Let Go My Hand

by Edward Docx

  Dad says: ‘Please be careful with that knife.’

  ‘Don’t – whatever you do – accidentally stab anyone under-braking, Lou,’ Ralph says.

  ‘This traffic is getting worse,’ Jack says.

  Ralph undoes his seat belt and half turns around. ‘Maybe the whole of Europe intends to ram themselves with the mighty Feinschmecker Hochgenuss and then commit suicide. Can’t say I blame them. We seem to be in a deterioration phase. The new Dark Ages are coming. Ignorance will not only be bliss, but power. Matches, Lou?’

  I pass them forward.

  Dad says. ‘Can I have a cigarette?’

  ‘Make that two,’ I say, ‘I’ve run out.’

  Ralph shakes out two more cigarettes.

  I light up. They are horrible – like smoking the exhaust of a Russian tank. Dad does the same from my match. We’re crawling now – and the traffic is queuing for miles ahead of us.

  ‘There must have been an accident,’ Jack says. He looks back into the dense fug. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. Cover the food up.’

  ‘Doing it.’

  ‘No. No!’ Jack glances back angrily from watching the traffic. ‘No. Lou – don’t just put the newspaper over it. Do it properly. Dad, tell him. What is wrong with you people?’ He winds down his window to let in some German diesel fumes to go with the sliced salami and cigarette smoke.

  ‘You might as well join in, Jack,’ Ralph says. ‘Then your sandwiches will taste better. Evens things out.’

  ‘Jack likes his smoking like he likes his aggression,’ I say, ‘passive.’

  ‘Louis,’ Ralph says, ‘try not to be mean about your brothers all the time. Tell him, Dad. He’s being really horrible to us.’

  I put the food in a plastic bag and lay the newspaper on top. I get the feeling that we were getting into something with Ralph. Something almost genuine. So I press him: ‘Why did you read her book?’

  Ralph strikes his match as slowly as it is possible for a human being to do while still achieving ignition. ‘I read it, Lou, because I was falling in love with her.’

  We’re inching forward and then stopping again. Jack looks over. ‘You don’t use that word very often, if I may so, brother Ralph.’

  ‘I read it because it was a way of seeing her more often. And because when I began reading it . . .’ Ralph reaches forward to place the matches on the table. ‘When I began reading it, I would come across these lost, lonely, isolated passages that were full of a kind of beauty and humanity.’

  ‘You wanted to save her?’ Jack asks, warily.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ I say. ‘This is going to end badly.’

  ‘I saw that behind the lazy fakery, she had real talent – an imagination – something rare and worth attending to. I don’t know. I wanted to pay her my full attention. I wanted to encourage her. I still do.’

  ‘This was the woman who . . . who . . . This was the last serious woman?’ Dad asks – almost as if of himself. ‘I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about this.’

  ‘The last serious woman on Earth,’ I say.

  ‘You’re saying the book wasn’t the start of it?’ Jack asks.

  ‘No. We met at a screening, we talked . . . Mostly about music. We had lunch and planned our future. We had dinner.’

  ‘She eat a lot?’

  ‘Yes – as it happens, Lou, she did.’

  Jack says, ‘You’re sure that this was love? I—’

  ‘As soon as we knew one another, we were amazed that we had not known each other before. Within a week, all previous relationships seemed juvenile – anaemic, paltry.’

  Jack turns his head from the road to look directly at his twin. ‘I know who this was. You never said it was serious. At the time.’

  ‘Oh, it was serious.’

  ‘What was she like?’ I ask.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Lou – I don’t know. That’s a silly question even by your standards. What is anyone like?’

  ‘What was she like?’ I ask again.

  ‘I have no idea . . . Christ.’

  ‘What did she eat, then? When she was doing all the eating?’

  ‘She didn’t much like fruit cake. She liked her bacon undercooked. She ate a lot of garlic and a lot of butter. She used the word “deliquesce” on the westbound platform at Royal Oak. What can I say?’

  There are trees beside the carriageway. A glimpse of the mighty river beyond. Other cars. Other lives. Mostly single people staring forward in consternation and anger at the blocked road ahead. And nobody talking. Nobody except us.

  Jack edges forward.

  ‘What was she like in the sack?’ I ask.

  ‘Louis,’ Dad winces.

  But Ralph doesn’t flinch: ‘She would put her hand on her stomach and she would say, “I’m greedy for it all.” Which she was. Is. Greedy for all of it – all the time. And then she would go to pieces all over my head.’

  Dad says softly: ‘Tell us why you loved her, Ralph.’

  ‘I don’t know, Dad. Her dark brown eyes. I loved her face of enquiry. I loved her face of fright. I loved her confusion. Her beauty. Her cheekbones. I loved her endless hurry . . . mainly to get away from all these fantasy versions of herself that she had constructed, but which never quite rang true. I even loved the fact that she was such a liar. Christ, I don’t know . . . I’m a sucker for a good-looking girl with an imagination and real intelligence.’

  We’re at a total standstill on the road. Sun stark and certain in the sky. Cars all around. Heat-shimmer from the engines. The river just out of sight. I’m thinking that there’s no place like a traffic jam to give you the feeling that humanity has somehow taken a wrong turn.

  But wherever we’re going, I want us never to get there.

  Dad speaks softly again: ‘When you were together . . . what was it like?’

  Jack half turns back from the wheel the better to attend to what his brother is saying. Ralph opens his palm slowly and we’re all watching him – his puppeteer’s fingers; he makes the gesture of reaching out, of connection.

  ‘I would hold out my hand – and she was there. We were wed. In thought, in feeling. In desire.’

  ‘How did her love declare itself?’ Dad asks, almost tenderly. ‘How did she—’

  ‘Music,’ Ralph says immediately. ‘She bought me music. She sent me music. I did the same. Duets. We would meet in town and say nothing – simply swap our headphones so she could listen to whatever I was listening to and vice versa. And then we’d walk beside each other.’

  My father nods slowly.

  Ralph exhales. ‘The world was reconfigured in front of my eyes. We were remade in one another’s company.’

  He douses his cigarette in our ashtray and immediately fingers another from his pack.

  ‘Love remakes us,’ Dad says. His face is full of feeling and his eyes are shining. ‘That’s it: that’s what love does. Love remakes us.’

  The traffic is still. I can feel that my father wants to reach out for Ralph like he would to me. But that he can’t. They cannot touch.

  ‘And the book?’ Jack asks, quietly. ‘What became of the book?’

  ‘Oh, this book became our joint project. Line by line, minute by minute, I went through it. In hotels, cafes, kitchens, bedrooms, train carriages. I sat with her and together we dragged this limp and bogus thing back to life. Scene after scene. All this ersatz shit she’d written.’ He sparks his match.

  ‘She let you do that to her work?’

  ‘Yes, Dad, she did. Because . . . like all the other stuff in her life, she was absent from it. It wasn’t really her. She’d managed to write an entire book without putting in more than five lines that she actually meant. It was breathtaking. She’d chase me and hound me to work on it. Not that it was saveable.’

  Dad asks, ‘What was it about?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Even in a gestural work, there must have been an ostensible subject?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was full of stuff that she was pretending to
herself to be writing about. I don’t know. I didn’t care after a while. We would work. Then we would climb into bed and make love. I cared about that.’

  ‘But you persevered with the work?’ Dad asks.

  ‘I gave her everything I could give.’ He winces as if there’s a nerve which gets trapped in his heart whenever it pulls in a certain direction.

  The traffic inches forward. Jack turns back to move us along. I put out my cigarette, which has burnt to the filter. Dad does the same. I pour more champagne. We stop again. Jack pulls the handbrake and swings an arm over the back of his chair so that we make a broken circle around our plastic table.

  ’But why?’ he asks. ‘Why did you care about her? If you say she was such a—’

  ‘I don’t know. Why do we do fall in love? It’s a dream, it’s a fantasy, it’s real, it’s everything. I just felt received and understood. But also because she was – she is – so clever and capable – and yet so ensnared and muted and bound in – all at the same time. Vulnerable. Invulnerable. It’s hard to describe.’ Ralph’s eyes seek the window and the world beyond for what he is trying to say. ‘It was like being with a creature hell bent on doing this mad dance of self-concealment and showing off all at the same time.’

  ‘Go on,’ Jack says. He helps Ralph speak, I’m thinking, just like Ralph helps Jack speak. Despite everything, he’s the only one who can climb in there with his brother, take the other paddle and shoot the rapids; these boys, they’d die for each other in a heartbeat.

  ‘There was none of that shit you normally get, the slow traipse through the foothills,’ Ralph continues. ‘She was quicksilver smart. She was able to slalom from one thing to another without self-consciousness.’ He exhales. ‘When we were doing the book . . . something strange happened: I realized she wanted me to tell her what she meant. She didn’t know. Because nobody else . . . nobody else had ever talked with her about her inner life.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Her mother worked every hour because her father was absent – he had another family. Her mother had another family, too, really. She had a step-dad. She lived in the gap between the two families. So basically she had to make herself up to herself.’

  ‘Absent father,’ Jack says.

  ‘Absence was her thing. And she’d had no companion. Or not the kind of companion she needed. I honestly think she was . . . she was estranged from herself. Not in a surface way – but inside. She was acting.’

  ‘No companion but married?’ This from Jack.

  ‘Married.’ Dad breathes in slowly.

  ‘She was married?’ I ask.

  ‘Married,’ Ralph says again.

  ‘Married,’ Jack says, quietly. He turns back and loosens the brake. We crawl forward a few metres.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  Ralph smiles, but wearily.

  ‘Married to whom?’ Dad asks.

  ‘Precisely the wrong person – psychologically. Married to the embodiment of her own deepest and most secret fears. Not that he could know any of this. He had no time for psychology.’

  ‘A good man though?’ Dad asks.

  ‘Yes. Of course. A superb, wonderful, kind, generous, man. Helpful. Decent. Dependable.’

  ‘I like him,’ Jack says to the Mercedes brake lights ahead.

  ‘Me too,’ I say.

  ‘A man who stands up straight and makes a point of doing so,’ Ralph continues. ‘Not exactly handsome. Not exactly not. Well travelled. Says “don’t hold back” like such phrases are in and of themselves funny. Doing well at work. How could he not be? Likes his films. Likes his music. Grooms but not gay. Favourite sunglasses. Favourite T-shirts. Ostensibly considerate, reasonable, steady, proud . . . but, oh, these dull and dreary people neck-deep in the platitudes of life. A professional fetcher and carrier. The kind of brittle, enervating masculinity that makes you wish for death. Sorry, Dad.’

  ‘Don’t hold back,’ I say.

  ‘And underneath?’ Jack asks, sarcastically.

  ‘Oh, underneath.’ Ralph ignores his tone. ‘Underneath. A wounded child. Not his fault. Some kind of trauma back there that took away his certitude. So he, too, had been required to make things certain for himself. You know the routine: I am unable to deal with the truth of human existence – and thus I must erect a grand architecture of right and wrong, a series of ingeniously idiotic totems purporting to delineate reality – this decent, this not; this fair, this not; this good, this bad. Surround yourself with titles and uniforms and clerical collars and hope that everybody will agree to forget that we’re all born mammal-naked and none of it matters a shit one second after you’re dead.’

  Jack: ‘You met him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So how do you know all this?’

  ‘She talked about him. He spoke to me through her. I listened carefully because I listen carefully and because it is interesting to hear another human being talk about love – especially if you’re in love with her.’

  ‘I feel for him,’ Jack says.

  ‘I did too. In a way . . . In a way, they had the same problems. Or cousin problems. Which is a disaster. First rule of a successful marriage: have different problems.’

  ‘Why was she with him?’

  ‘Why is anybody with anybody they only half want to be with? Accidents of timing. A certain non-specific thirst and a few self-welcomed delusions. Followed up by some subtle bullying, cajolery and entrapment from the other side. But it was worse than that.’

  ‘Worse than that?’ I ask.

  ‘He’s Christian,’ Ralph says. ‘A quiet faith. Except of course not quiet at all: it was all moral imperatives and social orders – the whole grand suite of commands supposedly given unto humankind by fuck knows who to enthrone the status quo and have us all skivvying for our betters. Oh, it was all masters and servants and the class system with him. Abasement. Humiliation. Worship. Your mother would have had a field day with him, Lou. Issues galore.’

  ‘I’m getting a lot of anger,’ I say.

  ‘Anger is how we cauterize the wounds of love,’ Dad says. Then gently: ‘He can’t have had an easy time of it with you in the picture, Ralph.’

  ‘He sluiced shame and guilt upon her head until her only duty was to sacrifice herself hourly at the altar of his rectitude, of his so-called love, which was actually possession. But what can anyone do? We all live at cross-purposes to one another. The misunderstandings are exponential.’

  Dad asks, ‘You feel no guilt?’

  ‘Yes, I feel guilty that I only made love to her about twenty times. I feel guilty that I was cautious – out of a respect.’

  The traffic edges forward again.

  Jack asks: ‘What did she do for you, Ralph?’

  ‘She bought me gifts. A CD of Gesualdo – the composer who murdered his wife – and a dictionary of what actors do when they want to fake emotions.’

  Jack glances towards Dad and clicks his tongue: ‘Would you say this was . . . a drama?’

  ‘Oh yes. Plenty. It was a drama as much as it was a reality. We were like two Oscar-nominees slugging it out at the Dionysian. And – believe me – reality went down and took several counts. But at the end, it was reality still standing there with one punch more to throw.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean reality defeated us. I mean pragmatism and convention triumphed. As they must. As they must.’

  ‘And you’re sure her feelings were real? How do you know she wasn’t fucking with you?’

  ‘Oh, she was fucking with me. She was definitely fucking with me. About fifty per cent of the time. She lied to everyone – mother, father, husband. I was there. I heard her. I have no illusions. I was way down the line in terms of important people to lie to.’

  ‘So there you are.’ Jack ratchets the handbrake.

  ‘But she also wasn’t fucking with me.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The things she did. The things she said. You have to look at the behaviour. Certain
calls. Certain texts wanting me. Others declaring love. As real and as heartfelt as anything I’ve ever known. She took risks all the time to be with me. She called me back once – after a long conversation – and she just came out and said it: “I love you.” You have to respect another human being when they say that. It may be the only thing we have to respect.

  ‘How did it end?’

  ‘Pregnancy.’

  ‘Whose baby?’

  ‘Hers.’

  Softly, Dad asks: ‘How did it end for you?’

  ‘Agony. Amazement. I drank and smoked and cried for nine days. I wrote her letters that I could not send. Then I moved to Berlin and became the greatest puppeteer the world has ever known.’

  Jack meets Ralph’s eye: ‘Are you not better off without her?’

  ‘Profoundly so. Unquestionably. But she is the most interesting woman I have ever met.’

  ‘And . . .’

  ‘And I was so in love with her.’

  ‘Sounds like your pride was hurt,’ Jack says.

  ‘Oh, don’t think I haven’t been through all of that. But, after the mutual exploitation and the drama and the narcissism and the sheer fucking misery for everyone, I find myself three years later unequivocally in love with her the same as I was before.’ He shrugs. ‘Love is what is left after every other motive, emotion, reason has fallen away. I strip my existence of all the darkness and self-deceit. I go at it with acid and a blowtorch. And when at last I stop . . . love remains, still standing there, quiet and true.’

  ‘When did you see her last?’ Dad asks.

  ‘Three years ago. We met up in this cafe – for coffee – Christ, it was the most disingenuous hour I have ever sat through. I tried to keep it real but she was gone . . . gone.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said we were never going to agree but she wished that we had never been lovers. Because then we could have been friends and talked every day.’

  ‘And what did you say?’ I ask.

  ‘Had to agree.’

  ‘Had to?’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t say that when her body was shuddering to a climax on the tip of my tongue, that she didn’t seem to be wishing it wasn’t sexual.’