Black Chalk

by Albert Alla

  Before it all happened, she was very certain of her role, and she wasn’t afraid of pushing hard to get to her ends, since she also saw them as my ends. I remember my mother walking into my room every night for two weeks in a row and asking me how my work was going, knowing full well that I hadn’t done anything since I’d discovered Tolkien.

  ‘It’s going well, don’t worry,’ I told her without putting down my book.

  ‘You’re reading too much. You’ve got your exams at the end of the year. You should be working every night. That’s the only way you’re going to do well.’

  I ignored her, and she ignored my non-response. I don’t think she was ever worried – she knew I was a good student – but she felt it was her duty to come and prod me. I could understand that. Even if I sometimes snapped back an answer, I was on the whole rather fond of her nagging. It’d been the first chink I’d pinpointed in her character, its discovery suddenly making her seem vulnerable, so that whenever she repeated something for the fourth time, I’d be caught between telling her off, and smiling at her.

  After a cricket match one summer evening, Jeffrey came back to stay at my place. We were out in the garden re-enacting one crucial moment of the match, just as my mother called me to set the table.

  Jeffrey was explaining why it wasn’t his fault that he’d got out and left me stranded just short of my half-century, and I was trying to show him there were perfectly sensible ways of playing thigh-high full tosses. As I was tossing tennis balls at his legs, he was telling me why what I was throwing him had nothing in common with what he’d faced.

  ‘Nate!’ her voice cut across our play louder than before.

  Jeffrey patted back a tennis ball, and said: ‘My mum’s even worse sometimes.’

  Already a little frustrated with him, I took him up on that statement and grabbed a hard ball.

  ‘Here, that’s what you faced,’ I said, and hurled the ball at his legs. He managed to absorb some of the ball’s momentum with his bat, deflecting it onto the inside of his groin. When he folded in pain, I laughed hard so as not to feel embarrassed. He grimaced back, but by the end of the evening, I’d convinced him it had been a good joke, and that he’d deserved it for getting out when he shouldn’t. He was too happy a person not to believe me. Still, after that day, he never made a disparaging comment about my mother again.

  ***

  This morning, I opened my first hospital diary, the one with most of the sketches, and looked at an early entry. ‘Eric: private mother moment after shed.’ Short as it is, it’s enough to make me remember how I felt then.

  It also helps me challenge the revisionist approach I took to my convalescence. A psychiatrist and two psychologists were always going to be too strong for me. Believing their scheme fitted my condition, I wrote over my early convalescence, accepting their jargon, fitting it over my experiences, wrapping my reality. But their picture was always too simple. And now, years gone since they had me in their grasp, I prefer my thoughts complex.

  Certainly, these thoughts show me that I was never in denial over the whole episode. Rather, mere days after the incident, I was already reaching for reason, pondering over the master of all questions, why, and all its guises. My thoughts were focused on Eric’s interaction with his mother, on a moment that had left me puzzled as it happened.

  It was in the spring of 1999. I was sitting down in Eric’s living room when his mother walked in with her husband. He was polite but didn’t linger, while she came towards us as if to start a conversation. Eric rose from his armchair and walked out into the garden, leaving me stranded behind. Rather awkwardly, I stood up and spoke with his mother about the weather, about school. When it became clear Eric wasn’t coming back, I left her and found him in his shed, absorbed by woodwork.

  ‘Why did you leave?’ I asked him.

  ‘I abhor him,’ he said. ‘Fuck her.’ Abhor and fuck; they still stand out today as they did then. ‘Of course, you’ve got no problems with them.’

  I said nothing. He wasn’t the only one of my friends fighting his mother. But that very afternoon, I had to rethink their relationship. His stepfather was out, and I was meant to be down in the shed clamping two pieces of wood together. I’d come up to ask Eric a question, and I was standing outside the kitchen window, peering in, afraid to walk in on them. I could see their shapes swaying back and forth, embracing each other almost violently, both his arms holding her head tight against his chest. When he eventually released her, I counted to thirty and opened the door. He was peeling vegetables, she was kneading dough. I looked at the space between them. But all I had was her gentle smile and his defiant look.

  ***

  On the fourth day, my mother walked in late, after lunch had been served and cleared, and stopped by the foot of my bed as if she could go no further. I’d raised the top half of my bed so that I could better lose myself in my ward’s dynamics. The first thing I noticed was that her eyes were bloated red. The rest of her appearance, the scarf hanging dishevelled from her neck, the coat drooping over her arm, had my fingers clutching hard at the sheets.

  For what can’t have been more than twenty seconds, she looked at me through a veil of welled-in tears. I could never handle my mother crying. I wanted to get up and throw my arm around her, but she was too far and I was too weak. It must have been my growing anguish that finally made her act.

  ‘Anna…’ she said before a sob took over. The tears breaking through, she crossed the space between us and took my hand, almost crushing my fingers.

  It took her a minute to calm down, by which time I’d already guessed that Anna had died. I listened to my mother through a loud dullness. Shock was weighing on all my limbs.

  Thinking of this moment now brings me a shadow of the pain it did then. I can still feel its contours, the shock bursting in to stay, its tentacles climbing down my arteries and up my veins, but it no longer has the power to stop my breath as it did then. Now I can think of the context surrounding my mother’s revelation, and I can think of her early tentativeness. She seemed to hesitate in breaking news that belonged more to me than to her, and then, on seeing me struggle, she seemed to revert to her maternal role. Perhaps I’m imagining this, but now that I’m thinking of my mother, my thoughts keep on turning back to this moment, as if it was then that our relationship started changing.

  ‘…She had both her sisters there…’

  Through sobs and tears, my mother’s story came together. I was feeling too slow to say anything. The only thoughts that came up had me wanting to tell her it wasn’t true, but I’d held Anna’s hand as she bled. However much I wanted to, I couldn’t believe that lie.

  My mother was adding more and more fragments to fill in my silence. She had been to see Anna many times since we were admitted to hospital. She hadn’t told me about it because Anna had been in such a bad way. This morning, as chance had it, Anna had her whole family around her when my mother dropped in on her room. Sensing the end, my mother had tried to leave quietly, but Anna addressed her directly.

  ‘…Her mother pulled me into their circle…’

  She painted an idyllic scene: drifting in and out of consciousness, Anna had emerged minutes before the end, said what she had to say, closed her eyes, exhaled, and moved to another world. She almost made it seem like a natural death: Anna ageing peacefully and passing away surrounded by her loved ones. Something about the picture, its artifice and its charm, repulsed me. I didn’t want any beauty in death. I tried to jerk my hand away, but her fingers were holding on strong. She immediately loosened her grip, as if she’d been unaware of her hand, and I felt shame. To make up for it, I mustered my strength and gripped tighter on my end.

  ‘…She asked her parents to take care of her cat…’

  Her voice was losing its shape as if she were hoping I would say something. Part of me wanted to stay quiet for fear it would all come up, but another part wanted to answer the call and cry, grunt, shout. When I spoke, it was in a whisper:

/>   ‘We could take her cat if they don’t want it. It used to snuggle up to me, and I’m sure Sloppy will like the company.’

  It was a silly thing to say, and I knew that as I was saying it, but I thought about the long white fur that came off its back whenever I petted it, the way it floated gently down to the floor, and I wanted to have it purring against my leg now – warmth seeping from its slow stretches, a ball of germs in a sanitised world.

  ‘We’ll put a basket with a few cushions by the phone,’ I said. ‘That way it’ll be able to see the whole of the living room.’

  I talked more about how it would fit into our home, and how our dog wouldn’t mind it. While I talked, my mother’s tears dried up, and her eyes, trailing over my face, went out of focus. For a few seconds, the distant eyes, the tension around her mouth, made her look as though she was grappling with a great decision. Her expression made me think of the time I told her Jeffrey’s family had invited me skiing and she decided she could put together the money to send me. And yet, it seemed far more than that. Her drying tears heightened her expression to something that made me go quiet. It continued for a few instants after I fell silent, before her gaze came back to me and found my eyes. Nodding, her long face tightened.

  ‘Anna had something she wanted me to tell you.’

  My legs tensed.

  ‘Are you listening?’ She yanked at my arm until I looked directly into her reddened eyes. ‘She told me to tell you that it’s okay, you tried.’ My mother sighed, letting go of my arm. ‘You know she would have liked to tell you herself. It’s okay, you tried. Will you remember?’

  ‘I’ll remember.’

  She rose, wiped something off her brow, and turned towards the window.

  ‘We can’t forget it. It’s what she wanted you to feel,’ she said.

  In the ensuing silence, I tried to change the conversation and asked my mother where my father was. Her answer washed over me: part of my mind made sense of what she answered, while the rest left my ward and its tedious reality. Tiredness took over from sadness. It made sense, it all made sense. I felt old, omniscient, omnipotent. The world was clay waiting to be shaped and undone. And yet I had no desire to test my newfound powers. I wanted nothing. The world was as it was and I was content with it.

  In that half-awake state, I started thinking about the sheets against my skin, and they were soft and comfortable, just as I wished them. I heard my mother moving away from me, and out of the ward, and I told myself that this was exactly as it should be. I smiled inside at the thought of how right everything was. Yes, I told myself, even what my mother just told me made sense. I had to struggle to remember what that was.

  When it came back to my mind, it threatened to throw me out of my pleasant, knowing state. Anna was on the operating table, her hair darkened by damp, her pink skin gone grey. Behind Anna’s drained cheeks, I could glimpse a host of other faces, basking in horror. Tensing up, I forced my mind back to my earlier image: the world was made of clay and her death was right. Yes, there was nothing sad about it. She was floating forever in the peaceful glow that I was merely touching. And the other faces weren’t horrible but blissful. Ha, I laughed, there’s such a thin line between beauty and horror.

  From that thought came a burst of resolve: I was on the brink of something special, which I shouldn’t forget, but which I couldn’t remember either. I understood how dangerous the sort of thoughts I’d almost had were. My resolve was to Not, I told myself. I would not think such thoughts, and already they were out of my grasp, so that I didn’t know exactly what I should not think. It didn’t matter: I’d been so close that that one moment of truth could never leave me. Picturing the word ‘Don’t’, I set it aflame and let its burning shape engrave itself in my mind.

  ***

  Later that day, my mother brought me the ingredients of a forgotten pastime. An A4 drawing pad, four graphite pencils, four charcoal pencils, a soft black pencil, a blending stump, a vinyl eraser, and a sharpener. She’d assembled the different items inside a wooden case which she’d lined with a fleur-de-lys fabric. I brushed the paper, feeling its grain on the tip of my fingers.

  I sat up, took the soft black pencil and drew three lines. My eyes following the swell of the curves, I reached for an object, an idea, leaving my hand to its own bidding. I revelled in the freedom of an uncorked imagination, the privacy of the page, the simplicity of pencil on paper.

  I’d spent hours, days, even years drawing as a child. The walls of our house had been covered with my pictures, with the ones I’d copied and the ones I’d composed. My matchbox houses and green pastures had gone on the fridge door. As my drawings improved, they spread from the kitchen into other rooms. My parents would make a ceremony of the moment they hung them. At first, I spent a long time on each, but soon I started craving the pomp and attention, and I started to speed through the page. I still remember the day my mother told me a picture wasn’t good enough to go on the wall. I ran outside, cried, and swore off drawing. But two days later I was back at it, working on a single drawing until I thought it perfect. The satisfaction! Seeing my mother come back from a shop with it framed! When it became clear that my brother wouldn’t follow in my footsteps, my parents invoked equity and took most of my work down. I still kept at it, at least until puberty drove me to new distractions.

  There were still three of my more elaborate pieces hanging in the kitchen. One was of our home bathed in a halcyon light. Another was after a picture of Hornsbury’s Market Street. And the third was of my mother reading in an armchair. They were clichéd, simple, lifeless. That never stopped my mother from showing them off to my friends. How many times I cringed when she did that! I’d wait for my friends to leave, and then I would run her through my embarrassment, I would highlight the drawings’ flaws, but my entreaties had no effect. Friends on their first visit still had to endure her beaming eulogies.

  Four years after putting down my last sketch, two years after giving away my old kit, I sat in a hospital bed, pencil in hand, looking at the old man in front of me. He was sitting on a chair to the right of his bed, wearing a white and blue hospital robe, his brown legs naked, white slippers hanging off his feet, his head drooping towards the nurses’ station.

  Immobile. My subject.

  I started with the head, with the curly white hair, short and barely receding. I moved to the neck and shoulders. The shoulders were key: they stooped but their strength was obvious. Dejected yet able. Atrophy settling in. Pencil in hand, I could understand the man in an instant. I ignored his loose torso and worked on the arms, smudging his right forearm around his tattoo, darkening sinews and bulges. His hands came together into a single fist. My touch lightened as I moved towards his legs. I didn’t need his feet to ground him. He was a picture of stability.

  ***

  My brother looked back towards my mother. He stopped at the foot of my bed, his smile mirroring mine. A hand on his shoulder, words in his ear, she guided him closer.

  ‘I like to see the two of you spending time together. In times like this, all we’ve got is family.’ She looked at her watch: ‘James, I have to make a few phone calls.’

  We watched her leave and turned to each other. I reached for the controls of my bed and raised my torso so our eyes could be level. He seemed changed beyond the week we’d spent apart. He reminded me of the last time we’d come to blows, when I was twelve and he was eight. In Avoriaz, on the Thursday of a week-long ski trip, after three days of lessons, when I’d petitioned my parents to let me go and ski alone, on the slopes of course, and she’d told me that I could as long as I took my brother. I tried to negotiate a compromise – he wants to spend time with the two of you, not with me – but she didn’t budge. James couldn’t do a parallel turn, but he thought himself as good a skier as me. Whatever I went down, he could go down. Shutting his mouth, an obstinate look in his eyes, he pointed his skis right down the slope, and off he went, always trying to beat me to the bottom.

  ‘Did you se
e that lady?’ I told him. ‘You made her fall. Look. Look!’ I grabbed him by the shoulder and forced him to look a hundred yards up the slope. Dazed from her fall, one ski ten yards back, she slipped back on the other every time she tried to get up. ‘Be careful!’ I slapped him on the shoulder.

  He pushed me back.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ he said, and he jumped down the slope, his thin skis trembling under him.

  I rushed after him, howling as I overtook him. If he was going to be that way, I’d show him.

  ‘We’re not going up this chair this time. We’re going up the big one. Are you scared?’ I said.

  He shook his head and followed me up to the top of the expert zone. There, looking at the first drop, he seemed a little hesitant.

  ‘So easy,’ I said and I went first. My instructor had taken my group down moguls for the first time this year. After the first fifty yards, my legs were burning but I’d managed not to fall. I looked up. James was stopped halfway down the slope, looking longingly at the safety of the chair.

  ‘Come on!’ I shouted. ‘Hurry up.’

  Hesitantly, he launched himself across the slope, rising and dropping with every bump, somehow keeping his balance, until he got too close to the trees and he realised that he’d eat bark if he didn’t stop. Instinctively, he pointed his skis uphill until he came to a halt. There, facing the wrong way, he started to slip backwards, down the hill, gathering speed, until the top of a mogul flipped him the way he should have been, and he was rising and dropping with every bump, again somehow keeping his balance, towards the other line of trees.