by Edward Docx
I look up. Dean is staring into his Styrofoam like he wishes he could stir himself right in there and be gone. ‘It’s amaretto and fresh lime,’ he says.
‘You want some?’ Malte rolls me the spare and takes custody of the flat. ‘We have ice.’
‘I have to drive,’ I say.
‘Clockwise, Lou,’ Dad says. ‘I never heard of anyone drinking amaretto with lime.’
I tighten the wheel nuts one after another. Then I let the jack down and get to my feet so as to stand on the spider wrench and tighten them further.
‘That’ll do, Lou,’ Dad says. ‘It’s quite a long leverage.’
‘You think that’s tight enough?’
‘That’s fine: you don’t need to overdo it.’
I’m sweating. I straighten up. I realize I completely trust my father’s competence on this and – it now strikes me – on everything. And I don’t know what to do with this thought. I can hear the traffic on the road rushing by – and I’m thinking this is what madness sounds like – this moment. They’re all rushing somewhere. Hundreds every minute. Not to die. But actually – yes – to die.
I pull out the jack. ‘We should hit the road, Dad.’
But Malte is about as delighted as I have ever seen anyone and wants to reciprocate somehow: ‘Guys, you have totally saved our eggs. Thank you! Thank you. Come on, have a drink: Dean, how much amaretto do we have in there?’
‘We really can’t,’ I say.
‘No, sure.’ Malte nods. ‘You’re driving your father, I understand. But what can we do for you? What about some wurst? We still have the special ones from Detmold, I think. Dean?’
Dad is leaning against the van while I pack up his tools. He looks at Dean and says: ‘Do you have any CDs or anything – of your playing?’
Dean winces again. ‘Yes, I’ve got one. But it’s . . . it’s quite obscure.’
‘We’ll take that.’
Dean shrugs and moves to go and fetch his CD.
Malte is putting the flat tyre in the van. He’s way too lazy to fix it back up under the front.
And because I don’t want that job to be mine, I say to Dad casually: ‘The tasting starts at six.’
‘Plenty of time, Lou,’ Dad says.
Malte comes back with a business card which he tries to give to Dad. But Dad is watching Dean as he steps diffidently down from his van. So Malte gives it to me with a call-me-if-ever-you-need-vice wink.
Dean holds out the pale CD as if it were a slab of elderly feta cheese. His face is on the cover.
‘We’ll listen to this,’ Dad says. ‘And spread the word.’
Dean’s blush starts at his nose and heads aerodynamically back towards his ears.
I know how he feels.
Dad stands up as straight as he can. ‘Keep on going, Dean. Stick with it,’ he says. ‘Nobody else will ever play like you. Take delight in it, that’s the trick. Where possible – take delight.’
There are three audio cassettes covering maybe two and a half hours in total. The first begins with an evil hissing and then nothing until you start to hear these odd shouted words and muffled crashes – like the sounds of people far away, crying out their wares at a market stall. And then you can hear something like the noise of someone hitting a metal bin lid but on the other side of a wall. The recording stays like that for about a minute and it is impossible to make out the words or understand the bangs.
Then a door opens and you can hear someone come into the room where the machine must be. They are breathing heavily – right there close to the microphone. And then the tape stops for a second.
When it comes back on, the volume of the recording has been turned right up and the hiss has become a louder analogue buzz. You hear the person walking away again and then you hear a quiet voice – clearer now, but still not quite audible.
And then you hear the sudden screaming.
The shock of it – so loud. A vicious torrent of words. Completely clear but for the distorting rage of the voice.
The violence of what is being said is terrifying.
Followed by the sound of something shattering.
And then another male voice saying, ‘Don’t. Don’t do that. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t do that.’ Over and over again.
We were four days from Christmas and Eva was ill with a cold and she had the shivers but the world was ours and nothing really touched us. She came out of her shower room, her cinnamon skin the darker against the white of her towel, steam chasing her.
‘How you feeling?’ I asked.
‘OK . . . It might not be Ebola after all.’
I shrugged. ‘Maybe the mild form.’
She looked around the room and noticed that I had tidied and made the bed fresh. She came over to where I was washing up our three dishes at the sink and put her hand round the back of my head and held our foreheads together. Then, with her face still close to mine, she said softly: ‘You’re a good little carer, aren’t you?’
And I pulled away and she must have seen it in my expression.
‘What?’ she asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
So then I just started talking and it all came out impromptu . . . And after I had told her everything, with the two of us standing by that sink, she asked simply: ‘When did he find out?’
‘Nine months ago.’
‘You should have . . . And what? He’s already decided?’
‘Yep. As soon as there is what he calls “serious deterioration”. He’s hoping probably next year. You have to start the process a long time before.’
‘He’s hoping, Lou?’
‘His word.’
‘Jesus.’
‘There’s no cure. Some people get two years, some people get four, but it’s terminal and there’s no real treatment. The average time from diagnosis is fourteen months. So we’re way past halfway already.’
‘I mean . . . what? So you wake up and you can’t move?’
‘No, it’s gradual – month to month – but it’s relentless. He’s lucky in a way. It’s not affected his hands too badly – not yet. Or his speech. He . . . he says he doesn’t want to let it get too late. He wants to be able to talk.’
‘Lou . . . I’m so sorry.’
But I said to her not to be sorry because it was a relief that I had talked to someone outside the family at last. A mighty relief. But then I took a shower myself and immediately started to think that I had over-burdened us. That we were going to crash. That I shouldn’t have spoken. That I had poisoned our infant relationship and the only pure happiness I had.
When I came out, though, she was dressed in her jogging bottoms and a T-shirt and sat in the big leather chair that I had freed of her mound of clothes, drying the ends of her hair with her towel, leaning her head this way and that as she did so.
And she said, simply: ‘Is he sure he wants assisted suicide?’
And I loved her the more that she wasn’t all false tones or fake emotions around death. I had feared that most of all – feared how it would have made me feel about her, the distance that it would have opened up. Instead, she looked at me steadily – but with so much intelligence and fellow-feeling in her expression that my heart rose and I felt myself physically lighten.
‘Well, Dad would call it assisted dying not assisted suicide.’
‘Is there a difference?’
‘They say one replaces life with death while the other replaces a bad death with a good one.’
‘Fair enough. And what . . . you just go to Dignitas and that’s it?’
I shook my head. ‘It’s not as easy as people think. You have to become a member of Dignitas and then get all these different medical reports done here before they’ll even consider you. Which, by the way, the British doctors don’t want to do in case they get in the shit for murder. There’s a ton of admin to get green-lit.’
‘Green-lit – what the fuck?’
I told her about how people mistakenly thought that Dignitas was a clinic. But that really the wh
ole operation was an administrative service that helped the terminally ill get through all the Swiss legal stuff. That they give the clinical bit to the medics that they hire in. And I told her about all the documentation that Dad had been required to get. And about how – when you get to Zurich – you have to go and meet one of their affiliated doctors and get the prescription. But that even then – you have to speak to them a second time before you can go to the blue Dignitas house.
‘Only after all of that,’ I said, ‘do you get to drink the special poison.’
She puffed her cheeks out and exhaled slowly.
And it was a symptom of how far into the world of trauma I had already travelled that I misunderstood her and thought she was expressing consternation about the distance to Zurich rather than the nature of what we were doing.
‘I know,’ I said, ‘I know. It’s a disgrace that you can’t choose to end your life in this fucking country. But we can’t get into all that. Dad wants to campaign. Of course he does. But I don’t.’
‘What? You don’t want him—’
‘I don’t want him on the TV and radio going on about his right to die. It’s bad enough as it is.’ I looked over. Concern weighed in her eyes. I softened my voice: ‘He used to be on a few radio shows – and he wrote reviews for the papers. He was one of those media dons. But we have a deal,’ I said. ‘That he doesn’t do any shit about this that I can’t handle. And that . . . that we can change our minds.’
‘Who else have you talked to – apart from me?’
‘We saw this shrink for a while. And we went to see this family . . . They did it back in 2008. And a couple of relatives.’
She swapped the towel to the other side of her hair and looked up at me sideways from beneath the tilt of her head. ‘What did they say?’
‘They said that . . . that after a few years pass, you’re so pleased you did it because you keep looking at the calendar and thinking, “He’d be dead by now. And it would have been much worse.”’
‘So if you can go into the future and look backwards, it feels like a great idea – five years from now or whatever?’
‘Yeah.’
‘But that doesn’t make it feel like a great idea now.’
‘Nope.’
‘Fuck.’ She straightened her head and let the towel fall.
‘But in another way,’ I said, ‘your mind races forward. I mean . . . straight away when he told me – I saw everything. I saw the deterioration, the wheelchair, the end. You see it all. You’re kind of grieving ahead of yourself. Something like that . . . I don’t know . . . Sometimes I can see his death like a presence in his living face.’
She got up and came over and raised her finger and thumb to my cheeks and drew me in. I could tell that she was momentarily hurt that I had not told her before – but that she was trying not let this feeling show because she didn’t want to make it about her.
So I said: ‘I should’ve told you before. But . . .’
‘But what?’
‘I didn’t want this – us – to be burdened. Jesus, I hate that word. I wanted to get us over the line.’
‘What line?’
‘I wanted us to be – I don’t know. I didn’t want all this heaviness between us. I wanted you and me to be—’
‘You don’t know how much.’ She spoke now in a whisper, her face close, her eyes dancing from one to the other of mine. ‘You don’t know how much you’re in my mind. All the time. All the time.’
She has this twitch in her brow when she’s being serious.
I was so brimmed full of feeling that to move would have been to fall.
LOST
We are late. We are lost. We are stressing.
‘Go back up that way,’ Dad says. ‘That turn – there. It’s got to be up there.’
‘We came from the right,’ I say. ‘So it must be right.’
‘No, it’s left. Up there. Must be.’
‘Can’t be.’
‘Must be.’
A vine-tractor is lumbering towards us. I pull away across the oncoming lane unnecessarily fast in front of it. I’m driving aggressively now. I can’t be sure but I think I saw the van’s temperature gauge rise when we were queuing on the motorway; it’s as though the recent exertions have caused it to become introspective. And it may just be the irregular muffle and echo of the narrow country lanes but the engine sounds different, like it’s complaining, like it wants to be treated with more dignity.
The first tasting is at six – in ten minutes. We paid for the whole package – much more than merely dinner and accommodation – and Dad thinks they’ll do the best champagnes before the meal – ‘you can’t eat anything with good champagne, Lou.’ So there’s the additional angst of wasting our money. Not that it matters.
‘Keep your eyes peeled,’ Dad says, fractiously.
‘I’m looking.’
‘What’s that? What can you see up there?’
‘Cows.’
‘No, up there.’
‘A house.’
‘A chateau?’
‘No, that’s not it. Dad. It’s much bigger than that. And it’s yellow.’
‘That is yellow.’
‘No, that’s beige. The chateau is crazy yellow like custard. Like your fleece.’
‘How do you know?’
‘There were pictures on the Internet.’
‘Oh, the Internet. Right. Well.’ His scorn is bottomless.
The satnav breaks in: ‘At the next junction, continue straight on.’
But there is no junction.
Dad lets out another told-you-so puff. ‘It’s not real, Lou, that’s the problem.’
I keep driving. A frantic pheasant appears from the verge, veers into the road, feels the proximity of death and forces itself into cumbersome flight.
‘What’s not real? The Internet?’
‘Satnavs!’ He gestures at where the offending technology is suctioned to the windscreen then begins fumbling for his glasses in the glove compartment. The flickering light irritates him all over again.
I reach forward to turn the satnav volume down. I wish I’d just flown to Zurich a few hours before – checked into the hotel, popped over to the blue Dignitas house, got the job done, checked out and flown home.
‘Maybe it was the wrong postcode,’ I say.
‘Chateaux don’t have postcodes, Lou.’ Dad puts on his glasses. ‘I knew I should have brought a proper regional map. You can’t read anything on this. I’ve got it at home. This exact area. Never trust these wretched devices.’
We are very close but the satnav is confused or wrong or has not been updated. And somehow this is my fault. Dad has a way of transmuting such failures into evidence of the failure of the modern world and proof that progress is an illusion, that civilization has lost its way. Somehow, the satnav’s failure is not just a technological failure, it is a moral failure. And it’s like he wants to elbow this imaginary point into my ribs over and over – even though it’s insane and he knows it, and I know it, and we’re only getting more and more insane talking like this.
‘Is that clock right?’
The clock says five. He knows we haven’t changed it to French time.
‘No, it’s very nearly six now,’ I say. ‘But we can’t be more than three miles from the place.’
‘No, I mean is it precisely six? Or is it a bit fast. I think it’s a bit fast isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I haven’t touched it.’
We can’t talk about time or clocks. Of course not. But I want to make the point that if we hadn’t stopped for forty-five minutes to change Malte’s tyre then we wouldn’t have this problem. I want to make the point that none of this matters. Instead, I am squashed again and again behind the heavy door of his told-you-sos, which he slams open and then slams shut on me. And then slams open to tell-me-so again. I feel like Jack must feel in Dad’s company – a claustrophobic anger that makes me want to ward him off and escape his presence; the
feeling – not that he’s right or wrong, not that I want to argue with him – but that I don’t care what he thinks about anything. Or maybe this is more how Ralph feels. I don’t know. The thing is that sometimes I think Dad is my disease. And that he’s virulent. But I want to be well. I want to be free. And what does that mean?
‘Right. Stop here,’ Dad says. ‘Stop.’
Now there is a junction. But with a left and a right and no straight on. We cannot keep going. There are no signs. The empty sky doesn’t know us. I stop the van. I wind down my window. There’s no breeze but the smell of cut greenery somewhere.
‘If I can get service on my mobile,’ I say, ‘I can get the website.’
‘Turn that thing off.’
I do as I am told like a dutiful child.
‘That thing is absolutely useless, Lou.’
‘I can get the website on my phone.’
‘Forget websites.’
‘The website has directions on it.’
‘You should have written them down – on paper. What were you thinking?’ He folds the map of France into the relevant section. ‘Right, let’s work out where we are – on this actual map. We need a village. Near here.’
‘We passed through a place called Vignerons.’
‘What would you say? Are we about twenty miles southeast of Troyes?’
‘More or less. Hang on. I’ve got roaming.’
‘Roaming,’ he says with pure sarcasm that even I can’t attain.
I ignore him. ‘I’ve got Google.’
He ignores me. ‘OK. Found it. Let’s go back to Vignerons. Then we’ll know where we are.’
‘Yeah, but we still won’t know where the chateau is.’
‘One thing at a bloody time.’
My phone pulls up the page. ‘Here we go. Directions. From Vignerons.’
‘Right – pass them here. Let’s go to Vignerons and proceed from there. I will write them down.’
And so I turn us around and we drive back the way we have come. Poplar trees march down a gradual slope to where white cows graze in a field dusted with buttercups; beyond, the gentle hills rise and the late September sun is slipping westward over the promising vines.
Low British skies of rag and bone. I was six. My dad had taken me to a motor race – some minor circuit somewhere half-hidden in a shallow, misty English valley. I remember that the rain stopped and started and the wind was blustery. And so the racing was treacherous and exciting. We watched together from a muddy man-made knoll by the side of the track which swept towards us, curved left, and then fell away further into a dell, tightening for the drivers as it did so. First the open-wheel Formula Fords and then the Touring cars and then the Minis, streaming by, side by side, spray from the tyres, probing for the limits of adhesion. We had spent a long time in the van on the way there debating which corner was likely to produce the most ‘action’. This came down to a choice between two ‘spots’. Usually we would spend half the day cursing our luck, wryly convinced that all the overtaking and crashing – all the daring – was happening at the other place. But on this day, we got it right.