Burn, Return

I recently attended a talk by a Buddhist monk named Chamtrul who, rather than change my perspective, informed me my entire perspective was an illusion. A very light-hearted affair, of course. ‘Picture the house and that is a mistake,’ he said. ‘Objects are only in existence through being interdependent. A house is window, ceiling, floor and brick. This can then be thought of further as sand, even further as atoms, before which we reach energy and then emptiness, which is where this all first began.’

I pictured my childhood house as he said this, dismantling it brick by brick. I rid it of every detail my mind could conjure and created a pyre in the back garden. Everything was piled up: the spice jar caked in dust, frames containing monochrome photographs, the pillow my father had made from a jumper I had been heartbroken over outgrowing. The electric guitar he strummed endlessly in the early morning hours I placed almost ritualistically in the garden. It’s funny how fear can be treated with reverence.

All of these things I piled high and set alight with my mind. A powerful kingdom from hurtful years reduced to the blaze as quickly as silk to a sparked match. Embers and wood and ash, so much ash, is all that remained as the fire yawned and passed. I could still see the remains of obstinate table leg intertwined with the smoking metal of the spice jar. These objects were the interdependent items of my home now. What could this be broken down into? What kind of energy lies beneath?

We all have a spectre which haunts us, assuming different forms but striking a similar sense of fear within us. Mine was this house which, no matter how much I burnt it down in my mind, loomed over me like the cartoon character constantly dogged by a cloud. This cloud hovered, taunting me with the knowledge I would one day have to return. As I write this, five years have passed since I ran and never returned. Now, my father lies in a hospital bed, a face half fallen, a body half numb. Now the house beckons and the cloud begins to pour.

I travel back by train with my mother, watching the landscape zoom past and adjust into familiar streaks of industrial grey. The following taxi ride reveals little change to my hometown. Long abandoned buildings remain empty, others now emblazoned with supermarket names or knocked down altogether. We speed past beggars with upturns hats nestled in doorways and groups of women in tight dresses walking drunkenly on stilted shoes. The taxi traverses the grey streets against a grey sky until we reach the hospital. I sit outside and leave my mother to go; I have done my role, I tell myself. I was there to support, to be a companion for the journey I knew would have been so hard for her alone. Family members I haven’t seen in years soon squeeze outside the doors in their gaggle and circle me like gulls. They frag me inside with teary faces through labyrinthine halls to the ward. Awkward catch up turns to whoops as we reach the hospital bed, announcing my arrival like this is all some sort of happy family reunion. I have always dreaded this moment, knowing the inevitability but unsure what situation it would assume.

I think of the last time I saw him. I bundled onto a train laden with bags to a university I had chosen for being so far awa. Riddled with a mixture of guilt and excitement, I threw him a reassuring smile and a garbled promise to be back by Christmas. He nodded with a grimace and stood on the other side of the window until he decided against watching the train depart. His figure faded into a ghostly shadow before dipping out of sight altogether as the train slipped away.

Now my father’s crumbled body lies against crumbled sheets. His long hair is no longer jet black and matches his grey stubble. Physical strength was the one thing he prided himself on. His rage had finally overridden his body one evening, set his heart into overdrive and collapsed him headfirst into the fireplace. His phone within reach, he mustered strength to call everyone on his address book but nobody had wanted to pick up. It wouldn’t be until morning until he was found, weak and hollowed out from all the bitter anger he had carried for so long.

My mother is standing, curved over the end of the bed, her face folded around sad eyes. This is a sadness her eyes always subtly carry but right now is so pronounced, I consider making a stupid joke that at least now he couldn’t murder music with that electric guitar but all words remain in my mouth and turn to ash. I look at his motionless body, his lips puckered without dentures, chin collapsed into throat. Relatives urge him to see who has arrived and, suddenly, a wave rolls through his body and flops his head up to lock eyes with mine. It is as though the rage has rendered his bones bendy. This moment lingers just a second or two before he collapses back into the bed but lasts long enough for me to want the ground to swallow me whole. My body catapults into flight mode and I run back through the labyrinthine halls, holding onto walls as sobs rack my ribs. Once outside, my knees buckle to the ground and I look up to the hospital, which was not a hospital but walls and floors, seats and beds and beeping machines and a weak man I was simply not ready to face.

I decide to make a compromise. I will not face him but I will face the house the following day. I go with my mother, who I haven’t seen since leaving the hospital. The sadness is still there, always there, but a certain serenity has replaced the furrowed brow of yesterday. We are sharing the same thought: I am finally returning to the place from where I ran. We are in this together, I know. Our hands clasp together as our legs take us up the familiar street in the bitter cold. As we approach the house the same thought flashes through my mind I had when coming home from school. Please don’t let his car be in the driveway. Old habits die hard.

There it stands, the home with peeling paint and aching with so many stories to tell. Chimes are strewn anywhere they can hang in the remains of the garden, plastic flowers linked on a silver chain are plopped across half-dead plants. Here is the house of the madman, they seem to whisper. A breeze rustles dry leaves and sets off the chimes, creating a cacophony in my cranium that hurries me to get inside. My mother fumbles the gold key out of her picket and creaks the old door open. Greeting us at the door is a mannequin, the face covered with pilot goggles, the torso with painted tattoos. It prepares us for the clutter crammed into every room of the house. This does not surprise me; my father always loved eccentric possessions. Since his mental health deteriorated, he has become a magpie for the dimmest of objects. The family home now his alone, it seems he has found the antidote to loneliness in occupying every nook and cranny.

What does surprise me is how small each space is. Have you ever revisited somewhere you had been as a child and felt surprise at how much smaller, how less magical, the place was in returning? Memory can be a fallible thing and time an inflating devil to the imagination. At the mercy of fear, my mind had swelled the rooms in size. Now I wonder how I could have lived through everything in such confines. The living room is now his dark den, laden with an unwelcoming energy. A tile from the fireplace lies smashed from his fall, a nearby stool broken on one side where his head catapulted. Upstairs, the room he shared with my mother has become a shrine to all the things he couldn’t bring himself to toss away. All that remains of my things are my books, which he knew were his daughter’s most treasured possessions. Maybe the only possessions he had hoped she would someday come back for. I have no desire to flick their pages, moving a step to look into my old bedroom where my surprise turns to shock.

Unable to sleep in the marital bed, he had moved to mine. The furniture stood in the same place, my adolescent posters still adorned the walls and my childhood teddies lined the top of the wardrobe, the compartments of which were now stuffed with his clothes. He has lived like this for five years. I have since graduated, overcome home-grown anxieties, lost my virginity, felt the magic of friendship and the afflictions of love. So many trivial stories have made up my existence up until this point whilst he has been here, sleeping in his daughter’s old bed in a room left relegated to the past. I am not ready for forgive, but guilt seeps through my body and makes my knees buckle.

I pick up my feet and head downstairs to find my mother in the kitchen. She looks around at me, at the kitchen, at everything and nothing in particular, and briefly collapses into sobs. ‘There’s so many memories here. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to leave.’ Behind her I see the spice jar nestled in the same corner of the kitchen, caked in dust. She regains herself as we hug and I ready myself to leave. I recognise the split between us and realise the decision she will make, to stay and care for my father.

I leave the grey town, watching the industrial streaks turn to green pastures through the train window. I return to the same microcosm, interrupted but unchanged. My mother calls me a few days later to tell me she had taken my father from the hospital to visit the house. The winter season has proved stubborn, freezing and bursting the rickety old pipes. My mother tells me the water was flowing out of the front door frame like Niagara Falls. She tells me my father walked underneath it, wordless, letting it pour over him. I think of all of these things - the house, the pouring cloud, my father, that cascading water - and wonder how they interconnect, how they may be broken down. I refuse the desire, allowing them to co-exist without knowing what lies beneath.