24. Within two months, I’d received two phone calls...
The twenty-fourth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero bids farewell to his father and seeks solace in the many watering holes of Norwich.
Within two months, I’d received two phone calls…
The first was from the Travelling Companion, whose name on screen produced a sudden and insensate blend of hope and terror within me. I knew from the first syllable she uttered, and by the register of her voice, which was conciliatory but compunctious, that this was to tell me she’d met someone else. If the news of her decision to leave had turned the universe into an abyssal nightmare, then this revelation filled that vacuum with a farrago of rage, contempt, and disbelief.
Suddenly, the mind-forged vision of this other being was at large in the world. And the fact she had the impudence to prefer this person to me was like a sledgehammer in the face. Worse, was the notion that she was telling me this for my benefit, which was what she’d doubtless told herself, convinced it was the ‘right’ thing to do; and yet this was surely an admission meant to clear the way for her new feelings, rather than out of a loyalty to her old ones. Whatever it was, my deepest fear had come true; she now cleaved to another, and the years of our love were like flies to wanton boys.
This anger was still coursing through my veins when the second call came a few days later. It was from a nurse at the Norfolk & Norwich Hospital, who told me that my father had been admitted and was in a ‘serious but stable’ condition. Apparently, he’d being found wandering delirious in the street, with a deep wound to his head. The first thing I thought of was Edgar Allan Poe.
It was almost dark when I arrived at the hospital, and the gloomy ward was quiet except for the muffled coughs of other patients and the various whirrs, clicks and pings of the mechanical sentinels stood watching over them. It was far worse than I’d expected. He was medicated, and when I spoke to him the words barely registered; he responded only with slight movements of the head and occasional half-formed utterances. I sat down and studied his face. When that became too much, I turned away to gaze at all the machines, then at the bacillus-like patterns on the ceiling tiles, which repeated themselves every second iteration; then at the bed, heavy wheels, grey tubing, multiple levers, sheets tucked in with military precision, taut across his feet. Finally, I stared at the large clock on the wall, and the perplexing and contrary motion of the second and minute hands, like tortoise and hare, patience and frenzy, acting out their own version of Bergsonian time. And when there was nothing left to distract me, I turned my face back toward his, which was worryingly colourless, with flakes of skin peeling off from either side of his nose, which somehow seemed bigger and more beak-like now; with eyes, like sinkholes, set back in their sockets.
And each time I looked, I felt the strange surge of my own culpability, which reared up in my brain like an angry animal, and was a prospect so terrifying that almost immediately some other more clement and conciliatory thought emerged to counter it, as my mind leapt to save itself from falling into this newly created chasm of self-contempt from which it would surely be impossible to escape. For hours, I sat pitched between the poles of this terrible mechanism of reproach and denial, suddenly aware of my spiritual and material abandonment of the man who’d given me life. Like some ancient tribesman, I’d killed the king at the first sign of weakness. And so, I pleaded to whatever it was that passed for numen in my soul: What could I do to make it right?
As it turned out, there was nothing to be done. Three days later I received another call from the consultant. He said I needed to come to the hospital straight away. By the time I arrived, walking back into the ward, I could see a gaggle of medical staff surrounding my father’s bed, and so I rushed toward them. I was asked to step away, but as they wheeled him past, our eyes met, and I could tell he was conscious and aware of what was happening. He was looking straight at me; and whereas his irises had been a sort of milky grey during the preceding months, they were now blue again, perhaps bluer than ever before, like the blue he’d used in his youthful paintings; a cool and crystal Paul Newman blue that offered an uncanny counterpoint to the dismal blackness that now surrounded me, and in which dwelt a grim truth, so utterly incomprehensible to those who remain stationed in their hopeless terrestrial vigil, that it cannot be allayed by penance, prayer, or pantheistic platitudes.
Intensive care, some days later. I spoke to the consultant again. There is nothing we can do, he said. Or something to that effect. I looked at him, mute, incredulous. He looked back with the same impassive gaze he’d grown used to giving. There was nothing I could do either, but sit in the small, charmless room reserved for families on such occasions and start making the necessary phone calls. But there really was no one to speak to. His parents were dead; he and my mother hadn’t spoken in years; if he’d kept any of his friends, I didn’t know their names or how to find them. So, I sat there alone in silence for hours waiting for ‘news’, during which terrible time I remember being utterly incapable of controlling the direction of my thoughts, which with eager energy, crawled circuitously about the known earth like some greedy clutter of spiders, intent on finding the most inopportune subjects on which to gorge themselves. Thus, interspersed with all the best and worst of my feelings concerning him, came every awful and conceivable thought concerning the Travelling Companion; a rising tide of carnal visions starring her and her new lover, which propelled me – like Swann – into fresh agonies, wholly inappropriate for the circumstances, but no less insidious.
A few hours later, and the hospital staff couldn’t seem to explain to me what had happened to him, or I couldn’t seem to understand what they were saying. I remember unintelligible terminology and having to sign illegible papers on which the words had seemingly detached themselves from any real-world corollaries. I remember magnolia walls and bad botanical art. I remember lips opening and closing on people’s faces, the glint of teeth, the flap of tongue, but not hearing the sound of their voices. Death is so inscrutable that, for the living, dying is almost immediately transmogrified into administrative process. And so, I did what they told me. I nodded assent in all the right places, thrust leaflets into my pockets, even shook hands with the consultant as I left, thanking him and everyone else for everything they’d done.
Before I realised where I was, I found myself outside the main hospital building, standing alone in the sunshine, with my face raised up to the sky, flush with warmth, pierced by shock, devoid of thought. My father was dead, and I didn’t know what to do next. Freedom’s sudden claim was as indecorous as it could be. Meanwhile, the world kept quiet; no counsel, no succour, no solace; just the same summer breeze blowing litter across the same car park as on my way in.
At least, I thought at last, he’d avoided the hubbub that usually accompanies death in the secular milieu of materialist societies; the unseen uncles and unheard-of cousins, the long-forgotten friends and alien associates, who come to stand around the exanimate body, sigh and shake their disbelieving heads. The agonising moments when language fails these polite gatherings, the rush to think of something to say that isn’t entirely fatuous; or worse, the efforts to inject odd flashes of humour into the proceedings; or worse even than that, the asinine adoption of the argot of the medical profession, the impossible effort to impose some kind of comforting narrative on the process of expiration, which is merely a diversion from the glissades and pirouettes of Death’s dismal little dance. And no one seems to realise or acknowledge that in the middle of all this forced propriety and self-deception, what’s really called for is a very particular combination of utter, world-shattering outrage on the one hand, and calm, thoughtful, metaphysical stoicism on the other.
‘We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain,’ says the Narrator, ‘but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time; it does not occur to us that it can have any connection with the day that has already dawned and can mean that death – or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again – may occur this very afternoon…’
I must have cut a very strange figure in the following days and weeks. If you can imagine experiencing freedom as desolation, this is perhaps the closest way I can describe what I was feeling back then. Suddenly, the two forces – she and he – that had weighed most heavily upon me were gone within a matter of months of one another. Like a satellite thrown out of the stabilising forces of planet and star, I was flung into the cold depths of the cosmos. Or rather, I was alone, drunk, and strung out in Norwich, which is much the same thing. Lost and wasted, wandering the streets for hours, staggering from pub to pub, with no purpose other than to somehow quell the dismal meanderings of my mind, I can’t even remember how long all this lasted. What seems like three or four months was probably only a few weeks at most. But I do remember being aware, albeit fleetingly, and long before I’d discovered the term psychogeography, or read Will Self or Iain Sinclair, of the potential for the physical act of walking to translate into something more meaningful, and even creative, which was a possibility I’d never really considered before, and was perhaps simply a way to convince myself that I wasn’t just trudging hopelessly around in circles; which is exactly what I was doing.
To reinforce this vague and surprising sense of hope (if I can call it that), I began carrying a notebook with me at all times. These were the first efforts I’d made at writing for a while, desperate scratchings meant to allay the feelings of utter futility which were crowding my brain, to inscribe some sort of value onto a reality which suddenly seemed wholly devoid of it. Up until that point, my writing had been little more than an exercise in vanity; a way of imagining myself into the august shoes of my heroes; of pretending to myself that I might one day be like them. But this felt different; more a sanative measure, a means to wrangle the jackals of grief, anger and jealousy; and something I suddenly needed like never before because it was all I had left. Plus, it was a good way to look less conspicuous in a pub when drinking alone.
And so there I was, caught in an unedifying orbit of self-flagellation and alcohol abuse around the inner ring road, a slow trudge through the Golden Triangle, that mesh of semi-salubrious streets between Unthank Road and Earlham Road, rich with the scent of the Travelling Companion, with memories of clasped hands, yearning looks and interlocked lips. The Eaton Cottage. The Lillie Langtry. The Garden House. The Belle Vue. The Alexandra Tavern. Eventually, I’d cross Dereham Road, stop for a few more at The Fat Cat, before heading up St Benedicts Street, to The Ten Bells, then over the river and along Colegate to Fye Bridge Street, to The Mischief, up Tombland, past the cathedral, looping round, past the castle, to The Murderers, and finally back to where I’d started hours before. Pub after pub after pub. All the while, concocting in my mind bleak visions of my absent love cuddled up to her new Brighton beau (handsome, clever, rich), at the same time as picturing my father cast into oblivion, nothing but a billion particles of dust, blown this way and that on the Earth’s eternal winds.
And I’d write out the worst of these thoughts, etched in sesquipedalian prose, so as to begin the process of externalising them, to neuter through narrative. It was all so absurd, so ridiculous, that I’d sometimes find myself bursting out in sudden, breathless gasps of laughter. But mostly, I remember it being like a disturbing and somewhat numb waking dream, which was at its worst during those moments when sobriety cut through, and, temporarily relieved of its shroud, crystalline reality offered itself up for inspection, which was usually enough to send me rushing back to the nearest pub to staunch the pain with whisky. You can imagine what happened to my job.
So, with every streetlight, storefront and paving stone somehow speaking the names of my father and the Travelling Companion, with no gainful employment, and with my mind unspooling still further as the days and weeks passed, I eventually decided to do the only thing I could: run away.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.