by Edward Docx
‘Dad,’ Jack says. He’s leaning forward, holding out his hand.
Dad clasps his wrist, like he does mine, and raises it for a second. Then he does something I have never seen him do: he reaches out his other hand and lays it on Ralph’s shoulder.
I lean in so that we form a loose circle.
‘When you get to where I am, you see it clearly, boys. Finally, finally. And what is really important to me . . . most important . . . the only thing that I ask . . . is that you go on . . . talking to each other like we’ve always talked.’ His eyes go round us again – Ralph, Jack, me – the circle of father and sons, holding steady for the briefest moment. ‘Don’t fall out. Don’t ever fall out. I want you to promise to stay friends. And to help one another where you can. Because you’re very lucky to have each other. I don’t know how that happened. It’s another miracle.’
‘Dad,’ I say.
‘Let’s get weaving, Lou. Let’s get checked in and cleaned up and ready for what’s next. The readiness is all.’
PART FIVE
PAINTINGS ON THE WALL
THE CELESTIAL CITY
After the van, my room in the Hotel Ambassador is so staggeringly beautiful and spacious and private that it feels like I have crossed into another world. As soon as the heavy door is shut, I sit down in the big leather chair amazed by my polished table (on which there is fresh fruit) and stare at the vast bed and the thick cream stripes of the wallpaper. The light is coming in through some kind of diaphanous lace that hangs tall in the windows and seems to make the place luminous with an unvarying daylight that somehow glimmers even in the dark wood of the big desk. At my elbow, there is thick ivory stationery – as though I might be an actual ambassador about to write despatches home. Maybe civilization is a Swiss hotel. I don’t know. I never stay in hotels. I have no idea. But Jack is helping Dad. And so I have ninety minutes to rest and the prospect of this bed in which to sleep tonight. And I am so relieved. I could live in this room for ten years. Come out when it’s all over – ISIS, the climate-change crisis, the new Dark Ages, my fucking father’s happy fucking demise.
Suddenly, I want to be naked and clean again.
I go into the bathroom – my own, my own – with its huge bath and lights that dim and a sink wide and deep enough to bathe twin babies. I take off my clothes – grimy and crumpled from the camping – and run the water, which is copious and hot. There are lots of small bottles that say things like ‘balm’ and ‘soak’ and ‘infusion’. So I empty them all into the water. Then I fetch my phone and place it on the bath-side table.
I can’t believe the size of the towels; or their thickness; or their number.
I ease myself into the bath and close my eyes and sink slowly under the water.
When I come up, I am calm again.
So I dry my hands and pick up my phone and search for where Eva’s apartment is located on the other side of the lake; that’s where I am going – whatever happens, that’s where I am going tomorrow. She lands in the morning. She’ll be there by nine, she thinks. The flight was crazy-early and cheap.
But when I climb out of the bath – all warm and serene – I make the mistake of going over to the windows and pulling back the lace so I can take a look at the actual lake – just away to the left of the hotel. I see across to the neighbourhood where Eva will be staying, past the boats and the sun all busy in the water between us. I wonder if I can guess the building. But it’s too far. So my eyes travel half-right towards the old town where the shore narrows into the rivers. Then I look back at the Opera House directly opposite the hotel. And then – below, to the right, my attention is taken by a cafe, almost beneath my window but a little way along.
And that is when I start watching this family. Not doing anything much. Five of them. Sitting and fidgeting at this fussy and too-small pavement place. And that’s when I see the kid – I don’t know how old he is – maybe seven – knock over his father’s glass of wine so that it spills in a spreading red spear across the table.
Instantly, his mother jumps up to stop it staining her clothes; and the older kids – a girl and a boy – they jump up, too, because some of it is on their plates. And so I’m watching everyone hammering the kid (while all the cars go by and nobody else notices), like he is the kind of idiot they all wished was nowhere near their family. And he’s shrivelling up because he’s got nowhere to go; and he’s too young to tell them to lay off; and what can he do but sit back in his seat and wish to disappear? Except, now, his father is also up and doing this ‘calm down’ thing with his hands and moving round and round and in and out like some kind of Morris dancer, mopping up with the napkin. Sorting the mess out. Making it easier on the kid.
The thing is – when we checked in – we discovered that Dad had only booked two rooms. We parked the van and wheeled him in. And he was all super-cheerful and polite and still bonfiring his energy. And straight away in the eyes of the receptionist – surprise: ‘Hello, Mr Lasker,’ he said, ‘good to see you but you have only reserved two rooms. This booking was made in March, I can see. But, listen, we have no problem here, because . . . I think . . . yes . . . we have two more rooms . . . if that is good for you. Lucky for you and lucky for us! Because there are only three left in the whole hotel . . .’
And Dad was fine to pay for the extra two and put them on the card. More than fine. Eager. Of course, he said, of course, handing the card up from the wheelchair. Bloody hell. Yes. Of course.
He had forgotten. But we had all registered it. He had only booked two rooms. Because that’s what he was expecting back then: two people. And the second one was reserved in Doug’s name.
And suddenly, staring out of the window, it starts to happen. I don’t even know what it is at first . . . this weird water brimming and spilling from the corners of my eyes. Because I’m watching the mum go inside the cafe and I’m watching the dad change seats with the daughter so that he can sit next to the kid. And I’m shaking and my face is all scrunched up. And I still don’t really know what is going on with my body. But I am sniffing my breath and my voice wants to talk but it has gone hoarse and thin – and something feels trapped in the muscles of my cheeks.
These must be tears, I’m thinking. These must be tears.
And I am not me. But I am me. And I must be crying because these heavy tears are rolling down my face into my mouth like I am dissolving and soon I’ll be made of water and nothing else.
And I really want to talk to my brothers. And my dad. I really want to see my dad. Which I can do. Since he is next door and I have his spare room key.
But what about when I can’t? Because he isn’t next door? Or anywhere?
We are early, of course. So we sit in the doctor’s waiting room. We are lined up on three upright chairs, like this is all fine and normal. Dad at the end. Clean, scrupulous, fresh. Like maybe we’re enlisting. Like maybe we’re waiting to renew our passports. Like maybe we’re having our toenails done. There is the smell of carpet-cleaner. Traffic is passing outside where we parked the van. Touched-up photographs of people on the covers of untouched magazines. A woman, a receptionist, is speaking somewhere in hushed German on a telephone. On the wall for no reason, there are pictures of impossible families on impossible holidays with impossible teeth. There’s a dot-matrix board which calls patients in for consultations. I watch the names. Traschsel. Fassnacht. Enz.
Lasker.
But there is no way of processing the fact of those English letters – the way they are formed so unconvincingly; then flashed; then dissolved – and so I just stare at them like maybe I’m going to find something meaningful in my own hallucinations. And yet they contain nothing of me, neither identity, nor meaning. I am in space looking down. We are a deluded family in a delusional species. We wait for a magician dressed in white to cast a spell that permits us to die. Yes, from the vantage of the stars, I can see that there is a madness raging through the collective human mind and it won’t stop until we have destroyed ourselves and
vanished from the world. We have to fight back. We have to face reality and deal with it.
Lasker.
So we stand up. Jack moves in for a moment – almost as if to take the handles – and then steps aside and lets me wheel Dad towards the surgery. Ralph follows, seeming slow and deliberately so.
Lasker.
The door opens and the doctor stands on the threshold. He is tall with delicate rimless glasses and has the rigorously pristine old-but-new look of someone who scrupulously sand-blasts his facade every weekend.
‘Thank you all for waiting,’ he says, his English as close to perfect as his shave. ‘I’m very glad to see the family here.’
We haven’t really been waiting. It is precisely two p.m. We are exactly on time.
I can’t speak. Only Ralph has managed any politeness with the receptionist.
‘So – it’s great to see the family here,’ the doctor says again. ‘Are you all . . . sons?’
Ralph steps forward into our silence. ‘As far as we know,’ he says.
‘Lucky man,’ the doctor says. There is a vein that spasms in his temple. ‘We have a saying here in Switzerland that red hair is the sign of fire in the spirit.’
Ralph returns the smile with interest but says nothing and we’re all stuck in the doorway for a second until the doctor realizes – what? – that time is no longer illusory and insubstantial to us but as real as starvation and thirst.
‘OK – so – if you wouldn’t mind,’ he says. ‘I need about fifteen minutes with your father. That would be great. And then we can all have a chat together.’
He offers to take the wheelchair handles from me and I cannot do anything but accede.
‘Let’s go and have a cigarette,’ Ralph says. ‘Cheer ourselves up.’
The grey street outside is absurdly normal. The sun is shining in the windows of the office building opposite. Cars are parked down one side. A little boy is scooting past with his mum. A man with a bag of groceries fiddles with the lock of his door. We walk a little way down to near where we left the van.
Ralph shakes out his cigarettes. He looks different now. Somehow he has bought some thin pale trousers and a fitted jacket and a new shirt – all in less than two hours.
‘How did it go washing Dad?’ he asks Jack.
‘Painful.’ Jack sighs deeply, like the whole of his breath has to move through the whole of his stolid body. Conversely, he looks worse in his clean clothes: his jeans and his uneasy polo shirt. He seems somehow thickened by the weight of care and for a second I think he might take one of the cigarettes. He says: ‘I’m going to ask the doctor to give him something for his ankle.’
I see now that we are standing by a shop – a chemist: ‘Apotheke’ – and beside a yellow zebra crossing that feels wrong to our British black-and-white sensibilities.
Ralph shakes out his match to extinguish its fire and squints through his smoke across the narrow distance between us: ‘Is he actually doing this?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jack says. ‘I don’t know.’
‘What did he say when you were with him?’
‘He says he just wants the prescription. He says that’s what he wants. To know that he has the option.’
‘Is he just saying that to stop you arguing with him?’
‘I don’t know.’ Jack’s whole bearing has changed – as though certainty was the Action Man wire within him and, now that it has gone, he has got nothing with which to set himself upright where he stands. But maybe all it took was an hour alone with Dad – undressing him, washing him – because now I can tell that Jack is in it: the life-and-death zone. Which is where we all are.
Jack sighs again and rubs at his stubble which has become a fatherly beard: ‘He says it’s ironic. He says that it is a pilgrimage.’
‘What’s ironic?’
‘This whole thing. Like a religious pilgrimage . . . but to suicide.’
‘Assisted death,’ I say.
‘So it’s not just about the prescription?’ Ralph presses.
‘I don’t know,’ Jack says. ‘I don’t know. He says it is. He says he wants to keep going and then decide tomorrow.’
Ralph half turns his face to exhale his smoke but keeps his eyes fixed on me. ‘How you doing, Lou?’
‘I was fine.’
‘Was?’
‘Until we got to the hotel. There’s something about the hotel. I don’t know. It totally fucked me up.’
But the truth is that I think I do know. I think that we all know. We all know that Dad wouldn’t be so blithely paying for four rooms in a four-star hotel on Lake Zurich unless he’d made up his mind. Because it’s the money that talks. Or Dad’s attitude to the money that talks. He just wouldn’t be doing this otherwise. Unless he meant it. He couldn’t stand to . . . to waste thousands of pounds. Or that is what we all suspect. And I think that this suspicion is killing us because – after all – if it is only the money that tells us the truth, then this seems like another something that is insufficient. And there is already so much that is insufficient.
A car comes and hesitates, ludicrously polite – the driver thinks that we are planning to cross on the yellow zebra. Ralph bends to the window to wave the stranger on. He nods from behind the wheel and smiles. He looks sixty. How long does he have? Another fifteen summers. Or thirty more? Two? How many does he want?
‘The hotel just fucked me up,’ I say again. ‘I’m not sure we should ever have got out of the van.’
We all look at the van, which is waiting solidly by; irrefutable. What are we going to do with the van? There is no way we can sell it. There is no way we can keep it.
‘All for one,’ Ralph says. He’s looking back at me like he’s my boxing coach.
‘I want it over,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ Ralph says. He puts out his cigarette. ‘We’re pretty much at the truth now, Lou.’
I feel an arm go round my shoulder, which can only be Jack’s.
‘I want to say, Lou.’ Jack draws himself up. ‘I want to say that I’m sorry about last night. It wasn’t anything to do with you.’
‘I know.’
‘Yes . . .’ And now Jack pulls me in so we’re forehead to forehead. ‘But what you don’t know is how bloody amazing you have been all your life. With your mum and – now – with Dad.’
That’s Dad’s word, I’m thinking: bloody. Why is Jack using Dad’s words?
‘And what you don’t know,’ Jack continues, ‘is how you, me and your annoying other brother are going to stick together whatever happens. Always. Right until we’re back here for one of us – probably him first because he is such a penis.’ Jack breaks to look at Ralph.
And Ralph reaches out for my other shoulder so we’re standing heads down and arms locked like a team before the big game.
‘All for one,’ Ralph says.
‘It’s his choice,’ I say.
When we get back inside, Dad is sitting opposite the doctor’s desk. He turns round – almost spins round – with a smile for me and wink for Ralph and Jack as we come in. He’s getting the hang of the wheelchair already. He’ll be one of those wheelchair veterans whizzing round town in another week or two, I can see, sharp with knowledge of every ramp and lift.
We don’t say anything. Dad’s instructions as we drove to the doctor’s through Zurich with the satnav were not to fuck anything up. But it’s hard to see how things could be more fucked-up than they already are. Still, we sit down to one side on this too-low grey sofa and stay silent as per our father’s wishes; three brothers, our knees knocking together.
The doctor starts talking about all this stuff I already know – ‘the condition of your father’s health and matters we have discussed relating to this’. His tone in English is too breezy. He sounds like he’s describing the slightly disappointing failure of a much anticipated aerodynamic upgrade on a high-performance car. There’s a clock above the desk that ticks just audibly with a relentless sarcasm.
‘Of course, as a doct
or my first duty is to save life,’ he says, ‘but here in Switzerland, I have an extra duty that I can perform. Which I am prepared to do in this case.’ He presses his palm down on a slim folder in front of him.
I feel so tired; but were I to sleep, it might be for a season or a century; or for ever.
The doctor smiles. ‘Three sons,’ he says again. ‘A lucky man.’
Ralph says: ‘Yeah – and we’re only just getting to like him.’
‘Doctor, can I ask?’ Jack begins. ‘How long is the prescription valid for?’
‘Well, obviously, it is the decision of your father how he goes from here. That’s a matter for him in consultation with our friends from Dignitas. They will be calling on him later this afternoon after I have spoken with them. But the prescription remains live for three months.’
‘Live,’ Ralph says.
‘Good to know,’ Jack says.
‘Well, you have everything from me.’ The doctor stands. There is a note of – not of triumph but of completion – in his voice that makes me feel additionally sick. ‘We have all the necessary reports and these will go alongside the civil documents should you wish to proceed.’
Ralph speaks in a sudden flow of fluent German.
The doctor is unnerved and his temple spasm gives him away again. He answers something that I don’t understand before coming forward and bending down in front of Dad – a little too hammily.
‘Might as well get something powerful for your ankle, Dad,’ Ralph says. ‘Just in case. You never know. Could be miles yet to go. Let the doc have a look.’