He began laughing again. Could I give you a word of advice? he said. Don’t ever apply for a job with the Samaritans.
He could hardly speak for laughing.
My mother, I said, called the Samaritans once and asked whether research had been done on thwarted suicides to find out whether they had spent the time after the incident happily.
What did they say?
They said they didn’t know.
He grinned.
I said
Sibylla said
He said
Who?
I said My mother. She said they should recruit people like Oscar Wilde, only there isn’t anyone like Oscar Wilde. If there were enough people like Oscar Wilde so that you could staff Samaritans with them, no one would want to commit suicide anyway—they would joke themselves out of a job. You could call and someone would say
Do you smoke?
And you’d say
Yes.
And they’d say Good. A man needs an occupation.
My mother called once and the person kept saying Yes and I hear what you’re saying, which would have been reassuring if my mother had been worried about being inaudible.
So my mother said
Do you smoke?
And the Samaritan said
Sorry?
And my mother said
Do you smoke?
And the Samaritan said
No
And my mother said
You should. A man needs an occupation.
And the Samaritan said
Sorry?
And my mother said
That’s all right. It’s your life. If you want to throw it away, fine.
Then she ran out of 10p coins.
I said
It’s your life, but you should give things a chance. You know what Jonathan Glover says.
He said
No, what does Jonathan Glover say? And who is Jonathan Glover?
I said
Jonathan Glover is a modern Utilitarian, and the author of Causing Death and Saving Lives. He says before committing suicide you should change your job, leave your wife, leave the country.
I said
Would it help to leave your job, leave your wife and children, leave the country?
He said
No. It would help a little not to have to fake it all the time. But wherever I went I’d see the same things. I used to think I’d like to see the Himalayas before I died. I thought I’d like to see Tierra del Fuego. The South Pacific—I’ve heard that’s beautiful. But wherever I went I’d see a child clubbed to death with the butt of a rifle and soldiers laughing. There’s nothing I can do to get it out of my mind.
He looked at his glass.
He said
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
That weighs upon the heart
He said
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself
He put his head on his hand.
He said
It is a pretty story.
He said
The world would be quite a pretty place if the only people tormented by atrocities were those who’d committed them. Would you like another Coke?
I asked whether I could have orange juice instead.
He went to the refrigerator with his glass. He came back with the glass and a can of Coke.
He said
I don’t mean it wasn’t hard on my wife. She had to shoulder responsibility. She had to write a lot of letters to people who weren’t very helpful. She had to keep going for the sake of the children.
I said
Does she want to die?
He said
I don’t think so.
He said after a pause
It changed her a lot. She became much less
He said
Or rather she became much more
He said
That is she turned into the kind of person who
He said
That is she developed a lot of skills. She organised a successful campaign, you know, that is she organised a campaign that was successful as a campaign, it had a lot of supporters who gave money when she wrote to ask them for money and went on demonstrations when she told them there was going to be a demonstration and wrote letters to their MP when she said everyone should write to their MP. The papers published her letters when she wrote letters and they covered the demonstrations when there were demonstrations, and she got interviewed on radio and TV on a regular basis. That kind of thing doesn’t just happen, you know. Anyway once it happens you become quite confident that you can get that kind of thing to happen.
He said
Would you like another Coke?
I said OK.
He came back with another drink. He said he was sorry but they were out of Coke, he had brought me an orange juice instead.
He said
It sort of spoiled things for the campaign, in a way, my just escaping like that. Apparently negotiations had reached quite a promising stage or anyway my wife thinks they looked quite promising, I could have jeopardised everything by just making a run for it. It’s irritating for her to have this have-a-go-Grandad type of attitude to deal with because she thinks it was just luck that it worked whereas she doesn’t think that if a campaign works that’s luck. It’s not that it’s a major irritant, more of a minor irritant, it’s just that I had to keep hiding how happy I was to see the dog. He practically went insane as soon as I came into the room, it was all I could do not to or actually I think I did break down and it wasn’t as if he’d developed any media skills worth mentioning or made a significant contribution to the campaign or anything. What I mean is that my wife had spent, well all of them had spent five years making progress or facing setbacks whereas I’d just spent five years
He said
So obviously when the dog died
He said
Well anyway it’s past history. You’re bored, I’m bored, you’re bored or if you’re not you would be if you’d spent as much time thinking about it
I said
Have you read that book by Graham Greene?
He said
Which book by Graham Greene?
I said
The one where he kills his wife in a mercy killing and is tormented by the memory and then he loses his memory in an explosion?
He said
Oh that one. You read Graham Greene?
I said
Only that one and Travels with My Aunt. I liked Travels with My Aunt better. My mother read the other one and she thought: that’s it, I’ll get amnesia. So she tried banging her head on walls but she couldn’t even knock herself out, and then she remembered that she’d once been knocked out by a car and she could remember everything when she came to. So she read a lot of articles on amnesia but they weren’t very helpful. Then she thought: What about a hypnotist? People are always going to hypnotists and remembering things they’d forgotten that happened to them as a child, or in a previous existence when they were Cleopatra—why shouldn’t it work just as well the other way?
He said
Now there’s a grand idea. You go to the doctor a nervous wreck and come home Cleopatra Queen of the Nile.
I said
So she called the Samaritans.
He said
And what did they say?
I said
They said they didn’t know. So she called a lot of hypnotists and they all said this was an unhealthy attitude & hypnosis as a tool of psychotherapy was aimed at helping people to confront things & no ethical practitioner would contemplate and my mother said well what about an unethical practitioner? Suppose she found a rogue hypnotist, the kind who would fornicate with the unresisting body of his subject and steal her credit cards and her cashcard and ask her cashcard PIN number and take the pearls she got for her 18th birthday, would somebody like that be able to make her forget everything that had happened in the last 10 years or so?
He said
And what did they say?
I said
They hung up.
He said
So then what happened?
I said
She tried to kill herself.
He said
That must have been hard for you.