The Madness of Grief

by Panayotis Cacoyannis

  ‘But they haven’t kept in touch,’ I said.

  ‘There were a few letters from Jane at the beginning. But Ada never wrote back, and I think at some point Jane gave up. Once she realised that Ada wasn’t changing her mind, the last thing she’d have wanted was to add to her distress. She’s not been mentioned in years now, not since I met Val. She and Ada hit it off straight away, your mum obviously reminded her of Jane, and being close to another woman was a way of reliving the past. But then at some point she forgot about Jane, you could see it in the way she looked at Val.’

  ‘And mum knew?’

  ‘Your mum was an angel… or a saint, as Ada likes to remind me, as if I needed reminding. She knew – if I knew, then she must’ve known too, by my silences mostly. Very occasionally she would ask me a question, but for the most part it wasn’t really something we talked about. And I doubt if Val and Ada ever talked about it either, even though they spent a lot of time together – doing all the things you and Ada like to do, and thank God it’s your mum you’ve taken after, not your philistine dad. When Ada first told me that she’d got a Giacometti from Jane, I’d never even heard the name. “So what’s a Giacometti?” I said. “As I doubt Jane’s only given you a biscuit, I suppose he must be a jeweller and she’s given you a ring.” Val knew what it was as soon as she first saw it, and when she asked her, Ada said it was a copy she’d picked up from a flea market in Paris. But your mum was like you. Nothing escaped her. “That’s no copy, George, it’s a genuine Giacometti, believe me,” she said. “Ada’s lying, someone’s given her that sculpture. If she’d bought it herself she’d have told me.” I bit my lip and kept my mouth shut.’

  ‘It’s funny. There’s a painting at the heart of Karl’s family history, and a sculpture at the heart of ours.’

  ‘I think your auntie Ada’s made much better use of her sculpture than the Reichian therapist’s made of her Dix, if you’ll pardon the pun.’

  ‘You’ve really got it in for Dr Schmidt, is it because she goes to church?’

  ‘I’ve a general aversion to therapists, I didn’t even know she goes to church.’

  ‘What’s a “Dix”?’ asked my father.

  ‘Otto Dix is a German painter,’ I said. ‘Hitler thought he was degenerate, so a lot of his paintings were destroyed, but at least he survived. Karl thinks he’s still alive.’

  ‘So what is she, a Catholic?’ asked Jack.

  ‘She’s not actually religious. She just thinks that religion is useful. Karl says going to church is good for business.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Jack. ‘She must be a very practical Reichian therapist.’

  ‘I’m not really all that keen on her either,’ I said.

  I was getting flustered. This wasn’t the time to be bringing up Karl and degenerate painters, or Hitler, or church being good for business… But my father, who had been so downcast, was now almost smiling.

  ‘And what’s a Reichian therapist?’ he asked.

  ‘Someone else who makes a living out of theories,’ said Jack. ‘Another parasite if you ask me. A charlatan, according to Ada – your sister doesn’t mince her words, I’ll give her that.’

  ‘No… no, she doesn’t.’ My father seemed absent again, but after stretching out his arms and taking a breath he recovered himself. ‘I’m sorry I put you through that, and for imagining I wanted you to be someone else, not yourself.’ He was touching Jack’s arm, and many more words danced around in his eyes than he managed to speak. ‘I thought that if… but no, that was definitely a lie. And you went, week after week, for me, even though the sickness wasn’t yours.’

  ‘The sickness was theirs,’ said Jack, ‘but at least after going there so often I know myself better. I even like myself better, I think.’

  ‘You should,’ said my father. Then he took a second breath and turned to me. ‘She’ll always be there for you, Ada. You’re all she has now.’

  ‘But I’ve got you to be there for me,’ I said, and if my father hadn’t looked at me so miserably, ‘You and Jack,’ I would have gone on to say.

  I stood up and spread my arms around him. He turned in his chair and pressed his head against my shoulder. ‘Nothing’s changed,’ I found the courage to say one more time, but my words met only with a stiffness in the expanse I was embracing and a stillness in the weight against my shoulder. In the suffocating silence that had almost filled the room, Jack stood up behind his chair and pushed it in until the back touched the edge of the table.

  ‘I think I should go now,’ he said, while his arms flailed again across his chest. This time his hands had disappeared behind his shoulders - like a contortionist’s, I felt stupid for thinking. ‘There’s no place for me here any more, I feel like I’ve become an intruder,’ Jack went on limply, and now his whole body was swaying, as though he were about to collapse in a heap on the floor.

  My father looked up at him, staring woodenly at the young slender body as it reeled on the spot, but then all at once he was up from his chair and standing behind him, gripping him from under his arms and manoeuvring him out of the kitchen, past my books on the dining room table, into the chair he always sat in to read The Weekly Magic News. I was right behind them, wanting to help but not knowing how.

  ‘A glass of water,’ my father said.

  ‘I’m fine now,’ said Jack, when I was already on my way to fetch the water. And after he had drunk it and handed me the glass back, ‘Thank you,’ he smiled, first to me and then to my father. ‘I just felt dizzy for a moment, it’s probably the heat.’

  ‘Do you feel strong enough to walk?’

  ‘Daddy, he isn’t.’

  ‘He needs some fresh air, you both do. And I need just an hour to myself. We all need a breather to take in what’s happened. What’s the time now?’ And after looking at his watch, ‘It’s almost a quarter past seven, take Jack somewhere nice for some food.’ He took out his wallet and handed me some notes. ‘Jack?’

  ‘Anything you say, George. If Jane doesn’t mind.’

  ‘Of course I don’t mind, if you’re sure you’re all right.’

  ‘I’m fine now. And I wouldn’t mind some food.’

  ‘I’ll stay here while you get yourself ready,’ said my father. ‘Have a shower first, if you like. You look like you’ve been wearing those clothes for a week. Here, I’ll take the glass in case Jack needs more water. Now go!’

  In the dim light of my box room, after my five-minute shower I threw on my pink cotton blouse and blue and white polka-dot Bermudas, slipped into my sandals without undoing the buckle on the side, and after just a quick glance at myself in the mirror on the door of my wardrobe I made my way anxiously back to where Jack and my father were waiting exactly as I had left them – Jack holding hands with himself in the chair, and my father standing awkwardly beside him, holding Jack’s empty glass.

  ‘Doesn’t she look lovely!’ said Jack.

  ‘She does.’

  ‘You should tell her more often, instead of always teasing her.’

  ‘You tease me too,’ I said to Jack.

  ‘He’s right, I should,’ said my father.

  ‘And you should break up that box you make her sleep in, open up her room to how it was, with a window she can actually open, instead of having it behind a piece of board.’

  ‘But I like my box room. It’s like no other room in the world.’

  ‘I should’ve let you have my room,’ said my father.

  ‘I don’t think Mia-Mia would’ve slept with you in that box room,’ said Jack.

  ‘The box room is mine,’ I said. And after doing a girlish twirl, ‘These are the Bermudas Jack brought me from Torquay,’ I tried to joke, but my humour fell so flat on the floor that it might as well have been my father’s toupee.

  ‘Right, we should leave your dad alone before he asks us for his money back.’

  ‘You better put some shoes on first,’ my father said to Jack. ‘Stay there, I’ll fetch you your pumps.’

  ‘Oh dear,
I don’t think I’m allowed back in the bedroom,’ Jack sighed under his breath. And when the pumps arrived and he was putting them on, ‘Your Bermudas are actually from Carnaby Street, so I think that officially makes you a hippy.’

  ‘I’d like just five minutes with Jane,’ my father said. ‘If Jane doesn’t mind.’

  ‘I’ll wait outside,’ said Jack. ‘Take as long as you like.’

  ‘Jane?’

  How my eyes must have sparkled with joy. My day had been too full, first with Karl and Mia-Mia and then with Jack, and lastly with attempting to keep up with “the truth” and its unstoppable momentum. At the heart of the new future I dared to imagine, my father was the threat that might prevent it. But the way he had just spoken my name was full of all the affection and warmth I had craved since that moment on his knee when the whole world we had shared had collapsed, and I knew at last that even if everything else was uncertain, our feelings for each other were not.

  When Jack had shut the front door behind him, daddy lifted me up off the floor and lowered me into the depths of his chair. He sat beside me on the pouffe, and I saw my hands being dwarfed as he took them into his.

  ‘I’d like you to know that I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry about Ada and I’m sorry about Jack. I’m sorry I haven’t been a better father, and I’m sorriest of all about what happened to your mum. It’s no excuse that we were young, or that we encouraged each other to do stupid things. We had to think of you, we didn’t have the right to be stupid.’

  ‘It was an accident, daddy. A one in a million chance of something that had never crossed your minds.’

  He smiled and brought the nest of hands to his mouth, unfolding mine briefly to kiss them. ‘You’re so much like your mother,’ he said, ‘and I’ve always loved you as much as I loved her. I wanted to tell you tonight, because there’s a chance that tomorrow… Well, who knows how we’re both going to feel?’

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘I promise I’ll still love you even if you ask Jack to leave.’

  ‘Let’s see,’ said my father. ‘Sometimes how we feel, and how we need to protect how we feel…’ He broke off a sentence he didn’t seem to want to decide how to end. And after just a quick squeeze of my hands that felt like a heartbeat, ‘I also wanted you to know, in case it makes a difference, that when I’ve not been away there’s not been a night when I’ve not come to your room and kissed you good night. Mia-Mia would be snoring like a man and I’d slip out of bed and listen at your door to make sure you were asleep. Then I’d hold my breath and tiptoe to your bedside, and I’d sneak you a little kiss just there… or sometimes there… depending on which side you’d fallen asleep in.’ He broke the nest of hands to touch first the right side of my forehead then the left, and his finger as he touched me was trembling. ‘But there’s no way I can prove it, and I couldn’t say I’d blame you if you thought I was making it up.’

  I threw myself out of his chair and I saw his quiet tears as I kissed first the right side of his forehead, then the left.

  ‘Our secret,’ I said. ‘I want it to belong just to us.’

  When a short time that couldn’t have been counted had passed without unnecessary words, daddy got up and made me giggle as he whisked me off to the door.

  ‘How you’ve grown,’ he said as he was setting me down.

  I looked back from the last of the five shallow steps that led down to the gate where Jack was waiting. I smiled and daddy smiled back.

  ‘Nothing’s changed,’ he said, and after blowing me a kiss we all waved goodbye, then he stepped back inside and shut the door.

  9

  Encounters

  Jack and I held hands as we zigzagged away from the house. An unremarkable turning was the only point of exit from the labyrinth of narrow alleyways and cul-de-sacs that snaked around it. On the map, stripped of all the buildings that at least gave it some character, our neighbourhood looked like a plate of spaghetti.

  ‘The second time your dad called to invite me for a drink he made me come all the way from Chelsea to Angel. And when he asked if he could kiss me and I told him that I’d love him to but I was actually a boy, he didn’t bat an eyelid, I swear, he just went on and kissed me like I hadn’t said a word.’

  ‘You think he’d guessed already?’

  ‘Or maybe he was trying to keep me quiet. That kiss just wouldn’t end; it must’ve gone on for at least half an hour. People were staring; someone even whined that we should get ourselves a room. None of it bothered your father one bit, I had to push him off in the end, or the landlord would’ve shown us the door.’

  Jack would raise his arm now and then, and mine would rise with it, and we laughed as we carried on walking hand in hand without slowing our pace. I could feel Mia-Mia’s invisible presence beside us, an inseparable part of the boy and the man my father had fallen in love with.

  ‘Imagine if they’d got an inkling I was actually a man,’ Jack carried on, reminiscing about the beginning of something that already might have come to an end. ‘You’d think your dad would be more mortified than I was, but he was too much like a boy in the middle of falling in love, even more than I was, and his whole world at that moment was that. “Just as well I live round the corner,” he said, then he put his arm around me and I followed like a lamb, circling round these creepy little streets and thinking to myself, “This is it, my last night alive on this earth, any minute now he’s going to strangle me and dump me in a ditch.” But then we turned a corner, went up those little steps and there we were, safe and sound and being screamed at by you and your aunt.’

  ‘In all those years since dad… since we all lost mum, it was the first time he brought anyone back - a woman I mean, except he’d actually brought back a man…’

  ‘He brought back Mia-Mia,’ said Jack. ‘And we’ve just taken her away from him.’

  ‘I was thinking just the opposite. You were a part of Mia-Mia and she’s still a part of you.’

  ‘Yes, well, I’m not sure if that’s good enough for George.’

  ‘When we talked, I told him I’d still love him even if he asked you to leave.’

  ‘I should hope so.’

  ‘But he loves you, he’s admitted that it wasn’t all a lie. He even said you made him happy, so why would he ask you to leave?’

  ‘And he can’t take all that back whatever he decides.’ Jack tightened his grip of my hand as we slipped out of the plate of spaghetti. ‘What I’ve never understood is how people find their way to the shop.’

  ‘But they do,’ I said. ‘There’s never been a day when it hasn’t been busy.’

  ‘That’s magic for you, I suppose.’

  We were on Upper Street now. A light twilight breeze was cooling the air and making the evening feel fresh. There wasn’t much traffic, and the people who were out were mostly clustered in orderly queues at the bus stops, waiting to get home after a hot day at work. Suits stood apart as overalls mingled, and women looked glum in their tight office skirts and monochrome blouses. Dotted here and there, almost always in pairs, the most colourful girls were also the most cheerful, causing boys to gawk as they swanned their way past them.

  ‘Jack, are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not about to faint on you. George was right, all I needed was a bit of fresh air.’

  ‘And some food. I haven’t seen you eat since you got back from your brother’s bed-and-breakfast in Torquay.’

  Jack leaned down to knock my shoulder with his. ‘Aren’t you the funny one, eh?’

  ‘It can’t have been easy for you, all that pretending.’

  ‘I’d say parts of it were hard, but some parts were actually fun.’ Jack spoke slowly, as though dwelling on the parts that had been hard, and I dragged on his arm to slow him down. Just then a group of dirty children ran across us, chasing after a ball. When it hit a shuttered window and bounced back, Jack let go of me to tackle it by turning it around, and all in a single deft movement was keeping it steady on
the ground with his foot. The boys and one girl had all gathered round, looking eager to play with this stranger who could handle a ball.

  ‘Come on then, come and get it,’ said Jack, but as I moved to one side he did a little dance around the ball and then lobbed it with a kick at the biggest of the boys, who hit it with his chest and made it drop to his feet.

  As the whole group cheered him on, Jack picked up my hand and we got out of their way. ‘Good kids,’ he said, turning to give them a wave. He took in the air in a long deep sigh, and as he breathed it out he pushed both our arms as far into the sky as he could without lifting me completely off my feet, and then he lowered them again after holding them still for just a few seconds. ‘It wasn’t the pretending I minded so much, or even the limited wardrobe forced on Mia-Mia by having to keep that preposterous bulge under wraps. What really got me down was George’s constant fear of being found out.’ The way he spoke now was more purposeful and brisk, almost carefree. ‘And yes, Shepherd’s Bush was hell, but at least all the newspapers were free, and I’m grateful that I haven’t got a brother in Torquay who puts me down. Oh, and I did have a sandwich while you were dreaming.’

  ‘That was hours ago,’ I said.

  There were so many questions I wanted to ask. If he didn’t have a brother in Torquay, did he have another brother somewhere else? Were his parents still alive? Did they know? I wanted to ask about his English degree, about where he had studied, what books he had read, who had been his friends, if there had been someone else before my father… I wanted to know about the first time he had fallen in love, how it had felt, how he had known. I wanted him to tell me how I could be sure if the same thing was now happening to me. If all the strange sensations I was feeling meant that I was falling in love, would I know it? And could I only know if Karl felt the same if he told me?

  ‘How about you, are you hungry?’ At the sound of Jack’s voice I came to.