Dance on My Grave

by Aidan Chambers

  ‘I guess so.’

  I broke away; started dressing. He lay on the bed and watched.

  ‘What about the people who are dead?’ I said. ‘What about your dad?’

  ‘What about him? If dead means finis—nothing—what does he care? If it means anything else . . . Well, I’ll tell you: if it means anything else my father will be in there organizing himself a part of it.’

  I finished dressing, waited for the moment to be right for leaving. Correction: Waited while I tried to make myself leave. I wanted to stay. Who wants to give up the can of magic beans when you’ve only just found it, even for a second?

  ‘You know what you should do about death?’ he said.

  I shook my head, not thinking about death anyway.

  ‘Laugh at it.’ He raised his eyebrows asking: What do you think of that?

  ‘All right for us to say now,’ I said. ‘We aren’t exactly on the point of death, are we?’

  ‘Look,’ he said coming to me from the bed and smiling that dangerous smile. ‘I’ll make a deal with you.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll chance anything once.’

  ‘Whichever of us dies first, the other promises to dance on his grave.’ The raised eyebrows again.

  I laughed and walked towards the door.

  ‘I’ve told you before,’ I said. ‘You’re crackers.’

  ‘You think I’m joking, don’t you?’ he said.

  I turned to face him. He was standing in the middle of the room.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re just crazy.’

  He came to me. Flicked at my hair with his fingers.

  ‘We’ve got to do something about that hair.’

  ‘Like what?’ I said, handing him my comb.

  ‘Not sure. I’ll have a go at it tomorrow.’

  He finished sorting me out, stood back a pace and looked me over, head to feet. Smiled. Proprietorial.

  Then he suddenly held out his hand to be shaken. I took it, not knowing why.

  His grip tightened so that I could not easily pull away.

  ‘Promise,’ he said.

  ‘You mean—’ I said.

  ‘If I die first you dance on my grave.’

  ‘Look, Bee,’ I said, ‘don’t be daft, eh?’

  ‘I’m serious. Promise.’

  ‘You’ll live to be eighty.’

  ‘Don’t raise difficulties.’

  We laughed.

  ‘But—’ I said when he still did not let go, instead adding his left hand to the grip of his right.

  ‘But me no buts. Just promise.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For me.’

  I looked at him, wakened out of the mindlessness of the last two hours.

  ‘I’m tired, love. Let me go.’

  ‘No. Promise. Is it so hard?’

  ‘No—’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t understand, that’s all. It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why I want you to promise. Because you don’t understand. Because you always have to understand. Don’t you? That’s what you always want, isn’t it? To understand. But some things you can’t. Can you? Never. So promise. For me.’

  There seemed no point in arguing any more. This was something he wanted from me; why say no? He’d just given me something I’d been wanting, hadn’t he? Now he wanted a ridiculous oath. A promise it was pretty unlikely I’d ever have to keep. So there he was, the boy with the can of magic beans wanting me to swear an oath. At that moment there was nothing I wouldn’t have done for him.

  ‘I promise,’ I said. ‘For you and for no other reason.’

  And it was a split lip on a bruised mouth that sealed the oath, not cut hands in never-never land.

  * * *

  1 For those who have yet the pleasures of Southend in store let me explain about the Ray, a most important feature of this watering place. At Southend the tide goes out a long way. Some people say it goes out all the way to the other side of the estuary. Be that as it may, when the tide is out an amusement often enjoyed by the resident locals, the younger of them especially, is to plodge through the gooey mud left behind by the receding waves until you reach, half a mile or so from shore, a deep, fast-flowing channel of water known on the maps with delicate felicity as the Ray Gut. Here only the brave and foolish swim, for the current is dangerously strong. Everyone cavorts on the comparatively sandy and hard Ray bank, having messy picnics or bottle parties (and, as you can imagine, much else besides) before trudging back through the sludge. Set off for home too late and you are likely to be trapped on the sandbank by the fast in-coming tide and be eventually drowned. So the jaunt is not without its frisson of danger. For a drunk to make the trip would therefore be unwise. But whoever heard of a wise drunk?

  2 I said this to Ozzy. ‘Not such a fool,’ he said. ‘Tolkien grew rich on his fantasies.’ ‘A fool made rich by bigger fools,’ I said. He laughed. ‘There’s hope for you yet,’ he said. ‘But you’ve misjudged Tolkien, as time and greater wisdom will show you.’ Crunch.

  3 I have not yet decided whether my mortal remains shall be buried or cremated. Some people of religious scruple hold strong objection to cremation and others to burial. So there is no answer in the multiple voices of God. Without such authoritative aid, I cannot decide whether I prefer to rot in the ground, providing food for worms and fertilizer for dandelions, or to be reduced to the aforesaid ashes and dispersed to the four winds. I guess it is some primordial instinct which sometimes makes me prefer burial so that at least my bones will stay together in case of any chance of future need, such as resurrection. But then I get a social conscience about being a nuisance. I mean, if everybody insisted on a six-by-four plot of ground to lie dead in, the country would very soon be covered in graves and become a vast cemetery. Apart from the sneaking suspicion I have that bodies rotting in the ground, however regulated and well-behaved, pose something of a threat to the already unpalatable water supply. All I can say is I hope I’ve made up my mind before I snuff it.

  PART THREE

  Death is the greatest kick of all.

  That’s why they save it till last.

  Graffito

  1/FROM BEGINNING TO end was seven weeks.

  Forty-nine days from me being soaked in seaweed to him being dead. He becoming It.

  One thousand one hundred and seventy-six hours.

  Seventy thousand five hundred and sixty minutes.

  Four million two hundred and thirty-three thousand six hundred seconds.

  And all that time, and a lot of the time since, I wondered: Why Barry? Why him and not, say, Spike? It can’t have just been that I liked the look of him; it can’t only have been physical; not sex alone. Can it? Was it? It might as well have been Spike if that was all there was to it.

  Maybe I loved him. I thought I did. As much as I knew what the word means.

  How do you ever know? I used to think I would know when it happened. Know immediately, without having to wonder about it.

  But all I knew for certain was that I couldn’t get enough of him. I wanted to be with him all the time. And yet when I was with him that wasn’t enough either. I wanted to look at him and touch him and have him touch me and hear him talk and tell him things and do things together with him. All the time. Day and night. For 4,233,600 seconds.

  A for instance: He would leave me alone in the shop. I’d wait on edge for him to come back. Customers must have thought I had some sort of convulsive twitch because my head and eyes would keep darting towards the door every few seconds. But they couldn’t have been mistaken about what was going on when Mister Wonderful hove into view again, because then I went to pieces. Lost my grip entirely on what I was supposed to be doing and had eyes for nothing but him till I got used to him being there again.

  Sounds like a pet dog. And I knew what was happening to me even while it was happening.

  At first I tried to stop myself. But I couldn’t. It was a compulsion, an o
bsession. Irresistible. After a while I gave up caring how I behaved or who thought what about me. Trying to hide how I felt was too much strain, and I wasn’t succeeding anyway. I was just making a fool of myself. So I let it show, let it happen. I felt easier straightaway. More natural. More in charge of myself. If that was the way I was, I told myself, why pretend anything different?

  We never discussed any of this. All the time we talked. But never about this part of us. I knew anyway what Barry would say: ‘That’s the way I feel, so that’s the way I am. End of story.’

  Now, I keep going over and over in my mind everything that happened. Everything we said. And did. Every detail. Every little bit. Trying to fit the little bits into one Big Bit. Into one whole that makes some kind of sense. Some kind of meaning. A Meaning. Capital M. Something that explains him to me, me to myself. Explains what it was all about.

  These Bits coming now are some of the Bits from the good times. From the Monday after we got together, with me working in the shop and us spending every evening together and most nights as well, to the Friday it came to an end.

  2/After the first week I stayed with Barry every Saturday night and most week nights.

  ‘Your mother,’ I said, the first time.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t you mind?’

  ‘You’re a long time dead.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She’s very good at knowing only what she wants to know. And medical science helps her blot out what she might not be able to help knowing. She’s taken sleeping pills since Dad died.’

  But she had to have known. How could she not? Which is why I can’t understand the way she went on in court. Saying I’d led Barry astray, made him act wildly . . . all that. She has to be crazy.

  3/‘Like a plate of ham?’ Barry said one night.

  ‘Thought you was a ten-to-two, squire.’

  ‘Don’t mess about.’

  I hadn’t a clue what he meant, so ‘Help yourself,’ I said, and he gave me a present from Southend of a kind I hadn’t had before. He gave me a lot of those: new experiences. One of the things that was exciting about him. I never knew what was going to happen next.

  I enjoyed this one, after the surprise had worn off.

  4/One morning I woke just after dawn. I liked waking early with him. They were the nicest times. Quiet. Warm. The early morning sounds outside. The drift of sleep. Him. Looking at him. He slept like he did everything else. Flat out.

  That morning he was already awake, and looking at me.

  He kissed me, said:

  ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love,

  Human on my faithless arm;

  Time and fevers burn away

  Individual beauty from

  Thoughtful children, and the grave

  Proves the child ephemeral:

  But in my arms till break of day

  Let the living creatures lie,

  Mortal, guilty, but to me

  The entirely beautiful.’

  I said, meaning thank you, ‘A poet and he doesn’t know it.’

  ‘So much for your budding genius,’ he said, laughing. ‘The lines are Auden’s. Mr W. H. by strange coincidence.’

  ‘What coincidence?’

  ‘Cor, Ozzy’s got his work cut out with you! Shakespeare.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Dear, dear! The ignorance!’

  I smiled at the condescension and looked smug. ‘Can’t have everything, can I? Not when I’m young and beautiful as well.’

  ‘Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets to Mr W. H., widely thought to have been his boyfriend.’

  ‘Ah, I see!’ Light dawning. ‘Wouldn’t have thought you’d go much on the guilt, though . . . “Mortal, guilty . . .” whatever.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Nor did Auden, I guess. But times have changed since he wrote that.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I dunno. Nineteen thirties I think.’

  ‘How do you know it anyway?’

  ‘You aren’t the only one Ozzy ever asked into his Sixth.’

  I lifted my head, surprised, to face him. ‘You too?’

  He nodded.

  ‘So that means you were in his English Sixth when you left?’

  ‘He wasn’t very happy about me going either. I did have a certain flair.’

  ‘Bighead. But how come?’

  ‘Told you. He’s a fanatic. I’m sure he really does think Eng. lit. is more important than anything else. I told him I was leaving. He said I was betraying a talent, selling out to Mammon, giving in to a possessive mother. Didn’t mince his words.’

  ‘But you explained? I mean about the shop—how you feel about it. Surely he understood?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Not at first. Now I do. After working with you.’

  ‘So I should employ Ozzy?’

  ‘Hey, that would be a laugh.’

  ‘A laugh it might be to you. Customers might not see the joke.’

  ‘He’d refuse to sell them stuff he didn’t approve of.’

  ‘One thing you’re going to learn, mate, is that Mr O. is human. And, dearest chuck, can be wrong.’

  I let that go. We were too cosy to argue. I brooded instead on what it must have meant to Barry to drop out of the English Sixth. Looking round his room at the books, the pictures, the stacked music, the whole feeling of the place—why I liked it so much—I knew it had to have mattered.

  After a while I said, ‘You still mind?’

  He drew in a breath. ‘About Ozzy or about giving up Eng. lit.?’

  ‘Both.’

  He took his arm away, stretched on his back, hands behind his head.

  ‘Both,’ he said.

  There was bitterness in his voice.

  We never talked about that subject again.

  5/One morning in the third week when Barry wasn’t there and the shop was empty, Mrs Gorman, doing the accounts, said, ‘My Bubby hasn’t been so happy since before his poor father died.’

  ‘That’s great,’ I said.

  This was the first time she had said anything about Barry and me getting together. At the beginning she treated me like a favourite visitor. I was pampered and overwhelmed with attention. Then suddenly, as if she had made a conscious decision about it, she started treating me like one of her family; I’d be asked for my washing, given chores to do, ticked off if I crossed her. But never mentioning what she must have known: that B. and I were sleeping together. I thought she was going to say something about that and I didn’t know what to say if she did.

  ‘After his father died,’ she went on, ‘he was miserable. Went a little wild, poor boy. Out all hours. And with—well, not nice people sometimes. Not good for him. Worried me sick, Hal. I don’t mind telling you; you’ll understand, I know. But now he’s so happy again. Properly happy. Do you know? His old self again.’

  Pleased, embarrassed (why?) I picked up some disc sleeves from the counter and put them on the display rack.

  ‘You are so good for each other,’ Mrs Gorman said when I was behind the counter again. ‘Maybe together you could make the business better, eh?’

  ‘How d’you mean, Mrs Gorman?’

  She put down her pen, turned me by the shoulder to face her. ‘I’ve been thinking. Why don’t you work here full-time? It’s a good job, good pay. Maybe in a couple of years, when you’re older, know the ropes, who knows?—we would open another shop. Have two. One down there in the precinct in Southend, where the trippers go. You could manage one. Or maybe we move to bigger premises in the best spot in town. Mr Gorman always wanted a place there. You and my Bubby together, you could do it beautiful. What d’you think?’

  I didn’t know what I thought, only that it meant more of Barry.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said; then, after a silence because it was the only thing in my head that I could actually say, ‘Is that what Barry wants?’

  Mrs Gorman raised her eyebrows, shrugged. ‘He hasn’t said in so many words. But—
I know my Bubby. He’s thinking about it, you bet, my darling. You too, why don’t you think about it?’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

  6/This morning I reckoned up that during our seven weeks together we:

  + Sailed Calypso twelve times, once as far as the Kent coast, where we slept out in the boat for the night and sailed home the next day.

  + Read eight books.

  + Saw four films, including the one on our first evening together.

  + Ate one hundred and nineteen meals together: twenty-three breakfasts, forty-four lunches, thirty-one suppers, nine picnics, and two middle-of-the-night snacks in bed.

  + Motorbiked eight hundred miles approx., mostly just mucking about, but one Sunday going as far as Norwich for the day.

  + Slept together twenty-three times literally and fifty-five times, one way and another, euphemistically.

  + Went by train to London to see a show (cf. Bit 11 following) and poked about the crap and con of puky Piccadilly.

  + Listened to hundreds of hours of music (because of the shop).

  + Wrote each other five letters. He to me, three; me to him, two.

  + Stayed up all night four times because we were talking so hard and didn’t want to stop. (To be exact, we went to bed about five o’clock in the morning each time, but it was dawn by then.)

  + Bought each other six presents—one each week. The present I gave him the seventh week was death.

  7/Busy busy listed like that. But at the time, time seemed timeless. Except time apart, which seemed endless. So long as we were together time did not matter; what we did did not matter. We did things to do them together; nothing had to be done. There was only one imperative: the two of us together.

  I thought.

  8/’What frightens you?’ he asked at the end of one of our all-talking nights.

  Without hesitation, thinking I meant a joke, I said, ‘You!’ And then knew I really felt it.

  He was silent. I, too, waiting, having taken myself aback.

  Finally, he nodded, smiled, said, ‘I frighten myself.’

  9/His present to me the second week was a black sweatshirt.

  ‘Why do you always wear the same few things?’ he said. ‘Is it money?’