Clobber

By Thomas Ulrome

An older woman, unsoothed in grief, meets a young black woman whose fashion business has folded. Together they explore the chances of help through a group of people similarly afflicted by loss, with unlikely sympathies and alliances. In this unflinching study of grief, Thomas Ulrome again presents lives of ambiguity and moral dilemmas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mereo Books
• Release date: Dec 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781861518736

Book preview

Thomas Ulrome

CLOBBER

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Thomas Ulrome

Copyright©2017 Thomas Ulrome

The moral right of Thomas Ulrome to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. Neither the whole nor any part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-86151-871-2

The author hereby exclude all liability to the extent permitted by law for any errors or omissions in this book and for any costs, expenses, damages and losses (including but not limited to any direct, indirect or consequential losses, loss of profit, loss of reputation and all interest, penalties and legal costs (calculated on a full indemnity basis) and all other professional costs and expenses) suffered or incurred by a third party relying on any information contained in this book.

Dedication

To Chantal

Frontispiece

Whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.

Matthew 13: 12

PART I

Chapter 1

Black man on tube, angrily ranting, his violence purposed, fierce against some whore. She had cast him off without satisfaction; taken his money; fired his lust. A sudden violent cry: ‘De bitch has took ma rings! O no! O man!’

The history of the rings cries in his voice. The rigid alert fear of the carriage swings to compassion and sympathy.

He rose, falling against the carriage, throwing up violently against the doors.

The older white woman in the carriage got off at the next stop. She ran through King’s Cross to the clattering time-board, seeking the platform for her next train.

She sat, thinking about her neighbour.

Ten days ago, Robert from No. 3 went into hospital to have neurological surgery. In the past he had had a quadruple by-pass. It was said no more could be done for him – he was ‘pushing at the barriers of medical science’ – but he walked, seemed fit, did menial jobs. In the intervening year, he repaired No. 4’s dripping tap; looked after the keys; sold the land for car-parking; looked after the cats.

A few months ago, out of the blue, he had a stroke. The ambulance could not get down the lane; he had to be carried to it. The hospital sent him out saying there was little that they could do for him. He had lost too much vision; he couldn’t read, watch much TV; he’d become too deaf to listen to music. But, when you saw him, he made sense. He gardened; fed his birds. Last time I saw him, to give him plums, he said he was making sloe gin.

He had been put on the list for further surgery. This had been cancelled twice, at the last minute. Tensions built up within the family. As Phyllis said, ‘It isn’t a little operation, it’s a big operation.’ We all hoped it would soon be done, and happily over.

Ten days ago, he did go in. A group of us, women, gathered in the lane, talking to her – Amy was there first; then Ann and I approached together, asking after Robert; Cher put her shopping in and then came out. All of us eager for news. He had had his op; he was very bruised but was getting better. ‘He’s got a big black eye – all this side of his face, it’s all swollen – they had to cut him from here to here. A nine-hour op. He wasn’t too good at first, but he is, he’s getting better. A little bit better, day by day.’

On Sunday I saw Phyllis in the lane, talking to Joan.

‘The operation wasn’t a success. They’ve just told us. They said they had to tell him first, and they couldn’t tell him before. They operated on him for nine hours. At the end they said they were causing brain damage. He won’t drink. They said he can, but he won’t swallow. At night they hydrate him, but he won’t drink during the day. He just sits there and sulks.’

Joan said, ‘He’s having a tantrum.’

Yesterday I saw Phyllis drive out – her car behind Libbie’s – to take the car to the garage, I now find. A few weeks ago, the car needed a new head-gasket, £350, but it’s not right; they need a new car, really; the mechanic is keeping this on the road for Phyllis while she has to go back and forth to the hospital. Today I saw her as she was getting out of the car. She had been swimming. ‘I thought I’d better go out and do things while I can. When he does come home, who knows? I might have to look after him all the time.’

Yesterday, he had seemed better. ‘He raised his hand to me when I went in the ward. I thought, O, this is great. He hadn’t done that before. He knew me, he knew Libbie. We sat talking. All of a sudden he said, I feel sick. And he was sick. And after that, it was as though being sick had blown his brains apart, he couldn’t remember anything. He kept looking round, like this, real suspicious. What is this place? What am I doing here? I said, Robert, you’re in hospital. He said, have I had an accident? I said, no, don’t you remember, you’ve had an operation. And then he’d forget and I had to start all over again. And I had to do it. He’d get agitated, like this, I could see, his fingers going, like this, and his blood pressure would go up – his blood pressure goes shooting up and down.

‘He didn’t know Jack. He recognized me, he recognized Libbie, but he didn’t know Jack. Today when I went he’s got just one word – Sheeny, it was today, and he uses that word for everything: have you got some sheeny for me? Can I go to the sheeny?’

Saturday 7th October, 2000

Saw Phyllis again today, in the rain, as she returned home briefly to have her hair done. Robert is a bit better.

‘He’s walking a little bit. He knows me, he knows the kids.’

‘The swelling must be going down.’

‘He’s far from right, but he’s a lot better than he was.’

‘It must have been a shock.’

‘It was a shock. They didn’t warn me. Not a ’phone call or anything. I got there and he was looking at me...’ She imitated the affronted glare of one who feels himself assaulted.

‘And it was terrible the way he’d use one word for everything...’

Since his stroke she had seen him once, in his garden, beside Phyllis.

His silent unknowing seemed to convey the wisdom of the world.

He was dead now, six months after Ryan.

She was moving from the village back to London.

London. The group.

She – the older woman – tends to be silent at the group. Little release for her. She observes the other members of the group, and their grief.

She observes grief in another, young widow: the one who quotes poetry.

It reminds her of her own situation, one week before his death.

The woman was reading a poem called The Dead Horse: ‘No sooner do I stop flogging a dead horse than I start flogging another dead horse.’

Walking the fields, craving for what could not be had; only to see, in the gloom, behind a copse, beside the rabbit warren, composed of shade and derelict farm machinery, the clear indisputable form of a dead horse.

Putting down the poetry book, the young widow said, ‘The point is that this was written – recalled – as being one week before his death.’

She watches as a man at the group tells the young widow, ‘As that priest just said to the relatives of those murdered patients: You need to be able to let go, and move on.’

Ignoring him, the young widow said, ‘I came across this a year later, almost to the day.’

She began reciting:

WIDOW’S SONG

The wind

Sways the brown leaves

Of the dead

Nyree

In the garden

Where you’re not here.

The young widow was reading a poem into which the older woman was silently inserting her own reflections.

Through the glassed door of the kitchen, I see the gap between the two round ball-trees you used to trim every year.

They carried you through here,

on a trolley,

the red blanket

covering your face.

The young woman continued her reading.

Today I must start

New compost

With the dead Nyree.

In the upper hallway:

Picture of you

Alive with me

At a wedding.

The older woman recalled the incident, months later, on a blazing summer day when she came in alone from house-hunting with her sister and brother-in-law. The pair had driven off at the top of the street, leaving her to insert her key in her door alone.

Come in crying. Stand in the bathroom, recalling those ten minutes of doubt and numb and hidden terror, when I did not come to find you.

Standing aside with a group of neighbors, Phyllis being driven down the lane, back from her craft fair in London.

‘24/7 for a year. The one day I have off: that’s when he dies!’

He had died in the garden, in his daughter’s arms.

The wake for that funeral had seemed jolly, small house full of relatives and neighbours, she pouring orange juice from the carton, having taken juice, whisky and chocolate to them the day after the death: ‘Juice because you can dehydrate; whisky you can put in tea if you feel you need to drink – top it up with sugar; chocolate because you often don’t eat. Fish and chips – that’s a good stand-by. Take care and take care of each other,’ she’d said to the red-eyed, red-faced family gathered around the inside of their door.

Phyllis had always been a carer.

Young woman once in the lane, slide-stopping her bicycle, never was one woman so pleased to see another. ‘I used to take in foster children. When we were younger. Robert was fostered. We cared for Sylvia when she was a little girl.’

Peeling her potatoes while she went swimming, Robert in his bedroom, he could not be left. Spoon-fed. Taken to the toilet. ‘I haven’t really got a husband.’

She goes back to her modern house.

A mangy old fox, sitting on my doorstep as I open the door.

One side of its fur stripped or bitten away: it looks and smells like rancid lard. The stench is terrible. Surprisingly small, the beast looks at me: steadily, with its pointed snout. Surviving in this state for months, it perches on doormats, hoping to get food and warmth as it waits to die. Has it come here for water? The last two nights frozen, fearful. Is this the source of the sound that I hear in the night? – rustling after the water collected in my grey bowl and red bucket? Barely red itself, and almost hairless, the beast boasts hardly a tail. It most resembles a rat.

It does not move. Almost I must step over it. Shoo it away. Still it remains. Again I shoo. Reluctantly, the small dying thing stirs to its haunch and drags its weight across the road.

Shaken by the sight, made nauseous by the stench, hit in the face by foul mortality, I ring Sally’s bell. The Es-so sign means hap-py mo-tor-ing. Hurriedly we close the door against the descending beast.

‘I was going to ring the RSPCA then, but you said it would die.’

‘I thought it would. In this cold weather. I can’t think how it has survived.’

In the night, the foul dying animal haunts me.

Always I flee from death.

This is the third time.

As I grieve death and life, Marie, with pancreatic cancer, rings me from her house on the corner.

I feel about him, dead, as parents are said to feel about their sick child:

There’s nothing I can do to help.

Dawkins, Pullman, His Dark Materials – denigrating religion because of a cruel God.

If there were a God, he would be all right!

If there were a God, he would be in glory!

In the group, the poetry-loving woman was quoting a piece from the paper: just before Christmas, 2003:

‘An Arab proverb likens religion to the sea:

one is safe only in the shallows;

the other only at great depths.’

The older woman thought her own thoughts.

I think all the time

how I didn’t go to him.

In the lane.

In the house.

What was I thinking! –

I sat on the wall

and prayed for him to be all

right when I’d already heard him fall!

‘Don’t you miss the country?’ – when she had mentioned the fox.

The country was his. Never mine. Legalistic. This right to this right of way, that piece of land…

She had once been a legal secretary.

For a while she had taught history and maths.

She lived now on her husband’s pension and her own. Between them they had bought their house – most of the money his not hers.

She had moved sideways, selling up to return to London.

She had moved house to get past the death. Now she found herself needing to explain to her first husband’s questioning relatives why she thought she might ‘no longer go to the group.’

Walked back from the cemetery in growing anger. Yesterday, saw James and Lee, Rick and Meg. In the pub, told James about her so different reactions to the deaths.

In Maggy’s lounge later, she goes on at me for no longer reading modern novels. ‘Lots of people have suffering and losses and sometimes they see plays and books and things that don’t reflect them, that get published.’ At the 50th time of this, I said, ‘You talk as though it doesn’t matter, Mag!’ Maggy continued about how going to that lecture on Mahler, seeing pictures of him and his wife, learning about his life, and then hearing his music – ‘Well, I think that was just about the best night in my life!’

‘Music is different,’ James told his mother.

‘There is so much… great art, music… All these people, artists, suffered. Leonardo, Shakespeare…’

‘Great works…’ James concurred.

She talked on, over her son, ‘And he wrote them for you!’

‘Listen, Mag, it’s nothing to do with Shakespeare, music. Ryan died! What does Shakespeare matter?’

‘Ryan died? Ryan died? Ryan? What’s Ryan died got to do with Shakespeare or music?’

Visit Marie time after time since the onset of her cancer – to listen to, ‘O, Lu, it’s leap-year – perhaps you’ll find a millionaire you can propose to by the 29th!’ Roland, when I talk about drains, ‘O, never mind that; what about the ridge-tile?’

My roof is none of his business; those drains are, and nothing is being done.

Sally next door has twice said, ‘O, well, leave it till next time.’

No. I can’t leave it till next time. Johnny ran out to me:

‘Go to council! Call the council!’ He did nothing.

I paid for the whole of the original £70 clearance charge to Thames Water for clearing the drains, which should have been shared 3 -ways; I arranged the CCTV, of which only AN has paid their 3rd; only AN has ready a cheque for the work. I chased up Metro-rod’s written reports, when both of the other insurance companies said they’d never received the CCTV; I suffered abuse from Metro-rod when others didn’t pay; I have for two years paid out something like £56 to Thames Water, for drains cover, for which I am covered by AN, in case another emergency occurs.