It was my last evening in the flat in Bristol, and Joe and Miriam prepared dinner. I got a bottle of rum. Real rum.
None of that Navy stuff, Joe said.
Miriam excelled herself with recipes she had found in a West Indian cookery book: chicken fricassee and curried shrimp. These are prawns, she said. Rice and peas, melangen grantin.
My favourite, pumpkin, she made into a soup. I got the avocados for the salad. These are zaboca, I said.
We were all doing the washing up, standing in the kitchen. A favourite place for English parties, I’ve discovered, leaning up on the fridge and sink, drinking and joking. It felt like we were avoiding something. Joe had been avoiding it for months now.
In the corridor outside J. M.’s old room, Joe and I stood up and talked. Like we couldn’t sit down.
You must take it all, if you want to. You should take his academic papers, that one called ‘Atlantic Junction: Toxteth, Brixton, St Paul’s’. I think we’ll take the rest to Oxfam. Miriam and I have chosen our mementoes. Small things, like this photograph. Have I shown you this one? 1967! The year of consenting adults! Joe said cynically. On the steps of the student union in Bristol. That’s where we all met. Edward read History, J. M. English and History, and me, Sociology and Politics. We were educated for the sixties: ‘68 was Paris and Prague! We went through everything together. That story you’ve been piecing together, Joe said, is a horror show as far as I’m concerned.
But there were ironies. Here is another photo I’ve kept. Polonecks and jeans. Their hair is already getting long. Barmouth in Wales. We’d speeded up to Shropshire in an old mini to visit Ed’s parents. I remember them loving Tintern Abbey. J. M. quoted Benedict quoting Wordsworth as we drove along the Wye. ‘O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro the woods,/ How often has my spirit turned to thee!’ He leant over from the back and put his arms around Ed’s neck. He was always doing things like that.
They got cold feet in Shropshire. Ed couldn’t face his father. He wanted to ‘come out’ in ‘68. Imagine! I had an aunt in Barmouth with a guest house, so we went off there. It was hot. The hillsides near the estuary were purple with wild rhododendrons and shimmering with yellow gorse. High mountains sheer to the Irish Sea. In the distance mountains in haze.
Reminds me of islands, J. M. said.
It blew our minds. I think we were high anyway. Look at how young and lovely they are. I’ll make you some copies of these and send them out to you. All the way in the car we sang along to ‘Are you going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.’ I had some hash and we got high, falling about on the grass where we stopped for a picnic. ‘There’s a strange vibration, people in motion.’ We giggled so much.
I remember, when we were sorting out the sleeping arrangements at my aunt’s, J. M. saying, It’s not much different out here, is it? We can’t hold hands in the street. We worry about being caught sleeping together. It’s worse, he said, in some ways. I saw ‘QUEER’ written up on the wall on the seafront.
I remember that time vividly. It was odd being with them, lovers who had been lovers in a monastery. There was a kind of other-worldliness about them. Don’t get me wrong. They loved having sex. In the evening, we walked on the front. ‘Under the boardwalk, down by the sea …’ we sang along with The Drifters.
Near a funfair, J. M. suddenly ran off in the direction of the square. Right there, standing all alone was a black guy playing a steel tenor pan.
J. M. said, God that music! I’ve not heard it in years. I would know it anywhere.
Ed said, Ask him where he’s from. J. M. was shy. Ed said teasingly, which I didn’t understand at first, Bet his name is Jordan.
J. M. was absorbed. Then he turned and poked Ed in the ribs playfully. The metallic notes bounced off the steel basin. We tapped our feet, moved our hips. J. M. said, Calypso, man! Hear that calypso music!
Joe couldn’t stop talking. He was circling in the small space of the corridor playing with the photographs in his hands all the while he was talking.
I’ve never told you, have I?
I knew what he was talking about and I said, No. You want to, so tell me. I want to hear. We sat on the bed in J.M.’s empty room. I pictured it as Joe talked. Ed’s dying was bad enough. It was I who wrote and told J. M. to come back. I knew he would. I couldn’t cope on my own. You should’ve seen your brother: he was not that indulgent romantic of the story you piece together. No, I loved him, really, in ‘67! Don’t mind me. He was a practical, caring man who sat by Ed’s bed and nursed him. We took it in shifts. A year ago we didn’t know as much as we know now. I expect we took a lot of risks. He had the works, that rare cancer with horrid sarcomas. The sweating was the thing, having to repeatedly change him through the night, high temperatures, raging, frightening. My memory of J. M. at that time is him sitting by the bed in the other room, the one Miriam now uses. Sitting there putting ice cubes to Ed’s mouth. His mouth was a grey line. He hallucinated about his mother a lot. You know he sort of lost his mother when he was young. He used to see her at the door to his room. She had been ill and had to be away from home. His father did come and visit him when he was in hospital. He didn’t want to come to the flat.
But with J. M. it was different. It was very gradual at first. It was an ordinary cold and cough which just wouldn’t go away. I would hear him coughing at night. I still hear that cough in the flat sometimes when I’m in on my own. But he had the fevers, the night sweats. There was an early bout of pneumonia which miraculously he recovered from. It left him wasted. His breathing became difficult. He needed oxygen. As you see, we’ve never taken back the cylinder. He had terrible pain, which they gave him morphine for, so we would lose him for days. It became too much and we had to take him to casualty. Then bring him home again when he was recovered, for more often than not they needed the bed.
Miriam was brilliant. She came to live here. She had always been fond of J. M. since that time I took him back home as a student. What shocked her was the cancer. He used to call them his sunspots. It was extraordinary how handsome he remained despite his gauntness and the grey pallor.
Joe twirled the photographs in his hands.
He had nightmares. He would call out in the night. Sometimes I or Miriam had fallen asleep. It was very tiring. He often dreamt of Les Deux Isles. He would describe these lurid dreams, always full of tropical ferns and lilies and heavy rain. He would describe the house at Malgretoute and the cocoa hills. I think these were caused by the morphine. He dreamt of Ted, the waterfall. The whole Ted thing came back, all that awful teenage stuff. It was as if his whole life was being played back as a Spielberg film. The past returned as a terror. He mentioned you. He tried to talk about you.
He said, I have a younger brother whom I don’t know. I haven’t been able to get to know him.
The names of your sisters popped up: Chantal, Giselle.
He recalled your mother’s death. Her dresses, he said. I remember her dresses hanging in her press. I went and smelt them. And Dad… then his voice faded.
But he wouldn’t let me write. He once said that despite all the work he had done on himself he could not bring himself actually to say to any member of his family that he was gay. Somehow, that very deep sense of sin, shame, never left him. Catholicism, a pernicious religion! Joe said, characteristically. Miriam wasn’t there to moderate him.
Joe’s voice goes on in my head. The two photographs arrived today. Krishna brought them up in the post. I’ve propped them up on my desk on the verandah where I do the estate work.
Joe’s voice is under the rain which is falling in the cocoa. Like an English summer’s rain. Now I make the comparisons.
He asked me to plant some hyacinth bulbs and put them in the dark, Joe continued. He said that I must bring them out in in February or March and put them on the windowsill. I saw him look as far as the window and stop. I thought he must’ve wondered how far his future stretched. Always, from his student days he had hyacinths in the spring. What did he say the smell brought back? The pomme arac! There were geraniums in the summer. Always red, in terracotta pots. Funnily, though, he would often say of the plants, I’ve got to clear these out and get some other fragrances in my life. There was always a hankering for a monastic cell.
Miriam was out. I was there alone with him. Miriam promised she would get back early, but there was some hold-up at her work. He was in and out of consciousness. He wouldn’t go into hospital. He begged me not to put him into hospital. He said, Let me leave from here, Joe. The effort to breathe was intense, but he didn’t always want the mask on.
He called for Benedict. Is that you, Benedict? Benedict, my love, he said. After all these years! He called for Edward to come and get him. I think he’s coming, Joe, he said, and turned his head towards me. It was a real effort to turn his head. His eyes were crossed. The doctor had said something was going in the optic nerve.
I was standing looking out of the window watching the bulbs grow. I heard something different, like a gurgle. I turned around to look at him. He was gone.
When I took his hand there might have been some consciousness there. I was alone with his body for half an hour before Miriam got back.
Thank you Joe, I said.
Now, again, Thank you.
I wanted to tell you, he said. The rest you know: his ashes sprinkled in the cemetery with the African heads where he had sprinkled Ed’s.
Yes, yes.
The rain was coming in at the window, Joe said.
I hear the drip of the rain in the cocoa. The scent of pomme aracs rise from the garden below the window at Malgretoute.