Messages

Music:

Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5, Movement III

Content Warning:

Mental illness/disability theme

Transcript

Messages

The day after the government introduced compulsory age verification for pornographic websites in the UK, Lionel received a laconic text message from his mother. The message said that Lionel’s father was unexpectedly busy, could he please pick up his brother from the café where he did voulantry work. Lionel’s brother, Thomas, was nineteen but unable to use public transport without aid. He was reluctant even to walk anywhere unattended, even short distances around the small town within which he had lived for nearly sixteen years. Lionel’s mother didn’t specify as much but it went without saying that she was completely snowed under. She had used a questioning form of words for courtesy’s sake, but it wasn’t really a question she was asking her eldest son.  

            Lionel had been about to sit down and listen to a new recording of Shostakovich’s fifth symphony. He was looking forward to disliking it, he delighted in his own outrage, in his own substantiable animus towards new discs. He had recently been given a job reviewing new classical releases for a website.

            He had risen just before eleven-thirty, too late as usual, and he was angry with himself for not getting up at an earlier hour. By the time he was ready to listen to the disc, which was a double album containing the unusual pairing of Symphony No. 5 and Symphony No. 9, plus the Festive Overture as a little aperitif, it was past one, and he needed to be on his way by quarter-to-two in order to get to the café in the next town by three o’clock.

The trains were one an hour and no help to him in this instance, so he took the bus instead. He sat on the top of the bus, watching the world go by, and felt rather swaddled, that was the word he felt his mind using about itself, “swaddled”, as though he were tightly wrapped, layered in grey-coloured cotton wool, in sheets of opaque plastic, or gauze. He sensed figures moving around him, he sensed the creeping movements of shadows, sometimes he heard voices, or felt presences close by. But in most ways he felt incredibly lonely and disconnected from the people around him. His mobile phone, heavy and certain in the inside breast pocket of his jacket, was a single throbbing portal of hope. Every so often it would buzz in notification, announcing the receipt of a text. His mother replied belatedly to his reply to her first message about picking up Thomas, extravagantly layering her digital gratitude in terms of endearment, and kisses. Lionel felt only sadness while he read them: it was as though they could not reach him, nor redeem him.

            Periodically, other text messages came through. His uncle was over from Zagreb with his taciturn wife. They were staying at his grandmother’s house two or three towns over. The uncle’s messages were usually devoid of adjectives, endearments, warmth of any kind. They were always matter of fact, informational: he and his wife were walking along the prom with granny, they were having a swim, he had caught something on BBC Radio 4 that he suspected Lionel might like, here was a link to an article about a subject that had come up briefly in the last conversation they’d had. This time the message said that they were eating “brunch”, a word Lionel was sure he had never heard (or seen) his uncle use, at a brand new restaurant in the town where they were staying. They had just ordered cockle soup. Lionel didn’t reply. In fact, he resented his uncle’s inexpert ways of showing love, of attempting uncle-nephew rapport. He considered reproaching his uncle for his cluelessness by text, but decided against it.    

            Lionel wondered what might be behind his father’s sudden withdrawal from the agreement. He was supposed to pick up Thomas from the café one week in every three, so both Lionel and Lionel’s mother could get some extra work done. If Lionel was honest, he had been half-expecting his father to bail out at the eleventh hour. He wondered what had preceded that laconic text from his mother. It had been curtly worded, as though she wished to convey as little as possible. Yet behind that silence, tortured and pressurised behind that brevity, like a sock stuffed into a tiny hole, was drama, private drama unexpressed to him but discernibly there.

            He had received subtle intimations that his father was drinking more heavily midweek. Instead of coming home on Tuesday evening and making himself available on Wednesday, which was his day off, he’d taken to drinking excessively on Tuesday evening, staying in a city hotel overnight, and then coming back much later in the day on Wednesday by the time his hangover had worn off, partially or totally. Lionel wondered if his father was having an affair, if he had habitual affairs. He couldn’t imagine either scenario and so decided neither one could possibly be true. 

            Lionel thought back to that time he had received a text from his father that said “I love you” more than once, and used the word “sorry” over and over again. He had deleted it as soon as he had read it, so the record was no longer there to be consulted.

Lionel reached his destination a little before twenty-to-three. The bus-stop was only five minutes from the café so he had time to spare. Since there were many of them, he found a different café nearby, (he couldn’t bear to sit in the one where his brother worked as part of a scheme to give disabled adults work experience). He ordered an espresso at the counter and sat outside. He took out a cigarette and lit it while he waited for his drink to arrive.

            Sometimes, Lionel and Thomas walked home from the café. The walk took about an hour and a half: it was always satisfying to have completed it. The route took them through a rough part of town, then through a bleak area full of brutalist accomodation for university students, and then by a smelly, stagnant part of the river, and finally to the walk’s most blissful section, away from civilisation, way out in nature, where there were wading birds and geese and lapwings and oystercatchers and cormorants and herons and egrets; where dragonflies hunted over their pools of birth; where the bullrushes stood fat against the sky; and where the trees and bushes formed cool corridors of shade. Lionel and Thomas would walk most of the way in silence, having nothing to say one another. The mere presence of each was intensely communicative, intensely meaningful to the other, and so there was little that could be added verbally. Theirs was a permitted, welcome silence. There was never any panic to dispel it. 

            The outdoor seating of the café Lionel had decided to patronise spilled onto a long, cobbled street. Until about eight-o-clock in the evening the street bustled with a nearly constant stream of activity. Ten yards or so away from Lionel’s table, a few metres up the street in the western direction, something odd was happening. Lionel became aware of it and squinted at it in curiosity, just as his coffee arrived. The waiter who had brought the coffee on a tray with sugar packets and milk, lingered by the table and looked to see what was going on. A man was standing in the street with his pants and trousers around his ankles, his genitals exposed. The man was heavy-set, wearing a beige short-sleeved shirt, and was shocked with curly, greasy-looking hair. Most people passed him by quickly, and embarrassedly; one mother put her hand over her young daughter’s eyes, a father turned his son’s head the other way; a small number of people challenged him but he just stood looking at them, as listless as another species, as a being who had stumbled upon humanity by accident. Lionel recognised the man. He had seen him, frequently, ambling aimlessly around the town with a medicated, deadened slouch, and feverishly muttering to himself.

            He was quite far away, but even so the shock of his nudity told. The tiny, wrinkled apostrophe of his penis hung there, not exactly visible to Lionel, and yet palpably present and wrong and declared in the street. The world was lit with a cold, cynical light from the sky. The weather was warm and the day was bright but the sky was overcast with clouds. Sunlight penetrated their congregation with a kind of unpleasant reluctance. The man who had taken Lionel’s order in the café and served it to him had another customer to tend to. He went inside. Lionel looked the other way, away from the man standing half-nude in the street. He stubbed out the cigarette a little ahead of its natural demise and drank up the hot, bitter espresso in some haste. Finding it painful, he didn’t confront the sight directly from that point on. But in periphery, just as he was leaving, he became aware that a security guard from a nearby Boots had intervened in the situation. The security guard, a very tall, dark-skinned, dispassionate-seeming man, shepherded the man with his trousers down into a private corner and held him there until the arrival of the police. It was a public disturbance and the police were qualified to deal with public disturbance. They were capable of threat, and of force, when faced with criminality. But Lionel sincerely hoped, and believed, that they would treat the man with compassion, with a firmness that had more to do with medicine than the law, guided by the desire to administer aid not punishment.

Thomas worked in a cafe called The Windmill. Young adults with learning difficulties prepared the lunches, and baked the deserts, and waited tables, and cleaned crockery in the kitchen. If Lionel was honest, the place depressed him, its grace, its well-meaning-ness depressed him. But he didn’t show this depression. He always forced a certain sunniness and always listened attentively when the staff told him what his brother had been up to all day. 

Thomas didn’t express himself like other people. Even for a severely autistic individual he was unusually withdrawn. He had sunk deep into a consuming taciturnity. When people attempted to communicate with him, he offered, in general, only a dull, indifferent silence. He spoke only very seldom and in a low mutter that was almost impossible to understand. One couldn’t look to him for much encouragement, one had to press on in the hope that there was some kind of internal response. Little by way of an audible or external reply could be expected. In the face of this, Lionel admired their steadfastness, the staff who ran the café seemed plucky and dauntless in the face of futility, and as such they were able to supply Thomas with activity and a sense of belonging.

Lionel entered and told the lady on the counter that he’d come to collect Thomas. The café was closing and the last customers were leaving. Lionel could already see Thomas round a corner. He was seated at a little table with his rucksack on, wearing his bright red cap. One of the arm-straps of his rucksack was in a tangle, turned the wrong way up when it should have been flat. Lionel looked forward to smoothing out this little malfunction. 

The lady on the counter asked Lionel what relation he was to Thomas. 

“Brother.” Then he added: “Older brother”. He felt stupid adding this; it was obvious. 

The lady asked if he wouldn’t mind waiting around for two or three minutes. 

“Hannah just wanted to speak to you briefly,” she said.

Lionel felt apprehensive about what was coming. He took the temperature of the room. He looked at Thomas and didn’t sense that anything was particularly wrong. It didn’t seem to him as though anything especially bad had occurred. Still, the worst case scenarios loomed large: Thomas had hit somebody, he had urinated in front of people, he had sexually assaulted a female colleague. Lionel apprehended the images, the visual reality of these crimes, as best he was able. He felt fairly certain that the room in which he presently found himself contained no trace of such acts. Still, the sense of trepidation he felt was powerful.  

“Hello,” the woman called Hannah said, coming downstairs. She had on a royal blue apron powdered in flour.

“Hello,” Lionel answered.

Hannah had a briskness about her. She wasted no time saying what she had to say.

“So, he’s had a good day,” she began. Then she muttered something Lionel didn’t catch about a cake Thomas had helped make and that was going to be on a table at some event or other at the arts centre. “We had a bit of an issue with soap,” she continued. “He takes a lot of soap when he’s hand-washing and today it went all over the floor which is really dangerous.” 

Lionel had witnessed this; he had witnessed this ritual of his brother’s in public bathrooms, where he’d take far too much soap from the soap dispenser. He seemed to have an appetite for it, it was as though his palm were ravenous for a huge splatter of that fragrant, gelatinous blue, and he’d push the dispenser again and again and again until he was holding maybe one hundred millilitres of the soap in his hand. Then he’d wash and most of the soap would be wasted in the sudden water. He didn’t know how to work up a lather; he didn’t see lather as the objective when it came to handwashing. Lionel was able instantly to visualise this deficient practice. He felt love when he recalled it, as soon as it came to him it brought with it a feeling of love, an amused, even condescending tenderness. He felt that he understood why Thomas did this, why he took too much soap. Perhaps he liked the smell, perhaps he liked the feel, perhaps he liked the motion of the dispenser. Or maybe he just thought that his way was the right way to hand-wash. In any case, Lionel knew that this woman called Hannah was telling the truth, and he also knew that his brother, Thomas, was guided by just and gentle instincts.

All the same, he felt odd about it, about this scene. He listened to Hannah with a kind of aghast incredulity. Yet he agreed with her, he nodded his head enthusiastically and said:

“Yes, I’ve told him just to use a little bit…” He mimed the application of soap. His gestures were always inelegant, over-explanatory.

Thomas sat, quiet, distant, as though he couldn’t hear what they were saying. But there was a hint, just a tiny hint of forlorn recognition that they were talking about him. 

Lionel didn’t agree with this. With every look he cast over the glum, bearded profile of his brother, with every stuttering attempt he made to include Thomas in the conversation, he felt in himself this penetrating sense of inadequacy. He didn’t want to be rude, he lacked the mettle and means of assertion. So, he just stood there participating in something he felt incorrect. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt so lousy, that he felt such disappointment in himself. 

“One other thing,” this woman called Hannah said. “His fingernails are a bit long and it’s not hygienic when working with food. So…”

“Yes, absolutely, understood,” Lionel said. “I’ll give them a trim.”

They left the café. Thomas didn’t wave back when the women waved him goodbye.

Walking through town to the bus-stop, Lionel couldn’t bear the sense of shame he felt pressing between them. He shouldn’t have let them, he should have let them talk about his brother in front of him like that, in front of his brother. It was wrong to talk about people in front of them. If they were there you included them, or you invited them to include themselves. If you had something to say that you didn’t want them hearing, something they couldn’t respond to, even something you did want them hearing, you sought a context in which they weren’t present, a situation out of earshot. 

Lionel had been going to suggest to Thomas that they walk home together along the river. Shall we walk home? Nothing. Then maybe that almost imperceptible yep. Before, he had thought it was a good idea. But now he didn’t. He couldn’t bear to walk beside his brother, not at such length, not for so long. There was no animus in Thomas. He walked a little swiftly, a little nervously, often flashing one of those anxious little waves and tortured rictus smiles. It was as though he sought a confirmation that couldn’t be provided. He moved through the world with a sense of accepting resignation. He might protest later, in an ailed, inarticulate language. But, in the meantime, he was that quirky pragmatist Lionel knew well and recognised. Thomas couldn’t hold grudges or be resentful about anything real. His emotional life lived in a highly constructed, fantastical place. Lionel tried to bring himself to apologise to his brother. He rehearsed what he would say, inwardly. But he couldn’t voice it, he couldn’t utter it. It wouldn’t come, as they say, out. Out was a fearful, if remedying place. But there was no “out” with Thomas, and Lionel couldn’t bear the thought of the deaf ears his apologies, his general petitions, would fall upon. He encouraged his brother, tacitly, towards the bus stop, where they waited for the bus.

The bus arrived, quicker than Lionel had thought it would. They got on and Thomas scanned his disabled persons bus pass with a quality Lionel found indescribable. In exactly the place where he had learned to swipe, he swiped the pass. It was attached to a lanyard which hung around his neck. He scanned it with a weird, graceful, mechanical duty. Lionel paid for his journey with his phone. He had only recently uploaded his card in digital form to the google play wallet app.  

They both sat upstairs but in different sections of the deck. It was a way of fostering a feeling of independence for Thomas, but without any risk. Thomas took the back where he became a mysterious, pre-occupied stranger to Lionel. He’d look back at him and think, with a kind of beautiful amazement, that’s my brother. 

As the journey went on, Lionel thought of all sorts of things. His behind was parked, his legs rested in front of him, there was no-one around whom he might impress with his way of sitting. He thought of the man who had exposed his penis and connected the scene with the one in The Windmill Café in which he had been a significant player rather than a spectator. He resisted the comparison, he tried to sever any ties that bound the scenes together. But, of course, they were related. Whatever the differences you emphasised, if Thomas had stood up and taken out his penis, everyone in that room would have stopped acting like he wasn’t there. 

Lionel felt a crippling sense of injustice in his body. It suffused him like a virus, it leapt with a vengeful tang like acid reflux. He took out his phone. The screen was cracked from where he had dropped it not long ago. A network of connected cracks, like a spider’s web, lay in the glass. He wanted to be bad, he wanted to be- what did he want to be, what precise quality… indiscriminate. Because the most recent text was from his uncle, and so high in the exchange list, his uncle was the first person Lionel thought of. But he wouldn’t send anything to him. He opened his mother’s last kissy message and typed out the frank, succinct phrase: Your brother is a twat. He was on the verge of sending it. He found this new sense of risk delightful, this sense of being suspended on a hard, sheer brink, of standing before such a  fork in such a road, tantalisingly consequential. For nearly ten minutes, he sat with his finger hovering over the “send” button. For all that time, during which a clattering endlessness of trees brushed the upper windows, the obscene sentence lay before him, beside his thumb.  

What he eventually did was far stranger. He wrote a new text: Gooey goo 4 gooey chewing, that’s what the goo goose is doing. He sent it to his father. It was a bizarre thing to send. By some nonsensical logic, a pejorative quality was readable within it. Lionel set the mobile on the seat next to him, and tried to imagine how his father would react to the message. The phone made no noise, the screen went dark. He nervously awaited the sudden syllable of clamour, the sudden, notifying blink of a new message. It didn’t come. 

They were very close to home. Without reacting to any of it, Lionel and Thomas recognised all that was local to them, below, burgeoning suddenly then rushing past the large cereal-box vehicle out of sight: the sharp house rooves, the acrimonious evergreens, the post office and pair of pubs and the post-boxes in their various red and garish places.

They arrived at their stop, and Lionel looked back to see that Thomas was coming. He reacted without expression to their arrival at their stop, a little too belatedly, and slowly. Lionel went downstairs without waiting for his brother. It was better, Lionel thought, to go downstairs and wait for Thomas there than for them both to linger upstairs. Impatience emanated from everywhere. He felt it all around him: a certain impulsive nastiness that had a thousand sources.

Lionel stepped down off the bus, thanking the driver, and his brother followed after a few long seconds. The doors of the bus closed behind him, symmetrically, with a sibilant scrape. Lionel noticed that Thomas was clutching something. It was his mobile phone. Lionel saw, with sudden incredulous amazement, what he held, what he awkwardly, purposefully clasped, and uncertainly offered up. Within, he was full of an exclamation, a giant yelp of relief, as though a window had at last been opened in a heated, humid room, admitting an instantly refreshing breath of air.  

“Thank you, Thomas.” Lionel said, receiving the phone. He was so grateful. He’d left his phone on the seat and Thomas had picked it up for him. He noticed the tangled arm of Thomas’ rucksack; he reproached himself for forgetting to fix it.    

It reached him almost passively. And Lionel found it indescribable, incomparable to anything on the earth, the way the phone, with its cracked screen, left his brother’s hands, the way his long-nailed fingers relinquished it. The phone changed hands with huge significance, the final seal on a rare act of love and attentiveness. Lionel looked into the sullen, introverted face, and he knew by the flat expression that his gratitude was not understood. Thomas turned away and started homeward. Lionel followed.        

When they got back to the house, Lionel went upstairs immediately to listen to the new release. He left his brother downstairs. His brother liked to watch peculiar videos on You Tube. What consolation they provided could not be understood by anyone outside his mind. He watched recordings of various VHS adverts, recorded episodes, menus, quizzes from old Thomas the Tank Engine DVDS, the video standards council public information film on BBFC age ratings, PSAS about copyright law and video piracy, videos from private accounts of autistic adults talking through their Disney DVD collections, sometimes videos of trains in snow, or dogs, or water-slides, or children playing in soft plays. Sometimes songs, good songs sung by Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. 

In his own world, Lionel felt clung to by this feeling of precious positivity, he felt somehow elected to know it and carry it. He could even communicate it to other human beings. He wouldn’t of course, and he knew it would end, die its unremarkable death. But for now he cupped this extraordinary preciousness. He sat in an old rocking chair that had belonged to his other grandmother and went straight to the third movement of the fifth symphony. His day took on a remarkable symmetry and he basked in its providence as those three lonely notes let up their first and terrible howl from the CD player.

            Of course they weren’t alone for very long. They were joined by a green sickness, a fog of others. A cloud. No witnesses. The tempo was faster than he liked and within seconds he felt himself reacting strongly against it, more strongly second on second. But it didn’t take more than a minute before some unexpected seduction was taking place. The movement’s voltage increased, and by the ninth or tenth insistence of its most salient theme, the entire room was suffused with a sad electricity. Some lantern, like a lighthouse lamp, blinked its morse code message, lonely and almost obscured in the endless fog. Once the first climax had subsided and desolation was restored, Lionel began to see a great zombified city of aquarium green. The fog was lifting, revealing long hilly streets where many ghostly people slouched. And out of each person, from the place where their soul once was, there shone a beam of light, a beam of solar intention and kindness. By the time the movement’s great and final climax was reached, the citizens’ many component rays had all amassed into a giant, general luminosity.

            He woke from the reverie. His abandon had been gay and all-consuming. He had submitted to the spell so keenly, so readily, that his critical faculty had played no part in his reception. As the movement’s final chord died softly away, he found he hadn’t a word to say. He turned off the CD player, hastily, before the first shrieks, the first blasphemous thumps of the final movement were able to sound. 

            He had been too engrossed to notice but he had received a text. He opened it. It was from his father. No words, just three unspaced question marks. 

            Instead of going back to the beginning of the symphony and listening critically, Lionel went downstairs. His brother was sitting on the sofa, watching the television with a stern, mesmerised look. He had a large teddy bear in his hands. He patiently, repeatingly stroked the crown of the soft head, and the plump, softer belly.

            Lionel found a pair of nail-clippers in a kitchen drawer. The drawer was full of various bits-and-bobs, mostly non-culinary. He took hold of his brother’s hand, the right, in his left. It was a strange, rough, gaunt hand. The nail at the end of each finger was long. As lovingly as he was able, Lionel cut his brother’s nails, those on that hand and those on the other. 

            When the crescent shaped nail-ends were disposed of, Lionel looked at his phone again. He had a text from his mum. It said that she’d be home at six o’clock. He had learned how to translate her assurances into truth. He knew that six o’clock meant approximately twenty-to-seven.