Harry Kratchnikov’s face fills the mask:
Did he cry for help as he lay there?
Then after a pause, “Are you there?”
It was only luck that I had the radio on at 9pm, BBC Radio 4 (21/03/2014), began listening to Four Trees Down from Ponte Sisto (NB click on this link to ‘listen again‘), and found myself instantly transported back by the poetry of Sharon Charde and the music/radio making of Gregory Whitehead. Back where? Back to the place where my older brother lies dying in the street in 1973. He had been hit by a car. Or a van, I think it was.
“There is no end to this”, reads a line in one of the poems of Sharon Charde in the FOUR TREES play/poems about the death of her son Geoffrey in 1987. Or were they her words? Or mine? Whatever, they are among those that I wrote down as I was listening bent over close to the radio in my kitchen three weeks ago. Geoffrey was a student in Rome in 1987. He fell of a bridge. He was 20 at the time. Ferrier (my brother) was 28 when he died in 1973. He died in Callandar, Scotland. He was on foot, went to cross the street, and stepped in front of a fast moving car (or van). I was 21 at the time, and I was far away out in the pampas of Santa Caterina, Brazil.
These are some of the few things I know for sure. The rest I don’t know. By the time I got back from Brazil three months later, it was long after both the inquest on my brother’s death and his cremation.
Accident or suicide? The question also comes up for Sharon Charde in the FOUR TREES play/poems and she comes down firmly on the accident side. And for Ferrier? The answer to that question is among those many things I don’t know. He had been depressed for a few weeks. That is what I was told back then when I got back, although not exactly in those words. But back then it wasn’t easy to ask or talk more about mental illness or suicide. Or actually permitted.
So maybe I am suicide survivor, and I am glad I find that I can say that now.
Then there is the bit which I recall in the FOUR TREES play/poems when Sharon Charde describes the moment now all these years later, when she meets new people, and they ask: ‘What happened to your son Geoffrey?’. There is the moment her mind expands as she pauses unsure which way to go with her answer. Like I do too, whenever I am asked what happened to Ferrier, and I also watch the moment expand and think about the uncomfortable conversation which will likely continue whichever of the forking paths I choose to follow in my answer.
“There’s no end to this”. That could have been the very moment I write that line down, and I am grateful because there is the chance to tell my story and his too.