Dance on My Grave

by Aidan Chambers

  One person knew the answers.

  I picked up the telephone and dialled without a second thought.

  ‘Mrs Gorman—’

  ‘Who’s that? Is that you again?’

  ‘Mrs Gorman, please listen—’

  ‘Are you pitiless? Without all decency?’

  ‘I’ve got to see Barry, Mrs Gorman, got to—’

  ‘What! Are you tormenting me? Is that what you are doing?’

  ‘No no! I must see him. It’s important—’

  ‘You’re mad. That’s what’s happened. You’ve gone mad. I don’t want to talk to you.’

  ‘Tell me where he is. Please, Mrs Gorman.’

  ‘I’ll put the police on to you. I’m warning you. You deceived me. I trusted you and look what you did. How you repaid me and my Bubby. He told me all about you. All that you did. Throwing things at him. Breaking up our shop. I cleared up the mess myself. I saw it. Vicious. You’re a vicious nasty boy. You should be put away. You’re a hooligan.’

  ‘No, Mrs Gorman . . . you’ve got it all wrong. I can explain. It was only the mirror, that’s all I broke, and I’m sorry, I’ll pay for it, but Mrs Gorman you have to tell me where he is, I’ve got to see him, I loved him as well you know—’

  ‘How dare you! How dare you say such a thing! I know all about you. And now you want to add sacrilege to your crimes against my son. As if you haven’t done enough. He’d be alive now if he hadn’t gone after you. Forget him, I told him, but no, he wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘Came after me? How do you know?’

  ‘He told me. Telephoned from the shop. He told me about you making trouble, smashing the place up. He said he was going to find you. I went straight there but he’d gone and the office was a wreck.’

  ‘But, Mrs Gorman—’

  ‘And now you prey on me! The nerve you have! Well, my daughter will be here soon with her husband. See what happens if you plague me again, a defenceless woman. I should take care if I was you.’

  She put the telephone down. I listened to the dialling tone, trying to make sense of what it was saying.

  16/I flit the shop as soon as I put the telephone down, pushing my key through the letterbox to be rid of it. Mrs Gorman talking of police and sons-in-law made me fugitive. The empty shop, Barryless, made insistent the need to see him. How could I stay there?

  The escape route. Room to breathe; time to think.

  I cycled to the beach by Chalkwell station, walked my bike across the station footbridge (OZZYMANDIAS RULES OK some wit had spray-painted on the footbridge wall), dumped it by the esplanade, where I could keep an eye on it, found an empty space on the sand with my back against the heavy, grey ridge-grained wood of a groin, from where I could look along the beach towards Southend and the pier, and across the mud and water to the hazy horizon where the Kent coast lay hidden.

  The sky was overcast, the weather dull, and almost no breeze. The tide was a long way out. A poor day for bathers and not time yet for sailors. Only a few people were scattered about along the sand, though there was plenty of activity on the esplanade—sightseers and kids on the loose and local folk exercising themselves and their babies and dogs. Not that I paid any attention at the time; I was all inwardness. In fact, I’ve had to think hard even to remember these few details, which I tell you only to fill in the gap around myself who was huddling from the psychic chill beside the wooden shield, barrier against stormy seas and shifting sands.

  17/This morning I read what I wrote during the last couple of days about the aftermath and it is useless. Doesn’t tell anything like I really felt. Which was mashed, minced, chopped, granulated, flensed, mangled, mortified.

  That’s the word: mortified.

  Latin mors death and facere to do, and thus via Old French (in case you didn’t know) from church Latin mortificare, to put to death: i. to humiliate or cause to feel shame; 2. to cause or undergo tissue death or gangrene. (Cf. Collins English Dictionary.)

  What a wonder is language! All that in one word. And still tells you nothing.

  I had put to death and was being put to death. But there is no way of telling you about the tissue death of my own self, or about gangrene rotting away my dreams of bosom palship.

  Hell, let’s take it as read.

  JKA. Running Report: Henry Spurling ROBINSON 8th Oct. Requested and got a two week postponement of Hal’s next court appearance on the grounds that reports are not yet satisfactorily completed. Emphasized the unusual nature of this case. Impressed on Hal the urgency of his completing his written account for me to see.

  11.45. Telephoned Mr Osborn. Told him of the postponement. Asked him to try and expedite matters with Hal. Mr O. said that Hal is agitated because, Hal says, he can’t get into his account all the details he feels ought to be included. Keeps telling Mr O. ‘the words are never right’, and constantly rewrites passages because after a couple of days he is dissatisfied with his first drafts. But apparently he is scribbling obsessively all day. Mr O. is certain writing the account has started to have a beneficial therapeutic effect, and that in addition the act of writing about himself is giving Hal a new and purposeful focus in his life.

  I suggested to Mr O. that I might see some of Hal’s account so that I could begin to see what is involved. But Mr O. was very strongly against this on the grounds that it might stem the flow and disturb Hal again. I asked whether he couldn’t let me see pages without Hal knowing, and received the kind of scornful reply about trust and confidentiality he gave me during our first interview.

  I pressed on Mr O. the urgency of Hal finishing the task soon. Mr O. told me he is seeing Hal every day after school, when they discuss Hal’s progress, and Mr O. comments on any passages Hal brings for him to read. ‘You’d think he was writing a novel,’ Mr O. said, and I felt he was as pleased about this as he was about the serious aspects of Hal’s case. I tried to explain that all I want is a straightforward record that explains what Hal and Gorman did. I didn’t, I said, have time for novels, and said that I hoped Hal wasn’t inventing anything.

  9th Oct. Received this letter from Hal in today’s post:

  DECLARATION TO MS J K ATKINS

  by Henry Spurling Robinson aka Hal

  This is to certify that I, Henry Spurling Robinson (hereinafter called The Author, acronym TA), being of unsound mind and disturbed body, am working to the fullest of my capacity, and seriously intend completing and delivering to you, Judith Karen Atkins (hereinafter called The Impatient Social Servant, acronym TISS) a record of my crazy actions relating to the Death and Burial of one Barry Gorman (hereinafter called The Encomiumed Dead, acronym TED) with as much dispatch as TA can muster. TA must however herewith point out to TISS that the tiss TISS has put TA into regarding his aforementioned account of TED because of The Court’s impatience to know The Truth and pass sentence on TA about TED must mean that from this Bit on in the story of TED TA will only be able to describe for TISS the actions TA engaged in without adequate explanatory detail, and that this gives TA cause for concern about TISS understanding, or rather not understanding, everything about TED and TA.

  18/Kari almost literally stumbled across me on the beach.

  She had heard the news from Mrs Gorman when she telephoned that morning, wanting to speak to Barry.

  ‘I came here to calm myself,’ she said. ‘Hal, it is terrible. I just burst into tears. I couldn’t stay in the house. Mrs Grey was wonderful. She tried to comfort me. She couldn’t understand why I was so upset, and I couldn’t tell her, you know. But she let me come out here because Mr Grey was not being so nice. He told me to stop blubbing—blubbing?—and get on with my work. But I couldn’t do anything with the children anyway. It was all rather awful.’

  She was in jeans and a white sweater, with a tired old brown mac over them, too loose—probably one of Mrs Grey’s—which she hugged round herself as if the day was cold and wet.

  It wasn’t. Outward expression of inner feeling. She slumped beside me, glum, on the sand.

>   Not far from us two boy children of three or four were playing naked in the sand while a woman in a summer dress sat on a towel nearby, watching them. While Kari was talking I watched the children, thinking how I would like to be four again making castles in the sand.

  ACTION REPLAY

  The image that remains strongest in my memory from that first Barryless day is this still life, like a snapshot, of two naked children kneeling in the sand, their faces bright with pleasure. A mnemonic that revives every fractured sensation of the time. Strange that a mind-frozen moment in the lives of two happy children should memorialize so vividly something so sad. Nor does it simply provoke, this picture, remembrance, for the children seem to embody in themselves the distress I felt as I looked at them. Why should that be? As though every smallest pleasure in the world contains within it all the world’s sadness.

  19/‘We must visit Mrs Gorman,’ Kari said. ‘Don’t you think? When I phoned she sounded very upset.’

  I shook my head. ‘She won’t let me in.’

  ‘Not let you in? But why? You and Barry were so much friends. He talked about you all the time the other day. I was rather envious to have such a friend, I must say.’

  I said, ‘We weren’t just friends.’

  She turned her head to look closely at me, her eyes touring my face, searching for a message. She found none in that tundra.

  ‘Weren’t just friends?’ she said. ‘Perhaps that is your English way of saying more than just friends?’

  I nodded.

  The children were breaking down their sandcastles with relished violence, the woman laughing at them.

  Kari turned from me so that now we sat as replicas, backs bent against the rough groin, legs jacknifed, feet dug into sand.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said bleakly. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Why should you?’

  ‘I ought to have guessed. But it is rather a shock.’

  ‘Moral, or a surprise?’

  ‘O, not moral, not at all. No, a surprise.’

  ‘Because he slept with you?’

  A pause. She riddled sand through her fingers.

  ‘You know about that?’

  ‘We had a row about it.’

  ‘O dear, that does make things rather difficult.’

  The children were building new castles; the woman, leaving them to themselves, was pouring herself a drink from a flask.

  ‘It wasn’t so much about you. Not your fault. I was jealous. He didn’t like that. Said I wanted him all for myself. He meant I was possessive and was stifling him.’

  ‘And were you?’

  ‘I didn’t think so. . . . Does it matter anyway? He thought I was.’

  A pause.

  Then she said, ‘You want me to go?’

  I put a hand on her arm. ‘No. Stay. I’d like you to. Honest.’

  I think I meant to take my hand away, but before I did she slipped hers into mine and let them rest together between us.

  ‘It is difficult,’ she said, ‘to give everything to one person.’

  ‘Maybe it’s wrong to want that. Maybe it’s wrong to try.’

  She shook her head. ‘I am rather confused about it.’

  ‘Can I join the club?’

  She looked at me, puzzled. ‘Club?’

  I smiled at her. ‘Forget it. Just a saying.’

  We turned our attention to the kids again: their funny stomping way of doing things before they are manually dextrous. Wanting more than they’ve the skill to achieve. Miniature Laurel and Hardys. (Maybe that’s what’s so funny about L & H. They’re children who are trapped inside adult bodies and lost in an adult world they can’t quite find out how to control, while pretending all the time they know how.)

  If J had thought about it before that moment I think I would have said Kari was the last person I would want to be with right then, and that I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to talk to her about everything that had happened between Barry and me.

  But as it turned out just the opposite was true. She was the only person I could have been with, and most of all she was the only person I could talk to. As though this was the very reason we met that morning, I told her everything, starting with the capsize of Tumble and finishing with my rejection that morning by Mrs Gorman. Sometimes we laughed; the first time I had laughed in forty-eight hours. Now and then she asked a question. Towards the end she wept, quietly, without noise or fuss.

  Meanwhile, the woman had gathered up her two children, slipped them into their doll-size pants and shoes, packed their picnic oddments, and sauntered away with them chattering at her heels. The numbers of wanderers on the esplanade thinned, gone to lunch. The tide had crossed the mud, reaching the beach; a yachtsman or two were already out and rigging their boats. The sky’s greyness had lightened; a veiled sun showed through and was brightening. The afternoon would bring crowds; the beach would be an escape no longer.

  20/We moved to Leigh gardens, buying a snack on the way.

  ‘What about your work?’ I asked.

  She shrugged. ‘It will have to wait. Mrs Grey will understand.’

  We sat on the grass, our backs protected by bushes.

  ‘There are a couple of things I haven’t told you,’ I said.

  ‘I would like to know everything,’ she said.

  I lay on my back, hands behind my head. She turned and lay on her front at my side, supporting herself on her elbows so that she could look into my face.

  ‘When we first got together,’ I said, ‘he made me swear an oath. He made me swear that whichever of us died first the other would dance on his grave.’

  A pause while she took this in.

  ‘But that’s . . .’

  ‘Weird?’

  ‘A little.’

  Silence.

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘I must.’

  ‘You’ll be stopped.’

  ‘At night?’

  ‘At night!’

  ‘An oath is an oath is an oath. Will you help?’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Not with the dancing. I have to do that on my own.’

  ‘How then?’

  ‘Find out where he’s to be buried and when. Mrs Gorman won’t speak to me, I told you. And I’ve got to know where his grave is. Mrs G. will talk to you. Say you’re a friend, want to attend the funeral. Get the details.’

  ‘I don’t believe this.’ She turned and sat up, her arms round her knees.

  ‘I’m not sure I do.’

  ‘But—’

  I sat up and faced her, cross-legged. ‘Please.’

  ‘I’ll think.’

  I said quickly, ‘There’s the other thing.’

  She said, looking nervously at me, ‘What other thing?’

  ‘It’s a bit weird as well.’

  ‘I think I’d rather not know.’

  ‘You said you wanted to know everything.’

  She looked away across the gardens, her chin planted on her knees. ‘All right, go on.’

  ‘I’ve got this . . . compulsion. It’s crazy, I know. But I’ve got to see him. I mean his body. I have to know for certain. I can’t explain. I just have to, that’s all.’

  She sighed. ‘Poor Hal,’ she said. ‘For you it wasn’t just . . . casual, was it? But very serious.’ She reached and took my hand in her slim fingers.

  ‘You’ve been hit rather badly,’ she said.

  I took her hand in both mine. ‘I have to know where they’ve taken him,’ I said.

  She nodded, the movement felt through her fingers.

  21/‘He’s in the mortuary at Leigh General Hospital,’ Kari said when she returned an hour later. ‘I talked to Mrs Gorman’s son-in-law. He was rather nice. Mrs Gorman was resting. Her daughter and son-in-law arrived about lunchtime and they put her to bed at once because she was so distressed and tired from not sleeping. Her daughter is sitting with her.’

  ‘In the mortuary? Why there? Why isn’t he at home?’

  ‘There must b
e an inquiry—no, that wasn’t the word—an inquest?—yes, an inquest.’

  ‘An inquest! Why?’

  ‘Mrs Gorman’s son-in-law says it is all quite normal. When there has been a death because of an accident your law says there must be an inquest by—a coroner?’

  ‘Yes, a coroner.’

  ‘Who has to find out what happened. In case someone is to blame. Mrs Gorman’s son-in-law explained everything but it is all new to me.’

  ‘When’s the inquest?’

  ‘On Tuesday, they hope, but perhaps later.’

  ‘So when’s the funeral?’

  ‘On Wednesday, but if the inquest is over soon enough on Tuesday it will be on that day.’

  ‘Why the rush, for God’s sake?’

  ‘There is no rush. It’s their rule—their custom.’

  ‘Whose custom?’

  ‘The Jewish custom, of course. Barry was Jewish, Hal, you must have known that!’

  ‘I knew, I knew. But he wasn’t practising. He didn’t go to church, I mean synagogue.’

  ‘That has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Of course it does! He was like me. We didn’t believe in religion. Or in God come to that.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So why should out-of-date customs he didn’t believe in matter now?’

  ‘Out-of-date?’

  ‘Yes! The Outina Indians of South America used to scalp an enemy’s corpse, break the bones in the arms and legs, tie the body into a bundle, leave it to dry in the sun and then shoot an arrow up its arse. Are you saying South Americans should still do that because the Outinas did it?’

  ‘You’re being ridiculous and disgusting. I don’t want to hear these things.’

  ‘In the Middle Ages in ever-so-civilized Europe they sometimes boiled dead bodies to get the flesh off so they could easily carry the bones around the place in their luggage. They had this thing, you see, about bones being kept in certain places, like nick-nacks with sentimental value. D’you think we should still do that? It was a widespread custom among our ancestors.’

  ‘You’re horrible.’

  ‘But they did! When our brave and chivalrous Christian knights of the crusades went off to slaughter the heathen of Islam for the greater glory of the God they were both supposed to worship, they used to take their own cauldrons with them for the purpose. They wanted their nice clean bones carting back home when they were dead, you see. You wouldn’t want your left femur to fall into the hands of the rival gang, would you now? Never know where you’d end up.’