Let Go My Hand

by Edward Docx

  PÉAGE

  ‘So,’ Ralph says, as if summing up the entirety of existence thus far, ‘the good thing about this trip is that nobody can object if I smoke. I mean – you’re going to die any minute, Dad. So passive smoking is hardly a worry for you. And you – Lou – you secretly smoke anyway. I assume you haven’t told Dad – since in your case the habit is peculiarly untactful.’

  I look across at Dad. He is leaning on his pillow with the map spread on his brand-new summer-holiday slacks, which are the colour of rubber bands, and which he has unreservedly teamed with his sky-blue tunic-fleece. He is happy – there’s no other word for it – but he makes a rueful face and shakes his head slowly as if to say we’re going to have to retune to radio Ralph. In the rear-view, I can see my brother standing up, falling over, engaging epileptically with the stove.

  ‘Did Lou mention it, Dad?’ Ralph asks, loudly.

  ‘He tells me nothing.’

  ‘Well, Lou is a ten-a-day man now, Dad. Swaggers around the office half-arseholed most of the time, I bet, trousers roped low round scrotum and cleft, blowing smoke into the face of every fucker he fancies. Which, I bet, is not that many – is it, Lou? Not in database management.’ There comes the attenuated rasp of one of Ralph’s slow match strikes. He has found the cooks’ matches. ‘Don’t worry, I am opening the window.’ He succeeds in unsticking the catch and then sits down in the centre of the bench seat so that he can see out of the front window between Dad and me.

  I ease my window down a fraction to let out the dancing horseflies. We’re going to buy baguettes later, and soft cheese, and ripe tomatoes, and wine the like of which we’ve never before dared to look upon. We’re going to camp like the old days and fuck this chateau bullshit. Maybe we are falling under a spell that has been cast by France itself – the fine weather, the steady ranks of the vines marching up and down the hills, the faded ochre houses of a blue-shuttered village in the near distance, the white-arrowed sign ahead that tells us ‘Toutes Directions’ as if there were indeed no choice. And Ralph: the fact that he is here; the surprise of it; the joy of it; the fresh air of it. Dad says that the greatest pleasure is to meet again with someone you love after a time apart and I’m with him on that.

  ‘Can you use the side seat?’ I ask. ‘It’s depressing looking at you every time I have to use the mirror.’

  ‘Nope. I am going to sit here and enjoy my holiday. Every mile.’ Ralph is wearing his own boots and jacket with the clothes he’s borrowed from Neil: a pair of pale-grey jogging bottoms and a repulsive green T-shirt that says ‘Daddy Day Care’. He’s holding a little saucer that he must have taken from the chateau and into which he studiously taps his ash. ‘Comfort is the enemy, Lou. Isn’t that right, Dad? Or is it death that is the enemy? I forget. Who said that?’

  Even though he never concedes a single thing to my father, Ralph still expects him to know everything. And yet, at the same time, he has a way of turning Dad’s knowledge into further evidence against him. But if Ralph has been caught off guard by the reality of Dad’s decline, then he’s hiding it; or maybe this is his way of being obliging. I fix on his eyes for a moment in the rear-view again; they are considering and undecided and they belie the playfulness of his voice.

  ‘That’s Corinthians.’ Dad is winding madly at the half-broken window handle; sometimes it turns without result; other times the window goes down. ‘“The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”’

  ‘St Paul. I should have known.’ Ralph exhales. ‘History’s least welcome correspondent.’

  ‘Then used by Donne, of course, for the big one,’ Dad says.

  ‘The big what?’ I ask.

  ‘Holy Sonnet.’

  I had forgotten that this is what it’s like with these two; it must be years since we three have been alone together.

  ‘You know . . .’ Ralph begins, as if reading my mind in real time. ‘You know, it’s good to see you both after so long.’

  Dad has his window down all the way. The country lane ends. I know the answer but I ask just the same to give him the pleasure of responding: ‘Which way is it here, Dad?’

  ‘South,’ Ralph says, leaning forward again. ‘It’s south and then a bit east.’

  ‘The satnav says left – do you want to check it on the map, Dad?’

  ‘Already have.’ Dad breathes the fresh air from his window as if his lungs were tasting it the same way his mouth tastes wine. He points at the sign: ‘Left. Sommepy-Tahure, Suippes, then direction Bouzy. Stay Bouzy.’

  I ease the van onto the main road. I like the driving. I like that my family give the youngest this honour – even though one is unable and the other is already over the limit.

  ‘So how are you, Lou?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’

  ‘What the fuck?’

  Ralph smiles.

  ‘Stop swearing.’ Dad sighs.

  ‘Please tell me that you’ve got a girlfriend, Lou. People need to be making urgent love all over the world or I start to feel uneasy. Like maybe the other team is winning.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say.

  ‘You’re fine?’

  ‘Is the E50 the same as the A4, Dad?’

  ‘Yes. Bouzy. Stay with Bouzy.’

  ‘Bouzy.’

  ‘Come on, Lou.’ Ralph leans forward and pats my side: ‘How are you? Let’s get down to it. I want to hear your news. How is it all going? Spare me the tiresome virtue. Talk to me. I’m utterly sick of myself.’

  I glance back at him. ‘Apart from this?’

  ‘Apart from this.’ He winks. ‘Or including this, if you prefer.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re fine? That’s it?’ He strikes another match.

  ‘Totally fine.’

  ‘You don’t seem fine.’

  ‘Ralph, seriously: fuck off.’

  ‘Oh. Oh. It’s “fuck off” now, is it?’ I can tell he is smiling without looking. ‘Unbelievable,’ he says. ‘For the last six months I have had nothing from you except “Please fly to London, please fly to Paris, please fly to Frankfurt, please fly to Zurich.” It’s been “Oh oh oh, Dad this, me that, Jack the other. You need to be here, Ralph. You need to be there, Ralph. We’re all dying, Ralph, we all don’t want to die, we all do want to die. Please call, please Skype, please teleport. Please come. Please stay. Please go.” And now – now that I have interrupted rehearsals to clang and thump across Europe on minor overnight trains – now all you can say is “fuck off”.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  Dad cuts in: ‘Please stop swearing, the pair of you.’

  ‘Not possible.’ Ralph tips his saucer into the plastic bag we are using as a bin and then shakes it for no reason. ‘But we’re getting off the point. Have you got a girlfriend?’

  ‘I actually feel sorry for you.’

  The sun seems to be climbing higher in the sky today and there are people working in the fields as if the Earth was indeed created for the well-being of human kind after all.

  ‘Eva,’ Dad says, disloyally, shifting allegiance.

  ‘Eva.’ Ralph says her name almost as slowly as he strikes his matches. ‘How old is she? Nineteen, I hope? What did you go for, Lou, looks or personality?’

  ‘Jesus. I didn’t “go” for anything.’

  ‘You must have gone for something, Lou. We all go for something.’

  ‘A person.’

  ‘Oh, please. We’re driving to Dignitas not some hipster festival for total fucking dick-weasels who want to look like D. H. Lawrence. You should come to Berlin, Lou. They have both there – all rolled into one: intelligent, charismatic, witty women who also know what they are doing in the sack. I mean it. Experts. None of the bewildered ironing-board routine you get in the Home Counties. It must be their fathers, don’t you think, Dad? Teachers. That’s what fathers need to be: teachers.’

  For reasons I don’t fully understand, only Jack can take Ralph on. Or only Jack can do so effectively. I
look across at my father as if to say, who is this nutter? But he’s looking back at him like, who are these nutters? Nobody really understands anybody else; this may be an insurmountable problem for humanity.

  The road widens and I steer us into the overtaking lane.

  ‘I wish I had a sister,’ I say.

  ‘I wish I had alternative trouser-wear and the prospect of a pork pie,’ Ralph says.

  I glance in the mirror. ‘What about you?’ I ask. ‘Who are you with?’

  ‘Anyone. Everyone. No one.’

  ‘How does that feel?’

  ‘Sexually very satisfying. Intellectually preoccupying. Spiritually lonely.’

  ‘Maybe you’re a frustrated monogamist.’

  ‘Tried it. Feels like death without the mercy of death.’ He exhales. ‘Not that I would know how death feels. How does death feel, Dad?’

  Dad blinks. ‘Do you think there will be oysters in Troyes?’

  ‘It’s not a very coastal town,’ I reply.

  ‘There will be oysters,’ Ralph offers, confidently. His smoke rings somehow drift forward despite the air from my window rushing the other way. ‘And there will surely be a pork pie. Does anyone have any paracetamol or aspirin or ibuprofen or just something to take away this ceaseless pain?’

  ‘They’re in the old ice-cream tub,’ I say, ‘under your seat.’

  ‘Of course. The magic mint-choc-chip box.’ Ralph gets up and starts rolling around in the back again, shouting forward: ‘Do painkillers have a best-before date, I wonder? After which time the pain can’t be killed? Or is there always a solution? What do we think? Dad? Where’s Jack, by the way? In Jakarta enslaving a new generation with insurance?’ He laughs at his own bad joke.

  ‘He’s coming,’ I say, deliberately casual.

  ‘He’s coming?’ Ralph noses forward again suddenly interested and hovers with his cigarette in the corner of his mouth. ‘I thought he was implacably against? Drawbridge up. Fuck-you flags a-flutter on the battlements.’

  ‘He was,’ Dad says.

  ‘He is,’ I say.

  ‘Do we know why?’

  ‘Siobhan,’ Dad says.

  ‘That’s not true, Dad.’

  Dad raises a shoulder and looks away.

  There are untroubled cows crossing a bridge over our heads. If I was a farmer, I’d grow tobacco.

  ‘I was meaning.’ Ralph sits back down with the ice-cream tub. ‘Do we know why he’s suddenly coming? Are we to assume we’re now being taken seriously?’

  ‘He can’t get a flight at the moment,’ I say.

  ‘Late for death. Who would have thought it possible?’

  ‘Is he meeting us in Zurich?’

  ‘I don’t know, Dad. It’s wherever he can fly to. He doesn’t want us to go to Zurich.’

  ‘Are we going to Zurich?

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Bouzy!’ Dad grabs at the wheel. ‘Bouzy, Lou!’

  I swerve us across the road and just make the exit. A horn blasts behind us.

  It’s true: my brothers were brought up by a different, younger man; one of the prophets of the new literary theory then at the height of his grandiloquence, loudly punishing himself and his people out there in the desert where he also liked to call himself king. He who they knew would allow no false idols but insisted on worship of the one true Marx. Pompous, vain, conceited. So Ralph treats Dad with a kind of unengaged humour you reserve for a drunken bum with good patter begging carriage-to-carriage on the tube whereas Jack treats him with that simmering moral repugnance you reserve for those fat white men who incinerated America’s moral authority in the deserts of Iraq.

  Meanwhile, the deeper emotional calculus goes something like this. For Ralph: ‘Listen, Dad, I find you to be such a staggering hypocrite betrayer that in the face of all your public appearances as the upholder of this and the defender of that I am left no choice but to approach your every decision, action and utterance with the arched eyebrows of amused indifference or disdain.’ Whereas for Jack it runs in the opposite direction, more like: ‘Listen, Dad, given what you have done to my mother and what you have put me through – you leave me no choice but to live my life as a reproach to you and all that you are; either that, or my interaction with you might be mistaken for forgiveness, which cannot be.’

  I’m exaggerating but the point is that the default setting on Ralph’s hard drive is to withhold engagement while the default setting on Jack’s is to withhold consent. Ralph feels that to engage is to take Dad seriously. Jack feels that if he endorses one thing, he endorses everything. Dad used to say that when they were on the attack, it was like dealing with Nixon and Kennedy at the same time but not knowing which was which. I sometimes think they’re straight-up cruel. But who was their teacher in that?

  Ralph once told me that when he and Jack were around nine, my father took them to Keswick in the Lake District to ‘climb their first mountain’. Carol didn’t enjoy tramping around in bogs and so this was going to be some kind of father–son bonding weekend. A rite of passage; so my father billed it.

  In the weeks leading up to the trip, Ralph remembers that Dad duly made a big deal of the gear they would need – buying second-hand walking boots for them both, balaclavas, waterproof trousers and Ordnance Survey maps; ostentatiously teaching them how to orientate a compass over the breakfast table.

  Unusually, Dad took the Friday off work. And so they loaded up all the camping and walking equipment into the old van and left London – bright if not early – for the six-hour drive north. Ralph also remembers that the weather was exceptionally good and that he and Jack felt happy on the drive; that they shared a rare father-and-son ‘camaraderie’ – Ralph’s word. They stopped en route and reheated the campfire stew that Carol had made for them on the little stove in the back. The traffic thinned after Manchester and so, sometime in the middle afternoon, they were driving through the shadowed valleys of England’s only real mountains.

  But when they got to Keswick itself, the boys were surprised to hear that they weren’t going to be staying at a campsite after all. Instead, Dad had booked them into a hotel: a vast Lakeland grey-stone house with peacocks in the garden and a view of Skiddaw – the mountain they were to climb in the morning. Money being in much-cited shortage back then, this was the first time my brothers had ever stayed in such a place. But Dad reckoned that rain was now forecast for the next day and that they would need a roof over their heads following the rough weather. Ralph remembers in particular how struck he was by this because it undermined and contradicted Dad’s often-professed love of camping come hell or high water (of which both there was usually plenty) whenever they went anywhere in the UK. So why balk this time?

  In any case, from the moment they parked the van in the walled garden, Ralph says that they were thrown into a fresh and febrile excitement – pretending to be much older than they were and yet taking a childish delight in everything. There was a dining room with white tablecloths and a menu to read at a lectern; there was a billiard room with a massive table and balls to roll too fast at the pockets; there was a stag’s head hanging in the hall above the reception desk and a wide polished wood staircase with banisters that begged to be climbed; there were corridors to be explored and gardens and attics and bowls of nuts free on the tables in the bar. Which is where, also unusually, Dad then said that they were going to have their dinner – and pretty much straight away.

  And so my brothers sat in the bay window like twin princes on a progress – Ralph’s phrase – while Dad ordered sandwiches and crisps and – unbelievably – Coca-Cola. Three hundred miles north and this was a new man. His generosity, his ease, his bonhomie. Ralph remembers that he didn’t even force them through the agony of eating their salad garnishes. But it was important that they get an early night, Dad insisted. The walk was long and steep. And the weather . . .

  Maybe the most surprising thing, though, was that Dad had booked them a separate room – down the other end of a creaky corridor.
My brothers were delighted. Their own kettle. Their own TV. A bathroom across the hall with a shower and wrapped-up mini-soaps. Everything.

  Ralph remembers that Dad sat with them while they washed and talked about what happened if they got caught in a ‘white out’ and how to ‘save’ the balaclavas in their backpacks so that they had something more to put on if it got ‘serious’. He read to them about Skiddaw. And when he got up to say good night, he said that they could read too, as long as they promised to be sure to be asleep when he checked on them at nine.

  And so the third time Dad opened his own bedroom door to their knock – at almost ten o’clock – he was a man in the vice of fury.

  Ralph remembers that Dad blocked the entrance again, his bare foot propping the door open a fraction as he stepped out, his right hand holding the white cord of his untied pyjama trousers. So Ralph stood back, caught out by this new register of his father’s rage, and tried to speak, gabbling about how the picture had ‘just fallen’ off the wall and how the frame had splintered and knocked over the glass of water between their beds . . .

  But the threshold had been crossed: they had disturbed Dad once too often and now he was in the burning draught of an anger that sought furious vent. He let the door shut behind him with no regard for being locked out and pursued Ralph down the corridor, speaking in a furious whisper that rose as he went.

  Ralph says that he saw Jack leaning out of their room at the end of the corridor and he remembers his brother’s terrified-but-determined expression when he broke through the fire-door and came towards him with Dad bare-chested and red-faced at his heels – still in his thirties then, at the height of his manly noon.

  All in a second, Ralph ran past where Jack was standing and leapt onto the far bed to cower in whatever wrap of the duvet he could twist around himself.