The Helen 100

by Helen Razer

  I bought the newspaper for some months after we left the ward. Eventually I saw Essie’s name and read that she had ‘passed away peacefully’ having ‘lost a battle’. Essie, who left this life in agony, had also lost the battle with her editorialising niece.

  To insist that illness is a battle or that death is not the end rarely does service to the dying or the ill. These moments of hope serve only those of us in good health who do not care to see hope disappear. So I remain quite sorry that I bought my ex a wholefood recipe book with a rainbow on the cover. Actually, if she had left me for this dreadful excursion into hope, I could have understood it.

  Hope had been an early sign that my ex was going to leave me. Hope, I have come to believe, is not a treatment for pain so much as it is a symptom of illness. Along with long hours spent at the gym, an unusual interest in Facebook and genitals that smell strongly of someone else, the suspicious spouse should watch out for hope. Hope was an irregular thing for her. Such a sustained period of it was unprecedented.

  A few months before she left, the ex had joined a group of chanting simpletons whose goal it was to end the world’s wars with ‘positive thinking’ and neurolinguistic programming, or similar gobshite. She became irritated when I offered the view that good vibes were no match for a good military.

  She started listening to uplifting music whenever I tried to talk, which is often, so I heard a lot of kick drums and swooshing synths for about a year. Then, one afternoon, she painted the garage door a hopeful shade of orange, and when I asked if she wanted me to try to clean up the concrete that had been splashed orange, she said, ‘No. I think random colour that lands where physics decrees is so beautiful. Don’t you?’

  Well, no, I fucking didn’t. I don’t like contrived boho design statements, I don’t like giving up the security deposit on a rental house and, these days, and I don’t much care for the colour orange.

  Tuscany is full of orange, I hear.

  I saw the crudely painted door and the rebellion its bright strokes strove to represent, and I began to see that something had shifted.

  ‘Are you sleeping with Arty Sandra?’ I had asked this tangerine stranger that day. She said no, she was just ‘collaborating’. She said I had become a predictable thinker. I should not presume that a glorious orange door whose pigment was drawn into the driveway by the beating heart of the physical universe needed cleaning. I should not confuse a close artistic partnership with sex. Jeez, Helen. You’re so bourgeois.

  Bourgeois? This was certainly a case of the pot calling the kettle orange. There are few practices more ruling class than (a) adultery and (b) shabby-chic decorating.

  I am not at all fond of cheating, but I am even less tolerant of a pseudo-design school that mimics the style of a down-on-its-luck upper class. Those who try to conceal their aspirations from themselves by dressing them in spattered paint and other signifiers of a faded wealth are, in my view, much more poisonous than those who simply buy pirated Burberry scarves. Pretending to be rich is far less offensive than pretending to be formerly rich.

  Aspiration, the close cousin of hope, is a lie. An orange door is a lie. ‘If I was sleeping with anyone else, I would tell you and we’d work it out’ is a lie. And, yes, we all lie and the truth, a habit into which I’d fallen when she left, is often overvalued. But there’s a fucking limit with the lies. I’m not too sure where it is, but you’ll know it when you find it. It is somewhere close to hope.

  Perhaps you will see your limit in a shabby-chic orange door whose imprecise edges, your soon-to-be-ex partner tells you, are testament to the lived glory of the universe, and the death of the bourgeoisie.

  Perhaps by a hospital bed, where you’ll find yourself exceeding the limit of reasonable lies. ‘Everything will be okay,’ you say. You’re lying.

  Hope is a lie. Hope doesn’t work. Hope, to be clear, doesn’t fix shit. And as much as the sex-destroying Karl Marx warned against it, apparently I still took the hope opiate now and then.

  I believed that a three-way would save my marriage. I gave my ex a book of faith-based recipes when what she needed was a good neurologist. I had agreed to go to Al-Anon to Heal My Life when what my life needed was for me to look directly into its wounds and not to find plasters to conceal them.

  I hate hope. Normally. Even more than I hate kale chips lightly toasted in cold-pressed natural oil. I hate it. I hate the hopeful farmers’ market where I bought that stupid book. That week it was full, as it always is, of mothers loudly worrying if that lamb was raised on a diet rich in Omega 3; if that green smoothie was entirely biodynamic. Biodynamic is a made-up word that signifies nothing. ‘Clean eating’ is a harmful religious fiction. There can be no clean thing or fresh start in this world.

  She would not eat the optimistic diet at the time of her diagnosis, but I would chow down on hope in my own critical hour. I would go to a meeting to tell my most shameful secrets to strangers and I would do this the same day I had allowed my home to be ‘smudged’. Which was just a few weeks after I had purchased a shamanic journey from a dude in Reykjavik and completely fallen for a few hundred text messages.

  But I had been told several times that I ‘needed to grow’. Which, you should be aware, is hopeful nonsense. People who have been newly dumped do not need to grow, as much as their departing spouses might valorise this goal for themselves. We don’t need to grow. We need to go to bed and shrink right down to almost nothing so that one day we are small enough to rise.

  If there was anything at all left to honour from our average years together, it was shared laughter at bullshit hope.

  I readied myself for the first of twelve steps with the pamphlet Kay had given me. I took it and started towards a hopeful goal.

  I would leave the hopeful pamphlet in a bin, not too far from a church, while I was impaled on an age-inappropriate finger.

  19

  Two weeks, one step, one moment by a bin that may be considered an indignity by some

  The first step is pretty easy. It requires only the admissions that (a) one is ‘powerless over alcohol’ and (b) one’s life ‘had become unmanageable’.

  I knew long ago that alcohol was something over which I had no control. And, of course, one look at either me or my bank balance would show how unmanageable my life had become. I had neither worked nor washed laundry in weeks. I had occasionally failed to piss exactly in the toilet. I was a bad life manager. The first step is easy.

  The second step is not so straightforward. It requires that we nominate a ‘Higher Power’.

  Being of the view that life has no founding principle, I found this pretty tricky. ‘I’m an atheist,’ I said to Kay before we left the house. ‘Actually, I’m a poly-non-theist, which is to say I don’t believe in many gods.’

  Kay, who did believe in a great many gods and angels, pretended to indulge my refusal to believe in some sort of Ultimate Purpose, but was really having none of it and who can blame her, as I had, after all, just permitted her access to every room in my house with a bouquet of burning weeds.

  ‘Let’s get you a higher power.’

  I have since heard some adequate rationales for the function of this higher power by the otherwise faithless and recovering. They say it’s important not to believe you have agency in all matters and this is good advice. There is stuff bigger than us. Of course there is. But in order not to believe that I have any real control, I don’t see how I must believe in a force that has all of it.

  Nonetheless, the twelve-steppers say you must believe in the power of something good in order to no longer submit to the power of things, and Kay advised me to just give up on the idea of a Karl Marx as god and perhaps nominate a tree in my yard as a higher power instead.

  ‘Quick. Choose one. Go and say hello to it. Then we have to go.’

  If you go to a Twelve Step meeting, and this is not always a terrible idea, you should know that the choice of a tree is stupid. Particularly a walnut tree and particularly one that has not been clos
ely inspected for some months.

  Although I am a keen gardener and it is my normal practice to look for signs of disease on all the plants with which I share a yard, I had been so busy looking for signs of disease in my relationship I’d failed to detect any elsewhere. So after a solemn moment of thinking about where a miserable atheist should locate her higher power, I made a decision and walked out the back to address it.

  It didn’t look well.

  During months of suspicion and sadness, many of my higher power’s branches had died, and those that had not were full of bleeding holes.

  If you have a walnut tree that is discharging sap from multiple wounds, you probably have Thousand Cankers Disease. It’s easy to identify but nearly impossible to cure. All you can do is cut back the dead wood and, um, hope. By no means should you nominate such a vulnerable plant as your higher power. It’s a horticulturally unsound decision. Under a dying walnut tree, this village dickhead stands.

  I didn’t tell Kay that the tree was on the critical list. I figured I was stuck with it now and, in any case, we now needed to leave.

  Kay had offered to drive me to a meeting we had selected online for its declared atheism and for its location in a suburb so distant I was unlikely to run into either God or anyone I knew. She offered to go in with me, too, and I understand that such fellowship is a good function of the twelve-step community, but I declined. I had completed few tasks more complex than pissing, crying and wanking, sometimes simultaneously, since the ex became the ex, and if I were to resume independent life better than the walnut tree this seemed like a good opportunity for a practice run.

  Al-Anon is simple, and this is a good thing for people in distress. The rules are plain, the literature and meeting times are easy to find and the experienced twelve-steppers are sweet when a newbie who fumbles the words ‘It works if you work it so work it ’cause you’re worth it’ takes a chair beside them.

  Kay drove her Cherokee fast through progressively nicer suburbs. I made it in more than enough time. For a free-range earth-worshipping smudger, that bitch knows how to burn rubber.

  I went in. I offered some coins to the collection plate and a sweet-looking man said no.

  ‘You’re new here. Welcome. Only give when you feel you have received.’

  ‘Ha ha, I wish my ex had that attitude,’ I said, thinly.

  He didn’t laugh but said, ‘I know,’ and made a steeple with his hands.

  When the group began to ‘share’, I was struck for some minutes by the quality of speeches, which, for this meeting, had the second step as its focus.

  ‘Let’s talk about our relationship to our higher power.’

  Mine had just died. Marvellous. I wondered what I might say, but shortly became too entranced by the others and I gave it no great further thought.

  There were many clever atheists in this well-to-do suburb, most of which were describing much better than I could the hardship they’d encountered in the search for a god substitute.

  A young, beautiful and extravagantly gay man delivered a spontaneous eulogy for the death of his ‘enabling’ self. It was of a quality I could not have prepared, let alone extemporised. It was rich in rhythm and light in regret. This young man spoke of the simplicity of Al-Anon, including its slogan ‘Keep it simple’ with a complexity so poetic that I began to believe that regular attendance could truly Heal My Life.

  Here was a man who had overcome the suicide of his alcoholic mother, a profound sense of guilt and the problem of god to emerge as eloquent and self-possessed. His speech was so fine my crude memory retained none of it. I only remember that it was compelling and largely concerned with the problem of the higher power.

  The ladies were crying. The men were making steeples with their hands. I was staring at him in utter disbelief that my years of utter disbelief had thus far prevented me from coming to Al-Anon and hearing this and restoring all the painted orange lies in my life to disease-free, hardwood truth.

  It was my turn to speak, and even though I wanted to be good I said something like ‘The love is bleeding from my branches’. Which is the statement of a lunatic. But it was received with so much love, and I felt so much love for these people in return.

  I had thought all the love I had given to my ex these past years in diminishing doses had just completely disappeared three days ago. I had thought that it was gone. But it seemed to return all at once and it had this healing, hopeful group as its object. And apparently they loved me back.

  ‘I have Thousand Cankers Disease,’ I said. ‘I am a dying walnut tree.’

  To the credit of the group and of the organisation whose behaviour it governed, nobody looked at me like I was a dick.

  After I had ‘shared’ the problem of my diseased boughs, an older chap started on about how he angry he was with his higher power for not helping him get a better package at work.

  ‘I’ve been doing all the affirmations,’ he said. ‘But I still haven’t renegotiated my contract. When is it my time?’

  When will it be Barbie’s time to shine?

  I told myself that a natural metaphor, however poorly explained, could not been nearly as gauche as admitting you expect to monetize your recovery. But they didn’t look at him like he was a dick, either.

  I was full of hope. Was hope so bad? I’m sure even Karl Marx had moments of hope; he must have, or would have otherwise fled the British Library screaming, ‘Fuck you all, you don’t deserve my help and work out a theory of value yourselves, you lazy wankers.’

  Of course hope is shit. We know this. Karl knew this. And my Helen One Hundred was not based on hope but on probability.

  This is how I reckon the whole thing to myself these days, anyway. You try doing something that stupid and not rationalising it afterwards. Even if my date plan was bullshit and even if hope is a sop, I still expect it to visit me briefly from time to time. But what I do not expect, nor long for, is to be quite so transported by the possibility of hope as I was in that meeting.

  I was so hopeful. I would definitely come again. Perhaps even tomorrow. This was great. I could be on the seventh step by Tuesday. I left, hopeful. Feeling clean truth and love and the memory of impromptu speeches that spoke so well of loss.

  I had not planned to say anything to anyone after the meeting, least of all to the abundantly homosexual and pretty young star, as it seemed to me that those who had come to be anonymous wished to remain so in the minutes post-adjournment. But he was walking to the same tram as me and when this became as plain to him as it had been for some metres to me, he smiled and said, ‘Hey, Tree Disease!’

  I smiled back. I explained how I had encountered difficulty in completing the second step. ‘The thing is, my higher power was a walnut tree that turned out to be physically dead.’

  I didn’t mind being godless, I told him, but I was embarrassed about being a bad gardener. He laughed, and when told me that he despised the idea of god and even of a universal truth, I began to enjoy the conversation.

  Intellectual arrogance has always been my default crime, but it had remained largely uncommitted living, as I had been for some time, in a death row of silence. So, I was responding to this young person as I normally don’t. Which is with enthusiasm and appreciation, instead of impatience and opinions.

  We talked about the problem of god and of locating any founding principle or final authority for life like it was the first time.

  As I am a sceptic and a wanker in my forties, I had long ago thought my way into and then back out of meaninglessness. The questions of ‘What does it all mean?’ and ‘Why are we here?’ had been asked and answered to my ontological satisfaction. But for this young chap, who introduced himself to me as Hayden A, the transition into uncertainty was new.

  For me, these thoughts were ancient. But they were also buried in years of writing cheap sales bullshit. These thought relics were sufficiently undisturbed that I had almost forgotten their original forms. So it almost felt new when he said, ‘I think we ju
st need to live with the idea that there is nothing.’

  I responded first with genuine surprise that someone I had just met should say such an accurate thing and next with the vestiges of my knowledge on the matters of (a) nothingness and (b) not believing in everything.

  It took a few minutes to find my shallow groove, but bits of anti-foundational thought borrowed from university came back to me in handfuls.

  ‘Yes. The human world itself is will, and not much else! We are little more than a collection of drives! The only essence is the irremediable fact of no essence! The oceanic feeling of connection is nothing but a memory of infant life!’

  These bits of Freud and Nietzsche and Sartre, and possibly Heidegger, who I’d never understood, were so badly remembered that they came out in an unrecognisable glob. It is therefore likely that they appeared to Hayden as my own ideas. I believe that it seemed to him that I had been so inspired by his anti-foundational thinking I was immediately doing some of my own.

  There are few spectacles, I’ve heard, so seductive as the dying moments of someone else’s innocence. This seeming death of my innocence—wow, this old chick finally sees that there is no purpose to life!—charged Hayden with a force of desire that was met, for other reasons, by me.

  Then he said, ‘I understand how much love you feel right now.’ He tugged his infinity scarf for emphasis.

  I understand how much love you feel right now.

  Of all the things that were said to me about the nature of a break-up while I remained inside it, this remains the most insightful.

  If you have felt the loss of a much-loved person, perhaps you know just how strong and fast love can surge when it finds itself alone. It’s terrible to learn that your love continues to exist, even and especially without a responsive object. It’s obscene to know that the love is just there. There it is: dumb and ugly and homeless. There it is: huge and present.