Aunt Janice, Uncle Pete

No one knew for sure why Janice did it. When she was in the hospital, that was one of the reasons why they wanted her to wake up. So at least then they’d be able to ask, and then they’d know.

All anyone knew is that one minute she was sat with her husband, watching TV. Then she slipped upstairs. It took Pete a while to realise she hadn’t come back. He went up, which was when he found her.

Some said she was going through the change, the change of life, and this normally so bubbly woman had been struggling. Perhaps that was true. Everyone needed an explanation. It was so out of the blue, such an unexpected thing, that it was the only natural response, to try to find a reason for it. It needed to be fitted into something, needed to be made explicable.

There was a spell in hospital, on life support. In the first couple of days there was some hope. Those are the crucial ones, the cliché has it. But gradually the prognosis grew more gloomy. Too much damage had been done to the brain by the time he’d found her there, hanging at the top of the stairs. After a few more days Pete had to make the decision to turn off the machines that were keeping her lungs moving, her blood flowing. I strain my imagination to put myself in that position.

The funeral was a predictably grim affair. That may sound obvious, but consider, some funerals are more bearable than others. Someone who has lived a full and productive life that can be felt to have run its natural course is quite an easy person to send off. Similarly someone released by death from a long illness. For a life abruptly and avoidably terminated, what do you do? There can be none of the easy homilies of the wake, none of the mutual relief that comes from trading anecdotes of happy moments. Sure, I was there, and we tried, but conversations fell flat.

I went to the funeral to help my dad, drugged with grief at the loss of a sister. I did my best to prop him up, but confess I felt nothing as strongly as the guilty relief that came afterwards, when released onto the station platform for the eventual London train.

We adopted her widower, my uncle Pete, for a while after that. He moved out of their house and lived for a spell with one of their daughters. Understandably he couldn’t stand to go back there. Nor could he force himself to go to their local, a backstreet pub in which I used to occasionally bump into them on my intermittent visits to the area. Too many memories there. So he started going to one of my dad’s regular pubs, and my usual haunt on trips north. We did our best to look after him, talk to him, include him in wider conversations, make him feel part of us. This was not easy. He was never the most easily conversational of men, and of course there was always left lurking in our pub chats the great thing that linked us left unsaid. But we tried. We might have felt good about ourselves for this trying.

We even went to the civil partnership celebration of their daughter and her longtime girlfriend, an odd but heart-warming evening from which we emerged being glad that we had attended. We probably would not have gone if it had not been for her mother’s death.

We’d see Pete quite a bit from time to time. Then one night he was in our pub with a new woman. This would have been about a year afterwards.

We made polite but even more strained than usual conversation. I found it hard to look at him. He had given up the role we expected him to play out. I haven’t seen him since.

In Ireland

Ireland is Western Europe’s East Europe.

This observation occurred to me, 28 May, in Cork, though I fear it may not turn out to be original.

Train journey

We caught the slow, crowded train through Wales, towards the eventual ferry. We have become reluctant flyers these days. The world may fry, and there seems to be little anyone can do about it, but we want the satisfaction of not being to blame. Plus the only form of journey which isn’t innately interesting, the only one where your holiday doesn’t start until you get there, is that taken by plane. But they don’t make it easy for you. Public transport still feels like a punishment, the choice of the poor and eccentric. Trains were late, full and smelly. Toilets didn’t work, food was unobtainable and information was wartime-rationed. Travelling Virgin Trains, with that lingering chemical pong, frequent slow downs, continual passive-aggressive apologies for things that have gone wrong and occasional, unexplained blasts of random noise from the speakers, is perhaps the nearest one gets in this country to legalised torture. It has the arbitrariness of Beckett and Pinter. Possibly it is really a piece of site-specific theatre, and one day we’ll all be let in on the joke and allowed to buy a copy of the script.

At one of the interminable stops a group of obviously related, clearly wealthy Jewish women got on. There were five of them and four seats around a table, and they made an elaborate ritual of trying to fit themselves in to the satisfaction of all. They tried every possible permutation, each one in turn volunteering themselves to sit in a different, distant seat. Their numerous bags also had to be passed from hand to hand continually. I watched them, against the backdrop of the bleak coast past which we trundled, with rising amusement. I realised then that the old woman opposite was doing precisely the same. We shared wry, mutually complicit smiles. It was a sweet and rare moment.

Later on the ferry, we drank overpriced, mediocre chardonnay, and appeared to be the soberest persons aboard. It occurred to me then that I would make a poor eco-warrior.

Goths

Yesterday afternoon I took advantage of an unexpected break in the weather, and was out and about around central London. It is apparently the eighties at the moment. Groups of young girls have the hair, the clothes. The cuts and colours are 1985. All are apparently worn without irony. This seems uniform.

Except for the small and rather forlorn groups of goths, still holding out against their peers. I’ve started, to my surprise, to sympathise with them. They seem a tight, internally-directed bunch, turning their backs on the world and finding sufficiency in each other. The world’s moved on, but whenever was that a concern of theirs? To be desperately, perversely, deliberately unfashionable has its own cool.

It’s just I can never quite see what’s in it for the girls. The boys, I get. Most of them aren’t good-looking, so a style that makes them look bad offers camouflage. When I see obviously attractive girls all gothed-up and looking like shit, I struggle to work out what’s behind it, what might be their motivation.

I just want them, and everybody, to be alright.

Photograph

I think often of that photograph, of the two of them, taken during some Eastern European city minibreak. The photo’s in a frame on a middle shelf in their ever-changing living room. They would have caught a budget airline, got a good deal online for accommodation somewhere reasonably central. They stand in a recently restored medieval town square, Communism’s grime freshly sluiced. It’s a sunny day. They wear t-shirts. Sunglasses are pushed onto the tops of their heads.

She looks directly into the camera’s lens and smiles, showing newly polished teeth. He looks to one side, somewhere over to the photographer’s head and to one side, into the middle distance. Like he’s looking for something else, I always think. Like he knows this isn’t quite it.

Doubtless this is just an example of the camera capturing a fleeting moment that doesn’t really represent the whole. I’m reading too much into an inexpertly-taken photograph shot by a reluctant passer-by. He was just getting ready for the photo. A second later and they’d have been both perfectly posed. It’s only one moment in a series of variegated moments. But then why put it somewhere where you can’t help seeing it, can’t help thinking about it, every time you walk into the room?

Erections

It gets to the point where he starts to experience a fierce erection when talking to her. This surprises him. It’s been a long time since just conversation with an attractive woman has been able to do this. But the magic works once, then a second time, then time and again. They talk, he gets hard. It becomes rarer that it doesn’t happen.

There seems little he can do about the fact of the erection, apart from try to conceal it with loose clothing. Or should he not? Should he just leave it there to be seen, if that happens to be the way she looks? Would that help force the issue? At the end of the conversation he will rise, walk awkwardly away. Surely she sees this?

This is, he knows, pathetic. This will never go anywhere. This is not his life. And he’s pretty sure he is not having any corresponding effect on her. But these erections, he cherishes them, for at least they make him feel alive.