The Madness of Grief

by Panayotis Cacoyannis

  For Yannoulla

  Acknowledgments

  With thanks to Oliver James of bluepencilagency for being so incisive and inspiring as an editor, to Keith Voles for the cover design, to Javier Lopes and Keith Voles for the website design, and to Michael Duerden for his unfailing technical wizardry.

  Copyright

  The Madness of Grief

  © 2018 Panayotis Cacoyannis

  All rights reserved.

  I

  1969

  1

  Karl

  ‘I hate him!’ I said.

  ‘No you don’t,’ said Karl.

  ‘Yes I do.’

  ‘Jane, he’s your father.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You’re not allowed to hate him.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘Says the Bible.’

  ‘I don’t believe in the Bible,’ I said matter-of-factly.

  ‘You’ll go to hell if you’re not careful.’

  Karl was sweet. He was always looking out for me. I was glad we were friends.

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said.

  ‘Shh! God can hear you.’

  He ran his fingers dextrously over the keyboard, as if to smother my profanity with something irrefutably divine – the heart-stopping opening of Beethoven’s 5th. That was something else I liked about him: no one ever knew if Karl was being ironic. Even when I tickled him to try and make him laugh, Karl wore his straight face like an iron-faced mask. But when he played the piano for me seriously, then he wouldn’t so much lose as surrender control, giving himself over to the music completely. Or perhaps it was the other way around. In fact it was both. Becoming as one with it, he had a way of interpreting the music that added to it something mysterious, an inscrutable extra dimension. I didn’t know all this because I knew a lot about music, I knew it because someone important had written it and Karl had read it out to me, and although I’d be the first to admit that I didn’t know a lot about music, every time I heard him play I could feel what it meant. Karl gave an edge to the music that made his performances “visionary”, a word that made me proud to be his friend. And it made me even prouder that Karl said he was proud to be my friend.

  ‘Of course he can’t hear me,’ I yelled over Karl’s playful thumping. What I liked best was the lack of complication in our friendship. The other boys I knew were all after only one thing, or at least made a show of being after one thing – which they wouldn’t have known what to do with. My interest had always been in much older boys. They too were after only one thing, which they would know what to do with, after they had bullied the younger boys out of the way. But though I relished their attention, I had only ever let them go so far – about as far as holding hands and a dry kiss on the lips, which wasn’t very far and fell short by a very great distance of the one thing they were after, and which really I only imagined they would know what to do with. Probably they were just better at pretending.

  ‘Yes he can, or he wouldn’t be God,’ Karl yelled back as he marked his finale by pounding the keys with all his fingers at once. When the music had reverberated into silence, he turned his stool to face me squarely as I stood beside the rickety grand. ‘You’ve filled your head with too many books. Have you been reading Nietzsche again? You do know he went mad in the end.’

  I never lost my patience with Karl. I was fond of his confident manner, even though I never knew precisely what he was being confident about. Swooping down on his gaze, I held on to it fixedly. I wondered why I wasn’t attracted to him physically. It wasn’t because he was young (he was seventeen, one year older than me, but looked almost twenty), or because he wasn’t good looking – he was very good looking. Perhaps it was because he was so dauntingly unique, a virtuoso pianist destined for greatness. I was clever; I didn’t just parrot what I read, I was able to digest it and form my own opinion. But my cleverness was purely analytical; I was still too excited by learning to have found my own voice. Karl’s opinion of the world was so uniquely expressed in his music that it was as if its mysteries were visible only to him.

  ‘We all go mad in the end,’ I said, my eyes aflutter as they let go of Karl’s to look him up and down in his entirety. It was a hot July evening, hotter and muggier than I had expected when choosing what to wear for my friend and the men on the moon. A nice, short skirt would have been so much cooler than jeans, and my tucked-in linen blouse was another mistake; it was clinging to my body like paint that wouldn’t dry, its long sleeves far too tight to roll up. I had covered up too much of myself and felt stupidly overdressed. Karl was very noticeably underdressed, and looking at him made me feel even hotter. He was wearing shorts, an unbuttoned denim shirt whose sleeves had been cut off, and a pair of flimsy flip-flops. Really he was quite a dish. What I could see of his body was sheer definition, a picture of athleticism altogether disproportionate to effort – being a prodigy, Karl never did sports. I had never seen so much of him before, and now I could see even more! After wriggling his fingers, Karl had brought his hands together at the back of his head and stretched his torso backwards as he yawned, exposing the hardness of his abdomen and both sides of his muscular chest.

  ‘My God, you have such enormous nipples!’ The words had spilled out of my mouth sooner than I had been able to think them, let alone hold them back. I could feel the rush of blood that would turn my ears crimson, and was grateful that I wore my hair long.

  Karl seemed hardly fazed. Without moving his arms, my poker-faced friend looked down at his chest, first to the right and then to the left. ‘I suppose I have,’ he said.

  I burst into a fit of nervous laughter, and when he still remained impassive, ‘You mean you hadn’t noticed? Honestly?’

  Karl knitted his brows, repositioning himself on his stool as he landed an extended finger on each of his nipples. ‘Is it important? Should I see a doctor, you think?’ His hair, the darkest shade of brown before black, already too long before the school year had ended, was by now a disorderly mop, and clumps of it had fallen forward when he lowered his head to examine himself. There was something of the foreign aristocracy about him, I thought, but French rather than German, which I knew was absurd.

  ‘They don’t feel abnormal,’ he said.

  ‘If you don’t stop rubbing them, they’ll grow even more.’

  ‘Ha!’ said Karl without stopping.

  And suddenly I was feeling territorial. ‘Has someone else been playing with them?’ I asked him in a manner that implied it was my business. Well, he and I were friends; we could ask each other anything.

  Karl looked at me as if he hadn’t understood what I meant. ‘Playing with them?’

  ‘Like you’re doing now, only harder, much harder, maybe even biting them.’

  ‘Biting them?’

  I had to roll my eyes. ‘It’s called foreplay,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, you mean sex.’ And letting go of his nipples he cracked his fingers twice before swivelling back into place, and after staring intensely at the keys for a couple of minutes, he spread out his fingers and held his hands up in the air…

  ‘Not Für Elise again, please.’

  Even before I had finished, Karl had gathered his hands in his lap and was staring at the ceiling.

  ‘You can if you want to,’ I said.

  ‘Hmm, I wonder…’

  ‘If anyone has bitten your nipples?’

  ‘About what you said; that we all go mad in the end.’

  ‘We do,’ I said, laying my covered forearms flatly on the piano.

  ‘All of us?’

  He seemed unruffled even by the prospect of madness. If his eyes betrayed any emotion, it was only curiosity and wonder perhaps mingled with a measure of pleasure - the pleasure of mocking me
, probably.

  ‘Don’t...’ I began.

  ‘We mustn’t tell Mami,’ Karl interrupted me, holding on to my eyes as though urgently pleading with me.

  His elbow on his leg and his face in his hand, he had carved himself into Rodin’s The Thinker. His features were proportionate without being commonplace; the thickness of his eyebrows gave the sockets of his eyes extra depth, and he seemed to have been sculpted in a luminous opaqueness superior to marble. His beauty was striking, monumental…

  ‘What are you thinking?’ I remembered to ask, even mimicking his air of indifference while discarding the erotica of pseudo art-historical allusions.

  ‘We mustn’t tell Mami,’ Karl said again.

  ‘Your mother’s a therapist. She makes a living out of madness.’

  ‘She wouldn’t call it madness.’

  ‘Anyway, it isn’t really true.’ I gave him a comforting smile.

  ‘We don’t all go mad in the end?’

  ‘Of course we don’t.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, Karl, I’m sure.’

  ‘Phew, that’s a relief.’ He dragged his hand across his forehead while he whistled out a sigh.

  ‘You think you’re so clever,’ I said, whistling out a different kind of sigh of my own. ‘Honestly, you’re such an actor.’ I stood upright by the piano, and while I went through the motions of wagging a finger at this boy-god who somehow always got the better of me, I felt the redness return to the tips of my ears.

  What I was experiencing, quite without warning, wasn’t altogether unpleasant. My mild embarrassment at being so gullible was more than made up for by the first-time excitement of my sensual admiration for Karl. How lucky I was to be able to enjoy it purely, from the safe distance of a friendship that would always be platonic, because… well, because why would Karl be interested in me?

  ‘I was trying to make a point,’ he said, getting up from his stool and offering an open hand to me. He bowed his head a little as he gave his hand a jerk to encourage me to take it. When I did, he led me away from the piano to the opposite end of the room, and we sat next to each other on the sofa, facing the TV.

  ‘And what point would that be? That there’s a God who can hear me?’

  ‘That there’s more to life than just being clever at manipulating words.’ While he spoke almost mechanically, Karl was looking at me oddly, not talking down to me exactly, but as though he felt sorry for me.

  ‘You don’t think I know that?’ I knew it at that moment better than at any time before.

  ‘And everything you read is so depressing. Mami thinks it’s unhealthy.’

  After a spell of reading mostly Kafka and Dostoyevsky, I had made the leap from fiction to the quicksand of pure philosophical thought – Plato, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. But Karl was being unfair. I had not been seduced, and remained a steadfast sceptic. In the soup of postulated “knowledge”, my young inquiring mind had always sought the fly of the flaw. There was no incontrovertible truth; in its many different forms the flaw was universal. But there was beauty in the poetry of manipulating words, and I was clever enough to regard what I read as mere exercises in expressing different versions of untruth. I had examined obsessively the lives of the men (they were mostly men) whose fictions and theories proffered an interpretation of the world. Invariably their vantage points were tainted, mired in contemporary prejudice or personal tragedy, even in lunacy. As for religion, Svidrigailov’s mockingly cynical account of eternity in Crime and Punishment had instilled in me an absolute lack of even the most minimal capacity for faith. I was definitely not a mystic.

  Karl had never before shown any interest in what I was reading. He had politely listened to me talking about Phaedo and Phaedrus and The Metamorphosis, and had winced at my devotion to Nietzsche. I had tried to explain that Nietzsche had been much misunderstood, and that in any case what had attracted me was not so much the letter as the lyrical energy – the raw gusto - of what he had written, but Karl had barely listened. I was interested in his music; he did not reciprocate by being interested in my thoughts. The few comments he had made had been flippant. But apparently he did have an opinion after all: his mother’s.

  ‘And what does Mami think about your music?’ It was a blow below the belt. Mami didn’t know about Karl’s own, very special compositions. Only I did.

  ‘Tell me what you think of this,’ he had said to me one afternoon, and after picking out a sheet from the stack he had just carried from his room, he had delved into the piano with a tenderness that bordered on reluctance, as though luring to the surface the emotion he had wanted to convey by performing affectionate surgery. I had sat there dumbfounded, enraptured by the music and my friend.

  ‘Oh my God, Karl, you wrote that?’ I had asked in complete disbelief as the final few notes drifted off.

  Karl, still suspended in a bow over his instrument, had turned his head slowly to look at me, and that was one of the very few times I remembered him smiling so broadly. I knew, and Karl knew that I knew, that I didn’t have to know a lot about music to appreciate that what I had just heard was sublime. And now, to score a silly point, I had thrown his confidence back in his face.

  ‘You think my music’s depressing?’

  ‘What does it even mean, “depressing”?’ Puffing out a cushion and pulling a face, I tried to make light of my outburst.

  Karl shrugged his shoulders. ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Sad?’

  ‘Plato isn’t sad, and nor is Dostoyevsky. Kafka’s life was depressing, but I don’t think his books are. They’re a bit claustrophobic, but parts of them are also very funny. And Nietzsche was as much of a poet as Plato.’

  ‘That leaves Schopenhauer and my music.’

  ‘That just leaves Schopenhauer. Your music may be sad but it’s also uplifting. It fills you inside with…’ I held the cushion over my chest, and I almost said “feathers”, but that wasn’t the word I was looking for. ‘I’m not really sure with what, but whatever it is it’s amazing. And it definitely isn’t depressing.’

  ‘Uplifting,’ Karl repeated uncertainly. ‘I don’t feel it.’

  ‘You don’t? You look like you do. When you’re playing.’

  ‘Huh, then I suppose I must do.’ And then unexpectedly, ‘Let’s go upstairs to my room.’

  2

  Ten Years

  Attached by a common wall to my father’s shop, our small semi-detached house stood at the far end of a winding dead-end street south of Camden Passage, a flea market near Angel Underground Station. It had taken me twelve minutes to walk home, idle time in which my mind had gone blank, marking my short journey not by thinking about Karl but by failing to imagine a single tomorrow. I must have looked at my watch a hundred times, as though I were a grown-up hurrying blindly to some urgent but unspecified appointment. The night of the city had completely passed me by. Having cut my way through it, I had no recollection of breathing in its air or of taking in its threat. I had experienced it only as a succession of fuzzy shafts of light – all the streetlamps where, without knowing why, I had stopped time after time to read my watch.

  ‘So? Did you get into your boyfriend’s pants?’

  My father George Hareman, the illusionist, contortionist, magician known as “Mr Magikoo”, made a habit of guffawing at his crudeness like an imbecile, and tonight was no exception.

  It was almost eleven, and I had hoped that by now he would be in bed. Ever since before I was tall enough to reach the front door keyhole (on tiptoe), I had had my own key and had always come and gone as I pleased – I was a sensible girl; my father knew he could trust me. And he hadn’t done a bad job of raising me, had he? I read an awful lot of books and was more or less dating a classical pianist. What better proof that rules and regulations were counter-productive, stunting children’s creativity and growth… I found his camouflaged indifference almost funny.

  But unfortunately he was not in bed. He was - as was so often the case whenever Mia-Mia was visitin
g her brother’s bed-and-breakfast in Torquay - sprawled in his dilapidated chair, peering at me over The Weekly Magic News.

  ‘No, I did not!’ I snarled at his ridiculous toupee. ‘And he’s not my boyfriend!’

  ‘Oh, then I suppose that lovely shade of beetroot is your normal colour, is it?’ And roaring as he turned the page of The Weekly Magic News, still peering at me over it, ‘No, I personally reckon it can only mean one thing. Someone’s had his cherry popped tonight, and I’ll wager he’s a Kraut. Now tell your dad the truth, am I right or am I wrong?’

  ‘You’re wrong and you’re disgusting!’ Burning with rage and immobilised by shock, I was pressing with both hands against the knot that had formed in my stomach.

  ‘Well, pardon me for giving a damn.’

  ‘Don’t take any notice of him, love; he’s always had a filthy mouth. Shut it now, George, or so help me…’

  I felt the familiar wetness collide with me sideways even before I had time to turn round.

  ‘Auntie Ada!’ Having made me wet with her watery sweat, auntie Ada had my face in a vice, squeezing it hard with both hands and wetting it this time with kisses. ‘Mia-Mia is away,’ I was able to whisper.

  ‘I know,’ auntie Ada whispered back – even her breath was full of moisture.

  Every so often auntie Ada turned up unannounced with an overnight bag. If Mia-Mia happened to be visiting her brother’s bed-and-breakfast in Torquay, she would stay. I loved her dearly, even more as she grew older. I had gradually become aware that her visits’ primary purpose was to check on my emotional and physical wellbeing.

  Mr Magikoo’s Magik Shoppe had chaotically spilled over its old stock into every nook and cranny of the house, which made giving it a good and thorough clean an almost impossible task, to which for years auntie Ada was proud to have proved more than equal. But then came Mia-Mia, whose touch with housework was as magic as the best of the magic in Mr Magikoo’s Magik Shoppe, and even more magic than auntie Ada’s. Not by working around it but instead by organising its untidiness, she kept the house as spotlessly clean as Mr Magikoo’s Magik Shoppe, for which feat she had got up auntie Ada’s nose and very little gratitude from Mr Magikoo. Although meticulous in matters of personal hygiene, my father had otherwise always been oblivious to dirt, and would have hardly been able to notice the difference. And it was no good auntie Ada going about the house with her finger, looking in corners for dust or behind things for pockets of grime - there were none to be found. There was no getting around it. Mia-Mia was a domestic goddess. By also making all the necessary arrangements for repairs, browbeating handymen until they were practically working for free (money was tight, and she wasn’t one for throwing it around), I was certain she had rescued house and shop from complete dereliction and possibly total collapse. And she was an excellent cook, which in the circumstances I had thought it wiser not to mention to auntie Ada.