Quilt (11 page)

There is the lull and leave off, the to you surprising compassion shown by many of the official bodies, not the coroner or registrar or undertaker certainly, but so many mostly unnamed others, representing the utility companies, your father’s bank, local authorities, the pensions company, the tax office, the solicitors entrusted with the original of the will. There is time given. It is a time that never existed before. It is as if your father’s phrase ‘from time to time’, apparently so casual, opens up like a cuckoo clock, intimating a time in between the one and the other, a mad gift. Even your employer proves unexpectedly benign, granting you compassionate leave (officially described as ‘sick’), for as long as, so long as, what does the voice say? You try to recall the manager’s exact words: three months, is it? What does it matter?

You will stay here now in this house with Taylor, Audrey, Hilary and Mallarmé, in need as they after all are of almost constant attention. Really, so much care must be taken: it is a far more onerous task than having children or looking after elderly loved ones. You will watch in this house for as long as it takes.

In the first days after the funeral there are occasional visits or calls from neighbours, further cards of sympathy and calls from family friends. The farmer down the lane offers to help with carting stuff off to the tip and tidying the garden, his wife to collect supplies of food for ‘the fish’, as she insists on calling them, from the city where, some twenty miles off, you have to get such supplies. Someone else, an old friend of your father, calls and tries to put you in touch with another local man who specialises in house-clearance, to move along the business of sorting out the house. You politely decline all these offers, but when the farmer’s wife asks for the second time within that first fortnight when are you going to put the house on the market you struggle to remain courteous. As in the story of the man who cannot go into the street because he is absolutely sure he will kill everyone he meets, you find yourself driven deeper into the solitude that is in any case never yours.

It is while you sit with your Aspall, eyes sunk in the cool shadow-life of the great tank, that you talk to the girl last seen in green shoes. In the calm of water-lights, in this placid lost world of
motoro
, you drift for hours, telling her what you have been doing and thinking, enabling her to follow your life by telephone. When the conversation ends it is always the same. It is time to feed the rays. You relish the almost dissociated pleasure of seeing them seeing food on offer and rising to the surface accordingly, or remaining oblivious, at a distance, like Auden’s reindeer, altogether elsewhere, picking up a morsel of whitefish, shrimp or piece of cucumber only after it has come to rest on the substrate. It is strangely compelling to observe them eat while being unable to
see what it is they are eating, since their eyes are on the other side of their bodies, the sense suggested of a communication between dorsal and ventral not of the order of vision, and the faintly frightening plates of teeth, the closest resemblance the rays have to their cousins the sharks, as they inexorably imperviously grind up their prey living or dead.

One day the telephone rings and it is H, asking if you would read something from Shakespeare on French radio. You laugh because she always makes you laugh.

– In French?

– No, darling, in English.

She asks you how you are. You want to tell her that you fear you are going crazy. In fact you merely note your unease at what you call the disappearance of the house.

– You must film it, darling.

You want to say yes, but the word stops in your throat. Instead:

– What is the Shakespeare?

– It is Clarence’s dream. Will you do it?

And so a couple of days later, at an hour agreed, the radio station calls and they record you reading, over the telephone:

You hear
methoughts
in your father’s playful fashion, like ‘me wife’: someone is hearing me thoughts. The recording is not good. To disguise it they later layer a crashing of waves over you. You sound as if you are speaking from the deep, within the tumbling billows.

The next day you tell me:

– Shakespeare has been filming the house.

You had a terrible night and could hardly sleep. You had a nightmare of unimaginable length and intensity. You attribute it to your ‘marine correspondence’ with H.

– I dream of gravel. I’m going to miss the funeral because of it. Time’s recoiled and we are completely
lost in the logistics of acquiring the gravel, the agitation about having the right kind. It’s as if I were dreaming intermittently aware that what’s happening is an allegory but I keep forgetting this. The surface of the body is such a strange kettle, I remind you, with no scales, and even the dermal denticles on the dorsal surface affording limited protection at best, the ventral surface another hopeless hazard of sensitivity. We are arguing about it. I tell you I
know
that gravel is already a perversion of the standard natural habitat of mud, sand or silt, and no amount of scientific research will bring a satisfactory resolution to the question of the right
kind
of gravel, granted that
gravel
it needs must be. I know that the very fineness of sand or mud creates an
unsustainable havoc
,
filter-blocking
and anaerobic in the artificially generated world of a home aquarium. You suggest that there are numerous other, equally important issues to be concerned about, such as the type and quality of water, filters, pumps and so on, but I’m not to be deterred. I accuse you of being no better than the so-called authorities who blandly note the abrasive character of gravel as a minor problem to be avoided, since it can lead to infections of a fungal or bacterial nature. Only as it were in passing do they note that such infections are ‘almost inevitably fatal’. The ray is but a trifle, easy picking, so many more in the sea. Like cookies churned out on a factory conveyor-belt: such is the tone. I can see I am upsetting you, comparing you quite unjustly with these scientifically trained specialists and collectors, but I’m on my high horse and haranguing like a crazy man:

– Then there are the online dealers. Replaceable ray, dish of the day, this one or that! Initially set you back a
hundred dollars, my friend, but if it arrives damaged or dead, refund guaranteed, we’ll dispatch another within twenty-four hours! If, on the other hand, you get it home and it acclimatises and seems happy but after three weeks begins to develop fin curl or abrasions from that gravel you selected for the substrate, or if it turns out the creature never really developed an appetite and has succeeded in starving itself, such apparently suicidal behaviour not unknown, if it dies it dies: just think of it as one of those balloons that go flat, simply pick up the phone or get online and order another one!

– I notice that you have stopped listening and put in your earphones and are playing music, but this only makes me rail the more.

– Nothing sharp that might abrade the creature’s ventral surface. That’s the main thing. It’s hardly a question of driving down to your local gravel pit and filling up the car in a series of stealthy operations: so many black bags filled, like all our recent life in reverse. Obviously it is necessary to realise that there is
no such thing
as aquarium gravel in the plain and simple sense. Nothing is
reliable
. If you spend most of your adult life burying yourself in a mass of tiny rocks you perhaps should expect to get into a few scrapes. But don’t imagine the guys at the building supplies company are going to give us much useful information or assistance in a situation like this. We’re strictly
on our own
!

– So then I’m sitting on the dining room floor surrounded by bags of gravel, the sort known as quartz sand, with a grain thickness of 0.4 to 1mm. You’re nowhere to be seen. Nothing’s been done. There’s no sign of the frame or any of the other equipment. I’m working
my way through, bag after bag. From one bag to the next I inspect every little pebble, taking it like snuff between the thumb, forefinger and middle-finger, feeling, turning and assessing its abrasiveness, accepting or rejecting accordingly. I’m distracted by the thought that among all the hundreds of thousands of tiny granules there may be a few, a child’s handful or just one, a solitary single serrated little bastard that will injure and quite possibly lead to death. And I’m going as fast as I can, but all the time I’m thinking to myself: I’m
missing the funeral
.

– Then I wake up. I’m covered in sweat and my heart is thumping like a nightclub. It’s pitch dark and I can hardly breathe.

I call you and begin by asking where you are, even though you are always in the same place. I depend on this routine. As you sit in your father’s armchair you can tell me about Mallarmé, Hilary, Taylor and Audrey. It’s calming to hear your voice and description of the movements in the pool. But then there’s no knowing which way the conversation might go. A couple of days after the gravel-dream (which you tell me comes back repeatedly over the nights that follow, and which you relate to a disquiet you have about ‘no substrate at all’), you declare:

– I am going blind.

– What do you mean?

– I mean blind. I catch myself staring, as if I’m simply failing to shut my eyes, and what I see is dissolving. It’s as if I couldn’t sleep, but I go out like a light. Things appear bright and blurred at the same time.

– That’s just what you’ve been going through, the burden and strain of everything. It will get better. Try to sleep longer tonight. Have a lie-in.

But the thing persists. A couple of days later you refer again to troubled vision and then, after a pause:

– I’m overlooking myself.

Sometimes I wonder if I hear you correctly, your accent foreign and still unfamiliar (doubtless in part that is why I love your voice), an impression accentuated by the telephone and hundreds of miles between us. One cannot endlessly ask, Could you say that again? or Did you say you’re overlooking? Signifying what? A surreal game of Whisper Down the Lane tracks our every syllable.