Dry Bones

by Richard Beard

  ‘Go sleep on a chair,’ Helena said.

  ‘I’m so glad you came. I love you.’

  ‘Look, Jay. I’m not going to sleep with you. You’re drunk.’

  She didn’t mean it. We’d slept together hundreds of times, and I was a good lover, and imaginative in bed. I often imagined other women.

  She was now saying something else, but I don’t think I was listening. As she spoke, I leant back on my hands and let the drink increase my awareness of detail: the down on her earlobe, the single bitten nail on the index finger of her right hand, the sunspots on her neck. It was a kind of preparation, and if not, then a kind of replacement.

  ‘Come here,’ she said, holding out her arms. ‘Just come here.’

  I stood and stepped between her welcoming arms, and she held me, and I thought she might be crying. I held her tight, as close as I could, a body-to-body crush in which I lost myself, forgetting who I was. Yes, that was love, I remembered now. Forgetting who I was. I wanted to hear her breath. I turned my head, wanting the little weather of her breath on my cheek, my neck, and although Helena had a very lovely back and spine, my hands found themselves somehow round towards the front of her strapping black dress.

  ‘James.’

  What now?

  ‘I mean it. Go and sleep in the armchair.’

  ‘Let’s get married.’

  ‘You’re dreaming. Sleep it off.’

  I went to hold her again, but she poked me in the ribs. ‘Actually,’ I corrected her, but not nearly quick enough to sound sober, ‘I’m fantasising.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘More details.’

  She pushed me away, and looked at me with love, or perhaps pity. ‘Jay, you should try and mean the things you say.’

  ‘I’m a good catch. You could do a lot worse.’

  And not just once, but in one mistaken marriage after another, with the very rich but violent heir to the Hilton hotel chain, and a senator in decline many years her senior, and an opportunist builder of bungalows. Oh yes, I had her now.

  ‘Good night, Jay,’ she said, resting her hands on my chest, gently pushing me from the room. ‘Sleep well.’

  I waited outside the door, thinking it would suddenly open and she’d pull me in. But the door didn’t open. I went into the kitchen, and poured a very small sherry into one of the mugs. Down the hatch. I poured myself another, slightly larger, and officially considered it my first.

  Then I carried it through to the living-room, not the mug, but the bottle, and balanced on the arm of the armchair. Genuinely, for most of the day, I’d been determined not to drink. But up on the hillside above Morges, Helena had reminded me what I was. I was no one out of the ordinary, and there would be no body-snatching, and no salvation. So I had a drink, because I couldn’t see the harm, and at this rate, drinking from the bottle all day and every day, I still wouldn’t kill myself for another twenty-six years.

  So I’d had a drink, to help me forget, I forget what, and now I was astonishingly drunk, except after a while it wasn’t astonishing any more, just a fact of existence. I was drunk, and the miracle needed constant refreshing to help me conceive of all the contented and fulfilled people I never was. And sometimes, even if just in snatches, to believe I could become them.

  All I wanted was Helena, a house near a stream in the shadow of mountains, and lots of little Byczynski-Masons laughing and gambolling in a water-meadow. With occasional trips to the city for the company of younger and prettier women. And then Helena again. In my cups, I could imagine every detail, and therefore concluded it must be possible.

  From my haughty position on the arm of the chair, I pulled off the cushions and tumbled them to the floor. I ought to sleep, but it wasn’t in Burton’s nature to give up so easily. I had another nip from the bottle, not prepared to settle for Possible not Probable, a lightweight at wing-forward, with the wrong type of bones to make my presence felt.

  Burton was an avid reader who failed as a writer (he wasn’t James Joyce), but still he went on writing. He was an ambitious lover who failed as a husband, three times, and then he married again. He was a natural actor and heir to Olivier with a blighted future in TV specials in the limited States of America, but he never stepped back from his craft. He was a family man who failed to protect his family, his brother the granite Ifor falling down drunk after a family binge in Céligny’s Café de la Gare, and paralysed for life. But still Burton sent twice-yearly cheques and Taylor’s old dresses and plane-tickets and cars to cousins and nephews and nieces in the valleys.

  He never gave in, not even to the ancestral pull of vague Welsh melancholy, the hiraeth for the green hills of an idealised home. He fought that like everything else, and by the end he could be found shuffling round Geneva in white shoes and a red turtleneck, frail and crooked and beaten, his arms withered, his bones gnarled and jarred by rugby at the pitheads, his body thinned and weakened by the fastness of life, abused and brittle, the spent valley boyo a regrettable feature in the bars of international hotels, but still reciting poetry, an obvious success, drinking, still acting, failing.

  He left unsolved the conundrum of how best to live.

  When still a boy, his elder and beloved sister Cis, who did most of the work of bringing him up, used to ask him why he couldn’t be happy. He was the strongest and smartest of all the Pontrhydyfen boys, and still he wasn’t happy. The young boy Burton would tap and tap his fetching head.

  ‘Too much of this, Cis. Too much of this.’

  He thought too much, and at the end, in the free-fall of his self-destruction, this was his most frequent thought: there must be more to life than putting on make-up and pulling on tights and replicating the frustration of others.

  Acting was not a serious vocation. It was a light and flippant thing to have grown old while going through life disguised. To have lifted up, week after week, other people’s words in the echoes of old beliefs, knowing that this play-acting would be the main business of life, in the slender hope that acting itself was a kind of discovery, with its own kind of truth.

  I wanted to be someone else, anyone else.

  The drink wasn’t working. That was the worst of the failures. Richard Burton never gave up, not even at the bottom of his three daily bottles of vodka, with crystals of alcohol forming on his spine. And yet, despite his dedication to the drink, he remained himself, always the small boy from the Baptist Chapel, hauled back from greatness by the niggard claims of conscience.

  Thou Shalt Not.

  What had held us back, as he’d held back all men of fire and passion for many centuries, was John Calvin. If it hadn’t been for him (no games, no theatre, no drinking), the great Burton and others like us, the strong and the brave, we were the ones who’d have inherited the earth.

  I decided to dig up John Calvin. It made perfect sense to me. He deserved it, and that would get me clean.

  One for the road, and then I gathered up tools, humming over and over Land of My Fathers. Just inside the doorway, I drained the bottle, Jay Mason Minor the adrift and exiled deacon, the rationalist, the son of his vicar father and mummy’s favourite. And even now, still now, at the age of thirty-four, also this wild Welsh boy shining out with greatness. It was another of my lost lives, unled, not lived.

  My ancestors would have known me well as I stumbled outside into the darkness, deep in drink, and back to the man’s work of mining.

  Jung’s Knee

  ‘It was only after I had reached the central point in my thinking and in my researches, namely the concept of the self, that I found my way back to the world.’

  Carl Gustav Jung, Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower

  THE NEXT MORNING I was woken by Helena padding out of the bathroom, the cistern refilling. I rolled on to my back: I was on the woodblock floor of the living-room, my neck stiff and my shoulder sore to the bone. From the kitchen, I heard a stifled gasp, then Helena in the doorway hands on hips. She was wearing my blue-black car
digan as a dressing-gown, the wool at the end of the sleeves bunched between her fingers. She took a step forward, and kicked me hard on the sole of the foot.

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘What the fuck is that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know what.’

  I did a single sit-up, to get myself sitting up, and immediately wished I hadn’t. After my second successive late night I felt terrible, tongue dry, bones aching, head splitting in a serrated line through my bleeding right eye to my nostril. Relics were supposed to heal, as in miracles, but secular remains plainly couldn’t be trusted. I stood up and shuffled to the kitchen for gallons of water.

  And in the middle of the floor, splayed open to reveal a muddle of dirt and bones, a brown plastic bin-liner. Black for waste. Brown for recycling. It was the new skeleton I’d dug up last night.

  ‘I can’t believe you did this,’ Helena said. ‘This is sick. You seriously need help.’

  ‘I’m not. I don’t.’

  ‘Put them back. Right now. Wherever they came from, put them straight back.’

  ‘Helena, just.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just be quiet for a moment.’

  I was an idiot to have left the bin-liner out in the open. I didn’t remember leaving it there. I didn’t remember coming back from the cemetery. All I could remember: I didn’t know who it was.

  It was supposed to have been John Calvin. And last night, this too I remembered, there had been many incontestable reasons for choosing John Calvin. Revenge was one. Money another. In the catalogue, Calvin was at the top end of the price range, up there with Constantine and Karl Marx. These were the big three in the spiritual history of the West.

  At the time, completely plastered, I was confident it’d be a breeze. Calvin was nearly 500 years dead. He had no close relations to offend or traumatise. In his own lifetime, he’d placed no value on burial, or his own bones, so the man himself couldn’t have cared less. After 500 years, it would be more like digging up Elizabeth Taylor’s Snowflake (1973–1979 My Darling Most Precious). And Calvin was only round the corner, so I didn’t even have to drive.

  The weather had been perfect, the half-moon in a patchy sky enough to outline the stones and, further on, the sharp angles of the mechanical digger. With a fresh wind rustling the trees and muffling abrupt noises, I vaulted the low wall in a single fearless bound, and stalked lightly across the grass to Calvin’s corner. You can do it, I told myself. I was hoping, even now, without a recent drink, or a clutch of agreeable girlfriends, or a yacht with yapping dogs on, that I was actually Richard Burton, rugged and dauntless, the Major Smith of Where Eagles Dare. I was counting on the continuation of miracles.

  It took me a little while to locate Calvin’s headstone, which was the size of a shoebox and marked only J.C. Following Rifka’s advice, I immediately went to work on the seal of the recumbent. I’d expected it to be more difficult, after 500 years, but I soon had the mortar away and the stone quietly sliding. I applied my skills with an absolute drunken concentration that allowed me to do one thing very well. I wouldn’t have been able to talk at the same time, for example, or care about anyone coming.

  Using the trowel, digging, I expected the old bones to have risen close to the surface. I sank the trowel at least three feet, even a little further, then probed even deeper with the crowbar. There were no bones, no remnants of anything. The grave was full of nothing but mud. John Calvin wasn’t there.

  I was feeling stubborn, a pig-headed and self-willed Celt, and I’d come to the cemetery for relics. I had the attitude and the skills and the tools. I closed up Calvin, and started in my tenacious way on the next grave along. Or maybe not the next one, but the next after that. Anyway, it was quite close by, and it wasn’t easy, but after all the effort and the drink I refused to leave the cemetery without some celebrity bones.

  I soon had them out and into the bin-liner. The earth went back in, the stone back on. And for the second time that night, just as I had with Calvin, I brushed the stone clean and tidied the edges and applied my home-made paste to the join, replacing the mortar I’d earlier chipped away.

  The details were a blank. No matter how hard I tried, I genuinely couldn’t remember who I’d taken in place of the absent Calvin. I had no memory of the stone, or any dates, no names in my head. I remembered that John Calvin wasn’t there, but the rest was impenetrable, a haze, a blackness.

  ‘Am I supposed to be impressed?’

  ‘I was drunk.’

  ‘So why drink so much?’

  ‘I don’t know. Cry for help?’

  ‘Yesterday was a very strange day, Jay, but this is worse. Much worse. I didn’t realise how far it had gone. Jay.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Listen to me. Why are you being so odd?’

  ‘I guess I’m just an odd kind of person.’

  ‘You didn’t use to be, not like this. Not odd. Inconsistent, maybe.’

  ‘Then I’m an inconsistent kind of person.’

  ‘So cold.’

  ‘I’m a cold person.’

  ‘You’re not yourself.’

  ‘So who am I, then?’

  ‘Frankly, Jamie, you’re being an arsehole. And you’re making an idiot of yourself. Look at this. Just look at it.’

  She gestured at the upright lump of the bin-bag as if she was going to slap it, and then kick it. In the end, she just walked around it, the sleeves of the cardigan gripped tightly in her hands. ‘You’re a fucking mess, James Mason. You need help.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, suddenly falling in on myself. ‘I know I’ve not been myself. I am a fucking mess.’

  ‘There’s more, isn’t there? Tell me the worst. Tell me everything.’

  I put down my third glass of water and went through to the bedroom, which smelled warmly of Helena in the morning. I opened the closet, and brushed aside my various shirts and cardigans to pull out Dad’s heavy kit-bag, now damp through the canvas in patches.

  ‘Oh no.’

  It was open. Helena peered in, over the top. ‘And who the fuck is that?’

  ‘That,’ I said, feeling very awkward, and even embarrassed by my lowly taste in the famous, ‘is Mr Richard Burton.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The actor. Burton and Taylor. Liz and Dick.’

  ‘Oh God, oh no. What else?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Why? What on earth possessed you? And does anyone else know? You’ve got to sort yourself out, Jay, because this is frankly unbelievable. When we talked about it yesterday, I assumed you were joking. What the hell were you thinking of?’

  ‘It seemed like a good idea. Harmless. And for the money. You know. Because it’s the information age, and real things command a premium. I thought it was a kind of materialism, in keeping with the times, but taken to a higher level.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Jay, feel the difference. They’re not just another commodity.’

  ‘Aren’t they? People buy them. They pay handsomely. Apparently it’s a buoyant market, and the future of the antiquities industry.’

  ‘But it’s still not right, is it?’

  Of course not. Obviously it wasn’t. I’d been overwhelmed by a fantasy of my own making, a deluded Welshman living the hero of one of the old Welsh stories, in which only the Welsh were hard and grand and heroic. The attempt to live like Richard Burton was absurd, as if I had the same failings, the same appetites, and girls rolling over me like wheels.

  ‘Either the bones go, or I do,’ Helena said.

  She’d started to fold her clothes on to the bed, and I suddenly most urgently needed her to stay. The bones go, the bones. I did not want to speak with the dead. I wanted to stay on good terms, in a sane and acceptable manner, with the living.

  ‘The bones,’ I said. ‘I’ll get rid of the bones. God’s honour.’

  ‘Today.’

  ‘Out. Gone. Never to be seen again.’

  I could chuck them with the rubbish. Only Rifka knew
about Burton, and she hadn’t been all that interested. And no one but Helena had seen the unknown bones from the cemetery of kings. It ought to be easy. However, even after disposing of the bones, there was still the problem of Moholy.

  As far as Joseph Moholy was concerned, I’d now had two fine nights in which to fetch Joyce. I’d kept the van, so presumably I was taking advantage of the favourable conditions. I had some explaining to do. From Rifka, I already knew that Burton was inadequate as a replacement for Joyce. However, I also had Jung’s knee-cap, up in the kitchen cabinet. I couldn’t actually remember seeing Jung’s name in Moholy’s catalogue of bones (Switzerland, Volume One) but I was confident he’d outscore the disappointing and unreliable Burton in almost every category.

  If I offered Jung’s knee in the place of Joyce, I could return the van at the same time, and so discharge my obligations. Admittedly, this would leave me back at square one, but it showed the extent of my recent failings that square one looked like progress.

  I fetched Jung’s knee down from the cupboard in the kitchen, still wrapped in its safety clingfilm, not realising that Helena had followed me.

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘It’s nothing. Jung’s knee.’

  ‘Jesus Christ. Another one.’

  ‘It’s only his knee. I’ll get rid of this first, then I’ll come back for the others. Don’t be angry. I’m going to make it right.’

  I dressed in a hurry, kissed Helena on the cheek, and left the flat without checking a mirror. It was a while now since I’d stopped enjoying my reflection, and I knew anyway from photographs that I was rarely how I looked in mirrors.

  It was raining. I sat behind the wheel of the van watching each raindrop splitting on the windscreen like a dice coming up five. It was metric rain, methodically swept aside by the wipers, throwing more fives, again to be swept away. I bet on fives. I won. Must be a lucky kind of guy. Fives. Fives again.

  If only I’d waited, been less impatient, I’d have made fewer mistakes. One more day and last night’s digging would have been rained off, like cricket. I sat there in the early-morning gloom, going nowhere, with the wipers wiping away the rain, and wondered how I’d managed to get it quite so wrong. I watched a large black aerosol-can skipping across the road. It was made of foam-rubber and branded in white cut-out letters, Consume, Be Silent, Die, and it bobbed past my windows and away towards town. Right. Like everybody, I knew that reform was needed, in fact it was always in the back of my mind, but first I had to see to myself.