Oh Dear Silvia

by Dawn French

  So, in the depths of his humiliated hurt, he had indeed often wished upon her a grisly illness. Something long and slow and debilitating, at least as intolerable as his intolerable suffering.

  Now, he numbly stands stock-still, in abject fear that this whole catastrophe may well be his doing. He is as still as her. He wonders what he can do to put it right? That’s the job of the man of the family; to put right whatever might be wrong. He is currently the ex-man, so perhaps the job is redundant? He couldn’t fix it when they were married, so why would it be different now?

  Actually, he thinks, there is one massive irrefutable difference. Now, here, today, he can talk without Silvia interrupting. That was always a big problem. She wouldn’t let him speak for long enough without either getting irritated or changing the subject, proving that she simply wasn’t interested in his ideas. He was aware, right from the outset, that he wasn’t as fizzy as her, he could never think as fast or be as assured. Which is a shame because in fact Ed is every bit as bright as his ex-wife. Just not as confident. Squeaky wheel, and all that.

  Silvia told him in the early days that she found his self-doubt endearing. She apparently loved the dichotomy of his tall, imposing angular good looks and yet his many seeming inadequacies. An assured-looking chap who was in fact nothing of the sort. A diffident man, Ed was for her ‘a proper-looking bloke’ who represented perfect husband and father material. She listened to him more at the beginning, sometimes he would rap on about his dreams and plans for easily twenty uninterrupted minutes before she became fidgety.

  If only he’d known then that he would never again have such a window of opportunity to be heard. He might have risked telling her the really big dream. The one he has since realized, unbeknownst to her. The one that gives him purpose and saved his life. The one that offers him the significance he would never find with her.

  He is suddenly aware his back is hurting from standing still for so long, so he gathers his achy bones up and moves stiffly to the seat next to her bed.

  ‘Hello Silvia.’

  His voice falters, it’s croaky, he hasn’t used it much today. He secures it with a steadying cough, and restarts.

  ‘Silv. Hello there. It’s me, Ed. I’m not sure whether you can hear me, but the doctors have told us to keep talking … um … at you … for you … well no, to you. Yes, talking to you. So righto, that’s what I’ll do. You probably don’t relish the idea of me blethering on, but I’m hoping that’s preferable to the sound of an empty room at least … ha ha … Christ, I hope it is, otherwise I am genuinely dull. “Duller than the world’s dullest-ever thing, so dull it’s not worth the time it takes to imagine it,” as you not very succinctly put it once, if I remember it correctly. Which I do … unfortunately. Anyway love, I’m here right next to you, and I’d like to tell you some stuff. Even if you only hear bits of it, that’s OK. Let me … just think …’

  He stares up at the ceiling, wondering where to start. The ventilator wheezes rhythmically and to his horror, he finds he is tapping his toe in time with it. His foot the metronome for her life. He stops immediately. Then he starts again but this time on the off-beat. Something about Silvia being helpless promotes an irresistible urge in him to misbehave.

  Can his footbeat persuade the machine to change its tempo? He feels an overwhelming impulse to drum on the bed. She always said he was a child. She used to laugh when she said it. He took that to mean she found some of his more childlike qualities attractive. She giggled at his bad jokes and appreciated his shyness. Slowly, incrementally, that changed though. She didn’t call him childlike any more, she flatly called him childish. Well … yes, he is, in many ways, and glad of it. He likes doing his silly voices, mimicking everyone that amuses him. He likes tickling and wrestling with those he loves. He likes making faces with his food on the plate, he pretends to walk with a club foot, and he knows he can get babbly when he’s overexcited. But he isn’t an actual child.

  That was another depth charge that hurt so badly when she exploded it.

  How did she always manage to insult him with barbs that contained just enough truth to pierce his skin?

  She was astute, no doubt about that. He thought he liked smart women, he thought their impressive brainage was an aphrodisiac. He hadn’t quite thought through how it would feel when a smart woman decides to round on you wielding her sharpest cleverest incisors, if you fall out of favour with her.

  ‘OK. Well, righto, best to start at the beginning I suppose, which ironically was also the end. The end of us anyway. Just out of interest, why did you decide to become so hellishly unkind in that last couple of months? I knew things weren’t great for you in the marriage but honestly I thought we could work it through. Then suddenly I was right royally dumped after twenty-odd years for reasons that are still not clear to me today, apparently to do with “being stuck in adolescence” and “failing to operate as a functioning recognizably human being”. I was already in enough distress, did I really need to feel the full power of your turbo sarcasm?

  ‘You really can be cruel Silv, I didn’t deserve a lot of what you said. That kind of spite is corrosive, you know. It ate away at me when I was already full of holes. Gouda. I was a living Gouda man. Sometimes, when you attacked, I thought all the holes would just get bigger and bigger ’til they joined up and made one big empty hole. S’pose I’d then be a doughnut man.

  ‘Anyway, it was after I saw the lawyer that I really lost it. Being told you were selling the house. That was a body blow. I signed it all over to you Silv, so you could stay there with the kids. Somewhere secure for all of you, you said. I didn’t realize their family time was up too. Neither did they. I know you and Jo were sent out of home so young, I know that, but it was different for you Silv. Cassie was only sixteen, for God’s sake. She had only ever lived in that house, that’s all she knew. Jamie put on a brave face but just because he’s a fella and a couple of years older didn’t mean he coped. It meant he “pretended” to cope.

  ‘What did you want with the money Silv? The money from our home, which you swindled the three of us out of?

  ‘What was more important than your family for God’s sake?!

  ‘Why didn’t we matter?!’

  Ed puts his head in his calloused hands and for a moment he relives the heavy empty feeling he used to regularly have in his gut, all those years ago. The familiar wretchedness, the throbbing ache of helplessness. He can’t go back to that. It very nearly did for him. It became huge and impossible to endure. He realizes that here and now it’s different though, because now he can rant at last. Now is his chance to speak.

  ‘You’ve got no idea what you did to us. You broke us, Silv. We splintered off in so many bad ways. It’s still bad now. Sometimes.’

  He pauses.

  She breathes. Regular heavy breathing.

  She is as impassive now as she was when he arrived. Even if she can hear, does she care? Is she faking it all and purposely sleeping through his torment? Of course not, stop it, Ed. Come on. Courage. Tell her.

  ‘So, one Friday evening, in the middle of the worst of it, when I was so blue that I felt I’d turned black inside, I decided to pretend to be cheerful and do what cheerful people do on a Friday night. Have fish and chips. A normal thing. That’s like having your rudder in the water. It’s steadying. It’s familiar and comforting and keeps you on kilter, upright. It’s what normal people are doing in their normal houses on a Friday night. Fish and chips. Normal. I needed some normal, just to get me through the weekend. I was only just surviving, a drip of ordinary at a time.

  ‘I was glad to see the queue at The Plaice To Be was long. I was grateful to have a purpose, to be in the warm, and to have a valid reason to swap cursory pleasantries with other shadows. In fact, I remember very clearly, letting other people go before me in the queue so that my time in the fishy fugginess would be extended. I didn’t want to leave there, to sit alone in my car. A car which, incidentally, had a noose in the boot. Well, not incidentally.
Purposely. I had made it weeks before and I’d been carrying it around for when the tipping point came. It was close, constantly nipping at me. Up ’til then I knew I could stave it off by thinking about Cassie and Jamie and how much they needed me to stick around.

  ‘Cassie had only just moved into her first flat on her own, she was very scared, Silv. Neither of us could even manage to get the oven on ’til we worked out that the timer was somehow stopping it. That took a whole morning of stomping and swearing. She was so young to be on her own but by then she’d been staying with me at Ma’s for too long, and it was all so obviously wrong. The teen and the old mad lady together. Both of them took to sleeping a lot to avoid seeing each other. There’s only the one bed at Ma’s as you know, I was sleeping on the couch, so Ma slept in the bed all night and Cassie slept in it all day. Shift-sleeping. I knew Cass would crack if it went on much longer, so we went and applied for the flat.

  ‘You should know all of this Silv, I shouldn’t have to be telling you … anyway, Jamie had already gone along to the Army Recruiting Office in town and they took him immediately. Course they would. A bright, lost, sad young man, full of potential and full of rage. Just what they’re looking for. So he was gone. In a heartbeat. She was gone, he was gone, you were gone and I was living with my mother whose bungalow reeks like a tanner’s hut. When Cassie complained of the stench, Ma just blamed the cats. The last cat died eight years ago. Ma claims there’s still one remaining rogue cat wandering about the house pissing on everything. Cassie agreed that yes, there might well be, and if there was, it would be called “Granma” …’

  At this point, Ed groans as he gets up and goes to the window mumbling ‘living with my mother again, after forty years’ and ‘bloody appalling’ and ‘Why d’you sell it anyway?’ and ‘unkind, truly unkind’. He stretches and scratches. He remains at the window, fixed on the view into a dismal quad, with tall hospital buildings on all four sides. There is a bench next to a bin, and a small lawn, half of which is brown because it never sees the sun, the buildings are too high. Who would ever want to sit there? It looks grim.

  Perhaps, if Silvia is in here long enough and the weather gets warmer, if he can stomach still coming to visit her, he will come to regard that bench as his sanctuary. It will be a pleasure to sit on it because it will be wood against his legs, and a relief from sitting in here with Silvia, breathing her same stuffy air and watching her staunchly make no progress whatsoever.

  Or maybe not.

  Maybe she will wake up soon.

  Yes, she might.

  All the more reason to tell her. Tell her now.

  He girds himself.

  ‘So, that evening, the fish ’n’ chips evening, eventually I was at the head of the queue. There was no one else to let in front, so I had to take my turn and give my order. I couldn’t steal any more time. As the girl gave me the packet, she said, “Have a lovely night,” and I automatically replied, “Yes thanks, I will.” I quickly climbed into my car and once inside, I allowed that little comment to land on me. “Have a lovely night.” She said it with conviction, actually she genuinely hoped I would have “a lovely night”. I wouldn’t of course, I knew that, but that wasn’t what struck me. The shocking realization I had, was that she imagined “a lovely night” was a possibility for me. Somehow she had the hope I had completely lost. A stranger could still imagine I had the capacity for happiness.

  ‘She didn’t know that I was dead inside, that … I had ruled out the chance of joy ever again. For that night and every other night to follow. I had fully settled into my unhappiness and wore it comfortably. So comfortably in fact, that it was barely perceptible to others. It just fitted me so well. My suit of misery hung happily on me. So happily that she assumed I could have “a lovely night” in it. The loveliness she referred to was so extremely far out of reach for me. It was as far as … the bloody moon.

  ‘The sadness of it all hit me very hard, very suddenly. It virtually winded me. As I pulled away from the kerb, my mind started to chase me … towards … the bloody tipping point. I didn’t drive home. I drove up to Collicott Fields. I parked in the turning point at the end of the lane, you know it. It was still light enough to see, so I grabbed the fish-and-chips bag and the noose, climbed across the wall on that stile they have there, and headed up the field towards the wood.

  ‘No one was about, save a few sleepy cows who gave me that witheringly dismissive glance they do, and then they just resumed their serious chewing job. Four stomachs, apparently. Amazing. As I trudged across the grass, I could see the grove of ancient beeches at the far end of the field, getting closer and bigger, as if they were coming towards me to swallow me up. That’s just what I wanted, to be right inside that wood, away from the woodless everywhere else. Away from openness. As I approached the outer edge with the first trees, I could feel the structure of the ground beneath my feet begin to change. The floor of the forest is scattered with the detritus of the massive gnarly beeches, all their droppings. It became quite crunchy and I had to pick my way through carefully. Remember, it was twilight by now, so it was fairly perilous.

  ‘You know where I was going Silv. I headed straight for the massive queen beech at the centre of the copse. She is the mother of them all, I think, the giant shade giver, the oldest. Maybe even four hundred years, possibly.

  ‘You will remember her, you will have looked up past her great knotted trunk into her magnificent dense top foliage that amazing day Silv, all those years ago, y’know the first time. I couldn’t believe how young you looked. Easily fifteen years younger than you were. I suppose you must have been … What? … thirty-three or something when we first met, but with the filtered sun dancing on your skin, so … dappled and … sort of creamy, you looked like a teenager. You were smiling up at me, giving me permission to go further. Inside the wood, inside you. So breathless and … willing.’

  Ed looks at her.

  Yes, she’s still breathless. Different kind of breathless.

  That kind, back then, is such a turn-on, he remembers, when a woman can’t find enough breath to keep up. When she has to snatch air between waves of pleasure. Deep, guttural sexual breaths. God, he loves that sound. He hasn’t heard it for so long.

  So long.

  So …

  Long.

  He sighs and looks at her.

  ‘You were the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen that day, your nakedness in amongst those huge snakey roots. It was all … earth, or something. Overwhelming. Completely natural. The best kind of beauty. It was a better moment than any I’d ever had. Maybe even than I ever will have, Silv. It was … sort of … dunno … sacred? I know that sounds grand and I’m sorry to say I’m glad you can’t respond to it, because I can just hear your haughty derision now. Maybe deservedly. But Silv, I just want you to know how much it meant.

  ‘It was in that moment I genuinely believed in – you know – love, for the first time. Well, for the only time. I believed we would always be one, I wanted that. I thought you did too. I really thought you did. Did you Silv? I would like to know. Yep. Like to know when that all changed … Anyway, it was on that day remember, we carved the Latin initials: “CICA” for “Crescent illae, crescit amores”, “As these letters grow, so will our love” into the bark of that immense matriarch.

  ‘So that’s where I was heading, Silv. I found her, after a bit of palavering about and tripping up. A beautiful, monumental big fat beech with our memento tattooed on her. I felt guilty when we did it, like it was tree vandalism or something, but you said it was a badge of honour for the tree, that she would be proud to display our epigram along with all the other human markings made long before us. By schoolchildren in breeches and petticoats? By lovers in tight collars and corsets? I had to fumble about in my pocket for my keys so that I could use the pathetic little key-ring torch to search the giant trunk to find it.

  ‘It was, of course, further up than we had carved it, twenty-seven years further up in fact, and further in, which
isn’t so much on a colossal mama like that. I found it though. Still there, holding fast. Unlike us. I sat back down on the ground beneath it. Exactly where we had made love, and I unwrapped the fish and chips. They were a bit cold by then, but I gorged on them anyway. Delicious. “Have a lovely night.” I looked at the noose I had flung on the floor nearby. It definitely wasn’t going to be lovely.

  ‘The noose was well made even if I do say so myself. I had been practising making it with various kinds of rope, different thicknesses. This one should be just right, I thought. I bought the rope in a chandlers, it was nylon and strong and manoeuvrable where it needed to be. The slip knot was well executed. That was the most crucial part. It must work first time, and it must take my weight. As I fall, I need the knot to jolt my neck forward and snap it cleanly. No fuss.

  ‘Jump. Snap. Done.

  ‘I tied and retied it sitting next to Ma on the sofa whilst she was watching Midsomer Murders. She didn’t notice.

  ‘I finished my fish and chips, and tidied away my mess. I didn’t want to leave a mess. More mess than there already was. Which was a massive bloody godawful mess. Holding the torch in my mouth, I flung the length of the rope over a strong lower branch and secured it to the trunk of the tree. Nothing would loosen it, it would remain firm, I was sure of that. I positioned the noose just above a massive old log that I could use to step off. It was all ready. I realized that these could be my very last moments in this world.

  ‘What does one do? Or say?

  ‘I wanted to be quick or I knew my courage might fail me, so I rummaged around in my brain for anything of significance to think or feel. In the end, I mumbled something pathetic out loud like “Dear God, if you exist, and I’ll know pretty soon, help my children to forgive me for this, and please be the strength in them that I can’t find in me. Amen. Oh, and sorry for being such a prime tosser …” I climbed up on to the log and tried to balance. It was hard because there was slimy lichen all over it, and because I was brimming with tears. Stinging my eyes, then streaming. Thousands of tears. Mostly self-pity I think, and self-loathing. But Silv, I didn’t know how to pity and loathe myself ’til you taught me. What an accomplished coach you are. So well acquainted was I with my shortcomings, that I could end up on a slippy log prepared to donate my life to them. Feeling like absolute shit, Silv. Absolute shit.