No Way to Say Goodbye

by Rod Madocks

  I found it strangely hard to remember now what it was like to be with a lover myself, so wrapped up in loss and revenge. It was nearly ten years after Irina had gone and middle age was overtaking me. Bartram once watched me rushing to reviews at this time, with a wedge of files under my arm, ignoring a lissom female student nurse who was passing me in the corridor. He wagged his finger and said, “Qui finem quaeris amoris, Jack.” And when I did not catch his allusion, he translated, “As Ovid has it, ‘You who seek an end of love … be busy and you will be safe’.”

  Bartram had the knack of striking to the heart of things and I nodded back to him in acknowledgement. I had indeed kept myself alone, sleeping with women sometimes, yes, but even this less frequently, for it had all begun to leave me feeling too exposed. It was somehow too shocking to encounter another being for I remained locked in encounters with those that were lost to me. Sometimes I would try and remember what it was like to make love to Irina but the memory became like a drawing on a steamy window, with the finger moving again and again over the image, making it more smudged and blurred with each new marking. But I did remember Burgh-Next-The-Sea, the first place where Irina and I had become lovers.

  As the security flap died down about Pinsent’s waving cleaning woman I couldn’t help but be distracted by Lynch, a new patient, whom I had been asked to check out. I had seen in his file the name of his hometown, Burgh-Next-The-Sea and that name alone drew me to the case and back to the past.

  It was Irina who had suggested the place. She invited me to her home one Saturday afternoon a few days after our trip to see Monty. It had been wonderful to hear her voice over my telephone at home inviting me to come over right then and there. She needed my help with something and I was the only person she knew who would be able to help. I arrived cautiously, not wanting to encounter the husband. She proved to be alone and Gosia had apparently taken Anton away for the weekend. Irina was waiting for me in her hallway. Her face looked grey with strain and she held her hands close to her chest, knotting and kneading them anxiously. There was a broken pane in one of the antique glass panels of her front door and an implication that it might have been broken in some domestic squabble. I imagined a heavy, male hand slamming the door. It pleased me to go out to the building supplies shop to buy those items for the task of repairing the door: tack hammer, glazing pins, the gleaming replacement pane handed to me wrapped in newspaper like a slice of fish.

  Irina made me cups of tea and hovered about as I worked and she expressed surprise at my practical ability — although I well knew that the dissembler must be able turn his hand to many things. I remember the linseed tang of the putty, rolling little beads of it on the balls of my fingers, seeing my whorled thumbprint on the new glass, finding satisfaction at leaving my imprimatur there. Irina looked back at me, through the glass of the new pane as I stood outside fixing the beading. “Job done,” I called eventually, swinging the door jocularly and gathering my tools.

  “I don’t know how to thank you enough,” she said, and came towards me with a quick movement. She hesitated then stood up on her toes holding me by my shoulders and pecked me on the cheek. She lowered herself still holding my shoulders. We both came together again with a spontaneous movement that turned into a battering, awkward kiss that was so hard our teeth clicked against each other. Then we stepped back while I still clutched my tools. “I’ll call you,” she said as she closed the door behind me.

  I heard nothing further for several days and she did not turn up to work. I found myself at directorate meetings, looking at her empty chair and wondering what was happening but knowing I could not ring her. Five days after our kiss, there was a knock at the departmental door and the secretaries were handed a padded envelope addressed to me. Inside, I found a small, glass, ornamental box wrapped in tissue, decorated with blue cornflower motifs stained onto the glass. Inside the box was a small, folded card with an image of a Polish salt miner from Wieliczka with a shako-like cap, depicted holding up a lantern and on the card in Irina’s slanting hand was the message Thank you for being my friend. The box sat there on my desk, glinting in the light all week and then the weekend came and went and still no news of Irina.

  A few days later I saw her slim back in the hospital canteen queue. I saw her talking animatedly to two young male psychology assistants and felt absurdly jealous. I saw her notice me, acknowledge me with a quick nod, then turn her head away and continue talking to her colleagues. I felt childishly crushed and stumbled to my table with my food, sat numbly there for a while then stood up to go, but was suddenly surprised to see her near me. Her hand lightly touched my arm, drawing me away from the crowded canteen tables.

  “Can we talk?” We moved away from the groups of key-chinking staff, their ID badges flapping as they leaned to look into the food cabinets.

  When we were out of earshot of the others, she whispered so quietly that I could hardly hear her, “I want to get away, things are difficult at home.” Her face had a mournful look and she went on, “Gosia can look after Anton.”

  I did not say anything, not sure what she wanted of me, thinking perhaps that she wanted me to feed the lovebirds.

  Then, astonishingly and miraculously she asked me, “Will you come away with me somewhere … for a few days?”

  I hesitated out of disbelief and surprise at what I was hearing and she said fiercely, “What’s the matter, don’t you want to be with me?” Then, at last, I stammered out my agreement.

  I do not know why she picked Burgh-Next-The-Sea. Perhaps it was a chance choice or maybe she had been there on some past family holiday. I did not even know where we were heading until the next week. It was a working day, both of us giving hasty excuses to the secretaries at work. Irina slung a road map across to me, when she pulled up outside my flat in her little Micra.

  “We are heading for a place called Burgh-Next-The-Sea, you can tell me how to get there,” she said, and I leafed through the map until I found the place on the southern shoulder of the Wash as it empties into the North Sea. I remember looking down at the map as the car jiggled about, tracing our eastward route with my finger on the page. Irina drove intently, hunching forward at the wheel. Torrential rain fell through the early part of our journey as if the elements were trying to prevent our progress. The windscreen wipers battered wildly as we plunged down country roads. We drove on without stopping until we neared the coast. I covertly glanced across at Irina trying to sense what she was feeling. She looked serious and tense, as if angry at herself. Sometimes she gave me a fragile smile in an attempt to reassure, and then her face would fall back into that intent look once more as she strained the little engine of her car.

  At midday we glimpsed red, sea-eroded cliffs with broken woodland along the skylines. We splashed through swelling culverts as they overflowed the road. We plunged into more deeply rural places, rattling down lanes with shingled walls where wind-shaped trees leaned over the road until at last we came across our first glimpses of the sea on our left.

  We paused near Brancaster, a coastal hamlet on the road. The weather began to clear and a fitful sun came out as we bumped down a ribbon of tide-washed tarmac between stands of last season’s high, tawny reeds. We stopped in a gravelled car park and switched the engine off. The sound of the wind reached us, young herring gulls watching us from bleached posts. On the dunes beyond, the coarse-bladed marram grass rippled. I asked Irina if she was alright. She nodded, rubbing her face with her hands then touched my hand with hers. “Just feeling strange,” she said, “not sure why we are here, I feel that really I don’t know you, though I want to be with you.”

  “Let’s walk, find where we are,” I said and we went out on Brancaster Sands, the tide on the ebb. Far out, the broken-backed, black shape of a sunken ship wedged on the sands could just be seen against the dark edge of the sea. Dunlin flew past, skirling on like smoke along the shoreline in front of us. The air was full of their calling as we walked across the wet sand. We wandered the expanse of
the empty beach, all the way to where an area of creeks and muddy gullies stopped us from going further. There we crouched in the lea of a dune to lie on the dry sand in a hollow between the grasses. We clasped each other and she put her head on my shoulder and we remained there like lost children, looking up at the sky, listening to the salt hay whisper and the song of the birds. Later, walking back barefoot on the ribbed wet sand I turned back several times to see her behind me laughing, lifting her cotton dress to reveal her slim legs, running awkwardly and fitting her footprints into mine as a chill tide rose behind us, welling up and erasing our tracks.

  We drove into Burgh, and found the hotel where Irina had booked ahead. We signed in as Mr and Mrs Starsha, using Irina’s maiden name, then bumped our bags up the narrow stairs and into our room. Inside, there was a faint smell of damp; faded prints of boats on the Broads lined the walls and a bunch of limp forget-me-nots sat in a vase on a side table. There was a thick quilted counterpane on the bed and Irina plucked at it disapprovingly then prowled the room with a look of unease. I sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand. It burned hotly and she moved about uneasily but did not pull away. Then she said, “Lets go to bed … we don’t have to do anything,” and we lay at first fully dressed under the bedclothes moving our hands awkwardly over our bundled shapes, then more ardently as we warmed until something loosened and we fell upon each other completely. We remained like that together as darkness came on and the other guests shuffled past our door to dinner and we paused, shocked perhaps by having done something from which there could be no going back.

  She was a revelation to me, the heat and silkiness of her skin, and when we slept I had a brief, vivid dream that I was a little boy again at a 1960s dinner party, spying on the adults in their chatter and smoke and stealing up to a coat stand where the fur stoles hung, moving my face over them, scenting their perfume and savouring the delicious pleasure of sliding my hand again and again into the silky pocket of a woman’s heavy coat.

  As evening came on we talked a little and she ran her fingers over my chest and belly, feeling the welted, lateral scars that ran across there.

  “What are your secrets, Jack? What are these scars? Tell me your secrets,” she urged, “and they will be both of ours.” Well, I had secrets enough. I told her something about those scars on my chest and belly and wanted to tell her everything, but I knew even then that Irina was only free enough to give me a part of herself. I kissed her own scar on the right wrist bone which I had watched all those preceding months. She told me that she had received it from a childhood dog bite in Poland and had remained always a little afraid of dogs ever since. We reluctantly detached ourselves from each other for a while in the early evening and wandered the wet streets of the out-of-season resort. I asked her if she was OK. She said, “Oh yes, wonderful. You are my first real lover though my husband has screwed dozens of women. As far as he is concerned I am visiting my mother.”

  I made no reply, her other life was never far away when we were together. We walked down to the slippery wooden piers where a spring tide of glistening water swirled below and the shrimp boats chugged out for the night’s fishing, their lights swaying into the darkness. We passed a child on a quay, pulling up a large crab on a hand line. The crab was red and dripping and feebly moving its legs and the boy brandished it at his parents with a scream of triumph. Irina said, “I hope Anton is alright,” and I murmured reassurance.

  We walked down to the edge of the town and stood under a creaking pub sign, near a white stone monument showing a wreathed anchor, commemorating a maritime disaster. The pale stone gleamed in the lights from a fish dock and we stood there arm in arm for a while facing the sea, then turned back to our hotel room.

  The wet leaves of the holm oaks rustled in the main street outside the hotel as a gale began to blow up. We listened to the wind later that night as we coiled and coiled around each other, sometimes pausing to hear the restless, lonely coughing of some salesman in a neighbouring room. In the morning, Irina threw the bedroom window open and leaned out into the cool air to look outside with only a bathroom towel wrapped around her. I lay in bed watching her and thinking of that image of the Copenhagen Mermaid. We stayed two days. On the second day we went to the nearby pilgrimage site of Walsingham and watched pilgrims walking bare foot to the shrine in the spring rain. Inside the church Irina offered me a candle, her face glowing in the light from the flame. “Go on, Jack, light one for someone whom you have loved and who is no longer here,” she said.

  Burgh remained sharp in the memory. Though we went to other places and other hotels, somehow our track was later erased by sadness and the bitterness of rejection. And so it seemed strange and fateful, to see the place named in a new set of case files that were plumped down on my desk nine years later. Reading and pronouncing the name Burgh-Next-The-Sea on Lynch’s home address made me think of Irina and brought back the memory of us quoting the lines from Little Gidding; “coming back to where we started and knowing that place for the first time”. The appearance of that place name would have been enough to draw me to the case yet also it had its own clinical interest.

  I had been asked to risk-assess Lynch as there was something not quite right about the case. He was on Burnet, Kress’s old ward; four months into a prison transfer for assessment. He had come from Lincoln Prison after an incident in his cell. He had taken his cell mate hostage, bound him tightly to a hot radiator with electrical flex peeled from his cell lighting system, stuffed a biro into his hostage’s ear and threatened to ram it into his brain if his demands were not met. He wanted a prison transfer and for his complaints to be heard. Lynch seemed to be psychotic, stumbling about his cell, muttering to himself, his captive quivering and moaning and Lynch yelling threats to the prison security staff who had begun to mass on the landing. After a few hours’ standoff, he began to set fire to the cell with shreds of lavatory paper. He was rushed by the riot squad with their shields and helmets. He was overpowered and his hostage released — shaken, but relatively unharmed. Lynch was sent to us at High Secure for psychiatric assessment for six months. Once he arrived at the hospital, however, he appeared to be cheerful, helpful and cooperative and with no sign of psychotic illness. He seemed to enjoy the hospital regime, praising the food and the level of care, offering to help the staff with minor tasks and zealously reporting to staff on the other patients’ behaviour.

  Lynch’s index offence did not seem to be that serious compared to his peers. He had stolen pewter ware from the Anglican church in Burgh-Next-The-Sea, part of a long list of property offences which had earned him a cumulative sentence.

  The nursing staff had theories that the hostage had been a staged event with his cell mate’s connivance to allow Lynch to serve out the rest of his sentence with soft hospital time. Perhaps he had sadistically enjoyed binding his hostage, or then again maybe it had all been a transient psychotic episode prompted by smoking skunk, readily available in the prison, or some sort of confusional state brought on by taking pilfered tablets from the hospital wing. The conventional psychological tests on him gave anodyne or contradictory results. He seemed proof against the usual filtering and assessing methods and I had been asked to see him to give a final view on his dangerousness.

  I walked through the area where the patients exercised and noticed Burnet ward out on their allotted weekly session in one of the fenced grassy compounds in the brisk air of a late November day. The rooks rose and fell in clouds on the bare fields beyond the wire. The staff heard me coming by the clank of the gates and watched me approach over the rough grass. They lounged in a group still wearing their long blue coats, although uniforms had been officially abolished some years before. Most of the patients crouched in the lee of the wind in an old concrete shelter. They wore baseball caps and knitted hats, some were crouching glumly smoking nub ends cupped in their hands, a few kicked a ball about on the thick wet grass. I asked which one was Lynch and a staff nurse pointed to a man in his forties pacing restless
ly away from the others by the fence, he occasionally stooped from time to time to pick the last of the yellow hawkweed flowers from the turf, crushing the flower petals in his hand and gazing out to the fields through the wire. He was a powerful figure in an unbuttoned denim jacket. As I chatted to the staff he came striding confidently past us with an assertive, rolling gait giving me a flickering, appraising glance, trying to identify me and place me in the hospital hierarchy.

  I went on ahead of them and sat reading Lynch’s file in the nursing station as they came trooping back from the courts. He was forty-seven years old, born in Birmingham, one of seven children. His Irish father was a labourer in the building trade who had married a local woman. She had developed a wasting disease when young, and faded out of their lives. At first she had been glimpsed by the kids in her wheelchair manoeuvring to avoid her husband’s flailing fists and drunken rages, slipping them food in compensation for some beating or other, still producing children despite her increasing disability. Then they were brought to see her in a hospital bed; then at last she disappeared, fleeing to be looked after by family, then eventually quite gone from their lives. The children, some of them very young, were left in the care of Lynch père. He took to locking them in a cellar while he went out to work. He painted the image of a skeleton on the wall of this chamber in phosphorescent paint and left them in the dark to scare them into obedience. Johnny Lynch, this patient, the eldest boy, began to escape through a coal chute to steal food from neighbouring properties to feed his hungry siblings. When the father came back, the children, both boys and girls were often taken out of the cellar to be abused. “Oh, he was always fucking us kids,” Lynch told the clinicians carelessly later.