I shan’t be going to any faith-healers again.
The Good Samaritan
January 1988. Hilary is five. Feeding her this morning, I thought: ‘We get less change out of her than one would out of a three-week-old puppy.’ I alternate between this ruthless realism and cloying sentimentality. The girl is so constipated that sometimes we have to hook a finger into her anus and lever the turds out. Shirley does this. I simply can’t.
Travelling to work, I am fascinated by the truth that I am both seriously mentally disturbed and at the same time among the most conventional of commuters on the Northern Line; the soberly dressed junior director of a highly successful software company, personally responsible for a whole new concept of computer usage on small- to medium-size building sites. Forty grand. Saab Turbo. Walletful of plastic. On/off highly erotic affair with lovely marketing director, Marilyn.
But the Telegraph tells me that an Indian in Walsall has been arrested for the attempted murder of his five-year-old Downs syndrome son using poisonous mushrooms masked in a hot curry. I buy the Telegraph now, not just because it is generally free of the kind of social pieties one finds in the other ‘serious’ dailies, but mainly for the eye they have for these sort of stories. The paper comments briefly on the deplorable morals of some ethnic minorities who not only abort healthy foetuses for no other reason than that they’re female, but have a quite horrific record as far as handicapped children are concerned. ‘All too often the social services cover up such incidents out of a perverse inversion of race discrimination. In March 1986 a young black girl suffering from elephantiasis was burnt to death in a caravan in Brixton. The story was not. .’
Fire. The idea suddenly comes to me. Cleansing fire.
If the cause were sufficiently disguised. .
For a moment I am quite rapt by the beauty of this solution. Fire. Pushing my way through the crowd at Hammersmith with briefcase and squash racket before me, I am, as it were, enveloped in flames. I can really see myself doing it at last. This is actually possible.
But not in our beautiful Hampstead home.
For Mr Harcourt, I should have said, died last year, just as we were about to set off to Lourdes. Which is why in the end we never went. Being a profoundly lucky man he died suddenly: heart attack on the john, in company of the FT. In any event, we called off the trip to Lourdes for the various solemnities, quickly followed by the sharing of the spoils, which in this case, fortunately, were considerable indeed. Of course, the taxman took his whack, but what was left, in both our names I was relieved to see, allowed us to move up into the three-hundred-grand property bracket. Gainsborough Gardens, a gorgeous close a stone’s throw from the Heath and no more than five minutes from the tube.
I’m not going to burn that place down.
‘Unless somehow,’ I’m saying to myself on the return journey of that same day, ‘it’s the sacrifice required of me.’
What a strange thought! Much easier surely, just to refuse her oxygen when she has one of her respiratory problems. How could they ever really know I’d done it on purpose.
But staring at my curiously double image in the carriage window, I remember an incident of a few weeks ago which made a big impression on me. I’d stopped to fill up on the Finchley Road and after paying, as I was walking to my car, somebody on the road hit a cat. The animal wasn’t dead. Using just its front paws and squawking fearfully it dragged itself toward me in spastic jerks across a patch of pavement. With the winter evening’s yellow sodium light, its mutilation was garishly lit. Its back haunches had been completely crushed into a pulp of black fur and blood. Its wild howls were attracting the attention of passers by. Then, unable to pull itself further, it lay and writhed. Clearly the one thing to do to this cat was to get a brick, or even the jack from the boot, and put it out of its misery as soon as possible. Yet nobody did this. Not I, nor the home-going secretaries, executives, workers. Nobody had sufficient compassion or courage to dirty their hands with a liberating violence, to bring down the brick, the jack on this poor animal’s skull. Nor did anybody want to talk about it. They hurried by silently, not stopping. Perhaps, you could suppose, if it had been a question of playing Good Samaritan, of saving an animal with glass in its paw, a cut on its haunch, perhaps somebody would have stopped. For that is something entirely different and infinitely easier. But what was needed here was a savage coup de grâce. And for maybe two or three minutes I hesitated, staring at this shrieking cat. Then got into the Saab and drove away.
House or no house, the advantage of the fire is that I would not need to be in the same room as her. I would not have to see her clawing for breath.
But what decides me in the end is Peggy’s abortion. We have been seeing Peggy and Charles regularly for a couple of years now. Really, they are our only visitors. Shirley did go through a period of trying to contact and make friends with other couples with handicapped children, and we would drive out to meet them some evenings or Saturday afternoons. One does these things, looking for reassurance, I suppose, others in the same boat. But it was too depressing. One’s own handicapped child is bad enough, but the deformities and spastic contortions of a stockbroker’s boy in Walthamstow, a railway worker’s teenage daughter in Hounslow are too appalling. And far, far from reassuring. Merely a reminder in fact of how lost and wave-tossed the shared boat is. Somehow the more these people insisted on the little progresses, the tiny achievements of their doomed offspring, the more obstinately cheerful they were, showing you family photos in fields of flowers, so the worse, at least for me, the whole scenario became. Until, with the reasonable excuse that we were only depressing ourselves, I managed to put an end to this interlude. Shirley offered no resistance. She is not quite at my mother’s level of martyrdom yet. In fact we will have these moments, sitting on the sofa for example, watching the box, when our fingers will meet, involuntarily it seems, and some kind of communication, of affection will pass between us.
We haven’t made love for more than five years.
Shirley has confiscated and burnt my euthanasia scrapbook. Though I don’t generally go in for hocus pocus, I find the fact that she burnt it excitingly symbolic. Anyway, I shan’t be collecting any more such articles now. I sense the need for them is over.
Although never exactly assiduous, all our old regular friends, Gregory and Jill and Shirley’s one-time school colleagues, have completely dropped off. They find it too hard to handle. Shirley has her church friends of course, but she generally sees them in the morning or afternoon when I’m at work, or at Wednesday evening choir practice or after Sunday Morning Service. So our paths don’t cross. Anyway I have no desire to see them. Their determined niceness grates on me, reminds me of Mother humming ‘Count your blessings’, under an umbrella on Park Royal Road with an empty purse in her threadbare pocket. There is a primal anguish behind it all for me, dating back I sometimes wonder, to some experience I can’t even remember. I dream my dreams of mutilation.
But we do see Charles and Peggy. They come over once, twice, even three times a week, eat with us, talk, argue. They always come together because they are sharing a house he has persuaded his buddies in Camden Council Housing Authority to let Peggy have, pending demolition. This is a wangle I’m sure. They’ve had the place more than a year now and there’s no sign of the bulldozers. Meanwhile, God knows in what investments Charles has sunk the hundred and fifty-odd grand he got from Daddy-oh. In British Airports, I wouldn’t be surprised. Nothing would surprise me.