Shatter (4 page)

‘I’m so sorry, Joe. It must have been awful. Do you know anything about her?’

I shake my head.

‘How did you get involved?’

‘They came to the university. I wish I could have saved her.’

‘You can’t blame yourself. You didn’t know her. You didn’t know her problems.’

Dodging the oily puddles, I put her case in the boot and open the driver’s door for her. She slips behind the steering wheel, adjusting her skirt. She does it automatical y nowadays—

takes over the driving. In profile I see an eyelash brush against her cheek as she blinks and the pink shel of her ear poking through her hair. God, she’s beautiful.

I stil remember the first time I laid eyes on her in a pub near Trafalgar Square. She was doing first year languages at the University of London and I was a post-grad student. She’d witnessed one of my best moments, a soapbox sermon on the evils of apartheid outside the South African Embassy. I’m sure that somewhere in the bowels of MI5 there’s a transcript of that speech along with a photograph of yours truly sporting a handlebar moustache and high-waisted jeans.

After the ral y we went to a pub and Julianne came up and introduced herself. I offered to buy her a drink and tried not to stare at her. She had a dark freckle on her bottom lip that was utterly mesmerising… it stil is. My eyes are drawn to it when I speak to her and my lips are drawn to it when we kiss.

I didn’t have to woo Julianne with candlelit dinners or flowers. She chose me. And by next morning, I swear this is true, we were plotting our life together over Marmite soldiers and cups of tea. I love her for so many reasons but mostly because she’s
on
my side and
by
my side and because her heart is big enough for both of us. She makes me better, braver, stronger; she al ows me to dream; she holds me together.

We head along the A37 towards Frome, between the hedgerows, fences and wal s.

‘How did the lecture go?’

‘Bruno Kaufman thought it was inspired.’

‘You’re going to be a great teacher.’

‘According to Bruno, my Parkinson’s is a bonus. It creates an assumption of sincerity.’

‘Don’t talk like that,’ she says, crossly. ‘You’re the most sincere man I’ve ever known.’

‘It was a joke.’

‘Wel , it’s not funny. This Bruno sounds cynical and sarcastic. I don’t know whether I like him.’

‘He can be very charming. You’l see.’

She’s not convinced. I change the subject. ‘So how was your trip?’

‘Busy.’

She begins tel ing me about how her company is negotiating to buy a string of radio stations in Italy on behalf of a company in Germany. There must be something interesting about this but I turn off wel before she reaches that point. After nine months, I stil can’t remember the names of her col eagues or her boss. Worse stil , I can never
imagine
remembering them.

The car pul s into a parking space outside a house in Wel ow. I decide to put on my shoes.

‘I phoned Mrs Logan and told her we’d be late,’ Julianne says.

‘How did she sound?’

‘Same as ever.’

‘I’m sure she thinks we’re the worst parents in the world. You’re an über-career woman and I’m a… I’m a…’

‘A man?’

‘That’l do it.’

We both laugh.

Mrs Logan looks after Emma, our three year old, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Now that I’m lecturing at the university we need a ful -time nanny. I’m interviewing on Monday.

Emma charges to the door and wraps her arms around my leg. Mrs Logan is in the hal way. Her XL T-shirt hangs straight from her breasts covering a bump of uncertainty. I can never work out if she’s pregnant or fat so I keep my mouth shut.

‘I’m sorry we’re late,’ I explain. ‘An emergency. It won’t happen again.’

She takes Emma’s coat from a hook and thrusts her bag into my arms. The silent treatment is pretty normal. I lift Emma onto my hip. She’s clutching a crayon drawing— a scribble of lines and blotches.

‘For you, Daddy.’

‘It’s wonderful. What is it?’

‘A drawing.’

‘I know that. What is it a drawing of?’

‘It’s just a drawing.’

She has her mother’s ability to state the obvious and make me look foolish.

Julianne takes her from me, giving her a cuddle. ‘You’ve grown in four days.’

‘I’m three.’

‘Indeed you are.’

‘Charlie?’

‘She’s at home, sweetheart.’

Charlie is our eldest. She’s twelve going on twenty-one.

Julianne straps Emma in her car seat and I put on her favourite CD, which features four middle-aged Australian men in Teletubbie-coloured tops. She babbles from the back seat, pul ing off her socks because she likes to go native.

I guess we’ve al gone a little native since we moved out of London. It was Julianne’s idea. She said it would be less stressful for me, which is true. Cheaper houses. Good schools. More room for the girls. The usual arguments.

Our friends thought we were crazy. Somerset? You can’t be serious. It’s ful of Aga louts and the green wel ie brigade who go to Pony Club meetings and drive four-by-fours towing heated horse floats.

Charlie didn’t want to leave her friends but came round when she saw the possibility of owning a horse, which is stil under negotiation. So now we’re living here, in the wilds of the West Country, being treated like blow-ins by locals who wil never entirely trust us until four generations of O’Loughlins are buried in the vil age churchyard.

The cottage is lit up like a uni dormitory. Charlie is yet to equate her desire to save the planet with turning off the lights when she leaves a room. Now she’s standing at the front gate with her hands on hips.

‘I saw Dad on TV. Just now… on the news.’

‘You never watch the news,’ says Julianne.

‘Sometimes I do. A woman jumped off a bridge.’

‘Your father doesn’t want to be reminded…’

I lift Emma from the car. She immediately wraps her arms around my neck like a koala clinging to a tree.

Charlie continues tel ing Julianne about the news report. Why are children so fascinated by death? Dead birds. Dead animals. Dead insects.

‘How was school?’ I ask, trying to change the subject.

‘Good.’

‘Learn anything?’

Charlie rol s her eyes. I have asked her this same question every afternoon of every school day since she started kindergarten. She gave up answering long ago.

The house is suddenly fil ed with noise and industry. Julianne starts dinner while I bath Emma and spend ten minutes looking for her pyjamas while she runs naked in and out of Charlie’s room.

I cal downstairs, ‘I can’t find Emma’s pyjamas.’

‘In her top drawer.’

‘I looked.’

‘Under her pil ow.’

‘No.’

I know what’s going to happen. Julianne wil come al the way upstairs and discover the pyjamas sitting right in front of me. It’s cal ed ‘domestic blindness’. She yel s to Charlie. ‘Help your father find Emma’s pyjamas.’

Emma wants a bedtime story. I have to make one up involving a princess, a fairy and a talking donkey. That’s what happens when you give a three-year-old creative control. I kiss her goodnight and leave her door partly open.

Supper. A glass of wine. I do the dishes. Julianne fal s asleep on the sofa and apologises dreamily as I coax her upstairs and run her a bath.

These are our best nights, when we haven’t seen one another for a few days; touching, brushing against each other, almost unable to wait until Charlie is in bed.

‘Do you know why she jumped?’ asks Julianne, slipping into the bath. I sit on the edge of the tub, trying to keep contact with her eyes. My gaze wants to drift lower to where her nipples are poking through the bubbles.

‘She wouldn’t talk to me.’

‘She must have been very sad.’

‘Yes, she must have been.’

3

Midnight. It is raining again. Water gurgles in the downpipes outside our bedroom window, sliding down the hil into a stream that has become a river and covered the causeway and stone bridge.

I used to love being awake when my girls were sleeping. It made me feel like a guardian, watching over them, keeping them safe. Tonight is different. Every time I shut my eyes I see images of a tumbling body and the ground opens up beneath me.

Julianne wakes once and slides her hand across the sheets and onto my chest, as if trying to stil my heart.

‘It’s al right,’ she whispers. ‘You’re here with me.’

Her eyes haven’t opened. Her hand slides away.

At six in the morning I take a smal white pil . My leg is twitching like a dog in the midst of a dream, chasing rabbits in its sleep. Slowly it becomes stil . In Parkinson’s parlance, I am now

‘on’. The medication has kicked in.

It is four years since my left hand gave me the message. It wasn’t written down, or typed or printed on fancy paper. It was an unconscious, random flicker of my fingers, a twitch, a ghost movement, a shadow made real. Unknown to me then, working in secret, my brain had begun divorcing my mind. It has been a long drawn-out separation with no legal argument over division of assets— who gets the CD col ection and Aunt Grace’s antique sideboard?

The divorce began with my left hand and spread to my arm and my leg and my head. Now it feels as if my body is being owned and operated by someone else who looks like me only less familiar.

When I look at old home movies I can see the changes even two years before the diagnosis. I’m on the sidelines, watching Charlie play footbal . My shoulders are canted forwards, as though I’m braced against a cold wind. Is it the beginning of a stoop?

I have been through the five stages of grief and mourning. I have denied it, ranted at the unfairness, made pacts with God, crawled into a dark hole and final y accepted my fate. I have a progressive, degenerative neurological disorder. I wil not use the word incurable. There
is
a cure. They just haven’t found it yet. In the meantime, the divorce continues.

I wish I could tel you that I’ve come to terms with it now; that I’m happier than ever before; that I have embraced life, made new friends and become spiritual and fulfil ed. I wish.

We have a fal ing-down cottage, a cat, a duck and two hamsters, Bil and Ben, who may in fact be girls. (The pet shop owner didn’t seem exactly sure.)

‘It’s important,’ I told him.

‘Why?’

‘I have enough women in my house.’

According to our neighbour, Mrs Nutal (if ever a name suited…) we also have a resident ghost, a past occupant who apparently fel down the stairs after hearing her husband had died in the Great War.

I’m always amazed by that term: The Great War. What was so great about it? Eight mil ion soldiers died and a similar number of civilians. It’s like the Great Depression. Can’t we cal it something else?

We live in a vil age cal ed Wel ow, five and a half miles from Bath Spa. It’s one of those quaint, postcard-sized clusters of buildings, which barely seem big enough to hold their own history. The vil age pub, the Fox & Badger, is two hundred years old and has a resident dwarf. How rustic is that?

We no longer have learner drivers reversing into our drive or dogs crapping on the footpath or car alarms blaring in the street. We have neighbours now. In London we had them too but pretended they didn’t exist. Here they drop by to borrow garden tools and cups of flour. They even share their political opinions, which is a total anathema to anyone living in London unless you’re a cab driver or a politician.

I don’t know what I expected of Somerset but this wil do. And if I sound sentimental, please forgive me. Mr Parkinson is to blame. Some people think sentimentality is an unearned emotion. Not mine. I pay for it every day.

The rain has eased to a drizzle. The world is wet enough. Holding a jacket over my head I open the back gate and head up the footpath. Mrs Nutal is unblocking a drain in her garden.

She’s wearing her hair in curlers and her feet in Wel ingtons.

‘Good morning,’ I say.

‘Drop dead.’

‘Rain might be clearing.’

‘Fuck off and die.’

According to Hector, the publican at the Fox & Badger, Mrs Nutal has nothing against me personal y. Apparently, a previous owner of our cottage promised to marry her but ran off instead with the postmaster’s wife. That was forty-five years ago and Mrs Nutal hasn’t forgiven or forgotten. Whoever owns the cottage owns the blame.

Dodging the puddles, I fol ow the footpath to the vil age store, trying not to drip on the stacks of newspapers inside the door. Starting with the broadsheets, I flick through the pages, looking for a mention of what happened yesterday. There are photographs, but the story makes only a few paragraphs. Suicides make poor headlines because editors fear a contagion of copycats.

‘If you’re going to read ’em here I’l bring you a comfy chair and a cup of tea,’ says Eric Vaile, the shopkeeper, peering up from a copy of the
Sunday Mirror
spread beneath his tattooed forearms.

‘I was just looking for something,’ I explain, apologetical y.

‘Your wal et, perhaps.’

Eric looks like he should be running a dockside pub rather than a vil age shop. His wife Gina, a nervous woman who flinches whenever Eric moves too suddenly, emerges from the storeroom. She’s carrying a tray of soft drinks, almost buckling under the weight. Eric steps back to let her pass before planting his elbows on the counter again.

‘Saw you on the TV,’ he grunts. ‘Could’ve told you she was gonna jump. I could see it coming.’

I don’t answer. It won’t make any difference. He’s not going to stop.

‘Tel me this, eh? If people are going to top themselves, why don’t they have the decency to do it somewhere private, instead of blocking traffic and costing taxpayers money?’

‘She was obviously very troubled,’ I mumble.

‘Gutless, you mean.’

‘It takes a lot of courage to jump off a bridge.’

‘Courage,’ he scoffs.

I glance at Gina. ‘And it takes even more courage to ask for help.’

She looks away.