The Water Is Warm

by Jennifer Stawska

  She was on the phone. She was crying. She had called the ambulance and was talking to someone, urging them to come quickly because something terrible had happened. She kept saying ‘I don’t know.’ She was telling them something about having found my father on the kitchen floor. She saw me and said in English ‘Simon, get back into the car please.’ But I looked and saw what she did not want me to see. It was my father. He was slumped across the floor. I could see the kitchen chair that he had been sitting on was pushed back from the kitchen table. The lights were on and there was a half empty bottle of whiskey on the table and three empty pill bottles next to it. That’s why I hate the smell of whiskey so much. He had vomited before he died and the room stank of the stuff.

  I just stood there frozen by what I was witnessing. ‘My Dad is dead’ kept swimming around my head – I can remember that moment vividly, even now thirty-seven years on. That bit is not acquired, I am quite sure. And then I wet myself, ran to my father and held his head in my arms as he lay on the floor. I wiped the vomit from his face with my sleeve. And then I cried. I just sat on the tiled floor of the kitchen in wet trousers, with my father’s head in my arms, crying and rocking backwards and forwards. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted him to open his eyes and tell me that he was playing. That it was a game. But I knew that it wasn’t.

  I could hear my mother telling the emergency operator where we lived and begging her to get the ambulance to come quickly but I knew that it was far too late for that. His head was cold and his eyes stared blankly. My mother then came off the phone and came towards me. I didn’t want her to take me away from him because I wanted to stay where I was and to hold his head hoping that there was a chance that he might wake up. I remember thinking that, if I let go, he would never wake up, that I would lose him and I did not want that. But my mother came towards me and crouched down beside me, she put her arm around my shoulders, stopped crying, sniffed and spoke to me very softly in English.

  ‘Simon, I am so sorry. I am afraid that I think that your father has died.’

  ‘He can’t have.’

  ‘No, I am afraid that he has. We are both going to have to be very brave now.’

  But I was aged eight and did not want to be brave and as I write this now I can still return with such ease to the utter despair of that moment. I rested my father’s head on the floor and that’s when I ran. I ran upstairs to my bedroom and hid under the bed. I lay there in the darkness in my room and cried. That’s where my emotions stayed for years. That’s the last time I have any memory of crying as a child.

  I remember very little of what happened next, although I heard accounts of it later. The ambulance came quickly and my father was taken away. He had died some time before we came home and there was nothing that anyone could have done. He had taken a month’s supply of his anti-psychotic medication (largactil), and what was left of his supply of tranquillisers (imipramine) together with a bottle of paracetamol which he had washed down with whiskey. This was the 1960s when psychiatric practice was heavily pill based and, in his instance, had been combined with electric shock treatment. He meant to die. He was in the highest suicide rate band of people; middle aged men.

  My mother called my father’s parents and told them what had happened and they came to the house and stayed with us. I remember the warmth and softness of my grandmother’s touch. A softness that I can only describe as having been unreservedly kind, gentle, enveloping and, somehow, radiatingly pink. She took me out of my wet clothes, put me into a warm bath, then wrapped me in a towel and sat with me on her lap. I remember how she held me and rocked me on her lap in the arm chair in the sitting room. I remember being overwhelmingly tired and falling asleep on her lap.

  There is a song for children that my father and I used to sing together and which is sung in most families. ‘The bear went over the mountain. The bear went over the mountain. The bear went over the mountain. To see what he could see.’ My father had asked for a record of the song for his birthday that year, when I had asked him what he would like me to buy for him. After his death and perhaps as the budding lawyer, I remember thinking of my father as the bear, trudging over a mountain on his own, shoulders weighed down by his burdens. I remember once asking myself: ‘But why did the bear go over the mountain?’ To see what he could see was no answer. Why did my father go over the mountain that day? How could the appeal of the country on the other side of the mountain be the reason for the journey that my father took? Why did he not stay on this side of his mountain? Why climb the mountain and face the freezing loneliness of doing so?

  I understand the answer now. Because what was on his side of the mountain was no longer good enough. It had been dug up and was no longer as nature had intended it to be. The ground had become infertile so resembling the impotence that drug and under researched therapy had caused him, as my mother explained to me in later life in an unguarded moment. My father’s life had been spoilt and he could not see any way in which it could ever be restored and so he had taken the solitary road of death over the mountain unable to face the life that he thought lay ahead.

  I used to think that, maybe, he would walk back into our lives or appear from the afterworld. I was brought up in the Catholic faith in which death is but a doorway into the spiritual world where we retain our earthly identity. But I also knew that suicide was regarded as a sin and, every time I went to church with my mother, I prayed for my father to find rest and to be forgiven as he had asked. What if his eternal identity was as the depressed and damaged man that took his life that day? For years I spoke to him in my head, telling him of his forgiveness and praying to God to give him rest. And he spoke to me as I carried him with me but I still craved for the feel of his arm on my shoulder – that same feeling - and to hear his voice say out loud the words: ‘Simon, you are OK,’ words which I never heard from anyone until I met Josh. Even as I type this I can feel in my shoulders that longing for their touch and comfort and I don’t want it to go away.

  My father’s plea for forgiveness was in the note that he left. It read: ‘Remember me as I was. And please forgive me.’ I found the note one day in my mother’s jewellery box where she had kept it. I have always remembered, as he asked me, even if some of my thoughts have been dormant or distorted; what happened became part of me and has always been in my mind like the beam of a lighthouse sweeping across my thoughts. I have found myself repeatedly introducing the words ‘forgive me, but...’ into my own conversation - it must be a family trait. How did I feel in the long term? I just felt very sad and very lost, as though my emotions froze that day and they remained frozen for a long time, hidden behind the façade of my care for my mother, my work and my marriage. It was not until I met Josh that I let go of my father because until then my grief was my comfort and it belonged only to me. Until then I never felt abandoned because I never let go. I just absorbed into my own being the person that I knew him to have been.

  Those then are the feelings that you allowed me to offload onto you, knowing that it was the only way that I would be healed. That’s how big a deal it was. Listening to me, pushing me to remember, making me voice the feelings that I had locked away and protecting me while I did so. Holding me, even at my most pathetic moments and letting me start again.

  After my father died I tried to look after my mother as he would have wanted but she retreated into her own world of widowhood and Catholicism, it was all too much for her to bear. Not only did she have to deal with the horrible events of the day but she also had to cope with the inquest, the police enquiry, the financial impact, the tittle-tattle and gossipy glances of others, the care of a bereft child and then the crippling isolation of widowhood in a foreign country.

  So, what happened? Well, I learnt to fend for myself and competed in everything that I did because I felt that I needed to beat other people to prove my own worth and to gain some sort of attention. I also deeply resented overt sympathy when it was directed towards me since that was the very last thing that I wan
ted; what I wanted was to be normal but in order to be normal I had to prove myself much more than others did. There was just a margin down the side of the page into which no one trespassed, making it very easy for me to leave people, as I did. The part of the page within the margin was my part, where I belonged, the true me. I even wrote it down once when I must have been about fifteen – I drew a margin on a piece of paper and wrote outside the margin ‘what you see’ and, within the margin, ‘what you don’t.’ I got very good at it. I learnt how to behave with other people in a way that did not give anything away. I encouraged people to think of me as charming, clever, good at sport, driven and even brave. ‘You always work so hard,’ people would say to me and I let them think of me in that way. Penelope thought I was the upwardly thrusting lawyer, an up and coming leader. Safe, because my horizons were so limited. A judge in the making. Someone who never stepped out of line.

  Wherever I was I made friends easily and left previous friends behind and I can see now that, as I got older, the line down the side of the margin got stronger as, in circumstance upon circumstance, I added ink to its definition. Penelope, certainly, had never entered my true emotional world nor did she want to. Why should she? And I hadn’t the first clue what she really felt – did she really admire Tom and despise her own mother? We both used our legal careers as something to hide behind and we both enjoyed them. To cure a repetitive nightmare of being chased by something monstrous I took up running and the monster went way as long as I didn’t stop training. Other than Catherine and Jennifer, I selected people who didn’t really matter and who confirmed the image of myself that I had created. By keeping my functioning life separate from the person I felt that I really was, the part of me within the margin gave me comfort and an ability to cope because it was my world and it was safe. I coped with my mother and offered her comfort, so she thought of me as a dutiful son which, in a sense, I was.

  That’s how I ended up playing the game of marriage and professional life, competing in everything that I did and making sure that I won. It was very easy to do so. I could have gone on like that for ever and, I am sure, neither I nor anyone else would have been any the wiser. I could easily have continued up the ladder of success in the law constantly, constantly competing. Constantly wanting to be one better than those who surrounded me so as to prove myself in a never-ending quest, believing that everyone else had a more complete way of life and that I needed to prove my worth as I searched in a vacuum for my own completeness. Constantly vying for attention from those who I perceived to be one step up the ladder from me and thinking dismissively of those whom I saw myself as overtaking in the race. Constantly feeling the drop over the precipice when I came second, when someone else won the race and then wanting to run away, planning how I might do it but knowing I would never dare to do so.

  Like the lawyers in the 1890 print of The Temple in London that hung in my old room in chambers, I could have strutted my moment on the legal stage discussing seemingly important issues of the day and then have retired quietly into nothing. It is only with Josh that that margin has been erased and I have felt that I have become a whole person again after stripping down the machinery to the last cog. God only knows what I am now. I can’t go back to being like that and I don’t have the chance to shut down as my mother did and retreat into family and religion. If I tipped up in France now it would be ‘fous-moi le camp d’ici, t’es pédé.’

  So, like father like son? I cannot die as my father did, in misery and without putting the pieces of life’s jigsaw together. He swept the whole thing off the table, half complete. I have the ability to complete it and have known fulfilment that he did not – which is why I have to finish this story and see what’s left.

  Enough said? I think that I know the answer to that question too.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  No, it isn’t enough. I’ve tried to leave all that behind but I can’t, because there is something else. Something that I know is simply not rational. It’s mad. But it’s true.

  ‘Simon, I’m not your father.’ That’s what you told me as we sat on the beach at Unawatuna on the night I had run out of the shack screaming full of nightmare. ‘I’m not your father. I won’t leave you.’

  When you said that I replied, ‘I know you are not’ and buried myself into you as you soaked the nightmare, my terror, out of mind, telling me that you would never leave.

  But I thought of what you had said and it took me a long time, months, to say what I really wanted to say, to say what I needed to say. It came only after we had found our faith together.

  ‘Josh, you know that you told me once that you were not my father. I know what I want to say about that now. You see, you are my father and I want you to be my father. I want you as my father and as so much else. I don’t want anything else.’ It is always in the middle of the night that I am able to see things as they are and I had woken up at the witching hour, three o’clock in the morning, and couldn’t settle. So, I woke you. That’s what we both had agreed we would do when something mattered.

  ‘Simon, tell me.’ That’s what you always said. You knew what to do. And, when I did tell you, you knew exactly what I meant, too.

  In the dark it’s easier to say it as it is. ‘I mean my life, my emotions, froze the day my father died and I didn’t know. Now I do and I don’t want to stay living like that. I don’t want to be hidden away. I hate myself for being there.’

  ‘Simon...’

  ‘No. I need to say this. I want release from myself. I’m sick of pretending. I need you to help me to carry on from where my father left off all those years ago. I want to grow up and put everything that I have into the two of us. It, you, are the only thing that matters now, you must understand that.’

  ‘Simon, I love you.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not just that I love you, that is easy to say, everyone says it. I need you, do you see? I need you to be at the centre of who I am now. At every level, I need you. Nobody else. That’s what I have wanted to say for a long time but I just didn’t know how.’ Well, it went something like that. I never did learn to précis.

  If I had read that in a psychological report when I was at the bar, I would probably have chucked it across my desk, muttering ‘how fucking contrived.’ But, I’m afraid, it’s true. It’s me. And you knew it.

  Sometimes words are nothing, they’re just animal noises. You understood, you coped with me in my most pathetic, my most infantile, state. This was me, back to being a child, crying out to you for comfort. You moved across the bed.

  ‘Simon, turn with your back to me.’ No, this has nothing to do with sex.

  Then Josh held me. His face buried into the back of my neck, his chest pressed against my back, his legs resting against mine, his feet crossing mine. He was the chair once again. I sat in it, once again.

  ‘Simon, I will always love you. I will never leave you. Breathe with me, follow my breath.’

  I breathed with you, following the movement of your chest, not letting it leave my back.

  Then I had to turn. I turned and I buried my head in your shoulder and I cried. Again. I’m good at that now. So are you.

  ‘Josh, I am so sorry.’

  ‘Simon, I am not. This has been coming for a long time.’

  And in that night that is so far beyond my vocabulary to describe properly, there is one other thing that meant everything to me. That is my Simeon’s song - ich habe genug – I have enough.

  You said: ‘Simon, you are my parents. You are my church, my faith. We belong together. You must trust me as I trust you. I couldn’t live without you, not now.’ And then you told me in words that do not belong in writing.

  Josh was twelve when he decided he was gay. That’s when he shut down and remained shut down through university, priesthood, working as a nurse and through the previous relationships that he had made. So, he gave me a task as well, a gift that I wanted more than anything or anyone else in the world. To protect him, to look after him, to be with h
im in his own moments of terror and to help him rebuild himself as he helped to rebuild me. It’s what you asked me to do. It was the gift you gave. And I took on that gift and I have cherished it as my most precious possession. Listening and listening again, always listening to your beautiful voice. I made it my world and threw away the page with its margin. This is who I am, part you, part me and this is the person I have always wanted to be, very different now to the Simon Greenwood of three years ago. You are a very different Josua Sebastien Ohlsson. I felt it all happen.

  What a pair we made. Two needy individuals just rubbing off on each other? Two underdeveloped people who would eventually have matured apart? No, that’s just not how we were and it just didn’t happen; it will never happen. We matured together, deepened together. Understanding each other bound us together and, now that I am on my own, I can control what happens in the future because I am not leaving you. But you must breathe with me again, Josh, while I get this done. I’ll be the lungs but you must hold me, you must keep your chest against me while I do this.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I have had to move from the hotel in Nilaveli. We spent the past three years in the south of the island, fed with newspaper reports about the conflicts of the north but never seeing them. I had no idea what life was really like in the eastern and northern provinces and only now, I think, have some sort of understanding of the gallows of war that once more await people only a few miles north from where I was staying. The two provinces were linked together in 1988 and it was only fourteen months ago, on 1 January 2007, that they were separated again, leaving the predominantly Tamil people of the Northern Province even more identified as the problem, the outsiders. Dharan and Karunya made me realise that it just wasn’t safe with them any longer and I also realise now the danger that I was causing them. They were really anxious after I told them about my conversation with the young soldier on the beach.