No Way to Say Goodbye

by Rod Madocks

  I asked her if she was happy now and she smiled and kept her eyes on mine as she said, “Yes, I am really happy now. I have got what I want.”

  I began to beg her to see me — just sometimes.

  “Be strong Jack,” she said, her eyes moving with distaste. She leaned forward and dabbed a quick kiss to my cheek and her hot hand pressed mine for a moment. She drove quickly away.

  A little later, a green For Sale sign appeared at her house. I went to the estate agent’s office and received a brochure entitled Quality Homes describing, “a delightful converted coach house, carefully and interestingly renovated”, read through all the lists of fittings, “the entrance door with original transom”, which I had repaired that day of our first kiss, and the “pampas low suite panelled bath” where we had bathed together. Sometime later I took off her silver Madonna and coiled it into the glass box with the corn flowers she had given me and I folded her black doll picture away into the box and sealed it up.

  Later, much later, I saw her photo on a psychology website. Her book on Dyadic Death made a small flurry in forensic circles. Many years later, after a long interval I saw her stopped at traffic lights in a car, leaning forward with her sharp profile against a veil of hair, there was a blinding shaft of sunlight and the traffic moved on. Her husband appeared on renowned national advisory committees and I heard his name in the serious press from time to time. Later still, I was drifting through the city one summer afternoon when I stopped to listen to a slight, blonde, beggar girl sitting on some soiled shop steps with bruises over her thin legs, playing the tune Greensleeves on a penny whistle. There was a sweet melancholy to the tune and I paused to listen, I caught sight of Irina sitting at the nearby outside tables of a fashionable coffee house. She was accompanied by a young man who had the same powerful features as his father. It was obviously Anton, now grown up. I stood there in the anonymous crowd as the tune Greensleeves played over and over and I watched them as they drank their coffee. I wondered if Anton had a subliminal memory of a stranger carrying him, crooning, “Swing, swing together” and showing him the flaring Perseids. The girl stopped playing and I turned to watch her staring at herself in a little pocket mirror with heroin-dazed eyes. I looked back to see that Irina and her son had gone and their table was empty.

  Seeing Irina in the street like that, I knew not to speak to her. I had learned to live in the fabric of the present and not in the past. A past that was full of hate which had been a hate for the self, and of loss which had been an estrangement from the self. It was painful but necessary to turn away from everything that I had known and to learn to live in the present moment. It was a discipline that I had at first drawn from work, going up the five steps each day to tread the shadowed corridors and look freshly into the faces of the patients as they streamed past me. And then on weekends or on the occasional day off, I learned to savour the pleasure of days disowned by memory as I walked past the lopsided suburban hedges, noticing the humble offerings of life — sunlight falling on the dusty nettles of the verges, the iridescent soap trails from the Sunday car washers. I had learned to live in the present, for happiness is a release from memory and those everyday offerings around me were the true gifts of life. I savoured them for they helped to wash away the dull ache of the irresolvable past and — who knows? Perhaps one day there could be more than that out there waiting for me.

  To live like this is almost to rediscover a self that once was. As once long before, going to a morning lecture with Rachel at university. The lecture was on Developments in European Thought. Our lecturer, Dr Knowle, was a minor celebrity, a histrionic, touchy man whose eyes gleamed with emotional intensity when he warmed to his themes. We admired him for his obscure book on modern philosophy where he maintained that something had gone terribly wrong with the European mind. He contended that a sterile objectivism has sheared us away from being within and around things and he called instead for a “deep subjectivity”. His lectures were popular and we were moved by his passion even though we barely understood his references. Rachel and I sat near each other at this particular lecture. It was a spring morning. The long narrow hall resounded to our chatter and to the thud of our feet on the floorboards. The doctor made his entrance and began, “Welcome, children of Rousseau, for that is what you are — new Romantics indeed.”

  His gaze passed over the ranks of long-haired and bearded students. Our noise subsided. He paced the dais in his rumpled corduroy suit and declaimed some lines from the Eighth Bolgia of Dante’s Inferno, “For those of you who do not have lingua Toscana I translate — ‘you were not born to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge’.”

  He laughed heartily at his own joke and we grinned uneasily. He developed his theme, moving from Rousseau’s ideas to Fichte’s notion that the consciousness fights an internal battle with its own sense of its finitude. My thoughts drifted. I rubbed at some ink stains on my wrist with a spittle-moistened finger and smelt a waft of patchouli every time the girl to my left leaned forward to scribble something in her notes. I gazed at Rachel, sitting forward to my right, admiring the way she hooked her hair back with one finger in an absentminded gesture while continuing to follow the lecturer.

  Movement took my eye beyond the windows where I watched a blackbird hopping in leaf litter under a stand of laurels. The yellow ring around its shiny little eye seemed very vivid against the dark plumage as it turned its head it seemed to look up at me for a moment. The light outside darkened a little and a few raindrops disturbed the foliage. The bird darted away under the bushes. Knowle moved about on the dais, his white shirt front rippling as he acted out his teaching.

  “As we move through our day, our consciousness accretes images like soup dishes fitting one into each in a pile, like so.” He mimed being a waiter tottering under a stacked heap of dishes with a waddling, backwards-leaning walk.

  We laughed, but on the instant he swung round and stalked among us pointing from one to the other asking, “And how do we get to the truth about what we see and experience?”

  “You?”

  “You?”

  The timid or the dull-witted among us shrugged or avoided his gaze.

  “By asking questions?” said a spectacled lad.

  “Good, good of Aristotelian! That’s a start. We also get to the truth by creatively opposing, by contradicting.”

  He made his large, white hands into fists and clunked his knuckles together.

  “The French have a saying. Du choc des opinions jaillit la vérité. The clash of opinions shakes forth the truth. This clash can be destructive or it can be an overthrown by deceit, for existence is so very deceitful my dear, earnest, world-changing Romantics. You tend to see only the world that you really want to see and so, existence has to get round that old gate-keeper consciousness of yours.”

  He gestured towards us with an ironic smile.

  “This journey can be an iridescent, tricky progress. That old fox Hegel said, ‘We only get to the truth by a devious and chequered course of development’.”

  He paused to sweep his hand over the great, balding dome of his head.

  “Consider that wonderful word Aufheben, that essential movement of things through and towards identity, things that come to be by dissolving and negating themselves.”

  I watched Rachel’s pale forearm under the pulled-up sleeve of her red, cotton blouse and the prominent bluish vein on the back of her hand as she wrote a few notes on a lined pad.

  “Aufheben, an irregular transitive verb meaning to annihilate, to cancel, to abolish, yet also to promote, to raise, to lift up and transmute.”

  Outside the spring shower quickened to a brief drumming crescendo, then slackened. I watched the laurel leaves bouncing under the impact of the drops then the movement slowed, as the shower passed and the leaves flickered in a dipping motion as they shed the rain in a stately metronomic beat.

  “Aufheben is uniquely a word and an idea that encompasses both a movement and a result. It is
a word that has been hijacked by ideologues, but it belongs to everybody for it exemplifies the pulse of life apprehended by the mind.” Knowles concluded, and his hands fell to his sides in a theatrical gesture that signified exhaustion and completion. We shuffled our papers and exchanged glances. The university clock tower bonged out the hour and Knowles waved us out.

  “Remember dear things; remember the absolute goal lies in the journey itself.”

  Rachel and I sought each other among the knots of departing students. The rain had passed and the laurel leaves continued their dipping motion, except when a breeze swept through and brought about a sudden coarse pattering of drops all around. We agreed to go for a walk between lectures and went down to some ornamental grounds surrounding a lake on the campus. We stood in a patch of early spring sun, on the rain-scoured gravel path, under the lime trees in bud and I took out my Instamatic for a picture.

  Rachel sighed, “Why now?”

  “Because it is now,” I said.

  She endured my need to take the picture, the sunlight gleaming in her hair and her eyes fixed on the skyline. I sensed that she was impatient with me as if I had not understood something.

  We walked on, our hands clasped.

  I said to Rachel, “I’m not sure if I get the Aufheben thing. It’s too abstract.”

  She laughed and pulled herself away from me.

  “It’s easy. It just means ‘to lift up’ — look.”

  She went to the edge of the path where lilac, rain-toppled, crocus blossoms lay in the wet grass. She stooped and picked a flower, raised it to me and brushed my lips with it.

  “Aufheben!”

  *

  All the days we could have had Jack. But which were not to be. I used to think that it was your fearfulness that undid us, for fear drives away love. At least, I thought it was fear. Maybe it was just unbelief. You were a man who had no belief. Whatever others found true you found so hard to accept. You always sought after knowledge, wanted to look at things and you knew the names for everything, yet you did not see my signals, my gifts, my truth.

  And I have lived a hundred lives since you left me — for that I thank you.

  What did you teach me? You taught me … patience and suffering. For there is a terrible shameful loneliness, the betrayal of abandonment, something I should have prepared for in some inner heart for only a fool could not see that there was an inattention about you and there was a wind that blew through all the cracks of our little house.

  But I did so love being with you in the early days, playful, happy, for happiness is a forgetfulness. Holding you as we rode on the bike and in all our early ways.

  I called you Mecki. The hedgehog — impudent little bristly fellow of my childhood, my doll Mecki, with your sticking up hair and cautious brown eyes.

  I don’t really remember our lovemaking now, just you, your presence over time, kindly, well intentioned, clumsy, always waiting, and cautious as if for some sickening blow to fall.

  I remember you in our hotel room in Pisa, reading, falling asleep over your book, the watchfulness going out of you, then me sleeping too. Rain drumming on a skylight awoke us, you drew me to you and we lay there safely embracing as the rain thundered above us. Or crouched in student lodgings, trying to dry our washing and keep warm over a tiny gas fire while mice scuttled in the shadows and we both wept with laughter when you melted my knickers on the gas mantle. You were fun and you awoke something protective in me for there was a vulnerability about you. I wanted to look after you but you would not allow that.

  You would allow me to do so little for you, though in a sense you were a demanding presence.

  And I knew that you would protect and avenge my hurts for you had that sense of honour and a harsh pride — but what good is that? You cannot live on that.

  I did so love you and my heart was open enough to love others after you had gone though I could never quite let you go for you kept returning like a familiar traveller on the far shore.

  You come to me still, in the silence of the night or in the speaking silence of dreams.

  A presence, indicating something, standing by thresholds...

  Come to me again, in dreams of the past,

  Come to me, lean low, murmur and say, “Vergissmeinnicht!”

  *

  I went to see Catherine for the last time one evening in September. We had kept in touch and agreed to meet following the inquest on Jayney Kirkman. We met at a hotel not far from Rachel’s old flat. I drove there as if to an assignation. The city paused after the day and drew breath, the young girls going out on dates, waiting at bus stops, their abdomens curving under their short crop tops, the parks with their yellowing plane trees outlined against a milky sky. Catherine sat waiting for me in a panelled alcove of the bar of the old fashioned hotel. She rose to greet me as I approached, tall like her sister, her hair now shorter and with blonde highlights. She wore a grey linen jacket with a lime-coloured blouse. Her red-painted toenails peeped out from designer sandals. Her eyes held mine as she talked of her daughters, grown up now with boyfriends of their own and of her husband, Ray, who was on reduced hours and heading for early retirement.

  I asked if she was content. Yes, she said, speaking with that familiar slightly shaky tone as if about to break into laughter.

  “We go cycling now as a family and we are doing up the house a bit. And you?”

  Well, that was more problematic. I skated over my life and my work in the hospital and asked if she had seen anything about Hobman’s escape in the press.

  “No. I no longer read things like that,” she said.

  She no longer wanted to follow the cases of the missing either, although everything had got stirred up again after the Clouds Hill discoveries when the police contacted her again and showed her a few things they had found in that bleak estate house. They showed her items, that Max had given to Theresa, in the jewellery box and some of Rachel’s possessions still stored from the original investigation. Once the inquest was over, they allowed her to take some things that she thought she recognised and which she wished to retain as keepsakes of her sister. Apart from that, she wanted an ending to it all, although she told me that sometimes as a family they went to Tuxford Water.

  “Yes. I do too,” I told her.

  She gave me back Rachel’s red leather address book, which I had originally bought her in Italy and which had been retained by the police all this time.

  I gave Catherine in return some copies of my photos of Rachel.

  And that was it. We made our exchanges then parted. She came up to me to kiss me on the cheek in farewell and for a moment I put my hand to her hip bone in a remembered gesture.

  *

  It was at about that time that Bartram and I let Mattie Dread go.

  Each patient at the hospital was given an independent tribunal, every three years, in order to determine their continued detention. Very few such hearings resulted in any change to their situation. Mattie Dread was due for such a tribunal and Bartram and I summoned him for a preliminary review. He entered the review rooms with headphones to a walkman clamped to his ears. He sat on one of the shiny, plastic chairs and sang falsetto,

  Let’s get.

  Let’s get.

  Bartram signalled to him to take the headphones off and he slid them back to hang around his neck. We could hear the tinny music and he continued rolling and jerking his head to the beat. He leaned forward and drummed his long fingers on the low table that held the medical notes and sang,

  Everybody get into it

  Get stupid

  Let’s get retarded ha!

  Let’s get retarded in here!

  We tried to talk to him but he said, “Whatever you say Bossmen.” and put his headphones back on and resumed drumming on the plastic sides of the chair and sang again,

  Let’s get, ooh hoo

  Let’s get cookoo

  Ow wow ow!

  Retarded yeah!

  He then gazed at us with a benevole
nt look and lifted one earphone off an ear and said, “I leave it all in your good hands. I believe in you doctors!”

  His rich, deep laugh rolled round the room and we couldn’t help smiling in return.

  “What are we going to do with him?” said Bartram after we had dismissed him. The whirlwind had departed with the sound of “Oo hoo cookoo” diminishing down the corridor.

  Psychology said that there was no insight.

  Nursing grumbled about him.

  Bartram said, “I have the feeling that even after a hundred years of treatment here he would still be exactly the same!”

  I walked with Bartram down the blocks afterwards to the canteen past the trudging lines of patients returning from workshops and therapy rooms. Bartram said to me as we walked, “Perhaps we have to give up our structures, to give them up to change. Perhaps we are the first to really understand that or the last — I really can’t quite decide. I see us as precursors in a strange way — antennae here, the antennae of the race!”

  He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder, “Behold — Ab uno disce omnes. From one person learn all people!”

  He gestured to the stream of patients as they came past, some whispering or croaking out their greetings, their faces lit up by the porthole vents, their eyes glimmering, drawing my gaze towards them.

  Why did we let him go so readily? In the past he would have been winnowed and filtered through the villas until he was a husk of a creature fit to be processed out to medium secure. Perhaps we had become weary of being guardians, maybe Mattie’s residual joyfulness had called to us. Bartram had once said to me, “You know Jack I feel sometimes that we are all hiding here in the hospital, that we simply would be noticed too much in the outside world.”

  Maybe in that way we were sending Mattie out as our envoy, our explorer.