Let Go My Hand

by Edward Docx

  He was upstairs. He called down – ‘That you, Lou?’ Like if it wasn’t, what then? And I shouted back: ‘Hello, just stopping by.’ He said he’d been planning to phone me. So I asked why. He said ‘news’. And I went straight on into the kitchen to steal some stuff – tea, batteries, anything – before he came down.

  He walked in. He told me. And then we both went crazy. But not in a crazy way. In the way of going crazy when two people know that they’ve gone crazy, but they’re pretending not to go crazy, because if they admitted, for even a second, how crazy they were going then they’d have to start screaming and never stop.

  Two hours later, we were sat in the library, a bottle of wine more than half gone and he was talking – crazily – and I was writing it down – crazily – and he didn’t mind. As if this – this writing – was now OK. As if this was now urgently what I had to do. As if his imminent death OK’d or unlocked or sanctioned me as a writer. As if, even if this aspiration of mine was total fiction, then suddenly, it was a fiction we could both converge upon. Or accept. Or promulgate. Or indulge. I don’t know. As if here was a way to be his son. As if here was a way for him – pristinely – to be my father.

  He was saying, ‘But everyone is insane, Lou, insane and half-wrecked . . .’

  And I was writing it down, which was itself insane and half-wrecked, as if it was his last will and testament.

  And he was saying: ‘. . . I’m telling you: you spend your thirties thinking that it’s only you and that they’re all doing fine – maybe a little rude at parties, a little tense, a little cold, odd, oblique – but they’ve arrived on the scene feeling totally together and you’re the only one packing the panic and the anxiety. But then it hits you – in your forties – it hits you that most people are going quietly mad inside themselves. And they’re all self-medicating – not just the alcohol or the yoga or the children or the vocation or – heaven forbid – the hobbies, but everything. Everything. Every single thing they say to you is more self-medication. I’m not this, I’m that; that’s what they want to tell you. I’m better at this than you think. I’m deeper, wider, more than I appear. I’m not at all “x”. I’m more “y”. And then it dawns on you. You are not alone. They’re all hurting like hell. They all wanted something else. A bit more of this. A lot less of that. They’re all trying to block out the missed opportunities and the wrong turns. They want to know how-the-hell-did-this-happen and is-this-good-enough? Am I too late? And they all want to be understood in a different way. They’re all being tormented by different versions of their own stories that they never got the chance to tell. Seriously. Even the President of the United States wants you to rethink your view of him. Reconsider. Remember this. Forget that. I know about the whole Iraq thing, but . . . Sure, there was semen on the dress but what about . . . ? And so then – when you realize that this is everyone – the panic, I mean, the anxiety – you know what happens? You start to relax again. You do. You start to think: well, if everyone is insane and panic-stricken, then that’s OK. That’s a big relief. That’s much easier to live with. Why didn’t they tell me? The bastards. And you know what that is? That’s your fifties, Lou. That’s your fifties when you suddenly get everything back again because you . . . you ease up, you understand. Of course everybody is doolally because that is the nature of being a human on a planet that has no interest in humans. Has to be. The way out of the mid-life crisis turns out to be the realization that life is one long crisis. For everyone. So – yes – you ease up. The crisis passes. You start to enjoy things again. You don’t have to prove yourself to yourself so much. And then what happens? I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you what happens . . . Just as you’ve worked out how best to live, you are betrayed by your own bloody body. Just as you’ve got the hang of how to go about your own bloody life with a modicum of wisdom and relaxation. Just as the money worries recede, your body starts packing up. And so then you realize yet another thing, Lou: that you were an animal all along. A mammal. Blood and tissue. Organs and limbs. With an embarrassing and pathetic best-before date. And you can’t do all those things you realized you should have done – let alone enjoy your own thoughts and feelings – because it’s all about your body from now on. In fact, it has been all about your body all along – if only you had noticed. Because if your lungs don’t work, or your heart, or your legs – then everything else is totally beside the point. And that’s your sixties – right there. The realization that you have about twenty minutes left to live in the way that you’ve finally – finally – understood is right. But with gathering disability and the certainty that something is going to hurt more and more in your body until – agony of agonies – you’ll wind up hoping for death. Begging for it. I’m not joking. Lou. Seriously. What kind of a life is this?’

  FEINSCHMECKER HOCHGENUSS

  We follow Malte. His stock is high in Oberotweil. Now that the concert has been deemed such a success (and there’s every chance of a rebooking next year), he is all bad jokes and bonhomie again. He waddles up to the desk to greet the maître d’ – a thin and wiry man with an inclined head and eyes that glance sideways every few seconds as if to intimate that, yes, he is peripherally aware that the world is a conspiracy. They seem to be friends – or, at least, familiar collaborators of recent days; and so this, we quickly understand, is the fluid colloquy of equals. Nods and checks-of-the-system ensue. Mute re-agreements are remade. And then the maître d’ looks past Malte at us four with the brief concern of a man with many wider worries; he sees my father’s over-worn black corduroy blazer, Jack’s over-smart dad-casual jacket, Ralph’s over-battered boots, my too-skinny drainpipe jeans. And there is a moment when he might object – rightly, rightly – but Malte’s presence and the need to get on with it prevail.

  ‘This way,’ he says, the menus in his arms like scrolls of law or worship.

  The restaurant is not on the battlements but rather on a terrace in front of the castle overlooking the Rhine. We pass through high doors and outside into the warmish evening air. I am at the back, pushing Dad, glad of the thoughtful German access ramps and the flatness of the tiles and the generous space between the lamps and tables.

  ‘Is good, ja?’ Malte asks over his shoulder.

  ‘Sensational.’ Ralph is additionally delighted that he will be able to smoke because our table is outside.

  The castle must have been medieval originally – rebuilt when Germany felt romantic – and it rears up in the glow of soft architectural lighting beside us. There are square battlements. High round and narrow towers with tight conical roofs. A yellow banner, suspended between two windows far above, announces to the river-valley below (and the world beyond) in black Gothic writing: ‘Das Gourmet-Festival Denzlingen: die Feinschmeckermesse am Rhein.’

  Dad twists in the wheelchair. I lean in to hear him as all such carers do.

  ‘Find a world,’ he says, inclining his head after Malte, ‘and rise therein to greatness.’

  ‘That’s what I’m doing, Dad,’ I say. ‘But in database management.’

  The place is full. The other diners are a mixture: fellow concert-goers still carrying their programmes; one or two families with teenagers; two bigger tables of more elderly couples, stiffly dressed and falsely good-humoured (as if meshed together on some atrocious ‘Romantic Rhine’ cruise); and several undeniably heavy-weight tables where an atmosphere of great gastronomic seriousness is evinced in the care with which forks are raised to mouths and eyes are closed and grimaces of delight or disappointment disport themselves across the kind of faces that start revolutions. We’ve been told that the castle is very popular and used throughout the year by everyone from bat-watchers to medieval re-enactment specialists. We are lucky. Some terrifying and irresistible psychological pincer-movement perpetrated by Ralph and Malte has ensured that we have a special table at the far corner of the terrace. This turns out to be situated on its own – on a round area that juts out a little as if the base of an un-built hexagonal tower planned to give
the best possible view up and down the river. And, here, the maître d’ stops, turns, smiles, inclines his head.

  ‘Your table, Herr Lasker,’ he says in English. His eyes travel briefly sideways and back again. ‘If there is anything we can do for you, then let it be done. And may I say, Happy Birthday, Herr Lasker. We are honoured to have the family and friends of Herr Swallow for this occasion.’ He indicates the expensive linen with a magician’s flourish. There are candles in teardrop glass to thwart the non-existent wind and I can smell the scent of the roses that climb the old walls around.

  He lays out the menus. ‘I will send someone over to begin . . . the process,’ he says and backs away as if from the Holy Roman Emperor.

  Malte comes forward – his head trampolining in the mattress of his neck.

  Ralph pauses in the lighting of his cigarette and makes a gesture of appreciation with his hand. ‘Thank you, Malte.’

  ‘You must have a drink with us,’ Jack says, ‘and Dean.’

  ‘Amaretto and lime,’ I say.

  ‘Where is Dean?’ Dad asks. ‘His Chopin was . . . I don’t know. Transportative.’

  ‘He is with Rheinmetall. He must eat with them,’ says Malte.

  ‘Who are they? A rock band?’ This from Jack.

  Malte demurs: ‘No – the sponsors.’

  ‘Rheinmetall sponsor the Debussy festival?’ Ralph’s brows rise.

  Malte nods. ‘Yes, we are all grateful to Rheinmetall.’

  None of us knows what to do with this information; it seems to mean something about the universe that can’t be tackled in a single night.

  ‘Well, thank you, Malte,’ Dad says. ‘I, for one, am having a wonderful evening.’

  Malte bows. ‘No, thank you, Herr Lasker. We would not be here without you guys. They say one good efforts deserves another and so this is my pleasure to help. I know nothing about the vans. But music and eating – I am the man.’ He clasps his white hands together so that they rest over the gelatinous dome of his white stomach. ‘Well, we see us in a while, crocodiles.’

  ‘Come and have a drink with us,’ Dad says again. ‘And bring Dean. We thought his Chopin was . . . sublime. Truly. Tell him. Tell him.’

  ‘For sure. Yes. I will try to come back with Dean . . . But if you have finished before I find you – then there is a jazz bar in the castle – on the other side. Sometimes Dean plays. I will be there, myself, later on. They serve the excellent – how do you say? – snacks.’

  ‘We’ll be there, Malte,’ Ralph says.

  Malte smiles his curling-bacon-on-the-grill smile and backs away with a waddle and a wave looking like that rarest thing – a happy man in a world more or less to his liking.

  I park Dad up next to the stone wall and put on the brakes so that we can look out across the valley. The Rhine is wide and oily-black tonight. Long shimmering poles of reflected light from the villages opposite reach out across the surface – crimson, yellow, pale green. The vine-terraced hills beyond are massed shadows save for another old fortress opposite that is likewise under-lit in amber and set forward on an outcrop-vantage overlooking a distant bend. The darker shape of a night barge is passing by with its forward light – like a long diamond-studded tongue lapping through the water without a mouth.

  We eat and drink as if Valhalla will indeed be destroyed in the morning. Course after course; little portions but lots of them; stuff on strings, see-through soups, stuff made of seeds, stuff made of skins, some little lobster tails with some kind of lime-frost, bits of pigs with figs, and then some kind of pasta with truffles, which has my father more or less singing, but smells to me like socks and tastes like sodden mushrooms.

  I have never seen Dad so happy, though. He’s having the time of his life. The liquid light of the candles a-swim in his eyes. The castle, the river. The mighty night behind him. Talking about the Valkyries. Talking about Volkswagens. Ralph on one side, Jack on the other.

  But maybe the three bottles of wine are the problem because, sometime around about dessert, this dark vapour starts to permeate our talk – something clammy, cold and noxious that has slipped from the water, slouched up the banks, climbed the walls below and now comes creeping and curling into our conversation. Maybe it started with what my father was saying about my mother and a camping trip from fifteen years ago because that’s when Jack suddenly jolts forward.

  ‘. . . But I don’t think that’s right,’ he says. ‘How can Lou really understand? He wasn’t there.’ He pauses a moment. ‘And then you lied to him.’

  My father’s face flinches but sluggishly like everything is running slow because he desperately needs to clear out the cache on his hard drive but hasn’t got the time to shut down properly and reboot. ‘That wasn’t important, Jack. It was the past. It didn’t matter. Not as far as Lou and—’

  ‘Not true.’ Jack stops him, sharply. ‘I’d say concealing things from your children hinders them in their effort to understand who and what and how they are. I’d say it really sets them back, Dad. I’d say it’s damaging.’

  I put down my glass. ‘What are we talking about?’

  Jack continues: ‘I’d say it is something you—’

  ‘Dramatized,’ Ralph cut in. ‘Yet again.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Dad retorts. ‘People conceal things from their children all the time. For their own good.’

  The night vapour is a spirit that is more than noxious, I’m thinking, something toxic – insinuating its way within.

  ‘That’s how families work,’ Dad says. ‘Have to work.’

  ‘What are we talking about?’ I ask.

  ‘I wanted to protect you and Ralph from th—’

  ‘Not true.’ Jack interrupts. ‘In fact, now I have my own children, I can’t believe y—’

  ‘I wanted to make a clean start, Jack.’ My father makes a swatting motion with his hand. ‘I wanted to make a clean start.’

  I bang the table, half-meaning it. ‘What are we talking about?’

  Everyone goes cold-silent. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it has been me all along. Maybe I was just waiting for the right moment to grab the wheel and lurch us across the road into the oncoming traffic. Because now we’re going to crash. At last.

  Ralph reaches forward for the wine. ‘I would say now is a pretty good time to tell him, Dad.’

  ‘Tell me what?’

  My father’s eyes are tired but there’s something else I‘ve not seen before – something wan and weak that has hidden itself from sight; shame.

  ‘I didn’t meet your mother in New York, Lou,’ he says, slowly. ‘I met her in Russia – about eighteen months before you think.’

  Ralph’s voice is equanimous: ‘Taking the total amount of time you behaved like a fuck-pig to around three years.’

  ‘Your mother lived in London, Lou, before she went back to New York.’

  Jack interjects: ‘Dad liked to pop round and see your mother once or twice a week and then come home and scream and shout with ours.’

  ‘We tried to stop, Lou. She went back to America. To stop.’

  ‘Ralph and I used to lie awake listening to Mum and Dad fighting while all this was going on,’ Jack says.

  Ralph smiles, cold as cracked china. ‘It was very soothing.’

  ‘We were upset for the first six months,’ Jack says, ‘but then we got into this game where we’d count the swear words.’

  ‘Dad used to swear a lot back then, Lou.’ Ralph sucks his teeth. ‘Lots of cunt and fuck.’

  ‘I was . . . I was trying to talk to Carol. I never stopped trying to—’

  ‘Not really,’ Jack interrupts again. ‘Dad thought the best approach was to lie, Lou, and then – when Mum found out – as she was bound to do – he thought the next best plan was to move from coward to bully.’

  Ralph does this swimming fish gesture with his hand. ‘From lies to torture and back again. Isn’t that right, Dad?’

  ‘It went on for a long time, Lou,’ Jack says. ‘A long, long time.’


  My father looks at me as if for mercy. ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ he says.

  There’s a black hole burning inside of me; I’m dark, invisible and I have no centre but I’m dragging everything in.

  ‘So you went for the option which created maximum suffering for everybody.’ Jack shakes his head.

  ‘You don’t “go” for “options”, Jack.’ My father’s derision is weak and shabby and ugly. ‘It’s not that simple.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘There was dignity in leaving. There was dignity in staying—’

  ‘For fuck’s sake.’ Ralph laughs dismissively.

  ‘There was zero dignity.’ Jack speaks almost as though he is the father and Dad the disappointing son.

  ‘There was cowardice in leaving,’ Ralph says. ‘There was cowardice in staying. I think that’s what you mean, Dad.’

  ‘I was going mad.’ Now my father is wheedling. ‘You have no idea. I was afraid of my own mind.’

  ‘Wrong people to ask for sympathy, Dad,’ Jack says.

  ‘I’m not asking for sympathy.’

  ‘You’re asking for something, though,’ Ralph says. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘I could not talk straight to Carol. I could not talk straight to Julia. They . . .’ Anger enters my father’s voice – a vehemence part alcohol and part rebarbative. ‘There was so much drama in it . . . I was being fucked over by both of them.’

  ‘Don’t speak like that about my mother,’ I say, quietly. But my own voice is strange to me. I want to go. But I can’t. I have no other family.

  ‘How would you like me to speak? I thought you three were all big on reality.’ Dad expels that last word like it’s the bone that has been stuck in his throat all these long years.