by Lu Spinney
Southwark Coroner’s Court, weeks later. Though Miles’s death was the result of his initial brain injury compromising his health, it was nevertheless sudden and unexpected, a situation which requires a coroner’s inquest. His assistant explains to me over the phone that it is a formality and that I don’t have to attend; the coroner dealt with the matter at the time and released Miles’s body for the funeral. Perhaps she is concerned to protect me, but of course I must go, I tell her. I can’t endure the idea of Miles’s end being discussed by strangers in an anonymous court without anyone present for him.
Walking from London Bridge station to the court I think she may have been right. The pain I have been carrying with me since Miles died is melting, rising, forcing itself to the surface and I can’t quell it, my face contorted and running with tears as I scrabble in my handbag for tissues and sunglasses and then must stand still to take a deep breath and hold onto myself. An elderly woman passing by looks at me with concern and then distaste; I suppose I appear mad or drunk or both, a woman hunched crying in the middle of the pavement. You’re right, I think, I must pull myself together, I cannot let Miles down and I am due at the court in five minutes. What you don’t realise, you old bat, is that everything is coming to a head; the horror of the past five years and now this, this final thing, yet another claim on Miles’s life. For five years his life has been other people’s business. I just want him to be left in peace at last. Anger helps, as it always does; the tears stop coming and I arrive at the court more or less intact.
My anger is entirely misjudged. From the moment I arrive at the court everybody I deal with is unfailingly kind and considerate. When the coroner’s assistant comes out of her office to greet me her kindness disarms me completely and now the tears really come; I can barely breathe. I’m so sorry, I keep saying hopelessly, I’m so sorry, I don’t know why this should happen now, I seem to have managed so far. I completely understand, she says, as she hands me a box of tissues from her desk, this is very normal. You have lost your son. Her kindness is matched by the young man whose job it is to show me to the courtroom and the counsellor I am surprised to discover has been assigned to accompany me. The coroner himself is exceptional; both a lawyer and a doctor, he reads out Miles’s history, deals with the formalities of the inquest, asks me to go into the witness box to answer questions and does it all with great authority but with such sensitivity and respect for Miles that, far from an intrusion, the process feels like the proper and dignified end to Miles’s years of suffering. He talks of Miles’s youth, of his career so far and the loss of his potential and he imagines the distress his plight must have caused the family. His recognition of Miles and of us all is an unexpected validation I will cherish.
The formalities of death have been dealt with, the legal paperwork, the letters, certificates, notifications and the coroner’s report, all the paraphernalia of closing down a life. The distractions of organising the funeral and then, six weeks later, the memorial party, are also over, the latter held at home with more than a hundred of Miles’s friends arriving and much food and wine and music. All these things, in retrospect, have carried us through the first turbulent, raw months of grief.
There is nothing left to do, and now with his death there comes a silence that is the depth of oceans. Even surrounded by loving family and friends, I feel alone, submerged in my grief. The full impact of Ron’s death was muffled by Miles’s continuing situation; now as I mourn Miles I am freshly, vividly aware of the loss of Ron. How time passes, how I manage the mundane daily acts of living, I have no idea. Trying to retrieve those memories now there is nothing, only a void.
It is summer and I go out to the house in France and for the first time in over five years I stay longer than a week. I am a double amputee, carrying the constant pain of phantom limbs, convalescing in the sunshine. The children come out to join me and together we reconvene, slowly consolidate our depleted group and we reminisce. For what we do have are our memories of Miles and Ron. We share them, watch Miles running across the grass to leap off the dangerously high garden wall into the pool, or we see him arriving back from the morning bread run, glowing with sweat from having run up the steep hill that leads to the house, his rucksack full of baguettes and flattened croissants. We remember Ron lying in the sun with his Discman, in his element, eyes closed and unconsciously and adorably conducting the music as he listens. We see them both coming back from the supermarket with a box of fresh squid to barbecue, neither having ever cooked them before. Or Miles, in the boiling heat of a summer’s night, pulling his mattress into the windowless laundry room and sleeping there so as to shut out the noise of a neighbour’s party.
In death Miles returned to his former self, five years receding into bleached-out images of a dream-like other world. Our foremost memories now become those of the vital, powerful Miles, embracing his future, regaling us, enlivening our lives. More vivid than ever, we have those memories back and we indulge ourselves, luxuriate in them. But our mourning is a doubled thing, for the double loss of Miles both as he was and as he became. We have lost the powerful Miles; we have also lost the vulnerable, hurt, sweet Miles that we loved in a different way but quite as much.
The memories do not overlap; they remain separate, distinct. Remembering Miles as he was is accompanied by the fierce agony of knowing how young and alive he was at the moment he was cut down, the terrible waste of his vibrant potential; remembering him as he became is to relive the poignancy of his helpless, unalleviated suffering. In the months before Miles died Claudia had described her fear that she was losing the memories of Miles as he had been before the accident. It’s distressing, she said, I’m finding them difficult to retrieve. They’re being submerged by the Miles we see now. I can’t bear the thought of not remembering him active and vital, the old Miles. I don’t know what to do to stop it. What she did do was to order ten large photograph albums to be delivered to the house and then spent the following weekends sitting at the kitchen table sorting out thirty years of pictures into chronological order and pasting them into the albums. Only weeks before Miles died my hopeless mess of photos in the old copper trunk was transformed into a coherent memory bank, just in time.
Looking through the later books I’m aware there are no photos of Miles taken after his accident. None of us could bring ourselves to photograph him, just another small way of saving ourselves from confronting his reality. Nothing concrete remains of that time. And suddenly that seems to me a gross and cowardly misrepresentation of Miles’s life. We should, we need to honour his years of suffering and not allow them to be forgotten or pushed into the background.
Today I read in the paper that the Court of Protection has refused an application by the family of ‘M’, a severely brain-damaged woman in a minimally conscious state, to withdraw her feeding tube and allow her to die.
This must be the case that Dr Lazard had told me about. I discover that eight years ago the woman referred to as ‘M’ suffered viral encephalitis, which put her in a coma. Her mother, sister and partner made the application; they were unanimous in their view that she wished to die. Before her illness she had expressed the view that she would not want to remain alive in such a situation, but they had no proof. She had not taken out an Advance Directive.
When refusing the application the judge said: ‘“M” does experience pain and discomfort, and her disability severely restricts what she can do. However, I find she does have some positive experiences.’ Apparently he had formed this opinion as a result of the care home assistant’s claim that ‘M’ cried when she heard Elvis Presley and appeared upset when she heard a Lionel Ritchie love song.
Will and I are sorting through Miles’s belongings. For three years, since the flat he and Will shared was sold, they have lain untouched in his old room here at home, the door closed; sorting through them remained on my To Do list, the job undone. The pile of books, CDs, personal files, notebooks, music-making paraphernalia, boxi
ng gloves, snowboard and snowboarding gear, motorbike helmet and biking gear, his laptop, speakers, ornaments, wallet, rucksacks, suitcases, briefcase, all an inventory of his former life, and even though I knew he would never use any of these things again, clearing them out remained impossibly final, an admission of the end of hope.
Will and I start off by dividing everything into two piles, to keep and not to keep. The latter pile requires decisions – throw away, give to charity or sell? We intend to be business-like about this but very soon we are floored. Every item is a graphic personal remnant of what he was, each thing has a history, evokes a particular memory that spools out into a fresh story. I stand holding the hammered brass bowl I gave him one birthday, when he surprised me by asking for something decorative and surprised me even more by how delighted he was with it. I want to smarten up the flat, he had said. I don’t know where to get those kind of home things. Why don’t you be my interior decorator? But once he knew where to look his natural flair took over, just as he had personalised his rooms at university. I had not expected him to be domesticated; how he would have loved a home of his own.
We can give his clothes to the hospice shop, I say to Will. That seems simple, but it isn’t, each piece as I fold it away releasing a fresh image of how he looked wearing it, how casually he wore his clothes, how little he cared for them. I’d know he’d come home even if I hadn’t heard him come in because of the trail of dropped coat, jacket, keys on the floor in the hall, even the jacket of the Paul Smith suit he bought when he began his last job. I remember the ridiculous fun we had choosing it despite his hatred of shopping for clothes, the lunch we treated ourselves to, his exuberance talking about his new job and his future and his protectiveness of a waiter who irritated me by getting the order wrong. Be kind to him, Mum, he’s trying hard, he’s probably new here. How handsome he looked, finally wearing a smart suit. His dislike of shopping was a family joke, the grumpiness that accompanied it, his decisiveness – that’s fine, I’ll have that, let’s go now – and his incredulity that the girls and I could happily spend half an hour deciding on whether or not we should buy something.
While I sort the clothes Will goes through the electronic equipment, putting the music-making kit, the keyboard, synthesiser and other complex-looking instruments aside for safe-keeping. It was a shared hobby and they could spend hours riffing together. I imagine them now, the way they sparked off each other’s humour, their adorable energetic boyishness I would think, listening to them, no different from their shared excitement dressed up and playing Starsky and Hutch aged five and six. And though I never understood the instruments I loved the haunting futuristic sounds of the digital music they made. Will hasn’t done anything with them since the accident and looking at them now I think that their silence – silence altogether – is the purest reflection of our loss. All the particular resonating sounds of Miles silenced, the only noise he could make for the past five years that roar of frustration and misery that we dreaded.
We are almost finished. Around us lie the remains of Miles’s life, sorted and labelled in black plastic bags and boxes. Will and I are still intact but we are wrung out and facing us now is the final pile stashed in the corner of the room, the thing we have both been avoiding. Miles’s snowboard leans against the wall, its sleek shape and colourful design of snowboarding graffiti still in perfect condition, not a scratch on it. Like a riderless horse after a fall, it stands quietly innocent of the disaster it carried. I don’t want it in my house. Would you sell it, Will? I ask. No, he says, I couldn’t let someone else use it. I understand; innocent or not, it has bad feng shui now. Next to the board is the battered leather and canvas hold-all, still with its easyJet label for LGW, Gatwick, that Ben and Charlie brought back with them from Munich, the bag that Miles packed that Sunday morning. Beside it is a pile of snowboarding clothes, boots, gloves, hat, scarf, the wide waterproof trousers and zipped jacket and, Oh Jesus, Will, I say, that’s the helmet. This is what Miles was wearing when he fell. Will puts his arm around me as I pick up the helmet. How slight a thing it looks. How lethal. I turn it over, run my hand round the padded interior, weigh its lightness in my hand. His brain rotated. Not even a scratch or dent on it. Get rid of it now, get rid of these things, throw them all away, immediately. Bending down to scoop them up I see underneath them all his vest, one of the cream-coloured thermal ones I bought so long ago for the boys when they were teenagers and we still had the chalet in the Alps, and as I stand up it falls apart in my hands. It has been ripped up the front, slashed from waist to neck in one long jagged cut. Of course, the paramedics. Dropping the rest of his clothes I close my eyes and bury my face in this torn old remnant and suddenly I’m drenched in the smell of him, the distinctive acrid smell of his perspiration, vivid man smell, still alive. The essence of him, still here, that final moment of pure exhilaration perfectly preserved. He is about to leap into the boundless blue air. And now I am standing next to him and I say, Go for it, Miles. Go for it.
Acknowledgements
My heartfelt thanks:
To Clare Alexander, Margaret Stead, and all at Atlantic Books, Blake Morrison, Francis Spufford, Tamsin Shelton, Erica Platter, Eileen Horne, Genevieve Fox and Tricia Gilpin, for their encouragement, and for their invaluable help in the completion of this book; to all my friends, for their kindness and support, and to Teresa and Jonathan Sumption, Benjie and Sarah Lister, Liv Lowrie, Jane Custance Baker, Pete Gingold, Nicky Thomas and David Mitchell, for their sustaining practical help as well; to all Miles’s friends who continued to visit and support him; special thanks to Tom Lister, Zach Leonard, Caroline Kamana, Jason Blain, Freddie Sumption and Simon Rucker; to Richard Greenwood, Christine Quisel, Daniel Atkinson, Suzanne Davey, Khanye Lembethe and David Echendu, my deep gratitude for the outstanding care they gave Miles at all times; to the many medical staff and carers who looked after Miles with gentleness, respect and understanding; to Belinda and Amelia Spinney, for their generous encouragement and support; and finally to Will, Claudia and Marina, to whom I owe everything.
In grateful and loving memory of Jennifer Mitchell, Angharad McAlpine, Josef Barbach, Martin Coleman, and Shasha Li.
Beyond the High Blue Air
LU SPINNEY was born in Cape Town and spent her childhood on a farm in the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal, later moving with her family to the Indian Ocean coast north of Durban. After university, she left South Africa to live in Nice and Paris, before settling in London.
First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2016 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Lu Spinney, 2016
The moral right of Lu Spinney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
“Buffalo Bill’s”. Copyright 1923, 1951, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage, from complete poems: 1904–1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
‘Ninth Duino Elegy’, in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (1987), by Rilke, Rainer Maria edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell, published by Picador. Reproduced by permission of Macmillan Publishers Ltd and by Abner Stein Ltd.
Heaven’s Coast (1997) by Doty, Mark, published by Jonathan Cape. Reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
Sir Thomas Bingham MR, in Frenchay Healthcare NHS Trust v S [1994] 1 WLR 601, [1994] 2 All ER 403, [1994] 1 FLR 485
The Myth of Sisyphus (1955), by Camus, Albert, translated by Justin O’Brien, published by Penguin. Translation copyright © Justin O’Brien, 1955. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
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Hardback ISBN: 9781782398875
E-Book ISBN: 9781782398882
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Author’s Note
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people like Miles who are unable to speak for themselves and give or withhold consent for inclusion in a book such as this. To protect the identity of those few I have included, their names have been changed and some details of their story altered.