The Inward Empire by Christian Donlan

Author:Christian Donlan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

Amazingly, Brian wants to carry her. More amazingly, she is up for this, and so I push the stroller through the cold streets while she sits merrily in his arms, visibly thrilled to be up high and a part of everything that’s happening. And what’s happening is Brian rebuilding Gene for us both, or trying to, out of anecdotes, out of tiny pieces of memory. Right now, he is explaining the classic elements of a Gene story: you must have an objective, and a social fear, and the social fear must scupper the objective.

“That’s why he never got the white suit,” Brian explains. “It’s a pincer movement, like Stalingrad. There’s the fear that his mum will get the wrong suit, and then the fear that he’ll have to wear the wrong suit regardless so as not to disappoint his mum.”

Not disappoint, I think. Upset. Gene never felt like he had to be anything to anyone else, but he was terrified of causing pain.

Brian searches for another story to confirm his narratology, and then we get lost sifting through details. He loved cricket, Gene—loved Shane Warne, the bowler. He loved gambling: the first time I saw him after university he was coming out of a bookies with eight hundred quid he’d just won on an accumulator. He always had a flutter going on something or other. He was endlessly recalculating the date at which he would break even. Last I heard it was going to be 2021.

He was political—political in a way that we weren’t, old enough to have been directly engaged with poll-tax riots and Thatcher the Milk Snatcher. Even so, he was gentle, and people were gentle around him. He sagged into chairs and then sat forward when people spoke to him. He was quiet and alert.

I try to prod us back toward the thing I am suddenly far too interested in. Gene’s illness, did it weigh on him? Did he ever talk about it with us? I mention a rare trip to Gene’s house to watch a film, in which we briefly ducked into the kitchen for tea and I saw a landslide of blister packs on a sideboard. So many pills, different sizes and colors, spilling over the counter. And Gene just brushing past them, saying: “Do you take two sugars?”

Brian steers me out of the kitchen. He can’t remember anything about pills. Instead, he goes into the stuff I didn’t know about, coming from the days after I left town for Brighton. He tells me about the time they used to spend playing pitch and putt together, about an unlikely Clint Eastwood impression. The time Gene bought Brian a T-shirt—I Fought the Law and I Won—after a tribunal at the cinema. This Gene sounds like a riot, but is it my Gene? I remember someone watchful and sometimes silent, perhaps separated from the rest of us by perspective. A grown-up around us children.

Maybe Brian remembers this Gene too. “Do you remember the thing about the Age of Reason?” Brian asks, buckling Leon up and gesturing that he’d like to push her for a bit.

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