Written on the Body (18 page)

DIY has never caught on. There’s something macabre about making your own coffin. You can buy boat kits, house kits, garden furniture kits, but not coffin kits. Providing the holes were pre-drilled and properly lined up I foresee no disasters. Wouldn’t it be the tenderest thing to do for the beloved?

The funeral here today is banked with flowers; pale lilies, white roses and branches of weeping willow. It
always starts well and then gives way to apathy and plastic tulips in a milkbottle. The alternative is a fake Wedgwood vase jammed up against the headstone rain or shine with a wild Woolworth’s spray to topple it over.

I wonder if I’m missing something. Perhaps like calls unto like which is why the flowers are dead. Perhaps they’re dead when they’re put out. Maybe people think that in a cemetery things should be dead. There’s a certain logic in that. Perhaps it’s rude to litter the place with thriving summer beauty and autumn splendour. For myself I would prefer a red berberis against a creamy marble slab.

To return to the hole, as we all will. Six feet long, six feet deep and two wide is the standard although this can be varied on request. It’s a great leveller the hole, for no matter what fanciness goes in it, rich and poor occupy the same home at last. Air bounded by mud. Your basic Gallipoli, as they call it in the trade.

A hole is hard work. I’m told this is something the public don’t appreciate. It’s an old-fashioned time-consuming job and it has to be done frost or hail. Dig while the ooze soaks through your boots. Lean on the side for a breather and get wet to the bone. Very often in the nineteenth century a grave-digger would die of the damp. Digging your own grave wasn’t a figure of speech then.

For the bereaved, the hole is a frightful place. A dizzy chasm of loss. This is the last time you’ll be by the side of the one you love and you must leave her, must leave him, in a dark pit where the worms shall begin their duty.

For most the look before the lid is screwed down lasts a lifetime, eclipses other friendlier pictures. Before sinkage, as they call it at the mortuary, a body must be washed, disinfected, drained, plugged and made-up. These chores
were regularly done at home not so many years ago but they weren’t chores then, they were acts of love.

What would you do? Pass the body into the hands of strangers? The body that has lain beside you in sickness and in health. The body your arms still long for dead or not. You were intimate with every muscle, privy to the eyelids moving in sleep. This is the body where your name is written, passing into the hands of strangers.

Your beloved has gone down to a foreign land. You call but your beloved does not hear. You call in the fields and in the valleys but your beloved does not answer. The sky is closed and silent, there is no-one there. The ground is hard and dry. Your beloved will not return that way. Perhaps only a veil divides you. Your beloved is waiting on the hills. Be patient and go with nimble feet dropping your body like a scroll.

I walked away from the funeral up through the private part of the cemetery. It had been allowed to run wild. Angels and open bibles were girdled with ivy. The undergrowth was alive. The squirrels that hopped across the tombs and the blackbird singing in the tree were uninterested in mortality. For them worm, nut and sunrise were enough.

‘Beloved wife of John.’ ‘Only daughter of Andrew and Kate.’ ‘Here lies one who loved not wisely but too well.’ Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Beneath the holly trees two men were digging a grave with rhythmic determination. One touched his cap as I passed and I felt a fraud for taking sympathy not mine to have. In the dying day the ring of the spade and the low voices of the men were cheerful to me. They would be going home for tea and a wash. Absurd that the round of life should be so reassuring even here.

I looked at my watch. Locking up time soon. I should go, not out of fear but out of respect. The sun setting behind the rows of birch long-shadowed the path. The unyielding flatstones caught the light, it gilded the deep lettering, burst along the trumpets of the angels. The ground was alive with light. Not the yellow ochre of spring but heavy autumn carmine. The blood season. Already they were shooting in the wood.

I hurried my steps. Perversely, I wanted to stay. What do the dead do at night? Do they come forth grinning at the wind whistling through their ribs. What do they care that it is cold? I blew on my hands and reached the gate as the night security guard was clanking the heavy chain and padlock. Was he locking me out or locking them in? He winked conspiratorially and patted his crotch where hung an eighteen-inch length of flashlight. ‘Nothin’ escapes me,’ he said.

I ran over the road to the café, a fancy place on the European model but with higher prices and shorter opening hours. I used to meet you here before you left Elgin. We used to come here together after sex. You were always hungry after we had made love. You said it was me you wanted to eat so it was decent of you to settle for a toasted sandwich. Sorry, Croque Monsieur, according to the menu.

I had scrupulously avoided our old haunts – that’s the advice in the grief books – until today. Until today I had hoped to find you or more modestly to find out how you are. I never thought to be Cassandra plagued by dreams. I am plagued. The worm of doubt has long since found a home in my intestines. I no longer know what to trust or what is right. I get a macabre comfort from my worm.
The worms that will eat you are first eating me. You won’t feel the blunt head burrowing into your collapsing tissue. You won’t know the blind persistence that mocks sinew, muscle, cartilage, until it finds bone. Until the bone itself gives way. A dog in the street could gnaw on me, so little of substance have I become.

The gate from the cemetery leads here, to this café. There’s a subconscious reassurance in slipping scalding coffee down an active throat. Let the bogeys and bloody-bones, raw-heads and ghouls bother us if they can. This is light and warmth and smoke and solidity. I decided to try the café, out of masochism, out of habit, out of hope. I thought it might comfort me, although I noticed how little comfort was to be got from familiar things. How dare they stay the same when so much that mattered had changed? Why does your sweater senselessly smell of you, keep your shape when you are not there to wear it? I don’t want to be reminded of you, I want you. I’ve been thinking of leaving London, going back to the ridiculous rented cottage for a while. Why not? Make a fresh start, isn’t that one of those useful clichés?

October. Why stay? There’s nothing worse than being in a crowded place when you are alone. The city is always crowded. Since I’ve been in this café with a calvados and an espresso the door has opened eleven times bringing in a boy or a girl to meet a boy or a girl with a calvados and an espresso. Behind the high brass and glass counter the staff in long aprons are joking. There’s music on, soul stuff, everyone’s busy, happy or, it seems, purposefully unhappy. Those two over there, he pensive she agitated. Things aren’t going well but at least they’re talking. I’m the only person alone in this café and I used to love being alone. That was when I had the luxury of knowing that
soon someone would push open the heavy door and look for me. I remember those times, getting to the assignation an hour early to have a drink by myself and read a book. I was almost regretful when the hour came and the door opened and it was time to stand up and kiss you on the cheek and rub your cold hands. It was the pleasure of walking in the snow in a warm coat, that choosing to be alone. Who wants to walk in the snow naked?

I paid and left. Out here in the street, striding purposefully, I can give the impression that I’ve got somewhere to go. There’s a light on in my flat and you’ll be there as arranged with your own key. I don’t have to hurry, I’m enjoying the night and the cold on my cheeks. Summer’s gone, the cold’s welcome. I did the shopping today and you said you’d cook. I’ll call and get the wine. It gives me a loose-limbed confidence to know you’ll be there. I’m expected. There’s a continuum. There’s freedom. We can be kites and hold each other’s string. No need to worry the wind will be too strong.

Here I am outside my flat. The lights are out. The rooms are cold. You won’t come back. Nevertheless, sitting on the floor by the door, I’m going to write you a letter with my address and leave it in the morning when I go. If you get this please answer, I’ll meet you in the café and you’ll be there won’t you. Won’t you?

After the roar of the Intercity train, the slow sway of the branch-line carriage. Nowadays British Rail call me ‘You the Customer’ but I prefer my old-fashioned appellant, ‘Passenger’. Don’t you think ‘I glanced at my fellow passengers’ has a more romantic and promising air to it than ‘I glanced at the other customers on the train’? Customers buy cheese, loofahs and condoms. Passengers
may have all these in their luggage but it is not the thought of their purchases that makes them interesting. A fellow passenger might be an adventure. All I have in common with a fellow customer is my wallet.

At the mainline station I ran beyond the booming intercom and the ‘Delayed’ board. Behind the parcels depot was a little track that used to be the only track at this station. Years ago the buildings were painted burgundy and the waiting-room had a real fire and a copy of the morning newspaper. If you asked the Stationmaster the time he would pull an enormous gold Hunter from his waistcoat pocket and consult it like a Greek at Delphi. The answer would be presented to you as an eternal truth even though it was already in the past. I was very young when such things happened, young enough to shelter under the Stationmaster’s paunch while my father looked him in the eye. Too young to be expected to tell the truth myself.

Now the little track is under sentence of death and may be executed next year. There’s no waiting room, nowhere to hide from the squalling wind or beating rain. This is a modern platform.

The wheezing train shuddered to a halt and belched. It was dirty, four carriages long, no sign of guard or conductor. No sign of a driver except for a folded copy of the
Sun
at the engine window. Inside, the hot smell of brakes and the rich smell of oil colluded with the unswept floor into familiar railway nausea. I felt at home at once and settled to watch the scenery through an evocative film of dust.

In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have
recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of
Anna Karenina
? ‘All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.’ In fact it’s the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.

Misery is a vacuum. A space without air, a suffocated dead place, the abode of the miserable. Misery is a tenement block, rooms like battery cages, sit over your own droppings, lie on your own filth. Misery is a no U-turns, no stopping road. Travel down it pushed by those behind, tripped by those in front. Travel down it at furious speed though the days are mummified in lead. It happens so fast once you get started, there’s no anchor from the real world to slow you down, nothing to hold on to. Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. Whatever your private hell, you’ll find millions like it in Misery. This is the town where everyone’s nightmares come true.

In the train carriage, shut behind the thick glass, I feel comfortably locked away from responsibility. I know I’m running away but my heart has become a sterile zone where nothing can grow. I don’t want to face facts, shape up, snap out of it. In the pumped-out, dry bed of my heart, I’m learning to live without oxygen. I might get to like it in a masochistic way. I’ve sunk too low to make decisions and that brings with it a certain lightheaded freedom. Walking on the moon there’s no gravity. There are dead souls in uniform ranks, spacesuits too bulky for touch, helmets too heavy for speech. The miserable millions moving in time without hope. There are no clocks in Misery, just an endless ticking.

The train has been delayed and we are sitting in
a cutting with nothing but the rustle of an evening paper and the tired stirrings of the engine. Nothing will intrude upon this passive derelict scene. I’ve got my feet up on the stained upholstery. The man two seats away is snoring in sleep. We can’t get out and we can’t get on. What does it matter? Why not relax in the overheated stagnant air?
IN THE EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS
. This is an emergency but I can’t lift my arm high enough to smash my way out. I haven’t got the strength to sound the alarm. I want to stand up strong and tall, leap through the window, brush the shards from my sleeve and say, ‘That was yesterday, this is today.’ I want to accept what I’ve done and let go. I can’t let go because Louise might still be on the other end of the rope.

The station at the village is a small one and leads directly on to a lane and through fields spread with winter wheat. There’s never a ticket collector, only a 40-watt bulb and a sign that says ‘
THIS WAY
’. I’m thankful for a little guidance.

The path is bulked with cinders that give a high-pitched clink under your shoes. Your shoes will have charcoal patches and flakes of white ash but it’s better than mud on a rainy night. It’s not raining tonight. The sky is clear and hard, not a cloud, only stars and a drunken moon swinging on her back. There’s a line of ash trees by the picket fence that takes you out of man-made things into the deep country where the land’s not good for anything but sheep. I can hear the sheep munching invisibly over tussocks of grass thick as a pelt. Be careful to keep on the right, there’s a ditch.

I could have got a taxi that late night, not chosen to walk six miles without a torch. It was the slap of
the cold, the shock in my lungs that sent me up the cinder path and away from the pub and the telephone. I slung my bag on my back and made for the outline of the hill. Up and over. Three miles up, three miles down. We walked all night once, Louise and I, walked out of darkness as though it were a tunnel. We walked into the morning, the morning was waiting for us, it was already perfect, high sun over a level plain. Looking back I thought I saw the darkness where we had left it. I didn’t think it could come after us.