Christine Brooke-Rose: Life, End of

The apparitions may vanish. The stone ghosts are no longer primal. The bilocated bitemporal bedroom is less frequent. Like visits from friends off-season.

Nevertheless, yes, just keeping alive is an on-going business.

Allo?

Hello hello, it’s me.

Ah, hello, how are you?

All right now thank you, but I’ve been very ill. That’s why I wasn’t here, if you rang. I had to go to the hospital, but I’m very lucky, it’s near and I could walk.

I know. But do you have anyone to look after you when you’re unwell? (Of course, he doesn’t fall into that unintended and completely forgotten type of trap.)

Oh, yes, the neighbours are always very kind. I get on very well with them.

And what’s wrong?

Well, first I had to go for an X-ray, and I was made to drink a glass full of a thick white liquid, it was horrible.

Barium, you mean, is it intestinal then?

Yes, it was for the operation, which came the next day. Since then I’ve been to Poland. I’m really very welcome and fêted there you know, in my village, and felt I had to go, they’re so touching. It was a ceremony in my honour, and they fetched me by taxi from the airport, very far and very expensive for them.

But how long after the operation? Did you have time to recover?

Two days. In fact I had to wait so long for the ambulance, I decided to get home on my own, and walked up the hill. It was very difficult but I did it, aren’t I brave?

Yes, very. But what kind of operation? It must have been fairly light if you could travel so soon so far.

Oh no, it was quite serious. But I’d promised to go. It means so much to them. I’m an idol there now. I had just come back from Spain so I had to have it at once.

But d’you know the name of the operation?

Yes. Enema.

I see.

I tak dalej, tak dalej .

The Ex, the Polish poet, English professor and European exile, rings now and then. Why? Abandoned thirty-five years ago, after twenty-two years of an extraordinary marriage thrown away for a girl with high-rise black hair and eyes edged like stained glass. It’s all part of a mid-life crisis at fifty, unrecognised into an over-dramatised affair. ‘I want to be adored’, he exclaims during an outburst of high intensity, before the eleventh last straw or so. Adoration is for the gods, comes the Catholically correct reply, emanating ironically from a catechumen-ish Catholic life led superficially for so long and thankfully dropped when free. Clearly the girl gives him what he wants. As does his village.

However, it’s not the what that hurts, for it seems quite normal, but the how, in which straw by straw becomes the last. The real last being, on returning from one of his repeated weekends with his little suitcase for toothbrush, clean pants and electric shaver: did you suffer? I thought of you.

Yet he can’t quite let go. Something about that twenty-two year old friendship in love and poetry and stimulus and childish jokes seems to arouse hesitant regret as against irresistible passion. He remains in touch, visits each new home, out of mere curiosity perhaps, or for keeping an eye, from the lowly Paris lodging, far lowlier than student days or wartime billets, a lowliness lasting the six months it takes for a French Ministry of Education to pay a salary not yet on its books.

Last straws in his behaviour even then. After which come the long desired silences, since last straws don’t make for the post-conjugal friendship he seems to want.

Or access, simply? What is access? It can sound like axes. Soon they cease to wound, or even hurt. The head rolls off under the falling blade, but finds a second life to merge into, quite bloodlessly. But no, it’s not the head that rolls, it’s the previous life, enveloped in previousness but evolving fast. Giving birth to the next. The head lives on. Nous in use. A single gene can double the brain cells, though they die throughout life, then faster and faster. Part of the dance.

Years later, the little birds begin, and little flowers and pussy-cats drawn at the bottom of neutral notes or cards. Decoded, perhaps wrongly by a mere catechumen, as the Catholic version of I’m sorry I hurt you, with the little birds saying it for him, Twit. And You plays the game. Perhaps as a true Catholic he needs personal forgiveness, or at least more cheerful signs of it than specific words or the slight breast-beating at the sea culpa during Mass, felt as right in themselves but insufficient?

The friendship however, though re-established as a phone friendship, is not exactly phoney, but also not the same as the friendship during that amazing marriage. Oh, those long conversations, about everything from dreams to drolleries at breakfast. Or other times.

But now, at eighty-seven, he talks wholly about himself. not even minding the questionnaire since it’s about him, occasionally opening out to world generalities and political situations relevant to him. For as long as an hour sometimes. Yet never once does he ask his handicapped ex-wife, how are you? And You continues to play the game. Who cares? Once a man, if not so much adored as admired and loved, steps down from that pedestal, the conversations seem free-pedalling on one side and patient on the normally impatient other. Perhaps You has the same effect on others? Old age being more and more inexorably and pettily self-centred, it’s almost comforting to hear someone seven years older so much more advanced in the process. And he must be rung on his birthday and on his namesday and at Christmas. Oh, how wonderful of you to ring. I’ve had many calls already this morning. I tak dalej .

So access, without axes now, is respectfully though distantly continued.

But there is access and access. Here it has become a double myth, like the double sprain still on Pollykettle feet. A myth about its existence as access, and a second myth about its applicability. Rather like French laws, passed after heated discussion as solutions but inefficiently if at all put into effect. What distance has gradually opened out. Has he become an O.P.?

For this is the man who, whatever the wrongs towards him and a long-term exile himself, provokes, through the unacceptable how of his behaviour, another long-term exile for his wife, since the Paris offer comes in the middle of the marriage crisis. An exciting second career, yes, but a slow alienation also. Is it an obscure revenge on her for Britain never quite making him feel at home? A weirdo transfer from a land to an individual? It cannot be. The original fault must lie here. As usual this end, in a deep divide, the blame is somehow shouldered. Silently. If only world leaders could do that. If only O.P.s. Who then automatically cease to be such.

Politically the myth of access is held out at all levels, from schools to scholars, from the poor to the politicians, the handicapped to the heroes, the homeless to the stately homes. No Selection! is sometimes still the sixty-eightish cry of the students, apparently unaware that they all take tough selection for granted with footballers, poptops and other idols. And with doctors and surgeons who might harm them if not rigorously selected all the way. That is, no selection is only for themselves in the weaker disciplines, the crabbed humanities. Who’ll be neither harmed nor enchanted, who just need diplomas.

Yet they themselves keep the myth of access going, access to everything, to everyone, all the time. No mobility without mobiles, no walk without talk. The mobile either active on the ear or passive on the buttocks.

In this room access to the books upstairs, to that vanished view over the pink village roofs towards the hills, gone; access to walking normally along the evergreen oaks, to the sun, to images, thoughts, words — no more, because of the imbalance and the firebird feet, just as the stairs down to an ambulance to see any specialist at all have become out of the question, except on a stretcher; access to reading, soon, because of the sudden squintish astygmatics now glaucoming along; to debates, because of the loud and endless overspeaking. Access to legendary places, an Other Paradise. Or to a black hole.