by Peggy Frew
Nobody cares if he does this or not. No one will believe it, if he does pull it off. (He tries not to dwell too often on this fact. It is, in any case, impossible to accept—hope, for all its gentle pinkness, is unkillable.) In detox they talk about rock bottom. Perhaps for him, this is it: he is alone, and he has been given up on.
Thinking like this, after decades—a whole lifetime, really—of pressing anything remotely like insight into a harmless paste with the heel of his habit, is difficult. He is having to locate muscles like someone recovering from a spinal injury, straining into the unknown, pushing with all his might for the slightest stirring, the merest wiggle.
He fucked it up, the chance with Chloe, with the kid. He slipped. Chloe had known he would; they’d both known. I’m sorry, he said. The battered old appeal, but emptied, this time, of expectation. He was quite simply sorry, moved to a frank and general sorrow—by the dreariness of failure, the ordinary greyness with which even this precious opportunity was brought undone, by his own indefatigable and banal destructiveness, by Chloe’s necessary, enviable strength, by the whole damn situation. I’m sorry, he said. Me too, said Chloe.
He fucked it up with Chloe and the son and heir, and that sealed things with his father. That particular door has at last been slammed, and barricaded. From his mother a more resigned closure, but, he thinks, one as sincere. This was how he got the property—a farewell gift from her, a last provision, thrust at him with the heartsick finality of the terminally disappointed. This is all you get, understand. Do what you like with it. Liquidise it and put it up your arm for all I care, but you will get nothing else, nothing more, from me.
The tadpoles spurt, the trout send up silver bubbles. He rummages. Of late he has found himself returning to matters filed under Green. This is probably his easiest material, his time of baby steps, light on despair, rich with what were still relatively simple pleasures—its angsts almost laughably naive. Even remembering Dee the way she was then is not always painful; more often it’s like thinking of a different person from the one she ended up being, and ended as, full stop. Interestingly—is any of this interesting? Is his whole life a bore? Probably, but who cares, he is free to wade; surely this is the chief pleasure in finding oneself not being given a shit about by any other human being on this earth? Interestingly, other than Dee, he is hazy on who else he hung around with in those days. But he works to draw them out. He’s not sure there’s any reason for this, other than the general benefits of flexing his poor, wasted mental muscles. But random dipping does usually end up getting him somewhere worthwhile—meaning somewhere that hurts.
He struggles with his dipper, his imprecise and atrophied probe. Johnno? Thommo? Boofhead type, acne. He’s got the name wrong, but the boy is coming into focus now: meaty shoulders, rugby tops; an unsuccessful mushroom-seeking venture in a borrowed car, culminating in a visit to a small-town hardware shop, and chroming in a cemetery.
Megan? Stoner girl, into death metal, skin-tight jeans after (and before) they were in fashion. Showed him how to roll amps, although he always preferred his joints sans speed; stimulants were never his thing. What he sought was not sharpening, or bolstering, or delusions of grandeur; what he sought was obliteration. Thank God—imagine how much more insufferable he might have been had he gone in that other direction. He wouldn’t have made it—he would have wiped himself out in a toxic streak on a road somewhere, or fallen under a train, or got himself shot by the cops, thrown himself, demented, railing, stringy fists and champing jaws, into the hail of bullets.
Ah, here comes something, from the Green days: Anna. He has opened this particular treasure box a few times. There was a reason to remember Anna. Anna vanished, apparently, and her father came to him, asking questions. A man bristling with need. He descended onto the white leather Grimaux couch and cushions shot out in all directions. His clothes were scruffy, his hair in want of a trim. He had a little notebook, and wrote in it pedantically, pursing his lips. And which station is it? And how many times did you go? He would not be sold short; he pressed, he insisted, he got down on his knees and stuck his face right up close—close enough to see blackheads. There was no defence against this desperation other than to withdraw—not that there was far to go; any further would have meant imploding.
Regret: that he couldn’t find it in himself to say, I am so sorry about your daughter. I am so sorry I can’t help you. Shame: for his selfishness, his lack of compassion. No excuses.
He sits with it, for a while. Then goes on, to Anna. This is ripe, this territory. He has circled it on other visits, touching only with fingertips. There is work to be done, if he is able.
Here is what he remembers of her. Pale skin, on the surface of which freckles seemed to float. Beautiful, gold-red hair she roughed with her hands to make it stick up at the back and let hang into her eyes. A body too young for her age, that made you feel afraid when you saw how credulously, how boldly, she sent it into the world. A smile to make you cry, so pasted-on was its mystery.
She was hungry for a certain kind of wastedness. Not for oblivion, and not for escape either. He, having only a blind and one-dimensional intimacy with his own need, felt wary when faced with hers—there was nuance there, there was, dare he call it, sophistication. Heightening, that’s what she was after.
He thought at first that she was desperately sad, and romantic with it. That she was—and weren’t they all—in love with the full range of minor-key emotions, from the intensely glorious to the lumbering: melancholy, woe, anguish, downheartedness. At her school they learned French, and once, peaking, her eyes all ravenous pupil, she whispered to him, Tristesse, isn’t that the most beautiful word? But what he realised, eventually, was that for her it wasn’t only about sadness—she was just plain romantic. On the train back from Belgrave she showed him a poem, in a book. She spoke the final line of it: Childe Roland to the dark tower came. It thrilled him—how could it not? But he hid the thrill. He stayed safe. He would not—could not—come out of himself to where she was.
All this he knew when her father arrived, drilling with his questions and taking his notes, and trying to make eye contact. And none of it could he give over—which would have been a better gift than nothing. Which would have been an act of kindness. (Shame. Regret.)
The sun is nearly down. Mosquitos are rising from the dam’s moist reeds. What a waste his life has been. If regrets were silk handkerchiefs he could sew himself the world’s biggest parachute, find a cliff and float gently down, to—what? To a place of no regrets? To a mattress of forgiveness? Not deserved. To a field of spikes fashioned from every act of forgiveness he ever betrayed? To an ocean of tears, filled with sharks fed only on betrayed forgiveness? Oh, shut up. Get your hand off it. Here is the downside to so much musing, to lengthy, unfettered rompings of the mind.
He forces one more moment of honesty, a small punishment. They are necessary. The truth is, he couldn’t do it even now—look her in the face, Anna, were she to be magically un-vanished and here before him. He would quail still at her passion, the absoluteness with which she gave herself over to feeling, the challenge it threw out: Live! He would turn away from it, as he did the first time, terrified and ashamed of his fear, his stumpy little claws dug in.
She wouldn’t have become a junkie, that girl. She would have made the most of life, of living. He hopes that she did. And now he sees what must come next, in this series of arduous and miniscule advances. Kindness is still possible. Anna’s father is, most likely, still out there. He is, most likely, reachable.
He goes into the house. He looks up the school, and he sends an email.
And then he plays a record, on his parents’ state-of-the-art seventies turntable. Mulatu Astatke: ‘Tezeta’. The rolling piano, the warm guitar, the hovering, feathery sax. So much space between every sound. It’s like a sigh; it’s like tender evening light in which a drink might be poured, in which forgiveness might be offered. There is no one here to forgive him, and forgiving himself is s
omething on which he is yet to establish a position. But he can have a drink. Soda water and lime, his sober treat. He pours it, and the fizz is pleasant, calm, suitably comforting. He raises his glass. He will drink alone. He will drink, a father, who does not know his child.
Helen grew up in a country town. Her father was the doctor, and their house was at the back of the surgery; their laundry stood side by side with the supply room, where there were shelves filled with kidney basins and rolls of bandage, and brown-paper packages of suture thread and needles, and sinister coils of rubber hose, and large white squeezable bulbs, also rubber, the purpose of which Helen never discovered, and, upright in a corner, the spare cylinder of laughing gas.
The smells of the surgery and the smells of the house bled into one another: disinfectant, the pine-y sweetness of tongue depressors, carpet powder, beeswax polish, roast dinners, Bon Ami.
Helen’s father was a tall man, with a face that was mostly eyebrows and nose. His eyes were small, and hid behind black-framed glasses. He wore his dark, thick, wavy hair combed down with Vaseline tonic from the cabinet in the bathroom. Helen knew this only from the smell, of the tonic and of her father—in their house nobody entered the bathroom while another person was in it. Alongside the tonic lay her father’s shaver, which had a heavy stem with an embossed, criss-crossing pattern that was strangely soft to the touch and made Helen think of reptiles.
Helen’s mother had been a nurse but now she ran the surgery, sitting behind the waiting room desk in her brown wool skirt and yellow blouse with the buttons that looked like pearls but weren’t. Her face was round, with very fair, almost invisible, eyebrows and lashes. She wore no make-up, but her lips were naturally a pronounced pinkish-red; the bottom lip was plumper than the top one, and she had a habit of pulling it in with her teeth and then letting it slide back out, so it was often wet and shining. Her hair was fine and mousy, unfashionably long, pulled into a low bun. At night she put it in a plait, which went right down the back of her nightdress, as far as the soft and rounded shape that was her bottom released from its daytime strictures.
Helen saw this—the plait and the nightdress—very rarely, only when she was sick and her mother needed to come into her room in the middle of the night. Usually, Helen got ready for bed and went down to say goodnight to her parents in the sitting room—where they would be fully clothed, her father reading the newspaper, her mother sewing—and then when she saw them again in the morning they would both already be up and dressed. In her mind, they existed only as daytime people, their bodies sheathed in their clothes, their hair arranged, their feet shod. So this vision of her mother in her nightdress, with the curves of her body loose under the cotton and her long wispy plait hanging down, pale at its tip, lurked like a kind of spectre, something that might have been imagined.
In all her life, Helen never saw her father undressed, or in anything less formal than slacks and a short-sleeved shirt. When she was twenty-eight years old she saw his bare feet for the first time. He was dying, in hospital, and she was visiting, and a sheet came untucked. The feet were large and had yellow, brittle-looking toenails, and Helen looked away, struck by a terrible sense of shame and transgression.
As a young child she knew that her parents must have done something to make her be born. She knew that the thing they must have done involved nudity, and private parts—she knew this from what other children said at school. This idea was absolutely impossible. And yet there was that spectre, of her mother in her nightdress, with her girlish hair and her softened body. And sometimes, late at night, inexplicable sounds could be heard coming from her parents’ bedroom—an odd, silly giggling, in what was recognisably her mother’s voice, although her mother never giggled like that in the daytime, nor laughed in any way. When this happened, Helen put the pillow over her head.
Helen’s parents were old. This understanding did not come to Helen until she was almost an adult herself—while she was a young child they, like all adults, seemed ageless, outside of time. Much later, when it was too late to find out, Helen did wonder why they had taken so long to have her, their only child. Had they believed children were not possible, for them—had she been one of those unexpected, last-minute, miracle babies? Or had they not meant to have her? Had she been an unexpected, last-minute mistake?
The heavy black telephone in the downstairs hallway rang sometimes in the night, calling Helen’s father to emergencies. Occasionally, if things were too desperate for the drive to be made to the city hospital, these emergencies were brought in to the surgery, and from her bed Helen might hear shrieks and wails, doors banging, cars coming and going—but never the voice of her father. Her father never raised his voice, which was deep and precise and dry. It was a voice that hadn’t ever needed to be raised, that was certain of being attended to, of being, as Helen’s mother would put it, minded.
Every weekday at noon Helen’s mother left the desk in the waiting room and went back to the kitchen, and made lunch, and set the table for Helen’s father. At a quarter past twelve her mother ate, standing up, at the bench. At just before half past twelve, her mother put her father’s lunch on the table and filled his glass with lemon cordial, and dropped in four ice cubes.
For lunch Helen’s father had cheese-and-tomato sandwiches with salt and pepper, and butter Helen’s mother softened by putting a pat of it on a saucer and holding the saucer over the steaming kettle. Or he had leftover meat from the night before, reheated: grey, greasy slices of lamb; a chop with its curving bone so like a handle, although nobody in that household would ever eat with their hands; sausages that made popping sounds in the frypan and sent up a dancing haze of fat. With the meat there was often potato salad with tiny green jewels of gherkin, and mayonnaise Helen’s mother whipped by hand, staring in a mistrustful way down into the bowl, her whole body tensed and rocking with the beat of her wrist, in a way that Helen would be reminded of for the rest of her life by the action of a washing machine on spin, and—a much less welcome association—by certain urgent frictions of a sexual nature.
Helen’s mother, and Helen, when she was home during school holidays, did not have the same things for lunch as Helen’s father. They had the crusts of the loaf of bread with only a scrape of butter, and the end bits of tomato; they had half each of the smallest sausage, which was burnt; they had the cold scraps of lamb and the driest potatoes. They did not have mayonnaise. They did not have cordial with ice. They ate side by side at the bench, quickly, bent forward so that no crumbs would drop onto the floor.
When the clock showed half past twelve on a weekday the kitchen was ready for Helen’s father, his lunch on the table, his napkin folded, the ice cubes shifting gently in his glass of cordial; the frypan, the wooden spoon and mixing bowl, the cutting board and knife washed and dried and put away; the bench wiped. Helen’s mother was back at the surgery desk. Helen, when she was home, was outside—or, if it was raining, in her room.
Once—only once—Helen crept down the stairs and to the door of the kitchen while her father was in there eating his lunch. She saw his jacket hung over the back of one of the empty chairs; she saw his large hand resting by his place; she saw his white shirt and his tie and his black glasses and the brisk munching of his jaw. She saw the ripple of his throat as he swallowed. He reached for and lifted up and drank from his glass of cordial, and the ice cubes in it made a silvery sound. Then he turned his head and looked at Helen. His eyes, distant behind his glasses, moved slowly over her as if she was a part of the doorway, or of the bannister of the stairs behind. Then her father turned his head back and put down his cordial and took up his sandwich, and resumed his biting and chewing and swallowing. He did not look at Helen again, and she withdrew and ran upstairs and hid behind her bedroom door. She used her fingernail to flick up the edges of a scab on her elbow and then peeled the soft middle bit from the sticky, pink skin underneath. Then she put the scab in her mouth and ate it.
Dinners were not the same as lunches. At dinnertime th
ey all sat together, and they all had the same food, more or less, although Helen’s father got the best and biggest of everything. They ate in the dining room, and special plates were used, and special cutlery. Helen’s father disposed of his dinner quickly, efficiently, and then he put his knife and fork together, set his forearms down on each side of his plate and interlaced his fingers, so that his knife and fork and plate were encircled by his arms and hands. Then, his gaze fixed somewhere to the left of the mantelpiece, he began to talk.
His talk was musing and leisurely, and it was always about his work. He spoke in long sentences that were filled with medical and anatomical terms, making no concession to his listeners. He expected no response, and in fact did not appear to be conscious of any audience. This was not storytelling; there was no art to this talking, nothing in it glittered or flashed, despite the potential of the material. Years later Helen would tell friends that her father was the only man in the world who could put you to sleep with a story about draining a boil that yielded half a pint of pus.
Every now and then Helen’s stultified brain would, despite itself, catch at promising words—hernia, psoriasis, ocular rosacea—but these never went anywhere other than back under the surface of the colourless and unrelenting tide. Now take this morning, her father might begin, a fascinating case—but it wasn’t, ever.
Helen always tried to make her dinner last so that she would have something to do while her father talked. This was clearly her mother’s trick—as the soporific mist of Helen’s father’s voice filled the room, Helen’s mother’s small, rather puffy hands busied themselves with a minute and pedantic dissection of whatever was left on her plate. One string bean could get her through two cases of diabetes and a heart murmur. Helen tried, but her plate was always empty even before her father had laid down his cutlery, hitched in his chair, and established the arm-and-hand fence around his own. Her stomach gurgling—because she was never completely full, completely satisfied—she ran the edge of her fork as quietly as possible over any left-behind smears and down both sides of her knife, then sucked it, the tines pinching her tongue. Then she sat holding in yawns and trying to inconspicuously lick all around her lips and into the corners of her mouth, in case she had missed any traces of food.