Britical

 

New York City

 

 

"You help yourself to life", she would tell me during the last year or so, adding recently that it was something she admired - and I would tell her it’s what you taught me, and especially lately by example, so there.

As things had wound down in England and I was left with nothing to occupy my mind, I could barely wait to get out. Flying from England to New York I worried that the world’s epicenter of helping yourself (and I don’t mean in the negative sense of grabby opportunism) would not feel like home. I thought that the cause of my absence might have changed the city for me, as it had seemingly changed the country I was from. Unless that was just a symptom of the flat wrongness of the calm I feel. In the peripheral vision is the thing I can’t shake. I haven’t on purpose decided not to look at it either. But when I try, I can’t see it properly. Out of focus, it looks unfamiliar and quite absurd.

I am informed you can get a good four months out of Total Denial. If I help myself to heaps of denial, no doubt the "life" bit will follow, won’t it? Friends who have "been through it" have offered the correct yet ultimately useless advice that "there are no right or wrong ways" to doing so. (Although I sure can think of a few…oh yessie….and perfectly do-able too if there’s a jury trial.) But a map would be nice. A (non-New-Age-claptrap) guide to whatever this is, or isn’t. And I don’t mean Jesus.

People had left messages, cards, and emails offering coffee, walks, dinner, chats, drinking, seventy-five Valium or anything, anything they could do. I don’t know what to tell them. I suspect my Mother might encourage them to help her daughter uphold the noble quality of Helping Yourself to Life. But that’s the awful point (she can’t. She isn’t. She will never, ever again.). I certainly qualify for some sort of messy binge-type rampage - drugs, alcohol, gambling, adding a few inches to the bungee cord and so on. But I doubt that was what she meant. And, annoyingly, it holds no appeal. Opium might be O.K. for a night, but it’s impossible to find here. Travelling could be a cure, but I hold no funds. Which leaves us, I think, at distractions in the form of people.

My lovely friends and I….I sense we all feel a bit useless and tactless. Sitting there. What to say. What not to say. Can we make a mundane joke? Or is this inappropriate? We all tip-toe together through the minefield. It’s all so…..peculiar. And so, it occurred to me, if one feels a bit unreal right now, perhaps spending time with someone equally unreal is the solution; someone met randomly and briefly in a bar just before you left for Paris. Just before it happened. Someone a bit like that, say. Because in Paris, the morning she died, you may have hung up with the hospital, and logged, shamefully, straight onto Facebook. Your excuse was one you didn’t need, but anyway you were thinking the little chat box might have someone in it you felt like talking to, but it didn’t, and any sensible sorts of friends on the Eastern Seaboard would be asleep at 6am on a Sunday. Then you thought about calling your Mother, remembering with sudden pleasure that the time difference was only an hour from here and she should be home eating lunch about now. Ooops.

So let’s think about this: what if…what if….as you’re watching the stupid Facebook box, the stranger from the bar pop up, a green dot next to his name. He is Online. What ever is he doing up at 6am in New York on a Sunday morning? Burning his boss’s eggs as he types with one hand to you, he replies (you, some random stranger he met briefly in a bar who is thousands of miles away). You wonder then why someone would be frying eggs for their boss on a Sunday morning, but you have more important things on your mind and go ahead and drop the bomb. You tell him, a would-be stranger on a train, what happened. He sounds shocked & concerned - genuinely. Even though the night you met he was sarcastic & dry and had even declared with deliberate cheesiness, "We’ve talked a lot tonight. If you give me your number we can talk less next time." Har har, you laughed, because it’s the bestest terrible line you’ve heard since the guy who said, "Do you have any Portuguese in you? Do you want some?" You might have replied, knowing he meant it, "I don’t think so, but I guess it’s a good line if you read Neil Strauss". Later, you realise you said this despite being amused and vaguely intrigued, and later still, curious….so you relented. And now, in Paris, he keeps you on the line, for all you know typing and burning away his whole career.
 
He will call you the weekend you get back to see how you are and offer to drive immediately two and a half hours back to the city, right now, to take you for a drink. Not in a creepy and desperate way, mind you. You can tell by his words that he isn’t a serial killer or a stalker and also that he’s fearful of coming across as taking-advantage-of-the-bereaved.

And what else might he be, generally speaking? We will make him 29, with an accent, but not an American one, since like you, he should be from somewhere else. Maybe Australia. He is to be good-looking: green eyes, 6′1" - maybe an ex-model (because in this recipe, I’m sure we can agree, it’s important to gaze at universally acknowledged beauty when you’re sad, isn’t it?). And, bearing in mind that the moment the plane took off from Heathrow and there was nothing left to do except think, and that thinking chased away your appetite, we could add in that he is a professional chef who is skilled in cooking exactly the food you love. And how much does he love nothing better than giving massages? Yep. That, too.

You have dinner with him two weeks and one day after she died and three days after you get back to New York, which may or may not be a home anymore - you can’t tell. That’s the thing. You suggest meeting on the Northwest corner of Gramercy Park because you always liked it there, because he might like to look up and see how that house has a top floor with French windows and a roof garden. Plus there are squirrels. He is a few minutes late (you knew he’d get very lost) and you spy him hurrying towards you accompanied by some man from whom he’d asked directions to said specific yet obscure corner. He is grinning from ear to ear, but trying not to. The man has a book about William Hamilton, and he shakes your hand, looks approvingly at you, and tells you both to have fun. You walk to the restaurant, which is small and quiet, with a menu that is deliberately all things pure and clean and good - and, being New York, accordingly priced. You tell him to order for you, which is only right because first, he’s a chef, and second, you became sick, in the last two weeks, of making all those endless, heartbreaking fucking decisions. He orders with less fuss than a regular diner. The waiter has no clue he’s a chef, and this - you think to yourself as he makes you eat dessert - is very cool of him. In return, you manage to be pretty much your wry, sarcastic self and you certainly don’t do any crying. And this is very cool of you.

Afterwards, standing by the fountain in Madison Park at 11pm, you tell him proudly how you got through the funeral. An old friend in New York who knows you well had emailed you the day before and said: "Remember, you’re a soldier. A Spartan. Monster trucks." This is the mantra that you said in your head, as you sat deliberately alone in the chapel to avoid the influence of snifflers, as you walked up to the front to say your speech with your shoulders back, surveying the audience with plenty of eye contact. And afterwards, at the food and drink thing afterwards, the "after funeral party", chanelling Bill Clinton, you were all smiles but also solemn diplomacy. He looks at you carefully, despite these cheery assurances, and then he sits on a bench a few feet away where you hear him quietly call his friends and cancel his allegedly tentative plans as he watches you gazing blankly and stupidly at some tree. Then you sit on the swings in the deserted playground nearby and he pushes you. But it’s one of those weird tyre swings which you don’t get, and this makes you irritated and restless. You stand up and linger there together by the gate. You feel him looking hard at you through the dark as if he wants to do something but is not sure if he should. But he does anyway, and you think: brave boy. Then you take Park Avenue up to Grand Central Station where he shows you exactly how the Whispering Arch works, which, though you have tried for years and years, you have never been able to work out and impress any tourist friends with. Then you stare together at the emptiness of the station, its vast ceilings in sea green and gold, and its nighttime train timetables. It feels hushed like a cathedral. Neither of you says anything dumb or stupid and if someone did then that person would laugh about it first. But nothing dumb or stupid is said. Not here. Everything is to be perfect. Because the alternative is screaming, spitting hysteria - or something vaguely along those lines.

Because you’re in a station, you want to get on a train and go somewhere. You decide Poughkeepsie is not an option, even if the name suggests to you, in a way only you could fathom, that it’s full of hamsters and other sorts of  small, furry animals that you like. You wander instead up Fifth Avenue, past the giant shops, their huge displays lit and more still seeming than ever you remember. And look, there is Central Park, which must be gone into, surely, in this story. So in you dive, at 1am. He says, as you both creep through the dark and the trees: I saw this animal in here once, some huge cat thing and it had a raccoon with it. Right, you say, certain this is not true. Meanwhile, you think, you’re stumbling through Central Park with a stranger in the middle of the night. This seems pretty allright to you. Until suddenly, how very embarrassing for a New Yorker like you, you find yourself at completely the wrong corner of the park you told him you were making for. But here, look, there’s something in a tree. It moves like a sloth but isn’t. It’s a racoon. Well, that’s some compensation, at least. It’s the racoon!!! you say, a bit too loudly, as if you’d just sighted a new continent or invented the wheel. No, he says, it’s not the same one; the one I saw was bigger. So you both stare at the creature and it sits there staring back, unmoving, unmoved. It’s a New York City raccoon, you inform him: it’s not bothered.

You’re both sorry to leave the park. It’s dark and unknowable and quiet and strange - which might all be things you feel, you’re not sure - and maybe he feels like this, too. Who knows. Of course, you’re allowed to do and say whatever you want in this story, and so is he. After all, if it’s not at times like these, then when? It could be worse, you think; you could be doing crystal meth, jumping off a bridge, getting Religion. But you can’t care about that when you have started to notice that his lips curve in a particular way that might just kill you, and that wouldn’t be a bad way to go - even if you had to take him down with you. It’s almost 2am, and you decide to hail a cab. Then you sit in your room with the windows wide open talking about everything and a few more things besides, until you hear the sounds of traffic and regular people getting ready for work in the city you now know you can still call home - and in this way you might manage, for now, to help yourself to life once more. Hypothetically, of course.

Copyright Britical, 2009. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

She was sharpening a pencil when it happened. Or so it appeared when they found her, breathing but unconscious on her kitchen floor.

We knew it could happen. The brain aneurysm she had had last year, which she was not expected to even survive, had been seen off by this determined woman so she could once again walk, talk, laugh, drink scalding hot coffee and sharpen pencils. http://britical.blogsome.com/2008/03/05/mother/

But she lived in some terror these past fourteen months, knowing the thing would creep back one day and try again - this afternoon, tomorrow, or twenty years from now - no one could know. Carpe diem, indeed. She walked, talked, laughed, and tried not to sneeze too hard, knowing there was a time bomb in her brain. And so, two Saturdays ago, the clock hit 00.00

I wonder if she felt the first gush of blood, the first burst from the artery and then, as it bloomed like Little Boy in the dark sky, a flaming, billowing red firework, a volcano spewing bloody lava running madly, joyously even, high on "freedom hysteria", through the narrow channels, destroying everything in its path. But I doubt that she did. Its force would have sent her reeling and down onto the lino in her kitchen, the whole process taking mere seconds since it was, they said, "a catastrophic bleed". She had a red button hanging round her neck for if she felt bad or ill. It was not pressed. In fact, to be killed instantly is what she had hoped for, since the fear of the thing was certainly death, but more than that: she dreaded being left disabled, paralyzed and drooling, left in some "home" that is not your Home, to lay for hours in your own piss, the air smelling of old cabbage and closed windows, your children pretending not to be repulsed by your smell. As we all do. All this she had imagined, I know, and all this she escaped, just as she had before, but with different consequences this time.

As she sharpened her pencil, I am almost sure it would have been to make a food shopping list for the next day, which was Sunday, the day before I was to arrive to see her. At that moment I was in Paris. It was very warm that day and I was probably eating an afternoon snack - cheese, bread, olives, whatever - walking through Les Tuileries, looking at the barges on the river, rifling through a bookstore. Oblivious. Later, back at the apartment, I could not reach her at her usual times and I texted my sibling, who also tried and to no avail. But, he said, this had happened the other night, too, so he wasn’t too worried.

So off I went to a dinner party, and afterwards, driving at some speed up the Champs Elysees on the way to a party, it occurred to me to check my phone messages. There were two. The first voice told me that my friend E. in New York had just died that day. But there was no time to think on this as the second came through, from my sibling: Please call. Mum’s collapsed and has been taken to hospital.

His girlfriend answered his cell and told me they were now driving the long drive down from London to the hospital on the South Coast of England near where she lived. It was past 11pm and they would arrive in about half an hour and phone me back. Having returned to the apartment, I paced, as you do, helpless. Someone sweet but a bit clueless offered me strawberries and Pierre Herme macaroons, and asked what I needed and I stopped myself from saying stupidly, ‘My Mum’. I figured, correctly, that I would not let myself get that far gone until I got back to New York.

The phone rang, eventually. My sibling had arrived. Mum was alive, just, and unconscious. She has, he said, barely a few hours to go. I thought for the 100th time: can I get there in time, how can I get there, I want to be there…..Metro, Eurostar, London…and then…? How, how, how?? She was, awfully, so near - just across the sea really. But I knew she would be gone before I even I got to London. I could never, ever make it in time. But, I thought, at least her son would be there, her only other family, extended or otherwise, who could sit with her and hold her hand. She would not die alone.

 

He said then that since he’d arrived her pulse had sunk from 95 to 50 in just a few minutes. He said her brain was destroyed (Isn’t that what they said last time, I thought?). He said, it was a catastrophic bleed and they say she won’t survive the night. He said, I’m driving back up to London now.

And he did. The hospital rang him five minutes later and said, "She’s gone."

Gone forever, Sunday 3rd May at 12:35am, almost two months shy of her 75th Birthday, and a day before she and I had planned to be wandering the thrift shops in her seaside town, drinking coffee, eating cake, and later, watching telly as she dozed and I ate too many crisps.

I took the train to London Monday morning. I just did it. I don’t know how. It was blissfully, no, mercifully fast, that Eurostar. I recommend it highly. At St. Pancras I found my brother’s car and my brother greeted me with a "Hello" and perhaps a nod. We picked up his girlfriend, and drove South to the coast, to the hospital. Being my Mother, the tradition since last year was to have any further medical complications occur around a bank holiday, when doing anything about them was made bureaucratically impossible. We would always joke about it. Today was the Spring Bank Holiday. But I had spoken to the head matron the day before and she had kindly agreed to find someone to come in and take us to see my Mother. Or her body, as it should more accurately be described.

At the hospital a man I shall call "Peter" greeted us. It said on his name badge, ‘Peter Mort’, which I thought was a weirdly untactful thing which rather sabotaged his quiet, careful, funeral director-type manner (which, yes, I was more than ready to find soothing and comforting). In response to this manner my sibling later remarked, "They’re trained to be non-reactive." I thought, but did not say, so are we - but especially you. He also informed me ‘mort’ was simply short for ‘mortician’ {or ‘mortuary, more like}. Still, I thought.

But Peter Death - who I find it comforting to think of as Death himself, who took pains to greet us personally, and show us his handiwork because we were Special in some way - he was clever or experienced enough to take measure of us: the woman in the inappropriate bright red coat attempting to make a cynical joke and then ask him about his job and if he liked it, and the tall, greying, poker-faced brother with a very young woman trotting along beside or perhaps just behind him. Yes, he took measure enough of us, of me at least, to preface his remark as we descended the echoing stairs (downstairs, inevitably) with, "I know it’s a cliché but…..". That is: "I know it’s a cliché, but she looks very peaceful." I didn’t believe a word of it, of course. My Mother and I were both very morbid in the sense that we liked to gleefully discuss death, dead bodies and the awful sorts of things that happened to them and what they looked like afterwards (at least we did before last year). So I was afraid of finding a hanging jaw, her eyes suddenly popping open, the shudder of a hand - or a smell I would never forget. This was just a hospital after all, not a funeral parlour with its cotton wool stuffing and plumping, its embalming and rouge, the eyelids glued down and the lips stitched imperceptibly (and forever) together. I was terrified. And horrified by standing at a bank of metal drawers, the sheet being suddenly pulled back with a nasty flourish by a testy man in white galoshes like on C.S.I. or some other TV crime show. I wanted to ask Peter Death if perhaps this bit could be done before I got in the room, so I might prepare and judge my approach slowly as one would a hurdle or, on a horse, a five bar gate. I knew I couldn’t not look.

But this was unnecessary. Peter Death showed us into a quiet ante-room, all "tastefully" decorated, which led to another tiny area with a large glass window through which was a small room (non-denominational, of course, no crucifixes or other supernatural gee-gaws). It had dark walls, I think, and long curtains on at least one of them. In the middle was a single bier, and on that lay, I had to suppose, my Mother.

We all stood at the window and stared in, as you would outside a shop. And lo and behold she did indeed look peaceful. "I tried to make her hair look nice…how…how she would have liked it", said Peter Death. I loved him for that. (Her hair did indeed look fantastic, although my sibling later said in the car, "Mum would have hated it. Anyway, she went to the hairdressers’ on Friday.") 

I had asked my sibling if he minded if I went in first and also alone. (I usually like to do daunting things alone.) I walked in and made my approach. It was just a few feet. She was at waist height, a blanket covering her body. It had some tiny pattern on it, little flowers, I think, like a baby blanket. Above that, a white, cotton ruffle surrounded her neck, and above that was her face, which face looked to me utterly un-frightening because it looked asleep. (Sleeping!) She did not look covered in any make-up, "shrunken" or "smaller" or any of those things people say. I stared, to try to imprint this all on my memory. But wait! She was breathing, the chest rising ever so slightly. Same with her left eyebrow which surely fluttered, her mouth, too, about to speak…the life still be pulsing somewhere within. This was, as you may have guessed - but I cannot quite believe - either wishful thinking or the mortician skill of Peter Death.

Being informed by poetry, books and films of what to do, I gently touched her forehead, expecting it to be cold. It was cold. Ditto, I kissed her forehead and said, feeling sad and also very, very foolish and like a bad actor in a mawkish scene, ‘Goodbye, Mum’. But I wanted to see her hands before I went. They were always so beautiful and I wanted to look at them one last time. I looked around furtively and seeing no one in sight, and although fearing still that I might see something…unplanned, I pulled back the blanket slightly. But her arms were covered, bound and wrapped tight across her ribcage, again, like a baby - but in some winding cloth or length of cotton. Fine, I thought, and replaced the blanket, and, looking round at the big window again for anyone who might see me, took my camera out of my pocket. I positioned myself right over her face and, in a 21st Century attempt at the Victorian death mask, snapped a picture.

After that, we drove to my Mother’s house to start the long process of sorting, emptying, throwing away, donating and so on, the almost 75 years of her life. The house was not hers and the council (government) wanted it emptied and the keys returned as soon as possible. I saw the pencil sharpener on the kitchen countertop where the police must have left it. I saw her glasses on her armchair, and her make-up tray which, closing my eyes, and in rehearsal for the next ten days to some, I tipped quickly into the first black rubbish bag. There was her green handbag with its bits of tissue and lipstick, pension card and discount cards to here and there. There were photos, little ornaments, clothes, underwear, plates and pots, old school reports, and heartbreaking little notes and scribbled grocery lists. Every cupboard, every drawer, contained a booby trap. We found a letter to my sibling, and one to me. I read mine once and have not looked at it since.

 

My sibling had announced, only upon my enquiring about bedding and where we would all be sleeping there, that he would be driving back up to London every day. Oh, I said. He did not ask what I would do - if I would stay alone in the house (which approached the very limits of stupid and unnecessary bravery even for me, I think) or where I would go. But I called some friends in Brighton and they seemed very keen to take me in.

That night, I lay in their guest bedroom and I thought about England, how in an instant every leaf, every blackbird, every noise, sight or sound typical to it, and that I associate with my Mother or my childhood, had become suddenly unbearable. I had wanted to walk down to the sea, which is where I grew up and spent so much time after we left London, the same sea that has saved me more times than I can count. If it was a movie I would have. But even that, especially that, I could not do.
 

I thought about how much this time was so like the year before: the wretched journey to England in February of 2008, to the hospital, to be told the bleed would leave her dead, the trip to a friend’s house as my sibling left the hospital immediately for London. Then weeks later, as we waited, they confirmed the CT showed "low density throughout the brain". They started to switch off the machinery keeping her, or what was left of her, alive. And then she woke up. And, except for the sniper in the brain, biding his time, she was fine.

Back in New York, two nights ago, my first day back, I saw a helicopter hovering over Fifth Avenue. I stared at it for a while. I could not be absolutely sure it wasn’t there to lower a basket, a stretcher, inside of which would be my Mother, wrapped tight and safe, alive after all. She pulled off that amazing trick last year, didn’t she? Like an impossible rabbit from a hat, the lady sawn in two, made whole - and I, idiotly, cannot make myself understand why then she can’t just do the trick again.

Copyright Britical 2009. All Rights Reserved.