I climb the hill on foot. My borrowed boots are a bit large, and my left heel is getting a blister on it. When I walk, I push my toe all the way forward into the boot. My heel comes down a half-centimetre or so from the back, and slides across the insole. For some reason a little patch just off-centre catches against the fabric. It is a slide-rub, the skin dragging and making an elongated patch, slowly filling with clear fluid. Tomorrow, I will resent it. Right now the sensation of the disconnected skin, rough and stretchy and no longer a part of me yet still connected, is a bit disgusting and a bit fascinating.
I remember this hill. It is a deceptive bugger. It is rippled, legacy of long-ago terraced agriculture. Just when you think you’ve done the hard bit, the hard bit begins again. The house is very dark up there. Perhaps they are not in. I climb. The blister stretches.
A car winds by. (Is it them? Will they recognise me? Stop and pick me up? No.) Another memory, of two slender shapes in the doorway of the house, graceful arms waving me off. Good luck. I remember thinking (child surly) that they were gladder to see me go than to return, that they enjoyed their unencumbered time. I remember Gonzo drawing me away to the playground or to school, consoling, endlessly creative. I remember unconditional gratitude. I know, from this distance, that he was lonely too. At the time it seemed like compassion.
Go out and play. That, I remember. Cricklewood Cove was a place so safe I could be left alone. There must have been a childminder or a nursery club. I don’t remember them either. I remember my parents as beautiful shapes waving from the porch, arm in arm. I remember them stepping gingerly through Lego. And yet they are the kind of memory you paint in. I have to strain to recall their faces. That happens too. The face of someone you have known all your life clouds as you look at it, and you realise that you remember them, for who they are and what they mean, far more than you remember what they look like. The mind plays tricks to stop us knowing how disconnected we are.
Another car goes by, executive swish. It could be theirs. It is not. Endless, my expectation of rescue.
Top of the hill. On the flat, the blister is surprisingly painful already. I soften my left knee, stiffen the ankle and foot a little, and keep walking.
There is no one on the veranda, no light on in the kitchen. No surprise.
The gate is dry. The catch is rusty. The metal has not been oiled; I can feel roughness in it through the wood. Voiceless Dragon style: keep contact, let your softness tell you where your enemy is going, when he will stop. Resistance is information. The gate resists, a tiny thorn of decaying metal snagging the hinge. I lean into my arm, and the rust breaks. The tiny flecks of my enemy tumble to the ground. The gate swings open.
The front door is painted black, glossy wrought-iron black. The key is where it should be, under the statue of the goddess Diana—a bit racy for Cricklewood Cove, now that I see it as an adult, with one breast bare and a very short toga covering her hips as she runs.
Key turns in the lock; it’s quiet. I always have to shout to attract attention when I come in. Although I also seem to remember them being there, waiting. Well. They could hardly do that this time.
“Hi! I’m home! Just me. Hi.” The words fall flat on timber and paint.
There is no one here. The house is empty. It smells of empty, of old sheets, of resin leaking from wooden heirloom furniture, and dust. I walk down the hall, feeling that the walls are contracting around me, knowing it for a child’s perspective. The hall isn’t shrinking. I am larger. The hall was a grown-up place, where doors were answered and post delivered and exotic guests were welcomed (although I don’t know who, now that I think about it), and where I was relinquished to Gonzo’s care each morning and handed back by him later, or the following day. By the time I went to Jarndice, they were so rarely here. I used the back-door key, lived my own, sovereign life. In the intervening time we have somehow never spoken. There was no rift, just distance and time. I know they survived the war. I heard it somewhere, I think, or perhaps I just realise that I have not grieved, and from that I deduce their continuance.
The glacier room has huge windows and a great, throne-like chair. I remove the sheet and look at it. I remember it another colour, as if seen at dusk, a golden glow upon it. The shoulders and back of the chair are bleached from direct light. The room is filled with ghosts. Ghost legs. Ghost cocktails. Ghost parties. What parties? I remove some more sheets. I do not know the other furniture, just this chair. The one which is visible from the window. Have I sustained a head injury at any time, to forget my own life here? In the far wall there is a door. It leads to my father’s den, mysteries of maleness. Will I find him in there, skin like parchment, dead these many years? Or making love, passionately, to a new wife? Is that why I haven’t heard from them? I open the door with caution onto the panelled snug, balance to go down two steps, because the den was excavated to make it warm in the Cove’s occasional chill, and for privacy besides.
The door opens onto a cupboard, bare and cold. Only the door is familiar—imposing, ornamental and false.
Rebuffed, I walk through the kitchen to the back, open the cellar door, which leads down to my old apartment, where Theresa Hollow made love to me the night of the great cannibal dog slaying. A narrow stair leads not down, but up. The room at the top is a sort of ghastly boudoir, filled with old-lady trophies.
I do not know this house.
It becomes increasingly obvious—painfully obvious—as I wander through it. I know it the way a stranger does, a passer-by or a curious child: I know it from the outside, its public spaces and the rooms in easy reach of the windows. I may have looked in. I have never inhabited it. And yet I remember my house behind this door. And where, in my home with Leah, this was clear evidence of infidelity, of terrible betrayal, here it simply cannot be. Impossible to imagine Gonzo has seduced my parents too, however great his successes. They have not divorced me and taken up with him. They have not remodelled the house to make the point to me. This was never my house to misremember. Points in evidence: the people who lived here had no children. Their home has no pencil marks on the frame of the kitchen door, no torn carpet or scratched paint. There is no room which might have been mine, no bunk bed, no cluttered, dingy bedroom where the young me might have sulked and sweated his way to adulthood. And the pictures of the inhabitants are not pictures of my parents. The names on the old letters in a tin box are not familiar, let alone familial. This house has a history, and I am not in it.
My chest is very tight. My eyes are itchy, sandy in their sockets. I can feel the pulse in them. I wonder if they will rupture. I turn, and turn, and turn, or perhaps the house does, or the world. Did I dream a life? Did I, perhaps, make it all up? Yes. Yes! That must be it. My real life is so drab or grim that I have created a fresh one from scratch. I have lost my grip. I am weeping on the landing, precarious. My mother—if she existed—would tell me to be careful, and when this did not penetrate my awful grief, would sit below me on the third step down, and hold me in her arms and wait to be sure I did not fall. I have no mother. The step is empty. Like the house. Like, in fact, every place I go. Gonzo Lubitsch, I believe I hate you.
I roar without words, until my lungs are empty too. I laugh, and the sound of it is loud and unsettling, which encourages me, and I laugh louder. Then I cry, and the two become one. Quite deranged, sobbing and whooping in the dark of a burglarised manse. Deranged? I ponder. Yes! That would explain everything! My alternative life unfolds before me.
Behold the madman! His name is Crazy Joe Spork, a tinker and Freeman of the Open Road! Crazy Joe once served his country bravely, but went a bit far into the dark and lost his marbles, hence his sobriquet. Now he sees all authority figures with loofahs instead of heads! Crazy Joe was discharged from the army for washing his craggy thighs with an officer’s toupeé (still attached!). Alas, this same disability rendered him quite unfit for civilian life. After some unhappy incidents he became a drunk and a jailbird, and his medals were forgotten—sold, in fact, for low
grade hooch. More recently, asleep one night against the fence of the pumping station where he makes his home (the breezes from the air-con vents are warm, the soldiers keep him safe from mountain lions), he heard a grand kerfuffle and charged to investigate what he took to be a thief making off with his moonshine. But no! Baser villainy was afoot that night, and some fragment of the decorated veteran resurfaced. Slipping through the blasted gates, he found a crew of heroes boldly struggling to save the world, set upon by a dastardly bandit! No slouch is Joe, for all his bathtime confusions, and taking charge he led them to a hallowed victory. Sadly, even as his broad shoulders laboured to achieve their goal, his traitorous, malfunctioning brain was spontaneously inventing a long and glorious history with his new chums, which fantasy unfortunately brought him into conflict with the man whose wife he had inadvertently appropriated! Shot in self-defence was Crazy Joe Spork, and quite right too, tumbling from a moving vehicle even as he lunged with murderous intent for his rival’s spongy head. Injured but too tough to die, he wandered to and fro, and thus came he to this old house, with which he has no connection beyond the wild visions of his imagined world, but onto which he projected a childhood by turns idyllic and neglected, with parents whose faces were appropriated from a mail-order advertisement. What will he do, confronted with proof of his own madness? Broken on the wheel of truth, his strange fixation lies in pieces in his lap. Will he heal? Perhaps crawl up from his distempered pit and find a proper job, buy nice clothes and settle with some kind lass of lardy middle, who will care for him and bring more Sporks into the world? A colony of bucolic brats and a spreading wife, possibly some contented pigs, would be a fitting end for this good, unchancy man. Or is it Loofahland henceforth for Crazy Joe, and acts of ever-greater violence until at last he stands, picked out in the spotlight of a police helicopter, shaking one enormous fist? “Put your hands in the air, Joe, and give yourself up! Father Dingle’s here, your old headmaster!” But Father Dingle’s pabulums are of no interest to Joe; he roars his King Kong fury at theology’s finest and the consolation of Mother Church. An elemental, downtrodden and misunderstood, he wants only revenge of gruesome stripe. Has he hostages? Perhaps. Or bombs. It hardly matters. “Joe, your mother wants to talk to you!” The negotiator’s trump card is a disaster, fatally misdealt: Crazy Joe Spork hates his mother, consequence of long years spent locked away in the closet for sins against her endless list of fatuous commandments. Bellowing irrelevantly that he will not eat his sprouts, he whips a vast and improbable gun from beneath his tattered coat and blazes away, killing dozens; is, without delay, perforated and transformed for the most part into a red mist by the thousand rifles all around. His head tumbles to the ground and rolls wetly to the feet of Police Captain Malone.
“Garn,” says Captain Malone, “that’s a bad ’un, right enough.” And he heads home, red-headed (though not in the same way as poor Crazy Joe), to eat with his Irish wife and freckly rugrats. Over tea and sausage, he teaches the children to say “eejit” and “Pawdraig” and is well satisfied with his day.
Deep breaths. In halfway. Stop. Fill your lungs, from the diaphragm. Stop. Out halfway, pushing with the belly. Stop. Empty your lungs. Stop. Stop laughing. Yes. Stop crying. Repeat.
I am curled in a ball on the landing, and I have leaked tears into the carpet. And this grief, this immense, inconsolable upset, takes me inevitably to the place I need to go, to the sandpit where I met Gonzo. At first I go there only in my head, recollection triggered by this same horrid sense of alienation and distress. Since that time only this has hurt so much. But shortly I am there in the flesh as well, a tallish, thinnish man with wayward hair, standing in a public sandpit in the middle of the night—the day has moved around me as I screamed and rocked in the empty house. I am observed from a respectful distance by some teenagers who are perplexed to find their trysting ground and occasional drugstore invaded by a tearful nutjob, but who—as I remove my shoes to run my toes through the sand—draw a little closer in the hope that I will do something dreadful or disgusting which will be worth talking about.
The sand is rougher than I remember. Perhaps they have refilled it with a different sand, a cheaper one. They must have done. The old sand was imported. The beach it came from probably does not exist any more. It was white sand. This is yellow. It holds more moisture, for longer. My toes are cold.
Across the sandpit and thirty years distance, near enough, I spy the infant Gonzo. He has taken possession of a rough circle about twice his own height in diameter. He has rolled around on it to make it flat, then carefully and meticulously smoothed the dimples made by his protruding joints with his flat-soled shoes. The arena is ready. Missing, however, is an opponent. In the sand Gonzo can draw his battalions and sculpt the terrain; he can render the world exactly the way he wants it. What he cannot do is replace the missing element. His shoulders droop, and he lets his face fall into shadow. Older brothers are supposed to be immune to accident.
They had The News two weeks ago, and the funeral on Friday: Marcus Lubitsch is dead. Gone for a soldier, killed in a dry country, laid to rest half a mile away with honours and the acrid smell of gun-powder as his friends sent him on his road. The smoke made Gonzo’s eyes water and the bang made him flinch, for which he feels guilty. Marcus did not flinch at anything—not even the shot which killed him. Some part of Gonzo still feels that if he had just been nicer to him, Marcus might have come back alive, instead of dead. He tried to say this to his mother on Wednesday afternoon, and she shouted at him to be quiet and then apologised (something she has never done before) and wrapped him in enormous arms and shuddered all around him. Gonzo’s tears disappeared entirely in his mother’s tidal wave, his hugest howlings dwarfed by hers.
Marcus Maximus Lubitsch: earthbound god, companion, gap in the landscape; Gonzo’s instinct is to re-create him. In his mind he carries Marcus and all the things they have done together. He can still hear his brother’s voice, knows roughly what Marcus would say and do in any given interaction. So he can still play with Marcus, even though he knows he will never play with Marcus again. He can share his bereavement with Marcus, hear his brother’s voice telling him it will all be all right soon, taste the blandishing ice cream of sibling bribery. This is what he wants to do, desperately.
But Gonzo, at the same time, has begun to appreciate that there are things in the world other than himself. He senses that continuing to play with Marcus is somehow wrong. When his brother was put in the ground, certain things became not-right which had always been perfectly okay till then. For example, on the day before The News came, Gonzo had a tea party whose attendees included two aliens, a talking mouse named Clarissa, Marcus in his tank (all soldiers have tanks and drive them everywhere they go) and three former kings of Scotland in various states of decapitation. There was nothing odd or unsuitable about this. His mother provided cake for all of them, but insisted that the mouse, the aliens and the kings have magic, invisible cake, and that Gonzo and Marcus share one tangible slice between two. In the event, Marcus pronounced himself not hungry, so Gonzo ate the whole piece.
After The News, though, this wasn’t possible any more. Marcus was perfectly able to be in several places at once before he died, but it is somehow part of the process of his dying that this is no longer the case. Gonzo—lacking the words to express his understanding—believes this is because Marcus, alive, could be brought up to speed when he came home on what he and Gonzo had been doing while he was away. Marcus, dead, is complete and unalterable. He will never recover these absentee experiences. They are therefore some kind of theft or trick. Pretending to be with him now diminishes his death and as a consequence the preciousness of his life. Refusing temptation, Gonzo is bereaved twice.
However, he knows what to do. After The News had been imparted and everyone cried—which was awful—there was The Conversation. Old Man Lubitsch took Gonzo on a long walk, perhaps the longest walk they have ever been on together, longer even than the time they went to the very top o
f Aggerdean Bluff to look at the sea and stare into the mansion, through its grimy windows at the ghostly tented furniture and solemn rooms. Gonzo’s father told his son to grieve without reservation or embarrassment until he could grieve solemnly and inwardly, and then finally to hang up his tears and wear them only occasionally, as befits the true men of the heart. Grief is not a thing to be ashamed of or suppressed, he told Gonzo. Nor yet is it a thing to cherish. Feel it, inhabit it and leave it behind. It is right, but it is not the end. Old Man Lubitsch could barely bring himself to say the last word aloud.
Gonzo considered this, and then announced that he had some questions, but that he didn’t want to ask silly questions or bad questions and he didn’t know which ones these might be. Old Man Lubitsch said that there were no questions Gonzo could not ask, here, with his father, at such a time. So Gonzo unburdened himself of the key issues arising from the matter, in no particular order: Why did someone kill Marcus? Would they now kill Gonzo? How would Gonzo, without Marcus, play various games they had played together? Could Gonzo have Marcus’s enormous hat with antlers on? Should Gonzo dedicate himself forthwith to the speedy eradication of those responsible, by deed, accident or omission for Marcus’s death? If he did so, would he still have to hand in homework? Who would walk with Gonzo to school? Would Ma Lubitsch make him a new brother? Please could it not be a sister? Was Ma all right? Did what had happened to Marcus hurt a very great deal? Was it Gonzo’s fault at all? Did Gonzo’s parents still love him, even if it was? Would there be cake at dinner this evening? Was Marcus in heaven, as the Evangelist asserted, or was it possible he was haunting the Lubitsch house and looking after them all for now and evermore? And had Marcus, as he had at one time intimated he might, purchased a puppy for Gonzo, and would the puppy still arrive or was it in some way made moot by the death of its sponsor? Was Gonzo’s father all right too?