The Iceberg

by Marion Coutts

  Yet wordlessness can be exquisite. There are times when Tom can speak when we have nothing more to say. The car is a natural arena for this. It is a luxury to sit next to each other in silence. Returning at night from somewhere, I park outside our house and we sit awhile with the headlights on. It is better if it is raining. The bark of the birch tree to the right glows luminous. When I turn the lights off, the afterimage of the tree remains as an elegant smear of oily white like a line of paint. We sit and we are silent. Rain patterns the road and dins on the car roof. This sight is so near, so familiar that the road smudging into darkness takes our thoughts with it. We live in real time. Here we are in our car. This is the street outside our house. This is where we live.

  2.21

  I would tell you about the camaraderie of the chemo day room but today we have the wrong attitude, so it is not working and for the first time the reverse is happening. We are getting on people’s nerves. A lady with a leathery tan and her silent husband opposite disapprove of us. They have come prepared and are settled in already like promenaders at the Royal Albert Hall, habitués with flasks and newspapers, taking positions well in advance and assured in their intimate knowledge of the way things go. We are clearly making far too much fuss and showing our discontent. Perhaps that’s not done. Mostly we take the drugs at home as pills. But it’s not even that we are new to this, we have been here before; sitting, waiting, saline flushing, but something is askew. The micro-workings of the chemotherapy machine, the innards of its outlandish system, have got clagged up and mired in psychological sand. Tom is tired and therefore less coherent. It is the worst time of day for him to be out and it’s dawning on us that we have been called here in optimism well in advance of anything happening. Only after an hour and a half of waiting do the cytotoxics arrive on a trolley in thrice-checked, light-resistant sealed packets. The chemo room is several staff members short so the delay looks set to expand in all directions.

  Smiley nurse on secondment comes up. My, you look tired, she says brightly to me. I have been here for an hour and half with nothing happening. I need to get home in time to collect my child from nursery and today is my birthday. Tom doesn’t believe in not complaining and I have learnt some useful lessons over the years in the straight art. I have got much better at it. Smiley nurse is now repeating at us, Have you got a line? Have you got a line? A line? She is pointing at Tom. We are puzzled and frayed like foreigners at customs. Tom asks for the music to go down so that he can make sense of her. Sweet dreams are made of this. Who am I to disagree … Tan lady tuts and rustles her crossword. After a minute says in a measured tone to the room, It’s the worst thing, to not be able to quite hear the radio. I look at her. Do turn it up now if you want to. He just couldn’t hear. It doesn’t matter. She does not reply, her eyes snap down to her paper, 3 down, bovine, and won’t meet mine. They never do meet mine. It is all a bit like being on a long bus ride but with drugs. There are the usual boredoms and embarrassments, minor aggro. The passengers are here but not here, on their way somewhere else, in the world or out of it.

  The room is more or less empty and all during our non-encounter with tan lady the man in the corner chair is staring at me. I meet his eye once and decide not to do so again. He is looking with bright interest, as an entomologist looks at a beetle. When not looking at us he seems to be asleep or resting, his head tilted back discreetly, but when alert, his blue-grey eyes are fixed on us. He is in his late sixties, aggressively neat with his shirt a bright ironed white and cuffs turned up over his arm, with the line – now I know what this is – perforating his wrist as it lies lightly across a pillow on his knee. He may be an habitué but he is a quiet one, without books or papers. Our minor commotions seem to be his only interest. His hair is a shade yellower than his shirt but not by much. His face is chalk white.

  To distract us, I sit with my mouth close to Tom’s ear and read poems in a low voice that slips below the beeping of the drips and the teeny, tinny, too-quiet radio: a rubbish one by Hardy, Auden’s The Fall of Rome, a Larkin something or other. It really is my birthday. I don’t care that much but grim just the same.

  In 1865 the photographer Edward Fox took two pictures. Together as a document they make an elegant pair of brackets. One is Chestnut (Spanish) in Winter, Buxted Park, Sussex. The other, Chestnut (Spanish) in Summer, Buxted Park, Sussex, is taken from exactly the same point. Between them, the photograph I want to see does not exist. It would show the point of turn.

  Is it possible as a form of record to know how long a tree takes to lose its leaves? It may start in late summer, say, August. It would depend on the type. What would be the average for a municipal elm in the park at Kennington soaked at the base in dog and human wee, its roots infiltrating drains and each leaf drawing fumes deep into the vessels and knots of the wood? And would it be slower then for an old oak at Selborne, Hampshire, high on the weald, exposed to smashes of wind and violent shifts of air? How long would each take to drop and become the outline of its own skeleton? Can this be charted?

  Leaves are the talkers and the articulators of shape, the shifting thrill and shrill of the tree, the noise. How long do you think? I want to know. I understand there are many parameters – vagaries of aspect, wind, weather, disease, drought or seasonal shift. But when might you notice the first one falling? Who is to record it? Who will catch it as it sidles down, not just a rogue leaf but a marker, the signal of the real turn. Autumn, Fall, is now. So it is with us, from August this year and ongoing, Fall is now.

  Back at home we have a long talk. This is our favourite activity. I don’t even think about how incredible it is that we can do it still. The place to do it is on the sofa, now jacked up on blocks so that Tom can get up and down more easily and blockaded beneath with a barrier of the fattest art books; Uffizi and Pitti complete, Hermitage, Vatican, Louvre, National Gallery, Musée d’Orsay entire. The books make an institutional barricade. Each is about 12 cm thick and they stop Ev disappearing under the sofa in curls of dust and broadband cable. Tom is laughing. You are so good – how you undercept me. He is brilliant at this; his hybrid of understand and intercept is exactly right. I can pick up his meaning prior to understanding, near pre-articulation. I can sometimes get in there so fast I am his mouth and message. This is why I will not leave him alone now, in case I miss something, a phrase that it might grieve me not to hear.

  Our friends don’t want to leave him alone either. The house is full of people: sitters, supporters, cooks, companions and watchers just in case. He is the motor for all this and drives it with urgency: more, more. The last time we came out of hospital I wanted us to have a couple of days’ rest to acclimatise to home and to Ev, but no. The next morning at ten we were at the table working on the article he was writing, the one about language and illness, picking at his notes, guessing, finding, repeating, hammering at every word until we got there.

  Now. I think I need to say it now, he says. I have paper and a pen. I am ready. I want four things. He has done his homework and in his notebook he has written down these words not really as words but as rubbings of them, bundles of letters, tracks and caches of lines done so lightly in pencil. He shows me. He cannot say them but I can decipher them. They are, Speech? Quiet but still something? Noises? Nothing? He is precise. Here are four stages in order, as accurate as he can make them. Recorded from within.

  Halfway through the work he breaks off. What is this lump? A small hill is rising on the side of his head at the site of the scar. I touch it with my finger. A thing. I had noticed it first a few days previous hidden under his hair but definitely it seems bigger. It is growing. We are puzzled. We think of the skull like a motorbike helmet that can shatter but not expand. We mark it down to tell Dr B at the next clinic. What is this? Her fingers go to it quickly, gently parting the hair. Her eyes narrow.

  2.22

  Lasagne, chicken with couscous, lemon cheesecake, a pork and bacon pie, lentil soup, a three-tier blueberry cake, ready-made meals for kids, past
a sauce, half a chicken, beetroot and apple salad, rhubarb fool, sausage rolls, ham, macaroni cheese, clafoutis, fish pie, bread pudding, figs, shepherd’s pie, lamb casserole, a whole chicken, roast chicory, spinach and chickpea tart, bolognaise sauce, rice salad, chestnut and celeriac soup, hummus, spicy chicken wings, croissants, beef stew, bread, vitello tonnato, caramelised onion tart, duck, peaches, a great deal of cheese, a basket of little cakes anointed.

  Friends have been bringing food to our door over the last two years. Often they stay to eat with us but not always. Praise for the foods and praise for the bringers of foods.

  2.23

  Plasticity. This is the environment we live in. It is volatile and dangerous. Our family is a working model of the plasticity of the brain. Tom’s consciousness is doing a barely-checked work of unpicking itself. Dishevelment is the order of the day; of edges, surfaces, nuances, formulations, habits. Yesterday his voice went funny, not his language but his speaking voice, and he spoke like a person thick-tongued and cartoon stupid. Yet this does not hold true this morning and it may not be true tomorrow. I don’t like how my voice sounds, he grumbles, it’s ugly. We could be a controlled experiment on flux and micro-change, on plasticity in action. Scientists could come and live with us over forty-eight hours, connect us to a three-way monitor. We have a spare room. They could set up their equipment there. I shall apply for a Wellcome Grant. I got money before, only a couple of years ago – so short? – in another life, for a film they commissioned. I filmed objects from their collection and laid them out on a black ground. I filmed them like you could feel them, pick them up and stroke them and then in intervals of black, each like a long shutter, one would slip its moorings and change places with another. It was about the paying of close attention, about touch and the lovely redundancy of filming the inanimate: duration stripped of agency. Nothing much happened. With us, much too much is happening. Our lives are live streamed and no one is in charge.

  Come ladies and gentlemen scientists, come record the words running into each other and garbling, regard the thoughtfulness of Ev as he watches and listens even when appearing not to do so, chart the surges, the rallies and the minor collapses, photograph the way I hold my body in extreme watchfulness and note how I never actually rest. Test the blood sugar of the group at various times of day, map my eye movements as they run over any given hour, monitor the ways in which our hearts beat separate and together, count the number of times I shout You all right, love? and note from which rooms I tend to shout it and how high my voice is pitched. Come and chart us for the record. Tom has been asleep for two days solid and the last two nights I have taken to sleeping with Ev. It is a single bed. This feels temporary but extraordinarily relaxing. This is what can happen in a domestic family when the normal formulation of cells is interrupted.

  We are in a highly polarised situation. Tom is being here linguistically unformed yet he is moving like an adventurer into ever rarer territory and working hard at it while Ev pursues its straight opposite, bashing away merrily like a junior workman with a Fisher-Price tool-box. He is fearless and jovial, learning to craft language even as he is not sure what it means. Both are engaged in a work of beyond-the-brink resourcefulness, an improvisatory balancing act, an enforced making up as they go along. Tom is an inventor, an innovator, a pioneer, as is Ev. Both of them are on the front line of personhood, more so now than ever.

  Ev’s brain is of course as impressionable as dough, as clever as – there is nothing cleverer than a child on accelerated learning. Today was his first day at big nursery. Blue-goo on your head. Blue-goo poo on you, said Ev when he came home. He may not say this again. Blue-goo with glitter in it was a substance from little nursery and he has moved on and left Blue-goo behind. Information goes in to be parked against other bits of information, shelved and saved for later, unregarded, waiting to be made sense of or used.

  I watch him in the playground forging neural pathways as he shoots tinted water along the bamboo gutter. He notes that it will go downhill and not up and constructs ever more complex runnels and routes, wetting his shorts and shoes and cuffs – how children hate wet cuffs. I hear him mobilising the meanings of words as he says Have you ever seen a combine harvesting the rain? He understands from somewhere that rain might be likened to stalks of wheat, that combine-harvester has a verb in it that may be adapted, that the impossible might be addressed directly through speech, and that chasms and categories of ideas can be skipped over and bounced on. In words! Only words. This is pure play, pleasure and pastime, done just for the hellery. His visual intelligence keeps pace with his linguistic advances. He presents me with two empty Evian bottles side by side on the table, a litre one and a half litre one. This one is Dad and this is me.

  The brain is said to never cease its work of adjustment in the normal run of a life. In our family experiment I would ask the ladies and gentlemen scientists to take a look at mine. It feels as if it has changed state and been thrice cooked. It is not remotely plastic or adaptable or clever, nothing like dough or some zippy modern moulding medium, but is more materially akin to an obscure man-made and obsolescent substance like Bakelite between the wars; brittle, chipped, hard, yellowing, nearing the end of its life.

  2.24

  My love is cryptic. He speaks in mysteries. He speaks a language that is singular. Communication with Tom is nothing like speaking any other language. It is at the same time known by heart and deeply foreign.

  Late in the day (Why did they leave it so late? you cry) we are trying to elide language altogether and invent a communication that bypasses all known words. We do not have a lot of time. We do not sign and are not so stupid as to learn. The brain orchestrates the hands. You cannot teach the fingers autonomy like a little manual dance troupe. No, the language we are looking for must circumnavigate the brain. (You laugh.) How clever it is. How hard we try to outwit it. How it foils us. In an open folly Tom makes a wild attempt on language one morning in the kitchen. His plan is to use colour, and to demonstrate he takes the set of melamine side-plates. This one (red) means this, this one (olive) means this, this one (grey) means this, this one (saffron) means this. We look at each other unconvinced. The set of all known things you might want to say maps nowhere on to a suite of nine coloured discs.

  After discussion we arrive at a word list, though we both know this may not help and indeed is not likely to help, but we assemble a list of topics by way of a start point. The plan is to head off subjects, cut down on the guessing of desires and things and narrow the verbal field. Our list is made of the current main themes arising. I print it out in Gill Sans and stick it on the wall, where it will stay for months. When words go I will voice each item and pray that the matter in hand pertains to one of them. If it does not then we are dumped back in the linguistic vastness beyond the list. The list seems narrow and though you might say as an observer that our field of operation is narrowing all the time, it doesn’t feel like that at all to us. We are in a formless, live state that changes daily, spreading and pooling like a poured liquid of strange viscosity left unchecked; at once broader and more saturated than we ever were before.

  MEDICAL CARE

  WRITING AND WORK

  MY COMPUTER

  FUN THINGS TO DO

  MY BODY

  AFTER MY DEATH

  MARION

  EV

  FOOD

  CLOTHES

  FRIENDS

  MUSIC

  PICTURES

  THE OUTDOORS

  READING

  POETRY

  The immediate problem is that I am becoming the whole of the context. The swiftest way to cut to the chase with Tom – and of course, that’s what many want to do, privileging arrival/comprehension over the journey/experience – is to talk to me. This is by no means true of all and we have a solid core of those who stay and spend the time it takes – for really if you are going to join with us, this is the life and it will use all the time you give it. These last weeks since when I can�
�t remember we have been working at words around the clock. We all do it, solo and in small groups at a time. Collectively we are his amanuenses and close workers on text. Tom has projects he wants to see made public. He is the editor. His back catalogue is vast and protean. Our job is to organise his thoughts and writings under dictation. We rewrite under instruction, calibrate what’s important, flesh out structures and crucially note where all the stuff is on the computer. Only when I sleep does this stop and when I wake up it starts again. It is exhilarating, satisfying, frustrating and it is my work. After one particularly arduous session, hammering over and over at points I suspect we will go over again tomorrow, Tom looks at me. It has been a good session. He is delighted, amused, he says. Ultimately, you will know everything.

  As someone who writes for newspapers, Tom’s language will survive beyond the ephemeral. One book project is in the making. We have a publisher and are moving towards a date. Others are forming and their nebulous state now that they have been articulated is tantalising. His words have always read deceptively easy on the page, echoing his conversational, deep speaking voice. Here they are being made ready. Here are the things that will come into being. They represent a future.

  At the end of this month his piece will appear in the Observer: summoning his situation in 5,000 clear and precise words, not posthumously as a ghost but as a man observing himself living under great duress. It is a work on language and much else besides, described from the epicentre of a storm. His wayward lexicon is of primary concern and he is ever occupied with the gradations and nuances of his writing. It has to be right. This is what concerns him in composing the article. He gets me to arrange the phrases. He always was a perfectionist: alert to touch and beat and tone and still is the same but the tools are infinitely slippery and weightless, like beads of mercury. This is the article we finish in these violent days on the cusp of everything collapsing and it is a group finish. We are elated as drunks. For weeks his words have been read aloud in the house like an epic poem. I expect Ev to know them by heart and say them back to me in years to come.