Pulse (25 page)

‘Of course I do. As long as she makes you happy.’

‘That sounds … conditional.’

‘Well, it is. It would be. A mother’s love is unconditional. A mother-in-law’s love is conditional. That’s how it’s always been.’

‘So if she made me unhappy?’

My mother didn’t reply.

‘And if I made her unhappy?’

She smiled. ‘I’d put you across my knee.’

As it turned out, we almost didn’t get to the wedding. We each postponed once, and even got an official warning from Jake about discussing heavy stuff while out running. When I put it off Janice said it was really because I was scared to commit. When she put it off it was because she wasn’t sure about marrying someone who was scared to commit. So somehow it was my fault both times.

One of my father’s bridge partners suggested acupuncture. Apparently it had done wonders for the fellow’s sciatica.

‘But you don’t believe in that stuff, Dad.’

‘I’ll believe in it if it cures me,’ he replied.

‘But you’re a rationalist, like me.’

‘We don’t have a monopoly of knowledge in the West. Other countries know things too.’

‘Sure,’ I agreed. But I felt a kind of alarm, as if things were slipping. We need our parents to remain constant, don’t we? And all the more so when we’re grown up ourselves.

‘Do you remember – no, you’d’ve been too young – those photos of Chinese patients having open-heart surgery? All they had by way of anaesthetic was acupuncture and a copy of Mao’s
Little Red Book
.’

‘What chance those photos were complete fakes?’

‘Why should they be?’

‘Mao worship. Proof of the superiority of the Chinese way. Also, if it worked, keeping down medical costs.’

‘You see, you said
if it worked
.’

‘I didn’t mean it.’

‘You’re too cynical, son.’

‘You’re not cynical enough, Dad.’

He went to this … whatever acupuncturists call their surgery or clinic, in a house on the other side of town. Mrs Rose wore a white smock, like a nurse or dentist; she was fortyish and sensible-looking, Dad told us. She listened to his story, took his medical details, asked if he suffered from constipation, and explained the principles of Chinese acupuncture. Then she left the room while he stripped to his underpants and lay down under a paper sheet with a blanket on top of it.

‘It was all very professional,’ he reported. ‘She starts by taking your pulses. In Chinese medicine there are six, three on each side. But the ones on the left wrist are more important because they’re for the major organs – heart, liver and kidneys.’

I didn’t say anything – just felt my alarm growing. And I expect my father read my mood.

‘I said to Mrs Rose, “I’d better warn you, I’m a bit sceptical”, and she said that didn’t matter because acupuncture works whether you believe in it or not.’

Except presumably it takes longer with sceptics and so costs more money. I didn’t say this either. Instead I let Dad tell us how Mrs Rose measured his back and marked it up with a felt-tip pen, then put little piles of stuff on his skin and set light to them, and he had to sing out when he felt the heat, and she’d pick them off him. Then there was more measurement and felt-pen markings, and she began sticking needles in him. It was all very hygienic and she dropped the used needles into a sharps box.

At the end of the hour she left the room, he put his clothes back on and paid her fifty-five pounds. Then he went off to the supermarket to buy dinner. He described standing there in a sort of daze, not knowing what he wanted – or rather, wanting everything he looked at. He wandered around, buying all sorts of stuff, came home in a state of exhaustion, and had to take a nap.

‘So you see, it obviously works.’

‘You mean, you smelt your dinner?’

‘No, it’s early days – that’s only my first treatment. I mean, it clearly has some effect. Both physical and mental.’

I thought to myself: feeling tired and buying food you don’t need, that sounds like a cure?

‘What do you think, Mum?’

‘I’m all for him trying something different if he wants to.’ She reached across the table and patted his arm, near where his mysterious new pulses lay hidden. I needn’t have asked – they would have discussed things beforehand and come to a joint conclusion. And as I well knew by now, divide and rule was never successful with my parents.

‘If it works, I might try it for my knee,’ she added.

‘What’s wrong with your knee, Mum?’

‘Oh, I sort of twisted it. I tripped and bashed it on the stairs. I’m getting a bit trippy in my old age.’

My mother was fifty-eight. She was wide-hipped, with a good, low centre of gravity, and never wore silly shoes.

‘You mean, you’ve done this before?’

‘It’s nothing. Just age. Comes to us all.’

Janice once said that you can never really tell about parents. I asked what she meant. She replied that by the time you were able to understand them, it was too late anyway. You could never find out what they were like before they met, when they met, before you were conceived, afterwards, when you were a small child …

‘Children often understand a lot,’ I said. ‘Instinctively.’

‘They understand what parents let them understand.’

‘I don’t agree.’

‘So be it. The point remains. By the time you think you’re capable of understanding your parents, most of the important things in their lives have already happened. They are who they are. Or rather, they are who they’ve decided to be – with you, when you’re around.’

‘I don’t agree.’ I couldn’t imagine my parents, once they closed the door, turning into other people.

‘How often do you think of your father as a reformed alcoholic?’

‘Never. That’s not how I think of him. I’m his son, not a social worker.’

‘Precisely. So you want him to be Just a Dad. No one’s just a dad, just a mum. It doesn’t work like that. There’s probably some secret in your mother’s life you’ve never suspected.’

‘You’d be laughed out of court,’ I said.

She looked at me. ‘I think that what happens with most couples over time is that they find a way of being with one another that is basically untruthful. It’s like the relationship depends on mutually assured self-deception. That’s its default setting.’

‘Well I still don’t agree.’ What I thought was: crap.
Mutually assured self-deception
– that doesn’t sound like you. It’s some phrase you picked up from that magazine you work for. Or from some bloke you wouldn’t mind fucking. But all I said was,

‘Are you calling my parents hypocrites?’

‘I’m talking generally. Why do you always take things personally?’

‘Then I don’t understand what you’re saying. And if I do, then I can’t think why you want to be married to me, or anybody else.’

‘So be it.’

That was another thing. I was beginning to dislike her use of that phrase.

Dad admitted that he hadn’t expected acupuncture to hurt as much as it did.

‘Do you tell her?’

‘Certainly. I say, “
Ow
.”’

If Mrs Rose stuck a needle in and didn’t get the reaction she expected, she’d do it again, near the original spot, until she got what she was looking for.

‘And what’s that?’

‘It’s a sort of magnetic pull, an energy surge. And you can always tell because that’s when it hurts most.’

‘And then?’

‘And then she does it in other places. The backs of the hands, the ankles. That’s even more painful – where there isn’t much flesh.’

‘Right.’

‘But in between she needs to see how your energy levels are coming along, so she’s always checking your pulses.’

At which point I lost it. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Dad. There’s only one pulse, you know that. By definition. It’s the pulse of the heart, the pulse of the blood.’

My father didn’t reply, just cleared his throat slightly and looked at my mother. We don’t do rows in our family. We don’t want to do them, and we don’t know how to, anyway. So there was a silence, and then Mum started on another topic.

Twenty minutes after his fourth treatment, my father walked into Starbucks and smelt coffee for the first time in months. Then he went to the Body Shop to get some shampoo for Mum, and said it was like being hit over the head by a rhododendron bush. He was almost nauseous. The smells were so rich, he said, that it was as if they had bright colours attached to them as well.

‘So what do you say about that?’

‘I don’t know what to say, Dad, except congratulations.’ I thought it was probably coincidence or auto-suggestion.

‘You’re not going to pretend it’s a coincidence?’

‘No, Dad, I’m not.’

Mrs Rose, to his surprise, greeted his account neutrally, with a little head-nodding and some scribbling in a notebook. She then explained her proposed course of action. There would, if he agreed, be fortnightly appointments building towards the summer – by which she meant the Chinese, not the British, summer, because that, based on my father’s date of birth, would be his time of maximum responsiveness. She added that his energy levels were rising every time she checked his pulses.

‘Do you feel more energetic, Dad?’

‘That’s not what it’s about.’

‘And have you smelt anything since your last appointment?’

‘No.’

Right, so ‘energy levels’ had nothing to do with ‘levels of energy’, and having higher ones didn’t increase his smelling power. Fine.

Sometimes I wondered why I was being so hard on my father. Over the next three months he reported his findings matter-of-factly. From time to time he smelt things, but they had to be strong to get through: soap, coffee, burnt toast, toilet cleaner; twice, a glass of red wine; once, to his joy, the smell of rain. The Chinese summer came and went; Mrs Rose said that acupuncture had done all it could. My father, typically, blamed his own scepticism, but Mrs Rose repeated that attitude of mind was irrelevant. Since she was the one who proposed ending the treatment, I decided that she wasn’t a charlatan. But perhaps it was more that I didn’t want to think of Dad as the sort of person who could be taken in by a charlatan.

‘Actually, it’s your mother I’m more worried about.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘She seems, I don’t know, a bit off the pace nowadays. Maybe it’s just tiredness. She’s slower, somehow.’

‘What does she say?’

‘Oh, she says there’s nothing wrong. Or if there is, it’s just hormonal.’

‘What does she mean?’

‘I was rather hoping you could tell me.’

That was another nice thing about my parents. There was none of that holding on to knowledge and power that some parents go in for. We were all adults together, on a plateau of equality.

‘I probably don’t know any better than you, Dad. But in my experience, “hormones” is a catch-all word for when women don’t want to tell you something. I always think: hang on, haven’t men got hormones as well? Why don’t we use them as an excuse?’

My father chuckled, but I could see his anxiety wasn’t allayed. So on his next bridge night, I dropped in on Mum. As we sat in the kitchen, I could tell immediately that she hadn’t bought my excuse of ‘just being in the neighbourhood’.

‘Tea or coffee?’

‘Decaf or herbal tea, whatever you’re having.’

‘Well, I need a good dose of caffeine.’

Somehow, it didn’t take more than that to bring me to the point.

‘Dad’s worried about you. So am I.’

‘Dad’s a worrier.’

‘Dad loves you. That’s why he notices things about you. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t.’

‘No, I suppose that’s right.’ I looked at her, but her gaze was elsewhere. It was perfectly clear to me that she was thinking about being loved. It could have made me feel envious, but it didn’t.

‘So tell me what’s wrong, and don’t mention hormones.’

She smiled. ‘A bit tired. A bit clumsy. That’s all.’

About eighteen months into the marriage, Janice accused me of not being straightforward. Of course, being Janice, she didn’t put it as straightforwardly as that. She asked why I always preferred discussing unimportant problems rather than important ones. I said I didn’t think this was so, but in any case, big things are sometimes so big that there’s little to say about them, whereas small things are easier to discuss. And sometimes we think
this
is the problem, whereas it’s actually
that
, which makes
this
seem trivial. She looked at me like one of my stroppier pupils, and said that was typical – a typical justification of my natural evasiveness, my refusal to face facts and deal with issues. She said she could always smell a lie on me. She actually put it like that.

‘Very well, then,’ I replied. ‘Let’s be straightforward. Let’s deal with issues. You’re having an affair and I’m having an affair. Is that facing facts or not?’

‘That’s what you think it is. You make it sound like a one-all draw.’ And then she explained the falseness of my apparent candour, and the difference between our infidelities – hers born of despair, mine of revenge – and how it was symptomatic that I thought the affairs were the significant thing, rather than the circumstances which gave rise to them. And so we came full circle to the original charges.

What do we look for in a partner? Someone like us, someone different? Someone like us but different, different but like us? Someone to complete us? Oh, I know you can’t generalise, but even so. The point is: if we’re looking for someone who matches us, we only ever think of their good matching bits. What about their bad matching bits? Do you think we’re sometimes driven towards people with the same faults as we have?

My mother. When I think of her now, there’s a phrase that comes to mind – one I used when Dad was rabbiting on about his six Chinese pulses. Dad, I said to him, there’s only one pulse – the pulse of the heart, the pulse of the blood. The photographs of my parents that I’m most attached to are those taken before I was born. And – thank you, Janice – I do actually think I know what they were like back then.

My parents sitting on a pebble beach somewhere, his arm around her shoulders; he has a sports jacket with leather elbow patches, she’s in a polka-dot dress, looking out at the camera with passionate hopefulness. My parents on their honeymoon in Spain, with mountains behind them, both wearing sunglasses, so you have to work out how they’re feeling from their stance, their obvious relaxation with one another, and the sly fact that my mother has her hand slipped into my father’s trouser pocket. And then a picture which must have meant a lot to them despite its shortcomings: the two of them at a party, clearly more than a bit drunk, with the camera flash giving them the pink eyes of white mice. My father has absurd muttonchop whiskers, Mum frizzy hair, big hoop earrings and a kaftan. Neither looks as if they could possibly grow up enough to be a parent. I suspect this is the first picture ever taken of them together, the first time they are officially recorded as sharing the same space, breathing the same air.