Exit Wounds - ‘A fascinating wormhole between this world and the next’

23 Sep 2024

In Exit Wounds, Peter Godwin’s latest and longest memoir, he shares his personal experiences of love, loss, longing, exile and resilience, and the complexities of his life.

The Mountain Has Fallen

‘We thought so too,’ I say. ‘But the doctors now tell us she won’t recover, I’m so sorry – we just found out.’ ‘So, you mean she will never come home?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

Nema puts her face into her hands and starts to sob. Then, embarrassed by this display of emotion, she turns and runs out of the ward.

Through the window, heavy, contused clouds skirr past, shedding rain and sleet, but allowing gludders of sunlight to dapple through in between. We wake Her Grace to see it.

‘Oh, will you look at that,’ she croaks excitedly. ‘A monkey’s wedding, just like home.’ By which she means Zimbabwe, which is what we call it there when it’s somehow sunny and rainy simultaneously.

‘How are you feeling?’ I ask and, in my question, I hear the echo of tabloid reporters shoving mics in the faces of some recent victim. How do you think I’m feeling, numbnuts? I imagine her thinking. I’m dying here. But she indulges me.

‘Well, I’m inhabiting a fascinating wormhole between this world and the next. I can tell you the rules, and then you can write about it.’ Her voice is weak but clear, clearer than it’s been for a while. ‘I am about to leave this world.’

She seems unafraid at the prospect of death, excited even. ‘What’s the view like from the bridge of the good ship mortality?’ I ask.

She pauses.

‘From up here you cannot tell islands from clouds,’ she says finally.

Vera pads slowly over, back from the loo.

‘Allo, ’Elen,’ she says. ‘How we feelin’ this afternoon?’

‘Couldn’t be better,’ says Mum.

‘Same ’ere,’ says Vera, and they both laugh and clasp hands; the solidarity of a departing cohort preparing to die. The meal man has arrived with his trolley.

‘We gotta choice between cod an’ chicken,’ announces Vera. ‘What’s it gonna be?’

‘Hmm. I think I fancy a little fish this evening,’ says Mum. We plump her pillows and sit her up so that she can eat. It’s clear she’s not hungry but she doesn’t want to disappoint us, so she forks a morsel of cod into her mouth, followed by a tiny torn crust of bread.

‘Loaves and fishes,’ she says. ‘Just like the Last Supper.’ I exchange glances with Georgina. ‘Don’t get any ideas!’ she laughs.

But her laugh is hollow.

After dinner, there is a commotion across the ward, nurses scurrying, tidying. An instinctive movement like iron filings rising when a magnet passes overhead. Presently the cause becomes clear when a departmental matron, who is a Black Zimbabwean, arrives, surrounded by underlings clutching clipboards. Matron’s authority here is absolute; even the doctors defer to her.

She strides straight over to Mum’s bed. ‘Good evening, Dr Godwin,’ she says.

Georgina and I fall back. Matron looks briefly at Mum’s chart, then she sits at her bedside and takes Mum’s wrist in her hand. Looking at her watch, she measures Mum’s pulse. They both know that medically, this is utterly unnecessary – she just wants to give Mum some physical contact, to comfort her. She wants to say goodbye. The two of them chat in a low murmur for a while, then Matron squeezes her hand and departs, her clipboard retinue scurrying behind her.

Mum drifts off to sleep, and I sit there thinking of this extraordinary ellipsis. At how my mother helped train and tend to these nurses for so many years in Zimbabwe, where they would still like to be now. Yet here they all are, brought together again, thousands of miles away, on a different continent, in the European cold, like storks stranded in northern climes.

Godwin, Party of One

I remember now the place we first lived when we arrived in New York: Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. Back then it still had several working abattoirs. The whine of bandsaws filled the air and dumpsters of bones lined the streets. In summer they stank. This was long before it became a tourist hub. Before the High Line was reimagined as an elevated park. Back when it was still a desolate, disused rail track, cordoned off by coils of razor wire. Sometimes I would sneak up there with friends and walk along its diagonal route, two stories up, wending our way between empty warehouses that have since become art galleries.

The High Line had been a freight rail spur, the end of the route bringing livestock from the Midwest to be slaughtered. On smelling the cattle carnage in the abattoirs below, and realising they were riding to their own deaths, the steers emptied their bowels in terror. And in their dung were the seeds of the pink, Midwestern grasses from the home ranges they had grazed.

The invention of commercial refrigeration made it cheaper for the livestock to be slaughtered where they were raised and trucked into New York as deadstock. By the early 1980s there were no more cattle trains, and the last of the fear-dung grasses sprouted and grew on the High Line rails, undisturbed.

In the design of the High Line park as a post-industrial tourist attraction, the landscape architects made a feature of preserving the Midwestern flora they had found up there, calling it a ‘self-seeded landscape that grew wild for 25 years after the trains stopped running’, but they left out the bit that the soft pink grasses had grown in the dung of terrified cattle on their way to be killed.

Back then, before the tourism revamp, the Belgian cobblestones of Gansevoort Street were still the glistening preserve of a thriving trans sex trade, and there were few places to eat locally. My regular was Florent, a twenty-four-hour café, presided over by a gay Frenchman, Florent Morellet, who gave it his name and styled it not so much as a New York diner, but as a parody of a New York diner, an ironic, camp diner. It was long and narrow, with red leatherette bench seats, quilted aluminium walls and a pink ceiling from which hung a slowly revolving disco ball. Every Bastille Day, a bewigged, powdered and bustled Florent emceed a Marie Antoinette look-alike competition.

Florent was a benign version of Mos Eisley Cantina, the Star Wars bar, where anyone could ‘fit in’: abattoir butchers, sanitation workers from the garbage-barge dock, trans working girls, clientele from a cluster of nearby sex clubs – the Anvil, Manhole, the Mineshaft, Pandora’s Box, the Clit Club and the Nutcracker Suite – artists from the Westbeth building, ‘resting’ actors and me. No matter how late you arrived, you were always welcome, because Florent never closed. Until one day, of course, it did. Forever.

Florent had decorated one wall of his diner with framed artwork drawn by his father. They were intricate maps of cities, not actual ones, but wholly imaginary. Now, it strikes me that maybe this is what we should all do, draw our own maps of imaginary cities, city-states of mind that we can inhabit, that we can call home. And when we go there, they will grant us asylum. They are the ultimate sanctuary cities. They meet Robert Frost’s definition of home, the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. DM

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Exit Wounds: A story of love, loss and occasional wars is available at the DM 168 bookshop

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Africa

The Mountain Has Fallen

But her laugh is hollow.

Godwin, Party of One