Written on the Body (15 page)

She turned to go and then turned back to me worried.

‘You haven’t got cancer have you?’

‘No!’

She nodded. ‘You see, sometimes people who have been newly diagnosed want the inside story on the treatment. Doctors are very patronising, even to highly intelligent patients. Some of those patients like to find out for themselves.’

‘What do they find out?’

‘How little we know. It’s the late twentieth century and what are the tools of our trade? Knives, saws, needles and chemicals. I’ve no time for alternative medicine but I can see why it’s attractive.’

‘Shouldn’t you have time for any possibility?’

‘On an eighty-hour shift?’

She left. I took my book,
The Modern Management of Cancer
, and went home.

June. The driest June on record. The earth that should have been in summer glory was thin for lack of water. The buds held promise but they didn’t swell. The beating sun was a fake. The sun that should have brought life was carrying death in every relentless morning.

I decided to go to church. Not because I wanted to be saved, nor because I wanted solace from the cross. Rather, I wanted the comfort of other people’s faith. I like to be anonymous among the hymn-singing crowd, the stranger at the door who doesn’t have to worry about the fund for the roof or the harvest festival display. It used to be that everybody believed and faith was found in thousands of tiny churches up and down the British Isles. I miss the Sunday morning bells ringing from village to village.

God’s jungle telegraph bearing the good news. And it was good news insomuch as the church was a centre and a means. The Church of England in its unexcited benevolent concern was emphatically to do with village life. The slow moving of the seasons, the corresponding echo in the
Book of Common Prayer
. Ritual and silence. Rough stone and rough soil. Now, it’s hard to find one church in four that still runs a full calendar and is something more than a bit of communion every other Sunday and the odd parish event.

The church not far from me was a working model not a museum so I chose evensong and polished my shoes. I should have known there’d be a catch.

The building was thirteenth-century in parts with Georgian and Victorian repairs. It was of the solid stone that seems to rise organically from the land itself. Grown not made. The colour and substance of battle. The battle to hew it out and shape it for God. It was massy, soil-black and defiant. Across the architrave of the low front door was a plastic banner which said
JESUS LOVES YOU
.

‘Move with the times,’ I said to myself, slightly uneasy.

I walked inside across the cool flagged floor, the particular church cold that no amount of gas fires and overcoats can penetrate. After the heat of the day it felt like the hand of God. I slid into a dark pew with a tree on the door and looked for my prayer book. There wasn’t one. Then the tambourines started. These were serious tambourines the size of bass drums, flaunting ribbons like a Maypole and studded round the side like the collar of a pitbull. One came down the aisle towards me and flashed at my ear. ‘Praise the Lord,’ said its owner, desperately trying to keep it under control. ‘A stranger in our midst.’

The entire congregation except for me then broke
into a melody of Bible texts and scattered shouts liberally set to music. The magnificent pipe organ stood shuttered and dusty, we had an accordion and two guitars. I really wanted to get out but there was a burly beaming farmer standing across the main door who looked as though he might get nasty if I ran for it before the collection.

‘Jesus will overcome you,’ cried the minister. (God the wrestler?)

‘Jesus will have his way with you!’ (God the rapist?)

‘Jesus is going from strength to strength!’ (God the body builder?)

‘Hand yourself over to Jesus and you will be returned with interest.’

I am prepared to accept the many-sidedness of God but I am sure that if God exists He is not a Building Society.

I had a boyfriend once, his name was Bruno. After forty years of dissolution and Mammon he found Jesus under a wardrobe. In fairness, the wardrobe had been slowly crushing the resistance from his lungs for about four hours. He did house clearances and had fallen foul of a double-doored Victorian loomer. The sort of wardrobe poor people lived in. He was eventually rescued by the fire brigade though he always maintained it was the Lord himself who had levitated the oak ever upwards. He took me to church with him soon after and gave a graphic account of how Jesus had come out of the closet to save him. ‘Out of the closet and up into your heart,’ raved the Pastor.

I never saw Bruno after that, he gave me his motorbike as a gesture of renouncement and prayed that it might lead me to the Lord. Sadly it blew up on the outskirts of Brighton.

Ripping through this harmless reverie, a pair of hands seized mine and started banging them together as if they were cymbals. I realised I was meant to be clapping in time to the beat and I remembered another piece of advice from my grandmother. ‘When in the jungle you howl with the wolves.’ I slapped a plastic grin on my face like a server at McDonald’s and pretended to be having a good time. I wasn’t having a bad time, I wasn’t having any time at all. No wonder they talk about Jesus filling a vacuum as though human beings were thermos flasks. This was the most vacuous place I’d ever been. God may be compassionate but he must have some taste.

As I suspected, the sumo farmer was in charge of the collection, so as soon as he had joyfully collected my bent twenty pence piece, I fled. I fled into the raw fields where the sheep continued their grazing as they had done for ten centuries. I fled to the pond where the dragonflies fed. I fled till the church was a hard knot against the sky. If prayer is appropriate it was appropriate here, my back against a dry stone wall, my feet on the slabbed earth. I had prayed for Louise every day since December. I did not know entirely to whom I prayed or even why. But I wanted someone to have care of her. To visit her and comfort her. To be the cool wind and the deep stream. I wanted her to be protected and I would have boiled cauldrons of stuffed newts if I’d been convinced it would have done any good. As to prayer, it helped me to concentrate my mind. To think of Louise in her own right, not as my lover, not as my grief. It helped me to forget myself and that was a great blessing. ‘You made a mistake,’ said the voice. The voice wasn’t a piping sly voice now it was a strong gentle voice and I heard it quite clearly more and more. I did hear it out loud and I was not sure that my
wits were still mine to command. What kind of people hear voices? Joan of Arc yes but what about all the others, the sad or sinister ones who want to change the world by tambourine power.

I hadn’t been able to reach Elgin this month although I had written to him three times and telephoned him at every hour proper and improper. I supposed him to be in Switzerland but what if Louise were dying? Would he tell me? Would he let me see her again? I shook my head. That would be wrong. That would make a nonsense of all of this. Louise wasn’t dying, she was safe in Switzerland. She was standing in a long green skirt by the drop of a torrent. The waterfall ran down from her hair over her breasts, her skirt was transparent. I looked more closely. Her body was transparent. I saw the course of her blood, the ventricles of her heart, her legs’ long bones like tusks. Her blood was clean and red like summer roses. She was fragrant and in bud. No drought. No pain. If Louise is well then I am well.

I found one of her hairs on a coat of mine today. The gold streak caught the light. I bound it around my forefingers and pulled it straight. It was nearly two feet long that way. Is this the thread that binds me to you?

No-one tells you in grief-counselling or books on loss what it will be like when you find part of the beloved unexpectedly. The wisdom is to make sure your house is not a mausoleum, only to keep those things that bring you happy positive memories. I had been reading books that dealt with death partly because my separation from Louise was final and partly because I knew she would die and that I would have to cope with this second loss, perhaps just as the first was less inflamed. I wanted to cope.
Although I felt that my life had been struck in two I still wanted life. I have never thought of suicide as a solution to unhappiness.

Some years ago a friend of mine was killed in a road accident. She was crushed to death on her bicycle under the sixteen wheels of a juggernaut.

When I recovered from her death in the crudest sense I started to see her in the streets, always fleetingly, ahead of me, her back to me, disappearing into the crowd. I am told this is common. I see her still, though less often, and still for a second I believe it is her. I have from time to time found something of hers among my possessions. Always something trivial. Once I opened an old notebook and a slip of paper fell out, pristine, the ink firm not faded. She had left it at my seat in the British Library five years earlier. It was an invitation to coffee at four o’clock. I’ll get my coat and a handful of small change and meet you in the crowded cafe and you’ll be there today won’t you, won’t you?

‘You’ll get over it …’ It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

I’ve thought a lot about death recently, the finality of it, the argument ending in mid-air. One of us hadn’t finished, why did the other one go? And why without warning? Even death after long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and
snatched the body and the body is gone. The day before the Wednesday last, this time a year ago, you were here and now you’re not. Why not? Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a small child. If yesterday why not today? And where are you?

Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space. Do the dead find peace beyond the rattle of the world? What peace is there for us whose best love cannot return them even for a day? I raise my head to the door and think I will see you in the frame. I know it is your voice in the corridor but when I run outside the corridor is empty. There is nothing I can do that will make any difference. The last word was yours.

The fluttering in the stomach goes away and the dull waking pain. Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.

August. Nothing to report. For the first time since leaving Louise I was depressed. The previous months had been wild with despair and cushioned by shock. I had been half mad, if madness is to be on the fringes of the real world. In August I felt blank and sick. I had sobered up, come round to the facts of what I had done. I was no longer drunk on grief. Body and mind know how to hide from what is too sore to handle. Just as the burns victim reaches a plateau of pain, so do the emotionally wretched find grief is a high ground from which they may survey themselves for a time. Such detachment was no longer mine. I was drained of my manic energy and
also of my tears. I fell into dead sleeps and woke unrested. When my heart hurt I could no longer cry. There was only the weight of wrong-doing. I had failed Louise and it was too late.

What right had I to decide how she should live? What right had I to decide how she should die?

At A Touch of Southern Comfort it was Country and Western Month. It was also Gail Right’s birthday. Not surprisingly she was a Leo. On the night in question, hot beyond hell and loud beyond decibels, we were celebrating at the feet of Howlin’ Dog House Don. HD
²
as he liked to be called. The fringes on his jacket would have made a whole head of hair had he needed it. He did need it but he believed his Invisible Toupee was just that. His trousers were tight enough to choke a weasel. When he wasn’t singing into his microphone he cradled it against his crotch. He wore a
NO ENTRY
sign over his bum.

‘Cheek,’ said Gail and roared at her own pun. ‘I’ve seen better colons on a typewriter.’

HD
²
was a big hit. The women loved the way he threw them red paper hankies from his top pocket and growled into the bass notes like a gravelly Elvis. The men didn’t seem too worried by his bum jokes. He sat on their knees and squawked, ‘Who’s a pretty boy then?’ while the women anchored themselves round another gin and lime.

‘I’m doin’ a Hen Night next week,’ said Gail. ‘Strip tease.’

‘I thought this was Country and Western?’

‘It is. He’s gonna wear a bandanna.’

‘What about the banana? Doesn’t look much from here.’

‘It’s not the size they’re after, it’s the laugh.’

I looked at the stage. Howlin’ Dog House Don was holding his microphone stand at arm’s length and crooning, ‘Is it really you oo oo?’

‘Better get ready,’ said Gail. ‘When he’s finished this one they’ll be queueing at the bar faster than an outing of nuns at the true cross.’

She had mixed a washing-up bowl full of Dolly Parton on Ice, this month’s special. I began to line up the glasses and the tiny plastic bosoms that were replacing our cocktail umbrellas.

‘Come out for a meal after work,’ said Gail. ‘No strings. I’m finishing at midnight, I’ll finish you too if you fancy it.’

That was how I ended up in front of a Spaghetti Carbonara at Magic Pete’s.

Gail was drunk. She was so drunk that when her false eyelash fell into her soup she told the waiter it was a centipede.

‘I got something to tell you kiddo,’ she said leaning down at me the way a zoo keeper drops a fish at a penguin. ‘Want it?’