plea, or a gesture that requires response. It’s just that I want you to live the rest of your life knowing that as far as I’m concerned you’re forgiven, and loved. The whole thing was my fucking fault.’
‘Declan . . . Oh, God, Declan I –’
‘Don’t say anything now. I just want to feel clean and right for once. We’re not stupid; there’s no point in talking about being friends or anything. I think we were too much to each other to be satisfied with that, now.’
I’m in two minds about the next bit – but it feels right, so I turn her hand over in mine and bend forward to leave a chaste kiss in its palm. She’s utterly astonished. (And would you believe it? A thought breaks through in her like a sunbeam: My God, I was right. My instincts were sound. He’s grown – but you have to have the potential for growth . . . Maybe . . . maybe . . .) But I’m gone. Out of the kitchen and down the hall while she’s still scraping her chair in getting up from the table. I deal with the front door myself (’Wait . . . Declan please wait . . .’) pull it shut behind me, then stride briskly away down the street. I feel her, of course. She comes to the door, opens it, looks out, sees the purposefulness and speed of my step, understands that now it must be left to germinate, that more words will ruin it. (Indeed they’ve ruined things enough for me, already, one way or another – but I’ll come to that in a moment.) Nothing has prepared me for how I feel. I flag a cab and fling myself into its gloom, barely capable of muttering a destination (’. . . station . . . Piccadilly . . .’) before feeling overwhelms me and I pass away into a terrible dream.
The first terrible part of this terrible dream was a merciless assault on my body. The train journey was bad enough (the train journey’s bad enough even if you’re tickety-boo in the health department, I’ll grant you): shivering, cold sweats, hot sweats, tommy-gun teeth, blood flecked with peppercorns and glass fragments, the fever taking and releasing me like an equivocating molester, every bone a bruise, flesh as if stripped of its dermis – you wouldn’t think, would you, that a mere seat cushion . . . A murmur in my ears like a Wimbledon crowd between games. Mere consciousness a terrible interrogation. By the time I staggered into my room at the Ritz it was all I could do to chug down a fifth of Jameson’s and collapse onto the imperial bed. I believe I tried to speak. Not English, you understand. No. My own language. A very bad idea. I was seized with convulsions. My tongue swelled and burned. I hurled myself from the mattress with the intention of crawling (slithering would have been more likely, ha very bloody ha) to the enormous bathroom with its cooling spirits of basin, bowl, bidet and bath. Another bad idea. I hit the deck to discover I was paralysed. My tongue detumesced and my guts fired out a spectacular arc of sulphurous vomit. Now I’m familiar with this sort of thing – you don’t get through the average possession without the odd gastric fiesta – but previous chunderings were picnics compared to the . . . the surrealist free-for-all to which I gave myself over that evening in my bathroom. I tried getting out of the body altogether: nothing doing. A wave of panic that sent through me, you can imagine. (S’all right. I’ve done it since. Must’ve been a temporary blockage on account of my . . . on account of what I was going through.) Things progressed. A chain-gang of fevers. Me babbling, incomprehensibly. I wouldn’t’ve believed myself capable of moving – let alone writing – but, since I have the sheet of Ritz stationery to prove it . . . Not that it makes any sense. Handwriting’s pretty atrocious, too. I can barely decipher it. 5%ityas 3insevvse??3 666666666theyiii ho yo hurthurtyoulove6$$$and evenb thetgloryisn’t you!!!!1youthought isn’tyouisn’you%$$was te of????y ou???rexis 10sveig rof3”1””””!t ogoh$?$?ome
That’s my best guess.
It stopped as suddenly as it had started. The madness, I mean, the terrible dream. Or rather, switched its assault from the body to the mind. In actuality, no doubt, I was lying supine in a state of unflattering partial dress on the unjudgemental bathroom floor. In the terrible dream, however, I was back at Penelope’s gaff in Manchester with the words ‘forgive you’ opening me – how can I describe this? – separating my ribs and filling them with unbounded, mentholated space. Space. Can you be filled with space? Is it just me? I could see the inside of my head. It was an area big enough to seat every being in the universe, an infinite amphitheatre overarched by . . . well, a sky, I suppose, one of icy and sunlit blue, going on, as you might expect, forever. Vertigo? Sort of. The vertigo of bliss. (Gunn should make a note of that for a title. The Vertigo of Bliss. That’s got to be a title for something. Not this, obviously, but something.) In any case nothing I’ve felt before, angelically or otherwise. Still at the Manchester table, still observing the concrete particulars – Penelope’s bare feet up on the chair next to her; the coffee rings and half-done Guardian quick crossword (14 Down: To forgive? (6); she’d fill it in later, no doubt); the open back door with its colour- riot and smell-festival; the buzz of a passing bluebottle; my own hand, the Marlboro with inch-long ash smouldering between first and index – still, as I say, there. But released, too, simultaneously, as it were, into a realm from which it was possible to both feel what I was feeling and observe myself feeling it. And what I was feeling is water to this language’s net, evidently. Hugeness. Internal hugeness. Room inside for . . . well, one hesitates to say this, but, for everything. Is there any other way of saying it? Bear with me, I’m searching . . . Searching . . . Nope. Room inside for everything. The discovery of infinite inner space, belonging to me and in which I ceased to matter. In this terrible dream my fingers grip Penelope’s table edge, my feet hook around its mock Queen Anne legs – I’m convinced that without such precautions my own infinite lightness will see me carried up, up, passing immaterially through Penelope’s ceiling and the floors and ceilings of the three flats above, up, up into the blue, filled with space, emptied of all but terrible bliss, permeated with the knowledge that I am both nothing and everything, a minute speck with the capacity for infinite expansion . . .
Wearing, isn’t it. And that’s just hearing about it. Meanwhile, back at the actuality ranch, I was very much regretting having turned the bathroom’s lights on. Inset halogens surrounded prone me with interrogative stares of piercing brightness. It would have been lovely – it would have been absolutely the thing – to have got up and crawled or staggered back to the unlit bedroom with its forgiving shadows and soccer-pitch sized window filled with London’s dusk. It would have been just what the doctor ordered. Instead, wide-eyed and inert, I lay on the bathroom like a mute patient unable to tell the approaching surgeon that the anaesthetic hadn’t worked, that when the buzzing blade entered, I would, actually, feel it.
Nor was that the end of it. Oh dear me no. Betsy – yes, Betsy Galvez – stands in her bathroom gripping the rim of the sink and staring into its large, bulb-rimmed mirror. Her eyes are raw and her make-up is fractured. Tears, you see. Every now and then a part of her rises up and looks at the other parts with contemptuous clarity. Downstairs, her eighty-three-year-old mother sits in her chair with bits of her mind abandoning her by the hour. There’s a home help during the day – but Betsy handles the evenings and the nights. And it is evening now. Mr Galvez wants the old girl out and in a home. Ridiculous, he says (the smell of piss and medicine, the deteriorating mind, the ice cream in the handbag, the idiotic and impotent rages), since they have the money to pay for the best. But Betsy (would you believe it, our Betsy) is wedded to caring for the old woman because . . . Because . . .? I don’t know.
‘I don’t know!’ I believe I screeched out at the bathroom’s brilliant eyeballs, trying, at the same time, to get to my knees – failing.
In any case, there’s Betsy at the mirror. Her mother has just slapped her across the face. Betsy doesn’t know why. ‘Why’ is a concept sliding into irrelevance in relation to her mother’s behaviour. The old woman, Maud, had dropped dessert all over her blouse. They’ve tried getting her to wear a bib, but she won’t have it. Therefore these mealtime messes. Banana mashed with clotted cream and sprinkled with pungent ginger. The old woman will eat virtually nothing else. (Betsy gags, these days, preparing it, having seen it far too many times in other form at the end of its journey through her mother’s bowels. Mr Galvez won’t even be in the room when the old woman tucks in. Betsy understands. . .) Anyway. Bending to mop-up her mother’s blouse, Betsy received a stinging slap across her mouth and a look of purest hatred from the still piercing octogenarian eyes. I hate you. Maud had said. You’re a dirty thief. You think I don’t know where all this money comes from? You’re nothing but a thief. You’re wearing my cardigan. D’you think I’m blind? And Betsy, for once, had been unable to bear it. Unable, for a moment, that moment, with her mouth bloody from Maud’s in-turned garnet and diamond cluster, to bear it. She had run upstairs, on fire with hurt and choking on unswallowable knots of tears, until, safe behind the bathroom’s locked door, she had taken her place before the mirror and let herself weep.
Without much surprise, by the way, I found that I was weeping myself, right there on the bathroom floor. No flailing or wailing, just strangely cooling and continuous tears. Somewhere in the back of myself, I remember, panic was politely trying to get the rest of my attention.
‘As long as I have strength,’ I find myself saying, in Betsy’s wobbling voice. ‘As long as I . . . Oh, Mummy . . .’
‘Who on earth are you talking to you insane man?’
