Let Go My Hand

by Edward Docx

  There are exceptions: my father, for example. He chooses to camp. Loves it. In later years, he’s had the money to do otherwise; but no, sir, he’d rather van his way round the Vendée – in his own time, at his own pace, a medieval church here, a Neolithic cave there, a vineyard where possible. I have never known him more relaxed than sitting at sundown in the corner of some foreign field in his big chair with some clever book, the corner of a baguette, his wine in his glass amidst the evening expirations of the warm goodwill of the Earth at the end of the day.

  ‘Nothing has changed,’ Dad says, as if this were the apogee of all accolades he might bestow.

  There are tents of all shapes and colours – little grey pop-ups and huge red permanent pitches with great square plastic see-though windows. Washing lines of multi-coloured clothes are strung between the trees. There are parked cars and every kind of motorhome. Men in sensible camping clogs carry basins full of pans and cutlery towards one of the sandy-coloured washing blocks. Women are talking across the low-lying hedges that divide the sites. Boys and girls on bikes race to and from invisible appointments. Elderly couples sit side-on to watch us ease over the speed humps. We draw up slowly by the office with its familiar sign – ‘l’acceuil’.

  Beyond, there is a strip where families are playing boules – or pétanque, I’ve never known the difference. We can hear the shouts and laughter. There’s bad French pop music coming from the bar. Two overweight middle-aged men walk by on their way to what must be a pool somewhere; they are both wearing tight black trunks with matching turquoise trim. Ralph pulls up the handbrake with melodramatic emphasis.

  ‘Behold the pastoral idyll,’ he says and kills the engine.

  ‘Look.’ Dad indicates the chalk board. He’s excited like a kid checking out the holiday let. ‘They still do sausage and frites. Do you think they’ll let us bring our own wine?’

  ‘I think you’re going to have to get a bit more rebellious, Dad, given that you’ve only got three more days or whatever,’ Ralph says. ‘If you want to do something . . . just do it. As they say.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Never mind.’ Ralph shakes out a cigarette.

  ‘Why isn’t the ruddy window working?’ Dad asks.

  ‘It’s been broken for ages,’ I say.

  Ralph passes me a cigarette and the cooks’ matches. ‘Just say fucking, Dad. Why isn’t the fucking window working? And then when you want to emphasize a point say . . . say “cunting”. Like you used to.’

  Dad looks at Ralph like he is going to say something but stops himself.

  ‘Sound advice, Dad,’ I say. ‘No one says “ruddy”.’ I slide open the side door of the van and let in the evening air to ward off the immediate cancer.

  A woman appears in the office.

  ‘Shall I go and see if they’ve got a place, then?’

  ‘Not in the main circle,’ Dad says. ‘Down by the river.’

  ‘Pass me the credit card,’ I say to Ralph, who has taken full possession.

  He obliges before my father can object: ‘Knock yourself out, Lou. Get all the extras. I want some of those tight trunks that those two guys were wearing. The paedo-chic Speedos.’

  Dad looks round at me. His eyes are smiling. He looks almost young. This is some kind of homecoming for him.

  I check my phone. The bastard is almost out of battery again.

  I text Jack where we are. I text Eva: ‘feeling better’.

  One time back in May, Eva and I went go-karting with some of our friends. (She beat me in the race but I had the faster lap.) In the pub afterwards we had to share this awkward little table in an alcove because the place was full and the others had got there before us. There were these mock-Tudor windows and we were eating terrible fake homemade chips and scampi with those sachets of thinned-out tomato ketchup that you can’t open except with your teeth and that somehow always squirt when you do – even though there is never enough actual sauce in them to warrant so outraged an initial splurge.

  And she started telling me about her parents’ divorce and how she thought it had made her shy and awkward except with people she knew really well. About how she felt uncomfortable a lot of the time at college and this came out as not-exactly-rudeness, but a kind of unfriendliness and abruptness, which she never meant; but that then she’d got a reputation with a few of the girls for ‘taking no shit’, which she had cultivated – because they’d praised her for it and had mistaken it for strength and because this persona seemed like an easier way to be when they all hung out since it saved her from explaining herself. And that this feisty persona had started to be her ‘character’; but that actually it wasn’t her character at all. And wasn’t it strange that she’d never felt the need to twist through all these loops of defence and attack and mediation with me; that she could just be.

  And that got us on to how hard it is to get a handle on your own situation and how odd it is that other people – even strangers – can sometimes see everything that you can’t, or won’t. And I didn’t think about it then . . . but maybe this is what it means to be in love. You have to feel known. Or maybe known and forgiven. Which is how my mother made my father feel, I realize now. Whereas Carol did not. And all of a sudden, my mother is gone and he doesn’t feel forgiven any more. And so he’s trying to atone in some way.

  The rain drums and flutters on the van roof. The windows are steamed up except where I have swiped a spot to try to look out at the trees and down towards the river. But I can hardly see anything – it’s as if some kind of veil has been thrown over us – and all that happens is that I soak my sleeve. By way of counter-strike, we have the heater turned on all the way up, and it is whirring strenuously, but it’s not really having any effect on the damp. Only in an old camper van in the rain in Europe can you ever feel too hot and too cold at the same time.

  Ralph and I are sitting in the two front seats, which we have turned around. Dad is facing us across the table, settled on his pillows without being at all settled, lying side-on in the bed. I’m thinking that there’s a big issue we’re going to have to confront pretty soon: that either all three of us are going to have to sleep in that same bed or we’re going to have to pop up the one in the roof, which we haven’t done for a long time, and which (though nobody is saying it) may well cause leaks.

  We’ve only got one cabin light on and we’ve lit a candle in the lantern like we’re smugglers. We are studiously drinking a bottle from the case we bought in Troyes, which Ralph and Dad are talking about as if it were the second messiah. Apparently, I should have a major hard-on about it, but it tastes to me like licking jam off an old church pew. I am a little drunk again, though, and it feels good – like the rats in my stomach have stopped their gnawing and gnashing. But there’s no way we can talk about the wine any more so when they shut up for a second, I interrupt. I am a master at changing the subject; another of my skills.

  ‘So what’s your new show about, Ralph?’

  He sucks his teeth and sends the wine around his gums again. ‘What is it about, Lou? Or what is it about?’

  ‘Both,’ I say to keep us moving and away from wine.

  ‘It is about the life of Moses, a bunraku puppet, who lives on a table.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Bunraku?’ Dad asks, making a face intended to convey the intense concentration of veteran taste buds.

  ‘Japanese,’ Ralph says, ‘three-person operated. Cardboard.’

  ‘And what’s it about about?’ I ask.

  ‘God and Man,’ Ralph says, matter-of-fact, but meaning it. ‘The theatre of religion. The theatre of existence.’

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘Great.’

  We watch Dad put his glass down with painful care.

  ‘Why Moses?’ I ask.

  ‘Because he looked upon the face of God.’

  Wine spills on Dad’s bedclothes. He winces and then irritably motions with his other hand as if to say that it is the last thing in the world that matters. But I can te
ll he’s also cross about the waste. He cannot help but count the cost. He has been deliberately asking for half measures, pretending it’s about the alcohol; but really it’s about his fear of not being able to control the glass.

  ‘And what does God look like?’ I ask.

  ‘In this case,’ Ralph inclines his head, ‘he looks like me.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Dad hoists himself up a little with his arms and says: ‘Moses probably didn’t exist.’

  ‘Correct,’ Ralph says. ‘Correct. And isn’t that the point?’

  I sip the sour-bench jam. ‘Isn’t what the point?’

  ‘Moses is an invention of his writer,’ Dad says. ‘People are apt to forget that the Bible – like all the holy books – is written. And the one thing we know about writers is they make shit up – as you would say, Lou.’

  ‘I don’t say that.’

  ‘Which is why,’ Ralph says, gargling wine, ‘Moses is perfect puppet territory.’

  ‘Go on,’ Dad says.

  ‘Because . . . because my Moses exists only when I – the puppet master – bring him to life. But even then – only in the minds of the audience.’

  ‘Go on,’ Dad says again.

  I fake a long slow-tasting sip. And it suddenly strikes me on the swallow that Dad is – has always been – desperately interested in Ralph in a way he is not interested in me; that he wants to know again and again what Ralph is thinking and what he feels; and then what he really thinks, what he really feels. He wants to understand his son and he absolutely does not do so. And he wants to know – after a lifetime – how can this be, how can this be, how can this be?

  ‘You’re right, Dad,’ Ralph says. ‘The Moses of the Bible probably didn’t exist and yet everything about his story is so—’

  ‘Irrelevant,’ I offer.

  ‘Substantial,’ Dad says.

  ‘— yeah, exactly, substantial. Moses writes on stone, for fuck’s sake. His eyebrows get singed by the burning bush. He’s probably got a cock the size of the Gherkin.’

  ‘He is a commander of plague,’ Dad adds. ‘And a violent murderer of women and children.’

  ‘Whole tribes.’ Ralph leans forward a little. ‘He kills and he drinks and he eats and he fucks. He’s vain and conceited. He fights war after war after war.’

  ‘And thus he dares to go up the mountain to remonstrate with God,’ Dad says.

  ‘We’d all love some face time with Mr Motherfucker,’ I say.

  ‘Louis.’

  ‘But God is also angry with Moses,’ Ralph continues.

  ‘Of course.’ Dad smiles his lopsided smile. ‘Whether the Jewish God is good or bad is open to the comments section. But one thing nobody can dispute is that he is mighty – mighty.’

  They’re telling the story for my benefit, I realize. All I have to do is keep the questions coming: ‘OK – so why is the Almighty so pissed off with Moses?’

  ‘Because,’ Ralph says, ‘God tells Moses to go speak to a rock in order to get some water to flow out of it. But Moses is—’

  ‘Consumed by existential incandescence,’ Dad interrupts. ‘He is bloody furious . . . furious that even the sheer lunatic nonsense of being alive is so glibly mocked by the total obliteration of death.’

  ‘And so Moses thinks, bollocks to it,’ Ralph continues. ‘And goes beyond what God actually asks him to do; he starts having a go at everyone gathered around, putting himself centre stage, and then he strikes the rock with his staff—’

  ‘In direct contravention of God’s orders,’ Dad adds.

  ‘As if,’ Ralph says, ‘he did not believe that the mere word of God was sufficient to produce the water. As if he were God himself.’

  ‘Hubris,’ Dad nods slowly. ‘Hubris. Again and again and again.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So,’ Ralph sucks his lips, ‘God says to Moses: OK, Plague-Boy, you can see the Promised Land, but there ain’t no way you’re going there yourself. So have a good look, breathe it in . . . And then get ready to die and don’t be thinking—’

  ‘But but but . . .’ Dad is as captivated as I have seen him since we left. Ralph makes my father live like no one else can. ‘God also says: I will bury you myself.’

  ‘Exactly so. Right there is the deal, Lou. God buries Moses himself – personally – in an unmarked grave.’ Ralph reaches for his cigarettes, hesitates, decides not to. We all fall silent and look into the vastness of whatever there is behind our eyes. When the wind gusts, the rain sounds like tarantula armies massing. I feel like some great point has been clinched but that I have no idea what it is.

  ‘So . . . Anyway . . .’ I say slowly. ‘What is the show about, Ralph?’

  Now Dad and Ralph look at each other and shake their heads slowly in the manner of long-suffering veterans the world over.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I need everything spelled out.’

  ‘Lou.’ Ralph turns to me. ‘Lou. Think about it.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Moses exists but he does not exist. Like a puppet.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘His backstory is . . . is nothing. He was cardboard, wood, glue. But in the theatre he is alive. He is wholly alive. You can’t help but believe that the puppet is really there. But you know – you absolutely know – that he really isn’t there, too.’

  ‘See how the metaphors accrete,’ Dad murmurs.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘To stay in the theatre you have to understand and believe two separate and contradictory things,’ Ralph continues, ‘that what you are watching is not true but also that it is true.’

  ‘Which is religion,’ Dad says, ‘if only they’d admit the not true bit first.’

  ‘And since Moses is not really alive, he cannot really die,’ Ralph says.

  I feel like I want to ask questions for ever just to make them talk.

  ‘Do you have subtitles or somebody at the side of the show explaining all this shit to the audience?’

  Ralph shakes his head wearily. ‘Everything is real and unreal, Lou, true and not true, extant and not. The audience are the people. The puppet is the prophet. I am God.’

  ‘I get that bit.’

  ‘But the prophet doesn’t exist without the God and vice versa,’ Ralph says. ‘And yet the audience don’t want to be left on their own in the theatre. That’s not what they paid for. Nope. That would be intolerable to them. There would be mayhem. They require that the puppet and I to go to work on stage. Go to work entertaining them.’

  ‘Distracting them,’ Dad says.

  ‘And that is what we do . . . until, eventually, we pass through yet another wall – yet another illusion.’

  ‘Which is?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, midway through the show, Moses turns on me – the puppet master – with a series of demands.’

  ‘He insists on explanations,’ Dad says, now speaking as if the show were as much his creation as his son’s.

  ‘Precisely. And suddenly the audience see me. They realize I have been there all along. Manipulating things. They knew this but they didn’t apprehend it. Now they do. I become an actor in the drama.’

  Dad exhales slowly: ‘So God is only real when the puppet – the prophet – turns on him.’

  ‘You should have been a critic, Dad.’ Ralph is straightforwardly smiling for the first time since he arrived. ‘But how can my Moses live without my hand? My breath? He can’t. He’s made by me. He’s animated by me. I am his prime and only mover. He is not alive. He doesn’t exist.’

  Dad points his finger. ‘And how dare the prophets make demands of their God?’

  ‘How fucking dare they,’ I say.

  ‘Louis.’

  ‘And yet,’ Ralph says, ‘each night we see, we feel, how the audience urges Moses on to insurrection. The moment I reveal myself, they are with him. And they turn on me.’

  ‘But it’s an insurrection that you have created yourself,’ Dad says.

  ‘Yes.’ Ralph is actually grinning.
‘Yes. It is.’

  ‘How does it end?’ my father asks.

  ‘Little by little,’ Ralph says. ‘I concede ground. I back up the mountain. I let the puppet come at me.’

  ‘But how does it end?’ Dad’s eyes are sparkling. ‘How does it end?’

  Ralph raises his puppeteer’s wrists, his fingers extended downward, long and tense. ‘I cause my Moses to come after me. He comes after me . . . after me . . . after me. Up the mountain.’

  ‘Then what?’ Dad asks.

  ‘I promise him a life without me. I show him the Promised Land.’

  ‘And then?’

  Ralph pauses a second. Then his wrists snap down and his fingers flash apart. ‘Then I give the signal and we drop the little fucker right where we are standing, centre stage, in the spotlight. And we walk away. And suddenly he is nothing. Nothing. Cardboard and glue. No thing.’

  ‘It’s perfect,’ Dad breathes.

  ‘And you know the best bit of all: that the audience clap. They clap like crazy. Every night. And what are they clapping, I ask myself.’

  ‘What are they clapping?’ I prompt.

  ‘They are clapping the summary death of their prophet – killed by a mighty and disdainful God. Again. Every fucking night.’

  ‘Amazing,’ I say.

  ‘But there’s another level,’ Ralph says, ‘because now they know – or now they remember – as I take my bow – that I am, in fact, human.’

  ‘Surely not.’

  ‘A puppeteer – yes – but one of them. A human being. And so they are also clapping because they are elated and happy and deeply impressed that I made the whole thing up. A show. A fiction. About Gods and Prophets. Art. Magic. Religion. Made up by a human being just like them.’