Oh Dear Silvia (3 page)

At this point, Ed groans as he gets up and goes to the window mumbling ‘living with my mother again, after forty years’ and ‘bloody appalling’ and ‘Why d’you sell it anyway?’ and ‘unkind, truly unkind’. He stretches and scratches. He remains
at the window, fixed on the view into a dismal quad, with tall hospital buildings on all four sides. There is a bench next to a bin, and a small lawn, half of which is brown because it never sees the sun, the buildings are too high. Who would ever want to sit there? It looks grim.

Perhaps, if Silvia is in here long enough and the weather gets warmer, if he can stomach still coming to visit her, he will come to regard that bench as his sanctuary. It will be a pleasure to sit on it because it will be wood against his legs, and a relief from sitting in here with Silvia, breathing her same stuffy air and watching her staunchly make no progress whatsoever.

Or maybe not.

Maybe she will wake up soon.

Yes, she might.

All the more reason to tell her. Tell her now.

He girds himself.

‘So, that evening, the fish ’n’ chips evening, eventually I was at the head of the queue. There was no one else to let in front, so I had to take my turn and give my order. I couldn’t steal any more time. As the girl gave me the packet, she said, “Have a lovely night,” and I automatically replied, “Yes thanks, I will.” I quickly climbed into my car and once inside, I allowed that little comment to land on me. “Have a lovely night.” She said it with conviction, actually she genuinely hoped I would have “a lovely night”. I wouldn’t of course, I knew that, but that wasn’t
what struck me. The shocking realization I had, was that she imagined “a lovely night” was a possibility for me. Somehow she had the hope I had completely lost. A stranger could still imagine I had the capacity for happiness.

‘She didn’t know that I was dead inside, that … I had ruled out the chance of joy ever again. For that night and every other night to follow. I had fully settled into my unhappiness and wore it comfortably. So comfortably in fact, that it was barely perceptible to others. It just fitted me so well. My suit of misery hung happily on me. So happily that she assumed I could have “a lovely night” in it. The loveliness she referred to was so extremely far out of reach for me. It was as far as … the bloody moon.

‘The sadness of it all hit me very hard, very suddenly. It virtually winded me. As I pulled away from the kerb, my mind started to chase me … towards … the bloody tipping point. I didn’t drive home. I drove up to Collicott Fields. I parked in the turning point at the end of the lane, you know it. It was still light enough to see, so I grabbed the fish-and-chips bag and the noose, climbed across the wall on that stile they have there, and headed up the field towards the wood.

‘No one was about, save a few sleepy cows who gave me that witheringly dismissive glance they do, and then they just resumed their serious chewing job. Four stomachs, apparently. Amazing. As I trudged across the grass, I could see the grove of ancient beeches at the far end of the field, getting
closer and bigger, as if they were coming towards me to swallow me up. That’s just what I wanted, to be right inside that wood, away from the woodless everywhere else. Away from openness. As I approached the outer edge with the first trees, I could feel the structure of the ground beneath my feet begin to change. The floor of the forest is scattered with the detritus of the massive gnarly beeches, all their droppings. It became quite crunchy and I had to pick my way through carefully. Remember, it was twilight by now, so it was fairly perilous.

‘You know where I was going Silv. I headed straight for the massive queen beech at the centre of the copse. She is the mother of them all, I think, the giant shade giver, the oldest. Maybe even four hundred years, possibly.

‘You will remember her, you will have looked up past her great knotted trunk into her magnificent dense top foliage that amazing day Silv, all those years ago, y’know the first time. I couldn’t believe how young you looked. Easily fifteen years younger than you were. I suppose you must have been … What? … thirty-three or something when we first met, but with the filtered sun dancing on your skin, so … dappled and … sort of creamy, you looked like a teenager. You were smiling up at me, giving me permission to go further. Inside the wood, inside you. So breathless and … willing.’

Ed looks at her.

Yes, she’s still breathless. Different kind of breathless.

That kind, back then, is such a turn-on, he remembers, when
a woman can’t find enough breath to keep up. When she has to snatch air between waves of pleasure. Deep, guttural sexual breaths. God, he loves that sound. He hasn’t heard it for so long.

So long.

So …

Long.

He sighs and looks at her.

‘You were the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen that day, your nakedness in amongst those huge snakey roots. It was all … earth, or something. Overwhelming. Completely natural. The best kind of beauty. It was a better moment than any I’d ever had. Maybe even than I ever will have, Silv. It was … sort of … dunno … sacred? I know that sounds grand and I’m sorry to say I’m glad you can’t respond to it, because I can just hear your haughty derision now. Maybe deservedly. But Silv, I just want you to know how much it meant.

‘It was in that moment I genuinely believed in – you know – love, for the first time. Well, for the only time. I believed we would always be one, I wanted that. I thought you did too. I really thought you did. Did you Silv? I would like to know. Yep. Like to know when that all changed … Anyway, it was on that day remember, we carved the Latin initials: “CICA” for “Crescent illae, crescit amores”, “As these letters grow, so will our love” into the bark of that immense matriarch.

‘So that’s where I was heading, Silv. I found her, after a bit of
palavering about and tripping up. A beautiful, monumental big fat beech with our memento tattooed on her. I felt guilty when we did it, like it was tree vandalism or something, but you said it was a badge of honour for the tree, that she would be proud to display our epigram along with all the other human markings made long before us. By schoolchildren in breeches and petticoats? By lovers in tight collars and corsets? I had to fumble about in my pocket for my keys so that I could use the pathetic little key-ring torch to search the giant trunk to find it.

‘It was, of course, further up than we had carved it, twenty-seven years further up in fact, and further in, which isn’t so much on a colossal mama like that. I found it though. Still there, holding fast. Unlike us. I sat back down on the ground beneath it. Exactly where we had made love, and I unwrapped the fish and chips. They were a bit cold by then, but I gorged on them anyway. Delicious. “Have a lovely night.” I looked at the noose I had flung on the floor nearby. It definitely wasn’t going to be lovely.

‘The noose was well made even if I do say so myself. I had been practising making it with various kinds of rope, different thicknesses. This one should be just right, I thought. I bought the rope in a chandlers, it was nylon and strong and manoeuvrable where it needed to be. The slip knot was well executed. That was the most crucial part. It
must
work first time, and it must take my weight. As I fall, I need the knot to jolt my neck forward and snap it cleanly. No fuss.

‘Jump. Snap. Done.

‘I tied and retied it sitting next to Ma on the sofa whilst she was watching
Midsomer Murders
. She didn’t notice.

‘I finished my fish and chips, and tidied away my mess. I didn’t want to leave a mess. More mess than there already was. Which was a massive bloody godawful mess. Holding the torch in my mouth, I flung the length of the rope over a strong lower branch and secured it to the trunk of the tree. Nothing would loosen it, it would remain firm, I was sure of that. I positioned the noose just above a massive old log that I could use to step off. It was all ready. I realized that these could be my very last moments in this world.

‘What does one do? Or say?

‘I wanted to be quick or I knew my courage might fail me, so I rummaged around in my brain for
anything
of significance to think or feel. In the end, I mumbled something pathetic out loud like “Dear God, if you exist, and I’ll know pretty soon, help my children to forgive me for this, and please be the strength in them that I can’t find in me. Amen. Oh, and sorry for being such a prime tosser …” I climbed up on to the log and tried to balance. It was hard because there was slimy lichen all over it, and because I was brimming with tears. Stinging my eyes, then streaming. Thousands of tears. Mostly self-pity I think, and self-loathing. But Silv, I didn’t know how to pity and loathe myself ’til you taught me. What an accomplished coach you are. So well acquainted was I with my shortcomings, that
I could end up on a slippy log prepared to donate my life to them. Feeling like absolute shit, Silv. Absolute shit.

‘In that moment, all I wanted was for you to find out that’s where I hung myself. On “our” tree. Because of you, you, you. So, I reached for the noose and pulled it towards my head. Just as it was slipping over my ears, I lost my footing on the wretched moss and tumbled unceremoniously, arse over tit, on to the forest floor. My back scraped down the bark of the big old dead log and I was scratched to hell. Then the crying turned into sobbing. Completely involuntary. I just felt like such a useless dickhead, I couldn’t even off myself well. Couldn’t do decent dying, I felt utterly bereft.

‘Then, then something happened. Something amazing. I picked up my torch to look at the log that had attacked my back so badly, and d’you know what I saw? Fresh shoots, Silv. In some big storm, this old rotten tree had fallen. But in its new, horizontal position, it had come back to life. It wasn’t finished yet, Silv, it had more living to do, that dead old wood. More to give. Yes. It was so clear to me. However battered by our storm, however uprooted I was, I didn’t have to lie down and accept that I was felled. I still had strength, I still had sap, and more importantly Silv, and what you will never understand the joy of, I had my saplings to shelter and raise. Of course I did. Of course. I left the noose hanging there and I walked away from that huge tree where only minutes before I had thought I would finish.

‘I ran in the darkness back to my car. As I was climbing over the stile next to the gate, I heard a weird flapping noise. With the help of my trusty torch, I could see it was a public notice announcing the sale of Collicott Fields. I read on. It included the beech wood I’d been in, Foy Wood. I didn’t know it even had a name! Surrounded by twenty acres of field. Foy Wood, Silv. That’s
my
wood now. I bought it the following week. The down payment was money I nicked from Ma’s secret cupboard. Not so secret after all! He he! She counts it every week, and doesn’t even know it’s gone!

‘Yes, that’s my wood and I’ve taken good care of it Silv. And while you’re in here, stuck in that bed and stuck in your head, I’m going to tell you all about it, and that way, I’m going to take you there. You may be a cruel old cunt, but everyone is entitled to beauty. And that’s what you shall have. The beauty might just save you.’

Friday 10am

‘Hello Mrs Shit! Is me at last – Tia!’

Sutiyah Setyawati bumfles noisily into Suite 5, proudly carting a brace of plastic bags with her. She has brought gifts for her employer Mrs Shute. In one bag, there are three Tupperware clipboxes containing three different dishes that she knows Mrs Shute especially loves. She immediately unpacks them and spreads them on the table which swings across the bottom of the big clinical bed.

‘I have your favourite. Three favourite. I make for you in my cooker last night. Every in my family try steal! I say no, that for Mrs Shit only. For make her much well. I tell them to do big piss off, not to eat. They have many other to eat. Keep dirty fingers and toes off Mrs Shit food. This goin to make her alive again. If Mrs Shit smell my gado-gado, you think she stay dead? No thank you! She jump up and suck it off very quickly.’

Without even removing her coat, she unclips all the tiffin boxes and takes the lids off, releasing the ambrosial spicy scents into the room. The juicy vapours permeate Silvia’s tired dry air with their delicious moisture. Tia, as she’s known to all British people who can’t pronounce her full name, picks up one of the boxes piled high with delicious fried rice with chillies and anchovies and whole, shiny garlic bulbs. She positions herself near the top of the bed where Silvia’s head is slightly lollopped on one side. She places the tub under her nose.

‘Come on Mrs Shit. It smell good, yes? You wanna wake up now? I make plenty more if you do. Deal or no deal, come on. This is my special nasi goreng. For warriors. One big lady is easy for this. Will help you fighting. Come on.’

She checks no nurses are snooping through the window, then she dips her index finger into the luscious juice at the side of the dish, slips it into Silvia’s mouth, and rubs it all over her gums and teeth.

‘Is good. Is very good. Enjoy the juicy and wet. You won’t regret. The taste is gentle, hm? Not enough too spice? Just as the lady likes, I think. Who wants food in the tube? How is getting in properly? A tube with bad soup in, no pepper? No please thank you for Mrs Shit. She like hot, ow ow, nice dance on her tongue. Like a bursting she says. Not boring English soup water. Going in a nose hole. How to enjoy that? Aw look at the dry mouth lips.’

Tia replaces the tub of food on the table, and rummages about in her bag ’til she finds a small bright pink tin.

‘Here comes! I get this in Jakarta, nowhere in UK can find this, special grease made from tiger ass. Not the bad part where dirt comes through, other part higher in. On two sides, the holes make a juice come out to help the dirt get out easy. But this grease is from that bum juice very fresh, very clean, very expensive. Makes mouth lips fat and slippy. You ever see dry tiger asshole? Never! So, here. I put there for you.’

She opens the tin and spreads the balm all over Silvia’s lips and beyond. As high as her nose and as low as her chin, and ear to all-the-way-on-the-other-side ear. The lower half of Silvia’s face is now thoroughly glisteningly greased. She looks strangely mannequin-like. For luck presumably, because there’s no other earthly reason, Tia adds more grease to Silvia’s eyebrows.