All at Sea, page 11
In the past, bereaved friends have often described their incredulous fury at the world for continuing to turn, indifferent to their tragedy, and as we walk through Soho I share something of this disbelief. It’s not as if I had expected the city to seize up when Tony died; it is just a shock to see that while my world has turned inside out it has been carrying on as normal. An urge to scream ‘Haven’t you heard?’ at passing strangers is also, I understand, quite normal. Given my current state of derangement, that I am not seized by this mad impulse feels like something, at least.
The last time I met Tanya I was interviewing her for the Guardian, so it feels strange to present myself as a patient. We meet in the Groucho club. I was here only a month ago, interviewing an author, but now the bearded media types talking loudly about film scripts look like creatures from another planet. We sit outside on the roof terrace and drink coffee. How, I ask Tanya, do I stop Jake blaming himself for Tony’s death? Her advice is so breathtakingly simple that I cannot understand how none of us had thought of it.
Everyone has been telling Jake that it was nobody’s fault. But to a four-year-old this is worse than meaningless; it is palpably untrue. When something goes wrong, it has to be somebody’s fault. Why is everybody lying to him? No wonder we seem to be just making him angrier.
‘Tell him it was the sea’s fault,’ Tanya tells me. And of course, it was. When I say this to Jake the following day, it’s as if I have given him a tranquilliser. For the first time since Tony died his body relaxes, and the tension in his eyes eases away.
A few days later we are in the car when I tell the boys something else which has an impact so instant and dramatic that I wonder why it has taken me so long to say. ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ I tell them. ‘I’m so desperately sorry this has happened to you. Everyone is so sorry that this has happened to your family.’ It is only when I glance in the rear-view mirror and see the relief on their faces that I realise they have been unsure until now if they are the victims or the cause of all this distress. Ever since Tony died they have been surrounded by grown-ups looking stony-faced, tearful, tense, and have been wondering if they have done something wrong.
Tanya had been less concerned about the boys’ state of mind than mine, and it is beginning to dawn on me that I must be in some sort of state of post-traumatic shock. I need to send Ben a simple two-line email, but when I open up the laptop I stare at the screen for three and a half hours, unable to type a single word. Thoughts hurtle about in my head, but I can’t seem to convert the mental commotion into any sort of action. In the face of the simplest of tasks, I freeze up in paralysis.
Processing quite basic information is beyond me. I can’t concentrate enough to read anything, and don’t even contemplate turning on the television. Out of habit I turn on Radio 4, and find it quite soothing, until I discover that I cannot listen to the news. As soon as the pips strike the hour, and I know a bulletin is about to start, my heart begins to race and I am pitched into total panic. News reporters have a special broadcasting voice I had never noticed until now – portentous, urgent, and to my ears now wilfully alarmist. It is a voice that says: I am going to tell you something new and important, and quite possibly shocking. And of course they are; that’s their job. But I don’t want to hear anything new and important.
After several days I tell myself I am being pathetic. I find a copy of the Sunday Times magazine in the living room, and take it to bed to read. The cover story is an article about the Lost Prophets lead singer, Ian Watkins, recently convicted of unimaginable sexual crimes against babies and children. It’s the sort of article I have written many times myself. Now I find I am not just unable to read it; I can’t even have it in my bedroom. I carry the magazine to the door gingerly, as if it were a dead mouse, and fling it down the stairs, shaking.
I am becoming increasingly preoccupied with amazement at how anyone comes home from fighting in Helmand and is expected to resume normal life. How are refugees fleeing Mogadishu supposed to make a new home in a Tottenham tower block, and fit in with everybody else as if nothing had happened? I watched just one person die, and am left incapable of even making a phone call.
It is a surprise to find myself thinking about how much worse other people’s situations are than my own. In the past, whenever I heard others express something similar in the immediate aftermath of their own tragedy I assumed they were probably only saying so to sound like good people. But the sentiment turns out to be quite genuine; tragedy really does expand your circle of empathy.
An even bigger surprise is how I keep forgetting that Tony is dead. It is now more than two weeks since I watched him drown, but I have been too consumed by how he died to comprehend that it means he is dead. Fixated on the horror of what happened, I have failed to grasp what it means; my mind still can’t register the permanent reality of its consequence. Each time it hits me that he is actually dead, which it does about once a day, it’s as if I am hearing the news for the very first time. I will be filling the dishwasher, or hanging out laundry, when out of the blue the stunning revelation winds me. Tony is dead? The perverse amnesia is bewildering. How can I have been thinking about nothing but Tony all the time, and yet keep forgetting?
This cognitive delay may help to explain my peculiar response to correspondence. A mountain of letters and cards is waiting at home when we arrive back from Jamaica, and more keep arriving every day. I am astonished by how much they move me, and feel awful about all the bereaved people I have known and never thought to send a card. I hadn’t the faintest idea how much it would mean, and each day’s post dissolves me into fresh wonderment at the kindness of the world. But on our first day home, when I open the envelopes my initial reaction is confusion and embarrassment.
I think all these people writing to me have got the wrong end of the stick. They have mistaken my loss for a catastrophe; their letters speak of my family’s lifelong pain, they console our devastation. Oh no, I think. How awkward. How has this happened? I appear to have inadvertently tricked them into feeling sorry for me. I feel a total fraud.
When I realise that is not why they have written to me, the shock is chilling. They haven’t got the wrong end of the stick at all. They haven’t mistaken our situation for something far worse than it is. On the contrary, they are way ahead of me. They understand perfectly. I haven’t defrauded them out of sympathy; the only person I have been hoodwinking is myself, in blind denial of the enormity of our loss.
‘Dec, do you believe this is really happening?’ Tom asks one evening. We are in the kitchen, cooking supper. ‘I mean, does it feel real to you? Cos I don’t mind telling you, it doesn’t to me.’ Tom is the most militantly rational person I know. At our C of E primary school, aged ten, he once organised a mass prayer boycott. To hear Tom now confess his own lapse into muddle-headed denial is a huge relief, because with each passing day Tony’s death is becoming not more real to me, but less.
In those first hours after he drowned, when the catastrophe was still confined to Calabash beach, and to Jake, Joe and me, its speed was impossible to reconcile with its scale. Nothing so big could happen this fast; it defied the laws of physics, it could not be true. Death is too much for the mind to register in a matter of minutes; the incalculable magnitude can only be absorbed by increment, day by day. As each day allows a new glimpse of its immensity, and the aftershock extends beyond the beach to reach hundreds of people all over the world, my comprehension slowly expands until its dimensions resemble a more accurate impression of the truth. But the bigger his death grows, the more inconceivable it becomes. It feels like an ambitious piece of performance art; a work of fiction, not real life.
How strange that the truth of my own situation should be so much clearer to everybody else. Still, it amazes me that so many people write. Even the staff from our local Tesco send a card. What is it about a death like Tony’s that can hold such power over our collective imagination? Had he died of cancer I wouldn’t receive cards from people I barely know. It is sudden death that galvanises our emotions. But if Tony had died suddenly of a stroke I still don’t think old school friends I have not seen for twenty years would get in touch. It must have something to do with the horror of tragedy’s proximity to innocent pleasure which we find so haunting, for we can all picture ourselves on holiday with our family. The possibility that one of us might not come home seems to evoke the primitive terror of a folk tale.
In a filing cabinet in my father’s study is a folder full of the letters and cards he received when my mum died. As a child I used to find them comforting to read, even though most were from people I didn’t even know. So I buy a big box to store all the correspondence that keeps arriving, and ask a colleague at the Guardian to send us all the newspaper reports of Tony’s death, for the boys to read when they are older. As I’m boxing everything up, I’m struck by a thought so dangerously ugly, I want to scrub my brain with bleach.
I see there’s been no card or letter from X, whispers a toxic voice in my head. Nope, nor anything from Y.
Christ, what is wrong with me? Is this what grief will do to me; does sadness curdle into monstrous self-importance? Horrified by myself, I become hyper-alert for any new warning signs of narcissistic entitlement.
When I was pregnant with Jake, I used to wonder whether motherhood was going to change me. Everybody said it would. I didn’t much like the sound of the new emotional landscape reported by friends with new babies, and couldn’t fathom why they all seemed so relaxed about turning into uptight neurotics. Who would want to be in a constant state of anxiety over disasters that are never going to happen, endlessly fretting about colic and faulty travel cots and whether the next-door neighbour is a paedophile? ‘Do you know,’ one old friend actually boasted, ‘before Alex was born I used to feel quite compassionate towards paedophiles. Now whenever I think about them I feel murderous.’
When none of this came to pass in my case, I wasn’t just relieved. Although I did not like to admit it to anyone, I was also a tiny bit smug. Jake was always a strikingly fearless child, and privately I credited his confidence to my unwillingness to subscribe to this perverse parental cult of fearfulness. But one evening as I am putting the boys to bed, I see Jake’s face darken. This is happening a lot; he’s fine one minute, and then a grey cloud settles across his features and he disappears inside himself.
‘What’s wrong, Jake?’ I ask. ‘I’m frightened,’ he says. ‘What are you frightened of?’ He considers the question for a while. ‘I’m just frightened,’ he says eventually. And I realise that is exactly what I am now, too. I’m not frightened of anything in particular. I am frightened of everything, and more specifically of everyone.
Sometimes I used to wonder why I have always been drawn to people whose appeal is not conventionally obvious, when it would probably be wiser to spend one’s life around straightforwardly sensible friends. But the company of those who are not terribly stable or considered can be terrific fun, if they can’t hurt you. And nobody ever could. I could absorb almost limitless amounts of other people’s idiocy without ever feeling upset, because to me it was only ever fascinating. I was surprised everyone else didn’t see life the same way. Why let yourself feel offended or wounded, when you could be interested and amused instead?
Now almost anyone can undo me. They don’t even have to try. The day after we get home from Jamaica a man from our local village knocks on the door to offer his condolences. He was a friend of Tony’s, and means well, but everything he says is horribly wrong. It ranges from the glib (‘Oh well, we’re all going to die, that’s just life’) to the staggeringly self-regarding (‘I mean, it may be my turn next, have you thought of that?’) to the pseudo-mystical (‘You do know he hasn’t died, don’t you? He’s still here, he’s just changed shape’). It is a five-star tour de force of what not to say, and within minutes I have to mumble some sort of excuse and flee upstairs to hide in my bed, trembling, barely able to breathe. If all it takes is some well-meant crassness to take me apart, the world is suddenly a terrifying place.
It was because nothing ever used to make me feel afraid that I never thought of Tony as my protector. In the beginning this had been surprisingly problematic. Old-school manliness had been so central to his self-image that a new relationship which rendered it redundant quite unnerved him. If that wasn’t his role, then who else was he expected to be? And why was I even interested in him? To Tony it made no sense.
In my experience, men who make a meal of their masculinity do so chiefly because they have little else to offer. I only began to grasp how much more there was to Tony when he accommodated himself to this conundrum of my stated independence, and made himself indispensable in all sorts of new and unfamiliar ways which did not involve threatening to beat anyone up. But that was only part of the story, I see now. I was too bowled over by Tony’s capacity for what Americans would call ‘personal growth’ to notice that I, too, was changing – although in my case the shift was less impressive.
The invulnerability so central to my own self-image turns out to have been a self-delusion; a necessary invention. A couples therapist I know once told me that the qualities we look for in a partner are those we needed as a child and were denied – and so of course, Tony’s protection had appealed to something deeply hidden within me. After all these years together, I have grown accustomed to depending on him to protect me, and hadn’t even noticed. Now, without him, I discover I am afraid of everything – burglars, Vladimir Putin, gypsies, jihadis, the future – and the literalism of my nightmares is almost embarrassing, like a schoolgirl’s idea of the unconscious.
In one recurring dream, I come out of a shop in Maidstone to see a gang of lads break into Tony’s car and speed away. I go home to wait for them. How I know they will be driving to our house is lost in the illogic of the dream; all I know is that any minute now they are about to drive through the gate. I stand at the upstairs bathroom window, watching, waiting. When Tony’s car pulls in, the doors swing open and a band of cartoon hoodlums pour out and swagger towards our front door.
I turn from the window, and standing right in front of me is Tony. I am dissolved with relief: I am euphoric. He gathers me into his arms, and together we watch from the landing as the men burst into the hallway below. They have axes and hammers, and set about swinging them at walls and doors, cackling wildly as they smash up the house. I couldn’t be less scared. Everything is alright, because Tony has come back to take care of me, and those goons down there have no idea what’s about to hit them. I almost laugh at the first one to bound up the stairs towards us – until he walks right through Tony. The vandals do not even see him. He is just a ghost, visible only to me.
I was brought up to regard even the mildest anxiety about personal security as ideologically suspect and vaguely shaming. I didn’t own a key until I left home, and as far as I know my father’s house has no locks to this day. Until I got to university, I didn’t know you were supposed to remove the car key from the ignition. Trust in the world was an article of faith for my family, and when my dad’s car was stolen from outside the house a few years ago he could not have been more astonished if it had been abducted by aliens.
Part of me can of course now see the machismo of our contempt for safety concerns. It is equally clear to me that I am now a single woman living with two small children in the countryside. Were someone to break into Tubslake in the middle of the night, what exactly would I be able to do about it? Under these new circumstances, my old snootiness about security is a self-indulgent posture, and plainly irresponsible. But none of this makes my call to the electrician any easier. Asking for a burglar alarm to be installed feels awkward, but just about bearable. Asking for a panic button in my bedroom is more of a challenge, and becomes a confusing conversation for the poor electrician, because I literally cannot bring myself to say the words.
I am finding it impossible to believe that Tony does not know he is dead. How can he not know? In my mind he is watching us, and apart from the new alarm system, of which he would wholeheartedly approve, everything I do feels treacherous. When I interview a woman as a potential future nanny for the boys when I go back to work, I have to maintain a performance of sanity for her. It is a beautiful summer day, so I carry a tray of coffee and biscuits out into the garden and we sit in the sunshine, watching the boys play on the fireman’s pole the builders have built for them, and I try to sound like a plausible employer. We talk about nursery pickup times and hourly rates, but all I am thinking is, how must this look to Tony? What am I doing, inviting a stranger into his home to look after his children?
Of all the startling revelations these first weeks bring, one shakes me perhaps more than any other. Some experiences, I am discovering, really are too painful to talk about. It is becoming clear to me that the story of how Tony died is what everybody wants to hear, and even when they don’t say so I sense them waiting, angling, hoping it will come. Being immensely nosey and often quite prurient myself, I know I would be exactly like that too, so I am not at all offended by their curiosity. It is just that I don’t have the strength to keep satisfying it. I am amazed by what it costs me each time I have to tell the story, and see for the first time why others have been unable to talk about trauma in their life.
But I see, too, that how Tony died is currency. Most of the time I can choose not to spend it, but every now and then, when someone is especially kind or generous, I feel obliged under the terms of some bizarre contractual barter to offer them the story in return.
This is not, it turns out, the only form of currency he left behind. In Jamaica Matt had asked if I was afraid of what I might find out about Tony. ‘Are you worried you might discover any secrets?’ It took a moment to understand what he meant. But of course, one of the clichés of a sudden death is the posthumous discovery of a double life – a hidden mistress, a massive gambling debt, even a secret second family. Tony often had the manner of a man who might well be keeping something under his hat, so I could see why Matt would ask, but his question made me laugh. ‘No, Matty, I can safely say that’s about the only thing in the world I’m not remotely worried about right now.’
