by Edward Docx
Dr Twigge would say you sublimate your parents’ insecurities and sabotages as a child and fashion them into a deep subconscious narrative of self-criticism – this is the voice that you come to hear as an internal commentary and, worse, to believe. This is the hostile, self-defeating, and self-destructive adviser who promotes anger and pessimism and cynicism. Every human being has one – euphemistically, they call it the ‘inner critic’. The trick, they say, is to learn to recognize the problem and then tell it to fuck off. But what if it’s your father you want to silence? Ah, well, say the shrinks, death is a great time to make peace with your parents. Bury the bad voices with their dead bodies. Heed only the good voices thereafter. Distinguish. Let love reign. And if you can’t manage that – then try for understanding.
Ralph placed his cigarette in the ashtray and surveyed the menu. ‘I wonder is it possible to have unseasonal greens. And non-heritage carrots?’ he asked.
‘I want pesticides,’ Jack said. ‘Pesticides and preservatives.’
Ralph nodded. ‘Yeah – something processed and heavily packaged and with lots of air miles.’
‘Ideally from somewhere with a bad human-rights record.’
Ralph picked up his cigarette again. ‘Maybe they’ve got Chinese battery-chicken or some ocean-dredged crabsticks.’
‘OK, Lou,’ said Jack. ‘What have you never eaten before?’
‘Lobster. I’ve never eaten lobster,’ I said, still trying desperately to impress them but secretly attracted to the ‘and chips’.
When I was around nine, I remember that my brothers took me out to dinner. Ralph was at the beginning of his (not) working as an actor. He had picked me up from school because Mum and Dad were away for the weekend. Meanwhile, Jack was working (for free) for the Fulham and Hammersmith Chronicle – a paper that seemed to be so belligerently short-staffed that he already got to write about everything from NATO air strikes to restaurant reviews. In those days, Jack’s hair was longer and he was thinner so that he and Ralph looked much more like identical twins when they were together: art fraudsters, maybe – Ralph the forger, Jack the dealer. I felt like a god whenever I was with them. But then (as now) my brothers never came off the gas in the way they talked in my company – and they probably should have kept some stuff away from me when I was younger. I remember, for example, that when the food arrived, they got on to the subject of Carol.
‘I went round there three days ago,’ Jack said. ‘And Christ, the atmosphere . . . It was . . . It was like one of those Soviet submarines that has got trapped at the bottom of the Arctic Sea.’
‘What happened to that man she met up with once – what’s his name – Arnold?’
Jack shook his head. ‘They went to the cinema and had an argument about subtitles.’
Ralph nodded slowly.
‘She’s not as resilient as usual,’ Jack continued. ‘I would say she’s depressed.’
‘Which is the only intelligent response to the world,’ Ralph replied.
‘Don’t be facetious.’
‘Which is the second most intelligent response to the world.’
‘Try engagement.’
‘Try acceptance.’ Ralph shrugged. ‘I think she’s probably—’
I interrupted: ‘Which bit of the lobster do you eat?’
‘Start with the claws, Lou,’ Ralph said.
Jack ventured: ‘I’m saying maybe . . . maybe she needs to see us a bit more round there.’
‘She is completely fine when she’s out.’ Ralph attempted to cut his pan-fried veal with his fork. ‘I went to a concert with her last month. Life and soul of the interval.’
‘Yes. As long as you stay off the subject of Dad.’
‘Obviously. But that’s been the case for ages. Don’t go anywhere near the subject of Dad and she’s as ostensibly normal as everyone else is ostensibly normal.’
‘What are the claws,’ I interrupted, again. ‘Are they these little bits?’
‘No, the claws are the huge claw things at the front,’ Jack said. ‘I’m just saying . . . I’m just saying it’s so dark in there. You need to have all the lights on in order to see your own hands.’
‘She lives in a basement flat, Jack. It’s bound to feel a bit submarine.’
‘Maybe we should buy her a new place. She could move. We could help. Something airy and—’
‘Jack, the problem is not her fucking living quarters.’
‘I’m trying to be practical.’
‘Superficial.’
‘Maybe if we took care of some of the superficial stuff, then—’
‘The problem . . . the problem . . . is that she’s a functioning alcoholic.’
‘Well, then – no, listen to me for a second – maybe we need to try and do something about that, too.’
‘And the real problem behind the problem is that she has had her heart fractured into a thousand pieces by the man she loves.’
‘Yes but—’
‘As far as Mum is concerned, love is singular and it endures for life – or it isn’t love.’
‘I’m not—’
‘The real thing cannot be rivalled or replaced. That’s her definition of what love is, Jack. And who are we to argue? In order to cheer up, she’d have to bin the foundations of her entire belief system.’
‘Let’s tackle—’
‘There is only one solution and you know it: Dad. And that is never ever going to happen. Not ever. They tortured one another past the point of permanent disfigurement and then Dad did something even worse: he got up and left the torture chamber, closing the door behind him.’
‘Right.’ Jack nodded sarcastically. ‘So we – her kind and loving sons – leave her to her despair?’
‘We leave her alone. The measure of her suffering is testimony to the measure of her love.’
‘We callously abandon our own mother to her depression.’
‘I keep telling you: she needs to be depressed in order to enact what she believes about her marriage – her life.’ Ralph inclined his head and raised his palm in an offering of reasonableness. ‘Maybe she enjoys being depressed in some way. People do. Take a look around. Stunned disbelief is taking widespread hold. Half the world cannot understand what the fuck the other half think they’re doing.’
I cut in: ‘How do I get the claws off?’
‘Just pull them, like this.’ Jack reached over and detached a lobster claw for me. ‘I’m saying I think she needs us, Ralph. She seems to be turning inward. She doesn’t have enough real-world input. And if not us . . .’
Ralph sighed. ‘Why do I sense the word “duty” about to arrive in this conversation?’
‘I think that we do have a duty . . . a duty to cheer her up at least.’
‘As I say: let’s take her out more.’
‘That as well. But we also have to be there . . . To be there in a quiet and regular way. More often. No drama. Just having a glass of wine. Just making the dinner. Chopping carrots.’
‘Chopping carrots – that’s your solution?’
‘We have to interact without melodrama.’
Ralph grimaced. ‘Impossible.’
Jack met his eye. ‘What I am saying is that it’s about being there for her. She needs—’
‘But how . . .’ I cut in loudly this time. ‘How do I eat the claws? They’re really hard.’
‘It’s an exoskeleton, Lou,’ Ralph said. ‘In a way lobsters are really only huge insects. You eat the insides rather than the outsides.’
‘I’ve never eaten an insect.’
‘Seriously,’ Ralph said, ‘fuck going round there, Jack. She loves the theatre, she loves music. She needs to go out more.’
Jack had reached the end of his oxtail with the expression of a man wishing that there was somehow more of the ox to go. He sat back. ‘I think – even though she would never say it – I think she’s lonely. Isolated. She listens to the news all day—’
‘Which is enough to make anyone suicidal.’
&n
bsp; ‘We need to persuade her . . . To move flats. To get it together. To stop drinking. To live again. Engage. There could be thirty years ahead of her. Why not seize them?’
‘As I say: maybe she wants to be left alone to suffer in peace and quiet. Have you thought about that?’
‘You can’t go through life decrying life. What kind of life is that?’
‘A very popular one.’
‘But how do I eat the insides?’ I asked. ‘The skin on this lobster is really hard.’
‘It’s a shell, not a skin,’ Jack said. ‘Crack it, Lou, crack it. I’m saying we must at least offer to help . . . it’s for her own benefit, Ralph.’
Ralph sighed more deeply. ‘Have you ever – have you ever in your whole life – managed to suggest one single thing to Mum that might be for her own benefit?’
‘She likes talking and—’
‘No, she’s utterly impossible to talk to on a personal level. Everything is immediately taken as an insult.’
‘She’s very proud.’
‘What do people actually mean when they say that?’
Now Jack sighed.
‘They mean,’ Ralph said, ‘that a person is fearful and brittle. They mean that a person cannot allow any contention or openness of mind for fear that their entire world will shatter and they will be left without their certainties. They mean that a person is so fragile within that they have created this rigid carapace as a protection.’ He indicated my lobster.
‘You’re wrong.’ Jack shook his head. ‘Everything you say is only ever partially true and yet you pretend that it’s a complete explanation.’
‘That’s what we love to do here on planet Earth, Jack. Join us. Please.’
‘She’s got me and she’s got you, Ralph. I’m a knob and you’re a nightmare. But that’s it. That’s all she’s got. We have to show some . . . some love.’
‘OK – OK – OK.’ Ralph softened. ‘Fuck it, then: you win. Let’s go round there now. Straight after dessert.’
Jack weighed the challenge. ‘All right, let’s do that,’ he said.
‘Lou, what’s wrong?’ Ralph looked at me. ‘You haven’t touched your lobster. No, don’t lick it.’
And so we banked into the Bayswater basin just as the low London sun gave up again somewhere in the west.
‘Looks like she’s in,’ Ralph said.
‘Very seldom out,’ Jack replied.
‘My point exactly. Can you get this?’
Jack paid the driver through the window and we stood a moment, three brothers in the brief and uncertain dusk of a stuccoed London street.
Carol’s building was the colour of exhausted white underwear; it was five storeys high and must once have been a grand place owned by somebody who did something that made money. Nowadays the old house had been divided and subdivided into more flats than the pillared portico had space for buzzers. On the second floor, there was an open window and inside a man in boxer shorts was hitting a punch bag. On a neighbouring stoop, a woman in a hijab was speaking animatedly into an entry-phone in a language I will never know. Meanwhile, in the great and on-going war, the gulls flapped and screamed the high vantage of the rooftops while the fat London pigeons patrolled the yellow lines of kerb and gutter, tick-tocking back and forth with news of territory held and skirmishes lost or won.
I remembered hearing my own mum say once that Bayswater was ‘transitory’. I didn’t know what she meant then. But my take is that few things are sadder than moving to a transitory part of town and staying put.
I crossed the street and followed my brothers around the black railings, past two reedy plants, down steep stairs, past the flaking security bars on the basement window – and so to a brown door with the appearance of being crushed beneath the stoop. Ralph pressed the bell which rattled rather than rung. Classical music was quieted. We stood listening to the sound of someone inserting a sequence of keys.
‘Who is it?’
‘Mum,’ Ralph said. ‘It’s us.’
‘Ralph!’
‘No less.’
‘Hello. Hello! One second.’
A bolt was shot.
‘Who constitutes us?’
Ralph leant towards the door: ‘Me and Jack and a surprise . . . a surprise visitor.’
‘Jack! Why didn’t you phone?’
‘We did.’
‘I didn’t hear it.’
‘You’ve got your Brahms on too loud again.’
‘What a surprise. Oh, bloody hell. Wait a second.’ The sound of a security chain and then, finally, Carol opened the door.
She was shorter than I had imagined – or maybe it was just that she seemed to have thickened from the angular younger woman of the photographs I had seen. She had silvery blonde hair now, though still in the same fringy cut – as though she had only agreed not to curtain herself from whatever was in view unwillingly. She wore this long grey skirt with a grey cardigan and there was something in her stance and bearing that suggested she had run out of people to be sardonic with and so had started on herself.
‘Sorry for the short notice,’ Ralph said. ‘We were—’
‘Who the . . . ?’ Carol’s expression travelled from delight to something frozen, hostile, involuntary. ‘Who the hell is that?’
‘This is—’
‘Get him away!’
‘Ma,’ Jack said.
Her voice began to rise and thin. ‘Get him away!’
‘Ma. He’s only a boy.’
Suddenly, she was shooing wildly with both hands. ‘Get him . . . Get him . . . Get that child away from here!’
Ralph stepped into the space between us and shot a look at Jack. ‘Mum, it’s OK,’ he said.
‘Out of my sight! Don’t ever!’ And now her raised voice ricocheted round the basement well and tore upwards at the world above: ‘Get him away from here!’
‘Ma.’ Ralph raised his hand to her elbow as if to calm a child. ‘Ma.’
But she was coming out: ‘Don’t ever! Ever. Ever. Get that bloody child away!’
She was pushing past and my brothers were physically blocking her now, holding her.
‘You! You! Look at me! Look at me, child.’
Over Ralph’s shoulder, her face was contorted with her fury. I turned and ran back up the stairs behind me, slipping, smashing my knee. I ran on down the street, her shriek swirling and echoing as if trapped for ever in the shell of my ears. I ran until I had run too far and I was suddenly alone, on an unfriendly London pavement, tall houses pressing in with the gathering darkness, strangers passing by, hiding my tears in the crook of my arm.
ON THE ESCARPMENTS
There are two other British couples staying at the chateau. They already hate us because we’re so late. I want to say, ‘Relax, people – I already hate us, too.’ But instead Dad and I struggle up past the old tractor and the crooked bench to the door of the cave – actually a barn – and receive their hellos with better grace than they are offered.
Inside, it is dark and cool and smells of sawdust and spilt wine. The French woman is our tasting hostess; she seems to be doing everything around the place. There are four champagne bottles on the big barrel by which she stands. There are these huge wooden wine racks down two of the walls. There’s some strange gigantic spider-claw agricultural equipment that seems like it might easily double for torture duty were the Inquisition to pass by. We all stand around – except for Dad, who takes the only chair. As he settles himself, shifting his legs with his hands, he looks up and says something about L’Assommoir, which I don’t quite understand except that it’s funny. Our hostess smiles – not by way of reciprocity but as if at the persistence of a favourite pupil – and my father’s easy French gives him the instant seniority of the room. Even the effortful way in which he moves does not make him an invalid to be pitied or patronized but somehow confers charisma and authority; centrality. I feel a new pulse of certainty. My father doesn’t want to be in a wheelchair. My father doesn’t want saliva to leak from h
is slack lips as he slurs and slips on the surface of words that he once so commanded.
Our hostess starts in on her spiel in what I sense is a deliberately thickened French accent. We all stand and listen to her for about ten minutes – none of which we understand, except Dad, who asks questions like he’s genuinely interested, which of course he is. Soon enough, Dad and the French woman are just talking to each other and the rest of us are left out.
Meanwhile, it takes me a while to figure out what the low volume squeaks and squeals are that we all keep hearing. Finally, I realize that they’re coming from a little white chunky speaker that one of the other men is holding: a baby monitor. Every so often, he ducks away from not listening to the French woman to hold it up to his ear in a move that is designed to be discreet-but-noticed.
One of the other women is making some kind of oblique play in my direction about how she is glad that she’s not with the baby-monitor guy. She starts a conversation: I’m Leah, she says, and I have no choice but to join in. Soon we’re all swapping stories about who we are and what we think and where we’re heading. I say stories because there’s no way I am telling anybody the truth. But then, I don’t think the others are telling the truth either; only the stuff they like to hear themselves say in public. Dad would argue that life is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves; that it’s all stories for Homo sapiens; narrative. Ralph says that he is ‘with Sartre’ and that our lives are really only the collection of stories by which we misunderstand ourselves. Jack says, ‘It feels pretty fucking real to me.’
I want to tell the other couples that it isn’t their fault; that I can’t respond or interact at the moment; that it’s just that I’m on the way to killing my father; and that its making me dislike people who are inattentively alive. That they could have been anyone because I’m only dealing in the tectonics these days and everything else feels like bad acting. But I don’t say any of this. Oh no. I join in like the weasel little pleaser that I am.
Which is how I find out that Leah and her husband are ad-agency millionaires and that the other couple, Neil and Beth-Marie, have had two children and are the first people on planet Earth to do so. The ad-agency millionaire doesn’t say much and he looks a bit like I imagine Richard the Third must have looked; tall but a little hunchbacked and twisted with prominent wrist bones and eyes that speak of an intelligence that he knows he has deployed in the wrong direction. He can’t smile but his mouth sort of twitches every so often. I figure he’s my only chance at dinner.