Chapter Seven

The Living Dead

25 December 2002

It was hard to relax knowing that I would be facing trial in the new year. Taffy warned me during our weekly call on Christmas Eve: ‘Be ready, comrade. We’ll mount the best socialist defence possible, but the pigs tell us they have footage. If it comes to it we’ll find somewhere for you to hide. But I’m optimistic.

‘Now I know that I have long been considered ultra-left, overoptimistic, and over-confident. In fact, I would go as far as to say that miserablists positively loathe me. I’m just far too chirpy and love activism too much for people’s taste. So I’ve learnt to be aware of that—and you need to be as well, Eddie. But even within our ranks there’s a split between Bolsheviks who are looking for the coming explosion and Mensheviks who want to keep accommodating and compromising because they think this low level of struggle will continue indefinitely.

‘It is too early to decide tactics at this stage, Eddie, short of the defence that we are currently mounting. Still, free thinking about tactics is of the essence, especially until we have more evidence about what the police are up to, and then we can change our approach in a more rounded, fulsome, open, clear way. Pardon the usual degree of over-optimism and speculative thinking.’

His gruff advice rattled the phone. He finally rang off with the words, ‘I have to go, Eddie. The kids love Christmas. I hope you can wangle some sort of break from all the pressure you’re under. Take great care of yourself. You are so vital to us all. Lastly I just want to say, comrade, that we’ll make 2003 the year we stop the war and rip the fucking head off the global bourgeoisie.’ He hung up, not wanting, I thought, for me to voice any doubts, to question our readiness for revolution. There were two wrongs at the end of that year. They criss-crossed each other in a web of global and personal confusion that I tried to climb out of and flatten down with my feet. The war, to me, was familiar: the promises of laser-guided missiles, precision bombing and democracy. The old lies. We had been here before. Blair was the new loud-hailer for the lies: ‘WMDs are but one aspect of the new dangers we face. The Cold War has ended. The great ideological battle between communism and Western liberal democracy is over. The struggle for world hegemony by political ideology is gone.’

His certainty and pleading eyes, his self-righteousness, filled most of us with contempt. When he spoke, I stared at his thick hands on the desk in front of him and wondered if anyone had ever told him that he was stupid. He looked too large under his suit jacket, which twitched on his shoulders. This wanker, I thought, even has time to work out. He was about to crush Baghdad in his sweet appeals for compliance and democracy, and the liberal papers agonized: Saddam is evil, but on the other hand, he was worse when we funded him.

Our rumbling movement had started to be heard outside the circles of activists. Most of the anti-war groups were full of people who didn’t know the words to the Internationale. A “fuck Blair ” generation of school kids and tabloid readers. As Blair prepared his sermons for the new year ’s war, a million people were stapling cardboard placards together and writing up their own anti-war anger, like mine, like Taffy’s and Jessica’s, on the backs of cereal boxes. ‘Stop Blair ’s illegal war.’ ‘Bush #1 terrorist.’ ‘Make tea, not war.’ ‘Jail Tony.’

But there was a second wrong. My sister. Her rapid-fire psychosis poured out of her in her hospital bed. She crouched in the middle of the mattress as though she was about to start a race. Her eyes were fixed as she tried to keep up with a reality that kept shifting in front of her. She shivered on her bed, holding onto herself—because she was coming apart, because she needed to stick herself together, to hold her limbs in their sockets.

She had always been the thin-boned bird I had found in the garden as a boy, fallen from its nest and too weak to fly back. It had been mauled by the neighbours’ old cat, which had been too lazy to kill and eat it. I brought it in, cradled in my hands. ‘Take that filthy thing into the backyard and wash your hands,’ Stewart had shouted. Instead, Jessica emptied a box and folded up a dishcloth. The bird was so light that I had to keep looking at it to make sure it didn’t disappear. I could feel its scaly feet clawing weakly on my hands. We put the box in the coal shed, in the corner by the window where it could soak in the spring sunlight. ‘It looks like Esther,’ I said. Jessica hugged me tightly. The bird was gone when I got back from school. Jessica told me that it had flown away.

I looked now at Esther ’s little see-through frame, her bones prodding at her hospital gown, and remembered that bird.

We visited her on Christmas day. Each time I pushed the stiff door open and entered the room, I was scared that she would finally have disappeared, that her thin, impossible skeleton would have collapsed. I held my mum’s hand on the way back in the mini-cab. We looked like strange and silent lovers. I thought, Maybe Esther won’t come back this time . Jessica, always more practical, spoke. ‘I should have insisted that she got rid of the baby.’

‘That’s past, mum. She’s going to have it.’

I hated visiting her, and I hated leaving. If we were not there to see her, to prove she existed, she would vanish. Her life was so faint that she would disappear if we closed our eyes for a minute or left the room. Only the small imprint of her feet would remain, just visible where she had been crouching on the bed, as proof that she had briefly been here, to remind us that if we had stayed with her, she would still be with us. I was angry with Rebecca for assuming that we could already make plans together, that the world was neat and could be organised simply by a force of will. People, she thought, could choose to be happy and predictable. I hated her optimism, her unworldly bounce and aimless smiles.

* * *

1991

Stewart was washing dishes in his mobile home outside Chicago. The floor shook when he walked across it; the fake mantelpiece above the ornate fireplace rattled with each of his heavy steps. This particular path to the kitchenette at the back of the lounge made Stewart think that this place, his bullshit home , really was made of cardboard. His arms were full of dirty dishes from the meal of roast chicken and corn on the cob. He was thinking about the assignment tomorrow. His footsteps rocked the caravan as they always did. The room vibrated and from the corner of his eye he saw something slip on the mantelpiece and fall to the floor—the old colour photo of us. Eddie and Esther. It was almost too twisted, even before it fell, to make out the faces. He had not straightened it, had not even gone near it for some time. That part of the room had been contaminated. He took a wide, strange route around the fireplace, sticking hard to the wall left of the mantelpiece without realising what he was doing, just to avoid that curled-up photo. Now as he put the plates into the sink and ran the water, he thought about us.

He tried to distract himself, sunk his hands into the hot water, but it didn’t help. He remembered how he held us long and hard in the mornings before we were packed up for the last time in the car. The way he squeezed us and how we held on. My arms around his neck, my warm tears smeared on his shirt. My need for him unlimited; our separation soon unlimited. He remembered how I struggled to catch my breath in his arms in the early evening glow of the sun as we held him goodbye before the car ride back to Jessica. I liked the feeling. Safe. An embrace that filled all the absence.

Stewart leaded on the sink, splashing water chaotically on the upturned and dirty plates. Suddenly he yelled, breathed in, and sobbed uncontrollably. His knees buckled and he crouched on the floor, sobbing. Vicki rushed into the room and saw Stewart on the kitchen floor, worried that his crying, his yelling like a wounded beast, would bring down the caravan’s cardboard walls and wake their three-month-old daughter.

I thought I must have heard him crying that night, the same night that I hid my head under the covers and cried.

* * *

1 January 2003

The new year came. We knew that the war had been planned, that the invasion would take place before the paralysing heat of the summer descended. We predicted an Easter invasion. There would be a Pyrrhic victory and then the gates of hell would open. The occupation would signal a resistance that would not rest. Our rag-tag bunch of part-time intellectuals and street agitators were great diagnosticians. We condensed, explained and synthesized our politics on the high streets.

‘The war they want to wage is a symptom,’ we explained on street corners, ‘not of American power and supremacy, but the ebbing of that power. America is over-stretched. It’s hegemonic only in military strength. Its crisis compels the American ruling class to control oil resources and strategic territory round the world.’

As tanks and politicians positioned themselves in the new year, we fought their plans with analysis and protests. We sold papers and started conversations: ‘The neo-conservatives represent a group of the American ruling class, principally among the oilmen, who see the end of the Cold War as a missed opportunity for American business...’

So we were oddly euphoric in January 2003. As arguments, lobbies and protests spread, we began to think we could actually stop the war.

Jessica always surprised me. I sat on her sofa on New Year ’s Day. The road outside was quiet for once. I sat in the warm room with my shoes off, listening to the trickle of light rain on the roof and windows. We sat like this, screwed up, as little of our bodies protruding into the world as possible. I always got Jessica wrong. We had spent the morning at the hospital and the afternoon taking turns making each other pots of tea to punctuate our political conversation. I heard her humming in the kitchen as we shuffled through the old newspapers and holiday reading that had built up on the kitchen table.

‘Your father was difficult, but for a while we were a good team. He liked me speaking. Sometimes he insisted that I speak. Stewart didn’t have any of that macho disdain for a woman’s success. We used to have such debates… there were those who argued that we needed spontaneity, but Stewart, everyone thought it was strange he was still in the Communist Party, Stewart argued for the hard grind of organisations and politics.’

The two of us clutched our tea, our glasses streaked with steam.

‘But wasn’t the level of political discussion higher, among students at least?’ I said, sounding high-pitched and naive.

‘Nonsense. Sitting in they could do, but thinking was another matter. There was, I suppose, more hope. There wasn’t any notion that capitalism was inevitable. Capitalism seemed to be under attack from movements and ideas everywhere. And the workers took action. Nobody expected the miners to strike after almost half a century. They’d been complacent since they got defeated back in 1926. And then suddenly they went on strike in 1969, and it was effective! All over, teachers and civil servants were forming strong unions. It was extraordinary—our heroes had been all abroad, you know. The Viet Cong, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, DRUM, the Derry civil rights marchers. But suddenly it was all happening here in the UK. For six years, Eddie, I saw people fight and organise here. We only lost because the Stalinists and the Labour Party won leadership over our movements. Today they don’t have that sort of influence. The Stalinists are dead and New Labour are war-mongers. There are other contenders to ensnare us, of course, but I am positive. So positive.’

I thought that I knew my mother. I imagined she had been eaten up by the past. Now I was not sure who she was. Each time I thought I understood her, she confounded me. Trying to fix Jessica in one spot was like building into sand.

I had been settled at the library for three years. I shunned training courses and kept to my four-day week. ‘Denying the capitalist your labour,’ Jessica commented, laughing. I wasn’t, to my secret shame, the hard man of wage-labour. But I was still young enough to think that the new year would be different and that I could reinvent myself. The easy lure of my life in the library proved, for now, too much. I wheeled the trolley loaded with books, bent over like an old man with a walking frame. When I was on desk duty I wrote reading lists for the Read Against the War notice board: Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation . John Rees, The New Imperialism. I sent emails to members of the Save Tooting Library Campaign.

Jessica never said as much, but I felt her disapproval. I could hear a faint hint of disdain every time she asked, ‘How’s the library, Eddie?’ She thought that an activist should pack bourgeois society under his thumb; success would be proof of his contempt. She thought that we had to be informed about each strand of the world: political economy, philosophy, literature and science, like the best Bolsheviks. How could I not fail?

‘What’s happened to the girlfriend you mentioned?’

I was as startled by the question as Jessica was by the escape of it from her mouth. We stared at each other. Since Rebecca and I had argued I had left my phone off, turning it on only to get messages.

‘Oh, we’ve gone our separate ways.’

‘That’s a pity.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you must get lonely.’

We are our parents, not in partial fractions but in complete sums. Each particle is filled by them, each reflex a copy. I am my father. Each of my actions is a repeat of his, behind black-rimmed glasses and the lens of a Rolleiflex. He set me up. Jessica’s hands fidgeted with the newspaper on her lap, the two of us wishing that we had not exchanged this intimacy. If there was another question, another word, her son would probably cry and we would both hate that. Instead I got up and made us another cup of tea.

* * *

Stewart and Jessica, September 1967

They drove to Sheffield. The meeting was held in a lecture theatre at Sheffield University, the hall prepared with posters advertising their visit. Leon owned the headline; Jessica and Stewart appeared in brackets: ‘Film-maker Stewart Bereskin introduces his short film History Lesson .’ Leon had travelled on the train and was sitting at the front of the room, resting his feet on his guitar case. The room was already full, the thin benches packed. Jessica spoke first. She stood over her notes. The room was hot. People had lifted themselves onto the desks that ran along the room. One woman squatted on a windowsill, blowing smoke from her cigarette out of a window she kept ajar with her foot. The hum of whispered conversations continued even after Jessie had started to speak. She faltered on her introduction.

Stewart stood up and spoke over the muttering. ‘Comrades, this is a political meeting, not a cabaret. Please keep quiet.’

Jessica continued. ‘I get the impression that you want the para-techniques and the songs.’ She indicated the projector that was in front of her. ‘So I’ll keep this short. We are here because of the war. We are the children of war. But we need to do more than just oppose war. What happens when we have forced the US to withdraw? Celebrate? Already the war parties in the States—the Democrats and the Republicans—are facing their stiffest opposition from veterans and students who have been lied to for years...’

Jessica Joseph had been a radical before Stewart arrived. Her break from her family was an escape from their conservatism. Stewart and Jessica both fled in the same year: Stewart across North America from his father ’s controlling brand of communism and Jessica to London from her blue-lipped Tory household of English Jews. Jessica’s parents were eccentric only in their interest in politics. Their children were expected to have opinions on everything: Darwin, Suez, ancient Rome. But for these Tory-Bolsheviks, the opinions had to fall into the right camp. Her family’s line was harder than anything she found on the New Left when she finally got out.

The Joseph family was shaped like a gun, and Jessica was the trigger. She set them off and escaped. Reading was their religion. They read collectively, like slaves, in the sitting room, on those bloody hard sofas against cushions printed with English hunting scenes. Their legs were neatly crossed, their allocated readings unfolded on their laps like hymnals. They spent every Sunday for two years reading en famille Gibbon’s six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . Their father the General sat over them, their mother, his adjunct, trying to love them but corralling them back when there was a break in discipline. Over dinner they would argue with their father dividing his children up like the chapters he had given them to read: ‘Jessica, you take the role of Romulus Augustus just before he is overturned by Odoacer in 476’—then, skipping two millennia—‘What are the Americans’ interests in North Africa after Suez?’

As an unaligned socialist, Jessica organised a reading group of Marx’s Capital in South East London. Stewart had asked her, when they first met, what she did in the evenings. She answered, ‘Bookworming, comrade, like Karl Marx.’

Now she paused and breathed in deeply. ‘But we need more than “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?” We need politics. We need to know how to sit in—but also how to think. We need to think about alternatives, imagine another politics—remember what the demonstrators sang in Paris?’ Jessica picked up a sheet from her notes and read, ‘“Everything is ours, nothing is theirs. Everything they own was stolen. Nationalisation and workers’ control and not a penny’s compensation.”’

Jessica made no concessions to the meeting. She wore an ironed blue shirt buttoned up to the neck and a long skirt. She looked like a suffragette, her hair tidy and combed. When she sat down, students clapped. Some cheered. Stewart whispered into her ear, ‘You are a traitor to your class, comrade. I love you.’

Stewart spoke next. He had spent two months making the seven-minute film. He hired an editing suite at the Hornsey School of Art, found clips of historical footage: Chamberlain waving a piece of paper from the steps of an airplane; newsreel shots of the bombing in Vietnam; anti-war protests.

‘Leon,’ Stewart said. Leon got up and sat on the corner of the table facing the room, his guitar ready. Jessica couldn’t help thinking: he’s going to fucking shoot us with his guitar .

Stewart turned a switch on the projector. Nothing. He scrambled under the table for the plug. Still nothing. The room remained silent, then there was the slow hum of the fan. The reels, protruding from the top of the projector, started to rattle, then turn. The machine shook rhythmically in the middle of the room. Leon looked up. History Lesson flashed up, unsteady on the screen. Leon looked down to his guitar, fingered his first cord. An image came onto the screen: a parched and cratered field, nothing living. Each scene flickered briefly on the screen. The effect was impressive. The audience was transfixed by the images and Leon’s rough cadences. Stewart’s montage of war was beautiful and tragic. Where was the liberation? His American, communist hope? Could possibilities of another future be derived from the charred and screaming girl running naked towards the camera with her arms open? Stewart had failed at the one role on which he prided himself most: purveyor of revolutionary possibility. Leon’s voice was loud and strident.

History lesson, it’s time to remember

Time to remember the deeds of the great

Please pay attention, don’t let your minds wander

Day dreams and playtime can wait .

* * *

August 1991

Behind my grandmother stood two of her old friends, both sighing and moaning. The rabbi struggled over Stewart’s coffin to pronounce the Hebrew as the wind blew across the cemetery, pulling up our jackets and yarmulkes. I put my hand on my head to keep the skull-cap from flying off and felt the wind across my body. The men looked devoted, bent slightly, holding onto their heads in silent lamentation before God and death. As the last words of the Hebrew prayer sounded, the coffin was lowered into the grave. My grandmother ’s wailing rose and the women behind her echoed her distress in harmony. She grew louder as my father sank deeper into the ground. Then she was silent. The cemetery stood still. Everyone looked to my grandmother, the conductor of our grief. She turned, looked at me, and let out a shout.

‘My son!’

She fainted, falling back on the woman behind her, who collapsed on the woman behind her . The three women fell like dominos, letting out a descending wail as they reached the ground. I managed to wedge myself between them and the ground. The cemetery erupted in panic. I was pinned to the earth by the three substantial women. They were still but I struggled, trying to keep my yarmulke on, lying across a grave. The women seemed to press their weight against each other. I could not move. For a moment I gave up the struggle to free myself and lay still.

My grandmother thinks I am my father and that I am dead. She is trying to push me back into the ground. I stared at the sky and the trees around the walls of the cemetery. The sky was a cold blue, strange for August, the clouds torn and scattered by the wind. The moon shone full and icy in the daylight. I felt comfortable and warm under my human cover. The stone supported my back like a bed.

I thought that maybe I was dead. Maybe we all were. That the dead and the living had been mixed up and the day and night had merged. I could stand up and my father would be there at his own funeral—or I would fall into the ground and sink into his coffin. I would lie with him, squeezed against the wooden sides of his bed, like I had as a child. We would talk once more and settle some of the life that had been so broken. Pat it down, level it. Bring our hands across the earth and tell each other that it would be okay. We would lie like this, softly whispering to each other in his coffin. He would explain what had happened. I would tell him how much I had missed him, how angry I was. He would stroke my head, his hand cold because he was already dead, and tell me that he was sorry and that he loved me. That everything would be all right. When this was done I could get up, kiss his clammy cheek and see him smile, run my finger for the last time along his creased brow. I would step out of his grave and see the moon fade from the sunlit sky, and all the living would take their places and all the dead would stay in theirs. No more would my world be confused between night and day, living and dead.

My grandmother was resuscitated. Mourners in ill-fitting black suits helped the women off me and led them back to the cars.

* * *

2 January 2003

When did I know that I loved her? It was almost two months after we had started seeing each other. We weren’t talking and I missed her. I was rid of her, free to work in the evenings, to drink with my friends, to flirt. I could not sleep. After the third night I woke and ached. I turned in my bed, sleeping for an hour, waking again, cursing the night, wishing I could hear the birds, that there would be a sign of the morning. In the day I stared at my phone until it was wet from my palms. As night approached I turned the phone off, because I couldn’t bear that it did not ring. I spent the next night fretting, turning in my sheets, staring at the silent phone, resisting the temptation to turn it on. Finally, sitting up naked in the bed with my dim bedside light illuminating an open book I could not read, I turned on the phone and waited for the sound of a missed call or a message. Nothing. I passed the night waiting. Now, I thought, I loved her. This glorious love had me desperate and sleepless.

This was the only way I could comprehend how I felt for Rebecca, in the quantity of suffering I envisaged if we were to separate. That night, when she didn’t phone, I thought that if we were to break up today, Tuesday, I would feel sick. I would not be able to sleep for three days, until Monday. Then for the following five days, until next Friday, I would still feel ill whenever I thought about her, but already I would have started to recover my sleep. In the following months she would start to fade as my life became cluttered again by temporarily forgotten anxieties. I would still be struck by sadness during a meal or as I got into bed, but even this would fade. This was, I thought, the only way I could understand love: as the suffering it would cause. This was the only way I could recognise that I was in love now.

I don’t think we are built to love, not more than once or twice. We don’t learn the knack. I thought about my mother and knew that she could not cope with loving again. I could see her more clearly, her constant activity, the hum of the radio always in the background of my childhood. When she slept, I could hear the babble of voices in her room, the low mumbling of people on her bedside table. Even when she read, the radio was there crowding the room. She needed this mess of soft noise to deaden the pain. I wondered whether the thoroughfare of lovers after Stewart was an attempt to chase away doubt and regret. I saw her, frail now, snapping at us like a hurt animal. Perhaps love should be rationed only to the first people who come into our lives. There should be a pact not to die. I wondered whether any good had come of my love. Did I enjoy loving my parents? Was my sister helped by my love? Was I any better for beginning to love Rebecca? We love too much. I wanted none of it.

* * *

August 1991

My father fought death until the end. He took on the cancer with his fists. He gripped it in his hands and tried to stop its unravelling. When he was finally hospitalized, he still fought, waving his young daughter away. He did not want to be taunted by life, by reasons not to die. He knew I was coming and tried to hold on, but he kept slipping. Finally, when the cancer pinned him down, he sat up in his bed, his father staring at him from the corridor. He shouted for thirty seconds. ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die, I’m going to die. Leave me alone, please leave me alone for five minutes. I am very tired. I am going to die. Fuck, shit, fuck, fuck.’ He fell back dead. My father ’s last words were fuck and shit . What better epitaph for his life? Fuck and shit to life.

* * *

January 2003

There was a basic truth to Mark’s obsession with a younger woman. Fifteen years separated Mark and Giuliana. Mark was strong and fit and, in his effusive and careless way, attractive. But Giuliana was striking, her face intriguing. You wanted to linger on it, to discover the deep hollows around her eyes and study her dimpled chin. Her beauty reminded me of Rebecca’s and forced me to ask the question: how much of what we are inside is because of the way we look outside? Like the rich, I thought, she had done nothing to be mysterious and intense, to arouse respect and curiosity. I felt sorry for Giuliana that the random ensemble of bone and flesh could so determine her fortunes. It had been the reason for her relationships, why she never had space to breathe between lovers. There was always a quick jostling to the front as men elbowed each other aside to woo her and show off. Giuliana was the queen and we were her players. Giuliana’s cruel beauty was the reason she had never been single and the reason Mark had gone mad.

In my desperate attempt to explain this to Mark, I even quoted Ben Jonson to him:

And punish that unhappy crime of nature,

Which you miscall my beauty: flay my face,

Or poison it with ointments, for seducing

Your blood to this rebellion. Rub these hands,

With what may cause an eating leprosy,

E’en to my bones and marrow: anything,

That may disfavour me…

As Mark felt his decay at forty-six, he counted his decades and weighed up his plans and ambitions and compared them with what he had expected to achieve twenty years before. As he aged he seemed to need the affirmation of Giuliana’s taut, impervious body. His obsession with her youth was a never-ending fiction. Youth begets youth. Our desire for further plunging and undulating youth only deepens the older we get. I told him to cleanse himself with Woody Allen. ‘First it’s the women ten years younger, then fifteen years younger, then it’s your wife’s daughter. Mark, you better watch out,’ I said. ‘We can’t delay our own demise by hitching up with nymphets.’ Mark didn’t answer, as though he was really considering a child bride, as if I’d given him the idea that he’d been searching for. Fuck , I thought, I should just keep my bloody mouth shut.

* * *

December 1991

After the funeral I thought I would meet Stewart in London. I thought I would run into him in the street and suggest a coffee. He became present suddenly in my life. I saw his red, slightly pocked face, his large and fleshy ears in the distance on the way to work, in shops on the weekend, his hair catching the light and turning dark red. He appeared to me in dreams. He was dead, but now always just out of sight. He was not cremated, so he could, I thought, technically still come back. Buried, but whole. My complete father still bent over, underground. The first winter of his death was bad in Chicago. Four feet of snow fell on the city in November, then more in December. Cars went into heated garages and roads disappeared overnight. Tunnels had to be dug through entire neighbourhoods. I received letters from my grandfather, his usually strident voice muffled by the snow and grief.

December 16, 1991
Dear Eddie,
Today, Monday, Chicago—this city of 2.5 million—is digging out of a horrible snowstorm. On Friday evening at 5 pm it struck. And for thirty hours, dear grandson, winds of sixty miles an hour lashed the city and all of Southern Illinois. Almost twenty inches of snow fell, easily the worst snowstorm for a hundred years. People were stranded everywhere. At hotels. At airports. In their cars. At hospitals. I was driven around the city by friends in an emergency four-wheel-drive truck and so I saw some of the strange happenings… people on skis in the center of the city, people in snowshoes tramping over snowdrifts twelve feet high with groceries or essentials like medicine. Of course, some idiots were also out in their snowsuits on Saturday night—at the height of the storm—lugging cases of beer home on sleds. The National Guard was using personnel carriers to take essential workers to hospitals and old folks’ homes. The Chicago Police Department authorized snowmobiles to operate on the streets for emergency purposes all day Saturday.

For the last two weeks the temperature has gone down to minus forty degrees. Our electricity bill will be 25% higher than normal. But there is a kind of carnival atmosphere in the city. Many people are helping their neighbors.

We have had to leave Stewart for a few weeks because of the snowfall and the cold. Grandma hasn’t been able to leave the house. I am going to end my Monday snow letter with an expression of love… we all miss you very much.

Solidarity, peace and love,

Your grandfather.

The winter was now my enemy, sealing up the ground, freezing the cemetery. I worried for my father ’s comfort. Frozen in his box, unable to push off the lid and scoop away the loose soil. His temporary rest, testified by my sightings in South London, had now been hard-frozen in the deep winter that caught Illinois in 1991. I only concluded that he was finally dead from my grandfather ’s weather reports that year.

* * *

December 1991

We packed ourselves into the Peugeot Estate and drove to Yorkshire. We bounced on the seats like kids and took turns choosing the music. Even after the divorce there was a clutter of men. The certainty of strange voices downstairs and in the bedroom. We had not had time to be together. Jessica rushed to cover her life with more chaos. Now we had a month together. Clothes fell out of our cupboard, dishes filled the sink and we stayed up late.

The Peugeot broke down. We sat listening to the sound of trucks revving at the service station outside. Drivers sat at scattered plastic tables under lights that shone too brightly. Jessica was suddenly in tears. ‘Fucking hell. I have spent all my life driving shit cars. Second-hand wrecks. I never have any money.’

The narrative of our lives was solved. The arguments between Stewart and Jessica had been about their cars: the Wartberg, the Fiat 500, the Renault 19. There had been cold winters in the backseats of old cars, waiting hopelessly as the engine failed to start. My slowness at school had been caused by the petrol fumes I inhaled as I push-started an old banger. I hammered my fist on the table. ‘Those bloody second-hand cars,’ I repeated.

Jessica put her hands over her face. No money. No AA membership. Life a series of breakdowns.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ A burly man who looked a bit like Rambo came over to the table.

‘You could fix our car,’ Esther said.

Jessica slid her hands down her face, wiped her cheeks. ‘Our car has broken down.’

Esther and Jessica sat in the car. I stood in the sleet with Rambo.

The car was fixed, except for the headlights. As we left the motorway the darkness enveloped the car. I walked in front of the Peugeot flashing a torchlight across the road. I looked like a funeral director. We got drunk the first night to celebrate our arrival—our survival. We were together and wanted nothing else. Esther was radiant. She told us, ‘You know, there isn’t a day that goes by when I’m not terrified that I am going to fall ill again.’ She cried. For four years we had not discussed her illness. We let it hang there, neither entirely forgotten nor completely present, but Esther had still been in its grip. Four years later she fell ill again.