by Edward Docx
‘It’s Eva,’ I lie.
Because, actually, it is Jack; and he’s asking a question I don’t know the answer to.
JACK
I edged the bathroom door open.
‘Siobhan?’
‘No, it’s me.’
‘Lou. Hello. Come in.’
I stepped inside. The bathroom was small – has always been small – which didn’t help the situation. Jack has long needed a bigger house (such as Dad’s, ours, mine).
He glanced up. ‘Woah, Louis. What is going on with your hair?’
‘Growing it.’
‘Right.’ Jack grinned. He was on his knees in his suit surrounded by nappies, towels, infant pyjamas and an array of bottom-related ointments, lotions, creams and gels. He was trying to remove Baby Percy (our nickname for his daughter, the youngest of his three children) from her clothes, an effort that she was resisting with an intense physical and psychological determination that belied her age – one. This struggle was further complicated by the fact that her own version of the tummy-trouble had managed to escape her nappy the better to reach up her back and disperse itself with some enthusiasm among the many layers of her winter clothes. Jack paused from grappling with her thousand buttons and gussets and flaps in order to tuck his tie into his shirt to prevent it dangling into the mess.
‘Careful. Don’t stand there. Those nappies are dirty. Everybody in here has got diarrhoea.’
‘That’s how I like it.’
‘Can you find me some more wet wipes? There’s another packet in here somewhere. Under the sink.’
In the bath, Billy and Jim, Jack’s three-year-old twins, were pouring water on each other’s heads, one with a sponge in his mouth, the other with a toothbrush.
‘Don’t drink the water, boys,’ Jack cautioned, straightening up. He contorted his eyebrows at me in a can-you-believe-any-of-this expression not dissimilar to that of our father’s when watching the news. Jack looks more like Dad than Ralph because he is robust and solid rather than being so guardedly thin, and because he keeps his auburn hair shorter and his blue eyes are shaded with grey. Most of all, because he has a stubble beard streaked here and there with white and gold, which makes him look older, and, well, fatherly.
‘Hello, Littles,’ I ventured. I am godfather to the boys. ‘Is it bathtime?’
They greeted the fatuity of the question with that expressionless infant contempt that children reserve for such occasions and continued – with a fraction more concentration – to suck upon sponge and brush respectively.
‘Say hello to Uncle Lou,’ Jack urged.
They continued to suck but cut me a wave each. ‘The taxi is here, Jack, by the way.’
I sometimes think my main job in the family is to play the tactful emissary between the irreconcilable and the insane. Apparently, I am the only person whom everybody likes. Or, at least, whom nobody blames. Which seems to be the same thing. So, gently, I add: ‘We need to get weaving.’
‘Not possible.’ Jack looked up from the struggle. ‘Percy, the boys and I have solemnly sworn to cover the house in shit before they go to bed. We won’t sleep till it’s done.’ He glanced over at the twins. ‘Don’t eat the sponge, Billy. You both did your wee-wees in the bath – remember?’
Riotous laughter from the bath.
‘Can I do anything?’
He made as if to lean aside from the excretal abyss: ‘Here you go. All yours, Lou.’
Jack smiles a lot more easily than Ralph. He finds things funny-broad more than he finds things funny-deep.
‘Should we just go? And you catch up?’
‘No. How are Dad and Siobhan doing down there?’
‘It’s civil. Dad is being sarcastic about the television. Siobhan is deliberately not noticing.’
Jack peeled off Baby Percy’s little pink tights. ‘If I can get them all clean in the bath, you go down and tell Siobhan that it’s job done and then get Zita – the babysitter – to come up. Say they want to say hello to her before we go out. I’ll bribe her to get them out of the bath and then we’re away.’
‘I no like Zita,’ said Billy.
‘Wet wipes, Lou. Wet wipes. Wet wipes. Wet wipes.’
‘I’m looking.’
The bathroom was knee-deep in towels as well as everything else.
‘Should Dad come up?’
‘No. You’ll start a war.’
Jack was down to the last layer before the nappy itself – some kind of Babygro covered in absurdly complicated press-studs. I handed him the wet wipes. If sex is Ralph’s rebuke to my father, then Jack’s reproach is his sleeves-rolled-up style of fatherhood. I’m not sure how conscious this is in his case either. But part of him definitely relished being late for Dad because he was too busy being a father.
Jack used to be a journalist. Now he is in public relations for a life-insurance company. It’s an embarrassment (Jack), a defeat (Dad) and the abandonment of hope (Ralph). As a consequence and by way of compensation for all this humiliation and pointlessness, he is now paid five times more. I’ve noticed this seems to be the way of things white-collar-wise: the more tedious the job, the higher the pay. But there’s another irony in that Jack used to be a communist. For real. He went to college in Edinburgh and he used to sell Socialist Worker and wear boots and have one of those high short-back-and-sides cuts that Leninists seemed to share with rockabilly kids long before any of it was cool. Don’t ask me why: in search of fatherly approval, or calling fatherly bluff, take your pick. Maybe he even believed it; there’s always that chance with Jack.
Jack frowned. ‘Dad is serious about tonight?’
‘Never more so,’ I said.
‘Christ, Percy, keep still for one minute.’ I could feel Jack tensing. ‘There is no point in even discussing it. Dad is never going to go to Switzerland.’
‘Tell him that.’
‘What is his problem?’
‘Motor neurone disease.’
Jack looked over. ‘Try not to be a complete penis, Lou.’ He has an unsettling way of being deadly earnest. Where Ralph makes you feel inelegant and wrong, Jack makes you feel frivolous and wrong.
‘Well, that is his problem.’
‘There are plenty of people who get motor neurone disease. Stephen Hawking.’
‘Not at Dad’s age. It’s terminal. No exceptions. Absolute max: two years. That’s what they’re saying at the clinic.’
‘Dad is just not a Dignitas man.’
‘How would you characterize a Dignitas man?’
‘We are not a Dignitas family.’
‘How would you—’
‘Percy! Keep still!’ With the care of a bomb-disposal expert on the last operation of his tour, Jack was now removing the nappy itself. The smell of sour baby milk filled the close air of the room. ‘Does he think we won’t look after him when it gets worse?’
‘I don’t think it’s the looking after him that he’s worried about. It’s the getting worse.’
The boys were splashing.
‘There must be hundreds of care options,’ Jack said.
‘Not hundreds. And they all wind up in the same place.’
‘He might at least discuss it.’
‘That’s why he’s here, Jack.’
‘No, he’s here to tell us that this is what he is doing.’
‘He definitely can’t discuss it if you won’t discuss it.’
‘I mean . . . Switzerland? Really?’
‘Maybe they’ll change the law and he’ll be able to do it in Shepherd’s Bush. But until then . . . it’s Zurich . . . or Albania or New Mexico.’
Naturally, I had gone behind Dad’s back and relayed the progress of his thinking to Jack during the last few weeks. But Jack had decided not to tell Siobhan that Dad’s new plan was what tonight was all about – partly, I guessed, because Jack had thought that up until now Dad was merely ‘exploring’ the idea, and partly because he wanted Dad to take the consequences of tabling the discussion vis-à-vis Siobhan.
Jack raised Percy’s legs. ‘He’s being stubborn and truculent.’
‘That’s what he says about you.’
‘But this involves all of us. We are the ones that have to go on living – with the consequences. In a way, this affects us more than it affects him.’
‘Somehow, you’re managing to be selfish about Dad’s illness.’
‘Plus he wants our approval. And I—’
‘Why don’t you put these excellent points to him?’
‘We’ve been through all this.’
‘You and me, Jack. Yep. Lots. But you and D—’
‘Boys, will you stop splashing?’
Jim took an extra-large suck on the toothbrush and swallowed with melodramatic emphasis. And then – once he was sure he had the room’s attention – he tipped the contents of his plastic cup over the edge of the bath.
‘No,’ Jack raised his voice. ‘Jim. No. You do not pour water out of the bath.’
Billy started eating the soap.
‘Billy!’ Jack shouted.
At which increase of the volume from her father, Baby Percy decided she had taken as much as she was going to take and launched an assault on the entire house’s hearing.
I must have looked anxious because Jack mouthed above the burgeoning racket: ‘I’ve forgotten her milk. She likes milk at bathtime. Shut the bastard door.’
Baby Percy was now kicking and wriggling as if her tiny life depended on Jack never cleaning her bottom again. His tie had somehow slipped and swung down above the ever-spreading diarrhoea. He cursed. I was reaching down to pull it up for him when, suddenly, Billy appeared to detonate himself with the abrupt and terrible wail of a suicide-bomber. ‘My eyes! My eyes!’ he yelled.
‘Shit! Shit.’ Jack leapt up. ‘He’s got soap in his eyes.’ He leant over and deployed a towel in Billy’s direction.
Baby Percy redoubled her screams.
Then it started raining everywhere.
Icy, frozen, torrential rain filled the room.
Jack was bellowing: ‘Turn it off. Turn it off. It’s freezing!’
Somehow, Jim had turned on the shower.
‘Turn it off, Lou. Turn it off.’
Billy screeched. Percy screamed. But they were as nothing to the high-pitched shrieking of Jim.
I jumped over Baby Percy and tried to lean into the shower taps without getting my clothes wet.
‘Turn the bastard off, Lou. What the hell are you doing?’
The trebled cries seemed to fill every available register of the human ear – echoing and reverberating off the tiles about our bewildered heads. But it was impossible to quite reach the mixer without getting wet. I gave up and bent past Jim who was huddling uselessly against the deluge that was now soaking my clothes. The water stopped.
‘Oh God.’ Jack spun around, letting go of Billy, who slipped, howled and started to go under.
‘Percy, come back. Lie down!’ Jack picked up the still filthy-bottomed Percy and held her aloft without further plan.
I grabbed Billy, soaking myself again and accidentally knocking into Jim in the process, whose little face was astounded and then horrified.
Somehow, Percy had got into the boy’s nappies as well as redistributing her own. There was infant excrement all over the floor. There was water everywhere. The children’s pyjamas were sodden and the clean nappies were swollen from the flood. Percy moved up through the gears to hit full lung. Jack was now holding her above the sink and swearing that he couldn’t find the plug. The water was too hot, too cold.
Billy started to choke on his sponge.
Jim was shivering from the cold of the shower and flat-out bellowing: ‘Out! Out! Out! Out! No like it! No like it! Out! Out!’
Jack was yelling: ‘Take my tie off, Lou. Take my fucking tie off. Find the plug. Turn the cold off. There’s shit everywhere. My fucking tie. There’s shit everywhere.’
At which moment Siobhan entered the room.
Ten minutes later we went out to discuss whether or not my dad should commit suicide.
AIRE DE REPOS
We’re somewhere short of Arras. The aire de repos turns out to be one of those obligingly wooded lay-bys off the motorway that the Europeans seem to do so well – a clean, convivial, carefully planted copse that somehow cancels out the noise of the cars. A safe harbour. While I am standing listening to my dying father defecate, I text Eva, the woman with whom I make love, and I think about Freud and Jung, of whom I know nothing except that they are beloved of a certain sort of intelligent person – like, for example, Ralph.
Where is the bastard?
I text his German mobile. I text his UK mobile and copy it to email and send that, too. He said he would meet us en route. The sickening thought comes that maybe on some level – shallow or deep – he’s decided not to communicate by way of stopping Dad: like Dad won’t do it if he doesn’t see Ralph first. Either my brothers are not taking this seriously; or they are taking it so seriously that they’re going to stop the whole thing by not showing up.
‘Success,’ Dad says pretty loudly from within the cubicle.
This must be the first time we have been to the toilet together since I was three.
A man with a precise and somehow pompous goatee walks in.
‘You OK?’ I call to Dad through the cubicle door.
‘Yep. Pleased to say, Lou, I can still wipe my own bottom.’
I glance across at Goatee; he gives me an arch look.
Dad speaks loudly from within: ‘That’s actually the main reason I want to do this now.’
I am both amazed and not at all surprised that my father is trying to start this conversation at this moment and in this manner. (My phone buzzes: a three-word text from Eva: ‘I love you.’ How the fuck did they manage before phones?) The only way to take my father on when he deploys his jokily-being-serious tone is to do the same right back. I’m not sure such exchanges get us anywhere. But since our destination is death, I’m not sure it matters that they don’t.
I speak loudly through the door even though there is no need to do so: ‘What are you talking about? What is the main reason you want to do what?’
‘The fact that I can still wipe my own bottom is the main reason I want to make this trip.’
‘You’re saying that you want to kill yourself because you can still wipe your own bottom?’
The goatee guy can’t figure out whether he is dealing with perverts or clowns. I need to speak to my brothers.
‘Do you think that’s a common feeling?’
‘Actually, yes I do.’
Dad flushes the toilet. So I raise my voice even further.
‘Life and death: it’s all about the anus?’
‘I think that the fear of decline, the fear of incapacity is really a fear of not being able to wipe one’s own bottom.’
‘Right.’
‘I think that is what people really mean, Lou, that’s the physical anxiety in their mind – when they say they want to die with dignity. OK, I’m ready for action: come on in.’
Goatee is buttoning up. He frowns. I push at the door and edge inside.
Dad is bent over, head down, as if he might fall forward any moment and knock himself out on the floor. His legs look scrawny and he’s holding one with his hand because it’s twitching.
He looks up. ‘It’s a threshold,’ he says, quietly. ‘A threshold we do not wish to cross, Lou.’
I reach forward and offer my arms and haul my father upright; it’s the getting up and down that he finds so tough.
‘On one side of the threshold you can clean your own bottom,’ Dad says. ‘And on the other – you can’t.’
‘And that’s significant, Dad?’ I help him pull up his trousers. He has his wrists on my shoulders.
‘Yes. It is.’
We are face to face. Saliva spools from his mouth.
He lowers his voice. ‘I don’t want to have anyone else doing this for me. Least of all you, Lou.’
&nbs
p; I drag up a smile and chain it to my lips. I can hear breath entering him and leaving him. He is looking at me. I can feel myself nodding slowly. I can feel the surge and churn of my emotions again: disgust, sadness, anger, pity, terror, despair, love; each vying in the same instant with its opposite. The last time I slept with Eva, I dreamt about the ground cracking apart beneath my feet: on one side what I felt, on the other what I said – and the fissure between them widening and widening so that I must surely fall into the roiling lava below.
I say: ‘I’m glad it’s me in here right now – not Doug, I mean. I really wouldn’t want to miss this, Dad.’
‘Yes, poor Doug though.’ Dad smiles. ‘The man loves a communal toilet. That’s his archaeological speciality.’
‘We should send him a picture. Is he on Snapchat?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
Out we come. We bind arms and shoulders – so that we’re locked together again. Goatee is hammering the hand-drier as if it’s responsible for all the slights he has ever suffered. He shoots us a disapproving squint that becomes a synthetic smile as he sees Dad’s stick. But ever since the ferry, I’ve moved past all the what-other-people-think stuff – and so on we go, sanguine and shameless, shuffling towards the washbasins. There’s a sparrow flown in through the open side of the building and for a moment it tilts its curious head to watch us – two men side by side washing their hands in water that only gushes or dribbles.
The beginning of love is the end of sleep. From the start, I was at a disadvantage because she was more intelligent but the whole Eva thing nearly cost me what was left of my shredded mind. Three months of completely incomprehensible confusion and uncertainty. Until, at last . . . We were standing in the darkness on the threshold of her flat.
‘Sorry,’ she said, ducking down and fumbling around beneath what I could just make out must be her desk. ‘The main bulb is horrible.’
A sidelight flared and she crossed her rug. She has the blackest possible hair, which here and there escaped her tea-cosy hat that night and fell in long loose question-mark curls. It was impossible to tell whether her expression – her manner – was shy, or defiant, or both at the same time. And when she looked across, as now, her eyes were so dark that it seemed pupil and iris were one.