by Joe Hammond
We discovered this woodland, with its deep running brook, accessible from the back of the garden through a broken wooden gate. The trees and water have been described to me, but the land beyond our garden descends to such an extent that, even when we first viewed the bungalow last summer, it was inaccessible with the crutches I was using. On that first occasion, Tom had gone swimming in the brook, as I waited in the grounds of a house we didn’t yet own. I remember watching Gill’s orange shirt disappearing first, within a green enveloping mass, then Tom, then Jimmy. I watched Tom quietly disappearing into those trees, but he came back as something different, as a child exulted and complete, appearing from behind the green velvet of a conjurer’s cloak – mud-splattered from below, dripping from the top, his narrow bare chest pulsing and shivering like a tiny combustion engine, fuelling his motion, rattling his teeth.
For the last five months the bungalow has been a building site, and I’ve been relying on Tom for progress reports from his Saturday visits with Gill and Jimmy. And with the knowledge of difficulties supposedly common to those who employ builders, it seems remarkable that we have not experienced a single moment of strife and vexation. Instead, our three builders strive away in the background with all the care, attention and devotion of three giant, dusty, leather-handed mothers, all working and worrying away – in our absence – on what this building will become. As the months pass, it has become clear that our three giant mothers are not just building an extension for us, but preparing a home; thinking, like any mother would – or three huge, caring, wood-splitting, bricklaying, nail-driving mothers would – of what we will need or want, or what will make us feel just so.
It’s been my experience that any of us can be a mother when we really need to be, or a father, or whatever we need to be – that being just a friend exists at the very beginnings of our imagination. Ten months ago we were collected from Portugal by untold mothers and fathers and, since that time, enough people have held on to us, helping to make sure that we have the home and the support we need. We have been listened to, propped up, encouraged and rescued by virtual strangers and by a few of those we have known almost our entire lives.
For the last five months our home-to-be has been, for me alone, a photographic fiction – comprised of images of Tom and Jimmy eating sandwiches on piles of timber, or wading with wellies through the channels being dug for concrete foundations. The winter leading up to this was the bungalow season, marked with a preparatory bungalow weeding and planting party, a bungalow cake, bungalow jokes, bungalow bickering and endless bungalow dreams of different colours and kinds. But now, after sleeping all on top of each other in one stable room, after all this bodily decay, the moment finally arrived when we found ourselves travelling towards the completed building in convoy from the hospice, with Tom and me in the wheelchair taxi, and Gill and Jimmy following behind.
We pulled up and the boys ran straight in, like two ferrets spilled from a hessian sack, but when I reached the big glass doors at the back, and looked out at the giant ash tree at the end of the garden, my body rippled and surged, and some old tide breached upwards and bent me forwards in its flood.
One of the things I’ve observed is that everyone’s face takes on a distinct shape when the tears really come; or at that point of volatile energy just beyond the moment when the tears can no longer be stopped. My own face curls inwards from the sides, and I reach upwards with a paw to a point just above my left eyebrow, as if I’m trying to package up and clear away all the upset before anyone can notice. No matter how far any of us travel in our life, I’ve formed the theory that our faces in this moment offer the reminder, or the evidence, or the imprint of original feeling. And it makes no difference if these tears come from pain or relief – as these ones did – because our faces have been shaped for these moments back in a distant time in our lives.
Gill had followed me in and her own face cracked open as she bent in around the front of me, across my wheelchair. It’s very hard to kiss someone, let alone hug them, when they are reclined in a powered wheelchair. The only way to achieve this is to stretch out like the arterial trunk of a mature tree and to grow around and through the obstacles of a padded armrest or a protruding console. Our chests criss-crossed and, within a few moments, my weaker diaphragm had synchronized with Gill’s. We carried on like that for what seemed like several minutes.
These were very different emotions to the ones that had surfaced with my friend and beloved uncle, Doctor Tiago, but they seemed to exist at the distinct other end of that time. This bungalow was such a long way from his hydroelectric power plant, but I imagined he might have been there with us in this moment; that he might even have been the one to open the bungalow door to us, with his hand sweeping down under the broad warmth of his smile and extending out to an arm’s length as a gesture that we had finally arrived.
And with Gill and I clasped together, like two entwined and wayward branches, he might have moved in behind our broken and bent torsos, nodding as he looked out at the tree, his smile undimmed and undented, holding our bobbing shoulders in his vast avuncular palms; letting all this energy flow with the knowledge and awareness that all great hydroelectric engineers possess.
At this point, and I don’t know, but I think Doctor Tiago could have discreetly broken away from us to make a speech to mark this occasion. More than anyone, he would have been able to measure this moment, occasionally glancing outside and gesticulating towards aspects of nature when he felt such reference points illuminated the wider thrust of what he needed to say. It wouldn’t have been obvious quite who, if anybody, he was making this speech to, but with Gill and I crumpled and twisted up in each other, it would have felt right that someone with this authority in our lives would have returned to mark this auspicious change in circumstances by telling our story.
As I knew from the start, he was a man who could have been anything to us – doctor, engineer, uncle. He could have been a person in the desert selling us chilled coconut water, and perhaps that’s exactly what he was. There are some people who can be anything. Everyone knows a person like this, detectable from the wide watery lustre of their eyes, and a face acting in complete unison across all its parts, which is something quite rare and unmuddled in a face. It’s a moment of good fortune to have such a person in your life at the very time you need them most but, if that’s not the case, or if the timing is wrong, it’s particularly important to invent them.
And I feel sure, after clearing his throat, that Doctor Tiago would have commenced with his account of meeting this curiously misplaced English couple in his consultation room, and his recollection of our shared experiences with a pin. His tone would have begun lightly, with a cheerful reference to the lopsided nature of my face, and how this had diverted his attention from recognizing the true nature of my condition.
It’s likely he would have remarked upon our many subsequent and temporary homes, serving only to highlight the fitting final residence within which we had settled, with its views of the garden and the wood beyond. And finally, deftly combining a measured tone of both sombreness and felicitousness, he would have reminded his absent audience that this new beginning of ours – like so many of life’s arrivals – was also an ending; that we had arrived as an embattled family of four but would one day – some years from now – be leaving this place as something smaller, or different, something with all its pieces no longer completely intact.
And after pausing in this moment, drawing back not just his lips but his entire face, to smile with, of course, his customary warmth, I’m in little doubt – knowing Doctor Tiago as I had come to – that the final point he would have wanted to make is that our eventual incomplete departure from this place was a fate that, in one form or another, would eventually be shared by himself and everyone then present, and also by everyone who was not.
When my eyes cleared, and after Gill had pulled away, a very different view of the great ash tree became visible. It was mid March, and its stripped, muscu
lar branches dipped and turned in many directions, like the tentacles of a mythical sea beast. I noticed the moss and daffodils encircling its wide base, then glanced upwards to where the thick neck of one main branch formed a crooked joint, and observed, within this knotted mass, the smallest dark pupil of a hole, set in a smooth almond shape of bare wood.
Tom’s red T-shirt came into view, and then its colour disappeared behind a large bush. I could see his head moving above the foliage. I looked further beyond, into the leafless wood itself, with the speckled background colour of the sky visible deep within and, now moving across the foreground, Jimmy’s blue wellies.
Acknowledgements
Hundreds contributed to the fundraising that helped return us from the top of a Portuguese mountain, to a settled life back in the UK. I wish I could name everyone.
Those mentioned below have supported family life in unique and imaginative ways. These are all people who noticed us and became the community we needed. They will always be part of our story.
Julia & Ed Banks, Xin & Jessie Zhu, Cinead O’Sullivan, Emma Collins, Paul Edge, Susan Edge, Jason Silk, Leigh Short, Kim Wilson, Sam Goodwin, Kayode Adeniji, Matthew Quint, All staff from ward E6 of Portsmouth’s Queen Alexandra Hospital, Roisin O’Sullivan, Mandy & Dennis O’Sullivan, Emma Gilgunn-Jones, Peter Lamb, Simon Lace & family, Lucy Elphinstone, The staff, student & parent community of Francis Holland School (SW1), Natasha Warne, Nicola Morrill & family, Kim Archer, Ashley Tong, Deborah Gosling, Helen Vickery, Sarah Wolverson, Phil Desmules, Sonja & John Doris, Manjeet & Russ Turner, Kate Fismer, Father Bernhard Schunemann, Mary-Ann Ridgeway, Yasmin Page, The staff & parent community of Inwoods Small School, Sarah Lowson, Mariamah Mount, Emma Ball, Nat Segnit, Louise Morley, Isabel Ferreira, Suzanne Cook, Simon & Victoria Cobden, Brian Sawkins, Heather Woodrow, Ellie Lloyd, Mary Goldberg, Stephanie Tyrer, Stephanie Pattenden, Miranda & Roderick Williams, Joel Cadbury, Orpha Phelan, Phil Williams, Anna Mayer, Tom Macken, Alex & Suz Crichton-Stuart, Elina Borin, Joy Coughlan, Andy Salter, Chris Weitz, Lilita Grinberga, Dan Gent, Guiseppe Rufini, Laura Camfield, Louise Cartledge.
About the Author
Joe Hammond is writer and playwright. He took part in the Royal Court Studio Writers’ Group in 2012, having previously been mentored by the theatre and BBC. His debut London production ‘Where the Mangrove Grows’ played at Theatre503 in 2012 and was later published by Bloomsbury. He lives in Hampshire with his wife and two sons.
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