by Edward Docx
But Ralph says that Jack did not realize the magnitude of Dad’s anger. Instead, he assumed that Ralph had blamed everything on him, Jack, and so wanted urgently to set the record straight. In reality, the picture was a cheap print but – in his nine-year-old mind – Jack probably feared it might be as valuable as the paintings he had seen in galleries. And so, when Dad got to their doorway, spitting curses, Jack was still standing there, Ralph says, within easy reach, pleading tremulously in his unbroken voice that this was not his fault, that they were both dancing on the beds when it fell and the frame split and the water spilt.
Standing his ground was Jack’s big mistake, according to Ralph. Because now Dad did not pause in his momentum and – in one movement – he picked Jack up, strode into the room and threw him back onto the nearer mattress – all with such force that Jack landed on his back and bounced up again, slamming his nose on the side-table as he fell into the gap between the beds.
Ralph remembers his brother’s cry and thud – and then twisting round to see his father half-naked and physically shaking as he turned his bare back and took the key out of the lock of their door. Ralph remembers Jack’s wail break; remembers Dad turning back again and advancing on them both, arm raised and shouting at them to shut up; remembers kicking himself off his bed and down into the gap beside his brother; remembers knowing with a child’s clarity – innocent and experienced – that Dad would find it harder to hit them both together down there; remembers his father lean down over the bed; remembers the taut contorted fury of his face as he brought up his pointed finger and hissed: ‘Not another word!’
They heard him leave. They heard him lock the door behind him.
They didn’t move for what seemed like ages.
When they dared to untangle themselves, Jack wasn’t exactly crying but he was convulsing with something past tears, holding his nose in the cup of his hand.
And Ralph remembers looking at his brother in horror – looking at his own face reflected – and seeing the red line of blood from his brother’s nose to his lips; sometimes Jack sucking it in and sometimes smearing it across his cheek where it streaked and mingled with his tears.
I think of the two of them. The last of the summer dusk at their attic window. The hotel tray and the kettle with the too-short cord. Sachets of sugar and instant coffee. The old television. The beds a mess. The fallen picture – still broken on the floor by their upturned glass. The pillows wet from the water spill. The silence of that room. The two of them sitting on the bed. Jack crying. Ralph – now a child-adult – doing and saying everything he had ever seen a grown-up do at the scene of an injury. His face grave and comforting and sympathetic. A knot in his boyish brow. A hunch in his narrow shoulders. Willing his brother to be OK as he looked across. Holding the bedside tissues. Jack’s blood soaking red-brown through them one after another. Head back. Head forward. Still the blood. Then Ralph trying the door. Scared to bang on it and shout for his father – for anyone. What would they say? Ralph pulling the chair to the window. Because if it gets worse, he told Jack, he would smash the pane and shout for help.
The two of them.
Scared that Jack was going to die. No one in their world. And nobody ever coming to their rescue.
Ralph remembers that when Jack fell asleep with stiffcaked tissues stuffed up his nose, he climbed into his bed and lay beside him because his own bed was wet from the spill and he was afraid to sleep alone.
And, in the clear light of the morning, when they woke, Jack’s pillow and his sheets were everywhere smeared in blood. There were tissues all over the floor. There were streaks of blood on both of their pyjamas. Jack’s nose was swollen and his lip fat. Scared and ruined and sure that they would be further blamed for the mess, Ralph says they had no idea what time it was and so they sat and waited for their unknowable father to unlock the door and take them up the mountain.
Outside, Ralph remembers, the sun was shining as strong and sure as the day before. And the peacock was crowing.
‘What are you doing, Dad?’ Ralph leans forward like a cartoon burglar poking his head in through an open window.
‘Finding some euros,’ my father says, scrabbling, sausage-fingered.
‘Yeah – but why?’
‘To pay the toll.’
‘The toll?’
‘Yes.’
‘But how can we ever pay that?’
‘Where’s all the change gone?’ Dad asks.
Not yet lunchtime and we’ve recently stopped for gas and what Ralph calls a few ‘errands’. We’re eighty kilometres outside of Troyes. I don’t know why but I’ve had my foot down. We’ve been making up time. Which is a dumb idea and a dumb expression because it’s the one thing we cannot do. Ralph has started drinking something from an opaque plastic cup. He says it’s an ‘isotonic’ vitamin replenishment drink recommended by his ‘personal physician’.
‘There’s no change,’ Dad says. ‘It’s gone. Do you have any money, Louis?’
‘Of course he doesn’t. Look at him.’
‘Ralph?’
‘Offshore.’
‘I’m sure I put some change in here. There was at least twenty.’
A vast blue sign frames the road ahead. It stretches across all four lanes saying ‘Péage Péage Péage Péage’. We’ve been getting these signs all the way down from the coast, of course, but the word is just getting nastier and nastier.
‘Surely, Dad,’ Ralph says, ‘now is the time for a credit-card spunkathon – the like of which the world has never before seen?’
I glance in the rear-view.
‘I mean shouldn’t we be flying there,’ he continues. ‘Private jet. Load up with beautiful girls and designer drugs. You should buy a gun – shoot a Serbian hooker in the ass at thirty thousand feet because she disrespected your pamphlet on W. B. Yeats. Go out in style.’
‘You’re a maniac,’ I say. I’m thinking that I need to text Jack and see if he has booked a flight yet. You spend time with Ralph, you need Jack. You spend time with Jack, you need Ralph.
‘Spunk it, Dad,’ Ralph says. ‘Spunk whatever you’ve got left. Now’s the time to get right down to it. Come on. What do you really want to eat? What do you really want to drink? Imbibe? Inhale? Inject? Who do you really want to sleep with? This is your one shot at consequence-free living. There’s no collateral damage any more. A few days where you can finally let go. If you’re going to be dead, you might as well be alive.’ He sips his plastic cup and aerates the drink in a parody of how Dad tastes his wine.
I look across at my father; he’s fiddling in the door.
‘I think Ralph means we can put the toll charge on your credit card, Dad?’
‘Hell, yeah; that is exactly what I mean. All seven euros of it.’
Dad’s phrase for credit cards is ‘the never-never’. He considers them the embodiment of all that is wrong with capitalism and the West. Even at the best of times, Dad is stressed by transactions: tolls, tickets, bills. When he’s in America, he dreads going out because he can’t get his head around the tip – the whole idea of tipping and ‘the falseness’ it engenders ‘in society’. Maybe it’s because he has never had quite enough money or maybe it’s something to do with the shadow of the war and austerity or ‘making do’, as he calls it? I fix my eyes on the traffic ahead and change down a gear. Péage. Péage. Péage. Péage.
‘Pills, that’s what we need,’ Ralph says. ‘We could use your card for that too, Dad. MDMA and some kind of definitive sexual extravagance.’
Thick-fingered, Dad rummages on the dash. I have to choose one of the queues to join.
‘I could bust through the barriers,’ I suggest.
Ralph shakes his head. ‘Not possible, Baby Lou. You’re going to have five hundred randy French cops all firing their weapons from behind their vehicle doors. Either that or they’ll vaporize your cousin’s grocery store from thirty thousand feet.’
‘Asymmetry,’ Dad mutters.
‘I was just—’<
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‘And if they don’t shoot you,’ Ralph says, ‘you’re not going to be able to get them to chalk you down with Camus and Sartre and the gang – “it’s existence that I’m trying to break here, officer, not the law” – no, sir – you’re going to be a terrorist, Lou.’
‘I don’t have any cousins,’ I say.
Dad has given up the search and he’s struggling like a man pretending he’s not in a straitjacket – merely to get his wallet out from under him. I can sense that Ralph is quietly processing Dad’s state in a different jurisdiction of his intelligence. I go for the pay-with-card line because it’s shorter. As if we are in a rush. ‘Who inherits credit-card debts?’ I ask.
‘Who inherits what. That’s a good question,’ Ralph says. ‘They can’t transfer debt. Not if the card is in one name and that person doesn’t exist any more.’
‘You’re shitting me?’
‘We need to stop talking like this,’ Dad says. He has his wallet out – no mean feat.
‘Jack will know about debt,’ Ralph says, leaning back. ‘He’s an expert on personal finance now. Has anyone tackled him on life insurance, by the way? How do you want us to talk, Dad? Would you prefer—’
‘Can we stop . . .’ I interrupt. ‘Can we all stop having a go at Jack.’
The van comes to halt in the queue.
Dad looks over at me. ‘Have you definitely not taken any money out of here, Lou?’
‘No. Ask Ralph.’
‘Ralph?’
But Ralph has the fingers of his spare hand pressed to his head as though he’s thinking that maybe the Higgs boson isn’t the last word after all and existence has somewhere smaller to go. ‘Seriously, Lou, do you think Siobhan has taken over Jack’s mind?’
‘No.’
‘Is the Pope living in there?’
‘No.’
‘Does he tell stories like, “Oh, I saw a tramp on the tube and he reminded me of the risen Lord”?’
‘No.’
‘What’s he like now? Conspicuously platitudinous?’
‘He’s distant,’ Dad says. ‘Unengaged.’
‘He’s not distant. That’s not true. Why can’t we stay with what is true and real? OK – pass me the card.’
‘We’re not putting it on the card,’ my father says.
‘We have to, Dad.’
‘We are not putting it on the card. I have cash – here.’
‘We have to. We’re in the card queue.’
‘For God’s sake: why are we in the card queue?’
Ralph leans forward again, smiling and pretending puzzlement: ‘Why are we in the card queue, Lou?’
‘Dad. Card. Come on. We’re holding people up.’
Dad hands me his card. His irritation fighting the slackness in his face so that for a moment he actually looks disfigured. I have the feeling of being seven again and having just knocked over my expensive orange juice in a restaurant.
I turn away and push the card in the slot beyond my window. There’s a guy in the booth whose job is . . . to do nothing since there’s no money to take. He looks at me. His eyes are grey and depthless but they glint madly at certain angles – like tarmac. He’s wearing his headphones and shaking his head and singing along in that closed-off way people do when they think they are in the band, wrote the song, and nobody feels it more than they do. For a second, I believe that I know everything about him and that we’re somehow the same. I want him to take off his headphones so I can whisper ‘me too’ and let him see the solidarity in my face. I want to call Eva. If I could live in a faded old room with high ceilings, tall windows and a view of an Italian lake and write poems for Eva, then I’d be happy. Is that too much to ask?
I engage first gear. I pull away until the engine’s grumble rises to grievance. I leave it a fraction too long before I change into second – merely to annoy Dad. I don’t know why.
‘Back to Jack,’ Ralph says. ‘Has something happened to him?’
‘Well, he’s got married, had three children and he bought a house. And I think he’s trying to live as an ordinary citizen in London amidst the Oligarchs and the Oil Sheiks and the Fund Managers who serve them. He needs—’
‘That is a whole other issue,’ Dad cuts in, his irritation about the card, about money, now channelling into this deeper swell. ‘Why – why – why does the British government feel the need to open its legs to the world’s most morally disgusting wealth?’
‘Does it?’ I accelerate harder than need be – third, fourth.
‘Yes it bloody well does. The message we send out is crystal clear. As soon as you’ve stolen your nation’s resources or otherwise sullied the world, let us know, sir, and we’ll find you a big house so that you can use our courts and our best schools and have our police protect you. And no, don’t worry, we won’t ask you to pay tax. Would you like a newspaper, or a football club? Or just a property portfolio? That’s the real immigration problem, let’s not—’
‘So nothing has happened to Jack?’ Ralph asks, cutting Dad off. ‘He’s the same Jack as before. Dad, what are you moaning about?’
‘Well, something has happened,’ Dad returns with sarcasm enough to power a dynasty of dark-hearted generations. ‘He used to be a serious political journalist. He used to be an atheist. Now he is peddling sinister insurance scams in the Third World and inviting Father Patrick over for carrot cake and kiddie-fiddling.’
‘Damascus,’ Ralph says.
‘He’s got to get the boys through school,’ I say. ‘It’s free if you go Catholic.’
‘That’s the excuse, Lou,’ Dad says, his vehemence quickening. ‘But he doesn’t need to do that. He’s earning vast amounts of money from the insurance racket. Why does he need to be fawning over clerics? Why does he need to be perverting the minds of his own children?’
‘Maybe it’s because of what happened with the boys,’ I say.
Jack’s boys had some near disaster in the womb. If they’d been anywhere else in the world but down the road from the only professor who could perform the operation, they’d both have been dead: no Billy, no Jim.
‘So because your children are the lucky beneficiaries of science and medicine, you submit yourself to the world’s most insane – not to say disgusting – power structure?’
‘Not most insane, not most disgusting, Dad. I mean—’
‘Up there, Lou. Up there. You thank the doctors in the morning – the people who did the actual work – and then you’re on your knees in front of the priests in the afternoon – who did not a single thing. You’re telling your children they are born brim-full of original sin – whatever that is – and that only the man in the black dress up at the front can save them – assuming you let him touch your testicles whenever you get changed at the schools he’s so kindly opened to foster grooming opportunities. That the state then subsidizes. Leaving aside the misogyny and the paedophilia and the imaginary friends, wouldn’t that make you feel bad?’
Ralph strikes a match. He knows, because I’ve told him, that for whatever reason – the medicine or the disease – Dad is more easily slipping from reason to rant these days. (‘Mirroring the modernity he claims to dislike, Lou,’ Ralph says.) But here’s the thing: Ralph seems actually to relax the more Dad gets riled. He blows a smoke ring and says: ‘It’s like you always say, Dad. The Enlightenment seems to have passed a great number of people by.’
‘It’s got to change, Lou. Something has got to give. Mark my words.’
I don’t know what Dad means or why. What is ‘it’?
‘Maybe Jack has a predilection for ideology,’ Ralph says. ‘Millions do. Is this not the same Jack who used to peddle the Socialist Worker?’ Ralph is Jack’s most lethal enemy and his most loyal defender; the precision and cruelty of his attacks are perverse evidence of some kind of love that undermines even its own undermining. ‘A lot of religious people – they like rules and punishment. They find it reassuring. They want the imaginary strictures. They like feeling that they have t
his private God who redeems their anxieties and connects them to a power structure that has secret dominion over others. Am I right, Dad?’
Dad snaps: ‘Jack is not like that. You know it. I know it.’
Troyes: forty kilometres. I’m speeding.
‘What is Jack like? Christ, I would love a pork pie.’
‘Maybe it’s nothing to do with all of that.’ I try to keep my voice level. ‘Maybe he just doesn’t want you to do this.’
‘Then why not say that?’
I look across. ‘That is what he says, Dad. He says exactly that.’
‘Then why all the . . . why all the “you can’t come and see Billy and Jim and Percy. You can’t be friends with them. You can’t get to know them.” It’s manipulation.’
‘Manipulation,’ Ralph repeats, egging him on. ‘Manipulation and . . . control. Dad! You might be on to something! But why? Why, I wonder?’
I say: ‘Maybe he doesn’t want his children to get to know their grandfather and then the grandfather just . . . just to die.’
Dad looks across. His voice quietens. ‘Every grandfather dies.’
‘Who was Jesus’s grandfather, I wonder?’ Ralph asks. ‘And did he die? We must ask Jack.’
A flock of birds swirl into the air like a monseigneur’s cloak.
‘Why do you want to stop in Troyes, Dad?’ I ask.
‘Oysters,’ Ralph says. ‘Pork pie.’
‘Because I want to visit the cathedral again.’
‘Jesus,’ I say and look across. Dad’s eyes are opaque with their anger for a moment and then they soften as he realizes and he sees me again. I shake my head. Ralph is laughing. Dad laughs. We let the hypocrisy and contradiction permeate and settle for a spell. Then Ralph leans forward, suddenly serious.
‘Hang on a minute,’ he says.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘What?’ Dad echoes.
‘Why aren’t we listening to any music?’
‘We can’t,’ I say, sadly.
‘Why?’
‘Because.’
‘Because it means too much to us,’ Dad says.
‘Fuck that,’ Ralph says. ‘Have you got your phone converter?’