Tim Parks - Goodness

I watch, biting a nail. Fifteen minutes. It’s hard keeping still frankly. I fidget. I feel tense. It’s farcical. For of course, now I’m here, I don’t expect anything. In the end I would have done a lot better by myself and Hilary if I’d gone to St James’s Park. Shirley would think I’d lost my marbles.

Another ten minutes before at last Miss Whittaker rises slowly to her feet, then sits on the bed and strokes Hilary’s hair in what is now an entirely normal way. Immediately the child begins to smile and gurgle again.

‘Poor little lovey.’ Then she turns to me. She says: ‘Well, apart from some small irritation or infection which I may have been able to help, your child is really perfectly healthy, Mr Crawley, and beautifully, beautifully innocent. Don’t you see how her smiles shine?’

What? Is the ‘session’ over? Is that her verdict? But she holds up a hand to stop my protest. ‘As for the question of what she is, I mean the form in which she was sent into this world, I’m afraid it is far, far beyond my humble powers to alter that.’

After a moment’s awkward silence in this dimly-lit room, I decide the best thing to do is cut my losses. Only £12.50 after all. A joke. I stand up to go, reaching for my wallet.

She smiles her sad smile, so similar to any sympathetic, middle-class smile an older woman might give you waiting in a long queue at supermarket or post office. She is still stroking Hilary’s hair. For the first time, standing above her now as she moves her legs, crosses her ankles, I think of her as feminine, ample, faintly perfumed, a woman. They are always women. And she says calmly:

‘Perhaps I could help you, though, Mr Crawley.’

‘I’m sorry, I beg your pardon.’

‘Perhaps I could help you more than your child.’

‘Oh I’m fine.’ Caught by surprise, I automatically assume my jocular office persona. ‘As terminal patients go I mean.’ I laugh falsely. I’m never ready for people’s extraordinary presumption.

She raises her eyebrows. ‘In some ways you may be less healthy than your daughter.’

‘That,’ I tell her emphatically, dropping any attempt at humour, ‘is patently non-sense. Anyway, I’m in a hurry.’

‘Of course, as you wish.’ But then as I extract my wallet, she adds: ‘It’s just that you said you were desperate.’

‘I am. For her.’

‘And for yourself.’

‘Only in so far as I find her suffering unbearable.’

‘So perhaps I could help you with your desperation, help you to bear it.’ She works on me with her soft eyes the way certain women will.

‘Frankly I’d say desperation was the only normal response to this situation. I shall be desperate while she is like she is. She is the cause, not a symptom. And that’s that.’

Miss Whittaker sighs, faintest half-smile wrinkling the corners of a generous pale mouth. ‘As you wish. Dear Hilary,’ she says again as I struggle to get her into her coat.

At the door she declines payment with a simple shake of the head. She has exactly my mother’s serene sad wistfulness. For Christ’s fucking sake. I hate people who won’t take the money you owe them.

And once in the car I go for the Fulham Road with a real vengeance. Only at the second or third lights do I remember I’d offered to take her to Richmond. Of course. Suddenly it’s very important that I honour this promise. I don’t want to be thought a shit. I am not. Quite the contrary. I swing the car through a U-turn, alarming the inevitable pensioner in his Morris 1100. But when I get back to Fernshaw Road no one answers the door. She has put two milk bottles out that I don’t remember seeing before. I look up and down what is after all a fairly long street. Could she really have walked so far?

At the first newsagents I pick up a few bars of chocolate and feed myself quickly, heading for Battersea Park. Who knows if a band mightn’t be playing there? In the mirror I can see poor Hilary’s lolling head. My eyes fill with tears. It is this I can’t stand. I would so dearly like to give my daughter some chocolate, to see her gobble it up greedily like I do. I would like to give her at least this small piggy pleasure: good thick foil-wrapped chocolate. But the sugar brings Hilary out in rashes that cover her whole body.

I shan’t be going to any faith-healers again.

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.