by Dawn French
Jo is the first to speak, and her voice cuts through the sadness of the room like a knife through jelly.
‘I am sorry, Winnie. I really am. I thought … I don’t know … I thought it was kind of a wild thing to do, bit crazy y’know … saucy, for her. She would’ve laughed about it if she was … y’know … the old Silvia. Would’ve found it sort of revolting and amusing and, well, it certainly would’ve got her attention.’
‘H’indeed. Yes. Yes. Hmm …’
‘But obviously it … hasn’t worked. Nothing works, does it? Nothing I do. Never has, to be honest. All I’m trying to do is to think differently. Come up with something to give her a reason to want to come back … y’know.’
‘So, sorry, yu tink she purposely unconscious?’
‘No, well yes. Well, no, not exactly. All I know is that Sissy is a phenomenally strong person and if anyone could push through and wake up, it would be her. Except that … she’s very different, these last few years. Very … changed. Personally, I blame that awful woman Cat. You’ve seen her in here, haven’t you Winnie? I mean, honestly, what do you think …?’
‘Not fe mi to say … but …’
Jo isn’t listening really. She is revelling in the fact that someone, anyone, is listening to her. Being the listener herself isn’t her bag …
‘Because I think Sis has made some weird decisions. Well out of character. I mean, she’s always been a bit selfish, but to not see the kids, not answer their calls, not even acknowledge Willow, honestly, it’s not OK, is it? D’you think?’
‘Well, you haffi remember she …’
‘Personally, I think it’s cuntish. Sorry to use that sort of language Winnie, I know you’re churchy, but really, it’s the only word that’ll do. I mean, even if you have hooked up with someone who’s obviously very strong-natured, very bossy, and frankly, very weird, even if that’s who has a massive strange, bloody inexplicable hold over you, don’t you buck against that when it comes to your bloody kids? Don’t you?’
‘Mi not sure she …’
‘I mean, come on! She wasn’t even speaking to me in the end. Not that it’s the end, sorry Sissy, if you can hear me. It definitely isn’t the end, that much I bloody know. It can’t just be … this. It can’t.’
‘Well, Silvia not so …’
‘You don’t understand. That is my baby sister. I am older than her and it’s my job to bloody look after her. Except, of course, she won’t bloody let me! As usual. Has to do it her own way. Has to be the bloody winner. Well, well bloody done, Silvia, you are doing it all your own way, bravo! But you know what, in the end, you’re not the winner, are you? Because I’m here and you’re … there!’
Jo stands up.
Winnie keeps hold of her hand to placate her.
‘Now den Jo, yu haffi stay calm …’
‘So I am the winner. Yes, I am the one … who’s in front … for once. I am the one who is … alive … oh God.’
‘Shhh now, come on …’
‘I don’t mean alive. Of course she’s alive, you know what I mean. I am the … longer-lasting one … everyone always thinks she’s the valuable one, she is the one who matters. My name has bloody always been “Silvia’ssisterJo”. That’s it. All one word. Attached to her. That’s why I’m here. To be a connection to her. Well, sorry if I’m not special enough on my own, everyone! Sorry if Jo isn’t sufficient! Sorry, dead Mum! Sorry, bloody old stupid Dad! Too drunk to even notice there is an alive daughter. Got a dead wife and a half-dead favourite daughter, sorry Sis, but you are, both favourite and half dead. Yes. So, sorry Dad, if you’ve got an alive daughter who would quite like a chance to dance on your feet please, or be arms-linked in the street, or share a tawny port with, or be given a big illustrated copy of Beauty and the Beast when I have my measles jab. Sorry I’m not enough! You twat!’
‘OK. OK …’
Jo crumples back on to the chair. She cannot staunch her tears. These are tears Jo has refused to allow for a very long time, and so the build-up is quite a considerable reservoir. Jo’s whole body shudders as she lets it flow out. This is the kind of crying that really hurts.
Winnie knows it matters, she can see that this isn’t part of Jo’s typical histrionics, this is real pain. Jo means everything she has said.
And Winnie is right, Jo hasn’t filtered any of it through her usual screen of jollity and eccentricity, she has connected, at last, with some long-held feelings of bafflement and outrage about how she was, and maybe still is, perceived inside the family. The difficult memories of her mother’s early death, and of how she was left feeling like the reserve-bench mother to the family at age nine. She was slammed into that role far too early. To watch her beloved mother decline so quickly and be eaten up by what she and her sister were told was ‘the muscle monster’ was agonizing. Even Mummy herself didn’t really explain it, and chose to use baby language around the subject of motor neurone disease.
Why? To make light of it? To puncture its power? Well, that didn’t work because ‘the muscle monster’ ate Mummy.
Limb by limb.
Then it took her speech.
Then it took her.
Jo tried to stop it, she rubbed Aqua Manda cream on Mummy and gave her everything from the medicine cupboard she could find. Mummy obligingly took all the cough medicine and laxatives and Germolene in a sort of game where Jo was the nurse. Except it wasn’t a game for Jo. It was the difference between life and death. Daddy was getting very drunk and Silvia was busy playing, but Jo was consumed with crippling worry, and stayed indoors, near Mummy at all times, watching her closely and administering all her own solutions.
Of course there were real doctors too, but Mummy was often too tired to remember what they’d said, and Daddy was always elsewhere. Jo once caught him in his study, crying. It was so strange and frightening to see. Jo decided then and there that she would have to be in charge, so that’s what she did, she charged at life headlong from that precise moment onward. She might now recall those very frightening times and have to see and feel it all again.
Here she is. In a room with another beloved, who might just … die … like Mummy went and did.
Jo had to do a speedy fast-forward through her childhood when that happened, but of course, something in her remains staunchly, defiantly, nine years old, even now, demanding to be responsibility-free. Nine years old. That is the state Jo longs for.
She feels as if she didn’t get enough of it then, so she lives it now, off and on. She is profoundly nine years old in a parallel, hidden life that lives simultaneously alongside her 63-year-old present life. Usually, she can juggle the two successfully, but in this moment, where her sister is gravely ill, which Jo inexplicably regards as her own fault, she has trouble differentiating between the two. Old, confused memories flood back, and all Jo knows is that she must, must try to save Silvia.
As Mummy was floating away, when she couldn’t even speak properly any more, she used to repeatedly point at the then six-year-old Silvia playing in the garden, and then point at Jo to indicate she must take care of her little sister. Mummy obviously knew that Daddy wouldn’t manage it very well. Jo would whisper again and again, ‘Don’t worry, Mummy, I will look after her. I will,’ and she would watch Mummy visibly relaxing. It was so clearly a huge comfort. The promise was made, and Jo kept it as best she could after Mummy died.
For three or four years, Jo looked after Sissy while Daddy fell apart. He wanted to care properly for them but he just couldn’t, and when his drunkenness and his loud grief became too much for them, they were sent to live with their paternal grandmother until Jo had eventually got a job in a small bohemian boutique, and was allowed to live in the poky flat above it. That’s when she brought Silvia with her, and encouraged her through school and uni, to broaden her horizons. Jo persuaded Silvia to study, and travel and read, although Jo had very little time to do any of those things herself.
All that care. All that nurturing. And look at her now. Jo has failed
. She has let Silvia down and she has let Mummy down, and she feels wretched. In the torrent of tears is a small stream that is purely those of nine-year-old Jo.
Winnie puts a loving arm around her and offers a tissue from the pack she keeps in her regulation uniform pocket for just such an occasion.
Jo blubs, ‘Thanks for all your advice Winnie. You’ve certainly helped a lot. I won’t forget what you’ve said. And, again, sorry. I was just, trying … to …’
‘Yes, yes child. I know. It all OK. Jus’ forget it now, yes?’
‘Yes. Yes. Sorry. Yes.’
‘And no more nonsense, yu hear mi now?!’
‘No more, no. Only one thing I thought might help. Not help her wake up or anything, not wake up, I don’t think I mean that, I just thought it might help if I brought Dad in. She hasn’t spoken to him for about forty-five years. What d’you think?’
‘Well, hmm, mi tink that would …’
‘Yeh, I thought so. Thanks Winnie. For everything. I’ll be back soon. God, you are so …’ Jo points to her head and to her heart ‘… you really are. Amazing. See ya!’
And she is gone.
Twenty-Six
Ed
Wednesday noon
Ed is on the visitor’s chair. He is mid-flow about his favourite subject and stroking a carved wooden circle he is clutching in his hand.
‘I mean, you’d think a tree would just be there, fulfilling its usefulness and sort of y’know, doing what it’s told in terms of growing, but beech is a misfit. It’s like the misbehaver in the tree family. It’s unpredictable and surprising. Capricious. That’s a lovely word, isn’t it Silv? Wonder if people in Capri are capricious? But that’s exactly what beech is. Moody and idiosyncratic, because they can appear to be big and showy and … commanding, but quite honestly, at the drop of a hat they can just give up and fall over, unlike so many other trees which are, let’s face it, sort of generally seen as monuments to solidarity and longevity. Like giant wooden anchors that secure us to the past. So this big old matron just … went crazy and uprooted herself. It’s not as if the weather was really even to blame, I think she just decided to … collapse. Bloody drama queen.
‘Anyway, it gave me a good excuse to chop up some firewood and I decided to bring you this today, on your sixtieth birthday. To be honest, Silv, I was going to carve it into a heart shape, but then I thought, no, that will give completely the wrong impression, and I know you hate mushy stuff, so I have left it a circle. Which seems more apt somehow.
‘We may not be directly connected by the heart any more, so to speak, but we are still bound in the same circle, kinda, with the kids and everything. It’s to represent how sort of concentric it all is, y’know life, relationships, trees. It all makes sense to me. I love all these circles.’
He looks down at the wood, scrutinizing it.
‘They are connected but separate if you know what I mean. One inside the other. And. I think, looking at the trunk of this lazy ol’ dame of a tree, she was about sixty. So. There. A sixty-year-old circle, for a sixty year old. Happy wooden birthday Silv.’
He lays the thick disc of wood on the bed above her stomach. It looks oddly as if Silvia has died when it lies there. Why? Too stately or something. He removes it immediately and places it under her hand gently, so that her fingertips are touching it. All he knows is that this is what he would want if it were him in that bed. And that’s the best he can do.
He stands, and starts slow rhythmic pacing around the room. He is familiar with how many steps wide, and how many steps long the room is. He can’t get around it completely, because of the bedhead being up against the wall, and various free-standing machines and a cupboard prevent him from encompassing the boundary. That’s what he would like to do. Yes, he would like to beat the bounds of this room. Understand the extent and the limitations of it, meanwhile marking a protective parameter he could be the custodian of.
His instinct to safeguard is key for Ed. He tried to do that in his family and he feels he failed. He most certainly does it in his wood, every day. He literally patrols the borders of his land to check for damage or intrusion before walking back into the heart of the wood to double-check all is in order. He is the keeper, and he takes it extremely seriously. He is also a creature of habit, or has become so. He finds routine comforting. He seeks out any opportunity for reassurance. On his daily round of checks, he circumnavigates his forest in ever-decreasing circles so as not to miss anything. It’s an effective way of searching thoroughly, and observing detail. Lots of animals do it like that. So does Ed. He carried out his custodial duties just like that this very morning.
At the end of his patrol, every day, he finds himself at the very centre of his wood, at the queen beech where he and Silvia once pledged their love and where he tried to end himself. This is his nucleus. This is where he stops, he rests and he is positively charged, so that he can cope with everything else going on in his life without flipping into massive anxiety about his many inadequacies. It’s Mother Nature’s Prozac, and he has a serious habit.
This morning, when he sat under the huge flourishing queen tree looking up at her dense crown, he was taken with a sudden consuming feeling of abject loneliness. It was a familiar gut wrench for him. He didn’t experience it with all the attendant horror of before but it tugged at him nevertheless. Yep. He can confirm with absolute surety, that he is most certainly a profoundly lonely man.
He stops pacing. He sits down. He dives right into the centre of his thinking, with no introduction.
‘Don’t take this the wrong way Silv, but I see now that I didn’t know what lonely was ’til I married you. That sounds awful. It is awful. It was awful. I don’t mean that I had never been alone, that’s completely different. Solitude is fine, being alone is fine. Being lonely is not. I came to that marriage with you, prepared to do anything it took to make you happy. Truly. I know that sounds wanky and self-pitying now, but honestly, that is the bloody truth. I was naive, in love and … open to anything.
‘I know I can be a tosser, I worry too much and I’m a bit needy. Yes, I know that. BUT. Something I know now, that I didn’t know then, is this. You are the lonely one. You came to the marriage drenched in it, and I didn’t see it. I just kept trying to fix you, any way I could think of. But nothing was ever going to fix it Silv, was it, because by then, all those years after your mum died and your hopeless, selfish dad did everything to cut off from you, it wasn’t just that you felt a loneliness somewhere inside, it was that you were and still are, MADE of it. Made of loneliness.
‘It has shaped everything about you. Even the things I was perversely drawn to – your feistiness and your opinionated confidence. All of these things about you have loneliness as the main ingredient. Perpetual, howling loneliness. Which you were driven to share. Thanks. And y’know what Silv, the cruellest loneliness I felt was when you started to refuse to communicate with me. Doing exactly what your bloody father did to you. Stepping away from me, and never explaining it. A gradual slowing of the drip drip. A tourniquet. Drip … nothing … drip … nothing … nothing … nothing. Slow slide into emotional poverty. Until, one day, I realized that there was no flow left. It was entirely blocked, utterly strangled from your side. I was left on my side to carry the heaviness of that particularly rampant infection of loneliness.
‘Unlike you, I had no previous form with it, no process to deal with it, so it nearly finished me off. But guess what Silv, I’ve got beechwood in my sap, and beech flourish on thin, acid soils. They challenge the soil, the weather, the planting, all of it and they bloody prevail. Look at me, I’ve even got the bloody trunk of a beech now. Yep, got the bloody girth, indeed, but also got the plasticity to adapt and respond to the space I’ve got around me to live in. In fact, I will shape the space around me. And that’s what I’ve done. I’ve put everything I love and trust around me to help me. Nourish me. The wood. The kids. Willow. They are my medicine to fight off the disease of loneliness you infected me with.
‘I am doing that. I know I am. I’m winning. I just have to work out who Ed is, who the actual bloke is that I am. I have to coppice myself ’til I can grow back nice and thick. Ha. I have put myself in the centre of my wood, under the shade of that big ol’ queen, but I need to see some sunshine soon myself, I really do …’
Instinctively, Ed stands up and walks to the window where he can still catch a few rays on his face if he stands on his tiptoes and tilts his face towards it. So little sun comes into the quad below. The light on his face is lovely.
‘There is one advantage to loneliness though, Silv. It lends a very particular kind of beauty to everything. You so desperately need to see beauty to mitigate all the shitty stuff, so what happens is, the trees are greener, the sun is warmer, and bread tastes breadier than it ever did when I thought I was happy and not lonely. It’s like the world is inviting me to come out to play, so it’s got its best bloody jacket on. It does look amazing I must say. Not this, not this bloody awful empty yard down here where the sun doesn’t get a chance, but my world out there. It’s phenomenal really.
‘I’ve just got to find the … courage is it? … or confidence or something. Yeah. It’s all waiting for me, but I’m still holding back. Why? Why am I? I still feel empty, that’s why, I think. Haven’t found my balance yet, not completely. I can see a chance, I can see opportunities but I haven’t quite got the balls yet. I am stabilized, my roots are down. I just need to. … decide that I am capable of … triumph. Deserving of it … and I’m not there yet. I am faking it to make it at the moment, which is OK, but … I dunno … I have huge plunges into solid bloody doubt. And. It really pisses me off … because I want to be … better … Yep … I want to be a better, much better man … than this … damn.’
