by Rick Gekoski
I followed her down the hallway, turned right into the sitting room – Sam calls it the parlour – and waited for instruction.
‘Sit down. I’ll make coffee.’
‘No thanks, love, I’ve had a couple already.’
‘Well, I need one.’ She set off into the kitchen. In a few minutes the kettle was whistling and I could hear the top of a jar being unscrewed.
I was there, choosing to be at her mercy. It was up to her how we began, and she was taking a long time to make her coffee. Keeping me waiting? Composing herself? Thinking what to say?
She sat down across from me, and put her mug on the coffee table.‘This is such a surprise. I thought I’d lost you. I hardly know where to begin.’
‘I know, I’m sorry.’
‘Will you stop saying you’re sorry?’
‘No! Never. I will always be sorry.’
‘Who cares? It’s not enough. What I want is an explanation.’
‘I did warn you at Paddington. I said I needed to be alone, didn’t I?’
‘Alone? You call that alone? Why the barricades? Why no phone? No email? No response to my letters? That’s not fucking alone, that is designed to escape completely, to reject me.’
‘Not just you, everyone.’
‘There is only me! Just me! Mummy died and you ran away when I needed you most! And when she needed you most, you ran away too, you couldn’t bear it, you scarpered from her bedside, hid in your study . . .’
‘I can only say I did my best, and it wasn’t much good. Sometimes I was paralysed by the sheer awfulness of it, her impending death, all of it. I had no experience of – ’
If I remember correctly, from our days in the sunlight in the Parks, sitting with Suzy in our deckchairs, eating cucumber sandwiches, there is such a thing as a losing wicket. It’s when you get in for a moment, but can’t stay there, the conditions being too dangerous and uncongenial. I gather a batsman can retire in such peril, for fear of being badly injured. Lucky him.
‘For fuck’s sake, neither did I. So what? If your heart is full of love, you sit there, like I did when I came. Hold hands, wipe brows, get into bed and have a cuddle, offer anything and everything by way of reassurance.’
‘I don’t think that’s very fair.’
She picked up her coffee, drank it down with a slurp and banged it back down on the table, wiping her lips with her sleeve, which she had been forbidden to do as a girl and which she knew irked me, though that was hardly her intention now.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said deliberately, ‘why you are so surprised by human frailty. So disapproving. Implacable. Of course I am sometimes weak and incapable and selfish. I don’t think myself exceptional in this regard.’
‘It’s a matter of degree, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose I mean I am mid-spectrum, selfish-wise.’
There was a long pause, during which she maintained her eye contact with me, and I felt it impossible to break the connection. If that is what it was.
It wasn’t.
‘Oh. “Mid-spectrum”? So your average man murders his wife, does he?’
The receptionist greeted me as I stumbled into the lobby, having miraculously guided the trusty Merc safely back to the hotel. Presumably God wanted me alive, to keep tormenting me. He’d got a new Job, the bastard.
She wanted to offer me an upgrade, how marvellous. And there was me thinking all the joy had been drained from the world.
‘You’re one of our regulars now, Dr Darke. We can offer you a full suite, which we could have ready for you later this afternoon. It’s much roomier, and still very quiet. It would be at the same price. Shall we move your things for you?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘It would be no trouble at all.’
‘No, please . . . I may be leaving soon.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it, doctor.’
‘I need to get back to London.’
‘Nothing serious, I hope. Are you quite all right?’ She looked at me with some concern. They’d got used to me, grumpy old sod that I am. After all, I was probably their best customer at the moment, their oldest member.
‘Will you be checking out tomorrow?’
I hesitated for a moment. Would I? At the moment the allure of my London fortress, with its blank black door and impenetrable defences, was almost irresistible. It was enough having to face Lucy’s anger at having been abandoned – but this? Now this? How the fuck was I supposed to respond to such a charge? How could I return to her wrath and the inevitable interventions of plonker Sam?
‘I don’t know,’ I said to the concerned receptionist. ‘I’ll let you know. I think I need to lie down.’
This nausea and dreadful dizziness were metaphors and instructions: rest, withdraw, keep yourself out of the world, stay inside. Go back into the dark. Be sick.
As the linguistically challenged Sam might have put it, there are grave issues at stake here, and I was unable to draw the necessary distinctions. I tried, and failed, to clarify the regress: to murder, to kill, to assist, to release. The kinds of discriminations that sent the lawyers and the priests running in their black gowns, anxious to legislate. But all the fucking wisdom in the fucking world couldn’t help when what you had to do was what you were not allowed to do. When the obligation of love is paramount, if only one could be clear about it, and all the rest is just stuff: laws, injunctions, prohibitions.
Perhaps I sounded as if I was justifying myself and mounting a defence? That’s what Lucy required of me, and what I would not do. Might I try, though, to explain? To see if her mind, as ideologically processed as a slice of Kraft cheese, would admit that, sometimes, you must do the thing that shall not be done? Didn’t Isaac’s father have a similar problem? But mine, crueller even than his, was not directed by the will of God. To murder a perfectly healthy and adored son? It’s revolting. He should have revolted. Said NO.
I accept neither the charge nor the verdict.
I accept both.
How does one – how do I – say this to my dear grieving daughter and her dunderheaded mate? How to make them understand? Beg them to follow me, here in the darkness, in order to understand that I am . . . what? Say it. A man who loved his wife, and who acted righteously. In spite of all.
Righteously? I hate the term, I hate the concept. When you are pushed into a moral and psychological and legal corner, you use what language you have available. Cross it out. How fallen a creature I am.
What to do? Have a shower, lie down, eat something, write, get some rest. Stop gnawing the threads and knots of rights and wrongs, ifs and buts. Darke hath murdered thinking. There was only one thing left to do, and I shall do it. Face the music, however harsh, painful and ugly to the ear, however discordant. Go to Lucy’s tomorrow.
I sent her an email to say I would be there at 2 p.m.
I was sufficiently recovered to eat a decent breakfast in the dining room, amidst the aesthetic tat and unprepossessing, though quiet, morning diners. Lovely eggs, really, and the coffee was perfectly tolerable. The waitress looked relieved.
I would have liked to have arrived at Lucy’s with some decent scones, but they would be unobtainable in that insalubrious suburb. Empty-handed but dry-eyed, I knocked on the door. After all these months it was almost a relief. I never believed, quite, that I could get away with it. Lucy is like her mother. ‘I want,’ Suzy used to say, ‘to be someone on whom nothing is lost.’ She noticed things, it was what she did, if not for a living – she’d never quite made it pay – at least as a living. Lucy had inherited the capacity, without the obligation to write things down.
The door opened slowly this time, but the shock was even more acute, for it was not Lucy who was behind it, but Sam.
‘Hello, Dad,’ he said in the pseudo-sensitive tone of the social worker, ‘it’s good to see you. Do come in.’
It wasn’t good to see him. I’m not his bloody Dad, no matter how many times I have pointed it out. Lucy says Rudy likes to hear him cal
l me that. I felt ambushed and betrayed, and contemplated for a moment returning to my car. Skedaddling.
He took my arm and led me indoors like a recalcitrant horse. I looked about. When I am in their house I scan, inventorise and disapprove. I try not to, but I hate being in an ugly environment – it makes me ill. I look around and recoil, as ever. Three-hundred-and-sixty-degree tat. IKEA bookshelves, filled with elderly Penguins. Badly framed posters of rock bands and brown-hued left-wing heroes. Three-piece velour suite. Modern pine dining set, varnished. Carpets with swirling patterns. The parlour painted a noxious mushroom colour, with its rear wall in maroon.
I wish Lucy would yield in her resistance to the model her parents offered, consent to be better, more appropriately and tastefully housed. She knows that I – and her mother – have always loved her, but also that we could not rejoice in the unimproved faces she turned towards the world. Comprehensive school, Sheffield University, the Oxfordshire housing authority . . . dressed like a militant lesbian, for God’s sake.
‘Lu’s making coffee. Or maybe you’ll want tea? Come and sit down.’
It would have been undignified to bolt, and I allowed myself to be corralled in the sitting room. Lucy joined us, carrying a tray with three mugs, a bowl of sugar lumps, and a Battenberg cake with three blue-and-white faux Chinese side plates. She pushed aside a jug with a few partially opened daffodils in it, which hadn’t been there yesterday, and set the things down.
‘I thought that Sam should be here, so he’s taken the afternoon off.’
‘Good of you,’ I said, nodding to him. ‘Of both of you.’
Lucy looked puzzled. ‘What do you – oh, I see, you don’t know. Of course. I’m not working now, I took leave of absence when Mum was dying, and then I found I couldn’t go back – ’
‘I see . . . and you need Sam to be here now?’
‘This is a family matter,’ she said firmly, aware that I would have banished Sam if I could. ‘And frankly I’m not sure I can handle this on my own.’
‘And I’m not sure I can handle it – or even want to handle it – with Sam here . . .’ I nodded to him, ‘No offence but – ’
He nodded back. ‘None taken.’
There were a few moments of silence as the coffee was poured, the cake sliced and distributed. Sam stirred two lumps of sugar into his cup, an infallible indicator of his working-class roots.
‘So,’ he said, taking a hearty gulp, ‘let’s try at least. Lu’s told me about your talk yesterday. I thought it might be helpful if we could triangulate – ’
‘Excuse me? Could what?’
He laughed uneasily. ‘Sorry, bit of jargon. I just mean talk, the three of us, share points of view sort of thing?’
‘I see.’
‘Why don’t you start?’
‘I think Lucy should. She’s the one who is accusing me.’
‘It’s not an accusation. It’s a fact!’
‘Darling,’ I said, ‘I did not murder Mummy. I only – ’
‘Don’t you dare! Don’t you deny – ’
Sam raised his hand, and gestured towards her. ‘Why not let Dad finish, Lulu? We want to know what he has to say, don’t we?’
I cannot recall ever feeling grateful to him before, but I was determined to put my case. No, nothing as formal or as clear as that. We were not – were we? – in a judicial proceeding, though I felt as if I were in the dock and was about to be handed a Bible to swear at.
‘You saw what was happening. She was in a pitiable state. She couldn’t sleep without morphine, wasn’t eating, barely drank anything. She was like a living skeleton and she wanted to die. She kept moaning. You remember? No more, no more, I can’t take any more, please God, please . . .’
Lucy had begun to sob. ‘Of course I remember. She was ready to die. She wanted to die.’
‘Of course she did.’
‘But she didn’t need your assistance, she was going to see it through!’
I didn’t know what to say? Of course I did. But I didn’t want to say it, not all of it, not the tangle, the contradictions, the wretched skewed feelings, no, not all of that, no thank you. What I wanted to say was too hard, too complex, too – I don’t know how to say this without sounding patronising – too complex for minds like theirs, both of them fed on the pablum of crisp and clear definitions, procedures and conclusions. This was good, that bad. This – if it came to argument – was preferable to that, if you had to choose. And you do: you have to choose.
It was a disaster, a fucking train wreck. I’d seen it coming – indeed, I’d solicited it – but the sheer horror of it was dizzying. I was in the dock. I had to plead. Not guilty or not guilty. Just for understanding.
‘I’m fully aware of that. What I did may be regarded as both immoral and illegal – ’
‘You’re guilty! You should at least feel guilty!’
‘I am and I do. But I also feel proud of myself. I cannot see why we must be defined and trapped by maxims and laws. Do this! Don’t do that! Aren’t we told to do unto others? Or to act such that our actions become a universal law?’
‘Oh please!’
‘I didn’t know what to do, or how to do it. I was trying to think with my heart . . .’
Sam looked at me steadily. ‘I don’t know what that means,’ he said.
‘Neither do I. It’s the best I can manage. It means something – ’
He waited for me to continue, but I’d told him the complete truth, and was left with nothing else to say, but a lot of feeling. I had promised myself not to raise my voice. Hah. He may have made me defensive, but he’d also made me angry. The two go together after all.
‘For Christ’s sake, Sam, Lucy,’ I said. ‘Think of what you are saying! Don’t you think we ought to treat our loved ones as well as our pets? Not allow them to suffer gratuitously? Help them to die when they can no longer live! I would want you to do that for me. I beg you to.’
Her head jerked up. ‘What? Even if you don’t want me to at the time? I get to decide?’
‘Yes.’
‘You cannot ask that of me! I forbid you to. So everyone gets to consult their own little conscience? That is fucking moral chaos. It’s not up to you, or me, or anybody! You’re not allowed to kill my mother!’
There was a long pause. ‘I did. I’m sorry. I regret it.’
‘Oh?’
‘But I would do it again. It was the kindest thing I have ever done.’
There was what felt like a long pause. Probably measured in seconds, though. Minutes are not a pause but a halt. But it went on and on.
Lucy glared at me. ‘Bullshit. You did it for yourself. You’re a coward, you can’t stand to see illness or suffering . . . You run away!’
‘I know. I do.’
‘You disgust me, with your evasions and your sophistry.’
Gone, out of control, tied to the rails, irretrievably crushed. From such a death, what resurrection? And how to explain? That I had found myself – we poor humans all the time find ourselves – trapped by what is on offer. By the available choices. This, or that. Well, I chose. Was I wrong? I still don’t know. No. Yes. Damned if I can figure it out.
Clear discriminations are for lawyers and priests and moralists. Lawmakers of one sort or another. Logicians. This-ers or that-ers: this is legal, that illegal. Moral, immoral. Godly, or sinful. Whereas in real life . . .
Useless to argue, useless to explain. If I exonerated myself, I blamed myself equally. Lucy would not have understood this. I hardly understood it myself.
‘I disgust myself . . . I have hidden myself away like a wounded animal in the darkness. It hurts my eyes to be in the light, it bruises me to be back in the world.’
‘You could have counted on me! Been with your family. Been with your grandchild who loves you!’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘It’s weak, pathetic, self-indulgent. It’s, it’s . . . solipsistic stewing.’
It was rather a good phrase, and I felt a qui
ck impulse to congratulate her. ‘Guilty as charged. Call me names. Be angry. You cannot find me as culpable as I have found myself, and I hardly find any route to self-forgiveness, save for the single fact that I believe myself to have done a brave thing.’
‘You’re not getting forgiveness from me, why should you?’
Sam gave a little encounter-groupy sort of cough, and we dutifully subsisted. No sense merely recriminating.
‘I helped her to die. That’s right. I got hold of the right tablets and stirred them into some sweet tea and she sipped it all down. Then she fell into a sleep, then a deeper sleep. I sat with her all night, holding her hand.’
‘Oh, great! That’s more than you did when she was conscious. Then you couldn’t get away fast enough, could you? She didn’t need your assistance, she was doing just fine by herself! That doctor said it would only be a week or two. What right did you have to make that decision for her?’
‘Well, she couldn’t make it for herself. I think if she hadn’t been so weak she would have ended it. That’s why she stopped eating and drinking, to hasten the end.’
‘That was her prerogative, not yours. Who do you think you are, God?’
If she’d saved up the line, I’d saved up an answer. ‘Somebody has to be. To take charge. To act kindly and firmly and respectfully. Lovingly.’
There was another long and necessary pause, and all of us respected it. It was a fruitless conversation. Lucy hunched into herself, crouched with her head in her hands, perhaps listening, or merely blocking me out.
I was happy to let it linger. I didn’t want to yield to the imperative for me to defend myself, to plead that we give too one-sided a privilege to the needs of the dying. Everybody dies, after all. But not everyone has to witness a death, sit through it, be dragged into the abyss by it. The lucky thing about dying is that it is over and done, you don’t have to worry about its effect on you. But witnessing a protracted and horrible death infects the soul, the images implant themselves, root and flourish, you can never look at yourself or others in the innocent light – you are tarnished, uncleanably darkened.