So I Am Glad

by A. L. Kennedy

  “Well, no . . . no, my mother was very fond of her Librium— wouldn’t go on holiday without laying in an emergency supply. I suppose that was . . . unusual. But I was expecting . . . well, I don’t know. How did he get ahold of these?”

  “Ask him.”

  “Thanks. Why don’t you?”

  “Because you’ll do it better than me. Cool, calm and collected.”

  “Every Thursday like the refuse sacks.”

  “He’ll listen to you. You’ll be fine.”

  “All right. Shall I take them with me?”

  “Take one. I’ll flush the others away where they belong and we’ll hope he only had one stash.”

  Art gave me a pat on the shoulder and I started upstairs. It had been dark outside for several hours and the intervals of peace between vomiting had elongated.

  “You awake?”

  He lay curled on his side, facing the doorway. I could see his eyes were open.

  “Do you mind if I come in?”

  The eyes gave a long blink. I moved close enough to notice the whole bed was shaking. The hands clutching the quilt to his throat were shuddering. I watched his mechanism breaking down and didn’t know if there would be anything to replace it . . .

  “Can you speak?”

  “Yes.” Every letter of the word escaped with an involuntary stammer of air.

  “Well, we need you to tell us where you got the pills.”

  “No.”

  “That’s not very helpful.”

  “Not now.”

  “We found where you hid them.” His face smoothed into an innocent glow of relief. He seemed younger, stiller, in moments.

  I shook my head. “No, you don’t understand.” The eyes clouded again, a dull burn behind them.

  “If we gave you them you would have to be like this all over again afterwards. This way you’ll finish it and then you can get well—you’ll be fine. Come on, you’ll manage, you’re through the worst. You know that, don’t you? Me and Arthur, we’ll see you right. I promise.”

  He rolled over and didn’t speak again.

  That night Arthur and I were woken by dull, irregular thudding.

  Savinien was slumped in the corner of the room, close by the window. Now and again he would turn his head and beat it off the wall behind him. The sleeves of his pyjamas were covered in soot—he must have been searching the chimney again, hoping his need would make things all right. If he wanted them enough, we couldn’t have taken his pills, he must have only imagined the theft.

  “I hurt.”

  We walked him between us, pausing when he had to yawn or a cramp attacked him.

  And in the morning I called Liz’s current boyfriend/older man friend and told him to suggest she should stay over with him for a week or so—plague in the house, better to stay away and Arthur sends his love, that kind of thing.

  Which gave us seven days of working in shifts, sleeping in shifts, calling in sick and guarding our domesticated madman.

  Savinien was afraid of the dark. At times the expanse of his room would terrify him and Arthur or I would have to speak to him while he cowered against a wall, his mattress closely dragged up after him.

  On the Wednesday he seemed to move into a kind of calm. Arthur and I were watchful. Savinien made it across the landing alone. His chin was too high and he had the air of a tightrope walker, but we had hopes for him.

  For the first time in a while, I felt like eating.

  Three or four hours later, he appeared in the kitchen holding the contents of the medicine cabinet. We hadn’t thought of that. There wasn’t much there to harm him, but we still hadn’t thought of that. Our carelessness raised a sweat on my upper lip.

  He dropped the bottles and packets on to the table and stood. I thought he intended to speak, but he was brought to a halt by a long yawn that ended in a retch.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Take these away from me or I will look for them. I . . . I am not my own man. I used to talk about honour, that thing we are born with. I have given mine away.”

  The next day he was ill again, calling out that something was crawling under his skin, scratching himself. The gleam in his sweat was faint and sickly.

  Friday was calmer. He had a poison dream, that was all.

  On Saturday, he laughed about something none of us could remember later, but whatever it was, it was entirely real and funny enough to laugh about. And we all laughed with a will, made a point of it, in fact. The stubble on Savinien’s head was thickening and his skin was evening its colour, no longer ashy or puce. In his surplus clothing, he looked a little like a military recruit, only fresher, more hesitant.

  So, physically, Savinien got better. We lifted our voluntary quarantine and Liz came home, leaving again almost immediately in the car whose motor we heard running while she dropped one bag of clothes and filled another. She had an interesting life, very committed.

  Our days patterned out much as they had before, except that Arthur brought home more unwanted pastries than we could usually face to satisfy Savinien’s new, compulsively sweet tooth.

  But we couldn’t help feeling a weight in our air. There was another darkness coming, that was all we knew—no need to reach for it now, no need to second-guess, because it was on its way.

  One

  Thick

  Inescapable

  Thought

  Falling

  Hard

  And

  Numb

  And

  Bitter

  Slicing

  Down

  The Mind

  Tugging

  It

  Under.

  Having come home and fought for his health, prayed for his health, screamed in convulsion for his health, I watched Savinien regret his own survival. He left off food, slept day into night, stopped speaking. Because Arthur and I had spent so much time with him, made really quite trivial sacrifices on his behalf, we felt ourselves rejected. I was perhaps less philosophical about it than Arthur, but both of us had the impression that someone had become our child and then turned against us, grown out rather than up. I began to feel we might have been bad parents.

  It was an odd time altogether. Beyond our house, in other more or less salubrious addresses, sweating armfuls of the politically incorrect were committing Moral Disarmament. Reality was running amok in a way that could only embarrass fiction. My bulletins developed a genuinely Berlin Nightclub feel while it became clear that we, the public, had become too tame a lay—Parliament had ditched the unconstitutional for the just plain unnatural acts. In many ways it made perfect sense of what we’d always really suspected they got up to behind those high, closed doors. No wonder our government’s concentration often lapsed—now we could see it was cruel and arbitrary, even demented, for a reason. Screwing itself blind and rabid left it no time for us. Perversion can be quite exhausting—I should know.

  For those of us unable to pursue such virulent and esoteric indoor sports, other distractions were lavishly provided. As my planet and my country spun daily further towards irredeemable dissolution, an unheard-of largess was being exercised in the provision of second-hand outdoor sport. Rough-and-tumble chasing and record-breaking broadcasts were blanketing the watching and earwigging public at any and every hour.

  During this particular month, Norway was filled to overflowing with men and women sliding up and down things Olympically. Their ingenuity with frozen water was depressing. But unexpected moments of terrible vulnerability flickered through the white, slithering course of it all like blood. In other words, I waited to see them fall. Especially the skaters.

  I spent most of one Sunday afternoon hypnotised by skaters, sequined and sexlessly camp in a way that could only be excused by miraculous athleticism, when for the most part they were just sliding up and down some frozen water. Still it was wonderfully awful when they fell. The grace, the training, all their defences would disappear in one to
rn instant when they would slip and tumble like anybody else because ice is slippy, after all. I watched for their falls and their struggle to catch on a balance again, to replace the synchronised swimmer’s smile and the mindlessly gesturing arms. I felt increasingly sick and nervous on their behalf, as if I was running my thumb over the line between justified bravado and utter indignity. That afternoon they looked far too much like life.

  Savinien passed the doorway while a Russian duo fumbled through locomotive simulated intercourse and too much chiffon. I don’t know what there was about him that made me uneasy, I only saw him for an instant, after all. Maybe I had grown accustomed to reading the tilt of moving bodies. He certainly read all wrong to me.

  “Hey.”

  He’d reached the kitchen, was standing in front of the sink, his face to the window’s light.

  “Hey, you all right? Hum, listen, I was thinking, it’s all very well, you dressing like a NATO commander, forces of all nations, but maybe you’d like to pick something out for yourself. If you felt . . . maybe it would be interesting for you. Make a change.”

  He absolutely didn’t move. I don’t think he was even breathing.

  “If I’m disturbing you, I’ll go.”

  One drip fell from the tap and shattered.

  “Am I disturbing you?”

  I heard the metal clatter at the sink and saw him bend and I knew we were a little lost again, at least a little lost.

  He made a ragged turn.

  “Shit. Shit, oh shit. Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I just . . .” His hands raised in defeat and bright with blood.

  As it happened, he hadn’t been able to cut anything vital. In anger or frustration he had closed both his fists around the carving knife. Squeezed. At the time I did not understand this and there was a great deal of blood.

  “You . . . you fucking . . . God, you . . . stupid fucking man!”

  I was angry. I closed in and shook him uselessly by the shoulders while he twitched his arms out of the way and began to drip blood on to my back. A warm splash on my neck called me slightly to my senses again. I stood up on my toes and pressed my forehead against his, gripping his skull with both my hands, the hot skin there under his growing hair.

  I waited until he opened his eyes.

  “We are going to clean you up again now and then you are going to tell me what has been going on because I have no more patience and if I don’t know what has happened to you, I am afraid you will keep on being stupid like this until you get it right. This is very ridiculous and I won’t have it.”

  Savinien blinked.

  “And don’t think you’re not worth all this bother. If anyone’s going to think that it’ll be me. Don’t even consider it.”

  I could feel him moving against me. When you are too close to someone like that, you are very aware of their aliveness. All the time there are pulses, tensions, readjustments of muscle, shifts of breath.

  Quite together, we looked ahead, we blinked, we looked, both of us all that we could see. I loosened my grip.

  “Jennifer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know . . . I feel well.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean that I feel perfectly well. My hands don’t hurt yet. I am sure they will, but now they are only cold.”

  For a moment, he shook his head as if he was settling a loose idea. “I will be well now. Yes, I’m quite certain. I will be well.”

  “Don’t think I’m not pleased. I am pleased. But was all that performance really necessary? Oh, for goodness’ sake, come here, you’re leaking all over the place.”

  His cuts were not terribly deep. The hospital casualty department seemed too much of an ordeal and my doctor’s receptionist was less than sympathetic when I called, so we did the best we could ourselves. Strangely, I felt nauseous only when the cleaning and the bandaging was done, when his pain had subsided.

  “I don’t guarantee that I’m getting this right. Hold still, though.”

  “This seems more than adequate.”

  “Well, I should hope so. You’ll probably end up with your lifeline twice the length.”

  “I would like that.”

  I tried to be light and gentle, drawing away if he seemed to flinch. We co-operated well around his discomfort and smiled and smiled and smiled.

  Why not? He believed he would be well now, that was good enough for us. We knew how we felt. Moment for moment we understood the slip and press of cloth over our skins, the easy temperature of our bloods, the colour of our minds. We were just as we were.

  To demonstrate the advantages of having been a little dead for a long while I might tell you how I was, that I was in the position of coming upon—what—joy, happiness, gladness, as if it had never been before I was.

  Once in my life, to date, I saw something very like joy. A series of little broadcasts had taken me north. I had reached almost the farthest extent of my country, a wild, odd spread of islands, afloat on the tightening bands of latitude that creep up to ice and the Pole.

  I spoke for my suppers and walked as hard and as far as I could on any fair days left alone to me. The islands were good for walking. My progress finally brought me to an open bay where the high curve of the world climbed up to the depths of the Atlantic. I stepped down there to the edge of the sand and the whole hump-backed ocean lifted the sky like a blue-green impossibility.

  And in my mind I was washed away. White gushed at my feet, roared at the cliffs, bleached and salted the continuous numbing breeze and took me out like a sail. I knew the right size of myself, the nothing I would be in the simple beat of miles and years of waves. Land would grow and break, gather and waste away and I would be myself beyond the movements of earth and time.

  No one should go to church—take them all to the seaside, do them good.

  Having exercised a touch of happiness with Savinien, we walked up to his room and talked because it was time for us both to hear where he had gone and what he had done. Nothing he might say could harm us, we’d made ourselves invincible.

  Savinien sat on the bed and I pulled up a chair to face him. He covered his mouth to cough and the movement disturbed the air near my face. I nodded.

  “It’s time now, really. If we wait any longer, neither of us will be able to say a thing. We’ll freeze up. I’m sure you’ve faced far worse.”

  “I am not afraid. You are very good for my courage, you know this, Jennifer? You are encouraging.”

  “Thanks. I don’t have too much courage myself, I can tell you.”

  “Perhaps I have borrowed more than I should.”

  “I don’t think it works that way.”

  “I shall put it back.” He reached forward and I gave him my hand. He took it lightly. “To keep you informed, my mother taught me this. I think possibly this is the only thing she did teach me. Espérance, that was her name—Hope—something of which she had need. My father was not the best husband and she had to spend her life with him. For my part, I spent very little time with my father and that was still more than enough. My mother, at least, made me feel like her son. She would rest a glance upon me and I would know who I was at once, if I had pleased, or disappointed. Father was the kind of man you would want to . . . to insult very badly, to steal from, you understand?”

  “I think so.”

  “Factually, I must say that I did insult him very badly and steal from him . . . ah . . . but he did make this as though it was his fault.”

  Savinien’s hand firmed in around mine. I could feel a smooth, solid pressure under the dressing.

  “I know. Some people can do that. I know.”

  “Eh, but we have a matter here in hand . . . I was . . . I suppose encouraging myself. So . . . as my mother taught me . . . to give courage, some force of life, I must, with your permission . . .

  “Do I have your permission?”

  “Oh . . . yes. Yes, you do.”

  “Good. That’s good.” And he closed his ey
es, bent his head, kissed my open palm. “Now it’s necessary, you close your fingers. Then it shan’t escape again.”

  I took back my hand. “I remember when you did that before . . . it’s very . . . I don’t know . . . daft. Nice daft. You know what I mean by daft?”

  Big smile, huge smile, a smile with something waiting at the back of its eyes. “Oh, yes . . . but that makes no difference. It’s the gesture, you know. The gesture stands for itself. Always. And, ah well, I have to say this has worked an effect on a number of individuals, a number of times before. I admit that I did want to know if this was still possible. This was nothing personally to do with you. I mean no offence.”

  “I’m sure. I think I’ll open my hand again now and we can begin.”

  “Of course.”

  There was a short silence.

  “Yes, I shall talk to you now. But if you will excuse me—”

  He swung himself slowly up on to the bed and lay back, allowed himself a small readjustment of his weight, a sigh. “You see, I have such a tiredness. It is like an animal that waits for me, but don’t worry.” He inclined his head slightly towards me. “I will make my best effort now, to speak and not to sleep. You have been very patient through all of . . . this . . . this me. Remember that my story will be very ugly, but you are please to not mind it. The whole of this is over now, do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will not return to it.” He gave a small wince. “You know, I used to imagine from the time when was I a boy that I would make wonderful voyages and in my mind I did. I really did go away from all of those faces, all of those looks and those impacts in the street, all of myself I broke off the earth and lifted beyond it daily, daily, daily and I saw paradise. I promise you, I ate and drank in paradise.”

  He pursed his lips, flopped one hand. “Now the journeys my body could manage to make, they were always something of a disappointment.” He shook his head softly. “Hmm. I have had so many years to change, far more than one man (one not such a good man) could reasonably expect and so little about me is different at any point. I have made another bad journey and I did not even accompany it with good dreams. I am a fool.”

  “No.”

  “Of course, yes. I already have lain dying once, on my death’s bed, and told anyone who would hear that I had wasted everything. Now this is two lives and no good sense between them.”