Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  I do have a life, you see, this is what I realise—flawed, perhaps, but interesting and profoundly colourful in its way. What I do not have is gas. The warning light has been on for thirty minutes and the needle is way below zero. I get on the hard shoulder and speed toward the exit, grimacing inarticulate excuses, and suddenly everything speeds up.

  I’m on an empty road, park in an empty lot, throw my keys into a waiting slot, pick up a ticket from a grinning uniform, dart through the airport, arrive at a gaping gate, check in, fly down the tube, sit steaming on an empty plane, find myself in Atlanta leaning against a stucco column talking to a buffed-out, Miami-based female coach and physical therapist (her lips forever compressed by exertion) whose father is in the CIA (a cold individual, she tells me), and soon am sitting on the New York plane beside a man in a grey suit, and I’m tired and don’t want to talk to anyone, but when he speaks to the stewardess he’s English, so I look at his boarding pass, which is on the armrest between us, and see his name is Chapman and think, okay, one more conversation before going back into my little room to type for a year.

  Chapman lives in New York and owns a factory near Atlanta which recycles human skeletons. He tells me the skeletons are boiled and washed before being turned into screws which are then used to repair broken bones. The screws, unlike metal pins, fuse with the bones and the healing process is more complete.

  So I flew south with a woman who grows flowers in Mexico and fly home with a Chapman who mills bones in Georgia. Had I been on time for the re-enactment I would never have met either.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  92760

  When Bryan died everyone said it was Darrow who killed him. ‘He died of a broken heart,’ someone said.

  ‘Broken heart nothing,’ Darrow responded, ‘he died of a busted belly.’

  But I think it’s possible Malone and Darrow did in fact kill him. The line holds, and then it holds no longer. A happy man gets hit by a car and lives. A sad man stubs his toe, it gets infected, and he’s gone. If Bryan’s faith had been holding him together all this time, shoring up the line, and suddenly his faith was shaken, faith not only in himself, in his sense of who he was, but also in the book he had relied on all his life, who knows what that might do?

  I’ve always thought it would be fun to write a scene where someone is receiving a massage and dies. The masseur doesn’t notice and keeps on massaging the corpse until it’s time to get paid. Whenever I have a massage I always ask the masseur or masseuse if this has ever happened to them. One time I got a qualified yes. The masseur had been called by someone whose lover had AIDS and was dying. The man wanted to die, the pain was so intense, but he couldn’t let go. Would the masseur go there and massage him so he’d relax and die?

  He did and he did.

  I remember my mother. One week she was alive, sitting up on the hospital bed, commenting humourously on the other patients in the ward. A week later, she was dead.

  After she found out my father was in love with someone else, she no doubt longed to kick him out; but she could not. It was too late. She was too sick and she needed him. She insisted, however, that she didn’t care: if Cecil wanted to see his lover, fine, what was it to her?

  My father took her at her word, but after a while her pain became so visible and so profound, he could not endure it and ended the relationship. Perhaps more humiliated by this than by the affair itself, she lashed out and wrote an anonymous letter to the woman’s husband. The pain was amplified. My father settled back into his life with my mother. Although he had chosen to remain with her she could not let the matter rest. Often when he was thinking of nothing in particular, she would say, in her typically schoolgirl fashion, ‘You’re pining for the love of your life, aren’t you?’ and no assurances to the contrary would pacify her.

  Soon it was discovered she had cancer. Cecil was stoic, cheerful, decent. She became quieter. They still had things in common, the children, their intelligence, the Times crossword puzzle, a few old friends, and their shared contempt—part snobbery, mostly conviction—for Margaret Thatcher and her gang of arrivistes and bullies. At times I believe they were even happy in a curious way; it was hard to tell. One day Hugh, her closest brother, came to visit her. By now his wife, Jean, had died. In the course of discussing their lives, Hugh said, ‘Well, it’s just most unfortunate that you married the wrong man.’

  My sister, Sarah, found Clare crying many hours later. How could he say such a thing?

  When everyone but my father realised she was going to die before too long, she came to visit me in America. A friend of mine lent me his house in New Hampshire and we drove around the countryside, she, my father, my wife, and my daughter. For some reason, he arrived later than she, so we were alone with her for a day or so. When she spoke to my father on the phone, they bickered, but on the night he was due to arrive she was concerned that everything be the way he liked it, the bed, the reading light, his pillow. For all the pain they had caused each other, a grudging admiration existed between them, a wry, enduring affection.

  My relationship with her had worsened over the years. I adored her because she was funny and morbid and a rogue, but in the last decade no real relationship was possible because everything was distorted either by alcohol or by its absence, by viciously expressed alcoholic despair, or by guilt and craving. I knew too much of what it was to be a drunk and nothing of what it was to be her. I watched her sink into inebriated gloom, eyes closed, moaning in excessive sorrow at the state of the world or at the awfulness of some acquaintance. I knew from my own research that alcohol was a depressant. If only she would stop it, even for a month, I thought, maybe she could muster sufficient optimism to ask for help, and then perhaps, at last, she could retrieve some final remnants of happiness. I lived in America. All things were possible. I could not stand by and watch her misery and not intrude.

  So I broke the code of silence. I’d call her on the phone and say, ‘Why don’t you go to AA? Don’t you realize how much happier you would be if you’d just get this out of your system?’ I wrote long impassioned letters, evangelical and blunt. I thought I could save her life and in the effort lost her affection. Once the most loved son (or so I thought), I now became ‘The Hollywood Mauler,’ a clumsy, insensitive scold.

  One day my father called me. Clare was in the hospital. He couldn’t say for sure, but it seemed to him she might not last much longer. I should consider coming over. Consenting Adults was being edited. I had work and was being offered still more. For the first time in forty years, I was the good schoolboy, good reports, almost a prefect. I was terrified that if I was absent even for a few days, I’d get found out, the momentum would be lost, and I’d flounder backward into obscurity and debt.

  Denise told me to pack and leave. My relationship with my mother was so powerful and confused, I could not allow myself to miss this last opportunity.

  I flew out the next day.

  As a would-be doctor and a socialist Clare had an absolute commitment to the National Health system. When it worked, as it had when we were children, it was a system that benefited all and neglected none. By the time my mother needed it, it had been starved and beaten by a succession of callous Conservative governments, elitist scum who then threw up their hands and cried, ‘It’s just not working!’ and anyone with money was barging to the front of the line, elbowing back the less fortunate to snag a place on the beleaguered operating table. But not my mother. Die first.

  Which she did. She was in a large public ward. Though I’ve seen far worse under the privatized American system, it was a dismal place nonetheless. I went out and bought her an expensive miniature TV to distract her from her death. For some reason it wouldn’t function in the hospital and anyway it embarrassed her. When I came the following day, it was hidden away.

  I stayed for three days. Whenever I could, I went and sat with her. Sometimes my sister was there, now living and working in Cambridge, or one of my brothers. Most often I was alone with her or wi
th my father. There were many things I wanted to talk to her about but I could not bring myself to do so. I wanted to thank her. I wanted to tell her I knew about Francis and who his real father was. I wanted to tell her that no matter what pain she had caused me it was outweighed by love and that in surviving both I had become who I was, good and bad, and that that was okay. I wanted to tell her I forgave her. I wanted to hear her say she loved me and that she was not angry about my letters. Perhaps I would have liked her to apologize or explain. But her pride forbade any show of sentimentality or defeat and no revelations were forthcoming. If I extended so much as a toe into the unacceptable territory of maudlin reflection, she sniffed and looked away. There would be no deathbed confessions here, no conversions, no apologies. Death tiptoed through the ward with long exaggerated steps, sometimes for amusement pouncing forward—only to freeze and step back, laughing at the shocked face upon the pillow. Acutely aware of this fatal pantomime—aware of little else, in fact—I could not acknowledge it. My mother and I pretended to chat without concern while in the background the orchestra tuned up for a Requiem Mass.

  Soon, I had to return to Los Angeles, to my own struggle for survival.

  When I went to say goodbye, I hid my suitcase behind a counter—let her not see the reality of my departure—and then walked over to her, half sitting on her mechanical bed, a Plexiglas oxygen mask pressed to her face. Even harder to bear than the thought of her physical pain was the fear I could see in her eyes above the mask, an anxiety which at any moment seemed as if it might become a look of horror. I had seen this same expression when she was trying not to drink. She did not share with anyone what it was she was afraid of then, nor would she confide in anyone now. Did she know this was the last time she would ever see her oldest son? She, who had accompanied me, blubbering with fear, to the doctor for inoculations or to the dentist for fillings, now faced the terror of death without me. I was needed by my own life, the life she gave me.

  I sat on one side of the bed, my father on the other. They talked inconsequentially, my father with his ever-practical cheerfulness. Her large breasts, the same ones that fed me forty years before, were visible through a gap in her pyjamas.

  Eventually, I said determinedly, with my own mendacious brand of cheeriness, ‘Look, I have to go. Get better and then it’s back to Barrington and I’ll come and visit you there very soon.’

  I kissed her and slunk off to retrieve my bag. Unfortunately, I had miscalculated the angle and she could see me from her vantage point in the large ward; but she showed scant interest.

  I waved. I clenched my fist. And left.

  Next time I saw her she was in a small container the size of a milk carton and I was driving her home.

  On my return to Los Angeles, I wrote her a letter, thanking her for all she’d given me, for her love, and hoping she would soon go home (to die was the implication). It was an unusually explicit letter for our family, almost American you might say. A day or two later, my father called again. My mother was about to die. Alcohol and cigarettes had been attacking her body for years and now it seemed ready to concede defeat—or victory? An artery in her leg had put up a barricade and said, ‘No more blood shall pass through here,’ and nothing would dissolve this insultingly small challenge. Giving the entire leg its independence was the only alternative, but Clare knew the empire of her flesh was not long for the map and told my brother Francis there would be no secession. In the end, her opinion was irrelevant. The doctors were sure she wouldn’t survive the operation.

  That afternoon in Los Angeles, the jury came back in the trial of a group of white cops who had beaten a black suspect, Rodney King, insensible and were caught on video. The cops were found innocent and L.A. was suddenly torn by riots. I waited a day, experiencing the feeling of a city under siege, then figured I could sneak out unnoticed. I flew to England the following night with Denise and Anna Bella, the three of us looking down at the city to marvel at the idiocy of blacks burning their own neighbourhoods to protest white violence.

  In England, my mother was being injected with something to combat the pain. Given the choice of being washed by a nurse or my father, she chose my father. He diligently sponged her down and tucked her in. They injected her again. She asked him to hold her hand.

  He said to her, ‘You know I do love you.’

  She turned and looked at him and said, ‘I know.’

  A few minutes later she slipped into unconsciousness. My father sat beside her, unable to let go of her hand although he knew she could no longer feel his steady grip. After about five hours, she died.

  And he did love her. We all loved her. No amount of abuse, no decades of anger or frustration—nothing she could do—and she did and said some terrible things to all of us—could stop us loving her. Maybe it was because the melancholy ten-year-old child was always so visible, peeking out, afraid, through the despairing alcoholic eyes of the sixty-year-old woman. The yo-yo she brought with her the day she met my father was not an affectation but the symbol of a desire not to grow up. And, in the most unsatisfactory way, she never did; she never controlled her own life and never used her brilliant mind. It was tragic, this fear, this resolute and fatal reserve, this misplaced pride: gulping down her counter-productive medicines of gin and cider, she stumbled alone, an obstinate child, through the desert of her mental illness. Anything was preferable to the humiliation of admitting weakness to a stranger.

  My youngest brother, Ludovic, met us at Heathrow Airport the following morning. He sidled up in the pervasive chill of sour tobacco smoke and murmured, ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘thank God.’

  During the last years of her life I had often wished her dead. Her pain was so palpable, the despair and bitterness, the sound of her voice when I would call too late in the day. What was the point in living if living was so utterly devoid of pleasure? And then there was the tension: always waiting for the call—she’s fallen downstairs, she’s broken her neck … The family was in orbit around her sorrow.

  We got in the car and started along the drab motorway home. I became almost feverish in my relief. I’d been expecting her death since I was a child. Not that I didn’t love her. I loved her. I loved my mumma, my mamae as they say in Brazil, my short, sad shrubby sea-blite. I loved her deeply, but with such overwhelming pain. Her depression was an affront to love, shrapnel from the womb, a long, bending test of love, and now the test was over.

  By the time we got home, my father was in a frenzy of organisation, as if his talent for this would enable him to dodge the complex emotional consequences of her life and death. In the afternoon, Denise and I were sent into Cambridge to buy envelopes for the invitations to the funeral. My sister, Sarah, gave me specific instructions. A number and a letter designating the size. We parked the car in some dismal structure built to be as ugly and inconvenient as any combination of talentless architect and sadistic city planner could devise, and trudged among the defeated to a stationery shop called Rymans; but when I saw the size of the envelopes it seemed too large. I asked the woman who worked there if I could use a phone to check.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not company policy.’

  I explained I was trying to organise my mother’s funeral. It was a local call. It would only take a few seconds. I would happily pay. The face pinched into itself like a fist. A sympathetic look but a firm no. If the envelopes were the wrong size I could bring them back. I told the woman I had arrived from Los Angeles that morning. I was very tired. My mother died only last night. If the envelopes were wrong, I’d have to drive out to the village and then come back. It would take an hour. ‘Please …’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  There was the phone, I could see it on the wall. I was insistent. The woman, at first only wilfully obedient and correct, now looked up at me with obstinate trepidation. I insisted on seeing the manager. A balding man with a wretched swipe of hair pasted across his oily dome came hurrying up the stairs. Mr. Filz.

 
; Mr. Filz seemed angry. ‘It’s not company policy to allow customers to use the phone.’

  I began what was to be a series of questions.

  ‘What harm could it do?’

  ‘That’s not the point. It’s company policy not to let people use the phone and I’m the manager.’

  ‘I understand that but …’

  Before I could develop a logical argument (Did he think the man who came up with this policy was thinking of this particular case?) Denise self-detonated. Her face red with fury, she started screaming at him. How dare he behave like this? What kind of a man was he anyway? Didn’t he have a heart? Is this what it meant to be English?!

  I studied her, thinking her next move would probably be to start throwing things. Instead, she threatened to walk out. Checking that nothing impeded a swift retreat back into the basement, Filz gestured encouragingly toward the front door. I have no appetite for physical violence. I went to pay for the envelopes.

  When we got back, the village vicar was at the table, the greedy priest scrabbling at the atheists in their grief. All we wanted was to use the church, the only building large enough in the village to accommodate all those who wanted to bid the reprobate goodbye.

  He was a limp little man with damp, protruding eyes and a weak chin. ‘Are tears being shed?’ he asked solicitously, as if dealing with cretins.

  When, just to bait him, I brought up some larger issue of faith, I think it was to do with the obvious inefficacy of prayer—the poor and miserable seem to do it most and get least—he hesitated and then looked up at me.

  ‘Discuss? But not now?’ He smiled, rubbing his hands together.

  Trying to comfort us in advance for the gruesome peculiarities of the crematorium (or ‘the Crem’ as he referred to it affectionately) he said, ‘The coffin will be to one side. The curtains will come around—but you must realize, she’s not there.’