Let Go My Hand

by Edward Docx

  ‘Not Neanderthals,’ Dad says, wearily. ‘How many times? Homo sapiens. This is a Palaeolithic site.’

  ‘How old?’ I ask.

  ‘Between thirty-two and thirty-five thousand years old. Aurignacian.’

  Dad hates standing in the direct sunlight; he wants to be underground. We are all fair but Ralph and I seem to handle the sun better. We hobble Dad over to the shade by the ticket office and sit him down on a bench. Ralph goes to the booth and leans in to the glass and starts speaking loudly with the man inside – English, then German, then Russian while Jack and I look at the mobility carts.

  After a few seconds, Ralph calls over to us as though such a thing were inexplicable: ‘The man speaks French. Can you talk to him, Jack?’

  ‘What would you like me to say?’

  ‘Explain our mission.’

  Jack and I walk to the booth.

  ‘What mission?’

  Ralph stands aside and gestures Jack towards the window. ‘I may have confused him. He thinks we are all trying to kill ourselves. Tell him that we’re not.’

  ‘We are not all trying to kill ourselves,’ Jack says in French.

  ‘Explain the concept,’ Ralph urges.

  Jack looks round. ‘What concept? What the fuck are you talking about?’

  ‘That we are doing everything together. That therefore we’d like to book four disability buggies. In concert. In sympathy.’

  Jack sighs and then says some of this to the man, who is now hunching forward so that he can peer up – grimacing and narrow-eyed through the gap where the money and tickets pass back and forth beneath all the stickers advertising other, more attractive, attractions.

  ‘Tell him,’ Ralph says, ‘that we have agreed to be together in all things. Until we part ways.’ Ralph grinds out his cigarette. ‘On the sad shore of the River Styx.’

  ‘Until we part ways,’ Jack says in French.

  Nothing happens.

  We are at an impasse. We three stand in a fraternal horseshoe while the man looks back at us, his face like a washing machine mid-cycle.

  ‘Maybe he is deaf,’ I say, quietly. ‘Or maybe it’s the altitude.’

  ‘Tell him we will pay him two hundred euros,’ Ralph says, ‘And no questions asked.’

  Jack does so. Instantly, the man disappears.

  Again, we stand with no purpose.

  ‘How is it going?’ Dad shouts over from the bench – not without sarcasm.

  A door opens somewhere round the side and the old man comes out, hurrying towards us, his back bent, his arm on his hip, wizened and worn down, his life spent at the entrance to a cave. He clasps each of us by the hand but then crosses over to the bench and reaches down for Dad so that the two embrace – not heartily, but with the delicacy of age.

  The man speaks in French as thick and jagged as the rocks on which he stands: ‘I have wanted for so long to end my own vigil, sir. But I do not have the courage. You are a hero to me. I salute you.’

  Dad is taken aback but he is smiling. He flips up his shades. ‘It’s my children,’ he says also in French. ‘They’re driving me to it.’

  The man clasps his elbow.

  ‘Your children?’ The old man gestures at us enquiringly.

  ‘Yes,’ Dad says, smiling. ‘I thought when they were little that one day . . . one day they would cease to be a burden to me. But it just gets worse with each passing year. You think your parents are a nightmare all your life until you have your own children and then you realize it was the children who were the problem all along.’

  ‘Can we take the wheelchairs?’ Ralph asks.

  ‘Armand Pujol,’ the man says. He stands upright away from Dad, spreads his fingers to his chest as though preparing to self-administer his weary heart’s restart without quite knowing which side to press. ‘Of course. Les fauteuils roulants électriques. Yes, come. Come. Let me guide you.’

  There is a wide roadway cut smooth into the rock that bends this way and that down towards the entrance – as if they were expecting the entire disabled population of Europe to stage a marathon through the cave. Armand seems to have shut up shop for the day as part of his bribe. He drives ahead. He tells us that our mobility cars can get up to twenty kilometres an hour. But he is strict that we mustn’t go ahead of him. So we follow him down, weaving and bunching like racing drivers behind the safety car. And thus we enter the underworld.

  The cave smells of wet stone, cool and damp and earthy, like it must have done for every single one of those thirty-five thousand years. The original entrance – higher up the gorge – was sealed off millennia ago by a rock collapse and so now we must take the same long route inside that the explorers took when they accidentally discovered the paintings. Sometimes we are able to drive two or three abreast. Sometimes we must drive line astern. One joystick controls the angle of our forward spotlights, the other our direction and speed of travel. Either side of our pathway, the walls are lit in eerie lights: yellow, white, reddish, pale blue. Many of the lamps are hidden and angled so that features of the rock are shadowed or illuminated, creating vast imaginary shapes and silhouettes; the suggestion of human intentions, imaginations, intuitions. Everywhere we hear the drip and seep of water.

  Armand has some kind of speaker on his cart and he tells us what we are supposed to be seeing in an amplified voice that is eerie, then muffled, then echoic by turn; a voice that comes at us – now as if rising up out of the earth and now as if crawling across the walls. Dad translates after each pronouncement with a sardonic inflection that Armand cannot guess. ‘Here is the Emerald City, high up there on your left. And there’s the Devil’s Tongue . . . right down low on your right. If you look back, you can see the Hags’ Fingers above us. When we stop, just up ahead, please look over the ledge: you will be able to see the Organ of Persephone – beside the shore of the Stygian Falls.’

  ‘Did Armand say Persephone’s organ?’ Ralph asks, loudly, from the back. ‘Or was that you, Dad?’

  ‘Armand,’ Jack says.

  We are side by side, paused on a wide turning area, our carts stopped at odd angles like dodgems at a circus awaiting the music that signals the power being switched on and the next session.

  ‘But the organ was invented in . . .’ Ralph hesitates. ‘Dad, when was the organ invented?’

  ‘Thirteen-nineties – more or less.’

  ‘Maybe he meant Persephone’s organ – as in her urethra,’ I say, helpfully.

  Ralph leans over towards the rail. ‘Do you see a goddess’s urethra down there?’

  There are two eerily still pools of water illuminated from within by a tiger-eye light. The lower one is filled by a single stream of water that falls in a constant stream – quietly, solidly, without splashing – from the upper.

  ‘Looks pretty urethral,’ I say.

  ‘Is the urethra an organ, though?’ Jack asks.

  ‘Was Persephone a goddess?’ Ralph asks.

  ‘Your phones don’t work down here, so I guess you’ll never know,’ Dad says as if he (and his new pal, Armand) are determined to teach us a lesson and serve us right.

  ‘If that’s the Styx,’ I say, ‘then we’re not going to need much of a ferryman to get you across, Dad.’

  ‘Not big enough for the Styx, Baby Lou,’ Jack says.

  ‘There were five underworld rivers,’ Dad says.

  ‘Styx, Acheron, Lethe . . .’ Ralph says. ‘Go on, Dad.’

  ‘Phlegethon and Cocytus,’ Dad says. ‘The rivers of hatred, pain, oblivion, fire and wailing respectively.’

  ‘Now we’re talking,’ I say. ‘This is much more like my kind of holiday.’

  ‘Should have bought sandwiches,’ Jack says. ‘We could have had a picnic where the five rivers meet.’

  Armand calls to us from the next bend in the track.

  We move off again. Our electric engines humming quietly. We file by some jellyfish fossils from three billion years ago and then, for a while, there are no ‘features’ and Armand is si
lent as we go.

  The path has little cat’s-eye lights that bead the edges. The darkness beyond the pools of the lamps above us is an absolute black that contains everything, nothing.

  My mind moves away from itself. I start thinking that this is probably what Dad most wants in the world; that this is precisely how he’d like to enter eternity. And that gets me on to thinking about why he likes these places. Which I’m slowly realizing is to do with time . . . and perspective. The setting of his life in a great context; the relief and easing that such a context brings . . .

  And it works. Because now we’re all thinking about thousands of years – instead of the next few hours, days, weeks. We’re no longer trapped in the present. Instead of myself and instead of tomorrow, I’m thinking about all my ancestors and all of my pasts, I’m thinking about all of those people I can never know – my father’s father’s father a thousand times over, who maybe looked a bit like me and who was himself a son. I’m thinking about how he must have thought and wondered as I think and wonder. A mind exactly the same in biology and in capacity. About how, after he had eaten, he must have sat beside a fire in the shelter of the caves and looked out over gorges like these and seen the moon and stars and talked and talked and talked with his kin. In what language? And what must they have said? My father was a great hero to me. My father was a great coward. My father was weak. My father was brave. And I’m thinking about how the Earth is so ancient. And the dignity of that. The dignity of age. Even though dignity is only a human word and doesn’t describe it. And I’m thinking about how an alien-god might stop by as it passes through the cave of the universe and look down upon our blue globe of beautiful light and how it might hear all the millions of human voices in what might be the equivalent of less than a second for such a being – since it will surely have conquered death – and how this alien-god would be amazed at our confusion, at how we swaggered and worried and mistook what matters again and again and again and again in the brief match-flare of our own lives and in the repetitive failure to see what our species might best be and yet become. And it would sigh to itself and shake its head and say, ‘Well, OK, fuck up then, so-called sapiens, but don’t lose it, guys, don’t totally lose it, whatever you do, do not totally lose it’ – and then it would reboot its satnav and get back on track for some distant star system where they’d long ago got the hang of how to live well, intelligently and for ever.

  Armand has slowed us and we concertina again. We are driving onto a long and wide viewing gallery, two or three feet above the floor of the cave. And here we stop. He tells us to park against the rail and look over it into the darkness. He asks us to put the brake on and to turn our lights out. We do so. He must have stopped himself somewhere near a master switch behind us because suddenly the lights go out completely.

  We can see nothing – absolutely nothing. So black is the darkness that I swear I can hear the shape of the walls, taste the stone, smell the water that has passed through from the Earth from above.

  ‘Now,’ he says. ‘Now look with your eyes. Friends, look!’

  Gradually, gradually, a light grows. Like a hallucination. Like a red shape behind our eyelids. So that we think we’re mad. Or reborn from the womb. But it widens and it spreads so that the opposite wall starts to shape itself, the light growing sharper and brighter, sharper and brighter. We see ochre hand prints; the human mark. We see strange red patterns and dots; human signs. We begin to see the outlines of animals – the beasts. The human mind, the human imagination, the human signature. And now the light starts to flood the wall and we see that these animals crouch and creep and crawl this way and that all around us – lions, hyenas, panthers, cave bears. The light brightens still further. There is an owl daubed in white paint. We sense the finger that smeared the surface of the wall on that day thirty thousand years ago. There is a rhino notched and scored in black. We see the artist has chosen a certain place on the wall where the shape of the rock serves his purposes. We see a heavy-haunched bison painted in sweeping flowing lines. We sense the human being standing back and admiring his artistry in the flicker of his torchlight. We see the curved flourish of the antlers of a reindeer. We see head after head of black-drawn horses, each on the other’s shoulder, as if caught in the instant of the herd’s fierce gallop, their black eyes somehow still alive.

  We are silent.

  Dad’s voice is full of wonder: ‘I’ve wanted to see this all my life,’ he says.

  I get this feeling like the opposite of sickness – the feeling that these paintings are being sucked inside me and that they will somehow live there for ever and ornament my soul.

  ‘This is it,’ Dad says. ‘The beginning.’ His voice has the hushed tone of long yearning met – as though he has been trying to get to this moment ever since he was born. As though now that he apprehends the beginning, he might understand the ending. ‘This is it as best we can know it, boys. The dawn of a distinctly human kind of consciousness.’

  And then another thing hits me: that whatever happens to Dad, we will remember this always. Yes, when I am old, I’ll think of this . . . of Ralph and Jack and me and Dad on our carts. And if this was my father’s intention, then he’s achieved it. Because this journey – Dad’s journey – has its sacrament now. A moment, a monument, made in our memories that will stand outside of time.

  My father’s voice is still quiet but he sounds strong and unfaltering in the silence: ‘Can you see how the shadows fall to create the illusion of movement? You can tell that the artist understands the drama of space. And can you feel it? That we understand that he understands. And that this understanding connects us to him. The human conversation not bound by time or space.’ He’s talking to us now like he did when I was little and he was teaching us. ‘Testimony to the inner life, boys. The life of thought and feeling. That which makes us what we are. That which separates us from these beasts we draw.’

  Jack speaks softly: ‘Did you know this place was open today, Dad?’

  ‘I did. I did.’

  ‘You planned this?’ Jack asks.

  ‘When I got my date, I had the idea. Then I – just – I just looked on the internet and it was too much of a coincidence. I was going to come along on my own with Doug – you know, Doug – because I didn’t know if you’d be free . . .’

  The word seems so inexplicable now – ‘free’ – but this is how we were; so bound in by our lives that we were unable to see life itself.

  ‘I didn’t know if you’d . . .’ And now Dad wavers. ‘I didn’t know if you’d be with me.’ His voice thickens. ‘But . . . you are. You are all here.’

  The wall is alive. We don’t die. Or, if we do, we die all together – every human being that has ever lived.

  ‘And I’m so glad,’ Dad says. ‘So happy that you all made it.’

  ‘Well, you’d never have got us all here without promising you were going to kill yourself,’ Ralph says.

  ‘The truth,’ I say. ‘And isn’t that something?’

  My father says the most staggering thing about human beings is not the tools – it’s the art, it’s the language. Because art and language allow us to consider and talk about things that don’t exist. Other animals communicate, he says. But they are bound in by the physical world – where the food is, where the predators are, the cold of the winter and the return of the sun. Only we create art and fictions. Only we deliberate over things that do not exist: our gods, our nation states, our money and our laws. Only we design an imaginary architecture of ideas and then persuade one another of its reality. This is what art and language have given us. The ability to share these great games and structures of our imaginations and to persuade one another to live by their strictures. We are absurdly successful because of our fictions. Truly, this is the theatre of the imagination.

  The race for the finish is like the last three laps at the Brazilian GP at the end of the season when the championship is yet to be decided. The (unknowing) safety car – Armand – peels off and
we’re released. Basically, it’s an uphill drag out of the mouth of the cave towards the first left hairpin and then a short uphill sprint into a sixty-degree right and so back up the gentler incline to the finish by the ticket booth.

  Dad goes left for the inside and Jack goes right, quicker to react to the restart than me and Ralph. I tuck in behind Dad and Ralph veers even wider than Jack, planning for the cut back.

  Dad is hogging the racing line and leaning a little on Jack, forcing him out wider. There’s a gap opening up in the inside therefore. And so I’m right there. It’s all going to be about the brakes.

  Dad leaves it too late in an effort to hold Jack off and keep him wide around the left-hand hairpin. And so I’m suddenly right up his inside trying to keep as tight a line as possible. But I’m also too fast and deep into the bend and I can’t slow my cart down enough. I T-bone Dad, who, in turn, has now wedged into Jack. And so we three are unable to straighten up and get back on the gas up the hill for the right-hander and – unbelievably – Ralph has come sneaking through on my inside. The fucker must have braked early, swept it out wide and turned in sharp so as to slip through the gap as it opened up.

  ‘It’s all about corner exit speed,’ he shouts.

  He’s away and in the lead. But I’m after him. Only a cart-length behind. I guess it’s a fifty-metre sprint to the right-hander. And we’re both at max speed. The question is, therefore, who has the nerve to take the last corner flat. I hang out wide to sweep in. I can watch Ralph, I’m thinking, and see if his trajectory takes him into trouble. There’s no way he’s going to back off. He’s too insane. I watch him swing in for the racing line but – halfway round the corner – it becomes clear that he’s definitely not going to make it. I slow myself down. But it’s not enough. Ralph is scraping along the outer wall, effectively narrowing the corner exit by a cart’s width, and I therefore need to get even tighter to miss him which I cannot do. I bump into his back wheel and come to a head-jerking stop. At the same time I feel a thump up my backside. It’s Jack, who is doing to me precisely what I have done to Ralph. We’re rammed nose to tail. All three trying to free our front ends. Ralph deliberately blocking me. Me deliberately blocking Jack. And that’s how Dad comes bowling by at half speed and takes it through the gap before accelerating up and away for the chequered flag that is already waving in his mind.