by Edward Docx
‘Talk to him.’
The van door is sliding again. I’m wondering if Ralph is actually helping Dad in there.
‘He thinks you’ve gone Catholic.’
‘I haven’t. I’m a secret druid. But all this bluff-calling is not—’
‘It’s not bluff-calling. He’s dying, Jack.’
‘Good morning, soldiers!’ Ralph hails us, bent-backed in the frame of the doorway which cannot contain him. He jumps down as if to parachute the eighteen inches to the ground and lands on both feet, standing square in his boots, his borrowed jogging bottoms and Dad’s epic shirt, which is long, un-tucked and without cuff-links so that only the fingertips are visible beneath the ends of his sleeves.
He calls across: ‘The long march starts today.’
‘The long march was a retreat,’ Jack calls back.
‘Precisely.’ Ralph comes over, inhaling the world and smiling like a spy at the gladdening innocence of civilians. ‘What other course do we have, comrades? Are we not incalculably defeated?’
‘Interesting shirt,’ Jack says.
‘Interesting pyjamas,’ Ralph returns. ‘Morning, Lou – want to go find a lap-dancing club and drop some acid? Take the day by surprise?’
I shake my head slowly and walk back to the van. Dad is sitting on the edge of the bed, looking out at the trees. He needs my help to climb down off the back bed. I gather our wash things, give him his stick and stand still as he sits on the step and hauls himself to his feet.
‘It’s like the beginning of the world here, Lou,’ he says.
The others walk back. I slam the van door shut, too violently. Water sprays in a dying arc. As one, my family look at me like I’m precisely the kind of prick they have devoted their lives to not getting to know.
Ralph shakes out a cigarette. ‘I think Lou’s trying to tell us something. The van doesn’t matter – is that what you’re trying to tell us, Lou?’
‘Do they have personality transplants in Berlin yet?’
‘They have everything.’
‘Book yourself in. Ask for the opposite.’
‘I’m just saying: without that door, Dad might fall out and die.’
‘Don’t “just say”.’
‘Not that we’re going anywhere near Dignitas,’ Jack says, smiling. ‘Are we, people?’
Silence.
‘We’ll talk after.’ Dad grimaces.
‘After what?’ Ralph asks.
‘Jesus,’ I say again.
‘After we’re washed and dressed and we’ve had some breakfast. They sell croissants at the shop – superb ones if I remember rightly. The boulanger comes every morning. What’s the jam situation, Lou?’
‘We’re good.’ I offer Dad my shoulder. ‘I bought Morello cherry backup.’
Ralph is suddenly concerned: ‘No damson?’
Dad holds up a don’t-panic hand: ‘The damson is already open.’
Ralph relaxes. ‘What tea are we on?’
‘Darjeeling,’ I say. ‘Jungpana. First Flush.’
‘Been keeping Lou and me going,’ Dad says. ‘They also do pain aux raisins.’
‘What about pain aux raison d’être?’ Ralph asks. ‘I think that’s what we need.’
Jack is standing, looking from one to another of us as if he simply cannot believe what kind of delusional assholes he’s got to deal with. ‘Just so we’re all clear,’ he says. ‘We are going to talk about this – and properly. I have not lied to my employers and paid Lufthansa three million pounds to watch you three coax your minimal genitalia through a tepid shower and then ram yourselves with croissants.’
‘Shall we make a start?’ Dad says. ‘The sooner we get there, the better the chance we have of hot water.’
‘It’s what our genitals would want,’ Ralph says.
I offer Dad my shoulder. We shuffle forward.
‘I’ve got hot-water tokens,’ I say. ‘The showers are token-operated. So at least the hotness is guaranteed.’
‘Genital delirium.’ Ralph sighs.
‘Good name for a band,’ I say.
Jack shakes his head and exhales slowly.
We fall into slow raggle-taggle step together – Ralph on our right, Jack on our left. I’m thinking that Dad won’t be able to walk at all within the next few weeks. Maybe less. I have the feeling that the disease is accelerating. (Fits and starts – so our consultant said.) Or it might be that because this bit is so physically noticeable, it feels like it is accelerating. Either way, I’m thinking that this walk to the showers is a long way for Dad now and it’s going to cost him.
I slow it up and struggle a fraction more, as if I want to make some kind of a point; like now that Jack is finally here, he can face the fuck up. I get the vague feeling this is what Dad is doing, too, but it could be just my imagination. I can feel that the MND is registering, though, and that my brothers are backing up or off or down or something; that they are now having to take account of this disease, however they feel about everything else.
Meanwhile, all around, people are making chatty virtue of their necessary morning camp tasks. A young boy and a girl are riding the speed bumps on their bikes and doing wheelies – the boy’s front wheel veering wildly as he holds it up off the tarmac in a deliberate display of casual mastery. I’m worried that if he loses control Dad won’t be able to get out of the way fast enough. So we stop and let him by – so much motion and energy and boisterous, carefree risk.
We struggle on.
On Dad’s instructions, we have camped at the furthest remove. The thing is that Dad loves to be with the real people, but he also wants to be away from them, on the edges. Sure, he wants to be hailing his fellow man in the bakery queue every morning; and sure, he wants to be jauntily joining the tables at the camp bar in the evening; but always after having walked in from the furthest field, which is where he wants to sleep, to work, to rest, to be. Now, of course, it’s madness to be this far out.
Close by the washing block, an elderly man and a woman are conspicuously partaking of an immaculately prepared breakfast on newly varnished decking beneath a taut canvas awning. They watch us go by, unashamedly staring. Dad stops, grateful of the rest, waves his stick and asks them if the boulanger is ‘on site’ – like it’s the big event of the day – and like this is a great holiday we’re all having here together – but they’re unable or unwilling to hear the humour in his tone. Ralph asks them in German if they know where he might pick up some caviar for his blini. Jack tries French. But either they are deaf to all languages save one that we don’t know or they’re simply unprepared to deal any longer with the world as it presents itself.
We’re on the steps up to the block when we see the bird.
It’s some kind of pigeon and it’s just lying there to one side; grey-to-charcoal tail feathers fanned out, white back, mottled wings folded in, black neck, head turned flat against the concrete so that its slightly parted beak is somehow smiling while its yellow-ringed eye stares black and empty at our feet; dead.
We’ve all stopped. I have the urge to kick it away. I can tell Dad is looking at it too. It doesn’t seem to have been injured or wounded – simply dropped down dead. And the more unmoving it is, the more we’re thinking about how much it must have moved every second of its life – bobbing, pecking, flying, flapping, squabbling, hopping.
But not now.
Now, it is so very dead; and there’s nothing moving at all save for where a very slight wind disturbs the feathers and a drip of rain from the trees above runs off its head in a gross parody of a tear. I start to imagine the flavour of death in my mouth – as if I have to eat the corrupting flesh; I can taste slimy cold rotten meat churning with dirty feather. I’m going to be sick.
Jack speaks softly: ‘Let me help you up the step, Dad, and let’s go and have a hot shower. We’ll all feel better and then we can sit in the van and have some decent tea.’
I leave them on the steps and run to the furthest cubicle and smash open the door and
retch. But nothing comes up.
‘I would say . . .’ Ralph begins to unbutton his dress shirt. ‘I would say that the decision has already been made.’ He gestures to the room, the company. ‘I think it’s . . . I think it’s Zurich here we come.’
I have Dad’s Crocs off and I’m helping him hold his legs up so that he doesn’t get his socks wet. I have to fight the urge to look away. His feet smell strongly of a long day and a long night. We’re in the communal showers. There are three big old-fashioned rose-heads down either side with plastic chairs at the end and one of those pale tiled floors with little raised square bumps that remind me of the public baths where Dad took me to learn to swim after school one bleak midwinter when England was perpetually dark and the wind like a pumice stone.
‘I don’t think that a serious decision has been made yet,’ Jack says.
I have to consciously unclench my teeth. The word ‘serious’ makes me want to join Ralph in his mutiny or refusal or whatever it is. I’m furious with Jack, the same as I was furious with Ralph – for his turning up like this and having opinions. But now I notice I’m feeling this new extra thing: somewhere between afraid and embarrassed. Because, in a way, Jack is worse than Ralph. He won’t back down or let up. Or he’s the opposite of Ralph: once he’s engaged, then he’s all engagement and there’s no obliqueness or subtlety. For Ralph the world is a joke; for Jack it is a test. The problem is that if one thing starts for us, then everything starts and then we’re going to be falling and we won’t be able to stop – all the way down to why Jack is like he is, and why Ralph is like he is, and their mother, and my mother, and Dad and the whole unholy shit storm.
‘I don’t think we know what this really means.’ Jack says, evenly. ‘The implications – for all of us. But – like I say – we can talk in the van. And we are going to talk, Dad, or else you’re going to be on your own.’
And that’s when Dad just comes out with it – loud and spitting – as if he’s angry with not only us, but with everything that has happened in the world since the Berlin Wall came down: ‘I am happy to talk, Jack. I want to talk. Believe me. But, Jack: we are going to Zurich. I have an appointment – a consultation – tomorrow afternoon at two. The doctor sees me – assesses me. I get the prescription. And if—’
‘Dad,’ Jack cuts in.
‘Believe me, Jack, I don’t want to be a bloody burden to you now any more than I want to be a bloody burden to you in London. But I—’
‘Dad—’
‘Burden!’ Dad raises his voice: ‘Burden. Burden! Burden! I even hate the bloody awful clichéd vocabulary.’
‘You don’t—’
‘Burden!’ He shouts the word loud so that it echoes off the tiles and ricochets around the room.
I don’t know where to look. I’ve not witnessed his fury – or not his fury loud and overt – not once in eighteen months. Is this what Jack summons up? Nobody speaks. I can feel my brothers’ anger contending with their reason.
Dad pulls himself back. ‘But I’m too much of a coward to . . . to stage an amateur suicide and so—’
‘Dad,’ Jack interrupts again.
‘The law being the ass it is, I have to do it with one of you.’
‘I’m not—’
‘Has to be family, Jack.’ Dad cuts the air with his hand. ‘Bloody has to be.’ The effort again – to control himself; his face slack and then tense, slack and then tense; the struggle. ‘Or the carer faces prosecution. Stupid bloody law. Of course, I could have asked just Lou. But that didn’t seem fair or right either. If it’s one of you, it’s got to be all of you.’ His voice becomes embittered with sarcasm: ‘Or those of you who wanted to come.’
‘Dad—’
‘I’m bloody dying.’ The echoes are like bars that imprison us. ‘I’m bloody dying!’
‘Dad—’
‘I’m bloody dying. And let me tell you boys: it’s as real and as shitty as it comes.’
‘Nobody is saying—’
‘I realize I’m not the first. And I certainly won’t be the last.’ Dad tries to smile but it comes off as a leer. ‘I don’t want to die. Of course I bloody don’t. But that’s not how death works, boys – is it?’ The cheap plastic chair legs scrape on the little bumps of the tiles as he shifts his weight. ‘The main thing is I’m not in any pain. And believe me – that is great news. Great news. Tomorrow, we’ll be in—’
‘But—’ Jack tries to come in again.
‘What I want . . .’ Dad cuts him off regardless, ‘what I want, Jack – is that we stay like this together and we carry on talking about whatever we’re talking about. Silly, serious – it doesn’t matter.’ Drool spools from my father’s lips. ‘When you’re . . . When you’re ill like this . . . You realize that being human is a physical thing. All the other stuff is on top or beside the point. You’re my bloody sons. So what matters now, boys, is your physical company. Being together. Let’s do some things together. Together. We’re all here. But mark these words: we are going to get to Zurich.’
He looks round at us with eyes that you’d be mad to doubt.
Nobody can speak or move.
I’m thinking Jack is going to leave – for ever maybe – but just then some poor half-Chinese kid sticks his head through the swing doors and sees an old man (semi-naked) sat on a plastic throne with a young man (semi-naked) on his knees in front of him while two middle-aged men (semi-naked) look on from either side – all four persons are gooseflesh-cold and yet seemingly without any plans to go, stay or even shower. The kid takes this in, thinks better of it, then ducks away to some other future where none of these people will ever matter. I want to go with him.
Jack hangs up his towel and balances his wash bag precariously on the same peg. Then he asks: ‘Can you stand up to wash, Dad?’
I feel I must intercede on my father’s behalf: ‘He can stand if he holds on . . . One of the main dangers with MND is actually from falls. Especially at the transitional stage – which is pretty much now.’
‘Transitional?’ Jack asks.
The sickest shit is rising in my mind: that – yes – I want it to be only me and Dad again. Like it was before – when we were on the ferry or tasting that wine. Everything is twisted and cauterized inside of me now. But somehow I glance around with this serenely earnest face, like I’m Student Carer of the Year, and say: ‘A lot of people with the disease divide their remaining time up into three sections: walking, wheelchair, bedbound. Transitions are the cusp periods in between. Dad is at the cusp between one and two.’
‘I can still stand,’ Dad says. ‘As long as I can hold on to something.’
‘Tokens, Louis, tokens,’ Ralph says. ‘Or we shall soon be a genitalia-free family.’
I reach up and put my hand into the baggy pockets of my shorts where they are hanging on my peg behind. But somehow, when I pull out the fiddly little ridged bronze discs, one of them slips through my fingers, drops to the floor and then rolls away with a tinny tinkle – in slow motion – down the slight slope of the floor straight into the wide vents of the drain.
I am down on my knees and fiddling with the grille, my fingers unable quite to pinch back the bronze disc that I can see glinting in the narrow channel of grey murk.
‘You can share my shower,’ Dad offers.
‘Or mine,’ Ralph says.
‘I might be able to get it back,’ I say over my shoulder.
‘Lou,’ Jack says. ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll get you another one.’
My knees hurt from the ridges in the tiles. I am cold and naked and shivery and I can feel hot tears rising inside me and I know I have less than two breaths to stop them.
‘I can’t get it,’ I say, ‘I can’t get it.’
‘Pass me my wash bag,’ Dad says, softly.
He’s giving me something to do, I realize; a distraction; like you distract a child. I stand up and turn to him.
‘Open it up.’
‘Why?’
And now he’s smil
ing like we’re all set, like we’re all totally fine and he is all kindness and no gnarl, no wrath.
‘Because there are some tokens in the bottom, Lou.’
‘You’re kidding?’
‘No.’
I rummage through the crap in the ancient black wash bag. Ralph and Jack are watching like this is a magic trick decades in the execution.
‘I’m not sure if they are from this exact campsite,’ Dad says. ‘But they might be. They all use more or less the same system. I’ve had them for twenty years in there – just waiting for the moment.’
My fingers find the little discs down in the corner at the bottom amidst dried toothpaste and unknown pills burst from forgotten blister packs. I hold them up like miniature gold medals. ‘Here we go – two more.’
Dad looks from one to other of us and does this big stage wink. ‘Because ye know neither the hour nor the day,’ he says.
And it’s some kind of supreme triumph. And fuck knows why but we’re all grinning. Because everything is somehow trumped by this. Like these tokens are tokens of our communal story and Dad has been keeping them – all but forgotten – until now.
I hand them out and Ralph slides his into the slot and hits the push tap and immediately a geyser of hot water gushes down. He tilts back his head.
I haul Dad to his feet. I get this sense that everything inside me has realigned again – as if around some new magnetic force – and that force is to do with my dad’s bravery, his courage, the way he has not once pitied himself.
‘Let’s get your trousers off, Dad,’ I say.
Dad holds my shoulder as he steps out of his paisley specials.
‘I’ll do it,’ I say to Jack. ‘You go and have your shower. Dad can hold on to the pipes . . . or me.’
Jack nods like he’s honouring that I’m the one who has been looking after Dad. He stands beside Ralph and inserts his token and a second geyser begins.
And suddenly the cold echo-chamber is gone and now the place feels alive with rising steam and falling water like a room in one of those grand old neo-classical bath houses that Dad used to take us to sometimes when we were in Germany. Already it feels warmer: warm mists billow and curl out of the long narrow windows at the top and it’s soothing and delicious and like we’re meant to be here. And something else: the fury is draining away because Dad says we’re going to Zurich. Which makes me feel better; happier.