The Last Act of Love

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The Last Act of Love Page 13

by Cathy Rentzenbrink


  And then it was over. We walked out into sunshine. I could see some suited men, functionaries of some type, smoking behind the bushes. Sue gave me a cuddle, her kind face full of love. I sobbed into her shoulder. I still felt bad about the vicar’s mistake, but I didn’t know how to say it to her. She’d been lavishing care on me as well as Matty for years and I wanted to say thank you, but I couldn’t find the words.

  Then it was back into the black cars which would return us to the pub. There were people to be entertained, in that strange way that a funeral makes hosts of the next of kin. We’d been a long time waiting for this wake – there was drink to be drunk and stories to be told.

  By this time, I was a long way from laughter.

  ‘LIVING DEATH’ TORMENT OF FAMILY

  Gifted schoolboy Matthew Mintern finally died on Sunday, aged 24, eight years after an accident left him in a persistent vegetative state.

  When Matthew Mintern’s GCSE results came through in 1990 he was confirmed as one of the brightest boys in his school.

  But the 6ft 4in talented sportsman never recovered from a road accident to discover he had achieved eight A grades and two Bs.

  Eight years ago, as he made his way home after a night out, Matthew suffered horrific head injuries when he was hit by a motorist, later prosecuted for careless driving.

  Back then his parents Margaret, now 44, and Kevin, 48, and sister Cathy believed and hoped that one day he would recover. What followed was an eight-year nightmare in which the family tried every conceivable treatment and device to rouse Matthew.

  ‘Over the years we tried everything – reflexology, physiotherapy, music, using computers to track Matty’s eye movement,’ explained Cathy, to whom he was very close.

  Medical opinion now suggests he was in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) soon after the accident, the same condition as suffered by Hillsborough stadium disaster victim Tony Bland.

  It means that part of the brain which controls talking and thinking has been irrevocably damaged. But Cathy says that in 1990 there was talk about the condition PVS, although she suspects doctors realized there was no chance of Matthew ‘waking up.’

  ‘I think people knew a long time before we did it was a no-go situation.’

  The family’s hopes were raised soon after surgery when his eyes opened. His head occasionally moved and small amounts of food could be swallowed.

  After nine months in hospital he was brought home to live above the pub, the Bell and Crown at Snaith, East Yorkshire, which his parents still run. It required 24-hour dedication as he had to be fed, washed and clothed several times a day.

  ‘It was terribly hard,’ recalls Miss Minter, at 25 a year older than her brother.

  ‘We were all so confident that he would recover. I suppose blindly and stupidly we thought that enough love and enough effort would make him well. Everyone put so much work into trying to make him better.’

  [. . .]

  Last month the family brought Matthew home to die. Thirteen days after all hydration, nutrition and medication was withdrawn he died with mother, father and a nurse present.

  A funeral service at Snaith Priory Church yesterday was followed by cremation at Pontefract crematorium.

  Yorkshire Post, 10 July 1998

  AFTER THE FUNERAL

  The day after the funeral, Carol phoned through to the bungalow. A girl from the local paper was at the bar and wanted to talk to us about Matty.

  Dad asked me if I could speak to her.

  ‘What shall I tell her?’

  ‘Just tell her the truth. Everything.’

  So I sat with the girl in the back room of the pub and watched as she converted my attempts to explain the gradual erosion of hope into squiggles of shorthand in her notebook. After the story came out, lots of other papers rang up and I talked to them all. It was a relief to have our secret out in the world and our customers were lovely to us, though a few people were cross that we hadn’t told them about it ourselves.

  ‘I don’t think I should have had to read about it in the paper,’ said one of Matty’s friends who hadn’t visited him for years. I shrugged. I didn’t know what to tell her. I felt a bit sorry for her but she hadn’t been at the top of our extremely long list of things to worry about, that was all.

  Everyone kept saying how strong I was, what a support to my parents, but I didn’t feel that way at all. There was a surface me who could smile and talk to people, but underneath I was only a few seconds away from splintering into tiny pieces and floating away on the air. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I didn’t know how I was going to live in the world. I kept having nightmares that Matty was alive and banging on the lid of his coffin underground, that he was rotting away, that he was chasing me and wanted me to get into the grave with him.

  I had expected a sense of relief and kept telling the reporters that it was a relief that Matty had finally died, but I didn’t feel it. I thought that once Matty was dead the pain of worrying about his suffering would ease. I thought I had done all my grieving – I seemed to have been crying constantly for the last eight years so I was unprepared for the further avalanche of grief and guilt.

  And I was surprised. I’d experienced plenty of pain over the years, but none of it – after the night of the accident – had been surprising. Now I was full of a swirling and incomprehensible anguish I’d never anticipated. I didn’t know what to do with myself.

  I didn’t tell anyone about this. I tried to show a happy face to the world, including my parents, who were both exhausted and ill. The only people who knew the real story were John and Sophie. They were used to being my confidants and looking after me.

  ‘It takes a year to get over a death,’ one of our customers said, and I thought of all those novels I’d read where people wore black gloves for a period of mourning. A year, I thought. There have already been eight unspeakably shitty years. I just have to get through one more, and then I won’t feel like this.

  ‘Now we can get on with planning your wedding,’ Dad had said on the way to the crematorium. He loved John and he wanted me to be happy. I’d felt it was impossible to get married when Matty was alive, but now I drifted towards it. It was something to do.

  I organized it for the following September, when I thought I’d be healed. We booked Carlton Towers, where I’d daydreamed in the library, where Matty and Didge had taught themselves to drive off-road in their little Fiat. We invited 170 guests and I tried to be enthusiastic about choosing what sort of flowers would decorate the church, what we would eat. I planned several courses with a trou normand and a croquembouche. I didn’t want to wear a white dress as I thought I’d look like an idiot, so I left it until the last minute and then bought a grey silk trouser suit from Monsoon. A friend from the pub painted my nails silver and put some make-up on me, and I wore the same black ballet pumps I’d worn at Matty’s funeral. I cried my way up the aisle of the church, and the same vicar who had buried Matty married John and me. We got a double-decker bus to the Towers and everyone from my side got very drunk.

  The next day we threw an enormous party in the pub, a feast with oysters, lobsters and shell-on prawns.

  ‘They’re all right, these prawns,’ said one of our customers to Dad. ‘Bit crunchy, though.’ He didn’t know you were supposed to peel them.

  Back in London, I waited to feel fixed. A year had passed. I was married. I was due my happy ending.

  Instead, I cried every day for three or four months. I had no idea what was wrong with me.

  John was travelling more with work and sometimes I went with him. I’d learned in the pub how to strike up a conversation with anyone, and I could do the same with all John’s colleagues and clients. I liked the bustle of Hong Kong and the novelistic feel of the ex-pat community, but I was in a continual state of panic in South America due to the awful driving and the large insects. One especially reckless taxi driver had a bunch of religious medallions hanging from his rear-view mirror. I said a Hail Mary
in my head and did my breathing exercises. I remembered being in the chapel and noted my continuing habit of turning to religion in times of extremis. We got safely to our destination and I felt relieved that my parents wouldn’t get a phone call to tell them I’d died on the road in a faraway land.

  Back in London, John and I drank a lot in the pub at the end of Little Russell Street, the Plough, and one day the landlord asked if I would help out with a couple of shifts as he’d been let down. I started working from 12 till 5 during the week, and found it was good to be back behind a bar again. My favourite customers were a group of builders, and when I finished my shift I’d sit on the other side of the bar with them and drink pints of Guinness. They taught me how to do the cryptic crossword in the Telegraph. John wasn’t massively impressed with all this, especially as I was always several sheets to the wind when he came home from work, and he began to lose patience with my insatiable appetite for booze and new people. He was growing up, moving on, taking himself and his career seriously while I was still behaving like a student. I was often useful, though. One night John rang me from Quo Vadis, where he was entertaining a diverse group of foreign work contacts to dinner, to say, ‘They won’t talk to each other. Can you come down and liven it all up a bit.’ So I did.

  I was doing some writing, and one of my customers in the Plough sent a few chapters to a publisher who liked what I’d done and wanted to see more. I got the call from the publisher on the same day that John was asked to set up an office in New York for the recruitment company he worked for. We went out for dinner to discuss it. Why not? we thought. I phoned my parents, who were very pleased.

  Here, I thought, was our happy ending. We arrived in New York just in time for the fourth of July celebrations in 2000, and found an apartment in Chelsea with a 24–hour bookstore at the end of the street. John worked long hours and I’d write during the day and then join him and his colleagues or clients in the evening for drinks and dinner. I enjoyed talking to them about work. Recruitment is about people, after all, and there were plenty of good stories about the peculiar habits of sought-after candidates. One man, whose wife didn’t want him to take up a job offer in another country, decided to plump for the job rather than the wife.

  I loved the open nature of New Yorkers and found it easy to make friends. They liked bookish English girls. I’d never thought of myself as looking Irish, but people would regularly ask me if I was and were pleased with the answer. When friends came over from England, we would take them for cocktails at Windows on the World at the top of the World Trade Center, and then out for steak or lobster.

  You can get anything you want in New York, but you have to be specific. Instead of asking for a Martini, you need to ask for a vodka Martini, very dry, straight up with a twist. I smoked white-tipped Lucky Strike Lights and loved that you could call up the grocery store and get them to deliver booze and fags. We ate a lot of takeout Chinese and delighted in the cute little boxes and fortune cookies that made us feel like we were in an episode of Friends. I adopted the language: I liked that I lived in an apartment, rode the elevator, got the check, drank mimosas and did brunch.

  I didn’t have a work visa, which made me feel less of a failure for not having a job. And the writing was going well. I was quite happy, though it felt a bit like a dream. One day, as I was walking down Fifth Avenue, snow started to fall, and I suddenly thought, I’m not real. I’m in a film about an English girl walking down Fifth Avenue in the snow. I’m not real.

  After a year, John’s company asked if he would relocate to Chicago and move into the telecoms side of the business, leaving recruiting behind. There was a gap of a few weeks, so we came back to London where John worked out of his old office and I went out a lot with Sophie, who was living in London and working as a journalist.

  We were both at home on 11 September 2001, because John was off sick with tonsillitis, when a friend called and told us to turn on the TV. We watched the Twin Towers fall again and again. Everyone phoned us, worrying we might still be there. For most of that day and the weeks that followed I really thought I was dreaming or having an episode. The world suddenly seemed too full of pain.

  It was a relief to be on the move again, and in October that year we moved into the top floor of a white wooden house in the western suburbs of Chicago. We had a picket fence and a mailbox at the foot of the lawn. There was none of the joy of being in New York. America as a nation was grieving and suspicious and it was difficult to be there as a foreigner.

  It was the law in the state of Illinois that you had to show ID when buying alcohol. ‘This ID is from out of state,’ people would say, staring at us resentfully in supermarkets, liquor stores and bars. We’d always get the booze in the end but it often felt like they’d rather be phoning the police to have us arrested for being foreign.

  I tried to get on with my novel, but everything seemed irrelevant. My main character had worked in the South Tower, so either she was dead, or she had more to worry about than the fictional problems I’d been subjecting her to. I’d made the mistake of introducing a character based on Matty. He wasn’t essential to the plot, but I kept thinking of ways to make the book more about him and torturing myself by trying to imagine what he would have been like as he grew older.

  I toyed with the idea of a novel about the death of a relationship, but couldn’t start it. Deep down I feared that the novel writing was a pretence, that I wasn’t capable of it; I just didn’t want to be forced to do something else. I spent the mornings sleeping off my daily hangover and then woke up and read detective novels or sat at the kitchen table in my pyjamas, playing countless games of Minesweeper on my laptop, watching the double-decker trains go by and wondering if I’d like to be on one. Yes, I thought, because I’d like to be doing something different, and no, because I was frightened of almost everything. I felt like my own dull, rather saccharine storyline could veer off into thriller territory at any moment. If I were to get on one of those trains, I’d end up buried under the floorboards of someone called Jed or Buck.

  John was bewildered by my failure to enjoy America, my lack of enthusiasm for his suggestions that we go skiing in Aspen, or sailing on Lake Michigan, hire a Cadillac and drive to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. He didn’t say so directly, but I knew he thought that I had grieved enough. I agreed with him entirely that that should be true, but wanting something didn’t make it so, and no amount of counting my blessings – and I did try. I lay in bed at night listening to his breathing and counting blessings like fat sheep – made me feel anything other than ungrateful.

  Most nights we went out to dinner in one of the restaurants in our little town. We’d have two cocktails each and share a bottle of wine as John talked about work. There were no interesting stories in telecoms so he’d try to explain about routers and trans-Atlantic cables. I can’t remember what dense wave divisional multiplexing is, but I know he told me. Then we’d go home and he’d sit on the sofa and fight terrorists on his PlayStation while I opened another bottle of wine and got back to not writing my novel.

  Winter set in. It was so cold that it hurt to breathe and I was frightened of being in a car on the snowy roads. In the spring all the supermarkets introduced displays with snake and rodent traps and I developed a distrust of our garden and of what might be loitering in the longer grass.

  When I went home for a holiday, I lied to all our customers and friends. I was fine, John was fine, Chicago was great, the book was coming along nicely. There was one night, when I was drunk, that I thought about trying to explain to Mum how I felt stuck in my grief for Matty, but at that moment she started telling me with tears in her eyes how proud she was of how I’d coped, how proud Dad was that I was well and happy and living in America, how he talked all the time about my novel, how he was convinced I would be on Desert Island Discs one day, how he loved John almost as a son, how it made her so happy that he was happy and how wonderful it was that the family was moving in a positive direction. After all that I didn’t have
it in me to disillusion her. I nodded and smiled. She and Dad seemed to be getting over everything that had happened to us, and it felt cruel to make them talk about Matty. I didn’t want to bring them down by referring to those hard times.

  When we moved back to London in the summer of 2002, John threw himself into work and I ricocheted between refusing to leave the house and going on benders for several days. One day John came home with a Caterham 7, a sports car that he’d been given the use of for the weekend as some sort of bonus.

  ‘Get dressed,’ he said, ‘I want to take you for a drive.’

  I could see he was proud of himself and I didn’t want to be mean, but I hated the thought of getting in it. However, I decided to make an effort and cleaned my teeth and put on some clothes and even some lipstick. I knew it was a terrible mistake as soon as we set off. The seats were low down and I was far too close to the road. I couldn’t stop thinking of Matty, of the horseshoe-shaped scar on his head, of metal staples punctuating shaved scalp, and I started to shake. I tried to do my breathing exercises, but as John was revving the engine, tears were running down my cheeks. We were going round a roundabout when he looked at me.

  ‘What is it?’ He had to shout over the noise of the engine.

  ‘I want to go home.’

  He drove us back. I got out of the car, went straight to bed and pulled the duvet over my head.

  Later, John came and stood in the doorway to the bedroom. ‘I feel like I can’t get it right with you any more. Everything I do is wrong,’ he said.

  I didn’t reply, and after a while he went away. I thought how once he would have known that I’d be frightened to drive so fast in a stripped-back car and would have cared more about looking after me than trying to have a good time. But I also thought that he deserved to come home to a girl who would enjoy the fruits of his labours, a girl who would cry ‘yippee’ and jump into the seat next to him, lavishing him with admiring looks. He was worthy of a fully functioning wife, and I was not that wife.

 

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