Corpsing (15 page)
Authors: Toby Litt
The fourth bullet skids across the skin of my chest and hits me in the upper left arm, the biceps brachii. The impact feels a little like the prod of a particularly bullying schoolteacher. Nothing more. The bullet first makes contact with me right in the middle of my sternum. It passes, half in half-out, down and across, making some little contact with the sternocostal pectoralis. As it is heading roughly in the same direction as the muscle fibres, it does less damage than it might otherwise. A bright white scar will be left across my sternum. Passing through my arm, the bullet misses the median nerve by about five millimetres and the humerus bone by about two millimetres.
Later, I couldn’t believe it had happened this way. The thing was a phoney Hollywood injury. The kind of winging flesh-wound that allows the hero to strap on an improvised tourniquet and go on fighting bloodied but unbowed. This was the maximum amount of damage that a movie star could be seen to sustain. This, maybe, and a scar on whichever cheek emphasized their best side.
Even as the shooting was taking place I was aware that it was something for which I had been thoroughly prepared. I liked this kind of thing – this was the video I’d rent, if Lily didn’t insist on something girlie. And if someone needed to get shot to get the plot going then I wasn’t going to complain. I was deep into the by proxy guilt of genre already. By now all of us have seen so many on-screen gun-killings that we judge whatever we see against a very rigid pre-existent canon.
There are the stills: the apple spewing itself out around a brass bullet, Capa’s hand-grenade thrower during the Spanish civil war, Capone’s oil-slick sidewalk aftermaths. There are the black and white classics: going over the top and performing Chaplinesque pratfalls at Passchendaele and the Somme.
There is the documentary: President John F. Kennedy succumbing to the magic of a bullet, that screw-faced Vietcong POW getting it side-on in the head, the US Congressman eating his gun at a press conference. There is the fictional: Straw
Dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, Reservoir Dogs.
‘Oh, that wasn’t a very good one,’ I thought, after the first bullet went into Lily. ‘That wasn’t at all realistic.’
In the end, this wound didn’t really inconvenience me. By the time I came round out of my coma, it had mostly healed.
Sometimes, when the weather is about to change, it aches.
I got into the lift, forgetting even to press the button to another floor. I was on the top floor so there was no way but down. Someone called the lift. The doors closed. They opened again on the second floor. ‘I’m going up,’ said the nurse. I didn’t reply. We went back up to the fifth floor. The nurse got out. Someone called the lift down to the basement. They got out on the first floor. Then someone on the third floor called it, and got out on the ground floor. I followed them – seeing the exit door, daylight, parked cars: a single taxi, waiting.
‘Mortlake,’ I told the cab-driver.
I was the never-to-be father of a never-to-be daughter. Lily had landed another blow upon me. It made me wonder whether Lily had known the baby’s sex – almost certainly not.
‘Are you alright, mate?’ the cab-driver asked.
‘Mortlake,’ I said.
How many times would I have to feel this grief? And not the same grief every time – it seemed to come back renewed, empowered, having changed shape. I had mourned Lily, then a possible child, then a definite daughter – and I had found, on each occasion, that none of them were truly mine to mourn. I was a long long way from being the right person. I was no longer anything like the person I had been when Lily died. With each decrease in my ignorance came an increase in my confusion. This last expansion, to be honest, left me more shocked than shattered. I wanted this – whatever it was – to stop. I wanted to be at the very end of it.
Circumstances, cruel as they were, forced me to consider whether my reaction would have been different had the embryo been male. Terrible to admit, but its being female meant that I minded slightly less. What had been lost was, I felt, being of the opposite sex, just a little less intimately to do with myself.
However, the thing that had died inside Lily was not only a possible human being but also my own version of what my life would have been. That version had been ailing and dying ever since Lily kicked me out.
The version went like this: We would carry on living together. We might even have had children. We talked about children. I’d wanted them. She’d always put them off, on the grounds that she couldn’t afford to take time out at such a crucial point in her career. (For Lily, every point in her career was crucial.)
And now I knew that she had definitely been prepared to sacrifice another human life – even if only a possible human female life – for that career.
The taxi dropped me off. The driver gave me his card.
‘Any time, mate,’ he said. ‘I live local.’
I remembered that I had something I had to do: I had to be at the Barbican theatre that evening by seven o’clock.
I asked the taxi-driver if he could pick me up around six.
‘Sure.’
‘I’ll have a wheelchair.’
‘No problem.’
The first night, Monday, I’d booked a seat right in the middle of the front row. Alun and Dorothy must notice me, they must come to associate me with certain noises, they must start to get really pissed off.
For this production to have its full intended effect, it was necessary that the audience be cowed into total silence during certain key scenes. The actors had to feel they could create at will these precious pin-drop moments. Soliloquies… were… the most obvious… place. But there were other crucial moments of quiet: Banquo’s ghost, Birnam Wood. Having once already endured the performance, I knew where these significant silences were most required. My plan was simple: sit there and insert a loud, tension-destroying cough into every single one of Alun and Dorothy’s precious pin-drop moments.
This being the RSC, there was plenty of competition between actors to see who could produce the greatest number of silences. Which of them – we were implicitly asked to judge – really had their foot on the accelerator? And who the brake? Was it Alun or Dorothy, Macbeth or Lady Macbeth?
This first night of my plan, I improvised. Whenever a silence seemed to be looming, I put in a preparatory hack and then tried to pitch a good throat-rasper in more accurately.
At the same time I made a mental note where the hack
should go,
were it to be perfectly placed.
Part of the plan required my cough to be particularly unmistakable:
I therefore put on my Scottish spinster hack – half-hiccup, half-apology-in-advance.
It was hard to tell how soon Alun and Dorothy noticed, but by the end I was certain they knew and were disconcerted.
As I don’t wish to have to make too many more verbal visits to the Barbican, I will collect them all together.
Here is my Cough Diary.
Tuesday
A good solid performance. Alun, I notice, is developing something of a facial tic. No doubt this is part characterization, but I have hopes that it is equal part persecution mania. I’ve also invented an important little marker: as the lights go down and the cast waits in the wings for the witches to do their business, I give a signature cough – just to make sure Alun and Dorothy know I’m in for the night.
Wednesday
Lost it a little today. They are trying to break up the rhythms of the production, and shorten the silences. As a result, the play has (through my indirect intervention) improved. I limited myself to unmissably sharp surgical strikes. I also began coughing on top of crucial words. As I’m no longer scared of the huge acoustic of the place, my volume is becoming quite impressive.
Thursday
Since yesterday a notice has appeared asking patrons to please refrain from making any unnecessary noise during the performance. An usherette had obviously been detailed to watch over me, to see how the man in the wheelchair behaved. I stayed silent throughout the whole of the first half. You could see Alun relaxing, getting into the flow. After the interval, the usherette had gone – and I launched in without mercy.
(I have to say, this hasn’t been easy on me – the production is driving me mad. By now there’s not a single self-satisfied detail I miss nor a piece of smug improvisation that eludes me. It took real strength of character to force myself down to the theatre
this evening. I’m glad I did, though. It was one of my best performances.)
Alun and Dorothy are reacting quite differently. Alun, his head hanging, sullen unscripted silences punctuating his entire interpretation, has almost admitted defeat; Dorothy, on the other hand, merely becomes more and more hysterical.
The rest of the cast has obviously been informed of my hate campaign.
Friday
For reasons that will become clear, I was forced to miss Friday. But this was all part of my plan: that Alun and Dorothy’s performances should be disrupted – if not ruined, for them, in terms of satisfaction – even if I
weren’t
there to do the destroying. Approaching every significant: pause, there would be fear in their minds as to whether
this
was the one that was about to be shattered.
Saturday
Before the performance, the manager had a quiet word. He’d obviously been told to ‘stop the man in the wheelchair’. Luckily, there were another three men in wheelchairs – and he couldn’t stop all of us. Tomorrow, I guess, he will check tickets booked under my name – and see I’ve been six days straight (plus one). Therefore I will phone up to cancel my remaining tickets and – surprise surprise – go on my feet and buy them at the door or queue for returns and pay cash. That’ll confuse them.
Sunday
Alun actually stopped dead, turned and peered out into the auditorium this evening. I was limited in my attacks, as someone turned round and told me to shhh after only my third sally. Life without the victimology of the wheelchair-bound (whom no-one dare shhh) is quite a different, difficult thing. I rationed myself to six coughs (three each for Alun and Dorothy), but apologized loudly after every one.
When the performance was over, I sent a note round to Alun
and Dorothy’s dressing room along with a large bunch of white lilies. The note read: ‘I can go on doing this for ever. I wonder if you can?’ My phone number followed.
Tuesday.
The printout of Lily’s phone bill arrived in the first post.
The most important calls, obviously, were those she’d made to Alun. Using my fluorescent marker-pens, I traced back all her calls to him. To my distress, I found that they occurred fairly constantly from around the end of
The Ghost Sonata
until almost the day she died.
In fact, just before that tour was the exact moment that Lily had decided to get a mobile phone. It looked as if her mobile, like so many, had been a means of conducting an affair. Or more than one.
Alun, it seemed, had been lying about the length and seriousness of his involvement with Lily. And also about his reason for becoming involved – that Lily had told him I was on my way out.
I wondered if Dorothy had been lying knowingly as well – or was she merely repeating the lie that Alun had told her, and the police. But the police, I remembered, had the printout as well. In which case, it was far more likely that the lie was to me alone – for the police would have seen through it in a moment. So, either Dorothy was protecting her husband by maintaining a lie – a lie that would be exposed as soon as we went to court – or Alun had managed to get the police to cover up for his affair. Neither explanation seemed any more or less likely than the other. Maybe they just didn’t want to tell me the truth. Maybe they were just playing for more time.
And then I noticed something else: many of Lily’s calls to Alun were in the evening. The reason for this seemed simple – Dorothy must have been safely out of the house.
A call to her agent, pretending to be a casting director for a film, gave me a rough c.v. of her past year’s performances. A couple more calls to the RSC and other theatres firmed up the dates.
Then I had a thought – shouldn’t I check when Alun had been working as well: strengthen my case by confirming that the evening phonecalls only came when Dorothy was off working and he was free to take them at home?
So, I repeated the casting charade with Alun’s agent, then with the film companies he’d worked with.
The result was unexpected: on almost every occasion that Lily had called Alun and Dorothy’s number in the evening,
neither
of them had been around.
For three weeks, during which there were five phonecalls, Alun had actually been off in North America and Asia touring a production of
King Lear.
At the same time Dorothy had been in Stratford as a miscast Mistress Quickly.
The calls, lasting ten or twenty minutes or more, had been made to Alun and Dorothy’s house but not to them. Lily had been calling someone else, someone at their house.
There was only one person I could think of who it might have been: their fifteen-year-old son, Laurence.
When I came back from the Barbican on Tuesday evening, I found that someone had up-ended my dustbin on to the porch.
Stepping over the mess, I opened the front door. There was an envelope. It was charred around the edges and had singed some of the mat. Inside, I could see, without even opening it, was shit.
I tidied up, wondering who would want to do such a thing.
It was only after I’d cleared up the dustbin mess that I checked my answerphone. There was the usual message from my mother. There was a message from Anne-Marie. And then there was a message from the rough voice. It was very simple, it went: ‘We know where you live.’
Immediately, I started to dial Vicky’s number. But then I realized I would have to tell her that I’d been pursuing my own investigation via Lily’s mobile-phone bill. I would have to confess to dialling up all those numbers.
I put the phone down.
How had they found out where I lived? And who were
they
anyway? Why did they want to frighten me? And why had Lily been making calls to them the day she died?
No serious damage had been done. I guessed it was quite easy to find out where someone lived from their phone number. Anyone could discover the area by dialling directory inquiries.
After I’d had time to sit down with a drink, I began to reason myself out of my fears. It was – as the phrase always goes – probably just kids fooling around. ‘We know where you live’ was
too much of a cliché to have actually come from someone wanting to scare me. But the voice itself had something unmistakably real about it. It got to me, and part of how it did this was by sounding so confident in the knowledge that it
would
get to me. The rough voice wasn’t merely terrifying, it was professionally terrifying. Terror (in the voice, in other people) was something its owner could turn on or off at will. Unfortunately, try as I might, I couldn’t do the same. My terror stayed with me all night.
When I called Anne-Marie, though, I didn’t mention it.