The Madness of Grief Read online

  ‘I think I’ve been quite brilliant enough as your auntie. And I’m not sure I’d have been even half as brilliant as a playwright as you imagine. I’d have lacked the violence of John Osborne’s language or the exuberance of Orton’s bad taste. I’d have even lacked the brilliant titles of Williams and O’Neill… No, I’d have been too polite, a sentimental feminist, mediocre at best… you see how I can’t help babbling on?’

  ‘At least you’d have tried.’

  ‘Oh, but I did, no one could’ve stopped me from trying.’ Auntie Ada spread out the blanket to cover my feet, and snuggling up to her I had my arms around her neck. ‘My friend Edith from the library came over every Tuesday after work and we’d read what I’d written, trying to act it out like we were actors rehearsing. And Tuesday after Tuesday what I’d written was so bad that neither of us could keep a straight face. Every week we’d be in stitches, and poor Edith would be embarrassed, and I’d end up feeling rotten for putting her through it. So to put us both out of our misery I stopped, and everything went in the bin. You know what Edith said? “Ada, you’re selfish,” she said. “Those Tuesday nights were precious to me.” Apparently she wasn’t embarrassed at all. She was just too exhausted from laughing. “I’ve not had so much fun in all my life,” she said, “and now you’ve gone and stopped it without giving how I’d feel a second thought.” “Edith,” I said, “our Tuesday nights were precious to me too. If we put our heads together, I’m sure we can figure something out.” And we did. Every week I wrote a sketch about one of our Tuesdays, this time trying to be deliberately funny. Well, it turned out that I was terrible at comedy too, only not in a way that made either of us laugh. And that was the end of my Tuesday nights with Edith.’

  ‘That’s so sad. Is Edith all alone now?’

  ‘All alone with a husband and five children, except on Tuesday nights.’

  ‘But I thought you said…’

  ‘Our Tuesday nights are over,’ chortled auntie Ada. ‘But Edith’s Tuesday nights have just begun.’

  ‘Is she having an affair?’

  ‘With Bingo, and her husband blames me.’

  ‘So you definitely didn’t give up writing because of what happened to mummy?’

  Auntie Ada’s breast rose sharply. ‘Even my evenings with Edith were over by then.’

  ‘How come you never married, auntie Ada?’

  ‘Oh my… where did that suddenly come from, I wonder.’

  ‘I’m sorry, that was a horrible question to ask.’

  ‘Life,’ said auntie Ada, as though she hadn’t heard me.

  ‘Life… What does that even mean?’

  ‘We really are asking big questions tonight,’ sighed auntie Ada. ‘Let me see how I can put it… Men weren’t exactly chasing after me, for obvious reasons, and I didn’t have the time to be chasing after men. I had a life too full already.’

  ‘Too full already with what?’

  ‘With theatre and wonderful books, and with answering my even more wonderful niece’s impertinent questions.’

  I loved listening to auntie Ada, especially her fairy tales. They weren’t the ordinary fairy tales that everyone knew, but dark, melancholy, scary ones. Auntie Ada called them “psychological”. These grown-up fairy tales, which she started without knowing how to finish, had somehow had the effect of passing on to me auntie Ada’s love of reading, and perhaps even the seeds of a longing to write.

  From auntie Ada’s fairy tales, the leap to The Metamorphosis had been but a short one. I had read it one evening from start to finish, then I had turned to the beginning and read it again.

  ‘I lay in bed wide awake in that horrible room and I felt…’

  ‘Like a bug?’

  ‘It’s not funny, auntie Ada.’

  ‘Maybe Kafka was a bit premature.’

  I sat up abruptly, gripping auntie Ada’s hand as she made to pull it back. ‘No!’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’ve read a more beautiful story. It made me feel like I had Gregor inside me, just here, at the centre of my tummy, where I can sometimes feel Karl’s music. But I wasn’t the bug that Gregor’s trapped inside in the book. My room was the bug, and we were both trapped inside it.’

  ‘Dear God!’ said auntie Ada. ‘Uncle Freud would have a field day. And this Karl?’ It was the first time I had mentioned his name.

  ‘Karl’s my new friend who plays the piano. Everyone thinks he’s a genius.’

  ‘Your new friend or your boyfriend?’

  ‘Oh no, just my friend. I think I’m too young for a boyfriend.’

  Outside the night had been still, but now the eerie whistle of a gust of wind had wrapped itself around the house as though in a frantic attempt to uproot it. When I looked up at my aunt, what I saw was not the usual face of reassurance.

  ‘What is it, auntie Ada? I’m scared, it sounds like something evil.’

  ‘It’s just a gust of wind, I’m sure it’ll pass in a minute.’

  But it didn’t pass, nor was it a gust of wind. The catastrophe that was approaching was human.

  ‘It’s not an act of God, it’s your father.’

  ‘It’s partly my father,’ I said. ‘The whistling is his, but those spine-tingling giggles are definitely someone else’s.’

  ‘A woman’s.’ Stiffly upright on the sofa beside me, auntie Ada had drawn up the blanket to just below our eyes, and was holding it scrunched up with her fists. ‘I’m scared,’ she said, ‘it sounds like something evil.’

  And when the door opened and the slender Mia-Mia wafted in unsteadily ahead of my father, his squat bulkiness protruding either side of her tallness as he steered her in a zigzag by the waist, auntie Ada and I simultaneously and spontaneously screamed…

  The excitement of my evening with Karl had brought it all back. On that cold winter night, none of us had made the best impression. Mia-Mia was the first woman my father had brought to the house since the “mishap”, and some small degree of shock would have been normal. But our unwelcoming reception had betrayed something far beyond a small degree of shock. I interpreted our scream as a reflex reaction to the vast discrepancy – it was really nothing short of a chasm - between this rather conspicuous newcomer and the simple, understated memory of my mother. “Chalk and cheese” was nowhere near close; it did not even begin to cover it.

  But with time, I had become accustomed to this vast discrepancy. In fact, I was glad of it. If there was going to be a new woman in my father’s life, the less that woman resembled my mother the better. How lucky, then, that Mia-Mia resembled her not in the least. And hadn’t I been taught (by Kafka and auntie Ada) not to judge by appearances? Wasn’t it ironic that Mia-Mia had made her entrance seconds after our discussion of the bug in The Metamorphosis? How could anyone tell, far less judge, what kind of Gregor Samsa - decent, caring, ordinary – might be trapped behind that high-heeled armour of extravagance that rocked from side to side as Mia-Mia?

  Auntie Ada was a different story. Resolutely she remained the proverbial immovable mountain: whatever might have been the first impression that had made her join me in a scream, she seemed to want to cling to it forever. Mia-Mia really wasn’t that bad. She was a loudmouth, undoubtedly, but auntie Ada had a big mouth too, so it couldn’t have been that. Was it perhaps a sense of unshakeable loyalty to my mother? Many years had passed since the “mishap” she had never forgiven her brother for, the “mishap” I had never forgiven my father for, the “mishap”, I suspected, my father had never forgiven himself for. If my mother hadn’t lost both her parents before I was born, no doubt they too would have been added to the people who had never forgiven George Hareman.

  I wanted to tell Karl that he was right. Grief was at the heart of all that circular lack of forgiveness. I had already lost my mother. By blaming my father, I risked losing him too. Yes, he was selfish, and cruel, and a fool without being dumb, which was actually worse than being dumb. But mightn’t that also be grief? I found it difficult to judge him without judging myself, and I wondered
if the same mightn’t be true of auntie Ada. If it was, then auntie Ada was judging herself far too harshly. Nearly ten years, and no one had recovered from my mother’s death. This last thought filled me with an almost unbearable sadness.

  No one need compare Mia-Mia to the woman everyone had loved, and who everyone had suffered from losing. Auntie Ada had perhaps suffered, and also sacrificed, the most. Whereas my father had found solace by withdrawing into Mr Magikoo, auntie Ada and I had found solace in each other. But I was a child with a long stretch of life still ahead of me. Auntie Ada was now a woman whose life belonged to me; it was as if her own had all but ended. For anyone’s life to move forward, we all of us needed the chain to be broken, and by setting off a domino effect Mia-Mia might just manage to break it. For the sake of this distant possibility alone, I thought that she at least deserved a chance.

  I had never really disliked her. And I had grown to like her more and more since she moved in.

  ‘She’s not that bad, auntie Ada.’ On a crisp Saturday in October, almost two years since Mia-Mia’s first appearance and our scream, auntie Ada and I had just got off the bus and were on our way to see the Parthenon marbles at the British Museum.

  ‘Oh, I think she’s actually worse than “that bad”.’

  ‘Is it because… you never find any dust?’

  ‘Of course not, what a thing to say!’

  ‘Is it because… she doesn’t have a proper job?’

  ‘Hairdressing is a proper job.’

  ‘But she only works part-time.’

  ‘So do I these days. And I’m sure she makes more money than I do. Why all these questions, are we playing a game?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, skipping forward two steps, then returning to auntie Ada and clasping her arm as I walked on beside her. ‘Is it because… she never wears a bra?’

  ‘No, it’s not because she never wears a bra.’

  I was running out of words to put in her mouth.

  ‘Does it have anything to do… with how she dresses, and all that make up she puts on?’

  Aha, the first hesitation.

  ‘Is it because… she’s so unlike mum?’

  Auntie Ada stopped dead in her tracks. ‘Your mother was a saint,’ she said, and turning to face me she held me in place so that we could look at each other head-on. ‘So no, I could never blame anyone for not being like her.’

  We walked silently through Russell Square. The previous night’s rain had seeped through the earth and brought to life its colours, giving an exaggerated magnitude to every sensation. Fresh, bright, revealing, days like this were to be savoured, and I was taking in the purity of the air in deep breaths. Even people looked sharper, more defined in their movement, invigorated as they cut through the chill.

  When we were back on the grey of the pavement, I tugged at auntie Ada’s arm.

  ‘But doesn’t it have anything to do with how she looks?’

  Now a second hesitation, and after a more temporary halt and a sigh, ‘It has something to do with who she isn’t.’

  ‘But you said…’

  ‘I don’t mean your mum.’

  ‘If not mum, then who?’

  ‘Or what,’ answered auntie Ada. And surging forward as she shook both her hands in the air, ‘You’re too young to understand. Now come on, before the Greeks descend on the museum to claim their marbles back.’ And as an afterthought almost, ‘It doesn’t really matter what either of us thinks of Mia-Mia. I don’t think she’ll be staying for very long. Her sort never do.’

  I didn’t have a clue what she meant by “her sort”. I had never heard her speak like that before.

  ‘But she’s nice to me, auntie Ada.’ This was only true up to a point. Mia-Mia liked to tease me just a little bit more than I liked to be teased, but she did it without thinking, as though she were performing to a crowd. I didn’t really mind all that much. ‘I actually like her,’ I said. In fact I liked her a lot. And contrary to auntie Ada’s prediction, she did stay around.

  As I became more independent, busy with reading and homework and Karl, auntie Ada’s visits to the house grew scarcer. Occasionally we would still take the bus to the centre, to eat cakes together and browse around the bookshops in Charing Cross Road, as often as not on our way to an exhibition or the very special treat of a matinee performance at the theatre. Only rarely did we go and watch a film; auntie Ada for some reason disapproved of the cinema. She thought it generally dumbed people down.

  ‘I’d say it was time for Mr Magikoo’s well-earned aperitif, wouldn’t you?’ Mia-Mia would purr affectionately as she whirled her viscous tongue around my father’s ear the minute he had walked through the door, where (unless she was away at her brother’s bed-and-breakfast in Torquay) she greeted him at eighteen hundred hours precisely every evening, weekends included – the proximity of the shop promoted in the household a culture of strict punctuality in certain routines from which I was excluded.

  ‘How well my Mia-Mia can read my mind,’ my father would then answer in that very high-pitched voice he couldn’t help when he felt horny, which he evidently did as he pinched Mia-Mia’s bottom at just a few seconds past eighteen hundred hours every evening, weekends included.

  Through the gap between Beyond Good and Evil and Volume II of The Brothers Karamazov, I would carry on peeking…

  ‘Any news from Torquay?’ my father often asked with a squeak while he carried on pinching.

  ‘Early days,’ Mia-Mia always answered.

  ‘But you are making progress.’

  ‘Mm!’ Mia-Mia would mumble in vague reassurance, and I would wonder what progress she could possibly be making in Torquay.

  Mia-Mia’s bottom must have been the blue of a permanently irritated bruise. My father’s daily pinches, which I witnessed from the dining room table, buried in philosophy and fiction and homework (my own room, being a box, was too small for a desk), consisted of prolonged and fanatical clamping and twisting. Far from ever complaining, Mia-Mia moaned with pleasure to the rhythm of the heavy-breathing clock on the wall behind the dining room table. Or perhaps it was my own throbbing heart that I could hear as I snooped from behind my barricade of abstract thought.

  Through obstinate spells of Schopenhauer bleakness, a Nietzsche fascination that bordered on a crush, and ultimately a Buddha frustration that enlightened me by practically driving me mad, every evening without fail I pretended not to watch, unable not to notice Mia-Mia staring back in my direction with a luminous glint in her eye. Not content with being pleasured by my father, she was also pleasuring herself by imagining that she was pleasuring me. But what I found even more disturbing was that I was actually being pleasured. Mia-Mia was imagining correctly.

  ‘Pas devant les enfants,’ Mia-Mia would then remember to utter knowledgeably in French.

  ‘Jane?’

  ‘Studying.’

  ‘In her room?’

  ‘Behind you.’

  ‘That’s my girl!’ my father would exclaim, and then he and Mia-Mia would disappear behind the flimsy hollow door of the only decent bedroom in the house.

  Not even solid oak could have muffled that cacophony of animal sounds emanating from the other side. My father, who was slightly hard of hearing, clearly liked to listen to himself talking dirty; he wasn’t so much talking as shouting, and I would wonder if it hadn’t crossed his mind that I could hear.

  ‘You like that, don’t you… mm? Go on, say how much you like it…’ It was that kind of thing, only smuttier.

  And on and on it went, Mia-Mia’s affirmative guttural grunts punctuating the obscenities of Mr Magikoo’s piercing falsetto until nineteen hundred hours precisely, when one last unearthly screech would signal its final crescendo. Behind my barricade I remained stock-still, like one of those religious statues that bleed or shed tears. But instead of either weeping or bleeding, I’d be wet with the reeking perspiration of hormonal adolescence, and palpitating wildly. So loud and distinct were my rapid heartbeats that had I leaned an
y part of my breast against the door, I might as well have pounded on it with my fists. What I felt in my total incapacity to move out of earshot until after my father had climaxed, was a culpable mixture of excitement and shame. I was disgusted by the thought of my father having sex, but there was something about Mia-Mia that aroused me. And it wasn’t because I was attracted to women.

  It was all rather confusing at my age.

  7

  Uneasy Dreams

  We were walking hand in hand along the sand of a deserted beach. The air was damp, and the water still and quiet. We came across a jetty that went far into the sea, a corroded mass of metal with fragments of dark, sodden wood. Battered by the waves, the primitive monochrome structure imposed itself upon the landscape in a brutal but inevitable way, its long winding frame hunched over the sea like the fossil of a melancholy pathway. Now Karl let go of my hand and climbed onto its backbone. He moved effortlessly while I stood at the edge of the water and watched him. Then I was with him; now with him and now watching him from where I was standing, unable to move, unable to be with him holding his hand. He moved further and further away, and I tried to call out to him, ‘Karl! Karl!’ But my words had no sound. I was with him as he reached the end of the jetty, far, far into the ocean, but when I saw him turn to look at me, once more I stood heavy at the edge of the water, my arms stretching out. ‘Karl!’ But again there was silence. He turned away from me and gazed ahead into the sea for a moment or two. Then almost comically he held his nose before he plunged into the water, his body a perfect vertical to its horizon. I tried to call again, ‘Karl!’ And again there was nothing. I felt the water freeze Karl’s body as he sank through it; I felt the terror Karl was feeling as he drowned.

  ‘Karl!’ As I finally managed to call out his name, I woke up. Lying flat on my back, I felt cold in the dark, as cold as I had felt in my dream at the moment when Karl had hit the water. ‘I must have thrown off the covers in my sleep,’ I thought. I continued to stare at the ceiling waiting for my eyes to adjust, for the blackness to turn grey as it did every morning. Although my room had no windows, enough light seeped in through the edges of the ill-fitting doorframe to break the total darkness, which I wouldn’t have been able to bear.