Written on the Body (16 page)

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?’

There was nothing else to have. Magic Pete’s was an all-night drinking club, low on amenity, high on booze. It was Gail’s revelation or find 50p for the juke box. I didn’t have 50p.

‘You made a mistake.’

In cartoon land this is where a saw comes up through the floor and teeths a neat hole round Bugs Bunny’s chair. What does she mean ‘I made a mistake’?

‘If you mean about us Gail, I couldn’t …’

She interrupted me. ‘I mean about you and Louise.’

She could hardly get the words out. She had her mouth propped on her fists and her elbows propped on the table. She kept trying to reach for my hand and falling sideways into the ice-bucket.

‘You shouldn’t have run out on her.’

Run out on her? That doesn’t sound like the heroics I’d had in mind. Hadn’t I sacrificed myself for her? Offered my life for her life?

‘She wasn’t a child.’

Yes she was. My child. My baby. The tender thing I wanted to protect.

‘You didn’t give her a chance to say what she wanted. You left.’

I had to leave. She would have died for my sake. Wasn’t it better for me to live a half life for her sake?

‘What’s the matter?’ slurred Gail. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

Not the cat, the worm of doubt. Who do I think I am? Sir Launcelot? Louise is a Pre-Raphaelite beauty but that doesn’t make me a mediaeval knight. Nevertheless I desperately wanted to be right.

We staggered out of Magic Pete’s towards Gail’s car. I wasn’t drunk but supporting Gail was a staggering sort of business. She was like a left-over jelly at a children’s party. She decided she was coming home with me even if I had to sleep in the armchair. Mile by mile she reviewed my mistakes. I began to wish that I’d done as I first intended and kept back some of my story. There was no stopping her now. She was a three-ton truck on a slope.

‘Honey, if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a hero without a cause. People like that just make trouble so that they can solve it.’

‘Is that what you think of me?’

‘I think you’re a crazy fool. Maybe you didn’t love her.’

This caused me to swing the wheel so violently that Gail’s gift-box collection of Tammy Wynette tapes skidded over the back and decapitated her nodding dog. Gail was sick down her blouse.

‘The trouble with you,’ she said wiping herself, ‘is that you want to live in a novel.’

‘Rubbish. I never read novels. Except Russian ones.’

‘They’re the worst. This isn’t War and Peace honey, it’s Yorkshire.’

‘You’re drunk.’

‘That’s right I am. I’m fifty-three and I’m as wild as a Welshman with a leek up his arse. Fifty-three. Old slag Gail. What right has she to poke her nose into your shining armour? That’s what you’re thinking isn’t it honey? I may not look much like a messenger from the gods but your girl isn’t the only one who’s got wings. I’ve got a pair of my own under here.’ (She patted her armpits.) ‘I’ve flown about a bit and picked up a few things and I’ll give one of them to you for nothing. You don’t run out on the woman you love. Especially you don’t when you think it’s for her own good.’ She hiccuped violently and covered her skirt with half-digested clams. I gave her my handkerchief. Finally she said, ‘You’d better go and find her.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Who said?’

‘I said. I gave my word. Even if I am wrong it’s too late now. Would you want to see me if I’d left you in the lurch with a man you despise?’

‘Yes,’ said Gail and passed out.

The following morning I caught the train to London. The heat through the carriage window made me sleepy and I slid into a light doze where Louise’s voice came to me as if under water. She was under water. We were in Oxford and she was swimming in the river, green on the sheen of her, pearl sheen of her body. We had lain down on the grass sun-scorched, grass turning hay, grass brittle on the baked clay, spear grass marking us in red weals. The sky was blue as in blue-eyed boy, not a wink of cloud, steady gaze, what a smile. A pre-war sky. Before the first world war there were days and days like this; long English meadows, insect hum, innocence and blue sky. Farm workers pitching the hay, women in waist aprons carrying pitchers of lemonade. Summers were hot, winters were snowy. It’s a pretty story.

Now here am I making up my own memories of good times. When we were together the weather was better, the days were longer. Even the rain was warm. That’s right, isn’t it? Do you remember when … I can see Louise sitting cross-legged under the plum tree in the Oxford garden. The plums have the look of asps’ heads in her hair. Her hair is still drying from the river, curling up round the plums. Against her copper hair the green leaves look like tarnish. My Lady of the Verdigris. Louise is one of the few women who might still be beautiful if she went mouldy.

On that day she was asking me whether I would be true to her and I replied, ‘With all my heart.’ Had I been true to her?

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds

Or bends with the remover to remove.

Oh no it is an ever fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken

It is the star to every wandering bark

Whose worth’s unknown altho’ his highth be taken.

When I was young I loved this sonnet. I thought a wandering bark was a young dog, rather as in Dylan Thomas’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
.

I have been a wandering bark of unknown worth but I thought I was a safe ship for Louise. Then I threw her overboard.

‘Will you be true to me?’

‘With all my heart.’

I took her hand and put it underneath my T-shirt. She took my nipple and squeezed it between finger and thumb.

‘And with all your flesh?’

‘You’re hurting me Louise.’

Passion is not well bred. Her fingers bit their spot. She would have bound me to her with ropes and had us lie face to face unable to move but move on each other, unable to feel but feel each other. She would have deprived us of all senses bar the sense of touch and smell. In a blind, deaf and dumb world we could conclude our passion infinitely. To end would be to begin again. Only she, only me. She was jealous but so was I. She was brute with love but so was I. We were patient enough to count the hairs on each other’s heads, too impatient to get undressed. Neither of us had
the upper hand, we wore matching wounds. She was my twin and I lost her. Skin is waterproof but my skin was not waterproof against Louise. She flooded me and she has not drained away. I am still wading through her, she beats upon my doors and threatens my innermost safety. I have no gondola at the gate and the tide is still rising. Swim for it, don’t be afraid. I am afraid. Is this her revenge?

‘I will never let you go.’

I went straight to my flat. I didn’t expect to find Louise there and yet there were signs of her occupation, some clothes, books, the coffee she liked. Sniffing the coffee told me that she hadn’t been there for some time, the beans had gone stale and she would never permit that. I picked up a sweater of hers and buried my face in it. Very faintly, her perfume.

I was strangely elated to be in my own home. Why are human beings so contradictory? This was the site of sorrow and separation, a place of mourning, but with the sun coming through the windows and the garden full of roses I felt hopeful again. We had been happy here too and some of that happiness had soaked the walls and patterned the furniture.

I decided to dust. I’ve found before that ceaseless menial work calms the rat-cage of the mind. I had to stop worrying and speculating for long enough to make a sensible plan. I needed peace and peace was not a quality I had come to know.

It was while I was scrubbing away the last of Miss Havisham that I found some letters to Louise from the hospital where she had gone for a second opinion. The letters were of the mind that since Louise was still asymptomatic no treatment should be considered. There
was some swelling of the lymphatic nodes but this had remained stable for six months. The consultant advised regular checks and a normal life. The three letters were dated after I had left. There was also a very impressive document from Elgin reminding Louise that he had been studying her case for two years and that in his humble opinion (‘May I remind you Louise that it is I and not Mr Rand who is best qualified to make decisions in this uncertain field’) she needed treatment. The address of his Swiss clinic was on the letterhead.