Let Go My Hand

by Edward Docx

  PART TWO

  TWO RIDERS WERE APPROACHING

  THE LIBERATOR OF THE LAKE

  Outside, in the distance, there’s an extremely tall man walking down the long tree-lined avenue towards us, the morning sun at his back. I’m waiting for the moment to tell Dad that I’ve changed my mind. Meanwhile, we’re all dying amidst the exquisite agony of a guesthouse breakfast: muted propriety, furtive greed, napkins and frippery.

  Except Dad. My father is enjoying himself. He’s got three different artisanal jams on the go with his second croissant and, unusually, he’s ordered coffee, not tea. He pours himself another cup – meaning that there’s no more left for me.

  ‘Only the French really know how to make coffee, Lou.’

  ‘Apart from the Italians,’ I say.

  ‘Apart from the Italians. Granted.’

  ‘And the whole of southern Europe.’

  He scoops the darkest jam so that it rests in the hollow cone where he has bitten off the end. I can’t think of a time when we have hung out with a hangover together like this; and I’m half glad of its communality and the way it obscures reality, like a big fat sheltering eclipse.

  The room has been rearranged since dinner – instead of one long table, we’re seated at four separates in a loose semicircle around the French windows. Dad and I at one end and Beth-Marie and Neil at the other, the latter busily taking pictures of the former as she pugnaciously breastfeeds. Christopher and Leah are in the middle, positioned on the same side so as neither loses out on greeting the sun. In the centre of our semicircle is another table on which a buffet breakfast has been arranged in front of the patio doors. A bottle of champagne on ice has been placed carefully at an angle as some kind of centrepiece or challenge or rebuke. Nobody knows what to do about it. I keep thinking about going up there and popping the cork, swigging some down myself and spraying the crowd like I won the Monte Carlo GP. There’s a weird atmosphere in the room – as if last night was all way too revealing and traumatic and now everyone wants it to be known that we are not friends after all. Ralph says the English are the only nation in the world that like to retreat after intimacy.

  ‘Where are we tonight, Lou?’

  ‘I’ve got it written down.’

  ‘On paper?’

  ‘In my phone.’

  There’s a pause as if that doesn’t count as written down. I start scrolling through the screens.

  ‘Do you know what I reckon, Lou? I think we should camp tonight.’

  I look up at him. ‘Camp at a campsite in the van?’

  He looks back with a where-else face. ‘Like we used to,’ he says. But the past tense is our enemy. ‘Like we always have, I mean.’

  I can hear Leah asking for low-fat yogurts and filtered water. Christopher is talking about carbs. Neil and Beth-Marie are discussing ‘their eldest’, who recently went off on his scooter on account of his adventurous nature, his intelligence, his likely being the next president but two.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ Dad asks.

  I lay down my phone and flatten my hands on the table.

  Softer, he adds: ‘Are you OK, Lou?’

  I can’t believe that he thinks I am hurting about the itinerary change. I need to say it but instead I just come out with some of his phrases for no reason: ‘The triumph of triviality, Dad. The championing of the charlatan. The much-trumpeted return of the third-rate.’

  His face cracks with amusement and he grips the table with one hand and raises his croissant with the other as if it were the sceptre of freedom. I can tell Leah and Christopher have stopped talking. But after last night, everybody thinks we’re nutters anyway. And Dad doesn’t care. He lets go of the table and reaches across with his spare hand and then he does something I can’t remember him doing for at least fifteen years: he spiders his big palm wide and lays it over the crown of my head and messes with my hair.

  ‘If this is a champagne hangover, Lou, I’d hate to spend whiskey time with you.’

  I can feel the effort on his arms that this lean is costing him. And that he’s loose and uncoordinated; physically, emotionally, cognitively; labile.

  I remember seeing this fox once in broad daylight in London, walking down the street towards me at a slight angle, and not running away or hiding, and I didn’t know what the hell was going on and I thought maybe it was aggressive or some new urban strain of day-fox, but then, when it got close, I could see it was really weak and sick and that it could barely walk at all, and that it was dying, and that it was frightened and confused and disorientated, and yet that it knew enough to know it shouldn’t be here; but, all the same, here it found itself, veering slightly always to its right; and I swear that as it came past it was kind of smiling – smiling madly, tight with fear – and I stepped out of its path across the street because it scared the hell out of me, even though I could see that it had only hours to live, because that face was the face of death.

  Dad withdraws his hand and now we’re on the edge of a precipice. If we fall, we fall for ever.

  But maybe he’s still of agile mind because he settles back and the sceptre becomes a croissant again: ‘One thing I will say, Lou, is that these croissants are superb. I can’t remember better.’

  ‘That’s the Alzheimer’s kicking in, Dad.’

  ‘You should eat. And if there are any left we should take them for the van.’

  ‘I’ll cancel the next place.’

  ‘Will there be a cancellation fee?’

  ‘Does it really matter?’

  He blinks then he offers me his sagging salivary grin and we regard each other from inside the ruins of our mortar-shelled minds – two rebel fighters sharing a joke amidst the casual atrocity.

  ‘I know a great campsite,’ he says. ‘It’s in the forests – near Belfort. It’s only about fifty miles from Basle and the border. We’ve been there before. Next to a river. More or less in the right direction. We can look up the address on your phone. Program the satnav.’

  My father puts down the croissant, picks up his napkin and starts to nod, slowly but with his whole upper body.

  But I’m thinking maybe the hangover is going to make me weep and maybe I should find me some more coffee and come back and just say it. Just say it, Lou: I can’t do this any more. Just say it: we’re going home.

  ‘Dad—’

  But suddenly the French windows are pulled open. And the tall man is standing there with the sun at his back.

  He is not eight foot after all. Rather, he has a child on his shoulders and a scooter in his fist. His clothes are dripping wet, his boots and his pale trousers are slathered in mud. He is wiry-thin with luxurious medium-length auburn hair and a widow’s peak and he has the demeanour of a wartime airman shot down over marshlands who has nonetheless enjoyed the walk home.

  Without stepping into the room, he addresses our breakfasting semicircle from the French windows: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, may I present young Felix. He was scootering his way through life – and with admirable conviction – but he has been the victim of an unexpected precipice. Witness knee.’

  With his free hand he raises the child’s leg from where it dangles. At chest-height, inside his light summer sports jacket (spattered and filthy), the man’s white T-shirt has a darker and wetter stain – blood from the boy’s injury. But the child, who is also soaking wet, is eagerly jockeying up and down on the madman’s shoulders and smiling.

  Beth-Marie has risen, indignant infant still affixed to abundant breast.

  The man turns a quarter left and a quarter right. He says: ‘Except for the knee and some grazes to the left hand, Felix seems clear of all ancillary injuries but he wishes it to be known that he would now like to pass some quality time in the close company of his maternal progenitor . . . Madame, you, I presume.’

  ‘Oh my God . . . Felix!’

  The man sets down the scooter and raises the grinning child from his shoulders so as to place him carefully on his feet. Then he bends down to offer his fis
t. The boy makes a reciprocal gesture. They knock together. Some sweet and secret knowledge of what is funny in the world passes between them. Then the man gently ushers the child towards pale-lipped Beth-Marie, who has dropped to her knees to greet him, the infant as before but suckling all the harder by way of an attention-gathering counter-offensive.

  ‘Felix,’ she scolds, ‘you must not go so far without Mummy!’

  The man stands up and in so doing scatters the spell he has created. ‘Hello, Lou. Hello, Dad. You look well – given the circumstances. I am fine, thank you for asking. Although my luggage has been detained in Oschersleben. An unforeseen separation of carriages. Which is irritating – especially since I am now covered in mud and child’s blood. This all seems very pleasant. Why has nobody opened that bottle of champagne?’

  Beth-Marie now sunders infant from breast and passes him to Neil, who hastily puts down his phone. The breast is re-housed and Felix is clasped to the self-same bosom his younger brother has just vacated.

  Immediately, the infant starts to fret. Neil has no idea what to do and so he backs away towards the door, seeking mutely to suggest that his experience best advises absence.

  ‘Did you see what actually happened?’ Beth-Marie demands as she fusses with Felix.

  Ralph bows. ‘Witnessed the entirety, madame. As I was walking in.’

  She dips a serviette in a glass of water and wipes at his knee. But she has reversed all Ralph’s good work and now the boy subsides into tears and the room is rendered awkward and immobile. I feel for the kid.

  ‘Where did he fall? Where?’

  ‘In the lake.’ Ralph indicates the path beyond the windows with a thumb over his shoulder. He’s no longer concentrating, though, because he’s craning in through the French windows and trying to read the label on the champagne upside down.

  ‘Demi-sec,’ he murmurs to himself from the threshold and begins rather half-heartedly to brush drips from his clothes.

  ‘There’s a lake?’

  Ralph realizes his mistake a fraction too late.

  ‘Why did nobody tell me before that there is a lake?’

  Collective uncertainty. Felix starts to cry more vehemently by way of doing justice to his mother’s outrage.

  ‘The lake is round to the side over the slight rise,’ my father says, gently. ‘It’s not very big.’

  Leah says: ‘You can see it from the first floor – if you have one of the big rooms.’

  ‘I think it’s artificial,’ Christopher adds, both softening and strengthening his wife.

  ‘Well what happened?’ Beth-Marie demands. ‘I want to know exactly. I’m going to—’

  ‘There’s a step down at the end of the path just before the . . . before the minuscule lake.’ Ralph is seeking to meet the boy’s eye and convey cheer. ‘Our adventurous hero must have plunged headlong to his gravelly fate and then fallen forward into the water. But—’

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God.’

  ‘But I was there instantaneously,’ Ralph affirms. ‘I leapt in after him. I became a sea horse. Then a land horse. He has ridden me all the way here. As you see – all is well.’

  Beth-Marie raises her voice against the crying of her infant and the sobbing of her son: ‘He fell into the lake?’

  ‘Waist-deep, madame. Waist-deep only. To my knees. His waist.’ Ralph, too, has to raise his voice. ‘Only a drunken midget who had never learnt to swim would run the risk of drowning.’

  But Beth-Marie isn’t listening. ‘Oh my God. Felix. You have to be more careful. Oh my God. Oh my God. Neil – Neil! – this is not acceptable.’

  The boy is now desolate – wailing, convulsing. Neil glowers from the corner where he is wrestling with the infant as if forced to share a tumble dryer with a rabid mongoose.

  Beth-Marie shouts above the racket. ‘Can you just go and get the manager.’

  ‘On it!’ Neil yells back: ‘On it. On it.’

  But now something magical happens that holds Neil from leaving the room . . . The madman of the lake steps muddy-booted and sodden through the patio doors and reaches out to an empty chair beside Beth-Marie where he picks up a blue cuddly toy horse about the size of a lapdog. He returns behind the central table so that he is once again framed in the doorway and clears his throat loudly against the yowling and the keening and the fury. Then he stands quite still. Preternaturally still. And then, somehow begins, gradually . . . to disappear.

  The crying falters.

  And suddenly, we all are staring at this toy horse as it begins to wake up. We watch it – slowly – taking in its surrounds. The crying stops. The horse acquaints itself with croissants and with cutlery, considers the fruit and the pots, the wide omelette platter, stops here, beckons us there, seems to smile and delight in its new-found consciousness.

  Our attention is intently focused. There is nothing else in the room. The puppeteer has vanished. We feel only for the horse. He canters and dances. A gentle tune is humming. And now this horse is not so much animate as appealing to us; in its every movement – real, alive – as if throughout its existence it has been waiting for this moment to perform, to reach out, to declare itself. Oh, did we not know of what a story it had to tell?

  And thus, quite naturally, the horse comes forward and begins to sing in a sweet tenor voice:

  ‘I am the lonely horsey, ma’am, that leapt into a lake

  To save my young friend Felix, sir, from his big mistake.’

  This is what Ralph used to do for me when I was a young boy; these mesmerizing little shows with these terrible-but-somehow-still-amazing songs that he made up on the spot. The horse pauses, looking out at the audience – sadness, he seems to say, sadness, peril, but not without hope.

  ‘His little hand was ouchy, ma’am, his little knee was scraped

  But bravely did he ride me, sir; and thus we did escape.’

  He takes the centre of the stage now. This is his moment. One front leg rises.

  ‘At our tail – a thousand ogres, ma’am, with very stinky toes . . .’

  He sings of trials, of destiny and overcoming.

  ‘. . . And a big fat troll with problems, sir, and a finger up his nose.’

  Galloping.

  ‘There were witches in the ditches, ma’am, and goblins in the trees,

  But Little Felix Rascal, sir, he didn’t even sneeze.’

  Back and forth, back and forth – a spoon a lance; toast racks the lists.

  ‘He cared not he was wet, my friends, he cared not he was cold.

  He fought off all these idiots, ma’am, and fast away he rode.

  The monsters and the stinkies, sir, they never had a chance

  Because Little Felix Rascal, friends, is the coolest boy in France.’

  The horse bows and rears and bows again and then leaps towards Felix, who catches him. And in that instant, as if by magic, Ralph reappears.

  Leah is clapping and whooping. Christopher, too. I catch my father’s eye. Everybody is smiling. Felix is clutching the horse and his face is suffused in that kind of delight that only kids can know. And that I remember as Ralph’s gift to me.

  ‘Holy Mary,’ Beth-Marie says again. And then, as if seeing Ralph for the first time: ‘You’re soaking.’

  ‘Madame, the lake was wet.’

  ‘Do you have any spare clothes?’

  Ralph grimaces. ‘Oschersleben.’

  ‘Do you want to borrow some of my husband’s?’

  ‘That’s very kind. I’d be honoured.’

  ‘Neil, have you got a spare shirt and some trousers?’

  ‘No rush, Neil, no rush,’ says Ralph. ‘I think I am going to have some breakfast now. My trip has not been without its own peculiar trauma. Couchettes. Taxis. Lack of adequate funding.’

  Neil finds his voice: ‘Can you do that again? I’d love to film it.’

  ‘No, Neil – alas, I can never do it again.’ He picks up the champagne, which drips from the melting ice. He reaches out a cigarette from the inner po
cket of his battered jacket. ‘Lou, Dad, I think petit déjeuner out here on the terrace for me – since I am covered in shit. At least until I am bit drier . . . Luckily the sun is with us. Can I have your croissant, Lou, and can you bring me a glass or some kind of vessel? I want to explore the world of demi-sec.’

  My heart has lightened.

  ‘He’s my brother,’ I say.

  I’m not sure Tolstoy had it right. All families, happy or sad, conceal a great deal of dark matter, something greater than the known physics and chemistry, something that must create the dark energy that holds them together or pushes them apart, something unseen and unknowable that just has to be written into the equations in order to make sense of what we understand and feel and discover about one another. Who knows what this dark matter is or how it creates so much dark energy? Something to do with all that living together, I guess: the getting up every day, the going to bed every night, the bathroom, the brushing of teeth with the wrong toothbrush, the unexpected naked encounters on the stairs, the distinctive sound of water running in particular pipes, the hasty breakfasts, the laborious dinners, the likes and dislikes of every diet, the fact that the oven door swings open and the fridge door sticks shut, the box in the hall that nobody claims, the silent moods, the covert negotiations, the cyclical anxieties, all those matters dealt with, all those matters pending, the ignoring, the badgering, the endless money trouble, the successes and the failures, the summer nights when the light lingers later than everyone remembers, the dark January cold when everything feels a little hunched and in retreat, the fights, the furies, the feuds, everything said, everything unsaid, everything unsayable; the secret understandings of love.

  But what, I want to know, is the best way for a family to behave? To drag the dark matter out into the light? To be honest? I feel like that word – ‘honest’ – I feel like it’s blurring or migrating or drifting. Or that its meaning now has a contraband freight of selfishness somewhere hidden below the waterline. Or maybe the word is slipping away from us into the mist like some old idea from the last century. And is it not at odds with love? Doesn’t love necessarily require some kind of delusional state? After all, surely only a monster incapable of love would tell a child the truth of the world?