Diary of a Lone Twin
Page 22
Gennaro, whom I’ve known for over twenty years, is one of the few people who can read me like an open book. Hunting for skimmers and feeling melancholy among the chattering girls and the sparklingly beautiful scene, he came over with two large red rocks he’d picked up while foraging for honey mushrooms. ‘Launch them as far as you can into the millpond, Loftus,’ he said, handing me one of the giant flints. A satisfying heave, an almighty splosh and thud as it hit the shallow bottom. He handed me the other one, identical to the first. ‘And one for John,’ he said, a tear in his eye.
* * *
On 26 September John was allowed to come home to The Beeches for the weekend. It seemed at the time terribly risky; he was so frail after both the operation and the meningitis, but that feeling of concern was tempered by the joy of having him home, sitting in his bedroom. Because of the nature of his operation, the entry point being beneath his upper lip, you could have been forgiven for thinking that there was little wrong with him. His Parosian tan had faded but there were still tan lines under his woven bracelets, his hair was foppish and, though he’d lost a lot of weight, he was handsomely thin rather than skinny.
That weekend we sat in the garden, under the damson and hazelnut trees, talking of his memories of the operation, his hopes and his fears. Sally, our corgi, spent her time curled by his feet as if sensing his early departure. He was obviously in demand. Samantha protectively fussed around him, friends popped in briefly so as not to over-tire him, he even, briefly, fell asleep in the sun.
I knew Mother was worried, I could see her watching us through the living-room window. She knew it was far too early and too risky to have him at home, yet acknowledged the pleasure he was getting from being back. It was during that first afternoon that John started leaking the cerebral fluid again, through his nose, like a clear continuous nosebleed. Mother telephoned both the neurology and oncology units, but was assured by both that there was no further treatment needed at that stage. She was told that he would be looked at upon readmission to Oncology on Monday the twenty-eighth.
During the week beginning the twenty-eighth John was treated for another serious, life-threatening dose of meningitis, which meant another week of lumbar punctures and antibiotics, violent headaches, vomiting and unconsciousness. Luckily, somehow, he later found it hard to remember some of the worst moments of this terrible week. Sadly, I do, a week that felt like a month, John often curled up amidst taps, tubes, drips and monitors, endless tests, probings, awakenings while trying, trying to sleep, sleeping while trying to be awake. But it was he who had to endure their constant discomforts, not me. All I could do was hold his hand and communicate with him in moments of lucidity, bed-tagging with Samantha and poor Mother. No mother should have to watch their beloved offspring endure such ghastliness.
Thursday 27 September
Under a clear blue sky, shoeless still, sitting watching the dewy dawn sunrise over the fields. Warming my hands around a morning tea, watching muntjacs nervously skirting Gennaro’s garden, attuned to the crack as he fires his rifle frequently from the comfort of his dining-room table.
As my feet began to thaw I stubbornly remained barefoot as Gennaro took me for another of his little strolls around the neighbouring lanes and fields.
In the early evening, after our shoot, Gennaro bundled me into his rickety old Land Rover and raced, driving like a mad teenager, through the narrow lanes so we could sit quietly beside a nearby lake where he fished for trout and we watched the sun set over its mirror-like surface. Walking back later we picked fresh walnuts from a tree, a first for me, cracking them open with a pebble, soft and slightly bitter, ideal companions to the rosé waiting for us back at Waterfall Cottage. Well done Gennaro, my dear friend, you successfully distracted me for a whole day and I fell asleep slightly tiddly, a belly full of mushrooms and pasta, to the sound of the ‘Barnsley owls’ hoots’, as he calls them.
Friday 28 September
Another gorgeous misty morning, day three of our shoot, grubby feet a testament to a third day of no shoes and socks.
During the day, my third spent almost constantly in various dappled corners of Gennaro’s rambling garden, shooting combinations of him making pasta, picking mushrooms and courgette flowers, foraging or just smiling playfully at the camera, I am reminded how lucky I am to have refound photography post losing John.
Thank you, Father, for persisting with your mission to find me a hobby, because John had so many and I had so few. Twenty years of almost daily shooting, whether on a phone or a camera, hiding behind an inherent desire to keep trying to create beautiful images. Even today, in between set-ups, I wandered almost continually, my hungry eyes searching for pictures. Last night’s walnuts and their dark green leaves; the vibrant turning leaves of the grapevine bruised with the deepest reds and oranges; conkers bursting from their prickly cases; backlit crocuses, impossibly pinkish-purple. Dahlias of every colour; flowering lemon balm and thyme; ripening white blackberries; tree stumps covered in honey mushrooms; medlars and quince trees laden with fruit . . . and all within whistling distance of a steady supply of milky tea from an attentive Gennaro, with his calls of ‘Loftus! Loftus! Where are you?’
Day three over, his book finished and ‘wrapped’ to a toast over champagne and cream cake baked by his gardener, Penny.
Saturday 29 September
Another clear blue sky
Breakfast in Chelsea, mussels fresh from the fishmonger. Catching up with Ange, rarely more than a few feet apart.
A weekend of quiet contemplation, editing and reading, snuggling, spooning, kissing and chatting. Just what was needed. This period, between John’s re-hospitalization and 5 October when eventually his deep X-ray (radiotherapy) treatment started, was an anxious time, toing and froing between The Beeches and the neurology unit. Mother trying to maintain her patients and alternating between hospital and surgery and The Beeches, with me, Molly and Samantha; Molly too upset to visit but holding fort at The Beeches, endlessly baking and cleaning. Somehow I had fitted in a few illustration commissions. Ironically my career was flourishing but my heart wasn’t in it at all, it was pure distraction.
Sunday 30 September
I sent my Sami edit in this week, to Niklas and to the publisher. Niklas is over the moon. The removal of the heart of the adult stag, the Sami people, their fishing, farming and herding, is, in my mind, one of the best forty-eight hours of shooting I have ever accomplished. Of course, as ever, there is so much I could have done better – missed opportunities, focus not quite on target, fear overtaking technical speed of thought, under- or over-exposure, but I’m still happy with the results.
I photographed the heart, cut out of the chest cavity, as Kajsa’s father ladled out its congealing blood with his father’s old hollowed spoon. Laying in its bed of wild flowers it looked a lot smaller than I had expected and clean of the blood it had been pumping around the extraordinary beast. I placed my camera down upon the grass and picked it up with both hands. It was heavy for its size, clean purples and pinks mottled with sinews of white muscle, firm to the touch, almost like a miniature rugby ball. I inspected for the bruises of heartbreak. Of course there were none, just smooth flat colour, a perfect heart that had been beating frantically but ten minutes before, now lifeless in my open palms, in this small patch of sunlit cotton flowers, under a vivid rainbow shining through the rain; I felt an intense sadness.
Monday 1 October
The boat
A clear blue sky
A dreadful night’s sleep, a night of utter madness, often waking in dreams, returning to bad dreams, awake until 3.30a.m., mind abuzzing and rampantly untired. God, I hate my own brain sometimes and wish it would just let me rest.
Barefoot again, sitting upon a Moroccan pouffe on the deck of the boat, I disturbed a heron on the front anchor, though the grace in which it took flight suggested that there was no feeling of fear, just a need for solitude. A pinch and a socking great punch, it’s the first day of the month, a day
so clear that you can see every inch of the Dickensian foreshore, the odd early-bird mudlark larking about, pied wagtails wagging. I can just hear their chirp, more a ‘chripp’ than a chirp. There was even a solo grey seal hunting in the murky shallows this morning, ignored by all but me.
Tuesday 2 October
At the Mews, shooting for the British Heart Foundation
Card found on the boat yesterday, a rare written note from Ian. A picture of Paris in the mist. 31 October is now twenty-nine days away, our birthday, always a silent and reluctant countdown.
Dearest David
I don’t think it’ll ever be a happy day again because it’ll always be yours and Johnny’s day. But it is a day for some happy memories as well as sadness.
I’ll be thinking of you and Johnny today on your 25th birthday, as I think of you every day.
With all my love for next year, hoping it may bring a little more comfort and happiness. I’m so glad I’ve got you there – I think of you so much.
From your Little Bruv, Ian xx
Life at this time of the year is a close-together batch of anniversaries from 1 October to 11 November, mostly unwanted and uncelebrated, but marked yearly. A countdown to the anniversary of John’s death, but now also peppered with joyful anniversaries including Ange and my official and unofficial weddings in London and Marrakech.
Morning, Wednesday 3 October
Shooting at the Mews, British Heart Foundation
I dined with my brother Ian last night at the Colbert in Sloane Square, my usual table in the corner, an intense dinner of rosé and oysters and more rosé. The head this morning is fuzzy with over-drinking, lack of slumber and too many Solps but the mind is clearer and I chuckled at the memory of John’s insistence that Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday was funnier than Laurel and Hardy’s Sons of the Desert – how wrong he was.
Such mixed emotions from the evening. There were laughs and hugs but far too many sorrows and tears. The postcard I found yesterday in the boat was written by Ian at Leicester; almost childlike really, a second-year medical student just managing to hold it together, excelling in his exams but detached from the family, Mother and me, at The Beeches. Year two of a seven-year medical education, the same education that my son Paros has now embarked upon.
That postcard-writing boy is now sitting next to me in the Colbert; little changed, really. John and me grew up teasing him about his hair, we called him Mushroom for his tendency to look like a large cep, much to his annoyance. It’s a nickname John would still use in later life, knowing it always touched a nerve. I’ve no idea why John teased him so remorselessly and continued to do so into Ian’s student days, often quite meanly. I did ask him but he didn’t really have an answer. Yes, Ian was the annoying little brother who passed every exam with a clean 100 per cent, the gifted, Mensa-busting genius who followed my mother into a glittering medical career, but that shouldn’t have warranted some of the abuse he took from John. Neither should the cheating at cricket, the annoying Sunday-night magic show he occasionally put on, or the ‘Swap Shops’ he used to open in his bedroom, swapping some excellent car-hee cars only to renege on his swaps hours later, or the fact that from a young age he kept audited accounts of his pocket money.
In the summer before John became ill, he invited Ian to spend the day with him at Nucleus. Ian watched him work, met his colleagues and boss Peter, had lunch in the pub by the river. It called an end to the teasing and constant ribbing and I think it was John’s way of saying, ‘Well done, little brother, now go forth and conquer.’ John would be so proud of Ian now, a pioneering Professor of Vascular Surgery, with ‘special interests including complex aortic repair, hyperhidrosis, thoracoscopic sympathectomy, popliteal enlargement, thoracic outlet syndrome, carotid surgery and varicose veins.’ He’s also the editor of a number of books on vascular surgery, has written over 200 publications, is the chair of many a vascular society and has saved countless lives on and off the operating table at St George’s. Father and John would have been chuffed.
Sitting under Monsieur Hulot, he is little changed from that slightly chaotic and annoying, cricket-cheating younger self. Though four years younger, he has always behaved as if four years older than us, the brighter, more mature, more sensible brother. The ‘mushroom’ haircut is no more, his hair now short and spiky and thinning like Father’s, much to his chagrin. His fashion sense still generates a gentle ribbing from me, looking as if he’s just walked out from one of the Italian Gentlemen’s shops you only see in Rome or Milan. Once a little brother, always a little brother. The emotional ‘hit’ of sitting together, just the two of us, for the first time in a year is immediate; tears flow, wine glasses rise, hugs are exchanged. He spoke, I spoke, we agreed on everything, even things we’d always disagreed on, we hugged some more, tears mingled with rosé, promises were made, secrets were undone, unravelled.
I told Ian that we had tracked down Dr S, now Professor S. ‘Professor of what?!’ – the same reaction as Mother. I told him that Ange’s letter had been opened, but ‘returned to sender’. More tears, ‘All he needed to do was apologize, it’s the lack of remorse that upsets me so much,’ he said. I talked to him of Tim, and how missed he is on his sabbatical, his struggles with lone twindom, and again, how it’s the lack of remorse that chokes him, the IRA bombers and their cronies.
I had thought that Ian and Jean-Marian were against me writing my elongated love letter to our lost brother, but I was wrong. What I had failed to do, in the thirty years since his death, is learn to communicate with them as a singleton, as their solo older brother. I thought my presence just upset them with reminders of John. It did, but what hurt them both far more was me isolating myself, cutting myself off from them. As they became closer to each other they felt that I was moving farther and farther away. As a result, they became more and more paranoid about saying the wrong thing, walking continually on eggshells, and texts and emails were misread and misunderstood, secrets were kept, tales untold, barriers raised. Where once a family had been so close, after the tragedy of John’s death we became broken and uncommunicative. Those doctors, and their total lack of care, love and humanity, had driven in wedges where previously there had been none. From the moment of the injection to the coroner’s inquest, these men who had trained to provide care to the sick and needy, through their collective arrogance and unsympathetic stance managed to leave our family broken, scattered, shattered and torn to this very day.
I left Ian last night with a long hug, and the promise of an attempt to return to our relationship of old, teasing and all, and he told me that all he hoped for me is that I find ‘some sort of peace’.
Afternoon
Mother used to hear nightingales at Naworth Castle, and recognized the bird’s song immediately. She believes she heard one in Cheam, we certainly heard one once at The Beeches. Today, as I lay restlessly awake, I listened to a muted dawn chorus, thinking of the gorgeous cacophony at The Beeches. A solo thrush singing among the concrete patios in place of the finches, sparrows and doves of The Beeches.
Last week Ian had Mother checked over: heart, blood pressure, circulation and general wellbeing, but ignoring the cancer. He told me last night that her heart is barely functioning, she is so weak and frail that he is amazed that it works at all, and the circulation to her feet is nigh on non-existent. What is truly amazing is her lack of complaint. She is obviously in a great deal of pain but makes no fuss at all.
Thursday 4 October
Shooting at the Mews, British Heart Foundation. Tick-tock.
A photo album from Mother’s to peruse, compiled in 1974. Highlights include:
John and me on our eighth birthday, at The Beeches. One cake but with sixteen candles, eight each, big front-toothy grins. I’m proudly showing off a new watch on my wrist, and we’re both at the breakfast table in our pyjamas.
Ian’s fifth birthday, his face so serious.
John opening a Meccano set at Christmas, Dad in a suit and tie and apron, cooking the
turkey.
Mother on a steam train, looking so young at thirty-eight, John’s back turned to the camera. I took the photo.
Me, skimming stones, head to toe in orange, John in a blue-stripe jumper, watching from a rock. The Kent coast in summer, a day trip to see Uncle Derek.
Nanna Nicholson, Mother’s mother, rarely smiling, fearsome. ‘Who’s broadcast?’ when she heard a fart. Once swiped me with a metre rule, it missed me and broke in half. She didn’t like Father, which always upset John and I. We called her Banana because banana backwards was ‘ananab’. John and I were fluent in ‘backwards’, our private language.
‘Uncle’ Ronnie, suit and tie, looking always like Dad’s Army’s Captain Mainwaring, cuddling a young and very smiley Jean-Marian.
Jean-Marian, playing her recorder. ABBA and the recorder, her two annoying musical habits.
Christmas 1974, taken by Mother: Father holding Sally the corgi; Ian with newly opened ‘explorers kit’ including camera and binoculars; John, a new camera; me, the Eagle annual; Jean-Marian some Kenyan dolls for her doll collection, a present from her godmother.
Friday 5 October
Radiotherapy, day one
John started his deep X-ray treatment on 5 October 1987. The radiotherapy was to remove the tiny bits of the tumour that had been left from his operation. He was understandably weak after his meningitis and the week of lumbar punctures and heavy antibiotics and painkillers so I helped him down to the room. He opted for the stairs as ‘that’s what his physiotherapist had wanted’, so progress was slow and painful. He was told to lie face down on the table, a torturous version of a massage table with a hole at one end to fit his head into. His face mask, moulded but hard plastic, was designed to allow him to breathe while holding his head rigid. I helped him up and lowered his head as delicately as I could into position. As he leaned forward some of the cerebral fluid ran from his nose into the mask, collecting in its grooves and in the nose area, causing him to splutter and choke. The radiologist wasn’t in the room so we just got on with it but I was alarmed at his choking on the fluid so I got some help from Nurse Douglas, who tried to dab away the liquid.