THIS PARTY’S GOT TO STOP
RUPERT THOMSON
A MEMOIR
GRANTA
To Peter Straus
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
1965
Sorry If I Look Strange
He Didn’t Say Goodbye
Chubb
Call Me by My Proper Name
Death Pyjamas
Gravity Will Do the Rest
Parasites, Hangers-on and Layabouts
Under Uranus
A Helicopter Crash
The Sauce is Nice
Not What He Would Have Wanted
Horrible Trees
The Sticky Cherubs
Tumbleweed
Little Black Joe
Beautiful Day
Letter from Shanghai
Like a Reservoir
Last Nights
Moonlight Represents My Heart
The Burning Bed
Copyright
1965
My mother spoke to me once after she was dead. Nine years old, I was standing outside our house, in the shadow of a yew tree, when I heard her call my name. It came from high up, and to my left, and I imagined for a moment that she was upstairs, but all the windows at the front of the house were closed, and there was nothing pale in any of those black rectangles, nothing to suggest a face. Besides, I felt her voice had come from outside. Real and clear, but disembodied, like a recording – though later I thought it was how an angel might sound, if an angel were to speak. I stared at the yew tree – its splintered bark, its scratchy leaves – and noticed how dull the berries looked, their red skin covered with a milky bloom. I stared at the scuffed toes of my shoes. I had answered my mother’s call – I had said, ‘Yes?’ – but I heard nothing else, and my one simple monosyllable hung in the silence of that summer afternoon until it seemed I had been talking to myself.
*
My mother had died suddenly the year before, aged thirty-three. My brother, Robin, and I were at school that day. We went to lessons. We had lunch. We didn’t know.
When school finished, we walked home, which took half an hour. It was hot, even for July, and I could smell grass cuttings and the tar melting at the edge of the road. Three years younger than me, and something of a dreamer, Robin lagged behind as usual, and I arrived at the house ahead of him, but stopped as soon as I turned in through the gate. My uncle’s Jaguar was parked in front of our garage. I glanced back down the hill. Robin was still a hundred yards away, socks around his ankles, cap askew. He looked exhausted and fed up – the long walk home was the part of the day he dreaded most – but when I shouted that Uncle Roland had come to visit, his face brightened and he speeded up.
I waited until he reached the gate, then we both ran up the drive. The back door was open. The house felt cool. Through the kitchen, across the hall. On into the sitting-room. Then darkness suddenly, and silence. I seem to remember shadowy figures at the edges of the room. I don’t remember what was said.
I bent over my bed, my face in my hands, my body shaking. Crying kept what had happened at a distance, stopped it becoming real. Crying meant I didn’t have to believe it. The counterpane was cream-coloured, with delicate orange stitching, and smelled as if it had just been washed. Granny Dickie – my father’s mother – stood behind me. I felt her hand on the back of my head. She said my name, and then she said I was going to have to be brave.
I spoke into the counterpane. ‘I don’t want to be brave.’
‘I know, darling.’
I imagine she stared past me, towards the bedroom window. Outside, the weather was beautiful. My face stung.
‘I know,’ she said again.
I turned and pressed myself against her skirt, still trying not to see or understand. Our front garden lay in shadow, but intense orange sunlight coloured the tops of the trees and the roof of the house over the road, as if that half of the view had been dipped in a sweet syrup.
The seventh of July. Long days.
I often tell people I can’t remember anything before I was eight, but it’s not true. I remember lying on the back seat of a car during a thunderstorm, the sky folding and crumpling above me – I was still a baby then – and I remember being two or three and watching bits of a cup dart across the kitchen floor while my parents shouted overhead. I remember being five and falling for a girl called Rowena. What I can’t remember is my mother. Her sudden death wiped her out, like a teacher rubbing chalk words off a blackboard. I can remember a dress she used to wear – pink with white polka-dots – but somehow she isn’t there inside it. I can’t remember her legs, or her shoulders. I can’t remember what shape her fingernails were. I think I can remember the smell of her lipstick, but I can’t see her mouth. I can’t remember how she sounded, even though I heard her call me once when she was dead. Was her voice light and breathy, or was it deep? Did she have an accent? I have no idea. I try and remember her saying the ordinary things that mothers are always saying to their children, things she must have said thousands of times during the eight years we were together. Hello. Come here. I love you.
But no, nothing.
*
Not long after her death, I left school in the middle of the day. On the street, it was unusually quiet; the sun lit a world that seemed motionless, suspended, like a statue of itself. I came down out of Meads village and turned along Link Road. Deciding not to cross the golf course, which was the short-cut home, I started up Paradise Drive. The woods rose ahead of me, the foliage massed in brooding clusters like a mushroom cloud.
The pavement narrowed and then vanished altogether, and I had no choice but to walk on the road. The bend into the trees was deceptively sharp; if any cars came the other way, they wouldn’t see me until the last moment. Dad was always saying people drove too fast on Paradise Drive. It was a miracle, he would say, that nobody had been run over.
I shivered as the shade of the woods closed over me. Through the trees I could see the golf course, its fairways smooth in the sunlight. On top of the greenness was a narrow strip of blue. The sea.
When I reached our house, Dad was sitting at the far end of the kitchen table, a spoon halfway to his mouth. In the bowl in front of him was his favourite pudding – stewed blackcurrants and custard. He looked at me as if I were a stranger. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve come home,’ I said.
‘But it’s only lunchtime.’
He must have heard my footsteps, wondered who it was. He wouldn’t have been expecting anyone to walk in through the back door, not at that time of day, and not without knocking first or calling out. Did he think for a moment that it was his wife returning, even though he had watched her coffin drop into the ground? Was that why he had seemed so shocked, and why his voice had sounded different? Perhaps it had been in his mind to say, You’re back, or, My darling. Then I appeared.
What are you doing here?
Normally, when school was over, Robin and I would catch a bus to the Town Hall and then walk home, but I hadn’t thought to query the sun’s position or the fact that I was on my own. Everything felt automatic, and harmonious. It felt right. I wonder whether, at some deep level, I had been trying to out-manoeuvre fate. I had learned that bad things happened when I wasn’t there. If I made my absences more unpredictable, the bad things would be less likely to occur. Or perhaps – just perhaps – in taking the route that was longer and more hazardous, I was risking some kind of misadventure. I missed my mother. I longed for her. I wanted to follow her, to go where she had gone …
The deceptive bend, the speeding cars.
The cool shadow of the wood.
/> Perhaps it wasn’t the thought of his wife walking in through the back door that had startled my father. Perhaps it was something he saw in my face.
Sorry If I Look Strange
A Wednesday morning, twenty years later. I lie in bed and stare out of the window. A thin crust of snow clings to the tiled rooftops, and the sky beyond is grey, a Berlin grey, steely and unrelenting. I glance at the clock. Half past eight. Soon Hanne will be off to work, a drug rehab unit near the border. I met Hanne the previous summer, on the Amalfi coast. Her slim, tanned legs, her face as mobile as a clown’s. Her easy laughter. We lived in Hamburg to start with, then she got a job in West Berlin. Tomorrow it’s her birthday. She’ll be thirty-one.
Only minutes after Hanne has left the apartment, the phone rings next to the bed.
‘Rupert?’
It’s Robin. Since leaving art college, Robin has moved into my old council flat in London. Neither of us has much money, so we rarely speak to each other on the phone. It must be important, I think, for him to be calling me like this.
‘Dad’s in hospital,’ he says. ‘He’s having trouble breathing.’
My heart lurches. ‘I’ll fly over.’
‘You don’t need to. They told me he wasn’t – what’s that word they use? – he wasn’t critical.’
‘I’ll come anyway.’
The last time I saw my father I lied to him. Three months have passed since then, and I still feel bad about it.
‘Where are you?’ I ask.
‘In Eastbourne. At the house.’
He says that when he rang Dad the other day, the au pair answered. She told him Dad had been taken to Midhurst. She had been alone for two days, and had heard nothing. She sounded anxious, bewildered. I remember a short, shy girl with light brown hair. I remember, too, that Dad thinks she’s a bit dull, and that he has given her the nickname ‘Forbes’.
He’s having trouble breathing.
During the war, my father served in the North Atlantic, first on destroyers, then on motor-torpedo boats, but in 1943, at the age of twenty-one, he caught pneumonia. Both lungs were affected. He spent the next ten years in hospital, and was subjected to several major operations. He has always dreaded having to go back. Even his six-monthly check-ups frighten him. If a hospital ever appears on TV, he switches channels.
That night, Hanne and I sit at our living-room table, drinking wine. Our apartment is on the ground floor, and looks directly on to one of Kreuzberg’s smaller streets. Outside, people are walking home from work, their features smudged by the sheet of rose-coloured plastic Hanne has fastened to the bottom half of the window. We talk about Dad, whom she has never met. When I saw him in November, he made it clear that he didn’t understand my relationship with Hanne, and could see no future in it, and I flew back to West Berlin feeling aggrieved, but when I suggested to her that perhaps we should have nothing to do with him for a while, she disagreed. Her mother was always saying such things, she told me. Hanne thought it best simply to ignore his disapproval. Tonight, though, she wonders what would happen if I took her to England with me. Would he like her?
‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘If he could get over his prejudice.’
‘What is prejudice?’
I explain.
‘Oh yes,’ she says. ‘Yes, I know. Nobody likes the fucking Germans.’
I touch her face. ‘I do.’
The next morning Hanne leaves for work at eight-thirty, as usual, even though it’s her birthday. We will celebrate later on, when she comes home. Since I have just received my unemployment benefit, a sum of about 600 marks, I’m thinking of taking her to Exil, a fashionable restaurant on the Paul-Lincke-Ufer, but the phone rings and changes everything.
Robin says my name. Then he says, ‘Dad’s dead.’
‘Jesus,’ I say. ‘God.’
Outside, in the courtyard, an old woman watches as her dog cocks its leg against the back wheel of a bicycle. Her coat is the waterlogged dark green of a rotten kiwi fruit. I glance at the clock. Five past nine. Something about the angle of the hands seems grotesque. It makes me feel dizzy, as though I’m standing next to a big drop, and I wonder if I’m going to be sick.
‘Jesus,’ I say again.
My lips feel clumsy, numb.
Robin tells me that Dad died in the night. The cause of death was respiratory failure.
‘That’s what he was always scared of,’ I say. ‘Not being able to breathe.’
‘They told me it was peaceful.’
Peaceful? I don’t see how that can be true. I’m not even sure what it means.
‘Did you visit him?’ I ask.
‘No.’ A woman at the hospital said he could wait until the weekend. She told him not to worry. ‘So I didn’t worry,’ Robin says bitterly, ‘and now he’s dead.’ He talked to Dad, though, on the phone. He asked Dad how he felt, and was startled by the vehemence of the reply. How do you think I feel? He had never heard Dad say anything quite so abrasive. ‘He was almost sarcastic,’ Robin tells me. He was also surprised by Dad’s voice, which sounded harsh and gravelly. ‘I should have known,’ he says.
‘At least you spoke to him,’ I say. ‘At least one of us called.’
Why didn’t I think of picking up the phone?
‘They asked if I wanted to view the body.’ Robin laughs nervously. ‘I’m not sure I want to.’
‘Well, I do.’ More than a thousand miles separate me from my father, and I have to try and close the gap. Close it to an inch or two. My mouth to his ear. My hand on his heart. ‘You don’t have to go. I’ll drive over by myself.’
Robin doesn’t say anything.
‘Have you spoken to Ralph?’ I ask. Ralph is our other brother – the youngest of the three.
‘Not yet.’
When Robin hangs up forty minutes later, my sense of isolation is so immediate and profound that it registers as a drop in the temperature, and I begin to shake with cold. Why didn’t I ring Dad? I didn’t have the number of the hospital, but I could have asked Robin for it, or called Directory Enquiries. I was Dad’s eldest son. He would have found it comforting to hear my voice. I could have let him know I was on my way. I could have told him I loved him. But now, all of a sudden, it’s too late. Though I’m in bed, with the duvet drawn up to my chin, I’m still trembling. My legs appear to have no feeling in them. They’re smooth and dry; they might be made of wood. Before we moved into our apartment, it was a print studio. The room we sleep in used to be the darkroom. It took coat after coat of white paint to obliterate the black, but as I stare up at the ceiling I can sense its presence, like a shadow pressing from beneath.
I call Hanne and tell her what has happened. She puts me on hold while she goes to ask Ernst, her team leader, for permission to leave early.
‘The bastard,’ she mutters when she returns.
‘What did he say?’
‘He said the day ends at five o’clock.’
I tell her I need to fly to England as soon as possible. There’s a travel agent round the corner, she says. On Kottbusser Damm. In the background, I can hear one of the junkies’ babies screaming.
‘I’m not sure I can do this on my own,’ I say.
‘You can,’ she says. ‘I know you can.’
She promises to be home by six.
I wash and dress. Grey light filters through panes of frosted glass. Toothpaste. The mirror. A pair of boots. Things seem mundane, precarious. The world, like a bowl filled to the brim with water, is something that can be dropped or spilled. I leave the apartment. Old snow has been shovelled into long uneven ridges at the edges of the cobbled pavement. The air smells of coal. Outside the shop that sells electrical appliances is the usual cluster of middle-aged Turkish men in leather jackets. It’s so cold that everyone has tears in their eyes; when I push through the door of the travel agency, no one suspects that I’ve been crying.
In stumbling German, I tell the woman behind the desk that I need to fly to London urgently. Tomorrow, if possible. Only sch
eduled flights are available at such short notice, she says. It will be expensive. Her eyelids are the blue of blackbirds’ eggs. Her hair is glossy, wire-stiff. I tell her that I have no choice. There’s been a death in the family. As I speak, I have a sense not of an echo exactly but of a kind of superimposition – how many times, I wonder, have people come out with that sentence? – and the effect is both prolonged and underlined as the woman solemnly lifts her eyes to mine and says she’s sorry. I end up spending my entire dole cheque on a British Airways flight to Gatwick.
Walking back to the apartment, I realize that the life I have been living for the past fifteen months – first in Tuscany, and now here, in West Berlin – is being brushed aside, and I am doing nothing to prevent that happening. I suppose I have always known this moment would arrive. Even as a boy, I was afraid my Dad would die – but he didn’t, and he didn’t, and I began, little by little, to trust him, to believe that he could last. How perverse that his death should come only when I’ve got out of the habit of expecting it!
I turn the corner into Sanderstrasse, and as I pass the cake-shop with its old-fashioned brown-and-gold lettering I am briefly wrapped in the bitter, sumptuous fragrance of dark chocolate. My fingers tighten round the one-way ticket in the pocket of my coat. I feel as if something has been achieved. I also, oddly, feel less alone.
Three months ago, I caught a train to Eastbourne, the town where I had grown up and where my father still lived. I arrived later than intended, and there were no lights on in the house when the taxi pulled up outside. I knocked on the front door. Nobody answered. I walked round to the back and stood on the lawn. The cherry trees that grew on the south side of the garden stirred in the night air. Nearby was the sycamore I used to climb when I was young. Dad’s bedroom window was dark, the curtains drawn; in the moonlight, the glasshouse appeared to be built from sheets of ice. I called his name. Softly, though. As if afraid I might rouse him. To disturb Dad was to break one of the rules that had governed my childhood. When he had finished lunch and swallowed his pills, he would go upstairs, and my two brothers and I would have to be quiet for the next hour and a half, but we were boys, and as we tiptoed from room to room, talking in exaggerated whispers, one of us would invariably knock a chair over or let a door slam shut. Even the chink of a spoon against the lip of a cup could be fatal. You woke me up. How often had we heard those words? I felt guilty every time – and not just of carelessness or disobedience: in depriving Dad of his much-needed rest, we were affecting his chances of survival.
This Party's Got to Stop Page 1