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  For Jinan

  Then certain Shrouds that muttered head to head Came and were gone.

  W. B. Yeats

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  AFTERWORD:

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  About the Author

  Copyright

  Part One

  In the middle of the night the phone rings, over and over, but I don’t hear it. First it is the hospital, then the police.

  – These things happen from time to time, my father says.

  He is lying on the bed, his single bed alongside the other which, still made up, was my mother’s, dying two years earlier, and the covers are off and I am trying to get him up and dressed, ready for hospital, but I’m weeping. Tears are streaming down my face making it difficult to see. Unenvisaged, embarrassing. Until now I have managed to remain quite calm, like him. I discussed the case over the phone with the doctor and agreed the best thing would be to get him into hospital where they could make him more comfortable.

  – If it’s possible to persuade your dad, see what you can do, I know old folk don’t necessarily want to shift.

  And for all the antiquarian power of his habits he could always amaze me, turn out to have been thinking or not, entirely elsewhere, for years impossible to get him to go somewhere, come out for a drink, walk by the sea, drive down the country lanes over the hills. I didn’t expect him to agree but he did without the faintest remonstrance:

  – Yes, take me to the hospital.

  He’s lying on the bed and he is my flesh, so simple, his body mine, and so difficult, so com-pli-cated he’ll say shortly in a portmanteau coming apart at the seams, just when it will have become to my mind most straightforward, so deluded. Give up the thought of the sentence, he seems to tell me, and I am in his grip, he mine, here and from now on, I prop him up, help him sit, help him remove his bedclothes and get him dressed, ‘stertorous’ is the wrong word but hangs in the air, a signpost to how the most ordinary thing, getting dressed, becomes impracticable fateful tangled up with words and images from a song or book, the grotesque persnicketiness of Edgar Allan Poe, the stertorous breathing of Monsieur Valdemar, figure of impossible, resuscitated putrefaction. It hangs in the air like a silent spy-plane, shadowshow of gallows. That is where living backwards begins: to pronounce dead is to murder, he wrote. All the time the other bed, by her, my father and I all the time aware, though we do not exchange a syllable, unoccupied.

  Yesterday I called the doctor in, he asked my father if it would be possible to go upstairs so that he could examine him on the bed and we all went up together, one by one, three bears, me at the back, the doctor in the middle, each of us holding onto the handrail as we went, the doctor remarking with admiration on its crafting, smooth but knotty trunk of a young pine fallen in the garden years ago meticulously bolted to the stairway wall by my father. Solid silva, yes, silva silvam silvae, the way words twinkle to others’ uses, other to her, solid flesh, melting into dew, slivering into you. My father makes to lie down on his bed but the doctor asks him to lie down on the other bed, because it is closer to the window and he’ll be able to see better. My father is nonplussed, looking over at it he says:

  – But that was my wife’s bed.

  My wife, he says, pronouncing the words very carefully, his speech become fuzzy, especially in the preceding few days, and he strives to overcome it, I can hear the struggle. At innumerable moments in the past he has referred to her as me wife, in deliberate loving lapse of propriety, that was me wife’s bed, but he doesn’t venture it now, we seem to be embarked on some new phase of language. For some days there has been an eerie formality, an explicitness, almost disembodied, in referring to his anatomy and bodily functions, urinating, retraction of the penis, excreting, liquid stools, incontinence, as if this new emphasis on the proper heralds some strange homecoming, the rending mystery of my father. Is there fear and confusion or only loving respect, even awe when he objects, as if to say: But I cannot lie down there, that was my wife’s bed. Yet the doctor insists on that bed, it is closer to the window, he says, he’ll be able to see better, to see to see, what is it, magically thinking, my father complies.

  But now it is today, nearly twenty-four hours later, and we say nothing about the other bed, unoccupied, constantly in our minds.

  No, not stertorous, rather wheezeful, softer, gulping, an immeasurably beautiful strange ancient fish glopping glooping groping grasping rasping for air, at air, sitting up, slowly so slowly to get dressed, article by article, until the socks, I am dressing my father for the first time in my life, his, due to him melting to me all his body mine, mining me, me father. A miner, yes, that thought is never far away. Underground, he carries it within him, for three years during the Second World War a coalminer day after day deep down in the dark and apparently relishing it, sheer subterranean strength, coming up for air at the end of the day face blackened, hot shower, then tea at his digs, a couple of pints at the local, and bed, then before dawn down again into the earth, mole of my life. It’s as I help him dress now I have this searing sensation, smell and feel and look of his body mine, mined out, to have and to hold, every article exhausting and he has to rest, catch or fall back seeking breath respite resources from somewhere unrecognisable. He insists on a vest, shirt and two pullovers even though it is almost the end of July, a hot summer’s day. We get to the socks, he is lying down and his feet calloused alien corn swollen, one of them worryingly red, a rash that runs up over his right foot to above the ankle. I haven’t been aware of it till now, something else to be looked at in the hospital. I inch on the little soft gray cotton socks for him and the tears begin trickling down my cheeks. I try to conceal this, it is not the place for crying, not in the presence of my father, he does not weep, he whom, yes, incredibly only now for the first time it flashes, I have never seen weep, and he’s evidently not about to start now. But I’m blinded: the tears are pouring out of my face. Why merely this word, tears or teardrops, but no others, like Eskimo snow lexemes? Why not a new language invented every time? What’s pouring out of my face has never happened before.

  I’ve succeeded in getting him dressed and can begin to negotiate the business of getting him downstairs and out to the car and drive him to the hospital but I cannot see anything, with all this streaming. I have to tell him, I have to bring myself under control, the thought steadies me:

  – I love you, Dad, I say, now standing up between his bed and hers, holding him by the hand.

  – I love you too, mate, he says, and the tears flow from me with renewed force, impossible to restrain, strain stain in tears. My father says: don’t worry, it’s alright. Or he doesn’t, no, not that exactly. The precise words are delivered as if from such an unfathomable distance I hardly recognise them:

  – These things happen from time to time.

  Not even his body which seems, in the wake of this remark, transported to another world, ventriloquism of his heart’s desire, not even his body knowing or himself, as if there could be another voice, a strange guardian of my father now remarking that these things happen from time to time; it doesn’t occur to me to ask him to clarify, the words might be dreamed, spoken in some walk-on part, picked up snatch on the radio. I came here yesterday, a couple of hundred miles across country, to be with him because in the past week or so, since last seeing him, I had been in regular contact with the doctor and neighbours and gathered from them, as well as from daily telephone conversations with him, a sense of his having significantly declined. A farmer’s wife down the lane told me over the phone a couple of days ago:

  – He doesn’t have long by the look of him, your
dad.

  I help him sit and stand, finally, and we make our way downstairs. I collect a few things, a couple of books, a notepad, some money, mobile phone. Together we put his jacket on and attempt the shoes, but his feet seem swollen and his slippers are easier. Unspoken sense once more of a slip in the proper course of events, wearing slippers outside, these things happen from time to time. Hobbling out to the car, leaning on me step by step, a month ago he was mowing all the lawns, fit as you like. I help him lower himself into the passenger seat, both of us knowing he never likes to be in a car unless he’s driving. Only two days ago he was still making it down to the local shop to collect his newspaper: he’s too weak for that now.

  I bring the car right up to the hospital entrance, find a wheelchair and ease him into it, stow him in the entrance way next to a large aquarium while I go to park the car. Then I wheel him through to the ward where a nurse welcomes us. We’re led to a room in which there are two other patients, a man who is blind and another who, I’ll later be informed, has learning disabilities. A couple of nurses shift and winch my father, after a struggle, onto a bed.

  – The doctor on duty will come in half an hour or so and have a proper look at him, says one of the nurses pleasantly. Then they leave.

  – Things are becoming so com-pli-cated, my father tells me, with a piercing smile of resignation.

  And he is right, so viciously true, even though I want to tell him: no, this is simplifying things, it makes sense to be in the hospital, they’ll be able to examine you and with luck make you feel more comfortable, we need to find out what’s going on, and what can be done to make you stronger and better. But I can’t speak. I’m on the verge of streaming tears again. Translucent soldiers lining up, throwing themselves out without parachutes, come from some unknown zone I am struggling like a fish on land to grasp. What to talk about in this simple, abject desolation of a hospital, his body in a foreign bed, mine in a chair alongside? We watch the blindman: two words in the dark and wide, ‘blind man’, collide. In silence we watch him make his way without a hitch to the lavatory and back.

  – No need to turn the light on in there, I’m fine, nurse, he says.

  The other man restless, sitting on his bed in a dressing-gown, then walking about a bit, then sitting on his bed again. My father needs some new underwear and pyjamas. His incontinence, lack of time to get any washing done before coming to the hospital. Sentences stop, leak, caught, soil themselves short.

  – I’ll go and buy some new underwear for you while we’re waiting for the doctor, I tell him. And he tells me about the one and only satisfactory brand and style of underpants and points out, with an ironic smile, that there are none to be had in the local town: I must drive to a specialist, old-fashioned hosiery shop in a village on the coast, about twelve miles away.

  The ray lurks, impenetrably, around the origins of philosophy. In Plato, for example, it occupies the space of something like déjà vu, it disturbs thinking, dislocating the question of virtue. The ray seems to figure what is magical and uncanny about philosophy. Socrates asks Meno what is virtue. But what Meno already knows, before their first meeting, is that Socrates is not Socrates, he is not purely or simply himself, there is something of the ray about him.

  – Even before I met you, says Meno, they told me that, in plain truth, you are a perplexed man yourself and reduce others to perplexity. You are exercising magic and witchcraft upon me, you are exactly like the flat stingray that one meets in the sea. Whenever anyone comes into contact with it, it numbs him, and that is the sort of thing that you seem to be doing to me now. My mind and my lips are literally numb, and I have nothing to reply to you.

  – You’re a real rascal, Socrates replies. You nearly took me in.

  Apparently realising that Meno is just fishing for compliments, or more precisely for being compared with something in turn, Socrates berates him:

  – I’m not going to oblige you. And as for myself, he adds, if the stingray paralyses others only through being paralysed itself, then the comparison is just, but not otherwise. It isn’t that, knowing the answers myself, I perplex other people. The truth is rather that I infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself.

  Virtually Socratic and rascally at the same time, the ray is thinking’s quandary, paralysis of speech, an infection at the heart of philosophy.

  Scholars seem perplexed by the word itself: how are they to translate Plato’s ray? It has them in a spin, as if it were narcolepsy reified, as if in a reality haze, language in drag, drugged, dredging up first one creature then another, out of a dead language a new respiration. It’s elementary: the stingray, says one, the electric ray, says another, the torpedo, the flat ray, the numbfish, the narky, the fish that numbs or narcotises.

  For Pliny its narcotic qualities were reckoned a cure for headaches, the ray palliatively at play in the migraine. Pliny also knew, and so therefore very probably did Plato himself, that the torpedo ray or narcofish does not numb or paralyse itself. Still in this image of self-numbing there is the strange thought of autoimmunity, a couple of thousand years early. Socrates is the rascally ray, experimentally auto-narcotic. Whatever he may say, the ray remains. It is nature’s way, nature awry. Socrates looks like the flat narcofish in the sea, says Meno. (Regarded, at least by some scholars, as a reference to his snubnose, we are thus offered a rare glimpse of Socrates’ physical appearance.) And then Socrates is like the ray in relation to what he does to others. He numbs mind and mouth. The ray in Socrates generates aporia. The ray is the figure of the already. It’s what Meno knew all along, in an eerie way, the ray of hearsay, the paralysing figuration of all knowledge as recollection.

  Down small familiar country roads I race in the late afternoon sun, finding the store still open and acquiring the relevant items. My father will be pleased, I think, he’ll appreciate my having tracked down the very thing, or not, perhaps no. No, this morning for the third time, why the fairytale precision, the cockcrowing fabulous knowing, for the third time in as many days, first over the phone the day before yesterday, then to my face yesterday, and then this morning a third time he said:

  – I am beginning to see the attractions of euthanasia.

  In the devastating lightnesses of his language, ghost-train supersonic in the airy turquoise gulf, for twenty minutes with a cold beer in a cliff-top garden hanging over the sea I sit wondering at his words. He makes euthanasia sound like a woman, or man, old as the hills. To be exact, this morning he said:

  – I have begun to think that there may be advantages to euthanasia.

  It’s like a pitiless game, euthanasia keeping a step ahead, having a better hand. On the phone and then again yesterday it was word for word the same:

  – I am beginning to see the attractions of euthanasia.

  Back at the hospital he is asleep but a nurse asks me along to another room to have a chat with the doctor. The doctor tells me she has examined my father and is concerned about his condition.

  – Obviously he’s feeling not too special, she says, in one of those euphemisms I imagine she reserves for the seriously ill.

  She has given him an ECG and discovered his heart rate is twice what it ought to be; no wonder he isn’t feeling too special. Also there appear to be some signs of jaundice, she tells me, which could mean, if there is cancer, it has reached his liver, but could mean a variety of other things. It’s too early to say for sure: gallstones, for example, can produce a similar effect. But for the moment, she says, she has prescribed something to slow his heart down and hopefully (yes, she uses the word in that hopeless way) make him feel more comfortable. She proposes keeping him in for the weekend and seeing how he is on Monday. He already has an appointment booked for next Friday to have a barium meal x-ray at the main city hospital, some twenty miles away. Cancer has been a suspicion for some time. For the past three or four months, he has complained to me of back pain but has refused to see a doctor about it.

  Special beyond speciousness of words: my fa
ther has not been to the doctor’s, let alone a hospital, in more than thirty years. I try to take positives from this conversation with the doctor: perhaps it is not cancer after all, perhaps it is primarily a heart problem, the medicine she has prescribed will steady him no end, and he’ll be feeling much brighter in a day or two. The way a life shifts, paths reconstituted, scopes collide. Another thing, yes, collapsed. The ECG, she says, shows that my father probably had a heart attack about two years ago, around the time, in other words, of my mother’s death.

  – Silent heart attacks are not uncommon, the doctor explains.

  Typical of him to say nothing, I think, to have a heart attack and not even notice. I go back to the ward to find him awake but drowsy. The blind man’s wife is now present and the man with learning disabilities has taken his chair out through the french windows and is sitting in the sun. I tell my father about the ECG, the heart attack and steadying medicine. I’m not sure how much he has been told while I was away or how much he understands. Things are becoming so complicated. His face seems difficult of access, like approaching a mountain moving in fog. Yet his eyes are open as a child’s. I feel I am the only person in the world who really knows how to address him, how to be heard. And I experience this as something at once always felt and never registered till now.

  Words for my father, to and of my dearest funniest Biblical father, dropping away. My beautiful father: tears starting once more to bulge in my eyes, I fight them off, order them back, this madness of lachrymosity. Lachrymimosa, as if I touch with words in my head and they shrink back, military tears standing to attention, veteran characters, starry-eyed, medalling, at a touch transported, bright young things just starting out, awaiting orders, ready to leap. What has made it possible in the past between us, to keep away weeping, all these years, is gone. Because it is going it is gone already. In his esoterically Buddhist way, he has always stressed the joys of silence, the turns of taciturnity. To tire the sun with talking and send him down the sky was never an option. Conversation with my father has always been a minimalist art. And from his eyes in all these years unwitnessed, it now occurs to me, even a tear of sadness shed. Unshed: the mountain of my father’s face, seen now going, the haunting cataracts.