I love the library from the first time I set foot in it. The quiet and the beauty of it, the calm, and students bent over their books, and the invisible work of the library team holding it all together. A lot of my work is administrative, keeping the shelves in shape, that sort of thing. I get to help the archivist a bit with special collections as well, a big collection of medieval manuscripts and the books and papers of a theatre critic and the library of a poet. I like cataloguing all that. People’s libraries are a window into who they were, a map of their thinking, their lives. That’s a fascinating detective story to follow. I love spending my days in the service of thought, making new thinking possible, cataloguing ideas. It seems to me that I’m involved in making the most beautiful, dangerous, powerful, sensuous thing in the world available, and of course I have no idea where exactly my work leads the people who use the library, but I know everyone who comes through its doors is travelling somewhere I can’t imagine, and that’s an extraordinary thing to be in charge of.
Frank has lunch with me in the Senior Common Room about a week after I start. He tells me I won’t ever see much of him round the college.
‘I’m pretty much retired now. Only come in for the food really,’ he says. ‘And anyway, don’t ever think you have to be nice to me or anything, if you do see me. I got you the interview, but you got yourself the job.’
Three months after I moved to Oxford I get a call from Dad to say Grandad has gone into hospital.
‘No need to worry, love,’ he tells me. ‘It’s just a chest infection – one of those things they have to be a bit careful over with people your grandad’s age. He doesn’t want visitors, thinks we’ll be a bother I suppose, drown out Test Match Special.’ I go to visit him that evening though. I remember what it feels like to be alone in a hospital. Once I’m there I find he has pneumonia.
‘He’s been ignoring a cough for weeks,’ says the nurse who shows me in, shaking her head, ‘so then of course he collapsed one morning and hit his head against a table on the way down. We had to give him stitches. These older gents are always hopeless about going to the doctor when something’s wrong – mind you tell him to take better care of himself from now on, all right?’
Grandad starts when he sees me, tries to cover himself with a blanket. ‘Kate. You don’t want to be around places like this.’
I’m suddenly worried that I’ve done the wrong thing coming here, seeing his agitation, the way I’ve embarrassed him. His voice is hoarse when he speaks, as if he’s been shouting.
‘It’s all right, Grandad,’ I tell him. ‘I wanted to check you were all right.’
‘I’ll be fine. Just a cold and a fall. I’ve been going too hard at things. I’ll be all right in a few days’ time.’ He doubles over, convulsed by a cough, and I go to him, place a hand on his back, uncertain what to do.
‘Do you want some water, Grandad?’
He nods. ‘On the little table.’
I pick up a cup of water on the table by the bed, and hold it while he sips from it, clutching at his blanket with both hands.
‘Thank you. So sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry. You’ve got nothing to be sorry about.’
I can’t stop looking at the bruise that’s formed around the cannula, the great dark mark drowning most of his right hand, which seems so small and desiccated now, with the needle sticking out of it.
Before long Grandad has recovered enough to leave hospital, but when I visit him again at home, I find him quieter. Something has changed. I ask him how he feels, but he just smiles and tells me not to worry about it. Late in the autumn he has to go into hospital again.
I’m at work when I hear. Dad calls, and tells me he has bad news. I know before he says it.
‘I’m so sorry, Kate, but I’m afraid your grandad’s gone.’
It always feels the same when anything important happens to me. It reminds me of the first time I ever told Joe I loved him. The same punch in the gut as the words were spoken, the same uncertainty drowning me as the world changed. I can’t react at all for a few minutes after I hear, and then I cry, because I loved my grandad, and now the root of my family is torn out, and I don’t know what in the world will hold us together any more, all those strangers who used to come together every May for the party. I hardly knew him, not as I would have liked to know him. I didn’t give him enough of my time; it’s almost as if I assumed that he’d be there for ever. And I loved him. Did he know that? Did he know I really meant it when I said it? I didn’t say it enough. I don’t know whether he was on his own at the end, or whether he knew he was dying. I wish I had been there with him. But I’m like so many grandchildren with their grandparents – I felt I loved him very much, but that didn’t mean I saw him very often. That didn’t mean I was the one by his side at the end. There was too much in between us, too much life, too many things to call me away.
I take the afternoon off work and go to see my parents. I haven’t been to their house, the place I once called home, for a very long time, and it’s strange to visit and find I’ve somehow become a visitor, and feel I need to ask whether I should take off my shoes when I come through the front door because it might all have changed, and besides I can’t quite remember. Mum is inconsolable for the whole of that afternoon and evening that we’re together, and I don’t know what to do. I’ve seen Mum upset before, but I never quite believed it. It always seemed for show. I don’t know how to reach her now, though I find that I wish I could help her. We sit on the sofa together, the three of us, a family, and hold hands. From time to time we break down and cry again, and then we hold and comfort each other. We say very little. It feels like the closest we’ve ever been.
‘He used to make me breakfast every day he was home,’ says Mum. We both look at her, waiting for more, but nothing comes. I lean tentatively into her shoulder, which is sharp and uncomfortable. ‘Boiled egg and soldiers,’ she continues after a moment, and then stops again.
‘I remember your mum laughing about that,’ says Dad, rubbing her back. ‘He kept making it after you left home, gave it to her instead. Every morning, crusts cut off all neatly. Did she tell you about that?’ Mum doesn’t reply. Eventually Dad gets up to make yet another pot of tea that we won’t drink.
‘Do you remember that summer we went to Lyme Regis with him and Grandma, Mum?’ I venture. She breathes out slowly.
‘It rained,’ she says, and I nod, feeling tearful again, but can’t think of anything else to add. The threads of conversation keep fraying like that all day. It seems there’s no way of touching the sides of grief, and slowing your fall as you plummet into it. I remember a story Mum told me once of a man who tunnelled all the way from England to Australia. I suppose that’s what it’s like to lose someone. You have to pass all the way through the centre of the earth before you come out into the light again, dizzy with the emptiness of losing something you need and can’t have any more.
At the end of the evening, Dad gives me a lift to the station, and I catch a train back to Oxford. Mum and Dad tried to tell me that I was welcome to stay the night, but I refused their offer, smiling, saying I’d rather spend the night on my own.
And I meant it, but Sam’s waiting at the flat when I get back there, so I have company. We don’t talk, but only lie next to each other and listen to the traffic passing on the road outside, and watch the yellow car lights strafing the ceiling till we fall at last into grateful sleep. I reeled out all the words I had for loss after Joe’s accident; I don’t want to say it all again.
Grandad’s funeral is held in the church at the heart of the village. The place is full, and I see it all for one last time: the world he built up around him, the people who used to fill the garden on the day of the parties. I sit between Sam and Dad during the service, Mum sitting on the other side of Dad, and we cry, and sing, and think of him. I can’t find a picture for what has happened to him, how he can have just disappeared. How does anyone ever come to terms with the way that stories end? When th
e service is done and the coffin is being carried out, Aunt Laura has to stop in the aisle for a moment, and Dad holds her up while people watch, not knowing what to do.
‘I can’t,’ she says, ‘I can’t.’
‘Come on, Laura. It’s all right. Come on.’
After the wake and the half-hearted speeches and the sandwiches cut into quarters and bad coffee in the middle of the day, and the love all around us, I take Sam’s hand while the party starts breaking up.
‘I don’t want to go back to the house. I can’t do it,’ I say.
‘OK.’ He can see how serious I am: there’s no point arguing about it. ‘We’d better go then, I guess.’
‘I’m sorry. I can’t go back there. It would be too – I just can’t go.’
‘Will you say goodbye to your family?’
‘Of course. Give me a minute. Why don’t you go and wait outside?’
‘I’d like to say goodbye too, if you’d let me.’
‘Of course. Sorry. Come on then.’ We cross the hall to where my parents stand. Dad hugs me, and Mum hugs me as well, and tells me I should do what I need to do, that’s what’s important.
We call a cab to the station. I wonder whether Sam understands, whether he thinks I’m mad now for leaving. But I have to close my mind to worries like that. Grandma and Grandad are buried side by side in the churchyard, and I can’t bear it, that they’ve both gone on without me, that I’m left here. The taxi comes and we sit in silence in the back while it weaves through the lanes and finds its way into the life and ring roads of the town. At the station I pay the fare and jump out of the car and go in to stand on the platform.
‘What are we going to do?’ Sam asks. I don’t know the answer. I can’t go home now, back to Oxford and my flat and my bed. I can’t go to Sam’s in Bristol. Then I look at the boards in the cramped little ticket hall of the station announcing the train times, and I realise what I want, where I need to be, what has to happen.
We buy tickets and board a train, and pale winter light is on our faces as we head for London, the centre of everything, the blighted beating heart of the country in which we’re living this afternoon of our lives. We change at Clapham Junction and catch a train for Putney, and still Sam doesn’t ask where we’re going, only sits with me and holds my hand, and I’m grateful because I couldn’t have explained it, I don’t know how to put it all into words.
What is needed is an amnesty, a forgetting. What might save us all is a way to put our lives behind us, and love facing into the future, not always turned back looking for the past. But the song of memory is forever calling. You can’t just wash it away. It’s everything people are made of.
What people want above all isn’t just forgiveness. What people love is the dream of laying it all out into the open and letting the light play over the acts of their days, all crimes confessed, all sins revealed. The idea of amnesty is only the end of a process the whole world longs for: the comforting dark of the confessional, the ease of the psychiatrist’s couch, the non-judgemental blank sheet of paper listening to them, and the giving up of sins into words. Only then, at the end of all that, do they long for some absolution to come from baring the soul. Above all what everyone wants to do is sing of their sorrows and sins.
We get off the train and walk, and reach our destination. Sam looks up at the building and still I don’t think he understands, because he isn’t in my head. He’s never quite known how it all looks through my eyes. He hasn’t seen everything I’ve seen. No one ever succeeds in learning the map of another person’s life; they only glimpse the surface. We walk into another hospital, another corridor, another ward. Back into the centre of the world, the place where I want to be more than anywhere, the place I’m more afraid of than anywhere else.
Looking back, I know what happened to Joe became part of my own illness. I wanted to suffer as much as he did. I wanted to be trapped and half-drowned in a sickness like him, and make amends for having run away from him, and know what it felt like to be where he was. I wanted to be so ill he would believe I still loved him, even though I had let him down.
It didn’t work out like that. He never heard anything about my illness. He never got any better as I grew worse. Nothing changed for him, and I didn’t have control over the gesture I was trying to make, and it held me down under the water, and I couldn’t take back what I had done. But that was part of why it started, all the same.
It was part of why I wrenched myself free of the hospital, too. Once I reached the bottom of the ravine of my sickness, I saw it had never been a way of getting close to anyone, only a way of getting close to death. So I used the thought of Joe to make me strong again, once I saw I was further away from him than ever. The patients on my ward used to say that the NHS provided a DIY recovery – lots on offer, but you had to put it all together by yourself. That was the hardest thing, that in the end nothing was healed by medicine or medical expertise – people recovered because they willed those recoveries into being; they fought until they could live in the world again. To ask so many people who were at their weakest to have to fight so hard seems very cruel, but that’s the truth of the illness. Lots of people can’t do it. There were people on my ward who had been there for years. People who were there to die, who never thought of leaving. They couldn’t find a way to see a dream worth living for, so they carried on in the rut they were in, propped up by the endless sympathy and kindness and patience of the nurses, and the Fortisips fed to them by tubes, and the garden sits and escorted walks and unescorted walks and community leave that dripped like blood transfusions into the darkness of their days, the little heartbeats of freedom in the middle of the prison of it all. I chose to fight my way clear of that half-life. The light I aimed for then was the thought of Joe, the same light I had thought I was chasing in the first place, now leading me on in a different direction. He was the way I found to get strong enough to take on the role of a human being again, act out the part of a living person.
Joe sees us approaching before Lizzy does. She’s sitting with her back to the entrance. Joe’s eyes light up, and I laugh, because I know now that I am in the right place. Lizzy turns to see what Joe’s smiling at, and stands and hugs me as we meet by the bedside. I know Lizzy always spends her Saturday afternoons here. I knew I would find them both here.
‘Hello! We weren’t expecting you,’ Lizzy says.
‘I know. I’m sorry. I just really wanted to come and be with you both. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘Of course we don’t, it’s brilliant. You’re all dressed up.’
‘Family do.’
‘Your grandad’s funeral.’ Lizzy’s face becomes suddenly serious.
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m sorry. Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine. I just really wanted to be with you guys now it’s done.’
‘Of course. Well, we’re so glad you came. You must be Sam?’ Lizzy holds out her hand, and Sam shakes it.
‘Yeah. Hi. Nice to meet you.’
‘Do you want to help me get some extra chairs?’ Lizzy says.
‘Sure thing.’ Sam follows her off through the ward.
I sit down beside Joe and hold his hand. I want to say something, but there’s too much to say. So I stay silent, and we look at each other instead. Lizzy and Sam come back with chairs, and the four of us are together for the first time.
‘I don’t think you two have met before, have you?’ Lizzy says, looking from Sam to Joe. I take my cue. This, I suppose, is what I came for.
‘No, you haven’t. Joe, I wanted to introduce you to my friend. This is Sam.’
Joe looks at Sam, and for a moment no one says anything. Then Sam speaks.
‘Hi, Joe. It’s nice to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you.’
Joe looks away from Sam then, at me. All I wanted this whole time was to hear his voice once more. All I wanted was to speak with him again. He smiles, and for a moment I almost feel forgiven that I didn’t die that night, that I wasn’
t there in the car beside him. And I think I can imagine what he might have said to me now, if only he could still speak.
Don’t be stupid. That’s not what I want. I want you to carry on living.
Acknowledgements
This book was written during my tenure as the playwright in residence at Keble College, Oxford, and was nourished and shaped by conversations I was able to have as a result of that position. I would like to thank Roger Boden, Yvonne Murphy, Sir Jonathan Phillips and everyone at Keble for affording me the opportunity to develop my work in such a supportive and enriching environment. Some of the thinking also got done while on attachment at the National Theatre Studio, and I am grateful to Emily McLaughlin, Tom Lyons and the rest of the team there for their support.
Thanks, from the bottom of my heart, to Laura Williams and Suzanne Bridson, Alice Youell, Kate Samano and everyone at PFD and Transworld; Lord Bew; Molly Waters; Checky Gardiner; Richard English and Angharad Vaughan; Gemma Oaten; my uncle and aunt, John and Sally Norris; Doug Rolfe and everyone at James’s Place; Up In Arms, particularly the Fear Of Music company and the Visitors company, above all Alice Hamilton and Eleanor Wyld; and the staff and patients of St George’s Hospital and Springfield University Hospital for their contributions to this story. Richard English’s Armed Struggle, David Beresford’s Ten Men Dead and Ed Moloney’s A Secret History of the IRA and Voices from the Grave were invaluable sources. Support and advice relating to eating disorders is available from the charities Beat and Seed, as well as from GPs and NHS Mental Health Services.
Thanks are due always to Bernard O’Donoghue, who started everything by arranging for me to visit the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo in 2009. I made my second visit to Sligo while finishing this book, and was reminded of how much I owe to that fortnight, that place.
When I started writing this story it was going to be about the Boston Tapes, because I believed two things about that project – that it was profoundly important, and that more people needed to know about what happened. Then life took hold, and the book became about other things as well, that are also of profound importance to the society in which we live, and also demand more concerted attention. I wish I had never gone through the year that led to the rest of this story; I would give anything to change the tape, so none of it had happened. But happen it did, and at the insistence of my wife, Charlie, I refused to let that stop my work; I fought to turn it into poetry instead. Perhaps it will offer some catharsis; if it helps one person feel a little less alone some day, that will be something. Charlie, I can only hope this tale has earned its telling, and this writer has deserved his dedicatee. To you, my love.
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