by Tessa McWatt
I saw Wood. Told him everything. Please come home now.
Her heart goes all dented for Wood but not for Catherine, because a mother who lies to you your whole life will have to do a whole lot more than ask please. She holds tight onto herself in that clench she has perfected. In four thousand more words, one after the other, she will examine legislation that needs to go beyond current rights issues: beyond the disposal of bodies; beyond crimes committed against dead bodies in which there is a tangle of competing rights pitting survivors against the deceased, or the deceased against the police or the powers of the state; beyond cases of harvesting sperm from a corpse; beyond the definition of sex with a dead body as rape; beyond the anatomical gift act that regulates organ donation and follows the wishes of the deceased unless the family vetoes them and gets the last word. And if she gets beyond all these, she will have arrived at something resembling an original idea. There is a case to be made for rights that take into account a proper goodbye.
ROBIN
His side hurts, his calf, his right hand, and there’s a feeling in his ear like someone is twisting the tip. He stands up. If he stays perfectly still he can feel his insides churning, his body’s organs at work as though against one another. He lies back down on the bed. The ceiling of Robin’s bedroom has a brown stain left over from a leak of many years ago, a stain he’s not got round to painting over. He will have to do that, soon, before Emma moves in, before things get crammed with baby paraphernalia, before he forgets that these small things make a difference to a life, that aesthetics are important. These are the kinds of things that people with children forget. The stain looks like the figure of a giraffe. Perhaps he should keep it.
He has been lying on his back now for over twelve hours, the light on throughout the night while he dozed and woke, not sleeping deeply enough, not having changed out of his clothes.
Emma is thrilled with the news of his job. She is planning on bringing him an Easter Sunday lunch to celebrate, to share as a family.
The fact that he waited outside Katrin’s bedsit for an hour until he realized how futile that was, the fact that he returned to Epicure and Alejandro was able to confirm that she had not left for another job, that Alejandro had received a few texts from her about the possibility of leaving London but nothing more, the fact that Robin’s calls to her phone were answered by the woman who tells you that the number has not been recognized, the fact of Katrin as only an afterimage: his head is somewhere else entirely from his legs, feet, fingernails, groin, heart. The only thing to do is to keep staring at the giraffe.
He looks at the clock and waits until 23:11 before he closes his eyes again.
Emma’s Easter lunch is roast lamb, potatoes and green beans. She is gentle, careful, trying to help him feel better because he’s told her he is ill, has some sort of Asian flu probably, some ghastly thing from his students, not well at all.
“Any old excuse not to wash up,” she said at first, but she must have then taken seriously the anguish in his face, because now she’s clearing up and making the flat comfortable for him. This will be his life. Surely not a bad thing.
“Maybe we should go to Cornwall—you could use a break, and you have two weeks before teaching starts again. The sea, some walking, check in on your folks,” she suggests. But he would be too tempted to slip down one of those cliffs. Too tempted to tell his folks that he doesn’t love this woman and that they should not go thinking it’s all just one big happy family now—that it’s not as simple as that. He will look after his child. He will. He will love, provide for, play with, challenge, educate and be a good, honest role model. But before he can do that he needs to drag all the pieces of himself together in one spot, to pull in his insides, to gather up his fingers and the strands of his hair. Together.
He goes back to bed when Emma leaves. The giraffe holds its head up high as Robin’s body litters the room. Deleuze: The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering … It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.
What kind of success is it to have saved himself a job where he does nothing but think? He sits, picks up the journal on his bedside table: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. He flips through, but then tosses it aside. He lies back down and stares again at the ceiling. He tries to focus on the feeling of being a dad, but nothing comes but terror. Fact is, fear might just create a new stain. Deleuze: If you’re trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re fucked.
He picks up the list tucked into the journal. On it are Bernadette Mayer’s suggestions for poetry experiments:
• Write the same poem over and over again, in different forms, until you are weary. Another experiment: Set yourself the task of writing for four hours at a time, perhaps once, twice or seven times a week. Don’t stop until hunger and/or fatigue take over. At the very least, always set aside a four-hour period once a month in which to write. This is always possible and will result in one book of poems or prose writing for each year. Then we begin to know something.
• Attempt as a writer to win the Nobel Prize in science by finding out how thought becomes language, or does not.
• Take a traditional text like the pledge of allegiance to the flag. For every noun, replace it with one that is seventh or ninth down from the original one in the dictionary. For instance, the word “honesty” would be replaced by “honey dew melon.” Investigate what happens; different dictionaries will produce different results.
None of these is as structured as chance-operation. He looks at the clock, watches it until 23:11. The first book of poetry he takes from his shelf is White Egrets.
“The chess men are rigid on their chess board.” Okay, line one. He turns out the light and tries to sleep.
ED AND ROBIN
The stapler is his—he must remember to take it. They give you rass-hole staplers in the council and this one he bought himself, top of the line. Sammy steals it at least once a day, but it’s Ed’s.
“This place,” Sammy says as he opens the office for the day. “This place,” again, and Ed isn’t sure if Sammy means the Safe and Sorrow office or if he’s talking about the local authority, or London, or the whole damn world. It doesn’t matter, because all of them feel like a head-shaking mess to Sammy today, and this you can see in the man’s shoulders, which have gone hunch-up. But what’s to be hunch-up for? When water throw away ah ground yuh can’t pick am up.
“You know, it’s not me they’ve booted out only because they’d have to give me more severance, don’t you? Longer-term service, uninterrupted. You know that, right?” Sammy says. They both look over at Ralph, who looks straight ahead, filling out of a form on his computer.
Poor Sammy is feeling sad, but this shaking-head is the only way he knows to show it. He hasn’t looked Ed in the eye since they heard the news.
“Sammy,” Ed says, calm fa so. He pauses so that Sammy will stop and turn around, but he doesn’t, just keeps tidying up, putting paper in the shredder. “Sammy, I’m fine, you hear?” And Sammy does hear, but that doesn’t make him stop tidying, and Ed can tell from how Sammy sits down at this desk that his heart is mash-up. Ed will remember to get Sammy a raisin Danish on his break.
He’s not the first one in, but Robin is standing at the door of the Safe and Sorrow office as soon as Ed opens it. He knows him only by the glasses that look bigger on the man’s face now.
“You cut off all your hair!” Ed says, in a tease, but in fact Robin looks better this way, more grown-up, dignified-like. He doesn’t bother to take Robin to the staff room. Sammy and Ralph can overhear anything they want at this point.
“How’s Olivia’s project going then?” he asks. “Haven’t seen her since before Easter. She tried to reach me, but I’ve been busy-busy,” he tells Robin because when guilt is so big, lies come fast and easy. He will ring her back, he will, but what to say? Almost-dad. Not good enough.
“I would like to contribute, to her project, your funerals,” Robin says.
“
Doesn’t matter, not now,” Ed says.
“Oh,” Robin says, yet sees nothing like sadness in Ed’s face. Only some small trace of Olivia. “I’m sorry,” he says. He touches his pocket and feels the crunch of the paper there, the ridiculous, irrelevant game of the past fourteen days.
Wood’s face opens up to a smile. “Sorry? What you have to be sorry for?” The man’s accent is strong today. Robin nods.
“I thought I would try, in any case—Olivia’s idea, it might bring some good,” he says.
“Well, it might, but who knows when the next one will be—we can’t predict these things. Maybe Sammy will work with you.” Ed looks over at his friend, who is listening but making a show of ignoring the whole damn scene, probably wondering what the rass is going on over here. These two men like surra and durra on the stage, both wishing they could do a little something, both just sorry-sorry to one another. Olivia missing in between them. The St. Kitts man must have been something. Who gave the girl her sense of right and wrong? Is that something you are born with?
They sit in silence until it becomes uncomfortable. Robin pulls the piece of paper out of his pocket, unfolding it. He reads over it, quickly. Crap, not a poem, but deliberate, like lightning. He gives it to Wood, who takes it but doesn’t look at it. There’s a gritty irritation in Robin’s eyes, as though sand is caught on the underside of his eyelid. His eyes water and he wipes them. In cinema a flash burn is named after the effect of snow blindness, which is akin to a sunburn of the cornea. But a flash-burn effect is too obvious, too simple for now.
Wood holds the piece of paper, still just looking at him. Robin imagines Wood at the head of a coffin, reading his plagiarized nonsense.
“Well, it was good to meet you,” he says.
“And you,” Ed says. Robin stands up and shakes his hand. This man is something good, true-true.
Then Robin has the opposite of an afterimage: a time image that produces space, the finite restoring the infinite; it’s the house where Katrin’s grandmother grew up, beside the river, and his finger on the tiny buzzer alerts its occupants to a visitor. Fact is, Gdansk is only a city. Gdansk cannot be that big.
OLIVIA AND ED
“An examination of civil rights in death,” Olivia says, and keeps her knee from moving. Holds it there, stone-like, ’cos this is how it’s going to be from now on, steady, like steel, but knowing, like silk. She will not be tricked again by Catherine or anyone else. “My supervisor said I needed something historical, not practical—it’s not practice-based research,” she says. Ed nods, but maybe he’s disappointed that she abandoned the lonely dead. She hasn’t, really, it’s only the appearance of stone there in her leg; there’s no stillness in her heart.
The A13 feels different. Same emptiness, same salt, pepper and brown sauce, but today it looks sparkly bright, as though Mary has been scrubbing and buffing and picking out the grime with a cotton-tipped swab.
“Sounds good,” Ed says, and man, oh man, the girl is clever-for-so, but where once he thought he had something to do with it, now he feels like a rasshole fool. There’s no one here but Mary to see him cry if it comes to that.
“It was possible all on account of you,” she says, and it’s true, even if it was for all the wrong reasons. Catherine is the lifetime liar, and Olivia is taking her sweet time to talk to her mother again, but Wood—Wood is solid fam.
She’s humouring him, of course, he thinks, because he is laughable, lonely, nearly dead himself. He takes a sip of his tea and sneaks a quick look at the evidence of her face, and maybe there is a trace of the St. Kitts man there in the wideness, when all along he thought it was like Auntie Margaret’s face.
While Ed is staring at her Olivia knows there’s stuff for him to get used to, expectations he has to stop having, so she lets him. She lets his eyes wander over her ears, her nose, her chin, like he’s looking to see if maybe Catherine was wrong after all. Olivia hasn’t even wondered what the other bloke might have looked like, doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to have another face or another voice in her head to haunt her. Once she thought she would ask Ed to sing the song again, of the brown girl in the ring, but, hell, no. She doesn’t want any more incantations or ghosts.
“But I still want to do the project with you—it’s still right, still good,” she says. With her dissertation finished, she’s confident of a 2.1, at least, and if she doesn’t get a first, well, she’ll still become a lawyer, will still train further, will still make enough to move out—alone—but there’s no giving up; this she accepts. The questions change. Who will _____ these people? Fill in the blank. Living with Catherine, Nan, Granddad and Eric won’t be as bad, for a while, if she knows at least this much about herself.
“Look, Olivia,” Ed says, and meets her eye. There is no denying that she is beautiful and of course she is nothing like Geoffrey. He pulls apart the paper napkin that came with his tea. “The man Geoffrey killed …” the napkin looks like snowflakes … “I wanted to say …” and there’s a tinkle-like sound from Mary’s bracelets as she wipes the table next to them … “I arrived at the spot where Geoffrey killed him—minutes too late—and he was there, his face in the river. He was dead, I was sure of it, but I could have done something, maybe. I could have called someone; I could have turned him over. I could even have said something like I was sorry, but I didn’t. I did nothing. I watched Geoffrey run through the bush and I didn’t tell anyone what I saw. I went back to the camp farther down river and I pretended I saw nothing, and no one asked me, and no one expected me to know, so I kept it to myself. I had gone to find Geoffrey, to give him the money he needed, to make sure he wouldn’t get into trouble, and found a whole lot worse.” He looks back at her. Olivia has questions in her face the way some women have desire. She nods. “It’s what I thought you did for family, for a brother.”
“You thought?” she says.
“I don’t know, now. I don’t think so, no,” Ed says. The real story was so much easier than he had imagined for so long.
“So, you’ll let me know when the next one is?” Olivia says, and for a second he thinks she’s referring to Geoffrey, before he realizes.
“I might not have a funeral again before I go—you can’t plan these things. I have only three months.”
“It would be a good thing if you got none in three months, wouldn’t it?” she says. Olivia is mash-up for anyone’s heart. “But if you do, you’ll tell me, right?”
“Yes, I will,” Ed says.
“We could go to the museum again. Or I was thinking, I’ve always wanted to go to the Carnival.”
“Oh?” She’s never jump-up, never played Mas or ever wind-up and fete so. He nods, and his heart is doing a j’ouvert jump-up of its own. “I was doing some research, too—there’s a Guyanese poet … it might be good.”
“Oh?” Same intonation as his, but she is not mocking him.
“Death must not find us thinking that we die.”
“That’s good!” she says with a flourish. They both pick up their teacups at the same time. They sip.
“Wood,” she says, and she sees where the word has landed in how his shoulders relax. This man was the only one who ever picked her up and held her.
FRANCINE
At the door to Ronnie Scott’s Patricia doesn’t look unhappy, doesn’t look like a woman whose whole department has been shut down—“Who needs a degree in anthropology when you could get one in marketing?” Patricia said flatly to Francine on the phone. It was Francine’s idea to come out tonight. “It’s fine,” Patricia says to her as they walk up the stairs to the salsa room.
“What will you do?” Francine says.
“Never write a book again,” Patricia says, and Francine is surprised by her equanimity, not believing that she could be as fine as she professes. Upstairs Francine checks their coats, gets them a drink and then the feeling of being in the transporter is back.
Diaphanous men in their twenties: African, Latino, tight jeans. Very tight jeans. Their
skin is translucent in Francine’s X-ray vision.
There is a dark Latino dancing salsa with a tiny woman with straight, brown hair whose short flounce skirt splays like a sail when he turns her. The man’s arms are as sculpted as an Oscar trophy.
Patricia raises her glass and sips from a straw. Francine looks at the pad of lines on the skin of Patricia’s knuckles, there like ancient footprints or dinosaur knees. They are the oldest women in the room. There are one or two middle-aged men, but the rest are in their twenties or thirties, not English. How is it that Patricia has no self-consciousness here?
“You look good,” Patricia shouts over the horns, conga drums, the singer and his repeated galenga, galenga, galenga. But Francine is sure she looks like shit and that to see through her you’d have to penetrate her puffy, ricotta-cheese cheeks. But maybe Patricia has seen through her all along.
The instructor turns down the music and she notices for the first time that the men here are checking them both out. When she looks through them, she sees them in a sandbox: dump trucks and spades and diapers full of poo hanging down from their backsides. If she looks harder, she sees them fifty years in the future: their skin loose and iguana-neck-like, their butts gone soft and droopy; their penises bulbous but flopping. What is the sound of one hand clapping?
“Line up, line up. Girls on one side, boys on the other—but some of you will be acting the part of boys,” says the instructor, who is taking into account that the females outnumber the males. Francine does as she’s told and is face to face with the Latino with the Oscar-trophy arms, who couldn’t be older than thirty.
“Now face your partner—girls, stretch out your arms; and boys, take her waist. Girls, hand on shoulders.”
He starts the music again and shouts instructions at them while doing the moves himself, his hand on his tummy, his hips swinging side to side. He does the steps, shouts the ins and outs, the hand holding, the spinning, and Francine follows along with trophy man without a foot wrong. She looks up at him, sees him smiling at her, and he pulls her close, suddenly: “Manuel,” he says in her ear. She looks down at her feet. His hot breath on her cheek makes her nervous and she misses a step. When he releases her she looks up and says, quietly, “Francine,” but he’s not looking at her any more and will never know her name.