by Steve Low
Isobel was bent over a pot, stirring baked beans with a big wooden spatula. She lifted the pot off the element, carrying the steaming mixture across to a large wiped down table where a number of people sat dealing to the first meal of the day. There was an appearance of sluggishness about these other inhabitants of the kitchen, as though it was really far too early to drum up enthusiasm for such a day. In contrast there was an air of quiet desperation about my sister and myself. We were both starting a new life from the inauspicious base of the Windsor Youth Hostel. Today we were going job hunting – myself as an ICU resident and Isobel – well anything. She wasn’t going back to nursing – too complicated with her recent history.
We left the hostel separately. I had an interview to go to whereas she had a clean slate. She was going to cruise around and see what the possibilities were. I walked out onto the street. The air was crisp – cool without being sharp. The streets were clean and metallic looking. Above me the castle probed the sky, limpid sunshine painting the upper turrets, much like the dawn awakening on a granite mountain range. I scarcely dwelt on the scene. I was worried. I had no job and we had nowhere to live yet. We could only stay at the youth hostel for 3 days. I had completely depleted my savings to get to Britain. I dreaded having to crawl to Graham on some long distance phone call, begging for money. I knew he would bail me out – Julia would insist on it. But I wouldn’t consider such an indignity. I had quit his university, I had quit his country, and I had quit his beloved specialist training scheme.
The train rattled through carefully manicured fields and villages. My companions aboard the carriage sat stolidly, staring straight ahead in an unfocused way, but looking quickly away if I caught their eye. Opposite me was a girl in her twenties, all dressed up in high boots, a camel coloured skirt and designer jacket. The inner curves of her thighs disappeared seductively into the dark tunnel of the skirt. Her face was devoid of intimacy. I was nothing in her life – merely a presence on a train. The train slowed to a halt and I watched her get off onto the platform. She clipped away on her high boots, exiting from my life forever.
Ashford hospital was several blocks from the village railway station. The houses along the way were semi-detached, sombre greys and mottled browns. I strode along in my best clothes, my fingertips drained and cold, enduring the prospect of an interview. .After a while I came to an intersection. A four-lane highway hummed with speeding vehicles. It was the A3. I pressed the pedestrian button, bringing the entire mass of traffic to a shuddering stop. I could see the upper stories of hospital blocks sitting in behind a line of housing that bordered the highway.
I crossed the lanes and found the main gate. The hospital seemed to be an array of stand-alone buildings, like stationary icebergs on a green sea. Some were old and solid (brick or stone), others prefabricated (wooden and flimsy). There were plenty of open spaces, grassy patches and roadways. It took quite a bit of help to locate the administration block.
“You’re the only white applicant,” the young administrative official said. He had scrubbed pink cheeks and thick glasses. His lapel name badge said, ‘Hi my name is Bernard.’
“Is that important?” I asked.
He gave me his wounded look. “Hounslow’s just down the road,” he said. gesturing over a shoulder.
I had to meet an intensive care specialist next. I was sent up to the theatre block to ask for a Dr Holdaway. She came bustling out in her blue theatre clothes, stethoscope hanging from her neck. She looked like Margaret Thatcher. “We like New Zealanders,” she said, looking me up and down. “You’ll learn the ropes here very quickly.” she said, the statement indicating I had the job.
Back at the administration block, Bernard absorbed the good news without surprise. He had more good news for me. I could live on site, in the hospital grounds.
I got accommodation in the ‘married’ quarters, after indicating to Bernhard I had a partner. I was relieved to have something sorted out so easily, avoiding the stress of having to hustle for a place to live in the outside world. Jubilantly I went back to Windsor to give the good news to Isobel, We gathered up our gear and took the train back to Ashford. Later after settling in we ventured out into the grounds in search of the hospital bar. Bernard had told me about it. We made our entrance, walking over mud coloured carpet to the bar, a six by four hole in the faraway wall. We stood at the counter gulping down beer, and surveyed the other patrons. At one table a group of young woman, some in chequered blue uniforms, chattered and laughed. At another table three men in white coats conversed in a more salubrious manner. And further away, two older men, one balding, one fully thatched, stood beside a tall circular table. Isobel had been into London but thought she’d rather work a bit out of the main CBD. She figured she’d go to job centres in the surrounding districts, Hounslow, Putney and Slough. We strolled back to the flat while overhead a jet climbed out of Heathrow with an accompanying roar. I stood and watched the graceful flight path, the riding lights flashing in the black sky. Businessmen going home to European capitals – home to a warm European kitchen – home to their nice European wives. Someone like Melanie . . .
Dr Holdaway was like a surrogate mother, nursing me through the early days, I did a bit of anaesthesia as well as intensive care. It was quite an adjustment to witness the carnage of the operating theatres – to see blood oozing out beneath slashing scalpel blades – sometimes squirting out like a geyser, spraying the linoleum with an arc of red dots.
In the weekend I made a dash to the big city, emerging at Charing Cross, my ultimate goal the record stores on Oxford Street. I had waited five years to see them, those unseen album covers, but it took me only five minutes to fill the gaps in my Byrd’s collection. On fire, I unearthed Younger than Yesterday, The Notorious Byrd Brothers, and Sweetheart of the Rodeo. I bought a record player and a cheap guitar as well. Quite a good day’s work. Engorged with anticipation, I clutched the square package to my chest, as the return train rattled along through Clapham Junction, Putney, Hounslow . . .
Back in Ashford, I unveiled the fresh black vinyl, playing them chronologically, so as to experience the releases just as a sixties' listener would have done. Notorious was the revelation. The atmosphere poignant, resonant and ethereal, resigned, angry and hopeful. Temporarily, I was taken over again, as if a pilgrim seeing at last the route to a higher place. It was a feeling of extrasensory power – a subliminal absorption of energy and meaning. It reinforced for me again, the elusive purpose of my existence – to be a disciple of the Byrdsian atmospheric, to create something that would carry other people into the magical realm of my own experience.
Accordingly, I laboured over my guitar, late into the evenings, searching for the exquisite chord change, waiting for the magic phrase, a few words that might transform a soul. When we settled down to sleep, Isobel took the bedroom and I stayed out in the lounge and slept on a couch.
In the summer evenings we walked along the straight concrete paths that bordered local reservoir lakes and tenement gardens. Isobel liked the country feel of the district, the sparrows flirting in the hedgerows, and beyond, the puffs of cumulus on a soft English horizon. We had plenty to talk about, things we hadn’t broached on the journey from NZ. Then we had felt like fugitives and our discourse was mainly pragmatic
Isobel became employed, preparing food in a vegetarian restaurant near Notting Hill Gate. I pictured her there, imagining her curvaceous frame bent over a sink in the restaurant, peeling potatoes, washing zucchinis, slicing up mushrooms. Before long I started going in on a train and eating there. One evening as we walked back to the tube station, buoyed by the vibrant pulse of the city, Isobel announced it was time for her to give me some space and that she was moving out into a flat she’d found in Putney. She felt the best she had for years – she was over her fall from grace in Dunedin and she didn’t feel tempted to use hard drugs again. We celebrated at a bar in the railway station, running over all of the tumultuous year in Dunedin. I too professed to be working free of the
Melanie heart-brake and the marriage break up with Eleanor. We left the bar and under the plimsoll sign that indicated the Underground, Isobel hugged me to death, the force of which reawakened the memory of a previous encounter, the one in the Travers valley so many years before. For a moment we were children again, as close as brother and sister could be.
With Isobel off the hospital scene, I started to spend some evenings in the hospital bar. This time, amid the low lighting and soft background funk, there were groups of people into which I could fold myself, almost anonymously, without fear. And as my infiltration prospered, I began to find a new voice inside of me, one that was able to speak independently. The foreign country was the key. There was no fear of being prejudged by ones trailing history, remembered so easily by those at home. That shadow was twelve thousand miles away,
Amongst the crowd of student nurses, my developing irony (cynicism perhaps) was becoming a feature. And ironic it was, that I should be attractive to the brashest nurse of them all, her surname transformed by her peers into ‘Flesh.’ With wild blonde hair, the shortest skirts and chunky curving thighs, she was well used to the roving eye.
Came a drunken night, I deviated to her room, a tiny box on the second floor of the nurse’s home. She placed her beside lamp on the floor, unhitched her white blouse from the regulation chequered skirt and lay back on the bunk. Feeling a little foolish, I took off my shoes and lay down beside her, half sprawled over her waiting body. Her eyes were unfocused as I kissed her swollen lips, her gin soaked breath bitter in my mouth. She undid the remaining buttons of her blouse and yanked up the bra, allowing her well formed breasts to drop out like two ripe pears. She looked at me as if to say, ‘So . . . What do you think of these?’
The tumultuous year in Dunedin and the fresh stimulus of living in a foreign country, meant I had plenty of raw material for composition. I bombarded publishing companies with songs andone called You’re Easy was picked up after many a failure. I read and reread that letter time after time. It was my first break through and my whole being throbbed with the good feeling. I waited expectantly to hear if it was recorded.
You’re Easy
Here I am living in clover
With the best of everything I need
My lady and I
Riding it high
Nothing going to rock us over
You enter my life (with the hint of a smile)
You got the body language
You know where I stand
And yet you come on
The mistress of suggestion
You’re easy, You know that you are
It hurts me, When you show your hand
I phoned Isobel one Sunday evening to see how she was going, It had been 2 months since she’d moved and I’d been surprised how little she had contacted me in that time. Her voice sounded very matter of fact, as though the gap in communication was quite normal and to be expected. I invited myself over to her flat in the forthcoming weekend. Her lack of enthusiasm in response had me worried.
I took Flesh with me and after we left the train we crossed over the Putney Bridge, following a map I had made on the back of an envelope. It didn’t take long to find the flat, located in the ground floor and basement of a terraced building. I rapped on the door and waited. Isobel appeared and I was jolted - she could have been Julia.
Isobel had gotten so thin in such a short time. The insipid daylight on her anaemic face, highlighted all the tiny lines and creases. Yes, she looked like her mother. She was dressed in faded jeans and a ragged wool jersey. Her hair was matted and unbrushed – a mass of loose split ends. She hugged me, and Flesh too, a loose clasp with her face half turned away - there was a detachment that I perceived straight-away, as though she was now of a different persuasion, a different faith.
She took us down some steps to her room. There were no windows. A bedside lamp was the only illumination. A battered mattress lay on the wooden floor. The scrim on the walls was a sickly green, with much of it flaking and peeling, loose ends to tempt a ripping hand. “It’s not exactly luxury,” she said with a hollow laugh. As she turned away from the scene, her face was caught in lamplight, and I saw her lips and mouth were caked in a white substance - milk-shake perhaps? Did she not look in a mirror?
She took us back up to street level, to a small living room that overlooked the street. Floorboards creaked and moved underfoot. Down one side of the room, floorboards were absent. I could see framework of the ceiling below. There were copper coloured insulated cables tacked to some of the beams and a rank smell, perhaps of a smouldering wire or a dead rodent. Loose threads of a rug tripped Eleanor and she stumbled into the centre of the room. When we sat down in the two armchairs, Flesh looked across at me with gesturing eyes, her top lip askew.
Isobel sat down in the bay-window, pulling out a cigarette and lighter. “Don’t mind if I smoke?” she said. It was more a statement than a question.
We conducted a stuttering conversation, Isobel and I inhibited by the effect of our long estrangement. “Do you work?” Flesh asked, pulling the free ends of her coat together in the frigid atmosphere.
Isobel’s mouth twisted into an ironic smile. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m a part time cleaner at the health clinic, just around the corner here.” She got up off the window seat and came across towards me, wordlessly offering the cigarette. It occured to me for the first time that she was smoking marijuana. I took it from her, feeling it would be churlish to refuse. I puffed away and then passed it on to Flesh who was a bit of a wild child in her own way.
The drug loosened our tongues, Isobel and I. We laughed - an infectious giggle that ran with its own momentum. Flesh looked bemused in this new atmosphere, before getting caught up in it herself. We had latched onto our common denominator - Graham. I was describing the day I had left home, sitting aboard the idling Newman’s bus, trying to catch the eye of the ‘caring’ father.
“He’s so old fashioned,” Isobel said, wiping tears from her cheeks. “I couldn’t wait to be shot of him.”
“What about him and the Greek!” I said, sitting forward in my chair.
“Oh God, don’t remind me.”
We went over the stories, lampooning the distant father, laughing and smoking. Isobel continued to roll joints, tipping the dried leaves from an opaque plastic container onto filter paper, . “Yeah,” she said. “I’ll not be going back to see him in a hurry.”
From Flesh’s corner, I heard the clearing of throat. “What about your mother?” she asked, her arms extending into her jacket pockets.
Isobel’s face coloured, a slow wave of red that burned at her neck. She swivelled in her chair. “What do you mean,” she asked.
“Your mother sounds like a good sort. You must be missing her,” Flesh said.
Isobel slumped in her chair and looked up at the ceiling. “Well of course I do,” she said. She sounded irritable.
I realised that the bringing up of Julia had destabilised Isobel. Maybe she felt guilty about having scarpered away overseas again without saying goodbye in person. We had not notified our parents of the move until it had been completed.
I got to my feet unsteadily, alarmed by the turn of events. “We better make tracks soon,” I said.
“Maybe you should,” Isobel said, rising herself and heading back into the main part of the flat.
We were left to the filth of the room, the sombre grey sky at the window, and a ticking clock on the mantelpiece. I suggested to Flesh that she wait out on the footpath while I sought my angry sister. I went down a dark corridor, locating a kitchen at the back. Isobel was seated side on to a table, an arm extended across the table’s surface. She had a tourniquet around the upper arm, the opposite hand controlling a syringe and needle. The needle was inserted into a vein on the front-side of her elbow joint. “What on earth are you doing?” I asked, coming to a halt.
“What does it look like,” she said, her eyes fixed on the needle tip.
I said nothing, my
gaze transfixed by the events at her elbow crease. She aspirated with the plunger, blood shooting into the barrel of the syringe. Then she drove the blood stained contents inward, into her streaming blood.
“I’ll come back another day, alone” I said, breaking the silence.
“If you like,” she said. She leaned back on her chair, holding a handkerchief to the puncture site, the spent needle and syringe discarded on the table-top. Her eyes were diverging and she almost began to smile. “She’s a bit young for you Gerry.” She said and immediately she was laughing, doubled up with cathartic humour. And I too, succumbed to this fresh wave of hilarity, chortling and grabbing her shoulders, my head hanging down beside hers. “You can’t go on like this,” I said, indicating the syringe. “You need help.”
“Oh . . . I’m on a methadone maintenance programme – at the drug clinic where I clean. They gave me the job as a cleaner.”
I looked again at the white dust, dried into a corner of her mouth. That was the methadone. “Well it doesn’t seem to be working ,” I said, indicating the discarded syringe.
“It was just some diazepam I stole from the clinic,” she said. “It’s not an opiate.”
I went back to see her, one afternoon in the middle of the week.
“Come and share a smoke with me,” she said, steering me down the short staircase that led to her basement bedroom. The poverty of her circumstance was as shocking the second time, as it had been the first. Flakes of scrim hung listlessly from the walls, like timeless stalactites in an underground grotto.
She flopped across the bed, gathering up a cigarette lighter and the hash container from between her mattress and the wall. I noticed her quilt had numerous black rimmed holes near the pillows. Cigarette embers had fallen unnoticed from the grasp of a half drugged woman.
“Put some music on,” she said, gesticulating towards the dark end of the room.
In this dim recess sat a cassette player. I hadn’t noticed it before. I sorted through her music collection - a pile of plastic cases, torn slicks and loose cassette tapes heaped around the player. From the glut of metal and acid rock, I found Can’t buy a thrill, a synthesis of beguiling harmony and jazz phrasing.
“It’s got a nice groove this,” she said, sitting cross-legged on the quilt, kneading the filter-paper and marijuana leaves into the shape of a torpedo. Soon we were reeling from the potency of her creation. I lay back on a cane wicker chair positioned at the end of her mattress, my naked feet warming in the forlorn rumpled quilt. Again we were overtaken by infectious laughter. Firstly it was the image of the unfortunate Flesh that we succumbed to. Isobel saw her as youthful and naive, her hair a Farah Fawcett copy and her breasts pert and partially revealed by her low cut tops. Wracked with laughter, my toes entwining with those of Isobel’s on the bed, I had a flush of intense well-being, like a low amplitude orgasm. We began dissecting the family again. Graham, Julia, Richard – and associates such as Margo, Francis, Junot, Eleanor, Melanie . . .I exhaled a long stream of smoke into the gloomy interior.
“It must have been an amazing scene when Margo arrived back at the bach, trailing after the other three.”
Isobel gave a grunt, her teeth clamped over the end of a butt she was attempting to light. She too made a temporal shift back to the late 1950s, back to a story that was of great relevance for her and myself. And in my mind (almost adrift from its moorings), I discerned a new maturity within myself. It was as if at that moment, I could dissociate my current self from my former self.
“Oh yeah . . . Margo . . .” She sat up, pulling her feet into the lotus position, a movement of hers that was totally familiar to me.
“When Margo arrived at the bach, Graham would have already confronted Julia,” I said. “Francis would still be there as well. They must have all been in a hell of a state.”
“Yeah that’s right. Margo was the last to arrive. She saw Francis’ life jacket, stained with blood, hanging from the veranda fence. She entered the bach through a side door, one that opened straight into the lounge. Graham was standing in the middle of the room, arms folded, his face red . . . menacing. Margo realised he had stationed himself between the two bedrooms, both of which also opened directly into the lounge. He was acting as a barrier between the two lovers, keeping them apart. Graham gestured to Margo with his head, the direction of the bedroom where Francis was. Margo went in, finding Francis kneeling on the floor, his face bandaged, packing his belongings away into a case. She told him she was leaving him, that their marriage was over. And she too began to pack a case.”
“Hell, imagine the atmosphere in that room.”
Isobel laughed, throwing her head back, her eyes heavily lidded. “Oh yeah, well years later when I was talking to her even Margo saw the humour in it. She was laughing when she told me. As for Francis, he was dumbstruck. He didn’t know what to think, or say I guess . . I mean he was hardly in a position of strength.”
“He was losing both his wife and lover on the same day.”
“Mm . . . bad scenario . . . Margo was firing her things into a case and all the while shouting insults at him. The next thing was, she took off in their car. The keys had been hanging on a nail in the kitchen. So Francis was left to walk off with his heavy suitcase, all the way to the main road. Presumably he hitched or caught a bus to Picton.”
The room was beginning to circle gently around me and I felt a rush of nausea. “I’ll have to lie down,” I said, getting off the chair and crawling onto her mattress. I lay on my front, my head turned away from her, my brain apparently doing a long slow somersault. I felt her come to lie in behind me, her uppermost arm draped across my shoulders.
Her voice carried on with the story, in my head a pleasant cadence, phasing in and out with my own changing state of awareness. I don’t remember any detail, only that Julia had stayed with Graham, and that after a month Margo went back to Francis. I must have slept for a while then, until I was disturbed by something. Still prone, I propped myself up on my elbows and looked across to Isobel’s side of the bed. She wasn’t there, however I knew she was in the room somewhere. I rolled onto my back to locate her. She was sitting in the wicker chair. The rubber tourniquet was knotted about her upper arm. She was pressing fingers into the elbow crease. She saw me watching. “It’s hard to find a vein these days,” she said. I don’t remember whether I said anything. Probably I just rolled back over and went back to sleep.
When I awoke again, I was abruptly sober. I looked at my watch, shocked to find it was nine o’clock at night. I had arranged to meet Flesh at eight o’clock but I was not going to make it. I resolved to leave straight-away, scrambling into my jacket and shoes. Isobel was face down on the bed, her breathing slow and irregular. I folded part of the quilt over her legs and fled up the stairs.
Things deteriorated after the visit. Isobel began contacting me daily, sometimes several times a day. She wanted drugs -ketamine. diazepam, morphine, omnopon, pethidine, diamorphine – anything from the opiate cupboard. Her knowledge of the drugs and what was available in the hospitals was of course substantial. I said no to everything. And each time, after wheedling with me for half an hour, she would become vindictive. “We’ll I just won’t see you again - you can take a running jump,” she said as she terminated the first call. The following day she was back talking again. “I’ll ring your boss and tell her you indulge in drug taking,” she announced in response to my further refusal.
“I don’t,” I said. “I only smoke a bit of weed.”
On the Thursday she ranted down the line, ‘I’m coming to the theatre, right now. You better have something for me, or I’ll tell your manager you’re supplying me ketamine. It’s your choice.”
I didn’t know what she was capable of. I knew I would have to get help to deal with a force about which I knew little, but first I bought myself some time. “I’ll bring you some temgesic,” I found myself saying. I hadn’t been supplying her with ketamine but I’d have to prove that and that would be
very onerous.
I got to Putney in the middle of the Friday Afternoon. “I thought the methadone was supposed to be enough,” I said as I was let in her front door. She laughed in a dismissive way, leading me up to the kitchen. She smelled clean and soapy. Her hair was wet, falling in long tangled clumps to her shoulders. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Come and have a smoke with me.” She pushed me onto a kitchen chair, pulling hers up close so that our knees were locked together. “Let’s put the Dan on again,” she said. She left me there, charging off to get her cassette player from the bedroom.
I glanced around the room. The sink was piled high with pots and plates, all coated with dried remnants of food. Above the sink, a window, barely transparent, curtained by thick hanging webs containing the purloined carcasses of captured insects. On the wall, a ripped poster advertised Led Zeppelin in concert. Below that, a gas hob, rusty and clogged with the remains of charred debris, A dusty refrigerator grumbled in a corner. I dared not look inside.
“Where are your flatmates?” I said as she came back into the room. She plugged the cassette player into the stove and wound back the tape.
“Jocelyn is in France,” she said. She pressed the play button so that we had ‘Can’t buy a thrill’ again.
“What about the guy,” I shouted above the music, watching her construct the joint. She shook her head.
“Don’t know,” she said.
We shared the smoke, both drawing heavily when it was our turn, sucking the solace into our lungs - two refugees from a recently troubled past. I felt myself sinking into a soft metaphysical pillow, and our conversation became the trigger of more infectious laughter.
“Have you got the temmies?” she said, her bony legs resting on my knees.
I laughed uncontrollably, putting the packet up on the table. “Here they are, have one,” I said. I felt reckless and free. “Have half a dozen.”
She didn’t take any. She slipped the packet away into her layers of clothing,. So . . . she was going to sell the drug. Temgesic was quite a weak opiate and wouldn’t touch her. But its street value was immense. I’d been fooled again. I’d been weak again with Isobel. Weak because she’d been my buddy when we were children. Weak because she’d cuddled me in a grassy hollow up the Travers Valley. I could see it now – a few months after Melanie had seen it.
“If Graham could see us now,” she said.
I thought about his plethoric face, the eyes blazing like a bird of prey. “Imagine if Mum had left him, there and then – when the affair blew out into the open. Mind you, I wouldn’t have been born if that was the case.”
“Margo reckoned Mum and Francis were in shock after the Marlborough Sound‘s incident. It was probably the first time that they had really considered the consequences of their relationship - that knowledge of the affair could leak into the community. And she said Mum probably stayed in the marriage for our sakes, Richard and I –so that we wouldn’t grow up in a broken home.”
“And Margo went back with Francis after the Sounds?”
“Yeah, she decided to give him one more chance. They’d sold the house in Kelburn – obviously the two couples could no longer live next to each other –and Francis had bought a new place in Khandallah, several kilometres away. Margo had been staying with her mother. She moved into the Khandallah house for another try. But after only a few weeks something happened, and Francis moved yet again - into a rented house with Mum, Richard and I. I was too young to remember any of it, but Richard would have had memory . . . Of course Mum and Francis must have met up . . . By chance or by design, I don‘t know. To be together must have become imperative, in spite of all the negatives.” The joint was spent. I watched as Isobel stubbed it out on the wooden table top. “Margo went ballistic then, telling all and sundry about the affair. And she was happy to act as the emissary for Graham, bringing to Francis and Mum a legal document from Graham’s lawyer, seeking custody of Richard and myself - citing Mum and Francis as inadequate parents. Only two days after delivery of the document, out of the blue, Mum turned up at Graham’s door, with Richard and I in tow – she wanted to come back – for our sakes. Within days Francis disappeared with all his belongings. He’d gotten on a flight to Sydney. Margo reckoned it all must have become too much for him - not just the loss of Mum, but also the dent to his reputation in the legal fraternity. Apparently his practice was drying up as news of the affair ripped through the Wellington law community. This was the 1950s you see. Attitudes were rather Victorian towards marriage breakdown. Perhaps he felt he could start afresh in another country. Margo paints a fairly bad picture of him - as a character. She made out that he was of restless disposition and was not likely to stay in any relationship long-term. Margo never heard from him again. Nobody did. Where he settled, nobody knew . . . Aussie . . . the UK? If Mum knew, she never revealed anything to Margo.”
I thought immediately of Julia. She must have really held a candle for Francis. To go through all that - especially in the fifties. “I guess the pressure - moral and legal was all too much.”
“Yeah. She went with Graham . . . whether for us or for herself or because of the risk of losing us, I don’t know.”
We decided to go out for a drink. Outside, night had fallen. We walked to the nearest underground station, ambling along with a swelling tide of office workers leaving the business district for the weekend. At the station, we hopped onto a down escalator, standing passively on the left side to allow the dashing flow of commuters to proceed past unimpeded. Standing on the step below me, Isobel turned her head to look back up at me. “You know, Richard must have known all about the affair. He would have been old enough to retain memory of the few weeks we spent in Francis’ flat. But I don’t recall him ever bringing up anything remotely related to it.”
“I got to go see him again one day soon, I said”
“Yeah, me too. It’s so remote where he lives. It’s another world.”
Isobel had her arms wrapped around my midriff and I had an arm laid across her shoulders. To the commuters we must have looked like a couple in love. The discussion about our family’s past had diverted my attention away from the pressing problem of the present – Isobel and her drug dependence. I told myself to work on the problem over the coming weekend – to find a solution. A wind started to blow up the tunnel. The train was arriving and we quickly broke apart as if both remembering we were brother and sister,
Standing on the underground train, hurtling through a dark tunnel, I dwelt on the expression on Isobel’s face when I had bid farewell to her. It was a mixture of resignation and melancholy. She had a rabid desire for drugs, but deep down she was very unhappy. I really had to find a solution.
On the Saturday afternoon I was grappling with a song called Heart of Stone but I was getting nowhere. In my mind I was castigating myself for my weakness in dealing with Isobel. I could see the history of pandering to her needs all to clearly. I needed to confront her – give her an ultimatum. I resolved to leave for Putney as soon as possible. I needed resolution. The train I caught rattled through along through weak afternoon sunshine, my pensive state interrupted by the abrupt roar of commuter trains racing by in the opposite direction, their carriages packed with workers returning to the suburbs.
The last of the light was retreating from the streets as I climbed the steps to the small balcony of Isobel‘s flat. In the West, an orange hue was germinating, spreading through the sky like a dye diffuses into water. I knocked on the door, gently at first, then forcefully when no response was attained. Disappointed, I got down on my knees and hollered through the mail slot. Defeated, I stood up, stepping back to the edge of the balcony, hanging onto the balustrade while I surveyed the street. There was no sign of Isobel amongst the sporadic pedestrians moving up and down the street. I determined to wait a while, in the hope of her return.
I rested there for half an hour, the chill of the evening infiltrating my clothing. Thinking I might go back and try to locate where Flesh
was, I hopped down from my perch intent on returning to the train-station. On impulse I went across and tried the door handle. To my surprise it was unlocked. I stood there for a moment, holding the door ajar, the murky interior of the hallway seeming to reach out and envelop me in its musty odour. It was just what I might have expected of Isobel - to leave the house unlocked in one of her inebriated states. I considered flicking the catch and pulling the door shut, locking out unwanted intrusion. I reconsidered though - maybe there was someone inside. Isobel or a never seen flat-mate, watching TV or listening to music, oblivious to the shouts of the visitor. I walked through to the kitchen, calling out as I did so. The room was in darkness. I found the switch, blinking in the flood of illumination. There was nothing to see of note - merely the expected pile of unwashed dishes beside the sink. I walked back along the hallway. There was no light coming up from Isobel’s room, but even so, I flicked on the foyer light and descended her steps into the shadows.
I could see her, the form of her figure, lying on the mattress. Gingerly I edged into the room, not wishing to scare her or awaken her. In the darkness, a stain beside her, like a spill from an overturned ink pot, appeared black against the pallor of the sheets, Something flashed, an angular reflection of some obscure light source. A needle had fallen out of an antecubital vein and the puncture wound had bled. There had been no ability to staunch the flow by the unconscious fingers of my sister. Her breathing was slow and noisy – partially obstructed. I knelt down beside her and shook her by the shoulders, calling her name. Her limbs extended but her eyes didn’t open and she attempted to roll on to her side. I placed fingers under her jaw angles and executed a resuscitation jaw thrust manoeuvre. I knew it was very stimulating and her eyes popped open. I yelled at her. “What have you taken?” Her reply was incomprehensible but a search of her side of the mattress revealed a 10mg diazepam ampoule. She had lapsed back to noisy breathing so I rolled her onto her side and adjusted her head and neck so that her breathing was easy and unobstructed. I went to the bathroom and found a towel to clean up the blood. In my mind I was weighing up the options. I could phone for an ambulance and have her admitted to hospital for observation. However the follow on from that would be investigations and trouble with the local authorities. Perhaps even deportation. Of course all of that was probably what she needed. But Isobel would be gutted if I did that to her. So once again I turned away from the logical solution. I resolved to stay with her all night until she woke up. I also decided I had to get her out of the flat and back to my hospital flat.
She woke at 4 a.m and as we lay staring at the flaky ceiling, she rolled into me and I comforted her with my extended arm, pulling her in close so that her breath warmed the side of my neck. Transiently she moved away to her edge of the mattress, to find and light a cigarette. Then we resumed our study of the ceiling, as if peering at the distant cosmos. “It’s a fucked up world,” she said, emitting a plume of smoke into the low lit atmosphere.
I nodded slowly. “Well you certainly are,” I said.
She laughed, a hoarse croaking sound and she tapped me on a shoulder with her cigarette hand. Ash spilt over the front of my sweater. “You’ve still got some hope,” she said.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, haven’t you?” I asked.
She looked at me for a second, but said nothing. After a few minutes of silence she spoke again. “The only guy I kind of settled with was basically a drug dealer. I think I’m doomed like Mum . . . I’m married to a life with drugs and she’s been married to . . . well to quite a difficult person. Things were so stifling back in her day. People got stuck in ridiculous marriages. At least our generation has rejected those constraints of society.”
“Yeah but look at us. We’re free to do as we please - yet we’re still fucked up.”
“Not as fucked up as they were.”
You‘re not exactly in great shape, I thought. Had one dysfunctional generation infected the children of the next. I lay on my right side, facing her. “When you’re a child, the blueprint for adulthood is laid down. How the hell else do you become what you are? It can’t be good when your parents are such a mismatch.”
She laughed uproariously then, rolling about the mattress, trying to hold the cigarette aloft, but spilling plenty of ash nevertheless. When she’d stopped her cavorting about, she sat upright, her legs bent into the lotus position. “I’m free of it now,” she said, nodding vigorously in self-agreement. “All that stuff is on the other side of the world.”
I felt like saying – hello – yes you’re free of all that, but you’re a bloody drug addict.
Moments later she came across and kissed a side of my face, her frail body half laid across mine. “You’re my Rock of Gibraltar, aren’t you,” she said.
“I wish I was,” I said. “But the truth is I’ve been taking the wrong option with you for the best part of a year. I keep assisting you to run from what you really need – expert help.”
She stayed silent and I thought about my next moves. If I couldn’t bring myself to hand her over to the authorities I’d have to get her off the drugs myself.
Chapter 2