Let Go My Hand

by Edward Docx

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘So then her mum comes back in – still dressed as Santa – and starts looking at the presents like she couldn’t believe what her dad has just done. At which point her dad comes back in to check what her mum is up to – and they start arguing with each other – louder and louder – until Eva is lying there wide awake while these two Santas are yelling at each other through their wispy white beards at the end of her bed – all on Christmas Eve.’

  ‘Has it affected her?’

  ‘Everything affects everyone,’ I say.

  Dad looks at me. I look back at him.

  ‘What’s she doing now?’

  ‘Same as me.’

  He can’t hide his disparagement: ‘She’s a database manager?’

  ‘No, she’s a solicitor. I meant the same as me as in . . . drifting aimlessly in the shallow seas of futility and false purpose.’

  His brow furrows; he really doesn’t like it when I joke about my job and I want to keep the good vibe going so quickly I ask about the book that he’s still carrying: ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘The sonnets. Seventy-four. “But be contented”.’

  ‘Do you know it off by heart?’

  ‘Yes – that I do.’

  ‘Say it then.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A line?’

  ‘But be contented when that fell arrest . . . Without all bail shall carry me away . . . My life hath in this line some interest.’ The wind blows in his hair. I can see he feels better out here. And that makes me feel better. He finishes the verse: ‘Which for memorial with thee shall stay.’

  ‘I wish I knew some poetry by heart,’ I say, because it is true and because I love Dad talking about what he loves.

  ‘You have the Internet on your phone, Lou. You don’t have to learn anything. In my day, we had to commit things to memory – so that we would be able to use them again. Otherwise it was a trip to the bloody library on a bus every time you wanted to check anything up. Unimaginable now. Are there even any libraries left? There can’t have been a bigger generation gap in history than between yours and mine.’

  Dad looks for somewhere to put out his cigarette. There’s a bucket of sand behind us. He waits for the wave, pivots on his stick, takes a step and dips down to drop the cigarette and then shuffles back, reaching for the rail.

  ‘You think that it was better before though, don’t you?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because when you learn something, when you commit it to memory, then the words are in you – physically – or chemically – or however the brain works.’

  ‘Neurons.’

  ‘Exactly. In a way, the words exist inside you – in the neurons themselves. And so they’re available to other neurons. So when your thoughts fire through your mind – there’s all this Shakespeare in there for them to fire across. And that’s got to be good – for the subtlety of your thoughts – for your ability to express yourself.’

  Out on the Channel, some guy in one of those little yachts is more or less mountaineering across the waves and – not so far off – another ferry is pummelling back the other way.

  ‘It’s like a part of you is Shakespeare, Lou. And that part is available to all the other parts that are not.’

  ‘I’m going to learn some.’

  ‘You should. Not for me. But for yourself.’ Dad shifts his weight. ‘The more words you know, the better you can say whatever it is that needs to be said. Language is thought. Thought is language.’

  ‘You always say that.’

  ‘It’s worth saying again. Put good things in here and there’s a chance good things will come out.’ He raises a finger and taps it on the side of his head. ‘You know, even if I had tens of millions of pounds, I’d never buy a boat.’

  ‘I just don’t think we’re seafarers, Dad.’

  ‘What would you buy?’

  I put out my cigarette in the same bucket.

  ‘An apartment in Rome,’ I say. ‘Some place good-looking.’

  ‘Do it. Sell the house.’

  ‘Dad, don’t.’

  We fall silent, leaning on the rail, and I get this strange feeling – as if I am able to see my father clearly at last, as a man, without the binding twine of all those billion bonds of our DNA or the thousands of hours we have spent together; but also as if those same bonds have never been so tight and true. And now we’re staring at the sea together like I guess a lot of dads have done with their sons – except not like this – and the waves are dipping and swelling and starting to shine all mackerel-backed in this shard of light that’s sparkling all the way back to whatever Britain might yet be before it fades and is gone for ever.

  RALPH

  My brothers and I have always been close. Which is surprising – since I am also the living embodiment of all their trouble with Dad, and, indeed, all the trouble that has happened between everyone. Now I think about it, I suppose the gap between us is so big – eleven years – that maybe it goes all the way past mattering and comes back around to not mattering again. They used to pretend that I was a musketeer, the same as them. And they’d say, ‘All for one and one for all, Lou’ – mainly to make me feel I was ‘big’ when I was ‘little’, but also because we were ‘in it together’. I now see that – subconsciously – what we meant by ‘it’ was our father.

  When I was born, my brothers were living with Dad because of their mother’s alcohol-related issues – the screaming and the subsequent solicitor-related stuff. So I’ve never known it any other way: they’ve always been my full brothers. And what with all the toddler-sitting they had to do when my mum and dad were out – which was a lot – they fell into the habit of looking after me, stopping me choking and falling down the stairs and playing with kebab skewers – all of that.

  They did a lot of teaching me, too, whenever they came back from college; taking me out on my bike, showing me how to light fires, introducing me to real music. And, over time, I guess I developed this strange way of doing things with them – for them. Especially Ralph. Not in terms of what was happening in our lives day to day. But more in the way that whenever he wanted to kick back or show off or stretch his personality, he knew I’d be right there – the world’s most eager audience, devoted, amazed, without any other judgement but admiration. Likewise, whenever I did anything – a clever message straight back to some girl, learning how to do bar chords on the guitar – I would have him in my mind, giving me the nod with a big brother’s nice-one-Lou expression, keep going.

  There was this one time, I remember: I was fourteen and he was in his middle twenties – busy being an out-of-work actor – and he had come over for my dad’s sixtieth with some Sami-Swedish fashion student who he was dating and who had everyone secretly crying into their hands on account of her ludicrous beauty. This was before Mum even knew she was ill and the house was full of Dad’s Labour Party we’re-the-coolest-government-ever people (whom he ‘joked’ about as ‘betrayers’) and all these folk that Mum always knew – un-recordable singer-songwriters, un-producible screenwriters, un-readable poets – everyone in London who never made it, she would say, and who are never gonna make it, Lou, due to ‘the climate’. And I was supposed to be reading this poem that Mum wrote for Dad but I’d left it upstairs and so I went up to fetch it in order to practise because I was feeling secretly frantic with nerves. But just as I got to the door at the end of our narrow attic corridor, I heard a woman’s voice saying, ‘Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop’ – and since this was my first time hearing this stuff live, I hesitated; and tuned in. The problem was that the floorboards in our house groan and creak. And two seconds later I knew I was busted because the room had gone silent. And that forced me into having to pretend that I’d only just come running up through the house and that I hadn’t been eavesdropping at all. So the only thing to do next was to knock on the door – nice and loud and rat-a-tat-tat.

  ‘Ralph, I need to get something,’
I shouted. ‘And you need to come down . . . I’m doing my mum’s poem and Dad is giving a speech.’

  Sounds of stalled exertion.

  ‘Ralph?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Ralph – I know you’re in there.’

  ‘Well, fuck off then.’

  ‘Sorry. I need to get the poem. And you’re supposed to come down. Dad wants to say something. He doesn’t want you to miss his speech. It’s important. Come on, man.’

  ‘So is this. I am having sex.’ Sounds of the bed sighing. ‘And I’m not alone.’

  Ralph was then – as now – incapable of embarrassment; an actor for ever devoted to his audience whomsoever it might be. Even in his early twenties, though, he freely admitted that, by any reasonable standard he was an awful human being. It’s true: I am a total penis, Lou, he would say – candidly, shaking his head and sucking his teeth as if admitting liability at the scene of a minor car accident. I accept that, you accept that, we all accept that. There’s nothing to be done about it. But at least . . . at least I do accept it. Which is more than can be said for everyone else around here. At which juncture he would raise his eyebrows and look invitingly at me.

  I re-addressed myself to the crack between door and frame: ‘Jesus, Ralph. Can you just give me the poem? Then you can get right back to it.’

  ‘Lou – go away. I’ve got a huge erection and you’re my brother. It’s not right.’

  Sounds of suppressed female laughter.

  ‘Ralph, I’m being serious.’

  ‘So am I. Never more so.’

  But there was no chance now that I was going to spend twenty minutes running up and down the stairs waiting for everyone to orgasm. And I could tell Ralph was in some kind of perverse protest mode. I had no choice, therefore, but to entrench my position: ‘Give me the poem and I’ll go, Ralph. I can’t go down without it. I’ve got to read it to everyone. I think it’s on the desk.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘No man should ever get out of bed with a woman in order to placate another man, Lou, especially not his little brother. Oscar Wilde said that.’

  ‘Oscar Wilde was gay, you idiot.’

  ‘He said it before he came out.’

  ‘OK, fine. But just so you know: I’m going to get the poem now because I don’t want to let Dad down . . . And I don’t believe you’ll get the job done in time.’

  More laughter from inside.

  I guess this was the kind of thing I meant about always being one another’s favourite audience – because the truth is that some part of him wanted me to come into that room and see him there; and some part of me wanted to go into that room and have him witness how cool I was with the whole sex thing.

  ‘I’m coming in.’

  ‘Lou, don’t – whatever you do – come in here.’

  ‘I’m coming in.’

  ‘For your own sake, Lou. It’s horrible. I’m telling you: there’s spunk everywhere.’

  ‘I’m counting to three and then I’m coming in. One, two . . .’

  And so, shielding my eyes, I opened the door and walked head down into the room. The bedside lamp had either fallen or been knocked to the floor so that shadows reared on the walls. Ralph sat up. Never was there a man more at ease with the emotional discomfort of others. His girlfriend had pulled the covers over her head and was clearly intent on not being in the room at all. Somewhat piously in order to mask the crimson of my own shame, I crossed straight to the desk.

  ‘So . . . this is interesting,’ Ralph said, placing a pillow behind his head. ‘My weekend finally takes off.’

  I lowered my shield and frowned, trying not to look in his direction, searching through the mess on the desk for my printout of the poem while he lit a cigarette with the noisiest and most protracted rasp that any man ever made in the striking of a single match.

  ‘Don’t smoke, Ralph, you bell end,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to sleep in that bed. Jesus.’

  ‘I should have warned you, Kristen,’ he said. ‘Since I left home, my little brother has launched a one-man jihad on joy.’ Ralph waved the flame ostentatiously dead. ‘We’re going to have to watch out for him. By day, he patrols the house forbidding all human pleasure. By night he sleeps with burka and cilice. Feverishly masturbating, no doubt.’ Ralph was talking to the duvet, but really he was still talking to me. ‘What the fuck is happening with your haircut, Lou?’

  The covers shifted. He sent an idle smoke ring ceiling-wards in search of a hook on which to hang around a while.

  ‘Have you joined the Young Conservatives?’

  ‘At least my whole life is not a massive embarrassing failure, Ralph.’

  ‘Yet.’

  I glanced across at him and met his familiar half-smile. Ralph was always fair skinned but his tousled auburn hair was longer then and fell easily over his eyes which have always been set deep, like our father’s, though lighter – the pale blue of robin’s eggs. Dad once said that he looked like a secretly gay Indian maharaja’s dream of England’s opening bowler – which pretty much sums my brother up.

  I was more or less dying now – and I couldn’t find the poem and I was afraid that I’d put it down somewhere and would have to rush to print it out again on our juddering grain-thresher of a printer.

  ‘Sorry, I don’t know what’s going on. I’m sure it was on this desk. Maybe it’s downstairs.’

  ‘It’s here.’ Ralph eased it out from beneath the mug he was using as an ashtray on the bedside table. He knew he’d transgressed.

  ‘Jesus, Ralph.’

  ‘It’s very good,’ he softened.

  ‘You are such a—

  ‘Nightmare. I know, I know. But I read it because I was interested, Lou. She may not write much, your mum, but she’s . . . she’s a great poet. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different.’

  Ralph studied English and got the highest marks ever awarded to a mortal at a university; and as far as I was then concerned, this meant he was not only the most sophisticated human being I knew, but also the most sophisticated human being possible. The fact that he chose not to become an academic was somehow an unspoken joke at our father’s expense.

  ‘It’s anapaestic tetrameter,’ he said. A sun-burnished knee was now visible thanks to some new arrangement of the duvet. ‘So you should read it with a lilting-rolling rhythm.’ His hands danced slowly as he spoke. ‘Like Byron’s . . . “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold”.’

  He passed the poem over. Now the duvet was drifting up the very faint blonde down of her thigh. His cigarette fizzed where he dropped it into the cold tea.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Ralph.’

  He pretended to apologize: ‘All the other rooms had lodgers or children in them, Lou. It came down to a choice between my dad’s bed or my little brother’s. I’m agnostic – as you know – but this seemed marginally less disturbing for everyone else.’

  ‘Deep-level issues.’ I shook my head. ‘Deep level. Seriously, Ralph – try psychotherapy. Pay someone to pretend to be your friend and listen to your problems.’

  He smiled a Mephistophelean smile. ‘Surely we can discuss all this later, Lou. At the moment, you’re just standing next to my bed watching me, your older brother, in a sexual situation. And that’s way weirder than anything I’m doing.’

  ‘My bed,’ I retorted.

  She moved. I glimpsed her pubic hair. Then the revealed leg clamped the edge of the duvet and drifted no more.

  ‘You should come down and hear Dad speak,’ I said. ‘Come on. There’s no point being here otherwise.’

  ‘Why, I wonder, does Dad feel the need always to be giving speeches?’

  ‘Not always. It’s his sixtieth birthday, for Christ’s sake. Come down.’

  ‘Maybe it’s going to be about the whole child-abuse thing we’ve wiped from our minds, Lou. At last we get it all out in the open. The alcopops. The hazy parties. The perma-tanned television presenters. The half-familiar MPs.’


  ‘You guys . . . you are sick.’ The duvet spoke quietly but vehemently at the wall. ‘What is wrong with you British people? Even the Swedes . . . we don’t say these kind of things.’

  ‘It’s Lou – I told you – he’s got big issues.’

  ‘Come down, Ralph.’

  ‘But I can’t stand any of the people down there, Lou. They make me want to stand naked on the stairs and spear heroin into my eyeballs.’

  ‘He would want you to be there.’ I was heading for the door. ‘And I’m sleeping in here tonight. Just so you know. Not on the floor, either.’

  He called after me: ‘Lou, just so you know: you’re the opposite of an aphrodisiac. Every time you talk, you push orgasm further down the agenda for the rest of humanity.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Shut the door.’

  ‘Fuck off again.’

  I pulled the door behind me. And then went tharn as I heard the familiar step on the attic stairs. Half a run. Purposeful. Demanding. Invasive. I didn’t know whether to go back into my bedroom or start down. But I felt this sudden certainty that I had to protect my brother from my father and my father from going into that room. Looking back, I can see now that so much of Ralph’s behaviour was a sexual rebuke to Dad . . . As if he were saying: you were secretly sleeping with someone else on my tenth birthday; now I am sleeping with someone else on your sixtieth; you broke the family with sex; you made infidelity OK; then you canonized it; so live with the consequences, old man, because every woman I will ever meet is more important to me than you; and every time you want me to pay you attention, every time you need me, I won’t be there. I’m not sure Ralph saw it that way himself – or not explicitly; but that’s what he did, that’s what he was always doing; he took the specific and he made it general; every new girlfriend was a way of mocking Dad, reproaching him. The lessons that the son takes to heart turn out to be those the father never realized he was teaching.

  Dad was at the top of the stairs. ‘Hello there, Louis,’ he said. ‘We’ve been looking for you. Ten minutes. Is that OK? Are you all right?’