Live; live; live

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘I’m not talking about a new car,’ Erin snapped. ‘I’m just talking about something that doesn’t look as if it’s waiting to be towed away.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ said Lucas, meaning that he would not. Erin left the room.

  This disagreement would have been a few weeks before the kiss.

  Within two months of Lucas’s death, the old car was replaced with something almost new, on the advice of Chloe, the sister, who knows about cars, it seems.

  •

  Before the disagreement about the car – perhaps a month before – there was the afternoon on which Lucas and I walked down to the sea, when Erin was away for a couple of days, visiting Chloe. I was at my desk, and Lucas came out into the garden, took up a position in the middle of the lawn, and then, having gained my attention, made his fingers walk up and down the palm of an open hand, while looking at me questioningly.

  ‘She’s with the sister,’ said Lucas, right at the start. He made the noun sound like the title of a troublesome person who had some authority over him – notionally, at least. The tone was one I had not heard before. Suddenly I was a confidant, it seemed. He smiled and raised an eyebrow. Something was happening, he implied, that might not be in his best interests; but he was amused by it, as one might be amused by a conspiracy concocted by children, a conspiracy that had been obvious to everyone from the outset. This is what the smile told me, and the debonair flourish of the walking stick.

  The sister had a new and superior job, Lucas informed me. ‘More money. Bigger office. More underlings. Better view,’ he said, listing the achievements weightily, as they warranted. In the past week the sister had posted about a hundred pictures of the London panorama that came with the new office, Lucas reckoned. Had there, he wondered, been a single unrecorded hour of Chloe’s waking life in recent years? Erin’s ‘ridiculous’ phone had been bought chiefly, it seemed, to keep track of the sister’s ‘pathological snapping’.

  ‘She has a compulsion to share every single thing she likes, or “Likes”,’ he went on. The sarcasm was extravagant. Chloe seemed to like almost everything that passed in front of her. ‘Meaningless. Utterly meaningless,’ said Lucas. ‘Friend’ was another word that didn’t mean anything any more, he informed me, gathering momentum. ‘You gather friends you have never met and will never meet, and about whom you know nothing except that they like you in the same way you like them, and you like each other because you both agreed with something inane that was thrown out into the world by someone else, who is now a friend of both but unknown to either of you. And you tell everyone about all the friends you have and all the things you like, and so you enlarge yourself, and on and on it goes, gathering more stuff and sending it back out, and there is never any end to it.’ The narcissism of it all was appalling, Lucas moaned. Never pausing for thought, people passed judgement instantly. With each ‘Like’ they advertised who they took themselves to be, not understanding that they were in fact becoming nothing. The self, said Lucas, was turning into something like a bloom of algae, getting bigger every day, but with no shape at all, no centre, no real life.

  It was a long walk. We had reached the seafront, where a couple of teenagers were sitting on a wall, staring into their phones, as if to give Lucas his opportunity. Each took a picture of the sea, and compared the results. Each took a picture of the other. They kissed, and took a picture of themselves kissing. Then, it seemed, there were messages that demanded attention.

  Life is becoming a whirlpool of perpetual distraction, said Lucas, gesturing at the examples who had been set before him. We are surrounded by people who need to ensure that every moment of the day has some form of activity. But all this activity is in truth the opposite of activity – it is a dreadful passivity. ‘This is what you have to understand,’ he said, though I was not inclined to disagree. He said it urgently, raising his voice, which made the couple turn to look at him. Seeing nothing of interest, they gave a glance to the sea, where nothing of interest was happening either, then turned back to the phones.

  ‘You know where those things are made?’ he said. He stopped, so that the couple might overhear what he had to say about factories in China in which tens of thousands of people slave day and night, and every week someone is driven to such a pitch of exhaustion and despair that they jump off the roof. These factories are every bit as bad as the factories of Victorian England, but with a crucial difference: the workers who are suffering for our benefit nowadays are safely out of sight, so we can continue to amuse ourselves untroubled by our consciences. Satisfied that he had been heard, Lucas moved on, to further expound on the perniciousness of these devices. We no longer need to pay attention to the world, because these gadgets – our ‘exo-memories’ – will remember everything on our behalf. Or rather, record everything, which is not the same thing. The world is being reduced to a pocketful of digital data. It just becomes ‘stuff’ to possess, along with all the music we can pour into our ears whenever we feel like it. People seem to think that by accumulating all this stuff, by never taking a break from it, they are in some way getting ‘more life’, he preached. Plenitude is being confused with fulfilment, he instructed me, as two women jogged past us, barely lifting their feet. This was another cue, for the cult of fitness, the obsession with ‘activity’ and ‘well-being’, et cetera, et cetera.

  On and on he went. We are living in an age of ‘hysterical positivity’, he stated. It’s no longer enough for a company to do or make something – it has to tell the public that it has a ‘passion’ for it. Only last week, he’d seen a van emblazoned with the words: ‘We have a passion for paper.’ Could anything be more ridiculous? Another thing that was ridiculous – the assumption, evident every time you open a newspaper or turn on the television – that we all ‘love’ the same programmes, the same films, the same actors, the same singers. We are in danger of becoming the unresistant consumers of everything, warned Lucas. If one takes a stand against this tide of relentless positivity one is accused of saying ‘No’ to life.

  Some people, he knew, regarded him as a curmudgeon. He was nothing of the sort, but he was quite content to be misperceived, even to be disliked, because dislike is a form of resistance, and thus a good thing. We must not become people who are unable to resist any stimulus. ‘Our survival depends upon refusal,’ he said, sweeping his stick from side to side, as if clearing a path through undergrowth.

  We demonstrated our refusal by coming to a halt, to admire the strange pallor of the sea that afternoon. Then his phone rang. ‘This is all you need,’ he said, displaying the superannuated device – the thing that was no better than a walkie-talkie, as Erin had said, charmed by Lucas’s recalcitrance. It was Erin calling. ‘I’m with Joshua,’ he told her. ‘We’re having an interesting talk,’ I heard, before he removed himself to a distance of twenty yards, for a lengthy conversation.

  On we sauntered, in silence at last, setting an example to all, walking slowly and looking around, taking no pictures.

  •

  On the morning of the day that followed my mother’s death, Lucas and Erin came to the house, having seen the ambulance. ‘How is she?’ Erin asked; Lucas, knowing the answer before I spoke, looked at me over her shoulder, steadily. His handshake was only in part a contract of sympathy; it marked my induction into the community of the bereaved, a community that was his domain. As soon as the door was closed, Erin, saying nothing, crying silently, held me; I closed my arms around her, as if taking comfort. Lucas, at a yard’s remove from us, waited. When I opened my eyes he was looking at me still; he was assessing what species of grief this would be, and what might need to be done.

  There had been no farewell, I told them. By the time I arrived, she had gone. I could not recall the substance of what proved to be the last conversation with my mother. She had not been especially unwell; and then she was dead.

  Lucas and Erin spent more than an hour with me, sitting apart, but united in p
urpose; like compassionate missionaries rather than lovers.

  A few days later, after a meal cooked by Erin, during which I had been scrutinised by Lucas less discreetly than he might have intended, he said to me, as I left: ‘You are fine, aren’t you?’ He never offered his services in connection with my mother, and hardly ever spoke of her. In this respect, his conduct was unimpeachable.

  Every night, however, for many months, on turning out the light for the night, I would see my mother, the body that had been by mother, in the hospital. I was looking again at the corpse. Suddenly she was no longer in the world; her life was now entirely in the past, and only this thing of flesh remained in the present, for a short time longer. I looked into the pit into which she had fallen, into which I would one day fall. There was no mingling of spirits; there was no spirit at all.

  •

  One Sunday, there were fresh flowers on the grave; left by Lucas, I later learned. Certain ‘observances’ were right and proper, he told me, and I thanked him, while wondering why flowers should be placed on a grave by a man who believed what Lucas professed to believe.

  •

  Clearing the table with me, at the end of an evening, Lucas said quietly, with no preamble: ‘You were a good son, you know.’ I had indeed been thinking, at that moment, of my mother. Then he added, with a dash of eye contact: ‘Everything is fine.’ I was to understand that he had picked up a signal. He wanted me to know that he knew she was happy. But everything was not fine: she was utterly dead, not happy.

  Affronted, I answered: ‘Glad to hear it.’

  Yet I had to admire him, a little. Even with me, he could not suspend the performance. He had to impart the good news, though I could not be converted. People are so rarely persuaded, Lucas would say. We change our minds not because someone convinces us that we have been in error, but because experience obliges us to change.

  Across the table he gave me a smile, a smile that offered some sort of apology, and accepted my resistance, and wanted me to understand that I would one day know what he knew – that all would be well.

  •

  Novelist and actress Florence Marryat, in There is No Death, a book of which it has been said that it ‘has done more to convince many people of the truth of Spiritualism than any yet written’, wrote of the medium Bessie Fitzgerald: ‘Of course, I am aware that it would be so easy for a Medium simply to close her eyes, and, professing to be entranced, talk a lot of commonplaces, which open-mouthed fools might accept as a new gospel, that it becomes imperative to test this class of media strictly by what they utter, and to place no faith in them, until you are convinced that the matters they speak of cannot possibly have been known to any one except the friend whose mouthpiece they profess to be. All this I fully proved for myself from repeated trials and researches; but the unfortunate part of it is, that the more forcible and convincing the private proof, the more difficult it is to place it before the public. I must content myself, therefore, with saying that some of my dead friends (so called) came back to me so frequently through Bessie Fitzgerald, and familiarized themselves so completely with my present life, that I forgot sometimes that they had left this world, and flew to them (or rather to Bessie) to seek their advice or ask their sympathy as naturally as if she were their earthly form.’

  There was a further dimension to the genius of Bessie Fitzgerald. ‘She was a wonderful medical diagnoser, and sat for a long time in the service of a well-known medical man. She would be ensconced in a corner of his waiting room and tell him the exact disease of each patient that entered. She told me she could see the inside of everybody as perfectly as though they were made of glass.’ Bessie’s paranormal examinations took their toll, however. Her gift ‘induced her to take on a reflection (as it were) of the disease she diagnosed, and after a while her failing strength compelled her to give it up.’

  •

  For a surprisingly modest payment, an investigator traced my father – or rather, found out that my father was no longer alive. He had died, it turned out, a year before my mother, in Castlebar, County Mayo, leaving a widow, Aoife, née Feerick, who had previously been married to one Jack Jennings, proprietor of a Castlebar pub, which Aoife had continued to run, latterly in partnership with her second husband. My father was sixty-three when he married Aoife; she was fifty-six, with two children in their thirties. I can see the pub online, and the streets of the town in which my father lived. It is unimaginable for me; alcohol is absent from my memory of him; no photograph shows him drinking. My investigator did a good job. Now I know even the location of the grave; on my laptop I can follow the route from the centre of town, out along Newport Road, then left; about a mile from the pub to the cemetery gates.

  Lucas, on being told what had been discovered, nodded his head at every item of information, as though everything confirmed what he had thought.

  •

  When Lucas first talked to me, when I was a child, I saw no resemblance between him and my father. For a long time, I was conscious of no similarity in appearance or character. My father’s character was almost unknown to me, it must be said. But then, one evening when I was back from university, I looked at a photograph of my father – taken in Poole, before I was born, on an occasion that my mother could no longer remember, or so she said – and for the first time a small resemblance became apparent: some similarity of posture; something around the eyes – a certain inflection of a sideward glance. The resemblance, such as it is, is not attached to the father whom I remember, who is a figure of no solidity. Rather, the later Lucas, the heavier Lucas, is not unlike my father in this single photograph.

  •

  Near the bench of conversation my mother and I once had our picture taken by a man who introduced himself as a professional photographer. For the past few years he had been putting together a collection of images of mothers and sons, he told us. Once a month he would visit a town he had not previously visited, and roam the streets for an hour or two, on the lookout for subjects. By now he had taken hundreds of double portraits; the youngest son so far was only one week old; the oldest was in his seventies. On the day that the photographer spotted my mother and me, I was eleven, Lucas informed me. It seems that I was immediately as impressed by the photographer as he was by us. He was about forty, thin and unusually tall, with black horn-rimmed glasses and soft dark hair that stuck out strangely, as if full of static. He wore a long red scarf wound around his neck, and his companion, a Jack Russell terrier, was tethered by a lead of exactly the same colour. Seeing us walking hand in hand, the man had crossed the road and approached us, smiling with such openness that my mother wondered for a moment if he was someone she should be recognising. The Jack Russell and I established an immediate rapport, and it was then that Lucas passed by, with Kathleen. For the photograph, I knelt on the ground, leaning against my mother’s legs, patting the dog.

  Lucas first described the scene to me not long after my mother died. The narration came with a plenitude of detail – the weather; the heavy old camera; the coat I was wearing that day; where Lucas and Kathleen had been going. Something began to form in my mind – an imprecise recollection of a tall man and a red scarf, perhaps. On another day, prompted by the sight of a Jack Russell, Lucas again recounted the episode, with other incidentals. This time, I think, I saw more in my memory. There were other occasions in which reference was made to the photographer and the dog with the red lead. At the table, sitting opposite me, he told Erin about the photographer who had been beguiled by the eleven-year-old Joshua and his mother; he made an affecting vignette of it. Now, hearing the story for the fifth or sixth time, I had a glimpse of a man holding a box-shaped camera, standing over me, with a scarf like a huge red collar, which might indeed have been the residue of a scene in which I had played a part as a child.

  No picture in my mother’s albums corresponds to this scene.

  •

  From the garden of their house I could be seen a
t my desk, hour after hour, day after day. One could draw a line from the centre of the lawn to where I sat, and nothing would impede it. So Erin would have known that she could be seen. She would never sunbathe in the garden when Lucas was at home, as I recall; something could be made of this fact, perhaps. But this is not to say that there was any flirtatious intent. Erin was direct in everything; this was one of her many qualities. Her body was admirable and she was content for it to be admired, as a beautiful dress might be admired. There was no vanity with Erin, no coyness, no affectation. She was not disingenuous. It was a fact that she inhabited a well-made body. One could imagine an artist’s model, a professional, regarding herself in the same way.

  And it would be dishonest to say that I did not take pleasure from the sight of that body. She would fall asleep in the sunlight and I would look. A woman would have looked as I did. The body of Erin was beautiful. Occupied by any spirit, or soul, or mind, or person, it would have been beautiful. When I looked at that sleeping body, however, I did not see what I loved in Erin, and what I desired. I would be weakened not by the sight of Erin barely clothed, but – for example – when, having dressed, she came back out into the garden to water the plants, methodically, as if in observance of some ritual. The precision and slowness captivated me; the manner with which she executed the task put me in mind of the fastidiousness of Kathleen. It was not possible to imagine either of them hurrying. There was a gesture that Erin often employed when talking – she would turn her hand backwards sharply at the wrist, and swivel it, as if presenting an object for our scrutiny at various angles. Some aspect of Erin was summarised in this gesture; it charmed me, as did the little prance with which she would sometimes step over the threshold to go into the garden. Fascination rather than charm would be the word for the effect of the veiled look that often came into Erin’s eyes – not quite a look of preoccupation, but a slight clouding, produced, I tended to assume, by thoughts of her brother, but not always. She was often not wholly with us. On the other hand, I observed a converse quality: following her, occasionally, I would observe the way she looked at what surrounded her – her entire bearing seemed to signify pleasure, even delight. Another thing that I found alluring: she never gossiped; Lucas would occasionally offer up a rumour that he had heard, but Erin would not join in. She did not squander words; the silence of Erin was a receptive silence, a silence of self-composure. The tone of her laugh was lovely – another banality for this account, but it should be recorded. With the word ‘laugh’ a scene comes to mind: ‘I can spot you a mile spot you a mile off. The white shirt – it’s your summer plumage,’ she told me, tapping my shoulder; and now I hear that small light sound.