The Art Of Falling Apart

I'll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal, you.
I'll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal, you. 

I'll be standing on the corner high
When they bring your body by,
I'll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal, you.
Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five : I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead (1932)

She knew all about it although in my mind she didn’t really know a thing. See I’d managed to hide it for over a year, this condition, as the doctors like to call it. The thing that darkens my daylight hours and haunts me through the night. I’ve become an astute liar, a coverer-upper, an actor in my own one-man show. I have eventually become an expert at excuses and reasons as to why I struggle to do things.

Ordinary things.

The kind of things that people like you and her take for granted. It’s not that hard to cover your tracks when you’re as practiced as I’ve become. So the excruciating pain of walking upstairs becomes a leg injury sustained during my youth which prematurely terminated what was shaping up to be a promising career as a left sided defender and was further aggravated through a couple of years of intense fell walking during my early forties, while the constant dizzy spells and all too frequent blackouts are brushed off as a particularly aggressive strain of vertigo, much like the kind Jimmy Stewart experienced in that famous Hitchcock flick. If only I could have predicted that the strong young body of my youth would turn out to have such shabby genes, I might have approached the job of living from a totally different direction.

Sometimes she tries too hard, makes too many concessions, refuses to stand up to my bullying, a rage born out of pain and frustration, a rage from deep within that knows I shouldn’t be subjecting her to all this anguish, watching as if somehow detached from the daily rituals as an ageing body corrupts her young mind. She stands before me in a state of submission, my tiny blonde haired rage doll, my nurse, my confidant; the human walking frame that supports my torn and frayed emotions. Why do I persist in putting her through this seemingly unending grind I find myself asking as she helps me from the car? Why don’t I set her free and simply acknowledge that this battle we’re both fighting is a losing one, and that defeat is the inevitable consequence regardless of the strategy and effort? Because I know that if I do then I will only have one real option left open to me.

I’ll be left with no alternative but to kill myself.

It all started on a train from Euston, heading back home from a long but rewarding day in London, visiting the National Portrait Gallery, catching a matinee of The Thirty-Nine Steps at The Criterion and grabbing a bite to eat at a Covent Garden pizza joint, and in-between window shopping on Oxford Street. Her youthful innocence and enthusiasm, coupled with a natural desire to embrace new and exciting experiences had ignited a strange fascination deep within me, an emotion born of sheer admiration and a deep rooted sense of satisfaction that somehow age, as opposed to being a natural barrier, was a means of intense communication via a shared symmetry, like listening in to the Venus line. Sitting opposite each other in that crowded carriage, packed with tired empty eyed commuters on their way back from the daily grind, enjoying the luxury and freedom of the shared holiday, sharing sweets and stories, some true and some most obviously made up, so blurred around the edges that eventually it became difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction. I’d been in the process of laughing at a suitably tall tale she was telling about a weekend at some holiday camp when my throat suddenly clammed up and I found it impossible to swallow the lukewarm Virgin coffee. At first I thought it was that kind of self inflicted lockjaw you get when you laugh too long and loud, but the moment refused to pass, to the point where tears of pain welled up in my eyes as I discreetly deposited the tepid brown sludge back into the polystyrene beaker. Luckily she was too wrapped up in her tale to notice the sweat on my brow and frightened look behind my eyes. That night after I’d dropped her off I stood nervously in front of the bathroom mirror and tried to swallow a sip of tap water, only to experience the same strange sensation. That night I lay awake in the dark and stared at the ceiling, wondering what the hell was happening.

My father had died in his early seventies, a hollow shell with deep empty swimming pool eyes and the expression of a man haunted by the kind of dreams you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. My mother, a tough old boot, soldiered on, fighting a losing battle with dementia, imprisoned in a mind where yesterday always won over today and tomorrow would never ever know, sleepwalked her way through a succession of identical days, devoid of any highs or lows, and populated by familiar voices from a long forgotten past. Somewhere there was a younger brother, but apart from the old mans funeral, our paths never crossed, an arrangement which suited me just fine for, if the truth be told, apart from those early boyhood days, we had never been close. I had no idea where he lived or worked, and had no desire to find out. As for my mother, I popped my head around the door once a week to keep an eye on things, more out of a guilt-ridden sense of duty than any great love. The day she departed this life I’d arrange the funeral, notify the relevant authorities, cash in my cut of the will and the quietly get on with living, secure in the knowledge that, all things being equal, I would be next in line for a trip to the bone yard and an eternity spent who knows where. One thing was for sure, I sure wanted some answers as to why unseen hands had inflicted so much pain and suffering on one whom up to now had led a seemingly blameless life. After all, I mused as the tiny blonde haired rage doll fixed a sandwich and coffee, there were plenty far worse than me; sinners who paid heed to no earthly commandments or moral obligations, who strutted around overflowing with health and vitality, safe in the knowledge that their nights would not be spent sobbing in the darkness of an otherwise empty room. If there was a God why were his ways so bloody mysterious, and why did he bother with creation if all he really wanted to do was treat the earth and all its inhabitants like pieces in a giant game of celestial chess? Why was it that there were graveyards overflowing with the great and the good while statues were erected to the cruel and corrupt? In God we trust, but trust what? Trust that we’ll be remembered for what we really are, or what we failed to become?

One morning after she’d departed for a lecture, leaving me propped up in an old armchair gazing at the rain swept waters outside, I found myself Googleing Dignitas, plastic bags and Exit while the DJ on the local station played the latest hit from JLS, and discovered that all it took was an oral dose of an antiemetic drug followed a few minutes later by the lethal overdose, to usher in the moment when the lights would finally go out and the overpowering sense of pain and hopelessness would finally disappear. The feeling of guilt, of hopelessness, of despair. The end to the cul de sac world of prescription painkillers, health workers and support groups where fellow suffers, like alcoholics who no longer feel the need to be anonymous, instead unburdened themselves on fellow sufferers. We all believe in God, I’d thought as I listened to the rock guitarist, the teacher, the care worker, the retired lathe operator and the old lady who was a well respected artist until her right hand became devoid of all feeling and withered and died like the branch of a once mighty oak cut down by shards of forked lightening. It was easy to feel that, both individually and collectively, we were somehow being punished for the sins of mankind, for the transgressions of others we had never met. And what for? So that this cruel joke could be played out on our lives, cutting us down in the so-called prime of our existence. All those things that still needed to be done were now undoable, left to gather dust in a dark attic that doubled as the corner of my mind. More than anything, I remembered thinking as I clutched the plastic carrier bag emblazoned with the gaudy logo of a well known supermarket chain, taking the handles and pulling them down either side of my ears, feeling the air evaporated as it slid down over my bowed head, tilted downwards as if in prayer, it was the sense of total and unimaginable hopelessness, of a life no longer worth living. I slowly closed my eyes and felt the warm air slowly depart my tired lungs.

It felt as if I was in a dream, floating high above the clouds. On the horizon I could see a white light at the end of a long dark tunnel. In the distance I could hear a voice gently calling, seemingly inviting me to move forward. But to what? Suddenly the sense of somnambulism deserted me and I felt fear wash over me like a tidal wave. I didn’t want to travel any further down that line. Something didn’t feel right. This wasn’t my time.

I awoke to a sterile white room, surrounded by wires and the gentle humming of machines. Beside me sat the tiny blonde haired rage doll, a look of both pity and concern etched across her pretty young face, a face that, without words, seemed to say that the game is up, that I know what’s the matter and the lengths you go to try and hide it from both me and others. And it was then, as the hot tears of pain and frustration welled up in my eyes, that I finally realised I’d got to fight it, if not for myself than for her, if only to reward the effort and unswerving commitment to what I had long considered to be a lost cause.

So, as the machines whirred and hummed and the pretty red lights flickered like Christmas in Regents Street, the tiny blonde haired rage doll and me sat in silence and stared at each other. And at some point an unspoken commitment was made, a bond forged, and a pact made.

I would stop, she would stay, and we would both fight this thing together.