You Left Early

by Louisa Young

  I thought he was dying, all the time. Why? Because I always thought my father was dying, with his heart problems. I longed for Robert’s death, and I dreaded it. I planned for his funeral as a girl plans for her wedding – ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, I thought, Velvet Underground. Joni Mitchell’s ‘Trouble Child’. And ‘Der Leiermann’ from Schubert’s Winterreise. And him playing of course: the Chopin. At last everyone would remember how they loved him. I saw them flee from him that sometime did him seek. I heard them, reluctance in their voices as they sensed the vampire in him, and retreated … And they would see how I suffered. Ah, the self-pity! There was a lot of that too.

  *

  I never saw that young doctor again – and just as well. In the course of conversations with other doctors, it became apparent that her view was not necessarily correct. The consensus was that there could be no definite prognosis, yet. Whatever was going to happen would take a while. Robert wasn’t going anywhere immediately, and when he did it would be to a long-term NHS residential rehab centre, probably for six months.

  Oh, OK. That’s good, isn’t it? I mean, better?

  I picked up my confusions, my fear and guilt and helplessness, and went to my other life, in Italy. I felt there was nothing I could do for him. What good had I actually done him so far? Judging by results?

  I can’t pretend it was a rational decision. Some kind of extraordinary curtain was drifting across my mind, hiding him from me, due to my fundamental inability to take on board what was happening. Fear. His face like a blank ecstatic monk, gentle and completely ignorant of consensual reality. Self-starvation. Crooked, unworking legs. The state of his flat, after he was taken away to hospital. Bottles and shit again; maggots and fag ends. Blood dried up in the basin. Puddles of what turned out to be, probably, ancient vomit. Food that I had given him months before rotting in the fridge.

  Walk away from who you love. Leave them, literally, in their own mess. A man who cannot deal with his own mess is going to remain forever in his own mess.

  Really?

  But he’d said, ‘At least I’m getting closer to home.’

  But.

  All right: other things and other people exist, apart from Robert. Two days after I visited him on his birthday, my daughter was in A&E at the same hospital. She went on her own, without ringing me, having what she thought was one of her bad asthma attacks. But it wasn’t asthma – her peak flow and oxygen levels were fine. It was a panic attack. She’d never had one before. I did not want her having panic attacks. I did not want her taking herself alone to A&E. She was fourteen.

  And, three sets of friends and their children were due to visit in Italy and had bought their flights, including Israeli friends on the only visas they would get that year. It was ten days. It was all arranged. Easter. Daughter. Family.

  So Lola and I went to Italy, and in the meantime friends came and, God bless their sweet hearts, helped Robert. I don’t know who emptied the months-old piss from the vodka bottles, threw out the rank piles of newspaper, cleaned off the layers of filth. No cleaning company would touch it. But someone brought some tea-lights and lined them up on the mantelpiece, thinking I suppose that he might go back there, and wanting it to be nice. Hopeless kind gestures fluttering in the face of this catastrophe. And then someone took away his furniture – a table, his desk, a trunk full of letters and old programmes, the sofa on which Truncheon and I had slept – in a van and put it into storage. His piano had moved in to Bush Hall. The grandfather clock had disappeared, nobody knew how or when. He has friends apart from me.

  Leave him to it, the small voice said.

  So I went about my business. In a daze. Thinking, Where is his sweet mind? What the hell is going to happen? What am I going to do about it?

  One thing at a time. That’s what you do.

  I rang John and Kath in Wigan from a sunny Italian courtyard. I hadn’t told them earlier because nothing seemed definite enough to tell, and it seemed too horrible to inflict on them when there was nothing they could/would have done about it anyway, other than suffer from the knowledge, and because I was struggling with my responsibility here. I was staring at a dense rosemary bush when I told Kath what was happening with Robert, harshly, thinking it would be better than faffing about. Looking back, I frightened them, and I am sorry. I should have gone up there and told them in person. I had a tendency to think people are stronger than me, and know what I know, and more besides. And of course that’s not always the case. So there was John, in Wigan, hearing this news third-hand, at a distance, about his only son, his genius boy. Would John have gone to Robert if he could? Would it have helped? Who knows. One of the first things I learnt reading Narnia under my father’s piano was Aslan’s great piece of wisdom: you don’t get to know what would’ve happened. John couldn’t travel and that was that. And there was Kath, who loved Robert (though he couldn’t see it, thus denying himself a measure of parental solace he could’ve benefited from), having to find a way to support John. And me, in Italy, trying to be straightforward, and so concerned with myself and Robert that I forgot to be kind to these old people. John’s health was not great – he was a huge smoker, and a depressed man – and this was I’m pretty sure the biggest shock of his life. Though his initial response was, apparently, ‘Trust Robert to get something Russian.’

  This gift of time allowed me to think, but I knew already that, whatever happened, I was going to look after Robert. It would be a challenge to my creative skills to romanticise being a carer; and to my personal abilities to make the adjustment from caring about somebody emotionally to caring for them physically. But actually, it’s the same damn thing. And anyway I’d made that decision years before, in the little black car on the A29.

  Part Four

  2007–09

  Chapter Twenty

  Camden Town, April–November 2007

  By the time I got back from Italy, Robert had returned to consensual reality. After all that, it took only six weeks or so. We spoke on the phone. He was in Camden, and I was to visit.

  I felt relieved, disbelieving, buffeted and weirdly disappointed. If I’d known he would be back so soon I would have spent more time with him in Australia and Paris, in that semi-real land where shafts of clarity pierce the murk and join up to make unexpected patterns. I’d have asked impertinent questions, taken notes, and made friends with the madman he was then, in that place. But I had been accustoming myself to the terrifying possibility – probability? – that he was staying there. Now, in my relief, it didn’t occur to me that he might have left some of himself behind. I hadn’t thought how changeable things still might be. I was in yet another new land I knew nothing about.

  This rehab was in a Victorian house with disability-friendly annexes and a paved yard out the back, but it was again the world of duty managers and overhead lighting and encouraging slogans, with cleaning rotas in Comic Sans stuck up on corkboard in the kitchen and separate cupboards protecting people’s instant coffee and Cup-a-Soups. I walked through. The paved garden was full of thin people, smoking under a tree in blossom. I knew their expressions, if not their faces, from Clouds and Max Glatt. They eyed me and directed me through to the lounge, from sunny day into dimness. There he was, opposite the door, sitting on a low institutional couch, a walking frame at his side.

  He stood up, and I started crying. I hadn’t known he’d be able to stand up. He talked. He was sane and sober. He hugged me. My head in his neck. He was sane. He was sober. I made a promise then, in my heart: I love you and I will stay with you forever.

  I could fill the next ten pages with those words. SANE and SOBER. SANE and SOBER. SANE and SOBER and HERE and ALIVE. I want to do that joy justice – to give it as much space and attention as I’ve given to all the pain.

  In another blue file under the piano, I find another batch of Significant Event Sheets. Among them I find that on 24/04/07 his ‘significant event or general mood of the day (Please be specific)’ was ‘The visit of my “girlfriend” – she
is ex, or semi, non. I’m not quite sure. We had a very lachrymose session. Extremely upsetting for both of us. I insisted on her telling me about the last few months – many things have been forgotten due to chronic inebriation. Very painful but potentially creative. Crying. Lots of deep breaths. The panicky feelings remain. I have to come to terms with the damage that alcohol has caused both to me and to her. Being so drunk I distanced myself from my eight-year-old son. I just hope to God that I can fix the damage caused and for him not to feel alienated from his father.’

  ‘Could you just write down what happened when?’ he asked me. ‘Because I can’t really remember.’

  I leapt at the opportunity, and produced an efficient timeline of his life since divorce. Writing his own life story at Clouds, he’d got factual details wrong – the year of his divorce, the number of breaks he had in his leg. He had become his own unreliable narrator, which was unsurprising but also oh fuck. How do you tell someone that, when you’re trying not to be controlling and also trying to work out whether you’re going to have to compensate for brain damage? I was trying to find the truth in memories of things Robert had hardly registered as they happened. Later, I would be in charge of all his old love letters, his father’s LP collection and his rehab papers, but already I was becoming arbiter of his truth; editor of his version. Questions re-emerged which have been on my mind since I first wrote my grandmother’s biography; about truth, fiction and memory and the relations between them; about the writer’s responsibility.

  What I really needed was to settle myself, to take nothing for granted, to protect myself and Lola, and take care of him too. But we were all over the place. I was overwhelmed by this unforeseen possibility of survival, another chance at life – hasn’t he used up his nine yet? I felt unbalanced. I came home wanting to splash about in SANE and SOBER and HERE and ALIVE. Instead, while he returned to the life of Group and Assignments and Significant Events, I wrote and wrote and wrote: for self-definition, I think, in the face of his chaos. ‘I became overgrown with self-pity,’ I wrote, ‘looking in the wrong direction, caught in the thicket like any rescuing prince, snagged with the thorns, confused, fighting the wrong battle, no direction home. Every patch I clear in my mind grows back more tangled; a hydra thicket, out to get me. It never loses. It never goes away. The one I am trying to rescue never escapes. But is that him, or is it me?’

  *

  Robert was to be in Camden for six months, till November 2007, alongside these people with whom he had everything and nothing in common. The Prof, yet again. They liked him. He liked them. I liked them. I offered him country-and-western lyrics; Townes Van Zandt’s lines about drowning tomorrow when you cry too many tears for yesterday. Someone printed it out and stuck it up in the kitchen. As Robert wrote in his notebook: ‘Nothing that comes from the outside can cure us, because the problem is inside us. Only the things we do will bring recovery.’

  Among his papers I found a battered envelope from that time in Camden, with this written on it:

  Robert’s Wishlist

  To never again pick up a drink

  To regain mental + physical health

  To rid myself of envy, bitterness, jealousy and resentment

  To have a mutually fulfilling rewarding relationship with my son and for him to be a happy, fulfilled and eventually rounded man

  Ditto with Louisa Young my father

  Ditto with Louisa Young

  Ditto with all the people I love and am fond of and even one or two who I don’t actually like, for the benefit of others with whom we are mutually connected.

  To write beautiful music, perhaps eventually for the concert hall but to become more successful than before in the media milieu

  For our planet to become a more peaceful and beautiful place

  For Wigan Rugby League Club to regain their former status as the world’s premier club side.

  This makes me laugh – not Wigan to win the rugby, though that was a sign of life – but my being crossed out and then added in again, after John. I think Robert was less worried about losing me than about losing his dad. I hope it meant that he believed in us. Though later, reading through the new file of rehab papers, I saw it was more complex than that.

  I found these papers almost unbearable when I first looked at them. I stopped and cried. I scurried from page to page, looking for themes, for chronology. I cross-referred to my own diary. Sheets flew across the desk; forms filled in in his spidery handwriting, crossings out, parentheses; folded pages with his nickname for the counsellor written on the back: ‘The Marchioness of Istanbul’. I typed it all up – I couldn’t tell how to use his words until I saw them out of his potent handwriting and into print. This turned out to involve a curious and painful physical/emotional overlap, as his words from long ago went through my eyes into my brain and came back out through my fingers, my physical means of production – which recalled the means of his production, his fingers on his piano keyboard, and his ‘first language’, how he expressed himself. I type up so much sweetness, so much pain and physical frailty, so much concern for his fellow recoverers and gratitude to his friends. And I type up myself: almost continuously coming through as a negative.

  Here is a simple line diagram of a head with a sausagey brain coiled up inside. Robert has added a moustache, a blacked-out tooth, stubble, and an earring, for some reason. (He didn’t wear an earring – earrings on men were another fucking poncey southern bourgeois affectation.) It’s a self-portrait. On the right, he has written a list of positives; on the left, negatives. I am not on the right among ‘passing moments of happiness like watching the sun come out, the clouds, wildlife’, ‘a stimulating conversation’ and ‘friends’. I am on the left, between ‘increasing angst about practical issues’ and ‘fear of not being able to work again’.

  I type out: ‘The relationship with my girlfriend is in tatters. Not sure that either of us has the strength to resurrect it (and sometimes not even the desire). It has either come to an end, or is going through a non-existent patch. I decided not to have any contact with her except by post until the completion of my first three months at Herbert House. We love each other, always will, I think, in a way, always did, in a way, since we met when we were nineteen. But the effects of my drinking have had a wearing effect on her and I think it’s best, as does she, to call it a day. Don’t get me wrong she can be a real pain in the arse even when not provoked. I started going out with her when I was drunk. However I still have some good friends who can be supportive.’

  Of whom I was apparently not one.

  Reading these papers from 2007 for the first time, my own 2007 emotions leapt to life again, as if he was still up there smoking in that Camden yard. I wanted to head straight up there and have it out with him. ‘A wearing effect’? It makes our romance sound like a trying attempt to get through to the tax office; an uncomfortable pair of shoes during a longer-than-expected social occasion. ‘Best call it a day’ is not how my love for him would end. And did his vodka-drenched blood-clotted thiamine-deprived brain cells miss the fact that his intention and desire to get sober was the mainstay of my being with him at all? And while I don’t deny my capacity to be a pain in the arse, at what stage, ever, in any addict’s life, were they not being provoking?

  Then, as usual, I rationalised. He was a brain-damaged man in the early stages of understanding the effects of addict behaviour. He wrote of still being ‘pretty wrecked, very nervous, unstable, very stressed, full of regrets, remorse, embarrassment, fear, pessimism, neuroses, obsessions, thoughts of suicide, thoughts of leaving here and drinking which may well lead to death. There is no anaesthetic, little protection.’ And also of how ‘there is now much more than a glimmer of optimism, of hope. I’m slowly gaining strength – inner strength, not relying on people so much – as I did on Louisa last time round.’ He couldn’t yet bear to listen to music. When bad things happened, bad thoughts, it tore him apart. But, he wrote too of his genuine belief that ‘when, rather than if, I get th
at poison out of my mind I will be able to enjoy my own well-being, to enjoy all the wonderful things that are out there. I want to be a good father, I want a fulfilling relationship and friendships. I want to have the hunger to learn, to enjoy life instead of being trapped in that dark ominous frightening tunnel.’

  I had to be – I was! – grateful that he was able to do any of this.

  His significant event of 5 May, he writes, was seeing me. I remember that night. We tiptoed round each other with great kindness. His fears about his physical well-being and mental health were well-founded. On top of the usual symptoms, his speech was slurred, and he had developed accommodation lag which, along with dizzy spells and his weak legs and limp, meant that he had fallen over several times. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t see that now he was sober, for the first time in years there was a possibility of these other problems being overcome. ‘The atmosphere is difficult when we only have three hours,’ he wrote, ‘both of us self-conscious – knowing that if we embark upon analysis we don’t have the time or emotional energy to sort anything out. We love each other a lot but there are big issues, big problems (not just my alcoholism but of course that has played a major destructive role). Lonely, remorseful now. Lonely with other (nice) people around is not nice. Sad that Louisa had to leave so soon. Sad that it has been and will be a long, drawn-out process. Angry at myself for abusing her love. Ashamed even.’

  He was frightened too about his father’s health, and the alienation that had grown up between the two of them, knowing that ‘my recent demise has unquestionably had an effect on his clinical depression’. Homesickness was strong in him at this time. One evening returning to Camden Town, he took a cab. ‘The driver had a very familiar, very strong accent – totally shocked, confused: WIGAN! Too many feelings to go into.’ He rang home, and Kath answered. ‘I tried to be polite and nice. Mentioned that I may come up at some stage. She said, “I don’t want you staying up all night with your friends” etc. Cold inconsiderate shitty non-comprehending. I talked to him. He sounds weak – trembly voice, confused, old.’