Diary of a Lone Twin

by David Loftus

  Stepping back from the table, seeing him there, skinny and weak, his right side drooped and barely moving, face down, coughing into his mask, was heartbreakingly sad. Only four weeks earlier he had been fit and strong, happily playing cricket with me, Debbie and Peter and his Nucleus team, a designer at the peak of his ability, bowling spinners and thwacking balls for six. Happily in love with Samantha. It was beyond horrendous how far life had changed and how much he had suffered in such a short space of time. Suddenly I missed our father terribly. I was aware John couldn’t see my tears, but might be able to sense them, so when I was asked to leave the room I did so with a gentle squeeze of his good left hand and went to call Mother. The vision of him lying there in the treatment room, strapped into place, choking on the fluid from his sensitive brain, coughing and spluttering as if drowning, is an image that is seared into the memory banks of my own headaches.

  Afternoon

  A quiet day of editing and a quick portrait shoot at the Colbert in the dull grey afternoon. Summer seems to have breathed its last.

  * * *

  The week of 5 October progressed painfully slowly. I’d work on my illustrations at night and in the early hours of the mornings I’d jump into a taxi up to see John. Sometimes Samantha would be there, and Mother if she could get a break from her patients, but between us at least one of us would try to be with him. He’d started a cycle of radiotherapy in the morning followed, while he had the energy, with physiotherapy. It was on one of these days that I found him, still in his pyjamas, coming out of the hospital chapel. He’d always been an atheist, at times uncomfortably vocal about it. I myself was a hypocritical agnostic Christian, i.e. praying when in trouble (as we were then), but disbelieving conversationally, not sure what to think in all other times.

  John had been vocally anti-Catholic with me in conversation. I asked him about his visit to the chapel and he just said, ‘Well, it can hardly do me any harm in here . . .’ As I shuffled him back to his bed it felt like an eternity since Richmond Park and our game of cricket, but he was positive and we began to talk about things to do when he got out, which was something all the doctors and specialists were discussing. It very much felt that this was the beginning of John’s recovery, that the worst was over, and now would come a period of recovery, treatment and physio to return him to his previous self.

  As John mounted the stairs, I put my hand on his shoulder to steady him and noticed some long fine hairs on the back of my hand. As he had been warned about and dreaded, his hair had begun to fall out from the radiotherapy. I’m sure he was aware, but we didn’t talk about it.

  Saturday 6 October

  The Mews Rain, rain, tick-tock

  Spent the day quietly, not leaving the Mews. Persistent rain falling today in London, for the first time in months.

  We had a surprise visitor last night in the shape of Simon (‘Farmer’) Jones, one of my Musketeers and closest chums, beaming smile and ruddy face, always smelling subtly of fresh milk. He’d driven down from his Lincolnshire dairy to see me ‘because he felt something was up’. We talked late into the night, polishing off a small truckle of his ‘poacher’ cheese and me a bottle of Whispering Angel to his small glass, Ange asleep in our bed, deliberately giving us space to chat into the wee hours. Simon is as spiritual a person as one could meet, as good as a person could be. Listening to Simon reminded me of times spent in Windermere in the Bahamas, the four of us, Tim, our mutual best friend Jeff, Simon and me, talking later and later into the night, our girlfriends asleep, the sound of the crashing Atlantic waves.

  We’d wander down between the palms and the casuarina trees to Atlantic beach to watch the sunrise. Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, Easter Day, Midsummer’s Day, we did them all. Simon’s voice is like the waves, euphoric and lightly soporific, talking of out-of-body experiences, spiritualism and unconditional love, it’s akin to being hugged. Some of the happiest times of my life have been spent in the company of these three chaps, whether lounging louchely about, zipping through the clouds or skipping through the waves. I was the happiest I’d been for years. It’s a funny old world.

  Sunday 7 October

  Driving along the Thames towards Cheam and Mother, Ange and I were listening to an old episode of Desert Island Discs in which Kirsty Young asks Tom Hanks why he became an actor. He chokes back a tear and says, ‘It was loneliness.’

  I sit in the car, listening to Agnus Dei, the adagio for strings, my mind drifting, the passing treetops blurring, and thought about my own loneliness and how it has infected almost everything I have done.

  I gave up a very successful career as an illustrator because of loneliness, swapping the solitary drawing board for the company of strangers, semicircled behind one’s back, watching the photographer’s every move. I dated totally unsuitable but beautiful girls because of loneliness and the jealousy at John’s settled and beautiful relationship with Samantha. And then, a month after starting to date a fellow illustrator, Debbie, John became ill, dying weeks later, and I was plunged into an ocean of loneliness so dark and deep that I thought I would never recover, never find my way to the surface.

  I once read an article in The Independent that featured a ‘Top ten types of people to avoid having a long-term relationship with’. It was meant to be lighthearted, and I seem to remember that pop star was number one. But identical twins was number two, and photographer number three. They jokingly even said that the only thing worse than an identical twin was a lone identical twin. My relationship with Debbie, according to the paper, was doomed from the kick-off.

  I met her at the Seven Dials art gallery. Debbie was very bright, and a talented artist. She looked Greek or Italian, though thirty years later her actual heritage is still a mystery to me. The stress I suffered after John’s death is such that there is little I can remember now of our courting days. John became ill and the amount of time I spent with him in hospital soon became an issue.

  There I was, running between my gloomy bedroom at The Beeches, the oncology unit, the neurology unit and courting Debbie, who was about as bewildering and mysterious as one could imagine. After John died I felt under a huge amount of pressure, especially around her and my other chums, not to be sad. Be normal. It was a Herculean task. I’d often cry for two hours before I went out to meet them in the King’s Road, to try to ‘dry out my tear ducts’, feeling that somehow if I cried enough beforehand there would be no more tears to cry.

  Bumping into Dr S on the Underground was my first journey into town after Johnny was buried and it set me back a month or two. I made several trips to the Lake District with Debbie and Peter and Janet. I remember some climbing and walking, croquet in the garden, but mostly I remember drinking. In the pub, The George; in the garden playing games; late candlelit nights, the soundtrack of This Mortal Coil and the Cocteau Twins. Beer, red wine, vodka. Endless bottles, a river of alcohol, never-ending. Even up mountains, hairbrained risks at every corner. And then tears, tears in bed, on the stairs, in the forests. I was an absolute mess. And there would be another shout of ‘Hurrah!’ from Peter. More Pimm’s lined up in the garden, more games, more wine, more fireside tears, more booze.

  How I survived that road to self-destruction I do not know. Somehow my career continued to climb and I became established as one of a small handful of top illustrators in Europe. I commanded large fees, created book covers, album covers, wine labels, Tube posters. My images were everywhere, but I hated them. I felt like a fraud. I’d even begun to cut up some of John’s painted backgrounds and use them in my illustrations. I told people they were mine.

  I married Debbie in October 1990, surrounded by friends and family, in the Norman church behind John Loftus House in Thames Ditton. It says a lot about my state of mind how blurry my memory of the day is. I remember the late-October sun shone, and standing between Tim and Jeff, my cousin Edward and brother Ian, waiting for Debbie in her white Cadillac. Uncomfortable in my first-ever morning suit.

  Tim, Jeff and probably Mo
ther, also grieving, were the only ones who knew how terrible I really felt. They were my three rocks, my supports.

  I was in no fit state, and neither was Debbie, really. She married a seriously damaged, incredibly lonely, highly emotional and needy, self-destructive lone twin, flailing in the dark of our relationship: desperate to be loved, silently screaming for physical and mental warmth. Debbie was beautiful, but enigmatic and aloof. Straightaway I insisted she kept her old flat as a studio to work in so that we could have our own creative spaces. There were immediate problems between us: me blaming her coldness, she blaming my abject misery. We were both right and we were both wrong.

  At marriage guidance years later I had to laugh when she was asked to list the negatives of living with me. The list was so long that when she had finished the counsellor’s chin had almost hit the floor.

  It was sitting in La Delizia restaurant in the Fulham Road that she asked me whether she should move back to her mother’s. Fearful of being left alone, I asked her what she wanted, how I could make life easier for her and she stunned me by saying, ‘I want a child.’

  Fear of being alone, fear of fatherhood, most of all, fear of losing a child; suddenly I was confronted with all my fears. Not to mention loneliness and mortality. I could barely function as an adult let alone be a good father. Nevertheless, just over a month later, I had a call at the Delano hotel in Miami Beach. I remember that No Doubt’s ‘Don’t Speak’ was playing on a vast screen of MTV, as Debbie told me she was pregnant.

  Eight months later I got a call, in the same room at the Delano, to say that she was in labour and that our son was about to be born. I abandoned my shoot, jumped on a Freddie Laker flight, sitting in the cockpit as there was no room on board, and I still made it back to London with time to spare. Though we had both decided that I wasn’t going to be there, I was at least nearby. Debbie gave birth to Paros, three weeks early, like her, sporting Mediterranean brown skin and dark thick hair. He was, and still is, furry all over.

  That weekend at Chelsea and Westminster made the newspapers the Monday following, with a perfect storm of births, emergencies and deaths. One mother had died, one baby, and Debbie had only just pulled through a sixty-five-hour birth. With the utter chaos of blood loss and screaming, she had survived what the doctor called ‘the equivalent of a major car crash’.

  Paros, however, looked, and has forever looked, totally unfazed by anything. Paros, the island of my and Johnny’s youth, a name given to him by Debbie as a nod to John, a gesture greatly appreciated. Paros Erik Loftus, now a third-year medical student at St George’s, where his uncle Ian is Professor of Vascular Surgery, and where the coroner at John’s inquest trained to be a doctor.

  Where Paros was a dark and swarthy baby, Pascale was the polar-bear opposite, pale-skinned, blonde and blue-eyed and three weeks late. I wasn’t present at either birth but, after the near disaster of Paros’ birth, my mother was with Debbie when Pascale was born. I was on the boat, cuddling the two-year-old Paros who had flatly refused to sleep since his birth.

  Pascale and Paros – the two Ps – two peas in a pod. It is they who saved my life and I do thank Debbie, with all my heart, for persuading me into fatherhood. By then I was sharing a bedroom with Paros and something had to give, so I bought a tall terraced house beside Battersea Bridge, a stone’s throw from Candy Coloured Tangerine, the narrowboat we were then living in.

  Debbie and the Ps moved into no. 31 but I kept the boat and began to spend more and more nights there, while Debbie became a full-time mother. It was around this time that a neighbour, a barrister called Paul, popped in to take the piss out of me. When he walked onto my houseboat I was half-naked, doing pull-ups on the roof of the boat, with crazy unwashed hair, skin the colour of the river, a half-smoked joint in my mouth and a bottle of rosé half-empty beside me. In my defence, it was the first and last time I have ever smoked a joint, your honour, and, being a non-smoker, I was choking like a hound.

  Settling me down into a deck chair, he invoked ‘barrister’s confidence’. I told him how desperately unhappy and lonely I was, how I thought that I needed to learn how to be a singleton, to spend time on my own. I pointed to one of the many small whirlpools that eddy around the boat’s hull and said, ‘That’s how I feel!’ I was lost, swirling aimlessly in life, unhinged and unstable. If I’d been asked to write a ‘be thankful for’ list at that moment it would have read:

  My mother.

  My Ps – Paros and Pascale.

  My photography, particularly, at that time, my work with Jamie.

  The boat, Stow, that I’d moved in to, a.k.a. Candy Coloured Tangerine.

  Rosie Scott, my PA, my assistant and my rock.

  Debbie was still a big part of my day-to-day life, but she had become a mother, and a great mother too. I was, understandably, second fiddle to the Ps. I was the depressive mud walker, and actually it was okay, living apart gave me the space to breathe as a photographer, to travel on commissions without worry of upsetting Debbie. She once told me how much easier it was when I was away, the kids always getting the best of me upon my return.

  It couldn’t carry on forever though. I so desperately needed human warmth, love and kindness. I began to date a stream of beautiful but totally unsuitable young ladies, each relationship involving far too much drinking and over-neediness, usually by me, turning to feelings of crushing claustrophobia and paranoia, particularly a fear that the relationship might affect my time spent with my Ps, which inevitably it did. That metaphorical whirlpool was getting bigger and bigger, faster and faster, sucking me under.

  Meeting Ange changed it all. Debbie likes to tell me that Ange is lucky, she has inherited the ‘good’ me, the ‘recovered’ me, whereas Debbie had the impossible, sick me. It’s not as simple as that; I’m still prone to prolonged bouts of darkness and at times I teeter on the edge of something much worse; my nights are a continuous battle of good and evil, evil often winning through. I am, as I have said before, overemotional, incredibly needy both physically and emotionally, prone to manic happiness and extreme darkness, certainly not a walk in the park. I do, however, have a strong survival instinct, ambition in my craft, and a maturity that I didn’t have when I met Debbie. I regret many of my relationships in my life, but how could I regret a relationship that ultimately brought me the Ps, and the freedom to work as I now do?

  * * *

  In Cheam with Mother, she can barely walk, but, as ever, endures it with little grumble and good humour. I’ve noticed that she has started wearing her ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ bracelet and necklaces outside of her clothing. She cheerfully sits with us over tea and flapjacks, anointing her aching limbs with a mixture of olive and hemp cream, her pale skin incredibly smooth but painfully thin over her brittle bones. I often photograph her hands. The way her long and elegant fingers intertwine, the way she holds her forehead in moments of anguish and despair: Brexit, Boris Johnson, Gerry Adams, Donald Trump, Martin Amis, all warrant a clasp of the forehead. As ever, subjects are diverse and the Good, the Bad and the Ugly are all covered, from nightingales to the Hornseys, to the Lake District, dear Tim and his sabbatical, Hadrian’s Wall to Heath Robinson. Smiles and laughs and tears, an average hour spent with our dear mother, like riding a joyous roller coaster.

  Tuesday 9 October

  Stunning, cloudless skies, the clearest light. I watch a high-in-the-sky ‘V’ of migrating geese flying south, so high I could only just hear their call. They seem happy in their formation; I’d be happy flying south for winter.

  My sister Jean-Marian just wrote to me, including a letter, a poem really, to John, as follows:

  Dearest John

  Do you still remember?

  The long summer days on the Orkney Sands, collecting cowrie shells and cycling in the dunes?

  Building dams in the rivers of the Lake District, and swimming in the icy water of Hynam Pool?

  Playing potato tennis over a Northumberland farmhouse, catching a mouse in a lampshade, tossing hay
bales at each other?

  Barbeques in the garden, whatever the weather, at any time of the year?

  Picnics at Rottingdean?

  Inter-railing?

  Old Greece?

  New friends who came and stayed?

  Dad sat in the corner of the kitchen as we all came in from school?

  Smoke rising over the shed door?

  Do you still see?

  California poppies?

  The autumn colours of the chestnut trees brightened in the late sunlight?

  Collecting conkers?

  Fireworks nights wrapped up against the cold evening air, exploding in the sky?

  Watching Guy Fawkes at the top of the immense blaze?

  Birthdays?

  Do you still feel?

  The excitement of waiting at the door as Dad put the final touches to the Christmas morning?

  The cold snow against your face?

  Standing in the rain?

  The wind against your face on your motorbike, or standing on the end of Brighton Pier?

  Pebbles under foot?

  Can you still hear?

  Sally barking, and pushing under your legs?

  Childhood memories of happy days?

  Playing and fighting?

  ‘Boys being boys’?

  Do you still play?

  With toy hand-painted soldiers

  Strawbod?