by Edward Docx
‘It depends . . . it depends on so many things.’ She extends her lower lip and opens her palms. ‘It’s very difficult to say.’
‘As so much in life. But still . . . we persevere.’
A second smile. ‘Well, we have the 1996 Gosset. They are the oldest maison in the world.’
‘And? I sense an “and”?’
‘And also . . .’ She speaks the name as if a prayer: ‘Also the Philipponnat 1990 Clos des Goisses.’
‘Which do you recommend?’
A deep sigh. ‘Before 1996, I was confident that 1990 was the greatest vintage of the last century. Now . . .’ she shrugs as only French women can shrug ‘. . . now I am not so sure. But . . .’
‘But?’
‘These are very exact wines, Monsieur. Beyond famous. The—’
‘Money is no object. Ignore my trousers. They belong to another woman’s husband. Our only concern today is to promote our immediate happiness. We have very little time. My father a few days. My brother perhaps only a few hours.’
‘Well, it’s a very difficult choice, sir.’
‘An impossible choice?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah, this so often seems to be the way . . . but perhaps it is only the illusion of choice and perhaps we must have courage.’
‘Courage.’
‘So I think . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘I think we’ll have the ’96 first. And then the 1990.’
THE HARD PROBLEM
‘Is this a one-way street, do you think?’ Ralph asks. ‘Did you see any signs? Was the wine shop you saw definitely down here, Lou?’
‘Yes. I think so.’
‘These bastards don’t like me driving against the flow. I might need to be more aggressive. Hang on back there.’
He switches on the hazards. This is an emergency. There’s a belligerent-looking van up ahead. A Mercedes. The driver is gesticulating behind the wheel like he’s a one-man custodian of world righteousness. But he’s never dealt with my brother before.
Ralph is half on the pavement. ‘Fucking kerbs,’ he says.
The Mercedes is in reverse.
Dad inhales slowly. ‘The Canterbury Tales. You should read them. The pilgrimage of life. It’s all there – 1392. How to live, given this. How to love, given that.’
‘Dad, nobody is taking any fucking notice,’ Ralph says. ‘I doubt they even gave the slightest of shits at the time; why—’
‘Bike! Watch that bike!’
‘He’s seen me.’
‘Great. But let’s get off the pavement,’ I say.
‘Not possible. Not if we’re going to get where we want to go.’
‘There,’ I say. ‘Aux Crieurs de Vin.’
‘The wine criers,’ Ralph says. ‘That’s got to be us. OK, Lou, let’s get in there and get ourselves a case of something unequivocal.’ Ralph clicks the handbrake but doesn’t turn off the ignition. ‘Dad, you stay here. If anyone comes, explain that you’re drunk and dying and tell them to take it up with your sons. Lou, bring the credit card. It’s time for some monsoon drinking.’
Eva dislikes some aspects of her job. But she believes in it. She believes in justice. I admire her for that. I can’t say I feel the same about database management. Maybe it’s the future – and that’s what my company believe – but the only people who count there are the algorithm designers. They’re like gods or oracles or something. They see into the future. They design the future. They even summon the future. The problem is that I want to be a poet. Or a writer of some sort. But, if such a thing had ever been possible, it definitely isn’t possible now. By possible, I mean: financially possible. I think when people ask if things are possible, that’s what they usually mean: is it financially possible?
My family are kind enough not to bring all this up too often. But I know what they all think because – even though they seldom talk to each other – they all talk to me. As if I am the conversational catalyst. As if I’m the only one who will actually listen. As if I am a proxy for them talking to each other. As if they are all trying to advise me. Or trying to correct their own lives through me.
But life is un-correctable.
So I write everything down.
Dad says, for example, the world has been atomized by the unchecked ascendency of capitalism and ‘the great meta-urging to acquire’ and that the world is desperate for a new idea.
Jack says look at all the good capitalism has done.
Ralph says he has no problem with the status quo, but let’s not pretend it’s good news for more than fifteen per cent of the global population.
Dad says the post-war period only recently came to an end – somewhere between September 11th and the 2008 crash.
Jack says that’s a little off – that actually the post-war period ends when the last of the war babies dies; by that he means Dad but doesn’t admit to it. Jack thinks all the memory of empire and the colonies and the Battle of Britain is what is holding the country back; he says you cannot set a nation against modernity and globalization and hope to thrive.
Ralph says that history will see his as the digitally transitional generation; the world before and the world after; no two more different.
Dad says ‘it’ is all about ideas.
Ralph says ‘it’ is all about energy.
Jack says ‘it’ is all about economics.
They mean it, but they don’t mean it.
Ralph says everyone is responsible for their own orgasm.
Jack says whatever any paid-for public communication claims, the exact opposite is likely to be the case.
Dad calls the magazine racks at newsagents ‘wailing walls’.
Ralph says regrets rush in where once there were dreams.
Jack says it is impossible to live in London as a normal person any more.
Dad says the world contains everything – the birth of every possibility, the death of every dream, every conceivable cruelty, every conceivable kindness – all in a moment.
And I listen. I listen in ways I don’t think other people do. And I write it all down. Because I want somehow to capture it, to seal it, to nail it to the wall. I want something I can point to and say, ‘That was me, that was us, that was then, this is what we did and this is who we were.’
My mother says this is the writer’s desire.
I won a poetry competition before she died; it was in the summer and it was such a happy day – not only for me. But I’ve struggled to write much of cogency or worth ever since; it’s the lack of ideas, the energy costs, the bad economics. The strangest thing: I have to try not to be angry with Eva for encouraging me. Why is that?
My mother never once drove the van. She had a crappy little car. And I remember once when her old CD player broke and suddenly there was silence and we still had miles to go, I remember that she told me that she would have liked to have written not just poetry, but a book: a grown-up love story. Not in the traditional way, though, but between a son and his father.
We drive. We talk. Dad is asleep behind us. After we bought the wine, we flattened the seats and made the bed in the back; it seemed sensible and more comfortable. But also – now that Ralph is here – it seemed OK. Dad and I could never have made the bed in the day on our own because it would have felt too decadent, or somehow morally unacceptable, indicative of a wider capitulation, the ‘slippery slope, Lou’. Now that Ralph is with us though, we can simply do whatever we like without all these thoughts in our heads that come from I don’t know where; we’re free; it’s like some kind of a miracle; my brother is like some kind of an inverse redeemer.
‘. . . your anger is natural,’ Ralph is saying.
‘Is it though?’ I ask. ‘Is it natural?’
‘Yes. But everything that angers you about other people should lead you to a better understanding of yourself. Think about that for a second.’
I do. I’m still drunk. Conversely, wine seems to have sobered Ralph up. He’s driving – responsibly,
respectfully, five thousand units over the limit. Slow lane. Lots of etiquette. Mirror, signal, manoeuvre. I’m thinking that maybe we are doing this. That – subtly, subtly – Ralph is going to let Dad die just as surely as if he were killing him.
‘Basically, Lou, human beings need meaning in their lives. They look for it in all the wrong places and don’t realize until too late.’
‘Cue puppetry.’
He looks over and his face softens and his eyes smile. ‘There are a billion reasons not to put on a puppetry show, Lou. Sure there are. Or not to write your book. Or not to sing the song. Or not to paint the sky. That’s not the point.’
‘What is the point?’
‘The point is . . . Can you overcome all of these billion reasons not to try to make something worthwhile with a single human act of will and do it anyway? Most people cannot. Think about that.’
I do. I think about everything.
Ralph suddenly looks over and frowns: ‘Hang on a sec, Lou. Are we following the satnav?’
‘Religiously.’
‘You realize the fucker is now luring us in the direction of Lure?’
‘Obey,’ I say. ‘Question not . . .’
We drive. Our father sleeps. There are silver trees on the verge growing at wizened angles as if we are passing through some kingdom of the old and wise – men and women who were long ago defeated and could leave no legacy but this.
The conversation becomes about parents in general. Covertly, I watch Ralph at the wheel. Like Dad, he seems happiest when he’s talking about ideas but I see that his physicality is very different. The way he flicks the indicator on and off to change lanes is absurdly mannered. An elegant gesture such as a pianist might make to introduce an exceptionally beautiful passage of music. But he’s not doing it for me; he’s doing it for himself.
He says that the human relationship between child and parents is the most important of all, the most intimate.
‘What do you mean – most intimate?’ I ask.
‘I mean dealing with parental death is the most private thing we ever do,’ he says. ‘Because the relationship goes right back to when you were a child. Your memories of that.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And those childhood memories are so private. All those moments – just you and your dad or just you and your mum. Nobody can share them. Your mind goes back to them. Mine does, anyway. Compared to your childhood, everything else feels constructed.’
‘Does it?’
‘The other kinds of love . . . With your woman, there was a decision. But with your parents, there’s no choice. It’s in the nature. It’s in the nurture. I sometimes think that all our lives we are bracing ourselves for our parents’ death.’
‘You can always hate them.’
‘It’s actually the same thing as loving them. Read Freud. Read Jung. Read Melanie Klein. I think the satnav is taking us back onto the N19.’
‘Yeah, it keeps changing its mind.’
‘Or it likes detours.’
‘Or hates destinations.’
The D4 becomes the D12 without telling anyone. We’re silent for a while. But I need to press my brother. I need him to come into the moment. The darker side of his dignity is his distance. But I need very much to know what he really thinks.
The grey areas. That’s where most people like to live.
Mum and I went to see a human brain once when I was about ten, I think. It was at this exhibition that came to London. Some mad professor had peeled a human body so that you could see everything – muscles, organs, bones, ligaments. Christ only knows how he had made a show out of this. But he had done so and hundreds of thousands went to see it.
He had put one of the organs in a special transparent display case: the brain. A brain. Straight out of some poor bastard’s head.
And the thing that stayed with me is how grey it looked.
I miss my mother so very much.
Because of the ‘failure’ of her poetry, as she said, she retrained as a shrink. She started studying tentatively – as if unable to admit to herself she no longer wrote – but gradually she became more and more committed. She qualified as a therapist but she wished to become a full-blown psychoanalyst. She would seek out exams and attend lectures hungrily. She began to build up a small counselling practice. I didn’t realize it at the time but it was a kind of renaissance for her.
A few months before she was diagnosed, she had started to read about ‘the hard problem’ as part of a course she was doing. That day of the exhibition, I remember asking her about it – as we were walking past a peeled human face with another uncovered brain exposed behind it: no ears, no skull. And I remember listening to her but also being powerfully aware of her spirit as she spoke, her presence. A spirit on the rise. The hard problem, Lou, she said, is to do with our thoughts. How is it that the physical processes of certain atoms assembled as they are in the human brain give rise to consciousness? Whereas the same atoms otherwise assembled everywhere else do not? Or do they? How does self-awareness emerge from the material world of molecules and matter? And what is this thing we call experience? It’s funny, isn’t it, how the human factor is missing despite all these body parts? I was too old to do so in public but I wanted to lean my head on her hip in order to connect with her. I wanted to ward off the oafish exhibition with her figurative sensibility.
I think my mother could have made it all the way back from her self-described failures and outrun or outflanked Dad in her later years – if she had been given the time.
The engine sound of our van is hypnotic. We talk some more and then I come out with it: ‘I’m serious, Ralph,’ I say.
‘I’m serious, too.’
This is the word; the word we all have to play with, confront; eventually.
‘Because – wait a minute – let me speak – Dad will listen to you.’
‘This is about him. Not me.’
‘What do you say though?’
‘I say we are what we choose to become.’
‘Wrong. He didn’t choose the disease.’
‘No, but he chooses how to deal with it.’
‘So what do you think? Admit it: you’re shocked by the state he’s in.’
‘I think the best thing we can do is withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others. I’m here to accompany not to discuss.’
We enter a forest of some kind. Like we’re in a fairy tale all of a sudden. The darkening gloom between the trees. Pine and silence. A glimpse of something: deer, boar, goblins, nothing.
At some point, Ralph uses the word ‘manipulative’ about Dad again – and it manipulates me. I can feel myself becoming rebarbative but there is nothing I can do.
‘. . . What do you mean?’
‘I mean, the self-dramatization, Lou.’
‘What the fuck?’
‘Think about it, Lou. Think about it.’
‘You—’
‘No, wait. Think about how this is being played out.’
‘How can you even say that, Ralph? How can you say “played” out? How can you turn up and just say these things?’
‘All his life—’
‘What do you know about all his life?’
‘Uh-oh. Here comes the anger again. I’ve been – OK – OK – interrupt since—’
‘I’m not interrupting. I’m asking you to . . . to . . . to . . .’
‘To what, Lou?’
‘To engage.’
PUPPETS & PROPHETS
We’re calm. We’re cool. We’re camping.
The orange and white barrier at the entrance to the site lifts in the manner of all such campsite barriers the world over – jerkily. It’s making me think about limbo. Not the dancing, but the region on the borders of hell reserved for those who died before Christ’s coming. Tacitly, we three have somehow agreed: there will be no more ravening today.
‘Do you remember being here before?’ Dad turns back to me.
I’ve been asleep on the bed. The rest has done
me good. We stopped off for petrol and Dad woke up – so we swapped him into the front seat since it seemed undignified for him to lie down when he was awake. But we couldn’t face reassembling the back so I lay down and I have been drifting in and out of consciousness for a while listening to Dad beguile the miles by interrogating Ralph on German politics.
‘I remember only trauma,’ I say.
‘I hear you,’ Ralph chimes in from behind the wheel.
‘Well, you both seemed very happy last time we were here. We stayed for five days. You and Jack – you used to go and hang around the bar and play table football and try to steal whatever drinks people left behind. And then come back thinking that I wouldn’t notice the smell of dregs on your breath.’
‘Maybe that’s why you’ve become a tramp, Ralph,’ I say.
‘And you used to play on your bike until it went dark, Lou. And then I’d find you crouching in a bush with this Dutch boy – Jan, I think his name was – pretending to be a commando.’
‘There’s still time to find him, Lou,’ Ralph says. ‘Come out together. Big wedding in Brighton.’
The barrier has hauled itself vertical but now it seems to sway and judder as if daring us to drive beneath.
‘Let’s see if they’ve got a spot down that way,’ Dad says, pointing away to the left. ‘We definitely want to be by the river. Away from the noise.’
He starts sawing away with his arm trying to get the window down again.
‘Look at that,’ Ralph says, pointing up through the windscreen.
We’re on a slight rise. The campsite lies in the valley below. Above the trees, the clouds are massed, bruised and purple and pregnant with a coming storm; but the sun has fallen so low in the west that one quarter of the sky is smeared in crimson and gold as if someone has turned up the page of an unimaginably beautiful tomorrow.
‘We’re going to be grateful we’re in a van and not a tent when that shit hits,’ Ralph says.
‘Always,’ Dad says.
‘Just imagine what it must be like to holiday in a house,’ I say. ‘The weather must almost cease to matter.’
I must have been to about three hundred campsites in my life. And they are all subtly different – in design, in clientele, in atmosphere. But one thing they all have in common is the sense of human beings making the best of it. Why is this? If I were being cruel, I’d say it’s because nobody really wants to be there. Not deep down. Sure, there’s some people doing a good job of pretending – bikes, barbecues, badminton – but wouldn’t they rather be kicking it with some hot-assed Spanish señorita in a bougainvillea-scented villa with the sea whispering at the bedroom window and the promise of cocktails on the beach at sunset with their pals? They would. Of course they would. But they have to put aside the suspicion that some more fortunate people are doing exactly that – bury it deep – and get on with loving camping.