It was twenty minutes past their arranged meeting time when he saw Michelle pull up in her convertible Audi and park illegally on the pavement outside. She created an enormous disturbance in the atmosphere as she entered the bar jangling with keys and earrings and beads. She bustled up to the table. ‘I’m sorry, Frank love, bloody workmen. Take my advice: you want a new kitchen? Fit it your bloody self. Couldn’t do a worse job! Oh God, I need a drink.’
Frank smiled and stood up to kiss her. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve been enjoying the ambience.’
‘Oh, I bet.’ Michelle sat with her back to the other tables and ordered a spritzer. She asked lots of questions about Frank and Andrea and Mo before Frank was able to speak.
‘What about you? How have you been?’
‘Fine, yeah fine.’
Frank frowned at her.
‘You don’t have to say that.’
Michelle smiled. ‘Okay.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Well, since the funeral, in chronological order, I’ve been bad, really bad, terrible, better and now okay, I think, or close to it.’
‘We tried calling, but it was always the answerphone. You should have called us when you were having a rough time.’
‘No offence, Frank, but what could you do? What could anyone do? I had to get through it. I went away. After the circus of the funeral I had to get out of the country. The scale of the reaction just freaked me out. I know it wasn’t that extreme – Phil wasn’t Princess Di – but even at his level of fame it felt so inappropriate, so invasive.’
‘Were people bothering you?’
‘I’m probably overreacting, but I never really got it. I never got who those people were who used to write to Phil when he was alive – his agent got letters every week from fans. Who writes to TV celebrities? Maybe if you’re a kid and you have a crush – but to Phil? I can’t see him being a teen pin-up. So it was just more of that, much more. Death seems to bring them all out of the woodwork. I had letters from people saying they’d cried more than when their own fathers had died. Can you believe that? Maybe I should have been touched, but I just thought they were tapped.’
Frank thought of the kinds of letters and emails he received each day, the endless ways in which people construed and interpreted you once your face was on television. The baffling array of purposes they thought you served. He had letters asking him for directions and for recommendations of dry cleaners, letters telling him about Jesus, letters telling him he was a wanker, letters telling him he brightened up their mother’s day, letters asking for photographs and letters containing photos of their own. He knew the number he received each week would be nothing to the volume that Phil had got. Phil hadn’t looked and certainly hadn’t acted like a man in his early sixties when he made his transition to national TV. In just fifteen years he’d become an institution. The nation’s favourite older man, twinkly yet suave.
Michelle shrugged. ‘I suppose people can’t deal with the shock of death. Even at seventy-eight. It’s something that we never really absorb. He was on telly every Saturday night; he couldn’t just suddenly die.’ She fell quiet for a moment. ‘I felt the same way.’ Tears started to leak.
Frank gave her a tissue.
‘I still can’t believe it. It’s so stupid. Of course I knew the age difference when I met Phil. Nearly forty years – you can’t overlook that – but I always just thought of that in terms of him being elderly before me. I never thought of him dead. I thought I’d have to look after him in his old age and that was fine. I know it’s corny, but I believed in the wedding vows. It never occurred to me that he’d go so suddenly, before I even had a chance to take care of him properly, when he needed it.’
Frank shook his head. ‘You were together twenty years. You took care of him.’
Michelle smiled, but she looked unconvinced. ‘So, anyway, I went abroad – Spain, Portugal, Italy. I don’t know what the hell I was doing. Running away, I suppose. Lying on beaches, eating too much, drinking too much, feeling lonely and a mess. I came home, spent time with friends, got my head straight, sold the house and then this whole TV thing came along.’
The TV thing was a new career for Michelle as the host of a makeover programme called Tough Love. During her marriage to Phil she had become a regular guest on chat shows and celebrity quiz shows. She was pretty, laughed in the right places and was married to a famous man; no other reason was needed. Since Phil’s death, though, her career had taken off with Tough Love. Andrea loathed it; Mo loved it.
‘Now I get the bloody letters. Only mine are more extreme. I’m their inspiration or they want to kill me. Women are so vicious. Anyway, I’ve got a place here that’s handy for the studio, a place down in London and a villa in Almeria. I’m busy working and sorting the houses and busy is good.’
Frank smiled. ‘How do you like life in Byron’s Common?’
‘It’s weird, isn’t it? Toytown. My sister visited and said she thought a big white ball would chase us if we tried to leave. I like it, though. It’s wipe-clean.’
‘Yeah, I know what you mean. Mo liked it for the same reasons.’
‘You know, on the programme, it’s all before and after. And the before is always rubbish and ugly and sad. I like it here because there’s no before, only after.’
Frank thought that with him it was always before. It was after he had a problem with. He remembered Michael Church. ‘While you’re here, I wanted to ask you something. Will you look at a photo for me and tell me if you recognize a face?’ He pulled the photo out and placed it on the table in front of Michelle.
She looked puzzled for a moment and then smiled. ‘Oh my God, it’s Phil. Wasn’t he handsome when he was young? I mean he was handsome when he was old, but just look at him. Those eyes. I’ve never seen one of him this young before. His old photos got lost along the way somewhere. What a charmer. Who’s the other boy?’
‘That’s what I was hoping you might tell me. His name is Michael Church. Do you recognize him at all? Can you remember Phil ever mentioning him?’
Michelle peered at the photo for some time. ‘No, sorry. I don’t recognize him.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Maybe the name … I don’t know. “Michael” is ringing a vague bell, but I can’t think from where. It’s not an uncommon name, though, so it’s probably the wrong one.’
Frank shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it. I was just trying to figure out who he was. It’s not important.’
Michelle looked at her watch and swore. ‘Shit, I’ve got to go. My whole day is half an hour out of whack. There was something else I wanted to talk to you about, but it will have to wait. I’ll call you, okay?’
He stood up to kiss her goodbye. As she left, all the women in the bar turned and watched her go, their faces as unreadable as the skulls on the walls.
16
Phil
December 2008
There isn’t any discernible transition between sleep and consciousness, no gradual surfacing, no sudden disturbance. He just finds himself fully awake, lying in bed, and when he looks at the clock it’s always around three. It’s jet lag without the long-haul flights. His body clock has shifted to a rhythm that beats out of time with his life and his routines. He’s had a year of it now. He knows that nothing he tries will send him back to sleep until the half hour around six, when his thoughts will lose their edges and he’ll drift into dreams for two hours before he hears Michelle moving around and making their morning cup of coffee.
Michelle has a remarkable aptitude for sleep. Like a doll her eyes seem to close automatically as she lies down, and then stay shut for the nine hours or so until she sits up again in the morning. She is able to sleep at will, and Phil has often envied her ability to simply switch herself off for the duration of long, dull journeys or tedious plays. He knows she won’t wake, but still he moves the duvet gently and shuts the door quietly behind him.
He’s never sure which is worse, lying in bed awake, or wandering around the house in the middle of the night. He seems to f
eel more isolated when he gets up. When he lies awake in bed, he knows that he is at least in the customary place and position for three in the morning. Once he’s up he feels as if he is setting himself against nature. Something about turning lights on in cold, empty rooms and seeing the blackness outside the window makes him feel nauseous.
After getting a glass of water he goes to his office. He pulls down the blind before turning on the desk lamp. For a while he moves about listlessly, adjusting the angles of photos, moving piles of paper from one place to another. All the while, though, he feels the pull of the locked door. He doesn’t put up much of a fight before getting the key from his drawer and opening the cabinet. He knows Michelle disapproves of him watching this stuff. She allows that once might be okay, but anything beyond that is damaging, is essentially unhealthy. He twists his head to better read the labels. His eyes drift past the DVDs back further in time to the shelves of video tapes. He plucks one at random, puts it in the machine and flops back onto the leather sofa with the remote control. He holds a cushion on his lap.
The tape hasn’t been rewound from a previous viewing and it starts with a crackling of distortion and white lines before the image settles down. It’s the old Heart of England Reports studio. Phil looks at the suit he wears on screen and the shape of his haircut and is able to date the broadcast to somewhere around 1985 or ’86. He and Suzy are out from behind their desk and standing in the small circular studio area reserved for all manner of nonsense. Phil is halfway through a sentence as the picture clears.
‘… of course invited John, Peggoty and Roland down to the studio.’
Suzy looks off camera and starts laughing delightedly. ‘And here they all are now!’
From the back of the studio a man slowly walks in a crouched position waving a celery stick at ground level. Behind him emerges a complicated arrangement of wheels and fur. The camera closes in to reveal a guinea pig harnessed to a miniature cart upon which sits an immense white rabbit. The guinea pig pulls the rabbit along following the celery.
Phil laughs. ‘My goodness, I hope you can see this clearly at home. Here he comes now, our very own Ben-Hur of the hutch.’ The camera closes in on the dissipated face of the rabbit.
Suzy turns to John. ‘John, thank you so much for coming down to the studio today and bringing Peggoty and Roland along with you. What an extraordinary sight they make. Now Peggoty’s the guinea pig, is that right?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And is she or he quite …’
‘Her’s an her.’
‘Right, good, is she quite comfortable there? Roland looks like he’s eaten more than a few carrots and Peggoty’s really very small.’
‘Her loves it!’
‘Perhaps we should let poor Peggoty have her celery reward now.’ John seems reluctant, but eventually drops the stalk on the studio floor, where the guinea pig seizes upon it. ‘Gosh, she’s enjoying that, isn’t she?’ says Suzy.
‘John, I have to ask,’ says Phil, ‘how on earth did all this start?’
John starts to give his answer, but Phil, sitting in the dark, isn’t listening. He looks instead at his own youthful face on screen. He watches how his eyes are focused on John until Suzy says something causing Phil to turn, smile and then look to camera before making his own comment. He freezes the image and then rewinds it a few seconds to play the reaction shot and his turn again and then again. The look at Suzy, the smile and then the full turn of that smile to camera. Every time he watches it his heart seems to take a gasp. The simple combination of ease, grace and timing in those few seconds captures something he feels he has lost forever. He watches it over and over again as if repeated viewing will bring it back to him, but he knows it is not something he can relearn. The clip shows him in his fifties with all the confidence and sureness of successful middle-age. He freezes the screen and looks at the face he had over twenty years ago. Surgery has provided him with a poor, tautened imitation of that face, lacking the fullness and fleshiness it once had. He reaches up slowly and runs his fingers over his stretched skin, feeling only the skull beneath it.
He drops his hand onto the cushion on his lap and stares at the back of it. His mother always said to look at the hands to know the real person. She would notice the bitten fingernails of glamorous starlets, the small feminine hands of certain leading men; she saw hands, not eyes, as the windows of the soul. She was right, of course. His hearing aid is invisible, his need to piss every half hour easily covered up, but his hands dangle there at the end of his arms for all to see. The skin on the back of them is loose, covered in coarse grey hairs and dotted with liver spots. He wonders why cosmetic surgery is never offered for hands. He stares at them until they seem entirely alien to him. Two lumps of bone and gristle lying on a purple velvet cushion. He imagines them touching Michelle’s smooth skin. He sees them cupping her breasts, stroking her stomach and he closes his eyes to try and block out the image.
When he opens them, the freeze frame has released and the tape is playing again. There is mild chaos on screen as Roland has leaned too far to the side and pulled the cart over with his substantial weight. He lies inertly on the studio floor, allowing John to scoop him up, while Peggoty drags the capsized cart around behind her looking for more celery. The camera closes in on Phil’s face to block out the scene behind him. He’s unflustered, with a wry smile, as he hands over to the weather report.
Phil turns off the TV. He sits for a few moments and stares at the dark screen, but the silhouette of his head is still reflected by the light of the lamp behind him. He reaches back for the switch and turns it off. His reflection disappears. He stays there awake and upright in the dark, blessedly invisible to the world and to himself.
17
Frank found it harder each time he went to locate his father’s headstone. He visited the cemetery so rarely that the rows of graves expanded in vast leaps between each visit. They proliferated faster and further than Frank ever managed to predict, always leaving him struggling to navigate his way around the featureless landscape. Once his father had been a pioneer, breaking new ground for the dead on the far west of the cemetery, but now he had been overtaken by legions of newer recruits advancing steadily down the gentle slope.
After fifteen minutes of wandering, he found his father’s stone looking nothing like he had remembered it, in a place he wasn’t expecting. It was a dark, flecked, rose colour, not the black he had thought. In front of the imposing stone was a plot-sized rectangle of stone chippings, surrounded by a low chain. Frank had no idea what that was supposed to be; he lacked any understanding of cemetery aesthetics. He thought of it as a kind of front garden to the headstone’s house and it seemed ridiculous to him. Were the loved ones supposed to put deckchairs on the shingle and admire the stone? Perhaps lay a towel down on it and recline there just a few feet above the deceased?
He’d always felt resentment at the idea that this was the place he was supposed to reflect on his father, that this anonymous plot was where he should care. He felt no connection there. In his experience the only thoughts that cemeteries inspired were of the physical remains beneath the ground, not the lives that once animated them. The sole reason he came, albeit occasionally, was that to not come, to allow the grave to fall into total neglect, would suggest an utter lack of respect or care for his father. It would make a false statement. As it was, the plot looked pretty bad compared to its near neighbours. The bottom of the stone was caked in dried grass cuttings and blackened stalks poked from the holes of the mildewed flower container.
Today would have been his father’s eighty-fourth birthday, though the date was as meaningless as the location. He didn’t think of his father any more or less on certain days. It was just habit that he came on this day, a habit started by his mother and continued now by him. What he remembered about the visits with his mother was the silence. They would stand by the grave saying nothing. Frank would wonder what he was supposed to feel. He would look at his mother’s face a
nd find no clues there.
He looked at the headstone now, picked from a brochure of similar stones, made in a factory in Wales, and reflected that as his father’s buildings were torn down, there was every chance this mass-produced slab would be the only monument left bearing his name.
He knew he should clean the stone. Should walk over to the stand pipe, splash water over his shoes as he tried to capture the sputtering flow in a plastic bottle and then labour with whatever tissues and old business cards he could find in his pockets to remove the worst of the accreted dirt, but he felt himself paralysed. He was trying to will himself to move when his phone rang, making him jump. The cheery tone, always grating, seemed particularly out of place in the setting. He fumbled in his pocket to silence it quickly:
‘Hello.’
‘Hi, Frank, it’s Jo from the coroner’s office. Is this a bad time?’
‘No, it’s fine. Actually I’m at a cemetery.’
‘That’s appropriate … Oh no. Are you at a funeral? I’ll call back.’
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