by Louisa Young
Truth: he had been drinking. Truth: he was smoking.
I texted Jim: ‘These days probably feel a bit odd. They do for me.’ He wrote: ‘They do for me as well.’
Talking to the dead, I told Robert I’d do my best for Jim. Robert died at the same age as his mother did. I told him about his own funeral, how he’s buried one row down, one grave along, from my father. Not in the north – I wanted him closer by, for Jim and for me to be able to visit. There is a grave-space next to Robert, at Wayland’s feet. So that is my grave. There is a big R for Reserved on a square of terracotta among the mossy turf, and when I go to visit the gentlemen I walk on my own future grave and I always forget to see whether I shiver.
I tell him: ‘I love you.’ ‘What, still?’ he says, as so often.
I wanted a webcam on his grave to make sure he’s OK, to see if he was under snow. I wanted to talk to him. How are you? What’s happening? Tell me the funny little stories.
I wanted to go in with him. Ribs interlacing, skulls resting, pelvises slotting together.
GFW texted: he was at the rugby, and told me to put on the Wigan shirt from the funeral. Wigan scored: 6-8 to Huddersfield. I would have gone to the rugby with you, would have done all the things. All the things we couldn’t do. I want to dream of doing them, starting with the lost things: kissing, talking, eating, walking. Can we?
*
They came to take away the feeding stuff.
*
I said to grief: I capitulate. I salute you. You are the emperor of your craft.
Like grief cared.
*
I had his phone. He wasn’t good with technology. Technology was for sound engineers and producers, not for composers and musicians. There were several texts on it, to me, that he hadn’t sent. I sent them to myself.
One said, ‘I’m waiting for you; I’m at the back.’
One said, ‘Where are you darling? I’m not worried I just want to know you’re OK’.
One, presumably in response to similar query from me, said, ‘In heaven, thanks to blackbird’.
*
It became The Year of Saying Yes, because the alternative was inconceivable. Oh it tumbled out, that year. We went to Accra for Grandma’s funeral; weeping all night, the Harmattan wind blowing fine dust twenty-four hours; many days of ceremonies and drummers and dancers, relatives, special black-and-white outfits for each occasion, shake hands, shake hands, cold beer, hot food, endless church, leopardskin masks, gold wands, dirge-like hymns, dancing undertakers, the lead one like Baron Samedi in kente waistcoat, red bow-tie, top hat and cockade. Loving comfort from Osei’s widow and children, all of us together, so close and kind. The Ashanti do good funerals. Then Ireland on horses with my twin friends who had lost their mother two years before, for what came to be known as the My Lovely Horse Holiday. Do not underestimate the capacity of a really big animal to give comfort. The Outer Hebrides with Jackie; mist, jewel-clear turquoise water, silvery distant streaks of light, St Kilda a smudge on the horizon, clarity and a feeling of your head and heart being washed in purity. The Kings Lynn festival, where I was booked to appear and didn’t want to cancel, almost breaking down on stage and running away with milk chocolate and chips in the open car with the twins.
To Wigan, to try to sort things out. There was a storage unit. Driving back down the M1 in tears with a heavy car-load of John’s records and CDs and Robert’s thirty-five-years overdue library books, I found myself writing a song: ‘83 Miles the Wrong Side of Birmingham’. Suddenly, songs came thick and fast – about him, about me, about death, about drink, about love. To the Wigmore Hall, over and over, to sit alone at the back and cry. ‘Weeping at the Wigmore’ became a thing; my hobby. I wept all through Mark Padmore singing Jonathan Dove’s setting of ‘The End’ by Mark Strand, not noticing till later, when he was hugging Padmore, who sang like several angels, that the composer had been sitting in front of me (tall and clean and handsome and pleased, alive). I hope that he took my tears as a compliment, when in fact they were the overflow of my loss, my envy, my hurt fury, at composers who were alive and listening to beautiful performances of their beautiful music about death, and how not every man knows what he shall sing at the end.
I spent money like water, and fled: to Croatia with Simon where, between diving into the sea and coming up for air, I had an idea from which I wrote a novel in three months based on the folksong ‘The Unquiet Grave’, where the corpse tells his weeping lover to piss off, she’s disturbing him. To festivals in Norfolk and Scotland as part of a country & western musical puppet adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, in which a friend had involved me, making me sing and play the guitar, and write songs. To Barcelona, babysitting for a friend, thinking of possible titles for the book I would write about him one day: Bloody Robert; The Clothes He Died In; 34 Items Representing Love. To Italy. Lola, who had put off her travels to hold me in place, was finally away. I could weep now, and throw furniture around and stand in Tesco’s staring for as long as I wanted. My sister lent me her kind dog, to stroke and lean on.
In airports and stations, I missed the benefit of the special little wagon disabled people and their girlfriends get to ride in. It was no longer mine, though I was wheeling his ghost around which was just as hard as wheeling him. And nobody knew. You lose a role overnight. You become carer against your will and inclination, and then as you learn to appreciate its few blessings they are whisked away. I really missed his parking permit. You are, in grief, yourself disabled.
What was I to do with all this love?
I was living with someone who wasn’t there.
How I missed him; his big heart, his curiosity, his wisdom. He was all over that year like a Sixties pop song, whispering, lurking, his tunes in my head, coming out under my breath without me noticing till someone said, ‘Lou, you’re singing …’ I had streaks of obsession about loss: the ring, before it came back. His brain – did they replace it? There’s a sign in a shop on the Weind in Wigan that says: ‘We Frame Anything’: I thought of getting his clothes framed, with his hat and sticks, laid out to form him like those characters he used to leave on my bed. I wrote my dreams out obsessively; and tried to do the ‘three things to be grateful for’ exercise that stops people losing their mind. It was always the same: 1) Lola, 2) my bed, 3) having had him.
There’s a sign in a shop on Uxbridge Road saying ‘Everything Must Go’. Well yes. Thanks, sign, for your timely reminder.
I rang his old college to talk about his library books, in a flurry of ‘I have to do something about death, even if the only thing I can do about death is pretend I am capable of taking these books back’.
So many other things were alive, and him not. Together, and us not. Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?
I was furious.
I wrote long long letters to him: ‘I have spent so much time trying to put you right – I have, I shouldn’t lie – that now there are so many adjusted versions of you lying around my mind that I am having trouble locating unadulterated you, you untouched by my idealising. You a little cleaner, a little more forthcoming with your monumental gifts, a lot more sober, more inclined not to smoke, healthier, less DEAD – these false yous, in my mind, warp and block the actual you – who I cannot begin to record, because you surprised and delighted me over and over. I couldn’t begin to make you up. I can’t believe that you are not with me.’
I felt that if wrote about him I would rewrite him and so lose him. My version would replace the original version.
‘Do you want to replace the original version?’ asked the computer screen. ‘The original version no longer exists in this location.’
*
I went to a mouse taxidermy class. Because I am a teachers’ pet, fast and over-achieving in lessons, I stuffed two mice. I didn’t mind the chemicals and the peeling and stuffing, but then I had to pull their tiny translucent tongues out with tweezers, and that made me sick, the delicacy and vulnerab
ility. I gave one of the taxidermied mice – the man, I decided – a little tiny hat and a tiny dolls-house, old-fashioned telephone, and put him on the stool of the cigarette-case piano. I tucked the other one up and put her in the little wooden grave cavity meant for cigarettes. I wanted Robert to ring me. I wanted to sleep.
‘Why the hell are you doing that?’ people asked, and years later I realise: I was afraid writing about him would be taxidermy. I did it to show myself what not to do in writing about him. Don’t slough out his innards; don’t pluck out his tongue.
At the end of the first year, we had a Memorial Concert for him at Bush Hall. Grief is meant to give way somewhat after a year. That’s when the earth of the grave settles and the headstone can be set. (It was made by my nephew Louis, the one who liked wrestling stickers when he was eight.) It’s when the corpse starts objecting in ‘The Unquiet Grave’.
We printed huge photos of him; the Brindisi Quartet reconvened to play his quartets and Wayland’s Elegy. Susan Bullock sang ‘i carry your heart’ again; Catherine Bott sang some of the French songs; John Parricelli did a gorgeous jazz guitar version of ‘My Funny Valentine’; Jackie played an elegy she had written for Robert, and Peter Donohoe played the too-shiny piano of Robert’s that had moved there years before. We recorded it for a CD and raised money for a music scholarship at Magdalen and for the rehab in Camden, and it was bloody marvellous.
I made a tiny speech. It started with ‘He was the best of men, he was the worst of men’ and ended with ‘I never expect – nor indeed want – to meet anyone like him again.’
Chapter Forty-Four
Home, 2015
I liked having his things around. His DMs. His green jumper sewn into a cushion. His wild-boar signet ring. Some dead roses. Using his manuscript paper for my songs. Playing his tunes on his piano. Three years on, I still hadn’t used up half the plastic lighters. In 2014 there was a stage adaptation of My Dear I Wanted to Tell You in London: it used Granny Annie’s prayer as lyrics for a nightclub blues number, sung by my character Mabel, an enigmatic African American woman in a gold sequin dress. I wrote that scene into the third book of the series, Devotion. What we have lost remains, and comes round again to feed us in unexpected ways. I felt the gap where he used to be very strongly beside me that night.
A widowed friend photographs his wife’s empty shoes in places she would have liked to go, and sends me a poem he has written about a jar of tamarind in the back of the kitchen cupboard. Another has his wife’s make-up in the bathroom, ten years on. The curiously quotidian legacies they leave us, jars of stuff that dries up though the thoughts and feelings that our dead beloveds left us still continue to flow and feed our living conversations.
Bottles of vodka upset me, but alcohol itself wasn’t a problem for me. I like it. So many flavours and strengths, so much control one can have over exactly how one can change one’s mood. So legal, too, and safe, compared with other chemical means people use to alter reality. At least you know what it is. People being drunk wasn’t a problem for me either, not if they were drunk sweetly and not that often, maybe with extra singing and declarations of love, but without violence and unkindness. If they were drunk every time I saw them, I found that extremely difficult, especially if they were younger, and sad, because I wanted to help them, and when the idea of helping a drunk enters my mind I start to shake and have to go away.
But my glass of pink wine on a garden bench was not Robert’s bottles of vodka delivered daily to his flat by cab because he could no longer walk; it’s not my friend’s two bottles of cheap rioja that she brings with her every time she visits; it’s not the couple of beers that used to make Boots imagine that scoring some heroin was a really good idea.
People used to say to Robert, ‘Is it all right if I have a drink though?’ and he would reply, ‘Why, are you an alcoholic too?’ Not drinking because someone else is an alcoholic is as illogical as it sounds. If they had cancer, would you go for their chemotherapy? An addict friend used to try to control his (non-addict) wife’s drinking by ordering tiny splits of wine – two glasses per bottle – until his shrink told him stop, his wife wasn’t him and he was projecting.
Robert thought that he and I got on best when he was stone-cold long-term sober and I was two thirds of the way down a second glass of wine. He was right. It would stop me from staring at him in fear about what the fuck was going to happen with him next.
*
A minicab driver picked me up at home. He said, ‘That is the house of Mr Robert – how is he?’ I said, ‘He died, I’m afraid.’ The driver pulled over, and wept. He said he was very sorry, he had liked Mr Robert very much, he talked a lot and was a very nice gentleman.
*
I have thrown away his hair gel, and taken the books back. Three and a half years longer wasn’t much, given how long they’d been out. I wasn’t fined. I looked for the staircase where we met, and couldn’t decide which one it was. I left a rose on the piano in the chapel.
Riding my bicycle a few days later, doing a mental checklist of who was where and how things were, I found myself using the phrase: ‘… and Robert’s safely dead.’
Chapter Forty-Five
Home, 2017
There’s a sound in this house. I don’t know what it is. Wind in the chimney? Something to do with heating? When I heard it during the awful times, I thought it was him, moaning low in his sleep, turning over, up in the back bedroom where he lay, day in day out, face to the wall, face to the room, attached to his feeding pump, unattached, lines clogged, lines clear, pissing in the bottle, pissing on the floor. It was a comfort to me. It meant that he was alive, maybe dreaming, maybe recovering. His breaths were always much quicker than mine. Someone said that we are all allocated the same number of breaths, and the slower we breathe them the longer we live. Rubbish, but I thought about it, late at night.
I hear the noise still, often. It still is a comfort to me.
Now Louis has come in. He’s been watching the rugby in the other room. It is a comfort to me to hear Louis talking to the match as Robert used to, so involved, so passionate, in the other room.
He was helping me take things away the other day, and found the turquoise mask in the garden. I’ve been getting rid of it by instalments. It had caught my eye the night before, when the light of the streetlamp fell on it in the dark: a phosphorescent Scream. Louis said, ‘Is this something that’s being kept?’
I said, ‘Do you know what it is?’
‘I can guess,’ he said.
‘Take it,’ I said.
‘Sure?’
‘Take it.’
*
I finish this six years after Robert’s death. I still hum his tunes every day, still cry at what I’ve been writing. I see what we went through a bit more clearly, and hope that what I’ve written may make these experiences clearer for some others too.
The nature of our tragedy may seem obvious. But on closer look, it was simply this: we didn’t have the time, the sickness-free time, to be what we should have been together. And the comfort is that within that stricture, we did have some absolutely glorious times. In this way, this it is not a typical cautionary/instructive tale about loving an alcoholic. A more usual misery memoir dynamic would be: I fell in love with an alcoholic, he fucked up my life and destroyed our family because I didn’t understand that his primary relationship was with alcohol, behold my catastrophe all ye women and steer clear of such men. But Robert destroyed, in the end, nothing but himself.
I have thought so much about what put him so out of balance, and one part of it is this. A price was paid by that socially mobile generation. At sixteen, Robert’s talent hijacked him. It tore him out of his childhood’s familiar society, offering him new, distant, dazzling intellectual and emotional adventures. What did Robert lose, by taking on what he was offered? His family security. His home. His hometown. His friends and peers. Playing rugby. His mother, and his father. It left him perpetually out of kilter, and he lost faith in h
is judgement, and clung to the wrong straws. And that, in turn, took from him everything else.
For others close to him, I regret a lot, but for myself, heartbroken as I have been, je ne regrette rien. My life so far has largely been a pretty good adventure, conducted on my own individual, idiosyncratic even, terms. Above all, I was able to maintain my social and financial independence, and this alone has protected me from the wider veil of destruction which alcoholism so often spreads. Robert funded his own addiction; there were no children going hungry, no mortgage failing because Dad drank the wages. He wasn’t a nasty drunk, crashing cars, hitting people, terrorising neighbours. He saved himself over and over, but in the end his condition destroyed him. And however much that hurt, it didn’t destroy me.
There is a moment in any memoir of loss where the writer speaks movingly of, oh yes, moving on. I wasn’t sure I would be able to come up with that bit. But perhaps I can.
Devotion, the third novel about Riley Purefoy, is published. Lola’s a grown-up. Jim is two years older than Robert was when I first met him in 1976. I seem to have finished this memoir, and I have other things to write. I’m making an album of my songs. Lola’s boyfriend is my collaborator. We’re called Birds of Britain, and the album, like this book, is called You Left Early. The songs are about loss, death, addiction. Love. Robert.
And then there’s this: three and a half years after I had stood grief-blasted on stage at a book festival, I sat in the audience at another one and heard another grief-blasted novelist read about his wife who had died, of cancer, two months before. I wrote and told him – Michel – to do nothing irreversible. He sent me a terribly bleak and funny poem he’d written about people who offer to help. Fellow widow, I could laugh where thousands couldn’t. Grief-blasted novelists half in love with our dead true loves and without the sense to keep off stage in the immediate aftermath should stick together. He’s published a volume of poems about his wife, called Undying, A Love Story. I’ve been writing this. ‘His and hers grief memoirs,’ he observed. He’s out this afternoon; he’ll be back later. They are dead; we are not.