by Rick Gekoski
Overcome by grief at the loss, the waste, the transience. We’re not immortal souls even in this life, much less the next. I don’t blame God. We are not created in His image, in any image other than that of a minute helix of DNA pursuing its inexorable ways. We are neither made nor crafted – just spermatic instances, penetrated eggs, larvae, spawn. No one can make sense of it, there’s nothing there to work with.
No one can sleep with such thoughts ricocheting around his head. I got up too quickly and the room started to sway, sat down again to let the dizziness resolve itself, rose again more temperately, put on my dressing gown, walked to the window. It was an uncommonly clear night, the stars more visible than usual in haze-infested Oxford, thousands of pinpricks of light insistently recommending themselves as sources of contemplation, as multiple metaphors. It frightened Pascal, the silence of those infinite spaces. I don’t know why. The gigantic scale might be dread-inducing, but what’s wrong with silence? What did he want his heavens to do, talk? God presumably, with his commandments and proclamations and prohibitions – yack yack, what a bore. Give me a little peace and quiet any day.
Might those pinpricks of light in the darkness evoke the myriad souls who have passed, or perhaps the faint sparkle of memories we seek to console us? It’s too much for me. I’d rather eat a chocolate Hobnob, brew a cup of tea. There is something obscene in the desire to make sense of what is too large, too inchoate, too lacking in meaning to comprehend. Fruitlessly seeking an appropriate image, to appropriate an image. It doesn’t matter, exquisite or clichéd, words fail. The night draws to a close: the light obliterates the lights.
I preferred going to her modest little college for our trysts, slumming it rather than watching her cast envious eyes on my chambers, wistfully aware of her banishment to the utilitarian and the modern. In her room I tried very hard – and no doubt failed – to avoid denigrating judgements of tongue or eye. She was ashamed to be a member of St Anne’s, which had only recently joined the University, having ascended from its status as a mere training institution of some sort.
It was a step down – more like a staircase down, Suzy acknowledged ruefully – from the heights of Somerville or LMH – but St Anne’s had the great virtue of being willing to accept her, with her modest record at A level. Yes, she interviewed fluently, though her school reports, and worse, her ambiguous recommendation – ‘she is a sprightly girl, fluent and self-confident, but rather inclined to trade on both charm and talent’ – put off the grander colleges. Fortunately her mother was, if not a friend, at least a regular acquaintance of Mary Ogilvy, the Head of St Anne’s, with whom she had been at school. A lunch à trois was arranged, and Suzy’s offer of a place was wrapped up by coffee-time, months before any application was lodged. Miss Ogilvy was a shrewd judge, and her decision had nothing to do with her feelings for Lady Moulton, whom she had always disliked. No, she was intrigued by Suzy, who, she suspected, might blossom if transplanted from her drear Dorset habitat and family.
Suzy arrived at St Anne’s feeling that she should have done better, and knowing that she hadn’t. She settled in. Put up her Grateful Dead posters, bought throws and bedspreads and Moroccan pillows, burned incense, played the Stones on her portable turntable, and occasionally entertained me for a few happy hours.
We rarely spent the night together, and looked forward to having a place of our own. Living with one’s girlfriend – they were not (blessedly) called partners then, which still has a business-like connotation to my ear – was rather risqué, and when Suzy’s lamentable père heard of our later cohabitation, he worried – her mother confided with a giggle – that his daughter was now ‘used goods’.
‘I got used a long time ago,’ Suzy laughed, and her mother, having sensed this as only mothers can – fathers try not to notice – was far from disapproving. She’d done the same, and not with boring Henry either, who still didn’t know it, or chose not to.
My windows overlooked the front quad, and we would gaze out together into the night, naked and giggling, wondering if anyone would spot us. I’d stand behind her, hands cupping her breasts.
I looked up, and from that very window a girl was gazing pensively into the quad. For a moment her eyes trailed over me as I looked up at her, an elderly stranger, met mine of a moment, and moved on, indifferent, as the rooms were indifferent too – the quad, the Hall, carrying on as they had for centuries, inhabited by thousands like us, stony and remote.
I’d been to St Anne’s. Done Merton. A few days had passed, and I felt no closer to – what? Picking up the phone? Writing an email? Writing a letter? Too distancing and formal. And I could hardly drop in, could I, ring the bell, stand there like a pathetic scarecrow from the past, importuning, red-faced and stuttering? I’m here, I’m near, but the distance has paradoxically enlarged with every advance I make in her direction.
Do as Suzy and I used to do? Neither of us had access to a phone, except to make outgoing calls. Home, that sort of thing. Or we could receive calls through the College, though this was understood to be for emergencies. No – one would write a note, go round and put it in the pigeonhole at the College lodge. Meet me tonight at 8 at the KA for a pint?
So: Meet me tomorrow at midday to discuss my shameful, craven disappearance? I will come to you. That sort of thing? Best of a bad job. I sat down. Took some headed hotel notepaper from my desk drawer. Got out my pen.
Darling Lucy,
I am so wretchedly sorry to have caused you such pain, and at such a terrible time. I can hardly explain how or why this happened. I found myself – how can I even say this? – incapable, lost, stricken, bereft – no, all and none of the above. Words fail me.
All I can say is that I did not want to hurt you. That I knew I was doing so. That I was harpooned by grief, and that every day for many months I was quite incapable of human discourse. Even with you, my very dear girl. Especially with you.
Can you forgive me this, a little, if only enough to allow me to come to you and to talk? I would give anything if, for a moment, I might embrace and recover you, and perhaps you, me.
I can be reached at The Old Parsonage Hotel in Oxford.
Your inadequate penitent, loving you, loving you always, still,
Dad
No. Never. Not that I can do very much better, but it won’t do. Talking about the failure of language, what rot, how inappropriately appropriate. She’d be offended and laugh, or sneer, and she’d be right. What a wretched effect I am become, how lost to love.
WRETCHED
miserable, unhappy, sad, broken-hearted, heartbroken, grief-stricken, grieving, sorrowful, sorrowing, mourning, anguished, distressed, desolate, devastated, despairing, inconsolable, disconsolate, downcast, down, downhearted, dejected, crestfallen, cheerless, depressed, melancholy, morose, gloomy, glum, mournful, doleful, dismal, forlorn, woeful, woebegone, abject, low-spirited, fit for the rubbish, useless arsehole
And am I, envelope in hand, to creep up her drive, drop my contrition through the letter box, skedaddle back to my car, hoping she will not hear the sound and open the door, or come to the window? See me skulking away, as I have skulked away these long months. What better to confirm her opinion of me, to strengthen the regret and abhorrence that she must feel?
No. I will ring her. I have my phone, and her number.
The receptionist said yes, they could accommodate me for another week. Am I happy to keep the same accommodation?
‘Delighted, thank you.’
‘Thank you, Dr Darke.’
I walked in the Parks, strolled along the river, sat on a bench, ignored the daffodils, read The Times, prevaricated, lost in funk. In a fit of apparent free-spiritedness, if I were either free or had any spirit, I decided upon an antidote to the culinary adequacy of my hotel and sought out my old haunt in the Covered Market for a nostalgic bean feast.
The old working-class café was still there, filled with the same tradesmen and builders and undergraduates who’d been in it forever, as if in a
modest circle of Hell. I ate a full English breakfast so proletarian it embarrassed me to be seen in its company. My stomach began to growl at the stench, anticipating the dire gastric effects to come. Processed fried white bread, tinned baked beans, mushrooms that had never encountered a field, stewed tomatoes lacking any taste other than a faint residue of acidity, eggs so batteried that they assaulted you, fatty undercooked bacon, a sausage made up of the grisly scrapings and remnants of what was once, perhaps, a pig. Instant coffee with longlife milk.
I first ate here almost fifty years ago, in this very place, and the breakfast was as I remembered it. Maybe it was the same one, and they’d kept it warm for me? I wasn’t always as fastidious as I’d now become, nor so superior. I read the Daily Mail. Burped. Went to Boots to buy some Eno’s.
I made a point of getting straight back to the hotel, in case my bowels made immediate protest. Yesterday I was in the loo four times, on each of which I strained and produced a little, knowing there was more to come, almost ready to travel, but not yet. Repeat again, and a few hours later again. My anus felt like it had been injected with Botox, a baboon’s would look pert and virginal in comparison. I knew that if I didn’t keep trying to expel, my perverse, recalcitrant passage would slowly melt and disgorge its partially impacted contents into my pants.
Business idea! A line of underwear for the elderly in shades of brown! Perhaps they could be branded ‘THE HUMAN STAIN’, if Philip Roth hasn’t copyrighted the phrase. Featuring pants with brown paisley designs of rugby balls, West Indian cricketers, leather boots, chocolate bars, bagels, coffee beans, redwood trunks, acorns or pine cones, bears or armadillos. Or turds, that’d be cute. You could do a whole line of them: Spiketurds would be too gross, but I rather fancy horse droppings with bits of yellow straw sticking out. You could mess those with impunity, it would be like filling in the blanks.
If you hang around the underwear department at Marks and Spencer’s and watch the old folks, you can tell what they are looking for. Entirely preoccupied, without embarrassment, solipsistically bowel-defined, they are seeking pants in the darkest available colours, anxious not to expose their leaky frailty to spouses, nurses, cleaners or launderette attendants.
Brown pants! Problem solved! I could clean up on this idea: any Freudian knows that where there’s shit, there’s money.
I returned to my room, my stomach surprisingly settled down, and rang Lucy. My hand, to my surprise, was not trembling, though I was pretty sure my voice would be.
She picked up at the third ring. ‘Hello, Lucy here.’
She first began to announce herself like this, answering our phone, when she was three. It delighted her to proclaim that it was she, not Mummy or Daddy, and whoever called was charmed by her directness and innocence, and would pause to have a few words. She loved talking on the phone, chattering away inconsequentially, and eventually had to be persuaded to fetch whichever of us was being called. ‘Daddy,’ she’d say, handing over the receiver, ‘it’s a man. It’s for you.’
‘Lucy, Dad here.’
There was a long silence, and it was hardly up to me to break it.
‘Who?’
‘Darling, it’s Daddy. Won’t you please talk to me?’
‘All of a sudden you want to talk?’
‘I’ve wanted to all along. I am so sorry. I feel dreadful to have hurt you so . . .’
There was another and longer silence.
‘I’m not talking to you on the fucking phone.’
‘I don’t want to either, darling. May I come round, please? I’m in Oxford. I need to see you . . .’
‘Wonderful! So you need to see me now, in your own good time? What about me needing to see you? And after Mummy died and I wrote to you and wrote to you, and you were hiding in that damn house, too frightened to answer the door, or a letter, or a phone call . . . So now you’re ready?’ Her voice was grinding, metallic, hardly recognisable.
‘Please. Yes. Please. I am so wretchedly sorry. I’d like to explain if I can, but I’m not sure how. But I want to see you and be with you and be your father again. If you will allow me to.’
‘Tomorrow at the house. Ten o’clock. And if you funk it, don’t bother to try again.’
She put the phone down. I rang off and lay down on my bed, desolate yet buoyed by the sound of her voice, however hostile, my dear Lucy’s voice that despised me.
I’d apologised, cringed, wet myself with contrition. It didn’t make me feel any better. There was scant pleasure in the humiliating process. No relief, no satisfaction. It had to be done, but unlike those bumbling Catholics who exit the confessional grinning inanely, purged of their sins, there was neither cleansing nor forgiveness in secular contrition. God wouldn’t forgive me. Lucy won’t. I don’t. My abject apology was a necessary step to get me from a state of misery to one of what? Less misery? Big fucking deal! Yes. It was.
I couldn’t sleep, turned on the light, tried to read a magazine, but the print sauntered before my eyes. The telly showed a black and white movie, some sort of thriller, some cops and some robbers. I turned it off. Made tea from my supplied kettle, ate chocolate Hobnobs. Turned off the light, turned it on again.
I have a distressing recurring dream, but I am hesitant even to write it down, which gives it a sort of credibility and transfers it from my twilight world into the light. Harder to get rid of in that state. I hate accounts of people’s dreams. Suzy used to record hers in the middle of the night when she was in therapy, transmit them to Dr Frommer, come home and write down the interpretations, and then wish to discuss them with me. They were all boring, or at least the recounting of them was, curious how it takes thirty seconds to have a dream and thirty minutes to tell it. After a few tries she ceased imposing them on me.
In a novel, when the hero has an Important Dream – and they never have less than whoppers – that goes on for two pages, I always skip it. Who gives a damn? Just a dream, imbued with phoney significance by an insistent writer, a cliché. Like Dostoevsky’s horse being beaten.
I’ll do it anyway, I only have myself to bore.
I had been kidnapped and forced into the boot of a car, screaming, terrified, clawing, urinating. The car drove for hours, then stopped. The doors opened and closed. I heard footsteps walking away . . .
I had it at least once a week, always the same. It terrified me, and I woke up sodden, screaming, palpitating. I waited for ten minutes to regain my breath and equilibrium, to still my heart, and then stood in the shower under hot water for ten minutes, then cold for one. Took a Valium, got back in bed – the dream never comes twice on the same night.
I know what it means. I take the point. So why won’t it just go away? The hours passed as slowly as if I were entombed in that boot, and almost as fearfully. I lapsed into a series of short periods of sleep, apparently fleeting, though when I checked my watch, again, it seemed as if I had been asleep for an hour, or two. But my thinking was uninterrupted, and it was clogged with remorse, and fear, and arid regret. Of anticipation of seeing Lucy, hearing her voice, touching her fleetingly, I could locate none at all.
I got out of bed at 7.30 – the forthcoming hours lay like an endless desert before me, searing. I forced myself not to look at my watch, put it in my pocket to avoid temptation, as I walked round and round St Giles. Waited for an hour – at least an hour! – to pass, then checked my watch to find it had only been twenty minutes.
The Mercedes had a slight film of dust, squat and abandoned in its parking place. Unlike my 3.8, though, it starts every morning. I set out, heading more or less towards Abingdon, around a road system become so circuitous and complex that I gave up, and merely tried to head south-ish, perhaps to kill the remaining time in the country. Maybe go for a walk somewhere, anywhere.
I wanted to arrive at Lucy’s toned by contrition, conciliatory, yet – can this be credible? – hopeful. I missed her dreadfully, and I knew how much she has always loved me. Surely this could not get swept away so easily?
; So easily? I take the point.
Lucy hated anyone being late. I suppose it is because she leads a provincial life – no traffic jams, Tube strikes, buses blown up by terrorists, nothing to slow progress unexpectedly – there’s nothing to do in her Abingdon suburb except be on time. I rang the doorbell at 10 a.m., and it made a drear cacophonous, triple-chiming church bell sound that gave me the creeps. It was already installed in the house when they purchased it and, despite my frequent entreaties that it be changed – I offered to pay, to arrange it, to oversee the work, anything – Lucy and Sam kept it. They said that little Rudy liked it, but I suspect the reason, aside from inertia, was that it irritated me. Suzy, predictably, claimed to adore it. Very middle England, she’d say.
Lucy kept me waiting, then opened the door so quickly – so harshly, if doors can be opened harshly – that it rather startled me, as if by a slap. She didn’t have her hands on her hips, but she didn’t have them round me either. She stepped aside. ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’
‘Thank you.’
She looked at me closely. ‘My God, you look terrible. Don’t you eat any more?’
She was dressed in faded jeans and a baggy orange sweater, and some sort of rubbery shoes that would have looked ugly even in a gymnasium.
Suzy would look at her and say, ‘ Darling, I despair. Can’t you make an effort, just sometimes?’
‘I know it is a continual surprise and disappointment to you, Mum, but I’m not you.’
Suzy never gave up, or gave in. She would arrive with a smart new scarf, or a pair of well-cut linen trousers from a shop on Regent Street, and Lucy would accept them with mock grace, but never be seen in them in our presence. Suzy liked to hope that she would use them for best when she went out with Sam, but their outings were confined to kiddies’ activities, and the occasional Indian or film. Nothing to get your glad rags on for. I suspected she gave them to charity shops, brand new.
