The Iceberg

by Marion Coutts

  Money is a worry. I will set it out here as sometimes in the middle of the night it presents itself to me. We don’t know what will happen. Tom earns money as a writer. How long will he continue to earn? When will it stop? What will happen when it does? In the beginning I would wake soaked in such a sweat of ice it needed changes of sheets. Sweat is the main reaction my body has to crisis: Atlantic and Pacific quantities, estuaries and whole pools stream out of me. I am an icon that weeps all over its skin: a marvel to be exhibited and worshipped. I shall gather a sect of the faithful to devote their lives to me as keepers, making tea, burning incense, stroking and wiping down my long glistening surface with chamois and charging an entry fee. I need to earn money. I shall make people pay to look at me.

  Feebly I start up conversations. We need to talk about provision, strategies, savings, but this has never been our ambit. We are much too late. We have no debts bar our home but we do have to continue living. This is what drowns me in the night. There are agencies I can talk to, Macmillan, Citizens Advice, forms I can fill in, and I do. When I have time and volition I do. But Tom has no interest in these conversations. His concerns are not these. This is so understandable that I abandon my case. His living depends on speaking and writing and when he cannot speak and write then his income, the main of our two, is gone. Overnight our household is unsustainable. I will be the sole earner and carer to both. My earning power has been undermined this last year to such a degree I can’t bring myself to look at it.

  But sitting hard by this question is a critical one that casts the other into shade. If Tom lives for a long time as a person who depends on speaking and writing and he cannot speak or write, then where is Tom? If you hear this, tell me.

  Ev and I go out to the pools and lidos of London. There is no greener city this year. Trees and water, water and trees, with a hard dappled light bouncing between is where the children like to gather in bright, hot sun. The paddling pool in the park is the watering-hole for all the locals. Adults stand in groups as overseers, mid-calf in water, arms folded. Those with older children have a policy of minimal intervention or feign lack of interest. Those with younger ones will not miss a single splash. They hover enraptured, their eyes never leaving their young.

  Kids steam about: naked, in pants, T-shirts, every kind of swimsuit and school uniform soaked on to their bodies. Babies flop in padded pants on to the municipal blue surface. Nude girls do cartwheels. Toddlers swash through the circle of the pool on scooters. A lip smashed on cement is spectacularly bloody and attracts a small crowd. Boys fire dotted arcs of white beads into the air from water guns. Knots of girls screaming and splashing steal the centre of the pool, 30 cm deep at most. Every type of social interaction – trade, fights, sex, feeding, friendship – is being modelled, copied or tried in embryo for the first time. Each day is the creation of the known world over again.

  Ev is a negotiator. He navigates the scene. Assessing it for entry points, he is alert for ways to fulfil his desires and he works with the head not the body. Today he ignores the water, but in deep concentration begins with one red lorry. An hour later he has seven vehicles of various types, and a group of toddlers around him, playing on the drain cover closest to the pool.

  In an undertow of anxiety that is familiar, I will him to be like the others, or like certain of the others, the young who lord it in the middle of the pool and dare each other on. These are the unequivocal children. About them there is no doubt. I am willing Ev to be more physical, to squeal and jump and act like a child, or at least to get wet. It is stupid. I was never like that. Nor was Tom. Ev wears his red and blue trunks. His sunhat is pushed back on his head. I watch him at his self-made parliament, cajoling, engaging, issuing statements and rounding up fresh players, and my anxiety ebbs away. I keep my distance. Ten minutes becomes fifteen becomes thirty. Finally we leave as the sun is cooling and clouds make a pink line over the houses. He finishes with a swift valediction, a circuit of the water on his scooter. He could pass for any child. That was a good play, he says to one of the other boys.

  2.7

  When the resurrection comes to Herne Hill it will not be as imagined by Stanley Spencer. No. It will be the resurrection as painted by Luca Signorelli in 1500 on the wall of the cathedral at Orvieto, where the immaculate dead lift themselves by their own force, pulling their pristine bodies miraculously out of the smooth, grey piazza. The local council have newly paved the area, taming the junction and doing away with the road to make it continuous with the pavement. They have cleared the way for small armies of café tables to do everlasting battle.

  Today I hear the beat of death in all things. I hear it in Brixton, in Stockwell, in Herne Hill, in the streets around the park and off the High Street. It does the thing it has always done; acts as counter and beater and engine, driving blood around my body and to my eyes so that I can see the world before me and all the people in the world afresh. It is in my ears: pumping the blood around the bodies of all the separate people as they move into view going forwards and backwards and always separately to the shops and home and out again to pick up a paper, milk, something they have forgotten, and back again to be with their families at the final hour. 26, 27, 28, 29 … All is mundane and all is exalted. 81, 82, 83, 84 …

  When I look at Ev, only he eludes this death song. I know why. It is because I cannot see him clearly in the way I cannot see the small of my own back. It is my central pivot but I never get to look at it straight on. Once, Ev was in there himself, pressing against the curve of my spine, fossicking round the vertebrae as he flexed and spun and readied himself in his egg of fluid. Now, he was thinking. Now, it is near.

  Ev’s ever-present consciousness and his great unfurling slides of patter run alongside me from about hip level. My mum made me an omelette and the omelette was tasty it was eggy and so I had an eat. It was a green omelette that my mum made. It was tasty and eggy. I wanted it in triangles. Ham is my best friend. Mum, look! The sky looks like milk! If a cow went on its back its milk would go up into the air.

  This is nothing new or special. This is a child learning to talk, but it is our world he is describing and my ears ping to his voice. Our world is not secure. I strain and bend my body to catch his every utterance and hear us reflected back and back. Mothers do this but here there is more at stake. I spy on him. What does he understand of our situation? I must find out.

  In the other room he is explaining us carefully to a friend, paraphrasing and adding to what I had given him earlier. My dad is a bit stiff and sometimes my mum has to give him a hand. I can’t give him a hand because I’m too small. The friend cuts him off with a question about nursery even though he is uninterested in the answer. No. This is wrong. I will not have it. Ev needs to speak, to repeat. All will be worked out in words. Others need to hear what the boy knows from his own mouth about his own life and his father’s dying though they might rather die themselves than hear it or be shrivelled and struck dumb. Embarrassment has supernatural strength.

  Ev’s hair seen from above is a thick whorl, a dynamo centred on the crown of his head. The cut is growing out Plantagenet and after a long day’s play it is stiff with sweat and frizzy with stored energy. Women have twice stopped me in the street to tell me they would pay good money for highlights like that. Its colours are impossible. Alphabetically and incompletely, they are: amber, bronze, butter, citrus, copper, cream, flax, gold, hay, lion, mustard, orange, peach, pink-milk, saffron, straw, tawny, tea and umber. In certain lights it looks green with a chartreuse glaze. I have a yellow leather coat, now too flayed to wear. This coat has the same violent characteristic of yellow-greenness, particularly under neon, as Ev’s hair.

  We go to a children’s party. It is for twin boys: white-faced, red-haired and three years old. In a sensible twist, the hostess has opted out of organisation, structured games and party bags. The house is large, pleasantly dirty and packed with tinies. It is like a set for a Fellini film, an orgy of carpet-level groping, fondling and treading.
Each room is primed with babies and toddlers all under a metre. Sometimes three, four deep, they line the stairs and bob around the hall. I count them. There must be more than thirty. There is no floor space to run or pick up any speed so they don’t hurt themselves but manoeuvre quite well from room to room like snooker balls, rolling and hitting against padding. Toys spark brief clusters of interest as they settle, skirmish and retreat. All play is in parallel. Busily, constantly, they are shitting themselves and the living room smells of poo on a rolling boil as one child after another is picked from the mass, sniffed and removed. Many mothers are present but as if in a different film. No voices are raised. There are very few tears. It is strangely subdued. The sheer volume of children has the absorbing effect of mattresses stacked against walls. By touch and by feel they soak each other up in empathy. Ev is absorbed and when it is time to go home he is quiet as if deep in thought.

  2.8

  So. As happens, the future eats the present without sentiment and with straightforward hunger. We are in a position to know. Tom is speaking to me less. We agree. In the automatic formulation of speech, the consciousness that flies out in straight parallel with the word is under strain. Attention and great effort of thought are required and even that may be not enough. The strain fluctuates but at root now it is permanent.

  The way his intellect is made manifest through language is being destroyed. Great chunks of speech are collapsing. Holes are appearing. Avenues crumble and sudden roadblocks halt the journey from one part of consciousness to the other. He strings words together like ropes across voids. He is a master improviser, an artist of the swing from thought to word. Optimism, content, publication, orchestra, ladder. Yesterday those words were lost and could not be summoned up or spoken. He got them back today through trial and care but will they be lost again? He never panics. What would it be like if he did? Strategically our lives depend on this aspect of his character. And what happens when those words are lost entirely? No optimism, no content, no publication, no orchestra, no ladder.

  His vocabulary is filleted. The lapses may be temporary. After a time he can track them down but they are no longer to hand. As I write – no longer to hand – the words are to hand. I know what they are. I know what they mean without thinking about them. I know what order they go in and how to spell them. I know that I can use the phrase to hand without referring literally to my own hand. This is no longer his experience. Spelling goes awry or syllables get switched or a likely sound is substituted. The complexity of the problem is so intricate as to be scarcely graspable: sometimes minuscule, like drop-out in a piece of digital music, or then surreal, like the wholesale cut and paste of a message spoken in tongues, at which we all stand astonished, including him. It is a traffic jam inching by degrees. When it becomes chronic, everything stalls. What does work mean? What is of course? He knows what work means and how to do it. But how do you spell it? In the last two weeks, spelling is gaining as a significant problem. Along the top of his computer I put a strip of masking tape and write in red pen: a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z. I point out the letters. It works, sort of, for a bit.

  We are having lunch in the café in the park and as we eat he relates a conversation he had yesterday with Mark. He had said to him, Talking used to be such fun. When I hear this I lower my face on to the white disc of my plate and rest my forehead on its surface. It is a comedy gesture, a side step. I cannot risk a straight one. If I did I would collapse like a puppet in spasm, my joints and connectors violated. No one would be able to put me back together.

  Talking used to be such fun. We met in conversation at a party. I’d been in London for only a year after leaving Holland. I had ditched my old happy life with some discontents in search of a new happy one with more structure – if being an artist could be said to have structure – and I was without much firmly established in the way of networks, money or sense of place. I had a horrible studio in King’s Cross, a part-time job and an idea about what I wanted to do. With no optimism for the party I had come north on my bike in a spirit, not so much of hedonism but puritanism – much closer to my heart – thinking that socialising in this period of mild drift would be better for me than sitting in my bedsit. The bedsit was often reason enough to propel me out into the night and I was still new enough to be thrilled at cycling across the city in the dark.

  I didn’t know many there, the hostess, one other and a couple of faces. But I could see that the company was most interesting around him. Tom was drinking happily with a long start on me and not worried about the road home as he lived opposite. What our content was I’m not sure, but the other talkers, a woman and another man, receded. The surface of the table was dotted with foil tops from wine bottles, corks, cigarettes, bits of snacks, spoons, ring-pulls, orange peel, and as we talked his hands were always fiddling with this or that detritus: underscoring a point, rolling a cigarette, pushing things around, orchestrating the surface in front of him like a map or a table-top battle, not really looking at me too much but concentrating on what we were saying. So we began in words. The next day, at twelve o’clock, he called me.

  In the space of the last month, words and meanings have been presenting themselves above the surface of the still pool of our existence as if the water that has been evaporating all along had suddenly reached a point where it was noticeable. We are being laid bare. Our waters are receding. Faint white rings of past levels line the walls.

  Wordlessness is a symptom of the object-tumour-thing but hand in hand with it is a symptom of its host. Through the last eighteen months he has been producing regularly each week two pieces, 1,500 words and 1,000 words approximately. This is the minimum. Sometimes there is much more. These articles involve going out in the world, looking at artwork, exhibitions, thinking about them and making sense of them. His pieces remain lucid, original and to the point. Funny. His style, always telegraphic – Why do you make such short sentences? I used to say – is now more so. He is in danger of self-parody: full stops, commas, dashes and truncations flash and dot all over the text. Here everything flows like language. The work is coherent. It sites itself in the world of legibility and insight. Its aim is to communicate clear things wonderfully well. You can read them. No one would ever know.

  These communications are done later and later at night. They take double, near triple the time to write and consume more energy to compose than we can quantify. What does the brain do when it can’t reach the phrase of course? Where does it go to look for substitutes? Tom was always canny. He waits and he thinks and he waits some more. He does not give up. We are still in the café, my face remains in the plate when he says slowly, The getting of things exactly right with words, refined and compacted, is my job of many years standing. It is my pride. The plate holds my cheek and frames the dead weight of my head. It is cool. My eyes are shut. I do not see him, or the café, or the square.

  In desperation Ev and I go to the Diana Memorial Playground. He is in my sights.

  C’mon. Play, he says, turning to look at me. Play.

  I’m sad.

  You can be sad and still play.

  Is the world of the happy different from that of the unhappy? Both states are true and present, both polarities alive in the same moment, cognisant of each other and coexisting. They map exactly. Within the margins that have been given to us, everything is contained, stuck tight against its opposite in full measure, and the friction between them is what makes the life. You cannot help but notice this. If we were to lose this demarcation, if, say, Dr B phoned today to say It has all been a clinical error, the friction would vanish. It is total, yet weak as surface tension on a drop of water. There would be no way to mentally attain it or to think yourself back into this state. You cannot pretend to live like this. But it makes the old ways seem intolerable, dependent as they are on pretence.

  Trailing Ev as he tacks through the sand, I light up to watch him and I despair as I think of Tom not having this experience now and Ev not having the
experience of him to come. It’s the same world in the same moment of the world. Dying atoms are contiguous with living atoms but their mass is much heavier, of a weight beyond what I ever thought possible. Ev chases bubbles from a machine shaped like a gun. Look, Mum, stars, millions of stars!

  2.9

  9 July 2010

  Dear Friends

  It’s been three months since Tom’s operation. After the latest scan, it appears that the subsequent chemo treatment is not working. Another form of chemo is now being tried out, as of this Monday. This one – PCV – is regarded as being generally more toxic. We don’t know how he will react to this. We are anxious.

  Tom continues to work well but more slowly. The tumour has always been in the area of speech and language functions, and small changes can have large impact. Though still physically fit, everything becomes much more difficult. We are very tired, except Ev.

  This chemo is scheduled to go on for ages and we will need some help in the coming weeks and months. Please let us know if you have some nice ideas, food is always good, as is childcare, normality, outings and conversation. Just staying in touch at this time is really important to us. Forgive us if we don’t immediately get back to you, but do continue to write, phone, text, email, invite and visit us.

  Thanks as ever for your support. We look forward very much to seeing you.

  With love

  The cornfield pans out low in front of me. It is a basic landscape scene. The horizon holds the field flat in its dish. Silhouettes of deer break the skyline and telephone wires mark out the sky in radiating segments. To the right is a one-track road and on the other side are woods and a bridleway. Ahead is all farmland. There is no wildness and the land carries everywhere the print of maintenance and marks of use, yet encroachment feels not so far off, as if left to itself the land would slip back in a short year: paths covered with brambles, fields threaded with weeds. Our friends’ house is the middle one in a row of three cottages built around each other and set at odds to a road running between one hamlet and the next. Roses loop about the brick. We are back in the place where it all started.