A Walk in the Park

by Peter Newall

Foggy Evening by Bernd Thaller, Flickr

When I was fourteen years old, my father decided to move our family from the capital to a country town, to take up a promotion in his employment. It was an important step, and would lead to even further advancement; at least, that is how he presented it to us, my mother, my sister, and me. In the end, although not soon enough, he failed in the new job, caused a scandal by having an affair with a local worthy’s wife, quit the company in disgrace, and left the town, leaving us all there, including my mother. He found himself some young widow and returned to the city to live with her. My mother agreed to a divorce, preferring that to further scandal. Abandoned in this backwater town, I attempted to strike back against my father by treating my own life as if it were worthless. I was too young to understand how stupid this was, and I succeeded in doing myself a good deal of damage before I learned any better.
        But that was all later. The starting point was that we came to this place, which was miles from anywhere but which had pretensions to being somewhere. It had a college (an outpost of a city university), two cathedrals, a library, and a sports oval. It had a central park with a bandstand and a town hall and a local history museum. And it had perhaps nine public houses; alcohol was necessarily a way of life there.
        We arrived in midwinter, and of course it was, as the locals gleefully told us, the harshest and coldest winter in memory. It was every day bleak, in my memory always grey, but overnight there were fearsome frosts; trees cracked down the middle from these frosts, while we huddled inside our big, gloomy house, half-choked by smoke from the ill-drawing porcelain stove which was our only source of warmth. I hated this house, I hated the town, I hated my parents. I hated myself, I suppose, for being there, for having fallen for the trick of being a child in a family, a child whose movements were dictated by others who had power over me. My fingers hurt every morning from the cold, and developed hard, painful chilblains.
        There was absolutely nothing for me to do there. I was drawn, out of my resentment and incomprehension, to weapons of different sorts, which seemed to offer some kind of absolute remedy, some potential for strength. In those days, in the countryside every boy my age had a rifle—a .22 at least—a clasp knife, and a fishing rod. I learned to use these weapons, going with other boys for weekends of hunting and fishing. Later I graduated from those weapons to a syringe; I found that heroin and speed gave me some doorway out of the tedium. So, before I was twenty, I was living in a cheap, cold, shabby, vinyl and aluminium flat, with only a kerosene heater for warmth, that and a short, fat blonde girl who had attached herself to me. Be it on your own head, I told her, or perhaps I didn’t actually tell her but thought she should understand for herself. I was using heroin daily, except when I didn’t have any; when that happened, I was sick and cold and unable to sleep until I got over it, and started to get healthy again, then some more heroin arrived in town, and I got habituated again.
        But even that is not the story I wanted to tell. What I wanted to set down was an account of my father’s near-death, one night when I was still living with my parents, and how I watched it from the darkness under the trees in our back yard.
        I still think this near-death was a ploy, a device put into play by my father, who was an irredeemable attention-seeker. I have no doubt he really had a heart attack, but I cannot help regarding it as a stunt he pulled to deflect criticism, or draw attention, or sympathy. Or to fight back against the tyranny of my mother, who, having finally accepted that he was a weak man, had taken it on herself to control the family’s operations. This worked out very badly for her and for all of us. Most of all for her, because it caused her husband to leave her, her children to hate her, and plunged her into a long period of misery. But again, that is all afterwards. I don’t want to colour events with my later views.
        What, then, happened? I had been out, that’s certain. I could not by then bear being in the family home. I didn’t have much else to do which was worthwhile, but I had to get out, even if only to walk endlessly round the streets. As a remedy for my unhappiness, I walked all over that place, mostly at night when I had it largely to myself. I was especially drawn to the sulphurous arc lights that hung above the railway crossing on the southern edge of town. The harsh orange light made everything look ashy grey, another world, another universe altogether. My walks, wherever I first directed them, would frequently bring me there, and some nights I sat for hours on the kerb, staring at the fences, the banks of high weeds, the crossing sign, all in grey, transfixed.
        I was certain then that a parallel life existed, a life in which we did not come to this place, and I was happy. And I felt sure that this parallel life was just on the other side of a thin film, a membrane, stretched somewhere above my head, which if I could only bypass or penetrate it, would permit me to resume, uninterrupted, the life I’d had before, and continue that life onward and upward to its proper fulfilment. I think I felt the ash-grey zone under the orange railway lights might be a portal to that other life, but it never opened to me, no matter how long I sat there staring.
        So exactly where, and doing what, that particular night I can’t recall, but very likely hanging around with a loose group of acquaintances or walking alone through the deserted streets. Actually, just now it occurs to me that I got home earlier than usual, and I have some faint memory that I felt content, so possibly something pleasant had happened, something to do with a girl perhaps, but I really cannot remember. It was around nine o’clock on a September night. Dark, cold, but no longer winter. The sunsets in that place were gloomily lovely, orange and lead, pink and lead, peach and lead. However, when I arrived the sunset was long gone and it was quite dark.
        I approached the family home, which was a big two-storey place set in extensive grounds—it didn’t belong to us, but the company—through the black shadows of a grove of pine trees on its western boundary. A white crescent moon was flickeringly visible through the spiny branches. I knew I could not be seen there. I often came home that way; it entertained me to approach the house unseen until the last minute. Walking along a path I could not see, but followed by its hardness under my feet, I came to the tall hedge bounding the kitchen garden. There I stopped.
        Beyond the hedge, the yard was coloured with a strange, artificial red light, mobile, which swept across the thick tree trunks and beds of rank daffodil stalks. It was the rooflight of an ambulance, parked in the back driveway with its rear doors open, showing a white mini-hospital inside, all sterilised metal and flat sheets.
        I saw two men come out of the back door carrying a stretcher. I knew it was my father lying on that stretcher, without seeing him at all I knew. I hated that knowledge, hated everything I was watching. I thought, you contemptible show-off, you worthless prick, allowing yourself to be carried on a stretcher by two strong young men. The tubes and valves sticking out of him only confirmed his weakness, his dependency.
        I was ashamed to face these ambulancemen, so I didn’t emerge from the dark shadow of the trees. I was ashamed because they ought not have had to bother themselves with my father; it was an unwarranted imposition. They had families to go home to. No doubt their wives were trying to put the children to bed without them, probably they hadn’t even had dinner, and yet here was my father, needlessly interfering with their lives with his heart attack bullshit, which was a part of his whole life bullshit.
        I watched as they put the stretcher on a gurney and slid it smoothly into the back of the ambulance, closed the double doors, took their seats and made their way, with difficulty, out to the street—ha, you don’t know how the circular back drive works, no, only we know that—and drove off. If I thought of my mother then, it was only as a sentry, guarding against my access to the house, where, after all, I had a bedroom. I thought of going inside, but instead I lit a cigarette, still concealed in the black well of the trees’ shadows, and smoked it to the end, even though my hands were smartingly cold.
        One thing: I can’t remember a siren as the ambulance left. The flashing ruby light going round and round, yes, but my memory says everything took place in silence. While it might or might not have been silent, I do remember smells; pine needles, cold earth, the black shadows, which had their own smell. My tobacco smoke, at one point. The exhaust of the ambulance, although perhaps I’m inventing that. Dewy grass? No, that was earlier in the evening.
        I decided not to go into the house. Something would have to be said between my mother and me, and I didn’t feel like saying anything. Whatever I said would be a falsehood, anyway. ‘What happened? Oh, that’s terrible.’ A falsehood for both me and my mother. If we were honest, we’d say something quite different, something like, ‘So, he’s putting on this stunt to avoid everyone’s critical eye. What a coward. What a joke if his stunt actually catches up with him this time, and he dies. And do you think his mistress knows?’ But neither of us was going to say any of that. And anyway, why should I grant my mother any comfort from fellow-feeling? My grudges against her militated against that. I didn’t want to give her my company. I had to suffer everything on my own, and so can she, I thought.
        So I went back out of the yard, retracing my invisible steps. Only much later I went home again, and when I did I pretended ignorance of the whole thing. As nobody knew I’d seen him being carried away in the ambulance, that was clearly the better position; otherwise, I’d have to explain that I saw it all, but went away without coming inside, without speaking to anyone, without inquiring if he were alive or dead. ‘They say he may not live’, my mother told me when I finally got home. There wasn’t much I could have said in response to that, anyway.
        What I did, once the ambulance was out of sight, was go for a walk in the park behind our home. This park was large, dark, and also full of tall trees. It was divided by two long paths crossing it diagonally from corner to corner, paths which met in its centre at a fountain surrounded by four white lamps shining inside big glass balls.
        I took one path right across the park, then returned to the fountain and struck off along the other. I had no choice but to follow this predetermined geometric pattern because I could not see well enough to leave the path. For a time, it was silent except for the crunch of gravel under my feet, but then an owl called from somewhere, oddly early; they usually began hooting around midnight. The fir trees flanking the path reached up to the sky, black points barely visible against the dark firmament.
        I understood, even at that age, that my father’s near-death device was nothing new or original. He, with his infidelities and weaknesses and prevarications, was simply repeating a pattern, acting a part in a play that had been acted out from the beginning of time. A shabby play, nothing noble, not Euripides or Aeschylus, just a grubby domestic farce that nobody had ever been bothered to write down, but which played itself out nevertheless a hundred times, a thousand times, in all sorts of languages, in all sorts of cities and towns and villages every day. Of course, I too was trapped inside this stale, dogeared play. I felt disgusted with myself, with my life, with life. The moon finally got clear of the trees and shone down, mockingly, it seemed, as I walked back and forth through the inky park.
        Much later that night, I lay in my upstairs bedroom, watching the same moon through the casement window. I thought I could smell wisteria, which I had always liked, but it didn’t make me any happier.
        My father came back from the hospital after a few days, having of course survived his near-death episode. We tiptoed round him for a while until we got bored with it. He said very little, but I sensed his shame. His gaze was no longer direct but flickered around. This was the start of his departure, or a step along the way of his departure, from us, and from the image of himself he’d created for us.
        I wasn’t much for firm decisions in those days, but I resolved that if I ever saw in myself any trace of character or behaviour like my father’s, I would stamp it out ruthlessly. I must never, under any circumstances, be like him in any way. That must be the lesson I was intended to learn from all this unhappiness, from being placed in proximity to my father, I concluded.
        Of course I failed. I replicated his behaviour, sometimes in spirit and sometimes in actual fact, for most of my life. At one time I even adopted his irritating habit of pinching the tip of his nose between forefinger and thumb. That, at least, I did manage to stop doing.