Next it’s Katie’s turn. She says, ‘My personality.’
‘You can’t lose that,’ says someone. ‘Nobody can ever take that away.’
‘How naïve of you,’ says Katie, triggering another intense conversation. She doesn’t speak in the group session again.
She only wants to talk about the ghost, and all I want is to refuse her. Whenever she tries to raise the issue I put another task between us and the conversation. A swim. A shower. Dinner. And now, at the end of the day with the meal all eaten, I demand to spend half an hour on my declaration.
Katie sits across from me at the kitchen table and puts down her own words. She writes fast, without pause. She has a lot to say.
I don’t try to pick up where I left off. I don’t think this whole thing will find any order, chronologically or otherwise.
I feel so badly for that woman with the wasting disease. I’m learning from her. She taught me something. But who wants to be there just to be an inspiration? We went around the group and said our names and I registered hers for a second at most, then forgot it. Her pain is nothing more than an impetus for me to have my own thoughts. She’s a ghost too, I suppose. We’re all ghosts to each other. We breathe out smoke, and others take it in. But we’re no more than the smoke.
I must be more.
Those are all the words that will come to me. I put down my pen and wait for Katie to stop writing. She levels a calm stare at me, and I meet it.
‘All right,’ I say. ‘Tell me about your grandfather.’
She reads it straight off the page in front of her and I try to take it in and hold it.
I’m forty-seven years old and I have never been close to anyone if I can help it. I mean that in both the emotional and the physical sense, although I’ve had times when I’ve been unable to keep my barriers in place. I feel disappointment in myself when these rare events occur. I can’t explain why, except to say closeness appals me. It feels like a way of avoiding certain realities. We’re born alone, we die alone; that kind of thing. I hate the things people do to evade this inevitability, like taking a scenic diversion to a place that you already know is a shithole.
I think my attitude to life is probably very similar to my grandfather’s way of seeing the world. Let me give you an example:
My grandfather got married for a bet. It wasn’t even a bet he made.
He couldn’t have cared less about the idea of human companionship as a necessity for a fulfilled life. Nothing mattered to him but being outdoors, alone, miles from anyone. When he was young he would go walking for months, across the breadth of Yorkshire. He would eat what he could find, beg or steal. He would only return when his shoes had worn through.
At least, that’s what my father told me. My father, the social being and needy romantic.
On one of these occasions of return my great uncle, one year younger than his brother, told my grandfather over the dinner table of a conversation he’d had during a night out at the pub in the village. A bet had been mooted that my grandfather would never get married – but who would be stupid enough to take such a bet? Everyone knew he would never tie the knot. He’d never even so much as looked at a girl. Eventually my great uncle had reluctantly taken the bet, out of a sense of familial duty. After relating this story he had, apparently, shrugged and said, ‘That’s good money wasted, unless you’re willing to pay me back for it.’
That had been enough.
My grandfather set his sights on a girl. The girl who became my grandmother, who was always ‘the girl’ to him, if he spoke of her at all. She left him, and my father, soon after my father started school. There wasn’t even a picture of her for me to examine as I wanted to. I was keen to see what the face of a traitor looked like; that was how I thought of her, for years, until I understood life better.
My father told me that story of the marriage as a gamble often, trotting out the familiar sentences to a little girl who was too young to make sense of it. He told it as if it were a parable, and wisdom could be unlocked if only the listener heard with better ears. For a while I blamed myself for failing to find an answer within it.
My father is an idiot. He loves people and their many problems. He can’t walk through the market square of our home town in less than an entire morning because so many people want to stop and chat, even now. I can remember having to hold his hand throughout, pinned in his grasp, shamed by his inane conversations. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other as he chatted. I was wearing yellow wellington boots. This must be one of my earliest memories.
I know my mother went out to work for the local solicitors’ office while my father stayed home with me – an unusual choice in the seventies, perhaps born from his time spent alone while he was growing up. He wanted to keep me company every minute. But occasionally he would grab a day of work for a removals firm or on a building site, and then my grandfather would turn up on the doorstep.
There was always a sense of reluctance to leave me in his care; I felt that from very early on. I used to think my father was needlessly worried that the old man wouldn’t really notice if I lived or died, which I took as a reflection on his own upbringing. Now I suspect he was more concerned about my grandfather encouraging the sociopath in me to emerge, by giving it a proper role model.
We had one proper conversation about the bet early in my teenage years.
‘Katie,’ my father said to me, ‘think of it this way. He likes to pretend he’s an island, but he still made me and raised me. Not well, perhaps, and with long absences, but he did. He wants people to think he doesn’t have feelings, and that’s his choice. It’s not a choice I would make, but he lives with it.’
‘Has he never loved anyone?’ I asked, meaning: Why doesn’t he love me? It’s a difficult thing for a young person to understand.
‘He made a baby and lost a wife, and both of those events were his own fault. But he comes here to look after you, every once in a while. That has to mean something.’
I don’t know if my father genuinely believed that. I’m not so certain that love can be measured in distance travelled, or tasks performed.
I’m not the way I am because of my grandfather, although I wouldn’t deny that he proved to me that living without having to hold fast to another human being was possible. I stress that it was humanity alone that didn’t appeal to him; he loved the beauty of all other living things and knew everything about them. The only time I saw him smile was when he took me out of the house, into the wild.
That only happened once. My parents decided to take a summer holiday to France and I didn’t want to go. In fact, I remember I was angling to be left alone in the house. A week without having to say a word to anybody – the school summer break had started – appealed to me deeply after my father’s endless neediness. But it wasn’t to be. My grandfather turned up on the doorstep on the morning of their departure, and was admitted. They all stood in the kitchen together, and I watched from the doorway.
‘She’ll be fine,’ he said to my parents.
My mother said, ‘I’ll hold you to that, Michael,’ in a warning tone. I think my grandfather was a little afraid of her. But as soon as I’d been kissed goodbye, and my parents had driven away, he looked me up and down and pronounced me old enough to do some proper walking.