This Party's Got to Stop

by Rupert Thomson

  I crossed to where Joe was sitting. He made no attempt to get to his feet. Instead, he held out his right hand, which I took in mine. Up close, his eyes had a sombre, penetrating quality; I could see no humour there. The two brothers didn’t touch, I noticed, or even greet each other.

  Now I was over by the fireplace I saw that Joe was not alone in the room. Against the opposite wall were four or five other men, all seated on ramshackle chairs. The way in which they were arranged, in a loose semicircle, and at some distance from Joe, suggested not just that the residents of Penndale Lodge had divided into two camps, but that Joe was viewed as a performer, as entertainment.

  I said hello, then took a seat facing my uncle. Frank sat to my right, with his back to the other men. I could see them beyond him, eyeing us with a kind of patient cunning.

  Frank held out the two brown-paper bags. ‘I bought a few things for you, Joe. I thought you might like them.’

  Joe thrust his cane aside, then roughly took the bags. He opened one and peered inside. ‘Are they halal?’

  Frank’s face assumed a look of agony. ‘I don’t know, Joe. No, I don’t think –’

  ‘Then what did you bring them for, you stupid bugger? They’re no bloody use to me.’ Joe almost slung the paper bags at Frank.

  ‘Halal,’ one of the men muttered, and winked at me.

  In a voice that had lifted half an octave, Frank was defending himself. He hadn’t noticed, he was saying. He didn’t know. How was he supposed to know? He’d driven all the way from Four Oaks, just so Joe could meet his nephew. He’d seen an Islamic shop and bought some things he thought –

  Joe didn’t appear to be listening. I had the impression he had heard it all before and found it utterly contemptible. Sometimes his eyes would drift towards the bay window, but he seemed indifferent to the world outside. Sometimes, too, he glanced at me, but with such impassivity that I was rendered speechless, almost inanimate. In the end, he fixed his gaze on Frank again. Though he wasn’t paying the slightest attention to what Frank was saying, he clearly derived a certain vengeful pleasure from watching his older brother squirm.

  ‘If that’s all you’re capable of,’ he said at last, ‘you shouldn’t bother coming. If that’s all the respect you can show.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be like that, Joe …’

  Later, he decided to concentrate on me. He said he could see a family resemblance. There was something of Wendy, he thought. I told him people usually said I looked more like my father. He shrugged. Either he didn’t remember my father, or else he just wasn’t interested. To my right, I was aware of the old men shifting on their chairs. They sucked their teeth, dropped ash on their cardigans.

  ‘Apparently, Wendy was frightened of you,’ I said.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘It must have been my dad.’

  Joe’s eyes gleamed, and I felt my words had pleased him. He wasn’t about to speculate on why somebody might find him frightening. What other people thought was their own affair; it had nothing to do with him. But I was struck by the fact that he seemed flattered by what I’d said. He was a vain man, even if his vanity took a decidedly unusual form. Despite that, I found I wanted him to like me.

  ‘You haven’t offered your guests any tea, Cedric,’ one of the men said.

  My uncle’s head lifted sharply, and he glared across the room. ‘My name’s not Cedric.’

  ‘Come on, Cedric,’ another man said, nudging his neighbour. ‘You don’t have to be like that.’

  ‘Call me by my proper name,’ Joe thundered, ‘or keep your stupid mouths shut.’

  ‘That is your proper name,’ the first man said.

  ‘My name is Abdul Rauf. How many times do I have to tell you?’

  The old men exchanged glances. One was smirking. Another choked on his tea.

  Joe raised an arm and pointed across the room at them. ‘You’re going to bloody burn in hell, the lot of you,’ he shouted. ‘You’re all damned.’

  ‘That’s not very nice – ’

  ‘That’s rude, that is – ’

  ‘No need to lose your rag, Ced – ’

  ‘You ignorant fucking half-wits. You’re all going to burn, you hear me?’ Joe’s voice was shaking with rage.

  I looked at Frank. His head was tilted back, and he had closed his eyes. Of all the people in the room, he seemed to be suffering the most.

  During the hour I spent in Penndale Lodge, Joe had two such outbursts, both provoked by personal affronts. The old men were going to burn in hell, not because they were Christians, or godless, but because they refused to take Joe seriously. Their sin was mockery – a lack of deference. Somehow, though, I felt that Joe had brought this on himself. People didn’t see him as a Muslim. He was just somebody who had taken dressing-up a bit too far. He had turned himself into a spectacle – a freak; he had invited ridicule. I thought I understood why Ralph had become a Catholic, but I still couldn’t make sense of Joe’s conversion to Islam. Was it a matter of genuine faith, or was it an intellectual decision, born out of his lifelong interest in comparative religion? Had he simply adopted a set of values and beliefs that would allow him to rail against a world into which he didn’t seem to fit? Or could it have been a calculated attempt to upset the family, to ‘stick two fingers up to the lot of us’, as Frank had put it once?

  I no longer recall what Joe and I said to each other after that. I only remember his physical appearance – the large, expressive hands with their prominent knuckles and blue-black veins; the beard, which was of biblical proportions, reaching almost to his lap; and his eyes, such a dark shade of brown that the pupils and irises were hard to tell apart. I said goodbye, knowing I might never see him again. Had I asked the right questions? Probably not. It had been difficult with all those old men listening – but perhaps it would have been difficult anyway. Joe wasn’t exactly forthcoming; one would have had to pick him, like a particularly stubborn lock.

  What saddened me as I walked to the car was the thought that he would go on sitting in that front room, day after day, the other residents ranged against him like a Greek chorus, or a jury, or a crowd of hecklers at a comedy club. Intentionally or not, he had contrived a kind of purgatory for himself.

  Driving back to Four Oaks, Frank returned to his theme, and it echoed some of what I had been thinking.

  ‘He wouldn’t play the game, you see – just wouldn’t play the game. He was buggered if he was going to do what other people wanted. He thought he was above all that. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t above it.’

  I remembered Frank telling me how Joe behaved on the football pitch at school. Joe would have been eight or nine at the time. When the ball bounced towards him, he folded his arms and watched it roll past. Everyone on the touch-line was shouting. Come on, Gausden. Kick it. But he wouldn’t. A goal was scored as a result. The game was lost. He wouldn’t even take part, let alone compete.

  ‘He always had to do things his own way,’ Frank said, ‘and look what happened.’

  ‘He’s pretty hard on you,’ I said.

  ‘All I ever did was try and help him get back on his feet. The number of times I did that! God!’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t want to be helped. Maybe you should have left him alone.’

  ‘He was still part of the family …’

  Frank had missed the point. I was wondering how Joe would have reacted if Frank had called his bluff. You want to have nothing to do with us? You want us to leave you alone? All right. We will. But it was too late now.

  Back on the dual carriageway, Frank switched lanes without signalling, and the driver of the car behind us had to swerve. He gave us a loud blast on his horn.

  ‘Now what?’ Frank said.

  Death Pyjamas

  I unlock my father’s bright red Renault and climb behind the steering wheel, then twist the key in the ignition. Exhaust fumes cloud the garage doorway. Two hours’ drive away, in Midhurst, his body has been laid out in a chapel of rest.

&nbs
p; I follow the coast road, through drowsy, crumbling towns like Peacehaven and Rottingdean. Ralph and Vivian sit in the back with Greta, holding hands. Beside me, in the front, Robin stares straight ahead. His eyes look oddly static in their sockets, and his lips move, one against the other, as though he is trying to moisten them. He only decided to join us at the last minute, saying he didn’t like the idea of staying in the house by himself.

  We pass all the old landmarks: Saltdean Lido with its blistered white paint and sweeping concrete parapets; the fudge-coloured façade of St Dunstan’s Home for the Blind; Brighton’s elegant but derelict West Pier. As we turn inland, I wonder whether Robin’s sudden change of heart might help to explain how it is that we three brothers have come to be living together in the same house. It’s not so much that we didn’t trust each other with the funeral arrangements or the execution of the will. It might simply be that none of us wanted to feel left out.

  To the north of Midhurst, the road climbs steadily for about a mile, and as I shift down into third I glance into the pines that mass on the left side of the car, their trunks showing through the mist like rusty nails lodged in wax. In my teens, I often kept Dad company when he drove to the hospital for his six-monthly check-ups. Before reporting to his doctor, we would stop at a pub called the Angel for half a pint of bitter and a ploughman’s. As Dad told one terrible joke after another, his smile would seem to take up too much room in his face. I don’t think I ever realized how nervous he was. On those occasions, he would always have to prepare himself for the worst. They might not allow him to go home. They might have to operate. They might give him only weeks to live. While he was in the hospital, undergoing tests, I would wander through the grounds. I would think of my mother, who had worked in the hospital as a nurse. It was here that my parents had first met. It was here that they had fallen in love. They would have strolled across these lush, striped lawns, beneath these lofty trees. Wendy was dark-haired, voluptuous. Twenty-one. Rod was nine years older. Though the war had destroyed his youth, it had also, paradoxically, kept him young, shielding him from the pressures of an ordinary existence. His black hair was thinning on top, but his face had a beauty that was classical: a strong straight nose, a sculpted mouth. Their first kiss, I was sure, would have taken place in this hushed half-darkness, buttresses of sunlight slanting through the gaps between branches, pine needles scattered, glowing, on the forest floor. The early fifties. The war was over, but only just. Rod had forfeited so much – his fitness, his health, his dreams. As for Wendy, she had lost both parents. Her father had suffered a fatal heart attack when she was seventeen. Within a year, her mother found she couldn’t cope and committed herself to an asylum in Northampton. Though still young, Rod and Wendy had been through difficult times, both of them. But now they had each other. Together, they could make a go of it. After what had happened, they had every right to expect life to start working in their favour.

  And for a while it did.

  A big ‘H’ appears up ahead, and our faces stiffen. Even the baby has gone quiet. I signal left and turn into the drive. When the hospital finally reveals itself, it looks exclusive. With its white flagpole and its ivy-clad brick walls, it could almost be a country house hotel.

  As we wait in reception, I go over my recent phone call with Ilaine, my godmother. Ilaine is a Sufi, and when I told her that I had bad news she took issue with the words. Given the many hardships my father had faced, she believed he had done well to lead such a full life. Look at what was taken from him, she said, and what he did with what remained. However she also felt he had very little left to look forward to, and that this might have been a good time for him to go. She offered me her thoughts on grief. As a Sufi, she saw mourning as a form of selfishness, since mourners are generally only thinking of themselves. All tears do is bind the dead to the earth. People who have died need to rise up, she said, and we shouldn’t try and stop them. Since talking to Ilaine, I have begun to incorporate some of her philosophy into the way I handle the other calls I’ve had to make, and the conversations have become less tortured and more natural.

  At last, a sister arrives. She apologizes for the delay; there was an emergency, she says. She leads us down a long passage with a highly polished floor, through doors that swing outwards, then thump back into place behind us. She tells us that our father was well known in the hospital, and very well liked. This carries the faint sting of a rebuke, as though, having noted our dyed hair, our jumble-sale clothing, and our unlikely baby, she has decided that we don’t deserve him. One final set of doors, and we’re outside. The air is watery and grey, the colour of an empty milk bottle. Crows creak and scuffle in the treetops. We follow the sister along a path that cuts diagonally across an area of grass. My eyelids feel swollen, as if I’ve just woken up. My mouth tastes sour. The sister’s shoes are black, with spongy soles; the heels give slightly every time they make contact with the ground.

  Inside the chapel of rest she turns to face us and we gather round. She indicates the door we should use. We can take our time, she says, her voice softening. She offers to hold the baby while Vivian is in the chapel, but Vivian shakes her head and says, ‘She stays with me.’

  I go first, struggling comically with a heavy curtain. Once I have parted the folds, I find myself halfway up a high-ceilinged room. Dad is below me, and to the left, on a raised bed. Two candles waver on a shelf above his head. I climb down the stairs, the others behind me, then walk over to where Dad is lying, his body draped in a weighty, embroidered cloth of blue and gold. I stand beside him, looking down. His mouth, which is covered with a swatch of muslin or gauze, has fallen open in a kind of sigh, and his lips have set in a position that makes him look oddly flirtatious. His eyes are closed.

  The four of us circle the bed, Vivian still holding Greta. To begin with, we seem preoccupied with details: the small square of see-through fabric over his face, the white shroud in which his body has been wrapped. I am aware that I am looking at a corpse – my first – but I also know the dead person is my father. My mind oscillates between the two ideas; it just won’t settle. Dad’s neck is raw, discoloured, and I keep wondering how the rest of him has altered. There’s a sense of the grotesque, of barely concealed horror. I remember what the sister told us on the phone. As a hospital, they lacked the skills of a funeral director, and we shouldn’t expect too much. It would, she said, be fairly basic.

  As soon as Vivian is satisfied that Dad is definitely dead – earlier, someone had suggested that she might use a pin – she climbs back up the stairs. Once she has disappeared through the curtain, Ralph approaches the end of the bed and touches the hill Dad’s feet have made in the embroidered cloth. Seeming to follow Ralph’s lead, Robin lays a hand on Dad’s stomach. The three of us look at each other and smile, but there is a tension, a palpable uneasiness, as if we are expecting to be reprimanded and then asked to leave. I suddenly feel we are squandering an opportunity that is precious, unique. This moment will not come again. We should have agreed to visit the chapel one by one. We should all have had our own time with the dead man. But we are being governed by a group dynamic. We’re still the little army I told Hanne about, full of bravado and hilarity, both of which are out of place. We’re thinking not about our father but about each other.

  I reach down and touch the hair above Dad’s ear. It is cold. Dry. Brittle as spun sugar, it could snap or crumble in my fingers. I wish I could speak to him, but the presence of my brothers makes me self-conscious. My goodbye has to be a silent one. I have to think the things I should be saying. I try and send my thoughts through the air, from the inside of my head to the inside of his, but even though we’re only a few feet apart, they fall short, glance off, or crumple, like paper planes thrown at a wall. This is wrong, all wrong. There is a moment when I nearly scream. I imagine how wild and mad it would sound, and how the chapel would reverberate, and how somebody in the hospital would hear me and come running. I imagine the looks on the faces of my brothers. I imagine my
father’s face too, motionless, unmoved.

  Later, as we drive away, the pine trees closing in again, Robin blows some air out of his mouth and says, ‘Thank God that’s over,’ but I feel I should be braking, turning round. I don’t feel I’ve done what I came to the hospital to do, and yet I can’t find it in myself to insist. Robin would object – or Ralph … I could always tell them to take the car, I suppose. I could make my own way back – a taxi to the station, then a train … But I don’t stop until I reach the end of the drive, and then, once I have made sure nothing’s coming, I signal right and set off down the hill.

  Back in the house, I slip away from the others, climbing the stairs while no one’s looking. In my hand is Dad’s brown canvas-and-leather holdall, containing the things he took to the hospital with him. I open the door to the au pair’s room. Darkness crowds the windows. There is a floral smell that reminds me of cheap hotels in Europe. A scent, I imagine, or a deodorant. All that remains of Forbes, who we will never see again. I realize I have forgotten her real name.

  I shut the door and sit down, Dad’s holdall on the bare mattress beside me. The zip parts to reveal his sheepskin slippers, offcuts of lurid green carpet glued to the soles for added insulation. Under the slippers I find his sponge bag. The contents are predictable enough: lavender soap, a flannel, throat pastilles, and so on. I turn back to the holdall. Beneath the sponge bag is the dark green tartan of his dressing-gown. As I push the dressing-gown aside, his hairbrush appears. Chipped wooden handle, one third of its bristles missing. I lift it to my nose. His smell is so vivid that it pushes at me like something solid, physical. Closing my eyes, I can almost believe he’s in the room with me.

  At the bottom of the holdall is a pair of neatly folded blue and white pyjamas. When I take out the jacket and hold it up, I see that something has spilled all down the front, leaving a ragged stain. It is blood. My heart thuds once, as if it just collided with my ribcage, and the breath stops in my lungs. I remember what Robin told me about Dad’s death being peaceful. It doesn’t look peaceful.