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Family Cancers
or
The Big Zero
by
Bart
Alder
for
Angela Adair-Hoy
© Copyright 2000
‘Why is it that people care more about fiction than
the truth. You know what I mean?’
Steven looked at me intently, the froth of a beer on his
top lip making him look slightly comic. His young, low voice was muted by that
voluble hum generated by the small crowd huddled in the beery, sweaty pub.
I took my eyes from his gaze and surveyed the wall of
drunks leaning against the bar. I could still feel his question hovering upon
me. I turned back to look at him and his eyes were still on me, focused and
intense.
I pretended I understood him with a
cursory nod, in the hope of ending the discussion there, but it was no use. I
was going to get the full blast from him today. Steven was in an expansive
mood. Fueled by three pints of Guinness he was also capable of spitting
sibilants across the room and hitting the walls with them. I could see he was
anxious but I had no idea why.
‘We go to cinemas right?’ he said.
‘Right.’ I said, wiping the wettest part of the noun from
my forehead.
‘And we see these movies - wonderful fuckin’ movies
sometimes - where terrible things happen to these fictional people. And we all
weep and feel terrible for these fictional lives.’
‘Right.’
‘But a real person, a solid, feeling, thinking human being
sitting one seat away, for all we know, has a life ten times as bad as what
we’ve just seen flashed on a white wall. And yet if they came up to us needing
help they’d get turned away. We all cry in the cinemas and then hide from the
other people on the way out so they never see the tears. What’s that about?’
‘Movies are good because you get involved with people who
can’t ever phone you up for a whinge.’ I said finally. ‘It’s safe. Sure. So
what?’
‘It’s sick.’
I knew what he was saying of course and he was right. I
once met a woman who refused to watch the movie Philadelphia because she thought that homosexuals who contracted
AIDS deserved to die. She also cried
in Disney movies when cartoon animals died. Cartoon animals who could talk.
Maybe it was the perverse safety of an inked, talking lion with a death scene
that made her feel anything human at all. Give her a harsh reality and it
turned her inhumanly cold. Give her something fantastically stupid and totally
unbelievable and she’d howl like an infant going through teething.
‘Not everyone is built for that kind of care, Steven.’
Virtually no-one really. I saw a woman crying on a train once. Everyone ignored
her. Steven, had he been on that train, would have been drawn to her like a
deranged moth to a porch light.
Steven Briggs was different to most people in that he was
incapable of not caring. I don’t know what it was about him that made him
fixate on stuff like this, but sometimes it was tiresome. I’d squirm my way
through a dialogue with him thinking ‘If you care so much about my feelings
then why are you putting me through this torture?’ Of course I knew Steven’s
torture was worse. He actually cared about other people - even complete
strangers - and in this life, there can be no greater punishment. It’s a
freezing man wanting to embrace an iceberg, hoping it’ll give him more warmth
than the slushy oceans.
‘People are
built to care,’ he argued, ‘they just get it knocked out of them.’
He and I were both evidence to the contrary of course. I’d
never really thought too much about other people and Steven rarely thought
about much else in spite of the fact that he’d been knocked and kicked about as
hard as a man can be. But I nodded all the same. It was a nice way to think and
maybe it was sort of right. I didn’t want an argument, I only wanted the
dissertation on the problem with humanity to end.
‘I think that’s why people loved Jesus.’
I am not religious because as a kid I was ruthlessly
sentenced to twelve years of Catholic school. Any talk of god or Christ or
Mohammed causes me intense suffering. Steven wasn’t religious either so far as
I knew and this was the first time I’d had cause to imagine otherwise.
‘What are you
talking about?’
‘No, think about it. I mean he might not
have been the son of god but he cared about everyone, the poor, the weak, the
suffering. They’d never been anything but despised. Then came Jesus and
suddenly they were important, as important as any rich man, as any priest or
general. So they turned him into the son of god to feel better about
themselves.’
I was relieved that he’d taken that point
of view. It meant that copies of The Watchtower weren’t about to come out of a
well concealed briefcase.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll go along with that maybe.’
‘And today it’s the same with movie stars. We love these
actors and their films. We pay our money and for two hours or whatever we’re in
the same room as them. Their presence rubs off on us. We think we know these
people because we watch images of them flash on a wall, we laugh in good humour
as they speak lines written by someone else. The whole experience of watching a
movie can seem really intimate and personal but it’s all illusion. There’s nothing going on but the sound and light and
a lot of trickery.’
‘Yeah. And
money.’ I let forth a sigh and toyed with my beer coaster.
There was a pause. He sensed he’d been boring me, as
indeed he had.
‘I’m sorry.’ he said. ‘I just hate it.’
‘What?’
‘The distances between everyone. I hate it.’
The distance between me and others was always something
I’d kind of adored. I didn’t like all that many people too much, truth be
known. I thought they were pretty rancid when you got right down to it. If it
was legal to poke people with a stick I’d be poking fifty a day. Poke. ‘You
shit me to tears.’ Poke. ‘You have breath like fetid onions.’ Poke ‘You walk
too slow.’ Poke ‘You drive too fast.’ Poke poke poke.
‘I mean take dogs, right?’
‘Yeah.’ He was off again.
‘Now dogs, no matter what you say against them, are not
full of crap.’
‘True.’
‘They lick you when they like you and shit in your shoe
when they don’t. You’re never left in any suspense. They never play mind games
or expect you to know what’s wrong. When a dog thinks there’s something
annoying about you, you’ll get growled at and bitten. It’s that simple.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘But people… Timid, shy, insecure, unloved and self
loathing.’
He was warming to my point of view.
‘You fuck up with some human beings even once and they’ll
do everything they can to screw you over twice as hard. They’ll be sugary to
your face only to take the time later on to crap in every shoe you own. Well,
you know, if they can be bothered.’
‘So what’s you’re point?’ I asked.
‘Well…why?’
‘Why what?’
‘I don’t know, just… why? People have a
choice in life and they deliberately choose hostility, distance and bitterness.
Why?’
Finally a question and it was one I felt I could answer.
‘Equal parts cowardice and stupidity, Steven. They’re
upset that they’re a nothing and they’re too stupid to realise that everybody’s a nothing.’
His head was nodding. I could see it moulded well
alongside other thoughts he’d had. To him nobody was more special or important
than anyone else. Everyone was equally special and equally nothing. To me
people were always nothings and, in most cases, without any shred of special.
My words left enough ambiguity to force a kind of agreement from him.
‘Thank god we all die.’ he said finally. ‘It’s the only
chance we’ll ever get to love life… like a diamond. Can you imagine dying?
Thinking these are the last thoughts I
will ever feel. It’s kind of sacred.’
‘Hopefully I’ll be thinking more interesting things than that on my deathbed.’
‘But you know what I mean right?’
‘Sure.’
‘It’s just like sound.’ He seemed to expect me to know
what kind of a tangent his brain had taken.
‘Like sound?’ I truly wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly.
‘You know… When you speak and you hear the sound of your
voice… well where does the sound go? It hangs in the air long enough to be
heard and then it’s gone.’
‘Sure.’
‘Well our thoughts are like that too. They come and stay
long enough to be… seen, felt… you know… and then suddenly the next thought’s
already upon you. So the last thoughts you have in life, the last things you
think right before you die, are like sounds that you can make but never get to
hear, or maybe it’s a sound you hear forever. A sound which carries your life
away.’
‘Uhmm.’ I added. I liked to keep up my part of the
philosophical discussion.
‘I reckon the last moments of life would be the most
intense and magnificent. You’ve lived all that time just to reach the point where you’re about to fade into the big
zero.’
‘Yeah.’ I said flatly. Talking about
death was okay for priests and undertakers and maudlin bastards. It was not
something that I wanted to continue doing at that point in time. Death
depresses me because I am not young. Only the young can talk about it in the
abstract.
‘And suddenly you’re gone. Not even a thought left to
think. Nothing.’
‘Yep.’
‘Doesn’t it seem something of a waste then?’
‘What?’
‘Fearing and hating everybody so much when you’re never going to see them again.’
He wasn’t talking to me specifically until then. It was
always philosophy in the general case. But not any more. It was really strange.
Those words had an effect like nothing else I’d ever heard said. And I hadn’t
seen it coming.
At that moment I felt closer to him than I’d ever felt to
anyone in my whole life. Somehow, after all the crap he’d come out with which
had slid off my tortoise-like armour without leaving a wet patch, the bastard
had finally flung a turd so adhesive that it stuck fast. I felt teary and
hollow. He’d exposed something very deep and I found the exposure annoying. I
felt the need to hold him and cry while strangling him, but I couldn’t say why.
I covered it up well enough though, with an arching yawn.
‘My buy.’ I said, noticing his glass was half empty,
wanting to change the subject.
‘Nah.’ he said ‘I’m still half full.’ He swirled his
drink. I felt a choking in my neck as though I was about to scream. Even
talking about death, the bastard’s glass was still half full.
I yawned again. This time the yawn failed to conceal all
of my grotesque feelings. I had let something slip. A look of gaping loss, a
frailty which he noticed, an admiration for his own inner fortitude. I don’t
know how it happened, how I came to slip into humanity.
‘Are you okay?’ he said, concerned, worried, geniune.
I felt that warm turd slide off my shell.
‘I’m just fine.’ I muttered too defensively for him to not
notice the lie. ‘Nothing wrong with me.’
I added to fend off his caring glance. I told myself I was strong. That he was
weak. I told myself a thousand times in the hope that it’d become true.
He studied me for a second and took a sip on his beer.
‘Shall we talk crap now?’
Finally he was showing some real sensitivity. A smile crept across my lips. ‘Check out the
barmaid with the big tits.’ I said.
His head turned slowly to appraise the woman in question.
‘She’s got a nice smile.’ he replied. ‘What about her?’
‘Nothing. Just that she has big tits.’
He seemed disappointed that I should have no other remark
to make about her.
‘Oh.’ he said. ‘Yes I suppose she does.’
‘You suppose?
Look at ‘em. They’re the size of fuckin’ car tyres.’
It was a strange moment for him to say
it. The last turd he had to fling in life.
‘Dad?’ he said.
‘Yep.’ There was no point in denying
that’s who I was, even though there had been debate about it in the past.
‘I’ve got cancer.’ he said. There was not
exactly a silence because there was the chatter of dozens, animated and
drunken. That humming of noise must have been there but I didn’t hear it. I
didn’t hear anything, not until he whispered a deeper confession, ‘Actually, I
have several.’
I’ll never forget the way his sad eyes
locked on to mine. I felt an itching to say anything which would fill the
moment. He was only 26 years old.
‘Like fuckin’ car tyres.’ I murmured,
feeling my world implode. I looked at the barmaid’s tits again but my heart
just wasn’t in it.
‘Yep.’ he said, casting his eyes down at
the table. He drank his beer in one gulp. ‘Still your buy?’ he asked, but I was
already crying.
My only son Steven died two and a half
months later. I don’t know what his final thoughts were but I hope they were sacred. He was too good for this
world, too gentle. Doctors called it cancer of the liver and lungs. But it wasn’t
that. It was a cancer of his humanity. And that cancer was me, the living and indifferent. Poke poke poking death into his
life with my sturdy poking stick.
To this day I carry that turd on my
shell. It sort of weighs me down a little, but I know that if I try to scrape
it off it’ll be the last shred of his humanity to die. A part of me needs his
voice to ring out forever, to be a sound which never fades into the distance.