The first night Field sat with the board, it gave her exactly what she wanted. Her father’s initials, ‘J. F.’ were scrawled in a large and indistinct hand. The next night, she sat up late, awaiting Planchette’s movements. At first the board simply directed her hand up and down in a peculiar sawing motion. Then, three times, she wrote the words Your Father, and it began to talk to her like a father would. The board called her a dear child, and began a sensible lecture on the best route for self-improvement.
I wonder what it would be like to read a voice from the dead. The reconstitution of the voice of an absent person in a line on a board. A dream come spookily true.
Trollope was a year older than Field when his father died, but he was no stranger to loss. Three of his siblings were also gone before he reached the age of nineteen. They were all dying, he writes, except my mother. There’s a cold resignation about that except. Trollope knew the way that death can make a heart cold. He is so very good at catching anybody’s cold ambivalence in truth. His most famous novel begins with a deathbed scene – a son, kneeling by his father’s bedside. The father’s death means the son will come into a kind of inheritance, but the logistics of this all depend on the right government being in power, which, in turn, rather depends on said father dying sooner rather than later, and the father is taking his time about it. The father was dying as he had lived, peaceably, slowly, without pain and without excitement. His breath leaves him almost imperceptibly.
Then the novel takes us to the most painful moment. The hero kneels by his father’s bedside, wondering if he will become a bishop, and asks himself a question.
He dared to ask himself whether he really longed for his father’s death.
This sentence takes my breath away. Here, as elsewhere, Trollope is brave. Brave enough to show the inside of another’s mind, with all its selfishness and cowardice and inward turning – brave enough to show the stuff within us all. Waiting for people to die can be boring. We must not say so.
Nor should we ever say that mourning can be profitable. For Field’s Planchette board was part for real, part gimmick. She turned the grief into a book, and sold it. People do things like this. Grief encounters. Death did it for all of us. It left Trollope forever chasing other worlds. It left Kate Field impatient. I am, she wrote, always so conscious of the fleetness of time, always fearful of wasting time. I know that I do not accomplish all that I should.
The true sadness of grief is mixed up with feelings that you are never sad enough. That you are doing it wrongly, or selfishly, or theatrically. And it’s far beneath any arrangements of words on a page. It feels as if someone is scraping a grapefruit spoon on the inside of your stomach.
I talk to a friend who is a psychologist. She says that we sometimes try to tell too neat a story about what loss can do. We sit in the bright white of her kitchen and she makes me coffee. She asks some questions and listens. Before I leave she goes up to her study and brings down a book. Sometimes, she says, the experience of losing a parent can be processed as much as a gain as a loss. Intuitively, that makes no sense. You think that when you have lost something, you would be sad, empty, bereft, hollowed out. Actually, it can be that, and something else, too. She opens a book to show me. There’s a chapter about the way in which utter devastation – particularly that of losing a parent – can lead some people to feel almost elated. Like they’ve survived a bomb. The near miss makes them feel as if nothing can touch them again. Of course, the writer says, losing a parent is not like having your house bombed or being set upon by a crazed mob.
It’s worse. It’s not over in one terrible moment, and the injuries do not heal as quickly as a bruise or a wound.
But, like a bomb, he writes, parental death can feel like a kind of near miss. It can, for some, give the sense that a bomb has dropped just beside you. The death of a parent can be a kind of gift to a certain sort of child. The fact of survival leaves you feeling tough, exhilarated. Hardened by experience. I know this.
I like the idea of winning back something from all of this losing. My resentful shell is built up with layers of Teflon conviction, and it’s been like that for years. I’ve always told myself that I need not care too much because, like a gambler whose luck is on the turn, I’ve hit rock bottom. We losers – the bereaved children – can recognise our kind across a crowded room, sniff each other out at parties. We glance over the shoulder of the present, trying to catch the future’s eye.
The worst thing has happened, and we are still standing.
My dead dad stands on top of the piano, leaning against a wall. A trick of time, he is the same age as I am now, wearing a pale blue shirt, with a clothes line in the background. Two years after that photo was taken, he began to sink. I think I realised something was unusually wrong when he took me to Brent Cross for clothes on my thirteenth birthday – my birthday treat. I walked around the revolving stainless steel hoops of clothes on hangers, flicked my way through the rows of sweatshirts. Then turned and saw my father out of the corner of my eye, carefully vomiting into the bin near Luggage & Children’s Shoes.
By June he was lying in a bed in the back room, except for the two times I found him lying on the floor having a seizure. After that had started, we took him out of the front door in a wheelchair. I think we levered him into the back of the green Renault, but it could have been an ambulance. Either way, it felt OK. People who get into ambulances are on their way to getting better. I wasn’t aware that sometimes people go to hospital when there is nowhere else to put them.
It wasn’t a hospital, though.
The one bonus is that he got away from the stucco, I suppose. Set in a quiet corner of north London, the Edenhall Marie Curie Cancer Centre is in prime property space, its red-brick rectangle rising among leafy trees, between Victorian mansions. They moved him there from the Royal Free, down at the bottom of Pond Street, and in both cases I remember being quite pleased at the prospect of visiting my dad in Hampstead rather than Finchley, partly because it was posh, but mostly because there was a big Body Shop and a Laura Ashley on Hampstead High Street, which meant that I could stare at swimsuits and bottles of gloop, or iridescent globes of oil.
It seems almost impossible to square the knowledge of the pain that was to come with my thirteen-year-old preoccupations at the time. If I did not exactly will or wish for my father’s death, waiting for it seemed like a sometimes interesting but mostly burdensome sideline to the rest of my life. Looking at my diary, the entries are all about what to wear to Rachel South’s bat mitzvah disco, how neat my handwriting was, whether I should shave my legs, and if I would get a merit in flute.
They let me in alone to see my father’s body. He was lying on a plinth bed in the hospice chapel of rest. He was pale, long, his red hair nearly gone, and that which was left had faded to the colour of sand. When I saw him, I wondered at the new burgundy pyjamas. Wherever he was, he wasn’t there. Back at home, his sheds and lean-tos struggled in the wind. The rented hearse drove slowly up the road, and we lowered our heads in the crematorium. Relatives bent down to speak to me in the front hall, hunting for words. A friend’s father started to talk to me about how it would be from now on. Then his voice broke and he couldn’t go on. I think, refreshingly, that he was trying to say that everything wouldn’t be alright.
They are very sorry for my loss. I am very sorry for him too. He arrived the day my father died, wrapped up in brown paper, and I have felt for him ever since. A grey, damp creature with pilled fur and webbed feet. He wasn’t labelled, but I knew him straight away. He was my very own Loss. I did not choose him, as you might hope to choose a lifetime companion, but I have grown to know him and his ways. He is clammy and demanding. He smells. He has a habit of turning up at key moments. Graduation ceremonies. Dates. In bed. He really loves Christmas. Every year, he sits in the middle of the table, among the turkey and the roast potatoes. A centrepiece. Later, he moves to the Christmas tree, and sits there for days, as the pine needles fall around him. He has no
special allegiance to time or place. He seeps into all festivals and celebrations, seamlessly. My Loss is outgoing. Sometimes embarrassingly so. He forces himself onto people I have only just met, and cuts into conversations that do not concern him. He has a weakness for alcohol. I can almost guarantee that at the end of any drunken evening, my Loss will turn up, tearful, angry, determined not to be left at home. People are very kind about him. They are intrigued at first. He reminds them of their own losses. And they pity him. But my older friends must have tired of him some time ago. I think they must wonder why I haven’t brought him up better, why I haven’t made more of an effort to control him, or to make him fend for himself. Their losses are usually left at home. I imagine they may think I bring him along on purpose. And occasionally I do. That’s when he stinks the most.
How do children mourn when there are no models of grief? How does anyone mourn when there is no shape to hold the pain? It still wells up inside me from time to time with a fierceness that I fear. Nowadays people make memory boxes. They record tapes. There are websites. There are people trained to help children to try to make a story, a fixed place that provides, if not an ending, then a point of return. I remember more of a blank. A perplexity surrounded me, as adults and children alike wondered what to do with us. This family of four, missing a father. A mother, two teenagers, a baby.
At times I tried to create my own rituals. I had a tape of a piece of music he liked, which I played at full volume and walked around the garden at dusk, until I thought my heart might break. I was told to stop it. I created in my imagination a kind of hybrid deity – Dearfathergoddeardaddy – and I would lie on the grass under the apple tree, talking to it, making pacts and promises and trade-offs. There were no mourning clothes to wear, to show how I was feeling (if I even knew), so I chose, I think, things that I thought would get me noticed. I remember being asked to take my sister for a walk and putting on a hand-me-down two-piece red knitted tube skirt and jumper set. I walked around the block with the pram, hoping to be looked at.
A man came down the road and asked me to suck his dick for a tenner.
Finchley Central to Burnt Oak
— 1988 —
Of course there is a little danger, but who is going to be stopped by that?
Anthony Trollope, The American Senator
A fortnight after my father died I went to Rachel South’s disco. I wore a black Aztec-patterned Monsoon shirt (part of a two-piece that my mother had bought me for the funeral) with jeans. After three dances, David Clark’s friend asked me if I wanted to kiss David in the car park. (Getting off with people at bat mitzvah discos usually operated by the Cyrano de Bergerac method.) I paused. I hadn’t imagined my first kiss would happen in a car park. I didn’t really know David. I looked down at my shirt and shook my head. In biology the next day, Michelle Stevens said it was highly possible I was frigid.
The friend emails some more articles about the effects of the death of an attachment figure on children. It can produce, the author says, a cascade of secondary losses. The loss of the assumptive world, loss of essential caregiving behaviors, loss of proximity and comfort from the attachment figure, and loss of biobehavioral regulation furnished by the attachment figure.
My eyes begin to glaze over. I prefer to be distracted by the idea of a cascade of loss. A Niagara Falls of losing, beautifully. Sadness like a torrent of water running over a cliff edge and into a fast-flowing river, or like champagne down a coupe stack of glasses, frothing and puddling at the stems. I open the other attachment about attachment. A comprehensive literature review of the effects on children of the death of a parent is a risk factor for a host of related life issues including depression, criminal or disruptive behaviours … self-concept and self-esteem and early sexual activity.
Three hundred and sixty-four days after the car park, it looked as if I was finally going to get my long overdue first kiss, and prove Michelle Stevens wrong. I was on a school trip in Athens. My intended kissee was an American boy called Greg, who I’d spoken to over the youth hostel breakfast, and who’d asked me round for a bag of Doritos. To get there, I’d need to climb from my balcony onto his. The whole thing could have looked like a suicide attempt, but my planned movement was horizontal rather than vertical, involving going around a corner of the hotel block to his outstretched hand, and benefited from the aid of full daylight and a will to kiss. Greg helped me over the iron railing into his room. I came through the window unscathed, apart from minor knee grazes from the Athenian wall. Face to face, after my entry, there was an excruciating (because unexpected) attempt at dancing around the bed, with no accompanying music. We lay down and ate some of the Doritos (which I hadn’t tried before and didn’t like). This was awkward. I was wondering what was going to happen next, when, to my complete confusion, he shuffled the upper part of his body down to the lower part of the bed. Pulling my cut-offs and pants down, he put his head between my legs, and, with the determination of a man who had been reading some kind of manual, started to lick. We hadn’t covered this in biology.
I stayed an hour in his room, and when I got back to mine, everyone was queuing up in the corridor for the bus to the airport. On the tarmac I gave Michelle a verbal memo, and she sought advice from the sixth-formers sitting a few rows further back in the bus. The group verdict (disgusting) was delivered to me when we got on the plane, and I spent the flight home in a state of shock. Greg never wrote to me, so I wrote him a letter in my diary, along with a self-congratulatory doodle, reassuring myself that I had established my non-frigidity, even if half the class now looked at me a bit like they looked at Amanda Banks who had BO.
In the years after my father’s death, there wasn’t a lot of money. I perfected the art of bedroom-hopping. Depending on the bank balance, varying quantities of foreign language students came through the door of our stucco semi, sometimes one, sometimes three at a time. The rest of us compressed ourselves, sardine-style. Toys were packed away. Furniture was requisitioned at speed. My MDF bed would be magically transformed, identical to its former self, apart from the fact that it was now covered in my brother’s Star Wars stickers. Carl from Bavaria now slept in a bed like mine, the fairy transfers replaced with scratch marks and the scent of Jif Lemon. I watched Ceefax late into the night, scrolling through the horoscopes with the remote control, waiting to see what the world would hold for an Aries with Leo rising.
I read a lot at this time, especially as it was on the list of approved activities in the household, and most of my reading was about sex. Beginning with what I could find in the house on my parents’ bookshelves, I moved from the Penguin copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, full of haunches and forget-me-nots in pubic hair and taxonomies of orgasms, to Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, with its spellbinding cover showing a range of arses, but disappointingly tame contents. It was a year before a friend’s mother’s copy of Hollywood Wives explained what Greg had been doing, and even then, because one of the participants was a dog and the other was Portuguese, it took some figuring out. Julie Burchill’s Ambition, purchased in the Brent Cross branch of WH Smith, clarified things further, telling me more than I possibly ever needed to know about having an orgy in downtown New York. Anaïs Nin made sex sound all black and white and cultural, like something I could put on my UCCA form along with Grade 6 flute and Duke of Edinburgh.
I read poetry too. Initially because I thought it might make me look interesting. But some of it stuck. Along with the lyrics to Belinda Carlisle and the Bangles, I copied out extracts from Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’, from my Penguin anthology. The poem touched something in me. It seemed to be teaching me not about technicalities, or positions, or threesomes in Paris, but about attitude. A poem in which one person tells another that she might as well sleep with him because life is short, spoke to my sadness and my fear. Andrew Marvell became my insulation, a manifesto for my life.
But whatever I read at that time, death kept creeping in. The couple of years following my father�
��s death had collided with one of the biggest advertising campaigns in history – run by the government department that my father had worked for. When I got off the 221 bus for school, the streets were lined with frightening posters about death that looked like massive chalkboards. At home, we sat at the table eating Lean Cuisine chicken in orange sauce with wild rice, bought because it was quick, without realising that it was diet food. TV shows were interrupted by the repeated images of a volcano exploding. Great chunks of rock flew into the air. A tombstone fell to the ground. Some bloke started drilling. It was, John Hurt told us, spreading. I found an AIDS leaflet in the hall desk-drawer. Now I knew the technical language to describe what had happened with Greg, I devoted a few hours every weekend to sitting by the phone, nearly calling the Terrence Higgins helpline, to discuss the ramifications of cunnilingus.
When not worrying about trying not-to-die-of-ignorance, I needed a way to fill my time. I got through to the Terrence Higgins people once and they told me I was probably OK, but I still thought my number was up. Given that everyone around me seemed to be liable to die, something in my child mind figured I might as well make the most of it.
Rule number 1. I can get away with more than I think. After school, one day, I got off the train with a stranger. He’d spotted me in the back carriage, between Camden and Burnt Oak. I’d caught his eye, and nobody knew where I was. We walked down the high street together, stopping at the corner shop to buy a litre bottle of cider, some bread and cheese, and an onion. Then stopping again to call my mother, from a red phone box, and to lie. He took me to a scrubby meadow, near a railway line, with no passers-by in sight. Afterwards he made us sandwiches. We didn’t have a knife, so he pulled the cheese into pieces with dirty fingernails, and broke pieces of onion off in curved shards. I held the slices of bread open on my lap. It was getting late, and as night fell I felt as if I was flying above myself, looking down from the railway bridge on the two figures below. This was my secret life, and I loved it. Years later, I can still taste the bread and the feeling of risk, the bitter onion.
The Lost Properties of Love Page 9