by Matt Wilven
“Hi, Mum. Everything okay?”
“Hi, love. I don’t know how to say this. Are you at home?”
“I’m at a Halloween party. Say what?”
“It’s your dad.”
“My dad?”
“Yes,” she says.
“What about him?”
“The hospice rang. He only has a few days left… He wants to see you.”
“He wants to see me?”
“He’s dying. Cancer.”
“He’s dying and he wants to see me?”
“That’s what they said.”
“Why?”
“You’re his son, Vince.”
“I know that.”
“That’s all they said. He wants to see you.”
“I don’t know about this.”
“You might regret it if you don’t go.”
“I might regret it if I do.”
“You can stay with us, if you come. John will drive you up there if Lyd’s not… well, you won’t tell me anything about what’s going on. If she doesn’t, if she’s not—”
“I need to think about this.”
“You don’t have time to think about it. You either come or you don’t. He’s on his last legs.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll ring you in the morning and let you know.”
“Remember he’s your dad, Vince. Whether he was a good one or not, he’s still your dad.”
“I know, Mum. I’ve got to go.”
Being dressed like Frankenstein’s monster suddenly seems ridiculous, as does dressing up in general. The whole party is surreal and absurd. I need to leave but my first instinct is to tell Lyd about the phone call. She is my barometer of truth. By talking to her I’ll know how I feel. It also occurs to me that this is a serious thing, an important moment, and, as such, if I’m still important to her, I’ll be able to see in her response where we stand.
I turn back to her.
“My mum,” I say, waggling my phone before I put it back in my pocket. “Apparently, well, my dad’s dying.”
“Your dad?”
“Cancer. He wants to see me.”
“He wants to see you?”
“So she says.”
“Are you going to go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to?”
“I guess. More for curiosity than anything.”
Lyd is fully immersed in my situation, sympathetic, but she catches herself at it. She forces her emotional tides to recede, moving heaven and earth so that she can seem resolved in her decision not to share the burden of my problems. I see this struggle in her face and find it hard to blame her, especially after seeing that her instinct was to come forward, towards me. Her reticence is born of trauma and pain. Her hand wanders over her pregnant stomach again.
“Sorry you have to go through this,” she says, deadpan now, rational. “It’s bad timing.”
“I’m not sure I’m going through anything,” I say. “I can’t go anyway.”
“What do you mean can’t go?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“Tell me.”
I stare at a plastic bat hanging from a light fitting. Beneath my green make-up my cheeks are burning. I’m glad that some portion of my embarrassment is covered but I know that Lyd will be able to see it in my eyes.
“Well?” she says.
“I can’t afford the train ticket.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“I can barely afford food.”
“You’re a child, Vince, a child.”
“I know.”
She shakes her head with an exasperated grin.
“Fine.”
“What?” I ask.
“I’ll take you.”
“You’ll take me?”
“Yes, I’ll take you. If you want to go?”
“I think so,” I say, grabbing the opportunity to be with her for an extended period. “I mean, I do.”
“You’re hopeless. You know that, don’t you?”
I nod but, beneath my shame, beneath my dying father, beneath my overdraft limit, there is a tiny glimmer. She could have just offered me the money for the train ticket but instead she’s coming with me.
FOUR
The objective truth is a concept formed within subjective realities about a wider reality. Words and numbers are constantly added to this extremely complicated concept, expanding its sign system. When its underlying rules are wholly understood and the objective truth has been fully expressed, further signs and significations will only ever enhance and readdress what is already known. Having come of age, the objective truth will be celebrated and made available to everybody. People will analyse more or less of it, tell stories about it, make discoveries with it, progress or regress because of it, believe in it or dismiss it, but, most importantly, they will remain separate from it.
London recedes like a sea we’ve been swimming in. We drive past inert industrial zones, warehouses, piles of stones and sand, silos and long chutes. Monolithic chunks of concrete fly backwards, glass flashes, wires bounce, brick walls smear into clay smudges. Dirt and soot taints the first fields but the colours gradually become more vibrant and natural. Birds begin to outnumber aeroplanes. There are more orange and red tree roofs than grey and terracotta house roofs.
My MP3 player is plugged into the car stereo, set on random. “Venus in Furs” by the Velvet Underground begins to play. Fixing my eyes on the middle distance, the fast-moving tarmac and traffic seems almost stationary. John Cale’s discordant viola and Lou Reed’s wooing voice send me into a reverie about when I first met Lyd.
A large group of us were out in Victoria Park for Bonfire Night. She was a friend of a friend of a friend, just starting out as a particle physicist, obsessed with M-theory and mini-black holes and unable to talk about anything else. I found her passion fresh and exciting. Unlike me, talking with self-interest about the novel I was working on, her work sounded important, it was new ground, it was adding to how people would understand the universe in the years to come. She made me appreciate how selfless and meaningful the pursuit of science was.
I remember watching her face as light from the fireworks glowed on her skin. Her expression did not contain the same vacant joy of the others. It was philosophical, but not pretentious. She was bathing in the chemistry of gunpowder, the physics of light and sound, space and time. She was as infatuated with the mysteries of science as I was with her.
At the end of the night we exchanged numbers, promised each other coffee and soon found ourselves in constant contact, sharing stories and spending all our free time together. I couldn’t believe she wanted to know me. I felt so lucky.
“What are you thinking about?” asks Lyd.
Another song is playing now, something by Credence Clearwater Revival. I can’t remember the title. The vocal is full of passion and honesty and the rhythm guitar is chugging and rolling. The tarmac passes quickly beneath the car. I’m full of sad love for Lyd.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Nothing really.”
“Your dad?”
“No. Not him.”
We sit in silence for a while. I watch her driving from the corner of my eye and take a moment to imagine the position of the baby inside her bump.
“Do you ever think about death?” she asks.
“Sure. All the time.”
“No, I mean, what it actually is.”
“I wonder whether it’s an actual force of nature, something inside time that makes things deteriorate and die, or if it’s more like an abstract drive in our minds and all the physical stuff is just part of the nature of systems.”
“No. I’m talking about the afterlife, nothingness, that kind of thing.”
“Do you, think about it?”
“Sometimes. Since. You know.”
“When I was a kid, from when I was about five until I was eight, I became obsessed wit
h this idea that when you died you met God and he showed you every single thing that was ever said or thought about you. So it didn’t matter what people said or thought about you now because you’d find out everything when you were dead.”
“That’s cute,” she says, with a smile. “And an ingenious way of beating your socially obsessive streak at its own game.”
“I don’t really believe in identity after death though,” I say. “Not really. A mind and a memory are part of a brain and a body. Even if I could stretch myself to believe in some kind of energy transference, or a bigger life force, it wouldn’t make much difference to what a person became when they were dead. Why do you ask?”
“I had this weird dream that made me start questioning a few things.”
“What things?”
“It was one of those big dreams. You know, the kind that seem as important as real experiences, when they change something inside you. It was based on the idea that what you do in life is what you’re stuck with after you’re gone.”
“Go on.”
Lyd tenses her arms, grips the steering wheel tight, takes a breath and loosens up again.
“So in this dream, I’m dead, and I know I’m dead, and I’m in this empty blackness, like outer space. There are no stars or planets or anything like that. It’s just this endless nothing, but I also know that it’s where all the dead souls go. Nothing happens for ages, aeons. It’s really boring. But I’m slowly understanding that I haven’t retained my human form. Instead, everything I ever said, everything I ever did or thought has been transformed into this bizarre spirit sign. I’m like a ghost but also a signpost – it’s me, every single aspect of me, transformed into the language of the dead. I never get to see my own spirit sign, I just know that that’s what I am now. Eventually, I start bumping into other dead souls. And they’re completely exposed before me, as I am to them. One glance is everything, all at once. All their strengths and weaknesses, all the moments they’re ashamed of, all the right and wrong, how they felt and behaved, what they regretted, who they were, who they wanted to be. And all this is signified with strange emblems and foreign markings, wood, eyeballs, gemstones, feathers; all kinds of crazy stuff. I couldn’t communicate with the other dead souls because everything I could ever say was said during this one second of exposure. I didn’t have a mouth anymore anyway. The frequency of bumping into the dead souls was varied. The dream seemed to go on for months. Sometimes it was like rush hour in Holborn but other times I spent days in the black before I bumped into anyone. Pointless, eternal, in death you became everything you ever were in life, forever.”
I laugh.
“That’s pretty messed up. And, for you, very moralistic.”
“But it was relative moralism. The morals of the person were part of the context of the spirit sign: they gave insight into their behaviours. It really made me think about how I’m choosing to live my life.”
“And did you feel the need for any major changes?”
“I’m not sure. The thing was, I bumped into your dead soul.”
“My dead soul?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And?”
“And it was beautiful. I really liked it. We just kept looking at each other and even though there were all these new dark bits and these weird bits we didn’t know about, it just felt right.”
“I wish I could have a look at your dead soul.”
“Well, I’ve seen yours.”
“And then what?”
“Then I woke up.”
The implications behind telling me about this dream might suggest she feels like she has treated me too harshly, that we only have so much time on this planet and we should be spending it together, but hopelessness stops me from responding as though this is the context of the story. Lyd has not been directing any love my way.
“Let’s just hope death is the end of it,” I say.
“I think it probably is.”
“Me too.”
We both look ahead.
The hypnosis of the motorway pulls us back in. The cities we edge around become smaller the further north we go. After the Northern Belt, cities give way to towns, towns to villages, villages to farms. When farms give way to reserves there is suddenly more nature than civilisation. Particularly after Lancaster, the views of the Lake District and the North Pennines on either side of the car keep us quiet and satisfied. I feel like London has made me forget what the planet is made of. And here it is: the greater truth.
As we pass through Eden Valley there is an enormous cloud of starlings in a murmuration, whipping and bulging in perfect synchrony above a wood of red and orange trees. The sky is a crystalline dark blue with diamond stars beginning to glow. There must be a hundred thousand starlings, many of them recent migrants, here for England’s mild Gulf Stream winter. Their flight patterns resemble the movements of magnetised metal but there is no giant magnet being waved around, no conductor. They fly freely, each with their own individual will, and collectively, definitively part of their cloud.
“You know, I read somewhere—”
“Here we go. Vince read somewhere. Probably the Internet but let’s pretend it was the National Archive.”
“Okay, okay,” I say, smiling.
“Sorry. Go on.”
“In the 1890s this guy, Eugene somebody, he was obsessed with taking all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays over to America. Anyway, he released one hundred starlings in Central Park. Most of the species he took over there didn’t survive but by the 1990s there were two hundred million starlings in North America.”
“I think the same thing happened with blackbirds in New Zealand.”
I try to ignore this.
“The strange thing is, in the same period, clouds of starlings disappeared from London altogether. There used to be thousands living underneath London Bridge. There were once so many of them perching on Big Ben’s minute hand that the clock came to a standstill. Now there’s hardly any. There hasn’t been a cloud of starlings above London in decades.”
“If I was a bird I don’t think I’d live in London.”
“Probably not. But I wonder what the breaking point was. How did they all decide to move away?”
“Things only live where they can survive.”
I nod.
We’ve been on the road for over four hours. The sky is darkening. The roads are narrowing. Hedgerows and ditches replace grass verges. There are no lamp posts and, a little further along, no cat’s eyes. Trees obscure the sky. Twigs scratch at the doors. The speed of the car’s movement is beginning to feel dangerous. The way ahead is full of blind corners and potential collisions. When the road dips our headlights illuminate less than a metre in front of us. The blackness is immediate, and infinitely dense.
We pull up to my childhood home (in a village outside Carlisle) and drop our bags off. On the doorstep my mum enacts an overly sympathetic sadness even though there is a smaller and more honest sadness behind her eyes. My stepdad, John, shows solidarity by standing up, away from his laptop, next to Mum. Chelsea lurks by them too, kindly keeping her mobile phone in her pocket (though the tips of her left-hand fingers are passing over the bulge to make sure that it’s still there).
It occurs to me that they are making this man’s death about me even though I barely knew him. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say something meaningful or make a throwaway statement to ease them out of their sympathy. Maybe I’m supposed to have a feeling and express it. Even Lyd’s looking at me now. It was my mum who loved him and had a child with him but her emotions are shielded by her new family. I’m the one whose life this changes. He is my family, nothing to do with hers. Yet, if he is my family, I don’t have a family. I only have Lyd, the baby growing inside her and my dead son.
“Don’t worry about me,” I finally manage to say. “I barely know the guy.”
This brings tears to my mum’s eyes. John nods with a gruff manly respect as though he thinks I’m only being strong for m
y mum. Chelsea stares at me like an alien. Lyd puts her hand on my shoulder. I have no idea why they’re all so sorry for me.
When me and Lyd get to the hospice I ask the woman at reception whether we can visit Alan Watergate and she looks through a computer printout attached to a clipboard, tells us to hold on for a second and makes a phone call with a well-practiced inaudible voice.
After she hangs up she flicks her eyes across at us, smiles a tight-lipped smile and gets back to work on her computer. For the first ten seconds I think she might be doing something regarding us and then I realise that she’s ignoring us. Just as I’m about to ask her for some information two nurses and a doctor, all female, approach. The doctor looks over at the receptionist, back at us and then back at her. The receptionist nods. The three of them approach us.
“Mr Watergate’s son?” asks the doctor.
“Yes,” I say, though I don’t particularly agree with the terminology.
“I’m afraid your father passed away about an hour ago.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.”
“Would you like to see him?”
I look at Lyd and at the two nurses, they all expect me to want to.
“Okay,” I say.
“Follow me,” says one of the nurses.
The doctor and the other nurse immediately branch off and head in another direction. I look back; Lyd’s not coming with me. The look on her face reassures me that she thinks she’s doing the right thing, that she has no right to see this dead man’s body because she’s never met him. The problem is that I don’t particularly feel like I have the right either. I must have seen his living body less than ten times in my life.
After walking down a couple of squeaky-floored corridors I’m led into a room that has a plastic plaque inscribed, Viewing Room. It’s just the same as the other rooms we passed on this corridor, with space for four patients, but in this room all four curtains are closed around the beds and there are no machines or extra pieces of furniture.
The nurse stands by the curtain. It crosses my mind that she might whip it open like a magician but she doesn’t. She just stands there.
“Take as long as you need,” she says, before walking away.