by Sarah Hall
Nicki was in the same room that she has been in for years. She was surrounded, as ever, by photographs, teddy bears and flowers. On the table next to the bed was her CD player and the stack of albums she had listened to as a teenager. You inserted one and pressed play. You wondered how sick she was of hearing Joy Division. You sat down, picked up the hairbrush from the bed-stand, and ran it once through a lock of her hair. It was still beautiful.
An intense nausea flushed through you. You felt your face tingle and your mouth water. You fought against the sensation. The discomfort passed. You were surprised, the feeling was unusual-your stomach is strong and you are almost never sick. You pulled the brush through Nicki’s shiny hair once more, working a tangle loose. You looked at her, lying there. Her thin golden eyebrows, her snub nose, the skin smooth around her eyes. She is your age, but she looked like a girl, the muscles of her face blissful and unused. Again you felt like throwing up. You put the brush down and cupped your hands over your mouth, looked towards the door.
It came out of nowhere, the rage. Suddenly you wanted to slap her so hard. You felt such anger towards her. Her apathy, her indecision, her refusal to wake, get up and reclaim her life, or once and for all shut off. Surely there was some choice she could make, you thought, some flickering pilot light in her brain, that could be turned up, that could take charge, rousing her wasted limbs? All the years of stand-by, her visitors held like hostages in this room, ransomed by the slimmest of hopes, and equal to her in their impotency. All the years of dependency and money, waiting for her second coming.
Looking down at her, you couldn’t remember her at all, only that sharp feeling of terror as she struggled for air on the moor, as she buckled to her knees, her chest rising and falling massively, her trachea hissing, the snow blowing upwards around her. You couldn’t remember what her voice sounded like, only the words, when she called, To you, Suze, and passed the netball into the semicircle of the court so you could shoot at goal. You couldn’t remember her laughter in the toilets when you had to borrow tampons.
But you could remember Danny. You could remember counting all of Danny’s milk teeth with a finger, and wobbling the front ones loose, and how those pink dental tablets you were given to chew at school showed where he was missing plaque after he brushed. You could remember how he turned the pages of a book, pinching the paper together in the middle, and bunching each leaf over, and how his eyes seemed to bruise in their sockets after he’d been on a massive bender, and the way he would sneeze three times, always three, never just once or twice. You could remember a million tiny indelible details about his life, and all of this was useless, an encyclopedia of the redundant, because he was gone.
But there she was, on her back, blushing prettily, her hair growing longer every day. Nicki, still connected to life by some stubborn filament, holding the gift of the present with the loosest grip.
While you were sitting there, trying not to be sick, wanting to strike her, one of the nurses came in to rub her legs and drop saline into her eyes. She recognised you, asked how you were, thanked you for still coming all these years later. She chatted to you indiscreetly. She said Nicki had stopped getting periods now. They had done tests but there was nothing conclusive. It could be early menopause. It could be loss of bone marrow. She began to clean around the hole her food tube slotted into with a cotton swab. Look. Your friend has brushed your hair, Nicki, she said. Isn’t that nice of her? I think it’s just like being Sleeping Beauty.
You wondered if that’s how the nurse really saw it: a coma like a fairytale curse. Meanwhile Nicki would be helped to eat and piss and cry. Her sores would be irrigated, her densities measured. Her family would bring her birthday cake and tell her the news and pretend she wasn’t catatonic. Inside the husk, she might be conscious of everything, the voices, the bathing, those morose repetitious lyrics. Her mind might be shrilling out its state of emergency in a pitch too high for the human ear to register. Get me out. Get me out of here. Or she might know nothing at all.
Next to her bed, as the nurse swabbed the distended ring of flesh, you bit your lip and hated her. You wanted to shout in her face, stick pins in her forehead, anything to get a response. You wanted to scream at her for not being Danny, stand up, and walk out. Of that day’s visits, you didn’t know which was worse-the flowering, planted graveyard to which you had just been, or this vacant form in the bed. Life is a joke, you thought. It is worthless. And there is no point. There is no point.
Your mum made a pot of herbal tea when you got back to the cottage and you sat with her at the kitchen table. The house was cold, the windows trickling with condensation. Neither of them ever notice the chill in the house the way you do now. The south is making you soft. Upstairs you could hear your dad clomping and banging in the studio, the deep drawers of his apothecary chest being jerked open and slammed shut. Looking for something that probably never existed, your mum said and smiled, all the tiny lines around her eyes creasing. She was tired, you could see that; her skin was unusually dry and her hair was greyer. Losing a son had altered her vitality; it had leached her lustre. But she was sitting erect in her usual chair by the range, her woollen jumper brightly flecked with blue and yellow, and she seemed to fit the room so well.
When you were a kid it was the same: she always matched the surroundings perfectly, wherever she was, in the garden, by the river, being blown about town when she was shopping. Sometimes she would seem almost to disappear, and then she would move, to fetch something or make something, and you would catch sight of her again, and you would be amazed by her camouflage. You always wanted to ask her how she could accept everything so gracefully, how she could belong?
She was your father’s exact opposite. Where he was extraordinarily plumed and song-filled, your mother was quiet and ordinary. They were like finches, the pair of them.
You watched her stirring the pot of tea, holding a strainer over the cup, the stream of yellow liquid directed perfectly, without a drop being spilled. Do you want honey, poppet? She asked as if giving you the option, knowing you take it, and already passing you the jar.
When you were younger she had experimented with Buddhism and had gone on a few retreats, leaving your dad to manage the household. You would hear nothing from her for three weeks. Sometimes you had imagined she’d left you all. No-left him, because he was so often overwhelming. The chaos was always restored within a few hours of her getting home; the beds straightened, the bread bin filled. She would talk about containers and cleansing, the way to breathe. Your dad joked that she was hinting about his homebrew and his rollies, but you could tell he was pleased. She was home and he was over the moon. Often you would see her meditating by the elm tree in the garth, cross-legged, in her moccasins.
She went with you every week to see Dr Dixon at the health clinic. She never went into town to kill the hour, was always there reading Digest magazines or bracken-control leaflets when you came back out into the waiting room. Or she’d be gazing at the stick insects twitching on their leaves, fascinated. You knew it bothered her, that she was not really convinced about the need for treatment. She was not one for interference. Later, she apologised for making you go. We should have trusted you were going to be OK. I hope it wasn’t too awful. We weren’t trying to hurt you.
She handed you the cup of tea and the wooden honey pestle. Darling, she said, my darling, and for a moment the maternal guard slipped, and you saw the rawness behind, as if half of her had been cut away. You stood up, walked round the table and hugged her. You were still hugging her when your dad came in. Aha! Here you are, pet. In the artist’s fucking shoes, eh! In his hand was a lumpy object wrapped in a piece of chamois leather. He stood in the middle of the room, shrugged his shoulders a couple of times like a magician preparing for a trick. Then he slowly turned back the corners of the wrapping, being a total ham. You were braced, as ever, for proportionate disappointment, for having to put up with some elaborate act, the gold-spun-from-straw routine. Inside the rag was
a bottle. You looked at him blankly, waited for him to make his inevitable declaration, which of course he did. It’s for the exhibition. I’ve hunted it out to loan it to you. Go on. Here. He waved the bottle at you. After a moment’s hesitation you took it. It was a familiar item, the patchy glaze, the old-fashioned proportions. It had been in his studio for years, moving to various new locations around the messy, tobacco-stained room. For a while it had stood on the windowsill, then on the desk. It had been in the alcove next to the fireplace, holding his longest brushes and a dry teasel, part of the clutter, one of your dad’s many inexplicable collectables. That old thing, Peter, your mum said.
You heard yourself tut in that petulant way, and tried to explain the concept of the exhibition again. You tried to keep a pleasant tone, not turn into the sulky teenager you so often do when he makes a song and dance about something. You explained you couldn’t just put any old thing in the show. It had to have associative significance, and where possible, a certificate of authenticity. Van Gogh plus hanky. Magritte plus pipe. An instantly recognisable motif. The words came out wrong, sounded too harsh.
Silence. The usual, awkward interstices between you. You knew it could grow wider or it could come together, one of you had to make a move. Then your dad laughed a high-pitched, boomerang laugh that bounced off the ceiling and the walls and landed back inside him. It’s not mine, Fanny Ann. He tapped his head. There is still a bit of computing left up there, you know. It’s Giorgio’s. He rested a big paw on your shoulder, leant downwards conspiratorially and whispered. Right though, you best say it’s from an anonymous donator, cause there was a bit of unofficial liberating en Italia, if you get my bloody drift. He made a whistling sound. You heard yourself sigh.
You’d been there before, in this theatre of operations, a hundred times and more. Rationally, you knew what to do. Usually, it was not what you would do. What you would do was refuse to believe his yarn, his hokum, his stupendous bullshit. You’d tell him you weren’t seven years old any more, when your dad would go overboard trying to convince you he had known Wallis, Hughes, Warhol, all of them old pals, chums, brothers in arms. You would spit, and shout, and be irrationally annoyed. And this, in the fourth decade of your life, was still the usual drill.
But out of the corner of your eye you saw there were still a few old scabs on his knuckles from breaking stone in the quarry the day that Danny died. They were brown and cracked and dry, and it looked as if he had been worrying them. He had broken one of his own beloved rules–An artist must always protect his hands–and so you surprised yourself. You agreed. You said you’d check with Angela and if she had no objection, it could go into the show.
He almost burst with joy. Literally. You could see him inflating, through his shoulders, through his cheeks, as if he was attached to a pneumatic pump. Brilliant, Suze, just bloody brilliant. I must have found it for a reason. I mean, these things don’t just happen…
On the train back to London you opened your bag and took the thing out. It certainly looked the part. He might have got it from a flea market, or a junk shop, or a dead relative; you would probably never know. Or maybe your old man’s great-uncle twice removed was the cousin of the reclusive Italian. It was simply a bottle, a bottle by name and description, with no pedigree but for the word of your dad.
The electric doors of the train beeped and closed. People made their way along the aisles looking for reservations, bumping luggage against the armrests, hauling it into seat wells and the overhead racks. You put a hand out to steady the bottle as it rocked on the table. Yeah, you thought, gold star from the Caldicutt school of flimflam, fable and fabrication.
You did swallow his stories once. When you were a kid you bought the whole lot, every last word. Flying in Leonardo’s helicopter. Marching with Martin Luther King. Singing with the Beatles. The heroes, the nutcases, the flophouses. And later, the parties, the busts and arrests, those big-haired, Afghaned comrades of a bygone era.
The big man. He was so full of vim, so experienced, so full of life’s banquet. To you it seemed he had tasted the wares of the world. You knew you could never live like him, even if you tried. He was too potent, too hungry. No wonder your mother had to be sage. It was probably a reactionary measure, designed to give you and Dan balance. Where your dad was as effervescent as his berry hock, which often exploded on the pantry shelves, she was a spirit level. You remember her charting the water table and the ley-lines. Quartering withered apples to feed the fell ponies over the garth wall. She had devices that hung in the garden to measure rainfall, air pressure, and wind speed, tubes that sang and gurgled, emptied and filled. Inside was her kitchen of pies and soups and breads, her known recipes, her faith in the ingredients.
You were once theirs, as Danny was theirs. The fertilisation of bilateral ova. Sometimes it seems unbelievable. That remarkable double spark. The celestial, genetic chance of you and he, playing thumb-wars in the womb, doing an amniotic slow dance, and making yourselves from the pattern they gave you.
You could probably tell them everything, about how you feel, or don’t feel. You could say that your home life is deteriorating rapidly, that you are being unfaithful. You could say you can’t work any more, that you can’t even develop the last roll of film in your Leica because Danny is on it and you can’t bear to see him, on the bench outside Euston with pigeons at his feet. You can’t bear to be reminded that only a few months ago he was walking naked round your flat, showing Nathan some juvenile trick with his cock, making chocolate pizza to thank you for your hospitality, making you laugh. You could say to your mum and dad that you are in such serious trouble, in such decline, you are so unbearably alone and undefined, that you can’t operate normally. You could say that without Danny you are imbalanced, you have no real identity, you are not really Susan.
Maybe they would tell you what to do, or who you are. Maybe they would remind you that you have always been the strong one, always wilfully yourself, despite the pronouncements of Dr bloody Dixon. They would say that you have control over your relationships, and that you are a professional artist. They would remind you of the time you sneaked into your dad’s studio as a kid and applied some white acrylic to a painting he was doing. One rebellious brush stroke in the upper left corner. You waited a few days, braced for discovery and a row of epic proportions. But he didn’t notice. All he did was rove about the house in the kilt he was currently favouring and sing in the bath and drink homebrew. Later you went back into the studio and the mountain had advanced in composition. The flat crescent summit appeared sturdy enough to support another world if one had been set down upon it. It looked like an authentic Caldicutt. Annoyed, you confessed. You didn’t say you were sorry. You just said you’d done it. Oh, bloody hell, sweetheart, he said, it was exactly the thing it needed.
Of course they would sympathise. They love you. But they can’t fix you, can’t make you yourself again. No more than sex can shock your atoms, make them come alive. No more than Dr Dixon’s therapy could make of you a first person. You are comprised of a million tiny locks. There’s no master key to be found, encased in the plush velvet heart, no matter how desperately you ask someone to reach in and grope around. No matter how hard you try to find it.
You put the bottle away as the train began to move, and you watched the familiar old town slip away, its red masonry lost behind you, the river, the peel tower, the henge. You took out your mobile. Already other people were chatting to those they had just left or those they would soon see, oblivious to the Quiet Carriage signs. You scrolled through your list of contacts. You passed over Angela, Danny and Nathan. When you arrived at Tom’s number you paused, then pressed the green call button. There were enough rings for you to guess he was finding a quiet room in Borwood House before answering. Pronto. Are you coming back down today? I miss you. Can we meet? I’ll come in. I’ve got something to tell you. The train sped up and began to lean into its corners, the plastic bulkheads squeaking and wobbling, and the phone signal cut out. You
drafted a text, telling him the name of a hotel and where to meet. You watched the country roll past. The hills and cellars of cloud, the flat, grey Irish Sea, then mill town skylines, chimneys, canals, and terraces, small back gardens filled with bin bags and scrap metal, prams and bicycle frames.
Translated from the Bottle Journals
I have not known Theresa to be a sentimental woman, but yesterday I found her weeping beside the tomatoes. A handkerchief was pressed tightly to her mouth. She was weeping with a terrible distress, as a parent might if their child stood before them with a suitcase in their hand, having taken a vow to enter a monastery. She was weeping for me. This morning we received a letter from the hospital. I do not know if it was solely this news that upset her or if Theresa was weeping with a private grief. I know, for example, that she misses her father.
In any case, we have been waiting for the news and the cancer is confirmed. It is not a surprise. I believe we all anticipated it, but Theresa is still a young woman and she is less reconciled to the inevitabilities of later life. I have been trying to continue with my work. I want to finish the new painting before winter. I am pleased with the arrangement of objects on the table. The measurements are exact, and the canvas is ready, but the easel remains unscrewed and turned away and I have stalled. Perhaps I am not immune to morbidity, as I would like to believe I am.
The sound of her crying in the garden was so unusual that I thought at first a bird was defending its nest from a predator. But she had left the house to grieve, trying to be discreet. Any compassion at my disposal is always tempered with an awareness of how absurd life can be. Theresa might have found more consolation in her work, for I am afraid I was not much use to her, and perhaps said the wrong thing. I wonder does she imagine me to be a lonely man? Does she underestimate the life I have lived and the pleasure I have derived from it? Of course I could not ask her simply to stop. A weeping woman has no desire for opposition; she wants only to know her sadness is correct on the occasion of her expressing it. All will be well, I said to her. Let us find some perspective on our little situation. In Spain this year they ran the bulls and twenty men were trampled. In Argentina penguins are swimming under the ice sheets instead of breeding. There are wars on the other side of the world and I am seventy-eight. She only wept harder. I said to her, come, my dear Theresa, we will forget our chores and retrieve our coats from their hooks and we will visit the aviary in the city. We will take the train like proud citizens of Italy! Today I am well. Today we will go. I pressed her hands between my own and she appeared to recover quickly, and I felt for the first time her hands made rough by continual work.
