Let Go My Hand

by Edward Docx

  ‘I love my thoughts.’ Ralph lifts one hand from the wheel. ‘They are the only thing that is the slightest bit interesting to me. Imagine if I had to rely on yours.’

  ‘And yet you’re a physical creature. You have a body.’

  ‘And it’s in much better shape than yours. Thin, for example.’

  ‘Troubled.’

  ‘Free.’

  ‘Not so. Your mind is tyrannical, Ralph.’

  ‘Not so. You hear tyranny because you’ve enslaved yourself.’

  ‘By enslaved, I take it that you mean that I’m married.’

  ‘Your word-association.’

  ‘And what about your heart?’

  ‘My heart is like a blister.’

  ‘And this is a good thing?’

  ‘I believe in love. I believe in death. I’m trying to experience as much of the former given the latter. But we’re talking about you. What do you believe in? Life insurance?’

  The further up the gorge we climb, the more swiftly and turbulent flows the river. The boulders by the side of the road are a sandy colour now and look like the illustrations in children’s books about the ‘Holy Land’.

  ‘I believe in constancy,’ Jack says.

  Ralph clicks his tongue and glances in the mirror. He shakes his head slowly but his eyes are smiling at me. ‘I refuse to accept,’ he scoffs, ‘that you are the kind of man, Jack, who says to himself: “Let there be no more love affairs.” How can you say that? This is my last experience of women. Are you that kind of a man? Should we drop you off somewhere punishing and abstemious?’ He indicates the landscape. ‘You could live in a cave. Eat rocks. Fight with the devil for forty days and nights. Although I bet he’d be bored to tears with you after an hour.’

  ‘Marriage isn’t the end of the love,’ Jack says. ‘Watch out for that goat.’

  Ralph slows. The goat frisks nervously into the road.

  ‘No, but it’s the end of all the other forms of love.’

  ‘Again: no. Love evolves.’

  ‘Subsides.’

  ‘Wrong. For many people – marriage is a beginning.’

  ‘But you—’

  ‘In my case . . . If we’re talking about my case.’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘In my case . . . despite all my stupidity and immaturity and being a dick, guess what?’ The goat hesitates, uncertain. ‘It turns out my younger self arranged a good marriage for me. Yep – I know – it’s staggering. Given me, given us. But each year that passes, I am more and more grateful to him for his wisdom. Each year that passes, I fall further in love with my wife.’

  ‘Then you are almost unique in the world, Jack. And your marriage a shining beacon for the rest of humanity. No doubt it is visible from space.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘There are probably foggy-visored astronauts weeping silently into their helmets as we speak.’

  ‘Love is not what you think it is. That is all I am saying.’

  The goat scrambles away up the rocks to where we now see others are waiting. We start off again. The road straightens and Ralph changes up through the gears.

  ‘Tell me, how does this overwhelming love manifest? A mutual interest in TV dramas? Fashionable shades of paint? Fresh herbs?’

  ‘You underestimate people. You underestimate everything. Except yourself.’

  ‘Not so. I’m at the bottom of all my own estimations. There’s no man alive who can estimate me lower than I estimate myself. I merely disguise this in order to appear convincing and self-assured. Just like everybody else. Though, in my case, with the additional disability – and honesty – of knowing what I’m up to.’

  ‘Maybe lots of married people are happy. Have you ever considered that?’

  ‘Oh, please. Come on. Look around you, Jack: all these oafish husbands discussing the missus this, or the kids that. Alternative routes through upcoming roadworks. Business-class breakthroughs. Market capitalizations of taxi companies. For ninety per cent of women, marriage is the opposite of fulfilment.’

  ‘Are you a feminist now, Ralph?’ I ask.

  ‘No, but I am an expert on married women.’

  ‘Lucky them.’

  ‘Most of these wives, Jack, they’re sitting around reading The World of Interiors while the world of their interiors falls into shrunken ruin. Not a single appeal to their imaginative faculties in years. Unless we count imagining other men in the sack. So I say . . . I say how about at least one of us falls in love with your wife, mate, and we see how that goes? Why the sanctimoniousness? Why the—’

  ‘Decency.’

  ‘Our love affairs define us.’

  Jack is exquisitely breezy: ‘You don’t really understand the family until you have got a family, Ralph. Nor the real relationship between men and women. Go and watch a woman giving birth to a few of your children sometime. I promise you: it changes everything. I’m afraid this inner-humanity stuff is inconsequential once you’ve been through the other end of sex.’

  ‘The other end of sex,’ Ralph repeats the phrase. ‘I like that. But answer me this: when you die, what are you going to remember? What are you going to look back on? I’ll tell you: the times you lay beside a woman in the warm afternoon and made love and talked and ate and talked and made love and drank and made love and talked about this and that and her and you and everything good and bad and lost and found until the world stopped its mattering and the evening sun fell across the bed – where you then made love again, the deeper this time for your communion and the coming of the dusk. What beats that? What the fuck beats that? What else is there?’

  Jack turns in his seat: ‘Is that what you think about, Dad.’

  ‘Among other things,’ Dad says to the roof.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Your children. What a mess you made of that.’

  Up ahead, above the road, something strange is going on with the weather: the sky is surreptitiously tearing itself apart so that the grey is revealed to have been hiding torn sheets of white which in turn have been concealing secret robes of blue.

  ‘I think that love turns out to be the opposite of what you describe.’ Jack is more engaged than he’s pretending. ‘In fact, love is the procedures, the practicality. Making sure there’s milk for your coffee. Changing the bulbs. Picking the wet towels off the floor so that they dry.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake – if love turns out to be picking up the towels, then haven’t you got to ask yourself who – or what – you’ve fallen in love with?’

  ‘I’m saying these things are totems of love.’

  ‘And I’m saying they’re not.’

  ‘I’m saying that after all the melodrama and madness has subsided, what you are left with . . . is life itself, Ralph. The reality. You really have to give reality a try one day.’

  ‘The superficial.’

  ‘Look to what a person does, not what they say.’

  ‘Pick up towels.’

  ‘Consider the million actual sacrifices and daily kindnesses. Look to the acts not the words. Who prepared the food you are eating? Who changed the interest rate on your mortgage so that you had money for your holiday? Who organized the plumber? Who found your door keys?’

  ‘And why would I want to make love to this person? Because of their steady determination over the towels or their quiet proficiency when it comes to mortgages?’

  ‘This is what life is made of.’

  ‘It’s not what my life is made of.’

  ‘And so you are lonely.’

  ‘Free.’

  ‘Sad.’

  ‘Truthful.’

  As if to make his point, Ralph accelerates and we overtake a labouring old Renault. It’s not the best place to be making such a move, though, and he has to brake severely for a hairpin, which we then swing round a little too fast. There’s a dent in the barrier on the outer edge beyond which you fall down the mountain, maybe for ever. We need another driver. Someone with a different surname. Dad has rolled into me.
I help set him back on his pillow.

  ‘You’re being dishonest, Jack.’

  ‘No: you’re the dishonest one.’

  ‘Don’t you walk out into your day and ache for some escape from your prison?’

  ‘Your word.’

  ‘The unspoken implication.’

  ‘Of course.’ Jack puffs out his cheeks, conceding a little without conceding anything. ‘I see women all the time and I want . . . I want what you say you chase: an intimate and enlightening conversation that is physical as well as everything else.’

  ‘There you go. That’s what I’m talking about.’

  ‘But I choose not to.’

  ‘You choose imprisonment.’

  ‘Because actually those choices damage me. I choose—’

  My father interrupts in his lecture-hall voice: ‘I’ll no more dote and run to pursue things which had endamaged me.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ I ask.

  ‘John Donne,’ he says. ‘“Farewell to Love”.’

  ‘Donne thinks love is damage?’ I ask.

  Dad looks at me without raising his head. ‘Long answer or short?’

  ‘Short. Always short. This is the twenty-first century, Dad. We all have attention deficit disorder.’

  ‘If we take love here to mean sexual desire—’

  ‘We do,’ Ralph says, vehemently addressing the landscape. ‘We must. We can. And we do. Without desire the world withers.’

  ‘Then, yes, in this one instance – amidst dozens of poems with different points of view – love is damage.’

  Ralph glances in the mirror and I can see his eyes are bright. He’s not had a drink yet, I’m thinking. He’s not even thought about it.

  ‘Keep arguing with each other,’ I say. ‘It’s making me and Dad feel better about our personalities.’

  ‘And how do your choices – the ones you have made – how do they leave you, Jack?’

  ‘Happier than you, Ralph.’

  ‘Dreaming of a mistress who you could trust.’

  ‘Living with a wife who I already do.’

  ‘Dying inside.’

  ‘Living . . . and not in some fantasy.’

  ‘Constrained and compromised.’

  ‘In some ways, yes, but not everything about relationships is physical.’

  Ralph laughs out loud like Jack has just lost everything with a single catastrophic move on the chessboard. ‘For fuck’s sake.’ He lifts his hand from the wheel and gestures at the world. ‘Sexual chemistry, sexual charisma, is what we’re all about here on planet Earth. Take a look around, Jack. Watch some nature documentaries. Every gene in every life form is going absolutely mental trying to attract someone, something, anything in order to make as much love as physically possible. In order not to be lonely, in order to pass itself on . . . Every gene in the world wants to fuck like there’s no tomorrow. And you want to know why? Because there isn’t any tomorrow. As soon as the fucking stops, we’re all dead for eternity. You, me, Dad, the planet. Even Louis.’

  ‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ Jack says. ‘I love my wife dearly and I’d hate to be without her.’

  ‘Maybe this is why we could use some sisters,’ I say. ‘Get a fresh perspective.’

  ‘It’s not too late, Dad,’ Jack says. ‘Maybe you’re going to meet some hot Neanderthal ass in this cave. The sort of prehistoric señorita that you never could say no to.’

  ‘I’d love a sister,’ I say. ‘I’d really love a sister.’

  ‘It’s not a Neanderthal site,’ Dad says. ‘It’s Upper Palaeolithic. Homo sapiens.’

  ‘Pleasure is not the same as happiness,’ Jack says. ‘You should remember that, Ralph.’

  ‘Contentment is a form of boredom,’ Ralph says. ‘You should remember that, Jack.’

  ‘It’s really not boring. Children are . . . children are the opposite of boring.’

  ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ Ralph is mocking. ‘Here we go: the fatherhood defence.’

  ‘It’s not a defence.’

  ‘A compensation.’

  ‘Wrong again. Fatherhood is a unique relationship. I love my children in a way that is entirely free from the tangle of Eros you describe. And that is a kind of freedom, Ralph, a kind of love that you don’t get to experience otherwise. And – yeah – an experience that trumps all others.’ Jack breathes in as if the temptations of this mountain wilderness had been dismissed long ago. ‘You need a family to understand the family. You need children to understand yourself and the women you are with. Childbirth. Motherhood. Daughters. If you don’t see any of that, you only get half the picture. I promise you, bro. Hate me. Hate what I’m telling you. But it’s true.’

  ‘Except not true at all. What about all the gay artists in the history of the universe? From Virgil and Plato . . . via Michelangelo and Marlowe . . . to . . . to . . . Auden.’

  ‘None of whom understood the first thing about women.’

  ‘Henry James,’ Ralph says. ‘Shakespeare. Flaubert probably. Gay, gay, gay. The list is endless. Pretty much everyone who is good at anything to do with deep human understanding is gay.’

  ‘Did the Neanderthals fuck Homo sapiens, Dad?’ I ask. ‘Or just the gay ones?’

  ‘Louis, there’s no need for that language.’

  ‘Did early humans make heterosexual cross-species love?’

  ‘We now know they did.’ Dad sighs. ‘Not in any great number but to some extent. We all carry a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA.’

  ‘There you go,’ Ralph says.

  ‘There you go what?’ Jack says. ‘That doesn’t prove anything. What the fuck?’

  THE UNDERWORLD

  We climb out of the van.

  The sun is bright and strong and fierce when it rides out from what remains of the cloud so I reach back inside into the little docket on the back of the driver’s seat where I keep the dark black sunglasses that Eva bought me. We are high on the side of a mountain where the road has been widened to allow maybe a hundred cars to park obliquely. But there isn’t another vehicle in sight. And it feels like we are entirely alone in the world: the precipice before us, the cliffs behind. All about our feet lie jagged rocks as if lately discarded by rampaging giants. From this vantage, the valley below is like some fevered imagining of the approach to hell: the twisting snake of the road, the sheer plunges, the violent outcrops, the overhanging escarpments, the serrated columns that march madly downward into the throat of the gorge itself.

  My brothers come round and we ease Dad out. Ralph has Aviators; Jack has Wayfarers and my Dad has these vintage flip-downs which are the only cool thing he possesses; he bought them in 1969 and every few years he clears his writing desk to mend them himself with a tiny screwdriver and this old-school jeweller’s magnifying glass stuck in front of his eye.

  He swallows some more pills and then throws his now-familiar arm around me. But we take one step across the dusty ground towards the entrance and then we stop. Dad is going nowhere fast. His legs are weak and his ankles sore and tender notwithstanding the painkillers. Jack stands in and supports the other shoulder. Ralph waits. We move forward again – limping, super-slow and tender. We are lined up like Mafiosi bringing in the Godfather after a shooting; and maybe he’s gonna die, maybe he isn’t. We’re more or less carrying him. There’s no way, I’m thinking, we’re even going to make the entrance . . .

  Then we see them: adjacent to the ticket office, there is a row of state-of-the-art mobility chairs – ‘fauteuils roulants électriques’ – all lined up like the start of Le Mans. Wheelchairs. Better than wheelchairs.

  Given the remoteness of the location, the worldwide lack of interest in human history, plus the time and money and engineering that must have gone into creating a smooth track through what must be the boulder-strewn darkness of the cave, this eventuality strikes all of us as something close to a miracle. Because only now have we realized that Dad could never have walked all the way to the paintings. What were we thinking? We stop still and stare. The
sun surges out from behind another cloud. The mobility carts glint. They are pristine, hitherto unused and look like the sort of vehicles NASA might have designed for an ostentatious assault on one of Neptune’s moons.

  ‘Socialism,’ Dad says, his weight heavy on our shoulders.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jack says, ‘you have to hand it to the French – they can’t run their own economy but they do great prehistoric cave-access.’

  ‘Best food. Respectful of artists. World ambassadors for adultery and champagne.’ Ralph lights a cigarette. ‘What’s not to love?’

  ‘Is this the right place, Dad?’ I ask. ‘I mean where is everybody?’

  ‘It’s hardly ever open,’ Dad says.

  ‘How come?’ I ask.

  ‘They only open a very few days of the year, Lou. Because of . . .’ he winces, ‘because of the air.’

  ‘Because of the air?’ I ask.

  ‘Because of the breath of the tourists. It creates fungus and mould. On the cave paintings.’

  ‘Well, lucky it’s open today,’ I say.

  Dad leans harder on me.

  ‘Why the facilities?’ Jack asks.

  ‘Because they had to pretend that they wanted to welcome the whole of France. Even though they can’t, and don’t, and never have.’

  ‘Socialism,’ Jack says.

  So I just come out with it: ‘Dad, do you want to go round in a wheelchair?’

  And Dad does not hesitate: ‘Would seem stupid not to.’

  Wheelchairs: you think they’re a huge psychological problem, you think they’re the end; then, one day, they’re the solution, they’re the beginning. We move forward again while Ralph walks over to inspect the beautiful machines.

  ‘They’ve got wine-glass holders,’ he says.

  ‘Coffee-cup holders,’ Jack says.

  Ralph straightens. ‘We could open the Thierry Rodez early and drink-drive our way round in the darkness. Get rid of our headaches. It’s what the Neanderthals would have wanted.’

  ‘Maybe some of the fuckers are still hiding in there,’ Jack says. ‘Waiting for things to die down a bit. Did Neanderthals drink, Dad?’