The Ends of Our Tethers (6 page)

F
OR GOD'S SAKE DON'T BELIEVE what my wife says: I am still one of the luckiest men who ever walked the earth. Yes of course we've had our troubles, like hundreds and thousands of others recently, and for a while it seemed impossible to carry on. I'd have paid a man to shoot me if I'd known where to find one. But I survived. I recovered. The sun is shining, the birds are singing again, though I perfectly understand why the wife has not recovered and maybe never will.

It was my father who had the really hard life, years and years of it: a joiner's son, self-educated, who after many slips and slides turned a small house-renovation
firm into a major building contractor. Before he expired he was a city councillor and playing golf with Reo Stakis. He sent me to the best fee-paying school in Glasgow because “it's there you'll make friends who'll be useful to you in later life”, and yes, some were. Not being university material I went straight into the family business and learned it from the bottom up, working as a brickie's labourer for a couple of months on one job, a joiner's labourer on another, a plumber's mate elsewhere and so on till I had first-hand experience of all those jobs and painting, plastering, slating, wiring, the lot. Of course the tradesmen I served knew I was the boss's son. He told them so beforehand and warned them to be as tough on me as on other apprentices. Some were, some weren't. Either way I enjoyed gaining manual skills while using my muscles. I even worked as a navvy for six weeks, and (under supervision, of course) drove a bulldozer and managed a crane. Meanwhile, at night school, I learned the business from a manager's standpoint, while calling in at the firm's head office between whiles to see how it worked at the costing and contracting
level. So when the dad collapsed of a stroke I continued the business as if nothing had happened. My mother had died long before so I inherited a fine house in Newton Mearns, a holiday home on Arran and another in the south of Spain.

Is it surprising that I was able to marry the first good-looking woman I fell in love with? She was more than just a pretty face. In business matters she resembled my father more than me. I was less brisk than he in sacking workers when we lacked orders to fully employ them.

“You can't afford to keep men idle,” said the wife. I told her that I didn't – that I found them useful though not highly profitable jobs until fresh orders arrived.

“Maybe you can afford to do that but your wife and children can't!” she said, using the plural form though still pregnant with our first child, “You're running a modern business, not a charity, and seem anxious to run it into the ground.”

I quietened her by signing the family property and private finances over to her on condition that she left the firm to me. It prospered! We sent our boys to the same boarding school as the Prince of Wales.
Being smarter than their old dad they went from there to Glasgow University, then Oxford, then one took to law and the other to accountancy, though both eventually got good posts in a banking house with headquarters in Hong Kong and an office in New York. Alas.

By that time I had sold the main business, being past retiral age. I kept on the small house-renovation firm my dad started with, more as a hobby than anything else. I had always most enjoyed the constructive side of business. Meanwhile the wife, on the advice of her own accountant (not mine) invested our money in a highly respectable dot com pension scheme which she said “will make every penny we own work harder and earn more”.

I didn't know what that meant but it sounded convincing until the scheme went bust. Highly respected traders had gambled unsuccessfully with the scheme's assets while spending most of the profits on bonuses for themselves. Clever men, these traders.

But when the fuss died down and the
Newton Mearns house and holiday homes were sold, my wee remaining firm kept us from destitution. We shifted to a three-room flat in the Cowcaddens and without asking help from the boys had everything a respectable couple needs. If some of my wife's friends stopped visiting her she was better without them, I say. And our two highly successful sons in their big New York office were a great consolation to her until, you know, the eleventh of September, you know, and those explosions that look like going on forever.

Years ago I enjoyed a television comedy called
It Ain't Half Hot, Mum
about a British army unit stationed in Burma or Malaya. There was a bearded sage who spouted proverbs representing the Wisdom of the East. One was, “When a man loses all his wealth after contracting leprosy and hearing that his wife has absconded with his best friend, that is no reason for the ceiling not falling on his head.” Or as we say in the West, it never rains but it pours. My wife never abandoned me though I sometimes wished she had better company. My efforts to console us drove her wild.

“You must admit,” I said, “that compared with most folk in other countries, and many in our own, our lives have been unusually fortunate and comfortable. We must take the rough with the smooth.”

“All right for you!” she cried. “What about the boys?”

“After nearly thirty-five very enviable years their only misfortune has been a sudden, unexpected death, and their last few minutes were so astonishing that I doubt if they had time to feel pain.”

“They didn't deserve to die!” she shouted. “Would you be happier if they did?” I asked. “The only evil we should regret is the evil we do. As far as I am aware our sons' firm was not profiting by warfare or industrial pollution. Be glad they died with clean hands.”

She stared and said, “Are you telling me to be glad they're dead?”

There is nothing more stupid than trying to talk folk out of natural, heartfelt misery. I had talked to her like some kind of Holy Willie, so I apologised.

After a bath one morning I was towelling myself dry in one of these low beams of sunlight that illuminate tiny
specks floating in the air. It let me see something like smoke drifting up from the leg I was rubbing and a shower of tiny white flakes drifting down to the carpet. Like most folk nowadays I know most dust around a house comes from the topmost layer of human skin cells crumbling off while the lower cells replace it. Looking closer I saw the lower layer of skin was more obvious than usual. It reminded me of the sky at night with a few big red far-apart spots like planets, and clusters of smaller ones between them like constellations, and areas of cloudy pinkness which, peered at closely, were made by hundreds of tiny little spots like stars in the Milky Way. Then came itching and scratching. The first is widely supposed to cause the second but in my experience this is only partly true. The first itch was so tiny that a quick stab with a needle could have stopped it had I known the exact point to stab. But this was impossible, so I scratched the general area which itched even more the harder, the more widely and wildly I scratched. This crescendo of itching and scratching grew so fiercely ecstatic that I only stopped when my nails had torn bloody gashes in
that leg and the delight changed to pain.

Since then I have often enjoyed that ecstasy, suffered that pain. The disease spread to other limbs, torso, neck and head. I could no longer supervise work in houses under renovation. Dust from cement, plasterboard and timber maddened my itches to a frenzy that only the hottest of baths subdued. Under the pain of scalding water the skin also felt many wee points of delight, as if each itch was being exactly, simultaneously scratched and satisfied. I left the bath with my skin a patchwork of pink and red sores that I patted dry, ointmented with Vaseline, covered with clean pyjamas, every itch now replaced by dull pain. So I went to bed and slept sound by quickly drinking half a litre of neat spirits. Perhaps modern pills would have knocked me out more cheaply but I felt safer with a drug folk have tested on themselves for centuries.

So the main side effects of the disease are:

1. exile from the constructive part of my business,
   
2. exile from my wife's bed,
   
3. her endless work to clean up my stained sheets and underclothes,
   
4. greatly increased dependence on alchohol,
   
5. a search for cures.
   

After a thing called A Patch Test my doctor explained that the disease was due to an inherited defect in the immune system defending my skin. A mainly serene and prosperous life had not strained it but now, weakened by recent emotional shocks, I was allergic to forms of dust that nobody could avoid. The origin of the allergy, being genetic, was incurable, but medication should reduce the symptoms. He prescribed a steroid cream to combat eruptions, an emollient to reduce the flaking, anti-histamine pills to ease the itching and (to be used instead of soap) a bath oil that also counteracted infection.

These helped for a while. The rashes healed in places and itched far less until the steroid cream ran out. My doctor was unwilling to prescribe more because continuous use made the skin dangerously thin. He prescribed a less potent antibiotic cream and arranged a consultation with a
skin specialist who, because of a long waiting list, would see me five months later. My wife wanted me to jump that queue by paying for a private consultation. I refused for two reasons. 

But while waiting for the appointment I noticed near my home an alternative medicine clinic, though not the sort using astrology and occultism. The consultation fee was not huge so I tried it. An ordinary looking youth weighed me, examined my fingernails, tongue and inner eyelids, asked questions about my eating and drinking habits, then delivered a small lecture.

Everyone must live by consuming more solids and fluids than their body needs, so our digestions, kidneys and liver help to excrete what cannot nourish us. With age these weaken and work less
efficiently, especially in middle-class people like me who eat and drink too much. The excess not expelled through my bowels and bladder is retained in fat or expelled through the skin, damaging it on the way. I should therefore stop drinking alcohol, coffee and tea, apart from one cup of the last each day. I should daily drink at least three pints of pure water, should stop eating meat and poultry, but consume as much fish as I liked if it was not fried. I should also cut out dairy produce – eggs, milk, butter, cheese – also sugar and salt, but eat more fruit and vegetables, preferably organically grown. Two months of this diet would heal my skin if I also took more exercise: a brisk half-hour daily walk would be sufficient. When cured I could experiment by trying some things I had eliminated – wine with my meals or ham-and-egg breakfasts. If the disease returned I would then know what to blame. He also prophesied that any orthodox skin specialist I saw would prescribe a stronger kind of steroid ointment than prescribed by my general practitioner.

I left that clinic certain I had been told the truth and determined not to inform
my wife. She would have adopted that diet for me with enthusiasm, especially the no-alcohol part; I would then have started tippling in secret and been continually found out and denounced. But I told her when I visited a Chinese clinic that sold me brown paper bags containing mixtures of dry twigs, fronds and fungus with instructions to boil the contents of one bag in water – simmer for half an hour – strain off the liquid – drink a cupful three times a day for two days then repeat the process with the next bag. My wife refused to do that so I did it myself, but kept forgetting to set the cooker alarm so twice ruined pans by boiling the vegetation into adhesive cinders. I realised that orthodox British medicine was the most convenient, even when the skin specialist prescribed what the nature healer had foretold. Luckily by then I had turned my bad skin into a hobby.

Explanation at this point becomes embarrassing because it requires a four letter word I hate. Chamber's Dictionary gives it several meanings but the relevant one is this:

Scab
noun:
a
crust formed over a sore
or wound
.

I take a gentle pleasure in carefully removing most such crusts and have my own names for the main varieties:

Cakes and Crumbs
. Black or brown lumps that form on the deepest scratches. Dried blood is a main ingredient. I try not to touch these because, picked off too soon, they leave a hole in which fresh blood wells up before clotting.

Hats
. A cake or crumb may grow a crisp white border, as much part of it as a brim is part of a hat. This brim overlaps the surrounding skin in such a way that the tip of a fingernail, slid beneath, easily lifts off the whole hat uncovering a moist but shallow and unbleeding wound. A few hours later other kinds of crust form over that. They also form over larger sores where topskin has crumbled off, flaked off or been scratched off.