‘Why should I listen to this rather silly lecture—’
‘I’m not lecturing you.’
‘—when I’m only trying to help you with your—weird plans.’
‘I’m grateful. Honest!’
‘Anyway, what would you do about Barry? Even if you don’t believe in anything as you seem not to, you still have to do something with dead people.’
‘I know.’
‘Well? You’d just throw their bodies into a furnace and forget about them, would you?’
‘No, of course not!’
‘Then what would you do?’
‘I don’t know, I haven’t decided yet.’
‘O, how wonderful! So the world must pile up its dead people until you decide what to do about them, eh?’
‘Don’t be so daft. All I meant was that I haven’t made up my own mind about what should be done about me, when I’m dead. Barry didn’t care about religious customs, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘Isn’t that rather obvious, as he made you swear to dance on his grave? Which also means he expected to be buried, not cremated, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’
‘That isn’t all you haven’t thought of either.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘You’ve upset Mrs Gorman terribly, that’s what I mean.’
‘What about her?’
‘You’ve upset her with your phone calls. Especially asking to see Barry. How could you!’
‘She should have been pleased. Aren’t friends supposed to visit after a death?’
‘No. Not in Jewish families. They don’t go and look at their relatives and friends. They’re supposed to bury them as quickly as possible, and simply, and everybody in the same way so there is no difference between rich and poor. They show respect for their dead, which I think is admirable and beautiful. And, after all, you should know all about such things, being so expert on customs of death! Or are you only interested in the gruesome kind!’
‘So how come you know so much?’
‘Mrs Gorman’s son-in-law tried to explain to me.’
‘He seems to have explained quite a lot.’
‘I told you, he was very nice.’
‘I’ll bet! Ask to view your body, did he?’
Kari sprang to her feet, furious. ‘That is a disgusting remark,’ she snapped, and began spluttering garbled English, stamping her foot in frustration, and then poured upon my startled head a spew of Norwegian the gist of which her flaming face and vehement gestures translated. Unmistakably vituperative. After which she stalked away, her old mac flapping around her legs, leaving me marooned in bilious turbulence.
22/As it happens I do know what Kari said in her Norwegian invective. You will have guessed that I didn’t remember all this chat word for word, not being a human tape-recorder. Kari helped me reconstruct it, so, yes, she’s still around, but I don’t want her involved in this mess. even though she says she’ll tell all publicly in court if I want her to. Remember, TISS, what you promised: TOTAL CONFIDENTIALITY. You wanted the truth and an explanation for yourself only. (And just to show how much I trust you, I’ve changed Kari’s name and place of abode, just in case . . .)
What Kari says she said was, roughly translated, ‘You are a selfish, nasty-minded little squirt who doesn’t deserve any help from anyone and you can go and take a flying @*+/ at the moon2 for all I care because all you are good at is wallowing in self-pity and upsetting a nice old lady because you think half-baked ideas are more important than people and are only interested in your own lousy petty piggy feelings.’
I am glad she could only say it in Norwegian at the time. Otherwise there might now be no more Kari in HSR’s life.
Being in ignorance of her sentiments, however, I worked myself instead into a sweat that evening about being friendless and having no one to turn to for help, and how all this was my fault and how I might as well be dead. Which led to imagining various ways of achieving the desired state.
A knife to the throat or wrists. I rejected this as too messy and slow, not to mention painful. Pills would be okay. But none were available except aspirins and they didn’t even cure my mother’s backaches, and I’d also heard somewhere you have to take so many they make you spew before you’ve swallowed enough to kill yourself. (She kept her Valium locked somewhere in her bedroom.) Jumping out of my bedroom window wouldn’t have worked either. I was only one storey up and would have landed on the tablecloth lawn of our front garden. Poison? My dad’s aftershave or my mother’s hair shampoo were the nearest thing to poison in our bathroom, though I did remember some slug pellets in the back garden shed. But they didn’t seem too good at getting rid of the slugs so I decided not to chance them. Hanging myself. The ceiling would come down, even if I got a hook into it without being heard. Suffocation? Holding a pillow over my nose till I expired didn’t seem quite me. Guns were romantic, but the only one in the house was a water pistol I used to have when I was a kid and the inner tube that holds the water leaked anyway. Willing myself to death. I’d read about some tribe somewhere who could decide their time was up and lie down and think themselves to death. I tried this for half an hour and all it did was make me feel more awake than before I started.
I gave up after two hours of sorting out the options. It does seem that if you want to do away with yourself you have to plan pretty carefully for a long time previous. Unless, that is, you’re prepared to give yourself the chop in some disgustingly messy manner that leaves someone else to clear up after you. And I didn’t/don’t think that’s fair. Which is all very discouraging when you’re in the sort of depressed state I was in that night. At such moments you want a simple, quiet, comfortable croak that provides just long enough before your last gasp for you to relish a few of the zizziest scenes post mortem. Like the satisfying devastation caused by your discovery. The sumptuous distress at your crowded funeral. The way everyone bewails your passing and wishes they had done this for you or that. The speeches of praise. The lavish regret for past offences against you. The gap they all feel in their own lives for the rest of their natural. Ah, the loss you’ll be to the world—and serve it right! And the deep and gratifyingly painful GUILT they’ll all feel they didn’t do something to save you.
After a long soak in this sort of candied vinegar I got fed up. Slept an hour or two. Woke. Shoved on the cans and played a tape of Britten’s Quartet No. 3, which offers cauterizing passages of unsentimental sadness. A couple of times through and I was asleep again. Woke at dawn when one of the cans got pushed off my ear and trapped my nose as I turned over in bed. (Audiosphyxiation might, come to think of it, be a novel and amusing means of expiration.)
Sometimes you go to sleep grated, like me that night, and wake up in the morning spun-dried, but all of a piece again. I did that morning. Didn’t have to think about it, just do it, thus:
Kari: SORRY I was an idiot. Will you see me again? You’re the only person I can talk to about B. and I have to talk to someone about him. If I wait for you on the beach by Chalkwell station, where we were yesterday, will you meet me? I’ll be there today—Sunday—from 10.30 until 12.30. Please come. Hal.
I folded the note, wrote her name on it, slipped it into the window of a cassette box, with a tape of the Beatles’ Let it be inside. Then I sneaked out of the house before my parents were up—Sundays they lie in till about 10.30—cycled to Kari’s house and dropped the package through the letterbox.
23/What happened next I can’t quite believe happened to me. If anyone had told me beforehand I could do such things I would have clocked them one for being so cheeky. No, I wouldn’t; I forgot, I’m a pacifist. No, I’m not; I’m just not very good at fighting so I don’t go around laying them on people in case they lay a few back on me. But you know what I mean. Which is that the following events are so astonishing to me, are so unlike my imaginings, so out of character, that I can only assume they were aberrant. (It is a relief that Mr Oz agrees: in fact
he suggested this in the first place.) Still, I can’t write it all down as me, as ‘I’. I’d feel too uncomfortable.
All yesterday I chewed over this problem; wrote nothing. (Usual stunt: cans on; tape after tape; doodle on a note pad waiting for a thought that wants to be written down. Odd, I’m always certain which few thoughts want to be written down out of all the chaff blowing in the cerebral wind. And all the time, feeling physically weak, heavy, lethargic. Mute too: there is nothing sayable to anyone. Never thought, starting this lark, writing down what has happened to myself would be so difficult. It isn’t what happened that causes the sweat, but how to tell what happened. Like jokes—some people can tell them, some people can’t. [Barry couldn’t.] I guess the same is true about telling terrible tragedies like mine. Anyway, this next Bit was one of the hardest to decide about.)
Only very late last night did the idea I needed turn up, and then I was so whacked I had to leave off till this morning. Solution: If what happened feels like it happened to someone else, then tell it like I was someone else. Simple? Seems like the simple answers always take the longest to sort out.
24/
A DAY AT THE MORGUE
Starring Henry S. and Kari Norway
Here is how Henry S. Robinson got to see the dead body of his mate Barry Gorman with the assistance of his new friend Kari Norway.
When Kari suggested the plan that Sunday afternoon, Henry thought she had gone mad.
‘You’ve gone mad,’ he said to Kari.
‘I am not mad,’ she said. ‘You are, otherwise you would not be wanting to do this thing. Well, maybe I am a little mad for helping you.’
‘But,’ said Henry, ‘I can’t dress as a girl and walk up to the door of a mortuary and calmly ask to see one of the corpses.’
‘That is the only way,’ Kari said.
They had argued the ins and outs of this plan for hours. Kari had found out by telephoning the morgue that only official visitors were ever allowed to view a body, and then only by appointment.
‘So the only way in is by deception,’ she said to Henry and Henry thought to himself how cold and calculating Kari could be. ‘There is bound to be a man in charge of a place like that,’ she said. ‘On Sunday he is likely to be a relief person, just to keep an eye on things and deal with emergencies. That means he won’t know the regular details so he’ll be easier to bluff. And a man will not resist a distressed girl who only wants to view her dead boyfriend but isn’t allowed to because her boyfriend’s mother is being against her. Which is half true anyway. Still, you will have to play-act well.’
‘I can’t do it,’ Henry said many times, but he knew all the time he would have to try.
‘Let’s get on with it,’ Kari said. ‘I have had enough of you pussypawing about.’
‘Pussyfooting.’
‘Don’t quibble.’
‘You said to correct your English.’
‘You are just trying to put off. Strip to the waist. We’ll start with your hair.’
All this was going on in Kari’s room in the Greys’ house, which was deserted because the family had gone to visit Mrs Grey’s mother in London for the day, leaving Kari in charge.
First she clipped at the longer ends of Henry’s hair with sewing scissors. Then she pulled on a curly blonde wig, which, she said, came from Mrs Grey’s store of clothes. She tucked and fitted till she decided it was right.
‘The damn thing feels like a hairy crash helmet,’ Henry said.
‘Good enough for now,’ Kari said, removing the wig. ‘Your face next.’
She sat Henry on a stool in front of her built-in washbasin and dressing-table, part of the wardrobe unit that occupied all one wall opposite her single bed (which sported a coverlet blazoned with a large NO ENTRY road sign. Did she plan, Henry wondered, to be single for ever? Though the sign seemed often violated.)
‘You must shave,’ Kari said, rubbing a hand down Henry’s cheek.
‘Why?’ Henry said, peering round her hips to look into the mirror.
‘Your fluff will give you away.’ She left Henry exploring his fluff and came back with a disposable razor. ‘Use this.’
Henry stood at the washbasin. Kari watched from behind his shoulder. He tried a tentative stroke of the blade down his cheek.
‘Yeow!’ he whimpered.
‘Stop fussing,’ Kari said.
‘Hurts!’ Henry said, trying a second swathe.
‘Nonsense. All men are babies.’
‘All women are bullies.’
‘That’s a sexist remark.’
‘No it isn’t. No more than yours.’
‘All men were babies once,’ Kari said, ‘and most of them stay that way. Ask any woman.’
‘I’ll not bandy words when I’ve a razor in my hand,’ Henry said. ‘This is my first time, you know.’
‘Then it is past time you started. Put some soap and water on . . . Here, let me.’ Kari reached over, rubbed soapy water briskly onto his face. ‘Your beard is softer than the hairs on my legs.’
‘You don’t have to shave your legs though,’ Henry said through puckered features.
‘Of course I do!’ Kari stood behind him again, watching in the mirror.
‘What?’
‘What what?’
‘You shave your legs?’
‘You don’t know? Men want women with soft hairless legs, so we give them soft hairless legs.’
‘By shaving them?’
‘That’s the easiest way. You really didn’t know?’
‘No.’
Kari laughed. ‘You are rather innocent after all, dear Hal, aren’t you!’
She bent towards him, kissed him on the ball of his shoulder.
Henry nicked his chin and yelped.
Kari, laughing again, said, ‘First blood to me!’
Henry finished shaving himself. ‘What now?’
Kari said, ‘A very little make-up to emphasize your prettiness. But nothing that might call attention to you. Discreet.’ She considered his face, sitting him on the end of the bed and herself on the dressing stool between Henry and the mirror. ‘A little foundation, a touch of lipstick, a hint of mascara to sharpen your eyes. That will be enough.’
‘I don’t like this,’ Henry said.
‘You are not asked to like it,’ Kari said, getting busy.
Henry endured being worked on. Had the purpose not been so daunting, he would have enjoyed such pampering. He liked being handled. Correction: By some people he liked being handled. Kari’s fingers were soft, precise, firm. Pencils drawing sensational sketches. But she was working quickly, anxious to be done. Was she, Henry wondered, already regretting her crazy notion?
Reminding himself of why Kari was drawing on his face put a silence on him which Kari heard through the fingers. Her eyes carefully avoided his till she finished.
‘Yes,’ she said when it was over. ‘Stand up.’
Henry tried looking in the mirror; Kari blocked his view.
‘Not until you’re dressed, then you’ll see the proper effect.’ She handed him a pair of honey-coloured tights. ‘Put these on.’
‘No,’ Henry said.
‘Yes,’ Kari said. ‘You can’t wear jeans. They show you are a man. The only suitable dress I have will show some of your legs. They must be properly covered. Men always look at women’s legs. At their breasts and their legs. You must be right.’
‘This is awful,’ Henry said.
‘Do you want to change your mind?’
He thought about this, vacantly, finding no answer.
‘Did you—what is the word?—dither like this with Barry?’ Kari said briskly. ‘He was not a person who dithered. No wonder he was losing interest.’
‘Shut up!’ Henry said, stung.
‘Then get on with it. Perhaps it is a mistake. Perhaps you can’t do it after all. You haven’t the courage.’
Henry scowled at her.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘Are you going to stand t
here and watch me?’ Henry said.
‘O, for heaven’s sake! What are you afraid of? Is there something special about your body? You are a prim! I’ll turn my back, but I am not leaving the room. It would be ridiculous.’
Henry was so angry by now he tore off his shoes and socks, his jeans and underpants, throwing them on the floor.
‘And,’ Kari said, arms akimbo and her back to him, ‘be rather careful with those tights or you’ll ladder them. They’re expensive and I do not have another new pair.’
Henry huffled, concertina-ed the nylon hose, sat on the bed, slipped his feet into the legs, pulled them up, wriggled his thighs and bottom into the tights, smoothed them, hated the feel of the stuff against his skin.
For fear the tights would slip and fall about his ankles, he pulled his underpants on over them. Besides, wearing his underpants helped him retain some sense of still being himself.
He said, subdued, ‘What next?’
Kari turned. ‘A bra.’
‘O, God!’ Henry said, drooping.
She helped him into the straps, adjusted them to fit, fastened the hooks, stuffed wads of cottonwool into the cups.
Henry watched Kari fiddling to get the bra looking natural. The strange sensation of entrapment round his chest brought back a memory of childhood: his mother strapping a halter round him so that he could play safely in a kind of bouncing swing. He remembered giggling with excitement and anticipated pleasure, his mother smiling and trying to restrain his exuberance while she fastened the clips. How old would he have been then? Three? Younger? Was this his first memory?
Kari tugged gently to snug the bra firmly to his chest.
Now it was the two boy children on the beach the day before who came to Henry’s mind, with the woman slowly, patiently dressing them after their play while they babbled to each other, taking no notice of her while submitting to her attentions, like princes attended by a body slave.
Dance on My Grave Page 17