Rock and Doris

　
I thought he was developing into a remote control addict, leaping compulsively from channel to channel. He denied it. Said it was art, a modern take on montage. He was a John Heartfield or Hannah Hoch of the disappeared, juxtaposing for mere seconds images that left only a fading flare on the mind’s eye. Nothing to be traded, dealt, gloated over by grasping heirs or predatory capitalists. I still thought he was turning into a remote control addict.
He once told me of a bus journey he had taken from Dublin to Belfast. The driver played the radio all the way. One DJ, well, he wasn’t a DJ because he didn’t play records and he wasn’t a shock-jock because he wasn’t a fool and anyway the term hadn’t been invented then; he was a chatterer, a bit of a comedian. Gerry something. Today he was asking listeners to call in with their stories of remote control addiction. One man told of the self-help group that he attended. They’d sit in a circle and pass around a remote control, learning how to pass it on, give it up without a struggle, and how they would substitute it at home for a pool-cue with which they would change channel, turned off channel-hopping through the sheer inconvenience of the thing. He got a bit tearful. The whole busload of people was killing themselves laughing. He wasn’t sure now if the whole thing wasn’t a joke by Gerry something. Probably. The next caller was a Blackrock woman terrified of spiders and one had turned up in her bath, could Gerry go round and remove it. Gerry was busy, but another woman phoned to say she lived in the same part of Dublin as woman number one and would go round and remove the spider, she not being afraid of them at all. Gerry said stay on the line and we’ll give you that address.
Anyway, back to remotes. The husband had told me that story and yet here he was, self-help groupless, stabbing at the zapper like a mad thing. Then I began to detect a pattern after all. Whenever anything about illness came on he couldn’t move fast enough to change the channel. Didn’t matter if it was to a home makeover programme, or, as they seem to want us to call them ‘show’, like in America, and a series is to be a ‘season’ like a string of hospital dramas are as momentous as spring.
Anyway, it could be that or hymns from unfeasibly full churches or even a party political broadcast, no matter, as long as it was a refuge from SARS or CJD (Human Variant), which sounds like an android. Even Parkinson rather than Parkinson’s, which amount to much the same thing in my book.
Then the newspaper. Usually he would read it right through, excepting the obviously too boring stuff: cars; travel, business; most sport; most lifestyle; gardens; ads; small ads; births and deaths. All right, so he missed out quite a lot, but he defended himself by saying that the car stuff was just advertising, even when criticising one car, it was only to promote another. Travel was all about white middle-class English people and their amusing mishaps, promoting the sacking of ‘undiscovered corners’ by rapacious readers, sandaled locusts. There’s an image. Grasshoppers in espadrilles. The business pages were just crime reports with the perpetrators getting away with it, usually, or actually rewarded, knighthoods for services to the fridge industry. Eat your heart out, Lancelot. The other ignored stuff was mainly padding, cul-de-sacs for has-beens and never-wases.
So it was front page, home news, international, letters, editorials, columns and the remaining sport. And the crossword. Then it changed. Now it was just the football results. Those and the crossword. No matter how long it took, he would study the clues; get angry they beat him.
Mercury’s hat, he told me, is called a ‘petasus’, worked it out with only a little help from his smaller classical dictionary. Then came ague. Obscure illness that has dropped five. Four letters. Ague. Easy enough, went unfilled. As did any other clues with poor health. Crossword abandoned. Keep Out notice.
I like crime novels but have never felt that interested in complication for its own sake. I can’t be bothered with following the plot where Poison X only works if the 13.20 from King’s Cross arrives at Little Deducing before Virgo is in conjunction with the MCC breaking for tea. I’m more into Chandler’s belief that when the story gets too complicated, have a man walk into the room with a gun.
My man walking into a room with a gun moment was when…hold on, let me backtrack a little (the gunman begins to open the door, hesitates, and retreats, closing the door gently). One day we were walking into town. It was very busy and people constantly had to dance/manoeuvre past one another; the hands extending to the side, shoulder and head movement denoting which way they intended to waltz onward. Often with that little polite, pursed-lip smile. But on one occasion, my husband did that other look; the one small men do when manoeuvring past much taller men, the sideways look-away, sudden interest in the far-off, ok you’re tall but I could nip in and give you a few in the bread-basket before you knew what hit you, ok Lofty? look.
Only it wasn’t that look. It was a get me out of here look. A something has appeared that I do not wish to be around look. The tall man had a jaw destroyed by cancer. The husband would have jumped aboard a passing bus full of ravenous tigers to get away. That was a big clue I suppose, but the moment when the hesitant gunman made it into the room was one morning when I had started at the sight of him.
‘What’s up?’
I pointed at his left eye. ‘Your eye looks all bloody. Like you’ve been scrapping in the street except there’s no bruising.’
He checked it in the mirror and said that if he got off to the doctor’s before nine, he’d be seen without an appointment. That night he returned with eye drops and an appointment at the eye department of the Royal; the Princess Alexandra Eye Pavilion.
‘Have you ever heard a dafter name? Pavilion! Princess Alexandra! It makes eye-doctoring sound like a sport. One for toffs. Russian toffs. Romanovs on horseback! No doubt ol’ Alex’ll be there, in the outpatients, swinging her eye-mallet… “out of the way, serfs. My eye!” ‘Course, it’s all down to some snivelling little bureaucrats, sook up to the establishment with a name like that and they confer some piddling little so-called honour that you can impress everybody at the golf club with.’
He didn’t seem bothered about the eye, apart from being self-conscious at having to wear sunglasses when it wasn’t that sunny, felt like a poser. It came to me that he wasn’t overly bothered about his own health. He was suffering from hypochondria all right, but it was a kind of hypochondria by proxy, a variation of the Munchausen thing. He began to worry if I had the slightest thing, a sniffle, sore throat, anything at all. How thoughtful, you think, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt more like I was a car newly bought and anxiously examined every five minutes by the owner for the tiniest mark, given the half-closed knife tour, slow and deliberate, is that a scratch? And he still turned the page or changed the channel if illness was the theme.
Can you beard a lion? That sounds like the phrase, but it sounds a bit silly and I’m sure that it’s not meant to. I cornered him one day in the kitchen. By the toaster.
‘Is there something you’re not telling me? Healthwise? Mine or yours, I’m not sure which. Whom. Who. Anyway, what’s going on? Are you sick? Am I?’
They don’t still do that, do they? Tell the spouse and not the, eh, other spouse? How can you leave a few exquisite watercolours behind, if you haven’t been warned in time to learn how to paint? In watercolour?
He just stuffed his mouth full of toast, mumbled something about me still being in dreamland and took his tea through to the front room, turned on the television news.
I shouted after him. ‘Is it your eye? If you need to get an eye-patch, you’ll look just like…’ I couldn’t think of anyone with an eye-patch at that moment. Except Nelson. And I was trying to think of someone less heroic. Or exciting, like a pirate. And maybe that would have hexed him. Ended up with him losing an arm or getting a wooden leg. From sustainable forest timber, hopefully.
One day I came home and he had managed to get it down on paper. Or at least tried to. I won’t quote him straight, that wouldn’t be right. It’s like books of people’s letters, you feel a bit strange reading them, like you’re hanging over the author’s shoulder as he writes, a ghostly presence, where he should be the ghost as he is the one who is dead, probably. Though I suppose there are plenty of writers who have every intention that their letters should be published as another proof of their genius. Even when they demand that their executor burns all their work, they have innocently chosen an executor who is pyrophobic. Not sure there is such a word, but you know what I mean.
Anyway he told me how his own ageing, likelihood of illness, possibility of catastrophe and certainty of death didn’t bother him unduly, he could handle it. How sometimes when he was about to fall asleep, he thought that he wouldn’t really mind if he never woke up. Each night he would dream the same dreams, as familiar as well-thumbed novels. What do you call a novel that no longer is?
What was far worse for him, to him, was the idea of me becoming ill, diseased, changing from one being to another in front of him even just through ageing, transformed from a graceful aspen in the breeze to a gnarled, lightning-struck old chestnut. That image is mine, not his. The cheek. How he would never be able to think of me other than as I ended up through calamity or just being alive for longer in the world. How he didn’t want his memory to rewrite how we were at first together, on holiday, walking down the street, in our first home. He couldn’t escape from the idea that what I was to be would backwardly transform what I had been, his memory would have him as a young man in love with whatever blighted specimen it was my fate to become. He didn’t say ‘blighted specimen’, that’s another of mine. It was a dread that was invading his mind like a malignant, no, the other word for a weed you can’t get rid of, pernicious, a pernicious weed with its roots threading throughout his idea of us, me, him and the space that was to be filled by our personal cataclysm, and there was no pill, book or doctor that would change the situation.
He’d left me.
Maybe it’s a bit like when Rock Hudson was dying. He didn’t want people to know about his disease because he said that that would then dominate how people would remember him, not through his films. And he was right. Like now. He wanted his movies to stay with people, not the reality. And this from someone, God bless him, with a very self-deprecatory opinion of himself as an actor, of his films. He wanted Rock and Doris to live on, Pillow Talk where the pillow stays white as the driven snow and as cold. All those films that they keep tying to remake but can’t because we’re all so much more cynical.
So my Rock wanted his Doris in a movie, ninety minutes of not getting old, or damaged, or dead. He didn’t get sick, he was a Rock that crumbled for fear that I would. Doris in decay, had her day, gone away. Except I’m not.
And, of course, I have the certain knowledge that I will live to one hundred and three, nary an ill day, never an unfortunate collision between me and the planet or the objects on it, not a hair shall be stirred from its place other than romantically on wild Atlantic shores. My mind will put razor blades to shame. Men seem to have that need, the escape route, the hidden track into the hills, the ship taking on hands for a great adventure. Most make do with voyaging the library shelves, but some think they can do better. It’s childish, but I didn’t make them, I don’t accept any blame. He has gone and the space left behind is wavering, becoming part of the everyday. It has been like throwing away an old copy of Peter Pan. Now I can do the crossword without having to undo all his solutions that aren’t, and quicker than he ever managed. Mercury’s hat and all.