by Edward Docx
‘Just been to get this.’ I held up the paper and hoped that he wouldn’t guess it was a poem that Mum had written for him since I didn’t want to spoil the surprise of what I was going to read.
He was hesitating – uneasy, a little drunk.
‘Have you seen your brothers?’
‘No. Maybe in the garden?’
He was looking at me with a concern that lived next door to suspicion.
So I made it about my nerves. ‘I’ll be down in a sec. I want to read this through again. Can you give me five?’
I turned to go back into my room, hoping he would go back down the stairs.
‘Well, can’t wait to hear it, Lou, whatever it is.’ He hesitated again. ‘If you see them, will you tell them it would be nice if they appeared for the speeches?’
‘Yep.’
He started down.
I half pushed open the door and hovered, holding my mother’s poem, neither in nor out of my own bedroom.
‘Hello, Louis,’ Ralph said. ‘Back for more? We were just about to start enjoying ourselves again. Who was that?’
‘Jack,’ I lied. ‘Ralph – please come down. I’m fucking nervous. I don’t know anyone here and I feel like a right cock doing this reading.’
‘We are coming.’ Kristen sat up suddenly, clinging to the duvet. ‘No question, Ralph. We go for your brother. Come on.’
‘It seems we are heading down, bro, especially for you.’ Ralph sighed and slowly put his hand on the edge of the duvet. ‘Well . . . turn away, Lou, or face me naked.’
‘You say that every night.’
‘And yet still you don’t turn away.’
Kristen looked from one to the other of us and shook her head: ‘Let’s try to be normal human beings – just for a few hours – OK?’
I smiled my thanks and went out to sit on the stairs to practise my poem while they got dressed.
We have been to some odd places together over the years, the two of us. And Ralph is still the only person I know who really gets it. But now . . . I don’t know how he’s going to be. When he arrives, I mean, from Berlin – where he lives and works as a successful puppeteer.
If he arrives.
L’AUTOROUTE DES ANGLAIS
‘No, but listen to that, Lou . . . Almost silent. What we doing?’
‘Close to sixty-five, Dad.’
‘Exactly. Almost silent . . . that’s the beauty of rear-wheel drive.’
‘And what beauty it is.’
So now we’re driving along the French motorway – the A26 – and it’s turning out to be one of those days where the sun keeps on coming and going between the clouds like they’re testing the system in heaven. Meanwhile, we’re passing by signs to the Somme and Dad’s got the map open unnecessarily on his lap because he hates ‘satnavs’ and, of course, we can’t put any music on because it would affect us too much. So instead we’re talking about engine noise.
Dad ignores my sarcasm and rams right on: ‘And that’s why I didn’t get a new one . . . Because after eighty-nine, they moved the engine to the front – diesel – and they make a racket. That’s the problem with four-wheel drive.’
‘What’s the problem?’
‘The noise.’
But I also ignore him because I know that when Dad says ‘noise’ like this, he wants to talk about ‘noise’ as a major issue in ‘the modern world’. By which he means – initially – nonclassical music, particularly as played in shopping centres, pubs, restaurants and so on. But by which he really means ‘noise’ as a symptom or signifier of ‘inanity’, which he considers is forever on the verge of taking over our public life, culture, civilization. Behind even that, though, lurk some angry feelings about the people involved in the making and consumption of the ‘noise’. And I can feel my jaw tensing because (on some deep level I don’t fully understand) this anger of his makes me angry, too. But now is not the time; now is not the time.
Another sign pops up and says ‘Reims 254 kilometres’. The kilometres are going so much faster than miles. All the same (and even though it is off the scale insane), we’re in a slight hurry because I have booked us into this Champagne chateau for the night – it seemed like the right thing to do – and we have to be there for six because that’s when the pre-dinner tasting starts. So I accelerate a little to pass a convoy of lorries that have appeared ahead.
‘They had to do it, though,’ Dad says.
He is nodding like he’s pretty pleased to have got the inside on this. Dad is big into his vans and roads and driving and cars and maps; it’s a hangover from some old-school idea of masculinity from when he was a boy way back in the last century. He used to take me motor racing at weekends when we weren’t at poetry festivals. Once a year, we would drive to the Belgian Grand Prix and camp. We still follow Formula One like other people follow football teams – Ralph and Jack, too. Dad’s hero is Jim Clarke; Dad says Clarke was ‘a great’, which is the highest accolade Dad ever gives. Ralph’s is Senna. Jack’s is Prost. I refuse to have a hero – just to annoy them.
I can feel the exact half-second when Dad becomes conscious of my lack of overt attention to what he is saying – and how that hurts him. So I say: ‘Who had to do what, Dad?’
‘VW had to do it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of builders.’
‘Builders?’
‘Yes. Builders all wanted flat-bed trucks so that they could load easily from the back. So they had to move the engine to the front. Which means from nineteen-ninety on, you’re dealing with a front-situated engine and—’
My phone starts ringing inside the glove compartment. I’ve got this atrocious ring tone – ‘Jelly on a Plate’ – from when I was last playing with Jack’s children because they find it hilarious – although nobody knows why – since they don’t even eat jelly and they use plastic bowls. So now we’re just two Englishmen on our way to commit suicide, glancing across at one another while racing in the wrong direction down a French motorway called L’Autoroute des Anglais and listening to a hysterically insistent ‘Jelly on a Plate’.
Dad opens the glove compartment and answers it: ‘Hello, Larry Lasker . . .’
He is grinning and doing this ‘keep your eyes on the road’ thing with little nods of his head.
‘Oh hello, Eva,’ he says. ‘No I’m afraid you’ve got the wiser and more seasoned model.’
My father is actually winking at me.
‘Lou is driving. Well . . . I say driving. He’s not written the van off yet.’
‘Dad.’
‘A few close shaves coming out of London.’
I reach out. ‘Dad – let me speak.’
‘Had to remind him which side of the road to drive on – when we got off the ferry.’
‘Dad!’
‘Eyes on the road, Lou.’ He holds up his hand and goes silent.
I try to imagine Eva – she’s probably in her flat in Tufnell Park, standing on her mattress at her gable window to combat the strange reception issue.
Eva and I have only been together-together for ten months, but she knows what is happening because we share everything – coffee, money, shampoo, every shiver, every song. But I didn’t tell Dad about her. Not in any detail. I don’t know why. I keep secrets. Maybe because I was trying to give myself some place that I might make towards on the other side of this, some place that was nothing to do with my family. To involve her seemed wrong, presumptuous, since she wasn’t bound up with them, only with me. And I didn’t want them to have to deal with her being there; or her to have to deal with them dealing with her; or me to have to deal with all of it. Most of all, I wanted to shield her from their ravening.
Now, though, as I’m glancing over, I can feel that Dad is sieving what she’s saying like only Dad can do. And I can’t stand to think of Dad imagining her with me after he has gone. And suddenly, the whole idea of keeping my father and Eva separate feels like it was another big mistake. Among the many. I extend my hand for the ph
one. ‘Dad – can I talk to her.’
He holds his finger to his lips. The side of his face is slipping into this slack expression of solemnity.
My eyes are burning. And it takes me a moment to realize that it is because someone is flashing me in the rear-view mirror. Somehow, we’ve moved into the fast lane to go past this Citroën who, in turn, is passing the trucks. But this Citroën is only doing one mile an hour less than me. So it’s taking for ever to get by and I can’t pull out of the way.
‘Thank you, Eva,’ Dad is saying. ‘That took courage.’
The flashing comes again. And this Mercedes is now so far up my ass that if I even touch the brakes, we will all die. So I put my foot all the way down on the gas and we are not Slow Driving now – no sir, we’re racing to Zurich as fast as we can and the engine is making plenty of noise.
‘I will,’ he says. ‘I will. I’ll have him call you – as soon as we stop.’
We’re past the Citroën. Dad is holding my phone up high to hide his face and he won’t turn towards me.
‘Thank you. Yep. Goodbye . . . Yes.’ I can tell Dad wants to say something more, something that resonates, but he doesn’t know if he should. ‘Goodbye,’ he says, again. ‘And really good luck.’
The Mercedes is coming by and this Botox-beast in the passenger seat is looking up at me like I am the one who screwed up her surgery.
‘Dad?’
‘Sorry,’ he says.
‘Maybe we should stop.’
‘OK. Yes. Let’s pull over at the next lay-by.’
‘OK . . .’
I don’t know if he means stop stop; or just stop. I know that if I say we should stop and turn around, then he will. It is the one thing I am certain of: that my father will abide by my wishes. There’s some kind of tectonic understanding between us that guarantees this. Beneath it all. That we do this willingly together or not at all. But in another way I can’t have him saying he wants to stop stop. I can’t have him doubting anything. Because then everything we have been through becomes meaningless and my brothers will have been right all along.
He’s still not looking in my direction and I can’t keep glancing over without making our embarrassment worse. He’s suffering. Emotional lability. He’s shaking almost imperceptibly. He looks so ill in this overcast light – so wan and wasting and weak. Like dying is an active, minute by minute, process that I can actually see. Which it is.
I don’t know the best way to be.
‘Sorry,’ he says, hoarsely, ‘I shouldn’t have answered.’ He places the phone back in the glove compartment and fiddles with the catch. The flickering light annoys him. The bulb is going.
‘There was no name. It said number blocked. I don’t understand these bloody phones.’
He does understand – he has had a phone for twenty years.
‘Dad – don’t worry about it.’
He rummages a second more then says: ‘She sounds sparky.’
‘Sparky’ is not one of his words – and it makes me wither inside to hear him use it because it means he doesn’t know how to talk to me about this. So because I know that Jack is the best distraction from Eva, I say: ‘I thought it might be Jack.’
‘Did Jack say he was going to call?’
‘No. No, he didn’t. But . . . you should call him.’
‘I will . . . He knows we left?’
‘Yes.’ Now I’m hurting him even more. The fact that Jack is not coming is Dad’s greatest sadness – or defeat. But at least it’s something that I can hide behind while we crawl out of the moment.
‘Look,’ I say, ‘there’s an aire de repos – six kilometres. Do you want to stop there?’
‘Yes . . . Yes.’
We sit in silence a while. Driving down the road. A horrible despair hovers between us. Like it’s about to define our whole lives. I would rather have him at his most rancorous – raging, ranting; anything other than this. Anything that revivifies him. Black birds rise from the roadside like ashes scattered into the wind.
My father murdered my mother’s poetry with his very presence. Oppression. Asphyxiation. He smothered her as surely as if he had lain down on top of her with a pillow.
A major side effect of the treatment that Zeus, Yahweh, Jesus, Allah and the gang have been dishing out to me for not believing in them is that I’ve had to think a lot about my parents. And – yes – once they got married, my mother never really made it as a poet – despite her talent. Ah, Lou, she would say, truly in headaches and in worry life vaguely leaks away. But she taught me a lot about the ‘greats’ as she would call them – and I feel a sort of responsibility to . . . I don’t know . . . to keep poetry in my life. Whatever that means. Sometimes these bits and fractions and half-lines come into my head like ‘the centre cannot hold’ and I have no idea where they are from or who wrote them.
I should also say that Dad completely wrecked his first marriage – and probably the minds of Ralph and Jack – in order to marry my mum. Fifteen years, vows, wife, the emotional well-being of his children – straight down the pan. We’re talking court orders. We’re talking people standing outside windows screaming about love and hate. I said my father was ‘honest’ not ‘good’ – lots of people think they’re the same thing and they’re not – nothing much to do with each other if you ask me.
And yet I’ve never seen it the way my mother and father had it with any other couple – young or old. They flat-out loved each other – physically, mentally, spiritually. A lot of couples like to live with all these roses and vines wrapped around them – check out the scent of heaven; observe the fruits of paradise – and, sure, it all looks and smells beautiful; but behind the flowers and the fruit and the foliage, the columns are all chipped and dry and crumbling away to nothing. Whereas my mother and father could just stand there gleaming white, two pillars and a mighty arch: welcome to the temple of love, people.
My best shot is that it was to do with an absence of any persuading themselves about each other. Even the word ‘commitment’ doesn’t quite cover what they had – because that suggests there was a struggle with something that had to be overcome so that the ‘commitment’ could be made. So what does this tell us? That it’s fine – no matter how you behave – as long as it’s in the name of true love? That good is blithely born of bad and vice versa? That a world of lies can give birth to a world of love? (The honesty was only ever a streak.) And where does that leave Carol – Ralph and Jack’s mother? Living in that basement flat in Bayswater, listening to the radio and measuring out her life in those bottles of cheap white wine that she keeps shoulder to shoulder in her fridge door.
Sometimes I think that maybe grief is what is torturing my father most of all – grief, not the disease. Maybe that’s why he’s doing this – because he doesn’t see any purpose in carrying on without my mum. All this . . . All this is an elaborate requiem for her.
I say the only thing I can think of to say: ‘Why do the French call them aires de repos?’
He’s still croaky. ‘Not following you, Lou.’
‘As opposed to service stations, I mean.’
‘It’s interesting,’ he says.
Maybe the only upside of Mum’s death was that it taught us how to pull ourselves together – how to find the false things to say that pass the time, that do the job of fending off reality until we are able to get back up and fully engage with the enemy ourselves.
‘It’s interesting the difference in the words that the two languages deploy, Lou. And what those words tell us about our national characteristics.’
‘How do you gloss it?’ I ask.
‘Well, as you say: we call them service stations.’
‘Yes . . . Meaning?’
‘Meaning we tacitly consider that petrol and food are the same – fuels – with which we “service” ourselves.’
‘Whereas?’
‘Whereas the French term – “aire de repos” – suggests that they assume that their citizenry would like to take their t
ime over eating and consider this activity distinct from the purchasing of petrol.’ He starts to gesture at the windscreen again – remonstrating. That’s what he likes to do, I’m thinking, remonstrate with the outside world. ‘Meaning – second – that the French tacitly assume their fellows will be carrying better picnic food than any roadside chain of offal-bucketeers could serve up.’
‘And third – I sense there’s a third, Dad.’
‘Meaning – third – that they also assume that their countrymen would like not to be corralled through some kind of soulless mall but, where possible, would like to eat and to rest beneath the splendour of the open sky.’
‘Is that why you’re a champagne socialist?’
‘You’re the one who booked us into a Champagne chateau.’
‘I’m not a socialist.’
‘We’re very much back in fashion, Lou. What are you?’
‘A person.’
‘Don’t be facetious.’
‘A facetious person.’
Discussion and debating eases us, soothes us, heals us – ‘The Socratic Method’ as Dad calls it. Or ‘arguing’ as Mum used to call it. This is another problem we all share: that we need opposition to feel OK. Otherwise, maybe we don’t exist.
‘I am a socialist,’ Dad declares, ‘because I believe human beings can do better than to understand and organize themselves through the clumsy, grinding and miserable metaphor of the market.’
He is alive again.
‘Witness the crash . . .’
‘Nope.’
‘. . . An eisteddfod of bailouts and bonuses and economic bunting for the very same banks – and bankers – who pillaged civilization in the first place. Bailouts funded, naturally, by taxpayers. By us. The people. What is that if not socialism? Your phone just beeped.’
‘Pass it here. Straight away, Dad. I’m not fucking kidding. Sorry.’
‘Wait a—’
‘Right now.’
‘Be careful, Lou. Keep your eyes on the road. This is the turn-off.’
I grab the phone, swap it into my other hand and hold up the screen. It’s a text.
‘Who is it?’