The Scent of Dried Roses Read online

  I volunteered to make the phone calls to relatives and close friends. I didn’t mind. In fact it was quite satisfying in a way, because it was something to do that was real and necessary. What I feared, what we all feared, was the exhaustion of these rituals. What would the gods demand of us then? Perhaps they weren’t indifferent after all.

  Chapter Three

  In fact, our family don’t believe in gods – even though sometimes I find myself being careful with my thoughts, as if I suspect they are being monitored. It’s just a word I use to indicate vicissitude or circumstance. My earliest lesson in circumstance was from my father.

  It’s unfair, I would complain, as children do.

  Get used to it, Jack would respond with a shrug in his voice. For Jack, the essential characteristics of life were first boredom, then injustice. Get used to it. So the gods I invoke don’t act purposefully, because they are non-existent. Still, ‘gods’ is a better word than ‘luck’, because whatever I know to the contrary, there is always this feeling that someone else is determining events, while nevertheless holding me to account.

  As the days and years passed between me and my mother’s death, I came to understand that the gods truly were indifferent, whatever my imagination had once told me. Yet I remained confused about where the line stood between their blind power and my culpability. However, this much I knew: I wasn’t the sole culprit. It was more in the nature of a joint enterprise, I would say, as in The Mousetrap. There were as many different fingerprints at the scene as on the butt of a gun in a gumshoe thriller. The threads that bound up the life that ended with that abrupt, confessional act were as numerous and interconnected as the fibres of the hanging rope.

  The past was everywhere in that simple bedroom, invisible and inescapable like the air, the backsliding force that drafts out the present. Parts of that history, as if elements of air, could be teased apart. There was the force of heredity, knitting with childhood experience. There was adult drama, sparking with the larger inner history of the old, odd, transformed country within which Jean was a tiny connection.

  Psyche, if that’s what you want to call it, was also there as a shadow on the wall – the workings of the subconscious, the operations of the will, the convulsions of mental illness, the mysteries of biochemistry and clinical depression. And the gods, too, were there right enough, shadows behind shadows, blank and disinterested, dishing out varieties of fortune – variously disguised, of course. And finally, I was there, a photograph on the sideboard, doing my part to tighten the knot.

  All these things I wished to consider, to take into account and hold responsible, but above them all Jean was there, Jean herself, the constellation of powers that makes up a single personality. It was Jean who wrote the note, Jean who sought out the rope, Jean, finally, who kicked away the stool. But who was Jean?

  When I first asked that question of myself, I was taken aback by the reflex answer, which was that I had only the vaguest idea. She was simply Mum, a lovable, bright cartoon who cooked us meals, was pleasant, loving, available. Despite having borne me in her belly, having suckled me and raised me, having shared a house with me for twenty years, there were probably a score of people whom I knew far better. She was insubstantial to me as a personality, although not as a person. Her presence was dense despite being intangible, bound to me by love, respect and a genuine affection that went well beyond what was biologically necessary. I liked and admired Jean as well as loved her. Yet, I began to realize, I had no more idea of what made her tick than I knew what made the universe expand or a leaf tumble from a tree. Jean was not so much a person as a soft and muddy idea whose purpose was to comfort me.

  If I was to find out what made her commit suicide – how metallic, how abrupt and tactless that phrase still feels – I needed to get to know her, if only in retrospect. I had to examine the traces of her life, the products and waste products, like a forensic scientist, inferring, deducing, blind-guessing. At the same time, I knew that I needed to find out about myself, a greater mystery to me perhaps than even Jean was. After all, I too had been where Jean had stood, on the precipice, waiting to die by my own choice, if choice it was. We had been forged in the same foundry, out of our blood, and our class, and our England. To understand Jean’s death, I needed to understand my own death wish and the way it fed back into the shape of my own life.

  I wanted to do what was, perhaps, impossible: to try to see Jean with eyes scrubbed of worship, or caricature, or simple hope; to look at her straight, and through her see myself in a less distorted way. I wanted to understand her life, the world she was born into and the way that shaped the person she became. I also needed other kinds of knowledge, to get an understanding of what many doctors imagined as a largely physical illness, and what many psychologists imagined, quite differently, as a crisis of the self, of meaning and faith. The inquest said that Jean took her own life as a result of clinical depression, as if it were like a heart attack or a brain haemorrhage. But this was no explanation. I needed to learn the secret language of suicide. I needed to get inside Jean’s head, and through it inside my own. Or perhaps it would turn out to be the other way round.

  I am sitting at my desk, in the room where I write. The window overlooks the Westway Flyover and there is an unceasing low hum of traffic. The Portobello Road is twenty yards away.

  Mine is an expensive house, a few hundred yards north of my old flat, but much of the area is poor, despite being fashionable. Crack-heads, yardies, droolers, screamers and totters, child-whackers and curry-pukers parade the streets outside. I live here because it is as far away from England as possible, as far from Terry and June and Wendy Craig as it’s possible to be. This is where misfits congregate, by choice or injunction. James has christened it the Bronx, but it is a place peculiar to modern England rather than America. There are fifty nationalities and languages and as many income brackets, backed up on to each other’s doorstep.

  My heart is beating faster than usual and my fists are clenched. There is a folded piece of paper in front of me, torn from what might have been a school exercise book. It is ruled in blue, with a one-inch left-hand margin marked in red. Jackie is written on the front. I stare at this scrap of paper, reluctant to touch it. Then, in a quick motion, I unfold it. Immediately, my eyes flood. They overflow.

  In the top right-hand corner, in blue ink, there are two doodles, both in the shape of an L, or right angle. One has the vertical strut extended to three times the length of the other. The first word, Jackie, is written in blue ink and is followed by a comma. Then a new line starts, in black ink. The writing is slightly more untidy than Jean’s usual hand.

  Now I am sobbing, in deep, sharp jags. I move the paper to one side so that my tears do not stain it and take short, struggling breaths. It is only the second time I have read this note. The first, I was numb with shock. Now time has shrugged off my protection. I can manage only one sentence at a time without breaking off for a few moments to try to collect myself. I cannot stop moaning out loud. But I force myself to read it all the way through.

  Jackie,

  Please forgive me for this terrible thing I am doing, but at least it is one brave thing I am doing.

  I cannot keep up this pretence. We have had so many happy year’s and I can see the strain this is having on you, in the end you will grow to hate me. So it is time for me to get out of your life. You have so much to give such a bright mind and I am holding you back.

  This will be so bad for everybody but I hate Southall, I can see only decay, I feel alone.

  I have loved you alway’s and this is something you will have to be strong enough to get through, but you will, and then you can start life with somebody who will take you on to better times. Please forgive me. I love you forever.

  Tell my dear friends they have been great pleasure in my life. My darling son’s. I love you.

  Forgive me. Forgive me.

  Jeannie

  Then there are two diagonal crosses – kisses.

>   I squeeze my eyelids together and rub them with the heel of my palm. The misplaced apostrophes are crushing, somehow. I swallow, and swallow again. I feel a fathomless sadness and repeat the same phrase again and again in my head. Poor Jean. Poor, poor Jean.

  From time to time, over the next few weeks, I take out the note and read, when I feel strong. At first it tends to affect me for several days, but now it is unpredictable. Sometimes I can shake it off, sometimes it scratches and vexes me in the middle of the night. But I need to read it, again and again, because I want to understand, and I have to start somewhere.

  This will be so bad for everybody but I hate Southall, I can see only decay, I feel alone.

  I am driving towards Southall, to try to reimagine the place I grew up in, that I left twenty years ago. The place that Jean could no longer stand to live in. I turn the phrase from her note over and over in my mind.

  I arrive through Greenford, the first stop off the Western Avenue on the way to Southall. I drive past the anonymous shops. There is an ugly 1950s church, Our Lady of the Visitation, just before Cardinal Wiseman High School. My school, Greenford County Grammar, would play them at football. To the right, the Golf Links estate, white high-rise blocks, where I would go to visit friends from my school who were not lucky enough to be owner-occupiers, Ds and Es rather than C2s. Here, the skinheads would gather to brood and swagger, but racial attacks were largely unheard of, or perhaps simply unreported, at least until Gurdip Singh Chaggar was murdered outside the Dominion Cinema in 1976. After that there were the National Front march in 1979, when Blair Peach died at the hands of the Special Patrol Group, and then the Southall Riots in 1981. Both were largely orchestrated by outsiders.

  Skinheads were not dangerous then anyway, or so it seemed to me. They just liked dressing up differently: boneheads, suedies, peanuts. They didn’t even take drugs like we did, we who styled ourselves, laughably, the heads, or the hairies. They were better than the straights anyway, the kids with water-slicked five-shilling haircuts who made A grades and were never rude to their parents.

  On each side of the road, stone-cladding, pebble-dash and red-tiled roofs. Satellite dishes collect junk from the heavens. There is an empty playground with a skeletal rocket ship, its brightly coloured paint invaded by rust. On the opposite side, West Middlesex Golf Club. On the days it is open to the public, Jack, James and I play a round if the sun is shining. Dad is reliable and consistent, James flamboyant and reckless, me wholly inadequate and unpredictable. It is a surprisingly working-class game now. There are lager cans in the litter bins and builders who smoke Marlboro Lights as they mishit the ball.

  I brake to avoid golfers who are suddenly dragging trolleys across the road from one part of the course to another. One man gesticulates angrily at me, then passes out of sight. I speed up again. I am approaching the border with Southall. Past the Pig and Whistle – ‘West London’s Premier Public House’ – past what were once known as stockbrokers’ Tudor houses, although there are no stockbrokers here and there never were. Instead there are software buyers, computer programmers, local shopkeepers, skilled workers, financial services salesmen, bank employees.

  These houses, like most in Southall, look worn and dispirited. It is hard to believe they were built as part of a great common dream of England, one that emerged around the time Jack and Jean were born. They are England, more than any palace or flag or uniform, with their dull, decent reflection in every city and town.

  Until the First World War, such suburbs – where they existed at all – had been fenced off for the middle and upper-middle classes. The working classes would have been in rented accommodation in the inner cities, like Jean’s family, crammed into a flat in Shepherd’s Bush, or Jack’s parents in the two-bedroom flat in Lambeth they shared with another family. The new houses – with their front and back gardens, their inside toilets – sprouted, like Southall, around the arterial roads and tube lines that pushed out from central London. The estates of ridge-tiled semis and terraces with their round stair windows, porches, creosoted gates and privet hedges must have seemed part of an almost mythic vision, a prospect of privacy, independence, peace and quiet. This was the most visible sign of the then much-vaunted new Jerusalem. People, it is said, believed in such things at that time.

  I turn right into the Uxbridge Road, with Brunel’s Iron Bridge to my left and, beyond that, St Bernard’s Hospital, where my mother was referred. It was once less delicately known as Hanwell Asylum for the Insane Poor, one of the first great nineteenth-century mental-health projects. It has been largely converted into a new housing estate now, with typically cramped windows and belligerent red brick, although the hospital survives, facelifted and remarketed as a ‘community resource’. Acute depressives still languish here in locked wards, waiting for the slack nurse who will leave the medicine cabinet unlocked.

  I drive past the used-car showrooms, a line of semis with garages, then Southall Park, where my Uncle Alan – Jean’s brother – worked as a park-keeper, until they found him asleep in his barrow and gave him the sack. Men with turbans are playing cards on the benches. There are drunks beetling pointlessly along the paths.

  To my right, the youth club I spent night after night during the dead zone – between thirteen and fifteen years old, between childhood and the pub. I try to imagine myself loping through the door, surprised now that I was tough enough then not to be unnerved, for it was mainly a skinhead haunt. There were feather-cut girls French-kissing overgrown boys in Doc Martens steel-capped boots and thin clip-on braces, hoiking up two-tone Sta-Prest to expose the regulation white socks. But I had a bruiser’s face, scarred and coarse, and I had been known to punch. It was just enough of a reputation to make them wary, but not enough to challenge them. They danced with short, stubby movements to Laurel Aitken, the Skatalites, Prince Buster, Trojan Chartbusters Volume 3. In my hipster Wranglers, black Converse All-Stars and maroon tie-dyed three-button grandad vest, I tried to sneak Neil Young with Crazy Horse, or the Fugs or Iggy Pop and the Stooges on to the busted-up record player. It was always swiftly removed, with an amplified squawk.

  The youth club shrinks in the rear-view mirror. Now I move past the entrance to Southall Horse Market, a Victorian relic which actually still does trade horses once a week. On Saturdays it was a general market. I bought my first record there, an ex-jukebox copy of Lee Dorsey’s ‘Working in a Coal Mine’.

  Into Southall proper, past the abortively ugly police station, from which one of the drafted-in SPG officers battered to death Blair Peach in the riots. The signs read Curried Halal Meats, the Queens Style Carpet Centre, the Shahi Nan Kebab, Fine Fabrics: Specialists in Sarees and Dhuptas, the White Hart Pub – now Shadows Night Club, Karaoke Most Evenings, West London’s Fun Club. Past the White Hart and the town hall, boarded up and crumbling: These Premises Controlled By Security Officers. There are mock Doric columns, bathetic, supporting the roof to the entrance. Beyond and to the right, the plaster melted wedding cake of Southall Mosque. To the left, Mohammed Jewellers. Diagonally opposite, the astonishing folly of what was once the Southall Palace Cinema, its two giant Golden Dragons still intact and scowling down at the street scene. Now it has been broken up into small market units selling cloth, gewgaws and pencils.

  I hate Southall, I can see only decay, I feel alone.

  The odd thing is, Jean and Jack were the only ones in the family who, so we thought, didn’t hate Southall. Jeff, James and I loathed the place, like a bad cell within ourselves which we feared would infect the other, healthy ones. Jeff left at the age of eighteen to go abroad and never came back. James, when asked where he came from, would always say Ealing, the London borough we were a small part of. At the age of sixteen, returning from a holiday with his girlfriend in Denmark, he cried on the bus back from Heathrow to our house as it progressed through the dead, littered streets of Hayes and Harlington to the tired, spiced air of Southall, of suburban England. I got out as quickly as I could, at the age of nineteen.

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nbsp; At the time, Southall had the largest concentration of Asian immigrants in the country, at first largely Sikhs from the Punjab, but later Muslims and Hindus from East Africa, Bangladesh and Pakistan. But we didn’t bolt because we disliked Asians. The fact that they were there at least gave the place some identity, some interest, some special status. To be honest, we didn’t go out of our way to court them either. They were an insular community, as were we, I suppose, and you had little chance of kissing the often beautiful girls. We were just indifferent; each community kept itself to itself.

  No, we bolted because Southall was a dump, because it was nowhere, like most of subtopian England. We hated it for the reasons we imagined our parents liked it – because it was predictable, safe, conservative and limited in scale and possibility. We hated it because we could see that it didn’t know what it was, or where it belonged, or what it was for.

  But Jean stayed, tending her isolated front garden, as the other gardens in the street were paved over for car-parking space, as Sikh traditional styles – saris, turbans, salwar and kameez, dhuptas and guths – became more familiar sights than Aran sweaters or M & S belted raincoats. She would nod and say hello, always be polite and friendly, chat over the fence to Mr and Mrs Mukherjee at No. 29. Perhaps she was secretly prejudiced, although she never said anything.

  I drive through the entrance to Southall Park, past Villiers High School, once Southall Grammar. An aircraft roars overhead on the flight path to Heathrow, five miles west. As a child, I would lie in bed listening, scared that they were carrying A-bombs.

  In the car park there is a man with a can of super-strength lager. I used to come to this park all the time, along the primula path, to the tennis courts, or the Scout jamborees, or the Summer Holiday Shows, dull magicians and pompous brass bands. It was horribly boring. The primulas are still lovely.

  There is a train whistle in the background, still an oddly pre-war sound. The little building which used to take the fees for our Sunday games of park tennis is boarded up and marked Keep Away. There is graffiti, as predictable in its presence as the man with the can: El Krew; Sanj; T. Nungs (the Tooti Nungs, Asian gang rivals of the Holy Smokes). Under the awning of the building, unpunctuated except for unnecessary speech marks, a sign which reads ‘Do Not Stand Under Here Private’. There is what looks like verdigris on the roof.