce.
