HOW TO DISMANTLE YOURSELF
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Another regular little occurrence in my stories is the ‘big voice’.
The one that leans back from the story and speaks not as narrator but as a choir.
In Gold In The Abraham, it’s still the angry protagonist talking, and the same with All The Colours Of Death. Here it’s less clear.
All I do know is it’s the emotional heart of the story.
When I wrote:
“Sometimes the world is so ugly that your heart cowers in the darkest corner it can find. It covers its face and weeps.”
It truly felt like I was at the centre of why I was showing up for this story. Why I was there in the first place.
Which brings us to the ending. A space for the reader to write their own reason for living. If this was printed in a book you could scribble your own lines with a leaky pen.
What would I write? I would write my own calling -
To make art that helps other people feel less alone.
And less absolutely terrified of the world, even for a moment.
RJ
Make notes in the margins as you read.
Dog ear the corners.
Leave breadcrumbs in those impossibly small spaces where the pages meet, because you’ll want to find your way back.
• • •
We used to visit our father on the last Sunday of every month, before his Alzheimer's convinced him we were strangers. Old margarine tubs full of tulips and cracked dirt were lined up on the window ledges and it would become spring, even on the darkest of days.
Most of the things I learned about the world were from those Sunday afternoons of rolling news channels, where loud dusty men spoke in proverbs and set things alight. I remember groups of people holding homemade signs amongst dozens of collapsing buildings. It turned out to be only one but they played the footage so many times I thought the world had ended.
I sat on the button-backed armchair for hours eating biscuits and drinking my father’s cement shaded Earl Grey under the re-framed portraits of my mother. Visiting him in our family home always reminded me of being young, when his mountain range hands gripped our fingers so tightly it hurt until bedtime. He used to take us out for walks in the ever-rainy moors and we’d trek over to the steam engines at Dawlish Warren. We’d walk for a while, and when we got too tired he’d put us on his shoulders and we’d dig our fists into his raincoat and hang on for dear life. He was a cathedral of a man with the heart of a chapel, and I loved him.
And we were all there when he died. Right up until he closed his eyes there was a strength that reached out as though caught in a burning building. An alive soul in a collapsing body. Fighting to breathe. A desperation to fly upwards and away from the flames. A dream, that after an evening of bright hospital lights and praying relatives, eventually arrived.
• • •
Mark the lines that trouble you.
Bend back the spine until it cracks and fits in your back pocket.
• • •
We volunteered to live in our parents’ empty house for a few weeks and spend the days packing boxes. We got to explore the drawers and cupboards nobody gets to explore. My brother and I, we got to eavesdrop on fifty years of secrets, all hidden away safely for as long as their keepers were alive. Eras and seasons that lined each and every drawer like blotting paper, and memories I could instantly recall, hidden in every hoarded pile.
It took three days to pack up my old bedroom. I kept sitting in silence just looking at the walls and turning the pages of illustrated encyclopedias and crumpled comics. I remember getting home after school one day, I must have been thirteen or fourteen. My mother had decided to tidy my bedroom.
I remember knowing that meant the gap behind the bottom drawer. The space between the pine and the dented carpet. I remember checking when I got home to find cobwebs where my magazines used to be.
In our family, secrets never got discussed. Family meetings were for pro-life lectures and anti-smoking propaganda. We never got around to debating my filthy habits.
And then, years later, we got to flick through every private closet and find out who our parents really were. I got to open drawers and read everything I found.
We found sort-of-love letters, written with red pen and surrounded in hearts, but we were disappointed to find them speaking of ordinary things. We found newspaper clippings of articles we couldn’t fathom and bundles of cassette tapes with no cases, wrapped in elastic bands. One was labelled on both sides, Side A with my name in capital letters and ’Tommy Cooper At The Palladium’ on Side B. I would have played it but the tape was twisted and tangled. I wondered for a moment what it could have been.
We found an old record player with a broken stylus held to the cabinet with garden wire. Faded boxes of board games and brown paper bags full of chess pieces and monopoly money. Everything smelled of distant bonfires and musty wooden cabinets.
• • •
Towards the end of the third day we were poking around in the attic. We found a book crumpled up between the Christmas tree and the bags of tinsel. It looked different to the others so we bought it downstairs. We left the packing unfinished and turned its old pages with no idea how it was to change us.
The living room was scattered with open boxes in the places we used to curl up and watch cartoons. Stanley knives and sticky tape. Piles of newspapers for curling around the ornaments. Bubble wrap with all the bubbles popped.
We flicked through the printed pages over steaming hot chocolate. There were two sentences scribbled inside the back cover. In faded pencil lines one of them said, “To Make The Weary Laugh.”
My brother read them both aloud, the way a newsreader handles headlines.
“To Build A Resting Place,” he announced.
“Looks like mum & dad’s handwriting,” I said.
“Yeah probably meant something at the time.”
He put the book down and walked into the kitchen. He turned the radio on and I heard him open the refrigerator and rummage around. I picked up the book and turned to the first page.
When regarding Honnet Latches & Heartstrings, the author began, We must realise the magnitude of our discovery. Our purpose in life is woven into our bodies from the tips of our eyelashes to the soles of our feet.
Every now and then there were drawings, printed on slightly thicker pages. The first was of a woman’s back and it curved around her body. It showed the slight outline of her spine and muscle lines, and about halfway up, there was something like a door in her side. The drawings looked older than the book itself, and the captions were in Japanese, so it was only my best guess as to what everything meant.
My brother turned off the kitchen light and sat down at the table with a carton of juice. He tore the top open and flicked the soggy cardboard into my lap. He took a sip and orange rivers ran down his chin.
The book talked about magic and romance, and by the end of the first chapter he was going on about holding our hearts in our hands and we giggled at the strange sentimental language. But the more we read, the less we laughed and the stranger the book became.
Only the blessed know of love the writer said, and only the loved will find their latches.
We didn’t know that soon, we would see the world differently.
As we read, the writer seemed to be talking about the door in the woman’s side as if it were real. He called it a Honnet Latch and explained how we could unlock ours.
Not with a fist of sharp keys or a belt of burglar’s tools, the book explained, but through the acceptance of darkened years.
My brother put his hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Why?”
I didn’t know what to say. He sighed and moved away.
The only light in the room was from the blue dials on the old hi-fi and the security light which flickered on and off outside the window. There was a TV on in the neighbour’s living room. Somebody was being interviewed.
“I’m…I’m just sorry I wasn’t around when mum died,” I said.
“We could have used you,” said my brother quietly.
The radio was playing a sad piano melody in the kitchen.
I closed the book and put it down on the table. “Please don’t forgive me.”
He picked up the carton and drained the last of the juice. Then stood up and walked through the archway into the kitchen. I heard the trash compactor’s squeals and then he went upstairs.
I sat in silence for a moment. Outside there was the quietest rumble of traffic and a beat played 6/8 from the bar down the road on Garrett Parkway.
• • •
My mother was a God-fearing lady with a wonderful sense of humour. I still smile whenever I take communion. While the silent pews before her pinched out a thumbnail of bread as it was passed around, she would tear off a burger bun sized chunk from the body of Christ and chew it slowly though the final hymn. The disapproving looks from the congregation were only beaten on the day she added cheese.
She made us laugh when Aunt Minnie, my father’s sister passed away. In the car on the way to the memorial service we were all still and quiet, but she was in the passenger seat doing cartoonish impressions of Minnie’s deep, masculine voice, often joining in with songs on the radio in her gravelly chords.
When you’re growing up you think your parents will live forever. When you get older you prepare yourself for cancers and heart attacks. The phone call I answered during my first year of college sounded like a breathless version of my brother and he told me she’d been struck by a lorry on her way to the newsagents. It took me weeks to get over the feeling in my stomach that we could go back and change it. That it was somehow reversible. I started having dreams of groceries rolling down gutters. Of apples with friction burns. Of torn-apart morning editions and plastic bags in the wind.
After a few weeks the dreams changed. They became her standing in the middle of the road with her eyes closed. The sunlight shone on her skin in infinite streaks and the eighteen-wheeler thumped down the high street. It smashed into her frame and exploded into grey confetti and a spray of shredded metal and glass which wrapped around her invincible bones. She would stand on the white lines and look at the sun. She would still be holding the shopping bags while the back end of the truck flipped into the clouds of asphalt and exhaust and crashed back down into the pavement.
The dreams soon gave way to panic attacks and they led to a breakdown. I stopped calling home and I didn’t go to the funeral. I decided that if I didn’t go to the house where I grew up I wouldn’t have to see her empty chair. Her blue apron still hanging in the kitchen. I wouldn’t have to listen to the silent spaces she would have filled and I wouldn’t have to see her silver counter left in the box of the board game while we played.
• • •
Sometimes the world is so ugly that your heart cowers in the darkest corner it can find. It covers its face and weeps.
Circle the words you fall for.
Underline everything you want to remember.
• • •
I opened the book at the next chapter. There was another drawing, this time of a man reaching through the door in his side and holding his heart in his hand. All four fingers and thumb of his right hand were wrapped around it and his eyes were closed.
Through tragedy, pain, even minor set-backs we find ourselves minimised. Said the book. Perhaps, through the untangling of our heartstrings we will find our true purpose.
I drained the last of my lukewarm chocolate. I could feel how my father must have felt when I stopped returning his calls. He lost his childhood sweetheart and his eldest son in the same day. An ache in my side bent my body over double as I thought of how much I abandoned him when she died.
I held my hand over the pain and put my empty mug on the floor.
I pushed harder and harder into my side as I felt the tension growing and the pain get sharper until my nails scraped against the side of a piece of metal.
It was small and I could barely grab it with the tips of my fingers.
I grabbed at it and gave it a pull but it felt as if it was bolted to my bones. I gasped and fell to my knees. I couldn’t hear the TV next door, I couldn’t hear the bar down the street or the radio in the kitchen. My pulse thumped through my eardrums like that murderous truck and I tugged at the small lock until it shifted across my rib cage and my hand disappeared into an opening in my side. I yelled out in agony and I could hear the words of the book shouting even louder in my ears.
Darkened years..honnet..burglar…honnet…latches.
I was crumpled on the floor with my back against the couch.
… sharp keys…tools….
There it was, as clear as the carpet I was sitting on. A door in my side, completely open. I tried to catch my breath but the book was screaming at me.
Untangle…untangle…tragedy….heartstrings…honnet…untangle.
I reached up and pulled the paperback from the tabletop. I held it in my shaking hands and followed the instructions until I reached the point of no return.
With your dirty palms clinging for dear life to your own beating heart and your fingers tangled up in your arteries you have two choices. Keep reading or squeeze until it’s over.
The next diagram showed an old man’s neatly trimmed nails discovering something labelled Superior vena cava and the reader was instructed to move past a collection of small woven chords until they felt two raised parallel lines.
There they were.
I ran my fingers over the lines, and felt my mouth moving.
But I wasn’t saying anything. I felt the lines again and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I started to panic.
A third time and I felt myself breathe in.
And then I shouted.
As I shouted I knew exactly what those sentences in the back cover were. I could see both my parents smiling excitedly as they scribbled down what they were discovering.
Their reason for being alive. Curled up inside their chest just waiting to be found.
As I shouted my own line, my own life’s purpose through the walls of this old house, I could feel the dust from my childhood being shaken from the door frames and window ledges. Everything that could hear my voice was vibrating in celebration as if the very walls were finding a new energy.
I stopped shouting and realised I’d let go. My hand was resting against my closed-up side with no signs of hinges, doors or latches.
I scrambled for a pen and opened the inside back cover of the book.
Find the old scribbled lines.
Make the book your own.
‘To Make The Weary Laugh.”
“To Build A Resting Place.”
“___ ______ _ _____ ___.”