“Panic? I don’t see much of that.”
“Up there there is. Don’t you doubt it.”
Larry looked uncertain. It was as if Helen’s words could be taken in two ways, either as confirming the great success of his venture or as hinting at some vainglory at its heart.
They were entering the town now, the march slowing, held up in the small squares and narrow streets, directed here and there by the police. After the open countryside, it was also noisier, raucous congestion, restlessness. The townspeople, making their own noise, had lined the streets to watch. The makings of a rabble, Douglas thought. The town seemed too small, not just for the marchers but for the rumours they had brought. (Like flames of different colours, the rumours tried now this street, now that, now this structure, now that, until everything had been licked, unsettled.)
He saw that Larry was looking for an opportunity to dodge away up one of the side streets to the hilltop. His face was suddenly grave and calm, as in remembrance of the hilltop, its stillness. For quite some time now Edith would have been up there surveying the afternoon, filming it, Douglas hoped, for the media, posterity. On his own face too, he imagined, there would be such a look, hope and gravity in equal measures.
“See you,” Larry said, dodging off.
“Edith,” Douglas said in response to Helen’s enquiring look.
“She’ll be alright,” she said. “Cold and stiff but alright. Triumphant probably. Don’t worry.”
“Cold certainly,” Douglas said. “I’ll join them in a minute. Push her down to the car. Or bring the car up to her. Whichever.”
The climb from here would be steep, but if he were to take it steadily, shoulders back and breathing well, he would make it in good time and with energy to spare if Edith was in a bad way. She would have wet and fouled herself, he was sure. The great worry over Larry. The medication. The wheelchair cramps. Loneliness. It couldn’t be otherwise. They would have to get her home as quickly as possible. He would clean her then as kindly and temperately as he could, talking about the explosion, the triumph, to distract her. The worst of his tasks. The worst for both of them. His spirit was insufficient. Or had been, until now.
Quite quickly however Larry was back. He said that Edith was not there. Gone. He had looked for her briefly round about, but in vain. He had shouted her name, hands cupped to his mouth (of this he gave a quick, distracted demonstration). Then he gestured fretfully, as if the hilltop was a spirit as well as a place, responsible somehow for his mother’s disappearance.
All three set off up the hill, leaning into a breeze, leaving the clamour of the crowds gradually behind and below them.
Douglas had to admit he wasn’t surprised. Had he really expected her to be still there? To remain in the one spot for hours? Unmoving, a mere spectator? As though asleep in the sun or before television?
Asking the question like this, he realised that he hadn’t expected it. Apart from anything else, she could cover considerable distances in the wheelchair, or had once been able to do so. And she wasn’t afraid of risks.
Struggling up the hill, though, always just ahead of Larry and Helen, he couldn’t imagine what risks she might have taken today. Merely knew that she would have taken one. Suddenly realised also that, all things considered, it would have been much more surprising had she still been there, waiting for them obediently on the hilltop, than not. How foolish not to guess at these further reaches in others, their main track, for all one knew. Climbing fast, he cursed himself.
“I think we should try this one,” Larry said, gasping, perspiring, “I didn’t check it.”
Douglas felt it might have been because the road was very narrow, with large houses set well back from the road, inhospitably self-contained, that they ran down it as they did. It was as if they had no business being there and should pass through as quickly as possible. Three people unused to running, running abreast, labouring, gasping unashamedly, keys and loose change jingling.
They were running in utter panic, Douglas then saw, but whether the panic had started with Larry and spread to him or hit them both at the same time, he didn’t know. Halfway along, the road went to the left and downhill, and here they ran even faster, Larry ahead now, looking scared, very scared, with the eyes and movements of a bolting horse.
Even although it was downhill, a point was quickly reached when they couldn’t go any faster. Their hope was held back at the limits of their running: the limits of their hope were the limits of their bodies. Douglas strove to make it not so, but could not. Flat out. Perhaps then they should stop and recover themselves, out of their calamitous breathlessness decide what they should do?
As though his senses had been cleansed by panic, the violent running, Douglas was suddenly able to smell, acutely, smoke from the explosion, from chimneys and garden fires, grass and sap and foliage, petrol and oil, diesel, barbecues.
Larry now stopped, stumbling, hands on hips. They had about fifty yards to go to the end of the road. The road it joined was one of three which ran down to the town, the main square. They could hear shouts, then applause, then more shouts. Then silence, silence for the speeches, barely audible up here, mere broken threads of sound.
For a moment or two then, in the profound lull between energy violently spent and energy slowly returning, they might have been wondering why they had been running at all, never mind so fast, with such terrible abandon.
Then they saw Edith passing the end of the road in her wheelchair. She was alone and going downhill – quite fast. She was also, it seemed, on fire, ablaze. At first Douglas’ thought was that because it couldn’t really be so, it wasn’t so. The flames were some kind of product of her velocity, harmless as dust.
He didn’t think it for long because already she appeared to be recoiling from the flames, recoiling as in a dream, with incredibly stalled and slowed up movements.
What he thought next was that the very speed of her descent would put out the flames. Unless she ran into a wall or a car, she would be alright. As it was, the flames had been flattened by the wind of her passage, tucked about her like wild red feathers. If he ran fast enough, he might be able to put them out, one by one.
Shouting, screaming, running again. It was as if the run in the upper town had been a rehearsal. Douglas was sure he was keeping up with the wheelchair, gaining on it even. Soon he would have her in his arms again. He would take her home. She would tell them what had happened.
It was drawing away from them though, Edith was drawing away from them, heading for the main square, the crowds. Father and son redoubled their screams, frantic to warn, to enlist help, inspire some miraculous intervention. Twice the wheelchair veered and tilted, twice righted itself. Or was righted by the burning Edith. They were running in its burning wake – too close and they might start to burn also.
Larry was well ahead of him, Helen behind somewhere. He didn’t know how he could sprint like this.
The wheelchair ran along a level stretch of road for a bit, but then, like a ski-jumper taking off, went over the last hill before the square, leaving the ground as it did so. He lost sight of it, but from changes in the noise of the crowd – speeches faltering, shouts becoming screams, fervour and good fellowship horror – he could tell that Edith was approaching and would soon be at rest. The crowd would surround her, he was sure, one or two great souls stepping forwards to give aid.
He ran after Larry into the screaming crowd. The wheelchair had toppled over and was burning freely, high leaping flames and dense black smoke. Edith had been thrown from it and was sitting, in her own circle of fire, about five yards away. Dark and getting darker, she was making spidery little gestures as to a god of her own choosing. She was swaying, a kind of charred vatic monkey. Then she was even smaller, a midget woman being ushered from life by extraordinary forces.
Larry was bellowing at her, his belief seeming to be that her sacrifice was some malignancy of the will which only pure rage could overcome. Douglas felt the same. For some mo
ments they bellowed together, until their voices cracked and they were silent.
“It’s almost over,” Helen said behind them.
Moving forwards on his knees, Douglas put his arms about his son, aware that the strange smell was that of Edith burning.
“Almost over,” Helen said again, her voice quiet and still against the commotion, the sirens of the approaching emergency services, already overwrought, overstretched on account of the earlier disturbance.
Edith’s Journal – 7
Woken around three by terrible pain. Oddly I thought it was in the walls or the bedclothes at first rather than in me. No chance. Back with a vengeance. You’d have thought it could have waited another day, given me … allowed me …
Four now. Hard to write, but the pain drives me to. Who is whose instrument? Said it before: pain, mine anyway, seems to have a mind, purposes, a will. If some are chosen by God, some are chosen by pain. Don’t ask me how you know the difference. Quite close, I suspect. Good to think so. Let me think so. Who will ever know?
In each joint and in lines between them the pain burns. Or are there several pains, vying with each other, competitors? I don’t know. They seem to send each other messages. I can’t decode these. Sometimes then I think – give me another perspective and I’d hear music. My body. Wracked, wracked into song! Terrifying harmonies. What would I understand, were I to hear them?
What a question: What nonsense: Let me hear them first!
So what must I do to hear them? Haven’t I taken enough initiatives? Let them come to me! Yes!
Rage, irrationality – it gets you nowhere. There are no such songs. Screams more likely. Screaming children! I hear them behind me and before me and within me as I write.
Douglas is asleep. Not deeply or peacefully, of course. Who could possibly rest, given tomorrow? Larry’s been up twice, once, as if tempted to come in, pausing by our door. I could hear his breathing. He must be feeling it all depends on him. It does, doesn’t it? If we belonged to a primitive tribe, we’d be sleeping together, watched over by ancestors, no doubt.
Pain like this puts it out of the question. Watching from the hilltop, I mean. I thought it’d be possible. Not now. Utterly. Waiting – except for the pain to cease – is impossible. You can’t wait with pain. It mocks you.
Then it can make you feel you should be doing something with it. Not sure if this is mockery or good advice. It can make it seem as if its purposes are your purposes. If you but knew it, your purposes too (whatever they are)! God’s? I see what you mean. If we’ve got this far, we might as well go the whole hog. (Who am I addressing?) I’ll be glad to own up to them anyway, whatever they are, whether mine alone or … another’s also and in parallel somehow …
In this matter of the march, the explosion. What has there been in it for me, if you stop to think about it? I’d have settled for it, I think, for a mother is blessed when she witnesses the fine purposes of her children bravely fulfilled. I would, oh almost surely so. But in spite of the pills and the brandy and the deep breathing and the thoughts of colourful and infinite horizons, it isn’t enough and never now can be or will be. No. I can’t rest. I cannot.
D’you know what I’m thinking? That the person suffering from great pain is like the person suffering from sexual desire. Quite similar sounds and movements, if you think about it. Abandonment the only answer. To orgasm for them, for me …?
The curtain trembles in a light breeze. It’s quite hot, but maybe I’m slightly feverish. Normally with pain like this I can’t write at all. I’m writing quite steadily, though, as if the pain is driving me more than … the reverse. Can I write myself out of pain or am I just going forwards into further pain? Or am I not in pain at all, just crazy enough, self-absorbed enough, to think that I am? Pain! Pain! Pain! Can I not stop going on about it! Can I not cease and forever on the subject! There are others. Let me choose one. Let me see.
For five minutes there I neither moved nor wrote. I had the illusion that I could hear all the insects in the garden, all the birds and animals on the moor, hushed nocturnal sounds, intimate adjustments. Once heard the base too, some stridency or other followed by a shout.
Douglas stirs, turns, but does not wake. May he sleep on. Tomorrow will tax us all. Should I wheel myself through to see Larry, talk to him if he’s awake, sit by him until dawn if he isn’t? I’d do it only it would wake Douglas.
Writing the above, an image was flickering on the edges of my mind. It is doing so still, as I write this. In the darkness of my pain or my unconscious. It’s in fragments, struggling to come together. An image in the making. Presently it will come forwards, over a threshold of faith and pain, and I will see it, it will be revealed, or will reveal itself.
Perhaps not much though. Not much will be revealed, I mean. It’s always possible. You sweat to give birth, or to make birth possible, and are disappointed. Nothing appears at all or it is banal. You’d have thought I’d have learnt by now not to expect much, not to court revelation even as I go on about the likelihood of nothing or of damn little. I’m doing what I’m doing though. I’m waiting. May not be making much sense but I’m waiting. Or am awaited. (Am awaited?)
Not quite sure what this is that I’m seeing. It could be a donkey, down on its front knees, performing a trick of some kind. The movements are slow, as though it’s spellbound. There seems to be a crowd. Yes, it has an audience. Then I see a human head, attached to this body, a centaur it would seem, though I hope not, for what would be the point of that? The head is bald, that of an old man, wise-looking, shrunken. The legs are kicking however; the legs are disturbed. Between the upper and lower halves no accord at all. Then I see nothing. As well nothing as a centaur, if that’s all it was. At a time like this to be bothered by centaurs. God preserve.
Then I see it. At last! A newsreel from the sixties. In protest against the Vietnam War a Buddhist monk is burning himself to death. In a pyre of his own making he is swaying backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, his gestures at once of supplication and farewell. He is bald, with spectacles, rather like Gandhi, and he is not afraid. He is in slow motion, dying very patiently while policemen, soldiers, businessmen and other monks look on. Charred then, brittle, he falls to one side, is still. There are screams, I think, but not from him. He is beyond us now.
If pain has driven me to this vision, the vision has certainly subdued the pain.
So that’s the idea for me today? Really? Bribe a passing youngster to go and buy some petrol, then set fire to myself on my hilltop?
Seems so.
Is there no other way?
X
They continued to smell her after her death and even after the funeral. Believed they did, anyway. It was not just a smell but a presence, suddenly there, as suddenly gone. It would come at them in the hall, the lavatory, in the middle of the night, at dawn. Douglas believed they must have it in their hair, their clothes, the car, on their very flesh. He would wring his hands, look over his shoulder.
Larry thought that if they were to scatter her ashes in some beautiful and appropriate spot, the smell would leave them, they would be free of it. He suggested the top of a mountain; he suggested the loch.
Though Edith had occasionally talked of mountains – dream talk, much of it, corries, ridges, summits as places of transcendence, redemption – they didn’t think they had the strength or daring for them at the moment. Most of them still had snow and looked wintry even in the sunlight.
They chose the loch instead, a cove about a mile past Helen’s cottage, meeting there early one morning to be sure of being alone.
Three times they tried to launch the urn on the waters of the loch, three times it was brought back to them, bobbing stubbornly. It got caught amongst rocks, amongst seaweed, amongst detritus. Vexed, Douglas seemed about to call the ceremony off, if ceremony it was.
“We can’t give up,” Larry said. “Nature isn’t made to order. I may have to help it on its way – throw it, I mean, toss it.”
“You can’t throw an urn,” Douglas objected. “It would be farcical.”
“She wouldn’t mind, I assure you. That way it would be sure to catch the right currents and be taken out to sea. Look, there, where the dark water is, that’s the place, there are strong currents there, it’s very deep.”
He made as if to take the urn from his father, but Douglas backed away, holding it behind his back, mouthing distress, annoyance. Larry desisted, also backing away. In the early morning warmth of the cove it appeared that the venture had come to grief. Gulls cried and swooped and on the still air there was an immense smell of sea, the pungent salt wrack of it, the oiliness.
“It doesn’t need to be irreverent,” Helen said simply. “I’m sure Larry has a good arm.”
And so it proved. As if silence had lent itself to them for a moment or two, they didn’t hear Larry throw the urn, didn’t hear it sail through the air, didn’t hear it hit the water. They were simply aware of it after it had come to rest, bobbing a little before one of the strong currents Larry had spoken of bore it away.
By the start of the summer Douglas was alone in the cottage. As if the time had come for father and son to mourn separately, Larry had taken a temporary job with the forestry commission in Dumfriesshire.
Douglas had lived in the cottage for less than a year.
Mourning on his own, it turned out, was easier than mourning with Larry. He wasn’t required to console, to concern himself with a grief which, he suspected, was deeper and more terrible than his own.
He gave way to the strangest impulses, though, pushing the spare wheelchair round the house, for example, as in search of Edith, bending low over it and saying things, what he hardly knew; pushing it out into the garden, weeping, calling her name, cursing the silence; once pushing it angrily away from him, down a grassy slope, laughing when it came to rest, unbearably empty, against a hedge.
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