Chapter 5: Deathbed
Somewhere around the missing north coast of Alaska is a sea monster.
Before you dive in, you can catch up on other chapters here:
CHAPTER 1, CHAPTER 2, CHAPTER 3, CHAPTER 4 and you can read my ABOUT if you want more background.
RECAP: I was called away from my London squat, back home to The Florin, in Norfolk. When I arrived, my mother Jocasta was hosting a pagan ritual for her adoring (paying) pilgrims, despite the fact that my father was upstairs dying.
December 21st 1992
He died. On the winter solstice. The only person who ever loved me, and probably ever will, is gone. Charlie Crowe: dad, raconteur, anthropologist, drunk. Death is so fucking rude. I wish I could say it was the quietly emotional moment Jocasta had been stage managing for days, but I can’t. We did not reach out and touch one another’s shoulders in loving togetherness, swallowing our tears in warm embraces, blowing out candles with gratitude. It just didn’t go that way.
For days, the small, panelled room, where my dad lay dying, was an icebox. Jocasta had opened the leaded light windows, on all three sides, for his spirit to drift out. Through the north window, the distant flat sea could be seen, through the east, the grey marsh, and the west, the whispering village. I did not wonder which way he would go when the time came. If Charlie Crowe had any say in his eternity, he’d head west, to the pine-lined Case Is Altered pub, where ‘The Melody Machine’ would play Mr Tambourine Man, and his pint glass would never be dry.
According to Netty, Jocasta had spent most of the two days before my return, on the four-poster next to Charlie, naked. In the wintry air, she lay atop the covers, like a Klimt nude - nipples and goosebumps pert, singing to the misty tendrils of smouldering cedar, performing her grief. Poor Doctor Cooper stood at the end of the bed, not knowing where to look.
Outside the door, Roose and Troy, my dad’s Russian Wolfhounds, waited for their master. That’s how I knew which room he was in. I came out of my room and snuck past, clicking the dogs away from death’s door but the minute they saw me they launched, hitting me with such adoring force that I was knocked over backwards and the three of us surfed metres on a Persian rug over the polished floorboards.
I quickly pushed away their panting tongues and struggled to stand, shushing, and rushing us down the hall to the galleried drawing room. In two years, it had not changed. As the dogs assumed their places in front of the grand fireplace, like a pair of sphynxes keeping watch, I inhaled the hug of furniture wax and wood smoke. It went some way to masking the smell of my now four-day-old jeans and shirt, which still held the stale smoke and body odour of London.
As I stood at my father’s desk I noticed the indent in his green leather seat, as if he had just risen to make a whisky and would be back at any moment. The marble lamp lit a spread of curling manuscripts, held at the edges by coloured glass paperweights. I twisted to look but realised there was no point in trying to read them, I don’t speak rune or hieroglyph.
Flanking the desk, two enormous globes, set in mahogany and brass, show the terrestrial and the celestial maps (as far as either were known in the 18th century). Like so many of the antiques at The Florin, these giant globes just appeared one day, and have stood there ever since. Where their charted lines of certainty stop, imagination starts. For example, somewhere around the missing north coast of Alaska is a sea monster. I laid my fingers on the Earth to find it but noticed grubby fingernails and curled them back into my hand.
Stretching the entire ten metres of this upper room, from floor to very high ceiling, are glass-fronted oak cabinets, such as you’d find in a museum. Here lives my dad’s collection of occult, pagan and religious artefacts and relics. I can’t say I know every item. He adds to it often, but my favourite times at The Florin have been in this room, sitting by that fire, listening to my dad tell me the story of his latest acquisition.
A Haitian voodoo doll.
The famous Cottingley Fairy photographs.
Aleister Crowley’s Magick In Theory And Practice.
A skull cap made from a human skull and carved with a dancing skeleton.
An Inuit Tupilak, carved bone figure to ward off evil spirits.
A black onyx pagan cross.
I went over to that other cabinet he so loves, the drinks cabinet, and poured a tumbler of water from the decanter. I knocked it back like whisky and reloaded. Next to a horn-handled corkscrew I noticed a small gathering of empty glass vials. I carefully and slowly put my glass down, avoiding making any contact with the tiny bottles.
Suddenly, Roose and Troy stood at the sound of a door latch lifting. I got back to the fireplace just as Jocasta entered. She was wrapping a silk gown around her nakedness when she noticed me and stopped.
“What’s wrong with you?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“Answer me.”
“What? I am answering you. I don’t know what you want me to say.”
She stamped her bare foot and said, “Why are you doing this to me?”
“Doing what?”
I was searching for a solution without knowing the problem and as always landing on me. She marched at me, closing the gap between us quickly, speaking through her gritted teeth.
“Doctor Cooper is in there now with your father, who is dying. He is dying.”
Spit landed on her chin, and I tried not to look down at it as she fired more venom at me.
“He has only hours left Cassiopeia and here you are, lounging about by the fire, drinking, looking like a tramp. Why do you do it?”
I wanted to say I was not drinking, I was waiting, that I had hurried the dogs away from the door. But I backed away from her, towards the fire. I knew better than to give Jocasta the argument she wanted but I was too tired and hollowed out to control my emotions, which were hanging out messily on my face.
I said, “When can I go in and see him?”
“Do you mean to tell me you have not been in there yet?”
“What? No. I have been out here, waiting.”
“You should have been here weeks ago. But instead, you have been living your life, drinking like there’s no tomorrow, prioritising your happiness, as always.”
“Well, someone has to.”
The words were out, and I winced even before the slap landed.
“Vile!” she shouted.
I held my burning cheek and tried to stop the room spinning by focusing on my breath.
“I didn’t know I was supposed to … allowed … to be in there.”
She tutted and walked to the top of the staircase and looked back at me.
“I’m sorry Cassiopeia but this is a very difficult time. Go in and see your father. But wash first. You smell worse than he does.”
I held my tears until Jocasta left, a mechanism I learnt from a young age. When I let them out, I was small again and I ached to run to my dad and have him scoop me up.
I hugged the dogs around their warm soft necks, both sitting still and solid so that their two skulls, either side of mine, felt like safe refuge.
But then Roose struggled backwards to free himself from me and as I let him go, I saw one of the glass paperweights shift and then lift. It drifted a foot over the manuscripts and hung there. I sniffed and released Troy. Together they skulked past the desk, back out to the hall.
I wiped my eyes and let the paperweight rest.