Juliet woke at six, whimpering and saying that she wanted to go home. She was worried about Fred. Jacob soothed her and called a cab. He held her hand all the way to Khyber Road and when they arrived, helped her out and knocked on the door.
It was thrown open by a tall woman with a wicked face and splendid red curly hair. She nodded at Jacob, hugged Juliet and propelled her through to the kitchen where Carlo and Fred were waiting.
Fred threw himself on Juliet and burst into tears. ‘I thought you too!’
Juliet was embarrassed. ‘What is this? I’m sorry if I had you all worried. I couldn’t get back. This is Jacob.’ He was standing beside her. ‘You’ve met Carlo, this is Fred and my sister, Clara.’
The woman nodded again but did not speak. No one spoke. Juliet was bewildered. ‘Christ, Fred, I should have rung. I was close to it, I fell down and then I walked. I fell asleep.’ His greater distress made her feel strong and, her voice restored, she said firmly, ‘We’re safe. We’re all safe now.’
Fred raised his head. She watched his mouth. He was saying ‘Tobias’.
‘Tobias? The bomb?’ Something deep in the earth reached up and pulled all her substance downwards.
Fred gave a peculiar laugh, as if this were a novel idea, a connection he would never have made himself, and shook his head.
Juliet fell into a chair. ‘Thank god for that. I think I’m going to be sick.’
Clara knelt by Juliet, holding her bruised hands too tightly. ‘After the bomb, there was another alert. Tobias was on his motorbike, going through the Hyde Park underpass just as they cordoned off the road ahead. The traffic in the tunnel backed up. He came round the corner into the back of a car. Too fast.’
‘We don’t know that!’ shouted Fred.
Juliet drew herself in. Carlo put his arms round Fred. Jacob stood in the doorway, watching.
Eventually Clara got up. ‘I’ll make some tea. Would you like a cup, um, Jacob?’ she asked and Jacob shrugged, a gesture that in such absolute circumstances enraged Fred.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ he snarled, like something small and cornered.
‘Leave him alone,’ said Carlo half-heartedly.
Clara was standing at the sink under the window with her back to them and her extraordinary hair with its several reds seemed to float in the light. When she turned, Jacob found her face no longer witchlike. It was stunningly ugly.
Jacob crossed the room and began to take cups down from a shelf and pass them to Clara as if he had been doing such things for years.
‘Make yourself at home,’ said Fred.
‘Oh for god’s sake,’ snapped Juliet.
‘Well what’s he doing here anyway? No one should be here now except us.’
‘He looked after me,’ admitted Juliet. ‘All night.’
‘While we thought you were dead. You should have come home. I would have looked after you.’
‘I couldn’t get home.’
Everyone in the room, except Jacob, was crying while they tried to be doing something else, even if it was just looking at the floor.
Fred saw Jacob glance at his watch. ‘Don’t let us bore you,’ he sneered and then, formally, making a point of the presence of this stranger, ‘Where are our mother and father?’
‘They’re with Mary,’ said Carlo, taking hold of his brother again.
‘They should be here with us.’
‘Alright Fred,’ said Clara. Jacob could see she was holding herself extremely carefully. ‘For today you can say whatever you like. And I’m warning you, the rest of us can say whatever we like too.’
Fred looked at Jacob. ‘I bet he says whatever he likes all the time,’ which made Jacob smile and seeing this, Clara smiled too and murmured an apology as Carlo grabbed Fred and took him out through the kitchen door into the yard. Jacob kissed the top of Juliet’s head and stroked her cheek as he nodded to Clara, and left.
Although this was not the hospital where he worked, Carlo knew where to go. He found the back stairs down to the basement corridor, at the end of which lay the unmarked doors. He had pulled on a white coat over his clothes, as if it might help.
He was coming through the doors when the woman who ran the mortuary found him. She smiled and, nodding towards the row of fridges, said, ‘Lost someone?’
‘Yes,’ said Carlo, ‘I have.’
She looked kind and amused. ‘You’ll get used to it. Anyway, you should be too busy to care.’
‘I’m sorry?’
She looked at him more carefully. ‘There’s always one who won’t let go. Regardless of how many more you lose, and there’ll be plenty, believe me.’
‘Yes.’ Carlo stared at the ground.
‘So have you got something to say to them?’
‘Who?’
‘Your patient. I can let you have a quick look, if you don’t make a habit of following them down here.’
Carlo shook his head and the woman said, ‘In that case, you ought to get back to work,’ but Carlo went on shaking his head until the words rolled into place: ‘I have come to identify my brother.’
When he looked up, a different woman was standing in front of him. Someone had ironed her face and her hands were no longer in her pockets but clasped in front of her chest. She said something about being so sorry and if only and what was she thinking of, but Carlo wasn’t listening.
She led him into a hushed and painted world where she stopped outside a door and Carlo knew that she was about to ask whether he wanted to go into the room or look through the window.
He pre-empted her: ‘Please, leave me to it.’
She jumped back and Carlo realised how sensitised people become around the relatives of the newly dead. Of course. Anything. Absolutely.
Carlo had been shown the Chapel of Rest in his hospital, with its abstract stained glass, modest arrangements of plastic flowers and pastel cubes of tissues. He knew its protocols, but had spent little time on that side of the fridges. He had not yet met a relative. Now he was a relative and had to go through this door.
It could have been any room, any kind of waiting room, without a body in it. A waxed blind hung in strips across the frosted window, and the chairs, floor and walls were of colours so neutralised that it would have been beyond Carlo to describe them. The room admitted just a trace of noise and daylight, and was decorated with collages representing three of the four seasons and a copper sculpture which, at the flick of a switch, became a waterfall.
There was the body, like a subject waiting to be restored to a picture. Carlo looked, looked round, looked back, looked away and the collages and waterfall were there for him to rest his eyes on. All he could think of were the stories – of the people who fainted, threw up, wet themselves; of those who howled and those who were furious; of the fights that broke out. Some stayed for five minutes, others for hours and if certain rites were to be observed, they could be there for days. People prayed, sang, whispered and raved but most were quiet and still, and some were dreadfully embarrassed.
The nurses would have wiped some of the blood from Tobias’s body, but they would not have been allowed to wash him properly. A death like this had to be treated carefully, the details preserved until they had been recorded. Carlo pulled the bedclothes back. Why did it surprise him that Tobias was naked? When had he last seen him naked? His body must have been stripped in A&E, which meant that he would have been alive when they brought him in. How alive? Had he heard and felt things still?
Carlo laid a hand on his brother’s arm and wondered what he was touching. (On their introductory tour, another student had grabbed his hand and plunged it into a body bag. ‘See? Just like cold chicken.’) Tobias’s head had been aligned and propped up, but Carlo knew that his neck was broken. He made himself take note. Evidence of extensive lacerations around the eyes. Had he seen what was coming? The air splintering and rushing towards him and then himself rushing, to collide with the abruptly unmoving world. Had he screamed? Carlo noted his brother’s snapped
wrists, crushed pelvis, smashed legs and unrecognisable foot. He knew that despite all this damage, it was what had happened inside that had killed him.
The next day, Tobias’s post-mortem would be performed. The fridge would be opened from the other side, and his body would be unzipped from its bag and laid upon a porcelain table. There would be a cradle for his head and a block would be placed in the small of his back to arch his spine. Beside the table would be a steel tray containing scalpels, knives, pincers and an electrical circular saw.
Let whoever is going to do this be loving, Carlo prayed as he sat beside his brother, holding his broken hand. This body was loved. Love this body.
Will you make the first cut behind the right or the left ear? Think about it, and don’t think about anything other than what you are doing as you draw the blade down one side of the throat and then the other. And if you’re not alone, don’t make conversation; don’t speak as you open this body down to the groin.
Part my brother’s flesh with tenderness and crack each rib in a swift and certain style. When you lift out his bowels, wash them softly, and as you reach for the heart, the liver, kidneys and lungs, think how precious this man was, how full. As you examine and weigh each organ, I hope you see that these are unlike any other you may have beheld. As you note each compaction, inflammation, haemorrhage and perforation, contemplate my brother’s pain but also acknowledge that these were once the good strong parts of someone.
When you arc your blade over the head, loosing the scalp, you might want to kiss my brother’s lips as his face folds itself away. Do not do this. Your touch must not disturb.
Is it your habit to tap the skull with a knife? If it is fractured it will sound dull, like a cracked plate but don’t think of a cracked plate, or an egg, or of anything other than this as yet human head, and as you saw into the skull, do so with confidence and artistry, remembering to tilt the curve down towards each ear so that when the crown is returned, it fits neatly.
Lift up my brother’s brain as if you were about to lift the whole of him to safety, adjusting your stance to the weight, which will always surprise. Take your time in locating the dark pools among all the pale containment and make sure that you know what each of them means.
And when you have finished, put a finger on my brother’s throat, here, as I am now, to know for certain that he is dead.
Tobias died because the traffic stopped because there might have been another bomb. Perhaps also because, and Carlo wasn’t ready to consider this, he had been driving too fast. This was likely. He crossed the city all day according to his map of shortcuts and rat runs, skimming pavements and jostling his way between lanes of traffic. Had he been happy? Tobias had trained for six of the seven years it took to qualify as an architect. He had been supposed to build things, not fetch and carry, but he got stuck looking after Mary and the child. Carlo did not like to think of Tobias as losing momentum so much as being taken up by love.
The dead struck Carlo not as absent but as removed. Now he would begin to understand what they did to what they were removed from.
In the days that followed, the Clough family dispersed and waited. Fred and Juliet spent as much time as they could at work, where Fred was surrounded by noise and Juliet by silence. Carlo made arrangements, and Clara went back to her husband and children in the country. Five miles away, in a large and empty house, her parents tried to help one another move through the days but each found that their pain became trapped in the other’s. At night, they lay and waited for morning. On the fourth night, Francesca Clough rose and left her husband’s bed for ever.
Juliet’s friends tried to surround her, but she felt that just as their circle formed, she slipped outside it. Her feelings were of such a size that everyone she spoke to or passed in the street had to stay where they were, miles away. Tania tried a few times to send her home, and then settled for bringing her cups of tea and slices of cake. Juliet stared at the wall.
Hour by hour, the truth of her brother’s death accumulated. She did not think about that other pain, or kissing a married man, or going to America; and then she did and forgot about Tobias with such entirety that when she remembered she had to begin again at the first shock.
She didn’t know that she had moved or made any sound until the door opened and Jacob was there, holding her and saying ‘You can stop now,’ and she did stop and asked, ‘Stop what?’ and he said, ‘Banging on the wall. You were banging so hard, I thought you’d bring what’s left of it down.’
Just outside the village of Allnorthover, Carlo turned into a gravel drive and pulled up outside a large, shabby greystone house. Jacob looked out of the window and then at Juliet who asked, ‘What is it, what are you thinking?’, which made Carlo frown. He did not like the fact that Jacob had come with Juliet, nor that she would not let go of his hand.
An hour of inching their way north through the city and an hour of signs and fields, more like fields of signs thought Jacob, a chain of mini-roundabouts, and a brief wind through a wood. Primroses, ice and mud.
Jacob answered Juliet’s question: ‘It’s barely outside London. Hardly the country at all.’
‘And here it is,’ said Carlo as he watched Jacob helping Juliet out of the car, ‘Hardly a home at all’, and Jacob laughed so warmly that Carlo felt pleased, which then made him cross.
Fred, who had chosen to come up by train, was in the kitchen perched on a particularly ugly chair that Jacob noticed was held together by string.
Francesca Clough turned from a sink piled high with dirty dishes and held out a soapy red hand to Jacob, who pursued her attention in her eyes, as dark and unreadable as Juliet’s, and sunk in brown hollows within planetary yellow rings. Her strong skin was still smooth but had lost its light and was shadowed by the mass of wiry hair, black spliced with grey and white. The bones of Francesca’s face were rising up as the flesh receded.
‘What did you think of Ma?’ Juliet asked later.
‘That she looks like a ghost of you.’
‘And Clara? Did you like Clara?’
Clara, he had thought full of light. She strode into the kitchen with a baby on her arm, buttoning the front of her dress. Her twins, who looked four or five, followed her as closely as courtiers as she plonked the baby on Juliet’s lap and shook Jacob’s hand while reaching up with her other arm to tidy her hair. His eyes flicked from her smooth copper shoulder to the damp shock of orange in her raised armpit to the tight bodice with its two patches of milky wetness. He stared frankly at her hair. That evening, as they sat smoking in the garden, Jacob asked her about her painting, which he managed to suggest he knew by reputation and not just through Juliet. Clara had scoffed at every good thing he said but did not move away, even though he was sitting powerfully close to her.
Juliet’s father was known fondly in the village as Dr Kill Off. He was a dignified man with a face that naturally looked full of grief, so that the change brought about in him by his son’s death was not generally noticed. At the funeral, he had spoken in a voice so cracked and agonised that it was the sound that people remembered rather than what he said.
Juliet and Fred walked into the church behind Mary, who was wearing the black dress in which she sang. Her parents had come – her mother, Stella, from Hay-on-Wye where she ran a chain of antique shops and her father, the architect Matthew George, from New York. Carlo carried Bella, who gave sudden shouts throughout the service and hit out with her fat fists at anyone who leant over and suggested that they take the child outside. Mary shook her head as she stared at the coffin. She could not believe that Tobias, with all his strength and capacity, could fit inside it.
She was whispering something.
‘What was that?’ Carlo murmured, but she didn’t reply. It had sounded like ‘Stop’.
After the funeral, the entire village, it seemed to Jacob, came back to the house for tea. He stayed by the French windows which gave onto the garden, smiling at whoever passed. An aunt approached. She had Juliet by t
he hand and took one of his and looked for a moment as if she were about to demand some sort of vow. Her mutterings of hope and approval panicked Juliet, who was not ready to admit that in these last few days something had begun.
In the evening, there was a dinner of odds and ends: a salad of dandelion leaves that Francesca had pulled out of the lawn, luncheon meat that looked like something freshly skinned, slices of cold fatty lamb, white sliced bread, an enormous cheese that had gone glassy with age, cake left over from the tea and a blancmange rabbit. This last was placed in front of Fred who decapitated it and auctioned off the head.
The children were in bed and so these were the children, and as such they recovered themselves and talked all at once in a condensed coded language punctuated by the same unattractive laugh. Juliet reduced it to a snort and Fred to a horse-like snicker, Clara trumpeted and Carlo rumbled. Fred made Clara a crown of dandelion leaves and flicked spoonfuls of blancmange. Mary sat next to Clara’s husband Stefan and they talked to one another. Jacob tried to catch the eye of Francesca, who ate slowly while staring past his right shoulder. He also tried to talk to the doctor, who was interjecting in his children’s banter but did not seem to listen and could not be heard.
Later, when the parents had disappeared, Jacob went into the kitchen to get a glass of water. The dirty pans were still on the stove but someone had moved each plate, bowl, spoon, knife and fork onto the chair of the person who had used it. The table was clear and had been wiped clean. He went to find Juliet.
An Irresponsible Age Page 6