by Joe Hammond
When Catherine flew in, I was at the airport, but I wondered if this had occurred by accident, or whether I was there to pick up someone completely different. With the sorry way I was ambling through the concourse, it seemed most plausible that I was a refugee from somewhere, without the means for onward or return travel. By some freak chance, I happened to be standing at the arrivals gate at exactly the time Catherine emerged. She looked tired as she glanced along a line of people leaning into a chrome rail, but when she finally picked me out from the grey faces of those hanging back, there was enormous warmth in her smile. On reflection, a genuine smile, when a person’s really tired, can be something quite beautiful. I’m talking about that point of tiredness when someone is so exhausted it takes profound pleasure for a smile to emerge. And then it’s something slow and languid and lasting.
I don’t think I appreciated this beauty at the time. I may well have pointed at my chest, miming the words ‘Who, me?’ And then I might have glanced around, hoping that someone else might have been the recipient.
In all the years leading up to this moment, I encountered a lot of bemusement, and often some level of self-questioning, from those I had tried to convince, through sleight of hand, that I possessed some kind of prowess. Occasionally, I encountered relief. There had been grunts of annoyance, as with that first time in a French wood. But if I half remember these reactions as somewhat watery two-dimensional images, from Catherine’s face, over the next few months, I harvested a deep, shimmering palette of three-dimensional disappointment and sadness.
Catherine stuck with my stultifying presence for a while, before realizing that, all this time, I had been bent double, walking backwards along our path, attempting to rub and scrub out all traces of the troubling closeness we had once shared.
The expression of Catherine’s that I remember most was from the last occasion that we saw each other, on some nondescript central London street. I remember this because, if there had been any expressions of contempt from her during this period, they had long since been replaced by a kind of fatigue and tedium. Quite understandably, she’d had enough and, in a very sad and straightforward way, said goodbye and disappeared through the ticket barrier of an Underground station.
*
I sat inside my car in the rain and ate fried chicken with the windscreen wipers on. I think a letter came from the bookshop telling me that, due to prolonged absenteeism, I was no longer an employee, and I stuffed it inside the glove compartment. I imagine this was autumn and that the leaves fell from the trees for over a year and that they never seemed to stop. I walked down roads and when I got to the end I crossed back over and walked back again. I had various temping jobs in warehouses, moving boxes from one end of a large building to another, or taking things out of boxes, or putting them back in again. And in this time, most of the people I knew moved away in different kinds of ways, and I tended to walk around or drive around on my own.
I increasingly preferred staying in my car or remaining at home because of the inconvenient ways in which my body started leaking sadness at a bus stop or when paying for something at the checkout. And I remember having a problem with blushing, so that it was hard to buy stamps at the post office or pay in a cheque at the bank. There seemed to be so much wrong with my body, and I was happy to tell the doctor what kinds of tests he might commission, but once I’d started offering him my different theories and opinions, it was very hard to stop. To enable his understanding, I thought it best to keep coming back, and I was always so positive during these appointments. I think I smiled a lot and had really good manners – always stopping to check that he understood what I was explaining to him – and it was only afterwards, in the street, that I’d pinch my cheeks to try and stem what was coming. And with the heat from my face it would feel like grease rather than tears and I’d sit at the outside trestle table of the pub next door, lowering my head between my knees and making dark little patterns on the tarmac.
*
In writing about spirits, I suppose I am acknowledging that there isn’t a person who ever existed who hasn’t, in some way, by the end of their life – particularly towards the end of their life – composed or reflected upon the architecture of their very own religion. And when I think about what this is, I have in mind those moments when Tom comes to me in my wheelchair or my hospital bed and I will hold out my good left hand, palm upwards, and then he will gently rest his palm down on mine. And what exists there between us is just the smoothness of our skin and the warmth we have created. And then Tom will ask me something, like where the Sellotape is; or he will tell me that dinner is almost ready or that the cardboard house he is working on now has a new roof. The question will then be addressed and answered in some form, and then he will be gone, leaving the trace of himself on my upturned palm.
I’ve found different aspects of physical life very difficult and there is something of a great personal narrative climaxing in what is now happening to my body. But I have felt that love is a physical act – as it is in these exchanges with my son. At different times it is the physicality of love that has struck me and how strong the body is when it feels love for someone; and how weak when it doesn’t.
When I was young, there was one glorious adult in my life who, in this physical respect, was completely apart from all the other toads lined up there on the muddy bank. Jean was a tall and slightly gangly friend of my mum’s, with extremely long, straight dark hair and a conspicuous mole on the waxy brown surface of her right cheek. She always seemed so strong and, for all the majesty she held for me, this social worker from north London might as well have been chief of the Apaches or an Egyptian queen.
She smoked a lot and laughed a lot and offered me the permanent impression that what she wanted was to laugh about the situation she and I were in. And with this single motivation: that both of us must share in the hysterics of the moment. Her eyes always prefigured her laughter and, when this laughter came, it rippled in her face like chain reactions prior to eruption. And then it felt like she and I were holding hands, feeling each of these vibrations. Hers was a seismic compressed laughter – bubbling and jostling behind her pursed lips. But when it came, when the lips gave way, the sound it created was informed by the texture of her smoking. It was a vast spillage of a laugh. A wheeze and a wobble and a scream that would take my legs from under me and wash me away to a place, with this woman.
Though slender, she was a physical presence, with power in her hands. She would grab me and squeeze me and, in those moments, I melted through her skin and just rested there for all the time I needed. I saw her very little – perhaps once or twice a year – but, when I did, all my preoccupations dropped away like petals in October. I didn’t have to dance or be a thing or guess the direction of the wind. She looked at me as if she already knew everything there was to know. She knew it all without me saying – as if I ever could – and whirled me around and pulled me to her chest and kept me there and filled me up until it was time for her to leave.
*
The consulting room was a wooden shed set back within the garden of a large house on the affluent northern side of the city. I’d enter a tiny reception area at the front of this garden shed and, after a few moments, the internal door would open and another client might exit; at other times it would just be her and she would gesture for me to come inside. I would lie down on what was a narrow, flat bed, with a pillow under my head, with the woman seated out of view, just behind me.
Next to my feet there was a table with a small potted plant and a box of tissues. If I arched my neck upwards I could see the very simple light fitting immediately above my head. Apart from these features, within a field of vision that took in perhaps sixty per cent of the room, there was one slightly more interesting item that I spent the next six years, and up to four times a week, examining and trying to understand. On the right-hand wall, next to a window, was a small, framed reproduction of a nineteenth-century painting in which a woman kneels in the furrow of a f
reshly tilled field, presumably planting seed. Just behind and to the left, her very young child sits on the hem of his mother’s dress playing in the earth.
I was now twenty-one and for the first four years I said very little and winced at the few things I did say. I became adept at memorizing my dreams because it meant I didn’t have to think of anything to say. It had been suggested that the opportunity to bring thoughts and feelings to these appointments might enable me to function more effectively in my relationships but, instead, the opposite became true. I moved into a bedsit so that I could live on my own and my contact with friends and family declined. My life consisted of a clerical job in a large office and extended lunchtime appointments at the garden shed.
Throughout these four years I held a very low opinion of the woman who sat behind me at my appointments. Though I could have stopped at any point, I assailed her with a continual list of her many and obvious faults, mainly relating to her incompetence and lack of professionalism, along with the preposterous, ridiculous nature of almost everything she said. I consistently questioned her credentials and even told her she was unbearably ugly. She had a large house with evidence of family life and perhaps my main gripe was that she couldn’t possibly care for me, with all these children of her own and other clients to look after. Her faults seemed so obvious to me and I came to realize that her difficulties had been widely known for some time:
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.
Despite her being relatively young, this was so clearly the woman in question, and such a perfectly concise indictment of her crimes, but I lacked the confidence to report her to the appropriate prosecuting body. So I continued like this, month after month, year after year. It was a vast expanse of time that passed – a period of time in which I could reasonably have qualified in a number of quite advanced professions, or mastered several musical instruments; I could have built a large house for myself with my own garden shed or, a little more adventurously, trekked across a continent or two. But instead of considering these possibilities I maintained a clerical job with a hole-punch and a lever arch file and, despite my frustrations and suspicions, continued to attend my appointments inside the garden shed.
*
By the fifth year I was living in a bedsit at the top of a vast Victorian town house divided into twenty or so other bedsits. And by this time, it could almost have been something Alexandre Dumas might have written – an epic love story, with religious overtones, about a man in a tower wearing an iron mask; whereas I was a boy in a bedsit with the curtains closed, masturbating into a tissue twice a day. In fact, this had been my third or fourth such room, but I liked the anonymity this one provided, and also the advantage of the single bathroom I shared with a resident who was never at home. I stored food in my room to avoid using communal kitchen cupboards and timed my runs to the kitchen fridge to avoid other residents. On weekends, and particularly religious holidays, I was especially careful to manage my provisions in such a way that I could remain completely out of view. On the previous Christmas I had been caught with my head in the fridge by a joyous Spanish couple who vigorously persuaded me to share their lunch with them but who then, after prolonged exposure to my company, lost so much blood to their faces and vital organs that I was able to retreat carefully away, thirty minutes or so later, without the three of us even needing to say a word to each other – as if I had walked backwards out of a still photo.
During the long hours I spent in that room I watched a lot of television. On Saturdays, a reliable segment of the middle of the day would be consumed by the build-up to the 3 p.m. football kick-offs and the subsequent post-match analysis. It was fortuitous that, at about this time, Channel 4 started broadcasting live Italian football on Sundays and this offered the ideal equivalent match-day experience. Both days of the weekend I used this central sporting chunk as a kind of tent pole to my waking hours and, either side of this, I managed the preparation and consumption of breakfast, lunch and dinner – laid out on a tray upon my lap. It was an arrangement that enabled each day to pass without too many empty intervals and, before long, I would be through to the engulfing commitment of my clerical job. And weeks would pass like this and months turned into years – Monday through to Sunday, New Year through to Christmas.
*
Recalling this despair and emptiness, it’s of little surprise that God appeared to me in one very specific moment, when I was parked up in an old blue Saab 900 by a river, and spoke to me with quite the clarity that he did. He did so in the summer gap between the fifth and sixth year of my appointments inside the garden shed. When this moment took place, I was sitting in my stationary vehicle on the edge of a field, leaking oil from an unfixable engine gasket. I had the driver’s side door open and was seated on the passenger side, set to full recline, so that I was able to put my feet on the dashboard and lie back reading my book, with all four windows wound down, so that the early-evening air cooled my skin as it went racing by.
It was in this year that I had moved on from reading spy novels and had worked my way through most of George Eliot and a lot of Dickens, so that by the summer I was mainly concentrating on translations of Dostoevsky. And this was my reading material in that moment when God spoke to me through the rusting petrol-blue bodywork of my car, by the side of the river. Specifically, it was The Brothers Karamazov – a tale of three brothers born to a wanton father. I think I may have felt this moment moving closer and I had parked up in this spot between two footpaths so that I could finish this book in a setting other than my bedsit. In that sense, it could be said that I was looking for something, or that it had been building, so that I had perhaps selected this very special location in preparation for the approach I knew was coming.
I should say that the literary aspect to all of this didn’t occur in isolation. During the fifth year of appointments with the woman in the garden shed, I had started to relax a little more. I began to notice a few details about the voice that existed behind me and one of these details was an occasional tendency to relate one of her observations to a literary reference or quotation. I was able to infer that, despite living in a shoe and having vast numbers of children to look after, she still managed to find a bit of time in her day to read. I had been an early reader, but when the difficulties took root in my childhood everything fell away and I left school at sixteen with very little interest in books or anything else.
So there had been some changes over the course of about a year that led up to this moment in my car with this book – perhaps a kind of loosening of something that had become impacted. And when it happened I would describe it as a penetrating warmth and something ligamental that was softening and lengthening. My body felt less tight and this was almost instantaneous. I can’t remember but I imagine, in that moment, I would have needed to adjust my heels on the dashboard to accommodate this. It was also the accelerated sensation of being noticed in a very direct kind of way, which was both unsettling and comforting at the same time. It wasn’t possible to disentangle all these feelings and, at this initial stage, I felt no impulse or awareness that I might actually talk with this sudden presence in my life. It was enough, with the seat reclined and my feet up on the veneered black dashboard, just to notice the resistance easing in my body, like the depth change that wood or metal vessels undergo when coming to the surface – the tiny creaks and pops and hisses of a body expanding to its natural state.
In the weeks that followed the incident in the car, my body felt different. This change was dramatic and quite sudden; instant, in fact. I even considered the possibility that I might have become an inch or two taller, which is the way it felt. A lot of the simple mechanisms in my life felt somehow easier: walking, for example. At home in my bedsit, I enjoyed putting my lengthening strides to the test around the large Victorian building. I no longer felt it necessary to frequent the kitchen during significantly off-peak hours, such as three in the morni
ng; in fact, as my confidence grew, there were even occasions when I chose to use the communal cooking facilities during conventional dinner times and found myself sharing the kitchen with a range of fellow housemates. We even struck up conversations and I no longer felt a pain in my forehead when someone smiled at me. It actually felt natural to smile back or even to laugh about something with another person. It meant that I could form facial expressions that were wholly new to me and which caused a slight delay in the reactions of housemates or colleagues as they examined my face for evidence of whether what they were experiencing was a good thing or an extremely worrying thing.
*
It feels like the appropriate time to tackle the question of whether God exists or not. Not whether God exists but the question of whether he exists. It’s a question that belongs in the same category as ‘Why doesn’t anybody love me?’ or ‘Why do I never feel good enough?’ A person who properly knows that God doesn’t exist would never waste their time asking this question. To be asking whether God exists, a person must find it so hard to feel certain or confident about even the most simple things in life: to know whether the chair they are sitting on really exists or whether the kisses they receive in life were ever really meant.
It’s only possible to luxuriate in the question of whether God exists or not. So that if your home is threatened by mortar shells or if you live in a time of famine and must notice the bloating in your children’s bellies, you either know God exists or know that he doesn’t. When I was desperate and leaking sadness in my life it was also very clear to me. And now that I’m leaving my wife with a two-year-old and a six-year-old, with no money, and with no family who can safely look after them if something happens to Gill, I don’t feel comfortable enough to question God. Everything I love is teetering high up and out of reach. There is nothing I can do but know God, as I assume everyone finally does, when these moments come.