Let Go My Hand

by Edward Docx

  But I underestimate Jack.

  Or I don’t understand what kindness is.

  Or I forget that he is my father’s son.

  Or maybe we’ve been baptized and born again.

  Because now in all the warmth and soap and spray, Jack starts up and his voice is somehow loud and clear enough to cut through the patter and gush.

  ‘Dad, I know you think that the religious stuff with the boys’ school has changed me,’ he says, the shower streaming off him. ‘But I want you to know that it definitely hasn’t. It’s just . . . I see all this in a different way.’

  ‘Go on,’ Dad says – like now he’s vented his fury, everyone can say what they want and you never saw a more reasonable and open family.

  Jack has this mini Mint Source shampoo which he’s tipping into the palm of his hand.

  ‘Do you remember when the boys got twin-to-twin syndrome?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dad says. ‘Of course I do.’ His grip on my shoulder tightens and I can tell he’s greedy now for Jack in the way he was greedy for Ralph – as though he’s suddenly realized he doesn’t understand Jack either and he wants urgently to hear him speak.

  ‘Well, we were at St Thomas’s for the twenty-week scan and the doctor says, “Go now – straight away – to King’s Hospital. The foetuses are going to die in the womb.” And so we get in a cab and go straight to the wrong hospital because we are so freaked out.’

  ‘I remember,’ Dad says.

  I glance at Ralph. He is lolling his head from side to side as if he’s listening to music only he can hear, all the while his eyes fixed on Jack.

  ‘So then we get to the right hospital three hours later and this professor takes us into this tiny room and she says, “OK, Mr and Mrs Lasker, this is a seriously complicated pregnancy. Unfortunately, you have what we call twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. It’s quite common when the placenta is shared. But, basically, they are both likely to die in the next two or three days.”’

  Jack is massaging his hair. Half the time he’s got his eyes closed as he speaks.

  ‘The professor says, “I am the only person in the country that can do the operation to save them. We pioneered the treatment at this hospital. But I have to tell you there’s only a thirty per cent chance of both surviving and they definitely won’t go to term. So your choices are – one – to let nature run its course and maybe – just maybe – one will survive. Or – two – to terminate the pregnancy. Or – three – I go into the womb with a laser gun and try and ablate the connecting vessels in the placenta that are causing the problem. The chances of both dying are about a third, the chances of one dying are about a third, the chances of them both living are also about a third.”’

  Jack stands on one leg to wash his foot. ‘The professor says that as well as that, there are several risks involved in performing such an operation in utero – for the mother and for both foetuses. “I can’t tell you what damage has already been done,” she says.’ Jack switches legs. ‘You’d be completely within the normal parameters of what we deal with here if you decide the risks are too great and you want to terminate. The risks are too great. But if you do want to go ahead, we’ll do the operation tomorrow. Have a think and then tell me what you want to do. I’ll wait out here for your decision.’

  Ralph’s token has run out. Jack is letting the water rinse his body free of soap. His stomach is convex where Ralph’s is concave.

  ‘So . . . so we said . . . We said we would risk it. We had to choose and we chose a shot at life – life for both of them. Why?’

  Jack’s water stops. Ralph is covered in un-rinsed soap. Dad and I are side by side. Our shower turns itself off as abruptly as it started. So now we’re all four of us standing there in the echoing silence again.

  ‘Why?’ Jack asks again, his voice suddenly quiet and intimate.

  ‘Go on,’ Ralph says.

  ‘Because . . . because life is a miracle. A totally inexplicable miracle. Not in a religious sense. No. But in the sense of how the fuck did it get started at all? In the womb. On Earth. In the sense of it might not be happening anywhere else in the universe. We don’t know and we don’t understand. In fact . . . I don’t have to tell you this . . . but . . . but life might be the only true miracle, the greatest mystery. And so . . . you know what? Even if you’ve only got ten more breaths left to draw, you should . . . you should suck in every single one of them. Because not to do so is an insult. Against life itself. Which is the greatest privilege. This miracle. This . . . This all we have.’

  ‘Go on,’ Ralph says, again.

  ‘And – what you’re doing now, Dad . . . This is turning yourself against creation . . . You’re not like that. You’re not. We are optimists in this family. We’re curious. We’re engaged. We choose life. Don’t we?’

  Jacks looks from one to other of us.

  All my hostility has been washed away and I’m lost with these people.

  ‘We’re going to need more tokens,’ Ralph says, quietly.

  THE FACE OF A GHOST

  The broken arch of the branches still drip the storm. Jack is helping Dad walk back to the van. On either side of the track, the organized and the determined are making their plans for the day. I have to wait and halt myself continually. I hadn’t realized how slow it felt when out from under my father’s shoulder. Ralph walks ahead, turns, smokes, looks at the sky, watches us, falls back into step. I stand sideways on, waiting. I catch Jack’s eyes but they flick away as if he is not concerned to deal with me any more. Abruptly, I feel as though I’ve been helping Dad to his death – physically helping him – and that Jack has stepped in to take him in the opposite direction. I feel that I am wrong or worse than wrong, and that my brother – my persistent, noble, undauntable brother – is right and his rightness and his character is a mercy to us all.

  ‘You used to say . . .’ Jack speaks softly and then stops as they ease across a speed bump. Neither can talk directly to the other because they are shoulder to shoulder and Jack must instead address the road ahead. It strikes me that Jack is making Dad walk just as I did on the ferry; and that Dad is obliging him – just as he did for me.

  ‘You used to say,’ Jack continues, ‘that our relationships are a big part of who and what we are. More than half our identity. That we’re about the love we give, receive, withhold, venture.’

  ‘I still stay that. Of course I do.’

  Dad is irritable again – despite himself. The fatigue; the alcohol; the night.

  But Jack is outwardly patient: ‘I suppose I’m asking you to consider your relationships . . . What this means for those relationships. Actually, not only for us but—’

  ‘Please, Jack.’ My father raises his head. ‘Don’t make this sound like . . . like some kind of bribe involving my grandchildren.’

  ‘Let him speak, Dad,’ Ralph says, clear and sharp where he stands ahead of us, looking back. ‘Go on, Jack.’

  ‘All I’m saying is that with you gone, Dad . . .’ Jack’s voice is plain-chant empty. ‘With you gone . . . There’s no centre.’

  Dad stops walking. He is wearing his dressing gown and little else. Anywhere but on a campsite, he would be stopped and taken to a police station or a homeless shelter.

  ‘Jack, I am going to go,’ he says. He stops and leans on his stick. ‘We’re all going to go. Even you.’

  They set off again. I want to step in beside my father but it feels wrong – to interrupt, to divert, to steal back the burden. The burden. I can hardly bear to watch. Is this how Jack feels when I walk Dad? Excluded? Debarred?

  There is a family packing a people-carrier – nappies, fold-up chairs, a sports bag labelled ‘swimming things’.

  ‘Siobhan . . . Siobhan and I . . . We both thought . . .’ Jack uses his free arm to press his palm against his chest. ‘We both thought we didn’t want the boys and Percy getting to know you because of this . . . because of the MND. And maybe that was wrong. I don’t know. Siobhan felt it strongly. And it didn’t feel
like a fight I had to fight. But now . . .’

  He tails off. And again it is Ralph who speaks: ‘Go on, Jack.’

  ‘Now what I’ve realized is . . . That people need to know where they are from. The boys and Percy . . . they want to know who they are. And that means knowing you.’

  Dad stops again. ‘What do we have in common, Jack? You and I, specifically.’

  We all wait.

  ‘What do we share?’ Dad persists.

  We are still six hundred metres from the van, which is around a corner. Dad’s eyes are watery.

  ‘What do you mean, Dad?’

  ‘Let me tell you.’ Dad half turns. ‘We’re both fathers.’

  Now it is Jack who hesitates.

  ‘And if you were terminally ill, what would you hope for from your boys – from Billy and Jim? From Baby Percy? When they are a bit older, I mean. What would you hope for?’

  Jack doesn’t speak.

  ‘Let me tell you: you’d hope for understanding.’

  Before I met Eva, half-drunk and alone, one night I pulled down the paperback copy of my mother’s poetry – the only collection she ever published – the one in which I knew my dad had made his notes. I wanted to read some of the poems again, but I also wanted to read the margins where my father had written with his pencil. I sat down and turned the pages. And it started to affect me badly – pretty much tore up my heart – just seeing the two of them there – the attention he was paying her, the concentration, the devotion, how seriously he was taking her . . . I couldn’t handle it and I wanted to tell somebody – look, look, look at this. But where do you go and whom do you tell?

  We want to eat breakfast outside so we are putting up the awning by the side of the van because the trees keep causing these mini-squalls of residual rain from the wet leaves whenever the wind gusts. I am standing on these little fold-away steps in order to reach up to the roof of the van. Behind me, Jack is holding one supporting pole, Ralph the other; they’re silently urging me to hurry up by deliberately not moving. They look like two soldiers either side of a decrepit earl. Dad is sitting in his dressing gown on his camp chair watching me. He is utterly exhausted. He can’t walk any more. That’s the truth. Not any kind of distance. We’re at the end of his walking days. Even two hundred metres is killing him. He’s hungover and ratty and admitting to neither. He still hasn’t changed into his fresh clothes because they are in the cupboards under the seats which make up the bed. But there’s an irascible energy to him and he wants us to get set up. By this he means disassemble the bed in the back, fetch out the other chairs, put up the outside table, get ‘the bloody tea’ on and send me to fetch the croissants from the bakery. We should have flown. Airports, hotels, two clean and civilized days in clean and civilized Zurich. A clean and civilized ending.

  ‘Come on, Lou,’ Dad says. ‘We need tea.’

  ‘I’m doing it.’

  Dad modified the awning twenty years ago to replace the prissy little one that was supplied as standard. He cut and sewed and folded some kind of canvas to enlarge the thing so that we could all five of us get round the table comfortably and sit outside in the rain. Completely sheltered, Lou; everyone able to eat, drink, play cards, talk. But the modification is thicker and so tight and tricky to unwind from the VW housing since Dad has origami-doubled the material and the bastard thing now takes three people to extend and erect.

  ‘I should take the Littles camping,’ Jack says from his pole station.

  ‘I can’t believe you haven’t,’ Dad replies, aggressively. ‘It’s the only way . . . I can’t understand these idiots who want to lie on the beach.’

  The awning is jammed. But I don’t want to say so because that will be a criticism of Dad’s workmanship and therefore Dad. I climb down to move the steps so I can free the other side. The air smells of wet leaves and pine like it must have done before there were humans. We need to get breakfast. We need to eat.

  ‘They’ve heard about the van,’ Jack says, like maybe this idea is a bribe. ‘They want to go camping in the van.’

  Dad is brusque: ‘Siobhan would never let them.’

  And for the first time Jack is brusque in return: ‘That’s only because she doesn’t want them forming a relationship that’s going to end in certain grief.’

  ‘Everyone dies, Jack. Can you not grasp that?’

  ‘Not on a given day and at a given hour.’

  I free the awning.

  ‘Oh, so it’s the date that is the problem.’ Dad is openly derisive. ‘Think of it as the opposite of a C-section.’

  ‘What is—’

  ‘If you make the decision relatively early . . .’ I interrupt. I have to stop them. I can’t take Dad pushing them. Like he wants to . . . to salve himself in their wrath. But if they turn on him, I don’t know what will happen or what we’ll do.

  ‘If you make the decision early,’ I continue, ‘the shrinks say that everyone finds it harder to accept. They call it pre-grieving.’ I start rolling out the awning over Dad’s head like a shroud. But I keep on talking loudly like a tour guide: ‘It’s like you’re grieving for the death of a person still alive. The same five stages: anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance. It’s the most emotionally toxic state possible.’

  ‘Sounds about right, Lou,’ Ralph says. ‘You’re still at anger. I’m at depression. Jack’s at bargaining. Dad’s at acceptance. Maybe we should all get back to denial.’

  I hook the eye over the spike of his pole as he leans it towards me. Ralph is trying to help me, I realize. Like he’s been helping Jack speak. Like he’s been helping all of us. In his way. I cross to hook over Jack’s so that now Dad is the only one under the awning and we are looking at each other over the top. Ralph holds up a hand to Jack to stop him from responding.

  Dad’s voice comes from beneath: ‘You know, I would have liked to die in Britain,’ he says. ‘But I don’t recognize my country any more so . . . so what does it matter.’

  I fix the peg into the wet earth so that I can create the required tension on the guy rope to pull on the pole and hitch the awning taut. I peg Ralph’s guy rope. I peg Jack’s. I tighten them and the awning rises and straightens, square and true.

  When I see Dad’s face again, it is white and drained and hollow; the face of a ghost.

  There was an email on my father’s computer that he didn’t know I saw. Something he was drafting about two weeks after he had found out about the MND. Addressed to Doug. I don’t know if he ever sent it; I copied it and sent it to myself then deleted it from his sent file. He wrote:

  My own father was terrified at the end. Crying and begging me. Racist about the nurses in the hospice I had found for him. Even though he knew better. The worst of his personality – Doug – and let me say that, despite his relative prosperity, he was a small-minded and nasty man, full of vindictiveness and resentments and umbrage – the very worst of him had risen to the surface and come pouring out of his mouth. Bigotry, misogyny, racism. Drains backed up in a flood. All the litter and scum afloat. Devoid of any grace or dignity. Forgotten whatever education he once had. Mind like that of an overfed donkey left too long braying to itself in the stall.

  He was trying to make these little gestures of what he thought was reconciliation – me and him in it together – having a chat at last. And I couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t look at him. I wanted to leave the minute I arrived. I had to fight every second not to transmit my desire to go. My father and I in a small room on the outskirts of Bradford. He . . . he wanted us to be friends. Friends! After all the years so replete with his many rages. Still called it ‘that’ London. If he hadn’t been my father, I might have laughed. A child at the age of seventy-nine. An infant.

  Ah, but you can’t do it, Doug. As you said about yours. You can’t turn on a tuppence and race back across the six decades of distance you put between yourself and your children. Too late, old man, too late. The walls were all built long ago and fortified – too well, too well.

&
nbsp; Even so, even so, he should have performed better. Of course it is terrifying. Of course it’s horrible. Of course it’s keen and fell and lonely and the world just drops away – no longer interested in you, no longer even pretending. And the speed of it. You lose your friends, you stop your work and – guess what? Nobody is in the slightest bit interested. The speed of it. You get to forty-five and you realize everyone is either busy with the wrong thing or dying – and you’re in the lucky ten per cent of the world population where they have good health and hospitals! Any minute you might get cancer, you might get a heart attack, you’re swept off your brand-new bike by a bus driver who didn’t even see you. The whole thing is dark and uncertain and constantly on the threshold of total catastrophe or, worse, pointlessness – the years spinning faster than on one of those Italian lira petrol pumps. (Remember them?)

  So you have to perform. Like you say. If you can’t be close to your children, then perform for them. Act. Put on a show. Give them something to believe in. Smile in the photographs. Turn up and look like you might at least know something about wisdom. I think that is why I’m writing to you, Doug. Can’t write to them. Not about this. I envy you your daughters. Lucky fellow.

  Thanks for the stuff on Happisburgh by the way: reassuring to know that our ancestors braved the bitter conditions 850,000 years ago to settle in . . . Norwich. Norwich! Didn’t realize that was then the Thames estuary. I bet they lived on shells. (The aquatic ape theory – that’s what my money is on.) Let’s get back out there. I’ve got some good months yet. I want to discover my own flint. Just one. I’d love to find just one treasure. I’m going to do something that

  But he stopped there. What does he want to do? I don’t know. I won’t ever know. And I can’t ask because I shouldn’t have been reading his private email. Pity the relationship where understanding is gained through spying.