by Various
My son is downstairs in the car, playing a handheld gamer, which I bought him to console him (no pun intended) for the death of his mother, while I sit upstairs at my new job. He waits, on his own in a dreary garage, playing – what game is he playing? I don’t even know – until I’m ready to take him to his mother’s funeral. Sympathetic and Compassionate. I may be in the wrong job.
Eventually, having been through a ten-minute meet-and-greet with my new team, I get back down to the garage. It had been as uncomfortable as expected; one person referring to their team as the ‘death squad’, and one other guy making the same mistake as Steve before cringing about what an idiot he’d made in front of his new boss. Then at Steve’s behest, I’d given a short speech about ‘me’, paraphrasing from memory a similar speech I got from my last boss when he joined – “I’m a workhard-play-hard kind of manager” – that sort of utter nonsense, since I’m a get-by-and-go-home sort of boss really, but that wouldn’t have been what Steve was after.
Daniel looks pretty impassive, as they say on the news. People don’t really say impassive. They say more dramatic things; he looks drained, or dazed, or defeated by the world. But he doesn’t look these either; he looks blank, he’s quiet, like he’s tired. He probably is tired.
As I climb into the car I ask him again if he’s OK, and I get a nod and a shrug all at once and it’s clear he’ll be a teenager soon. Losing his mother before he’s at high school, no wonder he looks like that.
We pull out of the garage, and out onto the city streets, which are now recovering from the rush hour traffic and starting to bustle with shoppers and tourists, as well as the businesspeople.
He’s so quiet though.
“You OK, Daniel?” I’ve asked him that already. I ask him that too much. Leave him alone. “Do you want to talk about it?”
I must be reaching the age where you have children and you wish you could chat to them like adults, or at least like they do with their friends.
But Daniel switches off the handheld, and says “no thanks, Dad, I’m fine,” and nothing else, as he looks out the window and I’m left wondering how to move it on from there.
Of course he’s not fine. He’s practically an orphan for all the use I am. Hardly knows me, hardly sees me.
If he would just ask something about his mum, we could speak about her, speak about things. It would be healthy for him. Speak, Daniel, speak.
He looks out the window at a couple of late teen girls, walking along shrieking, who should possibly be at school.
I can imagine it, his head turning, and looking ahead slightly hazily asking how me and his Mum met. He’s never asked me that. I wonder if he ever asked Louise.
If he did, I wonder if she told him the truth. Not the story any boy wants to hear about his parents, even if his opinion of them is as low as Daniel’s must be of us. Or me at least.
How would I answer it? Tell him the truth? Your mother and I met at a concert, I could say. Or maybe, to make it sound more salubrious, I would say ‘we met when we were out at a show’, like we were from the ‘30s.
I couldn’t think how to get it across how it really was. A night in the Barrowlands, watching Julian Cope. Sweaty, like it always is, the place just reminds me of beer-stained clothing and sweat. Even the ceiling perspirates, dripping condensation on those below. I saw her at the bar about half way through, her t-shirt cut down from the collar to be loose, and showing a small amount of chest. Twenty-three and mostly there to size girls up when not watching the band, she caught me at it. She scowled, frowned, and I shrugged a who-can-blame-me shrug. I saw her again toward the end, and to talk to her, exchanged a lame ‘great gig – yeah, great’ type of conversation with her.
Then I saw her up Sauchiehall Street soon after when we’d both had a lot more to drink, and despite the lecherous start, an hour later we were back at her flat, drunk and stupid.
Not that I’d be saying that to Daniel. It seems wrong even to think about it now she’s gone. One-night stands were rare at that age for me, (not like they were ever common) I couldn’t believe my luck. I didn’t even have to try very hard.
Poor Louise. I can’t help but picture her. One minute, in the gym. She must have just had pain, and collapsed. Could she have known? I can’t imagine, and I shouldn’t imagine. What were her thoughts as she crashed off whatever machine she was on? What would you think – “I’m going to die?!” Probably not.
No, I’d tell Daniel we met at a concert, then started going out. Though that’s not true either. After we slept together I didn’t see her again for six weeks, and when I did, it was awkward smiles all round. A short conversation, trying to establish if the other felt guilty, or worse, hurt. It was probably the lack of guilt, the lack of attachment, or interest either of us had in the other, which did the trick. Of course, it should have been a sign of things to come, but it meant that instead of the atmosphere being icy and weird when we kept bumping into each other, on the train, at the supermarket, we’d exchange a smile and a hello, and move on.
She was pretty though, back then. She put on a bit of weight in the past while, but she had smiling eyes, and what you’d call a wholesome figure. Full-chested and at twenty-three, a tapered waist.
I shouldn’t think of her this way. It’s been a while since I’ve thought about Louise, how sexy I found her there. But today’s not the day is it? Or maybe it is, I’m hardly thinking ill of the dead.
Then at Nick Cave, back at the Barras, it stopped being a one-night stand. We fell into bed again, then again and again, and two months later, she was pregnant.
We’re getting out of the city now. Daniel watches out the front window with the same stare. We pause at a traffic light, with a supermarket on the right. “Do you want anything to eat?”
He looks over at me and looks me plainly in the eye, looking like I broke his train of thought. “No, thanks” he says with a soft smile.
So there’s no excuse to stop, but I have to, I need the toilet. Ten minutes after I leave the fucking office. “Couldn’t you have gone before we left?” I’d have asked James and Sally, my two younger kids, if they were here. Hypocrite.
“Sorry, Daniel, I just need to nip to the loo.”
The toilets are empty, and I’m grateful. I stand at the urinal. I wait. Nothing. Try not to think about it. Think about something else. Nothing. Nothing. Someone may come in. Nothing. Goddammit, I need the toilet.
I go into a cubicle just in case anyone comes and I have to give in. Eventually, something comes. A weak stream. A pause. Another weak stream. A pause, then another weak stream, followed by nothing. I have to get this pissing problem seen to.
I give up. I have to do something about this. I know I still need a bit, but I also know I could stand here for twenty minutes and not feel like I was finished.
I wash my hands and go back out to the car. There’s nothing like going to a funeral to make you resolve to sort out your own health problems. Nothing like starting a new job in the death benefits department of a life insurance company; nothing like realising your relationship with your practically estranged son is in tatters; nothing like the sudden death of your ex-girlfriend. It could be me next. It could be Daniel here again, with no family dropping him next time.
Stop it. Not worth thinking this way. Just sort it out.
But sort it out this time, Martin. Don’t bottle it, talk to your wife, you twat. I’ve tried – countless times, I’ve tried to talk with Kathy about it. I prepare myself for talking with her, but whenever I sit down to open my mouth, it’s always seemed like nothing. A bit of stage fright. Just too distracted by other problems to properly concentrate on urinating.
I’ve pictured myself telling her, getting the support I want to visit the doctor about it. Getting the chat about it to put it into perspective – it may well be nothing. I’m probably making too much of a meal of it. I would tell her, and she would nod and listen and say, “don’t worry, just go to the GP, it’s probably nothing.” And I could
tell her I know it’s probably nothing, but it’s the biggest reason I wanted to come home, get a job back up here. To be closer to my parents, to Daniel, as well as with her and the kids. That it makes me think about the fact I’ll not be here forever. That it might not be nothing.
No, I’ve never had that chat. But nothing like all this to make me resolve, again, to do so. Maybe I’ll just go straight to the doctor about it, not bother Kathy. But it’s serious, I have to do something. I can’t leave Daniel alone.
I get back to the car, and Daniel’s sitting still, looking in front of him again, not annoyed or impatient.
He does seem a good lad. What must he be thinking? “What’s this old man turned up here for?” Maybe. Probably. Couldn’t blame him.
Oh, pull your head out your arse Martin, why would he be thinking about you? He only sees you two, three weeks a year. He’s thinking about his mum, or Newton, or his brothers. Or more likely himself. More likely since he’s my son, anyway.
He’s probably weighing it all up. What’s it all mean for him?
The lights are green and we move off.
Or maybe he’s thinking, what does a boy do without a mother as he enters teenaged life? Or, a miserable thought, he might be asking what sort of genes he has.
Christ I hope not. It makes my little scenario all the harder to think about.
But that’s why I’m here, that’s why I took this death job – to help him out, to see him more. That’s why I’m able to take him to his mother’s funeral, instead of hiding four hundred miles away and giving him useless, empty consolation over the phone. Poor little bugger, left without a mother. The least I could do is offer him a half-baked father. Even he knows that I wouldn’t have gone to the funeral if he hadn’t actually asked. What the hell was I thinking? In what sort of world would it be OK to miss the funeral?
I can’t think like this, it’s not good for him. He’ll be able to tell.
“Are you…” I start, but I can’t ask him if he’s OK again. “Are you nervous or anything? About the funeral, I mean?” That’s not right. “Not nervous,” I add, as he looks confused at me, “but anxious?”
He frowns momentarily, then resorts to his Gallic shrug.
“Good,” I nod, a little too vigorously. What is the matter with me? I can’t even talk to my own son. Come on. “I think I probably am,” I glance over at him, one eye on the road, which, as we approach the outside of town, is getting less busy. “I’ve never actually been to a funeral.”
“You’re joking?” he says, and for a moment, he looks normal, relaxed, comfortable in my presence, and I get a surge of pride in myself for dragging it out of him at last.
“No. Thirty-six years old, and I’ve never been to a funeral. Have you?”
He nods his head. “I went to one two years ago, when Mr Burns, my old music teacher, died.” He sadly looks down to his feet as he says this, though I doubt it’s for Mr Burns.
What sort of a question was that anyway? Sympathetic and compassionate? Er, no.
Twelve years old, and he’s been to more funerals than me. This one, though, this is the big one. Not for the first time in his life – though not as often as I probably should have – I wish I could take it on for him. If I’d been around more, maybe I could have. Cowardly twat.
I wonder if I could take it though. How would I feel if my mother died? Fucking awful, that’s how. And that unfortunate, sad little soul beside me has that to bear.
“No, I haven’t ever been to one. It’s probably something to be pleased about, getting to my age without being to one.” I soliloquy. I may as well, Daniel probably won’t ask me. “My grandparents all died before I was born, except your Nan’s dad, but he died when I was two. I suppose I may have been at that one, but I don’t think that counts.”
He smiles and looks at me, wide-eyed and earnest like he does, looking from one eye to the other, and I hold his look as long as I can before I look at the road again.
“You’re still young though,” he says, and looks back down at his feet.
Young? I am, in the grand scale of things. Although when I was his age, I thought everyone out of school was old. I thought you had kids when you were twenty-five if you wanted to wait a while and live a bit first.
When I was twenty-five with a child at home, I thought differently, of course.
But that sort of remark sets him apart, I think. Most boys wouldn’t be that grounded. It’s his Mum, I take no credit.
When I was at school, maybe Daniel’s age, come to think of it, I had a friend, Mike, who moved away. I found out, about nine months after he left, that he’d died of leukaemia. It was terrible, I knew, and I was sorry that he’d died, but I didn’t grieve.
He’d been a bit of a friend, but not much, just someone I mucked about with at lunch and went round to his house a couple of times. Simple truth was I didn’t really know him that well at school, and much less by the time he died.
Yes, I know nothing of death, and that’s modern life. Real reference to death is frowned upon, any sight of the sick and needy shuttered away, chances of your own demise abstracted in statistical terms. The news will talk about other people’s tragedies, but with so much ‘reality’ on the television, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who’s desensitised.
You only get real feelings like this in hospitals. Three times in my life have I been reminded at close quarters about the fact that we’re just animals sharing the same fate as all other animals. All three times it wasn’t even me who was facing the fate – it was the child-bearing women I was with. Louise first, and worst, with the blood pouring out of her after Daniel was removed, and Daniel, blue, taken to the back of the room to breathe. Everyday occurrences for the people in the hospital, but for me, the boldest reminder I could have that both of those humans might not make it through the next hour. The other two times were with Sally and James, when it was Kathy, screaming and panting, and me, realising it could all go wrong any moment.
Then what? You leave the hospital and forget all about it – it’s just normal after all. Forget that for a moment, you knew what actually mattered.
That’s typical of how it’s been for me. People have died that I’ve known, sure, but not until long after I’ve known them. Or it’ll be someone I was in a meeting with twice, or something like that. Knew them? No. Heard of them maybe – or I once knew them, at best.
Louise, that’s a different sort of matter. I’m not grieving, not really. I didn’t know her either, not for a long time. I shared only cursory conversations to arrange which weeks I’d take Daniel. I haven’t had a conversation more than three minutes long with her for, I don’t know, maybe five years.
So I’m not grieving. I hardly knew her even when we were together. We’d split up eighteen months after the Nick Cave concert, and I was the heartless arsehole who’d left a woman with a child of not even a year.
But, all that aside, it’s strange, thinking of her as dead. You can’t argue with the connection, however misguided and accidentally, that a child can have. She is Daniel’s mother, my son’s mother. Otherwise she’d just be my ex, and I’d maybe hear like Mike – “Oh, Louise has died? That’s scary, so young” .
I’ve had friend’s brothers who’ve died. Parents of friends. My parent’s neighbours. My ex-girlfriend’s friend from school died – when was that, when I was twenty-one, twenty-two maybe? I didn’t know them, but she was really upset, and it had been sudden. It, like when so many of these people pass, made me wonder how it would be if it were me. How would it feel to be me with a heart attack, or leukaemia, or post-operative issues gone badly wrong? How would it feel to be me with the dying parent or friend? I have thought about it, for a while, and moved on. Louise, she gets the prize, she’s the person I’ve known best so far who’s died.
“Dad,” Daniel says out of nowhere, and it takes me by surprise – I’d given up on his speaking. “Why did you leave Mum and me?”
Careful what you wish for, I should hav
e thought. Here he’s opened up, and it’s not the question I’d have asked for. The ‘and me’ resonates particularly. It’s a question I’ve dreaded being asked anyway, for years, but today of all days. I really wouldn’t have picked today. How can I look anything other than selfish? And why should I anyway?
“What did your Mum say?” is the best I can come up with.
Daniel fiddles with the straps of his rucksacks, and looks out at the window, in no hurry to answer. That is just like his Mum too. She’s a dreamer – was a dreamer. It drove me nuts the year I lived with her. I’d ask her a question, and she’d look at her feet, pick up a magazine and flick a couple of pages without looking at them, or twiddle her hair around her fingers, then, if I’d waited that long, answer. For a while, I found it endearing, but then pretty quickly I’d get to the stage where I’d ask the question again, and then leave the room, annoyed.
Now Daniel is doing it, and I can live with it. That is one fairly clear distinction, a good reason that it didn’t work out. Mostly, she irritated me, and I didn’t love her enough to not hate it. With Daniel, I have no such problems. But I can’t tell him that on the day of her funeral.
Eventually he looked back at me, and responded, “she said that you just didn’t go. Actually,” and he looked a little sheepish, “she said that there was nothing wrong with custard, and nothing wrong with chips, but they didn’t taste great on the same plate.”
I laugh out loud. Louise was a lovely person, and that proves it. No bitterness, nothing betrayed to Daniel, just a simplistic explanation of the truth – we just didn’t go together well. For the first time, I feel a genuine sadness that she’s gone. The first time, four days after she died. Four days! What sort of a prick am I?
“That’s a funny way to put it, but she’s right. Your Mum was a lovely woman, but we just didn’t get on. There must be people at your school, who you just don’t really click with?
Daniel takes a moment, then squints his nose a little. Apparently not.