by Edward Docx
‘But the thing is, Lou . . .’ Ralph is composed by way of counter. ‘My mum still let him in. She still let him come in and sleep in the spare room. Can you imagine what that was doing to her? Night after night. Week after week. Even after she found out.’
‘Every morning,’ Jack says, ‘every morning we used to have these horrible little breakfasts . . . Mum all tense and red-eyed with controlled hysteria trying to make our toast and ask us about our school work and then kiss us on the way out.’
‘The best bit,’ Ralph says, ‘was when Dad promised to stop – swore blind that he had. And then—’
‘Carried on.’ Jack shakes his head disgusted.
‘I didn’t carry on.’
‘Sorry. Started again,’ Jack scoffs. ‘In secret.’
‘I had to go to New York—’
‘Ah, this bit is true, Lou,’ Ralph says. ‘Important conference on Emily Brontë’s misuse of layered narrative.’
‘I thought I was having a bloody breakdown, boys.’
‘No; a breakdown was what you caused Mum to have,’ Jack says. ‘She was a steady woman before. Naive maybe – but with her own life and plans. You – you created her suffering.’
‘I . . . I was falling apart. My mind was a hall of broken mirrors. You don’t know.’ Dad is leaning forward, his eyes burning – muscles twitching unbidden in his furrowed brow. ‘You try . . . you try to sort out the love from the desire, the desire from the madness, the madness from the meaning, the meaning from what the hell you are supposed to do. But you are on your own – on your bloody own – with no experience and no counsel. On your own. With your children in revolt and your wife hating you and a job which eats your waking existence and the shit-spray of everyday life in your eyes all the time. So, yes, I go to New York and suddenly . . . suddenly it stopped. On the plane. Over the Atlantic. Everything cleared and eased. I felt better.’
‘Fine,’ Jack says, derisively. ‘Fine, Dad. Glad you felt better. But instead of never coming back. You went for the other option. You came back for . . . what? For more cheating, more lies. Another eighteen months of torture.’
‘Of staggering self-indulgence.’ Ralph pours himself more wine. ‘You have to admire the commitment. The narcissism. However malignant.’
‘I don’t presume to judge you, Ralph.’
Ralph’s eyes are mica. ‘No children, Dad.’
‘I—’
‘Big difference, Laurence.’ Ralph places the wine down with slow deliberation. ‘What I do is between consenting adults. We all agree to the agony. We don’t enlist child soldiers.’
‘I didn’t—’
‘Of course you did.’ Jack’s drunkenness is like some sort of super-sobriety. ‘How could we not be involved? Dragged into the psycho-drama. All children are half their mother and half their father. You divided us against ourselves in the worst possible way at the worst possible moment.’
Ralph exhales. ‘But even forget that. Forget us. It’s just that you behaved like such a cunt for so long. Didn’t you? Such a total cunt.’
Dad’s face is tight and he’s not moving. They’re going to tear him apart in front of me, I’m thinking, and hang him from the battlements. And I don’t know whether to save him or join in.
‘The second discovery is what sent my mother properly crazy, Lou,’ Ralph says. ‘Dad lied. Dad was found out. Dad swore he would stop. Dad lied again – deeper and with more duplicity. And Dad was found out a second time. Good old Dad.’
‘There are as many kinds of love as there are people in the world, Ralph.’ My father gestures wildly. ‘We love one way here. We love another way there. Of course we do. You know that. I . . . I was the one trying to get reality into both pictures. I was—’
‘After being found out again.’ Jack’s disgust is written in the lines of his face. ‘These were not pictures, Dad, these were lives. Listen to yourself.’
‘First rule of any affair,’ Ralph says, ‘is that you protect the people you know you love over and above whoever it is you think you might love.’
‘The only explanation is that you wanted to be caught,’ Jack says. ‘You wanted us all to know.’
‘You wanted the drama,’ Ralph adds.
‘You wanted all four of us to see . . . to see how much we needed you. You know what I think?’ Jack pauses. ‘I think you were preening yourself in the reflection of the suffering you were creating.’
Ralph takes over: ‘You seek conflict, damage – you drag everyone else in – down to your level – and it’s all the classic stuff a cunt needs to make himself feel better about his miserable soul. But what’s really depressing,’ Ralph says, ‘what is really fucking depressing, Dad, is the idea that you haven’t grown up at all. Because here we are again. It’s all about you. It’s all about you.’
‘I tried . . .’ My father’s face is pale and his hands are tight to the arms of the wheelchair. I can tell he’s being annihilated not just by what they’re saying, but by the cool fervour with which they are saying it. ‘I tried . . . I tried to drain the thing of all the drama. I sat with your mother . . . And then I sat with your mother . . .’ He points at me with a stabbing finger. ‘And I said . . . I said . . . But there was no reasoning with anyone.’ Anger notches his brow again. ‘There’s no bloody reason to it – to any of it. She became a monster. You don’t know.’
The four eyes of my brothers are as one creature.
‘You don’t know,’ Dad says, his voice rising. ‘Some nights I sat in the van on my own hating myself. Knowing how much you hated me. Knowing that. Can you imagine? And that you were right to hate me. And—’
‘We didn’t hate you, we just thought you were a total cunt.’ Jack saying it – Jack saying the word rips into my father the deeper. ‘We couldn’t understand why you didn’t just fuck off.’
‘A coward and a cunt,’ Ralph says. ‘You were the monster. Whatever she became, you turned her into.’
My father recoils. All the light goes out of his eyes. He cannot take much more. But I am not the referee and I’m holding the sponge in both corners.
‘There was no escaping . . . the situation . . . because you can’t stop loving your family and the mother of your children. I loved—’
‘Don’t pretend—’
‘No, Jack, no. No.’ My father is shaking as he leans forward in his wheelchair – and now I can see the ghost of his former violence stirring in him – as though he would rise and beat his sons if only his body were still able to do so. Beat them into tears and submission. ‘I did not get married lightly. I loved your mother. I loved Carol. Do not . . . do not . . . do not tell me who I loved and who I didn’t. Never tell me that. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. She was my north star, my guide, my safety. I loved your mother dearly before it was all so . . . so incinerated. You two . . . you two . . . you don’t know—’
‘You could have made a decision and stopped – stopped – involving the rest of us,’ Jack says. ‘One way or the other.’
‘Everything was self-created,’ Ralph says, ‘self-inflicted, self-designed, self-centred, self—’
‘You two know nothing of what I did—’
‘We know enough.’
‘—or what was done for you. For you!’ My father rises from the chair and stands, shaking, swaying, one hand on the table, one hand on the armrest of his wheelchair, fury coursing through him. He reaches for a knife and tries to bang it down. But he has no control and it flails wildly into his wine glass which spills, expensively, rolls in a half-circle and smashes onto the floor. He cannot stand but sways a moment, the stars stealthy in the sky behind him, his face cracked by feeling and smeared with its flood, before he falls back heavily into the wheelchair that jolts and bucks – held only by the brake that I set.
‘What was done for us, Dad?’ Ralph asks in a voice of deadly calm as he lights a cigarette from the candle. ‘Are you talking about that weekend when we drove across Wales in the van with Mum chasing us in her car? Or what about K
eswick when you smashed up Jack’s face and then locked us in that room. Can you imagine what that felt like for us? I thought he was going to die. He was fucking bleeding everywhere. And it wouldn’t stop. I thought Jack was going to die from having no blood. I was nine, Dad. Meanwhile you were down the corridor busy in bed with Julia. Christ, the deceit of it. The lies. I mean what the fuck were you doing? What the fuck were you thinking? Beating us up. Taking all your shit out on us.’
‘Or what about Devon when you left us in that shitty hostel?’ Jack asks. ‘No food. No call. No money. No idea if you’d had an accident or something. Was that done for us, too?’
‘I’m sorry, boys.’ My father’s voice is hollowed out. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Why didn’t you just go?’ Jack asks.
‘Carol was drinking. She was hitting me. And it became – it was violent. Terrible.’
‘You made her that way.’
‘Maybe I did. But I saw that she was . . . she was becoming unstable. And I was worried what would happen to you.’ His voice has no tone of combat left. ‘And in those days the court always decided in favour of leaving the children with the woman. I was told that she’d get custody of you. Unless I had overwhelming evidence. And I thought . . . I thought she would take it to court. I wanted to be with you, boys. I wanted to be with you two.’
Ralph is looking directly at Dad – his eyes the world’s most powerful and precise tunnelling apparatus. ‘You’re saying you stayed to collect evidence?’
‘I felt I had a duty to look after you . . . both. I didn’t want to lose you.’ Now the emotional lability takes him. Tears leak from the side of his face. ‘You two – my boys. Christ.’
But Ralph is relentless. ‘You stayed to collect evidence? This is your defence?’
‘Sorry, this is the disease—’
‘Forget the fucking disease,’ Ralph says.
‘I stayed so I could take you with me. I didn’t want to be without you. I thought she’d stop me seeing you ever again. Not everything I did was bad. I loved you.’
Jack’s voice is identical to Ralph’s: ‘So what? So that’s why you deliberately tape-recorded her screaming and crying?’
This is the creature that crawled out of the river. Two heads, one voice.
‘That’s why you did it?’ Jack presses. ‘That was your solution?’
‘Yes.’ My father’s is quiet now – as if it is a relief to give it all up and lie down and die. He closes his eyes. ‘Yes. That’s why I recorded her.’
But the creature isn’t done.
‘And did you let it all happen naturally, Dad?’ Jack mocks.
‘Or did you goad her to get the good stuff on tape?’ Ralph asks. ‘Did you set the whole thing up?’
My father is silent.
The creature’s voice is two vicious whispers.
‘You deliberately staged it, didn’t you, Dad?’
‘You deliberately provoked her pain and suffering to get it on tape.’
‘I didn’t know what to do,’ he breathes.
‘Can you imagine – can you imagine – after all that had happened – can you imagine how Mum felt when she found out – from her solicitor – about those tapes? About what you’d done?’
‘Did you know that she asked to listen to them? So she could prepare a defence. But they wouldn’t give them to her. They said no because they were too harrowing and there was no point.’
‘But even then . . . Even after she knew she would lose, she still wanted to hear them.’
‘You know why?’
My father is silent.
‘Because she wanted to make herself confront what you were capable of so that she could hate you instead of loving you.’
‘She wanted to listen to the sound of love being pissed on.’
‘That’s what she said. To us.’
‘Those exact words.’
‘She told us she remembered the nights you did it. How you did it.’
‘What you contrived. To make her attack you.’
‘She told us about the faces you made that the tape would not pick up.’
‘Your mother was—’
‘Those tapes. Her whole life.’
‘You – you were the sick one.’
‘I had to make a judgement . . .’ My father’s eyes seek mine but I can’t look at him. ‘I’ve been happy for the last twenty-seven years. Really. And I think you’ve been . . . I think you’ve been better off, too. I think—’
‘Fuck it.’ Ralph suddenly scrapes back on his chair to stand. The creature is gone. They are two – my brothers again. ‘It doesn’t matter. We got over all this a long time ago. You did what you wanted to do. We’re through it, past it; you’re the one with all the shit to carry, not us.’
Jack rises slowly and speaks as if to himself. ‘As a child you trust the relationship of your parents. As an adult you realize that this is an unreasonable expectation.’
‘Yes. Who gives a fuck? Not us.’ Ralph throws down his napkin. ‘Much worse going on right now in some Cambodian lithium mine. Besides, there’d be no Louis otherwise. Let’s go and see Malte and listen to some more music. I’m fucking starving.’
Jack is swaying. ‘Come and find us, Lou, if you want to.’
‘Thanks for dinner, Dad,’ Ralph says. ‘Lou, be sure to use his fucking credit card. Least the cunt can do.’
Eva’s beautiful face fills my phone. She is telling me that she has a flight for the day after tomorrow. She is going to fly to Zurich whether we are there or not. She has booked a tiny Airbnb apartment – in the centre near the lake. I can come and get her or she can come and get me. Whatever is happening. I say I will see her the day after tomorrow. I’m not driving back with these bastards. And I kiss the screen goodbye. Then I look at myself in the bathroom mirror. I don’t really know who I am; but I know that with this woman’s love, I can do whatever it takes. I can outlast. And I can endure.
REQUIEM
A gibbous moon is rising fast in the westward sky as if late to its command. The air is good to breathe and clears my head. The path back to where we had parked the van forms a shallow saddle – down from the castle and then back up along a paved escarpment to the mobile-home parking place. The valley of the river is on our left. We can see a cruise ship lit up with a daisy-chain of lights hung high from stern to bow and the water has changed from oily black to a dark and glassy blue in which the moonlight now pools and polishes its silver.
There are couples stopped here and there to look down at the view – most of them older, but two that I guess must be my age and who walk ahead of us, stopping playfully and lightly to kiss, like it’s their little joke; save that it’s not a joke and it’s really all they want to do. Kiss. Stop. Kiss. Walk. Kiss. Stop. Kiss. I have to hold the wheelchair hard and lean backwards to prevent Dad running away down the slope ahead of me. His hands are folded in his lap and I know he won’t get anywhere near the brake if I let him go.
‘. . . before that,’ he is saying, ‘we met at this conference at Yasnaya Polyana,’ he says. ‘You know – Tolstoy’s country house.’
‘Go on,’ I say. We are together again. Just me and him. He’s sobered slightly and he is desperate to talk – to pour himself out to me. And I’m too tired and unable to do anything but listen and prompt and let him be. And it’s like when we were on the ferry; except that it feels as though we’ve survived a shipwreck since then.
‘She was there as a poet, of course. But she ended up being an interpreter. She interpreted everything for everyone.’ He shakes his head. ‘So we went round Tolstoy’s house together. This is the black couch on which he was born, she would say; this is the chair with the sawn-off legs on which he wrote Anna Karenina; this is his treasured picture of Dickens. Later on, when there were lectures, we played truant and she came and sat in my room and we talked for five hours straight.’
‘There was a connection?’
‘Connection. Oh, much, much, much more than that, Louis. Whoever
loved that loved not at first sight? It was like meeting—’
‘The exact shape of the hole you did not know you had in your heart.’
My father twists around, his eyes wild and full of feeling. ‘Yes. How did—’
‘You wrote it in your sonnet book – the copy you gave to Mum.’
He turns his head back but raises his right hand to the side. I let go one handle and offer mine forward. He grips it and we shake our common fist a moment.
‘There was a dinner at a long table in the woods, Lou. We sat beside one another. She was still interpreting. She was such a good dining-companion to everyone. I don’t know . . . We ended up holding hands under the table. I was so . . . so wired to her touch. I’d never felt anything like that before.’
We draw level with the kissing couple who are taking turns at looking through one of those heavy metallic coin-operated binoculars that they place around the world so we can all bend down and pay to look into the distance for half a minute.
‘We went back to my room. She left. She came back. Then she left again. Four in the morning. I slept for two hours then something made me get up . . . I sensed she was leaving. I remember dressing quickly and I remember running outside. I was right.’
‘She was leaving?’
‘Yes, she was already on the early bus that was taking half the guests back to Moscow. So I just stood there in the trees and she looked back at me out of the misted window. I was doing this begging thing, saying – please, please, please come down. I was pretending to be funny about it but – you know – really – really, I was begging. Until, eventually, she got off the bus. She was so reluctant. She said she knew she had to go because otherwise we would be in deep trouble. I gotta get out of here, she was saying, I gotta get out of here. I couldn’t tell if she was crying or if it was just the rain . . . I had to implore her for a number, an address. Anything.’
‘She knew you were married?’
‘Yes.’
‘The whole truth?’
‘She had already guessed it. I didn’t lie.’
Behind us, I can hear the kissing couple; the view through the binoculars is black, says the man. Schwarz. And the woman laughs.