Dying to Know You (17 page)

I’m sure most people would have asked what I thought. But Karl didn’t. Another example of his difference from most people and of his sensitivity. He waited long enough for me to have a good look from various angles before he spoke.

“I know they are bad copies of the one we saw at the hotel.”

I said, “Some. Not all. But I wouldn’t say bad. And what does it matter if they are? Copies, I mean.”

“I wanted them to be a bit different. A bit more … my own.”

We weren’t looking at each other, but at the sculptures.

I said, “When you started as a plumber, didn’t your boss show you what to do and how to do it and then you did it the way he showed you?”

“Yes.”

“And when your dad taught you to fish, did he show you how and then you did what he did?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that copying?”

“I suppose.”

“Isn’t that how we learn everything? By copying people who know how to do it and show us?”

“Hadn’t thought of it like that.”

There was a high stool in a corner. I sat on it. Karl hitched himself onto the workbench.

I said, “When I was fifteen, I wasn’t regarded as clever, and I wasn’t much of a reader. But one day I came across a book I started reading just because I had nothing else to do. I don’t know why I picked it rather than another. Anyway, I started reading. It didn’t hook me straightaway. It didn’t have the kind of catchy opening that grabs your attention. I was well into it before this strange thing happened that had never happened before. I just couldn’t stop reading it. And as I read the last page, all I wanted to do was write a book like that. I wanted it so much, I started straightaway. I still have the story. It’s about eighty pages long. Eighty-one to be exact. It took me six months. When I read it now, it makes me laugh, because it’s so obviously a bad copy of the book I’d read. But it got me going. It showed me what I wanted to do with my life. It showed me what
I am
.”

That put a silence on both of us.

When the emotion had drained away, Karl said, “What you’re saying is something like that has happened to me.”

I kept my eyes, as I felt his eyes were, too, on his sculptings.

And replied, “Hasn’t it?”

How hard it is to admit to someone else who has recognised it before you have yourself, that something has happened to you, which will reshape your life. Perhaps because you resent that they have noticed before you have. Perhaps because such an admission reveals your deepest and most vulnerable self. The self we all fear someone will injure or hurt or destroy.

And it’s hard because you know at that very moment of recognition that your future is decided. That whatever happens, come what may and whether you want to or not, you will have to live your life in a way determined by your discovery of what you are and what you are meant to be.

At one and the same moment, you suddenly feel free—free to be who you are—and at the same time restricted, bound, unfree, because you can be nothing else. In gaining your freedom to be you have lost your choice of being anything else.

I sensed Karl was struggling with that very dilemma before he answered in a voice forced through a jammed mouth.

“Yes.”

After such moments of a truth declared and accepted, discomfort sets in.

What should you do? Break the ice by telling a joke? Change the subject?

I thought of suggesting we leave it there for today, but that felt like dodging the questions still hanging in the air.

All I could do was take the advice I’d given Fiorella: follow my nose.

“I’m guessing these are models,” I said. “D’you plan to make them the right size?”

“One or two,” Karl said. “The ones I’m pleased with.”

“Which are?”

He pointed to two. One very like William Tucker’s, the other a more complicated arrangement of entangled and almost knotted wires.

“And making them out of pipes?”

“The Tucker one. But the other one I’d like to make out of stainless steel rods.”

“And then what will you do with them?”

“I don’t know. Haven’t thought that far.”

“You made them on the spur of the moment because you couldn’t resist it?”

“I suppose … Yes.”

Pause for thought.

“Maybe,” I said, “the thing to do is make those two the size you want and then decide what to do with them?”

“Maybe … But is it worth it?”

So that was the question he really wanted me to answer?

I said, “Do you mean, is it worth you making them, or are they worth making?”

“Both, I guess,” he said.

Pause.

“Well … in my opinion, yes. It’s worth you making them and they are worth making.”

“Why?”

Oh, please, I thought, just do it! Don’t question so much!

And I was beginning to feel down. I’d forgotten the aftereffects of the ’flu during our happy meal and finding out what Karl was doing. But now started to feel queasy again.

I don’t know how I’d have answered his question because before I could try there was a knock on the door.

This injected a supercharge of energy into Karl, who shot off the workbench and grabbed the door handle, while shouting, “Don’t come in! Go away! Don’t come in.”

And Mrs. Williamson’s shocked voice replying, “I won’t. I’ve brought you some coffee.”

“All right!” Karl shouted. “Put it down. I’ll get it. Don’t come in. Go away.”

And Mrs. Williamson saying, “Yes, all right. I’m going. I’m going.”

Karl waited, then opened the door enough to check his mother had gone.

Now, I’m slow to anger, which is just as well, because I’m unreasonable when roused.

And Karl’s behaviour roused me.

“Just a minute!” I said, or rather heard myself explode, for anger splits you in two, or at least it does me. The angry me being angry and the normal me observing the angry me being angry.

I was beside Karl and pushing him away before I could stop myself.

“What!” Karl said.

But I paid no heed, opened the door and called after Mrs. Williamson’s retreating figure, “Wait, Mrs. Williamson. Please wait!”

But she went on into the house.

I closed the door and confronted Karl and in a stern voice new to him and rare to myself said, “That was disgraceful!”

“What!”

“You should be ashamed of yourself!”

And then in a voice that matched mine, he said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“That was your mother, for God’s sake.”

“I don’t want her in here.”

“You don’t talk to your mother like that. Never! Not for any reason.”

We were enraged bull to bull, close up.

“It’s got nothing to do with you,” he said.

“I won’t stand by and say nothing when you behave so badly to your mother.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Have I ever interfered in your
business
before?”

No reply.

“Have I ever criticised you in any way?”

No reply.

“Have I ever told you you were wrong?”

No reply.

Karl turned away and leaned against the workbench.

I waited. Nothing.

“Have the decency to give me a reply.”

“All right!” Karl said with a wave of the hand that would have pushed me away had I been in range. “All right. No.”

I made myself calm down before saying, “Then give me some credit for that and listen to me now.”

“I don’t want her in here, that’s all.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want her seeing what I’m doing.”

“Why not? You invited me to see it.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“I thought you’d understand.”

“And your mother wouldn’t?”

“Yes! No! No, she wouldn’t.”

The anger drained from both of us. I sat down and we declined into silence.

Now I was upset with myself for losing my temper.

They say you should never apologise and never explain, because it shows a sign of weakness.

Baloney.

That’s the cause of vendettas, endless cycles of revenge and the interminable abomination of war.

And I know something else. It’s the older, and the stranger, who must break the circle.

I forced myself to say, “I’m sorry. I lost my temper.”

Karl said nothing. Nor did I want him to. Mutual
apologies don’t heal the wound, they only put a bandage over it.

I said, “Do something for me.”

Karl remained silent.

“Let me ask your mother to join us. Show her what you’ve done and see what she says.”

No reply.

“Put yourself in her shoes, Karl. You’re her only son. Her only child. She adores you. Quite literally, she’d die for you. I think you know that. She’s gone through a hell of worry about you these last few months. Now she sees her beloved son full of life again. And it’s obvious whatever has happened has something to do with what you’re doing in here. Don’t you think you ought to show her? Even if she doesn’t understand. Isn’t it the right thing to do?”

Still he remained silent, but took a deep, deep breath and let it out as if he were expelling poisoned air.

A few moments passed again before I said, “Shall I go and get her?”

He nodded.

When she was upset, Jane used to talk about “crying inside.” I thought of that when I found Mrs. Williamson sitting at the kitchen table, no longer chirpy, no longer the happy woman she had been during our meal, and everything about her betraying how hurt she felt. There were no tears in her eyes, but I was sure she was crying inside.

I sat down at the table, opposite her.

I said, “Karl wants you to join us in the shed.”

She said, head down and with an effort, “I hoped we were through with this.”

I said, “I think you are.”

She let out a heavy sigh.

“Then why …”

“I think this is different.”

She looked at me, a hard angry look I hadn’t seen from her before.

“Different?” she said. “What’s different about it?”

“He was rude. I know. But I don’t think he meant to be. I don’t think he meant to hurt you. Or reject you.”

“That’s certainly how it felt.”

“Yes.”

“Well, then?”

“I can only tell you how it seems to me. I’m not saying I’m right.”

She didn’t respond. For the first time I wondered whether Karl’s reticence, whether his refusal to speak when he was upset or facing a difficulty in himself, came from his mother, and not, as I’d assumed, from his father. Maybe he wasn’t so much his father’s child as his mother’s boy?

I said, “This didn’t happen because he’s depressed again. It happened because he isn’t ready to show you what he’s doing in the shed.”

“He showed you. Why not me? Do I mean so much less to him?”

“No! Just the opposite.”

She gave a huffy laugh.

“He showed it to me because I don’t mean to him what you do.”

“Well, I’m glad you understand it, because I certainly don’t.”

I waited a moment to let the sparks die.

Then I said, “When I was starting out as a writer, I hated showing anyone what I was writing before I’d finished it. I feared that if they said it was no good, I’d feel so crushed I’d give up. Especially if it was my parents who didn’t like it. Even when I finished it I didn’t want my parents to read it. Not till someone else had said it was OK. Someone whose opinion my parents respected.”

Mrs. Williamson gave me a searching look.

“Is he writing something then?”

“No.”

“So what is he doing?”

“I think that’s for him to tell you.”

“And he’s sent you to fetch me?”

“Yes.”

“Why couldn’t he come for me himself?”

“It’s too hard for him.”

“He didn’t have any difficulty telling me to go away.”

By now I knew she was being deliberately stubborn. Of course she understood! She was an intelligent woman. She knew her son. She’d been through worse than this with him. I was pretty sure this wasn’t the first time he’d been
rude to her. I knew what it was like when you were in the pit of depression. You want the person closest to you to attend, but at the same time you want to be left alone. An emotional double bind. And you are hurting so much you can’t help passing the hurt on.

Mrs. Williamson knew this. But Karl seemed to be out of the pit now, and she had been shocked by his behaviour because she feared it meant he’d reverted. What’s more, there was hurt from those bad months locked up inside her, where she’d kept it while Karl was ill so as not to make things worse, and to show him that nothing he did, however bad, would turn her away from him or cause her to treat him as badly as he had treated her. She thought this was over, but his sudden rudeness had churned the pent-up bile, which she couldn’t help letting out a bit on me.

As for Karl, now that he was his best self again and something was happening to him he only half understood—something bright and new he didn’t yet know how to deal with—he was protecting himself in case this bright new thing was taken from him before he’d grasped it.

And me? I was an outsider, sympathetic to both mother and son. And quite often an outsider can see what’s going on between two people when the two people are blind to it.

There was something else I thought I understood, but didn’t mention to Mrs. Williamson.

Karl is an only son and I’m an only son. I’ve known others during my life. And have observed that they—we—tend to behave in one of two ways with our mothers. Some
are deeply attached, tell their mother everything, and do nothing without discussing it with her. Others keep their distance, are reserved, tell their mothers as little as possible about what they are doing. I was of the second kind. And by now I knew Karl was too.

But unless you’re intent on deliberately hurting your mother, which I never was and I believed Karl wasn’t, there are some important things in your life you have to reveal. And just as I had to tell my mother I was trying to be a writer because of how hurt I knew she would be if I didn’t, so I knew it was necessary for Karl to explain to his mother what he was trying to do that made him closet himself secretively in the shed. I was sure he had to do this because I had left revealing what I was up to till it was too late. The breach this caused between myself and my mother was never repaired. I didn’t want that to happen to Karl.