The Madness of Grief

by Panayotis Cacoyannis

  ‘I don’t want to go home yet. Dad mustn’t see me like this, he must never find out.’

  ‘Jane, you’re making me frightened. Should we go to the police?’

  ‘And say what? That when he kissed me I let him? That when he asked me to I went to his room? He even called his mother first to ask her to be late. He told her he was going to play the piano for me, some difficult pieces by Chopin he’d never tried before, could we have the house to ourselves for an extra hour? I heard his mother’s laughter pouring out of the receiver, and Karl was trying to muffle it by talking more loudly. I think Chopin was a signal, he’s always playing Chopin so what was so special about Chopin tonight? His mother knew. She knew what he had planned; she knew why he’d asked me to go round. She knew and she thought it was funny.’

  ‘What happened when you went to his room?’

  I was in no state to be pacifying Jack, what I wanted was to let it all out, and I did.

  ‘The kissing and the touching got rougher and rougher, and when I asked him to stop he just wouldn’t. “Stop it,” I said. “This doesn’t feel right, I think I should go now.” But he didn’t. He wouldn’t. He said that I didn’t really want him to stop, that girls were all the same and liked to play games. I said it wasn’t true and I wasn’t like that and I didn’t play games, he was the first boy I’d kissed and if I’d given him the wrong impression I was sorry, but now he had to stop and let me go and I’d still be his friend. It was too late to be sorry, he said, and if I wanted to be friends, then why not just relax and have some fun. But he wasn’t just talking, he was holding me too tightly and rubbing against me, trying to keep me still so he could kiss me again, getting rougher the more I resisted, too rough with his hands and those delicate fingers. I wanted to scream, I wanted to so badly but I couldn’t. Then he grabbed me by the wrists and pushed me onto his bed and fell on top of me, and for a moment I felt dizzy and I lost all my strength…’

  ‘Jane, I think we need to go to the police. Unless you’re hurt, if you’re hurt then we should call your dad first, and then we’ll stop a cab…’

  ‘I’m not, I’m not, I promise you I’m not hurt. When he let go of my hand, trying to undo his shorts, I punched him in the face and then I punched him again, again and again and as hard as I could, until he rolled off the bed and fell squealing on the floor, whimpering that I was crazy and I’d broken his nose. I stepped over him and he was yelling at me to get out, and I did, I got out, but before getting out I walked back to where he was and I kicked him. And as I kicked him, I was wishing I was wearing proper shoes.’

  Jack used both hands to hold my face, and in the kindness of his gaze my disgust felt like a burden, something ugly I had borrowed from a stranger. ‘I’m so sorry this happened,’ he said. ‘I blame myself, if I hadn’t insisted you wouldn’t have gone.’

  ‘I went because I wanted to, not because you insisted. And if I hadn’t gone tonight, he’d have invited me again and I’d have gone, because I liked him, I liked him a lot.’

  Jack bent down and kissed me twice on my forehead. ‘I’m so proud of you,’ he said, ‘and I think you should be proud of yourself. But I don’t think you should just let it go.’

  ‘I’m not letting it go, I’ll never let it go.’ I fell again into Jack’s arms as another car sliced through us with its headlights and then drove past us slowly. I heard the laughter pouring out from inside it and felt it like a shiver of needle upon needle puncturing the surface of my body.

  ‘We can’t stay in the street. We need to go somewhere. And later when I’ve taken you home, if you’d like me to I’ll come back.’

  ‘What for?’ I almost pushed him as I pulled too hard away from him, and standing one step back I held on to myself with my arms across each other and my hands around my neck, in a gesture I broke out of as soon as I remembered it was Jack’s. ‘Why would I want you to come back?’

  ‘To talk to Karl’s mother, to confront them both, to at least make sure she knows that her son tried to rape you.’

  The word made me flinch. ‘But I don’t know them,’ I said. ‘They don’t even exist, they were just a bad dream.’

  ‘You and Karl, you’re at the same school. Come September you’ll be seeing him every day.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘How can I see him if he doesn’t exist?’

  We did stay in the street, walking past St Mary’s Church to the triangle of Islington Green, and then instead of turning left and entering the plate of spaghetti, we crossed to the other side of Upper Street and walked back in the direction of Cross Street. When we crossed the road again, I wasn’t sure if I was following Jack or if Jack was following me. It was as if by some unspoken understanding we had reached the decision together to go back to Cross Street and look at Karl’s house from the opposite side of the road, pausing for no more than five seconds before walking briskly on, turning into Florence Street and following it round to the end, where it veered its way back onto Upper Street.

  The ground floor lights had been on and the windows still open, but Beethoven was no longer wafting out into a night that had now become more still, with fewer indoor lights on and hardly any traffic at all. It wasn’t yet eleven o’clock, so the extra hour Dr Schmidt had promised her son hadn’t passed, although a telephone call might have brought her home sooner. The absence of more music at this hour had signified nothing, but I wished Karl had been back at the piano, making up with sound for what I hoped had been a lapse – a temporary moment of madness. Briefly we had shared it, but then Karl had gone too far. And now that he no longer existed, I already knew I would miss him.

  ‘Do you think he’s okay?’ I asked Jack as we again walked past the top of Cross Street, now more steadfastly in the direction of home.

  ‘Do we really care if he’s okay?’

  ‘Yes, I think we do. He’s only a little boy.’

  ‘I’m sure the little boy’s just fine. Who knows, you might’ve even taught him a lesson.’

  ‘I wish we’d heard him playing the piano.’

  ‘Ah, so that’s why we went back.’

  ‘He always likes to play when he’s upset.’

  ‘He’s probably in bed with an ice pack. And it’s too late to be playing the piano.’

  ‘I feel sad,’ I said.

  ‘Of course you do,’ said Jack. I had my hand around his arm again, and he squeezed it right into his ribcage. I could feel the shape of his bones with my fingers.

  ‘I mean for Karl.’

  ‘The same Karl who doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Yes. The same Karl whose horrible taste is still in my mouth.’

  ‘The same Karl…’

  ‘Please don’t say that word again.’ Still clinging onto Jack as he fell silent, I shut my eyes tightly, keeping them shut while I took in gulps of air that filled me with the sharp metallic tang of the night. I thought of my father waiting at home, unaware of everything except his own confusion, grappling with his demons while Jack and I wandered the streets. Across the road an ambulance flashed past, its siren blaring as it sped to or from yet another dramatic unfolding of “real life”. It was definitely time to go home.

  Jack tripped and lost his balance, surging forward with such force that when his arm unlocked the grip of my hand, it gave me such a jerk that it almost dislocated my shoulder. He stumbled far ahead, nearly tumbling over more than once, but somehow as he wobbled he stayed standing. When he came to a stop, still crouching he held out his arms away from his body, and used a lamppost as a pole to swing around and face me. I almost laughed, with relief more than anything else, but then I saw the rage in his gaze at something behind me, and that was when I knew that he hadn’t just tripped.

  ‘Hello again,’ I heard the familiar mocking voice, and before I could turn, I was pushed out of the way with a shove by the boy who hadn’t finished with Jack in Captain Cook’s Fish and Chips. ‘I promised my mates that you’d have your face punched in by the end of the night, guaranteed. See, I just knew you’
d still be roaming our streets, seeing as your sugar daddy’s probably dumped you. And I told the lads you needed to be dealt with tonight, or we’d have a fucking queer roaming our streets with his tart every fucking night of the week.’

  ‘Yeah, fucking queer,’ parroted one of his mates from the shadows. I recognised the two shrinking violets. They were still keeping their distance, cheerers-on too cowardly to heed Frank’s good advice.

  ‘But don’t worry, no one’s laying a finger on your tart,’ said their leader as he circled Jack. ‘Tonight we’ll just do you.’

  ‘I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never seen you around,’ I said. ‘So how are these your streets?’

  ‘If we say they’re our streets, they’re our streets,’ said the bolder of the two shrinking violets.

  I remembered the head bully’s name. Maybe if they all knew I remembered… ‘So, Mike, what’s all this really about? Can’t you find yourself a girlfriend?’

  ‘Or I’ll give her just a slap or two to keep her quiet,’ said Mike.

  ‘If you so much as touch her, I promise you her dad will find you and he’ll kill you,’ said Jack. ‘So I’d strongly advise you to leave her alone and try your luck with me.’

  ‘I mean, how many Mikes can there be, roaming our streets with a couple of stooges? And the people in the shop know your faces. It shouldn’t be too hard for the police to track you down.’

  ‘Mike’s dad is the police, you stupid bitch,’ said the same shrinking violet.

  ‘Shut your fucking face, you fucking idiot,’ said Mike.

  ‘Come on, Mike, just leave it,’ said the other shrinking violet, but again it was too late for Mike to just leave it. Before he knew what had hit him, Jack had spun around the lamppost again, and then had swooped down to head-butt him twice.

  I reached for Jack’s extended arm, and as I passed over Mike’s squirming body, sprawled across the pavement and howling as the blood from his nose seeped through his hands, I would have stamped with all my might on his face if Jack hadn’t managed to pull me away.

  ‘That makes it a broken nose each.’ Jack’s voice crackled with the effort of running, and while we ran there was no sound of footsteps behind us.

  As soon as we had entered the plate of spaghetti, I let go of Jack’s hand one more time, to be sick on the side of the road. And finally I was able to scream.

  10

  Home

  At last we were home, but would it still be home for Jack? In every conceivable way I was exhausted, even more so under the pressure not to show it.

  ‘Nothing happened tonight,’ I had said to Jack, just before I turned the key to open the front door.

  ‘Imagine if anything had,’ Jack had smiled without relish.

  And as soon as we had come into the house and closed the door behind us, I knew that no amount of barricading could have kept the night outside, that it had followed and would stay with us, its implacable burden made heavier by the effort of pretending to my father that nothing had happened. But the vastness of the untruth in which I had made Jack complicit was essential, or the selfishness with which I had perverted the course of the night would contaminate the part that had remained, and which more than any other part did not belong to me.

  When my father gave me money and asked me to take Jack somewhere nice for some food, neither he nor Jack, nor even I myself, could have imagined how completely my desire to see Karl would have thwarted what had been a simple plan: to provide a breathing space in which my father and Jack would share an equal opportunity to gather their thoughts, before reaching either separately or together a final decision concerning the future. But really I had taken Jack completely for granted, as though he had no choice but to acquiesce in whatever was decided by my father, particularly if he asked Jack to stay.

  Only now that we were back, and I felt glad and relieved to be home because it was safe, did it strike me how precarious Jack’s position was. ‘Nothing happened tonight,’ I had commanded, as though the many things that had happened tonight had all revolved entirely around me. As though it would be safe for Jack to be cast out into the night by my father, because the night was tonight, and nothing had happened tonight.

  I turned the light on in the hallway. The bedroom door was shut.

  ‘I’m thirsty,’ said Jack, and we both walked to the kitchen.

  The table was as we had left it.

  ‘Would you like a glass?’

  I nodded, and when we both had drunk our water and put our glasses down, ‘What I said wasn’t fair,’ I said. ‘Dad needs to know you were in danger tonight. He can’t just turn you out.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ said Jack. And bending his fingers, he rubbed the back of them against my cheek. ‘Really, I will be. Whatever we decide.’

  So it wasn’t just up to my father, Jack also had a claim to the decision. Even if my father asked him to stay he might not. Perhaps the night had made him more determined. Perhaps it had made life seem too short to be wasting it on half-hearted offers. Feeling proud of Jack, I felt sorry for my father. Thoughts of Karl had receded, shrinking into a small and self-contained compartment of sadness locked away at the back of my mind.

  ‘And you and I will always be friends, just like you promised.’

  ‘Just like I promised,’ said Jack. ‘And now I think we need to find your dad.’

  When I knocked on the bedroom door no one answered.

  ‘He’s probably fallen asleep,’ said Jack, so I opened it slowly. The two bedside lamps either side of it were on, soaking up the colours of the room to give the empty double bed an orange sheen.

  ‘He hasn’t packed your things,’ I said, while we both stood at the doorway surveying the room. ‘Maybe he’s gone out for a walk.’

  ‘Stay there.’

  ‘But why, what is it?’ I was pinching on his T-shirt, trying to hold him back.

  ‘Just stay there, please,’ Jack insisted, his voice now more grave than the voice that had already alarmed me, and I let him break away, watching as he walked the few steps to the head of the bed. He stooped over the lamp on that side as though to hide it from view, and then still with his back to me sat down on the edge of the bed, only to get up again and stride back towards me. As he reached me he pulled me by the hand and closed the door behind us.

  ‘Stay there. Promise me you’ll stay there,’ he said to me intently, and before I could answer he was already at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Is auntie Ada here?’ I managed to call out, but Jack had disappeared, and when I didn’t hear voices, when I only heard the sound of frantic rummaging, I was unable to wait any longer. I hadn’t promised, and I couldn’t just stay there.

  The bathroom door was open. Still wearing his underpants my father lay in a bath full of water, looking very peaceful with his eyes shut, and for a reason that I couldn’t understand Jack was on his knees, breathing rapidly as he used something torn to tie up a towel he had wrapped around my father’s right arm. And then I saw the blood.

  ‘Daddy? Daddy?’ It was a low, wooden repetition, stifled by incomprehension. My mind, until then too full of how I myself had experienced the night, was now crowded with my ignorance of how my father had spent the same time, moment by moment, in a sequence whose inevitable culmination had been the enactment of the scene that lay so starkly before me.

  Jack flew up from his crouching position and stood in front of me, touching my forehead with his. Holding on to my shoulders, he spoke to me quickly and loudly. ‘You must go back downstairs and call for an ambulance. Will you do that? Dial 999 and ask for an ambulance.’

  When I nodded he let go of my shoulders, but before moving away I tried to stand on tiptoe and take another look at my father. Could he really still be alive?

  ‘Jane, you have to go downstairs right now.’

  Jack gave me a nudge and I turned around and ran down the stairs to where the telephone was in the hallway. I called 999 and asked for an ambulance, but whoever I was speaking to wa
nted to know who the ambulance was for and what was the problem, and I said that my father was upstairs in the bath, and he seemed to be asleep but there was blood on the floor, on the floor and in the water as well, and that Jack had wrapped his arm in a towel. Halfway through the call I had started to sob, and I was trying to get the words out as fast as I could but they were getting tangled up with my sobs and catching at the back of my throat, and as I tried to dredge them out I was fighting for breath. When the call was over, I leaned against the wall and let my body slide down to the floor. Then I saw that the receiver was still in my hand, and I made myself get up, to hang up so I could run back upstairs and be with my father and Jack.

  ‘Is the ambulance coming?’ Jack’s voice resounded in the house, but the loudness was just a disguise and I hadn’t been fooled.

  ‘Is he dead?’ I called back from the bottom of the stairs, but the urgency had left my voice too. I might as well have asked if Jack thought I should make a pot of tea.

  ‘Is it coming?’ Jack asked me again, and when I told him that it was, the same loud voice, now a practical voice, was asking me to call auntie Ada. ‘Just tell her that we’ve had to call an ambulance for George and I’ll be going with him, so someone should be here to stay with you. And tell her to hurry.’

  In a small way this return to a sense of urgency was comforting, and the same was true of having to perform another task. My father’s life and death were uncertain, and certainty would come only when the ambulance arrived, but really what I hoped for wasn’t certainty at all, certainty could mean just one thing.

  ‘Auntie Ada?’ I interrupted whatever auntie Ada had answered. ‘Jack says that we’ve had to call an ambulance for dad, and that we need you to be here and please can you hurry.’

  ‘Is Jack Mia-Mia?’

  ‘Jack’s upstairs…’

  ‘But is he Mia-Mia?’ auntie Ada asked again.

  ‘Yes, yes he is.’