by Liz Byrski
Ros turns to face Simone, and Adele can see that she’s really pissed off.
‘It’s not about replacing them, Simone,’ she says. ‘You feed him at the table, every meal time. I haven’t said anything earlier, because I don’t want to nag, but now this – so many treats! What I put in that tin would normally last him about three weeks, but now there’s only a couple left.’
‘It’s not only Simone,’ Judy says. ‘I’ve been sneaking him some too, every day.’
Adele takes a deep breath. ‘Me too,’ she says sheepishly. ‘He always seems so hungry.’
‘He is NOT hungry!’ Ros is really angry now. ‘He’s a dog, and so by definition a natural scrounger. I can’t believe you would do this, especially as I specifically asked you all, on the day we arrived, not to feed him at the table, and only occasionally to give him treats. Every meal I’ve seen you slipping stuff to him. But now the treats as well! Yesterday I saw one of you – you, I think, Adele – give him a piece of cheese. Well did you know that a small cube of cheese, smaller than the one you gave him, is the equivalent of a Big Mac for a human? No, of course you didn’t, but you do now, so don’t do it. Clooney has two perfectly good meals a day. He’s old, and this is very bad for his health. It could make him really sick.’
Clooney looks mournfully up at Ros and the tin. There is deadly silence and Adele can see that she’s not the only one who can’t look Ros in the face. ‘I’m so sorry, Ros,’ she says, making herself meet her eyes now. ‘I wouldn’t want to do anything to hurt him.’
‘Well that’s just what you are doing,’ Ros says, glaring at her. ‘It’s what you’re all doing.’ Adele hears the crack in her voice and sees for the first time that Ros is not simply angry with them, she is also deeply upset.
The others are murmuring more apologies, but Ros picks up the tin and calls to Clooney, who has been looking from one to the other with a grave expression. He gets up and follows her as she marches towards the door.
‘Ros,’ Simone calls, standing up now. ‘Really, I’m so sorry.’
‘Just go off to your blasted exhibition and leave me in peace,’ Ros snaps, then stamps off down the passage with Clooney following her.
‘Oh dear,’ Judy says once Ros is out of earshot. ‘That was pretty awful. What do we do now?’
‘Nothing,’ Simone says. ‘We just do as she asked. We leave her alone to get over it.’
‘One of us could go and talk to her,’ Adele suggests.
Simone shakes her head. ‘I think that would be a very bad idea, Adele. Let’s just clear up, put everything in the dishwasher and go out. A little walk, the exhibition, a nice coffee somewhere . . . by the time we get back, she’ll still be annoyed, but she’ll be over the worst of it.’
‘Do you really think we’ve made Clooney ill?’ Adele asked. ‘I’ve never had a dog. I know nothing about looking after them but I have rather fallen in love with Clooney.’
‘Me too,’ Simone says, ‘and I doubt we’ve done any damage yet, but Ros is right, and we do have to stop. I thought it was just me.’
‘Me too,’ Adele says. And Judy nods.
Simone starts to stack the dishwasher. ‘Come on, let’s get going, everyone, there’s some shopping to do.’
*
Ros sits by the window in her bedroom, staring out at the rain and savouring the silence, with Clooney stretched out on the rug in front of her snoring very softly. The others have been gone for some time and she relishes the sense of being alone in the house. She had come back to her bedroom seething with what she can now see was probably an unreasonable level of outrage, and it then took her some time to calm down. On reflection, she can see that it was fear more than anything else that fired her outburst. Feeling she had lost control over Clooney’s diet, and potentially his health, had totally spooked her. It’s made her realise how much she depends on the reliability of his habits and their regular routine. He is her constant, faithful companion, hugely comforting and entertaining, and so predictable. Although, she admits to herself, maybe in addition to the fear of losing him, she also didn’t like the thought that the treats and titbits would mean sharing his unconditional love. She smiles slightly, nudging Clooney with her socked foot. ‘So, maybe I was jealous,’ she says. ‘Competing for your affections, I said, and I’m the most fiercely competitive of all.’ Clooney yawns, readjusts his position slightly and starts snoring again.
The house is blissfully quiet. It’s not just the silence that she relishes; it’s the lack of movement that enables her to feel at one with herself. Constant movement and conversation eats away at her equilibrium, leaving her feeling like an old plaster statue slowly being chipped around the edges, the colours peeling off and flaking away. Living with three other people was always going to be a challenge, and she’d felt relieved when she heard the car crunching off down the gravel this morning.
When, after James’s death, she had converted the first floor into a separate flat Ros had insisted on soundproofing it. ‘I don’t want to hear people moving around,’ she’d told the builder. ‘And I don’t want them to hear me. The only sounds that should be audible to both of us are those around the front door.’ Even the staircase was insulated. It had turned out to be mightily expensive but to Ros it was worth every last cent.
Ros has not always sought stillness and silence. In the late sixties and well into the seventies, she had shared a large and chilly apartment with three other musicians. It was a grubby sort of place that allowed for deteriorating standards of housekeeping. The sink was always full of unwashed crockery, it was rare to find a clean plate in the cupboard, and tea towels would be discovered balled up in odd places gathering dust and fluff. Ros could cope with all of this, and make her own contribution to it. She grew accustomed to strangers sleeping on the sofa, or to discovering them in her bed if she came home late. She became immune to late night encounters with someone’s naked boyfriend raiding the pantry; to discovering her hairbrush had accrued someone else’s hair, and to unknown persons pilfering the curry or pasta that she had left in the fridge. But as time passed living with others became oppressive, and she craved her own space. Eventually she moved into a flat over a greengrocer’s shop, and there she discovered the pure joy of living alone.
She was twenty-nine when she met James, who was a few years older and much more mature. He was a calm, organised person, with high domestic standards – to him cleaning and cooking were things that one just did daily without fuss; a rare find in this respect as in many others. He was also something of an introvert and Ros, in those days, was inclined to adapt to her surroundings. She had grown up in a really well-ordered household; her mother was a true domestic goddess and perhaps the shared flat had been a reaction to this. It was easy for her to adapt to James, to adopt his standards and live in peace with order, cleanliness and agreed personal boundaries that helped her to stay calm and centred. She moved into James’s larger flat within a few months, and they lived there for several years until he eventually inherited his parents’ home in Paddington where she still lives now, and where they had shared their love of stillness, of music and books and good, simple, well-cooked food. Ros had felt that James was the only person who had ever bothered to find out who she was; who knew her, and who accepted the whole package. He made her real to herself, validated her idiosyncrasies, tolerated her more irritating habits and loved her just the same. It was easy for her to reciprocate. Ros reflects on this now, on her extraordinary good fortune in finding another introvert, falling in love and living largely in peace for so much of her adult life.
But James died. He died when he should still have lived, earlier than either of them had imagined. He was on a two-year residency as a Visiting Fellow at the University of London, and they were almost halfway through their stay there when, on an icy February morning, he caught a bus along Euston Road, close to the apartment the university had provided for them. Ten minutes late
r, as the bus slowed down to approach the corner of a busy junction he jumped off, slipped on the ice and crashed down, hitting his head on the kerb. He was dead before the ambulance arrived.
Ros thinks of this now, fifteen years later, as she does at some point every day. She thinks of James: blood seeping from his skull staining the ice crimson, the clamour of people around him, their breath making clouds in the cold air, and the ambulance siren growing closer as the driver weaves through the commuter traffic, unaware that it is already too late. She’d tried to make sense of it. Why? Why then? Why James? Why couldn’t she have had the chance to be with him at the end? What was the meaning of such a banal death for such an extraordinary man? How could she live with it? But she has, of course, lived with it every day for almost fifteen years, and there are no answers. It happened, it’s done; it was all over a long time ago. Why, then, does it all seem so unfinished?
Ros is an only child who learned how to live her life through reading, and so she believes that one day she will find an answer in the pages of a book. She believes this despite knowing that there is no answer. It is simply what it is. But where there are books there is hope. Isn’t there? The hope that one day she will land on a page and there will be resolution at last.
She had left London as soon as she could and in the meantime avoided going anywhere near the place where James died. Somehow she had kidded herself that by staying away she would find an answer to her questions. But what answer could there be? And what would resolution look like? Some years ago she started to read some of the classics she had neglected in her youth. She had begun with the Russians: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev. It was hard but rewarding work, though if resolution was tucked away in the pages Ros couldn’t find it. Eventually, searching for something completely different, she began to read Proust and staggered through In Search of Lost Time, by turns loving and hating the author and his alter ego hero; wanting some days to sit down and talk with him for hours, and on others itching to punch him in his calm, pretentious face. What it clarified for her, though, was something she unconsciously understood but had never thought much about: that experience is only fully lived through memory, through true imaginative recollection. When, back home a few weeks ago, she had first read Tirra Lirra by the River, she saw that Nora was, in a way, reliving – perhaps remaking – her own life in this same way. It was a very short book compared to Proust’s three hundred thousand words, but Jessica Anderson had created something similar and, in Ros’s view, more beautiful, thanks to its simplicity. She had been captivated by this seemingly perfect example of revisiting the past to make sense of it; not just in the mind and the heart but also the power of physically going back to a place. And since their conversation about it she has realised that this is what she has being trying to do for a long time – make sense of her own life, both with James and since he has gone. She has more in common with Nora than she realised: the observation and reflection through the lens of old age, the attempt to see her life as a whole, coordinated entity, rather than a jumbled mess of experiences. It has made sense to her to try to work out why she did, or did not do, certain things at certain times, why she had been selfish or cruel when she could have been generous or kind, why she had been blind or indifferent when she could have shown compassion. It wasn’t a simple rehashing of the past but it was showing her a way to think about the future and how to live a good life in her old age.
It seemed tied in somehow with the changes in her body. Even before the diagnosis she had begun to feel physically old, weaker and more vulnerable, and to tire easily. She lost her balance a few times and had to grasp the back of a chair or a table to steady herself. Her feet sometimes seemed to be heading in completely different directions from each other and she came close to falling as she tried to correct them. And then her hands started to shake from time to time. Even her feisty, often obstructive nature seemed to soften and thin. It was her shaking hands and her disobedient feet that had eventually compelled her to talk to her doctor. And so began the whole battery of tests, followed by the delivery of information, of certainty.
Parkinson’s, they said, thus transforming her image of the future with a single word. Parkinson’s. And now, each day, try as she might to pretend that if she doesn’t tell anyone it isn’t real, she recognises that this is the second time in her life that she has been faced with the unchangeable, and that she is stuck in a place in which she cannot summon imaginative recollection to her aid.
In their discussion of Jessica Anderson’s book she had raised questions about the value of returning to a place of memories. The others had looked at her strangely, as though she was suggesting it might be a waste of time. But what she had really been asking was – should I go back? If I went back to the Euston Road, if I stood in the spot where James’s head cracked so sickeningly against the kerb, would that provide resolution? And how could going back help me now that my future is disappearing in a blurry haze of incapacity and dependence? She pictures him doing what he always did; getting to his feet, walking to the back of the bus and standing on the open rear platform, near the conductor, hanging onto the rail until they reached the stop.
Why, she asks James now, why did you have to jump off? Why the hell couldn’t you wait until it turned the corner and stopped? It was only a few metres, for goodness sake. What sort of idiot does that? And she can almost hear him answer: People do it all the time, Ros, you know that. I was just unlucky.
The rain has stopped now and she can hear the sound of an engine and tyres splashing through the mud. They’ll need a cup of tea, she thinks, and she gets to her feet intending to go and put the kettle on, then stops. No, she tells herself. You need this time – sit down, stay here. They can make their own tea.
Chapter Eight
The second Sunday
Judy wakes on Sunday morning with a sense of energy and purpose. She has enjoyed a whole week of rest and finds now that she is actually looking forward to discussing Sacred Country this afternoon. Only the wretched cough remains to cramp her style. The weather has cleared and she decides on an early walk. For the first time since they arrived she is up before the others, standing in the kitchen in her tracksuit, drinking a cup of tea, when Adele wanders in.
‘Really?’ Adele says, when Judy tells her she’s going for a walk. ‘Do you think that’s a good idea? You’re still coughing and it sounds rough. It’s cold out there, and look at the sky.’
July reboils the kettle and gets out a mug for Adele. Then she peers across the sink to study the sky through the window. ‘Looks okay to me. Not all bright and clear like yesterday, but I think I can beat the rain.’
‘Well I don’t like the look of it,’ Adele says.
‘I need some fresh air and a bit of exercise.’
‘You could wait until a little later,’ Adele suggests. ‘We could all go with you.’
The last thing Judy wants is company. ‘It’ll be fine,’ she says again. ‘And I’m looking forward to this afternoon.’
She hands Adele a mug of tea, hurries to the front door, pulls on her boots, her anorak and a beanie and closes the door behind her. The coldness of the air takes her by surprise; it catches in her throat and she coughs, tightens her scarf, and looks up at the sky again. Maybe Adele is right; it does look as though it could rain later. Anyway, she thinks, I’m not going far, just a gentle stroll. But Judy has spent at least a couple of decades rushing everywhere, trying to fit the various aspects of her growing business into a working day. How a gentle stroll might feel has been erased from her memory by her need to keep on the go. She sets off at a rapid pace, taking a steep track down and away from the house.
She walks on for some time trying to focus on the book, what it means to her, and what choosing it as her special book might tell the others about her. The last part is difficult – what could it tell them? Why hasn’t she asked herself this before? She stops abruptly. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ she says al
oud. ‘I can’t just say it’s about my home, the place, the characters, and so on.’ She feels the same sharp stab of failure that she remembers from schooldays, especially from exams, when she would invest considerable thought and effort in answering a question only to realise, as the final bell rang, that in her haste to begin, she had misread the question.
Okay, she tells herself now, this is all perfectly okay, this is not an exam, it’s fine for me to pick a book simply because I love it and it means something to me about my old home. That alone must tell them something about me.
There is a wooden seat ahead of her and she stops and sits down for a moment to get her breath. Thinking about the book has distracted her and she realises she has walked further than she intended, and her breath is uncomfortably harsh in her chest. As Adele predicted, it’s now starting to rain. Judy checks her watch and is amazed to see that she has been out for more than half an hour. She gets to her feet and starts back up what seems like a different, wider and rougher track towards the house. Her pace is slower now and the tightness in her chest has worsened. She puffs and wheezes. Idiot, she thinks. It’s going to take her a lot longer to get home again. It’s raining heavily now and she pulls up her hood and feels her hair pressed wet and cold against her head. Fifteen minutes later, the effort of pushing back, uphill, against the forces of wind and rain compels her to stop and rest. Her legs are aching horribly and her knees are particularly sore – as though someone has hammered nails into them. Somehow she has lost track of how much further it is to the house, and has ended up on a different path; in fact it’s a dirt road. She just knows she needs to keep heading for higher ground. It’s hard to see through the downpour and she struggles against the wind that keeps ripping the hood from her head. A sudden sense of helplessness overtakes her, a feeling of weakness that tells her she can’t go on. She sinks down onto a fallen tree trunk on the edge of the road, eyes closed, face buried in her hands, willing her lungs to get her home while struggling to breathe normally. She hunches her shoulders, trying to sink her neck deeper into the protection of her anorak, and doesn’t hear the sound of a car engine until it stops alongside her.