Graham Swift - Shuttlecock

And now, a few hours later, in bed, because of this (in her view) excessiveness on my part, Marian was once more questioning my threat to have our television removed — not with the bluster of our earlier row in the kitchen, but with the neat, just and almost disinterestedly expressed argument that since I had already made my point by my stern penalty, wouldn’t it be going too far to confiscate the television as well?

All the time Marian was pleading in this way I was making adjustments to her body and manoeuvring her limbs into one of my favourite positions for love-making. I won’t go into exact details; it is something developed over the years which requires a little setting up. Marian is quite accustomed, almost indifferent to these preparations. She lies back, lets me continue and lets herself go like putty. I was determined, you see, to take my consolation for a taxing day.

She kept on talking. ‘So I’m not taking that television back,’ she concluded, firmly — though hardly in a posture that went with command. It was rather as if she were saying (it’s a kind of argument which Marian is always, in a way, silently, wearily advancing): ‘See what I’m letting you do to me, I don’t resist one bit, I let you go ahead — and you still want everything your own way.’

‘All right, all right,’ I said. I had almost finished my adjustments, had become quite aroused in the process, and now the matter of the television seemed not so important after all. I was ready to take my place in the structure of flesh I had been building.

‘Now —’ I said.

And then Marian said: ‘Tough’ — in a quite mild voice. ‘I haven’t put my doo-dah in.’

When Marian says her ‘doo-dah’ she means her diaphragm. I looked her in the face — which was not, in fact, in our present position, such an easy action. I knew she was probably lying. But I didn’t risk it. Martin and Peter are enough by themselves.

I held out for a few more, tormented seconds. I thought to myself: now is the time when I could tell her about my promotion. This might break the impasse. Then she might say: ‘Oh — it’s all right darling — I’ve got my doo-dah in really’ — and give some coaxing wiggle.

But I didn’t. I said: ‘I’ll bloody well take the television back myself.’

Today –

But you will have gathered by now that I am writing all this as thoughts come to me and as things happen. I have broken off since I last wrote, time has passed, and when I say ‘today’ I mean, of course, today, a day later — Wednesday to be precise. I don’t know that I ever intended to put pen to paper again, or, indeed, to write as much as I have already. It all began when I remembered my hamster in the Tube and I had this urge to set down my feelings and try to account for them. It’s strange, I’ve never really wanted to put them on paper before. And then it seemed, no sooner had I written that first confession than there were lots of other things that had to be examined and written down — and now I’m at it again. I don’t know where it’s getting me. It’s not as if anything extraordinary is happening. But I feel I have to go on.

Today I went to visit Dad. I go to see Dad most Wednesday evenings, and often on Sundays too. Dad lives in a mental hospital. It’s fair to use the word ‘lives’ because he has been there now for nearly two years. He is not insane, you understand. Most people who live in mental hospitals are not insane; they just have, like people in ordinary hospitals, some particular thing or other wrong with them. If you saw Dad now you would see nothing alarming. Quite the opposite. He is an upright, robust, distinguished-looking man in his late fifties. He has always had a good physique, a strong, intelligent, photogenic face — like the face of some seasoned explorer or mountaineer — and all these imposing features, this statuesque quality, are now, if anything, accentuated. But nearly two years ago he had some sort of sudden breakdown, as a result of which he went into, for want of a better word, a kind of language-coma. I haven’t heard Dad speak since. For two years I have been visiting this silent shell. That is all that is odd about him. Now the doctors say that there is no physical reason that they, at least, can discover why Dad shouldn’t speak. In that sense his condition is ‘psychological’. But what they don’t know for certain is whether Dad can understand anything of what is spoken to him or if he can even recognize people around him. In order to know that, Dad would have to be able to tell them. Oh, I speak to Dad myself, of course. I have long, rambling conversations with him — like Marian with her plants — in which I even reply to things which I suppose Dad might have said. But all I ever see in his eyes is a filmy gaze, fixed on the distance, which now and then settles on me as on some curious object. And all that ever emerges from his lips are inarticulate sounds — coughs, grunts, clearings of the throat.

Nobody knows the cause of Dad’s breakdown — or, if it comes to it, whether what was involved was a true mental breakdown or some sort of seizure of the brain. At the time, there was nothing in my Dad’s circumstances which would have seemed capable of triggering off such a crisis. A year before his own trouble, it’s true, my mother died quite suddenly and apparently in perfect health (she simply collapsed one day on the kitchen floor — it’s a day, to be honest, I don’t like to remember in detail), and if any event might have led to my father’s breakdown, this was it. I have never doubted — since I began to consider such things (and that, of course, was after my pre-hamster days of tantrums and rebellion) — my father’s feeling for my mother. I have always thought that his command, his confidence and poise, owed much to her, and that she in turn derived her calm, her contentment from his success. Since I got married myself I have looked up, almost in awe, to the solidarity of their partnership, their health, stability, their ease. If any event … But my father did not crumble at my mother’s death. He bore it, yes, with grief, but with a noble (and it was only then that I began to think of that word as appropriate to my father) resignation. All this admiration, I should add, I have never shown, not to my father’s face — quite the opposite. He was a partner in a successful firm of consultant engineers. He had an office with a thick, plush carpet and enormous chairs. After my mother’s death he worked on as energetically as ever, no doubt with a certain inner hollowness, but (for reasons I will come to) he was a popular, a respected man, he had plenty of friends and business connexions with which to fill his time. Then one day, a year later, he cracked up completely. Nobody can say why. And nobody can say if my Dad will ever recover.

When I go to visit him we always follow the same ritual. Dad lives in a ward with about twelve other patients, all in their fifties and sixties. For the most part, gentle, amiable-looking men in dull dressing-gowns with piping round the cuffs and tasselled cords. Now that the weather is warm, and as the ward is on the ground floor, they are usually sitting outside when I arrive, grouped in wicker chairs on the little terrace outside the tall ward windows, smoking, talking, reading the papers or playing board games. Dad sits amongst them, but not taking part in any of their activities. When I appear I say hello to them all, and a broken chorus answers me. Then I say hello to Dad in particular. His eyes flicker. He recognizes me. But I don’t know if he recognizes me as his son or only as the person who comes to see him on Wednesdays and Sundays. He gets up — sometimes he does this automatically and sometimes I have to put a hand on his arm — and we go for a slow stroll round the hospital grounds. We sit for a while on one of the wooden benches placed here and there on the lawns and ‘chat’. Then we stroll back to the group outside the ward windows and I have conversations with some of the others in which I somehow pretend Dad is taking part. In the winter, of course, we cannot take our stroll outside. Then we walk up and down the corridors (the hospital is run on liberal lines and is quite tolerant about this), and we visit the canteen where the more capable patients can come and go as they please. But I don’t like these indoor meetings so much. In the corridor we have to pass other patients, some of whom jibber, jerk their heads and even yell out loud (though I have learnt after two years’ visits that such things are nothing to be alarmed at). But passing by these patients makes me think that my Dad is only another indiscriminate member of the ranks of the mad.