People began to linger and stare. When Richard, pink with shame, had whispered that he was hungry, she’d sent him to the beach vendors for hotdogs and chips. He’d got back to find a small crowd had gathered. She was laying strident claim to VIP connections and an important job in the theatre. As if.
Eventually the law had arrived, to the cheers and hoots of the onlookers: a policeman who spoke sternly, and a policewoman who had put her arm around Richard as though he were a little kid. The policeman had told his mother she would lose her son into foster care if she didn’t shape up. He’d told her to consult a solicitor if she had grievances. He’d driven them home in a squad car, his mother silent at last in the passenger seat and Richard in the back with the policewoman, who’d kept asking him if he was all right.
The black dress, the makeup, the handkerchief. Of course. He knew now why she was happy. She was planning to stage some kind of scene at the funeral. He had to dissuade her. ‘They’ll be expecting you to come, ready to laugh at you. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Tell you what, we’ll have a day of remembering him here, just you and me. You can tell me the whole story again, and we’ll watch his best bits, make an occasion of it. Remind me, you first met him at...?’
‘The Barbican,’ she said dreamily. ‘He was playing Oberon, and his crown got trampled onstage, so they sent me running to his dressing room with a new one. He held my hands to his heart, and he drank me in, Richard, you wouldn’t believe it. His eyes were so big, painted in turquoise and blue, and his chest was bare and so warm.’
Memory made her radiant: it wasn’t a leap to imagine her as a gullible twenty-year-old.
‘He smelled wonderful, of greasepaint and of the sweat from being out there under the lights, spellbinding more than a thousand people. So earthy, so sexy—’
‘Mum, okay.’ Always her account of this scene had him squirming. A lecherous fifty-one-year-old togged up as the king of the fairies.
His mother persisted. ‘He turned me to the mirror with the light bulbs all round it, and he put his face next to mine, cheek to cheek, and he asked me, ‘What is your name?’ And then he said, “Deborah Lawton, just look at you. You’re more beautiful by far than Titania, inside and out. Your soul sings in your eyes.” He poured me champagne and begged me to wait there in his dressing room. And when he came back—’
‘Enough for now,’ Richard said, ‘but we’ll make a day of it together, I promise, with non-stop Harry-movies, and I’ll bring champagne, the very best champagne.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘We have to go to the funeral.’
He leapt to his feet. ‘Oh, come on. Don’t do this.’ There must be a way to dissuade her. ‘You won’t get anywhere near him. You’ll only upset yourself. It’ll be massive. A memorial service in Westminster Abbey, they were saying on the radio this morning. Invitation only. Crowds in the streets—’
She interrupted sharply. ‘You’re being stupid on purpose. I’m not talking about that razzle-dazzle. That’s just for show. There’ll be a private funeral earlier. Soon. There’s no time to waste, Richard. We’re going to find out where it is, when it is, and then we’re going to be at it, both of us, and that’s final. Harry wants us to be there.’
No argument would shift her. ‘He wants us there,’ was her answer to everything, as if the rancid old bugger not only gave a damn but was still alive to give it. She insisted that Richard must ring his father’s agent the next day, because if he wouldn’t, she would, and if he wouldn’t go with her, she would go without him. She wore him down until he exploded, ‘Okay. You win. I’ll do it,’ and slammed out of the room, throwing himself into action in the kitchen, not caring if she heard him fill bin bags and scrub surfaces.
Eventually she came and watched, pale and silent, not commenting or protesting or snatching things from his hands. Maybe this was his opportunity: he would get some house-clearance firm out of bed and summon them round to start ferrying the whole contents of the place to the dump before she remembered how she needed every last worthless item. He strode back and forth to the street with the bags.
Then she started to wail, ‘Stop it. Please stop it, Richard. You’re frightening me.’
Her fear wasn’t fake. He dropped the bag he was carrying and let himself hug her, really hug her for the first time in years, shocked at how fragile she was beneath the black dress, feeling the pressure of her thin arms round his ribs, inhaling her perfume, burying his nose in her lacquered hair, almost crying himself.
Later, as he negotiated his way up past the heaps of theatre programmes and scripts on the stairs to snatch a couple of hours’ kip, he gathered resolve. He had to think this through as a grown-up, not as an eleven-year-old kid. Harry was dead at last, that was something, and if she made a public spectacle of herself, he would just have to weather it. But maybe she wouldn’t and the funeral would release him somehow. He would reach some resolution, be able to sign off on his anger. It was the nearest he would ever come to the callous father who’d never bothered to come to him.
On the landing he eased past the bundles of charity-shop glad rags, the tower of hat boxes and the rocking kangaroo, and found the key to his room on his key ring. Inside, he exhaled a sigh of release, stretching his arms in the space he kept empty of all but a bed, a lamp, a rug, a toothbrush on the washbasin, and The Times Atlas of the World.
He tipped sheet and pillowcase out from the pannier and gave the duvet a shake. With Harry gone, his mother might begin to turn herself round. Might accept the space he’d made in the kitchen and not fill it with jumble again. Might concede that she didn’t miss anything, allow him to throw out more stuff next time. He would come for a whole day, talk to her seriously, get her to acknowledge her hoarding and stealing and smothering and clinging, to accept counselling even. He’d persuade her to sit tight in the front room while he cleared another area. Bit by bit, visit by visit, he would liberate the kitchen before making a start on the hall.
Or he would brave her hysterics and get it done anyway, calmly, hugging her tears away afterwards. With Harry gradually forgotten, her house would become normal, his mother would become normal. She would make friends, develop less morbid interests, and at last he could leave her.
He sat on the bed and sent two quick texts: one to Claire, saying he was tied up looking after his mother, and the other to Tiffany, praising her brilliance, telling her she was a godsend, and asking her to open up because he wouldn’t arrive until mid-morning. Then he stripped and slid into bed, reaching for the atlas to lull him to sleep. Harry’s death was a milestone. It might or might not mark a new start for his mother, but either way he was determined to claim his own freedom. Where should he google tomorrow? He consulted the index. Dalgety, Dalhousie, Dalmatia, Dalwhinnie...
Someone was moving below. He got out of bed and moved silently to the door, easing it open a crack. A draft of night air came up the stairs, and the noises were unmistakable now. A rustle, a clink, a soft thud. The sounds of his mother carrying the bin bags back in.
Two Wednesdays later
Harry
Dear God, how much longer? I’ve lost track of the days. Skewered by fear until I’m weary of fear, abandoned in this refrigerated warehouse, stacked floor to ceiling with bodies festering like bad wine in a cellar. The only sound is a tap dripping somewhere, counting the interminable seconds.
The corpse mocks me with a semblance of life where there is none. I’ve examined it so minutely it has become unfamiliar, as though I never spent all those years rehearsing its moves, fretting its aging, watching its weight, shaving its chin, picking fluff from its navel. Drained of the life that was me, no longer my professional tool, my means of sensual enjoyment, it has become my millstone. Desperate to be away from it, instead I can only flitter around it, enduring the impotent hours. Who knew that time could extend so as I wait for the door to burst open and the daylight to flood in, craving the raucous jests of the undertakers. I know their names now: Bill and Frank.
Sometimes
they arrive empty-handed and whistling to fetch one of us out. The disintegrating hag who accompanied me here went off yesterday. The young black man, two down and one along from me, looks philosophical waiting his turn, his handsome face so serene he might be an actor taking his curtain call.
Sometimes they manhandle a new corpse from trolley to hoisting machine and slot it in among us. What sights of ugly death! Many are barely recognisable as human: mangled by post-mortems, smashed in accidents, crisped and blackened by fire. This is it. This is what we all come to. Meaningless husks. Refuse disposal.
Except no, here I am, still myself, as some of these ruined creatures surely are too. I beam the message yet again – Is anyone there? – but no answer comes, only the drip of the tap. It’s hopeless: my fellow shades are as unheard and unseen as I am. Scotty smiled at me, heard me, held me in his hands, but he’s ‘one level up’. ‘Look in a mirror,’ he said. ‘You’ll see you’re not anything at all.’ We lost souls are lost to each other. The laws of the universe are cruel indeed.
I refuse to despair. Significant emotional investment: Scotty’s phrase nags at me. He started this way himself, he said, perched on the nose of a sixty-three-year-old railway clerk, and then he jumped, or transferred or whatever the term is, to someone he cared for, and he never looked back.
Fear closes in like a smothering pillow because, although I adored my work and my home and the power that so much money gave me, and the wide, beautiful world, and life itself, God help me, all that is far, far away, out of reach, which leaves only the possibility of some person I cared about who may come to the funeral. But each person I think of is tiresome or tedious or trivial. Try as I may, I can call to mind no one, not even a woman, least of all an ex-wife, who held my attention for long, let alone earned my deep affection. Taken individually, human beings are so paltry. I’ve rubbed shoulders, raised glasses, been intimate in one way or another with the good and the great and the bad and the humble and found them all disappointing, no match for the marvel of humankind gathered together as a spellbound audience. Even if I have overlooked someone and whoever it is comes to see me off, how in heaven’s name will I know they are there? I’ll be shut away in the coffin as I was in the mortuary fridge, one second outside it, frantic to escape, and then, as the lid closes, dragged in along with the body.
I have to hope that won’t matter. Within ten metres, did Scotty say? Maybe I’ll sense my rescuer somehow and the coffin won’t hinder me. I’ll pass through the velvet and the silk wadding and the solid oak and fly to whoever it is. It had better be so because, if not, what then? I’ll remain with any particle of the body, he said. I imagine riding a speck of my own dust to a crematorium worker’s sleeve, later to be disgorged from a washing machine into a sewer. Or will I swirl with the smoke up the chimney and be carried off who knows where by the wind? Awful to contemplate, but the alternative is even more awful: sealed in the urn, never to see light again. I should have asked for my ashes to be scattered. Instead I specified ‘interment in a modest memorial’, confidently imagining myself in Poets’ Corner in the Abbey, alongside Larry and Irving. Ah, take care what you wish for. I shall be alone in a stone vault in darkness and silence, perpetually wakeful, time without end. No, no, have pity.
I need to share this with someone, to beg for reprieve. ‘I’ll try to look into your case,’ Scotty said. ‘I’ll come again if I’m free.’ I’ve called on him endlessly, using the name and number he gave me, Pickles 64123, but he hasn’t appeared, not a gleam, not a glimmer.
At last, some relief. The throb of an engine, slammed doors and footsteps. Sunlight streams through the doorway, and in come Bill and Frank. Thank heaven for the sheer, loutish animation of them, blowing their cigarette smoke, sniggering at some banal profanity.
The trolley they’re pushing is empty. They trundle the rickety hoist into place at the far end and move it towards me.
Joy and horror, I’m the one they have come for!
They are sliding Lord Whittaker out and away, and me along with him.
I was alone in the unmarked grey van, with no new visitation from Scotty. They’ve brought me to the back room of a funeral parlour, where my body lies naked, face up on a table. Nearby waits the sumptuous coffin I chose for myself, not trusting to leave the choice to incompetents. I shrink from it, tugging in the other direction, straining uselessly to break free, while Bill and Frank pull on coveralls and surgical gloves and squirt disinfectant into hot water in preparation for administering the ‘gold star, full malarkey’ treatment they mentioned in the hospital mortuary.
‘Has anyone asked to view ’im?’ says Frank.
‘I’ll check,’ says Bill and ducks into the next room. ‘Nah,’ he says, coming back. ‘He ordered embalming, make-up, the ’ole lot, but let’s skip it. What the eye doesn’t see we can put in the till. It’s a straight coffin job.’
The swindling bastards – but I’ve no time to be angry. This is it. Here I go, any minute, into the dark, abandoned by everyone.
Rigor mortis wore off days ago. These animals are running flannels across my limp corpse, flipping it on its side and making unrepeatable jokes. I thrash about uselessly. This is happening in slow motion, with ghastly inevitability.
They have my best dress suit on a hanger – Simon must have brought it to them – and Frank holds up a pair of my shoes.
‘What size?’ says Bill.
‘Ten.’
‘They’d do for my dad. D’you think?’
‘Go for it. If someone wants a look, we can sort him out sharpish.’
Bill examines the suit. ‘Tailor-made. Should fetch a bob or two.’ He rezips the cover and goes off with it.
Then he’s back, and – no – no – they’re moving tables together, the high one the body is on, the low one the coffin is on. They’re getting ready to tip the one into the other and me along with it. Oh Scotty – I mean Pickles – Albert Pickles 64123 – anyone, please help me, please, please. I lived such a bad life. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I couldn’t be more sorry. Set me free, and I swear I’ll spend the whole of eternity bringing comfort to the afflicted, the lonely. Anything, anything, but let them not do this.
The body is in, slumped on its side against the cherry velvet padding, and I’m fighting wildly to get out from under it as they heft the lid from where it leans against the wall and raise it up and lower it onto me. No, no, no—
The lid is on the coffin, they’re screwing it down, but glory be – I am outside it! In a euphoric moment I find myself pardoned and free.
Bill and Frank are stripping off their coveralls, heading for the front office. I’ll go with them, back to the land of the living, what blissful release! But no – try as I may, I still cannot follow. I have to stay behind.
This is nonsensical. I hover above the coffin, reading my name engraved in brass. I’m still tethered, I don’t understand. Then I do. Comprehension sweeps through me in a surge of new horror and helplessness. That maudlin Sunday I spent, mourning my mortality, selecting this casket, imagining myself lifeless within it – did that count as significant emotional investment?
I want to scream, but lack voice. Lack everything but an insane predicament. I batter the coffin with my silent howls.
Richard
‘Gosh, I’m excited. Aren’t you excited?’ said Claire. She flopped down on the sofa and put her damp bare feet in his lap. Her blonde hair dripped on her shoulders. Steamy from the shower, she had a flirtatious look in her eye.
‘Not half,’ Richard said. Her towel was slipping, and he gave it a tug. There was a condom in his back pocket.
‘Hey, stop that,’ she tugged back, ‘I want to watch telly. About tomorrow, I mean. I wonder who’ll be there. Wall-to-wall famous faces. Will they all be old actors, do you think? He must have known dozens of young ones as well.’
Richard hunted around for the remote. ‘I’m trying not to think much about it. I’m worried what Mum will get up to.’
He’d started this e
vening at home in his flat, but the laptop images of elsewhere had lost their power to distract him. Today’s letter was O, always tricky. Oban wasn’t foreign enough and Oman looked far too expensive. He’d stopped googling, logged off and come round to Claire’s, to escape into sex and TV-land instead.
His mother was hard to read. Last night when he’d cycled over there she’d reminded him of Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire. In a flimsy white frock, fluttering her lace handkerchief, she’d run from room to room, pulling one thing after another from the stacks and the heaps, reminiscing, rearranging, making impromptu speeches, and all the while quivering with nerves.
‘You don’t need to do this,’ he’d told her. ‘You don’t need to put yourself through it. Harry wouldn’t have expected it. He’d be amazed you even care.’
She had sagged momentarily, which had him hoping she might relent, but with a grand flourish of the handkerchief, she had straightened her back and announced to the dress circle, ‘Pride of place at his funeral is the very least Harry owes us.’
Fuelling her excitement was the fact that, wonder of wonders, they were indeed welcome, and not to the service alone, also to the reception in Marine Parade. At last she would gaze in triumph from those fine Regency windows instead of up at them from the pavement below. She could scarcely contain herself.
The service was tomorrow afternoon, four o’clock at Woodvale Crematorium, just north of Brighton. His father’s theatrical agency had given Richard the number of a neighbour who was organising it, and once he was sure Richard wasn’t a reporter, Mr Foyle had effusively welcomed him onto the guest list.
‘His son! Well, I never – that’s extraordinary. He didn’t breathe a word to me about having a son. No, really, I don’t doubt you for a moment – Harry was quite a rogue by all accounts. It’s truly wonderful news – I’ll be delighted to see you, and yes, of course bring your mother – it goes without saying – and anyone else as your guest. Please keep it to yourselves, though, as I don’t want the media turning up and spoiling the day. You simply must come back afterwards. There’ll be smoked salmon and champagne at Harry’s. I can’t wait to meet you and your mother. No, no, please don’t thank me, and you must call me Simon.’
The Posthumous Adventures of Harry Whitaker Page 5