Telescope

by Jonathan Buckley

The word ‘good’ did nice things to the shape of Dr Goffman’s mouth. I can see that shape almost as clearly as if I had a photograph of her, and I can hear her voice saying ‘Daniel’ too.

  It was Dr Goffman who made me start writing. ‘Don’t let a day go by without writing a page,’ she advised me, and I did as I was told. I enjoyed it, even if what I was doing wasn’t quite what Dr Goffman had wanted. Her idea was that by writing I would take control of my life. (‘Take control’ was one of her catchphrases.) Writing would stop me thinking of myself as a victim. ‘You have access to unique experiences,’ she told me. ‘Make use of them.’ Writing would help me to make sense of my life, she suggested. But my life already made perfect sense: genetic damage had given me an incurable and increasingly repulsive illness. Nothing could be clearer. I had no interest in writing a self-help manual for myself. Dr Goffman said that this wasn’t quite what she was saying – ‘Just write, and see where it leads you.’

  So I wrote my observations, and Dr Goffman was disappointed in me. ‘I need to see more of you here,’ she said to him. I pointed out that all these sentences had been written by me, therefore I was what she was seeing. These pages were full of me. This was being evasive, said Doctor G – a regular accusation. ‘What are you thinking?’ she kept on asking. ‘What are you really thinking? Write it.’ One day she remarked that we are all in some way wounded. ‘Some more than others, doc,’ I thought. But what I said, when Dr Goffman asked me what I was thinking at that moment, was: ‘I was wondering what you’d look like with your top off.’ And that was in effect the end of the road for Dr Goffman and me.

  Ellen’s only comment: she once had a crush on a doctor, when she was in hospital to have her appendix removed. He was an Indian chap, with long and silky eyelashes. Ellen sits with me while I search the internet for Dr Goffman. It takes a minute to find a nice picture of her, taken last year. Dr G is well into her fifties now, but she’s still a very nice-looking woman: smooth face, clear blue eyes, thick grey hair cut in a stylish lopsided bob. I gaze at the picture for a long time. ‘Hildi, Hildi, Hildi,’ I exhale, moonstruck.

  The thought of Dr Goffman lingers, and perhaps contributes to the afternoon’s little incident, at shower time. We have a new sponge, bought by Janina. Saturated and soaped, it’s as soft as a ball of water. It feels extremely nice – so nice, in fact, that as Ellen is swabbing my back an erection appears, the first for God knows how many months. ‘Insurrection of the unemployed,’ I remark. Ellen peers over my shoulder and says: ‘I’ll leave you for a minute or two,’ as if a friend has just joined me and she’s leaving us to gossip for a while.

  Celia the schoolgirl, a very popular classmate, was often invited to parties, and on occasion the invitation was extended to the younger brother, who might not have been the most photogenic or exciting of boys, but had a bookish air that, for certain girls, made him more palatable than many of his more ebullient male contemporaries. But I was never a sociable character. I tended to react adversely to anything that smacked of charity, and I was always quick to scent the whiff of charity in a generous gesture. Therefore I declined nearly all such invitations. For reasons that are no longer clear to me, however, I did decide to tag along with Celia on the occasion of Madeleine Firle’s sixteenth birthday. I suspect that I had turned down so many opportunities to socialise that I felt under some obligation to display more willingness to engage, and Madeleine Firle’s party would have been a less unenticing proposition than most, because Madeleine had been to our house two or three times, as an auxiliary member of Celia’s entourage, and I’d quite liked her. She was a stocky young woman with no breasts, big vase-shaped calves (Irish dancing was her thing) and a peculiar pudding-bowl haircut that made her look like a medieval pageboy. She was also rather earnest – some would have said ponderous. Celia once asserted, on the basis of nothing more than an overheard conversation on the subject of, I think, the Amazon rainforest, that myself and Madeleine were kindred spirits. We were certainly alike in our lack of allure in the eyes of the opposite gender. It was assumed by several of her classmates that Madeleine was not a boy’s girl. ‘Which I’m not,’ she once told me. ‘Boys are idiots. I’m waiting for the men.’

  This party followed a familiar pattern: I located the shadowiest corner; Celia kept me company for a while, then went off to dance. I found myself, inevitably, in conversation with Madeleine. Half-hidden in the folds of the dining-room curtains, we discussed at some length the plight of the great whales. Wildlife and ecology were Madeleine’s other two passions. A few years later she would appear on a BBC news report, decrying the fur trade while being dragged towards a police van, having deposited a litre of scarlet gloss paint on the shoulders of some fashion editor; in the same week, her girlfriend fire-bombed a guinea-pig farm. Now, I was flattered that of all the people at the party I was one of the tiny minority – and probably the only boy other than Stephen – with whom Madeleine thought it possible to conduct such a conversation. And the conversation was informative: Madeleine knew her stuff. I admired her grasp of the economics of the Japanese and Norwegian whaling industries, and of the cultural niceties of those two nations. Nonetheless, I was troubled by a hankering for stimulation of a different kind, such as was happening in various parts of the house as Madeleine and I sat talking in the gloom of the dining room. Boys and girls were locked face-to-face in our vicinity. On every step of the staircase, kissing and groping was in progress. Even high-minded Madeleine felt the need for something less virtuous than whale-talk. The sound of Donna Summer came through the wall. ‘Sorry,’ said Madeleine, ‘but I just have to dance to this one.’

  I stayed in the dining room until I had finished my beer and the one that Madeleine had abandoned. Celia appeared in the doorway, to check that I was all right. I assured her that I was. This was true: I was nearly drunk. I raided the kitchen for another beer and returned to my post. Every couple of minutes someone would peer in. ‘OK Dan?’ they’d ask, and I’d reply with a thumbs-up. Celia and her boyfriend came in, and we chatted for a while. I told her I’d be going home soon. ‘Stay a bit longer,’ she said; she brought me one last beer before being dragged off to dance. At ten o’clock I picked my way up the stairs to retrieve my coat from Madeleine’s bedroom. The coat was in my hand when the door closed and the room went dark.

  Within seconds a hand was on my waist, and sliding southwards. The hand, I discovered when the deed was almost done, belonged to a girl called Kate Sanderling. One could say that Kate Sanderling had something of a reputation. Parties often ended with Kate vomiting into the bushes. Before that, Kate would be seen snogging a minimum of three different boys. She was famed as the most voracious snogger in the class, and by this I mean not just that she accumulated a high tally, but that she went at it as if the aim of the exercise were to dislocate the snoggee’s jaw. But I did not get snogged by Kate Sanderling. Far from it – the face was turned away as the hand did its work. This work was done so briskly, it barely qualified as an erotic experience – a drain being unblocked is what came to mind. ‘All smooth and shipshape down below,’ she said, wiping her fingers on a coat, and that was the only thing she said while she was with me. The following week, on the way home from school, Celia overheard – as was almost certainly the intention – friends of Kate Sanderling talking about the party. Someone had bet her two quid that she couldn’t do what she’d done. Exactly what Kate had done wasn’t perfectly clear to Celia, but the gist was clear enough. That evening I told her what had happened, and the next morning she went up to Kate Sanderling as she was walking down the steps to assembly and, without any preamble, whacked her soundly in the mouth, which gave me some gratification, even if it did result in the wider circulation of the story of the hand-job in Madeleine Firle’s bedroom.

  This was my second sexual experience in the presence of a third party. The first can be dealt with more briefly. It was a Saturday afternoon in November or December, a couple of years after the diagnosis. I had been caught in a downpour
that had gone through my clothes by the time I reached the front door. I hurried to my room, and as I passed the bathroom Celia called out: ‘Who’s that?’ She was in the bath, immersed in thick suds that were spilling over the sides. A long soak had become one of her great pleasures, but she could never take as long as she liked when other people were at home. I stood in the doorway, shivering, as Celia brushed bubbles from her face. ‘Come and warm up,’ she said, closing her eyes. My father was at work, my mother had gone into town, Charlie was at a friend’s house. I undressed and climbed into the bath, and Celia drew her legs up to make room for me. My feet rested on hers. At this time, new growths were beginning to appear on my arms. ‘Let’s see,’ said Celia, leaning forward, and as she moved the bubbles slid down from her throat, slipping so far that a nipple showed pink through the thin white foam. ‘There’s not enough room,’ I said, putting my hands on the sides of the bath to haul myself out. ‘Close your eyes again,’ I told her, and she did, but she opened them again right away. ‘And hello to you,’ she said, in the drawl of a young woman who has seen everything, to the thing that had emerged from the bubbles.

  Herewith we conclude the account of the public appearances of my organ of generation. There are no others to record.

  At ease in my chestnut bower, daydreaming in the mild breeze and the soft surf-sound of the leaves et cetera et cetera, when Janina comes over and asks if she might join me for a minute or two. Evidently we are to have a significant conversation. Today she’s culling the slugs – ‘creeping dog poo’ she calls them, with a quick dilation of the nostrils, as if a stink comes to her nose at the very thought of them. We discuss the difficulties of maintaining a healthy garden, and then we have two or three minutes of substanceless chat before she comes out with the news: she has been speaking to her mother. She squints into the upper branches, as if in defiance of someone who is trying to make her weep. Her mother phoned last night, and told her that her father’s mind is going. ‘Charles thinks I must go,’ she says, ‘and I think he is right.’ The tears have been stemmed at source. The ruefulness in her voice is that of a woman conceding that she has been outmanoeuvred. Little more information is volunteered. ‘I thought you should know,’ she says, applying fingertips to my shoulder. She returns to the massacre of the slugs.

  A fuller account from Charlie. It turns out that Janina’s mother wrote to her back in November, telling her that her father was becoming confused. ‘Some mornings he does not know where he is when he wakes up,’ she wrote. Charlie thought a call was required, but Janina preferred to reply by post: she spent a whole evening composing her letter, which she did not show him. Weeks passed before the next letter arrived, but the tone was more urgent. Her father was getting worse, and he had asked after her. It was terrible: he’d walk out of a room and come to a stop right away, having no idea what he’d been intending to do. ‘You must come. You must,’ the letter ended. That night Janina spoke to her mother for more than an hour – or rather, she was on the phone for more than an hour. Charlie retired to the kitchen, but was close enough to hear that Janina wasn’t doing much of the talking. When she rejoined him, she was mildly dazed. ‘I’ve just been having a conversation with a very old woman,’ she said. She’d been told that her father was talking about her every day; that morning he’d suddenly called out her name, as if he’d just heard the door open and thought it might be Janina coming home. ‘Well,’ Janina said to her mother, ‘you told him where I am, presumably. If he wants to speak to me he can pick up the phone.’ He couldn’t do that, her mother replied. ‘Why “couldn’t”?’ asked Janina. ‘Are you telling me he can’t talk? Physically can’t talk? He can’t form sentences?’ No, things hadn’t reached that stage, not yet, not quite. ‘It’s too difficult for him. He couldn’t say what he needs to say,’ her mother explained. If he needs to speak to me that badly, thought Janina, he can manage a minute on the phone. ‘Let me speak to him. Put him on,’ she said, but the prevarication continued: her father was taking a nap. ‘He sleeps a lot,’ her mother said, with a crack in the voice. ‘Well, wake him up,’ Janina suggested, but her mother refused to disturb him. So Janina in turn refused to carry on: ‘Tell him I’m ready to listen, as soon as he’s ready to talk.’ A few weeks later, her mother rang. ‘He can’t speak to you. He just can’t,’ she said, then she came to the heart of the matter: ‘He’s ashamed.’ This knocked Janina off-balance for a moment or two. It was strange, she remarked, that this should be the first she’d heard of his feeling ashamed. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that this remorse was making it impossible for him to speak to her, it was odd that he’d never stirred himself to put pen to paper. No satisfactory answer was given to this point. ‘Come for me, Janina. Come for my sake,’ her mother responded. Janina impressed upon her that there was no question of booking a flight if she hadn’t exchanged as much as one syllable with her supposedly shamefaced father beforehand. Only now did her mother give in. She shuffled away from the phone; there was much fussing and huffing in the background; at last her father spoke. ‘I’m sick,’ he told her. ‘I get so tired.’ He sounded sick. His voice was tremulous and there was a thin squeak to his breathing. He seemed to have difficulty in understanding or hearing much of what she said. ‘What medication are you taking?’ Janina asked. After a pause the answer came, in a wheeze: ‘I don’t know.’ Janina was experiencing no upswelling of sympathy. ‘You must know,’ she said. ‘The tablets are yellow,’ he answered. It was too pathetic to be true, and on the subject of his shame there was not a word. ‘I have to go now,’ he said, after less than five minutes. ‘Give it to me, Karol, give it to me,’ her mother was coaxing, as though to a simpleton. Janina stood firm – if he was so sorry, she told her mother, he could say he was. This provoked a sorrowing rebuke: ‘I wish you were kinder.’ Whereupon Janina brought the exchange to a close.

  Some weeks passed before the next communication. Janina’s mother phoned to report a further decline. The police had brought her father home that afternoon; he’d been found wandering the streets a dozen blocks away. If her mother was to be believed, he was spending hours on end with his Polish dictionary, desperately trying to prevent it all from slipping away. Again it wasn’t possible for him to come to the phone: he was sleeping, of course. ‘Then why not call me when he’s awake?’ asked Janina. ‘You know, I’m sorry the way things worked out,’ her mother told her, which was some sort of progress, enough for Janina to answer, when her mother pleaded ‘Will you come?’, that she’d think about it, but wouldn’t be coming until she had some proof that her father did actually want to see her and had some awareness that he might have been at least in part to blame for the way things had worked out. During the next conversation she spoke briefly to him. He managed to bring himself to utter more or less the same words as his wife: ‘I’m sorry things worked out bad.’ This was far from adequate, but Janina knew that she was beaten. ‘I’m going to book a flight next week,’ she said. ‘That would be nice,’ he responded, as if she were talking about hopping on a bus.

  Last night Janina rang to let her mother know when she would be arriving. ‘Thank you, Janina, thank you,’ her mother said, as if she were speaking to someone grand. This show of deference upset her as much as the rants about ingratitude used to do, says Charlie.

  All this has been going on, and I knew nothing of it. ‘Janina didn’t want me to bother you with it,’ says Charlie.

  Ellen, it turns out, knows that Janina will be taking a trip to Canada, but little more than that. ‘Did you get on with your parents?’ Janina asked her this morning. ‘Mine always drove me crazy,’ she said, then dropped the subject.

  The old man of the farm is loitering near the house. ‘Oh God, him,’ says Ellen, when I point him out. A few weeks ago he accosted her in the street, wanting help to cross the road. Straight away he started complaining about the idiot politicians who’d banned fox hunting, and droning on about how city folk don’t understand the countryside. She was wondering why this old codger mi
ght think she wanted to hear his views about foxes when he suddenly switched tack and asked how ‘the lodger’ was. ‘Staying for long, is he?’ he asked. Ellen didn’t like his tone: ‘It was like he thought I owed him an explanation.’ He has nasty little eyes as well, like a ferret. Ellen let him know, as politely as possible, that she didn’t think it was any of his business. ‘You the cleaner?’ he asked, and Ellen said: ‘That’s right,’ just to be done with him. His name is Ridley.

  In 1920 Janina’s paternal grandparents emigrated from a village in the vicinity of Rogalin, initially to New Jersey, then onward to Toronto, where their sons, Adam and Karol, were born. Adam was to die of pneumonia at the age of six; Karol, not quite three years old when his sibling died, would often swear to his daughter that not a day went by without his feeling the pain of his older brother’s absence – sometimes, says Janina, he would even force out a corroborating tear. The boys’ father, Pawel, was a cobbler, an occupation into which his one surviving son followed him for a while. However, Karol found it demeaning to spend his days repairing other people’s filthy footwear, and so – being a dextrous, quick-witted and enterprising lad – almost as soon as he reached the age of independence he set himself up as a repairer of radios and phonographs and electrical goods in general, an enterprise that gave him the opportunity not merely to put the agility of his fingers to better use but also to develop an expertise that was truly modern and would earn him more respect from his customers than had been accorded to his father. What it didn’t earn him, ever, was a substantial income: indeed, in later years his revenue would often decline almost to the point of non-existence. Karol attributed these periods of penury chiefly to the public’s ignorant preference for the cheap and disposable (his late father’s footwear now being the epitome of the sort of well-made objects which today’s people held in contempt), an analysis which his daughter learned never to contradict, even though she knew that other factors were more pertinent, such as her father’s habit of not completing work by the promised date, and his acquisition of a tremor that eventually made it impossible for him to manipulate a soldering iron with the requisite accuracy.