Your mother is in the kitchen, sitting at the table.
– Is your father out?
She is sitting with a cup of coffee, with her daily crossword, shopping list and pen on the table, along with her cigarettes, a lighter and ashtray.
– He has died, you say.
– Typical. Is there anything you’d like me to get while I’m down in town?
She has put out her cigarette and picked up her ballpoint to write.
Yes, you think, before or beyond any religious belief, the dead speak. You don’t choose them any more than they choose you. Masters and mistresses of restraint, they hardly ever raise their voices. They try, if anything, to keep their commentary in wraps, their interventions airy nothings, their refrains mere janglery. Yet life is mostly a matter of how you listen to them.
– You’re smoking again.
– People who don’t smoke don’t exist.
– But you gave up.
– Once a smoker always a smoker. When did he die, did you say?
– Three weeks, no, nearly four weeks ago.
She then fills in a crossword clue, precisely as if she is in a world of her own and has neither spoken nor listened.
– Are you well?
She scrutinises you over her spectacles as you continue to stand, as if paralysed, at the kitchen door.
It is, without a shred of doubt, your mother, restored like the work of an old master, but alive, here in the kitchen, smoking, drinking coffee, doing the crossword, talking to you, apparently capable of driving down to town and getting shopping.
– What of the Alzheimer’s?
The moment you utter the word you realise you had never in her hearing done so. You begin now to advance into the kitchen, walking like an invalid, supporting your slow progress by keeping a hand on the counter as you take one step forward, then another. You wonder what has happened to your body.
– Alzheimer’s? she says, quizzically. That’s an invention, dear boy, not my bag at all. Of course it has currency, as you call it. Don’t get me onto currents. I lost my marbles. To each her own. I’m losing my marbles I said to you, I’m sure you remember (at which you nod).
And now you are standing in front of her at the table and trying to take her hands and bring her to her feet and gather her in your arms. And as you do so your strength seems to return. No longer seeing her, you hold, buried in the warren of this embrace, alternately closing your eyes as if to protect them and gazing out through the window at the forsaken ghost of a garden, you regale her with details of everything that has happened up to this moment, since your father died, every nuanced little thing. And you want to tell her what happened to her in turn, what it was to lose face, both of you, your mother no longer recognising you, speaking to the dead mother of a mother living but no longer capable of being addressed.
– The last time I saw you, you whisper at her ear, a weightless wisp of her dead gray hair caressing your cheek, was two and a half years ago and you didn’t recognise me. You were in a care home, past caring or home. For months already you were powerless of speech, incontinent, reduced to liquid foods, unable to follow even fragments of conversation. Before that, still here at home, for months and months already you’d lost the plot. You’d sit in your armchair in the drawing room, in wandering glassy-eyed silence for minutes or hours on end, then rise, walk on autopilot through the dining room into the kitchen, stare out through the window, trying to fool an observer into perhaps thinking you were looking at the bird-table where your once-beloved blue-tits, nuthatches and woodpecker might be pecking at the peanuts, perhaps actually looking at the bird-table, perhaps neither looking nor feigning to do so, then walk back to the drawing room and sit again, glassy-eyed again, or else again here, in the kitchen, try to do one of the things you used to be able to do, such as make a cup of coffee or get yourself a cigarette or help yourself to a biscuit from the cupboard. But those days were past. You had to be followed everywhere, in case you fell over or set the house on fire. And you were still his beloved wife. He would come to see you at the care home every day after breakfast, bringing a packet of digestive biscuits and a pocketful of paper kitchen-towels for when you dribbled. He would feed you, just as if you were your birds, and afterwards wipe the dribbling, trembling, futile mouth, over and over, whether or not that morning you were willing or able to munch and crumble. You would scarcely recognise him, giving out, in the early weeks, some sigh or stammer in the semblance of acknowledgement, then not even that. It must have been around then he had his silent heart attack. He claimed you recognised him, right up to the end (and here you draw back and stare into the shifting whorls of your mother’s eyes). But I couldn’t see it.
Then she looks you over, her eyes foam-flowers, with all the clarity of yore:
– Done rabbiting? Who’s this girl you’re with? How ever did the garden get into that state? What happened to the raspberry patch, the greenhouse, my flowerbeds, the roses, the orchids, the irises, the tiger lilies, the montbretia? And what, since I could hardly fail to notice it coming through the door, is that enormous tank-thing in the dining room? What have you done with my dining room table and chairs?
In consternation I call, but you don’t pick up. Perhaps you are still at the Tea Party, waiting for me to write back. I realise anew the appalling isolation in which I have left you: I have no contact numbers for neighbours or anyone else in the vicinity. In any case it is impossible to judge the gravity of what you have written or to interpret the abrupt manner in which your message concludes. There is no signing off, no closure or explanation. You just stop, as if mid-stream. I email you asking to call me back. I try to call you repeatedly, to no avail. In the end I resort to a text message, hazarding: ‘Sometimes a house is bigger than a heart, my love.’
Early next morning you call. I am angry and worried in ways I think it best not to voice. I let you do the talking. You apologise. You tell me you had to stop writing, because the café was closing. And when you got back to the house you were suddenly overwhelmed with an incredible tiredness, as if you hadn’t slept for weeks. Omitting even to feed the rays you fell into a sleep as deep as a coma and have only just come to. You say you thought it was in your head, or the estate agent stolen back into the house and playing a trick on you, improbably hiding in your parents’ bathroom and producing a top-class imitation of your mother’s screech. But how did he know how to imitate her? No: there was no one in the bathroom. The door was closed and you couldn’t open it. Not locked, just a window you’d left open had blown the door shut and now the wind was blowing a gale through, keeping the door as if stuck fast and whistling up a sound like a mad fugue, you say, a horrible frenzied feeling subsiding as you heard the screech fade and found the door could, after all, be opened quite easily and the bathroom empty, a site of harmless ruin and cobwebs enlivened by breezes. But then in a state, you say, of high but bleary relief you went downstairs and your mother was sitting at the kitchen table, fresh as reality, puffing on a cigarette, sipping at her coffee, fiddling with the Times crossword, quizzing you about your father and asking did you want any shopping as she was planning to drive down to the town. You asked about her Alzheimer’s, you say, and suddenly realised you’d never used the word to her face. It was mortifying. You say you were frozen rigid at first but then went closer. You thought you were in Madame Tussaud’s. When you first saw her, you admit, it was unpleasant to say the least, like a huge wave of something staggeringly malodorous washing in from the sea. Not this, you thought. You couldn’t move. You were stranded at the open kitchen door in a trance, rigid, and would have called me, an ambulance, a neighbour, but so many things seemed to be happening at once. It wasn’t just your mother sitting calm as the moon, it was like curtains pulled back very sharply, to expose another veil, one giving way to the next. It was when I said the word ‘Alzheimer’s’, you say.
You were seeing things, you see that. You frame a reconstruction: you’re hallucinating, had a funny turn coming ba
ck into the house, big day, big decision to sell the place, things perhaps all too quick, calling in the estate agent straight away and his speed taking the pictures, falling through the ladder, getting the sale rolling, as he said, with luck find you a buyer before we even have the brochure printed.
– It’s the word ‘Alzheimer’s’. Its very anachronicity produces the future it traces. Do you think I’m crazy? The moment I say it my mother looks at me, her soul collaborator, innocent little girl’s blue eyes she had even when she had completely lost the plot, but looking at me now in complete possession of her senses, entirely derailed by my use of this word, as if I have made a mortally serious mistake and something is being ripped, carefully but very fast, from the top of my brain. I say Yes, I see, Mother, it’s not your word, and I’m in tears now and scarcely conscious but we’re standing embracing one another, and then I’m lying on the floor. I have wet myself and my mouth is full of the taste of blood. I’ve bitten my tongue, I realise, coming round, and I see no sign of her or of the paper, the coffee mug, cigarettes or ashtray, not even a whiff of tobacco smoke remaining. I take a shower and feel cold, as if I’m dead myself, like Clarence: as if I were drowned.
Sometimes in a pool you can see one ray has sort of sidled up along the substrate and come down on another, sort of half-covering her. There’s nothing sexual about it per se. It’s like you can’t tell if they’re even aware of it. I remember when you suggested they are curiously insensitive in this haptic dimension: they can flop down on a heater, not realise, and get burned. But then they also seem to sense more or in other ways than we do: they are always a turn or more ahead of the game. I guess it’s not so incredible. They have massive brains proportionate to the rest of their body-size. They’re a great deal more intelligent, whatever that word is supposed to signify, than sharks, and sharks are supposed to be pretty smart after all.
It’s so difficult not to project onto them what you are thinking and feeling. You see this motoro, Mallarmé for instance, lying down as in a bid for amatory adventure, spreading out over Hilary, and Hilary doesn’t seem to care an iota, being apparently quite fulfilled in the serenity of the substrate, vaguely nosing perhaps for a morsel of what you dropped into the pool half an hour earlier and Mallarmé, having settled like a spaceship, then does absolutely nothing. You think: why do that? Is it chance that Hilary’s at rest just where Mallarmé came down? Is there some surreptitious motive, is it just being friendly or is there nothing in it at all, you can’t help but picture with a smile asking yourself, when someone sidles up to you and lays most of their body area on top of you?
And there’s something about these creatures that really makes me flip, like a kind of stratifying of the universe which is, after all, in the language of astrophysics, remarkably flat. Watching rays you get to feel this in a truly spooky way. We have shared this, I think, from the beginning. It has to do with the realisation that people have such a ludicrously anthropomorphic ego-projective perception of everything. They can’t so much as glance at a fishtank without thinking of being them, inhabiting a watery world of swimming, floating, shimmying through the depths. What must it be like, you think to yourself, to have the constant noise of that water-pump and filter system, the endless inanity of nosing up and down and burrowing in the substrate, and eating whatever is provided when it is provided, and flopping on a fellow-creature if that’s how the mood takes you, or burying yourself in gravel: what sort of a life is that? And then at the same time you come to experience this quite different thing, the murky registration that, in terms of deep time, in terms of the actual timeframe of life on the planet, half a hiccup ago you were a lungfish yourself. You were decidedly less imposing-looking, but you were a not dissimilar sort of creature yourself. At which point you dimly sense a sort of vast retelling, a turning shadow cast out over the waters in the flickering light of which the projection actually goes the other way, and the refractively aleatory antics of Mallarmé with Hilary, no different now from how they would have been a couple of hundred million years ago, show us frankly what or who we are.
Part Three
It is scarcely seven weeks, still less than two months, since the funeral. A week, a month, whizzing in an hour. Every noun is another ephemeroid. Time pop. No more thought bubbles, never again. I miss him and worry more than I can say. He speaks sometimes with his usual lucidity but at other times he sounds somehow off, difficult to follow, obscure. And too often I can’t reach him at all. Where have you been? I thought you said you’d be around today? Don’t you remember I said I’d call at this time?
I tell him he has to see a doctor.
– About the episode?
He calls it the one-off episode, like it was a special edition of a TV show. He assures me he will go. And then for three days I hear nothing. Three oceans. He doesn’t answer the phone, he doesn’t respond to emails. I send half a dozen text messages imploring him to let me know he is OK. On the fourth day he picks up the phone and sounds normal. He asks how I am, apologises for not being in touch earlier, he’s been out a lot, tootling about in the motor, he says, picking up supplies for the rays.
– I’m onto a new project, he says.
– What about the doctor?
Silence. Then in a dipped voice:
– You’ll be just like the rest of them. You’ll think it absurd. I have a new theory of ghosts. It’s been staring me in the face.
His voice sounds strained. I try to reassure him:
– Of course not. I’m listening, my love.
Then he pitches off again:
– I was down at the Tea Party… Oh!
– Whatever’s the matter?
– Oh, my god! It’s happening again!
– What are you saying?
– It’s the rays. I noticed it last time we talked and now it’s happening again. I was just feeding them some bits and pieces of left-over salad from the fridge. They were tranquilly engaged with that, chomping away, then when the phone rang…
– Yes, when the phone rang?
– It’s as if your voice, that pristine chapel, held in place, hello?
Another silence.
– Are you there?
– It’s like a choreography written in water. When you speak they raise themselves up, as if braced by something deep inside your voice. They were busy at the lettuce but the moment I say ‘Tea Party’ they all break off, and when you go ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ perk up their noses and pulse upwardly through the silvery light of the pool, in a shimmy of adoration. They miss you.
I laugh, a bit apprehensive, unsure how much of this is his English sense of humour.
– I miss them. You were at the Tea Party…
– …having a coffee and veering about on the net, I came across all these images of rays, you have to see them. They’re stunning. But then there’s something that’s terrible. It sickens me. It’s from somewhere, some hunting grounds I want to say, off the coast of your country. I don’t want you to see this. It’s like the forbidden photograph in Barthes, the most important one, he doesn’t reproduce. It’s almost a hundred years ago and there’s this moustache-twirly sea captain standing in front of a dead ray that’s been yanked up on a crane, perhaps an old fire-engine winch. It’s a manta. A ‘giant devil fish’, as the silly caption exclaims. It measures seven metres across and weighs eight tons. For me, it’s a photograph of photography. It’s a puncturation of the punctum. It’s a riddle, a true riddling: a punctum everywhere you look. It’s the astonishing, majestic corpse of a manta, bigger than any living creature. It fills the frame and it’s full of bullets: it seems the creature caught its hunters rather than vice versa. It comes with strings attached.
– Strings attached?
– Strings, lines, ropes, yes: it got caught up in fishing lines and the noble captain and his trigger-merry men had to shoot it twenty or thirty times to be confident it was dead, but it’s a picture that shows you the ropes, the way everything is rigged. The colossal creature i
s strung up: the iconography of a lynching is unmistakable. And the captain is standing proprietorially alongside, pointing with his right forefinger, in case you might otherwise not notice the – I was going to say, elephant in the room. Like a tenting to the quick, now dead, his digit is itself a wound. Ecce Manta birostris. Another wound, but not the last. And can you guess what he’s holding in his other hand?
– His gun? A cigar?
– At first glance it looks like a paper plane. But it’s a baby manta, rigid, barely ten inches across, stillborn, proudly extracted from the mother at the creation of the massacre. And then the eye…
– I, ego?
– No, this isn’t about the ego. The eye of the photograph. It’s a way aloft, unnoticed at first amid the ropes and crane, against the tall deadwall blankness of brickwork that forms the backdrop to the whole picture. Only one is visible, but it’s the mother’s eye, and it’s looking at you, just as though it were alive.
– Sounds terrible. It reminds me of something I was reading recently about hypnosis. Just as you can never be sure someone under hypnosis isn’t merely pretending to be, so a dead eye in a photo might be a trompe l’œil too. I’m sorry. But I was asking you about the doctor…
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