William Brodrick: The Gardens of the Dead

‘Yes.’

‘Marvellous.’ He looked around, as if for help. ‘It’s unfortunate you didn’t get back in time, given… what happened.’

‘Yes.’

‘I must say your mother was a quite re maaark able woman. He’d shaken his shiny head and Nick made for the pantry.

Where he also shook his head. He’d been away about a year. He’d planned to travel since he was eleven but hadn’t actually got on a plane until he was twenty-six. And he was already back, hiding in the family home in St John’s Wood from people he barely knew. The endless ceremonial of accepting sympathy required patience and gratitude and he had neither. He had a headache. It had been non-stop movement across time zones: the train to Sydney, the flight to Singapore, the long haul to Manchester, the hop to London – a crazy sequence to get him home as fast as possible. When he had finally embraced his father two days ago, his body was still in Queensland. He’d come home to a fantastic absence in the heart of the familiar. Sitting on a footstool, he wondered how he could ever have been drawn away.

The first impulse to travel grew by the fireside with his father who, on cold evenings, would read out tales of adventure, of expeditions financed by some committee dedicated to Humanity and Knowledge and Geography This was the world of men who’d grown beards for the journey who wore khaki and had machetes. The romance of entering the darkness had filled his boyish soul, and would not be displaced – even by education, an appreciation of colonial oppression and the advent of the aeroplane.

Perhaps it was the spirit of the great philanthropists that pushed Nick towards a career in medicine. In fact, while an undergraduate at Edinburgh, he had considered setting up (eventually) a clinic on the banks of the Amazon – a thought he kept to himself – which itself disclosed that ‘ordinary life’ held out few attractions for a man whose footing belonged in a canoe. Nick saw his future with Medecins Sans Frontieres or at the side of Mother Theresa, and not in a high-street surgery.

The second impulse to travel came from an unexpected quarter: his dealings with his mother. As he’d grown an indefinable tension had crept between them, evident not so much through confrontation as a loss of assonance: that pliability, the willingness of children to rhyme with the lives of their parents.

As a boy Nick had rarely seen Elizabeth before nine in the evening, but she’d sit on the edge of his bed and they’d talk way past a sensible hour. They had no secrets. He would give his verdict on his teachers and she’d pass sentence – like consigning Mr Openshaw, the headmaster to a week at Butlins with a clothes peg on his nose. This was a time of alliance against Sensible and Prudent, and the Grown-Ups. Unusually the separation didn’t begin with a conflict of ideas – although that was to come – but with his size. It started when he began lumbering round the house and spilling things at the table because of the glut of adrenalin. As he filled out and rose above her head, she turned brittle. It was as if becoming a man had not been a foreseeable consequence of his infancy Nick couldn’t recall when it first came to pass, but she stopped coming to his room at night, and no comparable ritual took its place. It was what they both wanted, without saying so; perhaps without even knowing it. He’d lie in the dark simply aware that she was still in the Green Room, still between the papers of a brief. During breakfast he could see the courtroom looming in her face. At the weekends, she was forever tuning into conversations halfway through, getting the wrong end of the stick. As he moved towards manhood, her work expanded to meet the space created by his diminishing childhood. It was part of a symmetry that he didn’t altogether like. For while he wanted to build his own life elsewhere, he didn’t altogether appreciate her concurrence. The night before he went to Edinburgh, she cried: out of loss but with relief, he thought. Most of the friends he made told the same old story.

Comradeship, hangovers and exams were the landmarks of his growing independence. And from that new vantage point he began to see his mother’s awkwardness as an achievement, a mighty thing, purchased by little acts of selflessness. She’d managed to let go of her son, knowing that she would drift towards the waterfall. She, too, was an adventurer, he thought. She’d made the heroic sacrifice.

Just when this adult gratitude had shaped his outlook, Nick observed with surprise that his mother was hovering over the terrain she’d abandoned. At one point, he thought she’d lost her sanity. Just after Nick had qualified, she slammed the front door and practically ran into the sitting room. ‘You’ve never had a full medical,’ she said, as if he’d been reckless since childhood.

‘I’m fine.’

‘I don’t care.

They had argued a great deal recently, so Nick seized the opportunity for accord. ‘All right… send in the doctor.’

Nick had thought of blood pressure and tummy pressing from a buxom nurse. But his mother had other ideas. She wanted every organ screened. They argued some more; they bargained; and she paid. Nick had X-rays, ultrasound scanning and an ECG. Kidneys, liver and heart. When the results came back showing him to be without fault or defect, she burst into tears.

‘What else did you want?’ asked Nick.

‘Nothing,’ she sobbed, flushed and radiant. ‘I only wanted this.’ And they went to a restaurant as if she’d won a nasty case.

After that outburst she began to come at night and sit on the edge of his bed, but it didn’t quite work. She once asked about his intentions.

‘What will you do, Nick?’

‘Dish out prescriptions, hold the odd trembling hand.’

‘Whereabouts? I imagine London would be an attractive prospect.’

Without having said anything to his parents, Nick had already approached Medecins Sans Frontieres, and various other agencies, all of which had suggested he obtain some practical experience. So Nick was thinking of a couple of years in a surgery, but not one so near to home.

‘How about approaching Doctor Ferguson in Primrose Hill?’ continued Elizabeth.

Primrose Hill was on the other side of the road from St John’s Wood. She wanted him back home. His mother had worked out how to swim upstream, away from the waterfall, and she was determined to survive. At that moment more than any other, Nick recognised that he had to put some distance between her need and his identity.

Nick’s father had observed this progression from medical-test frenzy to night-time enquiries after employment hopes with the calm attentiveness that he gave to bookplates and display cabinets. He’d been an unhappy banker for twenty-seven years until they’d got rid of him, an apparent humiliation that had set him free to study butterflies and beetles. He was a simple man who considered work a species of evil.

Avoid it,’ he said firmly.

Elizabeth had just gone to the Green Room. This was the day following the Primrose Hill proposal, and, as if on cue, Charles offered Nick the third reason why he should travel.

‘See things. Make notes. Be fascinated.’ He was leaning forward, whispering loudly ‘Look at that streak in your mother’s hair. That’s what work can do to you.’

It had appeared rapidly over two weeks when Nick was sixteen. In fact, as he subsequently learned, there was no medical explanation for the change. But Nick looked to legend if science was found wanting, and something similar had happened to Thomas More and Marie Antoinette before they were executed. He told his father.

‘Precisely,’ said Charles. ‘There’s no rush. Have you thought of Down Under?’

Nick hadn’t, but he liked the idea. It stirred his soul, for the phrase conjured up the ultimate voyage. He’d be able to wear a hat with corks dangling from strings. He could legitimately have a machete in his belt. A week or so later Charles phoned an old client in Brisbane who, it transpired, had a nephew with a surgery in Rockhampton.