The Iceberg

by Marion Coutts

  But nothing is unbearable. We find that everything can be accommodated and everything can be tried at least once. Whole sleep-theories are extrapolated out of a single precious night of half-decent rest. Why did that work? Maybe we should try this? Was that a little better? Time is so tricksy I cannot track it. Two nights is eternity. We endure continuously everything all at the same time. The good happens in the maw of the bad and the bad in the teeth of the good. I am a saint, I tell you, in what is expected of me here. It is a monstrous evil this sainthood. A deformity. Worn like a caul. We have gone into Bible time. It is medieval. It is more primitive than you can imagine.

  1.21

  On Brockwell Park we stand with our backs to the slope. Mornings when we open the curtains, each time the sky is the same colour. I don’t know what to do about this. It is in some way a direct offence against us but there it is. Same blue. It forces us to go with it, to set in motion the things a sunny day demands. With a child you fall into patterns of activity so days end up both different and the same, same setting, subtly different child, acquisitiveness enlarging his arena each day. It is accretion by pushing: relentless, local and undistinguished.

  It is easiest to stay close near Tom and near home, so often that means the park. Ours sits on a hill from where you can see a tranche of London realigned and even though I know the view so well, it remains slightly mysterious. The major landmarks in parallax interrupt the skyline in a way that isn’t quite right, and look slightly daft in contrast with the more conventional view – or perhaps the conventional view is simply from the north. Buildings miles away bank up and dwarf each other on the same sightline. Shard, Gherkin, Wharf, Eye. It is a collage.

  The park serves many functions. For Ev it is an entrée to dogs and dirt and strangers and the act of running away. For Tom it is his constitutional as he weans himself off chemo. The gentle walk up the hill along and down helps open out the muscles of his thighs, soften his legs and invigorate his head. The very known-ness of the place means he can sleepwalk. We always came here. Now it is imperative. Whenever Tom suggests a walk I never turn it down.

  We arrive in the park in all combinations. Tom alone with a book, us three in a loose unit, Tom and a friend, me and he marching in close step, a whole troupe of us messing about on the slopes. Ev has a weekly appointment with a dog to gouge leaves from drains and throw sticks. One permutation has ended though. Ev and Tom don’t come here together. The risk of a fit while Tom is alone with Ev unmarked in the wide space is more than we can bear. We did it for a while, and now we don’t. This is a secondary and unforeseen by-product of illness and its impact blankets an expanse of our activity.

  We come here in all weathers but there is only one weather currently on offer and the blue becomes more exacting as the days go by. Crossed vapour trails mark out the spot above our heads. Here they are! Here! Often we bring lunch or supper with us: dahl, rice, chicken green masala with poppadoms bigger than our heads. Ev will tear through these by himself. We eat falafel with hummus and pita or we forget about food and bring a bottle of Prosecco, setting the bottle to fire askew into space between us, its base manipulated neatly into the dirt.

  These days I am always looking for a place on which to rest my eyes, for some sight that might be neutral and tolerable and will not hurt me. If I could shut my eyes for a month, I would. But because I know this park so well and know it all so well in the company of Tom, the sight of it now pains me very much. Here is hard evidence for the external world as construct. In all our excursions is the imprint of past excursions. You wouldn’t even call them walks: arrivings and standings-still, alternated with movement, roundels and circuits. To be aimless in the company of another is a fine aim. This is one of the bits of ground on which we have tested each other’s measure over a long time. This is where our thoughts have been salted with new thoughts. But it means that every bit of this municipal land incorporates the future. To visit my park, the park of habit and memory, is to glimpse a projection of the time when we will no longer come here together. It is a whitish projection, not clear, something like a thin line thrown blindly ahead, a trajectory of spit, a nebulous strand without substance. Future walks. Future halts. Stops.

  Unlike falling in love, there will be no period of grace in which to work out how to be apart. It will just happen. I will experience this place in the future without him by my side. So what I see on the ground here is this. The path curving upward to the house with the land falling away right and left on either side. The runnel of grass that intersects the imprint of the cricket nets. The usual bench we gravitate towards. The pointed spire from Samuel Palmer that spikes the horizon in the direction we never take. And this is what I see when I look closer: Tom’s eyes shaded under his hat. Ev’s jacket dropped on the path. The pushchair with a collection of sticks and leaves mounting on its hood. And closer still: my hand in his, Ev’s hand in his, their silhouettes as they move ahead of me big and small against the sun.

  Ev likes to sit within sight of the miniature railway that is staffed at weekends in summer by men who bring the trains in from the suburbs on the roof-racks of their cars. Through the week, children shuttle along the vacant line and the little boys are programmed to follow it from end to end. They get as much neurotic pleasure from this as they do from riding the train. Up until the age of about five their feet are the wrong gauge. They pitch and wobble over the sleepers, falling off and righting themselves. Touching the buffers makes Ev happy. In reverse, he will jump categories with impunity and make a noise like a lorry in retreat.

  In these weeks of local sun everlasting and blasting, my understanding of the dialectic of terminal illness at its most intricate is growing to make a bank of observations and a bank of hurt exactly corresponding. What You Love You Will Lose. All these records are thrown together, not filed, but interleaved hastily like cards with no chronology, and the entries in this archive are mounting up now into the thousands. I do not know who will ever look at this archive. I do not know where its limits will be. From the top of the park, backs to the slope, above our heads, the sky ascends as immaculate as the skies in Les Très Riches Heures, their colours matched directly to the Virgin’s cloak.

  We are creatures of context. We can only see as far as we can see. I can only think in the way that I can think. The sky only appears blue. Beyond our view we know that it will edge from blue to dark, from dark to black, away from the atmosphere and hard pull of the earth. There is something here I did not know before. I thought that there were limits to the absorption of pain. I thought that it was finite. I thought that it would stop.

  1.22

  17 July 2009

  Dear Friends

  Tom had a scan last week. Yesterday we were given the results. They were described as ‘very good news’. Since the last scan in January the affected area of his brain has shrunk, and there are currently no signs of bad activity there.

  This is obviously encouraging, not least because we weren’t expecting anything so definite. But the situation is ongoing and there will be another scan in three months’ time.

  Thanks again for your thoughts, messages, support and company. We look forward to hearing from you.

  With love

  The summer is taking shape and it is the shape of France. This is unusual. I have never been on a French holiday in the way the English do. This summer we go there twice. Tom is well enough that it feels beneficial for the three of us in a nineteenth-century way to move out of our sphere and take the air in another. We move from bad spores toward good, from the miasma into the brisk air. The outcome of the latest scan translates into speech as Very Good. Good and Bad are the sum total of the standard descriptors up till now. It is either one or the other and the language is never tarted up, so Very Good is an outcome we must celebrate. Very Good gives us a rocket of energy like a burst of ticker tape, a firework display, a rain of glitter from heaven. An unreadable scan counts as a nothing, a nil or the equivalent of not having had an MRI at all. No
change of course comes into the category Good. Very Good means we go on holiday. A holiday from watchfulness is all I seek.

  As we don’t plan holidays, often they don’t turn up. Through my twenties I played in a band and we toured a great deal in Europe and America. This has made me insensitive to tourism. Travel was a by-product of work. We were always going to places to meet people who wanted us to come in order to hear and see the things we did. To go to a place without being invited still seems genuinely foreign, like pretending you lived temporarily somewhere else. Why would you do that? Tom never cared much about travel. What he needs is in his head and hands, and in us.

  July: We are in a wooden house in Brittany. It faces the beach. Three generations ago it was hard against the sand. Then a road was built to join the scattered houses to the village. The road was later widened as more visitors came, then parking bays were introduced and now a further barrier of angled parking fringes the view with a buffer of silver and black estates. Bull bars against the ocean. As the cars get higher and heavier: vans, trailers, 4 × 4s, sailing kit, the view becomes ever more impeded until evening falls, when suddenly they all depart again, leaving us to sit on the step in the hazy late sun.

  Nights are sweet and blue, with the lights ribboning into the distance as we walk along the promenade. The town has a neat modern centre and smells of burnt sugar, nougat and toffee. Our friends, whose extended family owns the house, have been coming here for steadfast local pleasures for years: eating and swimming, low-level reading and talking. It is delicious to be a guest in someone else’s life. Our family has been taken up temporarily into theirs with low expectations of us and we may safely drift even below them. Tom sleeps chemo-sodden sleeps.

  Very early, before the cars arrive to take their slots, Ev and I fall out on to the beach for our private sessions between six, when he wakes, and nine, when the household does. I take a cup of coffee with me and caffeine resonates like a gong in my head in time with the light bouncing off the sea. My eyes are slits. The air sparkles. The beach is glitter and pearl. Most mornings we meet two people, the man who does Tai Chi and outlines the yin-yang slowly in the sand with a stick, and the big wet woman who swims with her big wet dog. For the rest, the beach is empty. Ev and I are incandescent. We chase each other across yellowness. He is golden as he watches blood-warm water trickling on to his toes, in and out, in and out. He says nothing but learns by feel about tides and pull, gravity, planets and moons.

  Wood ingrained with salt and sand is the matter of the house. Summer dries it, winter wets it, expansion and shrinkage go in yearly cycles and whole feet and inches might be added to its size over a season. The floors gape with gigantic knot holes. Panelling, stairs, the arms of chairs and ancient bookcases, all are rubbed and handled to a sensual smoothness. Ev plays with wooden bricks from thirty years ago. Their paint is worn away to rare un-nameable hues. Every colour in the house has muted and his plastic bucket and beach towel seem like garish imports from a different register of brightness.

  From the beach I take a photograph looking back towards the house. The weather is British, with blowy-grey upside-down clouds. Ev wears a blue shirt and sunhat and his bottom is nude. He crawls away to the left, intent on gouging his truck through the sand, and will not stop until he hits an obstacle. French beachgoers lounge in the background. At the centre of the photo Tom lies asleep in parallel to the lens. Every hour of sleep eases him further away from his encounter with temozolomide. Sleep is so much the best thing for him but lonely for me. I wish he were here. All in black, he lies on his side, his weight on one shoulder, his arms tight crossed. In the photo there is a clear gap of two inches between the sand and his unsupported head. It is a miracle. He is a fakir. The image is proof.

  August: We are in a stone house deep in woods in the district bordering the departments of the Lot and the Lot-et-Garonne. A hall, forty feet long, eight wide and large enough to spend time in runs off from the door, with the kitchen facing off the living room and rooms going down opposite each other in pairs. The house sits above a cellar that runs its length and is packed with the tool kit of the second-home: mower, swing, skittles, scythe. It is too hot to move much. At the sun’s zenith we pull the shutters each day and the house is made beautifully cool. Tom, Ev and I have come down as the advance party on the train because we cannot drive. Our friends will follow. At the station, which feels like nowhere but is in fact a large town, we are at the casual mercy of the local café owner as to when he might be able to summon a taxi. It is a Saturday night and nothing is being hurried, so I buy milk for Ev and wine for us and Ev plays between the chairs as we sit to wait in the bar. We look like a normal family on holiday.

  The house is in an area called Quercy Blanc and the woods are mainly oak, from which the area takes its name, with maple, ash and hawthorn rooted on limestone rock. The taxi climbs into ever more impenetrable woodlands. As we get near, we leave the road and bump down a track lined thick with trees. The driver starts to laugh. Where the hell is it? Only the English want to hide themselves away so much, he says. The English always like to think they are the only ones here. Look at those houses back there, he shouts, waving his arm; there are the French, all out in the open, up each other’s arses, sticking their noses into each other’s pools. The English, they go deep into the woods like hermits. So unsociable!

  The night we arrive, the fields that border the house on three sides are walled with maize. The crop is nine feet high and encloses the house in a live curtain of grain. When Ev is settled in bed we go out to meet it. Each plant is crested with moonlight, fondant and foaming with seeds while the harsh stalks make a black, shifting mass. I imagine it teeming with creatures spying on us beyond our sight. The wind through the stalks generates a moaning that sends us to sleep while its vast bulk absorbs all the other sounds in the valley.

  Next morning at seven we wake to an almighty roar. Two huge machines have moved into the field and our horror at the prospect of the breaking of the peace, the thing we have travelled so far to find, is tempered with amazement when we realise that the entire job looks set to be done by noon. Ev is in awe. Humans are mortal but God created machines. By lunchtime the harvesters are done and they knock off, leaving acres of brown stubble razed down to the river. The house we arrived at is now a different one: nude, stranded and exposed to the slope below. The earth, slightly cold at first and strewn with little stones, is scorched within the hour, as if it had always baked like this under the sun and it is impossible to summon up again in the imagination the mystic barrier that surrounded us in the night. When our friends arrive that evening we try to describe it but it makes no sense to them. They see only the rudiments of bare earth met neatly by sky.

  The house sits below a road that links the cosmopolitan market town in the valley where you can buy everything with the terse village on the plain that provides milk and eggs. The soundtrack by day is of a billion frogs. By night bats loop on bat zip-wires and a large creature we never see snuffles in the undergrowth, drawn to the kitchen light. Tom and I sit on a bench in the garden to watch the moon melt in an arc below the horizon as fast as ice on a warm hand before we can call the others to witness its exit.

  The configuration of our party is four small boys and four adults, one chronically tired. So each day we go for the lines of least resistance: the paddling pool or the Plan d’Eau, playing under the trees or Lego in the sun porch. The nearest I get to my goal of mindlessness is the hammock, so I try to be in it as much as possible. When I can, I turf children off discreetly. Tom has first call on the hammock though. He has first call on everything. There can never be enough sleep. The sleep you get suspended between two trees under light filtered through leaves is a heady one. It is triple-strength, strong as on prescription. In the afternoons the weight of Tom and Ev together takes the hammock so low it crops the top of the grass. Ev lies asleep between Tom’s legs and shadows of leaves pattern their bodies like an intricate christening shawl.

  One mor
ning at breakfast a lime-green mantis as big as my handspan between thumb and little finger comes to sit on the table. Tom lets it walk up his sleeve and into his hair, where it sits for many minutes to the delight of the little ones. Its companion, an equally large green grasshopper, adopts the oldest and bravest child. Everything is bigger here: bigger, emptier, hotter, drier, quieter and further away. France is giant and it has no one in it. Silence is standard. We can rest.

  1.23

  There are these simple words that are starting to cause him trouble: small, single, only, speak, one, tiny, tall, short, sign, slow, same, few, lips, stop, sole, lone. Tracking elusive words was always Tom’s pleasure but now it has added urgency. His recovery is becoming less secure. Out of the blue, pronunciation needs attention. Meaning swoops and flits about and can land on the wrong thing. In a miracle of Tube extension, Kennington Tube becomes Dulwich Tube. Driving through Hackney, a police stakeout becomes police steakhouse. Hand replaces head.

  I am a lazy person. His repertoire and verbal sure-footedness was always mine to share. Through him I had access to a store of language: quotes, stories, songs, ideas, poems learned by heart. He has the ability to use the stuff, to turn a phrase, make new. I had thought that learning by heart was the crowning glory of the public school system but maybe he was idiosyncratic even in this. Its worth is clear. Internalisation is power. You know it. It is yours. You can do what you like with it.

  Tom’s language is our weather, the sky we live under. Pompholygopaphlasmasin: this morning he writes this phrase on the blackboard next to our lists and messages in order to find out if he remembers it. He does. Brekekekex koax koax, say the chorus of frogs in Aristophanes. It is Monday morning and Ev and me chase round the house being the frogs as I try to get him dressed. It is a dull day and we must find our entertainment indoors. Later, Ev is sitting high above me at Soft Play. He has lost me amidst the apparatus, obscured by netting, coloured balls and ropes. He casts about and sees me below. Brekekekex koax koax he says.