Byron Easy (69 page)

Sexual abuse. Why is it when I think of something shameful from my past—some aberration or incident—immediately there flashes up this image of a gun blowing my head to pieces, my own finger on the trigger? It is an infallible synaptic process. And why does it always come down to sexual abuse in the end? Why does it make Hitlers and suicides and junkies? The world of adult appetites crashing in when you didn’t know they even existed. Delph. The Reverend Cave. The satanic agents of my downfall. They couldn’t keep their hands to themselves. Maybe they had had it done to them. In that case, one can really ascribe it to ignorance—the blithe lack of insight that what hurt them might in turn hurt others too. And such a cliché, to be hurt by it, to be fucked up by it. On my gravestone, if there’s enough room, they should inscribe—Here Lies A Cliché.

But I forget. There won’t be a gravestone. Only a midnight burial at the crossroads.

Sitting down now, in the long wet grass, I take Rudi’s pistol from my pocket and lay it on my thigh. In the gutter I can see the stems of cut flowers, decaying orange peel and sweet wrappers from the day’s visits. There’s a strong wind in the high yews, making that old sound. And all around me—a homunculus surrounded by giants—the dead, wringing their hands on their plinths of stone. Irrationally, I find I’m scared of necromancers or Satanists or deranged lovers disturbing me in the act. And what act is that? The act of self-destruction. Here I am, possibly surrounded by the ghosts or souls of my significant dead (mother without her trademark headscarf, Grandma Chloe without her beatific eyes, Ramona lacking her seemingly ineradicable flesh) thinking about topping myself. I must, after all, be my own worst enemy. What more terrible enemy can a person have than a self that is hell-bent on destroying itself? Born to be my own destroyer! I should have died in a duel with Rudi, like Pushkin. That would have automatically conferred immortality. Is that what I’m looking for?
Non omnis moriar?
Or is it merely oblivion—an end to the tiring vicissitudes of life, with its relentless wheel that dashes hopes as soon as they are raised. One thing’s for certain, I have been spectacularly unsuccessful in exercising any negative capability. Pre-Freud Keats, unbeknown to him, stumbled on one of the main tenets of psychotherapy, one of the central things it tries to inculcate—the ability to sit up to your neck in your own mental shit, assailed by unendurable stinks, yet still function. The fact that the barrel of Rudi’s gun is making the short journey from my thigh to the back of my mouth confirms this.

Lying down with my mother’s stone at my crown, like a marble headboard, I see again the sky in its array of bruised greys and incipient blues. Still that uncertain hour. How I long for the rosy-fingered dawn, et cetera. Again a three-tier colour hierarchy in the sky—a dusk in reverse—difficult to distinguish the two occasionally. Something tells me I should learn to endure my going hence instead of continuing with this stupid, cowardly caper. Isn’t that what everyone else has to do? I should learn to take death less personally. After all, what is fairer than death in its benevolent democracy? Death, as the poet said, will be a quiet ride in some green lane. Or did I say that? At least I don’t think I’m God any more—now that would be worrying. However, there is an amazing stillness in the air now the wind has died down. A preemptive calm. A delicious freshness that is life itself … It makes me wonder whether I regret anything. If you regret your youth, then why live? What else—now let me see. My impercipience? My people-blindness? Well, I’ve paid the price for that. I suppose if I regret anything it’s not picking up that phone and speaking to my father. It’s bad luck not to resolve things before death—I fear an unsettling meeting in the underworld, like Odysseus’ with Achilles. Nonetheless, as a symbolic act for a father, you can’t get worse (or better) than locking the doors on your own son. And as a verbal act from son to father you can’t top ‘Hurry up and die.’ I think, on balance, my act, my words were worse. As Coriolanus said, ‘Often, when blows have made me stay, I fled from words.’ These vicious acts must hang around somehow, like radioactive debris, long after their perpetrators are pieces of dubious bone in a rusty casque. Yes, it’s a shame I won’t get to see my real father, after my rejection by the wicked father, then the relinquishment of the good father who came third, Martin Drift. I certainly won’t regret leaving these curious times behind. Things are always much worse in apprehension—the Millennium will more than likely bring, well, nothing—a prosaic continuation of what went before. Nineteen ninety-nine will seem, in retrospect, a more genteel time, full of deceptive panic, but in reality the calm before the hurricane of the twenty-first century. Yes, I am doing the right thing in getting out while I can. In leaving this warm, sensible motion for good. In the words, once again, of my namesake, I must forsake the earth’s troubled waters for a purer spring.

The barrel of the gun has been in my mouth for so long it feels warm. Uncomfortably, it sits in a moat of equally warm saliva. The stillness around me really is scintillating. I have chosen my ground well. My final resting place, my home, where I may get some rest from the onslaught of change, temporality, life. The trees swell soundlessly in the gentle breeze, the light above them still undecided. Then a startling sound, a bird—not the soft coo of a wood pigeon, but a harsh cuckoo! Its blunt notes ring out again, like a reproach. I can see the bird itself on a low, rain-black branch of the nearest tree. Well, hello, friend. The noise I’m about to make will be much louder. My finger tenses around the trigger as I resist the urge to close my eyes—I want to see it all, down to the last dregs, the stones, the church, the sky, the world. Oh, well, I think—no time like the present …

It’s no good. I can’t do it.

But I was prepared for this. I knew it would be a struggle, right to the very end. After all, I could have done this in Rudi’s flat and saved myself the effort. But, crucially, I wanted to remember everything first. To fix those moths of memory under glass once and for all. It’s difficult to act when thinking shows you every angle, when you plough the pros and cons until the ground of action is fallow—and all along there is the suspicion that everything you do is
an act,
a hollow, non-conclusive pantomime. Well, this is intended to be the final conclusive act. An escape from this whirlpool of lies, the nothingness of life, the battle with Time and its bigger army. This world which passes like flowers fair.

Cuck-koo!

That’s okay, my friend, you go right ahead. It’s over. The woods no more us answer, or echo to our ring. Clenching my eyes tight, I commend my soul to the Everlasting. Then, very gently, very slowly, I squeeze the trigger.

It’s … it’s … not much different to being alive. The view, that is. Except, if possible, stiller—nothing is moving; the static stones of my last resting place immovably still. The cuckoo frozen on its branch. So
this
is what the soul sees after death—not blackness, but the
same thing.
Of course! This is where the soul begins its journey: in the same place it divested itself of the cumbersome body. And the soldier was right! I heard no bang whatsoever—the speed of sound being a notorious slowcoach. It was all remarkably painless, too. I can recommend shooting yourself in the head to anybody. As quick and effortless (and meaningless) as pushing a button.

Hold on, the cuckoo just moved. Flitting noiselessly to the branch below … now it is in flight. And the light, the light has changed too. Barely perceptible, but a definite lightening has taken place. I can see inscriptions on stones that I couldn’t before. I gingerly try to unlock my fist from the pistol. My God! I am still in my body! We are still coupled in that intolerable bind Marvell couldn’t abide.

I try shifting what I think is my right leg. It moves! Flux—Heraclitean and vital—tells me I’m definitely not in the underworld yet. Now I am on my feet, dizzy in the gathering light of dawn. The ancient movement of wind in the trees is not only affecting branches and twigs but also lightly caressing my face—and now it is deep in my nostrils; taken down into the lungs in greedy gasps. I stop to examine the gun in my hand. Fiddling with the stock, the magazine drops into the wet grass. I retrieve it and examine the cartridges. A gurgling, trembling laughter fills my whole living body.

‘Rudi, you bugger!’ I say out loud, my voice startling to me. ‘You were shooting blanks all along!’ Just as Rudi was a facsimile of a human being, the gun appears to be a replica; the bullets dummies. Then something even more astonishing, even more welcome. A beam of light, strong and yellow, the first of the new day, surprises me from behind the church spire. I drop the gun and close my eyes in rapture. The sun, even at this chilly hour, feels warm and restorative behind my lids, like hot amber. I luxuriate in this sensation for as long as I dare.
Yet though I cannot be beloved, let me love!
Opening my eyes again, I decide to walk—one foot lame from my long recumbency in the grass—towards the true, non-deceiving light.

T
HANKS TO ANNA WEBBER
, Zoe Ross and Jessica Craig at United Agents; Tom Avery, Jason Arthur, Emma Finnigan, and all at Heinemann; Becky Swift, without whom, etc. (
www.literaryconsultancy.co.uk
); Deborah Rogers, Hannah Westland; James Cook, Ian Tuton, Riet Chambers, Daisy Falconer & family; Robert Newman, Dan Jenkins, Ben North, Waheed Khan, Jeannette Robinson, Kelly Wilkie, PJ Harling, Pete Chapman, Paul & Jonny, Steve Necchi, Dave Pearce, Andy Naughton, Wayne Burrows, Sean Gascoine, Jaspreet Pandohar, Caffy St. Luce, Mike Scott, Rose Gledhill, Yvonne Enright, Geoffrey Cook.

Also the following inspirational teachers and academics: Jeff Wood, Neil Rogal, Mike Shearer, Helen Hackett, John Sutherland, Kasia Boddy, Mark Ford, John Mullan, Greg Dart, Paul Davis and Neil Rennie.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Jude Cook

978-1-4804-4758-5

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