On Chasing Brad Through Purgatory (3 page)

“I used to believe that I was special—”

“You're intensely special.”

“No Brad I mean like Jesus. When I was a boy part of me really thought I was designed to be another saviour; not to die on the cross, nothing uncomfortable like that; but put here on earth to be a fine example to all you sad and ordinary folk. How'm I doing?”

“None too well. That's just sweet and childlike and completely normal. You no doubt believed at least half the time that you were utterly despicable and quite beyond the pale. Much less deserving than any of us poor sad and ordinary folk.”

“I did! I did! How can you know these things? How can you be so very wise?”

“I guess because I was designed to be extremely special—oh far more special than yourself. You fake and fraud and upstart!”

“I reckon I must love you then … you very wise extremely special man.”

“I reckon I must love you too … you false and jumped-up boy.”

I smiled—then was suddenly surprised to find that in the throes of reminiscence I'd passed unnoticing the place at which seven hours earlier we'd turned into the main road. Brad had been concentrating on all those potentially dangerous ruts; we had hardly spoken until we'd driven to about this point, when I'd lazily mentioned the irony of needing to be up so early on this particular Sunday. “Still. Always best to leave while you're having a good time,” he'd said.

And very soon I got to that vaulted section which had reminded me of smugglers but where there was no longer any grassy bank and I was forced for the sake of my soles to tread more carefully. When I reached the other end and came to the spot where we had pulled over and then gone to stand beside the lake, arm around shoulder, arm around waist, I experienced even now a sudden sharp twist of nostalgia—and thought, “My God how good we had it and how much of it I simply took for granted.”

Experienced it even now despite my knowing our reunion couldn't be that far off. It struck me forcibly how very blest I was. Under any other circumstances, with Brad gone, I'd have had to avoid this lake altogether, perhaps this whole stretch of road, certainly for the time being. To revisit … would have been much more than I could manage. Could I even have borne to go back into the house, although obviously I should have had to? But how did others cope in such a situation? To my shame I knew I'd never given it much thought. Maybe the closest I'd ever come was crying in front of some old movie dealing with bereavement. In my own life only one grandmother had died; and she had been someone to mimic rather than to mourn.

Back in the car. By now we had been talking of Suzanne.

Suzanne…! No doubt at this moment she was somewhere high above the Channel looking forward with a mixture of pleasurable anticipation and suppressed nervousness to a week of holiday spent with her father and his boyfriend. How would she react when no one came to meet her? When no one answered her increasingly panicked calls? Suppose for some reason she couldn't get in touch with her mum back in Paris—and in any case what could Hélène reasonably advise? Suzanne was only twenty-two; she was going to feel so let down and lost and helpless. And all because some schmuck had called her father a bastard. Dear God look after her.

Part of me, undoubtedly a part which needed to grow up, provided for her a young airport official, handsome and unattached and caring, who would tactfully take control. Man made in God's own image. During slack periods at work—I'd worked on the reception desk of a small hotel in Uckfield—I sometimes used to read romantic novels; even, despite the teasing, Mills & Boon. I'd claim these made a change from heavier things like Gide and Kafka and Joyce and Pasternak though no one at the hotel ever saw me with Gide or Kafka or Joyce or Pasternak. (But you did Brad. You did. Sorry if in the end I had to return each time to the more lightweight stuff and never let you know.) But please God. Just for Suzanne. This once. You ever read a Mills & Boon?

(Daft question. The million times you must have helped to write one.)

The association of ideas inevitably brought into my mind Sebastian and Sally and Laura. Gosh would the three of them be shaken! Imagining this, made me almost laugh again. Oh to be a fly on the wall—my grandmother's reiterated wish—when somehow the news got through to The White Hart! I reflected that throughout their lives they'd fleetingly remember me, those three; remember me as bright-eyed, blond and sexy and always in tiptop physical condition. Not bad, that; there were certain consolations in nearly everything; although I knew I shouldn't care.

I supposed I'd soon be seeing my grandmother. The prospect didn't thrill me. “Don't do this … don't do that … I'd have hoped you would have learned by now!” My chief remembrance of her. Negatives.

Yet now the thought came rushing: I had no right to mimic her as cruelly as I did. Admittedly, only in front of my brothers and sisters but not merely before she'd died—even afterwards as well. Soon afterwards. And with the same total lack of understanding. I wished I'd never done it. I really wished I'd never done it.

Something else, not simply a thought, that came rushing on me just as unexpectedly: that bend in the road where the bark of a massive lone oak was jaggedly damaged near its base—the naked wood savagely indented; where there were tyre marks on the verge, and bits of broken glass among the fallen leaves.

Yet that was all. They had removed the Porsche with commendable efficiency; I briefly wondered where. Less briefly I wondered where they had taken the body of its driver. Most likely to the same place where they had taken mine; or now were taking it. But what would happen to us after that?

Of course if I had an actual preference we would both be buried side-by-side in the nearby peaceful pretty churchyard—St Leonard's which I had from time to time attended—with a gravestone common to the pair of us; but even if there'd been room in the churchyard and the coupling of male lovers on a single stone could now at last be countenanced there still remained the problem that Brad had been a non-believer. I would willingly have gone with him to the nearest cemetery, naturally, though the nearest cemetery couldn't start to compare aesthetically with the churchyard at St Leonard's but I had never made a will—what had I to leave?—I didn't know if Brad had either, and never having discussed with any of our friends or family the issue of interment as opposed to cremation (had Brad ever done so in the days before I knew him?), I now wasn't at all sure where any of this muddle finally left us or whether indeed—

Oh Christ!

Brad wasn't a believer.

How could I have forgotten? How could I have overlooked that glaringly important point?

He had been such a good man.

God! God! God! He was such a good man. A dozen times better than me. More! Oh Lord you can't refuse him his salvation just because he honestly couldn't understand why if you existed you permitted such a quantity of suffering. It would be so petty to deny him. To deny membership to someone merely because he didn't tug his forelock when in every other way, apart from the actual card-carrying bit, he practised all your teachings just as truly as any person ever could! You
can't
deprive him of the same chances which you're supplying to a nobody like me! Oh Lord, Lord. You who so clearly understand everything. And isn't understanding the same thing as forgiving? You can't possibly be a lesser soul—a meaner, touchier, stubborner soul—than whoever it was who said that. Wasn't it a Frenchman?

Arrogance? I'm afraid you haven't heard the half of it.

And listen God—Lord—I've never known which one I should be talking to. If you insist on sticking to these rules … belief, belief, belief!… then count me out. As of
this
minute. I don't want to be in any place where Brad himself can't be. I don't want any part of a life which he himself can't share. I don't want any further dealings with a God who's so very obviously a clubman.

No thank you. I'll just go along with Gladys. I'd rather die in his world than live without him in mine.

I licked my lips realizing I had made a declaration of such life-threatening seriousness I ought at least to formalize it.

If Brad isn't somewhere on the road ahead I hereby give notice that as of this moment I'm officially withdrawing my allegiance. It's as if I no longer believe.

There now. Come on and strike me dead.

In spite of everything I rather enjoyed the wording of that last command. The situation hardly permitted of a grin; I was well aware of that; but it got one just the same. My whole approach must seem so vain, my puerile little ultimatum so irredeemably … puerile. Yet so far I was still standing. So far I was still breathing. No thunderbolt, no interruption to that gently warming sun. What could I do but hope then that I might have had my answer?

Yet like nothing short of an overindulged brat I again decided to test how far I'd be allowed to go.

I said: Then just so long as we understand each other? No crossed fingers; no dirty tricks; no pretending afterwards you hadn't fully grasped my meaning.

Some sort of a sign wouldn't be bad. Some little token of good faith.

Like a bit of skywriting perhaps?
Brad lives!
You don't even need an aeroplane. Only dip your finger in a trailing wisp of cloud or else some garden bonfire smoke.
Brad lives. Just follow the yellow brick road
.

I looked about me. Like I say I was at the scene of the accident. Pure instinct had returned me.

But just for the moment—I hoped just for the moment—pure instinct appeared to be stalling. No skywriting. No yellow brick road. Merely a bend and a tree and granules of glass catching the sunlight between the fallen leaves.

So what now I wonder.

5

And a house.

Bend—tree—glass—leaves. And a house.

It was on the other side of the road some twenty yards back and well hidden behind a weathered brick wall that reached above my head. The wrought-iron gates revealed a sweep of gravel drive, tree-lined and culminating round a circular island of lawn behind which was the front door, shiny and bottle-green. As far as I could see it was the only house in that immediate area. Viewed from the gates it looked impressive, even daunting.

Especially to someone who wore a raincoat that was stained and several sizes too small and had nothing showing below other than bare legs and feet.

I walked up the drive. A dog barked. I looked for a sign that might direct me to the tradesmen's entrance.

A middle-aged woman in a dressing gown opened the front door. I hadn't even knocked. She was plump, fair-haired, had a pleasant sort of face and held a snarling mastiff by the collar; held it so tightly that its forepaws no longer touched the ground.

“I'm sorry,” she said, “no hawkers or …”

I wondered what might have come next. Probably beggars though she was too polite to say it. It obviously couldn't have been Jehovah's Witnesses or encyclopedia salesmen or double-glazing representatives. At least I hoped not—for
their
sakes.

“But if you wait a minute,” she said, “I could go and make you a cheese sandwich.”

“That's very kind but I'm really not here to ask for handouts.”

She was impressed by my voice as I had hoped she would be. And perhaps also by my face now that she had heard my voice. If it hadn't been for that shattered tumbler my face might well have been black-eyed and badly bruised; but to judge from my hands and legs and feet death seemed mercifully to have got rid of all such marks of injury. Had it also got rid of the need for food I now wondered briefly, at her mention of a sandwich. I thought that probably it hadn't: I could in fact have fancied a cheese sandwich or more particularly the cooked breakfast which Brad and I had usually allowed ourselves on a Sunday. Not that in any case, I remembered, we'd have had much time for any cooked breakfast this morning.

Also while I'd been approaching the house and feeling somewhat nervous it had occurred to me I'd like a pee. But then the dog had barked so there was no longer any question of my simply stepping up behind a tree or bush. Anyway the urgency had now departed.

“Then how may I help?”

“I'm sorry to be a nuisance,” I said, “but in the small hours of this morning there was a car accident across the road. I'm wondering if by any chance you—”

“Yes we did!” she said. “My God! It was horrific. That bang … we almost thought the world had ended!”

“Esther what is it?” A male voice from above.

“Someone inquiring about the accident,” she called back though scarcely turning her head. “All right Rufus please stop. You can stop now.” She relaxed her hold upon the dog's collar and the animal stood properly on its four legs. It made a sound that was either one of compliance or of disappointment or possibly both.

Her balding rather squat and jowly husband (I assumed) with grey bristles in his ears and sleep in his eyes, having descended the remainder of the stairs, now came to take a look at the person who was making these inquiries. He wore blue silk pyjamas and black leather slippers. I said quickly, “I have to apologize for my appearance but it's a long story.”

“What do you need to know about the accident?”

To be candid, I could have said, I haven't the slightest idea. But then somehow I managed to find the right words.

“I knew the man who was driving.”

“Oh God!” said the woman.

“The poor devil,” said her husband.

“Would you like to come in?” asked the woman. They all moved aside to make room—although Rufus, until his mistress yanked him hurriedly away, stuck an upwardly inquiring nose under the bottom of the raincoat. I wiped my feet on the doormat but still left damp prints across the varnished floor. They led me into their kitchen and towards a scrubbed deal table flanked by wooden benches. Two filled cups and saucers waited on a small tray. It was the husband who fetched another cup and brought the teapot from the stove. It seemed almost farcical to be answering his questions to do with milk and sugar. (But that's exactly what I meant Brad. We're dead yet life goes on. In all its mundanity. Be truthful now—that can't be right! Surely?)