Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, page 23
Father said: ‘What’s it like that paper then?’
‘Do you want to read it?’
‘Why don’t you read me a bit. Read me a good interesting bit.’
O hunted through the paper, making a point of being seen to be choosing something ‘suitable’ (he might even have said, I could read this story, but you wouldn’t understand it). Then he began to read a piece about Gardening Tasks for the Winter Months, about how the more delicate plants can be helped to endure the frost and the killing winds of winter. He wanted to say, You’ll be interested in this bit, meaning, you’ll have to pretend to be interested in this, won’t you? I know about you and your famous garden. I know all about you. I know what you like. I know what you want.
When he got to the bit about how to ensure that your Christmas roses, perfect and unrotted, flower in the middle of the darkest week of the year, Father interrupted him. While O was still reading, without looking at him, grinding out his cigarette on the tablecloth (though of course Boy had put out a clean ashtray for him), he said, ‘You make enough noise, you two, don’t you? I’ve heard you. I’ve heard you. And I’ve seen you. I’ve seen you.’
Now he did look up at O, to see what effect he was having, still grinding out his cigarette stub, burning the tablecloth. ‘I get up in the night and look through your door. Is he good in bed that Boy of mine then? Is he?’
O didn’t reply. He thought the old man was going to go on and describe what he’d seen; he was smiling, as if to prove that he had stood in the dark and watched them fucking, as if he’d scored a point by catching them at it, more of a dirty, contemptuous grin than a smile. But he didn’t describe them fucking. What he said was: ‘I’ve seen you lying there all hours of the night looking at him while he’s sleeping. I’ve seen you pulling up the cover over his left shoulder like you was his mother or something.’
The old man’s voice broke and he stood up in his chair and O could see he was shaking, his hands were white where he was gripping the sides of the chair. He was shouting now. ‘I suppose you love him. I suppose you think you love him more than I do. I’m going to my room now.’
He spent all of that day in his room, O could hear him crying with rage. When Boy got home, O told him about the scene, and Boy said, almost with triumph: ‘You know he always told me that it would be me who would be lonely.’
In the second month, Father got older and he got sicker. Now he slept during the day as well as during the night, never more than for a couple of hours at a time, but at least eleven hours out of the twenty-four, and sometimes as many as eighteen, which is as much as a baby sleeps in the first few weeks of its life. Like a baby, Father did not now seem to distinguish between night and day.
Often O would wake up in the night to find himself alone in the bed. He’d get up, go into Father’s room, and there he’d find Boy standing over the bed. He’d stand there with a pillow; the first time that O saw him standing there like that, he thought Boy was going to do something awful, thought he was going to kill the old man, smother him, for he was hugging a pillow to his chest with clenched fists as if trying to restrain himself from attacking the sleeping body … then Boy expertly lifted the old man’s head up without waking him and put the extra pillow under his head; he said to O, whispering, He’ll sleep better now. O said, whispering too, Why are you doing this? and Boy said, innocently misunderstanding the question and thinking that O had just asked him why he was up again at four a.m., I can hear it when his breathing changes, and I just needed to check if he was alright. Listen, it’s different now, I can tell when he’s rolled over onto his back just by listening to him. That’s what makes him breathe like that.
Fear undoubtedly keeps people awake, the text book said.
It is pointless to pretend that it does not exist, the textbook said.
When Father whimpered in the night, or cried in his sleep, for he cried both when sleeping and when awake now, Boy would sit by him and gently read out loud to him even if he thought Father was asleep. He read passages from the books he had kept by him in his first days in the city; also from the books that Mother had given him. If they were passages that were especially dear to him, or passages describing sexual activity, Boy would wait until he was sure the old man was asleep. He wanted to say these things to him, but he did not want him to hear them. Shall I still be attractive to my boyfriend or husband? Am I becoming a burden as I become older? Who will look after me when I cannot cope any longer? Shall I be able to bear the pain? Am I going to die? All these are very real anxieties, some without solution, the book said.
Boy also tried whispering to him, as a sort of lullaby, Goodnight, Father; Goodnight, Father, over and over again; but again he only said this when he thought the old man could not hear him, sat there in the dark and said it very quietly, goodnight, father; goodnight, father; goodnight, father.
Late one night, in a desperate effort to calm him, for he was making so much noise that neither O nor Boy could sleep, Boy climbed onto the bed beside Father and pulled the covers off him. It looked as if he was going to hit him, drag him across his knee and hit him. What he in fact did was haul him, sweating and still asleep (he was on pills now) in to his lap. This was quite easy, for Father was getting smaller and smaller and lighter and lighter.
Boy had looked up the correct posture in his book. He was wearing a shirt; he unbuttoned the shirt and, guiding Father’s head by placing his hand on the back of his neck, he brought Father’s lips to his left nipple. The old man remained half asleep, and kept on crying; but he let his face be pushed into Boy’s chest, and then he began, quite involuntarily, to suckle, half biting, half sucking at the nipple. Boy put his other arm round him and rocked him and crooned to him, with one hand still supporting his head and the other arm right round him. It seemed to work; they stayed there for a long time like that, with Father gradually getting calmer and calmer, sucking steadily on the nipple now. Boy didn’t look down at his Father, but stared calmly ahead, at the picture of a moonlit garden which was the picture for December on Father’s calendar.
At four in the morning, Boy felt a wetness on his chest; but no miracle had occurred. No miraculous milk of charity had begun to flow; it was Father’s tears that were trickling down from his nipple and wetting his chest. Boy stayed like that till dawn, his arms aching and his chest wet, while Father gently cried himself into a deep, true sleep.
When Boy went to lay him down on the bed, Father whimpered slightly and threatened to wake; Boy put a finger in his mouth to calm him.
And that is how he finally slept and that is how Boy stayed with him. His Father went to sleep with Boy’s finger in his mouth, just as Boy had once loved to go to sleep with O’s penis in his mouth. Father went to sleep with Boy watching over him, just as O had watched over Boy with tears of love in his eyes, just as Boy had watched over O on the nights of his dreaming. And all the time Boy was whispering, Goodnight, goodnight, Father.
With their days and nights taken up like this, of course they never went out much, though I think O used to phone Mother regularly so that she knew what was happening and that they were basically all right.
So that she knew what she was getting for her money.
The two times I did see them out, Boy just wanted to talk about his Father (the way people want to talk about their children when they’re very young. It’s not just because he’s old, he’d say, I think it’s because he’s unhappy, and because he’s unhappy – well, you don’t ask a child why it’s unhappy, you just hold it, don’t you?). The period of their absence from The Bar wasn’t very long, however; this whole episode with the sick Father was over in less than three months.
And if I can’t talk about them kissing or standing in The Bar, at this period of their lives, I hope you notice how I still want to tell you everything about them, how they coped, the food that they ate, their housework and who did it. I want you to know, you see. I want you to believe me.
Goodnight, father; goodnight, father; goodnight, father.
The book said: A sagging posture suggests weariness, dejection or unhappiness. The outstretched arms of a mother promise love and security. From earliest childhood we are taught to recognise these signs, and others.
Boy hardly ever left Father now that he was visibly getting worse. He watched him all the time, looking for physical signs of how he felt. It seemed to Boy that it was important to try and determine if his pain and misery came from an illness, or from some deeper unhappiness. He looked in his books at the diagrams of internal organs, as if that might provide a clue to or reason for this man’s condition.
Father, for his part, gave no explanation. He hardly ever spoke, and kept his face turned away, mostly. When he did this Boy wondered if his refusal to talk was a symptom too; if the old man wanted to throw himself on their mercy, to throw himself helplessly at them as the last thing he could do to hurt them or take them away from each other. Boy had never said to him, Do you know that you’re dying. All three of them knew it though.
Because there was nothing he could do to get through to him, as he got sicker and sicker, Boy made more and more work for himself in the flat. All the hours and all the energy that he had previously expended on the elaborate and time-consuming rituals of sexual contact which had characterised his life with O were now dedicated to elaborate rituals of housework. The ridiculous breakfast became a permanent feature of their life, and the other meals of the day grew to match it. He began to serve high teas of tinned grapefruit segments, sliced ham with lettuce and salad cream, fruit cake – food which seemed to carry some memory of another place and another time, as if he had learnt to do all this somewhere else, in another house, run by someone from another generation. On Sunday he did a roast – and every Sunday, as a matter of course, not as a joke or a celebration. He even went out and bought a table for the kitchen, which they had never had before, and now he made them do things really properly; breakfast in the kitchen, lunch on a tray and supper on the living-room table, with different china and a different tablecloth. He would be up at seven every morning, working in his dressing gown, laying the table with milk, cereal, the toast rack, even napkins, a formal cruet and both brown and tomato sauce bottles; and then when O appeared from the bedroom he would serve (in silence) fried eggs and fried bread, and often tea and coffee at the same time. Then he would take Father his tea in bed. And then when O had left for work (taking the sandwiches that Boy now made for him the night before) he would wash up immediately after the meal, which he had never done before. He made himself so busy that he had no time to complain. Sometimes he made himself so busy that he apparently completely forgot the usual reason for eating (hunger, propriety, variety); so intense was his dedication to his domestic role that he would serve four meals a day instead of three, or serve exactly the same meal for dinner three nights running.
Boy now did all the shopping and cleaning, whereas before O and Boy had shared these jobs without even talking about it, except during one of their rare rows. Now when O came home the fridge would already be full, dinner would be on and the bathroom smelling of Ajax and Flash. O said nothing, but let Boy do it, and ate as much of the food as he could. He swam every day now, because Boy’s new diet of meat, potatoes and vegetables for every evening meal, plus the breakfast, was making him put on weight. He did not complain, even when he began to notice that Boy was buying much more food than they needed, going shopping every single day, so that often there would be perfectly good food, especially bread and milk, thrown into the bin just to make space in the fridge so that Boy could go shopping again. O didn’t complain because he understood that all this domestic labour, this labour of love, now had nothing to do with being practical. He never told Boy what he should or shouldn’t do. This took considerable nerve; he even let Boy hurt himself, but only slightly; if Boy had ever fallen, I know that O would have been right there to catch him, and that his arms would have been strong enough to lift him up again. He watched in silence as Boy’s body began to be marked with various small wounds. He cut his knuckles under the taps while scouring the bath. He got splinters under his nails from scrubbing the kitchen worktop so hard. His eyes were bruised with exhaustion again, just as they had once been when O and Boy were first sleeping together.
O kissed these bruises and marks every night, as he had done when he found the marks of another man’s passion on his Boy’s body during that earlier period of their life. When he kissed him, all over his body, he saw that Boy was not being consumed by all this work, but was getting stronger, especially his back and his beautiful arms.
This was mostly from lifting Father in and out of the bath, which he had to do several times a day now to keep him clean. Boy would undress him, and then, when the old man was naked, he would stand close behind him. Then he would slip his hands under the old man’s armpits and grasp his forearms; then he would tell him to lift his left leg and step into the bath, then the right, and then Boy would bend his knees and gently lower him into the bath. All this was done just as the book said it should be. Boy also sometimes did it facing him, with Father’s hands clasped behind his neck, using his hands to lift his legs into the water. Often Boy used to take his shirt off so as not to get it soaked; when O saw these two men through the bathroom door, one naked and one half naked, holding onto each other, and when he heard the very deliberate instructions, Lift your leg, that’s it. Higher. Lift it higher, he was reminded of the times when Boy and he had made love in the bathroom just like that, when he himself had given instructions not unlike those. He thought it strange that the old man should accept this treatment; he was often sweaty or incontinent, and must have been embarrassed to have his genitals washed daily by a younger man, surely he must be embarrassed, O thought, even if he doesn’t show it. Has he accepted the way in which this young man, this young man in particular, is touching him, or is he just too ill and old to be able to fight back any more?
O would watch them together; he was very moved to see Boy doing what he was doing. He said: ‘Can I help?’
And Boy said, holding the old man to his breast (he had just lifted him from the bath) and giving his lover a rare smile (rare these days): ‘It’s alright, suddenly I feel very strong.’
‘Strong enough?’
‘I think so.’
And he was; he never hurt the old man, not once, never slipped when he had him in his arms, never dropped him.
He was strong enough; but some nights he would let himself collapse into exhaustion once he had got Father to bed. He had enough strength for the days, but not for the nights any more. They had always held on to each other as they had fallen asleep; now Boy often just lay there exhausted, and then O would hold him and kiss his body everywhere, saying over and over again, very quietly so that not even Father would hear, I love you, I love you, I love you, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, we’re going to live, we’re going to live, we’re going to live.
As he pushed himself to perfect his new role, Boy began to use a set of gestures that came from nowhere, weren’t learned from anyone he knew. Perhaps he got them from watching all those old films. He would push his hair up from his temples with the back of his hand – or rather, he would make the gesture of a washerwoman pushing back her grey and lank hair with a wash-reddened hand, stretching her aching back – but Boy had no real hair to push back, since O still clipped his hair short for him every week, except for the lock at the front. He would also twist the ring on the work-roughened second finger of his left hand when watching the television. This was a gesture which O had only ever seen in widows. Boy even seemed to somehow acquire skills he had not had before. One morning Father clutched suddenly at his arm, fearing that he was about to slip on the wet bathroom floor; he tore the sleeve of Boy’s shirt. He wore it torn for days (he would just get up each morning and put on yesterday’s clothes, there was no dressing up now). But then one night when they were watching television Boy took his shirt off without saying anything and sat there bare-chested in front of the television and neatly repaired it. O didn’t even know he could sew.
It was amazing how much work he found to do in such a small flat; cleaning, ironing, dusting, even re-painting – he started painting even though all the paintwork was still fresh and new from when they had moved in. O had heard that pregnant women sometimes had a compulsive need to clean. He had read about the Jewish ritual of throwing out all the food in the house; he had read in one of Boy’s books that in the moments before death you may see the dying person’s hands frantically plucking and smoothing the sheets, as if tidying them. But still he did not actually know what compulsion Boy was obeying when he did all this. Sometimes the intensity of Boy’s gestures was such that O wondered if he was in a fury of revenge; if he was revenging himself on some previous, hated life by repeating its gestures in a bitter parody, doing it all more diligently than it had ever been done, knowing full well that he, a young man, should never have been doing these things in the first place. He would scour the bathtub as if he was scouring away blood, wash the walls as if he had to be rid of some terrible infection, slice the vegetables with a great knife and boil them for too long. But he never took his anger out on the old man. He did have dreams of actually prising words out of him, dreams of actually cutting him open to see his heart, but he didn’t ever hurt him. He wanted him to live. If he’d been asked, he would have said that he was fighting for his Father’s life. Sometimes, in certain lights, O would catch Boy looking like a mother with a baby; his face slightly swollen with tiredness, flushing easily. He smelt all the time of food and piss and creams; he was extraordinarily sensitive to sound, always ready to attend to a cry for help or of hunger.
