Nick Blackburn - The Reactor: A Book about Grief and Repair

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v

I dont know what to tell you about. Death or love?

Or is it the same thing. What should I tell you about?

Lyudmilla Ignatenko, Chernobyl Prayer

Contents

You have died but its fine, Dad. Its fine, its fine, like Helen Mirren coming down the stairs in Red does she shoot the security guard after? Its fine, Im sure Im allowed. You were getting tired of the whole thing anyway. I saw you were tired: you fell asleep in your dinner.

Im trying not to make a big fuss over it.

Soon after it happens the distances are wrong: things that were joined together come apart. Things that should not be connected have become fused. It takes time to sort out. But somethings also wrong with time.

Denise Riley on the death of her son, time is: without its flow.

Youve been dead for two weeks but when its dark and the bathroom door is half-closed and I need a piss, I still open the door politely. As if I might be disturbing you.

You died while I was presenting in a seminar on narcissism, like the punchline of a bad joke. My mother called saying I should come, that you were going. And the presentation was already terrible with me just reading and reading Andrea Long Chu against Andr Green about desire, about the idea a trans woman might actually want things. It was quite the exit: straight out of the room with my phone in my hand.

You were dead before I picked up the message.

I am thinking of a sample from Paris Is Burning that Honey Dijon used in the runway show for Louis Vuitton Menswear (Autumn/Winter 2017). Were not going to be shady, just fierce. Were not going to be shady, just fierce. The high-line of the music is like a shower of warm rain.

Im writing this the day after Notre-Dame burned down, all over Twitter and the news. There is an outpouring of money to make repairs. One minute youre on a train looking at your phone and next thing youre crying about a cathedral.

You had the worst death imaginable, the death that most terrified me as a child, I think: loss of control. It took four nurses to hold you down because you wanted to go to the toilet, because you were holding your cock and pissing yourself, and the doctor was a prick you said and wouldnt let you go home, and my mother brought you your wedding album to remind you who you were but it was your bedside clock she said you remembered.

Since you died Ive been watching bionerd23 on YouTube exploring the Exclusion Zone around Chernobyl and Pripyat in Ukraine, twenty-five years after the reactor exploded. She, bionerd23, has a very calm voice. In an interview online she quotes Marie Curie: Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.

Marie Curie was poisoned by the thing she was trying to understand.

When I type the letters bionerd23 into the search box on YouTube and then stop typing, a white box comes up with the following suggestions:

bionerd23 dead

bionerd23 cancer

bionerd23 hospital

bionerd23 chernobyl

bionerd23 apple

bionerd23 claw

bionerd23 dead 2019

bionerd23 basement

bionerd23 fuel

Shes alive though, as far as Im aware.

I think shes OK.

In the days after you died, Dad, I watched bionerd23 on YouTube climb the Duga-3 radar array. There she is, standing high up above the forest near the power plant, wondering if the militiamen can see her. People have been scavenging the Duga arrays for metal and bits of it are lying on the ground. In another video I watch her take home tiny crystals of uranium left over from a pitchblende mine. She films them glowing green in the dark.

On YouTube we are walking along a train track, along whats left of a train track, and the ground is made of stones. To the left of the train track there are young fir trees and to the right of the track are young birch trees. A man is walking ahead down the middle of the train track and bionerd23 says the man is Ukrainian personnel and has had to be blurred out of the video. As we walk, there is the crunching of stones and the scene widens and we see now that the ground is stones because there is more than one train track in amongst the young trees and this is because since the reactor exploded the forest has been encroaching discreetly, blurring out the rails.

Im reading this over and as Im reading, Clare Torry is wailing her part of The Great Gig in the Sky on Pink Floyds The Dark Side of the Moon, wailing high up there, wailing and wailing. Its such a beautiful song.

I dont know if youd like this song, Dad. I know its an odd thing to play at a funeral, but Im going to sit here in bed and imagine for a minute that were having a funeral and this song is playing. Its night-time here, Dad. Youve been dead for a year and a half.

The Great Gig in the Sky begins with Gerry ODriscoll, the Abbey Road doorman, talking calmly, saying he has no fear of death, why should he and a piano takes over and there is guitar and percussion and the wailing starts.

Im crying a bit writing this, Dad. Im in bed with my laptop and Ive got both arms stretched right out above my head and the second knuckle of my right hand is in contact with the wall and Clare Torry is singing ow and oh high up there and its brilliant. The song is in the middle of the album, not at the end.

Wooooah! Oooaw! Ooooweeeeeeeeeeeh!
Aaaaaaaaaaaah! Oooohwaaaaaaaeeeeee! Aaaaaaaaah!
Waaaaaaaah! Ahhhiiiiiiiiiiiy. Owwwwwwwwwwww.
Aaaaaah. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! AAAAAHHHHHH!
AAAAAAAHHHHHH! Ahhhhh! Ahhhhhh! Ahhhhhh!
Aahhhhhhhhhh!

Ahhhhhhhhh! AAAH!
WAAAAAAAH! WAAAAAAAH! AAAAAAAAH!
AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH! AHHHHHHHH! Aaahhh!
Ooohhh!

Booooooooooooh! Oo-oooo! o-ooo!

Awwwwww, haaaaaaaaaa, ahhh, haaaa, waaaaaaa,
eeeeeeeeh, ehhh. Ah ha haaaaaaaaaaaaa.

Aaaaaa ohhhh OHHHH ohhhhh, oh oh oh.
Ooooooo. Hoooo ho-oooo waaaaaaa.

Oh. Oh. OH! Aaaaaaaaa. Laaaaaaa. Haaaaaaa.
AH-AH-AH. Oh! Wooah. Oh. Ah. Ahh. Waaa. Ha.

Listening to Julie Walters singing A Modern Romance on the drive home one night I have to pull over and then for five minutes I am howling and sobbing in the car next to a bus stop. I find myself thinking, Oh this must be because of you being dead, and I find this quite funny so Im laughing and then I am howling again; it feels like the nightmares I had when I was small and I couldnt make sense of the chaos of things.

Im remembering my father let us dunk his head under the water, me and a friend. He was so much larger than we were, it was exciting. I find Im regretting it now like its tangled with everything else. He just let us sink him under the water.

I remember once, my mother telling me after school that morning my father had thrown his cereal on the floor because he couldnt take it any more, a point when he was very depressed.

I liked cereal very much and it disturbed me, the idea of the mess on the carpet. He needed to put the feelings into something, I am thinking now, he wanted to watch something spill.

The first verse of A Modern Romance goes like this:

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